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Oct 24, 2003
Memo's from our Asian Correspondent
Brother Friendly writes in with the new lowdown about his first few days in Hanoi. It's entertaining reading, but we were particularly struck by his opening paragraph:
Monday was a day of successes. No, there was nothing akin to the carbonized filiment at Menlo Park or the wheel right maneuver holding the high ground on Little Round Top, but little steps start great journeys.
There's not too many computer-chip-designing, pony-tail-having, former-Saab-driving expatriates who can link the invention of the light bulb, the battle of Gettysburg and a trip to the local Vietnamese electronics shop with such élan. Salud!
Posted at 11:00 am by Shpotzir
Oct 23, 2003
Here's the damn piece that I read last night at that damn happy ending bar last night about my damn ankle.
My Achilles Heel: My Ankle
By Dimitri Ehrlich
DAY ONE.
11:29AM, Tuesday October 14th
Having a fractured ankle really isn’t so bad, I think to myself, as I arrive home from the hospital. A short, manic Zionist Buddhist compulsive exercise-aholic with a penchant for 8thstreetlatinas.com and Chinese martial arts, I’ve been told more than once that mellowing out might not be a bad idea. So maybe I’ll finally get around to writing my great American novel. Maybe I’ll discover why the Chinese character for “crisis” is also the character for opportunity—or, as Homer Simpson called it, a “crisitunity.” Maybe my meditation practice, songwriting, or general demeanor will be subtly elevated.
Or maybe I’ll just sit around smoking pot and watching TV. Either way, I feel proud for not freaking out, despite the fact that I had to limp home 20 blocks from the spot near the Central Park Reservoir where my ankle snapped like a brittle twig while jogging a few hours earlier, at 6:30 in the morning. All things considered, I thought there was a certainly dignity to the way I yanked my body home, cursing and sweating, like it was someone else’s bag of lumpy, dirty laundry. Also, I must compliment myself on how well I’m adjusting to the fact that--after 20 years without missing a single working out--I will now be laid up for six weeks of constant throbbing pain.
I see a spiritual opportunity, there for the plucking, like a ripe, tumescent, slightly luminous Israeli hydroponically grown hothouse tomato, the color of the Dalai Lama’s robe. I begin to get lost in visions of taking my practice to what the Blastmaster Krs-one would have called, a whole other level.
Each time I wince, I remind myself of the Zen Buddhist phrase, “sensations arise.” This is shorthand for meditative insight into the fact that pain and pleasure are really only the arisal of neutral sensations, onto which we impute labels and projections of craving and aversion—a very nice thought, which will have do until I can get my fucking hands on some Vikies and a few martinis.
2:13PM
All in all, the day has been going pretty well. Other than the slightly-ennui inducing experience of going to a hospital by myself, and smelling those scary hospital hallways with no one to smell them with. But considering it was a trip to the hospital for X-rays, and not, say, like that time last week when a certain a balding techno artist took me to a strip club in lower Manhattan and treated me to multiple lap dances as part of some research I am doing for a “screenplay”—an evening which, by the way, was also ennui-inducing--the hospital visit was quite tolerable, even taking into account the way the angry, alcoholic, asexual loner X-Ray technician--who I got the sense spends most of his nights watching cable access TV with a loaded Walther PPK semi-automatic handgun pointed at his black and white TV, in a furnished room in Astoria--was staring at my ankle like it was a piece of chicken. Really, the only bum moment in the whole day was when my orthopedic surgeon, one Dr. Hubbard, aggressively and inexplicably grabbed the exact place where the ankle fractured, and began squeezing it while staring at me with his bulging goat eyes, asking if it hurt. The rush of sensory data, which some people might label as “pain,” tried to tear-ass to my brain through every neuron available, causing my body to shudder violently for several minutes. I considered crying, or peeing on him, (which I had done once on my pediatrician) or just mercilessly beating him with my homemade ghetto cane. But then I looked down and noticed poor Dr. Hubbard crouching my by ankles, and that he seemed already to be suffering from some terrible internal pressure in his skull that was causing both of his eyeballs to bulge like plastic ziplock bags of goldfish, slightly protruding from his face, looking like they would burst if he heard one more slightly surprising thing. I realized that had I given in to my baser impulse—which was to cane him frontier style with my homemade pimp stick—everything he had ever learned about ankles and all kinds of disturbing goo would come gushing out and mess up my one remaining good foot.
A note about my cane—I had fashioned it while in the initial phase of fury, pain, and disbelief that immediately followed the instant when my tendon, sensing it’s chance to escape, had attempted to flee the location where it was been mounted on my ankle for the last 37 years. In doing so, Dr. Hubbard explained, the tendon had yanked a shard of bone off my ankle and then gave up, causing me to crash to the ground like a paper bag full of Elmer’s glue and coat-hangers, in New Balance 991s. Once I got home and realized I couldn’t even walk across my living room, I lunged into my coat closest cursing, and tore out an oak dowel. Then I asked a friend to buy me a rubber ball from the toy store across the street, which I hacked at ineffectually with an X-acto knife, finally managing to carve a hole out of the center with a pair of pliers. I jammed the hollowed out handball onto the staff and secured it with electrical tape. After noticing that the tape was leaving a black sticky resin on my hand, I added the final touch: a dirty sock, and had what I considered a class-A pimp cane, suitable for standing on the corner for up to one entire lifetime or cracking Dr. Hubbard’s dome, whichever came first.
And so I went to bed that night feeling strangely calm about the prospect of being unable to walk or maintain my kung fu routine. Every day for the last 20 years I spent between one and three hours, engaging in a ritualistic combination of kicking, punching, jumping, kneeing, twisting, gouging and clawing exercises, designed to maim and kill up to one hundred armed opponents at once, provided you realize that the phrase “up to” clearly includes the number zero, and that I am a Jewish middle class homunculus from New Jersey who never met a supersize serving of rice, beans and shrimp garlic omellettes I didn’t like, and who carries cockroaches out of my apartment while mumbling Buddhist prayers rather than kill a bug. Now, if I am a lover not a fighter, you might well ask: But Charles, why have you spent twenty years engaging for several hours a day in really violent martial arts practices, to which I would patiently explain, What, are you my fucking therapist?
The fact is, if you were, say, a devoted runner who jogged every day for 20 years and were suddenly told you had to lay off for 6 weeks, there would, understandably be some adjustment, both psychologically and physically, in terms of giving up the endorphin rush, or runner’s high, to which all serious athletes are addicted. But if you’re a jogger, you’re not going to forget how to run in six weeks. Whereas in my case, it’s more like if you’d been obsessively practicing 25 different folk dances every day, with each movement tied to a specific inhalation or exhalation, and you had spent years fine-tuning these ancient Asian hacking and harming techniques, which unlike parmalat, are very perishable. So I was doubly burdened by the fact that my kung fu skills and street survival techniques, such as “white crane spreads its wings,” “embrace tiger, return to mountain,” and “whitey falls on the ground and bleeds to death,” which I had been sharpening for two decades, would soon be dull and flabby, and so would I.
DAY TWO
6:29AM
It’s not so bad. I woke up and my ankle looked like a grapefruit. I like to think of it not so much as having lost an ankle, as having gained a grapefruit. A big red swollen painful, throbbing grapefruit where my ankle used to be, that makes it impossible for me to walk, and which I cannot eat.
1:09PM
I have begun to actively loathe people who say, “Thing s happen for a reason.” Or, fortune cookie wisdom like, “The world is telling you to slow down.” Or those other little new age truisms like, “Sir, we will report you to the police if you cannot get it through your head that this prescription for Vicodan is not renewable.”
I know, I know: this injury is the universe’s way of telling me to slow down. It now takes me half an hour to go downstairs and get a cup of coffee. By the time I get upstairs, I need another cup of coffee. By the time I get downstairs again, I have to pee. And true, in my new slo-mo life I do have the time to notice important little things, like the fact that the mailbox on my corner is rusting. But if I wanted to move slowly, I’d drink decaf, and care about where the egrets and warblers make their nests, and I wouldn’t have moved to New York in the first place.
10:34PM
They say when you’re told you’re gonna die, the first stage reaction is often a cheery denial. As a highly developed being of light, I pride myself on not being freaked out and instead indulge myself in totally unrealistic fantasies, punctuated by forays into a miasmic, bottomless abyss of numbness, despair and foul smells such as one would associate with the bowels of Hades, of which, I would like to just point out that I smelt it and therefore cannot technically have been the one to have dealt it.
As so I lay, a lion laid low. A lion in winter. A lion with an air-cast on and six weeks ahead of him, unable to stalk and kill a single metaphoric zebra, unable to even sneak up and just sucker punch a regular zebra, which God knows those zebras have coming to them. So I lay. And lied. And laid.
No wait, I lied. Actually I couldn’t sleep.
DAY THREE.
9AM
I am ready to kill myself.
Soon, I say to myself, staring at my stubby fat face in the mirror, I shall certainly shank you. Shank you good. Shank you with this knife I made out of a sharpened spoon. Having hoisted myself on a steely petard of my own devising--namely my excessive exercise--and now inexplicably having begun talking to myself in late 70s prison lingo--I limp downstairs to the deli to gorge myself on halavah and fried eggs.
9:02AM
I have become one of those slow moving old men who smell like Vix, Grapenuts and mothballs, and who can’t quite make it across the street in the time allotted by the sign that says WALK. I have taught myself to curse at cabbies who glare at me in Pashtun, Urdu, Hindi, Greek and happily, even remembered how to say sharmouta—a useful Arabic phrase I picked up while traveling in the Levant, which translates roughly as, “your mother has sex with people she doesn’t know very well, though I ‘m not sure if she does it for financial reasons or just for fun.” It is not yet noon, and, I have nearly been run over twice. Thank God my for my rubber tipped, sock covered schtickle, Inshallah.
10:24AM
While this may be just a coincidence, I noticed this morning that when I woke up, a small patch of skin, about the size of a dime, was missing from my left elbow. At this rate I will just be a raw sack of organs and meat in about a week. Also: I have noticed that my belly button has gotten deeper. Much deeper. This morning, I think I saw a piece of lint in there, but couldn’t reach it.
My cavernous new navel may have something to do with the fact that my metabolism is accustomed to me eating about 4,000 calories a day and burning most of that off with 3- hour workouts. While I have been tremendously disciplined about avoiding my beloved workouts, I have so far still not been able to wean myself off eating 6 enormous meals a day. Even my teeth have blubber on them. Being a small, hairy, slow moving, morbidly obese beast that can curse at almost every cabbie in NY in a language they understand helps me maintain a sense of pride.
Noon:01
I unpack the bong.
3:12 PM
A “friend,” which I put in quotes only because I keep catching myself wondering what she would look like silhouetted on a balcony in St. Lucia wearing an ever so slightly see-through summer dress the color of a buttercup, calls and sends me flying into a rage. What begins as a perfectly nice phone conversation goes awry when I politely demand that she leave work and come up to massage me with Jojoba butter and administer a bubble bath while playing Joa Gilberto and wearing a tiny bikini. She says she cannot possibly, as she is busy “at her job.” And that she is “working.”
“Let me telling you something about work,” I think to my self. “Work is ME, okay, busting a double horizontal on your bizznackside.” But instead, I patiently explain: Let me dumb it down for you, honey: What part of “My fucking ankle is broken and I need you to come here immediately and shizzle my nizzle,” do you not understand?
Just to clarify, her refusal wasn’t what got my goat: I am by now used to people lacking the vision to understand the brilliant and universe-melting super-genius of my “Work.” (Aside: My work, an extremely subtle, kind of super-wry performance art, generally involves having a 17 year-old Indo-Eurasian-Serbo-Croatian-white-black-Puerto-Rican-and-Haitian-but-mainly-what-I-like-is-from-the-Zulu-nation salsa dancer-type rub coca butter on me.) No, what made my head rotate 180 degrees like Linda Blair in the Exorcist is what my friend says next: “Well,” she says, sighing that, I-just-got-back-from-my-Ashtanga-Vinyasa-yoga-class-where-I-finally-did-my-oola-tandasana-with-mulah-ukhta-bunda-shravasana-and-am-not-really-listening-to-you kind of sigh, “everything happens for a reason.”
Yeah, I think to myself, like there’s a reason you must like to get yo’ ass to’ up. But instead I just said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” and hung up the phone.
4:30PM
I had always considered myself a sort of impregnable evil Yiddish super-dwarf, a pocket Adonis perhaps a little past the sell-by date, but also somehow immune to the vagaries of time and ordinary people. This theory was borne out until two days ago, by the fact that, I had never broken a single bone in my body (unless you count my nose, which my friend Brian broke while we were sparring and he came down on it with the infamous northern Shaolin kung fu “monkey lunges with paw at quivering honky strike,” forgetting he had a metal bar inside his boxing glove. Or unless you also count my finger, which I broke while sparring with an awkward-moving health-nut who smelled of cumin and who always freaked me out because he worked as a court stenographer, and who jammed my middle finger half way back into my wrist with a front kick that made me plotz). Also, I have long harbored a secret pride that my bones are denser than average, and that were I to stab my fingers into you they would penetrate you like feta cheese. “This is poetic,” you say, “But beneath your beautiful visions of feta cheese and stabbing fingers, does there not lurk the ugly face of pride? “But I have no time for your convoluted questions now. I have seen my true Achilles heel. It isn’t my pride. It’s my ankle.
Posted at 03:21 pm by The Beastly Infant Charles
A Happy Ending For The Shpotz
Last night's Happy Ending Reading series was a rare treat, not only for the excellent pieces read and fine music played, but for the people who showed up. It was, all in all, an excellent night-time Shpotzir.
G. Cornelius Ehrlich surprised all by arriving at 8:00, having taken an earlier flight from San Francisco than originally planned. Chairman Potsdam Wilcha showed up with his lovely paramour Lainey Higgenbotham, and quickly fell into conversation with fellow film maker R.Wanamaker Talbot. Harris Tweed Grebin showed up sporting a berserk mutton-chops-and-mustache look, and noted earth-elf T. Snodgrass Newman drove in, fresh from a consulting job in Pittsburgh, looking tired but hale. Newly baptized suburbanite A. Winkle Kisch made the scene after an unusually appetizing meal of Chinese food which he scored for a mere $4 (approximately half the cost of a scotch and soda from the Happy Ending’s lovely bartender). He even stayed for a drink after the reading, brazenly ignoring the fact that he still had to take a commuter train out to Jersey that night. E. Stubbins Graf next arrived, accompanied by his beautiful and pregnant wife A. Dowland Hewitt. Rounding out the Shpotzirist in attendance were D. Jingle Ehrlich and J. Buzzfuzz Moskowitz, both of whom were official participants in the evenings event.
The admiral always liked his brandy. "Hmmm." Scotch. I mean scotch.
After a medley of ‘80s hits performed by New York scenester Brandon Wilde—including a show stopping rendition of Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines (Don’t Do It)”—Happy Ending host Amanda Stern introduced Large Charles, who read an untitled piece about his recent ankle injury. Charles’ reading (you can download a sample of it here) was met with great hilarity by the assembled masses. Bones Moskowitz faired less well: in fact he was met with much silence (download here to experience). That may have been as much the fault of his quick reading (positively headlong compared to Ehrlich’s lazy ramble) as to the quality of his prose, for several people praised him afterwards. During the performance of the third reader, Mr. Daniel Nester, Messers. G. Ehrlich and P.H. Grebin retired to the bar and drew on napkins, the results of which have been sprinkled throughout this entry.
Theo finds the tractor ignition...
There were several other people there whose company caused us much pleasure, but such was the conviviality of the evening that we can’t remember their names. Our apologies. We do remember their faces, though, especially the tall woman from Wesleyan who now works at Baby magazine and the Australian cutie who was just finishing her first visit to New York, and who made the Shpotz the final stop on her two month “walkabout” before returning Down Under. Our thanks to everyone for attending, and to Amanda Stern and the Happy Ending bar for hosting.
After enough beers, Theo would dream of beer...
Large Charles pours some out for the dearly departed.
Posted at 02:56 pm by Shpotzir
Oct 21, 2003
Hate to keep this cross-posting up, but Jonny tells me he wants more words on the page. So there a lttile bit about my physical ailments at Hanoi Notes. -DHF Posted at 11:29 pm by Holmes
I have no idea why I'm posting this, but if you want to see what ice cream looks like at a molecular level, click here.
Posted at 04:21 pm by Bones
Oct 20, 2003
Holmes writes, Wilcha snaps and Large Charles hobbles...
Once again proving that his life is infinitely more interesting than any of ours, Holmes Friendly sends a gallery of photos from Hanoi, his new stomping ground (see the entry immediately below), as well as a long description of his first days in the capitol of Vietnam. It's pleasant to see how well his kids are coming along, and we note with amusement the sensation they seem to cause among the Vietnamese. We presume they will soon start their own Shpotzir, complete with the appropriate regional cuisine. 
Chairman Wilcha sent this candid shot of a recent Shpotzir, by all appearances one that took place at the Cosmic. Our only regret is that our irascible waiter John is no where in sight. In other Wilchatistical news, the Chairman made a splash last week with what we hope will be the first of many episodes of “Second Hand Stories.” The show, which follows Wilcha’s adventures driving across country in a used ambulance, was largely inspired by the garage sale obsession of Original Shpotzirist M. Ehrlich. Said Grand Master was recently mentioned in a New York Times profile of Wilcha. Ehrlich followed up this bit of cutting edge recognition by submitting one of his poems to the Times (a publication not renowned for its championship of verse). To the surprise of many, the Times published the piece, thereby rendering Ehrlich the only Shpotzirist to have lines published in two of the most respected newspapers in the world (the other being the Christian Science Monitor, who several months ago published his ode to a spring morning). In further Ehrlich news, D. Ehrlich recently broke his ankle while jogging, a bit-of-the-not-alright which will render him debilitated for the next six weeks. All of us who know of his overwhelming need to squat, thrust, parry and kick for three hours a day will doubtlessly feel sympathy for his plight. If you want to hear an extensive essay on his feelings about the subject, you should trek down to the Happy Ending bar on 302 Broome Street this Wednesday night. Large Charles will be reading, along with fellow Shpotzirist Bones Moskowitz, as part of an evening of literature and music. See the entry below for a link to more info.
Posted at 11:04 am by Shpotzir
Oct 19, 2003
Folks- For those of you who might have any interest in this, I've posted a new blog entry at www.farmeast.com/hanoi. There are also new pics at www.farmeast.com/grandkids. The first is fairly long (and probably fairly boring) and about 2 weeks behind our current life. The second is only about a week out of date. I don't plan on continuing to waste this space with these updates, so if you really are interested and are not already getting email notification of these things, drop me a line and I'll update you personally. -DHF "I'm a computer engineer and consequently too boring to be of interest." Posted at 07:40 am by Holmes
Oct 14, 2003
Current and upcoming projects
We thought we’d take a moment to sum up the many and various creative endeavors being undertaken by Shpotzirists at the moment or in the near future. Most of you probably already know about most of these, but perhaps you don’t know about all of them. (Of course, it’s entirely possible that we here at Shpotz HQ are not completely in the loop either. Please feel free to add anything we leave out).
West Coast Shpotzirist G. Ehrlich is currently self-publishing a collection of his early Shpotzir comics, which you can buy here. We’re a little unclear on how he’s undertaking this project, and whether or not said collection is an actual bound book or a set of color Xeroxes (is that the plural for Xerox?). We are sure that the comics themselves are fiendishly clever and gigantically funny—so much so we had planned to ask him about posting them on this sight, to accompany our projected Newsletter archive. We’d still like to do this, but not by any means if it entails cutting into our brother’s profit margin.
The Chairman, Brother Wilcha, recently sent out an email regarding his latest project, “Second Hand Stories,” which premiers tonight on your local PBS station at 9:00 (EST). He also mentions a party:
Please join me at Kili, 81 Hoyt Street (bet. State Street and Atlantic Avenue) in Brooklyn, this coming Tuesday evening. We'll watch the broadcast from 9 to 9:30 pm and then DJ Chappy will be spinning for the rest of the evening.
While we won’t, regretfully, be able to make the party, but we do look forward to watching the show and basking in the electric-blue aura of the Chairman’s championship-grade wit.
Finally, Shpotzirists D. Ehrlich and Bones Moskowitz will be taking part in the Happy Ending Reading Series next Wednesday, Oct. 22. You can read about it here. This series has attracted some pretty heavy hitters in the past, a fact that distills our two comrades almost to jelly with anxiety. This could be the big time: white-wine publishing parties, column inches in the Times Book Review, perhaps even invites to the Conde Nast cafeteria. We hope you can join us there. Posted at 12:14 pm by Shpotzir
Oct 8, 2003
While perusing the Village Voice Best of NYC 2003, I noticed a short piece about Dark Passage. A website devoted to exploring the forgotten and/or abandoned structures of major cities. I particularly liked this piece about the tunnels under Grand Central. It’s a pity that this kind of amateur exploration is probably a lot more difficult now that everyone is worried about terrorism. I still remember with fondness the Brooklyn Anchorage, beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, that was shut down after 9-11.
Posted at 02:16 pm by Bones
Oct 6, 2003
Our West Coast Correspondent G. Ehrlich, always on the lookout for evidence of other Shpotzirs, sends us this excellent link. Having had dinner on Friday night with Bros. Grebin and D. Ehrlich, and having noted that the former has sprouted a positively Pickwickian set of mutton-chops, we can only say "Huzzah!" We thought that Grebin's facial hair gymnastics were the sign of a completely unique aesthetic. Reassuringly, this is not the case. We've booked our seats for Carson City: we look forward to seeing you all there.
Posted at 05:49 pm by Bones
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