Here’s one from Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights. Asked by the Gothamist last February to describe one experience that struck him as a classic New York moment, Miranda said this:
When I was writing the first draft of In the Heights
during my winter break I would go for walks when I got stuck for
inspiration I would take a walk around. I think I was on 181st Street
walking around. I always tell people Washington Heights is full of
music and they sort of think it’s just a line I use to plug the show.
But I swear to God when I was writing the first draft I was walking
around and I saw a Chinese delivery guy riding his bike with a boom box
strapped to the front of his bike. It wasn’t a little radio; it was a
two speaker boom box blasting music. It was like Pimp My Ride but with
a two wheeler. I always thought that was a classic New York thing: Of
course the Chinese delivery guy has got a subwoofer on his bike!
It’s an image of the confluence of cultures that’s just what I’m trying to portray in my piece for the Companion. You can read the full interview with Miranda here. I’ll be posting more suggestive moments in the days to come as a finish up the piece.
The cover story of this week’s New York magazine, the year-end double issue, is “Reasons to Love New York (Especially Right Now).” It’s the fourth time that the magazine has run the feature, but the first time that a Chicagoan has figured so largely in it.
You see, the magazine’s number one reason to love New York right now is that “Obama is one of us, despite all that business about Chicago.” After noting that other presidents in the last half-century have lived in New York before assuming the presidency (Kennedy, Nixon, Bush I), the article argues that none of these men were really “of New York. The city did not make help make them who they were.” Not so with Barack Obama:
Barack Obama, on the other hand, deliberately chose New York as a young man, transferring his junior year from Occidental College to Columbia, and all one has to do is crack the binding of Dreams From My Father to appreciate the authenticity of his experience. It’s all right there in chapter one, paragraph one, sentence four. “The apartment was small,” he writes, “with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.” Before readers have even turned the page, he’s mentioned his stoop, his fire escape, and the Knicks.
Hey, it works for me. [Click here to read the whole article.]
[Photo: Obama Presidential Campaign/AP via nymag.com.]
I finally had a chance to see Matt Wolf’s much-acclaimed documentary on the avant-pop cult hero Arthur Russell, who died of AIDS in 1992 at age 40. He had been a key force downtown since the early 70s, when he was the musical director of The Kitchen, one of old SoHo’s key venues for experimental performance/art. For years he lived on E 12th St in a building inhabited by other artists, including Ginsberg and Richard Hell.
The film is beautiful. See it. Give it as a gift. Let it lead you to a lot of amazing music (with more to come, as Audika Records and others sort through the thousands of tapes he left behind). This year’s release, Love Is Overtaking Me, should be a good starting point for newcomers or a fantastic complement to those who already thought they had this multi-facted composer and performer pegged.
A quick snippet from the official site’s synopsis and a trailer to lead you in:
Arthur began working with Philip Glass and other composers in the
avant-garde music world, specifically at The Kitchen, where he became
musical director in 1974. He composed melodic orchestral music and
absorbed the vanguard ideas of the new music scene. Simultaneously
Arthur discovered the liberating social and aesthetic possibilities of
underground discos. Under the guise of various monikers–Dinosaur L,
Loose Joints, Indian Ocean–Arthur produced playful and eccentric disco
records that became hits of the pre-Studio 54 era.
The rules and codes of established genre didn’t apply to Arthur. The
serialized patterns of minimalist symphonies resonated with the
repetitive rhythms in dance music. Likewise, the utopian social settings
of the early discos were like the Buddhist commune Arthur had once
known. With childlike innocence and fun, Arthur ambitiously explored
all of these possibilities.
He fell in love with his boyfriend Tom Lee, and the two moved in
together in the East Village, next door to Allen in a building populated
by poets, musicians, and artists.
But despite Arthur’s musical talent and ambition, he was often tempered
by self-defeating career choices and alienating perfectionism. It
seemed that Arthur was creating a kind of utopia, where the absorbing
process of making music was his life. Finishing his work was a
secondary concern. Collaborators moved on to new projects, career
opportunities passed, and Arthur began working alone in his apartment.
What resulted was perhaps his most fully realized body of work, “World
of Echo.” These transcendent solo cello-and-voice songs were like
intimate diaries that fit somewhere between lullabies and art songs.
I only wish there had been a little more in Wild Combination on the wider scenes he helped to shape, but it’s a small complaint about what’s ultimately one of the best films of the year.
For more on Russell:
A New Yorker profile by Sacha Frere-Jones from a few years back. A Slate profile by Andy Battaglia from around the same time. A Gothamist interview from just last week with Tom Lee, Arthur’s boyfriend.
Well, the 2008 Santacon is already two hours underway, but you may be able to catch up with the crowd. They shouldn’t be hard to spot. This year’s red-and-white inebriated spectacle began at 10 am on 33rd St. between 6th and 7th and will rove around that part of town most of the afternoon. You must be fully costumed to participate.
I first witnessed Santacon several years ago by accident. We had a nice view of the Brooklyn Bridge from our old apartment down by the seaport and one morning I woke up to see hundreds of Santas — every size, shape, color, gender, and national origin — parading across the bridge. A sight I won’t soon forget.
If you’re not quite up to that level of revelry, try a quieter drinking experience and buy some locally handmade gifts and treats while you’re at it. The 4th annual DBA neighborhood craft fair takes place at the cozy East Village bar DBA, First Avenue between 2nd and 3rd streets, Saturday afternoons in December from 3 pm to 7 pm. (Next week is the last chance!) The DBA Urban Folk Arts & Crafts Fair has been central to our family’s holiday experience since the fair’s inception. Its key organizer and sometime DBA bartender — Sacha, aka Stiggly’s Holistics — is one of our oldest friends in the city. She sells her handmade balms, pottery, and holiday puddings. My daughters, each year, have come up with some money-making enterprise or another: their famous sock monkeys (featured in the ad above) tend to sell quickly. Molly makes killer chocolate chip cookies and brownies from scratch and next week will sell a fall’s worth of her own pottery. Anna, who once won our family a four-night, four-star trip to Monaco using only colored pencils, will take orders for custom portraits on greeting cards or for framing. She’s raising money this year for an exchange trip to Paris in the spring.
So if you’re inclined to kick back, drink a pint, listen to good music (I control the iPod dock!), and support local artisans, drop by and say hello!
Via today’s Gothamist, video of a ride along the contemporary 4/5/6 line from 14th Street to 42nd. If the ride seems too slow for your 21st-century tastes, jump to the 5 minute mark and watch it to the end. You won’t be sorry you took the time.
In other old subway news, I recently learned that the train that runs under the building I live in (on Broome Street, near Centre) is not the 4/5/6, as I’d always imagined, but the J/M/Z, which makes a 90 degree turn at Kenmare and then runs over to the Bowery/Delancey stop. The 4/5/6, by contrast, continues to run down Lafayette toward the Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall stop, missing our location by a good block. The real estate grad student (also a resident of our building) who told me about this provided this map, which tipped him off:
Jim Dwyer, the Times reporter whose story I mentioned this morning, responded to my email late in the day by forwarding some of the material Google sent him to pitch their Zeitgeist story.
And so, aside from Walter Gropius and the Large Hadron Collider, what were New Yorkers Googling most this year? The list was compiled using tools like Google Trends and Google Insights, outlined at this nifty Google Press Center page for the Zeitgeist release.
The top 10 fastest rising* seaches for 2008 from NYC computers:
1. Palin 2. iPhone 3G 3. McCain 4. Beijing 2008 5. NBC Olympics 6. Walter Gropius 7. Large Hadron Collider 8. Bernie Mac 9. Michael Phelps 10. John McCain
[*By "fastest rising" they mean the most popular searches from January to November ranked by their popularity increase when compared to 2007, which explains how Palin outstrips Obama in some of these lists. You can browse last year's results to see how Obama fared then.] As for 2008, Lord help us, the city was curious about — or terrified by — the prospect of the world collapsing into a black hole. And that’s just #s 1, 3, and 10!
Here’s the 2008 list taking the whole U.S. into account:
obama
facebook
att
iphone
youtube
fox news
palin
beijing 2008
david cook
surf the channel
And here’s the list for fastest rising searches worldwide:
sarah palin
beijing 2008
facebook login
tuenti
heath ledger
obama
nasza klasa
wer kennt wen
euro 2008
jonas brothers
What else can Google tell us about New Yorkers? The press email links to a Google Insights table showing the relative popularity of the five boroughs in search queries. Spoiler: Brooklyn wins.
Yesterday Google released its “Zeitgeist 2008″ report, a supposed picture of global Internet interests — at least via one monolithic search engine. The news isn’t all that surprising: Sarah Palin was more searched for worldwide than Obama; and lots of tweens use the Web, as the high profile given the Jonas Brothers would attest.
In an “About New York” column in yesterday’s paper, Jim Dwyer reported that Google had released a more specific top 10 list for New York City searches:
It turns out that New Yorkers are looking for something a bit
different. On a list of the 10 subjects that posted the greatest
increases this year, the country as a whole was looking for Fox News
and information about David Cook, the “American Idol” champion.
Neither made the New York list. Then again, the national list did not have 2 of the city’s top 10: Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus architecture school, and the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile circular underground tunnel in Switzerland that was built to smash protons into each other at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light.
No
doubt someone out in cyberspace can explain the surge of interest this
year in Gropius, who has been dead since 1969 and has only one
structure of any note in the city, the former Pan Am building.
The
collider is easier to understand. There were worries that the crash of
protons would instantly create a black hole, but in good news that was
widely overlooked at the time, no hole appeared — or is it disappeared?
– on Sept. 10, the day the machine was turned on. Search-engine
interest in the collider promptly dropped off, as people pointed their
anxieties and inquiries toward “Wall Street.” (The collider is
currently on the fritz, as is Wall Street.)
What someone out in cyberspace hasn’t provided, though, are the other eight items on the NYC top ten list. Such results aren’t to be found on the official site. Nor do they pop up when I try any other number of Google searches to find them. All we know is that they aren’t Fox or Idol. (And I have a hunch that the Hadron Collider’s popularity on NY Web searches has to do with the fact that the scare went viral among city public school science classes: both my kids came home talking about it in worried tones. Good thing the Jonas Brothers were there to allay their fears.)
The Times‘s City Room blog also reported on the NYCentric results, but only by incestuously citing the Dwyer article. Nothing new fit to print on line, apparently.
Any guesses what the other items would be? And any idea how we can get the rest of that list? Dwyer didn’t respond to email I sent him yesterday.
Later this morning I’ll be giving the last lecture of my Conversations of the West class, wrapping up the course’s treatment of how Moby-Dick engages with its cultural inheritances from the ancient Greek, Biblical, and early modern English traditions. I’ll try to tie it all in the end to what Barack Obama calls “deliberative democracy,” in which “all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent.” (As we’ve noted here before, Moby-Dick is reputedly Obama’s favorite novel.) “Deliberative democracy,” which Obama writes about in The Audacity of Hope, sounds a lot like the conception of cosmopolitanism that we’ve been exploring in my course: in fact, you could think of it as applied cosmopolitanism.
The last word will go, however, to someone whom I suspect very few of you have heard of, the post-punk laptop rapper MC Lars. I’ll show his music video, Ahab, which you can watch below. Fans of Moby-Dick will be impressed, I think, by just how well Lars’s song gets at major ideas in the novel.
But that won’t be the last song of the course: that honor goes, of course, to Led Zeppelin.
… or studying for finals, or raising kids, or whatever it is you do, gentle reader, you may have missed a couple Deitch Projects installations that are slated to close within a couple weeks. First, the breathtaking Kehinde Wiley show, “Down,” at Deitch’s 18 Wooster St. location (around the corner to the south of the old main space on Grand). I was walking back to SoHo from a doctor’s appointment in TriBeCa* with one of my kids when we stopped in for a gander. I have a hard time thinking of something I’ve seen this arresting (or cool) all year. [The piece above, "Sleep," measures 25 feet in length!] Through December 20.
Second, and also sponsored by Deitch, the recreation of Keith Haring’s day-glo mural at Bowery and Houston — installed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the artist’s birth — is slated to “close” on the 21st. Not sure exactly how that will happen, although there was some indication when it “opened” last spring that the piece would eventually be replaced by another Haring recreation.
Catch them while you can. I, for one, have enjoyed the mural’s place in the neighborhood for most of the last year.
*Do we have a style guide for this blog? I find typing the internal capitals in “SoHo” and “TriBeCa” to be a little annoying. But aren’t those standard usage?
EOTAW and others noted this one a little earlier today (it’s still the 8th for another 20 minutes!) but it’s certainly worth covering ourselves. I reported on the murder a few days later in my 6th grade class newspaper, which I edited and reproduced on brand spanking new Xerox technology. Here’s the 11:00 NBC news from this day in 1980.
I’m sure there were crowds at Strawberry Fields today. The closest I’ve come to being at one of the annual Lennon memorial singalongs came when George Harrison died, and crowds spontaneously gathered to the same spot. I’m glad I had my kids with me that day — seeing what a group of musicians could end up meaning to the world is something I’d hoped would stick with them, and I think it has.
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