It’s the rare video of a cat and a computer voice that keeps me interested for three minutes, but between the Walter Benjamin quote and the Bronson Pinchot references, I couldn’t tear myself away.
I had a job interview in Midtown recently. Dressed in proper interview apparel (I clean up fairly well, you know), I spilled off the too-crowded Q train at 42nd Street and into the beehive of morning commuters rushing through the station’s sweltering underground tunnels, emerging from the underground into the sea of tourists that is Times Square. Walking briskly through the crowd in my new, not-yet-broken-in dress shoes, I did my best to avoid collision with the throngs of wide-eyed out-of-towners ambling obliviously down Broadway. Darting onto 45th Street and into the who-knows-how-many-floor monolith of an office building, I breathed a sigh of relief to escape the chaos.
Most people who live in New York—the ones I know, anyway—loathe Midtown. We scoff at its overpriced, gimmicky eateries and grumble at the impenetrable crowds of tourists clogging the sidewalks. With proper motivation—a new exhibit at MoMa, or some fancy new restaurant, for instance—we might bite the bullet and brave the crowds, but for the most part, Midtown is something to be avoided. Midtown, we scoff, isn’t the “real” New York.
I have to admit that, after moving to New York, it did not take long for me to adopt this attitude. But in all fairness, it’s not exactly the kind of neighborhood you go to for… anything. Not the stuff of daily life, anyway. If you’re looking for an Everybody Loves Raymond coffee mug, Midtown is the place to be. Otherwise, you’re usually better off finding your goods and services elsewhere.
But this particular morning, as I sat in a conference room in the 30-somethingeth floor of this office building looking out over Times Square and the oversized advertisements for Broadway shows like Rent and Beauty and the Beast (last show July 29th!), I remembered what it was like to visit New York for the first time. I remembered how exciting it was to walk down Broadway, marveling at the gigantic ads and news tickers. For a minute, anyway, all my distaste for the neighborhood melted away and I actually got kind of nostalgic.
I first visited New York when I was 17, in August of 1994. The trip was a year-early graduation present from my uncle Brad. We stayed in Midtown and managed to do all the things a tourist is expected to do in our four day trip: World Trade Center, Times Square, Wall Street, a Broadway musical (Grease!), shopping in SoHo, and of course, the Statue of Liberty. We even managed to take a quick detour off Broadway to CBGB’s, which we found surprisingly lifeless and dumpy at noon on a weekday. (It was not until my next trip that I would discover that it was pretty much always dumpy, even when not lifeless.) We never strayed far off the first-time NYC tourist’s to-do list, but it didn’t matter.
On that trip, Midtown was New York to me, and it delivered all the glitz and excitement and bustle that I had imagined. As I sat in that office looking down at it all, it occurred to me that when I first fell in love with New York, I was falling in love with Midtown. In subsequent vacations and over my years living here, I have fallen in and out of love with many neighborhoods, and I’m always finding new reasons to love (and hate) them. But Midtown was where it started.
That morning, in the office of one of those big financial companies that are the reason so many of us dislike the area (the irony is not lost on me), a hint of that wonder and excitement came back to me. It was a nice reminder.
Dear Linewaiter’s Gazette,
Some time ago your publication ran a comic titled “Meet the Tofus,” which introduced readers to the characters of Silken and Firm. I was intrigued by the single-paned strip’s enigmatic brevity, and looked forward to learning more about this soy-based duo. I questioned what was behind Firm’s jovial façade, what dark past or burning passions lay just beneath his milky white surface. I was tempted by Silken’s lush prose—do I detect some sexual tension between this protein-packed pair? As I studied its many intricacies, I considered the comic’s potential. Meet the Tofus’ possibilities seemed as endless as the number of ways one can prepare the beloved meat substitute by which it was inspired.
Given my enthusiasm for Tofu’s inaugural installment, you can imagine my disappointment at the series’ discontinuation. How are readers to know what is to become of Firm and Silken? Your decision to cancel this popular comic does a grave disservice to those in your readership who have invested time in following the series from the beginning. Even in the cutthroat business of network television, producers of canceled shows are often given several episodes to tie things up. I do not think it unreasonable to expect your publication—nay, our publication—to afford its readers the same courtesy.
On behalf of the your loyal readers who were similarly enthusiastic about this exciting new comic (our number most certainly rank in the dozens to baker’s-dozens), I implore you to give Meet the Tofus another try. With a stable space in the back of the Gazette and uninterrupted biweekly installments, I’m sure others will join us in our love of these anthropomorphized cubes of bean curd.
And let’s face it—you could really use the content. The monthly meeting minutes just aren’t bringing in younger readers.
Yours Truly,
Chad
For the past two weeks, Shirley has been cat/housesitting gig at a beautiful townhome in Tribeca. When I say beautiful, I mean multimillion dollar, 7-level, floor-to-ceiling-window, mid-century-modern-design-furniture-from-wall-to-wall beautiful. (Shirley is gainfully employed and really doesn’t need to catsit for money, but I can see why she took this one.) As it is kind of creepy to stay alone in such a vast space—and because I really like their self-cleaning espresso machine—I’ve been staying there, too. And while it was a little weird at first to have to climb three flights of stairs to get from the kitchen to the bedroom, after a few days of lounging about and sipping on iced lattes, I had to admit that I could get used to this kind of life.
But it’s been two weeks now, and I’m really ready for this mini-vacation to come to an end. I love the cats, and the place is as beautiful as ever, but there’s something about Tribeca that gets to me. I’d never spent much time in the neighborhood before, and now I know why. Sure, there’s a certain (small… very small) rush one gets peering out the window of sitting at ‘wichcraft and seeing Dennis Leary pedal by on his bicycle, but that’s really no substitute for what the neighborhood lacks. Despite its beautiful historic buildings and narrow, winding cobblestone alleys, Tribeca is missing the energy that one finds in other, similarly scenic New York neighborhoods.
Tribeca fills the gap between the Financial District and SoHo, and does so in just the way one might imagine. Having diluted the “hipness” of SoHo—if it can still be called that—so as to make it palatable for the financial types a few blocks down on Wall Street, the cobblestone streets of Tribeca are lined with restaurants that, for the most part, are expensive purely because they can be. They’re the kind of places a guy might take his date just to show her he can afford it. Maybe there’s a premium for using the word “Bistro” in your name, and I guess the overhead on tight black t-shirts for all those servers must be pretty high. Or maybe whatever magic they’re doing to that brown butter sage sauce is really worth it, but having tried one of the more moderately priced of these restaurants (one with a good reputation, even), I kind of doubt it.
I have a love/hate relationship with my own neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. Among New Yorkers, Park Slope is mostly known as a breeding ground for hyper-PC thirtysomethings. I like to say it’s where hipsters go to die. The neighborhood is epitomized by the Tea Lounge, a kid-friendly coffee shop with daytime children’s song singalongs, and the Park Slope Food Coop, which has a reputation for fantastic produce and a Stalinist member base. Given my extremely close proximity to both of these institutions, I am truly in the nexus of the Park Slope storm. This is at once wonderfully convenient and tremendously irritating.
Sometimes the myriad of strollers (and the self-righteous parents pushing them) gets me down, and as a member of the Coop, I’ve had my fair share of run-ins with kooky socialists. But there’s more to Park Slope than that. There are good restaurants and bars, Prospect Park, trees along the streets, historic brownstown buildings, and stoops—beautiful stoops on which I’ve whiled away countless hours watching people—dog-walking, stroller-pushing, organic-Swiss-chard-eating, Coop-membership- having people.
Staying in Tribeca has renewed my love of Brooklyn and Park Slope. I love Manhattan, but the college feel of the East Village just isn’t for me anymore, SoHo feels too trendy, and Tribeca has the beautiful old buildings and quaint streets but all the enthusiasm of a GM shareholders meeting. It’s a nice place to visit, but right now at least, I’m glad I don’t live there.
I haven’t had much to say for the past few months. That might be because my life is very domestic these days, and in the past I’ve found domestic life rather boring to write about. But the fact is that my quotidian routine is mostly filled with appropriately quotidian vignettes that could be titled “What We Cooked For Dinner” or “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Co-op…” (it’s no mistake that both examples are food-related, as Shirley is hopelessly food-obsessed in ways I have never before witnessed), so maybe I have less to write than I used to.
It’s not that I don’t like domestic life. I just don’t like to write about it. And unless it’s someone I know, I don’t like reading about either. In fact, I’m truly befuddled by the popularity of blogs like Dooce. Then again, I’m befuddled by the popularity of a lot of things. Now that I think about it, I might just be befuddled all the time. Huh.