I went out walking last night. It was, I hope, the last anxiety-fueled ramble for the foreseeable future. I needed someone to talk to, more than I can remember of late. But I am not drinking this week, and even if I was I doubt anyone at the bars would have been sober enough to listen or care. Bartenders are busy, and awesome for brief wit and check-ins but not real conversation.
My concerns are petty, though, and I know it. Who doesn’t have an angry landlord? Who doesn’t have a landlord threatening to call the cops on him at the next indiscretion? I should simply never have called the guy. It was complete naïvete on my part to just check in and see if I needed to do anything on account of the leak in the ceiling. I guess if I have any residual explanation for this moment of weakness it is that there is a new super in the building, and I thought that might signal the beginning of a new regime. That makes no sense, but I was mildly curious to know if this new super had authority (and keys) to access the apartments. That would be a big change from the previous super, who never did anything and seems to have been appointed “super” while never doing anything super.
But if this new super had keys to my kingdom then I think I was entitled to know. It does not sound like he has the keys.
I did not walk far, and I was only out for about an hour. I made it to Broadway and back, via Crescent and/or 31st Street, where I took my blood pressure at the Rite Aid. It is pretty much back to normal after last week’s weirdness. Too cold to stay out too long, and I gave myself a deadline of being back by 11pm — a goal I reached within a 5 minute margin of error. It was nothing compared to my all-night wanders of yore, which took me as far as the Food Bazaar at Junction Boulevard — and all the way back, because no cabbie would accept my fare at that hour. They just smiled and drove away. It was not the hour of the day so much as the fact that they were heading to their garages for the night, and only wanted to take passengers in that direction.
Last night I could not sleep out of paranoia that dropping a book on the floor or getting up and tripping over something might prompt a call to the angry landlord, and then a call to the cops. It is great living in fear.
I remember the end of that all-night wander to the Food Bazaar, passing Tupelo at around 6am. Kids (probably mid-30s by now) were still there, drinking the morning away. Tupelo became a Bravo Supermarket, which then became a C-Town. I don’t shop there any more on account of their trick pricing. Adjacent to Tupelo there used to be a limo company. The frieze of the C-Town today bears a set of Lions, which were newly placed after Tupelo closed and the space was converted to a large supermarket. Before the Bravo opened I took those Lions as a signal that the new store would be a Food Lion, and in fact I think that was the original intent. I remember looking up records on who had filed the building permits and the names appeared to be those of individuals who owned other Food Lion franchises in the Bronx.
There’s your moment of hyperlocal history.
I am thinking along these lines because a friend asked me to give a walking tour of some arbitrary stretch of road in AsLIC, focusing on whatever I could bring to such a thing. 35th Avenue, for one, is reasonably rich in real history, what with the Kaufman Astoria Studios and all. But my tour would be more about what used to be at each place of business and perhaps who owned the space and what went on there. It would fit in to my belief that every place of business should have on its façade a list of what businesses inhabited that space before them, dating back as far as public records or reliable memory can go.
But how does one make a walking tour of that focus interesting, and worth the time for those who show up? It has to be within the so-called KAD, the Kaufman Arts District. The KAD, contrary to its name, has relatively minimal heritage in the arts, and only the most perfunctory (and peripheral) arts community inhabits that area.
When the C-Town (née Bravo, née Tupelo/Limo Company) opened I looked about the new SPACE for vestiges of Tupelo. There was a spiral staircase leading up to a small treehouse-like room, with a stained glass window. I think that was left over from Tupelo but I can’t be sure. I tried to place where the bar would have been in relation to what was there now. I saw the hairy-faced ghost bartender moving from one end of his workspace to the other, not colliding with the C-Town (née Bravo) cashiers because he (the hairy faced ghost of a bartender) had no physical properties. He was a memory that did not vanish. That is not what memories do. Memories inhabit the physical space of others without violating it. But memories do not need physical properties to collide with their earthly brethren. You look at one person and see someone else. You hear the words of another person and, no matter what they actually said, you hear something either entirely different or else subtly manipulated by the weeds of memory, weeds that guide the structures they surround.
I might opt out of doing that walking tour. It would be a lot of work for minimal compensation, and I might be in jail by then after the angry landlord calls the cops on me.
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Flaneur.NYC
I might go ahead and pull the trigger on Flaneur.NYC soon. I was browsing through it, and through this site, to compare the design and such. I like them both for individual posting pages (.MOBI slightly more but I’ll work on that) but the top page is still kind of a bugger for me. I like the new top page look at Flaneur but it is twitchy. If I could get a look that does not twitch at all. Ah, story of my life.
I think what I don’t like on the desktop version is how the mouseover of a single post causes the others to go grey. And the foldout of the dek for the mouseovered post is not quite satisfying, especially given the way I start my postings with what usually ends up being the weakest material. I think, contrary to clickbait mentality, that a mouseover should sell the post well enough that you can click it or not. It shouldn’t matter. There should be enough substance in a mouseover that you can get your edification (heh) and choose to go deeper for MORE SATISFACTION. But it should not be a clickbait type of lure.
Remembering now my dream of long ago to have a site with a complete world of applications and forums, all of them populated by the words of one person talking only to himself, with perhaps the occasional self-aware outreach to posterity. I guess it could be me for reals but this was more the stuff of a short story or radio piece, something in the spirit of Krapp’s Last Tape.
I had a little self-contained world of my own in the form of a groupware web application designed for an office of any size, large or small. But all the sub-applications were populated solely by me. I filled in closet inventories, dresser drawer contents, computer and tech gear. All that administrativia was there, as were random poems and text matter such as this. It was not as comprehensive as it could have been, but then the software itself was entirely too twitchy for to earn my trust.
You could call this dream of a self-contained world of discussion and conversation, all inhabited by the words of one person, as Bipolar Delight. But now that I know I am not bipolar I guess I can’t joke about that any more.
The Muzak memory of yesterday (yesteryear, really) seems to connect to other things. I am putting points together, points from these recent weeks of effluvious text eruptions to those of years ago. Drawing two points together on the Muzak memory I guess I have said more than once that I want to be active in the worlds of music or writing or whatever, I just don’t want anyone to notice me or to know I am here. If I am lucky no one will take note of what I’ve done on earth until long after I am gone. Luckier still if everything vanishes, not even to wash up at the thrift shops of the future, be they physical, spiritual, or virtual.
BBC, LBC, etc
Speaking of radio pieces, I’ve discovered the rich world of the BBC 4 and BBC 4 Extra. A lengthy radio drama last night about a dysfunctional family at first had me worried it was a horror piece reminiscent of the Stephen King story I read in Playboy a while back. I tuned in to this radio drama at the point where a father and mother are entertaining a guest, pouring him a drink, passing the appetizers, etc. As this happens the sound of a man screaming for mercy is heard in the background. The parents say not to worry, they are just trying to teach their son good manners, trying to teach him not to demand so much attention. He sounds like he is bound and tied to a chair, or some heavy object. His real circumstance might have been made clear in the fast-moving dialogue but if so I missed the details.
The guest asks how old their son is, seeming to assume the answer will be that the kid is 6 or 7. “Oh, he’s 38.” And from there the son is let free from the shackles and the comedy of it all comes through. It was quite hilarious. I think the setup of the profoundly dysfunctional family could be mined for comedy into the next millennia, or until family itself is no longer.
A friend recommended LBC (Leading Britain’s Conversation), and I gave it a try. The first time I tuned in I heard a few moments of an excruciatingly detailed tutorial on how to coax an unwilling woman into receiving anal sex. I turned that off. The next time I gave the LBC a chance I heard a chat program where the host invited people to call in and bark at each other about bike lanes. The level of discourse was about the same if not more sanctimonious/acrimonious/condescending there than what I remember of it here in New York (I tuned out of that hopeless shit parade years ago). Each caller, whatever team they were on (car, pedestrian, bike) held their opponents to inestimable standards of perfection, standards which are impossible to meet and that is the point. If those standards are met there would be no more of this outlet for otherwise undirected and unrequitable anger and disrespect.
It didn’t seem to matter what team called in. A car driver might have referred to bicyclists like they were naïve children, while a bicyclist would call in next to describe pedestrians — every last one of them from toddlers to the elderly — as inconvenient imbeciles.
Put a few beers in these people and they’d be calling for genocide of their enemies.
If you live in a world full of dumbasses and idiots then does that not put you at the center of their orbit? Do they not gravitate to you for some reason?
I turned off LBC. Nothing from that smattering of LBC left me wanting more but, since it was recommended by a trusted friend, I will give it another go.
I bought an amazing radio app for Windows — RarmaRadio. Love that piece of software, despite its amateur looking interface. It does so much, and aside from the occasional crash it seems to do it well. It stokes my inner radio junkie.
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Page 181
Today’s page 181 comes from George Pelecanos’ What It Was, a Derek Strange Novel.
“This joint stinks,” said Fanella, shaking his head as he took the last bite of his enchilada platter. “What’s the name of this shithouse again?”
Hah, “Fanella” is a name I never thought I’d see again. That was the name of one of L.’s cats, the one whose eyes suddenly turned green one night and were no longer green the next day. That was freaky, though thinking of it now I have to wonder if that little freakshow was from the library of calculated drama that loaded the gun with the bullets I so luckily dodged.
I take issue with one word in the above excerpt: HIS. It is not really his enchilada platter. He is only renting it. That’s an old joke told time and again at the oyster bar/pub in Daytona Beach: “You ain’t buyin’ dat beer. You jus rentin’ it for a whiiile.”
But then a human being never truly owns anything. It’s all up for grabs when the corpus callosum shuffles off its undefinable mortal coil. Everything you own eventually ends up rotting in a thrift shop or making a tantalizing appearance on a pickers reality show.
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Butt starting to hurt from sitting here at the LIBARRY.
