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| Trash and Mirrors |
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| Park Ave and 52nd |
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| Flushing |
Were Chinese Eunuchs the first to "discover" America?
Monday, February 9, 2015
Sunday, February 8, 2015
The lonely and the desperate
Lindsay, lonely and desperate, has begun dating sleeping with (they may date) her fat-dweeb roommate who is also pretentious and condescending.
I've often said Tinder is for the lonely and desperate, but Lindsay's sinking to such a low indicates how lonely and desperate we--and I mean the universal we--can be. People whose formative adolescent social beings came to rely on technology, who were nascent adults during the advent and ubiquitous adoption of a social internet world, these people have difficulty when it comes to forming and maintaining relationships that have no electronic component. Beautiful, smart women settle for ugly men with personalities that leave much to be desired, because they feel they are unable to meet the smart, attractive men they deserve. Kim has transcended this and I am proud of her. Blue collar romance never really blossomed, but she has struck up with a French-Canadian/Eastern European consultant. I'm pulling for this one.
I may go to a pretentious art party in the Bronx tonight where Lindsay's fat condescending fuck buddy cum roommate with bad music taste will DJ. The art party in the Bronx intrigues me, but spending any time with fat condescending dweeb? I just do not think I can submit myself to that sort of thing tonight. Definitely for the first time in weeks I will see China for drugs and clubs. Kim may come along and Cash too, but Kim is semi-obligated to attend Bronx event. Cash finally paid Kim the money he owed her so I think she can at least be pleasant to him as I think Cash plans to meet China and I later on.
I love this song and contemplate tracking Gloria down to talk with her. There is such an intense level of feeling in her voice. I only fear if she was old before her time when she sang this song it will be too late.
Tina Turner is another favorite. I took my mother to see Tina in Chicago maybe six or seven years ago, and man, even in her late sixties that woman brought down the house. I wish I could have seen her in the sixties.
It is an unshakeable conviction of mine that American R&B will stand in history as some of the greatest production of the human spirit. There is very little as arresting and bursting with raw power and feeling and life--and for that matter death--as this music that blends the dusty cry of the guitar, the steps of the piano, the certainty of the drums, the low throb of the bass, the wail of a woman telling her story, the shout of a man telling his troubles, the trumpets and horns underlying everything in opulent oranges and golds (because how they sound, for me, I can only convey in color).
Then there is Saint-Saëns and Rufus Thomas.
I am very interested in Timbuktu and the forthcoming Terrence Malick--it looks like Malick may have grasped the spirit of today in the same way David Lynch managed to package and wrap the 2000s in Mulholland Drive, accomplishing what Kubrick groped toward in Eyes Wide Shut...the Malick film looks fantastic.
On a lighter note, I saw the effort of CityLore and a determined Irene Chagall, the film Let's Get the Rhythm: the Life and Times of Miss Mary Mack. Fantastic! Uplifting! A wonderful documentation of lived culture.
I maintain an active interest in the "life" films of 1960s Paris. Some people will call these "French New Wave"--this is an indication they do not really know what they are talking about, or, that they know so much that they are unable to grasp anything but amorphous threads of experience so cerebral as to be nonexistent. These films are about spontaneity, chance, beauty and existence. Lola (1961) is nice but I love Adieu Philippine (also 1962), there with an odd Norwegian (?) soundtrack. The promenade sequence is a classic of cinema and also available on youtube.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
February Life & El Guero
It's cold as f*ck in New York.
I walk to the train between 7 and 7:30, AM, and for the walk yesterday (friday) it was 12 degrees, windchill 5-6. For those of you that think windchill or "feels like" is bogus, I'm with you. At the same time though, please, when I say "it was cold as f*ck," commiserate. Don't be like these Chicago dweebs who insist on recounting a story about ten or twenty below. Go away. You either chose to live in that city or were unlucky enough to be born there.
I have been having extreme pain in my back lately, which I believe is due to a mixture of high stress related to the new job (unbelievable, I know) and my own laziness: I haven't been working on my back lately and am paying the price. Last night I took a large quantity of muscle relaxers, cyclobenz, and my, it put me out. I intended this morning to write, drop off some laundry, surround myself with art, grab a few green tea cream puffs, perhaps even make a trip up the Cloisters, but I couldn't get out of bed until around noon. I refer to the experience of this class of drugs, muscle relaxers/relaxants, as "cycling," and when I can't get out of bed in the morning because I'm so laid up by the drowsiness, well, that's when I can't get off the bicycle.
I finally did manage to pry myself out of the nest, though, and skulk into the kitchen to put water on for espresso. My mind was a limp balloon, what with the cycling, and I stumbled and glowered between the stacks of filth my roommates cultivate in our kitchen. After a cup of espresso I could feel the balloon twisting itself into a taut, spry form, a Koons balloon animal, and now I'm writing. The world is strange and life is unusual.
I've been intrigued by the jewel street blocks between Brooklyn and Queens, an area some people call "The Hole" because it's below sea level and lacks a municipal sewer water. It looks almost gothic, and could perhaps be a peripheral neighborhood in a city like Memphis. What is The Hole doing in New York? Narratively just produced an excellent photo essay w/ accompanying narration and there is also a bit here that features some photographs and commentary. The NYTimes features the neighborhood as far back as 2004.
One of my grandfather's was born in 1912 on a train in Pocatello, Idaho. He rode the rails during the Depression, worked on the rails, served with Patton in Europe, and later wound up a successful businessman working on Park Ave in New York. That generation, those people born 1910-1918/20, to me that is one of the most fascinating generations of Americans, those who were adolescents/young adults during the Depression, when this country was still a vast, unknown wilderness, and when many young people had to sort things out for themselves because their parents simply couldn't afford to clothe, house, and feed them. PBS produced a stunning portrait of a few of these peoples in the 90s, which is now on youtube in its entirety. It's about an hour, and comes highly recommended. People talk about feeling about children into their twenties or thirties, well, these people became adults as teenagers. I suppose the feeling I have when thinking of the experiences of these people invokes a kind of test of experience, a risk-it-all-reality that we have lost. Joseph Conrad, in an early Marlow story, has it well put:
I need not tell you what it is to be knocking about in an open boat. I remember nights and days of calm when we pulled, we pulled, and the boat seemed to stand still, as if bewitched within the circle of the sea horizon. I remember the heat, the deluge of rain-squalls that kept us baling for dear life (but filled our water-cask), and I remember sixteen hours on end with a mouth dry as a cinder and a steering-oar over the stern to keep my first command head on to a breaking sea. I did not know how good a man I was till then. I remember the drawn faces, the dejected figures of my two men, and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon—before life itself.
Youth, unabridged, available here.
The MTA, rather than improve and add to extant subway service, has chosen to build an expensive and unnecessary subway under Second Avenue. Once, there was a functional El on Third Ave, which was torn down in the 1950s or 1960s. Wouldn't it be fun if we were still able to ride a train up and down Third Ave? And then we might have a G that once again reached as far as Forest Hills, additional service on the 4/5/6...just think of the possibilities!
Take a ride on the Third Avenue El.
I finished Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and have begun Octavio Paz's Laberinto de la soledad (Labyrinth of Solitude). It's a fascinating book that a fallen white Mexican recommended to me. To compress what could easily balloon into a dissertation-length piece, I'll say the following: Latin America has complex class systems that are often understood racially. By "white Mexican," I mean a person who has a "European" look. In Mexico, a country where most people are a beautiful brown, these European-looking people dominate politics, entertainment, culture. It is a legacy of colonialism and largely the reality in most of Latin America (not to say the US is superior or different). The night of the blizzard that never arrived, I went to my local bar for a drink, and met one of these white Mexicans. We had a few drinks and shot the shit, discussed the women that had destroyed our lives, etc., it was cathartic for me and brought me back to my days in Merida, Acapulco, and DF. He began to reveal details about his background: a fancy prep school in DF, cars, a private university. He moved to New York with a woman, an American girl from Philadelphia (!), and his parents, who disapproved, cut him off. Money and a position was lost. For years they struggled, in love, barely living on a slice of pizza a day, unable to find work (he has no papers and she refused to marry), until they ultimately moved to farthest Brooklyn, Sheepshead Bay, to work in the kitchen of an Uzbek restaurant. They fell out of love, he devastated, she with no remorse, and he found a place and a job waiting tables at a restaurant in Park Slope. Meanwhile, the parents, having heard nothing for some years at this point, hire a private investigator to track him down. I cannot imagine how his mother would react were she to learn he was waiting tables, never mind that he had worked in the kitchen at an Uzbek restaurant in a neighborhood so far from any image of New York she could possibly possess. He avoids the parents, and changes his phone number frequently because he fears not only the authorities (no papers), but his parents and the private investigators. I refer to him as the guero, both to protect his anonymity, and because that is a name I was often called when I lived in Mexico.
I relayed this tale to my Aunt K, who responded with the following:
Wow, Marcel, I love your story of the guero. Has all the murky promise of those Graham Greene tales of fallen South Am RCs. Now you should get busy! As I see it his story could go several different ways:
1. His family is actually allied with some heavy duty drug money, the girlfriend was one of their mules, or something, and she defected by running away with father-hating son. Now private detec on his trail is actually because father is worried he/she got away with potentially destructive info (contacts in US govt?). Detec finds her first, threatens to dispose of her unless she tells him where son is & they both return with her to Mex. So now both detec & ex-gf are going round & about ethnic underworlds of Coney Island, stop laughing, in search of him. Do they find him? Is he an unreliable narrator & there’s something really scary he left out of his story???
OR
2. He’s a classic downward driven anti-hero, abandoning and/or destroying all who get involved with/want some human response from him: first his family, then his girlfriend, finally when detec finds him detec thinks he’s bonding over guero’s new lifestyle, terrible ending for detec, anti-hero wanders off to another continent … there to wreak further, etc
OR
3. There’s a shameful secret in his family, incest, father’s mistress living with them so mother becomes alcoholic/schizo compulsive Mex shopper whatever, and he runs away with what he thinks is innocent & true girlfriend. Story is what & when he finds out girlf’s living a lie also, and discovery robs him of all hope in world, he drifts into Russian émigré bar world. Told from vpoint of detec who becomes saddened/alienated himself as he discovers these various secrets
Of course none of these address his reading habit: maybe he’s a Cortazar hero who won’t engage, but is living off writing about the sordid/disappointing lives/secrets of everyone he comes to know, from family to gfriend to detec, he‘s trying to find an overarching narrative for these 3 tales when he discovers v threatening one to do with owners of bar, and their detached observation of him writing causes final horrific end???
Good luck tomorrow!
I walk to the train between 7 and 7:30, AM, and for the walk yesterday (friday) it was 12 degrees, windchill 5-6. For those of you that think windchill or "feels like" is bogus, I'm with you. At the same time though, please, when I say "it was cold as f*ck," commiserate. Don't be like these Chicago dweebs who insist on recounting a story about ten or twenty below. Go away. You either chose to live in that city or were unlucky enough to be born there.
I have been having extreme pain in my back lately, which I believe is due to a mixture of high stress related to the new job (unbelievable, I know) and my own laziness: I haven't been working on my back lately and am paying the price. Last night I took a large quantity of muscle relaxers, cyclobenz, and my, it put me out. I intended this morning to write, drop off some laundry, surround myself with art, grab a few green tea cream puffs, perhaps even make a trip up the Cloisters, but I couldn't get out of bed until around noon. I refer to the experience of this class of drugs, muscle relaxers/relaxants, as "cycling," and when I can't get out of bed in the morning because I'm so laid up by the drowsiness, well, that's when I can't get off the bicycle.
I finally did manage to pry myself out of the nest, though, and skulk into the kitchen to put water on for espresso. My mind was a limp balloon, what with the cycling, and I stumbled and glowered between the stacks of filth my roommates cultivate in our kitchen. After a cup of espresso I could feel the balloon twisting itself into a taut, spry form, a Koons balloon animal, and now I'm writing. The world is strange and life is unusual.
I've been intrigued by the jewel street blocks between Brooklyn and Queens, an area some people call "The Hole" because it's below sea level and lacks a municipal sewer water. It looks almost gothic, and could perhaps be a peripheral neighborhood in a city like Memphis. What is The Hole doing in New York? Narratively just produced an excellent photo essay w/ accompanying narration and there is also a bit here that features some photographs and commentary. The NYTimes features the neighborhood as far back as 2004.
One of my grandfather's was born in 1912 on a train in Pocatello, Idaho. He rode the rails during the Depression, worked on the rails, served with Patton in Europe, and later wound up a successful businessman working on Park Ave in New York. That generation, those people born 1910-1918/20, to me that is one of the most fascinating generations of Americans, those who were adolescents/young adults during the Depression, when this country was still a vast, unknown wilderness, and when many young people had to sort things out for themselves because their parents simply couldn't afford to clothe, house, and feed them. PBS produced a stunning portrait of a few of these peoples in the 90s, which is now on youtube in its entirety. It's about an hour, and comes highly recommended. People talk about feeling about children into their twenties or thirties, well, these people became adults as teenagers. I suppose the feeling I have when thinking of the experiences of these people invokes a kind of test of experience, a risk-it-all-reality that we have lost. Joseph Conrad, in an early Marlow story, has it well put:
I need not tell you what it is to be knocking about in an open boat. I remember nights and days of calm when we pulled, we pulled, and the boat seemed to stand still, as if bewitched within the circle of the sea horizon. I remember the heat, the deluge of rain-squalls that kept us baling for dear life (but filled our water-cask), and I remember sixteen hours on end with a mouth dry as a cinder and a steering-oar over the stern to keep my first command head on to a breaking sea. I did not know how good a man I was till then. I remember the drawn faces, the dejected figures of my two men, and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon—before life itself.
Youth, unabridged, available here.
The MTA, rather than improve and add to extant subway service, has chosen to build an expensive and unnecessary subway under Second Avenue. Once, there was a functional El on Third Ave, which was torn down in the 1950s or 1960s. Wouldn't it be fun if we were still able to ride a train up and down Third Ave? And then we might have a G that once again reached as far as Forest Hills, additional service on the 4/5/6...just think of the possibilities!
Take a ride on the Third Avenue El.
I finished Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and have begun Octavio Paz's Laberinto de la soledad (Labyrinth of Solitude). It's a fascinating book that a fallen white Mexican recommended to me. To compress what could easily balloon into a dissertation-length piece, I'll say the following: Latin America has complex class systems that are often understood racially. By "white Mexican," I mean a person who has a "European" look. In Mexico, a country where most people are a beautiful brown, these European-looking people dominate politics, entertainment, culture. It is a legacy of colonialism and largely the reality in most of Latin America (not to say the US is superior or different). The night of the blizzard that never arrived, I went to my local bar for a drink, and met one of these white Mexicans. We had a few drinks and shot the shit, discussed the women that had destroyed our lives, etc., it was cathartic for me and brought me back to my days in Merida, Acapulco, and DF. He began to reveal details about his background: a fancy prep school in DF, cars, a private university. He moved to New York with a woman, an American girl from Philadelphia (!), and his parents, who disapproved, cut him off. Money and a position was lost. For years they struggled, in love, barely living on a slice of pizza a day, unable to find work (he has no papers and she refused to marry), until they ultimately moved to farthest Brooklyn, Sheepshead Bay, to work in the kitchen of an Uzbek restaurant. They fell out of love, he devastated, she with no remorse, and he found a place and a job waiting tables at a restaurant in Park Slope. Meanwhile, the parents, having heard nothing for some years at this point, hire a private investigator to track him down. I cannot imagine how his mother would react were she to learn he was waiting tables, never mind that he had worked in the kitchen at an Uzbek restaurant in a neighborhood so far from any image of New York she could possibly possess. He avoids the parents, and changes his phone number frequently because he fears not only the authorities (no papers), but his parents and the private investigators. I refer to him as the guero, both to protect his anonymity, and because that is a name I was often called when I lived in Mexico.
I relayed this tale to my Aunt K, who responded with the following:
Wow, Marcel, I love your story of the guero. Has all the murky promise of those Graham Greene tales of fallen South Am RCs. Now you should get busy! As I see it his story could go several different ways:
1. His family is actually allied with some heavy duty drug money, the girlfriend was one of their mules, or something, and she defected by running away with father-hating son. Now private detec on his trail is actually because father is worried he/she got away with potentially destructive info (contacts in US govt?). Detec finds her first, threatens to dispose of her unless she tells him where son is & they both return with her to Mex. So now both detec & ex-gf are going round & about ethnic underworlds of Coney Island, stop laughing, in search of him. Do they find him? Is he an unreliable narrator & there’s something really scary he left out of his story???
OR
2. He’s a classic downward driven anti-hero, abandoning and/or destroying all who get involved with/want some human response from him: first his family, then his girlfriend, finally when detec finds him detec thinks he’s bonding over guero’s new lifestyle, terrible ending for detec, anti-hero wanders off to another continent … there to wreak further, etc
OR
3. There’s a shameful secret in his family, incest, father’s mistress living with them so mother becomes alcoholic/schizo compulsive Mex shopper whatever, and he runs away with what he thinks is innocent & true girlfriend. Story is what & when he finds out girlf’s living a lie also, and discovery robs him of all hope in world, he drifts into Russian émigré bar world. Told from vpoint of detec who becomes saddened/alienated himself as he discovers these various secrets
Of course none of these address his reading habit: maybe he’s a Cortazar hero who won’t engage, but is living off writing about the sordid/disappointing lives/secrets of everyone he comes to know, from family to gfriend to detec, he‘s trying to find an overarching narrative for these 3 tales when he discovers v threatening one to do with owners of bar, and their detached observation of him writing causes final horrific end???
Good luck tomorrow!
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
February Four
Sorry about the silence. I started a new job, a serious job, with real movers-and-shakers, and I keep an active social calendar, and I write, and I maintain a certain physique. It can consume.
My new work has a Lavazza machine.
My new work has a Lavazza machine.
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| Watch out, its amNewYork's Lit Posse |
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| The Fountain |
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| The Unexpected Rewards of Inquisitiveness |
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| FDR Branch on 3rd Ave |
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| This utterly revolting poem appeared on the B yesterday during my morning ride |
Friday, January 30, 2015
Winter Walks
I do my best to mix the big walls of text with posts full of photos. I took a stroll around the old neighborhood (Chelsea), and hit a few galleries, before walking crosstown on one of my favorite backstreets, 25th.
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| Winter Line |
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| Brillo Box |
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| Diana Thater, Science, Fiction |
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| Toward the Hudson |
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| High Line |
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| Jiri Georg Dokoupilupil |
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| Pynchon? |
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| 25th |
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| Ave. A |
New York: the city that entertains at every corner.
I feel old skool today. Here is some nineties shit:
Biggie on Fulton, 1989 (if you haven't seen it yet)--take that Taylor!
Big and Kim--fuck Faith, Kim has always been the sh*t and when she comes to Brooklyn people trip, parades, everyone out to see the Queen B.
Big and Method Man, which has my one of my all-time favorite quotable: "I spit on your grave and I grab my Charles Dickens, bitch."
Kurupt (from Philadelphia) could really flow, and this is one of his best, especially that second verse!
I'm not a big fan of Tupac, at all, but I do love this video, and I'm headed to LA sometime in the near future. so, nostalgia.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Heroin and the Lower East Side
The Lower East Side has transformed beyond recognition. I'm not old enough to remember New York in the seventies or eighties, but I remember New York in the nineties. You may have heard it, you may have read it, and it's true: this city has changed.
I don't remember Soho or the Village, but I remember rundown Chelsea, the redlight "West Village" where you really didn't want to end up anywhere near the SROs on the Hudson after dark, and an empty and lifeless Lower West Side (Tribeca). Well, in the case of Tribeca, not much has changed. On the Lower East Side and especially Alphabet City, I remember the shooting galleries near Tompkins Square Park and the junkies and the ancient Eastern European and Italian women who would step over them, shaking their heads, as they walked to temple or church. Chinatown hadn't moved as far west as it eventually would, and there were many more Puerto Ricans in the area. I have a nostalgia for the look of it, for the diversity of it, for the bizarre, surreal condition of those years, but I do not miss the filth and the fear and the terrible poverty of life. People who reminisce and wish we lived in the seventies again, they're very selfish--it is an expression of privilege. The Lower East Side is filthy now! Can you imagine what was like when they were really filthy? You don't want to. You hardly see syringes on the streets these days, because heroin moved to the suburbs about ten years ago when big pharm reformulated oxycontin, but back then there were "rigs" everywhere in the nineties, sometimes floating in buckets full of opaque, pinkish water, one of the more disgusting things I've ever seen.
Why am I writing about the Lower East Side? I came across this piece, which is an articulate and accurate expression of suburban malaise and its discontents, and I have to confess I felt a touch glad when I read you could still buy heroin around Union Square. That triggered a number of memories, of being told I could go as far as Washington Square but that if I went east of Broadway and was caught I would be in big trouble, of venturing east of Broadway, of later trekking with my cousin to real Lower East Side apartments of friends of hers and thinking it was the coolest thing. An unusual and interesting project would have been/would be an ethnography on the heroin culture of the inner cities, before it all vanishes, in places like the Lower East Side, or Seattle, or Downtown Los Angeles/all Los Angeles.
The Blizzard was a total hoax, and it was incredibly frustrating to have the subway shut down for twelve hours. My mother called to remind me that "it wouldn't be a good idea to walk out on the Manhattan Bridge, and, take pictures, or whatever it is you do." Believe it or not, I went out for a few hot toddies at a bar down the block Monday night. It was the rare opportunity one has as an adult to misbehave and to harmlessly flout the rule of law, something I can rarely resist. I discovered a good number of fellow flouters upon arrival, and as usual the bar stayed open until 4. I met a guero--a catch-all term in Mexico for people of pale/light complexion, with "European" features--from Mexico City, who works at an ordinary restaurant in Park Slope. This in itself is odd enough, as people who look "white"--for lack of a better term--are not expected to "work" in Mexico. It is a caste system in many ways similar to what exists in India, and is broadly the case in much of Latin America. If you think we have a class/caste system in the United States, you're right, and we do, but it is essentially a have/have-not system, and upward mobility is highly feasible/expected for the haves. In Latin America, there is a hierarchy and a racial structure--not to say there isn't a racial structure in the US--that is very, very difficult to escape or transcend.
The guero in the bar was immediately of interest to me as it was very clear that this was no run-of-the-mill individual: he had attended a well-known prep school in Mexico City (the equivalent of Trinity or Dalton) and gone on to an equally well-known (and costly) private university. What on earth was this person doing in Park Slope waiting tables?
Well, as Mexicans are prone to do, with the drink, he began to confess, and it's an interesting story: he moved to New York with a girlfriend, as you suspected. The parents did not approve, they're estranged, and there is a substantial amount of money and a position at stake. He has no papers. The couple lived together happily for some time, until they ran out of money and wound up in a flophouse in Sheepshead Bay, where both began to work in the kitchen of an Uzbek restaurant (she's American). If neither worked, neither ate, and over the summer they lived on dollar slices of pizza at Coney Island. They were miserable, but happy together, for a year or two. Then they were miserable and miserable with one another, for another year before they split up, she having found someone new, he devastated. He had grown to love New York, though, and had no interest in returning to Mexico, and so found the job at the restaurant in Park Slope. I can't imagine what the society parents would think had they any idea their educated son had moved into an SRO in furthest Brooklyn with the American girl (of all things!) he ruined himself for, to work in the kitchen of an obscure Central Asian restaurant without papers like a commoner! He said he changes his phone number regularly because his parents have hired private investigators to track him down. He's lived in New York for two or three years.
We talked literature, and he convinced me to pick up a copy of Octavio Paz's long, likely morose essay Labyrinth of Solitude, which I was told "explains Mexico" (I also found a beautiful edition of The Years with Ross, for balance). I'm also reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and may soon reacquaint myself with George Eliot.
Charlus visits New York this weekend, and I can't decide what to do about it. Kim thinks I should avoid him altogether: for her, there is too much to lose with the new job, the stress, who knows what sort of a tantrum he may throw, etc., but I worry more what he might do if I push away the olive branch. It is a tough thing, having relations who are difficult and unstable, and mean. One experiences a mix of guilt, frustration, and anger. General consternation. If there is a nice dinner in it for me, I'll accept. I have mercenary tendencies.
I have to move again, but I do not want to leave my current neighborhood. I love it and I am happy to live in Brooklyn. My current roommates weirdly watched Obama's state of the union, giggling and clucking and chuckling and gasping along with the address like the utter simpletons they are. It was so disconcerting, and they're so foul and filthy--the sink is constantly full of dirty dishes, one is always having diarrhea or vomiting, they cook constantly and the kitchen is always a mess, filth and clutter has spread to the living room like untreated gangrene--and also judgmental and condescending. Sometimes we're talking politics and one or both of them will explain to me some political item or correct me when it is in fact they who are ill-informed, this being as you know an unpardonable offense. I will not endure it for another month, and I'm sure they can find some filthy person who can abide correction better than I.
Grieg--we endure, like Dilsey.
Yesterday I went to the Ivorian restaurant the New Yorker reviewed a few weeks ago. The food was of middle quality--neither succulent nor delicious, but perfectly passable.
The real pleasure: to be surrounded by West African French, and to hear, when a red card was produced in the Atletico Madrid/Barcelona match on the television, shouts of "rouge! rouge!" from the gathered crowd. It's La Savane on grotty 116th.
I don't remember Soho or the Village, but I remember rundown Chelsea, the redlight "West Village" where you really didn't want to end up anywhere near the SROs on the Hudson after dark, and an empty and lifeless Lower West Side (Tribeca). Well, in the case of Tribeca, not much has changed. On the Lower East Side and especially Alphabet City, I remember the shooting galleries near Tompkins Square Park and the junkies and the ancient Eastern European and Italian women who would step over them, shaking their heads, as they walked to temple or church. Chinatown hadn't moved as far west as it eventually would, and there were many more Puerto Ricans in the area. I have a nostalgia for the look of it, for the diversity of it, for the bizarre, surreal condition of those years, but I do not miss the filth and the fear and the terrible poverty of life. People who reminisce and wish we lived in the seventies again, they're very selfish--it is an expression of privilege. The Lower East Side is filthy now! Can you imagine what was like when they were really filthy? You don't want to. You hardly see syringes on the streets these days, because heroin moved to the suburbs about ten years ago when big pharm reformulated oxycontin, but back then there were "rigs" everywhere in the nineties, sometimes floating in buckets full of opaque, pinkish water, one of the more disgusting things I've ever seen.
Why am I writing about the Lower East Side? I came across this piece, which is an articulate and accurate expression of suburban malaise and its discontents, and I have to confess I felt a touch glad when I read you could still buy heroin around Union Square. That triggered a number of memories, of being told I could go as far as Washington Square but that if I went east of Broadway and was caught I would be in big trouble, of venturing east of Broadway, of later trekking with my cousin to real Lower East Side apartments of friends of hers and thinking it was the coolest thing. An unusual and interesting project would have been/would be an ethnography on the heroin culture of the inner cities, before it all vanishes, in places like the Lower East Side, or Seattle, or Downtown Los Angeles/all Los Angeles.
The Blizzard was a total hoax, and it was incredibly frustrating to have the subway shut down for twelve hours. My mother called to remind me that "it wouldn't be a good idea to walk out on the Manhattan Bridge, and, take pictures, or whatever it is you do." Believe it or not, I went out for a few hot toddies at a bar down the block Monday night. It was the rare opportunity one has as an adult to misbehave and to harmlessly flout the rule of law, something I can rarely resist. I discovered a good number of fellow flouters upon arrival, and as usual the bar stayed open until 4. I met a guero--a catch-all term in Mexico for people of pale/light complexion, with "European" features--from Mexico City, who works at an ordinary restaurant in Park Slope. This in itself is odd enough, as people who look "white"--for lack of a better term--are not expected to "work" in Mexico. It is a caste system in many ways similar to what exists in India, and is broadly the case in much of Latin America. If you think we have a class/caste system in the United States, you're right, and we do, but it is essentially a have/have-not system, and upward mobility is highly feasible/expected for the haves. In Latin America, there is a hierarchy and a racial structure--not to say there isn't a racial structure in the US--that is very, very difficult to escape or transcend.
The guero in the bar was immediately of interest to me as it was very clear that this was no run-of-the-mill individual: he had attended a well-known prep school in Mexico City (the equivalent of Trinity or Dalton) and gone on to an equally well-known (and costly) private university. What on earth was this person doing in Park Slope waiting tables?
Well, as Mexicans are prone to do, with the drink, he began to confess, and it's an interesting story: he moved to New York with a girlfriend, as you suspected. The parents did not approve, they're estranged, and there is a substantial amount of money and a position at stake. He has no papers. The couple lived together happily for some time, until they ran out of money and wound up in a flophouse in Sheepshead Bay, where both began to work in the kitchen of an Uzbek restaurant (she's American). If neither worked, neither ate, and over the summer they lived on dollar slices of pizza at Coney Island. They were miserable, but happy together, for a year or two. Then they were miserable and miserable with one another, for another year before they split up, she having found someone new, he devastated. He had grown to love New York, though, and had no interest in returning to Mexico, and so found the job at the restaurant in Park Slope. I can't imagine what the society parents would think had they any idea their educated son had moved into an SRO in furthest Brooklyn with the American girl (of all things!) he ruined himself for, to work in the kitchen of an obscure Central Asian restaurant without papers like a commoner! He said he changes his phone number regularly because his parents have hired private investigators to track him down. He's lived in New York for two or three years.
We talked literature, and he convinced me to pick up a copy of Octavio Paz's long, likely morose essay Labyrinth of Solitude, which I was told "explains Mexico" (I also found a beautiful edition of The Years with Ross, for balance). I'm also reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and may soon reacquaint myself with George Eliot.
Charlus visits New York this weekend, and I can't decide what to do about it. Kim thinks I should avoid him altogether: for her, there is too much to lose with the new job, the stress, who knows what sort of a tantrum he may throw, etc., but I worry more what he might do if I push away the olive branch. It is a tough thing, having relations who are difficult and unstable, and mean. One experiences a mix of guilt, frustration, and anger. General consternation. If there is a nice dinner in it for me, I'll accept. I have mercenary tendencies.
I have to move again, but I do not want to leave my current neighborhood. I love it and I am happy to live in Brooklyn. My current roommates weirdly watched Obama's state of the union, giggling and clucking and chuckling and gasping along with the address like the utter simpletons they are. It was so disconcerting, and they're so foul and filthy--the sink is constantly full of dirty dishes, one is always having diarrhea or vomiting, they cook constantly and the kitchen is always a mess, filth and clutter has spread to the living room like untreated gangrene--and also judgmental and condescending. Sometimes we're talking politics and one or both of them will explain to me some political item or correct me when it is in fact they who are ill-informed, this being as you know an unpardonable offense. I will not endure it for another month, and I'm sure they can find some filthy person who can abide correction better than I.
Grieg--we endure, like Dilsey.
Yesterday I went to the Ivorian restaurant the New Yorker reviewed a few weeks ago. The food was of middle quality--neither succulent nor delicious, but perfectly passable.
The real pleasure: to be surrounded by West African French, and to hear, when a red card was produced in the Atletico Madrid/Barcelona match on the television, shouts of "rouge! rouge!" from the gathered crowd. It's La Savane on grotty 116th.
Friday, January 23, 2015
Wandering around the Met
Friday evenings I am at the Met. I rarely miss a Friday; I find there is very little as soothing as being utterly lost in art.
I spoke with a volunteer who moved to America after the Second War, landed in Bensonhurst, and, because apartments were so scarce (there had been no construction during the War), told me that it was only because a realtor was also a cousin that she found an apartment in Flatbush. She now lives at 90th and York, and has lived there for more than thirty years. I hope to one day become like her, with thirty years in New York to my name.
She also visits the Met every Friday.
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| 2nd Street |
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| 2nd Street |
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| Never seen this before |
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| You Know You've Made It When You Can Commission Original Art! |
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| Zabar's |
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| Max Klinger, Entfuhrung (Abduction), from Ein Handschuh (1881) |
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| Preferred Picasso |
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| The Dream of the Shepherd, Ferdinand Holder (1896) |
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| Boatmen of Barcelona, Dionisio Baixeras y Verdaguer, (1886) |
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| Gandolfi, 1770 |
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| This beautiful instrument may have been made in Staten Island (of all places!) |
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| The Instrument Room |
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| II |
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| Morris Gurrie, Climax in Steel, Chicago 1920-30. At center is the Jewelers Building, from 1925-27 the tallest building west of New York. In the cupola Al Capone ran a speakeasy. |
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| Favorite Thomas Hart Benton faces |
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| Another favorite |
How I Feel Tonight: Mendelssohn / Nathan Milstein, 1954: Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64
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