the area also appears to be relatively hipster-free. i have nothing against hipsters, except that i would not want to grow old among them.

Sunnyside the Funny Side.

who knows how long this will take but the idea made sense enough that as i thought about it and imagined the logistics of the move i looked out the window and saw the old familiar sights: apartment buildings across the street, neighbors i’ve seen but never known for over a decade. suddenly, after this bout of what might amount to little more than escapism, the old familiar sights seemed like i hadn’t seen them in years, and they almost looked like memories already.

that’s happened to me before, though. i get inspired by these ideas of moving on, moving out, trying a different lifestyhle, and then i get lazy and drink beers.

this time it feels different, though, even with the beers. it feels necessary. my plan is to go back over there tomorrow or Thursday and look around. i already know the exact area for me, from an area of several square blocks. i am pretty familiar with the area, but i never really looked at it as if i’d want to live there.

…..

in other news from my always interesting life, i guess the adrenaline from feeling like i’d made a real decision about moving on out got me going on other things. i contacted a correspondent from a couple of years ago who told me where a rotary dial payphone still existed in Manhattan. he sent a follow-up email with details on exactly where it was, but i lost it to the server blowout, and had assumed the info was lost as i had no memory of the gentleman’s name. then i remembered that i had forwarded his picture of the rotary dial payphone to a yahoo.com address (because i never download e-mail attachments to my PC) and there it was, his name and email. he quickly replied to my somewhat sheepish e-mail, reminding me of where the phone is or was. it’s up to me now to see if it still survives.

web traffic seems to be resurging somewhat. i have no real control over it so no point sweating the day to day vagaries… i threw in a few more clicktricks, though, and i was surprised at how well they did on the first day. nothing blockbuster, but for the effort expense to ROI it’s a good signal.

and blahblahblah.

i was rambling around the Schubert D Major Sonata today. i’ve been looking at it for weeks now, amazed to have never gotten to know it better. there’s a lot of Beethoviniana about it, but in ways i think he took the Sonata form and made it make more sense as an organic unit than other composers. the knock against sonata form is that it is besically arbitrary, with 3 or 4 separate pieces of music that essentially have nothing in common and no relationship other than opus number.

but with this D Major sonata i sense that Schubert wrote the thing as a continuum, not literally repeating motifs or themes but echoing spirits and textures of sound across the 4 movements. Schubert always seems to be traveling through a continuum. were his Beethovinian allusions intentional? i do not know, but they seem to be in the discussion, in the blood of Schubert.

how much longer can i do this? should i do this? it’s been nearly 10 years… well, not quite. maybe 7, or even 6, depending how you define what i do now versus after getting whacked from corporate. February 28 is the decade anniversary of leaving corporate, and my nephew’s 10th birthday.

just not feeling good about myself any more. no confidence. i am not directionless but this unstructured life creates the same sense of ennui.

yesterday was interesting, though. i took my recording gear and a newfound headset/microphone out to the big cemetery for the purpose of delivering a running narrative of the place, for as much as i know about it. i probably know more than most about the obscure burials, or rather those that were once illustrious but would now be considered obscure. a couple of famous bible publishers are out there, along with someone who designed a very famous monument. it is not a star studded burial ground but it’s not without its interesting characters. once i started talking i got into the monologue format and essentially delivered a warm-up for an eventual narrative that would be accompanied by photos of what i’m talking about. it’s not going to be just a typical who’s who, though. it will be about me in some ways.

my work is hampered at times by a stagnant lifestye and limited technical resources. i have to get a new PC, and that’s a given, but holy shit those things take time to set up and accommodate. and i crave new roofing, new ceiling, new wallage, new windows. i would have to discard a great many things, i think. and i would want to move far away from this place. far away being a relative notion, of course. that was one of my fantasies about living in New York: the feeling that if things got cluttered or uncomfortable in one area i could just up and move 8 blocks away and be in a different world. it seems like most new yorkers never leave the street they live on, save to go to work. i am sometimes spotted by friends and acquaintances in areas far afield from where that close-to-home lifestyle would assume. but anyone who knows me much at all probably knows that i am a desultory flaneur.

for some reason i have Tribeca in mind, if only because i know little about it, and because that area seemed to have a preponderance of pretty girls walking the streets when the Streetview cameras
rolled past. i also like upper east side, near my old digs at York Avenue. and the Parc Lincoln would be a hilarious place to move back to.

but really, there is nothing wrong with Astoria. that’s the problem. complacency. ease. why move when the place is fine? why not just travel instead? why try when the work is easy? i also don’t want to be too far from the 181… although a single bi-weekly visit to that shrine would be enough these days… that would be awesome to get a room at the Parc Lincoln, shit into the shared toilet at the end of the hall, and use the 181 as the permanent address, just like 21 years ago.

…..

couple of conspicuous lesbians sucking face at the bar, or i should say conspicuously sucking face at the bar. really fucking annoying. it’s annoying when heterosexuals carry on like this. it’s annoying when dogs carry on, fucking in the schoolyard. who is improved upon or even impressed by unbridled sexual acts in public spaces? who is humiliated or embarrassed? (both those feelings interpretable)

…..

ok so i am going to buy a laminator! hell yeah. i decided that if i am going to do the Payphones Gone But Not Forgotten project i might as well do it right.

for some months, maybe years, i’ve been dropping prints of photos that i have of payphones as they once stood at streetcorners and in alleyways from the mid-1990s to today. most of the payphones are gone, but as a memorial of sorts i’ve left photos of the former payphones at the spots where once they stood.

but i’ve done it half-assed. and my pursuits should be pursued nothing less than whole-assed. i had similar thoughts when i started the old magazines project. at first i thought i could get away with using freeware open source OCR products but i quickly realiZed that those products were gratuitous crap, and that if i was going to bother doing this at all i might as well do it right and spend the $400 on quality software and spend the $300 on semi-quality hardware. i think i spent about $1000 on all those things, including upgrades and replacements, not to mention what i paid over the years for the magazines themselves.

but that’s all good. that project still needs a creative breakthrough to make it interesting to anyone but me, but i’m happy with it so far.

in a different sense i decided last week that the Payphone Memorial Project needed a similar assertion of seriousness. this is not so much a financial outlay but a resource and time commitment. i am going to laminate the photos, and affix them to the former payphone locations either with super-sticky tape or maybe with nails. whatever it takes to make them more permanent. until now the photos just blew away with the wind, which seemed like an inspired, ephemeral, signatory, salutatory way to commemorate the fleeting payphones of yore. (think of the movie “Big River Man”) But in this urban maelstrom i doubt if a single human being noticed the gesture, and this seems like something that — if i am going to bother doing it at all — should be noticed at least on some small level by those who might remember.

so to the laminator it is!

that gadget is stupid cheap compared to all the crap i had to get for the old magazines…

oh crap they just turned down all the lights in here and i can’t see a goddam thing, fingers pecking frantically at the darkness of the table above my knees.

but this reporter got me at a sour moment. it’s a sad day in NYC payphonery when the only fully-fucntional rotary dial payphhonne in Queens has been removed, “upgraded” to a push-button creature that seems to work erratically.

i was really, truly sad about this. it’s not the phone itself or any use of it that i enjoyed (though i had used it a few times). it was the secret. among virtually anyone who might care about the matter i found that only i knew of that phone’s existence. i feel like i lost a friend… but i’ll get over it. i just thought it was enough of an event that it might be a good time to reach out through a reporter.

he writes for a magazine that i don’t think i’ve ever been in, so that’ll be fun. that is, if it all works out. if it comes to pass. if it reaches fruition. if it fruits (pronounced “froo-itz”).

…..

otherwise a dreary, dumpy day. i rebuilt a new top page for sorabjiland. it’s too much. too long.

i’ve felt lonely and solitary these last few weeks. it is not a good feeling. it is like a sadness raining down on me. a sour, poisonous sadness. i don’t remmeber when i first had this vision of myself as an old man, but it might have been in high school. i imagined myself alone, but at peace, and comfortably sitting in an easy chair. my feet were white from lack of sun, and i settled in to the recliner chair to read and keep warm under a blanket of some sort. there was a smile on my face, and through my mind passed mercurial memories of past wives, past lovers, and the financial and emotional carnage they had inflicted on me. for all that my accommodation was comfortable and my future was secure, much better off on my own than under the adversarial cloud of marriage.

i am not old enough for the scenario to play out just yet, and i will probably never be married, but i do see myself growing old alone. will i be happy with that? will i even care?

…..

Christ it’s dark in here. I can’t see a fucking thing.

…..

typing now under the light of the dark screen. i type white text onto a black background, so the most light comes when i type enough words to fill the screen. it’s like i’m typing to stay warm, as i rub my hands over the hot embers of these words.

…..

i think i know what i’ll do about the page bloat of the new top page. iframes! yes. that will solve the content and page size issue. genius!

…..

people either don’t listen or they won’t shut the fuck up.

…..

i found myself on streetview at Slaughter Beach, Delaware, today. maybe i’ll buy a shack there. i liked what little i saw of Delaware in 2005 when i drove up Route 13 from FL to here. like any place that is seemingly off the grid, though, it is mighty expensive for what you get, this due entirely to its proximity to NYC. any place within a stone’s throw of NYC is way expensive compared to similar places in flyover climes.

then i looked at Pennsylvania. lots of space there.

where will i go? what will i do?

that was a line from an episode of Benson. it made my mother laugh so hard i thought she’d cough up a lung. in that episode of Benson the Governor hired a robot to do some work around the mansion. mostly cleaning and tedius stuff. but the robot didn’t work out. s/he was too cold, and not commuincative with the human beings at the place. so it was left to Benson to tell the robot that s/he had been let go. “You’re fired.” the robot went a little nuts, panicking, turning around and saying “Oh no! Where will I go? What will I do?” i don’t remember what Benson said in response, because my mother was laughing so hard i could not hear myself lightly chuckle.

for whatever reason she thought the idea of a robot having an existential crisis was just mad, mad funny, funny in the way good comedy targets anxieties and squeezes them, wrings them dry with laughter.

and i imagine that i will shovel stuff into this storage room until i die, and that the scavengers will circle, plundering my precious valuables — my legacy! — for crap they could sell for a few bucks on ebay.

…..

i could stand to move that stuff somewhere else, but where? i could buy a shack in Delaware, or a house in some flyover state, and leave the stuff there for me to pick through on my rare-if-ever visits. i could possibly stash it in the garage down in Florida, but that garage isn’t really mine, and i don’t think it’s particularly climate-controlled or hospitable to storage of this type of stuff. i need to go back to the storage room again and just throw stuff away. much of it has no need to linger in my life, even in a remote room that i rarely visit.

…..

i wrote a fairly lengthy essay today, and as i neared the denoument it started to feel familiar. i am pretty certain i wrote almost the exact same essay once before. it concerned VIOLATORS. Violator, when used in publishing, refers to any visual element that disrupts the expected look or feel of somehting like a magazine cover or billboard. i was first introduced to the VIOLATOR when a designer at Time Inc. pointed it out to me. we were looking at a cover for Sports Illustrated, and in the top right corner was an illustration of a cartoon hand peeling away the corner of hte page. this created the illusion that, as the cartoon hand pulled at the corner of the page, behind th epage appeared some kind of promo text, something like “SI Goes To the Beach! See page 44!”

“That,” the designer said with relish, “is a VIOLATOR!”

i think about the Violator when i see receipts that have colored streaks running through their center. colored streaks on receipts are kind of like Cigarette Burns on movie film reels. the receipt streaks signal to the cashier that the end of the thermal receipt paper is near, and the roll should be replaced.

i don’t know of a legitimate or assigned name for this end-of-roll reeipt streak, but i think it could be included as a species of the VIOLATOR. its use is more utilitarian and rugged than the aesthetically sarcastic VIOLATOR of design use, but in the annals of service industry aesthetics it fills the same purpose.

but maybe the analogy is better made between this and the cigarette burns.

who can say?

i think about it ALL THE TIME.

…..

watching the Jeremy Lin sploogefest, and thinking again how it would be interesting to get a photo essay of the faces of NBA players at the instant they score a basket. tight, taut, righteous, o-face. that is the NBA player in the seconds after he scores a basket and trots down the court.

…..

aha, so i watched REDS last night, getting within a half hour of the ending before giving up. the story weakens at the knees so badly it’s hard to stomach. Maureen Stapleton as Emma is a highlight, and Jack Nicholson in a rare substantial role is also of interest. George Plimpton annoys by his mere presence, but then what Renaissance man doesn’t?

the movie mostly looks beautiful but the “epic” sweep, the epic “sweep” runs thin through a story that could have made more informed historical statements. the romance is not even that interesting, either. those 2 people hated each other. he was an asshole and she was a cunt. but they lived in interesting times, and she followed his invitations, reminding me of Lady Bird Johnson who, when asked why she stayed with such a pig as LBJ, such a womanizing, cheating, indifferent pig as that, she responded that without him she would have no opportunity to see the things she saw, do the things she did, and go the places she went to. things are different now but in those days it was worth a woman’s dignity for her to ride on the coattails of a successful man.

…..

i got the idea to go back up to the top of the rock a week or so ago, while watching the movie version of Godspell. a short scene in that film shows the cast dancing and singing on the roof of one of the Twin Towers. it made me sad because those towers were, besides blisteringly ugly eyesores, sources of fascination, aspiration, and even inspiration among creative artists and adventurers. that scene of naive, even purile joy made me sad, but it also reminded me that i had been meaning for a long time now to go back up to the top of the rock at rockefeller center. the entrance to this tourist attraction is virtually a few steps away from my post office box, which i had to check today, so as long as i was there i thought i’d zoom it on up.

i was last there maybe 4 or 5 years ago, when a friend asked me to babysit her 10 year old for a day. she frequently enlisted her friends to do this, but most of her friends took the poor kid to exciting places like the laundromat while they did their laundry, or else they would let him play video games at home.

nothing is wrong with either scenario, but i was not really aware of this when i got the call to take care of the 10 year old for a day. i figured hey, it’s a little kid, let’s do something fun. so i planned to hit the Top of the Rock and he came up with the idea of seeing Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park. between those two plans we spent an hour or so at the Rock, then took a bus uptown to Central Park, where we saw the needle and then i took him to Belvedere Castle, which I don’t think he had ever seen or heard of before. we talked about heading out to the Unisphere but i thought it was getting too late, so we went back to Queens and, for the first time in at least 10 years, i entered a McDonald’s. he wanted burgers, or something, and if the smell that washed over us as we entered the place made me feel ill i was man enough not to say so.

we went home to my place where we built a web page, one that plugged in images and text quips that had been running jokes throughout the day.

that was the thing, well one of the things, about that day: i was making him laugh so hard i thought he was going to get sick. so i took it easy on the humor after a while, but now and again he’d bust out laughing at something we’d said an hour earlier.

i guess it was a nice day. he and his mother talked about it for years. i wonder if they still do? he is 14 or 15 by now, and i don’t cross paths with his mother too often any more, so i would not know.

…..

i signed up for Netflix last night. i watched as much as i could tolerate of a Nic Cage home invasion flick (remember when that guy used to be able to act?) before giving up on the poor image quality and switching over to a stored copy of REDS, the Warren Beatty “epic” about Jack Reed and Louise Bryant. i admire the film in some ways but the unfortunate drawback is that Warren Beatty is just too damn pretty for the role. he was too damn pretty for “Shampoo” ferchrissake… but if the role of Jack Reed needed some manly glamour it did not need as much girlyman beauty as Beatty’s freshly-cleansed image injected into the scenes.

as a youth that movie was legion for me. the Witnesses were my favorite, but the scope of the cinematography and the movement of the narrative from New York to Russia was directorial and story-telling virtuosity at its finest for me. i still have that film mostly memorized, but seeing it again after some years reveals new things. it is *not* a masterpiece and do not delude myself into imagining that it rocks the genre of historical drama. it is full of holes and glosses over vast swaths of relevant history. it simply appeals to my insatiable inner adolescent.

but i only got about a half hour into REDS last night.

one dead-end of that film that i know i will resent upon re-visiting it is the ending. first of all, Jack Reed is clearly breathing after he was pronounced dead. his stomach rises and falls, just like a living human, except that he should be DEAD. but that is a relic of film-making common to many actors and directors. dead people are always breathing in Hollywood.

that is not what i resent about the ending. what i hate is that the fate of Louise Bryant is unreported. where did she go from there? from the bedside of her lover’s death in remote Russia, where did she go next? not even a simple “where is she now” type of closure to assuage any interest in or concerns about the woman in this story, as typical of Hollywood.

the role of Louise is better than most female roles, but she is still stuck in the stereotypical part of being concerned about a man. in this case i give that weakness some slack, since it does seem to fit the historical story…

but where her role falls into the usual weaknesses is that she is, aside from being beautiful, not a desirable woman. what does Jack Reed see in her? her writing sucks, her pedigree has nothing to recommend it, and she’s a feisty, bitchy pain in the ass. yet, like so many Hollywood creations of her ilk, some man finds this shit irresistable.

gonna resume the viewing of REDS tonight, i think.

…..