World Tour - Day 97 - New York

I left home early this evening to eat dinner at Noodle Pudding in Brooklyn Heights with some friends. The plan worked out excellently; I had been invited to a birthday party elsewhere in Brooklyn Heights to begin at 11 PM. A single R train trip to westernmost Kings County seemed to solve my entire evening's opportunities. Dinner at Noodle Pudding was severely delayed due to its current "it"-itude, but it was a pleasure to see the Hubbard-Yu family, and it is similarly always a pleasure to catch up with Ebenezer and Cate. During dinner, Sammy Stover called to see whether I would like to party in the LES, but as I said, my dance card was quite full with Kings County business at that point, and I had to demure. One hopes I can catch up with Sammy and Amber and all of their no doubt quite lovely and single female friends one day soon.

After an excellent dinner, over the course of which I managed to drink a quite reasonable amount of wine, I moved around the corner to the birthday/housewarming/going-away party, being that Brooklyn Heights has quite emphatically expressed its intention of being the new New York stronghold, with all due love to the also-ran UWS. Congratulations to Schofield for guessing first.

The party was lovely. The apartment was appropriately Kings County king-sized with none of the ugly yet compelling appurtenances of Williamsburg. I spent time with a number of my young friends, met some quite charming young women, became briefly enchanted with a young woman before realizing (at least explicitly) that she had arrived at the party already obscenely drunk. One imagines, to be frank, that I detected this immediately and thus found her so charming, before coming to explicit knowledge of her not-quite-there state and growing sad. Yet intrigued. I took on an apprentice in the art of rolling cigarettes better than well. The party partied on, and so did I, until about 4 AM, at which point I know that Simon and Hodges (D.) and I were in the living room, having just gone out to the river and come back.

I came back to consciousness receiving a #5 from the cashier of a McDonald's in Forest Hills, Queens. I believe it is safe to assume that I rode the R train past my presumably intended stop of 8th Street out to its limit in Queens. Having arrived there, I appear to have decided to take a walk about and to get breakfast. I am by no means unhappy with these evident decisions. Yes, reader, if you have not been paying attention, the fun part of the story did begin at the top of this paragraph.

As my ability to attach immediate experiences to long term memory slowly resumed function, I finished my breakfast sandwich and hash brown, took my coffee outside, and began to walk directly to the railroad station. I do not know whether it was inspiration or recently acquired advice from a helpful neighbor or map about the vicinity (which had imprinted itself upon my brain despite the willful independence that alcohol wreaks) that let me know where to find the local commuter train stop. Still, I walked directly to it. A slightly circuitous ramp brought me to the train platform. There, I noticed that I had lost my glasses. I went back to the McDonald's to see whether my glasses were there, although it was already apparent to me that I had had some fair adventures prior to my wise visit to the McDonald's, and that my glasses had most probably been lost at some point in that substantial lacuna.

Indeed, the McDonald's did not have my glasses, and I returned to the train station. Throughout this whole process, I had slowly been returning to normal mental functioning, and I had essentially "woken up" entirely by the time I came back to the station. Again, as far as I know, I had at no point consulted a map of any kind, yet I was quite confident that I was waiting on the correct side of the tracks to return home. I say that I had fully "woken up," and this is true. This did not prevent me from - with a quite normal woman trying to commute quite normally sitting very near me on the bench - as I said, from standing up, walking a few steps to my right to look around the platform, and then coming back to a point immediately right of the rightmost seat on the bench, and trying to sit down, resulting in me landing on my ass and the ground, in the course of which bonking my head most cruelly against the wall behind me on the way. I made a no doubt quite reassuring remark dismissing the entire affair to the woman beside me as I stood back up and sat in one of the actual non-fictional seats.

At this point in the morning (it was shortly before 8AM), it was quite evident to me that I had set myself on an adventure.

Two trains passed by very quickly without stopping before one stopped for me to get on. Again, I had no idea where I was or what the nature of this train was. I also had less than perfect confidence that the train was in fact taking me home to New York and not further afield. As I waited, there was on the opposite platform a family group of a father, a very young daughter, and what appeared to be identically dressed twin girls slightly older. When one is on an adventure, it always helps to have two identically dressed little girls in vivid magenta skirts on the opposite train platform to remind one to be absolutely Jungianly Shiningly terrified. If Death does not look like little girls in matching outfits, I cannot guess what it does look like. And, honestly, Who is the third (and fourth?) who walks always beside you?

Anyways, the train came.

I got on, and realized on my way on that I had extinguished my on-hand reserve of cash in the course of buying breakfast. I also realized that the train on which I was riding may not want the currency of MetroCards, which I had similarly extinguished on my trip out to Brooklyn, although presumably replenished prior to my journey out to Queens. And again, reminder, I did not know at this point that I was in Queens. I believed that I was possibly in the Bronx, although I did not discount the possibility that I was in one of the more interesting cities in Westchester County or Connecticut.

Happily, at no point in my trip did anyone attempt to collect a fare or ticket from me. Indeed, I rode free from Forest Hills (it turns out to be in Queens, and not even that damnably far out within Queens) back to Penn Station. Along the way, I stood (how could I in good conscious take a seat?) alongside an older woman reading a newspaper and a charming family unit quite reminiscent of the crew at the Mobil St. station in that last Matrix film. Their little boy was adorable.

At Penn Station I got out and decided to walk home.

At this point, I was already pretty satisfied with the adventure I had crafted for myself. Happy fellow I am, I enjoyed immensely the walk back. My sleeping schedule being what it is, it was a rare and lovely opportunity to savor Manhattan in the golden hour so beloved of photographers. It was also a pleasant spiritual reminder of what I was actually doing with my life to find the sun staring down at me so brightly every time I came to an unobstructed crosstown street. That damn sun gets quite bright when it has a mind to! And judgmental! Who the hell are you, Sun, to be judging on me?

Again, it was a lovely walk, as always. It has at last started to get a bit cold here in town, which I always like. Not one but several squirrels were at the business of squirreling in Madison Square. Passing a Dunkin Donuts on 2nd Ave, a number of cops walked out, coffee and donuts in hand. Also, a general condition of beauty existed which I enjoyed greatly.

Had I the night to do over again, I would not change a thing. I love a decent adventure, no matter how ably I deal with it. My head did hurt from the bonking incident until about when I came home. True, I would not mind if it turned out that I had left my glasses in Brooklyn rather than having had them stolen off of my face in transit to Queens, but I am not a greedy man, and to be honest, I never quite felt that those glasses worked right with my face, with my pretty, pretty face. Yes, reader, I am going to leave you thinking about how pretty I am. Very, very pretty.

The only work I've been able to get done so far on my screenplay for a Street Fighter sequel

E. HONDA
Oh yeah? Well you're a spinning bird dick.

Weird Plane News

On Thursday evening, I saw a strange gray VTOL plane flying over the Hudson. Neat, I thought. Then just now I found that the plane, the V-22 Osprey, is the subject of a cover story in Time Magazine concerning its decades-long development, the great number of lives already lost to its testing, and its imminent deployment to Iraq despite the further danger and cost that such a decision represents. Still, it looked pretty neat.

The Art Scene

About a quarter past one yesterday, I was walking west on 6th Street to Avenue A. An old woman with a cane was crossing the street, when something flew just by her foot and crashed on the ground. At first, she did not seem to notice, because she kept walking. Although she may just have wanted to get off the street before investigating the matter. Meanwhile, a man with a plastic grocery bag cradled in his left arm walked past her. He pulled a glass jar of peanut butter out of the bag and threw it onto the ground about six feet ahead of him. I see, I thought, that man threw peanut butter at the old lady's feet.

As I came to Avenue A, the old woman was beginning to look around to see what had just happened. I began to wonder whether I should do something, like yell at the man for endangering an old woman. But I was torn, because yelling at him might not improve his behavior, and because it was dawning on me that he might be an artist whose work I would be interrupting (or augmenting?) by yelling at him, and because he might throw peanut butter at me, and cut me or make me dirty.

I turned south, away from the man with the jars, as I tried to sort this out, and realized that he had a number of other spectators. A few individual pedestrians, and a couple with a baby stroller were all looking up at the jar man and the old lady. I thought I might be able to get further insights into the nature of the man's work or at least its public reception by listening in on them. I could see that there was a trail of these shattered peanut butter jars going back the way the man had come. Most of the viewers did not seem happy about the work. One of the custodians of the baby stroller announced that he was calling the police, which seemed like a satisfactory resolution to the situation, although who knows whether someone might not cut their feet before the police arrived. There were at least four more smashed jars leading down to 5th Street.

All of the jars were Smucker's brand peanut butter, which I could tell from the distinctive brown checked pattern on the lid. Where each of them had fallen, the jars had shattered, and the peanut butter had started to splatter, but it was viscous enough that it stuck in little blobby patterns before spraying anywhere. Also, the glass seemed to mostly stick to the peanut butter, meaning that doing this was probably safer than throwing empty glass jars around. The peanut butter was very shiny, I suppose most name brand peanut butters are high in oil.

Was it art? It is hard to say. (Not for me, I know the answer. But I am running through a rhetorical exercise.) One can think of any number of reasons why the man may have been doing what he did, and three main ones. First, he may have been crazy, or otherwise victim to a compulsion beyond his control to throw the peanut butter around. He had a very calm demeanor as he did it, and was throwing the jars at a very regular pace. I can sympathize with this compulsion. If I were left with an entire sack of peanut butter jars, I would be somewhat curious as to what it would be like to throw one. And having thrown one, I could understand feeling an itch to throw another, and another. Certain social boundaries - public safety, the sinfulness of wasting food - would keep me and most of us from following through on this whim, though. Second, he could have been a jerk. He may have had a lot of anger, and chosen to direct at other pedestrians, at peanut butter, and at the city itself, and the cleanliness of its public spaces. Third, he could have been doing this for a deliberate effect. In the third case, he could perhaps be considered an artist. Of course, a lot of artists should be considered to suffer from compulsive behavior, as in the first explanation.

Is it even necessary for him to have intended his act as art, or for a viewer to have willingly accepted it is art, or both? Must his actions have been performed in an appropriate context to be framed as art? The answer is I do not care, and you should not either. Is it necessary for it to have had some sort of artistic effect? What he did certainly had a (I can not help saying it; there is no better word) jarring effect on those who witnessed it. It even elicited some strong emotional responses, it refigured people's experience of a familiar public space, and it drew attention to the social contexts of the viewers' lives as neighbors. It did not look too good, but it sounded interesting. Again, I do not care.

These are actually all non-issues, and I will now draw back the curtain and reveal that yes, what happened was indeed art. The reason: I, your narrator, have all along been a Situationist, and I was in the process of a dérive as the peanut butter incident crossed my path. Ha ha ha! I am sorry if this is an unsatisfying conclusion to the mystery, but given my presence, it is the only one possible.

Later on my walk, I met Bob at the Winter Garden of the WFC to witness and help eat the second largest fondue in history - very tasty, more information to come - from which we walked up the Hudson to Chelsea Market for milkshakes, and then went across town home.

In other art news, the other night, I was walking down the street behind a man carrying a potted plant, which he was holding with the pot sideways in front of him, and its leaves sticking back out under his arm. In the darkness, for a moment, it looked like he was carrying around the still-twitching corpse of an enormous (~4' wingspan) dragonfly. I think a fun project for a young person might be to construct an animatronic dragonfly body to carry around the city and terrify people. It is always nice when young people take it upon themselves to give their neighbors tastes of the sublime.