Last Days of a Great City

Text Messages From Gotham

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	Hello, Auntie. I’m in Times Square.  I like it here. Here’s what I see: A black man with earphones, in his late thirties, holds up an arm and shouts, “There is no word, fool!” A middle-aged white woman talks into her cell phone. “If you don't know,” she hisses, “just say you don’t know.”
I walk past the My Way Nails and Spa where a bearded man is getting a pedicure. A boombox in the doorway blares the latest Hip-Hop anthem.
A old couple wanders past. They’re plugged into separate iPods. Each has a different soundtrack for the moment they share on Gotham’s streets. I begin to wonder how people manage to meet and fall in love in this confusion.	A woman sitting at a restaurant booth waves a sheaf of yellow papers covered with rows of numbers. She lays them down and writes more numbers, dating each one as she does. You can tell she’s as crazy as a jay.
There’s a surfeit of consciousness in Times Square. One consciousness begins to push against another. People cope by transferring some of it into machines and other objects. As I write this, a woman in a trench coat and a headscarf looks up and talks to one of the buildings.

Doesn't Pay to Sit in the Front Pew

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News item:  The pastor of a Mount Airy, NC church accused of pulling out a gun as part of his sermon is free on bond after being charged with possession of a firearm. He was using the gun as an illustration.

Preacher:  Now lissen up, sinners!  [He fires two rounds from a pistol.]  You varmints know that in Matthew 26 verse 52 the Good Book tells us that he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.  But 'taint say nuthin' 'bout guns, do it?  No it don't.  [Fires two more rounds.]  What's that ma'am?  Looks like nuthin' but a flesh wound to me.  Stick 'round and I'll do ya a healin' service after the sermon.

Rachel's Guide to Commenting on Blog Posts

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No. of Martinis	Commenting Strategy/Tactics
1	Read the post carefully. Try to get a feel for the values, beliefs, and desires of the author. Assume the best about the author: he, like you, is trying to find his way in the world. Leave a comment that respects his intentions but extends the discussion in some interesting way.
2	Skim the post. Wonder why the author is indulging himself by taking so long to get to his main point. Entertain the suspicion that if you met him face to face, it wouldn’t be a completely pleasant experience. Leave a comment that gives the author a snap of the towel on his partially exposed conceptual buttocks.
3	Try to hold one or two key words from the author’s post in your quickly dissolving consciousness. Does he care? Does the fucker really care what you say about his barely comprehensible screed? You don’t, why should he? The stupid fucker is quoting fucking Husserl for chrissakes. Fuck him. Write something that subverts the author’s intended meaning. Laugh out loud at your funny comment and pour yourself another drink.
4	Ignore the post completely. Try to focus on the stupid shithead thing you’re writing. What is it? You don’t even know, you stupid fuck. Wha wha wha. b b b …
5

Where Reality is Enhanced by Exquisite Amenities

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“It’s a nice room, James, but … it’s filled with water.”

The Post-Ironic Swimsuit Special

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The February 2006 issue of Out Magazine seeks perfection in the malformed and gravitas in the patently silly.  Although the editors playfully dubbed it the “Swimsuit Special,” they could just as accurately have described it as a transformative hermeneutics applied to the nature of contradiction.

A Diesel ad (the brand that brings you “Successful Living”) pictures the apotheosis of our militarist culture, when the earth and everything on it is camouflaged for War.  At this key moment in our history—now, one assumes—we can most effectively counter the ravages of the military-industrial-academic complex by purchasing knit shirts and distressed jeans.  Missiles are peacekeepers.  Arbeit macht frei.

An ad from Abreva asserts that “Nobody looks HOT in a cold sore.”  But the model who appears in the ad would be attractive even if half his body were covered with lesions, leading one to conclude that the ad is a kind of koan whose meaning is inaccessible to rational understanding, a post-postmodern deconstruction of the HOT/not-HOT binary that moves the reader to abandon whatever good judgment is left to him.  Not likely?  You’re reading this screed, aren’t you?

Finally, in an article on his new line of Hot Nude Yoga DVDs, Aaron Star declares that “[g]ay men—or men in general—need to celebrate the erect penis.  It is a point of power for one’s masculinity.”  Star’s neo-phallogocentric statement once again privileges the male signified even though, as Aristophanes made clear over 24 centuries ago, the phallus is a silly structure, made even sillier when it’s dressed up with hats and small sweaters.

God Hates Fag Wars

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The House of Representatives approved a Republican-sponsored resolution today defining the Iraq War as between a man and a woman.

Congressmen speaking in favor of the resolution argued that it would help preserve the sanctity of killing people.

I’m glad they got this off their chests before the fall elections.

_____

Image source: bartcop.com

Crime Does Not Pay ... As Well As Politics

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CEO:  Leaving this lavish, privately-funded golf junket so soon, Senator?

Senator:  Yes, I need to get back to Washington to address an important national security issue.

The New Miscegenation

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On the eve of Senate debate on an amendment to ban gay marriage, I adapt the verse appearing on a racist postcard of the 1900s …

Not Particular

I know you’re not particular to a fault
Though I’m not sure you’ll never be sued for assault
You’re so fond of sex that even a mensch
Attracts your gross fancy despite his man-stench