Dear Leader won his referendum while we were in exile. Touring Ireland with a turd the size of a potato taped to the camera sensor, two kids and a craving for nicotine that threatened to consume what little was left of my mind. No. Not true: we were in Geneva when he won, and had fled thence to the Isle of Guinness after seeing Calvin’s chair, which they have parked in a corner of a cathedral the size of a church. A mean little chair with a sharp edged triangular back and a well-worn footrest. Calvin had short legs.

The upshot of the Michael Jackson autopsy seems to be that, under the clown outfits, he was actually ET – a hairless little thing with no obvious connection to planet earth. Well, whatever. ET gone home. But why is everyone being so nice about him, now that he’s dead? What is it about a massive coronary that brings to flood the milk of human kindness?

Time has come to bid farewell to New York and head back north to cooler, less intense climes. But not before tacking up a couple of notes on art stuff. This is a subject that I am singularly unqualified to comment on, which makes it that much easier to say what I think.

Jackson Pollock: somewhere in that dizzying tangle of glue and latex, string, tequila bubble gum and manic depressive paint is the intersection of Art for Art’s Sake and Art for the Sake of 140 million clams. Or dollars. I want to stand on that corner with a paper cup in my hand and a sign hanging around my neck that reads “Will splatter for food.” Or maybe “Will splatter for fud.” Seems more artistic that way don’t it?

MOMA has a room of this stuff and you emerge feeling gut wrenched, excited or just pissed off that some bald philandering finger-painter who got drunk one afternoon and wrapped his Oldsmobile, and his girlfriend, around a tree (all too the ultimate benefit of the wife) gets that much attention. All depends on your disposition, or maybe whether you got a drink at lunch or instead had to attack the afternoon from a platform of splintered sobriety.

Can’t remember much else from MOMA except the Bell H-13 helicopter they have parked high above the lobby. Sitting under it, if you look straight up and quietly hum the theme to MASH, you can almost smell Alan Alda’s aftershave. An experience of limited appeal, I’ll grant you.

Then there’s the Met, where they have an entire Egyptian temple for God’s sake, not to mention some French guy’s living room from 1920 (rather dark and over-wrought, who saw that coming?) and half an Andalusian villa (lovely marble balustrades). God bless America. All that money. My favorite thing in the Met has to be the little collection of Brassai’s black and white photos of French hookers from the 1930s. Who doesn’t have a soft spot for that stuff? It’s like paintings of Elvis, or little brass cowboys being bucked off little brass horses. Classic.

The ICP has photographs by a drowning Japanese man—I mean, they really make you wonder how they recovered the film. Go to the website. You’ll see what I mean. Some photos of exploding limestone, a class picture in which every student is the same model and a very peculiar video that involves elephants, elephant shit and ventriloquism. After which you can presume yourself to be up to date on the state of Japanese art photography.

And finally the Guggenheim: that Frank Lloyd Wright thing that looks like the inside of a soft-serve ice cream cone. I think it’s more like climbing up the inside of a long coil of dog shit, but fine, if that’s your thing then that’s your thing, but it takes a little getting used to. There’s a fantastic room full of Kandisky there. You emerge shaking your head and wondering what those crazy Russians are going to think of next. The main attraction these days, however, is a an exhibition of the life’s work of Louise Bourgeois—yes she of the giant world spanning spiders. Nothing scarier than a crazy ninety-something year-old French lady who owns a herd of spiders each the size of a two-story bungalow. Well, maybe a balding finger-painter with too much red wine in him behind the wheel of a giant green convertible.

An afternoon in NYC: Walked down from Central Park past the Rockefeller Plaza. Didn’t go to the Top of the Rock. Then to the New York Public Library. Bought a hotdog and ate it in Bryant Park watching an old black guy, tanned and dried to a fetish (but whose? Some pinstriped Whitey needing to ward off some heavy Wall Street bear mojo?), drinking from a brown paper bag. Walked on down 5th. Listened to a forty-something with white-guy afro (Hey, welcome back Kotter!) discuss his callback. Walked past the Empire State Building. Didn’t go up. Didn’t buy an “I [heart] NY” t-shirt from next door. Listened to blonde ambition with a $200 cut discuss escrow. Passed the Flatiron Building. Avoided walking through Washington Park (not worried about the shiny black guys with the biceps and no shirts, more worried about the frizzy haired NYU film school people filming them). Down through Soho. Cast iron buildings were big disappointment. Don’t know what I expected to see. Cast iron maybe? Past the former World Trade Center (now that’s a big fucking hole!) to the Esplanade. With the sun hunkering down over the Hudson, the towers of New Jersey shone like the Emerald City itself and the Coast Guard ribs wallowing in the wake of the tour boats, their 50 caliber machine guns arcing against the sky, were silhouetted black against the shimmering water.

Walked on to Battery Park and the Staten Island ferry terminal, my feet hurting by then. Watched a skinny black guy running for the boat. Back peddling, pumping his fist in the air. “Yo yo, nigger’s gettin’ on the ferry!”

A middle aged black lady standing nearby watched him pass. Turned to a middle aged black lady standing next to her. Both wearing bright floral print shirts and skirts and holding handbags.“What did he say?”

“He said niggers.”

“That’s what I thought he said.”

“He said the niggers are getting on the ferry.”

“But the ferry don’t leave,” she checked her watch, “for another half hour.”

Other lady shrugged.

It’s not so much that you can’t get drunk when you’re a parent, it’s that you can’t stay drunk. When you’ve got a kid, you have to sober up overnight. And, the way hangovers are these days, that’s pretty well the fun sucked out of getting drunk.

My copy of Robert Kaplan’s classic rewrite of some second year history textbook, Eastward up my own Ass, has notes in Turkish all over it. As though some sad-sack Turk was trying to discern through Kaplan’s ramblings, half-baked in someone else’s oven and sprinkled with comments that sound like a ten-year old writing home from a school trip, what it is that the Western Mind thinks of their country. Kaplan’s books really are the Desperate Housewives of travel literature: the entertainment lies in the glossy puerility of it all, and in imagining the navel-gazing wasteland of his readership. Jesus. Whining about rude border guards and breathlessly recalling the old world drama of a shoe shine.

A story I’m going to pitch to the New Yorker: this Canadian. He’s driving to New York, passing down through Pennsylvania one Sunday morning. Making the minutes tick over by tallying up road kill—12 skunks, 14 groundhogs, six deer and so on. The critter corpses are everywhere in Pennsylvania. Torn up bits of them spread down the shoulder and across the middle of the road with blood smears that look brown like bbq sauce on the tarmac. At one point he runs over something he thinks is a rib and it seems (erroneously as it turns out) to have punctured his tire. He stops and wonders at the pristine silence of the surrounding forest before pulling the bone fragment out of the rubber, flicking some fur from the radiator grill and getting back in the car. Where he turns on the radio and listens for a while to the Sunday types rambling about Paul and Jesus and some other old Jewish people. Stops at a Ponderosa Steak House for their all-you-can-eat (turns out to be more like all-they-can-eat, “they” being the whalelike denizens of the area, fat swinging from their arms like Tarzan on his way to work) breakfast buffet.

Pretty good huh? I’m thinking it’ll work pretty good for them.

Mike the barber from around the corner won 16 million dollars in the lottery the other day. Next time I see that bastard I’m getting back the 2 bucks I tipped him on my last haircut.

Holy Kurd! No new pictures for a while. My shoulder’s wrapped in tape and my arm’s hung in a sling. “Don’t lift anything heavier than a Dixie cup full of warm air” were Physioguy’s parting words. First thing when I got home I tried to lift a camera. Something crunched inside the joint like a mouse under a bike tire and I decided in to take his advice for a while. So recycled pictures of peculiar Kurds (that’s Betseh’s hand on the left btw) is what it is from here on in.

Life here in Suburbiana continues (which is about all life in Suburbia really does). I got a haircut yesterday. My hair looks like I got attacked by a drunk guy with a bowl and a pair of those kids’ scissors, the ones with the plastic blades they use for craft-day in kindergarten. The criminal is Around the Corner Mike, a squat balding guy (should we trust balding barbers?) who’s lair is around the corner (get it?) from us. Mike offers old fashioned value, by which I mean he’s cheap and he keeps the combs in a jar of green stuff that I think is probably Lysterine. There’s a spinning barber pole outside the door and just enough room inside for two ancient barber chairs—the humongously heavy kind with the wide red Naugahyde armrests and cast iron footrests. Mike wears glasses. He’s worked there for 48 years and he still has an Italian accent. I guess Mike’s name is probably Michelle.

Apart from value, Mike also offers old fashioned service. The sunshine comes Rockwell-style through the window as the afternoon wears on and when I pick up a pinch of half-gray clippings from the bib that he slung, perfectly clean, around my shoulders a moment before, he apologizes for not having cleaned it off after the last customer. I like Mike and wish I could go sit in his chair and chit chat, but somehow avoid the horrendous hair cut.

Fatherhood: there are few other states in which a heterosexual male will boast about getting urinated on by another male. An underage male at that. And in the bathtub. With his wife watching. No photos, tant pis (pronounce as you will).

Summer has sprung and the lawnmowers are emerging from the snow. Or so I imagine. We don’t have crack addicts or derelicts in our neighborhood so it is up to our supple imaginations to manufacture their lives and what they are like. I’m pretty sure that they don’t bother to keep their lawnmowers inside, however. Nor do they follow behind their dogs with little plastic bags over their hands, waiting to scoop up the piles of steaming shit from the sidewalk. That’s why life in the slums isn’t so very nice. I guess. Not being a dog owner, I don’t really care about this issue, but if I were, I would be phoning the local heeler to get more garbage cans installed. Or maybe it’s a mark of virtue to stroll into Bridgehead, Dachshund under your arm, the smell of his feces wafting up from the bag in your pocket. I don’t know.

Nothing much changes when you have a baby; sure there’s an absolute imperative that drives your entire life, keeps you up all night, necessitates driving around town at 3 am in search of a packet of this or a bottle of that, but this isn’t unfamiliar territory. At least not to anybody who’s been a junkie of whatever sort.

If I had a one of them “what I’m reading lists” Boogie Nights would be on it (check out the lighting on Burt), Burt Glinn would be on it, and so would the Department of Transportation’s Motorcycle Driver’s Handbook. Gotta memorize this handy little guide in order to acquire my License to Kill (Myself) from the Canadian Government.

Meanwhile I’m still intrigued by the sullen sense of space enjoyed by Canadians. It’s odd. It envelopes them like a space suit or one of those groovy Boy in the Bubble outfits that were popular in the 70s (where have all those bubble kids and flipper kids and so on gone?) or maybe like an aquarium—one that has a sign on it that reads “please don’t knock on the glass.” This interest is piqued by the motorcycle handbook. “Experienced drivers” (we are told) don’t weave in and out of traffic, nor do they “lane-split.” “Experienced drivers” follow the rules and above all “maintain a safe distance from other vehicles.” The idea seems to be, generally, that if you follow the rules and maintain a safe distance from your fellow citizens, that you’re going to be ok.

Experienced Canadian politicians, meanwhile, line the pockets of their pimp suits with millions of dollars of public funds. Far be it from me to suggest that there is any connection between a government that teaches its citizens that blind obedience to the rules is the only way to stay safe and a culture of impunity for those who make the rules, but one does sometimes scratch one’s bean and wonder. Were there a point to this, it would warrant cross reference to a libelous and defamatory Encyclopedia Canadiana entry on Adolphus Egerton Ryerson. But there isn’t so it doesn’t and now I’m going to change a diaper

If I was a journalist, and there are mornings when I wake up and I look at the ceiling and I curse my Lord God that I am not (not many mornings, Paul, but they do happen… usually when something big is blowing up somewhere and you guys get to put on little GI Jim hats and go out with notepads stuck in those pockets on the thighs of your pants where there’s supposed to be ammo) but if I were, a journalist, I would write stories like this: White guy watches Arabs shop at Walmart in Dearborn and it would certainly have lines like “As he [the manager] recalled their effort [took them two weeks of looking at food down at the wholesaler to figure of what the Mohamedeen would buy], a few women in hijabs — traditional Muslim head scarves — inspected produce. One spoke in Arabic to Mohamad Atwi, the developmental store manager.”

Meanwhile, down at Canadian Tire, it’s all very pale. Hockey jackets and those little pudgy white children who come in from the suburbs to vandalize the bubble gum machine by the door while Mom flirts her way through Aisle 9 in search of the Wii accessories. The rickety ones with the Hapsburg jaw from chewing their poptarts half cooked and the great bulgy troglodyte eyes from the rec room hours in front of the TV. Reflexes of a praying mantis from all that Wii, though.

It’s thawing and the snow drifts are getting to be middle aged: all saggy, with the bits that were perky subsiding into bits that were curved but are now only rounded. There is something to be made of this, the coming of spring and new life and so on, but I really can’t be fucked.

It snowed last night. Two feet of the stuff. Cars passing this morning looking like bits of wedding cake calved from the main berg and floating free up the street. Marzipan crust blowing off in little bits. It’s a wonder, I thought, bending to the task of digging out the fucking car, a wonder that children aren’t running behind them trying to catch bits of the icing. Catching it in midair and shoving it into their mouths. It’s just all so romantic and lovely. I love winter.

Baby class is going well. I am hoping for an A, or at least a solid B, but I guess it’s all down to the final exam, with no credit for course work. Yesterday we learned about morphine, demerol and nitrous oxide. Tonight we will purchase the car seat, which you are legally bound to use until your child is 8. Unless you go live somewhere in the third world, in which case you don’t and you get a maid to look after him so you can just leave him at home. But then you don’t get to huff at the whippits on your way to the hospital like a pear-shaped Frank Booth. So, you know, trade-offs. Pluses and minuses.