Ken's Blog

I am starting to feel bad for the Republican majority in Congress. They are trying desperately to act as though things are business as usual, but the Trump administration is gumming up the works.

You see, we are currently living in a legal framework that assumes the President of the United States and key members of his cabinet have not accepted millions of dollars of Russian payoff money. But with every day’s new revelation, it is getting harder and harder to ignore that such an assumption is, how shall I say it, an alternate fact.

So I propose, for the peace of mind of those poor Republican Senators and Congresspersons, the following amendment to American law: Let’s make it a requirement that the President and key members of his cabinet must all have personally been bribed by the Russians by some reasonably large amount — let’s say something in the eight figures.

This woul allow our legal framework to align itself to the reality. I suspect, once this change takes effect, that it will become a badge of honor for a member of the Administration to have accepted an extremely large bribe from the Russians. It will come to be seen as a way to project strength and authority.

We know, for example, that the President himself, in just a single Florida real estate deal, took a sixty million dollar bribe from the Russians. After knowing the man did something that impressive, how could anyone continue to doubt his leadership qualities?

And I suspect, from what I’m seeing now, that Jeff Sessions is not slouch either in this department. Of course Wilbur Ross has outdone them all.

Ross is the kind of like the guy at your friend’s party who brought the drugs. The others are pretty much just hanging out in the bathroom doing lines from his stash.

Some might object that such a legal change would run counter to the spirit of our Constitution. But if I were a Republican lawmaker I would have none of that guff. “Hey,” I’d say, “It’s the law now. What are you, unamerican?”

We’ve all had the experience: A song comes on the radio that you’ve never heard before. And from that very first listen, you know. This is a song that you will carry with you for the rest of your life. Later, you find that remember where you were when you first heard it.

I was hanging out with some friends this evening, and I raised this topic. Sure enough, everyone had their own personal list of songs. The ones that flew into their soul the very first time they heard it, and never left.

For me it’s a pretty eclectic list. They are songs from different eras, in wildly different genres: Billie Jean, Heart of Glass, Blues in the Night, Walk on the Wild Side, Bad Romance, Pirate Jenny, Don’t Think Twice it’s All Right, to name a few.

In some cases it’s only a particular version of a song. The very first time I heard Venus by Shocking Blue it became one of those songs. But the remake by Bananarama does nothing for me.

Then there are the songs that go even deeper, that end up shaping your very sense of who you are. When I was a teenager I heard Suzanne for the first time. It took only one listening. Leonard Cohen has pretty much owned my soul ever since.

Last night I had an incredibly vivid dream. I recall it now only in bits and pieces. There may have been a larger context or narrative, but if there was, that part is gone from my memory.

Yet I do remember that there was much anxiety and a feeling of great urgency, combined with a tremendous sense of movement through space — along corridors, down spiralling ramps, through doorways into large rooms, balconies, atria. It was, one might say, a highly architectural dream.

When I awoke, I found myself contrasting this dream experience with the way literature operates. Our ability to lose ourself in a work of narrative fiction is predicated on our willing suspension of disbelief.

We are able to sit in a darkened theater watching a deadly velociraptor chase after somebody precisely because we know it is not actually happening. If we were to actually confuse the fiction and the reality, we wouldn’t stay in that seat — we’d be tearing down the street ourselves, running away as if our life depended upon it.

The same goes for all genres of fiction, whether comedy, tragedy, romance or farce. We know it’s not real, and that is what gives us permission to enter the magic circle — to vicariously experience the full gamut of emotions, be those emotions love or hate, loyalty or betrayal, hope or despair.

But dreams are not like that. When you are in a dream, you don’t generally know you are in a dream. To the dreamer, it all feels like it is actually taking place. It is not until the moment that you regain consciousness — perhaps startled awake from the vividness of what you have just experienced — that you understand it was all in your head.

So it appears that the dream state constitutes an entirely different category of fictional experience. There is indeed a sort of circle that is entered by the dreamer, but it is not really the “magic circle” of fiction. I guess it might be called the dream circle.

The patterns are real
But they are not the same ones
That you think you see

I now understand
How Trump happened. They opened
The wrong envelope.

Yesterday I was looking for a silver chain as part of a present for a friend. Not a piece of jewelry per se — I already had the thing I wanted to hang on the end of the chain. I just needed the chain itself.

So I walked into a jewelry store in the neighborhood, one that Google Maps had told me was a likely candidate. The nice woman there said that they don’t sell silver chains. They only sell complete pieces of jewelry.

Normally, she said, she would send me up to the jewelry district on 47th St. But yesterday being a Saturday, none of the places up there were going to be open. So she suggested I go to the KMart on Astor Place.

That seemed unsatisfying to me. Big box retail outlets are so generic. Somehow, the energy seemed wrong for what was supposed to be a personal gift.

Besides, I was on my way to check out a multimedia yoga class in mid-town, for which some friends of mine had created procedural interactive music and computer graphics. I thought surely there would be someplace along the way that would do the trick.

Now here is the interesting part: Because I was looking for a specific type of store, I found myself looking very carefully at my surroundings, far more than I usually do. I started noticing cafes, music shops, convenience/liquor/hardware/stationery stores, a Salvation Army drop-off center, and lots and lots of other things besides.

It wasn’t that these places hadn’t been there before, just I had never really noticed them. For some reason, having a “mission” was making me hyper-aware of my surroundings. Even when it came to places that were completely off of that mission.

I wonder whether there is a general principle here. Perhaps when we are focused on finding something, we switch into a general mode of gathering information from our surroundings. Maybe there is a specific mental mode of “looking for things”, a legacy of evolution, that activates some salient part of our brain and causes it to kick into high gear.

It turned out that the woman was right. I found no shop yesterday between Greenwich Village and midtown that carried silver chains. Although I did discover lots and lots of other cool places, some of which I plan to go back and visit.

That evening I went to the KMart on Astor Place, shortly before closing time. Sure enough, they had exactly what I was looking for.

Which I guess shouldn’t really come as a surprise. After all, if you want to buy a chain, what better place to look than a chain store?

This week, during my wanderings around Greenwich Village, I happened to walk past 114 E 13th St. And I noticed that it has a name.

The building is officially called the “American Felt Building”. I have since looked it up on-line, and it turns out that this building was originally the home of the American Felt Company.

Now long gond, back in the day that esteemed company supplied the felt for the hammers of Steinway pianos. The building currently seems to be the home of condo apartments.

But my first impression when I saw the words “American Felt Building” was that it sounded like a sentence in a newspaper headline. I can still see that headline in my head: “Extra, extra, read all about it! American felt building!”

It remains clear why that particular American was feeling this particular building, or why the event is newsworthy. But that’s only the more reason to pay your nickel and read the daily paper. Good stories always begin with a mystery.

I wonder how many other buildings around New York City have names that sound like newspaper headlines. Are there lots of them? I’ve never thought about it before, but now I’m going to keep an eye out.

In case you are wondering, yes I did indeed walk up to the side of the building, reach out my hand, and feel it. The building felt nice.

Last night, as I was walking home, I encountered a bubble man in Washington Square Park. But what is a bubble man?

A bubble man, in this context, is a guy who creates giant bubbles. These are beautiful ephemeral sculptures. They exist for a few seconds, and then they are gone.

I stoode there, in rapt attention, as he created one beautiful bubble after another. Then I asked, somewhat shyly, whether I could try my hand at it.

The man graciously handed me the bubble making apparatus, and then I was off and running. I created one beautiful bubble after the other, throwing each new creation out into the unsuspecting air.

Each bubble lasted for only a few seconds, but that was sufficient — that was enough. So herein below, for your edification, is a photographics record, for all time, of yours truly, Ken the bubble man.

Our nation on fire
Yet in New York a bubble
Of sweet sanity

Every time I think that Donald Trump couldn’t possibly do something more dispicable and ugly, more hateful and counter to what this country stands for, he surprises me. I am starting to think that this administration is the greatest enemy our nation is facing.

ISIS can kill our bodies, but they do not have the power to destroy us from within. In contrast, Donald Trump’s relentlessly hateful policy decisions pose a far more fundamental danger to America.

This so-called administration is a cancer. This cancer has infiltrated the body of our society and is now eating away at our very core principles.

I have gone beyond feeling disgust for this narcissistic self-aggrandizing con-man. Disgust for such a crass operator is so obvious that it is no longer even important.

What is important, and what I now feel, is fear for our beautiful nation. When we pick up the pieces in another two years, after the mid-term elections finally erect a road block to the cynically corrosive policies that are oozing daily from our own White House, just how great will the damage have been?

I feel terrible for all of us, but mostly for the well-meaning people who voted for this bozo. How will they ever explain to their grandchildren that they were conned into supporting such an anti-American swindle?