For my fans

I’d like to say that I’ve been feeling guilty not updating my blog or that I meant to post many times but never got round to it, etc. Truth is, I almost forgot about this damned thing until I started receiving flattering comments on my blog from unknown fans, such as: “enlarge your penis”, “cheapest place to buy viagra click here”, “hot Russian brides register now”. So I said to myself: Hell, there’s people out there who need you. You can’t let them down.

In the last three months life has been easier without the New Yorker. Our subscription ended in September. End of September, actually. The 28^th of September, to be precise. Was I counting? Yes. Every Monday my husband and I would ask each other: “Do you think this is our last issue?”. Until one Monday there was no New Yorker in our mailbox. Only the old, sweet, comforting junk mail. A new taste of freedom. Well, I shouldn’t exaggerate. I remember my granpa’s stories about his walking back home from the Russian front at the end of World War II. That’s freedom, and what do I know about it? But hey, after all, a New Yorker-free life is my coming home from the Russian front.

The Big Lebowsky Festival and the SS Burger Project were our requiem to the New Yorker. In short, the Big Lebowsky Fest was our entertainment highlight of the year. I liked it so much that if they write a story about it on the New Yorker I’ll buy it.

The SS Burger Project is about my husband and I sampling highly recommended burgers in the city. I named it SS because we’re radical in our choices, we control the means of production, and we reject criticism of our opinions. Just like Social Security.

Since we made a point of not eating meat more than once a week, we’ve tried out only 7 places in 2 months. Normally I would end my post here. But once I read that you have to give something back to your readers, like advice on how to do things, recommendations for places to visit, how to teach your squirrel some new tricks, etc. So here we go: Hey, Viagra people and Russian pimps, if you happen to be in the city, try the burger at Beacon, 56^th street, between 5^th and 6^th.

Learning skills that may come in handy in NYC

Westside Rifle & Pistol Range

Descending into chaos

From Barnes and Noble,

to the Strand,

to sidewalk rummaging.

Williamsburg, 09/07/2009

Wake up and smell the incense

I am the opposite of a hypochondriac, whatever that is. Same goes for my husband. We may be suffering from delusions of immortality, the thing is we ignore pains and symptoms until we literally can't function, we don’t bother visiting physicians at all, we can safely watch House and Grey’s Anatomy without shouting "I have that!", and happily embraced a “I must be ok 'cause my heart's still beating” philosophy.

Maybe this explains why I was dumbfounded when last Sunday in church my fellow parishioners refused to share the sign of peace. The woman in front of me, hands firmly anchored to the back of a bench, turned and spit out “Peace be with you” in such a way that if I were deaf I would have thought she told me to go to hell. When my husband stretched out his hand to the man behind him, the guy withdrew in disgust.

Later that day I learned that, over swine flu fears, various Archdioceses around the country invited parishioners to refrain from taking Holy Communion from the chalice and sharing the sign of peace to avoid close contact with others.

Three reasons why I think things are being blown out of proportion:

1) There have been 12 fatalities of swine flu in the US. Considering that there are over 300 million Americans, my fellow parishioner’s chance of catching the flu by shaking my hand is 0.04 in a million.

2) Dear fellow parishioner, are you a germ freak? If you live in the city, then sorry, you signed up for this filth. A germ-free New York is like, say, a noodle-free Shanghai. This city is a goulash of bacteria. You may avoid my hand at church, open the church door with elbows, punch the elevator buttons with knuckles, carry wet wipes to disinfect the bench, and in the end you take the subway, used by 7 million people daily. Seven million people eating, spitting, scratching, touching their feet, rubbing their noses, picking up bacteria and then leaving it on that handrail, on the change, in the gym… Yes, that reminds me, if you work out at Crunch Fitness in Midtown, then be aware that a spot check of health clubs revealed that your gym has fecal bacteria hanging around the water fountain.

Now my favorite: no one knows how many rats live in the city, but the estimates are anywhere from one to 10 rats per person, which in the best case scenario adds up to a quarter of a million ratti norvegici, i.e. the species living in the city that, incidentally, has been known to gnaw on concrete. In addition, they seem unlikely to pack up and move to Jersey any time soon. In a study recently conducted by the University of Tel Aviv, researchers developed mini models of city layouts to see what type of city a rat could easily navigate its way through. The finding: rats prefer New York City over New Orleans and Jerusalem.

The problem had gotten so bad over the last decades that in 2000 the city hosted the first Rat Summit, cosponsored by the Daily News and Columbia University. Mayor Giuliani was represented by Joseph J. Lhota, his top deputy mayor, who presided over a rat control task force of health and sanitation officials and whose office door at the City Hall had a sign reading ''The Rat Czar: Allied Command Headquarters.''

In an effort to keep up the good work, last year the health department created a rat map available on their website which is billed as “a one-stop resource website for New Yorkers' rat prevention needs." (Fascinating. Where would Abraham Marlow and his school of psychology place “New Yorkers' rat prevention needs” in the hierarchy of human needs?).

3) Last but not least, the sign of peace is a gesture intended to communicate that the peace of Christ extends to the unity of the church and of all humanity. It recalls the passage from Matthew 5:23-24 about being reconciled with your brother before presenting your offering at the altar. After all, aren’t you, my fellow parishioner, and I both going to church because we believe in a blue-eyed Jew who, on a hill near Rosh Pina, said love thy neighbor, and that bastard of your enemy too? And correct me if I’m wrong, but when the leper went to Jesus and said “If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean”, Jesus DID NOT ask “Wait a minute, did you wash your hands?”

Dreams of a three-day tourist visa

Bunburying: term introduced by Oscar Wilde in the play The Importance of Being Earnest. The art of inventing a sickly friend in need of assistance, as a clever means of dodging unwanted social engagements.

Our 10 days guests finally left. We’ve been gracious hosts, they had a good time, and everybody’s happy. As for me, I’m enjoying every single second of this Hegelian progression from bondage to freedom. Not that I don’t like company. But perhaps I've worked for the Israelis for too long; I’m not a big fan of territorial concessions.

The aggravating factor of our last guests’ stay is called: The Garrulous Wife. Her trivial ramblings accompanied us throughout our hosting experience, which under these devastating circumstances normally follows a pretty standard path, like this:

• day one is when your guests say thank you and please all the time, and ask permission to go to the bathroom;

• by day three every time I come home I have to introduce myself: “Hi my name is Silvia and I live here”;

• when on day four dinner starts with the ins and outs of her colitis, you realize you would have been better off in the hands of a bunch of Iranian or Chechen kidnappers. Next you stay up all night trying to sell your guests on Craiglist;

• day five is when you make an attempt to scare them by interrupting the conversation several times “Shhh… my mother’s dead uncle is telling me something” ;

• day six is when you actually agree with everything your mother’s dead uncle tells you;

• days seven to ten are just fine. You feel like you just had a lobotomy.

Garrulous Wife was put on a plane back home on Sunday at 6.30 p.m., after she told me about ten times I ‘aaaaaabsolutely’ have to go to her place for dinner this summer, and made me swear I will. I said yes. Anything to see her leave. As for this summer, I will have no choice but to commit the Bunbury.

Storage deluxe

The rule is: if you have to walk 10 blocks or more in high heels to get to that party, bring extra, more comfortable shoes with you so you can change shoes if necessary.

Problem: clutch is too small for your flats.

Solution: stick them into your husband's coat pockets.

The yawning kingdom and its subjects

How do I know that today in history Louis XIV of France moved his court to Versailles (1682)? That today is Sigmund Freud’s birthday (1856)? That a cat named Hawkeye scuba dived in a custom-made $20,000 wetsuit? Because lately, I’ve been finding myself sitting around work bored pretty often. A typical boring day at work is when an email from FreshDirect announcing they’ve added over 50 new cereals to their online inventory is a big thrill.

I know that the best thing to do under these circumstances is to tell your boss. I did. I asked for more work. I got something to do and chew on for a couple of weeks. And now I am again bored out of my mind.

With a simple Google search I discovered the vastness of the office boredom universe. A recent survey found that 14% of employees in the US are bored. There’s even a Boring Institute, founded in 1984 as a clearinghouse for information about boredom. What bothers me the most is that due to the stigma attached to acknowledging your infinite uselessness (or your exceptional time management skills, like in my case), I have to bore myself to death alone. Otherwise I could hang out with that 14% of bored people working in my building, we could establish bored employee clubhouses, perhaps have a dedicated trade union?

On the contrary, you must pretend that you’re very busy at work. However, a proficuous Internet time-suck session will show you a gazillion sites offering help to squash your boredom. Among the many pearls of wisdom I found, here are my favorite ideas to liven up your day:

• Reload your favorite news page every 5 seconds to make sure you are the first to read the newest article,
• Shout random numbers while someone is counting,
• Put your garbage can on your desk. Label it "IN."
• Put decaf in the coffeemaker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has gotten over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.
• Repeat the following conversation 10 times to the same person: "Do you hear that?" "What?" "Never mind, it's gone now."
• Walk sideways to the photocopier.

Overachievers get bored too. They should check out those sites that teach you how to take dull moments as a signal to start on some productive action and “advance towards your goals”. For example: tidy your desk, practice your PowerPoint techniques, learn your keyboard shortcuts, etc. Actually, I’d rather bang my head against the wall (calorie expenditure: 150 an hour, I learned in the course of my fourth Internet time-suck session of the day). “Socialize with colleagues” was the best piece of advice I found on these nerd websites. To make it more interesting, I would further elaborate on the socializing task: “start a surreal conversation with the dumbest colleague you have.” Like the one I had the other day with my Asian colleague who happens to start every sentence with “oh”:

-oh, did you have a good week-end?

-absolutely, my sister is in town

- oh, she’s moving to New York?

- no, she’s on a field trip with her law school

-oh, she got a resident visa?

-for what? She’s on a field trip with her school and she’s gonna go back to Italy in 2 weeks

-oh, she can’t get a resident visa?

-she doesn’t need one, she doesn’t want one, she is viii-siii-tiiing.

-oh, so she can’t live here, what a pity.

-yes, what a pity. Sorry, I gotta go… I’ve got a lot of work today.

Travel through life, travel through Israel

I received a beautiful and enlightening email from a college classmate I hadn’t talk to since 1997. It’s the best thing that happened to me on Facebook. The guy, let’s call him Mike, says that over the years he came to see himself as having serious flaws in his character, he made a point of addressing these issues and he’s become a better person. This is not the average reconnect letter you receive on Facebook. The average letter is from someone who tells you about how many houses he owns, how much he travels, how successful he’s become and how busy he is, except five minutes later you find out he’s just become a fan of emmenthal cheese. Most of the time catching up with friends becomes nothing but an account and collection of individually unimportant, material things. Mike’s letter made me realize how we travel through life asleep to what really is important, spending all our time and energy on the small stuff and what it means to really strive to live with meaningful purpose.

Moreover in his letter Mike apologized to me for all that happened in Israel in 1997. That summer we volunteered on a kibbutz. We were not friends. It’s just that it was my first time in Israel, in the middle of a terror campaign, I wanted a travelmate and Mike was the only guy I knew in my super-conservative slightly anti-semitic university who was crazy enough to accept my invitation.

Our trip was like living in a Problem Child movie, without the fun. A real troublemaker, Mike managed to turn pretty much every ordinary day into a mess. The worst horror story is when Mike went missing in Jerusalem.

We went to Jerusalem for a long week-end. The fist night we walked around the Old City, had a frugal meal in the Arab quarter where our hostel was located, and booked a trip to Masada. We had separate plans the following day but had agreed to meet for dinner. He didn’t show up. The day of the Masada tour I waited in vain at the reception desk. By 2 pm, descending Masada, I started worrying. I pressed the panic button when I got back to the hostel and there was still no sign of Mike. My first thoughts had been:

- How to cope with the first body identification of my life;

- how to inform the parents whom, to make things worst, were told by Mike he was going “somewhere in Spain”.

Around 7 I was at the police station. Somewhat to my amazement I wasn’t asked the usual questions “when is the last time you saw him, what was he wearing, etc…”. Instead the officer wanted to know if he was my boyfriend.

-No, I said.

-So why do you care?

At that point I was about to lose it. That was the epiphany of the old Jewish joke that goes why do Jews always answer a question with a question, why not? Is there anything more frustrating that being denied the possibility to file a missing person report on the ground of not-your-boyfriend-why-do-you-care reasons? After I provided a thoroughly ethical and torah-inspired explanation of why I cared, he shot his second bullet: “do you have a picture of him?”. When I said no, although we took pictures in the last few days but they’re still on film, he announced “without a photo I can’t do anything”. I remember trying to broadcast hate-rays to incinerate him as I stood there staring at him and thinking: “Where the hell do you think I can find an open photography shop in Jerusalem on Shabbat, you a--hole?”. All of a sudden everything became clear: it was Shabbat and that cop had no intention to move his ass for the following 24 hours.

In the Christian quarter, the only place where an open shop could possibly be found on a Friday evening, I had my film developed at Photo Christo (no joke). Back at the police station the cop called my kibbutz. Nobody picked up the phone. It’s Shabbat, he said with a shrug. I hadn’t notice, I replied. I decided not to leave the picture with them and try my luck elsewhere. Like in the movies, I pathetically walked around the bazaar and the narrow streets of the arab quarter showing Mike’s picture to vendors.

I went back to the hostel where everyone had been put on high alert, meaning that every time I stepped in, the reception desk guy and his friends, slouched around a white plastic table sipping Wissotzky tea and playing cards, would turn to me and ask “Found anything?”

I have this dim, blurred memory of a woman lingering around the place, I don’t know in what capacity. A weird, skinny and tall foreign woman in her fifties, totally out of context in a youth hostel, dressed in a long flowery gown. I was ready to swear she was affected by the Jerusalem Syndrome, although I’ve never seen a real case (i.e. the phenomenon whereby a person who seems previously balanced and devoid of any signs of psychopathology becomes psychotic after arriving in Jerusalem, Wikipedia.). In her attempt to help, we embarked on a surreal conversation, starting with her asking in what kibbutz we were working. Maoz Chaim, I said. She had never heard of it. Nevertheless, “It’s a moshav”, she claimed. No, it’s a kibbutz, I corrected her. It’s a moshav, she insisted. It’s a kibbutz, for god’s sake, I live there, I know. And by the way, what impact does the collective organization of labor and decision-making in the State of Israel have on my search? Our kafkaesque exchange went on for a few minutes. It was like playing ping pong in a psych ward. Anyway, it’s a kibbutz.

At the end of Shabbat the volunteers coordinator at Maoz Chaim, a 90 year old German Holocaust survivor who by the end of our stay hated us more than she hated the Nazis, received a phone call that almost gave her a heart attack: “Ms Finkelstein, this is the Jerusalem police. It’s about one of your volunteers.” Mike was at the kibbutz. He had left the morning after our arrival because of sudden intestinal problems (gee… didn’t he read the health warning section of his lonely planet before ordering a GREEN SALAD in the Arab quarter?). He rushed to the bus station early in the morning where he happened to have another attack, left his backpack on a bench and run to the bathroom. Reemerging from the bathroom he found two armed soldiers waiting for him for a little… two hour “Q&A session” about his unattended luggage.

I never told Mike the whole story. When I saw him back at the kibbutz he was laughing his head off over my going to the police, and I wanted to deny him any further satisfaction. As far as I remember I gave him a dirty look (or the finger?) and walked away in rage.

I have to thank Mike for his totally unexpected, touching letter and his life lesson. And because now that the last traces of anger have been buried I can finally laugh my head off too.

Are we dead yet?

With all the media overhyping the swine flu and officials around the world, including WHO, reacting to the pandemic scare with dire warnings, it is no surprise that family and friends are calling us, freaking out and worrying about our health.

Let me reassure everyone that we are just fine. NYFD black-plague carts are being hauled through the streets piled high with dead bodies, corpses are being stacked up on Madison Avenue very efficiently, the Waldorf-Astoria hotel is being used as an isolation hospital, all Hispanics found on streets get systematically beaten up, disinfectants are being sprayed every 2 hours, and we’ve been distributed gas masks to wear in case we need to break the curfew and leave the house for urgent matters like, say, you have tickets to a Broadway show you bought back in unsuspected times. On top of this, pork ribs are selling cheap these days.

The irony is that the day before the wave of panic started I bought pork chops. It’s funny because I don’t buy meat very often. We have meat once a week with a preference for white meat, and according to my online grocery records the last time I bought pork was a year ago, on Thursday, April 3, 2008: Boneless Center Cut Pork Loin Chop, 1.0”, Standard, Hand-cut, Standard Pack.

The single most adventurous, thrilling experience of the year: having balsamic vinegar and Dijon mustard glazed barbecue pork chops in the middle of a swine flu pandemic outbreak. Take that, WHO!

Art consists of limitation, and the most beautiful part of every picture is the frame

A few months ago an ad on the Internet caught my attention. The New Museum was searching for women volunteers to take part in a contemporary art installation. The living statues were required to go to the museum a.m., take a sleeping pill, get into a bed installed in the exhibition space, and sleep as many consecutive hours as possible.

It turned out the sleeping installation was part of the exhibition “Generation younger than Jesus”, showcasing 50 international artists born after 1976, that we saw last week. First off, the reason why we can still sleep at night is that we were wise enough to visit the exhibit on their free day. Otherwise those 30 dollars would have haunted me for the rest of my life, together with the following (and I quote a review) distasteful, borderline offensive, and cliché in its romanticism of martyred youth (close quote) bullshit:

• A new banana skin is placed anywhere in the exhibition space every day by one museum employee after he’s eaten the banana. Of course we were relieved to see that there's a security guard always hovering nearby to protect the masterpiece. Basically this banana skin is more guarded than the Monna Lisa;
  

• Three platforms displaying personal items from three Chinese guys approached on the street by the artist who offered to buy everything on them for $500;

• Clips of skateboard catastrophes to “rethink the concept of revolution”;

• A Czech artist asked her depression-crippled grandmother to draw from memory items on inventory at a home supply store the woman worked at in Brno for 30 years;

  
  

• The museum’s fourth-floor gallery watcher, who has to wear a white tracksuit, stained with embroidered blood;

• A black steel staircase that only minutes ago I found out to be an art installation. At the Museum I simply thought it was an emergency fire escape.

The event is drawing enthusiastic reviews such as “With nearly all the selections, one gets the sense that these youthful artists are themselves becoming parents. They’re bunch of Geppetos displaying little Pinocchios for the first time”, and “These young artists show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the sublime; life, not art, has become so real that it’s almost unreal.”

While attempting to convince myself that looking at nothing is good for you, I started listening to other people’s conversation because, yes, I wanted to know if I was the only one in the room where the sublime had not taken residency. Man telling his friend: “What really strikes me is… the freedom these artists have”. Right, the freedom to add a bunch more crap to the world.

In the end I don’t blame the so-called artists, though. I think of Maurizio Cattellan (see quote below), or the young painter who issues an invitation to his new exhibition that reads “I've got a bunch of crap showing at The Chicago Art Department's”. Most don’t take themselves seriously. Critics take them seriously. Museum goers take them seriously.

Or perhaps the problem is that I’m turning one year older than Jesus. Or 50 years younger than Geppetto.

“Io non mi prendo sul serio, questa è la mia forma di difesa. Ho sempre odiato lavorare. Nella mia vita ho fatto di tutto: la donna delle pulizie, il postino, il becchino, il giardiniere, il cuoco, il contabile, il
disoccupato, perfino il donatore di sperma, a Verona. Ora mi inseguono tutti e rimango stupefatto, perché io sono sempre lo stesso idiota di prima"

Maurizio Cattellan, il cui Papa di cera abbattuto da un meteorite e’ stato venduto per due miliardi.

The Deep South

Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi

April 3-13, 2009

The end of an era

Just finished watching the series finale of Six Feet Under.

It's been an awesome 4 year journey.

God bless Hollywood.