In Media Res
I just got back from the Barnes & Noble on 86th Street, where I impulsively bought a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s basically-the-My-Beautiful-Dark-Twisted-Fantasy-of-year-end-book-lists novel Freedom and even more impulsively bought a copy of Christoph Niemann’s delightful children’s book Subway.
I bought the former because I’m pretty sure (and by that I mean pretty not sure, but it’s nice to think) that I saw Franzen in the United terminal on my second day trapped at San Francisco International Airport this week. The book jacket says he lives part-time in New York, which I knew, and part-time in Santa Cruz, which I didn’t, so it’s totally possible. Cool beans. Anyway, I figured that if I’m going to tell strangers on the plane that I just saw the dude who wrote Freedom, I should probably read it, right?
I bought the latter as a gift for Sussan, who introduced me to Niemann’s delightful “Abstract City” Blog at NYTimes.com. Niemann uses media ranging from Legos to cookie dough to leaves to coffee stains on napkins to create whimsical, captioned images that are, well, really fun to read through. Subway, which the New York Times insists is spelled with all caps, is adapted from an “Abstract City” piece about his school-aged sons’ love for the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority subway system. It’s mega-cute.
It’s also pretty closely related to the New Year’s Resolution that I just decided on about fifteen minutes ago as I was walking home from the book store and trying to find a bodega with a decent selection of 22 ounce bottles of craft beer. My resolution this year goes like this: sometimes go out and do more stuff. The emphasis is on the “out,” as I tend to spend far too much time sitting in my apartment, poring over sidebars on NYMag.com and watching “Man Vs. Food,” or at the same several bars near work with people from work, getting drunk enough that the same pre-made sandwiches at the 96th St. CVS seem like new, totally great decisions when i get home.
Not anymore. I’ve got a ridiculous transit system and an unlimited subway card, and this city is full of neighborhoods I’ve barely even heard of. I finished my album halfway through the year and finished my book just before Christmas. I’ve created a bunch of shit, and I’m not feeling particularly motivated to make anything right now, but I get bored if I don’t set tasks for myself. My goal this year is to have a bunch of neighborhood field trips, especially to all those places that my favorite food blogs usually forget to tell me about.
I’m doing well on my resolution so far because I spent the afternoon walking around Astoria, which is a place that I should probably have more friends living in, and would if I just had more friends in general. I got a fantastic slice of spinach burek (well, the only burek I’ve ever had, so it might be lousy as far as bureks go, but it was pretty good as far as $4.50 giant triangles of phyllo and spinach filling go) at the Bosnian mini-chain Djerdan Burek, then a carnitas taco and a chorizo taco from La Espiguita, where I watched Jake Gyllenhall piss his pants in a Spanish-dubbed broadcast of Jarhead as I waited for my food. I ate the tacos on the N train, riding it to the end of the line at the Astoria/Ditmars Blvd. stop. The chorizo taco in particular was one of the best tacos I’ve ever had. The burst of flavor on the first bite was beyond anything I could have expected. Amazing.
I ended up walking around Astoria as it got dark, making my way past streets of delicious-looking restaurants until I arrived at the Steinway M/R stop. I really have no excuse for not spending time in Astoria. Fantastic restaurants, terrific diversity, a total lack of pretension - this is the type of neighborhood that should exist in any decent-sized city in America but is rare in New York, where the forces of poverty and steamrolling gentrification have conspired to rid the land of places that people both want to and can live.
Still, Steinway Street was a little weird. And by weird, I mean really normal. The lower-middle-class urban shopping district, which should be a fascinating phenomenon, has a tendency to look exactly the same in every New York City location not below 100th Street in Manhattan. You have your stand-alone mall stores - Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, maybe the Gap - your cell phone provider brick-and-mortars (Verizon on the higher-end blocks, T-Mobile on the lower-end blocks), your banks, your Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins combos, your Wendy’s, and maybe your New York Sports Club (on the same block as the Verizon), and then nestled in between them you have your 99 Cents and Up!, your El Mundo Discount, and your sketchy looking furniture stores. And Jimmy Jazz (which I still don’t understand. Why have Jimmy Jazz and Hyperactive? In the same places?). And Game Stop, which is everywhere, because apparently the kids need to have their video games. Anyway, Steinway Street: the first place I’ve ever seen a non-mall Express store.
I like that very few of the shops and restaurants in Astoria are of the farm-to-table, only craft beers on tap, single-source coffee, white person from Ohio-made “ethnic” food variety. I happen to really like those types of restaurants, and streets like Graham Ave in Brooklyn do a fantastic job with them, but it’s nice to have cheap, non-McDonald’s food that isn’t served with a wink by a girl with a nose piercing who went to NYU.
I listened to the Weakerthans as I walked around today, which was nice. I forget how much I like them because tend to mostly listen to them when I’m in transit - walking, maybe sitting on the subway. For some reason, home isn’t the best place for them. I get tired or, when listening to “Virtute the Cat Explains her Departure,” unreasonably sad. Walking around, imagining if I live in a different neighborhood some three and a half years into the future, after law school, they fit into my whole still-cool-but-was-never-really-cool-but-at-least-cares-about-some-things version of myself that I imagine I’m slowly settling into. I’m listening to them now. I’m thinking about being outside and walking around, so it still works.
Plus, with all of the grossly melting piles of snow and slush still around, hearing John Samson sing about Winnipeg is perfect. He makes Winnipeg sound like the worst city in the world, but it makes me want to visit. Some authors create fantastic, living versions of cities - James Joyce with turn-of-the-century Dublin, Charles Dickens with Victorian, underclass London, Philip Roth with postwar Jewish New Jersey - and Samson does the same thing with the drearily cold, boring, alcoholism-enabling Winnipeg. It’s awesome.
I went into a bunch of bodegas I’d never visited before, despite the fact that they’re all within two blocks of me. That’s sad. Geography is weird. We make up boundaries for ourselves and create holes in the landscape, skipping over blocks or refusing to go north while gaining great familiarity with south, or taking the subway every day without ever getting off at one particular stop, to reshape and warp our worlds. My New York is a singular one, completely unlike the New York of neighbors in my very same building. I’m hoping that maybe, before I (likely) move away from here for several years, I can fill in a few of those holes.
Work tomorrow. With the storm and the airport delays, I only made it to one day of work last week, and there’s going to be a lot to do tomorrow. I’m hoping that by next weekend I still have energy.
