A moment of Zen

That's what Jon Stewart calls the little fillip at the end of The Daily Show. For me, in New York, there are a lot of moments of Zen, mostly having to do with suddenly seeing the city from an odd angle, or unexpectedly coming upon a place I've heard about but never seen. And a lot of these moments are about seeing the Empire State Building from every which way - sometimes it looks small and distant and it's hard to believe it's the tallest building in the city.

Other times, it's right there in front of you, looming in such a way that you can't really even see the top of it. If you're literally in front of it, you're aware of its presence as a monument (a weak word to describe it), an icon, a surreal thing that is in reality just another building. You notice it more at the level because of the crowds that are always swarming around it.

Sometimes, for me, it's like a lighthouse: I can tell that I'm heading in the right direction because I can see it - there it is, so I'm know I'm heading north or south or east or west. A quotidian thing, useful and amazing at the same time.

On occasion, I've been walking somewhere in Manhattan and I'll realize that a little clutch of people are looking up at something, transfixed, and when I follow their gaze they're almost invariably looking at it. It's a religious experience, like when the sun and clouds accumulate in a certain way and you can see the luminous rays falling to earth - I always call that phenomenon God light, a strange thing for a non-spiritual person like myself.

There are certain things that define a city, and it's almost silly to say it, but the Empire State Building IS New York in some fundamental way - like the subway and the Met and Battery Park, only so, so much more so.

Sometimes I look at the Empire State Building and I get a little shiver of fear that something terrible could happen to it like what happened to the Twin Towers. But then it just seems so singular and strong and tall that the fear goes away and the awe sets in again. It's just a building, but oh, what a building.

(A note about the picture: I took it one night while walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, so it encompasses three monumental structures: the Empire State, the Manhattan Bridge and the BB.)

East River interlude

This past week was a busy one at work, not least because I spent a day in Washington DC at the office there. It was a quick trip - down on the train on Wednesday morning and back that same night. One of those business trips that seems useful but in retrospect dealing with something that could have been hashed out in a good conference call. The good thing was that my coworker and I got a chance to walk down to the Tidal Basin and see the cherry blossoms - lovely, even in a misty rain.

Today, I took a walk with a group called the Outdoors Club along the path by the East River. We started at 34th St and walked to South Street Seaport, after which I caught the nearby Ikea ferry (free!) back to Brooklyn. It was a lovely day, clear and in the mid-60s. The walk was notable for the views of Brooklyn, but I don't think it would become one of my favorites because it skirts the East Side Highway and was really noisy.

It was an interesting group of mostly older people from the city and as far away as Poughkeepsie. Some of them have been walking with this group for 30 years or more. I loved hearing one woman's stories about growing up on the Lower East Side before it was chi-chi, and as a working single mom. Her name was Shirley and she lives in Chelsea. I would guess she's in her mid-70s. Shirley was very short, like many New Yorkers (I remember Mary B remarking once that there were a lot more short people in NYC than in Seattle - who knows why? Genetics?). She had a lot of opinions about recent immigrants to New York, some not so positive, and about working moms who leave their kids with these immigrants while they work. Interesting in that she herself was the child of immigrants from the Ukraine and Hungary. "In those days," she said, "Mothers didn't work and they made do."

Another woman, Eileen, came in from Long Island, where she lives with her third "husband" - they're not married but have been together 20 years. "You don't make that mistake three times," she said. But her two husbands before that both died of illness, and her current one is going blind, so she has to take care of him. Thus, she hikes to have a respite from being a caregiver. She was also a first generation child of immigrants, from Ireland. But she had a more tolerant attitude towards the newer immigrants, seeing them as being like her parents - hard working and looking for something better. She very sweetly took me in hand when she learned I was new to the city.

What's interesting in situations like this is that people often ask me where I'm from, a question that I could confidently answer in Seattle - Kentucky. But here it's a bit harder. I am from Kentucky, but I'm also from Seattle, having spent equal and more recent time there. The next question I'm asked is unanswerable for me at the moment: How long do you think you'll stay in New York? After all, I've been here only three months - barely the length of a season.

For this post, I'm including some pictures of what I think of as Dickensian New York. You see these strange things here that are so retrograde, like the guy heating up a bucket of patching tar with a blow torch right on the street, and those weird pipes that seem to be vents for some kind of underworld. I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for them, but I just don't know what it is yet.

And finally, a picture of a message written in chalk at a house down the street a few days ago.

Rose

Nona and Bob and George and Martha and Abe and Barack

Hi everyone,

What a nice weekend I had in DC last week chez Nona and Bob. Their place is so sweet, and they're so hospitable that every time I've stayed there I've felt like इ was registered in a luxury hotel. Try it sometime - you'll like it.

And speaking of luxury, Mt. Vernon, where the three of us went on Sunday has to be one of the most architecturally sophisticated and beautiful historic homes I've ever seen. It was a lovely, sunny, cool day when we there, and the grounds of Mt. Vernon had a nice early spring glow. The house itself is amazing - all red-roofed, rusticated elegance, exactly the kind of home you would imagine a successful 18th century farmer would have. The location atop a hill overlooking the Potomac is breathtakingly perfect, especially the river view from the porch that runs the length of the house. George and Martha had style - most evident in their gorgeous bedroom, which is the most simple and elegant room in the house. Some of the others are painted in a rather garish green - but this bedroom is white and the most soothing palest blue-green.

Even the loud cell-phone talker we had to endure in the line couldn't spoil the experience. Check it out in the Flash presentation on this page.

On Saturday Nona and I spent several hours touring the National Portrait Gallery, another gorgeous building that has been painstakingly renovated in recent years.

There are so many stunning portraits in the gallery that I can only mention a couple. As I write this, I realize that it was sort of a presidential weekend, which I suppose is not that unusual an experience when you're visiting DC. Nonetheless, it was awesome to see photographs of Abe Lincoln just down the hall from the iconic photo collage of Barack Obama. These two presidents in particular belong together. (Abe was photographed many, many times - he was apparently fascinated with the form and invited photographers into his world.)

Another revelation in the gallery were the photographic jewelry pieces, mostly from the 19th century - exquisite little mementos of people who had died, or simply tokens of affections.

And yet another wonderful thing about this trip was the discovery of a cheap but nice bus service that goes to DC (and Boston) - I'll be using Vamoose and Bolt buses from now on. (Take note, Ann and Nona! )

A New York story - the neighbor I never met

I went upstairs to collect my mail today and there in the doorway was a bunch of yellow roses with a note saying "For James Purdy." I looked on the tenant list and there was a Purdy, but that told me little. So I went to the Times web site and searched his name and found this obituary:

James Purdy was a novelist and playwright, and he had broken his hip sometime in the past few months or weeks and was in a nursing home in New Jersey when he died, at 94.

The Times said: "Purdy, the author of the novels “Malcolm” and “The Nephew,” labored at the margins of the literary mainstream, inspiring veneration or disdain. His nearly 20 novels and numerous short stories and plays either enchanted or baffled critics with their gothic treatment of small-town innocents adrift in a corrupt and meaningless world, his distinctive blend of plain speech with ornate, florid locutions, and the hallucinatory quality of his often degraded scenes."

He was a pal of Paul Bowles and Dorothy Parker, who apparently made his reputation among writers with a review of his first book, "Malcolm," in Esquire. He never became a mainstream writer, though, and apparently was at peace with that on some level. He told an interviewer a few years ago, “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me. I’d think that something had gone wrong.”

I feel an obligation now to track down his books and read them. Anyone know anything about him?

A walk on Staten Island and a bit of art

I feel like time passes so quickly here - maybe because I'm working later and there's less time left in the evenings to get everything done. I'm really not sure. But in any case, I'm just now writing a bit about what I did last weekend - and it seems eons ago.

On Saturday, I took the train to the Upper East Side to see two museum shows, one at the Met and one at the Jewish Museum. The show at the JM was about Yiddish/Jewish theater in Moscow in the 1920s, when Marc Chagall was still living there and designing sets. The canvas banners he painted as backdrops for a show at one of the theaters had been rolled up and stored in the theater’s cellar for decades – through the worst of times in Russia – and were then rediscovered. It was amazing being in the gallery surrounded by these immense Chagall paintings filled with floating people, animals, food, etc. – experiencing them in the same way as the Russians who had attended the theater for which they were painted. Chagall signed some of them in Russian script and others in French.

The Met had a really great show of pictures by Pierre Bonnard – a painter I knew little about but had always lumped together with the Impressionists and thought of as a still life painter – pretty bowls of fruit and vases of flowers. Boy, was I wrong.

These paintings were all done when he was older and all are of domestic scenes. But the more you look at them the more you realize these are not pretty pictures. Bonnard’s wife, Marthe, is often a ghostly presence on the edge of the scene, or an unhappy lump sitting at a food-filled table. She’s almost not there. In one heart-rending painting, he shows her pushed out to the corner of the frame, looking towards a smiling young woman. The young woman is Bonnard’s long-dead mistress, who had committed suicide years before when she learned he was marrying another woman. But the real specter in the picture is his living wife.
I hope this makes some sense. Here’s the picture so you can see what I mean. All of the paintings share the very tight framing that this one has. The colors are gorgeous but the people and objects seemed trapped or locked in. Great show.

Sunday marked my first excursion to Staten Island, for a 7-mile walk with a group called Shorewalkers. It was a warm, overcast day – so perfect for walking. I’m beginning to thing you can’t leave the house here without running into a writer. One of my fellow hikers was Gloria Naylor, who won a National Book Award in the 1980s for a book called The Women of Brewster Place (Oprah was in a movie made from the book). I would not have recognized Naylor, but someone else pointed her out, saying, “She says she writes books. Her name is Gloria something.” Look her up on Wikipedia – interesting story.

The hike was great, especially as a way to get a little bit of geographic orientation, and the free Staten Island Ferry takes you by the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Best freebie in NYC. I’m told that it’s especially great at sunset – and it’s one subway stop from my house.

Shorewalkers does an annual walk around the entire island of Manhattan – 32 miles, 14 hours. Anyone want to join me?

New York is liberal, right?

More to report, so I'm actually doing another blog today. This one's about a protest I stumbled upon at City Hall in Lower Manhattan yesterday.

Yes, it was an anti-Obama rally, and people in attendance seemed most upset at what they see as his Red tendencies.

I felt as if I had landed on another planet - read the signs and you'll see what I mean.

After Bobby Jindal's strange rant the other night, I can't help but feel that the fringe is growing larger and more desperate as the days go by.

And these protesters looked to be working class people, not Wall Street fat cats (with Wall St just equally desperate blocks away, you couldn't help but think about it while watching the rally).

One last image to sum up the day - No Socialism! Gotta love America.

Signs of the times

Sorry, folks, I'm an inconsistent diarist, partly because my home laptop died and I've just now gotten a new one. So I'm writing to you on my new red Dell XPS M1330 at a Starbucks on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights - just doing my part to keep the economy moving.

Interesting thing about this nabe for a Seattleite is that there are very few places where you can find wi-fi connections. Two that I know of, and Starbucks requires a sub with ATT or - and this is a great loophole -- you have to buy a coffee card (even a $5 one will do) and you get two free hours of wi-fi per day as long as you use or refill the coffee card once a month. (Suzanne, take that laptop out for some air using this consumer tip from Rose.)

The headline on this post refers to signs I've seen and photographed around BK and Manhattan. The first one is from a bank in the neighborhood - a broken sign that kind of sums up the world of banking as many people see it these days. No aspersions cast on TD Bank - I'm sure they're perfectly respectable.

I heard from someone who works there that even American Express is getting bank bailout money. Odd.

The second picture is not really of a sign, but the sight of this Warholian sized soup can sitting out on Henry Street for trash pick-up certainly stopped me in my tracks on the way to work. It was in front of a church, and it's chicken noodle, for those of you searching for clues about it provenance.

The snow in the picture reminds me - that was from the last snowstorm of a month or so ago. There's another one on the way, with potential accumulation of 10 inches or so - though I doubt that will happen in the city.

In a while, I'm off to see Two Lovers, which takes place in BK but was filmed in New Jersey. So many illusions in life, as well as in the movies, including Joaquin Phoenix's recent odd behavior. My celeb following friends will know what I'm talking about.

Went for a walk yesterday across the Brooklyn Bridge - my third or fourth time doing that over the years. It never fails to amaze me. And it also surprises me every morning when I see it as I walk to work. Who would have thought a year ago I'd be living within walking distance of the Brooklyn Bridge?

Rose