Owlspotting

I spent Thursday and Friday in Washington, D.C. looking for an apartment. It was the beginning of my process of accomodating to new city I had just taken a job in.

If I think hard enough, I can summarize all my experiences in a few words. The summer of 1994 was soccer, the summer of 2001 was brother, and the U.S. elections of 2004 were the awesomeness. My couple of days in D.C. were about sweat.

I got off the Chinatown bus in D.C. around noon. Throughout the duration of the trip useless streams of the coldest of cold airs invaded the bus, turning my knee joints into rocks and my spare T-shirts into blankets. I tied to converse with the woman sitting next to me about her research into a popular black author of erotica (she was reading newspaper articles with the words erotica and Zane in bold), but my teeth were chopping words as I struggled to get warm enough to speak. I will forever regret not being able to strike up a conversation with a stranger reading “Gettin’ Buck Wild” on a crowded bus.

About an hour after I began my trek through the D.C. real estate jungle, I got a glimpse of the hours to come when I felt my backpack stick to my T-shirt; I had chosen a gray one that morning. Bad choice. Soon I was sporting one of those in-your-face sweat stains that cuddles under your chest. I wished for one of those athlete V-shaped stains, but no, I only had a pathetic bulls-eye stain, a result of walking too many blocks and not a 10-mile jog.

I handled it well until it came time to see a studio apartment in Dupont Circle. I decided to walk though the place was a good 20 minutes away. I told the leasing agency I’d be there in 15 minutes. That was 4:30 p.m. At 4:55 I called to say I would be 10 minutes late — I was lost. I entered the building at 5:05 to find that everybody in the leasing office, except for the woman I spoke to on the phone, had left.

You have to understand that by that time I was on my second gray T-shirt of the day; I turned the first into a towel, trying to avoid another stain in the brisk walk to my appointment. My preventive measures turned out to be as messy as most preemptive measures are — the stain only expanded because of the “towel.”

I passed people on the street and as I looked into their eyes I realized they were going to sit down on the sofa at home and tell their friends, relatives, partners, husbands, wives, kids, that they saw this man on the street, carrying a big blue backpack and sweating profusely. They will emphasise the word profusely because they don’t get to use it much. “I’m telling you Rob, this guy had one of those abstract therapy blobs on his T-shirt — only it came from sweat, not ink! Profusely! I’m telling you man, he was sweating profusely! Buckets of profusely!”

That’s the state I was in when I met Andrea from the leasing agency. The only times a man gets away with meeting a hot woman while sweating like a squeezed sponge is when he is Lance Armstrong or when their encounter is the mid-“plot” scene of a porn flick. The cliche of the second hovered over me. I followed Andrea into the elevator and watched as she pressed the button to take us to the eighth floor — an empty floor where studios were just being finished. I imagined myself through her eyes and I believe I looked as human as your best friend behind a waterfall yelling: “Can you see me?”

We saw the studio. Nice. I was too busy sweating — profusely embarassed by my appearance, and the possibility I had watched too much porn to believe I might have to counter a come-on. Both feelings shot off the charts as we descended to the basement and opened (with a key) the exercise room.

There we were, in this musty chamber filled with weights, benches and more weights. For the first time that day, my Freudian sweat stain looked like it belonged. I was just another sweaty man in an exercise room, alone with an attractive woman. Porn is just art imitating life after all, isn’t it?

I left seconds after having this thought and wandered out into the streets of D.C. sweating profusely.

Romania is under water. The recent floods in 33 of the country’s 42 districts killed 21 people and left more than 12,000 without a home. According to a Reuters report, the floods are the worst the country has seen in 50 years, topping the floods of April and May, which produced an estimated damage of $600 million.

Romanian officials have said they will ask for international assistance in cleaning up and rebuilding. An article published yesterday by the Institure for War and Peace Reporting says the Romanian government is much too concerned about EU accession and early elections to really focus on the villages hit by waters.

Here’s the irony: according to ReliefWeb’s Financial Tracking System (an arm of the United Nations) in 2005 Romania pledged almost $700,000 in aid for the Indian Ocean tsunami relief effort. More than $150,000 of that money has been paid, according to the data. The FTS says Romania has not given money to any other cause in 2005.

In turn, Romania received close to $630,000, most of the funds being earmarked — you guessed it — for flood relief. With the exception of a $42,308 Swiss donation related to dairy products, the rest of the money is destined to help with recovery and rebuilding. Donors include U.N. agencies, the Red Cross, Switzerland, Germany and the United States.

We donate to water related disasters and we get hit by similar tragedies. Here’s a report dated July 15 from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

You can also view a July 4 map of the affected regions here. The situation has gotten much worse since.

The photos below are by the Asssociated Press.

I am lucky (I guess) to be interning at a certain magazine in the midst of one of the biggest non-sex Washington scandals in recent years. And yet, as all the speculation and evasion and embarrassment swirls around me, I am reminded of the other news of the past week: the terrorist attacks in London.

Isn’t it a little odd that the people who are so desperate to get Westerners out of the Middle East and away from its natural riches are targeting our mass transit systems? I mean, if they want us out of Saudi Arabia, you’d think they’d want us to drive less, and therefore be less dependent on foreign oil. Alas, one cannot see into the mind of a terrorist, not even with the aid of Lynndie England.

I imagine that, much in the way applicants to magazine jobs have to take copy editing tests, applicants for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart must take a test as well, albeit one that fits the particular needs of a fake news show. I imagine they are handed a news story or press release and asked to identify the irony. An absurdity test.

When the Wilson/Novak/Plame/Miller/Cooper/Rove scandal is finally laid to rest, the Daily Show will have on its hands one hell of a test.

Few have commented on the absurdity of this administration attempting to discredit someone by leveling the charge of nepotism. But then again, why should they, when there are so many other obvious ironies to note? Like that the only reporter to go to jail is the one who didn’t write the story. That Rove would attempt to plant an attack against Wilson in the hands of Matt Cooper, who is married to a Democratic strategist, who is the daughter of the former editor-in-chief of Time. That there really were no tubes, no yellow cake, no WMDs. That Novak still gets to talk on TV, even though he hasn’t said anything interesting in years. My fav is Time leaking to Newsweek. What?

The crushing weight of all this irony squishes my little brain, giving me this constant throbbing sensation, somewhere above my left eye, that occasionally paralyzes me in front of CNN. One little brain cannot handle all this irony, and it leaves me wanting one of those Harry Potter devices for storing bulky or unpleasant memories.

To cope, I comfort myself in a monument to fake: the mall.

Yes, that’s what I crave — a trip to the mall, where I can buy perfume that smells like a fake waffle cone and scoop of fake ice cream made of air. It should be comforing to remember that those dollars I just spent are not all for naught. Yes indeed, I can stop the throbbing with the knowledge that those dollars are probably buying Hummers — poorly armed ones, yes, but Hummers nonetheless. I may be alienated, but I am still a patriot.

Just not one wasn’t built for this Post-Everything era.

How do you judge your music?

Is it the brilliance of the guitar riffs? The digital perfection of the production? The intellectual ambiguity of the lyrics? The ass-shake-potential of the bass? The “add to my sex playlist” quality?

Those are all good categories, and there are scores I didn’t mention. They are all safe conversational bets that won’t make you look like a total idiot. Even if you say you once got laid to “I wanna wake up with you” you might be able to get a nod of acceptance. After all, it’s likely your conversation chum first had sex to Lionel Richie’s “Hello” or even worse, to “Stairway to heaven” after a night of sharing vodkas. Can you say anticlimactic?

Over the years I developed a passion for a type of song I cannot describe.

It’s more about me than about the song, because I feel it most when wearing the three glasses of wine or two beers smile. It’s the smile you have when rushing home from a bar on a summer night — slightly muggy, but acceptable for jeans. You have to be wearing a T-shirt and believe strongly that you will keep grinning like an idiot even if it rains (thou shall not frown!). One might say it’s the face of the movie character who has just fallen in love and he (or she) has forgotten for a couple of minutes that this love thing comes with plenty of low-brow movies, ackward sex moments in which you sometimes twist her/his nipple like it’s the dial on you radio, and the day her/his parents tell you proudly that you seem “so much more reliable” than the “creature” before you.

Back to this dubious song. So it’s best felt in a state of tipsiness, it calls for jeans and a T-shirt (and sneakers!) and summer night’s weather. Ok, but what does it do musically? Well, here’s how my lack of musical theory can describe it best: the song needs some high notes and bridges that accelerate (or seem to do so) the beat. What’s more weird is that this song exists is almost all genres of music if you really look for it.

Let me put it this way; if I was a movie director — directing more than me and a couple of friends spoofing Baywatch — I would use this song for the cheesiest scene in my movie. It goes like this:

Introduce male character (I can’t play the role of the female in this one scene, other scenes are negotiable). Male character is walking about a deserted beach, park, street, highway, country road, slaughterhouse. Whatever. He is one of those tortured men who always gets the hottest women because his pain and misery make him twice as deep as his cartoon-illustrated socks and boxers would suggest. He walks briskly, hands stuffed so deep in his pockets it looks they came with the pants. His hair can either be having wind-related issues, or it holds so much gel that it can compete by itself in a nut-cracking contest. His steps get faster and faster as this song gets going. The notes climb higher and higher (or seem to), the drums (or drum machine or keyboard) get more and more into it and the chorus is a such a blatant sing-along that even the pop charts would consider it a cliche.

This male character starts running and the camera runs alongside him, above him, around him. You get this eerie feeling you are watching a pathetic display that must surely involve a woman. A few skeptics will say the man mixed beer with milk and he’s trying to find one of those elusive outhouses that offers relief and revelation for the price of a few napkins to be used as toilet paper.

But the skeptics are wrong. It must be some woman, and the man is sad. He is sad because he is happy. And he is happy because at this moment he is running so gracefully he feels he can maintain coolness no matter the song that accompanies his plight. Audiences start crying tears the size of snowballs and the song sticks in all its corny glory.

You rush home and look for it online. And then you trust me to come up with a longer list of mix-tape ready, more or less pathetic and corny alternatives from all genres and eras. And I, of course, oblige:

Save Garden – Break me, shake me
Sonique – Sky
Pet Shop Boys – Always on my mind
RMB – Spring
Roxette – How do you do
Something Corporate – Woke up in a car
Real McCoy – Run away
Scooter – The logical song
Aqua – Roses are red
Green Day – Nice guys finish last
The Cure – Friday I’m in love
The Raveonettes – Great love long
Blondie – Maria

A teenager was stabbed in Brooklyn late last week because he refused to hand over his iPod to his attackers, who fled with the mp3 player, a cell phone and the boy’s sneakers. The front page of the Sunday New York Post read “iPOD MURDER” and the New York Times also ran a brief on the slaying.

When I saw the huge headline Sunday I wondered if Apple would respond to this. The headline was the kind of thing that can make your PR people go berserk.

NY Times reported today that Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, called the family to express condolences.

What’s happening here?

Having a kid murdered because of a product your company put out, must surely be damaging. But it’s more than that. The reaction of the media says the iPod has become a cultural icon, a status symbol that speaks as much of wealth as it does of taste.

With prices ranging from $100 for the Shuffle to more than $400 for the large capacity players, iPod is no more expensive than its competitors. But we don’t hear of Rio Carbon murders, or Creative Zen stabbings.

The iPod dominates the market, but there is something else at play. The connection to the iPod is stronger than the connection people develop to other gadgets. In the first-person essays journalists wrote (and some continue to write) about their own iPods, they talked about the individuality they felt, the beauty of their personalized play lists which they organized by genre, or even mood. A Newsweek report last July, featuring Jobs and the iPod on the cover, stopped short of building a temple for the white and silver music devil.

The iPods are becoming the Air Jordans of this decade.

The New York subway authority has put up ads trying to curb iPod theft: “Earphones are a giveaway. Protect your device”). Now, a kid has been killed and newspaper editors who own an iPod felt threatened. What if they would be next? This was not just any robbery — this was an “iPod murder.” The attackers were looking to steal the kid’s individuality and become part of a pack of white-budded urbanites that use the same device to enhance their uniqueness.

And so hysteria begins. iPod users, change your earphones.

My mp3 player handles playlists as well, but there aren’t any ads telling me how to protect it from theft. It’s a useful gadget, and an entertaining past time, and if it’s stolen, bad luck. But what if I owned an iPod? Would I feel like I’m walking around with a target on my back?

A poll in a free New York paper yesterday asked people if they are afraid to have their iPods stolen in view of recent events (according to police, 50 iPod thefts were reported as of April — that’s fifty more than in 2004). The poll respondents said they were aware they carried a desired object, and one man said muggers would have to kill him to get it. Imagine that.

July 4 fireworks, originally uploaded by owlspotting.We saw this year’s fireworks display from the lawn of the United Nations headquarters in New York.

It was an amazing display of light and color and these photos don’t do it justice. I was too busy being amazed.

Still, there are a few more shots here.

“I sure as hell hope New York doesn’t get it,” she says earnestly, looking around the room for nods of support. “Might as well draw a big target on us.”

It’s about the 50th time she’s said this. But though I’m not sure of her title, I’m pretty sure she’s important to the grand hierarchy of the magazine. It’s only my fourth week as an intern; I’m still in the mode of just trying not to piss anyone off. So I allow only a tiny flicker of contempt to flash over my face before quickly looking down at the doodles on my notebooks.

She’s talking about the Olympics — we’re considering doing a little something on the cities vying for the 2012 games (New York among them). She doesn’t want them to come stateside. She’s afraid they’ll bring with them the terrorists.

First of all, hello, they’re kind of busy in Iraq right now. Second, who actually buys into that perma-fear stuff anymore? Apparently, the liberal East Coast media elite.

This is not the first time Important People have uttered little wisps of alarmism. My first week, we discussed a story about nuclear reactors and how the terrorists could cause a meltdown RIGHT NOW. They sat around the table in their expensive suits wringing their hands and declaring that half the population could be coated in radioactive goo any minute. I was so confused.

Of course 9/11 happened in New York. But it still stands as the only foreign terrorist attack to kill a whole bunch of people on our soil. Biological attacks have only happened in Gotham. I would have assumed the people sitting around the table would understand this.

They are, for the most part, liberals, some of them flaming. And yet they are the very people perpetuating the rhetoric of permanent panic, justifying the building up the security state for the very “red staters” they are (still) desperately trying to understand and view with just a touch of contempt (OK, sometimes more than a touch). They were key to getting elected the very man they despise. It’s an irony only New Yorkers could appreciate.

Owl Spotting, in collaboration with the Internet, is proud to launch a new feature available online every Wednesday afternoon starting today.

“8 with 8” is an eight-point Q&A session with a Brooklyn-based 8 ball notorious for providing correct answers. The ball has a tendency to avoid “no” answers, which is why the more positive the question is, the better the answer will make you feel. Submit your own questions by replying to this post.

This first sit down with the 8 ball is on the topic of George W. Bush and his role in the world. The 8 ball also predicted Iran will go forward and produce nuclear weapons.

1. Will Iran develop a nuclear weapon?
Most likely.

2. Will that piss off George W. Bush?
It is certain.

3. Speaking of George W. Bush — he made a big speech last night in support of the war in Iraq. Do you think Bush is the incarnation of evil?
It is certain.

4. Interesting answer. Don’t you think Bush is actually the incarnation of good?
Concentrate and ask again.

5. Ok, ok. He’s got a direct line to God. Isn’t he the incarnation of good?
Very doubtful.

6. Are you sure?
Without a doubt.

7. Are you saying he wants to take over the world?
Concentrate and ask again.

8. Are you saying he wants to take over the world?
Ask again later.

Remember when the whole red state-blue state thing was fun, insidery jargon used by political junkies? Yeah, those were the good ole days.

Much the same as we have to tolerate the thousands of permutations of Evangelicals Doing Stuff, now we have to put up with endless stories on the red-and-blue theme. One of the latest (and most ridiculous) is Matt Bai’s “King of the Hill Democrats” in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

Bai opens by explaining that the idea of “South Park conservatives” is all wrong. To understand American politics today, one must “set the TiVo” to catch “King of the Hill,” of which the blue governor of red North Carolina is a fan. Therefore, it must be gospel.

Bai writes that Hank, the central father character, “embodies all the traditional conservative values” because “he’s a proud gun owner and a Nascar fan.” But wait! There’s a kicker — as the North Carolina governor explains to our poor New York journalist, Hank is more complicated that he may seem. “Hank may be a lover of the environment — he was furious when kids trashed the local campground — but he resents self-righteous environmentalists like the ones who forced Arlen to install those annoying low-flow toilets.” See, Blue America? There is hope for us after all!

Bai’s most irritating commentary comes when he’s describing King of the Hill’s audience. He writes, “You might expect that a spoof of a small-town propane salesman and his beer-drinking buddies would attract mostly urban intellectuals, with their highly developed sense of irony.” Cause, you know, the only way to get a laugh out of those of us from the Heartland is to show some guy get kicked in the nuts.

So it comes as a huge surprise to Bai that the show’s viewers are mostly men, 18-49, a quarter of whom own pickup trucks. Yes, pickup trucks! Who knew pickup-truck drivers functioned on a high enough level to understand the complex irony of an animated sitcom on Fox? Bai closes by explaining that, “understanding the show’s viewers might resolve some of the mysteries confronting [Democrats] about the vast swaths of red on the electoral map.” Please, God, make it stop.

If this is what we have to put up with in the off-season, I shudder at the thought of what may come in 2006, especially during sweeps week.

A Romanian journalism student in Illinois posted a long comment in response to my rants on accents. I decided to upload some of it in case readers don’t click the “comments” link on past posts. You can read a story Luiza wrote about an Illinois Catholic worker here. Her comments on foreign students with accents are below:

I remember the first paper I had to turn in. It was pretty good, I thought. When the professor returned the papers, he couldn’t stop expressing his stupor at how remarkably well I write in English.

Imagine my surprise. Dude, isn’t that part of why they accepted me in the first place? I am after all a journalist, I should be able to express myself in English if I want to activate in the United States, right? “Right,” said the professor. It’s cool for you as a prestigious university to enroll international students. It has a ring to it, I guess. The problem is evaluating your applicants.

There’s no question about science and engineering – Asian students are extremely qualified. But say you’re the English Literature department and the majority of your assistantships involve teaching. Are you going to admit the Chinese student based on his GRE score or are you going to refine your criteria?!

I just don’t buy the idea of undergrads complaining of their TA’s accent. Felix, my German house mate teaches Chemistry to a class of 200. I don’t think he would have gotten the job had he not been worthy of it. His English is excellent except for his deep German accent that kind of makes you say every other minute, “I’m sorry, what?” Yet his students adore him. They come to the parties we throw, they never bail out on his class, his evaluations are fantastic and the next semester Felix will supervise a gang of TAs, mostly American.

[…] One of my sources told me last October, quite matter-of-factly, that he thinks girls with a South-Eastern European accent are cute. It annoyed the daylights out of me each time a source would start the conversation by asking me where am I from (and then having to wait for them to exhibit some knowledge of Romania) and each time a professor would outburst with the joy of seeing how articulate I am.

To my amusement, this sort of stopped. For the past month I’ve been interviewing political activists, campus radicals and underground protesters. Naturally, most of them believe Marx’s Manifesto is the shit (bad capitalism) and they do their best to convince me of it. Towards the end of interviews I usually bring up Romania and have fun with their reactions.

Losing your accent doesn’t mean losing your roots (that’s why they’re roots). Thinking ill thoughts of Romania in its absence is way more serious.