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Tomorrow Doesn't Look So Hot (The title is a line from a song by Stephen Sondheim, "Now You Know", from Merrily We Roll Along, which is featured in a cabaret performance for which I'll be playing the piano this Friday night back in New Haven.) It's twisted that I who rant so much about the New York subway system should decide to write about something which gives me strange pleasure. In various subway cars, one can find, among the advertisements lining the cases where walls meet ceiling, occasional blurbs co-sponsored by the MTA and Barnes & Noble entitled "Poetry in Motion". Occasionally, the literature they choose to proffer the commuter is uplifting or amusing, but on two occasions lately, I've found the selections particularly bleak. I suppose the first one that struck me wasn't all THAT bleak, just a bit wry. It was a proverb from some Spanish poet whose name I do not recall: "Man has three things that don't work well on the sea -- rudder, oars, and fear of drowning." The second, however, was a speech I'd been meaning to memorise for quite some time, so I took the extended time of my commute (The A was, once again, inexplicably, running local) to commit it to the brain-banks. It is, without a doubt, one of the most bitterly depressing things I think anyone could have conceived of posting to "brighten" one's commute, and it follows here, both because I'm glad I now have it in my head, and because I'm amused that only a couple days later did its impenetrable darkness strike me. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow -- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5 And they wonder why people are miserable in this city's ever-deteriorating and piss-poor excuse for public transport. r
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