Dora

I went to MoMA today, for the Martin Puryear exhibition which comes down in a few days, and the Lucien Freud etchings which have just gone up. I thought I was a fan of Puryear and now trying to remember what I had seen before. Some of the pieces were absolutely delightful; the limb of a tree stretching heavenward from found wagon wheels, 5 exhibition floors high, testifying as obviously and improbably as a spiritual. But the naivete that could be breathtaking in an individual piece (to wit, the perspectival Ladder for Booker T Washington) edged toward embarrassment by the end of an exhibition that was comprehensive and expansive enough to exhaust the artist's few concepts in a handful of gestures that one might well applaud at first glance, but soon subside into yawns.

There was a bit in the wall text where he said he is taken with the referentiality of art. I think that may be a big part of the problem.

The Freud had the opposite effect on me, and in that it achieved what is generally the purpose of this sort of exhibition, to suggest, undergird, complicate, displace (as you will) the received understanding, or maybe the real point is to create the experience of having done so by flattering viewers preconceptions. Works for me.

It was the mad stares of the early studies that brought me closer to his sustained later fascination with Leigh Bowery, for example, and made the interaction, and Freud's determination not to exist outside it, so obvious and grand. Formidable the talent that can so dominate such a biography, such a history. The brows and planes and gazes that start so boldly but more naively engaging the viewer (who is always the portraitist's double; weird trick, Ive never felt that so clearly with any other artist) shift and force the viewer into a more confrontational, self-conscious posture (and I'm not just talking about subjects staring back at us over their indifferent genitals, although this is the most typical gesture). I'm not an art critic and if I were trust I would not endorse the biological or genealogical fallacy that I assume is a discredited cliche of Freud criticism, but I can't help noting my own overwhelming experience of the transference.

Otherwise I have to say again how much I HATE the whole MoMA experience, esp. the meat grinder escalators clogged with three and four abreast phlegmatic tourists who WILL NOT step aside for those of us who actually have somewhere to go at the museum.

The Imperialism of Sound

A gorgeous and impassioned elegy for silence:

The Colonization of Silence

A composer, Andrew Waggoner understands and suffers more acutely than most (more's the pity) the impact our culture's indiscriminate celebration of noise has on music, and by extension....

I feel this so viscerally in the subway, where like most others, I assume, I feel more human and humanized by the occasional strains of a violin or guitar endorsed by the MTA's Arts Under NY program, but it's mostly because I like the idea that we're a city that cares about the arts. On the whole, the occasional great performance is lost in the mix of pan pipes and improvised percussion (I love going to the USq market on Saturdays; I hate the 4-5-6 uptown. The guy banging on overturned plastic buckets on the platform now has competition from Japanese girls clogging on a makeshift wooden stage at the top of the stair); and everyone is on an ipod and who's about to hang out in the subway anyway? For that reason the MTA program is probably more pernicious than otherwise. What difference can the artist make when you stage the concert on the tracks?

The Quiet Car

When I die and go to heaven, hell, just or the bottom of the East River, I hope to pull in to my destination on the Quiet Car. What is the Quiet Car? why, it's the sanctum sanctorum of contemporary travel, the new colossus for a mobile age:

...The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

So maybe it's stretching a metaphor, but it's the silent lips I'd like to discuss.

Don't we all understand silent lips? Is this an idea the performance of which actually varies over time? by situation? No, it is not. Silent lips are lips through which no utterance, meaningful or otherwise, escapes. No word, no shriek, no snore. Silent lips are the Golden Rule in the Quiet Car. To wit:

Quiet Talking Only, Please:
Customers must strictly limit conversation and speak only in quiet, subdued tones. If you'd like to carry on an extended conversation, please relocate to another car.

Mute Your Device:
Customers may not use any devices making noise, including:

cellular phones
pagers
handheld games without headphones
laptop computers with audible features enabled
portable CD or DVD players without headphones
Customers using headphones must keep the volume low enough so that the audio cannot be heard by neighboring passengers.

This is from Amtrak's web site, but in case there's any confusion, signs reading 'QUIET CAR: no cell phones, quiet conversation only' are posted every few feet, and the conductor generally announces the rules as the train pulls from the station.

Any questions?

Step outside to ask them. Please.

In the past few months, I've had occasion to travel between New York and Boston on three separate occasions. Back and forth, 6 segments. Even on the Acela, that's almost 24 hours. 24 hours on the Quiet Car. Each passenger acknowledging the inconvenience of her presence to her neighbors, all agreeing on a common illusion of solitude.

If only.

In fact, the Quiet Car seems to stimulate an adolescent compulsion that I can only hope is otherwise latent in adult passengers to break the rules because they are there. How else to explain the fact that cell phones are in common use in every Quiet Car, turned off when the conductor walks through to take tickets, occasionally scolding a less vigilant delinquent--and back on again just as soon as his back is turned? Talking, phone calling-- for all I know, break dancing and fist fights-- are invited on every other car EXCEPT for the Quiet Car, so called because it is supposed to be QUIET.

The worst offenders are not teenaged boys; in fact, I have asked two groups of chattering boys on two separate occasions whether they were aware that they were on the Quiet Car, and both looked gratifyingly stricken and apologized profusely as they gathered up their belongings and moved to another car. No, the worst are the old people, the lady with a show tune ring tone who covered her phone with her other hand and turned to the window as if, like a little child, she thought she couldn't be seen or heard by anyone she couldn't see or hear herself. When another passenger said 'excuse me, this is the Quiet Car, no cell phones', she first ignored him and then when he repeated himself, flashed a disapproving glance and said, 'it's just my daughter'. Lady, I don't care if it's just your parole officer. Take it outside. Or the man whose wife on the other end was evidently as deaf as he, who repeated his order to the entire car as the train approached the station. 'No, egg foo young, EGG FOO YOUNG!'.

And of course, that's the other thing, in and near the stations, even law-abiding passengers seem to think the rules no longer apply, as if the nearing prospect of freedom from the unnatural restrictions of the Quiet Car are too much for the most disciplined among us, and the torrents of irrelevant chatter will burst forth. And at this point, the transgressors cease even to mime their awareness of their transgressions, and a general air of relief and gaiety takes over, except in my corner, where I seethe.

And then there was one extraordinary occasion when even I was moved to utterance. In the Quiet Car (as in all the other cars, I assume), there are several sets of seats at either end arranged such that two passengers face two other passengers across a common table. I was seated in one such seat, and across the aisle, four passengers gradually found themselves seated in a similar fashion. First was a young man studying law books, and then a young woman who boarded with skis planted herself across from him and promptly fell asleep. Then another, rather large young man in a suit and shoes as shiny as his hair sat down beside the sleeping girl, and eventually an older woman sat across from him. After a time, the young man in the suit left his seat, and returned from the dining car with a cardboard box of food. Standing in the aisle, he set the box down on the table, and proceeded to remove his jacket, which he spread carefully along the back of his seat. Then, under the gathering glances of the car, he proceeded to unbutton his shirt, which he also removed, and spread with equal care across the shoulders of his jacket. At this point, attired in a wife beater for which I suppose in retrospect one might have been grateful, the astonishing fellow UNBUCKLED HIS BELT AND THE TOP BUTTON OF HIS TROUSERS. Whereupon he sat down, tucked a paper napkin into the scoop of his under shirt, and proceeded to tuck in. By now, jaws had dropped around his table (the girl slept through it all) and mine. The law student looked me in the eye and made a sheepish shrug. It was the older woman who, in the most matter-of-fact tone imaginable, addressed him in ringing tones.

'ARE YOU WARM?' she asked.

He looked up, cheeks full. 'No', he said, puzzled; and then seemed to understand. 'I don't want to get anything on my new shirt'.

Mind you, this is Boston to New York in 2007, not Jacksonville to Atlanta in 1887. (And if you recognize the allusion, you'll recognize that the comparison is also inept in ways I mean to address when I write about 'Richer not Better' [Walter Michaels's The Trouble with Diversity]).

By the time he reached across the aisle and tapped my shoulder to ask, 'do you have a mint or a piece of gum'?', I was so off balance that I actually burst out laughing. I am not proud of that moment, but he didn't seem to take offense, and just proceeded to the next person.

The Quiet Car is an ideal, and perhaps one that depends on the denial of class and other more trivial differences more than I generally care to admit.

But let's take that conversation outside.

Mmmm

When I started this blog I figured I'd be writing a lot about food. It had been my exclusive occasion for internet interaction, aside from email. I started on Chowhound some time in the mid or late '90s? not sure when it actually came on line. But I dropped out a few years ago around the time when it was sold to Chow or whatever, because I got fed up with the fastidious censors who removed one too many of my posts, as well as the grinding and obviously sanctioned dumbing down of the conversation. I was searching for something elsewhere on the internet not long ago and came across a count of my CH posts which was somewhere around the 1,300 mark. I was a little impressed with myself. And a little appalled.

I am sorry to have lost CH outlet in some ways (especially when I'm travelling to new places and need to plan food itineraries) but my relationship to products and restaurants and so on has changed too. Maybe it's partly because the CH engagement is no longer part of the experience. I keep thinking I should report here on recent meals at Fiamma, Magnolia Grill, Watts Kitchen, JoJo, Momofuku, Angel's Share, the Palm, B&G Oysters, Savoy, Back 40, El Quinto Pino, Myth, Tadich, Tsukushi, Cho Dang Gol, twice-weekly Greenmarkets and dozens and dozens of oysters & sea urchins at the GCOB (especially, of late, the Caraquets, Ninegrets & Malaspinas);

but documentation is just not that interesting any more. I think the proliferation of amateur food critics on the web, and their photographs (this really upsets me, that people who wouldn't be caught dead behaving like Japanese tourists [actually, the Japanese are more sophisticated now; let's call them Koreans and Chinese] in the streets have no compunction about whipping out their cameras or phones to take pictures of their food), have put me off the effort to consider, describe and engage with others over what I consider to be an incredibly personal and intimate experience: the food and drink I take into my mouth and my body,the people who prepare, offer and present it, the environment in which it is consumed, the language, memory, humor, trepidation, discovery, disappointment, pacification, comparison it evokes-- these are all so fully commodified now, that I can no longer take pleasure in the act of contemplation and sharing that once was voluntary, occasion by occasion; and now has become performative, competitive.

As the productions have developed in variety and sophistication, I have become increasingly less interested in the staging of a meal. Back when it first opened, Craft was my Platonic ideal of a restaurant. Of course it was carefully calculated and executed, but the conceit of each ingredient presented separately and simply was exactly what I was looking for, and even more so now (of course Tom Colicchio has long since abandoned the original and is trading off the reputation at Craftsteaks and other cute variations on the theme in Vegas & beyond. But I digress).

I reject the ideology of authenticity. But I am repelled, now, by the very idea of Atlantic salmon, say, or tomatoes in winter (in NYC). This is not out of any reverence for the idea of 'nature' or the 'local', but because of the specific, documented implications of producing, offering and consuming such 'foods', and the cheat they offer on the plate.

Reality Bites: or, Kentucky Bootleg

Not long ago, I had an emergency root canal, which was interesting in the sense that the tooth that had been throbbing sprouted from the lower jaw but the one that needed the procedure descended from the upper. The periodontist found this out through a few simple and ingenious tests involving the application of cold air to different teeth. I wonder if periodontists' kids perform this trick for their science classes. My father was a scientist, and I offered emulsification. (Hollandaise came much later).

So anyway, he was a very nice young man with a small office on the UES, and in the exam room were 3 framed photos of himself with 3 different patients (or at least that was the suggestion), arm on shoulder kind of thing. One was a woman I didn't recognize and one was a man I definitely did but now can't remember (was it Al Pacino?) because I was so involved in considering the idea that the man in the middle, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and I, had reclined in the same chair and spit blood and saliva into the same basin. I trust that Mr. Hoffman is receiving sufficient remuneration from his tremendous body of work (I'd see anything on the strength of his performance, and Laura Linney's too. The Savages is as good as it gets)not to have needed to avail himself of CareCredit on his way out of the office to the pharmacy to retrieve his vicodin reward. And what is CareCredit? 'CareCredit is a convenient, low minimum monthly payment program for your entire family specifically designed to pay or healthcare and elective treatment not covered by insurance"'. This might have been the perfect answer to the call to blepharoplasty my mirror has been submitting to my drooping, swollen, crepey lids, but an $1,800 root canal bill gets there first.

So on the way downtown the gold crown around which the periodontist has maneouvred falls out, leaving an interesting stump. So I'm back to the dentist in a few days, where for another $295 (thanks, CareCredit!) they install a 'temporary crown', because my insurance won't contemplate the sort of elective nonsense of a real crown for a year following initiation of coverage. So my plaster tooth crumbles at first floss and I'm wondering how much I paid for the fleeting play dough reassurance of tooth against tooth. My tongue finds comfort now in the gap between the stump of my back molar and its semi-detached neighbor that I understand will be next in line for reconstruction.

So CareCredit. CareCredit is great because it offers a limited time, no interest payment plan. I'm on track to pay off my bill well in advance of the deadline. But if something should happen and come spring I've got an outstanding balance, it looks like CareCredit could start assessing a hefty (22.98%) interest charge, which goes up to '28.99% for all accounts in default'. (I don't know what CareCredit considers default).

I'm also facing 2 real crowns, one to replace my temporary and one for the adjacent, as well as a strong recommendation for grafting in an area I've had unsuccessfully grafted twice before. My dentist will charge $2,000 per tooth for a crown, and my insurance, which won't cover such procedures until one year after enrollment (18 January) will cover only 50 per cent of what they assess as 'customary'. So I am looking at an additional $2,000-- at best-- out of pocket. (Forget grafting; I'll invest in saran wrap). My dental coverage is provided by AIG by the way. I have to say that Maurice Greenberg may have been the lucky one. Go Martin.

So anyway, I've been looking into getting the work done in another country, a 'developing' country, where there are more qualified medical professionals per capita (still trying to figure out the dental situation) than in most parts of the world. So far I'm getting a price that's 25 per cent less than I'd pay in NYC. If my insurance covers it, then I'd be paying a total of $500 versus $2,000 (or more) out of pocket for two crowns.

And maybe I could use some of the 'extra' money to help people in my own country who are still waiting for for 'development'.

“Not much has changed over the years here, really,” said Glen D. Anderson, who for two decades has made dentures in Corbin, Ky. He sells a pair of dentures for $400 that many dentists sell for more than $1,200. Like his brother, father and grandfather, he makes them without a license.

"Bootleggers exist here for a reason,” Mr. Anderson said. “People need teeth, but they can’t afford to go to dentists for dentures.” ....

...Dr. [Edwin D.] Smith [who paid $150,000 of his own money to set up a free mobile dental clinic] said, “the only choice a person with a severe infection has is to have the tooth pulled, even if she’s 25 years old and the tooth is right in the middle of her face.” He added that "the [Medicare] program does not pay for root canals or dentures, though it does help pay for a liquid diet for those without teeth."

Manneh from Staten Island

It's an easy pun from among so many temptations ('bushmeat'? Look, I'm a paragon of restraint). But I like to think it is not irrelevant to the analysis Stanley Fish makes available to those of us who would avail ourselves regarding a pending case in which a Staten Island resident defends herself against charges that she has violated US customs regulations and illegally imported 'bushmeat'.

According to CNN

A criminal complaint cited evidence that the illegal importation of bushmeat encourages the slaughter of protected wild animals. More ominously, the complaint warned of "the potential health risks to humans linking bushmeat to diseases like Lassa fever, Ebola, HIV, SARS and monkeypox.

At the center of the case in federal court is a modest woman with nine children and a history of domestic discord.

The case dates to early 2006, when federal inspectors at JFK Airport examined a shipment of 12 cardboard boxes from Guinea.

They were addressed to [Mamie] Manneh and, according to a flight manifest, contained African dresses and smoked fish with a value of $780.

Instead, stashed underneath the smoked fish, the inspectors found what West Africans refer to as bushmeat: "skulls, limbs and torsos of nonhuman primate species" plus the hoof and leg of a small antelope, according to court papers.

.... after she consented to a search, the agents came across a tiny, hairy arm hidden in her garage.

'Monkey,' she explained, claiming the arm was sent to her out of the blue "as a gift from God in heaven.

Well, call me a disciple and pass me a thigh.

NO IT DOESN'T
responds Stanley Fish

to the defense attorney's assertion that the case represents a regrettable but inevitable by-product of the sort of 'clash of cultural and religious values inherent in the [thoroughly discredited metaphor of the] melting pot that is America'.

It represents a more fundamental clash: between the imperatives of religion and the rule of law. The question raised by the case is whether the fact of a religious belief is sufficient to exempt the believer from the application of generally applicable laws — laws (like driving on the right-hand side of the road) that apply to every citizen no matter what his or her religious, ethical or moral convictions. Is religious belief a special case, so special that the devout practitioner gets a pass?

If it is, then I guess it's up to God to save the USA.

The Trouble with Genocide*

In a city that doesn't want for them, I think the NYPL Live series is one of New York's great resources (Paul Holdengraber* notwithstanding; although undoubtedly I unfairly discredit his contribution on account of my allergy to his attitude. About which I am nevertheless willing to modify my impressions, see below). Sadly, I find myself too often unable to attend events, usually because of my travel schedule. That said, I hadn't realized how much I'd missed until I heard that tonight's Robert Silvers Lecture with Nicholas Kristof was the final NYPL Live event of the season. The talk was preceded by a screening of excerpts from the recent event with Norman Mailer-- evidently his last public appearance. I really hadn't paid a lot of attention to him after 'The White Negro' which I read when I was reading everything about race and can't actually recall the essay but guess I didn't think it that important. Mailer didn't really figure for me; not my period, not my paradigm. But he was keen and unsparing in this final video which will send me back to the text. If I were a writer, that's the kind of legacy I'd want.

Anyway that was a preamble, delirious and bracing: Felix the Cat to the main event.

Nicholas Kristof's presentation was surprisingly unpolished and correspondingly effective. I hope that doesn't sound cynical, a quality I do not attribute to his performance. In large part, it was his coverage that introduced and engaged me and so many many others to and with the situation in Darfur. His courage in pursuing the story and the personal commitment were both evident and evidently sincere tonight.

But so too was a hopeless humanism. Clearly, Mr. Kristof is moved and motivated by the pathos of the individual. I think I remember now that
he bought a sex slave in SE Asia at one point in order to free her from bondage? There's no question that the stories he told (and the pictures he showed) are outrageous, and no question that the conditions obtaining in Darfur are unacceptable, that pressure from the international community is necessary and right.

I have to give credit to Mr. Holdengraber* for demonstrating an unaccustomed restraint in his role this evening, as well as for carefully synthesizing what he said were over 100 comments submitted in writing during the talk (written submissions are a wise programming decision, I think) into a few relevant questions. Apparently a number of people wanted NK to justify his argument that the crisis in Darfur merited priority attention from the international community (and individuals in the audience) over against say malaria, or the Congo where the deadliest war in recorded history supposedly ended in 2003.

The gist of Kristof's response was that genocide-- defined as a state policy of extermination of a race, ethnicity or other characteristic believed to be heritable or otherwise essential-- is the greatest challenge to our humanity and therefore automatically belongs at the top of the agenda of those who would pursue peace and justice for the peoples of the world.

A post-Enlightenment subject would find it difficult to reject this argument out of hand. Indeed, I confess that there were points during his presentation when I reached for my handkerchief. (I'm cutting back on kleenex). But I also find it incredibly uncomfortable. Leaving aside everything else, it reflects a quaintly modernist and decidedly 'western' conception of how power is organized and effected much less of the role of the state in its engagement and exercise. There's the whole ISA thing which I think is very important, and beyond that something I'm just beginning to glimpse from my recent exposure to part of the middle east, about which I don't feel sufficiently well versed, instructed, or experienced to comment beyond saying that I begin to realize, to my horror, that the Enlightenment project (within which I have understood my entire life) was likely always more idiosyncratic than I was aware, and even more minor tomorrow than today.

*with apologies to Walter Michaels.

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay

might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

I first saw The Wooster Group perform The Emperor Jones-- Kate Valk and Willem Dafoe at the Performance Garage. I was about to say around 1998, but just looked it up and it was 1993. That means I was just a couple years into my academic career, and can only be relieved that I didn't take the occasion to write something about blackface about which I would now be embarrassed. I could digress further in a few directions but suffice to say that I retained the memory and wanted to make it back to other things (I have to one or two but which?) including the revival at St Ann's last year which I'm really sorry to have missed. Is it possible that it's been 14 years? Hamlet was electric, and I don't agree with Ben Brantley that it was all about the mimesis. Every element of the performance from staging to acting to design was obliged to report on every element of the text and performance (via Gielgud via Shakespeare and via however many other interventions) from staging to acting to design, and the result was why we huddled masses stick it out in New York. That said, I have to confess that he's on to something with 'hypnotic to narcotic', but I attended last Friday at the end of a long week and long day and my sympathy extends of capacity not of judgment.

Gotham Garbage

Living in New York, I can only shop for as much food and other supplies as my two hands can carry in, yes, plastic bags (loaded down, paper tears sooner). If I'm not travelling, I usually make it to two farmers' markets per week, where I buy most of my food. But sometimes this doesn't happen or it does but I don't plan well enough and get home late or just tired, usually lazy, and decide to order in. Like other New Yorkers, I consider the luxury of a wide variety of delivery options at all hours to be an entitlement. I can't buy much in advance (how will I transport it? where will I put it?) but if it's 10 pm and I want a whole roasted branzino or salt and pepper lotus root or pastrami on rye with a pickle, I can have any one or all of these on my plate within the hour, with no more effort than it takes to pick up the phone or click on a web site.

Each time I take the easy way out, I'm left with mountains of garbage--or recycling, as I prefer to think of it. Not that that should make me feel much better. The sheer volume of plastic containers--often containers within containers-- is pretty staggering. I'm trying to cut back.

I guess I'm still going to have to do better. Check it out:

I played The Gotham Gazette Garbage Game and sent 2,014,352 tons of refuse across 793,937 miles.

Mother Earth

I attended an update on the millennium development goals at the UN today and learned that 80 per cent of sub Saharan Africa's small farmers are women. They walk an average of 4 miles a day to get their water, and they produce 90 per cent of the continent's food (elsewhere I've seen reports at 75- 80 per cent. Regardless: a preponderance). But for a variety of reasons, including the fact that (and this may be garbled; at the very least an overgeneralization; but I couldn't stay long enough to clarify during the q&a) they are not considered farmers socially (qua gender, as I understood it), they have the least access to technical and other information to help them improve their methods and lives. Only 17 per cent of the arable land in the region is under cultivation. Almost half of the population of the region lives on less than $1 per day.

(None of this is really surprising, of course. But I am reminded of how much is really at stake in an internationalist feminism: something I've always believed in and at times fought for--but if you live in a wealthy nation and don't commonly find yourself in the academic or activist situations that would tend to remind you--well, it does tend to become an abstraction. Even modest activities such as today's are salutary under such circumstances).

These statistics were offered as part of a presentation on progress toward millennium development goal #1: 'Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger'. The chart that accompanies this update in The Millennium Development Goals Report shows that since 1999, progress (even if slight) has been made toward this goal in every region except for Western Asia, where poverty rates have more than doubled since 1990. The narrative report doesn't comment on this. I can think of a few possible reasons. Check this out, too.

Murray Hill mayhem

Makes you almost nostalgic for the swaggering kids let loose from second rate universities, and the B&T crowd they will soon supplant. I guess I need to work out a guardianship arrangement for Ursa, and maybe some kind of id tag, in case our next walk ends in misadventure. I think we'll be staying in more often.



pedestrian killed by cab

pedestrians attacked with knives

What I brought home from the Farmers' Market today

1 bunch of green garlic
1 bunch of narrow leeks
3 small onions
5 small yellow and green streaked pattypan squash
1/4 lb of shiitakes
5 small heirloom tomatoes, because it won't last much longer, the season
I container of ricotta
1 cup of lemon basil tea (actually, I consumed it on the spot)
1 lb of grass fed minced beef, for the dog over the course of the week
2 dozen littlenecks, for me, soon
a mess of greens

I didn't get flowers as my Wednesday zinnias are still bright; and we're in between for fruit-- no more peaches, and early apples and pears are not that appealing. Some one had blueberries, but I doubt them this time of year, and I don't especially care for raspberries. Oh--loads of grapes, but the best ones, like scuppernongs, have bitter rubber skins, and the lychee inside clings to its pits, and I just don't enjoy the process. That said I bought some sliced and peeled cactus fruit on the way home, so perhaps there's no way around the sacrifice the changing season demands.

It was hot today, and crowded. I enter on the southeast side, from the subway exit on Park Avenue South and 15th Street, then make my way up past the mulchers on the left and the meat folks on the right, who are slow as mulch then never have bison hangar once they get to me, but do offer Ursa bits of jerky. Ursa hates crowds as much as I do and her tail goes down as we press on. I was looking for Yuno. Her stand has the freshest and most exquisite produce, and we chat about haircuts. I'll catch her on Wednesday, at Dag Hammarskjold, and ask why she wasn't at Union Square today. I ate her shishitos last night, and a few of the golden bite sized tomatoes left over from my Wednesday pint. As we head south on Broadway, the sun is in our eyes. I think about eggs from Knoll Crest but there's a line and my arms are growing heavy. There's a pork place with great bacon that's in my freezer right now, and occasionally they have just laid pullets, but not today. An unwitting fellow dog-accompanied marketeer stops to let his retriever greet Ursa, who shows him what's what (or rather, who's who) before I can pull her away. Corn is out of the question today; I have only two arms, and the pull of the lead in addition to the pull of gravity. Corn's getting awfully starchy lately anyway. I skip Ronnybrook, as I have been preferring the non-homogenized milk from Evans that I buy at Murrays Cheese. But Ronnybrook's glass bottles are the best. I actually remember having a tin box on the back patio, where milk was delivered, a creamy morning miracle.

New York green markets

Good night and veel geluk

The New Yorker sent an email to say that the lineup had changed and Ayaan Hirsi Ali could no longer participate in tonight's scheduled event. I'd seen the article saying that she'd had to return this week to Holland (as those icky people call it) and wondered. Ticketmaster refunded my purchase. Martin Amis and Ian Buruma are discussing now. I had a ticket for the conversation on Iraq with George Packer, too, but reversed the times, so when I thought Ali was cancelled, settled in for another hour before I realized. It was an fabulous double bill. I am suffering the loss, and myself as the loser.
Refugee from Western Europe

Conditions of Utterance

So Times Select has released
Stanley Fish.
I think he's right, despite my previous comments.
Unfortunately that means I am going to have to figure out
another career objective.

Silver Lining

I was out of town for Naomi Klein at the NYPL . I'd heard her on Brian Lehrer, and read the Harper's piece on the flight out. It's a smart if popular (or should I say, and popular?) analysis and I'm glad she has written it and that it is getting so much attention. One ominous-felicitous term she uses is 'disaster apartheid'. This is what happens to communities that lose their public services to private contractors, a phenomenon that is exacerbated in crisis or catastrophic situations (the US war in Iraq, for example). The reconstruction (I use the term advisedly) of public education in post- Hurricane Katrina New Orleans demonstrates how government and the private sector exploit emergencies to transfer the social contract to market, such that the citizen goes to bed with rights and responsibilities, and wakes the next day with a bill for services rendered.

Take 62

I live and work in the neighborhood, so for the past week have navigated barricades, stalled traffic, clusters of ill-assorted men in ill-fitting suits, and all the other annual inconveniences of the General Assembly. The protesters with bullhorns have been less in evidence and I'm trying to recall whether I've got my seasons confused and they really only appear in the spring and summer (I know they do show up then but I thought now too). At any rate, there is one group that has set up along the Second Avenue side of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza for the past week, protesting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency and his appearance before the UN. They have set up a barricade of lurid photographs depicting the executions over which he and his government have presided.

I am conditioned by the anti-abortion lobby and their crude intimidation tactics to disregard gruesome close-ups of aborted fetuses and other visual, visceral efforts to supplant reason and law with emotion and religion.

One photograph disturbs me terribly though. It's a woman in a white chador, facing the camera with an expression of extreme anguish. She is at a 30 degree angle, buried above her elbows, surrounded by men with shovels who are intent on completing the job.

It's incredibly ugly. But however righteous, indignation and outrage should not supplant discussion and debate.

My Name is Paul Holdengraber

I had read some of the New Yorker pieces and Istanbul and My Name is Red before my first trip to Turkey this time last year, and while frankly I have found Orhan Pamuk's exquisitely detailed universes to be more admirable than engaging (the miniature is truly his metier), I was very keen to attend his 'Conversation with Paul Holdengraber' which opened the fall season of the NYPL's LIVE series this past week. He's got a big fat new hardcover collection of essays called Other Colors and Sonny Mehta was in the audience which I know not because I saw him but because in the 10 minute ad with which Paul Holdengraber introduced and promoted the series and himself, he made sure that no one could be in any doubt about cultural and social importance of the occasion. (Along with Mr. Mehta, Holdengraber singled out Pamuk's publicist, 'absolutely the best publicist in all of New York'. What do you want to bet a big fat new hardcover of Conversations with Paul Holdengraber is in the works)?

I better understood my own response to Pamuk after hearing him talk about his return to painting (he had trained as a painter during his youth and is co-teaching a class at Columbia this term called Word and Picture which sounds charmingly mistranslated) and repeatedly referring to books and essays as 'objects'.

But mostly what I understood was that like an interview with Barbara Walters or a photo with Elvis (and no I'm not linking either), a conversation with Paul Holdengraber is never really about anything, or anyone, else.

The ethicist

I know a man named Richard. He has one lung and is receiving chemotherapy, intermittently, from what I can gather. Whether this is due to his own availability or that of his doctors, I cannot say. But he did show me his empty inhaler. Today was humid and it was getting to him. He'd picked up 14 of the 26 dollars he needed for a refill before I found him and I left him a few bucks closer.

This assuaged neither his need nor my conscience. I had more than $20 in my wallet when I found him and more than $20 when I walked away. Why? I often think about Richard and look for him whenever I pass that corner. I am disappointed when I don't see him, and sometimes worried. But today, I was in a hurry. I have plans this evening and didn't think I'd have time to get to the bank, to replenish taxi fare; I've overspent already this month and my remaining dollars are committed. And so on.

Do I really value the birthday dinner I'm buying a friend tonight, the cab fare, the sake on sale just through next week, the shoe shine, the cut and color, the holiday tips for building staff (already dreading my deficit there), the dog grooming, the tailoring, the subscription to the New Yorker, the NYPL membership, the flowers I buy once a week-- above the extra 10 bucks it would cost to relieve a dying man of a few more hot hours of discomfort and discouragement on the corner of 38th and 3d?

Evidently.

Do you think this is a fair equation?

I lived in downtown LA for a few years at the end of the last and beginning of this decade. My neighborhood housed the largest concentration of homeless people in the US. My apartment, first on the fifth and then on the 12th floor of a newly converted loft building (I moved to the other coast but came back), afforded a prime view of the cardboard roofs lining the streets. The neon sign on the adjacent building still advertised it as a flop house. It was a nice flop house, and the smell of bleach reached the streets in the morning, and a couple characters who lived there would still show up at the old bar they'd frequented from 10 am every day for the past 20, 30 years, indulged in their other preferences by espresso artists whose tatoos were far more literary and expensive than those of their customers. My landlord employed security guards from the newly released inmates enrolled in a job placement program at the halfway house across the street. I tutored homeless children at a local shelter, conveniently located three blocks away, and let my dog introduce me to anyone she fancied. She fancied the pungent.

Life was good.

But there was a down side. In my neighborhood, trash bins had become a contested terrain. For some scavengers, they were a source of income (I don't know actually know the going price for bottles and cans); for others, a source of sustenance (discarded food). I was one of the few newcomers--city dwelling, law-abiding, dog-walking neighbors-- who looked at the bins and saw trash.

None of us (I hope) was so deluded as to think that we were welcomed by longer-term residents with unmitigated delight. More often than not, I found myself standing in line behind a neighbor perusing the trash for another purpose, and frequently ended up running from corner to corner to corner with my leash in one hand and baggy in another as I sought a free bin at which to discharge both legal and civic duties with the least conflict between these occasionally incoincident imperatives.

Nor did I seek conflict with my neighbors. It was no different from seething in line behind some damned tourist who didn't know a grande from a venti. You just focussed on the paper and got your own request in order, so as not to hold up the process in turn. Only in this case, you knew, or think you knew, that the connoisseur before you was weighing the finer points of something that might actually make a real difference. Maybe because deciding whether to pick up a spent cigarette butt is the most significant independent choice she might be privileged to make all day.

After one too many mornings late for work on account of pondering these imponderables, longing for garbage just to be garbage, I emailed the New York Times columnist Randy Cohen, 'The Ethicist', for his expert guidance.

Should I feel justified in tossing my bag into a receptacle that might already contain some one else's breakfast? should I wait my turn (and just spoil some one else's breakfast)? should I leave the offending mess on the sidewalk, on the ground that my fellow 'urban pioneers' and I should just suck it up as part of the local color (and in the process, add to the misery of those we were --let's be honest-- further displacing), to hell with city ordinances? Should I persist until I could locate an unoccupied bin and thereby elude the multipurpose dilemma? Was it my ethical duty to bring the matter to the city council or take other measures?

I wish I had his response still but I don't. Basically, it was an excoriation for my frivolity. It was disgusting that I should pit my convenience (as he put it) against another's basic human needs. There was apparently no ethical framework that could accommodate such an offense.

I was trying to figure out how to act ethically in an unjust situation. If ethics can't offer any guidance then, when?

Are those of us who are privileged to choose whether to ask questions such as those I posed to 'The Ethicist' not obliged to do so? The Ethicist suggests that those of us who are contaminated by our positions should contemplate our shame. And I think most of us do. It's called liberal guilt.

But an 'ethics' that doesn't provide a rationale and strategy to propel its interlocutors beyond that acute point of recognition is nothing more than censure.

Which I believe belongs to the domain of morality.

breaking news

I took Ursa back uptown for a redo today as her stripping Monday left her furrier than it should, and cringed as she whimpered under the closer plucking. I'm not a mother and hope I will never hear myself saying: this hurts me more than it hurts you.

We got on the express from 86th, market bound, and as the doors closed, heard the the words all metrocard holders dread:

'Ladies and Gentlemen, stand back. You are in the presence of professionals'.

You know what happens then: the tourists giggle and clutch their bags, the tattooed and gelled guys from the boroughs turn up the volume and stretch their legs wide in the aisle, and the rest of us shift in our seats hoping not to attract attention.

But what followed from there to 59th was the best performance I have seen since The Tristan Project at Lincoln Center. And at 5 hours shorter and 350 dollars cheaper, I 'm thinking something's not right and I'm part of it.

Two guys and a boombox delivered a fearless and flawless acrobatic routine that spanned the packed car and was clearly designed to take maximum advantage of the poles and spaces and you know they're in and out between stations, gauging the crowd, the velocity, the volume, plunging forth with multiple individual and paired backflips and single hand stands and flying manoeuvres, repeatedly scaling a parked stroller and shopping bags not to mention protruberant knees and toes and baseball visors.

Even I couldn't help but laugh out loud and cheer, behaviours from which I have heretofore managed to refrain while engaged in the less-said-the-better business of mass transit.

I feel cheap having responded with a dollar and a compliment.

Give me a second chance. Does anyone know who these guys are?

Breaking News

to lift

I came late to Richard Serra, through Torqued Ellipses at the original DIA . My father was in town. He's an engineer and I was kind of challenging him by including the exhibition on our itinerary (Eddie Izzard was another highlight). But he absolutely flayed me not only with his fascination and insights as an engineer (which absurdly I hadn't anticipated), but also with his spontaneous personal engagement. It felt, in a way, more honest than my own. A few years later I was back in New York and so was he, and we went up to the then-new DIA-Beacon, to revisit the work. It was so very different, the skin had turned from smoother black to mottlier copper and you approach them by going down stairs, where the light is dimmer and the experience more sombre than it was in the white Chelsea gallery.

Today I went to the MoMA retrospective. I had never seen the earlier work (on the 6th floor) and it was kind of disappointing at first-- the evidence of evolution breaks the spell (and Belts' Dan Flavin fillip really made me cringe)-- but of course it was a healthy thing to do as my crush was entirely inapposite to begin with (see: father, above). Which didn't inure me to the enchantment of the new work, particularly Sequence:

vertiginous veil
a secret in the open
my future ruin

and Torqued Ellipse IV:

specificity
excised from a womb of steel
patch of sky above

sclerotic armour
abandoned who knows when, finds
a new occasion

Richard Serra Retrospective, MoMA