Picture Monday: Top Secret Attack Band in Prospect Park

IMG_0185, originally uploaded by Brooklyn Bridge.

A great day in Brooklyn

New House Passover reunion 2008

When I first arrived in New York, I sublet a room the size of a twin bed in a fifth-floor walkup tenement flat just south of Washington Square Park. I hated it, could touch both walls with my fingers at once, but like much else in my life at the time, I was too complacent to do anything about it. In my seven years living there, I grew convinced through observation that if you split MacDougal Street down the middle, there would be rings and rings of the same kind of tacky decadence going back two hundred years. When Edgar Allen Poe did his time on West 3rd St., he must have been slumming, pounding his head against his garret wall at all of the drunks and out-of-towners, clogging up the sidewalk and going: “Wither thou a good plate of spaghetti?” Dylan and the Beats were easier to picture, cheap bastards trawling MacDougal Street for a fast drunk in tack city.

Finally, I let myself be kicked out of that apartment and landed in the least likely place: a collective house in Brooklyn. A commune. And there was subsumed in the topsy-turvy feeling of sharing intimacies you would not share with a lover, four falling down floors of a crumbling brownstone, six grown-ups, one child, no locks, poor boundaries. We played this game of trying to recognize the footsteps of people coming down the stairs. I ran. They told me I always ran.

Even accepting the sacrifices that were required to live in that place, when we were forced to wear heavy coats while playing poker huddled around the kitchen table in the dead of winter, plumes of hot breath visible in the air, there was this tangible sense of something meaningful that assuaged the solitary self that I left behind me.

I remember one night early on during my stay there, Mars orbiting close, all of us clamored to the roof. Among five other bodies strewn across the expanse of black pitch and looking for the red planet, closer now than it had ever been in 60,000 years, I was floating down to earth, finally coming to rest.

I've moved on but every year go back for Passover, a messy/delicious improvised celebration with this family that I found there, these people who have become my family.

How is this house different from all other houses? I don't know how to put it into words exactly. You'd have to see it for yourself.

When I smile, people apologize.

Found this in my files, an abbreviated take on the MMPI I found on the interwebs, and it is a classic. Whoever wrote it, you are a genius.

Please indicate TRUE or FALSE next to each of the following statements:
1. [ True False] When I was younger, I used to tease vegetables.
2. [ True False] Sometimes I am unable to prevent clean thoughts from entering my mind.
3. [ True False] The sight of blood no longer excites me.
4. [ True False] I think beavers work too hard.
5. [ True False] It is important to wash your hands before washing your hands.
6. [ True False] Recently I have been getting shorter.
7. [ True False] When I walk quickly, I can feel my legs moving.
8. [ True False] When I was a child, I was an imaginary playmate.
9. [ True False] I believe I smell as good as most people.
10. [ True False] As a child, I used to wet the ceiling.
11. [ True False] When I grow up I want to be a child.
12. [ True False] Sometimes I feel that things are real.
13. [ True False] I have many enemies who secretly love me.
14. [ True False] I think I would like the work of a robot.
15. [ True False] As a youngster, I was suspended from school for attending.
16. [ True False] It makes me furious to see an innocent man escape the chair.
17. [ True False] I think I would like the work of a hummingbird.
18. [ True False] My tongue has been depressed.
19. [ True False] It makes me angry to have people bury me.
20. [ True False] People tell me one thing one day and out the other.
21. [ True False] I am easily awakened by the firing of cannons.
22. [ True False] I can wear my shirts as pants.
23. [ True False] I feel as much like I did yesterday as I do today.
24. [ True False] I always lick the fronts of postage stamps.
25. [ True False] When I smile, people apologize.
26. [ True False] It is hard for me to say the right thing when I find myself in a room full of mice.
27. [ True False] I never liked room temperature.
28. [ True False] I line my pockets with hot cheese.
29. [ True False] I can smell my nose hairs.
30. [ True False] My dog is someone else's best friend.
31. [ True False] Walls impede my progress.
32. [ True False] My toes are numbered.
33. [ True False] My best friend is a social worker.
34. [ True False] No napkin is sanitary enough for me.
35. [ True False] I've lost all sensation in my shirt.
36. [ True False] It takes a lot of argument to convince most people that they are lying.
37. [ True False] I try to steal other people's thoughts and ideas when they are not looking.
38. [ True False] I was not very strict with my parents.
39. [ True False] My sex life is satisfactory, except when I am with another person.
40. [ True False] I get nervous when I handle $100,000 bills.
41. [ True False] Most of the time I don't like to read newspaper articles about nuclear accidents nearby.
42. [ True False] I often dream of Kate Smith.
43. [ True False] I like to put chameleons on plaid cloth.
44. [ True False] I am liked by most people unless they know me.
45. [ True False] I believe I am following others.
46. [ True False] I don't like any of my loved ones.
47. [ True False] I salivate at the sight of mittens.
48. [ True False] I'd rather go to work than sit outside.
49. [ True False] As an infant, I had very few hobbies.
50. [ True False] Some people look at me.
51. [ True False] I often use the word "feh".
52. [ True False] Sometimes I steal objects like medicine balls and aviaries.
53. [ True False] I become homicidal when people try to reason with me.
54. [ True False] I never seem to finish whatever I

Sketch comedy: who do you love?

"Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" featuring Phil Hartman

Yesterday, I was talking to someone about our differing tastes in sketch comedy. I was really influenced from a very early age by Saturday Night Live of the late 80’s-early 90s Carvey-Myers-Lovitz-Farley-Sandler era (Wayne 's World, Church Lady, living in a van down by the river, etc.), and I also really loved the random absurdity of MTV’s the State.

"Porcupine Racetrack" by the State

He ix-nays my formative influences by being a rabid fan of Mr. Show, though he shares my ambivalence about the Kids in the Hall. Also, we agree that dorks have drowned out the contribution that Monty Python has made to the canon. I’m just like, whether you like Mad TV, Chapelle’s Show, SNL or UCB, can’t we all just get along? So I was glad to see that Nerve has posted their list of the 50 greatest sketches of all time. Many of these skew towards the ‘70s, but it makes for a great look-back at the defining moments in comedy history.

Picture Monday: It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry

Why men love birches

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

--From Birches by Robert Frost

Review Thursday: Into the Wild, book and film

You're either the type of person who comes alive in the presence of others, or else you need to get away from people in order really feel yourself. I mention this because I think your identification with one role or the other will probably determine much of they way you feel about Into the Wild, either the Jon Krakauer book or the Sean Penn film.

Watching the DVD the other day reminded me how engrossing I found this story when I first read the book. The hero of the nonfiction story, Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, really calls into question the prevailing attitude that solitude inevitably means loneliness. Conjuring an archetype honed by everyone from Henry David Thoreau to cranky naturalist and Desert Solitaire author Edward Abbey, the Krakauer book grapples deeply with a forbidding yet fascinating topic: being alone.

What would it feel like to just check out of society? Burn all your money? Spend day upon day by yourself, out in the wild? I don’t know many people who could embrace such deep solitude, so, by virtue of that accomplishment alone, I’m fascinated by McCandless.

At the same time, I know that the book and movie are both guilty of romanticizing this character. They want him to be one-of-a-kind, when certainly there are things about McCandless that are of a kind: there’s something about the guy that suggests the sort of self-righteous, fanatical hippie that probably everyone knew in college (exhibit A: when he gives himself the dopey moniker Alexander Supertramp). The hubris of a young twentysomething man--also, of a kind. The Penn film, particularly, lets McCandless of the hook for not having developed the skills to survive in the Alaskan wilderness.

Still, I was surprised how much the film was able to evoke fundamentally internal states. In both the book and the film, there is something really haunting about McCandless’s demise, when it’s certain that McCandless wasn’t feeling the life-affirming joy of self-reliance, but instead desolation…and loneliness.

How easy it is to slip between solitude and loneliness is certainly a worthy subject, and one that the book is able to cover much better than the film. But both portray a fascinating story that I think is worthy of consideration.