February 27, 2006
NEW YORK 1986
Pedro rang the bell and we both advanced warily, hands up, to the center of the ring. Almost simultaneously we both lunged and jabbed with our left. We circled, and jabbed again. I backed away toward the corner and when he stepped in my direction I suddenly charged him and threw a right to his head. He deflected the blow with his left glove and countered with his right, which slammed into the top of my protective helmet. I retreated, bouncing on the balls of my feet, chin against my chest, my gloves tight against my face, elbows in, guarding my midsection.
He peeked over his gloves. His face was red from exertion, distorted from the plastic mouth protector. He tried a kind of shuffling dance to distract me, but when I felt he was off-balance I charged with a right to his head, followed by a left hook to his body and another left hook to his head. He gasped. I followed up with a right to his head, which he deflected with his glove. I retreated with him following, more warily. We loped sideways together in a kind of clumsy dance toward the corner. Now we were getting into it. The stiffness was going away and we were getting used to the situation, and to each other’s style. Round after round of jabbing, chasing, deftly and not-so-deftly delivered shots to the head and body. We took turns chasing each other, going in tight and tying each other up, trying tricks to confuse and tire each other out, looking for an advantage. The room was hot and stuffy and our t-shirts and sweat pants became drenched with perspiration. Pedro, acting as both trainer and referee, kept time with us, pushing us apart when we clinched, barking instructions, admonishing against low blows, sometimes cajoling us to fight harder. “Use it!”, he would scream when he felt one or the other was not using his jab enough. We moved around the ring in a lump of three, sweating, drool dripping from our mouths, elbows flailing and laces flying. Occasionally a well-aimed shot to the face would launch a shower of sweat and sputum into the air.
We were well-matched, neither having the desire to inflict much damage on the other. After all, we were friends training together, not adversaries trying to kill each other, and the sparring session ended with a handshake.
Bogdan, Pedro and I sat in the Broadway Baby Piano Bar nursing our beers in a post-workout stupor. In some ways boxing is better than sex. Bogdan, my sparring partner, was a Yugoslav, 190 lbs., with black hair swept directly back and a neatly trimmed short beard. Bogdan was a very nasty piece of work. Like, he was a mental case. He had just gotten out of prison for assaulting a guy on the subway. While he was in jail his ex-girlfriend had died of AIDS, though he said he didn’t have it. I don’t think he had it. He didn’t fight like a guy who had AIDS.
Pedro was 160 lbs, a Puerto Rican who couldn’t speak Spanish for shit. He was short and muscular, a human pit bull. In fact, he used to train pit bulls and always carried around a book about them. Pedro was my boxing mentor. He was always developing scientific new boxing combinations to mess a man up. We used to take long runs together in Central Park. He worked for New York Social Services as a youth counselor. Once he had gone into a tenement looking for a kid and had gotten attacked by wild dogs in the hallway. They took a big chunk out of his butt. Another time, he had sat on a couch in some people’s apartment and got fleas, which made him so sick that he had to spend three weeks in the hospital. When I heard these stories I was thankful for my nice soft job hanging from scaffolding on the side of buildings.
That leaves me, Jacky O’Shea, six-feet 180 pounds of fun, girls. I grew up in a group home in Queens and I had to learn to handle myself pretty young, because when you have no parents to protect you life can be pretty mean and tough, though I didn’t have it as tough as some kids. God took some things away from me but He made me big and strong, and I’m thankful for that.
We sat around the table, gym bags and headgears hanging from the backs of the chairs. Pedro, his dark glasses flashing in the dim pink light, was waxing ecstatic over his new girlfriend, Darlene, an ebony-colored bodybuilder, into whose Brooklyn apartment he had already installed himself. He passed around snapshots of her flexing provocatively in a chocolate-brown wet-look bikini. “She’s a really fantastic person,” he enthused. “We’re gonna get some dogs and start training them. She says if it works out between us we can go live in this house her family owns in Huntingdon and we can become professional dog trainers.”
That alarmed me. “If you’re living in Long Island, how’re you gonna be able to train at the gym?”
“Don’t worry, man, I’ll still come to the gym.”
“O.K., then.”
Bogdan stared glumly at a posterior shot of Darlene, who was bent over suggestively and smiling at the camera from between her legs. “Boy,” he sighed, “I haven’t tasted pussy for a long time.”
“Well, it still tastes the same.”
Bogdan continued, “When I was in the joint, I had to pay guys to protect me.”
“Yeah?!”
“Yeah?!”
Bogdan was pretty tough, so it was hard to imagine a place so brutal that he felt compelled to buy protection.
“Yeah, it was like being in a cage with all these guys who wanted to fuck you and beat your brains out, or the other way around. And you could look out the windows and see people on the outside driving around and doing things, and you’re stuck inside with these assholes…
“Hell, I never want to go back there again.”
“So whaddaya been doing since you got out?”
“Working for my uncle. He owns an apartment building on E. 88th Street. He gave me a job as super, and I got an apartment in the building.”
See, people don’t appreciate the value of relations until they don’t have any. Even somebody as miserable and messed-up as Bogdan was able to secure some assistance, however pathetic, because he had some family ties. In my case, whatever hard luck befell me, I was strictly on my own. With Pedro it was the same. All we had was each other, and, let’s face it, we really didn’t have that either.
The subject of apartments had a lot of immediacy to me. I hated the studio I was living in, on E. 94th Street, and I was desperate to find something more desirable in the neighborhood. The way I got this apartment was, I met this girl in the gym, named Millicent Battaglia. She was an actress with a rich father. Originally, this other guy was hitting on her, but she went for me instead. I was living in Corona, but I was really living in the gym and on the trains, so it was really convenient to have a girlfriend who lived near the gym. So I moved in with her, and when she went to L.A. I got the apartment. The building was full of freaks who took drugs and practiced black magic.
I really loved living near the gym, and being in Manhattan, but I hated the apartment. Millicent wasn’t much of a housekeeper, and forget about me! I felt if I could find a new place in the neighborhood I could make a fresh start, maybe buy some new furniture or something.
Putting on the most casual air of nonchalance I could, expecting to hear an negative response, I casually asked Bogdan if there were any vacancies in his building. His response shocked me:
“Oh yeah, there are a lot of empty apartments. And you want to hear something? They’re all rent controlled. My uncle is trying to vacate the whole building. He figures that way he can get a better price for it when he puts it up for sale.”
That pissed me off good. Damn landlords! Manhattan landlords were a whole other biological species completely, some kind of freakin' maggots that had been spawned out of diseased rat sperm! Nevertheless, hope springs eternal. Smooth as I could, I implored, “Bogdan, my friend, what are the chances you could get me fixed up with one of those apartments?”
“Not a chance, Anyway, what can I do? I only work there. My uncle Walter hates me. He only loves money and Ronald Reagan. Plenty of times he told me he’s going to throw me out!"
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February 27, 2006
Je ne sais pas par quels moyens tu obtiens tes informations sur ce qui se passe en France, mais je pense que l'image que tu donnes est vraiment faussée.
Même si il est possible que le crime dont tu parles est eut des causes antisémites, le motif principal est l'argent et seule l'enquête policière permettra d'être sûr des réelles origines de ce crime.
Il ne faut pas rentrer dans un délire de persécutions interminables, que ce soit pour les juifs, les noirs, les arabes, les asiatiques, les blancs, les gros, les blonds, les nains, les moches et même les cons !
Ton premier article sur les émeutes des banlieues et Sarkozy l'année dernière était déjà orienté dans ce sens là alors qu'il n'était pas du tout question d'émeutes religieuses en France !
Le crime en question est encore une fois affreux, il touche effectivement un juif, vendeur de téléphone portables... Il se trouve que le piège a été tendu par une "charmante demoiselle" et que d'après l'enquête le même piège a été tendu à plusieurs autres personnes de la même façon, et je ne crois pas qu'ils étaient tous juifs ! Est-ce qu'ils étaient tous vendeurs de portables ? Je ne crois pas non plus. Et si il n'avait pas été juif, aurait-on dit que c'était un crime "anti-vendeur de portable" à ce moment là ? NON.
Est-ce que la police n'a rien fait ? NON, là aussi ce n'est pas vrai, elle n'a pas demandé à la famille de se débrouiller en tout cas. Et on peut effectivement croire qu'elle n'a pas bien fait son travail puisque le crime a fini par arriver et que ce qui était au début un enlèvement est devenu un crime de sang.
Est-ce que le gouvernement, les intellectuels et la population haussent les épaules et disent "c'est pas grave" ? NON, encore aujourd'hui il y avait un défilé dans les rues de Paris pour dire "NON A LA VIOLENCE, NON AU RACISME, ..."
Je peux te dire que la vie est bien calme en France et bien loin du tableau que tu dépeints ! Autrement plus calme que les guerres des gangs qu'il y a aux USA avec des morts par arme à feu tous les jours !
Je pense que ton prochain scénario pourrait parler d'une France devenu état policier ! et malheureusement peut-être même pire : un état dirigé par des nationalistes, parce qu'avec ces derniers événements la "France profonde" ne ressent qu'un sentiment d'insécurité croissant et demande de plus en plus des actions concrètes !
Mon avis est qu'il est bien plus important de résoudre des disfonctionnements sociaux et environnementaux par des actions dans les quartiers. Mais les actions dont je parle ne sont bien sûr pas policières mais bien sociales et architecturales !
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February 25, 2006
Bienvenue en France, terre promise de la liberté, la fraternité, et la brutalité, là où les juifs disparaissent de la rue pour réapparaître dans les chantiers, tout nu et torturé jusqu'à la mort avec des coupures de rasoir sur tout le corps, le visage utilisé comme cendrier, sans que la police ne lève le petit doigt.
Quand la famille de la victime a fait appel à la police après avoir reçu une demande de rançon, la police a répondu, « il faut que vous cherchiez les moyens… »
En France, c’est l’éternelle chasse aux juifs. Papon est enterré, mais son esprit est toujours vivant dans le cœur des petits Lacombe Lucien qui hantent les rues à la recherche des juifs riches, vendeurs de portables, pour les massacrer. Rien n’a changé dans esprit des Français qui, comblés, regardent les plus récents outrages à l’humanité sur la télé en mangeant leurs rillettes pendant qu’on coupe la langue des juifs en direct dans les reality shows.
C’est dans l’Europe contemporaine, comme en Pologne, qu'on planifie des parcs d’attractions sur les sites des crématoires, où le maire de Londres est sanctionné pour avoir traité un journaliste juif de « gardien de camp de concentration nazi », où le président de l’Iran ou Hamas déclare « Mort aux juifs » et le citoyen hausse les épaules en disant, « C’est pas grave. »
La France contemporaine n’est guère différente de la littérature de Balzac, dans laquelle les tortionnaires brulent les pieds d’une victime jusqu'à ce que la graisse pétille comme un porc rôti dans la braise, ou dans « Les Misérables » où la bande à Thénardier, ayant séquestré Jean Valjean dans les ténèbres, leurs couteaux éclairés par le feu, attend avec impatience l’ordre du chef pour lui arracher ses membres.
Mais cette fois-ci il n’y a pas eu de Javert pour arriver et lui sauver la peau à la dernière minute. Cette fois-ci la victime a péri, et avec lui tout l’honneur de la France.
L’année passée ils ont brulé les cités en hurlant « Mort a Sarkozy ! Nique les juifs ! » Aujourd’hui ils sont passés des voitures incendiées aux juifs brulés, sans que les intellectuels et les députés ne lèvent le doigt. Combien de temps avant qu’ils ne passent aux bombes et aux mitraillettes ?
Il y a quelques années, j’ai écrit un scénario, où Paris était dans un état de siège permanent, occupé par l’armée, où la police avait peur d’aller dans les quartiers populaires et les bandits s'émergeaient des catacombes et des souterrains pour enlever leurs victimes en pleine rue. Malheureusement, ce conte ne pouvais intéresser personne à l’époque. Maintenant, l’heure est arrivée où la réalité a dépassée la fiction, et le citoyen, ne pouvant plus compter sur les forces de l'ordre ou les autorités, devra compter sur ses propres initiatives pour se débrouiller.
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Posted on 2/25/2006
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February 24, 2006
I’ve got an idea for a new Olympic sport called Butt Skiing, where you go the first five feet down the mountain on skis, and slide the rest of the way down using your butt for a luge. I could win the Gold.
I always wanted to take up figure skating. I’d like to do some triple axle spins with Michele Kwan sitting on my face.
Why don’t they put in a mechanical rabbit for the speed skaters to chase, like at the dog track? Only since the games are being held in Italy, they could substitute a horse’s head for the rabbit.
Speedskater Apolo Ohno, whose real name is Kawasaki Suzuki, got his name when he was training on a frozen lake in California. He skidded off the ice and, catching his crotch on a fence post, screamed, “Oh no! Oh no!” and the name stuck.
Conditions in those four-man bobsleds are so tight that the Greek team had to be taken to the hospital to be surgically removed from each other’s butts.
Who ever heard of those countries? Slovenia, Slovakia. It turns out that Bulimia is a country halfway between Croatia and Wetdreamia.
The Arab speed skier was in the lead until he blew himself up and turned into a flying freestyle jumper. When the Mexican cross country skier crossed the finish line, he asked one of the judges, “Is this the way to LA?”
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Posted on 2/24/2006
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February 22, 2006
REPRINT FROM PAGE 6 OF THE NEW YORK POST
February 22, 2006 -- A crusty clash has broken out at world-famous H&H Bagels between owner Helmer Toro and his fired-up former quality-control manager, 200motels.
And it's going to take more than cream cheese to cool the boiling temper of 200motels, who claims that after he was fired from the legendary Upper West Side bagel mecca last year for "insubordination," his old boss wrongly listed him as a company officer - resulting in the state Department of Taxation sending him a $20,000 bill.
In addition to filing a complaint against Toro with Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau's office, 200motels has struck back by writing a scathing poem about the owner of H&H, whose many celebrity customers include Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman and Mike Myers.
Among the more cutting couplets in 200motels' "The Ballad of Helmer Toro":
"His production plant is such a rancid stinking nightmare/That even the rats and roaches are afraid to go in there/With putrid grease and moldy dough stinking like a gutter/The health inspector gave it a lower rating than the black hole of Calcutta."
200motels snipes at Toro: "He'll go down in history like the Three Stooges/On the Mount Rushmore of monumental scrooges/What he lacks in intelligence he makes up for in thieving greed/He would suck up the world in a black hole of avarice/If he could figure out how to succeed."
Toro's lawyer, Jorge Delgado, told us that he, too, has been on the business end of 200motels' vicious tongue. "It's unfortunate that it's come to this," Delgado said. "I've never in my life received e-mails like this. He even called me an imbecile."
Delgado confirmed that H&H made a "mistake" when it named 200motels as a company officer after he was canned, but claims 200motels has yet to send the proper paperwork to straighten out the tax situation.
"He was dismissed for insubordination," said Delgado, who declined to elaborate. "He knows he can call the office and send us the proper documents to have this matter resolved. But it appears he has a personal vendetta against the president of the company."
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Posted on 2/22/2006
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February 19, 2006
Mr. Robert M. Morgenthau, District Attorney February 19, 2006
New York County District Attorney’s Office
One Hogan Place
New York, NY 10013
Dear Mr. Morgenthau,
I am writing to you about a very insidious form of identity theft that was perpetrated on me by my former employer, MR. HELMER TORO, owner and president of H&H Bagels, 2239 Broadway, NY,NY 10036 212-595-8000.
Two months after leaving Mr. Toro’s employ, in October, 2005, I received a Notice and Demand for Taxes Due from the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance naming me as an officer in one of Mr. Toro’s entities, WEST MIDTOWN LP, and dunning me for $20,000 that Mr. Toro had been assessed in payroll taxes that he had apparently withheld from employees’ salaries and neglected to remit to the state.
I was simply employed as a manager at H&H Bagels’ 46th Street location and at no time had I ever consented to be an officer in any of Mr. Toro’s business entities. At no time did I sign any documents of incorporation, nor did I sign any returns to be submitted to the state.
When I contacted Mr. Toro’s office, his counsel, Jorge Delgado, refused to answer any inquiries about how my name had appeared as an officer in this entity, characterizing the matter as a “misunderstanding” and an “error.” He said that if I submitted to him the documentation I received from the state, he would “try to clear it up.”
Not having any confidence in Mr. Toro’s integrity, I ignored this offer and filed a formal letter of protest, return receipt requested, detailing the aforementioned facts (see attachments) with the State Department of Taxation.
On February 17 of this year I received another assessment from the Department of Taxation, this time stating that if I did not make arrangements to pay the full amount by March 14, the Department would take action against me. When I called the Department, after being shifted from officer to officer, I was told that there was no record of my letter of protest, and that I would have to send proof of my first letter and start the process all over again. When I insisted that I was a victim of fraud and identity theft, the officer, a Mr. Beckford, told me that there was nothing he could do, nor would he direct me to an investigative officer with whom I could file a complaint.
Let me restate – I was listed by Mr. Toro as an officer of West Midtown LP without my knowledge or consent, and am being pursued for funds that I have nothing at all to do with. However, the Department’s records now list me as being delinquent.
When I e-mailed Mr. Toro’s office this past week with a protest, all I received was a terse response that if I forwarded the documentation to them, they would, “in the interest of the company, try to clear it up.”
I am being victimized by Mr. Toro, who is a thoroughly unscrupulous, unprincipled and, I don’t believe I am overstating the case, criminal individual. I am clearly the victim of blatant identity fraud and forgery. I am formally requesting that the District Attorney’s office investigate this matter and check into the authenticity and legality of West Midtown LP.
I know for a fact that Mr. Toro is engaged in various forms of unethical activity in terms of his payroll practices, but I always stayed well clear of his financial dealings. Always behaving ethically myself, I operated on the principle that you can’t cheat an honest man (that premise is being put to the test). As soon as the economic situation in New York improved, I left his employ and found another job.
Please investigate Mr. Toro and West Midtown LP and help me disentangle myself from the monstrous tentacles of this corrupt individual. I guarantee that you will unearth enough nefarious activity to form the basis for multiple complaints.
Please feel free to contact me at any time for any cooperation that I might be able to contribute.
Thank you for your consideration in this matter.
Very truly yours,
200motels
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Posted on 2/19/2006
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February 18, 2006
PRESS RELEASE… PRESS RELEASE… PRESS RELEASE… PRESS RELEASE
H & H BAGELS PRESIDENT ACCUSED OF FORGERY
The only reason HELMER TORO, president of H&H Bagels, is not being sued for fraud, forgery and identity theft is that he is already broke, and a judgment against him would be unenforceable.
So says 200MOTELS, a writer and former manager at the company. After 200motels had left to work somewhere else, he received a notice from the state department of taxation naming him as an officer in one of Toro’s dummy tax shelters and assessing him for $20,000 in employees’ payroll taxes that Toro had withheld from their paychecks and not submitted to the state. 200motels maintains that he was simply employed as a manager for the company and never consented to be an officer in any of Toro’s fraudulent legal entities.
“Any articles of incorporation purporting to have my signature on them are forgeries, and any notary or attorney who filed them is guilty of filing a false instrument, a felony,” writes 200motels.
200motels, who is also a writer and a comedian, has written a very unflattering poetic assessment of Toro’s business practices and the hygienic state of H&H’s production facilities, which have been cited for numerous health and safety violations by the state department of health and OSHA. In addition, he is working on a comic novel about H&H Bagels, which he describes as “worse than the Black Hole of Calcutta.”
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Posted on 2/18/2006
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February 16, 2006
Last Saturday, President Bill Clinton shot a member of his hunting party under mysterious circumstances and waited a full day before revealing that he had done so.
The victim a 78-year-old Texas attorney named Joe Schmuckley, remains in the intensive care ward of Texas Memorial Hospital with a shotgun pellet lodged in his heart.
Republican critics were quick to attack. “This is an impeachable offense,” said Senator Kate Bailey Hutchison. “For this to happen on Texas soil degrades the great state of Texas and all its citizens.”
Republican Senator George Allen said, “This illustrates why Clinton is unfit to be president. For a sitting president to behave so irresponsibly demonstrates why he should not be permitted to conduct business in the name of the American people.”
Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, speaking to a convention of the National Rifle Association, told the assembled delegates, “President Clinton, a notorious draft dodger, has shown that he has no respect for or knowledge of firearms. In behaving so irresponsibly toward his fellow citizens, and with such callous disregard for human life, President Clinton has once again demonstrated his unfitness to hold public office.”
Republican House Majority Leader Dick Boner immediately called for a full investigation of the shooting and the fact that the sheriff of Kennedy County, Texas, refused to intervene after the shooting, allowing the president to leave the state without launching a thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding the shooting.
For his part, President Clinton has refused to meet with the press to discuss the matter. His press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, when asked at a press briefing if she had anything to say about the incident, declined to reply. “Why don’t you go ask the sheriff,” she said. “The president was not engaged in an official act, so we don’t have to tell you anything.”
/>Republican critics responded harshly. “We need to get rid of Clinton once and for all. He should be impeached, indicted and imprisoned,” said Republican Dick Cheney.
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Posted on 2/16/2006
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February 14, 2006
This moron Cheney is a totally apt metaphor for what has been going on since day one. We have been shooting each other, shooting ourselves in the foot, shooting our foreign friends and shooting innocent bystanders.
We have been shooting our own leadership any time they have had the courage to digress from our own suicidal tendency to shoot ourselves in the head. We have put firearms in the hands of small children to shoot each other in kindergarten, put automatic weapons in the hands of adolescents and allowed them to turn high schools into “Shoot The Freak” firing ranges.
We have permitted ourselves to be seduced by gun manufacturers into turning our streets into violent video games, our homes into shooting galleries, our public places into free-fire zones.
When our allies have tried to warn us against shooting ourselves in the foot, we have wheeled around and shot them, then stuffed the gun in our waistband and shot off our dick.
Our news commentators, who are specifically selected for their docility, conformism and mediocrity, have lulled us into complacency after each horror, assuring us that this state of affairs is the natural order of things and that we as a nation will continue to persevere, even as they themselves get sent to be shot and blown up bringing us “happy news” from the scene of our latest misbegotten crusade of idiocy.
People are blowing each other away over traffic accidents, arguments about women, card games, sideways looks and perceived insults while the nation’s imperial rulers are getting drunk and shooting each other in the face over smoldering, repressed interior resentments that they have not the culture or intelligence to express any other way.
From a standpoint of emotional development, putting a powerful firearm in the hands of an imbecilic moron like Dick Cheney is exactly the same as putting one in the hands of a retarded gang banger from Hollister, Queens. The end result is the same – mayhem and destruction.
Take away the firearms, and you will still have the same cretinous imbeciles, but they would have to express their thuggery with fists, knives and clubs, which would at least let some innocent bystanders off the hook, in addition to which some of our politicians might survive.
The underlying motivation for this suicidal behavior, the desire of the Elmer Fudds of the world to see themselves as Rambo, might then be addressed through pharmaceutical innovation.
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Posted on 2/14/2006
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February 12, 2006
When Richard Nixon was president, he and his sociopath National Security Advisor, Kissinger, intentionally established a policy of emphasizing Nixon’s emotional instability and recklessness as a gambit to intimidate and alarm his adversaries in North Viet-Nam and Moscow.
Cheney, who was a subordinate of Donald Rumsfeld and protégé of Nixon, seems to have picked up a few pointers from his old boss.
To paraphrase a hackneyed old slogan of the National Rifle Association, “Guns don’t shoot people, homicidal morons shoot people.” I always maintained that the Republicans were a bunch of murderous psychotic twits, and Cheney has kindly illustrated my point more succinctly than any words I could ever write on this page.
Nothing ever happens in a vacuum. With the revelation that Lewis Libby has flipped and fingered Cheney as the puppet master in the Valerie Plame leaks, this “hunting accident” may be interpreted as a not-too-subtle message to Libby to shut the hell up, or else.
The fact that this weirdo Cheney has his tentacles deep in the nation’s intelligence apparatus may also transmit signals of alarm to members of Congress and even Bush himself, who will certainly think twice about jettisoning Cheney in the event that the Plame affair burns too close to the White House. Remember, Libby’s testimony before the grand jury indicated that he was directed by his “superiors” – plural – to leak Valerie Plame’s name to the press. Now, if Libby was Cheney’s chief of staff, how many other persons besides Cheney were superior to him? Only one that I can think of – Bush!
What’s really funny about this is that the man Cheney shot, an Austin, TX, attorney with high Republican connections, was appointed by then-governor Bush to the Texas Funeral Service Commission. If the guy croaks, he can regulate his own funeral ha-ha!
Right away, the Republicans went into their manipulative word game-playing mode, referring to the incident as Cheney “peppering” the guy. Where do they come up with this shit?!!! See, Cheney didn’t shoot him in the face at point-blank range with a twelve-gauge shotgun, he “peppered” him. “It broke the skin,” said Katherine Armstrong, the owner of the ranch where the shooting place, in the understatement of the century. “I’ve been peppered myself,” she joked.
The joke’s on us. If you had any misgivings about the nature of the clowns in control of the country, this should really crystallize them. It’ll be interesting to see how the administration of justice in Texas, which has a notorious reputation for unbendingly strict interpretation of the law, decides to handle the hot potato of prosecuting the man who gives Bush his marching orders. They let Cheney fly back to Washington without even questioning him.
I know what would the consequences would be if it happened to be me who shot the man in the face with a shotgun, a long freakin’ jail term and a civil lawsuit.
The great American writer, Louis L'Amour, writing specifically about Texas, observed that the country was not built exclusively by virtuous, hard-working people, but also by thieves, outlaws and villians as well. Certainly, the owners of the 50,000 acre ranch where the shooting took place didn't obtain it by virtue of the sweat of their brows. Funny things happen in Texas. Ask Kennedy.
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Posted on 2/12/2006
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February 11, 2006
It was the year of the cheap sunglasses and the people rejoiced. Some knock-off designer in Taiwan was doing his job well, and anyone with five bucks could go through life like a Star. Bag ladies wearing sack dresses and knee-highs pushing shopping carts through the Rite-Aid parking lot in Co-Op City felt as though they were Gloria Swanson descending the staircase from a DC-9 into the waiting arms of Howard Hughes.
New York had retreated from its epoch of sweetness and light like a beautiful woman who had fallen back on her old habits after awakening one morning, ruined and with an ugly scar on her face, to realize that a life of virtue would only be poison to one for whom it was not in her nature. It had once again become a city of sharp elbows and “What’s in it for me?” and had immediately seen its fortunes rise.
The city was shuffling to the sagacious and salacious rhythms of twentieth century Trinidadian big band music updated for the synthesizer and Dominican steel washboard. Low-rider boys in pastel zoot suits and Panama hats, sporting dangerous little pointy sideburns and pencil moustaches hung out on East Tremont Avenue street corners bragging about their molls; greedy, feral, sharp-toothed little vixens in platform mules and little sleeveless sundresses which let them display their tattooed biceps, and swinging from a chain little clutch bags just big enough to contain a brass knuckle.
The mayor was in Punta del Este, fighting extradition from Uruguay. He was reputed to be sitting on an illicit fortune of hundreds of millions stemming from a re-zoning scandal which had freed up Coney Island to become New York’s new Gold Coast of luxury condos and carriage trade shopping just a ten minute trip from Wall Street by jet-powered hydrofoil. In the summer Surf Avenue was indistinguishable from South Beach, crammed with tanned, toned bodies of exiled South Americans and disinherited eurotrash, as the cash registers sang the Hallelullah Chorus under the watchful steel eyes of Russian émigrés (the retirees and cheap apartment dwellers had long been banished to deepest darkest Bushwick. If they wanted an ocean view, let them first get their stock portfolios in order).
Wall Street lunged from peak to peak, each week beefed up by some new innovation destined to revolutionize life as we know it. Petroleum-based food, miraculous new aphrodisiacs, they all had their day. A guy made a fortune on doggie toilets which flushed when Rover ate the biscuit which appeared in the tray after he did his business. It was Vegas with the odds reversed: you couldn’t lose.
Into this heady mix, like a fly diving into a zesty marmite to gorge himself for the umpteempth time, flew Havelock Jones. In a world of thieves, Havelock distinguished himself by his humility. He was a Canadian. Not for him the high living and braggadocio of the average loud-mouth New York big-shot. Havelock stole small and lived longer. He never forgot the story recounted to him by his father about the Old Bull and the Young Bull standing on the hill. The Young Bull says, “Let’s run down and screw a cow!” The Old Bull corrects him, “Let’s walk down and screw them all.”
Havelock’s specialty was stealing styles. His official title was “Designer.” All designers are derivative, but some more than others. It all depends on your market. A European designer might travel to Bolivia or Nepal in search of folkloric influences. The New Yorker will save time by letting the European knock himself out and then copy him. Not that Havelock ever stole a number whole. After he got through cheapening it down far enough for the cheesy low-end buyer to understand it and for his ignorant low-end factory to produce it, no creative spirit worthy of the name would even recognize it. His masterpiece up to this point had been the time he reduced a three hundred dollar belt from the window of a Madison Avenue boutique to something in extruded vinyl that wholesaled for twenty-four dollars a dozen.
What did he care? Strictly speaking it wasn’t illegal, and it paid the rent for his modest one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, his gym, it kept him reasonably well-dressed and bankrolled the occasional vacation to Miami or the Caribbean.
Oh, he knew better. Havelock had attended design school in Paris and operated a boutique in Montreal for several years before emigrating to New York. He understood fashion from the haute couture perspective. No decent artist, no matter how low, should ever bring himself down to this level of commerce, Havelock knew, but money is money, and in New York you’re a joke without it.
He haunted the stores of Manhattan like a ghost in an Italian silk suit, from St. Mark’s Place to Saks to Madison Avenue to Macy’s, notepad in hand for a quick sketch. If the belt or handbag couldn’t be captured by a sketch, or if it contained a piece of hardware he wanted to knock off, he would buy it and then return it the next day. Sometimes he would just tear a buckle off a belt in the store and leave the useless strap hanging there.
He was polite and he had a nice, well-groomed appearance, and that helped. Sometimes he actually recruited store clerks to help him by calling him when merchandise came in that they felt might be useful to him. He never went into Bergdorf’s without bringing coffee and danishes for the staff in the first floor accessory department.
Havelock knew every belt and bag in New York, and that’s no exaggeration. He knocked off his competition and they knocked him off. Sometimes he would buy a competitor’s knock-off of his knock-off and bring it back to his boss, Pops, and they would stand over it and compare it for why the store had bought it over his version. Pops would command him to make the competitor’s version exactly, so that Pops could send Havelock’s exact knock-off to the buyer with a cheaper price, to steal the re-order from the other supplier.
Sometimes, if Pops was especially friendly with the buyer (for instance, if he had given her a nice fat envelope full of cash for Christmas,oh yeah!) she would request a sample of an especially attractive style from a competitor, ostensibly for a sales meeting, and send it over to Pops for Havelock to knock off. If Havelock was particularly pressed for time, he wouldn't even copy it, just figure a price for Pops to phone in to the buyer. Sometimes he would just take something he had just bought in a store, figure a price on it, put a Majestic label on it and send it to the buyer. There had been times when Pops and Havelock submitted a bag to the store they had just bought it out of. In the maelstrom of fashion retailing, buyers were so harried and confused they didn't know, or care.
Eventually, though, New York would run out of ideas to steal, unbelievable as that may sound. Havelock would board a plane to Paris. Once there he would swill down food and liquor like a pig for a couple of days before he got around to looking at accessories. The problem with knocking off European styling was that you had to be especially reductive to make it basic enough to appeal to the brutish buyers' sensibilities, Havelock would joke maliciously.
Whenever he went to Paris, Havelock would first pay a ritual visit to lay a bouquet of flowers at the grave of Jim Morrison in the Père Lachaise Cemetery at the city's eastern periphery. Reposed alongside the most notable personages of that country's illustrious historical patrimony, Morrison's remains attracted a floating crap game of pilgrims, wanderers, dreamers, poets and musicians, artists, mystics, psychos, renegades, fugitives, revolutionaries and romantics. They had long ago turned his little corner of the place into a trampled, run-down, bottle-strewn, graffiti-besmirched ruin, a sort of Hollywood Boulevard on the Seine which scandalized the cemetery's conseil d'administration and the Paris civil authorities, though it must have delighted Morrison's spirit. It's a sure bet that his spirit lingers in that spot to this day, enjoying the perpetual three-ring circus that he had devoted his brief terrestrial tenure trying to whip up.
Morrison must be happy that he had the good fortune to die and be buried in Paris, for no respectable American cemetery would permit these goings-on. In America your death is as tightly controlled as your life, and when Americans say "Rest in Peace," they are wholeheartedly prepared to enforce it. The French cops were perpetually having to chase away musical acts, drunks and drug addicts, fornicators, religious zealots, speechmakers, shoeless vagabonds and a hundred other kinds of disorderly conductors but, to their credit, they never tried to shut the thing down. In the centuries that Paris has existed as a mecca for incessant waves of revolutionaries and émigrés, the police have learned that you can't keep a lid on a boiling cauldron of humanity. You can only keep stirring it 'round and 'round. "Dégagez, circulez!" they would gently (by police standards) and incessantly repeat, coaxing the crowds to leave and make the way for the next emerging tsunami of worshippers, none of whom had been alive when Morrison died or knew enough English to understand his poetry, but had been mesmerized by the digital reproduction of his seductive voice. When Havelock was a young man attending design school there and living in a series of derelict, heatless habitations in the city's popular quarters, he would often pass by Morrison's grave and hang out with the other broke, hopeful young habitués of the place. You could cadge cigarettes and a few centimes from the tourists, pick up girls, share nips of Martinique rum from a bottle or a few puffs off a joint of Moroccan hash. Many times he had convinced fresh-faced German or Swedish girls to accompany him back to his loft for a cheap dinner of pasta or couscous and red table wine. For these reasons Havelock considered Jim Morrison to be something of a patron saint. Indeed, it was Morrison's music, along with that of Led Zepplin and the Rolling Stones which had induced him to take up fashion as a career.
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Posted on 2/11/2006
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February 07, 2006
Now that the Transport Workers Union is in a shambles and is begging the MTA to give them another chance to vote on the contract agreement, the city, which is under no obligation to do so, should play hardball and extract major concessions from the union.
The MTA should go over the heads of the union leadership, directly to the rank and file, and offer to reinstate the contract, but only on the condition that Toussaint and his whole union executive be forced to resign, and that a whole new slate of officers be empowered as a condition for reinstatement of the contract.
Though I concede the necessity for trade unions as social interlocutors to protect the interests of workers in a complex economic environment, the behavior of TWU Local 100 has been extravagantly destructive to the city. Roger Toussaint has couched the contract negotiations in terms of racial conflict, and he brazenly attempted to strong-arm the city by calling an illegal strike in the middle of the Christmas shopping frenzy.
Toussaint’s bad faith and ineptitude are limitless. After threatening the union members who militated against the contract, he has now delivered on his threats, declaring them to be “members in bad standing,” and imposing a kind of Coventry status on them. Logic dictates that he should have extended a conciliatory hand to them in the interest of industrial peace, but logic is entirely alien to Toussaint.
If the MTA was in the mood to really bust up the union, it could go back on that part of the agreement which concedes a giveback of the union members’ past pension fund contributions, which amounts to several thousand dollars per member, and then declare that the whole thing is Toussaint’s fault. Toussaint, who must surely still be quaking in his shoes over a possible lawsuit by the family of Matthew Long, the firefighter son of Michael Long, the Conservative Party leader, for the grave injuries he received as a consequence of the traffic chaos that ensued during the walkout (the statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit for criminal negligence is one year), is in no position to call another walkout for any justification.
All of this calls into question whether is is really in the interest of the MTA or the city to see Toussaint replaced as leader of the TWU. To paraphrase an old motto, “The imbecile you know is better than the imbecile you don’t know.” It’s possible that this moron could be replaced by a labor leader just as destructive, but smarter and more effective.
Where would THAT leave us?
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Posted on 2/7/2006
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February 03, 2006
I give Bush an A for his idiot State of the Union speech. In bringing up the energy issue, which he intends to do absolutely nothing about, he threw out a stinky, smelly red herring that all the newspapers and television analysts gave their full attention to, and completely changed the subject from his own glaring policy failures like Iraq and Katrina and all the scandalous Republican thievery.
In a purely cosmetic move, The Republican House caucus named John Boehner as the "reform" candidate for majority leader, which is like trying to sell you an old hooker by convincing you that she is a virgin. Only an idiot could be satisfied by this lame gambit, but as a wise philosopher once observed, "Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
On another track, Bush’s Republican-dominated judiciary succeeded in pushing back Lewis Libby’s trial date to next January, allowing damaging testimony by high administration officials, notably Vice-President Chaney, to take place well after the congressional elections of November.
Bush has successfully succeeded in avoiding being impeached by his own party, which would have been inevitable had he permitted all these festering sores to come to a head in this election year.
The press and, shamefully, the Democrats allowed all these maneuvers to pass without so much as lifting a finger, proving once again that whatever feeble remnants of a democracy as we once possessed are now faded memories. And the blame falls just as much upon the Democrats, who have unfailingly bent over for Bush to sodomize them.
Remember, you read it here. Brain damage and chromosome breakage have decimated the reasoning powers of our intellectual class to such an extent that the average citizen may as well take another Prozac and plug into his iPod. Once they shut me down, it’ll be Aldous Huxley’s (anybody out there still knows who he was?) “Brave New World” brought to you in living color.
On the other side of the world, Muslims are raising hell because they don’t like some cartoons published in Denmark portraying Muhammad as a towelhead bomb thrower.
WELL EXCUSE ME!!!! It’s ok for them to portray Jews as ghoulish organ profiteers in Turkish movies, and they crowd into movie theaters to see Mel Gibson’s depiction of Jews as deformed, hook-nosed, crooked-teeth Christ killers in “The Passion of the Christ.” That was ok! Any cheap shots at Jews or westerners as soulless, greedy whores is par for the course, but an idiotic cartoon of Muhammad with an IED in his turban is enough to provoke bloody riots across the Middle East.
They need our money. The Iranians declared they wouldn’t interrupt oil production over the nuclear standoff, not out of a sense of international cooperation, but because our money is what permits them to run around behaving like lunatics. If the developed world could establish a sensible energy policy, those jackasses would have to go back to burning camel dung to keep warm. Oh, what a wonderful world it would be if we could get these morons off our back!
That is why I believe in working closely with the wonderful people that inhabit our hemisphere. South America and Canada are rich in natural resources, and Latin people make wonderful immigrants to replace our declining birth rate. In this I agree with freakin’ Bush, although how he ever got something right is a mystery to me!
Closer to home, Schmucky the rat emerged from the subway, saw his shadow and went back in, which means we'll have six more weeks of garbage for Staten Island.
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Posted on 2/3/2006
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February 02, 2006
I live in New York, not freakin’ Open Crotch, Arkansas. If you want to put something over on me, you better do some smooth talking. It’s totally unbearable to switch on the tube and see Bush pushing the lamest possible line in that Dogpatch hillbilly style of his.
Even the biggest idiot in New York City is like Einstein compared to the Texas population, Bush’s target audience. I have met Texans, and they are the worst imaginable knuckleheads. Bush reminds me of my last boss, who was so used to dealing with idiots and pineapple heads that he thought he was leading a charmed life. I put up with it for a while until I got tired of his smirking, self-satisfied egotism, and then I told him flat out – “You’re a fucking moron!” I went out and immediately started working for $200 a week more than he was paying me (which begs the question, who was the bigger idiot, him? or me, who was working for him for chump change?).
I was against the Iraq war from day one, not because I have anything against ripping off their oil – I’m too much of a New Yorker to be shocked by wholesale stealing and thievery, but because I have personal experience with middle-eastern people, who are uncontrollable. On an individual basis they can be totally charming, but as a group they are beyond any kind of regulatory authority. The only way to control them is to do what Saddam Hussein did, which is to keep them in line with a constant reign of terror.
Do we really want to behave like that? Better to let them do it to each other and then negotiate oil leases with the winner.
Does that make me a defeatist? I don’t go out and play in traffic during rush hour on the Van Wyck Expressway, does that make me a defeatist?
Bush is insisting that the news organizations send reporters to cover the “positive news” in Iraq, so lame, conformist twits that they are, the news executives send out reporters and news anchors into that charnel house to send back feel-good items. I saw this one old man on TV who looked like your grandpa, except he had a hook where his hand used to be. Somebody had pitched a grenade into the humvee that he was riding in. He managed to throw it back out, but it took his hand with it.
The ABC news anchor, Bob Woodruff, went out to get happy news for the folks back in Hicksville, and the only happy news he got was a concussion.
That’s not the worst of it. Back in 1982, Saddam Hussein, believing that Ayatollah Khomeini was a pushover, attacked Iran, vowing to march into Teheran in two months. The Iranians mobilized hundreds of thousands of soldiers and held Saddam to a standstill over six years of trench warfare. This little gem of history has apparently escaped our illustrious leader and his legions of bobblehead neo-conservative theorists. It’s not outrageous to think of our army in Iraq as potential hostages in the nuclear stand-off with Iran. If the Iranians decide to send wave after wave of suicide battalions into Iraq, where we barely have enough soldiers to defend themselves, what are we going to do, dig trenches and fight them hand-to-hand in the mud, and the whole time the Iraqis are attacking our rear flank with IEDs and dead dogs stuffed with plastic explosives?
One time, during the eighteenth century, the British Empire sent an expedition led by General Gordon into the Sudan to take out a Muslim fanatic called “The Mahdi.” That army was surrounded and decimated, and Gordon's head delivered to Mahdi. We better watch out that we don’t get stuck in a similar glue trap.
There’s an old saying, “Be nice to the people you meet on your way up, because you’re going to meet the same people on your way down.” Bush had a few good years (I wish I could say the same for us), during which time he treated our friends and allies like shit. Now all his harebrained schemes are unraveling and we have no friends. Who’s going to go to bat for us if we find ourselves in a mess?
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Posted on 2/2/2006
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