$10 Haircut.

Finding a reliable barber is difficult, and its one of the three important service professionals (Doctor and Dentist being the other two) that are not very easy to replace. I use to get my haircut by these two Italian guys and an Irish woman in the neighborhood (off of 30th. Ave). They charged $20. Now I go to this Chinese guy from Indonesia who charges $10 with a two dollar tip. Not bad. His name is Flex. Don't ask.

Plot Idea for a New Story.

A popular kid's practical joke goes disastrously awry. He is given a slap on the hand by the High School Dean, however a story is written up in the Student Newspaper about the incident and is posted online. His name gets black listed when he seeks a job and then when he realizes it may affect his college prospects. Faced with this fact he only has 6 months to correct his image and rehabilitate his name. To do this, he must perform good deeds in order to erase his defamed name from the Internet or not go to the College of his dreams.

Subplot #1- The HS Journalist who writes the article is a girl who hates what this kid (Johnny) has done. The victim also happens to be a in a circle of friends she runs with. However, she doesn't like him and kind of has a crush on Johnny. But for idealistic reasons won't give him a break by writing any good stories about him. Johnny finally realized that he needs to persuade her in order to make things right.

NYTimes article, "Erasing An Individuals Digital Past."

NYTimes Article, "How to Fix (0r Kill) Web Data About You."

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

...As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy....

.... A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear. (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm)

Need I say, Orwell is still relevant.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-march-28-2011/i-give-up---pay-anything---

Update and passing observations on The Entertainment.

Profound newsworthy events have taken up most of my attention for the past month. The story I am writing for this blog remains on the back burner while I read a book on physics to better understand these concepts. Currently,  I have a one day a week internship at NYC City Council 22. I was able to walk in this past St. Patrick Day's Parade. It was an experience. Mayor Bloomberg and Cardinal Egan where a few yards away from me at times, its surreal when you meet famous people for the first time. Bloomberg isn't a tall man.

I am not going to comment on the events in Japan, the Middle East or Wisconsin, Michigan, or Ohio. News travels so fast these days the minute you would write about the above mentioned events it's already stale. I have also recently found out that I will not be attending CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in the fall. However, I will post on this later probably. I want to mention the nature and role of entertainment in modern life. 

The author David Foster Wallace greatest achievement was writing a book called, "Infinite Jest." Its over, or close to 1,000 pages long with copious footnotes. I have tried to read this book three times and have failed at every attempt. When I first saw the book and pondered the title I thought it to be an important tome. Mike Judge's movie "Idiocracy" shares similar motifs on America's dystopic future.

The novel is a post-modern critique of modern society. However, it is set in the future, years are now sponsored by corporations (Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment), North America has become one nation, and the novels protagonists are the Incandenza family. Hal Incandenza, a tennis prodigy, who has at some point in the novel aquired some mysterious condition that makes him seem unintelligable in both speech and mind. Hal's father James Orin Incandenza Jr., who has by this time committed suicide by putting his head in the kitchen microwave, was the fonder of the tennis academy Hal attends, and a filmmaker. In the book one of James's accomplishments is a film referred to as the Samizdat or "The Entertainment" that the plot of the book revolves around. Like heroin once the film in viewed one becomes mesmerized and lifeless so the viewer's sole interest is watching the film (Wikipedia entry on Infinite Jest).  For more on the book click the link, http://io9.com/#!5049700/david-foster-wallace-rip

As we move on into the internet age I believe the amount of screen time a person has the less independent and more easily influenced they become. Be it video games, television or on the computer surfing the world wide web. The fact that the internet is always on can be a problem if you don't know how to turn it off or manage it.

If you start the this video at the 6 minute mark you can see an illustrated lecture that touches upon what I mean. That the brain becomes hardwired for stimulation that occurs only in mediated (digital) formats. The analog way of life has become obsolete. Usually when I am bored I turn on the television and scroll through the guide to locate the entertainment choices I want to select. Currently, I find myself clicking the mouse of my macbook sometimes mindlessly. I go from article to article in a somewhat engaged state looking for the next webpage that will stimulate my mind in someway. This is a pattern of behavior without purpose and one to avoid but at the same time is a great waste of time. Which brings me back to the previous point....

Juxtapositions

                                                                      


                       VS.                       

A Word On Internships

Around the end of December I took an Internship at a small New York City production company. One of my first tasks was to meet the director, who has directed a Hollywood feature film, at JFK in Queens and picked up luggage and film. They flew in from Austin from shooting some cooking show that was to broadcast on public television.

Prior to accepting this position when I interviewed with the office manager I thought I had agreed to something else. I thought I had accepted to work at their very small and extremely quiet mid-town office in return to work on post production. My goal was to learn Final Cut Pro and actually edit using this software in some capacity. I agreed to work and provide them with free labor if these were the terms of the deal. After working a third of the internship, the office manager made it clear to me that the terms were not negotiable, and the menial office office support help I likened to a Bounty paper towel job would be all I would be doing for them. Talk about a bait and switch.

This was my third choice of the internships I was considering. I took it somewhat reluctantly for reasons that are as follows:

1. The size of the office.
2. The presentation or apperience of the Office Manager. He looked frazzled, as if he had just emerged from the cellar right after a tornado strike or near miss.
3. It was unpaid.
4. I was unsure that I would be doing post-production work but I was given an assurance that this would be more than a mere possibility.

In the end I choose to pull the plug on the internship and study for the GRE's I took later in the week (I have applied to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism since then). After working in Education and at a State Park for the past decade this experience, and another,  has been an eye opener. Always look after your own interests.

Basically, I was working at cost to myself for office experience. The tasks I were issued came from Steven haphazardly. Either while I was working on another project or while I was waiting for something to do. I have come to believe that Steven had unwittingly violated Federal Labor Laws.

In a recent NY Times article titled, "The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not," Steven Greenhouse reports that, "many employers failed to pay even though their internships did not comply with the six federal legal criteria that must be satisfied for internships to be unpaid..."   http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html  


These federal criteria are listed below: 

1. The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to what would be given in a vocational school or academic educational instruction;  

2. The training is for the benefit of the trainees;  

3. The trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under their close observation;  

4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded; 

5. The trainees are not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training period;   

6. The employer and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training. 

Example of a violation given by the DOL:

A worker who participates in a program at a retail store or restaurant and who assists customers or operates a cash register with little supervision may be an employee because the employer derives tangible benefit (i.e., productive work) from the worker’s activities).

Every three months new interns cycle into this and other production companies for various industries in New York City. What constitutes a proper internship is illustrated by the six points and example provided above. If these are not satisfied then the company is in violation of federal labor laws.


Ill chock this up to a learning experience. Always know your rights and trust your gut if you feel like you are getting a raw deal.

Recent CNNMoney.com/Fortune article on the subject, "Unpaid Jobs:The New Normal?"