Damn right.

To the Editor:

Many thanks to Frank Rich for reminding people that after 9/11 Rudolph W. Giuliani tried to destroy democracy in New York City by urging that our elections be postponed so that he could overstay his term. In my experience, many people here have forgotten this shameful attempt at a power grab.

Whenever Mr. Giuliani the candidate says that “they” attacked us because they hate our freedoms and our rights, people should be reminded that his first response to this hatred was to try to strip away our most precious right: the right to vote.

The rest of America needs to know that the person they call “America’s mayor” desperately tried to become “New York’s autocrat.” Mayor Giuliani responded to an emergency by attacking the right of the people to vote. How would a President Giuliani react to an emergency?

Eliot Camaren
New York, Nov. 11, 2007

This is funny.

I don’t for the life of me understand why bloggers who post hot shirtless pics of themselves all over their blogs get so many readers. Do gay men really fall for this shit?

Oh, who am I kidding. Of course I understand it and of course they do. It’s just that I resent it.

I can’t get enough of “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah,” even though it aired a month ago. When I saw the short clip on “30 Rock” last month I laughed my head off. If I’d been drinking something I would have spit it all over the coffee table. That’s what I love about “30 Rock” – unexpectedly hilarious jokes fly at you from out of nowhere.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s the original clip (just the first 10 seconds or so). Here’s the full-length video. The original clip is funnier because it’s short and completely random.

And here’s the inevitable New York Times article.

It took three days to prepare the set, a combination of a rented spooky backdrop, branches hanging from metal light stands and carved-foam Jewish tombstones. The segment was shot on video — four takes totaling about 15 minutes, Mr. Carlock said — and was intended to look shlocky, “like Tracy was rushing to get it done in time for bar mitzvah season.”

Boys becoming men… men becoming wolves!

Charles Isherwood to the striking, out-of-work Hollywood writers: come to New York and write plays. I would love to see more well-written plays.

Apparently, among the 50 states, Virginia has the highest proportion of cars with vanity license plates.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. They were all over the place when I lived there.

Interesting Wikipedia page: List of last occurrences.

It’s fun to troll through the New York Times archives. For some reason I’ve always remembered a particular end-of-year editorial that summed up the year 1997. I remember reading it and wondering how it would read years later. Now I know.

Here it is, dated January 1, 1998. How times have changed – but in some ways, not.

The Year of Living Smugly

Perhaps the most striking thing about 1997 was its power to divert. The robust economy, the continued decline in crime and the blessed respite from terrorist violence on home soil gave the nation an opportunity to focus on intensely personal news events with little overarching import — the death of Princess Diana, the ”nanny” trial and the birth of American septuplets.

It seemed, in many senses, the best of times — even the prosperous, placid 1950’s had been overshadowed by the cold war. Now, the United States is the planet’s only remaining superpower. Its most ambitious hopes for furthering Middle Eastern peace or smoothing China’s emergence as an economic and political power may not have been realized, but 1997 was still a year marked by uneasy peace in places where the mere absence of armed conflict must be counted as achievement. At home, the stock market rose more than 20 percent for the third straight year, and it was no surprise that Wall Street traders ended 1997 by releasing balloons in honor of the new horde of millionaires the market had created.

Continue reading →

It turns out that the celebrity real-estate agent found dead a few days ago in her posh East Side apartment was murdered by her fed-up personal assistant. “It was that Linda just kept yelling at her, over everything,” a law-enforcement official said.

Coming this Sunday or next: a feature article on the front page of the New York Times Style section about the frustrations of being a personal assistant in Manhattan. “No doubt personal assistants all over Manhattan secretly applauded when they learned the identity of Linda Stein’s killer,” the article will begin. “But what is the life of a personal assistant really like?” The article will include several quotes from harried twentysomething personal assistants and at least one reference to “The Devil Wears Prada.”

You can bet on it.

I’m no fan of Mike Huckabee’s policies, but a comment in this article about his rising prospects in Iowa encapsulates what bothers me about political campaigns today.

Mr. Laudner said prospects beyond Iowa remained Mr. Huckabee’s chief hurdle among politically savvy caucusgoers. “If there isn’t going to be enough money to compete beyond Iowa and New Hampshire,” he said, “that goes to the heart of the viability question. That’s his No. 1 limit here.”

In theory, it should cost zero dollars to compete, or at least zero dollars beyond whatever filing fees are required to get on the various ballots. After all, it doesn’t cost any money to vote. In an ideal world, all voters would be informed enough to examine the various candidates, all candidates would get equal news coverage, and there would be no polls subtly influencing our choices (“I like Candidate X a lot, but he’s only polling 3 percent so I should vote for Candidate Y instead”). In theory, a poor person should be able to get elected president, given wide enough appeal.

In the early years of our republic, candidates didn’t run for election; they “stood” for election. It was seen as undignified to campaign. Of course, in the early years, the general public had much less influence on presidential politics. In half the states, the public wasn’t even allowed to vote for presidential electors. And it’s only in the 20th century that the public began having a say in presidential primaries. The wider the voter base, the more energy a candidate has to expend appealing to it.

One could argue that the influence of money isn’t that distorting, because money reflects support. For instance, maybe if Huckabee were a stronger candidate, he’d be getting more donations. But if a candidate appeals to a wide swath a poor people and opposes the interests of the rich, the rich potential donors aren’t going to give that candidate money and he won’t get any traction.

Still, it seems odd to me that it’s a given that a candidate needs a ton of money to compete. Why will Huckabee need money to “compete” beyond Iowa and New Hampshire? If he does well enough in those states, he’ll get favorable media coverage, which will influence the public.

Of course, I’m probably wildly out of touch with “the people.” I choose my candidates by following the news, not by watching TV ads. The undecideds, those who make a difference in elections, probably watch the ads.

Still, it sucks that things are the way they are.

Best New York Times letters ever.

Thank you and thank you and thank you. It’s nice to see people tear apart Maureen Dowd’s idiotic hatchet job yesterday about Hillary Clinton’s debate performance.

Two errors in particular stuck out in her column.

One, Clinton doesn’t want to “have it both ways on illegal immigrants getting driver’s licenses,” Maureen. As Tom Cole puts it:

The simple fact of the matter is there is no good answer to the mess of illegal immigration, Spitzer is trying to do something, anything, to gain some order, and Hillary may not like it (I certainly don’t), but recognizes the value in what he is attempting to do. That isn’t double-talk or flip-flopping. It is called dealing with reality.

Two, by far the most egregious sentence about Clinton in Dowd’s column was this: “If she could become a senator by playing the victim after Monica, surely she can become president by playing the victim now.”

Is Dowd really that stupid? Does she care at all about being accurate?

Whiskey Fire responds to her inane assertion:

Hillary won her Senate seat because she busted her fucking ass. I know the cocktail party circuit isn’t so interested in the problems of rural upstate, but she was. She sat down with factory workers and farmers, she visited small towns and places where the population was hemorrhaging. I know, MoDo, I lived there. I live there still, and let me tell you, we don’t really care, up here, if someone is a “real feminist”–we care if they will represent our interests.

I went to several campaign events in 2000, and you know what? She never mentioned Monica once. Bill wasn’t with her. She wasn’t a victim, she was a person with policies.

I don’t understand Maureen Dowd. She’s obsessed with gender herself, but then she accuses Clinton of playing the gender card. She makes fun of some men for being too macho (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush), but she makes fun of other men for not being macho enough (Gore). She criticizes Hillary Clinton for making too much of her womanhood, but then she criticizes her for being too ambitious (isn’t it antifeminist to think that women shouldn’t be “ambitious”?). She insults men by asking, “Are men necessary?”, and then she wonders why she can’t find one. Yeah… it must be their fault that they can’t put up with her.

Does Maureen Dowd like anyone? Does she even know what she wants?

She’s nothing but an inkstain on the New York Times op-ed page.

In my work as an editor, one of the publications I edit is a manual of terms for the oil and gas industry.

Some of the terms being added to this year’s edition are bottom hole severance clause, downhole commingling, squeeze job, and underreaming.

Tee hee hee.

Yes, today I am a twelve-year-old boy.

Here’s a map of many of the locations in AMC’s TV series “Mad Men,” which recently concluded its first season.

I totally got into this show. Did any of you watch it? What did you think?

Today was my first day commuting to work from our new apartment. I took the C train from 110th Street to Penn Station, then New Jersey Transit to Newark. I could have left home later, because I had to wait for 10-15 minutes for the train to Newark. On a normal day, I think I’ll be able to make my commute in an hour, compared to my old commute of 45-50 minutes. Not that much longer – it’ll just be more expensive.

And now I get to ride the NYC subway during rush hour like a normal NYC commuter. My previous commute was by PATH train, in the direction opposite rush-hour traffic. Now I get to stand on a crowded subway. Not quite as comfortable – but the NJ Transit train is barely full, so I get to ride the express train to Newark in my own private seat with nobody next to me.

I didn’t sleep well last night. I fell asleep around 12:15, but I woke up around 5:00 and stayed awake for an hour and 15 minutes before falling asleep again. Right now we have a mattress without a bed, and the ambient light from street lamps pours into our bedroom window. We’ll be provided curtains, but as an interim measure last night I taped up a bedsheet against the window. It helped a little bit, but not completely. I’ll probably sleep better tonight — sometimes I just wake up too early in the morning for no reason.

We have a lot of unpacking to do, though I’m still wary of fully settling in, since we’ll have to move again by mid-May.

I was missing our old apartment a little this morning. So I looked at a bunch of photos that Matt took when we first moved into the old place. My eyes actually welled up a little as I looked at them. What a great apartment in a great location. Boy, were we spoiled.

I kinda miss my old home.

There’s a front-page article in the Times today about how gay neighborhoods are disappearing — something beyond the ordinary demographic shift of neighborhoods over time. Some causes: skyrocketing real estate prices, straight people moving in, gay couples moving to the suburbs, a decreasing perceived necessity for gay people to band together, and the Internet.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the scheme of things, gay neighborhoods are a new idea, only having come into existence around 1969. The ebb and flow of physical cultural communities is natural. The Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Puritans banded together, but their descendants spread out across New England and diluted their identity; the Jews of Brooklyn and Queens moved out to the suburbs of New Jersey and Long Island.

You don’t have to live in a ghetto in order to feel part of a community. We all juggle numerous identities inside ourselves. When I was a kid, I went to a public school five days a week like everyone else, but on Wednesdays after school and on Sunday mornings, I went to Hebrew school at our synagogue. I had Jewish friends and Christian friends, and I felt different kinds of affinities with each group — religious ties, school ties, generational ties.

In high school I was part of the drama crowd but also part of the yearbook crowd. In college I was part of a tight-knit group of friends in my dorm, but I was also part of a tight-knit men’s chorus and a tight-knit a cappella group. In fact, I got a rush out of switching identities depending on whom I was with.

It’s healthy to be part of more than one group, to mingle. The more you get to know other people, the less you will see them as The Other, as one-dimensional foes.

Meanwhile, people of common affinities will always seek each other out. I don’t much go to gay bars anymore, but I have my gay men’s chorus every week. My best friend at work is gay. And of course I’ve got my Gay Boyfriend.

It could be that gay neighborhoods were part of a special cultural moment and that that moment has passed. But nothing lasts forever.

I’ve had several boxes of childhood, high school, and college memorabilia that I’ve lugged from apartment to apartment over the last 10-15 years. For the last couple of years they’ve been sitting in a small storage room in our building, and I finally decided that I didn’t need to carry all this crap around with me anymore. (It’s amazing what an impending move will do.) In my last move, I pared it down a bit, leaving three boxes. This afternoon, I spent a good 90 minutes digging through those three remaining boxes and paring it down to one box. I threw out a lot of crap. I had to adopt a cold, rational attitude to some of it — such as the 16-episode soap opera I wrote when I was 14. (Speaking of crap.) I felt sad, but it had to go.

One thing I came across was my program from the 1992 U.Va. production of “Cabaret,” starring Tina Fey as Sally Bowles.

I also came across a paper I wrote for a drama class about the production — in which I critiqued aspects of Tina Fey’s performance.

Back then, of course, I didn’t know that Tina Fey would become Tina Fey. Had I known, her performance in “Cabaret” would have been flawless.

(I adore Tina Fey, by the way, even though I’ve never met her.)

When you’re packing stuff up for a move, there’s nothing, nothing as satisfying as THROWING SHIT AWAY.

(We’re moving on Saturday.)