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Picture: Lola waiting for the bus near Times Square; taken with my Treo. We had a doctor's appointment for Lo with Dr. Richard, and caught the bus back from 50th Street.
I'm on day four of my trip to New York, and I'm starting to think about things other than work. I'm writing from my brother and sister-in-law's apartment in Chelsea. There's a Buddhist meeting in their living room, and I'm not quite ready to join the chanting. "NAM MYOHO RENGE KYO."
This morning I had breakfast at Cafe Mogador with Ed Halter and Thomas Beard. Ed just had a book published: From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. Ed and Thomas are a swell couple, and talking avant garde film/video shop with them is like scratching an itch with a long back scratcher/shoe horn with the creepy plastic hand. It satisfies!
I met with Tali Hinkis of Lovid, and had a botched playdate for the girls at the Riverrun Park (89th Street). Lola refused to leave her cousins and so I went to the playdate empty handed. Rama, Tali's daughter, was appropriately disappointed. Later, Tali and I walked down to the 79th Street Boat Basin, where I considered the feasibility of living on a houseboat in NYC. It seems possible, but was more expensive than I thought: $2500/month during the high season and less during the low, averaging about $2100/month for a 25' vessel. It would have to be a really really tall houseboat with an elevator to make it work.
*I am secretly a native Freeport, Long Islander (along with my boyz Lou Reed and Chuck D), but have lived in Texas for 11 years.
My oldest kid, Lola, has asthma, eczema, minor hairloss, and sinusitis. Houston, it's not worth it. Carlos and I are convinced that the damp weather and poor air quality are contributing factors. We visited an acupunturist today and he had Lola sit on my lap and hold single viles of allergens. While Lola held a vile, I raised my arm and the acupuncturist tried to push it down. Whenever my arm was weak, he associated the weakness with a reaction to the substance. Lola thought the whole thing was a laugh riot, and decided to announce "I farted" on multiple occasions. Carlos, my new agey hubbie, seemed to like the doctor, especially when he found a copy of Alexander Grey's book on the shelf, with forward by Ken Wilber and Carlo McCormick, the triumvirate of wisdom. For some reason Carlos handed me a book on tantric sex for women.
At the end of the tests, the doc recommended that Lola eliminate wheat, sugar, milk and cheese. No more cheese blintzes, chocolate croissants, or Newman O's. He also prescribed a number of tinctures and mysterious homeopathic drops. Fingers and chakras crossed.
Today I hired the Wallpaper Lady to install this autumn scene wallpaper mural in our living room. It's apparently New Hampshire. When my daughter Lola arrived home from pre-school, she asked "How do we get in there?"
The Wallpaper Lady's real name is Julie, and turns out we were both fans of the now defunct Star 790 AM radio station, especially the old timer disk jockey, Paul Berlin. Berlin had been DJing since 1950 when he went off the air in 2004, and had all the affects of a dutch uncle, with a twist of brat pack humor. I wonder where Paul is these days?
Picture: Anne and Buckminster Fuller by Suzanne Murphy
On rare occasions people cry while they're giving public talks, and I just did. A senior's group was visiting the theater that I run/live in, Aurora Picture Show, and they asked me about my dogs who were here five years ago when they first visited. I started telling them very matter-of-factly that both dogs had passed away this year, and the next thing I knew my bottem lip was quivering. Oh well, they caught me off guard. Everyone smiled uncomfortably, and then someone chimed in on another subject, but all I heard was "blah blah blah blah," because I was stuck in my head.
Speaking of death, recently I came across a two-DVD series of interviews with R. Buckminster Fuller (Buckminster Fuller: The Lost Interviews), which I highly recommend. The interviews are from an early 1980s (Fuller lived 1895-1983) cable access show on psychic phenomena and have a humorously new agey vibe, but what Fuller has to say is fantastic. He speaks about a myriad of subjects like the death of his 4 year-old daughter, how he had contemplated suicide but then decided he could justify living by trying to improve humanity, and how he did not speak at all for TWO YEARS-- his wife did all of his talking. She must have been a very loving person. He didn't speak because he needed to unlearn everything he had been taught, in order to tap into his innate genius (Fuller believed all children are born geniuses, but it is trained out of them). When asked by the host if he believed in life after death, Fuller replied "I don't believe in it anymore. It am convinced by the evidence." Then he explained how when he was growing up, school children were taught that reality is anything tangible, but during his lifetime all sorts of invisible realities were discovered, like atomic energy, for instance.
Here's an excerpt from Fuller's 42 hours of lectures titled "Everything I know." You can read the full transcripts at the Buckminster Fuller Institute website.
"And whenever death is no weight is lost. At first the scientists saw a little tiny bit of weight but it turned out to be the weight of the air in the lungs, the air in the lungs weighs quite a little. We take on 54 pounds of air a day, out of which we subtract 7 pounds of oxygen to keep ourselves going; and so that that residual air, and there is actually no identifiable arrow moving needle moving identification of anything being lost when the phenomena of life goes.
Now, you've often heard, recently, great specialists getting particularly into the chemistry in the virology and so forth, getting to the point where they say they have been able to identify in star dust the unique chemistries essential to produce the organism of life. They call it they have now, the key to life. When this man dies all the chemistry is right there. You know that. I now have to come to the absolute conclusion that the mistake is all the time in identifying the animate as being physical. What goes on in this room between you and I, and that word "between" is very important. Remember SYNERGY. What goes on between you and I which is understanding is really not implicit in your organism in your nose or your hair or anything. I simply say there is a synergetic phenomena that does go on between that is not of. It is not the physical, and everything that is going on between me and you is absolutely metaphysical. I use the word "metaphysical" the physicists, then, identify the "physical" then as energy, energy associative as matter and energy disassociative as radiation, and one convertible into the other. Metaphysical is everything that doesn't move a needle. And there is nothing that moves any needles here regarding this information I am giving you. The quality of the information the significance of the information. That is absolutely metaphysical."
