october 4 lately i want everything, every star tied to a string, coffee tea and in between
the sweetest smile i ever seen a different song in every room, mercury, sun and moonAlthough the intent is to write more frequently anyway, this is a specially written note to welcome my friends and etc. (we all have etc. in our life; the hope is you know which you are) to reading this. Hello, friends and etc.! I haven't invited many people to my apartment, but apparently it's okay to invite them into my head, so roam around. I'm writing pretty much what I want to write at this point, and will generally use actual names unless requested otherwise. (Work being an exception to that there rule.) So if you wanna be a pseudonym, ask. Management will comply. I still haven't decided how I feel about putting a journal out for everyone and anyone to read, but so far it hasn't gotten me in trouble.
St. Bart's Took my first class on the history of Islam tonight at St. Bart's Church on 50th Street. Yes, I signed up for it before What Happened. Not sure why that's important, but clearly some people showed up who had done so Afterwards, and probably Because Of. They have a Center for Religious Inquiry, which has always been something of a hobby of mine (religion, not the center itself) and I was looking for some way to keep the gray matter occupied, but at a reasonable price. I'd already gone through the New York University Continuing Education catalogue, but everything I wanted to do was a) held on a day when I usually have to stay late at work b) pretty freakin' expensive. Then the one course I thought I could make, Ballroom Dancing, was cancelled! I took one class last Tuesday at the New School, called "Jazz Insights: Charlie Parker," to feed the Book That Would Not Finish, but it was $35 a pop and the Insights never apparently ended. Plus it was pretty hard core for me. Things I Learned In My Charlie Parker Class:
1) Jazz is still dominated by old white guys. Not players, just admirers. Not sure what this means.
2) "Blowing snakes" apparently means playing with bad reeds.
3) "Rice and beans" music was considered "safe" music for blacks to play in front of whites in the segregated south. (Chuck Parker would play his own stuff anyway. Wild man.)
4) Bird loved Jimmy Dorsey.
5) Bird preferred an approximately 3 minute song.
6) Coltrane, on the other hand, would go on for days and be very repetitious.
7) Coltrane "ran the changes a lot," a concept I'm still working on. D, whom I asked, is too busy to explain and instead sent back definitions for words I could have looked up myself. That man....
8) Bird really didn't do #7
9) Bird preferred looking for melody and rhythm.Now you can save yourself $35. Some of the guys in that "class," (more like a club) had been going for 20 years! That's a lot of dough. I'd rather go hear the stuff played.
As I'm typing this, my NPR station, sickly ever since What Happened since their transmitter was blown out and they had to move studios (they sent around surveys which essentially asked, "Can you hear us?" recently) made a terrible clicking sound. Ten minutes have gone by, and it's just silence. Bird is listening....
So The New School was too complicated and expensive and the classroom was pretty crappy. I got the St. Bart's CRI pamphlet in the mail and was confronted with all manner of religious classes I could take. Exploring Islam seemed a cool idea; I'd like to know what's going on in the minds of Palestinians, as well as others. Now, in light of What Happened, it's even more important. Tonight's class, though, was a little less ... structured than I thought it'd be: The white-bearded, nattily-dressed ontime Kuwaiti teaching the class gave a little instruction, but mostly took questions for two hours. The white-bearded, casually-dressed American in the row across from me seemed generally pissed off about Muslims and had a lot of confrontational questions. At one point we naturally veered more into politics than religion, and I suddenly realized that probably most of the intelligent New Yorkers in that room had not thought things through very much at all. White-bearded American Guy asked how come Muslims call America The Great Satan, and hate us so much. He called that "evil."
Hey, NPR just came back on!
So he called it evil. And White-Bearded Teacher Guy explained that it wasn't all Muslims, and that the concept came out of Iran primarily, when Khomeni was in power. He then carefully explained that it was the U.S. who helped boot a democratically-elected government out of Iran back in the 60s (I think it was 60s) and helped install -- and backed securely, the Shah, who "brutalized" his people for 20 years. Khomeni took over in 1979 and we all know what happened. I mean, come on, if a country with huge resources and money and people suddenly showed up and booted out our President, installed essentially a dictator and supported him for 20 years, and life went to hell, do you think we'd be pissed? Do you need to think twice? The point being that it is not -- as the politicians no doubt know in their deepest hearts -- in the U.S.'s "best interests" to have anything other than a Third World in the Third World. If they had a democratically elected government running things, they might prosper. And suddenly want some of the resources we, the (coff, coff) First World "need." Like, uh, oil. So it fascinates me that people have not thought this through at all. A friend from high school who I reconnected with when she and her husband moved to New York for a while so he could get his dental degree and I are in email contact, and she's intractable. I mean, where do you even start in getting people to think outside the frickin' box?
NPR's dead again.
Well, that was a detour, wasn't it.
I've been meaning to explain how much I can enjoy the walk home from my subway station, particularly at night. There's one dark stretch I'm not too into, but I've only been semi-harrassed once (a guy followed me a few yards and told me I looked very nice, so I told him through clenched teeth, "Thank you very much. Now please go away.") and the view can be lovely on almost full-moon nights. If you look up Roosevelt Avenue, the moon looks like the peephole into another world -- it was a yellow parchment color tonight. I have to smile at it. Then as you cross 37th and come up 76th and the buildings all turn historical and residential, there is a long line of flags from each building entrance; it's like you're in a parade. Parents and their children riding toy bikes and pushmobiles scoot up the incline. It was a warm night, and people were just out and about. Two members of the co-op board (including Jeannie, who I bought this apartment from) were strolling around out front. It was lovely. I will take pictures; this doesn't come near to describing it.
I have decided that I love sushi. This after years of turning my nose up at it. The stuff with the sliced rectangular egg on the top is best. Who says you have to like everything all at once?
yum!
