SEE: FRANKENSTEIN, BRIDE OF by Andy Biscontini

She didn’t remember Todd the broker saying anything about the place being radioactive. In fairness, he probably didn’t know.

But the fact was that the windowless single-story cinderblock building which had sat unmolested for nearly a century at the back of the muddy lot upon which “the Nines” now stood had, in 1907, been the laboratory of a fearless and visionary amateur scientist with fantastically greasy hair, large goggles and elbow-length rubber gloves, as reckless as he was entrepreneurial, who, under the patronage of a consortium of Lithuanian financial pioneers anxious for a toe in the patent game, had dispersed a grain of un-named radioisotope into an ionic quantum field bisecting space and time in an ill-advised attempt to fuse the lesser developed theories of Nikola Tesla with the work of the Curies.

The initial explosion blew the roof off the lab and transported the scientist, his pinhead assistant, his talking cockney test rat Milo and the occupants of the Catholic orphanage next door into a strange and frightening future continuum along a twisted, distant ribbon of the multiverse.

Todd was a nice guy. An actor. She hoped he made it.

For one hundred and three years the lot remained hidden from view of the sidewalk by a corrugated metal fence, later plywood, later hurricane fence threaded with PVC and topped with a wild coil of litter-strewn razor wire.

It had passed through eight owners, scores of leases and countless escrows before being snatched up in ‘03 by the first in a series of twelve smallish legal entities. In the subsequent years it bankrupted six General Contractors, confounded thirty-seven bankers and eighteen lawyers, and provided shelter for dozens of crusty punks from the Pacific Northwest until finally, after nineteen months of more or less contiguous bouts of construction, it was deemed complete enough to hit the market in October of ‘08.

“999” sat between “664” and “668” on the grid. The limited liability entity now stuck with it, a cautious and optimistic bunch, were determined to break the cycle of ruinous whammies that had befallen each of their predecessors and paid the borough thirty-nine thousand dollars to get “999.”

It was worth a try. Like all bad numbers, those sixes had kept coming up, year after year, never twice alike in manner, ever inexplicable in circumstance, all financially devastating, occasionally lethal. Even after the re-numeration, anyone who knew the history prayed to their faith each time they passed it by.

They moved into their unit in February ’09. But they didn’t buy. They were renting the Nines! as the bus-stop posters said. She guessed it was cheap in relation to what people were paying, but it was hard for her to call it cheap. Bertie still brought home a trickle of ad money through the S-Corp he made with his college clique but lately they seemed to be spending most of their time interviewing interns. His contacts gave her some coding projects she could do at home with the baby, whose nap patterns synched comfortably with her intervals of JAVA and yoga. There was some money left from selling the condo in Minneapolis, but month-to-month more was going out than coming in.

The first floor stayed empty: flexible retail. The second, intended for commercial use, was now being converted. The third and fourth were occupied, but it was unclear who had purchased them and difficult to get an answer as to from whom: there were zombies living on the third floor, the fourth hosted a succession of discreet European partiers whose wee-hour subsonic resonances sometimes awoke her. The fifth floor had been sold but was as yet unoccupied.

Theirs was one of three occupied units on the sixth floor, which was being sub-leased from the scion of a once-eminent family of arms dealers who was tied up off the grid in the marijuana trade. Their rent checks went to a management company with a Bayside address.

They had the southwest corner. They could see the water and the bridge. The windows were big but they didn’t open. At night the skyline bared its electric teeth at her.

The air conditioner filter clogged easily. The timer of the exhaust fans on the roof had been incorrectly set and produced a draw only once a day through ducts hazy with gypsum from the unfinished floors above.

The quantum field had a different effect on everyone. On the third floor it had atomized mold growing between the wallboards, hence the zombies, who were usually polite but occasionally let slip on the elevator that they wanted to eat her brain. They were slow and weak and she wasn’t afraid of them.

There was no mold in her apartment: their side of the building had already been clad in Tyvek, windward on the night last autumn when the spores were in the air.

But Bertie was having a tough time of it. The peculiar charge of the bosons in the field penetrated one’s being, permeated the connective tissue of the mind. It disrupted the bonds of molecular synaptic transactions, it curdled electro-chemical cognition and warped the exchanges over which interstitial perspective was defined. His rigid struggle against it kept his perception locked in trembling, narrowly split double, closely separated perfectly dissonant stereo channels of everything, all the time, immobilized and torn apart, feeling compelled to make virtue of waste and loathing himself for it, losing healthy weight and wearing skinny jeans. She’d tried to explain to him what was happening, but couldn’t guess what he’d heard. He spent little time at home and she didn’t mind.

She was getting stronger every day. Her yoga practice evolved to bring her chakras into a ringing diminished harmonic interval with the energy of the field. She didn’t need him anymore. She vibrated. A coil of gray hair grew in from above her left temple. She wouldn’t dream of touching it.

Lauren Ann was a beautiful and amazing baby. She could bake a potato in less than a minute with her bare hands. Such beautiful, tiny hands, lifting the fist-sized organic Yukon Gold from the shopping bag and holding it out to her like an offering, her downy crown a halo in the polarized afternoon window light, hazel eyes aglow. Her daughter’s psychic voice was clear and calm, strange but wise:

Mommy. Potato.

It was hot to the touch. She passed it between her fingertips and put it on a plate. Wisps of steam rose from the fork’s rupture in the skin. The inside was perfectly flaky, light and delicious. She consumed it reverently under Lauren Ann’s patient and encouraging smile.

Today, the howling wind called her to the roof.
She carried Lauren Ann with her.
The storm came on fast from the east, an inverted ocean overtaking the city.
The last of the sunset burnished the steel, glass and brick-face around her in gold against churning billows of blue-black and gray cloud.
A cataract of newspaper and deli bags spiraled skyward down the block.
Her hair rose along her scalp.
Lauren Ann levitated and hovered above her left shoulder, aloft in shimmering aurorae, squealing with joy.
Lightning spread across the sky from a point beyond the needle of the Empire State Building.

Her scream bent light.

Not a scream of terror, but of beautiful and wrathful Becoming.


© 2010 Andy Biscontini

Andy Biscontini's film EVERY DOG'S DAY available here.

CURRENT EVENTS HOMEWORK: AFGHANISTAN by Andy Biscontini

You have eighteen months to demonstrably answer the following questions:

(Demonstrative graphs and diagrams are acceptable, but must be accompanied by synopses not to exceed one thousand words.)

1. Is it possible for the United States to establish responsible relationships with or facilitate the establishment of relationships between enough population factions within Pakistan and Afghanistan to establish a functioning economic system? If so, do we expect some kind of cut in return?

2. If Afghanistan has a future as a non-narcotic agricultural society, is the most obvious relationship not one of supplier to Pakistan’s densely populated urban areas? If so, would it then be Pakistan’s interest and responsibility as purchasing (consuming) economic partner to maintain the health of Afghani society, with implicit potential for cultural influence?

3. If the only thing the U.S. gets out of the whole thing is the satisfaction of fostering the development of healthy and benevolent sovereign societies, does that justify the expenditure of blood and treasure?

4. Wouldn’t it be cool if Britain agreed to shoulder the investment in urban Pakistan that could help finance the reorganization of agriculture in Afghanistan? If so, would that be a preferable use of their suddenly scant pounds as opposed to their current military presence in Afghanistan, not to mention a heartwarming shot at post-colonial reconciliation?

5. Is it called “market-making” when you create a market for healthy food and agricultural products while setting non-exploitative terms with your providers? If not, why?

6. Is it rare for people from healthy societies to want to blow everything up?

©2010 Andy Biscontini

Rocktoberfest!

In the spirit of last month’s confluence of Labor Day, September 11th, New York Fashion Week and the Pittsburgh circle-jerk (you can stick your 24-hour news cycle), allow me to indulge in a brief, optimistic and maybe even plausible meditation on the future of work in New York City. I mean beyond selling hot dogs at Ratner's Prokhorov's Nets Arena.

The financial industry doesn’t yet seem to have fully acknowledged the extent to which it so massively bungled the civic basket we’d entrusted to it (you know, the one with all our golden eggs in it), but it’s exciting to see people’s interest in fashion expand incrementally into an interest in the garment industry, because I think it could be poised to make a comeback as a staple industry and save the city.

Yes, I know that the conventional wisdom of the last thirty years has held that the job of the future would be in a cubicle, and that we would move away from the economy of things and into the economy of ideas. I’ve yet to grasp the connection between cubicles and ideas, but I think anyone with a brain can see that much of the last thirty years’ prevailing wisdom has proven to be fairly well full of shit.

Manufacturing matters. It creates jobs. And, if you don’t put the screws to your workforce in order to hoard profit, it could create good-paying jobs and meaningful rewards for innovation.

I’m not talking about going back to the days of Triangle Shirtwaist. I’m talking about building safe, clean and energy-efficient production infrastructure and paychecks sufficient to keep up with fair rents and sustain a robust retail and service sector, stabilize the real estate market and generate a tax base solid enough to maintain high-level civic services.

Along with media, garments are perhaps the best-suited form of manufacturing for a high-density population center: not too many toxic by-products and plenty of jobs for a skilled work force.

“Cash for Clunkers” aside, good pay for good work is often the very thing that people who complain about “redistribution of wealth” are complaining about. According to them, those smart enough to sucker the greatest amount of money out of the greatest number of people deserve the greatest rewards.

So this is my plug for systemic investment in the garment industry. If “systemic risk” is accepted to be justification for bailing out the white-collar casinos, “systemic investment” ought to be the other side of it, providing a lifeline to everyone else.

I know. Pipe-dream. Fine.

But just for kicks, what would need to happen?

First, and least likely, is a shift in investment capital away from the quick-blast-of-money-every-five-minute cokehead culture of Wall Street and into the more modest, demanding and challenging world of maintaining steady long-term returns.

(Yes. People love to gamble. And they should be allowed to. I hear Vegas needs help too.)

Second, there would need to be cooperation between designers, manufacturers and national retailers that builds on the current -- and encouraging -- trend toward more targeted regional buying strategies and greater attention to quality mid-market designs.

At some point, vertical integration beyond a particular scale (say, American Apparel) would inevitably become tempting, and if we’re truly doomed to keep repeating history over and over again, this would be where we slip up.

It might not be a prescription to save high-end fashion, but what most of us think of as “fashion” might prove to be its own worst enemy.

One of the nicer things to come out of this Recession, from where I sit, is that more credibility is going to people who can mix and match affordable items in creative and attractive ways than in sporting head-to-toe hot labels or prefab looks. It favors style (which I associate with taste and individuality) over fashion (which I associate with conformity and sounds like ‘fascism,’ which I hate).

Encouraging the co-existence of individuals’ personal tastes, be they aesthetic or utilitarian, and increasing the availability of diverse items in multiple markets exponentially increases the potential for brand development and sustenance.

The third fundamental systemic change we’d need to see is a return of respect for the trades. Gifted tailors, seamstresses, printers and machinists capable of innovation and teaching others are as valuable an asset as a designer or marketer, no?

There are already muted cultural rumblings of it, and not just in the form of ex-bankers buying books by phDs waxing romantic about motorcycle maintenance (I’ll leave it alone, but as someone who’s spent much of my post-collegiate life in the presence of power tools and seriously skilled craftsmen, I feel the same way about that as baseball fans feel about guys who try to turn a game into a philosophical treatise).

But what we need isn’t simply more i-bankers to buy custom shelving and have a beer with the installer (not to say they shouldn’t). What we need is a serious re-consideration of aptitude assessment in the educational system and reinvestment in trade education.

Which means that we, as a culture, would have to stop equating work to cosmic punishment and somehow figure out how to break the cycle of exploitation and loafing that has so defined the labor relations of the industrial and post-industrial age.

(That’s why this city needs to ditch Bloomberg. He’s smart enough in his way, but he still doesn’t get it. If you look at the link, keep in mind that the MTA is a private company providing a public service and chew on that.)

For the time being, until our workforce becomes competitive again, most of these skilled jobs (and I don’t care what anybody says, I consider sewing as much of a skill as knowing Excel) would go to immigrants. As per tradition. An excellent opportunity to revamp the immigration system: give people a reason to go on the books and a chance to straight-up contribute to society. Duh.

As for my generation, our skilled labor pool seems to be dominated by lawyers, media and the military. So one might think we ought to have enough business plans, marketing apparatus and trained logistical support to go around.

Yet here we are.

Since so much of our private capital can’t seem to see their small intestine in front of their nose (do the math), such initiatives may need to come from the public sector.

And since Biden’s supposed to start opening the valve on the remainder of the stimulus funds ramping into the mid-terms, now’s the time to get those plans in order. Otherwise it’ll surely fizzle and poop out just like the Republicans seem to want it to.

Forgive my indulgence in speculation, but these kinds of vague and general ideas are really all I can afford to invest at the moment, and as a survival-wage media piece-worker, all I stand to gain is a decent city to live in and a chance at a job someday.


copyright, © 2009 Andy Biscontini

Great!

Untitled from Andy Biscontini on Vimeo.

As the Summer That Wasn't winds to a close and the sea change some people seem to have been hoping -- or fearing -- would change life in America (universal health care, financial regulation, the prying of guns from cold, dead hands) reveals itself to be little more than a fart in the pool (incremental compromise, bailout bonuses, “take your gun to church night”), I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on what it is that makes this country Great.

Or, more accurately, Almost Great.

Because our Greatness in the world is not, nor arguably has ever been, based on any actual Greatness, but rather on the sustained potential for Greatness, and the ability of at least a portion of the population at any given moment to never stop striving for it, even if that involves shooting ourselves in the foot.

For if our Greatness lies in our potential for Greatness, to attain actual Greatness would be to destroy that which made us Great. Perhaps that’s why we seem to be hardwired to take two steps backward, or at best sideways, for every half-step forward.

Let me confess outright to being an optimist who loves this country and is proud of his grandfather’s contribution to defeating the Nazis. Landing on the moon was also cool. So are jazz, rock and roll, Thomas Pynchon and the automobile.

But optimism based on delusion is foolishness, and the surest way to destroy something you love is to idealize it (case studies: Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, James Dean, Michael Jackson, the Constitution...).

Where the rest of the world’s populations, especially the social democracies of Europe (not without their own serious problems) and myriad local micro-economies of Asia (which will still exist once the current wave of centralized global investment recedes) have grown out of thousands of years of natural civic growth, the United States began only hundreds of years ago with the genocidal scrubbing of generations of existing indigenous civic progress and the imposition of a new and experimental socio-economic paradigm that was simultaneously a social experiment based on Enlightenment notions of human rights (irony noted) and a global commercial venture in the exploitation of natural resources, including human populations.

Rejecting the cynical view that the rights of man were nothing more than rhetoric adopted to sucker a population of hard-up farmers and craftsmen into the Revolutionary Army, I’ll say that the current relationship between those two founding principles is problematic in that, as they have grown increasingly divergent, we only acknowledge the former while living in the latter: the spirit of freedom in the Declaration of Independence is celebrated annually, men and women die for it daily, but the social framework in which we function from day to day is purely commercial.

The actual, hard parameters by which our individual freedoms are defined, be they narrow or vast, are drawn by neither the morality of Church, the laws of State nor the bonds of Family, but by the dictates of Commerce. We all know it. And it’s always been that way.

Everything in our lives depends on it: where we live, if and where we work and how we get there, the decisions we can or can’t make, our social status, our access to opportunity. It is so deeply integrated into the matrices of our existence that it has become inextricable from our selves.

Which, within the context of a Commercial Democracy, should not have to be a bad thing.

But, if left unchecked by social mandate, it can (and has, again and again) quickly become incredibly socially destructive.

Central to the problem as I see it is the fact that there has never been a tradition of open social discourse regarding Capital and its relation to society in the history of the United States.

Since the Declaration of Independence, I can think of only two organized movements to attempt such an engagement between Capital and the population in any significant way: the American Socialist movement of the early 20th century and the latter Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s.

(RIP, Ralph Nader)

Both were met with brutal oppressive violence, imprisonment and assassination.

Without falling into the kind of conspiratological nonsense that makes it even easier to write me off as a crackpot than it already is, or the kind of studied confrontation that would make me worth bumping off, suffice it to state that historical events make it difficult for me to swallow the argument that our system is shaped by unforced, organically occurring “market forces".

In the abstract, the dominant commercial culture of America, which bears de facto responsibility for one of the larger nations on the planet, for which it has never been held meaningfully accountable, remains terrified by the prospect of publicly acknowledging that the American Dream exists within a framework of an actual, tactile, real America made up of dirt and rock and water and human beings who get cancer from time to time and like to fuck.

Now might be a good time to revisit “The Grapes of Wrath” next to Nick Reding’s “Methland” to contemplate how the processes by which the combination of nature (drought) and unchecked free-market principles (banks) led Agriculture into the hands of conglomerates, and how it left a wake of blight decades wide.

Before you start screaming “pinko!” you should know that I believe in private capital and think it has an important place in the social compact, and that profit and competition can be effective engines for innovation.

But we live in a society in which no such compact defining the obligations of power has ever been articulated (unless you count Carnegie's well-meaning if lopsided "Gospel of Wealth," which I don't).

I also believe that the structural flexibility of the federal system allows for capital to flourish in a manner other than it currently does. Under current practices, the goal remains for individuals to suck enough wealth out of the confusion of the status quo to be somewhere else when the dam inevitably breaks. (See Johnstown, PA, 1889). You don't have to be a socialist to question whether or not that's good for society.

If you’re going to have a government (disclaimer: I consider anarchism the domain of the narcissistic ideological retard), it is the responsibility of that government as an extension, if we’re going to get representative about it, of We the People, to ensure that business is conducted in a way that benefits society and maintains the rule of law and our individual liberties.

As it is, our federal government has never been much more than Commerce’s scapegoat, enabler, whipping boy or attack dog, depending on which party was in power.

There’s no reason profit should, as a concept, negate the right of individuals to earn sufficient means for the opportunity to live a good life according to their abilities. But in this country, as income inequality grows, it has become increasingly unlikely.

And becoming big enough to swallow your competition doesn’t count as “competition.”

The Reagan Revolution has been seen to fruition, and it turned out to suck. Hard.

Until the Republican Party acknowledges that and comes up with a new approach not based on bald cons, they will not be relevant beyond what they currently are – a disorganized, bloated and fragile backstop against an increasingly well-armed, uneducated and angry right-wing fringe.

Meanwhile, the Democrats deserve credit for maintaining the consistency of their uselessness even with a mandate and a majority (sweet Christ what will it take to get Pelosi out of office?)

Barack Obama’s “Philadelphia Speech” is a landmark because it acknowledged the validity of the anger that still lingers in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, and by doing so confirmed the real possibility of the fulfillment of racial reconciliation.
(A beer at the White House? Between a black Harvard Professor and a white Cop? Seriously? I’ll pass.)

But the fact is, we have no problem talking about race in America. In fact, we love to talk about it in the same way we love to talk about real estate – in short-term, superficial and ultra-personalized terms.

Apparently, though, we’re still no more “ready” to talk about Capital’s relationship to society than we are to talk about single-payer health care. (I mean, what’s up with that?)

Nerves are so raw about it that the gentlest intimation of the need for discourse is branded incitement to class warfare – which, let me be very clear, is to be avoided -- and this silence has all but guaranteed the continuity of intransigence. It is assumed that violence is inevitable once the subject is raised.

To be able to address it non-violently as a nation through elective democracy and rational debate would render us truly, actually Great.

Which seems to be more than we can bear.

I don’t know where the voices in this conversation will come from. The easily dismissed postings of un-credentialed outsider thinkers like myself aren’t going to make a dent. But I feel an urgent need to begin to hear them.

The Unions are in the woods and haven’t been articulate since Debs.

I don’t think the Obama Administration has the credibility to address it: Geithner and Summers may know how to talk to bankers and policy-makers but they sure as hell don’t know how to talk to anybody else.

And at this point Rubin, if he really is smarter than the rest of the knuckleheads who claim to have believed that anything expressed mathematically was a good idea (and that the clusterfuck we’re in now was an honest case of putting the chart before the horse and not a bunch of quantitative sand kicked in our faces), might be evil and thus can’t be counted on to come up with anything socially constructive.

Nor do I know where this public discourse will occur, with the media so widely (and deservedly) distrusted, disoriented and chewing on its own tail out of starvation (not to say bought and sold).

But my sense of urgency is not ill-founded.

In the near term, unemployment benefits for millions are about to run out – and indefinite extension is not an answer. In the middle term, at some point a large number of military men and women will have to come home, and they’ll need jobs – keeping them in the army forever is not an answer. And in the long term – Christ, this is the long term. We’re soaking in it.

Admittedly, the outlook for sane national discourse is shaky.

The minority core of “birthers” and ersatz-brownshirts screaming down Health Care Reform at Town Halls is not encouraging. Nor are the moron hippy progeny who attempted to take over the New School last year.

I realize that insulting everybody may not be the best way to establish a non-combative framework for social rhetoric, but accepting that the loudest voices on both sides are idiots seems an obvious place to start.

Yet my optimism remains intact.

Because when I ask small business people from various industries (and political inclinations) what it would take for things to work out for them, after the inevitable reaction of a jaded blank stare and a condescending pat on the head, more often than not comes a string of ideas that, while perhaps unprecedented in recent memory, are rational, practical, real, plausible and, in a real America not governed by the dream logic of vainglorious nimrods, possible.

But I’m not a fool.

I fully realize that, for the most part, we as a nation really just want things to get Back to Normal.

We’re all just waiting for the day when we wake up and find ourselves again on cruise control in Dream America.

Where the parameters of our imagined freedom are as vast as the golden clouds of toxic credit gilding the horizon and the nitwits on CNBC (Complete Numbskulls Bloviating Ceaselessy) again chirp hosiahs to the casino.

Where the world magically resets itself with each morning bell to a new set of ever-fresh possibilities, like the B of A commercial tells us we think it should.

Where we are again free to sweat the small stuff, unfettered by yesterdays, tomorrows, or the responsibility of thinking about anything bigger than how to sell a breadbox because we’re confident that people richer and thus smarter than ourselves are taking care of it.

Where that asshole really deserves to pocket nine digits a year – and if we were that asshole, we would too.

Where our children will never have to learn how to do or make anything, because they will be paid to sit and watch the computer, filled with quality drugs to keep them interested and granted tower-blocks full of a foreign-born underclass to fix their toilets.

And we shall all be forever full of our own sustained potential for Greatness.

Merry Xmas

Merry X-mas!
Uploaded by andybiscontini

A Song for Our Times

Open Letter to a Mayor

As of next week, I will have spent one third of my life in New York City. A little bit more, but I’m not going to get into decimals.

Still, I don’t call myself a New Yorker. Home will always be Lansdowne, PA. In the National League the Phillies will always be my team over the Mets. Philadelphia is the metropolis associated with my formative memories, and I wasn’t in New York for the Bad Old Days so much on everybody’s mind nowadays.

But I do love this town, and I do love New Yorkers. Heck, I married one.

Beyond the worn-out stereotypes of street hustlers, "dem-dese-dose" knuckleheads, black-clad culture vultures and whiny neurotics, there’s a warmth, a deep sense of humor, a genuine value placed on art and talent, an openness to foreign cultures, an incredible work ethic and a profound understanding of community forged by two decades of blight and tempered to such steel that the following two decades of oppressive development and quick-buck gentrification haven’t been able to fully displace it.

The past two Mayors of New York like to take credit for the city’s current state as a safe, well-functioning metropolis.

Don’t believe them.

In many ways, Rudy Giuliani was the beneficiary of the crack epidemic and the community groundwork laid by his predecessor, the much-maligned David Dinkins who, while not necessarily cut out to be Mayor, was an intelligent man with some good ideas who understood the city.

Giuliani inherited a generation that had witnessed first-hand the destruction of individuals, families and communities to drug scourge and survived it. He made a brutal show of ‘taming’ a city that wanted nothing more than to move up and move on.

Let me relay a story as told to me by a friend years ago. It was early ’95 and my friend, an editor, was working late at a post-production office with five other people. A guy with a gun got in (a delivery had been made and a door left open) and held everybody up. As the police filled out the report, the cop told him, “Used to be we’d have to fill out five incident reports cause there’s five of you got robbed. Now we fill out one. You wonder why crime’s down in New York?”

The brilliance of streamlined paperwork and “broken windows” policing was that by creating the feeling that New York City was safer, it attracted investment and tourists, which created jobs, which people gladly took.

Unfortunately, Giuliani proceeded to put the screws to the very communities upon whose backs he stood, cutting after-school programs' funding and opening the door to development and jacked-up rents designed to swap out the city’s struggling working people with rich white kids for whom the city became an urban theme park in which they could play dress-up and throw around their cash, a phenomenon that exploded out of control under Bloomberg (I know, I sound like such an old grouch...try spending ten minutes on Ludlow St. or Bedford Ave on a Friday night. You’ll turn into an old grouch too.)

By the time he left office, the only people in the city who liked Giuliani were the kind of outer-borough Italian-Americans who still pine for Mussolini (a similarly effective public servant). Yeah, that includes 9/11. This city got through that because of the greatness of our firemen, our cops, our steelworkers, our OEM and our citizens. (Yes, I understand that those city services were paid for by commercial tax revenue. No, I don’t want to chase business out of NYC.)

Then in swoops Mike Bloomberg on the Gospel of Wealth to save the city’s stalled economy. Now he wants to stick around to help us through the current crisis, which is a direct result of the unsustainable nature of the prosperity that saved us then. (There’s some forward thinking.)

The common euphemism is that ‘he has the trust of the business community.’

Read that as, ‘rich white people feel assured that he’s looking out for them.’

I’d like to share a couple of brief stories that illustrate why, in my opinion, we don’t need Bloomberg (never mind that he wants an absurd one-time repeal of term limits without putting it up for a public referendum. Does that make him an Oligarch or a Plutocrat?)

The Blackout of ’03:

Early evening. Edna and I were riding our bikes over to our friend Jeff’s place in Carroll Gardens to grill the steaks that would have rotted in our freezer.

I think it was at the intersection where Flatbush, Lafayette and Fulton all kind of come together near BAM in downtown Brooklyn (an unwieldy intersection even with functioning traffic lights), a group of black teenagers had stationed themselves at each intersection, taking cues from a man in the middle with a stopwatch and a whistle (and a baseball bat, just in case) who timed out the intervals by which the traffic was kept flowing. There wasn't a cop in sight.

Voluntary human traffic lights. A far cry from the looting and riots of ’77.

You can’t attribute that to a Mayor.

Then there was the transit strike, when Mayor Mike refused to even sit down with union leaders, labeling them criminals for daring to stand up for themselves against a notoriously corrupt and dodgy private agency.

And what were they striking for? One of the items on the agenda was the relaxation of the MTA’s dress code, which officially forbade employees to wear dreadlocks, facial hair or traditional headgear as per their culture or religion. If you’ve ever seen the Rastafarian or Sikh conductors, you’d know that they take a great deal of pride in their appearance and present themselves professionally.

Name another organization that places those kinds of rigid cultural restrictions on one’s appearance. I’ll help you out: the Taliban.

What the Mayor failed to understand or respect is that what keeps the subways and buses running isn’t the record profits of the MTA or the compensation packages of its executives, but the dedication and competence of its men and women in the tunnels and on the streets.

As we head into tough times (I’ve been having tough times for the last seven years so welcome to Andyland, everybody), what this city needs is a Mayor who can galvanize and inspire its communities and the people and families who hold them together. Giuliani antagonized them. Bloomberg has, at best, tolerated them. In the coming years, that's not going to be enough. These community leaders have been squeezed and screwed-over for funding for four decades. Unlike our Mayor, they've demonstrated that they know how to accomplish things without a fat bankroll.

A quick word about the schools: the corporatization of the Board of Ed may raise test scores but it’s not saving schools. I know several dedicated and talented people who have been so disgusted and fed up with the current teachers’ contract and the us-against-them mentality between teachers and administration fostered by it that they’ve turned their backs on teaching. You can’t meet the challenges of engaging and educating city kids without administrative support – as it is, the principals are cast in the antiquated theory of management that holds that their job is to pressure the teachers into increased productivity. Teaching human beings isn't making widgets. That’s not ‘accountability.’ It’s idiocy.

(Edna likes to point out that the gentry of our deeply gentrified neighborhood, while rallying around getting landmark status for the Domino Sugar Factory, all put their kids on buses and send them to charter or private schools, but none of them rallies for the local public schools.)

Yes, Bloomberg’s had a positive effect on many other aspects of the city government, and any successor with a brain would naturally keep them in place and build on the work he’s done. Hell, I think Ray Kelly’s done an overall good job with the NYPD, flagrant disregard for civil liberties during the RNC notwithstanding. I mean, I can understand protecting us from terrorists, but I don't get why they seem so determined to protect us from satirists and bicyclists... (The differences between the shooting of Sean Bell and that of Amadou Diallo and the abuse of Abner Louima are worth examining in a post of their own.)

Bloomberg's apparent infatuation with London disturbs me. There you have a city of highly centralized wealth and deeply stratified classes in which four of its youth were significantly disenfranchised as to blow themselves up in crowded subway cars. Hardly a model. Kids with a future don't turn to extremism.

This city needs to stop selling out its communities and put them to work.

The “business community” needs to understand that a healthy and prosperous working population is what will keep this city a safe place for their children to spend their money, stagger down the streets and piss on the doorsteps of people like myself before passing out in their own vomit. Fun!

Now that easy riches and cushy jobs don’t await the ivy-league i-bankers who’ve been helping to inflate rents, perhaps this city will become safe for the middle class again.

To all of those new New Yorkers worried about the equity they stand to lose in the condos they bought at the height of a bubble market should property values come back to Earth, ask yourself: did you buy here to make a profit, or to make a home? This isn't just a place for the young and fabulous to sew their wild oats, or a pit-stop on the way to their first million, this is a place where people live.

As the glitter is swept away and the tarnish beneath shined, this city’s best -- if not wealthiest -- years could be ahead of us yet.

No-brainers

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."
Albert Einstein

Over the past decade or so, on the odd occasion when the topic came up in conversation, I found that when I mentioned the inherent unsustainability of the “ownership society” as it was being peddled and the danger of allowing securitzed-debt and derivatives trading to become the engine or our economy, I was inevitably shouted down and told that I was incapable of understanding the complex nature of modern banking and that the smartest people in the country were working on Wall Street (which confused me, having been so often told that the smartest people in the country worked in advertising or for the CIA...).

Acknowledging my limited perspective as a hobbyist, I’d like to take a moment to try to boil this whole mess down to its failure on a conceptual level and explore some of the problems that economists and legislators (if there are any left whose devolution into mere politicians isn’t irrevocable) will need to deal with crafting into actionable policy as we move forward into the abyss.

The following four ideas are, in my opinion, ‘no-brainers.’ However, I have yet to come across a clear attempt at an analysis of the root conceptual problems succinct to my satisfaction. So here goes.

1. The relationship of banks to housing and real estate needs to be reexamined and reorganized.

The reason that the housing bubble became so fatally inflated was that home prices were based not on what people could afford to pay, but what people were allowed to borrow. They were encouraged to borrow these increasing amounts because their debt was securitized and given a re-sale value.

Once upon a time, working Americans could potentially save up and buy a house.

It rapidly got to a point over the last several decades where purchasing a home without the involvement of a bank became impossible for ninety-five percent of the population, and in that time, we saw the rise of mortgage-backed securities as a primary engine for the financial markets.

I'm not going to get into my moral problems with scumbag flippers, but they're not to blame for the inflation of prices, they just worked the system to their advantage.

Now, as far as blaming the borrower: I've had trouble with debt. I've had trouble with debt because I was convinced that if I could just hold on I would soon succeed in finding a job that would allow me to pay it down. As it is, I've been hanging on by the skin of my teeth from month to month, still looking for a living wage. Add to that corporate America's 30-day standard, in which they sit on what they owe and let it gain a month's interest before cutting out a check, and the death-spiral continues.

2. Supply-side economics just doesn’t work and never has

As these debts were bundled into triple-A financial products and bought and sold and covered in purchased swaps, tremendous amounts of the wealth generated pooled at the top of the system.

Sure, a big part of the problem is that this market-created system of buying and selling fancy IOUs only created imaginary wealth. But there were billions being paid out, and the inequality of wealth reached levels not seen since...1928. Funny, that.

If that wealth had been pumped back into the real economy in the form of taxes invested in infrastructure improvement or investment in private industry and used to create jobs (at least the dot-com bubble created jobs!), is it possible that so many people might not have defaulted on their debts and the cycle could’ve seen itself through?

As it happened, the only thing that trickled down was the opportunity to sink deeper into debt with no opportunity to ever pay it off. (I'm still waiting for someone to suggest a debtors' army to send into Afghanistan...)

3. If the United States is to survive as a capitalist democracy, some real thought needs to be put into the relationship between industry and government.

I know that sounds simplistic, even for a no-brainer, seeing as its been one of the core struggles we’ve been dealing with perpetually in our mere two-and-a-quarter centuries of doing this whole nation thing.

But the current collapse puts us in a unique position to re-examine some of the fundamentals of this relationship and gives us the opportunity to come out of this stronger. (Not likely if knee-jerk McCave-in and his idiot sidekick wind up in the White House. Obama-Biden ’08)

One of the greatest strengths of our constitution is its flexibility (interesting that the ‘structuralist’ school of constitutional thought often favors the interpretation of the 14th amendment that bestows the rights of individuals to corporations. Maybe time to revisit that one, no?)

Personally, I think we face a more immediate danger of slipping into corporate fascism than democratic socialism, but there is a middle road.

Essential to finding this middle road is a functioning legislature that puts governance before politicking (something that John McCain’s spectacular and unfortunate meltdown last week revealed him as incapable of doing) or ideology (some of these no-government-is-good-government Republicans’ zealous and ignorant adherence to dogma rivals the Taliban. I’m sorry if it seems like I’m picking on the Republicans, its just that from Reaganomics to Gingrich’s Contract on America to Bush-Cheney they’ve been behind so much of what’s gone so wrong.)

Anyway, here are my no-brainer ideas:

The labor leaders of the early twentieth-century had a valid point when they argued that industry should be in Washington lobbying for national health-care alongside them. Flash-forward to the late 20th century and what are all the big industries complaining about? The cost of health care.

By transferring the costs of health care to government, private industry will be in a position to maximize their profits, a percentage of which would then be channeled into the national health-care infrastructure in the form of progressive taxes which, to insure quality, could be allotted according to performance. (Why aren't the smartest people in the country working on this?)

As it is, market-based health care and insurance aren’t working out for anyone. Their costs are too high for either corporations or individuals to bear, and the result of competition in the field has had the opposite of its intended effect: rather than receiving the highest level of care for the lowest price, we get the crappiest care at the highest price, which profit-based insurance companies (which makes no sense to me whatsoever) don't want to pay for. (Again, I’m sorry, Senator McCain...but a $5,000 tax credit for health care? When’s the last time you looked at a medical bill??? Why not give me a nickel for a matinee while you're at it?)

The alternative, of course, is no health care for anyone and a Republican-endorsed return to third-world status. But hey, it's not a problem if we don't say it is! U-S-A! U-S-A!

But I digress...

Conversely, there have been some interesting success stories involving the leasing of public infrastructure to private industry. But don’t take my word for it. Give Pennsylvania’s Ed Rendell a listen.

And of course also under this umbrella is the issue of CEO pay. How is it considered acceptable that in a publicly traded company such a high percentage of profit is allowed to be concentrated in one individual rather than channeled to the stockholders...let alone paid in taxes? This seems like one of those things that a healthfully functioning market should have been able to correct, but hasn’t. Anyone who tries to tell you that CEO pay caps are antithetical to free-market economies is a con artist and probably a CEO.

4. The problem isn't globalization, it's centralization

Civilizations have lived in globalized economies since the first Phoenecian jumped into a canoe. The effects of global trade don't become detrimental until the profits from that trade become centralized (Rome didn't last), leading to the unfair exploitation of labor, which brings about stagnation in the mildest cases, civil unrest and violence in the most severe.

When I hear Newt Gingrich and his ilk argue that taxes need to be kept low to make the U.S. an attractive place for multinationals to do business all I can think is, great, we won WWII and became the anchor for the world's economy and now we're supposed to aspire to pimping ourselves out as cheap labor? Asshole. What kind of American exceptionalism is that?

On a national level, one answer is for a strong federal government to foster and oversee regionally based micro-economies. What happened to those thousand points of light? Apparently, they're all pulling in minimum wage at Wal-Mart.

Seems like a completely overlooked advantage of our civil infrastructure.

Anyhow, if the smartest people in the country happen to come across this post, maybe it'll give them some conceptual fodder to translate into numbers by which they can devise a sufficiently complicated numerical apparatus capable of stopping the country from blowing itself apart again.

Still the lights

So, I like the lights.

The twin columns of light they project into the sky from where the towers used to be on the anniversary.

I like them.

Most things related to 9/11 I dislike.

I dislike the politicization of the whole thing. I dislike Rudy Giuliani. I dislike the conspiracy theories. I dislike the fact that it could have been avoided, or at least altered, if a few men on watchlists had simply been held off their flights. And I severely dislike the fact that innocent lives were lost, that it's led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of more innocent lives, the deepening of hatreds and the waste of wealth (at the very least, how does it cost the Pentagon $10 million a year to maintain a memorial? There's the DoD for you...Minerva my eye.)

And I'm not nostalgic for it. That day sucked. The smell of death and burning metal that hung in the air for a month and a half after sucked. The feeling of imminent dread that bled into the terrible glacial dread of history sucked (sucks).

Anyway, the L train skipped First and Third Avenues so I walked from Union Square down to Arlene Grocery on Stanton to see the reunited Mommyheads and Johnny Society.

And there were the lights. Around every corner, at the end of every street towering over the still-freshly-scrubbed college kids and unwashed krusty punk squatter-wannabes and invisible homeless and European tourists and Sex and the City fans.

Autumn makes me nostalgic. Can't help it. It does. They didn't write a song about autumn in New York for nothing. The lights were a ghost reminder that this isn't the same city I moved to in October '96. Giulianiism was in full swing then, but the cauterization of character and independence wasn't yet complete. That took a businessman to pull off.

I first heard of Johnny Society within a week of moving here, having seen their name listed at Brownie's (gone) while perusing the Voice looking to see what bands were around. The name struck me. But I didn't go. I stayed home and watched the World Series.

Their name would subsequently come up over the next couple years when I'd ask folks what New York bands were around that I should check out. "Johnny Society," I was told.

I never managed to get to a show.

By 2002 I'd met Brian Geltner, who was playing in Nervous Cabaret (now that Elyas Khan's fled to Berlin, on hiatus as my favorite band in New York), and subsequently met Kenny Siegel and Gwen Snyder when I tagged along to shoot some of the recording of their first album up at Kenny's Old Soul studio in Catskill. I met Brion Snyder (if America made sense, at least three songs off "Build Another Empire" would be all over the radio) when Geltner signed him up to play the Rhodes on and record the original music for "Every Dog's Day."

The best and hardest-working people around aren't the best known or the richest.

Corporate meritocracy is as much of an oxymoron as fascist meritocracy. Welcome to Republican America.

But, acknowledging redundancy, this city ain't dead yet.

There are still the lights.

Only rock and/or roll

So, this is pretty much how it's been for me:

Get up early. Spend a couple of hours struggling to dig in on the new draft of the novel, which has gotten big and unwieldy.

Get to work by 8:30. Come home around 5 or 6 beat with a pocket full of sawdust and a head full of self-doubt about my level of precision with hand and power tools and wondering what I might have accomplished if I'd had those hours to write...

Spend a couple hours helping Edna silk-screen new stuff for her booth at Artists and Fleas (N 6th street btw Bedford and Berry, Saturdays and Sundays 12-7).

Get a couple hours of restorative horizontal time.

Repeat five to six days out of the week in order to keep the bank account hovering at about $100 once the rent, bills and groceries are paid. (This is why I didn't like Hillary's health-care plan: how exactly are you going to require someone in this position -- I work for an independent craftsman who himself operates on tight profit margins -- to pay for insurance without subsidizing it?)

Anyhow, them's the breaks. Glad to be working. Etc. etc.

But every once in a while I try to remind myself why I persist to tough it out in this rich man's town.

Maybe I bicycle down to the Rockaways on a Sunday morning and spend some time in the ocean. (Ten minutes in the ocean can take years off my week.)

Maybe the movie gets picked up by Netflix. Hardly a payday, but it makes me feel like a somewhat accomplished individual with a day job instead of a dead-ender in a rut.

Maybe Matt Morandi finally plays a show as pantagruel on a picturesque corner of Staten Island as thunderstorms pelt Jersey across the water. (see my last post)

And maybe I give up the horizontal time on a Thursday night to go see Asa Ransom.

In this city that's such a magnet for ambitious careerists, I can't help but love it when those bands or artists or movies or writers come along, the ones who come out swinging like the New York goddamn Giants against the New England Nazis and manage to trigger that response in me that the stuff I love triggers -- that thing that keeps me spinning a record twenty years after I first fell in love with it, free of self-conscious posturing and meticulous posing...er,'quoting' of whatever's in vogue-- a rhythm not enslaved to beat -- a style not enslaved to fashion -- who also happen to be genuine and nice people (kudos to TV on the Radio, Johnny Society and Dave Deporis, by the way. Just to name a few).

And when they come along -- and I'm fortunate enough to hear about it -- well -- it's a pleasure to break out the camera, stay out late and double the coffee intake the next day. From time to time. I'm not a young man anymore, after all.

I know, I know. That's an unprofessional attitude. I shouldn't be shooting bands because I want to. This is an industry. Nothing's special and nobody's any better than anybody else unless their label pays me to say they are.

How else is the media to be controlled?

The measure of art is marketability. Focus groups. Featured artists. Target demographics. Glossy magazines and sponsored blogs. Database advertising. Quantified individuality. Corporate patronage. Ivy league bricolage. Ones to watch. Hot or not. Synergy. The appropriate and accepted soundtrack for your preferred lifestyle. Listen to what you're supposed to listen to, look at what they show you, eat what they shove in your face and like what you're told to like.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a firm believer that art and media have both cultural and monetary value and commercial viability beyond low-cost broadcast filler, American Idol and paid product placement. Heck, I even think the potential exists for the arts to be a vibrant and lucrative sector of the economy should viable and sustainable decentralized (read as 'not centered in giant corporations...I didn't say it'd happen in my lifetime...) revenue models be established.

In the meantime, I say fuck 'em.

This city ain't dead yet.

Round and round she goes

Every Dog's Day trailer
Uploaded by andybiscontini

Thanks to the good folks at indiepix, "Every Dog's Day" is now available for rental via Netflix.

As the primary authorial voice behind it, I feel a certain ambivalence to the fact that much of what it satirizes has only become more relevant in the five years since it was shot insomuch as, while I'm glad it's relevant, I kinda wish it weren't...

So if you, like me, prefer to laugh at the global and economic mess we're all in rather than cry about it, put us in your queue.

And as always you can order it directly through indiepix. Download it for only $7.95 or order the DVD for $24.95.

In the meantime, send some good wishes to our good friend Niko, who played Vlad, and happened to have arrived in Tblisi, Georgia to visit family and friends two days before the goddamn Russians blew up the airport.

Pantagruel on the hillside

"But see in what manner I mean that we shall dispute. I will not argue pro et contra, as do the sottish sophisters of this town and other places.

"Likewise I will not dispute after the manner of the Academics by
declamation; nor yet by numbers, as Pythagoras was wont to do, and as Picus de la Mirandula did of late at Rome.

"But I will dispute by signs only, without speaking, for the matters are so abstruse, hard, and arduous, that words proceeding from the mouth of man will never be sufficient for unfolding of them to my liking."

Francois Rabelais, Pantagruel, chapter 2.XVIII



Matthew Morandi, electronics, percussion, vocals

Fred Wright, electric guitarifications

shot by Andy Biscontini

Virtual Disaster!

The title of this post does not in fact refer to the current state of my job search, applicable as it may be...

The recent fire at Universal Studios, which apparently started on the New York Street backlot and went on to destroy a video archive and the King Kong ride, brought back memories of my first-ever visit to Los Angeles.

It was 1997 or '98 and I was working for a company in New York that fabricated part of the interior of the Marvel Mania Restaurant at the Universal theme park. Specifically, I worked on shaped-MDF wall panels tricked out to look like a spaceship interior.

The panels were built in New York and trucked to L.A. and a small installation crew was sent out. The installation was plagued with difficulties. Certain anchoring walls hadn't been built, site measurements were significantly off, and whose brilliant idea was it to install the neon before putting it on a truck? The usual stuff.

I was part of the second or third wave of relief installers dispatched.

My first day in Los Angeles went kind of like this:

Find my way into the Universal Theme Park and locate Marvel Mania.

Make my way through the under-lit maze as the laser-light show was being tested and footage from Pink Floyd's "Momentary Lapse of Reason" tour blared out of myriad T.V. monitors.

Find my crew in the midst of a tantrum that involved a detail-sander and a sawhorse going airborn.

At lunchtime, step out of the dark work site (where early-Black Sabbath videos had replaced latter Floyd. "Lookit 'im," the crew chief shouted into my ear, "Ozzy had like no charisma then.") and into the blinding midday sunlight.

Pass a line outside the "Earthquake" ride. Because after all, who would want to visit Los Angeles without experiencing the thrill of being trapped underground in an earthquake?

Pass another line next to the billboard-sized photograph of the Hollywood sign. Because why find the real thing twenty minutes away when you can take your picture in front of its...picture?

Pass a railing looking out over the New York Street backlot, which was blazing on fire.

Watch it burn until the fire trucks show up, then continue to the employee commissary, where a guy dressed as Beetlejuice was breaking up with a plain-faced red-haired girl at the next table. She was bawling into her hamburger and he kept saying, "I'm not saying I don't think you're cool...I'm not saying I don't want to hang out with you..."

Return to the job site passing the New York Street backlot, already under reconstruction.

Now, I don't think I can say anything about Los Angeles simulacra that Nathanael West hasn't said better seventy years ago.

And I don't want to sound like an East Coast snob, certainly not when New York City seems to be slipping ever closer to becoming a municipality in which a theme-park island of affluence is maintained by surrounding tower blocks full of poor people (which worked out great for Paris and London, no?).

And to tell you the truth I'm kind of looking forward to the "Crane Collapse!" ride at Coney Island.


copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

Your Majesty, You've Done It Again!

There is a real-estate guy standing outside my window. He’s taking pictures of the building across the street. It’s for sale. It is an ugly one-story garage building. He envisions a cheaply constructed ten-story glass-and-steel ant-farm full of rich people rising in its place.

I'm not sentimental, but when that building is erected, it will block all of the natural light to my little first-floor apartment behind the garbage cans that I'm currently struggling to keep up with the modest rent on.

And I don't look forward to looking out my window or stepping outside every day with no choice but to look into the 1,000 square-foot lives of the poor suckers, eyes wide with optimistic hip urban home ownership, who've mortgaged their future to keep up with the cool kids as every month their income stagnates, their Ikea furnishings fade from fashion and their flat-screen goes on the fritz, the poorly riveted steel frame of the building begins to buckle and the half-inch thick caulk joints around the windows begin to peel until they sell it at a loss or rent it out to hard-partying college kids bankrolled by their parents.

That might sound pessimistic, but it isn't unrealistic. This is New York City, after all. It's not like it hasn't happened.

The real-estate guy doesn't waste time on such thoughts.

He doesn’t realize it, but he bears a striking physical resemblance to his paternal grandfather’s great-grandfather, who was personal valet to Ferdinand Bourbon, King of Naples.

His ancestor had made his fortune by stealthily taking a gold coin from atop His Majesty’s dressing table every morning, and through sleight of hand creating the impression that he'd just removed it from the freshly used Royal bedpan declaring, “You’re Majesty, you’ve done it again!” before carrying the steaming tray of Royal crap through the echoing baroque marble hallways and emptying it into the water closet.

Every morning for ten years.

Ferdinand, an appreciator of both flattery and innovative fecal humor, adopted the habit of allowing his faithful manservant to keep the coins as a tip until the summer of 1820 when, as the pressures of the revolt by Pepe and his Carbonari , with his own army mired down in Sicily no less, and his exclusion from the Congress of Troppau led to the erosion of both his fortunes and his sense of humor he responded one morning by growling, “Clean it off and put it back.”

Sensing the end of the party, within months the real-estate guy's ancestor had abandoned his family in the dark of night with a ticket in his pocket for first-class passage to New York, where he changed his name, reaped a bonanza in the stock market and married into High Society.

We'll see if this douchebag manages to cash out in time.



copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

The Other Money Bubble

A couple of winters ago I found myself wandering through a casino in Atlantic City.

In a glimmering inner chamber awash in electronic chimes nestled at the end of a serpentine mirror-plated corridor, I witnessed one man’s windfall.

He had hit on his slot machine and won a trip into the Bubble, a giant clear acrylic sphere suspended over the machines.

A red-vested casino employee cordially showed the man to the elevator cylinder at the center of the floor and explained the rules to him: once he was in the Bubble, he was not allowed to step beyond the defined area of the central platform; dollar bills would be blown around the Bubble by fans; he would be allowed to keep only what bills he caught in the provided butterfly net. Under no circumstances was he allowed to use his hands, except to hold the net. Any deviation from the rules would result in expulsion from the Bubble and forfeit of all funds acquired therein.

The man, who looked to be in his early sixties, bespectacled and fit, had the glazed look of someone who’d been breathing casino air and keeping himself hydrated with complementary cocktails while staring at flashing lights for several dozen hours. He smiled vacantly and nodded comprehension before stepping into the cylinder and rising sixteen feet or so into the center of the Bubble.

A siren sounded, followed by the whirring of fans, and the Bubble filled with dollar bills dancing on jets of air.

The man’s vacant smile broadened and he swung the butterfly net back and forth steadily. A dollar bill plastered itself against his glasses, but he dared not use his hands to remove it lest he should be stripped of his winnings thus far. He continued to swing the net blindly.

The siren sounded again, the fans cut off, the dancing dollars wafted gently to the bottom of the Bubble and the elevator brought the man, eyes moist, clutching the butterfly net to his chest, back to the casino floor.

I don’t know how much he’d pumped into the bandits prior to his trip into the Bubble, but he came out of it with thirty-six bucks, counted out for him by the Red-vest, who directed him to the counter where he would be given his, er, windfall in chips.

As the man nodded and turned towards the counter, the Red-vest spotted two rogue bills, caught in the static electricity of the man’s sweater, stuck on his shoulder.

He plucked them off and tucked them into his vest.

What I want to know is, where was the SEC?


copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

Nice New Fiction!

As promised, here’s some nice new fiction for you to enjoy!

So hoist up your suspenders, suspend your disbelief, fire up the wouldn’t-it-be-nice machine and join me on a speculative whirl around the world as we step into the not too distant future, where…

Barack Obama is elected president after convincing the Super-delegates (and the American public) that the possibility of Hillary Clinton’s brutal brand of politics inspiring a second Contract on America (sic) that would stalemate the government and kneecap progress at this critical and fragile time is very real and too dangerous to allow.

His campaign against John McCain was a clean fight full of clear-sighted debate about where this country is and where it’s headed.

He finally admits that his understanding of real-world political complexities does, in fact, run deeper than his very real inspirational vision of change and that the two concepts aren’t mutually exclusive. He acknowledges that Americans are, for the most part, smarter than needing to be spoon-fed simplistic buzz clips (possibly even smarter than some of their own news media…). Americans, so used to public figures making transparent and embarrassing efforts to dumb themselves down are, in fact, elevated.

Hillary Clinton applies her leadership, formidable political acumen and strength of ideas to restore a productive system of Checks and Balances by reinvigorating the moribund Legislature (a far more unwieldy branch of government requiring far more skill and experience to revive from obsolescence than the Executive) and with wide popular support and a convincing majority passes laws providing universal health care, reigning in out-of-control CEO pay and establishing a practical and equitable national budget.

The Republican minority, under the sane leadership of guys like John McCain, Arlen Specter and (come back, come back!) Chuck Hagel provides constructive counter arguments and healthy debate, which ultimately strengthen the laws.

(But seriously, I always thought that the President wasn’t supposed to be a democratically elected dictator. And wouldn’t a functioning legislature negate the need for the Supreme Court to legislate from the bench? Anyway…on with the fiction…!)

Technological advances (nanotech fuel cell membranes?), new patents and innovative business models give birth to new American manufacturing, and the business models are exported rather than just the labor, stabilizing South and Central America and leading to a mutually beneficial system of trade in the hemisphere. (I’m not so much worried about Canada. They’ll be fine.)

Christian fundamentalists take over South Carolina, and nobody cares.

Right-wing terrorists calling themselves The Sons of McVeigh wage an underground war against the Bicycle Anarchists.

A law-abiding Michigan plumber named Alfonso Cayeda is finally taken off of Homeland Security’s watch list after a decade of round-the-clock surveillance, freeing up all kinds of valuable resources.

Pakistan’s new government says fuckit and nukes Waziristan.

Cannabis is legally regulated in the U.S. and Europe and becomes Afghanistan’s cash crop, squeezing out the poppy trade and building schools and democratic institutions, lifting the people out of the kind of medieval poverty that makes religious extremism so appealing. Elsewhere, the number of young black men enrolling in, and paying for, college outpaces the number of them locked up in prison at taxpayer expense, and thousands of existing hopeless drunks discover they’re much happier and possibly less obnoxious as hopeless stoners, and western civilization rolls merrily along…

Italy finally realizes that it’s better off without a federal government.

After being led into financial and social near-ruin by a bunch of semi-aristocrats in love with reruns of Dallas, France wakes up from a cocaine hangover and figures out that its intellectual tradition just might be worth something after all…

China dedicates its new wealth to buying its own cheap goods and dealing with the huge freakin’ environmental catastrophe they’re cruising for.

Kim Jong Il finally completes the project he’s been working up to all these years: directing a sweeping cinemascope musical epic starring the entire population of North Korea. When he is unable to place it in film festivals and finds himself further marginalized in the international community, he begins writing cogent, funny examinations of what’s wrong with the film industry and posting them on a Los Angeles-based blog.

Africa. Sweet Jesus, maybe something goes right…micro-investment networks continue to expand and nurture local economies...the cash infusion from non-Colonialist Chinese investment sparks competitive entrepeneurship...and everybody stops blowing each other away...

Iran and Syria agree to put the kibosh on Hezbollah and Hamas, acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, stop fucking with Lebanon and take over as peacekeepers in Iraq in exchange for equitable participation and influence in the regional economy and a return to Israel’s 1968 borders.
I don’t know why they do this, because God knows the U.S. has squandered any influence we’ve ever had in the region again and again (the Shah, anyone?), Israel isn’t traditionally known for diplomacy, Iran is being run by fascistic nutjobs, the Iraqis are still pretty trigger-happy, Syria seems to have had a complicated relationship with honesty and you can’t count on the Saudis for anything beyond self-interest... But I don’t have to know, because this is fiction!

And in the spirit of fiction, John McCain is named Secretary of Defense and gets on famously with Wes Clark as National Security Advisor! Secretary of the Treasury Paul Krugman restores sanity and sustainability to the national economy! Secretary of State Bill Clinton reminds the world that Americans don’t suck at diplomacy after all! And a Giant Super-intelligent Beefsteak Tomato becomes Secretary of Agriculture and takes on the corporate food establishment (Big Food vs. Big Food!), and the resulting re-investment in small, regional farms restores the possibility of a good life in rural America, wrenching it free of the scourge of meth!

Oooh, isn’t fiction fun???


copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

New Media Now part 2

At the risk of overstaying my time on the soapbox (more fiction coming soon, I promise), I'm going to expand a bit on my previous post regarding the current state of independent movies. Bear with me through a brief diagnosis of a problem in the current system before I get to the rainbow...

Currently, film festivals have become the de facto conduit by which most independently produced movies reach the audience. While festivals are terrific opportunities to present curated rosters of new or rare work, they've proven to be completely insufficient as a means of distribution.

The volume of quality work produced far exceeds available spots in festivals, creating a severe bottleneck and gumming up the works.

Quality is, of course, subject to taste. Specifically, the tastes of festival programmers, and many in the Industry believe that a curatorial component is critical to distribution.

This is a flawed notion.

While individual exhibitors will naturally want to choose product based on their audience, too often the curatorial process has the effect of choking off new voices and modes of storytelling and encouraging homogeneity in the marketplace.

The danger is that large sectors of a potential audience become alienated. For example, does anyone who isn't a post-collegiate twentysomething care about Mumblecore? (Sorry. No knock on the filmmaking or the filmmakers, but I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and if I wanted to watch a bunch of tragically semi-articulate hipsters puzzle over a doorknob I'd look out the window.)

By allowing only works that they like, or that adhere to a trend or 'movement,' exposure to the market, festival programmers have, unfortunately, come to represent the same obstacle to the circulation of feature-length movies that the old-line corporate studios and broadcast networks have.

As I said last time, in order for markets to function optimally, goods need to be able to get to the marketplace.

The stated fear seems to be that lowest-common-denominator business realities could squeeze out serious or challenging works. (What's worse? A bunch of Jackass wannabes or a bunch of Juno wannabes? Depends on who you ask. And those audiences aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.)

But if media-makers are able to find their audience and an apparatus exists to reach them, odds are that more good and interesting work will be made as more talented people are able to work.

I guess I believe that independent movies should be made for more people than just festival programmers.

Another danger of the festival system as it exists is the dead-end effect. Say a movie plays at a festival and three hundred people in the audience love it and put the word out to their social circles. Where can they see it? The next festival it plays, wherever that may be?

And be honest, have you ever watched a movie because it won the jury prize at the Bumblefork International Film Festival?

(I was a little hard on Netflix last time. They pushed the Puffy Chair pretty hard and it did well for those guys.)

Alright. Enough complaining. Time for some constructive thinking...

One model that I find interesting is the regional theatrical distribution of independently produced movies in the 1950's, where small local companies would take on the regional promotion and distribution of independents, mostly genre pictures, booking screens, hanging posters, wrangling local press and generally working to get asses in the seats.

Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr. was in the regional distribution business, and with funds raised from pre-sales to other regional distributors financed what I think was the first indie blockbuster -- 1958's The Blob.

Granted, the model doesn't translate exactly because, at the moment, the primary markets for independents are small-format. Emerging Pictures seems to have a toe in the water with this model, but it's not yet enough.

I mentioned in my last post that I believe in indiepix's model for small-format distribution. (Shameless plug: Don't forget to pick up your copy of Every Dog's Day today!)

All this said, I'm honestly excited by the number of genuinely talented people making movies these days, and encouraged by the increasing number of them whose works are being made available by various means, and I urge everyone who happens to read this to get out there and explore what's going on.


copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

New Media Now

Last week I attended a panel discussion sponsored by the IFP New York on alternative distribution models for independent movies.

Just to be clear, I'm defining "independent" as "produced outside of a corporate infrastructure and without corporate investment" and "movies" as "moving pictures, not specifically on celluloid."

With the exception of indiepix founder Bob Alexander (full disclosure: indiepix is distributing the feature I made called Every Dog's Day), it seemed as though everyone was more or less still looking at independent movies according to the Industry status quo, where they're generally regarded as a junior-varsity farm system for Hollywood or expensively marketed and unlikely-to-recoup art-house 'cache' vehicles for stars.

This status quo is unsustainable. From a business perspective, does it make sense to invest the time, effort and capital involved in making a movie just so one or two people can maybe come out of it with an agent? Uh, no... And while I do appreciate that working popular actors want to make work they care about outside Hollywood, it's been proven again and again that name-recognition does not equal profitability any more than a classical three-act structure with redemptive characters does.

On that particular panel, Bob seemed to be the only person who understood, or cared, that the explosion in the production of independent media, fueled by accessible technology and a growing skilled work-force, requires the expansion and nurturing of markets for that media and had put together a smart business model that was fair to filmmakers. (With props to indie gogo for forward thinking)

It's basic free-market economics. In order for the market to function optimally, goods have to be able to get to the marketplace.

Until the costs of theatrical distribution are effectively reduced (no, I don't want to see 35 mm burn out into oblivion, either. Or two-inch tape, for that matter), those markets are small-format.

From my point of view, that means that the product (yes, I am an artist who refers to his work as 'product') needs to be catered to those markets -- it needs to work visually on a small screen and be made with minimal capital investment.

To my mind, an analogy can be drawn between today's independent movies and the pulp novels of the previous mid-century and the penny-dreadfuls and dime novels of the century before. The kind of cheap mass-market media that gave us Charles Dickens, Dashiell Hammett and Philip K. Dick among others.

That said, it remains to be seen if a living can be made at it, let alone if it can recoup. But that's the nature of the market.

The big question is: where are those markets and how do we get to them? And do they have eight or fifteen bucks to drop on a movie every so often? (Netflix, God bless 'em, is great for movie-lovers, but there ain't much of a profit margin for individual movie-makers.)

The audience is the future of independent media. And I'm convinced they're out there. As to whether or not they have eight or fifteen bucks to drop, we'll have to see how deep this recession bites.

Or is every creative professional doomed to be forever beholden to behemoths like Publicis (which envisions thirty-second spots tailor-made for every possible demographic in every platform) or News Corp (full disclosure: I too have suckled Rupert Murdoch's golden teat, having built sets for Fox News) in a future where eight people are employed to sell every one person a tube of toothpaste?

Don't get me wrong. I like big Hollywood movies and art-house flicks. If movies didn't cost twelve bucks a pop I'd be at a theater four nights a week (then again, with the same movie on six out of twelve screens at the average multiplex, what would I see?). And I don't have a problem with big corporations paying for media as advertising or through sponsorship, but I do have a problem with that being the only option for creative professionals to make a living.


copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

We Hack You Because We Love You And You Never Take Our Calls

Over the past several months, an undisclosed number of Americans estimated to be greater than the combined fan bases of four average large-market major-league sports franchises may have received an email disguised as spam containing a version of the following encrypted message:

We are writing to inform you that you have been hacked.

We have been aware of you for quite some time, and have taken an interest in your activities.

Please be advised that we have made numerous attempts to make contact with you via traditional avenues.

We have approached you in public and, while seemingly uncomfortable with small-talk, you have on occasion been exceptionally charming and we’d like to see more of that please.

Some of us have attempted to befriend you, but you have become guarded and make yourself socially unavailable.

We have repeatedly sent inquiries into your well-being by post, but you have discarded them as junk without so much as reading between the lines.

On more than one occasion, we have sent you messages in Fortune Cookies, which some of us consider to be pretty darn creative and an impressive logistical accomplishment.

We have crammed your bills and statements with exorbitant fees in an attempt to get you on the phone just so we can hear your voice but, after we dedicated valuable time and resources tapping your land-line you never use it anymore and we have been unable to access your cell because someone else is hogging it. We miss hearing your voice.

On several occasions, some of us have tried to send work your way, but we are unsure what exactly it is you want to be doing.

There are those of us who still think you might be up to something shady. They have been responsible for withholding your paychecks in the mail and delaying your bank deposits in an attempt to see where you really get your money because they find it hard to believe that you make as little as you do.

They have also been intercepting the resumes, job applications and queries you’ve been sending out and responding with those clever rejections. Based on the way they talk about you, we think it’s because deep down they wish you'd come work for us. And some of them are jealous.

For there are those of us who are simply wild about you, and we believe it is better for us to continue to admire you from afar lest we go mad. We’ve been down that road before and know it could only ever end in tears.

You should be aware that your friends, neighbors and co-workers have been instrumental in keeping us informed as to your whereabouts at considerable profit to themselves and expense to us and we don’t think they really love you.

We know you’re having a difficult time, and we want you to know that we believe in you. Hang in there!

FYI, the view from your webcam goes from the window to the couch.


copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini

The Teslacolonic

For the most part, I think I've come to do a fairly good job of maintaining a positive attitude, but I can no longer deny that for the last several months I've been feeling somewhat out-of-whack.

I don't know if it's Seasonal Affected Depression, Clinical Depression, regular Depression, Attention Deficit Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Frieswith Disorder, Restless Leg Syndrome, ants in my pants, low barometric pressure, Mercury going retrograde or the drying-up of my already meager freelance income on the brink of hard times, but lately I've been feeling it, and having a tough time focusing my energy productively.

Acupuncture has helped me in the past, I do a little yoga from time to time for general physical alignment, and the Neti pot once knocked out a persistent sinus infection that a brutal regimen of antibiotics couldn't lick, so I'm always open to alternatives to pharmaceutical treatment, especially in psychic crises.

A friend referred me to an elderly electrician in Woodside who, in his youth, had worked briefly in Thomas Edison's labs before becoming disillusioned and taking up as an assistant to Nikola Tesla towards the end of his career. He'd worked with the aging Tesla on several projects concerning the application of electrical current to personal health, and was now the sole practitioner of these techniques. This man could straighten me out for a reasonable rate, my friend told me.

So a couple of days ago I paid him a visit.

He lives alone, a widower, on the first floor of a trim split-level semi-detached on a quiet street a couple of blocks off Roosevelt Avenue and keeps a small workshop in the basement.

Sitting next to me on the crisp plastic-covered couch in the living room his niece, a cute pear-shaped girl with large almond eyes and thin hair tied into a whispy ponytail explained the procedure to me.

I would be asked to remove my clothes. Oppositely charged magnets would be placed in each of my hands, and I would be asked to make a fist. I would be asked to bite down on a negative lead connected to an AC modulator, and the positive lead would be placed in my rear.

"Don't worry," she reassured me perfunctorily in her thick Queens accent, "It's very non-invasive. You won't even notice it's there."

I followed her into the kitchen, signed the release waiting for me on the kitchen table and paid her twenty dollars which she tucked neatly into a small gray cashbox on the counter behind the toaster. She gestured towards the cellar door and told me to go ahead down, he was waiting.

Her uncle was a small, angular octogenarian, sad-eyed and quiet in a chin-to-ankle waxed canvas smock and rubber gloves that fanned out around his elbows, which poked sharply out from under his rolled shirtsleeves. He was barefoot, and I noticed that his feet were in excellent condition for a man of his age. Thick healthy nails, gently arched bridge, and expressively articulated toes, each crowned with a tuft of white hair at the knuckle.

He gestured vaguely for me to undress and began powering up a series of switches and ballasts as I disrobed and hung my clothes over a nearby vinyl-padded metal chair. A constellation of old-fashioned glass transformers and vacuum tubes glowed to life in the darkness behind him. He pointed to a rubber mat in the middle of the floor and I stood on it.

From the pocket in the bib of his smock, he produced two egg-sized magnets and put one in each of my hands, then made two fists with his own hands to demonstrate what I was supposed to do. I squeezed the magnets and held up my hands to show him I was squeezing.

He nodded and took a thin copper rod out of a beaker full of antiseptic solution, stripped the insulation off of the tip of a length of 14-gauge wire with his front teeth, twisted it onto the copper rod and placed it in my mouth, baring his own teeth as instruction. I bit down on the copper and waited for the positive lead to be inserted. While that really isn't my thing, his niece was right, it didn't feel invasive at all.

At that point, he turned on the juice and gradually increased the voltage.

It's difficult to describe how it felt. Having been bitten by 12-volt car batteries, I'd say that the voltage he ran through me peaked at about 8 or 9 volts and was raised so gradually that I hardly noticed I was being zapped, but at a certain point I lost all awareness of my body and was overcome by the tangible sensation that the universe and I were one, flowing into each other at a quantum level.

As to whether or not it cured my blues, that's also difficult to say. But I've had an erection for the last seventy-two hours.


copyright, © 2008 Andy Biscontini