bookofdays

planet ferrer

Well, we know what really happened in New York's mayoral race. Here's what was happening in a corner of New York.... (No link because I wrote it, and not for a newspaper.)

The chant, repeated and embellished, filled St. Nicholas Avenue and 181st Street in Washington Heights .

 

"We want Freddy!".

"Cuando?" a deep baritone intoned through a bullhorn.

"Ahora!"

"Cuando?"

"Ahora!"

Storekeepers and customers peered out their windows to wave at the candidate, even when not urged by the bass voice crying out: "Ferrer aqui! Ferrer acqui!"

A grandmother dropped her grandchild's hand and ran into the middle of the street, braving a near-miss with the M4 bus to hug the slight, white-shirted candidate.

Copies of The Ferrer Express, handed out at every corner: an alternative, perhaps, to all those newspapers that muttered all week what the New York Post finally screamed: IT'S OVER.

Welcome to Planet Ferrer, where victory is imminent for the longtime Democratic underdog.

Fernando Ferrer spent Election Day entirely among supporters, in his home districts in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, where he was treated like the celebrity he is. All around him, Democratic candidates new and old put themselves quietly on display for Ferrer, while they lined up their chips for the next round of the game.

At his campaign breakfast at La Nueva Caridad, a Washington Heights diner, Ferrer was relaxed, un-anxious. He showed off his little grandsons, Jalen and Brendan. He looked, not just like the winner, but already the mayor.  Those polls that had Mayor Bloomberg leading by over 30 percent – they didn't exist.

"The only polls that count are happening right now," said volunteer Jeannette Acosta, 32, a Kingsbridge resident and student at Monroe College.

"I talk to my friends, and Democrats that I know – and they are all like,'Nobody talked to me'. The people that are voting weren't polled."

Acosta, a mother of two, said she became interested in Ferrer after she became sick of Mayor Bloomberg's claims on education. "I spent $200 on school supplies last month," she said, "including napkins, so they can go to the bathroom. Including soap, so they can wash their hands."

In Ferrer, Acosta saw a chance for a new start – and something more.

"We will make history today. We will elect the first Latino mayor of New York," said Acosta with a heartfelt smile. The sentiment seemed less a party line than a steadfastly maintained article of faith, spoken by nearly everyone willing to comment for this story.

At the breakfast, Ferrer and Luis Moranda, co-chair of the campaign, held court with most of Upper Manhattan 's Democratic power structure. Though former Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields was the official guest; by the time it broke up,  respects had been paid by City Councilman Miguel Martinez, Assembly members Eric Schneiderman and Robert Jackson, and even Carol Bellamy, former borough president and head of UNICEF. All the talk was of victory; Ferrer's wife, Araminta, commented to Fields that "when people see Freddy, they wake up!"'

The loyal volunteers agreed; the shock troops of Planet Ferrer were ready to march. Including Kenny Agosto, the man with the bullhorn.

Agosto, 35, is a Bronx native who's worked on three previous Ferrer campaigns. "You might call me a Ferrerista," he said, laughing. Then he turned and waved his volunteers to the sidewalk.

"To Fort Washington!" he cried, as if the general for which the street was named.

St. Nicholas Avenue, an already busy shopping street, now swelled again with volunteers waving blue Ferrer signs, campaign operatives in uneasy pinstripes, and Ferrer's wife, daughter and son-in-law, as well as his bouncy grandson taking turns on the bullhorn.

Once the group had taken its pre-victory parade up the hill at 181^st Street to Fort Washington , they took themselves into vans and cars and went across the bridge to the Bronx, to Ferrer's original home base at Jerome Avenue and Fordham Road.

Here, the crowds were thicker and the event more overlaid with local officials. Here, the Spanish chants developed more beats, and a line emerged that would continue throughout the day, in reference to Bloomberg's millions.

"Los votos no se venden!" Our votes are not for sale.

At noon the media presence tripled. Univision competed with RNN, and the pinstriped campaign staff tried to flatten themselves out of sight of the shouting volunteers. Planet Ferrer is not about pinstripes, on the surface.

A more appropriate image was presented by Victor Thompson, a long-time activist with the Service Employees International Union, with his cold-hardened skin, his baseball cap, his 25-year track record as an organizer.

"I worked on the Kerry campaign, and for Dinkins," he said.

Asked if he thought Ferrer could win, he said, "If I didn't, I wouldn't be here."

Planet Ferrer, it seems, is as much about party loyalty as about the injustices its inhabitants want to address. As evidenced by the arrival of the next special guest: Rev. Al Sharpton, who seemed a bit disoriented by the sheer volume of pure Spanish with which he was surrounded when he got out of his van.

It wasn't until the group marched east on Fordham, to Creston Avenue, that Sharpton made some semblance of an actual speech. "Mayor Bloomberg will see even his $100 million couldn't buy our votes," he started, going on to his usual talking points about the West Side stadium and affordable housing.

The campaign's last official stop, as the sun set, was in Parkchester, in the southeast Bronx, yet another home base for Ferrer. And there was yet another set of local and state politicians, all standing in a line to shake the hands of commuters, like a receiving line at a wedding.  Kenny Agosto's bullhorn voice was hoarse as he bellowed to the growing crowd: "Make room!"

This time, the lineup featured Comptroller William Thompson, who's often spoken of as a potential Democratic nominee should Ferrer lose. Now, he grinned when commuters approached him instead of the candidate. "I'm not Freddy!" he kept saying, over and over. The subtext to Planet Ferrer, then, may be a Democratic organization pulling together, and preparing for the next step.

The volunteers kept saying "It's looking good!" And the supporters who turned up, though less certain, still refused to believe it was a lost cause.  A Queens police officer facing retirement said simply: "If he wins, the last five years of my career will be hell."

The officer asked his name not be used, because "I'd be talking against my boss, right? I work for the Mayor." Like most of the inhabitants of Planet Ferrer, he thought the city had been too often run for the glory of Bloomberg. "That stadium project – like he thought it would be his legacy or something,"

He sighed. "Do the math. $200 million of his personal fortune into this campaign, if you count all those charitable contributions – and he won't even feel it. Yeah, I feel more like Freddy's my kind of people."

As the meet and greet wore down, the manager of the station's convenience store, Rose Bengal, quietly offered a whisper from the reality-based community. Asked if he had met the candidate, he said "Yes." Did he support him? "No."   Did he vote? "Yes."

Then he turned away, went back to selling lottery tickets and Coca-Cola, and let the Democratic procession continue unchecked outside his door.

the legacy of samson

The news this morning of the bombing at Sharm-el-Shaikh  was bracing, if unsurprising in some ways. Still, that resort did feel a refuge during my too-brief time in that part of the world ( I'll post photos if I can later). Fot good solid analysis and a roundup of the commentary, the best come as usual from Billmon.

And today, Monday, Dan of the Christian Science Monitor writes of a "jihadi subculture":

The culture of Islamist suicide bombers is becoming more commonplace, as is the defining of civilians as "enemies."

Even in the wave of Islamist terror attacks that destabilized Egypt for much of the 1990s, suicide bombers weren't used. Now the country has seen two major attacks of this kind in eight months, with the latest death toll now at least 88.

What concerns counterterrorism experts is that tactics that once prompted fierce ideological debates within radical circles -- suicide and attacks on civilians are both classically defined in Islam as sins -- are now more likely to be embraced by young men. A decade or two ago, Muslim males might have been willing to take up a rifle and risk death fighting against the Soviets in the mountains of Afghanistan, but many would have balked at making the ultimate sacrifice or at blowing up civilians in a Moscow train station.

Still, I think it's still not useless to post this excerpt of  my crazy novel. If you ever needed to convince someone that that Islam has been hijacked as firmly as Christianity by its fundamentalists, this might give you a little ammunition.

I still never conceived that a project I've been nurturing for so long would be so fscking timely.

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"While we are bidden to place all our faith and trust in God, the rabbis nevertheless deduce from the language of the Torah itself that we should be active in improving and preserving the health of the body . . .Just as we are prohibited from taking the life of another, we are also prohibited by the Torah from taking our own life, which is God-given, and anyone who commits suicide is deemed a murderer and is not to be buried in a Jewish cemetery."
— Rabbi Eliahu Shalom Ezran,  spiritual leader of Magain David Sephardim Congregation, San Francisco

About suicide, the Holy Qur’an states clearly: ‘Do not kill yourselves, for surely Allah is Compassionate to you’ (Qur’an, 4:29), ‘Do not cast yourselves into destruction by your own hands’ (Qur’an, 2:195) and ‘No soul can die except by God’s permission’ (Qur’an 3:185). An Islamic objection to any form of suicide (rational or irrational) is that the motive which prompts individuals to take their own life is contrary to the divine prerogative over human life….  In theological and philosophical reasoning, suicide has been considered for centuries an unethical act. What is clear is that suicide has remained a religious taboo in the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

-- G. Hussein Rassool, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Jerusalem, of course, one of the few places frequently associated with suicide in the minds of even non-suicides: some will likely think first of headlines about the ill-named “suicide bombers.”
Like the FBI agents who zeroed in on a pair of Muslim teenage girls in New York City and deported them -- in part, for mentioning suicide in an Islamic chat room on the Internet. (They should have hired me as a consultant. Show me, I might have told them, a sixteen-year-old girl who’s not intrigued by suicide and I’ll give you five bucks.)

But I digress: neither of those girls was from anywhere near Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, the tourist brochures assure us, is sacred to three great religions. More  like three branches of a family, drunken cousins in a multi-tiered bloodthirsty dynamic that’s rather Shakespearean, for the number of bodies left on the floor.  Adherents of all three faiths have crossed swords both literally and figuratively for so many generations, some sculpting in white stone the tragedy of Temple Mount, that one can only find ironic that Judaism and Islam share with Christianity (see the Jesus option, above) similar canons 'gainst self-slaughter. They also share the same mirror-image flirtation with martyrdom – and  a not-quite-death-defying obsession with Jerusalem.

The two were paired, Jerusalem and suicide, almost from the beginning, especially in early Jewish writing – the Old Testament, the early Talmud, and those sexy and violent books excluded from the canon as apocrypha – especially the 5 books of Maccabees, some of which I’ll save for the next  guidebook (Special Edition: Masada.)

Of the five suicides in the Old Testament, the first to take place in Jerusalem is also among the most spectacular: Samson, who pulls down the walls of the First Temple, to die together with the same Philistines whose victory had led to the suicide of Saul. Judges 18:30 sings: the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life. Get that? He died so that the Philistines would die too, even if his temple would be destroyed with him, centuries before Islam was born --  millennia before its good name would be smeared with an epidemic of suicide-homicides.

aidan's sergeant

Speaking of updates, I'd promised some people close to Aidan Delgado, the conscientious objector at Abu Ghraib, that I'd post this profile of Aidan's work -- in which, for the first time, an officer confirms that the specific abuses he described were accurate.

what history?

Maybe, as a New Yorker, I'm oversensitive to real estate dominating other priorities, but of all the headlines crossing my overstuffed screen this morning, this small note from AFP caught my eye:

 

 

A hundred Chinese tombs more than 2,000 years old have been crushed or buried to make way for a housing project in Inner Mongolia province, state media reported.

The destruction, backed by the local government, continued even though the Helinge'er county site was one of the largest and best-preserved cultural heritage sites in China, the Beijing Youth Daily said.

Nearly 50 of the tombs were razed and more than 50 others were covered over by earth when construction equipment flattened the ground.

"Here we don't know how many cultural relics have been broken to pieces," said Chen Yongzhi, deputy director of the Inner Mongolia Cultural Relics Archeological Research Institute.

"We don't know how many historical mysteries that could've been solved will remain mysteries forever."

The site in the north of China was once the cemetery of the former city of Tuchengzi and has a history dating back to the Warring States period in the latter part of the Eastern Zhou dynasty (770-221 BC).

In 2001, the Chinese government placed it on the list of important national sites to be preserved.

County authorities, however, were eager to turn the 300,000 square metre (3.2 million square feet) plot of land over to the Xiangyu Real Estate Development Company to cash in on the local housing boom. (emphasis mine - cml)

Also in the news today, of course, is a follow-up report on the antiquities looted from Iraq since the U.S. invasion:

 

Evidence of how quickly and irretrievably a country can be stripped of its cultural heritage came with the Iraq war in 2003.

The latest figures, presented to the art crime conference yesterday by John Curtis of the British Museum, suggested that half of the 40 iconic items from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad still had not been retrieved. And of at least 15,000 items looted from its storerooms, about 8,000 have yet to be traced.

About 4,000 of the objects taken from the museum had been recovered in Iraq. But illustrating the international demand for such antiquities, Dr Curtis said around 1,000 had been confiscated in the US, 500 pieces had been impounded in France, 250 in Switzerland and 200 or so in Jordan. Other artefacts have been retrieved from surrounding countries such as Syria, Kuwait, Iran and Turkey. None of these objects has yet been sent back to Iraq.

Other items had been destroyed or stolen from enormously important archaeological sites such as those at Nimrud and Babylon. "Some of them resemble minefields there are so many holes," Dr Curtis said.

Random checks on Western soldiers leaving the area had found some in illegal possession of ancient artefacts.

For once, I'm not pointing my finger at soldiers and asking only of them: their motivation likely was the same as the local Mongolian officials now. Who cares about history, when there's money to be made? These sites weren't yet tourist magnets like The Temple of Karnak in Luxor or China's own Great Wall. They were never as famous as the Buddhas in Bamiyan -- and now we'll never know what was there.

The destruction of the Buddhas, of course, was notorious partly because of why they were bulldozed: the deep fanaticism and Khmer Rouge-esque zeal of the Taliban. This Chinese wipeout, like so much else we don't hear about, is in some ways even less excusable. It's not about deep beliefs, even crazy ones; it's not about survival (which could be claimed for the Iraqi looting, though I tend to doubt it). It's about being as rich as you possibly can.

Of course. that's  the holiest religion of all, if you're Ayn Rand -- or Donald Trump and his culties on that TV program I've never seen. Or our president, or one of  any number of  new-breed Reeps that pray more to John Calvin than to Jesus.  I'm guessing that this news from China will provoke no more than a smirk and a silent "You go, [girl}!" from the proclaimed guardians of tradition.

After all, "to get rich is glorious."  Pardon me while I weep.

five questions, many answers

Melanie sent out questionnaires to a few bloggers and challenged us to put the answers on our blogs. Mine come last here; the rest all are compelling enough to send me to check out their sites!

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1.  In no more than 18 words, describe the place you are right now.

My home office, where I am surrounded by all the comforts of the intellect, books, maps and photogrpahs.

2.  You can live anywhere on the planet for the next two years.  Where will you live?

Geneva, Switzerland.

3. You are asked to contribute one recipe for a six-month Space Shuttle mission.  What is it?

My wife's lasagna.

4. If you could have dinner with any poet, living or dead, who is your dining companion?

William Butler Yeats

5.  Describe a work day which is both demanding and extremely rewarding.

I think this Thrusday was a perfect example of an extremely demanding yet very rewarding day. First, I was very busy with clients, especially making some chages to their portfolios and then counseling and educating them as to why I felt the changes were necessary. The reasoning behind my decisions resonated with all of the clients and they were happy. ANd I was busy and successful. And then, on top of that I sat in on a blogconference with a Congressman and also worked on the Brookings Institution situation of which I am sure many are aware of. Rounding up blog support and then drafting the letter with Matt. It was a good day.

Posted by: Sean-Paul on March 20, 2005 11:30 AM

I'll participate.  Shall we pass it along?

Posted by: Lauren on March 20, 2005 12:45 PM

This could be fun...

Home office - birds, Blows Against The Empire album jacket, books, lacking globe, maps, plants and old AIM poster.

Where I've lived the past fifty, and anticipate yet another fifty.

Elk Pemican and Rattlesnake Sausage.

Jim Morrison.

Keeping three hundred workstations across a ten thousand square mile district happy while reading ten to fifteen thousands words of interest without running afoul of the ostensibly middle management rightwing jackjew nutjob (the later being the most difficult).

Posted by: Thmas Ware on March 20, 2005 01:15 PM

Thomas, This was great: "Keeping three hundred workstations across a ten thousand square mile district happy while reading ten to fifteen thousands words of interest without running afoul of the ostensibly middle management rightwing jackjew nutjob (the later being the most difficult)."

I love it.

Posted by: Sean-Paul on March 20, 2005 01:34 PM

This is going to take more than one post to get through.  Here's Melanie's first two questions for me, and my answers:

1.  A genie from a lamp grants you three wishes, but none of them can have anything to do with money.  What are they?

The first one covers a lot of ground: my wife's got a slew of close relatives who are in poor health, and she's not in such great shape herself. My first wish would be to restore them all to excellent health in every way that didn't have to do with the inevitable onset of advanced years.

My second wish relates to where I am in my life: 51 years old, and somewhat adrift, not really knowing what I want to do with the second half of my life. My second wish would be for some insight to help me make sense of myself and what I ought to be doing with my life.

Third wish: a small harem of women who'd...nah, let's leave my fantasies out of this. My third wish is for teleportation - for the ability to teleport myself, my wife, members of our immediate families, and appropriate luggage, anywhere in the world we wanted to go.

And this one really isn't about teleportation as a means of avoiding the *expense* of travel, which would violate the spirit of the question: asking for things that can be bought with or exchanged for money is pretty much the same as asking for money, AFAIAC. Let me give a few examples.

First, my wife has always wanted to go to Australia. Always. And we can afford to go; money's not the problem. But we've been as far as Hawaii, and we've discovered she doesn't bear up well on long airline flights. She's concluded Hawaii's about as far as she can manage, and she's reluctantly accepted that she'll never see Australia. Teleportation would be the answer.

Second, we'd love to take her parents (who are the quintessential example of a couple that's worked hard and played by the rules, but life's never allowed them to get very far ahead in the game) on a vacation somewhere nice. They deserve it. But her father's the sort who can't accept that sort of gift. But if we could teleport him for free, he might accept that instead.

But most of all, I'd like to be able to get from point A to point B, without all the time and hassle of going through the intervening space, whether it's commuting to work, or traveling around the world; it's the nuisance factor, the tire-you-out factor, that I'd love to be able to dispense with. We're having dinner with my sister this evening; she lives to the northwest of DC, and we live in the southeast exurbs. Teleportation would be a hell of a lot easier than driving to, around, then out from the Beltway, in each direction.

2.  Tell us about your most memorable vacation.

In 1983, I took a six-week trip by car, most of which was a big loop around the Western half of the U.S. I had a summer off between semesters of grad school, and I'd been working before grad school so I had some savings, and this is what I did with that money. I saw relatives in a half-dozen places that I didn't often get to see; I hiked down into the Grand Canyon; I drove a good stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway and saw Yosemite Valley, I saw the rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula, and - rapture! - I was surrounded by a flock of bighorn sheep while hiking the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park.

Going back to Glacier this summer, with my wife. I don't expect another miracle like that with the bighorn sheep, but once in a lifetime is plenty for that sort of thing. Lake MacDonald, the Garden Wall, Ptarmigan Tunnel. Haystack Butte in the morning. Ten days in heaven.

Answers to questions 3-5 will follow.

Posted by: RT on March 20, 2005 01:56 PM

For Palamedes:

1.  What is your deepest dream for your daughter?

To be able to take care of herself in the midst of a difficult world, while, in the process, usually being happy, healthy, striving toward her self-perceived most important goals, and aware.

2.  What is it for yourself?

When I was very young, according to my mom, there were three books she could always read to me again and again. The first was The Pokey Puppy. The second was The Happy Bunny. The third was Harold and the Purple Crayon.

The Pokey Puppy (almost) always figured out how to circumvent the rules if he thought they weren’t just. The Happy Bunny is asked about what he wants to be when he grows up. You find out, after much wandering through the career possibilities, that he wants to grow up to become a daddy above all else. And Harold is simply about a boy, his purple crayon, and where your imagination can take you if you’re willing.

For me, circumventing the rules became subsumed in something bigger – wanting to know “why,” with subversion a ready alternative if asking straightforward questions was getting me incomplete or dubious answers. So, I want to know as much of the “why” as I can. (Sometimes, I settle for “how” until a new opportunity for “why” presents itself.)

Happily, I became a dad. But while being a dad is a not-to-be-missed experience, the absence of an adult partner with which to have a lifelong relationship is strongly felt. So, a woman to share my life with and with which to create a richer family.

3.  If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

I pretty much live where I want to now - Seattle. I love to travel, though I’m still a little new at it, and intend to do lots more of it. Port Townsend, Victoria and Vancouver beckon, the greater San Diego area can be a wonderful place, coastal Baja California outside of Tijuana is remarkable, Chicagoland is my first home, Paris is a mystery that would take many wonderful years to open, London is like an honest, very intelligent, sharp-witted but slightly bedraggled aunt that you enjoy every second with, but Seattle is in my bones like the damp of a cold, misty day here in November.

4.  What would your ideal day off look like.

An ideal day off from work AND from trying to make my small effort against the troubles of this world?  It depends. 

The lazy version has me in my sweats, reading books and watching movies in a well-sunlit room with a well-stocked fridge (healthy stuff mostly – maybe one or two cans of Squirt, or a chilled bottle of Frivolo or a gewürztraminer, or maybe just a bottle or two of Black Hook, but otherwise no junk) and quality videos (I do this for my sanity once every two months or so already, though Seattle doesn’t always guarantee the sunlight – this coming weekend, it’ll be Baaaadass, Life at the End of the Universe, and From Chivalry to Terrorism by Leo Braudy).

The active version has me going somewhere, anywhere, preferably to someplace I’ve never been before, either with a small group of folks excited to be along for the trip, or on my own with a itinerary in place and the certainty in my head of the one or two most important things to see, no mater what, in case I have to toss said itinerary. If I have to be really, REALLY specific about this, I’d like the time to listen to Malcolm Miller give his entire series of discussions on the cathedral at Chartres face-to-face, as he walks us around and shows us the richness of the place and of a time. (I’m very surprised TV5 or the BBC haven’t put together a TV series on just this thing – Malcolm’s getting on in years…)

5.  Someone new is coming for dinner.  What will you make?

I assume they can eat anything. I’m not a fancy cook, so….spinach salad with a warm, mostly honey-and-bacon-based dressing, paella with shellfish and pork, the Frivolo or gewürztraminer to drink with the meal, and a quick fruit salad for dessert, made of freshly cut pineapple, mango and blackberries – whipped cream optional.

Posted by: palamedes on March 20, 2005 02:20 PM

Hey Thomas,
we all got individual questions. So you need to post the questions YOU had, not just your answers.

Stu

Posted by: Stu Savory on March 20, 2005 02:23 PM

1.  What is "the code of the South?"

Not being a native Southerner, the “code of the South” is the kind of thing that exists , with elves etc. just outside the corner of one’s eye. It’s there, and then, it’s not. So, one must simmer in the stew of mildew, heat, humidity, languor, slowness, swamp, and quicksand to begin to grind into one’s DNA the southern version of the desire for death, the longing for resurrection, the hatred of the “other, “ and the perverse value found in simple endurance. Flannery O’Conner. Cool Hand Luke. “I may be crazy, but you can’t kill me.” Secrets. Tiny flowers hidden underneath huge ferns and wide, squatting magnolias. Mysteries. Eternal hope, facing unending hatred.

2.  You are having a dinner party for eight.  Who is coming?

If I am having a dinner party for eight, whether in my imagination, or in my dining room, I am thinking about bringing people together who probably don’t know how wonderful they are, but will find out in the company of others. I’ll ask two longtime friends, my husband, a client I just met, who is growing old, crazy, and doesn’t care who knows it, and is also brilliant and broke. Let’s see. Someone else I met recently who’s ideas about the future I found thrilling. An old friend from college who consulted me recently about the disposal of a haunted painting. Finally, I think, ( retired) Bishop Sims, who recently and to no avail, published “Why Bush Must Go,” and a friend from Omega Point who said that “Maybe the worst thing I ever did was get a Ph.D.,  It seems to have started my mental decline.”

3.  What is on the menu?

What is on the menu is lots of girlie alcohol (Sherry etc.), lots of odd appetizers ,
maybe something sensual , like cornish hens stuffed with cream cheese, lots of bread, bowls of salad, dessert that goes on and on. Dinner in courses, with breaks between courses, accompanied by different kinds of music (jazz, classical, 40s crooners, H. Johnson’s Saturday night radio show, down here in the south, which makes him a dinner guest every Saturday). Getting people loose and laughing. Silly, and showing off. Candlelight making everyone appear beautiful, timeless, as if they just arrived from outer space. Let them smoke cigarettes, and wander outside. Let them get drunk and argue with each other.
They’ll end the evening in love with each other,  even if they never see each other
again.   No celebrities.

4.  In no more than eight words, describe love.

Facing east, in your heart, even at sunset.

5.  What do you do when doing the right thing will be extremely painful?

I go into “warrior -- battle stations” mode. Warrior-battle stations was honed from years being raised by an alcoholic and a schizophrenic. It became more aesthetic and less compulsive and involuntary by virtue of dance and bodywork training. The jarring neurological jolt of W-B has mellowed through time through the practice of Eastern arts, and Western prayer. I breathe, then I move. I think, and then I pray. I surrender, and then I leap. I think that this is what we are alive for. This is where we find salvation.

Posted by: dreaminginthedeepsouth on March 20, 2005 02:29 PM

Q&A, Part 2:

3.  What would your perfect day look like?

It would take place in and near Glacier NP in late summer. It would start with some pre-dawn sex with my wife. She'd go back to sleep, and I'd rendezvous at first light with one or two close friends at the Highline Trail trailhead. We'd spend most of the day hiking the trail, sometimes with no more accompaniment than the crunch of our boots on the trail, and at other times having intense discussions about life, the Universe, and everything, and at the end of the hike there'd be a group-sized hot tub, overlooking the waters of Lake MacDonald, reserved for just us, so we could soak away the muscle aches from the trail. My wife, who doesn't do hikes of more than a mile or two, would rejoin us for the hot-tub part of the day. Then we'd all go to Truby's in Whitefish, MT, where we'd meet up with a few more friends for more conversation over some world-class pizza and excellent local beers. Then at some point my wife and I would head back to our cabin, and since it's a perfect day, we'd still have some energy left for amor before being overtaken by sleep.

4.  You are going to have a dinner party to which you can invite any three historical figures.  Who are they?

Here's the deal: there are lots of historical figures I'd love to have a deep conversation with individually, but who might not have that much to say to each other. If Thomas Jefferson and Deutero-Isaiah were at the same table, would Isaiah be that interested in Jefferson? Probably not.

I'm going to go with the assumption that, in whatever sort of après-vie my invitation has retrieved our historical figures from, they're familiar with the history of the world between their deaths and the present. So I'm going to go with Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR. They faced very different problems, but it's hard to see them not being interested in one another's situations and how they dealt with the events of their time. I'd be especially interested in some Jefferson-Lincoln discussion about slavery and the breach of the Union, which possibility Jefferson wrote about at some length.

5.  How did you find your current profession?

I'm presently a number cruncher for a government statistical agency. I used to be a math professor at a small, struggling Christian college in Northeast Tennessee. Like a lot of places dedicated to a mission but struggling to get by, the college in question held things together, in large part, by asking a great deal of the faculty and staff, in the name of the mission. During the academic year, I was perpetually exhausted; my second year there, I nearly had a breakdown.

It got better after that, but after a few years, it was clear that there was a limit to *how* much better it was ever going to get. Plus, we went through a search for a new college president, and the winning candidate was a dean with whom I had the proverbial "philosophical differences," in spades. So I was looking for something new.

One morning around that time, I was looking at my current employer's website, just to get some numbers to see whether or not they supported some ideas of mine. A streamer was running across the bottom of the page, saying they were looking for mathematicians, statisticians, and computer programmers, and pointing me to an online application form. I said 'sure, why not?', filled out the application, and one thing led to another, with the upshot being that they hired both me and my wife for similar positions.

Posted by: RT on March 20, 2005 03:19 PM

1.  Scramble play on your iPod.  Give us the
> titles and artists.

I don't have an iPod, just iTunes on my laptop..

All of them???? I'll give you a few to start....

Stand Liquid Jesus
My Back Pages 真心ブラザーズ
Mosh Eminem
Don't They The Blue Method
Arrest The President Rawdog Feat Taskforce & Braintax
The Boy In The Bubble Paul Simon
Eistigh Liomsa Sealad/Listen To Me/Saor Reprise \
                       -- Afro Celt Sound System
Don't You Know                 --  Devo
Mary Jane -- Alanis Morissette
Eva Ozomatli Ozomatli \
Hallelujah, Here She Comes --  U2
Short Skirt Long Jacket - Cake

>
> 2.  Design an audio book.  What is it and who
> is the reader?
Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, read by Don Cheadle
>
> 3.  A world famous chef will cater your next
> event.  Who is it and
> what's on the menu?
Ron Siegel in San Francisco (one of the only Americans to win the " Iron Chef" competition). My mouth still holds his tilapia and creme brulee, but anything he chooses (with no meat) will be just fine.
(I thought you were customizing these questions. I never mention food on my blog.)
>
> 4.  What famous painting would you like to own
> and why?
Guernica. Because it could be any war: because it doesn't let you go or make excuses. I bet the Spanish who voted in Azar had the painting burned into their eyes.

5.  What's your favorite city?  Why?
My heart stops at Paris' Marais, Rome;s Trastavere district, East Jerusalem, and the Mission in San Francisco before stopping back at the inexhaustible place of my birth,New York. I love it for that very inexhaustibility, and for the way it is perhaps the least American of all U.S. cities; E.B. White has written about how New Yorkers accept pain and difficulty as part of life, instead of rushing as most Americans do to avoid or mask it as much as possible. I also love how much of a mob of writers aggregates here: if you bump a random person in the street, a novel or sheaf of poems will fall out of their bag.

But I don't get to choose it, really -- only Rome matched my pace and the open emotional expression of my youth (though it didn't my language). I was away for 20 years, including two in Baltimore (sweet place) and ten in San Francisco -- and the moment I moved back here, I was a fish back in my own tank.