Airport New Year

I am in the Atlanta-Hartsfeld Airport waiting on my flight to NYC to depart. There are LOTS of soliders here, carrying huge bags on their backs, cartons of cigarettes, stacks of magazines. It is easy sometimes to forget how young they are.

You can almost tell where the plane is going just by looking at the people in the gate area. The New Yorkers are dressed all in black, with dark jeans and expensive bags. Someone else has the same Jack Spade that I have -- which I only paid $40 for at the sample sale. That's another thing New Yorker's do: we have expensive taste, but like things to be cheap. Which means if, like me, you paid only $40 for the Jack Spade bag, you'll tell people that. And Jack Spade is so low on the totem pole of expensive taste, it's almost ridiculous. Relatively speaking.

The flight is (so far) a few minutes late, weather issues with the incoming plane. At first I thought that New Yorker's are better at waiting--since everyone in black looks to be so patiently waiting. I realized that we're not better at waiting, we're better at eavesdropping, and so everyone is listening to what's going on at the check-in counter, without having to get out of their seat. Hilarious.

The PA system here keeps reminding us that the "threat level is currently orange." As if that means anything.

Happy New Year.

Chattanooga

I'm here in Chattanooga, visiting the family and spending a late Christmas with everyone. My parents have gone off to the airport to pick up my brother, his wife, and my amazing nephew--who is the best nephew an uncle could ask for. Even if I don't see him much. "There's a tree in the house," he said the other day.

I'll be back for New Year's Eve in NYC....

New Novel Work

Last night, over a rather large boat of sushi at the infamous Taste of Tokyo with all the syrup folks, Stephan and I got to talking about the importance of marination in writing. I mentioned that I didn't like to give random deadlines to myself. Not random, exactly--but false. For example, I know the new novel is huge and almost impossible. (Almost, not completely.) And so I know to give myself plenty of time.

I often say that one of the troubles with being a writer is that it's happening all the time, whether you know it or not. Good luck keeping up. Once I was standing in line at Six Flags, waiting to get on Nitro, and something just exploded into my brain. I usually have a pad of paper with me wherever I go--but this time, I didn't. And of course, whatever it was, had been lost by the time I got home. One of the reasons I keep my landline is so I can call it from my cell phone and leave rambling, cryptic messages: "check light pollution levels in Memphis," I might say.

This lead to a discussion about how your writing can, and will, change while you're just doing nothing. Say, washing the dishes. You're answering your emails and poof, the plot appears. So, yes, it needs time. You need to write and then a week later re-write. And re-write again fifteen or twenty times. And it needs time to be by itself. Let the work get infected with everything else you're surrounded by: syrupmakers, farm co-ops, bad television, holiday cheer (and the occasional bah humbug.) But also know how much of all that to take out before it's finished.

I had a rather dramatic flash of narrative appear to me the other day while I was transferring at Times Square from the R Train to the 1 Train. Now--granted--I have pretty low taste in some things....a lot of things....so don't be surprised if, some years in the future, you come to the end of my second novel, to find that someone blows the whole place up with colorless, odorless gas....in a way that makes it a good movie starring Seann William Scott, taking a more dramatic, more action-centered role, who is mostly naked most of the time.

The moral of the story is: I'm still plugging away at it.

Briefly, Forever

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A Sesame Christmas

Last night, Kip and I went to the Sesame Workshop company Christmas party, which was held only 2 blocks from my house, at the Kaufman-Astoria Studios, on the set of the world-reknown show.

It was fun--all that insider vocabularly, door prizes, open bar and butlered hors d'oevres. Most company holiday parties are like this. What made this one particularly special was the performance--Elmo and Abby Cadabby hosted a "year in review" musical medly decidedly not for the regular watchers of Sesame Street. The other puppets all performed various higher-ups at Sesame Workshop. It was charming, funny and people loved it.

I also got to re-meet Stephanie D'Abruzzo, Tony-nominated former star of Avenue Q. She and Kip used to work together, and although I'd met her briefly after one Q show a few years ago, she did not remember me, and apologized profusely for it. There was no need to apologize, of course. At the first meeting, she shook my hand for about 1.5 seconds in a line of many other people. I was not offended.

Evidence of the fete you shall find below. Perhaps of all my readers, my nephew will find this most impressive.

Finished

The Rabbis for Human Rights conference ended yesterday. All of the staff went out to Marion's Continental for dinner, which was fabulous. I had the skate. The haricots verts were replaced with sugar snap peas, which was a welcome surpise.

I've hardly had any sleep in the last three days and all the adrenaline in my system makes you feel strung out and jittery. Thank god for the rain this afternoon. I can coccoon in my bedroom and watch movies.

Just Me (and Cindy) and the Rabbis

I am sitting here, almost 10:00pm, finally eating something since swallowing (nearly whole.....no blowjob jokes, please) a chicken-something-or-other wrap at about 4:00pm, while en route from one place to another. Those of you who know me, will calculate that six hours is too long for me to go without eating something, before turning into (even more of a) grump. And poor Cindy, she's still at the office. I know because she's sending me emails from there periodically. "Where's the sound permit?" she wants to know. "Who's doing the Literature Table from 4pm-7pm on Sunday?"

No, it's not Circus Amok, no matter how much you want it to be. It's the first inagural Rabbis for Human Rights Conference on Judaism and Human Rights! Cindy is the entire conference coordinator, and I'm just her humble minion. It promises to be a fascinating endeavor--assuming it all comes off, that is. And it will. At some point, things just begin to have their own life and you just swim along behind it. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, about 300 Rabbis and Rabbinic students will talk about human rights issues, and everything that surrounds all of that. I hope to sneak into some of the sessions.

Tomorrow, I'll be at the Greenmarket, where it is supposed to be all of 32 degrees. (Could be worse. I've stood out there in worse.) And so now I just chew my peanut butter sandwhich, lameting that I've run out of Beth's Farm Kitchen Jam (will have to get some more tomorrow,) and instead have to use the high-fructose corn syrup stuff to go along with my high-fructose corn syrup peanut butter left over from our Amok retreat back in August. The stuff never spoils. Right?

Ahoy, Doritos!

This article, which I found via Thomas Hobbs, has some amazing pictures in it. And to save you the click, here they all are -- brilliant captions included.


A cargo container that apparently fell from a ship washed up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on Thursday and spilled thousands of bags of Doritos brand tortilla chips on the beach. People collected the chips, which were apparently still fresh due to their airtight packaging. It was unknown which ship had lost the cargo or to what port it was bound.






People gather bags of Doritos in various flavors.
(Photos by Donna Barnett)









The cargo container apparently fell off a ship at sea and broke open. (Photo by Barbara Satterthwaite)

Positively Naked

Last Tuesday night, I went to a screening of the documentary Positively Naked, about Spencer Tunick's installation of 85 HIV+ people for the 10th anniversary issue of POZ magazine. It's a lovely film, honest and funny, and touching and affecting--what all good movies should be.

It premieres tonight on Cinemax at 7:00pm, in honor of World AIDS Day. It's only about 40 minutes long, and you know how I love anything under an hour. But seriously. And it's also an opportunity to see how Tunick works--you've seen his stuff before, these huge-scale portraits of a hundred, three hundred naked people laying about in some landscape or setting. His work is so perfect for dealing with the issues surrounding HIV and AIDS: body image, public vs. private, vulnerability vs. strength.

The New York Times Review, which appears today, seems to think that "the only truly disturbing note in “Positively Naked” is one man’s revelation that he still goes to sex clubs and does not reveal his H.I.V. status unless asked." I have an issue with this argument. What the review does not say is that in the film the man explains that "people don't go to sex clubs to hear about people's status." He's right.

To disclose, or not to disclose? Well, it's not the other person's responsibility. It's yours. If you want to know, ask.

Whenever this conversation comes up, inevitably someone asks "Well, wouldn't you want to know if the person you were sleeping with was positive?" My answer always is: Depending on what sexual behaviors I planned to engage in with that person. Because--duh--the topic of STDs is a definite mood-killer. And so why not go into the room with a set of I wills and I wonts already established?

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about World AIDS Day, and the film, is that we are still writing, making movies about, talking (and, of course, not talking) about safe sex. Because "uninhibited"--which appears so frequently in personal ads and sex ads--now means "I fuck without condoms" and not "free-spirited." Because testosterone is a fuckin' powerful thing and we all know what it can do to you in times of lust. Because gay men--and lesbians, and straights, and trannies, and bisexuals, and all the rest of the People Who Fuck (my new all-encompasing term) still need to hear about it.