thanks a lot

This is exactly the reason why I don't like going home for Thanksgiving. I'm fearful this will be me one day.

Man beats family to death on Thanksgiving.

over my head

This turned out to be one of the best Thanksgivings I've been through, and not just because of the great time we had breaking bread with EMC, his boyfriend and a few other friends. Good times were also had Thursday morning, when the BF and I rose early and braved the throngs of Middle American invaders for the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

In case you never realized what a dork I am (which is unlikely for regular readers of this blog), seeing the parade in person culminates a life-long dream of mine. The experience did not disappoint. The balloons, the bands, the D-list celebrity wannabes. I loved it.


One perk of having a four-year-old younger brother: I actually understand why Dora's backpack is smiling. Gracias, Dora!


By far my favorite photo of the day. This crew of cheerleaders went on for seemingly hours. And even though these poor chicks had been standing out in snow flurries since the butt crack of dawn wearing not much more than braces, they sure were perky. Go, team, go.


So I know that Disney is famous for its pro-gay policies (and following), but c'mon: Hercules here ain't fooling nobody. Come June, we'll see Muscle Boy again in the Pride parade.


One of the coolest balloons of the day: Chicken Little. Better than the movie, which isn't saying much.


How scary is Ronald McDonald? The balloon made the already disturbing fast-food icon into the stuff of nightmares, sort of like the creepy pedophile next door except four stories tall. Plus, for some bizarre reason, Ronald's sort of leaning over doggie-style the whole time. He's lovin' it, alright.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. Be thankful. I certainly am.

four performances: a haiku collection

Golly gosh gee, it's been a busy November. I looked up tonight and realized that the BF and I have been to four performances in the past nine days, which is a lot of culture even for the likes of us.
I couldn't possibly list here a full account of all we've seen and done, so I'll instead try and distill it down into bite-sized insights. In other words, and borrowing a page from the Jane Catoe playbook, I give you four haiku.

Sweet Honey in the Rock
(Nov. 12, Carnegie Hall)
They're best on CD,
But these six inspire me still.
Too bad Bernice left.

The National Chorale
(Nov. 19, Lincoln Center)
Ludwig's lovely Ninth,
Here with no extra polish.
Not great, not awful.

The Woman in White
(Nov. 20, The Marquis Theater)
Thank god for the Brits
With Victorian ghost tales.
Andrew keeps it pat.

Bea Arthur
(Nov. 21, Symphony Space)
Maude likes dirty jokes:
Bottoms and nuns and blow jobs.
Bea? We never knew!

wow

I mean. Really.

they say vision

Tuesday night, you stay at work late trying to get a jump on the coming holiday week. Your BF's traveling for work, so it's a good night to camp out at the office 'til 9 or 10 wrapping up stories. It's been a hellish week already, with three freelance projects due at once, plus a short story to wrap up and a writing group to host.

You feel the stress in your eyes. It's not quite been two years since you lost your glasses (maybe on a dance floor somewhere, but you still suspect your BF's former dog ate them) and got contacts instead. Which are fine, so long as you don't stare at computer screen too long. Tuesday, you log almost 12 hours in front of one monitor or another.

At home that night, laptop a blazin', your optical nerves officially go on strike. There's a nagging itch in the right eye, prompting you to remove your contacts earlier than normal. You leave the contact case in an unusual place in the bathroom, and for some reason don't screw the lid back on one side. A few minutes later, there's a clicking crash in the hallway. The BF tells you he's knocked your contacts off into the floor. Both lenses are lost. No big deal, right? You're more worried about your right eye. Ever since taking the contacts out, the vision on that side has remained cloudy. Which happens sometimes, but not usually this much.

The next morning, all day really, you drift around in a cloud. You decide not to wear your contacts, give the old eyes a rest for a day. Now, it's not like you're screwed without the lenses: You can certainly walk to work without fear of getting hit by a bus. But the world of clarity extends three, maybe four feet from your face. Everything beyond that, haze. Your head hurts. You start to freak out.

This is it, you think. I'm going blind. Diabetes? That's what happened to Aunt Alice. She lost her vision at, what, age 40? It's hitting me a lot sooner. Too much fucking sugar in my coffee. I knew it. I knew it!

Somehow you survive the workday, still in cyclops mode. That's the freaky thing: You're left eye seems to be OK. It's the right eye making life suck. But it doesn't look red or puffy. You do recall a day on the street when a passing gravel truck sped past on 7th Avenue, leaving a curtain of grit in its wake. Maybe one of those microscopic bits of granite has lodged itself in your cornea? A friend's mom recently had her retina detach without warning. Maybe you're next.

You've seen the blind folks tapping their way along 23rd Street. You always wonder, where are they going? There's some sort of center for the vision impaired near 5th Avenue, but why the East-West migration? You close your eyes and see yourself joining them, carrying the white and red stick, asking strangers for help. God knows you love huge black sunglasses, but what good are they if you can't see them yourself?

Thursday comes and genuine panic sets in. The right eye feels less irritated. But the world remains as blurred as ever. You put your day's obligations on hold and make an appointment with the eye doctor you saw last April. You call your mom. This is serious. If you're going blind, you're not going down without a fight.

Dr. G, a skinny and cute thirtysomething chick of Indian descent, gave you the single best eye exam of your life last time around, and you know she'll break the news to you gently that you only have 48 hours left to see. Her assistant does the normal tests, first for pressure, then the one with the little farmhouse in the distance. You'll miss that farmhouse, once your vision goes.

In Dr. G's chair, you explain your symptoms and she nods with empathy. She looks closely at the right eye and makes a "Hmmmmmm" sound. Not good.

"There are signs of abrasion here, some scarring," she says. "Have you had anything in your eye recently?"

That damn gravel truck. You knew it!

"But there's nothing under your lids now," she continues. "And the scrapes are so slight, I don't think this is causing your problem. It explains the irritation, but your vision should be fine."

What! Wait a sec. This can't be! You're about to demand a second opinion when she says, "You do realize, you still have your left contact in?"

You're silent.

No way.

But it's true. Tuesday night, you took out the right contact and somehow skipped the left. And you never realized it, due to the case getting knocked over. How. Fucking. Stupid.

Your face flushes red. Dr. G, always a vision of calm, chuckles. "It happens," she says. "I had one lady put two contacts in one eye and walk around like that for two days." But her words don't make you feel any better. You remove the left contact and, sure, enough, problem solved. The doctor gives you a prescription for some strong eye drops, to fix the irritation in the right, and offers advice on where to go for Lasik.

On the walk home, both contacts out now, the city appears consistenly cloudy in both eyes. It's comforting, sort of, and also terrifying. For two days you were convinced that your right eye had launched a revolt against the rest of your body. Or, even worst, that the brown globe of vision had decided it would be the first part of this creaking organism to die.
But in actuality, the right side revealed a true, unaided view of the state of your universe. It was lefty who was cheating, pretending to be something he's not. What you deemed the norm, the truth, simply wasn't.

At the corner of 8th Avenue and 19th, a gray-haired lady is walking a small Jack Russel Terrior. Even in your haze, you can see that the poor puppy has only one eye. You think to yourself, "Thank god that's not me."

better than flag day

Did you know that the holiday we now observe as Veterans' Day was originally called "Armistace Day," from 1927 through 1954?

Yeah, who gives a fuck, really?
The good news is, I had the day off work. I did some painting, cleaned the apartment, caught up on bills and also listened to a lot of music. Good times. Here are some highlights.

The McGarrigle Christmas Hour
Kate & Anna McGarrigle
My parade of holiday sounds continues, thanks largely to Lady Miss Heather, who sent me a big box of Xmas Cheer that included this keeper. Rufus and Martha Wainwright team up with their mom and aunt (and Emmylou Harris!) to sing the hell outta some obscure hymns.

Confessions on a Dancefloor
Madonna
OK, no more Madge after this post, I promise. But thanks to Taylor (who rocks my life), I got a preview of her latest. It's fun. Not as disco-licious as I'd thought, but still quite peppy. Honestly, I hear a lot of hints of earlier songs. Isn't "Isaac" sort of like "Sky Fits Heaven"? And "Push" makes me think of "Like a Prayer." Discuss.

Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State
Sufjan Stevens
I absolutely adore his Illinois album, which was my first exposure to Sufjan's uniquely melodic sound. This disc from 2003 started the states series, and has much in common with Illinois. No favorites yet, but I'm sure that my iPod will be camping out in Michigan for a few weeks.

Nashville
Josh Rouse
God bless the iTunes Music Store. I was searching for a different song and happened upon Josh Rouse, who I'd never heard of. Nashville, released this February, may be the most inaccurately named album of the year. It's not country at all, but a moody collection of hooks and guitars, very '70s radio, I think. "Winter in the Hamptons" makes me wish I still owned a car, so I could drive really fast with the windows rolled down and cold air hitting my face while singing along at top volume.

slower for the soul

Many months after first picking it up, I finally finished The Power of Now. I know, I know, insert joke here: "It's Now or never." Yuk yuk.

Seriously, though, I'm glad it took so long. Those weeks between chapters gave me some time to digest Eckhart Tolle's sometimes counter-intuitive ideas about consciousness and decision-making.
Going back and forth between a self-help title, some occasional fiction and the stack of New Yorkers I keep by my bedside generally slows down the process of ever actually finishing a book. When I do get to the last page, it's normally a cause for celebration. Not so with this book. I finished it feeling like I should give it another read.

A disclaimer: I think about a third of the book is bullshit. This tends to be true with many works I've read from the New Thought stack. Gary Zukav's The Seat of the Soul changed my life when I read it in 1999. That is, except for the sizable section on reincarnation, which I rejected entirely.
I realize this notion drives the fundamentalists batty, the thought that you can pick and choose your spiritual beliefs like plucking spring rolls from an all-you-can-eat buffet table. It doesn't bother me in the least.
As I see it, we're living in the first era of mankind when the collective wisdom of all cultures can be easily accessed by most anyone. Once you pull all those formerly mysterious ideas and traditions into the daylight, their similarities can be stunning. My man Joseph Campbell made this point two generations ago, but still precious few people seem to get it. Look to what happened this week in Texas for proof of that.

And speaking of fundamentalism, the new issue of Parabola gives a soulful and timely meditation on the topic — without resorting to politics. Good stuff. Check it out. Now.

it's run by a big eastern syndicate, you know

Holy crap.

Don't look now, but Santa Claus threw up all over the city. Today the BF and I had lunch in Manhattan Mall (don't ask) and we were surrounded by GOBS of holiday cheer. Same deal at the CVS on 8th Avenue, which yesterday was shoulder-deep in boxes of tinsel and cheaply made Chinese goods that unimaginative types will pawn off on their unsuspecting relatives.

Tis the season, y'all.

Also today, I received in the mail the new "Broadway's Greatest Gifts" CD — that's right, your favorite carols performed by the casts of "Hairspray," "Wicked," even "The Light in the Piazza." (How in the hell the folks from "Lennon" had time to throw a song together, we'll never know.)
You're probably ready for me to launch into a diatribe here about how awful all this is, that the crass commercialism just sucks the life out of the holiday before December even arrives.
You'd be wrong. I'm loving it. (Admittedly, it's a little hard to be in the Xmas Spirit when it's 60 degrees outside. But no complaints there, either.)

The BF has already started bitching, but we're listening to carols from now through the new year. Ho ho ho!

higher learning

I've written before about the High Line, the elevated train track that's being redeveloped as a unique park space in West Chelsea. Yesterday the BF and I got a closer look at the structure itself, along with a fascinating art installation inspired by the project.

We signed up for the 11 a.m. tour of Creative Time's exhibit, "The Plain of Heaven," which includes site-specific works from 14 artists responding to the forthcoming refurbishment of the High Line. The train track ends abruptly in the Meatpacking District, since its southern terminus was cut off in 1991. Creative Time's exhibition takes over an abandoned meatpacking (go figure) warehouse on Gansevoort Street, which is scheduled to be demolished to make way for the High Line's new entrance, as well as a (possible) new contemporary arts space from the Dia Foundation.

Now, I don't know if you've ever been inside an actual meatpacking warehouse, functional or otherwise, but I'm here to describe the experience with one word: Creeeepy.
The BF referred to the space as "better than a haunted house" — his half-hearted "I told you so" meant to make up for refusing to take me to Shakespeare's Haunted Pier the weekend of Halloween.

But I digress.

The mixture of high-concept art with this raw, dusty slaughterhouse — sparsely lit, with actual meat hooks hanging from the ceiling — worked together better than it probably sounds in the retelling. The artwork varied from painting and video installations to an ongoing live "dance" performance. Best of all, the tour terminated in a viewing platform that overlooks the High Line itself, which our guide called "an urban prairie."

I see her point. The rusted "plain" may look decrepit from below, but it's teeming with plant life on top: Whole shrubs and twisted thorn bushes push out of the metal rails and scattered collection of junk. Of course, all this will change once construction begins next year.

Leaving the warehouse, we were hit by a strong smell of fish carried by the breeze outside. It's not uncommon, as you walk the cobblestone streets of the Meatpacking District, to encounter such pungent aromas — a reminder that the tony boutiques and shops selling $4,000 couches have only recently arrived in this industrial enclave. The "neighborhood's" very essence, its grit, explains its appeal. Can that authenticity remain if and when the High Line gets revived? I wonder if a re-Packaged District will still have the same charm.

Anyway, "The Plain of Heaven" runs through Nov. 20. If you're in NYC between now and then, catch it while you can.