Uncharted Territory

My favorite thing about New York, other than the plentitude of coffee, is its vastness, its uncharted territory. I adore exploratory missions. That the city has been discovered before is immaterial, because I wasn't there, and I doubt they were serving brunch at the time. I am currently reading 'Teaching a Stone to Talk,' by Annie Dillard. She is fascinated by the polar expeditions of the 19th century, and of the bizarre personalities who attempted such journeys:

"In 1845, Sir John Franklin and 138 officers and men embarked from England to find the northwest passage across the high Canadian Arctic to the Pacific Ocean. They sailed in two three-masted barques. Each sailing vessel carried an auxiliary steam engine and a twelve-day supply of coal for the entire projected two or three years' voyage. Instead of additional coal, according to L.P. Kirwan, each ship made room for a 1.200-volume library, 'a hand-organ, playing fifty tunes,' china place settings for officers and men, cut-glass wine goblets, and sterling silver flatware. The officers' sterling silver knives, forks, and spoons were particularly interesting. The silver was of ornate Victorian design, very heavy at the handles and richly patterned. Engraved on the handles were the individual officers' initials and family crests."

My own discovery missions are less costly and burdened...I just need a metro card, an ipod and an unknown neighborhood. Last weekend I checked out Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Hopstop furnished directions, sending me for a 20-minute trek along the barren industrial wasteland that is the northern edge of Williamsburg. It was so deserted that no one had even bothered to mark the streets, and but for the cold I'm sure there would have been feral dogs. The only danger was my freezing to the sidewalk, but suddenly Kent Street made an anonymous turn and became Franklin (oh, the irony), and I was in the cozy historic district of Greenpoint. There were other people, there was the occasional car, there was brunch, and it was good.

What was also amazing about Greenpoint was the walk back along the considerably more lively Manhattan Ave, which serves as the main drag and center of the neighborhood's Polish community. The signs are in Polish, I heard the language everywhere, and deli after deli had lines of sausage hanging from racks in the ceiling the entire length of the store. I would have bought some, but all the shops were completely packed and ringing with shouts directed from both sides of the counter. I beat a cowardly yet strategic retreat instead.

Needless to say, Sir Franklin should have done the same. His expedition foundered quickly: the boats became frozen in the ice, and the coal soon ran out. Though the shipmates tried to walk to safety, nothing survived but the silverware, which was found, scattered across the arctic, in the pockets of frozen sailors years later.

The Grim Reaper & The Gowanus Canal

Recently, I became worried that a friend of mine was lying unattended, face-down in the Gowanus Canal. As it happened, he was at home eating cheese and drinking a bottle of wine, but the very thought (black and white, 'Einstein on the Beach' in surround sound, Bogart lighting up on the banks) of the oil-slick canal on a cold night was enough to have me frantically checking up on him.

The fact is that New York is a scary place, where peril and injury may lie around every corner. For some this is a thrill; others are oblivious. I prefer to observe and take notes. There is obvious danger, of course, such as oncoming sidewalk-biking delivery men and an unwary tumble onto the dread Third Rail. Evil might lurk, camouflaged, inside bad sushi or a bone-crushing but otherwise beautiful pair of shoes. And we all play Russian roulette with the unexpected, emotionally unprepared for early morning encounters with stale coffee and inbred, mohair-clad shih tzus.

The only answer is to become even more neurotic, or to be sure that if you DO fall into the Gowanus Canal, someone will notice your absence and check up on you. And so, when running late tonight to meet a friend for tea, I received a 'LADY DID YOU PERISH' text on my cellphone, I laughed...and was secretly comforted as I texted back, 'the scythe just missed me; CALM DOWN will be there soon.'

There's No Place Like Home

I once had a crazy ex-Texan roommate. An intense face and brow lift made her look like she was constantly in a wind tunnel, and thanks to a semi-botched childhood tonsillectomy she had a voice that carved grooves in our apartment windows. She listened to NPR on 3 radios in 3 rooms at once, and she never left the apartment...not that I can blame her, as we lived on a sixth floor walkup. I myself chose to spend most of my time on the other end of the staircase. I would have guessed that she'd be the type to have 14 cats running around, but instead she devoted her time and energy to our next door neighbor, who lived in a cave at the end of a corridor stuffed with 40 years of newspapers, and who had a leather and chain-clad dom come huffing up the stairs once a month to spank him and force him to clean up the mess. This neighbor had once attacked our front door with a hammer when he thought my roommate was blaring NPR too loud; the dents were still there but they had made up, for the most part.

What energy was not devoted to complaining about our floormate was focussed on the apartment, her baby, whose lease she'd held for years. I came home one day to find my roommate waiting for me, her visage as close to an expression of concern as possible when one's face is as hard as a melon. Apparently she had noticed some divots in the hardwood floors. Aghast, she had inspected all of her own shoes to find a culprit, but had come up with nothing. Returning to the scene of the crime, she got down on her hands and knees and traced the divots to my room, at which point she went through every pair of shoes in my closet. The offending pair of stilettos with heels worn down to the metal stubs were on the coffee table for my inspection. Luckily for everyone concerned, she moved to Croatia, and I moved downtown.

All this comes to mind because I recently noticed that my current roommate has come into my room and wrapped a giant shower cap over my air conditioning unit in my absence. Have I learned nothing from my earlier roommate experience? Do I need a giant "GO AWAY" sign for my door? (Actually, I have one of those, but it seemed rude and invasive). Should I myself move to Croatia? The easiest answer seems to be that it's New York, and I should be glad he does all the cleaning, and doesn't just snort coke all day through a vacuum cleaner-shaped straw.*

*True story, but not one I can claim as my own...thanks E!

MUDdy Goodness

My favorite thing about my neighborhood is that in the face of the horrific arctic weather recently sent down from the North, venturing even a step off the direct path to the subway is not required to obtain caffeine: the MUDtruck has set up shop by the Christopher Steet station! Though there may be 10 people shivering in line in front of me, I just shut my eyes to the wind and flurries and inch toward Mecca with a smile on my face, because $1 worth of happiness in a bright orange cup is worth the nose lost to frostbite.

I love the MUDman

Check them out: http://www.mudnyc.com/

I See the Sea

The lobster eye is an amazing device. Unlike the human eye, or even the cephalopod eye (which developed separately from the vertebrate eye, but which also features the single-lens model, wherein light enters through the pupil and is focused by the lens to fall on photoreceptor cells at the rear of the eye), the lobster eye has a completely unique model, and is based on reflection rather than refraction.

The basic component of the lobster eye is a perfectly square box, which tapers on four sloping sides to meet at a point, rather like a pyramid. The surfaces of the tapering walls are coated with a substance that serves the approximate function of tinfoil, sending light from the opening of the box bouncing off the sides until the rays converge at the cluster of photoreceptor cells at the point of the pyramid. Each eye contains about 13,000 discrete boxes.

Both creationists and scientists are fascinated by the eye; creationists because the perfect construction of the pyramids and mathematically exact angles required for light to converge at a precise point, indicate a higher being's hand on the exacto knife of the genesial drawing board. Scientists have drawing boards of their own, and have recently begun using the lobster eye, with its vast light-gathering potential, as a blueprint for a new class of x-ray vision space telescope, the Lobster-ISS.

The truly amazing thing, however, is not the very existence of this beautifully designed organ, but that the lobster rarely, if ever, uses it. Why do lobsters have such anatomically perfect eyes when so little light penetrates to the ocean floor?

Wild Swans at Coole, redux

I recently read 'Crossing Open Ground', by Barry Lopez. It's a series of previously-published magazine articles he reworked for the book, and very beautiful. The following passage was written about the hundreds of thousands of snow geese staging at Tule Lake in Northern California during their annual migration.

I remember watching a large flock rise one morning from a plowed field about a mile distant. I had been watching clouds, the soft, buoyant, wind-blown edges of immaculate cumulus. The birds rose against much darker clouds to the east. There was something vaguely ominous in this apparition, as if the earth had opened and poured them forth, like a wind, a blizzard, which unfurled across the horizon above the dark soil, becoming wider and higher in the sky than my field of vision could encompass, great swirling currents of birds in a rattling of wings, one fluid recurved sweep of 10,000 passing through the spaces in another, counterflying flock, while beyond them lattice after lattice passed like sliding walls, until in the whole sky you lost your depth of field and felt you were looking up from the floor of the ocean through shoals of fish.

Syrup Traps

From our late friend Mitch Hedberg.

"If you had a friend who was a tightrope walker, and you were walking down a sidewalk, and he fell, that would be completely unacceptable."

And keeps on delivering....

What I perhaps neglected to mention in my earlier post was that in the confusion of the moment (eyes still smarting from the fireworks, overwhelming blender activity from Jamba Juice?) I inadvertently gave the Magician to the Rich and Famous my phone number. Not Good...and even worse, it appears I gave him the correct one.

"S...it's the boy next door...I've got my dancing shoes on and I'm waiting for you! We're going to pursue our dance date, actually it's our DOUBLE date with your handsome, suave grandfather...and it's going to be fabulous. So call me back!!"

Whatever happens, I refuse to do the samba.

Whole Foods Delivers

I was sitting in the Whole Foods cafe last night with a half hour to kill before meeting R. for a drink and the ballet. My book was engrossing, my tea pleasantly minty, but peace was lost when a shot of wheatgrass plunked down in front of me and a voice boomed, "You must drink a lot of this stuff to get legs like that!"

Such openings rarely lead anywhere I want to follow. But when I looked up, I beheld a fantastic set of silver Salvador Dali mustachios trembling above a green silk cravat and three piece suit, and realized that I was going to have to go along with this one.

Salvador is a magician, it turned out, and a world famous one. When I expressed laughing disbelief he instantly set about a demonstration.

"First trick. I'm going to prove to you that the hand is quicker than the eye. How did that feel?"

oh dear god

"For my next trick, I want a kiss. But you probably think you don't know me well enough yet." He handed me a piece of filter paper. "Give me a lip print on that, will you?" I voiced certain concerns relating to DNA extraction and cloning. Assured that no duplicates would be made, I kissed the paper and handed it over. With that he lit the paper on fire and tossed it in the air [this to the considerable dismay of the man nose-deep in tofu to my right] and from the ashes conjured me a Hershey Kiss.

"Now," he said, unnerving me with the swiftness of his attack, "When are we going dancing? I'm a fantastic dancer. My dance partner Heather thinks she's a great dancer, but really I just keep her around for the massages."

I intimated that ballroom dancing is not my preferred activity, due to being dropped while attempting a dip early in my career.

"I dropped Heather once; you could hear the boom for miles. Thought for sure they'd get me for manslaughter."

I expressed regret that such a track record did not bode well for our future partnership.

"You'll love it, I promise," he said, and executed a small cha cha by way of convincing me.

I began to make vague movements suggesting imminent departure, but was waylayed as Salvador produced a stack of pictures. There was my friend with the Donald, Paul Newman, Benny Goodman, and as a heavily mustached infant. "Your mother must have been very proud," I said. "Oh, she was tickled to death."

As was I, leaving Whole Foods with a business card emblazoned 'MC: Magician to the Rich and Famous and [this hand-written] Dance Stud' in my hand.

Ode to a Cuisinart Wand with Chopper/Grinder Attachment

I crept into the kitchen last night
With flick of switch caused quite a fright
As fuses blew and roommate too
(“Son of a BITCH” through the office door flew)
But did I care? As if I could
When close in cabinet you stood
The beans now soaked and garlic stewed
You mashed and churned and happily chewed
Oh cuisinart wand I love you so
How I did without you I scarcely know
You whip, you froth, you live to puree
And best of all, leave no disarray

The Affair of the Amaryllis

kt: Are you growing an amaryllis?

ma: Are you insane?

kt: I don't know, are YOU insane?

ma: ......probably.

And on the First Day.....

...a barren wasteland.