Welcome to HoveringGiraffe.com!

Hello!

That's right, I've migrated my blog yet again! This time it's not out of simple tumblr malaise or a search for a newer, hipper blogging service to make me cooler in the eyes of the kiddies. Rather, it's due to the launching of my brand new website! I'd tell you the address, but, well, you're here, aren't you?This site was designed for me by the lovely and talented Leah Clark, and is meant to aggregate and showcase my various works, especially my nascent standup career and my various writing projects. Some of the pages herein are a bit spare at the moment, but don't worry, there will be lots more content to come. Most notably, I'll be continuing to update my standup page with clips, show dates, and anything else I can think of; and I'm currently collaborating with a director friend of mine on some original comedy shorts we'll be shooting soon. Plus, I'll actually start updating this blog thingamy again with more observations on everything personal, professional, and philosophical. And maybe I'll even throw up a cat picture now and again for good measure.So check back soon, and thanks for reading!

-TC

Rolling in It

Most of my culinary life has been consumed by an epic battle with dough. Granted, it tends to be the sort of epic battle where one warrior tribe regularly goes to the supermarket and purchases frozen heads to present to their villagers as freshly severed. But the battle rages on nonetheless, even if only in the minds of those who receive my ill-gotten spoils.

It’s been a considerable source of annoyance in my life that I hold a deep fondness for pie, but am incapable of producing a basic crust that even the most devoted mother would be able to turn the corners of her mouth up at when her five-year-old approaches her on Mother’s Day and proudly proclaims, “Look what I did!” And I can’t even fathom how bread can be produced in such massive quantities when the sheer volume of timber required to keep up the supply of Betty Crocker boxes would drive entire ecosystems to the brink of extinction.

After years of quiet acquiesence to my fate as being nothing more than a purchaser of baked goods, I decided to tackle to the problem head-on. It’s difficult to feel like a man while being constantly bested by a series of fluffy pastries (or, more frequently, insufficiently fluffy pastries), and there’s only so much indignity a man can suffer before he must stand up, raise his pastry brush on high, and scream to the heavens, “Enough!” So it was that I set out to conquer my nemesis, vowing never to rest until the tears of my dinner guests had ebbed to a mere trickle.

I decided to begin my journey with a simple pizza crust. I figured that the unreasonably large quantity of pizza I’ve devoured since the Ninja Turtles successfully dismantled my parent’s pro-vegetable agenda must have bestowed upon me an innate understanding of how the basic ingredients work. Without bothering to reflect on how long it’s been since the last time I made my own cheese, I dove into my first pizza dough. But in a matter of minutes I discovered that I lacked one of the most vital ingredients: common sense.

I’ve always read that baking is a more exact science than, say, grilling or boiling because ingredients really need to be in correct proportions. This is not simply to produce the desired taste, which is a subjective matter and can bend to the whims of the chef, but rather to produce the requisite chemical reactions to cause the ingredients to structurally behave how they’re intended to. So when baking, I tend to assume that the person who created the instructions knows more than I do, and much like the second-grader who breaks down in epileptic fits if the promised Slot A was not around to have Tab A insterted into it, I resist any temptation to think independently and make my measurements unquestioningly until someone else points out that souffle isn’t typically supposed to be incandescent.

But in reality, this scientific approach isn’t as exact as one might expect. Whether due to measurement, quality of ingredients, humidity, or whatever, subtle (and occasionally drastic) adjustments must sometimes be made when the theoretical ingredients are combined into an unfortunate reality. To make these adjustments, the chef needs a discerning eye with which to assess their product as it is being constructed. However, not having a wealth of experience to draw from, I opted to throw my discerning eye out the window and replace it with a healthy dose of blind subordination.

I followed my directions to the letter and upon mixing the ingredients together, I couldn’t help wondering why my dough had roughly the same consistency as uncooked Jell-O. As much as I wanted to avoid critical thinking, the solution seemed fairly obvious: I needed to add more flour. So I proceeded to do so until I had more or less doubled what the recipe had originally demanded. While the casual observer might still have mistaken the contents of my bowl for a watery and oddly beige cottage cheese, I was sure I’d used far too much flour and decided to stop in the hopes that some as yet unknown magic in the kneading process would turn my goopy mess into something more useful.

And it did. No sooner did I pick up my concoction than I found myself in possession of a brand new, form-fitting, dough colored glove that I couldn’t remove to save my life. My girlfriend was due to arrive any minute, and I was overcome by the image of my life quickly descending to the level of a sitcom where I have to open the door with my mouth and make increasingly implausible excuses for why I have to keep hiding my hand and backing out of rooms (football injuries, war wounds, training for the Olympic tryouts in the reverse 100 yard dash, etc.). I was thankfully spared from any such ruse when extensive use of three different faucets finally freed me of the unwanted garment, and instead I only had to explain to my date why I had three clogged drains.

As I didn’t want my newly-freed arm to be gnawed off by my dinner guest, I quickly launched into my second attempt, which was considerably more successful. After the previous debacle I decided to ignore all instructions to the contrary and just keep adding more and more flour until I had made a dough ball that I could dribble with. This approach went much more smoothly, and I was convinced that I had managed to pull off a coup. That is, until I removed my dough from the refrigerator and wondered why it hadn’t risen as much as it was supposed to. Assuming that I’d just set my rising hopes too high, I went ahead with the scheduled agenda and an hour later found myself eating my very first unleavened pizza. Only then did I realize that quadrupling the flour had probably left the original, paltry quantity of yeast unable to do more than enjoy a quick nibble on the surrounding carbohydrates before passing out from exhaustion.

Undeterred, I decided to shift my attention to pie crusts. Some of my earliest baking failures had been with pie crusts, so I optimistically decided that they should be my last. What is more, I decided to conquer them when trapped on a mountain with a roomful of virtual strangers. After all, the pressure of my own expectations can be a bit daunting, so why not alleviate them by surrounding myself with the expectations of others? But erring on the side of caution, I decided to make two pies. That way I could pass off the first pie as a practice round if it proved inedible.

Again, the troubles set in early, and again, they could have easily been avoided with the most modest amount of thought. I’d accidentally bought wheat flour instead of all-purpose flour. But since I didn’t have my car and couldn’t bear the embarrassment of asking someone to drive me to town so I could exchange the bag of flour I hadn’t had time to read to read, I decided to assume that, years of eating wheat bread notwithstanding, there wasn’t really any difference between white and wheat flour.

Making the substitution was simple enough, but I quickly found another measurement problem. Even after using triple the recommended amount of ice water to collect the dough, it was as dry as an economics textbook and twice as difficult to work with. But ignoring my instincts once more, I decided to assume the the author of my recipe had both prescribed the right amount and made allowances for my shopping deficiencies. So I decided to love my dough unconditionally and roll that sucker right out.

Rolling to my first pie crust in ages led me to question the infallibility of my recipe for the first time when I noticed that in order to roll my crust to a size that would cover the requisite pie plate, I had to roll it so thin that only its dubious structural integrity would have kept it from passing as cellophane. Rolling has always been a challenge for me as I tend to under-flour my counter tops like they were pizza dough. And my sorely remedial rolling skills aren’t helped by being applied to something so thin it defies friction. But after enlisting a second set of hands, we managed to transfer what we were generously agreeing to call a crust into the waiting pie plate with only minimal tearing, which was easy enough to cover up as the beach-like consistency prevented any individual cracks from being apparent. While the end product was a bit more crumbly and dry that might have been ideal, it held together functionally and was actually quite tasty. Perhaps not the greatest success story in the history of western civilization, but it was leaps and bounds from my first disastrous pizza crust.

Pie Number 2, much like pizza 2, went much better. I’d managed to find just enough regular flour for one double pie crust, used just enough water to get it to collect without resembling The Wicked Witch of the West during monsoon season, and rolled it out with only minimal counter sticking. Had I been making a five inch pie, my crust would have been perfect. However, as before, I hadn’t accounted for the possibility that the recipe I was using might not accurately reflect the size of your average pie plate. (I like to think that the recipe didn’t account for the fact that Americans are so overweight that even our pie plates need a few extra notches on the belt.) But by this point, my lovely kitchen assistant and I had perfected our four-handed traslucent dough moving technique and transferred our crusts at the appropriate times. And when the finished product emerged from the oven, it more than made up for its lack of thickness with buttery deliciousness.

Having experienced some notable success with my final pie, I decided to up the ante and take on empanada dough. The recipe would be similar enough to the pie crusts that I could learn from my previous pitfalls, but would present the added the challenge of having to perform the dreaded task of rolling an extra eleven times.

Armed with only my wits and, thanks to the unexpected realization that I don’t own a rolling pin, a heavily floured fifty-cent cup from Target, I stared destiny in the eyes and I. Made. Empanadas. The dough was closer to perfection than I ever could have imagined, and rolled with all the ease of a joint at a Phish concert. With the help of a light egg wash, they emerged from the oven perfectly brown, perfectly flaky, and perfectly moist. If a fault could be found, it was that they weren’t served at the feet of kings.

And so it was that I held my head high and for the first time I emerged from the kitchen not as a purchaser of baked goods, but as their producer, their master, their equal. That night I was the baker man. That’s right, a man.

Now if I could only figure out how to make cupcakes…

-TC

The Calm Before the Perm

I haven’t updated this blog in a while. Not for the usual reason, which is that I have nothing of value to say. Rather, I’ve been too busy to update it with the various nothings of value that I have to say. But now that the subway system is grinding to a halt and I am trapped in Queens with only a limited amount of electricity-fueled Arrested development to sustain me, I thought now would be the perfect opportunity to take a few minutes to share something that happened while I was out and about preparing for the impending storm.

First, though, let me start by saying that I’m not one to quickly adopt ridiculous terminology like “Frankenstorm” every time that something more severe than a light mist descends on the city. Call me old fashioned, but I have a bit of a hard time believing that a cute hash tag somehow makes death from the sky acceptable.

That being said, I figured I should play it safe stock up on a few of the essentials in case I find myself without internet access long enough for my own thoughts to bubble up to the surface and start occupying my attention again. And on my way back from the store, six-pack and jug of water in hand, I came across a sight that nicely summed up my feelings on New York.

The weather was far from brutal at this point, but it was certainly becoming ominous. The sky was gray, the trees were swaying and shedding their leaves. My neighborhood looked like the movie Twister just before everyone stops fast-forwarding. Everything seemed more or less exactly like what you’d expect just before a major storm hit.

And then I passed a local salon, which was still open. The simple fact that it was open wasn’t all that surprising. People need their paychecks now more than ever, and you can’t expect a business to close just because of an impending apocalypse. But what surprised me was that, just like the grocery store, hardware store, and Duane Reade, the beauty parlor was packed. Apparently, highlights are right up there next to batteries and water on the list of post-civilization necessities. In fact, the beauty parlor was so packed that not only were all the chairs inside occupied, but they’d dragged an extra one out onto the sidewalk where a woman in a surgical mask was typing on her iPhone while her hairdresser tried in vain to work a blow dryer on the woman’s wildly flailing strands. It was like watching Indiana Jones waving his torch at a snake pit, he kept them moving, but couldn’t pin any one of them down long enough to have an impact.

So let’s recap. The day is cold, the wind is whipping, and the air is too poisonous to breath. Everyone around you is scrambling like rats to find nourishment. But at this moment, nothing is quite as important to you as making sure you impress all the single fellows who made it to the fallout shelter. And that seemed to perfectly capture my feelings about New York as a whole. It’s not just the triumph of style over substance, it’s the triumph of style over common sense.

The fact that all this was taking place next to a life-sized, plastic, anthropomorphic bee didn’t exactly help either.

-TC

A Night in the Subway

I talk a lot about my experiences on the subway these days. Most New Yorkers do. In a city that is designed to accommodate as many people as possible while making sure that they never have to acknowledge each other’s existence, it’s only the people who shout louder than our earbuds that we have in common. And in a city with far more disposable income than cars, weirdos on the subway are so inevitable and so full of color that even the most humdrum, introverted lifestyle seems active and vibrant when viewed under the flickering flourescent light of the MTA. Not a day goes by that you don’t see at least one busker, fist fight, arrest, or self-pleasuring Japanese clown. And try as you might, you can’t ignore all of them.

And every once in a while, you have a single ride that nicely sums up the entire commuting experience. I was coming home from Harlem the other day when I had such good fortune, as a treasure trove of oddity paraded itself in front of me.

The first entrant was a homeless man trawling the cars for donations. But not to be confused with a simple beggar or the shameful indignity of a traveling hipster with a ukelele, he came equipped with a most unique approach to panhandling: he was the city’s first homeless stand-up comedian. His act was short, probably spanning about five minutes, but it was all on the theme of living below the poverty line. “This is my home,” he’d proudly declare, “a ten-car condominium. So pick up after yourselves when you leave, I’ve got company coming over tomorrow!” Not all of his punchlines were so easily comprehensible, though. He offered the following explanation for his current circumstance: “I had to leave home, with a wife like mine. She weighed 349 pounds…and that was on the weekend!”When his act was finished, he thanked the captive audience, collected a few coins, and proceeded on with his evening, only to be replaced by someone with an equally unique approach, even if not an equally compelling one. An elderly black man with a coffee cup full of change got on and asked, “What is this, the A train? Man, all the ugly motherfuckers get on the A train!” It seemed that we’d traded Jerry Seinfeld for Don Rickles.

I transferred to the E train at 59th Street to complete my voyage home. If anyone else finds themselves on an E train late at night, here’s an interesting game to while away the trip to Queens: scan the car, and carefully examine all your fellow passengers. Size them up, try to extrapolate their life stories and personalities as best you can. Then try to guess which one of them the smell is coming from. If you happen to be in the same car as an obviously intoxicated burn victim, the game won’t get you to the East River, so it’s good to have backup plans for distraction.

On this particular evening, I didn’t have to worry, as one was quickly provided in the form of the worst flute rendition of Hey Jude I’ve ever heard, performed by a man who hadn’t learned the most basic subway performer’s rule that if you’re playing a two-handed instrument, you should find something to lean on so you don’t fall over in the spotlight.

As he staggered towards the far end of the car, my eye began driftin over the shoulder of the woman sitting next to me. She was reading a Kindle with what seemed to be unusually large print for someone under eighty and with no corrective lenses. I have exceptionally bad eyes. But with contacts, I can still read print smaller than a billboard, and I tend to assume that if you can afford an e-reader, you can also afford a cheap pair of glasses. But nonetheless, this woman had opted to read her book with text so large that the average sentence couldn’t fit on a single page, and the unmistakably large characters kept drawing me back like a moth to a poorly spell-checked flame. The plot, as best as I could gather, revolved around a woman named Eboni, who seemed to be having some troubles with arson. I can’t say the plot was riveting, but it was better than staring at a business man’s crotch (my alternate means for entertainment), so I checked in every few pages to see how our protagonist was doing. Needless to say, I was a bit surprised when my eyes wandered over and read that a new character had been introduced into the narrative, and “he pushed his saliva coated head into her quivering mound of…”As the implications of large-print pornography started to sink in, the doors opened and I was home. I left the train and ascended to the surface world, where I couldn’t help but hope that the homeless comedian would soon get his much deserved Letterman spot, the flutist would make it off the train without chipping a tooth, and Eboni had found true love. She deserved it, after all she’d been through.

-TC

Hot Diggity Dog!

In this city, I never find myself at a loss for reasons to write off the human race as a nice idea whose time has passed.  The other day, I found another in a long series of examples when I stopped by a hot dog cart for a quick “meal.”  Surprisingly, my ire was not raised by contemplating the origins of the wares I was being served, something I learned to avoid long ago, but from one of my fellow patrons.

For my own part in this story, I simply ordered a hot dog, gave the vendor my money, then moved a few feet away to enjoy my logic-defyingly delicious treat before dashing off to the subway.  But about halfway through the perfectly boiled processed meat tube, I heard the guy who was standing behind me begin to berate the hot dog vendor.  I turned my attention back to the scene to see what the fuss was all about, and the hullabaloo seemed to have stemmed from the corner of the vendor’s hand sneaking around the corner of the paper and touching the man’s soon-to-be bun.

The man was livid.  “You should really be wearing gloves if you’re going to be touching my food,” he barked.  “Where is your license?”

I really wanted to turn to him and say, “you do realize that you’re basically eating intestinal scraps from the street, right? Is unwashed human flesh really a bigger health concern the the ground up hog anus you’re paying for?”  Let’s be realistic.  As much as we’d like to believe that we’re living in a sanitary society, I can guarantee that within the last two hours a homeless guy had pissed where he was standing and a pigeon has shit on this otherwise immaculate food preparation station.  This guy can put on gloves, he can wash his hands until the cows come home, and it’s not going to change the fact that he’s just a steam tray away from serving you out of a dumpster.

I like to think that the food poisoning came from my disgust with this scene rather any fecal matter that might have been on the vendor’s hands.

-TC

Standup Set #10

I don’t want to bore people with all the details of my nascent standup career, especially not at this point where I’m doing it at such an amateur level and have dubious skills. But I wanted to share something that happened the other day at my most recent show.

In general, my set went really well. While I wasn’t that confident in the material I had written for that week, and I had to actually stop halfway through my set to read my notes for the first time since starting this endeavor, I can still honestly say that I totally killed. This is the first time I can honestly say that, at least in reference to standup. Every single one of my jokes got a laugh from someone, and most of them were received well and boisterously by the whole room. Even the worst acts of the night got a little bit of a leg up from the fact that someone had brought eight or ten people with them, so there was a much higher ratio of normal people to frustrated comedians in the audience than usual. But I like to think that my success was at least in part the result of my giving a better performance than usual.

But I digress. What I really wanted to share was a little magic moment I had. As a comedian, the single biggest thing you want from an audience is laughter, and I got plenty of that. But there’s something else I notice a lot in comedy crowds, where something will resonate with a person, and they will playfully punch the person they’re with to signal something to the effect of, “Hey, you do that all the time,” or “isn’t that weird, we were just talking about that?” And for the very first time in my extremely short “career,” I saw that happening while I was on stage.

It’s great to get laughs however you can, but it’s also nice to be reminded every once in a while that they really are laughing with you rather than at you.

-TC

InGenius 2012 Review

InGenius 2012: Secrets Concealed/Secrets Revealed
By Christopher Ely

InGenius 2012: Secrets Concealed/Secrets Revealed ran from
Sunday-Tuesday, May 7-22. All performances were at 8pm at The Kraine
Theater. Presented by manhattan theatre source and The Writers’ Forum.

Manhattan Theatre Source’s InGenius festival returns once again with InGenius 2012: Secrets Concealed/Secrets Revealed, five one-act plays that showcase a diverse group of talent and exciting, inventive minds.

​The night begins with C.J. Ehrlich’s The Red & Green Room, a proto-No Exit for the video game set that evolves into a look at dedication, determination, and motivation. Eddie Furth is Luigi, the less famous Italian plumber who yearns for a chance to prove himself on stage. Eric Robertson is his older brother Mario, the star of the show who gets all the attention but must also suffer. Patrick Walsh as Yoshi and Stephanie Masucci as Princess Peach provide well-crafted emotion and flavor in their roles. Walsh in particular adeptly conveys the seasoned, reliable veteran who knows he’ll never be the star.

The Adventure of Barry Sachs, by Ed Malin, is film noir as told by an absurdist. Daniel Cohen is Barry Sachs, an old school private detective hired to find out the true story behind the death of a small-town mayor. His investigation sets him on a search for the Slovak Book and leads to encounters with a delightful mix of characters that, naturally, aren’t telling all they know and can’t be trusted entirely. Malin’s inventive wordplay and anarchic plotting create an ingeniously fun story but could have used more consistent pacing and assertive performances. James Reiser brings perfect manic energy to his role as the mayor’s son, and Chrysten Peddie adds magnificent intrigue as the mayor’s daughter and her lesbian partner.
In DeLisa White’s The Rationale, the President has just been assassinated and his staff is meeting to decide how to proceed to ensure the country’s best interests are protected. The weight of their decisions involves the things that most politicians won’t say out loud, and the entire cast—James Michael Armstrong, Paula Hoza, Mary Murphy, James Reiser, and John Say—does an excellent job in letting the silences and knowing glances fill the air to create tension and drive the action.

John McKinney’s Fly Season is the one of the show’s highlights. The most well-rounded piece of the evening, the writing is concise and developed, and both actors give enjoyable performances. Jessica Knutson plays Em’Lee, who has returned from New York City to her home down South to share some exciting news with her mother, played by Diane Tyler. Knutson is heart-wrenching in portraying Em’Lee’s struggle to draw her mother into her new life and showing her frustration whenever she realizes how easily she risks slipping back into her old one. Tyler similarly embodies her character fully, conveying Mama as someone who has been beaten down by the world. The ending, when she realizes what her attitude might truly cost her, provides a sweet, satisfying resolution.

The evening is capped off with Bones in the Machine, by Alaina Hammond, a reminder of the dangers of living in an age where you can be 23 forever thanks to camera phones and the Internet. Jessica Jennings plays a young teacher who is being asked to resign after a student has discovered an old video of her on Youtube giving a raunchy stand-up comedy performance. The confrontation with the headmistress, played by Katherine Wessling, becomes both an exciting duel of wits and a brilliant discourse on morality. Jennings is captivating in her role as she fights on knowing she will lose her job but can still walk away victorious. In a breathtaking—and hilarious—turn, she is ultimately able to seize the upper hand on her superior and walk away with her head held high.

As do the playwrights, directors, actors, and ultimately the audience.

Stand Up Set #2

Encouraged by last week’s showing, I returned to the stage this week at the same open mic. Shortly after arriving, a woman came in with a seven-year-old girl, who marched right up to the stage and plopped herself down in front of the microphone. The other performers started sweating bullets, as this was most decidedly not a family friendly room. For starters, the orthodox Jewish comedian and I were pretty much the only acts that didn’t have any jokes about masturbating to internet porn.

As it turns out, the little girl was a comic, with what I can only assume was a heavily ghost-written act. I have trouble imagining any seven-year-old knows that much about innuendo and parents with gambling problems.

Thankfully, she went on first, and was shuffled out the door quickly afterwards. On the down side, I went on next. And let me tell you, that was one tough act to follow.

-TC

My Stand-Up Debut

This will be my 100th blog post, and to mark that special occasion for all my dedicated followers (read: no one), I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on an actual accomplishment I’ve had instead of pure silliness. However, it’s an accomplishment born for silliness: last week, I finally worked up the nerve to realize a boyhood dream, and did stand-up for the very first time.

While I am beside myself with pride and excitement, it behooves me to be a bit realistic. I was only performing at an open mic in front of a very small crowd of people, who were almost all performing themselves; I wasn’t invited to the event, and had to pay five bucks for the privilege of spouting my nonsense at this abnormally kind and supportive audience; the median age of my fellow performers would make them a good decade my junior; and while I wasn’t the least funny person there, neither was the brain-damaged coke addict, who, save for some unavoidable issues with delivery, was actually pretty good.

While all this might lead someone to say that my performance wasn’t really any kind of achievement, I would respond to such skeptics by saying, “fuck that, I did stand-up!”

For much of my young life, my only goal was to be a comedian, and I’ve wanted to make people laugh for as long as I can remember. Comedians frequently have stories about a moment in their early years when they made someone laugh in one way or another, and they realized for the first time that the gift of humor could bring them attention and approval. For example, George Carlin had that moment of realization when his impressions of famous actors he’d never even seen would please his mother so much that she’d have him do them in front of all the neighbors.

I, on the other hand, had a very different experience. As a kid, I certainly realized the power that humor gave you over those around you. And I can remember thinking how the kids who could tell jokes were the ones who everyone looked up to as early as kindergarten. But whenever I tried to be one of those kids, I always fell flat. I wasn’t naturally funny, and whenever I tried to be, I felt the absence of laughter like a slap in the face. I wanted so desperately to be the funny kid in class, but alas, I just never had the knack for it. I was still drawn to the power of comedy to do everything from entertaining to healing, and I tried to cultivate the skill in my head. But I came to shy away from letting it out for fear of humiliation.

Another defining moment in my quest for hilarity came when I was ten years old, when my dad sat my brother and I down in front of the TV and made us watch George Carlin’s then new HBO special, “Jammin’ in New York.” I decided pretty quickly that it was the single funniest thing I’d ever seen, albeit due more to the excessive use of profanity than anything poignant in the material. (What do you want? I was ten.) But it was so much more than that to me, because it was also the first time I realized that comedy was actually a career path. It was possible to be so funny that total strangers would pay good money to gather around and hear what was on your mind, and no sooner did I realize this than I decided that it was for me.

Through high-school, being a comedian was still the goal, even if I never actually performed and tried to attract as little attention to myself as possible. That probably didn’t work very well, as I was still the weirdo who walked around with a tape recorder (lest a moment of genius go forgotten), but didn’t actually talk to anyone. But with the passage of time and countless empty laugh-breaks in day-to-day conversation, I came to both doubt and hate myself too much to ever try to perform. And while my obsession with comedy didn’t die, I would inevitably shift my focus to forms of writing where I could hide myself from the audience. I tried my hand at fiction, essays, you name it. And ultimately I fell into film because people finally started telling me how funny I was when I tried out the screenplay form (which, to be fair, also coincided with my first showing anyone something I’d written). Being both a terrible coward and a shameless praise-whore, I stuck with what seemed to be working.

But of course, it wasn’t really working. I still have no idea how to sell a screenplay or raise money for my own film, and my job in the isolated world of post-production limits my ability to network almost as badly as my lack of social skills does. Still, even as I grew disillusioned with the idea that I could ever make a living with my comedy, I secretly still wished that I could do stand-up. But I was so certain that I’d fail that I could never bring myself to try.

That is, until a few weeks ago. A friend suggested that we go to an open mic the following week, and I enthusiastically agreed under the assumption that he meant “go SEE an open mic.” It wasn’t until about three days before the show that I realized he’d meant “go DO an open mic.”

By that point, I didn’t want to admit my mistake or let my friend down, so I basically said, “fuck it, if I have to prepare something with no time and embarrass myself, that’s fine, I’ll never see these people again.” I renewed my commitment to this plan, even though I had absolutely nothing to support it. Fortunately, we ended up pushing the date a couple times, giving me a chance to write anything and at least make an effort at remembering some portion of it. But that moment where I decided that the transient nature of the audience in my life meant that it didn’t matter what they thought helped me to not only stop being afraid of the idea of performing, but to actually get pretty jazzed up about it.

The show itself was nothing special. It was an extremely amateur level event, with even the best comics faltering and using notes. And since the audience was almost completely made up of performers, they were all too afraid of being booed themselves to be harsh. But even so, it was just about the most thrilling and rewarding thing I’ve ever done. Over the last few years, in the absence of any hope of a screenwriting career, I’ve been looking for a way that I can write something more substantial than a Facebook status and actually have it make someone laugh. And to be able to stand up in front of an audience (as it were) and be able to make a stranger laugh with my words, hokey and generic as they may have been, was more gratifying than anything I’ve yet done with my post-collegiate years.

I’m a long way from being able to call myself a real “comedian.” And even if I work hard, I may never honestly make it to that level. (I’m already planning the business cards, though.) But I’ve whet my appetite for a crowd, and I look forward to giving it my best shot. And even if I do fail or quit, it’ll at least make for a better story than, “Hey, remember that time I lived in New York? Yeah, I didn’t really do anything interesting there. But I had some really good food while I wasn’t doing it.”

I’ll keep you all posted on how things develop. Even if no one reads this, I’d still like to thank everyone for being so supportive.

-TC

No "Santorum Drops Out" Jokes, I Swear

Rick Santorum finally called it quits this week in a move that was as inevitable as it was satisfying. Speaking generally, it is of course always gratifying to watch someone else fail and give up on their aspirations. More specifically, it’s nice to be reminded once in a while that the country isn’t filled with quite as many whack jobs as you might ordinarily suspect.

Santorum never had any real chance of becoming president, and it’s easy to see why. A couple weeks ago, he released a position paper in which he said he would “vigorously enforce” laws that “prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet,” as well as several other means of distribution, in order to put an end to the “pandemic of pornography.” First of all, “vigorously” is not a word that should ever be used in the same sentence as “pornography” if your goal is to elicit respect from an audience instead of cheap laughter. But more importantly, this is a nice example of one of the biggest problems with political campaigns, especially ones for high office. In order to have an effective campaign, you really have to run on a platform of things you’d like to do without regard for trifling matters like reason or practicality.

I don’t know if Mr. Santorum has been on the Internet lately, but stripping it of all it’s obscene content would be so tirelessly unproductive as to make Sisyphus give up and turn on Wheel of Fortune. The internet exists for the sole purpose of distributing breasts to as wide an audience as possible. E-commerce, social networking, lolcats, all these are byproducts of the most advanced pornographic collection ever conceived by man. You can’t even go to Toys R Us Online anymore without at least a couple pop ups for horny local singles moaning away in the background.

I’m not objecting to his right to be unhappy about that reality. But to believe he can do something about it is like saying, “I don’t like that my kids can’t drink from the ocean. I’m going to declare a war on salt! This president’s shameless pandering to Poseidon has created a pandemic of saline, and I won’t stand by while the needs of crustaceans are put above those of American kidneys.”

Fortunately, in the end he saw the error of his ways and shifted his gaze to the eradication of his own delegates. With the number of clicks that Bang Bus alone gets every day and the number of people who were willing to vote Santorum in 2012, the numbers should have spoken for themselves.

-TC

Blame Canada

Every now and then, I like to update everyone on the ever expanding list of reasons why I’m a bad person.  The most recent entry occurred a few days ago when I was riding home on the 7.  A man got on the train, and wasted no time in asking for our undivided attention.  He was, of course, a homeless person, and of course he was asking for money.  What made him remarkable was that part of his sales pitch revolved around his medical troubles, including a set of metal rods that had been installed in his body so that he could stand up straight.  In case any of us mistook this line for nothing more than a good hook, he pulled up his shirt and produced the the subcutaneous rods in question.

Now to be fair, my first thought was “Man, that’s horrible.  I should really give this guy some money.”  Unfortunately, that thought was quickly followed by, “Oh, hey!  I can finally get rid of that Canadian quarter in my pocket!”

I like to think that maybe he dreams of visiting Canada one day, and that I’ve helped him take the first step on his journey.  But the likelihood that the only thing standing between him and an international jaunt was foreign toll fare seems slim.

-TC

Rush to Her Defense

A lot of people were upset this past week when Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the recent contraceptive kerfuffle by making increasingly insulting personal attacks on a law student who testified about the merits of requiring birth control to be covered by insurance programs.  I, on the other hand, was not the least bit taken aback by his comments, as I’ve known since high school that Limbaugh is a walking bullhorn of ignorance whose job is to spout ill-informed and, ideally, inflammatory rhetoric at anyone who is more comfortable with the thoughts of a raving lunatic than being left alone with their own.  It’s what he does, and it’s what he’s been doing for a few decades now.

So when I read that he was making these comments, it didn’t bother me any more than when a man wearing Duane Reade bags as shoes tells me that the government is using pigeons to implant tracking devices while we sleep.  After all, he’s far more entitled to his opinion than he is to my attention.

This is not to say that he’s necessarily wrong for opposing Obama’s plans to have mandatory insurance coverage of birth control.  Even though I do not agree with his opinion, I am sure that many people hold similar views, and if asked, could articulate them in a calm, rational manner. But no matter the issue, Rush Limbaugh never has been one of those people, and he never will be.  Saying that Sandra Fluke was “having sex so frequently that she can’t afford all the birth-control pills that she needs” does less make his case than it does to demonstrate his ignorance of how birth control pills work.  (Their cost, after all, is not correlative to how often you get laid while using them, which is a good portion of the point.)  Similarly, his assertion that someone who has voluntarily appeared in court is a “prostitute” seems to suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of what a prostitute actually does.

In assessing whether or not Rush should even hold the power to create a controversy, it’s also worth remembering that we’re dealing with a full-time public speaker who has not yet managed to master the English language, something he abuses much more frequently and egregiously than law students.  And I don’t just mean saying that the word “slut” doesn’t represent a “personal attack,” or his extremely loose definition of the word “apology.”  Limbaugh writes in said apology, “I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation.”  One would think that if he can’t find the right words during a live radio session, he would at least make an effort to conjure the right ones in a prepared, written statement.  But the use of the word “analogy” in that sentence seems grossly incorrect.  Analogies are about comparing the similarities between two distinctly different things.  Did he mean to say Fluke is “like a slut?”  Maybe he meant for the analogy between the her and Obama’s birth control agenda?  But even then, using an individual instance to illustrate a broader problem isn’t an “analogy,” it’s a “case in point.”  If he wanted to make his allusions about the sexual promiscuity of an individual into a real analogy for the Obama administration’s plan, he should have said something more along the lines of, “If you give a girl free contraception, she’ll be as fucked as Obama’s birth control mandate!”

But, as they say, even idiots are entitled to their opinions (this one certainly is).  The real problem here isn’t that Rush Limbaugh said these things, or even that he said them in public.  The problem is that despite his inability to claim authority on any subject other than how much spit there is on his microphone, we’re all listening.  I think we’re the ones who really owe Ms. Fluke an apology.

-TC

Who Cares About the Poor?

One of the biggest political non-stories this week was of course Mitt Romney saying he’s not concerned about the very poor.  I call it a “non-story” because in spite of the attention garnered by his choice of words, he didn’t really say anything new this week, as most political hopefuls try to avoid doing most weeks.  It’s easy to take this kind of clumsy phraseology out of context and make jokes at his expense, as no end of commentators have been doing while they wait for a typo in a local headline to come along and steal their attention like a bird with a piece of shiny wrapping paper.  After all, whenever a rich white guy says he doesn’t care about the poor, it’s easy to conjure images of Uncle Pennybags lighting his cigar with an unpaid mortgage, or cleaning his monocle so he can more clearly make out a black girl’s tears when when her mother’s food stamps are rejected at the candy counter.  Really, the material just writes itself.

But more interesting than the hyperbole is the actual substance of what he was trying to say. The intended point was that the suffering of the poor shouldn’t be the focus of our attention right now because there are adequate safety nets to keep them from sinking any lower.  Welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, all these things are in place and ready to keep the basic needs of our poorest citizens met.  According to the American ethos, it’s their own responsibility to raise themselves from the ghetto by their bootstraps.  But as a good Christian nation, we can at least make sure they can afford to put some Fancy Feast on the table while they’re there.

So instead of worrying about the comfortably impoverished, Mitt Romney thinks we should invest ourselves in the plight of those who actually have something to lose and no one to help them avoid getting caught like shrimp in the government’s trawling safety net, the middle class.  In the most generous sense, it’s like saying we shouldn’t worry about the guy with cancer because he’s already in the hospital getting the treatment he needs, and should instead worry about the kids who are about to start smoking.  In a more realistic sense, he’s effectively saying that being poor is only a problem if you’re not used to it.  It’s not about what street corner you sleep on, it’s about the journey that took you there, and there’s no shame in having to sell your blood for a sandwich as long as you weren’t selling cars last week.  What we need as a nation is a new safety net with bigger holes to keep the fat and happy middle class from falling into the second safety net, which is good enough for everybody else.

So the next time I see someone with a tin cup and no legs dragging himself along the floor of my subway car with his knuckles, I’ll tell him proudly that there’s no need for me to give him any change, as my tax dollars have already paid for his well-being, and a “thank you” would be nice.  And if on my way to work I see a man in a tinfoil space helmet shitting on the sidewalk, I’ll pause to ask if he’s ever had a job with dental insurance.  If my inquiries are met with incoherent mumblings instead of a long, sad story about his precipitous fall from middle management, I’ll just move on and stand somewhere that smells a bit nicer, secure in the knowledge that our government has seen to his plight already, or will at least clean it up off the sidewalk in a few hours.

-TC

The Alan Test

Principle: If you open a book to any page and start reading, you should be able to glean enough from a random sample of text to reveal the merits of the whole.

Subject: “The Spread Eagles,” an exploration of modern feminist theory, viewed through the prism of a raunchy, ultra-violent, lesbian biker film.

Experiment Location: A friend’s office, where the script in question was found on the floor while organizing and looking for things to feed into his brand new paper shredder.

Random Sample: “Holy Hooters, Steve!  When did the milk lady start delivering pizza?!”

Conclusions: My friend should have bought a bigger shredder.

-TC

Hollywood Communists

When I first heard about the Hollywood Blacklist of the 1950s, I was a bit confused.  Aside from the fact that McCarthyism seems a bit reactionary with the benefit of hindsight, the particular focus on the entertainment industry struck me as a bit unique.  Sure, part of the idea of propaganda is that you can disseminate a message on a population without their questioning or even noticing it, but even so, the idea that Zero Mostel could bring down Western Civilization with a Marxist bounce in his step seemed a bit far-fetched.  If you want to persecute communists infiltrating government, fine.  If you’re worried that those in charge of the financial sector might believe in redistribution of wealth, then lynch away!  But do people really expect that the red menace could brainwash the American public about the merits of communal living with such devious tools as Creature from the Black Lagoon 6: Creature Goes to Summer Camp?  Or did they just think that it was the obvious place for undesirables to mask their identities, what with the abundance of wigs and false mustaches floating around the dressing rooms?

What is more, it always seemed implausible to me that Hollywood would be any more replete with Communists than your average run of the mill tire factory.  That is, until a few weeks ago when I overheard something so shocking, so un-American that it shook my values to the core.

The company that I work for is currently shooting its first feature film.  In discussing all the various legal hoops they have to jump through in order to comply with unions and achieve tax exempt status, someone mentioned that according to official documentation, the Screen Actors Guild does not consider hamburgers and hotdogs to be a meal.  If there is any more fundamentally un-American statement than “a hot dog does not a meal make,” I don’t know what it is.

For the first time, I was outraged at the red menace.  I could care less if they have Harry Potter learning spells from a little red wizarding book, or send the USS Enterprise on a five-year mission to give space-workers control of the means of space-production.  But if I find myself in a retirement home, being waited on by a generation of youngsters that have been manipulated into believing that red meat and tubified animal byproducts don’t constitute food, I will fear for the future just as I will fear for my taste buds.

-TC

Craigslist

When Craigslist removed their adult services section, it was easy to wonder what relevance the site still held.  Sure, you could peruse the personal ads and find no end of women and muggers pretending to be women who will indulge your most obscure fetishes for nothing more than the satisfaction of a job well done, and perhaps “many roses.” But it’s just not the same. Even if our most depraved physical urges can be fulfilled with nothing more than a few clicks and a five-year-old’s knowledge of slang, we can’t openly acknowledge our greatest and most American turn-on, the love of entrepreneurial capitalism.  The money may change the same hands, but when you’re told to pay no attention to the business transaction behind the curtain, it can’t hold the same thrill if you’re told to pay no attention to the transaction behind the curtain.  Half the fun of “adult services,” and some might even say the better half, is watching a buxom young market player stand up and proudly declare, “I have a commodity that you value, and I’m willing to exchange it for an artificially raised premium.”  With no adult services section, independent commerce is once more relegated to the seedy underbelly of society where it must disguise itself as nothing more than run of the mill nymphomania, and the American economy pays the price.

But before Craigslist became the one-stop shop for hedonistic enterprise (though perhaps only minutes before), it was once known as a place to buy and sell less commonly erotic products, like moth-filled Tupperware and broken lamps.  Thanks to Craigslist, I once slept for eight months straight on an old futon mattress that cost me nothing more than the gas required to remove it from a musty old porch.  And, of course, I couldn’t have made it through my twenties without selling my fair share of shoddily designed and even more shoddily assembled Ikea furniture to people who are under the mistaken impression that any bookshelf, no matter how wobbly or soiled, is better than no bookshelf at all.

As a veteran Craigslist seller, I’ve learned to avoid some of the more common hazards of direct e-commerce the hard way.  I mean, I’ve never agreed to cash a substantial check for an eccentric doctor who would love my old dresser with only two jammed drawers, but is too busy vacationing in Rwanda to write one for the correct amount.  Nor have I ever agreed to ship a toaster unwaveringly set to “dark” halfway across the country in exchange for 200 times the asking price (that is, 2,000 times the actual value).  But I have learned some basics lessons from experience.

For example, you should never respond to anyone who, when offering to buy an item, opts to identify it simply as “the item.”  This is internet code for “I haven’t read your listing, but I’d like to offer you non-surgical assistance with the problem of your rather diminutive genitals.”  Similarly, when someone responds to a post that includes overly detailed descriptions and enough photos to fill a coffee table book by asking what the condition is, what they mean to say is, “I bet you’d like to know what girls do when left alone with farm animals, and I’d be more than happy to offer a solution to your quandary every fifteen minutes or so until you change email addresses.”

I’ve also learned to avoid bartering. Not that there’s anything wrong with bartering per se. I actually kind of like the idea of compensating my local doctor with co-pays of freshly baked pies or freshly slaughtered goats. But since New York tends not to be the first thing that springs to people’s minds when they hear the words “pastoral simplicity,” I tend to assume that if someone is trying to offer me something I didn’t ask for and don’t want, they’re also trying to screw me in the process.  Best case scenario, anything someone is willing to part with “fell off a truck in New Jersey,” which is of course a polite way of saying “receiving stolen goods.”  Worst case scenario, “my brand new iPod” is code for “knife with which I will entice you to give me your brand new iPod.”

Usually I just disregard any offers for trade.  But the other day I got an email from a man who was very excited to have “many deals” for me.  He was particularly excited about the idea of taking the old backup hard drive I was selling, for which I had asked $100, in exchange for “a pair of air jordans 17 that are worth 200 dollars and they come with a suitcase.”  And I have to admit, this caught my attention.

First of all, when I read the words “Air Jordans,” I could only assume that I’d accidentally stumbled upon the Queens Wormhole and had travelled back to 1996.  But after the disappointment of learning that Air Jordans are still in active production and that I didn’t have the premiere of Independence Day to look forward to, I shifted my focus to the suitcase.

It seemed an odd thing to include with a pair of shoes.  Was it meant as a free gift, like when an infomercial offers you a glow in the ark key chain for being so kind as to buy something you wouldn’t dream of owning if you weren’t delirious with insomnia?  Did the 17th iteration of Air Jordans come with an overnight bag because you’d jump so high that you’d need to get a hotel for the night before you landed?  Or did he just imagine that I would be so enamored with my new shoes that I’d immediately want to take them on a romantic getaway to some remote island? Someone suggested to me that the man in question might not speak English as his first language, and it was a case of poor translation due to limited vocabulary.  But it seems odd to me that someone would learn the word “suitcase” before the word “box” in any language.  Unless, of course, Manuel had made it all the way from Torquay to New York, and was ready to sell his only possession, the shoes that brought him here.

I was tempted to inquire further, but in the end I was still worried about the prospect that he might mistake my interest in his offer for interest in receiving email updates about the goings-on of Asian ladyboys, so I let the deal slide.  I’ll just have to keep wondering if I’ve made the right decision until I finally meet the shoe of my dreams, which can offer me the comfort and support I need so we can pack up our belongings and run away together.  In the meantime, I’ll just have to keep stuffing my luggage, like my feet, in a series of Duane Reade bags.

-TC

An Ocean's Depth, Part 2

When I agreed to swimming lessons, I hadn’t reckoned on facing hazards other than drowning.  As it turned out, the road to aquatic independence would be fraught with trials and tribulations, and the biggest challenge would be faced before I even set foot in the the building, much less the water.  Since our memberships were good at any New York City pool, my girlfriend and I settled on Metropolitan Pool in Williamsburg as the most mutually convenient location.  Since the pool’s rules about alcohol and mesh-lined trunks would likely cut my encounters with ironic flannel and PBR to a minimum, I figured I could come to terms with being another indistinguishable face in a sea of failed writers wandering a hipster neighborhood, at least for a few minutes each week.

Aside from risking exposure to lethal doses of sarcasm and trucker hats, the biggest drawback to our pool was its close proximity to to Fette Sau, one of the most delicious barbecue joints in the city.  Every time we walked to the pool, I would inevitably find myself drawn towards the intoxicating allure of smoked meat and neon.  But as a child, I was always told to avoid eating for an hour before swimming, or in my case, before standing in the water pretending to be Aqua Man stuck in constant breach-mode, so it was easy enough to avoid a pre-swim snack on medical grounds.  But it was a lot harder to routinely convince myself on the way home that celebrating an evening of exercise by stuffing myself to the gills with pork belly was probably counter productive to say the least.

When I eventually managed to rip myself from Fette Sau’s doorway and reach the water with appetite intact, I was a little embarrassed.  Not only had I never learned to swim, but the better part of two decades had passed since the last time I’d made even the most halfhearted effort.  It’s never easy to admit that you don’t know how to do something, especially when it’s something everyone around you learned at such a young age, and catching up requires you to flail a bit too violently for your ignorance to remain inconspicuous. Plus, I typically reserve being shirtless in public for special occasions like midnight apartment fires and swingers’ parties.  It’s not that I have a bad body image, more that the people around me will if I show it to them.  And they are all but guaranteed to have better eyesight to boot.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of changing rooms, but there’s a certain special awkwardness reserved for changing rooms in Williamsburg.  There’s taking your clothes off with a stranger and then there’s taking your clothes off with an Hasidic stranger.  Whenever I find myself in the presence of devoutly religious people, I can’t help but feel like I should be apologetic for my decadent, secular lifestyle. Perhaps its being raised in a hippie town where we were raised to respect everyone, or just garden variety paranoia, but I always worry that people will mistake my failure to adhere to their beliefs as an intentional refutation of them.  But I’ve found that’s it’s not generally considered socially acceptable to say to tell a pantsless stranger that you really meant no disrespect to anyone when you selected your brightly colored underpants in the morning.  Plus, not to say that being religious blinds you to the basic facts of human anatomy, but I tend to assume that any group that discourages promiscuous sex probably has a few things to say about public nudity. But clearly they don’t share the deep-seated sense of bodily shame that I’ve learned from a lifetime of Pepsi commercials.  After all, if a man had the same kind of hangups about his body that I do, he probably wouldn’t be hanging around public locker rooms, or would at very least make a greater effort to keep his fly closed.

Once I’d figured out how to remove my clothes without making eye contact or conversions and made it into the water, learning the basics of swimming was actually fairly easy.  Within an hour I graduated from sinking to treading water for seconds at a time, and even moving forward a few yards. Most importantly, I had the motion down for the perfect Little Mermaid hair toss, and would only have to wait a few more months for the appropriate mane.

Over the course of my life I’ve tried to learn a great many things (most of them involving cooking, computers, or pretending to understand human feelings). But in all that time I’ve never tried to learn something where it took so little time and effort to get the gist as swimming. Sure, if you threw me in the ocean I probably wouldn’t last long enough to cry for help, but by the strictest dictionary definition, I could swim.

Rumor has it that practice makes perfect, so in spite of my irrefutable natural talents I figured I should keep up with the lessons for a little while, if for no reason other than to give hope and inspiration to anyone else who might sheepishly wander into the pool, their heads hung in shame.  Over the next few weeks I continued improving to the point where I felt confident enough to brave the deep end.  Or, to be more accurate, to brave the bit by the deep end where I can still keep my head above water if I stand on my tiptoes.  If you’ll forgive me for saying so, things were going swimmingly.

That is, until our pool closed for renovations.  This was little more than an annoyance since there are a good number of pools in the New York system that would honor our memberships.  All I had to do was find a slightly less convenient pool and fight my natural inclination towards grumbling, and we’d be all set.

We settled on a pool in Chelsea.  Despite the changing room being packed with an unnecessarily boisterous gang of youths who seemed unable to identify the aerobic difference between swimming and standing around with their shirts off, the facilities were a bit of a trade up; the changing room was larger, the showers were cleaner and had dividers behind which to hide my shame, and the pool was significantly larger.  After seeing the layout, I was ready for another amazing swimming experience.

The lifeguard, on the other hand, was less optimistic.  He interrupted us a few minute into our less to tell us I couldn’t go into the deep end because I’m “not a strong enough swimmer.”  He also said that I shouldn’t be there for lap swimming time, which is all the New York City pools offer in the evening, and should come to the daytime family swim time instead.  The normal embarrassment of having my swimming skills questioned was further compounded by the fact that he didn’t deliver his decree directly to me, he talked to my girlfriend as though I were an over-enthused puppy and it was her job to keep me off his lawn.  Under other circumstances, I would just write this off as Manhattan pool guards taking safety a little more seriously than Brooklynite hipsters who are no doubt guarding the pool ironically.  But it’s hard to believe that I was really the weakest swimmer in the beginners’ lane when my dressing down was being witnessed by a pair of tiny, old Asian ladies who were making their way down the pool by crawling along the wall.  Surely my swimming skills were superior to someone who had differentiate a body of water from a climbing wall.

I was tempted to argue with the man, but I couldn’t see any good coming from my telling someone who held my aquatic fate in his hands what I imagined his mother was strong enough at, or questioning whether or not he was a strong enough heterosexual.  So I kept my mouth shut and continued to do mini laps in the shallow end.

Humiliation aside, this poses a very practical problem for a grown man of my statue.  Being freakishly tall, the shallow end doesn’t even come up to my waist, and it’s surprisingly difficult to tread water when extending your legs even the tiniest amount results in standing up. I wanted to call it a day and see if I could get a better workout by flooding my tub, but as a man I had to stay at least long enough to make a point of annoying the lifeguard.  Once that important task was dealt with, I was ready to head home and wait for my normal pool to open its doors and welcome me back to the world of aquatics with open, indifferent arms.

I was determined to show that life guard exactly how strong a swimmer I could be, and I left the pool that night with a new found resolve to excel at what had previously been nothing more than a hobby.  A few more weeks of training and I was sure my swimming skills would be on par with Johnny Weismuller, or at least Agustus Gloop.  So when our home pool’s renovations were scheduled to conclude, I marched in the door, held my head high, and was told that a pipe had burst and it would be closed for the next three months.  So I marched back to Chelsea, held my head low, and hoped that the lifeguard wouldn’t recognize the tall man flailing around in the beginners’ lane.

-TC

An Ocean's Depth, Part 1

My uncle has a saying. “If I fall overboard,” Uncle Michael says, “I’ll either drown, learn to swim real fast, or sink to the bottom and walk to shore.”

On the face of it this might not seem like the sort of thing that would come up often enough to merit an official saying saying. It would be little more of a comment or a quip for most people. What you have to understand is that my uncle lives on the Maine coast, where Posideon spends as much time expressing his dissatisfaction with summer people and their yachts as the locals do. He’s also the sort of guy who spends his spare time working with his hands, building, fixing, and tinkering with anything that might have - or have the potential to have - more than one part nailed to each other.

I’m not much of a man’s man, preferring a good picnic or a quiet evening in to hours spent coaxing engines to life or building furniture that doesn’t come with an Allen wrench. Despite his best efforts, my middle school shop teacher was barely able to instill enough technical knowledge in me to identify which end of a screw driver will most effectively drag my phone close enough on the coffee table that I can reach it and dial a repairman without standing up.

Uncle Michael, on the other hand, is a wonder with such complex man gadgets as shop-vacs, band saws, and hip waders. While his skills can be applied from any thing from lobster boat go-carts for the local parade or the most involved haunted house this side of Knott’s Scary Farm, Maine has an abundance of boats and rich people who don’t know how they work. So when someone has a boat and needs it hit with a hammer until it behaves itself, they call my uncle, which is how he regularly finds himself mucking about on half-working boats with no life jackets. But Uncle Michael can’t swim, which is why he felt the need to arm himself with a handy saying with which to dismiss the concerns of anyone who might find the sight of him cursing at a broken engine while paddling back to shore with half an oar to be an appropriate time to remark on his ill-advised safety policy.

I never learned to swim either, but being from a land-locked town where the local pool is closed for “fecal investigation” often enough to incite extended debates in the Letters to the Editor colum, I haven’t had to defend myself often enough to bother coming up with my own saying, and would just borrow my uncle’s whenever the subject came up. That all changed after I moved to New York. Somehow this city has attracted an oddly high concentration of people who would respond to my news with the same sort of look that I give people who have never seen Saved by the Bell. It’s not so much a look of judgment or pity as a look of utter bewilderment that says, “But…you’re alive, aren’t you?” As I started getting this response more and more frequently, I started looking on my at my lack of basic survival skills as a matter of personal pride, something that separated me from the pack. I’d drop this little tidbit at even the slightest hint of nautically themed party conversation, or woo first dates with it as part of the rather extensive list of things that I’m not good at. (Needless to say, I struck out a lot.)

Despite their incomprehension, no one was especially concerned by my lack of buoyancy, probably because I didn’t usually spring the news on them in close proximity to the words “women and children first.” Even my mother was more matter-of-fact than concerned. Once on a road trip to Maine, I voiced my concern that if the suspension bridge gave out and our car fell in the ocean my teddy bear would end up at the bottom of it. She simply said “It wouldn’t matter, because you’d drown too.” Which, to her credit, shut me up pretty effectively, which is usually the goal when you’re trying to merge in heavy traffic and a single-digit passenger thinks your attention should be focused on a stuffed animal.

But my life of quietly paying tribute to the invention of the lung was interrupted when I made the mistake of telling my girlfriend that I can’t swim. In all fairness, telling her wasn’t the mistake. The first time I brought it up, she gave me the “you don’t know who Screech is” look, but the matter was quickly dropped and we got back to discussing such important bonding subjects as which types of cupcakes we both liked and how wonderful kittens are. The mistake came when I decided to remind her of this conversation just before Hurricane Irene hit New York. While in hindsight the hurricane wasn’t any more remarkable than any other slightly rainy day, there was so much talk of flooding, power outages, second-comings, and not being handled like Katrina that concerns were being raised with eyebrows.

I was a bit hesitant to agree at first. With thirty rapidly approaching, I’m probably getting dangerously close to the point where I can round up to being an old dog as far as new tricks are concerned. I already harumph at the mention of 3D televisions, dismiss tablet computers as ever being able to rival a good old fashioned laptop, and regard twitter with the same sort of derisive suspicion that my grandmother once gave to cordless telephones and polio vaccines.

But I eventually agreed to the lessons, though not out of any concern about drowning in the streets of Queens. Rather, I’ve been trying to combat my own laziness by finding something to do in the city that’s physically active but doesn’t make me the sort of person who goes to the gym. Somehow swimming felt less like a less soulless form of exercise than running on a treadmill while flirting with spandex-bimbos by telling them about my screenplay. Plus, if babies and moose can do it, how hard can it be? So I agreed to give swimming a very tentative shot.

-TC

Steve Jobs

The tech world lost a visionary figure this week with the passing of Steve Jobs.  His illness was common knowledge, and his deteriorating health wasn’t hard to deduce as his once taut turtlenecks started to sag on his slender form.  Even so, he managed to keep the exact details of his condition quiet enough that the actual announcement of his death came as a bit of a surprise. While I’m a dedicated consumer of Apple products and eagerly await the live blogs chronicling the announcement of their shiny new gadgets, I can’t claim to have known the man outside his role as Apple’s spokesman.  Still, it’s hard not to feel a little touched by his loss when I reflect on the ways his technologies have changed my life, and run down the staggering list of his life’s accomplishments.  He may have left this world, but his greatest achievement will continue to live on in our collective memory.

I don’t mean revolutionizing personal computing with the Macintosh, or changing the way we think about music with the iPod.  I don’t mean taking the telephone to the next level with the introduction of the iPhone, or magically creating a new class of device with the invention of the bigger iPhone.  I also don’t mean taking the guess work out of the Academy’s Best Animated Feature category with Pixar or turning the fashion world on its head by finding a way to make “business casual” look over dressed.  Rather, I mean his single most impressive feat, the one that best defines his life, his legacy, and his place in history: sleeping with Joan Baez.

Of course, a big part of what made Apple’s business strategy was implementation rather than invention.  After all, Apple didn’t invent the smartphone or the touchscreen, but they utilized them in a way that set the standard for mobile communication, and in doing so ensured that every knockoff that came after would be relegated to the newly minted category of “iPhone killers.”  Similarly, Bob Dylan may have had the idea of sleeping with Joan Baez first, but Steve was in a position to observe his methods, avoid his mistakes, appropriated the most crucial elements, and refine them into what I can only imagine was a superior user experience.

Billions of dollars, legions of fans, and enough unproduced iPhone prototypes to make the entire tech blogosphere foam at the mouth, they’re all great in their own right.  But they will never buy you a night alone with the queen of the coffeehouse vibrato.  Credit where credit is due, Steve. We’ll never see another like you, and you will be missed.

-TC

Midnight in Paris in New York

I don’t get out to the cinema quite as much as I might like.  But after months of hearing endless praise from everyone lucid enough to express an opinion (informed or otherwise), I finally found time to sneak in and see Midnight in Paris before it was yanked from the few remaining theaters in New York.  While I am a die hard Woody Allen fan and will defend even his most hated works as having at least some merit (Celebrity, Hollywood Ending, the one that unfortunately involved Will Farrell), I went in with pretty low expectations.  After all, few of his films from the last couple decades have been easily defensible, and fewer still have been remarkable. I knew I couldn’t quite bring myself to hate this movie, but as soon as I saw Owen Wilson’s casual, almost lifeless face on the poster I resolved to give it my best shot.

But my resolve was all for naught, as I was met by a formidable adversary in the form of one of Allen’s finest films in years.  I knew nothing of the plot and went in completely blind, which was a refreshing change of pace in this modern world where the latest Hollywood board game adaptation’s trailer is just a few clicks away, even if the actual film is a good year off. (Well, maybe not good, but at least better than the two hours we’ve been waiting for.)  While I would recommend to anyone who hasn’t seen the film and is equally oblivious that they stop reading now and let the film wash over them like it did me, here’s the basic gist for anyone who doesn’t doesn’t have time to waste on surprise.

Midnight in Paris revolves around a struggling writer (surprise, surprise) on vacation in Paris (quelle surprise) who is a little neurotic and occasionally twitchy (please don’t surprise me, my nerves can’t take it) and inexplicably time-travels back to the 1920s every night at midnight to cavort with most of the major creative minds of the day (…okay, didn’t see that one coming).  In tone, the film is very similar to some of his more whimsical works, like Alice or The Purple Rose of Cairo.  It’s a lighthearted affair where emotions rarely run high or low, the nature of magic is never explained (or even really examined), and everyone learns an unsubtle lesson about themselves and their real desires.  It’s fun, it’s silly, and it doesn’t make you think particularly hard about your own impending mortality.

I’m not as well-read as I would like to be.  A few presumably famous people who I’ve never even heard of pop up now and again.  And as for those whose I am at least passingly familiar with, I’m completely ignorant about their personal lives and mannerisms, so I’m not in the best position to judge whether they are accurate portrayals or just rough caricatures extrapolated from their works. That being said, the acting and dialogue were superb, and whether or not Salvador Dali really went about exclaiming “rhinocerouses” in Parisian cafes, I still giggled every time Adrien Brody did so from behind a mustache as surreal as his personality.  The image of an inebriated Hemingway seducing a woman by a carousel with pickup lines like “Have you ever shot a charging lion?” will inspire every barroom conversation I’m ever forced into. And my inner film geek was absolutely delighted by little inside jokes like Luis Buñel asking “Yes, but why can’t they leave the room?”

And surprisingly, Owen Wilson was a much bigger asset than I would have expected.  For most of the film, his almost complete lack of range gives him both a subtle bemusement that sits well in the atmosphere of fantasy and prevents him from attempting too strenuous a Woody Allen impression.  Too many fine actors have grappled with the nervous ticks and stuttering of their muse and lost.  But Wilson only occasionally breaks his cool, and those moments are infrequent enough that you don’t too much time wondering who told this California goy that he’s a Jewish New Yorker.

The film muses on the nature of nostalgia, and I don’t think it would be much of a spoiler to say that in the end, Woody comes to the conclusion that life is in the present, and does his darndest to bring us along with him.  It is probably equally unsurprising to note that the woman the Allen surrogate ends up with is not his fiancé, but someone with an enchanting accent who has heard of Cole Porter.

But what the film lacks in subtlety or shocking conclusions, it more than makes up for in charm.  It may not be his most challenging movie, it may not rank among classics like Manhattan or Annie Hall, but it manages to do what Hollywood is supposed to do: it puts a 90 minute smile on your face and leaves you feeling a little bit better about the world outside the theater.  Plus, in keeping with Allen’s best work, there are plenty of attractive ladies to ogle.  And even in these troubled times, that still counts for something.

-TC