More about historic cannibals

On the other hand, if I was in the same situation as the aforementioned pioneers, (i.e. the Donners from last month's blog) I can't say for sure what I'd do. At the International Studies library, I found a hair-raising book called the "Cannibal Within,'' which claims that cannibalism is "evolutionarily sound'' and that "everyone has cannibal potential." The book also makes the case that Americans, in particular, are preoccupied with cannibalism. In America, there are cannibal-themed rock bands, a one-hit wonder band from the eighties (Toto Coelo) with a stupid song on the subject ("I eat cannibals'' -- remember it from KROQ?) and thousands of zombie or cannibal movies (Silence of the Lambs, Soylent Green (famous line: "Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!'', Cannibal Holocaust, Shawn of the Dead, Land of the Dead, etc.) There are at least half a dozen cannibal-related episodes of "Gilligan's Island,'' and at least one movie -- the not very good "Ravenous'' -- that is directly inspired by the Donners. So it's possible that I'm being unfair about the Donners when I say they are "not true pioneers." Maybe they were pioneers in terms of pop culture.

Grey Gardens nosebleed seats and imploded rat

Every once in a while I get to take advantage of "hot'' events at NYC, though usually I need to sneak in, get a student discount or wait in the rain for rush tickets. This time I am going to see "Grey Gardens,'' about eccentric Kennedy in-laws living in a hovel with cats (did I get that right? I hope so.) The theater is small but the ceiling is very high -- and we will be up near the ceiling, with binoculars, and wearing oxygen masks. I'm also hoping to see the new "Spain'' exhibit at the Guggenheim (the one that's been in the news; one of the Goyas was stolen en route to the museum!) The city is its usual combination of incredible opportunities and stomach-churning squalor. Just as I was walking home with the New York Times, its 'events' page crammed with amazing gallery shows and performances, I almost stepped on an imploded rat with its innards strung out in the street -- easily the most disgusting thing I've seen in months.

Thumpo-Lena Hell

In case both of you readers were wondering, the Thumpo-Lena problem (new arrival in my apartment building moving chairs, furniture, etc., at 3 a.m. above our heads, shoving things around, banging, pounding, ) continues. It's just like "What's He Building In There'' by Tom Waits, but in an urban environment. One night at 1 a.m. I went upstairs and knocked on the door. I non-giant -- actually a petite woman --- answered. I asked if she was moving furniture around. Meekly, she said yes and apologized profusely. The next evening at 11 it sounded like a couple of rhinocerouses were consummating their relationship upstairs. Thump stomp crash kick stomp stomp crash. I went upstairs and this time it a defensive, but, fortunately for me, a thin and not very tall man, answered. He said he was "quite frankly surprised'' that I was hearing so many noises. "Really, I truly am surprised,'' he said. "i mean, what could be making the noise? Us dragging a chair around? It just doesn't make any sense.'' He was taken aback and wondering if the sounds ''were coming from the floor above me and somehow reverbertating downstairs,'' which strikes me as Voodoo Physics --- if that is true, why wouldn't he hear the thumping -- but finally he said, "Sorry, guy. We'll work this out, man. If we make a noise, just thump us with a broom handle.''' I love that sort of reassuring language, and the problem was solved -- for a few minutes. Last night the stomping and banging woke up my wife at 1:30 a.m. Indeed, we got out the broomhandle and thumped their floor pretty good and the banging stomping etc. stopped for a while. Stay tuned.

Thump-o-lena

Some guy, probably a big, dumb, hulking giant, moved into the apartment right above our heads. Every night he stomps around so hard up there that our whole bedroom shakes and dust falls out of the ceiling. It sounds like he's up there crushing grapes with his feet. The problem is that NYC is not designed for neighborly communication --- or any kind of interpersonal communication whatsoever. No one talks to anyone for any reason in this city. I plan to knock on the door and talk to the guy but it worries me; there is no context for this around here. This is not California, where people dump their personal issues and encounter-group stories on complete strangers. Last year I knocked on someone's door just to borrow a half-cup of sugar and he looked stunned, as if no one had spoken to him for the last 20 years. But it's gotten to the point when the thumper is waking us up. Stay tuned. If you read in the newspaper this week that some guy on Morningside Heights got stomped by a big, stupid giant, look for my photo next to the article.

More about Del Toro

I forgot to mention that Mr. Del Toro had quite an animated response to an audience member who asked, "So, who is your target audience? You've just made a movie with a child protagonist, but it's scary and there's lots of gore.' Del Toro responded: "(Who cares about) the target audience. I am the target audience. If I thought about such things, I'd be out there making 'X-Men Part Four. The rules of commercialism are pleasurable to subvert. If you try to 'appeal to both quadrants,' if you let that lingo seep into what you do, you will domesticate your imagination. In the long term, all that is false anyhow. Besides, you can see a lot of Jennifer Aniston movies that failed to appeal to any of the 'quadrants.'''

By the way, I was very impressed that he storyboards his entire movies himself -- including his own elaborate pen-and-ink drawings of every character. But he also says that 'preparation should not be a straitjacket. Film is about capturing the accident even at its best, while orchestrating a bunch of things that do not seem to relate to each other.'

Columbia MFA story in latest Poets and Writers

Columbia got written up in the latest Poets and Writers study of the top 5 MFA programs. The article was highly entertaining, and there was a great quote from Michael McAllister. All in all, it was a great read.

Sneak preview of "Pan's Labyrinth''

One of the great things about Columbia's MFA program is the free events at the School of the Arts building (Dodge Hall.) The Film Division, for example, has screenings almost every week, featuring first-run movies, including many that are in the sneak-preview phase. The film division lets us know about these things, in the form of flyers and emails, but we get so many emails about goings-on that it's easy to miss the best offerings. Last week I saw Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth,'' a strange but potent blend of horror-movie images, Grimm-style fairy tales and Franco-era fascist nastiness. The movie focuses on an 11-year-old girl whose stepfather is a cruel and overbearingly macho Franco supporter. He's in charge of an outpost on the edge of a vast forest, where guerrillas are hiding out and mounting attacks against the Fascists. Trespassers and curfew breakers --- including two hapless rabbit hunters -- are gunned down on sight. The interweaving of fantasy sequences (from the girl's imagination), and the Fascists-fighting-the-guerrillas sequences, is extremely well-done. The girl's imagination takes her to some increasingly dark places, including the lair of the "Pale Man,'' a cannibal with eyes in his hands. He presides over a banquet table. If a guest dares to take any item of food from the table -- even a single grape -- the Pale Man, a dead-ringer for Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Children,' springs into action and devours them. De Toro himself was on hand to talk about making the movie. In an eye-opening and profanity-laced interview, he said he was trying to create a film about disobedience in the face of an overwhelming power. This movie is a "Harry Potter'' for adults. (Impressionable kids should steer clear. It's full of sudden violence, torture sequences and some pretty off-putting horror imagery.) If nothing else, it's a reminder of a nasty (and recent) episode in Spain's tragic past. De Toro spoke of Generalisimo Franco "dying happy, in bed,'' in the mid-1970s.

Rename Donner Pass

Lately I've been doing a lot of research about California (my home state) and the emigrants who made their slow, miserable way across the Great Salt Flats in the 1850s. After reading quite a few books, I'm puzzled by one thing: Why is Donner Pass named after the Donners, the murderous, quarrelsome and (some would say) stupid group of people who left too late, brought way too much stuff, took an ill-advised 'shortcut' and wound up marooned in shanties in the Sierra Nevada, where they were forced to eat axle grease, dogs, mice, coyotes, rawhide, and, eventually, each other? It's not just the fact that Donner party behaved in reprehensible ways. On top of all this, they were not the first emigrants to cross the pass that bears their name. A homely -former blacksmith and fur trapper named Elisha Stephens crossed the same pass a full two years before the Donners clawed and gnawed their way across it. In fact, Stephens did not lose a single man, woman or child in his wagon train while half the Donner Party died of starvation and exposure. Stephens got very little glory for his role in all this. He ended up a beekeeper in Bakersfield and died alone and obscure. It's strange, how people who make a mess of things can become household names. Sometimes, doing your job properly, and quietly, confines you to the dustbin of history.

Beauty in a rat-infested courtyard

Sometimes you can find beauty in seemingly disgusting places. For example: my wife and I live in an attractive Pre-War apartment building, and Columbia owns the place so the rent is way cheaper than it would be if it was market price. Anyhow, there is a dungeon-like courtyard where we must go to do the laundry. It's in the basement of our building. To get there you must descend some rusted-out stairs to an enclosed flat area with large stinking Dumpsters (registered trademark) where some of the fattest burliest rats in the world live and thrive. In fact, every other time I get there, a huge honking rat runs right in front of me, looking terrified. It's kind of strange, the way rats run in terror every time I approach. It's not like I'm going to try to pet them or eat them. Anyhow, I was dragging our laundry down the stairs of that rat-infested hellhole when, all of a sudden, I heard this unearthly sound: a woman singing, mezzosoprano, perfect pitch, perfect tone, and the sounds of it were wafting through the air, out of an open window on one of the upper floors. It was one of those moments where everything seems to stop for a while. I just stood there with my laundry basket balanced on one of the stairs and listened for 10 minutes. It was like front row seats at the Met. Then the singing stopped and the courtyard was quiet again. Only in New York.

Hair-raising True Stories about the Natural World

Yesterday I asked my students to come up with some stories about the natural world, situations that challenged their assumptions about man and nature. They came up with all kinds of amazing stories. One of them talked about having to fed off a horde of crazy raccoons when he was in elementary school. Another told me that his surf break was temporarily rendered off-limits when wildlife officials tried to 'bury' a dead whale at sea, attracting the attention of enormous white sharks. Another was shocked by the murderous behavior of his feral cat. One student was shocked when he moved to New York and saw that the shy, retiring squirrels of his countryside home were nothing at all like the vicious aggressive squirrels we have here in the city. It's all part of a class section in which the students will be reading essays about man's uneasy relationship with nature. We started things off with a screening of "Grizzly Man,'' Werner Herzog's strange and hair-raising documentary about Timothy Treadwell, the grizzly enthusiast who was, eventually, eaten by one of his ungrateful (and hungry) beneficiaries. The class mostly thought he was well-intentioned but a total kook. We're going to put these experiences in context by reading Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Bill McKibben and others. I'm hoping to develop this (eventually) into a semester-long course. Another instructor in the writing program helped me out immensely by suggesting an essay about William Cronon, which challenges the American view of "man'' and "nature'' being separate realms. He claims that city parks and city trees are just as 'natural' as their counterparts in the forest.

A more positive outlook about experimental fiction

This is a revised version of my previous post about experimental fiction. The previous post was -- in all seriousness --- kind of a joke, the result of some exasperation. I sent out my strange little story to a couple of magazines and got some perplexed responses. However, I will continue my publishing quest while trying to flesh out this story. I wrote this piece for a class in my writing program. The other day, I ran into the writer who teaches the course. I told him I was having a bit of trouble finding a home for this thing and he said, "Well, it should be a book.'' That was pretty cool to hear him say that. However, I'm wondering if people will buy an entire book about Golem-like slave children made of terracotta and wood, with raisins for eyes. The cool thing is, after I published that last post, a couple of classmates have emailed me with some thoughts on this matter --- many thanks.

Thank God for Po, and lack of subway tweakers

This is an unbelievable restaurant (in the village.) There were gnaw-marks on my plate by the time they finally dragged me out of there. It's on Cornelia Street, just off Bleecker. My wife wanted to go there because she just read "Heat,'' a book about Mario Battali. Battali doesn't actually work at Po anymore, but the restaurant is doing just fine without him. We had the gnocchi and the cod. For once there were no loud tweakers on the subway to kill the mood. And there were no tuba trios or rats on the way home. I've been extremely busy lately so this was a nice break. By the way, uneventful subway rides are a rarity for me this month. Why, just the other day, I was taking a southbound 1 to somewhere or other. Some guy stepped on another guy's foot and, instead of apologizing, made kissy-kissy noises at the offended party!! I kept thinking, just apologize and shut up and stop giving this guy air kisses, please, but he just kept doing this. I was sitting right between them and was sure they were going to throw punches but I waited it out and nothing happened.

Raging tuba headache

So I was hanging out in Soho with my wife the other day, and we were eating Portuguese food at a restaurant with outdoor seating, right next to the Ear Inn. It was a nice, balmy evening, a hint of breeze, and the servers ladled out this great big pile of bacalao fried up with onion and egg on my plate. So far so good. Amy ordered some crazy dish --- shrimps with lemon shellfish bread pudding. Then suddenly out of nowhere I heard the blaring squawking shriek of a trumpet, a tuba and a snare drum. A trio of street musicians called the Stumblebums started cakewalking down the sidewalk, shrieking and wailing and making all kinds of faces while dressed up as tinpan alley tunesmiths from Prohibition times. They sounded like a cross between the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Tom Waits and an industrial gas-powered leaf-blower. I kind of like them --- they have style --- but I wish they wouldn't play so loudly. When they moved close to our table, it was just so ungodly loud, it felt like my skull was going to unhinge itself from my spinal chord. Waiters and diners watched helplessly as the Stumblebums squawked and wailed, with the drunken encouragement of Ear Inn patrons, who were lining up outside to get in to that bar. I'm wondering if the Stumblebums are one of those weird only-in-New York traditions that I'm supposed to know about already. I just hope this roving wind ensemble doesn't read this and somehow figure out where I live and show up to my apartment at three in the morning with drums and tubas a-blaring. That would be a horrible thing.

My claim to fame revisited: obscene tree article link available on this blog

The story on this link is about a woman who turned her tree into an obscene sculpture to enrage her neighbors. This story caused a very brief stir and got me on a bunch of Howard Stern wannabe radio stations across the U.S. This may well be my high watermark, so here is the link, and keep in mind that the story has an accompanying photo that is absolutely not workplace friendly, even though the photo just shows a tree. But what a tree!!! Let me know if this link doesn't work. Being a Luddite, I could not figure out how to just post the article straight up on this blog. This will be the last entry for a while because I want everyone (in other words, the both of you) to see this stupid article first.

www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2002/May/08/local/stories/05local.htm

Last chance to see Patty LuPone play the tuba

We just saw the incredible restaging of "Sweeney Todd'' on Broadway with Michael Cerveris and Patty LuPone. Scary, pitch-perfect, wonderfully imaginative. It's not every day that you get to see LuPone act and sing and shake her booty while dressed up like a 19th Century London slattern and, at the same time, playing a drum kit, a tuba (actually, a baritone) and triangles. In fact, all the actors play instruments --- flute, violin, cello, etc --- which explains why it's almost impossible for this production to find understudies for any of these parts. I guess that if someone gets sick, the producers just pump them full of Biaxin and shove them out on the stage. It is amazing that we got tickets at all and that I could afford them; my budget is so limited that my theater going experiences are usually restricted to off-off-off-off Broadway productions such as "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well And Living In Paris'' performed by trained squirrels and a gerbil in somebody's basement on the outskirts of Queens --- so it's great that we actually saw a bonafide production. They even moved up our seats so we were way close to the stage, at the front of the balcony. See it while you can. It's in its last 17 performances and closes Sept. 3. The only drawback of the day was almost getting into a brawl in the southwestern edge of Central Park with a horse and carriage driver who was hassling us to take his stupid tour and wouldn't take no for an answer. I can't stand the hack drivers. They are mean to their horses and look ridiculous with their chimneysweeper hats. Anyhow, I told the guy to get stuffed, or the rough equivalent of that. The actual words I said to him are "work inappropriate'' so I won't repeat them here.

Last chance to see

Some guy is trying to earn money off this blog

I just got a message from some guy, saying he was disappointed to read this blog and find no great advice about making money. Believe me, i am the LAST person you would want to consult about money. I am your go-to guy if you want advice about doughnuts, Entertainment Weekly, pop culture, fast food, etc., but if you're looking for advice about investments, you should probably read that Lee Iacocca book if it's still in print. I think I saw a nasty coffee-stained copy down at the Strand.

Only in New York --- felony hit and run narrowly averted

You won't believe this. We hired a car to take us back to Harlem/Morningside Heights because we were traveling with a cat. It was air-conditioned, comfortable, leather seats and everything. What could possibly go wrong? The black Lincoln Sedan cruised through Harlem with us in the back seat, and the driver had just banked a turn onto Amsterdam Avenue, when a kid (on foot, a toddler) runs right into the moving car! The car was going about 20 mph and we heard this horrible bone-crunching "kronk" and we turn around and the kid is yelping; he's been knocked off his feet from flinging himself into the still-moving car (which should not have been moving at all. The driver clearly saw the kid running around like crazy in the street and he should have stopped and waited.). So the driver finally stopped. A moment passed, and the kid was wailing but it turns out he was unhurt, so the driver , after checking whether he was all right, scolded him --- "Watch where you are giong!'' Then the kid's mother shows up with anger in her eyes --- but instead of raging at the driver, she rages at the kid: "Yes, watch where you are going!!!'' It was weird to see so much blame cast on this little toddler who didn't know what he was doing, especially in litigious America, where you can sue a fast food place just because you burned yourself on some coffee. I'd better watch my step when I'm jogging through traffic this year!

Summer reading: from memoirs to margarine

Every summer I read as widely as possible. This summer, I read "Mountains Beyond Mountains'' by Tracy Kidder, (terrific, though it makes you feel like a heel for not helping other people as much as you should) "Candy Girl'' by Diablo Cody (a memoir by a stripper from the Midwest; a page-turner, funny, out-there and irreverent. She slathers on the similes like butter on a heel of sourdough bread, but then again, so do I. I love similes. ) "My Lives" by Edmund White (terrific, though parts of it shocked me so much that it made me feel prudish) a large chunk of "Remembrances of Things Past'' by Marcel Proust (sure, his writing, at times, is a tsunami of logorrhea (example of metaphor, not simile!) but his endless novel captures the beautiful misery of infatuation better than any other writer. The thing about Proust is, you have to read him secretly and in total darkness with a flashlight or else everyone will think you are pretentious. But it's safe to mention him on a blog that no one ever reads.) I also read a manual, from the middle-1950s, about margarine and butter production. It was one of those situations where you are at a library, bored, and you vow to go through a row of books and blindly pick one out and force yourself to read whatever you put your hand on. The book wasn't half bad but there was way too much "demographics of oleo consumption'' in the middle half. It mucked up the pace with statistics and bar graphs. Fortunately the book perked up again when the author started talking about butterfat ratios toward the end. The book has been in Butler library for 53 years --- and I was the first person on record to ever check it out!! They had to create a barcode just for me.

Will you please leash your unwashed rodentish hound puppies?

A terrifying flat-faced puppy of unknown origins paid an unwanted visit to Rio Del Mar beach and wreaked all kinds of havoc. It was ugly as a bat and had fangs at least a foot long hanging out of its mouth. It came after me and my borrowed beagle yesterday, and guess whether or not this beast was on a leash. The answer is NO. Anyhow it came snarling through the sands and was just about to attack my beagle for rent when I gathered up my courage and performed an intervention. I created a human shield between the beagle and the monster puppy and told it very loudly to 'turn around and please go home.' Just then a woman appeared behind a mound of mouldering seaweed. She accused me of speaking in an undiplomatic voice to her puppy. She was slathered head to toe with tattoos and her yawns smelled like Bourbon. Let's just say that I'm bringing the bear mace to the beach from now on. What's next? Dingos? Hyenas?