a punker chick on astor place

Last evening as I came up out of the Astor Place subway station a young punker girl was begging off the exiting subway riders.

"Can I bother you for 10 cents?" she asked in a clear sweet voice.

It went through my mind to reply "save your change, you're already bothering me for free." But I don't particularly like the idea of teasing anyone who is begging, even if she is clearly less in need than others. So, I kept my mouth shut and walked toward the corner.

As I waited at the light, however, I began to feel guilty (as only a good Catholic boy can) for the smart ass comment that had never even left my head. I rumbled through about 75 cents worth of change in my pocket, stepped back over to her and emptied all of the change into her cup. Her sweet needy expression changed immediately. She growled at me like a mad dog, then purred, then laughed maniacally. I rolled my eyes and walked away.

It's been sixteen years since I first encountered the loser neo-punker kids that have hung out around St. Mark's Place in the East Village for over three decades. Even when I first arrived in the late 1980s they felt like an anachronism, dressed to the smallest detail in punker-gear that had not changed in the slightest from that of their predecessors from the 1970s. Never mind that the kids in the late '80s were babies when the punker movement started and that the kids on St. Mark's today were babies in the late '80s. The gear and attitude are identical. They are way too closely related to the Goths, Renaissance Faire participants, Trekkers, and Rocky Horror Picture Show crowd than they would ever admit. They're the branch of the Society for Creative Anachronisms that don't have day jobs.

Begging has always been a part of their modus vivendi. In my early East Village years there was a punker girl with an albino rat under her coat who begged on St. Marks, sometimes by herself, sometimes with a skinny pale mohawked boy or two. The girl would politely ask passers by for change, and if they refused, she would thrust her pet rat into their faces and growl, "then do you want to kiss my rat." Tourists would scream. Natives would wince and walk around her, dully annoyed. Either way she had the affect she had intended.

Today the East Village is far more developed. Most of the students living in the area have trust funds paying their $3000 to $4000 a month rent. Second-generation yuppies push giant strollers down narrow sidewalks that once were full of artists, druggies, and "fencers" (dealers in stolen goods). And fewer of the original ethnic markets and head shops are still holding their own against the franchises. But these young punker wannabees are nevertheless drawn back to the area, and despite that they are as annoying as a junior high student who has only recently discovered black nail polish and angst, I kind of like that they are there. I'm just going to have to get my game face back on.

satan's handiwork

The hand of Satan is alive and well in Senator Rick Santorum's commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and Bob and I personally witnessed the expanse of his power over the Presidents' Day weekend. Apparently, while Santorum was off divining homosexuality and natural disasters, Satan was undermining human goodness by far less predictable means. Driving through the suburbs, country roads and antique malls of Eastern Pennsylvania we saw with our own eyes the following insidious tools used by the Prince of Darkness to destroy our American culture and way of life:

• Suburban Housing Communities: a multitude of identical houses, with identical off-white siding, punctuate what once were pastoral hillsides, in tight, treeless rows like giant tomb stones. Apparently, Satan does not want individuality or creativity, and is stipulating the sameness through developers and community boards. Most Demonic Feature: giant two-car garage doors looming forward from the front exterior of each home nearly obliterating any other recognizable front entrance feature of the house.
  
  
• The Cell Phone and the Automobile: Satan has sent the cell phone to make traffic even more deadly. Every bad driver we encountered, from the slow poke in the passing lane to the idiot pulling into traffic without a glance in the mirror, was on his or her cell phone. Most Demonic Feature: hands-free headsets. This is Satan coming as an "angle of light," convincing drivers that not using their hands to talk on the phone frees up their brains as well.
  
  
• Strip-Mall Cuisine: it is damn near impossible to find an old-time dinner these days, much less a restaurant that doesn't think of wings as a salad and fries as a side vegetable. Most Demonic Features: the endless repetition of Olive Garden, Ruby Tuesdays, Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, Dunkin Donuts and any Chinese restaurant with "Buffet" in its name.
  
  
• Post-eBay Antique Malls: there is nothing there there. Senior citizens have found a way to avoid the high cost of self-storage units by simply dumping everything they don't want in antique malls. The malls are now full of nothing more than discolored afghans, dinged up wagon-wheel coffee tables, church or bank calendars from the early 1990s and hand-painted garden art (e.g. the wooden jigsaw cutouts of the woman bending over or pipe-smoking yokels leaning on the porch rail). Most Demonic Feature: those scary dressed up porcelain dolls that these old folks bought in five easy payments from a Reader's Digest advertisement.
  
  
• Wal-Mart: Entire hillsides have been deforested, not just for the Wal-Mart itself, but its parking lot the size of a small town and the symbiotic clingers, like dollar stores, car washes and fast-food restaurants that ring the lot. Most Demonic Feature: the small road that connects the Wal-Mart lot to a similar giant parking lot for Home Depot, ringed by a small video store, gas station and a one-hour photo hut.

men i would like to photograph - just about to luge my mind

From previous posts, you all know that my favorite sports (for jock-watching) are rugby, Aussie Rules football, wrestling, and weightlifting.

But to my surprise, the Torino Winter Olympics (which usually don't hold my interest because of the predominance of skinny plucked blonds in heavy clothing) have introduced me to a brand new sport: the luge! The men are big, dark and scruffy and wearing skin-tight gear, hurdling crotch-first down a track toward the camera!

Italy's Armin Zoeggeler (top left), Germany's Georg Hackl (middle), and U.S.A.'s Mark Grimmett (bottom with doubles partner Brian Martin) are stunning. (Check out Grimmet with the dark gruff in the photos from the World Cup races).

So in today's post to this recurring entry in my blog titled "Men I Would Like to Photograph" (with the first entries being Italian soccer hunk Angelo Peruzzi, Serbian strongman competitor Ervin Katona, and Portuguese soccer player, Luis Figo) I'm adding the whole damn sport of men's Olympic luge competition.

This recurring listing goes like this: anytime I see a guy that I would like to photograph, I will post his picture here, with a request to anyone who knows him (or someone who looks like him) to pass along my open invitation to sit nude in front of my camera.

So once again, I'm serious about this invitation. If you know Armin, Georg or Mark (or a close facsimile of any one of them) have him contact me through my photography web site. (Caution: photography site may not be work-friendly.)

snow

Over the past 16 years, at the first real snow fall of each season (and any other significant accumulations afterward) Bob and I have gone to Central Park and played. If it has started in the middle of a weekday, we've called one another and meet up after work. If we have woken up to snow on a day off, we've headed out early, camera in hand, bundled like Michelin Men. One year when I had the flu, we still ventured as far as the South-East corner in front of the old Plaza Hotel and caught a 20-minute horse carriage ride around a portion of the park.

Yesterday morning I woke to the wind and the lightening around 6:45 a.m. and could hardly keep myself from waking up Bob immediately. I managed to let him sleep, but even still, by 9 a.m. we were both out in the gusty whirl of heavy flakes, traipsing through the Village streets in powdery snow drifts with the few other daring souls who braved the heaviest showers of the day with shovels, or pets, or cameras of their own. By noon we were in Central Park ahead of the crowds that would pour in a few hours later.

Highlights (see photos): the still green ice that had formed on the surface of the lake in Central Park; the small dogs that couldn't make it out of the trenches trampled down by foot or tires; the multitude of birds that congregated along the paths in the Ramble; the driven Upper-East-Side parents shouting "Good Job!" as they watched their children sledding (as if by simply allowing gravity to have its way, their children somehow made one more step toward good self-esteem and their Harvard acceptance letter).

After a few hours, we had hot chocolate by the fireplace in the Boat House in Central Park. At one table sat character actor Gregory Jbara with his child. At another table, a homeless woman with her bags of belongings stared intensely out over the lake, compulsively clacking her tongue or her teeth rhythmically, incessantly. We watched several groups of snow-coated trekkers begin to sit down at the table next to her, stare curiously and then move away. Of the one family that chose to stay for a while, the two grade-school-age children couldn't take their eyes off of her. They were transfixed, like startled animals, each time the woman would start clacking again. Since our table was behind theirs, Bob and I were tempted to start clacking our tongues as well, just to mess with the kids' minds.

We came home as the snow was dying down in the afternoon and just lounged about in our bed, watching the last of the flakes falling outside the window. Around 4 p.m. we walked along Washington Square North once again, this time amidst large swarms of college students and neighbors coming out to play. We stopped in to see if we could get a "walk-in" table around the bar at Babbo and not a moment too soon, as the restaurant filled up quickly after us. We had our Valentine's Day dinner two days early, enjoyed the pasta tasting menu and some wonderful Italian wine, splurging against our diets and our budget, and then carefully toddled our way back home along the few short icy blocks above the Square, over stuffed and a little tipsy.

All in all, it was pretty much the most easy-going day we've had in over a year. No projects, no worries, no papers to gather for a mortgage company or a contractor or a lawyer. We just played, and relaxed, and hung out with each other and the City.

And my psyche knew it better than I did. All last night I had dreams of gratitude.

star gazing

Since moving back to the Village two months ago, Bob and I have spotted a few celebrities out and about in our neighborhood. The following list isn't even good shameless name dropping, since we simply saw these people on the street or in restaurants, just as anyone else could have. It's not like we were invited to the same party or went on the same private school admissions tour with them. Other than helping Victoria Jackson find a cab and shaking hands with Cory Kahaney, we didn't speak to any of the rest of them. So I won't be slinging the words "my friend" in front of any of the following, but here they are:

Meryl Streep on the corner of 13th Street & Broadway.

Parker Posey in Veselka's on 2nd Avenue at 9th Street.

Scott Speedman (from Felicity) stepping out of a movie trailer on 8th Street near 5th Avenue.

Victoria Jackson (from Saturday Night Live) at the Union Square Theater on 17th Street off Park Avenue South.

Cory Kahaney (from Last Comic Standing) previewing her new comedy review at the Union Square Theater on 17th Street off Park Avenue South.

Mario Batali (Restaurateur with three restaurants and an apartment within a five minute walk of our apartment) he's ubiquitous.

David Karger (from the Today Show and Entertainment Weekly) in Mexicana Mama's on Hudson near 10th Street.

I'm no stalker and I hate to bother celebrities when they're just trying to go about their daily lives. You won't see any paparazzi photos from me. However, I was very tempted to speak to Meryl Streep. She is a true acting luminary and I adore her. But she was huddled with what looked to be her daughter, conversing intimately as they stared from across Broadway at the Union Square Stadium theater marquee.

Still I will confess that Bob and I have connected with celebrities in the past. There was the time that Billy Baldwin caught Bob checking out his crotch, which reportedly was packed pretty damn nicely in his jeans as he walked with his girl friend toward Bob on the sidewalk outside the Arts Club building on Gramercy Park South. Billy just smiled and winked at Bob, who didn't know whether to be totally embarrassed or flattered.

Or there was the time I saw Ed Harris coming out of a shop and before I could stop myself I called out "Ed Harris?" It wasn't a yelp from an adoring fan. It had more the tone of an old friend saying "Ed? Eddy Harris? Is that you?" I didn't say it that way on purpose. It just came out that way.

He turned and smiled quizzically at me with those adorable blue eyes, as if to ask, "Do we know each other?" But he simply replied, "Yes?" This forced me to come up with something nice but unobtrusive on the spot. I ended up thanking him for his work and leaving him to his own life quickly, though I only narrowly escaped my impulse to blurt out how much I loved his muscular hairy chest.

Anyway, these all simply serve as reminders that we're back in the Village. Granted, when we went home each evening to our old apartment in Brooklyn we usually stayed in and watched TV. Maybe if we'd gone out more, we might have seen some of Brooklyn's celebrities, like, um, say, pugnacious Borough President Marty Markovitz or gay porn star Donnie Russo (link not work-friendly) who we did see now and again. Supposedly there are a few stars and several writers who live in Park Slope, and Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams lived not far from our old place in Boerum Hill, but we never saw them.

You just plain see celebrities more often in the Village, without having to go looking for them. So, I'll keep you posted on who's on the street.

winter blues

 

Even though this has been a milder winter than usual, the sun is still going down before I get home at night, and it amazes me how much its absence affects my mood.

The sun lurks past coldly,
an estranged friend
sneaking by
on the
opposite sidewalk
avoiding eye contact
behind a turned-up collar of
silhouetted buildings.
He hangs in other hemispheres these days.
I must be
last season's affair,
if he thinks of me at all.

The day opens
her doors only briefly,
pulling in her awning
as schools let out,
flipping her sign to "closed"
as the shadows grow long on the sidewalk,
slipping onto the bus before rush hour.
I pass her grated storefront
on my way to and from work,
wondering if she's gone out of business.

The papers pile on my desk,
layers moldering together,
settling
into impenetrable strata,
insurmountable mounds.
I should have raked
them into manageable heaps
and burned them back when they first fell there.
I cannot begin to make sense of them.
They are past their deadlines
waiting as mulch for the crocuses.

plucked priven

Cute hairy-chested funny man Jeremy Piven is on the cover of the current issue of Cargo magazine with his collar unbuttoned and I'm disappointed.

The guy who stopped me dead in my tracks each time he took off his shirt on Ellen's old sitcom and in several movies where he's played the goofy, but sexy side kick, has clipped his chest hair to that annoyingly even 1/8-of-an-inch-all-over length that too many guys have been doing in recent years. The gruff that he has let grow on his chin for the magazine cover even looks thicker than the stubble on this chest.

As I've said before, either let it grow naturally or shave it all off, but the plucked-goose stubble thing has got to go. It's not body hair and it's not smooth. It looks like a mistake or a half-way growth. It looks itchy as hell. It has no significance of its own.

No doubt having turned 40 last year, Piven, or his managers and publicists, has decided that body hair, which was sexy in his 20s, takes on new, negative associates now that he has reached middle age. He looks a little like he's starving himself in the picture and has apparently donned a toupee or plugs as well. I had to do double and triple takes to confirm that it was even him on the cover.

Jeremy, baby, I've got one suggestion for you. Everyone knows when you're faking it. Let yourself be what you are. You're a sexy man because of your energy and humor, as much as your looks. Keep it real! Which in your case is real hairy, real cuddly, and really funny. Uncuddly, unhairy, and unfunny are a dime a dozen in Hollywood right now.

oregon seven, fiave, fiave, fiave, fiave

As Bob and I have notified friends and acquaintances of our new address and phone number, we can tell the dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers by the way they congratulate us--not for finally owning something of our own, or for the great Village location, or for surviving a year of bad contractors. No, the true old-time New Yorkers have congratulated us for getting a 212 area code.

Area code is an issue for Manhattanites. I remember, years ago before cell-phones introduces the 917 and 646 area codes to the City, when I was teaching at an often-pretentious Upper East Side private school, there was brief talk of addressing the expanding demand for phone numbers by changing the Upper East Side area code from 212 to 718. The parents at the school (and probably every Upper East Side private school) were in an uproar. I actually heard one of them cry out (as if she were being denied food or water), "I pay good money to have my 212 area code!" and several others murmured in distraught agreement.

The issue, for those of you outside metropolitan NYC, is that 212 is the earliest area code for Manhattan and Manhattan only, while 718 has always been that of the "outer boroughs" of Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and Staten Island, giving 212 a status that Manhattanites, from Wall Street to the Bowery to Hell's Kitchen to Inwood, could take pride in. The old-moneyed Upper-East-Siders would have been forced to mumble their area code under their breath to the sales girl at Bloomingdales or the Admissions counselor at Brearley had the phone company resolved the issue by expanding the 718 area code to encompass their already hoity-toity "BUtterfield-8" phone exchange.

As it turns out, Bob simply asked if there were any 212 numbers available when he set up the new phone. He was given a few options and selected one similar to 677-5555 because he liked the sound of it. (I made up the 5555 part, so please don't call that number. It won't be me.) Had I been involved, I might have done some quick research into the old phone exchanges for Manhattan before selecting a number.

For those of you who aren't old enough to remember where you were when John F. Kennedy was shot (I was in Kindergarten and am thus the last of the generation that remembers), the old phone exchanges were actually words, names representing the areas within a city or county. One would actually dial the first two letters of the name of the area followed by four or five numerical digits. When I started grade school in Kansas City in the early 1960s, my phone number was SOuth 1-5555, which was dialed as SO-1-5555. By the time I was in junior high the letters had been dropped and the number was simply 761-5555 (again, not the real number, so leave those poor people alone).

Movies and music made some exchanges in New York City famous, like "PEnnsylvania-6500," "BUtterfield-8," "MUrray Hill," "YUkon," "KLondike" and "GRamercy." It turns out that our new phone number actually corresponds to a couple of the original exchanges on the mid and Lower East Side: first "ORchard" in the Orchard Street area and later "ORegon" which covered most of the entire east side of Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge at Chamber's Street up to about 37th Street near Grand Central Station. There were other exchanges within this area, and the area around our new apartment had several. "ALgonquin" covered the area around Cooper Square (very near our home), and "CHelsea" and "SPring" were used in the West Village, named more for their neighbors to the north and south than for the immediate area. And of course downtown's own chic area exchange was "GRamercy" for Gramercy Park, just above Union Square.

At any rate, just talking about all of this makes me want to answer my home phone with my best old-time operator voice, "Oregon seven, fiave, fiave, fiave, fiave." But it's also interesting to learn more about the history of this city. Before Manhattanites worried about their 212 clout, they had actually dealt with phone exchange clout. Novelist Daniel Akst wrote of his New York childhood for a Los Angeles Times article:

"New York City, like most of the country, was divided into a variety of [phone exchanges], and they could say as much about you as your accent, which believe me said plenty. 'ORegon' was, well, the wilderness. 'BUtterfield 8,' by contrast, was the much tonier telecommunications precinct immortalized by John O'Hara and later Elizabeth Taylor. 'MUrray Hill' was pretty good too, although there was one of these in New Jersey as well."

I know my "SOuth" exchange growing up told locals that I not only was from Kansas City, Missouri, but from a part of Kansas City, Missouri that had been cow pastures only ten years earlier. My new "ORegon" number may say nothing to 90% of the population of Manhattan, but to those few, I live in that "wilderness" area that developed piecemeal between the Financial district at Canal Street and the land of the Butterfields east of Olmstead's Central Park. My 212 area code may make some think that I've been in New York for several decades, but probably not for long, as other area codes get introduced and filled up and the whole world goes cellular.

If you'd like to do a little research on your own phone exchange, go to http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/Times.html. You can look up your current number, but if you haven't lived there for long, I'd suggest you try your mother or grandmother's old phone numbers as well. It may spark a conversation with an older relative ("older" meaning over 50) about your origins and what people thought about you based on where you grew up.

subway glances

Three men and an attractive blond woman shared the pole on the subway car with me this morning. The three other men were checking out the blond, while I, unnoticed, checked out each of the men: a handsome 20-something who looked uncomfortable in his Wall Street suit; a middle-aged man with a mustache, balding pate and thick hair on his knuckles; and a pudgy pale-skinned schmoe in a jumpsuit with a boiler maintenance company's logo embroidered above the breast pocket. They all stood motionlessly, staring at the blonde who frowned dully at the Poetry in Motion poster above the door. She was taller than all of us.

A small brown hand broke the stillness, reaching around the back of the blond to grasp the pole tentatively. A tiny dark-skinned boy of 12, maybe15 at the most, squeezed between the balding man and the blond, his eyes darting cautiously around the group of us who ringed the pole. I imagined that his prepubescent curiosity had drawn him to move in closer to the tall blond at his back, but I soon came to the distinct impression that he was checking out each of the men around the pole, especially the balding man and me: sneaking peeks up and down our coat fronts, or pants, our hands, our faces and then looking away. He looked a little frightened. He also looked as though he wanted something from us, especially from the balding man with the mustache to whom he moved closer in increments, and it didn't seem to be our wallets. I imagined that his burgeoning sexuality compelled him, and it made me uncomfortable. He was so young and appeared to be from a Middle Eastern culture that might not allow him to speak about such feelings. The time on the subway display read 8:56 a.m., which made me wonder why he wasn't in school already and if he road the trains daily checking out the mature men he found there.

At the next stop, the balding man took a seat and I moved over near the door away from the boy. The boy then spotted a seat next to another man with a dark mustache and slid into it cautiously. The boy's feet barely touched the subway floor and his knee bounced nervously, rubbing against the leg of the man next to him. His eyes darted back and forth from the newspaper of the man next to him to me, his brows knit, his knee bobbing like a piston.

On the boy's bouncing knee thumped a briefcase that I had not noticed when he was standing at the pole. His tiny hands grasped the sides of a big, overstuffed leather briefcase, the kind a Wall Street executive would carry. It made no sense for the boy to carry a briefcase of this kind. It was inappropriate for a junior high student's needs. It was too large and packed full for this boy in particular.

The boy continued to glance nervously from the man at his side to me to the briefcase and I began to wonder if it was instead the briefcase itself that was causing him concern. For months, I hadn't thought of the MTA's worries about packages and bombs on the subway. But now the small nervous Middle-Eastern boy with the overstuffed adult briefcase and a look as though he desperately wanted to ask for some kind of help from the grown men on the subway around him instantly terrified me. As quickly as the man next to the boy could flip the page of his newspaper, I imagined the child being sent on an inescapable mission, set to be discharged exactly at 9 a.m. or as the train passed into the tunnel under the East River, ending with the subway car engulfed in a ball of flames.

The subway doors opened at Wall Street and I leapt off. Many of my friends have gotten off subway cars in a bout of the post-9/11 willies, but it's never happened to me before. The train passed into the tunnel before I could think to notify a conductor or the subway policeman in the car behind the boy. I waited for the next train to arrive and road it anxiously just two more stops to mine.

Now two hours later, nothing tragic on the radio or the web news pages, I can presume that the boy was no suicide bomber and that his briefcase was either an eccentricity of adolescent who was indeed cruising the grown men on the train, or maybe that of his father who had called him to bring it to his office downtown in a hurry, or something he had stolen on a different train, quickly transferring to ours before he was caught. Or a phantom sent to spook us with the daily worries of living in the City.