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.”

Update on Ground Zero

I wrote a massive email today to a friend in India, catching her up on about a year’s worth of news. I was tapping it out on an iPod touch while doing errands all around town (Russ & Daughters was all out of the super special matzoh), and at one point I walked past the World Trade Center site. I work nearby, but I haven’t actually seen it in a long time.

One World Trade Center has been going up for a while, but it’s massive now! Wow. It must be fifteen, twenty stories tall already, towering over what is now a field of white cranes. They look like a herd of bleached sauropod spines. Bridges that used to look down into the pit are now dwarfed by the red girders; “Yankees #1!” is scrawled across the thickest horizontal.

I share this because after writing for six hours, you want something to show for it, something that can be shared with more than one person. Curse you, intimate details, sprinkled indiscriminately throughout this masterpiece of heartfelt correspondence!

Also: have you seen that building recently? I know it’s been a long time coming, but still. We don’t have a gaping hole in the ground anymore. Quite a feeling.

Opposite of Adults

The excellent music blog Pretty Much Amazing serves up a lot of clever, fun songs (Santogold and M.I.A. and Major Lazer!), but trendy music rarely has much staying power.

Rapping over a sample of “Kids” by MGMT—that impossibly catchy song you heard at every hipster dance party last summer— sounds like a recipie for just this kind of disposable amusement. Instead, “Opposite of Adults” by Chiddy Bang, which I found on PMA last week, is something I’ll be happily listening to ten years from now. It reminds me of Big Jaz or A Tribe Called Quest, that laid back, big hearted sound that never seems to get old.

Hip hop is brilliant at capturing and evoking nostalgia; see “It’s That Simple,” “T.R.O.Y.,” “Empire State of Mind,” “Concrete Schoolyard,” “A Wrinkle In Time,” and “The Art of Storytellin’ Pt. I.” That crashing hi-hat feels as joyous and innocent as we incorrectly remember childhood being.

So add this to your back in the day playlist. Click to stream, right-click to download.

History of The World: Part 1 (through 100)

The British Museum is producing a series of stories attempting to tell the story of the human race. They selected 100 objects from their collection, and with BBC Radio 4, are building fifteen minutes of radio around each, releasing them in chronological order.

It’s worth noting the disenchantment over how the museum acquired these pieces, and the institution’s claims to universal importance; the imperial roots of this collection are clearly audible as you listen. The skillful storytelling and the range of experts you’ll hear goes a long way towards selling this project despite that, but the gorgeous story itself is the draw here: how humanity developed, grew, and changed over these last thousands of years.

No one account can do world history justice, but it would be criminal to give up trying. Nothing gives me a greater thrill than great big stories about the shape of the human story, and like other entries in this genre, A History of the World reminds you how complex and amazing this story really is.

We have accountants to thank, for example, for our species’ most important achievement: writing. What we would call literature was content with spoken language, memorized and performed generation after generation. The first bureaucrats, on the other hand, looked to reliable, physical accounting to administer an expanding state. Some of the earliest surviving writing concerns itself with rationing beer in 3000 BC.

It doesn’t hurt that Radio 4 delivers everything in a British accent and peppered with dry humor. One of the learned experts, on the topic of beer as currency, quips, “no liquidity crisis here.” Then he chuckles to himself. It’s so bad it’s awesome.

You can stream episodes here, but the site’s pretty messy. I recommend downloading the podcasts.

An article in The Economist first convinced me this project was worth following. The kicker is delicious: “Of the 100 objects, only one has not been selected yet. Mr MacGregor is waiting until the last possible moment to pick out the best symbol of our own time. Suggestions, please, on a postcard to: British Museum, London WC1B 3DG.”

Dinosaur Colors Discovered!

I can’t and won’t try to compete with the web’s many wonderful science news sites and blogs. But this story makes the ten year old inside me oh so very happy.

When I was that age, reading all about dinosaurs, we didn’t know what they looked like. Not really. The colors in those drawings I poured over were only someone’s best guess. After learning this, imagining dinosaur herds became both more exciting and more uncertain. The mystery—likely permanent, I understood—frustrated and aroused me.

Turns out they had red feathers. At least, one of them did. For the first time, evidence of dinosaur pigmentation has been found. Look at a rendering here, read about the discovery here, and check out the Nature abstract here.

Hearing the news, I felt what I learned to feel when I was ten, paging through science books: gratitude, wonder, and pride. For some reason, the driving curiosity and hard work a discovery like this represents make me feel like a proud parent sitting in the bleachers, cheering on the scrappy but dogged efforts of our home team.

“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.

The Color Changing Card Trick

I saw Richard Wiseman talk and perform on the Lower East Side a few weeks ago: standing room only, everyone sweaty and crushed and Gumbi necked. We had a blast.

The guy looks and sounds exactly like Wallace, of the claymation capers, and the resemblance has served Wiseman well in his unusual career. Trained as a magician, he turned an interest in psychology into a career researching and writing books, and has been terrifically entertaining about it.

This video was one of the highlights of the evening. Go ahead- try to figure out what’s going on.

Weisman “currently holds Britain’s only Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology.” We need more paying positions like that in the world. His website has links to all his many awesome projects.

On Death and Dancing

This summer, just after Michael Jackson died, I took a walk with my mom in Inwood park. She remembered a fight she got in with a friend over custody of the “Thriller” LP decades earlier. We had once seen a French breakdancing troupe perform; asked after the show about inspiration, every single one of the young dancers said that it was watching Michael Jackson on TV as kids that made them want to dance. I had written about Jackson’s impact in revolutionary Iran a while back. My mom and I tried to imagine all the similar stories we knew people were telling each other that day.

Mourning “requires other people,” according to Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst. Meghan O’Rourke, writing in The New Yorker this week, explains:

Today, Leader points out, our only public mourning takes the form of grief at the death of celebrities and statesmen… This grief is the same as the old public grief in which groups got together to experience in unity their individual losses. As a saying from the Yangtze Valley (where professional mourning was once common) put it, “We use the occasions of other people’s funerals to release personal sorrows.” When we watch the televised funerals of Michael Jackson or Ted Kennedy, Leader suggests, we are engaging in a practice that goes back to soldiers in the Iliad mourning with Achilles for the fallen Patroclus. Our version is more mediated. Still, in the Internet age, some mourners have returned grief to a social space, creating online grieving communities, establishing virtual cemetaries, commemorative pages, and chat rooms where loss can be described and shared.

Public wailing and ritual black clothing have largely dissappeared, but we’re always inventing new ways to organize public mourning. My favorite product of the Jackson grief gale last summer was Eternal Moonwalk, which stitched YouTube clips together to create a surreal and powerful testament to the King of Pop’s influence.

Keep your eye on the countries named at the bottom of the screen. Watching the same dance step (executed with hillarious inconsistency) performed by so many disparate people somehow feels sublime, holy. It’s not the man, compromised and creepy as he was, that moves me. It’s us— connected, as always, by similar experiences of joy and grief, and now connected by cameras and satellites and software, status updates and text donations. Making mourning public, as it should be, once again.

Scrap Relation at The Stone

Some paintings are about the brushes and cloth, emotions and accidents that created them much more than the supposed subject. Scrap Relation makes music like that, about itself, about its own creation, its own beauty and dissonance: this humming, stuttering moment of live sound.

The Stone, a perfect dark corner of the Lower East Side, was filled tonight with a sea of seated bodes and the flash of the brass on the head of the upright bass. At times that bass and the drums melted into one instrument. The sax and guitar asked and answered each other’s questions. I tuned my attention from one instrument to the four voices splashing together in delicate conversation. Then to the room, the audience, and once, when a siren briefly joined the music, to the world outside. All the way back in then, the musicians’ faces, wild fingers flying.

I don’t know enough to place this complicated sound into a larger story about music, as I do, chapter and verse, genre and decade, with pop music. To call it timeless feels cheap, and not accurate, anyway. Instead, I will say that it hung in the present, in that blade of time where it was created. There, then, it filled the air around us, beautifully.

Introverts of the World, Unite!

Once, during a loud party full of people I barely knew, I managed to start and sustain a serious conversation. It was about law, I seem to remember. Sitting there on a couch with a kindred spirit while people stood, drinking, all around us, I was gently teased: I was quoting Adam Smith, at a party, instead of having fun. But I was having fun.

Many of my happiest memories are of lengthy, worthwhile conversations (even in inhospitable environments). The rest are of solitary pleasures: biking the length of Manhattan on a brilliant late summer Sunday, or reading for hours on end. Small talk, crowded, anonymous rooms, and pleasantries exchanged with strangers do not make the list.

I always thought these preferences were vaguely disappointing and embarassing, the result of grouchy, selfish impulses I should be curbing. Then Jonathan Rauch, writing in The Atlantic, set me straight. As Caring for your Introvert memorably and wittily makes clear, introverts are not shy or misanthropic. We really like people. Just not all the time.

And that’s ok. If you suspect that you or someone you know may be one of us, I recommend reading Rauch’s article. You may, as I did, find it welcome, and long overdue.

Imagine That

I remember the thrill each time we played, the excitement of it. I was nervous that we make it as good as the last time. I also remember my dad teaching me to skip rocks, and the pride in his voice, the joy he took at sharing this whimsical but precise skill. These were times to be cherished; tangible evidence of something incredibly flattering, that my parents seemed to not only love me in some abstract way, but actively enjoy spending time with me. At the time, theirs were the only opinions that mattered, and the pleasure I saw on their faces just filled me up. I needed nothing else.

My mom and I would chose our table for its view of the others. I don’t remember ordering food, but maybe I nibbled at some overpriced pastry or she sipped at a coffee as we spoke. We would – at least, I remember that I would – take pains to not turn in obvious ways, to not give away where we were looking. Our conversation wouldn’t be whispered, just politely quiet, easily lost in the wash of sound any public place provides.

It was a team sport. She’d pick someone, pluck him out of his anonymity, and the first thing to do was take several moments to simply sit, watching, waiting for inspiration. We would glance, not stare. There – the balding man in the yellow shirt, with the large bag, here on the left – see who I’m talking about? This was our canvas. It was best not to force it. Take him in without looking for something specific. Let it happen on its own.

Then we started telling the story. We were kind and knowing. Anyone could see his dour silence, the uneasy eyes, the nervous way he stirred his cold coffee. We knew, we understood like no one else, the circumstances hidden just outside of the frame. Do you think he’s waiting for his sister? We sketched roughly at first, thinking out loud, shooting each other down. No, no, he’s clearly been stood up. Look at the way he’s slouching. But some stories aren’t worth telling, are cheap or too obvious. We preferred unlikely and devilishly specific to probable, prudent and boringly vague.

The meat of our story came from one person. After the rough drafts one of us would realize that we had it – that perfect mixture of plausibility and bold fiction – and it told itself. Like the real story would be, were we to ever learn it, ours was unexpected in interesting and believable ways. Like the real story, it was detailed and unique. This man knows very little English, my mom would begin. (She always knew how to hook you. Also, she liked her stories to involve foreigners.) Guri. From Albania. He is in this country because his brother promised to get him a job, but it hasn’t worked out yet, he’s been strung along and he’s beginning to doubt his decision to come here at all. His brother told him to get out of the apartment and enjoy the city’s museums, so he came here, but he hasn’t been able to enjoy any of the art and he can’t get his mind off home.

What we had at this point could be called a foundation, but functioned more like a slip ‘n’ slide: the rest of the story poured out, flowing from the character we’d created. We talked over each other. The detail one of us created immediately showed up in an angle the other had planned. This courtyard reminds him of a place he used to love to go, back home – to go with a woman! He’s thinking of her – he’s missing her, that’s why he regrets coming here – he used to share coffee with her, and it’s too sad to drink it on his own – he’s looking at the other couples here and feeling how lonely – the coffee is no good compared with what he drank in his country. Ahuh. Yeah. Pause. The coffee was disappointing, and it reminded him of a time he went out for coffee with this woman he loves back where he could understand the language, where he felt at home. My mom would smile, and I would smile, and I would be so proud, and feel so happy.

Ah! She would say, when I filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle. I would encourage her most inspired moments: yeah. Yeah. We would sit quietly again, armed with secret knowledge. It was maudlin, it had pathos, it involved foreigners. Watching this man now, we would see Guri, the Albanian lonely heart. It was like a movie we had written coming to life. A moment would pass at it’s own pace. Then: what do you think is in the bag?

My mom started the game. I don’t remember the first time, how she brought it up. I don’t remember it needing an explanation; it was self-evidently an awesome way to pass an afternoon. Was this something she had done with friends, curious college buddies in love with New York City, turned on by the endless possibilities embodied in the countless strangers they passed every day? We always played in the courtyard at the Museum of Modern Art, so for me the excitement of being in the city combined with the excitement of Important Culture, and of being alone with my mom, and of creating something. Where did she play with her friends? Why there? Or was the game silent and internal until I came along, one of those well practiced but wholly private exercises, like the imaginary interviews I give to Terri Gross? Do you get to say out loud to your kid the things you’ve kept from fellow adults?

I picture my mom, young, no children, no husband, a crowd surrounding her on the subway platform. There are no iPods and no earbuds. People’s chosen distractions each reveal something about them: The Wall Street Journal instead of the Times, a romance novel mainstay instead of the latest literary star. Say my mom was without anything that day. She’s bored, and hot, the station air stiff and still. She notices that the man next to her is reading the Post, the editorial page, and the fragment of the headline she can make out suggests that there’s a good chance this is not a man she would agree with about almost anything. He reminds her of someone she knew once, but it’s hard to pin down. She notices his watch, which has a few visible scratches and a very worn leather band, and then his shoes. Without meaning to, she’s staring at the cuff of his pants, which has been folded over at one point. She knows the way her father dresses, the way his closet smells, the way he hangs his suspenders. She imagines this man’s closet must look different. Maybe he lives alone, and gets dressed half asleep, resenting the new day, thinking only of the first cup of coffee. She checks his face, around his eyes. He doesn’t look poorly rested at all, just very patient, very calm. Erase erase erase. Start again.

There’s no clear line between observation and speculation, just as there’s no clear line dividing a mental habit from a formalized activity. The rules write themselves. Passing people on the sidewalk, sitting in restaurants, noticing the couple, not particularly agitated but not particularly happy, over by the bar – the stories my mom comes up with get more intricate, more courageous. They are funny. They are terribly tragic. The only clear line is the one she crosses when she shares the game with me. It’s the first time she’s told any of the stories out loud.

As with all our stories, this is most likely not true, not even a little. As with all our stories, that doesn’t matter. Not even a little. The act of writing false biographies for our fellow MOMA patrons helped us remember how much is unseen, unexpected, how much is unknowable about the people around us. It also let us have fun at others’ expense. It was an act of willful creation, wholly ours, and our pleasure was as much in the invention as in the observation and pseudo-scientific deduction. If it made for a better story we’d happily suspension our disbelief.

As with all our stories, the way I imagine my mom coming to this storytelling is about me more than any external reality. The subway curiosity is my own. The concealment of daily mental rituals is my own. The dramatic, energetic inner voice, the rapt inner audience, even the memories of a watch scratch and a closet smell are mine. My mom taught me how to write fiction. How to love writing fiction.

The curiosity, the attentive observation, the awe and the gratitude may all have found their way into me some way or another. New York City seems to leave me no other choice. But fiction is different. For that, I have to thank my mom, and those balmy afternoons we spent surrounded by boring, inscrutable sculpture and blank, intriguing human canvases.

This Is Halloween

Batman or Superman? Kirk or Picard? Would you prefer to have the power of invisibility or of flight? Describe your best Halloween costume. At age ten, who was your favorite fictional character, and why? Who would it be today? Tell us about a time you were fired from a job. Explain in five hundred words what you believe in. If you were a flower, what kind of flower would you be?

If I waited for an original idea to begin working, I think I’d get as far as actually tearing my eyeballs out of my head before I gave up and joined a monastery. Diving right in, then. Batman. Kirk. (In case you weren’t aware, Krik or Spock? is not a question. You’ve completely missed the point.) To be brutally honest? Invisibility. I know. We can talk about it later.

—

What I remember about Halloween, other than how surprising it was every year that I could and did forget that it bumps right up against my birthday, is being disappointed with myself on the costume front. Maybe there is nothing I actually enjoy about dressing up, and my expectations were all unconsciously based on movie montages set to aggressively fun music, but it seemed like something I should be good at, something I should have fun with. My failure to do so was dismaying, and painful.

When it came to costumes, as in my other earthly pursuits, I aim high. None of the standard ghouls for me. Come to think of it, Halloween never really had much to do with fear or fright in my experience, but it’s not just that plastic moulds of Frankenstein’s monster didn’t pass muster. The standard costumes are familiar to everyone, I’m sure, but just to make fresh in your memory the utter inanity of this peculiar cottage industry, let’s review.

There are doctors and nurses, a strangely mythical rendering of a real world profession which may contribute to our love of soap operas set in hospitals and our expensive inability to resist a sales pitch from someone in a white coat. You can purchase superhero clothing that makes you look even less glamorous than you usually do, which is strange because it seems to go the other way on the superheros. You can be a pirate, which in light of the internet and the Indian Ocean makes less and less sense every day.

Bizzare aside: I did hear on EconTalk that the voluntary arrangements among eighteenth century pirate ships were atypically democratic for the times, possibly influencing subsequent governance, but even if we grant them that, it isn’t really what we like about them, is it. Maybe we make protagonists of mobsters, bank robbers and pirates because in our lives we resent the criminalization of victimless acts and therefore admire the balls it takes to disregard a law. Unfortunate then that the crimes we glorify are ones with victims. Pirates, the real ones who stole rivalrous and excludable things, may have occasionally had more fun than other denizens of the eighteenth century, but they did so on the backs of others and therefore don’t deserve our respect or our Halloween tributes.

So: no good options. I was looking for a costume that looked good, referenced something reasonably cool from popular culture, made immediate sense to onlookers, could be assembled from things we had lying around the house, and took about half an hour to take from conception to completion. No real successes, I’m sorry to report. Lest you think my criteria were unreasonable, and look to blame my failure on an unwillingness to purchase something, plan ahead, or otherwise put at my disposal anything other than my usual wardrobe, I’ll have you know it can be done. I had a friend, the one I always ended up trick or treating with, who pulled it off, year after year, making it look silly to do anything else. He appeared to spend no time or effort. He bought nothing, he never dressed in logo-printed polyester, and let me tell you, he looked good.

This was my general impression, but if pressed for specifics I can’t recall many. The costumes that impressed me included my friend throwing on a fedora and a suit jacket and calling himself a gangster. (So effortless! So cool! Why did this never happen to me? Where did he get a suit jacket?) Another year the article of clothing he found lying around his house was a wide, round hat pointed at the top which his father brought home from Vietnam. I think these are used by poor peasants who farm rice and need to keep the sun off their necks, but here, on him, it signified something much sexier and exotic. Were there ninjas in Vietnam? Probably not. It did not matter. No one was reminded of a farmer. He was, if I may, ninjaesque.

As for the embarrassing results of my attempts to replicate his feat, the only one I remember with any clarity was the year I put on my grandfather’s long black wool coat. It is with great difficulty that I reveal to you, in a spirit of openness and honesty, and not letting the past hang over us and all that, that the only thing I found to accessorize the coat with was, wait for it, balloons. Several balloons, I seem to recall, floating along over my head, just begging the question. I answered, with the heavy resignation of someone who is waiting patiently for this night to be over, that I was a balloon seller. You know. A balloon seller.

I’m not enjoying this, but I want to spell it out for you: I did not look good. My already tenuous self esteem was taking body blows every time someone new looked my way. I had no connection to any cool character, past or present. I also was not identifiable, not easily and not ever, not even after I’d done my best to explain, and my best, by that point, had moved past half-hearted and was actively flirting with words like “sulking,” “gloomy,” and “inaudible.” I didn’t know what I was myself. Couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t figure how I had come to be in such a awful position, scrambling the night of Halloween for something, anything, considering that costumes typically appeared, fully formed and awesome, a week before the holiday, after the discovery of some obvious and effortless linchpin garment, preferably one brought from a far away land, by a father, maybe.

That year as we walked through town I remember running into a classmate, a pretty and intimidating blond, surrounded by her friends and looking the opposite of an embarrassment. Not being far removed from elementary school and its automatic intimacy, we knew each other, and said hello, although this girl wouldn’t have considered herself a friend of mine. I was mortified. I think I tried to avoid even mentioning the words “balloon seller,” so tired and disgusted was I with my non-idea for a non-costume, so frustrated by my inability to justify, to myself or anyone else, why I was wearing this stupid coat. I had nothing to say, and bowed out of my social responsibilities, as I often do, with the grace of a log.

She was wearing a red baseball hat, backwards or cocked to the side, and I think her shirt was pulled and tied in a knot at the back. All her friends were dressed the same. The colors were red, maybe black, and white. Someone asked what they were. She said she was nookie. Like that song. Fred Durst’s band, what was their name? I did it all for the nookie. Limp Bizkit.

Limp Bizkit was a popular musical act, circa the earliest of the years I spent being awkward and dressing in oversized black coats. They were loud, dumb, and boorish, and their most popular song featured the refrain, “I did it all for the nookie, yeah! The nookie, yeah! So you can take that cookie, and stick it up your, yeah! Stick it up your, yeah! Stick it up your, yeah! And stick it up your, yeah!”

At the time it was not clear to me exactly what nookie was, and so nagging was my uncertainty that I much later looked it up just to pin it down, but seeing these girls I got the general idea. I now knew with certainty that was not a nonsense word, like those that featured in so many pop hooks of that era, but instead a word that referred to something a little dirty, something a little cheap, something sexual but not sexy, something childish and duchey.

My blond acquaintance was dressed like we had seen Fred Durst, the lead singer, dress in the video for this song. It is an ugly and smug wardrobe, the highlight of which is the aforementioned bright baseball cap, which says simply, I may be stupid, but I’m also mean, so stay the fuck out of my way. On her the outfit was tighter, and seemed sadder, less bullying and more tragic. She was volunteering to be the target of his cat calls, the willing subject of his leering and his arrogant appetite. It skived me out. I had that sense that history would not look kindly on her costume. Limp Bizkit never seemed like a keeper to me, and in my experience grown women did not subject themselves to this sort of thing, so presumably there was a moment when one left that kind of desperation and degradation behind. I hoped there was. Despite my balloons and wanting to disappear, I left feeling embarrassed for her.

I’ve accused myself of being judgemental and prude more times than you’ll ever manage, so don’t think I’m not aware of how I sound. She was young, Pop lust rarely hurts anyone, and playacting the part of a sexually desirable and available woman is often harmless, even charming and pleasantly embarrassing in hindsight. I had my own reasons for reacting the way I did. She was frighteningly confident, glamorous, and inaccessible, and things were much simpler if I could pity her. Her overeager embrace of sex didn’t have to highlight my own nervousness and inability to feel desirable if I could, instead, laugh it off. And of course, my failure of a costume wasn’t so bad once you considered I might have gone as nookie itself.

I hope she’s doing well. There were other things over the years that fed my pity, like her tendency to slavishly follow around a certain bossy alpha girl, and hints of a relationship with a boy who was significantly older and therefore potentially dangerous. Her fragility may have been all in my mind. It’s still a powerful memory. I wanted then to protect her, from the world, from herself. I wanted to be the beautiful and confident one, wanted to take her away, release her from the politics and paranoia of middle school. I would offer instead the serenity and solidity of my maturity, and she would be so grateful, so relieved to take off the nookie costume and leave her stupid friends behind forever. Most importantly, she would see me as I really was, not mumbling and sincerely hoping to vanish, but smiling gregariously, putting everyone at ease, charming, sparkling, shining.

—

I don’t know why but no other costumes, no other Halloweens, come readily to mind. I’ll think about it and try to figure out what else I put together. Somehow the adrenaline coursing through my system in my embarrassment has made that one night my brain’s go to story about the holiday and left no room for others. Some years I may have not attempted anything, figuring (correctly) that dismissing questions about my lack of a costume would be easier than finding something good or suffering something bad. It wasn’t like I got good at it after a while. The costuming was never really my thing.

I know people who are not me have memories of elaborate childhood costumes, and parents working overtime, or that time you had the best idea ever, and whether or not it worked, it was a glorious making the attempt. If you want to share a best or worst costume, explain why you’d rather fly than turn invisible, or talk about being dumped or fired or the songs your father taught you, write me at thisjoyfulnoise@gmail.com. I’d love to hear your stories.

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.

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.