Sunday, April 30, 2006

"Internment" Camps.."residences"

From last Monday's Democracy Now, this is part of an actual conversation between Amy Goodman, a resident of an emergency camp being run by FEMA for displaced victims of Hurrcane Katrina and a security guard working for Corporate Security Solutions the company contracted by FEMA to provide security at the residence. CSS,on its website, claims that its "experience in meeting diverse corporate security needs ensures the best possible protection for your employees, physical assets, and business processes."

SECURITY GUARD: Turn it off.

AMY GOODMAN: We were going in the car, and he said, "Please interview me."

SECURITY GUARD: Yeah, he -- he can't. That’s not his privilege.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s not allowed to talk?

RENAISSANCE VILLAGE RESIDENT: What's wrong? What's wrong?

SECURITY GUARD: You can go -- get that -- you’ve known the deal since --

RENAISSANCE VILLAGE RESIDENT: No, I don't know the deal. Tell me. What is the deal?

SECURITY GUARD: You can go get interviewed as long as it’s off post. Otherwise, you, like I said, I can call the 800 FEMA number and have them come in --

AMY GOODMAN: You mean, he has to come off of the property?

.......

SECURITY GUARD: Yes, you can be interviewed --

RENAISSANCE VILLAGE RESIDENT: Okay.

SECURITY GUARD: -- if they had a FEMA representative with them, but since they don’t and do not have an appointment --

RENAISSANCE VILLAGE RESIDENT: Oh, okay. ‘Cause I know they do it all the time.

SECURITY GUARD: Yes, they have the FEMA public relations officer with them.

RENAISSANCE VILLAGE RESIDENT: Okay, well, I didn't know.

1. I'm no constitutional scholar but isn't a Federal property or a Federally-funded property the one place that your constituitional rights should be guaranteed? Why does this guy have to leave a Federal facility to speak to the press?

2. (This is a rhetorical question, I know why) Why the fuck does the guy need a FEMA representative with them to speak to the press on the property? Why does this guy have to make an appointment?

3. Why is security being provided by a corporate security solutions firm? The firm specializes in protecting company secrets and "businesses processes" (I'm assuming from competitors). Protecting information from external competitors makes sense for a corporation trying maintain a competitve advantage in a market place but what is FEMA trying to hide? Its incredible success and innovation at protecting and housing disaster victims? Talk about misplaced priorities, keeping information in and media out gets Federal investment. The woman they got to interview before talked about their meal benefits being cut off (months earlier than they had been told it would) and the lack of constructive programs on the facility for kids to participate in.

But I guess there will always be money for "corporate security".

I'm glad that getting rid of Mike Brown solved all our problems.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Me and my cheating ways…


“You cheat on your girl before you cheat on your barber.”

-a wise man or a damn fool

I had a barber I trusted, this Russian dude at Astor Cutters. He was the first barber I had ever deliberately sought out for a cut. It was a big step in becoming a man I thought, a choice of barber that was all mine. I had had other steady barbers before but they were just the Korean barbers in K-town or Flushing that my pops had taken me too and I had continued going to out of habit. This guy at Astor was nice though; clean, smooth fades, he seemed to understand my Asian hair. But he disappeared for a few years and I stopped going to Astor and returned to my neighborhood spot on Bowne Street. Early last year I went back and started bouncing around different barbers at Astor; giving it up to anyone who had a free chair and clippers. I would walk in, request a “tapered fade” and the fat man at the counter would turn and yell for someone, anyone, to take care of me. So began a series of brief dysfunctional relationships and unrewarding one-haircut encounters. There was the white homeboy who looked like a mini-Kevin Federline/Mark Whalberg/Eminem/(fill-in-your favorite black-man-trapped-in-white-man’s-body…), the old Latin guy who took hours because he was always on the phone and the severe-looking Arab (?) dude in the corner who always looked at me as if he wanted to kill me (I swear while he was fading me he was having visions of choking me with the power cord. Hopefully all his customers got the same look of disdain from him and it wasn’t just my innate pussiness). It was rough times for my hair as my beard, sideburns and fade went through every possible style on the display poster.

But one day, he was back, I thought he looked familiar and while he was cutting my hair, in a pretty forward move for me, I struck up a conversation with him. “Yo, did you work upstairs a few years ago before they closed it down?” He was like yeah but he left to work at a shop out in Brooklyn and had recently moved back. I told him that I remembered his fades from a few years ago and we reconnected to the point where I consistently went back to him alone at Astor. No more motley crew of random barbers, I had a stable hair-cutting relationship. Things were great until…one day…

I was home desperate for a cut-poor planning left me with not enough time to get downtown to Astor and back uptown for a performance. I had let my hair get too long and a cosmetic trimming wasn’t going to cut it. I fretted and fretted and finally said fuck it I’m going to the neighborhood spot around the corner from me in Astoria. I popped into the shop around the corner from me and shamefully slunk into the chair. It was like they knew what I was doing, cheating on my barber, “you from around here?” the lead barber asked.

“yeah, around the corner.”

“Where do you usually get your hair cut?”

“Manhattan” I said barely above a whisper looking at my shoes.

His non-response said it all that bitch knew he was playing home-wrecker and he was loving it, calling me to the dark side.

The fade was tight, I couldn’t complain though he could have trimmed my beard a little bit less instead of leaving me looking I just had a dirty chin. My original dude’s haircuts and trims were better but realistically, not enough to justify their cost (local dude was 10 bucks to Astor’s 15) and inconvenience (going downtown every damn time I needed a haircut was a real pain in the ass). So I didn’t look back and made the local guy my new regular spot. The relationship wasn’t the same but price and convenience were enough to convince me that it was ok.

A few months later, I’m waiting for the N at 8th street and someone calls to me and I look over-its fucking old dude. And my cheating ways were spelled out on the edges of my shape-up and the slope of my fade. “Whassup man, what’s going on?” He gave me a vigorous pound but I couldn’t even look him in the eye. He knew. There was someone else. I tried to look down, look away, I craned my neck in every direction but his but you can’t just hide a fucking haircut. I wanted to tell him my new guy sucked and that he was just cheaper and around the corner and sometimes it was hard to get to Astor and one time I had even gone to Astor and that he hadn’t been working his chair and I had been assed out of a hair cut and that I had tried to make it work and he was always my first priority and that it wasn’t all cold blooded and that I missed his fades and in a perfect world...

But the words got caught in a lump in my throat.



Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Today's wow

You mean Roger Clemens isn't a paragon of racial sensitivity?

I like that ESPN said it was a comment that "some might consider racially insensitive."

Monday, April 03, 2006

Fat-Kid Memories


"I love you like a fat kid love cake..."

50 Cent
21 Questions


I don't think of 50 Cent as a great lyricist but this was a great line. I was talking about with this the office manager (a fellow former fat kid) at my job. Is there really any greater love than a fat kid’s love of cake? She hypothesized that maybe our moms might be the only thing us fat kids could love more. I got so amped whenever there was cake around it really was love like love for my mom…and actually cake never got mad at me or anything so actually…

How this all came up was a shipping catalogue she was looking through for boxes and she looked at these small white cardboard boxes with handles that looked kind of like mini-suitcases and it immediately reminded her of the chocolate candy bars that she used to sell when she was in parochial school. I went to Catholic school also [significant memories: 1) being spanked by the assistant principal 2) throwing up in front of the building after being spanked out of guilt 3) pining for communion bread 4) pleated skirts 5) spending three years of my life thinking I was going to hell (now I just know it) 5) pleated skirts and 6) pleated skirts] from grades K-2 before shipping out to a gifted program at a public school in Kensington. The most exciting time of the year was when we got those candy bar boxes. We both remembered how delicious those bars were, they were really chunky with lots of peanuts. They were better than any candy bar that were available in stores and I would always beg my mom to buy a bunch for us. Whaty made them so spoecial was that they were only available a few times a year when we had the sale. I mean they were probably the same as other commercial candy bars just with different wrapping looking back but they were a commodity back then to us. “Never get high on your own supply”-BIG’s wise words had not yet been written to teach me any restraint. Our argument was where the bars came from-she swore they were “World’s Finest” which sounds familiar to me but I always remember them having plain white wrappers with silver foil and a McDonald’s logo on them. But she said that McDonalds had simply purchased the bars from World’s Finest and stamped their logo on them, which actually sounds right. But what made this a real real eery fat kid communal memory was when I said my mom used to freeze the bars to keep me from eating them right away. They’d be hidden in the back and every now and then she would bust them out and the best tasting shit was biting into one of those rock hard candy bars months after the sale had ended and you didn’t think there any more of those bars left (what made them so special was they weren’t in stores) and her mom had done the same thing too. I didn’t think anyone else’s parents would have done that but I guess it was just a fat kid thing.