All American Party Crashers

The recent revelations that an uninvited couple managed to attend a state dinner and meet President and Mrs. Obama has added fuel to the media frenzy of the scandal-du-jour. Michaele and Tareq Salahi probably did not know the enormity of the event their crashing the state dinner would become.

In fact, it may turn out that the Salahis thought they were invited, at least to the meet and greet with the President and First Lady. The New York Times article notes that they appear to be friends with a high-ranking Indian diplomat who was invited to the dinner.

Let’s put this in perspective though: the couple went through all the same security checkpoints that anyone else visiting the White House would have to go through (almost anyone, I doubt the Prime Minister of India and his wife had to endure a magnetometer wand). They were never a danger to the President and First Lady.

So far as we know, these people are U.S. citizens in good standing. Why shouldn’t they have a chance to visit the White House? Their tax dollars pay for it as much as yours or mine do. They didn’t even get to stay for dinner, which our tax dollars pay for as well.

It is really a scandal that the President had to meet some of the great unwashed who were not on the guest list—though in this instance the “great unwashed” are a couple of wealthy polo enthusiasts? Not really.

We certainly can’t have anyone who wants to arrive when important affairs of state are being conducted. And while state dinners at the White House are considered important affairs, they are little more than expensive pageants. The party crashers are the least of the Obama administration’s diplomatic gaffes, and the Secret Service is taking the fall for it.

One element that interested me is that if you look the part, you can convince people that you belong. Recently in New York, a suspect awaiting trial in a Manhattan courthouse escaped because officers mistook him for a lawyer: he was dressed in a suit for trial. He was recaptured soon after. Letting a criminal go is a scandal, letting taxpayers meet the President isn’t really.

Yankees to City: Screw You

Last night I found myself at Hell’s Kitchen’s outstanding Holland Bar speaking to three women from South Boston. With courage and confidence built over several hours of steady drinking, I began discussing baseball with them, which is a dangerous proposition.

But what I mentioned to the women from Boston was that even though I hate the Red Sox with every fiber of my being, I will give credit where credit is due. Boston would not stand for Fenway Park being torn down and replace by a shopping mall-style monstrosity at taxpayer expense. Well, OK, maybe they would, but they haven’t and we (Yankee fans) have.

I have been a New York Yankee fan all of my life. I recently got to see some of the recent Yankee ticker tape parade from my office building window. It was good to see, and when the Yankees are world champions, it means that at least something is right with the world. But the Yankees have screwed New York City seven ways from Sunday, and Yankee fans are content to take it.

The Yankees are still planning on tearing down the real Yankee Stadium, a historically significant and legendary building. The team built a stadium with thousands of fewer seats for fans and three times the number of luxury boxes. Tickets close to home plate were lowered to $1,500 from $2,500 during the regular season. What’s worse, is they did it with millions of our tax dollars and left a stream of broken promises in their wake.

The Yankees were supposed to replace the public park land that they got permission to build on before the new stadium opened. The inaugural season in the new stadium is over, and the park land has yet to be fully restored. Bronx residents are still waiting for their parks.

So to my Boston Red Sox fan friends old and new, I will continue to hate your team’s rotten guts, but I tip my hat to you for being able to go see them in a real stadium.

The Vantastic Blue Betty, Part II

Jon P (aka The Beast) and I found ourselves the proud new owners of a large van and were taking it back to New York City so our band would be independently mobile for the first time in its five-year life. A few minutes into our trip, the van died at a stop light.

I telephoned our other band mates. “The good news is we got the van,” I said. “The bad news is we just broke down.”

We managed to push the van to the side of the road. Jon popped the hood and checked the oil. It looked to have enough oil in it. Luckily, there was a gas station right across the street. We bought some motor oil as well as some soda and water and came back to our ailing vehicle.

After putting in some motor oil, we were able to start it again—great nervous success! We managed to drive it across the street to the gas station. We filled up one of the tanks with gas and stocked up on motor oil and bottled water. After saying a prayer to no one in particular that even avowed atheists make at times like these, I turned the key in the ignition and … the van started and was up and running again. It felt a bit weak but it was running, and we were back on the road. I was confident enough to take the van onto the Long Island Expressway and even pass a few slower cars.

We had to retrieve our good friend and former drummer, Joey Bones, from Port Jefferson, which was on our way back to the city. After many tense miles of highway driving, it was time for an even more tense drive through summer Friday Long Island traffic to get Joe from the Port Jefferson Long Island Railroad station, where he was waiting for us.

What had seemed like a quick turn off the highway in planning this day became a hellish ordeal of fearful driving. The van lumbered along on roads not meant for the amount of traffic it now saw regularly in the overdeveloped Long Island suburbs. I had to accelerate rapidly enough not to stall but not so much that I couldn’t’ stop if I needed to. Every stop light and potential backed up lane meant possible automobile death and hours stuck on Long Island, which would mean missing our band’s show that evening.

This is no way to drive. It’s doable, but it sucks. We lamented aloud our plight and spoke of our dream that someday the van would have “full stopping capability.” We envied all the other cars on the road that had full stopping capability – meaning they could bring their cars to a complete stop without having them die mid-stop.

At the Port Jefferson LIRR train station, commuters’ cars were crowding to pick up loved ones back early from their jobs in the city. Joey Bones got in the van and sat on the floor behind the driver’s and passenger’s seats. We exchanged greetings as I tried to maneuver out of the full parking lot without stalling. I failed. As I attempted to restart the van, a snotty commuter in a fancy car with full stopping capability honked at me. I scrambled for the horn and honked back.

We got rolling again and headed back to the highway. It was hot and the van has no air conditioning. This was not a problem when cruising on the highway and the wind can circulate through the multi-windowed van nicely, but while chugging along slowly or stopped in traffic, the van became a big box of stale heat. That it sat around gathering dust for several months did not help its cause either.

On the highway again, we realized we were already running out of gas and turned off in search of a gas station. Somewhere on Long Island, we drove along a road expecting that any minute we would come across a place to buy gas. It was another long, tough slog.

At one point, I wound up in a turning lane that I could not get out of in time and had to make a right turn down a quiet, residential street lined with well-groomed lawns and expensive-looking houses. In attempting a three-point turn to go back the way we came, the van stalled in the brick driveway of a very nice home. There was a lawn jockey statue holding a lantern in this driveway, which no doubt belonged to someone who could afford more than one car with full stopping capability and would probably appreciate our van on their property none too much. A few minutes and several attempts to start the van later, we were still sitting there. Each attempt brought a weaker response from its burdened engine.

We discovered through this part of the experience that putting the van in reverse causes it to stall quicker. After a few minutes, I tried to restart the engine again and voila! I realized that the driveway we were stuck in was a circular one, and we powered around it and onward.

After much driving, we found a service station with self-service pumps, but these pumps were attended to by two very pushy and meddlesome attendants, who kept asking us questions and offering to do everything we would normally do ourselves. It got very frustrating. Joey managed to spill gas on the van and ground and had to cut part of the plastic gas cap away with a knife when it got stuck in the handle of the gas pump. I did my best to clean the van’s dirty and dusty windshield while filling up two tanks and fending off the pushy station attendants.

Once we were gassed up though, the van went on a glorious run without stalling that lasted us all the way to Brooklyn.

By this point, the troubles of our journey had created a good camaraderie among us three. The improved performance of the van helped this, and somehow, in the course of our conversation, we named the van Blue Betty.

I believe it came up when we tried to sing a song about the van, to the tune of the folk song ‘Black Betty,’ first made popular by Lead Belly.

Blue Betty
Bam-a-lam
Blue Betty is a van
Bam-a-lam
We have to take her to the shop
Bam-a-lam
Cause she loves to stop
Bam-a-lam

We found our way to Queens and to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. We made it to our rehearsal space and to the show.

After the show, which ended very late (about 3 a.m. or later), we loaded things up and began the long slog home. Blue Betty would sit in my neighborhood until I could bring her to Westchester on Sunday. We had a show no Long Island the next day, and were planning on taking the train.

I dropped people home along the way; everyone was in a good mood, having saturated their evening with punk rock and copious amounts of drink. I remained sober and tired, bleary-eyed and desirous of sleep.

As I was about to go to bed, I got a text message from The Beast at exactly 4:20 a.m. “Betty’s ready,” read the message. “Let’s take her back to Long Island tomorrow.”

Inspired by this, I went to my kitchen and retrieved a beer from the refrigerator and drank it in the quiet solitude of my living room.

The Crazed Beauty That Is New York City

Today could have been a lazy Sunday, but my life often refuses to let me be lazy. Without giving much thought other than I wanted a way to guarantee I would be awake and would do things today beyond sit on my couch, I agreed to meet people at 9 a.m. this morning in Chelsea to help renovate the location of a future Krav Maga school. It’s tough enough for me to get to work by 9 a.m. on a weekday, but I was determined to get there on time and I actually got there a few minutes early.

From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. I helped with renovations. I bundled cardboard, painted window frames with primer, hauled pipes and even a few radiators and finished scraping paint from some stubborn metal.

That ended, I walked from 25^th St. to 42^nd St. to see if Inglorious Basterds was playing at a reasonable time. On my way, a man outside the New York Times building handed me a pamphlet that informed me the world would end on Oct. 21, 2011. That’s good information to have, I think. I know it’s popular now to believe that the world is going to end sometime in 2012, but those predictions are based on the Mayan calendar. The pamphlet I received was based on the Christian calendar, and also predicted that the rapture would happen May 21, 2011. So if true, we’ll have five months without Christian fundamentalists before the world ends. That’s good news.

I sat at a table in a pedestrian mall area of Times Square to eat a snack while I waited for the movie to start. A guy was interviewing people with a video camera to make a funny video for his brother’s wedding. Two attractive young women were approaching people to interview for a local TV news show also.

While I was heading to the theater, I first passed by photographers snapping photos of a married couple in Times Square. Professional photographers were snapping away furiously, but then tourists got into the act as well. I walked around the mess and headed towards 8^th Ave.

Outside a hotel on 8^th Ave., people were rushing to get autographs of what appeared to be professional athletes of some kind, based on the glimpses of the photos they were signing. The athletes were dressed in expensive-looking suits that you could tell they loathed wearing, and they were getting into a large chartered bus. An earnest autograph seeker told me that these were the Anaheim Ducks, who were in town to play the New York Rangers. I don’t know why they needed a chartered bus—you would think professional athletes could handle the nine blocks from 43^rd St. to Madison Square Garden on 34^th Street, but I guess not (indeed their sloth proved revealing, as they fell to the Rangers, 3-0).

Also, I walked through a large street festival that was taking place on 8^th Ave. between 42^nd. St. and 59^th St. These street festivals in New York are pretty much all the same now. There are lots of food stands, t-shirt stands, sunglasses stands, and other stuff that you can get just about anywhere any time already.

Inglorious Basterds is an excellent film. When it was over, I decided to head to Barnes & Noble near Lincoln Center to shop for books. Near Lincoln Center, I came across the closing night of the New York Film Festival. A red carpet and a small throng of fans and photographers and a small but sizable throng of security awaited the arrival of Penelope Cruz, whose new film was to be shown there at the festival.

Just another slow Sunday in New York City.