With my Italian family here, it reminds me of how much I'd like to be a polyglot. Not necessarily fluent or anything, just enough to get by, and not just in Italian either. My grandma, the family's Italian immigrant, is fluent, and Mom is pretty good, too. On the other side, my aunt (or cousin or something) works in an Italian bank trading American securities and currencies, so her English is quite decent. The son (also a cousin or something) is shy with his classroom English, but it's way better than my Italian. What's interesting to watch are the father, who speaks four words of English (one of which is "golf") and my father, who speaks one word of Italian ("Italia")... and mispronounces it.

There's a weird psychological thing going on here, and I know lots of people think it's an Ugly American trait, but I have a feeling it's more of an isolationist thing: My dad, who's fully aware he might as well be speaking English to a brick, almost subconsciously decides he'll be understood if he talks realllllllyyyyyyy sloooooooow and LLLLLOOOUUUDDDDD. It's super amusing, if only because no one even talks to their dog like this. ("Blah blah Ginger blah blah blah Ginger blah...")

Their father just speaks normally, fast and with his hands, while I smile and pretend to comprehend.

Like I said, I don't think it's an American thing, because when I was on the Contiki tour, everybody spoke condescending, pointless English in that way to the natives — Americans, Australians, Brits, Canadians, New Zealanders. It's just a function of who's around you: if you're from a loose confederation of nations where your neighbors speak one of twenty-three languages and who knows how many dialects, I can imagine you freeze up a bit less when some incomprehensible sounds come your way.

The trick, of course, isn't to speak more slowly (although that can help) or loudly (which won't help) but to speak less, more simply, and with longer words that are likely to be cognates. Pointing helps too. Personally, I think it's a lot of fun, sort of like the world's most restrictive game of Taboo.

My family from Italy, or at least a chunk of it, is in New Jersey for the first leg of their Ameri-Canadian vacation. They wanted to go to New York, but my mom and dad — the Nuclears — usurped the planning and micro-managed them into staying at la casa della nonna, an hour out of the city, and tour-guiding them around town. Someone's been taking lessons from Contiki.

Maybe it's because they're European, but the Italian family is such a departure from the Nuclears: they're fun, and fascinated, and it's not like everything they see and do is utterly perfunctory. Us, okay... my fondest memory from our semi-regular trips to Disney World back in my kiddie days: We were on the now-defunct "Journey Into Imagination" ride, a vivid, whimsical trip through some Imagineer's storybook fantasy, set in the Dreamport and guided by the jolly Dreamfinder in his colorful DreamMobile blimp. (There's a theme here...) There's a catchy-ass song and a flying purple dragon guy and animatronic robots and, maybe three-quarters of the way through, a hidden camera takes a pic of you and the friends and family in the OmniMover, who, let me remind you, are on vacation in the Happiest Place on Earth. The photo of my family: we could not have been more disaffected and apathetic if we were at an estate tax planning seminar.

So yes, it's weird, slightly annoying and slightly discomfiting being around folks who aren't thoroughly jaded. And no, enthusiasm isn't infectious.

A lot tourist stuff I just don't get. Waiting in line two hours for their 86-story elevator ride at the Empire State Building — that makes sense. Wanting to see St. Patrick's Cathedral when you're from Europe, where they have bigger, older, real Gothic cathedrals on every other block? Not so much. F.A.O. Schwarz — yes. Fifth Avenue Apple Store — ...maybe. The official NBA store — who shops there? Maybe if you have a favorite team or something, although I don't think the NBA store sells anything you can't also buy at K-Mart for a lot less, but if you're not from America and have no connection to American basketball... don't you have your own cultural detritus to put on your T-shirts and stuff? Stop stealing ours!

It seems like it's working out for them, though, since they seem to have the opposite tourist philosophy that I do. They're sightseers, so as much as my dad tries to push them into experiencing New York (and America) rather than just taking snapshots of it, it looks like they're enjoying their cursory introduction way more than I ever loved the city. I'm a little jealous, actually.

I Have Not Fallen Off a Moving Train... Yet.

I loathe NJ Transit, our statewide embarrassment and financial sinkhole of a mass-transit system — for their trains' unfailing ability to arrive five minutes late, their abysmal service and obnoxious staff, and recently, their conviction that I'm going to fall out of a moving train unless I'm five-point restrained in their industrial-springy seats with some dude's newspaper tickling the back of my head. For at least the past twenty years, you used to be able to stand in the vestibule between trains during the ride — not that you'd want to, or anything, but it beats the dreaded middle seats, and the vestibule smells like train, instead of pee. NJ Transit would leave the doors open and everything, and this was even back when I was a kid, and even though the eighties had childproof bottles and childproof doors, there was nothing but common sense keeping us children from jumping off the train, adventure-style.

Cut to today, when now you can't ride in the vestibule at all — again, not that you'd necessarily want to — but, and I'm sure this was a coincidence, but there was an article in the Times about NJ Transit train doors opening before the vehicle has come to a full and complete stop. This can be dangerous:

“I typically stand between the cars, and it could be very dangerous because people could be leaning against the door,” said Neil McGrath, who commutes between Princeton and New York. “It’s kind of dodgy. You could easily get thrown out of the door.”

To highlight the danger posed by devil-possessed train doors, the Times article includes this tenebrous photo of a lady who was standing nearby a train door as it opened. I'm amazed she survived.

The real problem with NJ Transit, aside from their lack of maintenance capacity, is that they're total dickweeds about it, almost like it's our fault. The morning conductor, who is otherwise okay, basically took a "because I said so" approach to dealing with passengers who missed their vestibule rides (and if you have to stand, the vestibule gives you a lot more room than the train car aisle does), and a fair number of them complained. "If you don't like it, take it up with NJ Transit headquarters," he P.A'ed, like that's just what people need in the morning; we have an entire day to look forward to middle management passing the buck.

But today's evening conductor was a risible asshole about clearing the vestibule; he literally said, "I will not move this train until everybody is inside the cars!" Dude, you're not our second-grade teacher, okay? Shut up and get us home, Public Servant! If it's that big a deal, how about sticking a few more cars on the train... problem solved.

Considering the difficulty I'm having Googling incidents of lucid adults falling out of a moving train (the first news article dates back to 1896), I sense that the danger here is greatly exaggerated. Certainly it's not greater than the thousand people a year killed by flying coach. Don't see anybody quite so eager to take up that cause.

Eyesores

AM New York has an article "10 to lose: Ugly buildings NYC would be better without," and I'm so happy to hear that other people — real urban aesthetics professionals — also despise AT&T's foreboding Communist-era concrete behemoth on Thomas Street. I always assumed the building just housed switches, routers, and other telco equipment and it's built from an entirely functional point of view, but it looks like it's straight out of a Kafkaesque nightmare and needs, like, a plant or something.

I can see making those blank walls into a graffiti artist's canvas brightening up the neighborhood.

Another building that needs tearing down, stat, is the Astor Place Tower sitting, or oozing, on the corner of Lafayette and Broadway and sticking out like twenty-two inch rims on a 1974 Datsun. These trippy post-modern buildings are popping up all over lower Manhattan, especially on the Lower East Side, which is still home to a bunch of dirty tenements... or spruced-up tenements now available for lofty rents. Much as I like the neighborhood, I'm not a huge fan of its look and I have no issue with these heavily angular (or heavily un-angular — I'm not an architecture critic, in case you couldn't tell) fiberglass and glass-glass mixed-residentials springing up. It's the ones that keep springing up and up, growing above the neighborhood like a condominium freak crying out for attention that bother me.

I'm sure they have great views for the privileged few at the top, but they're fucking up the views from the street for the rest of us.

Vocab Off!

I must be in a feeling sad for people mood cause I never go to these teeny-weeny bad acoustic concerts, some guy, a guitar and a mike playing in front of ten people — technically nine and a volunteer sound guy. He's okay; my ears aren't burning but it's not like I'm not seeing him go triple platinum, or even triple aluminum, but then he strums a final chord and there's what I believe they call a "smattering" of applause. Again, ten people; the praise is just so anemic it makes me want to cry. Me, I'm cupping my hands so it looks like I'm clapping, but I don't want to draw attention to myself. I'm for a new rule in society, if there's fewer than, say, fifty people then no clapping. We all snap like beatnik poets, which is supposed to sound weak and laconic. You still probably wouldn't hear me though.

Such a nerd, though — I came for the... god, such a motherfucking nerd... vocabulary bee.

Round one: Come up to the microphone, Scripps style, and use the following three words in a sentence. Jingoist, laudatory, nebulous. Penurious, perfunctory, sacrosanct. It's all the fast-paced action of vocabulary combined with the incoherent ramblings of the crazy guy on the sidewalk who blurts out random words. Augury, avarice, burgeon. Some guy named Sid, who I'm sure I've seen at other geography bees, bar trivia contests, Scrabble nights, etc., where he probably also annoyed the living shit out of me: "The ornithologist's augury was he saw as a burgeoning field because there's avarice and money in ornithology." No style points.

Ornithology — twice! Then the guy has to yell at the judges because their definition of "augury" wasn't specific enough. An augury is a prophecy read from birds' entrails, except according to the American Heritage Dictionary (it's on my computer), it's not. On one side, they're lexicographers, but Sid's opposing argument is, well... loud.

Did I say "nerd?" I meant "hipster." I'm live-blogging this, for Christ's sake!

And points off to Meg for trying to subvert the game with her sentence. "Quixotic means idealistic, comma, hubris is like pride, comma, and castigate means a dressing down, comma. I mean period."

Sid: "Semicolon!"

Round two: Know your prefixes. Nychtophobic. Aurivorous. Which nobody knew, cause again, it's a contest for twenty-something hipsters and not socially maladjusted seventh-graders with stacks of root word flash cards. So they dumb it down for us with clues... not like funny ones or anything, just plain old Wink Martindale type shit. That's disappointing, really — I expected the hipster grown-up vocabulary bee, of all things, to be a mock ironic celebration of how much better we are than those knuckle-dragging blue-collars, and caked with extra irony since each of us, as an individual, was above the insecurities assuaged by calling someone who's not in the room a dummy. But it's just this chick in an inappropriate tiny white dress playing Alex Cameron, Doctor of Pronunciation, and some folks defining words. I'm not really having fun — this Meg girl is standing right behind me, either watching me type or not at all aware of my existence (and I'm not sure which is more awkward) — but I don't think anyone else is either.

What little crowd there was is getting sick of clapping every time someone guesses a synonym for the word.

Round three: Multiple choice. The words are getting pretty obscure, the kind that if you saw them in print, you'd be able to make out the meaning from the context and your past experience with English, but just hearing them is a garble of mismatched syllables. But it's multiple freaking choice. We've gone from hoping someone will use three words in a clever, amusing sentence down to a pop quiz.

Bonus round, this one's for the grand prize, the "25-Foot Long Crossword Puzzle:" Great, more words! You get the definition and you have to come up with the word, which ends in "sion." Whoever gets the most words in a minute wins. This isn't bad cause I can play along and feel stupid when I can't figure out the answer or even stupider when I figure out an answer that ends in "tion."

So It's Come to This: A Review of ABC Family's The Middleman

I was desperate for entertainment last night, and ABC Family had this first-run show among television's reality detritus re-packaged as summer reality detritus. The Middleman started out with a few bonus points, just for having no association with ABC Family's darling professional moralizing showrunner Brenda Hampton. As far as magical cyber-realism superhero shows go, it's not all that insufferable. The pilot, or the arbitrarily-named Pilot Episode Sanction, sets up the premise and the kind of pot-induced homages and humor we're in for. Struggling artist and X-Box fanatic Wendy Watson gets recruited by some nebulous organization to fight, literally, comic-book evil, and I always feel embarrassed for the actor who has to deliver that exposition: "The National Security Council's supercomputer was downloaded into your brain!" or "It appears the plasmatron laser fused your DNA with that of a squid!" Not just that could never happen, but, really, come on now, that could never happen.

At least The Middleman runs on a stylistic level that's aware of its absurdity, the comic book tropes its imitation flatters, and (to a lesser extent) the trite superhero conventions it adopts for narrative simplicity. The pilot's first half is the same setup — random encounter with evil forces, protagonist brought to the secret lair, she's resistant to the whole ridiculous idea, etc. — and neither all that promising nor indicative of the way The Middleman embraces its crazy fantasy in the show's second half. I'm not saying it was totally successful, but you'd expect one of those ABC Family shows to delude itself into thinking that a mad scientist breeding an army of super-intelligent remote-controlled gorillas in order to take over the world (there seems to be a step missing in there...) is the most Emmy-worthy thing ever, rather than a dumbass idea with possible comic potential.

My biggest disappointment with the show — aside from Wendy's least-flattering superhero costume and/or security guard's uniform circa 1986 ever — is the show's failure to live up to its tone. The Middleman kept reminding me of Bryan Fuller's aesthetic, with a cheap, retro vibe, bizarre over-exposition, loquaciousness, and alternately brisk and cautious speech patterns almost lifted from Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies... but whoever's behind The Middleman is no Bryan Fuller. It feels like the style in The Middleman competes with the characterization, and some of the tics bring the script to a halt. Wendy's boss and title character is perpetually and irrationally cheerful and super-consciously refuses to cuss — he sounds like a lobotomized Ned Flanders — and the worst part is it's just a setup for a particularly ill-executed joke. I can see a Fuller character like Charlotte Charles thinking of and soliloquizing someone's refusal to cuss as a surrender to and acceptance of destiny's random influence and one's insignificant but not inconsequential role therein, plus the Fuller speech would be amusing.

I guess the style substitutes for the humor ABC Family censors wouldn't work with — be shocked, it's sanitized and, save for one good joke at the end, the sort of stuff where you know why it's supposed to be funny but it's just not — or the inherent superhero violence that the censors cut, or the weird sexuality in concept only. It covers up the dishonesty, poorly — because there's no way any of that stuff would happen in the real world.

Ben Stein Gives Fashion Advice

Ben Stein — the guy from the Clear Eyes commercials — went on an angry rant on his semi-regular CBS Sunday Morning editorial, complaining the usual conservative complaints about how much better things were in the olden days. What's destroying society this time? Neckties — they're headed the way of the ruff and cravat, and the percentage of American men wearing ties regularly is at an all-time low. I'm still waiting for the day when I can walk into work in my little footie pajamas, but it's a step forward, no longer having an arbitrary piece of fabric choking you all day long.

When I was a lad and a younger man, men wore these to show they did not work with picks and shovels and pitchforks.

Ties were a symbol of white collar status, although even some workmen wore them under their leather aprons.

If you had on a necktie, it showed you had some sense of organization, some sense of dignity about yourself.

Even schoolboys wore them. At fabulous boarding schools like Cardigan Mountain in New Hampshire, where my handsome son went, boys still wear them. It showed, to use a word that you rarely hear, class.

And what, Mr. Stein, is wrong with working with picks and shovels and picthforks? Someone's sounding awfully elitist, with his Hollywood connections, Ivy League education, son at a "fabulous" (read: gay?) boarding school, and silk strip dangling off his collar for no reason other than to show off his "class." The cultural shift — lagging behind the cultural shift — must be a little humbling for Ben. Back in his Nixon-speechwriting days, Ben and his tie lived with presidents and CEO's in the moneyed elite, the people who could do their jobs while sitting in a thick leather chair. They left our cranky old fogeys behind with the junior associates, assistant managers — the subordinates who don't get a say in the matter.

"Power is being able to dress the way you want," argues a Joseph Abboud executive. Save for casual Fridays, I am more powerful than any lawyer, banker, or trader in New York. Ah, it seems the tables have turned.

What Ben needs is a Xanax and an invitation to the twenty-first century and away from his Eisenhower-age nostalgia. He's looking to his comfort zone, where "men were there to work, not to play," as the very thought of Ben Stein playing boggles the mind. I bet he wears his tie and loafers to the beach and has no clue why that "Bueller, Bueller" was funny coming out of his mouth. Back in the day, Stein's nameless economics teacher character would've been able to punch any insolent student who laughed at his monotone, in the eighties we could mock him and now we just exploit him to sell eye drops and Creationism. Pushing the status quo must be a relief for the poor man.

It's as if the tie makes the man for Stein, and our supposed progression towards a slacker culture could be reversed not by reinvesting in our infrastructure or education — that would be expensive — but just wrapping our necks. But why is Stein moaning in the first place: he and his whole tie rack will do just fine no matter where the culture strays — rich people just enjoy that privilege. It's from that privilege that blinds Stein to the real forces shaping the zeitgiest. There was opportunity back in the fifties, hence some reasons to not slag off. By the Ferris Bueller days, with the birth of elitism and the expansion of our class stratification, the payoffs of hard work only went to the power-suit elite, or to the lucky, undeserving asshole who skips class and somehow winds up leading a parade down Michigan Avenue.

These days, hard work on its own gets you nowhere and the tie is a key to a door that might or might not exist. Ben tries to reach the young'uns' demo almost name-dropping Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as guys who wear ties on TV, "It will probably come as a shock to all of the network newscasters and the late night talk show hosts. They're the coolest guys on the planet, and they wear neckties." (That "coolest guys on the planet" thing: I'm pretty sure he ain't talking about Craig Ferguson there.) They're a great example of how out of touch Stein is, with the youth, with logic, and with reality. Ben chastises us, "Start dressing like grownups and acting like grownups. The necktie is a start," as if dressing like grownups isn't merely the most superficial means of acting — pretending — like grownups. Thanks, Dad! I know I'm grounded but I'm gonna sneak out my bedroom window at midnight, too. Me and the gang are gonna smoke some cigarettes, then shoplift.

Stewart and Colbert don't sit us down for talks about being grownups. They treat us like adults, and that's why they don't have to ask for our maturity and energy, and that's why they're the coolest guys on the planet. They really are like the neighborhood cool parents who you can rebel with, against the tie-fanatic monotonous Ben Steins of the world.

My favorite Congressional vegan punch-line possible fairy sprite representative, Dennis Kucinich, I'm happy to say has brought articles of impeachment up against Bush. And I'm also happy to say that they'll go nowhere, which is the best possible outcome given two words: President Cheney.

Wanna Play a Game?

I found a box labeled Barista on that stack of random board games Barnes & Noble's got piled up near the Starbucks. The tagline: "Brew the perfect cup!" and "The strategic game of fresh brewed fun!"

I was curious, so here's some more info from the back of the box:

Grande nonfat mocha with a single shot? Or tall soy cappuccino with a double-shot? Match the beverage shown on a roll of dice to make the perfect cup and win! But wait…other players can force you to spill your drink order, or they can change the drink order and mess up your hand! Or maybe a player is closer to finishing the drink order than you are and calls a Barista challenge. Barista is the best game of strategy and match-up fun you’ll ever play with an espresso cup.

Holy cow, that box is excited about coffee.

The Post-Intelligencer — Seattle, where else? — calls Barista "a latte fun," which makes me die a little inside. The spokeswoman for Barista's publisher, Discovery Bay Games, gave it a resounding endorsement, saying Barista "really is a pretty good game." The box is more enthusiastic. Spilling coffee! Changing drink orders! It's everything you love about your local coffeeshop, except the coffee. And in board form.

I do, however, want to know what this Barista Challenge thing is, and if they could maybe import it into Grounded.

Maybe She Just Likes Campaigning...

It's pretty much the same thing we've been saying since the days of her revolving hairstyles: we haven't heard the last of Hillary. She'll help lead John McCain to the presidency next year and run again in 2012. In 2016, Chelsea will probably be on the ticket. By 2024, it'll be Roger handing whatever's pieces of the country aren't in China's or Dubai's hands over to the neo-cons.

Over the speculation about what the hell she's still doing, there's the question of why she's still doing it, whether it's political posturing or waiting for tragedy to befall Barack or what. My theory is she's just an arrogant bitch — whether it's American Idol or the party nomination process, you don't get eighteen million votes, and you certainly don't get to the top, without ego overflowing your cranium. Politicians, unlike the wacko fundamentalists who support them way, way after the game's over and everyone's left the stadium, are supposed to have the grace to at least appear humble. Bush, who, lest we forget, believes he's God's messenger bringing democracy and oil revenues to the Middle East, looks like a doofus — at least until someone challenges him.

Frankly, Hills, it's no longer fun and your militant feminist supporters remind me of those protesters on College Walk I tried to avoid cause they'd spend fifteen minutes of your life telling you how you're a bigot for not supporting their crazy rage-filled anarchic politics. This comes from someone who still would vote for a white guy, John Edwards, if he were still in the race. (Although to be honest, I really wanted to vote for Elizabeth Edwards, whose politics I agreed with and who, in my estimation, would be even less disingenuous than her husband.)

But then again, maybe she just enjoys campaigning, and pandering to the working class.

More Money, More Problems

It's good to know that the economic downturn is affecting the filthy rich — i.e. the same Wall Street dipweeds who lobbied for the de-regulation that caused the downturn in the first place. The Times reports that the priceless art, multi-karat diamond, and private jet rental markets are all suffering as the Greenwich pigs tighten their belts, metaphorically, and loosen them literally — trainers and personal nutritionists are also getting cut back.

Justin Sullivan, managing director of Regent Jet, which leases private airplanes, said most clients in real estate and on Wall Street are switching to chartered jets over private jets, and cutting their flight budgets by about 25 percent. One New York real estate developer cut his budget to less than $250,000 a year from $1.5 million a year.

“A year ago, he would have only flown Gulfstreams,” Mr. Sullivan said. “Now it’s moving to the point where he’s flying Beech jets and Learjets.”

A year ago, I would've only eaten Frosted Flakes, but it's gotten to the point where I'm eating generic brand "Sugar Flakes." Let's all pray for the economy before I have to start buying that bottom-shelf cereal that comes in plastic bags.

The economic fallout is also affecting the personal lives of the super-rich, with one guy confessing to his divorce lawyer "that his net worth had decreased to $8 million from more than $20 million, and he thinks that his wife will leave him. He has hidden their fall in fortune by taking on debt to pay for her extravagant clothes and vacations." I can't help myself: Ha, ha! You're trapped in a loveless marriage with a gold-digging bitch!

So Now, is "Retarded" a Compliment?

I wouldn't call "elite" a poor word, even as it's the latest in an otherwise benign vocabulary to fall victim to political pundits' Orwellian twisting of our language to their scurrilous ends. Misunderstood, maybe. Susan Jacoby traced the word's history in an op-ed article for the Times, calling for an end to our willful idiocracy and putting "elite" back where it belongs, in the pantheon of praises. "Elite," she claims, used to simply mean "the best of a group," until the political bloviators, "the left and the right" apportioned it for the us versus them group identity reassurance behind all of history's conflicts. It's insulting, when you think about it, because when Hillary took a swipe at the "elite opinion" of economists opposed to her ill-advised gas tax holiday, she basically said to her audience of knuckle-dragging Pabst-drinking cousin-marrying coal miners that they're too damn stupid to understand the forces affecting the long-term price of oil, so here's something your tiny brains can wrap themselves around: coupons! Obama rightfully called the gas tax holiday "a phony scheme." He said, "Nobody believes these savings would actually be passed on to consumers. Everybody believes that the oil companies would just jack up their prices to match whatever the reduction was on the gas tax."

But I would've liked him, or anybody besides Jon Stewart, to respond in mock incredulity, "Really, you're gonna fall for this bullshit? Cause I have this pyramid scheme you can get in on..."

The machinations behind this word are so bizarre, not like the previous political curse word, "liberal," originally meaning "generous" and which only needs to be seen in a different hue to mean "ready to take your money and hand it to someone else." "Elite" never meant "the best of a group." It is, and always was, a put-down drawing a clear line between people's fundamental places in society. "Elite" means "better than you, Loser," and I suddenly have a dusty glimmer of admiration for pompous opinionators like Dobbs or O'Reilly, humbling their huge Ivy League egos to the dustbin with the rest of us, then dropping the e-word like it's the next big thing after "fuck."

This is brilliant, though, at least in a cynical, disillusioned way that yearns for the tyranny of Plato's truly elitist philosopher-kings. Washington first creates a national insecurity complex by delineating the restless minority elite from the complacent commoners, then exploits it through the comparison, reminding Americans how powerless, dumb, and let's face it, obese, oily, and ugly we are. Hillary or McCain (or, fine, Obama too) come off their salon for a brief appearance and they're forgiven for their stature. "That troll Dick Cheney is talking with us! Not like those snooty economists. He understands the issues facing us!" And I have no doubt that Cheney does understand the issues facing me, as an average (or non-average) American. The man's not retarded — he's antipathetic and doesn't give a rat's ass about the issues facing me, but that's because he's an elite and sneers down upon the rest of us.

I don't see any reason that the divide is a necessity in our society, other than the personal disillusionment and existential crises that lead us to think, "Why even bother?" In the antiquated European system, being an elite — royalty — is something truly innate, down to your DNA, but there's no reason to continue the Eastern tradition over here. Not that I believe the Upper East Side gentry, or our nation's McCains, Clintons, or Obamas, will be all too chipper letting the Lower East Side into their private kindergartens and rooftop bars (at least pre-gentrification), but the updated G.I. Bill that McCain opposes seems like a good place to start breaking down that divide.

Listen!

Harrigan is a docent at the Guggenheim, leading tours — "interactive discussions," which I now realize is redundant, "of current exhibitions" — and I thought it would be fun hearing her talk and a wide open door into art appreciation, so I followed her and about seven other people around the museum's current show, Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe. Not to be confused with the similarly-subtitled X-Files movie coming out this summer, like nine years too late.The centerpiece of Cai's show is Inopportune: Stage One, seen here lifted off someone's Flickr page. It's a pretty spectacular sight, and I don't have my own photograph because the Guggenheim has a team of security nazis telling tourists "no photography" and just being utter tools in general. I'll have more to say about this later.

It took me a while to get a grip on what's going on here, even though Cai's liner notes (or whatever the art museum equivalent is called) make a point of his trying to make the show straightforward and free from the elitist art references that occlude so many other modernists' meanings. First I saw a bunch of cars hanging from the ceiling with colored light rods sticking out of them. Then the colored light rods sort of fused with my mental images of fireworks, which is closer thematically, yet still utterly wrong as an abstraction of the artist's experience and intent.

I've never been good at this art appreciation thing. I sat through my Art Humanities class in college convinced it was one giant trick question: everything was pulled from somebody's ass, on either extreme of obvious or obscure and never just fitting together neatly. We might be looking at a slide of Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch and the professor will point out that the figures of Mary, Jesus, and John the Baptist form a triangle, and a triangle has three sides, and there are three manifestations of God in the Holy Trinity so (duh!) this painting of Mary, two creepy naked babies, and a bird represents the Holy Trinity, and the class will be gaping like she just solved the Da Vinci Code. Connecting any three points with straight lines will make a triangle — sort of the definition of a triangle, there — and there are lots things that come in groups of three. Maybe Raphael was foreseeing the Stooges. It's possible.

Spoiler alert: Inopportune is Cai's artistic depiction of a car-bombing, conceived in the media frenzy after 9/11. We got the background from the non-interactive part, the respite, of the discussion: Post-9/11, pretty much up till the present day, the morning news would start your day off with whatever footage of a car skeleton, a rubble-strewn street, and some number of people dead came over the wire last night. In his frustration, Cai and his uncredited team built Inopportune, a kind of multiple-exposure image of a white Chevy exploding up into the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda. I was actually pretty fond of Fireworks in Dangling Cars, at least on an aesthetic level, but it's one of those things where you take a second look and see the work of someone who's bitching about media overexposure through a five-story installation in the entrance of a major museum. Discuss.

The methodology behind these "interactive dialogues," Museum Tours 2.0, comes straight from the darkened college lecture hall. Harrigan gave us a little background, then asked, "What do you see?" There's always somebody in the group who's really eager to speak up, plus somebody in the group ready to give an abstract answer to a very temporal question. "Liveliness. Chaos." (It's not Mondrian, but you'd need a really OCD life to pull uncontrollable chaos out of Cai's exhibition.) "Why do you think Cai insisted on using American cars?" Harrigan asked us, loaded but inevitable, and, "[There's an unmodified white car on the lobby floor, by the admissions line, and another one on the top floor, at the very peak of Wright's famous circular ramp.] Do we think the cars are falling, or are they going up?" And Final Jeopardy: "Why do you think Cai chose to call this show I Want To Believe?" In teacher mode, and she's good at this, Harrigan reminded us that there are no wrong answers — no mention of stupid answers, however — so feel free to speak up...

...except there are wrong answers, and I respect Cai for that. The cars, another spoiler coming up, are deliberately falling upwards, for example. This revelation turned him from an attention glutton in my mind to a pretty clever guy, at least with regard to Inopportune. You can't pick up the visual evidence in the picture I copied, but Cai's car-bombing in time transitions from (an abstraction of) reality to a sort of consoling quantum-mechanical fantasy: the explosions' colors become cooler and less realistic, blues and pinks, as the installation reaches upwards, and he imagines the car landing on the top floor, whole, and upright. Cai's thoughts on the piece pretty clearly draw an image of hope against the depressing media blitz, but that's really facile for somebody in his position, like I said, hanging from the ceiling of the Guggenheim over thousands of gawking visitors.

What somehow became clearer in the post-9/11 media coverage, and I think what's so obnoxious about the images of terrorism broadcast that they reinforce the fundamentalists' attitudes towards your fear and your role in the larger world. The crawl, the talking heads, the dead count in Iraq (but, rarely in the Sudan, Myanmar, or — until it could be linked with Westerners protesting a sports event — Tibet): the world is so complicated, run by corporations and institutions, that you, the average nine-to-five worker or dispossessed immigrant, have zero agency. You might join with 71% of your fellow population calling for an end to the war in Iraq, and the guy running the show just says, "So?" With Inopportune, Cai crosses from media outsider to insider (the fact that he was always an art insider notwithstanding) and becomes the same shrill, dogmatic voice that pushed him into the project in the first place.

Inopportune rejects dialogue, and I feel like it does so much more insidiously, non-profit, than the media does. Yes, you can talk about the work, how it makes you feel, how you respond to it, in a group of six camera-wearers and a grad student volunteering her time. So long as you're insulated, you remain a consumer instead of a producer. So long as what you say doesn't actually matter. That's why you're not allowed to take pictures — it's not like the artist doesn't want his work preserved as a framed two-dimensional digital representation, because there are plenty of professional photographs of I Want To Believe flying around the web. Cai... well, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt... his patrons maintain their power, their importance, by being the sole presenters of the work, just like the mass media. Why have curators if some yokel visiting from Podunktown can decide whether Cai's work is important, and by whatever philistine pseudo-Democratic American Idol Kinkade-skewed criteria they use, no less!

So I'm being subversive here, saying what I really think of the piece, just like getting your daily news off of Digg.com. But I realize that without Cai's notes, and the Guggenheim's curation, I would've just been looking at some cars with lights. It's not that I mind being told what somebody else thinks; it's the disingenuous nature that starts controlling how I think that bothers me.

The Biggest Earth Day Hypocrisy Award Goes To...

...the "Green Issue" of Vanity Fair, the multi-inch thick magazine that includes an entire rainforest in every issue. Old-growth rainforest, the classy stuff. And who better to embody the spirit of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" than the Material Girl for the cover?

It's A Blanket!

I am such a sucker for mood lighting, soft techno-lounge music, and gimmicks, so I've been dying to spend an evening at trendy Manhattan club Duvet. Duvet, in addition to throwing Hunkmania every Friday and Saturday evening ("Indulge your bachelorette party fantasy, celebrate a birthday or the have the ultimate girls night out. Celebrate being a woman and enjoy life with these Sexy HUNKS!"), spoils the "dress to impress" crowd's hedonism with bottle service in bed, literally. Thirty dining beds, banquettes, and seven private "intimate" bedrooms where you either want to be the night's first couple or you want to just avoid. (I assume they're for people who don't exactly have a private zone at home.) Everyone's got to stand out somehow; if I ever got the chance to own a club, I'd call it "Hammock" and replace all the seats with... well, hammocks. Hey, it's better than my other idea, "Bidet." (But worse than my blanket fort cafe idea.)

I got my chance last night, cover-free, courtesy of Netparty, and it was... I guess the right word would be "comfortable." Really, all the excitement you'd expect from sitting on a bed. But as someone who'd like to see Western fashion move towards an all-pajama direction, I felt a sort of kinship. Like if you go the Olive Garden, is there any good reason you have to sit up straight, keep your feet off the table, not scratch yourself there?

Mites. Forgot about mites.

I thought folks would be claiming beds right away, but it looked like young professionals showed up for the happy hour first and sleepytime later. Personally, I like exploring first, so found the Ice Bar, the jellyfish aquarium (Duvet's website says it "houses over 100 exotic jellyfish," but I counted five), the bathroom, then found an empty giant bed and, you know, sat on it. Pros: 400-count sheets, imported Italian pillows. Cons: not as comfortable as the Brookstone bed, not allowed to jump on the bed (I assume, I didn't ask), and right, no duvets! Took my shoes off. Laid back, curled up. Wasn't bad. I mean, I could do the same thing at home; I even have the right lighting.

I really wanted to get out my laptop and shine under its soft gray light, but the mattress and booze still didn't put me enough at ease. Inevitably, someone thinking they're duly pitying me would come up and remind me, joshing, "Hey, work is over! Get out there and have some fun!" Which would be the point — not that my personal projects, this writing and stuff, isn't fun to me — but nobody's drifting my way in the first place and I only opened the computer like an anglerfish, passively luring folks over. I do want to try it some day, but I need to think of a witty, but friendly retort first. Instead I started chatting with this girl whose friends left her alone — second unsolicited, unprompted conversation with a chick ever! Yay! (?)

I'd go back, with friends, but I bet what you're dying to hear about are the bathrooms! God, the best thing about these posh places are the comically nouveau trendy bathrooms, as if the concept needs improvement. Duvet has two bathrooms, both obviously designed by someone who's never used a public bathroom before. First motif is the one-way glass doors, so there's a mirror on the outside and tinted window inside, so you don't miss a minute of the party while you're evacuating. Of course I knew no one could see inside, but the setup doesn't ameliorate any piss anxiety, especially since the top floor bathroom's right freaking there, behind the clear jellyfish tank and it's a swinging door and there's no lock. Second motif is no toilets or urinals, just a drain running along the wall, like the one you're not supposed to use at the gym shower, and kind of fenced off. I took pictures. I hope they're expecting me to tie my horse to those posts or something, because there's no way I'm peeing there.

Since when did the Germans become masters of understatement? I'm talking about this article from Reuters, "Thief deposits loot with victim."

BERLIN (Reuters) - Three days after stealing a rare collection of coins, a thief in Germany took them to the bank for safe keeping -- and delivered them into the hands of the man he had robbed.

"I don't think the thief was expecting that," said a spokesman for police in the western city of Dortmund on Tuesday.

No, I'm pretty sure if the thief knew the banker was the guy he robbed, he would've chosen a different bank.

People Are Fungible

Mermaiden (probably not her real name) posted this comment after I got all ambivalent about chemistry.com, and I think it reflects a couple of my concerns, too:

do you really think online dating is a good tool? i have had a few interests online, and i do think it is a very easy way to meet people, but being pooled by your personality and then randomly selected for only certain individuals kind of ruins the whole natural selection process, don't you think?

And I was (am) a little concerned about the same idea that Mermaiden had. It sure beats arranging a marriage to the best-bred person your family can afford. I assume. I guess it depends on the size of your dowry, how many cows or Emperor coins or sacks of grain your betrothed can get for you. But chemistry.com... not that I've gone through the whole First Meetings™ process or anything, but it feels inorganic in its own special way.

I don't think it's the mechanics of Internet dating that's the problem. Way back in the days when your father might try to marry you off to the local duke before you hit puberty, people were having unseen forbidden, chivalric affairs via furtive epistolaries, collected in tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Pyramus and Thisbe, lead actor from High School Musical and lead actress from High School Musical, you know. I had my own impossible online love back in the "You've Got Mail!" days when you couldn't be online for too long before someone in the house picked up the phone and left nothing but miles between the two of you. I was in New Jersey, Jenny a.k.a. doucement@aol.com (I already tried — the address is long dead) was in Georgia, and we shared a genuine, redemptive love — where the mere fact that you're sharing yourself with another soul makes all the shit disappear — across six-hundred fifty miles.

That's the thing about the internet, like the letters of Heloise and Abelard, it connects your thoughts and your ideas and whatever sort of schmoopy emotion's festering in your minds. It's the same stuff that makes you smile when you meet someone special IRL and, okay, you're not gonna get to hit that over the web (no matter how much some people will try), but hire a prostitute if all you want is to snap the release valve on your lust.

But with Chemistry, those ideas, the stuff that really grabs your love muscle (sounds dirty, not meant to be) is pretty contrived. You get your picture, your profile, "about my match," but you don't actually communicate, which some people say is key to a relationship. If someone thinks you're hot, the two of you get to fill out a Relationship Essentials questionnaire, which is such a turn-on, and if your potential affection survived that, there's a short essay part of the courtship. I don't care how compatible Dr. Helen Fisher says we are; this all just the opening act you have to sit through. Stilted, perfunctory, not why you're here. So I just plug in my answers and hope she plugs in hers and wait excitedly (read: anxious as hell) to get to the stage where she or I either comes alive or dies a pathetic, lovelorn death.

I'm disappointed in San Francisco, their Olympic torch relay, and mostly their attempts to quarantine the torch from protesters like it might catch social consciousness germs. I expect that crap from Paris or London, or pretty much anywhere else in America, where people playing games, and corporate sponsorship of the same, have always outweighed the rights of oppressed peoples half a world away. But San Francisco has a pretty sizable and vocal population pressing for its own basic human rights concerns, so their indifference — tacit support, really — for the Tibetan genocide is so... decadent and Western.

I'm particularly amused by the official Chinese response, first and foremost by the simple fact that these Communist fogies who order protesters murdered believe they have a right to an opinion, period, and that we have an obligation to listen and agree with it. China called the protests "an obvious act of defying the Olympic spirit." You know what, China? How about you get back to exporting bird flu and poison toothpaste and shut the fuck up, okay?

Home Sweet Home

I bought my ticket to Berlin today. May 9. Non-refundable. I spent an hour building up my chi before taking the leap, and I've been feeling like I used up all my hit points, not to mention twenty-three hundred dollars, on this purchase. I'm trying to be positive — great deal on airfare! JFK to Berlin and Budapest to Paris to JFK for $618! That's less than eight cents a mile! — but here's what I can't stop thinking. Foreign language. Roommate. Foreign languages, plural. Fifty or so peers. What if I don't make friends? How do I get from Tegel to the hotel? I don't even know what hotel I'm supposed to get to.

I worry about my inability to micromanage this tour.

I was at work when I booked the tour, so I went back to my desk kind of shaken. I told my boss... I e-mailed him, even though he sits five feet away from me... I told him that I wouldn't be in for twelve days in May and, parenthetically, that I bought a ticket to Berlin. Oh my God, he couldn't have been more excited. I got the same thing from people when I went to Italy, and I'm speechless at that. "I think this will be really great for you!" "Tell me more, are you in Berlin the whole time!?" And of course, since I e-mailed him, "Oh, why didn't you tell me the good news sooner!?"

Uh... you are aware that you're not going to Europe? Right? You're gonna be stuck here, working.

But it balanced out, since I told Mom ("Oh, by the way, I booked my tickets today. And we're out of Poland Spring.") and she was noticeably less thrilled: "Are you sure you don't want to wait till tomorrow?" Thanks, Mom — after I booked the trip. Real encouraging.

You know your community ate paint chips as a baby when it can't even get a parking lot right. Here's the recipe for a perfect parking lot: Take one parcel of land, cover in asphalt, paint lines. Then leave it alone, you're done!

The year you get your driver's license is always the year your high school messes up the parking situation — they had no idea so many juniors would be driving to school! — and I've been touchy about parking injustice ever since. There was this permit system with stickers and registration numbers, so different people could park in different spaces in different lots at different times. The inevitable daily result was that all of your available spaces were filled, plus there'd be plenty of open spaces that you couldn't use since you didn't have Alpha Level 2 Code Black privileges. I suggested an alternate system, where whoever arrived at the space first got to park there — you know, just like in every other parking lot on the planet. But I think it was less about the parking and more about the power trip, which is so egregious. I mean, I'm already driving to school in a beige 1988 Ford Taurus station wagon, how much more humiliated do I have to be?

Ever since, I've been waging a one-man protest against parking meters and their partners, the two-hour residential parking limit. I'd rather the signs just
say outright Fuck You, Commuters!

Here's how things stand right now: Last year, the daily parking rate at the train station was three dollars. The Borough Council, or whatever cranky old people make the decisions in this town, raised the price to a round $3.25 — claiming that they had to raise the price to cover increased sales taxes. Sales taxes went up 0.25% but the town council raised the parking fee by 7.6% to cover it? Someone needs a new calculator. But that happened without too much incident. Then, maybe a month ago, the train station ghosts put signs around the building that the machine outside that eats your dollar bills and shits parking tokens and change was now out of service, because the town was "in the process of selecting a new system." I don't know — I would've probably waited until the new system was installed, or being delivered, or at least chosen, before decommissioning the current system.

We have a temporary system in place. A police officer stands by the parking meters with one of those metal cash boxes, and civilians hand cash over to a cop in exchange for parking rights. I'm not saying anything unscrupulous is going on with people paying a police officer to avoid getting a ticket, but it doesn't look that good. Maybe if I slip him a twenty, he'll let me park in a handicapped space?

On March 29, the town raised the price of daily parking again, announcing that as of April 1, keeping your car in the lot for a day would cost five dollars, a healthy 54% increase... and, I guess they chose their new parking meters, because the same promulgation made clear that the fee was five bucks in quarters. For those of you doing the math at home, that's a hundred quarters a week. Video arcades don't have that many quarters. There's a part of me that's really looking forward to the first of the month, when all the daily parkers head to the bank across the street to exchange a hundred dollar bill for two thousand quarters.

Fanwood (rightfully) claims it needs the extra revenue after the governor cut the state aid available to small towns, but it turns out our town seriously overestimated the demand for inconvenient five-dollar parking, especially after consumers are already being gouged by New Jersey Transit, the Port Authority, the MTA, and oil companies. The lot, which used to be filled to capacity, now operates at about forty percent... so now the town is making less money off the lot than they were before.