The Gates

In the park with my daughter Olivia, February 26, 2005.

All photos by me, except for the one of me and Liv which was snapped by a stranger.

It Makes No Sense

Thoughts on this ‘n’ that…

The Gates

Photo by Bluejake

I didn’t get The Gates at first, but I wanted to, I did. Then came the announcement that they’ll only be up for 16 days. And it clicked in.

It’s not so much straight art, it’s a moment in time, a finite “thing” to be experienced before it’s gone. In that respect, it’s like joy itself: surprising, revelatory, transporting, and then gone. What does art do, if not take the power of emotions, bottle them up, present them with beauty and unleash them back on the world? The form may take some getting used to (okay, they are the color of parking cones), but in their way Christo and Jeanne-Claude have made a piece of true art.

What do they mean? As Jeanne-Claude said, “Nothing. They just are.” In other words, they don’t have to make sense.

Joy rarely does.

The Anti-Gates

Speaking of making no sense… did anyone catch Andrea Peyser’s column about The Gates? (Does anybody really read past the sports section of the Post?)Amazing. Perfection. A piece of art in its own right… the art of self-revelation.

"Chuckles" Peyser

As a review, it’s a complete failure, because halfway through it you forget what she’s writing about and only focus on what kind of person could write something so dark, gloomy, scolding, negative, off-putting, unenthusiastic, downbeat and depressing.

Life with this Debbie Downer must be just a non-stop yukkfest. Can you imagine?

“Honey, what do you want for dinner?”

“Aww, who cares? It’s just gonna suck anyway. I’ve never really had food that I’ve enjoyed. Of course, I’ve never really enjoyed anything, so what the hell.”

“We’ve got pasta.”

“Oh, puh-leese! It’s friggin’ macaroni! In Queens, we called it macaroni, and that’s what it is! Save your postmodern, yuppie, pretentious, revisionist, too-good-for-the-bougeois rephrasing for your steel-and-glass cased Manhattan-venued office.”

“We’ve also got crabcakes.”

I mean, I’ve met nuns who look like Shecky Greene next to this lady.

My daughter’s a big Harry Potter fan, and her some of her favorite characters are the Dementors… horrific creatures who can make you feel like you’ll never be cheerful again, and whose kiss can suck out your soul. I can’t imagine I’d have much soul left if ol’ Andrea planted one on me. (“It’s just a kiss, for crissakes! It doesn’t matter, nobody kisses the way they used to anymore, now it’s all slobber and tongue. Fireworks? Puh-lese.”)

I’ve heard a lot of critiques of The Gates, some love it, some object to the obstruction of the landscape, but most get it. Some don’t get it. But some don’t want to get it because confronts them with what they don’t understand and aren’t willing to learn.

Sense and the City

You’ll see a Jets Stadium at 34^th and 11^th just before you see a Second Avenue Subway and just after you see all those new shiny buildings downtown.

In other words, never.

Now, I think the Jets Stadium makes no sense (you got $3 million for a stadium and more millions for the Olympics but my daughter’s teacher has to take a summer job? Puh-lese!). But it is sad that it’s become so difficult to do good, big projects in New York. It’s how a city grows, how it expands, becomes stronger. But lately it seems that if we’re either wasting money on some boondoggle that you can’t even tailgate at or nickel-and-diming to death something we need (like another subway on the East Side).

It makes no sense.

Life is bad, life is good...

My daughter went to her first shiva yesterday. It was for a classmate. A seven-year-old girl. A beautiful little girl A beautiful little girl in my daughter’s second-grade class who was killed in a freak accident last weekend. An artist, an actress, a life full of potential… gone, just like that.

My daughter drew a picture of all the things she loved: acting, art, dancing, the Yankees, her school. A unique combination different from every other person on the earth.

It’s amazing the footprint a child leaves in the world after such a short time. A cubby in a classroom full of art. History reports and math worksheets tacked to the wall. A stack of photographs of her with friends. Videos of performances in plays. Reminders that none of us, even the lonely, live in a vacuum. And that every life really is a miracle.

It’s been said that there are two kinds of people in this world, those without kids and those with kids. I’m not sure that’s totally true, but I do know that I didn’t realize how profound and unspeakable love could be until I felt the love I have for my daughter. And to have to look straight at the unspeakable horror, the ultimate nightmare, of having that love broken has left me frightened and sad and a little angry. Angry at the fates, angry at the sheer nonsensical nature of this life.

And a little angry that now my daughter and her friends have to learn that life makes no sense.

Contrast that with my father, 67 years young, who this week was declared cancer free. Ten weeks of treatment and the esophageal cancer is gone. Cured. Passed like a bad cold (granted, with a much tougher therapy). He gets to experience that sublime moment of “I’m not gonna die, I’m gonna live!” He called me to tell me that very message. The tone of his voice forced me to picture my ex-court officer father, -- 6 foot 200 pounds (maybe less now) of pink Irish rock – skipping down the street like Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters after the doctor has told him he’s not going to die.

See the resemblence?

Life is good, life is bad, but either way, life makes no frigging sense.

The Shanley Papers

A toenail drops off the body of Organized Crime: Ex-Street Priest Paul Shanley (left), Ex-Button Man Joe Valachi

As I write this, Paul Shanley was just convicted by a Boston jury of child rape. Big deal.

From this evening’s Times online: “Paul R. Shanley, the defrocked priest whose name figured prominently in the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston three years ago, was convicted on two counts of child rape and two counts of indecent assault and battery today, more than two decades after the victim said the molestation first occurred… Mr. Shanley, who many said had reached out to wayward teenagers as a so-called street priest, is only the second priest to be convicted of sexual abuse…”

Platitudes of faith in the judicial system and in the Roman Catholic Church’s ability to clean its own house; there will also be ample mention of Shanley’s support for gay men being accepted into the church, mostly with a “look, they’re all the same” bent.

Beautiful.

If you believe that, my friends, then you’re likely to believe the other twaddle that comes out of the mouths of the Princes of the Church who just want people to swallow what they’re putting out in the hope that this all goes away.

It won’t go away. Not as long as they keep lying while claiming a moral monopoly on the truth.

Convicting Paul Shanley will no more clean the Church of child rapists any more than the testimony of Joe Valachi made the Mafia go away.

Don’t remember ol’ Joe? Joe Valachi was a low-level Mafia soldier, a “button man” who was the first to break the vow of omerta or silence. He told the whole story: capos, bosses, soldiers, the Five Families, the Commission, the rackets, the made guys, the whole thing. He described his job as “the boss says to push a button on a guy, and I pus the button. I’m a button guy.”

Prosecutors, the press, the public at large, all knew that this would mean the end of the Mafia. The mob’s victims knew better. “You wanna kill a snake,” said one famously, “you cut off its head. Otherwise you’re just wasting your time.”

Why did the Mob flourish? Because prosecutors weren’t that interested in stopping it. The FBI was chasing Communists. I mean, they didn’t have to work that hard, it wasn’t like the Mob guys were some organizational geniuses or masters of stealth. They were in fact pretty clumsy. It had to do with not going after them.

They would occasionally catch and trot out a guy like Joe Valachi, who told their tales, horrified some city fathers, but in the end they didn’t amount to much. The guys on the bottom rarely do.

The mob bosses actually liked Joe Valachi. He became something of a smokescreen. When people were talking about Joe, they weren’t talking about them. They made a half-assed Mob movie about his tales, The Valachi Papers. Everybody went, "Oooh, gangsters!" And the Mob still stayed in business. Nothing changed.

When the Princes of the Church are talking about abortion, or electing George W. Bush, they’re really not talking about their own fetid house.

When they talk about their “moral authority” to speak out, they are really saying “don’t bother us with that again.”

Moral authority takes courage.

Ergo, they have no moral authority.

When will a prosecutor put these men under oath?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Paul Shanley’s in jail, but if the goal is to clean the Church’s house of the evil, then they’re just wasting their time.

Tomorrow, every bishop, archbishop, cardinal should offer his immediate resignation, then answer these questions under oath:

• Bishop, did you ever know of a case of a priest abusing a child within your diocese?
• Did you ever fail to report a pedophile who reported to you to authorities?
• Did you ever attempt to cover up those crimes?
• Do you know of anyone who is covering up for these priests today?
• Do you know of any accused pedophiles still performing as priests under your command?

Only then will the snake be dead.

Snow Makes the Mayor

The ghost of John Lindsay settles over Mike Bloomberg like a soft, two-foot deep snowfall.

New York had its first big snowstorm of the season last weekend. The rituals of snowstorms in this city fascinate me: people sledding and skiing on streets, the lakes that form on sidewalk corners, the peace that engulfs the noisy streets, and most of all, how fast the mayor gets on television to say, “The snowplows are on the streets!!! The streets will be cleared!!!”

The first vivid snowstorm memory of my childhood was the time we were stranded at my grandmother’s house in the Bronx for a week because our forest green VW bug was buried in a snowdrift on Esplanade and the streets weren’t plowed.

The first elected official in my memory was NYC Mayor John Lindsay. Because that was the guy my father and grandfather spent a week cursing out because those streets weren’t plowed.

And if you want to know why everyone in New York makes a four-alarm media alert for every small and mid-range snowstorm that breaches the city limits, here’s the story. For once, in the sixties, I can say, I was there. One month shy of my sixth birthday, I lived one of the great truths of Gotham politics. Forget the crime rate, the schools, the clean streets, the economy, forget it all...

Snow makes the Mayor.

Hey, is this our car? Bronx street, Blizzard of '69

Saturday morning, February 8, 1969. My mom and dad and my brother Chris and I pile into the Bug and head for Grandma and Grandpa’s, 1953 Tomlinson Ave, Morris Park, the Bronx. Going to G&G’s was always a big deal, you never knew what present they had waiting or what spare change they would pump into your hand. So Chris, who was 4, and I were already excited.

Light snow was predicted. My dad could deal. The city thought it could, too.

By the end of the weekend, 25 inches had fallen on the city. Fallen might not be the right word. Dumped in one fell swoop might be more like it.

Manhattan loved John Lindsay. He had a patrician grace and an air of elegance. “He is fresh and everyone else is tired,” wrote the great Murray Kempton about Lindsay when he first ran for mayor in 1965. There were race riots in Newark and a dozen other cities, but New York stayed quiet. Many credited Lindsay’s ability to reach across the races. He lured the best and the brightest into public service.

But he was the bane of the white working class (in other words, my parents and grandparents). They concluded that John Lindsay didn’t give a damn about them. He may have saved the city from race riots. But could he get the streets plowed?

The snow started on Saturday, when we were at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s. Grandma and Mom made hot chocolate. We watched the snow fall. On Sunday it was still snowing, we went out and made a snowman. On Monday it was still snowing a little, Chris and I had a snowball fight in Grandpa’s driveway.

And the snowplows never came. The VW Bug was going nowhere. And so were we.

My mother called the school to say we were snowed in and wouldn’t be getting there for a couple of days.

I thought all snowstorms are like this.

My father and grandfather, who both had to walk to work, sat at the dining room table and cursed John Lindsay until there was no breath left in them. Then they went to sleep, so they could gather their energies to curse him out all over again the next day.

I thought all politicians were like this.

It was Wednesday before the plows moved. Manhattan was moving just fine. Manhattan had subways. The boroughs didn’t have subways. So it was just another case of John Lindsay screwing the boros over the downtown crowd.

Was it Lindsay’s fault that people were trapped for days? Probably not. For one thing, the weather forecast was for light snow. Wrong. So everyone was caught off guard. It was also a very strange storm. Not only did the city get more snow than it expected, it got it real fast. If 25 inches fell, it seemed like 20 fell in one two-hour period Saturday night. So the snowplows themselves were snowed in. The city hired 10,000 shovelers to shovel out the plows. As the Times said, “Schools were closed, drivers were stranded in cars and travelers were marooned at airports. New Yorkers were ready to be dug out, but the city wasn’t ready to dig.”

The sanitation guys claimed that the streets weren’t cleared, they couldn’t get to work. Sure, they didn’t live in Manhattan. The Sanitation Commissioner swore for years that the workers dawdled in their response to make the mayor look bad. If they did, it worked.

Lindsay had walked the streets of Harlem and Bed-Stuy when the police were sure riots would break out. He stood eye-to-eye, without bodyguards, on hot nights, with some very angry men and calmed them down. And the city didn’t burn. He has walked streets piled with trash when the sani guys went on strike. So he decided to walk through Ozone Park, Queens, and face it down. The people in Ozone Park were just angry that he found a way to drive there when they couldn’t move their cars. They thought he had his nerve walking around their block. He tried to talk. They turned their backs. He tried to listen. They screamed. He got back in his black mayoral limo and drove back to Manhattan. They yelled him right off the block.

The Lindsay charm fails to move Ozone Park.

He couldn’t win, and that’s a bad thing for a politician.

We’ve had five mayors since Lindsay left in 1973. And believe me, every one – from Abe Beame and Ed Koch and Dave Dinkins to Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg -knows one basic truth. If there’s snow in the forecast, you better have the machines on the street. And to this day, my friends in the sani department tell me, Ozone Park gets plowed first.

John Lindsay actually won re-election later that year of 1969. It was the wackiest election not held in Florida. And in one of his campaign ads, he looked right into the camera and admitted he screwed up the reaction to the snowstorm. The people in New York (enough of them, anyway) bought it. But some never forgot. Lindsay died in 2000. I called my dad that day and said, “Guess what?” His first reaction? “That sonofabitch, there better not be any blizzards in Heaven or God’s going nowhere.”

Mayor Bloomberg and his sani commishioner
reassure Ozone Park.

Embrace Freedom!

Just don’t get all in my face about it...

Bottom of the ninth... two on... two out...

“Say you’re looking for some peace and love
Be the leader of a big ol’ band
You want to save humanity
But it’s people that you just can’t stand…”
--- John Lennon

I was morbidly curious about what GWB would say given an opportunity to make a speech with no political stakes for the first time in his life, and with the entire nation (not just the 50.9% who voted for him) and the ghosts of history watching avidly.

He went to the plate swinging a big bat, men on base, the crowd screaming, a tough pitcher on the mound. He dug in, confident, in control of the moment, took a big hack… and hit a single. He kept the inning going, kept the energy high, did his job, and then made room for the next guy. There was a thought that maybe he’d do something that history would remember.

But not today. There was the standard prattle about liberty, about opportunity, yeah yeah yeah, but the overriding note was freedom as the power of salvation… the engine of America’s greatness.

No argument there, Mr. President.

But with all due respect, you’re full of crap.

Booing fans are escorted from the stadium.

Digging into the batter’s box, the President talked trash about Freedom being the light of the world. Obviously that light didn’t stretch over to Fourth Street in DC, where Bush’s fellow citizens were being gassed and beaten for exercising their freedom. The freedom they are supposed to have by birthright. The freedom that allows them to criticize the conduct of the government without fear of imprisonment.

There will be trumped-up charges: disturbing the peace, verbal assault, whatever, that will be tossed out by a cool-headed judge as soon as they are presented to him. But he point will have been made. The freedom-free perimeter will not have been penetrated. Those inside will be of one like mind, or they will not be allowed inside. Check your thoughts at the door. And the President will talk about freedom encased in a “frozen zone” where none exists.

This says more about the man at the plate than it does about those yelling from the dugout. Bush at times seems to really believe what he says about America. The people who vote for him think he really believes it. But the fact of the matter is this: He likes his freedom, easily gained through family fortune and powerful friends, but doesn’t really give a damn about yours and mine. He’s just not thinking about it. My father used to say, “Your rights end at my nose.” Fair enough. But Bush’s nose is getting longer and longer.

Mike Bloomberg said during the convention, “You can have freedom, but maybe not as much as you want.” Who gets to decide how much I want? How much free speech do I want? As the great Jimmy Breslin said, “As much as my voice can stand.”

As he stands at the plate, Bush wants everyone to cheer. They would cheer if he hit a home run, brought everyone – everyone­- in to score. Not just 50.9%. Because they 50.1% will still boo. And he can have the boo-ers escorted from the building, and the stadium will just be half-full. And the boo-ers will still come back, booing him as he punches his weak base hit, booing him as he stands on first, waving his hat and taking a bow to half the park.

The Shout-Out

Wrong Barbarians. Photo by Dixie Sheridan

The Blatant Self-Promotion Department Checks In

The Broadway World Interview

So you want to play with the big boys, huh? When Adrienne Onofri approached me to answer some questions about where politica theater goes from here, on this dark day in our nation's history, I thought this will be fun (and it was), she's probably talking to lots of folks from last year's Fringe Festival, since every third piece was a Bush-basher, or she's talking to some of the good folks from THAW. Then I pop online and I see Tony Kushner (Tony F-ing Kushner!) and Edward Albee (Edward Albee, for chrissakes!) and... well, me!

Acts of Contrition. Photo by Jessica Ochs

It's a bit of a rush, to say the least. And then I got to the part where Mr. Kushner defends our "preaching to the choir" and I remembered that I told Ms. Onofri that our community not only preaches to the choir but we fall in love with our own voices (sort of like this blog). I'm thinking, "Okay, here's where I get into it with Tony F-ing Kushner." But Adrienne saved me... I think.

I had the pleasure of meeting Tony Kushner and hearing him speak at a Drama League lunch last year. I was fully prepared not to like him, but he's just too nice a guy and too real to dislike. Disagree with, maybe. But I was happy that I was completely mistaken. He's a good guy.

Albee, however, is just what you think... an asshole.

The Beautiful Void

Full Moon Over Manhattan, photo by TN

No entries last week, was finishing a big project and was therefore underground. Now I sit in “the beautiful void,” connected to the working soul, but without anything big to work on. Knowing another idea will come and maybe flesh out into another project, but not aggressively looking for anything. Basking in the temporary glow of accomplishment. For the moment, anyway, I have nothing to prove.

Now will come the endless cycles of reading, rereading, staging, critique, restaging, rereading, tweaking, editing… but that will start tomorrow. Today it is time for a nice cigar and good, fresh walk around town.

In the meantime, there are worse ways to start off a year than reading the new Pete Hamill book and listening to the new U2 album (more on the later in this week’s shout-out). In the meantime, here’s my suggestion: dedicate the year to something that will make you feel better and follow-through on it every day, even if it’s only for a few minutes.

See you next week.

The Wednesday Shout-Out

Buttcrack Carny Discovers Its Tele-Kitchen

"In almost every urban city around the world, space is extremely limited. The result is often tight quarters and a restaurant culture. In 2004 New York City decided that smoking in bars and restaurants should be illegal. Smokers rediscovered something very important and very convenient… their own kitchens."

Check out Episode One of Pinch here.

Just notice that that room where the refrigerator is also houses other appliances? Finally figure out that you can do something else with that "big machine that makes fire" other than light a cigarette off it? Congratulations... and now there's a cooking show for you, too.

The uber-hip rep company at Buttcrack Carny (Jodi Chamberlain, Chris Lee, Tim Kulp, Susannah Nolan, Miguel Erb, etc.) that was responsible for last year's The Stork Stalker have obviously decided that since everyone seems to have a cooking show these days, we denizens of restaurant culture might as well have one, too... though one with a slightly twisted outlook. Pinch is kind of like The French Chef if Julia was on acid (and had a three-day growth).

Happy cooking.

Ten Wishes for New York City in 2005

1. That we will be bold enough to proclaim the truth about our evil government, and humble enough to allow people who don’t agree to listen and be convinced.
2. That the so-called Christian movement sees that, as NY-er Norman Mailer once said, “When you think you are doing your holiest work is in fact when you are in the service of the Devil.”
   
   
   
3. That Eliot Spitzer launches a major investigation of the Catholic Church by deposing every bishop he can find and asking, under oath, whether or not he ever covered for a pedophile or knew someone who did, thus putting the lie to the "moral authority" bishops command over the ballot box.
4. That everyone find some time this year to read Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities before deciding whether or not the Jets Stadium or the Brooklyn Nets are good ideas.
And that everyone sees that throwing people out of their homes or businesses is never a good idea.
5. That people take a hard look at people like Monsignor Alan Paca, accused pedophile, and Bernie Kerik, accused phony, and wonder just who is and was on the payroll of Giuliani Partners.
6. That we stop referring to Rudy Giuliani as a “hero” and start referring to him as a “shill.”
7. That people see that the real “heroes” of the eleventh are the folks in the next apartment or the next cube or the next block who helped you (and you them) through that day and the days after.
8. That Cardinal Egan shows some true heroism and courage and proclaims loudly that homosexuality is neither a disease nor a choice but the way God made some people, then welcomes them into his church.
   
9. That Randy Johnson can go back to showing New England why they are and always will be second-rate citizens in the baseball universe.
   
10. That despite losing the pennant and losing the election and losing the ear of the nation, we will find a way to persevere and regain all three over the next fifty-two weeks.

Happy New Year, all. You’ll be hearing a lot more from this space in the coming year. (No, that’s not a threat).
(top photo by me)

WE'RE A DOWNTOWN FAVE!
WRONG BARBARIANS ONLINE
Hello, Friends... head over to the Fringe Preview on New York Theater Experience to see yours truly on the list of "Fringe Faves," then head over the WRONG BARBARIANS preview for an interview with yours truly!

TICKETS ON SALE NOW!!!
Tickets for the 2004 NY INTERNATIONAL FRINGE FESTIVAL are ON SALE NOW!
As a matter of fact... they went on sale Friday. Tickets to WRONG BARBARIANS are selling out fast (the Cherry Lane Theatre is only 60 seats) and once they are gone, they are gone! So head over the http://www.fringenyc.org/ now so you're not shut out!

Still need more convincing? We'll be on The Barry Z Show on August 9, and we'll also be appearing on Janet Coleman's show on WBAI next week as well. Stay tuned!

COMING THIS SUMMER!

SEE YOU IN THE SUMMER!!!
Timothy Nolan returns to the NY Fringe Festival
WRONG BARBARIANS to premiere in August

Just in time for those farty-smelling Republicans to descend on our beloved city, I'm proud to blow my own horn and say that WRONG BARBARIANS will be part of this year's New York International Fringe Festival. The play actually first showed its face during last year's Thaw Out for Peace sponsored by Theaters Against War. In fact, you can read my curtain speech for that event here.

"I let the fear f*** me and now I'm pregnant with the fear..." Intrigued? Come see the play! We will probably let RNC people in for free, just to see what their arrogance has wrought by coming to NYC ('course, it's not like they can't afford to come, is it?) The Fringe Festival runs from August 13th through August 29th. Details to follow!

For more info on our past Fringe successes, click here.





Me... Summer '01