Pearl Jam in Los Angeles

Positive Management 101 (Found in Brooklyn)

Found this just this morning on our street. Think the dispatcher has some issues with his driver?



I've always known that writing in red ink and underlining words multiples times for emphasis has been an effective management technique.

New York, New York! It's My Kind of Town.....

Ah, the Big Apple! Sunrise was spectacular this morning as I rode my bike into Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge. Once at work, I changed and ran downstairs for coffee. The Daily News greeted me:



Perfect. Just in time for peak tourist season! Good reason to ride the bike. Further examination indicated that the targeted tunnels were not train tunnels but vehicular ones. At least the subways are safer than they've ever been. Right? Any comments, New York Post?



Ah, makes you kinda miss the old New York of the 70s and 80s, don't it?

Fear not, humble reader. I have lived here nine years and have ridden the subway daily. The most violence I have ever witnessed on the train has been some grade A rush hour jostling. Statistically speaking, mass transit is much safer than driving to work.

Have a great weekend!

Battle Royale: Rock v. Pop

War was silently declared last night when the kids' favorite show So You Think You Can Dance? went up against season 2 of Rock Star. This year, it's Rock Star: Supernova, a "new" band made up of Tommy "I Used to be the Drummer for Motley Crue" Lee, Jason "I was the bassist for Metallica after Cliff Burton died, but they eventually kicked me out" Newstead, and Gilby "I was a guitarist in Guns n' Roses but no one remembers me because Slash is so much better than me" Clarke.

Sure, it's not INXS, or Van Halen (like many people dreamed and hoped for) but it's a show that guarantees you'll hear real rock and roll, not American Idol-ized rock, for the next 9-10 weeks. Very seldom do you get to hear Nirvana performed on network TV.

The best performance in our opinion was Patrice Pike:


Tune in...it's good rockin' fun!

What Else I Got for My Birthday

It's called an iHome, and it's a clock radio that docks and recharges my BilliPod. I can pick a new song every morning to rouse me from my slumber (July 5 - "Mean Mr. Mustard" by the Beatles; July 6 - "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" by Guns 'n Roses ).

It's nice getting old. People feel bad for you and buy you nice gifts to take your mind off the fact that you're almost 40.

Sigh.

Amusing Blogs o' the Day

Rebellious Wednesday One-Liners

Summer student: I don't know where and I don't know what, but I am getting something pierced.

--NYU Dorm, East Village


Girl: I just want to throw a rock at it and watch all the windows shatter.

--Sculpture for Living, Astor Place

Ok, those are from the latest site that makes me chuckle:

It's called "Overheard in New York" and is basically submission-based. People in the Big Apple send in snippets of overheard conversation and they post it. Like last weekend I heard a woman on her cell phone saying, "Well, if he isn't gonna treat me like a lady, then I ain't gonna treat him like a man!" Interesting and amusing, but it may not have made the cut for this site.

DISCLAIMER: Not for the faint of heart. Don't read this when the kids are around. Or if you have a strict moral compass. The stuff that is overheard is often crude, laced with profanity, and sexually-themed. I was going to skip this referral altogether, but there are some gems there worth the effort of wading through the refuse.

Keep in mind too, that this site has no way of verifying if these quotes are real. You just have to take a leap of faith.

If you find this offensive, go to this blog instead. It's called "Stuff on My Cat" and features cute pictures of cats with stuff on them. Hardly offensive.

Happy Independence Day!

Happy 4th all!

Quiet day here in Brooklyn...I was up early on a burn-off-all-the-birthday-calories bike ride. I took a two-hour, twenty-five mile trek that found me going through Bath Beach, out to Coney Island, past Keyspan Park, past Nathan's, where the TV crews were already setting up for the annual hot dog eating contest. I rode a bit on the boardwalk, past the aquarium where I could hear sea lions barking, and then over to Ocean Parkway, turning North all the way to Prospect Park. I did a quick loop of the park, marvelling at all the people setting up for barbeques so early in the morning. Headed back south through Sunset Park, into Bay Ridge and down to the 68th Street Pier, awash wish fishermen and what looked like people already positioning themselves for fireworks later tonight. I took the Belt greenway up under the Verrazano and then back through Bath Beach to arrive home.

Above is my favorite Keith Haring painting, "American Flag". I now have 364 days until I turn 40. I will leave you with images of one of my birthday gifts, from Shayna. I am thinking of doing some "Cool Stuff I Got For My Birthday" posts in the days to come.



The shirt came from my favorite store, Century 21, and is from the British maker Ringspun. I also got an awesome Jim Morrison/Doors Ringspun long sleeve shirt for father's day a couple weeks back.

Anyway, digressions aside, have a super 4th o' July. Be safe and happy!

39

Thirty-Nine

Hitchcock took thirty-nine steps.
I have stepped thirty-nine years.
Aside from not sounding forty,
thirty-nine has a nice ring,
thirteen times three
almost twenty (nineteen and a half)
times two.

Nineteen years since I wrote
twenty is plenty
but twenty was not nearly enough
to know what I was talking about.

The three and the nine
tease one another
three times three

A dozen past Jim and Jimi and Janis and Brian and Kurt
Brian died the day I turned two
Jim waited until the day I turned four

Three plus Nine
is Twelve
One plus Two
is Three
plus Three
plus Three
is Nine.

It could be worse. I could be forty.
Forty is harsh and sounds like a snort.
I could be with Jim and Brian
but I am not.
I am in the realm of thirty-nine
and content to reside here
until forty comes chortling along
next
year.

The Things They Carried

Our book club's latest offering was Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. This made the list of the New York Times' honorable mention of

What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

and was certainly worth a mention. It is an extremely powerful and evocative book. A quick read too, I started it on a Monday and finished it the following afternoon.

I usually post a whole bunch of pictures of the different covers of the books, but I found a page that already did so here. Check it out, if interested.

Like many of O'Brien's novels, this one is a Vietnam story. There are certain segements that are particularly haunting and wonderfully written.

One of the brilliant aspects of this book is the blurring of fact and fiction, and how it is often never clear as to what is being told. Here's a small excerpt:

In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.”

True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.

For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can’t believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside.

It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.

O'Brien's narrator is Tim O'Brien. But this is a work of fiction. But those who are writers know that the shadows of truths lurk behind the stories that writers tell. Another excerpt:

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Jimmy Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed 10 ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.

This blurring of fact and fiction adds power and strength to the tales O'Brien tells. It is a truly haunting work that one carries with themselves long after the back cover is closed.

Shuffling Thru Hump Day

It's been a while since I've played with the BilliPod on BillyBlog. I am actually challenging the limits of the device, pushing close to the 60 GB capacity, hovering around the 5 GB remaining threshold. That's 11,808 tracks, in case you were wondering. I have taken to pulling stuff off of it, whole Pearl Jam concerts archived to make space for more musical junk.

Here's a random 5-shot from the shuffle...please feel free to share your shuffle with us all.

1) "Big Pimpin'/Papercut" by Linkin Park and Jay-Z, from Collision Course. Highly recommended collaboration of hard rock/hip-hop styles. Their live set in last Summer's Live 8 was one of the highlights for me.

2) "Hypnotize" by Audioslave. Just mentioned yesterday. Basically the wedding of Rage Against the Machine and Soundgarden.

3) "Home Sweet Home" by Mötley Crüe. Originally from their Theater of Pain LP, this song was the Power Ballad that simultaneously launched them into super-MTV-mega-stardom and convinced diehard fans that they had jumped the shark.

I don't know what's up with Shuffle today, but it is making me look like an individual with rather singular musical interests, but that's the will of the BilliPod. Keeping with the theme, then, is



4) "Bed of Roses" by Bon Jovi, from the greatest hits compilation Cross Road. Of course, no one in my home will complain about an excuse to put up a photo of JBJ.

And finally....will the theme continue, or will we go in an entirely new genre?

5) "Luna" by Smashing Pumpkins from their album Siamese Dream.

Not really an interesting list, and quite consistent. And look, Ma, no Pearl Jam!

Top 25 Albums #24

Sorry there has been so much time between #25 and #24, but putting up samples is quite involved for me. I don't know how the hardcore music bloggers do it. I've given up (temporarily) on posting the mp3s, so this will be mp3-less.

Anyway, #24 on my list of "Top 25 Albums," which is not a "best of" list, but a list of my favorite records, based on how influential they were to me at the time I first heard them, is an eponymous album from the early 1990s.

On my 26th birthday, in 1993, we had a little party at our apartment in Saugus, CA, just north of Los Angeles.

My friend Dan Harrington, with whom I had worked in the entertainment industry (most notably on a show for Fox called "Down the Shore"), arrived with his girlfriend and handed me a small gift. It was a CD-shaped gift, so it was obviously a CD. I opened it and this is what I saw:



Wow. I was familiar with the photograph, that of Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk who self-immolated in a busy Saigon intersection on June 16, 1963 in protest of the Catholic Diem regime's refusal, among other things, to grant Buddhists the same rights as Catholics. The photographer, Malcolm W. Browne, is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer and this shot, although not a protest of the war, was wedded to the Vietnam era. You can read Browne's report of the incident here.

Anyway, as memory serves me, I must have had a blank look on my face, as Dan asked, "You haven't heard of these guys?" Rage Against the Machine. Great Name, I thought. Great Cover. I hadn't heard of them. How I had managed to live in L.A. and not have heard of them is beyond me. The album had been released in November of the preceding year.

I cracked the case and put the disc in. I was blown away. From the opening notes, a ferocious bass intro to the song "Bombtrack," by Tim Commerford, I was hooked. Lacking the mp3 link, you can get the feel for the song from the video:





Rage, or RATM, were pioneers of the metal-rap fusion genre, which is so hard to pigeonhole to begin with. The thrash band Anthrax really were the first pioneers of melding the two genres together, in their collaboration with rap legends Public Enemy. But Rage were commercially viable, without the metal stigma that held Anthrax back from widespread commercial success.

RATM was the first commercial album that fused the genres together for an entire record, and they added a hard-edged political commentary. The band name itself has been attributed to Karl Marx. And the song titles reflect an anger that not only blisters with words, but with the chords and riffs of Tom Morello's guitar-playing.
Just check out the ferocity of "Bullet in the Head":



From start to finish, the album is relentless in its energy and anger. Rolling Stone listed it as #368 on its top 500 greatest albums ever. So how does it rank #24 on my list? Just in its placement within my life, I guess.

I had given up on Metal in the late '80s and been seduced by the early 90's grunge scene, listening to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. But this new band had a harder edge that spoke to my metal roots. I liked the politics as well.

Rage broke up in 2000, in what I can best interpret as an Axl Rose-like split. Zack De la Rocha, the outspoken lead singer has gone off and done his own thing, very little of which has been released for public consumption. The rest of the band, including Tom Morello, a phenomenal guitarist, joined up with Chris Cornell and created a little band known as Audioslave.

You can buy the album here.

A BLUE BRICK AND LOST PAIN

There’s a phantom swooping on the plane
and bouillabaisse clogging the open drain.
I dream of traveling to Spain
and feasting on Bilbao’s holy pain.

Rushdie dangles from a cross:
A rearview mirror reflecting loss
like reruns of Danza’s Who’s the Boss?
I craft a noose from dental floss.

The salamander’s feet are slick
and yet they manage to grip and stick
to glass and metal, plaster, brick,
The thought alone just makes me sick.

All these thoughts and rhymes are true,
You’re wondering what they mean, aren’t you?
If I confessed, what would you do?
When they threatened, Salman knew
the salamander’s eyes were blue.
The phantom haunts me through and through.
All these rhymes and thoughts were true.

Ideas

In an attempt to break out of the recent trend of no-post days, I am going to try a poem based on the word of the day, in lieu of a gap. I will more often than not, fail completely, but failure is always more interesting than not trying.

IDEAS

Ideas like ossicles
vibrate in my ears.

Ideas like icicles
drip
from the eaves of my memory.

Ideas like bicycles
pedal across my
brainpan.

Ideas like tricycles
ring-ring like bells
and flutter
like ribbons in the breeze.

Ideas like triglycerides
course through
my veins
humming with energy.

Ideas like hieroglyphics
play out
in patterns on the wall
undecipherable.

Ideas are fictitious,
written and unspoken,
oral and real,
puddling in the recesses
of
a dark, unstable
reality.

© 2006, William Dickenson Cohen

Want lunch with Warren Buffett?

Frustration, Friday Cycling, and the Ten Commandments

Adding music links to BillyBlog has become exceptionally tedious, and for this I apologize. I have been hovering for months over a post about the band Wolfmother, from Australia, and #24 on my top 25 Album list. In this age of mp3 blogs, it seems woefully inadequate to discuss music without providing samples to hear. It can be done, obviously, as some of the music blogs listed on the right are testament to, but it is a frustrating task for me. Patience, please.

I refused to believe the weather reports that predicted rain in NYC this morning and prepped last night for a ride to work. I'm glad I did, as it was muggy but beautiful this morning on the trek from Bay Ridge into Midtown. I almost got doored near City Hall, just after coming off the bridge, but managed to brake and swerve rather skillfully, if I may say so, to avoid disaster. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of being "doored," here's an illustration:


The difference this morning for me was that there was a line of cars in traffic, so I didn't have the luxury of swerving as freely as this guy probably did. I also had less notice. But no harm, just a few extra squirts of adrenaline.

Several years ago, while riding in the Tour de Bronx (yes, that's what they call it), I was riding with a group and the person to my right wasn't paying attention and he rode smack into the back of a parked car at about 15 m.p.h. His bike flew out from under him and hit me, but I managed to continue without incident.

I'll end this rather eclectic post with a video from Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert is pure genius, even moreso when illustrating hypocrisy, displayed this time by U.S. Representative Lynn Westmoreland (GA):



Have a great weekend!

Veiled Conceit

Here's how my brain works. This Klimt painting sells for a record $135 million to "cosmetics magnate" Ronald S. Lauder.

This reminds me of a young lady that was a year behind me at Occidental College, Vara Lauder. This reminds me that Melanie mentioned in the last few months that Vara got married, I think, and she saw the announcement in the "Vows" column of the Sunday New York Times. I google and there's the column with accompanying video. Sort of. Actually, I have stumbled upon a hilarious blog called "Veiled Conceit," that picks apart the Vows section of each Sunday Times.
Cruel and mean-spirited? Perhaps. Then again, it is a public record and the "Vows" columns can sometimes be saturated with pretentiousness. Marriage is an institution and institutions often are fertile targets for mockery.

Veiled Conceit can be viewed here.

Random Last Day of Spring Rambles

BillyBlog killed my journal.

I love music blogs. It started with VH1 Best Week Ever and their daily blog. Each weekday, they list five or six links to the "Best Music Ever," and inspection of blogs dedicated to discussing music and providing mp3 files turns up some regulars. Right now, my favorite is "I am Fuel, You Are Friends" which refers to lyrics of, of course, a Pearl Jam song, "Leash." It's not a PJ-blog however. In fact, Heather, who operates the blog, has put up, in the last week, "Powers" by Blackalicious, covers of Van Halen, Mason Jennings, R.E.M.'s "You Are the Everything," songs from the vastly underrated George Clooney-J.Lo film "Out of Sight," songs from the Victoria Williams album tribute record, "Sweet Relief," and threw in a link to a great article on Slate by David Eggers about soccer/football in America. I strongly recommend her blog to all, especially if you are looking for some good music.

You can get lost in the mp3 blogosphere by hopping through the links on each blogger's sidebar, clicking on interesting-sounding blog names and seeing if you unearth any goldmines. Through "I am Fuel" I found a post on the funk-ska band Fishbone, a Cohen family fave --- it was Jolee and Shayna's first concert, in Central Park, when they were itty-bitty-kiddies. From there I found another treasure trove, a huge downloadable archive of concerts for free, including said Fishbone, the Grateful Dead, Jack Johnson, Ween, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Billy Bragg, The Mountain Goats, etc etc, all legal downloadable live music. Get started here.

Slow news day for the tabloids in NYC....the lavish spending habits of Giants' defenseman Michael Strahan and his wife, currently in divorce court, make the headlines for both the Post and the Daily News.

For those of you outside of NYC, enjoy the weather. It is hotter than a _______ in ________. Fill in your own regional metaphor and put it in my comments section. Hotter than a snake's ass in a wagon rut just doesn't cut it in the streets of Manhattan.

And kudos to Colin for solving the riddle of yesterday's post, although Tony e-mailed me with the same solution earlier.

Go Cyclones!

How'd They Do This?

I'm sure there's a logical mathematical explanation here. But I haven't figured it out yet. Let me know if you have any luck with it.

Also, in an unrelated matter, check out this blog. It's always flattering when a complete stranger likes your work enough to post it on their own site.

Happy Father's Day to All

Dear Ol' Dad in October 1962, 4 1/2 years before I was brought forth into this world. Leon is now known in our family circles as "The Ancient One, Blesséd be He." He's really only freshly 68. Dear Old Dad is retired, sort of. An Angeleno since 1982, he acts, performing on stage in the L.A. area, as well as in an occasional commericals and industrial films. Here's a head shot so you can see how gracefully he's aged:

Dad is a grand old father, blesséd be he. When he and my mom split in 1970, he saw me move with her to Hawai'i. As a father now, I can see how that must have been tough for him, to see his only child whisked off across the continent and then across an ocean (he was in Albany then). So he was a Summer Dad. He remarried once, moved to Illinois, and then remarried again to my step-mom Donna (Happy Birthday!), who with Dad, brought forth two more Cohens, in the form of a younger brother and sister.

When I went to college in the mid-1980's, 'twas not cheap, raising two young 'uns and helping pay the tuition. Pops not only worked full-time for Cal State Dominguez Hills as an administrator, but he also served a stint working for the L.A. Times for several years, rising at 2 AM to drive a paper route in the crazy, hilly maze known as Rancho Palos Verdes. That was a huge sacrifice that I have not thanked him enough for, one of those stories about fathers doing for their children what they themselves cannot fathom doing for their own kids.

Dad has always been a great supporter of me and my poetry. One of my first published poems, "Anger," a poem about the 1992 riots in L.A., received many more readings thanks to his posting it up at work, where other educators passed it along to others as well (an act that prompted me to copyright my first batch of poems).

He has made an occasional appearance in my work and survived a multiple bypass operation last year. We saw him last December/January in NYC, to celebrate his and Donna's 25th wedding anniversary.

And although I do not see him as often as other adult children see their fathers, I know I am in his thoughts and he in mine, even though our schedules and the time difference does not promote regular bi-coastal communication.

So, as we celebrate father's day today, here's to my Dear Old Dad, the Ancient One.

Blesséd be he.

Father, You Are Ancient

Ok, this is a self-promotional post, but it's Father's Day weekend, so I think I deserve it.

One of my crowning achievements at this stage in my life, aside from two beautiful daughters who will no doubt make me miserable when they are teenagers, is the fact that I had a run in the 1990s of publishing my poetry in multiple small magazines across this great land of ours.

The nicest and most lasting of these items is the publication of one of my poems in an anthology entitled Essential Love: Poems About Mothers and Fathers, Daughters and Sons.

Click on the title to purchase it from Amazon.com, if you so desire.

Not only is one of my poems in this anthology, but it is in some nice company. My poem, "Father, You Are Ancient," is just a few pages from the great poet Galway Kinnell's phenomenal and much-anthologized piece, "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps," which you can read here or you can listen to Kinnell reading here.

There are also works by Sharon Olds, Lyn Lifshin, Maxine Kumin, Li-Young Lee, and Naomi Shihab Nye.

In fact, in November 2002, when Shihab Nye was at a Barnes & Noble event with several other writers who were nominated for National Book Awards that year, I asked her to sign my copy of Essential Love.

She said she would, and when I mentioned to her that one of my own poems was in the book, she asked which one. When I told her, her eyes opened wide and she gushed, "Oh, I love that poem! I use it in my classes all the time." She signed the page on which her poem "What is Supposed to Happen" appeared and inscribed: "for Bill Cohen, in honor of your work - Thank you for your voice and kindness!" That was one of my most proud moments as a poet, and it took me a little bit of time to recover my power of speech.

So, in honor of Father's Day, I present to you one of my very best, written for my eldest daughter Jolee, when she was less than a year old. I would recommend buying the anthology through Amazon. It's a nice little book, and you can get it cheap through some of their used book subsidiaries.

FATHER, YOU ARE ANCIENT for Jolee

Father, you are ancient,
grinning your goofy smile.
One hundred and sixteen times
my age, you are today; yes,
I cannot help but smile
when you make those funny,
complicated sounds.
I wave my tiny arms
and feel your joy
splashing onto me,
your warm breath on my cheeks
and your gentle caress
making my bright eyes brighter.

Father, you are ancient.
I will forget this moment,
only because I cannot help it,
but please, retell it to me
when I am able to remember,
so that I can be reminded
that you loved me always,
Father, ancient
and never more alive.

© 2000, Grayson Books
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Enjoy Dad's Day everyone!