Tag Archives: New York City

NYC

Leave a comment | Posted by Patrick Calder on in travel

Have you ever been to New York City? I have, at least four times. And I like it. Just don’t tell anyone I know, because that could get me in trouble. I’m central NY, born and raised. But New York City just doesn’t come up spontaneously in discussions among “upstate” New Yorkers. Like some blemish you hope no one will notice if you don’t mention it. But I’m sure I can trust you to keep my secret.
I was back again, this past weekend; again visiting my friend Indri. She wanted to see an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, and who would I be to turn down a beautiful lady who asked me to show her lizards?!
lizard
It was very hard for me to come back from NYC. We essentially spent two days wandering around manhattan, on foot. No Times Square. No Rockafeller Center. We kept to the ass end of the island… Chinatown, the West Village, and surrounding areas. It was absolutely everything I love about city life, and everything that is being weeded out of DC. NYC* is the first city I’ve ever been to with the ability to generate and maintain it’s own culture. And you can absolutely see it in the faces of the people you pass. Here they are, living in this incredible collection of relatively ancient monoliths, immersed in the most active, vibrant communities I’ve ever seen, and yet these are the most down-to-earth people I’ve met. I’ve been out west, and I’ve been to the south, and I live in DC, and I can see why New Yorkers have a reputation for being mean. They have a strong directness combined with the ability to ignore anything that isn’t part of their immediate life.
indri eating pizza
I loved walking into store fronts, and finding a designer hawking his own clothing line. Or a cafe that doesn’t know the meaning of the word Starbucks. Breakfast on Sunday was at this great little restaurant … somewhere I can’t remember. Ice cream in Chinatown. Tofu from a man dishing it out of huge pots set into grocery carts on the street. And neighborhoods filled with real people walking down the streets with their friends.
The people. Holy hell, the people! I actually felt safer in NYC than in DC. Not because of any respective amount of crime. But there are just so many people on the street in NYC at every moment of the day, that any criminal would have to be incredibly brazen. And those aren’t the kind of crimes you can worry about. In relative contrast, DC seems almost dead. Our huge sidewalks spend more time empty than even partially used. And outside of one or two holidays, they’re never jammed with people. When I come home from late nights out, The six block walk from the subway to my apartment is always alone. I might pass 1 or 2 other people if I’m lucky, including the hookers.
facade
And the architecture in NYC makes me smile. So much of it comes from times when building was still a craft instead of an occupation. As if the whole city was carved out of rock by a million different artists working spontaneously. No two buildings are the same, and no two facades look alike. And everywhere you go, you can find these little anomalies tucked away where you least expect them.
It really was an amazing weekend, just immersing myself in this beehive of life, and activity, and colors, and smells… . If Indri wouldn’t kill me in my sleep, I’d probably never leave her apartment to come back here.
But I came back, and I wasn’t particularly happy about it. Driving back into this city was like having a cold, wet blanket thrown over me. The streets are deserted. Ominous people lurk randomly on the corner, waiting to intimidate someone. It’s a city that was built for the express purpose of imposing it’s will on other people.If New York CIty is ‘experience’, then Washington, DC is “ambition”. For the next two days, I couldn’t believe I had enjoyed the weekend so much, and yet it was now so far away.

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!

New York, New York

Leave a comment | Posted by Patrick Calder on in travel

There is something so wrong about sitting here on a Friday night in my pajamas, doing nothing.
I should have painted. Or at least sketched. (God forbid I should go out). But I was full of self-pity, so I played video games instead. Games are my little mental anesthesia. I feel completely brain dead by the time I’m done. Bad for art. Good for distress.
You know… I think I’m starting to understand the New York City subways a bit. The first step, as with anything else, is to discard your ideas of how complicated they are in the first place. All human interaction with our environment is based on symbols. So trying to figure out things like traffic patterns and transit networks is no different. If one level of information is too complex, make it more abstract. (In my home town, I would watch every car on the street to decide what to do. Here in DC, I watch the lanes.) Once I’m on the train, I’m set. But… you know… figuring out how to get to the right train? I’m completely fucked. So I still gotta work on that.
Did I mention I was in NYC again last weekend?
I was dragged out there by a brutal woman who didn’t care how busy I was.
(kidding!)
I was dragged out there by a beautiful woman who I’d been anxious to see now that she was ‘free’ again from visitors.
As much of a panic as they caused me, I really do love the Chinatown busses. They ferry people literally from the streets of one city to the streets of another. No terminals. No kiosks. No signs. No uniforms. Pay $17.50 and you’ll be 300 miles away by the time anyone notices. Okay… I probably should have thought more about how crowded a Friday afternoon shuttle was going to be. But still… I caught the second bus I tried for, and was only about 2 and a half hours behind schedule. The Washington Deluxe route lets you off at 34th and 8th; right across from the New Yorker hotel. This was the first place I ever stayed in NYC. It has a certain freaky grandeur. The neighborhood scared the shit out of me back then. But time has changed the place, and Friday night in that little corner of Manhattan is loud and bright. Busier, in fact, than during the day. (I’d had paranoid day dreams about sparsely populated sidewalks leaving me standing out like a purple elephant, with a sign saying “mug the tourist”.)
We went into Brooklyn on this trip, to see a jazz concert at the music conservatory. Apparently I’m working my way through the city one borough at a time. I can see what so many long-time NYC residents like about Brooklyn, though. What tiny bits I caught sight of through the rain (and rain, and rain, and rain…) and greasy taxi windows reminded me of all the character of Manhattan, but shrunk down to a human scale. (Well… once you’re away from the bridges, anyway). I actually felt safer walking to the subway after the show there, than I do most places in DC after dark. Could have just been blissful ignorance, though.
Earlier that afternoon, we went to the MoMA, to see the Pixar exhibit. The exhibit itself was fun, and certainly makes me want to see some of their movies that I’ve missed. But I was mostly impressed by some of the pre-production artwork. I was surprised how many early character designs were done as traditional collages. I haven’t seen anyone use the technique for practical purposes in what must be forever. (No. Photoshop doesn’t count.) Other than that, I probably enjoyed the color studies the most. Blocking out entire movies in highly abbreviated, highly abstracted scenes on long scrolls of paper. This great, super-condensed chunk of pop culture and art and motion and…
I got to indulge my New York City fetish on the way home, as we walked through Koreatown and stopped to pick up dinner from Madison Square Garden. Did I mention I have a serious thing for Asian pears? But since they’re roughly the size of a softball and weigh over a pound each, I didn’t think packing them home on the bus was going to work. At least not with my backpack already full of shit.
I pick on Indri, for sleeping late and taking so long to get ready to go out. In DC, thats a very ‘suburban’ thing. But until I sat here writing, tonight, it didn’t occur to me how much we did once the day finally geared up. Up through Rockafeller Center, MoMA, Koreatown, Dinner, Concert, Movie. That is very NOT suburban. And that was just us, having a slow weekend, and a sick host to boot.
My only deep regret is a lack of photos. The weather outside was primarily miserable the entire weekend. Friday and Saturday were all about rain, and Sunday was cold enough to stop me in my tracks, literally. A few pictures of Indri, of course. But otherwise, nothing. I really need to go back when the weather is less horrid, and I have time to wander.

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!

Part 2.

2 Replies | Posted by Patrick Calder on in travel

A couple little addendums to my last entry.
The other thing you should know about Indri is that besides the whole “disgustingly cute” thing, (which she is apparently not going to let me forget), she is disturbingly smart as well. Smart enough that if she let it show, she wouldn’t appear anywhere near innocent. But beneath every puzzled look and cute grin, there’s another question that belies the engines churning away inside her head. And while she may not seem to always like being an adult, her reactions show an acute self-awareness and consciousness of everything she does.
If she’s anything like me, that probably drives her a bit crazy.
And then there’s New York City. Addendum Two. I think had been about five years since my last visit, and changes were visible. We arrived in Manhattan through the Lincoln tunnel, which comes out pretty close to the place I stayed the first time I visited, so I was able to immediately compare. That area just west of the Empire State Building has built up with traditional commerce a bit more. New movie theatre. More restaurants. Signs of life. SO for much of the city I saw. Certainly Starbucks has exploded since my last visit. More banks. More shops. Most of the national chains for just about any industry you care to mention. But what I love — what makes this New York City — is that even with all that, it’s still just a drop in the bucket. There’s just so much squeezed into every last inch of this city that even if every national chain of every possible industry opened a storefront in every square mile, it wouldn’t begin to fill all the businesses. In some places, the store fronts go three stories high. Indri, who’s been there for two years now (?) was saying how she still frequently finds new places when she goes out on the street.
Okay… maybe that wasn’t a short addendum.
Okay. Here’s another New York City thing for you. It’s dirty. It’s worn. It’s lived in.
And that really feels soooo good.
In most of the well travelled areas of DC, you’d be lucky to find a building that was older than 30 years, or hadn’t been significantly remodeled in that time. (The Washington Monument requires a complete face-lift every 8 years, or it starts to deteriorate. No joke.) We have people running machines that do nothing but take bubblegum off the sidewalk. Billboards are regulated nearly out of existence. Everything is square and anonymous. Soot and stains are sandblasted off at regular intervals. Vacant old-time department stores are remodeled into wonderful new office complexes. It doesn’t feel like people live here. It feels like people are here as an afterthought to the city. (Which is pretty close to the historical truth).
Whereas New York City bleeds people. You could never question it’s “lived-in” status. I looked at an ornate door handle in a lobby, that must have been at least 60 years old. It was on the door to the staff toilet. I’ve never seen a better example of organized chaos than Manhattan streets, especially after dark. The buildings are all from an age that remembered art wasn’t something in a museum, and design wasn’t just for brochures. There’s a visual maelstrom of shapes and sizes, between the buildings, and the parks, and the stuff that fills the cracks.
I read an article once talking about how Star Wars, when it came out in the ’70s, it was so accessible because it showed a grimy, lived-in future that reflected our own world, where so much of the sci-fi of the last 30 years had told us the future would be sanitized and soundtracked for our protection, (a la Star Trek). So if Washington DC is Star Trek, then New York City is Star Wars.
I actually thought this stuff about Indri and New York City would be brief. I had much more to say about work, and personalities, and cultural underpinnings. But it’s after midnight, and I’m starting to get tired. So go away and leave me alone until another night.

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!

Indri in New York City

1 Reply | Posted by Patrick Calder on in friends

indriani
I spent last night in NYC, with Indri. Two words to describe Indri: disgustingly cute. You know… in every possible way. She’s got chipmunk cheeks, big anime eyes, and bouncy little outfits to match a bouncy little personality. She rambles on about anything and everything, and still comes across as fascinated with life and her surroundings. And those occasions when she doesn’t seem to know what to say, a look overtakes her face like she just stepped in pudding. In the nine or ten years I’ve known her, she’s never once let on that she’s anything more than sweet and polite, with a little bit of innocent mischievousness, which I take as reality, since it would be a shame to believe anything else. In her presence, I can’t bring myself to spout my more lurid innuendo that someone like Sara might experience. It would be like drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. I can’t even be as stubbornly negative as I occasionally still tend to be.
I swear… she’s a living pixie.
(There, Indri. NOW you can be embarrassed.)
Hopped the Washington Deluxe each way, which turned out much better than expected. I’d heard them referred to as the “pauper’s limos“. But I personally think it’s a pretty amazing service, for only $35 round trip. Top of the line busses, that make Grayhounds look like mobile shithouses. Clean and well kept up. Televisions with movies at the start of each ride. convenient pick-ups and drop-offs in the heart of each city. Couldn’t get all that if you drove your own self.
New York City always fascinates me. I came from New York to DC almost exactly 8 years ago. And although I’ve dug out my own niche, I’ve never fit perfectly here. And each time I visit New York, I’m reminded why. While I grew up in Geneva, somewhere up in central NY, there’s a certain ruggedness of personality, about any New Yorker, no matter where they call home. And no where does this essence seem more concentrated than New York City. It’s especially visible in the women, most of whom have the air of just having castrated a potential mugger with their umbrella, and are now on their way home to slip into pink, fuzzy slippers. Where women in DC confronted by lurid behavior may go the other way, cry, and sue, (not necessarily in that order), the same New York woman would probably grab the man by the balls and threaten to remove them manually if the assailant doesn’t grow a brain cell. You know, it’s there in the men too, but harder to notice since aggressiveness is more universally common in them. I remember a line from Crocodile Dundee that was supposed to be funny, about how New York City must be the friendliest place on earth, if 20 million people all wanted to live together. Joke or not, there’s a tiny bit of truth in there. I don’t know if you can call it friendliness. But the residents all seem to realize they’re packed in like rats, and naked hostility and apathy aren’t going to help anyone. New York City is really one of those places you can only experience first-hand.
Oh… yeah… happy birthday, Indri.

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!