A year's discoveries

Oh, what a lovely New Year’s Eve! It’s been I don’t know how long since I went to a New Year’s party, somehow I never wind up hearing about them or something and Chris and I wind up spending them alone together. But this year I had not one but two parties to choose from, and got to go to both.

The first, at the Queens home of batyatoon and sdelmonte was loud and jumpy (in a mostly good way), and I got to see cadhla one last time before she wings back home, and looked at more of camwyn’s sketches, and smooched in the new year with Chris. They threw us out at 12:30, but I was still in the mood to do stuff, so Chris and I headed back into Manhattan to see if the Columbia crowd party at JI’s was still going on, and it was. Much quieter, more relaxed, and absolutely yummy food (mmmm, stinky gruyere), a nice winding down. This would augur well for 2003 if I believed in omens and augury.

At some point I seem to have gotten onto 45 people’s Friends lists. How the hell did that happen? And why do so few of you comment?

It’s traditional to do some kind of summing-up of the past twelvemonth when the calendar cycles, so here, some of what I’ve learned in Ought-Two, and what I intend to do with that knowledge in Ought-Three:

• Discovery: My social life improves if I put some effort into it. A minimal amount of effort produces moderate amounts of good stuff. Resolution: Find out what a moderate amount of effort does.
• Discovery: Any weight loss plan ought to include exercise. If I work out strenuously and regularly and watch what I eat I can lose ten pounds a month. Resolution: Do that for at least six months.
• Discovery: Microwave, in the right context, is a very funny word. Resolution: Practice restraint.
• Discovery: Women really do like bald guys. I get more flirty attention from women friends now than I ever did when I wore my hair down past my shoulders. Resolution: Stay more or less bald. Also, don’t let anyone other guys know the secret to female attention; I don’t need the competition. So don’t, like, post this to the Internet or anything. Also, invent time travel and tell self this like twenty years ago, along with investment tips.
• Discovery: All TiBooks look alike. Resolution: Stickers, stickers, stickers!
• Discovery: The Boston area has lots of way cool people. Resolution: Go there more often.
• Discovery: Greyhound’s security people are evil and stupid. Resolution: Use cheap Chinatown buses to travel to Boston. (More buses. And still more.)
• Discovery: If I don’t make art, then no art gets made by me. Resolution: Make more art!

I love New York

Via Gawker, the NYC-centric weblog, I found Lockhart Steele’s Lower-East-Side-centric weblog, which demonstrates that the sort of things that only happen on TV happen all the time in NYC:

Standing on our roof with a friend looking down on Rivington, we're talking about the Mexican restaurant across the street. "The only person I know who's gone there got food poisoning," he says. Right then, an ambulance pulls up in front of the place and two paramedics rush in.

Also read about the Eldridge Street Hot Springs. Anyway, through the LES blog I found web host Fictional Company (“FictCo has a hosting plan that's right for you, as well as several that are wrong for you”), which led me to Tiny Ninja Theater! Check out their publicity stills from Romeo & Juliet. And here’s a description of their dramatization of the 2000 election:

The show begins with director Weinstein sneaking across the stage with a suitcase purporting to contain uncounted Florida ballots. From this suitcase, and another beside it, emerged not only the ballots but a host of other characters including Hillary Clinton (Princess Leia) Rudy Giuliani (Dr. Doom) and a dramatic re-creation of the death of the posthumously elected Senator from Missouri, Mel Carnahan, performed by a smiley 4-inch-high bright-pink-foam computer company mascot and a posterboard cutout of an out-of-control airplane.

Fly Guy

Most of you will have already seen pointers to the Fly Guy Flash animation, but those who haven’t need to check it out. One of the coolest Flash things ever.

Plowshares into swords into stirrups into scissors into rifles into scalpels into bells

Steel salvaged from the World Trade Center wreckage will (if it’s up to spec) be used in the bow of the USS New York, a new San Antonio-class amphibious assault ship currently being built in Mississippi. I read about this a couple days ago, I think, but forgot about it till I read this commentary by Jeanne D’Arc echoing this one by Elayne Riggs:

What makes the wreckage more than ordinary scrap metal is the fact that it's mixed in with the remains of actual people, much of it powderized by the intense heat to the point where it's probably inseparable. Now, it's one thing for Mark Gruenwald's ashes to be mixed into a special edition of Squadron Supreme, that was a request made in his will. But I can pretty much surmise that few if any of these 3000 people would consent to having their ashes be used as part of an instrument of war. That's what I find, in August's words, utterly obscene.

And that’s what I have a hard time swallowing. Did the WTC dead consent to having their ashes dumped in Fresh Kills landfill to begin with? Or sold as scrap? Surely not. Why balk at a warship, then? And if we can’t do anything with the steel that the dead didn’t consent to, then what do we do with it? And why limit this attitude just to this steel, and not to everything else the ashes bonded to?

Look, I was there in Brooklyn on 9/11. I saw that plume of smoke arcing up over me, and eastward. I breathed that air, and smelled that smoke, as did millions of other people. Those ashes travelled far and wide. They got everywhere, and into everything. They’re part of me now, and part of lots of other people too. The WTC dead were part of every rape, every kiss, every fight, every sneeze, every lie, every truth, every fart, every laugh in the New York area in the past fifteen months, no matter what the dead would have wanted. (And what they’d most want, I’m guessing, is not to be dead.) And every one of us has atoms in his or her body that spent some time as part of Genghis Kahn, or Charlemagne, or Aristotle, or Washington.

The other day Chris and I were talking about the current plans for rebuilding the WTC, all of which seem to involve leaving the actual footprints of the original buildings undeveloped, as if to build there would be disrespectful to the dead. Chris pointed out that there probably isn’t so much as a single square foot of land on all of Manhattan Island that hasn’t had somebody die on it at some point. And yet life goes on, and we keep on building.

I’m all for respecting the dead, but not to the point where the graveyard walls become a prison for the living.