Crazy Stable

This picture of sunset reflected in the sky over Coney Island is a tribute to a friend of Brooklyn.

I was shocked to learn this morning of the untimely death of Robert Guskind, a citizen journalist/crusader via his blog Gowanus Lounge (now offline) and as a chief contributer to Curbed.

Bob was a generous mentor to others in the fractious Brooklyn blogosphere, and used his own forum to advocate passionately and tirelessly for Brooklyn: his eponymous Gowanus, of course, but also all of brownstone Brooklyn and most especially, his beloved Coney Island. His blog was a quirky mix of personal passions as well; on any given day, it might feature a rare punk-rock video, a photographer's strange glimpse of urban street life, or the hilariously existential "Street Couch of the Day."

Most of all, though, Bob used his platform fiercely as a Fool-Killer and Weasel-Slayer, the two occupations I have come to respect most in this age of untrammeled greed and comatose consciences. He was merciless to crappy architecture, sleazy deals, and Bloomberg; he raised a flaming sword for all things old-school, unique, oddball, and endangered. His most recent crusade was to keep eagle eyes on the dangerous bloom of neglected construction sites around the borough. He will be deeply missed, as confirmed by today's tributes from fellow bloggers Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn and New York Shitty.

I was not a close friend of Bob's, but rather a friendly acquaintance; he would offer instant and open-hearted support to anything I sent his way, and was a booster of all things good, Brooklyn, and blogospherical. In person, he was pure Brooklyn, gruff, funny and kind. His quixotic fury at the slow, graceless death of Coney Island bespeaks a heart moved by things both broken and beautiful. My condolences to his friends and family at this terrible loss.

Just as I steel myself for a Very Serious Lent, I stumble on something incredibly silly to lift my grouchy Catholic spirits: LOLSaints. A mutant clone of my beloved LOLCats, it has quickly spurred an outpouring of just the kind of warped lunacy that I treasure in my fellow papists at their most orthodox. There are tons of good ones, but this one gets my Terry Gilliam Award. Goodbye, productivity; hello, online art archive search! Thanks to the redoubtable Dawn Eden for this priceless find.

And now for something completely different: Check out my Very Serious Lenten Observance. Regular readers will be shocked, shocked to learn it has a pro-life theme and is Obama-obsessed. If I had seen LOLSaints 48 hours ago, my energies could have been discharged harmlessly, but no, I had to go screwing around with Lennart Nilsson and the Obamicon, and one thing led to another.

Today, General Motors added insult to injury. After groveling for another gazillion-dollar "bailout," they announce that they're phasing out Saturn.

We are taking this very hard. There has been a Saturn parked in the driveway of the CrazyStable since 1996, the year after the Child was born, when we'd had enough of psychopathic used cars that conspired to strand us, conk out in front of oncoming Mack trucks, or simply incinerate themselves. Our marriage had been marked by a long succession of dysfunctional cars inherited or gifted from other people. (As beggars, we were not choosers.) We began with my dad's gigantic Delta 88 (or, as we liked to say, "This is your father's Oldsmobile"). This car, the Blue Shark, mourned my father by demanding a rebuilt transmission every other year, and eventually expired on the BQE.

Next came my deceased uncle's Cutlass Ciera ("This is...your uncle's Oldsmobile!"), a comfortable, but moody and evil, beige sedan we named The Manatee, because it was too slow-witted to elude predators. (It routinely fainted in the middle of left turns.) Briefly, the Manatee was joined by The Blue Whale, a Ford LTD owned in turn by several friends; this was a car so ponderously long and heavy that you could see the fear in the eyes of other drivers, especially those behind you as you climbed a hill. (The thing would start to roll backwards from its own weight before roaring into forward motion.) It had a trunk large enough for several dead mobsters. Its engine ignited in our driveway, and our local fire company ("Da Pride a Flatbush") tore open the hood and flung the air filter, like a flaming Frisbee, into the street with a crowbar. The Whale's blackened corpse was hoisted onto a car-squashing hauler and borne away for charity.

When we ran out of free cars, we did everything you were supposed to do in shopping for a used one, but still ran afoul of a Ford Taurus dubbed The Red Menace. This car got sideswiped the first time I drove it away from the curb, an ill omen followed by countless futile attempts to diagnose the engine's habit of broiling like a self-cleaning oven after an hour or more of highway driving. Who knew there were so many mechanics honest enough to admit they could not, for the life of them, figure out what the hell was wrong? During the last Taurus Barbecue Stunt, as we clutched our baby on the shoulder of the LIE and waited yet again for a tow truck, we swore: No more used cars.

Car-shopping in Brooklyn showrooms, however, was like a cross between a David Mamet play and a Mad TV skit. "Lemme talk to my boss and put ya together a package," said a Ford salesman who was a dead ringer for Andrew Dice Clay. We fled.

And then we remembered all the cute ads for Saturn, with folks dancing around proclaiming, "I love my Saturn!" We were especially drawn to their "haggle-free pricing" policy. The cars were just okay, but the showroom was paradise for a pair of auto-buying naifs. The nice people showed you the sticker price, answered your questions, gave you a test drive, and then gathered together for an embarrassing yet oddly touching rah-rah ritual before you drove away with your new baby. And we discovered something better yet: If we leased instead of bought, we could afford to drive a new, non-murderous car and then unload it in three years when it started to go sour.

Thus began our happy years with Saturn, the little plastic-covered car that could. First came little green "Zippy" (the "Z" line), then the heroic "El Zippo" (the "L" series), which was totalled in a two-sided collision but protected the Child and me with its stout steel frame. (Our dealer looked at pictures of Child standing outside the crumpled hulk and got tears in his eyes.) The least successful of the bunch was Legolas, an elfin green sedan with a mildly epileptic electrical system, but it was about this time that GM started hanging the whole Saturn line out to dry. (It was also during the time when you couldn't lease in New York, so we actually had to buy the damn thing. Used.)

But in 2007, the dealer joyfully introduced us to the Saturn Aura. What we could afford to lease was an Ion (a car so cheaply made that I swear the dashboard had stick-on decals). But what we got was a golden Aura, which we named Floradora. That's her in the picture up top, nosing out onto the scenic roads of Maine almost two years ago. She's no powerhouse, but she's a good, steady ride and we love her. None of the Saturns had a hell of a lot of personality, but frankly, we'd had plenty of that during the cars-of-the-dead phase. Driving Saturns felt like dating an accountant after a ditching a cocaine-snorting rock drummer; dull can be sort of nice.

Saturns inspired some crazy loyalty, especially early on. We were never goofballs who drove to Spring Hill, Tennessee for factory "reunions" or other such nonsense. But we liked the simplicity of knowing that we'd trade in one Saturn for another, and no one would try to sell us a "package." Last year, our Bay Ridge dealer folded his tents, and now GM is giving this once-visionary brand the shaft as part of their recession bloodletting. GM chief Rick Wagoner told the New York Times, "It is unfortunate and it seems like a cruel twist of fate at a time when Saturn is loaded up with a fantastic product portfolio.”

It was supposed to be "a different kind of car," made by spunky profit-sharing Americans and sold by kind, courteous non-weasels. Now it's one more stick on GM's bonfire of the vanities. In a year, when our lease is up, I wonder what we'll drive next. Maybe (shudder) we'll just take the bus and subway for awhile.

In a season of unrelentingly grim tidings, last night brought some badly needed good news: The powers that be in the Brooklyn Diocese have granted a reprieve to my daughter's school, which had been "proposed" for a merger with the school of a neighboring parish. The diocese is not in the habit of changing its mind about its "proposals," so the blowback on this from both communities must have been gale-force and accompanied by fiscal leverage. "These two communities were not ready" for the merger, announced Bishop Frank Caggiano, the beleaguered point man for the Diocese's absurdly named school consolidation program, "Preserving the Vision," to surprised cheers from parents and staff of both schools gathered for an evening meeting.

The merger will happen eventually, we were told, and both communities must soon start forming committees to "move forward," hold festive joint outings, and generally sniff one another with optimistic caution about our plighted troth. It is likely that neither parish institution will get to keep its name on the newfangled "academy," under a diocesan "no-winners" philosophy of making both communities feel equally peeved. (Since our school contains the name "Jesus" and the other contains "Mary," and all the good saints are taken by other schools, this somewhat limits our options; I have suggested "St. Elsewhere Academy." Other suggestions have been pithy but not printable in a Family Blog.)

Poor Bishop Caggiano; he insists (and, I think, truly believes) that we really will have fewer but "stronger and more vibrant" Catholic schools in Brooklyn and Queens, once we finish closing even more of them. Despite his good news, I'm afraid I lit into him afterwards with nothing-to-lose zeal (Daughter being a few months from graduation). Having watched the parochial schools left to sink or swim by our Church leaders for the past 8 years, and having seen the trust that was shattered over the past few weeks among our heroically underpaid teachers, I ranted. I foamed. I waved my arms. By now, my rant list is long: the diocese's abysmal communications and tone-deaf timing; the lack of investment and innovation that (more than any "demographic change")  has gotten some 40 schools closed already; the untried vagueness of the new "academy" model;  the whole clueless mess. He bore it bravely, and even promised to call me for more "input" before I was hustled out in a straightjacket by other parents waiting to bend his ear.

I hope he will forgive my wild-eyed tirade. The past week has been a gruesome media bonanza here in Catholic Brooklyn. First, our Bishop (in chief) DiMarzio appears in a press conference next to Mayor Bloomberg acting grateful for the chance to collect city rent money by turning some waning parochial schools into public charter schools (where, as Caggiano grimly acknowledged, "you cannot speak the name of Jesus"). Meanwhile, showing that Rome gets its priorities really, really straight, the Vatican follows up its Holocaust-denying-bishop fiasco by reviving, of all things, partial and plenary indulgences.

By the time Catholic education is thoroughly "reconfigured," we will all need a few coupons for time off in Purgatory, myself foremost.

Acknowledgement: The illustrations here hijacked without permission as an allegory for Catholic school closings are by Edward Gorey from his story The Wuggly Ump, found in the collection Amphigory.

It's a strange sort of crisis, this economic meltdown. Sages like Frank Rich of the New York Times are howling that "the abyss is widening" and calling it "an all-hands-on-deck emergency that's as trying as war." (My Aunt Beatrice, who lived through the Blitz in London, might have disagreed.) We've felt it, alright; my freelance work has slowed a lot, and Spouse casts a wary eye on threatened cutbacks to the nonprofit sector. As for spending, we can't give up most of the stuff recommended for "belt-tightening" because we gave it up 20 years ago, but we have mostly given up buying beer. This makes me sad, since I used to like to say that I had "champagne taste on a beer budget." It wasn't true—I actually like good beer better than most champagne—and now we are on whatever is less than a beer budget. A seltzer-water budget.

Yet the financial institutions with which the CrazyStable co-exists in a state of semi-feudal symbiosis seem weirdly distant from the fiscal bloodshed reported in each day's news. Yes, our "Wa-Mu" credit card has sent us a note declaring that it is now a Chase creature, which will deny me the pleasure of humming "Wah-Mooo" to the tune of Garrison Keillor's "Wahoo" while I pay off a few molecules of our balance each month. (However, the local Commerce Bank has made up for it by changing its name to the mysterious TD Bank, allowing us to say, in grating Tweety-baby talk, "Tee dee bank? Ooh, I tee dee bank, it wight ober dere!")

But otherwise, our encounters with our Insect Overlords, new or old, are remarkably unchanged. Citibank still sends out the same monthly statements, with no acknowledgement of anything amiss. Wouldn't you expect some sort of chagrined little insert? Maybe a "Monopoly" banker cartoon figure with a red face, and a note starting, "Whoops! We bet you've been hearing about our troubles lately, and we couldn't be more embarrassed! But now that the government has given us lots (heck, billions!) of your tax dollars, we'd just like you to know how grateful we are..."

In person, too, the Citifolks seem blissfully insulated from the Zeitgeist. Over the weekend, I stopped at a teller's window to change $30 worth of wrapped coins into bills. Before I was done, the sweet-faced teller had offered me (1) a personal loan and (2) a home equity loan. I believe what I'd asked was whether she could knock a few points off my credit-card APR. I wound up howling through the Lexan partition, to her puzzled amusement, "NO, dear. We want LESS debt, not MORE debt! But thank you for being willing to spread around that bailout money!" Every month, Citi extends their largesse, sending us "checks" to write ourselves even deeper into the pit. They even include perky suggestions for how to "treat ourselves" by spending them.

And then there is our "Notice of Property Value" from the City of New York. You'll  be surprised to learn (I sure was) that the market value of the CrazyStable, in all its half-renovated glory, has gone up this year, by $56,000! Our million-dot-something-dollar house is, hilariously, now a million-dot-something-even-more. Trust me, the only thing about the house itself to have changed is that the shabby chic got a year shabbier. So the first thing I thought was, aha! We are being preposterously over-assessed to fill Bloomberg's coffers. However, our actual "taxable value," on which the tax bill is based, actually lags behind the assessment...because the city won't crank up the house's official value by more than 6 percent a year. (Presumably we've been "appreciating" along at a far brisker pace than 6 percent, not that it matters to the squirrels who live inside the walls.) I don't know why this bubble-proofing factor is in there, but I'm grateful. Really, Mayor Mike, grateful!, and I am sorry I made fun of you for being bitten by a groundhog yesterday.

Hey, maybe we should have taken that nice bank teller up on the offer! It's snowing out right now, a dark and dismal February snow. Why, with that home-equity loan, we could be on the way to JFK and Barbados! Tee dee bank? Wahoo, WaMu! No...no. Instead, we will embrace the Owl of Fiscal Sobriety. All three images here are from the tripped-out Hieronymus Bosch and his surreal landscapes of beauty, pain and absurdity. I suggest we declare him the Official Artist of the Recession.