Category: Urban issues

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Will I never learn?

Oh, sure, I know you all think it’s easy being me. I know how you envy the dashing, romantic, debonair life of a pharmaceutical trade magazine editor who lives in a quiet, no-restaurant town a little beyond the suburbs. But it’s not all wine and roses, I tellya!

Take today, for example. Last night, I crashed at a friend’s apartment on 13th St. so I could get to an 8:30am presentation at the Waldorf. No problem, except that the presentation went on till noon with a short coffee break. That ran out of coffee. So I grabbed some scorched Starbucks in the lobby and figured I’d get something to eat on the way back down to the garage where I’d parked the night before.

Unfortunately, it was awfully cold out, and I’d forgotten that there aren’t any restaurants up around the Waldorf. I figured I’d pass on the street-meat kiosk, since I wouldn’t have anywhere to sit down and eat, and caught a cab down to 13th St.

Perhaps I was getting a little punchy with hunger, but I thought, “Well, as long as I’m in the area, I may as well stop in at the Strand on the way back to the car.”

And that’s where my troubles began.

See, dear reader, it’s one thing for me to go without food (and with crappy coffee) for a while. It’s another to be in a low blood sugar mode while walking around a giant used bookstore.

Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of the Strand, in part because it’s not a very serendipitous bookstore for me. For some reason, I can’t just meander around, pick something up, and start unspooling creative threads all around the labyrinth of the mythocreative mind. Maybe the shelves are too tall in the sides of the store, or the selections are too extensive. I’m not sure. But I have far greater luck when I go to a place like the Montclair Book Center.

That said, I usually find books to buy at the Strand. I just don’t find inspiration.

So I picked up a bunch of books today, including a collection of journalism about Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya, some gifts for friends, and a couple of discounted comic collections. I began my trek to the checkout line, resigned to carry both a bag of books and my work-bag (laptop inside) a few blocks along 13th to my friend’s place, where I would pick up my overstuffed overnight bag (Amy stayed last night too, which cut her morning commute from 2 hours to 10 minutes) before walking back down the block to the car.

And that’s when I saw it:

Yep: 11 volumes of the 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell edited by Peter Davison (reviews here). Never released in the U.S., and exorbitantly expensive to order from the UK.

So, minutes later, I found myself slinging my work-bag over my shoulder and hauling 2 enormous bags of books down 13th St. Where the overstuffed overnight bag awaited. Somehow, I got back down the block with all 4 bags; my slanted shoulders were not happy and kept shrugging the non-Strand bags off. But I got to the garage, picked up my car, and figured I’d just get out of NYC and get something to eat back in NJ.

I spent the next 45 minutes sitting in various stages of traffic and regretting that decision. Only two things got me through the trip home: the promise of White Manna and Howard Stern playing an audio clip of David O. Russell flipping out on Lily Tomlin. And $125 in Orwell books. Okay, so maybe it is pretty easy being me. I’ll shut up now.

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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.

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Random Seattle Stuff

Last night I remembered that, on my first trip to Seattle (August 2001), I almost decided to stay based solely on two factors: the summer weather here is gorgeous, and the sell Cherry Coke in 1-liter bottles.

On that first trip, it took me three days before I saw any black people. I’ve seen a bunch already this trip, even though the first black guy I saw that time, Sonics coach Nate McMillan, has moved on to Portland. Not sure if there’s been any demographic shift, or if the downtown area I’m staying in is more “urban” than the neighborhoods I generally hung out in on my other trips.

There’s a lot of construction downtown.

Ambien will help you get 7-8 hours of sleep even if you took a 5-hour nap earlier in the day.

That is all. We’re heading out soon to meet up with my buddy, the Brooding Persian, for lunch. Later, it’s on to the Flying Fish to drink and dine with a bunch of Amy’s friends, along with a cameo by another of my buddies from Annapolis.

I took a couple of pictures yesterday, but haven’t had time to process them and post, so you’ll have to wait on that. Our hotel’s kinda near the Space Needle, so I promise to get a bunch of pix of that and the EMP before long. And, of course, we’ll visit the co-located Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, even though the balloting is totally driven by RBI totals. . .

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Lazyday and Operawoman

I’ve been working pretty hard all week on the March ish, so I’m kinda tired out at this point. Plus, the wound on my right hand has made me contort my typing style all week, and that’s led to a weird pain in my right pinkie-finger. Grr.

Anyway, I finished Snow earlier today, and was much less interested in the last third than I was in the first two-thirds. A lot of what made the character of Ka interesting was lost when the object of his desire returned his affection. It made the rest of his actions driven almost solely by his lust, which drained any novelty from his character. Oh, well.

We’re headed off to Seattle next week for another wedding, so I’ll need to figure out what book I’m taking along with me for the trip. Maybe Dead Souls, which I’ve never read, but which was given to me as a gift on a previous Seattle trip.

Tonight, Amy’s treating herself to opera-night: Eugene Onegin at the Met. I’ll  occupy myself without drinking between 8pm and 11 or thereabouts. I’d like to stay up around Lincoln Center, but I don’t think there’s a ton for me to do, beyond my retailnaut exploration of the Time Warner Center.

So I may head down to the Village and see the Kochalka opening at Giant Robot. Or I can haunt Veselka and get all caffeinated for the evening. Since it’ll be a night-visit, I can’t promise any good pix, but I’ll do my best, dear reader.

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The City and a Man

The links are going to go dead in a few days, so if you’re interested in Robert Moses, historical revisionism and crypto-Oedipal conflicts, and the landscape of New York (and who isn’t?), you need to check out these two articles from the NYObserver and the NYTimes.

First, though, you should read the Atlantic Yards Report post on this revisionism (which led me to the articles), and how it’s being used (sorta) to justify Ratner’s plans for Brooklyn.

Oh, and read The Power Broker, which is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read.

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Mid-week Recap

(Oh, just check out the pictures instead.)

I meant to write a little recap of Wednesday-Thursday this morning, but got derailed by various circumstances, including writing that piece about Jews buying Chryslers.

Anyway, here’s the skinny: official VM buddy Paul Di Filippo was in NYC for a reading Wednesday night at the KGB Bar. I had a press event in the city Thursday morning, and the pharma company that was hosting it kindly got me a room at the Royalton so I could attend the meeting in full bright-eyes-and-bushy-tail-itude.

I got into the city pretty quickly, but that turned out to be my undoing. See, I got in so soon (around 5:30), I actually got caught up in traffic of cars leaving mid-town. So the last few blocks took almost as long as the vroom from Ramsey to 57th St.

After I checked in, I started to walk from 44th to 4th. It was cold as bejesus, so I figured I’d just meander a while until I got too chilly and then get a cab. I walked down 5th Ave. for two blocks when I noticed the glorious sight of Grand Central Terminal, with the Chrysler Building looming behind it. I couldn’t remember ever having been to Grand Central (I’m sure Mom’ll be able to remind me of at least one trip there), so I decided to walk through it.

It’s a gorgeous building, inside and out. I looked up at the painting of the (reversed) constellations, and wistfully thought about reading Little, Big last year in Paris. The commuters (it was around 6:15) were like the flow of commerce commuting into the personal, like hundreds of superheroes hurrying into MTA phone-booths to shed their costumes and restore their secret identities. I felt a little heady, and found that I was pivoting and turning liquid to avoid men in suits hurrying by, women with bluetooth earpieces talking to distant children.

Coming out the other side of the terminal, I walked another four or five blocks south, but the cold was just sapping me, so I hopped in a cab and sped the rest of the way to the village.

A year or two ago, a friend of mine asked me if I go to readings down at “that socialist bar in the village.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, before the KGB-aspect dawned on me. I never thought the KGB was equatable with socialism; I thought it was more like a state-sponsored terror apparatus, but hey. I told her that I’d never been to a reading at KGB, and that socialism gives me hives.

I admit that I reflexively bristled when I saw the hammer & sickle flag hanging above the bar. I had my usual thought-experiment about how well the place would be received if it hung a swastika in place of that Soviet banner. Then I thought about how the Hungarians made that great park of their old Soviet statues, and converted the stuff into memorabilia. I figured the Hungarians earned the right to goof on this stuff, but I still felt a little tweaked at the hipster-idea that it’s funny to have an NYC bar named after the KGB.

But guess who’s reading too much into things?

Amy was waiting for me at the bar, as was Paul & his partner Deb. There was much rejoicing, even though we’d seen each other less than three weeks earlier. Paul insisted on introducing me to numerous publishers and editors, even though I’ve been out of the publishing game. It was nice to talk shop a little, and I was happy to hear how other people were able to make it work far better than I ever did.

Eventually, Amy’s buddy and former roommate Carl showed up, and we all drank Baltica 4 beer to celebrate the occasion. It wasn’t a bad beer, even though I’m not a beer guy. My problem is, if I have even one beer or wine, I can’t transition over to my drink-of-choice, so I’m stuck.

Paul then read from his new novel, a chapter about a husband and wife in 2006 who keep timeslipping into a brother and sister from decades earlier. It had some good passages, as well as parts that were more cinematic and only transitioned into print with difficulty. For the most part, I enjoyed Paul’s performance.

The second reader was Ysabeau S. Wilce, who read an entertaining selection from her first novel Flora Segunda, Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), A House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog. It was quite a trip. Carl won a complimentary copy, which bummed Amy out because now she’ll have to buy one for herself.

Following the readings, we shot the breeze for a while in the bar, until a group of us filed out for a late (9pm) dinner at a Chinese restaurant on St. Marks. Ellen Datlow, an SF editor, took it upon herself to order for our table, while I took it upon myself to make conversation by rambling with a British SF editor and game-publisher. We were treated to some fantastic dishes (“treated,” because the British editor elected to pay out bill, over our objections), including pumpkin croquettes and stir-fry lotus root. Amy was in tears over the deep fried strips of beef. “It’s like cracklin!” she cried.

Following dinner, Amy & I finally made our way back to the Royalton, where we promptly collapsed. It’d been a long day for us both.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get much sleep. Although the room looked wonderful (see the pics), the bed itself was as hard as concrete. In addition, construction in Times Square meant there was a near-constant level of noise through the night. It was like having a garbage truck outside the window, except we were on the 11th floor.

I thought this would put me at a disadvantage the next morning, when I met the pharma company and other business-press people at breakfast. But I discovered that their dinner had gone somewhat late that night, transitioning into a night out for some.

So I was able to fortify myself with a half-dozen coffees, a danish, and smoked salmon and bagels. It reminded me of that multi-month stretch last year where the only things I drank were water, black coffee and gin. I mentioned this to one of the pharma-execs, who laughed nervously.

I’ve bored you enough, so I won’t bore you with the details of the press-event, except to let you know that I pulled my “big boy scout” routine. One of the execs was mid-presentation when his laser-pointer died, so I got up, went to my bag of tricks, and produced a new one for him. The PR rep who organized the event asked, “You carry one of those with you?”

“Never know when you’ll get tapped for PowerPoint karaoke.”

(Oh, just check out the pictures instead.)

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It was divine!

Not having a ton of family in these parts, I use the time off during the holidays to visit friends. On Friday, Amy & I went down to Lumberton, NJ to visit friends of hers who were in the area for their own holiday family-tour. We had an entertaining afternoon, centering around a lengthy meal at a P.F. Chang and a discussion of why Shawn Bradley never panned out in the NBA. Good times were had by me, which counts for a lot.

Yesterday, we drove up to Providence, RI to visit my friends Paul & Deb. They’d been having plenty of family get-togethers during the week, so it was a nice change of pace for them to get a visit from their weird friends in NJ.

I always love seeing Paul & Deb, because they have an awful lot of diverse interests and are quite passionate about them. We exchanged some holiday gifts — we brought back some neat tea from our Paris trip, and I also made them copies of a few Mad Mix CDs, while they gave us books, fancy knitting yarn, and unique coffee mugs from a local artist, before deciding we also needed to take back an amaryllis and some paperwhite bulbs. And a loaf of sweet bread from a Portuguese bakery.

In between these two bouts of gift-giving, the four of us drove over to the museum at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), which was exhibiting Wunderground: a collection of Providence poster art from the past decade, and a sculptural village called Shangri-la-la Land. I took a ton of pictures of the exhibit, before a staffer ran up to tell me that I wasn’t permitted to snap pix in the exhibition. I apologized and pretended I’d just taken one. Here’s a collection of 19 shots from the show. (The sculpture area was dimly lit, so I tried a few shots without flash, but gave up and started snapping away. I included both types.)

Comics Reporter and official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon wrote a great (and lengthy) article about Fort Thunder, one of the main groups of the Providence arts scene during that period:

Fort Thunder was different. The Providence, RI group has achieved importance not just for the sum total of its considerable artists but for its collective impact and its value as a symbol of unfettered artistic expression. The key to understanding Fort Thunder is that it was not just a group of cartoonists who lived near each other, obsessed about comics and socialized. It was a group of artists, many of whom pursued comics among other kinds of media, who lived together and shared the same workspace.

As an outgrowth of the Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] where nearly all of them attended (some even graduating), Fort Thunder provided a common setting for creation that imposed almost no economic imperative to conform to commercial standards or to change in an attempt to catch the next big wave. They were young, rents were cheap, and incidental money could be had by dipping into other more commercial areas of artistic enterprise such as silk-screening rock posters. Fort Thunder was also fairly isolated, both in terms of influences that breached its walls and how that work was released to the outside world. This allowed its artists to produce a significant body of work that most people have yet to see. It also fueled the group’s lasting mystique. The urge — even seven years after discovering the group — is not to dig too deeply, so as not to uncover the grim and probably unromantic particulars.

We had a great time in the exhibition. Over the years, Paul & Deb had snagged several of the posters from lampposts and walls in town, but they told us that most of the posters were stuck with pretty heavy glue, making it impossible to take home these amazing pieces. I figured it said something about the confluence of art, commerce and paste, but I say that about everything. I think it was also the first museum exhibition I’d been to where the art was held up by thumbtacks.

Before visiting the museum, Paul wanted to show us one of his favorite places in town, the Providence Atheneum. It’s America’s 4th oldest library (est. 1753) and requires an annual membership. Paul pays it gladly, because he loves coming to the place, reading magazines and newspapers, checking out the great collection, and soaking in the ambience.

After the Atheneum and the Wunderground exhibition, we were off to a Portuguese restaurant where I ordered the Shish-Kebab of Damocles, evidently an Iberian specialty.

If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you probably realize that a day that includes

  1. a comics-related art exhibition,
  2. an old library,
  3. some bizarre cuisine, and
  4. conversation with good friends

is pretty much as good as it gets.

(If you want to see pix from the whole day, go here. If you just want that Wunderground set, head over here. And you can check out Amy’s pix from that day over here.)