Rats!

OK. I am at my normal news watching position at the treadmill, which I insist on watching without sound for the added suspense, when all of a sudden, I see footage of rats rampaging through a restaurant that looks very familiar and kind of close to where I live.
1. I almost had a heart attack and fell off the treadmill, it was so disgusting.
You can knock out yourself on You Tube, where the footage has been gleefully running ever since.
2. This was at the KFC/TacoBell (serves them right) on 6th Ave and W 3rd St. A hop a skip and a jump away from ma maison. So as my neighbor Glenn told me, now that they get rid of the rats over there, they are all going to come live over here. He neglected to mention the rats that already make our garden building home. More rats.
This is my point: this KFC/Taco Bell is a metaphor for the entire city of New York, make no mistake about it. It is miraculous that given the amount of rats in this city, we don't get to share a communal table with them at dim sum, or stand in the line for pizza together, or sit next to them at the movies (I am always afraid of the dark, and now particularly of the dark at the IFC center).
Just today I saw a very dead rat on the subway tracks: it was the size of a truck. It was obese.
Yet, apartments in New York cost zillions of dollars to rent or buy while we live in a rat infested town. This is insane to me.
I say if we have to share the space with rats, and if it is indeed true that there are seven rats per person in this town, either they start paying higher prices or we get substantial discounts. We should pay much less for housing, who cares about the zen garden and the communal wine rack and all that crap if you have to share it with rats? What good is a 2 million dollar puny studio when your roommates may be rats, or when you step outside your door in your newly gentrified neighborhood and there they are, your friendly neighborhood rats.
As for the City Council getting "symbolically" rid of the n-word and curbing pedicabs, I have a better idea, you sorry nincompoops: get rid of the rats first.
Mayor zillionaire Bloomberg with all your newfangled schemes to turn this city into Peoria: GET RID OF THE RATS, everywhere.

F

I went to a lecture with F Murray Abraham, who is currently playing both Shylock and Barrabas (The Jew of Malta) at the Theater for a New Audience. It is impossible to get tickets and apparently, his Shylock rocks. So the next best thing is to go see him interviewed by a Shakespeare scholar at the New York Public Library. For those of you who have no clue who I am talking about, the man is famous for his portrayal of Antonio Salieri in the movie Amadeus by Milos Forman. He won an Oscar, justly so, for it.
1. F is looking great. He has enormous charisma. He looks better now than when he was younger.
2. He has a booming, magnificent voice. He sounds like he is on sensurround. He is an AC-TOR.
3. He is very actory, but charming and extraordinarily energetic. I wish I could get a freaking ticket for the damn play.
I was hoping, that this, being a conversation in the Public Library, with a renowned Shakespeare scholar, would be an interesting exploration of the Merchant of Venice, quite an incendiary, problematic play.
Instead, even though it was extremely entertaining, we were subjected to what always happens nowadays in the presence of celebrity: mostly banal repartee and gushing admiration from the interviewer, countered by false modesty and coyness from the interviewee. But what was more interesting was the elephant in the room, which everybody kind of skirted around, which was the issue of the antisemitism of the play. Both plays, actually, because Marlowe's The Jew of Malta is supposed to be even worse, and with none of the redeeming graces of Shakespeare's genius.
F was great because he spoke of what he knew as an actor. He identified with Shylock as an outsider, a man tired of being mistreated. He spoke of how he got to embody the part, of certain details that make him imagine things.
But the Shakespeare scholar didn't do his homework, in my view. He mainly gushed. If you have one of those rare creatures in attendance (a Shakespeare scholar) wouldn't you like him to explain stuff?
Luckily, and for a change, the audience asked good questions and deepened the debate a little bit.
But nobody spoke of what always leaves audiences pondering: is it a really antisemitic play, is it not antisemitic, is it ambiguous, what is Shakespeare's purpose?
I would have loved to hear some of that.

Put on your dancing feets

This kills me. The NY Supreme Court upheld that ridiculous 80 year old law, barring patrons from dancing in bars and restaurants that don't have a special permit. Jeeeeez. What the Fuck?
The law made its appearance in the time of Prohibition (another genius idea) to prevent the proliferation of speakeasies. We can safely say that the times have changed, no?

No smoke, no lard, no dance; what's next? This is becoming a fascist state, this city.

"Recreational dancing is not a form of expression protected by the federal or state constitutions," the court wrote.

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT, THE COURT IS AN ASSHOLE. RECREATIONAL DANCING IS A FORM OF SELF-EXPRESSION, IS IT NOT? AND THUS SHOULD BE PROTECTED BY THE CONSTITUTION. (APPLAUSE) I REST MY CASE. (Allow me to indulge my fantasy of being Clarence Darrow for a day).

City lawyer Norman Corenthal welcomed the court's decision, saying it upheld the city's right to enforce laws that protect residential areas from noise, congestion and safety hazards.

BULLSHIT. THEY JUST LOVE TO EXERCISE ORWELLIAN CONTROL OVER ALL OF US.

The plaintiffs claimed that in the 1960s, about 1,000 places legally allowed patrons to dance, but fewer than 300 such places exist now. They also had challenged the city's application of zoning laws, arguing it was arbitrary and capricious.

Norman Siegel, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he was considering an appeal.

CONSIDERING? You should be moonwalking up the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington, or something, Norm. Don't just stand there, do something!

So in the meantime, I suggest we engage in a campaign of civil disobedience and shake our collective booties in protest.

Shmapocalypto

Somebody sent me this Saturday Night Live video and I thought it's the only funny thing they've done in 30 years. I think it's all Borat's fault. Used to be, when someone hated us (like 24/7), we used to wring our hands and rend our garments and call Abe Foxman. Now Jews can make fun of those who hate them, for a change, and people get it. I find it utterly refreshing. Enjoy.

Bring back the draft

The College Republicans of NYU organized a game called "Find the Illegal Immigrant". When they saw the outrage they provoked, they claimed it was to create dialogue, or some rubbish like that. Of course, everybody else had a conniption and there were protests with inane slogans like "No human is illegal".
I congratulate both sides on their stupidity. Perhaps instead of organizing idiot games and stupid marches, they could get back to studying, which is what they are paying the big bucks for.
This, and other examples of the listlessness of our youth, convince me that what this country needs to shake it out of its sugar, fat and TV induced stupor is a military draft.
For instance, the other day I watched, by accident I swear, The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. The show was about outrageously ostentatious displays of wealth in weddings, bar mitzvahs and sweet sixteens.
There was a girl from Florida that had a party that cost like a million dollars, and on top of that her parents gave her a Jaguar and she rode in on a horse, etc. The theme was Mardi Gras. They could have given one tenth of the cost to the people in NOLA, but never mind.
I say bring back the draft and send all these spoiled retards to war. The ones in Florida, the ones in front of the Nintendo, the ones at useless colleges all over the US. Send them all to Iraq and Iran and wherever Bush and Cheney look to profit from murder and mayhem, and you will see how fast everyone wakes up and starts looking at reality in the face.

Assholelandia

I don't know what to write about today. Sundry assholes come to mind:

1. John McCain. Now he is saying that Rumsfeld was the worst Secretary of Defense ever. Now. Why didn't you say something when the guy was still in office, you stupid putz?
2. The Anna Nicole judge. One would have thought that the only dignified human being in close proximity to that silicone trash bag would be a judge, but I guess that Miss Smith's greatest talent, even in death, was to surround herself with the absolute bottom of the barrel, way down in the gutter, and so this judge Seidlin is no exception.
And speaking of assholes, what kind of family allows a person to decompose for two weeks before burying her WHEREVER?
This late show host Craig Ferguson gets in the news because he decides to defend Britney Spears from the jeering malevolence of the public. That's very nice of him, but why is this news exactly? I saw it on CNN and on ABC, as if it was some kind of incredible pronouncement. And I can't help but thinking he only said that because no one ever watches his show, so it helps with the ratings. Maybe I'm too jaded. But there seems to be far more interest in the fates of two trailer trash hos than in the fate of American soldiers in Iraq. Man, if I was a soldier in Iraq I would be seething. I don't know how I would feel when I came home to utter indifference and callous disregard for what I was doing over there. I'd feel murderous rage.

Finally!!!!

After a year or more of lugging it through airports and struggling with it, I finished Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. HALLELUJAH! I feel like I deserve a medal. I'm so very proud of myself that I stuck to this book, making my other reading come to a grinding halt, while I patiently (not really) tried to get through Swann's Way and like it. Sometimes I loved it, particularly when he was catty, incredibly insightful and mischievous about the social circles that Swann frequents, or about the family of the narrator. And sometimes it worked my last nerve with his endlessly complicated sentences and his impossibly meandering train of thought. There are passages in this book that are absolutely incredible. Then there are many passages about trees and branches and flowers and leaves and the baroque pain in the heart of Swann that drove me crazy. Sometimes I felt like screaming: Get a life, Marcel! But sometimes he made my jaw drop in wonder.
Basically Marcel (after a year I feel I am on intimate terms with him) has taken upon himself the not inconsiderable task of revealing the nature of time and memory. Even when one is wanting to strangle him, one is in awe of his almost scientific approach to exposing how exactly we feel pain, nostalgia, regret, love, how time works upon our memories and feelings, how it defines us and changes us. His investigation is so thorough that I kept thinking about Einstein and the scientists that attempt to do the same but with mathematical formulas.
There are some fabulous passages, but these two come to mind. Not the madeleine, which is deservedly famous. There is a passage about asparagus that goes on for pages, from where it grows and how it gets to his table, and why it reminds him of his aunt, and ends on how he loved the smell of the asparagus in his pee.
Then towards the end of the book, one of the most perverse things I've ever read: He goes on and on and on and on about how excited he is about an imminent trip to Italy with his parents. In his imagination, he has already built Florence and Venice completely in his mind, with full descriptions generously provided. He shares his excitement and anticipation and what he feels and thinks and how he's going to react when he gets there, and the reader is so ecstatic at the thought that this poor sequestered kid is actually going somewhere other than Paris and Combray, that he is going to take us on his journey, you are almost packing your bags to get on the coach next to him, and then one day before the trip, he is so excited he falls ill with fever and the doctor bans his parents from taking him on the trip. So they don't. Just like that. Does he scream and beg and cajole and revolt? No. He stays in Paris, resigned to visiting the Champs Elysees everyday. I can't get over this passage. Seriously, I can't get over it. But then it is at the Champs where he encounters and falls in love with little Gilberte Swann, and that's how he ends the book, the motherfucker, joining probably the most amazing instance of foreshadowing (or is it the opposite?) in world literature, with his recollection of those days of his youth and the realization that time changes everything.
Yesterday, as I closed the tome that soothed my fears on airplanes, lulled me to sleep when restless, and annoyed me rather consistently with its descriptive minutiae and its lengthy digressions, I felt a pang of sadness. I had thought "no more Proust ever again". Now I'm afraid I want to read the next one. But I can't give myself to him and forget everyone else, as he demands. I don't know if I have the mental stamina. I don't know if I have the intelligence. The man requires concentration. He requires abnegation and devotion. I don't know if I have it in me.

Talk Radio!

There is a revival of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio on Broadway starring Liev Schreiber. It is a very good production directed by Robert Falls. It seems interesting that someone would choose to bring back this little poisoned jewel from the eighties, which has not been updated for our times. At the beginning the references to Iran-Contra and Bush Sr. as Veep seem dated, but as the play goes on, it has the terrific effect that it makes you pine for the days of Reagan and Ollie North. Those were the days! How innocent and enraged we were then! As opposed to how jaded and callously indifferent to much worse events we are now. So that works. If you saw the Oliver Stone movie of the play, the character of Barry Champlain was played by Eric Bogosian himself, who is a fantastic, charismatic performer. As Champlain, Schreiber is excellent, just as he was excellent as Richard Roma in Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, (a similar kind of character somehow) and very excellent as Iago in an otherwise forgettable Public Theater production. Yet I kind of missed the heat and passion of someone like Bogosian. Liev Schreiber is a technically commanding actor. He uses his voice beautifully in this production. He is intense and extraordinarily effective, but he is cold. When you saw Bogosian, you saw a true manic guy, someone who had been losing it since childhood, someone truly on edge. Schreiber brings something different to the role, more of a seething, controlled rage, more of a calculated, reptilian intelligence, rather than just passionate outrage.
The actors who play the callers are extraordinary. They presumably stand backstage and interact with Schreiber over the phone. They are the best part of the show.

Vanity Feh

Am I the only person in the world who is tired of Annie Leibovitz? Anybody?
I bought the latest issue of Vanity Fair because I was curious about the Hollywood portfolio. I think I have bought Vanity Fair three times in my life and each time my overall impression is: what a presumptuous and useless waste of trees. There is something about the magazine that gets on my nerves and this last issue is no exception. The articles are always too long and not that well written. The tone is middlebrow with pretensions. It sucks.
But what is it about the Leibovitz photographs that creeps me out? I leaf through this portfolio, which has many very famous actors in it and it leaves me completely cold. Here you have dozens of Hollywood lovelies and they look expressionless, dull, like mannequins.
The pictures are so polished and perfect and contrived and every detail is so belabored that they are absolutely lifeless. They have been drained of all spontaneity, they don't have a sense of moment. Their perfection is scary and uninviting. I have never felt that Leibovitz's celebrity pictures reveal anything interesting about her subjects. They don't reveal anything at all. Rather, they seem centered on the gimmicky craftsmanship of the photographer. They dazzle because she always comes up with a clever concept but they don't say anything real or authentic about the subject in question. Whoopi Goldberg dunked in a tub of white milk? Please.
Her work for the new Disney anniversary campaign is slightly better. Only because it is rather daring that Disney should pick the Hollywood glamor route instead of their inane clouds in the shape of Mickey and their sickening pastel colors. As advertising, the Disney pictures are stunning, and for a change, dark and fun. Scarlett Johanssen as Cinderella, Beyonce as Alice in Wonderland (Oliver Platt is the Mad Hatter and creepy Lyle Lovett is the Rabbit), David Beckham as a Prince on a horse fighting a dragon. Again, all moody and preciously lit and inhumanly perfect, but because they are ads for Disney they are interesting. And they match the brand because Disney is not human either. You can also imagine the meeting where the agency proposed them. The person in charge of the pastel colors and enforced cheer must have had a heart attack.
The Vanity Fair portfolio, however, is a lot of overproduction for absolutely no meaning, no insight, no wit, no fun. If you see it here, it looks much better than on the page.

The Skinny

Because I do not follow fashion, because I love beautiful clothes but I loathe fashion, I have not been paying too much attention to models (also because I hate them, like all women who are not models do).
But I have noticed that they don't look like they used to in their glory days, when Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell ruled the Earth like Tyranosaurus Rexi of the runway. I've noticed that lately they look like emaciated children from a Roumanian orphanage, with a few exceptions like Giselle Bundchen or Kate Moss, who actually look like women. I don't know who decided that models should look like the spawn of the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with huge eyes and translucent faces, but I don't really care. All I know is they look much too young to be modeling and much too skeletal, and if you dressed them in concentration camp garb, Auschwitz circa 1945, you'd be calling an ambulance to Bryant Park. And perhaps the Human Rights Commission as well.
Clothes do look better on hangers, (as anybody who has ever been inside a dressing room trying them on knows firsthand) and models have basically become walking hangers. They have eating disorders, they don't eat, they take drugs, they are as abused as racehorses but without the mercy. And they don't even look good!
So I propose to designers to use actual hangers for their shows. With the technology of stagecraft available today, they could create interesting, long legged, long necked, size zero mannequins that could move or not, that could hover across the runway moved by rails like those at the dry cleaners, and that could make the clothes look as pretty as they want. This way, young girls would not be starving to death and being traumatized by body image complexes and other psychological abuse.
The article in New York Magazine that deals with this issue says that many of these teenagers come from Eastern European countries, whose bigger export seems to be women, be it for the sex trade or the rag trade. I don't see that much difference between a young woman who is enticed to prostitute herself and one that is abused the way runway models are. They are both made to feel worthless except for their looks. But people like that scary Diane Von Furstenberg who rose from the dead not long ago and that other zombie from hell, Karl Lagerfeld, two people who look like human remains in an advanced state of decomposition, are in a total outrage over Madrid and Milan demanding a minimum body mass index from models. Never mind that:

...a perilously thin teenage model, Eliana Ramos, would die in Uruguay, apparently of a heart attack, making it three model deaths in the past seven months. In August, Ramos’s older sister Luisel died after restricting herself to a diet of lettuce leaves and Diet Coke. In November, Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston died weighing just 88 pounds.

If Mayor Bloomberg is so concerned about health, why doesn't he take a look at the runways? They should be closed by the Department of Health.