A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 
WLAM

You know him when you see him,confidently pushing through the aisles of Wegmann's with about two feet of space on either side of his wide-bodied shopping cart, filled with a 12 pack of microbrew and twelve other high ticket grocery items which will total up to what you and I make a week. Or blocking the canned specialty food aisle at Greenstar,omnipresent beret, greying pony tail poking out, Grateful Dead T-shirt,


a slight gut from too many faculty-student receptions, as he chats with a class of '84 Bard College graduate, slightly greying, rather stern looking Natural Foods socccer mom. (Baby had to wait for the PhD and major career milestone.) Inevitably you see him at Gimme, latte in place, lap top open, oblivious to anything short of an appearance of the Dalai Lama. Or barrelling up State Street in the largest Volvo stationwagon still under the radar of community gas guzzling standards, several hundred telling decals plastered on the rear bumper, advertising his commitment to social change and environmental self-righteousness.

He is the White Liberal Alpha Male. The top of Ithaca's food chain. Carving a swath in the academic jungle or booming restaurant market. Remember the old print ads for Dewar's, profiling the players and niche makers of the booming 90's? He wrote a symphony, brought futures trading to Eastern Europe, and he only drinks Dewars scotch. Well, this guy would definitely be featured in any Utne Reader pantheon of shakers and bakers of the 21st Century, Two Phd's under his belt, tenured at 45, a fistful of publications, regular appearances at several international conferences, memebership in professional organizations up the wazoo. (How do you spell 'wazoo.') Yeah, and a community point person for a wife,a handful of trophy kids to boot with the orthodontist and violin lesson bills to prove it. So he talks about his colleagues' hair loss issues behind their backs, does his attractive graduate students, is a political tiger in his department, snorts a little now and again. That's to be expected.



Thank you, Charles Darwin. Thank you for the theory of natural selection. Thank you for bringing science to bear on the chaos of reality. Thank you for your iconic 19th Century beard. Thank you for reminding us that it's still a jungle out there.

Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:27 PM

 
Ithaca Merchants Pin Hopes on Free Sex




Just when Ithaca merchants thought that things couldn't get any worse on the Commons, the City Council decided to pass an aggressive new panhandling ordinance. Now the Commons is really dead!

Yep, it seems that, on any given day, most of the folks you'd spot downtown had simply come to bum smokes and loose change, or hang out in front of Jabberwock, hoping that the weather would improve enough to drag out the bongos. Now that the Dollar Store has closed, what reason would most people have to come to the Commons?

This sad state of affairs has prompted some downtown shopkeepers to take drastic measures. Jim Curon, owner of Ithaca Soaps, faced with declining standards of hygiene in Granola City, has pulled out all the stops. Jim is offering prospective customers sex with his ex-wife as an inducement to visit his downtown emporium. According to Mr. Curon, interviewed outside his downtown boutique on a snowy Tuesday morning, " Sales don't work anymore unless you're liquidating your entire inventory.April Cornell, that little shop up near Robbie Dein's, had more customers on the last day of their closing sale than they had in their entire three years of being open. The way I look at it is that you have to give people what they really want. That's the only thing you can do to bring them downtown now that the City has reduced the two hour free parking limit."



Mr. Curon's ex-wife could not be interviewed for this article. A part-time employee at Ithaca Soaps, questioned in the middle of a phone interview she was conducting with a prospective employer, told us, "Mrs. Curon is busy."




"Look, I've tried everything. I've tried adding new products, guava soaps from the amazon basin, hiring attractive young babes from Ithaca College and Cornell,taking out full page ads in the Journal, offering free showerheads with every $10 purchase. Nothing seems to work. This is my living. It's either this or drive a taxi part-time and eat at the soup kitchen. Anyway, Rosmary doesn't mind. She'd rather be doing something than just sitting around, handing the bathroom key out to the homeless."
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 10:03 AM

 


Gallery Night

It’s Gallery Night in Ithaca, NY.

The art crowd is out in this appalling weather. It’s so cold in this fucking small upstate ice capital that the city fathers and mothers have banned temperature readings on the Commons clock displays. No bad news gets past their vigilance. You could commit a triple homicide, dismember your victims, wrap the parts in sections of the Ithaca Journal and stick the parts in newspaper coin boxes without the news ever being reported in the morning edition. Bad for business. People will stay away, spend more of their disposable ncome in big box stores. Ezra digresses. We’re talking about what passes for art in Ithaca. A celebration of the Yankee aesthetic.

Where all the landscapes are pleasant. Like picture postcards. Ithaca is gorges. Don’t forget it. So people occasionally fall from one of those gorges. Mostly Japanese graduate students who have flunked out of Cornell and can’t find a hari kari kit at Wal-mart. Ezra digresses again. He is obsessed with Pacific Rim people infiltrating his community, competing with him for the top jobs at Wegmanns, buying up all the natural food groceries, filming remakes of Godzilla in Fall Creek and forcing all the residents of Ithaca to dress like Astro-boy.

That’s all Ithaca artists paint. Gorges. Ithaca Falls seen from the north wall at sunset under the influence of three cocktails consumed at Simeon’s in the company of fellow Cornell graduates who have all managed to have Ithaca Art Walk signs erected in front of their Fall Creek Yankee cottages. Or Ithaca Falls seen from the south side a half hour after Gimme Coffee opened. Or the visionary view of Ithaca Falls seen from the space shuttle Atlantis just as it is about to crash into Home Depot on the Elmira Road. That earned the artist a 90 day pass to the pscyh unit at Cayuga Medical Center.

Presiding over Gallery Nights is the Queen Prune of the Ithaca Art World. Barbara Hopkins. Barbara is the czarina of the Community School of Music and Art. CSMA. It doesn’t matter that Barb resembles a cross between Josef Stalin in drag and Grandma Moses a second after she passed menopause. She has outlasted all other competitions for the top art job in Ithaca, attended more mind numbingly boring committee meetings, smoozed with more people who knew Robert Motherwell when he was in a nursing home, bought more local art and stuffed it into her living room, owns more paintings of gorges than anyone else in Ithaca. More on the Ithaca art scene in the next blog. Have a piece of chocolate.

Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:28 PM