2010 - My Second Year in New York

Today was another lovely winter day in New York -- cold but sunny and bright. I went with Ian to the Outsider Art Fair, which is in a building near the Empire State Building. The silver trim on the Empire State was gleaming in a way the forced you to look at the pattern and really see the way the parts work together -- shiny silver, warm red, rich cream, and bluish glass all leading up to that gorgeous, machine-age spire.

As much as I grew to love the Space Needle after a period of not liking it, I still love the Empire State more -- it starts from a strong base and rises gradually to a point so it looks totally supported and strong, whereas the Space Needle has a spindlier build and from some angles looks as if it can't hold the weight of its oversized head. Unless you're standing right under the Needle and you can see its powerful splayed legs, it can seems like a pumpkin on a stick.

Another reason I was paying special attention to the Empire State Building today: I had just read that the new skyscraper in Dubai is twice as tall as New York's tallest. That is breathtaking height that you can only really appreciate when you're standing next to a building that's half as tall.

But enough amateur criticism of phallic architecture. Back to outsider art. The pieces in the show were from all over the country, in lots of different styles and materials -- crayon, sheet metal, wood, pencil, mud, cloth, wire, thread, even ramen noodle packages. The dominant themes were religion, obsession, peculiar ideas of beauty, and the overwhelming and deep desire for self-expression. The generally accepted notion of outsider art is that it's done by untrained artists, some using found materials, others using the tools that any artist would use. But what really struck me at this show was how confident these artists are. Some are developmentally disabled or mentally ill or just people who live away from the mainstream. But they know what they want to say and they find a way to say it. You can't deny the power of that, whether you like the art or not. I really love it, and I know Ian does too. "I'm inspired," he said as we parted ways at Herald Square.

What's really crazy about this art is that some of the outsiders are now true insiders -- collected and priced just like "real" artists. Some scrap of paper on which a guy outlined a dog in watercolor can sell for 100 Gs. Bill Traylor (painter of the red snake in the picture), Mose Talbot, Henry Darger, Morton Bartlett (he made the doll and staged the photo you see here) -- just some of the big-name outsiders.

As with other art, the monetary value didn't seem to have a lot to do with the quality of the work -- it's something more mysterious and in a way a metaphor for life in New York. What's worth spending my dollar on? That's what you can find yourself asking over and over here. A $15 sandwich or a $40 cab ride can be a bargain -- if the moment is right and you're hungry or tired enough.

But I'm meandering here, so I think I'll sign off.

Wow, I can't believe I haven't written anything here for nearly two months! Well, yes I can believe it . . . time just slips by, doesn't it?

As it gets close to the end of the year, I sometimes find myself shocked to realize that I've been here that long. Many mornings as I ascend the steps from my apartment to the street, it still feels like I'm on a movie set: Cue the New York extras -- the lawyers and brokers with their briefcases schlepping to the subways, the students heading to St. Francis College with their computer backpacks, the nannies with their strollers, the moms and dads dropping off kids at St. Ann's School before grabbing a train to the office.

One key extra in my daily script is the doorman at the building across the street. I've never met him, but a few months ago, he started waving to me as I left the apartment every morning. It's a simple smile-and-nod relationship, but it makes me feel secure, like he's going to make sure nothing bad happens while I'm gone.

As I walk through Brooklyn Heights to Dumbo, where my office is, I sometimes find myself saying, "Holy crap, I'm living in Brooklyn! How did this happen?"

As with life anywhere, much of my life here is routine: Work, groceries, laundry, movies. But I find that I deal with certain chores very differently here than I would have in Seattle.

Take laundry, for example. Here, I go to a laundromat, whereas in Seattle I had a washer and dryer in my house. So I have to set aside an evening to do laundry. Because it's more of a project than it used to be, I find that I can go a lot longer between trips to the laundromat than I ever would have imagined. But I try to go on certain nights that I know are not busy. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are usually good. Friday night is what I call Loser Night -- only people without plans end up doing the wash on Friday -- but this is an occasion when it's great to be a loser because you're guaranteed to get washers and dryers when you want them.

I fill up my wheeled cart, a gift from Sophie, and roll it to the Expressway Laundromat on Atlantic Avenue, which is about three blocks from my house. I rarely do laundry on weekends because the laundromat is waaaaay too crowded, and the patrons way too cranky and competitive, on Saturdays and Sundays. And I still have not succumbed to the temptation to drop off my laundry - maybe next year. That's partly because I've watched the Chinese women who run Expressway work their butts off doing other people's laundry and don't want to burden them. Such a chick reaction, I know - but whaddaya gonna do?

I often combine my laundry chores with grocery shopping at Trader Joe's, which is an avenue and a half from the laundromat. I dash down there while my clothes are in the washer, pick up a few things, and dash back. This TJ's, by the way, is in an old bank building that is very grand and elegant. Oddly, even here, the clerks have that same friendly-happy-helpful quality that they have in Seattle. Wish it was something they could bottle and feed to the you're-standing-in-front-of-me-but-I'm-pretending-I-don't-see-you clerks at the Key Market down the street.

On another topic, Ian's back in town, and last weekend we had a nice little adventure. Ian said he felt like he'd spent a weekend in some European city -- and I agree. We went uptown to see a David Hockney exhibit and ended up strolling along Madison Avenue and in and out of a couple of shops: the Gagosian Gallery's retail store, where you can buy $100,000 gifts for all your friends, and Fred Leighton, a jewelry store that sells mostly vintage pieces from the last several centuries. Even though we were in our rain gear and didn't look like money, the guy there welcomed us in and took out several pieces for us to look at. The loveliest was a pair of gold pins in the shape of hands - $40K, but who's counting?

After our nonshopping spree and lunch at Viande, a New York style deli that specializes in turkey, we finally made it to the Hockney at Pace Wildenstein on 57th- new landscape pieces that I found so-so. Then downtown to Chelsea, where we were planning to see the second part of the Hockney show but got sidetracked by the Richard Serra exhibit at the Gagosian. I love Serra, and these two pieces were particularly great because, as you walk into them, they somehow seem to be lots bigger than they look from the outside. From above (as you can see if you look at the images on the gallery's web site), they look like giant eyes.

From there, we headed to a great little store called Printed Matter that sells mostly small-press and art books, posters, and the like - many small editions produced by artists, well known and unknown. Then on the Angelika to see the Argentine movie The Maid - a really wonderful family story that I've been thinking about ever since I saw it. When it comes to Seattle, you should definitely see it.

An amazing day in New York - not least because Ian is so much fun to spend time with.

Eleven months in and more to come. I've just signed my lease for 2010 . . .

So much to do, so little time

I can't believe it's been a month since I wrote something here. Explains why I'm also not a good Tweeter.

It's been a busy month - trying to fit in some stuff before summer's gone, which is definitely is now. It seems to have happened so suddenly here. You don't get those midnight-sun kind of nights here that you get in the Northwest. Dusk descends with alarming speed.

Some catch-up stuff: I met up with Melissa and Sophie on Governor's Island the weekend before last, on a glorious summer evening. The 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's landing in the vicinity came with all sorts of Dutch events, as well as these lovely reproduction ships that mimicked the ones on which Hudson and crew came here.

Hudson's exploration prompted the Dutch to come check it out, thus explaining all those "kills" upstate in lieu of rivers. And of course, Brooklyn is named after the Dutch town of Breukelen, where Melissa's Mom, Angela, was born. (She said to me once that she never imagined growing up in Breukelen that she'd have a daughter who would one day live in Brooklyn.)

Back to Governor's Island, where one of the booths for the Dutch festival offered the opportunity to make poffertjes, little Dutch pancakes that puff up like balls and are then sprinkled with powdered sugar and eaten. Yum!

This past weekend, I spent half of (a rainy) Sunday volunteering at the Showtime Showhouse, which is a designer showcase that benefits a charity here called Housing Works. HW runs a bunch of really fabulous thrift stores, which, as you all know, are my favorite sort of store. Various rooms in the house were based on Showtime shows like Dexter (about a forensic scientist/serial killer with a heart of gold - sort of), Californication (screenwriter/sex addict), Weeds (mom grows pot to support her family after her husband dies), and The Tudors (Henry VIII et al).

The rooms were all very different - you can get sort of an idea here, as were the people who strolled through. My job was to explain things (by consulting a brochure), answer questions, and keep people from pawing the merch. The highlight was when a skinny, scruffy guy of 70-plus whirled in, wearing a crumpled raincoat, reeking of smoke, and bursting with questions. He even had a messy shopping bag filled with papers to set off the eccentric look. His questions were interesting, though, and he was clearly a designer or architect (he had great horn rim glasses, always a sure sign of a design professional).

He said he wanted to create a cross-shaped light sculpture using LED lights but he didn't know anything about the technology. One of the art pieces in the showhouse (actually two penthouses in Tribeca - $14 million or so each) was a giant LED eye. My entreaties not to touch it didn't make any difference to him - he was lifting and shifting and trying to discern the secrets of its construction.

After about 20 minutes of cross-examining me (I felt like I was in grad school) about the lighted eye and other art pieces in the Dexter rooms, he said, "Have you ever heard of Knoll furniture?" I said sure. He said, "I'm Peter Knoll" and then swirled out just as quickly as he had come in.

I checked around the web and couldn't find anything specifically about Peter Knoll - a rarity these days - but I think he was who he said he was. Hope I get to see his LED cross one of these days.

Last Thursday night I went to see the new production of Othello with Philip Seymour Hoffman. It got a crappy review in the Times this week, and with some good cause. The acting was incredible - I don't think I've ever seen anything like it on the stage (not that I've seen that much theater, and never a production of Othello). But four hours is a bit long for most audiences, and the ultra-modern touches (some characters never appear - lines are spoken to them over cell phones) were a little too-too.

Still, a great cast, and it's fun to see something in previews, before the reviews come out.

One last thing: Did you know there was a term for people like Sophie and me who are here from the NW? We're ex-PACs, and last week the new Ace Hotel at 29th and B-way had a party for us. Lotsa flannel in the crowd but nothing really all that PAC about it, frankly. But Sophie and I had fun anyway. (The Ace is a spinoff of the ones in Seattle and Portland, BTW.)

More later from the ex-PACs. Hope you're all well and happy and enjoying fall.

Crossing over . . . and over

Just got back from a three-bridge walk - across the Brooklyn Bridge, under the Manhattan Bridge, and back to Manhattan via the Williamsburg Bridge. The mnemomic device for the order of the bridges, south to north, is BMW. Easy, right?

Our leader, a guy in his late sixties named Cy, showed up in pinstriped baseball pants and an ancient cap with "Shorewalkers" imprinted on it. He had a way of stopping at certain points along the walk as if he had some amazing bit of history or lore to impart, only to tell us that we had five minutes to use the bathroom in a park or a cafe.

We started out at the Manhattan Municipal Building, built around the turn of the last century and designed by McKim, Mead & White in classical and Italian Renaissance style. It sits just next to the Brooklyn Bridge and across from City Hall, and still functions as the main office of city government. This area of Lower Manhattan is really lovely - though I'm guessing that as many people visit it to go to J&R Electronics and Century 21 (a discount department store) as are there to see the historic sites.

Up and over the bridge we went, fighting the tourist and stroller tide on this lovely wasn't-it-supposed-to-rain sort of Sunday. Then back under the bridge through Dumbo, right past my office, under the Manhattan Bridge and on to Vinegar Hill.

Vinegar Hill is a nabe that overlooks that old Brooklyn Navy Yard and was settled by Irish immigrants and named after a place in Ireland that was the site of a battle with the British during the Irish Rebellion of the late 18th century. Several charming streets remain - little slices of brownstone and frame, store-fronted houses surrounded by Dumbo, city electrical substations, warehouses, a large soundstage, and a huge public housing project (many people here still call them projects - not the polite Seattle nomenclature - public housing).

On we marched to Fort Greene, the centerpiece of which is Fort Greene Park, a large space that was in fact the location of a fort and is therefore on high ground with grand views (this is where yesterday's Michael Jackson birthday party was supposed to have been held before it was moved to the much larger Prospect Park). Surrounding the park are leafy streets lined with brownstones and large Victorian and Edwardian mansions with wide staircases and genteel porches (though many of the mansions have been broken up into apartments.

From there we made our way to an area of Williamsburg that is home to a sect of Hassidic Jews called Satmar. One of my walk-mates told me that this group is particularly insular and traditional, which seemed evident on the street. Men in black coats and hat and women with their heads covered and little boys with the traditional curls. All of the children wore contemporary clothing but in a more conservative style - dresses and tights - very covered up. Except for the trendy strollers and one (Satmar) woman in Chanel and gold leather flats, it really felt like you were walking back in time. What's incredible about this neighborhood is that it's not walled off or anything - it's insular in the middle of the diversity and worldliness of the huge borough of Brooklyn. How you accomplish that through belief and tradition alone is hard to imagine. It's faith and devotion personified.

We stopped at a little cafe on Lee Street where the food was all kosher, of course, and very good. Middle Eastern in character and all freshly made - grilled vegetables, shawarma, pita, and Israeli salad (cukes and tomatoes). Like a lot of inexpensive New York eateries, it was a plain place in decor terms, but with excellent food.

By now our group had dwindled in size as some people headed off to explore the trendier confines of Bedford Avenue in Billyburg, where hipsters parade their angst and their pricey sneakers. There's art, yes, and chic boutiques and espresso - in fact, one of my Pine Street Cottage neighbors, J.D., owns two coffee shops in Williamsburg, both called Oslo (he and his family live in Brooklyn most of the time and in Seattle in the summer).

The remaining 15 or so us of the group headed towards the Williamsburg Bridge, which has walkways/bikeways on both sides. To my surprise, the Williamsburg span had lovely art nouveau detailing at both ends. Between, it's rather utilitarian as a structure, but there was tons of interesting graffitti, which you don't see on the Brooklyn Bridge, and way fewer tourists. Also, on the car level below us, we witnessed a car fire -

The Williamsburg Bridge empties out on to Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, where the walking group parted company. I went north to Tompkins Square Park to take in a little of the Charlie Parker Jazz Fest before heading home - a nice little respite after an 8-mile walk.

Next time you come to New York, I'll take you on this walk myself, and I promise to have more historic info in hand than Cy.

Bye for now.

Dual-purpose weekend

Last Saturday: I would never have expected to go to a national park and see laundry hanging from a line strung between trees. But there it was, on Governor's Island, where there were two events competing for visitors' attention: a camp of Civil War reenactors and an African-American culture festival. A perfect combo on one level, but an unusual one on another. Nonetheless, the feet-on-the-ground African dance lessons, with drum accompaniment, didn't seem in conflict with the occasional cannon blast from the (faux) Grand Army of the Republic. (The laundry belonged to the GAR folks.)

That's the kind of thing that happens on Governor's Island, a former military installation (for two centuries) that was nearly doubled in size ages ago when it was filled out with dirt from subway excavations. Now, you can bike or walk around it (about the same distance as walking around Green Lake) or rent a six-person pedal carriage sort of vehicle (it has pedals in the two front and middle seats, so four people can pedal at once). There are old officers quarters, a former military prison, lots of contemporary art work, and much open space on the old parade grounds and here and there around the island. They're still tearing down some of the more contemporary buildings on the island and that will add to the open space.

The only way to get to Governor's Island is by free ferry - it's only a 10-minute ride from Lower Manhattan, but, as this is New York, you have to wait in line for 45 minutes or longer on weekends to take this brief excursion. The ferry slip had a sign stenciled on it that said "At the Same Moment." Not sure what that means, but it was certainly a big topic of discussion among the passengers. Interestingly, the return ferry had signs indicating that one side was for Sheep and the other for Goats. (I was directed to the Sheep side, which is good because, as you know, Sheep go to Heaven and Goats go to Hell.)

Last Sunday, I landed in an entirely different New York landscape - the West Village - where I took a literary/dessert tour nominally in honor of the 81st birthday of Andy Warhol. Our guide was part of a great little company called NYC Discovery Tours, which does history and literary walks through various city nabes. I've done a few of these tour walks, and these folks are definitely the best.

Among the highlights: I learned that lovely Washington Square was a burial ground at one point, and the bodies are still there. Basically, the park was constructed over them. Many were paupers or, sadly, criminals who had been hanged from a large tree that still thrives in the park. Looking down on this cemetery at various points were Eleanor Roosevelt and Edith Wharton, among others.

Another highlight was the desserts - cannoli freshly made for us in a little bakery on Bleecker called Rocco's, and rugelach fresh from the oven at a place on Hudson (I forgot to write down the name).

The tour ended at one of the later locations of Andy Warhol's Factory and the place where he was shot. It's actually the Decker Building on Union Square, an area that now seems so upscale that it's hard to imagine it as a radical art enclave (the Williamsburg BK of its day). The Factory is now a hangout for fashion models, according to our guide.

This weekend's plans: a walk around BK, from Bay Ridge to Manhattan Beach, and maybe a look at a John Currin exhibit in Chelsea. What are you up to?

Family vacation

No, not my family - Susanne's. Rusty, her brother his wife, Amy, and their son John. Cousin David, his wife, Debbie, and their daughter, Wendy. The weekend before last, I met up with Susanne in Ithaca and then drove up to a spot on Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, where they'd rented a cottage for the week. Cayuga juts northward from Ithaca and goes for 40 miles. The cottage had a lovely little yard that ran right down to a dock, where Rusty had a small sailboat. The weather was at least 10 degrees cooler and lots less humid than the city had been.

It's kind of odd to hang out with people you've heard about for years but never met - you know things about them -- some things that are maybe not so positive -- that you can't mention. So there's a strange sort of dissonance. They turned out to be very nice people, quite hospitable and fun to hang out with. They were the people I had heard about in some ways, but not in others. As much as we talk about our families to our friends, we can't really convey the absolute truth about them, because there is no absolute truth - just our experiences and peculiar biases and conflicted feelings about the people we love.

So, Susanne, thanks for the pleasure of your company on Cayuga Lake - and for the experience of meeting your family - not so different from my family, after all.

Switch gears now, to the trips up and back. I took the Greyhound, and I honestly don't think I've been on a Greyhound since taking a trip to Port Angeles sometime back in the '80s, before Sophie was born. This was also my first trip upstate since moving here.

The trip north was pretty uneventful, except for the fact that the bus driver at the Port Authority (the infamous Port Authority) had some sort of system for seating his passengers that he couldn't explain very clearly. Some seats were "reserved" but not really, so people would sit in them and then he would make them move, get off the bus, let more people on, and then make another group of transgressors move. Then suddenly, all bets were off and those seats were open to anyone. Before we got on the road, he announced over the mike that he wanted us to know he wasn't showing any bias towards any individual or group - just following some arcane Greyhound rules. But to my ear, he sounded like the Emperor of the Bus, a petty tyrant with a tiny, mobile kingdom all his own. Not a bad guy, but definitely happy to be In Charge.

My fellow passengers made up a sort of low-rent UN - there must have a dozen nationalities represented, and several entire families with kids, aunts, uncles, grandparents, many with Canada as their ultimate destination - 12 or 13 hours on the bus. (My trip was only about 5 hours.)

I got off in Binghamton and tranferred to a Shortline Bus for the last leg to Ithaca. The bus station was stuck in the '70s - see the yellow plastic chairs in the picture -- and in some lonely corner of Lost America. It was nice to get back on the bus again and cruise through the low, green Adirondacks towards Ithaca.

After three days in Ithaca and environs, I was back on the bus. This time, it was a different cast and crew. The conversation between the two guys behind me quickly drifted to drugs. The older of the two - he later said he was 40 - was full of advice for his young seatmate, who was maybe 18 or 19. The relative merits of Perc and Oxy, Beck's and PBR, the cost effectiveness of buying a kilo of coke for $8K, splitting it into 8-balls, and selling them for $100-$150 each. By Mr. Big's calculations, you could turn the $8K investment into $25K.

"I get everything wholesale. I buy two kilos, keep one for myself and sell the other." By now, Mr. B was clearly enjoying his role as teacher to The Kid. I had the impression they had just met on the bus. The younger guy said he had been visiting family upstate and was heading back home to Florida (another unbelieveably long bus ride . . .). Mr. Big assessed the status of Utica and Ithaca as drug markets and came down on the side of Utica. He bragged about having fought the police when he was arrested at some point in the past - his punishment for resisting, he said, was that they confiscated his expensive sneakers. He told his stories in a raspy, supremely confident New Yorkese. He was from the Bronx.

Pretty soon, a sale was made and the Kid took his pills and drifted off to sleep. (I didn't see any of this, mind you - just overheard it.)

Mr. Big also had an appreciation for good cheese. "Once, I went on this trip to this place where there was nothing but Amish. They make this cheese, man, and it is SO soft. They send their guys to the city and they don't even know what they're doing. They look like f--king Jews."

The conversation shifts to tourism as we near the city. Two women on the bus mention that they've never been to New York - they're looking out the windows for the skyline and keep mistaking Jersey cities for NYC. Mr. Big explained that there were certain places they should avoid but he wouldn't be more specific than "parts of Chinatown at night" or certain areas around Times Square. They said they'd heard the Bronx was bad, but he demurred. "It used to be," he said, "but now you go to the Bronx and you think you're in Queens, it's so pretty. They got cul de sacs and everything."

Welcome home.

(more pics here)

My favorite lesbians

I went with Sophie and Melissa to the NYC Pride parade last weekend - it was an especially auspicious year for this celebration because it was the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Seeing the veterans of Stonewall riding by on a float was at once heartening and sad. Many are now old men, and they still can't legally marry or live entirely free of fear that they could be the victims of anti-gay violence - even on some of the streets of liberal New York.

I imagine their stories are hard for people of Melissa and Sophie's generation to grasp, though they and the other younger people in the crowd absolutely recognize the contribution of these gay elders and they cheered them as they went by - they are heroes to all of their gay "children" and "grandchildren." And to people like me as well - parents of young men and women who are just trying to get on in the world and live their lives as free Americans. Stonewall is Selma.

This week's New Yorker quoted an article called "The Homosexual in America" that was published in 1966 in Time magazine: "[Homosexuality] is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness."

Back in those days, when I was in high school, I read Time voraciously. It was a sort of pop culture Bible to a certain people of my generation, and I am horrified to think that I was reading that sort of crap.

Times change, but not that much in some ways. I will never forget stopping with Sophie in Laramie, Wyoming, when we drove cross-country from Seattle to Poughkeepsie in 2003. It was just a few years after the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, and we pulled over to take some pictures of one of those lonesome stretches of fence that go for on for miles in that part of the west. Suddenly, Sophie started to cry -- and I knew right away what she was thinking. This was much like the spot where Matthew had been tied to a fence, beaten, and left to die. We both realized the horrifying implication -- that you could be targeted for violence simply because you were gay, plain and simple.

Now, 40 years after Stonewall and 11 years after Matthew Shepard, a parade seems a slight way to recognize the veterans of the struggle. But it does provide a moment of solidarity, and a chance to remind people of the gay rights issues that are critically important right now -- the fight for marriage equality and the struggle to get rid of the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't ask, don't tell.

Bare butts and drag may seem frivolous, but in a way that's what it's all about - the freedom to pursue your own happiness. See more pictures here.