Spontaneous Musings

This is my third post for the January Talking Meme - and we'll see where this takes me.

January 10: masqthephilospher asked - I'd like to hear about "your" New York City. What your neighborhood is like, where you shop, what sorts of residences and businesses are on the blocks nearby, the feel of the neighborhood, transit, etc. What it's like living in that neighborhood, and other places you like to go in the City as a whole.

NYC believe it or not is the only place that I've deliberately chosen to live in. All the other places that I've lived, were either due to college, study, or family. But NYC I moved to without a job in place. And as of this year, it is now the place that I've lived the longest. 18 years this March. I moved here in 1996. And it has changed through the years in various ways, yet also stayed the same. We've been through a lot together, NYC and I, and as a result, I am a New Yorker, it is in my blood and in my soul. I love and hate it in equal measure. And it will take a lot to get me to move out of it. I believe the place you choose as an adult is the place from whence you came, not the place where you were born and really had no choice in.

At the moment, my New York is cold, rainy and drab and all I want to do is stay in my cozy little apartment. Perhaps that's the best place to start? The word apartment is sort of misleading, makes you think of well an apartment building. Flat may be a better word? It's an one bedroom at the top of a brownstone. Most of the buildings in my area are brownstones, the sort you might see in an old school Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen film or maybe the 1980s films Moonstruck or Do the Right Thing. And depicted in the Cosby Show. It's called a brownstone because of the color, but in reality they are all shades, or rather their entrances are, one has been painted purple, and look more like brick and mortar row townhouses. With big front stoops. There's gardens in front of each, and the streets are lined with trees. There's a huge oak tree in front of my bedroom window. And out my kitchen and living room windows - the view is a pseudo industrial landscape of transit bridges, warehouses, a bus parking lot, construction and cement plant. I can see the F and the G subways meandering their way over the viaduct bridges towards my subway station, and sometimes hear the dull rumble of the cars on the tracks. Yet amidst this rugged landscape of steel and concrete, is also a small pink house situated on top of a warehouse - below, the walls of the warehouse are painted green and blue. And there's a winding canal, called the Gowanus. This is the site of an EPA super-fund and amongst the most polluted canals in the state. Yet people canoe it in the summertime and there are apparently boat tours. Towards the far right, a church steeple, whose chimes rung out the song What Child is This this past Sunday. It's a rather large Catholic Church, Saint Mary Star of the Sea, in the overdecorated 18th century gothic style - lots of bleeding saints, and a rather graphic depiction of Christ hanging on his cross, with dark stained glass windows shining morosely on the congregants. Haven't been in it in a while, so it may have changed.

My street is residential, but if you wander a bit eastward, and over the little road bridge that crosses the canal you will run into the shiny and brand new Whole Foods store. Across the street from it are abandoned warehouses, with the following message spray-painted in big block white and black letters, at the very top of the 20 story buildings, "Protect Our Children, Say No to STOP and FRISK". Wander in the opposite direction, towards the West, you will eventually stumble upon the Transit Garden, a coop vegetable, tree and flower garden located directly opposite the subway which now lies below a 15 story luxury apartment building. Across the street from it - is the bodega that I've visited for well nigh 18 years now. It changed ownership recently and the products have changed as a result. Was owned by a Korean Family (who spoke mainly Korean) and is now owned by a Middle Eastern Family or Arabic, who speak that language. I don't go to it as often as I used to...due to my diet, even though its selection has broadened. Down the street from it is the Dona Joseph Salon, an Italian salon where I get my hair colored and cut, along with my nails manicured. Everyone speaks Italian with just a bit of English. It's expensive, so this is not done all that often. Also they have a lot of turn-over. Two doors down from it, is my laundry mat, where I've been taking my clothes for close to 15 years. They know me by name. When I broke my foot and hobbled past in a boot, the laundress, Margaret Chen, came out and asked in a halting English, how I was and if I was okay. She's from China, and speaks basic English. We gesture a lot. And beside it is another little bodega, where I used to buy chocolate and potato chips and soy milk. There's also a rather cool little shop of environmentally inspired art - with delicate origami earrings - made of colored paper in intricate little designs. Butterflies, birds, snowflakes.
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1. While reading the NY Times this morning at the laundramat, which was a nice and warm, so much so the windows were literally sweating, I discovered that the Catholic church near me - been to Mass there five or six times, was where Al Capone got married. Its called St. Mary Star of the Sea and the congregation is made up of mostly Italian and Irish residents.

2. Again in the NY Times - this time the letters column, got even more information on the Transit Strike, causing me to realize this is not a black and white affair, not something you can really be definitive about.
Both sides were wrong and both sides were right. The Transit Union was right to want to keep their pensions, to have that security. Especially since they put money towards them at certain point. Although, I'm somewhat confused about that - since one group says they never put money towards their pension and don't think they should have to, and another says they have and don't want to lose that money. I can understand the desire for a pension and the fear of losing one - have that fear myself, having just joined a company that had one, which is merging with a company that does not and appears to be contemplating the idea of doing away with it completely.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that fear justifies walking off a job and endangering thousands of souls livilihoods, safety, health during a period in which those three things would be at greatest risk. Should a cop walk off a job if his pension is done away with? Yet - should we expect civil servants to be slaves for the public good? IS that what they do when they choose this line of work? Should we treat those we depend on and really cannot live without less well than movie stars and celebrities, who we most definitely can survive without? Why does the baseball player or movie star make 14 million a year and live in the mansion and the person who puts him or herself in danger each day making less than 60,000 if that? I don't know. The world makes very little logical sense most of the time, methinks.

3. Just read a lengthy article on Philip Pullman in the International Writers Edition of The New Yorker. Pullman is an oddity. I agree with half of what he says and half of it has me rolling my eyes. But I think part of that discrepancy has to do with dissimilar backgrounds. Pullman believes you story doesn't begin until you think or realize you've been born to the wrong family. But what about those of us who did not have dysfunctional families and feel we fit with ours? Are we instantly less creative, less artistic than those who had parents who more likely than not should have never had children? And what about Pullman's children - does he believe they should come to that realization about him? I do to a degree agree with this comment though - that while truth may not be a tangible object, if you think of it like an imaginary number - like the square root of minus one - you can use it to calculate all manner of things without it. I also agree with some of his criticism of Tolkien and CS Lewis. Did not realize he disliked Tolkien as much as he does. He considers "The Lord of The Rings - a fundamentally infantile work" - "Tolkien is not interested in the way grown-up, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps, plans, languages and codes." Yes, but what is wrong with that? Why should a story be only about the interaction? And I'm not completely sure this is true - how do you account for the father/child relationship/friendship between Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins, which keeps spinning about until you can't really tell who is which? Or the relationship between Frodo and Sam? Or Gollum, a character who is in an eternal struggle with his own baser instincts? Yes, the mythology on its surface may seem a tad simplistic, but
there are items within that which do provide depth. Tolkien wrote the story as an anti-war allegory. How can Pullman miss that? On the other hand, the books are a tad dense with language, maps, plans, codes and battle sequences that I can see how some readers may become a bit lost in them. But perhaps that was part of Tolkien's point? That we lose a bit of ourselves and our ability to interact by becoming far too distracted with the intricacies of what was originally created to make that interaction possible. Pullman does address this himself - stating his frustration with adult contemporary literature and preferring children's stories: "In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are flet to be more important:technique, style, literary knowingness...The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do." Is this true though? Or is it a condemnation of style over substance found in some works notably William Gaddis' novels? You could say the same I suppose about Cormac McCarthy, except I found a beautiful story well-told in All The Pretty Horses. And same with James Joyce - whose tale of Leopold Bloom does not become buried by the technique so much as enriched by it. I guess it all depends on how you view story, how you see it.
Then there's his criticism of CS Lewis' Narnia series, which in some ways I always felt Pullman's own triology "His Dark Materials" was a counter to - even though it is based on Milton's Paradise Lost. I can't say I completely disagree, but I find it oddly interesting that as child I was completely unaware of the negative messages I see in the series as an adult, or if aware, I dismissed them and concentrated on the portions of the tale I wished to concentrate on. I think that's what people do actually - see what they want to see, push aside what they don't. So much information - you know. Impossible to take in all of it. Even now, here, I am taking bits and pieces of a ten page article - remembering what I wish from it, ignoring the rest. Interacting with it.
I agree with Khalad Hosseni's comment on Book TV a while back - "Reading fiction is an interactive experience." But I'd extend that to all reading. We superimpose our own views and experience and understanding on to that which we read, taking from it what is useful to us, and disposing of the rest. That said, I do agree with the criticism of Lewis, a criticism I'd extend to a few other children's novelists here and there - "The idea of keeping childhood alive forever and ever and regretting the passage into adulthood - whether it's gentel, rose-tinged regret, or a passionate, full-blooded hatred, as it is in Lewis - is simply wrong." Yes, agreed. It was the problem I had with Lewis' later novels in the series and why I barely made it through some of them, even as a child who liked being a child and was in no hurry to grow up, I saw this as troublesome.

4. The above paragraph reminds me of a comment Wales made over the weekend - she was quoting her film professor, Wales has been taking film analysis courses: "Every film made is about the men struggling with their father and eventually becoming their father or the very thing they struggled with." After watching three episodes of La Femme Nikita yesterday and The Outsiders, can't say I disagree. So many of our stories are about the relationship between parent and child and the fear the child has of becoming the parent or either losing childhood or the desire to escape it as quickly as possible. In La Femme Nikita - the series ends with Nikita becoming more or less her father, metaphorically. Cool and distant, running his organization, as he has molded her to do. And in Angel the Series, we see Liam/Angel grapple with the fact that he in effect is no different than his own father - in his need to control his son's life and his struggle with that awareness. On the female side of the fence - depending on the writer - it tends to be more about not becoming or becoming one's mother.
That struggle. And watching each show unfold, I find myself wondering if only those who came from dysfunctional families are the ones that get their stories told? Or if we feel those are the only stories worth telling?
Perhaps not...I do see exceptions to that rule. Not all tales are about that. Nor all stories. So I'm not sure Wales' professor's generalization holds. But then that's the problem with generalizations, isn't it?

Now off to eat lunch and debate whether to see a movie - four to choose from: Memoirs of Geisha, Narnia, Brokeback Mountain, and Syriana at my local theater. Or sit home, veg, and watch DVDs. Nice to have options.
Need money though - laundry sort of took a good portion of it. Three loads - 12 dollars. Sigh.