Crossing the East River

When Edison recorded this, the Brooklyn Bridge was sixteen years old. Look at it, all surly and rebellious.

Even in 1899, the bridge’s best views clearly belong to the pedestrian walkway.

The train pulls into Park Row station, which stood until 1944 servicing a half dozen elevated BMT lines. It’s on the right in the 1911 photo below; City Hall is on the left. In the background the beautiful Manhattan Municipal Building is under construction, preparing to house a city government growing rapidly after the boroughs’ 1889 consolidation.

Jonsi at Terminal 5

Intimate live music sells itself, but why go to a big, impersonal concert? Any song you want is availably instantly, eternal, reproducible, and free or just about. Every large event is bootlegged an hour after it ends. Audiences, only partially present, thumb status updates or snap profile pictures or film for that night’s YouTube upload. No one dances.

Jonsi, performing solo after years with the oddball Icelandic pop outfit Sigur Ros, played Terminal 5 Sunday night, and the show he put on loudly defended ambitious live music. The big space with its three floors was filled with cinematic sound and soaring visuals. An elaborate stage, enormous video screens, and the expansive, ecstatic music itself earned its huge audience. The joy in those moments could not have been captured or reproduced.

Some of how Sigur Ros carry themselves – giving cryptic interviews, singing in a made-up language, and broadcasting a certain aloof self-regard – always turned me off. Indulgent and sometimes nearly ambient, their stuff can make for trying pop music, but it’s always great for studying or doing yoga. More importantly, repeat listens reveal great care and talent, and a sincerity so rare and precious you can’t help but be impressed. Listening to Staralfur, the 1999 track that made them famous, it’s hard to imagine modern music being any less cynical.

Jonsi now works closer to the surface, even singing in English, but he’s continued and actually amplified that childlike innocence. The pretty, looping melodies ride manic, joyous drums, rhythms that took center stage at the concert. Each surge of sound worked like a direct injection of endorphins. You feel this music square in your chest.

The video displays made the night, harmonizing with the band like another instrument. It snowed, thundered, poured rain and flooded on stage. Colors seeped and spread and exploded, images ran and tripped and fell apart. We were treated to virtuoso collages of animation, film, and effects, each as complex as the songs themselves. The panes of the backdrop managed to dance like a keyboard, tear like a canvas, and grow like a garden without ever moving an inch.

Music videos usually tell distracting stories, stage pyrotechnics, or show off a musician’s pretty face, completely missing the potential to compliment and expand the impact of music directly. Successful modern concerts, however, deliver carefully orchestrated, multi-sensory experiences. Done well, it’s very much worth the ticket.

“All 3000+ attendees were in the palms of his hands,” wrote The Music Slut after the show. “I’ve never witnessed a more respectful crowd at the massive Hell’s Kitchen space.” Powerful theatre will do that, focus thousands of eyes at once, and it’s a blessing to be a part of it. Leave your little screens at home, and remember: even if no one else is dancing, you can always be the first.

Jonsi’s new album, Go, is available (and streaming in full) here. He isn’t performing in the US any time soon, but watch his site for updates.

Heartbeats

Back in 2006, Sony turned Jose Gonzales’ cover of The Knife’s “Heartbeats” (hear a live version here) into one of the coolest ads ever:

Yeah. They actually dropped all those balls. I recommend watching this in 480p.

Real Poetry in the Real World

The most recent video from John Boswell’s Symphony of Science could be the anthem of This Joyful Noise. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael Shermer, and Richard Dawkins join Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking this time around, the visuals are a step above A Glorious Dawn, and honestly, this is a much richer explanation of how science happens. Curious, collaborative, and filled with awe:

It’s always nice to hear the word “awesome” in its rightful place: no other word quite does the trick. As Jill Tarter says, “the story of humans is the story of ideas that shed light into dark corners.” Our joyful noise, in a dark, silent universe, must be celebrated and shared.

Infoviz Art

I went for the naked people, and they didn’t disapoint: The Artist is Present, the big-deal performace art retrospective at MoMA through May 31, is well worth the trip. A few of Marina Abramović’s pieces broke through my instinctive skepticism, doing wierd and entrancing things to the passing of time. A few didn’t, but were interesting enough anyway. See it for yourself.

On our way out, my friend and I found ourselves in front of a big screen filled with bobbing pink baloons. Each represented a real profile pulled from a dating website; touching the screen sorted them by age, sex, opening and closing lines, ideal first dates. You were invited to explore the swirling shapes, wondering about the people on the other side, or try your hand at avatar matchmaking.

Around the corner were other examples of “infoviz” art, creative representaions of real world data. Carefully planned and yet largely out of the artist’s control, data mining and information visualization is fertile ground. Edits to Wikipedia entries, airplane and taxi traffic, and computers pondering chess moves translate surprisingly well to museum walls.

Every morning, planes take off in a wave that rolls across the country with the rising sun. Rendered in glowing white against blank black in a looping video, this looks like fireworks, or anemone orgasms. Wonder about all those journeys and destinations; watch the cycles, like breaths. The sensual and cerebral layer deliciously.

Explore more artist/data collaborations in this Slate slideshow. Don’t miss the massive and engrossing piece on break-ups, or the eerie Radiohead music video. Of course, most data visualization doesn’t get labeled fine art, but it can be as fascinating and moving as anything in a museum: check out some of the best here and here.

Symphony of Science

Carl Sagan was a treasure and an inspiration. Autotune is more of a mixed bag. What happens when they join forces to remind us of the beauty and possibility of our moment in this universe?

Catchy, ain’t it? Get your daily dose of perspective and grace at Symphony of Science. Let John Boswell’s project remind you, as Sagan says, “how lucky we are to live in this time: the first moment in human history when we are in fact visiting other worlds.”

“We Are Searching For Haiti”

This week Studio 360, an arts and culture podcast, went to Brooklyn to profile Djarara. All fifteen members of the rara band lost someone in the earthquake. The musicians do a beautiful job explaining how and why they look to music and tradition in the aftermath of the disaster. “Haiti will get better,” one says. “We are searching for Haiti. For a better Haiti… But don’t worry. Haiti will be Haiti again.” Listen:

Courage in Creole

Explore Haitian aid donations here (J.P.Morgan Chase, 1 million; Czech Republic, 1.25 million; Gisele Bundchen, 1.5 million). The Red Cross was reporting on January 18th that around half of its donations, or seven million dollars, had come in by text.

Djarara in Prospect Park

Learn more about rara and Studio 360.

“Moments” by Radiolab

If possible, watch this fullscreen with a minimum of distractions.

There’s very little I can add to that.

I remembered this video writing about “John Smith” by This American Life, which is similar except it lasts an hour and might be even more beautiful.

Radiolab is a an extremely ambitious and innovative radio show on WNYC, always worth listening to. Check out their podcast and blog.

It’s The Future: Photosynth City

The first of an occasional series. It is the future: let your jaws drop.

Microsoft’s photosynth software constructs 3D models of individual monuments from tourists’ photos. This takes it a step further. You can begin to appreciate what the world will look like to our children.

Google Earth and Street View are only a few years old, and already we take them for granted. Don’t forget! These are miracles; we are blessed. For more on modeling Dubrovnik, read the Gizmodo article.

By the way: Facebook turns six years old tomorrow, February 4.

Whitman on The High Line

I went wandering Sunday and found myself on the High Line. Watching the sun setting over Jersey, gawking at all the west side’s new diva architecture, and lighting up with the Empire State building, I felt very happy, very, very lucky.

I wrote a paper on High Line Park freshman year of college, when it was just a whimsical proposal (as I now brag to anyone who will listen). For all its expense and vanity, when the park opened I immediately fell in love. Walking it—an abandoned elevated freight railway reimagined by the wealthy and fashionable as a stroll through the skyline— you feel kissed by history, the river, the generous city.

Down on 14th, afterwards, I found Whitman quoted at length in a chic shop window. I stood and read from the huge glowing display:

PASSING stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me, as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl with me,
I ate with you, and slept with you—your body has become not yours only, nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass—you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone,
I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Some days the world overwhelms you. Sometimes, despite everything, you feel solid, clear and calm. I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Notes on New York

With many thoughts daily demanding to be remembered, and not being in the habit of taking time to write them down in a serious way, I have gathered a pile of handwritten notes that sits on my desk, reminding me that should I ever decide to sit down and begin my new life as a writer, the task ahead of me will be impossibly huge. Instead, this pile suggests, I should aim for some other line of work, garbage collection, perhaps. I should search for that clerk position in charge of sorting, shuffling, and filing things that no one will ever ask for again. Your strengths, my unruly collection of ink and paper gingerly suggests, lie somewhere else. No offense.

Occasionally I transcribe the phrases scribbled on this paper into a computer file, which I’ve titled Notes on New York and situated at the dead center of my desktop, so that like my desk, my computer thoughtfully reminds me that productivity is not really my thing. Leave that to those ambitious types. Don’t be a fool. There is solitaire to be played. Terry Gross is interviewing Iggy Pop. Relax.

When I open this file I sometimes find mysterious little poems that have no remaining connection to what they were supposed to record. One day, apparently, I intended to write down some thoughts on food, and took this note: “eating, new fruits.” I’m intensely curious as to what fruits I was referring to, but the following line offers no help: “on being too loud.” I think the person being too loud was me. Why I didn’t go with a memory aid more direct or detailed I don’t know. And now you, dear reader, will never know.

Other notes are very clear, if a bit much. One day, presumably after watching the Discovery Channel for a little too long, I wrote this: “the wonders of mass production! holy fuck – toothbrushes! breaker boxes!” I understand your enthusiasm, former me. I really do. But what, beyond delight at the very existence of objects we all take for granted, do you want me to convey? Why toothbrushes? And, let’s be honest, is the profanity really necessary?

I’m not so worried about having misplaced a stunning insight on breaker boxes, but I know for a fact that I loose a lot. They are not the thoughts that I write down and later find less than impressive (“how charismatic, the hudson valley”) or those I don’t fully understand (“Subway. Benneton Ad. Utopia.”). They are the things that never make it even that far.

There are impressions, sensations, and experiences that absolutely fill me up, make me instantly ache for the ability to share my inner life with someone else. I go for a pen and can’t think of anything to say. I try to stay in the moment; tourists passing me with video cameras fixed on outstreached arms are a constant warning not to shortchange the present in service of its preservation. Inevitably when I get around to trying to put words to what happened to me, they’re of no use. The only ones I encounter anywhere in the vicinity describe motion, temperature, color, brightness, viscosity. I’m intensely dissatisfied with them. And without a detailed description of what was happening – every shade, every texture, every point of light – even the best words are impotent. Without knowing everything that happened that day, and the day prior, without precise familiarity of my mental landscape, the life I’ve lived up to this moment, my understandings of the shape of the universe and my place in it, my opinions on politics economics history and culture and the long story of how they came to be what they are – I’m sorry, it’s just a loosing battle.

It surprises me how often the sensations that are most central to the experience of being me, how many of the moments that move me the most, seem completely beyond the reach of writing, indeed of any communication medium. I wonder that the world seems so full of fascinating and worthwhile writing, storytelling, and reporting when this process seems so doomed to miss out on the meat of life. What we manage to stick words to and share, as wonderful as that output is, could this be in reality only a tiny fraction of what is, of the experiences we are? Is that wonderful or terrible?

I’m not sure what it is about the world that inspires this kind of conceptual vertigo. It could be the physical size, although I’m fairly certain I have absolutely no grasp of that, or the numbers of people, on which I can’t imagine I understand any better. It could be this unwise attempt at calculating the possible realationships between our billions of lives, each governed by a good hundred trillion cells, each made of so many atoms, and so on, that my brain keeps making. But there’s more to it than that, bigger things going on. I believe we can identify and describe historical and cultural currents and patterns, which are not well defined and understood things, but neither are they imagined. I believe there really exist, in some nearly intangible way, ideals and ideas and memes, those things that defy quantification but have real effects on the physical universe. In fact, I admit they seem to color all the stars in the sky.

Dizzying numbers feeding impossibly complex relationships within maddeningly inaccessible scales, that’s what this universe is, and it’s high time I admit that it’s not something I can ever hope to write down. I want to sing it, the beauty of what is, the body electric, the noosphere thilling with its existence. It seems unbearable that I cannot understand it, explain it, contain it, and pass it around like a jar of fireflies saying see? Do you see? This is what is. This, this is what is. Is it not beautiful.

I’ll make do with the moments I can capture. I’ll dutifully transcribe the impressions from my notes (“the sweat on my face, the breeze playing over my ear, the black marks on every sidewalk”). I’ll gather them up, toss aside the chaff, and weave the strong ones into something whole, something with a beginning and an end, and before you can blink something new will have come into being, a narrative, a story. It has been carefully assembled here, cultivated, culled and coaxed. Suddenly we are grinning, we are laughing, no longer troubled by our failure to describe the beauty of what is, because here is a new beauty, a thing all our own – a story, built of glottal attacks and serifs, nothing but photons and the firings of neurons, nothing but patterns in darkness. Which is really more than enough.

This Joyful Noise

Wireless at last, my desk overflowing with scribbled notes on tiny scraps of paper, I’m setting out to make this pursuit work. Today all I’ve done is change colors again, though I’m still not happy with them, and add a snazzy picture, which I’m more happy with although I assume by the time this is all over it’ll be gone as well. No matter. I’m looking at websites that offer business cards and reading Apple’s instructions on listing a podcast in iTunes. I’m comparing myself to everyone else again and getting impatient with my findings. Some day soon I will own several magazines and a cable channel, and I’ll finance spinoff television programs featuring my favorite people, the ones I listened to and read for inspiration on my way to the top.

It will undoubtedly be a source of humor and some considerable embarassment years from now to reflect on the great efforts I made branding myself before I had actually produced anything of value. I will tell the story gracefully, fully aware of the absurdity of this period in my life. I’ll recount how late one night, dissatisfied with my progress towards my goal of becoming a world traveler, a well known and widely respected public intellectual, and a brilliant and acclaimed storyteller, I jumped into action and changed the name of my rarely updated web log from A Joyful Noise to This Joyful Noise!

Lest you scoff, this was not the extent of my activity this evening. Oh no. I also set up a gmail account (thisjoyfulnoise@gmail.com), and asked politely for someone named Sharon to give up the blogspot address she’s holding (thisjoyfulnoise.blogspot.com), and then gleefully explored what font I would choose I were to order hundreds of business cards bearing my new brand.

This Joyful Noise, unlike clunky old A Joyful Noise, sports a snappy subtitle, which I have very cleverly (if I do say so myslef) included on the reverse side of my imaginary business cards. My brand’s message – light, heat, sound – is simultaneously too precious to stand and too weighty to bear. If I do what I hope to and all goes very, very well, it will likely be a decade or more before I produce something that lives up to such a portentious and epic signature. Still, I have nothing better. It comes earnestly out of an attempt to explain what it is I want to do. Listening to Astronomy Cast, a weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, has me keenly aware of the unimaginable emptiness, darkness, quiet and cold of the vast majority of the universe. Doing yoga at Yoga To The People, a donation based studio in the East Village, has made me keenly aware of life’s incredible capacity for producing heat. Standing in my lake of sweat, watching the windows fog, my chest feels like a coal fueled furnace and my mind turns to the chemistry of energy storage and use in the human body, the wonder of willed work, and, always, the unfathomable context of our efforts. Vast distances, lengths of time, silences. I name the sources of heat in our universe, few and far between, all of them wondrous: nuclear reactions in our stars, gravity’s pressure inside our planet, and in our cells, bonds breaking, decisions being made, life out of lifelessness.

I say we’re a noisy, hot, curious and hard working species, never satisfied, never finished: a stunningly beautiful thing in a still and empty universe. My feelings on the subject of humans are precious and weighty, and I see no way around that. I won’t be transcribing all my dribbling wonder at the world here; those who have encountered one of my rants on this topic will tell you, I’m very enthusiastic but rarely coherent or disciplined enough to be interesting. The blog and the podcast will, however, take as their official subject humans, the human project, the human experience, if only to provide cover for absolutely any story I feel like reproducing. In that sense, I’m aiming at capturing a little of the light, heat and noise made by my fellow wise apes, and it’s such an innocent and gradiose intention that my cuteness feels appropriate.

It makes sense. I have, after all, never been a very cool person. I’m too excited, too earnest and too invested to be cool. I dance at parties. I think economists say more interesting things than any other kind of person. I try to write a blog. I declare this rebranding officially underway. May we soon have some content to fill the empty vessel of This Joyful Noise.

Crown Heights: Roof Quest!

I promise that one day soon AJN will cease to be solely sporadic quips about my new life in the city. I will set aside time, one day a week at the very least, to ramble on and on about the kind of big and involved things it is quite possible only I am interested in. For now, blogging on my lunch break, this is what I’ve got:

The A train is truly magical. It can make Central Park disappear – close your eyes and sixty five blocks are gone. That said, schlepping from Marble Hill to Crown Heights late at night just to see Trading Places is not the kind of thing that at first glance seems worthwhile. The movie was being shown on a rooftop, so it had that going for it, but I didn’t know any of the people hosting, didn’t anticipate the movie being any good, and due an epic and unjust failure of my laundromat’s dryers, didn’t arrive until after the movie had begun, so there was none of that introductory making an ass of one’s self that cements friendships and could theoretically justify schlepping one’s sorry ass all the way to Brooklyn on a work night.

Turns out the setup (laptop, projector, neighboring building’s wall), the movie itself, the company I arrived with, the beer (Colt 45, because apparently that’s what you drink in Crown Heights), and that magical and quintessentially Brooklyn view of midtown shining over the rooftops all conspired to make the night perfectly awesome. Trading Places is an utterly silly movie, but it stars Eddie Murphy, circa 1983; it isn’t hard to figure out how to have a good time with it, which I proceeded to do, loudly and without apology. Somehow the movie’s charms were entirely lost on the dour hipsters who were screening it, but what can you do? That’s the lot of dour hipsters. It sounded like the other movies they screened this summer were the epitome of highbrow, and some unexamined recommendation had caused this oddball comedy to land in their midst. It was like Sir Mix-A-Lot had crashed an opera. (Doesn’t that sound like fun? This was too.) The end of the night was increasingly surreal. I wandered through an apartment in which everything was labeled with knowingly precious hand lettered signs (“booze” – “vinegar” – “refrigerator”) trying to figure out if the movie I had just watched had been compared to The African Queen as a joke or in an honest expression of disappointment. I think it was a little of both.

The delight of the day came on the train ride home, while transferring from the A to the 1 at 168th street. We took the elevator down into the cantilevered, yellow home of what’s apparently among the oldest lines in the city, and spent a good ten minutes just staring at the hand cut and laid tiles, the masonry on the ceiling indicating long lost chandeliers, the epic oldness and grandeur of it all. I peered down the track, which was well lit and didn’t curve. I watched MTA employees clean the platform section by section with high pressure water jets. I encountered a warning about rat poison. It was beautiful. Just before the train arrived, one of the cleaners in his neon orange vest started telling us about the station, prompted by nothing but our curious gaze and idle discussion about the wonder that is a quarter mile of hand tiled mosaic. He volunteered information as easily and directly as if we’d asked him a question, and he was simply, naturally, answering it.

It matters very little that he was very wrong about the age of the station. He claimed that what we were looking at was 200 years old; turns out, “New York City’s first official subway system opened in Manhattan on October 27, 1904. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) operated the 9.1-mile long subway line that consisted of 28 stations from City Hall to 145th Street and Broadway. IRT service expanded to the Bronx in 1905, to Brooklyn in 1908, and to Queens in 1915. The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) began subway service between Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1915.” So our cavern was probably built in 1904 or 1905, and we were looking at over a hundred years of history, and that is awesome, and having unasked questions answered by bored MTA workers is awesome, and it doesn’t much matter that the answers and the history don’t match.

I’ll be keeping the beauty of the subway and what it can do in my memory today as I discard of my car. She’s served me well, for two years now, carrying me to Ithaca and Philladelphia and Saratoga Springs, to the Mountain Goats and Aesop Rock, to Bear Mountain, Harriman, Rye Playland, Coney Island. She’s given me no trouble at all. I’m sad to see her go.

At least I’ll still have Coney Island.

Delight of the Day

Today after work, I was talking with two coworkers, when in the course of our conversation one said she can not run on flat ground. When I asked what that meant, she said it’s because of a titanium rod in one of her legs. I immediately started grinning, and exclaimed, “Awesome! So you’re a cyborg! I’m a big fan of cyborgs! They are the future,” and then I gave her a high five. So that was pretty much the greatest thing ever: a high five for someone being a cyborg.

A related delight came to me later: we can’t tell who is a cyborg by looking at them. The future will be easier than anyone expects. It will be normal. Hell, this is the future. I work with a cyborg.

Afterward I walked west and discovered how easy the park is to walk across, and how beautiful a thing it is to walk across the park at midday. There’s no better vantage point to marvel at the blessings of our modern, cosmopolitan world. An observation: some people would do well to stop running so much.

Head Over Heels

I wanted to be downtown today, this morning, and despite setting out at six with only the vaguest idea of what that would look like, I am now sitting on a park bench, connected to free “downtown alliance” wi-fi, looking out at New York Harbor. In front of me, from left to right: the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, some flashy new office buildings in Jersey City, Hoboken (so that’s that Hoboken looks like!), enormous yachts. The sky still has a band of pink along he horizon, although I took my time getting here and its after eight already; above the pink is whitish blue, above that, a ceiling of white clouds.

This morning started in the Bronx with the discovery that the train runs fuller in the early, early morning than midday. I can’t tell you exactly what made me so happy, running up the stairs, stepping onto the platform. I’m sure I can’t describe it all and do it justice, the orange bucket seats, the ads for technical colleges, This American Life’s most recent podcast (“The Devil In Me”) on my headphones. I was overjoyed to be sitting among my fellow New Yorkers, my fellow humans, getting to watch them enter and leave the car, studying their footwear, their coffee cups, their thinning hair. Sometimes you are handed a great heaping serving of wonder, of gratitude, of joy, something that lets you access precisely how spectacular the world always is. It’s like the spectacle of a sunset or one of those breathless, spent, blessed moments when you look down at the face of the person you love in awe – it’s just given, occasionally, you just recieve it. The 1 train clacked and screeched down the island, gathering more fellow travelers than it let go, until we reached the 50th street station, where nearly everyone up and left.

I stepped off just after that, at 42nd. I wanted to check the map, decide my next move. I saw an underground connection to the A, C, and E traced from my current location, what must be a long white hallway, and immediately skipped up the stairs to the exit, settling on traveling crosstown on foot, above ground. I emerged under one of the flashiest subway station signs in existence, surrounded by the frenzied and glorious celebration of light and garish glamor that is Times Square. I am happy to report that reports of its uselessness have been greatly exaggerated. There are moments when Times Square just works. When you need a private little moment of civilization jingoism. When you’re celebrating the ballsy energy of New York City, remembering it and falling head over heels in love for the first time. When you’re listening to the rousing finale of The Hold Steady’s latest album, grinning and shaking your head in gleeful disbelief at just how fucking incredible this all is. Us. New York. The glorious noise we make.

Hate to admit it, I really do, but I was turned around, and what was supposed to be a quick trot to the next subway ended up taking me past Bryant Park and Grand Central and I kid you not I was nearly to the United Nations when I started putting together that I was headed East. I spent the next five minutes working hard to teach my new orientation to my brain, picturing myself on the subway map, a briskly moving, blinking dot setting out in my true, new direction. So I passed Grand Central Station again, the New York Public Library again. This is New York’s Fashion Week, and Bryant Park is decked out in white tents. The beautiful and the semi-famous are hovering around midtown, attending parties, passing judgements, buying and selling status. I couldn’t help but be tickled and proud. 42nd street is a trip. If you open your eyes and look, there’s this amost unbearable concentration of human achievement, some of the world’s most charismatic displays of human productivity, frivolity, grace, and grandeur there.

There is a tugboat directly in front of my bench now, flanked by a tiny red coast guard vessel. They’re both flying the American flag; the tug is hanging a truly enormous, and seemingly backwards, flag from its raised crane. The sky has brightened, the air is warmer. The unfortunate blank and boringly utopian architecture of the financial center and Battery Park is done no favors by the light, but New Jersey looks impish and impatient, already aping greatness and hungry for more. They should really throw a subway line or two across the river – it’s a really long island, and Jersey’s got a lot of useful land potential minutes away.

Google Maps, through the magic of wireless internet, tells me I’m sitting next to North Cove, which I found by walking through the World Financial Center. I’ve never been here before, out on the towers’ landfill, which considering how cool the view is seems criminally negligent. It makes sense; its because the West Side Highway lies in the way, and only infrequently do I find myself in this neck of the woods at all. I visited the World Trade Center only once that I remember. We took an elevator, and must have looked out at the region (maybe not from the top?), but I don’t remember the view or the observation deck. Not well enough to say with certainty that I’m not making it up. What I do remember is the ground floor lobby, a multi story thing that showed off the ribs that defined the building. I do remember the bare courtyard space, from which one could see those ribs extending straight up and up and up. I remember being excited by it, and a litle distanced by it’s coldness, it’s size.

There, a second smaller tug has joined the first. Also yellow and black. Also flying a big stars and stripes from a crane.

After flipping the map of Manhattan in my head, after the embarrassing realization of exactly how close Times Square is to the A, C, and E if you travel in the correct direction, I descended again and waited for the E. You can tell from the subway map that anything headed south will take you close enough to the World Trade Center site to walk there in a minute or two, but I wanted to be on the train that actually terminated at a station labeled “World Trade Center,” a train with those words lit up in blue in the cars. It was on this subway ride that I saw a beautiful woman who inspired the thought, simple and happy: what a privilege to share a planet with you.

My makeshift ipod programming also reached a crescendo with the utilitarian trio of Daft Punk songs I keep with me at all times: “One More Time,” “Digital Love,” “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” I turned to Daft Punk for the lyric “we’re gonna celebrate,” which I wanted to make my dedication for the day, but ended up most won over by “work it harder, makes us better, do it faster, makes us stronger, more than ever, hour after hour, work is never over.” Which, if you know the song, also becomes “our work is never over.” A fitting eulogy, I think. My dad long ago framed September 11th for me in terms of work. This is a city that each and every minute of the working day generates more value, more wealth, more useful, productive, creative, positive effort than the jealous jihadists have in the totality of their efforts. The work of this city, every minute of every day, shows the attack to have been a failure. I love being here, getting to bear witness to it. There is nothing like midtown at rush hour when you’re not rushing to work; nothing like the morning crowd of downtown brokers when you’ve got the time to just walk and watch; nothing like the adoration of tourists, and the sound of all the languages its expressed in, when you live here.

Speeding downtown, after 14th street, I leaned into the wall size subway map and resumed searching it. I’ll admit that I’m intoxicated by it, and study it every chance I get. I want to fasten each of the neighborhood names onto the map in my head and begin to remember the spatial relationships beween them. I want to discover, like hidden treasure, the nonobvious (underground) connections between the city’s many parts, the nearness of Long Island City to Midtown, the epic journey of the 2 train from Brooklyn College to the edge of Westchester, the L’s neat joining of the East Village and Williamsburg. I want to learn to place Bay Ridge (bulge on the southwest corner of Brooklyn / Verrazano-Narrows / Saurday Night Fever) on the map, detangle lower Manhattan’s ball of string subway lines and their respective far flung destinations, somehow discern what Rockaway people are talking about when they say “Rockaway” (I see a street, a neighborhood, and a few train stations with the name, none of which are in the same place). Nothing in my life is settled, as of today, but I just may be lucky and crazy enough to live in Marble Hill, work on the Upper East Side, intern in Fort Greene, go to school in Northern Manhattan, and try my hardest to meet people to talk and party with all over the city. There are not enough hours in a day to love my city, to learn it the way it should be learned. There are not enough years in a life. To travel these streets, to meet these people, to celebrate all the living that is done, here, is a task I cannot do justice to. I also can’t help but try.

10:28 and all the boats loitering before me on the river (I count 18 or 19) are blowing their horns. Exactly seven years since the North Tower collapsed. Loud as all hell. And now they’re all motoring away.

Ok, now six parachutists are falling out of the sky, towards Jersey. Four of them are dangling American flags. The flags look enormous.

10:34: Who knew he NYC police department had so many boats?

10:38: After lingering, the first, big tugboat finally sets off down river.

The sun is out in force now, beating down on my neck. It is September 11, I am siting downtown on a park bench, and I want to report that I witnessed men collecting garbage this morning, one block from the big empty lot where two towers used to be, executing an absurd many-point turn on one of those tiny, ancient streets. I wish to report that the goings on of the city’s baseball teams is being discussed on the streets of lower Manhattan. Construction workers are working, and buildings are being built. I saw families walking towards gathering sites, holding pictures of their lost loved ones, and television crews milling about, outnumbering everyone, incessantly shuffling the cameras and microphones around, searching for a shot, an interview, and a story. The police and fire departments were out in force, mostly looking bored and making everyday chatter, but every so often an older officer would be looking especially sharp, ceremonial, sad. Many, many Starbucks were open, serving coffee and pastries and sporting brand new signage displaying (to the dismay and annoyance of many customers, I can assure you) the calorie count of each product. Stopped by traffic cops on the side of the West Side Highway, I overheard an incredulous discussion between two police officers about he price of a cup of coffee and the difference between a Starbucks and a licensed Starbucks. “You mean it looked like a Starbucks?” “Yeah, it had the sign all in front, it looks like a Starbucks.” They had apparently charged him twenty-three cents more.

11:37: Germans seem to be overrepresented among the tourists taking pictures down here. Must be the strong Euro.

The site itself is rarely, and then only partially, visible from ground level. Today there was additional distance between a potential viewer and the present, flat World Trade Center, provided by a human wall of police gently cajoling the commuters to change their usual routes and accommodate the memorial service. The only change I noticed was the presence of two large hanging signs hanging from 7 World Trade visualizing Silverstein Properties’ finished product, which the banners seem to promise in 2012. I was also directed to a website.

Trinity Church is still there, as beautiful a thing as that is, the worn stone graves and the easy scale, the building visibly unconcerned about economizing on space and unfazed by the canyons surrounding it. The trains are running. Over two million people work in Manhattan, and I saw thousands of them this morning, face after beautifully distinct face in trains, on buses, and walking down the street. For a moment another subway car was running along next to mine, and then it slipped behind us, revealing in a row of little yellow windows tableaus of commuters that struck me as so wonderful, so beautiful, that I could almost picture it, the whole city humming, above and below ground the millions moving, the gears turning, the cash registers ringing. New York is home to two of the largest three central business districts in the country (Chicago’s is #2), and the experience of wandering around both with wide eyes in a single morning is one I highly recommend. I hope against hope I can do this again next year, collect a few thoughts and blog by the river to remember. The idea and the image of this city is powerful, no doubt, but in its details, in its indescribable and infinite minutiae, it’s beauty can move you to tears, and the only way to experience that is to get out in it, and look.

Oh, and the lights are going back up tonight.