My Dearest Jill- Miss Quinn, it has been far to long since I have touched your ivory face or gazed upon your sun-wheat hair. As I think of you, somewhere past the gull cry, I find myself asking, "Why oh why did you go and become a pirate?!?!" Pirates are horrible bloodthirsty scavengers of the sea! You were fair and kind and now you probably have a peg leg and a crew of deserters and chinamen. Well, I'm resigned to your fate- that's why I found you this: Dave Egger's Pirate Store. They say it's the best around for "your kind". In San Francisco, obviously, but they'll ship to wherever the Aolians take you, my dear, dear, much missed she-pirate. Eternally Landlocked, Japhy

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posted by Japhy at 9/24/2003 02:41:00 PM || #

Theatre Review: Over-Dose: The Weird and Mainly Unpleasant World of Dose: The Musical "-Do you like me? Yeah? -Would you do something really special for me? What? -Heroin." (from Dose: The Musical) I'd like to begin this review by pointing out that most people, me included, go to the theatre to enjoy themselves. The audience, for the most part, wants to have a good time. The audience that attends new musical theatre in the East Village is an especially tolerant breed. They've seen some pretty bad stuff and so, don't ask for much. I bring this up because for most of the seemingly unending eternity that is the new musical Dose, the audience remains pretty much silent as a heroin addict. Well, a normal heroin addict, not the singing, mincing, monsters on stage in this disaster. See, Dose is about heroin---and fat people...gay stereotypes too. I could go on about how confusing the plot is, but I could better use my time to say, read a book or pick my nose, so here's the briefest synopsis possible: Fat girl Lily (Shanna Sharp- who is buried under the world's most unflattering fat suit. Who knew that there were no genuinely fat girls who could sing left in the world? Thank god for fat suits- without them we'd have to see people who really ARE fat tread the boards!) is obsessed with model-boy Jamie (Kahan James)who is a heroin addict and not much else. He turns all of her friends on to heroin while she remains annoyingly oblivious and actually is the source of funds for Jamie's addiction. There's a minor sub-plot involving the most ridiculous gay character this side of Paul Lynde's grave and another about a performance artist with a Daddy-Catholic-Spank-Me fetish. Wow: An hour and a half of my life wasted on a storyline that thin. It kinda makes me want to do heroin. Alright, let's review this baby: The show starts off promising enough with Lily (aka Fat Girl), entering lonely and dejected, crying over her salad until she pulls out a salami and two prancing faggy chorus boys and starts singing about the joy of food. It's about time we had a musical number making fun of chorus boys and it's well done here. Someone should write a musical about chorus boys and girls- I'd bet it would be a big hit. In any event, this light hearted acidic comedy soon dissolves into the depressing and morose middle section of the musical, which could easily be retitled: D.A.R.E- The Musical. The usual problems that plague bad musicals are all here: One dimensional characters, boring plots, expositional songs, songs which really have nothing to do with the musical, songs that stop the musical dead in its tracks (no pun intended) and then, of course, reprises of all those useless songs throughout the second act. However, Scott Schneider's score is actually quite good. The tunes were catchy, even if the lyrics were generic or nonsensical. I hope to hear him again someday in a better musical. There are moments of enjoyment in the show. One number especially, "Manipulation" comes together in a catchy, proto-Fosse way that manages to tell the audience something without bashing them over the head with it. Also, the last ten minutes of the play are fantastic- and completely out of context with the rest of the show. If book writer/lyricist Tim Aumiller really wanted to make the point he makes at the end of the show, he would not have given us such entirely pasteboard characters. If the show could only be as witty as it is in it's final moments (there's bit about "karma" in the final number that is absolutely hilarious) the creators of Dose might have a show that doesn't leave its audience wishing for the narcoleptic bliss seen onstage for themselves. As it stands now, when the fatty finally gets around to shooting up, I found myself muttering, "Well now, maybe she'll lose some fucking weight." Dose is playing through September 26th at the Kraine Theater (85 East 4th Street between 2nd and 3rd). Tickets are $15 and available through www.smartix.com or at the box office. Showtime is 7:30. www.dosethemusical.com

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posted by Japhy at 9/23/2003 09:11:00 AM || #

Advice for the High School Senior From the College Senior Hey there Senior! Congratulations, you're almost out of high school! You've taken your senior photo and now, if you haven't already, you find yourself spending each weekend at some new campus that tries to woo you with impressive talk about "academic rigor" and "fun dorm living!". You've eaten at more Sodexo cafeteria's than you can imagine and you've collected enough embossed informational folders to start a small stationary store, but little senior, I know how lost you really are. You have absolutely no clue what's going on and if you think you do, you're probably in even worse shape. That's why you have me: The College Senior. Oh sure, I'm probably not the best one to be giving advice. I'm not at Harvard and it's taken me five years to get here, but Lil' Senior, trust me. I've been to three colleges: the rural state school Plymouth State College (now Plymouth State University), the highly urban private wannabe-Ivy New York University (where I attended Tisch School of the Arts) and now I'm at my soon-to be alma mater, the public, ethnic and urban Brooklyn College, here in sunny Flatbush, Brooklyn. My instability is your gain. I've seen almost every kind of college set-up and met almost every kind of college student. I took two years off to work and still came back. Most of all though, like you, I came into college wanting to get something more out of the experience than simply a piece of paper. Here's my advice to you, the High School Senior: Don't go to a University. This is the strongest advice I can give anyone looking at an undergraduate degree. Universities are large and serve the needs of researching professors and graduate students. As an undergraduate, you will find yourself taking classes that are extremely large and taught by T.A.'s, not professors. Save the university for your grad degree, when you'll get the attention you deserve. A university may sound prestigious, but unless you are going for a specific program, skip it and choose a college instead. The only difference it will make when it comes time to graduate is that your recommendation letters will come from someone who actually knows you. Major in what you want. Students are constantly majoring in things they "think" they should be majoring in and wind up miserable. Major in whatever moves you. It's not as if you're going to actually wind up doing what you major in anyways, so you might as well do something you enjoy. What if you want to get into a good graduate program? A friend of mine did his undergrad at the University of Austin and then went to Harvard Law. He's making tons of money at a major law firm now. His undergraduate major? Cello Playing. Be an adult. I don't mean act mature (god forbid!) but the way to succeed among your friends and impress your teachers is to simply act like you have a handle on things. If you act like a lost little kid, that's how you'll be perceived. Everyone is terrified in the first few months of school, but if you fake confidence, you may actually build up some real confidence in the process. Pick a college town. The big city universities are great fun, but that's their downfall. While you should be focusing on wearing baggy t-shirts and plaid, the big city campus makes you think about being a grown-up far faster than you really need to be. It's hard to consider class all that important when you can get a job in your industry now. Some students excel at big city college life, just realize that it's more city life than college life you're getting. Get involved in campus activities, but have a life as well. Sure, if your campus is the only game in town, your life is going to revolve around it, but get some real world experience as well. Meet people who are not in your college. Take up a job. The campus can be a bubble that shelters you, but eventually you need to burst it open. Take a semester off. Better yet, take a year off. Go travel. Write a novel. Have a passionate affair with a Latvian archeologist. Whatever it is, do it now. Once you graduate, you will most likely never have the opportunity to do so again. Find a mentor. If there's a professor you adore or who infuriates you in a positive way or if you have a director, coach or boss who you really seem to click with, hang on to that person. Develop a real relationship with someone older and wiser and in your field and you'll be orders of magnitude ahead of everyone else. This might sound too Mrs. Robinson-esque, but trust me. My first and best mentor, Matt Kizer, of Plymouth State University, challenged me in ways I would have never challenged myself. I still email him now and then, two colleges later and his advice is always on the mark. Do what you want. The great thing about college is that you get to reinvent yourself and unlike high school people are going to be pretty much cool with that. Always dreamed of being a jock, but was labeled a wimp in high school. Go for it! Didn't do drama because you thought it was gay? Get over yourself and do a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta! Be who you want to be. Just, for god sakes, don't be boring. And one bit of advice about your last year in High School: Enjoy it! Those jerks that think they're the kings of high school? Four years from now, they'll still be living in the same town, doing some crappy job and talking about how cool high school was. Get close with your friends and cry like crazy when they leave, because year or two from now, you'll be lucky if you're still talking to three of them! So, don't be afraid of college. It's just like high school- only the classes are easier, you get to do whatever you want and the jerks are the ones everyone makes fun of. Excelsior!

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posted by Japhy at 9/16/2003 12:38:00 PM || #

This is General Wesley K. Clark. From NPR.com: "Clark was Supreme Allied Commander of Europe from 1997 to 2000. A West Point graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and decorated Vietnam War veteran, Clark was the director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon from 1994 to 1996 and lead military negotiator for the Bosnian Peace Accords at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995." This week, General Clark, a Democrat, will announce his candidacy for President of the United States. Oh yeah, he's also anti-war.

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posted by Japhy at 9/15/2003 12:37:00 PM || #

The War on Terrorism Count...It Keeps Growing and Growing and Growing... Hope you had a Happy Terrorism Day! I'm not going to write about September 11th specifically today. Suffice it to say that turning on my TV this morning, I saw a special news segment on "What Celebrities Were Doing on September 11th" in which I found out that Christian Slater called his agent to find out when his flight to New York...blah, blah, blah. I turned off the TV and felt sick, disgusted and dirty. I think there are a myriad of ways to remember this day. That was not an appropriate one. Here is my way: The War on Terror began on September 11th, 2001. Two years later, let's look in on how we're doing: I guess this means we're winning.

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posted by Japhy at 9/11/2003 05:33:00 PM || #

Our Dull tomorrow: The Latest Issue of Time Hails the Death of The Future Take a look at the September 8th issue of Time, a special report entitled What's Next- Our fearless forecasts in the worlds of Science, Medicine, Tech, Sports, Design, Movies and More.[Click here to see it online] The "Look into tomorrow" theme is certainly not a novel one, but what's so telling about America's favorite magazine's take on tomorrow is how close tomorrow is from now. Managing Editor James Kelly writes, " we decided to avoid fanciful long-term projections of what life might be like in, say, the year 2050...we decided instead to focus on the near future, to look at the trends that will make a difference later this year and in 2004." That's right. The future is next week. While groups like Daniel Hillis' Long Now Foundation urge to think of things on a cosmic scale of thousands of years, we have become a culture obsessed in quarterly, even weekly future. James Gleick chronicles this trend in his book, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, but the latest issue of Time seems to transcend mere overcaffinated myopia. In fact, in 104 pages, James Kelly seems to be telling Time readers that future, or at least the vision of the future as ultimate cultural carrot that drives society forward, is gone. The first half of the magazine is filled with full page spreads of the recent bombing in Najaf. Looking like an eerily familiar post-apocalyptic scene, men yell and struggle to pull bodies out of dust soaked cars. Rubble fills the streets and a man cries into his t-shirt. This could be last year, two years ago, the Middle Ages or Armageddon. Time folds in on itself in Time. Afghanistan is back (as if it ever went away), conspiracy theories about Saudi Arabia and American politicians smiling and riding motorcycles (John Kerry, to be precise) all seem to exist without any real historical context. This might be the now, but when sandwiched between a cover about the future, these events already look hazy and dim. With the war on terrorism a war that can never be won, it seems that the future, past and present have all collapsed into rubble, leaving us to sift through the eternal now. Once we get to the actual section on The Future, we don't find flying cars or even new gadgets. Instead, we meet Irma Zandl, a media consultant who's job is to spot the latest trends. Her guesses: iPod DJ parties, Latin Flava, and Burlesque. Burlesque, of course, as my savvy readers know, is so last year it hurts. She describes the people who set trends as 'alpha consumers' and then describes the process by which, creative original ideas are commodified and transformed into bland, soulless, politically harmless trends to sell to shoppers. Happy Future! Then there's a nice article that you've read thirty times already about the security risks this country faces and then a little dazzle article about NASA's new Martian golfcart. Shiny Future! What else does the future bring? Chinese basketball players (again!), talking dolls (again!) and cyberspace and real space will blend according to the perennially unbuilt Asymptote (who's most public project, a virtual Guggenheim was cancelled after the dot com crash wiped out funding). Brad Pitt will star in an epic- actually, The Epic- The Iliad and in the music world, black people will get back to their roots while white people will be more soulful and sensitive. The eighties are back in as a fashion-style. In short, it's last year all over again. Or 1955. Or 2050. Welcome to Tomorrow- Everyday.

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posted by Japhy at 9/09/2003 12:10:00 PM || #

Come Have a Happy Ending! Once a Chinese massage parlor (with release!) Happy Ending is now a hip, swank, soiree (with release!) Come celebrate the birth of one party and the death of another! At 8 p.m.: The Happy Ending Reading Series begins with music, magic and Rick Moody! Free. (details) At 10 p.m: Dean Johnson and Johnny McGovern say goodbye to their own Happy Ending party. I'll sure miss their weekly emails with their clever quotes. Not for the faint of heart or the broke- it'll set you back five bux. The location: Happy Ending Bar 302 Broome Street @ Forsyth; 212-334-9676 6; N, R to Canal Street or F to Delancey

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posted by Japhy at 9/02/2003 07:19:00 PM || #

An Open Letter to Daryl Lang (Which You Can Read Too) "I'm just writing to point out that the destination you describe in your "Gone Hikin'" entry sounds an awful lot like New *Hampshire*, not New York. But have a great trip, wherever the road takes you!" - Daryl Lang, regarding my most recent blog entry *Japhynote: Daryl Lang can be read every day at his stupendous journal @ www.daryllang.com Dear Daryl, How are you? I'm well. You're absolutely right. I was referring to New Hampshire, not New York. Truth of the matter, I was standing in the middle of a library web kiosk at Brooklyn College while writing that blog. Looks like I must have been a bit distracted by all the...books, since I clearly mistook one 'New' for another. You can't really blame me though, since I've lived in every 'New' state save New Jersey (gak!) so it's easy to get confused. I'm not surprised that you were the only one to notice though. New Yorkers probably believed that Mount Washington might as well be in New York for all they care- it's all upstate to them. As I was driving past Concord, I thought of you and your days at the Concord Monitor. While New Hampshire might be home to a thousand human interest stories (exactly one-thousand, in fact), I can't imagine the frustration you encountered in your search for real news in the Granite State. New Hampshire defies the concept of The Now. I had not been there in five years and the only qualitative differences about the state I could discern were that Plymouth State College is now a university and The Old Man in the Mountain (a.k.a. The Great Stone Face- which is more majestic sounding if you ask me) is now a pile of dust at the bottom of Mount Cannon. In any event, I'm rambling. What I wanted to tell you about, Daryl, was my trip up the mountain. Mount Washington, home of the worst recorded weather on Earth.....reachable by road, cog railway and by foot. My Dad had been bugging my brother Mo and I to go on a father-son summer trip for years. Inevitably, whenever the three of us camped together, it rains. My childhood father-son bonding memories are a permanent water-logged alblum of playing checkers on a mushy cardboard surface, pock-marked by rain dripping down the sides of the tent....or nights of falling asleep to the sound of rain hitting the windshield of our Aerovan while Dad slept next to me in the driver's seat, fully reclined, minimally comfortable. The rain never really concerned us all that much, to be honest. Rain on Father-Son Weekend had become like Snow on Christmas....only, more inevitable. Which is why we stayed at a condo. And there wasn't a drop of rain. Someday, what we will do is make reservations for a hotel, pay for it, check in and then make a mad dash for our tents and camp, hopefully fooling the great storm spirit, Ammonoosuc, into thinking we're at Holiday Inn and giving our camp trip the impossible dream of a dry, dry camp. Seriously, we're doing it. This is what I want to write to you about Daryl. I want to tell you about Ammonoosuc, who makes his home on Mount Washington, who is a creation of the Abenaki people, and who I met at about 9:30 a.m. on the 21st of August. So, Dad, Mo and I hit the trail at around seven o'clock. Ungodly, I know, but the air up there defies sleep, too thin to ever lull you into a sense of relaxation. Down at sea level, the air is soup, perhaps a chowder, really. Up in New Hampshire, the air is more like an abstract concept that you might run into time to time while traveling through empty space. So we start walking- Mo in front, my Dad behind me, carrying his walking stick with feathers he had found on trails past tied into the leather lanyard at the top. I'm in the middle and for the first hour or so, true to form, I don't shut up. Every thirty seconds or so, there is an arrangement of rock walls interspersed with peg-like trees and lit by the morning sun in such a way that surpasses any Hudson school painter. My mind races with the idea that once the world was all like this and what it would mean to come upon such grandeur for the first time. Which I was, but I mean, to be discover this. Which I did! But to be the first. Which I am in my own heart. I am the frontiersman and the guy who died before ever hitting the mountain and who have endured snow storm and death and bears only this time, this umpteenth first time, it is beautiful and I am reminded of paintings that everyone call 'impressionistic' because nobody gets out enough anymore. Nowadays we call the fantastic unbelievable and call a painting surrealist if it's colors are to vivid, it's contrasts too contrasty, it's reality too stupendous. (Aside: Great joke I heard this week- "Dadaists are just keeping it surreal") This is what I'm thinking about. I'm also thinking about how to write a nature poem in a way that doesn't reference the man-made. No "rivers like ribbons" or "vast canopy's of green", but rather to find ways of talking about the natural without turning it into a dressmaker's shopping list or an architect's glossary. I'm thinking about this and crossing the Ammonoosuc, which when not being a mountain or a great storm spirit, is also a river. This is a mad river, really more water falling off the side of a giant rock than actual river, with banks and shores and things. It goes barreling down the mountain like dragon's flames, only wet and white. We reach this perfectly amazing waterfall that looks like it took thirty zen monks fifty years to arrange in perfect harmony each tree, boulder and pool into a balance that expresses the One True Nature of All and then we go up. This is a staircase. My knees are up to my chest in each step, bah-dah, shuffle, bah-dah, shuffle. If it was steeper, I'd need climbing equipment. This goes on in short intervals for about twenty- thirty minutes and then something happens. The trail gets harder. I'm dying here and the trail gets harder and all the sudden I'm flying. Crossing the ever shrinking Ammonoosuc back and forth, splashing it's fucking way-too-early-in-the-morning water in my face and I'm laughing at the boulders and the way they have absolutely nothing to do with a trail at all other than that I'm making my way up and over them. I'm falling up the damn mountain! Fuck the cliche, I am the cliche and I'm dangerously close to becoming the guy I'm named after, but I don't care, really because this is the most incredible thing I have ever felt, as if my heart has become this giant metal thing slicing out of my body and reaching out to the valleys below, the ravines and gorges, to the water and moss and lichen beneath my feet and I'm giddy. I stop every few minutes and scream out into the valley below and my voice is just absorbed into the mountains and the forests. My hollars and whoops are just sucked in and Ammonoosuc is saying, "Yeah, baby, let it all out, you aint' gonna' get me riled up. You scream and you hollar and I'm just gonna take it allllllll in, you hear?" Rhapsody of stubby pines shrinking down from vertical towers into nothing, into moss and shrub and nothing. Into nothing and nothing and nothing. Man on rock. Man up rock. No man. No air. No rock. Just the demarcations, the line of where footprint hit stone. When traced: A lightning bolt in empty space. Thanks for listening Daryl. (Everybody else, too) -Japhy

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posted by Japhy at 9/02/2003 11:39:00 AM || #