a little Credit in the straight world

This is the last week of my unemployment. I don't have a job but I have finally succumbed to the grey, listless world of Temping. The day that I left my old job, I vowed that I would never return to the cubicle-and-fluorescent habitat of Administrative Assisted Hell... well, at least not in a non-arts business. I've really had it with temping. I have done it far to long. That 8 A.M. phone call from the agency, followed by the shuffling search for the street then office then supervisor then lackey-who-needs-help which takes you to the dirty looks as you check your e-mail in between mind-numbing re-ordering of files or answering telephones and talking to angry people because you're not the one they wanted to talk you then the awkward begging for lunch then more of the same then the mousy knock on the supervisor's door to get your timesheet signed so you can dial '9', pound the agency's number in the keypad and send off an official notice of where you wasted your existence for the last 8 hours. The aching in my right hand has risen to a slow growl... Damned that numeric keypad!

New York City is a unique world for the job-searcher. It seems as if every interesting job suffers from one of three ailments - nepotism, unionization or favoritism. Businesses can, and often do, suffer from all three ailments but at least one is present. Multiple family members work ticketing offices in the City. Nobody, not even the snob-arts up at Lincoln Center can avoid it. I know the value of unions. They're critical when you are dealing with corrupt and/or impersonal corporate interests. There are some places and some positions that have been saved from unions. New York, however, has taken many unions and turned them into art forms. Look, when some art grad grabs a job at Pearl Paint, the largest art supply store in the city, he/she isn't expecting to earn a fortune, but when the pay is $8/hour AND you have to plug in union dues, then somebody's earning something and it sure-as-shit ain't the clerks. Favoritism is an old acquaintance of mine. We go way back. I've stood on the outside looking in and I've even gotten a few gigs in L.A. based on the same criteria. For the entertainment industry, it's a way for a film/TV crew to get help that isn't gonna bitch and moan when they're pulling 16 hour workdays or getting screamed at by a spoiled producer. In New York City, it is often a way for semi-competent people to rise through the ranks of various professions without ever really getting any better at what they do. When you get into upper management, this is one of the best way to move around, especially if you can piece together good severance packages along the way.

I find it interesting how American culture treats the arts in such a dismissive manner, yet there is no shortage of people desperate to work in it. Finding any job in the arts requires extensive experience In The Field, significant salary sacrifices (which are exponentially-worsened in NYC) and a time-immersive availability that only an twenty-something, trust-fund single could ever hope to meet. Otherwise, how could a person really be fluent in Mandarin and Spanish, have at least 7 years of gallery experience and afford a $12-15 an hour job in Manhattan (don't forget that you need to be available nights and weekends :)). I've seen people working gallery jobs in SOHO and the Meatpacking District. They're not THAT skilled. All you have to do is sit in front of an iMac, look pretty and ignore anybody who doesn't look money enough to afford anything in the shop. My three years of film production experience, combined with my summer theater management experience, along with my 3 years of marketing analysis, and my playwriting skills pretty much add up to Jack-over-Shit. I guess that being a Renaissance Man only worked during the Renaissance... and only when there was affordable housing.

Bitch bitch bitch

Moan moan moan

...have I covered everything?... oh yeah-

Whine whine whine

As my girlfriend said, so effortlessly destroying the extended rationale of my last post, "Maybe you'll feel better about others when you feel like you are accomplishing something in your life."

fallen from the grace of Hoops

The NBA All-Star game was on last night. For the first time in years, I sat in front of a television and watched a basketball game... well, the first half. Sports watching is a rarity for me these days. Last year I watched bits and pieces of the NBA finals so I'd have something to talk about at the office the next day. It's difficult to picture myself 11 years ago as the raving basketball enthusiast I was. I was in my final year of college at the University of Iowa and I had the best basketball seats that 5 years of student-ticket priority could purchase. I would skip evening classes if the Hawkeyes were playing and after a home game, I would be hoarse from the whooping and screaming. I entered every tournament pool and would read strategy books on offensive and defensive philosophies so I could spot the difference between a 2-3 zone and a box-and-one. I knew coach and player tendencies - I would have made a hell of a oddsmaker if I had been a gambling man. When the NBA draft approached, I'd scout out rookies and try to anticipate Jerry West's every pick and trade (I was a HUGE Lakers fan). What happened to that person? How could that same individual shut off the TV at half time and go read a book?

The natural answer is to blame the basketball culture. Nobody calls travelling in basketball anymore. It's no longer exciting to watch basketball players dunk when virtually every player on the court can do the same, plus 99% of them are considerably taller than me and even I could do it (albeit, no longer). The basketball skills shown by the Lakers, Sixers and Celtics of the 80's has completely disappeared from today's game. Athletes and owners fixate upon raw talent and not at all on skill. Athletes have become fixated upon the narissism of their highlight reels and 7-figure salaries. The endless pump to sell shoes and beer becomes irritating once you get old enough to realize that your identity doesn't hang upon your footwear and major-label American beer, for the most part, tastes like crap.

This argument is great for casual conversation and it's the tactic I take from the bar stool, but it's really just bullshit. The dunk was banned in the NBA when towering, 7-foot tall players started showing everybody up in the 60's, while Earl "The Pearl" Monroe shocked basketball in the 70's with his gliding style, causing fans to scream "showboat". Basketball, like all things, must evolve to survive. If it doesn't, it dies. The special quality of seeing a high-flying dunk diminishes over time simply due to repetition. I've spent years watching Dominique Wilkins, Michael Jordan, etc. perform stunning dunking maneuvers. Let's be honest, there's only so many ways a human being can stuff a ball through a hole. These dunks are new for younger fans (also known as the fanBASE). There are still great, skilled, basketball teams, like the Detroit Pistons of last year who shoved the ego-driven, pickup gameplaying of the Lakers back down their throats. The narcissism and money-making of athletes is simply a ripple in the wave of today's American culture. I see the same behavior in music, film and every 'reality' show on television. Marketing is marketing. Mars Blackman- I mean, Spike Lee, shilled for Nike and Jordan while Magic Johnson/Larry Bird hawked Converse. For a kid trying to get drunk, Coors might take like hamster vomit but if it gets the job done and affordable...

The truth to my lost love might lie in how I watched the Super Bowl last month. It was the middle of the third quarter and the announcers were driving me crazy with their lazy banter. None of them acted like they had any insight and had instead decided to rely upon their sparkling personalities to fill every second of airtime. When the announcers weren't gabbing away, we were being treated to highlights of the SAME GAME that I had been watching for the last hour. Hey, I might have a little problem with keeping my attention focused on a task, but I remember the touchdown I saw only 10 minutes ago. Unable to take it any longer, I shut off the sound and spent the rest of the quarter watching a silent pantomime of a football game. I had become my father.

Dad was a great sports fan back in the day. Boxing and football were his meat-and-potatoes. He would set a small wicker basket of mixed nuts on the table next to his La-Z-Boy then, with a nut pick balanced at the end of the armrest, he would crack nuts, dump the shells in the a soup bowl that lay between his legs and pop nuts in his mouth. He loved the ritual of watching football games, but gradually, a malice crepted into the comments that rose over the cracking of the filberts and almonds. Frustration and disillusionment touched his voice as he lamented the smarmy hype-machine of Don King and the big-money fights where Cassius Clay (NEVER Ali in my household) and Larry Holmes, my dad's Idols, were paraded out long past their prime and pummelled for national television and the promotion of a Bright, Shiny, New fighter. Non-Madden sports announcers made his blood boil to the point that I spent hours begging him to turn the sound back on so that I could listen to the game. Finally, the wicker basket found a permanent home on a kitchen counter and my dad spent his hours in the garden or out in the tool shed.

At some point in my life, I had discovered that there was something more to doing than watching. The emotional investment I weaved into the accomplishments of my team felt like a waste of energy. There would always be another year and another championship to win and the fact was that they were never MY team. Their accomplishments weren't my own, no matter how emotionally-invested I was. No one is going to remember my role in the glorious upset of the Lakers over the Portland Trailblazers. Granted, going to a game has the activity of effort and being THERE for the event, but the endless afternoons/evenings spent in front of the television were just a waste. I sat through the first half of the All-Star game telling my girlfriend one statistic after another about the older players that I had watched years ago. Grant Hill gliding through the air at Duke before blowing out his knee in Detroit, Shaquille O'Neal looking like a man among children at LSU and always waiting to move on to the NBA, Magic Johnson hitting the last second shot to beat the Celtics, Larry Bird... and I suddenly realized how much time I had spent and how much I knew and exactly how much it Totally Didn't Matter. I was reliving moments that were other people's lives. I could recollect the highlights of their lives nearly as well as my own. What about my life?

Suddenly, I realized that I didn't miss sports... and I had something else I'd rather be doing.

getting my chest Thumped

I am a huge music fan. I have always loved music. Admittedly, the last 12 years have made me somewhat of an indie rock music snob. I'm not one of those true followers of the Belief who scour import racks so they can get Absolutely Every remix of Every Song that Bjork made/re-made/re-re-made so that I can claim exclusive omipotence over that particular artist. Neither am I (like a good friend of mine) one of those fanboys who has amassed hundreds of band/concert T-shirts only to store them away in boxes for ever and Ever because they're all too Precious to soil with use. I just love music. I have downloaded hundreds of hours of music, bought hundreds more in CDs and now I'm the proud owner of a turntable and purchase almost all my music on vinyl. I'm not quite there, but I think that I felt the back end slide a little around the last curve.

I love it when I muster the energy to drag myself out of the cave and take the subway downtown to a small club and hear a band for the very first time and really feel the emotion in those power chords as my second vodka tonic sends me into that sweet spot of drunkeness where the thumping bass in my chest carries me up into the riptide of sound where I simply HAVE to mosh or pogo or maybe even just stand in one spot nodding my head in time to a song that so frigging Rocks I can't believe that I don't do this every Night of the Week and then a week later I get the wonderous release of listening to that same great song on my headphones because it's been rattling around inside my head all day, begging for me to play it the second I get home. The Kills, Public Enemy, Tommy Makem, Jefferson Airplane, Johnny Cash, The Postal Service, The Notwist, Low, Magnetic Fields, The Buzzcocks, Television, The Clash, PJ Harvey, Country Joe and the Fish, Underworld, Patsy Cline, Jimi Hendrix, Modest Mouse, Sun Kil Moon, My Morning Jacket - the list goes on and on and on and I don't ever want it to end.

It wasn't always like this. There was a time when lyrics and rhythm were a background for me like the soundtrack in a Spielberg movie or hum of a car on a cross-country roadtrip. It was there either as an excuse to press bodies on the dance floor with a girl I liked or as theme music for whatever activity I was doing, from memorizing the amino acids for a biochemistry class to taking jump shots off the driveway basketball court. My albums and CDs boasted such titles as "Slippery When Wet", "Hysteria", "Faith", "Poison" and "Thriller". True, there were some good titles nestled amongst the bad but I wouldn't have known it at the time. Most of my early collection resonates with me like a bad fashion trend that you pull out of your closet, try it on, laugh and reminisce, then return it to the dark corner from whence it came. One hair metal band sounds like another until only the joy of remembering another age has prevented me from throwing everything away and disavowing all knowledge.

By my junior year of college, it was apparent that I was heading down that long, slippery slope that ends with Kenny G, Phil Collins and Celine Dion (where my poor father now resides). My first exposure to a rock and roll concert was Huey Lewis and the News Small World tour in a grand, classical music hall in Mannheim, Germany circa 1986. I had paid some astronomical amount of money and sat in the nosebleed seats to let that mullet-headed blip down on stage to belt out "Heart of Rock and Roll" in my presence. Needless to say, my education was somewhat lagging. In college, a friend of mine saw my music collection, took pity on me and decided that an intervention was in order. He dragged my social-phobic ass to Gabe's Oasis in Iowa City where I was introduced to Uncle Tupelo. The entire experience was a shock. The stage at Gabe's was narrow and barely rose more than a couple inches off the floor. The band stood 3 feet from me nearly at eye level, there were more guys in the band that could fit on the stage and they shared amongst themselves at least a dozen instruments including accoustic guitars, electric guitars, steel guitars, banjos and a mandolin. None of them were playing anything that resembled a musical category that I could nail down. One moment they sounded like some Alan Lomax, folk-country relic from 1943, then the next minute they were doing a cover of "I Wanna Be Your Dog". I had no idea that music could sound like that and what's more, they fucking ROCKED. 'Why aren't these guys getting played on the radio,' I wondered and thus my long transition from naive youth was finally begun. It was like I had accidentally slipped into another dimension that just required a slight shift in perspective to be seen.

I always try to remember where my extended education came from whenever I start to come down too hard on bad music and their fans. I remind myself that I too was once a casual listener who thought he knew how the world worked and what it had to offer... then I was resoundedly kicked on myass. I guess that's what friends are for.

the fleshy container of my Self

My girlfriend was given a one-year membership to the Whitney Museum. One of the perks of being a member is that you can circumvent the crush of a new, 'hot' exhibit and check out a preview. Of course, it helps to be unemployed, under-employed or ultra-rich as the preview only runs from Noon to 6pm on a Wednesday. Fortunately, my girlfriend works part-time and I met the first option so in we went.

I've never been a fan of contemporary art. It's not that I am an art snob who enjoys ripping elitist museums apart nor am I one of those morons who thinks that realistic=good and everything should be painted in egg tempura or ELSE. It's just that there's a lot of digital photography manipulation and abstract blotches of paint that are being called art and I can see very little thought or feeling being mustered in their creation. Artwork should either move me or open me up to a new perspective. Now, that's a pretty tall order and I can't expect every artist to meet such high criteria straight out of the gate - it takes skill and experience. In absence of that, I always respect craftmanship. I know, I can hear artists screaming about how they are consciously making a choice to not learn specific techniques from their past because it forces a certain way of expressing themselves. Well, if that is truly the case, then all the more power to them. Re-invent the wheel if that helps you to understand how it rolls, but then don't come crying to me if I think your oil-stick, colored splotch with the word "Proteus" scrawled on it in Helen Keller script is a piece of crap. Yeah, you heard me, Twombly. I can write Shakespeare across my play but that don't make it A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Tim Hawkinson rocks. There's no two ways about it. I had seen the painting he'd done with the gigantic photograph of a face that gets randomly shifted with wires. It was interesting, but it didn't exactly light my fire and the idea of seeing an entire floor of hydraulic paintings sounded like just the kind of contemporary gimmick art that I didn't want to see. I know that, for museums and writers on such topics, it's difficult to pick out genius in the middle of a cluster-fuck of hungry artists who all want to be heard. In addition, most art schools hammer it into students that they have to find their 'thing' that is unlike anybody else's 'thing' and before you know it, you've got one artist churning out a hundred variations of the 'thing'.

Tim Hawkinson does have a thing but it is not entirely wrapped in technique or theme. Actually, there is a method to the madness but it is that intangible quality that can't be described in any explicit way outside of the art itself. Hawkinson has this analytical focus on self. Specifically, his body occupies his art. With his hair he has fashioned a feather with his fingernails he has built an eggshell. He hex-maps, measures and photographs himself from every conceivable angle. The exhibit made me think about this frail thing called my body that plummets through time and space with my soul buried somewhere inside it. As I get older and feel joints ache and age around me, I am in awe. Hawkinson does a remarkable job of giving such sensations an exhibit or at least he gives me an opportunity to remind myself that I AM in awe.

but i wanted to watch oprah

Maintaining a blog is much like starting an exercise routine. Motivation arises from an intense discontent. My first entry was energizing and euporic. I had never written or posted to the net and within a few minutes, I had a blog and web design posted to the World Wide Web. I tried out the weight machines of pre-fab templates, text coloring and boldface, then I even tested the free weights of html coding on the fly to fix a formatting problem. Holy shit! There I was, doing it. The thrill of having actually 'done it' more than made up for any exhaustion of effort.

The next few entries were encouraging. I worked to fit a disciplined routine into my manic life. The intense discontent fed my writing as I earnestly attempted to communicate thoughtful ideas in a well-formed manner. A total stranger posted a comment on one of my posts and I regained that initial thrill of posting, like the day you walk by the mirror after a shower and discover that you can see a little more definition in your shoulder than you had before. Progress was being made! People were hearing me! After years of quiet brooding on the subway or within the depths of my cave, my voice had carried beyond my self.

After about a week or so, it became that the Impulse was fading. I had been heard. I had done it. I had exercised my brain and diatribed. Now, blogging was going to start taking a little more effort. My belief in the blog was going to soon be expected to prompt me to continue... well, that and the guilt that I was thinking of quitting something that felt so imperative only weeks before. The routine became forced and uncomfortable. As I began to learn the skills to write concisely, it became evident that there was a little craft to be learned here and that I won't be picking the whole thing up overnight. Every topic felt like the whinings of a spoiled child who should know better. Then came that first day where I got sloppy. I wrote the first thing that came to my mind and ran out of the gym. The feeling of accomplishment had been sabotaged and all I could think was, 'It's out there.' People are reading that lazy piece of crap and clicking away before reading that really cool post I did about fallen cathedrals. Or worse, they're clicking away, deleting their browser history and vowing to themselves to never return to my blog.

First thing the next morning, I went online and deleted the offending entry. Then, I tried to explain myself in a follow up entry, like those friends that keep explaining to you why that exercise routine they were going to do didn't work out because they have this-and-that taking up their lives and the gym is just not very accomodating in it's hours and besides the only time that they can work out is the busiest time of day and all the exercise bikes are being used at that time anyway.

So here I am, taking the big breath to chill myself the fuck out and regain a little focus. Well, at least I didn't have to buy the 1 year membership to join the gym.

my Aerated head

Last night, I shaved my beard. This morning, I got my hair cut. My girlfriend did the honors. My shoulder-length locks are now resting on the top of the kitchen garbage. Looking at my mass of hair, clustered like the leavings of some springtime shedding, it feels as if I have been born anew. The leavings are so substantial, I feel like I should do something with it. If it was spring, I'd take it over to the park and leave it for the birds to make nests. I'm sure there's a chemo patient somewhere who'd kill for it, but then I'd have to put some effort into this lazy train of thought. I am now sporting a tapered, spiky sort of haircut that allows me to pull off both pseudo-mohawks and conservative looks with just a little gel. I've never been particularly attached to hairstyles... or at least that's what I tell myself. Mania allows me to follow an impulse and easily rationalize the moment.

It's tremendously liberating to shed one look and don another. I hope that this doesn't become the last time that I'll shed the hippie look. Admittedly, I am getting older and one never knows how many rounds of hair growth are left. It's never easy to go through that muddled stage wherein the hair is perpetually disheveled and the bangs are just long enough to get in the way yet too short for a ponytail. Then, there's the aging thing. My genetic history is a little sketchy with the whole balding gene. I have blood relatives on both sides who sport balding and furry scalps. In a sense, it's sad that balding is given negative stature. From the standpoint of evolutionary development, I'd think that it'd be desirable to have less hair. It makes a man that much further removed from primate origins who were entirely covered in hair. If I should one day discover that my genetics have vetoed my future hairstyle plans, then I doubt that I'll be terribly upset.

As for today, I could not be more happy with my lack of cranial foliage. I don't know what it is about haircuts that are so liberating for me. I'm like Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to hair. With short hair, I feel confident, jazzy and open to the onslaught of life's adventures. I also look about 5 years younger with short hair. I usually have short haircuts when I'm fed up with my life and want to make some changes. The last couple of times I cut my hair, I lost 65 lbs. and got a job supervising a summer theater. Long hair arises whenever I start getting into mythology, Tolkien, or hippie culture. I feel older, mature, expressionistic, laid back and comforted by longer hair. It gives me separation from the false, hipster sorts who troll concert venues and bars to be seen rather than to simply be. Sometimes, it's nice to feel older and, hopefully, a little wiser than the budding sort we worship in American culture. When I have a job, I start growing out my hair when I am fed up and feeling like a sell out. Unfortunately, long hair is a fantastic world to live behind when depression pays a visit. That veil of hair falls over the face and I am set apart from the world around me. I can sit in my private space and fondle my internal musings until they are polished from use.

Well, the veil has been clipped away and I'm looking out on the world, younger-looking, hipster-esqe, and no longer a viable rubbing post for our kittens. I've got a concert at the Bowery Ballroom tonight, my copy of Final Draft has been dusted off and fired up, and the wine is staying in the bottle. Baby steps to the desk...

a visual reference

of Deckard and the Book of the Obtuse

I finished the Lord of the Rings and now I'm perusing chapters out of The Silmarillion. Now, there's a hard nut to crack. It wasn't until last summer that I was finally able to slog through The Silmarillion - the bible of Middle Earth. It reads like the Bible too. Even as a longtime Tolkien fan I found the first few chapters impassable the first couple of times I attempted it. It's like reading those sections in The Iliad where Homer's describing so-and-so, son of such-and-such, who lived in Nowhereville slayed whazizname from those folks who ran the olive oil business in Eastern Nowhereville.

For those of you who have read the Lord of the Rings and want to read The Silmarillion, or at least get past the first couple chapters, it's important to get a good map. The one provided for the contemporary hardback editions is a little sketchy. It'll get you through the early chapters fine. The one for the paperback is a complete joke. I Googled up one on the net that must have come from a Tolkien companion book somewhere. Trust me, when you're following Turin through one marsh, across an obscure mountain range and into some lake at the east end of the forest where Barahir once hid out, you're gonna want to know where the hell you are. When Christopher Tolkien wrote this one, he wasn't exactly in full command of his father's evocative prose so it's probably best to think of it as more of a history textbook type of thing. Actually, Chris pieced this together from J.R.R.'s notes so I guess that I can forgive him after trying to decipher the hieroglyphics I write on Post-It notes.

With map in hand, your primary goal should be to remember names. They come fast and furious in the middle-to-late stages so if you're thumbing to the back every other sentence to figure out what the Valar are, who Morgoth is, or what was the name of the splinter group of elves made it over the Blue Mountains but didn't make it to the Sirion River during the first migration to the West, then you're gonna be in some serious trouble. Fortunately, there are some pretty cool details that you will discover if you can wade through it. Sauron has a pretty cool history, Galadriel puts in a few good appearances and Morgoth makes Sauron look like a total pansy in villain category. It was nice to get a few stories about dwarves and a killer elf named Turin and the whole book just underscores what an impressive and, thankfully, anal-retentive philologist Tolkien really was.

As for me, I'm going to re-read the Beren and Luthien chapter because I'd just recently saw that Tolkien had Beren written on his tombstone and Luthien on his wife's so maybe there's something a little special there in that story. Then, it's off to a little John Updike and Rabbit is Rich. I think I need a little dose of reality, albeit retro-reality.

on the road to Ithaca

Since I moved to New York City three years ago, I have become increasingly agitated with life. Now, the City is good at breeding a certain amount of guilt and compulsiveness as the have nots rub shoulders with the have-a-lots. There has been a particular itch that has been festering in my mind for a long time and now it has grown to tumor-size- ageism. I first beheld the warning signs of this impending storm many years ago. When I reached 26, I realized that I was now the exact age of Orson Welles, but I unlike him, I was not going to be directing my Citizen Kane that year. In addition, I was never going to be an NBA point guard or the next 'young phenom' of Hollywood - Steven Spielberg. As the years passed, I found myself measuring my progress through life relative to others. Having nothing in common with these people except my age, I decided to use that as the yardstick. In addition, this was a very natural progression because L.A., where I was living at the time, is perhaps the most age-ist city on the planet. My parents had me when they were in their mid-to-late 20s. George Lucas directed Star Wars at the 'ancient' age of 32. Now, the the only perceivable reference points I have in my future appear to be Robert Altman (M*A*S*H at age 44) and Grandma Moses (began painting at age 75).

Of course, there's always the dream of being a creater of "outsider art" which, according to CBS Sunday Morning, is all the rage in the art world. I could be one of those people with no training, no concept of the exploitation being performed by gallery owners at their expense, and (for street cred) a history of mental illness. I watched this show and I cannot communicate how depressing it is to feel that the $25,000 I currently owe in student loans, for the SOLE purpose of learning craft, has no value in the New York art world. Hey, I'm not wholly-ignorant about how the arts work in America, but DAMN... I didn't need to see that.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that it isn't age or the lack of a propogative drive or the nauseating trends in film, television and art that's really led to this depressed wreck of a man - it's my goal-oriented, guilt mentality. I have ceased to enjoy my journey and now the goal is the "thing" and all my actions are hot-wired into them. I am always focused on reaching Ithaca - a distant land where I hope all my happiness will lie. I have ceased to enjoy the journey. I have become a person fixated upon some abstract idea of success and any enjoyment along the way is considered to be a distraction from the goal. My measurement relative to others has become absolutely poisonous to me. There's something very American about how I have to compare myself to winners and never consider myself to be one until I've clearly won.

beneath the resin-scented darkness of the Trees

I'm reading The Lord of the Rings for the fourth time in my life. After I complete it, I suspect that I'll stop trying to keep count. It's a tremendous series and one of the greatest influences of my adolescence. I never became one of those freaky Renaissance fair folks who talk in Olde English at home, but I might have been guilty of making maps of my own little world and writing hideously-derivative tales of dragon-slaying and wizardry. I went on to read a whole slew good-to-lousy fantasy novels, always hoping to recapture some shred of newness and wonder I felt the first time I read a Tolkien novel. Raymond E. Feist, David Eddings, Orson Scott Card - oh yeah, I read books like Zorachus and even made the mistake of checking out a few Forgotten Realms books. It was never the same, though. There's nothing quite like genre fiction after you get 1 or 2 generations away from the original.

Something far more profound about Tolkien grabs me as I turned one page upon another. Tolkien's rendering of scene is absolutely stunning. The descriptions and feeling of hill, dell, river and season rendered images of my imagination that that the movie could never hope to touch. In single, almost throwaway lines, Tolkien rendered a feel wiith all the thrift of Hemingway at the height of his powers.

Away eastward the sun was rising red out of the mists that lay thick on the world. Touched with gold and red the autumn trees seemed to be sailing rootless in a shadowy sea.

The land of Middle Earth has a physicality that feels very removed from the world of today. With electricity, industrialization and gas-powered vehicles, we can hurl ourselves from one space to another with little thought to the weather, time of day or time of season. Instant gratification allows us to eat a strawberry or eat a hamburger any day of the year. It has taken a girlfriend who knows far more about plants than I to tell me the names of plants and their seasons of flowering. I've never known because I've never had to know.

the Fall of my cathedral

A couple of months ago, my girlfriend and I went to Thailand. I was 2 months into my unemployment and about to crawl out of my skin. My cave was looking darker than usual. It felt as if the earth was slowly pinching me off from the rest of the world and then suddenly, one day, I might wake up and realize that I had been cut off from all reality and forever lost in a world of depression and paranoia. I stopped working on things and began to stall for time. I had to get out. Only days before a national election I couldn't avoid and a Halloween that would once-again find me without a costume or party, I got on a plane, lost 12 hours worth of time zones, then stepped off a plane in Bangkok.

In Thailand, anyone who even remotely looks like a tourist has to expect a little hassle. There is always someone willing to take your money if you are sucker enough to part with it. Tuk-tuk drivers (the motor-scootery mosquitos of SE Asian transportation) regularly stand within a block of every tourist destination so they can tell you that the Palace/post office/train station/holy shrine is closed (Buddhist holiday) and offer transportation to the opposite end of the city. As a 6' 3" white male, I was not only a target, but one that could be easily spotted a block away. My blonde girlfriend only served to underscore our intense need to be hustled. The only place (for the most part) where a tourist could catch a break was in a wat. A wat is a Buddhist, temple complex. They are beautiful, quiet and mercifully-free of tuk-tuk drivers... inside the gates. As an added bonus, like a Starbucks in urban America, there are wats EVERYWHERE. They quickly became effective bunkers where I could take a drink of water, pull out my Nancy Chandler map and plan my assault on the next tourist attraction in the city, without the chaos of traffic jams and smiley glad-handers interrupting me every 30 seconds to ask me where I was going.

About a week into the trip, I was sitting in a Wat Suan Dok, in the northern city of Chiang Mai, when I realized that these wats were more than simply escapes where I was 'tagging up' before jumping into the fray of aggressive tourism - it was a place where I was settling my mind and re-centering myself. I was a first-time visitor to Thailand who was being hustled endlessly and who spoke very little of the language. My escapes were tangible and my escape route clear, but this escape was taking on a deeper aspect. The rules that govern wats are universal - wear modest clothing that covers your shoulders and legs, take off your shoes when you enter a bot (ceremonial building), sit on the floor, be quiet, and don't point your feet at the Buddha. By this time, I was watching others and becoming more thorough in my behavior. I burned candles and nodded in respect before the Buddhas before standing and leaving a bot. I am not Buddhist, but there was a respect and reverence that I found myself admiring in those spaces. For the first time, I was beginning to recognize that these rituals weren't simply perfunctory motions to be followed, but actions that contributed to these spaces through the respect they gave. In all my summers of Bible Camp, Sunday school and endless sermons of my youth, I had never understood the importance of ritual, and especially that ritual was an opportunity for me to take responsibility for my actions and contribute to these spiritual spaces. It was at this moment that I reached an epiphany - my cathedral in Mahhattan had fallen.

In northern Manhattan, there are very few places where one can escape the car alarms, beeping horns, and bellowing speak of the community. My experiences with christianity have not been the most affirming moments in my life. I have a significant amount of personalized baggage with churches, so those spiritual spaces offer little respite. The park, however, was such a place. Inwood Hill Park is the most beautiful park in New York. Prospect Park has beautiful lawns and wooden gazeebos and Central Park has... well, it's Central Park. Inwood's park, however, doesn't have the man-made feel of other city parks. The forest (or what is left of it) is old. The trees aren't simply look old - it FEELS old. The park's caves (unlike my own) are nestled against a beautiful horseshoe-shaped rim that gazes into the midst of a solemn mass of trees. There it is. My cathedral. I would walk into that nestled dell, sit down and gaze up into those stunning pillars of living wood and feel that I was living on another world. Even the distant rumble of a Metro North train heading to Poughkeepsie or a jet that just left La Guardia only added to the transporting feeling of sitting among those trees. Without ever consciously realizing it, I was sitting in my spiritual space. My silence, my respect and even the shoes I chose to wear whenever I visit that park, were all part of a reverence I offered to my cathedral.

Then, there was Sarah Fox. Last summer, a Julliard student was jogging through the park when she was abducted and murdered. To date, the murder hasn't been solved. The occassional poster dots the 207th St. subway station and bulletin boards, but there is still no indictment. For weeks after the murder, I didn't return to the park. I didn't think of why except that it had disappeared from my plans, like a spot of white-out on a page of 'Things to Do'. Later, I would take short walks along the remote paths with friends, firing off a dark stare upon every man we saw. I wouldn't walk alone anymore, unless it was along the outer rim, to peek into the dog park or sit along the salt marsh. I didn't fear for my safety, but my mind restlessly wandered with discomfort to the desecration of my cathedral. It was gone. It had a history that could be neither undone nor unforgotten . Other fell deeds have certainly been performed beneath the canopy of my spiritual santuary, but they were never a part of my experiences and this event weighs endlessly upon my mind... and it was at the feet of a Buddha in Wat Suan Dok, in a northern city in Thailand, 13 hours of flight time from my cave and my fallen cathedral where I could finally see what I had, what I'd lost and perhaps a glimpse of the road I'd been blindly travelling.

baby steps to the street

I left the cave yesterday. I didn't want to go. I had, in fact, spent the better part of the morning telling myself that I didn't need to go out. I had promised myself that I would get out of the cave every day this week. The cave had begun to take the shape of an very large bell jar and I didn't want two straight weeks of the same old thing.

Last week, I suffered another one of my occupational whiteouts where panic attacks tag-team with gutteral depression to render me essentially inoperable. These incidents usually begin with food cravings. After one or two days, I realize that my comfort foodsare not fulfilling their namesake. As the storm advances on my position, I become disgruntled with my career and where it is headed. I sit down and make sweeping plans for my future as well as all the important modifications that must be made to my personality/body image/personal finances in order for these plans to be realized. With renewed vigor (as well as some Clash or Nirvana for theme music), I sit down and begin to write the first few descriptions of a screenplay that will be sold this summer on my way to winning the Tribeca Film Festival two years from now. Of course, I hate everything I write because I'm not writing like Hemingway or Steinbeck so I jump to my stacks of unpublished poetry and my 2004 Edition of Poet's Market and begin to hammer out where and when I will be sending my poems so that I can win some festivals, gain literary credibility, then get an advance on my first novel that will be written and published in the next year. After 2 hours of editing my poetry and raging about how it has all the depth of the love songs I wrote in 9th grade, I quickly switch gears, squeeze out a little vermillion and yellow ochre, then settle down with the still life oil painting that I've been working on for 2 weeks. After mixing paint for 30 minutes in the fruitless attempt to match the color on my pallette knife with the beer bottle in my composition, I wash my brushes, change out of my turpentine-flavored clothes, and dive into the obtuse life of an Irish Catholic lad in James Joyce's Ulysses. Hmmm... maybe I'll just put that down for a sec and read the "Fables & Reflections" book of the Sandman graphic novels I've got on my shelf. An hour later, I am strumming my accoustic guitar and working on getting that smooth transition from the 'A' chord to the 'D' chord so I can master that David Bowie song, then compose an album that will revolutionize the music world and bring alternative rock back into the mainstream.

Some people might call this a Renaissance Man lifestyle. I think a therapist back in college called it manic-depression.

So, I got out of the cave yesterday. Just when I'd talked myself into playing 4 straight hours of Civilization 3 or Madden 2005, my girlfriend had to call me up and bully me into leaving the apartment. Well, to be fair, all she did was asking me when I was going out and I couldn't think of any of the great rationalizations I'd put together in my head. So, in the end, I took the 'A' train cave to Pearl Paints, bought a few items for my manic needs, took a swing by the East Village to thumb through a few LPs and cruised on over to Avenue A for a few happy hour libations. Ahh! Nothing like alcohol to cure depression, huh? It's good to be cruising along the old career track.

I need a day job.

the collective experience of snow

Though it was touch-and-go for a while, I have miraculously survived the cataclysmic event known as BLIZZARD 2005. For hour upon hour, New Yorkers (as well as virtually everyone in the northeast) had the ability to watch the snow come down on no less than 6 network stations. It just feels so much more real when you can watch the white stuff coming down on network (and cable) television in addition to the event happening only feet away. Every channel had roving 'reporters' who pointed out the fact that it wasn't JUST snowing outside our window, but all over the New York/New Jersey area. I watched one reporter as he took a plastic ruler, walked over to a snow-plowed drift and announced that the snow was so deep he could lose his ruler trying to measure it... Then he stuck it in the snowbank and lost it.

A news report on the weather is the easiest slam-dunk-of-a-news-report on TV. Older people love to obsess over the weather both because the risk of falling is greatly heightened and... well, they just love it. My grandmother saved all of her calendars because she liked to record the high and low temperatures every day. For outdoors men, the weather is a big deal. My dad hunts and is constantly buzzing around his rural property so knowing the next day's weather can be a good idea. In addition, my parents live in the the middle of nowhere so a moderate snow storm can mean 24 (perhaps even 36) hours of inconvenience. People who might live on a remote mountaintop in Colorado can get stuck for weeks. Hey, I've seen The Shining - I know that extended snow storms can result in a dangerous bout of cabin fever. This, however, is NYC. Doing an investigate report in Chelsea to report on how 'disrupted' people feel is a management choice that, from a reporter's standpoint, should be reserved for public-access television (along with extended diatribes regarding Star Wars memorabilia and/or corporate police-states).

As the hours of live, satellite coverage began to pile upon one another, it became evident to me that something far different than the average news report was being conducted. I wanted to call it narcissism, but that felt simplistic. It isn't solely about being seen on the tube. If a neighborhood robbery, murder, or fire makes it to the local news, the entire neighborhood can feel validated. Events gain a reality. There's something about being near an event that gains attention outside the community. A person might show up for work the next day and when somebody mentions that they saw it on the news, an immediate street credibility goes to anybody who can claim relations. He can can say that he was there (or at least in the vicinity of 'there'), present during or around the time of the event. When a local event reaches the national news, you hit the Big Time on the Validity List. Friends and enemies from across the country learn of the event and relate it to you because you were THERE... or at least in the vicinity of 'there'.

What an inane report like the Chelsea incovenience report does is give a significance to life. That restaurant you went to 3 months ago is sitting in the background of the shot. That weird guy who works at the newspaper stand gets 2 sentences of fame as he talks about how pretty the snow looks. Your life experiences connect up with some larger, macro-experience that every schlump watching the local news might relate to and, thus, confirm.

I'm as guilty as any other American. When a student shooting happened in my college, science building, I raced home like every other soul and glued myself to the local and national news to see my moment in time get validated all across the country. I would sit in those dorm hall groups, talking about the incident and try to manufacture some story that might put myself somehow closer to the danger of the event. 'I just saw that student in the hall the week before.' 'I was supposed to have a discussion class on the second floor that night but our T.A. cancelled it at the last minute.' Never mind that I had never met the student in my life or that my discussion class was on Thursday and not Tuesday, when the incident occurred. The important thing was that I was CLOSE to it.

Why do we do it? Why do we watch ourselves? Is it because we just can't get enough of the things we've seen before or which never directly affect us? I keep thinking of a quote from Joseph Campbell on his PBS series The Power of Myth.

People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive... so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

With all the media I take in every day, I feel as if I am swimming through an manufactured reality. I have this constructed atmosphere of music I carry around with me. My computer games render abstracted realities of sports and first-person shooters. Film and television allow me to watch other people engage life in clearly-defined, tangible trails of narration. How can a person expect to process events of his/her life in any sort of present fashion? With jobs, debts, expectations, career tracks, and relationship commitments, how many rapturous moments of life do I experience? On the other hand, hundreds of times a year I vicariously experience it through rock n' roll, movies, games, and televised sporting events.

For those of us not listening to ourselves our fulfilling our needs, how unnatural is it to need our experiences to be confirmed and re-lived on T.V. - perhaps the primary place of our simulated raptures?

Pippin enjoys his First Snow

more static for the white noise

After years of wasting my workdays, reading blogs and diatribing in reply posts and the darkness of my own cave, I have decided to prick my finger and do a few cave drawings of my own. Having seen The New York Times devote many pages to the fabulous world of blogging, I am certain that I can finally declare the entire community 'uncool' and join the huddled masses of despondent writers and self-proclaimed fringe and see if there are any brave (or bored) enough to venture into my subterranean hovel of rent-stabilized angst.

For those of you who know New York City from the movies (via Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet and/or John Cassavetes), let me be the most recent to tell you that those days are long gone. New York City is holding onto the tattered remains of hipness with bloody fingernails. When I moved to the City 3 1/2 years ago, I envisioned a day where I'd be talking like Serpico, churning out dangerous, provocative plays in East Village basements and doing loads of speed, all the while fending off hustlers and lowlifes with my honed street smarts. Instead, I've been introduced to the $7 minimum drink price and three years of achingly-dull marketing work at Lincoln Center.

Now, I am unemployed and living at the far northern tip of an island called Inwood. Up here, the only cultural advantage is that I can scrawl "New York, NY" on my return mail address... well, that, and a fantastic park. This neighborhood is considered to be up-and-coming because it's the last affordable place technically on the island and the nearest coffee house is 20+ blocks away so its air of desperation is taken for aloofness. I have been hibernating in my cave for the last 5 months, watching Final Draft cursors blink and planning exactly how early in the day one has to crack open a bottle of wine before he/she is considered to be in full posession of a drinking problem. Ten pages of my spectacular screenplay-in-waiting have been hammered out. That averages out to about 2 pages per month. At this rate, a 120 page screenplay will take me 60 months to write. Unless I'm churning out a fantastic adaptation of The Silmarillion (which, unfortunately, I am not), there is a major car wreck around the next bend of my ol' career track.

And now here I am, fantasizing that I am the new Hunter S. Thompson of the blogging world (or at least a Lester Bangs) and dreaming that there are others out there others with a similar taste in music, movies and ideas who are as mindlessly searching the internet as I did only months ago. Being very much my typical self, I am starting yet another project because, unlike finishing a project, I am REALLY good at starting something new.