June 2008 Archives

Have I mentioned that I’ve started jogging? In junior high and high school I ran track but rapidly fell out of habit and lately into disrepair. I’ve wanted to get into some semblance of shape—as well as have the more regular appetite and additional energy that running’s afforded me in the past—so on Monday I got up early and hit the Greenway that edges the western side of Manhattan. It starts in my neighborhood, at Dyckman Street (the equivalent of West 200th Street) and runs all the way to the southernmost tip of the island, though since I’m just beginning again, I only made it to the George Washington Bridge (the equivalent of West 175th Street) and back.

As previously noted, when traveling north-south in Manhattan, 20 blocks comprise a mile, so I’m only pulling down a round trip of 2.5 miles. But, hey, I’m aging and in rotten shape, and because I idealistically hope to jog every weekday morning, I plan to improve my distances shortly. And, no, I’m not timing myself (yet).

The Greenway is mostly peaceful and there are very few other people on it, although the beginning of the trail parallels the busy northbound lane of the Henry Hudson Parkway only a few feet away, over a barrier of cement and steel fencing. A wooded valley separates the Greenway from the southbound portion of the Henry Hudson, which lies much closer to the Hudson River, and every morning, I’ve spotted restful squirrels and birds perched on the waist-high wall of mortared rocks topped with sandstone slabs that separates the trail from the woods. When I run by, I’m amused to watch each critter leap or take wing off the wall just as I pass, as if I was in Super Mario Bros. and had just became invincible by collecting a enemy-dispatching “Starman.”

This afternoon, I ordered a new “entry-level all-terrain shoe,” the New Balance MT608, from Zappos.com after realizing the 10+-year-old Nike Air Skylon TCs I wear (my brother’s size-13 Nikes, no less) weren’t doing my feet or form any favors. I’m thinking the fact that they’re slightly more rugged “trail” shoes will help navigate the ubiquitous bits of tree branches, broken glass and other debris on the Greenway in my neck of the woods, where the paths aren’t as well maintained as in the swankier and more populous parts of the city.

In January 1960, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth to Manhattan, which he’d never seen before. He spoke little English but immediately started planning and assembling a sculptural homage to the city—a self-destructing machine, actually—that he decided needed to be exhibited in the outdoor sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art.

The museum gave him permission and an acetylene torch, then stood back. Tinguely built the machine in part with steel tubing, used motors, a powerful electric fan, an orange weather balloon, 80 bicycle wheels, smoke signals, a car horn, a radio nailed to an upright piano and an address-labeling machine rigged to strike a bell.

Once completed and activated before a large crowd, Homage to New York smoked and trembled. The piano caught fire but continued to play a three-note dirge. A rhythm was tapped out on a washing-machine drum. The labeler thrashed and chattered while the horn shrieked. The crowd loved it and although the machine didn’t fully self destruct, “it managed nevertheless to execute a great many wholly unexpected and startling feats,” according to art critic Calvin Tomkins.

I recalled this tale tonight at the sold-out Sigur Rós¹ concert Allison and I attended in the Museum of Modern Art’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, which looks out into that sculpture garden through a two-story wall of windows. The sun set over the city as the band began while giant spherical lamps on posts positioned just outside the window-wall glowed with shifting colors and patterns. The band’s music wasn’t as cacophonous as Tinguely’s yet just as unusual, transcendent and loud.

Through interweaving layers of delay, distortion and echo, lead singer and guitarist Jón Þór Birgisson crooned in falsetto—often in a made-up language—and sawed his electric guitar with a cello bow with such ferocity that he frayed the bowstring to a chaotic bundle of filaments, which he then whipped into the audience. Bassist Georg Hólm bounced out a constant rhythm on his bass with a drumstick for the song “Hafsól.” Drummer Orri Páll Dýrason rocked the brushes on more introspective song segments but for the loud bits whaled through several sets of sticks. Most of the band, including keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, got a chance on the boards—synths large and small, an organ, a glockenspiel. At times all four band members were playing keys at once.

I’d never seen Sigur Rós perform before now. They’re young guys from Iceland so most publicity shots I’d seen depicted them in cable-knit sweaters, crouching impishly on a caldera, but tonight Birgisson and Hólm were dressed in what resembled crisp, modern versions of Les Misérables-era activewear, accented with a few Adam Ant-style feathers. It seemed strangely appropriate the band shared stage space with Rodin’s craggy bronze sculpture of a robed Balzac.

A string quartet of young ladies dressed like flappers sat behind the band and provided symphonic swells, pizzicato and, for one song, exchanged their strings for cavalry drums. Midway through an early song, a male brass quintet, dressed and gloved in white, uniforms laced with golden braids and buttons, faces speckled with pearlescent glitter, marched down unexpectedly from the second-floor galleries while playing along. Later they emerged unaccompanied, awkwardly clutching sheet music, to play an impromptu and stirring rendition of the Icelandic national anthem in celebration of the country’s independence day as a republic (June 17th, 1944). The crowd was invited to sing along but only the flappers seemed to know the lyrics.

The band played my favorite of theirs, the soaring, eight-minute “Olsen Olsen.” Towards the end of the set, the audience clapped along to the speed-freaky “Gobbledigook” until its collective hands got sore. After the encore and a joint theater-style line-bow from every musician onstage, we exited over the piles of plastic cups and empty Grolsch bottles, strange debris for the stately slate floor of a world-famous museum, though less strange than the burnt machine-remains that once littered its garden.

Bonus Link: Concert photos by Brooklyn Vegan. Note the second shot from the top, in which I appear to be clutching my junk.

¹ Pronounced, according to the band, sih-ur rose; roll those R’s and say rose very quickly. [back]

Is it just me or is Coldplay lead singer/Gwyneth Paltrow-inseminator Chris Martin turning into Bono? I base my claim on having seen the iTunes commercial of the band playing its new single, “Viva la Vida.” In it, Martin sounds like Bono, sashays like Bono and sports a pompadour like Bono (otherwise known as a pompousadour).

Pitchfork notices something sonically similar as well. This blurb was posted on the site today for a review of Coldplay’s new album, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends:

In a case of well-honed troubleshooting after the startlingly bland X&Y, Coldplay’s fourth LP is a diluted version of U2’s Achtung Baby or Radiohead’s Kid A, the “experimental” mid-career maneuvers of their peers. Brian Eno produces.

For those of you who aren’t pop trivia nerds, I should point out that Brian Eno produced or coproduced several U2 albums, including The Unforgettable Fire, Achtung Baby and All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Also funny because when Coldplay hit in 1997, they were frequently derided as Radiohead Lite.

I don’t know what’s more surprising: the erroneous apostrophe on this sign in the unisex restroom at the Roebling Tea Room (seemingly a more-literate-than-average establishment) or the fact that an overeducated hipster with a pen or Sharpie hasn’t yet corrected it.

I admire anyone who creates—musicians, artists, actors, writers, mothers, a guy who can whittle a tiny toy duck from a scrap block of pine.

But what’s bad-ass is singing. Singing a capella. Singing a capella live.

For that you’re not using any tools or utensils. You don’t have a costume, a canvas or a band to hide behind. There is no editing of the process. Sure, there are people who’ve coached you and will direct you, and those who will sing alongside you. But you’re the only one responsible for the ultimate outcome: making noise, hopefully joyous, possibly unto the Lord, if you believe in that sort of thing.

My friend/coworker Allison, she of the pitch-perfect alto (and, I’ve heard, a mean karaoke rendition of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black”) sang in a women’s chorus in high school and a women’s a capella group in college and wanted to get back into singing, so she successfully auditioned for Amuse, a 16-voice women’s ensemble here in New York City. Tonight at the small, century-old St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church on the Upper West Side, the group’s guest-conductor, Penna Rose, the chapel music director at Princeton University, lead the group in a 15-song program of songs about Mary. The pieces were in English, Latin, Italian, Hungarian and Slovenian, some traditional aves and salves but all either arranged or composed by 20th century composers. (One was even in the audience and when called out by Penna, rose and delivered a thankful bow.)

Without air conditioning, the church was stifling. The propped-open front doors admitted a tiny breeze and the sound of the rain with traffic swishing by and buses braking on West 87th Street. But the audience stayed silent and rapt. Rightfully so: these voices could lift mountains. I liked that during some songs the group imitated instruments or added sound effects such as wind. Throughout the night it stormed but that only made the songs more poignant. As the choir stood sweating on the steps of the chancel, postured statue-straight with songbooks in hand, lightning flashed through the rose window behind them; loud thunder tried but failed to interrupt their beautiful harmony.

Without difficulty, the Tibetan restaurant Tsampa qualifies as the darkest restaurant I’ve ever eaten in. The only way it could have been darker would have been if the tiny white votive candles at each table were blown out. Andie, Katie and I took turns raising the one at our table to review our menus. Our waiter may have noticed our predicament because he later brought over another candle, which brightened things but not much. If, as a child, I’d been caught by my mom reading in this level of light, I’d have been chastised to turn on a light lest I go blind.

I drank a beer although I sort of wanted to try the traditional barley drink, described by our server as having the thickness of a milkshake and the sweetness of a dessert. Tiny tofu cubes and hot pepper topped my eggplant sauté and overall the dish was so un-spicy that I dumped a bunch of hot sauce on it to amp it up.

Afterward, we walked over to East 4th Street for drinks at KGB Bar and continued the low-light-level theme of the evening with goofy snapshots.

Tsampa

• 212 E. 9th St.
• (212) 614-3226
• Meal 34 of 52: a bottle of Singha beer ($5) and eggplant sauté ($9.95).

Summer doesn’t start until next Friday, but I’m in a summery mood so here’s a pre-summer mix.

Some notes:

Heat waves make me think of old people without air conditioning dying alone in their apartments, which is sort of why I included “Marie Provost,” a song about a former star who died alone and was gnawed by her dachshund.

I expect Santogold to be this summer’s M.I.A. in terms of guilty pop pleasure, and I followed her in my mix with the Go-Go’s because to me they sound relative. (Although someone pointed out to me after I’d compiled this mix that a closer comparison is “Voices Carry”-era Aimee Mann.)

Anyway, enjoy.

Bonus: Download the whole mix as a Zipped collection of mp3s or stream it through your browser on Muxtape.

I’m interested less in how you’d like to shuffle off this mortal coil than how you’d prefer your corpus preserved—or not. Because while we can imagine our meat and bone supine in pine six feet under, or flame-kissed to tragic granules not unlike kitty litter and scooped into a decorative receptacle, the previously imaginative among the dead (or their survivors) have taken to more amusing displays.

I read last week that some cremated remains of Fredric J. Baur of Cincinnati, who died May 4th at the age of 89, were interred in a Pringles can—a can design he patented as an organic chemist and “food storage technician” at Procter & Gamble. Did you ever try that trick where you squeeze an empty Pringles can until the lid springs off with a pop? I imagine the Baur family had to affix a label warning not to do that with Fred’s cylindrical crazy-crisp casket, lest one of his more rambunctious grandchildren got any ideas during the wake. As for the ultimate in going out with a pop, I still admire the extravaganza of Hunter S. Thompson’s last gleaming: mingled with fireworks, his cremated remains were shot from 34 mortar tubes during a party at his ranch.

On a larger scale, you may end up preserved whole, or nearly so, for the public eye. Lenin and his tomb bore me; instead recall nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. He sits in a glass-doored mahogany cabinet at University College, London, where underclassmen occasionally steal his head. Or consider this if you’re a Chinese prisoner: your final insult may not be your torture and execution but to remain educationally flayed as a popular American tourist attraction—“$27.50 on weekends and holidays, $21.50 for children 4 to 12, and a dollar less for each on weekdays.”

The pilot of my severely delayed flight from O’Hare to La Guardia this afternoon tried to liven up the crowd with some humor (?) over the midwest:

Pilot

For those of you on the right-hand side of the aircraft: a partial view of Toledo, Ohio.

Passengers

[silence; stunned indifference]

And I was born in Toledo. But I was also sitting on the left-hand side of the plane. Booo.

It’s sort of embarrassing: I work in real estate but whenever anyone asks me how big my apartment is, I have no idea. It happened again last week and when I got home, I pulled out the tape measure, a pencil and paper, and a calculator and figured it out. My apartment is 550 square feet.

No, I’m not telling you how much my rent is.

The new collection of essays by David Sedaris has brought with it the usual is it fiction or non-fiction fracas (though not on the level of Frey or Burroughs et al). Meh. According to the author’s note on the title page of When You Are Engulfed in Flames:

The events described in these stories are realish. Certain characters have fictitious names and identifying characteristics.

Good enough for me.

Beth, Mike and I immersed ourselves in the cacophony of David Byrne’s Playing the Building installation today at the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan.

The second floor of the building hasn’t been open to the public in decades and the lower half of the room in which the exhibit rests has been whitewashed, flat over pipes, molding and wall. An antique organ placed near the center of the room is wired by what looks like surgical tubing connected to devices affixed to the room’s pillars, pipes, walls and other elements to make a different noise with each keypress of the organ: tapping, clanking, clanging, tapping, bellowing, whistling. Very strange. It sounds like this.

Needless to say, we needed a beer afterwards so Beth suggested the Staten Island Ferry: an excellent idea. It's a free 20-minute ride—welcomely breezy on a day like today, stifled by humidity and sun—with excellent views of the Statue of Liberty. Best, they sell beer on board for $3.75. And I’ve now set foot in all five boroughs of New York: to prevent hobos and exhibition-goers from having too good a time, what with the beer and the breeze, the DOT requires all joyriders to exit at Staten Island then immediately reboard the same boat for the trip back to Manhattan.

Is there anything worse than having a cold in the summer? Probably, but when you have a summer cold, it doesn’t seem that way.

Today I threw a Frisbee around the grand ballroom of a hotel in Newark. There’s one more item off the Bucket List.

Today I spent some time in a large, empty warehouse in Jersey City. Which was not as interesting as I thought it might be.

In late 1916 or January 1917 (reports vary), six residents of Greenwich Village, including painter John Sloan and Dadaist/chess expert Marcel Duchamp, managed to get inside the Washington Square Arch (there’s a door at the base of one of the piers) and make their way up a spiral staircase of masonry to the top. There, they strung up paper lanterns, fired toy pistols and declared the Village an independent state, free from the tyranny of uptown. They’d been drinking, of course, but they may have been onto something.

In my view, books should be brought to the doorstep like electricity, or like milk in England: they should be considered utilities, and their cost should be appropriately minimal. Barring that, poetry could be sold in drugstores (not least because it might reduce the bill from your shrink). At the very least, an anthology of American poetry should be found in the drawer in every room in every motel in the land, next to the Bible, which will surely not object to this proximity, since it does not object to the proximity of the phone book.

Joseph Brodsky, from “An Immodest Proposal,” The New Republic, November 11, 1991. (At the time, Brodsky was U.S. Poet Laureate.)

I’m honored! Today around 10 a.m., a dude on Eighth Avenue in midtown tried to pull the bottle-drop scheme on me. I’d never had that happen before but I knew immediately what was going on.

Here’s how it works: a slouchy bruiser “accidentally” bumps into you as you pass one another, causing him to drop the bag he’s carrying, in which is a glass vodka or gin bottle. It hits the sidewalk and shatters. Note that I wrote “glass vodka or gin bottle” not “bottle of vodka or gin” because it’s a liquor bottle filled with water. Subject then grows belligerent and demands cash for replacement alcohol. I didn’t let this guy get that far; I kept walking. “Hey!” he shouted after me. I swung around, looked him in the eye and shouted back, “I’m not falling for that shit!” His angry face resolved into a shit-eating “I didn’t realize you lived here” grin. And that was that; we went our separate ways.

Heaven help the marks that fall for tricks like these—there are nothing but tourists on Eighth Avenue in midtown on late Sunday morning and I’d wager this bottle guy had a few unbroken extras and eventually bilked someone. I’ve also heard of this stunt pulled with eyeglasses.

Now would also be an appropriate time for further revelations to the naive and gullible of New York City:

• MetroCards sold by strangers are expired.
• Beggars on the subway likely don’t need your money for medication, to help them find a place to stay because their apartment building burned down or to “get something to eat.”
• Beggars on the street likely don’t need your money for bus, subway or train fare.
• The proceeds from the candy kids sell on the subway likely don’t fund their sports team or school (although the new shtick with these urchins is to announce that the money goes into their pocket, “to keep me out of trouble”).
• You probably shouldn’t offer your camera to strangers who volunteer to take a photo of your tour group.
• Any “luxury” goods sold on Canal Street are cheap knockoffs.
• There’s a brick inside the shrink-wrapped box of that bargain-priced laptop, not a laptop.
• Most DVDs sold on the subway and from vendors that spread them on the sidewalk atop a blanket are either blank or filmed with a camcorder from a theater seat.
• Demand the fare from a gypsy-cab hack before you enter his vehicle and even then, be prepared for a bait-and-switch.

Let me know which ones I’ve missed. I’m sure fresh scams have developed since the virtual extinction of three-card monte and squeegee guys.