THE GREAT GADFLY:

Crapposaurus Hex

Over the past twenty-four hours, I've been party to two crazy ranting homeless lady incidents in my neighborhood. To hell with the groundhogs - Spring is officially here.

When I take the bus or train every day, I more often than not find myself playing the game of "Cellphone User or Crazy Person?" It's where I try to figure out if someone is talking on one of those cellphones with the little earphone/Janet Jackson mouthpiece thingies (or even more challenging, that little black button mic thingie), or if someone is merely chronically schizophrenic. Really, the only way to tell the difference is by the clothes and grooming of the subjects in question: the young white guy in the Diesel jacket and Burberry scarf screaming "YOU BITCH!!!!" into the air is on a cellphone; the middle-aged black lady in a soiled purple sweatshirt with twigs in her hair and the aroma of corn chips and ketchup screaming "YOU BITCH!!!" into the air is crazy.

I didn't say it was a particularly fun game, or that there was anything at all joyous about it. Though I guess it is kind of uplifting to see how technology brings us all together.

You want fun and joyous? I'll give you fun and joyous.

There.

If you want a good time on a Saturday night and you don't have the money to paint the town red, let me tell you what you should do: Turn on the MTV2. Oh, I know, I know - MTV is evil and they never play music and they're fascist Satan scum bastards - yes, yes, it's all true and I'm with you 100%...BUT. Late on Saturday night, when they think nobody is looking, a crew of devious little music video elves must sneak into the MTV studios and play havoc with the rotation list...this weekend I saw videos for "Turn To Stone" by Electric Light Orchestra, "I Can't Tell You Why" by The Eagles, and a whole buttload of hip little alterna-boy-bands with strategically scruffy bedhead, big thrift-store painting moppet eyes and tight t-shirts. Bless 'em.

I want to paraphrase something I wrote someone this weekend: In the brown-bag lunch of life, romance may be the ovum of an egg salad sandwich, but perspective is the mayonnaise. Without the Hellman's, you just got some nasty dry egg on bread. I am not sure where paprika or mustard figure into this, as this whole metaphor is quite frankly a work-in-progress.

By this time next week, I hope to have experienced a Matthew Barney film for the first time, to have seen a live performance by The Postal Service, and to have seen Christopher Guest's new mockumentary yuckfest "A Mighty Wind". Yuppers, Ol' Cultcha Vultcha's back in The Big Crapple for a limited engagement...more like a cultural-intake surgical strike, really. My itinerary reads like an old issue of Interview magazine, only without the drunken phone interview transcriptions featuring Debbie Harry and Joey Arias. But I'm working on that. But then again, aren't we all?

I'm trying to decide who has the cooler voice: M. Gira of the dearly-departed '80s band Swans or the dearly-departed Esther Rolle of the 70s TV show "Good Times". Thoughts?