Sad ironies abound in the accounts of Irene's devastation in the Catskills and Vermont.
Who might have predicted that the Mayor of New York would order evacuation of parts of the mighty city, driving some folks to the northern latitudes for safety? And that those northern havens would then get flooded like nobody's business as Lower Manhattan stayed pretty much okay?
Who had mapped the possibility of intense flooding hundreds of miles inland even as reporters dutifully manned it out safely on the blustery beaches? Who might have predicted Senator Bernie Sanders (I)-VT bellowing for aid on national news as smug simpletons in Washington dryly state that federal disaster aid is more or less a lousy idea and that we really can't afford it?
Who could have predicted that anyone in any public office at any point in time would have the temerity to suggest the United States cannot take care of disaster-struck citizens?
Who could have predicted that States' Rights would be invoked in the middle of a hurricane?
How about this: New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and like places that send much more to the Feds than they ever get back--how about we invoke our states' rights? How about we just throw off Alabama and Texas from our backs and set our own standards and with all the money we saved by not supporting givebacks to red states, build ourselves anew?
How quickly would that action provoke a call for unity by the hypocrites now claiming they can't rescue Vermont from the worst disaster in its history?
Call their bluff. Sure. States' rights. Tell me when we start. And by the way, some of y'all may need passports to come here if you want to help with the flood cleanup.
Showing posts with label new york. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new york. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
What's up with the Capital One TV Commercials (NY Area)?
Maybe they customize them for different Metropolitan Statistical Areas, but in my area (NYC) the television ads for a bank called "Capital One" have taken several crazy twists, each one more annoying than the last. They have a separate and equally brazen (and disgusting) set of commercials for their credit cards, on which I shall also comment.
The offending campaign concerns their boasting about how many branches they have. Each branch is represented by a three-story-high red pushpin (like on a map!), except that the pushpin arrives plunging through the lower atmosphere much as would a missile, embedding itself violently in the sidewalk outside of each supposed Capital One branch. My problem is with the violent, transgressive, anti-New York feeling evoked by the sight of giant missiles attacking the city, and perhaps worse, the notion that people will see this (broken sidewalks and all), and instead of fleeing the invasion, go about their business, mildly curious, quite as if they had been hoping, mildly, to see one of these random, dangerous attacks for themselves (there is an element of terrorism as well as an element of unseemly voyeurism to it, in my opinion). In an especially baffling twist, there is even a giant pushpin that smashes into and pins a taxi to the ground, while an Islamic-looking driver gets out and seems dismayed that his taxi has been utterly destroyed. His reaction is as if someone had spilled Kool-Aid on the hood.
Lately the campaign has morphed into something truly monstrous. Now the giant destructive pushpins are simply part of the city landscape--giant, red alien presences blocking sidewalks--and cityfolk have adopted them as the kind of sorta-fun, only-in-NY semi-nuisances that get accepted as part of the diverse urban landscape (like counterfeit handbag hawkers?--rogue shish-kebab vendors?). Children jump rope under them; teens jump up and tag their umbrella-like edges. Dog-walkers get their leashes tied up around their steely poles but with colorful panache. Then it turns out the Rockettes have come up with a peppy, inspirational song about how these pushpins [branches] are "here, there, everywhere" while riding past atop a doubledecker tourist bus. At last, the jump-roping kids ask us "What's in your wallet?" as if we had somehow got onto that subject.
It is all quite incoherent as effective marketing, but the chilling message remains: we have invaded and you're going to like it. This hearkens back to an earlier and more interesting Capital One campaign that then morphed into a truly brazen and awful spectacle of cruelty and indifference.
A couple of years ago, a Capital One Ad Genius apparently came up with the idea that, since high-interest, no-reward credit cards could be construed as predatory, they could fairly be depicted as a Viking horde pillaging the suburban landscape--until the doughty Capital One credit card customer flashed his/her magic plastic, which seemed to rob the buffalo-robed Huns of their strength and made them drop their maces and halberds and crawl away simpering like stricken curs. The tag line was "What's in your wallet?" as if to say "watch out--your credit card may be eating you alive". Fair enough.
That campaign, at least, could pass the test for consistent logic. But then the Capital One Ad Genius took this tenuously coherent idea and turned it into something truly wretched. Now the Capital One Huns became everyday inhabitants of our world, and instead of marauding, simply misbehaved incoherently. They clanked weapons down at airport security, they smashed lobsters with sledgehammers at fancy restaurants, they were unusually cruel to women whose hair they were styling at the Hun Hair Salon. Then, quite inappropriately, one of them would turn his snaggletoothed visage to the viewer and croak "What's in your wallet?". The tag-line no longer made sense, since the Huns had turned goofy and apparently had been widely accepted (unlike the long-suffering Geico cavemen). The Ad Genius had lost the thread.
At last the thread became utterly entangled (I am sure the marketers were touting it as "convergence") around the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the jump-roping kids. As noted above, the jump-roping kids are now asking us what's in our wallet. This represents the altogether fatuous assumption that we, in reality, have adopted the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the inanely parading Rockettes as part of our own personal landscape, and would know perfectly well what sort of message was being delivered to us when the jump-roping kids asked us what was in our wallet.
The problem is that the Hun ploy was tenuous to begin with; that the pushpins were offensive; and the two paired became utterly contemptuous of reason and good sense.
I know little about the actual business of Capital One nor do I care to know it. I do know their Ad Genius should be fired for having polluted our televisions with a series of degrading, insulting, incoherent commercials that make me wonder about the collective soundness of executive minds at the client company.
What's in your commercial?
The offending campaign concerns their boasting about how many branches they have. Each branch is represented by a three-story-high red pushpin (like on a map!), except that the pushpin arrives plunging through the lower atmosphere much as would a missile, embedding itself violently in the sidewalk outside of each supposed Capital One branch. My problem is with the violent, transgressive, anti-New York feeling evoked by the sight of giant missiles attacking the city, and perhaps worse, the notion that people will see this (broken sidewalks and all), and instead of fleeing the invasion, go about their business, mildly curious, quite as if they had been hoping, mildly, to see one of these random, dangerous attacks for themselves (there is an element of terrorism as well as an element of unseemly voyeurism to it, in my opinion). In an especially baffling twist, there is even a giant pushpin that smashes into and pins a taxi to the ground, while an Islamic-looking driver gets out and seems dismayed that his taxi has been utterly destroyed. His reaction is as if someone had spilled Kool-Aid on the hood.
Lately the campaign has morphed into something truly monstrous. Now the giant destructive pushpins are simply part of the city landscape--giant, red alien presences blocking sidewalks--and cityfolk have adopted them as the kind of sorta-fun, only-in-NY semi-nuisances that get accepted as part of the diverse urban landscape (like counterfeit handbag hawkers?--rogue shish-kebab vendors?). Children jump rope under them; teens jump up and tag their umbrella-like edges. Dog-walkers get their leashes tied up around their steely poles but with colorful panache. Then it turns out the Rockettes have come up with a peppy, inspirational song about how these pushpins [branches] are "here, there, everywhere" while riding past atop a doubledecker tourist bus. At last, the jump-roping kids ask us "What's in your wallet?" as if we had somehow got onto that subject.
It is all quite incoherent as effective marketing, but the chilling message remains: we have invaded and you're going to like it. This hearkens back to an earlier and more interesting Capital One campaign that then morphed into a truly brazen and awful spectacle of cruelty and indifference.
A couple of years ago, a Capital One Ad Genius apparently came up with the idea that, since high-interest, no-reward credit cards could be construed as predatory, they could fairly be depicted as a Viking horde pillaging the suburban landscape--until the doughty Capital One credit card customer flashed his/her magic plastic, which seemed to rob the buffalo-robed Huns of their strength and made them drop their maces and halberds and crawl away simpering like stricken curs. The tag line was "What's in your wallet?" as if to say "watch out--your credit card may be eating you alive". Fair enough.
That campaign, at least, could pass the test for consistent logic. But then the Capital One Ad Genius took this tenuously coherent idea and turned it into something truly wretched. Now the Capital One Huns became everyday inhabitants of our world, and instead of marauding, simply misbehaved incoherently. They clanked weapons down at airport security, they smashed lobsters with sledgehammers at fancy restaurants, they were unusually cruel to women whose hair they were styling at the Hun Hair Salon. Then, quite inappropriately, one of them would turn his snaggletoothed visage to the viewer and croak "What's in your wallet?". The tag-line no longer made sense, since the Huns had turned goofy and apparently had been widely accepted (unlike the long-suffering Geico cavemen). The Ad Genius had lost the thread.
At last the thread became utterly entangled (I am sure the marketers were touting it as "convergence") around the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the jump-roping kids. As noted above, the jump-roping kids are now asking us what's in our wallet. This represents the altogether fatuous assumption that we, in reality, have adopted the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the inanely parading Rockettes as part of our own personal landscape, and would know perfectly well what sort of message was being delivered to us when the jump-roping kids asked us what was in our wallet.
The problem is that the Hun ploy was tenuous to begin with; that the pushpins were offensive; and the two paired became utterly contemptuous of reason and good sense.
I know little about the actual business of Capital One nor do I care to know it. I do know their Ad Genius should be fired for having polluted our televisions with a series of degrading, insulting, incoherent commercials that make me wonder about the collective soundness of executive minds at the client company.
What's in your commercial?
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Bring Back Elliot Spitzer
The timing was immaculate. His unsavory deeds were not.
And in spite of the former New York Governor's erstwhile tramping around the Mayflower in just his socks ordering call girls to do it as dirty as can be, I believe we want him back--as Governor of New York State--on his political and prosecutorial merits.
He's already appearing on legitimate talk shows and they are not talking with him about condoms. For instance, on last night's TRMS (The Rachel Maddow Show), hosted brightly but haltingly by the irrepressible Howard Dean, Spitzer was a guest and held forth on "The Trouble with Wall Street". In a cogent, cutting manner (as is typical for him), he rather eviscerated the current pay structure and mindset of Wall Street. Specifically, he said "compensation has to come down" and "these executives are fiduciaries that work for the investors; they are supposed to safeguard the shareholders' money--instead they simply took the shareholders' money for themselves while making catastrophic decisions".
Here we have an ex-Governor of the Wall Street State honing in on the Wall Street pirates like a torpedo plane dropping a steel fish into the water a quarter mile away and in the direction of the Bismarck. He clearly has it in for these guys and he should--as any American patriot ought to.
But for him it may be even more than that. I mentioned the timing above. In hindsight it now seems very possible if not likely that the sudden revelation of his sordid trysting (that came only months before the historic collapse of the Wall Street bubble which has resulted in the worst economic era in any of our lifetimes unless we are at least octogenarians), may have been engineered by his foes down on the Street. They knew he was a pit bull, they knew he didn't care for their chicanery, they probably knew he was going to be investigating, they probably suspected or knew he was going to come down on them like a bunker-busting bomb. And so they struck first. They pretty much cut his political legs off with some seriously scandalous news, and so he toppled and fell. Now somewhat rehabilitated, Spitzer is back on his feet and may be looking for a little bit of payback.
His resignation was a win for Wall Street and the right-wing in so many ways, but I will mention just two. Spitzer, a sitting governor deeply opposed to the treachery entrenched in the financial markets of his own state, was forced to resign in disgrace. His replacement, an unsteady buffoon, is about as much a threat to Wall Street as a Vermont Teddy Bear is to a run of salmon.
But now the world has changed again. The wizards of Wall Street look more like Sauron than Gandalf. Spitzer looks more like a steely-eyed (if perhaps kinky) Aragorn than the way he looked when he resigned (which was like Gollum). Americans, still gasping for air in the oily choke-hold of a class of cynical banker-thieves, cannot at this moment be overly concerned with the bedroom antics of anyone equipped to break that choke-hold. This is especially so if the potential rescuer is of the political caliber of an Elliot Spitzer. We need a defender who knows the ropes and who knows what it feels like to trade grapeshot with the enemy.
We need Elliot Spitzer again. I nominate him for another term as Governor of the State of New York.
And in spite of the former New York Governor's erstwhile tramping around the Mayflower in just his socks ordering call girls to do it as dirty as can be, I believe we want him back--as Governor of New York State--on his political and prosecutorial merits.
He's already appearing on legitimate talk shows and they are not talking with him about condoms. For instance, on last night's TRMS (The Rachel Maddow Show), hosted brightly but haltingly by the irrepressible Howard Dean, Spitzer was a guest and held forth on "The Trouble with Wall Street". In a cogent, cutting manner (as is typical for him), he rather eviscerated the current pay structure and mindset of Wall Street. Specifically, he said "compensation has to come down" and "these executives are fiduciaries that work for the investors; they are supposed to safeguard the shareholders' money--instead they simply took the shareholders' money for themselves while making catastrophic decisions".
Here we have an ex-Governor of the Wall Street State honing in on the Wall Street pirates like a torpedo plane dropping a steel fish into the water a quarter mile away and in the direction of the Bismarck. He clearly has it in for these guys and he should--as any American patriot ought to.
But for him it may be even more than that. I mentioned the timing above. In hindsight it now seems very possible if not likely that the sudden revelation of his sordid trysting (that came only months before the historic collapse of the Wall Street bubble which has resulted in the worst economic era in any of our lifetimes unless we are at least octogenarians), may have been engineered by his foes down on the Street. They knew he was a pit bull, they knew he didn't care for their chicanery, they probably knew he was going to be investigating, they probably suspected or knew he was going to come down on them like a bunker-busting bomb. And so they struck first. They pretty much cut his political legs off with some seriously scandalous news, and so he toppled and fell. Now somewhat rehabilitated, Spitzer is back on his feet and may be looking for a little bit of payback.
His resignation was a win for Wall Street and the right-wing in so many ways, but I will mention just two. Spitzer, a sitting governor deeply opposed to the treachery entrenched in the financial markets of his own state, was forced to resign in disgrace. His replacement, an unsteady buffoon, is about as much a threat to Wall Street as a Vermont Teddy Bear is to a run of salmon.
But now the world has changed again. The wizards of Wall Street look more like Sauron than Gandalf. Spitzer looks more like a steely-eyed (if perhaps kinky) Aragorn than the way he looked when he resigned (which was like Gollum). Americans, still gasping for air in the oily choke-hold of a class of cynical banker-thieves, cannot at this moment be overly concerned with the bedroom antics of anyone equipped to break that choke-hold. This is especially so if the potential rescuer is of the political caliber of an Elliot Spitzer. We need a defender who knows the ropes and who knows what it feels like to trade grapeshot with the enemy.
We need Elliot Spitzer again. I nominate him for another term as Governor of the State of New York.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Of Driving and the Original Wilderness
I am a train lover. I am an airline-intense-disliker (especially of the constitution-violating security measures they employ). I am an avid city-walker and an enthusiastic, if occasional country-hiker.
Perhaps it is a surprise to hear that a person (me) living in a place where one needs no car loves--truly loves--driving. Perhaps it is because that person doesn't ever really need to drive? And never has commuted by car in his life (except for a grim and thankfully brief period in his teens, intra-suburb,"carpooling" in the back seat of an AMC Gremlin, an experience so dispiriting it may have been life-changing)?
But I do love driving. And I can think of no more act quite as assuredly enthralling as pressing down on the gas, rounding a curve, coming upon a new vista, passing some relative slowpoke perhaps, and feeling quite in control and on top of the world. I like to think of myself as a "good driver". I don't do stunts. I don't speed. I use my mirrors. I am respectful of other cars, inanimate objects, the odd small animal and especially pedestrians. I am probably a regular goody-two-shoes of a driver. But none of that innate caution detracts from the feeling of power and ascendancy that comes from moving at speed through a gorgeous landscape--protected from the elements, The Basement Tapes playing off the iPod--I become misty at the thought.
Then there is the choice of venue. Perhaps a tour through the clamor and waste of, say, southern Nassau County, or to spin oneself endlessly in circles around the magnificent, vast parking lots of the Paramus Mall would not afford the same exaltation. But I do a fair amount of my driving in the storied, gorgeously well-endowed, quasi-rural and sophisticated Hudson Valley--a geography that has certainly got its due historically but remains underreported as one of the world's Great Locations.
The Hudson Valley is America's first "wilderness"--wilderness being a concept that requires a non-wilderness (and in this case that would be the million-footed beast clutching that last Palisade of the valley before its great river washes out past the skyscrapers and into the bay and the bight and ultimately the sea). It was sold to the masses cramped in city-quarters a such, and so many carriages and trains and parkways endeavored to take them there over the course of, say, the time just before the Civil War to the time just after Woodstock, that it became after a time overlooked and came to be seen as "your father's paradise" and therefore kind of dowdy and maybe even creepy. Certainly the dozens of abandoned, wretched-looking tourist shacks that cluster near some of the interior roadways do nothing to dispel the notion it may have been, for a time, pretty much a lowlife destination and kind of creepy.
I'm here to tell you today that it's not anybody's paradise, but that it's got as much charm and intrinsic beauty (and as many great restaurants) as any richly endowed valley in any part of the world. The other day I drove up River Road on the eastern side of the Hudson north of Rhinebeck (a very winning little crossroads town in and of itself) and was astonished at the autumn finery in the trees, the ancient, native architecture of the houses nestled in crooks of the valley, the way the road wound about through woods and over streams, and at last how it ended up in the entirely underrated river town of Hudson, New York, a very small city whose main street happens to be a study in American architecture from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century and is lined with stores and restaurants of a quality and sophistication more to be expected in urban centers like Tribeca and Soho.
There is a long story waiting to be written about how the Hudson Valley now beckons the driver to its winding, shady roads and tempts the driver with succulent feasts at charming restaurants owned by chefs that might as well have made their mark in Manhattan. But that would be a much longer story than this format will tolerate.
Let me just say it again: a) I love driving and b) I especially love driving in the Hudson Valley.
Perhaps it is a surprise to hear that a person (me) living in a place where one needs no car loves--truly loves--driving. Perhaps it is because that person doesn't ever really need to drive? And never has commuted by car in his life (except for a grim and thankfully brief period in his teens, intra-suburb,"carpooling" in the back seat of an AMC Gremlin, an experience so dispiriting it may have been life-changing)?
But I do love driving. And I can think of no more act quite as assuredly enthralling as pressing down on the gas, rounding a curve, coming upon a new vista, passing some relative slowpoke perhaps, and feeling quite in control and on top of the world. I like to think of myself as a "good driver". I don't do stunts. I don't speed. I use my mirrors. I am respectful of other cars, inanimate objects, the odd small animal and especially pedestrians. I am probably a regular goody-two-shoes of a driver. But none of that innate caution detracts from the feeling of power and ascendancy that comes from moving at speed through a gorgeous landscape--protected from the elements, The Basement Tapes playing off the iPod--I become misty at the thought.
Then there is the choice of venue. Perhaps a tour through the clamor and waste of, say, southern Nassau County, or to spin oneself endlessly in circles around the magnificent, vast parking lots of the Paramus Mall would not afford the same exaltation. But I do a fair amount of my driving in the storied, gorgeously well-endowed, quasi-rural and sophisticated Hudson Valley--a geography that has certainly got its due historically but remains underreported as one of the world's Great Locations.
The Hudson Valley is America's first "wilderness"--wilderness being a concept that requires a non-wilderness (and in this case that would be the million-footed beast clutching that last Palisade of the valley before its great river washes out past the skyscrapers and into the bay and the bight and ultimately the sea). It was sold to the masses cramped in city-quarters a such, and so many carriages and trains and parkways endeavored to take them there over the course of, say, the time just before the Civil War to the time just after Woodstock, that it became after a time overlooked and came to be seen as "your father's paradise" and therefore kind of dowdy and maybe even creepy. Certainly the dozens of abandoned, wretched-looking tourist shacks that cluster near some of the interior roadways do nothing to dispel the notion it may have been, for a time, pretty much a lowlife destination and kind of creepy.
I'm here to tell you today that it's not anybody's paradise, but that it's got as much charm and intrinsic beauty (and as many great restaurants) as any richly endowed valley in any part of the world. The other day I drove up River Road on the eastern side of the Hudson north of Rhinebeck (a very winning little crossroads town in and of itself) and was astonished at the autumn finery in the trees, the ancient, native architecture of the houses nestled in crooks of the valley, the way the road wound about through woods and over streams, and at last how it ended up in the entirely underrated river town of Hudson, New York, a very small city whose main street happens to be a study in American architecture from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century and is lined with stores and restaurants of a quality and sophistication more to be expected in urban centers like Tribeca and Soho.
There is a long story waiting to be written about how the Hudson Valley now beckons the driver to its winding, shady roads and tempts the driver with succulent feasts at charming restaurants owned by chefs that might as well have made their mark in Manhattan. But that would be a much longer story than this format will tolerate.
Let me just say it again: a) I love driving and b) I especially love driving in the Hudson Valley.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Oasis on Forty Seventh Street
I've posted before about how New York, and especially Manhattan, has been stripped nearly bare of its old, quirky shops--the ones that sold fascinating industrial junk on Canal St, for instance, have one and all been replaced by tiny storefronts all selling counterfeit perfume and watches--and how this has made the city, for large stretches, nothing but an open-air mall with the same chain stores and the same merchandise as in the Dubuque Town Centre (if there is one), but no doubt at much higher prices.
There are of course exceptions, though they seem precarious. There is a subterranean purveyor of model trains and plastic kits on Forty Fifth Street and it is indubitably quirky as is its goggled, high-waisted owner who dispenses N and Z-scale wisdom along with intricately detailed versions of 4-88-4s and pint-sized build-it-yourself Mysterions (incidentally, model-building seems a childhood pleasure now much lost to the ravages of video games--I defy you to try and find a model kit at WalMart--but I digress). There is also a stalwart sandwich shop on East Fortieth going by the rather infelicitous name of "Vaco e Pres" and it used to be run by Italians or Albanians and they made some of the tastiest heroes (not subs!) this side of heaven's gate; it is still there and they still make the sandwiches but it is owned by Vietnamese people now and one supposed one has no reason to lament that in and of itself (though I will hazard a guess they have no more idea what the name of the place means than do I).
However, the exception--the Oasis--of which I am posting today is on Forty Seventh Street and it has long been called The Mercantile Library--not to be confused with the much larger, much less elegant Mechanic's Society Library on Forty Fifth, or the Chemist's Club on Forty First which is now the hotel Dylan. The Mercantile Library recently changed its name to the Center for Fiction and I urge you not to become a member.
The reason I ask you not to join is because then you will help make the place more crowded and less an oasis. For right now it is, for those who can afford the rather reasonable yearly fee, a well-stocked three-floor library (with a great many older books not to be encountered at the NYPL branches) and a place where you can actually sit in a well-appointed room with books and plaster busts and leather chairs and rugs and hardwood floors and all the latest periodicals (on paper!), and read. You can stay as long as you like. They do not have wireless (though the writer's desks on a separate floor do and they cost a certain amount per month to rent). They do have a very good water fountain and they do have very nice bathrooms if I may say so. And like I said, you can sit in the well-appointed, clubby-feeling reading room as long as you like (reading books!); or you an sit at a table and read books or the papers and write or take notes; or you can, if you have a Blackberry, spend your time writing and answering emails though this would seem to defeat the purpose of going there.
For myself, I almost cannot believe the place exists. It is quiet, it is literary, it is not expensive for what it offers, and it is in the midst of a city so unkind to places like it that I fear (unless it is endowed with a fund of which I am unaware)it may one day close its doors and re-open as a Mongolian barbecue.
For now, I am enjoying the respite. I sometimes bring my own books to read there, just because it is such a relaxing, beautiful little place--clean, well-lighted, quiet. Sane, in a word--a quality much lacking in our culture of general cruelty and indifference. Did I mention the bathrooms were very clean?
There are of course exceptions, though they seem precarious. There is a subterranean purveyor of model trains and plastic kits on Forty Fifth Street and it is indubitably quirky as is its goggled, high-waisted owner who dispenses N and Z-scale wisdom along with intricately detailed versions of 4-88-4s and pint-sized build-it-yourself Mysterions (incidentally, model-building seems a childhood pleasure now much lost to the ravages of video games--I defy you to try and find a model kit at WalMart--but I digress). There is also a stalwart sandwich shop on East Fortieth going by the rather infelicitous name of "Vaco e Pres" and it used to be run by Italians or Albanians and they made some of the tastiest heroes (not subs!) this side of heaven's gate; it is still there and they still make the sandwiches but it is owned by Vietnamese people now and one supposed one has no reason to lament that in and of itself (though I will hazard a guess they have no more idea what the name of the place means than do I).
However, the exception--the Oasis--of which I am posting today is on Forty Seventh Street and it has long been called The Mercantile Library--not to be confused with the much larger, much less elegant Mechanic's Society Library on Forty Fifth, or the Chemist's Club on Forty First which is now the hotel Dylan. The Mercantile Library recently changed its name to the Center for Fiction and I urge you not to become a member.
The reason I ask you not to join is because then you will help make the place more crowded and less an oasis. For right now it is, for those who can afford the rather reasonable yearly fee, a well-stocked three-floor library (with a great many older books not to be encountered at the NYPL branches) and a place where you can actually sit in a well-appointed room with books and plaster busts and leather chairs and rugs and hardwood floors and all the latest periodicals (on paper!), and read. You can stay as long as you like. They do not have wireless (though the writer's desks on a separate floor do and they cost a certain amount per month to rent). They do have a very good water fountain and they do have very nice bathrooms if I may say so. And like I said, you can sit in the well-appointed, clubby-feeling reading room as long as you like (reading books!); or you an sit at a table and read books or the papers and write or take notes; or you can, if you have a Blackberry, spend your time writing and answering emails though this would seem to defeat the purpose of going there.
For myself, I almost cannot believe the place exists. It is quiet, it is literary, it is not expensive for what it offers, and it is in the midst of a city so unkind to places like it that I fear (unless it is endowed with a fund of which I am unaware)it may one day close its doors and re-open as a Mongolian barbecue.
For now, I am enjoying the respite. I sometimes bring my own books to read there, just because it is such a relaxing, beautiful little place--clean, well-lighted, quiet. Sane, in a word--a quality much lacking in our culture of general cruelty and indifference. Did I mention the bathrooms were very clean?
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
A Terrifying Realization
Yankee fans are people too.
That was what I finally understood in the late innings of the game where the Yanks took out the Halos at the new Stadium in the Bronx. Watching the mass of excited faces, some praying, some hiding their faces (the team from Orange County was a hit away from tying it up), some on the verge of tears and some hooting like soccer hooligans, I realized much to my horror and surprise that Yankee fans are just a bunch of New York schlubs and no different than anyone else in this enormous small town.
Traditionally I am a Met fan. Which means I have watched the team crumble four years running; and that includes watching the most recent season become classifiable into that worst of all classes for a sporting event: boring. They have a new stadium--I liked Shea (Shake Shack? I came to watch a ballgame). They decked it out with stuff about some Dodger player--stupid. They have a formerly dynamic shortstop who can't run anymore. They have a young "superstar" who forgot how to hit homers this season and who for several seasons has not gotten many clutch hits of any kind though he has "good numbers". How dull.
You might say I have stopped really caring about the baseball team I've long rooted for. And during this window of sanity I have seen that the notion of "rooting", especially in a two-team city, is a painful, unnecessary distraction (perhaps I would feel different if my team had won 26 World Series); and that it falsely creates a disputatious relationship with one's fellow townsfolk.
I am a lover of the game of baseball--nothing will take away from the beauty of a well-hit line drive nor from the symmetry of men circling the bases trying to beat the throw home--but I think my rooting days are drawing to an end. I remember suffering greatly as the Mets failed in three successive seasons (not including this year when I tuned out very early). I have promised myself I will never allow myself to suffer that way again over anything as trifling as a ballteam.
And one of the happy outcomes of this is I have seen the humanity in the formerly hated Yankee fan. Arrogant and foolish and full of false pride (and an even more false sense of superiority and accomplishment), they are not so different than the run of humanity. Really, they are just typically bumbling New Yorkers trying to feel good about themselves for one night.
I will be watching the World Series. I have in the past of course also hated the Phillies. I don't now. May the best team win.
That was what I finally understood in the late innings of the game where the Yanks took out the Halos at the new Stadium in the Bronx. Watching the mass of excited faces, some praying, some hiding their faces (the team from Orange County was a hit away from tying it up), some on the verge of tears and some hooting like soccer hooligans, I realized much to my horror and surprise that Yankee fans are just a bunch of New York schlubs and no different than anyone else in this enormous small town.
Traditionally I am a Met fan. Which means I have watched the team crumble four years running; and that includes watching the most recent season become classifiable into that worst of all classes for a sporting event: boring. They have a new stadium--I liked Shea (Shake Shack? I came to watch a ballgame). They decked it out with stuff about some Dodger player--stupid. They have a formerly dynamic shortstop who can't run anymore. They have a young "superstar" who forgot how to hit homers this season and who for several seasons has not gotten many clutch hits of any kind though he has "good numbers". How dull.
You might say I have stopped really caring about the baseball team I've long rooted for. And during this window of sanity I have seen that the notion of "rooting", especially in a two-team city, is a painful, unnecessary distraction (perhaps I would feel different if my team had won 26 World Series); and that it falsely creates a disputatious relationship with one's fellow townsfolk.
I am a lover of the game of baseball--nothing will take away from the beauty of a well-hit line drive nor from the symmetry of men circling the bases trying to beat the throw home--but I think my rooting days are drawing to an end. I remember suffering greatly as the Mets failed in three successive seasons (not including this year when I tuned out very early). I have promised myself I will never allow myself to suffer that way again over anything as trifling as a ballteam.
And one of the happy outcomes of this is I have seen the humanity in the formerly hated Yankee fan. Arrogant and foolish and full of false pride (and an even more false sense of superiority and accomplishment), they are not so different than the run of humanity. Really, they are just typically bumbling New Yorkers trying to feel good about themselves for one night.
I will be watching the World Series. I have in the past of course also hated the Phillies. I don't now. May the best team win.
Friday, September 25, 2009
A Protest at My Child's High School
I know this will sound cryptic, but my child attends a well-regarded high school in a borough of the City of New York, and that is as specific as I am going to get about that subject.
But what I will get specific about is that there was a protest there yesterday.
It was a protest against the school. And it was a protest especially against the school's heretofore not-very-noteworthy (in NY at least) diversity. Apparently there are a great number of Asians, Arabs, Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, Persians, Hispanics, African-Americans, Albanians, Russians and heaven knows what other New York-ish sub-subcultural representatives prowling the halls of this wonderful school.
And apparently at least one group of outsiders, from somewhere in the great prairies of this nation, believes this is cause for alarm. This cult-like group--I think they are called "the Phelps Clan" or something like that--makes a point of protesting against progressivism in a manner the perversity of which I can only reluctantly begin to understand. For instance, they protested at the funeral of the young gay man who was beaten to death for being gay in Wyoming (they said he was going to hell). They have protested at the funerals of men and women soldiers killed in our current crop of overseas adventures (I have no idea why, but it seems perverse and wrong to do so).
And now they have taken their protests to the streets of the populous, incredibly diverse boroughs here in New York. I am not certain why they picked my child's high school, except that it is well known and as diverse as any in the city, but I think it's because it isn't very far from the synagogue at which they plan to protest on Saturday.
That's right. They are protesting against Jews in New York.
Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing that we must all celebrate. However, the meaning of it is often lost. Freedom of speech is attained via laws prohibiting the government from taking action against free speech; in other words, when the government is thereby prohibited from stopping people from saying what they want.
Freedom of speech is not about one individual making certain another individual gets to shoot his or her mouth off until everyone's ears are red.
So, armed with these facts, can we urge ourselves to perhaps find this clan of simpletons where they sleep and, with heavy complements of duct-tape, wrap their heads in it such that they cannot utter a word of protest against diversity?
I am looking for volunteers.
But what I will get specific about is that there was a protest there yesterday.
It was a protest against the school. And it was a protest especially against the school's heretofore not-very-noteworthy (in NY at least) diversity. Apparently there are a great number of Asians, Arabs, Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, Persians, Hispanics, African-Americans, Albanians, Russians and heaven knows what other New York-ish sub-subcultural representatives prowling the halls of this wonderful school.
And apparently at least one group of outsiders, from somewhere in the great prairies of this nation, believes this is cause for alarm. This cult-like group--I think they are called "the Phelps Clan" or something like that--makes a point of protesting against progressivism in a manner the perversity of which I can only reluctantly begin to understand. For instance, they protested at the funeral of the young gay man who was beaten to death for being gay in Wyoming (they said he was going to hell). They have protested at the funerals of men and women soldiers killed in our current crop of overseas adventures (I have no idea why, but it seems perverse and wrong to do so).
And now they have taken their protests to the streets of the populous, incredibly diverse boroughs here in New York. I am not certain why they picked my child's high school, except that it is well known and as diverse as any in the city, but I think it's because it isn't very far from the synagogue at which they plan to protest on Saturday.
That's right. They are protesting against Jews in New York.
Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing that we must all celebrate. However, the meaning of it is often lost. Freedom of speech is attained via laws prohibiting the government from taking action against free speech; in other words, when the government is thereby prohibited from stopping people from saying what they want.
Freedom of speech is not about one individual making certain another individual gets to shoot his or her mouth off until everyone's ears are red.
So, armed with these facts, can we urge ourselves to perhaps find this clan of simpletons where they sleep and, with heavy complements of duct-tape, wrap their heads in it such that they cannot utter a word of protest against diversity?
I am looking for volunteers.
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