A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

ecovillage of the dead

You can't turn around without hearing that someone cranked out another sequel to a blockbuster movie of yesteryear. Friday the 13th went into how many overtimes with the dude in the hockey mask killing successive generation after generation of dewey young teenagers, all parked in the same lover's lane or otherwise sneaking love in all the wrong places. You'd think that after a while there wouldn't be any teenagers left in town to get hacked into little pieces.

Ez doesn't want to trade movie chit chat. He has something better in mind. He wants to resurrect the movie industry in Ithaca. This is not as off the wall as it seems if you consider that Ithaca used to be the movie capital of the Finger Lakes. Mary Pickford and other greats shot films in and around Cayugawood back in the days before talkies and before the need for sequels.

Actually Ez started thinking about how he could accomplish this when he heard that a studio was releasing Dawn of the Dead, yet another sequel to the gore classic Night of the Living Dead. George Romero, the original director, died so you might even see him in this flick. According to the publicity blurbs, Dawn brings the familiar cast of loveable zombies into the present day by introducing them to the joys of shopping at the mall.

Now that may be fine and well for some zombies. But not all zombies are braindead, jingle-whistling shopaholics. There are progressive zombies, Green zombies, zombies with a social conscience. Zombies who want to make a difference for the environment.

So Ez came up with the idea for yet another Dead sequence. Ecovillage of the Dead. Bring the suckers to Ithaca where they can plant organic vegetables, get their limbs caught in the blades of solar power windmills, drive rusted out Volvos, shop at the Farmer's market, play hackeysack on the Commons, listen to blue grass and sip wine coolers on the great lawn at Taughanock Park.

That's what's wrong with America. Some folks are sitting around a restaurant in Hollywood, throwing around ideas about a movie sequel. Hey, let's do a sequel to Night of the Living Dead. Great idea! What do you want the zombies to do? Oh, I don't know. Why don't we put them on a Carnival Cruise Line? No, that's been done. Hey, how about sending them to Congress? No, too political. Let's do a shopping mall. Great idea!

Wrong. They're targeting some imaginary blob of humanity in the middle, feeding a monolthic mass zeitgeist and missing all the fun on the fringes. People want alternatives. Zombies want alternatives. Ithaca is all about alternatives. Besides it's got gorges. You can throw in these great shots of zombies falling off gorges. In addition, zombies can pump up the dwindling numbers at anti-war demonstrations. They can even vote for Ralph Nader and help to defeat George Bush. Hey, the dead used to be able to vote. That was called the graveyard vote. Really, all the dead want to do is to be useful again. Let's put them work, filling the potholes, planting the veggies, making the bagels, pouring the Gimme. We don't even have to pay them a living wage.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 2:46 PM

 
nonprofit babylon

Ever notice that ithaca is the non-profit capital of the universe? There are nonprofit movie theaters, nonprofit shrunken head and baskets marts, nonprofit banks, nonprofit hairstylists, nonprofit delis, nonprofit car washes. Nonprofit you name it. There are more nonprofits in Ithaca than Martha Stewart has teaspoons.

Recently, the folks that run the movie theater on the Commons, the local showcase for toney European art flicks, sensitive, heartwrenching, slightly grainy avante-garde psychodramas, etc complain that plans to introduce a first-run cinemax downtown will threaten their existence as a nonprofit. It's not a question of competition, they say. "We're a nonprofit. This is a community service. We make these films in our basement. The director is actually a volunteer from Cannes."

Sounds more like cultural red-lining. None of that Disney shit in our neighborhood.

Did you know that Ten Thousand Villages employs 52 itinerant Ecuadorian basketweavers to keep their shelves filled with high end baskets and handmade toilet seat covers just for the love of free trade? Like those 52 basketweavers all have health insurance plans and 401K's, send their kids to alternative schools and drive Volvos?

Ez has always had a problem with the concept of volunteers moving merchandise in a retail business. Yeah, go past the 10,000 Villages store and you see a sign asking for volunteers. It's sort like the Catholic Church recruiting stockbrokers to say Mass and administer the sacraments. They pick your pocket right after they give you the Last Rites.

Only in ithaca.

The local nonprofit pizza parlor claims to be donating 70% of sales to the San Giacometti Water Conservtion Project. Short for Marco's new heated outdoor swimming pool.

Ben and Jerry's spent years, giving back to the communities in which they did business. Mostly directed towards job training programs. Now dozens of lower income Ithaca youths know the secret of balancing two scoops of Rocky Road ice cream on top of a slender little sugar cone.

Basically the only thing in Ithaca that's for profit anymore is this blogspot.

Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:59 AM

 
the protest industry


Last Sunday night thousands gathered in Kennedy Hall on the Cornell campus to celebrate the Grady Awards. For those political shut-ins, Papist die-hards, right-wing dodos who don't know very much about the local protest scene, the Grady Awards happen to be Ithaca's equivilant of the Oscars, the Emmys and the People's Choice Awards all squeezed together in one glittering gala night of song, liberal chest-thumping and self-promotion.

Of course, the Grady Awards wouldn't be the Grady Awards without the Grady's. All 575 of them, to be exact, Ithaca's be-freckled, redhaired socially relevant hordes, filling the front rows, the back rows, the balconies, the restrooms, the parking lot. There were more freckles in Kennedy Hall that night than in all of Kilkenny. A couple of graduate students in the back rows were furiously scribbling equations on their programs, trying to calculate mathematically the number of freckles in attendance. Enough freckles to fill the Super Bowl. At some point you felt that you were really at a measles convention.

The truth is that your very own roving curmudgeon couldn't make it that night. Sunday night is autopsy night on tv. Ez wouldn't give up autopsy night even for a chance to marry Britney Spears. Anyway, all that liberal chest thumping gives him a bad case of shingles. So the information he's passing along is second hand.

On to the Awards. Clare Grady won for best performance in an anti-war demonstration, for her blood-hurdling, flag-defacing role at the Triphammer Recruiting Station. Oona O'Neill Grady won for best juvenile protestor at the same event. Dan Burns, the filmmaker who recently toured the Iraq war zone, won for best protest in a bell tower. Dan is not technically a member of the extended Grady clan, never having dated a Grady daughter and having few feckles, but his heart is in the right place. He showed a lot of film clips of himself ringing the bells atop Immaculate Conception, hugging Iraqi kids, marching in every demonstration going back to the Catonsville Nine when Dan was only a fetus. Some viewers thought that Dan was stumping for a Life Time Achievement Award.

The program notes for the evening were rather interesting in their own right. Besides the usual self-promoting, peace sign flashing advertisers like Autumn Leaves, you had to wonder why a Volvo repair shop and a massage studio would be advertising in the liner notes for a protest concert. Not to worry. The Grady's run businesses on the side.

Fact of the matter, the Ithaca protest industry doesn't pay all that well. This ain't Hollywood. Nicole Kidman doesn't have to give massages, Bruce Willis doesn't have to fix Hondas, but, then again, they don't have to get arrested and go to jail to get noticed.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:55 AM