up in my hood

banksy sighting



a few blocks from my place in soho (you can actually see my building, light grey at far right, midway up) is this great brasserie, Lucky Strike. Walk past it on Grand, and look back toward the firewall adjoining the parking lot, and wham! three stories of Banksy rat. He's wearing an iconic tee and making his own urban art.

moth ball

this sounds awesome!

meaningless humor

s.o.s. from the zinc bar

The French institution of the café is in distress, reports the New York Times from Paris. The economic crunch and Anglo-/Americanization of the French lifestyle is eating away at this historical cornerstone of culture. It's an interesting/alarming cue into the changing identity of people and culture today. A clue that "globalization," or whatever you're going to call it, is affecting some of our most sacred and long-standing cultural and social institutions.

God, no! Give me a job, Paris, and I will come over there and try to help make things right on account of the Anglos with dining and alcoholic merriment. I may not bring back the chain-smoking, but it's a start.

Pulse Park, Madison Square

It was the last day for Pulse Park at Madison Square Park today. I'd been trying to go see the installation for a couple weeks and was glad we made it today.

It goes like this- two hundred stage-like lights are positioned around the outside of the lawn facing in on the lawn. They are attached to a heart rate monitor that you grip at one end, which mimics your heartbeat in the flashing of the lights. When you let go of the grips, the first light to your left maintains your heartbeat, while the heartbeats of the previous two hundred people before you register in the rhythms of other lights. I jumped in place for two minutes while waiting in line and got a really strong pulse going.

It's pretty cool- like a poetic visual disco-symphony. They let you on the grass to walk around in the strobing, somewhat magical atmosphere. Pretty darn cool.

Yay for good public art! Sadly it was the last day, but all good things must come to an end. ...or at least that's what they say? I do have to say that there's something magical about the ephemeral. You appreciate it more, live in the moment since you can't take returning to that experience for granted.

hipster

I went on a mission this evening- in search of pants. I've become a bit of a dress-and-skirt kinda girl in the past year or so, but as the weather turns cold and I have nothing of substance to cover my legs, I feel the aquisition of said garments to be imperative.

Of course I had to make more personally gratifying detours while tooling through my neighborhood, which included discovering and perusing Dean and Deluca and the Gourmet Garage, two boutique, hoity-toity groceries. One five-dollar espresso and thirty minutes of snickering at overpriced cheese and peanut butter later, I focused in on the purpose of the excursion.

Alas, pants are my least favorite apparel to shop for. First on my list is dresses, jewelry and underwear, followed by shirts and shoes, followed last of all by pants. It's my hate-hate relationship with my hips and thighs. I shun their form, and they respond to the negative energy by demanding pastries and holding on to the associated calories in protest. It's a bad cycle.

So when I found myself tooling up and down Broadway in my neighborhood (soho) this evening, looking for the right pair of pants and being disappointed, I finally decided I'd start at jeans and work my way up to work trousers. I've been kind of inadvertently sporting the beatnik look the past year or so, mostly black and somewhat french-mimey (and a lot of horizontal stripes more recently, too- I just beg for the Francophile teasing.). I had in mind dark skinny-cut jeans and was gravely disappointed by the low waists that were associated with the style and consequently do bad things to my lines by hitting at my widest part. So I ended up getting the old standby bootcut and feeling slightly less hip. Much hips, less hip. Ha.

However, my emotions took an upturn during the jean-buying experience- when I checked out there was a supercute guy in front of me who, the salesgirl reported after, was checking me out (I tend to be kind of oblivious). Ha! Then huzzah, I go to leave and he's there, holding the door for me and telling me to have a nice night. He was holding things for his mother (one point for him); he may have even been French (bonus point for my fantasy). There are a lot of them around.

Score one for my wide hips. Hoo-ah.

money on wall street

I literally found money on Wall Street tonight.

"In these hard times," as a friend or two might say... it's funny- ironic.

I was getting out of the subway to meet a friend at his place and I saw a bill on the street. It was drizzly, and the cash was wet, so I somewhat looked around, in the desterted Financial District, as I went to grab it and stuff it into my purse, walking toward cover. An hour later I told my friends about my find, which I thought was a whopping ten bucks. I dug the wet bill out, aiming to properly file it in my wallet, and holy crap, it was two tens! Imagine that! The humor of finding cash on Wall Street.

I tried to take them out to a round of drinks on my free money but they wouldn't let me. Maybe cause you can't actually pay for a round of drinks for three people with twenty bucks here- I dunno.

Cheers, nonetheless- it's two here and that's not a late night for NYC by any means, but it certainly was a good night, hanging out in Brooklyn after a beer-and-sausagefest.

I'm pretending that the fact that my total book purchase was an even $44.00 at The Strand today (my lucky number is 4, my double-lucky is 44, and on top of that, it was an even dollar amount! and I got books out of the deal!), and that I found $20 on the street- it's a good omen. Good times waxing.

RODENT!!!

Cute as they kind of are (I really do think so), there was a mouse standing on my bedroom door threshold just now, -just right frikkin' now- and it startled the bejesus out of me. This is my first indoor sighting (they were so precious huddling under subway ties, but not as precious near my kitchen). I was being so quiet in here it must have thought no one was home.

I tore the couches up but of course it had magically escaped. Not sure what I'd do if I had found it; my irrationally high adrenaline and innate curiosity forced me to look.

Oh, the nyc novelties. On a positive note, I heard rats and mice are mutually exclusive the other day. Yesss!

All Apologies

Somewhere in my young young-adulthood I became an apologizer. So I liked this Op-Ed in the NYTimes today.

Riding on the coattails of that theme, I made my first trip to Trader Joe's in New York today. There are only two words that accurately describe Trader Joe's at Union Square, the statistically most-patronized TJ's of all: Holy Shit.

It is an absolute hive. People are bumping into and squeezing past eachother every 1.5 steps. You move at a snail's pace. It's unbelievable how many people fit into that space, the same size as the Seattle locations (which are not empty either, mind you); I'm sure the maximum occupancy is a liar.



You should not attempt to patronize this store without patience, determination, and a healthy hour to spare. After swimming upstream at a pathetic, near-spawned-out dead fish pace, I realized that there is an ideal formula that consists of obtaining desired items at the center of the store (the delicacy of this matter is important as well, there should be a suggested progression with one-way arrows on the floor), and then acquiring the rest of the list as you snake your way around the outside and advance toward the registers (the line barricades access to all meats and cheeses anyway).

There are three people that orchestrate that 45-minute wait- one at the front to direct you to one of the twenty -something registers, and then two at the end that get the (coveted) position of holding up tall signs that delineate the tail of the two lines (over and under 15 items). On weekends you have to wait outside the store just to get in to shop.

In the monday evening grocery rush, people were somewhat weary but not truly unpleasant. I was surprised at the general "we're all in this together" attitude that trumped any "rude New Yorker" tendencies that may hold true to stereotype. Though there was a bit of gentle pushing and aggressive cart steering (I propose they do away with even the mini-carts) there were more "good grief"s than "get the hell out of my way"s.

However, you are bound to get random atrocities in such a dense, high-intensity situation. I was almost up to the front of the line when I witnessed, two carts in front of me, a couple with a young child get truly mauled by a tiny eighty year-old woman in a Rascal scooter. I'm not exaggerating; the woman gave no warning and came full-boar at the husband, knocking him down from behind and continuing to persevere without apologizing. Was it because he was black? I hope not. He was totally stunned silent and didn't know how to react, but it really pissed off his wife, who could not refrain from walking over there five minutes later to tell her politely how unacceptable it is to do something like that and not apologize. Everyone was kind of stunned at how odd/politically awkward it was to try and grasp whether you should yell at a well-dressed (the woman was wearing a jeweled barette in her freshly-coiffed hair), tiny old lady, and didn't want to hazard a guess whether race had anything to do with it. Whatever it was, it was kind of unsettling and his wife was really bent out of shape.

But hey, it makes for a good story, and I got my vat of hummus and tandoori naan after only a little over an hour.

And the moral of the story: 'member your Ps and Qs, even if you do go bat-shit crazy like that little old lady.

wherever you go, there you are

...here i am. I live in New York City!

As I mentioned, the past couple weeks were surreal. I moved out of my apartment, waiting to do the bulk until the last few days, which proved to be extremely stressful and challenging. I said goodbye to quite a few people I love in those last few days, while attending a close friend's wedding, completely dismantling and disbanding my home, and working up until the evening before my flight cross-country. I was packing the entire night through, until an hour before my flight.

I made the flight, however, using my first-class upgrade to zip me through the line, and then was actually able to recline in my seat and fall asleep (after warm nuts, a four-course meal, and a couple of those lovely complimentary drinks to fill me up and knock me out). A few hours later, 4:30 am EDT, I was sleeping between my best friend from high school and an exposed-brick wall in a 400 square-foot two-bedroom apartment in the East Village in Manhattan. My three suitcases and I were officially living in Manhattan.

I spent that entire next day in bed as I'd somehow pulled my neck removing shelves from the wall in a fury the hour before my departure, and dropped a solid-wood butcher block table on my bare foot the day before (a lovely wound to show for that), in addition to oh yeah, not sleeping for something like forty hours.

When I finally rose and left, around seven thursday night, it was to go out for cocktails.

And I didn't stop drinking until today. Night after night of meeting up for drinks- the ten-dollar manhattan-priced well drink, the huge Halloween bash (this city really knows how to do Halloween, be it full of some really shitty made-in-china, slutty-fill-in-the-blank costumes, or creatively fabricated ones, everyone's decked out)... or the Halloween bash the following night, or the multiple election parties... I have been going and going and going and if I don't slow down I'm not sure what will give first, my dignity, my liver, or my finances.

I located two unique Manhattan sublets after almost no luck finding a good permanent place to live, minus one scary tiny dirty West Village "two bedroom" that had a frightening bathroom and no common space or real kitchen.

One was a room I'd be renting from an eccentric indie movie producer traveling to India for work. He has been purchasing the top floor of his old and dilapidated tenement building in the East Village over the past ten years, a sunny and bright but nearly unfurnished space with exclusive access to a giant roof terrace rented to Google and political candidates for aerial advertising. He was wry and intelligent but also kind of a savant- extremely opinionated and emotionally needy. In the hour he trapped me there (I'm so stupid and polite, the walk-through took ten minutes), he told me all about his ex-girlfriend and how difficult she was and how he'd let her walk all over him, and how horrible and consumptive americans were, and how he didn't have any friends. The floorboards had half worn off their paint, and the light from the tall, narrow windows, and the giant skylight was reflecting off of them and the bare walls.

The kitchen was pretty scary, though he blamed it on the maid not making her twice-monthly visit, and the bathroom was scary, as New York bathrooms are, too often. The second place I came to see was on an edge of SoHo, not quite yet to TriBeCa, in a large, huge, old building. Something like an old manufacturing-esque building, the scale was very large for lower manhattan, and when I found and knocked on the kn0b-less door, I was greeted by a thin girl with an afro, a fiftyish male photographer, and a very large Newfoundland dog, all British.

The girl was showing the apartment for her friend (also travelling to India, oddly), and I currently live with the dog and the photographer who takes care of him. The space is huge, with fifteen-foot ceilings, 42-inch diameter (min) concrete columns breaking up the space, walls set at odd angles, and a random hodgepodge of manor-esque wood and leather furniture grouped about the common areas. Supposedly there's a guy that occasionally comes home, and rarely emerges from a back room. Hopefully I won't meet him. My room has a column running through it, and high windows above to let light in from the common areas, as it's precariously set at an angle within the center of the loft. The girl I'm subletting from travels for work and has a love affair with Paris, so her room is furnished accordingly- red, black, Chat Noir poster, and Eiffel Tower pillow included. I'm right at home in cheesy Paris memorabilia.

Unfortunately, feeling right at home here took three days of running all over lower manhattan trying to figure out how to get 2600 bucks to someone in Canada when my account was frozen for fraud investigation. 5 lost hours and a couple blisters later, and repeated encounters with the flighty but friendly and patient afroed friend, including one in the SoHo loft where she is an assistant to an artist selling paintings for over 10,000 dollars a pop (yelling coked-out red-eyed, potbellied artist blaring extremely loud music included with bonus tiny Pug-Chihuahua mix with glaring erection standing on hind legs air-humping me for fifteen minutes straight), I have keys and a bed, and cooked myself a real meal tonight. This was after spending sixty-five bucks at whole foods, so cooking wasn't a money-saving success in this instance.

How does the city manage to do that? I bet I'll somehow manage to blow fifty bucks in Central Park when I finally get back there this weekend, at this rate.

I figure that given the culture in this neighborhood, which is really cool and unique and glamorous/ arty but extremely chic and somewhat too commercial/snobby and generally beyond my means (full of who's who's), it will be a fun experience for a little while, but maybe only something that's right for a short time while I look for the right lasting neighborhood/apartment. Fingers are crossed. The options are greatly narrowed with pets.

Damnit, I'm up late again, and this evening I even stayed in to get to bed early. Ciao for now.

note- Afroed friend had to cue me in on the coked-out status of her boss, which was supposedly no big deal so I just went along, like, oh, of course... (It's how I work, too. I just can't draw perfect paving section details without inspiring myself with a little something extra in the ladies restroom at work...)

celebrate good times

a link to images of the good times had by most throughout the city last night, via Gothamist.

exciting times

It has been an incredible past week (or two weeks).

Today's sea change was an epic moment in our generations' and country's history. For the first time -ever- I can say I'm proud, maybe even excited to be American.

It's a great day to be a New Yorker, too. There is some wild celebrating happening in the streets. Some passionate excitement. Maybe even trumps that in the streets of Paris that I got to experience after the French national team won the semifinal in the World Cup.

Unfortunately I am a working stiff in my first week at the new office so I can't be wild tonight- had to leave the party to people who looked like they could rise to the occasion of partying for them and me.

I've been on a blog hiatus, totally overwhelmed with socializing every night since I flew in, and settling (well, beginning to) in The City. I moved into a 2-month loft sublet today (in SoHo, oh my), however, and actually landed in a space with lots and lots of room (and a photography studio complete with live-in Newfoundland dog), so I'm going to detox and relax a bit now that I have some personal space again. Fun as bunking with close friends is, it's nice to not be constantly stuffing wads of clothing into my suitcases to keep a tiny bedroom maneuverable, an then reapplying those same wads of clothing for work in the morning.

Stay tuned for Gotham Adventure Reports...