Bensonhurst

Yesterday I wanted to explore a part of the city I hadn’t seen before. So I hopped on the F train and went way out into Brooklyn, to Avenue P. From there I walked south along Stillwell Avenue through Bensonhurst, all the way to Coney Island. (With many little side trips.)

I visited Avenue P once before, last summer, but had to leave after just a few minutes because of rain. (My pals Lettuce and Squirrel were getting rained out at Coney Island on that very same day.)

I’ve always been curious about Avenue P because of “Really Rosie,” a children’s TV special developed by Maurice Sendak and Carole King back in the 1970s. I don’t ever remember seeing it as a child, but I was introduced to the music in the ‘80s by my friend Suzanne, who knew I loved King’s music. Rosie, a little girl who yearns to escape her boring childhood and be an actress, lives on Avenue P.

Surprisingly, I didn’t find a whole lot of terrific graffiti out there -- just lots of uninspiring tags. But once I got to Coney Island -- which I had visited before -- I found some good street art, and lots of other pictures as well. Coney Island looks even more desolate these days, with its amusement park now shuttered for redevelopment.

The tag above was on a phone booth. It could almost be a piece of Zen calligraphy -- disciplined and yet so simply and thoroughly an expression of the moment.

No Tweeting

When it comes to technology, I’m not a so-called early adopter. Despite all my blogging and digital photography, it takes me a while to warm up to technological advances. I’m a luddite at heart.

(I didn’t even get a cell phone until 2006 or so, after a trip to Chicago where I could not find a pay phone to save my life. I realized a cell phone was a necessity, but even now we have a prickly relationship. Sometimes I leave it at home just for the heck of it.)

Some Web stuff I’ve taken to pretty well. I really like Facebook, for example, which lets me maintain contact with hundreds of people all at once, and to give special attention as warranted. I have about 300 Facebook friends -- which one of my non-virtual friends says puts me squarely in the category of “Facebook whore” -- and some of them are people I haven’t seen in years.


Generally speaking, if you ask to be friended and I know you or have known you in the past, I’ll friend you. Who am I to reject someone’s outstretched hand? Consequently, a couple of my Facebook friends are people I barely knew in high school, or people I know only through work. Some of the work friends are people I’ve never met face-to-face, but have dealt with over the phone or otherwise. Some of them have even left the company since, but we’re still friends, which is a little weird, frankly.

On the other hand, I sometimes get friend requests from people I don’t know at all. These, I ignore. I have to know you -- even if just barely -- to be your Facebook friend. Seems fair, right?

All in all, Facebook has been a blast. I've reconnected with old friends I haven't spoken to in years, going back to people I knew in elementary school. It's great to see what everyone is up to.

On the other end of the Web technology spectrum is Twitter. I have a Twitter account, but I have never taken to Twitter and don’t understand why I would want to. Walking around with a little mobile device, sending out “tweets,” just seems way too obsessive to me.

So, you know, to each his own.

(Photo: I took these shots of the Empire State Building from Fifth Avenue while walking home from work a few nights ago. The clouds were low, reflecting the light from the tower, which was a cool effect.)

Culture Report

-- I rented “Dirty Dancing” and watched it last weekend. Somehow I never saw this movie, cultural touchstone that it was in the 1980s. Now I can see why. It is 100 percent terrible. Jennifer Grey can’t act, and Patrick Swayze is too old for her.

-- While I was in India in January I thought often of a miniseries I watched on public television in the early 1980s called “The Jewel in the Crown.” (It was on Masterpiece Theater, hosted by Alistair Cooke, he of the stolen body parts.) Anyway, I discovered that Netflix has the whole series on DVD, so I’ve been rediscovering “The Jewel in the Crown,” which is about the final years of British rule in India in the 1940s. It’s been great so far.

-- I just finished Phoebe Damrosch's book "Service Included," about her year working as a waiter at New York's super-swank Per Se restaurant. It was a fun, fascinating look at what it's like to be a server in a high-end establishment, where waiters make six figures and their clients are the wealthy and famous.

-- I’m now reading John McPhee’s “Oranges,” a book from the mid-1960s about the Florida citrus industry. It’s considered a landmark in Florida journalism. I'm familiar with much of the information about citrus cultivation, having grown up around the kids of citrus farmers and pickers, with grapefruit, tangelo and orange trees in my yard. McPhee's history of citrus, though, is all new to me.

(Photo: Artificial blossom on the sidewalk, March 2009)

Garden

The bulbs in our front garden are beginning to come up, as you can see from the unremarkable photo above. We have both daffodils, which are the smaller shoots, and tulips, the bigger ones.

In the winter, we cover our garden with pine cuttings, as you can see in the photo. We used to pay a gardening company about $600 to install a variety of greenery, but this year we just had our building super buy a deformed Christmas tree and cut off all its branches. It cost about $30! The pine lasts for months and gives us some greenery over the dreariest part of the winter. We’ll probably take it up within a week or two.

When we got our big snowfall last week, I was worried the snow would harm the bulbs. I always think those little shoots are far more fragile than they really are. Of course, they're made to endure snow, and it didn’t seem to faze them at all. They just kept on coming.

I should get out to Central Park this weekend and look for crocuses. I’ll feel robbed if I miss them!

A Book Sale!

After a two-year hiatus, we’re once again holding our charity used book sale at work. If you have a really incredible memory, you may remember how this works from the last time I wrote about it: We collect used books from employees and books that are lying around our offices, and we sell them to other employees, with the proceeds going to a charitable foundation.

A couple of years ago we made more than $40,000. But that was in our previous office building, where we had a well-oiled system for collecting, sorting, shelving and selling the books over a whole week. This year we’ll make much less because we’re starting from scratch in our new headquarters -- we collected fewer books and we have only three days to sell them.

Still, so far, we’re doing well. I spent lots of time over the last several weeks helping to collect and sort thousands of books, including this past Saturday and Sunday. Yesterday was the first sale day, and it continues today and tomorrow.

The big fringe benefit of working at the book sale is that I get first dibs on browsing the books! Here’s what I’ve bought so far:

-- “The Deep Blue Good-by,” by John D. MacDonald. A master of Florida fiction!

-- “I Know This Much is True,” by Wally Lamb.

-- “The Underminer: Or, the best friend who casually destroys your life,” by Mike Albo with Virginia Heffernan. (It’s a humor book, though it may not sound like it, and Albo is hilarious.)

-- “Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea,” by Robert D. Kaplan.

-- “Joe Gould’s Secret,” by Joseph Mitchell. (A profile of an eccentric New Yorker.)

-- “Through the Children’s Gate,” by Adam Gopnik. (A New Yorker writer and his family move back to New York City from Paris, just before Sept. 11, 2001.)

-- “Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life,” by Adam Gopnik.

-- “Consider the Lobster,” essays by David Foster Wallace.

-- The collected stories of John Cheever.

-- “New York State of Mind,” photographs of New York in the 1970s by Martha Cooper.

-- “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” by Richard Bach. (OK, it’s cheesy, but I have a sentimental affection for this quintessentially ‘70s book -- and it was just 50 cents!)

That should keep me reading for a while! I’ll probably keep very few of these books -- they’ll go back to charity after I finish them. (Martha Cooper and Jonathan L. Seagull are keepers.)

Anyway, I’ll let you know how well the sale fares!

(Photo: The graffiti artist known as Booker or Reader admonishes people to "Read More!" and often paints images of books. Lower East Side, July 2008)

Endorphins

Yesterday I went running outside for the first time this season, and I had an amazing experience. The critical factors were relatively warm weather, sunshine, blue skies, my iPod, and endorphins.

(Endorphins, in case you don’t know, are substances released by the body during exercise. They’re thought to be the source of the “runner’s high.”)

I got out at 6:30 a.m. or so, and ran down by the East River, on my standard route to the Brooklyn Bridge and back. I think it’s about five miles. The temperature when I began was in the mid-40s but getting warmer.

I had never run outside with my iPod before. After I bought it just a few months ago, I loaded it up with all my music -- literally everything.

Well, the first mile or two of a run are always the hardest, and I discovered while laboring along that my iPod is inadequately organized. It’s full of folk music and light rock, and I had it on shuffle. I’m here to tell you, you just can’t run to Joan Baez, as wonderful as she is. I need to create a special “running” playlist pronto!

Anyway, I made it down to the bridge, feeling better and better as I warmed up, and skipping past songs that didn’t suit the moment. There’s a sign at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge that explains its history, and I touched it and turned for home, as I always do.

This is about when the endorphins really began to surge. I ran past all the old guys from Chinatown doing tai-chi facing the river; I ran in the shadows beneath the FDR Drive, under the Williamsburg Bridge, past the empty soccer fields in East River Park. The sun was rising and brightening, reflecting off the river’s surface, darting in and out from behind passing trees.

My iPod landed on a great running song -- for one who came of age in the ‘80s, anyway -- “Alive and Kicking,” by Simple Minds. And just then I rounded the bend near the Con-Edison plant at 14th Street, and all of midtown was laid out in front of me: the United Nations, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, all that amazing architecture and POWER. And I felt FANTASTIC. I thought, “Holy cow! This isn’t a movie! This is really me, living here in the greatest city on the planet, healthy on a beautiful day! This is my LIFE!”

And then, a few minutes later, as I began to slow down at 23rd Street, “Alive and Kicking” ended and the iPod magically landed on a song I'd long thought would be perfect to have played at the conclusion of my funeral: “Good Night,” by the Beatles.

Now, it might seem morose, but it was a truly beautiful moment. I love that song, as intentionally sappy as it is, and coming right after “Alive and Kicking,” just as I stopped running, it seemed to say: Life is short. In the grand scheme of things, it passes as quickly as the interval between two songs on an iPod.

It choked me up a bit, which sounds silly, but even thinking about it now makes me marvel. So I guess I can’t entirely blame the endorphins.

(Photo: As I walked back to my apartment after my run, I found these two perfect gerbera daisies lying on the sidewalk! Another piece of everyday magic? Or just a floral delivery gone awry?)

Catch-22

After waiting about 25 years to read it, I finally finished “Catch-22” the other day. I did not love it.

My mom had a copy and urged me to read it back when I was in high school. I remember starting it, but I didn’t get very far. (It was probably a yellowed mass-market paperback from the 1960s with about nine million tiny, tiny words on each page.)

Recently, while I was at Barnes and Noble, I saw a new trade paperback version with nice clean, wide pages. I bought it and gave it my best shot.

It’s pretty much a guy’s novel -- one long military joke, about stupid officers and inept decision-making. The reader has little emotional investment in the characters. With a few exceptions, we learn virtually nothing about the men and their backgrounds, and their inner lives -- if they have them -- remain obscure. Even the few exceptions seem more like cartoons than full-fledged characters. The rare compelling moments, like when the main character is nursing a dying man in the back of a bomber, get overwhelmed by the slapstick.

I can see how it would have been more sharply relevant when it was being read by veterans of World War II and Korea, during the years of our growing involvement in Vietnam. But it’s interesting that now, even with our military deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the book doesn’t make that same connection. We as a society are so separated from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. The structure of the military is so different these days.

Anyway, in terms of relevance, I did find one segment that really spoke to me:

“Won’t you fight for your country?” Colonel Korn demanded, emulating Colonel Cathcart’s harsh, self-righteous tone. “Won’t you give up your life for Colonel Cathcart and me?”

Yossarian tensed with alert astonishment when he heard Colonel Korn’s concluding words. “What’s that?” he exclaimed. “What have you and Colonel Cathcart got to do with my country? You’re not the same.”

“How can you separate us?” Colonel Korn inquired with ironical tranquility.

“That’s right,” Colonel Cathcart cried emphatically. “You’re either for us or against us. There’s no two ways about it.”

“I’m afraid he’s got you,” added Colonel Korn. “You’re either for us or against your country. It’s as simple as that.”

“Oh, no, Colonel. I don’t buy that.”

Colonel Korn was unruffled. “Neither do I, frankly, but everyone else will. So there you are.”

Now, who does that remind you of? Did Colonels Korn and Cathcart go on to occupy the White House, decades later?

(Photo: Snow on E. 30th Street, March 2009)