CJC.org

I’m apparently in loser mode right now, having spent the early afternoon defrosting my freezer instead of frolicking in the frozen wasteland that’s NYC right now (denizens of Minnesota and similar places need not point out that it’s actually not that cold in the city right now; it just feels cold, since I lost my gloves on the LIRR yesterday, and I still don’t have a good hat). This was a necessary thing: I have an old, crappy fridge that probably can’t be moved out and replaced without tearing up the entire kitchen. I’m reconciled with the fact that this fridge will be with me for the life of this apartment, a sort of bad human-appliance marriage that can’t be ended without greater suffering.
Remember those little cube fridges everyone had in their college dorms? You remember how iced up the big-enough-for-one-popsicle freezer compartment used to get because there was no insulation or moisture-proofing between it and the rest of the box? Well, my grown-up fridge is just like that: the freezer is on top, and sits more or less exposed to the elements. Ice builds up just like in the dorm fridges, but, since this is a more mature appliance, it builds up not merely a-SnoCone-for-little-Joe’s worth of ice, but frozen-daquiris-on-the-house quantities. Some parts had an inch-and-a-half of ice when I got started.

Being far too infatuated with the Net, I went and did some searches for tips on defrosting freezers. A nice search engine is being developed by a couple of guys at Stanford right now, google.com. Salon actually had an article on them here.

Without too much fuss, I rediscovered Learn2.com, a nifty site that shows you how to do various mundane tasks. The “defrost freezer” lesson is here. Their tricks are to have a pot of boiling water that you can place in the freezer compartment, causing the ice to melt a bit and spall into good sized chunks. Less melt-off water to deal with if you can take the ice out by hand rather than bail it out by bucket. This is actually more important for my project, since, because the fridge is in the corner near the window sill, I actually can’t open the fridge door all the way, thereby preventing me from pulling out the melt-off tray. Any water that builds up has to be sponged out (though, way back when I first moved in, there was a fair amount of water, so I went tot he hardware store, bought some plastic tubing, and siphoned out enough of the mess to get in there with a sponge).

Let me tell you, there’s nothing more satisfying than being able to pull out large chunks of ice. Well, there are more satisfying things, but not in this context.

One thing I’d add to the Learn2.com guide: get some thick rubber gloves. You’ll be able to deal with the cold much better, and you can actually put a dish towel into boiling water and pull it out by hand. It makes this sort of task easier and more comfortable.

There were some touchy moments, when I realized how much ice had actually built up _above_ the freezer compartment, and along the far side, where I can’t really reach because the door is in the way. But the vigorous prodding of a long chopstick to push the loose ice over to where I could get to it solved that.

All in all, the whole project took a little more than an hour. My stowed-away butter didn’t even melt, though I’ll argue that the weather helped a bit. Doing this in a 90-degree apartment wouldn’t be pleasant. (The last time I defrosted the freezer was this impromptu exercise over the summer. Power had apparently gone out for a day or so, and all the accumulated ice had melted into the run-off tray. Then the power came back on, and there was a huge block of ice in said tray. I discovered this around 11PM one evening, when faced with soggy ice cream and a bit too much water everywhere else in the fridge. About two hours of vigorous hacking with butter knives and the application of hot water allowed me to pry out enough chunks to angle the rest of the block so that I could pull it out of the tray in one big piece. Never again.)

Of course, these trials and tribulations are probably lost to a majority of you, who live with the wonders of frost-free refridgerators.

Well, it’s Miller time now.

Makes me proud to serve the Internet community. Yup, that’s it.

Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1998 21:19:54 -0500 (EST)
From: xxx@webtv.net
To: Cheng-Jih Chen
Subject: Re: Review: Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

I always enjoy your reviews. It is very refreshing to hear a voice
different than the typical boosterism that seems to accompany the
release of so many movies now a days. Your someone I can count on to
apply some logic to the contradictory, incomprehensible, idiotic,
formulaic, and trite stories that are now the basis for so many movies.

Keep up the good work – your incisive reviews provide the only critique
of some of these commercial tie-in and product endorsement vehicals that
pass as movies that there is.

December 14, 1998

I think I finished this “tour” of Abstract Expressionist painting Friday, when I got around to see the Jackson Pollack retrospective at the MoMA. Much hubbub about this exhibit: a booming big front page E-section in the New York Times, lengthy reviews in the New Yorker, smaller reviews in any number of on-line magazines I read, an essay in the New Republic, and not least, MoMA carving out most of its third floor for it, moving any number of other paintings into storage. Much of this buzz was about how there was some sort of 50th year reunion for the Abstract Expressionists in New York museums this year, with Rothko up in the Whitney, Pollack at MoMA and some others in smaller galleries elsewhere.
While not exactly bouncing around excitedly like the proverbial kid in the candy store, I did see this as a neat-o opportunity to fill gaps in my education. Stuff that I didn’t fully appreciate in school: I reread Iliad and Odyssey in the past year or so, and toyed with the idea of picking up Dante again, maybe after I finish playing Tomb Raider 3 (current stuck on London: Alwych, which is modelled on the London Underground). I’m trying to get to Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall a bit more often. Given that it’s down the street from me, I have no excuse. And there’s this whole Abstract Expressionist movement thing, which was covered in Art Hum with a perfunctory “Picasso blah blah blah then there were the Abstract Expressionists, and the final will be next week…”, much like World War Two is covered in high school American History classes.

Anyway, I saw the Rothko on the day it closed a couple of weeks ago. It was perhaps the first time I saw a line snake out of a museum, onto the sidewalk and around the corner. And it wasn’t even a free admissions evening. Weird. Rothko’s signature style consists of massive canvases with two or three large, solid rectangles on them, and helpful titles like “White Center”. The NGA apparently housed this exhibit before the Whitney, and they haven’t gotten around to taking down the pages.

This exhibit nicely works through his early paintings, when he drew, well, things. From there, he started experimenting with basic forms and colors. You can see some of this, as pictures of people became somewhat more boxy. As the exhibit progresses, the experimenting with simple shapes and colors becomes the main thing, and we have the large paintings with a couple of rectangles, done in a few main colors. These colors apparently varied depending on Rothko’s mood: during his perky years, they were predominantly orange, yellow and red. In the next room, for his depressed years, we get lots of black, purple and blue. The ones from his perky years were better in some way.

Big rectangles on fields of color isn’t an adequate description, and the above URL won’t present this work sufficiently. Low-res jpegs on web pages don’t really capture how luminious the colors look, as your eye moves from the big orange box to the big red box, across the yellow background. Rothko was actually able to make the colors jump out in some way in these transitions. And these paintings are huge, easily filling your field of vision. You see color, and that’s basically it.

MoMA’s web site has the following bit, which I haven’t looked at.

This is a larger exhibit than Rothko’s. Perhaps it’s because Pollack’s name is a bit bigger, or perhaps he simply had more work under his belt before dying in the 1950s. In any case, this exhibit follow the usual format for retrospectives, starting with his early, student work (apparently spent at the Art Student’s League on 57th Street, right near Planet Hollywood), when things looked like things, and progressed through the years as he developed his signature style, where paint is dripped and splattered and sprayed onto the canvas with a variety of tools, none of them brushes.

At the heart of the exibit are three “monumental” drip paintings, really huge works that would cover the floor of my living room. Here’s “Autumn Rhythms”, the one I liked the most.

It’s hard to see in the jpeg, but the small splotches of light blue work very well, adding a sort of — that word again — luminosity to the piece. The splatters of black paint glow a little, and so on. And standing in front of the really large drip paintings, you usually can feel some sort of pulse or rhythm — pattern is too strong a word — despite the apparent anarchy of random sprays of paint. Something progresses across the canvas, though it’s hard to see.

Criticism that my pet monkey Stan can chug out Pollacks for a few bananas a day are somewhat unfounded. Stan would have had a hard time replicating the technique, actually, since Pollack apparently spent a fair amount of time figuring out and planning how splatters of paint would appear on canvas. Treating the canvas with glue, for example, keeps paint from soaking in and makes the edges more distinct. The MoMA exhibit has a section devoted to this, where curators apparently spent time figuring out how Pollack got things to look the way they do.

Despite its niceties, I found the Pollack a little disappointing compared to the Rothko, probably because I had a harder time figuring out what Pollack was trying to do. This may have been the lack of gradual progression from student work to mature work, or that this was a different sort of abstraction. I’m not sure. The best exhibit I’ve seen which showed what someone was trying to accomplish was the one MoMA had on Piet Mondrian a few years ago, where paintings of, say, cows became rectangular abstractions of cow shapes, which became simply rectangles, and so on. There was a strong sense that you could see into Mondrian’s thought process. Less so with Rothko, and even less so with Pollack. From that point of view, all this is a little disappointing: I may be looking at it the wrong way, but getting into the thought process seems to be the main trick for modern art, and in that sense I haven’t figured out what the Abstract Expressionists are trying to do.

Anyway, MoMA’s basically free on Friday from about 4:30 to closing. It’s worth a walk through, and if nothing else, there are the other parts of MoMA that haven’t been taken down for this exhibit. Oh, on the 2nd floor, they apparently have a few rooms of other Abstract Expressionist work. I think this room should be called “the Pollack and Rothko and others that’s too crappy to be sucked into the other exhibits around town” retrospective. One nice section is something on the design of light fixtures, which actually is very cool. The coolest one, which I may have come close to buying if they had it on sale at the gift shop, was a hanging lamp, with the lightsource a foot or two above this wide plastic ring. The ring apparently has a hologram of an old-fashioned light bulb, so it looks like, well, a light bulb floating inside the ring. Much cooler than lava lamps.

Of course, there’s also the obligatory end-of-exhibit gift shop, selling the usual coffee table book and prints, as well as “Jackson Pollack Jazz”. I’m vaguely surprised there’s no “Jackson Pollack Jigsaw Puzzles”, which would probably give anyone coniptions.

I’ve realized that I’ve been in somewhat of a hiatus in terms of babbling randomly about goings on. Most of this time has been filled with reading Stephen King books (“Bag of Bones” is fairly good, except for the last 100 or so pages, and “The Shining” wasn’t nearly as terrifying as the Kubrick film) and watching TV. I suppose it’s no coincidence that this hiatus corresponds with the new TV season and all the soul-draining inactivity that implies.

I’ve also realized that I haven’t seen a movie in a movie theater in a while. The current crop of movies is unremarkable, though that hasn’t stopped me in the past (yes, I’ve actually paid money to see “Godzilla” and “Armaggedon”, but then I find a giant special effects dinosaur more interesting than Brad Pitt in a tux). Instead, I counterintuitively blame my DVD player, and the several unwatched DVDs I have on the shelf. Guilt plays a role in all this: why should I spend $9 to see a bad movie, when I have these DVDs of good movies I haven’t watched yet just lying here? An accumlative instinct doesn’t help matters: I’ve been buying DVDs (“on sale now!”) faster than I’ve watched them. And, so, the movie theater-DVD gulf widens, and the effort to overcome the guilt increases. At some point, I’ll realize that there are a ton a books on my shelves that I haven’t read, and this hasn’t stopped me from buying more, adding to Amazon.com’s bottom line. Either this idea hitting home will stop me from reading, or applying the psychological framework to the DVD-movie situation will break this movie-going impasse. Accumulative guilt has to be boxed away in some mental carton, and put in the attic. It’s the American way.

In the meantime, I’ve been on some sort of art/museum kick. Saw the French architecture thing at the Soho Guggenheim. Oh, those French! A few things were interesting — the bit in the basement showing the process of dubbing a movie in a foreign langauge was fascinating — but, oh, those French! Saw the Upper East Side Guggenheim’s Compare and Contrast exhibit: this Paris modern art museum is being repainted (or something along those lines), so its contents have found their way to New York for the winter, to be displayed next to the Guggenheim’s collection of similar work (trivia point: the Guggenheim was originally the Museum of Non-objective Art, which means that the stuff they had couldn’t look like anything real). More interesting than the Soho exhibit, but expectedly so: up the Guggenheim’s spiral is a selection of this century’s major art work, spanning early Cubism to late century conceptual art. There’s some nice Giacometti, Picasso, a sprinkling of Pollack, a Dali or two, a niche full of Mondrian. Somewhat disconnected, but neat. Note the UES Guggenheim is pay-what-you-want on Friday, after 6PM, and the Soho one is like that on Saturday evening. It’s unclear if the full admission price is worth it, but then I’m cheap.

In the next month or so, I’m going to hit MoMA and the Whitney, for the Jackson Pollack/Rothko exhibits. I know little about abstract expressionism, beyond the fact that Pollack has the “hey, my pet ferret can do that!” drip art, and Rothko did the “hey, my drunk uncle did that once!” solid color things. I look to reaching enlightenment after these visits, though I suppose enlightenment may consist of a plan to coax one’s pet ferret to do a drip painting.

In the meantime, the Met is having three big-banners-out-front exhibits. One is this exhibit of Degas photographs, which is interesting, though short. Another is fancy Italian dress armor from the Renaissance, also interesting, though I was wondering what would happen if you put on weight during the holidays and couldn’t fit in your favorite suit of plate. Would a cunning adversary wait until early January to attack, when all your knights were loosening belt buckles a notch or three? And we’re not talking about jeans, which you might be able to cram into. “Buddy Lee tested”, indeed.

The big exhibit at the Met is the Dutch Renaissance paintings. Van Eyck to Bruegel. The wonder of this period of Dutch art is the fine detail the painters were able to place into their work. Yes, you have a major scene in the foreground — where fine wrinkles are delineated on each face, mind you — and in the background is, say, a stunningly detailed town scene. Tiny guys, carrying fish to the market, or wheat to the mill. Little people looking out minature windows. Generally, the Met allows you to get real close to these works, so you can make out the details.

Much of this is devotional art: various interpretations of the Passion or the Annunciation, random Biblican parables and lives of saints. Well, there’s also portraits and the last room has the “Wheat Harvest” showing naturalistic peasant life, but Hell imagery is more interesting than a picture of Bob, Salt Merchant in Antwerp. There’s also a fantastic rosary “bead” (if something the size of a pool ball can be called a “bead”), which is openned up. Inside, carved out of the wood of the “bead” is a stunningly detailed city scene. This is not a painting, but a diorama, one of those, “how did they do that?” things. Yes, we may have all that laser silicon wafer etching technology nowadays, but seeing this rosary, you’d almost swear the Renaissance Dutch had all those Intel engineers beat at the carving game.

Some of the paintings are jarring to modern sensibilities. For example, there’s a whole room full of paintings of the Virgin Mary breast feeding baby Jesus, which elicits a mild boggle. (While I didn’t see protestors, it’s unclear to me how the Christian Right, for example, would react to these paintings, seeing as how bodily functions are stictly verboten in modern American religious imagery). Other things just look odd in the late 20th Century. Joos van Cleve’s “Last Judgement”, for example, has Christ dressed up remarkably like Superman. Well, there’s a big red cape, and he’s flying through the air: it’s almost as if a blue shirt with a big “C” on it was at the dry cleaners. I don’t recall if he was buff. A different painting has a manger scene, with an angelically glowing baby Jesus, with me thinking, golly, they won’t need a night light for the kid. And then there’s this painting with Christ’s fingers splayed out in a Vulcan “Live long and prosper”. Yes, I’m aware Leonard Nimoy is Jewish, and the Vulcan thing is derived from a Hebrew hand sign, which was the only thing he could think of doing when he was asked to do some Vulcan greeting for the camera, but it still is jarring to see.

This is a long exhibit, and I got tired at the end of it. This may call for a repeat visit, since I’m sure I missed a lot of things, expecially in the final few rooms.

A unix quiz. Many of the questions deal with older hardware and obsolete procedures, though.

Basically, “Last Days of Disco” sold out minutes before I got to the movie theater. The people right in front of me were the first ones turned away, one of those if-I-hadn’t-sat-on-my-ass-those-five-minutes moments. But I did want to see “The Spanish Prisoner”, having liked “House of Games” a lot when I saw it a few years ago.

“The Spanish Prisoner” is the story of a man caught in an elaborate con, to separate him from the industrial secrets he holds. He’s the inventor of “the Process”, which will apparently allow his company to corner the market, or something like that. Perhaps he works for Gilette, and what they’re talking about is the new Mach 3 razor, with three (!) blades instead of two. Perhaps not. It’s immaterial: the book he has, with the Process scribbled down as a jumble of nonsense mathematics (clearly taking place in the age before computers) is the object of this game.

David Mamet is supposed to be a master of dialog. I thought the dialog was remarkably annoying in this film. He feels compelled to make his actors repeat things, over and over again. In “House of Games”, this trick conveys a sense of menace, of deliberate probing. It works. In “Spanish Prisoner”, it reminded me of a scene from “The Simpsons”, in which Bart (or Homer) approaches a moment of epiphany. Random words and noises sound like the thing he’s trying to think of (though, probably, if it was Homer, he got it wrong). “Spanish Prisoner” was like this, with the repetitions pointing to something obvious, which the audience should have seen many, many minutes before the folks on screen.

The ending also feels patched together. There was another con working. When it started is unclear: there were no moments when, thinking back on the film, you could have said, ah ha! It comes out of thin air, a deus ex machina, thorougly unexplained and unjustified. The cons fall into two classes, then: those that are telegraphed well in advanced, and those that come out of the blue. Neither is particularly satisfying.

The comparison with “House of Games” is inevitable. There are a series of cons throughout “House”, but they all have these retrospective ah-ha moments. They make sense. Cons are also seen to fail because of contingency: someone in the wrong spot at the wrong time, etc. The con men are not omniscient, not omnipotent. We seem them improvise when things go wrong. And they sometimes fail because of accidents.

As a bonus in “House of Games”, we see some secondary cons: ways to lift money out of an envelope, tricks you can play in a Western Union office, the idea of a tell. In that film, you have a feeling that you’re being let into the con man’s world, a gritty place of smoke-shrouded poker games and greasy spoon diners. This impression that you’re seeing things you’re not supposed to see is missing from “Spanish Prisoner”. “Prisoner” plays out as a caper film of high money and elaborate contrivances. It’s nothing in particular.

One minor plus with “Prisoner”, though, is that it was apparently filmed in my neighborhood. They use the 79th Street IRT, and shoot a few scenes outside the Althrop, this hulking building at 79th and Broadway (It’s apparently hollow on the inside, with a court yard. Rich people live there.)

May 6, 1998

I realize the Dylan lyric is overused in these situations, but it still seemed appropriate. So, here’s the story:

This all started Friday morning, I think. I woke up around 3AM, with maybe a touch of insomnia, and basically was restlessly thrashing around for the next few hours. At around 7AM, sweating heavily through a hot flash, I started to get up — thinking of an earlier start on the day, given I couldn’t sleep anyway — and immediately had to vomit. Luckily, the bathroom is right next to the bedroom, so there wasn’t an awful mess.

What I threw up was black stuff, nothing resembling, even remotely, the chicken-fried chicken I had for dinner the night before. There was a lot of it. Because I was sick last month, I called my doctor’s office to make an early morning appointment. I was worried that I might be relapsing with the hepatitis. They got me a 9:30 appointment, which let me rest and try to sleep a little before going. The little nap didn’t help. Luckily, the office is basically down the street, and all I had to do was flag down a cab.

When I told my doctor that I threw up, he asked me what the vomit looked like. “Black”. “Black? Are you sure it wasn’t brown?” “No, it was black.” After doing a couple of tests (Yes, my first rectal exam, to check for blood in the stool. No, it was not fun.), he concluded that I had thrown up dried blood, and that it wasn’t a coincidence that digested chicken-fried chicken looked like coffee grounds. It was then a question of whether I’ll get to the hospital by cab or by ambulance — I was bleeding internally, perhaps enough so to pass out on the way there. He checked the vital signs, and there was a visible difference between my pressure and pulse rate when standing and when sitting. My heart was working harder to keep a limited amount of blood moving against gravity. The ambulance was there in about five minutes. The ride wasn’t smooth; how could it be when you’re running red lights? I got extremely woozy in the ride over, and the wheelchair waiting at the ambulance bay was a good thing.

Roosevelt Hospital’s Emergency Room looks nothing like that thing on TV. It’s larger, darker, and more rationally arranged, with administrative and work desks next to each bank of exam rooms instead of being located in a dramatically central island that allows Gateway Computer product placements. It’s unclear if any of the doctors and nurses there were playing out prime-time soap operas in the supply room, and it’s unclear if there were patients in other rooms with funny, touching life stories to tell their nurses. At no point did they wheel in a schoolbus full of kids who were caught in a chemical spill on the way to the zoo.

It took a little while for my exam room to be ready. I spent the time waiting next to one of the desks in the obligatory wheelchair, watching this crazing person mutter to himself, occassionally yelling loudly at no one, while walking in circles in his small space. Relatives were in there with him, gently guiding him away from the exit and from places that he might hurt himself. I did feel much better about his proximity once I realized he was blind.

The first thing they did was put an IV in me. My doctor’s and the ambulance’s reports indicated internal bleeding after all, and my vital signs were showing it. The main thing is to get fluids in my body, to replace what was leaking out. The IV needle hurts like hell. It’s not like the pricks you feel when they’re taking blood samples or when you’re being innoculated for measles. It’s a bigger needle, and it’s dug in deeply so it can’t be easily dislodged, and so it can put a lot of fluid in you quickly. I apparently also had some sort of reaction to that first IV, sweating heavily and almost passing out. I’m told some people react this way; there’s a name for it, but I can’t remember what it is.

A little while later, they put a tube through my nose and down to my stomach to drain some of the fluid. They give you a pain killer, a spray for the back of the throat, but nowhere else. The tube going up the nose actually isn’t that painful. The hard part was getting the tube the rest of the way down. You get a cup of water with a straw, and you’re supposed to drink the water while the doctor pushes down the tube. Drinking the water makes everything go in the right direction, and it closes off the breathing passageways, so the tube doesn’t go down a lung accidentally. I didn’t get the swallowing thing right the first time, and just sat there gasping for a minute before he tried again. I made sure to drink the water in time with the tube being pushed that time around.

Surprisingly, you get used to the tube and the IV reasonably quickly. It’s uncomfortable, the tube in particular when coughing, but manageable. You just sort of lie there and drift.

Somewhere along the line, I think I fainted. The blood pressure was too low, I think, but I started to revive once they increased the IV fluid flow.

The main emergency room procedure happened a little while later, once the gastro-intestinal specialist got there and made sure everything was ready. This was something called an endoscopy, basically putting a fiber-optic camera and assorted tools down my throat to look around. They gave me sedatives before this, put me on my side and went in. I don’t remember most of this, mainly because I was drowsy from the drugs. I recall throwing up a couple of times when the endoscope was in there, and a nurse with a suction tube cleaning the mess up. I also recall hearing the doctors working, something about moving to the next position, extending a needle and injecting. Move-extend-inject happened many times.

In all that black murkiness that was my stomach, they found an ulcer with a blood clot forming on it. This is where I had been bleeding from. The endoscope had an attachment to coat spots with some concoction, which stopped the bleeding.

We learned later, after the blood test results came back, that I had lost close to half my blood in this. The blood statistic people looked at was the hemoglobin count. It’s normally 40. At the lowest point, when I was stabilized, mine was 23.

That Friday afternoon and evening, I think I threw up coffee grounds, it seemed, everytime I sat up, either to move me or to examine me. I guess I was just clearing the debris out my stomach.

There’s that standard visual motif in movies and TV, where the camera looks up at the hospital ceilings as the bed is being wheeled around. I suppose it suggests helplessness. It sort of works that way, but not really. Usually, you’re a lot more disorientated than a camera can show. The ceiling whooshes by unclearly, and there’s no particular feeling of helplessness, just whooshing, and dizziness. But, then, in my case, a lot less blood was getting to my brain, and the existential particulars may have escaped me.

I was eventually transfered to the intensive care unit, a busy place with many beeping machines that attach to you through a variety of skin pads and tubes. They put two more IVs in me, one on the back of each hand. It still hurt like hell, but I didn’t same reaction; it just hurt. They also put in a urinary catheter, to monitor the urine output on an hourly basis.

Let me tell you, the urinary tract was not designed for plastic tubing to be pushed in the wrong way. This, understandably, was the most painful thirty seconds this weekend. No more details, beyond noting that, after this catheter was in, and after these IVs were placed, I felt transfixed, like a butterfly pinned on some collector’s display case. While the immediate pain went away, I just didn’t feel like moving, and slept — such sleep that I got — through the night the position I started in.

The ICU is where they monitor you continuously. The machines, of course, would sound an alarm if there was something wrong. A nurse would also come in every hour or so, to jot down a variety of readings, and drain various containers, noting how much was in each container before pouring it out. Every few hours, they’d draw some blood to run whatever tests they do. Through the night, they put some five liters of saline in me, restoring my blood pressure to normal and bringing down my heart rate to something reasonable.

There was a surgery team briefed and standing by, in case the bleeding resumed significantly. The extra IVs were also a precaution: if there was a new leak, they could put a lot of fluid into me quickly, hopefully preventing a crash and giving them time to operate. One of the surgeons told me the next day that, thirty years ago, they’d automatically operate on patients with bleeding ulcers. These days, the medicines and technology are so good, they don’t have to in most cases. The work with the endoscope was sufficient for me.

There’s an awfulness in the alternate scenarios. I could have thought I was well enough to try to go to work; maybe I’d leave early, but I’d be able to take care of some things I hadn’t finished the night before. Those “sick passenger” announcements, to explain why the whole West Side IRT was stopped? That could have been me. Such thoughts encourage some forgiveness in subway delays.

I think the worst case scenario would have been throwing up, not realizing coffee-grounds vomit was a bad thing, and going back to bed to try and sleep it off. A couple of hours later in the ER, I was showing clear signs of shock from the blood loss, and, in this alternate world, I may not have been able to coherently use the phone in the apartment to call for help. There are occassional news stories of elderly people dying undiscovered, among their pets; Hercules the beagle and Mittens the cat would have to fight over “dinner”. Besides friends’ allergies, I suppose that’s a reason not to have pets, though I suppose a lemur capable of dialing 911 would be a good thing.

One thought: the modern hospital is basically a machine to provide 24×7 services. This may be a trite, obvious observation, but the systems that exist to do this are startling. There are of course shifts of doctors and nurses, rotating through the day, a tag team of medical professionals, that, in some sense, can be close to anonymous. I don’t remember the various shift nurses names, and I must have seen a dozen doctors. A few are important — my own doctor and the gastro-intestinal specialist, who was calling the shots — but most rotate through without their names or faces being remembered particularly well. A few stopped by during the weekend, and I did remember seeing them, but not always the context, except in certain cases: “ah, this is the one that put in the catheter.”

The informational glue that lets all this happen is the patient’s chart. The next team will look in on you quickly, probably give you an exam on their own, but most of the important information is on the chart, and is passed from shift to shift. A lot of writing happens. Small notes indicating blood pressure at such and such hour, doctors writing descriptions of the procedures they just performed, so the next shift will know what’s happened. My perhaps delirious metaphor is of meshing gears in an old clock, with patients as one gear, the medical staff as another, and that swinging/ticking mechanism as the chart. And for the most part, it works.

Saturday morning, I was moved to a regular room. The main dangers had passed, and the patch on my ulcer held up. I had two transfusions that day, in the afternoon and then late at night, putting two units of blood in me. This brought the hemo count from 23 to about 30. I’m told it put some color back in my face. After the second one, I didn’t get dizzy after sitting up in bed for a couple of hours.

They also started to feed me Saturday afternoon. I was on a liquid diet for the next three meals. A “clear liquid” diet, actually, which was composed of juice, tea and jello. There are other variations of “liquid” that include milk and soup, and something called a “brat” diet. It took a while to figure out that BRAT was an acronym, rather than something for pesky kids: bananas, rice, applesauce and tea. Harmless food. We skipped these varieties, and I was on solid food for lunch on Sunday.

People complain about hospital food, but I didn’t actually care. It was the first “real” food in a while for me. Yes, the quality could be described as “Salisbury Steak Day” at Southpark Elementary, but it was good to have to chew something.

Monday morning, they did another endoscopy, basically to check if the ulcer was indeed sealed up, and to take a biopsy of the surrounding stomach tissue. The biopsy will show if I have this particular bacteria that promotes ulcers. If I do, I’ll have antibiotics along with the Tagament. This endoscopy was much better than the first one. I hadn’t eaten anything the night before, so there was no goo in the stomach to get in the way, nothing the throw up while the scope was down there. It was close to painless, though I was drowsy from the sedatives through the rest of the morning. The ulcer looked fine; no new signs of bleeding.

It’s not clear how and when the ulcer got there in the first place. I could have had it all along, causing the minor stomach problems I had in March. The stress of the hepatitis flare-up last month and my taking aspirin the previous week — for minor back pain — may have caused it to bleed on Friday. But the aspirin itself could have done the damage; almost every doctor asked if I had taken aspirin, or commented on the fact. The head of the surgery team commented, “Do yourself a favor and buy namebrand aspirin next time, or take Tylenol,” as I have cheap-ass generic aspirin from Duane Reade. Generic aspirin apparently is less uniform than Bayer, and an undisolved bit, lodged in my stomach, may have burned an ulcer into the stomach wall.

Tuesday morning, they did a liver biopsy, to finally see the state of my liver after the jaundice last month. If I hadn’t been sent to the ER on Friday, we probably would still have scheduled the procedure, because of some odd numbers for the liver functions in last month’s blood tests. Since I was in the hospital anyway, seeing a gastrointestinal specialist, they did it at the end of my stay.

A liver biopsy involves sticking a needle into the liver, between the ribs. This hurt less than you’d think, certainly less than the urinary catheter. Pain killers were liberally applied, and the actual tissue extraction is a quick stab a short way into the liver. The stab caused me to convulse, as if being punched in the ribs, but there was little pain. They actually did the jab three times to get a good sample. Waiting for the biopsy, and watching them pull the various needles out of the sterile bags, was much worse than the actual procedure. Lying on your side for six hours, to make sure the entry point closes up properly, was perhaps the most annoying part. Yes, people sleep on their sides, but generally not with a large bandage underneath, and not fixed in that position for hours. The legs get tired quickly.

I’ll find out the results of this on Monday, on the follow-up with the specialist. The ulcer, while scary and dangerous, is a passing thing, a solved problem. Long term issues with my liver will be with me until they’re able to make a clone me to harvest organs (Medical ethics issues? When it’s between you and your clone, mano a mano? Ha!), though, hopefully, it’s sufficiently early to treat most problems with better diet and drugs. Or at least I hope so.

Besides writing the majority of this on my laptop — I’ve been dying for e-mail since Sunday, by the way, but the phone system seems to be a PBX that’ll fry my modem if I try to connect it — I spent my waking hours reading. I plowed through a small pile of magazines. “Time” and “Newsweek”: these are two news magazines you shouldn’t bother reading if you have the “Economist” in the same pile. The other news weeklies just look bad next to it. Someone brought “People”; make sure you vote for “Harry The Angry, Drunken Dwarf” for the 50 most beautiful people. I also had the “Utne Reader”, and I remembered why I gave up reading it a while ago: the articles are basically New Age fluff. “Discover” magazine was good, though. I read, with particular interest, this article about growing new livers in tubs. I think more funding for this line of work is needed.

The bulk of the reading was “The Odyssey”, the Fagel translation. It’s actually a quick read the second time around, much faster than when we did it in class. Odysseus is back in Ithaca, plotting vengence on the suiters. A book cart goes around the hospital floor, offering John Grisham novels, but who needs that when you have Homer? Actually, one thing about the Fagel is that he uses 20th Century colloquialisms, and these are jarring next to the more Homeric constructions. Gray-eyed Athena does such and such, and returns to Olympus, “Mission accomplished.” Ugh. He also seems to rely a great deal on ellipses to segue from one scene to another, which feels cheap.

Nintendo GameBoy sucks. I can’t believe people other than night watchmen buy these things.

I received a very nice Paint-By-Numbers set, something from an English lakeside. One associating that popped into my head was the Japanese film, Fireworks/Hana-Bi. I’ll leave this reference a mystery, to encourage people to see this movie. Film Forum, last I looked. In any case, I’ll hopefully paint this during my rest period this week. I had thought of re-mapping the color-number pairs, to achieve something psychedelic, but maybe next time. The English landscape doesn’t have any florescent colors, anyway.

I had the room to myself most of Saturday, but someone moved in on around midnight. He was in the next room, housed with an apparently crazed old man who may or may not have talked about the Kaiser stealing his yarn. He’s in the hospital to treat a blood clot in the leg. I suppose I would not have been favorably disposed to my roommate, given that I had this large room all to myself until _he_ got here, but I’ve concluded that he’s one of those Manhattanites that will coo at wicker furniture. He and a friend were talking about cruise ships, which to me cannot be considered without irony after David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” They’re theatre people, apparently, who, unlike me, are currently able to eat pepperoni pizza. We don’t get in each other’s way.

The roommate did do a neighborly thing on Monday, buying a newspaper for me when I didn’t have change. He also got some chocolates and a card for the nursing staff when he was discharged. Cooing at wicker may correlate with better manners, I suppose. I was the one who wanted to take an electric cattle prod to people slowly climbing the subway stairs, and I perhaps show less charity for that attitude.

I was discharged this morning, Tuesday. The gastrointestinal specialist came by, said I can get off the IV, and gave me prescriptions for something dealing with the ulcer and for iron tablets, to rebuild my blood supply. I signed some forms, and that was basically it. My mom picked me up, which was a good thing. I started walking quickly, in the usual New Yorker breakneck pace. I discovered this cost much more energy than simply padding around a hospital room, dragging an IV tree behind you, and hoping your gown doesn’t fall open to show everyone a full moon. I felt lightheaded quickly. I really do need to just come home and not move quickly for a few days.

Oh, I finally got a look at the last IV needle. Damn, it was 2 inches long. Stuck in me. No wonder these things hurt. I’m told this one in my elbow was relatiely small. The ones in the back of my hands were larger ones, though I didn’t have the nerve to look at them when those came out after the ICU.

Sign from god or not: the Simpsons rerun, that my roommate had on the TV, was the one in which Homer ate some fugu, and may have only 24 hours left to live. He of course does survive, and resolves to spend each day as if it were his last. The last shot, as the credits roll, shows Homer sitting in front of the TV with a box of donuts on his lap, happily munching away to the “Gracie Films” production company clip. In my mind, I’m making similar promises to live a bit more fully, though I fear I’ll wind up with a box of Krispy Kremes in my apartment. Inertia and fear are powerful things. Someone remind me to watch the sun set over New Jersey this weekend, please.

Anyway, that’s the long of it. Thanks to everyone for their support.

This film is a brilliant dystopia, depicting a nightmare world in which arena football has become the national pasttime. shudder

The arena football motif carries through the film, where we see, over and over again, people we’d hope would be sensible do remarkably stupid things.

OK. Stop. “Starship Troopers” is based — I use this word loosely — on Robert Heinlein’s novel of the same name. I’m not sure about the history of science fiction, but this novel may have been the first to coin the phrase “bug hunt,” which we see most famously in “Aliens.” It’s combat science fiction, centering on the actions of soldiers from the future, who are recognizably types from today, only with bigger, fancier guns and spiffier uniforms.

The film picks up the plot points and the names: there’s a big battle, where the humans get their asses kick. Then there are other battles, and finally, this “brain bug” is captured at the end, giving the humans the key to victory. Woo hoo!

The film, however, is just plain empty. It skips through the novel’s plot points, but there’s very little behind it beyond a massive special effects budget — the animated bugs make Jurassic Park’s dinos look like something we saw in King Kong (no, wait, they were things we saw in King Kong) — and the soap opera antics of the gruff foot soldier, the dashing starship pilot (who, apparently, is named “Ace”), the woman that they love, and this other woman who pines for the GFS.

The heart of the novel is its moral vision. You may disagree strongly with what Heinlein thinks, but you can’t say that this novel isn’t animated by his moral code. The code is expressed in the trooper’s actions, his progress through the ranks, the lectures he receives, the conversations he overhears and the implicit comparison between bugs and humans.

The film’s fatal flaw is that it is entirely lacking in a moral vision. At most, it makes very nodding, very satirical references to it. No code or vision powers the film; all we have are special effects and soap opera. And when the protagonist finally declares that he understands the morality of this universe, that he knows the difference between “citizens” and “civilians”, it’s merely a point of melodrama, a tying of plot threads, and a reference to a question he couldn’t answer
previously. There’s no conviction.

But, the one positive thing about Starship Troopers, the movie, in the future, will become fodder for MST3K. To wit:

1) Where else will we “Doogie Howser, Psychic Nazi”? Crow T. Robot will have been saying, “Our minds are linked, your thoughts are my thoughts…” at one point. You’ll know when.

2) The continuing mis-casting of Michael Ironside, who, once again, plays the gruff professional soldier. I’m sure he can play a caring, sensitive role, if only they’d let him. Well, maybe not.

3) The insistence of all the troopers to get in real close to the bugs, despite the fact that they have guns, and the bugs have claws. It’s sort of like those bad action movies, where the villan, who has a big gun, decides that, yes, getting really close to Steven Segal is no problem — he can’t kick my gun away!

[Actually, this leads to one of the major deviations from the book — these movie bugs apparently haven’t really developed technology. In the novel, there are bugs with ray guns, who pilot space ships, and they’re clearly intelligent and scheming. Humanity has an equal opponent, and you can think of bug society as contrast and comparison to human society. I find this scarier, in a way, than the must-invent-wheel-must-discover-fire bugs they have in the movie.]

4) 24th Century Technology, in which they’ve invented a new form of information storage that looks remarkably like carbon copy.

5) 24th Century Music, which looks remarkably like 1980s music, but with less hair.

6) Tug-o-war with the brain bug. Humanity has apparently lost the ability to manufacture the “bulldozer”, and must resort to “Ten Commandments”-like teams of rope-pullers.

7) Arena football. Played with a silver football. ‘Nuff said.

I have to credit the film with one good thing, besides the special effects. There was a nice reference to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” at the beginning.

These are used by Nynex/Bell Atlantic/Verizon techs:

x9901 — CO location
x9970 — busy signal
958 — phone number