I’m busy catching up on office-stuff, so the Boston writeup will have to wait till this evening. Meanwhile, here’s a slideshow of Japan pix from the only woman who ever got me to order half-priced sushi! Enjoy!
Bio Logic
I’m off to the BIO conference in Boston, dear readers! Blogging may be pretty light, as I likely won’t have much free time, between exhibit hall hours and dinner. Still, I’ll try to take neat pix, make funny observations, and otherwise entertain you when I’m back.
Whoa,LA
Yesterday, I saw a billboard on the NJ Turnpike:
Forever New Orleans
Open to Just About Anything
Road trip!
Actually, it’s not much of a trip: we have a conference in NYC this week, so I’ll be staying at a little hotel near Times Square for the next couple of nights. Since the exhibit hall doesn’t open till 10am, I should have a little time for blogging in the morning. On the other hand, we’ll also be taking clients out for dinner, etc., so I may be in no shape to write in the morning.
Don’t expect so much outta me, okay?
Bigger Than Tina
On the heels of yesterday’s announcement about Faiz K.’s new baby, another dutiful VM reader has great news to share: my favorite Australian is getting hitched!
No, not Jacko! He’s washed up!
No, not Michael Hutchence! He died under weird circumstances!
No, not Paul Hogan! What happened to him, anyway?
The Australian who’s getting married is none other than Tina B.!
Pictured here at Petra, which is nowhere near Australia! Good luck to her and Brendan (the wedding’s not for another 13 months, but hey)! It just goes to show you, dear readers: Love conquers all, including the Coriolis Effect!
(VM Bonus: Tina took two of the greatest photos of me ever: looking cute, and shitscared.)
Update: After Tina’s protest (see comments), I found a pic she sent of her and Brendan at Lord Howe Island. I’m just glad she remembered that I have those terrible pix of her table-dancing in a C&W bar in Nelson, NZ. Fortunately, no photographic evidence exists of me throwing down to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck:
Yesterday’s meander
I took a half-day yesterday from work. Cousins of my wife were in NYC and we were meeting them for dinner. Rather than risk running late with traffic, I decided to head in early.
Based on the location of the restaurant where I thought we were eating, I parked down in the west Village. As it turned out, Amy’s cousins (Wade, Robin, and Wade’s parents) weren’t interested in Italian that night, so she switched plans and we met up at a BBQ place near Times Square. In-between, I had about 5 hours to meander.
You know what that means: you can just skip this post and check out my collection of photos from the afternoon, or you can read whatever ramblings I come up with as I recollect my walk. If you’re one of those stupid brave souls who wants to stick with me through thick and thin, you’ve been warned.
It was stupidly cold for the first week of April: around 35-40 degrees, after a week of 60-70-degree weather the previous week. I wore a warm coat and grabbed my gloves before I left the house in the morning, so I was taken care of for two-plus-mile walk uptown.
See, dear reader, I actually had a goal for this walk, and it didn’t involve buying a ton of Orwell books over at the Strand. (Sure, I made my obligatory stop there, but it was only to use the bathroom! I swear! Okay, so I spent some time among the art books on the second floor, but I managed not to buy anything.)
People with too much time on their hands Astute readers may recall my recent post about Muji, the Japanese “no brand” company, and its amazing products. The slideshow mentioned that the company has a store at the Design Store at the Museum of Modern Art, so I figured I’d see just how ingenious and wonderful their products are.
Look. I don’t tell you how to live your life, do I?
So I made my way uptown from the Strand. I walked through Union Square, was disappointed that no one was protesting Israel, and decided to give my buddy Mark a call. He’s a public school teacher, and I had no idea if he was on break this week. I left him a message and kept walking.
At this point, around 2:30, I was starting to get pretty peckish. See, I have this tendency to Just Keep Going when that happens, and I know for a fact that this leads to my doing incredibly stupid things, as it appears my IQ and my blood sugar have a linear correlation. I needed to stop somewhere to eat, but my decision to keep “Passover kosher” made this a problem. See, in my incredibly half-assed universe, I’ve decided that I’ll stay off the leavened bread (and ancillary stuff) this week, even though I was heading out for pulled pork and brisket at Spanky’s for dinner. It’s hard work, being this inconsistent.
As it turns out, I was already becoming stupid, because I ended up getting lamb from a street-meat vendor. This was a bad idea both in the short term (when I realized I had nowhere to actually eat the stuff, and had to stand on a street corner while I devoured the lamb, lettuce, tomatoes and onions) and in the long term (when I lay in bed that night gripped by heavy nausea and realizing that, since my wife and I shared our dish at dinner, that my lunch was the culprit). Anyway, the lamb was delicious, though indecorous and mildly poisonous. Since I didn’t get too ill from it (basically, I spent the day feeling hungover), I consider myself a stronger man, and none of you can convince me otherwise.
Mark called back while I was huddled under a construction awning, eating my lunch. We briefly played phone tag, but soon got in touch and made tentative plans to get together once I’d finished up at MoMA.
From there, I decided to walk up Madison till I reached 53rd, at which point I’d head west for MoMA, which is between 5th and 6th. I figured that, since 5th heads south, I’d stick with Madison and if I got too cold, I’d get a cab up to 53rd.
(Bonus VM wisdom: David Gates, one of my favorite contemporary writers, once mentioned a great mnemonic for the easterly progression of avenues in NYC: Fat Men Piss Less, which stands for Fifth, Madison, Park and Lexington. Just try forgetting that one.)
New York is composed of a bazillion neighborhoods and districts, so it’s always possible to discover new sites that everyone laughs at you for never having seen. In this case, it was the Morgan Library, which I’d never heard of. I was impressed by the 36th St. side (here’s a pic from my flickr set), but wasn’t so interested in the modern section on Madison. I’ll have to go back some time to check out the collections and reassess the new section, which was designed by Renzo Piano and is supposed to be All That.
Just because I didn’t spend time at the Morgan doesn’t mean I was in some sort of rush. I had hours before dinner, and was conscious of my tendency to start rushing to get somewhere for no purpose. I just felt that I should save the museum for some other trip, when I’ve some idea of what I’d be looking for there (I think they have some Rembrandt drawings in the collection, which could make it worthwhile).
A few blocks up, I headed over to the south end of Grand Central. I’ve made a few visits to the terminal lately, but I came from the north or west. So I stopped and took some pics of the facade, which was typically glorious. I tried to get angles where “MET LIFE” wasn’t in the background.
Paradoxically, I started to become absorbed by how little I was thinking about myself. By now, you’ve surely guessed that I’m my favorite subject of conversation, among other things. But despite the cold and the wind, I found myself simply enjoying a mid-day walk uptown. There was a background anxiety about making sure I could get together with Mark and still get back to the Village in time for dinner (the plans hadn’t changed at the point), but it wasn’t too pressing. It would sort itself out.
Instead, I just eased into the throng (as it were), making little observations about the styles of retail in this neighborhood, noting the flow of traffic on different blocks, and keeping my eyes open for good photos. (This generally involves buildings. I’d love to take pix of people, but worry too much about getting my ass beat. This afternoon, the town crazy was on his way into our supermarket, and I thought, “I oughtta take a picture of him,” and then thought, “That’s an awfully big walking stick he’s carrying.”)
So there’s no Joycean reverie about NYC for you, dear readers. Just a guy in a nice coat walking uptown, until he reached the Muji section of MoMA’s Design Store. If you wanna find out what I actually bought there, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go through the flickr set. I kept snapping pix as I walked, figuring I’d get up to the Time Warner Center, laugh at it, get a coffee, and call Mark.
He told me that he wouldn’t have time to come down there to meet me, since he was still cleaning up his apartment, and we’d likely only get half an hour together, but if I wanted to come up to his place, that’d be great.
Now, there are two things you need to understand about my reaction to this invite:
a) it involved using the subway, which is fine in theory, but I’m always convinced I’m going to get on the wrong or mislabeled train, and end up on Staten Island;
b) Mark lives in Harlem and, to paraphrase Avenue Q, I’m a little bit racist.
But Mark walked me through the subway setup (that is, which line to pick up, and where to exit the station near his place), and I remained a little bit racist.
See, when I came up out of the subway stop, I saw a neat building, took a picture, and immediately thought, “I shouldn’t show that camera around here.” Why? Because I’m a racist. I was only a few blocks from Mark’s place, and it was broad daylight, but the lack of people in the neighborhood just made me nervous. “But only because I’m wearing a nice coat” and because I’m white. It was utterly moronic of me. Within a block or two, I said, “Mark’s lived here for years, and never had any incident,” and concluded that it’s Just A Neighborhood. But it was one of those instances where my point of view of white-guy-in/from-the-suburbs really made itself known.
Passing a black guy in a tracksuit, sitting on a stoop, I felt a little nervous. Then he smiled and called out to the UPS guy, and I realized, “This is where the guy lives. Don’t be such a douchebag.”
So, of course, I got to Mark’s place, and we shot the breeze for a while about books, friends, economics, his dad, my dad, his dog (whom I got to meet), Harvey Pekar, Robert Moses, Ben Stiller, and Mark’s unexpected invite to the previous night’s Knicks game, which he enjoyed (he’s not a huge basketball fan). Somehow, this all took place in about 30-40 minutes.
Eventually, I got the call that our dinner plans had changed, so Mark joined me on the trip to the BBQ joint. We had a drink at the bar while waiting for Amy, and continued our rambling conversation. It was a nice way to cap the day, since our conversation tends to be very easy. Even when we’re talking about complex subjects, I always have this feeling that Mark’s able to parse my sentences, and that frees me up to speak better. Because it’s rare that I can use a ton of clauses when I speak, and I really do find them necessary to make and qualify my points.
There’s not a lot more to tell. Amy arrived, and the breeze-shooting continued. I took a picture of the two of them, and realized that we need to get a nice pic of Mark, a good-looking guy who doesn’t photograph well in bars. Her cousins soon showed up, and told us about their day-tour in southern Manhattan. A rowdy Yankees fan kept cursing at the TV over the bar, which led me to say, “It’s only the second game of the season, dude. There are 160 more of ’em. Pace yourself.”
But the meal was good, and the conversation was fun. I like getting the perspectives of out-of-towners. Wade’s dad commented about the walk over from Times Square: “There were some burlesque shows over there.”
It was a phrase so astonishingly archaic that I could only reply, “The Square was a lot seedier in the ’70s and ’80s.”
There isn’t much more to write about. I’m really sorry about the lack of introspection, angst or anything else that you’ve come to expect from my posts (literary references, naked chicks, etc.). But it was a nice day, it yielded some good photos, and there’s always the story of how I scorched my finger while trying to put up a cork board earlier today.
Lala
Speaking of world-building and cities (see previous post), I was oddly compelled by this Go Fug Yourself post. It wasn’t just because of the insane fashion choices of its subject (which are great), but because it discusses a phenomenon that’s wholly intrinsic to Los Angeles, a city I’ve managed never to visit and which may as well border Timbuktu, since no pharma-conference will ever schedule an event there (those conferences being the impetus for most of my travel):
Here in Los Angeles there is a group of people (mostly women) who attend almost every event, from premieres to charity functions to the opening of a shoe store. These women are photographed. And we have no idea who they are. Literally. They’re not studio or television or music executives. They may claim to be “actresses” or “models” but they’ve never appeared in anything notable, nor do they have a string of non-notable credits. If they do have credits, usually they’re consistently playing something like “Girl #3.” Sometimes they appeared in Playboy once, but not necessarily. They’re not married to any one notable, as far as we can tell. We really don’t know how they’re getting invited to anything, why they’re being photographed, or how they’re making the money that allows them to keep up with their Botox schedule. They are a mystery, that, until now, we have basically ignored, primarily because no one knows who they are.
And then it gets really funny. Enjoy.
I guess I revel in those things that seem completely normal to the locals but are utterly bizarre to anyone from the outside
No-No-NO,LA
In the last few days, I’ve come across a pair of strange articles about New Orleans.
The first contends that a collection of public-housing buildings should not be knocked down, since they’re pretty nice buildings and just need “full-scale renovations”.
Oh, and the low-income residents shouldn’t be brought back in. Instead, the apartments should be sold to middle-class people, because, um, there are enough poor people in New Orleans already. Seriously:
The feds’ impulse to replace such perfectly good housing takes root in the flawed notion that the buildings are the problem with blighted public housing, not the dependent underclass people who live in it. Most residents of New Orleans’s housing projects paid less than $100 in monthly rent. Even if they weren’t on welfare, in other words, they were essentially dependent on government. Also, the complexes teemed with long-term tenants’ sons and grandsons, who terrorized the projects through violent crime. The failure of the city’s elected leaders to police and incarcerate these criminals long ago turned the projects into killing grounds with their own system of murderous street justice.
And nearly 18 months after Katrina, New Orleans certainly isn’t lacking for an underclass. In fact, the city’s murder rate is once again out of control, mainly due to unparented, impulsive young men shooting other unparented, impulsive young men.
What New Orleans is lacking is enough middle-class and working-class residents, who began leaving the city long before Katrina. Without such citizens, the Big Easy won’t have the committed voters and tax dollars it needs to become a functional, healthy city — something it hasn’t been for decades.
But, amazingly, that’s not the strangest and most insulting assessment I’ve read about the city this week. No, that honor goes to Andres Duany, who says, well, I’ve gotta just let him speak for himself:
I remember specifically when on a street in the Marigny I came upon a colorful little house framed by banana trees. I thought, “This is Cuba.” (I am Cuban.) I realized at that instant that New Orleans is not really an American city, but rather a Caribbean one. I understood that, when seen through the lens of the Caribbean, New Orleans is not among the most haphazard, poorest, or misgoverned American cities, but rather the most organized, wealthiest, cleanest, and competently governed of the Caribbean cities. This insight was fundamental because from that moment I understood New Orleans and truly began to sympathize. But the government? Like everyone, I found the city government to be a bit random; then I thought that if New Orleans were to be governed as efficiently as, say, Minneapolis, it would be a different place — and not one that I could care for. Let me work with the government the way it is. It is the human flaws that make New Orleans the most human of American cities. (New Orleans came to feel so much like Cuba that I was driven to buy a house in the Marigny as a surrogate for my inaccessible Santiago de Cuba.)
Keep reading, because his prescription for the city’s future success relies on this, um, lowering of standards.
Mental Health Day, Part 2
“You can love completely without complete understanding.”
–Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
Mental Health Day
Amy & I had a good time in Seattle. I was much more of a tourist than I was in my first two trips there. We spent plenty of time downtown during this trip, and I barely recall seeing any of that in 2001 or 2002, when I spent more time in neighborhoods, dive bars, and the offices of comics publishers.
If you rolled through my pix already, then you saw that we went up the Space Needle, meandered around the EMP, and took a million snaps in and around the Rem Koolhaas-designed Public Library. Before we got to all that, though, we made time for friends.
We had lunch Thursday with the Brooding Persian, who left Teheran for Seattle a while back. As you may or may not recall (thank gosh for hyperlinks), he went through a pretty rough stretch of mental illness last year. It turns out that he suffers from bipolar disorder, but also had other disorders, stemming from an autoimmune disease that was ravaging his mind. With medication and therapy, he feels that his condition is “under control,” but that’s a far cry from being well. (He gives profuse thanks to you readers who offered suggestions for how best to get help.)
I hadn’t seen him in four years, but it seems that his experiences haven’t aged him outwardly. Inside, though, it’s another story. I wasn’t prepared for his intense, thoughtful pauses, nor for the quietness of his voice. I remember vociferous arguments with him in graduate school, good-spirited but finger-waggingly authoritative. The 2007 edition appeared much more wrapped up in his own thoughts, less certain. I chose to see that as pensiveness, rather than shatteredness or medicated-into-zombie-ness. It’s a tough distinction to make, but I felt there was plenty in him, just more reticence about letting it out.
And as lunch progressed, he started to unfold a bit, expressing stronger opinions about our world and his world. He explained to us that the most important lesson he learned from the last few years was the absolute fragility of human being. All of our will and our drive for self-definition, he said, can be short-circuited so easily (I paraphrase slightly).
At one point, he expressed nostalgia for the highs of his manic phases, in a manner similar to the way some addicts I’ve known pined for the early days of their drug use. Before, of course, It All Spun Out Of Control.
Over coffee, I asked him a question about his favorite book, which I brought with me on this trip. I asked, “How do you understand the role of the gods in the Iliad
It had been a few years since he read it, and he was afraid that gaps in his memory might undermine his response, but he talked confidently about the role of myth in explaining the natural world, of divinities that once expressed the deeper aspects of the mind (I was going to write “psyche” instead of “mind” just now, then realized that she was one of those divinities). We’re both more apprehensive about those passages in which the gods take an active, physical hand in matters, but we glossed over that part and talked instead about fate.
My friend told us about his initial autoimmune diagnosis in 1995, and how his doctor told him he had 10 years left in the world. He said that he lived with that death sentence, embracing life to the fullest, achieving many goals, including a meandering journey across the world. All accomplished, he moved back to Iran, ready to die in his homeland.
Except it didn’t happen. He took ill a number of times over the years, but kept recovering. After passing the decade-mark in relative good health, he found himself trying to figure out “what to do next.” He’s on 12 years now, and he’s still trying to figure that out now, as he pieces himself together.
In a sense, he’s been catching up with his own experiences, trying to recollect his life from the perspective of a non-manic personality. I can’t imagine the struggle that he’s gone through, nor where he goes from here.
As I continue my way through the Iliad, his condition puts me in mind of Achilleus on the beach. As the Achaians implore him to accept Agamemnon’s apology and gifts and return to war, he explains that he knows his fate — or, more accurately, his fates. He knows that he can return to combat, where he will achieve eternal glory, but be killed before the end of the war, or he can pack up and head home to Phthia, achieve less glory, but have a long life.
I think about my friend, and how his sentence was repealed (“postponed”, of course), and wonder how Achilleus would have handled such a situation. Imagine getting to the end of the war, and finding that, your divine mother’s prophecies to the contrary, you were still alive and heading home. What could there be to do after?
The Brooding Persian hasn’t led as eventful a life as Achilleus, but he’s been through plenty over the years, including the Iranian Revolution, madness, and having to deal with the likes of me in seminar.
I was happy to see him, but sad that I couldn’t offer anything beyond my friendship. An older student — well, 7 years older than I am — he had a much more distinct mind than many of our younger friends when we were in Annapolis. He seems almost veiled now, as if his silences, his ineffabilities, are a mist about his head.
Which didn’t stop me from having Amy snap a pic of us outside the restaurant:
And that was lunch. Dinner promised raw oysters and a reunion with my twin brother. Which is to say, more to come. . .