So my little nook of Bushwick is not the cleanest place in New York City. Or the classiest. And, like my neighbors, I've had my fair share of rodents. But it's my home! Even if the following things have disturbed me:
While taking a walk through Maria Hernandez Park on Saturday afternoon, I saw a kid (maybe 6 or 7) squatting next to a tree and dropping a deuce.
After I got off the L train yesterday at the Jefferson stop, I saw a fully-grown man taking a leak on a garage door in broad daylight.
About two steps later, I saw a giant, dead rat laying on the sidewalk, belly up.
On my aforementioned walk through MHP, I saw a homeless gentleman passed out on the curb. As I was -- let's face it -- gawking and walking past him, a 13-year-old on a BMX bike rode past like a storm of bile and shouted,"Fucking crackhead motherfucker!" as loud as he could and sped away.
Some people take a different turn on their walk home and find a quaint bakery or a cerulean garden of Virgin Mary statuettes. I find turds! Hearts for Bushwick.
I don't know if it's the unfortunate reality that clowns inevitably show up or that happiness should be doled out in spoonfuls instead of buckets or that John Phillips Sousa made music for "extraordinary rendition" travel mixtapes, but there are people who seriously hate parades.
I, however, love them. My hunger for blustery hoopla and robotic beauty pageant waving and militaristic lockstep will never be sated. Did I mention marching bands?
So the 50th Annual German-American Steuben Day Parade on Saturday was obviously awesome. There were a number of marching bands fresh from Deutschland, a few of awkward sponsors (Trump?) and a group of German tourists next to me who kept giggling whenever a float had something German written on it (i.e. "Wir lernen sie Deutsch").
But my favorite float was the "German Originality" float that trumpeted Deutschlanders invention of the MP3 format. Danke, mein freunden. Thank you also for inventing beer. And Henry Kissinger, who was the Grand Marshall but too busy committing war crimes or watching soccer matches to show up when I was there. Kissinger excepted, Iche liebe Deutschland.
One of the most confusing discoveries I made when I moved to New York is that the MTA has no trip planner on its website. If you started out in, say, Bushwick, and wanted to go to Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens to see the spooky enameled photographs on the tombstones, how would you figure it out without several different byzantine subway and bus maps?
Back home in Chicago, we have a very nice trip planner that, if you put in your destination, will give you a plethora of options to get there by el trains and buses and feet.
Now, before anyone hops up and shouts HopStop! let me explain why this service falls short and why the city could do better if it harnessed its own information to give commuters a useful way to figure out how to get to their destinations.
Using HopStop, one's only option (and not a bad one, either. I use it all the time), getting to MoMa on Memorial Day should be easy. Pop in your starting spot and try to figure out where to walk when you get off the subway or bus. But HopStop has is missing one absolutely critical piece of information: real-time service advisories. New York has the most erratic service of any mass transit system I've ever lived with, and I am not a junkie for the MTA's email alerts and don't always notice the posted signs in stations. But how can I keep up with it all? Life is too short.
This information should be open and accessible in an API so that anyone that needs it can mash it up into something far more useful. Or the MTA could keep it for itself and reap the benefits. Unfortunately, neither has happened.
For instance, if HopStop had known that trains were running on a Sunday schedule this past Monday, it wouldn't have told me to get on a V train at 6th Ave./14th St. and I wouldn't have sat there for 20 minutes before I stupidly figured out that there were none. Instead, it would have said to take the F uptown and get off at 47-50 Sts. and walk three extra blocks. But HopStop doesn't have this information. The MTA does.
To defray some of the rising costs of running public transportation in New York City, how about they redesign their website with Google Maps technology and provide a trip planner with real-time updates so we can get on the right trains? You would encourage more people to go places if it was guaranteed they'd get there (and quickly) and it would be simple to figure out. Get museums, restaurants, and other destinations to sponsor ads in the site to help pay for it.
It's foolish for the MTA to not take advantage of all the data they have at their fingertips, even beyond service outages. How about frequency of trains and buses? They could use their own calculated average times (and even cater it to times of day -- rush hour vs. the wee hours ) to tell you if it's faster to walk from here to there or take a bus or transfer lines. HopStop does this, but how reliable are their numbers and who would have more accurate times? The MTA has all of this data and they could use it to make a killer product that would put HopStop to shame and at the same time make my life less-so.
A couple months ago, I was wandering aimlessly through the Lower East Side with my friend when we came across an illuminated wall covered in a grid of Post-Its. Using two different colors, the neat little squares spelled "To Do" in relief, and the purpose of the wall seemed fairly obvious once we squeezed into the giggling crowd. Tickled by the idea ourselves, she and I each dug for a pen, scrawled something innocuous and walked away.
Spring back to Sunday afternoon, when I was sitting with this same friend, reading the Sunday Times in Central Park: I was reading this depressing story about the slow death of drive-in theatres when she gasped and held up the paper.
There, in the center of a spread in the op-ed section, was my note, in my handwriting, in a virtual heap of papers. It said: "Move out of Bushwick."
I'm still living in Bushwick, and just this morning I threw out a glue trap with three unfortunate mice attached. Which makes five now in the past month. However, I've been here nearly six months, and I've already been published in the New York Times! Things are going well, obviously.
I saw Izzy on Petfinder, and I was wondering if she's been adopted yet (she's beautiful!). I live in Brooklyn, about an hour away, according to Google Maps, and I'd like to come out and meet her. Is there an application I can fill out and what kind of hours do you keep for visiting the dogs?
Thanks, Charlie Moran
... and the very next day, this curt response:
This exchange neatly encapsulates my dogged pursuit of a canine via the internet. I've wanted a puppy ever since I went to college and saw so many cute girls running with their Yorkies, and now I find myself in Brooklyn, watching cute girls (not running) with their Yorkies. I've even named him Steve/Lola, depending on his plumbing and demeanor. And I've decided that he should probably be a Boston Terrier.
But, like finding that your Iams, then your Purina, then your Eukenuba is full of white crystals used to treat pool water, there's been discouragement at every turn.
If there are 1.4 million dogs in New York City, why is it so hard for me to get one of my own? I applied for adoption with the Northeast Boston Terrier Rescue almost three weeks ago, and there hasn't been a single word from them since. I also contacted the Boston Terrier Club of America, who graciously provided a list of New York breeders. The very first one told me she had a puppy, and it was only $2,000! Dammit. That was way too much, and when I asked her if she knew any breeders who weren't peddling show dogs, she responded back: "Only puppy mills and backyard breeders (usually from pet stores and puppy mills), sell their dogs for that price. Even pet stores charge $1800.00." WTF!? A simple search on nextdaypets casts some doubt on this, and even more on my continued sanity.
This weekend, a furry ray of hope presented itself to me as another curt email about Izzy (formatting retained):
was returned,allergies. if interested tell where you live and what family like
I hurriedly responded and told her about my apartment, roommate, neighborhood, wet nose, etc. and 7 minutes later got this sparkling gem of concision:
I had just sat down with Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in Union Square when a young guy and girl approached me holding a camera. He was lanky and a little awkward, sort of like Michael Cera without the baby fat and maybe with a boyfriend back in Tulsa. She was just as maladroit, but somehow endowed with a smile that might have charmed the rust off a crusty subway car.
For some reason they didn't want to take my picture, but their own, and, after untethering myself from my headphones, I took the camera from the young guy. Except, as I was drawing my hand back, the handstrap clung to his hand and sent his 35mm crashing to the cobblestones behind us. We all stood around for a few startled seconds, and he finally picked it up, noticing that the back door holding in the film had come open slightly. He popped it back in and all seemed fine again.
It happened so fast and I was pretty sure the camera fell because of his awkwardness, but, being the conciliatory (read: non-confrontational) person I am, I duly apologized and offered to finally take the picture. They wiped the tension from their brows, poured out a couple shaky smiles, and I snapped the shutter. No flash. Again. No flash. The bulb might have broken when it impacted the ground, and I apologized a second time.
The girl said everything was okay, and I was sitting back down to read again and shake off the situation when he turned to me and asked, as if he just needed directions or wanted to know what brand of jeans I was wearing: "Are you gay?"
"No. Sorry."
I cracked a smile, placed my nose back in my book and checked to see how much time there was before Superbad was to start.
I guess I deserved it. I was sitting on the L train, nose-deep in Catch a Wave and Brian's Wilson hashish and Desbutol habits, when a couple brown drops stained my line of sight.
Maybe it was the drugs on my mind, if not in my mind, but, before raising my head, I imagined how a bird might have flow into my subway car and deposited this little, gritty bit of spittoon juice on my book. The subway is full of living things defying nature and surviving in the subterranean environment, and maybe one of New York's rats with wings had suddenly alighted into my cabin. But, of course, I must have swallowed too much Listerine that morning, because it was obviously just some big, careless lady with her coffee who had been hovering over me for no good reason.
But I couldn't cock an eyebrow or even furrow my brow. Because this past Sunday, as I was waiting for a train at the good ol' Jeff stop (and reading the same book), I reached to grab my bottle of water sitting on the bench railing next to me, and, in typical Charlie fashion, I fumbled with it and flung half of its contents all over the pavement before me... and a guy walking past, lugging a box on a cart.
Like the present, I was stunned with embarrassment, unable to look at the man. Maybe he noticed my reaction, because he graciously said, "it's okay" with a smile as he continued to walk by, and I was pried from my spell.
So, as I turned the page and the coffee stain disappeared into the past, I felt karmically balanced once again. But the next time it happens, I swear I'll gonna go all Murry Wilson all over that unfortunate person's ass.
"Did you just brush my elbow? This Heineken is gonna sting when it gets in your eyes."
Here are the two biggest reasons that I am a bad person:
1. I elbowed a little girl in the head. The L-line car was über-crowded, and I had strained myself to let passengers past me out the door at the Bedford stop. Afterwards, I relaxed and turned around to a more comfortable position, and my elbow landed not-so-comfortably in the skull of some 14-year old girl. She screamed "ow" a few times, and I immediately patted her head and said "sorry" as profusely as I could. We both recoiled at the creepiness of my physical contact, and my last two stops felt as long as two back-to-back bar mitzvahs.
2. I called an old man a dumbass. Gregory and I were crossing Broadway in a particularly unsavory part of Bed-Stuy when a car began to turn right into our path. The man honked at us, and I calmly, yet loudly and assertively, announced into his open window: "We have a walk signal, you dumbass." He was having none of that, and I could hear him repeating the line to me with increasing animosity as he pulled away. He was maybe 55/60 years old.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but, in light of my dick-ness today, I think I might be a real New Yorker now. You can't see my tears of joy, but you'll understand when I push you in front of a moving train or spit on your baby.
There's fossilized gum speckling the floor like globules of volcanic bile, I lean on support beams until I start to fret about contracting syphilAIDS, and the longest conversation I have ever attempted was a prolonged apology for elbowing someone in the stomach. It's the subway, not really a place that I would look for comfort or warmth -unless I was homeless, in which case I would pay my rent in bottles and pretend I was a conductor on the world's first underground steam locomotive!
This morning I experienced something akin to warmth, albeit in a delicately sensual, sexual way. I was standing on the L train, with my eyes buried in The New Yorker and my hand grasping the vertical pole for stability. I felt something brush the side of my forefiner, and I covertly glanced upwards; it was a girl wearing a fuzzy, white cardigan, about my age and not looking in my direction. Normally, this would be too intimate a pose for strangers, with their hands held nearly atop one another like that game in backyard baseball where everyone grabbed the club until one hand was left resting top.
During these ten clumsy minutes, my mind was flitting from one possibility to the next, hardly absorbing a word of Anthony Lane's takedown of Spiderman 3. Sometimes her sweater would brush my knuckles and she would choke up a little bit on the pole, but eventually it came back down to mine each time. We both stole glances back and forth, never willing to look each other in the face and acknowledge what was happening. Just as I was wondering if I was insane, and maybe she just didn't want to stretch her arm higher, the train stopped.
Stepping off and with little to lose, I looked her in her big brown eyes. She wasn't as cute as I had imagined.
"I hate that stuff, like the rock and folksy stuff. You know, CCR. That's before my time."
At first, the female voice behind me was only an irritating curiosity. Then things got better/worse, depending on whose heart you had in your possession.
"I can't let go of anything. Blame it on my mother... It's like... I don't want anything to change and I want everything to change at the same time. I'm gonna go."
This guy's girl had left him speechless, holding some cheap brew, but the rest of us stuck around to see Peter Bjorn and John's set finish. It was only fitting, a breakup amidst the clattering chords of Swedish indie-pop onstage at Webster Hall last night.
PB & J brought rougher arrangements from the meticulously arranged Writer's Block and a number of geriatric junkers from their previous album/s. Of course, "Young Folks" sounded just as triumphant and lovely as it does on record - the band walked onstage to the sound of the whistling melody played on a sitar (or some other jangly Eastern instrument) - and they saved the bombastic "Objects of My Affection" for later in the set, when I had assumed it was too late.
But, like I said, the nostalgic material showed how far they leaped with their most recent album; it harkened back to the time when these guys would have fallen through the cracks like a grimey quarter under a vending machine... just waiting to be put to good use. But they never overstayed their welcome, and the Swedish accents and mentions of "the fish-faced guy from Pirates of the Caribbean" from drummer John matched the charm of their finer moments.
Check out my photo album from the show; somehow I got some decent shots! And also, for a Mr. Lattacher, an acoustic rendition of "Amsterdam" that I recorded:
Walking through Bed Stu - and in the midst of a harrowing journey back from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which, ironically, seems most inaccessible if one actually lives in Brooklyn, okay, at least Williamsburg... that's most of Brooklyn, right? - I saw what looked like an old theatre named "Slave #1", with the numeral set in white against a black silhouette of... you guessed, Africa. Not sure at all what this was about and didn't have time to inquire. Pretty sure it has nothing to do with Star Wars.
On the same trip, I saw a shop called Total Tool.
And a real-life Marcy Playground, if not the original Marcy Plaground. God, who ever cared about that band anyway?
Walking down my street on a sunny Saturday, I was passing a shoe shop with a display in the window when a man and woman simultaneously opened the adjacent door. Once lovingly arranged and precariously suspended, the entire thing came tumbling down in a matter-of-fact act of gravity. After a moment of bemused bewilderment, we all continued on.
Well, it seems to have sprung upon me when I wasn't looking: spring. Unfortunately, this is the only bit of hope in my yard, although there are a few more promising signs that have yet to bloom. There's just something magical about fiery tulips blooming amidst errands liquor bottles just a few tender steps from my window.
Overheard over my shoulder at a Mexican food restaurant in the East Vill' last night:
"I think they should have made the Jesus out of white chocolate and avoided this whole mess."
An astute observation, indeed. I too was very very bummed out that the "My Sweet Lord" exhibition was canceled. It was to start yesterday night, right when I was to get off work and a mere four blocks from my office! That's a shorter distance than the big guy had to walk to Golgotha!
But now, the exhibition is a lonely, traveling sideshow, entertaining crowds of no one and Christ's genitalia is infuriating only the guy who has to drive the truck around so it doesn't become a target for Christian jihadists. What a sad state of affairs, just, as this young woman pointed out, that the son of god wasn't created with Caucasian-colored chocolate.
Sure, the whole "naked" thing set some people off, but that seems beyond prudish to me. I'm fairly certain that He rose to heaven with that loincloth/shroud left behind in the cave, and, what's more, can anyone even really make out the naughty bits in the photos that have been released? Is being naked so bad, and have we over-sexualized the human body so much that there is only one implication of leaving Jesus' boy parts exposed?
It wasn't quite like this... but the demographics of the audience were surprisingly similar.
With a drop of trepidation, a splash of skepticism and a mysterious 1.5-inch scar on my right cheekbone - I can't recall a recent scuffle, but it's been a long week - I attended a "poetry slam" at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Alphabet City last night. Can I say that it was the "blackest night of my life?"
It was a good time, even if the provocative posters on the wall promised bare breasts that went unloaded. Sasha, friend to my left, was randomly chosen to be a judge, which meant that she and four others were to select a score (0-10, to the nearest tenth of a point) after each of the four performers "slammed." I cannot speak for the sport in general, but I can speculate that there is serious appraisal-inflation going on at the Nuyorican. Most scores floated in the 9-10 range, with the lowest I can recall being a 7.
Perhaps the most difficult-to-judge performance of the night was a poem, delivered with puzzling defiance, declaring the superiority of darker-skinned black men to their lighter-skinned brethren. Unable to fully wrap our befuddled, Caucasian minds around this thick slice of skin-color-politics, we threw up a safe 9.1 in response.
My only major critique of the entertaining event was the seemingly self-referential nature of slam poets. So many of them spoke about how much they love poetry and slam poetry and such, which is great, but I have the same sort of disdain for this as I do for the song "I Love Rock 'n Roll" or "I Wanna Rock." Like, shut up about rocking or rolling or rapping or dancing to music, just do it and please deliver something a little less contrived. If all you're saying is how much you love saying what you're saying, then it sets up this crazy ground loop and all I can hear is the most horrendous 60-cycle hum.
Anyway, Ed was the winner, and he really defied all cliches by stringing together rhymes about love and Internet porn into something clever and poignant and hilarious. The dude was mostly spot-on, save a lame "ching-chong" joke about his own Asian-ness.
Sure, the poetry slam was full of the same urban clichés that have been harvested by everyone from ad agencies to Karl Rove to NBC, but fortunately there were enough inspiring moments to rose above the $10 cover and dingy, brick walls.
I bet you think I bought this at a trendy boutique... I did.
So New York's neighborhood boundaries are about as nebulous to me as the line between "petting" and "heavy petting." They're not clearly laid out on maps like Korea's 38th parallel, which leads me to respond with trepidation (and crossed fingers) when someone asks me where, exactly, I live in Brooklyn.
My apartment is near the corner of Grand and Manhattan, on a not-particularly-swinging part of... Williamsburg? It's a mostly Latino and elderly population walking my streets, and I've never felt particularly chic living there. A co-worker recently suggested that I, in fact, might be living in Bushwick, the nearby neighborhood and street, and I began furtively telling people that I, in fact, live there.
But then the New York Observer ran this piece, and I'm on top of my game, living in hip Williamsburg, and, at the same time, totally eking out a hard-scrablle existence in the hood! The story is about people like myself living on the peripheries between trendy/gentrified places and the "rougher" places. Apparently, if this stupid trend piece contains a speck of truth, people like me are "downshifting," or going with the less-affluent places when describing where they live, hoping to seem more urban and less Urban Outfitters. I guess it's sort of like when wealthy, pretty white girls make thug poses and gang signs in photos.
The bar pictured in the story, the Bushwick Country Club, is, in fact, a block or two from my apartment, and is, in fact, like my apartment, in Williamsburg. But I guess that doesn't stop a restaurant in Naperville from serving Chicken Kew on styrofoam plates and calling itself Hunan Inn.
Without spending a dime, I've moved on up/down and boosted my scene points by at least twelve. I also found out that, in addition to the backyard, there is graffiti on the front of my apartment building. +1 more!
