the past comes back all at once

Randomly ran into Beka E at Cafe Magora in the EV. I haven't seen her in a million years. She's been in NYC for 4 years!! working for United for Peace. She said she was living in williamsburg, and began to explain to me what a hipster and I reminded her that I've lived in this city for three times as long as she. When I get around that chick, I get so hyper that I feel like I'm hallucinating. Doesn't matter whether it's with Beka over fifteen years ago, watching her run up and around the hills in her yard in her old school uggs, or the Beka at age 30, sitting in some hip joint, her delicate arms leaning across the table toward her silently sexy middle eastern man.

other dream-like things

the building down the street from j caught fire and burned down. he woke up at 2am in the morning to the smell of smoke, so powerful that he thought his own building was burning down. he said now the fire vehicles are gathered around the building, and there's a wall that is standing in the middle of it all. it looks brand new. and he's not sure whether it had been built there or if the firemen had put it there for some reason.

description of the news cafe on university blvd & 11th

in most cities, sitting in a cafe, you're bound to see a child. but already it's been an hour and i don't see even one. on the television perched overhead is a story about crossed television signals - a person who had hooked up his camera to his television set had picked up the signal of one of his neighbors, who was beating her foster kids up right before his eyes. the cops traced the signal and arrested the woman.

at the tables are a lithe blond model and a pair of students conversing in japanese. the several people wandering in and out of the cafe: a punkish design student, an executive with a baseball jacket on over his suit, an old jewish woman with curly, badly dyed hair and outdated purse. but no children.

is it the grinding sound of the city bus with the darkness, lit only by fluorescent parking lot lights that drive away the children? or idiots who decide to leave the cafe entrance door open in 26 degree weather? the lonely asians who seem to occupy every table with a paper and perfectly coiffed hair?

it's a sea of black backs. even the model has put her black coat on. the air from the open door has freshened the stale, oily atmosphere but the cracked paint on the floors depress me. nothing, not the colorful rows of magazines perfectly arranged in a mosaic on the wall, nor the old-fashioned wooden store fronts across the street can cheer up this place.

smalls/fat cat

these are the jazz clubs owned, or once owned, by mitch borden in NYC in the west village. i need to sit there and describe it for you. but it'd be even better to find someone who loved smalls but hates fat cat, who will tell me what they think of those places.

too much shit to do

two pieces to finish. one piece to send out.
do you ever stand on the subway platform and notice red colors, from the scarlet cashmere coat on the girl walking toward me and the backpack on the guy walking through the gate and another lady's wool hat, moving back and forth together through the crowd?

more burroughs

Of course the Annexia police processed suspected agents, saboteurs and political deviants on an assembly basis. As regards the interrogation of suspects, Benway has this to say:

"While in general I avoid the use of torture-- torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance --the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved. To this end I devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. One was known as The Switchboard. Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject's teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine."