Monday, September 24, 2001
Chinatown Friday night the cops’ interest in passers through the Canal Street boundary line cooled a little. Still we had trouble getting our speakers in for the panel discussion we were doing on Walker Street — they’d been at a peace vigil at Times Square with some 4,000 other people, and had been herded into […]
Wednesday, September 5, 2001
Gareth leaves the house maybe twice a week he has taken to role playing the sixteen-sided dice are all over the table I say this is called Depression, my friend, he says No it’s not I can show you the clinical definition of depression (weaponry: DSM IV).
Sunday, September 2, 2001
I saw a sign advertising Mike Gioia for City Council today as Roger and I and James were heading out into Queens. “How do you like Green for Mayor?” I asked Roger. Roger figures Green as a center-right liberal, and says Ferrer is just a politician with his finger in the wind. Roger’s not up […]
Saturday, September 1, 2001
Scene: stoplight on South Lake in Pasadena. I pull up alongside two young guys in an SUV. They start making little dog-whistles, in the way some guys do just to get you to turn and look at them. I hate that tactic. I shake my head slowly. They get frustrated. “Yes,” the one on my […]
See, we need to get you familiar with the corporeal being of bougainvillea. I don’t know, maybe you’ve encountered it as a houseplant — that’s not what bougainvillea is all about. Bougainvillea, left to its own devices, is a force to be wrangled with. It’s the kudzu of the Southwest. It has thorny vines which […]
As you can see, I’m redoing the DSWJ at the moment. Believe me, it’s not going to look like this for long. The remodel is intended to make a distinction between the mindless link propagation and shorter observations I sometimes do — those will now go in a separate column from the main stuff, either […]
Thursday, August 23, 2001
James waits until after “Lisa Picard is ‘Famous’” to tell me that in the ticket line, he was standing behind Wallace Shawn. Wallace Shawn! I say. Do you know who his father was?! and am instantly smitten with migraine-force deja vu from the movie. I have nothing to say to Wallace Shawn. What surprised me […]
Browsing the Paper Tiger Television (they’re an activist video collective) link list, I found the Termite Television Collective’s Life Story project, in which people have five minutes to tell their life story to the videographer. Onward and upward with alternative TV!
Wednesday, August 1, 2001
The workshop counselors from the 2001 sessions spent two nights together in a retreat in the Virginia “mountains” after everything had wound down. On our last night together, after the dishes had been cleared, our director spurred us into a discussion along the theme of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About […]
Leanne and I had an unconscionably heavy bag of garbage to lug out to the dumpster. We ended up carrying it on a stretcher made of a baby-blue towel. It’s like a dead elephant, Leanne said, wrestling it into the dumpster’s mouth. heh heh heh with no apologies whatsoever to Papa Hemingway Why can’t you […]