Category: New York City

One of These Fabulous Prizes

I’m having trouble picturing any scenario that would result in someone leaving a brand new $130+ Lego Star Wars AT-AT at the curb with their trash.

And yet there it was. Thursday as I was walking home from Prospect Park, I came upon it. Of course I took it home. Some of the bags had been opened and resealed in Ziploc bags. There were two AA batteries out of the necessary 6 installed. It didn’t look like any parts were missing, and after several hours of putting it together, it turns out there weren’t.

I could very easily have been wrong; it’s entirely likely that I would have spent the necessary hours putting it together only to find that it would be incomplete somehow. But that’s life: a gift with no guarantees. New York City is a very one-man’s-trash-is-another’s-treasure town. People leave out books, furniture, appliances and more for others to peruse and take home. This time, though, I’m really tempted to go back and find out why someone would do this. Did they get frustrated really early? Was it an unwanted gift? Was it free?

Not having much room to store toys here, I’m also tempted to return it fully assembled to its previous owner. What do you think?

New York Limbo

August is on its way down. I’ve been here almost 8 months. I’ve gotten a good job and given it up, I’ve explored the city and gone down every road that has caught my attention. I’ve seen shows and hung out with great folks. Yet I’m still not feeling it. I just don’t (yet?) see myself living here for more than a year. I haven’t warmed to New York the way I did to London. I was there for three months, the first few weeks of which were defined by an overriding desire to leave, while the remainder by abiding affection. Part of the reason I chose to try New York was its cultural resemblance to London. So far it hasn’t delivered.

I’m not saying I’m ready to bail, but I’m having a hard time right now envisioning a life here. Even if I found a really good job, I’m already getting tired of…the experience? Here is the short list of complaints:

  1. The summer heat. It’s not as bad as Arkansas, but you have to walk around in it. A lot. Plus stuffy hot subway platforms are like dirty, dirty saunas.
  2. Grocery shopping is an ordeal. Going to Target even more so.
  3. The food isn’t that great. This town loves its comfort food, so the only good stuff is the gourmet stuff, which is prohibitively expensive. Everything cheap is mostly crap. There isn’t a lot of middle ground. When I do find the best food (tastiness at a reasonable price), there is the problem of mileage. I have to cross Manhattan into Tribeca when I want some Vietnamese fried rice as good as Lily’s in LR. And Barbecue? Forget it, unless you want to go all the way up to Harlem[1] to eat at Dinosaur. Which is still only just OK.
  4. The pizza comes in two styles: generic NY slice and authentic Italian. That’s a narrow spectrum for me, coming from Little Rock’s wide spectrum of Vino’s, Damgoode Pies, US Pizza, and Shotgun Dan’s. Don’t get me wrong; I’d eat at DiFara’s weekly if I could, but it’s way out in Midwood and takes an hour to prep.
  5. I don’t think I could ever play music here. Getting my amp to any gig without a vehicle is going to be either expensive or physically taxing. And even my favorite musicians, the guys who impress me most in the area, are disheartened by the impossibility of making a living as an original band in this town. Compound that with the fact that actually getting a gig here is made difficult enough by all the other people who came here to play music.

That last one reminds me. It seems like there are only 4 reasons to live in New York City:

  1. You’re very good at something and you want to do it here with all the other people who are good at something.
  2. You want to be famous for doing something you may or may not be good at.
  3. You want to be here to observe and/or interact with Groups 1 and 2.
  4. Your family is here.

At the end of the day, I think I’m really just a #3. Sure there are things I’m good at, but I don’t think I’m good enough at them to make it worth my while to stay here. Especially since I don’t know what my while is worth. Plus the volumes of #2’s seem to outweigh the population of #1’s by a factor of about 20.

And this is something I’ve been mulling over lately: The New York Celebrity-City Effect. New York City is, in itself, a celebrity. Coming here is like meeting someone famous, and I’d wager that a significant portion of those #2’s are here so that they can see themselves in their minds’ eyes as having New York for their own mental movie backdrop. A quick glance at the top movies of all time shows that New York outpaces Los Angeles as a film setting by almost 2 to 1. NYC is a character all its own[2], providing backdrops for films from such diverse sources as Woody Allen and Spider-Man[3]. That’s the magic of it. But that magic seems to have less spark these days. The artistic community has been all but shoved out of Manhattan by exorbitant rents, with the exception of Harlem, but give it time. Ironically, the cleaning up of the crime here has made nearly every portion of Manhattan a haven almost exclusively for the splendidly wealthy. And Brooklyn is already well on its way down the same path.

It also seems like a lot of people (the #3’s perhaps) move here so that they can have the status of saying “I live in New York City,” to their friends back home, as though simply by relocating they’ve achieved something. Moving here isn’t any harder or easier than moving to Detroit or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. Yet given the number of expatriate Arkansans here, I have to suspect that a lot of people move here for the sake of saying they’ve moved here. New York City is indeed a place of wonder, and I have to admit it does really feel like you’re advancing to a second or third act in your own personal screenplay, but a change of venue isn’t guaranteed to make your life any more or less interesting or fulfilling. At best you get to see more music and art, but when it comes to things that are really important – being creative, having friends and loved ones, enjoying life – these are things you can do anywhere.

So, I came here for the same reason mountain climbers do what they do: “because it’s there.” Now that I know what’s here…maybe I need more time to find the magic, but at this point I think I’ll most likely be back in Arkansas before the year is out. But who knows.

1.) A distance Elizabeth and I lovingly referred to as “Fayetteville” because that’s how long it takes to get there (or here from there) by train.
2.) Los Angeles is too decentralized and homogenous to have any real identity of its own to captivate an audience the way New York does.
3.) And let’s face it, Metropolis and Gotham City are essentially New York stunt doubles.

T-Shirt Nerd Glee

I like t-shirts. I particularly enjoy wearing obscure t-shirts understood only by a few fellow enthusiasts (Achewood fans, Mike Keneally fans, musicians, etc.). I like wearing them because they’re often conversation starters for otherwise complete strangers. So when I wore my Latyrx shirt to the DJ Shadow/Cut Chemist show yesterday, I was in for a pleasant surprise.

Some background info: Latyrx was a duo comprised of rappers Lateef and Lyrics Born. They made one pretty great album and went their separate ways. I found my t-shirt at a thrift store on Atlantic here in Brooklyn for $2[1]. It didn’t start any conversations at the show, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that Lateef was one of the opening acts as part of a new duo, the Mighty Underdogs, with Gift of Gab from Blackalicious.

I was even more surprised when they did a Latyrx tune, and Lateef said “my man in the Latyrx shirt knows this one.”

1.) Score. Of. The. Year.

On Williamsburg

I’ve been meaning to organize my thoughts on this topic for a few weeks now (for anyone reading this that doesn’t already know, yes, I’m back in New York), but I’ve been devoting entirely too much time to playing Scrabble on Facebook with Shelley.

My first venture into Williamsburg was to find some guitar shops[1] I’d read about. I’d heard a great deal about the area as a haven for indie rock hipsters (which is to say, I watched this), and after finding my way around Bedford Street’s book vendors and amazing record store[2], I was actually impressed to find a neighborhood apparently dedicated to things I like. Admittedly my evaluation was surface-level, as I didn’t actually interact with any of the region’s denizens. I did not “make the scene” as the youngsters no longer say.

From the long view, Williamsburg seems to be a rather nifty enclave populated almost entirely by people in clever t-shirts. What’s not to like? Bars full of twentysomethings, a park full of kickball enthusiasts…books, records, guitars. I felt like the Bee Girl at the end of the Blind Melon video.

However, I have a tendency to see the best in any given person or situation. I often miss people’s flaws. Or at least I don’t see anything worth complaining about. It’s entirely likely that the average Williamsburg citizen is as shallow and status-seeking as the Manhattan social climbers of the capital S society set so well documented by Clay Felker’s New York magazine. If that’s the case, then it’s just another flight in the spiral staircase of irony that hipsters invariably construct. In attempting (or at least appearing to attempt) to opt out of fashion by shopping at thrift stores, and to opt out of popular music by listening exclusively to self-consciously unpopular music[3], indie rockers paint themselves into a cultural corner: can any lifestyle founded on obscurism authentically grow? If so, would it not be populated entirely by mutants?

At some point, inauthentic aping is inherent in the growth of any subculture. I’m reminded again of that quotation from Eric Hoffer that says that every cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and degenerates into a racket. Clearly indie rock hipsters have been a business for some time now. You can buy ironic thrift store knockoff t-shirts for $30 at Park Plaza Mall in Little Rock, and CBGB t-shirts at Hot Topic. The racket period has apparently set in now that you can buy those same knockoff shirts at Goodwill in Williamsburg for $2. If irony were gravitational, Williamsburg would be a Black Hole.

Still, the frosted side for the kid in me stops and says, “quit thinking.” Maybe it’s OK to enjoy this cast of Fellini-esque characters in studiously ratty tight jeans. Clearly I’ve joined them to some degree. I like odd t-shirts, Pabst, Chuck Taylors, and I carry an army surplus satchel, but I draw the line at tight jeans, ironic moustaches, stubble and Parliament Lights. I also listen to Winger unironically[4]. Thus I have no credibility in anyone’s eyes, really, but my own. But mine are the only ones that matter to me.

1.) One of which recently sold me my new Les Paul.
2.) Where I bought a great CD of orchestral music from the Seattle World’s Fair.
3.) And becoming insufferable critics of anything on a major label, while promoting an endless series of crummy bands like so many Emperors with No Clothes who become just as disposable as anything Top 40. The constant search for the Next Hippest Band Ever That You’re Not Cool Enough to Know About invariably breeds the same cycle of disposability as the pursuit of the Next Hottest Bland Pop Star. When Vampire Weekend’s 2nd album comes out, will anyone care?
4.) Perhaps the next stop on the Circus of Irony tour is the legitimization of 80’s metal, but I doubt it. Posers built on irony can’t accept posers built on hairspray. They’d have to stop taking themselves seriously to do it.

32

As my birthday week closes out with a whimper, here is what I saw these last 7 days:

the inevitable letdown
the city in miniature
commuter hatred
the digital sky shines at night
the soft lights of Radio City
the physical limitations of old media
good advice
the headless mannequin
airwalks

And last but not least. For my birthday I went to see the legendary Les Paul. He’s the Thomas Edison of modern music, and of the two most famous electric guitars in the world[1], one bears his name: The Gibson Les Paul. He’s 92 and he still plays every Monday night in New York. He can still throw down some licks, too.

Oh, and i just discovered there was a pillow fight at Union Square yesterday and I missed it. Bummer.

1.) The other being the Fender Stratocaster, of course.

Positively 30th Street

My wanderings on Saturday took me to 30th street, where Marty told me the best guitar shop in NYC is located. Sure enough, 30th Street Guitars was a very impressive store. Also located on that street were another great Japanese toy shop, and Waves LLC, a vintage audio store. They had the widest selection of old radios, microphones, victrolas, and other retro paraphernalia. They even had several dozen Edison cylinders, the earliest commercial audio format. And a badass 80’s boom box with turntable.

Saturday evening I walked down to Houston to meet up with my common-law sister Elizabeth, and along the way I met a sad little train, a baboon and uniformed corpse, and some decorative lights at Sugar Cafe.

Throughout the weekend several other things jumped out at me demanding to be photographed: Love, Heck, Nail, an important note, some 45s, and Friday’s snowfall.

Haircuts and Signs

I got a haircut the other day at Angel’s Barbershop, a block up from my place. The guy was Cuban[1], I think, and he was so meticulous. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone pay so much attention to the back and sides of my head. The cost? $10. These guys are old-world craftsmen. I’m so lucky to have them so close by, even if they don’t seem to speak much English.

Today I walked around the East Village and across the Williamsburg Bridge. The best part was along Avenue A where I came across a $.50 Care Bears toy dispenser. For some reason I thought I’d get one. I told myself if I got the green Good Luck Bear, that my lucky streak will continue. Apparently I’m in some sort of zone. Moments before that, I saw this and knew that my grandmother was still with me.

I also debated buying a cheap Les Paul copy, saw a stuffed dog, avoided the third rail, took more trashy pictures, received another message from the universe, visited a Japanese toy shop, had flashbacks to Superman II, witnessed firsthand the encroachment of commerce on religion, heard the rock under Radio City, and saw Elmo.

Another leisurely weekend in the city.

1.) I have nothing to base this on other than instinct. I have a pretty good sense for accents and dialects – for example I had initially thought that the two German guys I work with were Dutch; I later discovered that they grew up along the Dutch/German border. So I was very close!

An Offering of Thanks to the Gods of the City

A brief list of things for which I am thankful:

Subway Lessons

If you ever find yourself at an F/V station in Manhattan during rush hour, know that the general pattern of the trains is this:

  1. Long wait – Platform population increases
  2. V train – Platform population increases and people get impatient because so few people ride the V train home
  3. F train – Everybody crams in, so nobody gets a seat
  4. F train – Far fewer people around, seats are plentiful

It’s a realization that occurred to me only when step 3 once left me behind because the train was packed.

I’ve also learned that, despite the convenient location of the Union Square stations near my office, it’s really not worth getting on the 6 train to Bleecker to get on the F. The crowds are are worse and the waits are longer (although this is the route I have to take if I need to stop off at the K-Mart at Astor Place – because Target in Brooklyn is not worth the effort). My F stop at 14th street is a half mile from the office, but it’s worth the walk.

The Week in Photos

I haven’t done much today, but I did run some errands up the street, which allowed me to take some pictures of the antique store and some interesting neighbor’s yard. There’s also a guy on Court Street who sits in the small window of what appears to be a shop of some kind, but I can’t see past him, and I’m not sure which door is his. I’m afraid to take his picture. I’ll have to figure that out some time.

Last night I went out to The Tea Lounge, which is a great little jazz venue and tea shop on Union in Park Slope. After that I went to Joe’s Pub to see the always delightful Mike Viola play. No pictures, sorry, because the weather was warm enough for me that I didn’t need my coat. Listen to his tunes, though. He’s like a happier Crowded House.

I guess most of the latest pictures are from last Saturday. Lauren and I went to the Knitting Factory to see Edan and Prince Paul, who together gave me my first truly revelatory hip-hop show. Edan is a virtuoso – he’s an MC, a DJ, and guitarist (with the fancy chords, no less!). Sometimes all at once.

Earlier in the day I wandered around Manhattan, taking pictures of whatever jumped out at me: the cat at Bleecker St. Records, Rebel Rebel music store, traffic, the famous Chelsea Hotel and its attendant guitar shop, and various sundry flea market items.

Oh, and here’s a picture of Rob Riggle from The Daily Show, who apparently decided not to use my footage this last week. Maybe they’re saving it for next week, but here’s footage that was taken that day.