Rest In Peace

I'll confess, its not like I ever really listened to James Brown, I'm one of those younger kids that got to know him secondhand through the music he influenced, namely hip hop,and to a lesser extent,funk. A musical giant and genius, and from the highlights I've been seeing, one hell of a live performer.

Rest in Peace.

More news

Oh my god, they just did a piece on the "Left Behind" video games (based on the Christian book series of the same name). You convert or kill non-believers and are apparently battling a satanic army led by Mohammed something something.

But don't worry, lest you get the idea that you think this game might promote violence in a religion I was raised to belive to be pacifistic, they quote a game developer saying that using violence actually decreases your "spirit points" and that its far more effective to use prayer and your bible to convert people "when possible."

You can't make this up. What's the point of satire in a satirical world?

Oh, and ABC News now just went to a black guy I've never seen before doing a sports update from ESPN. And I watch a lot of ESPN. I'm not sleeping until I see a Native American. Or maybe the Latina counts as both.

I really should sleep.

I just heard a white news anchor say "raw funky style," referring to James Brown with a straight face.

Christmas Morning

I cant sleep so Im watching ABC News Christmas episode
which seems like its on endless repeat. The co-hosts,
each in different cities, are some Indian guy and a
Latina, neither of whom Iv EVER seen on TV. Its
amazing how news programs become like the UN on major
American holidays. I guess its nice to know we have an
ample supply of colored journalists just under that
glass ceiling.

HOLY SHIT! They just said that James Brown died. He
had checked into a hospital last night with pneumonia.
Damn.

Rest In Peace, Godfather of Soul.

Wait, doesnt seem like the shows are just repeating
themselves, its actually one loooong overnight show. I
just saw a bit on men shopping for lingueries that
wasnt on an hour ago. They stuck these two schmoes
with the overnight shift! How ass is that? Well,
hopefully this isnt the only airtime theyll get all
year, there are other holidays.

***********
The future already exists

Jorge Luis Borges

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Men in Tights

Dennis found a wikipedia of comic books, comicvine. I checked out the entries and the character profiles are really thin. I also don't know how big a fan I am of the rankings and that they're based on user voting. Is Mr. Fantastic indeed the smartest comic superhero on the planet? Yeah, the FF beat Galacuts waaay back in the day but that's only because Uatu the Watcher hooked them up with the Ultimate Nullfier. Otherwise Earth would have been toast. And Spider-Man is smarter than Galactus? Peter Parker is a bright kid and won some science fairs, but making a couple of high-pressure web-shooters doesn't really stack stack up against building machines that enable you to consume whole planets and imbuing numerous other lesser beings with God-like powers (Silver Surfer, Firelord, Nova just to name a few).

After checking out comicvine I went on Wikipedia to look at their comic entries and I found two things that have been providing me hours of fun. A list of 1) black superheroes and 2) asian superheroes. I didn't get to the latino heroes list but that's next up. And for more fun with racial stereotypes in comics, I checked out the Superfriends list. As stereotypical as the characters were, they also rarely appeared in the show next to the white mainstream ones so I guess that mitigated their harmful impact on my young impressionable asian mind. And if I remember correctly, they were in fact rotated, so that each espisode would feature one guest minority hero, but you would never see them all at once.

Santa Baby...

One of the nice things about doing 7ARTS is that I get to try new things I writing that I’ve never done. Even though I’m an “artist” by training I learn new things about myself all the time doing the writing stuff alongside the students. Don had us free write a letter to Santa and I just bugged out, taking off from a joke that Dennis and I used to make that shutting down Christmas might be the best way to really start the revolution based on the amount of sales that retailers depend on in the holiday season. I was shocked to learn how much retailers’ success/failure in the year is really determined by this intense one-month period. So I went off and had some fun bitching out Santa:

Dear Santa,

How ya doin? I know you don’t exist. In fact, when I was in church, my youth pastor used to call you “Satan Claus,” I earnestly asked him if you were a demonic manifestation.

You are all that is wrong with American capitalism and the politics of consumer consumption. There are protesters throwing rocks at World Trade Organization meetings, the International Monetary Fund. Those cats have it all wrong. YOU’RE the problem, in your furry red coat with your cherub cheeks and gleeful smile. You are capitalist oppression at its absolute worst. What kind of working conditions do you have those elves in anyway? Are they union? When was the last time your factories were audited? Do they get a living wage? Fuck Wal-Mart, you make them look like a benevolent ruler.

We bring you down, we bring down capitalism, ushering in a new Marxist utopia. Stores would shut down; factories would cease operations-the ripple effects throughout our global interdependent economy would bring commerce to a screeching halt. Che had it all wrong trying train guerillas to overthrow two-bit South American and African dictators. He should have had his eyes set on the North Pole. Though with your elves, abominable snowman and harsh climates, you may have coup-proofed yourself better than Saddam Hussein. Or is it CIA money that funds your operation? Crack in the inner cities, overthrowing democratically elected socialist leaders, and you, forcing us to buy shit that we don’t even need. It all fits. Or maybe you’re NSA, secretly wiretapping us to find out who’s been naughty or nice. Maybe its Halliburton, is Dick Chency on your board?

All I know Kris Kringle is that I’m on to you. I’m on to you.

Sincerely,

Jason

PS Can you hook me up with a digital camera this year?

Ode to Dennis

Like monkeys given infinite time and typewriters eventually writing the complete works of Shakespeare, my dumb ass has somehow created a blog that has an exponentially higher ad rank than my friend Dennis.

According to him, I am living proof that Google’s ad ranking algorithms are deeply flawed. I don’t even know what an algorithm is. Dennis is an internet junkie, knows everything about Google and spends hours on his blog writing entries about random products for extra money and yet somehow his ad rank is lower than mine. He can’t figure it out. I haven’t posted in months and two people, maybe three, link to my blog while Dennis posts regularly and 60-80 people link to his. So he offered me five bucks to write a blog entry about him and to create a couple of links to him.

So in full disclosure to all my loyal readers (all two of you), I am being compensated for this entry. I guess he gets more for his pay-per-post entries if his ad rank improves and one way his ad rank can improve is if a blog with a higher ad rank links to his. Its all in the algortithm. Algorithm. Uh yeah.

Also, because one reason people hit his blog is because he has entries about Rachael Ray (apparently hating Rachael Ray is a big internet phenomenon). If I add a link to his Rachael Ray entry that will really help. I don’t hate Rachael Ray though. She’s overly perky and probably has more success and exposure than her raw talent really justifies but I’m not going to hate on her hustle.

I was also going to turn this into a creative writing opportunity to write about Dennis but I’ve met my two-link obligation. I will just say that Dennis is one of my best friends, he’s really smart, really bald, really funny and I’ve known him since our fat-awkward eigth-grade days at Hunter. He’s also quite the salsa dancer. All you hot ladies religiously reading my blog, get at him. He’s in business school too. Word.

San Francisco

Bay Area August 2006

Aug 5, 2006 - 92 Photos

French and Italian Bakery, Ditmars Boulevard between 34th and 35th streets

it'll get done when it gets done...

I just heard Bloomberg's live press conference in Astoria Park and was none too thrilled with his demeanor. I know he's a monotone guy but the complete lack of urgency was extremely frustrating. To keep describing the situation as an "inconvenience" is incredibly insulting. For me, as a young guy with little (if any) persishable food in my fridge yeah its just an inconvenience. No lights no TV no internet, no AC. Whatever-I can crash with my folks for a few days untill it blows over.

But for small business ownwers this is not an inconvenience, this is survival. They may not be million-dollar companies like Bloomberg LLC but they are businesses and these mom and pop shops are critical to the city's economy and they're suffering incredible losses. Along Ditmars Blvd, there are delis, groceries, bakeries and restaurants that are dumping crazy inventory (rotting food). One store owner in the NY Times reported that they looked into renting generators but the rental companies were price gouging them like crazy. Where is Bloomberg's leadership on this predatory pricing? Giuliani, in what was a symbolic, but important, move in the hours after 9/11, repeatedly said on the radio that he had inspectors on the streets to make sure no one was taking advantage of the crisis to price gouge. Basically, he told us that there would be order, there was infrastucture and we weren't going to descend into chaos. It was a small detail but it helped keep all of us calm. Impressively, he had the presence of mind to think of that in the first hours after the planes hit. The power's been out here for days, using his power to keep generator rental rates managebale should be something our fucking MBA CEO mayor should have figured out by picking up the damn paper. It might be the difference between some businesses folding or not.

"It'll get done when it gets done."

Bloomberg said this several times. What the fuck? There is no timetable? I understand that this is hard to predict and by avoiding a deadline he's trying to manage our expectations but I would venture a guess that Mike Bloomberg did not become a billionaire by keeping managers in his company that told him "it'll get done when it gets done." He should be lighting a fire under ConEd's asses right now. This is a mayorlty extremely committed to customer service, data collection and performance measures but all of a sudden he's got kid gloves? Tell ConEd to come up with a best-case, worst-case and a few in-between cases for when this will get done so they have some kind of fucking deadline. Instead he's just given them a license to dither. Give them a deadline. Use their data, how many manholes, estimate time per manhole, c'mon you put up fucking 311, demand more from ConEd than this.

He says doesn't want to point fingers right now or be confrontational. Right. Someone in Bloomberg LLP confuses 2,000 grossly mis-served customers with 15-25,000 and I want to see how CEO Bloomberg responds.

I understand it taking time, power usage is high, the storms are crazy but the city's leaden response starting with the mayor has reached the point where its inexcuseable. Its too bad its his last term so we don't have the satisfaction of voting his ass out.

Powerless

Why does the rest of the city hate us? We're people too dammnit.

Best of Friends

I went to the Noguchi Museum last Friday to check out Best of Friends, a show about the relationship between Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi, two incredibly brilliant people. The show wasn't that exciting. I think it may have just been kind of thin on quanitity of work and specifically work that really exemplified how they influenced each other. Maybe I wasn't paying attention but I also felt that the show focused heavily on how Fuller's obsession with geometry and physics influenced Noguchi's work but less how/if Fuller was influenced by Noguchi.

The thing that fascinated me the most was that apparently Noguchi had gone down to Mexico and made a giant mural typical of the revolutionary themes of the time, workers rights, opression by the government and the church. First of all, its fascinating to see Noguchi's paintings and to see how his painting style even when within a very specific genre and style of social(ist) revolutionary realism still echoes his sculpture as I saw in the angular features of this skeleton:
















But secondly, it was a trip to see Noguchi associated with such a blatantly political piece. He had organized artists of Japanese descent during the internment and even entered an internment camp voluntarily (he was a NY resident) but the closest I am aware his work taking on an public bent was his public playgrounds. It was fascinating to see him wrestle with this political language.

The museum in general is a great place. Its inspiring (and disheartening) to see the life work of someone so brilliant. In an era when I feel like people are told to specialize here was a man who could do anything in art. Sculpt from life-check. Landscape architecture-check. Abstract sculpture-check. Amorphous forms ala Brancusi-check. You walk around and see how limitless his curiosity and talent were just by looking at his output.

You can't ever stop being interested in shit.

A Fistful of Ass

So while I have don’t have ass enough to hold my pants up, apparently our 6’5” techno-music star, queen gay IT consultant likes it. He was showing our office manager a book and I walked over to take a look at it and while I’m flipping through the pages, he says to her, “see, he’s got a nice ass” and fucking grabs my left ass cheek. The office manager eyes bugged out and she busted out laughing, I turned beet red and I tried to play it off but I know I looked visibily disturbed. I’m open-minded but I’m no Ozzie Guillen (I don’t go to Madonna concerts or WNBA games).

Hoppin Styles...

I just hopped a turnstile. I'm 28 fucking years old! I have a masters degree! Come to think if it, its the first one I've ever hopped. I've gone under, I've snuck in the exit gates (back when you could just pull them open) but this is actually the first time I've up and vaulted one.

It was at the Canal Street Station. There are two sets of entrances, one towards the Q and N train and one towards the R and W. Only the N and W go towards my place and late at night the W doesn't run so I walked in the Q/N entrance. But I forgot that the N runs on the R/W track late at night at Canal Street until I saw the sign. Fuck. So I walk back towards the turnstiles I came in. There was probably some tunnel I could have taken to the R/W track but it would have taken forever and it have forced me to miss an N pulling in. Of course, as soon as I get in sight of the turnstile I hear a subway and its a fucking N so I start booking. The thing is, once I go out the turnstiles I came in I have to go back in through that other set to get to the RW track where I see the N pulling in. I had just swiped my Metro Card so I would have to wait 15 minutes to to use it again (I have an unlimited). The thought of having to sit an hour in the hot platform in my damp clothes (sweat and rain) for another train was so horrible that I decided to go for it. I ran full speed (for me) to the turnstile and in what I'm sure was a completely graceful maneuver, I placed my hands on the sides of the turnstiles, lifted my feet, ducked my head, swung over and through and ran into the subway car just as the car doors should have closed. But they didn't, they lingered open and I sat there nervously waiting to be thrown to the floor by a ganagload of plain clothes cops popping out of a revolving wall like in Hangin' With the Homeboys (great movie, "Pizarelli, thats an Italian name...") but nothing happened, the doors closed and the train pulled out. I made it. Except I banged the shit out of my knee when I was jumping over. Damn, I'm an old fucking man.

Assless Chicken...

“You know, I made a mistake, you actually do have an ass.”

So said Axel when he saw me in the tightest pants I’ve ever had to wear. I actually don’t have an ass but these pants were so tight that they must have manipulated my flesh enough to create the illusion that I had some back. I had lost my salsa costume on the subway (no, not the manitard) right before a show and had to run around frantically to find a pair. I ended up buying these tight-assed pants from Urban Outfitters that kind of flared out at the bottom-Maria said they gave me male camel toe. The girls collectively winced when they saw me walk into rehearsal and more so when I did the half split in warm-up. It wasn’t pretty.

I’ve actually narrowed down my lack of an ass as the source of many physical problems I experience. Of all my physical flaws, I think my asslessness might be the one that bugs me the most.

Case in point, my lack of an ass means that my pants have nothing to hang off of and are constantly slipping down. Now, this was okay back in the day when I was rocking the jailhouse sagging-pants-off-my-ass wannabe-thug look but I’m a little old for that now. I actually need my pants to stay up semi-respectfully. But because I have no ass I have to tighten my belt a lot more than another person would have to because I don’t have that physical “hook” to help hold my pants up. All I got is my belt. So what happens when your belt is too tight? Well, one it hurts like a mother especially by the middle of the day as your waist expands (my Mom says you’re always the lightest in the morning). So while I might be three holes from the belt tip at the start of the day, my stomach will start to get achy because of food in my stomach and my overly tight belt and I’ll loosen to two holes. But when I loosen my belt, my pants start to fall down and I start stepping on my jeans (which gets to my other physical flaw: short-assed legs). So while two holes is enough to give my stomach some relief and postpone a major case of indigestion and a nasty bathroom bomb, it also means I’m grabbing at my pants and hitching those shits up all day. In an hour, my stomach will start to feel better and I’ll be sick of grabbing at my jeans and stepping on my cuffs so I’ll get cocky and re-tighten back to three holes (“I got this…“). So while I can walk freely for a little bit, like clockwork, my stomach will start to get achy again in thirty minutes and I’ll feel my the food in my stomach curdling and the gas welling up again. That’s when I’ll start calculating where I am in the city with what I know to be the nearest, cleanest, accessible toilet. I’ll tough it out until I have to loosen my pants again and this horrible cycle will continue back and forth until the end of the day. You might say, what’s the big difference between the second hold and the third hole? Shouldn’t one or the other be ok? Or even just drilling a hole right in between? Here’s my theory, those people blessed with even semi-decent asses don’t have to calculate as scientifically whether their pants are too tight or too loose because their asses shoulder a significant amount of the pant-bearing load whereas mine is AWOL. Because I have no ass, I’m trapped in a constant war between too-tight or too-loose pants, there will never be a “just-right” adjustment no matter how many holes I drill in my plants or how carefully my pants are tailored because my ass is not helping the cause at all. For years I wondered why my stomach hurt so much and why I couldn’t keep my pants up and now, I think I understand. Its liberating.

Next time, the ass, salsa, squatting and quad muscles….

Faster than a speeding bullet...

I ran the Bronx Half Marathon last Sunday. I trained for it, but not as diligently as I would have liked. It was a really nice course, challenging, but nice. Nicer than the Brooklyn Half Marathon because it seemed to have a variety of sights, Brooklyn felt like a whole lot of Ocean Parkway but the Bronx route took us through a real diversity of neighborhoods (my PC way of saying we had to run through the ‘hood: “...what are all these white people in tights running outside my house for?”). The toughest stretch was Grand Concourse, because it was a long straight shot in the open sun and pretty hilly, but I was pretty happy with my time and proud of myself for finishing and finishing strong.

Well at least pretty proud until I looked up my results searching by my last name:




How's that for perspective?

Bowery and Bayard, July 8th, 11pm

Spectator

We were in the middle of rehearsal when we noticed a bird sitting on the window sill, watching us dance. It wasn't a pigeon and it didn't get scared when we pointed at it. It sat there for almost an hour watching us, looking to see who was talking and shifting its gaze to whoever spoke. It was pretty spooky, it kind of had the 'I don't give a fuck' attitude of a New York City rat.

Nostalgia for the nineties...

Who the hell did we draft with the 20th pick?

Mars Blackman?

Rolando Blackman?

Ronaldinho?

Ronaldo?

How about:

Rolnaldinhol Blakinman?


I can't say this guys name with a fucking straight face. The name alone is enough, its worse that we might have passed on a potential franchise point guard for him. Oh well, bring it on Zeke.

Further proof that the NY Post kills brain cells

I guess its possible that the AP wrote this headline:

LIMBAUGH CASE GOES LIMP

AP

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Rush Limbaugh will not face state criminal charges for the bottle of Viagra found in his luggage that appeared to have been prescribed to someone else.

The Free Rider

It’s gotten so hot I’ve taken to walking around the local supermarket to cool off. The produce section is great, especially if they’re spraying water on the fruits and vegetables, then you get the cold air combined with the moisture particles in the air and it feels so refreshing. The dairy section is also pretty good because of the refrigeration but not as good as produce. The first few times I did this I really tried to look like I was shopping, looking intently at prices and the quality of pears, broccoli, lettuce and rutabagas; I pulled the different cheeses off the shelf and compared ingredients and prices. After about 20 minutes of cooling down err… shopping…I would leave. Now I just don’t care and I wonder if the Trade Fair employees are beginning to suspect that I’m stealing their AC when this big sweaty Asian guy is wandering the aisles not even looking at food. I guess it’s a public good so I’m not really reducing someone else’s enjoyment of air conditioning or increasing their costs of providing it (though as hot and sweaty I get…).

The first few times I did this I would sneak back out the entrance but the thing is they’re those motion-sensitive supermarket doors and to get back out you have to hover at the door and wait for someone to come in then rush out which is pretty embarrassing. The other option is to go out the register and just walk by the cashiers buying nothing, which is also pretty humiliating. Though I’ve noticed the far aisle is usually unmanned and if Trade Fair is crowded that I can duck out that aisle without anyone noticing. Of the two that seems like the less embarrassing option.

Or I guess I should just get an air conditioner for my room.

In case you didn't see the lighthouse.

Tried to do the tip-to-tip walk of Manhattan, we didn't make it but it was fun. Saw some cool stuff that I didn't know was in the city. This was a pretty interesting structure-I think it was around the 150s....

Mt. Eden Ave Subway Station, 4 Train Bronx NY

I almost walked right by these in the subway station:

Tolerance

Ozzie Guillen, explaining to a reporter that he has nothing against gay people:

"Guillen also told Couch that he has gay friends, attends WNBA games, went to a Madonna concert and plans to go to the Gay Games in Chicago. "

...and he loves sex and the city...

Los Angeles

I guess I must have missed the funny face memo that Axel and D got.

Intimacy

I hate when people do this shit. There's clearly no room c'mon man.

Giuliani Time Reviewed

Watch Giuliani Time. It closes this Thursday in New York and distribution will be limited nationally I'm sure.

I saw it last night and the director was there and answered questions and urged us to spread the word about the film. It hasn’t been getting a lot of love from the film festival circuit (dinged at Sundance and Tribeca but it did win a best-of-festival award at one in LA).

It got annoying when people started asking him dumb questions like “did you try calling Howard Dean and the Democratic Party about publicizing this film?” Or “how about Air America, you know Al Franken?”

I wanted to announce, “look people, he’s not a moron, he didn’t get funding to make a critical documentary of someone who’s considered somewhere between a saint and a demi-god without being media savvy. “

The movie lets the viewer connect a lot of the dots, which works. When it gets into workfare, the contradiction isn’t explicitly made clear that the welfare rolls were being cleared while there was little low-skilled work to be had and while Giuliani was mercilessly cracking down on street vendors left and right (not exactly an environment that promoted micro-enterprise). The film juxtaposes the two contradictory policies without spoon-feeding the viewer. You never want to underestimate the intelligence or the patience of your audience, an easy thing to do with work like this.

For all my anger at that administration, until I saw that film I had actually forgotten that workfare had actually been the ultimate hypocrisy of his administration. While he was attacking people on welfare and claiming that workfare was necessary to instill the basic discipline necessary to hold down a job, he was constantly putting street vendors out of business and creating more barriers to entry for potential vendors through licensing procedures. These are people who were seemingly the very embodiments of the work ethic he decried for welfare recipients for lacking. What kind of message did that send to people being cut off the rolls?

There are already not a lot of low-skilled jobs out there for you, we won’t prepare you for the ones that are out there (its more important that you pick up our trash), we the city certainly aren’t ever going to consider paying you a living wage for work you’re already doing for your welfare check and now we’ll make it even more difficult for you to start your own micro-venture because Disney and the big retailers don’t like the competition.

Shit like that made me want to wring his fucking neck.

One of (the many) absolutely ill moments of the film is when the city’s then-Commissioner of The Human Resources Administration is on a television news show responding to allegations that workfare was simply an exploitative form of indentured servitude.

“Did you have to get up to go to work?” he asks his interviewer.

“Yes.”

“Do you consider yourself a slave? No. We believe that work will set you free.”

I kid you not, this is what he said. I’m glad he clarified that the city wasn’t running a slave plantation by quoting the gates of Auschwitz.

The Ground Floor
While the film gets great quotes from heavy hitters in politics and policy its the frustration of a five-man work fare crew in a park that does the most make the case that Giuliani’s policies actually deepened poverty.

They saw themselves in an endless cycle of dependency on the city. The work they were doing was not preparing them for any meaningful employment; they were not receiving training or job readiness or any basic education remediation. The performance measure of reducing the rolls made them feel as if the slightest mistake would get them cut from their "benefits" and onto a quick path to homelessness. They knew they weren’t going to be hired by the city. “Why would the city pay us more to do the same work?” asks a guy who probably doesn't have a master’s degree in economics.

Yes, the argument that some, or many, people on welfare lack basic job readiness skills: commitment, follow-through, discipline, attendance, socialization skills etc., and yes in theory a workfare program might succeed in instilling those skills in people but common sense should tell you without an incentive (like a real job, education, new skills, a living wage) people are not likely to commit the kind of focus necessary and (justifiably) will see the program as the simple exploitation of a low-cost labor source.

What Are We Not Measuring?
The film’s focus is on how performance measures drove behavior at the ground level that harmed city residents, many poor and minority. Getting guns off the street is a laudable goal and so is reducing the welfare rolls but without balancing counter measures the pressure to perform led to some pretty disastrous outcomes.

Performance measures ultimately signals the priorities of an organization (what gets measured is what gets done blah blah). In my public policy class we talked about Deborah Stone who argues that performance measures that focus on numbers can become an incentive to alter one’s behavior and not necessarily for the better.

Performance measures drove a culture where there was enormous pressure to collect guns, constitutional rights be damned and to reduce the welfare rolls, the well-being of individuals of people once forced off the rolls be damned. However, there is limited data from that era in both of these areas: 1) police misconduct (amount of money the city is settling per cop etc.) and 2) the outcomes for people pushed off welfare rolls (job attainment and retention etc.).

An administration incredible committed to data measuring signaled its priorities quite clearly by what it chose to not measure just as surely by what it did.

Left Out…
The director himself said that there was tons of material left out and with Giuliani there is so much fucked-upness to include but I was still surprised at some of the things not mentioned in the film:

1. The police misconduct commission he formed then disbanded after the Abner Louima attack. It was one of the most cravenly political moves I’ve ever read about and he’s gotten a free pass on it his whole fucking career.
2. That perhaps the only reason we heard about Louima’s case was because a pair of heroic nurses at the hospital he was admitted to went to the press, Internal Affairs and Louima’s family instead of just taking the cops story of a homosexual encounter at face value.
3. The film alludes to this towards the end, but more time could have been spent on the fact that Mr. Pro-Cop Rudy was reluctant to increase officer salaries. In fact, one of the key recommendations of the afore-mentioned panel was to significantly increase the pay of beat cops to improve the quality of policing at street level. Giuliani mocked that recommendation.
4. We hear Anthony Baez’s mom at a rally but that’s about it. That was one of the first high-profile police brutality cases that signaled a different time under Giuliani.
5. His constant attacks on CUNY and increasing barriers to higher-ed access through decreased remediation, increased tuition and increased admissions testing. It’s difficult to contextualize the destructiveness of his workfare policies without paying attention to his concurrent attacks on one of the city’s most important routes out of poverty into the middle class.

All in all, it was a great film and a hell of a flashback. It’s amazing how much you forget. Please get out there and see it.

Broken Windows....

I just watched the trailer for Giuliani Time and its crazy being brought back to another era. Its been almost ten years since the late 90s, since Diallo, Louima, Burgess, the Brooklyn Museum and all the bull shit we were going through dealing with him. I'm glad the movie is coming out especially now, because its like everyone (i.e. the mainstream media) seems to have forgotten what an ass he was. Michael Atkinson in his review in the voice makes the point very clearly that his career was a shell of itself when the Towers were hit. He had just pulled out of the race for Senator because of his cancer, a race he was not guaranteed to win, he was in the middle of a marital scandal basically keeping two women in Gracie Mansion (or had his wife moved out and Judith Nathan moved in? I don't remember) and he was limping to a weak finish of his last term. He didn't really have a future in politics after the mayoralty and likely would have faded from public view. Morbidly, 9/11 gave him the comeback of a lifetime. People seem to remember "heroic mayor" to "heroic national leader" forget that late 90s period through 2001 was a very vulnerable period for him. The shit was catching up with him, the callousness, the bullying, the subtle and not so subtle racism, the infringments on free speech, the scandals... people were beginning to see through him.

Then the towers were hit.

Here's a rather uncharacteristically partisan and politically post to the Wagner List Serve I wrote today. I don't think anyone will be offended unless there are Giuliani-era staffers getting their MPA. Oh well. fuck it.

"Giuliani Time" is premiering this weekend at the Sunshine Landmark Cinemas.

I urge you all to please support and spread the word about this film. As Rudy Giuliani continues to travel nationally gather support and funds for a run at the White House its important that we are able to counter the revisionist post 9-11 history that places him as the lone heroic savior of New York City and remember that 90's era New York City, while an economic and cultural renaissance in many ways, was also a very painful time for many New Yorkers, particularly the poor and people of color.

Personally, it was difficult being led by a man that did not seem to waste an opportunity to show many, communities of color especially, that he did not care about us. The press has alarmingly painted him as a “socially liberal” republican because he is pro-choice and pro-gay rights. That’s great but our next president should be something more than not-George W. Bush.

Wayne Barrett in his bio and the film go into better details about his policies but living in New York City in the 90s I will personally NEVER forget or forgive:

∑ his callous disbanding of a special commission on police brutality (one that he assembled in the wake of the Abner Louima assault), promptly after being re-elected to a second term, mocking their recommendations.
∑ His attempt to discredit posthumously Patrick Dorismond, a victim of a botched police buy-and-bust operation, by releasing his SEALED juvenile record of
∑ His repeated attacks on the CUNY system and access to higher education for the poor and working class; eliminating remedial education at the 4-year colleges and instituting ludicrous CUNY assessment standardized tests to students already ADMIITTED to 4-year colleges.
∑ His suggestion that the shooting of Anthony Burgess, a kid holding a candy bar by a Federal agent, was somehow the kid’s fault for being out so late.
∑ His attacks on artist vendors outside the Met (the only good artists are apparently dead ones, and ones that don’t offend his good taste-re: Chris Ofili)

Watch the film, tell other people about it. I’ve been horrified to watch this man become a national hero simply for being the mayor during the most horrific event in this city’s history.

Here is a link to the film:
http://www.giulianitime.com/

And a review in the Voice:
http://villagevoice.com/film/0619,atkinson,73162,20.html

Countdown...

Community Equity and Wealth Building Final Exam-check
Capstone Client presentation-check
Capstone Final Report turned in-check
Capstone "Fair"-tonight
Organizational Development Final Paper and Presentation-tonight
Financial Statement Analysis-tomorrow

Cashing in on a lucrative master's degree-hahaha

"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.

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.

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."

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.

Really Bad Advice….

I went to this panel hosted by a non-profit aimed at providing “technical assistance (so you’re here to fix my air conditioner?)” and “capacity building (you build houses not capacity!)” to help organizations perform better and achieve their desired impact (POW!). God, I’m getting really sick of all this jargon.

This panel was on “Board Development” and strategically attracting people to be on your board based on your organizations strategic goals etc… common sense stuff but we got a few helpful tips and tricks. The most galling thing that happened at this event was a comment made by a woman from the Arts and Business Council, a non-profit that seeks to help arts organizations perform better by getting them to perform “more like businesses” she says. The way she said it was so full of self-importance and knowing confidence. I get irritated when people just assume that non-profits need to be more “business-like”-what the fuck does that mean? There are tons of shitty businesses that are poorly-organized, full of dead wood and that don’t generate shareholder or social value-just like many non-profits. They’re such broad categories its almost meaningless to say to be more “businesslike,” but it sounds good-we’ll make you more “businesslike”…what does this mean? Will you make us more Enron-like, Google-like or Apple-like? And when people say that shit, its usually some stereotyped notion of what they think a business is like and its usually just pivoting off a stereotyped of notion what they think a non-profit is not (efficient, ruthless, effective). It’s a nice word to throw around and it gets people really excited-yes, all we need to do to fix non-profits is get them to be more like “businesses.” The private sector has its own set of issues and in reality the two sectors can learn a lot from each other, not just in one direction.

So she raises her hand and mentions a study she has recently seen that and says that arts organizations really need to get better at fundraising. Her evidence? The study says that arts organizations make up this much of the non-profit sector (she puts her hand wide apart, nice and precise -real “business-like”) and then says that they only generate “this much” of the fundraising (she then narrows her hands for dramatic effect). Lets ignore the numerous logical leaps in her implication that this disparity must be the result of some fundraising failure and not other factors; what said next really took the cake: the reason that Universities and hospitals in particular raise much more than arts organizations must be because that they have give-or-get policies for their Boards and arts organizations often do not. This was like a flashback to my LSAT teaching days at Kaplan-it was such a leap in logic I almost broke my neck looking back at her in disbelief. Thankfully, the people in attendance didn’t let her get away with her it either and pointed out the numerous other possible explanations for the disparity and that hospitals and universities were very different (and typically LARGER) organizations with larger donor pools (past patients and alumni). She looked pretty sheepish under all the critiques.

I was pretty irritated and disturbed and it took me a good part of the day to figure out why. I mean, it was just a poorly thought out argument, was I so hateful and pompous that I was angry that she just said something dumb? Partially yes, but then I connected her comments to her assertion that arts orgs need to be more “business-like.” What really pissed me off was that there was this person who didn’t seem to have the critical thinking/analytical skills to identify obvious holes in a faulty claim working for an organization that claims to have the expertise to help non-profits be more “business-like.” How much damage is done to good people trying to do good work when they’re told by some ”expert” to implement some one-size-fits all policy based on incredibly poor interpretation of data (“you clearly need a give-or get policy-that’s why you’re underperforming…”)?

In the end, its people like her that makes me think that any moron can just throw some buzz words out there, make a business card and call themselves a “non-profit consultant,” its fucking scary.

Note to self: 7ARTS will never seek consulting from this group.

Fucking Asians...

People of color UNITE!

unh...

This was posted by one of my classmates today on the Wagner Listserv:

On Saturday night (March 18th) I was studying on the sixth floor lounge of Bobst, over Washington Square Park with my close friend _________. My phone rang on vibrate and I immediately answered (whispering) and told my father that I could not talk. As soon as I put the phone down an Asian man 35-40 years of age approached me from the back
and said to me quietly "I didn't know Black people were so stupid and ignorant to use a phone in the library."

Frustrating

I posted this on a Wagner listserv today after someone posted a recent article from the Times about schools slashing curriculum. I get frustrated when I see stuff like this because it shows how out-of-wack our incentive structure in education. Lets improve kids's reading ability by decreasing the amount of time in Science, Social Studies and Art. Because no reading happens in those subjects right? But if you're an administrator, teacher what-have-you you're responding to a very short-term measure and its going to affect your decision-making. It seems counter-intutive, but more time spent on drilling reading techniques and skills will yield only so much after awhile-what you really have to do is take that shit for a reading test-drive and content area texts give kids a chance to do that. Not to mention the joy you deprive students of when you limit those subjects.

Kim Marshall calls test-prep junk food, he also said something else interesting, that good readers simply have more "miles on the odomoter", they have the love of reading to put in those out-of-school hours and over the summer to make the jump in reading ability in those critical early years. A diversity of reading materials is more likely to allow that to happen.

I guess this is all an extension of that library grant I wrote last year-that a child should be immersed in literacy all throughout the school day but not just by the obvious and regressive strategy of extending reading block twice as much ("we'll be twice as effective with twice as many cooks in this small kitchen" unh...diminishing marginal returns...) unfortunately that seems to be the twisted logic that has taken hold. But by integrating literacy across diverse content areas and subject areas and reinforcing reading all day, a smart program is reinforcing literacy when you're reading primary texts in Social Studies, science reports and artist biographies, not just getting rid of them. I don't know, the research I did seemed to point to it all making so much sense, how a sound education can and should be an engaging one to be most effective.

Am I missing something?

"The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art"-NY Times

The damn shame in all of this is that there is a significant amount of research that demonstrates that student immersion in these content areas (Science, Social Studies and the Arts), asides from simply making school less dreary for kids (a worthy goal), forces them to engage challenging non-fiction texts. One result of this is that students acquire new vocabulary incidentally rather than through drilling. Vocabulary acquisition, especially at a young age (through 4th grade), has a huge impact on a child's development of reading skills but a child can only learn so many words in a year through memorization. After that, marginal gains in vocabulary acquisition come from repeated incidental contact with words in context, typically in content-rich texts, the type of texts kids don't often see in their literacy block whether its 90 or 120 minutes.

So for short-term gain on these instruments we focus on what Kim Marshall calls the "junk food" of test prep but what we're cutting are the resources and curriculum that, when strategically used, provide students enduring gains in literacy skills.

boogie down productions....

I started a new job in February...in the Bronx. One of two boroughs I know nothing about (Staten Island being the other). Its fascinating borough, I get to travel to different schools across the Bronx so today I walked smack through Arthur Ave, an old school Italian enclave smack in the middle of the Latino Bronx. It was so bizzare, this serene calm little Italian neighborhood of restaurants, cafes and tree-lined streets smack in the middle of the Bronx. I hear the food is good-I just walked around though and took some pics.














































Two things I find facsinating about the Bronx is that its so hilly (maybe because they're on the mainland and aren't an island) and the architecture throughout the borough. Some of the row houses and old buildings are gorgeous.

Powerful

I heard this today on a podcast and I almost cried:

So for me to say look how horrible what they did to my son certainly I'm entitled to revenge well there are people who can say the same thing because there are people over there in Iraq who lost their sons and daughters in that prison and there are a 100,000 people in Iraq dead and think of all the families there that think they're entitled to revenge.

I don't think revenge is justified under any circumstances.

Revenge is an endless cycle and it has to stop somewhere and it stops with me.

-Michael Berg, father of Nick Berg, the US contractor beheaded on video in Iraq

The Universal Language of Sports

Japan is sending PlayStations...

Its been a minute since I posted for those of you religiously checking.

Anyone watching the WBC notice how racialized the commentary has been? I mean, its one thing to talk about how "disciplined" and "reserved" the Japanese team is but I think Joe Morgan took the cake last night when he said that the Japanese hitting approach was a direct result of their physical stature (oh those cute little yellow men). And Jayson Stark wrote that:

"The Japanese, on the other hand, often play the game like the men of science they are."

And that the Cubans "play baseball with a flair that separates them from every other country in the world" because of their African roots.

Friday January 20, Brooklyn Bound Q

Waiting is over. over.

They finally posted the Echoing Green semi-finalists. I did not make the cut to even submit a full proposal this time.

But in a great way to create some some suspense for knuckleheads like me they also posted on their website:

Due to the Martin Luther King Holiday, we were not able to get in touch with our subject matter experts to review a few last minute questions on a handful of applications. Therefore, we are publishing the initial list of Phase 2 applicants today and based on our reader input on our outstanding questions, we may invite a few more projects to submit Phase 2 applications no later than Tuesday, January 17th.

I'm not going to kid myself and try and pretend that my 7ARTS is so out there and abstract that they're just waiting to hear from some last-minute experts to decide if I'm going to be invited to the second round or not. My shit is not rocket science. I'm not in.

I knew getting the fellowship was a stretch but damn, I thought I'd at least get invited to the second round like I did two years ago pre-wagner, pre-almost two years of development experience, pre-edna mcconnell clark foundation. I actually thought the application I submitted was a lot better than the touchy-feely gobbledy-gook one I wrote two years ago.

I feel like I trained for a marathon like a maniac for a year and a half only to run a slower time than when I had as a fat out-of-shape fuck.

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Hugo Chavez is offering low cost oil to Native American tribes in Maine for heating use. The Bush Administration called Chavez’s deal an attempt to “embarrass” America. What’s embarrassing is the world’s richest nation not being able or rather willing to feed/clothe/heat/educate its population properly.

A weird analogy but it kind of reminds of this club/lounge I was at a few years ago. There was this chick who was hammered, completely toast. She was trying to dance and at one point fell down, straight pratfall. Her homegirls helped her up but then for whatever reason left her on her own. So she kept dancing (really sloppily) and this big, kind of oily looking dude, crept up on her seeing an opportunity to get his freak on with a pretty wasted and compliant (if not really capable of standing on her own) chick. So her gets up behind her and is “dancing” with her and putting his hands all kinds of places that this chick is really to drunk to care to protest. It was fucking gross. It was probably the only action that dude was going to get that night or had gotten in a minute. One of the bouncers was looking at him really disdainfully shaking his head. The dude, feeling the bouncer's disapproving stare looked back at him, upset because he was messing up his game, ”Yo, why are you looking at me like that? You’re making me look bad.”

The bouncer shoots right back completely deadpan:

“That’s because you DO look bad.”

Today's wow can you believe this?

Just got my new video ipod and I love though I haven’t downloaded any video yet. I didn’t think I would but having a big phat gorgeous color screen is really tempting. Damn those marketing geniuses at Apple.

One thing I’m getting into is podcasting which is great because I never listen to the radio but would like to keep up with some shows and stations that I haven’t listened to since I had hours in a studio to kill. I found the Democracy Now! Podcast on itunes which is awesome, I haven’t listend to the show in years maybe 4-5 so its great to have it on my commute. Friday’s Democracy Now opened with coverage of Ariel Sharon’s massive stroke and some commentary from Pat Robertson:

Ariel Sharon, who is again a very likeable person, a delightful person to be with, I’ve prayed with him personally. But here he’s at the point of death. He was dividing God’s Land. I would say woe unto any Prime Minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the E.U., the United Nations, or the United States of America. God says, “this land belongs to me, you better leave it alone.”

-Pat Robertson

Right after that Amy Goodman (with a straight face I presume, God bless her) then says:

The Guardian of London reported Wednesday that Robertson is heading a consortium in talks with the Israeli government over building a sprawling a biblical theme park by the Sea of Galilee.

On the real, you CANNOT make this shit up. Don’t mess with God’s land. Unless its a Christ-centered theme park.

Main Street-Bound 7 Train, 12:30pm January 2nd 2006

More random shit

Looking for a job sucks.

I'm really bad at proof reading my own shit. But pretty good at bullshitting about myself. So hopefully I will be employed and Thomas won't have to kill me for rent money.

*************

The Knicks one a HUUUUUGE game. It was great, I have some hope for this team. Nate Robinson threw some nice passes driving to the basket, David Lee is a rebound machine, Eddy Curry pulled some nice offensive rebounds (but had some trouble finishing once he had them) and Starbury hit some big shots in the last overtime period. Jamal Crawford seems to get flustered if he has to take the last shot, but he looked good too. I just watched the overtimes but closing out a game like this and not blowing it was huge, a great learning experience, especially for the rookies. Might the Knicks actually have a future? Until we trade them all for Ron Artest or Ricky Davis and/or a bag of magic beans and/or Scott Layden.

I was watching classic ESPN and a Knicks/Magic game from Shaq's rookie year and it made me so sad watching the mid 90s Knicks. I know everyone outside NY hated them but we loved them. It was a great era.

Happy New Year

For those of you into Salsa music I have been listening to Eddie Palmieri's Ajiaco Caliente OBSESSIVELY over an over. The song is beautiful, the interplay of the horns and the piano. When I listen to the piano I can imagine his virtuosity, the push and pull, its like he plays with my emotions...then the horns and the vocals come back in for a glorious finish. Get this song and listen to it and just close your eyes. Its got kind of slow start but if you listen closely and carefully its incredible, I can imagine him manipulating the keys on the piano so skilfully. Kind of makes me think of what it must have been like to watch Thelonius Monk on the piano.

I played "truth" with Rosalie yesterday and it was the first time I think I'd played since 8th grade and the first time playing sans the "Dare" component. One of her questions (she asked good ones, I asked adolescent stupid ones like "duh where's the wildest place you've ever hooked up?")

Anyway she asked me my best and worst of 05 of an arbitrary time frame especially because my years tend to fall along the academic one having been in school or working at a school or both for the last four years (five counting Brooklyn Museum education) but January to January Best and Worst of 05.

Best (no order)
Good times with good friends in a manner that is only going to decline as people grow up settle down (though I will be the last I guarantee it). I have always been blessed with good friends but the strength and support of my closeset friends this last year has been a treasure. I never fail to stop and pinch myself and ask myself why good people care/believe in/support me.

Growing phenomenally at Wagner and learning and networking in ways I never thought I'd be able to. Its what Im payin those fuckers for.

Making a serious leap as a dancer (especially last summer-I feel like I am taking the next step into really getting it as expression and not just doing steps and moves, I feel like I own my dancing more than ever before)

A birthday party that provided at least year's worth of comedy and I'm still learning shit about.

One completely responsibility-free, chill-ass, summer an absurdly high-paying internship without the pressures of a real job.

West Coast and NY Salsa Congresses...blaze....

Fuck that, I was on TV hahaha.

Worst
Mad self doubt, too much knowledge, too much learning. I reminisce about the bull-headed ignorance and passion I had when Kwah and I sat down and started 7ARTS because we wanted to some art with teens because it had helped us so much and that was it. Now I'm immersed in all this management, program evaluation strategic theory and I'm trying not to let it paralyze me but help me. But definitely very worst in 05 was learning too much and how scary it can be.

Wondering what the hell I was doing with mysef and whether my whole premise for attending Wagner was just stupid and I should have gone and got my Art Education degree and that my whole think big shit was just stupidity. Typical self-doubt graduation's approaching shit.

Sleeping on a bed of knives, hiding liquor and sending cryptic text messages to Thomas in one of the most bizzare and fucked up nights of my life. (Manu I love you man).

Nearly hitting Acadmic Probation at Wagner. (Which I'm not in the clear yet).


Happy New Year y'all