Like Herod

Went to the Mogwai show last night, the last of a three night run at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, and my ears are still bleeding. The explosion of sound that punctuated most of their set truly felt like a a roadside bomb where, instead of shrapnel, I was impaled by sonic bliss.

This clip is from the Terminal 5 show earlier this year (which I also went to) . . .

Falling from Above

It was a Thursday night in early October 2000 and the Mets were in town for a playoff matchup with the Giants at Pac Bell Park. My roommate Mike had an extra ticket—which I was happy to take—and I just stopped by the Hyatt to pick up my paycheck before meeting him at Zeke’s Diamond Bar on 3rd St.

Getting off of the bus at the Embarcadero, I looked south towards the stadium, where fog spilled over Potrero Hill like an overzealously poured beer, and zipped up my jacket. There was a slight chill in the air, enough to color the cheeks and making for great playoff baseball weather. Truly great baseball weather . . .

After making the familiar descent into the bowels of the hotel via the employee entrance adjacent to Justin Herman Plaza, named after the patron satyr of urban renewal, I made small talk with the security guys who were responsible for handing out checks. We agreed that Piazza should be living in our fair city due to his likely sexual preference, that J.T. Snow was the consummate Giant and that the 49ers would be better off without Terrell Owens.

With the thought that there would be a fair amount of drinking before, during and after the game occurring to me, I felt it would be wise to grab a few bottles of water from the bar where I had worked the night before. The main floor of the Hyatt Regency-the Atrium-held a few restaurants, a gaudy 20 foot tall bronze globe-like sculpture and 16 floors worth of open air into which the guest rooms opened up. During the Holidays the space was festooned with strings of lights cascading down from each floor, sparkling over the heads of the tourists and business travelers who frequented the hotel. Year round people were always stopping in to take pictures and after spending most of my first 26 years in Akron, Ohio I felt that it was a pretty neat place to work.

I took the elevator up from the basement and emerged into the Atrium where I exchanged a “Como Esta” and a “Nay Ho Ma” with a few of the housekeepers who were waiting to take the lift up to do their jobs. The Atrium bar, that was given the moniker “13 Views” for the number of windows looking out on Justin Herman Plaza, was buzzing.

Anchor Steams were being lifted by suits watching Baseball Tonight and inexpensive chardonnays being discussed by rotund women who had just returned from a day trip to Napa with a newfound lexicon to play with.

Then it fell. It looked like a golf bag. Thats how I interpreted the white and black object falling from ten floors up at the very first moment that it entered my field of vision. As long, thin clubs started to fall away from the bag at strange angles, I spied two wide open spheres with bits of blue in them at the top of the bag.

You hear how things move slowly when peculiar things happen in life, or at least that’s how we recall them to have happened, and true to form I can clearly remember the electric pulse that ran through me when I came the the realization that this was not a golf bag, that there were not clubs extended akimbo from it nor were there a pair of blue specked balls careening from the top it.

She hit the floor about fifteen feet in front of me and bounced slightly. The explosion of weary flesh and bone on naked cement echoed throughout the Atrium slowly. For the first five or ten seconds nobody seemed to notice what had happened except me and I walked quickly towards her. I took my jacket off—appropriately a black one that I had just bought the week before—and threw it over her. Before I did, I was surprised to see that there was no blood.

That’s when the first rotund woman screamed. More shrieks followed as husbands held the gazes of their wives on their shoulders, away from where I was standing dumbly silent.

After being interviewed by the police and the same security guys that I was talking sports with earlier, I still went to the game. JT Snow hit a three run shot into McCovey Cove in the 9th to send the game into extra innings but the Giants lost in the 10th.

The next day was my birthday.

Flip Flops

Summer has made an early visit to the streets of New York City and, as I write this, office squid such as myself are flocking to Bryant Park and Madison Square Park and Central Park to lay in the sun and gossip for an hour before heading back to the cubicles that hide us from the light for 8-11 hours at a stretch. This all makes me very happy. Happy enough that as I rode my bike to work today, zipping through traffic on 8th Avenue at 7:45am, I actually found myself smiling . . . And its only Tuesday.

But there is one blemish on the face of this fine weather that I cannot ignore . . . The bold insistence of people to wear flip flops as they traipse around this dirty city. On the subway, at the bar, (at work!!), with jeans, without a shower, with seeping blisters, with yellowed nails and without a conscious, people young and old ignore the fact that their feet are foul. And I just cannot take it anymore . . .

Even as I try to reason with myself and think, “Feet are just a part of the body” I cannot get over this fear and loathing. I hate feet, and have for as long as I can remember as, in my mind, they are the effluvium of dirt, sweat and toil. They are the lowest part of our bodies for a reason and I rue the day that they became so mercilessly ubiquitous. To be fair, I have no problem with flip flops while making a trek to the beach (although I choose to wear low top Chuck Taylors during my own beach visits) but while walking down 34th Street (or in the halls of 4 Times Square) they are simply an abomination and an affront to good taste.

Due to my strong feelings on the subject, and my unwillingness to dwell to long on it because frankly I hate even thinking about feet, this may be one of my least elegant missives but I just had to get it out . .

Hitchens on the Swat Valley and Sharia

On the whole, I do not fancy myself as an overly political person. I read the papers, have opinions (although not always very informed ones) and occasionally will wade into a polite discussion on the what’s going on. However, when it comes to defending secularism, feminism and reason—all which are under attack by the archaic motives of Islamofascist jihadists—I will give no quarter and try to read as much as I can on the subject.

So when Pakistan, who has been counted among our "allies" in the war on terror, recently gave the Swat Valley—a former resort area—to the Taliban to be ruled under the moronic, stone age law of sharia, I was apoplectic. I just cannot understand why any right thinking government would want to mollify these savages who were instrumental in the murder of over 3,000 Americans almost 8 years ago.

So take a moment to read Christopher Hitchens March 9th piece from Slate magazine as his point of view is spot on . . .



http://www.slate.com/id/2213246/

Swat? Not! Handing the Swat Valley to the Taliban was shameful and wrong.

By Christopher Hitchens Monday, March 9, 2009,

A whole new fashion is suddenly upon us. If only, in the confrontation with reactionary Islamism, we could separate the moderate extremists from the really extreme extremists. In the last few days, we have heard President Barack Obama musing about a distinction between good and bad Taliban, the British government insisting on a difference between Hezbollah the political party and Hezbollah the militia, and Fareed Zakaria saying that the best way of stopping the militants may be to allow them to run things in their own way, since an appetite for the imposition of sharia does not equate to a thirst for global jihad and may even partially slake that thirst.

It would be foolish to doubt that there is some case to be made for this: The Karzai government in Afghanistan has been making a distinction between the "Mullah Omar" madmen and the merely localized Taliban for some time. In Lebanon, anyway, Hezbollah takes part in elections and so far abides by the results (also serving as a proxy for possible future talks with Iran). In Iraq, the initial success of the counter-al-Qaida insurgency depended on the suborning and recruitment of other Sunni insurgents who were hostile to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Osama Bin Laden. One of the many reasons that I have always opposed the use of torture and other extralegal methods is that such conduct destroys the possibility of "turning" certain kinds of Islamic militants and making potential allies of them.

However, one should be careful of the seductions of this compromise. In a wishful attempt to bring peace with the Taliban in Pakistan itself, the government has recently ceded a fertile and prosperous and modernized valley province—the former princedom of Swat—to the ultraviolent votaries of the one party and the one God. This is not some desolate tribal area where government and frontier have been poorly delineated for decades, as in Waziristan. It is a short commute from the capital city of Islamabad. The Taliban have never won an election in the area; indeed, the last vote went exactly the other way. And refugees are pouring out of Swat as the fundamentalists take hold and begin their campaign of cultural and economic obliteration: no music, no schooling for females, no recognition of the writ of the central government. (See the excellent report by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah in the March 5 New York Times.

According to this and other reports, the surrender of authority by the already crumbling Pakistani authorities has had an emboldening effect on the extremists rather than an appeasing one. The nominal interlocutor, Maulana Sufi Muhammad, with whom the deal was signed, is related by clan and ideology to much fiercer and younger figures, including those suspected in the murder of Benazir Bhutto, in the burning of hundreds of girls' schools, in the killing of Pakistani soldiers, and in the slaughter of local tribal leaders who have resisted Taliban rule. Numberless witnesses attest that the militants show not the smallest intention of abiding by the terms of the so-called "truce." Instead of purchasing peace, the Pakistani government has surrendered part of its heartland without a fight to those who can and will convert it into a base for further and more exorbitant demands. This is not even a postponement of the coming nightmare, which is the utter disintegration of Pakistan as a state. It is a stage in that disintegration.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, where many very hard-line Muslims take the side of the elected governments against the nihilists, there is also a determined NATO or coalition presence that can bring firepower to bear as part of the argument. This was the necessary if not sufficient condition for the "awakening" movements on which Gen. David Petraeus relied and still relies. But even in default of that factor, the handing over of large swaths of sovereign and strategic territory to the enemy was never a part of any such plan, and it would have been calamitous if it had been.

Fareed Zakaria makes the perfectly good observation in his Newsweek essay that no Afghans have been found among the transnational terrorist groups that apparently most concern us. (He's righter than he knows: It's more likely now that a wanted would-be hijacker would be a British citizen than an Afghan one.) However, this can easily decay into being a distinction without a difference. What the Afghan fundamentalists did do when they were in power was offer their country as a safe haven to al-Qaida and give it a hinterland that included the ability to issue passports, make use of an airport, and so forth. Comparable facilities will now become available, much nearer to the center of things, in a formerly civilized province of our ally Pakistan. This is incredible.

There is another symbiosis between state failure of that kind and the spread of deadly violence. A state or region taken over by jihadists will not last long before declining into extreme poverty and backwardness and savagery. There are no exceptions to this rule. We do not need to demonstrate again what happens to countries where vicious fantasists try to govern illiterates with the help of only one book. And who will be blamed for the failure? There will not, let me assure you, be a self-criticism session mounted by the responsible mullahs. Instead, all ills will be blamed on the Crusader-Zionist conspiracy, and young men with deficiency diseases and learning disabilities will be taught how to export their frustrations to happier lands. Thus does the failed state become the rogue state. This is why we have a duty of solidarity with all the secular forces, women's groups, and other constituencies who don't want this to happen to their societies or to ours.

By all means, let field commanders make tactical agreements with discrepant groups, play them off against one another, employ the methods of divide and rule, and pit the bad against the worst. C'est la guerre. But under no circumstances should a monopoly of violence be ceded to totalitarian or theocratic forces. For this and for other reasons, we shall long have cause to regret the shameful decision to deliver the good people of the Swat Valley bound and gagged into the hands of the Taliban, and—worst of all—without even a struggle.

Junior Boys "Work"

Going to see The Junior Boys on May 7th at the dreaded Webster Hall . . . this track is off of their new album "Begone Dull Day" and while the video itself just a still photo the tune is head bobbingly, dancing-in-my-cubicle good.

Carroll Gardens to Times Square . . .

This coming weekend--much like the last--the weather is allegedly prepared to abandon its sadistic winter ways and bestow Gotham with a touch of light and warmth. Which, for me, no matter what happened on a rainy night a few years ago in San Francisco, means getting back on my bike and riding to work as often as possible.

The dilemma that I am confronted with at this time of year is what route to take from my apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn to 4 Times Square. It seems straightforward- cross the Brooklyn Bridge, cut down Chambers Street, head north on the West Side Highway bike path and then venture back east towards Times Square around 42nd Street.

But one has to consider a few things when planning the best way to and from the County of Kings

- Traffic. It is well known that NYC cab drivers (especially the virulent menace of livery/gypsy cabs) are the worst drivers in the Western Hemisphere (I didn't say FROM the Western Hemisphere) so it is best to avoid busy thoroughfares such as Chambers, 42nd Street, etc. Even with a bike lane, these guys are always on their cell phones and can't seem to drive in a straight line for too long.

-Tourists. Although the walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge is clearly divided so as to safely accommodate both walkers AND cyclists this does not prevent the cute couple from Indianapolis, here on their honeymoon, or the group from Germany from ambling into the bike line. They mean no harm but, damn, they slow you down and scare the shit out of you. Who wants to run over somebody on vacation?

-Roller Bladers. The bane of my cycling existence. Hordes of them clog up the West Side Highway bike lane and have caused me to wreck in the past. This Friday, when the temperature reaches the 70's, I can see them now: Hands behind the back, swaying from side to side and from lane to lane, iPod blasting the latest Coldplay album, in their own little universe. Ugh.

-Pot Holes. Another reason to avoid Chambers Street.

So, I in lieu of the "easy" way to and from work, I believe that this Friday I'll be taking the Brooklyn Bridge/West Side Hwy in--at 7am there are not too many tourists out, or roller bladers out-- and coming home via the East Side, as prescribed by the peeps at Ride The City, a great website that helps the urban cyclist get around safely.

Pray for me . . . .

www.ridethecity.com

Mogwai. "Dracula Family." Pics of Argentina.

Utterly beautiful song from one of the finest bands around. Check them out April 27-29 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Or wherever you are.