Leaky Faucets

Mission accomplished, right?  So, the tyrant is dead, fulfilling Jr.’s wish of reversing his poppy’s humiliation, thus proving him the better man and proving all of this well worth it.  Well, actually, the few drops of blood dripping from the hangman’s noose have not accomplished anything.  Iraq is still a mess.  The Sunnis and Shia despise each other more than they did yesterday.  A political solution is still improbable if not impossible and the American occupation is destined to linger until a person of integrity and honesty enters the White House.  In other words…forever.

What have we learned from this episode?  That those in power can freely execute their political enemies?  Sound familiar?

Oddly, I find myself agreeing with the Vatican a lot these days.  We were both against this execution and against the war from the beginning.  It’s not that we feel sorry for Saddam; we just do not feel that murdering another person solves anything.  In fact, it is wrong to kill someone no matter the circumstances.

But Americans and Iraqis do not see anything wrong with state sponsored execution.  After all, isn’t revenge what democracy is all about?

On the F train home on Friday night, a middle-aged black woman suddenly decided that the floor of the train was too dirty.  She would take it upon herself to clean it up.  She did not appear to be employed by the Metropolitan Transit Authority. 

Cleaning the floor would be no small task considering her method.  She pulled out a packet of baby wipes, removed one then placed it on the floor under her shoe, with which she moved it side to side, slowly removing the dirt.  This was happening a few feet in front of me.  After a few stops, she got off, apparently convinced that her work was finished.  In fact, the floor was quite dirty still, except for the spot in front of me, which was noticeably improved.

New York, a city full of lunatics, can use more crazies like this woman.  If all the people walking around the city who look like they should be wearing a strait jacket and sitting in a white padded room in Bellevue or should be on their medication but are not, spontaneously took up brooms and mops and whatever other cleaning implements they can find and went to work, we’d have one sparkling city.

 

Today, I learned of the passing of animator Joseph Barbera who created “The Flinstones” and “Scooby Doo” among others. I spent many hours of my childhood watching Hannah-Barbera cartoons: “The Flinstones” every day after school for years and “Scooby Doo” on Saturday mornings. Cartoons will never be the same and will certainly never measure up to these classics, just as computer animation will never trump the passion of hand drawn cartoons. When the live-action movie versions of “The Flinstones” and “Scooby Doo” came out, I refused to see them, partly because I knew they would pale in comparison to the cartoons, but also because of what I felt was Hollywood exploitation of these classics. So along with Scooby, Shaggy, Fred and Barney, I say goodbye to a true genius.

Aya said she wanted me to feel how she feels being pregnant by laying inside what she calls the “pregnancy pillow,” a long u-shaped cushion.  I decided to go one step further and put a pillow under my shirt.  After a few seconds, I was suddenly out of breath, gasping for air.  It helped me understand her condition a little more, as ridiculous as that sounds.  As Ali G would say, big ups to Aya and all the pregnant women out there for really carrying babies.  Damn, that’s hard.

Before the show last night, Aya and I had dinner at Fine & Schapiro, a classic kosher Jewish delicatessen on the Upper West Side. We spent a few hours in midtown but had to get out of there and didn’t want to subject ourselves to the midtown deli tourist traps Stage or Carnegie. I knew that the better food was as far away from the store-window-gawkers as possible.

It was Aya’s idea to go to a deli. She wanted to have a Chanukah dinner. I just love the food. We had a great meal starting with homemade gefilte fish basically a ground cake of white fish, best eaten with horseradish sauce (which Aya likened to the Filipino dish embutido.) Then we had a large bowl of soup with a matzo ball and kreplach, a Jewish dumpling filled with ground beef. We also shared a hot corned beef on rye and potato latkes with apple sauce. The sandwich was a reasonable size and went for $9.50 as opposed to the monstrosities purveyed in midtown at monstrous prices. The atmosphere was pleasant. Only half full, they let us linger long after we were finished. The owner also gave us two free rugelach. The service was also pleasant and patient.

When I go into a place like this I suddenly feel Jewish, but certainly not in a religious way. When I step into a synagogue I don’t feel at all like a belong, but stick a corned beef sandwich and matzo ball soup in front of me, and I feel at home. I even gained the approval of a 60ish man a few tables away when I asked the waiter in advance for the dark green well done pickles only. “The real sour dills,” he said. “Those are the only good ones.” “Otherwise, you’re just eating a cucumber,” I retorted. We shared a brief laugh and a knowing glance from one Jew to another, even if my Jewishness is usually hidden at the deep recesses of my consciousness.

The deli is an integral part of the Jewish culture I grew up with and probably the only part that has stayed with me.  I’m glad Aya wants to share this, and I want our daughter to be a part of it too.  Whenever we visit Cleveland, we usually go to Corky & Lenny’s, the deli I was raised on.  In New York, Fine & Schapiro may top my list now, though this is only the second time I’ve eaten there.  The first was back when Aya was living on the UWS when we first starting dating seven or eight years ago.  I guess, inside the deli, were all Jews, even Aya a Filipino Catholic.

Went to see “High Fidelity” last night. Generally, I don’t like musicals much with the exception of some revivals (namely those by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Kander & Ebb), where the music was actually great music, much of which plays well far removed from the context of the stage. Although my expectations going into the show were extremely low, I wanted to see it anyway to satisfy my curiosity. ( I also had highly discounted tickets; I would have never paid full price for this.) I love the movie “High Fidelity” (seen it three or four times) and dug the novel even more. Great movie soundtrack too. So I just had to see how they adapted this for the stage.

I absolutely hated the first half. I didn’t hate the second half, but didn’t exactly like it either. For a musical about music, the music wasn’t so great with the exception of a few songs such as the rap fantasy number and the closing soul number called “Turn the World Off (And Turn You On),” which I thought was a cover of Marvin Gaye or Barry White or someone of that ilk, but apparently was an original. My favorite aspect of the show was probably the sets, though they were a bit distracting as I kept wondering which album covers-if they were in fact real album covers-were in the store. The drama never developed and anything I felt for the characters was based on feelings derived from other versions of this story. If I didn’t know the story so well, I would have really hated this production; the fact that I had all that background made the experience richer for me. Without it, the show would have really seemed shallow. The guy who played Barry, the Jack Black role in the movie, did a pretty good Jack Black, but not as good as Jack Black does Jack Black.

Some changes were made to bring the show up to date and appeal to the Broadway audience. First of all, the setting was changed to Brooklyn from Chicago in the movie, which was moved from the novel’s setting of London. One of the memorable jokes from the book and movie revolved around a father wanting to buy Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” for his daughter and Barry ripping him to shreds for his bad taste. In the Broadway version, it was altered to be a Celine Dion record.

To me, “High Fidelity” represents one of the worst trends on Broadway, the Hollywoodization of theater. Whereas Hollywood remakes every movie from 20 or more years ago, Broadway is turning every Hollywood comedy of recent years into a musical. In addition to this one, recent examples are “Dirty Rotten Scoundrel” and “The Wedding Singer.” I saw the former and found it atrocious. They take a popular movie-although I don’t think Hi Fi was such a hit-and pen some lyrics in the course of a weekend and throw it out there with some slick marketing. “High Fidelity” would have made a much better play (even with just a recording of the movie soundtrack), but its all about the bottom line and I suppose tourists and people from New Jersey much prefer musicals.

I was left wondering once again if Nick Hornby, one of my favorite writers, is an utter sellout. He seems more than willing to take a nice hunk of cash in exchange for allowing his books to be changed and ruined any which way. As mentioned, the setting of “High Fidelity” was changed twice; “Fever Pitch,” a memoir of Hornby’s obsession with the British football club Arsenal became a Jimmy Fallon-Drew Barrymore vehicle about the Boston Red Sox. Another book, “How to Be Good” will be made into a movie and no doubt it will be moved from the U.K. to America as well.

At intermission, two women from Jersey who sat in the row in front of us, were decrying the possible death of the new musical and dissing snobbish critics who lean toward revivals. One of them said that if you cleaned up the language, “High Fidelity” could make a good high school production. One half of a gay couple in front of us seemed to enjoying the hell out of the show during the first act; he was really yukking it up at parts that I didn’t find funny at all. Then, oddly, they never came back after the intermission. Either one of them was a doctor paged for a medical emergency or their laughter was completely sarcastic and they hated the show.

On the way home, an elderly woman (of Eastern European origin, I think) sitting next to Aya noticed her reading her “Playbill” and started a conversation. She’d just seen “Chorus Line” and detested it. She did, however, enthusiastically recommend seeing the Alvin Ailey dance performance. According to the lady, it was better than anything in the city now. In fact, she’d seen it six times already this year. I’ve never really been interesting in seeing a dance-only performance, but she got me thinking that maybe we should check it out before their season ends in a few weeks.

Senator Tim Johnson’s condition has me deeply worried.  I don’t know much about him, but I do know one thing about him that I like: he’s not a Republican.  I hate to be callous about the situation, but those of us in the non-Republican half of the country desperately want him to stay alive to preserve the majority in the Senate.  According to the Senate’s historian, a Senator can only leave office by resigning or dying.  Even an incapacitated lawmaker can stay in office.  In other words, if Senator Johnson stays in a coma until 2008, the Democrats will still hold the majority.  (Not that I’d want to see that happen.)

In the event that he does pass away, I suggest the employment of the old “Weekend at Bernie’s” strategy.  Harry Reid and company can walk the corpse into the Capitol, sit him down in the gallery and feed him soup in the Senate cafeteria.  This strategy is not without precedent.  Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was dead for at least 20 years while still an active senator.    

General Augusto Pinochet succumbed to death’s grip today at the age of 91. The former right-wing dictator of Chile escaped justice on Earth for his myriad crimes against his own people, but is surely in a worse place now. According to his Wikipedia entry, “…many see him as a brutal dictator who ended democracy and led a regime characterized by torture and favoritism towards the rich…” Hmm. Sounds like someone we know.

I fist became interested in Chile and the Pinochet period after reading books by Isabel Allende, the niece of the democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende, who was toppled by Pinochet with the help of the CIA. I highly recommend reading Paula and House of the Spirits, both which provide keen insight into the Pinochet period, though the latter is a fictionalized account.

The other night in our childbirth class, we watched some videos showing several different labor scenarios. If I closed my eyes, I would have sworn I was watching porn. I mean the grunting and moaning and screaming was positively X-rated. All that was missing was some cheesy smooth jazz music. A lot of the men had mustaches too. Eerie. 

I decided to keep my thoughts to myself and not share them with my classmates or my teacher.  It might have seemed inappropriate or something.

When you’re eating dinner with a group of people, and someone asks if someone else wants the last piece of something on the table, it is pretty rare to find someone who says “yes, I was planning to eat that.”  The asker knows full well that no one is going to take it, especially when they are already reaching for it with their fork.  I suppose it is polite to ask, but by asking the question you are already saying it’s mine, so back off.  When I want something, I hate when someone beats me to the punch.  Damn!