Waterfalls

In response to Olafur Eliasson’s upcoming NYC waterfalls installation (which is going to be a huge, wet let down), Curbed has come up with some artist renderings of what actual waterfalls would look like in the city.

Delightful chaos!

Desk Jockey Life-Porn

My friend Jonathan is living in the Chinese coastal city of Dalian, a small metropolis he has described as a cross between San Francisco, Palm Beach, and Dubai; like Portland, but bigger, classier, wealthier, and Chinese. Apparently, Dalian is a collecting pool for all manner of young, hip Asians, Russians, and Americans, and he’s found work as an English tutor and author of language education textbooks, which he writes in a cafe part time, presumably while wearing loose-fitting linen clothing perfectly suited to writerly idling and the nursing of Bloody Marys. Here in New York, in the blinding hustle of unrestrained, collective Capitalistic striving, I stew in a mixture of admiration and jealousy. I should be in China, living simultaneously in the mountains and on the beach, which is apparently possible there, because the hills run directly to sand and ocean. Jonathan writes:

I took a jog this afternoon, but after ten minutes of running I found a little path that led into the mountains, and my jog turned into a brief sunset hike. Dalian is a mountain city, like San Fran Sans Trollies, and there ain’t nuttin’ butter then having a mountain trail ten minutes from your front door.

That is the language of the truly relaxed, of a man in harmony with his surroundings. Reading Jonathan’s blog, The Art of Living, I am reminded of living in Spain during my semester abroad in college and the value of an open-ended adventure devoid of conventional purpose. You don’t travel to make money or fall in love or advance a career; you travel to let striving fall away and find, in it’s place, a connection to movement and the ever-unfolding newness of the world that is difficult to see in the grinding rhythm of daily life and worries.  For a desk jockey, this sort of writing is a kind of porn – I read it to remind myself that I’m going to go see the world too, one of these days.

Rudy Giuliani: Turncoat Liar

I was living in Illinois on 9/11 and, like many people, saw events in New York unfold on network news. CNN, ABC, all of them were a bizarre mixture of hyper-patriotism, diffuse anger, and simple fear, with Rudy Giuliani playing the role of the sound-byte hero. I remember thinking vaguely, “huh, he’s really stepped up.”

Six years later, with Guantanamo and Extraordinary Rendition and a continual stream of Bush-originated bullshit, I’m a bit more savvy about what the news tries to feed me. I’ve also lived in New York for nearly three years and heard from people who lived here what the city was like in the 90s, and how much it continues to change.

Rudy Giuliani’s campaign for President is predicated on his credentials as a protector of the homeland (read: Fear-monger) and, by extension, his time as mayor of New York. I wasn’t in the city at the time, so I can’t speak to the Giuliani years personally, but I’m here now and he’s pissing me off. Giuliani has sold us down the river. He’s pulled a Benedict Arnold. He’s a traitor to the city that made him the worthless national figure he is.

Consider this quote from an excellent article in New York Magazine by Chris Smith, summarizing the thrust of Giuliani’s rhetoric:

Before Mayor Rudy, the city was a black-and-white jungle-land of sex shops, violence, and crushing taxes. After Rudy, New York is Oz: sunshine, happy young couples, and shiny gold-plated statues. The message, which Giuliani hammers in his appearances outside the city, is that he made big bad New York safe for the rest of the country. For the pitch to work, Giuliani has to demonize the city he inherited and claim all the credit for the improvements he left behind. The city itself is his original enemy.

There it is. Bashing New York to bolster his failing campaign, painting this immensely diverse city as a den of iniquity piled high with homeless person shit. By all reports, New York was a troubled city and, if my neighborhood is any indication, it still is. Rents are rising and forcing out entire immigrant communities. Infrastructure is aging and increasingly unreliable. There continues to be shootings, stabbings, corruption, police brutality, public gropings, and lots of dog crap on the sidewalk.  Through all this, however, New York is thriving and Rudy Giuliani would like American to think he’s solely responsible.

If you live in the city, read Smith’s article and get pissed. We know better than anyone that Giuliani is a turncoat assface. Spread the word.

New York: Playground for Beautiful Women

The girls. They are everywhere on this island. I can see one, right now, from where I sit on a shop bench at the corner of Mulberry and Bleeker. It is evening, and across the street the sun is setting a red brick and wrought iron apartment building on fire. She has black hair, bob cut like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, one black boot on the Bleeker subway station railing, the other in the street, her slim body zig-zagged into an impossibly tantalizing shape. Like a crazy straw for drinking sex.

They run all varieties and I’m an equal-opportunity gazer; Punk, preppy, Betty Boop, cyclist, hipster, Wall St. pin stripe suit, yoga instructor, ballet dancer, disillusioned Midwesterner, and, of course, waif-like model. There are lots of would be Cover Girls floating around, with one cubic centimeter of stiletto touching the sidewalk. They used to drive me first to euphoria, then grinding frustration.

These days, I’m training myself to have an aesthetic-sexual experience instead of the other way around. Still, when I get hit with 4 or 5 in quick succession, even my Buddha’s Third Eye dilates and I want to scamper after them and drool on their high heels like a god damn dog. I flatter myself that I’m not creepy about it. My strategy is: be direct with your gaze, don’t shun eye contact, and let your eyes say, by way of an apology, “I’m looking at you because you’re gorgeous.” Chances are, they already know.

David Cross said it best: In New York, “You are constantly faced with this very urgent, quick decision you have to make about every 20 minutes. You have to decide immediately… ‘Oh my god. do I look at the most beautiful woman in the world or the craziest guy in the world? Look at her, she’s fucking beautiful, but look at him! He’s wearing orange footy pajamas and he’s got tin foil on his head and he’s playing a Casio, but look at her she’s amazing – ‘”

I opt for the girl every time.

New York City Public Transportation: A Daily Hell

I take the L train from Williamsburg/Bushwick to Manhattan every day, and today the commute was a small hell. It started off Ok – I got my third favorite position, leaning against one of the two poles in the center-most vestibules of the car, the smooth, matte steel cold against the space between my shoulder blades. I adopted my heavy-lidded, unconcerned Subway Demeanor and listened to “Equus” by Blonde Redhead and “Recently” (live) by the Dave Matthews Band. “Recently” opens with Matthews singing, “Sunlight on my shoulders makes me happy/ Sunlight almost always makes me high.” I tried, as Mitch Hedberg says, “to force the trip” and transport myself to a bright, grassy place where the sun warms my shoulders. It did not work.

Three stops after mine, the train was filling up. Four stops, and riders were packed like sardines in a large and fast-moving aluminum can. Five stops, and the human crush reached critical mass and the entire state of New York was consumed by a vengeful black hole. Hipsters at the Bedford stop pushed, squeezed, pried, hammered, wriggled, and climbed in to spaces that didn’t exist. A small Latino gentleman was eaten to make more room. I found myself facing the smooth metal pole, nose nearly touching it, left hand grasping the pole at neck level, unable to move my right arm to change the song on my Ipod Shuffle. I had to endure “Human Touch” by Bruce Springsteen (Good song, I just wasn’t in the mood), and various plunkings by Townes Van Zandt. I was beginning to feel a little panicked.

On a packed subway car, bodies cease to be discrete and begin to move as one organism. When there is a jolt or sudden deceleration, everyone heaves like a rolling wave. If you cut out one side of the car, replaced it with a glass wall, and viewed it from the side, it would look like one of those desktop wave-making water tables that you can buy at a museum gift shop.

All manner of unintentional sensory exchange happens on a densely crowded train. Smelly people (and in the summer, pretty much everyone) coat you with stink. A teenager with cheap headphones shares a maddeningly repetitious Caribbean hip-hop beat with the whole car – dunk dada dunk dada dunk. The worst, however, is the touching. This morning, I was pressed up against four things, representing the four cardinal directions: to the north, a balding hipster reading something in French. To the south and east, girls with their backs to me, wearing backpacks and messenger bags. To the west was a sprite of a woman reading Johnathan Safran Foer. She was smallish – perhaps 5′ 5″ with brown hair the texture of half-wet pasta. I couldn’t see her face. She was pushed up against my side by the press of people near the door, the inner face of her left leg against my outer thigh.

The minutes passed. The train stalled. The automated voice warned us to “please alert the police or MTA official in the event of an emergency.” This is about to be a goddamn emergency, I thought. If someone sneezes, this car is gonna explode. I began to feel something warm against my leg. At first, I thought it was just cumulative human energy, but I could feel it – my left leg wasn’t just warm, it was hot. I looked down – pasta hair woman, bent over her book, was placing some of her weight on me. I was suddenly alert, my sleepy, cool attitude gone. What is this, I thought. Is this a Senator Larry Craig situation and I’m not aware of it? Admittedly, it’s sad that the first scenario that came to mind was, “Am I being solicited for sexual acts?” But I’m single. These things happen.

My next thought was, how can she not notice this? The heat our legs was generating could have melted cheese. She was, essentially, straddling my leg. Casually, of course, but the contact was tight, down to the level on which atoms are exchanged. The heat, the touching, the beautifulness of my leg: I’m pretty sure I was vaguely molested this morning.

At Union Square, the crowd disembarked. Pasta Hair went her way, and I mine. I had wanted to see her face, to try and gauge her potential as a molester, but I couldn’t. I was, as Anthony Lane put it in a recent review, “feeling spooked and sullied,” and still a little bewildered. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just missed some social subtlety.

Whatever the case, Attention perverts: if you’re not getting enough public feelies in your repressive Midwestern town, the L train at 9:15 is the place for you.

New York is a city of grand cultural institutions and unlimited human energy, but as mornings like this one remind me: it is a bitch of a place to live.

6 Years Ago Today

New York is flat today. A layer of gray clouds and gray mist hover just above the skyscrapers and sitting in my office, 16 floors up, I can’t see the East River or the Hudson. Manhattan is bound by cloud-walls the color of dirty snow.

My thoughts turn to those in the city who are having a lonely day today. I was living in the Midwest in 2001, and when the first plane hit I was in fourth period, Mr. Berry’s Public Speaking and Presentation class, which was held in my high school’s decrepit auditorium. Backstage often smelled of the new lumber, tangy and sharp, used to build sets; the seats gave off a different smell – of wood past it’s prime, deteriorating from too many years of hefty Illinois backsides squeezed in to watch an out-of-tune version of Our Town or The Music Man.

Mr. Berry called us into his office, saying, “A plane just crashed in New York City. It hit the World Trade Center.” I remember thinking, “This can’t be an accident.” My father was a few logged hours away from getting his instrument rating as a private pilot (like a “pro” certification for pilots of small planes) and I had recently been flying with him, watching him negotiate the intricate procedures designed to make sure planes never hit other planes, buildings. anything. A trained pilot would never hit a building unless he was impaired. I watched smoke hemmoraging out of the first tower and thought, this is intentional.

9/11 was, for years, remote in my mind. It was a complex question of politics, radical Islam, Bush abuses, civil liberties, and foreign relations. I thought about it in abstracts. Partly, I wasn’t able to grasp the enormity of it’s impact on our country. Partly, I simply didn’t have a face, a personal relationship, to connect to New York or the towers.

But I live in the city now, and a visceral sense of the thing has been creeping up on me slowly. It is present in the city in a thousand small ways: the postcard of the WTC taped to my landlord’s door – his miniature memorial. The posters at construction sites and the ads in the subway about Ground Zero responders who are sick and not getting medical attention. A friend or roommate who has a story of loss or a close call (“My friend’s mom was supposed to be on the Boston flight, but she got the flu.”) New York is big and fast and cold, but the sheer scale and business of the place cannot cover over such a loss. Nor should it. Today, I’m thinking about loss – what was lost in the attacks and in our clumsy response to them. 

My admiration goes out to real New Yorkers (not transplants like me), who are grumpy, pushy, kind, and not making a fuss that it’s September 11, 2007. No Fox News drum beating or CNN tableaus here. The L train is slow today and the office is dreary. It’s business as usual in the city.