Blizzard of 2010

Never Mind The Bulloks.

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

This rhetorical question fomented in San Francisco by Sex Pistols front-man Johnny Rotten at the end of the Sex Pistols American tour in 1978 has always been a mystery to me like Fermat's Enigma was to math geeks.

This question he addressed the audience, then threw the microphone down with a thud, exited the stage, and the band. No band after has come remotely close to capturing such menace in two-minute songs.

The tour itself was an exercise in agitation as the four British punks played the Deep South. When asked why they didn't play New York Johnny Rotten replied it would have been too easy, it would have been like preaching to the converted. Playing behind chicken wire, audiences threatened the band and threw bottles intending harm. At one show a bloodied Sid Vicious cracked his base on someone's head. This was hatred as an emulsifier, clashing British youth culture and the American South for a brief period of time. But why?

Music, since the 1960s and 70s, was seen as a change agent. Along with drugs it would help change society in some incomprehensible way. Punk itself was a reaction to the bloated prog-rock of the 70s that reigned at the time like some crowned prince, itself a child of the 60s. Johnny Rotten just called bullshit on the whole notion of peace & love, and the power of music to change society. Maybe he knew better cause he fucking tried.

ScreenCatch

Just going to post this online.

ScreenCatch is a smart phone application. It is a hyper localized social networking device with a twitter like scrolling feed with bump it zone (wi-fi) info exchange. The problem with facebook is it isn't immediate enough. You have to use your computer. This is more automatic, more apple like it its user friendly easy consumption function.

It has a public and private mode. You don't have to broadcast to the public if you don't want to- also a passive broadcast which means you can just receive public info from the people around you.

The phone acts as a storage device so there is no need to incorporate photos or contacts into the app.

You can set the broadcast/receiver strength to a finite geographical proximity. (Ex. 1 mile). It lets you know who is around.

When turned on the app will scroll with other people's very brief profile (pic and status - some message) kind of like a social GPS that lets you know what's going on. Kind of works off of the flash mob idea- or an electric flock of users who are able to share information very quickly.

Advertisers can be bought on board and then two versions can be offered. Basic (with ads) Premium (no adds for a monthly fee of course $2).

Got the marketing down to... this is the next big thing in social networking! ScreenCatch.

Ok you can laugh at me now.

Photos of A Scene From 'The Sitter' Being Shot In Astoria.

Amused To Death- The Battle for the sole of America's Entertainment.

Entertainment has taken over our lives. It along with technological progress are the pixy dust of the American Experience. The internet ate the music industry for breakfast, the movie industry for lunch, and for dinner Television is on the menu. In the next 5 years a few factors are going to change how you watch television forever.

These are the factors that will push people to cancel their cable contract, of course there will be resistance as those who prefer convenience over a cheaper experience- both in terms of money and satisfaction.

The first is the recent Fox Network/Cablevision battle over retransmission rights. When the government made broadcast stations switch from an analog to a digital signal, to free up transmission space for cell phones and other communication technologies, it also unwittingly set up this confrontation. Every station has to broadcast a public signal that is free. However new technology (HDTV) does not come equipped with digital rabbit ears, like the old analog television sets used to. You have to purchase these in order to pick up the digital signal, and in some cases they don't work very well. Recently, Fox Networks renegotiated retransmission rights with Cablevision for both their cable and broadcast station shows- since most people view these shows through cable. Stated simply retransmission rights are an annual fee that television stations charge cable carries for their content. ABC pulled the plug on Cablevision right before the Oscars last March, while Fox blacked out Sunday Football and the early games of the 2010 World Series. In the end Cablevision agreed to pay Fox Networks more than double, $170 million, for retransmission rights. Content is king.

This of course will be passed down to cable consumers in cable rate hikes down the road. How many cable providers are out there and when will those contracts expire? If only cable consumers knew at the time the Fox signal was broadcast for free, with the use of those digital rabbit ears, they could have seen their sports without being held hostage by these corporate babies. Why didn't Cablevision see this as an opportunity to run some well timed informative commercials I don't know.

Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, has recently purchased a majority stake in NBC Universal from GE. This is the other side of the coin, cable provider gobbles up content provider. Right now content providers and cable companies are engaged in a TRON like game, trying to wall off one another in an order to achieve dominance. The only problem is the internet and the concept of net neutrality.

Net neutrality... is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates no restrictions by Internet service providers and governments on content, sites, platforms, the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and the modes of communication.

The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.

                             - wikipedia entry on net neutrality

Right now many internet advocates are drawing attention to sites like facebook that act as walled gardens whose integrity threaten the open source spirit of the internet. But net neutrality poses a big problem for television.

Google TV, Apple TV, Netflix OH MY! In five years Cablevison's revenue streams will be decreasing. It will have to compete with Verizon as an internet provider, while Fox Networks and NBC Universal will become content providers to a greater degree. The real battle is going to happen between Google TV and Netflix, while Apple TV will exist on the margins mush like premium cable today.


During peak hours, 20% of America's broadband is streaming Netflix movies. That figure will likely increase as more people add this feature to their PS3s, Xboxs, Wiis, and computers. The problem with Netflix is that a lot of their content is old and you'll have to wait longer for new releases. A game changer would be a deal between one of these internet companies with a content provider like ABC or CBS to stream network feeds. Who knows when this will happen, if at all. And if it does what type of experience would it be. For the moment Netflix isn't really in the game yet, at least not to the extent it can be, and Google specializes in eating more established internet companies for lunch.

The web changed the way we experienced music and movies first. How it will affect television is a completely different question. Television viewing is much different from other media consumption. Show lineups and news have an immediacy that can't be replicated at the present moment online. And it is still a shared experience. How will atomizing the viewer experience affect viewership? I am sure these questions will be resolved profitably by someone else.

I have tried to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest 3 times. I know it is an important book and believe it says something of cultural value. It's just too big, complex, and post-modern of a novel for me right now. No matter the form of change what will take place we will be watching just like the characters in his book, sadly. On an endless loop of entertainment.

Fashionably Unemployed.

Frictional, Structural, Cyclical Unemployment. What does this have to do with me?

Kind of caught up in all three of these right now.

Frictional- waiting for three years hoping to land a teaching gig.

Cyclical- the economy sucks right now.

Structural- even though my position (teacher) hasn't been eliminated and outsourced to one of the BRIC nations, I have been a substitute for three years and was displaced by more attractive workers that came into the labor market for that duration.

For the Forsaken Days...

Story of the Fisher King,
by: Richard LaGravenese, The Fisher King

It begins with the king as a boy, having to spend the night alone in the forest to prove his courage so he can become king.
Now while he is spending the night alone he's visited by a sacred vision. Out of the fire appears the holy grail, symbol of God's divine grace. And a voice said to the boy,
"You shall be keeper of the grail so that it may heal the hearts of men."
But the boy was blinded by greater visions of a life filled with power and glory and beauty.
And in this state of radical amazement he felt for a brief moment not like a boy, but invincible, like God,
... so he reached into the fire to take the grail,
... and the grail vanished,
... leaving him with his hand in the fire to be terribly wounded.
Now as this boy grew older, his wound grew deeper.
Until one day, life for him lost its reason. ... He had no faith in any man, not even himself.
... He couldn't love or feel loved.
... He was sick with experience.
He began to die.
One day a fool wandered into the castle and found the king alone. And being a fool, he was simple minded, he didn't see a king. He only saw a man alone and in pain. And he asked the king,
"What ails you friend?"
The king replied,
"I'm thirsty. I need some water to cool my throat".
So the fool took a cup from beside his bed, filled it with water and handed it to the king.
As the king began to drink, he realized his wound was healed. He looked in his hands and there was the holy grail, that which he sought all of his life. And he turned to the fool and said with amazement,
"How can you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?"
And the fool replied,
"I don't know. I only knew that you were thirsty."

Effort.

There are very few classes you take in college that stick with you, kind of like there are very few teachers you remember fondly from high school. I do remember an English Composition 123 course I took from the first college I attended. It was an interesting course taught by a woman who used to be a hippie. Stereotypical English professor right, or so I remember now.

One of the professor's assignments was to describe a brick from one of the buildings on campus. This is one assignment I didn't spend a lot of time on completing. Picking a brick at random while standing in the quad is what I remember doing. I wrote a quick battleship description. Stupid task and it frustrated me. After all how many bricks did I walk past everyday walking through campus to my classes. But I remembered the assignment for some reason. Looking back I realize I didn't look hard enough. I hadn't put in the effort to find a brick that interested me.

That memory resonates now. Substitute the object, but the subject and verb haven't changed. I tend to accentuate the verb with the addition of an adverb now.

Vampire Teeth

Conflict is the essential element to every story no matter how it is told. Usually there are two opposing forces represented the characters of a hero and a villain. The hero, protagonist, the reader or viewer can easily identify with. It is often from the hero's point of view that the story is told. The villain, antagonist, is a force that opposes the hero. In most stories it takes the form of a character, but sometimes it may take any form as long as its opposes the hero and provides conflict to drive the story. At the end of the story the conflict is traditionally resolved. However, there are some stories where the conflict goes unresolved. 

Here is a story from the movie, Where the Wild Things Are, told by the character Max to his Mother: 

There were these buildings....these really tall buildings, and they can walk. Then there were some vampires. One of the vampires bit the tallest building and his fangs broke off...then all his other teeth fell out... then he started crying...and then all the other vampires said, "Why are you crying, aren't those just your baby teeth?" 

He said, "No those are my grown up teeth." 

And the vampires knew he couldn't be a vampire anymore so they left him. The End. 

Internal conflict is difficult to illustrate and easy to get bored with as a reader or viewer. But sometimes it can be mysterious. This story so simple and still very complex. It is hard to understand that it is about becoming an adult. The vampire's teeth symbolize a child's imagination, which helps protect the psyche from loss. 

Here is the story taken from the movie and animated on youtube: 

Health Insurance and Luck.

Most people who are unemployed don't have health insurance. Sooner of later you're going to get hurt. Hopefully, it won't be that bad. You can get up, brush yourself off, put a band-aid over a cut, and miraculously let your body heal itself. Then, there are times you will be unlucky.

Many people in their late 20s and 30s gamble with their health by not having health insurance because they are healthy. It's a gamble that many make because they can't afford to pay the monthly premiums. Even some of the employed don't have health benefits, while others work at places like Starbucks that provide health care, even for part-time work. Needless to say, health insurance is a very big deal.

Two months ago I was playing flag football at a local park in Queens, and after making a difficult catch at the goal line, I noticed my pinky finger on my left hand was dislocated. A good doctor can diagnosis the medical condition correctly. However, proper treatment without medical insurance can be difficult and uncertainty of the condition can be one of the problems.

I had a few options. The first was I could relocate, or outwardly reduce, my left pinky myself. Second, wait for a friend who is a chief resident, and my girlfriend's roommate, at an area hospital to come back from a trip to Florida. Third, go to the emergency room. Because, I didn't want to fix it myself and I've heard of people getting huge medical bills from trips to the emergency room I waited for my doctor friend to get back.

After a couple of days my dislocated finger had swelled complicating what seemed to be a simple procedure. However, with much effort, my finger was eventually set back in place by the good doctor and splinted for the ligaments to heal. This took longer than expected.

By November the splint came off and I could hardly move the finger. Panic set in at the thought of permanent damage. Anyone I knew who could help I called. This is what you do when you don't have insurance.

It turns out one of my oldest friends is a radiologist in a New England hospital. I called. Left a message and waited. My Father told me of a cousin who works as an OT (occupational therapist) at a Hand Surgeon's office in Huntington. I called another cousin to get in touch with him. This all took more than a day. David, the radiologist, called back first and his advice was to go to the Emergency Room.

If you live in New York City and don't have health insurance and need to see a doctor you have two choices. The first the New York City Free Clinic run by New York University.

http://nycfreeclinic.med.nyu.edu/

The clinic is located on 16th street near Union Square. You must speak with a social worker before you can get an appointment to see a doctor. Appointments are only available on Saturday. And you will be seen by a medical student from NYU who will be supervised by an actual doctor. The second choice is to got to the Emergency Room at hospitals that are part of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/hhc/html/facilities/directory.shtml

Their mission, as stated on the website, is to provide healthcare to all New Yorkers, "regardless of their ability to pay." Whoever wrote that also used important sounding words like equally, quality, dignity, respect.....blah, blah, blah. What is important is being seen by a physician who has access to medical equipment, such as a x-ray machine.

It seemed like a big decision to go to ER at the time, but I didn't have a choice. The wait wasn't that bad. I walked out of Elmhurst Hospital Center six hours later with different questions though. What is Boutonniere's Deformity?

After being seen by a medical student in ER, the doctor told me after an examination and X-rays that I had a leguminous injury. Possibly a central slip injury and the beginning of Boutonniere's Deformity. An appointment with the hand clinic was suggested and made for a follow up.

You can scare the shit out of yourself by using the internet to self-diagnose medical conditions. Trying to sleep believing you are permanently disabled in part because you made the wrong choices can be difficult. David called back later and told me he worried about that particular diagnosis. My appointment with the hand clinic was for 12:30 on Friday.

If you don't have insurance you have to register with the hospital and get a HHC card. This took about an hour. I was then able to get past the secretary at the hand clinic and into another waiting room. I waited for over four hours. Doctors and nurses finished their shifts and other patients got treated multiple times. I changed my seat multiple times, looked at the television, tried to read, and listened to other people speaking in Spanish. After an interminable amount of time a doctor with wispy white hair and glasses told me after examination that I had a bad sprain. This he was able to determine without looking at my X-rays. Meekly pushing a roll of medical tape towards me on the desk with two fingers he said, "You can have this. Make sure you buddy tape the pinky to the ring finger. You should be okay."

After waiting four hours and paying $15 that lukewarm prognosis was the best I could wring out of the system. I made another appointment with the Elmhurst Hospital Center hand clinic at the end of the month. When I went to the hand surgeon my cousin works for it was as if I had been transported by benevolent aliens on board their mothership, treated with space aged technology, and returned safely.

There are many unemployed who don't have access to medical care. In some cases it is their reason for that status. This time I kinda of lucked out.

Important first steps. (Who moved my fucking cheese!)

Welcome to being unemployed. Yeah, I am sure that thought took more than a moment to comprehend, like a slap in the face or a punch in the gut.

One of the last days I was officially employed as a public school teacher the union representative came up to me and handed me some forms. I still have it somewhere in one of the bins I keep papers. It reads like chapter from a Dale Carnegie book.

"Just make sure you apply for unemployment insurance as soon as you can," he told me.

His perfunctory union duties satisfied I met one more time with some other faceless school representative, a secretary for the assistant to the superintendent for instruction or human resources. It funny how your physical presence can be a minor obstacle to their office chatter. With a signature I relinquished the title of teacher I once held for the school district I used to work for. Now what?

If you live in New York State click on this link:

https://ui.labor.state.ny.us/UBC/home.do


It will direct your web browser to the New York State Department of Labor Unemployment Benefits online application. Fill it out. The reason why my union rep told me to fill it out as soon as I can is that there is a waiting period of one week from the time you claim benefits to the time you get your benefits (money).

If you live in any other state I am sure if you perform a google search you can find your State's DOL Unemployment benefit application page.

At most you'll receive $405 a week. This may not seem like much, but it helps. Right now I am not getting the full amount but its a life raft. Take it.

Posts from the Underground.

Russell Crowe

One of Charlie Rose's guests tonight is actor Russell Crowe. Who stated during the interview that he likes to tailor his schedule around the director's work habits, and said, "There is something soul destroying for having to wait around for work." I agree. See the interview tonight at 11 PM on PBS. Mr. Crowe if nothing else can be a captivating speaker.