[it’s my new york again]

Somehow I missed the news, so when I walked past East 33rd and Third Avenue — Toidy-Toid and Toid, to those from the old school — I was overcome with awe and delight. I had to go in for a closer look, just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. But it was real: the Second Avenue Deli is back, with a line out the door.

I have always believed that living in New York City means accommodating yourself to change. I have heard mourned just about everything good or bad that has ever come to pass here, from Ebbets Field and the old Penn Station to porn theaters in Times Square and a lawless Alphabet City on fire, and I’ve thought, hey, that’s life in the Big City. I’ve been here long enough to see a few of my own beloved landmarks go, and to see neighborhoods change character completely.

But when the 2nd Avenue Deli closed, somehow that was different.

Growing up in California, I was taught by my transplanted New Yorker parents that there were no proper baked goods west of the Hudson and that there was a right way and a wrong way to prepare and eat a deli sandwich: mustard on rye, with none of that bullshit lettuce and tomato or (chas v’shalom!) sprouts.

My Great Aunt Sylvia had lived since the 1950s at Second Avenue and 10th Street, so my father’s family had been going there since he was a kid. On trips Back East, and even years later, stopping in at the Deli felt like visiting my parents’ childhoods. I remember Abe Lebewohl once greeting my Cousin Roberta, then in her fifties, as if she were still the little girl he had known decades earlier.

New York can be a hard town, and sometimes I wonder what I’m still doing here. Too many of the funky places I fell in love with are gone, and too much of the city is chain stores, tourist crap and stuff I can’t afford. The resurrection of the 2nd Avenue Deli reminds me of what I still love about Gotham.

Now to go and stand on that line.

[living in interesting times]

Last week, on Monday night, I went to sign the divorce papers. It was devastating. It was a freezing night with bitter winds, which seemed to fit. I went separately from Jenny, but on my way out I stopped in at a McDonald’s for a suitably grim dinner, and Jenny bumped into me afterwards on the subway platform. We were both very sad, and there was little to say.

It didn’t help matters that I had a cold. On Tuesday I dragged myself to a job interview with a very nice company that isn’t hiring. This did not lift my spirits. Exhausted, I took Wednesday off. It was my first time being sick while on my own — ever, really, except for one bout of serious illness in India — and it scared me. Afterward, I made sure to talk to a couple of new friends in the neighborhood, who said that of course they would help if I needed it. Learning to ask for help is good.

Saturday I went to a dance concert at Juilliard, then a much more ramshackle dance concert put on by a composer friend of a composer friend. Afterward, we all went back to the organizer’s apartment in Brooklyn for a party, at which I discussed Korean and Finnish folklore with a Finnish folklorist. I left just before the microtonal orchestral music began. I’d been suffering from my arrhythmia all evening, and I almost couldn’t walk the three blocks from the subway to my apartment. I had taken too many of the beta-blocker pills that are supposed to fix the arrhythmia, and I ended up staggering to the curb and throwing up in the gutter. I realized that to anyone passing by, I must have looked like a drunk, which was funny because I hadn’t had a drink in nine months to the day.

On Tuesday night, as I was heading to a 12-step meeting, I saw a pickup truck start backing up just as a small Hispanic man darted into the street looking the other way. I shouted — “Yo, yo, YO!” and the truck stopped inches from the pedestrian, who never noticed any of it. I then made an incomprehensible gesture at the driver and walked on.

Yesterday morning I went for a job interview and was kept waiting in the lobby for 40 minutes because of a miscommunication. But at least they’re hiring.

Last night, after a very interesting evening out, I was walking home from the subway and heard a rustling in the bushes in front of an apartment building. I turned around, expecting a cat or something, and was startled to see the wide-eyed face of a young woman who was lying there, bundled in a coat and mittens. I turned around and kept walking.

Today at lunch, the diner on 49th and First was shaken by an explosion up the block. A manhole cover had been blown off, smoke and steam billowing into the street. A few minutes later, the fire department showed up and taped off the street. As we left, we saw the shards of the manhole cover lying a few feet away from the hole. Fortunately no one was hurt.

I feel today as though I’ve somehow stepped into a Murakami novel, where the world is off-kilter in a way that may or may not be ominous, and my role is simply to live in it as normally as possible.

I’m tired.

[are suburbs the new bohemia?]

The New York Times reported recently on the decline of gay enclaves. Places like San Francisco’s Castro District, New York’s West Village, West Hollywood and Key West are gentrifying. High real estate prices and a changing ethos are transforming these neighborhoods from bastions of wild nightlife to comfortable places to raise kids, and there is attendant hand-wringing over the disappearance of a vibrant culture, along with soul-searching about whether there’s even a reason for gay neighborhoods anymore.

There is a long discussion to be had about the mainstreaming of homosexuality in America, the consequent coming out of a more diverse group of gay men and women, and the ongoing debate over gay assimilationism. But I’d rather talk about hipsters and real estate.

To understand what’s happening to America’s gay neighborhoods, it helps to look at how they were formed. America’s gay community more or less began with the Stonewall riots and their aftermath. Though usually not presented as such, these events were part of the larger 1960s embrace of counterculture and individual freedoms. It’s no accident that both hippies and gays were into free love, drugs, leftist politics and bikers (though the fascination with bikers remains something of a mystery). Like the hippies, the founders of America’s gay communities tended to be white middle-class baby boomers, and they colonized many of the same neighborhoods (the Castro is just blocks from Haight-Ashbury).

The changes in America’s gay enclaves mirror the changes in formerly bohemian neighborhoods that are not specifically associated with gay life: it’s not just the Castro and Greenwich Village that have seen skyrocketing housing prices, but also the East Village, SoHo, the Mission District, SoMa, and pretty much every other patch of once-hip ground in America’s major cities. For the first time in memory, there is no bohemian frontier in Manhattan.

This connects with another recent Times story, this one noting the discovery by bohemian types of Staten Island’s North Shore. I’ve long believed that the best way to tell what’s going to be incredibly fashionable in three to five years is to look for whatever is most egregiously unhip now (which means, among other things, that you should be preparing to grow your hair out and unmothball your flannels) , and it’s hard to think of anything less cool than the suburbs.

But will hipsters who are priced out of the city really start moving to little houses in Jersey and Staten Island? Hard to say at this point, though I will raise the possibility that a generation raised on Facebook and Craigslist may feel less compelled to form hipster neighborhoods than their forbears. What made the suburbs so awful was isolation, and the Internet provides a way to overcome that isolation without spending $1300 a month to live with rats and roaches. And there is much ironic fun to be had in a lifestyle that embraces garden gnomes.

I now live in a perfectly nice neighborhood that has yet to be discovered by hipsters. Down in Bay Ridge, we have trees, houses, lower rents and safer streets than in Bushwick, and I can still get on the subway and go to Manhattan. Am I part of a vanguard, or just out in left field? Time will tell.

[gowanus + art = agast]

It’s once again coming to that wonderful time of year when the leaves fall into the toxic soup we know and love as the Gowanus Canal, and the artists in the neighborhood open their studios to share their fume-inspired creations. This is the Annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour (AGAST), of which I am a devoted fan. The tour is actually a really cool opportunity not just to see lots of inspired and interesting art — everything from conceptual installations to marble sculpture to a stained-glass studio — but to get inside those weird, funky, fascinating old industrial buildings that dot the landscape. Plus, you will surely consume your fill of Goldfish, mini-KitKats and cheap
chardonnay.

The tour will be taking place from 1 to 6 on Saturday and Sunday, October 20 and 21. As usual, I’m going to try and visit as many of the galleries as I can. Hope to see you there!

[the fighting 13th]

I posted recently about the upcoming Congressional race in my district, NY-13, and got a comment from the author of NY13 Blog, who gave me a nice shout-out.

I’ll be keeping my eye on this blog as we move closer to campaign season. Oh, and here’s the comment, in case you missed it:

Hi! Found your post after searching for news on Fossella. Recchia has formed an exploratory committee and has some big backing (Rep. Jerry Nadler and even McMahon). Cusick and McMahon are not going to jump into this race unless there is some massive scandal and the DCCC comes throwing money at one of them to take out Fossella. So expect to see a Harrison v. Recchia primary race although I am not sure both will stay in through September.

Good stuff.

[don’t forget congress]

There’s a lot of attention already being paid to the 2008 presidential election, but let’s not forget about Congress!

In 2006, I campaigned in New York’s 13th Congressional District to support Steve Harrison’s scrappy but unsuccessful bid to unseat Conservative Republican Vito Fossella.

Now that I actually live in the district, I’m even more anxious to see Fossella taken down. Steve Harrison has announced he’ll run again, but the New York Times mentions three other potential candidates: City Council members Michael E. McMahon of Staten Island and Domenic M. Recchia Jr. of Brooklyn, and Assemblyman Michael Cusick of Staten Island.

I know next to nothing about any of these guys, but in the coming weeks and months, maybe one or more of them will declare, and it’ll be time to do some research.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine is backing a friend of his, one Tom Perriello, in a campaign to unseat Virgil Goode in Virginia’s 5th CD.

Goode is a former Democrat who voted for three out of four articles of impeachment against Clinton, then became a Republican in 2002, becoming the first Republican to serve in the district since Reconstruction. He came to national prominence by loudly criticizing Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison’s to be sworn into Congress over a Koran rather than a Bible. (In a delicious irony, the Korean Ellison used was once owned by Thomas Jefferson, whose Monticello home is in Goode’s district.)

I don’t know much about Perriello yet, but I’m going to a fundraising party tomorrow to find out more. What I do know comes from his Res Publica profile:

Before co-founding Res Publica, Tom served as Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a United Nations tribunal, and as a Yale Law School/OSI Teaching Fellow in West Africa. He has worked for the US State Department, the International Centre for Transitional Justice and others on human rights and legal reform efforts in Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Argentina, Chile, India, and the United States. Prior to law school, he worked as Assistant Director of the Center for a Sustainable Economy (now part of Redefining Progress) and as a consultant on youth and environemental campaigns … Tom is also a founder of the Catholic Alliance for the Common Good. He holds a BA in Humanities from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School and is a member of the New York State Bar.

It’s all good stuff, but not exactly the kind of good stuff that’s going to wow Virginia voters. Hopefully there’s another side to his story. I’ll keep you posted.

[moving on]

So it looks like I have a new apartment: tonight I go to sign the paperwork on a pleasant, spacious one-bedroom at 7502 Ridge Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

On the one hand, I’m glad to have this particular chore done, and glad it’s an apartment I can feel good about: in a nice neighborhood, close to the subway, close to shopping and a dry cleaner, with laundry in the basement. On the other hand, taking the actual step of paying for a new place gives the whole divorce process a depressing feeling of finality. I never wanted things to come to this, and I still don’t. I’m doing this because I have to, not because I want to, and I am very sad.

I’m also scared. I’m scared of the financial risks of moving before I have a job that will allow me to afford the new apartment, though I appreciate Jenny’s generosity in helping me in the meantime. I’m also scared of living alone, something I’ve never really done.

The move will presumably happen over the weekend of September 1. A week later, I’ll have my birthday on September 8, when I will turn 33. That day will also mark six months of sobriety. This may well be the hardest birthday I’ve ever had. If you’re a friend of mine and reading this, I hope you’ll give me a call and maybe come keep me company on my birthday.

Let’s hope things are looking up by the time I turn 34.

[eating on the run]

The Times on Wednesday published an incredibly useful article listing 101 10-minute recipes. (Via LifeHacker.)

For someone like me, who eats pretty much every lunch and most dinners on the go these days, these quick-fix recipes are a great find. Of course, a lot of the recipes demand that you have on hand perishables like fish or eggs or fresh thyme, so they’d be more doable on the evenings I happen to pass a Whole Foods or something on the way home. Even so, it’s a good reminder that there are creative, tasty, healthy things I can cook in minutes when I get home — options, in other words, beyond what I can get a the Chinese joint, the pizza joint, or some dismal eatery along Sixth Avenue in Chelsea (which seems to be where I end up a lot lately).

[manhattanhenge]

Tonight, on Friday the 13th, at 8:20 p.m., will be Manhattanhenge — that magic day (well, two different days each year) when the sun sets in alignment with the Manhattan street grid.

The forecast is for scattered thunderstorms, but I’m hoping we get a clear view.