Ran over the Williamsburg Bridge and back today.  Saw seven (7) ironic mustaches, two (2) non-ironic pairs of legwarmers and one (1) Scottie dog.

One of the many annoyances of living in NYC is that a production shoot will frequently interrupt your daily routine. Today was a freezing cold, windy and rainy day, but for some reason, everybody was shooting in Greenpoint. Some project had trailers parked all up and down Driggs Ave., but I didn’t see anyone out in the weather, other than a few workers taping down wires. Then, there was a commercial shooting at the track. A little tent had been erected next to the track, and about ten people and all their equipment huddled under it. A guy dressed like a referee stood out on the track opposite four muscular dudes in summer running gear, who posed squatted down as if about to race. They must have been freezing. An aide with a showy sense of urgency stopped me and requested I run around behind the tent, so as not to mess up their shot, so I had to squelch through the mud, dodging trees and benches, every time I did a lap.

Exiting the food court adjacent to the Lex & 53rd subway station, an Indian guy in some sort of food industry uniform chased two Hispanic guys who both wore a different restaurant’s uniform. ‘Mexico, Mexico, everybody from Mexico!’ the Indian guy was saying, while the two other guys rolled their eyes at each other, and clearly tried to out-walk him. ‘I love tacos! But I am just not [unintelligible]. Seriously, Mexico is a beautiful country, a gorgeous country.’

On Park Avenue, a car failed to go promptly at a green light, causing several cars to lay on their horns for a good long while, which in turn interrupted the phone conversation of a thin blond woman whose tweed pencil skirt met her black leather boots in a perfect horizontal line across her kneecaps. ‘It’s just so loud here,’ she screamed into the phone. ‘It is just too loud, I mean. This whole city, I don’t – this city is so…loud, and I really, I feel sorry for people who have to…’

I had to go all the way down to the Financial District today, which hasn’t happened since…ever. Now that I think about it, it was the first time I’d been down in that particular area, and I was sad I didn’t have time to linger. I saw the Stock Exchange, with a massive security cordon out front and tons of tourists snapping shots, and Trinity Church, and Federal Hall, with the big bronze statue of George Washington out front. He had a little cardboard sign in his hand, which read ‘Free Bonuses!’ Several of the streets (which are narrow and cobbled, in an oddly quaint way) were shut down as pedestrian walkways, which was nice. The tourists were all in tight clumps, so they were easy to circumnavigate. I didn’t pass the Wall Street bull statue, but I did see a vendor selling mini Wall Street bulls decorated in different patterns for “only” $10, which I thought was stupidly high. Although I only walked around down there for about ten minutes total, during that time, not one, but two older men came up to me, despite my headphones and lack of eye contact, to ask hopefully if I might need some directions, miss. (New Yorkers really love to give directions, particularly to young women.) And there was a man wearing a sandwich board, which said something about corporate greed and American capitalist repression, but what I really noticed was the young man interviewing the sandwich-board wearer and taking notes on a little pad. Undoubtedly sourcing local color in hopes of selling a freelance article somewhere. Everything down there looked as overall gray as Dorothy’s Kansas, but that might have just been the weather, or possibly my psychological response to anywhere money is actually made.

Shortly after 9/11, Hans van den Broek’s wife leaves him alone in New York City – in the Chelsea Hotel, no less – and returns to England with their young son. For the next two years, Hans commutes to London every other weekend, and spends the rest of his time aimlessly distracting himself in post-disaster New York. He becomes involved with a cricket league composed of various immigrants and enjoys thinking back to his youthful days of playing cricket in The Hague, where he was born. One player is Chuck Ramkissoon, a charismatic and eccentric Trinidadian mover-and-shaker, who has his fingers in all sorts of pies. Hans finds himself more and more involved with Chuck, drawn into his mysterious world.

Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is largely about cricket, which is something I can’t get a mental picture of at all. Hans himself admits that:

The uninitiated onlooker at a cricket game is . . . puzzled by the alternation of two batsmen and two bowlers and two sets of stumps. . . . It can take a while before the puzzle is sufficiently solved, particularly for the American viewer. I can’t count the number of times I, in New York, fruitlessly tried to explain to a baffled passerby the basics of the game taking place in front of him, a failure of explanation and comprehension that soon irritated me and led me to give up.

As elusive as the cricket descriptions, however, the various illustrations of New York City neighborhoods, landmarks and institutions are lovely, from the Herald’s Square DMV to the Greenwood Cemetery. O’Neill has a knack for setting, and his brief descriptions cut right to the essence of a place. And in Netherland, O’Neill is expansive on the subject of New York. Critics have compared this book to Gatsby, and indeed the mapping is unavoidable: Chuck Ramkissoon is found floating in the Gowanus Canal at the beginning of the novel, and the comparisons only start there. The book spends time on the American dream, the idea that any hard-working dreamer can go rags-to-riches, and Chuck is the ultimate schemer. When Rachel asks Hans about Chuck’s politics, Hans realizes he has no idea:

The decisive item, if I’m going to be honest about this, was that Chuck was making a go of things. The sushi, the mistress, the marriage, the real estate dealings, and, almost inconceivably, Bald Eagle Field: it was all happening in front of my eyes. While the country floundered in Iraq, Chuck was running. That was political enough for me, a man having trouble putting one foot in front of the other.

And yet, for all its Gatsbyish notes, Netherland is not really about America, precisely because it is such a love song to New York City, and any American who spends upwards of a minute in NYC knows that it’s not remotely representative of the 50 states proper (not that any one location really is). But then, in another sense, the quintessential American dream is realistically centered in NYC, because so many immigrants arrive here, join communities of immigrants from their own countries, and live and work here for generations. I’ve met people who’ve lived here for years and have never been anywhere else in the country. This city is more of an international crossroads than a fixed location; it is the most international place I have ever been, which is one big reason why I love it.* In this respect (the gathering of the teeming masses), New York is the ultimate representation of an American ideal – albeit America as it never really was, and most emphatically is not now. But somewhere back there, in between the Puritans and the ’50s, there was a time when New York was thought to be representative of the country itself. Later, after relocating to London, Hans observes:

Although it’s not a secret that I lived for some time in [New York], I’m not accorded any unusual atuhority. This isn’t because I’ve been back for awhile but, rather, because I’m precluded by nationality from commenting on any place other than Holland – one of those parochialisms, I am pissed off to rediscover, that remind me that as a foreign person I’m essentially of some mildly buffoonish interest to the English and deprived, certainly, of the nativity New York encourages even its most fleeting visitor to imagine for himself. And it’s true: my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York – that New York interposed itself, once nad for all, between me and all other places of origin.

But commenting on the American dream is not the main thrust of Netherland – this is primarily a book about Hans, and Hans is intrigued by Chuck, but in a removed, and not overly involved way. Whereas Carraway’s raison d’etre as narrator was to observe and describe Gatsby, Hans’s relationship with Chuck is a take-it-or-leave-it sort of friendship, as is everything in Hans’s life at that time. In fact, the motivations of all of the characters in Netherland are fuzzy at best. We don’t really know why Rachel leaves Hans – mostly because Hans, a rather unreliable narrator, will not admit to having any idea himself. We don’t really know why Hans stays obediently behind in New York for as long as he does (again, he doesn’t spend much mental time on it himself), or why everyone in the novel seems to suffer from a confusing and painful ennui (“I wasn’t especially troubled by the hours spent flat on my face,” says Hans, of his habit of lying for hours with his head under the armchair in his hotel room). Perhaps it has something to do with 9/11 itself, which, while mercifully not focused on in much outrageous detail, bookends the story of these people, looms slightly behind them without their ever looking straight at it, just as the actual event framed New York itself and everything that happened here for some time. Hans: “We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington, and, for that matter, Moscow.” But Hans’s mourning has far less to do with 9/11, and more with the fracturing of his family, and his lack of ability to shake off his own inertia:

The difficulty was not merely that I couldn’t think of an alternative to the program of traveling to London once or twice a month. No, my difficulty was that I could not disarrange the boundless, freezing dismay that undermined every personal motion I attempted. It was as if, in my inability to produce a movement in my life, I had fallen victim to the paralysis that confounds actors in dreams as they vainly try to run or talk or make love.

Perhaps Netherland is more about the time it takes to shake off a tragedy – something unreasonable and inexplicable happens, and people totter away from its epicenter, where, stunned and confused, they distractedly go on with their lives.

At any rate, I didn’t care. Nobody could call this a bad book – it won the PEN/Faulkner, after all – and I paged through it readily enough, but it left no deep impression on me, and I wouldn’t ever urge it on someone.

__
*Oh, yes, by the by – I love NY now, for those of you I haven’t spoken to in awhile.  I had my reservations for the first couple years, but now I’m like a googly-eyed newlywed, and am currently entirely convinced this is the only place to be (in the US, anyway).

Two weekends ago, my friend and I were on our way into the city, when we saw lights in the distance from Bedfort Avenue (where we’d been eating Thai food).  We walked down to the lights, and found a fairly large fair!  I’d stumbled on this fair the year before, as well, but hadn’t known what it was.  Apparently, it is the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel and San Paolino, a 12-day festival that happens every July.  That would explain all the Italians.

Entering the fair...

Crowds at the fair.

A pretty big fair, too - it spread off in all directions.

There was everything you look for in a fair…rides:

This ride spins everyone around very quickly.

…guys grilling meat…

Meat!

…women frying zeppole…

This lady was upset at me for taking her photo.

…patriotic frozen drinks…

Red, white and blotto!

…souvenirs…

Not sure what any of these are.

…tasteful novelty Ts for i bambini….

Pity the poor child.

…games, where you can win a half-dead goldfish in a Ziplock baggie…

Chuck's Live Fish

…firefighters, lest things get out of hand…

In addition to these firefighters, there were many groups of funny cops standing around, but they told me that if I took their picture, they would confiscate my camera.

…and garbage, without great piles of which no street fair in July in NYC would be complete…

Smells better than the zeppole!

…and finally, bizarre religious iconography!!

Giant, garish, totem-pole-like thing.

Man in a boat. (Don't be immature.)

Now, according to this video that my roommate found on Gothamist, these two religious icons are stars in a ceremony, in which they are lifted by gangs of fellows and danced toward each other, to the tunes of the Rocky soundtrack.  Please watch the video – it is something else.  Unfortunately, we did not witness this spectacle.

After exploring the street fair, we went out a-drinking in the East Village, after which we thought it would be good to get Pommes Frites.  Apparently, everyone else thought so, too.

Mmmm...Belgian fries up ahead.

We couldn’t find a handy stoop to eat them on, but luckily the nearby Max Brenner’s was closed, and someone had left some of the tables out!  We spread out our fare and felt very clever.

Sidewalk dining at 3:00a.m.! No wait.

The next night, I went to see Jigsaw Soul, a local band that always provides a giant, multi-media performance experience.

Jigsaw Soul

The audience.

The Jigsaw Soul dancers.

Shadow visuals.

Choreographed keg cup stacking.

One of several giant papier-mache bird heads.

More visuals.

After the show, we were famished.  Time for shawarma and falafel!

Mmmm, gyro-loaf!

After that, it began pouring, so we went over to Washington Square Park to watch the band and friends play dodgeball in the fountain.

Rainy Washington Square Park.

Hipster swimming pool.

It's all fun and games till someone loses a contact.

The next day, I was pretty tired.  I went for a long, lazy Sunday walk, over the nearly deserted Williamsburg bridge.

Bike and pedestrian lane.

After that, I ate a massive cup of ice cream, but I did not choose to document that with photographic evidence.  A pretty good weekend, overall.

Tama Janowitz, if you haven’t heard of her, is a novelist who, as far as I can surmise, accidentally achieved it-girl status for awhile back in the 80s, because she happened to make friends with Andy Warhol and the two of them, plus another woman, had weekly ‘blind date’ dinners where each of them had to bring a likely date for the others (none of these dates ever worked out). After Warhol’s death, Janowitz faded from view, and it seems that whenever she opens her mouth nowadays, she pisses everyone off. She’s kind of Sarah Silverman-ish with the un-P.C. comments, although I don’t think Janowitz does it to provoke; it just doesn’t occur to her that anyone would bother to be offended.

I recently read a fat book of short, humorous essays by Janowitz, Area Code 212. The essays focus mainly on life in New York as a semi-famous but not particularly fashionable person, tiny dogs, ferrets, Janowitz’s adopted Chinese daughter, Prospect Park, Andy Warhol, unmanageable hair, and food. I thought most of them were great fun, although I think the entire book could be condensed into five long developed essays – a lot of these are repetitious and many of them blurbs that don’t seem to be at all thought out.  I’m pretty sure Janowitz would be a lot of fun to hang out with – though she was in the in-crowd at a hot time in NYC history, she mainly just exclaims about all the free fancy food she got to eat.

Area Code 212 is aptly named; Janowitz seems to be one of those people who came straight to NYC as soon as possible, and then never left it. The above list of topics could also serve as her bio. Still, if you have to narrow your entire scope to a single topic, New York – sprawling, ever-evolving – is a good one. New York is also one of those places that was always way more fun right before you got there. I am forever jealous of the many phases of its past, and wishing I had arrived in any earlier decade. Although, no matter when I came to NYC, I’d likely shy as far away from the scene as I do now, so it would probably make no difference.

Listen up, New Yorkers who live in high-rise apartment buildings: just because you cannot see into the windows of surrounding buildings does not mean that you are not lit up like Christmas to people across the way. If you do exercise videos in the buff toward the back of your apartment…oh, man, can I still see you. Without even trying. In fact, it’s very hard not to see you. And I’m sure other people can see you, too, and are probably not as polite about looking away as I am.

Seriously, last night, as I was looking at this woman (and trying to stop looking at her), a naked old man totally ran back and forth in the apartment under hers. I am not even joking, I swear. What is with these people? Being filthy rich and having an enormous apartment in Soho must make you want to turn on all the lights and pace nakedly back and forth before the windows. How can they not realize they’re visible? I’m never leaving any curtains open ever again.

My last year in Chicago, I lived in a fourth-floor studio with big windows facing out over a parking lot, which was ringed by distant apartment buildings. I couldn’t directly see any other people in their apartments, and so I breezily concluded that no one could see me, and lived for a year without curtains. I now wonder how many of my activities ended up photographed and posted on the internet.

I have become more conscious of curtains lately, as there is currently a giant gang of men working construction in my backyard, and continually bringing buckets of rubble up from under the house, right in front of my street-level windows. From what I can tell, the crew consists of a pair of Hispanic men, exactly the same height, one with facial hair and one without, who both wear hoodies and are involved in a continual fireman’s ladder of excavating rubble buckets from whatever is going on in the backyard, and one gangly, furious-looking Polish man who stands around smoking and glaring at the other two. Plus, my landlord, who shows up from time to time to conduct an endless lecture in deafening, emphatic Polish. I’m frankly at a loss to imagine what he could find to discuss at such length. I’ve never talked so much at a stretch in my life, and he ,shows up to orate at least twice a day. So, that’s the entire cast of characters as I’ve spotted them, but it sounds like there must be at least fifteen additional people working back there. I can’t tell for sure, because shortly after all this work began, the back door into our garden apartment (and our main source of natural light) was nailed shut from the outside and then covered over in thick black plastic, momentarily confusing me one morning into thinking I’d slept straight through the day. So whatever’s going on back there is a mystery to me.

Every time I enter or exit my apartment, the workers stop whatever they are doing (emerging with a bucket from just under my bedroom, or standing atop the enormous economy-size dumpster that’s been permanently installed in the street outside my window) and stare at me until I’ve passed. It’s really uncomfortable, and my initial impulse was to ignore them steadily, but that was uncomfortable as well, because I was forced to do so multiple times a day. And I felt like a bitch, since they are working on my apartment. So, at one point, as I passed one of the twins (the one with the facial hair), I said hello.

‘Heeeyyy, babyyy,’ he replied. Fine. Bitchface and steady refusal of eye contact it is, then.

Given this environment, I’m newly interested in the opacity of my curtains. When I lived in the back of the apartment, I had no curtains at all for the better part of a year. Then, summer came, and there were boys in the next yard. I bought a $.99 shower curtain, and then realized it was transparent, so I bought another one, and between the two of them, I felt fairly private. Then, I moved to the front of the apartment, with windows right on the busy sidewalk. I bought some nice curtains this time, and spent a good bit of time with a friend, taking turns with one of us standing on the sidewalk and the other positioning herself directly in front and behind my various lamps, dancing around and removing clothing, and I came away from these experiments fairly confident that my activities weren’t particularly observable from the street.

The other windows in the apartment, however, were not crash-tested. Until the back door was papered over, the guys in the back yard used to watch us as we made coffee in the mornings, as if we were some sort of mildly interesting zoo animals. I don’t miss the company, although I’m sorry for the loss of light. Additionally, there’s a little window in our shower that gives onto the backyard, but it’s frosted and marbled. Still, it’s a little disconcerting to bathe with several men carrying on a conversation just on the other side of the glass. And one of my roommates hung a scrim of washrags over the frosted glass, which immediately made me paranoid that perhaps the window was transparent after all, and I’d given everyone a show with that first morning’s shower.

During the day, I work in a cubicle with giant windows, and the immediate view is of the skyscraper opposite. It is close enough for me to see everyone across working, and even to tell if there is text or pictures on their computer screens. I sit with my back to the windows, though, and occasionally I forget that I don’t really have any privacy, especially after dark. I have yet to catch the eye of someone in the building opposite, but I’m conscious of them there behind me, and I’ll often wonder if I’m being watched and turn around to see.

This afternoon, for example, I realized I had a little boogie, and dealt with it in the usual way. But then, I wheeled around guiltily to see if anyone in the building opposite had witnessed this. And directly opposite was a man standing right up in the window, wearing a yarmulke and bowing repeatedly over his little book (the Torah? I don’t know from Judaism). To either side of him, his coworkers worked on, unawares. Now, that’s not particularly embarrassing, but…it’s private, yeah? Later, I turned around again, and he was plastered against the window, staring at me, or someone or something in my building. What do you do if you make eye contact with someone in an opposite building? Do you wave? Or does that puncture the polite fiction that, as we all go on about our private businesses in bright and framing windows, we are unseen?

Was there some sort of unofficial holiday last night, or something?  NYC was freaking insane – there were fireworks, and people screaming and dancing in the streets, and all sorts of hoopla.

Help me out here – I can’t find anything about it on the internets.

Sorry for the lack of posts, but I’ve been distracted by my show, followed closely by a sinus cold, followed closely by a 30-day Notice to Vacate from my landlord, followed by an (ongoing) apartment search, and all the while working on my latest screenplay (entitled Dr. Prozac, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love NYC).

I’ll get back to updating soon.  Meanwhile, Happy Halloween, and remember to vote!!

Hi everyone!  If you are not on my email list, you may be unaware that on Monday, October 27 at 9:30p.m., I’m performing a brief, funny one-woman show at Manhattan Theatre Source!  Here are the details – if you’re in the NYC area, come check it out!!