Ford MF

Maggie and I washed the dog yesterday. It was a fun thing to do on a hot Monday afternoon, and comparatively painless. Roscoe's not crazy about the process, and the shampoo smelled like Maalox, but he's fairly amenable to it. And I enjoy doing it myself rather than sending him out for grooming. I meant to take pictures, but I forgot.

Also yesterday I spilled wine on my keyboard at home and now I think it's broken. Fuck. Those things aren't cheap. Or not as cheap as they should be, at least.

I've sent in my orientation fee to get myself registered at SUNY at Empire State College. And only partially because then I can pretend I'm attending Empire State University. It's an "adult learning" institution, which regrettably is not as salacious as it sounds. It's basically a place where thirtysomething cats and kittens who never started or never finished college can polish off a degree without taking four years off work to go back to school. And there is some kind of thing where I should be able to get the execrably named "life credits" for having run a business for, geez, seven years now?

Not that I need credits or anything, I just need to tie my various, completely unrelated past interests into a finished degree so I can move on and maybe go to grad school (did I just say that?) I've got 3/4 of a degree of at least three different disciplines: classical languages, film (kind of a 50/50 split between cinematography and film studies), and fiction writing. Probably English literature too, if you want to count that separately. None of which I have much interest in pursuing in a scholarly or professional sense. We'll see how that goes. I think I have a friend on the faculty.

The other element of the plan is to take out a student loan and use some of it to pay for the 1st + last + security for the place to which Maggie and I will eventually move, which has been pressing heavily on my brow lately, since both of us are flat broke. To that end, I've been stalking a second job--since I'm going to get Alzheimers before I get a raise here--or possibly something that would let me leave. I've been sticking faithfully to a schedule of finding something to apply for, at least one job, every single workday. I'm professionally unqualified to do much of anything, so I'm not surprised that my volleys of resumes and cover letters have yielded not one single response yet (not even to the unpaid volunteer positions! ouch), but it feels good to be doing something for a change.

My life plan has always been to assume I was going to be hit by a bus sooner or later, or drown in a freak accident in a foreign country. But I am part of a couple now, I have to be more practical.

I rewatched (most of) Batman Begins yesterday, and I'd forgotten they relocated Batman's origin to some stupid opera house instead of a theater showing Douglas Fairbanks' Mark of Zorro. It was a stupid, pointless change that subtracts the mythological and the heroic from Batman's origin. There is no clear explanation for why Batman does what he does. He's neither crazy nor haunted, he's just ... bored maybe? He sure looks bored.

Granted, they bungled the mythology almost 100% in the first movie. A sullen, aimless Wayne goes to Princeton ... and then he fucks off to Asia to train with Liam Neeson and Al Qaeda? Uh, sure.

It's hard to pinpoint why I am still able to watch that movie--repeatedly--when it's every inch as frumpily mediocre as Superman Returns, and I can barely make it through the first half hour of that thing.

really oughta be titled "The Joker Wins: And Christian Bale's Face Looks Fat".

I read a few reviews before going to see it, most notably ravenface's, and mostly concurred with the things people said. The short version, which is all you're going to get (it's not like I work for Warner Bros or anything), is that everything that was wrong with the first move is wrong with this one. Batman is flat and boring talks in a silly voice still. Luckily this movie has THE JOKER. And the Joker is, without a poppy seed of hyperbole, motherfucking AMAZING. Seriously. If the movie is any good at all, it's because of Heath Ledger, and because the director and screenwriter were okay with making such a relentlessly downbeat franchise film.

I am pretty sure mordicai is going to love the pants off it.

I think it might be time to move on to Ironside

Studebaker garage turned into a church.

Banner on the building of the New York Telephone Company, indicating how many of its employees are members of the armed forces. 1917.

I've mentioned before what a devotee I am of the New York City murder blog. I check in every few days, to see who's dead, and where. The answer is numbingly, depressingly regular: "Young black male, shot dead in Brownsville / East New York / Flatbush / The Bronx, no arrests".

Yesterday, I'd found myself again mulling over the case of Nicole duFresne, twentysomething white chick with a theatre degree from Emerson, whose story, like the case of Willie Bosket, haunts a lot of New Yorkers, or at least people like me. She and her boyfriend and another couple were walking home through the Lower East Side, on Clinton, and they got jumped by a bunch of kids from the projects over there. One of them, Rudy Fleming, pistol-whipped deFresne's boyfriend in the face and fucked up his eye socket or something. After all four people had handed over their stuff, the kids just sorta hung around. Which would probably throw me off too, since when a crime is committed against you, the perpetrators generally flee when they're done, right? Not the other way around. But duFresne approached them and said "What are you still doing here? You got what you wanted. What are you going to do now, shoot us?" And Fleming did, and killed her.

It is perhaps one of the greatest moments of New York stupidity, as it assumes you can talk shit to people who are robbing you because you can't imagine they'd want to take it further. It's also one of the great moments of New York's race bias in victimology. No doubt there are poignant narratives to be mined from the last moments of the legions of young colored men (and women, but mostly men) shot and stabbed week in and week out, but for some reason the one that sounded the greatest chord--even to me--is this tale of an arty white chick, young, affluent, pretty, who wasn't even trying to help someone, was just being indignant. It's been on my mind the last couple months, I guess, since I read Richard Price's Lush Life, which features a murder that's not based on duFresne's, per se, but definitely nods in that direction.

And yet half the time, when I read about twentysomething black dudes getting capped, like that guy in the photograph above, my eyes glaze over. What can you say: two young black guys got in a fight over a girl, or maybe money or drugs, one guy had a gun and he shot the other. Can somebody turn the record over? I think I've heard this side so much I'm singing it in the shower. After the hundredth such story (and by hundredth, I mean "hundredth this year"), even a dedicated vice-hound like me starts daydreaming of lightsabers and kryptonite. I didn't even read the article attached to the photograph; I just walked away from my computer, read for a bit, and fell asleep. When I woke up, his face was still on my monitor and it weirded me out maybe more than it should have, and I just shut off the browser and watched Fellowship of the Rings and had dinner with my girlfriend.

So two days ago some middle-aged white couple got whacked in their homes down the block from the park where I go running, and some Russian kid got beaten to death with a pool cue in Brighton Beach, and let me tell you: that is a weird whitey trifecta. Three Caucasians in one day? That shit never happens. Got me thinking about Nicole duFresne again, and her killer, Rudy Fleming (age 20 when he pulled the trigger). So I started Googling his name, and the first thing that popped up? That same damn photograph above.

Turns out it's a picture of Grant Fleming, who just a few days ago tried to do a home invasion and rob some guy at gunpoint, and the victim wasn't interested in going quietly, and so they struggled for the weapon. And Fleming was, as that Elvis Costello tune goes, "shot with his own gun", and killed. (The Daily News did not fail to point out that the favorite TV show on his myspace page was "Law & Order.")

Weird. It's a small world. Small, I guess, if you're a dude from the LES projects whose brother is already in prison for murder. Their other brother, Royal Fleming, is also in prison, for beating a guy with a baseball bat.

Well wow, Andrew Sarris actually reviewed The Dark Knight. He almost never even mentions the existence of blockbustery stuff, let alone superhero stuff, so my mind is kinda blown that he'd write about Batman and shower it with unambiguous adoration. He's kinda my hero.

Went to ranai's (first) birthday party tonight, at Asian Pub. Maggie's starting to get sick, so we bailed comparatively early, at around 10:30, which at the Asian Pub means "just in time to stave off crippling inebriation". No kidding, folks. At the end of any given night at Asian Pub, I always feel like at least one person is two ounces of Tequila away from an emergency room visit. Four of those $3 girly drinks and a couple chocolate cake shots and you are done, son. I was gonna write some Wikipedia articles tonight, on some of the lesser known Alexanders, but I need to get some sleep.

*I looked up something using the search engine on DC Comics website and got the following cute message when the search turned up no hits: "We probably no longer recognize the existence of the universe it was in. Sorry."

*I like a lot of the ads posted for skilled tradespeople on Craigslist, because they're so adorably un-internet-savvy. Like how the "telecommuting" lists always have ads seeking plumbers and bricklayers and shit, presumably because none of these dudes know what telecommuting actually is. Some of the titles kill me: "LOW VOLTAGE GUY NEEDED" is my favorite.

*I wish I understood Russian, at least a little bit, because there are so many amazing music sites registered with a .ru domain that are just giant piratey clearing houses for CD downloads. Just ... tons and tons of stuff. I can kinda understand the pages when I get Google-linked to them, but not enough to navigate the sites unfortunately. But man, you go Russia, for being the crazy wild west of internet copyright.

I have identified a taste that makes me feel like a child: original flavor Ny-Quil. It's such a weirdly strong mnemonic.

Witch Prison wrapped yesterday. Devoted boyfriend that I am, I notched up my fourth viewing, and took the opportunity to take a whole lot of pictures, which I wish I had started doing earlier. I feel like after the mistakes I made yesterday, I'd be savvier to taking photographs of the play today, but alack and alas, the witch is no more.

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Yesterday was pretty great. It was Maggie's birthday (her 20th!), and we spent the entire day together. Got up early and headed into Manhattan way in advance of her play, grabbed breakfast together at that diner near NYU, University something or other. The high maintenance old peacock sitting behind us had a list of instructions for how he wanted his omelette made that was longer than Philip Roth's last book, and when he was done he gave the waitress the cheese he had brought with him, with which they were to construct this next-gen superomelette. They looked like Kraft Singles; individually wrapped slices of cheese food product. Then he read (to a woman whom I dearly hope was an acquaintance and not a wife) book reviews from the New York Times out loud, explaining each sentence.

Then we walked around steamy Manhattan a while. I picked up some back issues of The Lone Ranger I'd been looking for. We threw pennies in the fountain at Madison Square Park, and then hopped a train to Broadway, where my lady is appearing as a witch with a silly voice in ... Witch Prison! It was two hours before the show, so I hung around the lounge, reading my comics, and chatting with frocked shrekmeister ravenface, and continuing, slowly, to slog through Dahlgren, which William Gibson has charitably called "a riddle that was never meant to be solved", as a way of politely saying "it doesn't make a damn bit of sense." Let it not be said that I require my stories to make any damn sense at all, but a lot of that book makes me feel like I'm reading capital L littracha, which is never a good thing. It is, as I found myself explaining to hydrozoa last night, a lot like Ulysses written by a fabulist who thought Joyce just didn't have enough buggery, blowjobs and bone-ogling. I guess that's basically what it is. Calling it sci-fi is a bit of a stretch.

I also got to be a nerd showoff at the bar by explaining Lorem ipsum when a girl showed up with a "Lorem ipsum" t-shirt and didn't know what it was (it's a nonsense abridgment of Cicero used by typographers to show off their fonts).

The play was great again, and different in a way (thanks, live theatre!) At first I thought there were a lot more lines this time, like a bunch had been dropped in the first performance, which might be true in some cases, but I think it's more like a lot of stuff I didn't catch on the first bounce, or maybe some of the lines got stepped on enough that they didn't quite penetrate. But overall I thought the play was funnier last night, but got less laughs from a less responsive crowd. And zero applause, whereas the first night everyone applauded whenever one of the actors smiled. Maybe that's just an opening night thing.

Afterwards, I took Maggie to dinner for her birthday, at Osso Buco, back around Union Square, which was really good. After afterwards, we walked around the village for a bit, sat in the park for a bit, took a million cell phone pictures of us for a bit. Even still, it was barely 9pm, and Mags wasn't ready to go home (birthday!), so we headed over to Cooper something, which is what the Asian Pub has turned into, even though it's the same in most respects. We heard the fireworks, but ignored them, and cuddled and got moderately drunk on lycheetinis, sea breezes, bay breezes, margaritas and creamsicles. Then: the train. The ride was mostly quick and painless.

Then Maggie and I arrived home and had some amazing sex.

ME: Baby, would you characterize the sex we had last night as "amazing"?

MAGGIE: Yeah, I guess so. Why?

ME: Because I'm writing in my livejournal about it, and I want to make sure it's accurate.

MAGGIE: It's weird that you're writing that in your livejournal.

Afterwards, however, she became violently ill, due, I think, to the (MAGGIE:Put some more commas in that sentence, why don't you) current $4 cocktail menu at the former Asian Pub. She spent the next, oh, hour or so puking her guts up, during which I nodded off and woke up to find her sleeping on the couch. I brought her back to bed, although couldn't get her to let go of her glasses. (MAGGIE:I'm kind of cute, David) I pried them from her fingers in the morning.

But it was her birthday, so a net win, altogether.

By the time I finish talking about my last vacation, it'll be time for the next one. Jeez.

Also: hey everybody, go see Witch Prison.



Teotihuacán is enormous and very well preserved. Its primary annoyance is that the souvenir hawkers are denser here that at any other site I've been to, and unlike, say, Chichen Itza, they aren't behind stationary tables segregated in one area of the park, they carry their stuff in backpacks and kind of follow you around. They shoot themselves in the foot too, as far as this Americano is concerned, because aggressive salesmen just get the off switch from me. In other circumstances I might have been like, hey, you know, I would like a tiny obelisk made from volcanic glass for twenty pesos. But when they descend upon you like a cloud of capitalist cajolery, all you want them to do is get the hell away from you. Fuck it, though, it was worth it. More than.

This is the Templo de Quetzalcóatl, within la Ciudadela, a large walled courtyard on the southern end of the site that was the residence of the city's supreme ruler. Behind the temple, or rather, underneath it, is the ruin of another, much older temple that was covered over with this one. I didn't really take a good picture of the excavation.

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The Brooklyn Museum (which has a neat photostream at Flickr) just posted a couple of sweet bookplates. The angel one above is my favorite.

"Do you sell communion cups?"

(throws hands up in a "what kind of place is this?" way when I say "no".)

So a couple of our TV night people are pretty occupied these days--kromelizard and toughlad are out of the country for a couple weeks, and Maggie and Christopher are involved in the play. And we were generally on hiatus for the last few weeks because I've been out of town, and I've been broke, largely as a result of going out of town. But once TV night resumes, I think I want to move my people onto Dexter. My sister Siobhan gave me the DVDs on a lark a couple weeks ago.

It was a slow boil, and took three or four episodes for me to realize how much I was actually digging it. And there remain some things about the series that annoy me (viz the "serial killer as superhuman" trope), but now I think it's pretty cool, and not just because there's absolutely no other TV for me to watch right now. Michael C. Hall is pretty compelling to watch, and it's nice to see Julie Benz again, as Rita, Dexter's damaged-goods girlfriend.

A lot of it is how the show's a weird metaphor for how hard it is, how much character and fortitude it takes, to adopt a special-needs child and really make it work (kinda like The Martian Child). Dexter's relationship, in flashbacks, with his late adoptive father is really thing that sold me on the show. When he's a kid, his dad sees what he is, and makes a committment to loving him nevertheless. And not merely cow-eyed, passive, unconditional love, but a canny, hands-on love that will put in the serious work to help the kid have some kind of a life as an adult, not executed or imprisoned. When the show's about being a good parent, it's pretty stellar. When it's about serial killers, it's ... mostly mediocre. But the ratio of good to bad is high enough to carry it.

My sister says the second season is even better, so I'm looking forward to that on DVD.

Friday, Maggie and I went over M's to pick up the toddler's coffin that M had been keeping his laundry in. They were doing some house cleaning and getting rid of some stuff to make space, and, you know, the coffin's always the first thing to go. It's moderately heavy and unwieldy, and we took it home on a hand truck. On the bus. It wasn't as bad as I'd been imagining it was going to be, not by half, but it wasn't exactly ballroom dancing either.

Since we're going to be looking for an apartment together in November, we decided this counts as the first piece of furniture we acquired together.

After a bit, Jenny and Carla and Robert showed up and we all played M & Jenny's new Wii, mostly Wario Ware, which is a terrific game. And my desire to get a Wii, already ardent, was stoked once more.

The night before last I went to dinner at Holy Basil with Maggie. We had mango margaritas of truly geological proportions, and I had some kind of duck curry. By the time I woke up, I was explosively ill, and after waving Maggie off to work in the morning, spent the rest of the day on the couch, reading comics and Dalhgren and watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers because I hadn't seen it in years, and I wanted to know if my dislike of the movie was justified (I hadn't seen it in maybe ten, twelve years). Turns out it was. That movie is the pits.

Also I didn't get to say goodbye to kromelizard as he departs for the Celestial Empire. Bon voyage!

Tonight I'm going to M and Jenny's to pick up a child's coffin for the apartment. Mostly for Maggie. I think we'll probably wind up keeping her laundry in it.

I'm going to my cousin's graduation this weekend in upstate New York.

( the remainder of photos from Day 1 of Cuidad de Mexico )

I was also really sad to see that Cyd Charisse died while I was gone. What legs.

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