More Tales from the City

Yet another long-winded-Bats-in-New-York-City-travelogue post. Posted from a 45.2 kbps dialup connection, no less… gaaah… please, make the pain stop…

• Catching up with friends: Had dinner with Air Force Guy/New York IP lawyer and his wife at Tagine Dining Gallery, a Moroccan place that Bird and Jen found. Food was good, but service was pretty annoyingly slow—although the belly dancing later in the evening made up for it. Air Force Guy is working pretty bad lawyer hours nowadays—he couldn't get out to meet us until about 9:30 PM on a Friday night.
  
  
• A very special guest appearance: A surprise showing by Big Bird for Saturday brunch: he was flying back from a business trip on Friday night, and didn't make his connection at LaGuardia due to thunderstorm delays. So he called up Perlick and crashed with him for the night. We couldn't convince him to come and hang out in New York with us for the rest of the day, though.
  
  That reminds me… I really need to cultivate drop-in-and-crash friendships with people who live near the major hub airports. I have Squanto and Beth for BWI, Psycho Security Guard for MSP, Beemer for DEN. Anybody know someone who lives near ORD?
  
  
• Not as omnivorous as I'd hoped: Went to dinner with Logger, Constance, and Perlick at Joe's Ginger in Chinatown. Dinner was excellent, in particularly the soup dumplings (Dumplings with soup inside! Bite in and make a big mess! Magic secret of how they are made here).
  
  I was entranced by this restaurant review description, and had to order the dish: "Kung pao shrimp finds itself tricked out here with small sheets of tender pork kidney that Mr. Blam said was a nod to Hong Kong tastes. The slight metallic tang of the kidney echoes that in the shrimp, and the harmony dances over the top of the more familiar players in the kung pao song…" Unfortunately, I have not mastered the taste of kidney, despite this attempt, and the dish went mostly uneaten. Yeah, I know… friggin' weak…
  
  
• A Personal Haj: I don't know how many of you are jazz aficionados, but the Village Vanguard is a famous Greenwich Village jazz club that has been around since the 1930's. The greats have all played the Vanguard, and a multitude have recorded live albums there: [Insert name of jazz giant] Live at the Village Vanguard (including my personal favorite, Bill Evans' Sunday at the Village Vanguard). As a younger jazz musician puts it: "I call it the Carnegie Hall of jazz because most jazz clubs just don't have the sound that that place has. . . . It's the place where Moses and Mohammed and Jesus walked!"
  
  Note: I grew up on Long Island and come back once a year for the holidays. I've never been to the Vanguard. I suck. This needed to be fixed.
  
  
  
  So Perlick and I went to catch the Lewis Nash Quintet's 9 PM set. First of all, the music was great; the bandleader is the percussionist (who did a few cool solos), and I thought the pianist's solos were terrific. But more importantly, OMIGOD, LIKE, I'M AT THE VANGUARD! I'M AT THE VANGUARD! WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO!. Okay, so I didn't quite express my emotions like that; my pants remained unsoiled. But to be in that cramped triangular room, with the 1-2-3-9 subway rumbling behind the wall… it felt just so right, and steeped in history. On those live Vanguard albums I've mentioned, the recordings capture the tinkling of glasses and murmur of background conversations… I was in that world… wow.
  
  
• More beautiful than you: On the way back, Perlick walked us through the Meatpacking district. It was originally a blue-collar industrial district, but in recent years, it has been utterly transformed and is today filled with trendy bars and restaurants catering to young professionals and "scenesters." In 2004, New York magazine called the Meatpacking District "New York’s most fashionable neighborhood." It was definitely the world of the hip and clubbing people who are more beautiful than you are. I was wondering when Perlick and I were going to get kicked off the sidewalk for looking too dorky.
  
  The whole scene set off the reaction I have mentioned in previous blog posts: "... whenever an attractive woman that I don't know approaches and starts talking to me, part of my brain immediately responds, "Yes, yes, you're pretty. Thanks... and good for you. Now, what are you trying to get out of me?" I guess it is that I know that I'm not a player in whatever game they're playing, and don't want to be bothered/suckered with it..." A lot of women putting a lot of time into showing off their stylish clothing and appearance… sounds terrifying to me. One thing that I found amusing is how strong the conformity was: there was maybe a couple of basic uniforms: you could probably track fashion trends over the long term very closely with a streetscape snapshot once a week ("…this period shows the rise of pointy-toed shoes…").
  
  As a tangent, I always wondered how peacocks managed to survive, in evolutionary terms—that's a whole lot of energy expenditure and added vulnerability to trade off for increased mating potential. Evidently, it really works for turning on the peahens (and, presumably, 20something Wall Street investment banker guys).
  
  Perhaps that's why I like to wander the more immigrant-filled parts of Chinatown or similar—in relative terms, I'm hip, young, and attractive by virtue of having all my teeth and not pulling a shopping cart full of groceries.
  
  
• Dim sum (with Perlick and Ann W) at Mandarin Court. A recommendation from Air Force Guy's mom—it's good to know Chinatown-raised ABC's (American born Chinese): Attendance was below dim sum critical mass, but it was still enjoyable.
  
  
• Be in your happy place… be in your happy place: My wandering then took me on a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. This was a bit more of a challenge than you would expect: I suffer from some degree of acrophobia. It was bad enough that when I tried this in high school, I turned back. Fearing heights really sucks for work in the construction industry; I've been up on three-story high lift platforms, but not terribly happily.
  
  
  
  I managed to get across, mostly by tricking myself to keep looking sideways or at the view. The big problem was on the middle span: the walkway is open wooden slats, and you can look down between them to the East River 120 feet below you. Yaghagahgaha. Yes, I know I'm not going to fall through--remember—a phobia is an irrational fear.
  
  But it's still a gorgeous old bridge; I'll have to see if I can start enjoying the walk next time.
  
  
• Great… I'm not even hip enough to drink this: My random walk from the bridge deposited me in the Brooklyn neighborhood known as DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). As described in that article: DUMBO was known as an artists' haven, as many of the expansive warehouses in the neighborhood have been renovated into loft space. However, in recent years, as property has become more and more valuable in Manhattan, this neighborhood has also increasingly gentrified, pricing out many of the artists. It appears that the current wave of dot coms are concentrating in this neighborhood.
  
  You know that gentrification is crashing in when neighborhood descriptions mention "one of the best children's parks in the city." New loft buildings and renovations were going up all around my walking path.
  
  I ended up at a juice bar called The Plant: I had an grapefruit, kale, apple, and lime juice. It was tasty despite its somewhat scary foamy bright green appearance (kale? juice? huh?). The place was the first floor of a renovated loft/warehouse; they are into raw cuisine—the food was far beyond my hipness range.
  
  But I really did like the feel of the neighborhood--part of what I love about these old industrial areas is that the history is evident simply in the streetscape. The cobblestones and railroad tracks poke up through the asphalt in patches; you can tease out the uses of various old buildings from vestigial hardware and fittings. If I ever moved to the city, I might end up in a place like this, if I could afford it (a short subway hop on the F train at York Street). The idea of having a rollup gate as my front door sounds just too awesome.
  
  
  
  But the gentrification factor kept on creeping into my head: I wondered whether DUMBO is quickly devolving into an urban theme park. To wit: "It's HipsterLoftWorld--all of the grit, graffiti, and authenticity, but you can still park your Mercedes on the street!" Admittedly, it was a Sunday afternoon, but many expensive cars were in evidence.

Anyway, a bit more time on Long Island, back to the city tomorrow evening, and rolling out back to Canada on Wednesday.