Musings

Summer

An office. A window. A view of another Manhattan skyscraper. You're supposed to want this, right? It's definitely a step up from my 1940s-era government cubicle in my last job. That building had a brilliant facade that in no way extended into the building. This one is non-descript outside but I'm told is going co-op. There's a free gym. It feels corporate inside. Bland. What I do like is my commute here. In the first ten minutes I walk down Avenue C below Houston, and then walk east through lower east side stores putting out their wares. Fruit. Shirts. A breakfast place on Clinton that looks more alluring when it's empty. Chinese stores. Matzah (crates of it!). Then down Essex. I now take New York's most obscure subway line to work: the (brown) JMZ. It's still a mostly non-white and hassidic crowd where I get on at the first stop in Manhattan. Bowery, then Canal, Chambers (huge, decayed, my old stop, most people get off), Fulton. I'm not sure if I'm closer to Fulton or Broad yet. Fulton's old school and frumpy. A few blocks south it changes as you approach the Chase Manhattan Plaza from any direction. There's a new condo building with an independent coffee shop in it. Unfortunately the whole independent allure is gone the second you see it's called "financier," has an "expresso" menu, and find that its illy and pastries taste like different varieties of cardboard. Two blocks away is my building. It's across the street from a construction site where they've saved the facade of an old 4-floor building presumably to front whatever new building is coming in. It's across the street from an old school diner with a neon sign called the Pearl. It's at the bend, 1 storey, attached, beneath 60s-era skyscrapers. How could I not try it? With some luck I'll be able to go there by summer's end and order "my regular." Oh the charm of frumpy Lower Manhattan.

It's deathly quiet in here. But loud outside. Construction. Repetitive banging. I told myself that writing this here now would get the creative juices flowing since I have to hunker down and write about housing! It's just been so long since I really wrote anything long, concise, and policy oriented. Design School core was more about design. Striking, that. Even for a wonk. That's what I'm doing this summer. I'm a fellow of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, which is the one center at Harvard that I followed long before considering becoming a student there. It seemed a swell opportunitiy even for a brief diversion from my goal of going into development (in brief, I got bored of critiquing development; I want to build). After this the whole idea of doing affordable housing in some distant future will be easier. Though I definitely want to do more generic development first. Until then, I get to look at my screen, or my view south, across Maiden Lane, at an Andreas Gursky-like alleghory of office windows.

(Actually it's not that dull. Yesterday I was here an hour, and they told me to come to a big meeting about a program they're creating to counsel first time home buyers. So I met big time housing people after being on the job for an hour. People were really nice. I got cards. I met people in city and state agencies. Bankers and mortgage brokers too. I'm having lunch with a nice guy I spoke to who went to Harvard. Crazy to be in the office for an hour and already using that as networking fodder. So there will definitely be good networking. It's just weird to know that my summer is mostly independent. To make it better I think I just need to start setting up the meetings. I like networking. :)

Leeds and London

My First Show

Today my first photography show at Harvard comes down. It's been up for 2 weeks in the main lobby opposite a show about the landscapes of Switzerland. My theme for the show was infrastructure of NYC, Ukraine, and California.

The summer of...

I’ve been marinating about how to write my end-of-the-summer post in which I announce that I’m now in merry olde Cambridge. Most of that thinking happened mornings in the shower in Brooklyn. That was while I was mostly just doing nothing. The plan was to blog about the apartment search and write a journal about the more private things that were pissing me off. I did neither. It was fabulous. Doing nothing is highly underrated.

It is however frustrating to do good thinking and then never really get around to it. The good news is that now that I’m about to start school I’ll have many the opportunity (perhaps too many) to write and funnel creativity into tangible products. Reflecting on my summer of shower thinking, I decided to create a gallery of summer pictures, and still post the pictures herein that made me laugh at the time.

 

It was the summer of the surprise party I threw for my mother’s 60^th at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, the summer when newborn babies entered my social milieu (one to my cousin [pictured above when 2 days old] and one to friends, both named Leo, both in greater Park Slope, both couples with an NYC-native and a Bay Area-native parent), the summer when I left NYC politics and my cousin entered it, the summer of 3 trips to Chicago (to go to my 5^th college reunion, to my brother’s college graduation, and to Brett and Emilie’s wedding), the summer that Aaron and I left our Park Slope brownstone of 3 years and I moved to an immense loft overlooking the Long Island Rail Road Vanderbilt Yards in a block of bought-out and mostly empty converted factory-lofts headed for eminent domain while he traveled from Riga to Hong Kong on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the summer I somehow talked my way into a free summer at said loft rooming with the ever-cool Megan, the summer when I threw 3 loft parties in said loft, the summer I made 3 trips to Cambridge to look for an apartment (and got one at Inman Square), the summer when I got my first gig as a paid photographer, the summer when I vacationed very locally (Philadelphia, New Milford CT, Cherry Grove NY) intentionally staying around the City and hanging out at coffee shops and seeing museums before leaving, the summer when I read the full canon of Augusten Burroughs for shits and giggles, the summer that lots of friends visited me (Dan from London, Alison from Chicago, Cathy from Ithaca, Galeet and Erica from Philly, and Erica F returning from 2 years of Peace Corps in Kiribatis ["near Fiji"]), and lots of friends just stayed over since I had that much space, the summer that I made new friends (Ayuko, Ginny, Annika, Jason B), the summer when many friends dispersed from NYC for school programs near and far (Tamar and Radhika to Berkeley, Meghan and Josh to Evanston, Aaron to Newark, Pam to Taipei), and others came to New York anew (Rachel from Ottawa, Ginny from Chicago, Arleigh and Neil from San Francisco), and the summer when my brother came to NYC, and after 4 great years there I left it for an educational interlude.

Departing is such sweet sorrow. Below’s a picture I took on my first trip to Cambridge at the CVS in Porter Square. I was thinking of entitling it “Boston’s gonna be fine.”

… and the wedgie that probably made Rafael Nadal lose to Mikhail Youzhny (a then relatively unknown player) in the Quarterfinal of the US Open.

 
This is a reflection of the sky over the Hudson and the west side highway from beneath the High Line.

I’ve now left Eminent Domain Land/Prospect Heights and UHaul’d my way to Inman Square/Cambridge in order to start a (2-year) Masters of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Cambridge seems a lot like Berkeley so far. Tonight I meet my new classmates.

Postcard from Brooklyn

The best thing about this summer is that I’m done with my job! People ask me what I do with my time and the answer is simply “nothing.” It’s amazing. I’ve never done this before. It’s amazing to just be and not have to do anything or be a tourist with sights to see. Chilling out for two months is in fact novel to this Californian. It does however feel like a weird thing to be doing at 27. But there are a few things that make it fine: that I’m doing it for a finite amount of time (‘til September), that I have no rent*, and that when it’s over I’ll become a grad student at Harvard. Not bad.

*Footnotes to the first paragraph: “No Rent”? Am I living at home? No. Amazingly I’m living in the nicest place I’ve ever lived in my 4 years in New York. By the grace of God I found myself having beers with the newest member of the Policy Department at work in May at Loreley, one of my favorite beer gardens in the Lower East Side. My mom was there too since she’d announced that she was at Century 21 and wanted beer. So there we were and Megan goes off on this tangent about how she likes the columns at Loreley but the apartment she’s currently in has columns twice as big, and then how she’s got great apartment karma and has lived in all these amazing apartments in New York without ever paying more than $400. Megan’s incredibly nice and has this magnetic personality that you don’t run into much. It’s not hard to imagine that she makes incredibly nice impressions on people that result in this karma. Luckily I have good people karma. So when she got to the part about how she’d re-established contact with distant relatives who’d been bought out of this amazing apartment that’s slated for eventual demolition that she was now living in following their departure and that she was actually kind of lonely there since there weren’t many people left in the building, I volunteered that my Park Slope brownstone had just been sold and (with a bit of my Mom’s prodding) asked her if she wanted a roommate for the July and August. And her response? “Totally!” “What?” “Yeah, totally!” And so that’s how I ended up living in a 1500+ square foot loft condo conversion in the former Spalding Factory directly overlooking the Atlantic Yards in the footprint of the planned/future Brooklyn Nets development. It’s such a non-category in the New York living experience that I’m sure Malcolm Gladwell would gladly write about us if he’d ever heard about us.

 

This Eminent Domain land (as I like to call it) is quite the ironic place to be living right before going to graduate school for Urban Planning and after two years serving as land use policy analyst to New York City’s second highest citywide elected official. Although he doesn’t know it, Daniel Goldstein’s now my neighbor two doors down. Oh, and I have central air and chrome appliances. They’re pretty. I’m now sitting in the swing in the living room blogging about this (a funny spot considering that I proudly blogged in the backyard last summer and even photographed it—now I’m indecent so I’ll spare you). Every so often I daydream about co-hosting a giant party with Megan on the roof with live bands called “Rock the Yards.” I’ve made a few preparations, such as taking pictures of the building from the train yards themselves which are usually left open. So I took some pictures that I intended to use for invites. In the meantime I posted them to Flickr, and was immediately befriended by such lovely Brooklynites as “No Land Grab” and “F-Trainer.” ‘Til then it’s tame wine parties in a loft and on our roof both too big to fill ... punctuated by a lot of sleep.

 

So what exactly do I do with all this time? Well, I do have a few stated goals. Read, go the gym, find an apartment in Cambridge/Sommerville, fix my bike, go to museums, see the some new neighborhoods in town. I’m also considering rejoining the crazy Park Slope Food Co-op for a month so I can make eccentric fruit salads and just maybe learn how to cook. So far I’ve delivered on the reading but not the gym. I finally finished Kenji Yoshino’s book Covering (highly recommended to all), and earlier this week read Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors, and Magical Thinking. I’ll join the chorus on RwS re wondering how the hell they’re going to turn this into a movie. Two weeks ago I started and immediately dropped both The Devil Wears Prada and Max Barry’s Syrup—Galeet's and Yana’s faults respectively ;). Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is intriguing to us map/city freaks but I’m not sure I’d recommend it since it’s a bit obscure even to map nerds. Today I ordered books by David Rakoff and Sarah Vowell. And last week I finally started George Chauncey’s Gay New York. I’ve been meaning to read it for almost the whole time I’ve been in New York. In fact I bet Meghan doesn’t even remember loaning it to me the year she and Josh moved to Brooklyn from Jersey City. They’ve now left Brooklyn and moved back to Chicago. She had it from the core back at the University of Chicago. It crossed my mind that in my closeted days back then that I might have actually opted not to take the core sequence she took out of fear of feeling weird when reading a gay text in a discussion oriented class. It’s a weird thought especially considering that one of the reasons I liked the second half of Magical Thinking is precisely because Burroughs spends so many chapters describing how deeply in love he is with his partner Dennis. We gay twenty-somethings in New York really don’t have many role models in successful long committed relationships. There are several reasons for this: such as being in a relationship can easily translate to being a homebody when so much of the crazy New York life takes place in public places, or that there are so many dating options out there. The one gay couple I know my age here that’s been together for 6 years have I think finally broken up for the last time. Perhaps the longterm relationships come in our 30s? Or maybe just when we’ve left New York?

This leads in well to what’s really eating up all my time. I finished my job and thought to myself that I have about eight weeks, wouldn’t a summer boyfriend be great? Bad idea. Despite my optimism that I could somehow find an instaboyfriend, online dating is a black hole for my free time, and all the good contenders have big jobs that make them busy all the time.

 

So that leaves me in the murky waters of either becoming friends with those few folks after a nice date or two or being thrown to the rather vast hookup crowd that I’ve always avoided. This logical proof didn’t somehow stop me from going on a number of first dates. I'm not entirely sure why I went on them since there's no time to develop a relationship with these people. But I like meeting new people. I think I'm a people junkie.

The most notable/weird date in my mind was actually a closeted guy I met. I thought maybe I could be a good influence to this 25 year old hasid who wrote me. He immediately called when he learned that I was at least somewhat observant growing up (we did Shabbat every week and I know what a shidduch is). His parents are non-religious Russian immigrants, and he’d become religious by his own accord, gone to Yeshiva in Crown Heights, had an arranged marriage, had a kid who’s now 3, since gotten divorced and become his kid’s primary guardian, and is apparently gay. He’d never been to Park Slope despite being a Brooklyn native. We had coffee at the Tea Lounge. He was clearly uncomfortable there. So we ended up sitting by the door where it wasn’t possible for other people to see us. With his full beard, after asking me if I liked Matisyahu (which I don't -- as if he were somehow emblematic of our one pop culture overlap), he went on to tell me he made himself enjoy having sex with his ex-wife who he otherwise freely described as immature and psychotic, and took part in a group called “Jonah” (an acronym for "Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality") where young hasids who suspected they might be gay learned to “channel” their sexual desires away from members of the same sex. I made a mental note that I'd never heard new-agey words like "channel" used to mean intentional suppression of sexuality. He then went on to tell me how less religious Jews like me are unknowledgeable and don’t truly experience our Judaism and that I should seek out various Chabad rabbis out at Harvard and Berkeley.

It’s as if meeting the hasidic gay guy were some sort of proselytizing derby: I to let him think it was ok to be gay, and he to tell me that I should really be more Jewish. Maybe I shouldn’t have presumed he’d want to meet someone online as a stepping stone to coming out, because I certainly wasn’t looking for someone like him to tell me I should be more religious. After all this he wrote me a text message the next day saying how great it was to meet me and that we should do it again. All told I thought our meeting was pretty excruciating. Clearly not friendship potential. I’d like to be able to help him but I just didn’t connect with him substantially enough to feel interested enough in taking him on as any sort of project.

Short of finding a boyfriend, I decided to theme a mix for one. In June I joined the International Mixtape Project after DailyCandy wrote about it. It’s an international list where you are randomly assigned someone on the list, and someone else is randomly assigned with you and you both send and receive a mix once a month. I just got mine for July from someone in England. And my August one, which goes to some girl in Virginia I’ve decided to call my “Summer Boys mix” – it’s an indie mix where every track includes the word “boy” somewhere – stuff like: “I wish you were my Boyfriend” by the Magnetic Fields, “The Boy who Never Lied” by Ultrasport, “Sexy Boy” by Air, and “Music is my Boyfriend” by the Hidden Cameras. It’s cute and actually pretty good. So is the mix I made last month which all the friends I visited in trips to Chicago and Philadelphia now hold copies of it that, I'm told, they adore. And so I make an offer to anyone who’s made it this far in this post. Well actually an offer and a request. The offer is a mix – send me a SASE (with at least $1.20 on it) and I’ll send you a mix. And the request is that I’d like this to be Invite-Jesse-To-Lunch-With-You month. I think it’d be fun. I could see where you all work now that I’m soon to be leaving New York. Also if you manage to invite me to lunch and request your mix in tandem, you can skip the SASE. And if I get my shit together and join the co-op let’s do a dinner at the loft.

 

Photo Key: Silkscreening T-shirts at the SPACE1026 in Philly (I got many t-shirts out of this.. they rock). The "pretty" appliances at the loft. The loft building from the Atlantic Yards. Drit and I on the roof. Sunset on the roof. Brett and Emilie at their wedding in Oak Brook (Jordan went too; Annika was my date and host in Naperville; I also brunched with Brette G on that trip--my third to Chicago this summer following my 5th college reunion and Misha's graduation from Northwestern). Alison in our swing. Close up of Maurice on the roof. Erica (who just returned from 2 years of Peace Corps on an electricity-less Central Pacific sub-island of Kiribati) and Louisa on the roof after sunset (the three of us went to high school together in SF). An art-deco fire dept I liked in Red Hook near the Brooklyn entrance to the Battery tunnel.
 

Our Lady of LIC

She looked better (last year) before she was done. Is it me or does she have a Frida Kahlo likeness? (5Pointz, LIC)

Summer Fun for the whole famn damily

First the party, then the requiem. Despite the oppressive heat, summer may be my favorite season in New York. Why is this season different from every other season? Because in this season we party outside. Let's start with some spring and food porn (JWay thinks I should be a food photographer). I hope there'll be many festivities where we can get those two in the same frame. Insofar as the summer has gone so far, I've somehow ended up in Williamsburg more times in the last week than I've been in the last year. I've gone recently for DuMont Burger, M. Shanghai, My Moon, and Royal Oak. And I will be returning soon for Team Queen's Release Party at Galapagos (Weds 10), Fun, and hopefully trivia night at Pete's Candy Store.

This brings me to you kids in the peanut gallery. This may be my last summer in New York for a while (I'm leaving in late summer to go to grad school for 2 years in Beantown -- don't worry, I'll still visit, my fam's still here), and so I have a long list of things to do. And I want you to do them with me. So I started making a list of things to do below. E-Mail me and let me know what you'll be joining me for:

(check back here for updates and/or comments)

Explore Neighbs and New York places I haven't visited yet: Broad Channel, Jamaica Estuary, The Rockaways, Wave Hill, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Roosevelt Island (not by tram, sadly), Van Cortlandt Park, Randall's Island, Arthur Kill (incl. the Boat Cemetery and sundry other urban grunge), and possibly Fire Island.

Quiz nights at the slipper room (mon, LES) or pete's candy store (tues, Wburg) even though i'd probably suck at it

Do an outdoor movie (Bryant park), opera (Central park), and concert (summerstage, castle clinton [B&S, Okkervil River, Hold Steady, TL+Rx], siren fest at coney, or prospect park [New Porn, Hop Fu])

nightlife comma more of it. some ideas: Mehanata, see DJ Hutz or Gogol Bordello (if they're here), new bklyn gay spots (fun, cattyshack, dragon lounge) including maybe a barcrawl on atlantic ave, seeing indie bands in okay or shitty overcrowded venues on Ludlow or some loft somewhere)

Art: Galleries, AMNH (i've never been; and the Darwin exhibit's spose to be good), MoMA (i haven't been enough), the whitney biennial, PS1's urban playa (should the DJs be good)

Funky Ice Creams: Il Laboratorio (Honey Lavender), Tempo Presto (Orange Cardamom), The Chocolate Room (Strawberry Honey), Cones (berry flavors, ginger) and perhaps a Chinatown Ice Cream Factory t-shirt for kitsch value. And sweets too: Lady M is high on the list.

Parades: i've still never seen PR-day (I've always gone to Portugal/Brazil Day in Newark instead). Maybe i'll walk in gay pride with betsy this year. hmm.. nah.

I'm already nostalgic about the summer that hasn't happened yet.

On public spectacles and marketing genocides

David Blaine takes the cake for weird sight of the day along my walk up the west side from Tribeca yesterday (Sunday). I'm not really sure why I'm adding to his PR with this picture. He's already enough of a public spectacle with his spot in the middle of Lincoln Center (for the week) in addition to getting the front page of Sunday's NYT. Symbolically though, I think his week of waterlogged semi-nudity for all to see makes it feel like summer has arrived.

The honor for weird sight of the week goes not to him, but to the tallest woman I've ever seen... who I happened to be walking a few feet behind on Wednesday. I wish I'd had my camera with me then. I was on my lunch break from jury duty in Downtown Brooklyn when I saw her. She must have been 7 feet tall. She was just walking down Court Street talking with her friend -- who she totally dwarfed. She made Minute Bol look short. And I'd just seen him the weekend before. He was one of the speakers at the Darfur rally in DC. Obama was there too. Neat speakers, but I was a bit surprised that the people in attendance were almost all Jews. Yes it must be easier to market a genocide cause to Jews, but that's such a lame explanation.

Future Sounds of Bklyn

I give you some choons from my secret life as an mp3blog devotee. A gaggle of wild French truffle boars painstakingly selected them from a couple of my favorite blogs and labels. (The pic is from last week near the Tenderloin in SF).

(To Download: Right Click, Save Target As..)

Future Sound of ..
Berlin // Ellen Allien & Apparat - Do Not Break
France // Yelle - Short Dick Cuizi
Kenya // Sinpare - Jina Langu
Boston // Wayne & Wax - A It Dat

Scandinavian Indie
Marching Band - Feel Good About It // Linköping, Sweden
The Envelopes - Sister in Love // Sweden
The April Skies - Rise & Rise Again // Norway
Dýrðin - Prins í Álögum // Reykjavik, Iceland

Breuckelen Bands
World/Inferno Friendship Society - Brother of the Mayor of Bridgewater
The PeachWaves - Too Much Shit
Palomar - Planeiac
Stellastarr* - Love and Longing

Young Female Songwriters
Uffie - Ready to Uff // Avenue D meets Ms Kitten
Tender Forever - Then If I'm Weird I Want To Share // New Lesbian Rock
The Vibration - 87 // UK Grrl Band

From the Decks to your Spinning Class
Stacs of Stamina - Mistake, Rewind, Repeat (dDamage rmx) // Sweden
Lady Sovereign - Hoodie (Mizz Beats rmx ft. Baby Blue, Ears, Jme, Jammer & Skepta) // Grime
Bonde Do Role - Funk da Esfiha (Curtis Vodka rmx) // Favela (Brazil)
Madonna - Hung Up (Diplo rmx) // better than the $400 seats at MSG
Enduser - More Distant Than you Think (Larvae rmx) // Bollywood Breaks

God's gift to MP3blog enthusiasts came last year in the form of The Hype Machine which is a realtime aggregator of MP3blog postings. It's nothing less than amazing. Especially considering how all of this is somehow legal -- as promos or something.

Finishing School?

So it looks like I'm going to be leaving New York to go spend two years in Boston. It's a weird thought to leave the big city for the provinces. ;] I'm going to go back to school for a Masters in Urban Planning at Harvard's Grad School of Design. I'll be focusing on urban redevelopment, affordable housing, and real estate development and finance. Those emphases will involve some classes at Harvard's other grad schools (Govt, Biz, Law) and maybe MIT (which also has a great urban planning program). Since my work's pretty wonky, I thought I'd do a little photo collage up top to prepare for this whole "design school" thing. I can't believe I'm leaving New York or even Brooklyn. A move this summer was inevitable I suppose since my apartment building is being sold and turned into a single family home. But this is a big move. As the roomie Aaron points out, at this age it was between getting hitched or going back to school. I don't know Cambridge at all. So, a few simple requests: tell me where to live in Boston, introduce me to your friends there, and come visit me. Got it?