Yo!
It just isn't fair. Fuck gets all the attention. Sure, it's a versatile word, applicable to just about any human situation. But all sorts of people have written about fuck, and I want to discuss something different today.
On the corner of Broadway and Myrtle, in Bushwick, are three corner stores. As far as I can tell, their most important contribution to the local economy is in the supply of Colt and Corona to neighborhood gentlemen. As is usually the case, each of the three stores had a group of men out front, when I passed at 6:55 am.
As I approached the stairs to the train, a fellow across the street yelled, “Yo!” A guy standing with one group then replied, “Yo!,” and darted in front of me, across the street, and through oncoming traffic to the other group. This set off a call-and-response, one group to the other, across the busy intersection: “Yo!,” said one man. “Yo!,” replied another. As I climbed the stairs and crossed the street on the overpass, I heard yo knocked about like a volleyball.
Fuck, I can get behind. When I hear it, no matter the context, I usually know what the fucking fuckety duckfucker means who says it. But yo? Other than “Hey,” I don't know what the hell it means. I still don't know what it was in that first yo that specifically said, “Luis! I need you over here immediately! Dodge that bus and get your ass over here!”
Chertoff tells straphangers, Just die already*
Michael Chertoff, director of Homeland Security, back-burnered, yesterday, the task of protecting mass transit from terrorist strikes, saying the onus falls on local government. Chertoff's reasoning? A plane-as-weapon might kill 3,000 people, whereas a bombing in a subway car would kill “only” 30.
Now, while I recognize that government officials perform a complicated calculus when setting national priorities, and that sometimes that calculus seems cold and cynical, I still think Chertoff's full of shit.
First of all, you send four suicide bombers into the public areas of Penn Station or Grand Central, and you're gonna kill more than 30 people. But what he's also failing to consider here is the economic impact that coordinated transit attacks would have on New York or Washington. I don't know about D.C., but knocking the MTA, LIRR, NJ Transit, and MetroNorth offline for days after an attack would temporarily cripple the city.
Perhaps that would be okay if New York were just a wretched hive of scum and liberalism, but it's the financial center of the nation, you idiots. How can that not be a federal priority?
Oh, but look here. Joe Lieberman seems to agree with me: “This has to be, in part, a national responsibility.” Really, Joe? Is that why you voted to reduce the share of security funding that goes to major cities, in favor of helping rural-state senators win pork for back home? You really think Sam Brownback will support your next loserific presidential bid?
*I know, I know. I'm pretending to be the Post this morning.
Subway etiquette
I propose a deal. If I'm so dumb or so desparate for a seat that I actually sit in front of a subway map, I'll gladly move my big ol' head over so that you can read the map, and I'll avert my eyes so I'm not watching you read the map.
However, I do think that you should live up to your part of the social compact: Don't just hover right in front of me when you finish, staring in the same general direction as the map. If you do hover and stare, I'll think you're continuing to read the map, and I'll keep holding my head in a weird, uncomfortable angle so that I'm not in your way. And then, when I finally realize you're not actually looking at the map, I'll get irritated.
So, turn away from the map so I know you're no longer looking. It's only fair.
More Brooklyn "pioneers"
Following up on the pioneer watch, I just read one of the Times' pieces about the “new” Brooklyn, in which Jeff Vandam discusses the area not far from our place where hipsters have settled into loft apartments.
Vandam profiles Glen Bingham, who is (what else?) a singer in a rock band. Bingham tells Vandam: “I was like: 'Right on! This is nothing! We can make it something!' ” Then, later, Bingham says, “I guess we're pioneers, but we're not homesteaders, you know?…I didn't move here to stay here and have it stay this way.”
At least Gideon Yago, talking to the appalling Toni Schlesinger, had the decency to say, “Oh, pioneers! Though I'm not sure I enjoy that term. There are people living here.” That's what the other “pioneers” lack: a sense that there are people already here who might not want a Brooklyn Industries and a music scene.
But then here's where I might be a hypocrite. When Vandam described the bar Kings County, I thought, “Maybe we should check that place out.” I'd love to see more hang-outs and restaurants in our area, but unlike Bingham and the other “pioneers,” I don't want to completely change what's here. We can have places here that we like without driving out all the places that are already here. Besides, does every street in Bushwick really need all the bars and galleries and boutiques that Williamsburg has?
More on the Queens high line
I first posted about this back in January, but the Times reported this week that the city is studying possible uses for the LIRR's abandoned Rockaway branch.
The Regional Rail Working Group has been studying the matter and suggests refurbishing and reopening the line to train traffic. Advocates of this plan cite several advantages, two of which really stand out to me: First, it would cut the commute from the Rockaways to Manhattan in half, from one hour to half an hour. Second, if linked to the JFK AirTrain, it could provide a one-seat ride from Penn Station to JFK, at a fraction of the cost of Pataki's proposed link from Lower Manhattan to JFK. (Pataki's plan would cost 6 billion bucks and would probably entail digging a new tunnel under the East River, along with acquiring right-of-way. This plan would cost only 400 million and could use existing tunnels and right-of-way.)
The cynic in me still feels, though, that the JFK/Lower Manhattan link is the sugar designed to coat the real medicine: increased LIRR access between the Financial District and the Long Island suburbs. As Ray Sanchez pointed out in Newsday this week, NYC usually gets the short shrift in transit funding, compared with the suburbs.
New York suck my jock
Z train runs express from Marcy (in Brooklyn, motherfuckers) to Myrtle, and today there were a group of teenagers too far up their own asses to realize that, so they missed their local stop.
Get to Myrtle, and I'm standing by the door waiting for it to open. I mean, I'm close enough to touch the door. Ugly teen girl pushes up next to me and tries to push in front of me. “I'm getting off here too,” I say, impatiently. But she's in my face: “We need to get to the other side, asshole. Let me go first.”
Doors open. Her friends all start pushing me and calling me names. I whirl and face them, and they shut up.
There's a very small space between me and the stairs down from the platform. (Yeah, Brooklyn. Elevated train, motherfuckers.) I step off the train, block their path. More pushing, more “asshole,” more shit. I get to the stairs. Walk slowly. Ugly girl tries to dodge around, I step in front of her. More “asshole.” They run through the passage and up the other steps.
I hope the shitheels missed their fucking train.
I'll drop off to sleep tonight with this fantasy in my head: She's trying to dodge past me on the stairs. I say, “In a hurry?”, reach back, grab the back of her head, and push the bitch down the stairs.
New connection on the 6 train
This is cool: The Times' Sewell Chan reports that the MTA is planning to finally connect uptown 6 service to the B-D-F-V line, at Bleecker St./Broadway-Lafayette.
One thing that confuses newbies is that the only connection available at that station is to or from the downtown 6 train. As Chan points out, if you want to get from the B-D-F-V line to the uptown 6 (or vice versa), you have to actually leave the system, go above ground, and re-enter, swiping your MetroCard again.
If you have an unlimited card, this isn't such a problem (although it's an asspain when the weather's bad). But I myself was really confused by this when I was new here, and I've seen many tourists and other new arrivals get confused. It's really bad when the tourists speak little English. The confusion will be even worse in a few months, when one of the token booths at Broadway-Lafayette is slated to close.
Building the connection is part of a $50-million project that will also renovate the Bleecker St. station and make both Bleecker St. and Broadway-Lafayette handicapped-accessible. Chan talks to some riders who question the worth of the project, since it is fairly easy to go above ground and transfer, but I think those riders aren't seeing the full value of the project.
First, Bleecker St. is in bad shape and really needs the makeover. The station is poorly lit and the beautiful tilework is grimy and, in many places, broken. Bleecker St. was among the system's first stations in 1904, and as such, it should be among the system's showpieces. As it stands now, though, it's an embarrassment.
Further, the area around these stations is seeing several new commercial and residential developments. It's likely, then, that these stations will see an upsurge of traffic, so I think riders in the area will certainly benefit from the improved facilities and accessibility.
Chan gives no timetable for the project, but it's going to be a doozy. The uptown platform of the 6 at Bleecker St. will actually be shifted south a few hundred yards, because the uptown and downtown platforms don't actually face each other. The uptown platform isn't adjacent to the B-D-F-V in the way that the downtown is, so they need to be aligned. The MTA will have to shore up neighboring buildings, tunnel under the streets, install stairs and elevators, and so on. The engineering alone makes this a cool project, as far as I'm concerned.
The Times has a diagram of the proposed changes, but it might disappear behind their subscription wall in a week or so.
Saving Brooklyn
These hipsters who want to save Williamsburg and Greenpoint from the city's rezoning plan—I have to say, they remind me of the cool kids in high school who loved U2 and R.E.M., but only until top-40 radio started playing them. Jen and I like hanging out in W-burg, but the attitudes often seem cliquish and patronizing. Consider three quotes from recent publications.
First, the Village Voice. Paul Moses wrote a good piece about the working-class folks who are being priced out of riverfront-Brooklyn, as rents climb. But he mentions something interesting. He talked to an area priest who fights for fair housing:
Reverend Jim O'Shea…said he is rankled when news accounts refer to the neighborhood as a “frontier” and the newcomers as “pioneers.” It's “like Columbus,” he said.
I hadn't thought of it that way before: This is the language of colonial oppression.
Jonathan Van Meter, writing in New York magazine, echoes this:
When I hear modern-day yuppies talk of being “pioneers” in certain Brooklyn neighborhoods—so smug in their 718 T-shirts—I want to poke my finger in their eyes. Brooklyn is not a clean slate. People who live there have a history, one that, more often than not, is of grit and forbearance. It's a history that I imagine the shabby Gentiles of Park Slope and the midwestern hipsters of Williamsburg—colonists, all!—don’t want to think about too much.
Gotham Gazette published a piece by Deborah Apsel about the New York City Teaching Fellows program, in which professionals and recent grads can earn a master's degree in education, while teaching in the public schools and earning a salary and benefits. Apsel interviewed the principal of a school in Williamsburg. This principal says that although he's hired excellent fellows to teach in his schools…
“I've met some fellows who are going to go back after two years and write a book about 'my time in the urban jungle,'” he says. “Don't come in here to do a social experiment. It's a slap in the face.”
Pioneers and colonists in the urban jungle. They've hacked out their spot in the wilderness, and they won't let it go for anyone.
News v Post
The email newsletter Cynopsis reports today that…
Bravo will launch a new series on August 10 called The Daily News (Hearst Ent), a six part documentary that highlights day-in-and-day-out operations at the New York Daily News. Each episode with focus on a group of journalists as they move through their day, covering various stories around the city, and the paper's notorious competition with the New York Post.
File under "cautiously optimistic"
Although I know that the MTA breaks everything it touches, I'm still looking forward to this month's automation of the L train. Getting trapped in the closing doors doesn't concern me on the automated L train any more than it does when I ride an elevator. Otherwise, anything that allows the MTA to run trains more frequently (if, indeed, this project lives up to that particular bit of hype) is all right in my book.
My kind of place
After weeks of sousing in Mexico, Dan Freeman has resumed his thousand-bar crawl in New York. I wondered what gave a man time to pub-crawl all day, but now I see he's retired. What a way to retire. Too bad his liver's still working OT.
Also of note, NYC Dives, cataloguing New York's dive bars. I had a half-formed thought to do something similar once, but these fine blogs got there first.
Living in Bushwick
Jen blogged about this before, but I have a few things I'd like to add.
This guy El Moreno describes the Opera House Lofts, across the street from us, as a happy building of artists and musicians, plagued by a neighborhood full of rapists, drug dealers, thugs, and whores. (Although I have to laugh when he says his budddy's “stash” got stolen. I guess El Moreno has one set of morals for poor people who smoke crack, and another for artistic people who smoke pot.)
But the neighborhood he describes isn't the one I've experienced. Sure, I've heard the “all these fucking white people” comments. They annoy me, but I take them in stride. See, I've watched Opera Loft dwellers pass through the neighborhood. They nearly run from the train at Broadway and Myrtle down to their nice lofts, seemingly afraid that if they're not inside their razor-wired bunker, they'll be attacked. They never lift their heads to acknowledge their neighbors, much less say Hello or stop for conversation.
Contrast that with some of the neighbors Jen discussed. The Delgados and Pedro have been open, friendly, funny. Pedro offered the use of his van if we ever need it. Emily Delgado described our street as one where the neighbors look out for each other—the implication being that they'll look out for us, too. The Lofters, meanwhile, are seemingly only looking out for themselves and each other.
They live inside an insular community, guarded by razor wire, flood lights, alarm systems, and security gates. They have a laundry, music and rec rooms, a yoga studio, a rooftop patio, and a garden. They have no reason to be part of this street, and so they choose not to. They walk briskly past the storefronts on Broadway, never lifting their heads. They don't buy from those stores, except MAYBE to go to the corner market for milk, smokes, or beer. If FreshDirect delivered here, they wouldn't spend a dime in this neighborhood.
El Moreno bitches about how “dangerous” this neighborhood is, but he doesn't mention that Opera House dwellers come and go at all hours of the night. We hear them coming home at 3, 4, and 5am. Common sense might tell you that any part of most cities and towns is potentially dangerous at 4am, but I guess El Moreno flunked Common Sense.
By the way, we know they come home that late because they're loud. They yell like drunken frat boys, they bicker among themselves, and they slam the security gate behind them when they enter.
When Opera House residents have parties, we see stylish 20-somethings running drunk, up and down the street, wearing very little no matter the temperature. I will never say that any woman deserves to be assaulted, but I will say, again, that common sense suggests that perhaps it's unwise to run down a street in an unfamiliar area, after midnight, dressed only in a miniskirt and a loose-fitting blouse.
El Moreno discusses an incident from late October, when an Opera House resident was badly beaten late one night. I can understand why that shook him up. It shook us up. But I wonder whether El Moreno knows or cares that our neighbor upstairs called the police that night.
When Opera House residents have parties, we hear car services coming at 3 and 4 and 5am to pick up party guests and take them home to Williamsburg and SoHo and the East Village. We know they're out there because we hear the drivers honking for ten or twenty minutes or more; Opera House guests, apparently, never bother waiting downstairs for the car.
When the weather warms up, I know that there will be Opera House residents and their guests in the courtyard across the street or up on the rooftop patio, partying and laughing and shouting until 5am every weekend.
Opera's neighbors are happy that the lofts are here. For decades, that beautiful, historic building was boarded up and empty. Large empty buildings breed crime. They're happy that the new owners didn't demolish and rebuild because our neighbors value the history of the neighborhood.
El Moreno and his former neighbors in the lofts clearly disdain Bushwick. Perhaps they were dumb enough to believe the “East Williamsburg” hype, and came here looking for young pretty white people, cool bars and restaurants, and cute little record stores.
So they hide away in their ghetto oasis, sneering at the Salvadorans and Puerto Ricans around them, unaware that they've made themselves a target by being so conspicuously “protected” all the time. The razor wire and other security measures tell the few bad eggs who are around, “Look at us. We have stuff you want that you can't have.”
It's hard for me to blame people for hating them, when they've gone out of their way to be such assholes to people in the neighborhood.
More MTA hoohah
The MTA has so far failed to pass the subway photography ban, Newsday reports. The article cites a spokesman for NYC Transit, who says that a flood of public comments about the proposed ban has led the MTA to temporarily shelve the measure, pending further review.
I still think we'll see a ban of some sort—probably on photographing “sensitive” equipment such as switches and support structures—but I suspect the MTA will back away from a full ban.
Save a horse, ride a barmaid
Admittedly, I don't know much about this Patriot Bar (for example, how long it's been open, or how long the tenants quoted here have been living above it), but I do know one thing: If I were thinking of moving in over a bar, I'd spend some time in the bar and outside the bar before I dropped my security deposit. I'd meet the bartenders and the owner, and I'd find out how late it was regularly open and how loud it is at, say, 2am.
[via Curbed]
Big, orange banners
Over at Carbongeek, Tom writes: “Apparently having solved all problems with crime and education, New York City spends $21 Million on lots of big, orange banners.”
Set aside for now the fact that NYC didn't pay for the Gates. (Christo did, by raising the money himself. He's even paying for the cops who are protecting the project.)
Tom seems to think this $21 million is a waste of money—that no matter who raised it, it should have gone instead to solve problems of crime and education.
I disagree with this on a couple of counts: First, problems crime and education will always need more funding than governments are willing to give. The War on Poverty and the War on Drugs and the War on Illiteracy and the War on Obesity and the War on Other Unpleasant Stuff are just as unwinnable as the War on Terrorism.
Throw ALL your money at them, and you'll never win those wars. That's not to say we shouldn't generously fund education, antidrug programs, welfare, and so on. But to say, We can't build new parks, or We can't go back to the moon, or We can't fund the arts, because we still have hungry people…
Well, we'll always have hungry people. Throw all of NASA's budget into food programs and nutrition education, and we'll still have hungry people. Wait to fund art until you've “solved hunger,” and you'll never have art.
Second, this is $21 million. That's not a lot of money when you think about it, and as I noted before, it was funded privately. If George Lucas had funded hunger relief instead of Attack of the Clones, I kinda think the world would be a better place. Why is it cool for Steve and Tom to reimagine War of the Worlds, but it's dumb to put up “big, orange banners”? To pick on someone other than Hollywood, how much did the Grammys spend to fête John Mayer and Bratney Spears last night?
Finally, if Christo's priorities are screwed up, perhaps we should examine our own as well. We spend money on comic books, Maxim subscriptions, cigarettes, video games, DVDs. Perhaps all of that should go to the poor instead. Perhaps, instead of going out drinking, we should spend our time teaching people to read.
The Gates might not be your thing. That's cool; many things aren't my thing. But let's please not make the Gates a moral issue. You spend your time on pop tunes and dumb popcorn films; I'll spend mine among the banners.
Sniffin'
I saw a guy yesterday on the uptown 6 train, stretched out on a bench, passed out. In his mouth was the nozzle for an aerosol bottle of cleaning spray from Staples.
He slept on one half of a bench. A family came on and tried to occupy the other half. The kids sat at the end farthest from him. Dad stood, but taunted Mom and tried to cajole her into sitting next to passed-out man. A look of revulsion crossed Mom's face, but she sat down, all scrunched up, and as far from him as she could get.
Then at the next stop, some hipster kids boarded the train. One of them got pissed off that the guy was taking up so much space. Have you ever seen self-righteous hipster fury? It's funny. It's so passive-aggressive. Hipsters say it's okay to be non-hipster, just so long as you're non-hipster somewhere over there, where you won't smudge us with your uncoolness.
He started nudging the guy. His friends told him not to bother. I turned away with a smirk, not wanting to see aerosol man pull out a knife and slice off a hipster ear for his collection. But as I left the train at Union Square, I saw that aerosol man was sitting up and making room, so I guess all ended well.
More on 9's demise
I missed this first time around, but the Times has a piece on the end of the 9 train. The 1 and 9 offer so-called skip-stop service, in which each train leap-frogs past alternating stations. As the Times describes, it's common on 9-train stops to see three 1 trains in a row pass your station while you wait for the next 9.
What killed the 9? Ironically, suggests the Times, the gentrification of West Harlem. The riders most inconvenienced by skip-stop service tend to be lower-income Blacks and Hispanics, but now that higher-income Whites are coming into the area and buying up homes, they don't want to stand around and wait for trains to carry them downtown.
What the article doesn't mention, however, is that the 1 and 9 aren't the only skip-stop trains in the system. The J and Z run skip-stop along the Broadway-Brooklyn line.
New York City-State?
The Post reports today that the City Council is considering a bill to create a commission to study whether New York City should secede from the state. Given that I don't respect George Pataki as governor, I'd probably support this move. Go all the way, NYC! Secede from the Union as well!
Stress freakos
I saw these freakos yesterday. On my way home from work, I stopped at Grand Central for a few cooking items from the market, a copy of Atlantic Monthly, and a bottle of wine. Since the market didn't have what I needed AND since I'd forgotten to deposit a check, I had to then go to Union Square to hit up my bank and stop at Food Emporium. So after finishing up in Union Square, I went back down into the subway and saw tables set up for these stress tests. I didn't know they were Scientologists, but I also didn't need them to tell me I was stressed. Dodging tourists and random fuckheads was enough.
High line of Queens
I missed this article when it was first published, and the only link I have for it probably requires registration, but Sunday's Times featured a story about a proposal to turn the LIRR's abandoned Rockaway Beach Branch into a linear park, a la the High Line.
The Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) ran the Rockaway Beach Branch (link 1, 2) line until the 1950s, when declining ridership led to its abandonment. The MTA bought the right of way (ROW) in the late 1950s, and now a portion of the ROW carries the A line out past JFK, across Broad Channel, and onto the Rockaway Peninsula. (See Jen's photos from our trip to the Rockaways.)
Apparently, the MTA floated a proposal a few years back to reinstate train service along the line, but then abandoned the idea. Looks like NIMBYism, in part, killed the plan. It's a shame. As the Times article notes, it would provide speedier service from the Rockaways (and, of course, JFK) to Manhattan.
Also, since most of the old stations along that line have been demolished, it might also provide another option for routing a one-seat ride from JFK to Manhattan. However, proponents of the current one-seat plan envision two things that the Rockaway Branch wouldn't provide: access to Lower Manhattan (the Rockaway Branch, if reactivated, would terminate in Penn Station or Grand Central), and an extension out to Long Island's suburbs. Face it, easy access to JFK is a smokescreen for what planners really want: increased commuter service for wealthy Long Islanders who work in the Financial District. Since the Rockaway Branch can't provide that, it's best future is as a bicycle path.
Bye-bye to subway photography
Ban looms for subway shutterbugs
Transit officials are moving ahead with a planned ban on taking pictures, filming and videotaping in the subway system - saying it's a necessary security measure in the post-9/11 world.
The article goes on to say that the MTA rejected a less-stringent measure that would have allowed most photography, while still banning shots of dispatchers' towers, equipment rooms, and infrastructure such as tunnels and bridges.
A 45-day comment period on this measure ends Jan. 10.
Thanksgiving 2k4
What I Did On Thanksgiving Day, by Mikey Dietsch, age 36.
[or skip the jabbering and go straight to Jen's pictures]
Jennifer and I had a yummy Thanksgiving Day with lots of good food and fun things. First we went to Sarafina Broadway, where we met up with members of the Lunch Club. We had brunch while watching the parade pass outside Sarafina's big picture windows.
Ain't no party like the ho-train party...
This morning, I was on the 6 train, and after a couple stops this person got on. Ugly person, of indeterminate gender. Unlit cigarette dangling from the mouth. Clearly really out of it somehow--deeply fatigued, strung out, drunk, something.
I paid no attention, but because I was sharing a bench with this person, I kept my distance, as did everyone else who came aboard. The 6 pulled into Grand Central. At the last minute, the woman (I'm guessing/hoping) got up to leave, and I finally saw what she was wearing: a miniskirt, stilleto heels...
...and her panties down around her ankles.
Smear
So, for those entering late: Andrea Mackris is accusing Bill O'Reilly of sexual harrassment. O'Reilly is suign Mackris and her attorney, claiming extortion. O'Reilly works for Fox News, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The New York Post today publishes a report claiming that Mackris "threw a hissy fit" inside a hotel bar in Midtown Manhattan.
Waiiiiiiit a second.... Remind me again who owns the Post?
Tristan and Laurenn
Sexy and Loathsome: Author J. T. LeRoy talks to Tristan Crane and Ted Naifeh
Tristan Crane appears tonight with Laurenn McCubbin, at Jigsaw Gallery.
MTA backs away from ban
The Daily News reports this morning that the MTA is backing away from a full ban on subway photography. The ban, thought to be unenforceable, was proposed a few months as a security measure designed to help prevent terrorists from gathering information on the city's infrastructure. But the proposed ban was blasted by civil libertarians and transit fans, and now it seems the MTA and the NYPD are working toward a narrower restriction against "sensitive areas" of the system such as equipment rooms and underwater tunnels.
Rats and hobos
Last night, on my way to the new place, I saw a dead rat on the sidewalk. When I looked closer, I saw that it was stuck in a crack in the pavement around a manhole cover, and it was bent at the waist (if rats can be said to have waists, that is) and its head and torso were slumped over the cover. It was clearly in the midst of trying to squeeze through the crack and reach the sidewalk when something happened to kill it.
This morning, there was a youngish dude passed out on the 4 train. He was on the floor, slumped against an empty seat when I boarded at Nevins in Brooklyn, but at some point, he lost his perch and stretched out entirely on the floor. No one, myself included, did anything to help him, although when he fell completely to the floor, his eyeglasses fell under him, and one fellow pried them lose and placed them on the guy's chest. Finally, a cop came through the train and rousted him.
Dead rats and passed-out drunks. Ah, New York.
Worst commute?!
Yesterday's downpour left New York's subway tunnels flooded and many commuters stranded. Many commuters walked across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, and taxis and buses were overwhelmed by the rush of extra travelers.
I was lucky. The rains were worst after 7am, and by that point, I was well on my way, so by the time trains were diverted and tunnels were closed, I was already at work. The post-work commute was a little longer than usual, but it was fine.
However, I think Gene Russianoff needs a reality check. Speaking in today's New York Times, he calls yesterday ...
the worst commute since Aug. 26, 1999, when another unexpected deluge caused a systemwide crisis
Uh, no, Gene. I can't see how this commute was any worse THAN THE FREAKIN' BLACKOUT.
Russianoff, who advocates for subway riders as staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, is usually sharper than this. Maybe the Times misquoted him.
Events: Satrapi, Spiegelman
Marjane Satrapi speaks at the Chelsea Barnes and Noble on Wednesday, Sept. 8. Art Spiegelman speaks at Cooper Union at 6:30pm on Friday, Sept. 10.
[via flavorpill]
Living in Brooklyn
Long but worth every word: Maud Newton discusses Brooklyn apartments and orgasmic neighbors:
New York City apartment living is a lesson in lowered expectations. My first Brooklyn residence featured new wood floors, shiny porcelain doorknobs and a view of the Chrysler building.
...
One night, after about a month, things turned sour. I woke to what sounded like metal balls rolling, or heavy chains being dragged, across the floor. “Fuck,” the man yelled. There was a furious clattering before he yelled it again three more times. Then there was the sound of someone kicking something. And then he was crying – weeping, in fact – and moaning.
“I’m your fucking wife now,” she screamed. “You motherfucker.”
Mayor confuses "right" with "privilege"
Next thing you know, he'll tell us that food, water, and shelter are "wants" and not "needs."
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, already under fire for his tough stance against anti-GOP protest groups, Monday suggested that First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly are "privileges" that could be lost if abused.
[link]
Blade Runner meets High Line
Lockhart's right: The High Line plans look like a dystopian hellscape. I need to get back up there with my camera before the High Line is twisted beyond recognition.
Squid shoots in Brooklyn
On the way to work this morning, I saw No Parking signs up along Seventh Ave. in Park Slope. The signs indicated that a production called "Squid + Whale" would be filming, tying up several blocks.
Back Stage West reports (scroll way down):
Beginning July 12 and spooling through mid-August is The Squid and the Whale. Set in Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1986, the film focuses on a writer who's going through a divorce.
The film, written and directed by Noah Baumbach and produced by Wes Anderson, stars Jeff Daniels as the writer, Laura Linney as his wife, and Jesse Eisenburg and Owen Kline as their sons. (Earlier reports had the Daniels role going to Bill Murray; Owen Kline is the son of Phoebe Cates and IU-grad Kevin Kline.)
IMDB offers this plot description:
The patriarch (Jeff Daniels) of an eccentric Brooklyn family claims to once have been a great novelist, but he has settled into a teaching job. When his wife (Laura Linney) discovers a writing talent of her own, jealousy divides the family, leaving two teenage sons to forge new relationships with their parents. Linney's character begins dating her younger son's tennis coach. Meanwhile, Daniels' character has an affair with the student his older son is pursuing.
Whereas this synopsis focuses on the parents, reports on other sites (Film Jerk, for example) seem to indicate that the film centers on the sons, Walt and Frank, and their friends.
More as I hear it.
Hilary Clinton responds to marriage-sanctity amendment
Received in e-mail:
July 12, 2004
Mr. Michael Dietsch
[address snipped]
Dear Mr. Dietsch:
Thank you for writing to share with me your thoughts regarding the President's support of a Constitutional amendment on marriage. I have heard from many New Yorkers on this subject and, as always, welcome the comments of my constituents.
I do not support amending the Constitution to address this issue. The Constitution is a sacred document and should not be used to divide the American people. Please be assured that I am monitoring this situation very carefully.
Again, thank you for taking the time to write. Please check my website at http://clinton.senate.gov for updates on this and other important issues being debated before the United States Senate.
Sincerely yours,
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Coddling the stupid and famous
From today's NYTimes, one reason I wouldn't go to hot spots even if I could get in.
The Big Napple?
I could use a nap myself.
High above the bustling streets, honking taxicabs and crowded sidewalks, on the 24th floor of the Empire State Building, is MetroNaps, a month-old company offering the Big Apple version of the Spanish siesta: a 20-minute nap.
Servicing the family-values party
Escorts and strippers from the West Coast and from London will converge on New York for the Republican convention, Aug. 30 - Sept. 2, the Daily News reports. So, how does the god-fearing GOPper explain to his wife where that dose of the clap came from?
Jason rules the subway
Kottke offers his rules for manuevering the subways. I have to admit that, when I'm alone, I break number 7 all the time. If it's any consolation, though, I try to keep an eye out to make sure I don't get in anyone's way when I pace or meander.
Shriek
From today's Times: Simon Property to Buy Chelsea for $3.5 Billion
[Simon Property Group and its most heinous famous property]
Stuck at Grand Central
You'd think that the city that never sleeps would have a train station that never closes, but you'd be wrong. After Grand Central's transition from a national to a regional hub, the station began closing during the night, stranding those who miss the last trains out.
The Times offers a smart and funny look at the unfortunates who miss the train. Some grab hotel rooms for the night, others stay out on the streets, and some are easy work for cab drivers who charge $60 and up for rides into Connecticut and upstate New York.
Grand Central at midnight:
Things I learn on the subway
F train, Brooklyn. A woman boards the train, asks for our attention, and explains that certain FBI agents and CIA agents have grown tired of going door to door masquerading as Jehovah's Witnesses. These agents want Americans to know that the September 2001 attacks were engineered by "the Mormon Mafia," which is, at this moment, orchestrating another attack on the U.S. for later this summer.
This woman also says that two FBI agents--black agents, she's quick to point out--warn that one day "Black and Hispanic youth will wake up" and realize that the entire hip-hop culture has been engineered by the CIA as a ploy to destroy minority youth.
So away with you, Special Agent Fiddy Cent--you ain't touchin' our kids.
Protest the proposed photography ban
Overblown rhetoric aside*, I support the protest and I'm planning to attend and get lots of pictures.
Sunday, June 6, 1pm
Grand Central Terminal
Meet at information kiosk
*Although banning subway photography does indeed infringe on First Amendment rights, I don't think it equates to pushing African Americans to the back of the bus, mainly because this MTA ban abridges one right, and Southern blacks were fighting for many rights--including the right not to be lynched for whistling at white women. I'll stand up for the right to free expression, but I won't pretend I'm Rosa Parks.
The ballad of Sonny Payne
You know, every time I see Sonny--or, more accurately, when I hear Sonny, since I almost never look up anymore when he enters a car--I always think how interesting his story must be, but I've never had the gumption to try to write it. Steven Kurutz, however, has the gumption.
I've still never given him money.
Beer in Brooklyn
The Brooklyn Historical Society has opened a new exhibit: 100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, complete with weekly beer gardens, sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery. The Times has more.
Mm, beer.
MoCCA saves Road Runner
The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art helped rescue two Chuck Jones murals on Wednesday, reports the Daily News. Jones drew the murals in 1988 during a visit to the offices of New Visions, a nonprofit education group in Greenwich Village, which is moving offices. Until MoCCA and art preservationist Joseph Braby stepped in, the murals were headed for demolition.
Library archives chart LES history
Annual reports from the Seward Park library, a 95-year-old branch on East Broadway, chart the many changes in the Lower East Side since the branch's opening. The branch has just reopened after a two-year renovation.
F evacuation at York
The PA announcer at Broadway/Lafayette called this an "ongoing incident at York Street," but when the Brooklyn-bound F conductor said there was an injury at York, I immediately wondered whether someone was on the tracks.
Mapping the credit
Mike Hertz points out that my entry about the evolution of the New York subway map leaves out a few details. He points to a follow-up column by Ray Sanchez that discredits John Tauranac's claims to having designed the map.
However, my post of April 7 wasn't about the current map or its designer but rather about a book tracing the history of the subway map. I still hope to see such a book.
Light and gargoyles
Right, so the big news out of Brooklyn in the last couple of weeks has been the opening of the new entrance to the Brooklyn Museum. Timed to support the opening of the new entrance, however, is a major renovation to the Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum stop on the 2 and 3 lines. I should get out there and see it before all the cool new fixtures get trashed.
F resumes Coney service in May
I'm going to miss the "F to Avenue X" PA announcements. There's something so sci-fi about Avenue X. However, I won't miss cringing every time the Jay St./Borough Hall announcer says, "There is a Avenue X bound F train approaching Jay St./Borough Hall." Gah.
Manhattan User's Guide
The 411: Manhattan User's Guide ("a daily e-mail that keeps you on top of the city...from splashy restaurant openings or wonderful hole-in-the-walls to useful services such as the best moving companies or tailors to the best shopping in town") will soon accept advertising, but to attract sponsors, MUG needs to increase its readership.
MUG is a daily must-read. Charlie Suisman, MUG's writer, is sharp and savvy, and his writing is crisp, well informed, and witty. Subscribe to MUG and make your inbox happy.
(Disclaimer: I have no personal or professional association with MUG or Suisman, nor will I benefit in any way from its advertising revenue. I simply think it's a damn good read, and I think you'll agree.)
Will the Jets help save the High Line?
The Daily News reports that the New York Jets will unveil a plan today that will preserve portions of the High Line and incorporate another portion into the entrance to its proposed West Side stadium. I don't know how I feel about the stadium itself, but I'm glad to see that the city and the Jets are serious about preserving the High Line.
In search of the original subway
Writing for the Times, Michael Luo describes a fan trip along the path of the original 1904 New York subway. The trip, led by Joseph Brennan and Joseph Cunningham traced the route from the now-closed City Hall station, up the 4/5/6 line to Grand Central, across what's now the shuttle to Times Square, and then up the 1/9 line to 145th Street.
Sounds cool to me.
World's oldest fireboat, still going after 65 years
Launched in 1938, the fireboat Fire Fighter still fights blazes on New York's shores and waterways. In warmer months, tour cruises of the fireboat John Harvey are available.
I go out walking...
Andrew Womack, writing in the Morning News, offers tips for walking in New York. They're all pretty much commonsense, but any New Yorker knows that commonsense is as common on an NYC sidewalk as a passenger pigeon.
Last week, I was walking home from the F train, and I saw a woman gesturing with her cane. She was shouting at a woman across the street and using the cane to point at something I couldn't see. Except she paid no attention to where she was or who was around her, and she lifted her cane up to shoulder level and held it out almost perpendicular to her body--just in time for a man behind her to face-check the horizontal cane. Like watching the Stooges. (Moe's pals, that is, not Iggy's.)
Opening day
Today is opening day at Yankee Stadium. Ordinarily, I wouldn't give a damn--baseball just isn't my thing. But I work in the Bronx, not far from the subway station nearest the stadium. The game will let out just as I'm leaving work, and I'll have to push through those crowds to get onto a train. I should've brought my billy club and my brass knucks.
Bank-robbing for Smoochie
A 44-year-old Brooklyn woman embarked on a crime spree, the New York Post reports, to earn money for an operation for her cat. Smoochie, a young orange tabby, had a tumor that require surgery.
[Confidential to Jen: Don't get any ideas.]
Restaurant week in Brooklyn
$18.98 buys a damn good meal, starting April 15, as Brooklyn celebrates Restaurant Week. Newsday has the story and a list of participating eateries.
Mapping the MTA
Not long ago, I mentioned to Jen that it would be great to have a book charting the evolution of the New York City subway map. It seemed like such an obvious idea, I was surprised that no one had thought of it first. I was wrong. John Tauranac thought of it [read to the end of the article], but the small minds at MTA turned him down.
4/30 UPDATE: First, the link I've posted above no longer works. Ray Sanchez's story on John Tauranac can be located here.
Second, Sanchez wrote an update to that story, and I really should have linked to it. Sanchez's first story could lead a reader to believe that John Tauranac deserves sole credit for designing the MTA subway map. The follow-up story credits others who were responsible for helping to develop the current design.
Psychedelic posters of the 1960s
Via Flavorpill comes news of an exhibition of of 1960s psychedelia at the Matthew Marks gallery in Chelsea. The exhibit runs through Saturday, 4/24.
Thirty-four years later, Park Slope still recovers
The shell of an unfinished apartment sits at Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood, site of a 1960 airline crash that killed 134 people. The lot, empty since the crash, seems to resist all efforts to fill it.
[more]
Abandoned New York
From the New York Times, two articles look at forgotten bits of the city's past: a Queens cemetary, and a Bronx synagogue.
One of these days, I gotta get on one of those ForgottenNY tours.
Weird stores
Lockhart Steele discusses weird stores, and he lists several that I'd like to check out.
I read a recent survey of the fashion industry, in which one prominent designer commented on his love of browsing small New York clothing boutiques. I'd like to broaden my wardrobe anyway, and I'd like to see some of these boutiques myself, but now Lockhart's got me jonesing to look for weird stores, too.
Lockhart's comments come by way of reading Adam Gopnik's review of the new book, The Devil's Playground, which chronicles the history of Times Square. Playground is just one among a handful of New York books I want to read. There's also Waterfront, a walk around the rim of Manhattan, and Rats, a look at New Yorkers' least-welcome neighbors.
First amendment mob
From e-mail:
Join us -- recite the single sentence that guarantees the right of free speech and peaceable assembly.
When: Tuesday the 23rd, 6:30 PM, for 30 minutes.
Where: WTC Path Station on Church Street at Ground Zero (Subway: "A" to Cortland, "N/R" to Rector, "4/6" walk over from City Hall)
What: Come down the steps into station, a large boxy room with a view of GZ. And bring a cell phone!
How: First, memorize the 1st Amendment, or wear it on your sleeve, or have a friend prompt you over the phone.
Vinegar Hill tour; Revised track maps
A couple of notable items today:
Mike, of Brooklyn-based photoblog Satan's Laundromat, will lead a tour of Brooklyn's Vinegar Hill neighborhood, Saturday, March 27.
Also, Peter Dougherty has updated his book, Tracks of the New York City Subway. Updates new to Version 3.6 include the Manhattan Bridge changes, the restoration of PATH service to WTC, and the AirTrain routes to JFK. Dougherty plans a centennial edition for May and the fourth edition for 2005.
Fulton Street Tunnels
Today's Fulton Street subway complex is a warren of tunnels and passageways, stairwells and storefronts, confusing to visitors and residents alike. The current complex serves fourteen routes in seven stations, and it was built over twenty-seven years by three different companies or agencies (the IRT's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 9 services; the BMT's J, M, N, R, and Z; and the IND's A, C, and E).
This map shows the current configuration of the Fulton Street complex (source, MTA):
The MTA is in the process of designing a new Fulton Street Transit Center that will add new connections and tunnels, streamline and beautify existing connections, and introduce new retail opportunities to Lower Manhattan. Eventually, a straphanger could ride the 2 or 3 to Fulton and William streets and walk west through the passageways all the way to the World Financial Center's Winter Garden.
As Times reporter David W. Dunlop writes, in Midtown terms, that's roughly Times Square to the Chrysler Building. Dunlop describes the tradeoffs involved in designing such a complex:
But underground concourses (like skyways in other cities) are not an unmixed civic blessing. If they are simply unadorned passages, they can be bleak and discouraging. If they are filled with stores, restaurants and other amenities, they can drain life from the streets.
The new complex will cover ten million square feet of space over twelve acres, says Joseph J. Seymour, of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The new complex will connect to the rebuilt WTC and link the MTA to the new PATH station.
This map, from the Times article, shows the configuration of the new complex:
Other improvements include a new centralized gateway, improved street access, and a new passageway under Dey Street.
Construction of the Transit Center is scheduled to begin by the end of the year, with completion expected by 2007.
Subway exhibit at NYPL
Another NYPL exhibit of note features William Barclay Parsons, the first chief engineer of the subway system. In collaboration with the New York Transit Museum, the Science, Industry and Business Library presents Parson's correspondence with subway-financier August Belmont, photos of subway construction, early subway tickets, and other reports on the early system. Note also the related programs, especially the lecture on tunnelling.
[via nycsubway.org]
High Line takes step forward
Friends of the High Line announced today a request for qualifications. Working with the city, FHL is seeking teams of architects, engineers, urban planners, and horticulturists to create a master plan to oversee the conversion of the abandoned elevated railway into a linear park.
In other High Line news, Kottke and Megnut ventured onto the structure this weekend and returned with pictures.
Explosion at West Fourth
"An apparently deranged Bronx man unleashed chaos in a Greenwich Village subway tunnel last night by hurling debris on the tracks - sparking a series of explosions and a blaze that brought trains to a screeching halt, officials said."
By the time I made my way to work this morning, MTA apparently still was repairing the damage to the Sixth Avenue express tracks. Dispatchers had rerouted the B over the Eighth Avenue line (that is, along the A/C/E line), and the D was running express, but over the Sixth Avenue local (F/V) tracks.
Rerouting the B and D added trains to lines that already run near capacity during morning rush, which slowed down pretty much every train running on the Sixth Ave. and Eighth Ave. lines.
Doesn't take much to disrupt our subway system, does it?
More from Apple photoblog event
Me with my hand up. (I asked Laura how people respond when they catch her taking pictures of them.)
Kottke's coverage. (Note that Jason's commenters have started a good dialogue about photoblogging, covering some of the same questions discussed last night.)
After all the talk of the squares that Laura and clarson use, it's refreshing to see Rachelle go in a different direction.
Moblogging the photobloggers
Lauren moblogs Anil Dash moblogging the photobloggers. I love living in the future. The photography was excellent, but alas, I got no cookies. I did get to chat briefly with Jake and Mike, though, and that was cool.
New York Architecture, at NYU
New York City Architecture: A Field Study
Two snarky points about the Course Info page: First, you can bring two subway tokens to each class, but they won't do you much good. Second, the Tauranac book might provide detailed bus and subway maps, but the book is dated 1979, and so they'll be only a little more helpful than the subway tokens.
Snark aside, any of these walks would make for a great spring Saturday, I think, and the reading list looks excellent.
[via thingsmagazine]
Art deco bookbindings, on display at NYPL
Opening this Friday at the NYPL is an exhibit of art deco bookbindings from Paris, in the early twentieth century. From the press release:
French bookbinders led the world in their craft in the earlier part of the 20th century — especially from the 1920s to the 50s — and fostered the designer-bookbinder movement that took firm root in several other countries. The most influential of these were Legrain and Adler, who between them created some 525 bindings for the French bibliophile, couturier, collector, and philanthropist Jacques Doucet.
The exhibit has a companion volume from Princeton Architectural Press.
[via Beatrice]
Even some journalists got a little lost
In his piece "Even Some Subway Riders Who Got the Word Got a Little Lost," Michael Luo writes of subway riders contending with this week's service changes. About midway through the piece, he notes:
Confessing complete befuddlement, Ivan Parmar, 21, a real estate agent from Borough Park, Brooklyn, stood at the downtown B and N platform at Herald Square yesterday morning, next to a Metropolitan Transportation Authority poster that read in part, "Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward."
Indeed. I haven't fully explored Herald Square since the change, but when I rode through that station on the downtown B train yesterday, it pulled in on the 6th Avenue platforms. (That is, it pulled in on the same platforms as the F, V, and D trains.)
The N, Q, and R use the Broadway platforms. I can't imagine why there would be a B and N platform anywhere in that station.
[article via Subway Web News; snide comments entirely my own]
Subway conversation
This morning, while waiting on the uptown B/D platform at Broadway-Lafayette, a woman approached me and pointed to the empty B/D tracks.
"Good morning! Can you tell me, does this train go to 14th?"
"No," I said. "It skips 14th. The F and the V stop at 14th." She rolled her eyes, tightened her mouth, and said, "What?"
"The B and D are express trains. They skip 14th and 23rd."
"I want the 6!"
As the D began to enter the station, I replied, "You can get a downtown 6 upstairs, but you can't get an uptown 6 here."
The D slowed to a stop. The woman watched the cars move past, scanning the windows for a conductor. "Oh, never mind!" she said, as I entered the train.
Rail planning and the Manhattan Bridge
All four tracks on the Manhattan Bridge return to service this weekend, after nearly 20 years of bridge renovations, carrying an array of new subway routes and schedules.
As Michael Luo writes in the Times, deciding on those routes presented the MTA with a challenge, and some intriguing patterns have emerged that point to the many changes in the city since 1986, when renovations began on the Manhattan Bridge.
Subway planners looked at MetroCard data to determine ridership numbers and origin and destination patterns; they also consulted demographic data and computer models. Luo writes:
Among the broad trends they tried to incorporate in their plan: once problem-plagued areas like Union Square and Times Square have become weekend destinations needing more service; an artist enclave known as SoHo turned into a retail hub; growth in Midtown far outpaces that of Lower Manhattan; growth in scattered neighborhoods like Astoria, Prospect Park and Bay Ridge has altered subway demands.
Planners admit, however, the new routes are the result of art as much as science, and they'll be looking to new ridership patterns to gauge whether they've succeeded.
Cops seize Chinatown buses
The NYPD checked 100 buses on Tuesday and yanked a dozen from streets to address safety concerns and curb bus war.
Activist fights for west-side rail cuts
A Manhattan reading teacher appeared before Community Board 4 to advocate the preservation of a railcut through Manhattan's West Side.
The railcuts, which now serve Amtrak's Empire line, were originally built as part of a freight network connecting Lower Manhattan to Upstate New York. The lower end of this network, nicknamed the High Line, is elevated; the High Line also has advocates seeking its preservation.
[article via Subway Web News; OldNYC on the High Line and the rail cut]
The B, which used to be the Q diamond, which used to be the D--whu?
It's not as confusing as it all sounds, and I'm geeky enough that I'm actually excited: ABC's of subway swap
High Line update
From the latest newsletter comes this update on the High Line project. In brief, the newsletter states that despite the earlier appeals-court ruling, the High Line is in no immediate jeopardy. Friends of the High Line reasserts that the Bloomberg administration supports turning the structure into a linear park.
Psy.Geo.Conflux Call for Proposals
"Psy.Geo.Conflux is an annual event featuring current artistic and social investigations in psychogeography. Part festival and part conference, it brings visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers, and the public together in New York to engage in walks, presentations, installations and other events with the purpose of exploring the physical and psychological landscape of the city."
[more | What is psychogeography? | 2003 events]
Mayor can demolish High Line
A state appellate court has ruled that the city can demolish the High Line elevated railway without first seeking outside approval.
The High Line was built in the 1930s to move food and merchandise through lower Manhattan. It fell into disuse in the 1960s and 1970s as trucking replaced rail freight as the primary means of moving goods into and out of the city.
Some local residents believe the structure is unsafe and an eyesore. They want the city to demolish it and turn over air rights to local property owners who hold land underneath the elevated structure. The High Line runs through the popular Chelsea neighborhood, and demolishing the structure could raise property values in the area.
High Line proponents would like to build a linear park atop the elevated structure. They argue that the old rail line is well-designed, stable, and historically valuable; they also say that a linear park would be a unique addition to New York's green spaces. They sued to stop demolition.
This Appellate Court ruling puts the decision into the hands of the mayor. Current mayor Michael Bloomberg supports the concept of a High Line park, but his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, argued for demolition.
[Gothamist on this ruling. Dietsch on walking the High Line.]
Possum!
An opossum struck fear into the heart of Murray Hill yesterday. No one knows exactly where it came from, but I'm amused by how confused everyone was by it.
For nearly eight hours, a quiet corner in Murray Hill was transformed into a kind of temporary zoo, as passers-by stopped to gawk and guess the identity of the long-snouted cat-size animal that paced along a narrow stone ledge about nine feet over a brownstone garden, sniffing, shaking and yawning.
I used to see these damn creatures all the time, but that was in Indiana. I drove home late one night and saw one in the garage, its long pink tail glistening in the headlights, its beady eyes blinking at me.
Volunteering time or money
The Morning News offers a helpful list of charities and causes.
[via Anil Dash]
Saving a bridge jumper
Brooklyn-based Satan's Laundromat is one of the best NYC photoblogs available; I try to check it weekly. On December 19, however, Mike told a story that's both harrowing and poignant.
Hey, eurotrash guy!
I know you think your tight black leather pants make you look hotttt, but your bigass shopping bag from American Girl Place begs to differ. I know it's Christmas and all, but dude...
American Girl?
New York turns into Boston?
EverythingNY asks: Bars to Close at 1:00?
I have another great idea! To save money, the MTA can suspend subway service from midnight to 5am!
MeFi: Subway busking
An interesting thread has sprung up on Metafilter about buskers in the New York subways.
SantaCon hits Gawker
So, if Gawker has covered Santacon, does that mean that Santacon is now played out or do we have to wait for AM New York to show up?
Pizza by the inch
The all-things-pizza weblog Slice reviews the new pizzaria Pinch. The review makes me very hungry for a tangy thin-crust slice o' pie.
The Pinch concept looks cool: you get a four-inch strip of pizza, priced by length. A twelve-by-four strip is six dollars, and of course toppings are extra.
American Air passengers stranded on tarmac
Passengers arriving at JFK from the Dominican Republic sat on the tarmac for over ninety minutes last night because the ground crew had all gone home.
Moblogging SantaCon
Lauren's just set up a moblog, which is a weblog to which one can post from a mobile phone. Not much is on Lauren's moblog right now, but come Saturday, you'll be able to see live pictures of the bright-red debauchery that is SantaCon.
Last year: Words from SantaCon
Winter in New York
Gothamist notes today several photoblogs with pictures of New York's first major snowfall of the season. In addition to Jake Dobkin's pictures of an all-white Central Park, I also really love Rion's pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge.
I forgot to carry a camera out on Sunday, when I went to the BARC shelter in Williamsburg to walk Billy in the snow.
Custom-made signs from NYCDOT
The New York Department of Transportation now sells custom-made street signs to the public, including reproductions of classic designs.
Signs include directional pointers to Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, vintage bus stop indicators, signs for kids, and humorous signs.
[Via mug]
Fung Wah Drama Festival
Because the Fung Wah bus is so cheap, it draws a lot of college-aged kids, young hipster types, and backpackers from all over the world. For this reason, I've joked with Jen that it won't be long before Fung Wah winds up in someone's first novel or in a song lyric by some up-and-coming band. I wasn't far off:
With a why-didn't-I-think-of-it title...
...Black Table decrypts the Chinatown bus that Jen and I have grown to love-hate.
Kean's New York photos
Here's something funny: A number of prominent blogs (Metafilter, BoingBoing, Gothamist) have linked to Kean Soo's photo pages from his recent visit to New York. Kean and his brother Meng were in town from Ottawa.
What makes his page noteworthy is his organizational design; he's using a subway map to indicate the places he and his brother visited. I thought that seemed cool, but when I started reading, I saw his mention of the True Porn release party, and I suddenly remembered that I'd met Kean there, because I recalled a guy who had driven down from Ottawa with his brother.
I didn't know anyone at the release party, and so I was wallflowering for a while. Kean was also hanging back a bit, and so we started talking. He signed one of the pages he'd drawn in the anthology for me. He's a good cartoonist, so go check out his work.
FreshDirect comes to my nabe!
FreshDirect is now in my neighborhood--well, parts of my neighborhood, anyway.
FreshDirect is an online grocery store that delivers to neighborhoods in New York City--rolling out first in select Manhattan neighborhoods and slowly expanding into the rest of Manhattan and the outer boroughs.
Turbanhead describes the experience of shopping in NYC groceries.
Sir Lunchalot describes the distribution center.
BusinessWeek explains the model.
When I order, I'll report back.
True Porn release party
Tonight's the New York City release party for the new comics anthology True Porn.
Toys in Babeland, 94 Rivington Street, 7pm - 9pm.
I saw a preview of this at the MoCCA Art Festival over the summer, and it looked very nice, so I'm excited to see the finished product.
The Kicker
Former Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers blogs about New York for New York Magazine. So far, she's already picked a fight with Paper Magazine for its overexposure of indy-queen Chloe/Chlöe Sevigny.
New NYC sites on World Monuments Watch
World Monuments Watch 2004 has placed two New York City sites on its list of endangered sites: St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, and the whole of Lower Manhattan. Of Lower Manhatan, the Watch states: "Today, some 200 historic and architecturally significant buildings near Ground Zero are at risk, threatened with demolition to make way for new transportation centers, retail corridors, and urban spaces."
Getaway train under Waldorf Astoria
The Post today mentions a special train parked under the Waldorf Astoria as an escape option for President Bush and other leaders staying at the hotel.
The Metro North train is parked at a platform that was built under the hotel during its construction in the 1930s; the platform was previously used by General Pershing and President Franklin Roosevelt, and Andy Warhol's collective is said to have once thrown a party down there.
You can get the whole story, along with pictures of the exterior entrance leading down to the platform, at Joseph Brennan's Abandoned Stations page.
[via Gothamist]
We're a happy family
Gothamist looks at Times critic A. O. Scott's review of the new film Duplex. Damned if they're not right: There are a helluva lot of strollers in Park Slope.
Scott even jokes that Park Slope residents are required to have a baby "within 18 months of arrival or face deportation back to Manhattan." This amuses me in part for assuming everyone moves to Park Slope from the city. My clock's ticking at one year; think the stroller brigade will shoo me back to Indiana?
Because you're mine, I walk the High Line
In which I describe an afternoon's adventures on the High Line.
Beginning in the 1930's, a freight rail line ran up Manhattan's West Side, carrying cargo through Manhattan's disparate neighborhoods, from Spring Street in Greenwich Village, up 13 miles to Spuyten Duyvil at the island's northern tip. As trucking became the dominant mode of shipping cargo, the elevated rail line carried less traffic. One section was closed and demolished in the 1960s and the last train rolled across the tracks in 1980.
What remains is a mile and a half of untended, elevated right of way, stretching from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District, through Chelsea, and up to 34th Street.
A group of local property owners are fighting to have the structure demolished, claiming it's a blight on the cityscape; they also say they could put the land and its air rights to better use if they were allowed to build on it.
Another group, calling itself Friends of the High Line, wishes to renovate the structure into an urban park of the rails-to-trails model. This group cites the success of the Promenade Plantée in Paris as a model for what the High Line could become for New Yorkers.
The High Line has been in the news lately, as the city decides what to do with the structure. Newsday reported yesterday that although the city is proceeding with plans to convert the rail line into a park, the final decision might rest with the federal Surface Transportation Board.
Knowing all this, I've been jonesing to get on the damn thing, even though to do so is to trespass, but I wasn't sure where or how you access it, until I read an entry at the blog Oblivio, with detailed instructions for getting to the thing.
Okay, Mr. Oblivio writes, enter the big truck lot on 33rd between 11th and 12th. The lot was easy to find, but my first obstacle was the security guard sitting in the guardhouse right inside the fence. If you want to survive in New York, though, you learn quickly how to walk purposefully through any given space. Act like you belong there, and you won't get trouble.
Or maybe the guard just didn't give a shit. Either way, I walked in like I belonged there.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden on the fabric of the city
The fabric of the city. The city is fascinating—perverse, complex, sometimes maddening, sometimes startlingly beautiful, full of the middles of stories whose beginnings and ends... [Making Light]
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted a long but fun essay about the "passionate fannish interests" that a city like New York sparks. Full--I mean full--of links to all sorts of New York geekery, her essay makes a good jumping-off point for armchair-exploring hidden or forgotten sections of the city.
Blue kamakazi
Friday night, 8/28. Joshua Tree, Manhattan. Ed Mathews orders a round of blue drinks...
I had one, too. I think it hurt me.
Photos courtesy the lovely Lauren Martin.
Subway stuff
More and more, I'm fascinated by the New York subway system--how the tracks run through the city, where various lines go, the system's history, and so on. I love reading about abandoned stations, platforms, and sections of track, and having romantic fantasies of underground lairs like Lex Luthor's in the first Superman movie.
I recently bought the book Tracks of the New York Subways, which features full maps of the entire New York City subway lines. It shows where all the tracks and switches are and the intricate ways in which trains move through the system.
Recently, I read a blog post by someone who has traveled the entire 722 miles of the subway system, seeing every train line and every station. I think that's my new ambition; and it doesn't bother me that I'm not the first to do it.
Jumping continents, London's Transport Museum has a nice Flash feature contrasting the London Underground map with the geography above. The tube map isn't really a map, in the way we usually think of them; it's a conceptual schematic. The tube map shows, for example, Notting Hill Gate station on a perfectly straight horizontal red line that passes through Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, and Holborn, before veering sharply downward to Bank. In reality, however, the line runs at a slight upward diagonal to Holborn before diverting down to Bank.
The map as it stands is a thing of simple elegance. All angles on the schematic are at 45 or 90 degrees, for example. But it's criticized for distorting the geography of the landscape above it. You can easily assume, as I noted above, that Bond Street is due east of Notting Hill Gate, when that's not really the case.
The Transport Museum's Real Underground site allows you to contrast the original 1993 map with today's map. Click to see the "real" Underground, and the Flash interface morphs the elegant curves and lines and angles of the schematic into a more chaotic map that shows where the trains actually go. Not only is it informative, but it's a creative use of Flash.
Marlene
"Bzzzzzzzt."
I get up from the computer, walk to the door, and press Talk. "Yes?," I say, and then press Listen. "Hi, I'm Marlene, and I'm in the neighborhood and I'm talking to the neighbors about the Bible. Would you like to hear about the Bible?"
"No, Marlene, but thank you anyway."
Gay writers, gay couples
This quote is coming at me from about ten different blogs this morning, and it obliquely illustrates a point I want to make about living in New York. Interviewed by Publisher's Weekly, Michael Cunningham (writer of the book The Hours) discusses being labelled a "gay author":
"What I do look forward to is the day when the notion of gay and lesbian books or a gay and lesbian section in a bookstore will seem as strange and old-fashioned as a section devoted to books by women or books by people of color. I'm more than ready for books to be on the shelves all together and for readers to be trusted to decide for themselves what books they want. For me and my friends, whether gay or straight, it's never a question whether or not a book is by a gay writer or if it's a story about gay people. We just read books."
I've made a similar comment about seeing gay couples on the streets of New York. I never saw gay couples walking hand in hand in Indianapolis, for example, and I rarely saw it in Bloomington (and when I did, it was always lesbians--never gay men).
But gays in New York can be openly coupled no matter where you go (holding hands on the train, quick smooches in the bagel shop, cuddling in Starbucks), and I'm tired of thinking that's significant or exceptional. I don't see straight couples hand in hand and think, "Oh, how cool that they can be so open!" Similarly, I'm tired of thinking it's exceptional to see interethnic couples together, especially now that I'm part of one myself. I don't want to see a "gay couple" or an "interethnic couple"; I just want to see a couple.
I'm an idealist, of course, but I think all this should be wallpaper--something you see but never really notice because it's just part of your daily life.
Band of the moment...
...the Polyphonic Spree, which I just saw live, for free, at Central Park's SummerStage. The band was great. A 23 piece, the Spree calls itself a "choral, symphonic pop band." That's apt. Horns, keyboards, a harp, steel drums (in addition to traditional drums), guitar, chorus.
If you've seen the recent cross-promotional ad between Volkswagen and Apple (buy a Beetle, get a free iPod), you've heard the Spree. But oh, you haven't seen them.
The band, dressed in white robes, played with remarkable energy and charm. The singer (Tim DeLaughter--perfect name--formerly of Tripping Daisy) seemed manic at times, whirling and spinning and leaping and laughing. The lyrics are all about love and sunshine and light and happiness, and yet the band's energy is so infectuous and so gleeful, the lyrics never sound cheesy or fake.
Encores included a number with special guest John Cameron Mitchell from the cast of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a great cover of Bowie's Five Years, and two harp solos.
I picked up a copy of their first album, The Beginning Stages of..., and it's almost as much fun as the show.
The website PopMatters has a great review of a Portland show. It's really worth checking out because it says all the things I can't really put into words. Also, there's sound clips available on the website, so go look there as well.
Lights out!
Thursday's blackout found me having to get from the Bronx to Brooklyn. I leave work daily a little before 4:15, so I was headed out the door when the power went down. I walked to the train station at 161st St./Yankee Stadium, only to find the trains not running. So along with a group of co-workers, I boarded the Bx113 to Washington Heights in Manhattan, where we'd supposedly be able to catch an M5 bus to Houston St. [more in link]
Blackout History Project
The Blackout History Project discusses the social history of two earlier NYC blackouts. I'll be intrigued to see its take on yesterday's events. [via MetaFilter]
Black Coffee
I don't understand why it's so damn difficult to order black coffee in this city. Go into a deli or bodega or bagel shop and ask for coffee and before you even blink, there's a pint of cream and a quarter cup of sugar in the bottom of your cup.
People tell me I should take the coffee with cream and sugar because it's probably in there to mask the acrid, cheap-coffee taste, but I just can't handle sugary coffee. Cream, sometimes, but not sugar. Ordering it black, though, is a pain in the ass. "You want it black?!" I hear that, I really do. It's like I've asked for cyanide.
When I first got here, I didn't know what to say, so I'd say, "Large coffee, no cream or sugar." One day, a counterman said to me, "You can just say 'black coffee.' I know what 'black coffee' means." So I started asking for "black coffee." One day, a different guy said, "You want cream and sugar with that?" When I said no, he laughed and said, "Oh yeah, you did say 'black.' It's been one of those mornings."
After I used "black coffee" for a couple of months, I ordered a cup and a dude at the neighborhood bagel place said, "You want sugar with that?" I said no, and he said, "You need to tell me no sugar. 'Black, no sugar.' That's what you say. 'Black, no sugar.'" I envisioned a swarm of cockroaches on his mother's eyesockets and went about my business.
But I started saying, "Large black coffee, no sugar" until one morning at the Krispy Kreme. I ordered two glazed and a black-no-sugar, and the dude laughed. "Black means no sugar." No, shithead. Technically, black means black. As in, not brown. As in, no cream. But it's pointless to argue. Clearly, coffee-slingers here have Attitude, and I'm never going to say the right thing no matter how hard I try.
The only exception is a sidewalk vendor who runs a donut stand at 161-Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. About twice a month, when I come up from the subway, I'll grab a couple donuts and a coffee. This guy sees me twice a month, and he knows my order and he's never crabby about it. I walk up, and before I speak he starts to pour a large cup of black-no-sugar. Most places I only visit twice a month, the people don't even remember me, let alone know my order.
I asked him one day, "How do you remember me? I'm not a daily customer." He shrugged. "It's what I do; it's important."
New York Public Library: Hat in hand
NY libraries putting out donation boxes in an attempt to offset deep budget cuts. [librarian.net]
Subway pet peeves
First in a random series of rude subway behaviors that get under my skin:
I hate jackasses who sit down between two people and open their knees like they're birthing a damn cow, crowding the people on either side of them. I hate it more when I've made room for them to have a seat in the first place.
The three New Yorks
Dog-sick this weekend. Blargh. But it gave me a chance to read E. B. White's excellent little essay, "Here Is New York." If White's name seems familiar, you probably know him either through Strunk and White's The Elements of Style or through his own book, Charlotte's Web.
White writes of the City:
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and aceepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter--the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last--the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is the third city that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.
NYC mafia site
GangRule - the history of organized crime in New York City. A growing database of photos, biographies, newspaper clippings and family trees from 1890 on. [MetaFilter]
Subway photography, by Nicholas Hegel McClelland
Photography from the NYC underground. Hugs to Annatart for the link.
NYCRoads.com
NYCRoads.com is an exhaustive history of the expressways, parkways, and river crossings that shaped metro New York over the last century and a half. [MetaFilter]
I'm much more of a train-and-subway guy than I am a road guy, so this probably won't get many hits from me, but it's still a thorough and well-done site. Very cool.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle available online at BPL website
The Brooklyn Public Library has made available the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1840-1902), in a fully searchable format. The feature, currently in beta testing, brings up full scans of each issue. Clicking a story or ad brings an enlarged view. This should be a great resource for historians and genealogists (the obituaries are also searchable), plus it's just damn cool to be able to dive into the borough's history in such a high-tech and intuitive way. [via Boing Boing Blog]
I'm goin' to Broadway
Erk. This is gonna ruin my cynical New Yorker rep I've worked nearly a year to attain. I'm off to the Shubert Theatre tomorrow night to see the new Sam Mendes production of Gypsy, starring Bernadette Peters. Some old friends are in town and they bought tickets for the show. I'm excited, although I should be hip enough not to admit that.
Shootout in Park Slope
The things I miss when I go about my day job. This shootout happened nearly two weeks ago, and this is the first I've heard of it. (Note to self: Read Teresa Nielsen Hayden's weblog more often.)
Le sigh: No burlesque for me
We tried last night to get to the Burlesque Festival shindig at Knitting Factory, but by the time we arrived, tickets had already sold out. The burlesque revival seems to me to be one of the most interesting cultural things happening in this city, and this festival is just one facet of that. Today's burlesque brunch has also sold out. Maybe we'll make it out next year.
As high as an elephant's eye
Last night, I was on the F train to West 4th Street. Somewhere around East Broadway, a young woman boarded the train and sat across from me. I noticed she was reading something, but I didn't pay much attention to her as I read my book. Shortly, I heard her start to sing--"Ooooooooooooklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain"--and I looked up again to see that was she was "reading" was sheet music.
At West 4th, I was chuckling to myself about this as I left the train, but the music seemed to follow me. I turned to look over my shoulder and I saw the woman behind me on the escalator, still singing.
Happy 150th, Central Park!
A Garden for All as Private Eden. Central Park, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, is our great urban oasis. By Herbert Muschamp. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
There's a couple of lovely pictures in this article; I'll have to wander up that way this weekend.
A handful of photo blogs
Via the newthings blog:
- One hundred mini-pictures of the Soldiers and Sailors arch in Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza.
- More from the Moonmilk site.
- Slower.net
New York photoblogs, courtesy the links sidebar on Gothamist:
I want a digital camera so much my teeth hurt.
Building New York
Koolhaas Deconstructs New York. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas writes a postscript to the building -- and unbuilding -- of the United States' largest city, from the late 19th century to the post-9/11 era. From Wired magazine. [Wired News]
Free concerts at Prospect Park
The lineup for the summer-concert series (most of them free shows) at Prospect Park has been announced. Highlights include Joan Armatrading, Roseanne Cash, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, and a Leonard Cohen tribute featuring Rufus Wainwright and the McGarrigle sisters. [via 601am]
Lessig at Cooper Union
Lessig spoke at Cooper Union on Monday evening. His speech was titled Free Culture: The Struggle to Liberate Creativity and the Internet from the Law. He explained, using Walt Disney as an example, how creative types have always appropriated ideas and images from others when building their own creations. "Steamboat Willie," the animated short that introduced Mickey Mouse, was based in large part on a Buster Keaton movie, Steamboat Bill, Jr.
The digital age, Lessig argues, makes it much easier to use existing culture in such innovative ways. Digital video, sampling, and other technologies make it simple for an artist to create a digital collage of sound or image. The threat to this innovation is a growing body of law that protects the interests of copyright holders--which, more and more, are large corporations operating in an age of increased media concentration.
This is really just a quick-and-dirty summary. His talk was interesting, although I've encounted the main ideas before, in his writings and in those of other commentators.
Finally getting into Cooper Union was also a treat. The centerpiece of the CU campus is an imposing large stone building near Astor Place. That thing is so solid, I suspect that thing could survive a direct nuclear assault. It opened in the 1850s and among the first speakers to grace its halls was Abraham Lincoln.
One side effect of the smoking ban
It used to be, when you walked into a New York bar, all you could really smell in the place was the cigarette smoke hanging in the air. Now, you get the bar's real smell, and trust me when I say that's not pretty. The bar I was in last night had a subtle odor that was a mix of stale beer and staler puke.
Thanks, Mayor Bloomberg, for a more fragrant New York.
Freaky
I was just looking out the front window, spying on the neighbors with my roommate's binoculars, when I saw a man and a woman walking up to the flea market across the street. The man pushed a stroller with a baby girl inside, and they walked with a young boy on inline skates.
What caught my eye was the man--my height, build, and coloring, with black plastic-rimmed glasses and a shaved head. He looked so much like me--barring that he's fully clean-shaven, both pate and chin--that I'm sure even my mom would be fooled.
He wore a blue-denim jacket and carried a pink diaper bag with a teddy bear on it. Not only would I never wear blue denim above the waistline, I'd pick a more stylin' diaper bag to sling over my shoulder. It's like some weird, domesticated, parallel-universe version of me. I spied on his wife a while to make sure the parallel-me has good taste and, unfortunately, he kinda doesn't.
I'm much better at pickin' the cuties than he is.
New York City crime stats
Poking around at crime stats on the Newsday site, I've come across a link to my local police precinct. I've seen the building pictured, but didn't realize it was a police station. Heh.
Up-to-date neighborhood crime stats are available, in PDF format, and city-wide stats are available as well.
City-wide, crime is down dramatically over 10 years ago, if these stats are any indication. Robberies, murders, rapes, assaults--all are down, by as much as 80%. (For example, in Manhattan North, there were 306 murders reported in 1993, as compared to 60 in 2002.)
I hear a lot about Mayor Giuliani and how his policing policies helped bring about a dramatic downturn in crime in New York, but so far no one's been able to really explain to me what happened. I really need to dig into this because I'm curious.
Look out for flying manhole covers!
Saturday, last weekend. I was meeting a friend for dinner on Sullivan Street, in Greenwich Village. She was running late, so I walked in the rain and browsed several shops in the area. After stepping out of a poster store, I walked along Bleecker, back toward Sullivan.
I heard a loud popping sound and looked ahead of me to see a manhole cover lift up a few inches. White steam whooshed out from the manhole, and the cover then settled back into place. A group of people standing nearby started at the sound and then laughed and gaped when they realized what had happened.
I kept walking. I was right next to the manhole when I heard an even louder bang coming from its direction. I turned to see the cover lift up again, this time a few feet into the air. Black smoke and flames poured out from under the cover before it settled back into place with a loud clank.
"Shit!" I yelled, running from the area. I watched several other people also yell and run away. A police car had just driven past and the cops must have heard and seen (in their mirrors, I presume) all this, because the car stopped. After a couple minutes, the policemen stepped into the street and cleared foot traffic away from those sidewalks.
A few minutes later, a fire truck and more cops showed up. They blocked off both Bleecker and Sullivan as they investigated. I watched for a couple minutes but I didn't want to be around if the damn thing exploded again, so I walked up Sullivan to West Third to await my friend.
After we finished eating, we walked back to Bleecker, but the streets were open again as if nothing had happened.
"I'll blow up all of you white motherfuckers"
War angst.
Tuesday last week, I was riding home from work on the F train. The train was crowded and so I was leaning against a door--the door opposite most of the entrances in that part of town so I wouldn't have to move for people entering and leaving.
Around about 23rd Street, an agitated man got on the train. Although I was listening to music on my iPod, I could hear him muttering to himself. The mutterings grew louder until he was literally shouting.
"That motherfucker sent us to war? For what?! What are we trying to do? My baby brother's over there and I don't know if he's alive or dead. Did you see the pictures on the news? Those boys were shot dead. Their brains were all around 'em on the ground! Their blood was everywhere! My baby brother's over there and I don't know if he's alive or dead!"
This man was also standing by a door, but because he was on the side where the door opened at each stop, passengers had to pass him to enter or leave. He shouted at them all: "My baby brother's over there!"
As he ranted, he grew increasingly agitated. "That stupid white motherfucker sent my baby brother to die. And for what?! What's the point?! My brother gonna die and for what?! Why's he over there? Why's any of 'em over there?"
I watched others on the train shuffle, try to look away. A few people laughed nervously, some moved away from him, others remained near him as if making a point.
"That stupid white motherfucker sent my baby brother over there and if he dies... If my brother dies, I'm going to shoot all of you white motherfuckers. I'll come back here and I'll blow up this motherfucking train car and I'll blow up all you white motherfuckers."
I still had my iPod on but I could hear him even with the volume all the way up. He took a seat when one opened and berated two women standing nearby: "Get yer goddamn white asses outta my face! What makes you think I want your asses in my face. I'll shoot you white motherfuckers."
He kept on like this, talking to everyone, no one, himself. Shouting. When the train pulled into Delancey, I remembered that the door would open behind me. I stepped backwards out of the door and hustled to the next car.
"My name is Sonny Payne"
Every afternoon, on the F train, somewhere between York St. and Bergen:
"Pardon me, my name is Sonny Payne. I'm homeless and I'm hungry. If you don't have it, I understand, 'cause I don't have it. But if can you spare some change, a sandwich, a piece of fruit, I'd appreciate it."
Every afternoon, Sonny Payne steps onto the F train at York St. and makes his way slowly along the train, switching cars at each stop. Sonny, an elderly black man with a white grizzled beard, shuffles through the car, back bent, an F-train stocking cap on his head, carrying a black plastic bag. Today, he carried a box of store-brand corn flakes.
I see this man at least three days a week. I've never seen him on the F in Manhattan; he only appears at York St. or at stops further along the Brooklyn segment of the F.
I've never given him money.
[Edited 5/21/04 to correct the spelling of his name and the beginning of his speech.]
Death knell for subway token
Farewell, Subway Token. The New York subway token, underground currency for 50 years, will be sold for the last time on April 12, officials say. By Richard Pérez-Peña. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
I hate the teevee
So, I came home tonight to find a production crew set up and filming an episode of Third Watch in my neighborhood. Equipment trailers, craft services trucks, and "talent" trailers all lined Seventh Ave. for three blocks. Second St. was blocked off to traffic and a film crew and an ambulance were out in front of a brownstone, filming at a basement unit. Looks like the scene will show someone being removed from the apartment and loaded into the ambulance.
Pretty cool. I've never watched that show, but I'll probably try to catch it (a PA told me it should air in a month) to see my neighborhood on the teevee.
"We shall see heaven shining like a jewel."
As noted below, last night, I finally saw the Jean Cocteau Repertory's production of Uncle Vanya. I was looking forward to this for two reasons: first, I'd never seen or even read any of Chekhov's work, and that's a cultural deficiency that actually kind of embarassed me. Vanya, of course, is among his most famous plays, and the Cocteau's production was a perfect opportunity to go.
The second reason was because my roommate played Waffles in this production, a small comedic part in which he did a great job. The cast includes several gifted, veteran performers, whose expertise was enjoyable to watch. Because this production features the Cocteau's four most experienced players, and because it's directed by Eve Adamson, the Cocteau's founder, Christopher recommended Vanya to me as an example of the Cocteau at its finest.
I can't personally vouch for any of that, but I can say I had a fine time.
Pardon je, mais savez-vous le chemin vers Carnegie Hall?
Yesterday, I took the F into Manhattan, on my way to a performance of Uncle Vanya at the Jean Cocteau Repertory. A woman seated nearby was reading a book. I had noticed her get on the train at Bergen Street. I noticed, of course, because she was pretty and I like pretty women, but her prettiness doesn't really affect the story at all.
Near her was another woman, who had boarded the train at Jay Street. She was reading some pages that had been stapled together. Now, these women didn't seem to know each other at all, which made the exchange between them all the more puzzling.
I glanced up to see the woman with the pages turn to the other woman, point to a section of the paper she was reading, and ask her a question about it, in French. The woman with the book recoiled, I assume in surprise at being addressed in French, but proceeded to answer the woman, in fluent French. They talked in French for a few minutes, and then I saw the woman with the book laugh to herself and shake her head.
I was close enough to see that she was reading a Bill Bryson book, one of his travelogues, but I couldn't tell whether it was a French edition. When I exited at W 4, the attractive woman with the book also left the train and I almost asked her how the other woman knew she spoke French, but I decided I liked letting the story end on a mystery.
How's it goin' Frood-dude?
About a week ago, I was at Ace Bar, on Fifth St, between Aves A and B. A number of my friends happen to be visiting that weekend, independently of each other, and we planned this giant drinkup at Ace tonight, to celebrate.
I was chatting with one of the visitors, Molly, and her friend. They asked me whether Keanu Reeves had played Bill or Ted. Neither of them could remember. I said, "I have no idea. But boy, I'm looking forward to the new Matrix movie."
They both laughed and said, "Yeah, it looks great!" And they carried on with their argument.
Then, one of Molly's friends got really excited. "I'm going to have him sign my chest! Ohmygod! I'm gonna have him sign my chest!"
This puzzled me.
"Who's going to sign her chest? Who's the lucky guy?"
"Keanu."
Incredulously, I said, "Keanu? He's here?!"
"Yeah, he's playing pool in the back room."
"You're fucking with me."
"No, man. He's here."
So, I grabbed my friend Kira and said, "I wanna see Keanu."
Kira says, "What?! I don't want to see him. I don't care about that crap. Just go back there!"
"Look, I'm sorry, but I can't go back there alone."
So Kira reluctantly agreed to join me. I still don't know why I needed moral support to catch a glimpse of a goofball actor, but for some reason, maybe the massive quantities of alcohol I'd had, I did.
Yep. Keanu was playing pool. Yep, it was pretty clearly Keanu.
Molly's friend came back a bit later. He'd signed the back of her shirt. "Ohmygod! I totally walked up to him and I said, 'I'm really really sorry to ask you this. My boyfriend loves your movies and I'm a big fan too. Will you sign my shirt?'"
I walked away and talked to other people around the table. I walked back, fifteen minutes later. The friend was still talking about Keanu. I went to the bar for another beer. I came back. Still Keanu. I walked away and chat and come back a few minutes later. Yep, Keanu.
I love this city, but it still surprises me when shit like this happens.
Love on the F train
This morning, I left the apartment a little before 7, as I usually do, on my way to work. My MetroCard had expired, so by the time I bought a new one and made my way downstairs to the platform at 7 Ave, I'd barely missed the train. So I waited for the next one.
As I sat waiting, I overheard a man saying, "Excuse me, sir, can you spare some change?" From the subtle Doppler shift in his voice as he spoke, I could tell he was walking in my general direction and I'd probably be next.
Sure enough: "Good morning, sir! Can you spare some change?" I ignored him and let him pass by.
"That's all right, sir," he continued. "I still love you. Him, too. There's nothing wrong for to love another man."
I processed this as he proceeded down the platform. I heard him approach someone else. "Excuse me, sir, can you spare some change." The answer was inaudible, but then I heard. "That's all right, sir. I still love you, and I don't care who knows it! I'm not queer, but there's nothing wrong with loving another man."
I laughed, and as I did, I looked down the platform and saw a young man laughing, and passing the guy a dollar bill.
Mr. Beller's Neighborhood
Okay, here's something cool. Pieces of short non-fiction, all set in NYC. Navigate by clicking neighborhoods on a map, or choose stories by theme. Swank...
More SantaCon footage
If you read my account of SantaCon, over on Nerdbait, you'll remember that we encounted Unsilent Night, a yearly performance/march from Washington Square Park to Tompkins Square Park.
A videographer running with the Unsilent Night people filmed the meeting of our two groups. You can catch a quick still of me mugging for his camera. My only gripe is, that because he used Flash, you can't really rewind or fast-forward the footage.
Ground Zero designs finalized
2 Teams of Architects to Compete for Ground Zero Design. One sees the foundations of democracy in the concrete walls surrounding Ground Zero and another that sees New York's rebirth in soaring towers of culture. By Edward Wyatt. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
I'm not sure I like either design, although the latticework towers would certainly look unlike anything else in Manhattan.
Both are designed to become the world's tallest buildings, once complete, and that almost seems like painting a bull's-eye on Lower Manhattan.
Eleven-digit dialing?
11-Digit Local Dialing Starts in New York City on Feb. 1. New Yorkers will have to start using an area code when calling a local telephone number, even if it is in the same area code. By Lydia Polgreen. [New York Times: Technology]
I'd gripe about this, but of the 30 or so New York numbers programmed into my cell phone, fewer than half are in my area code, when you consider the 212 numbers for Manhattanites and all the various cell-phone area codes.
So, y'know. No whining from me.
Roommate site spams users?
Clients of Roommate Service Report E-Mail Barrage of Holocaust Revisionism. Users of a well-known roommate-matching service in Manhattan say that after signing up with the service they began receiving e-mail messages from a Holocaust-revisionist Web site run by the service's founder. By David F. Gallagher. [New York Times: Technology]
This seems pretty vile; you can bet when it comes time to move from here, I won't be using that service.
Crawfish, jazz, rum butter, and hot barmaids
Updates have slacked off a bit. Anna, in all her kookiest of mojos, has been visiting from London, and it's kept me pretty busy. We met up with Todd and Lauren and Lorna and Jeff on Saturday evening for a trip up to Harlem to dine at Bayou and then drink at Lenox Lounge.
Bayou's a charming Louisiana-themed place, with yummy food and a nice wine list. I ordered the etouffee, which was good, but not nearly as delish as what I had when visiting Louisiana back in March. Still, it's worth many repeated visits; the menu has much I'd like to sample.
After dining and dessert and drinks, we left Bayou and wandered over to Lenox Lounge, a historic and groovy art deco club with an impressive history. Entering the back room required a twenty-dollar cover, so we were content to sit in the front and drink. Sean and, later, Brendan joined us, so we had a nice group going for drinks and laughs.
I'm happy I got over my low-level Harlem phobia; what I saw seemed safe. Anna and I arrived early, so we walked up and down Lenox Ave. a bit. At one point, this guy walked past us, got a good look at Anna, and said, "Damn, I DO love Harlem!"
We arranged to meet Lorna, Jeff, Todd, and Lauren the next morning for brunch. As we were heading in to the city, though, Lorna called to beg off. She and Jeff were driving back to Pennsylvania and had to be home earlier than they expected because of babysitter issues.
But we met Lauren and Todd on the Lower East Side and brunched at 7A Cafe. Bloody Marys, Mimosas, lots of coffee, delish rum butter, and waffles and pancakes and steak and eggs and did I mention lots of coffee? We followed that up with some meanderings through the funky boutiques and shops on St. Mark's Place, and then we walked down to The Library for drinks and Two Boots pizza in a dark bar. The Library's a great bar: hot barmaids, cheap drinks, books, and a huge projection teevee with funky B movies.
I love New York.
NYC NYE
Tonight, the Madagascar Institute was supposed to a host a New Year's Eve party in Brooklyn. The last time Madagascar hosted a party, it was busted by the police after about four hours. Tonight topped that considerably.
This party held lots of promise:
We are aiming for quality over quantity for this party. It will be fun, and you will meet someone new, and you will be kissed by a stranger, and you will be frightened, and exhilarated, and leave as dawn pinks the sky, your hair smelling faintly of gunpowder, tiredly smiling, aglow with the realization of what is possible and if that is not the best way to start a new year off right then eat some glass or move to Massachusetts, cause you have no hope.
But instead of mashing lips with a stranger, I'm sitting in my apartment, eating a cheeseburger and fries and drinking beer. How did this come to pass, you might ask.
After bathing and shaving and brushing and flossing and perfuming and dressing, I headed out to the party. I arrived at Franklin and Bergen a little after 11 and saw several dozen people waiting outside to get in. The venue, or, I should say, the planned venue, was a converted warehouse turned artists' loft space. It didn't look like much, but hell, all it had to do was hold a party. As I neared the door, a man left the building, saying, "They can't let anyone in yet. There's a problem with the permits. You might as well wait."
At that point, police and fire arrived. Cops and firemen shoved into the building and revelers hung out, waiting to see what would happen. I finally made it inside, but still only into a little holding area in the front. An organizer said, "Move into the next room if you want to get into the party. The people in there were the first ones here, so if you want in, get in line behind them."
I followed her orders. I also made sure to stand near four hot young women who seemed unaccompanied, so that when it came time for kissing, I'd have my pick of the litter.
We waited and waited and waited. Finally, another wave of cops came inside. Next I knew, one of the organizers came downstairs to where we were and said, "I'm sorry, the party's cancelled, you'll all have to leave."
I went outside and pondered what to do next. A beautiful brunette approached and asked what was going on. I explained what'd happened. She thought for a moment and said, "Hmmmm, plan B, plan B." I was almost shameless enough to say, "Can I be your plan B?" Almost.
I then left, wondering what my plan B was. I went to the C station at Franklin. On the way, I heard a woman explain, "They were busted because they didn't have the right lighting permits." This was a party with a pyrotechnic display, an open bar, food, a DJ, and a dance floor. And they were busted for having the wrong lighting permit.
I entered Franklin station and waited on the platform with about fifty other disappointed wannabe partiers. We piled onto the train. A group near me announced they were heading to the High Street station and walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. "Everyone's welcome!"
I thought that sounded good, especially since I thought one of the women in that group was pretty cute. But then, when the train pulled into Hoyt-Schermerhorn, a wave of partiers left. On the platform, one pointed ahead of him and shouted back to the train, "Party at that guy's place!"
The Brooklyn Bridge kids followed the Hoyt crowd and I thought about following also. I thought too long, for the doors closed before I could move out.
So I sat, pretty much alone, on the train. When it pulled into Jay St.-Borough Hall, I crossed platforms and waited for a Brooklyn-bound F. When the F finally arrived, I looked at my watch: 11:51.
I knew I'd be seeing in 2003 on the F train.
I entered the train and saw a family of six seated around and across from a couple. Nearby sat a pretty blonde. As I walked on, they were conferring about the time: "I have eight minutes 'til."
"I have six."
"I have seven."
I sat near the hot blonde--of course--and sort of made eyes at her. I think I was hoping--hell, I know I was hoping--that at the stroke of midnight she'd suddenly want nothing more than to kiss a bald man.
Alas, she exited at Carroll Street, at approximately 11:58pm.
Right as we pulled out from Carroll and started above ground, the conductor announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, it is now 12:00. Happy New Year!"
The family and the couple let out a cheer and began clapping. Prospect Park was supposed to be having a fireworks display, so I got up from my seat and looked over in that direction.
To my right, the mom had a couple of her kids at the other window and was pointing out to them the Statue of Liberty. Right then, we heard a loud crack and saw a white fountain of fire cascading up from direction of Prospect Park.
Everyone started smiling and clapping.
All in all, I guess it wasn't a bad way to bring in a new year, even if it's not at all what I was hoping for.
Red Train Party
My SantaCon report is online, now, over at Nerdbait.com. It's the full story of my Clausian day, complete with pictures! (Not my pictures, though. Not yet anyway. I should have mine up on Friday or Saturday.)
Go check it out, won't you?
[EDIT, 10/25/04: Hm. Nerdbait is dead. I wonder if this story is archived on my hard drive. I doubt it, somehow.]
Pirate Santa needs booty!
SantaCon was amazing. I'll have a full report, and pictures, up later this week.
Can anyone loan me a car and three friends?
As Commuters Line Up Rides, Some Hope to Ride Out Scare. For all the determined bikers and walkers, many commuters seemed unable to fathom how they would get to work or school. By Randal C. Archibold. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
I've been worrying about this, also. If MTA workers go out on strike next week, I'll need to find some other option for getting from Brooklyn to the Bronx. I'll bike it if I have to, but it's a 16-mile trip, one-way; the idea of 32 miles in the cold kind of blows.
I have a colleague who lives just a few blocks from me; she has a car, but she plans to crash with her sister in Westchester until the strike ends, so that's not an option.
My workplace started compiling a list today of workers affected--they took down names and locations of possible drivers and riders. When I added my name, only one driver had signed up, compared to ten riders. I hope that ratio changes.
MetroNorth will apparently offer a special shuttle from Grand Central to Yankee Stadium. That's probably my best bet; I already walk to work from the D or 4 stop at Yankee Stadium anyway.
The trick there is getting to Grand Central. Again, I could bike it, but where would I lock up my bike all day? (With the crowds that shuttle would see, I don't think carrying my bike onto the train will be an option.)
I could get on Long Island Rail Road at Flatbush (to which I'd walk), ride out to Jamaica in Queens, ride in to Penn Station, walk to Grand Central, and then get on the shuttle up to Yankee. To make that work, though, I'll probably have to be at the Flatbush stop by absolutely no later than 6:30am--more like 6am, I suspect. Would I be home before 7pm? Unlikely.
Here's what that looks like (the stations at Flatbush, Jamaica, and Penn are circled; the approximate location of Yankee Stadium is X-marked):
Sucks, eh? This strike had better not happen, that's all I'm sayin'.
December Saturday
Saturday was Santa shopping. Santa shopping? Heh. Wait and see.
Anyway, I had plans to meet Todd, Lauren, and Stacey on the Lower East Side. We were going to meet, have a few drinks, Santa-shop, eat, and then head to the Village for Moonwork.
Stacey recommended Iggy's Keltic Lounge, on Ludlow St. What a place. I walked in just after 4, and saw Lauren and Todd huddled up in the corner. At the bar were a group of middle-aged, whooping and hollering. Behind the bar, Iggy held court, drunker than any patron in the place. The Pogues jigged on the jukebox.
Great. Irish pub. Pogues on the jukebox. Drunk bartender. This is either a bad movie or a crazy-ass New York moment. I went to the bar for a drink. Iggy ignored me. I stood, trying to make eye contact, flag him down, throw glasses at his head--whatever it took. A woman seated at the bar turned and said, "Hi. What'll you have?" I asked for a Guinness, and she got up, walked around behind the bar, and pulled a pint. I paid and went back to Lauren and Todd.
"Fairytale of New York" came over the jukebox. December. Irish pub. Pogues on the jukebox. Of fucking course, "Fairytale of New York" was on the juke. Iggy gathered up everyone in the bar and got 'em dancing, and then into a group hug. Lauren, Todd, and I sat and watched, and then he came over to lure us in. We all declined. He distracted us with a story, and then, when our guard was down, he took Lauren by the hand and whisked her to the dance floor.
Stacey walked in at this point. "Where's Lauren?" We pointed at Iggy. "Ohhhh." She went up the bar for a drink. Before she could make it, Iggy grabbed her and yanked her into the dance also. Todd and I laughed and watched. Lauren returned, breathless, and then Stacey came back also.
One of the guys, Irving or something, was this 50-year old guy from Florida who'd never been to New York. His wife brought him up for his birthday. After the dancing ended, he approached the TV, where a college football game lit up the screen. "Oh, this is horrible!" he exclaimed, and then, "Brenda! Come here! I can't see the score. Read me the score!"
Irving and Brenda and all their new friends left the pub. Another bartender was on duty, so Iggy and his girlfriend (the woman who pulled my pint) left to go to his uptown joint. The four of us finished our drinks and then headed off for Santa stuff.
We returned to Iggy's around 6:30. Todd and I walked next door and ordered cheeseburgers and arranged to have them brought to the bar. A different crowd was trickling in. Younger people, yuppy stockbroker types. We sat and kibbutzed and mocked.
A little before 8, we left, and headed around the corner to Toys in Babeland. Todd bought Lauren a gun-shaped vibrator. I picked up Christmas cards for naughty friends. We ooohed over a beautiful Pyrex dildo, with a blue design spiraling up through the glass. Leaving Babeland, we caught a cab to the Village and went up to Moonwork.
This is a crazy place, but I dig it.
Snowing in New York
Have you ever had the pleasure of watching
a quiet winter's snow slowly gathering
like simple moments adding up?
--Cowboy Junkies
It's snowing in New York City. My workplace closed at noon today to let employees get home before accumulations pile up. It's coming down fast, also.
As I walked up the hill to work, snow was sprinkled on the ground like confectioner's sugar atop a cake. Three and a half hours later, four inches had fallen.
I thought for a moment as I was leaving: What would make a great NYC snow moment? The answer was obvious: Rockefeller Plaza. I took the D train from 161st St. to the 47-50/Rockefeller Center stop. I left the train and followed the signs in to the basement/concourse area of Rockefeller Center. It was lunch hour, so the concourse was packed with salarimen and -women, taking a nosh or popping to the dry cleaners.
I took the escalator up to the lobby and walked out front, gazing up at the mammoth tree in front of me. On the ice rink, which was smaller than I imagined, were about 30 people of all ages. Almost none of them could really skate well. One poor guy must have fallen six times while I was there. I then walked over to Saks to see its Christmas window displays. Quite lovely. The store had a queue set up so people could proceed past the displays in an orderly manner.
Last night, I saw a cabaret, performed by my friends Suzanne and Natasha. That was a wonderful evening. I know these lovely ladies through Suzanne's husband Sean McArdle, one of the nicest people I've met in New York. Suzanne and Natasha put on one hell of a show. My friend JOSH, also there for the performance, put it thusly: The horror and beauty of New York is that in any other city, Suzanne and Natasha would be divas, they'd be the talk of the town.
Yes, they're that good. I'm going again tonight.
New York events blog
"Veteran blogger John Hiler of Corante and Microcontent News has launched a city events guide in blog form for New Yorkers, CityBlogs: New York. The site and e-newsletter focus (initially) on event listings for cinema, book readings and talks...." [Hypergene MediaBlog]
Goddamn is it windy today!
Goddamn is it windy today! I just saw a four-year-old kid in a long coat swept up by the wind, carried across the Harlem River, and deposited safely in the park across the way.
Well, okay. I made that up. But it is bloody damn windy today.
Patti Smith
Patti Smith performed Friday night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which might be a strange venue for a rock show, but it wasn't really a rock show, so I suppose it doesn't matter.
The performance was billed as a night of remembrance in honor of All Saints Day. She brought a ragoût of spoken word, poetry performance, and music, assisted by Phillip Glass (on a Burroughs tribute), among others. Patti's mother, Beverly, died just over a month ago, and her memory permeated the performance. I almost wrote that it hung heavily, but that's not the case at all. Her mother seems to have had a very irreverent and light-hearted personality and that was the spirit that Patti herself had when talking about her.
Much of the show was Patti Smith, onstage alone, at a microphone, reading poetry, telling stories about her friends and family, and joking with the audience. She seemed both at-ease and nervous, at the same time. Her hair, once black, is now silver-gray, and she wears it long and straight. Her love of androgyny remains: she wore a black suit, a loosened thin black tie, and a white shirt, open at the collar. Although she's certainly not conventionally pretty, I believe that Patti Smith remains, at 56, one of the sexiest women I've seen.
I can never quite describe what Smith's music means to me and even when I play it for people, they often don't get it. When I do try to explain it, I sound like I'm speaking cliches: she "understands" me, her music "resonates," whatever. All I know is that I feel a deep, intimate interlocking with her music. Something about her music and my spirit just snap together. To hear her voice in person was profoundly moving for me.
Smith spoke about her friends, her mentors, her heroes: William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ezra Pound, Alan Ginsberg, Georgia O'Keefe. She read poems by or about those people. She spoke of her family--her parents' separation during WWII, her mother's work to provide joy to her children when no one knew how they'd afford another day's meals. She sang Sonny Boy in honor of her brother, and When My Ship Comes In to memorialize her parents.
She spoke with disarming candor about her feelings and inspirations. She spoke to us as if we were each her friends. A woman of modesty and wisdom, she was surprisingly sentimental and even goofy at times. That appeals to me, for anyone who knows me well understands that I too can be sentimental and goofy. For an evening, I was in the largest living room in Manhattan, listening to one of my heroes discussing her heroes as if we were talking over coffee.
She performed only one song, to my knowledge, that she's recorded before--Dancing Barefoot--during a two-song encore that began with a charming performance of the Beatles song Blackbird, during which she flubbed the lyrics and then giggled.
All Hallow's Evening
Halloween, New York.
I saw the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village tonight. There were no floats as such but several groups of large (about 12-feet-tall) puppets appeared. The highlight, though, were the costumed people. I guess the point of the Village parade is to let anyone in a costume join the fun and parade up 6th Avenue. Spongebob Squarepants was there, and Domo Kun and Clifford the Big Red Dog. Dykes on Bikes. About a dozen Wonder Women, only three of whom were obviously male, along with a handful of Batmen, Supermen, and Superwomen. Lots of men in drag, but that's no surprise. The X-Men were out in force. A troupe of nuns (only three of whom were obviously male) danced up the avenue, followed by a crucified Christ. Hobbes was there, unaccompanied by Calvin, and a Batman-less Robin shuffled up the street.
A cute girl in a pink bunny costume walked up our side of the street. She stopped nearby to have her photo taken and a dozen people simultaneously went, "Awwwwwwww." A woman in leather fetish gear, including a full mask, led a man by a leash up the street. A nearly naked man, his body painted to resemble Captain America's costume, walked arm in arm with one of several Catwomen (only one of whom was obviously male). Dancing in the wake of a jazz band, a Superman kissed a Batman, while Things One and Two skipped along side by side.
The costumed tended to travel in large packs of about 70 people, usually accompanied by a band of some sort. As a group, they boogied up the street--the Twister boards and Snickers bars, the Scooby Doos and Hannibal Lechters, the cigarettes and condom men and manta women.
Strangers in the crowd sang together as the parade passed by. After it ended, the West Village was awash with people. Streets were closed everywhere to auto traffic as thousands of people headed for bars and restaurants and pizza joints and cafes. As we picked our way through the crowd, my friend said, "This has gotta be what Mardi Gras is like!" I said, "Yeah, except that it's colder here and there's not nearly enough naked people."
As we moved through the crowd to West Fourth Street station, a woman passing in the other direction made eye contact with me, locked her gaze on mine, and sang to me: "Thank you very much, oh Mister Roboto!"
I wish I weren't working tomorrow. This would be one hell of a night to stay in the Village, drinking and people-watching and flirting and partying until the sunrise.
Maybe next year.
D-trainin'
Another train story.
Monday afternoon, I was riding the D train down to the west side of Manhattan. Directly across from me, I saw two men sitting side by side, dressed almost identically. They wore identical pinstriped suits, one in gray, the other in blue. One man's knee rested against the other's and they conversed quietly.
Three teenaged girls entered the train and sat beside me. They talked among themselves--nothing obnoxious or loud or particularly noticable, really. After they'd been on the train about fifteen minutes, though, I heard one of the guys across from me speak to the girl immediately to my left: "If you've got something to say, say it so we can all hear."
She paused for a moment and said, "We weren't even talking about you."
He said something I couldn't hear and then she responded, "It's not all about you, you know."
"You were staring," he said.
I think at this point, the other guy urged the first guy to let it go. They whispered to each other, and I heard the angry guy say, "But......and she......but they....."
We pulled in to the next station. The men were still discussing the girls, and I heard one girl say, "We're getting off here, right!" It wasn't a question. They left the train, and I made sure not to make eye contact with the guys across from me.
F-trainin'
Updates have dropped off, and people are starting to complain.
Rode into work this morning on the F train, up to 42nd Street, and then the D to 161st. The F was crowded, as usual, and so I stood most of the trip. Watching people on the train is always entertaining. I stood watching a man in a plaid flannel shirt, right arm in a sling, sitting hunched over a sheet of paper, filled with what looked like poems. He was an older man, with thinning silvered hair, craggy face, and a thin gray mustache. He worked with a pen through the poems, underlining words and phrases, circling others, and making notes in the margins.
Next to him stood a tall man, also older, who tilted his head down and looked over the seated man as he marked up the poems. For a short time, the standing man seemed like a sort of tutor for the silver-haired man.
At one of the Brooklyn stops, perhaps Jay Street, I watched passengers board the train. An Asian woman entered and stood next to me. Her face is neither attractive nor unattractive, but its lines and planes are interesting to study. The face is also familiar, because the same woman stood right next to me on the train yesterday. Although I do tend to see certain people repeatedly during the week, it's rare to be right next to the same person two days in a row.
Flash
Walking from the subway up to work this morning, I hear a horn honk to my left. I ignore it, but the car honks again. I still ignore it, but then I hear a woman shouting in Spanish. I turn to look and see a minivan driving by. The side door is open in back and a woman's kneeling inside, topless but for a pair of suspenders.
She laughs, jiggles herself at me, and the van drives off.
Ah, New York.
Friday night, lower Manhattan.
Friday night, lower Manhattan. I'm in from Brooklyn on the F train, stomping up to Ace, a dive bar in the East Village, to meet friends for drinks. Ace is on Fifth between Avenues A and B and I'm crossing Houston, heading north on Avenue A.
I notice a sharp-looking young lady well in front of me. About 5'8", thin, wearing a striped miniskirt, knee-high socks, and her hair pulled back into two little ponytails on either side of her head. In other words, that schoolgirl look that's so played and yet so capable of turning me to mush.
Unable to resist stalker urges, I quicken my pace to catch up with her. Just past Houston, and not paying close enough attention to my surroundings, I'm startled by about six young people, running full throttle in the other direction. One of them nearly slams me at full speed, but I sidestep just in time.
I wonder what they're running from but I don't really pay them much attention. I notice, though, the woman I'm following is standing there, mouth wide open, watching them tear by. I start walking again and almost catch up to her when she starts moving quickly again up Ave. A.
At the next corner, two men are arguing loudly, very loudly. A small crowd gathers at a distance, I think hoping to see blood splash and spray. One man's doing most of the screaming. Nothing coherent--just a lot of "Fuck you motherfucker and fuck your motherfucking motherfucker too." The other man shouts back more of the same. I notice he has a small, yappy dog on a leash, barking at the other man.
Now of course this all makes me curious, but I don't need to get involved. What I want instead is a pub and a pint glass and my friends around me. So I start to morph into the thousand-yard stare, the one where you're vigilant of your surroundings but pretending not to be. Don't make eye contact, especially not with the nutters, and roll on, roll on, roll on, roll on.
Right then, though, I notice what the girl I've been following is now doing. She's approaching the nutters, arms held out in front of her, and she's trying to step in between them. Just as I'm processing that bit of lunacy, I see the loudest of screamers rear back with his right foot, and plant a firm kick into the torso of the barking dog, who yelps loudly, flies about a foot into the air, and lands again with a whine.
What was chaotic has now become a maelstrom. The other guy is screaming now more loudly than before, the screamer guy who just kicked the dog is about ready to rain blows down on a human, and the girl I've stalked is now even more determined to wade into the fray. I hear her say, "Stop it! Stop it now! How can you kick a puppy? Stop it! Don't do this!" One guy starts shouting at her to fuck off out of their business, but she stays in the thick anyway.
I have no idea what to expect now. The girl is trying to get the guys to back off each other, but she's the only bystander who's involved. The dog is whimpering, the guys screaming, and other passersby agape. Convinced that the girl risks a face-pulping of her own, I think about whether I'd be willing to wade in and yank her out if either guy took a swing at her.
The fight moves off down the street, away from me. The girl sort of trails behind, and I figure any Jane who'd follow these idiots doesn't need me risking my skin for her. I continue up Ave. A toward Ace. A block up, at the next corner, is a Key Foods--a supermarket--and in front I see two guys talking. One of them says, "Yeah, they got her wallet, her keys, her cash, all her credit cards..." He continues talking but my eyes are drawn to a woman behind him, crying and standing alone.
The pack of young nutters tearing down Avenue A near Houston now makes sense to me.
I watch as another woman comes out of the Key Foods and puts an arm around the crying woman and I step aside to make way for the police. I keep going, a little jostled by all this, and a few minutes later arrive at Ace with a story to tell.
Starbucks
I'm not sure how the Park Slope Starbucks became the hangout of choice for latch-key, preteen fashionistas. This afternoon, I was working in Starbucks, editing some cookbook chapters. Shortly after three, the place was stinking with fifth graders whose back-to-school wardrobes cost more than I make in a month. They chattered and shrieked and laughed and gossiped as I packed up my laptop and went home.
Stats
Here's an interesting set of statistics:
- New York City population: 8,008,278
- State of Indiana population: 6,114,745
Brooklyn alone contains 2.3 million people, making it the largest New York borough. Were Brooklyn to secede from the City of New York, it would become the fourth largest U.S. city, after the remainder of New York, L.A., and Chicago. With a population of well over two million, Brooklyn has more people than does Nebraska, both Dakotas combined, or Maine.
This place is big.
I'm walkin', yes indeed
I took a long walk around Lower Manhattan this evening. I'd been inside the apartment all day, editing a book on gardening, and needed to get outside for a while, so I took the train into the city, with no real destination in mind. I wound up on Houston Street and decided to walk west to the river. I didn't know this, but there's a nice river walk, so I took advantage of it.
It was a lovely evening for a walk, so there were many people about. There's a long pier you can walk down, so I walked down it. The view of Lower Manhattan from that pier was fabulous. (Yeah, I took pictures. No, I don't know when you'll see 'em. Have you noticed my damn San Francisco pictures still aren't online? That was April, dammit. Leave me alone.) You could also look uptown and see the Empire State Building, lit up tonight in Old-Glory colors.
I kept walking.
Soon, I saw to my left a trapeze school. A trapeze school, of all things! I gotta admit, it's tempting. Very tempting. (Don't tell my mom.)
I walked on. The Downtown Boathouse offers free kayaking and free kayaking lessons. Now that's damned cool. It's a little late to sign up for lessons now; the calendar shows that basic lessons were held at the beginning of the summer. Maybe next year.
I kept cruising. Ahead of me, I saw another pier, this one bedecked with lights and happy people. I started to pass by but then realized everyone walking in wasn't paying a dime. So I wandered in, to see what was the hubbub. Swing dancing on the pier. Within half an hour, I'd seen opportunities for trapeze artistry, kayaking, and swing dancing. What a city.
I watched the dancers a while, longing to join, but my swing dancing's rusty. I'm sure I can find lessons around here. Everyone seemed so vibrant and glad, it actually made me happy to see it.
I wandered on, down to the World Financial Center. I skirted the plaza, keeping to the river walk. They've done it up nicely--brick walks, trees everywhere, lovely river views, gleaming steel-and-glass highrises. I didn't venture into the building cluster, but those nearest the river showed no signs of last September's unpleasantness. By this point, it was dark, but people were everywhere. Jogging, skating, strolling. Making out on benches. Chatting, arguing. I strolled past a cute cove given over to yachting, several restaurants with outdoor seating, another cove. Eventually, I landed at Battery Park.
Parched, I sought out McDonald's for a keg of Coke before grabbing the N train from Whitehall St. back to Brooklyn.
Coney
Last night, I hopped the F train to Coney Island. The train from Park Slope took about half an hour to reach Coney; as we got closer, I looked up from my book and out the window. We were on elevated track by that point, and I was delighted to see the lights of the carnival pass by the window as we arrived at the station. When I saw Nathan's all lit up, I actually got a little excited. Their hot dogs aren't any better than any others I've had (although I'll confess that being in New York has taught me to love a frank topped with sauteed onions), but the lemonade was good.
I arrived late, a little after nine. I had plans to meet Lauren and Todd in front of Nathan's. They arrived shortly after I did, and we met Lauren's friend Stacey. We then headed up to the boardwalk to watch the fireworks and track down Janet, visiting from California. Todd was the only one who'd met Janet, so he watched out for her and shouted when he saw her pass by.
Burlesque was the order of business. Coney has a weekly burlesque show on Friday nights during summer. Lauren and Janet, being at heart horndogs, were all about the burlesque. Not that I had to be dragged in screaming, mind. The setup was a gameshow--This or That--in which audience members are enlisted as "contestants". They answer sex trivia questions, and have to guess which curtain holds the most luscious dancer--Let's Make a Deal on hormone therapy. Janet answered the call for a pie-eating contest. Vying against five other contestants, she won handily. For her trouble, she received a butt plug from the night's sponsors, Toys in Babeland.
Of course, the real attraction was the near-naked women, and they were certainly on display. Tassles--one swinging this way, one swinging that. Pasties. Thongs. A crocodile woman came out to battle against a Mexican wrestler. Of course, they began the bout fully dressed but that didn't last long. The Mexican wrestler won, but was soon challenged to another bout by "Suzie Sukiyaki" who'd come to Coney Island to claim it for her corporate masters at Tokyo Disneyland. (Disney's expressed interest in buying out Coney Island and Disneyfying it. Given Coney's long history of seedy entertainment, most long-timers are outraged. Can't blame 'em.) Poor Suzie. When the wrestler ripped off Suzie's costume, one of her pasties came off with it. The crowd hooted and stomped at the site of bare nipple.
Rowdy, fun, vaguely sleazy. The auditorium is stuffy and not air-conditioned. With last night's temperature dropping no lower than 82, the mercury inside must have reached 95. Sweat just fountained from everyone in the room. In the end, I think it might have added to the atmosphere. When we came back after intermission, we sat up at the top of the bleacher seats and we all got a little giddy from the heat. We whooped it up and shouted until hoarse.
I'll tell ya...there's something about this city.
New York Public Library
Yesterday, I spent the day outside the no-AC apartment, mostly working on freelance assignments. I visited two libraries: the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and the Humanities and Social Services Library of the NYPL (that's the one at 5th and 42nd, with the two lions in front that everyone thinks is the main branch--it's not).
I noticed on an earlier visit that the NYPL's big reading room had electrical outlets built into the tables, meaning I could plug in my laptop. The Brooklyn library had no place where I could plug in and unfortunately, my battery was hosed, so I took the train to the city and worked there.
But that's not very interesting. After exiting the train at Grand Central Terminal, I walked the few blocks to the NYPL, stopping en route to pick up a carryout lunch. I ate on the terrace in front of the library. While I sat there, an old man sat down a few feet away and began feeding the pigeons. He filled his cupped hand with seed and held out his arm at chest level. One brave and curious bird flew up, landed on his arm, and ate from his hand. Then, several birds. Before long, pigeons were hovering about this man, waiting for a turn at the trough.
The old man clearly took great pleasure in this, but when another man began talking to him about birds and pigeons, the expression on the old man's face became pained and pinched. He made no reply and shuffled off awkwardly, birds trailing after him.
Now in NY
I am now safely and happily in New York City, land of brave and/or stupid. I'm staying at my friend Josh's place in Park Slope, a charming multi-ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn. I arrived via Amtrak, and although the leg of my journey between Louisville and Chicago was hellish, the trip from Chicago to NYC was very nice, especially the run along the Hudson between Albany and NYC. We hugged the Hudson River for nearly that entire leg of the trip. The mid-afternoon sun shone brightly on the river, the gently rising Catskills, and the lush, verdant palisades across the way. A calm breeze rippled the waters of the Hudson, and the cool temperatures (mid-70s) made me envious of the boaters taking advantage of the perfect day.
In many ways, this Amtrak voyage was picture-perfect. In one northern Indiana town we passed through, two young boys bicycled past the train, pedaling in the opposite direction. As they passed us, they waved back at the train. I felt like an extra in a Cary Grant movie when I saw that.
I'm blogging right now from the dumbly named web2zone, a Samsung cybercafe venture near Cooper Square. It's pricier than EasyInternet, but the Samsung place has two things in its favor: it has Microsoft Office, which means I can actually edit from here if absolutely necessary (the hourly prices would cut dramatically into my profits, so I hope not to--it's just nice knowing I can); and unlike EasyInternet, it's nowhere near Times Square, which as you'll recall, I fucking hate. This means I don't have to weave around and trip over the tourists lined up for the Broadway production of The Lion King or those queued to see whomever's on display at Madame Tussauds. (It was a waxy Samuel L. Jackson; today it was waxen Albert Einstein.)
One way or another, I hope to have my iBook wired up very soon. Once that happens, I should be able to update this thing more often. I hope to have a lot to talk about.
Blogging on the run
Blogging on the run.
I'm in Times Square again, at EasyInternetCafe, which I just love the hell out of. These cafes started in London as an offshoot of the EasyJet empire, and they have cafes now throughout Europe. I think NYC is their only American outlet, but I'm not sure. I dug the hell out of them in London and Paris, so finding one here was a relief. Terminals at the hostels I've stayed in are horribly expensive--on the tune of 15 bucks an hour. EasyInternet offers a sliding scale, based on how many customers are in the store. A buck will buy you anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, so it's very much worth the trip into Times Square--which, truth be told, I really fucking hate.
I'm off soon. Probably gonna join the tourist throngs at the top of the Empire State and gaze out over the city.
A friend told me in e-mail that she's not surprised I'm exhausted. She said I'm basically on a work trip--my interview on Wednesday, learning the city, learning more about finding housing, finding my way about the subway system, and so on. I think she's right. I've already started to think of this city like my new home, which is funky, if you think about it.
Still hayseed enough to say look who's in the big town
I had my first celebrity sighting tonight. I was with Christine and Tim at Shakespeare in the Park, watching Twelfth Night. Although there was a slew of name actors in the cast--Julia Stiles, Jimmy Smits, Kristen Johnston, Oliver Platt, and Christopher Lloyd, to name a few--that doesn't really count. In the audience of tonight's production was Topher Grace, star of That 70s Show. Very cool.
Greetings from Times Square
Greetings from Times Square. I'm sitting in a Internet cafe on 42 Street. I know I've been away, but I doubt it matters since there's probably no one checking this page anyway.
I'm damned exhausted. These "vacations," where I hit a city and try to pack in as much as possible in the time I have--I don't know why I do this. My next vacation will be much more relaxing. I think tomorrow will be a day off. I'd like to find a little cafe somewhere, read and maybe write a little also. I might be lunching with my friend Elizabeth, which would be nice. Otherwise, I'm having dinner and seeing Twelfth Night (at Shakespeare on the Park) with Christine and Tim tomorrow. I'm looking forward to that.
This is probably the most social vacation I've ever had--at least the most social I've had when travelling alone. Monday night, I saw the aforementioned Elizabeth playing Irish music in a groovin' pub in Greenwich Village. Our friend Kira joined us--I had a chance to really talk to each of them individually, and I enjoyed that.
Today, after an interview with a recruiter, I met my friend Anne R. for lunch. We ate at a Chinese place around the corner from where she works. She didn't know me, immediately, because I was wearing a suit, which she wasn't expecting. That was funny.
Ah, but it's not all fun-and-games with the estrogen set, friends, although I'd be happy if it were. Friday, I'm meeting a group of people for drinks, and then we're going out to boogie all night. As of Friday, I leave the hostel and bunk at Todd's place Saturday and Sunday night. Sometime on Saturday, I still hope to squeeze in a viewing of Metropolis.
New York is a kickin' place. I fell head over heels for, and was also very overwhelmed by, The Strand, billed as the largest used book store in the world. I can believe it, easily.
I could go on--the coffee shop I sipped at in the Village, the cute galleries I saw today in Chelsea, seeing the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Terminal for the first time. But I won't.
Cattle for 9-11
There's a nice piece in this morning's online edition of The New York Times about a tribe of Masai cattle raisers in Kenya. Although it might be hard to imagine, this remote village lacked electricity until the end of last year, and so none of its residents had seen footage of the 11 September attacks on New York or Washington. The radio reports they'd heard were hard for them to fathom. The tragedies remained distant, indistinct, until a young man from their village, studying in the United States, returned home with stories of the attacks that astonished and deeply saddened the villagers--and moved them to make a great sacrifice to honor the dead.
The Times story tells of their response. A free registration with the NYT site is required for you to read the story.