Walking NYC at night

I used to walk Manhattan at night, in fact all thru the night till after midnight. I would take the bus from Rutherford NJ and arrive at the Port Authority transportation depot in about an hour. Although Rutherford was only 8 miles away from Manhattan, if you did not get an express bus you were obliged to take the local bus route, which wound its way thru various town, ultimately reaching Secaucus or Union City before proceeding into NYC via the Lincoln Tunnel, the construction of which I always intended to study one day; I found it amazing that the NJ Transit bus I was on, as well as all of the other vehicles, both cars and trucks of various shapes and sizes, would somehow traverse the water by way of a tunnel that took them from an urban NJ setting and, within the space of a few minutes, emerge into the heart of the Manhattan district. I never ceased to marvel at the feat of engineering that the Lincoln Tunnel represented: "Surely," I said to myself, "the air pressure must be regulated in such a way that everything goes smoothly" -- but I found myself unable to control my anxiety at those times when, for reasons unbeknownst to me or my fellow passengers, out progress would come to a halt while in the tunnel itself, when everything went black around us and the lights in the bus came on. However, whatever the cause of a momentary stoppage, if indeed there was one, the bus always emerged from the tunnel and proceeded up the ramp to the Port Authority building. In 2003 I was acquainted with an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn named Gedaliah, who was part of the management at the Manhattan Life Insurance company; he lived in Brooklyn (I believe) and he prided himself on the fact that he had never been inside the Port Authority itself, but I understand that to be just an example of the inherent prejudice New Yorkers have for those who reside out-of-state, the "bridges-and-tunnel" people was the derisive epithet used against commuters. Although I had originally wanted to live in New York for a time, I now found it way too crowded for me, and preferred the environs of Bergen County, still vastly more urban than Thiells NY, where I grew up, whereas Rutherford had a "city" feel to it without the sense of overweening claustrophobia that prevailed in a town dominated by skyscrapers. I felt that had no idea what they were missing out on, the joys of comparatively "country" living to be had from residing in NJ, which to my mind was a world with more natural features and comforts, not having to go to park to see grass and trees, for instance. ======================================================== Anyhow, I would spend my days in NJ and my evenings in NYC. I would catch a NJ Transit bus at 4 PM, get into Manhattan at about 5 PM, at would soon find myself on 42nd Street, heading east toward Broadway. At Broadway I would turn South and walk all the way to (usually) Canal Street, then walk east to Fifth Avenue, then head north to 57th Street, walking my way past the Plaza Hotel and Trump Tower, or sometimes as far as Central Park South, where I imagined that perhaps someday I would have a girlfriend with me that I could take a carriage ride thru the park with, then I would turn back towards where I came from, the West Side of town. I rarely, or I should say almost never, went east of 5th Avenue. As I plodded those streets, I pondered my place in life, what I wanted to be and who I thought I should become. Some of the nights I walked the streets of Manhattan was during the time immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, somehow, thru a social worker I was in contact with, I had received a six-month period of rental assistance as a grant thru a head injury fund; there was also work assistance, but my case manager seemed uninterested in working with me, plus the fact that I was too scared to drive to his office, as my vision was horrible and the roads were so confusing that the one time I did go and meet him, I got stopped by a police car for making a right where it said "No Right Turn" and received a ticket for the violation. ======================================================== One day at the Nat Sherman smoke shop I used to frequent I met a young Indian fellow who spoke with confidence and seemed to be an entrepreneur, as he kept repeating "direct to air dot com" like a mantra. He said his name was Jay and he was a self-made man from California and visiting New York for the first time and although he was only twenty years old, he claimed to a multi-millionaire. We hit it off immediately and spent the day together, walking all the way from 42nd Street to the WTC site, which was still papered over with "missing person" posters. He wanted to see for himself where the tragedy took place, I believe he may have known somebody who was killed in one of the towers; Jay and I mourned for his friend. We strode thru the crowd, arms over each other's shoulders. We made a strange pair and people thought we were undercover police. About this time I let him know that I had attended Bard College and he replied, "What a remarkable coincidence! My sister is studying at Bard College right now, in fact she's in the city right now and I'm going to see her tonight." However, he didn't mean she was studying at Bard in upstate New York, but at one of Bard's satellite campuses in Manhattan. We split up and made plans to meet again at Nat Sherman's at 4 PM. When I arrived at Nat's at 6 that evening, I saw a woman showing him around the humidor as, apparently, he had reserved a space for his personal cigars collections. Only the wealthiest and most spendthrift examples of Nat's clientele took these steps. Needless to say, I was impressed by what seemed like his financial acumen. We smoked cigars (I smoke cigarettes) at Nat Sherman's for awhile, and then he wanted to go to another smoke shop he had heard about which was downtown, he said. We eventually made our way down to the West Village, where he let me know his philosophy of life: "Nothing can happen to you, you have to get over your fears," he said to me, and sat down in the street, on the pavement before a moving car. I held my breath as the car zoomed into the other lane, avoiding Jay, who got up and dusted himself off with a sweep of his hand. "See," he said, "I'm alright." We found the place we were looking for, it was a hookah shop where people gather around a water pipe to smoke tobacco and blow smoke. I had never seen one before or since that time, in fact. Jay and I were introduced to a number of people who had also come to this establishment to smoke the hookah. A not very attractive girl said she had just gotten out of a relationship with a contortionist, meaning a man who could bend his body in a variety of ways. Jay introduced me as a money-manager. All were suitable impressed. We left there and eventually made it to the dorm where his sister was living. She yelled at Jay for quiet some time. Apparently he still lived with his mother and was less than fully independent. Such is life.

Wednesday's Response:

Check out what Jeremy Good said about me ! Jeremy wrote: Andrew, When I think of you, I think of a person who is just a mess of contradictions. Probably you think of them as complexities and are proud of them. I just think of them as weaknesses and inconsistencies. You're the Marxist who believes in the stock market, you're the whoremonger who wants prostitution to be illegal, you're the 911 conspiracist who is also a patriot. Probably "postmodern Christianity" is itself an oxymoron. What would I have you watch, you ask? I can't even get you to listen to a song I think is good, let alone direct your television watching. If you and I were to watch an hour of anything opinionated, we'd probably come away with different opinions. Read the New Yorker, from cover to cover, every week, then we'll have things of substance to talk about. Hot button issues aren't interesting to me. You like Fox News because you share the prejudices of a typical Fox news listener. You are basically a white chauvinist paternalistic patriarchal bore, but of course you like Hugo Chavez and Bobby Jindal and voted for Obama.

Why are the Grateful Dead such a polarizing band ?

Answers are as follows ----- KLB said: Deadheads are a breed of their own. I grew up in SFO when The Grateful Dead was alive and well. Saw them in the early days at Winterland, had a great time, and that was enough for me. Still LOVE to crank some Dead, though. =================== Professor Scrotenhauser said: The Professor gives you a good answer - that they're just worshiped, and that the most fervent cult members are generally regarded as losers. This guilt-by-association thing and the fact that the Dead are known for being a very loose band make some people associate them with laziness, which is not fair at all. Garcia was a brilliant guitarist, and didn't get that way by slacking. Some of their songs are deeply moving. Lady With A Fan has splendid, thought-provoking poetry for lyrics. Why does he say the soldier's strength was "strategy and not disaster"? Because it rhymes with "master"? What is a soldier prepared for? Traps. What is a sailor prepared for? Nothing but disaster. ==================== You are of course correct. I suspect if anyone were to do some serious research they would be able to demonstrate that there were good reasons for this based on the very different lifestyles of their loyal fans, the so called "Grateful Heads", and the ordinary fellow , the man in the street, who simply does not get what all the fuss is about. The "Grateful Heads" are by and large a bunch of feckless wasters prone to growing their hair long, adorning it with flowers, indulging idealistic notions of free love and peace and the abolition of property. They are generally so mashed off their faces after shooting up "wacky baccy" that they actually think they enjoy the Grateful Dead s music. On the other side of the divide we have people who actually have to work for a living and through their taxes support the lifestyles of the "Grateful Heads". The irony is that if property and big business were to be abolished as the "Grateful Heads" wish, there would be far less taxpayers money available to fund their lifestyle, but such finer details are no doubt lost in a cloud of smoke form the "wacky baccy". Of course I m no square, I was something of a hepcat in my youth, and I once grew my hair past my shoulder, wore bell bottom flares, and flowers in my hair. I got some very strange looks on the streets of Surbiton I can tell you. ===================== They Pelted Us With Rocks And Garbage said: Three primary reasons. First off ,because they were extremely popular, and popular bands always draw criticism. Secondly, you add that to the fact they were always a live band, which means all those kiddies who worship classic rock will never get them, because they can't be boiled down to a condensed milk version like so much other classic rock. Some bands are about the live experience, not the studio pretend version. If you ranked bands which built followings based on their live music, the Dead would be the apex of that pyramid. They're the anti-rapper. The anti-sample band. The band which is the opposite of the music nerd sitting with his lap top in his room or the guy who lives in a mansion, but never tours. Third, because they embraced experimental music in a big way while still clinging to the roots music which made rock. Thus they pissed off two groups at once, the people who hate old music and the people who hate odd or experimental music. ==================== Anonymous said: They aren’t. Most people simply don’t care. ===================== My response: I listen to the Dead every day and here's what I think: they did what few bands actually do in their musical career -- they built a community of followers that broadcast a spirit of peace and freedom into an American society from the 1960s to the 1990s which became increasingly corporately-controlled over that time-frame; their political decision to allow members of the audience to record their concerts was only one example of their overall anti-capitalist philosophy of distributing their productions in an unfettered fashion and lastly, because at the height of their fame, they were able to maintain a certain level of artistic integrity. I am not one of those who think commercial success ruined the band. Like Bob Dylan, another extremely polarizing figure, they were true artists and their body of work may be judged on artistic (non-commercial) standards.

I miss my long-time friend, Jeremy Gabriel Good - please contact me again !

Dear Christine, Do you remember the case of Jeremy Good ? I took a trip to Portland, Oregon in 1992 to visit Ivar and, during my time there, I became friends with both Jeremy Good and John Anders. Well, Jeremy made such a big impression on me that I brought back several examples of his drawings and writings and I eventually showed them to you in North Carolina. As I recall, you found it very interesting stuff, noting in particular his penchant from composing symmetrically abstract artwork; indeed, you thought it contained signs of a tortured genius, possible schizo-affective. Below is an email he sent me several years ago, when I was still living in New Jersey. --ABN Read below: ================================== From: Rhino Reason To: Andrew B. Noselli Subject: Anyone can cook. Date: Sunday, May 10, 2009, 8:20 AM Andrew: After our conversation yesterday on the topics of chauvinism, snobbery and literature, I thought I'd like to share with you some analysis I wrote. Hopefully you will enjoy reading it. - Jeremy Have you seen Ratatouille? If not, this email contains spoilers if you think that's important. If so, I would hope you will want to watch these clips again anyway. Be sure to watch them in the course of reading my description. By the way, the whole film has been put on youtube, last I saw... I sent this email to my father and likened Anton Ego to a friend of his at Yale's, one Peter Iseman, a displaced New Yorker. My father wrote back, "He does remind me of Peter, in both his egoistic and kinder incarnations" and went on to make what I took to be a gauche reference to Proust (but unlike my father, I haven't read Proust). Ratatouille happened to be on cable and I watched it again recently and then I watched and rewatched several times the scene containing the second clip below. I didn't know why I was watching it so much. Finally I had what I took to be a new insight and I thought I'd write you an email for the purpose of sharing it with you. On Abney's 7th birthday I think it was, I took her and several of her friends to see Rataouille. Well, it's such a well done film and was positively received among actual chefs in France, I read. This first clip isn't the part where Anton Ego is introduced. He is introduced ridiculing the title of a popular cookbook written by Gasteau, the dead ghost chef who guides the rat protaganist through the movie. The title is Anyone Can Cook. That just doesn't fit in with Anton Ego's super-elitist approach to the world. He goes on to give Gusteau's restaurant a negative review, causing Gusteau heartbreak and causing his restaurant to lose one of its stars in its rating. Which can be an absolutely catastrophic event in the world of fancy dining. I recently saw a documentary about a fancy restaurant opening in NYC by the family of a famous chef patriarch. Much of the effort and discussion hinged around the family's hope for a good review and when they only got two stars, what measures they took to up it to three stars (hiring a new head chef among them). Gusteau in fact dies partly due to heartbreak over this sad state of affairs. So Anton Ego is set up to be a peculiar antagonist, the archvillain of the movie. Once Gusteau restaurant starts to gain in popularity because of the teamwork of his unwitting heir with the genius chef rat hidden in his toque, it comes to Anton Ego's attention that Gusteau is gaining prestigious status again. This irks him and he sets on knocking Gusteau back to size again. In this opening part of this scene in the clip below, he is seen laboring over his skull-shaped typewriter beneath a gloomy, frowning self-portrait in a ginormous studio with impossibly tall ceilings. Towards the latter half of this clip, the young fresh owner of the restaurant fresh-faced unwitting heir to the Gusteau fortune, Linguini Maquette sits beside his lover and sous chef Remy. Anton Ego stalks in and insultingly challenges Linguini to find a way of pleasing his palate. Linguini hits Anton Ego back with the remark: "For someone who loves food, you're pretty skinny." Here is my favorite moment of the movie when Anton Ego responds gloweringly: "I don't like food. I love it. If I don't love it, I don't swallow it." He goes on to unload on the Maitre D' a bit of hellacious snobbery while challenging the chef to present any food item he pleases, certain that it won't appeal to his attenuated sense of refinement. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=2EEKcWoyuEw&feature=related Then comes the scene which Abney said was her favorite at the time and I remember feeling impressed with her for realizing what it was, a flashback. The sequence comes at the beginning of this next clip. The intermittent scene is missing from this email but what happens in the kitchen is that the rat decides to make Anton Ego a very simple dish, one not associated generally with haute cuisine, ratatouille, referred to dismissively by the sous chef as a "peasant dish." Well, never was such a simple dish so guilefully prepared, never were the vegetables in ratatouille so thinly sliced and artfully arranged. But that's not what gets to Monsieur Ego who is not so easily impressed. The moment he puts a forkful in his mouth, it brings him back to a different day and time, to when he was just a poor, skinny peasant boy, presumably targeted by bullies, arriving home from school full of hurt feelings. And there is his loving mother, who is sympathetic and working hard to comfort him. She presents him with a dish she toiled over. It happens to be ratatouille, and this version is prepared not so fancily. The single bite produces an instant shock to the venerable critic Anton causing him to drop his pen and shaking him "to his core" as he says in his review the next day. The reason it produces such an effect on him is not just the chance coincidence it presents of being one of his childhood favorite comfort foods and reminding him of his mother's love, care and attention. It also causes him to doubt his own philosophy, the idea that only the selected few are capable of presenting worthwhile fare. The revelation leads him to a change of heart and causes him to embrace the more egalitarian philosophy of Gusteau. This is brought home to him particularly when he finds that the chef is nothing but a common rat. He writes very eloquently about it in his review and displays a rare depth of introspection and humaneness. The fine actor Peter O'Toole later won an Oscar for the way he portrayed Anton Ego's voice. In this clip is the speech, and below I have copied it. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=JDK2azVSE5Q&feature=related The film has an extremely happy ending, one where the conflict of rat and human is surprisingly and neatly resolved and everyone is given a satisfactory place in their universe, with a beautiful kitchen modified ergonomically to specially accomodate the rat head chef.. A tinier rat restaurant sits above the human restaurant, a place where families can relax and cultivated, civilized rats enjoy one another's company. Well, there are other things about this movie that I loved, the romance I thought was endearing, the realistic presentation of how things are done in a kitchen was nifty. A friend who has written a book on her experience as a caretaker of rats informs me that the rats' movements are realistic. Anton Ego's Review: In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new; an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook". But I realize - only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more. I HAVEN'T HEARD FROM HIM IN SEVERAL YEARS, MAYBE YOU CAN WRITE TO HIM AND ENCOURAGE HIM TO GIVE ME ANOTHER CHANCE AT BEING HIS FRIEND ? Happy Thanksgiving, Andrew N.

Ephemera of the writing of Postmodern Christianity

In the Fall of 1994, when I was sharing a room with Amar Kakodkar at Bard College in Annandale, New York, I had a dream of a Golden Book titled Postmodern Christianity. I kept this dream to myself for the time, although it moved me deeply. During my Senior Year I approached Bruce Chilton, a Religious Studies professor at Bard and related the experience of the dream and asked him if I could write it as an independent study. He pointed out some parallel between my dream and Joseph Smith's dream of the Book of Mormon several hundred years previously, pretty much in the same geographical location. I worked on this book, really only a partially complete paper, during the final term at Bard; it had a concluding chapter which I have deleted, as I felt it did not measure up and because I accepted the ancient Chinese Buddhist dictum that 'incompleteness reflects perfection.' It was my attempt to conceive a new religion, or perhaps a gentle re-working of Christianity, parts of which were revealed to me within the dream of the Golden Book, which I felt uncomfortable inserting within my essay, which I felt ought to be a more or less academic exercise. Anyhow the three tenets of Postmodern Christianity, which were revealed to me in the dream or, rather, downloaded into my conscious mind the morning after the dream-experience is that one, the disavowal of the Virgin Birth and, furthermore, (although it pains me to write this now, so sacrilegious it appears to me) a denial in the resurrection of Jesus Christ (that Jesus lived as a man and was a man only) and finally, a disbelief in existence of an immanent realm called Hell. I have learned, since the writing of my thesis, that the Muslims also deny the Virgin Birth and I was very interested in reading Nietzsche's critique of the theologian David Strauss, who voiced the general opinion that the Bible should be read allegorically.