…and Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi and I have no idea how many other, less famous places. How inexpressibly sad all this is. I was visiting a web forum where someone who has gone there as part of the rescue operation posted from New Orleans. He said it looked “unrecoverable” to him. “This city is dead. ” is how he titled his post. I hope not. How strange that would be. No New Orleans? But regardless of whether it’s a famous and much loved city or another one, the pictures of devastaion and the flooding are beyond describing. The losses, of life and of everything that so many people have worked for all their lives is too much to contemplate. What must it be like to experience it? I hope we can stop and just be one country for a time, while we try to send whatever help we can to this devastated region.

You notice we get a Monday almost every week? Why? What are they good for? I did survive the weekend, but just barely. We got to the club where our son’s band was playing around 11. He was particularly anxious for us to go because he wanted us to meet two friends of his. When we caught up with them he introduced us and announced that he and they would be staying with us overnight. As it turned out the sound guy stayed, too. I’d done my weekend marketing after work because I figured I’d need the days to recover from this newly resumed social life. We’d put away the groceries but left a bit of a mess everywhere else. We went home after the first set as planned, but we were doing housework at 2 a.m. It doesn’t every pay to figure you know what’s going to happen next.

Saturday day was the Arlo gig. Since I’d volunteered to help with things we had to get there at 5, which meant we had to leave here at 4. When we got there we met up with another friend who was also doing some volunteering. Luckily for me I got an easy job to do, but even so I got kind of winded and my sister, who was with me, said I was getting kind of pale by the end. She was a getting a little worried. At that point we took our seats and watched the rest of the show. Everyone was very good and the sound was marvelous. I’d never seen the Mammals together as a band before. One of them is Tao Rodriguez, who is Pete Seeger’s grandson. I knew he was very, very good. Turns out everyone in the group is an excellent musicians and the vocals were wonderful as well. I recommend their CD, or go see them if they’re in your area. No reason that these young people shouldn’t be major stars in the folk world for a long time to come. Sarah Lee and Johnny were delightful as always. I’d heard most of the songs they did, but not with a full band. That fuller sound makes a big difference. The surprise of the night for us was Gordon Titcomb. He’s been touring with Arlo for a while now, but I’d thought of him as a strings guy. He can be seen most often on the steel pedal guitar or mandolin or just about anything with strings. He sang a song from his new CD and blew us away. My sister bought one and I probably will too, if she doesn’t share nicely. It was interesting. Arlo is usually around signing autographs and things at shows, but not at this one as far as I noticed anyway. Instead, everyone else got to promote their CDS and do the signing. I think that worked out well for everyone. He got a break and the rest got more attention than they would if he were out there too.

In the department of a small world, we were in the parking area, waiting for the traffic to thin out before leaving and found ourselves in conversation with a group of people who were parked next to us, doing the same thing. The guy doing most of the chatting was in a band and said we should check them out on the web, so I did that the next day. Keep in mind this guy wasn’t from my hometown or even county. When I checked out the website, it turned out that the bass player is our former neighbor. And we never knew he played an instrument.

Then we took the scenic route home. It was too dark to be scenic, but my sister was starved. For some reason there had been nothing vegetarian available at this event. Very odd considering that the crowd was probably something like 25% vegetarian at a guess. We stopped in one of the larger towns along the way where there was an open diner and found more evidence that the city is coming to us. There was a hansom cab taking people around town. You used to have to go into New York to see that. And there was a small acoustic combo busking on the corner. I like this trend. It’s getting more interesting around here.

I was well and truly beat on Sunday, to the point of exhaustion. It was too much, really, but at least it was all nice stuff. This week is already shaping up as pretty bad because some key people are away. That always causes problems. Still, it’s hard to compain about petty things like that when you see what’s going on along the Gulf Coast. I was checking in on the computer every chance I got today and it looks like it could have been worse, but it was still pretty terrible. Of course, the ramifications including numbers of casualites aren’t known yet. It’s kind of interesting how the internet has made us all closer. In years past these disasters were something you saw on the news, but now you watch it happening and you very likely know someone from a forum or blogging community who’d being affected, even if you’re thousands of miles away. It all seems more real, somehow. Too band this whole “it’s a small world, after all” effect isn’t helping us get along any better except during catastrophes.

This was quite a week at work. Having had the gift of a nice easy start back the previous week, this one was the week from hell. Everyone who called seemed to be seriously divorced from reality, and it seemed like everyone did call. All week. Without stopping. I’m tired now, but I’ll be moreso when this weekend is over. I think I overscheduled.

Tonight we’re going to see my son’s band play. We try to go whenever he’s local, but nowadays we only stay for one set. That usually starts at about eleven at night. Tomorrow night I’m going to see Arlo Guthrie with the Mammals and I think I’m volunteering at that event. Considering that we were out last Sunday night as well, that’s all a bit more of a social whirl than I’m really up for.

Last week we were offered complimentary tickets to a production of The Full Monty for last Sunday night. It was playing at The Patchogue Theatre, which is one of the successful restoration projects around here. It’s gone from being a vaudeville venue to a local movie house to a rundown flea market to nothing at all, and now it’s a theater that’s revitalizing another downtown.

We took my mother with us. It was a great chance to get her out to something kind of special. It was a fully professional, equity cast, so the singing was great. The only disappointment was that the whole point of the comped tickets was a talk by Terrance McNally, who wrote the book for the musical and that took place up in the balcony. We couldn’t get there with my mother, so we had to skip that part. She enjoyed the evening so much that she remembered it the next day, so it was worth it.

The Full Monty is about a bunch of unemployed blue collar guys who put on a Chippendale’s type show to raise some cash. That’s the joke behind it. It’s not really such a joke. I remember when male strippers started and it wasn’t at Chippendale’s. It was at an obscure club on the shore of Lake Ronkonkoma about thirty years ago. The building and property were owned by a (Mafia) connected car dealer from Nassau county. He had his driver, known as Buggy Ray, recruit a couple of people he knew out this way to turn the club, which was kind of defunct, into a functioning nightspot. The rumor was that the county was going to buy up all the property around the lake and that the car dealer could get more for a running business than for just the property and building. No one knew if that’s what the car dealer was really up to, but the guys that Buggy Ray found threw themselves into the mission of creating a running club. It was what they wanted. And we were in a recession, which was hitting Long Island particularly hard. Opportunities were hard to come by, just like in The Full Monty. Buggy Ray’s friends just didn’t dwell on the possibility that they weren’t meant to succeed for long.

It was a big space to fill. The club was in an old Victorian mansion and there was one big room with a stage, a bar downstairs with a smaller stage and then there was a bar - no stage, over on the side. It was also a bad time of year to get started. The most popular bands on the Long Island circuit, foremost of which was Twisted Sister, were booked out in the Hamptons. In those days there was a busy bar and band scene on the east end of Long Island and celebrities didn’t own it lock stock and barrel. Come summer, the youth of Long Island headed east. Meanwhile, in Lake Ronkonkoma, Buggy Ray’s friends booked bands as best they could. Things were a little slow, but there were some pretty good nights, too. Most business people would expect a venture like that to take some time to build, but there seemed to be some hurry about this. The car dealer may have been under some financial pressure. He was reported to have been kidnapped for a very short period that summer. It was in the papers, but I don’t recall if that mystery was ever cleared up.

It hadn’t been terribly long since strip clubs had morphed into topless clubs, which were, at the time, featuring more nude dancers than merely topless ones. There were lots of those clubs on Long Island. Buggy Ray and his friends considered turning the club into one like that, but while they were considering, another idea arose. It was the Glam Band era, and the bands that played at the club usually performed in huge platform boots, make up and lots of accessories. One of the regular bands - the name is lost to memory now - had a drummer who was up for a solo career. His name was Bobby and he was basically skin and bones, but he had flare - literally. Bobby and Buggy’s friends came up with the idea of featuring male strippers and putting on a show for the ladies. And so it happened. Bobby used his band costume for starters - cape and huge fur hat with horns - and for a finale, he set himself on fire. Just the nipples, I think. It was supposed to be a trick, but sometimes he got burned. It didn’t stop him. Bobby was a trouper. And maybe just a little bit of a masochist.

Times were still bad and it wasn’t hard to find guys to dance. The Full Monty wasn’t really so far-fetched. Some of them were buff, some - not so much. It was news. No one had heard of anything like it before. Bobby got his picture in Newsday, although the story is too old to be found online. He appeared on a local TV show, complete with horned hat and cape. One of Buggy Ray’s friends did an interview for the newspaper article about it and said that they could have had a topless club, but that they didn’t want to, because those didn’t have “the taste of class”, whereas this did.

History has shown that they were onto something. Sadly, the club burned down before the idea could really take off. There were seven points of ignition. The police questioned everyone, including Buggy Ray’s friends, except the one who went to Mexico right after the fire. No arrests were made. Chippendale’s opened in New York within the next year.

Gmail’s gone and added the “send from a different account” feature. They’ve been rolling it out for a few days and it’s in my account as of this morning. Just when I thought I had my addiction to e-mail addresses licked.

In case you’re the one who hasn’t heard about it, when you acquire an “Accounts” tab in Settings, you’ve got the feature. You can then add additional address as the From - not just Reply-to - address. So, your message goes out as “otheraddress@otherdomain.com” rather than your Gmail address. This has a thousand and one uses.

I’ve been hooked on web based e-mail since Hotmail appeared, and before Microsoft bought it. At first it was because the e-mail provided by my ISP took hours - sometimes days - to arrive. This was early on. I got a better ISP and started using POP again. Then people started sending out attachments for fun. Dancing babies and other animations made people pee in their pants from sheer hysteria. I blame AOL since that’s where these attachments come from. It made my e-mail stop. It would get stuck downloading one of these and dial-up couldn’t handle it. It would stall. The rest of my e-mail would be sitting in back of the queue, unread, inaccessible. I loved the way webmail sat there and waited for me to tell it what to do before downloading anything. I mostly used Netscape’s mail client back then, but if I had to use Outlook, that would really drive me crazy. I’d be thinking I was discarding a message that I’d decided not to send, but it would stick it in my Outbox and try to trick me into sending them out later on. Oh, I caught on after a while, but it was always trying to sneak one past me.

Later on, it was that my computer time was almost evenly split between home and work computers. I didn’t want set up a personal account in a client on the work machines. Also, lacking a laptop it was easier to check mail from any computer that was handy when it was on the web.

Hotmail couldn’t satisfy me for long, though. Yahoo came along with its 6 MB mailbox and I had to try it. I stayed with it for a while, but eventually I wanted something bigger and more exciting. Something - you know - exotic. After that it all became a blur for a while. I’d go to sleep with one e-mail account and wake up with another. 15 MB, then 30 with POP and complicated PIM features thrown in. I was switching around so fast that friends were talking intervention. They didn’t know where to send a message. It was a mad, crazy time. I still get e-mail flashbacks just thinking about it.

Then the downward spiral began. Free e-mail providers started going out of business. Most of those who stuck around started downsizing their free accounts. Some of them started offering paid accounts with the features the free ones had before the bubble burst. Accounts with measly 2 to 6 MB would fill up and start bouncing messages if they weren’t cleaned out every day or so.

I found Fastmail. It was in beta then. It was a revelation. Faster and more reliable than most e-mail providers, it was free with a ton of features, including an innovative web based interface, POP, IMAP and “personalities”. They were very upfront about the plan to charge eventually, and they did, but not very much. It’s still a very good deal. Fastmail has more features than I could list here, but the personalities were my favorite. By then, I had a couple of domains. You could forward your domain addresses to your Fastmail account, set up the personality for you@yourdomain.com and have all your addresses coming to one account and still appear to be sending out mail from those addresses. Easy, simple. Fastmail even automatically sets the reply to a message from the appropriate address, which Gmail doesn’t seem to do, at least as yet. I bought one domain that I thought would work for the whole family, except the other members of the family didn’t care what their e-mail addresses were as long as they could send and receive. Philistines! I bought zenyenta.com for myself, since the others weren’t interested in my address largess. And that was in addition the others. Not to mention that Fastmail gives you several aliases within their own numerous domains and subdomains as well as plus addressing.

I knew things had gone too far again when someone asked me for my e-mail address and I was as stuck for an answer as George Bush in a political debate. I was only using one account, but I had too many addresses. I was having trouble remembering which one I wanted to use for what. Oh, yes. The wretched excess was starting all over again.

Then Gmail came along in April of 2004 and redefined free e-mail. I didn’t expect to like it, but I did. With a bigger inbox than the hard drive space on my first computer, it seemed like a chance to start over with a clean slate. I would just use one e-mail address for everything. First name/last name is what I finally settled on and that’s what I’ve been doing. Until now. I’m trying to be strong, but tempation just seems to chase you down.

I’m not against cellphones. I love my cellphone. It’s made my life easier. If I had young kids when cellphones and family plans were common, I would have gotten them phones. To be able to reach out and nag someone any time at all - that would have been great. It would have saved us hours of time, calling everyone in the neighborhood when one of the kids lost track of time and was supposed to be at a particular place instead of no particular place at all. It would have been sweet to call the kid and if he didn’t answer, leave him a message saying, “Get your butt home right now or we’ll stop paying for the phone!”

So, I’m not against them. But really - just a tiny bit of common sense would be nice. We’ve all heard stories about phones going off in theaters and other annoyances. No one should be stupid enough to leave their phone on in a theater. It should be illegal to be that dumb. Personally, I’m not one of those who minds when strangers around me are involved in conversations around me. I find it a little amazing is all. Most trains from here to New York take a bit over an hour. A lot of people seem to find something to chat about on the phone from the time they take their seat to the moment the trains pulls up at its destination. As I said, I don’t mind, especially if the conversations are worth eavesdropping on. Usually, they’re not. I do mind if someone I’m with spends a lot of time on the phone. That’s rude. But I’m not bothered by the nattering of strangers.

Today was a real winner, though. I made the usual convenience store stop for milk and sundries on the way home from work. When the clerk was right in the middle of the transaction, he whipped out his phone - it must have been on vibrate - and took a call. Now, I understand that there are emergencies, but then you say so. You say, “I’m sorry, I have to take this.” and you get someone to finish the sale. What actually happened was that he just sort of drifted off and the young woman who was also in back of the counter kind of noticed and finished things up for him. I stop in that store most days and I don’t think I’ve seen him before. I doubt I’ll see him again. It’s likely that clerking at 7-11 is just too much of a stretch for that kid.

Apparently we need some rules for what should be glaringly obvious for anyone who’s able to cross the street unaided. I’m sure they’re not all in the area of cellphone usage, but my first two are:

In personal life, the next phone call is probably not more important than the person you’re dealing with. That’s one of the things voicemail is for. Sometimes you might really need to take a call. Make it as brief as possible. Be apologetic to the person you’re ignoring in favor of the phone.

At work, if you take a call when you’re supposed to be waiting on a customer, you’re probably fired.

Anyone else have any new rules?

I hope the Ballad of Greenwich Village is available on DVD, or that it will be. Because the consensus is that the Village, in the ways that made it so important, is leaving and it won’t be back. I’ve been noticing the changes for a while. It’s been alluded to bit at A Sense of Place, where Ronni Bennett blogs her planned move from the Village. And now it’s been duly noted in The Observer.

For decades the streets of Greenwich Village beat as the counterculture heart of American life. From Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac to the anonymous thousands fresh off the bus from Middle America, it has provided a sanctuary for the alternative and outcast or those simply fleeing a suburban childhood.

No longer. America’s bohemian pulse has faded. Assailed by sky-high rents, chain stores and hyper-expensive eateries, Greenwich Village is starting to look more Wall Street than Beat Street. Last week a headline in the Village Voice, New York’s venerable alternative newspaper, said simply: ‘The Village is Dying’.

Another Voice column was more brutal. It called the remnants of the Village’s bohemian lifestyle ‘threadbare’ and concluded that poor poets, struggling artists and wannabe actors had been forced out by a simple new reality: ‘One must be rich to live here.’

The only thing wrong with the above statements is that it was more than mere decades. If the Village had started being a bohemian enclave with the advent of the Beats, then its passing would have no more or less significance than the Disneyfication of Times Square. Of course, the two are not unrelated. It’s part of the same thing. The impact on our lives varies from location to location.

The Village was home to aspiring artists, causes and political movements for generations. The artists had the benefit of cheap housing and proximity to the galleries, theaters, venues or publishers that they aspired to. You could leave your walk-up and all of New York was at your doorstep. And if you didn’t make it big in a commercial way, you could stay anyway. The fact that New York City, from the Battery to Harlem and the boroughs, too, is rapidly becoming a place that can’t accomodate anyone but the already successful for very long has implications. Tomorrow’s Dylan, whether Thomas or Bob, isn’t crashing in the Village. It’s not so much a matter of “if you can make it there” anymore as it is a matter of making it somewhere else first, before you can spend much time there.

Things didn’t get to this point overnight. It’s almost forty years since the Village proper was declared either too expensive or too popular and the East Village was declared to be the new home of the seriously edgy. Then we had SoHo and the acronyms kept on coming. It must be at least fifteen years since Long Island City was declared the best place to find loft space. Now the fatally hip are holding their happenings in the Red Hook Section of Brooklyn. Or maybe that was last week.

Everything changes. A lot of the buildings that had turned to slum dwellings when I was a child had once been grand homes. Now, a lot them are grand once again. The Village never was a slum, though. It was merely affordable and accessible to all kinds of people. It came into its own in the days when “the best” people didn’t mix with the artistic or the eccentric types that found their way there, at least not openly. It’s been a long time since that was the way things worked. Now bankers, corporate executives, heirs and heiresses are more than happy to live next door to actors and artists, musicians and writers. It’s quite an irony that by moving in among them, they’re chasing them away.

I just noticed that this blog has been accepted to The Ageless Project. That puts it in some great company. I’m going to have to work on being worthy, as soon as possible.

Thanks very much to The Ageless Project.

Caller: Please connect me with Mr. Jonanthan Doe
Operator: I’ll see if he’s in. May I have your name?
Caller: Sid ( Fast and Indistinguishable). I spoke to him last Thursday and he told me I should call him after I spoke to Mr. H at Organization A. He’s helping me with..(fill in problem)
Operator: Yes sir. May I have your name again?
Caller: I already told you. Sidney (low, fast, indistinguisable)
Operator: I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. Could you repeat the last name?
Caller: (Annoyed - spells name out in exaggerated manner) S i d n e y J. P e r l m u t t e r

Context is good, but you can’t be announced without your name. Please tell the nice operator what it is. Clearly.

All names are fictional. Any resemblence between anyone living or dead is purely coincidental

I got through the first day back at work in much better condition than I expected to. It didn’t hurt that it was very quiet for a Monday. That was a piece of luck I never expected. And there was a lovely welcome, starting with a sign on the bulletin board by my desk and then later, bagels in the library. Bagels are the basic unit of celebration at our office. There were donuts, too, but I passed on those. Being on medication that’s capable of driving one’s triglycerides up into the low thousands makes you think twice about donuts. There was a lovely bouquet of flowers as well. Now I remember why I’m glad I work there. At least as long as being independently wealthy doesn’t seem to be an option.

I was talking with the office manager about how the doubts I’d had last Friday. That’s when I called her and told her I wasn’t sure I could make it in by today. I’d been done in after just keeping an appointment with the doctor. I recalled that she’d taken a couple of vials of blood. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but then I recalled that I’d been exhausted the Friday before, which also featured bloodwork requiring multiple. The office manager, who’s lifelong medical odyssey of her own, said that when she was having treatments, bloodwork took it out of her in more ways than one, too. I’m including this tidbit because you don’t normally think of having a vial or two of blood taken as anything that you’d even notice. It seems that under some circumstances you can expect it to be kind of tiring.