A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

Tourist Hell


Ask a native New Yorker if he or she has ever visited the Empire State Building and you'll get a blank stare. So, don't be surprised that most Ithacans have never done the Carl Sagan memorial planet walk.

What? The Carl Sagan what...?? Hey, you know the cute little --well let's not call them headstones but then again they sure do remind you of cemetery markers planted all around town with neat facts about all the planets. That is, all except for Pluto --didn't they just demote Pluto to a comet or an asteroid or a cosmic pimple or something? Hell, next you know, someone who makes decisions about these things will decide tol pull Earth from the lineup. Stinky! Jesus Christ. Ughh!Too many SUV emissions. ve seen all the planets, now let's go to the mall!'

Now, if you really wanted to pull in the ole' tourista bucks, you'd chuck the cheesy planet walk and incorporate our old friend Dante's model as shown in the left hand corner. You got it! The nine circles of Hell! Perfect for the literary tourist, read cocktail party bore(they come and go,talking of Michelangelo) or intellectual bluehairs on vacation from small towns slightly upstate of upstate--'now, ladies, to your right is the Giants' Well from Canto XXXI."

The fact that Vonnegut, Nabokov, Pynchon all lived in Ithaca at one time or other doesn't cut it at the cash register. You don't often see people walking around downtown with copies of Lolita. That is, unless they're heading into the adult bookstore next to the State Street Theater. Now you better believe the City Mothers want to get rid of that conspicuously bubble-gum pink landmark .

Why get rid of it? In the new scheme of things, the downtown sex shop could be the epicenter of the 2nd circle of Hell -- you know, reserved for the lustaholics. Restaurant row on Aurora Street -- well that's perfect for the 3rd circle. Blessed are the gluttonous, for they shall inherit the check.

Now, if you bone up on your Cantos, you'd know what the souls of the futile (see diagram) hang out in the vestibule of Dante's Inferno. Drop by the Commons on any sunny day and you'll know exactly what Dante meant as you survey hordes of hackckysackers, aging hippies, former mental patients, lost souls all, candidates for the limbo line at the gates to hell.

Can you see it now? Folks pouring into town by car, bus, plane --armed with maps and translations of the Inferno, looking for the 4th Circle. Hey, look, there's a whole row of banks! This must be it! How appropriate - Spenders & Hoarders - take warning. Ithaca also has its own homegrown Citizen Kane to add authenticity to the showcase of scoundrels --the indubitable pot-bellied Jason Fane -- who, with his commedia d'arte looks complete with balding dome, shuffling around town with his trademarks scandals as he rules over a vast real estate and rental empire.

There isn't a graduate student in any English Dept. in America that wouldn't bring his or her family to Ithaca's infernal theme park. " Ok, if you kids don't behave now, Antaeus will collect your skulls." Stuff like that. "Hey, Dana, did you pack the Dore`?"

Screw Disneyland, screw 12 Flags, Ithaca, you got Nine Circles!

That will put us on the map, won't it, Virgil?




Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 4:29 AM

 

Vote for Ez

Ezra had a totally different blog to publish this morning but then he read the Ithaca Times article on Mayor Petersen's re-election bid.

That made Ez see red ..white..and blue.

Why would anyone ever think that Carolyn Peterson deserves another term? Does she really rate another term to do, as she did in her first term, the bare minimum for the people of Ithaca - for people of color, gays, working class families, renters, dog owners. Well, the list of people Carolyn hasn't served goes on and on. Liberal rhetoric doesn't cut it -- Common Council can take all the 'conscience' votes they want on gay rights, the war, etc. to maintain Ithaca's progressive reputation. But, all the generous liberal sentiment and talk aside, has the quality of life in Ithaca really improved in four years?

Who has Peterson served? Big developers, big retail chains, big education, landlords, property owners, not to overlook all her cronies, the good folk in Fall Creek who feel that they set the trend for this community, and finally, an undisclosed number of outside interests.

Why endorse another four years of the 'politics of exclusion and cronyism?' Carolyn has surrounded herself with old time politocs like Marty Luster and Dan Hoffman, rather than bringing new people into her administration, making City Hall an old boys/gals network of all the folks who have been around forever in Ithaca politics. No Fall Creek buddy left behind, right? What does Ithaca have to show for four years of nepotism, political favors, and sweetheart deals? A net gain in potholes, parking fees, and construction annoyance.

The 800 lb gorilla has gone off the reservation, moseyed downtown and started chewing on the trees down here. Cornell has pre-empted massive amounts of high revenue office space. skads of parking spots and countless municipal services provided gratis? Are tax abatements being handed out like cake at a kids' birthday party or what? party. When will the city assert a little independence and step out of the the shadow of that tax free Godzilla on the Hill? Was the recent publication of Cornell economic blue paper, boasting of the University's billion dollar footprint in the county, timed to coincide with its move downtown? Should working class Ithacans who foot the bill for a host of municipal services provided gratis to a largely transitory population of Cornell students be overawed by the numbers?

That's reason to vote for Ez. Ezra doesn't own a single piece of property in Ithaca. He has no vested interest in making Ithaca more tantalizing to high ticket developers, big box stores, and college students who buy most of their needs in house at the University shops and more on line than they do downtown. Ithaca should look to do more for its neighborhoods, its low income families, its minority teenagers than it does for the privileged occupants of the high rent district who live here only 9 months of the year. Where is the low income housing that is sorely needed? All Ezra sees these days is more upscale condos.

These are questions Ithacans need to ask. There are also things you need to know about Ezra. Obviously, an anonymous blogger cannot register himself as a candidate for office. So Ezra will not appear on any ballot and you can rest assured that Ezra will not be your next mayor. But, by writing his name in as a protest vote, you will be sending a signal to the people who think they own City Hall. 40 votes --hey that's a curiousity. 100 votes - now that's giving the finger!

A protest vote is unlikely to upset the balance between Republicans or Democrats. Nor is any Democratic candidate likely to emerge as a serious rival to Carolyn Peterson now that Michelle Berry has declined to run. That means, whether you like it or not, the powers that be have already ordained another Peterson administration. So why not send a signal that you're not ok with that? Give yourself something to snicker about while you sit out four more years of mediocrity.

Let's get out the pothole vote! Vote for Ez for Mayor of Ithaca. Tip a canoe and Kidder too!
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 10:43 AM

 

A People's History of Ithaca

One day Ez would like to hang up the shovel, tell Satan(for those of you who haven't been following the continuing saga of Ez, Satan is his boss at the pocket sprocket shop) to shove it, retire to a little place in the country and devote himself to writing a history of Ithaca. The real deal. You know, not the sanitized, Currier & Ives version.

Right? Consider, for example, the image in the corner on the left which shows --well, what does it show? Rolling hills, farm land, some of it enclosed, a countryside that goes for miles, a wide rural road that leads into a neat, well laid out community, filled with lots of public buildings and large comforable homes. In the foreground, a well appointed carriage with an elegantly dressed burgher couple, then over in the foreground, a rather aristocratic looking gent on a horse out and about as if he was joining the hunt. Hi Ho! Chauncey! And a young denim-clad country bumpkin walking down the road towards the town as if on his way to the iconic one room school. "I used to walk ten miles to school. They were the good ole' days." Hey, you're probably all too young to have heard that refrain from a grandparent.

All in all, a rather quaint panorama of 19th century Ithaca, New York complete with all the iconology of small town America life. An idealization that we know had little resemblance to reality. What do you think Currier & Ives, Inc was all about anyway-- except a series of miniature advertisements for the Good Life, the American Way, how the America of yesteryear was popularized to people who wanted to hold on to their vision of what was in reality a rapidly changing landscape, a society in the throes of economic upheaval and social dislocation. Currier & Ives weren't interested in portraying the America of small, hard scrabble farms, of people working from dawn to dusk to earn just enough to get by --if folks were lucky and there wasn't a flood or drought that year. Towns and cities without sidewalks and limited sanitation, animal manure mixing with mud and runoff from tanners, smithies and small industry. Most people back then only lived into their 30's. But that's not what people wanted to hear or see.

And take note in the image of the fence. Yes, the fence. The universal symbol of ownership, yours and mine, good neighbors. The enclosure movement back in England had meant the end of the commons, the loss of shared pasture land for small agriculturalists, the parceling of land into large packages. The Commons means quite something different nowadays.

Most of us know what happened to the Tutelo and the Cauygas. Ithaca didn't have a 10,000 Villages on the Commons in those days so the indigeneous peoples of the area didn't get a fair trade couldn't hang around and make baskets for the local market. You can read about Simon DeWitt and Ithaca's first white settlers on historical markers aound town. And, we all know that Ithaca was a stop along the Underground Railroad. But that's the kind of history that you can get any tourist guide. But we're looking for another kind of history, aren't we?

When Ez takes his long awaited sabbatical, one of the first things he'd do is plumb the mystery of the Clinton House. Why should a hotel on the main street of Ithaca, a cold dreary upstate Yankee town in the middle of nowhere, resemble Tara? Gee, Scarlet, we're home. Is Southern Colonial a visual analog for the Good Life? The scale, the solidity of the Clinton House bespeaks power,success, prestige, the heft of Capital. Consider that if you could afford to travel in that style back in those days, well, you definitely had money. We're not talking B&B here. Most likely you were in business, selling industrial equipment, trading rail road stocks, dabbling in lumber or shipping. You might have come to visit Mr. Cornell, the Boss Hogg of the time. After all, he built one of the first banks in Ithaca. A self-made millionaire with ties to the telegraph business and New York state politics. A wheeler and dealer. His son. Alonzo, went on to be governor of NY.

That's right. Ezra Cornell's little slab on the hill. Llenroc. Not too shabby, eh? Reminds this Ez of the typical Robber Baron hideaway, perhaps a little more modest than Vanderbilt rich but rich enough. Mr. Cornell worked hard, though, for his money. He just happened to make it before anyone else had a chance. But, by all lights, he was a paragon of industry. And a civic minded sort. How does it go? Cornell also built a college, according to the history books, where everybody was welcome, an incubator for self made men like himself. Except--- how many poor schoolboys who had to walk ten miles to school ever went to Cornell University?

Take a walk around Ithaca someday. If you want to know something about the social history of Ithaca, your effort will be repaid. Obviously there was enough lumber money or shipping dollars or what have you kind of dollars to go around beause Ithaca was home to a lot of other self- made millionaires or almost millionaires. Enterprising families as the local paid-to-write historian calls these pillars of the community. Check out the old Victorian or Tudor slabs lining Buffalo Street or Seneca. Who do you think built all those roomy, drafty piles that now house the campus fraternities around Cornell? And, who do you think lived in this little cottage, for instance? . We're talking burghermeister, lumber baron, merchant prince. How many bathrooms do you think that place has?

Ez is positive that there are tons of books waiting for him at the History Center that would fill in the blanks in his knowledge of Ithaca's past, tell him how the little people, the folks who weren't lucky enough to reside in those fairy tale homes, lived. Maybe they lived on the North side, nearer to the inlet, close to the business end of the lake, as was always the case with the drovers, the shipping clerks, the teamsters wherever you go in 19th Century America. Skid row. The other side of the tracks. Notice how geography always correlates with social status. Then there's Cornell's rock. The Magic Mountain.

Yep, one day yet Ez will write that People's History of Ithaca.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 3:11 AM

 

Impeachment: The Bored Game


Alright, you aging baby boomers, do you find yourself stuck in the doldrums of small college town life? Are all your old cronies from the fun days of SDS, the Chicago Seven, the Panthers moving to retirement villages in Arizona to play golf? A little concerned that kids under 25 have totally abandoned the political chase for IPods and texting?

You need a little excitement in your life. Are you ready to play Impeachment The Board Game?

Do you remember the rush you got watching Tricky Dick board a helicopter to presidential palookaville? Now you have the power at a throw of the dice to send W and his vice presidential pitbull, Dick Cheney, on a one way trip to Republican Boot Hill.

Here's how you play. Grab a game piece. You have your choice of several life-like figurines -- a bearded, potbellied, avuncular old hippie type, or a modish darling of the Women's Democratic Action Committee, even a piece that resembles Stokely Carmichael. Now you're ready.

Shake the dice.! Like Monopoly, you move your piece as many spaces as indicated by the roll of the dice. Some moves will advance your cause, move you closer to your goal of ousting a sitting president and vice president. Other moves will set you back, way back --like a smashing Republican upsurge in mid-term elections. That's the chance you take.
Here are some other milestones on your journey around the board.

You roll a 6! Hurrah. Common Council by a vote of 6 to 2 drafts an anti-war resolution which is front page news the next day in the Ithaca Urinal. You've won an important victory and, your confidence up now, you roll again.

Shit! Your popular four term congressman was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. (Hey, lighten up, this is only a blog. Maurice is as squeaky as Mr. Clean.) You've lost an important ally in the House of Representatives and you also lose a turn.

Your turn again! You roll an eight and get to draw a bonus card.
Holy Mother of Demonstrators! Cindy Sheehan is coming to your town to talk at a rally on the Commons. Immediately you get the news out to all the alternative media. Thousands are expected to show up. Where to put all the buses and cars? After all, you're a green community. Anyway, that's a minor detail. Your turn to roll again!

Whoopie! The President's ratings hit an all time low. A Gallup Poll reveals that only 3% of Americans think that Bush knows how to tie his own shoes. You're half way around the board. Roll again!


Crap! Jane Fonda, eminence gris of the 60's anti-war celebrity protestors, does an about face and appears at a White House dinner with George and Laura, sending a shockwave through the movement. Hell, this is tantamount to having Mahatma Gandhi do a commerical for Smith & Wesson. Back five squares.

Well, in the game of life, that's how things go. Eventually, you'll get another turn. Who knows. You might roll snake eyes and get another bonus card, pick up another 4,500 signatures on your petition to oust the prez. They're getting worried now, circling the wagons in the oval office. Waiting for the Volkswagon Terminator bus to roll up to the Capital, for the Men with Pot Bellies to step out and zap the Evil Empire.


Wait! You roll a seven. Lucky Number 7. Ahh--uhhhhhhhhhh....proceed right to Supreme Court, do not pass go. The justices are assembled, waiting to hear your brief on turning over secret presidential tapes. You know, conversations with Wolfie and Dick, where they're actually cooking up WMD and terror connections . Oops, you've been to that building before, haven't you? Remember hanging chads? Remember 2000?



Publish Post
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:43 PM

 

Day of the Dead

Move over tired old mantra. Ithaca ain't gorges anymore. Ithaca is headshops.

Ithaca's got four,well, last Ez counted, all crammed in the west block of the Commons, haunts for an array of under 30 wannabe hippies, white Bob Marley imitators, or dropouts that time forgot with their steel gray ponytails, toting guitar cases that bear decals from obscure towns in the Texas panhandle like Snake Zits, plus the usual underage kids that you sort of wished would come down with wanderlust and run away from home so you wouldn't run into them everyday playing hackey sack, playing bongos, hanging out on the Commons, bumming smokes, modeling the latest Goth couture.

Think about it. That's one headshop for every 15,000 residents of Tompkins County. All three shops probably carry enough bongs and pipes to supply every man, woman and child in Ithaca. Everybody smokes pot, everybody smokes pot. You gotta wonder about that. Do you think they turn the cameras off after city council meetings and light up? Can you just see the cops going into the ole swat van to sneak a few tokes? Are they getting high in the hills? Stoned in the valley?

Do you think that many headshops in one town says something about the community? Driving into Ithaca, bringing in a couple of keys. Hey, do you really think there is a drug culture in Ithaca? D rhymes with C which spells Cornell. Look, if you don't catch the allusion buried in the last sentence, go to Hollywood Video and watch The Music Man. Yeah, and don't forget to drop acid first. Wow, man, trombones.

Perhaps the city mothers should take note that Ithaca is turning into the Venice Beach of the East. Maybe they did take note. Yesterday Mayor Carolyn Peterson declared May 8 the Day of the Dead. Grateful Dead, that is. Thirty years ago, it seems, the Dead did a concert at Barton Hall. A stale, slightly sweet smell of mary jane smoke still lingers in the cushions.

To commemorate that event, a Dead cover band reprised the same concert at the State Street Theater. Outside, just before showtime, hundreds of Dead Heads or curious fellow travellers milled around the entrance formed a sea of tie-dye da-glo colors. Everybody in the line had a Dead story, some snippet of nostalgia or other; a couple of dyed in the wool Deadheads performed little obscure hand gestures and routines reminiscent of the coded Lodge Brother signals Jackie Gleason would show off on the Honeymooners. Down the street, teenagers from Freevile gawked at the Headshop store windows filled with ninja swords, Visigoth armor, kitschy posters of scantily clad Teutonic warrior maidens, and, yes, pipes. Pipes of all shapes and sizes, pipes shaped like camels--pipes shaped like M16s, even pipes shaped like SUV's.

Ithaca, the literal center of nowhere, has gone all out for the occasion. Someone with a marketing bent has gone to the trouble of handing out 8x11 tie-dyed like signage to the local merchants as window displays. Something like Ithaca is Grateful. Yep. That's right. A local Rembrandt is out there in the middle of the Commons cranking out Jerry Garcia portraiture.

Ez was watching this program on PBS about The Summer of Love 1967 the other night. OK. Let's get one thing straight. Ezra hasn't killed his tv yet. Hasn't dropped it off a gorge, pulled the plug, freed his mind. Ez knows it's not politically correct to mention owning a tv but there are folks driving around with those bumper stickers on their rusted Volvos who haven't surrendered their sets . In fact, people in Ithaca have found creative ways to conceal from their more politically correct neighbors and friends they too peer at the little pixels. You can buy special blackout curtains. You can buy tv's that disappear into special cabinets or even fold up. Or you can drive to some secluded spot and watch tv in your SUV. So, there it was, all this grainy footage of Allen Ginsberg, the Diggers, the Merry Pranksters, Timmy Leary. And Jerry, yes, Jerry and his gang, sans beard, holding a joint, espousing the religion of high

So, ponder this, fellow Ithacans. What would possess a prim, bun-couiffed matronly mayor of a respectable college town in upstate New York to endorse officially a bunch of drug-crazed, drug-promoting rock musicians from a long gone era when drug taking was considered a sacrament?

Money. Kachink. (Cash register, dummy, as if that sound, immortalized in the Pink Floyd classic, wasn't now part of the cultural unconscious.) The Dead last played Ithaca 10 years after the Death of Hippie when mourners draped in black actually paraded through Haight Ashbury with a giant coffin representing the Spirit of the Age. Abba had already conquered America with their gold sequinned toreadors. Disco was sliding into fade. Jimmi was dead. So was Janis. (Ain't it something --the cult of celebrity bestows on its victims the right to be called by their first name. Right, Brittany? The great leveller --mass culture.)

Face it. By 1977 everybody had sold out. That brief shining moment of the 60's had been blotted out by the dust of Kapital. The instrumentalities of redemption and spiritual transformation, the bong, the be-in, the communal life , had been reduced to the status of commodities. Everything, in the end. was and is reduced to consumption. So why celebrate?

"Your typical city involved in your typical daydream. "
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:31 PM

 

Reading Frenzy

In the market for 50 copies of The Making of the Counter Culure? You know, the book that predicted that the feel good culture of the 60's would eventually supplant global capitalism. Because.... well, because, it was the age of aquarius and anyone who had ever smoked dope, heard Jimmi Hendrix in concert, spent a summer in the Haight, piled into a VW bus covered with day glo rainbows, really never wanted to face the fact they might have to grow up and sell pork belly futures. Well, ýou're likely to find at least 50 copies of that classic of wishful thinking at the Friend's Library Sale running May 5 to 23. Ez knows a New Age homesteader in Danby who uses copies of the book for insulation. Stephen King novels don't work quite so well to keep out the winter winds.

Holy cow, Ithacans! It's library sale weekend! The first tents and portable habitats started going up this morning outside the massive warehouse structure on Esty St that offers the chance for an afterlife to yesterday's books. Booksellers from Belgium and as far as Damascus are pulling into town. Befitting the intellectual Paris of the Catskills (wait, are we in the Catskills?), Ithaca's book sale is world famous.

The first 250 people in line, invariably, are bookdealers. Which explains why they are always talking shop. How the book business sucks now the internet makes it possible for everyman to open a virtual bookstore. Yo, dude, 35% of Ithacans under 35 support themselves by selling books on the web. Most second graders have ebay accounts these days so it's little surprise that college students are selling their college textbooks online and a few intellectual bounty hunters haunt booksales and garage sales, looking for a first edition of The Golden Bough.

Ez doesn't sell books on line but he has been known to show up the first day of the booksale. He knows that one day he'll find a hardcover copy of Your Inner Child of the Past. Ez has been looking for his inner child for years. He thinks the kid's name is Schlomo. And the key to discovering Schlomo's whereabouts is buried in Chapter 5 of this 1962 self help classic.

If you find a copy in the Psych aisle at the booksale, will you please leave it there for Ez. Thanks.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 2:39 PM