MS 11/21/09: Williamsburg Bridge
Ran over the Williamsburg Bridge and back today. Saw seven (7) ironic mustaches, two (2) non-ironic pairs of legwarmers and one (1) Scottie dog.
MS 11/20/09: Miss!
A gang of teenage boys stood in a clump around the subway stairs. As I forced a path through them, one of them said, ‘Look out, Miss!’ and I stopped short instinctively. ‘Watch out for that dried water there!’ he said, pointing at a wet patch of sidewalk, and they all giggled.
At the 5th Ave. station, a woman handed out fliers at the top of the escalator. ‘Breakfast sandwich, only $3.99. Breakfast sandwich, only– Excuse me, Miss! Are you gonna pick that up!?!’ Every woman under 40 (including me) stopped short and wheeled around to see what they had dropped, and the entire throng of commuters staggered back a step.
MS 11/19/09: Commute
Today, I had to rise at the ungodly hour of 7:30am, and commute with swarms of anachronistic non-freelancers during rush hour. And I remembered something: NYC is hell. I had forgotten it, so rarely do I have to fight my way into or out of a business district during prime commuting time.
MS 11/18/09: Kids, Crime
Yesterday, as I waited for the train, a young boy ran in circles around me and the pillar I was leaning on. He was using a pencil as a pretend gun (and holding it ridiculously, I might add), and making explosion noises, and trotting up and down the narrow strip of platform between my knees and the tracks. One nudge, and that would have been it for him. It’s amazing children ever reach adulthood.
Last night, there were nearly two dozen cop cars zooming around Greenpoint where McGuinness passes under the BQE. Every pedestrian out was trying to figure out what was up. I passed a nest of stopped cop cars, but didn’t want to rubberneck too long. When I got to class, a guy said he’d been on his way when he saw a guy run by, and then a fleet of cops with their guns drawn charged toward him, screaming at him to get out of the way. I wonder what the fleeing man had done.
MS 11/17/09: Trust
A guy with a body like a spaghetti noodle and Warhol hair trotted alongside a lovely, stylish, and utterly fed up-looking Asian woman in boots and tights. ‘It’s not that I don’t trust you,’ he whined. ‘It’s just that you always threaten me, so I caaaan’t trust you!’
On the train, a very young guy with acne scars and unfocused eyes danced wildly holding the hands of a baby in a carriage propped between his knees. He giggled and tossed his head back and forth, and pushed his face down close to the baby. The baby had the exact look you have when dealing with a temporarily amusing drunk person who you fear could blow any minute.
MS 11/16/09: Affectionate Gestures
A bald man sat on a subway bench, and a very short woman stood in front of him, rubbing her hands in circles on both sides of his head, and cooing.
MS 11/13/09: Errands Day
Today in the laundry mat, I opened a washer, only to find it full of clothes. Thinking it was finished laundry, I pushed the door to and started loading up another machine. A pretty young blond Polish lady came over, shut the door I had opened firmly, turned around and shot me an extended glare as if I had just straight up pissed in her cereal. She then put her laundry detergent back behind the counter, and barked at the Korean teenage girl on staff, ‘This here mine. Don’t let nobody take.’
‘Yours?’ repeated the girl, confused.
‘Yes. This. Mine. Don’t let nobody take,’ the woman repeated, and left.
After that, I went to the grocery store, and I was rounding the end of the dairy aisle, I heard some major carrying on behind a swinging door. A woman in a white butcher’s apron was prancing back and forth, texting, and jubilantly singing something mocking in Spanish, and totally cracking herself up. She was totally cracking up another butcher, as well, who had his back to her and was using a cleaver to hack at hunks of red meat strewn all over a table.
‘Spanish spanish spanish spaaaaanish,’ sang the woman. ‘Ha, ha, ha, HA!’
‘Woo, ai, ai,’ agreed the man, swinging his cleaver.
‘Spaaaaanish, spaanish, duh-duh-dum, Spanish, heee hee hee heee,’ sang the woman.
‘Mwah, huh, huh, huh, HUH!’ shouted the man, hacking away.
I really wanted to work there, suddenly.
MS 11/12/09: Annoyances
One of the many annoyances of living in NYC is that a production shoot will frequently interrupt your daily routine. Today was a freezing cold, windy and rainy day, but for some reason, everybody was shooting in Greenpoint. Some project had trailers parked all up and down Driggs Ave., but I didn’t see anyone out in the weather, other than a few workers taping down wires. Then, there was a commercial shooting at the track. A little tent had been erected next to the track, and about ten people and all their equipment huddled under it. A guy dressed like a referee stood out on the track opposite four muscular dudes in summer running gear, who posed squatted down as if about to race. They must have been freezing. An aide with a showy sense of urgency stopped me and requested I run around behind the tent, so as not to mess up their shot, so I had to squelch through the mud, dodging trees and benches, every time I did a lap.
Exiting the food court adjacent to the Lex & 53rd subway station, an Indian guy in some sort of food industry uniform chased two Hispanic guys who both wore a different restaurant’s uniform. ‘Mexico, Mexico, everybody from Mexico!’ the Indian guy was saying, while the two other guys rolled their eyes at each other, and clearly tried to out-walk him. ‘I love tacos! But I am just not [unintelligible]. Seriously, Mexico is a beautiful country, a gorgeous country.’
On Park Avenue, a car failed to go promptly at a green light, causing several cars to lay on their horns for a good long while, which in turn interrupted the phone conversation of a thin blond woman whose tweed pencil skirt met her black leather boots in a perfect horizontal line across her kneecaps. ‘It’s just so loud here,’ she screamed into the phone. ‘It is just too loud, I mean. This whole city, I don’t – this city is so…loud, and I really, I feel sorry for people who have to…’
MS 11/11/09: RIP
Blowsy tourist lady on Madison Ave. screaming into her cell phone:
‘So, then where are you, where do you wanna meet? Oh, and Amelia said something about, uh, Ranger, so I told her Ranger got sick and died.’
MS 11/10/09: Ribbons
A very thin young Hassid arrived at the exercise area next to the running track, and shed his black coat and cap. In his vest, shirtsleeves, slacks and tendrils, he spent some time in a standing position, swinging his thin legs in nearly complete circles, dancers’ arcs, with much enthusiasm. People on nearby benches stared.
On my next revolution, he was bent over backwards walking his hands down the spindly trunk of a tiny yellow-flowered tree, attempting to get into a full backbend (I guess). He got about halfway.
On my next revolution, he was hanging by his knees from the overhead bars, with his tendrils hanging straight down, and also his thin thighs and arms, and also the four long strings of his special penile guard (which was also hanging upside down, abandoning its post). He appeared to be a collection of strands and ribbons, and his limbs were like ribbons he was pitching in all directions.
On my next revolution, he was sitting in half-lotus on the grass, holding a cigarette in a fancy way – with his hand extended palm up.
MS 11/9/09: Wall Street
I had to go all the way down to the Financial District today, which hasn’t happened since…ever. Now that I think about it, it was the first time I’d been down in that particular area, and I was sad I didn’t have time to linger. I saw the Stock Exchange, with a massive security cordon out front and tons of tourists snapping shots, and Trinity Church, and Federal Hall, with the big bronze statue of George Washington out front. He had a little cardboard sign in his hand, which read ‘Free Bonuses!’ Several of the streets (which are narrow and cobbled, in an oddly quaint way) were shut down as pedestrian walkways, which was nice. The tourists were all in tight clumps, so they were easy to circumnavigate. I didn’t pass the Wall Street bull statue, but I did see a vendor selling mini Wall Street bulls decorated in different patterns for “only” $10, which I thought was stupidly high. Although I only walked around down there for about ten minutes total, during that time, not one, but two older men came up to me, despite my headphones and lack of eye contact, to ask hopefully if I might need some directions, miss. (New Yorkers really love to give directions, particularly to young women.) And there was a man wearing a sandwich board, which said something about corporate greed and American capitalist repression, but what I really noticed was the young man interviewing the sandwich-board wearer and taking notes on a little pad. Undoubtedly sourcing local color in hopes of selling a freelance article somewhere. Everything down there looked as overall gray as Dorothy’s Kansas, but that might have just been the weather, or possibly my psychological response to anywhere money is actually made.
I’ve Been Reading: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar Cabral is a doughy, sci-fi loving virgin. His sister, Lola, is a tough, pragmatic survivor of her own rebellious youth, and his mother, Beli, is an even tougher survivor of her own romantic past and of the brutal and repressive Trujillo regime. The women are as resilient and capable as Oscar isn’t. Lola reinvents herself as the traditional American success story; Beli survives brutal violence and comes back kicking; but Oscar can’t even manage to kill himself effectively. The Carbral family has its origins in the restive Dominican Republic, and has since resettled in New Jersey, bringing with them plenty of baggage and a possible curse from their ancestral land. The Cabrals love hard, lastingly and disastrously, and the unlikely Oscar exemplifies this family trait most of all.
Narrated primarily by Yunior, Lola’s well-meaning but hopeless playboy suitor, the novel’s energetic and entertaining voice is perhaps its strongest element. Diaz writes with enthusiasm, sweeping the reader along through multiple generations, from the DR to Brooklyn to Jersey and back, with quick jumps down to footnotes which ground the reader in the Dominican history of which the narrator candidly assumes our ignorance. Junot Diaz is a solid writer, whose future work I won’t hesitate to pick up, but I wouldn’t number his book among my favorites, and I doubt it will stay with me long. Diaz has original voice down and handles his material with skill and authority…but I’m not sure the material he’s handling is anything much, and his characters are cartoonish types (particularly the women). The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a fun read, but for me, it doesn’t get at anything that resonates, and I’m unconvinced it has much real depth despite the accolades it has received.
Mulberry Street 11/6/09
A painfully awkward-looking guy in skinny jeans, and a precise-looking girl in tights and ankle boots shopped for fruit at the corner store. I would guess they were on about a fourth date. They blocked the entryway.
Girl: ‘Should we get fruit and other stuff, or…do you think…’
Guy: ‘I mean…I don’t really…’
(Long pause, during which other shoppers pushed them further into the store.)
Girl: ‘Ok, well, let’s just get fruit then, and that’s it.’
Guy: ‘Ok! Yeah!’
Girl: ‘Oh, God, I don’t even know. Do we need something for like a base, like juice, or…’
Guy: ‘…’
Girl: ‘Well, I guess we should get apples, yeah?’
Guy: ‘…’
Girl: ‘Should we, do you like red delicious apples?’
Guy: ‘Sure. Oh, sorry.’
Me: ‘Excuse me.’
Girl: ‘These are my favorite kind of apples, actually!’
Guy: ‘Yeah?!’
(Another long pause.)
Girl: ‘What? What are you laughing at?’
Guy: ‘Nothing! I just think it’s really funny that we’re making smoothies.’
Girl: ‘We are not making smoothies!’
Guy: ‘Yeah, I know. But like (mumble) funny if we were.’
Girl: ‘Should we get a mango? Excuse me.’
Me: ‘Oh, sorry.’
Girl: ‘Mango?’
Guy: ‘…’
Girl: ‘These are hard, though. It would need to be soft. Um…’
Guy: ‘…’
Girl: ‘Well, I’m going to get a carrot.’
Mulberry Street 11/5/09
On the G-train, a middle-aged white guy in construction clothes with a push-broom mustache and summerteeth screamed at his copy of the New York Post.
‘Oh, Jesus! That’s what you get for hanging with Giuliani!!’
I’m guessing he was perhaps remarking on this story?
It’s been a big week for NYC – Halloween, marathon, election, and I think there was some sort of sports thing that got people all wound up. Also, my roommate and I conducted (and concluded) a successful apartment search this week — no mean feat, I assure you. TGIF.
Mulberry Street 11/4/09
A quiet day along my route – I looked high and low, but saw nothing of interest.
However, entering the subway tunnel for my commute home, I immediately spotted a large gold-colored teardrop earring with a black stone in the center lying on the ground. I looked around a little, and sure enough, a bit to my left was a woman in a matching earring. I handed her the one I found, and went back to my position. Another woman, who was standing in between me and the woman with the lost earring, said something to lost-earring woman, who laughed. And then the woman who’d spoken said something to me.
‘Huh?’ I said, removing my headphones (I can’t hear a thing with them on).
‘I said, you are very observant,’ she repeated.
So, I suppose this blog series is already having the intended effect!
Mulberry Street 11/3/09
There is a cat that watches me from the other side of the fence behind my house. It is small and black-and-white, with green eyes and lots of whiskers, like a catfish. This morning, it was watching another black-and-white cat make its way slowly across our back patio. This strange cat was huge and fat and slow moving. It walked over to a bunch of stuff covered in blue tarp, and sniffed and licked all along the edges, slowly. Then, it disappeared behind the tarp. The little cat jumped in concern, and leapt over the fence. It ran over to the tarp, and started meowing. The big cat stuck its head out and looked at the little cat. The little cat’s meows turned to screams. Slowly, and by degrees, the big cat emerged from the tarp, all while the little cat kept yowling at it. They moved into the center of the patio and sat down facing each other. The little cat yowled repeatedly while the big cat silently considered him. Eventually, I banged on the window.
Later, on a busy street corner, a pinched-looking blond woman in a quilted jacket bawled out a nicely dressed little girl. ‘That’s disgusting!’ screamed the woman. ‘How dare you!?! Do you think that man on the train was (unintelligible), is that what you think?’ The little girl was methodically eating candy stickers off a large sheet of wax paper from Dylan’s Candy Shop. She said nothing, and ignored the screaming woman as best she could. So did a swarm of humiliated-looking business men trying to squeeze past them.
Mulberry Street 11/2/09
In an attempt to combat my habitual blindness to my everyday surroundings (and to give me something more positive to focus on than how irritating everyone around me is), I am going to try to take note of at least one interesting thing per day and describe it on this blog.
G-train conductor: “We are approaching the final stop on this G-train. When you exit the train, please be sure to take all your belongings with you, as well as any refuse, plastic drink receptacles, food containers and etc. On behalf of the train crew, we would like to thank you for riding with MTA, New York’s premier choice in public transportation.”
Lots of people all around Midtown East today wearing marathon completion medals.
Outside my office building, I saw an elderly man with a long, snowy beard, wearing a hunter green windbreaker and bike chain as if he were a bike messenger. He was too old to be a bike messenger, however, and was standing sadly astride his bike, which was painted black and had odd, red streamers coming out of the handle bars, and which had fallen over in the street. He stood there for a bit, looking around him mournfully, then remounted and wobbled up Madison Ave.
I’ve Been Watching: Where the Wild Things Are
Max (newcomer Max Records, who looks for all the world like Ellen Page) is pissed off. His sister has outgrown him, and, while his mother pays attention to him, is affectionate and always takes his side in things, still, she’s dating a guy, and she has money troubles. So Max runs off into the streets in a temper fit and crawls around in a storm drain, during which cooling-off period he visits the wonderful island of the Wild Things, which every American child will surely recognize from Maurice Sendak’s picture book.
Life on the island is…really, really emo. The Wild Things have got, like, mad conflict, but it’s conflict of the vaguest sort. The type of conflict an author might inject into a story if that author knows plot is traditionally driven by interesting characters with interpersonal “issues,” but isn’t entirely sure what those issues might be about, or what form they might take (hi again, Dave Eggers!). So, we have the main couple of Wild Things – Carol (James Gandolfini) feels abandoned, because KW (Lauren Ambrose) has made new friends and keeps moving away, because she’s really unhappy with Carol, for some reason. And these new friends just really get Carol’s goat…again, for some reason. Meanwhile, the rest of the Wild Things either cower in sulky despair or cynically comment on the inevitability of all this once again turning out poorly (“all this” being the rumpus, a dirt clod fight, building a giant fort). The Wild Things are clearly aspects of Max’s world, but it’s impossible to keep tabs on who represents what. Carol starts out as father figure, then becomes Max, sort of, and KW at first seems to represent Max’s sister, but then becomes very much a mother figure. The other Wild Things seem a little extraneous – there is the tart-tongued skeptic (Catherine O’Hara) and her boyfriend, and the timid one, and one that doesn’t speak until the end, probably because nothing could be thought up for him. You can read whatever you like into any of them. Max seems to like them, most of the time. They kind of like him, except when they don’t, and they sort of like each other, then they don’t. They are by turns threatening and harmless. They have eaten all of the ‘kings’ that came before Max, but for some reason, they are ultimately affectionate toward him.
Apparently, the Wild Things suffer from loneliness and sadness…although, again, why that is isn’t at all clear. All of this nothingness is discussed at length in the vaguest of terms, punctuated by even lengthier weighty, significant pauses, wherein Max and the Wild Things stare deeply into each other’s eyes for seriously about twenty-five-freaking minutes, pondering some point that hasn’t just been made. Then the soundtrack swoops up – Karen O vocalizing in a distractingly jarring way – and everybody runs around and screams for ten minutes or so, until it’s time to have a Very Important Talk again.
Granted, all of this happens against lovely backdrops of landscapes in moody, autumnal colors, but don’t get too attached to the scenery, folks: this world is on its way out. Carol gives Max a tour of the island, and as he points out each dessert and forest, he explains how things used to be lusher, bigger, more reliable. Max repeats a bit of doomsaying earlier imparted by his science teacher, that the sun is dying, which Carol thinks can’t possibly be true. Throughout the whole movie, there’s an overarching tone of ‘well, we’re all just about done here, right?’ As if, whether in real life or in fantasies, whether on Earth or on Max’s island, in familial relationships or community building (or, for that matter, script writing and adaptation), nobody is really even trying anymore. Which is part of what makes this movie seem particularly current – it is a movie that, in my opinion, could only have been made in the late 00’s.
WTWTA has been a long time in coming, partly because Sendak’s book is so thin on plot, dialogue, character and premise. It could be fleshed out in any direction, so long as the basic heart and beloved details are preserved. And so, Eggers and Jonze could have taken this any which way, and they don’t seem to have conclusively picked a definite direction. But the few themes they did settle on – the sun is dying, we can’t talk to each other, we need a ‘king’ to take away the sadness – are telling. The prevailing mood in Max’s world is the prevailing mood in contemporary American letters. This version of WTWTA isn’t interesting as a movie, but it is very interesting as flypaper for the themes in vogue at the present time, and if a screenwriter were to make a version of Sendak’s tale every ten years or so, it would be a cool barometer for seeing where we are and what we’re concerned with.
Apparently right now, it’s environmentalism and personal estrangement. And boredom.
I’ve Been Reading: Wetlands
Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands is a novel about a girl and her asshole. No, really – exhaustively and all the way through, this novel centers on 18-year-old Helen Memel’s butchered asshole. Having nicked something major during her regular and highly involved shaving routine, Helen is lying in a hospital bed “with my skirt hiked up and my underpants pulled down, ass toward the door.” But she’s not embarrassed about that, or anything else. While she lies there in recovery, Helen ruminates obsessively on her favorite themes – her body, its byproducts and the fun she can have with them. All of this is shockingly explicit, but if you ask yourself why it’s shocking, being (as it is) so utterly everyday and banal a subject (essentially, a long version of ‘everybody poops’), you get closer to Roche’s ultimate purpose.
Wetlands is essentially a protest novel. Helen is merely particularly interested in her body; Roche, on the other hand, is furious that Helen’s interests and comfort with herself could be as rare and shocking as they (to many) are. True, all bodily functions are hidden, but some are more hidden than others – specifically, women’s. Roche’s target here is the sanitized woman: society’s obsession with hair removal, its primitive taboos about menstruation and vaginal cleanliness, its commercial tendency to tiptoe around women’s genitalia with cutesy, pink crap, as though vaginas themselves are an inside joke.
Undoubtedly, bodily secretions are nothing to be ashamed of; whether or not they are interesting is another question altogether. As Helen prods, picks at and wipes herself continuously, the book becomes tedious. Other people’s fluids, like their dreams and their college photo albums, are ultimately of no interest to anyone but themselves. Helen also has family drama and a new love interest, and she is scared and alone and putting on a brave face, but these plot points were clearly thought up after Roche settled on her theme. They feel tacked on, and the ending takes a leap into the surreal that is entirely unjustified by the chapters leading up to it.
Which isn’t to say Wetlands doesn’t have something to offer. Helen is an endearing and original character. And as a feminist howl, the book succeeds – Roche’s point is certainly a valid one that needs to be made more often. Still, she probably could have made it just as well in a ten-page short story.
I’ve Been Reading: Atmospheric Disturbances
Rivka Galchen’s surreal tale of psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein’s search for his missing wife, Rema, is an absolute joy to read. In fact, it’s probably one of my favorite books I’ve read this year.
One day, Rema comes home with a puppy, and Leo immediately realizes that his wife has been replaced by a nearly identical simulacrum. But where did she go, and why, and who is this new person bent on impersonating her? Leo’s determination to recover his true love and crack the mystery of his disappearance takes him to Argentina, to the home of Rema’s estranged mother, Magda, and then to remote Patagonia, with the Doppelganger dogging his every step. Behind all of these strange happenings lurks Tzvi Gal-Chen, the mysterious research meteorologist of the Royal Academy of Meteorology, who has possibly hired Leo to battle the evil 49 Quantum Fathers.
The novel charts one man’s struggle to retain his grip on reality, but really, it is about love — its subjectiveness, its inexplicableness, the ways in which we make it up and find it and lose it and manufacture it again. Galchen’s novel brings to mind Borges and Kafka, but it also reminded me of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Atmospheric Disturbances is hilarious and involving with not a single boring passage, and I highly recommend it.
___
(By the way, Galchen is one of those entirely hateable people – she’s an M.D. with an MFA from Columbia, and she looks stunning [and about 25] in her book jacket photo. Fuck her, am I right?)
