The Onion on RadioShack

So true, especially the part about the “desperate, high-pressure sales staff.”

Queens Central is live!

Before I go out for some much-deserved ice cream on this beautiful spring day, just a quick note to let you know that the new Central Queens community site I’ve been working on, Queens Central, is officially up. Go and enjoy!

Queens Central update

I’ve been spending more or less all my free time working on Queens Central, the kickin’ new Central Queens community site that’s going to make Time Out New York sorry they called us hillbillies this week. It’s taking a while because building a new blog theme from the ground up and integrating it with a message-board system turns out to be kind of a big job. But I still think it might — might — be ready to go at some point this weekend. Don’t quote me on that.

In any event, this is shaping up to be fairly big. I think — I hope — you’ll like it. I seriously can’t wait to launch it. I expect a user base ready and willing to contribute no fewer than the 750 or so forum posts Astorians.com gets on any given day. Maybe I should open a hipster coffee house to promote it. The community site comes first, then the cafe, right?

A discovery

I can stay home all day and find the willpower to drag myself to the gym. I can go to work and go to the gym afterward. But I cannot go to work, come home, and then find the willpower to drag myself to the gym.

Oh, well — I tried. If by “tried” I mean “thought about it for a few minutes.”

Entourage loves me

I finally saw Sunday’s season premiere of HBO’s Entourage last night. Previously on Entourage, Queens boy made good Vinnie Chase won critical acclaim for starring in an indie flick called “Queens Boulevard.” Now Vince’s brother, Johnny Drama, has landed a leading role in a new NBC drama from Valley Stream native Ed Burns, “Five Towns.”

Is Entourage going to name a fictional project after every place I’ve ever lived? Here are some other names the writers might want to use for new TV shows and movies, and why they should seriously consider them:

Sutton Place. I got my apartment in this Manhattan neighborhood through New York real-estate monolith and serial gentrifier The Corcoran Group. Entourage star Adrian Grenier’s mother sells real estate for The Corcoran Group. Ergo, Adrian Grenier’s mother has probably sold real estate in Sutton Place.

Evanston. I went to college here, but Entourage scene stealer and critical darling Jeremy Piven grew up in this Chicago-abutting suburb, where his parents spent decades running a prestigious theater program that produced the Cusacks, among others.

Atwater Village. Vince and his pals undoubtedly spend some time in the celebrity-infused L.A. neighborhood of Los Feliz. Atwater Village is right next door, but grittier, and they totally go for that.

Also eligible: Greenwich Village, That Neighborhood in Brooklyn Where I Lived Until Age 2 and My Parents Can’t Even Remember What It Was Called, Merrick, Atlantic Beach (Little-known fact: Sonny lived there in The Godfather!).

Another thought on Vonnegut

When I was in eighth grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Rothman, told me to “write what you know.” It’s an old rule of thumb for writing fiction. For today’s novelists, the rule seems to be more “write what you don’t know, but make sure you do two or so years of exhaustive research on it first.”

I’ve read a lot of novels in recent years that I really enjoyed but impressed me more with the depth of their research than their artistry. Kavalier and Clay. Carter Beats the Devil. The Plot Against America. They’re research lit, clearly written by authors terrified of getting a single detail wrong about the birth of the comics industry or the golden age of magic or the cryptofascist American antiwar movement before World War II.

Kurt Vonnegut didn’t do any of that. He sat down, thought a bunch of stuff up and combined it with “what he knew,” such as surviving the firebombing of Dresden as a POW, or working soulless, unsatisfying jobs in an industrial Upstate New York burg, or struggling as a high-concept science-fiction writer. And it made his writing so much richer, more exhilarating and more fun than even 10 years of research ever could. Truth wasn’t stranger than fiction when Vonnegut was writing the fiction.

I wish we had more writers like that today. Historical exactitude has its place, but I’ll take whimsy.

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

I am very, very rarely actually saddened by the death of a celebrity. The last time I can remember it happening was Mr. Rogers four years ago. But just as Mr. Rogers was, no joke, probably one of the most important people in my early childhood, being my television neighbor and all, Kurt Vonnegut, who I just learned is dead at 84, was one of the most important people of my adolescence. I won’t tell you he’s the greatest author who ever lived. But to this day, I’ll tell you he’s the greatest author I’ve ever read.

Vonnegut easily shaped my cynical worldview more than anybody I’ve ever known or anybody I’ve never known. He’s my literary hero. Every time I’ve ever made an abortive attempt to write fiction, from age 12 until now, it looks exactly like watered-down, cut-rate Vonnegut, all choppy sentences and free-flowing irony. His books are beautiful to read, and every one of them makes you think about some serious issues. They’re easy books, but they’re not easy books. From junior high through college, I read every book he ever wrote. I used to think that made me special and imagined that one day I’d meet him and tell him that, and that would make him happy. Then I read in interview in which he said tons of kids come up to him and tell him they’ve read all his books.

Here’s how much my brain was affected by Vonnegut: I was thinking about him just last night. I think about him a lot. Last night, I just so happened to be scouring the Internet for information about San Lorenzo, the fictional island nation in Cat’s Cradle, the first Vonnegut book I ever read and still my favorite, for sentimental and other reasons. Along the way, I came across a page that collects all the material from Cat’s Cradle about Bokononism. Has anybody ever invented a better fake religion? Vonnegut, of course, was a Bokononist himself, which is why it’s so convincing. I don’t expect he actually recited the Bokononist last rites, but I hope that’s how he felt at the end. I bet it was.

In my first few weeks of college, I found out a play based on one of my two or three favorite novels ever, The Sirens of Titan, was showing in Chicago. Nobody wanted to go with me, so I went myself. I got on the el, rode to the stop, got off, walked two blocks, was terrified by the sketchy neighborhood, and turned back. I still regret that for a variety of reasons.

A couple of years later, he came to the school to give a lecture, and I was excited for weeks at the prospect of actually seeing him in person. Then, back home in New York, he was sitting directly behind me at a small play about a female cop and a doorman falling in love. When I graduated and moved to the city, I lived near his neighborhood and saw him three or four times. I still remember the last time: He was looking withered and old, hunched over in a sweater vest, depositing something or other into a corner garbage can. He clearly lived on that block, and I remember wondering why he would have to use a public garbage can.

All those times, I never worked up the courage to talk to him. Now I never will. So it goes.

I saw him on the Daily Show last year. He sounded terrible, and I knew it wouldn’t be long. Now he’s dead. I remember when Timothy Leary, like Vonnegut an influential hippie-era counterculture philosopher, died of cancer years ago. He talked a big game and announced he was going to make a big show of his death, broadcasting it on the nascent World Wide Web. But somehow I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Sure enough, the time came, and we got nothing. He chickened out. Who can blame him? But somehow I bet Vonnegut wasn’t scared, even though he was a proud secular humanist who fervently believed there was nothing waiting for him in the great beyond except maybe, if he was lucky, a purple light and a hum for all eternity. He did a lot, a lot of thinking about death, and he seemed completely OK with it. Read all his books and see if you don’t believe me.

Call for photos

I’m hard at work at the new Central Queens community site, which I can now officially tell the world will be located at queenscentral.com (get it?), but I’ve got a little problem. I want a banner up top cycling through a few Central Queens photos, but it’s tough to find copyright-free pictures. In the past, I would have just stolen something, but though non-commercial, this is a little too big an undertaking for that. Plus what if I want to stick up a couple of Google text ads at some point?

I’ve taken a bunch of photos of Forest Hills myself, but I’m not a good photographer and I have nothing of Kew Gardens, Rego Park or Briarwood. So I’m turning to you, the Internet. Do you have any good photos of these neighborhoods, and will you grant me unconditional permission to use them in any way I see fit? Take one for the team, if you will? I can promise you will get attribution on the homepage whenever your photo appears, along with a link to whatever you want.

In related news, don’t buy web hosting without first googling for coupons. Seriously, at $48, that was easily the most valuable Google search I ever made.

Gone Serf-in’?

Serphin Maltese is, thankfully, not my state senator, but he does represent some of Forest Hills as part of his oddly shaped district (warning: PDF), which bizarrely includes some but not all of Forest Hills Gardens, about as cohesive and homogeneous a neighborhood unit as I can imagine. In one of the great paradoxes of local politics, he’s widely known as one of the most conservative members of the New York State Senate despite representing one of the most liberal districts around — he’s been in power since 1989 and has been re-elected nine times. But the tide might be turning. (Oh, God, must resist making horrible “serf/surf” pun.) In 2002 no Democrat deigned to run against him, and he ended up getting a dictatorial 94 percent of the vote. But last year, facing an underfunded unknown whom the Democrats would barely acknowledge, he barely scraped by just 783 votes.

Now rumor has it Eliot Spitzer has decreed Maltese is going down in 2008, and he probably will. But my big question: What took so long? It’s truly amazing how people will continue to vote for someone who doesn’t share their interests or values just because he shows up to cut ribbons and shakes their hand. But that’s politics, isn’t it?

Now to think up a title for this post. No! Can’t use a surf pun! Can’t do it! Can’t do it! Must resist! No — resistance … weakening … I must … but I cannot …

Damn.

Bigger and better things

I am in dire need of a raison d’etre, and I’m increasingly thinking I’d like to start a community website covering Forest Hills. I’m talking blog, message boards, that sort of thing. Frankly, we’ve got nothing. I’ve been poring over sites like the excellent Astorians and QueensWest.com and seething with insane jealousy. I really, really think this neighborhood is worthy of something like that. Forest Hills NY is confusing and had its last post in January, and the Forest Hills Forum is mostly real-estate flames. Meanwhile, we have some excellent local bloggers, like Sarah of Avenue Food, but I don’t know of anyone who’s blogging about Forest Hills on a regular basis.

New York Magazine’s Neighborhood Watch archives have exactly zero entries on Forest Hills. That’s shameful, and we need to fix it. Basically, I’d like to try to build a sense of community around here among people who do more than just complain.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to do this, and I think I can already envision it. My only question: How wide-ranging should this be? I feel like anything covering just Forest Hills would die on the vine — not enough people would be interested in visiting and contributing. But how far do we go? I’m thinking “Central Queens” — but what is Central Queens? The Queens Chronicle, sadly the most authoritative source I could find, defines it as Forest Hills, Rego Park, Kew Gardens and Briarwood. But should we cast an even wider net? How about southeast to Richmond Hill and Jamaica? West to Elmhurst and even Jackson Heights?

Would anybody be interested in this? Would you like to contribute? What areas would you like to see covered? Is anybody there? (I would be so pleasantly surprised if I got any answers.)