Galleon Icing

Leaning back in an Adirondack chair at Wave Hill on a recent June afternoon, I was gazing up at the sky, basking in melodious, soul soothing birdy tweets. A few clouds in a perfectly clear and sunny universe, one in particular, started to resemble an old galleon ship made of frosty white cake icing gently rocking on an infinite sea of pale blue. A kind of aquatic fairyland, it you will,

It was one of those rare, becalmed moments of peace combined with the imaginary, solo playtime of a magic-infused child’s brain. A momentary regression to innocence, a mini second of pure escape.

Alas, it was not to last however, this workaday lull for the aspiring bourgeoisie. Slowly the weekend preparations began a stone’s throw from where I sat, assaulting my brief reverie.

First the chair haulers, then the floral arrangers, finally the nervous, busy staff skittering about everywhere on the grass, the awful, grating and piercing noise of sound testing, the unending chair placement, the floral arrangements, the construction of the matrimonial canopy, the folding chairs being unfolded and lined up, the equipment, the sound testing. . .

Wave Hill in its nineteenth century heyday was a grand private estate, a respite for the likes of of robber barons, a President, a great American writer. It was donated to the City of New York in the 1960’s and for a couple of decades remained a quiet and pretty neighborhood retreat from a time gone by; it offered views overlooking the Hudson River and in the distance a famous bridge that was not yet built or part of the landscape in that former century. It was a place to unwind from the everyday cares, an old fashioned simple pleasure with an aura of former elegance. It was free and there were no tour buses.  On a weekday one could conjure up pensively strolling the paths after alighting from a horse drawn brougham or some similarly patrician and sublime Edith Wharton moment. There would have been high tea no doubt and a roaring fire on late winter afternoons in the great hall, maids and butlers silently scurrying about. One could dream.

  

Eventually the city bureaucrats got hold of the place and had ideas. They quickly realized the former estate was a potential cash cow and not just an “environmental center with beautiful gardens” as the new brochures eventually advertised; now there are conferences year round, tour buses, an expansive gift shop in the newly fashioned visitors’ center, and weddings on summer weekends. These latter affairs are gross. Money, money, money is what they scream and it takes many hours and a formidable army of caterers and contractors to set up the trappings for that one, lavish night; while all this goes on, the last public visitors are allowed to continue to loll in their Adirondack chairs prior to closing time- a sort of lame nod to the proletariat.  

This past weekend being one of the last lollers to be lolling, I was able- nay, forced- to check out the guests as they began arriving, noting an astonishing array of wildly expensive and sometimes odd dresses, natty suits, hairstyles, face lifts and the occasional comforting sight of an unsculpted, overhanging belly. The robber barons were back. Many of the party goers looked like business associates.

As I was leaving I also happened to notice the wine with which the staff was filling dozens of stem glasses set upon a white table near the entrance for these thirsty arriving guests; the familiar, celebratory, red elixir being poured by the impeccably dressed young waiters attired in crisp black and white uniforms was being ladeled out from what resembled a large, plastic bucket of the kind used to wash floors. In essence, a rather worn looking, not so spiffy pail full of cheap, red stuff that looked a bit like Kool Aid or perhaps supermarket punch.

Who knew. . . ???

No place like home. . . .

Time to take a quick break and get my house in order- see you next week with a new (old) story! 

NYStoryweaver

They're Everywhere

If you wanna do something right use your own cone-

                               A Cone Head on Saturday Night Live

The other day I visited the smallish upstate town of a leafy suburb, hoping for a quick and bucolic respite from the unending repair of failing infrastructure. The city streets now often are shrouded with soil, dirt and rocks under the shadow of intimidating diggers and other humongous trucks with scoopers and dinosaur teeth that gleefully rip up every inch of asphalt. Toddlers love this, are completely mesmerized, could watch for hours. See Cooper, that’s a big, big digger!  Look what it's doing! The clanging and grinding for everyone else is pretty much unbearable and traffic basically nightmarish. Sink holes spring up in unexpected spots at an alarming rate, no doubt from the continual pounding. I figured a day away would be nice.

Lately my own neighborhood’s turn came and we were besieged by torn streets, dazed workers, unsuccessful attempts to direct foot and car traffic, and giant sections of ominous, round, black water pipe lying around; imposing tubes with a formidable presence stacked here and there at the curb, patiently waiting their own turn to be placed inside the long caverns that the large trucks and deafening drills created exactly in the spots where you normally plant your tootsies. Finally, the ubiquitous orange cones appeared, dropped almost randomly from the heavens to warn and direct you, though that also made no sense as there still seemed no clear pedestrian path.

In such cases of course you wind up zigzagging across lanes, weaving in and out of slow moving traffic manned by cursing drivers so that you can keep changing sides of the street just to keep moving. Eventually you do find a sidewalk, or at least a sizable section of one that is almost walk-able, as they always leave at least one, no matter how skimpy or narrow, to ferry you (and double strollers and people on walkers and dogs and runners) the hell out of there.  Eventually you find that lone little line of poured concrete creating a path to an intersection where finally you can cross and head back to the chimera of unperturbed civilization- always tantalizingly visible in the near distance- providing an illusion of maintained stability, a kind of  yellow brick, undisturbed paved road to the  un-wrecked familiar.

I see the cones everywhere. When they are not guiding you along a stretch of untrammeled sidewalk beneath you they're usually alerting you to treacherous roof work up above. They appear on highways and parkways to make lanes suddenly disappear. Sometimes the cones are simply plunked solo to steal a coveted parking spot. Really, they're everywhere. But back to that small, upstate town in the quiet, upscale, leafy suburb. . . .

So after lunch I decided to take a walk- a simple pleasure, yes? As I reached the center of the main street however with its little roundabout, I noticed something amiss: it was the cones, as far as the eye could see. They were placed in all four directions on all the streets leading out from the center.  So omnipresent were they in fact that they began to suggest something akin to the alien Cone Heads from Saturday Night Live, those pointy headed, ineffable beings who emanated from a far off galaxy and hilariously tried to blend in. Honestly though, these cones were not like those other, funny cones from SNL, but more like a silent invasion. We're worried about immigrants???  How about the damned orange cones?? And to make matters worse, unlike their cone headed cousins in the city, these cones were lined up fascistically straight, exactly parallel to the closed sidewalks they so meticulously straddled, not scattered randomly about like city cones; all routes were cut off  to everywhere and it remained eerily still. The four little streets that streamed out from the center were completely empty and devoid of human life, though I can't speak for the squirrels. As you can guess, these cones did not blend in but rather loomed.

As I searched for a way to proceed on foot, it became apparent that each street had been dug up and the sidewalks temporarily(?) obliterated, albeit in an oddly neat and orderly fashion- this offering a glint of solace, even though you were sort of trapped in the roundabout. The suburbs after all are not like the city, but still. . . . It was one of those strange, dreamlike moments, along with the realization that obviously there was no escape and there would be no walk here either. You just had to turn back on your heel to wherever and forget about walking in this town, ever, or at least for the moment and probably longer- you know how these things tend to go. At least in the city there is always the vague possibility of twisting an ankle as you take a few baby steps and try to navigate the debris along a much too narrow, rubble strewn trail- but still a path- as if this were any consolation.  

As I headed back to the car I began to realize how hopeless the whole thing was. How from now on you most probably always would be running into one of these cone headed detours no matter where you went or how hard you tried to avoid that little army of conical soldiers and their outlying orange troupes as you attempted to take a walk or drive somewhere. Apparently everything everywhere has to be dug up all over again and restarted, rebuilt, replaced; re-broken, re-pounded, re-sifted, re-filled, and re-aligned. Everywhere. This is not fake news, but maybe metaphor. I hope not.  In any event, we seem to be sinking fast.

So how are your sidewalks doing these days?

And the ground beneath your feet?

Our Town

 I’m sitting behind the wheel of a car tentatively parked at an “Official Parking Only” spot (whatever that means) on one of the faux side “streets” of a large, outdoor, meandering mall, a marketplace designed to look nothing like the town square it was meant to evoke. It could be anywhere in America though this one happens to be in Westchester, and as in all such places everyone seems to be running. The day is cloudy and overcast, which somehow adds a welcome and almost noir touch to the scene. Other drivers of sound mind and fully functioning hearts and limbs have parked even more boldly- a notch up the risk category- in those hallowed handicapped spots, almost flauntingly in fact.

There is not an available, illegal, outside space to be found! I lucked out because I was cowering in the fire zone before the miscreant in front me sashayed back to his car like an insouciant mafia don and languidly pulled out, allowing me to creep up into the area’s last non-spot spot a notch down from the emergency vehicle lane. We rebel outliers have decamped here on the faux streets of the faux town because either we are sociopaths with total disregard for sign warnings, or more likely we wish to avoid the monstrous cave of a garage that swallows drivers into its gaping maw then frustrates the hell out of you as you try to get it to spit the car back out- in large part because the scanners never work. Some of the more devil-may-care insurgents simply walk away from their illegally parked vehicles on the street and nonchalantly stroll to their destinations. Most people run. I am out here waiting because the person I am with “ran in” to make a purchase. Run, run, run. . . .

Even those who come stumbling out of the multi-leveled, dark cavern of a giant parking structure with an assured “legal” spot seem to be hurrying in a kind of semi-somnambulant state. The air is filled with a sort of droning background noise passing itself off as a "song" that’s a simulacrum of the original Muzak simulacrum (remember the tunes of the Beatles homogenized to a cool whipped, barely recognizable melody in a freezing supermarket as you checked out the eggs? That would be like Beethoven compared with this stuff). The track or channel or outer space station from whence this horrible sound blasts a wavy, repetitive series of dissonant grunts, unintelligible moans and repetitive lyrics- some fast, some agonizingly slow- cuts through the sporadic rain slowly beginning to gently splatter the windshield and wafts overhead.

Visitors wander back and forth under the spell of the sleep inducing, indecipherable beat, trance-like and weary, weaving or running toward one or another of the stores on the snaking trail of wares stacked horizontally and lining the way; it’s a series of neat corporate igloos with brand names. I think people think they’re having fun. Well, maybe not. But they’re definitely acquiring stuff.

Like everyone else, I too like to acquire stuff and throw it out. But why can’t this happen like in those earlier, twentieth century Hollywood comedies and romances that take place on a fashionable New York avenue? Cinematic shopping outings with well dressed, perfectly coifed, silly women in little hats, elegant suits and impossibly high heels who breathlessly balance a stack of gorgeously wrapped and festively ribboned parcels in their arms as a doorman suddenly appears out of nowhere to graciously open a taxi door. So relaxing, so much fun! A kind of languorous shopping, no running! Can you imagine such an extravagant bout of retail therapy, at full price no less, with doting shopkeepers clucking over you and the most pretentious, smarmy, Fifth Avenue department store adding a touch of shock and awe; or much less envision squeezing your bunions into those painful, toe pinching “pumps” of yesteryear. . .  and yet it still seems a much more desirable fantasy!

Or perhaps a classic “Shop Around the Corner” jaunt in slightly faded black and white would be more to your taste, where the staff is like a family, the owner the mustachioed, beneficent patriarch, the setting a quaint little pre-WWII European town, the longtime salespeople comically competing; a place where Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan fall in love with each other in and out of the stock room by means of  some wacky pen pal plot device, where there are no parking garages because people walk everywhere, and personal attention is paid to each and every shopper, no matter how obnoxious the customer or small the purchase . . . .

I am whisked back to reality as I continue to wait and the rain drops start to hit the glass methodically like seconds ticking away in a Hitchcock film. Some of the people in the simulacrum shopping town I observe through my windshield- a goodly number of them mildly or wildly overweight and not very well dressed- are carrying little and bigger bags with recognizable brand lettering stamped across the stiff paper. These wrappings with the company names proudly ensconced on them make the purchases seem more important than they are; but the bags are all recycled and not nearly as glossy and shiny as in the good old days of planet destruction. Somehow this makes me sad.

But really, what are my choices? Spending hour after hour blearily sitting in front of a screen at all times of day or night, obsessively browsing and doing the work of store employees by typing in scads of  style or “sku” numbers, addresses and credit information? Then weeks later desperately hunting around the house for tape while grappling with the repacking of a hopelessly and messily torn open box, after you’ve even forgotten you ordered the damn thing in the first place because it took so long to arrive.  And all this so that you can run to the post office and return the defective merchandise as you curse out the seller and swear never to order online again???

Oh wait- gotta go!- a fifteen minute loading zone just opened up and I need to run in for something. . . .

Obligations

Like many of you, I no longer innocently answer the phone with the customary, expectant "hello," mainly because I no longer answer the phone. 

The robo callers have won and altered the cozy civility of phone conversations and personal communication perhaps forever. That awful phenomenon along with texting have kinda' made the whole enterprise of spontaneous, un-screened voice to voice contact obsolete; the absence of other social interactions in which we so casually and easily once participated have followed.

The other day however, either in a moment of weakness or letting down the guard, or maybe because I was expecting a call, when the phone rang I thoughtlessly picked up the receiver and naively said "hello." Crazy, huh? In truth, it may even have been a foolhardy, impetuous descent into morbid curiosity, a sort of devil-may-care rashness that caused me to act so spontaneously and incautiously. 

After a brief silence and quite a bit of static on the other end- a condition which made me think the call emanated from far, far away- before I was able to hang up a voice managed to identify itself as "John from Loan Obligations." John, the archetypal ordinary American guy, calling from Loan Obligations, a phrase intended to strike fear and loathing into the heart of anyone who is not currently in the one percent. I mean, who has ever not had a loan? And even if you were lucky enough to be debt free, you never could be quite relaxed with the lingering, ubiquitous specter of identity theft that hovers over us all and fuels ads on late night TV. The horrible thought of even more obligations that you may or may not even know about, designed to evoke images of millennium debtor prisons; Dickensian work houses twenty-first century style as you try to straighten things out.

So I've sworn off answering the phone, although the scammer's hook to get you engaged did seem kind of funny. Loan Obligations. Clever. Not as clever though as "Existential Angst." Think about it. This is John calling from Existential Angst. I dare you to talk to me in 2019. 

Rescuing April

April by far is not the cruelest month- anyone who has been through a New York winter knows this. And nothing illustrates the truth of this better (while also attempting to shore up the blighted month's reputation) than a good poem.  Bards through the ages have tried to do justice to the start of the vernal season, but no one came near the lyrical craft of Geoffrey Chaucer, who codified Middle English in the year 1400, and poetically sanctified this first full month of spring for all time in just a few unforgettable, introductory words.  

Okay, admittedly 1300's England was nothing to write home about, that is, if you were even literate enough to scrawl out your name. Famine, plague, the Hundred Years' War and of course the crusades. . . . And yet there also was Chaucer and that famous first line.  

As far as April goes however, every era has its baddies and its bards. Let's travel back in time, to some of the past centuries nearer to us and see how they approached the start of spring. 

T.S Elliot of the much blighted 20th century, in his overarching, smarmy, hyper intellectual versifying way, particularly in The Wasteland, famously and rather spitefully called the period following windblown March the cruelest month, quickly imbuing sweet April, innocent, fragrant harbinger of balmier days, with all sorts of strange mythological allusions; sadness, loss, ancient fertility rites and other arcane symbols were the underpinnings of his much touted, modernist poem. But April was maligned.

Later in the century, ee cummings tried to restore the reputation of the season by calling it "mud-luscious. . . ."

Back in the mid-nineteenth century, Victorian gentleman of letters Alfred, aka Lord Tennyson, took an airier stance, though with a more patrician and less liberating view of the early season's effects, reminding us that, In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to love. . . . 

And decades before in the eighteenth century, the highland lad whom my dear old English prof liked to refer to familiarly as "Bobby" Burns- the irresistibly brogue- laden troubadour of the early romantic era- offered his own, lilting Scottish praise to the start of spring's signature bloom; it all sounds out in the lyrical, flirty dialect poem where Burns mischievously pretends to seduce the very flower of April by likening it to his love, O Were My Love Yon Lilac Fair.     

But it was Chaucer who captured the mood of the purple-petaled, showery month (rocked it, blew it over the top, knocked it out of the park!) in his prologue to "The Canterbury Tales," a cataloging in verse of life in the Middle Ages, comprised of 17,000 or so lines of perfect rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter and beginning in April. And in case you should start to ponder how to pronounce these first 18 lines of the famed prologue (see below), please refer to the video link to hear a really neat rendering of those incredible, late 14th century spoken words of a bygone mother tongue. You will be treated to some of the most engaging phrases in the language, among them one of my very favorite images describing the essential cuteness of little birdies chirping their tiny hearts out in April: 
And smale fowles maken melodye (said as: ond smahlleh foul-less mahken mel-oh-deeya, or something like that). Oh how lovely to even think, much less say it!

Honestly, could any feeling person ever resist such an utterance, not relate to it, not be moved?? Merely recalling the image of those adorable, wee "fowl" of the 14th century, singing happily away and "slepen" with their cute little open birdie's "eye" (pronounced eeya) in those musical, iambic cadences is a connection with the past, and also beats watching the news.

So here's a link to Chaucer's paean to April, recited in Middle English, the first 18 lines of The Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales," and be sure to listen for "smale fowles." It's so April.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahuT-JwxIa8

The General Prologue

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote 

     1

The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, 

     2

And bathed every veyne in swich licour 

     3

Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 

     4

Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth 

     5

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 

     6

Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 

     7

Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne, 

     8

And smale foweles maken melodye, 

     9

That slepen al the nyght with open ye 

     10

(so priketh hem nature in hir corages); 

     11

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, 

     12

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, 

     13

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; 

     14

And specially from every shires ende 

     15

Of engelond to caunterbury they wende, 

     16

The hooly blisful martir for to seke, 

     17

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. 

P.S. If you find yourself moved to go on a pilgrimage as the season gets 
underway, get your airline tickets early. 

     1

Facebook Phony

I’m an unabashed facebook voyeur.

It follows that most likely I'm not a very good "friend." It's really hard to maintain a serious relationship with dozens and dozens of good friends with whom you keep in touch on an almost daily basis.

Like many out there (and I believe there are quite a few of us), I stand outside the “platform” and gaze on passively, but don’t participate or respond. It’s kind of like going to a place of worship but not saying the prayers, preferring instead to observe the passion of others, the more authentic devotees. 

It really is the ultimate form of social media voyeurism and imbues  the faint illusion of superiority, this very detachment one feels from not joining in or embracing the energetic, throwing and scattering of prosaic words and images that goes on hourly if not by the minute. You believe you are safely under the radar by staying out of it. But in truth, is the act of scanning the page any better than reading the "stories" on yahoo?? And whether or not you remain silent, just by being present you're making yourself vulnerable to the many sneaky advertising ploys. 

The hypocrisy of this passive activity of course is egregious, since I detest everything facebook stands for; and yet I am drawn into its overreaching web, like shopping on Amazon. 

I understand the need for self expression. How often are we made to hold the phone and our tongues for umpteen minutes while a robotic menu frustrates our every attempt to speak, attacks the very core of our individuality and eventually wears us down. . . . The soulless commands exhorting us to keep on pointlessly pressing  numbers on the dial pad so that we hang on indefinitely, or better yet hang up; and all the while the knowing that the question/comment/complaint/issue that prompted the call in the first place may never be resolved. I totally get it. We need to talk, and we need to be heard.

But nonetheless, what are these facebook posting maniacs getting so worked up about all the time? What is driving them to cool/moral/indignant/serene/caring/funny/angry/involved/ concerned/original public stances? Is it politics that form the raison d’etre of this ongoing soap box, a rock band of nostalgia from the past, a gathering, a world event, the mere illusion of those hundreds of meaningful connections one has accrued without having to interact inter-personally with such an invisible gaggle of bosom buddies? Just being heard?

Is it the hope that people will cling to your every inane posting? I read the entries and smirk at the “clever” ones with my own self perceived cleverness, bristle at the annoying ones, but am mostly bored. And then there are all the re-postings of other posts. I mean, do these folks have a life outside their screens? Do I?

On the other hand, you could say we silent observers are simply even more alienated than the hardcore users, looking as we are to hitch a free ride on the thoughts, impulses and emotions of these more connected participants in virtual reality.

Isn't this very blog in fact a kind of totally solipsistic and (barring the wrath of Father Google) mostly individually controlled facebook??? Even the terminology is misleading. It's media, yes, though not always so social.

We live in a world where the bottom seems to be falling out  and the facebook phenomenon (think twitter, youtube, instagram et al) seems to provide temporary housing, at least when not contributing to the dissolution. 

Seems to.

Oh, let's just face it; time to read a bookbook?