new posts next week. my brain is on vacation.

you're a day late, and a $2 metrocard short, gawker.

gawker scooped my clever ass. see #5 on their list.

strike is the new blog.

these transit workers are making me angry.

i am going to meet angela ruggiero today.

i really want the strike to end. i dont have the option of staying on the rock tonite, as i have to get home to feed my cat.

and i have to be home tomorrow morning to welcome time warner cable. needless to say, if i miss my appointment with those bastards tomorrow, i better be dead or in jail.

these transit workers are making me thirsty.

give em hell transit workers! bring a great city to its knees.

unfinished first morning transit strike diary.

7.30 am. wake up. check nytimes website. steeeeeerike! back to bed.

8 am. wake up for real. put on howard stern. it’s a ‘best of’ with sam kinnison. turn it off—sometimes i just can’t listen to recorded talk radio. the whole point (or one of the points) of talk radio is that it’s live. put on tv: fox five news. fox has been treating the strike like new years, what with their COUNTDOWN TO TRANSIT STRIKE. IF YOU MISS THIS STRIKE YOU BETTER BE DEAD, OR IN JAIL. AND IF YOU’RE IN JAIL, BREAK OUT!!!

for this year’s strike, the part of transport workers union head roger toussaint will be played by forest whittaker.










(btw, i just realized that i’ve completed the trifecta—ive been in the city for 9.11, the most recent blackout, and now the most recent transit strike. give that boy a kewpie doll!)

(btw part deux—do bloomberg’s chauffeur and personal assistant count towards the minimum passenger rule when he takes his limo to city hall? mayor mike’s like: ‘i want you to know, i am taking my manicure in my rolls royce today. so i am not violating the car pool statute.’ OR bloomberg’s in his mercedes, flying by the city limits right now, singing: ‘so long suckers!’)

8.22 am. write email to work. “not coming in. will work from home.” plan to be in email contact with colleagues.

8.32. rightly conclude that the most likely scenario is Bloomberg flying over the city in a hot air balloon, which burns hundred dollars bills and food stamps for fuel.


9.03. go to breakfast with danny at little Mexican lunch-counter place across the street. good, but the chorizo in my eggs was a little too spicy. and in the no good deed goes unpunished dept., danny might have had his miniature tropicana juice box stolen by one of the kids on premises when he got up from the counter to close the front door.

10.12. see clip of Bloomberg walking downtown to city hall, all bundled up. conclude that if you’re mayor, you have to forsake the limo no matter what on days such as this. otherwise they’ll destroy you. so i was wrong about that.

roger t. is all over the news. the dude's getting drunk with power. tomorrow he's gonna give all his press conferences wearing a leopard pelt and holding a scepter.

11.02. see clip of dude rollerblading across the brooklyn bridge. cuz if gabriel cant rollerblade to work, then the transit workers have truly won.

i'm bob dylan, bitch.

yesterday we (danny, chris, peter and i) watched no direction home, the scorsese-directed documentary about dylan's early years (i think it went up to around 1965, or whenever his motorcylce accident was). needless to say, as anything all about dylan would prolly be, it was amazing. i could go on about dylan for ages; for now i'll just say some things that struck me.
1. present-day dylan, at least in this film, is very lucid and intelligible. anyone who's ever heard him sing should rightly find this pretty shocking.
2. present-day dylan came off as modest and unassuming. i kept on waiting for him, in the way of trying to explain himself and his place in history, to just say, 'look, it's tough to explain to a regular mind why and how i did what i did. i just operate on a different plane, is all. i mean, i'm bob fucking dylan, for chrissakes!'

I. younger dylan was not immune to such exasperation. during one clip, a reporter asks him what is indeed a stupid question, and he responds with something like 'i don't know, man. why would you ask me that? would you ask the beatles that?'
II. of course, as explicated perfectly by the Palm L.O. Hedcatt treatise below, dylan was entitled to be fairly aloof and arrogant, b/c he is, after all, bob fucking dylan.

3. it was crazy how much hostility dylan suffered when he went electric--from folk music--with 'like a rolling stone' and all that. in these clips, when dylan would start playing his electric stuff at some packed venue, the boos would be so loud and fervent that i was impressed that, even as a consummate professional, he could keep playing his set without acknowledging them in some way. (he does admit that they bothered him, after the fact).
chris opined that this was not so different than what happens when a popular current band changes its sound and its fans get pissy about it, but this was different, in its level of hostility and sheer zealousness. people would act like dylan had morphed into nixon.
aside from leaping to the conclusion that anyone who booed a live, inagural verison of 'like a rolling stone' was a brain dead moron, i can only explain this loony treatment by theorizing that dylan was/is so transcendentally talented, that his fans felt that his gift belonged to everyone, like a message from god, and shouldn't have been toyed with according to his whims. ie, that they felt that by changing his beloved music he was violating a public trust. i remember reading, in michael jordan and the world he made, that when mj was contemplating retirement, phil jackson warned him that if he was still capable of playing, many people would resent him for keeping his gift from the public, as if it wasn't his to keep. these two scenarios seem parallel to me. (maybe b/c michael jordan is my measuring stick for almsot EVRYTHING.)
Hedcatt would consider a jordan-dylan comparison total heresy, and i can't tell if he's right or blind b/c he doesn't appreciate basketball. is music inherently more valuable than basketball? most people would say yes, but if millions of people can be truly inspired by an athlete, who's to say one way or the other?
i'd have to cast my vote for dylan, though, i must admit.



anyone who liked 'no direction home' should def. see don't look back. since it was made during the given time period, and therefore does not bear the smooth varnish of retrospective reflection, it offers a slightly better view of how hectic and crazy dylan's life was back then. on the other hand, by the same token, this prolly means that it lacks the more worldly perspective of 'no direction.'

Hedcatt's dylan treatise (highly classy):

Basically, the album "Bob Dylan" entitled him to be enigmatic, " The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" entitled him to be arrogant, " The Times They Are A-Changin' " entitled him to be a total dick, after " Another Side of Bob Dylan," specifically "Spanish Harlem Incident," I would have allowed him to rape one cancer victim. By the time " Blonde on Blonde" came out in 1966, I would be happy to let him eat fresh newborns as they came out of the womb. Add " Desire" and "Blood on the Tracks" and you've got a person, who, basically, could walk up to a reporter (or a fan), take a dump into his hand, insist that the person he was talking to eat the shit before continuing and agree to be immediately slain at the end of the conversation. That excludes albums unmentioned.

Hedcatt:

little plastic bags (& little chocolate donuts).

presently, if i had to come up with one object to symbolize the life that i--and as far as i can tell most of my friends--lead, it's little plastic bags. they're usually black. we all have roughly 300 of them, stuffed into each other infinitely--like some kind of plastic bag black hole--under our sinks.
why do we have so many little plastic bags? ("I logged a lot of miles training for that day. And I downed a lot of doughnuts.") because it is a symptom of our lifestyles as twenty-somethings in nyc. generally, we don't buy 'household groceries' that would require large plastic bags; we buy foods piecemeal, usually literally for the next meal. and we get these ad hoc foods from corner grocers, who put everything in, of course, little plastic bags (usually black).
what else do we buy a ton of? beer. six packs, cases, random deuce-deuces and even forties. and what does this beer come in? little plastic bags.
and with all the ad hoc food buying, and beer drinking, and purchasing of random goods like toiletries, and other small objects, the plastic bags start piling up.
i look at these little plastic bags as a symbol because the purchasing habits they stem from are wholly indicative of people who are at a transitional point in their lives. few things are long-term right now; most endeavors are day-to-day, week-to-week. we consume a thing quickly and move on to the next. we are feeling our "real lives" out, beginning to discern for ourselves the things we might want have permanent places in our lives. when we have a firmer handle on those things, we'll want to settle down, and we'll need bigger plastic bags for all the permanent acoutrements that surround you when you're settled. but for now, while we're on the road to committing to things, we need small bags for small rations which won't weigh us down while we're in motion. and beer accompanies us along the way.
little plastic bags. think about it. i have apparently.

go to hell, time warner cable.

December 15, 2005


Time Warner CableResearch Department41-61 Kissena BlvdFlushing, NY 11355Attn: Research Manager

To Whom It May Concern:

I write to you regarding a very disturbing experience I had with one of your service representatives over the phone yesterday, Wednesday, December 14.

First, I should explain why I called. I had an appointment to have cable installed at my new apartment; the technician was supposed to arrive between 8 AM and 12 PM (I made the appointment two weeks prior). When no one showed up by 12, I called Time Warner to make sure everything was still going forward. The service rep. I spoke to at that time told me that the technician had come at 9 AM, found no one home, "exhausted" all his means of contacting me, then left. I told the woman I was talking to that I had indeed been home the whole morning, and I did not hear the technician ring my buzzer. I asked her why the technician hadn't called me. This led the service rep. to double-check my phone number; it turns out that the number Time Warner had for me was off by one digit. Apparently there had been a miscommunication when I told it to whomever originally placed my order two weeks ago.

Frankly, I blame Time Warner for this miscommunication. I had called Time Warner Tuesday to confirm my Wednesday appointment, and when I gave the rep. my phone number, he could only find my old address in the system. When I told him my new address, and he looked it up that way, he found the appointment, and confirmed it was all set. But he never checked to see that the phone number was correct, despite the fact the phone number I gave him originally did not bring up the correct address. Not aware the number was wrong myself, I never thought to ask. I assumed that the system was bringing up my old address, and not my new one, because my cable had not been installed yet. It seems like the service rep. should have known better and double-checked the phone number with the new address, seeing as how the phone number I gave him only brought up my old address.

The service rep. on Wednesday told me the best she could do was reschedule a new appointment. Finding this unsatisfactory since I had already waited two weeks for the cable, and I had not neglected the appointment but had indeed been home, I asked to speak to a supervisor. I was put on hold, then I got cut off. Then I called back; this is when I had the horrible experience.

At around 1:05 PM, I called 718-358-0900 and was put on the line with a service rep. named “Rob.” I explained my situation, and that if Rob couldn’t get me a new appointment sooner than a totally new appointment, I wanted to speak to a supervisor. This is when things got ugly. Rob immediately became very rude. He told me that I couldn’t speak to a supervisor because a supervisor couldn’t “magically” schedule a new appointment. This made me fairly angry. It is my experience that if the customer wants to speak to a manager or supervisor, that is my right, and I should be transferred. I told Rob that I felt I deserved a quicker appointment, for the reasons I wrote above here. He told me that the technician “doesn’t appreciate going to a job when someone’s not home.” I found this highly insulting. Of course I had been home. If anything, it was a misunderstanding; I couldn’t fathom how “Rob” got the audacity to tell me I was lying about being home during the given time period. Not only had I been home waiting, but I had taken a morning off of work to do so. For Rob to accuse me of essentially trying to “pull one over” on Time Warner is utter lunacy.

The lunacy didn't stop there, though. When I went on to tell Rob about the mistake with my phone number, I told him that the original service rep. must have misheard me when I gave him my number. Unbelievably, Rob insisted to me that I must have given the wrong number, that the rep. didn't mishear me. Considering the number the rep. put down was ONE DIGIT off from the cell phone number I've had for four years, the same number I've given to Time Warner for the last four years for all my dealings with you, this was, again, very insulting. Essentially, Rob was claiming that either A) I don't know my own phone number or B) I had intentionally given the wrong number. What my motivation for not being home for my appointment and giving the wrong phone number could possibly be, I have no idea.

Throughout this whole conversation, I became increasingly irate with Rob. Aside from generally being very rude, he was telling me these things were my fault, and he kept refusing to transfer me to someone else, despite multiple requests. When I started really arguing with him because of this treatment, Rob would literally put me on hold, then get back on the phone two minutes later and say "Are you done?" Who was the service rep. here?! Me or him? In a culture where I've come to expect a "the customer is always right" attitude, Rob was treating me like a little child who didn't know right from wrong. I told him that I was glad the conversation was being recorded, and asked him to please tell me how I could identify him to the complaints department. He refused to tell me his last name (in his words, "What? Am I stupid? I'm not telling you my last name!"), or his extension, or anything of that sort.

I hung up on Rob and made new appointment for next Friday. I understand that even if it's more Time Warner's fault than mine that my original appointment got messed up (again, I never heard anyone ring my buzzer, and if the technician had the wrong phone number for me, Time Warner should have found that error when I confirmed the day before), it might simply be impossible to squeeze me in for a quicker appointment. But the way Rob treated me—claiming I hadn't been home, that I had given a false phone number, putting me on hold every time he didn't like where the conversation was going, and refusing to transfer me to someone else —was totally unforgivable. I've lived in NYC all my 26 years, and I have NEVER been so mistreated by a company rep.



I would very much like to speak to someone about this horrendous incident.

Yours,

Bean
917-XXX-XXXX (the only phone number I've had in the past 4 years)
XXX Adelphi St. Apt. 12A
Brooklyn, NY 11205