Luckily for me, I live right across the street from my polling place, which is well-staffed and has sufficient voting machines, so that voting is an absolute pleasure (in addition, a friend of mine works at the polling site). The local elections have been totally upstaged by the election happening three blocks south of my place. The one election I of interest I voted in was for the County Executive. Current County Exec Rob Astorino is a conservative who got in in the bad year of 2010.
More importantly, there were a bunch of ballot initiatives this year, including a bad one which would expand mining in the Adirondack State Park, a good one which would give disabled veterans a credit on civil service exams, one which would expand casino gambling (I live within walking distance of a big casino, I don't want competition to render the place a dilapidated husk), one which would raise the retirement age for judges to 80, one which would ease an Adirondack land swap, one which would keep sewage upgrade costs off of municipal debt limits, and a proposal for city redistricting.
I'll leave it up to the readers' imaginations to figure out how I voted (it's not too hard). Since I'm working the graveyard shift now, I'll be turning in shortly rather than following the more interesting elections elsewhere... this will save me a lot on my popcorn budget.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Sunday, November 3, 2013
It's Quiet... A Reflection on the Past Month
Tonight is the first night on the job in a while during which I haven't had to deal with an influx of visitors. We had our normal post-fundraiser levels of visitation, but everybody was gone by 6PM. This being the first night of Eastern Standard Time, it got dark early. We had a handful of technicians striking the sites and equipment from our fundraiser. I bid them goodnight, and told them that I would have the service gate unlocked for them before leaving at 8AM. Yeah, we're still understaffed, and we have one more fundraiser going on at this time. I'll be working two double shifts this week...
Before wrapping up this post, I have to make a note about our new Director of Events, who was hired at the end of July. Although she's only been with the organization for two months, I can't shake the feeling that I've been working with her for years. She was thrown into the deep end of the pool at the start of her employment here, and she made it through without losing her sense of humor... October is not an easy month for us, but I can't say that we didn't have fun, even while we were all getting our butts kicked.
Before wrapping up this post, I have to make a note about our new Director of Events, who was hired at the end of July. Although she's only been with the organization for two months, I can't shake the feeling that I've been working with her for years. She was thrown into the deep end of the pool at the start of her employment here, and she made it through without losing her sense of humor... October is not an easy month for us, but I can't say that we didn't have fun, even while we were all getting our butts kicked.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Day of the Dead Tired
One of our fall fundraisers (the one I have been working) ends tonight, so my workload will become much lighter after I get through it. The one rub is that I will be working a double shift, so I won't get out until 8AM tomorrow, with an hour added to the mix because of the end of Daylight Savings Time.
I know most people refer to November 2nd as The Day of the Dead, but for me, it's the Day of the Dead Tired.
I know most people refer to November 2nd as The Day of the Dead, but for me, it's the Day of the Dead Tired.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Pfffft... Halloween
I've worked every Halloween for the past seven years. Although October is our major fundraising month on the job, Halloween is not one of the nights on which we run a fundraiser. I have had a couple of people just show up at the front door and ask what's going on. When I told her that nothing is happening, one girl replied, "But your web site says..." I asked her to show me the website on her phone and then set her straight... "That's not our website."
There are some trick-or-treaters roaming about the neighborhood, but none of them has come by the front door (it is, after all, not a residence). A few hours ago, a couple of families came by to use the restrooms, but that was when the place was open. I figure the rest of the night will be pretty quiet.
At any rate, it's another lackluster Halloween. I think it can be summed up by this unintentionally(?) obscene pumpkin which is supposed to represent a tombstone cherub:
I call it "gourdse". Happy Halloween, folks!
There are some trick-or-treaters roaming about the neighborhood, but none of them has come by the front door (it is, after all, not a residence). A few hours ago, a couple of families came by to use the restrooms, but that was when the place was open. I figure the rest of the night will be pretty quiet.
At any rate, it's another lackluster Halloween. I think it can be summed up by this unintentionally(?) obscene pumpkin which is supposed to represent a tombstone cherub:
I call it "gourdse". Happy Halloween, folks!
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Busy Day Before Halloween... Post a Video!
Today was a lot busier than I anticipated it would be. At the beginning of my shift, I received a call from the Manager on Duty, who informed me that there was a gas leak in one of our buildings because the gas furnace had been turned on improperly. I had to locate the key to the furnace room and we turned off the furnace. No sooner had I done this when I received a call from the home office and was told that the employee who had to close down another of our sites had had a problem and that I would have to travel there to close the place up properly. Before heading down, I had to give a jump to another employee whose car battery had an insufficient charge. I spent the first three hours of my shift running hither, tither, and yon responding to out-of-the-ordinary situations, and it put me off my game for a while.
I don't have time to put up an elaborate post, so I figure I'll post a video or two by Screaming Lord Sutch, shock rocker and founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party (note to Tea Partiers, this party was founded as a joke). Screaming Lord Sutch did the "horror rock" thing a decade before Alice Cooper ever put on eye shadow. His songs aren't very good, but they do have some novelty value:
My personal favorite by the Third Earl of Harrow is Murder in the Graveyard:
As someone who often walks by Woodlawn Cemetery on his way home from the end of the 4 line after a night of drinking in Manhattan or Brooklyn, I look at Murder in the Graveyard as a cautionary tale.
I don't have time to put up an elaborate post, so I figure I'll post a video or two by Screaming Lord Sutch, shock rocker and founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party (note to Tea Partiers, this party was founded as a joke). Screaming Lord Sutch did the "horror rock" thing a decade before Alice Cooper ever put on eye shadow. His songs aren't very good, but they do have some novelty value:
My personal favorite by the Third Earl of Harrow is Murder in the Graveyard:
As someone who often walks by Woodlawn Cemetery on his way home from the end of the 4 line after a night of drinking in Manhattan or Brooklyn, I look at Murder in the Graveyard as a cautionary tale.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
A Year Since Sandy
Local news coverage has been dominated by tales from the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, which was a combination of a post-tropical storm and a "winter" storm that converged on the Eastern Seaboard. My personal experience of Sandy wasn't exactly pleasant, I had to move about half a ton of material on the job as the storm bore down on the NY metro area, then I camped out in a cold, dark workplace because my coworkers were stymied by downed trees and flooded roads, besides, there was no gasoline to be had, so I was better off hunkering down than sitting in a gas line or at the side of a highway. I ended up staying on the job for a thirty-two hour endurance tour, with no heat or electricity, before the power was restored a week after the storm hit. Yeah, it wasn't pleasant, but I was one of the lucky ones... I live on a hill, away from the coast. The power never went out at Casa de Bastard... I was okay, the house was okay, work was acceptable. I lost nothing more than sleep while many lost everything.
Certain communities will never be the same. People's lives have been irrevocably harmed due to the loss of loved ones or homes.
Yesterday, I ran into my friend Mary Courtney, who was involved in benefit concerts on behalf of Sandy victims. A year after the storm, the topic is still very much on the minds of residents of the Tri-State Area. While grassroots relief efforts did incredible work, there are still claims to be paid, neighborhoods to renovate or raze, and displaced persons to find homes for. I'm not complaining about my week of discomfort and inconvenience.
Certain communities will never be the same. People's lives have been irrevocably harmed due to the loss of loved ones or homes.
Yesterday, I ran into my friend Mary Courtney, who was involved in benefit concerts on behalf of Sandy victims. A year after the storm, the topic is still very much on the minds of residents of the Tri-State Area. While grassroots relief efforts did incredible work, there are still claims to be paid, neighborhoods to renovate or raze, and displaced persons to find homes for. I'm not complaining about my week of discomfort and inconvenience.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Good Night, Sweet Lou
I learned of the death of Lou Reed at one o'clock this morning after working a long, somewhat punishing day at our fall fundraiser. It was somehow appropriate that Lou shuffled off this mortal coil on a Sunday morning, that being the title of an incongruously pretty Velvet Underground song:
Brooklyn-born Lewis Allan Reed was the quintessential New York musician- cerebral, cutting edge, deadpan, and transgressive. His career spanned from the nascent days of the hippies to the salad days of the hipsters, his loyalty to the city never waned even through the Bad Old Days of the mid-to-late 70s or the sterile, crass days of the Giuliani administration. Of course, the only way to memorialize a man like Lou Reed is to listen to his body of work, and compiling this post will allow me to deal with my melancholy by listening to a lot of great music (I have to confess that Lou's death didn't hit me like Joey Ramone's death did- me being older now, and Lou being a lot less fragile than Joey was- I shed a tear for Joey on a drive with my brother Sweetums from Mom's house in Virginia to our native New York and blasted the two-disc Ramones compilation- I merely felt a bit melancholy when I heard that Lou had died, and blasted the traffic report on my drive home). Anyway, Roy has a great take on Lou's career, but here's my personal take on Lou's music, and its place in my life.
While some pundits characterized Lou as a malcontent, there was a lighter side to him that was made evident in his deadpan jokey love letter to his Brooklyn boyhood:
Another goofy oddball entry in the Reed canon (which is full of serious oddball material) is Reed's take on cartoon villainy, as he embodies an evil, postapocalyptic proto-furry in a somewhat obscure Canadian animated feature:
A guy who took himself too seriously couldn't have recorded that number.
Reed's best-known song, inexplicably played on mainstream radio stations despite its transgressive subject matter, was Walk on the Wild Side, which offered biographical snippets about members of Andy Warhol's "Factory". The song detailed the migration of disaffected suburbanites to the Big City and their subsequent transformation into superstars:
Years later, with the hard times in NYC in the 70s and the Reagan-era AIDS policy that ravaged the NYC arts scene having left their mark, Lou wrote Dirty Boulevard... the "TV whores" Reed describes in this song didn't have an escape into "superstardom" like Candy did. Dirty Boulevard describes living on the wild side, with no prospect of escape:
And now, on to Sweet Jane, my all-time favorite Lou Reed song, a song which perfectly encapsulates Lou's range. A 1969 live version, recorded before the song debuted on the album "Loaded" is a tender, almost jazzy number:
In contrast, the version which made it onto "Loaded" is more of a straightforward rocker, and the 1974 live version from "Rock and Roll Animal" may be the most "rock and roll" rock and roll song ever performed. I'm going to post a lesser known live version from a 1974 Paris concert (even though the video quality leaves something to be desired and the organ levels are too high- heh heh) because it has actual performance footage:
Of course, one could go on, citing even more great songs like Sister Ray, Heroin, Who Loves the Sun or more recent ones such as Romeo Had Juliette (sic). Brian Eno was reported to have said, "The first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years, I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!” Whether actually true or not, Lou certainly had an influence disproportionate to his chart positions. He lived longer than I would have guessed he would if you had asked me back in 1987 or so, in light of his "rock and roll lifestyle", but his passing leaves me with a sense of melancholy. Thanks for the legacy, Metal Machine Music Man.
Post title conflates Hamlet and the 1970s Yankees roster
Brooklyn-born Lewis Allan Reed was the quintessential New York musician- cerebral, cutting edge, deadpan, and transgressive. His career spanned from the nascent days of the hippies to the salad days of the hipsters, his loyalty to the city never waned even through the Bad Old Days of the mid-to-late 70s or the sterile, crass days of the Giuliani administration. Of course, the only way to memorialize a man like Lou Reed is to listen to his body of work, and compiling this post will allow me to deal with my melancholy by listening to a lot of great music (I have to confess that Lou's death didn't hit me like Joey Ramone's death did- me being older now, and Lou being a lot less fragile than Joey was- I shed a tear for Joey on a drive with my brother Sweetums from Mom's house in Virginia to our native New York and blasted the two-disc Ramones compilation- I merely felt a bit melancholy when I heard that Lou had died, and blasted the traffic report on my drive home). Anyway, Roy has a great take on Lou's career, but here's my personal take on Lou's music, and its place in my life.
While some pundits characterized Lou as a malcontent, there was a lighter side to him that was made evident in his deadpan jokey love letter to his Brooklyn boyhood:
Another goofy oddball entry in the Reed canon (which is full of serious oddball material) is Reed's take on cartoon villainy, as he embodies an evil, postapocalyptic proto-furry in a somewhat obscure Canadian animated feature:
A guy who took himself too seriously couldn't have recorded that number.
Reed's best-known song, inexplicably played on mainstream radio stations despite its transgressive subject matter, was Walk on the Wild Side, which offered biographical snippets about members of Andy Warhol's "Factory". The song detailed the migration of disaffected suburbanites to the Big City and their subsequent transformation into superstars:
Years later, with the hard times in NYC in the 70s and the Reagan-era AIDS policy that ravaged the NYC arts scene having left their mark, Lou wrote Dirty Boulevard... the "TV whores" Reed describes in this song didn't have an escape into "superstardom" like Candy did. Dirty Boulevard describes living on the wild side, with no prospect of escape:
And now, on to Sweet Jane, my all-time favorite Lou Reed song, a song which perfectly encapsulates Lou's range. A 1969 live version, recorded before the song debuted on the album "Loaded" is a tender, almost jazzy number:
In contrast, the version which made it onto "Loaded" is more of a straightforward rocker, and the 1974 live version from "Rock and Roll Animal" may be the most "rock and roll" rock and roll song ever performed. I'm going to post a lesser known live version from a 1974 Paris concert (even though the video quality leaves something to be desired and the organ levels are too high- heh heh) because it has actual performance footage:
Of course, one could go on, citing even more great songs like Sister Ray, Heroin, Who Loves the Sun or more recent ones such as Romeo Had Juliette (sic). Brian Eno was reported to have said, "The first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years, I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!” Whether actually true or not, Lou certainly had an influence disproportionate to his chart positions. He lived longer than I would have guessed he would if you had asked me back in 1987 or so, in light of his "rock and roll lifestyle", but his passing leaves me with a sense of melancholy. Thanks for the legacy, Metal Machine Music Man.
Post title conflates Hamlet and the 1970s Yankees roster
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