Author: Josh Philip Ross

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[banwatch: sweating the small stuff]

New Yorkers love to complain, and the Daily News is already bitching about how new UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, after advising diplomats to do “as Mayor Bloomberg does” and take public transit to work, decided to be driven the eight blocks from his hotel to a breakfast meeting, then left his driver idling in a no-standing zone.

Gestures are important, but I think the Daily News is jumping the gun on this one. Yeah, Ban’s driver should obey the law, and yeah, it’d be nice if Ban followed his own advice and took the subway everywhere. On the other hand, driving really is a lot faster much of the time, and Ban isn’t mayor of Subwayland. His work really is important — more important than impressing New Yorkers or fellow diplomats with his individual devotion to combating gridlock. Also, unlike a lot of the diplomats, Ban is actually busy.

Via Gothamist.

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[noodles forever]

DKNY alerted me to the passing of Momofuku Ando, the inventor of ramen noodles and the founder of Nissin.

I learned about ramen from Lorie. She and I survived my sixteenth summer on a diet of ramen, Pop Tarts, Gatorade, Diet Pepsi, sex, cribbage and Mr. Bungle tapes. Lorie’s technique was to pound the dry noodles to break them up while still in the package, and I follow it to this day.

In this time of sickness and uncertain stomachs in the Ross-Tavis household, we are grateful for the gorgeous simplicity of Mr. Ando’s invention: easy to make, easy to digest, always on hand and always cheap. The New York Times has a lovely appreciation of Mr. Ando, to which I would add that ramen, like Mother Teresa, has given solace to the wretched of the earth.

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[sick]

So Jenny and I have been just stupidly sick for days now. Jenny has had a cold more or less since Christmas, and I’ve had one for about a week.

Jenny’s had clearly developed into a sinus infection, so we went to the emergency room on Sunday to try to get Jenny some antibiotics. After staying long enough to see the Jets go from up three to disastrously trounced, we realized they were simply never going to see Jenny. So then yesterday we went to the doctor and Jenny got antibiotics, while I got codeine cough syrup as a consolation prize, having merely a viral infection.

We both went to work today. I spent the morning throwing up in my office bathroom, then managed to hide in my office and fall asleep in my chair — always a classy move — only to be awakened by Cheryl, one of the secretaries, coming in to give me my new UN ID. I was obviously startled, confused and unwell, and Cheryl told me several times, in several ways, that I should really go home, while I semi-coherently insisted I was fine.

It took me about five nauseous minutes to realize the Cheryl was right. I checked in with Mr. Yoo, who told me to take a couple of extra days if I needed them, and then headed out the door, taking a woozy cab ride back to Brooklyn and the comfort of my own toilet to vomit in.

Jenny also came home early, feeling wiped and having little to hold her at the office. She took care of me, cooking me some ramen with miso and then going out to get me tomato soup and Nilla Wafers. I took a nap, during which I managed to have two archetypal nightmares at once: I was chased from my bedroom in Marin into the Lower East Side by an oversized bogey-man sexual predator, who managed to follow me to the grad school in the dingy building where I couldn’t find my classroom and hadn’t done the reading. Eventually I escaped the building, the bogey-man still in pursuit, and ran in search of a police or fire station. But when I saw two firefighters, it turned out they were just gay guys in firefighter jackets. Then I remembered that I should wake up.

I have had weird nightmares before, usually during fevers: menacing triangles, menacing a capella groups. I can’t ever remember being chased by the bogey-man, and I’m just completely baffled by the eruption of psychic homophobia, which has really just never been my big problem. As for the creepy grad school — complete with a girl I didn’t like from my DoubleClick days, who had done all the reading — this is my first school nightmare since the one back in 2001, in which my boss at DoubleClick made an appearance and told me to stop worrying about school and get back to work.

It’s been a lovely few days. I’ll be staying home tomorrow, and hopefully no disasters will befall.

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[cradle music]

Pinball Number Count (YouTube)
The Pointer Sisters
Songs from the Street: 35 Years of Music

1-20 Raga (YouTube)
Sesame Street

Sing it to anyone who grew up in America who grew up in the 1970s and their eyes light up: “One-two-three-FOUR-five, six-seven-eight-NINE-ten, eleven-twelve!” This gem of a segment is quite possibly the funkiest music ever produced for children — funkier even than Roosevelt Franklin, that now-bizarre Muppetary exemplar of Black Power — and it has stuck with us through all these years, lodged firmly in our imaginations. (Click here and here to see examples of the shorter original segments.)

It wasn’t just the music, of course. Those animations are seriously groovy. But the music was key. And those solo sections aren’t exactly easy listening, either. Sesame Street was training our ears for the sophisticated sounds of post-Bitches Brew electro-jazz.

Less widely remembered is the “1-20 Raga,” a nugget of sitar-driven psychedelia that may well have been my first exposure to South Asian culture. Whether the pungent atmosphere of Marin County in those days contributed to my particular appreciation of this clip is an open question, but certainly it stayed with me. In fact, it’s the Indian bits that remained in my memory all these years — the sitar, the morphing Mughal patterns; I had forgotten the insipid vocal and the number-factory setting.

Sesame Street was and remains an extraordinary tool for reaching out to the very young with challenging material. As music classes are cut across America, it may be one of the last places capable of reaching little kids with sophisticated music.

Bonus for Jenny: How Crayons Are Made (YouTube)

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[the neighbors]

Across the street from the South Korean Mission to the United Nations is a construction site where the new United States Mission to the United Nations is going up to replace the old United States Mission to the United Nations (picture of the entrance showing the seriously dated old architecture).

The new structure is designed by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates Architects, the same folks who brought us the architecturally muddled but kind of cool Astor Place Sculpture for Living, that grand symbol of the death of bohemian East Village. (Sorry, kids: the ongoing eastward migration of hipness has crossed the river, passed through Billyburg and settled on Bushwick — for the moment. If trends continue, hipsters will be living in Middle Village, Queens, by about 2050.)

Emporis has details, the most intresting being that the new structure will be 22 stories, with no windows on the first six floors to make it harder to blow the place up. Friendly. They’ve also got construction pics, including a nice shot showing the temporarily exposed flank of the Ugandan Mission and the Korean Mission across the street, behind the crane. From this photo, you can probably work out that we can peer down into the construction site from our windows.

Of course, there are other ways to get a look. Cryptome, a rather cryptic and moderately creepy website, has an Austrian-domain-hosted page full of pictures of North Korean diplomats and their Mission, towards the bottom of which are a couple of shots of the US Mission construction site, one of which is labeled “The New US Mission to the UN Under Construction at East 45th Street and 1st Avenue, Photographed Through a Vacant, Unlocked Guard Hut.” Nice.

Oh, and on a local note, the cement for the project is being provided by the Gowanus Canal’s own Quadrozzi, in whose trucks I am tempted to try hitching a ride to work.

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[immortal]


James Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006)

So the Mothership has come to collect. On Christmas no less. Even his death has a kind of rhythm.

James Brown is dead, but James Brown will never die. As long as human beings still listen to the popular music of the latter 20th and early 21st centuries, they’ll be hearing James Brown. He’s everywhere, especially now that hip-hop has become a global music with a reach even greater than rock and roll.

I’d say rest in peace, but that was never JB’s style. The funk goes on, and wherever James is now, they’re all gonna have a funky good time.

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[dinkum]

I need to learn other Englishes. This thought occurred to me as I read the word “dinkum” in a New York Review article by Clive James about Robert Hughes.

I know American English in great detail, including its slang, its clichés, its style and usage. With British English I am less richly familiar, but I have a good sense of it. And I have had at least some exposure to Indian English. But what about Australian English? New Zealand, South African, Jamaican English?

I have found my exposure to other Englishes — including the broken Englishes of non-native speakers — to be rewarding. I should make an effort to pursue the literatures of other Englishes.