Destroying the Youth of America

An earnest young man sat in my office tonight tapping away at a computer. I assumed he was a fill-in editor, although I didn’t give it much thought, as earnest young types tend to circulate through the newsroom like slightly stale air that, at first, seems fresh. As the lad stood to leave, he turned to my editor in chief and said, “Thank you so much for today. It was really interesting to see all the craziness around here. I really enjoyed it and hope to come back.”

I looked at him for a slow-motion second and then blurted out: “Oh, wait!…That wasn’t sarcasm.”

My editor and I then broke into hysterical laughter that continued as his back faded off into the distance.

Interns. I was one once, too.

Seeing and Believing

The skyline plays hide and seek with me these past number of years from my bedroom window. The window itself is large, a good 4-5 feet in height. New York disappears from time to time in rain clouds or snow— when it does I feel a phantom pain; it's like losing a limb. Startling and terrifying. Tonight, though, having come in from a brisk night, I know why I can't see the Empire State or Woolworth Building, the anonymous multi-lit windows of skyscrapers downtown or even the near-but-far semi-skyrises of Brooklyn: They are blurred beneath a dense snowfall—small flakes, icier than the last loosely falling aqueous snow, tighter and less dreamy, but no less enchanting somehow. Just when the world is feeling bounded, the night is lit by bug-like white lights and a man from Fez who serves up a salty yellow and orange, warm and thick egg and cheese sandwich. Hey, it don't get much better than this, she says.

It is Philip Glass' birthday. And, I believe, Schubert's.

A piano plays through a transmitted wave, and the air thus vibrates. Sleep well.

Atmospheric Diversions

Tonight there is the first true snow of our New York winter. The flakes are thick and liquid and marvelous. The kind of falling snow you want to stand in and smile. You want to look into it and feel a little dizzy as the white clumps sting your face. And you love it.

I want to recommend an amazing site: Pandora.com.

Part of something called the "Music Genome Project," it will calculate your own perfect radio stations for you based on what music you like…say, Art Blakey, and you're off.

It's part of my new "Web 2.0" persona, dontcha know. Someone told me I'm possibly falling into that abyss. It seems not a bad place to fall. Music tailored to you, instant conversations with friends in all parts of the world at times of the day that are entirely distant from yours yet somehow perfectly essential.

What Is a 'Neutral Expression'?

Speaking of looks, looking, and thinking about looking, there's an interesting study out today from Scotland. It seems some dude found that we judge men to be attractive based partially on how other women rate them. (Not news.) What I think is interesting, however, is that men tend to judge other men poorly if other women think highly of them. Observe:

"Psychologist Ben Jones, of the University of Aberdeen, and his team gave women a test in which they had to choose the more attractive of pairs of male faces and to rate how much more handsome they found them.

"They were then shown a short video in which the same faces were displayed. But each face was being looked at by a woman smiling or one showing a bored or neutral expression. The researchers repeated the initial test.

" 'We found that the slideshow caused women to become more attracted to the men who were being smiled at by other women,' Jones said.

"But when men were asked to look at the same male faces, those who got the approving female glances became less appealing."

Dudes, stop the hatin'. (At least try this out in your office, as I just did. Bundles of fun for the whole cube-amily.)

Anti-Auto Focus

You know when something is second-nature to you--like, say seeing the days of the week in colors in your head--and you bring it up with people over the years only to discover that this is entirely foreign to them--you are the only person you ever meet who does this thing, this thing that never seemed odd at all but is apparently unique to the way you experience the world?

Like that.

I have finally discovered another human being with feet on this Earth who has this way of experiencing people that I have: We both cannot picture the faces of the people we know when we are not around them. Especially (maybe only) the faces of the people we care about or are attracted to.

For me, the harder I try to see their faces, the more their features float away. It becomes a chase. I start to see a collar of a shirt, a brown tint of hair, maybe the squint of his eyes. And then it blurs. I try to imagine his mouth, and it's more of an impression than anything. A muddle of color, reddish.

In the end I am left with more of a music of a person than a photograph. Their image is more a vibration than a still shot. Legato.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

Part of an IM conversation with a wise, wise friend tonight. Doesn't matter the topic, really. Just the words. Enjoy the words for all their painful, absurdist value.

Friend: this is ancient Japanese wisdom for you.
McBickle: ha
Friend: the old sages sat around looking at flowers as though they'd never seen one before
McBickle: and ny jewish wisdom tells me to realize i'm nuts

Now do you understand what some of us are dealing with here?

Do you know, yourself, what it is like to live abroad and have to explain to people, "No, I am not 'stress-ed.' Haven't you ever seen a Woody Allen movie?"

Coincidentally (ha. See below, and above, hm), I've been considering the proliferation of the words "magical thinking" this year in the media. I thought maybe it came from Joan Didion's choice of title for her most recent book. Maybe. (Magical thinking?)

Anyway, Benedict Carey has an interesting story in the NYT today, "Do You Believe in Magic?"

I like this part, by somebody named Emily Pronin, who I have come across somewhere in my past, although I cannot pinpoint exactly where:

“'The question is why do people create this illusion of magical power?' said the lead author, Emily Pronin, an assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton. 'I think in part it’s because we are constantly exposed to our own thoughts, they are most salient to us' — and thus we are likely to overestimate their connection to outside events."

Redonkulous

So I'm just here to perpetuate the use of the word "redonkulous," which was sent to me by one of my favorite women friends, who has a brain like a dense tree. You know, like, one with leaves and branches and knots and nuts 'n' shit. Blocks out the sun. Anyway, she wrote it in an e-mail about a class in college that encapsulated what I've always referred to generically as "Imagining the Gender of the Other as Difference" or some such crotch-scratching crud.

Here's what I learned from the Urban Dictionary:

re.donk'u.lous adj.

1. significantly more absurd than ridiculous to an almost impossible extreme; without possibility of serious consideration.

2. fitted to excite absolute ridicule; intentionally crazy and silly; completely absurd and laughable.

"redonkulous" - as first popularized by the fictional character Seth Cohen on FOX's The O.C.

George W. Bush is the most redonkulous person in the world.

The first Bush administration was ridiculous. This second one is just redonkulous.

That was the funniest movie I've seen. It was consistently redonkulous. Absolutely hilarious!

Enjoie.

Yay!

I like it when you meet someone in the world who lingers with you, like, say, a slash of color you accidentally got on your jeans when you swiped your pen along your thigh. Some people don't come out in the wash. I like it.

I've been trying to find you a link to a hilarious story I read in the New Yorker last week by Shalom Auslander. He writes about giving up Orthodox Judaism during the 1994 Stanley Cup playoffs. God bless his demented wife Orli and his demented self—they walked 14 miles from Teaneck, N.J., on the Sabbath to watch the Rangers play at Madison Square Garden. On a screen. (It was an away game in Canada.)

Here's a part of the story that I particularly like. It takes place in his childhood:

"One was always forbidden to eat pig, at least until the Messiah arrived—only then, Rabbi Goldfisher taught us in the fourth grade, would the wicked be punished, and the dead be resurrected, and the pigs be kosher.

"'Yay!' I said, high-fiving my best friend, Dov."

[I'm a big fan of men who write "Yay!" Duh.]

Fucking wind tonight makes my fingers too cold to actually be properly functional. They feel like tentacles. (I have jellyfish on the brain tonight. Jellyfish are supercool.) This is, however, part of the delight of living on the top floor of a 105-year-old building in Brooklyn. Wind whips in ropey sounds that you can envision circling from your borough to the skyscrapers downtown. Ribbonlike.

Seasonally Unusual Occurences

I walked down the Bowery today at around 4 p.m. A beautiful young black woman smiled at me. Her head turned as she passed, still, smiling, so I smiled back at her. She said, "Hello," so I said, "Hello," and kept walking. I heard a splashing sound.

I turned around to see her walking on and on the ground was a circle of…milk? About three feet around. A white splash in a circle, like paint. (At some point I registered that she was holding a bottle in her hand. Milky- more than paint bottle-like.) I walked on to the corner but kept turning around to try to understand what had just happened. A man on the opposite corner waiting to cross the street in my direction called out:

"She's doing that every time she passes a white woman." He was black. He shook his head and laughed, saying, "She's crazy."

I felt pseudo-assaulted.

In other news, around that same stretch of street my mind wondered, as the drizzle drizzled, whether it was a warm fall day or a cool spring day only to realize it is winter. This is January.

Everybody's Genitals Ride the Train

Okay, what?

What?

A man gets on a train. He holds two drumsticks. "Oh no," a woman thinks. "Here we go."

The man settles his butt on a milk crate and proceeds to drum. ON HIS CROTCH. Specifically on the baggy crotch of his jeans, which he periodically stretches out for maximum surface area on which to drum. His feet tap along with his, er, drumming, and he works himself into a beautiful drummy frenzy.

"Is that man drumming on his crotch?" I say to the woman next to me. "Don't you think that's a bad idea?"

I gape, I laugh, I realize the man is not asking for money. He finishes crotch-drumming, scoops up his milk crate and exits the train within four stops.

~

In a somewhat related story, the other night my colleague and I took the train to Brooklyn.

"That is the most intense camel toe I have ever seen," he says to me.

I look.

This is not camel toe. Calling this "camel toe" is unkind to camels. This is, to coin a word, swagina. Sweatpants in the shape of a vagina. Vagipants.

"Do you think when she takes them off, they retain the shape?" my colleague asks.

"No," I say. "I think they come that way."

Laughing at His Poet Hand, Illicitly

illicit
One entry found for illicit.
Main Entry: il·lic·it
Pronunciation: (")i(l)-'li-s&t
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin illicitus, from in- + licitus lawful -- more at LICIT
: not permitted : UNLAWFUL
- il·lic·it·ly adverb

Just, you know, 'cause.

~

My head spins when I think about this:

"It is strange to think that the man who wrote Mozart’s librettos spent most of the latter half of his adult life in New York: that he ran a boarding school on Greenwich Street, a bookstore on lower Broadway, and also, soon after his arrival, a grocery store. (Imagine, he asks us, “how I must have laughed at myself every time my poet’s hand was called upon to weigh out two ounces of tea, or measure half a yard of ‘pigtail’ ”—chewing tobacco—“now to a cobbler, now to a teamster.”) Later, he sold medicines and drygoods, and set up a distillery. None of these businesses prospered. At one point, the creditors made off with the family’s beds."

(From "Nights at the Opera," a review of books on Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, by Joan Acocella, in the New Yorker.)

Da Ponte moved here in 1805. How are we supposed to reconcile the extraordinary imaginary gulf we have created between New York of the 19th century and Europe of the 18th? (Newsboys and fire brigades vs. vermin-infested powdered wigs? Oh, dead horses littering the streets--that's how.) Let alone with what we think of when we think of "teamsters"? How very, very strange.

International Crisis, Narrowly Averted

My phone has four missed calls. They mysteriously differ, but they are clearly all from One Man in Baghdad.

"Shit," I think. I send a text: "You ok?"

The phone rings.

"OMiB?" I say. "Hello?"

"Hello?" I hear. Then, nothing.

In the background I hear voices. A man, a woman, others. What language are they speaking?

"Hello? Hello, OMiB?" I say. I wait. I listen. Is this English they are speaking? Arabic? "Hello?"

I wait longer. I don't want to hang up. What if this is it? Kidnapped, OMiB has somehow dialed my number, repeatedly, and now can't talk, but won't hang up the line? "Hello? Hello? I can't hear you. Can you talk? Hello?"

My nerves are rankled. I wait longer, unsure if he is even there. The line goes dead.

It rings again.

"HELLO?" I shout.

"Hi," he says.

"ARE YOU OK?" I ask, heart pounding.

"Yeah," he says. "Getting drunk with friends," he says.

Thank you, OMiB, thank you for that. I now have managed to dramatically freak myself out, laughed at you, attempted to hear through the phone the "cool music" you guys are listening tonight (no, I really couldn't hear it), pledged to be your BFF and now I drink heartily from the bottle of scotch newly given to me by TCNKIK (let's say "KIK" for short). Fucking hell. And the night has just begun.

More Data from the Screwball Division

I read two things today I would like to share bits of here:

1. Last weekend's New York Times Magazine featured its annual "The Lives They Lived" pieces, on people who died. Dead people. One that I found particularly surprising is about Rupert Pole, who the author of the story, Sara Corbett, names as Anais Nin's other husband. She writes the story in the second person, which is sometimes off-putting, but otherwise serves to grind in how contortionist it must be to constantly have to sort out your life by consulting something called a "lie box.":

"In a dusty little town in the Arizona desert in 1955, as quietly as you can, you marry Rupert Pole. For the next 11 years you are the wife of two men, on two coasts. You liken yourself to a trapeze artist, swinging from one husband to the other. The lies have multiplied to the point that you now keep them in a file you refer to as “the lie box.” It has two sections: one labeled New York, one Los Angeles."

Corbett says that when Nin died, the Los Angeles Times listed one man as her husband, the New York Times listed the other. Fucking hell.

2. The New Yorker has Malcolm Gladwell's 20 billion-word piece on puzzles and mysteries. I particularly like this section. (But I think I am made too easily happy by the combination of words like "Screwball Division" and "batty"):

"The mystery-solvers of the Second World War were small groups of analysts whose job was to listen to the overseas and domestic propaganda broadcasts of Japan and Germany. The British outfit had been around since shortly before the First World War and was run by the BBC. The American operation was known as the Screwball Division, the historian Stephen Mercado writes, and in the early nineteen-forties had been housed in a nondescript office building on K Street, in Washington. The analysts listened to the same speeches that anyone with a shortwave radio could listen to. They simply sat at their desks with headphones on, working their way through hours and hours of Nazi broadcasts. Then they tried to figure out how what the Nazis said publicly—about, for instance, the possibility of a renewed offensive against Russia—revealed what they felt about, say, invading Russia. One journalist at the time described the propaganda analysts as “the greatest collection of individualists, international rolling stones, and slightly batty geniuses ever gathered together in one organization.” And they had very definite thoughts about the Nazis’ secret weapon."

And here we give a shout-out to the coolest new kid in Kosovo this week. He's off to do good in the world, and this woman wishes him well (and wants him to know that his grappa is in good hands and will not survive in the world for another 11 years, so no worries there. The scotch, on the other hand, will be kindly nursed. Smokily sipped. Possibly in slippers.)

No More Present, Please

Today I am dressed like my father in the Seventies. It was entirely unintentional, but the effect is undeniable.

A fitted wool turtleneck: maroon.
A velvet blazer: black.
Jeans: blue.
Boots: shiny and black.

Hair pulled into a low ponytail...throw a stache and chops on me, and I could pass for your dad, too. I'm hoping by tonight someone invites me to a key party.

New Year's Is More Fun in a Red Dress

Dammit, I hate being in bed and about to fall asleep but am writing so coherently and distinctly in my head I have to get up and actually type it. Stupid writer brain.

Last night I met a man who was entirely reminiscent of Ian McKellan's character from "Gods and Monsters." (I felt a bit like the young Brendan Frasier in that film, too, in fact, considering what this gentleman appeared to be trying to wrangle.) Imagine the man with gray hair and a deeply lined face, eyes heavily hooded with libidinal confidence.

"Darling McBickle," he said. "You are so lovely." Or maybe he said, "You are tantalizing." Or "alluring." (He did not say, "Let me lick your earlobe," though the effect was similar: viscerally unpleasant and slick. Have you ever had a man you have never spoken to before ask to lick your earlobe? I have. It is not a good thing.) His hand slid around my waist. I was, fortunately, too distracted by the form of his words to be annoyed by the fingers feeling my hip. His British accent formed somewhere in his upper nose and his words traveled down the length of his tongue before exiting his mouth and entering my ear, looping around the three small bones in there and landing somewhere in my fuzzy, bourbon-laden head. It was New Year's Eve, after all—who wouldn't appreciate an elderly producer and his leery-eyed pronouncements? As I wandered off to the other end of the party, he said to me in a perfectly pretentious arrangement of syllables, "Do come back."

I did not.

A couple of nights before, I met a man (likely) named Vito Badabing, baddaboom, daddabing. He was Brooklynese (pronounced "Brooklyn-ay-zay") at its lasagna-baked best. Round body, curled hair, leather jacket and hands like meat hooks. (Is this a cliche? They really were like meat hooks.) He was one of multiple party guests who roundly did not resemble the next, thereby making this particular gathering much more interesting than if it had been only a cadre of musicians and writers, which it was at its core. That night I met a series of men and women who held playful conversations about the bulkiness of men's boxer shorts and more serious ones about the merits of creating art in a colony. (The serious discussions drifted off in a light wind, anyway. A quiplike party, done up in wine and cheese. Oh, and chili. There was a mess of chili on the stove—enough for a squadron, which, in fact, we may have been.)

The entire gathering wove though an apartment in which one room connected to the next end to end in a series of boxes until it unexpectedly began again back at the beginning. In that sense, the party was refreshed about every 20 minutes, making every guest you had seen less than a half hour before seem new and again interesting. Very helpful.