Best Thing Seen Today
It's a tie:
1) A bunch of people lined up along the fence at the baseball diamond in the waterfront park, rapt before a dramatic game being played by local Little League teams. The impromptu audience was clearly made up of people not planning to be there -- runners, dog-walkers, etc, and the players were little Little-Leaguers.
2) A man getting on the subway in full pimp-regalia. I'm talking, white suit with tails, wide-brimmed hat, gold-tipped cane and everything. Now, this man may not have actually been a pimp, but from his demeanor, I have no doubt that he was not wearing those threads ironically.
Monday, May 30, 2005
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Things I Find Unsettling
1) Finding homeless people sleeping in the ATM lobby of my bank every time I go there.
2) The sheer number of black women I see in New York pushing around white babies in strollers and creaky old white ladies on walkers.
3) The shrine for unborn "children" I walk by every day on the way to the train.
4) The frequency with which I hear someone trying the knob on the door to my apartment when I'm home, day or night.
5) Seeing a big, colorful ad for an HIV drug on the subway station wall, amidst all the big, colorful ads for movies, teevee shows, and FreshDirect.
6) The amount of hair I pull out of the shower drain on a regular basis, and not knowing whether it's mine or my roommate's.
7) Having our trashcans set on fire.
8) My landlord's crazy -- I hope -- theory that the garbage men set the trashcans on fire because they were mad about bad recyclable-sorting.
9) The way my boss makes me repeat every thing I say to him even when I know perfectly well he heard me the first time.
10) The way goldfish will follow you with their eyes when you pick them up out of the water, even when you turn them upside down.
11) The fact that Spanish is the primary language spoken on the payphone outside my apartment even though I do not live in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood.
12) The way my cell phone displays my voice-mail PIN in gigantic, full-color, back-lit digital glory when I check messages in public.
13) The fact that everyone I've ever heard making smalltalk on a cell phone sounds like an asshole, leaving me to conclude that when I'm making small talk on my cell phone, I must sound like an asshole, too.
14) Practically everything I ever hear on the news anymore.
1) Finding homeless people sleeping in the ATM lobby of my bank every time I go there.
2) The sheer number of black women I see in New York pushing around white babies in strollers and creaky old white ladies on walkers.
3) The shrine for unborn "children" I walk by every day on the way to the train.
4) The frequency with which I hear someone trying the knob on the door to my apartment when I'm home, day or night.
5) Seeing a big, colorful ad for an HIV drug on the subway station wall, amidst all the big, colorful ads for movies, teevee shows, and FreshDirect.
6) The amount of hair I pull out of the shower drain on a regular basis, and not knowing whether it's mine or my roommate's.
7) Having our trashcans set on fire.
8) My landlord's crazy -- I hope -- theory that the garbage men set the trashcans on fire because they were mad about bad recyclable-sorting.
9) The way my boss makes me repeat every thing I say to him even when I know perfectly well he heard me the first time.
10) The way goldfish will follow you with their eyes when you pick them up out of the water, even when you turn them upside down.
11) The fact that Spanish is the primary language spoken on the payphone outside my apartment even though I do not live in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood.
12) The way my cell phone displays my voice-mail PIN in gigantic, full-color, back-lit digital glory when I check messages in public.
13) The fact that everyone I've ever heard making smalltalk on a cell phone sounds like an asshole, leaving me to conclude that when I'm making small talk on my cell phone, I must sound like an asshole, too.
14) Practically everything I ever hear on the news anymore.
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Strangest Thing Seen Today
At the laundromat: a man, approximately late 30's/early 40's, tall, beer belly, beard, balding, hairy forearms, wearing bluejeans, untucked button shirt and well-worn sneakers -- appearing, in other words, to be your basic white ethnic Brooklynite straight guy -- occupying himself between loads by... knitting (crocheting? I dunno) what looked like a pink lace antimacassar.
You know, I realize that by now, violations of gender stereotypes shouldn't seem strange. And yet, I still just wasn't expecting to see that.
At the laundromat: a man, approximately late 30's/early 40's, tall, beer belly, beard, balding, hairy forearms, wearing bluejeans, untucked button shirt and well-worn sneakers -- appearing, in other words, to be your basic white ethnic Brooklynite straight guy -- occupying himself between loads by... knitting (crocheting? I dunno) what looked like a pink lace antimacassar.
You know, I realize that by now, violations of gender stereotypes shouldn't seem strange. And yet, I still just wasn't expecting to see that.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Subway Musicians
I haven't looked into the details of how it works, but the City of New York has some sort of procedure for licencing subway musicians so as to avoid turf wars. I think there might even be some kind of audition where you actually have to prove that you can play something. (I remember visting New York in the eighties and seeing all these homeless guys who had somehow gotten ahold of Casio keyboards, and would set up on the sidewalk, turn on one of the automatic rhythm accompaniment routines -- "Marching Band…Bossa…Cha cha cha…" etc -- and doodle out "When the Saints Go Marching In" or whatever with one finger. It was pretty excruciating to listen to and apparently somebody decided to put a stop to it. If Giuliani had anything to do with it, for that, I'd be willing to give him some credit). Clearly, you don't have to be able to play that something well, just passably, which is fine since I guess you’d be playing professionally for a paycheck instead of in the subway for change if you could really play WELL. Still, it's a little disappointing to realize that the myth of struggling young talents, or forgotten old ones, playing their hearts out to unappreciating commuters is just that, a myth.
Some are worse than others. I have the misfortune to have one of those Peruvian pan-flute players stationed at my regular morning-commute platform. He’s quite well outfitted with a microphone and PA and even has a little synth-string recording he plays along with. If he were just doing "I'd rather be a hammer than a nail" it would be one thing, but I think he's been inspired by the incidental music on "Survivor" perhaps, and he's prone to dramatic dynamic gestures like pausing for extended periods while the synth-strings languidly wheeze away in a kind of prelude, and then abruptly honking out glissandos that end in piercing overtones that distract you from your magazine and probably freeze all the subway rats in their tracks. The fact that he works the heritage routine so hard, with a multcolored pancho pulled over his head and his shiny black hair pulled into a tight braid, only reinforces the impression that he’d be much more welcome at say, Epcot, with a rain stick and some bird calls added to the soundtrack, than on a Brooklyn subway platform.
Although he's the most annoying subway musician I come across regularly, he is not the least talented. That distinction belongs to the young white guy on the G train platform who chops out Velvet Underground songs – exclusively, I think – on an acoustic guitar but instead of too-cool, spare Lou Reed style vocals, he sounds like Jandek, or maybe Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Gilbert Grape, with lots of volume but no real relationship to pitch. Coming down the stairs to the platform, you can't even hear the guitar, just the sound of some guy hollering like he's been hurt.
Easily the saddest case is a middle-aged asian guy who plays on the 4-5-6 at Union Square. He clearly has some classical training, because he’s always playing Bach or Mozart or sometimes tunes from Italian opera, but he can't afford a real instrument and so he does it all on this wretched little battery-powered synth-saxophone thing that makes even well-executed classical sound like a wino playing a boosted Casio.
There are some that are actually good. The first guy I ever gave money to was an old gent playing some kind of exotic asian or middle-eastern 3-stringed instrument. The music wasn't much technically, but on a Sunday morning, the meandering atonal rasp seemed meditative and filled up the empty Bedford Ave L station and made me feel like I was in an underground sactuary in Istanbul or something, instead of in the subway eating a bagel.
There are sometimes whole bands, and one group of young guys who sounded like Liquid Soul had the 14th Street station bumping with a trumpet soloing over a repetitive-but-definitely-funky riff from a drum, guitar, and electric bass rhythm section. More peculiarly, on Friday I saw a band made of all black girls, that sounded exactly like a white frat-rock college band.
The closest thing I've seen to real, undiscovered talent was a young guy who looked like a motheaten Ben Harper and had just a stunning voice – Seal's timbre and depth with Jeff Buckley's range and vibrato – playing rambling, pentatonic melodies of his own composition. He apparently had some appreciation of his own talent, as he was the only subway musician I've ever seen selling his own CD's.
He was probably the best, but still not my favorite. My favorite was a guy actually playing on the train (which I don’t think they're supposed to do). He was playing one of those things, I don’t know what they're called, that you blow into but has a little piano-style keyboard; it sounds like a toy organ. His repertoire consisted entirely of teevee theme songs, and some of the all-time best ones: I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Hawaii Five-O. It was hard not to get into a good mood listening to him, and by the time I got off the train, a fair number of riders were snapping along to The Addams Family.
I haven't looked into the details of how it works, but the City of New York has some sort of procedure for licencing subway musicians so as to avoid turf wars. I think there might even be some kind of audition where you actually have to prove that you can play something. (I remember visting New York in the eighties and seeing all these homeless guys who had somehow gotten ahold of Casio keyboards, and would set up on the sidewalk, turn on one of the automatic rhythm accompaniment routines -- "Marching Band…Bossa…Cha cha cha…" etc -- and doodle out "When the Saints Go Marching In" or whatever with one finger. It was pretty excruciating to listen to and apparently somebody decided to put a stop to it. If Giuliani had anything to do with it, for that, I'd be willing to give him some credit). Clearly, you don't have to be able to play that something well, just passably, which is fine since I guess you’d be playing professionally for a paycheck instead of in the subway for change if you could really play WELL. Still, it's a little disappointing to realize that the myth of struggling young talents, or forgotten old ones, playing their hearts out to unappreciating commuters is just that, a myth.
Some are worse than others. I have the misfortune to have one of those Peruvian pan-flute players stationed at my regular morning-commute platform. He’s quite well outfitted with a microphone and PA and even has a little synth-string recording he plays along with. If he were just doing "I'd rather be a hammer than a nail" it would be one thing, but I think he's been inspired by the incidental music on "Survivor" perhaps, and he's prone to dramatic dynamic gestures like pausing for extended periods while the synth-strings languidly wheeze away in a kind of prelude, and then abruptly honking out glissandos that end in piercing overtones that distract you from your magazine and probably freeze all the subway rats in their tracks. The fact that he works the heritage routine so hard, with a multcolored pancho pulled over his head and his shiny black hair pulled into a tight braid, only reinforces the impression that he’d be much more welcome at say, Epcot, with a rain stick and some bird calls added to the soundtrack, than on a Brooklyn subway platform.
Although he's the most annoying subway musician I come across regularly, he is not the least talented. That distinction belongs to the young white guy on the G train platform who chops out Velvet Underground songs – exclusively, I think – on an acoustic guitar but instead of too-cool, spare Lou Reed style vocals, he sounds like Jandek, or maybe Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Gilbert Grape, with lots of volume but no real relationship to pitch. Coming down the stairs to the platform, you can't even hear the guitar, just the sound of some guy hollering like he's been hurt.
Easily the saddest case is a middle-aged asian guy who plays on the 4-5-6 at Union Square. He clearly has some classical training, because he’s always playing Bach or Mozart or sometimes tunes from Italian opera, but he can't afford a real instrument and so he does it all on this wretched little battery-powered synth-saxophone thing that makes even well-executed classical sound like a wino playing a boosted Casio.
There are some that are actually good. The first guy I ever gave money to was an old gent playing some kind of exotic asian or middle-eastern 3-stringed instrument. The music wasn't much technically, but on a Sunday morning, the meandering atonal rasp seemed meditative and filled up the empty Bedford Ave L station and made me feel like I was in an underground sactuary in Istanbul or something, instead of in the subway eating a bagel.
There are sometimes whole bands, and one group of young guys who sounded like Liquid Soul had the 14th Street station bumping with a trumpet soloing over a repetitive-but-definitely-funky riff from a drum, guitar, and electric bass rhythm section. More peculiarly, on Friday I saw a band made of all black girls, that sounded exactly like a white frat-rock college band.
The closest thing I've seen to real, undiscovered talent was a young guy who looked like a motheaten Ben Harper and had just a stunning voice – Seal's timbre and depth with Jeff Buckley's range and vibrato – playing rambling, pentatonic melodies of his own composition. He apparently had some appreciation of his own talent, as he was the only subway musician I've ever seen selling his own CD's.
He was probably the best, but still not my favorite. My favorite was a guy actually playing on the train (which I don’t think they're supposed to do). He was playing one of those things, I don’t know what they're called, that you blow into but has a little piano-style keyboard; it sounds like a toy organ. His repertoire consisted entirely of teevee theme songs, and some of the all-time best ones: I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Hawaii Five-O. It was hard not to get into a good mood listening to him, and by the time I got off the train, a fair number of riders were snapping along to The Addams Family.
Monday, May 02, 2005
Things That Make Me Irrationally Happy
1) Those little brown birds that you see on the sidewalk when the pigeons aren’t chasing them away.
2) The way really nerdy people sometimes swing their arms a little too much when they walk.
3) Catching people micro-dancing on the subway.
4) My new Ikea pole-mounted dresser/shelf combo that looks like it’s floating in space. Yeah, it’s particleboard, but it looks hella Jetsons and that makes it good.
5) The food cart I pass on the way to work that has “LIVE, LIFE, LONG HEALTHY SAFETY” painted on the side.
6) There’s some brand of shoe out there that makes the soles out of bright yellow rubber, and it’s great to watch people walk toward you in those. [Addendum: today I saw a woman wearing white high heels with hot pink soles, which was also pretty good. The fact that her feet were spilling over the sides of the shoes made it even better.]
7) Hearing our lab technician Dores, with a very heavy Chinese accent, refer to fish larvae as “baybay.”
1) Those little brown birds that you see on the sidewalk when the pigeons aren’t chasing them away.
2) The way really nerdy people sometimes swing their arms a little too much when they walk.
3) Catching people micro-dancing on the subway.
4) My new Ikea pole-mounted dresser/shelf combo that looks like it’s floating in space. Yeah, it’s particleboard, but it looks hella Jetsons and that makes it good.
5) The food cart I pass on the way to work that has “LIVE, LIFE, LONG HEALTHY SAFETY” painted on the side.
6) There’s some brand of shoe out there that makes the soles out of bright yellow rubber, and it’s great to watch people walk toward you in those. [Addendum: today I saw a woman wearing white high heels with hot pink soles, which was also pretty good. The fact that her feet were spilling over the sides of the shoes made it even better.]
7) Hearing our lab technician Dores, with a very heavy Chinese accent, refer to fish larvae as “baybay.”
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