The second half of August is when a lot of things slow down in New York. Working in the financial district, the city can seem like a ghost town this time of year. Absent is the usually high-octane bustle and constant presence of crowds that characterizes daily life in the city for most of the year.
One friend remarked that Labor Day weekend is the best weekend to enjoy New York. Everything is still open but lots of people are out of town, so everything is less crowded and therefore more enjoyable.
I thought I was going to get out of the city more often this summer. Getting out of New York is very necessary to preserve your sanity, especially during the summer. I managed to get out of town a few times this summer, but not as often as I would have liked.
New York City is one of the worst places for it to be hot. The concrete and asphalt absorb and reflect the heat. Tall buildings trap car exhaust and other pollution, and there are millions of other people around contributing to the stifling misery.
And sadly, New York is in the midst of another heat wave. I don’t know what measure meteorologists use to declare a heat wave, but for me it’s two consecutive days where the temperature reaches or exceeds 86°F. The hot weather is not my friend.
If you enjoy sweat pouring down every part of your body while you share a concrete oven with 8 million of your closest friends, then New York City in the summer is for you.
Growing up in New York, SCREW magazine publisher Al Goldstein came to represent pornography, vulgarity and New York City itself. I recently finished reading his book ‘I, Goldstein, My SCREWed Life’ and I highly recommend it.
Goldstein presented himself as a stereotypical New Yorker. He was loud, boisterous and crude. He was an overweight, cigar-smoking slob who was infamous for launching tirades against airlines, health clubs, ex-wives and former employees, among others. He was feted by Howard Stern and fellated by Seka. His TV show, “Midnight Blue,” spurred millions of copycats and helped pave the way for porn’s permanent place on cable television.
One of the things I remember about him best from those days was his sterling defense of pornography. “Sex is a positive, happy thing,” I remember him saying. “What’s wrong with looking at pictures of vaginas in my newspaper?” Beyond the obvious First Amendment argument, Goldstein’s argument in favor of consuming porn was the best one. Sex is a natural thing, so why be ashamed of it? If it weren’t for people having sex, none of us would be here*. When I was a shy ten-year-old kid who loved tits, Goldstein was a hero. He was “sex positive” long before the term was invented. He was among the first to recognize and rail against the unholy marriage of radical feminists and evangelical Christians in their quest to use the law to suppress free speech in the name of protecting women from dirty movies and magazines.
Anyone who has looked at pornographic materials in the last 40 years (which is anyone who isn’t blind or living in a horribly repressive society) owes a debt of gratitude to Al Goldstein. One of the reasons we can enjoy the abundant pornography we take for granted today is because Goldstein, SCREW co-editor Jim Buckley and others (like the more famous Larry Flynt) fought for our rights years ago, often at great financial and personal cost. Goldstein and Buckley faced up to six years in jail for publishing a newspaper (yes, this happened in America).
And for all of Goldstein’s vulgarity, please note that the pornography and vision of sex he presented to America was a more real and vastly superior brand compared with what is popular today. I’ll take the realistic-looking women from the pages of SCREW over the silicone and botox filled automatons of today.
Goldstein was no angel, and he makes no effort to hide his many vices and excesses in his memoir. He even quotes from a book written by a former staffer that depicts him as a giant mouth whose personality is overtaken by a tremendous appetite.
Ten years ago, when I saw Penn & Teller at the Beacon Theater, I thought I was the shit because I had a slightly better seat than Al Goldstein. He was one row behind me. He was dressed in shorts, hiking boots, and a red, white and blue sequined jacket. Of course, I went home alone and he was with a hot girl who was maybe a third his age. Six years later, Goldstein had been personally bankrupted by lawsuits and criminal charges of harassment. He was destitute and in poor health.
A few years ago, I made a flyer to advertise a show that my band was playing and the flyer featured a photo of Goldstein giving the world the middle finger. I emailed him a copy of the flyer and he said it was wonderful. That’s one of the best endorsements our band has ever had.
Last I heard, Goldstein was living in an apartment in Far Rockaway. If his doctors let him eat it, I’d like to treat him to a delicious pastrami sandwich at Katz’s.
*I understand that today there is a small minority of people who were conceived by in-vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood and lesbians with turkey basters (I have considered trying to make a career out of being an inexpensive sperm donor for lesbians). These people’s lives are just as valuable as anyone’s, but I refuse to live in a world where the majority of people were not created through good, old-fashioned fucking.
I recently flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma and back, and with the connecting flights that made four plane rides overall. Air travel has not improved much since last year. I was able to actually reserve a seat instead of waiting by the gate for a last minute seat assignment, so that’s a small victory.
But the airline caste system is alive and well. The division between first class and coach class is made more glaring by the efforts the airlines have made to squeeze every penny out of beleaguered coach passengers ($25 to check one bag = outrageous).
First class passengers get their own flight attendant, who serves them drinks as they relax comfortably in large seats, watching the rest of us slobs file in. I hate them. I want to spit in their smug faces, piss in their complimentary drinks and strangle them with their own neck pillows. But we can’t do that in this day and age, especially with homeland security being what it is (I stood behind a crippled old woman in Tulsa who was made to go into a magnetometer and put her hands above her head— serves her right for packing a metal hip at the airport—so even when security is running smoothly, it is still completely retarded).
The most galling example of this was on a plane where the door was situated between first class and coach. After we landed, a flight attendant blocking the aisle with her body so that we scum of the coach class could not start to leave the plane until a sufficient number of first class passengers got off the plane.
So I think airline passengers should borrow from the bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium. A great tradition at Yankee Stadium, which I’m told has carried over to the New (not the real) Yankee Stadium, is this: at the start of every game, the rowdy “Bleacher Creatures” in the right field bleachers chant “Box seats suck! Box seats suck!” towards the privileged box seats close to home plate.
It’s a great tradition, as the people sitting in the box seats tend to be mindless beneficiaries of corporate largesse or disinterested scions of privilege with no passion for or knowledge of the game. The great baseball owner Bill Veeck observed, “The knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.” And that’s as true today as when he uttered it.
At a certain point before each flight, after everyone is seated but before the flight crew begin the safety information, coach class should begin a chant of “First class sucks! First class sucks!” This could be a great tradition. It would create a greater camaraderie among the masses in the steerage of coach class. It is protected speech beyond the authority of the government and in large enough scope the airlines could not stop it or sanction passengers who participated. And the snobs in first class would benefit from some humbling as well. So please join me in this, unless I get lucky and get upgraded to first class.
The New York Yankees lost two legendary fixtures within the last few days.
Bob Sheppard had been with the Yankees well before Steinbrenner bought the team in 1973. While he never amassed the wealth of George Steinbrenner, his life shows that he was a man with better perspective and an intact moral compass.
He was a teacher first and foremost, and took joy in helping people improve their speech and elocution. After he retired, Yankees—most notably Derek Jeter—continued to use a recording of him to be announced. I’m privileged to have attended games at the real Yankee Stadium and listened to Bob Sheppard announce games.
It’s not right to speak ill of the dead, so don’t read the following aloud: As a lifelong Yankee fan, I hated George Steinbrenner. I’m far from alone. Lots of Yankee fans have hated George Steinbrenner with a passion for years. It’s true he took a losing franchise and made it a winning team again, it’s also true he treated people like dirt, the fans most of all.
He fired Billy Martin so many times I lost track (six). He insulted Joe Torre, one of the greatest managers to ever wear the pinstripes. His quest to wring even more money from the richest sports franchise in the country included battling a cable company’s resistance to charge more money for the YES network and leaving millions of New York fans unable to watch games on television for at least half a season.
Steinbrenner and his offspring tore down the House that Ruth Built and replaced it with an expensive “mallpark” that has hurt local businesses and cost cash-strapped New York City and New York State billions in tax breaks, cut-rate land sales and public infrastructure improvements. The Yankees, who technically rented the old, real Yankee Stadium from New York City, were tens of thousands of dollars behind on their rent. They paved over public parks and broke their promise to replace the park land before the new stadium was built.
Yankee fans and other New Yorkers will be shedding tears for Bob Sheppard; George Steinbrenner, not so much.
Another July 4th has passed, and so I have spent another weekend in the countryside with friends, celebrating the independence of my country by blowing up a small part of it.
Actually, my friends and I did not blow up any piece of America, though we set off some very pretty and mostly legal fireworks for a gathering of friends. It was a relatively mild affair, as there were children there to enjoy the show and our host puts too much work into maintaining his property to have his n’er-do-well friends damage it. No one got hurt and no one called the police.
Growing up in Yonkers, the neighborhood teenagers invested heavily in massive amounts of fireworks. I would come out of my building on the morning of July 5th to find the gutters littered with spent firecrackers, red M-80 shells, and the exploded waste of an evening of gunpowder-fueled debauchery. Once, I noticed that one of the heavy steel garbage cans that served the apartments was face down in the street, blown apart and looking like a discarded banana peel. As a youngster, I yearned to be one of the adults lighting the firecrackers to the disapproval of my parents. Now I am and it’s awesome.
Sure, there are plenty of idiots who blow their arms off or set fire to themselves (full disclosure: a cinder from a sparkler I was holding burned a hole in my shirt this year; I was unharmed), but the overwhelming majority of firework celebrations go off without incident.
The night was aglow this past weekend with firework celebrations sanctioned and unsanctioned, legal and illegal. There aren’t enough police in the world to stop every American from setting off fireworks. And it was a glorious sign that the American spirit is alive and well.
Fireworks are Americans telling their government that we don’t need or want its approval in how we define and exercise our freedoms. It’s we the people taking the celebration and the meaning of America into our own hands. We’re showing our government and the world that we’re not afraid of fire, not afraid of things that go boom, and just not afraid.
When you first come across a Ghost Bike—a bicycle painted entirely white and chained by the side of the street— in New York you may think it’s some kind of odd art project, a waste of a perfectly good bike dipped in paint as a way to impress you with the decadent brilliance of the artist. At least that’s what I remember thinking the first time I came across one. Then I noticed some flowers and a sign that had been added to a street sign and realized it was a memorial to a cyclist that was killed.
There are plenty of cyclists in New York who deserve some hurt: delivery guys who ride on sidewalks, stupid kids who ride the wrong way in the street and speedo-clad Lance Armstrong wannabes who think they’re important because they were dumb enough to spend $1,000 or more on a damn bicycle. Sadly, these are usually not the people who get killed riding their bikes.
Like with much in life, it’s often the people who deserve pain the least who get it the most. It’s not the asshole illegal immigrant delivery boy who gets beaten by the cops, it’s an earnest Army vet trying to promote bicycle riding. It’s not the douchebag who thinks he’s in the Tour de France who gets flattened by a city tow truck, it’s a doctor out for a weekend ride with his wife, staying in the bicycle lane.
The Sanitation Department recently planned to take away the ghost bikes, but changed their plans when faced with the prospect of explaining their actions to the families of killed cyclists. It’s good that these memorials are staying put. It will put a little seriousness and perspective into our daily lives.
I have several friends and coworkers who are avid cyclists. They all have horror stories about being hassled by the police, threatened by rogue cab drivers, nearly killed by ignorant drivers or caused to crash by oblivious pedestrians. But they all love it and wouldn’t commute to work any other way ever if they could help it. Despite all the risks, I’m eager to give cycling a try. It looks very liberating: no longer at the mercy of MTA incompetence, having the mobility of a car without the stress of having to park it or buy gas. There’s a strong case for riding a bicycle.
Muslims have every right to open a mosque near Ground Zero. They should have the good sense not to.
Opening a mosque near the World Trade Center site would be like building a German beer hall just outside the gates of Auschwitz or opening a U.S. Army recruiting office in Mai Lai. After all, a majority of Germans today were born well after the Second World War and had nothing to do with the Holocaust, so why shouldn’t they show the world that they are good people and serve tourists some delicious beer and pretzels?
Muslims in New York want to open a large mosque and Islamic center two blocks from the site of the September, 11, 2001 attacks, in a building damaged in the attacks no less. They’ve been met with enormous criticism, of course, but may go ahead with the plan anyway.
Proponents of putting a place of Muslim worship close to where thousands of people lost their lives at the hands of Muslims argue that the mosque would serve as a more accurate representative of Islam, and that the work done by the September 11th hijackers in anathema to the true nature of Islam. Assuming that the intentions of these ambitious Muslims are pure, they could not be more misguided.
True, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are opposed to extremism and are decent people. To say otherwise would be ignorant. But it would be disingenuous or else willfully ignorant to pretend that Islam is at an equivalent stage of moderation of Christianity or Judaism. Extremism plays a much larger role in Islam, and Islam has a much higher percentage of violence-prone adherents than other religions. Critics of Christianity and Judaism do not require 24-hour security protection. Christ, who is considered divine by Christians (Mohammed is revered but not a deity in Islam), is regularly pilloried in various media without his detractors fearing for their lives.
Putting a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center will only show Muslims as triumphant, entitled and lacking in any decorum, class or common sense. By their very insistence that the mosque be near ground zero, the Muslims who want to build it will completely undercut whatever sympathetic message they hope to deliver.
To most non-Muslims, Islam does not mean peace today. It won’t mean peace tomorrow. Wanting it to be different will not make it so. And you can talk about the majority of peaceful Muslims until you’re blue in the face, but when your religion is enormously influenced by crazies and you’re across the street from some of their most deadly work, your message will rightly fall on deaf ears.
Instead of spending time and money to try to convince people that Islam means peace by putting a mosque across the street from one of Islam’s most infamous atrocities, supporters of the downtown mosque should spend their time and effort on making it true that Islam means peace. Right now it doesn’t, not by a long shot.
(FYI: the illustration above comes from the very sick but very funny Web comic Electric Retard - not for children and not safe for work; you've been warned)
Last week, Arizona’s governor signed an illegal immigration enforcement bill into law that has put the issue of illegal immigration and the movement to grant illegal aliens amnesty front and center. Congressional leaders even spoke of putting the immigration bill before Congress ahead of an important energy bill.
It’s a sign of how desperate things have become for states along the Mexican border that state governments are trying to do what the federal government has refused to do. The job of enforcing and protecting the country’s borders is rightfully that of the federal government.
With the President promising “immigration reform” in the form of an amnesty program, the government has cut back on enforcement measures, leaving individual states to deal with overcrowded schools, bankrupt public services, and the families of its murdered citizens.
The states have tried to do whatever they can do deal with crowds of illegal aliens coming their way, and this bill in Arizona is the most stringent so far, though far from the Nuremberg-style law that its critics accuse it of being. It will be litigated to death and may never see the light of day, but it’s a law that prods Arizona police to do what the federal government refuses to do with any consistency or competence: get some kind of handle on our out-of-control illegal immigration situation.
Kowtowing to both Hispanic ethnic tribalism and corporate wage-busting greed, President Obama promised to pursue an amnesty bill that would legalize millions of illegal aliens at a time when real unemployment is still well into double-digits. He hinted at a threat of using civil rights legislation to thwart the Arizona bill. Arizona’s governor signed it anyway.
Critics call the Arizona law racist, fascist, and everything except what it is: a desperate act by a state pushed to the brink by decades of border negligence and a federal government in the thrall of its own windy rhetoric and at the service of its corporate donors.
The passing of the recent healthcare legislation and the arrest of nutcase Christian militia members have served as striking examples of how we are a divided country. No doubt we are at a very divisive point in our country’s history, but we are not on the brink of a civil war. To hear commentators in the supposedly mainstream media tell it, we are either under siege from communist infiltrators or a fifth column of right wing lunatics is plotting to murder everyone who voted Democratic in 2008.
Calling Obama a socialist is making his opponents look like buffoons. A socialist wouldn’t raise more than $750 million from corporate donors and forgo public campaign financing. A socialist would not have made attempts to attract Republican support or sign what is at its core a moderate bill. A socialist would have insisted on a government-run healthcare system as exists in most Western democracies. I hate to break this to my conservative friends, but Canada, England, Norway and Spain are not communist countries. There are no “death panels” ordering elderly people to be euthanized in Sweden or France.
The recent health care plan may be a fiscally irresponsible boondoggle full of accounting tricks and underfunded mandates, but it is not a communist blueprint. Calling Obama a socialist is idiotic (double idiot points for denouncing Obama’s so-called socialist policies while quoting George Orwell, who actually was a socialist).
It’s the same brand of idiocy to claim that the opposition to the Obama administration is born out of latent racism or that conservatives are calling for wholesale murder of Democrats.
Obama supporters know that the stigma of racism (a word so overused and abused it ought to be in quotes in most cases) can condemn a political opponent to the humiliating and irrelevant margins of society. The easiest way to deflect blame and anger from the first black president is to somehow portray criticism of his administration as racist. Therefore, people angry at the healthcare bill aren’t really upset over cuts to their or their parents’ Medicare coverage or taxes on their healthcare benefits, they must be closet racists angry that ‘Hail to the Chief’ is played for a black man. Look for more accusations of “racism” when Democrats move to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.
Likewise, Sarah Palin is not endorsing murder when she uses firearms metaphors in her messages to her supporters. She’s the same kind of corporate water-carrier the Republicans have been pushing our way for decades. She may be an idiot, but she’s not trying to inspire a right wing coup. The same goes for other Republican Party blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck etc.
Republicans and Democrats are painting one another as extremists in an attempt to stigmatize their opponents and stifle debate. They’re both wrong.
I’m going to do something that some may think is heretical. I’m going to not drink on St. Patrick’s Day.
I’m taking a break from drinking for a while for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the patron saint of Ireland. But even if I was in full drinking mode right now, I’d still be putting away the alcohol on St. Patrick’s Day.
Let’s face an ugly fact: for most Americans on St. Patrick’s Day, even most Americans of Irish heritage, St. Patrick’s Day is little more than an excuse to be drunk and stupid. I have nothing against wanting to be drunk and stupid; it’s good and natural to want that. But let’s quit pretending we’re really celebrating Irish heritage.
The Irish embrace the ugliest stereotypes about themselves and hold them up for celebration. I can think of no other race of people on earth so enamored with their own weaknesses. I’m glad that the Irish have not given themselves over to wholesale professional victimhood (though that may be on its way), but the green beer and jokes about being drunk are little more than blandly accepted ethnic slurs. Frankly speaking, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day by drinking beer is like celebrating Martin Luther King Day by smoking crack.
I don’t rightly expect to do away with St. Patrick’s Day parades, the fighting Irishman, or even green beer (though you should have more respect for beer than to drink it). And I’d be the biggest hypocrite on earth to tell people to avoid drinking and good times.
But maybe, just maybe consider doing something that celebrates Irish culture and history in its own right.
Here are some good alternative drinking holidays:
January 26 – General Andrew Jackson wins the Battle of New Orleans on this date in 1815. Americans in New Orleans from that point forward would be free to drink themselves into a coma and bare their breasts for beads without interference from the British crown.
January 29 – On this day in 1880, W.C. Fields was born. The actor was famous for his drinking and once said, “A woman drove me to drink, and I never had the decency to thank her for it.”
March 22 – Celebrate the beginning of the end of Prohibition. On this date in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act, which allowed the sale of beer for the first time since the start of Prohibition. The 21st Amendment, which repealed Prohibition, was fully ratified on December 5.
July 21 – Birthday of Ernest Hemingway (1899), great American writer and also prolific drinker. It would be easier to name the non-drinking writers, but some other famous drinking writers’ birthdays include Jack Kerouac (March 12), Charles Bukowski (August 16) and Hunter S. Thompson (July 18).
And here are some alternative Irish holidays to celebrate:
March 4 – Birthday of Robert Emmet, Irish rebel born in 1778 and executed by the British on September 20, 1804. His rebellion began July 23, 1803, if you’d rather celebrate his legacy in July. He gave a famous Speech from the Dock at his trial.
April 24: April 24, 1916 was the start of the Easter Rising, the rebellion in Ireland against the government of the United Kingdom that set in motion the events that eventually led to Ireland’s freedom (most of Ireland anyway, there are six counties in the North that are still part of the U.K.). The rebels were a small group of brave Irishmen and Irishwomen. Most of the leaders were executed.
June 16 – June 16 is Bloomsday, the day in 1904 in which the James Joyce novel Ulysses takes place. Leopold Bloom travels about Dublin, drinks, eats gorgonzola sandwiches, masturbates during a fireworks show, and does other stuff that sound a lot more fun than slogging your way through Ulysses (which you should totally do; I’ll go back and finish reading it … some day).
I write a column called 'Notes from a Polite New Yorker' as well as short stories and poems. My writing has appeared in Ask A New Yorker, GetUnderground.com, Knot Magazine, The Black Table, Too Square, and other web sites and print publications.
