Bookey Bloggery

I am in the process of redecorating my old bedroom, and as much as I love this U2 poster, it needs to go. But it reminds me off that far-off time when you could actually buy a general admission ticket and join your friends at a concert. FOR TEN DOLLARS.

What’re U2 tickets these days, $150

In the summer of 1983, my friend Jeff and his girlfriend Laurie were going to see U2 and the Alarm at the pier on the Hudson. I think that pier is gone now. I wanted to join them, so I went to Mom, who worked the Ticketron counter at A&S sometimes, and she got me a ticket for ten dollars. I am still marvelling at the $10aspect. I think it was cheap even then.

All I had to to was join my friends, and mind you, I got the ticket a few days before the concert.

The rotting-away West Side Highway was in the background. It was the first concert of the summer, and Mayor Koch introduced the Alarm and U2 and said, “Make sure they hear you in New Jersey.” This was back when Mayor Koch was admired and his various cabinet members had not yet imploded. Remember Bess Meyerson shoplifting, and Donald Manes slitting his wrists and ankles while driving on the Grand Central Parkway? This was back when Koch was an actual Democrat. Today, he claims to be a Democrat while endorsing D’Amata, Bush, and various other embarassments.

I couldn’t imagine going to a big concert anymore, partially because of the huge cost, and the rigamarole of just trying to get tickets. My next concert is probably going to be Suzanne Vega at the Landmark in Port Washington.

I am dumb with amazement at the people who are against universal health care. If I sent Godzilla in to fight with the hundreds of insurance companies, I doubt he would win.

The thing about Americans that amazes is me is the idea that some people deserve health care and others do not. Our society, for better or worse, is based on Judao-Christian ethics, a cornerstone of which is charity.

Many did not seem to mind plunging the country into debt with the ill-conceived and floundering war in Iraq. We already have Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Universal health coverage is a natural extension of this.

We pay more when people use ERs for minor ailments, because they cannot go to a doctor. We pay more when there’s more reactive care than prophylaxis. I paid for diphtheria medication ($68) because my insurer wouldn’t cover it when I went to Sri Lanka; but if I got sick, they would have covered it, for much more money.

These people screaming in town hall meetings? Who are they? Why are they so angry. Believe me, if there was an outbreak of the flu, they would be screaming for the government to do something, but at the same time they want people to not be covered, because they pay for health coverage (a portion of it via work), and some might not?

I am currently unemployed and spending $300/month for Healthy NY via Empire Blue Cross. That $3600 could go to a LOT of other stuff I need to do to keep up the house, but I have to keep myself up as well. People go nuts over the notion that they don’t have a choice of doctors. Well, you don’t under the current system either. I changed jobs 10 years ago and had to leave a doctor I liked to one that turned out disasterously during a time I had a (false) cancer scare. The actual problem, which I won’t reveal here, was actually hilarious.

The bottom line is that a society that thinks it is built on some primary religious ethics should be a lot more charitable. We already have a lot of the basics in place. People are fed up, and even doctors are fed up, with the health insurance companies’ control over the situation, and it needs reform now.

Many moons ago, I discovered the band Squeeze, and within a year, they were breaking up. The year, of course, was 1982. And of course, we all know that Squeeze broke up for about three years, and then got back together with the release of the album Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti.

But in 1982, the band seemed to be history, after dismal sales of their album “Sweets from a Stranger,” an album that I always liked, btw.

So, having discovered the joy of going to concerts, I went to Nassau Collisseum in November 1982, probably driven there by my friend and concertmate Ann. And being dutiful, I bought the t-shirt to memorialize the band’s last concert. Except that it wasn’t the last concert. The farewell urge allowed for a second goodbye concert, followed by another final concert at a festival in Jamaica, I think.

But, no matter. The band was going to break up. I was just glad to have a chance to see them in concert, having just discovered them and their entire discography. There were some snotty people behind us who didn’t like the opening band, because they mumbled too much. The mumblers, were, btw, R.E.M. Then, another band took the stage, and the complainers didn’t like this band either. This band was actually breaking for good–the English Beat. Who doesn’t like the English Beat?

Then, Squeeze took the stage, and the complainers didn’t seem to like them either. Why did they come?

In the end, it was a pretty good show. At the time, R.E.M. was really not a known commodity. And I had the shirt to prove it. I  have this blog entry under Rememberance of Things Tossed, but, it might actually be worth money, so I am looking into selling it. Anything above $20 will seem like a victory for my years of hoarding.

Meanwhile, I have hoarded a ton of music as well. After the band split in 1982, Difford and Tilbrook did an independent project that sounded a lot like a Squeeze album. And they put out many albums since their 1985 reunion (the concert for which I attended in the same Nassau Colisseum) and I have most of them, despite the poor publicity for them and all the lineup changes to the band. But I think for a lot of people, the band’s best work is considered to be before the “Last Orders” in 1982. Ask anyone for a Squeeze song title and it’s going to be “Tempted” or “Pulling Muscles from the Shell,” not “Hourglass” or “Melody Motel.”

I recently went to see GI Joe. Why, you might ask? Was it the abs on the main actor, Channing someone, whose surname seems unimportant all of the time? Was it seeing the Eiffel Tower fall over? Sure… but the main reason is that I have all three services from Cablevision, which owns Clearview Cinemas, and on Tuesday, you and a friend go free. It used to be you and three friends could go free, but a good deal is usually squished when it catches on. But seeing the Eiffel Tower fall over is always great. Always.

The main virtues of the film, outside of the aforementioned, is the successful marriage of CGI and video games to create a film in which the alpha-elite GI Joe squad, run by the only true movie star here, Dennis Quaid, pursues the evil arms dealer, who owns M.A.R.S.

The arms company has created nano-mites–robot insects that just keep eating anything in their path until they are stopped by a kill switch. This concept reminds me of the Republican party when it loses a national election, except there is no kill switch. They went after Clinton from the moment he arrived in office to the time they found Monica’s dry cleaning bills. God only knows what they will do to Obama. But I digress.

So, GI Joe settles into the rather formulaic buddy movie/elite squad movie/fighting to the digital countdown finish movie. Marlon Wayans, as “Ripcord,”  has to stop two missiles at once as they head to Moscow and D.C., while Channing Whosits has to destroy a big ray gun under the North Pole. Or some nonsense.

The movie was free, and Rob and I quipped to each other freely. Also with us was a senior who has some problems, and actually reacts better to cartoons and more child-oriented films. So seeing a lot of explosions and the Eiffel Tower falling over was perfect. The movie features prominently the Hasbro logo, and often looks like a video game.  I wasn’t expecting much and I got more than I expected.

My sole problem: A lot of the bad guys get shot in the eye with bullets or arrows. That made me squirm. Given that much of the violence is cartoonish, these grimmer images make it less than desirable for kids under 15, but not kids over 65.

Also not explained: Why is Jonathan Price and his British accent playing the President of the United States?

NB, Clash Fans: Ivan did not meet GI Joe in this film. Maybe next time.

You might have noticed in my recent posts that I hate Canada. I do not hate Canada, or even the Canadians. It’s just that I hate what they DO. Love the sinner, hate the sin.  Who do they think they are, with their universal health care, true religious tolerance, and that infernal metric system. Damn them. Damn, damn, DAMN them.

Actually, this is my own highly humorous pseudocanadaphobia, developed during Facebook chats with Susie, who lives in Saskatoon, who watched Saskatoons on Saskatelly while using Saskatel for her Internet service.

Susie says quaint things like, “It’s almost 30 degrees up here” in mid-summer, forcing me to ask her what the hell that means in Fahrenheit.

Years ago, after ABC had a mini-series called Amerika, about the USSR take0ver of the USA, Saturday Night Live did a sketch called Kanada, in which a complacent American nation just let the Canucks waltz over the border and force us in the maple-iciousness and the metric system.

Well, I am all for the maple syrup, but even I am too old now to deal with a conversion to the metric system, although I still think it’s a good idea. In retrospect, that intensive metric education in seventh grade (known as Grade 7 in Canada) was a waste of time, because I couldn’t possibly explain a hectare to you without Wikipedia nearby. I give the cat ccs of insulin, I buy liter bottles of soda (that’s litres in Canada), I have kms on my speedometer, but that’s about it.

O Canada, if only you could take over the U.S., forcing health care and university educations down our throats. There’s nothing really awful about Canada, except the winters… and Alberta. For God’s sake, what is wrong with Alberta!? But otherwise, it’s not so bad. You just might like a Canadian takeover.

That’s take-oooo-ver in Canadian.

For some reason, I was overly fond of pennants, and my old room’s decor, before I slathered the walls with posters of all the new music artists I loved after graduating college, were these souvenir pennants, to show where we had gone on family vacations. I took all of the pennants down in a fit of “this is so uncool” pique in 1985, but I never tossed them out.

I am now tossing them out. Photographing them is much much easier. Except for a few vintage ones made of real felt, these are a styro-board mystery, and there’s no one  to donate them to. So out they will go.

I posted a gallery of them on Facebook, but the one vacation we too that was very different was right before I went to college. It was less glamorous than most of our vacations–we spent a week in a cabin on a lake in the 1000 Islands area of the St. Lawrence river, suspiciously close to Canada, where they lure you in with maple syrup and then brainwash you with bilinguality and the metric system. It was not completely primitive. A TV pulled in good enough reception for me to catch my daily fix of The Edge of Night. I mean, Gunther was on the loose. I couldn’t miss a minute.

I have maybe gone fishing three times in my life, and at least twice, I was the once who either caught the most, the biggest, or the only fish on the trip.

My father had polio when he was six and was left only able to walk using canes. But this didn’t stop him from doing anything he really wanted to do. Sportswise, he was limited to either gambling in Vegas or Atlantic City (and never losing that much, since he was an accountant) and swimming and fishing. As a kid, Grandma hired an off-duty lifeguard to carry Dad into the water and he would scare her to death by swimming out very fa, reducing Grandma to a frantic dot on the shore, waving her hands  and indicating he should head back in.

It’s easy to see why Dad liked swimming so much. The combination of gravity and legs robbed of their muscles made Dad less independent than others. So being able to swim on his own must’ve been very liberating. Gambling at a craps table gave him a sense of excitement. In the late 1940s, a car with hand controls was presented as a gift by Grandpa, because Dad spent many years enduring bad treatments and pointless operations and long separations from his parents and siblings while at the hospitals, waiting for these ill-conceived but well-meant surgeries. When a surgeon in 1995 asked me if I knew why there was a leg muscle in Dad’s abdomen, I knew exactly why.

Anyway, that week in 1981, we went out several times to go fishing. I know I caught at least one fish that fed us one evening–although I know very well that someone else took that fish off the hook. Late in the trip, only Dad and I went out in the small motorboat to go fishing.  We were armed with a depth map of the immediate area. This let me fully utilize my cartophilia (love of maps). We went to a quiet area around one of the 1000 islands, and we waited a bit. It was later in the day–not the time you are supposed to fish. You’re supposed to fish at first light, when I am usually heading to sleep these days.

At one point, there was a tug on the line. I thought it was a mistake at first, but it pulled again, and got stronger. I cannot remember which of us held the fishing pole, and which of us held the net, but a very fat, large fish soon emerged to the surface, fighting every inch of the way. Just as the net was being put under it, the fish broke the line and got free.

Oddly enough, this is probably the only truly exciting anticipatory moment my father and I ever shared. That, and rushing home from Baskin Robbins to see if Ronald Reagan was going to choose Gerald Ford as his running mate (this is the last time I watched a Republican National Convention, btw). We talked about that fish for quite some time. It is probably a better story that it got away, actually. In retrospect, I can see how exciting such an event would be, if you felt you couldn’t really do everything you ever wanted. But Dad pretty much did anything we needed him to do with us. He played baseball with my brother in the backyard, and tossed frisbees to us, and quite frankly, it was a pretty normal childhood.

So much emphasis is placed sometimes on what didn’t happen, instead of what did. And I sometimes wonder if Dad envied that fish, or hoped we would have caught it. I think if anyone valued the concept of independence, it was Dad.

The fishing poles are still in the basement, along with the tackle box. Bought once, used for a week, spending an eternity in the basement.

One day I went to high school, senior year, to find swastikas painted on the columns out front. We also were to find out that someone had scrawled “Hitler” and “Jews Rember” [sic] on the side of the school. As always, the haters are never very good spellers, are they.

Great Neck by 1981 was mostly Jewish, and you would think that the non-Jews in Great Neck were pretty much used to the population shift. The haters turned out to be our age, and non Jewish.

The incident ultimately led to what I called than an “all-day overreaction.” For one day in December, the entire school’s schedule was suspended for SHARE — stop hatred and respond effectively. I have the SHARE t-shirt to prove it, but not for long. It’s one of the many things, one bit of the Bookey Accumulata, that I am donating to the next charity that calls and offers to swing by and take a plastic garbage bag full of stuff for their ultimate placement.

I felt at the time it was an overreaction because I saw it in terms of Jews vs. non-Jews, and that with 75% or more of us in the school being Jewish, it was like preaching to the choir. Hindsight being what it is, I can see now that the point was to show all of us the irrationality of hatred and bias. The only program I remember vividly that day was a Chinese woman who worked at the United States Merchant Marine Academy. She told us about the stigma in general of being born female in a Chinese world that only valued boys. She told us how she was adopted, and therefore stigmatized further. She told us how the American-born Chinese and the China-born Chinese didn’t get along, and if you were born in a particular province in China, someone from another province or region was not too thrilled wtih you.

In a nutshell, everyone hates everyone else. It was astounding, coming back to Great Neck many years later, to hear that many old-timers are not happy about the Israeli- and Iranian-born Jews “taking over” and that among the Persian Jews, the Tehrani bunch doesn’t like the other non-Tehrani Persions. But this is nothing new. In Frankfurt on the Hudson, I read how the German-born Jews were at odds with the American Jews, and how in Germany, the Landjüden (the country Jews) were mocked by the urban Jews. And of course the yekkes didn’t like the Polish Jews all that much.

And over in France, most of the French hate Paris and many Parisians despise the Eiffel Tower. In Iraq, we have three groups that hate each other (Kurds, Sunni, and Shi’ites) forced into one mutual country.

So after all this time, what exactly is the secret behind the message on the t-shirt? How do you stop hatred and respond effectively? By trying to like other people anyway, and going to their restaurants? I dunno, but I am glad that I live in an area where we are all thrown together anyway, and I am glad to go to H-Mart and ask some questions and deal with the notion that no one behind the cash register understands a word I am saying, and going back week after week and NOT demanding that they learn English for my benefit. I am still going to say hello to my new orthodox neighbors, even if my being dressed appropriately for summer (i.e., wearing shorts) scandalizes them. Because I am not going to change how I am for their benefit either.

Oh, if only that t-shirt were magic and we could make some Lisa Simpson-style wishes and get world peace. But then Kang and Kodos would take over. Or Canada. I can just see the Mounties overtaking us and forcing the metric system down our throats once and for all. But aside from that, it might be nice.

Once upon a time, I was cool. I wasn’t convinced, but a few friends verified it for me independently.

I started late in a lot of things in life. I hadn’t a single tooth in my head until I was 13 months old, and consequently, I didn’t have braces until eighth grade, just in time to make junior high school even more miserable than it needed to be.

And so, my musical taste didn’t really grow and develop until that summer when I called in a request to WLIR for a particular Police song, and wound up hearing songs like A Flock of Seagulls’ “Telecommunications” and Haircut One Hundred’s “Fantastic Day.”

And I kept listenening, and suddenly, the boy without a stereo was buying cassettes and LPs at the used record stores around the college and around Great Neck. And for once, I wound up liking something that everyone else was likeing. Except for my friend Stu, who only seemed to like proven hits, and who would work the station buttons furiously on his car stereo whenever something he didn’t like, or didn’t want to like, came on. We heard more snippets than songs when we drove with Stu…

But for once I got to be… cool. I have proof of this, when my childhood friend Jeff, who hadn’t seen me for a few years, said to me in 1983, “When did you get cool?”

And when did I cease being cool? Probably when I turned into my mother. But my cool heydey was probably when I got to be an intern at WLIR, writing short news items for the morning DJs (Larry the Duck and Steve “The Pistol” Jones) from 6-10 am. Then, I spent another few hours working for the promotions department, sorting contest postcards by zipcodes and informing lucky winners that they could come to beautiful downtown Hempstead at their convenience to pick up the Gene Loves Jezebel album. Little known fact: DJ Malibu Sue also worked in promotions. I was out sick the day OMD came to visit the station, so she had them autograph their latest album for me. I am not coot enough to remember the name fo that album anymore though–it wasn’t Dazzle Ships or Junk Culture–but the next one.

Anyway, sometime after I got a “real job” (which I hated) and I called Julie, the other promotions person, to say hello, and she said, “Hey, do you want tickets to Simple Minds?” Of course I did. Who wouldn’t? And she also had tickets for the Cure. I forget who played first, but one Friday I was at Radio City seeing one band, and the very next night, I was at the other band’s concert. At some point, after facing extinction, Radio City suddenly looked at their own facade and realized, “Hey, we’re a music hall. We should have live music here.” And so, I went to two concerts in one weekend, for free, and Bob H., one of the WLIR volunteers in the Airline room, who took requests from listeners, was thrilled to see me again and introduced me to his sister, saying, “This is Seth. He’s the greatest guy it the world.”

It is nice that in the many years since, I have made a lot of friends who have made me feel that way also. I might not be up on all the scenes I should be, but it’s nice to have all of this music, and all of these memories, and to have met so many great people along the way.

As part of my clutter reduction and general overhaul, I am taking down a lot of the old posters in my room. I mean, I am 45 and my old bedroom looks like it could be used in a John Hughes film. Plus, some of the posters scared the hell out of my nephew (namely, the fluorescent Cure poster (In Between Days) and the creepy boy from U2’s New Year’s Day single). Here are the posters, still up, but coming down soon.

The coming out process is not one event, or a particularly focuses time, but a series of events that goes on throughout one’s gay lifetime. You think you’re out, and suddenly something pulls you back in, in some ways, into the closet. But, coming out to your parents is usually considered the biggie.

I came out to my parents in 1989, and it went pretty well, but you really feel acceptance when your parents come march in the New York City Gay and Lesbian Pride parade. My brother also came. I have to find the photo…

This item was something I carried in the parade–a “Boycott Colorado” banner, affixed to a hollow tube and accompanied by the appropriately gayly coloured ribbons.

I forget exactly why, without doing research, why we were boycotting Colorado–there was an Amendment for its state constitution that was basically going to codify LGBT folks as second-class citizens. It got defeated, and I have since been to Colorado twice, and visited its Capitol. But at the time, a lot of people were just not going to go to Colorado, for business or pleasure. I think some big conferences planned not to go to Denver.

More recently, I came out publicly as a gay member of the Special Libraries Association–in that I marched with the SLA in DC’s gay pride parade. And, a younger cousin of mine who recently came out (I had to find out on Facebook, btw) invited her parents along this year. Previously, only her brother had been invited along, so this was a big deal.

I am photographing a lot of the stuff that I am tossing out. It’s time to get rid of some of all this stuff that’s taken over my life. So, I will immortalize the items in photographs and stories instead.

You can find these stories under the subject “Rememberance of Things Tossed”–a/k/a ROTT.