August 29, 2009

Mondo Fatso!

                                 Typical Fashion Model of the Future

This woman I know asked me, “Have you seen Susan Boyle’s makeover? Doesn’t she look great?” Yeah, great! Instead of looking like the back end of a garbage truck, she now looks like the front end. Ugly is now the new beautiful. Even Glamour Magazine is now using fat plus-size models for its cover girls.

I am totally in favor of Glamour’s using plus-size models for its fashion layouts. As a huge, fat schlub myself, I have always felt resentful seeing super cool-looking female and male models with toned bodies and cut-up abs. What about the other 99% of us who are required by law to cover up our disgusting, flabby physiques? We got a right to look like jerks!

The only problem is that Glamour Magazine does not go nearly far enough to depict the corruption and degradation that people allow their bodies to disintegrate throughout a lifetime of sitting on their fat butts all day and stuffing their mouths with all manner of pollution like bagels, macaroni and cheese, calzone and Chinese food. The hot air and flatulence that erupts from fat people’s butts contributes more greenhouse gases than all the automobiles in China.

What do I care? The dinosaurs were on the earth for fifty million years, and their decomposed bodies count for all the petroleum deposits found under all the continents and oceans. They must have blown a lot of gas out of their butts, but nobody blames them for global warming!

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In fact, if you think about it, fat people perform a valuable service to humanity: they block out the sun and provide much needed shade in the summer, and their gas emissions actually help to warm our subway cars and offices in the winter.

In addition, they help the world economy by providing a need for extra fabric to cover their enormous butts. In this, they are using up all the excess agricultural capacity that would lie fallow on the cotton farms of Equatorial Africa. In addition, they are requiring larger cars and buildings with bigger doors and elevators, which provide jobs for working people!

I say, Right On! Have another corn dog! Let’s have fashion pictorials showing real Americans as they deserve to be depicted, humungous, and later for the anorexic fashion freaks!

While I’m at it, I’d like to salute the Latin people for scarfing down mountains of mofongo, which is mashed plantains fried in oil with pork, and then, after they have gotten to a point of obscenity reminiscent of a barbecued pig on a spit at a Polynesian luau, insist on parading around St. Nicholas Avenue in tights four sizes too small, allowing the rest of us to see every roll of fat in their buttocks and thighs with breathtaking clarity.

So, make way for the new wave of tubby fatsos, who are inevitably destined to take over since there soon won’t be room on the planet for anybody else!

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August 28, 2009

Los Estados Unidos de Mota

Nadie no me quiere. Mi esposa me dejó para salir con un mono. Mis hijos me odian. Los perros mean en mi pierna. Las mujeres piensan que soy gay y los gays piensan que soy mujer. Los patos vuelan por encima y cagan en mi cabeza.

Fui al medico y me dijo él que estoy loco. Le dije que quería una segunda opinión y me dijo que también soy feo.

Sólo me ama la botella, que es mi único amigo. Cada noche canto mi canción de amor a la botella.

O mi amigo la botella
A ti no te importa que yo estoy tan feo
Tu eres mi único amigo
Estoy contento tomar contigo
Besame con tus labios de cristal
Y besame otra vez
Un trago no es suficiente
Yo necesito como diez

En esta mano tengo la botella de tequila. En otra mano tengo la mota. Señor Mota, tengo el honor de presentarle la Señorita Tequila.

"Un gran placer".

"Para mí también".

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Tengo la idea de hacer un matrimonio entre el Señor Mota y la Señorita Tequila en la Catedral Hard Rock de la Mota, santo patrón de los patos bavosos.

Señor Mota, ¿aceptas la Señorita Tequila como tu esposa?

"O sí!"

Y Señorita Tequila ¿aceptas Señor Mota como tu marido?

"No puedo. Él es demasiado pequeño. Necesito el tamaño familial para llenar mi hoyo grande ".

"¡Cuidado! ¡Soy pequeño pero tengo fuerza, con una potencia mostruosa!"

Vamos a ver. Primero fumo la Mota, que es fuerte, y ahora echo el humo en la botella.

Exclama Señorita Tequila, “¡Caramba! ¡Que fuerza tiene Señor Mota! ¡Es fuerte como un bazuco!”

Ahora tomo la tequila. Dice Mota, "O señorita, tus labios de cristal son tan deliciosos!”

Mota-tequila, tequila-mota, etc.

Ahora estoy bailando.¡O mi amor tequila marihuana! Yahoo estoy volando en el cielo con los patos otra vez! ¿Señorita Tequila ahora estas enamorada del Señor Mota?

“¡O sííííí!”

¿Y Señor Mota, ya estas enamorado de Señorita Tequila?

"¡O sí, y no me importa que ella tiene el hoyo grande!"

¡Bravo. Vamos a hacer la luna de miel!

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August 25, 2009

Out Of Gas

The government’s “Cash for Clunkers” program expired yesterday like a Looney Tunes auto breathing its last gasp, even as frantic buyers were still banging down the door. Why Obama let the only really successful stimulus program die, even as European Clunkers programs were still roaring ahead full steam, is a source of dismay.

Obama’s starting to make too many errors, and it’s not satisfactory. I had my doubts about him early on, and that’s why I supported Hillary Clinton despite being called every name in the book by Obama supporters. He totally blew the “Cash for Clunkers” program by ending it too early. The German program is still running. Obama could have continued stimulating the U.S. car business, but he cut it short by being too cautious, as though he were afraid of what the Republicans would say about him.

All he would have had to do was to send one cabinet-level genius over to Germany, to see how their program was operating and what it was accomplishing, but he didn’t do it. He functioned totally in the dark, and now he has cut short a great opportunity to inject a lot of high octane into the economy.

He is also being too cautious on health care. The Republicans are not even disguising their true intentions – they mean to kill it. He should just ignore them and push the legislation through and worry about it later. He should explain to the Blue Dog Democrats that whether he wins or loses their seats will be on the line anyway, and if they expect to be supported by the national party in the next election, they should board the train before it leaves the station.

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Franklin D. Roosevelt was confronted with the same dilemma when he assumed office in 1933. He chose to push through his social programs during the worst years of the depression, in the face of unanimous Republican opposition, and he had to face reactionary Democrats as well. Everybody was screaming that the country couldn’t afford them, but Roosevelt had the wind at his back and he pushed through Social Security, the Federal Housing Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, banking and stock market reform and a lot of other legislation. To pay for it, he increased taxes on high-income earners, which really got a lot of his previous supporters mad at him.

Roosevelt had a four-year window of opportunity to act when he had big majorities in congress, and he took advantage of it. In 1937, a Conservative Coalition of Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats wrested back control of congress and prevented any further Roosevelt reforms. But the programs that had already been instituted were so effective and popular that the so-called “conservatives” were never able to reverse them.

Roosevelt’s programs were so effective that U.S. gross domestic product had shot up from –14% negative growth in 1932 to plus 11% in 1935. By 1936, it had attained plus 12%. When the Conservative Coalition took over congress in 1937 as the result of hysterical fear-mongering and insults by the media of that time, which was entirely controlled by Roosevelt’s enemies, and shut off many of Roosevelt’s stimulus programs, GDP plunged back into negative territory, from whence it did not recover until the Second World War. Do we really need the benefit of their wisdom now?

Obama should learn from the lessons of history. When you have the means to act, you act. As Mr. Dooley observed, “Politics ain’t beanbag”. You pick your shots and then you spend the rest of your time in office consolidating your gains.

The one person with the most health care experience is Bill Clinton. Sure, he mishandled it, but he’s had 16 years to reflect on what he did wrong, and Obama is not even considering his opinions, which is like a knucklehead teenager insisting on making his own mistakes. The possible achievable gains during this session of congress are too important for the administration to waste time reinventing the wheel.

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August 21, 2009

How I Broke Into New York Fashion

There was no point to sticking around Montreal any longer. It was 1982 and the economy was in the tank. I put all my things in storage, packed up my best clothes and my design portfolio, and caught the Montrealer express train to New York. I remember gazing wistfully over the hardscrabble Pointe St. Charles neighborhood as the train roared south.

When we arrived at the U.S. border, I had to show Canadian identification to the U.S. immigration and convince them that I was a U.S. citizen. They held up the train for a long time, deciding what to do about me. Finally they let me through.

Arriving in New York, I checked into the Pickwick Arms Hotel on E. 51st Street. At that time it doubled as a low-cost tourist hotel and an SRO. I convinced the manager to give me the SRO rate for a room facing the synagogue and garden across the street. Very charming and, unbelievably, only $160 per week.

Back in those days the fashion jobs were advertised in the classified ads in the back of Women’s Wear Daily. I wasn’t trying for a designer job. I was looking for something in production because the prospects were more immediate. I had no references and no resumé. All I had was my design portfolio of styles that I had designed and executed in my boutique in Montreal, and a fast line of talk.

At the time there was a lot of manufacturing going on in New York, with a constant demand for skilled help. My pitch was that even though I had no industrial experience, I had talent in the design and construction of leather garments and accessories. That at least got my foot in the door. A guy named Lou Smoltz took a chance on me. He owned a handbag factory that he called “New York Reptile” and he did contracting for the Etienne Aigner (which he pronounced egg-ner) handbag line. He was short and bald and not very charming. In fact, he was a total nut job, but he was a real handbag pro. He could fix every machine in the place himself. He stayed on top of his own production and he produced a beautiful product.

Lou Smoltz did not like me at all but he wasn’t making as much money as he could have because he didn’t have an effective foreman to push the work forward. My job was to receive the cut pieces that came from the Aigner cutting facility and put them through Smoltz’s factory, so that they emerged as finished handbags. This is a very useful skill to have, so I let him train me a little bit and then pitched right in. The guy immediately improved his daily production by 50%, strictly by virtue of me pushing the work forward. That is the value of employing a good industrial foreman. “You have good hands”, he said, “and you work hard on a steady basis”. Those were the highest compliments he was capable of giving in that business. Nevertheless he fired me. “We have a personality conflict”, he told me.

“I don’t have any conflict”, I answered.

“But I do”, he said.

Nevertheless, he knew I would be useful to somebody, so he referred me to this other turkey, Ed Stein, who had an office in the Empire State Building. Stein ran something called the National Handbag Council, which was a sort of industry association, I suppose.

Stein was a degenerate. “Oh, nice jeans you’re wearing”, he exclaimed as he grabbed my crotch. Gay guys have always liked me a lot. Too bad I can’t elicit the same reaction from women! I put up with this jerk grabbing my balls because I needed a job, and fast. Ed Stein sent me over to see Pearl at Accessories by Pearl, a ladies’ belt company located in the 330 Fifth Avenue fashion market. She interviewed me with her husband sitting in the office. I showed them my portfolio and gave them my pitch. Only now I had Ed Stein and Lou Smoltz as references, just as though I had been working in New York for years. The only problem was, I didn’t know anything. Unbelievably, Pearl gave me a job running her cutting department, which was a big department of about 30 cutters. I spent the first couple of days making them clean up the impossible mess in that department, but after that I was clueless. I just gave out cutting tickets and hoped for the best.

At the same time, I enrolled in a handbag design course at FIT to learn specialized patternmaking for handbags, which could also be used for belts. FIT is a very good school for learning basic industrial techniques, but it is a wasteland when it comes to developing styling talent, in my opinion. I was there for a couple of years, so I figure I have a right to an opinion.

I had no clue about Pearl’s leather inventory and I didn’t know her business at all, so I managed to make a couple of expensive mistakes almost right away. They let me go, but not before I had met Joe Bergman, the union rep. I went to see him at the union office and he told me that Calderon Belts and Bags was looking for an assistant belt designer. He asked me if I was any good at belts. I responded, “Belts are easy”, which he took the wrong way. Nothing is easy. What I meant was that belts are not as complicated as coats or skirts.

I knew he didn’t think I would get the job. I went down to Calderon on Greenwich Street, which is now Tribeca. Back then it was a deserted, slightly sinister waterfront street. I got in to see the factory manager, Bill Daniels. Daniels was not a New Yorker. He was, like, an engineer from flyover country. Calderon was a big operation, and the owners must have felt they needed a real American to run the place instead of a wacko garmento thief who would rob them blind.

I showed him my design portfolio, which impressed him a lot. The girls I had used were all professional Montreal strippers made up by a professional French make-up artist. The leather suits I had designed for them were along the lines of things being showed at North Beach Leather, with lots of appliqués and fringed looks, some of them being direct knock-offs of North Beach Leather ads in Vogue and Bazaar. It was a pretty cool portfolio. Daniels looked up at me from the photo album. “Why did you leave?” he asked me, somewhat in awe.

He took me down to the design room to see the company’s owners and showed them my portfolio. They were a married couple, Murray and Joan Nathan. They were hard-bitten old timers who had started producing Mickey Mouse handbags for kids and moved up the food chain to the point where they had a five-story factory producing snakeskin accessories for Neiman’s and Sackowitz. They looked over my portfolio while I shot them my pitch, which now included Accessories by Pearl. Nathan finally told me “Come back tomorrow and bring your sketches”.

Sketches? I didn’t have any freakin sketches! I ran to an art store and bought a sketchpad and pencils. After dark I went up and down Madison Avenue, sketching the belts in the boutique windows. I got some good designs. People walking down the street were saying, “This guy should be shot!”

Listen, when I was a kid growing up in Beverly Hills, I lived on Bedford Drive near Wilshire Boulevard, half a block from Saks Fifth Avenue. At night guys would set up flood lights and tripods right there on the sidewalk, with pedestrians walking back and forth, to take pictures of the dresses in the windows. One guy with a sketchpad, that was nothing! Anyway, in the following years I learned everything about knocking off styles that you can possibly imagine.

I went back to my hotel room and copied my sketches into presentable form. The next day I went back to Calderon and presented them to Murray Nathan. He was very impressed. Why shouldn’t he be? They were all the current European styles fresh out of the most exclusive Madison Avenue boutiques. He took the sketchpad and put it in his drawer. He never gave it back to me.

Now he took me to an empty design room and gave me a knife, a curve and some pattern paper. “Design me a belt”, he told me. I quickly started on a piece I had seen the previous evening. It was a beige contour hip belt 4” wide at the left hip narrowing to 2” at the right hip, closing with a hook at the hip with a bow covering the hook. The body of the belt was three contour pieces sewn together separated with black handbag piping. Actually, I think it was two belts I saw combined into one. The pattern was a very amateurish job and the construction was not up to industrial standards, but I nevertheless produced a beautiful-looking fashion belt in a couple of hours.

While I was making it, I received a visit from the sales manager, Ernie Dornbush, who had sat in on one of the interviews. Dornbush was a tall, imposing man with a business suit and a booming baritone voice, exactly the sort of sales manager to appeal to a hick department store owner from Texas who describes things as outré. He wasn’t in favor of hiring me and he came to let me know it in no uncertain terms, hoping to demoralize me and shake me up. Forget him! I needed the job.

I brought the finished belt to Murray Nathan in the big design room. He put the thing smack in the middle of the design table, where all the buyers would see it. “You’re hired”, he told me. “Come back tomorrow at nine o’clock”. He left the belt in that place of honor for several weeks.

Dornbush was in the design room when I got hired. He was visibly upset.

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August 17, 2009

I'm All Right, Jerk!

I’m All Right, Jerk!

Looking back over my old blogs written over the last few years, I realize that most of them are pure garbage, which is normal. Even Babe Ruth struck out more times at bat than he ever got a hit. It’s normal for a city like New York that produces more garbage than anything else. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have so many rich Italians, who have cornered the market in picking it up.

Nevertheless, I have produced a few nuggets of wisdom, like my idea for encouraging women not to wear panties during the summer months, allowing the vagina to air out and keep it from getting overheated, which would reduce global warming. Good point, right?

Anyway, it’s no more ridiculous than some of the ideas that are produced by the establishment media on a daily basis. The only difference is, these dorks have the official seal of approval coming from a bogus establishment that is manipulating opinion to serve its own bankrupt agenda.

Let’s examine the most overheated subject of this summer, which is whether the government should be permitted to set up a health insurance plan to compete against private companies. In Europe private companies were driven out of the health insurance market a long time ago, yet they are still making piles of money. AXA, Allianz, SocGen all still have huge insurance operations, and they are still in the health field by selling insurance plans that supplement the government plans. Some of them have even seen their supplemental plans skyrocket as cautious Europeans seek coverage for expenses that are not covered by the single payer entities, such as private hospital rooms, home health care for the elderly, cash payments during periods of incapacity, etc.

Of course, the European insurance companies did not do this by choice. They were driven to it by the political will of the public, who long ago determined that they were sick of being bled dry and having their health suffer just to enrich the coffers of private insurers.

This process is now taking place in the United States, on a primitive level. U.S. healthcare is being held hostage by a medical/banking establishment which is bleeding it dry and exacting huge profits by exploiting the political ignorance of the population, and they mean to keep it going by any means necessary.

If it means buying off politicians, no problem. No matter how much they spend on corrupting politicians it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the amounts they are raking in. With the shrinking industrial base and cut-throat competition coming from other countries, there are very few investment opportunities as lucrative as holding a gun to the heads of the people and soaking them for medical care.

There’s an old gag in the comedy business. When a table of customers is laughing, the comic tells them, “Why don’t you run around the room and pretend you’re a crowd?” The medical/insurance combine has taken that gimmick to heart, busing the same stale characters around the country and paying them good money to bust up any kind of consensus on medical insurance by doing what they do best: scream, cry, hold up bibles, complain about abortion – any kind of distraction. Then the news media focus on these Potemkin Villages of outraged yokels to convince the public that people don’t want insurance reform, even though increasingly huge segments of the population have no coverage, are being bled dry or are being bankrupted by the medical oligarchy.

Sorry to say, but when the news media behaves in such a destructive, antisocial manner, maybe it’s time to conduct a public examination of the big media conglomerates to discover whether or not there is any conflict of interest behind their reporting e.g. whether they hold insurance or medical stocks. That would be an interesting subject of public inquiry, to be sure!

Sure I write a lot of garbage, and some of it is antisocial, considering the kind of societal set-up we have. But who is more destructive, me of Fox News?

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August 15, 2009

Come Home Little Rabbi!

                                                                                          Rabbis on Parade!

I called up my accountant to find out how my investments were doing and I found out he was in jail for stealing all my money.

So I called up my rabbi for spiritual comfort and I found out he was in jail too, for theft, fraud, money laundering and trafficking in human transplant organs.

Boo-hoo-hoo! I want my rabbi! Now I don’t have nobody to play dreidel with me. Rabbi Schwartz is locked up in the Metropolitan Correctional Institute with the muggers, carjackers, rapists and Wall Street securities brokers. Boo-hoo-hoo!

Now I don’t have nobody to explain me the value of honest living and ethical moral standards. My sister misses him too because now she don’t have nobody to molest her in Hebrew school.

They showed pictures of the rabbis on TV. They were taking them out for a walk. They had them all chained together like elephants in the circus. The rabbis were all chained together and they looked like a charm bracelet.

Rabbi, I’m sorry! If I knew you needed your money laundered, I would have done it for you. I would have taken the money down to the Laundromat and washed it for you in the washing machine (for a percentage, naturally).

Look at it this way: anybody who needed a kidney or a liver for a transplant and bought it from my rabbi, at least they would know it was kosher.

Come home little rabbi! Everybody misses you. We’ll take up a collection at the temple and buy you a ticket to Brazil, and you can go on the lam down there for a few years until things blow over in New York, like Steve McQueen. That way you can wear Hawaiian shirts and drink capirinhas with the naked girls on Ipanima Beach instead of having to swelter in a hot cell in Sing-Sing with a convicted rapist for a roommate. Then, when you come back, we can open a private equity firm on Park Avenue and make an honest living. Love, 200motels

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August 14, 2009

The New York Publishing Disaster of 2009

If knowledge is power, then idiocy reigns supreme. Right now, New York is ruled by idiocy. I realize that in the politically correct world of today it is unkind to make fun of idiots, with so many of them running around free and in positions of authority, and that it would be unfair to state that the New York establishment is entirely composed of imbeciles, but the aggregate whole is ruled by the dynamics of idiocy.

As Galileo learned, you can get in a world of trouble for stating the obvious, and I don’t expect to hear the end of this anytime soon, but an unavoidable tentacle of this power of nullity reaches right into my living room in the form of New York Magazine, to which my girlfriend has for years been receiving a free subscription, do not ask me why. It pollutes my consciousness, destroys my spiritual equilibrium and throws my life out of balance.

I have never read an issue of New York Magazine where I didn’t end up more confused and ignorant after I read it than before. Last week they published a puff piece on Madonna that I am still trying to figure out what was the point of the article.

Madonna is for me dead letter. I used to adore her for her gilt crucifixes, her smutty sexuality and the inspiration of some of her arrangements, like “La Isla Bonita”. She grew up into a responsible middle class matron and her music degenerated into a kind of generic dance rhythm dominated by engineering sound effects. The money went to her head and she became the lady of the manor. She started making out with women onstage in a desperate attempt to remain contemporary. She tried to manufacture an English accent, like a drunk in a New Jersey seaside bar. She latched onto every fad that passed by: lesbianism, vegetarianism, kabala, African kids, baseball players, like a marketing focus group run amok. This mess seems to be working. Madonna still sells concert tickets. I suppose she must need the money because caroming around like a freakin pinball must require a fortune.

This vacuous behavior must be the motivation for New York Magazine to devote yet another lengthy article to her, because Madonna’s current music is totally moribund and without redeeming artistic merit. One song is indistinguishable from the next.

That must be the attraction for New York Magazine, which kills any subject it touches with its anodyne approach to life in the City. Basically, anything approaching personality is tuned out in order to avoid disrupting the social rhythm of Prospect Park stay-at-home mothers, to whom it eternally panders with features about healthy food and family life, the exact things I moved to New York to avoid confronting. New York Magazine promotes a kind of psychic Disneyland place that never existed except in the minds of half-wit rubes, who flood into the city to partake of wholesome fun, and then have their trips ruined when they run into unreconstituted pricks like me.

I say, let’s go back to the old way, where you could walk to the back of a bodega and score a quarter ounce of decent weed; where nobody wished you “good morning” or “have a nice day”; where making eye contact was for psychos and perverts.

What is this shit about eye contact? It’s a hick concept. George W. Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and thought he could see into his soul. What he really saw was Putin calculating to what extent he could fleece him. I once had an employer who would castigate me because I would not give him eye contact. Frankly, I would have preferred to do eye contact with a freakin sheepdog. At least the dog has the decency to look away. More intelligent! Anyway, this particular boss later revealed himself to be a thief, a liar, a forger of legal documents and a general idiot, which I already knew. Enough already with the freakin eye contact!

New York Magazine has learned nothing from the current economic depression. They still slavishly worship anybody with money, no matter what he did to get it. For years I retched at their glowing admiratory pieces about freakin captains of industry like Bernard Madoff, John Thain, Henry Paulson and all the other holy capitalists ordained by Providence to show us the way to the Promised Land of More Money, but these guys’ ranks are thinning out due to bankruptcy, SEC investigations, grand jury indictments and long prison sentences. Imagine, less than a year ago Madoff was one of New York Magazine’s pantheon of eternal gods, until the tide receded and he was discovered to be swimming without drawers.

But even though the field of rich guys has narrowed and the ones who are left are being shown up for lazy, useless thieves on a daily basis, it still hasn’t discouraged New York Magazine from pandering to its core audience of stylistically challenged sycophants, for whom money is the cure for whatever ails you.

[My girlfriend wants to know why I keep writing these nasty, insulting stories about useless New York media. Well, I’ll tell you why! After a lifetime of having their wishy-washy reactionary opinions shoved down my throat and no way to object, I am now able, grace of the internet, to strike back. The New York Times, New York Magazine, Rupert Murdoch, shove it up the place where the sun never shines!]

Now that Obama’s in, New York Magazine has focused on the rich guys in his cabinet. These rubes are just mirror image of the last gang of Republican stooges that robbed everything in sight and cleaned out the whole country. Robert Rubin, Paulson, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers blah blah blah. They were not trained to perform any useful function in society that requires work. Work? Never heard of it! Finally, everybody else having been served Wells letters of investigation by the SEC, which itself is under investigation, the latest rich guy for New York Magazine to profile in adoring detail is Steven Rattner, whose main claim to fame is that he kissed butt all the way to the top as a yes-man for the last generation of thieving pricks and then started his own private equity firm. He managed to recruit some big investors to capitalize his own firm to the tune of a few billion dollars and front-loaded himself a few hundred million bucks in commissions. That’s it. The money is not performing at all. The only difference between him and Madoff is that at least he can account for where the money presently is, but that could change too any day, I would surmise.

This Steven Rattner is one of Obama’s geniuses, whom the president brought in to reorganize the car industry, his job being to convince the other private equity chiselers to accept 15 cents on the dollar for distressed debt that they bought for 12 cents on the dollar instead of the 100 cents on the dollar that they were insisting on. Big deal! For this they’re calling him a genius.

He was forced to resign as Obama’s car czar when it was discovered that he was playing footsie with another group of thieves who controlled the New York State Pension Fund, having run out of legitimate patsies to invest in his own useless enterprise. Now he’s radioactive, and his own gang of creeps doesn’t want him around anymore, so he’s holed up in his $50 million vacation home in Martha’s Vineyard, waiting for things to shake out.

The most glowing recommendation Rattner got in the New York profile was from his old girlfriend, none other than Judith Miller, who herself got thrown off The New York Times for acting as an enthusiastic tool of the Bush administration and publishing false front-page accounts of Iraqi WMDs. She called Rattner “brilliant”. A “brilliant” recommendation from a worn-out, deluded, reactionary nut job like Judith Miller is exactly the reference you don’t need, unless your aim is to function in a totally dysfunctional environment, which is the one we are experiencing now.

I killed myself working all my life and managed to stay out of trouble for the most part. I always hoped that I would at least get a break that would let me earn a few bucks, but I don’t have the qualities that New Yorkers admire i.e. I’m not crooked enough. Thieves don’t trust me (gee, I wonder why!). But I never considered devoting my entire waking existence to butt kissing, chiseling and stealing like these Wall Street sharpies. They’re like a fanatical cult of larcenous morons who have come to nothing and brought the whole world down with them, and I have always resented them pushed in my face as examples of virtuous social munificence. Rattner now claims he wants to go to Washington and work for the public good. He mentions Secretary of the Treasury as a job he would be qualified for. Like Paulson? Like Stephen Friedman, the recent New York Fed chairman who was forced to resign when he was discovered to be trading in shares of Goldman Sachs, his old firm, when he was supposed to be supervising their activities? All of these unsavory characters have ties to Goldman Sachs, as New York Magazine pointed out in a recent glowing report on that bank.

It’s all very charming to be involved in a massive racketeering enterprise that steals until there is nothing left, that destroys the economy of the whole world and then pays itself $33 billion in performance bonuses like a Three Stooges movie, all the while being cheered on by New York Magazine, but ultimately it’s going to rebound, when entire states are living out of their cars and eating from community food pantries, and when one-sixth of the population does not have access to basic medical care. People have so far been good-natured about being fleeced and sheared like sheep, but they will inevitably run out of patience. All it takes is one good speech, like a William Jennings Bryan “Cross of Gold” speech, to ignite a furious social explosion of venom and revulsion.

Admittedly, it’s tough to put out a weekly general interest magazine. People are not that interesting. Not only that, but New York Magazine has painted itself into a corner by adhering to extremely narrow parameters of interest. Humor, they don’t do. Culture, in only a very diluted general WASP context. The Obama years just seem to be shaping up as more of what has come before, and that may seem reassuring to some, but as the tectonic plates of society continue to grate against each other, the heat and dislocation they will ultimately produce may ultimately render tedious general interest publications like New York redundant or even obsolete. Maybe…

Are the times a-changin’? Evidently not that much. New York Magazine is still finding raggedy pop stars and collapsed capitalists to profile, affirming the perfunctory social attitudes of the processed masses and boring others of us to distraction. It bores me and it offends me. When New York Magazine started out, it was really fresh and cool, like an upscale, glossy Village Voice. But now it is a dessicated sociological relic, like Madonna. It’s no longer about New York. It’s about MONEY in New York. The Voice is also redundant, having become totally politically correct, where it was once totally insurrectionary. Now it also exists only as a tedious general interest rag.

Where did New York Magazine go wrong? The same as New York City went wrong. What has it finally come to? Culture and entertainment only exist as functions of money. The idea of having a free spirit and living life every single day like Holly Golightly (or like my girlfriend, I am proud to say) is dead, when all people can think about is how much money they are going to have in 20 years’ time. In historical times geniuses flooded into New York for inspiration and to express their art, up to and including Madonna! Now that life has degenerated into a bloody balance sheet for financial managers and thieves, who is left to take the place of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker? Judith Miller? Madoff and his gang of financial schmucks?

Have we really come to this? Are we really just a function of our bank statements and corporate balance sheets? If life imitates art, shouldn’t we make a move to regain control of our focus?

Trying to figure out what happened to New York Magazine after its brilliant start in the 1960s is like trying to figure out what went wrong with the world. What happened to The Village Voice, which for many years was the vanguard of the revolution and the hipsters’ bible (when they could still read ha-ha), only to evolve into a tiresome, humorless, politically correct advertising circular owned by a company in Scottsdale, AZ?

What happened first? Did the population first go lame followed by the press, or vise-versa? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Sometimes I feel like I’m living a live version of the British TV series “Absolutely Fabulous”, where pot-smoking, vodka swilling Eddy and Patsy are constantly hounded to the point of distraction by Eddy’s prim, politically correct teenage daughter, Saffy. Well, now Saffy has grown up into a tortuous, insufferable mature plague of a conventional hierarchical middle-aged prick who has entirely backslid into a contemporary version of the old conformity and is determinedly dragging the world down with her as she tries to shoehorn herself into a version of shopworn conformity.

What’s the alternative? To grow old like Paul McCartney, unhappy and disillusioned, having to pay off Heather Mills a queen’s ransom to get her off his back so he can smoke a joint in peace? Or, worse still, like legendary Cream drummer Ginger Baker, who’s crippled from a spinal disease and choking from emphysema, wondering aloud whether God is intentionally keeping him alive just so he can suffer and repent his past intemperate behavior? Really, you have to wonder, what is the point of it all?

Ultimately, in my view, the point is art, which is the celebration of human existence, and that’s where New York is failing on every level. It’s an insidious, invidious marketing mechanism to sell advertising and create shareholder value, and if there existed any truth in the world, it would be labeled as such.

October 15 - OK, now I know how New York Magazine got to be such a turgid mess and such a poor excuse for a New York publication. It turns out that it is owned by the recently deceased Wall Street money guy Bruce Wasserstein. No wonder it worships money so much. Don't blame me for not keeping track of who owns what, but that explains a lot, OK?

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August 14, 2009

Town Hall Drunks

I once had a friend named Lenny, who was the leader of a fifties cover band called the Jets that played at the Yakkety Yak Club. Lenny was a cool guy and a very charming person. He was also a little bit of a lush, y’know? By the third set he could be counted on to be half in the bag.

One night Lenny was in the men’s room having a leak when he got involved in a conversation with the fellow at the next urinal. When he turned to the guy to make a point he pissed on the guy’s leg and the guy broke his jaw.

These town hall rubes who are disrupting and breaking up community meetings on health insurance reform remind me a little bit of Lenny, but they are not anywhere near as charming and good-natured as he was, and they sure can’t sing and play “Don’t Be Cruel”. Nevertheless, with their incoherent, hysterical diatribes about socialism and death panels they are pissing all over our leg.

I am not here to debate the merits of universal health insurance. That is a given. I am complaining about the lunatic fringe of society – loudmouth sociopaths who are being bussed around the country and paid cash money by insurance companies to do what they do best, scream and yell vindictively and inflict their freakin country values on the industrialized world.

Nobody outside their little wacky circle of friends cares what they think. Nobody is trying to take away their health insurance. They complain that they shouldn’t have to contribute to a national plan, but meantime the rest of us have been paying school taxes to educate these citizens’ idiotic offspring (to what result?) and have never complained about that.

People in New York have been paying a fortune in taxes which goes toward subsidizing idiot people throughout New York state and beyond, and these morons have never shown the least amount of gratitude to us, but we don’t constantly complain, even though we don’t care about them at all. All my life I have been paying taxes to educate other people’s idiot offspring and keep yokels in Biloxi, Mississippi, afloat, to subsidize Bush’s ridiculous Iraq comedy, and now I need something, health insurance. Since all the good industrial jobs went abroad, I have been working in offices with a bunch of lazy nitwits, sometimes with health insurance and sometimes not. The stress of it gave me an irregular heartbeat, and it is only by scheming and gaming the system that I have so far succeeded out staying out of trouble. I am too young for Medicare and not poor enough for Medicaid. I need normal coverage. I don’t care about the convoluted reasoning presented by the entrenched interests and parroted by their paid agitators. Quit jerking me around!

Right now New York is going through hard times. Things would be a whole lot easier if we didn’t have to pull a trainload of idiots and nutcases behind us. Basically, New York would be a lot happier if we could be our own country with our own flag (a Yankees flag!) and our own passport. More exclusive! We could set things up the way we want without a gang of cretinous morons inflicting their hick sensibilities on us. I’d vote for that!

It’s like a marriage that’s not working out. I had a conversation with this Texan who inherited a lot of money but not a lot of intelligence. He told me, “Poor people have to accept that it’s their destiny to be poor”. Easy for him to say. He expected me to agree with him, because for a long time that type of thinking has been the default position. I told him that to my way of thinking Willie Nelson is the greatest living Texan, which didn’t impress him too much. In his part of Texas they don’t admire ol’ Willie too much. Fuck ‘em!

Every time I see one of those red state suckers, I want to shoot the television. Fortunately, in New York we have got gun control, so it keeps me from inflicting damage on myself or anybody else. The rest of the country doesn’t have gun control, much less mouth control.

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August 05, 2009

Cash For Trash

Anybody who is the least bit conversant in world finance (and who can afford not to be, given the current economic conjuncture?) knows that the Cash for Clunkers program was developed in Germany and has been running there since the beginning of the year. It is responsible for keeping the German automotive industry afloat, as well as components manufacturers throughout Eastern Europe that feed into the German supply chain.

It's an expensive program. Germany, with a population one-quarter that of the US, has already run through $10bn, but it's a lot cheaper thatn letting that country's car industry wither and rot on the vine, with all the attendant social problems that would entail.

Obama was very clever to adopt an American version but he didn't do the arithmatic correctly. If Germany has spent $10bn, the equivalent American figure needed to achieve an equivalent result would be not $1bn, which was budgeted, but $40bn. One billion dollars? What were these geniuses smoking? I'm sorry, Obama is a very smart guy - for a college kid. A group photo of him and his cabinet looks like the Dorks & Wonks Club. Between all these geniuses together, they have never had a real job in their entire lives.

Not that the Republicans are any better. They are the party of no: no talent, no brains, no ideas. They are a bunch of sickos who should be committed to the mental hospital on Ward's Island. Never mind those idiots. In this instance we are talking about the present administration, who between all of them could not extrapolate the result of the car subsidy program even though the German results were public knowledge. All the information they needed could have been obtained by just looking at any one of a thousand European business web sites.

This is supposed to be the information society. Obama is supposed to be the internet president. So why don't they look around a little bit and figure out what they need to know?

Using the internet intelligently, you can find out in real time everything that is happening in Bogota, Berlin and Bombay. All of their people know everything that is happening here. Mexicans all know our baseball scores. So why is it a one-way street? How come the world knows so much about us and we know so little about them?

It is costing us market share, and it is forcing us to reinvent the wheel every time we are forced to innovate new solutions to adapt to modern reality. American interest in the world stops at the US border. This is an oversimplification, naturally, but there is a lot of truth to it. The only other country that seems to count at all for most Americans is the UK, because it's no stretch to figure out what they're saying. We feed off of them and they feed off of us. It's like having sex with your sister, which produces congenital morons. Our banking system collapsed together. We frittered away our industrial base in tandem, chasing the illusion of a service economy, while the Europeans and the Asiatics voraciously scooped up all the opportunities and got rich.

As a very smart professor wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, any country that sheds its manufacturing capacity is committing economic suicide. That the WSJ would report that as news shows how divorced our current economic thinking has become from reality.

Things have deteriorated for that they are past the point of no return. You could probably recruit serious business people with commercial experience to upgrade government administration, but the dead wood currently working at government jobs would certainly reject them. Once, when there was nothing else happening, I accepted a temp assignment to update the database at Housing Preservation & Development for three months, and it was an abomination, with employees sleeping at their desks for hours at a time, reading trash novels, coming in stoned at 11:00 AM, and adamantly refusing to work. The supervisors, who all held their jobs for no other reason than that they had obtained bogus graduate degrees in freakin government administration, blocaded themselves in their offices and never came out. This whole mess was presided over by Shaun Donovan, who is now Secretary of HUD in Washington, one of Obama's whiz kids. The reason New Yorkers are rather decently housed is because of the enormous amounts of money consecrated to the effort, not due to any administrative talent that the government is bringing to bear, let me tell you!

If I was pressed for a solution to this country's economic situation, I would oblige Obama to carry through on his campaign promise to eliminate tax breaks for corporations doing business overseas. That way we could at least begin to steal back some of the jobs that were stolen from us.

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August 05, 2009

Cash For Clunkers

This Cash For Clunkers program, which is a stimulus program for selling new cars, is a German concept that they have been running since the beginning of the year. It has been wildly successful in Germany and has kept the German automotive industry running at full capacity not only in Germany but in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and every other country that subcontracts parts for German car manufacturing.Germany, with a population 1/4 as large as the U.S., has already sunk $10bn into the scheme, but that is a bargain, considering the alternative of letting their industry wither and rot on the vine.

The strategy has been so successful that the French picked up on it as well, and French cars are also blowing out of the showrooms.

My question is this: if the Cash for Clunkers program is such a documented success why has the Obama administration made such a botched-up mess of it? Why did they only allocate $1bn to a program that, given the size of our market, could reasonably be expected to need up to $40bn of funding to achieve an equivalent result? Why has the Dept. of Transportation bureauracy performed like a clunker itself, clutching and stalling in processing voucher applications and keeping dealers in suspense as to whether the applications would be accepted, like a car running on empty?

Considering that this is the only stimulus program yet devised that is showing dramatic and immediate results in igniting an essential component of the economy, why are the Republicans trying to kill it? Why is the liberal wing of the Democratic congress, working in tandem with the Republicans, threating to derail the program by claiming that it does not go far enough in promoting energy conservation? Do they really intend to kill the only stimulus program that shows promise of fulfilling its objective?

Now that Obama is on the verge of crashing through with a really effective program for jump-starting the auto industry, the Republicans are all of a sudden converted to increasing gas mileage by trying to shut the scheme down on the grounds that its gas mileage savings are not ambitious enough. This is pure politics and blatant hypocracy, coming from a party whose slogan for the last election was "Drill Baby Drill!" The Republicans are trying to do the same thing to Obama that they did to Clinton and Jimmy Carter before him - slash his tires, break his taillights and pour sugar down his gas tank.

This broken-down heap of a government is about as far from full performance as a 1956 Edsel. I'd like to trade all these bums in for something that really runs, but I can't get no traction because all four tires, Obama, the House, the Senate and the bureaucracy, are bald!

No, they're flat. How does Obama expect the public to trust him to re-design healthcare whan he can't even run an automobile junkyard? The healthcare system is already a freakin gas guzzler, costing double of what other countries are spending and getting half the performance, but who is going to let Obama get under the hood if he demonstrates that his dipstick is not touching the oil?

Obama is giving the Republicans too much traction. A couple of months ago they were set to be towed away, but now they have repossessed themselves and they are getting back in the race. Nobody needs that!

Basically, Obama has missed the bus. He should get in front with this car financing scheme and jam the accelerator. Since nobody in this country seems to know that it is a foreign idea, he should get back in the driver's seat and claim credit for being the genius who engineered it, and promise that the rebate program will continue until every gas-guzzling piece of garbage on the road is replaced with something that rolls!

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August 02, 2009

Animalción - Akumal Beach Resort

The airport loudspeaker blared my name as I ran through the terminal holding my pants up with my free hand as I struggled to keep my carry-on bag from falling off my shoulder. The belt of my pants trailed behind my butt like the tail of a dejected dog.

“Last call for 200motels. Please report to gate 40. Your flight is ready for take-off.”I bounded up a long escalator and around a curb as the airport gates flew by. “200motels. Last call”. At last I caught sight of Magpie standing forlornly in front of the gate counter. She was the last passenger to board, and she had insisted that the flight attendant page me over the PA. I ran up to her, clutching my pants. The flight attendant impatiently waved us past.

“What the hell happened to you”, Magpie exclaimed insistently. “You said you were just going outside for a smoke”. We rushed down the corridor to the door of the plane. A pilot passing in the other direction said, “Glad you made the flight”.

I explained breathlessly, “When I tried to go through the security gate they stopped me for the suntan lotion and the bug repellant that you packed in my carry-on bag”.

“Omigod, you’re right! I forgot. You can’t take liquids or lotions on the plane”.

“Yeah, so they told me I had to throw it out, and I was arguing that I didn’t want to”.

“Well, that was stupid”.

“That stuff was brand new. We need them. It seemed like a total waste. Now we have to buy them again.
That’s what was taking so long. The security guy told me that if I insisted on keeping the sunblock I could go back to the check-in counter and put the carry-on through with the checked baggage, so I went back through the security to the front of the terminal and tried to check it through, but they told me I was too late. So I had to return to the security checkpoint, throw out the sunblock and the bug repellant and go through the metal detector again. It took a long time, and then I didn’t realize how far the distance was from the metal detectors to the airplane gate.”

“Well”, she said as we arrived at our seats, “you almost ruined the whole vacation for twenty bucks’ worth of sunblock and bug repellant”.

“Yeah, but now we have to buy them again in Mexico for a lot more money”.

The Akumal Beach Resort lay baking in the Caribbean sun like a smoldering tinderbox, which is not such a flight of rhetoric since the whole place is based on ancient palapa architecture, with thatched roofs. Recently both the reception and the main bar had to be rebuilt from scratch after burning down. The resort faces out on a pristine bay of aqua water, which hardly mitigates the broiling July sun. The ocean temperature is about 25^o C (80^o F), and hardly any relief at all. The pool is actually worse than being in the sun. It’s like boiling in a pot of soup.

The water in the ocean is a little bit cooler a couple of feet beneath the surface, and I found that I could get some relief by scooping the cooler water up into my chest and face using my hands. Even the fish didn’t like it. They hid in cool places inside the coral formations during the height of the intense, searing heat. Nevertheless, the coral formations were truly luxurious and even worn places were regenerating everywhere with enthusiastic vitality, as Magpie and I snorkeled our way through an enchanting petrified forest of green brains, purple fans, fields of swaying sea grass, huge piles of collapsed brown log structures with leaves and cactus shapes growing out of them. Fabulous fantasy sea creatures in designer shapes and colors darted past us into secret, hidden worlds of obscurity, going about their business like the harried White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland. Overhead, squadrons of pelicans glided silently on air currents like unmanned drones, barely flapping their wings for minutes or even for hours, while frigate birds patrolled the higher altitudes. The charm of the place was all the more poignant when you consider that just that morning we had departed the awful, claustrophobic ecology of New York, where nature is bent hopelessly out of shape, and a creature of beauty is a rare phenomenon indeed (this writer excepted).

Magpie and I swam out about a kilometer to where the waves were breaking over the reef. The sea was extremely shallow at that point and the coral was damaged from being bleached by the sun’s rays. The place was inhabited by huge black sea urchins that perched menacingly on coral shelves, their foot-long spikes quivering with rage as if to say: “Don’t even think about parking here!” We got out of there and never returned.

Back on land, all the bartenders remembered us (big surprise!). Basically, I use foreign trips as extended language lessons, which is why I only care about places that speak French or Spanish. France is a wonderful country and my trips there are tax deductible because of my work, but Latin America is the most amusing on account of the rollicking nature of the people, who love a wild good time. Me too, I love to party and I am always coming up with laff lines to accompany my wild drinking binges. My jokes live on long after I have departed, and when I returned to Akumal Beach Resort, I was confronted with a lot of my own gags, which the bartenders repeated back to me:

“Have you seen my friend Al?”
“Al who?”
“Al carajo!” (fuck you).

“The reason women call me Snowman is because I have an ice cream dick and two ice cubes for balls” (it sounds funnier in Spanish).

I do an imitation of a parrot where I squawk “Polly don’t want no stinking cracker. Polly wanna reefer!”

“Women don’t like piña colada. They prefer pinga colgada” (swinging dick).

Then I got my impression that I do of Fidel Castro: “Imperialista yanqui tool mutherfucker! Cuba sí Libre no! (Cuba Libre is a cocktail of rum and coke)” I scream. “The reason that there are clouds in the sky is that Fidel has been smoking an extremely elevated quality of Mexican marijuana in his cigar for fifty years!” A joke like that wouldn’t get you far in commie Cuba, where the whole second tier of the politburo got sacked for making Fidel jokes recently, but it’s also not beneficial to your health in capitalist Dominican Republic, where the secret police sent a guy around to spy on me and search my room when I was having too good a time at the Amsa Resort in Sosúa. Whatever kind of idiocy freakin Bill O’Reilly might feed the American public about the imminent demise of Mexico, it’s not happening. Mexico has got a 16,000 year pre-Columbian civilization, 400 years of Spanish elegance and a hundred years of capitalism, and it is at least as resilient and comprehensive as the US or Europe, OK? I’ll take my chances with Mexico before I’ll bet on either Cuba or the DR.

As it happened, the day after we arrived was my birthday, and my friend Alma Garcia, who was the social director, arranged to bake me a cake, which I shared with the other guests and staff. That night, after a spectacular dance entertainment put on by the resort’s “Animación” staff in its ultra-modern theater, Alma called me onstage with a staff member and a little kid who also had birthdays, and the audience sang us “Happy Birthday” while one of the dancers poured me repeated shots of tequila, which I was forced to endure, and only after did Alma oblige me to give a speech in Spanish and English, which I accomplished OK. I must have done real fine, because I was a big hit with the other guests at the bar later that night.

I made friends with a group of teenagers from Boston who did not look old enough to drink but were certainly able to do a fine job of holding their liquor. I gave them a very hard time about Boston sports teams and they didn’t seem to mind, but I think I went too far when I gave them my web site, which has a lot of provocative, not to say insulting, things about Boston. They must have looked at it and taken it personally, because after that friendly encounter they never came around again.

That same night, this young girl, Sandra, with big tits, came sniffing around me at the bar. She was from San Luis Obispo CA, and she was traveling with her mother, who was no ball of fire, let me tell you! Since she had just seen my birthday party on stage, Sandra couldn’t resist the impulse to ask me my age. I told her, “Since I’m from New York, any figure that I gave you would be a lie anyway”. Sandra was rather amusing for about the first 15 minutes, until she started telling me about her life. After that, forget it! To make a long story short, if a kid is living in an affluent, liberal household on the California coastline and she has her own car and money, why the hell does she need to be in analysis?

I didn’t say it like that. What do I care? I just told her, I’m not interested in analysis. I knew a guy in New York publishing who saw a shrink for 25 years, and when his career went south he had to ditch the shrink, leave New York and take a job as a ski instructor in Killington VT for $8 an hour. He didn’t appear any the worse for it, though he was a dork to begin with. Idiots of America! Learn to be happy with your idiot status. You were destined to be jerks, deal with it, OK?

When Sandra decided that I wasn’t interested in playing “I’m OK You’re OK” she kind of lost interest. Maybe if I would have shown a little more enthusiasm she would’ve given me a piece of something more seductive than pineapple birthday cake. When I was a kid, and women’s backsides essentially ruled my waking hours (and sleeping hours), I would have feigned fascination at her every thought. Unfortunately, my tolerance for women’s minds has declined proportional to my hormone levels. My fascination for women is at the stage where it reminds me of the guy who asks the girl to dance, and when she refuses he tells her, “I guess I can forget about the blowjob too?” It’s a good thing political correctness came along, because at least it keeps me relatively civil in mixed company (yeah, right!).

Akumal means “Place of the Turtles” in Mayan language, and this is where the giant sea tortoises come aground in the moonlight to deposit their eggs on the beach. They dig furrows in the sand, but since the tortoises themselves are the size of European automobiles, they don’t leave little holes, but rather huge moon craters which resemble defensive military foxholes from the Battle of the Bulge, which are duly identified with little hand-painted signs and covered with palm fronds as per conservancy regulations, to protect the species.

These craters dot the whole length of Akumal Beach and are of interest to the visitors, who await the birth of the baby turtles, but they are of particular interest to the boozy, half-wit Loco Gringo cult of flyover country idiots who keep in touch by way of posting idiot messages to each other on locogringo.com and make the ABR Moonrise Bar their club headquarters. To say that they are not too freakin smart would be to overstate the situation – they’re dumb as doorknobs. They bring their own insulated cups down with them from Alberta because those cups hold more beer, and that way they don’t have to make so many trips to the bar, which is ten feet away, duh! Trying to hold a conversation with these nitwits is like trying to teach Braille to Helen Keller, only you don’t receive an equivalent level of attention from them than you would get from teaching computer keystrokes to a trained ape.

Just to bug them, I played them a few bars on my harmonica, which they didn’t particular feature either. These flyover rubes don't like anything about me at all. Hey, you can't please everybody!

If east is east and west is west, then the opposite pole of the axis is the Italian Parenthood Brigade, who zoom around the grounds pushing expensive baby strollers loaded with their precious charges. I never saw such dedicated progenitors. All these Italian parents’ waking hours were dedicated to fussing over their offspring. First papa would take the little boy and mamma would take the little girl. Then the parents would quarrel about how they were handling the kids. Then whey would exchange kids and quarrel some more. I’ll say this though, the kids were extremely well behaved. No temper fits like New York kids, whose parents have other things on their minds than micromanaging children. With the excessive, not to say compulsive attention paid to Italian children by their parents, it’s impossible for the little darlings to even get a word in edgewise under any circumstances.

Nevertheless, with all the loving attention and service Italians receive from their parents, it’s no wonder many of them choose to remain at home with them well into middle age, if not beyond. Seen in this light, the young parents so intently pushing their baby carriages around Akumal Beach Resort, when they could just as well be swimming in the ocean and flirting at the open bar could be the heroic propagators of the noble race that produced Cato, Cicero and Puccini.

Speaking for myself, I would prefer to be cruising the Italian beauties, fashionably toned and attired in luxuriantly scanty bikinis. In this I am following the example of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who, preferring not to fade away like an old-fashioned nonno (grandpa), is determined to go down swinging, with a pile money and a medicine cabinet stuffed with cases of Viagra, and more power to him. Just that week he was exposed again to be entertaining sweet young things in the official prime minister’s residence in Rome and onboard his extravagant yacht in Sardinia, as well he should. The girls themselves, anticipating a big payout, delivered photos and sound recordings taken with their phones to opposition newspapers. Berlusconi, in a flamboyant display of Italian style, denounced the whole campaign as a communist plot, energetically riposted that “I’m no angel” and sanctimoniously promised to atone by visiting the shrine of his patron saint.

Naturally, I was loving every part of it, jamming my arm forward in an Italian salute and teasing Italian staff members by exclaiming “Forza Italia”, which used to be the name of Berlusconi’s political party until he changed it to reflect his current social respectability, if you can qualify it as that. At least, in Berlusconi, you have blatant sexual potency, even if it comes out of bottle so what? The motivation is still there to project a hot shot into some beautiful young girls. I know I would do the same thing if I had any money and I didn’t have my girlfriend, Magpie, watching me like an eagle hawk. Interviewed on the street, Italian women professed complete indifference to the proclivities of their national leader, preferring to base their dissatisfaction on the state of the current economic conjuncture. Compare that with the US or Britain, where any sexual indiscretion is treated as a cardinal sin, and where the idiotic South Carolina governor felt compelled to go before the cameras to cry like a baby to convince the half-wit voters that he was mortified at his own purely normal masculine instincts, which led him to abandon his wooden cigar store Indian of a wife and fuck his brains out down in Buenos Aires with a hot tamale broad wearing French lingerie. Hell, I would have cried too, from the joy of having my crank yanked to the plaintive musical accompaniment of Carlos Gardel’s tango stylings! You can’t fault Berlusconi’s taste in women. The hookers and starlets he messes around with are HOT HOT HOT, a far cry from ol’ fatso Monica Lewinsky and her pathetic rag of a blue denim Gap dress that Bill Clinton spewed his rocks over, which was minutely scrutinized, millimeter by millimeter, by the notoriously inept FBI crime lab, which itself has since been exposed for flubbing results in 50% of its criminal cases.

Anyway, Viva Berlusconi! He’s doing a fine job of upholding Italian manhood, or anyway part of it. I’d like to do the same here in the States, but the vaginocracy has got the men’s balls locked in a vise, so much so that men’s voices have gone up a couple of octaves in the last generation. You think I’m kidding? Just turn on the TV. All the metrosexual men are singing soprano, while the women are talking baritone, or even tenor, denoting a clear shift in animal dominance. Who is to blame for this erosion of masculine prerogative? Well, obviously, the men themselves, who have thrown up the white flag in the hope of getting a little sleep. But a large share of the blame resides with Hollywood, and this nonsense had been going on for along time. People are not smart. They are stoopid, and they believe what they read in their worthless newspapers and television. A long time ago the movie and production companies looked at their surveys and determined that the female dollar was driving the market. Out went male stars like Gary Cooper, Robert Mitchum and Steve McQueen and in came Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise, who dances on Doprah Winfrey’s boring sofa. These guys are basically on the fruit salad side of things. The male audience, seeing that this was what the females were responding to, decided to shoehorn themselves into these stereotypes.

Hey, this is my analysis. This is my web site. You don’t like it? Go fuck yourselves. Anyway, if it wasn’t for Berlusconi screwing starlets in the Pitti Palace, we men wouldn’t have any leadership at all whatsoever. Unfortunately, I am in no position to lead the charge. Also, if my girlfriend found out, she would kill me.

Never mind that. With all the Italian mammas and papas charging around the Akumal Beach Resort, pushing baby strollers like compulsive nut jobs from an old Claude Tati French comedy movie, it started to take on the form of a Formula One car race in my demented brain as I pushed back an ever increasing volume of tequila shots at the bar. That would be the ticket, I thought, to increase apathetic guest participation in group activities. Strap the kid into the stroller, put a helmet on it, and let the parents’ competitive instincts come to the fore with a few circuits around the pool. “Gentlemen, start your engines!” The guy waves the flag, and all the baby carriages roar into the fray, with pit stops for changing diapers and baby formula refills!

Why stop there? Why not bring the event to New York for a 26-mile Baby Bumper Death Race 2000? You certainly got a lot of wacko parents in the City! As it is, you take your life in your hands just strolling down 86th Street, with all the nutso broads running over you with freakin babies. This way, at least, these dorks would be able to raise a few bucks on the side by selling advertising space on the strollers to sponsors like Gerbers Baby Food and Pampers. Watch out going around the turns, though, the pile-ups could get nasty, with babies catching fire and getting thrown from their vehicles.

Have another drink, man!

Ok, so a lot of people might complain about babies getting crushed in stroller collisions. I got an alternative plan: a baby carriage regatta, where the parents sedately push their little bundles of joy around the pool while spectators sip frozen drinks and admire their progeny. “And here’s number five, little Umberto Biaggio, two years old, from Bari, Italy. How about a nice hand for little Umberto, whose father is an engineer for Finamecchanica and his mother is an office manager for Parmalat!” That would at least reduce the competitive impulses down to who’s got the cutest kid. But even so, you would have to be careful about a riot breaking out from the emotional Italian parents whose babies lost the beauty contest.

As I continued to drink during the week, my concepts kept evolving freakier and freakier. I wouldn’t exactly say I was deteriorating into delirium tremens, but I was definitely having visions of freakin sugar plum fairies dancing in my head. The way it happened is that my girlfriend, Magpie, has a talent for attracting the lamest possible company. She trapped me when I first met her by pretending she actually knew something, but as time wore on her veneer of sophistication wore off, and by the time I realized what had happened, I found that I had gotten involved with a conventional, normal woman! Not that she isn’t loveable and adventurous, but her social attitudes are a big yawn and her friends and acquaintances are like a voyage back through time to an alternate universe of conformity and correct manners that I had heretofore (and happily) been able to dodge my entire life.

Now, these two Hungarian girls had glommed onto her, and I was forced to endure an endless lesson of Eastern European political correctness, which was a stultifying comedy of manners. Magpie, who is a mature woman of a certain age, and who (ugh!) loves young people, took the two Magyar princesses under her wing like the maiden aunt in “Gigi”, the ersatz musical that purported to show the life and loves of a young girl in turn of the century Paris. That show was so revolting that its composer, Alan J. Lerner adamantly refused ever to license it for the French stage because he knew what kind of reception it would receive in Paris. That Parisian audience would have pissed on it.

Anyway, Magpie and the two Hungarian girls were having a fine time yakking up the old country, and meantime I’m socking back tequila shots followed with margarita chasers, as is my wont, when they happened on the subject of what a drag it is to pass Christmas in the tropics, without freakin snow and reindeer. At this, my whole life history as a revolting wiseguy compelled me to put in my two cents of nonsense. “No problema”, I injected. “In Mexico, Santa Claus rides a dolphin”.

The three women turned their heads in my direction and shot me a glance that said “What is this asshole doing here?” The fact of me wearing a small Jewish star about the size of a nickel hanging around my neck wasn’t winning me any popularity with these ladies, coming from races that had long ago successfully eradicated any trace of Jews from their national territory, only to be confronted with the worst possible example of that race in me. First of all, I’m from Chicago, where everybody is out of control anyway. I’m a kind of Rahm Emanuel, only without his brainpower. Actually, I have the spirituality of Don Rickles combined with the social consciousness of Jackie Mason with a generous helping of Cheech and Chong thrown in for good measure. I don’t think I’m going to be invited for any kind of symposium on Christian forebeanance any time soon.

Just to make matters worse, Jews don’t like me either. I never got my MA in accountancy. I’m nasty and ugly with a broken nose like a goy. When I got sick of living with Magpie a few years ago, I applied for an immigration visa for Israel and the consulate turned me down cold, until I appealed to the government in Jerusalem and they overruled their New York office, by which time Magpie and I had patched things up and I had found a job, so I never went.

So I’m walking a no-man’s land between gentiles, who detest me, and Jews, who can’t stand me, not a bad place for a writer. Anyway, Hungarians don’t even know who Santa Claus is. In their country he’s called Papi Schnitzel and he rides a tractor! But that got me thinking: how about a line of tropical Christmas cards portraying Santa in a Caribbean setting, wearing his red suit and carrying the bag of toys over his shoulder, only with a REALLY REALLY COOL pair of Speedo wraparound sunglasses and riding on the back of a dolphin, sea turtle or pelican “Feliz Navidad de la Rivera Maya!” I bet that would blow out of the store!

I told my idea to Magpie. “You’re out of your mind, as usual!” she said. But when I bounced the idea off a couple of the Animacion staff, they dug it. So I went back to Magpie. Now she was forced to concede it was a good idea, but she still couldn’t resist the impulse to give me a little dig. “Anyway, it’s already been thought of”. My ass, I thought. Until I got back to New York, and the first thing I saw, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal was a drawing of Santa Claus wearing sunglasses! The story was how the stores are already promoting Christmas in July! Hell, it’s getting harder and harder to be crazy.

Every day the weather got more perfect and the temperature got hotter and hotter. The only thing to do was to go in the water and stay there, which we did for hours on end. At the north end of the bay was the Akumal public beach, which encompassed the turtle preserve and an area reserved for excursion boats. The area was bisected by a 50 ft. channel that gave the boats access to the open sea. There was nothing to prevent swimmers from traversing the boat channel, but one really had to pay attention to the traffic or risk getting run over and ground into hamburger by a propeller. I was leery of swimming across the boat channel, but we finally decided to take the chance.

We were rewarded by a huge, pristine coral formation untouched by human civilization, the kind of coral one might expect to find in much less traveled areas like Belize or Honduras. This preserve was patrolled by a conservation worker in a kayak with Mexican government markings. Magpie and I swam around for an hour or so, marveling at the fantastic colors and shapes that only hundreds of millions of years of natural evolution could create. Rainbow hues of green, pink, purple sculpted into shapes resembling brains, fans, cacti; little isolated grotto scenes accessible only by narrow pathway through the rock, with little critters dashing from one ledge to the next. The warm water, which was close to body temperature, gave an effect of sensory deprivation, and left the swimmer numbly floating in unreality, as though succumbing to an opium dream or a visit to another planet or incoherent state of unreality as far removed from the chaos of modern life as was possible to imagine.

I was roused out of my reverie by the sharp command of a whistle blown by the conservation guard. Looking up out of the water, I saw him pointing to his eyes and then to the buoys and rope designating the boat channel. I wasn’t paying attention to the traffic lane. When Magpie caught up to me, I asked her “Are you ready to cross back?”

She gave me the thumbs up and, first looking in both directions for boat traffic and seeing nothing, I made a dash for the other side. The crossing lasted about a minute, but before I was able to reach the far rope I was distracted by screaming voices behind me. A dive boat that I had not seen because of the rising crest of a wave was barreling through the channel no farther than 20 feet from where I was swimming. The pilot of the boat was screaming in Spanish and, just for good measure, on of the passengers as well, a rather rotund North American woman in a dive suit who, though having nothing to do with the situation in any capacity other than that of a passenger, decided that this was as good an opportunity as any to vent her spleen and give me a piece of her mind. At the same time, Magpie, screaming in my other ear, let loose with, “You idiot!”

OK, I missed seeing the boat because of the waves. On the other hand, it’s also incumbent on these boat pilots not to jam the accelerator so close to shore where they know there might be swimmers. The old broad on the boat screaming at me, what do you expect? When it comes time to assign blame for the financial collapse, we should not forget the emotional and spiritual disequilibrum inflicted by loudmouth, incontinent Anglo-Saxon females.

Nevertheless, the way my own girlfriend jumped on me with both barrels in the middle of the ocean after I had taken her on a fine Caribbean vacation (and all the other nice things I do for her, which nobody has ever done for me) merits some observation about how far people have become removed from the means of production (definition: spoiled).

OK, I’m an idiot. Or worse – in the lexicon of New York womanhood, I’m an asshole. How did I earn the honorific Anglo-Saxon appellation of asshole? Because you’re first designated as an asshole until you kiss ass long enough to appease the satisfaction of your neighbors. I have always lived in large cities for exactly the reason of avoiding public opinion. Imagine my chagrin in finding that neighborly pressure is more exacting in New York, which has always had the reputation for anonymity, than all the other cities I have inhabited. It wasn’t always so. When I first arrived here, I didn’t have to talk to anybody. It’s only when that little prick Rudolph Giuliani became mayor that New Yorkers got in touch with their inner hick. He stimulated the tendency to return New York to village life, more out of a spirit of opportunism than anything else, but he seems to have struck a nerve in New Yorkers to return to a Disney World of small-town America that never existed.

OK, Giuliani got elected on the revulsion of New Yorkers who were sick to death of being terrorized and murdered by junkies and crackheads. Nevertheless, the non-conformist element, including myself, have been pressured into a smaller and smaller ball, like anchovies compressed by the continuing attacks of marauding dolphins. Also, the sense of community that developed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks seems to have made New Yorkers compulsively attentive to each other’s business. Nevertheless, all this public morality and neighborliness hasn’t stopped anybody from stealing, which continues apace.

But idiot and asshole are still badges of honor that I continue to proudly bear as long as the alternative remains to not only conform to a climate of compulsive mediocrity, but to embrace it with fervor, as Winston Smith was forced to endure by the tortures inflicted by Big Brother in “1984”.

Arriving at the other side of the boat channel, I witnessed the return of the sea turtles from open sea, as they glided down the center of the channel like super-jumbo jetliners making their final descent into JFK. For hundreds of millions of years these beauties have been following the same routine, swimming in the ocean, feeding in the tall grass close to shore, burrowing in the sand and laying their eggs in the moonlight, oblivious to economic downturns and the progress of history on the planet, same as the pelicans feeding in the rocky corners of Punta Nizuc. They were here long before the human race evolved and, God willing, they’ll be here after we destroy ourselves – if we don’t drag them down with us, with our PVC and anthrax bombs.

Every time Magpie and I went into the water at Akumal we witnessed some remarkable manifestation of marine life, like the giant manta rays prowling the sea floor, trailing their 15 ft. barbed tails behind them, the school of humungous six-foot parrot fish, with huge heads and mouths big and powerful enough to snap a man’s arm off. Oh, I know, they eat coral. But an animal that size, what if it’s in a bad mood, or you get too close? One can never be sure.

The other spiritual aspect of Akumal Beach Resort, aside from the nature, came from the wonderful nightly entertainment that the Animacion staff put on in the resort’s super hi-tech theater. These were not cheesy lip-synch shows or stupid games, but marvelously sophisticated dancing shows costumed and choreographed by Italian professionals, aided by the most elaborate big screen graphics and technical wizardry available anywhere on the planet, a big change from 20 years ago, when the Yucatan peninsula was little more than just a primitive outpost of thatched huts connected by a single, rutted 2-lane highway.

The conception, design and choreography of the dancing shows displayed a level of artistic professionalism that would have been right at home in New York’s Joyce Theater, but the real miracle was how they shaped a dance troupe from a talented and willing group of untrained young people and developed it into a professional quality show. This was truly amazing, and more real than any Broadway production of “A Chorus Line”. As I marveled at all the sophisticated elements that went into the dancing and the extraordinary physical and emotional discipline that defined the fine performances, reaching even the level of gymnastic excellence associated with LA and Las Vegas, I couldn’t help thinking what a great documentary film could be made about the brutal, disciplined exertion demanded of the dancers.

Actually, the choreographer deserves fantastic recognition for his expertise in shaping these young people into a dance troupe, but the ultimate glory belongs to the dancers themselves, who physically made the whole thing happen by virtue of their talent and application of physical effort.

Magpie and I being habitually early risers, we were usually flaked out by evening. I managed to catch only two shows. The first, the night of my birthday party, was taken from American pop culture, featuring sketches from Michael Jackson, Elvis, Grease, etc. It was beautifully performed by the enthusiastic young Mexican troupe, demonstrating all the familiar touchstones of Hollywood culture. You have to go to a foreign country to understand how thoroughly American commercial culture permeates world sensibility. No wonder there is such resistance, when Michael Jackson is more recognizable to people than the leaders of their own country. Hey, far out! I wish I could get a piece of that action. Cultural imperialism? Call it whatever you want. No question that we try to aggressively peddle our expensive products to make ends meet. The demand for bigger and bigger entertainment values requires an international market to offset production expenses. But that doesn’t explain the voracious demand for American inspiration, which is organic.

The world’s answer came in the second show, which was purely Italian/Mexican in its conception and execution, achieving a plateau of philosophical contemplation that is inaccessible to American consciousness. This ballet, entitled “Humanity”, drew upon Italian and Mexican traditions to interpret all the stages of the human condition, beginning with Birth, where the dancers emerged from cloth sacks representing the womb. Following were sketches representing Youth, Love, Work, War. The most affecting dance for me was Sickness, where the dancer in black, representing Disease, wrested the healthy man away from his sweetheart and tried to enclose him in a box occupied by other black-clad dancers, which represented Death. The healthy man broke out of the box and fought an epic dance battle with the Death Angel, marked by extraordinary martial arts and gymnastic tumbling, ultimately vanquishing him and his satanic cohort. Anybody who has ever recovered from a violent illness can appreciate the spirituality that went into this concept.

The striking ending of the show demonstrated the depth of magic inherent in the rich cultural traditions of Mexico, which embrace the reality of death as another evolution in the wheel of life. The dancers did a little circular march reminiscent of Isadora Duncan or the tribal dances of Les Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, and then lie down to die, using the original cloth sacks from the first scene as funereal shrouds to cover themselves. An angel appeared to lovingly sing over their corpses as the troupe’s most acrobatic dancer mounted cloth curtains as to ascend to heaven, and did an aerial acrobatic routine reminiscent of Cirque de Soleil.

I don’t mind telling the reader, this almost reduced me to tears, the beauty and spirituality of the whole show. It put the whole vacation into perspective a church of nature, wildlife and spiritual wholeness. The charm and sincere hospitality of the hotel staff went far beyond any expectation of a commercial vacation package. Magpie and I are now back in New York City, with all the psychic disruption and disharmony that implies (and also all the attractions and opportunities too, it goes without saying). But we’re thankful for the chance we had to take a deep breath of clean air, commune with the Mayan moon and stars and swim in the emerald sea, with all its lovely denizens of the deep.

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August 01, 2009

Renegade Rabbis

I spent the day at the beach in Fort Tilden in the Rockaways. The girls at Fort Tilden like to go topless, as opposed to the girls on the Brooklyn beaches, who like to show off their butts. These girls should go into conference, like the U.S. Congress, and come up for a uniform dress code for showing off their titties and their butts all at once.

New York girls are naturally exhibitionistic, but they are afraid because they feel nobody will support them. Don’t worry, girls, I will support you. I will fight to the death for your right to show off your titties and your butts anywhere you want, on the subway, in Gristedes, in the public library. Right on!

But what do I care about naked women when all of New York’s rabbis are rotting in jail with just a piece of matzoh and the Talmud for comfort while I am frolicking in the surf with a bunch of naked girls. I was crying, CRYING all day, thinking about the rabbis. Frisbee players were giving me their handkerchiefs to blow my nose, that’s how bad I was crying.

And what did the rabbis do? Nothing! They chiseled a measly few million bucks from a bunch of other thieves. Big freakin deal! And the guy who ratted them out was himself busted for stealing $50 million in a check-kiting racket. Oh, the tragedy, the iniquity of it all!

Meantime, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo released a report that the big Wall Street bankers paid themselves $30 BILLION in bonuses last year as their reward for stealing, driving the banks into insolvency and receiving hundreds of billions of dollars in government money. And where are these mutherfuckers? In jail? OH NO! They are hanging out by their pools in the Hamptons, while the Jewish people of New York have no spiritual leadership, all the rabbis rotting in the Metropolitan Correctional Center with just a piece of matzoh to comfort them.

Enough is enough I say. Either spring the rabbis or put the bankers away. Is this America, is this justice? Let my rabbis go!

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August 01, 2009

Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons

Yesterday Magpie and I went to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, which is very convenient because the beach is only one block from the subway. There is another, much more beautiful beach at Fort Tilden in Rockaway, but lately the ocean has been very rough and swimming there can sometimes be very problematical. Occasionally people drown in the riptides.

So, Brighton Beach is also convenient because the there are a lot of liquor stores. We bring ice and pick up vodka or rum and there are a lot of Russian stores that sell fruit juice from Israel and Bulgaria for cocktails.

The weather was about 90 and the water temperature was perfect, not like Mexico, where it was approximately like swimming through soup. We swam all day, and when the vodka ran out, I walked over and got another jug ha-ha!

As we were leaving, we walked past Riegelmann Park, which is just across the boardwalk, and the whole park and bandshell were tricked out for a major outdoor concert, which turned out to be Connie Francis and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Not the Broadway show, but the original Las Vegas revue, no kidding.

Connie Francis was a joke, she is really way over the hill. But Frankie Valli, who was backed up by a new Four Seasons revue, was really outasite. They sang all their big hits and it was insane, considering that the whole show was right there at the beach (we didn't go into the park, but we had a perfect view from the boardwalk, with the moon and the stars in the sky and the ocean waves behind us). Just to remind us we were in Brooklyn, guys zoomed by on huge motorcycles tricked out with lights to glow in the dark and police cars occasionally roared by with sirens screaming.

I met a guy there who has a band in Brooklyn. The guy is some kind of genius, and he speaks perfect French and is learning Spanish. We discussed me playing with his band and sketched out ideas for doing a repertoire of French rock and Latin music.

Look, New York is a big prick. These mutherfuckers really take a piece out of you, but whatever it takes to live here, it's worth it!

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