Clusterfuck Day, the National Counting Project, and Death in Venice

[mallorys_camera]

Is Clusterfuck Day a global holiday like Earth Day or merely a regional Hudson Valley celebration like Rip van Winkle’s birthday or the reenactment of the burning of Kingston?

Whatever.

Yesterday was it.

The hurricane took out Optimum’s cable. Or something. Internet here has been out for more than 24 hours. In fact, Optimum-enabled Internet is out over the entire New York City metropolitan area.

The only way I know this is through checking various Optimum Internet hate sites with my phone because Optimum has issued no customer service updates at all, and the outage isn’t being reported as a news story despite the fact that an Internet outage in America’s largest and most densely populated metropolitan region has the potential to get very hairy indeed.

Not only is the Internet out but also all television and VOC-enabled landlines.

Yo! Terrorists! Wondering about the timing of your next attack? Well, wonder no more!

No Internet is an inconvenience for me, but I know how to set up a hotspot. After I tromp and garden, I will mosey down to the library to see if the head librarian was smart enough to sign a deal with FIOS (underground cable!) Which will allow me to put in a couple of hours on client work.

And if the Internet is down in the library, not a biggie. My clients will just have to wait.

It’s a complete disaster, though, for all those people with real jobs who work from home and for all their young kids who assume that no TV means they’re being punished for something they can’t remember doing.



And then there is the National Counting Project, which I am enjoined from mentioning by name because I took an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution from all its enemies, real and imaginary, and apparently mentioning the National Counting Project by its true name weakens the National Counting Project’s mojo.

I’d gotten a phone call from National Counting Project central last week, instructing me to show up on the third floor of the Civic Center at 10 o’clock on Tuesday morning.

So, I drove into deepest, darkest Poughkeepsie on Tuesday morning. Hurricane minus 4 hours.

The city of Poughkeepsie is not a pleasant place to begin with, but it’s gotten a whole lot less pleasant since the Plague began.

I began circling the Civic Center looking for entrances, and I immediately stumbled across two very scabby looking syringes. People aren’t even disposing syringes in the bushes anymore; they’re tossing them in the street like gum wrappers.

On my third trip around the Civic Center, it began to dawn on me that the Civic Center didn’t have any entrances. I mean, once upon a time, it did! But they’d all been boarded up with plywood.

This presented me with a problem: How was I supposed to get to the third floor of the building?

And assuming I did get to the third floor, who was actually doing the training? A bunch of vampires?

I trotted around to the front of the building, which at one time, somebody had tried to turn into a kind of plaza with trees—half of them dead now—and blocks of concrete in case any itinerant masochists wnadered by and needed a place to sit.

Then I began assailing random passer-bys: Excuse me! Are you going to the training for the National Counting Project?

How crazy do you think they thought I was?

But finally, someone said, Yes!

She, too, had been stymied by the lack of entrances to the Civic Center!

Then I had an idea! “Hey, there’s a hotel over there, right?”

“Yes-s-s-s-s-s.”

“Maybe they know how to get in.”

So, we asked the desk clerk.

“Oh, no. That place has been closed for the past five months.”

Oh.

“But wait. You’re looking for the National Counting Project?”

We were!

“I think that’s at the courthouse two blocks down the street.”

He thought right.

Most of the National Counting Project training is being done online except for the first two hours—one hour of which was devoted to filling out two official National Counting Project forms, line by line, while the other hour was an orientation to our spanking new National Counting Project phones!

Except my spanking new National Counting Project phone did not have any of the proprietary National Counting Project apps downloaded on to it.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” I asked the trainer.

“I don’t know.”

“But, I mean, this phone is like useless—“

“That’s correct.”

In the end, most reluctantly, he gave me the number for National Counting Project IT, which I called as soon as I got home.

The national IT number turfed me to the regional IT help line, which had a recorded message that ran something like this: YOU are a fucking idiot for calling this help line. Leave a message with your name, phone number, the geographical coordinates of the place you were at when Elvis died, and the final four numbers on the bar code of the last case of toilet paper you purchased. Do NOT leave more than one message. Someone will get back to you in the next year or so.

Beep!

Whereupon a cheerful AI voice announced: This mailbox is full!

O-kayyyyyyy!

I was not gonna get bent out of shape about this, I decided, because this was really not an emergency.

Worst case scenario? The National Counting Project could shove the phone it gave me up its collective ass, and I wouldn’t work for them.

But it is pretty amazing to think that these are our tax dollars at work!

And not only that, but our tax dollars at work deciding highway improvement funding and federal education matching grants and how many congressional critters the State of New York should have in the next decade.



Else?

I watched Visconti’s Death in Venice.

For whatever reason, I have been thinking about Death in Venice for at least a month!

Criterion’s streaming service finally picked up my telepathic signal.

I wouldn’t call Death in Venice a good film although Visconti and Thomas Mann shared enough obsessions in common to make the film a fairly faithful rendition of the novella.

Here’s a fun factoid: The impossibly beautiful boy actor who played Tadzio also played one of the commune elders who commits suicide by leaping off a cliff in Midsommar 50 years later.

If you believe—as I do—that actors are always really starring in one long film, the same film, just mysteriously segmented up to confuse audiences, then this is pretty weird since in Death in Venice, this actor is the incarnation of impossibly gorgeous youth while in Midsommar, he is the incarnation of impossibly gruesome old age.

And then there is the issue of the Adagietto from Mahler’s 5th Symphony, which I will grant you is a stirring, soaring piece of music the first 25 times you hear it.

But the 26th time you hear it, you think, Enough.

Dirk Bogarde, who is my boyfriend even across the vast gender preference divide, is fabulous as Aschenbach, but then of course, when has Dirk Bogarde ever not been fabulous?

And Visconti has a good eye for that moment just before opulence turns into decadence. Which is a very tricky pivot.

Aschenbach’s makeover leaves much to be desired, though. As this is the seed moment of the entire narrative, it’s a glaring weak spot. The whole movie is kind of a Douglas Sirk wet dream, so I guess it would be too much to expect subtlety there. But it certainly would have worked more effectively.

Comments

Simultaneously hilarious and troubling!

[rebeccmeister]

Hilariously, one day, very shortly after S talked about how on this one street in Phoenix there are used syringes everywhere, lo and behold I found myself bicycling in that neighborhood and observed those tossed gum-wrapper syringes clogging up the bike lane.

I've meet a couple of people from Poughkeepsie by now, but haven't yet had the experience of going their and walking around yet. Sounds like I'm not missing much. S and I have gone down to Hudson a time or two because there are people who sail there, and I was struck by how much the main drag in Hudson reminded me of a half-dozen of those little Napa Valley boutique town main streets. (I hate those places, all of them, by the way, but that's just my personal opinion, and don't get me started on Saratoga Springs. Give me Albany any old day.).

Sounds like the higher-ups who are desperately trying to sabotage the National Counting Project (at least according to certain conspiracy theorists), are doing a damned fine job of it so far. Is New York State at least a little ahead of the curve when it comes to successfully actually Counting people? Or are we gonna lose out on some of our piece of the pie pretty quick here?

Re: Simultaneously hilarious and troubling!

[mallorys_camera]

Well, according to the propaganda information I was given in the first hour of indoctrination orientation, 60% of people have returned the National Counting Project's questionnaires in the mail.

That leaves the other 40%. Presumably, if I get another phone or figure out how to download the missing apps—difficult w/out Internet!—I will be ready to get out there and count in 10 days.

It is hard not to agree with the conspiracy theorists on this one because "clusterfuck" is actually wayyyyy too gentle a term to describe it.

Poughkeepsie is an awful place. There is nothing to be gained from visiting.

Hudson was settled by hipsters from Williamsburg escaping the escalating rents. I quite like the architecture! Also, it has some awesome antique stores. I can see the resemblance to those Napa Valley towns, but I gotta say, I kinda like Hudson. 😀

Re: Simultaneously hilarious and troubling!

[rebeccmeister]

I did enjoy the waterfront in Hudson, quite a bit, and at least Hudson isn't quite so full of Californians. ;^)

[asakiyume]

Your story about the National Counting Project--more specifically, the part about it being the Project That Must Not Be Named, was so funny I had to read it out to Wakanomori. Thanks for brightening my morning! (The part about the syringes and the lack of a way to be in touch with them is much less funny and in fact aggravating and depressing BUT the lead-in was GREAT)

What the heck, though, huh? The first rule of counting your population is not to talk about counting your population?

Also, I laughed at your regional holidays ;-)

[mallorys_camera]

I live to amuse! 😀

[mistersmearcase]

Ha, scrolling up to the Tadzio pic I thought "oh hey, Jodie Foster around the time of Taxi Driver." (I did just watch Taxi Driver but I maintain the resemblance is real. Taxi Driver is a film I will never love though I'm grateful of any glimpse of NYC in the years I couldn't have known NYC, when it was awful but interesting.) I'm going to watch Rocco and His Brothers at some point because I've seen no Visconti, despite his connection to Callas, and because Alain Delon is the #1 most hot, or anyway he was in Purple Noon.

What's wrong with Poughkeepsie? I always kind of wondered if it was nice, thought it might be a compromise of "not a very big town so not stressful" plus "big enough to have a few good restaurants and not feel like the countryside."

[mallorys_camera]

Poughkeepsie is kinda like a little slice of the South Bronx circa the late 70s and early 80s in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley. Frozen in time! Because, of course, the South Bronx has been gentrified.

It is really unbelievably awful.

I spent a year and a half doing community work in Poughkeepsie, so I've thought long and hard about why it is so awful and how it came to be so awful. And I've never come up with a satisfactory answer.

Alain Delon in Purple Noon! Be still, my beating heart!

Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver? I am thinking more a very young Charlotte Rampling, but then, I've seen the entire movie.

Rocco and His Brothers is not a bad movie, though there is something inherently comic about Visconti doing Italian neorealism. Over-ripe romanticism is far more his native metier.