Everybody!

How about another list:

1) Everybody here wears black. I'm not sure how to characterize it, but there is a particular look to the way people dress. One year back when I was in high school, we went to New York for Thanksgiving, and I remember my stepdad Jim observing that everybody dressed in dark colors. They’re still doing it. Not only is the dress generally dark, but it’s generally… kind of shabby and self-consciously awful. Everybody’s bluejeans are dirty and frayed at the bottom. The mens jackets all fit a little too tight, but their sweater sleeves are a little too long. The girls wear old lady clothes and lots of bobby pins in their hair. It’s weird, and if I were going to try to do it myself, I don’t think I could pull it off. I’d probably need to stop wearing all the brightly-colored ski clothes I got used to up in New Hampshire.

2) Everybody in Williamsburg ought to be a straight guy, because man, are there a lot of cute girls here (and I use "cute girls," rather than, say, "attractive women" deliberately. These are cute girls.) And man, are they hanging out with a lot of homely guys. Oh well.

3) Everybody in Brooklyn was on my commute train this morning. I remember this Richard Scarry book I had when I was a kid that showed how people (in the form of clothed, bipedal animals) from all over the world lived. There was a picture of people piling onto the commuter trains in Tokyo, where the subway attendents had to squeeze people into the trains to get the doors closed, like you’d sit on an overpacked suitcase to get it zipped. (I can't remember whether the Tokyo commuters were cats or dogs… you’d think that’s the kind of thing you’d remember. Are Japanese people more like cats or dogs, you think?) Anyway, it was like that. Lots of stranger-touching. Not that I’m complaining really; stranger-touching is about the best action I'm getting these days. But it was different.

4) Everybody in my neighborhood is coupled. It's nauseating. They clog up the sideway traffic, walking arm-in-arm, all slow-like, because who can really walk fast while you’re hanging onto your girlfriend's ass? Even the non-romantic types are coupled, apparently. When I go into the grocery store, everyone's shopping in pairs. Even the straight-guy roommate duos (yes, you can tell). Who does that? And why? Did I mention that the whole room is refrigerated?

5) Everybody's in such a goddam rush to get on the train. Let’s take a hypothetical: what do you do when you’re waiting for an elevator and you’re not an asshole? I’ll tell you what - when the door opens, you wait for exiting people to get off the elevator, and then you get on, and if you were the first one there waiting on the elevator, you stand a good chance of being the first one to get on it. You’d think it’d work the same way on the subway, but it does not. Even when an obviously full train is just waiting to spill its passengers, people are trying to climb on the second the doors open. And you could be standing there with your nose literally touching the doors and no one else around, and the instant before they open, at least two people will worm up in front of you and dart on the train before you. The same thing applies on the street. If you come to the intersection and there’s a "don’t-walk" signal, and you step off the sidewalk, a little bit into the first lane of traffic to wait for the light to turn, I guarantee that the next person to come up and wait will step just a little bit in front of you, even if they end up standing in the middle of the street to get there. I don't get it.

6) Everybody only takes cash. The grocery store, they only take cash. The video store, they only take cash. The subway machine actually takes cards, but I couldn’t make it work, so effectively, it only takes cash. In principle, I think this is a good thing since they’d only be entering my purchases into some giant evil database anyway if I were paying with a card, and of course, the cash, it encourages good budgeting habits. But it’s not so easy to work with when you’re waiting on that first paycheck.

7) It was raining like crazy this morning, and everybody was trying to put my damn eyes out with their stupid umbrellas.

8) Everybody who has a good public radio station in their community should thank their lucky stars because here I am in arguably the greatest American city, and of course the "bluest" of cities (and we all know what a bunch of Marxists they are at NPR), and my public radio station blows. There is some good original programming like On the Media and the Brian Lehrer show, but the national programming is limited and during those periods I'm most interested in listening to news programming – weekends and nights – the programming consists of a bland mix of thematically neutral classical and "American songbook" programs that always manage to alternately bore and annoy and include way too much Frank Sinatra. And, most unforgivable of sins, my prime public radio listening time, the sleep-in hours on Sunday morning, is violated by the execrable “Sound and Spirit.” To top it off, it’s recently been pledge-drive time, and I have never heard such aggressive fundraising from any of the many public radio stations I’ve supported. Usually the idea is to hold the popular shows hostage by begging on-air in between portions of the programming. But during the WNYC membership-drive, I frequently forget what "show" was even on, because I’ve heard nothing but guilt-tripping fundnagging for the last half-hour. Maybe that’s what it takes to get to hardened New Yorkers, but in only a short while of regular listening, I’ve grown to hate my local station enough to just turn it off.

9) Everybody, but everybody walks around wired either to an iPod or a cell phone. The iPod people I like, because the music is rarely loud (although I am interested to note that it turns out that it is, in fact, possible to listen to extremely uncool music on an iPod… I figured there’d be a block or something…”iMullet,” etc) and sometimes you get people who just can’t help themselves and bust a subtle move right there on the subway, and that’s kind of cute. I recently tried my iPod out on the subway for the first time, with mixed feelings. I’ve long had this attitude that I wasn’t so into portable music because I wanted to listen to the music of real everyday world sounds, blah blah zencakes, etc. But now I can totally see the appeal of walking around with your own little soundtrack and anyway, Stereolab sounds better than most of the subway musicians. Plus, those white earphones always give someone a certain allure: what cool-ass music is that cool-ass person listening to on their cool-ass media player? I don’t know, but I could use some allure, I think, so I’ll be wearing the white earphones at the very least from now on even if the jack is only plugged into my shirt pocket. The cell phone people, on the other hand, are pretty obnoxious because the cognitive tension generated by trying to distinguish between annoying people talking on cell phones and crazy people talking to themselves is appreciable; cues from someone’s appearance are less helpful than you’d think (see #1).

10) Everybody sleeps in. At first I thought it was just my lab – the PI commutes in from somewhere on Long Island, and waits until 10 or so to leave in order to avoid traffic. Naturally, the people who work for him will tend to conform to his schedule. But after a few rides in on the L at 10:00 AM myself, I had to wonder – why are there so many people on the train mid-morning? Nobody works? Or everybody comes in late… Yeah, well, everybody comes in late. It dawned on me when I found I couldn’t use those precious hours between 9-11 in the morning, when I can reasonably be up without anyone expecting me at work, to get a haircut. Because none of the salons open before 11. As it turns out, a lot of businesses don’t open before 10. City that never sleeps, I guess.

11) Everybody in Manhattan is moving to Williamsburg, apparently. There was an alarming article in the real estate section of the Times last weekend that had a half-page map showing all the new and planned construction in the neighborhood. I couldn’t swear to it, but I remember the little red dots on the map which depicted developments as being shaped like little cartoon bomb-flashes; maybe they even said “POW!” Everybody here who I’ve mentioned it too gets really irritable about it, and I think there’s a widespread feeling of dread as everyone gets ready for a yuppie invasion and braces for the inevitable rent hikes. I got out of San Francisco just before the internet bubble crapped up everything, but perhaps my timing wasn’t as good in this case.

12) Everybody was right: it costs a fortune to live here.

Milestones

Yesterday on a walk, I saw my first New York City rat, whom I startled into flight when I brushed his trash can as I passed by. If this one was representative, then it's true: they're big. Later, on the same walk, I was able to give some strangers directions to the subway. Me - I gave directions, and they were even right. I just want you to appreciate the significance of that. And then of course, earlier in the day, for the first time ever I paid someone else to do my laundry.

I must be settling in.

Check

This afternoon I walked over to the Dartmouth graduate studies office with a box full of my dissertation. I spent 20 minutes filling out paperwork and palavering with the all-powerful graduate office secretary, and then I left with an empty box, feeling much lighter indeed for the burden left behind.

I think this means I'm really done with graduate school, in an official sense. It comes in many steps; there's the commencement ceremony in June, and of course I defended months ago now, but with this last item checked off the list, there's really no way I nor anyone else can undo my degree. I guess I'm really, finally, done with graduate school.

What to say about the end to this era? All in all, not the healthiest thing I ever did.

Strangest Things

Strangest thing seen on the subway recently:
A grown woman, probably mid-20's, sucking her thumb. Like, full-on thumbsucking, complete with index finger curled over the bridge of her nose. She contentedly sucked away for the whole ride. Oh, and her nails were painted, too.

Strangest/dumbest thing seen on the highway:
A truck with a scrotum. Seriously, some yahoo outfitted his pickup truck with a pair of plastic (?) testicles, blue to match the paint, swinging away there underneath the trailer hitch, as if the truck were a big metal bulldog. And that's probably just how the truck's owner thinks of it.

What City Parks are For

This morning on my walk to the subway, I walked as I always do past this wretched little "park" that consists of an awkward triangle where three streets intersect. There's almost nothing there except for some benches a few trees and a fountain that doesn't work, and it's mostly used as a latrine by local dogs and homeless people.

But as a I walked by this morning, a breeze came up (brrrr) and there was a sound... the wind went ssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh as it blew through the scrawny, bare trees, making that wonderful sound that I recognize from sawgrass on the lake in Florida, and creekside liveoaks from camp in North Carolina, and pines around Tahoe, and birch copses in the farmland outside of Syracuse.

Procrastinators in the Park

On Sunday I transformed myself into a real live New Yorker by getting up, eating a bagel and coffee for breakfast, taking the train into the city, meeting JP and a crowd of his associates for dim sum in Chinatown, and then joining all the other people in New York who’d been meaning to get to the park to see The Gates on the last day before they were taken down.

It really was a great day for such an outing; cold enough to make me actually enjoy the hot cream cheese smeared on my chin; sunny enough to make the orange cloth of the Gates glow, and apparently Sunday is a big market day in Chinatown, so there were hordes of people spilling off the sidewalks, haggling over unidentifiable (to me), inedible (to me) desiccated sea creatures. Um, there are a LOT of Chinese people in New York, by the way. I don’t mean to take anything away from my beloved San Francisco, but New York Chinatown is a whole different ballgame from San Francisco Chinatown. In San Francisco Chinatown, you can wander through a couple of blocks and, especially if you’re a tourist, kind of imagine yourself back in the bazaar in quaint, exotic Olde Shanghai or whatever. In New York Chinatown, you can walk for block after block looking at nothing but Chinese people and Chinese writing on the signs and start to worry that you accidentally slipped through a hole in the Earth and ended up in some random neighborhood in Beijhing and how the hell are you going to find your way back. But the dim sum were good and someday I’m going to get brave and eat some of the extra weird shit.

The Gates were pretty neat. There was a ton of people in the park and in fact one of the most visually compelling parts of the Gates was looking across where sections of the path ran in parallel, and seeing the lines of people shuffle under the lines of gates. I heard some cynical types describe the color as “safety orange” or “hunter’s orange” but really the color was about as beautiful as I could ever imagine orange vinyl and nylon being. I think the common description in the press of the color as “saffron” was either clever or fortunate. It may or may not be true; I have no idea how well it matches the color of Buddhist monks’ robes, but after the very notion was out there in circulation, it was hard not to think of the Gates as saffron rather than orange, and that made a difference – instead of traffic cones and barricade lights, one thought of sunsets and airborn monks.

One of the most interesting things about the Gates is the reaction to the Gates. Or maybe, the meta-reaction to the Gates. The mere labelling of the Gates as art seems to require that people have a position on them, and that’s the part I find funny – people can feel so strongly over such low stakes. There’s pretty much no political angle; the Gates cost the taxpayers nothing at all, proceeds from all the Gates schwag they were selling goes to NYC park maintenance, they were only up for two weeks, and they were made entirely of a stuff for which there is an established recycled-materials market. Estimates from commerce types are coming in and indicate that the Gates drew in enough extra people to make a measurable difference to local businesses, but not so many people that there was bad traffic or other infrastructure strain, or even inconvenience to anyone but a few weekend runners who’d rather have Central Park a bit less crowded. So in other words, whether you want to bitch about the Gates or sing their praises, you’ve got only one thing to base it on: how they looked.

I thought they looked mostly interesting with an occasional beautiful here and there. But then again, I’m interested in anything novel, and I’m constitutionally inclined to think, “Ooh, pretty!” when I see a sunlit piece of bright orange fabric billowing in the breeze (for roughly the same reason as that kid in American Beauty got off on the windblown plastic bag). I haven’t actually talked to any real people about what they thought, but the media voices have sounded to me like either one of two opinions:

The sentiment: The Gates are art! Art is good! Yay!
The subtext: Isn’t it handy to have a monumental art installation to call attention to the fact that I like art, and am therefore cool, and I live in a city where we have monumental art installations, and I am again therefore cool.

Or

The sentiment: The Gates. Whatever.
The subtext: Isn’t it handy to have a monumental art installation to call attention to the fact that I know enough about art to be able to say what’s good and bad, and I will demonstrate it by implying without actually saying that the Gates are bad, and I am therefore cool, and I live in a city where we have monumental art installations and we are all so cool that they’re not even that big ‘a deal. Did I mention that I am cool?


What I haven’t heard is that “the Gates are a masterpiece,” or that “they fail as art because…” And I think I haven’t heard this because there is no real way to say so. More than anything else, what they are is neat-o because of their novelty; they’re beautiful if you’re the kind of person who can see them that way, but they force no particular vision on the world, they ask nothing of us except attention, and even that, they make easy. I’m inclined to look unfavorably on their detractors, because, since there’s nothing else at stake, they’ve basically defined themselves as people who, given the choice to see beauty, chose ugly instead.

I guess leaving art history behind was the right choice.