The Suburbanization of New York?

The second half of the title is "Is the World's Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town?"

I have just dipped into this book so far, but it is almost completely Manhattan-centric. Chain stores, fast food, and Starbucks replacing everything that was unique about the island, which was especially its intense and next-door close mixture of low-and-high end stores, bars, and restaurants; and the rich, middle-class (emphasis) and poor living in close proximity. Every three blocks or so, wrote EB White in his famous "Here is New York" essay, was like an entire town elsewhere in the country.

Living in the outer New Jersey suburbs, but connected by both frequent rail and bus, I grew up vicariously in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. (This included being threatened by various Ratso Rizzzo dirtbags when my teen friends and I went to get fake ID's in Times Square).

One of my favorite places was a magazine store on 43rd just off of Eighth Ave. that sold old "National Lampoons" from the early 70s that were absolutely hilarious and dirty as hell. Their fake news section was a precursor to "the Onion" and helped me construct an entirely bogus and funny newspaper for my fraternity at Tulane (before leaving for Madison, where the uber-serious lefty Daily Cardinal wouldn't even print an April Fool's paper).

The last time I took the misnamed "New York Express" bus into the Port Authority, the New York Times had replaced the "massage parlors (read whorehouses) on Eighth.

But this is begging the question: to be authentic, does a city have to cater to vice, crime, and the needs of the poor and working class? No, the point of most of the essays in the book is that blocks that used to contain a local business squeezed into every doorway now have been taken over by block-long Duane Reade's.

But everything else in the world has been changed by technology and the global economy, so why not Manhattan's mom-and-pop businesses? A city is organic, constantly changing, especially in world economy command-and-control centers like Manhattan, London, and Tokyo.

What needs to happen is for western Brooklyn to congeal. Hipster Williamsburg needs to connect to yuppieish Park Slope, Carroll Gardens et. al. There needs to be a new center of youthful discontent, a square that served the purpose of Tompkins Sq. Park in the 1980s.

One last note, to Rambler especially, is that 75 percent of Harlem is either rent controlled, regulated, or public housing. 125 St. will never be upper Madison Ave.

Looking out from the top of the bluff of Morningside Park in the 1980s (when a cousin and a friend were at adjacent Columbia), you saw below you a cityscape of abandoned buildings. When I went back about 7 years ago, everything was occupied. Is this so bad? Is Harlem not "real" unless it's black and poor?
More later when I've actually read and digested the book.

A Romantic Gets His Due

Do you remember that movie ("Say Anything?") where John Cusak goes after beauty n brains Ione Skye? He held up a boombox and plays "In Your Eyes" outside her house. Well, I learned the hard way that kind of "romantic" move usually gets you labeled a stalker or worse.
Some magazine I was reading had a list of these kind of bold, heart-full-of-soul maneuvers in movies. The girl is invariably persuaded to love the seemingly hopeless, out-of-his league protagonist. The magazine (and me) have some advice,: the girl will not be won over; she'll run to the hills and maybe get a restraining order on your scary, addle-brained ass.
Nevertheless, Hollywood keeps pumping out this wish-fullfillment pablum, much to the detriment of suckers who believe it. If they're male, they'll think that red-hot passion and soulful devotion are the ticket to finally get their unrequited love. If they're female, they'll believe that most boys and men actually behave that way. Both are in for big dissapointments.
So what's the ticket? Patience, complete casualness, joking, and never letting on how much you like a woman until you've landed your personal big one (not quite the old the more you ignore them the more they want you, but close). For women, put your respective money where your mouth is. You don't want passion, you want the opposite: responsibility, dependability, respectability and emotional and financial security. Daddy will take care of it.
(See the Onion story on "World's Most Emotionally Strong Man" and how he knows exactly how and when to comfort his mate).
As Jimi H. said "Oh, well I've still got my guitar."

Vacate is the Word

Cannot find the spark
Running in the dark
Cannot find the comfort in this world

snow and death

"It snowed upon the living, it snowed upon the dead" - James Joyce, in some short story.

The snow was melting yesterday, the water running into the drains like the blood in "Psycho." I thought of the Beatles "Here Comes the Sun" as winter strains against Spring. But I want everything frozen and covered over, like the real me that has been suffocated by pain, yet leaps to life the minute the terrible pressure in my body abates. For now, I want everything frozen until I can live again.

I can't breathe, I've found out. I have what is called sleep apnea, in which the throught is cut off from breathing by soft tissue which blocks breathing during sleep when relaxed.

That's right, relaxation is bad, and will kill me if I continue trying to sleep with blocked airways. Another doctor told me I had massive cholesterol levels. I am not long for this world, it seems.

This is too bad, for when I can get enough oxygen, I feel like me again. Confident, competent, and joking. The difference is night and day. If I had the confidence to know I could maintain it, what a wonderful world it could be. Otherwise, I have to resign myself to an early death or a nightmare half-life of suffering sleeplessness and pain. This is what I've dealt with for 20 years. I've had enough.

The real me, though, comes back so quickly when I can breathe that I miss normal life so much. To sleep deeply, to make love with enjoyment. To exist without pain, the ability to relax without penalty. This is all I ask. Yet somehow God or whomever above has chosen to deny it to me. What did I do to deserve this? I guess this is the eternal question of man.

So, with my 44th birthday approaching, I find nothing to celebrate. If and when I recover, will it be so late that anything approaching family, career, and children are out of the picture, or even a female mate? The sands of time, like the melting snow, are disappearing down the drain. Bring on the night, bring on the winter until I can feel a springtime in me for real this time.

John Barleycorn Must Die

Barley is one of the chief ingredients in Beer and Whiskey. The British reformers who attacked it forgot that it is also a chief part of Bread.

In the personification of the struggles over alcohol, John Barleycorn was Beer and Whiskey. In the folk song, revived by some band in the 1960s, there is the central lyric:

"And these three men, they made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die."

Is this now the central aim of AA? After all, it is said that if alcohol were just discovered today, it would be outlawed. I wonder about Rambler, going against the great social lubricant of today. How to do it? Outdoor climates like Southern California make it relatively easy by providing alternatives to bars and pubs and the like, but there is still the temptation to supplement the high one gets from the relatively unobstructed freedom of the West.

I can imagine being on the beach at Santa Monica, watching the sun set over Malibu. What could be better than a cool one to ice the day? Or should you just plunge yourself into the Pacific?

Money and Menace

There's a new book out (I'll find out the name later) that I flipped through that said New York has lost its character because of rampant real-estate development.

I must admit, Manhattan has lost much of its sense of place due to chain-development and the like. But it was an accident waiting to happen.

Real-estate pressures on Manhattan are immense, owing mostly to the lack of it and idiotic real-estate land-stealing through rent-control and rent-stabilized units.

But the real land-burst came with the city's plummeting crime rate. All of the sudden, neighborhoods that had been off-limits became open for development.

Anyone who knew NY in the 1980s knew the palpable sense of menace that started to overcome you, say, as you went further into Alphabet City. I remember my college roommate, an Upper Westsider, turning back on St. Mark's at about First Ave. because it supposedly got too bad "down there."

As I got bolder, I went more and more "down there" and enjoyed feeling like a badass simply by being in Tompkins Square Park with the "Anarchists" (read, apartment redevelopers before their time). My favorite place in the city was the intersection of 2nd and Ave. B, where there was this post-apocalyptic "gas station" where noise bands would play, surrounded by empty buildings.

So none of that is left. But a city is an organic creature, constantly reinventing itself. It is left for succeeding generations to create a new lefty/non-conformist-center, probably in Brooklyn. Don't look back.

Winter Light

A classic from last year, and one of the best things I've written. It's to my love, a majestic maple in the backyard.

Reaching up toward the pale light
Branches grasping it
Is perfect
Bridges the whiteness
Between ground and air
earth and sky, unified
It is a child's picture of a tree
Painted by a master artist
When the leaves come
They are lush and full
For now it is asleep
Its towering majesty undiminished
It yearns to the sky
stripped to the bones
and for a moment,
brings my eye to heaven high