Category: United States

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[korean dance at lincoln center]

On Tuesday, August 8, at 7:30 p.m., the 82-year-old Korean Living National Treasure dancer Kang Sun Young will perform at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, along with her troupe of 60 dancers and a 14-piece Korean traditional orchestra.

It’s extremely rare for a Korean performance to be staged on this scale outside of Korea. From what I know of Korean dance, it should be a moving and powerful experience. You can read the press release for details.

The Korean Mission to the UN is giving out tickets, so if you’ve got any interest in coming with me, please let me know by July 25.

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[the taste of summer]

There are certain flavors that I will always associate with summer: fresh blackberries hot from the sun and picked straight from the vine, chocolate milkshakes like my grandmother used to make when my best friend and I would watch Scooby Doo, ice-cold lemonade.

For Koreans, the flavor of summer is apparently naengmyeon (냉면), or cold buckwheat noodles. Today the New York Times profiles this chewy treat, which I have to admit I never liked. Lately my colleague Young has been trying to convince me to give it another shot, so I will soon be indulging in this peculiar Korean dish once again. Hopefully Kang Suh, which she says is the restaurant to go to, will do a better job than the hole-in-the-wall student eatery near Daehagno in Seoul where I developed my current dislike.

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[forza italia, carroll gardens style]

The Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, where I live, is one of Brooklyn’s old Italian neighborhoods. Al Capone was married at the church up the street, and there’s a social club just a couple blocks from my building where old men still hang around and argue in Italian.

So you can imagine that yesterday was a big day for the locals. Occasional correspondent Robert Ooghe came through with the pics.

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[why i live in new york city]

In the warmth on Saturday, Jenny and I went for a long walk through Prospect Park. On our way we were passed by a Haitian protest supporting Aristide and denouncing American and French intervention.

The next day, I went to a John Edwards rally at Long Island University. On a stage full of soldiers, black people and Chassidim, he gave exactly the same stump speech he always gives, except he said he was glad to be at LIU and welcomed all the Deaniacs to his camp. I could hardly see him — the stage was actually lower than the gallery where we all crowded around — and the whole thing had the surreal atmosphere of being inside of a giant infomercial. Which is, more or less, my problem with Edwards: like a good infomercialist, he has one pretty good speech that he performs pretty well. And that’s it.

Probably the best thing about the whole event was waiting on line next to a Trinidadian woman who wandered up, asked what we were lined up for, asked if it was free, and declared, “Well, I’m stayin’ then.” She shared her views on all the candidates. She liked “that little guy from Ohio,” and she didn’t like Kerry, and she thought Edwards was okay, but she was going to vote for Sharpton on Tuesday because “He brings them to the table,” and without him, she said, the candidates would never have talked about Haiti or about black people. She has a point. Then she started in about her great dream of one day visiting Czechoslovakia (never mind that it doesn’t exist anymore). She’d heard Prague was beautiful, and that was where she wanted to go.

After the Edwards rally, I met Jenny at Satalla in Manhattan to hear Huun-Huur-Tu, the throat-singing quartet from Tuva, a small republic within the Russian Federation somewhere off near Mongolia. Playing soulful folk songs that are all about horses, they create fascinating harmonic overtones in their throats — something roughly like a Tibetan monk’s growl, or perhaps an astonishingly lovely burp, that manages to ascend into the higher registers and make melodies there that dance over the earthy strains of their bowed and plucked instruments. If they come to your town, go hear them; recordings don’t do the music justice.

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[tongue sandwich]

A New York moment:

Today during the lunch rush in a deli near Union Square, I watched an Indian counterman banter with customers in English, then do it just as well with other customers in Spanish. Then his Hispanic comrade, who was on the phone, leaned in to ask, “Yo, pita bread issoyo?” Issoyo is Korean for “have.”

“No,” responded the first counterman. “We’re all out.”

In other words, I just watched an Indian and a Hispanic using a mix of English and Korean to talk business. In Manhattan.

I love this city.

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[snow]

 After a decade of wintering in snowy climes, I still get surprised by the stuff. The first snow of the season always sets me to gaping out the nearest window. I’m still totally entertained at the whole loopy idea of precipitation that can go up. I’m always genuinely startled that such a thing is even allowed — that a modern city will permit itself to be blanketed in a foot-deep layer of a dangerous substance. It seems absurd to me, the way it must seem absurd to transplanted New Yorkers when the California ground starts to jiggle under their feet. I remember the first time I saw Columbia University blanketed in snow, during my first winter in New York. I was shocked that such an indignity could befall such an august institution. Where I grew up, snow was something you drove to. It stayed up in the mountains three hours away, which made sense to me, because the Sierra Nevada was all about radical environments.

Last Friday night, New York got hit by the first big blizzard of the season, and it dumped more of the white stuff in one go than I’ve ever experienced here — 12 inches was the going rate, although I heard that pockets of the Bronx were buried up to 23 inches. Mayor Bloomberg, always a man quick with numbers, gave estimated the cost of clearing all that snow as $12 million, figuring $1 million per inch as a rule of thumb. Apparently that’s half the city’s snow budget for the season. I’d never realized how wildly expensive it is to clear something that would, after all, go away of its own accord by the following Thursday. But I guess when you hire union sanitation workers to stick plows on their trucks and drive around all Saturday night, it adds up. (And that big fat bill may explain why thrifty Korea doesn’t bother with the niceties of salt on its roads, preferring to let its buses skid through red-lighted intersections all winter.)

Perhaps some of my pleasure at snow comes from the simple fact that I have never in my life had to shovel it or scrape it off my windshield. The snow comes, sometimes it gives me a day off, and then it becomes Somebody Else’s Problem. Which, as we all know, is the best kind of problem to sit back and enjoy. And the snow has a way of making the angular, constructed environment of the city into an elemental wilderness, at least while it’s still coming down. Going out for our customary Saturday brunch at Whim (which I will tell you about another time, because you should know), my wife and I half expected to see bears and wolves and sledges full of Russian wedding parties. (What we actually saw was a man methodically rolling his snowblower over the same patch of sidewalk, the machine launching its haul in an elegant arc that piled up neatly in the middle of the street. As soon as he disappeared, the owner of the restaurant went outside to knock snow off his awning — and onto the sidewalk.)

It’s not that I’ve never found anything to dislike about snow. Even as I enjoy the blizzardy hush, I know that in a couple of days it’ll all turn into a turgid gray-black mess of salted, shoe-destroying ice-muck. The first time I actually saw the stuff coming down was when I was 12 years old, during an episode our family still refers to as the Vacation From Hell. Our annual snow-saucering trip coincided with the worst blizzard Truckee had seen in years, and then we totaled our new car on the way back home, in the clear dry sunshine of Sacramento. And my first winter in New York happened to be the most severe the city had seen for 100 years, with 16 separate snowfalls that all stayed put until spring, melting only enough to spread ice sheets across every pedestrian surface in town. The snow banks on the sidewalks towered above my head, and crossing the street meant squeezing into the gaps that had been cut in them — and, more often than not, stepping into the ankle-deep slush puddle that had formed there, waiting murkily for access to the ice-blocked drains. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day that January, having just returned from California, I was awakened at 6 in the morning by my dorm’s fire alarm, which continued to howl as they marched us into lobby, which was slowly flooding, and then sent us back up to our rooms. And when they’d finally turned off the godawful thing and I’d gotten back to sleep, I was awakened again, this time by my RA pounding on my door and shouting, “Get out! Get out! There’s a real fire!” I threw on my boots with no socks and my wool overcoat over just a T-shirt and ran down the stairs. When the firefighters threw us out of the building and into the 15-degree morning to fend for ourselves, I didn’t even have my wallet. (It was a small electrical fire in the basement.) With no student ID, I had to beg my way into another dorm where I sort of vaguely knew someone. I sat there all morning in my boots and no socks and watched pictures of Los Angeles falling down. It was the day of the Northridge Earthquake.

I suppose I’m not the only one who goes snow-crazy. A few years ago I was making my way back from Staten Island in a pretty serious snowstorm, and there were people on the deck with their video cameras out, filming the zero visibility, presumably so that they could go home to Florida or the Bronx or wherever and watch, well, snow. (Which is a disappearing artifact of pre-cable television transmission, by the way; like the sounds of rotary dials and screechy modems, televisual snow is becoming an anachronism, replaced by a less psychedelically inspiring silent blue screen.) And like all big citywide events — this summer’s big blackout, the Yankees in the World Series, September 11th — it pulls down the barriers between New Yorkers. For once, all these millions of perfect strangers have a reasonable excuse to start a conversation. It’s snowing, isn’t it? Whew! Cold out there. Careful on the ice! Can you believe it’s still coming down?

By Sunday afternoon, the snow had run its course, and on Monday there was nothing for it but to trudge into work. Having some experience of New York in the aftermath, I wore my hiking boots, which are lined with Goretex, and cheerfully stomped through whatever slush puddles were in my way. I even contributed to the upkeep of this fair city by kicking some ice out of the way, thereby draining a sizeable lake at the corner of Hoyt and Pacific. One of my wife’s coworkers came to work sporting a black eye from a falling icicle, and a house across the street from us had achieved a spectacular overhanging glacier whose gradual progress had turned a series of icicles into frightening rows of snaggleteeth. But instead of calving, as I had hoped it would, the glacier just melted away. As snow does.

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[coming home]

 What I love about New York City is that you can go to a free De La Soul concert in the park and meet the daughter of the former royal physician of Nepal.

For those of you who don’t follow hip-hop, De La Soul had a big hit with a song called “Me Myself and I” in the late 1980s and have since gone in a more experimental direction, putting out a number of musically innovative, politically savvy records that have entered them in the New York hipster pantheon with artists like Sonic Youth and Public Enemy. Their free Summer Stage concert attracted what looked to be the entire under-40 population of the western half of Brooklyn. Jenny and I were clever enough to arrive an hour early, and even then the line already stretched for several blocks and looked like some kind of pro-diversity advertisement: frizzy-haired Jewish lesbians, thirtysomething African-Americans with picnic baskets, Asian college kids all lined up to share an afternoon with each other.

Once inside the concert grounds, we wended our way to an open patch and sat down behind a blanket that was shared by three Indian girls. Gradually over the course of the day, something like fifteen Bengalis managed to gather on that blanket, all of them terribly excited about their pot-laced cigarettes and their beer, and I actually heard someone say, “De La Soul isn’t coming on for hours, yaar!” As happens at these kinds of public events, we all got to talking, and when I mentioned to one of the guys that I’d been to Nepal, he grabbed the girl next to him and told her.

“I’m Nepali!” she exclaimed. “I feel such a kinship with you!” She was born here but had been back about a dozen times, most recently to experience a bit more of the country and go trekking up to Muktinath, the same shrine we visited. I asked whether she was Hindu — she was — and then which of Nepal’s ethnic groups she belonged to. “Actually my family is from Bengal,” she explained. “My father is a doctor. Do you know the prince who shot everyone?” I nodded, having heard in detail the story of the crown prince who went mad, killing most of the royal family and then himself. “My father delivered him when he was born,” she said.

*

Central Park in summer is a glorious carnival. From certain angles it looks like a liesure painting by Seurat or Renoir — indeed, it was exactly this sort of Romanticism-inspired urban park that so interested the Impressionists — except that it’s as if the exotic characters in Rousseau’s and Gaugin’s paintings had taken over from the prim French ladies with bustles. On Sunday I found myself back in the park, this time with my friend Maggie. We ended up at Summer Stage again, where we watched a couple of terrible acts from New Zealand, then continued on toward Bethesda Fountain. In the plaza above we heard drumming and followed the sound into a dense crowd of people. At the center were a group of drummers — some African, some Carribean, some Latino, some Caucasian. They made a fantastic noise with their congas and djembes and rattles and gourds, and in front of them danced a small crowd, led by an African man draped in cowrie shells, sporting a fantastic multicolored cap and waving some kind of brush in the air. There was also a stunningly beautiful African woman wearing very little, her body covered in a sheen of sweat as she stomped and twirled and shook her hips in a manner that would make Shakira jealous. Soon the two African dancers were pulling people out of the crowd and giving impromptu African dance lessons, until the central space was filled with bouncing, grooving bodies. Some of the other dancers were very good, but there was something about the African pair — a kind of intimacy or naturalness — that made me think they’d probably been doing this — exactly this — for their whole lives. I thought about what it must feel like to live in such an incredibly alien place as America must be to them, and then to come to the park and dance as they might have back home; I had the strange thought that it must be something like the feeling I got when I was in Korea and I opened up a box full of New Yorker magazines.

We moved on from the drum circle and promptly passed another, this one involving some kind of large metal horns. Next to them rollerbladers were threading their way down an impromptu track of empty bottles. Down by Bethesda Fountain a man was going through a well-worn acrobatics-and-comedy routine, and just beyond were two young white guys playing a classical trumpet duet. We walked from there up into the Ramble, the wonderful part of the park that is meant to feel like wild nature, and in which you can almost forget you’re in the middle of a giant metropolis. As we lay upon a lawn watching a gondolier punt along the lake, Maggie picked up a tune on the air: it was the same song she’d been singing that morning in her capoiera class. Sure enough, we walked back to the fountain and discovered a white-clad circle of dancers taking turns performing the Brazilian combat-dance, while a few others played exotic Brazilian percussion and string instruments.

*

Yesterday I got in touch with my friend Daniel to see what he was doing for the evening. “Going to see Antibalas in Fort Greene Park,” he told me. Antibalas, which means “bullet-proof” in Spanish, is a 13-piece orchestra that plays Afrobeat, a heavy funk sound invented by the Nigerian pop star/political leader/demigod Fela Kuti. They’re sort of charmingly collectivist — one guy makes the announcements and political pronouncements, another sings, yet another conducts the group — and they manage to put over radical leftist politics without coming off shrill. And, well, they lay down a tremendous groove. Fort Greene Park was bouncing, and again I found myself dancing in a racially mixed crowd, many of whom were local to the neighborhood. When Antibalas sang a song with the chorus, “Is this America?” I wanted to shout, Yes! Yes, this is America, this park full of people from everywhere, all dancing to one beat, free to groove to a political rant or to go buy a hotdog instead, beautiful and open and smiling and swaying on a cool summer evening with fireflies.

I’ve come home.

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[fireworks and electroshocks]

 Last Friday night Jenny and I went to a great rooftop party in Brooklyn to watch the July 4th fireworks. We met new people and ate tofu-dogs and got tar on our shoes as the city around us crackled and popped and sparkled. As the time for the big show got closer, other groups began to appear on the roof: an older blue-collar couple, he with mullet and tattoos; an insular clan of young white hipsters like ourselves, from whose circle came wafting the occasional scent of marijuana; and finally a bunch of black kids in their late teens who seemed bent on blowing off somebody’s hand, as adolescents so often are on the 4th.

It was my first fireworks and my first July 4th in the US since 9/11, and it had certain curious overtones. I have to wonder what it must have been like last year, when it was New York’s first. For me it was jarring to see and hear all these explosions so soon after watching our Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq; I love fireworks and find them beautiful, but they’re explosions and they make me think about what it would be like to hear all this noise and know it’s hostile. We’re lucky that explosions are still cause for us to run upstairs to the roof, not downstairs to the basement.

*

Let me preface this next section by telling you that I’m fine. Okay, now that that’s out of the way …

Later that night, after Jenny had gone to bed, I felt my heart begin to beat irregularly. This has happened to me before pretty often — the first time it happened I was at summer camp, which gives you an idea — so I didn’t think too much of it. I’ve been told that my arrhythmia is called paroxysmal atrial tachycardia (PAT) or supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), and that it’s not especially dire, although it’s rather uncomfortable and unnerving. I tend to feel like my heart is both racing and not pumping enough blood; sometimes I get a little flushed, feel slightly nauseous or dizzy, or feel a tightness in my chest. Fortunately it usually goes away on its own, and I have pills in case it doesn’t.

On Friday night, though, the pills didn’t work. I ended up taking something like five of them over four hours, all the while afraid to go to sleep. After all, I’ve heard all my life about how my father’s father died when he waved off some chest pain and went to sleep, never to wake again. I finally collapsed at about 5 a.m. for a couple of hours of fitful sleep, but when I woke up I was still arrhythmic, so I woke Jenny and off we went to the emergency room.

I have to say that the Beth Israel ER staff was pretty good to me. I was told that what I had was a completely different type of arrhythmia from PAT/SVT, one that has no shared cause, and they were surprised to hear I had both. My new condition is called atrial fibrillation, and I was told that it’s so undangerous that “some people live in atrial fibrillation for years.” Considering my age and discomfort, however, they were determined to fix the problem.

Over the course of several hours I was given repeated doses of a drug that was supposed to slow my heart down, with the possible effect of kicking it back into normal rhythm. When that failed, I was rolled into a different room for electroshock. They shaved the left side of my chest, gave me heavy sedatives — Jenny tells me I babbled incoherently about trekking in Nepal until I passed out — and then zapped me. It did the trick, although unfortunately it left mild burns on my chest and back.

All of this I did uninsured, and it is a sign of the disastrous state of our health care system that two doctors, a nurse and a social worker all encouraged me toward various forms of fraud and obstructionism as methods of getting my bill paid. Fortunately Jenny was able to put me on her medical insurance and to make it retroactive to July 1st, which felt to us like a small bureaucratic miracle. And so life ticks on.

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[hot, hot, hot!]

 Today is hot, well up over 90, but somehow it doesn’t have that pounding force that New York heat sometimes gets — what I think of as murderous heat, of the kind depicted in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, the kind of heat that makes New Yorkers riot. No, today it just seems to have driven New Yorkers to go out in skimpy outfits, which I can’t say I disapprove of. I suppose that’s probably because of the cold, drippy rainy weather we’ve been having for so long. Murderous heat usually builds up slowly over time, and you only go really psycho when it’s been like this for a month.

In any case, today I went out in a wool suit, no less, for a job interview with DE Shaw. I signed a confidentiality agreement, and anyway I’m tired, so I’m not going to say terribly much about it except that it sounds fantastic and I hope I get it and I hope I never wear a wool suit ever again on a day that hits 90. Still, for all the hot hot heat, I can honestly say that it’s not as bad as it was in South India — and that was in the middle of winter!