On Being in the New Yorker

On Being in The New Yorker

1.
I'm in The New Yorker this week
(A little profile about my history
With my band, King Missile)
And, although I am a grown man
(Fifty-five years old, as, sadly, the profile
Points out)
I find myself on the subway
Looking around
To see if anybody's reading it
To see if anybody is noticing me,
and thinking,
Hey, there's that guy who's
In the Goings On About Town section
A grown man, I guess, but still a child.

2.
Somehow,
I managed not to tell the woman
Carrying the Strand Book Store bag
With the New Yorker magazine cover on it,
"Hey, I'm in The New Yorker this week."

3.
When the woman came into my office
Saying, "Did you see this?
You're in The New Yorker!"
I said, "I saw it, thanks."
She said, "I got you a copy."
I said, "I'm a subscriber, but thank you."
And she left.
And I felt like a dick.
But I had seen it,
And I am a subscriber.
Still, I felt like a dick.

4.
The woman sitting across from me
On the train is reading New York Magazine.
If she were reading the New Yorker,
Maybe she'd be impressed
That she's sitting across from me.
Not that I want to impress her.
She is, after all, choosing to read New York Magazine Instead of the New Yorker.

5.
My dear friend Julian
Suggested that by virtue of knowing me
(A guy who is in The New Yorker this week)
He can claim secondary bragging rights
And dine out it for years to come.
I'd just like to point out
That so far no one has taken me to dinner.
Just saying.

6.
I realize
That if I were to submit this to The New Yorker,
And they were to publish it,
I would again be in The New Yorker.
But I'm not going to submit this to The New Yorker.
It's highly unlikely that they would publish it,
And I don't deal with rejection all that well.

7.
Next week, I will no longer be in the New Yorker.
I will look back fondly on this week,
When I was in the New Yorker.
I will move forward and try not to live in the past,
When I was in the New Yorker.
And if I ever have grandchildren,
I will try not to bore them with stories of
When I was in the New Yorker.

June 30, 2016

Monday Morning, On the Way to Work

Monday Morning, On the Way to Work

I
The loose fitting pants
Hanging off the homeless guys ass
Were not a sartorial affectation
The ‎motherfucker clearly didn't give a fuck
And I can't say I would either
If I had nothing.

If I had nothing
I wouldn't give a shit
That I didn't have a belt
Or that the crack of my ass was exposed
To some asshole
On his way to work at 

Some fucking law firm.

II
On the subway platform
The schoolgirl
With the short pleated skirt
Looked like a deer caught in the headlights,
Made‎ me think how fucked up it is

That girls are made to wear that shit
Although maybe it wouldn't be a big deal
If men could behave themselves.

III
Mysterious
Crumpled
Paper
Bag:

 

Did you hold a breakfast or a lunch?
A cup of coffee?
Pixie dust?
A handful of magic beans?
The song of 100 angels?
A box of nails or screws?
A blueberry muffin?
A promise?
A lie?
Why were you left lying there?

Why? Why?

A thoughtless gesture.

Today, I appreciate the thoughtlessness.
 

June 6, 2016

Dissed

Dissed
For reasons that have become increasingly unclear to me, I have thought, for several months, that King Missile should play Bowery Electric, a club located relatively close to where CBGB’s was located back in the day. That proximity may have been a reason, or it may be that a number of my friends have played there and I liked the sound and the layout of the place, and a friend of mine tends (or tended) bar. I don’t know. But I knew that after two shows at Brooklyn’s Shea Stadium, it would be good to play Manhattan, and I thought Bowery Electric was a logical choice.

I went to their website, and found a contact email, and I made an inquiry. I didn’t hear back. I emailed again, and was told by Nick (not his real name) that he had forwarded my email to Debby (not her real name). She eventually got back to me and asked if we wanted to play a free show in the bar area upstairs. I said, “No, we’d like to play the downstairs room. I’m sure we could get a lot of people there. We have done well at Shea.” Or something like that. I didn’t hear back. I emailed again, and Nick got back to me, and then Debby again. Finally, we settled on a date: April 10, 2016. Debby told me I could put the evening together by adding bands to the bill but that I should get back to her in ten days.

I was excited. I asked Rachel Trachtenburg if her band wanted to play and she said yes. I had trouble thinking who the third band would be, and the ten day deadline was approaching, so I emailed Debby to tell her Rachel would open and I was just looking for the third band. Debby told me that she had filled the 9 and 10pm slots for that evening but that if King Missile wanted to play at 10, maybe she could switch the 10pm band or move everyone earlier. “And is Rachel 18  yet?” Debby wanted to know. Debby apparently doesn’t know about Wikipedia.

I got on the phone with Debby, and she started asking me questions about my band (“Are you local?” Are you the band’s manager or are you in the band?”), and I quickly realized that this was way more of an uphill battle than I had expected. I told her, “I think maybe I’ll find another Manhattan venue, one that is actually wants us to play.” Debby said, “How can I know if I want you to play when I don’t know anything about your band?,” to which I might have replied—“Wikipedia?” “You Tube?” but I was kind of resigned to the fact that this wasn’t going to happen. So I ended the call.

We went ahead and booked a show at Cakeshop for this Sunday (May 21, 2016) and yesterday I learned that we got a little write up in the New Yorker. In order to kind of rub her nose in it (but more because I still really wanted to play there), I sent Debby an email, reminding her about the show we had booked there that had fallen through (without blaming her) and letting her know that we got a little write up in the New Yorker, and that I hoped we could put a night together at Bowery Electric in the Fall. Her response was. “Congratulations. Cakeshop is a good size room for this.”

I pride myself these days on not writing angry obnoxious emails to people who are really pissing me off. So instead I wrote back and said “Thanks, but we’d really like to play Bowery Electric sometime.” Her response was “Maybe down the line. Thank you.”

If you know me at all, you can imagine the kind of things I wanted to say to her. I think I am glad that I didn’t say any of them. And I guess King Missile will never play Bowery Electric. And I guess that’s okay.

May 25, 2016

Hoverboards

Hoverboards

Fuck hoverboards

They fucking suck
I fucking hate hoverboards
Such fucking bullshit

 

They shouldn't even be called hoverboards
They dont even actually hover
They're just fucking skateboards with motors

 

Which makes them motor vehicles, right?
Which means they shouldn't be on the sidewalk, right?
Which means the motherfucker who bumped into me just now
Had no fucking business riding a hoverboard on the sidewalk in the first place, right?
So fuck hoverboards,  right?

 

I'm glad I got that off my chest
But the truth is, I didn't just get bumped into by a motherfucker on a hoverboard

I made that up

But it is true that I do hate hoverboards

They suck

Fuck hoverboards

 

May 19, 2016 

Three Short Poems: "Itch," "Creep," and "Bus."

Itch
I've got an itch
On one of my inner thighs
I suppose it might be sexy
If you were into older guys*
May 13, 2016


Creep
There was this a young boy
Coming down the subway stairs
Holding a plastic T-Rex
Asking his mom if all dinosaurs were carnivores
And his mom said no, some dinosaurs w‎ere herbivores;
They eat plants and vegetables.
"But T-Rex eats people?," He asked
And she said yes.

And because I'm such a busybody fucking smartass,
I wanted to point out that there were no people
When T-Rex was around,
Unless you happen to favor a very expansive definition of the word people,
Which, who knows, maybe she did,

But the forecast called for rain today,
So there I was,
An old man in a rain coat,
I wasn't about to butt in
And run the risk of coming off like a creep.

So that poor child
Will have to live in fear of people being eaten by dinosaurs
Because I didn't want to feel like a creep.
But of course, I feel like a creep anyway.
May 13, 2016


Bus
Being on a cross town bus
Is like being‎ stuck inside
An enormous, round, turd
Too heavy
To move
More than a few hundred feet
Every few minutes.

A fucking glacier
Made of shit
That never
Fucking
Moves.
May 8, 2016



*This could be a verse for a song if I wasn't such a lazy piece of shit.

The Guy Who Coughs

I'd hate to be the one who coughs during a recital. It's bad enough to be in the audience when the one who coughs coughs, and somehow it's worse when there's just one one who coughs as opposed to many ones.

Like that time when I saw the Philharmonic at what was then known as Avery Fisher Hall, at the beginning of Bolero, the very beginning, when it's very quiet, and beautifully slow, less than 30 seconds into it, and the guy let out this huge hacking cough that just took a shit on the whole thing, and the conductor, while continuing to conduct, turned his head back over his shoulder and looked back in the direction of the guy who coughed and just raised an eyebrow as if to say, do that again motherfucker, and I will fuck you up.

And then there was that time, at Zankel Hall, when the Ligeti Quartet was playing The Ecstasy, from Terry Riley's Salome Dances For Peace, and it was so beautiful and clearly very difficult to play, and the guy who coughed just coughed and coughed, many, many times, like an endless stream of piss just pissing all over the whole thing, to the point where several people in the audienxe made little noises to signal their annoyance, and I was quite anoyed too, but mostly I was thinking how I would hate to be that guy, the guy who coughs.


And the thing is, I know that if I keep going to recitals, one day, I'm going to be not feeling well, but I'll have tickets to something that I really, really, really don't want to miss, so I'll go, and yes, I'll grab a shitload of complimentary ricollas and I'll keep popping them into my mouth but still, inevitably, I will be unable to control myself and I will be the guy who coughs and it will be mortifying and I will hate myself and it will be awful and that will suck.

April 15, 2016

The Quartet

The Quartet sat down together to play the new work, both commissioned and composed anonymously‎ as a gift to the four of them. The cellist, the violist, and the two violinists had each rehearsed their separate parts but this was the first time any of them would hear the entire work with all of its parts played simultaneously, as this was their first attempt to play it together.

At various times as they played the composition, each member of the Quartet was nearly certain that they would be unable to get through it. This was not because it was technically difficult. Rather, it was the sheer beauty of the work that made it so challenging.

And in fact, as they played a motif near the end of the unbearably slow and unbearably beautiful second movement, all four players were weeping. Moreover, the lushness and simultaneous harshness of the sonorities, the strange, but never entirely alien tonal‎ idiosynchronsies, and the curiously teetering time signature, moved all four players not just to tears, but to an awakening within their deepest essences.

They each reported later that they felt as if a small number of precious, golden droplets of sunlight‎ and love were dropped directly into their hearts, and they were overwhelmed and enveloped with a sense of timelessness and stasis and indestructibilty and the feeling of being cradled in the arms of a supernatural being that would cherish and protect you forever.

The Quartet had a performance scheduled for that evening and they all knew, without a word of discussion, that they would perform the new work as an encore. They played their scheduled program that night with unprecedented urgency and masterful brilliance so as to insure that the audience would demand an encore. Indeed, they played so well that a riot would have ensued had they not played an encore. Not only that, the quality of their performance thus far that evening was such that they had raised the expectations of everyone in the concert hall, all of whom had become profoundly aware that they were witnessing an historic event, not unlike that historic Sex Pistols concert in Manchester in June of 1976 that led to the creation of the Smiths, the Fall, the Buzzcocks and Joy Division. Decades later this concert would be recognized as one that permanently altered the landscape and soundscape of chamber music forever.

Remarkably, not a sound was heard while the quartet played the new composition. Nobody coughed or cleared their throat. Nobody whispered or hissed. It seemed, in fact, as if nobody was breathing, although of course everybody was. Even more remarkable: virtually everyone in the concert hall had a nearly uncontrollable urge to take a selfie of themselves during the performance of the new work in order to prove that they were there; and yet every single one of them was, in fact, able to control that urge.

The sense of golden droplets of sunlight and love being dropped directly into the heart was felt by every person in the rather large room, including all of the ushers, one of whom was nearly deaf. The essence of each being in the room had been awakened in a startling but somehow familiar way, as if each of them was experiencing the myth of eternal return.

One could almost say that the intention of the composer was to offer up a means by which each individual listener might have direct experience of God, although it was later revealed that the composer had no such intention, and in fact, had no theistic (or, for that matter, atheistic) beliefs. Somewhat surprisingly, this news disappointed no one, although it did cause some people to reevaluate their religious conceptions.

‎About a half hour after the performance, it was discovered that the sheet music for the new piece had literally vanished. The composition had been written in disappearing ink, apparently timed to disappear directly following the evening's performance. Each member of the Quartet had followed the composer's strict instructions not to make copies. No one had recorded the concert and no one could remember the piece in its entirety.

And yet, nobody who missed the concert was jealous of anyone who had been there. This was most likely because every single attendee carried the experience with them in their hearts and was able to transmit it to others. Indeed, they were unable to avoid transmitting it: simply being in the presence of one of the original attendees was enough to profoundly shift one's relationship to the universe. And then,  having had a spiritual awakening as the result of their proximity to one of the listeners, they carried the message to others, who in turn carried it to still others.

Over time, the awakened feeling penetrated the essence of every sentient being on the planet. The world was changed. The composer remained anonymous but did release a number of clarifying statements, such as the one about not believing in a supernatural creator god. ‎Perhaps the most significant of these statements was the one that revealed that the composer had never written anything before or after the composition, had no formal training, could play no instrument and knew no music theory. "It was as if something or someone had taken me over completely" said the composer, "As if I was merely a conduit, a messenger, an instrument."

Soon it was discovered that many people were suddenly able to compose extraordinarily beautiful music. Others were able to paint magnificent paintings, and still others could dance, or write stories, or design urban landscapes, or tell almost dangerously hilarious jokes. Everyone, it seemed had developed an extremely entertaining new talent. Everybody also had developed a much deeper appreciation for art and beauty. Many people became interested in theological or philosophical ideas. A large number of people felt the presence of God in their hearts in a more profound way than they ever had before. Many others, while not calling it God, acknowledge a presence or power deep within that made them feel a part of the totality of the universe, and made them feel connected to every living thing.

The point being that the performance by the Quartet of the new composition was extremely fortunate for everyone involved--that is to say, it was extremely fortunate for everyone.
April 7, 2016