Primrose Road

I found this posted to a Facebook group about growing up in Queens in the 1980s. It seems authentic, because I remember the ancient 21-year-olds in our neighborhood talking about Camouflage, and the bands were New Wave acts well known to the outer boroughs; it's also got the 212 area code! (Now only Manhattan is 212 and we've got 718s and 917s and a couple of 646s out here ... alas). But there's something a little weird -- no, very, very weird -- about the ad, too. See if you can spot it: Anybody have an explanation for this?

Cousin: Nobody ever moves from Brooklyn to Queens. Brother: Our mother moved from Brooklyn to Queens. Cousin: Because she fell in love. Otherwise, nobody moves from Brooklyn to Queens. SigOther: Nobody moves from Queens to Brooklyn, either. Me: Lots of people move between Queens and Brooklyn. But everybody moves away from the Bronx. SigOther: Hey! (pause) Well, yeah. Cousin (to Brother): You should definitely move to Manhattan. SigOther: Why does everyone think Manhattan's so special? Brother: I think there's one thing we can all agree on -- Staten Island blows.

The Daily News and New York Post tend to not be the most intelligent rags on the newsstand, and I'm finding it somewhat annoying that, by their jumping on the story of David Paterson and his wife's self-confessed extramarital affairs, both papers made it look like Eliot Spitzer was forced out of office simply because he cheated on his wife. Spitzer resigned (and would have otherwise likely been impeached) because he knowingly committed a federal offense. He's an awful man for potentially exposing his wife to AIDS by refusing to use a condom when visiting prostitutes, but that type of judgement should probably sit outside the political sphere, because my "family values" aren't your "family values" and yours aren't mine.

As I'm catching up on my reading for the annotated bibliography that's due in less than three weeks: 1) For lack of a better expression, Artaud gets wackier every time I read him. 2) Grotowski was right in pointing out that Artaud's theatre of cruelty was more of a manifesto than a method. 3) And Artaud wasn't much of an upstanding philosopher, either. His commentary on the Balinese theatre derives from his encounter with a Balinese theatre "display" of sorts at the Paris Exposition in the 1930s. Fascinating how he tries to pass colonialist display off as ritual. 4) His plague-theatre analogy is almost ... Cartesian? ... in its insistence that what makes theatre *interesting* is how it "attacks" only those organs and body parts associated with consciousness. That's enough theory for today. I'll post my review of The Wooster Group's Hamlet later this weekend. For now, enjoy this blurry cellphone photo of Cooper Union kids spinning the Astor Place cube: Despite the fact that the East Village really isn't the East Village anymore, some things never change.