Category Archives: NYC

NYC

The Lost Art of Keeping Your Mouth Shut

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It’s always okay to say nothing. That’s a concept we’ve lost in the internet age, where we rush to project our thoughts as soon as they flit across our brains. But really, it’s perfectly acceptable to keep your mouth shut once in a while.

I say this because last night, while Hurricane Sandy was unleashing its worst on the tri-state area, Jack Shafer of Slate saw fit to take to Twitter and unleash this (reverse chronology from top to bottom):

Normally, I assume most people outside the tri-state area don’t like New Yorkers, and I could care less. Provincial hatred of other cities might be the saddest, most ineffectual prejudice there is (think Springfield vs. Shelbyville) and it says more about the practitioner than his target.

However, I truly don’t understand the psyche of a person who would see what was happening to New York and choose that moment to express snide, impotent rage against the people living there. And not specific people, either, but a vague idea of those people crafted in a badly compartmentalized brain.

Fine, Shafer, you hate some mental image of New Yorkers. Congratulations. I have zero interest in changing your mind, but is it too much to ask that you wait a day to express this thought? At the exact same moment I read his first dismissive tweet, I saw a news report about two children who were killed by a falling tree up in Westchester. Excellent timing, professional journalist.

As I write this, houses are still burning out in Breezy Point. Neighborhoods in southern Queens and Brooklyn are still under 6 feet of water. Parts of Staten Island and the Bronx were hit just as bad. People have lost homes, and for the most part they’re not the kind of people who have the means to just shrug and rebuild. If that does nothing for Shafer, I can assure him the storm also hit New Jersey and Connecticut hard. Houses destroyed, whole towns flooded and possibly more if levees don’t hold out, power out for who knows how long. I don’t know if those states have been too polluted by their proximity to New York to earn his sympathy.

Tragedy isn’t a contest. When something bad happens, there’s zero point in trying to determine if this Bad Thing is better or worse than the last Bad Thing. There’s no award given out for Best Reaction to Horror to the people involved. In any disaster, there are heroes and there are crappy people, because there are humans. Actual humans. Try to remember that when you’re sitting at a keyboard.

A tweet Shafer wrote later (the last one he wrote, at this moment) indicated he was without power in the DC suburbs. So maybe he didn’t see all the images of destruction that I’ve seen in the last 24 hours. That’s still no excuse for his reaction. As a journalist, Shafer should know that if you don’t have all the facts, you can always keep your stupid mouth shut. The internet will manage to go on without your uninformed, hateful garbage, I promise you.

Different people react to tragedy differently. Some feel compelled to help, others joke to deal with their terror. If your reaction is to sneer at the people who are in harm’s way, I feel sorry for you, and anyone who may be in your life.

NYC

Respect the Baritone

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I live in a Bus Neighborhood. All subway lines are too far away to make walking an option, so if you want to get anywhere and you don’t want the trip to last 3 hours, the bus is mandatory. The buses that serve the neighborhood are always overcrowded at rush hour, because they’re the only ticket in and out. When a bus arrives at a stop, no matter how packed it is already, people claw their way on as if it’s the last helicopter out of Saigon, because there’s something both terrifying and humiliating about getting left behind by a bus. Watching it chug away from the curb, engulfing you in its exhaust, telling you that you’re not good enough for the bus.

Last week, on one brutally hot afternoon, I emerged from a subway station and jogged toward my usual bus stop. The bus stop isn’t immediately visible when I get above ground, and it’s also on the other side of a very busy street, which always presents the infuriating possibility of arriving just in time to see my bus leaving me behind. That did not happen this time, but what did happen was almost as enraging. As I neared the queue for the bus, a guy chugging toward it in the opposite direction cut into the line a split second before I could assert my I-Am-Here-ness.

Of course, I had the fear that this guy would be The Cutoff, that one last passenger after which the bus driver slams the door shut and moves on. How many passengers can get onto a bus is left to the driver’s discretion. Some drivers let people occupy every molecule of available space, while others rigidly enforce the “stay behind the white line rule,” and this guy arriving just ahead of me made me worry the next bus to arrive would fall into the latter category. But getting beaten to the punch in the bus line was more galling because the man who did it to me was lugging a baritone.

You’re probably familiar with the baritone if you ever played in school band. They’re like tubas that were blasted with a shrink ray. They’re made primarily for marching bands or kids who can’t make the full tuba commitment. Baritones are technically portable, but this man was planning on bringing this thing onto a crowded bus, where sardine-can conditions make handbags deadly weapons. Adding further desperation to his overall mien, the baritone was beaten up, dinged and tarnished, with several sizable dents in the bell. This was a baritone that had been down a few dirt roads.

Initially, I was furious. How inconsiderate was this guy? He didn’t even have a case for the thing, just cradled it against his chest like a huge, brassy child, the enormous, injured bell barely clearing his head. Given a jam-packed bus, crappy road conditions, and the typical skills and safety of an MTA bus driver, he could actually kill someone with this thing.

But then, I began to soften a little, because it occurred to me that no one in their right mind would bring a baritone onto a bus if they had any choice in the matter. I realized that I probably hadn’t seen a baritone since high school, and had a wave of Band Geek nostalgia. And I wondered, where had he been playing this thing, and why? It’s gotta be rough trying to make a living as a working baritone player these days.

The bus pulled up and was, of course, already well full. The line slowly pushed its way inside. The Baritone Man somehow managed to fish a Metrocard out of a pocket, then turned to see the bus’s standing room already completely occupied. By now, I’d done a complete 180 with my feelings. I pitied him. Here it was, a scorching, muggy summer day, and this man was trying to bring an enormous blunt brass instrument onto a jam-packed bus where the AC is being overwhelmed by the sheer mass of sweaty, angry humanity on it. This, I figured, will not end well.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The aisle between the seats is usually an impenetrable thicket of shopping bags and hate, but for Baritone Man, it parted like the Red Sea. The passengers willingly–gladly, even–moved to allow him to move toward the back. Not only that, but once he reached the back of the bus, someone offered him a seat. And there he sat, comfortable and unperturbed, for at least the duration of my trip. When my stop arrived, there he still was, baritone nestled in his lap, happy as a clam. It was one of the most endearing, yet weird, things I’ve ever seen in my life.

In all my years living in New York, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone offer a bus seat to anyone else, no matter how elderly, infirm, or feeble they were. When my wife was pregnant, you couldn’t have made someone give up their seat for her with a million dollars and a shotgun. There is a certain mentality that takes over when you ride the bus, which essentially boils down to This is horrible, so we’re all gonna be horrible to each other here.

I used to think nothing could pierce the flinty Darwinian shell of the New York bus passenger. Now I know better. If you want to melt the collective heart of an angry, sweaty MTA bus, bring your baritone.

NYC, Parental Guidance

Baby’s First Brooklyn Moment

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On Sunday morning, me and the family took a brief trip into Greenpoint to pick up some gardening supplies and to stroll. I lived in Greenpoint for six pre-kid years and I still love it there, though I don’t find many chances to make it back to ye olde neighborhood.

When I called it home, Greenpoint struck me as having the exact amount of artsy-ness that Williamsburg aspired to while being a tad more real, for lack of a better word. For one thing, Greenpoint never needed to “recover” in the way that Williamsburg did, since it had a well-entrenched middle class that never left in bad old days of the 1970s and 1980s. On top of that, it seemed like the artists in Greenpoint actually had jobs and weren’t being held aloft by trust funds. This was provincial prejudice I’m sure, because it still wasn’t hard to find a wealthy dilettante among the populace, someone who seemed to be dabbling in bohemia until Dad’s Law Firm came calling. These folks tended to be the ones most into juvenalia like kickball tournaments and organized games of manhunt, since they had the idle time and total lack of worries necessary to waste in such pointless pursuits.

As I said, we were strolling through Greenpoint, on Nassau Street near Lorimer, where McCarren Park ends. Ahead of us, I saw a twenty-something swinging from scaffolding like it was a jungle gym. At a certain age and in a certain mood, I could have found this kind of thing is cute. In fact, I’m sure I’ve done the same at some point in my life, though I’m also sure I haven’t done so since college. To mid-30s Dad Me, it just struck me as juvenile, embodying the worst aspect of all the dumb infantile things people think of when they now think of Brooklyn. My mind voiced a judgmental Really?, but I said nothing out loud.

My daughter was less guarded. Our corner of Queens holds very few hipsters, and this was not a specimen she’d encountered before. “Why is that GROWN UP swinging like that?” she asked, very loudly. I saw this guy as a kid, because that’s how he was behaving, but to my child, everyone over the age of 10 is a Grown Up, and this was conduct unbecoming a Grown Up. The Swinger abruptly stopped, somewhat embarrassed, and continued on his way, as did we.

“Grown ups shouldn’t be acting like that,” my daughter said, again very loudly and slightly annoyed, as we passed by The Swinger.

“I agree,” I said, and I felt confident that I’d already given her enough information to tell the Real Grown Ups from the fake ones.