 Is Richmond Burning? | |
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| My sister has a Masters in Library Science from Berkeley. She was one of
the first women students at the University of Virginia. She got
accepted at Harvard but my parents couldn’t afford to send her there, though
her close friend at Madiera, the girls school they both went to, did. Not that
it did her any good. She wound the executive editor at Silhouette Books, which
is a higher class version of Harlequin Books, though that did give her the
bucks to send one of my nephews, her godson, to Sicily as a graduation present. When you
think about it, it’s depressing to think how much money has been spent to send
people back where their ancestors came, in this case, Italy.
When she was going to UVA, she wound up as a chef at the
C&O, a restaurant a friend owned. That led to graduate from the Culinary
Institute of America, and then she moved to San Francisco, only to find that the
restaurant field is a lot harder when your friend doesn’t own the restaurant.
I’m sure the restaurant biz has its share of ahos too.
I arrived at a similar conclusion in my
journalism: that you weren’t an aho, you had to become one in order to succeed
in the field. I also had an epiphany when I was offered a job as editor at a
small daily, that I should I stop reacting to events and start setting my own
course. In the middle of my career, I had the chance to work at The New York
Times Washington bureau and got to meet some of the big dogs and lesser dogs in
journalism at the time or earlier such as Johnny Apple, James “Scotty” Reston,
Clifton Daniel, Joe Lelyveld, Bill Kovach, Hedrick Smith, Seymour Hersh and Tom
Wicker, and Les Gelb who went on to the
Council on Foreign Relations as well as people whose names wouldn’t mean
anything to you such as George Thames, the head photographer at the bureau. I
can’t say that I was terribly impressed. They may have been talented but they
weren’t particularly outstanding specimens of humanity with the exception of
Wicker – with all the usual failings, generous helpings of self-importance,
childishness and egotism. Monkeys in suits was my conclusion. Maybe I should have gotten a clue, bought a
vowel, etc. stopped then and there and saved myself some effort but I couldn’t
think of anything else that I wanted to do. I didn’t have an
escape plan.
Nancy the pre-med student and former dancer, was in tears
after one phone call in South
Carolina. It was the first time she’d encountered raw
racism. Having spent considerable time in the south, I can’t say I’m surprised
enough to get upset. When the guy in Wyoming
I called referred to Obama as a zebra, I just said, that’s a racist thing to
say but I didn’t blow my stack. I don’t know what the Secret Service would do
to you but you’d probably wind up the ground. The ones I saw in action when I
got to see Obama up close and personal were no-nonsense types – more street
than the usual men-in-black but no-nonsense anyway. I’m not a fan of the Secret
Service – sometimes they try to intimidate critics. We may have an empire but
we don’t need a praetorian guard.
Informants and agent provacateurs are fairly easy to spot. There
are floaters who drift around the scene urging people to do illegal things,
which of course, is how they got their gig in the first place. After the Oklahoma City bombing, there was a former biker meth lab
chemist/neo-Nazi who was pretty obviously working for the ATFE drifting around Richmond.
Sometimes the cure is worse than the illness, given what the FBI did in the
sixties with COINTELPRO. That’s in their organizational DNA. They did some
terrible things aside from the usual black bag jobs: caused Jean Seberg’s
suicide and fomented trouble between Ron Karenga’s US group and the Black
Panthers in LA, which led to several deaths.
The Obama campaign has sent me several exhortations to call
this weekend, having calculated that I’ve made almost 3,000 calls – on
my.BarackObama.com anyway. Actually, I’ve probably made double or triple that
during my nine days in South Carolina and nine
during the Virginia
primary. But I didn’t make any calls today because it seemed like a good idea
to give the good, religious people of Kentucky a rest on Sunday.
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| Posted by Christopher Martin at | | | |
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when first we practice to deceive.
I got a call last night from the Webb campaign, which is apparently too stupid to figure out that I am no longer a supporter. I told the volunteer, "You crapped all over me when I was a volunteer, and now I'm crapping all over you."
The Webb campaign violated the first, most basic rule of politics: help your friends and fuck your enemies. That's Chicago machine politics, Boston ward politics, Tammany Hall politics, Washington, D.C. politics - politics everywhere. I spent two weeks as a phone bank volunteer for the Webb campaign and almost an entire day at the Maymont School on primary day. I was a volunteer while the Miller campaign worker was getting paid. The guy who ran the phone bank promised he would pick me up and take me to the after party at the Bank restaurant in downtown Richmond. Instead, he left me in the lurch and I had to hump a bunch of lawn signs back to my apartment by myself - which I later threw in the trash. The Webb campaign had a friend and now they have an enemy. To compound the insult, a campaign volunteer lied to me and told me that the person who broke his promise wasn't invited to the party and didn't attend - when another volunteer told me he was there.
To further compound their error, the call last night used up valuable minutes on my Virgin Mobile prepaid cellular phone, another incentive and reminder that I need to fuck the Webb campaign some more. So I will. I have glued a Confederate flag on the front of my Webb campaign t-shirt and a CSA patch on the side to remind potential voters of Webb's nonsensical statements about the reasons the Scotch-Irish fought for the Confederacy. Both Webb and George Allen are sons of the Confederacy espousing the same dangerous myth of the nobility of the Lost Cause. There's nothing noble about dying for slavery - even if those dying had different reasons than for slavery. There were plenty of Jews who fought in the German Wehrmacht during World War II. Were they noble? The problem with the United State military today may be too many white Southern males who believe that losing is a good thing.
I made a thunder run through Carytown this morning and now I am gallivanting around downtown Richmond with my detoured Webb shirt. Wait until I show up at the Second Street Festival with a sign reading, "Jim Webb: racist, sexist to the corps." And I'll be back at the Maymont School in November, but my sign will be different this time.
Jim Webb is nothing more than George Allen Light - like Miller Light and Bud Light. As one of the tribal elders on the Monroe Park bench facing the VCU campus told me, he is the lesser of two evils. The difference is that Allen has never done anything to me personally. I plan to vote for George Allen because things have to get worse before they can get better, and six more years of Allen's bogus cowboy bullshit - George W. Bush Light - should do the trick. People have to get thoroughly sick of the John Wayne simplistic moralism that is getting people killed in Iraq before they will turn to a rational alternative. Also, sticking it to Webb when the Allen campaign is on the ropes ensures a more balanced, interesting race. It's amusing when the Richmond Times-Dispatch says the campaigns should stop talking about racism and sexism and get to the real issue. HAW! HAW! HAW!
Another disturbing aspect of the Webb campaign is sexism. There were at least three women - Robin, Nicole, and Susanna, who could have done a better job of running the phone bank than the male lawyer. This suggests that Webb hasn't learned anything since his remarks about women in the Naval Academy dorms being a horny woman's dream - as if that wasn't a horny man's dream too. Yeah, me so horny. Me love you long time. Or as Bernard Goetz said, "You don't look too bad; here's another." The Webb campaign used a caricature of his primary opponent that some considered anti-semitic. And Allen's ethnicity may have been unearthed and raised by Webb's opposition research. The local Webb phone bank manager made a reference to "black bag jobs" and it's possible that they were monkey-wrenching, stealing Miller's yard signs.
I was also put off by Webb's brain-dead campaign management by out-of-state campaign consultants during the primary. He was wasting his time going to a Greek food festival - yeah, there's an important voting bloc in Richmond. He went to the Sine Irish Pub and Restaurant. If Webb doesn't have the Irish vote sewed up - being Scotch-Irish himself, and having written a book on the Scotch-Irish - he shouldn't have gotten in the race in the first place. Webb should have been campaigning in Jackson Ward with Donald McGeachin instead. And what sort of message does it convey when your campaign headquarters is way out in the suburbs rather than downtown? |
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| Posted by Christopher Martin at | | | |
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| Private Joker: The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive. |
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| Posted by Christopher Martin at | | | |
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Noah wants to be rich.
George wants to win the McArthur genius grant and the Nobel Prize for ending femal genital mutilation in Africa.
Audrey Hepburn, the fierce fashionista, is looking for her own miracle on 34th Street. She wants to own Macy's.
The Haughty Hottie wants to take Manhattan by storm.
The Flower Child wants to be a movie star. (She'll take Manhattan and Woody Allen for all he's got).
Kelly Justice wants to star in a vampire movie.
Fred Argoff wants to own the New York subway system and big chunks of Brooklyn even though he already owns a penthouse. He also wants to be mayor of New York and for Brooklyn to secede (it will be interesting to see how that works out.)
Richard Freeman wants to be the Playboy Advisor.
Not only does Mark want to shoot for the moon, he wants to walk on it. I'm not talking about Pirate Mark, but Pro-life Mark.
Fred Neal wants a documentary made on his pro-life campaign.
Pirate Mark wants to build buildings.
Mr. Pax Christi wants to own a restaurant.
Cliff wants a tall, beautiful, blonde VCU coed and to do more women than Wilt Chamberlain.
The Charmed Ones want to take over Scotland, er Channel Six, and are willing to commit diabolical deeds in order to do so. Just be sure and wear latex if you commit any crimes against nature. If the gloves fits, you must acquit.
Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in The Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus but it still wouldn't change the fact that I don't own a car! - Ferris Bueller's Day Off
I'm in New York state of mind as well. While in Manhattan in December, I hope to do some consulting work with the Mafia and discuss the liberation of China and the importation of Chinese women for sex work with the Tongs during my visit to Canal Street, home of many of the scenes in "Year of the Dragon," a Chinese-American "Scarface." Great movie, except for the tragic ending.
Sometimes people see qualities in you that you don't see yourself. Janeane Garofalo thinks I'm a cross between Steve McQueen in "Bullit" and Warren Beatty in "Shampoo." Janeane says I look presidential. That's funny. I say the same thing about her. She says I take her breath away.
Janeane at the recent CanWest Comedy Festival where she bombed like the Strategic Air Command
Without her glasses, Janeane ain't bad either. I'm flattered to be compared to Steve McQueen, but as the Beach Boys said, "That's not me." Except for this line in Bullit:
Walter Chalmers: Frank, we must all compromise.
Bullitt: Bullshit.
Unlike Bullit, I don't have any desire to eat a revolver, having seen the results of same. In any case, I don't like cops, nor would I play one on TV. Who made me that way? Cops.
I do see the part about Warren Beatty in "Shampoo."
Other people think I'm like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Hannibal Lecter, or Alexander (Alex) DeLarge in "A Clockwork Orange." Not seeing it. My best friend in Kentucky, a Marine in Vietnam, whom I asked to be the best man at my wedding, thought I reminded him of Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver." That may have been a case of projection: "A mentally unstable Vietnam war veteran works as nighttime taxi driver in a city whose perceived decadence and sleaze feeds his urge to violently lash out." Actually, I studiously avoided serving in Vietnam, have never driven a taxi nor wished to (a hazardous profession like convenience store clerk), have never owned a gun or used one, and I like decadence (I'm a big fan of Helmut Newton and Karl Louis) and sleaze (I read Hustler and Barely Legal occasionally but Larry Flynt isn't my cup of tea) and if 13-year-olds and prostitution were legal in this state, I'd be running an escort service for them rather than getting worked up about their choice of professions. As for mental instability, I'm a lot more stable than the ferals, freakazoids, vampires, werewolves, succubi, incubi, demons, zombies, and drugged-out, religion-addled, fear-crazed people roaming this planet. If you put a healthy person in an asylum, I'm sure he would seem abnormal to them - and annoyed as well.
Unlike Alex in "The Clockwork Orange," I have no problem resisting pretty women. I do it all the time. As for "rape," that's wishful thinking and a dangerous fantasy on some women's part. I don't trust any woman enough to indulge that particular fantasy. What have you done to earn that level of confidence? The answer is: jackshit, nothing, nada, zero, zilch. Why would I take that kind of risk? Nor am I interested in accomodating any woman's puerile stalking fantasies. As for ultraviolence, that says more about you than me - more projection. Like Sun Tzu, I believe that to win without fighting is best.
The ownership delusion
Another false impression that women suffer from is the result of wishful thinking on their part. I look like the owner to them. Or maybe a more accurate phrasing is that they think I could be the owner or they want me to be the owner. But I'm not. I used to live in a run-down apartment building on West Grace Street. The owner kept suggesting that I buy it. Apparently she had never run a financial background check on me. I could barely buy a futon, much less an apartment building. I was too polite and too politic to tell her that a) if I could afford to buy the building, I wouldn't be living in it, and b) if I had the money to buy the building, I had better uses for it than buying a dump like that.
A waitress at a short-lived restaurant called Pompey's Place at the Jefferson Hotel once said I looked like the owner of the hotel. But that was her fantasy, not mine. My fantasy was a 20-year-old blonde who looked like she had stepped off the cover of a Beach Boy album. My fantasy was real - her. Her fantasy was not. If I were the owner, an employee of the Jefferson Hotel wouldn't have gotten me in trouble with the Virginia Film Office.
An employee of Barnes & Noble on West Broad Street once took the time to show me how the bookshelves in the store were misaligned. I'm supposed to give a rat's ass? Do I look like I have $400 million or whatever in my back pocket so I can buy the chain and do something about it? And even if I could buy Barnes & Noble, why would I? Am I enthralled by stacks and stacks of John Grishman and Harry Potter novels apparently meant to delude customers into believing B&N has a comprehensive selection of books? According to Kelly Justice of Fountain Square Books in Shockhoe Slip, Barnes and Noble is a gift and coffee shop disguised as a bookstore. With Fountain Square and Barnes & Noble, more often than not I get the same answer: we don't have the book you want but we can order it. If I'm going to get the same answer, then I'd rather buy from a downtown bookstore that's expressive of someone's individuality rather than from a suburban big box that could be the Home Depot down the street - just substitute lumber for the books stacked to the ceiling. Those are my values. If I had the money to acquire Barnes & Noble, why not buy Janeane Garofalo's favorite bookstore, The Strand, and clone that across the country?
Gangsta's paradise
In the early nineties, I used to eat at a restaurant on West Broad Street around the corner from VCU called the Kokopeli Cafe. The owner, a real estate developer, predicted the boom that accompanied VCU's growth. He suggested that if I was ever in New York City, I should visit a certain restaurant in Chinatown that the Chinese Tongs frequented. When I mentioned this to the beautiful Chinese-American waitress at the Park Row coffee shop I frequented when I was in NYC last year, she informed me quite sharply that the Tongs had been wiped out. I asked when. She said, around the time "Rise of the Dragon" came out. Then she softened and suggested that if I wanted to see Chinatown as it was in the movie, I should visit Canal Street - where you can get a meal for $1 - and a nutritious one at that. And I must say the security guard in the Chinatown co-op was very polite when he asked me to get off their park bench. And then she allowed that the people who ran the Chinese buses might know something about them as well.
Years later, I fell in with a former Mafia lawyer from New Jersey. He claimed he only handled civil cases for them. Then again, he also claimed to have witnessed a mob hit in a card club in New Jersey. Uh, I don't believe you see that and live to tell the tale unless you are mobbed up, so to speak.
Then there's Janeane Garofalo, who wanted me to see two movies, "The Transporter" and "Sexy Beast" at the beginning of our relationship.
So why does gangsterism keep popping up in my life? Is it random or the universe tapping me on the shoulder? Or as a Marksist little old lady put it recently, "God kicking you in the ass."
I also hope to visit NYC strip clubs to get ideas for one in Richmond.
Anyhoo, as the Spanish poet Lorca observed, life is fired at you point blank. Or as Ferris Bueller notes, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." |
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| Posted by Christopher Martin at | | | |
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Mad Scientists of America
The Eccentrics Society |
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| Posted by Christopher Martin at | | | |
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Apple Computer
PEI, Inc.
LFP, Inc.
Target
Barnes & Noble
Hooter's
Starbucks
The New York Times
Bank of America
Yahoo
Go Daddy |
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| Posted by Christopher Martin at | | | |
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Life coaching - plan to get certified in structural consulting
Modeling agency
Homeless football
Peformance arts space/community space in downtown Richmond
Strip club
Removal of all statues from Monument Avenue and renaming it Soul Street.
Turning Richmond into Sin City, USA
Getting married and having a family |
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| Posted by Christopher Martin at | | | |
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Photograph celebrities for Playboy.
Shoot models and direct videos for Barely Legal.
Photograph models for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
Photograph models for Elle magazine. |
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| Posted by Christopher Martin at | | | |
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I like you! When the world is mine, your death shall be quick and painless"
- Stewie "The Family Guy"
Pinky: Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?
Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky...Try to take over the world!
Singers: They're Pinky and The Brain,
They're Pinky and The Brain,
One is a genius, the other's insane.
To prove their mousey worth,
They'll overthrow the earth.
They're pinky, they're Pinky and The Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain.
Meaningful work for everyone on the planet.
Optimum health for everyone on the planet.
Optimum nutrition for everyone on the planet.
Access to housing for everyone on the planet.
Access to education for everyone on the planet.
Peace, from neighborhoods to nations.
Elimination of female genital mutilation.
Dedicated to the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales.
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| Posted by Christopher Martin at | | | |
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