Oh, brilliant
It's
Fleet Week here in the city, which means everywhere you look there are uniformed men and women overrunning the city. Truth is, it's kind of nice to see them mingled in with the crowds. An awful lot of people are out there serving our country militarily these days (whether they want to or not, given our lovely stop-loss programs), but it's easy to never see them if you live on the Upper East Side and work in Times Square; the New York Times reported a few months ago that ONE PERSON enlisted from my zip code in the past year (enlistment = different from joining the officer corps, fyi). A little mingling is a decidedly good thing, if you ask me.
All this mingling is bringing out some interesting behavior from New Yorkers, however:
Interesting Behavior Exhibit ARandom man on subway to uniformed sailor from the USS Kearsarge: Hey son, I was on the Kearsarge in 95 and 96.
Sailor: Um, yep.
Random man: And I served on X, Y, and Z other ships, too.
Sailor: I've only served on the Kearsarge.
Man: How long've you been in the service?
Sailor: Uh, two months.
Man: Let me take you out for a drink, son.
(Man moves over to sailor, and they fall to talking and laughing as opposed to shouting at one another from opposite sides of the train.)
Interesting Behavior Exhibit BIz and I were climbing rocks in Central Park and considering throwing a frisbee when a man approached and asked us for change. Turns out he was a military man on active duty, on leave for the week. He and a bunch of others were spending their leave collecting change in New York, "to help out a bunch of vets in the city," he said. "The government's not doing it, so we're doing it ourselves."
We both gave the guy what we had--more than just a few pennies, too. You can argue broadly against the amount we Americans spend on the military, but you have to admit that this fellow has a good point about veterans' affairs and about how little we spend on, say, VA hospitals. Considerations of this sort always lead to me to sad reflections about military spending and the way we allocate our (substantial) DoD money.
At any rate, the guy sat down and talked to us briefly, and he was quite cool, really pounding the pavement for a cause he believed in. Begging for quarters is not, generally, how I picture the members of our armed forces. It was an interesting sight.
Interesting Behavior Exhibit CNew Yorkers flooded the 311 lines yesterday. (311 is a brilliant New York-only phenomenon, a line you can call when you need help of a non-emergency kind--when you have a city question, when a pothole needs to be filled or you want to know where to find a local hospital or hardware store, when your building has rats or the people outside are too loud or you want to know what voting district you're in.) The cause? Supersonic jets buzzing Manhattan landmarks. Oops. Someone forgot to tell New Yorkers that the Blue Angels were planning on a couple of Fleet Week flyovers. Um, hello? Post-9/11 world? Paranoid citizens? Tight aerial formations past important city landmarks? For goodness's sakes. Could you be more brilliant? Perhaps somebody could have reported on this
before the fact. (As it is, newspapers and TV stations are treating it as news that people called them to ask what was up. "Frightened New Yorkers called this newspaper to figure out what is going on!" "Our news show reassured New Yorkers worried about supersonic jets from Harlem!" "We didn't know what was going on either, but we went to find out and now we are reporting on it for you!" And so on and so forth.)
boys will be boys, i suppose
I went last week to hear a concert given by the St. Thomas Choir of Men and Boys (and several soloists, and of course the attendant musicians). The concert was, I think, of variable quality; the choir was unfailingly excellent, but the soloists had their better and worse moments, and the orchestra was not quite top notch.
St. Thomas Church has a choir school, the last church-affiliated school in the United States (or so they claim). It is strange to consider the boys who go there (and who thus sing in the choir of men and boys). They are small; the youngest are in the fourth grade (and a third grade will be opening next year). They are professionals, too: musicians of a high quality--indeed, some of the best in their field. Few people are more suited to singing the soprano lines in the Bach Cantatas than well-trained choirboys (since, after all, it is well-trained choirboys for whom those lines were written in the first place).
This is highly unusual. Many children work in this world of ours, but few are better at their jobs than an adult would be. As a general rule, this is all the more true when it comes to skilled labor. Yet choral works written for boys' voices are best sung by, well, boys. Most adult men cannot hit the notes; most adult women do so with a different vocal timbre. This is not necessarily bad, but it is importantly different. You can have a couple of oboes playing the Bach double, and it might be an excellent performance--but surely we recognize that this is not the same as having two violins playing instead. It is relevant that the piece was written for violins; it is also relevant that the soprano and alto parts of the cantatas were written for boys.
But this presents a problem. The boys of the St. Thomas Choir School are well-compensated for their time and effort. They recieve a first-class private education very cheaply; they recieve a near-unrivalled classical musical education; they get the run of a church and a professional resume before even reaching their teens. But they are still professionals, still obligated to work in a very real way, still living a serious lifestyle that today might make us uncomfortable when we consider that the youngest of them are nine years old and all are boarding away from home.
Still, I find that I cannot want the school to
close. After all, if there really are only two English-language church-affiliated choir schools left in the world, we've got to encourage them to stick around. I find it sad to think that in 20 years, say, there won't
be any boys left who can sing the Bach Cantatas. That would be a real loss.
Besides, these professional kids seem to be funloving enough. I managed accidentally to wander into the bowels of the church during intermission (oops--was looking for the public bathroom), and what did I see but a bunch of kids in full performance dress, kicking a soccer ball irreverently past cruxifixes, bumping into walls (and guest soloists), and just generally causing a ruckus. The soloists and conductor may have been annoyed (though maybe not, I don't know), but I thought it was great.
top of the tower
If you walk straight back into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you will get to a room with tapestries on the walls and an enormous choir screen in the middle dividing the east end of the room from the west end. If you then turn left and walk for a good distance, you will eventually pass a pair of relatively nondescript elevators on your right-hand side.
Unlike the other elevators in the Met Museum, these elevators will take you up to the roof. If the day is nice, you can buy a drink and lounge about on benches while enjoying a fantastic view of Central Park and midtown Manhattan.
This is what I did yesterday. It was an accident. As a "contributing member" of the museum, I get the privilege of paying a ridiculous sum to dine in the special members' dining room. I was walking past the museum on my way out of the park when I thought, "Gee, I wonder where the members' dining room
is." It turns out it's on the fourth floor, just below the roof, also accessible by this special elevator.
I didn't go to the members' dining room. It was not actually my plan to eat alone in a particularly expensive place simply because I've never done it before, after all. I did, however, make my way up to the sparsely populated roof, from which New York looks surprisingly green and inviting. There was
an installation by Cai Guo-Qiang up there. Some of it I just didn't "get"; without more in the way of explanation or interpretation, I'm hard-pressed to appreciate crocodiles stuck with knives and scissors. (I admit that it was a briefly clever gag; the sharp objects had all been taken from airport passengers as they went through security, and the title of the works was the official-sounding
Move Along, Nothing to See Here. A good momentary evocation of the confiscation, but still not, I think, good art.) More interesting by far, also amusing, and visually striking, was
Transparent Monument (pictured, above). This is, essentially, an enormous piece of tempered glass, slightly tinted. The amusing bit is provided by the dead birds placed around the base, as if they'd flown into the window and knocked themselves out.
But the interest was provided, for me, much more by the tint and the way the glass divided such an open space, without precisely making it less open. I liked the way the color of the sky was slightly different through the glass, the way it played with color in our world. I liked its openness; it was well-conceived for the available space. And I liked even the title of the work, "monument" being such a loaded word ("monument to what?" we might ask, especially given the prominently displayed Egyptian obelisk not far off in Central Park).
The Apartment (Finally)
Also, in other news, I've finally moved into the 21st century with a new computer that can handle images. Yay! So, finally, here's a taste of my spiffy New York apartment. To the left, you see a mirror and some interesting spatial stuff going on with the hallway between the living room and the (New York-sized) kitchen area. I like what the mirror does to the angles of the room.
And here's, um, a wall (with glass coffee table in the foreground). The pyramid, red pentagon dice game, and cube on the coffee table are all math games. The pyramid took me two years to solve; it represents a kind of pinnacle of my college career, and I'm exceedingly proud of the fact that I managed to get all those pieces together in a regular form. It's not news to any of you, my readers, that I'm a big dork.
That reminds me of a joke told to me by cousin R. God creates the animals and the people and He says, "Go forth and multiply!" Well, everybody is very pleased with this commandment and they multiply just as fast as they can. Except the snakes. God, annoyed, comes down and says, "What's wrong here? I gave you a commandment. I'm God!" The snakes sort of waver a bit and try to say that they
can't reproduce quite like the others, but God'll have none of it. "Just do what I say!" he commands. So the snakes slither off and the next day God comes down to check on them. To his dismay, there are still only two snakes! God is annoyed and chastises them, and they sort of hem
and haw and then finally say, "Well, we're not like the others. Do you think you could knock down a couple of trees for us?" God can, obviously, and he does, but he leaves in a bad mood and assures the snakes that he'll be back the next day to check on their progress. Well, Lo and Behold!, on day # 3 God sees that the snakes have finally managed to go forth and multiply in fine fashion. He is pleased. So he praises them a bit and then asks, "What on Earth was the problem?" The snakes turn to him. "We're adders," they say. "We need logs to multiply." (Lamp and windows up by the beginning of this joke. More with the table just above. No pictures of the bedroom, kitchen, or bathroom in this installment...)
Green in the City
New York is a neat city because it has really rather a lot of green space. This is lovely. My own apartment is beautifully nestled between Central Park four blocks to the west and Carl Schurz Park (home of Gracie Mansion) on the river, four blocks to the east. Last weekend, Lrand and buddy M and I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival at the brilliantly-blooming
Brooklyn Botanic Garden (which I persist in wanting to call the "Brooklyn Botanic
al Garden," though why I like the redundant adjectival suffix is beyond me). I routinely play softball in Riverside Park in Manhattan, in the ubiquitous greenspace on Roosevelt Island (technically in Queens, but actually in the middle of the East River between Manhattan and Queens), and in Central Park. I eat lunch on the lawn of Bryant Park, just a couple of blocks from the office.
This must be a fantastic cosmopolitan luxury. New York City's
Parks Department is per capita very well funded (at least by comparison with other cities of reasonable size). Moreover, there is an enormously strong popular appreciation for public greenery, public playing fields, and public art here. Communities take an active interest in their local parks; downtown, everybody and their brother is taking part in the discussion about how to turn the high line into public green space, while up here on the Upper East Side, people turn out every two weeks to tend to the gardens in Schultz park. This is a social as well as spiritual activity. The green is important.
All of this has very real, and very desirous, consequences. It means that, in the middle of the Manhattan, you can watch hawks from the Boathouse in Central Park and you can jog along the river under shade and through gardens. It means that you can grow things in the middle of this big city. It means that you can play frisbee on open lawns even when you only own a single-bedroom fourth-floor apartment without so much as a front stoop. I don't think non-New Yorkers can appreciate how nice--and how important--our parks truly are, concerned as they are with seeing the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.
I mention all of this because I was dismayed--and surprisingly, viscerally annoyed--to discover that the softball field I played at last week was carpeted with, horror of horrors, artificial turf. Goddamn it, this whole CITY is artificial turf. And that's okay: the city is an amazing, fuel-efficient, heat-efficient, space-efficient, hip, fun, populous urban hotspot where people use public transit and where we build up and not out, leaving a brilliantly small footprint on the earth. But the softball field was in a PARK; why the heck tear up the turf in order to put in rubber "sod" and sandpapery "grass"?? (I also maintain, for you grammarticians out there, that those question marks really should be outside of the quote marks. It's because I'm feeling ornery.)
I take some solace in the fact that I am not alone in my dismay.
New Yorkers everywhere agree: actual grass--and, for that matter, actual dirt--are an important part of this city.
Time to pony up in a little more tax money then, I suppose. I wish there were a "save the grass" foundation to which I could give!
