g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

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USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
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Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog

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Friday, October 1, 2004
23:02 - It's even more so by day

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A few more random New York thoughts, after another day's worth of experiences...

Driving in the city is an adventure indeed, but it's really not that bad. Parking is even less heinously expensive than I was led to expect. See, movies and TV had shown me that all of New York's streets—the ones in Times Square in particular—were perpetually jammed with unmoving traffic, bumper to bumper and honking ceaselessly, and made up almost entirely of endless streams of taxis, private cars being all but unheard-of on the city streets. Well, now I know that the reality is quite a bit different. At any given moment, Times Square is full of a lot more people than cars. That goes for pretty much the whole part of the city that I've seen thus far: pedestrians rule the roads, which is really the major thing cars have to watch out for. Eight million people is a lot to be out and about on the sidewalks, and they've all come to know the patterns of the traffic signals down to a finely tuned science. They know exactly when a light's about to go yellow, at which time it's okay to start barreling across; and they know that as soon as one person starts the trek, you're safe to do so as well, because most cars will defer by politely hitting the brakes before they run you over, even if they have the green. (The notable exception is if a big-rig truck ends up wedged the wrong way down an alley or something and has to be backed up with the aid of several harried handlers directing foot traffic and telling the truck driver to just floor it and not worry about the idiots crossing behind him. I saw this twice, and it was fascinating enough in the first place just to imagine big-rigs in Manhattan at all. But there they were.) The sidewalks are an unrivalled exercise in high-speed collision avoidance, and one learns very quickly how to move in and out of the flow, where its eddies and currents are, and so on.

I discovered one interesting effect of having an iPod: with headphones in your ears, you give the impression of being a local—why, you're confident enough in your knowledge of the streets that you're listening to music!—which exempts you from a lot of the free tickets to comedy clubs or Falun Gong awareness flyers that people would otherwise try to press into your hands. I wondered if this, perhaps, was what accounted for the fact that I saw some three dozen iPod People walking around today alone; but on every one of these people, representing all walks of life, those telltale white earbuds led to an actual iPod held in the hand or on the belt. I swear, I have never seen so many iPods. I'd thought CapLion had to have been exaggerating when he told me how many New Yorkers had them, but he was dead-on right. Perhaps even more usefully telling is that among those people who had earbuds or headphones leading to music players of any type, the iPods outnumbered all others (chiefly disc-based players) about three to one, or perhaps more. I've never seen anything like that ratio, in any other city. Welcome to New York; here's your iPod.

Now, I might be getting a somewhat distorted picture of the city as a city, by basing my impressions of it on Times Square; but what has struck me hardest of all about it is that while the throngs of people milling through the sidewalks are quick-moving, brusque and businesslike, and while there are plenty of street artists and musicians and people selling framed art from stands on sidewalks, I didn't see a single panhandler—and, indeed, only one homeless person. I constantly felt hurried, but I never once felt nervous for my safety or that of my various possessions. This would be unheard-of in, say, San Francisco on Market Street, the closest parallel I can think of. Similarly, at midnight the sidewalks become lined with piles of garbage bags as the curbside restaurants finish cleaning up from the night of business, open up the trap-door in the sidewalk, and toss out the day's trash; but during the daylight hours, the area around Times Square has got to be one of the cleanest big-city areas I've seen. Especially considering the sheer vast number of people that pass through it on any given afternoon. The fact that the sidewalks and gutters aren't filled to overflowing with eddying soda cups and hot dog napkins turns my every preconception on its head. I'm really very impressed, and whoever can be credited with turning Times Square into this well-balanced a high-revving machine deserves accolades.

The kid who worked the ticket line for The Lion King confided tongue-in-cheekily in me and a Canadian couple behind me that the theater had put him in that job because he's so naturally anti-social; as a native New Yorker, when he says Thank you, and have a nice day to a departing customer, he's really saying I hope I never see you again; have a shitty day! We all chuckled, and I pointed out that we'd have to bear that in mind for all future occasions when service-industry people said that to us. But I never got such a vibe from anyone I encountered; from parking attendants to Jamba Juice employees to waiters, everybody seemed far more laid-back and easygoing than I was expecting. I even got into a little impromptu verbal sparring with a toll-booth operator at the Lincoln Tunnel who ended up laughing uproariously as he counted my change back to me. And I never once heard 'Ey! I'm walkin' heeah! in all my travels.

(And yes, the actual original Broadway production of The Lion King is notably better in just about all regards than either of the two other versions of it I've seen, in Toronto and in San Francisco. The actors put way more elaboration into their performances, and the sets are a good deal more involved—mostly just because since these guys have been doing it the longest, they've got every last move down to its quintessence and know just how to time things. Even when the cast isn't having their most "on" night, it's still as good a show as it gets. ...Next time I do this, I'll make sure to have plenty of advance, so I can get into a showing of Avenue Q.)

We saw Thoth in Central Park, playing his violin under a bridge. I'd seen him a couple of times before, once at a convention in LA and again at a Pride Parade in San Francisco. This was his natural habitat, and he looked at home in it.

Back to the subject of driving: the road system, particularly in the environs leading into the city, is so tangled from so many years of evolution that it's a wonder any of it has any consistency at all. There's a kind of disorienting nature to the circulating exit ramps that wind around the tool plazas, and to all the expressways with their "jug-handle" turn lanes (which turn out to work pretty sensibly, as a matter of fact) and their left-hand exits that make it impossible to simply sit in a lane and turn your brain off the way I'm used to in California. I now realize how spoiled we are out West: signage is austere, consistent, predictable; exit lanes are leisurely, always on the right, always giving you plenty of warning. Here, you've always got to be on your toes, lest the fast-lane on the left suddenly turn into an exit that leaps off a skyway bridge into Weehawken or Rahway or some other such quaintly named town, with nary a "San" or "Santa" or "Los" to be seen. I took Highway 1 back from the city tonight instead of the Turnpike, to avoid the tolls as well as to get a better view of what New Jersey looked like at street level. It's far from the industrial wasteland I'd been led to believe it was; it's quaint and charming, and you'll never fall asleep while careening down those narrow lanes trying to keep your place in line and avoid being peeled off into some exit to a town with a Chaucer-esque name that you had no intention of visiting.

Tomorrow I hit the Upper East Side for lunch at a recommended restaurant, then over to JFK to see what all the fuss over JetBlue is about. And then it's back to the wide open spaces and modestly two-story-at-most business districts of San Jose, which is going to look one hell of a lot different to me now.

The various regions of the country may be growing more similar with time; but there's still plenty of distance to go yet, and the remaining differences are so well-established and cherished by the respective locals that they'll probably be with us a long time yet. Thank goodness.


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© Brian Tiemann