Strange Things I've Seen So far

This is a random, spur of the moment type entry where I'd like to catalogue, for my own enjoyment, the funny and strange things I've seen in the 10 months I've lived in NYC.

--Woman dressed as mermaid, complete with bikini top, lying on the sidewalk outside my office building

--Man dressed in women's thong leotard with fishnet stockings running down the street on the UES

--Man in bright yellow suit/pants with a big fur jacket and neon orange shoes hailing a cab in SoHo

--Group of overweight men and women dancing in the rain outside Penn Station wearing daipers...and nothing else

--Old man in the subway proclaiming that "Jesus Christ was a Negro. That's why black people play football so good!", and "The Bible says: never hit your mama, or God will kick you in the behind. The Bible also says: never have sex with your grandfather", and "All Negroes are Jews. J-E-W-S. All white people are homosexuals."

--Drunk guy in the subway at 2pm chugging a bottle of wine and throwing his empty Coke bottle at other passengers

--A tiny dog dressed in a yellow rainjacket and wearing four black rainboots

--Homeless guy near 8th and Broadway with a sign that says "Voldemort broke my wand. Need money for new wand."

Review of "Path to Power" by Robert Caro

I remember reading part of one of Caro’s books about Lyndon Johnson several years ago and being so disgusted with Johnson that I couldn’t finish the book, and had no inclination to pick up another. Yet over the past month or two I’ve developed a taste for biography, so the first book in the series The Years of Lyndon Johnson, called Path to Power, seemed like a good bet.

I admit that it’s difficult to walk away from the first volume without really disliking Johnson as a person and as a politician. Caro himself, in the introduction, says that all of Johnson’s campaigns were “amoral” and that throughout his life, wherever he was, Johnson was always disliked by nearly everyone – except by those who could help him. What a way for a biographer to introduce his subject.

A couple of scenes that Caro describes of Johnson’s youth stick out in my head: Johnson as a young boy, unable to be the leader of the local sandlot baseball game, takes his baseball and walks home; Johnson as a college man provoking someone to attack him and then running away and falling backwards onto a bed, kicking his feet in the air, saying “Enough! Enough!”; Johnson screaming to high heaven when he’s lightly spanked for doing something wrong.

Of course a reader of Caro’s book is also struck by how talented Johnson was at playing politics. He was incredibly successful at a really young age. Luck had something to do with it; being from oil-rich Texas had something to do with it; having no morals had something to do with it. But there were a lot of amoral, lucky young Texans who didn’t become president.

I’m surprised at how involved Roosevelt was in the political game. I had always thought he had won and kept his power based on his moral superiority. But he couldn’t have been elected to 4 terms without being a master at the same game Johnson played: getting people to do things for him. Though Caro only deals with Roosevelt indirectly, I get the idea that Roosevelt combined ruthless politics with fatherly leadership qualities.

Path to Power ends at the start of WWII, immediately after Johnson failed to steal the 1941 special Senate election in Texas. I’m really looking forward to the next volume, which will detail Johnson’s 1948 election to the Senate – which Caro has already hinted that Johnson stole – and who knows what other shenanigans.

I still detest Johnson this time around, but it’s difficult not to be fascinated by the path his career takes. It reads like a Clancy novel: filled with shady backroom characters and powerful politicians throwing money around to influencing political outcomes. All that’s missing are the terrorist plots and the guns, though I think those will probably show up in the as yet unfinished volume describing Johson's presidency in the the 60s, with the escalation of the Vietnam war.

What do you miss about NYC?

The following question was posed on the New York Times' City Room blog today: What do you miss most about Old New York? A recent emigre to the Big Apple, I was curious to know what the old timers (though not so old - they were reading blogs, after all) would say. The responses ranged from the humorous - "Myself. When I could afford to live there," - to the ridiculous - "The whores on Seventh Avenue."

I was surprised at how many people longed for the Good Old Days, one man saying he missed "The bar in Sheepshead Bay, where clams were a $1 a dozen and PBR at $o.35." Others wished for the time when New York hadn't been spoiled by the "rich white people" at NYU and on the Upper West Side, and when neighborhoods had felt like neighborhoods. One lady seemed almost desperate: "Doesn’t anybody care anymore?"

I guess, as a newcomer to NYC and as someone who was only dimly aware of New York before 2001, the complaints about the present in favor of the Good Old Days seem strange. I can understand, for example, when my own grandfather longs for the simplicity of his countryside childhood. But a New Yorker who complains about the hustle and bustle? I was under the impression that all New Yorkers loved the city's newfound dynamism - that's why people (including me) move to New York in such big numbers.

To me, New York's "Good Old Days" seem impossibly remote and out of place in 2008. I can't imagine the city ever stepping backwards and trying to take itself out of the limelight. It's the thing that you either love or you hate. You feel the energy or hate the crowds, or some combination. But a New York filled with quiet neighborhoods? I wonder if anyone would still want to come here.

Perhaps this responder came closest to the enduring definition of New York. He writes: "The city is always changing and that hasn’t changed."

Subway Performers

In general there are two types of people who solicit donations from passersby on the subway system in New York: beggars and performers. Usually the distinction is clear, though in some cases the line is blurred – I’m thinking in particular of the highly entertaining version of “Amazing Grace”, sung by a ragged old blind man late at night on the F train. Most of the time, though, even people as ignorant as tourists can probably distinguish between beggars and performers. And while I avoid giving money to beggars, I will generally give money to a performer who, I think, has earned whatever small donation I want to give.

For the most part, “street” performers are confined to the sub-street level. The Times Square subway station, like the above-ground Times Square above it, seems to be the hub of subway performances. It is nearly always filled with easily-impressed, quick-to-donate tourists, and usually boasts at least one, and usually more than one, performer or performers.

Walking through that station, I have seen everything from flute playing South Americans to singer/songwriters dressed as butterflies to a man in a wheelchair playing blues on an electric guitar with a harmonica hung from his neck – and they’re all pretty good. Unlike the eager tourists, though, I don’t usually drop money in Times Square performers’ cups. After all, who wants to spend any more time than necessary in a subway station?

Occasionally, the stray performing musician will find his or her way to the surface. I remember vividly a time in my youth when my parents took me to a Broadway show and, after the show, we were among the crowd that gathered around two men who were frantically, and very loudly, beating empty 5-gallon plastic jugs. At the time I remember thinking “this city is really wonderful! It has people who can make music out of jugs!" Of course, the novelty of jug-beating wears off quickly and by now I consider that genre to be mass-market, low-brow entertainment, in the same category as summer blockbuster movies.

Outside Times Square, the diversity of subway station performers varies greatly. There’s a performance spot that’s usually reserved in the 34th street Herald Square station, but the station is always crowded and if I’m in that station I’m usually in a rush to get to Penn Station.

At Prince Street in SoHo there’s an old man who plays the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” over and over again. The first time I heard him play it, I dropped a dollar in his collection cup, but over the following few days I realized that that was his only song. Like any good entrepreneur, he markets his product (a song that everyone will recognize and like) and parlays it into countless one-time donations by tourists and travelers. I’d be more cynical if I didn’t like the song so much. Because really, is it possible to hate “Here Comes the Sun?”

Performers on the subway trains themselves, I think, are even more successful than those in the stations, though whereas the station performers are licensed, the train performers are not. They run the risk of getting ticketed and booted off the train. These performers play or sing for a minute or two and most people, myself included, feel compelled to give them a small donation. My favorite performance has certainly been “Barbara Ann”, of Beach Boys fame, sung by a group of men. For me, any distraction on the subway is a welcome distraction, and if the music is any good, then so much the better.

One of my favorite performers, who I discovered only recently, is a strange-looking ex-hippie with a huge gray beard who stations himself every day for who knows how long on the downtown B, D, and F platforms at the Broadway-Lafayette station. He plays a wooden instrument that he holds like a clarinet and sounds like a flute, but with a richer and more vibrant sound. Most of the time, especially during rush hour, you can’t really hear him above the people and the trains. But when it’s quiet, the sounds and melodies he produces are relaxing and make me think of quiet mountain valleys in dense East-Asian forests. I usually give him whatever coins I have, and the occasional bill.

Not all the performers are competent, though. On the uptown track at Prince Street, there is often a man who has taped modified cooking pans to his chest and leg and sits on a stool hitting them in seemingly random patterns. It’s certainly not music, and only by the broadest definition could you call it a performance. Spectacle, I think, is the better word. Maybe it would be funny if the man didn’t look so serious, and didn’t seem to be trying so hard to beat some sort of rhythm and sound out of the thick metal.

And of course there is the partially blind, stooped old man with a dying, raspy voice that might once have been strong who walks slowly up and down the F train late at night. His insane version of “Amazing Grace” is, like the man hitting the pots, more spectacle than performance. If nothing else it fits the physical appearance of the performer – wobbly, rasping, only slightly resembling the stronger original version.

When I see performances such as those, I wonder how long the performers ride the trains or sit in the stations, and what they do when they go home. I wonder if they perform for pocket money, or if it’s their only source of income. I hope it’s the former.

I once saw a young guitar player dressed like Bob Dylan playing in the Times Square station. He was pretty good, and three or four people had stopped to listen to him. The rest of the crowd moved past him, not seeing him. Several weeks later I saw him playing at a street festival on the Upper West Side – not on a stage, but off to the side, in the shadow of a shop tent near the sidewalk. Three or four people stood listening to him. The rest of the busy crowd moved past him, not seeing him. And I too walked quickly by.

If we only believe in 'Change'

This is an article that I wrote a couple months ago that was published on http://SpliceToday.com. My friend John Lingan is the managing editor there, so check it out if you've got time. I've posted the link to the article at the end:

Andrew Carnegie had only recently immigrated from Scotland when he wrote that the “‘doing of a thing’ because our grandfathers did it … is not an ‘American Institution.’” No one can doubt that Americans’ love of progress has led to many social achievements, Carnegie’s among them, and that each new generation has added its own technological, medical, and social advances. But as time has passed and the rate of new discoveries has increased exponentially, the divide between generations has also widened proportionally. Because of these changes, living conditions have changed far more dramatically in the past 50 years than they did in the 50 years prior to that.

Our desire to break with the past is reflected in some of the generationally oriented rhetoric of the current presidential campaign, where “old” means “bad” and “new” means “good.” The message of change has been so readily adopted by the country’s youth, myself included, that I’m afraid we might not fully realize the ideological implications of living in a culture in which change always trumps experience.

This year’s presidential candidates are pandering to the MySpace/Facebook generation with a message of change, but we understand better than anyone that societal “progression” is not always an unambiguous triumph. We’ve grown up knowing that the same airplanes used to ferry food into Africa also allow children to leave parents behind as they seek their fortunes elsewhere, or for terrorists to use as weapons of mass destruction. Advances in nuclear physics have allowed us to understand our universe better than ever before, while also injecting our lives with a constant, low-level dose of “what if?” fear.

Another upshot of this widening cultural gap, especially for those of us who have never really known life without the Internet, is that we find it more difficult than ever to connect with older generations—our parents, and to a greater extent, our grandparents. Our elders do not need, nor have they ever needed, the type of constant technological upgrading that we have come to view as necessary. Who hasn’t paused before buying an iPhone, Xbox, or similar device, knowing that a newer model would arrive in months? Our grandparents did not abandon products so easily in favor of the new trendy item. They spent most of their lives without the commodities we young adults have come to view as staples. Their generation is simply not geared, as we are, for instant everything—instant information, communication and gratification.

But there are undoubtedly certain benefits to simplification and slowness. A hike through the woods is not enhanced by speed walking, nor do we make a canoe trip better by putting an engine on the back. And there is something quite different, and ultimately more pleasant, about camping in the quiet woods than driving on the interstate in an RV.

In our mad rush to embrace every new technology, we sometimes forget these non-technological pleasures. And by forgetting much of what previous generations enjoyed, we lose an important link between us and our past. This is consequential: what, after all, happens to a society that is so ready, even eager, to dismiss its past?

All of this illuminates an age-old conundrum, but one that our society faces in a much more direct manner: how to bridge the gap between the old and the young without alienating either. The answer isn’t to cleave ourselves completely from the sentiments and rituals of the past and view all innovation as universally beneficial social progress. And it’s not to bind ourselves so tightly to the past that we are unable to step forward into the future.

We must not let the growing technological gap alienate us from the older generations—discarding technologies is quite different from discarding people. After all, the Information Revolution will only grow faster, and before too long we will find ourselves on the wrong end of the generational divide. We must find ways to link ourselves to what has come before, and use that link to guide us as we move forward.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a member of the Reagan Revolution who yearns for the “good old days.” I think that life is better now for more people than it was 50 years ago, but it is also somewhat more complicated. Many of the rules, traditions and rituals that were accepted in the mid-20th century—even in to the 1980s—don’t necessarily apply today. For that reason, it is imperative that we keep moving forward, but not so quickly as to disregard recent history.

Recognizing that stability is an attribute that all societies should share, we must be careful in embracing a political message of Change, Above All Else. Perhaps a more appropriate message, especially in the current political and social climate, would be Change, Based on Experience.

http://splicetoday.com/politics/change-the-only-thing-we-believe-in

Paradise Lost/Frankenstein

O fleeting joys
Of Paradise, dear bought with lasting woes!
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man? did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me, or here place
In this delicious garden?

John Milton - Paradise Lost - Book X

This should be easy...I'm trying to be a good person!

I signed up for an orientation session, set for this past Tuesday, for the volunteer group NYCares. The email that was sent out the day before told me the session would be held at the 'New York Public Library, 45th Street and 5th Ave., from 12-1pm.' Those of you who know me know my compulsion for being on time, so it won't surprise you that I asked my boss if my lunch break could be extended a few minutes to allow for travel time. Even so, in the words of Tucker Max, hilarity did not ensue:

11:40 - Leave work, get on subway

11:50 - Arrive at the corner of 42nd and 5th, perfectly on time

11:55 - Walk into the main public library building, walk to the information desk, ask where the orientation session is to be held. Older lady behind the desk is flummoxed - she neither knows where the meeting is to be held, nor has she ever heard of NYCares. She suggests I talk to security.

11:57 - I ask the security guard if he knows where the meeting is supposed to be held, and he suggests I ask the lady behind the information desk. I say 'She told me to ask you.' He says 'Oh,' scratches his head, and says 'Walk that way' and points towards an open passageway.

11:59 - I walk towards and through the passageway. There are a few rooms that look like conference rooms, but the doors are locked and the lights are off. I'm standing there, perplexed, when someone with an ID card walks by and asks if I need help. I tell him what I'm looking for, and he says 'No, there's no NYCares meeting here. Why don't you try across the street?'

12:00 - I leave the NY Public Library at 42nd and 5th and walk towards the branch across the street, at 40th and 5th.

12:04 - I ask the lady behind the information desk where the NYCares orientation session is; she says 'Oh, it's up on the sixth floor. Take the elevators.'

12:06 - I'm on the elevator, but the elevator doesn't go up to the sixth floor.

12:08 - I get off on the fifth floor and try to take the stairs. The stairs to the 6th floor are locked. I ask a security guard what to do, he says 'go downstairs and ask someone.'

12:10 - I take the elevator back down to the first floor and ask a security guard what the problem is. She says 'You can't go to the 6th floor. It doesn't open until 6pm.' I say 'but I have a meeting that's happening right now.' She says 'Well the 6th floor doesn't open until 6pm.' I say 'can you ask someone?' So she calls on her radio for a supervisor. Time passes....no one answers. I say 'well is there any possible way to get to the 6th floor? I have a meeting that's happening right now." The security guard says 'The 6th floor doesn't open until 6pm.

12:15 - I go back to the information desk. The lady tells me 'oh, well you have to go through the administrative offices and take the staff elevator to the 6th floor.' I nearly cry.

12:20 - Finally, I am on the staff elevator. I have fantasies in my head of arriving at the orientation session, and being told 'Congratulations, Ian, you have passed the first test.'

12:22 - I arrive at the orientation session. There are no congratulations.

12:30 - Having filled out a double sided piece of paper, the "orientation session" ends and I'm free to go.

12:31 - Barely resisting the temptation to fling myself through the window and plunge to an untimely, gruesome death, I walk towards the staff elevator. Adding to my troubles, I accidentally get off the elevator too soon, somehow ending up in a maintenance corridor.

12:35 - Before heading back to work, I decided to relax and read a book in Bryant Square at 42nd and 6th for a few minutes. I realize that I'm very envious of those close enough to the park to sunbathe during their lunchbreaks. I lounge leisurely for a few minutes, but before I make it to the safety of the subway I am subjected to yet one more aggravation. Sitting in the middle of the park's lawn is a 30ish male professional, shirt off, flexing his huge muscles as he basks in the sun's glow. I really want to give him an open-handed slap right on the stomach, but am afraid he might then proceed to crush my skull between his pectoral muscles. I walk harmlessly by.

1:10 - I arrive back at work. I am barely alive, but feel better about myself for having passed through the volunteer gauntlet.