March 29, 2003
3/29/03 Brooklyn, NY One of
One of the common saws coming out of even the wisest of mouths right now is "well, I'm against the war, but I support our troops." Mid-discussion, at least two people have asked "but you support the troops, right?" Um, well...
Our "commander-in-chief" was not voted in by me, nor did he win the popular election. He was sneaked into the Oval Office by the vote of an ideologically-stacked Supreme Court, and it is my opinion he has a tenuous mandate over the armed forces. Should I accept that he is my President, and get over it? Sure, but "supporting" him in blind faith is excruciatingly difficult.
People who join the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines do so using their free will. There is no conscription forcing anybody to grab a gun and kill people in foreign lands. They knew what they were getting into, and made a conscious decision.
Did I support the troops when they went into Bosnia and put an end to the genocide? Absolutely. Did I support the troops when they kicked the Taliban's ass? You betchya.
But this war is the delusional fantasy of a few individuals sitting deep inside the White House, plotting to viciously re-arrange the Middle East. Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rice and Ashcroft are not people who speak for me. Even Powell, who used to be the voice of reason, was swallowed by the Dark Side one lonely night, and the war followed soon thereafter.
As of today, 37 American kids have been killed. Hundreds of Iraqi troops have been mowed down, and two count 'em, two - American missiles have found their way into Baghdad markets, turning hundreds of women and children into slabs of dismembered meat. This war is reading like an Al-Qaeda Training Video on the airwaves of Al-Jazeera. The viscous, bubbling syrup of white-hot hatred is gushing over from Arab nations, and we are creating terrorists by the bushel.
To all you pro-war people: your viewpoint is hard to stomach unless you live in New York City or Washington. When your sisters bike across the Manhattan Bridge every day for work, when you enter each tunnel praying you'll see the other side, when you are forced to rush across Times Square to do an errand, maybe then you can have an opinion. Until you move here and experience what it is actually like to live in a place charred by horrifying memories and palpable threats of more, you should just shut up. You - and the other 71% of America who dig the war - make it very dangerous for my family to live in the town we love.
As for our troops: I don't see how they're making us any safer. I didn't think Iraq was a threat before, and I don't now. So far, U.S. troops have killed a lot of brown people and turned a billion or so Muslims against us. Our missiles are accurate, to be sure, but not accurate enough. We took over one of Iraq's airports and called it Bush International. How cool was that? I hope everyone had a good chuckle. You know, while four thousand Saudi teens seethe with rage.
Every day this war drags on, most of the thinking, sensitive people I know toil in a vague sense of agony. Do I wish the entire Army could come home in one piece, get back to making jokes at the dinner table and playing hoops in the backyard? God, yes. But saying "I'm against the war, but support the troops" is the mealy-mouthed, pusillanimous wimpering of a nation living under the Orwellian eye of a fear-mongering government, and the lockstep induced by a highway full of redneck assholes driving Yukons with bumper stickers that say "YOUR NEXT, NORTH KOREA![sic]"
"Support the troops..." Can't it be enough just to wish they survive and come home?
March 28, 2003
3/28/03 Brooklyn, NY Tessa hasn't
Tessa hasn't been doing too well lately, so I convinced her to go to a festival of short films produced, directed and starring several friends of ours. After that, I took her to A Salt & Battery in the West Village and started talking a lot of bullshit to get her in a better mood.
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When that didn't work, we came home and played two hours of Boggle. Now she sleeps soundly next to me, radiating comfort and serenity, and I think to myself, what a awful fate to sleep alone on a night like this.
March 27, 2003
3/27/03 Brooklyn, NY My brother
My brother Steve flew over Hollywood today in his orange airplane (on his way back up to Mountain View, CA, I assume) and took a few pictures from the cockpit. One of them was right over my old house, shown here with a red arrow:
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I have always characterized myself in that house as a vessel of pure misery; by 1998, after living there for a year, I began to loathe Los Angeles and everyone in it. One of my first blogs ever was written about that Beachwood house, and though that entry was tainted with the bleakness that followed Sept. 11, my feelings towards Hollywood have remained relatively steadfast: it was an awful time, an awful place, full of criminally uninteresting people, and I wasted years 30 through 33 being there at all.
Strange, then, that I have these occasional longings for it. Ever since our trip to L.A. in January, I've had to re-assess my experience. The movie we are about to finish was written at that house, and I've come to understand that my social shortcomings were as much based in my own horseshit as they were in the collective clue of my peers.
I'll stand by the statement that Los Angeles is the worst place to be single on Earth (well, that or a Turkish disco) and I wouldn't wish it on anyone aching to meld with a loved one. But it did provide me with a forced monkhood that allowed a switch of priorities which, in turn, allowed me to be with Tessa a few years later.
Also, this was a time when anyone with a good idea could make a fantastic living. Having helped invent the editorial look and feel for CitySearch, I stayed on as their movie reviewer, and they still had the money to pay me. There was a sense, in about 1999 or so, that we had entered a brave new world in America, where new companies like Amazon and web-broadcasts like Radio GoGaGa were leading us into a future where there were, like Donald Fagen sang, "just machines to make big decisions, programmed by fellows with compassion and vision."
Even though I was still dialing up with a 14400 baud modem on my PowerBook 1400, we were all 5 years into email, a year into online shopping, and three weeks into listening to my hometown radio station streaming from North Carolina over a pair of spliced speakers.
This was before September 11th crucified our spirit, before George Bush II stole the presidency, and before Dook won its third national championship. It was back when duct tape was used to seal ducts. There was no hint of Armageddon in the air in those warm, long Hollywood afternoons; as long as you made rent ($475), the month was yours to do with as you pleased. I was desperately unhappy, sure, but it was the kind of unhappiness you can look back upon with a certain nostalgia.
Do you know what I miss most of all? Kozmo.com. What an amazing thing we had for a few years there. Any time of day or night, someone could bring you Krispy Kreme donuts, a Red Bull, the DVD of "My Favorite Year," and 100 feet of coaxial cable. Deep into a project, I would click on Kozmo and grab whatever I wanted. Moments later, the door would ring or in 2000, the secretary would page me – and in a few seconds I'd be holding a freezing cold cappuccino and Glenn Gould's recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations.
Certainly we could have lived without it, and certainly we have, but it was the promise of the time that I miss. Kozmo, like Pets.com and Skillgames and WebVan, hinted at an excitement some short distance in the future, where things could be fixed with the blessings of technology. Medicine, travel, communication and even romance would be immeasurably bettered by "just machines that made big decisions," meaning "more leisure for artists everywhere."
Instead, we were thrust into this mini-Dark Age, a paradoxical time of paralyzing cynicism and gung-ho jingoism. Subtlety has been lost in a tidal wave of moral certitude. And my beloved technologies have been trounced, killed, legislated out of existence, or betrayed by the very society that overfed themselves on their dividends.
Yep, Los Angeles sucked all right. I was very lonely in the late 90s. But I got something then that I don't get now: the sense that everything was going to be okay.
March 26, 2003
3/26/03 Brooklyn, NY Some days
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Some days are better than others, that's for damn sure. Some days your favorite team ends its season in a no-name tournament, sometimes your right sinus is so impacted that you actually look forward to surgery in April, sometimes you are so ashamed of your own government that you can barely walk down the sidewalk without feeling guilty you have a sidewalk to walk on, and sometimes when you get back home, you step in a humongous dollop of dog poop.
I could take everything else, but the dog shit really did me in. I had to take my shoes upstairs and scrub them with a wire brush and a quart of Windex. I would have used water, but the water isn't working in our apartment building today.
I'm going to go eat worms,
ian
March 25, 2003
3/25/03 Brooklyn, NY A lot
A lot of bloggers have a long column on the left side of the screen that lists the other blogs they like (or at least ideologically support). I'm especially thankful to Diane, who put both me and my sister on her list, and I know from the webstats that many of you got here through her consistently-entertaining page. What is strange about these blog lists is how many people actually click on a random one, even if you're buried among 500 other worthy diarists. For instance, I get lots of hits coming from one of the U.K.'s finest rabblerousers, the intense, charismatic Mike Atherton - and I'm tucked among hundreds.
So, to keep things simple, I'll list only a few of my favorite online diaries (besides those mentioned above) to keep this great circle of cyberlove spinning.
Driver 8 - From topics mundane to the magical, minutae to the morbid, Charly Z is always worth checking in on. Particularly interesting was his post on blogging ethics like, in two months, should I go back and fix that last sentence, ending so horribly with a preposition?
Randomly Ever After - Gus had the first blog I ever read, and it continues to be the sentimental favorite. We have weirdly parallel lives he's from Charlottesville, I'm from Chapel Hill; we both lived in communal houses that became legendary (his here, mine here); both ended up with pretty, formerly-bisexual, strong women that we met in college but kindled romance 10 years later; we live a block from each other in Park Slope, and we both bought small houses upstate near the Hudson. In the ultimate internet irony, I have yet to meet or speak to the dude. Doesn't matter – his cheery apocalysm and dark humor on the blog are satisfying enough.
SF Liberal and Bud's Misty Mountain Hop - Dave and Bud are two of my favorite folks on this green planet, both from my fraternity at Carolina. They seemed very different from each other in college, but in their 30s, their worries - and thus their blogs - ended up being remarkably similar: both feature fabulous links leaning left; sobering data laced with occasional comic deftness (Bud recently took issue with a BBC headline that read "Iraq's David vs. Goliath Tactics" by saying the war was "more like Jeffery Dahmer vs. Darth Vader."
Reinvented - Through Peter's tirelessly prolific site, I feel like I'm a part-time resident of Prince Edward Island, the maritime province of Canada 200 miles east of Maine (for those of you who learned geography in the United States, Maine is that thumb-looking state way at the top right hand corner of the map!) Tessa and I plan to drive up there and take the ferry across this summer, and check out movies at Derek's art house cinema.
So, between those diarists and my family Kent, Steve, Sean and Michelle - you ought to have enough to keep busy. But remember to keep comin' back here, no matter what, y'hear?
March 24, 2003
3/24/03 Brooklyn, NY Some people
Some people only "read" this blog for the pictures, which is fine with me. Words on the internet scarcely make their way into your cerebrum, something I realize even as I rewrite sentences days later to make them more interesting. I doubt you've made it this far. I was amazed when one loyal reader asked me if I was a homosexual (because of my "latently gay aging fratboy" comment yesterday) and I had to tell her that being latent is not the same as being actually gay, and that I misuse terms like that all the time.
Lacking a "comments" button at the bottom, it's often hard to know what - or if - anyone is thinking about the stuff contained herein, and using the email link to the left might seem a little daunting. Sometimes you just want to comment, and not engage a whole dialogue. Since my brother Steve is the web administer for this blog, and he says he hasn't found any good code for a "comments" section, I'm not sure what to do about that.
So instead, here's some pictures!
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Yeah, so it's self-indulgent. FYIYCTAJ, as my elder Chi Psis would say. Anyway, these are three shots taken in the exact same place: in New Orleans, on the Mississippi dock just behind the Caf du Monde. The top is 1987, the middle is 1995, and the bottom is 2003. I'm 19, 28 and 35 years old.
First off, my hair is unthinkably moussed in 1987, and homelessly unkempt in 2003. Also, that 2003 shot makes me look bloated and drunk (it'll have to be re-taken when I look employable). Also worth noting: that area of the river is getting seedier and seedier each time we go; in 1987, Bud and I spent the afternoon on the dock drinking Evan Williams and talking poetry - this last time, there was a whole posse of vagrant punks peeing off the side and discussing killing family members.
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Top is Jon, me and Bud in 1986. Bottom is Jon, Bud and me last week. All I can say is that it is good to keep friends for a long, long time.
March 23, 2003
3/23/03 Columbia County, NY I usually
I usually don't pay much attention to the Oscars, despite my chosen career but at this point, anything was a respite from the war, and my rapidly-deteriorating NCAA Men's Hoops picks. Re: hoops... at this point it should be noted that not only are two of my final four picks gone, but my champion as well. What a nightmare. I want all my pools back, just to spare the humiliation. Tessa is now kicking my ass two years running – I think she got 29 of 32 games right in the first round. She picks teams according to "how much sleep they get," which is a divination only she knows. Whatever she's doing is working; she would have won big bucks with her brackets last year, and most likely this year as well. Next year, I'm hanging my NCAA hat on Miss Blake and riding her to victory.
That sounded vaguely pornographic.
Re: the war... today was a bad day for the Americans. Instead of cheering masses of Iraqis being liberated, our Marines are getting killed, our choppers are crashing into each other, and one soldier... oh Jesus, forget it.
Re: the Oscars... the usual sweep of one crowd favorite. I mean, I liked Chicago as much as the next latently gay aging fratboy, but six Oscars? And nothing but geek awards for The Two Towers?
The best television of the night was Michael Moore's "acceptance speech," which anyone could have seen coming a mile away. The only thing pathetic was the booing, most likely by sensitive movie people who were sick of being pigeonholed as leftists. Let's face facts: Moore is a pretty flawed messenger, and in fact, can be very cringe-worthy (I may be the only person who didn't dig his meeting with Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine). But pretty much everything he said tonight was right. I have a feeling he'll be vindicated one day looked upon as a millennial Thomas Nast – but not anytime soon.
I don't usually watch the Oscars for the same reason I never ran for senior class president. Movies, to me, are a completely personal experience: a balled-up sweater for lumbar support, popcorn with real butter, and a place to put my legs. I love everything about going to the movies, which is why I made one. Perhaps someday I'll feel different, but for now, I'm much too fascinated by the micro-managed minutae of editing, tweaking, angling and crafting our own film to be concerned with the results of a high school election.