Home Sweet Home for the Holidays

The saying is, "you can't take it with you," but there is a way to carry your home with you when you move somewhere else.



Take, Adam, for example, who I stopped on Seventh Avenue between 29th and 30th Streets.



He currently resides in Pittsburgh, but he has lived in Miami and New York City.



His tattoos are a work in progress and he has had about eight hours done so far.



Adam says he has lived all over the United States and he wants, ideally, to tattoo a "piece of everywhere I've lived".



Check this out:

The Statue of Liberty clearly represents New York, and the palm trees recall Miami. All the bridges and a few of the buildings are Pittsburgh landmarks, like PPG Place

and the Highmark Building.

The "Home Sweet Home" sentiment is anchored by the multiple locations, echoing the idea that home is where the heart is.



Adam's work is done by Michael Patrick at Jester's Court Tattoos in Pittsburgh.



Thanks to Adam for sharing his wonderful sleeve with us here on Tattoosday!

I Love This City To Bits

For some reason I got a sudden, explosive crush on New York. It happened Thursday, when I experienced the unfettered happiness of being able to pick up a prescription in the pharmacy, have my attempt at a screenplay bound at the copy place, take my bag to the shoe repair guy to have the zipper fixed (I wanted it replaced but he convinced me he could fix it for $15 less), and buy a new lightbulb for the fridge. Made it to a meeting in Astor Place 10 minutes early. Everything on foot and in the span of about 15 minutes. The soundtrack in my head is the brassy section of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. With fireworks. Top that, burbs.

Then yesterday I had lunch at the snaking counter in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. It is one of the few places left in New York that feels like New York and nothing but. It feels like a great movie of New York, and it condenses the brisk, no nonsense energy of this town like a genie in a bottle. I order the Manhattan clam chowder (after Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco there really is no point on having New England clam chowder anywhere else, plus I am on a low cholesterol diet), which wasn't good, a fried oyster po boy which was quite terrible, the oysters having been fried and left to wither probably since the night before, and a nice little astringent glass of Verdejo, with a nose of nail polish remover. Still, best lunch ever because the place and the people in it are priceless. It's like eating in an Edward Hopper painting, minus the gloom.

Yesterday's endearing subway stories: I board the 6 train for Grand Central and as the doors of the car open, I get a whiff of the inimitable smell of rotting foot, groin and armpit gristle that tends to be exuded by some itinerant homeless the world over. I periscope my head to find the source of the sickly sweet and acid stench, and sure enough, there is one such unfortunate soul, of mysterious gender, sitting with all their possessions in one corner of the car. A vast gulf of empty seats ensues and, like a sight gag in a Buster Keaton movie, everyone else is sitting crammed together on the opposite end of the car, pretending everything is hunky dory.

Subway on the way back, car full of people but not super crowded. White woman with a bad peroxide dye job is lying prostrate on the bench, down for the count. If it wasn't for the rivulet of spit trickling down her mouth, we would all assume she is dead tired from working all day. For she is not dressed as a homeless person. She is wearing Timberland construction boots, mismatched but decent clothes, and is clutching a leather handbag between her legs. But the trickle of spit makes us all think that she is a junkie or she is unwell and who knows possibly very sick, or maybe dead, but nobody, including me, does anything. For stations. She lies there like the elephant in the room and I realize that the not doing anything is horribly contagious and quintessentially New York. I'm torn about whether to rouse her or hit the emergency brake, which would probably earn me everyone's enduring enmity, and to this day, I still don't understand what we can possibly be debating inside our heads in this crazy city, that makes us tarry if not totally ignore, the plight of someone who is in jeopardy right in front of our eyes. Finally, a man sitting across her tries to wake her. He grazes her as if he was touching a melting snowflake. She needs a neutron bomb, but that man's initiative gives me confidence so I go and give her a good shake. Or several. She wakes.
Her eyes are blue, her eyebrows black and she has bad skin, but she could be a cashier in a supermarket. Quick mental picture: lives in the Bronx, possibly drunk, abusive parents, didn't make it to high school, boyfriend who whacks her, the works. I wonder if she is drunk, although she doesn't reek of alcohol. So maybe it's junk.
Me: Are you okay? If you are not feeling well, you should get off the train.
She mumbles she is okay and then keels right over in very slow motion like the Titanic at the end of the movie, but slower. So I wake her up again. "Do you know where you need to get off, are you sure you're okay?" -- "Yes, thank you".
So I go back to my little corner of anonymity and soon she is blabbing aloud (and I bet we all think, see what happens for butting in? You have released the Krakken), yet she's not belligerent but plaintive, something about nobody helps you in this town and oh my God where is 42nd st, and where is the lady that was asking me if I'm okay. So I go back to her and tell her she needs to get out in the next station, 14th St, and go to the uptown train).  I'm told I'm an angel. I feel like telling her that nothing could be farther from the truth, but why break her heart. Then a kindly looking woman volunteers to take her to the train. And don't you think I didn't think of the possibility that she would steal from the woman's open handbag. Just like I thought of the possibility of waking her up and getting punched in the face. Or as she thanked me, of her giving me a sob story and asking for twenty bucks. We all have our reasons not to help and they are a combination of cowardice, fear of uncouthness and some sort of distorted respect for privacy, which goes by the catch phrase "none of my business".
Still, and because of all this teeming human condition, I love this town to bits.

Cranky News Digest

Blood pressure rising as a result of reading the news:

Body scan or aggressive and insensitive pat down? Well, it's been almost ten years since 911 and we're still idiots when it comes to airport security. Given a choice, I much prefer the Israeli trained agent that looks at you in the eye and asks smart questions. I understand the volume of fliers in this country makes this wish of mine utopian, but the TSA needs to admit they are a disaster. Traveling to and from Israel this summer, no one lay a hand or a scanner on me. I didn't have to take my shoes off. I just had to answer a bunch of questions in a process that was actually faster and less annoying than any gauntlet I've ever went through stateside. Many of the questions were personal. I wonder if Americans, with their concern for privacy, and their sensitivity for political correctness, are willing to subject themselves to this kind of human intrusion. Done correctly, absolutely everyone gets profiled, not just the usual brown and turbaned suspects. I can tell you, it is much more polite, much less humiliating and SAFER than the moronic inferno (to borrow from Martin Amis) we've had for years.

Mr. Hoffman said the administration should move away from adding more layers of security for every passenger in response to every new plot and consider an Israeli-style approach to identify passengers who pose a particular risk, based on advance intelligence, questioning travelers and watching their behavior.
“We’ve had nine years of just grafting security measures one on another,” Mr. Hoffman said. “Maybe it’s time to step back, take a hard look and look for a new approach.”

What the fuck has taken them so long? 

Drivers are incensed about the proliferation of bike lanes in Manhattan. 
Guess what? I'm incensed about drivers. They pollute, make noise and clog the city with traffic. This city needs to have more space for bikes and less for cars. And people who drive should grin and bear it. I've been saying this for years. Americans need to wean themselves off their love for the automobile. Manhattan should be a mostly car-free zone (except for small taxis, public transport and delivery trucks). What happens in Brooklyn I don't care, because with all due respect to my adorable friends from that borough, I don't give a shit. But Manhattan should be like Amsterdam or Berlin, where drivers don't kvetch about bikes invading their space. The nerve.

Some Noo Yawkers go to specialists to get rid of their accents. Noooo! Why? This is such a pity. I love accents. For instance, I learned today that the twang of our beloved Mayor Bloomberg is actually Bostonian. I always thought he spoke kinda funny. We don't all want to sound bland and indistinguishable from podunk, do we?  In my building there are still several people who have New York accents so rich, I feel like I'm in a movie. I don't drink coffee, but if I did, I'd drink cawfee.

NYU's Grandiose Schemes

NYU is proposing to add 6 million square feet of new space across New York City in the next twenty years, with half the growth taking place in the historic blocks of the Village—the equivalent of three Javits Centers.

Let me translate: NYU plans to add 3 million square feet of construction to my neighborhood (a lot of it on my block) and apparently not much can be done to stop it. The recent landmark status accorded to the I.M. Pei superblock, where I live, has not been a deterrent. They want to build a 38-story new hotel tower on the site. They are going to build a 17-story building on Mercer Street facing the Angelika Film Center, where they intend to put, among other things, 1,400 freshmen. They are going to put two buildings in the beautiful and serene gardens of Washington Sq. Village.
John Sexton, the president of NYU, who confuses himself with Lorenzo de Medici in a bad way, has grandiose words to sell his vision. 

“The analogy that I use is to the Italian Renaissance, when there was Milan and Venice and Florence and Rome, and the talent and creative class moved among those points,”

As if. Yet he talks about the opposition as "demagogues" and "activists". But the opposition is actually mostly neighbors. It's the people who live in the buildings and on the streets where this monstrous expansion is slated to take place. Many of the faculty who live in the Pei towers and Washington Sq. Village are not jumping for joy either. It is not so much about preserving a bohemian and artistic character that, let's be frank, has been virtually lost. It's about NYU not engulfing everything on sight.
Of course the expansion plan is a boon for construction work and jobs and money for the city, which is why Bloomberg and the politicians don't oppose it. In New York City, preservation efforts are massively heroic and mostly doomed to failure. This is the only civilized city in the world where a gorgeous and important landmark like the original Penn Station was torn down, a city that would have torn down Grand Central Station if those pesky activists and demagogues had not fought to stop it. They had Jacqueline Onassis on their side. The neighbors who live in the Pei superblock (which I am not comparing to the train stations) don't have the glamorous power credentials. We are just people. Of the three Pei towers, two are faculty housing for NYU and the other one is a Mitchell-Lama Co-op where middle class people of all ages and races live. There are a lot of elderly residents. It is a community.  And it is a community of Greenwich Villagers.
The irony is that the Pei superblock was an offending eyesore in its day. Together with the Washington Square Village buildings across the street, an entire swath of quaint Greenwich Village was demolished to make way for its brutalist, modernist aesthetic, and at least in the case of my building, for middle income people to have affordable housing. I assume this must have been a concession the city asked of NYU in order to let them build. The buildings were hated in their day (1960), but time has proven them to have been executed with a certain grace, and they provided enduring public spaces for community life. As happens with buildings of a certain age, now they have a retro feel that people are actually fond of and they are architecturally significant (I guess the Pei more than the Washington Sq. Village, but I happen to love the blocky sixties architecture and their peaceful inner courtyards).
I'm not opposed to progress. Cities change. The village is a pathetic shadow of what it used to be. But it should not become NYU. What I like about the Village is that it is full of lively and engaged people who are putting up a fight.

The little people

El mundo es una cloaca infecta

Translation: The world is an infected sewer. Just read the paper.

This is how I feel about it, hearing about the likes of Carl Paladino and his courting of a repulsive fringe of the fringe attention-seeking giant asshole rabbi. Memo to the both of them: enough with the gay hate. I've fucking had it with all this crap. Why are people so bent out of shape about gays? Most of the time, the most vocal anti-gay people are those who are deathly afraid of being gay themselves. Otherwise, what's it to you? So for fuck's sake, deal with it. Gay people exist, they will continue existing and they are no worse or no better than anyone else. Hence, they deserve exactly the same rights as everyone else. If you can't handle that, go to Iran. Or to Saudi Arabia. There you'll feel right at home.
That asshole Paladino has a gay nephew that all of a sudden didn't show up for work (in his uncle's very own campaign) after his uncle said horrible things about gays. This is the human turd New Yorkers want for a governor? Besides, who the fuck cares about what these ultraorthodox retrogrades think? They don't live in the modern world, They should not count for shit.

I certainly hope that both Rabbi Levin and Paladino choke on their kosher sausages.
Not that I am thrilled by that horrible Cuomo guy, but these are the freaking choices we get in this human sewer we live in. I miss Elliot Spitzer. Who is now pimping himself to CNN. Disgraceful.

I'm very happy about the Chilean miners, but I can't stand how everything becomes a vulgar, mawkish, horrendous circus. How about some dignity? Do people still know the meaning of the word? CNN makes me puke and cringe at the same time. I'm glad I didn't even watch the damn thing. Reading is better. Watching Jon Stewart skewer the whole unseemly carnival of cheese, even better.

And what is the Iranian vantz doing in Lebanon? A missile on his head could help dispel this foul mood of mine.

Then we have his counterpart Avigdor Lieberman, possibly the worst candidate to hold a Foreign Relations post in the history of mankind. A foul, abrasive right-wing asshole.
And don't be surprised if he ends up being prime minister. Israelis, if they continue voting with fear and extremism, are going to end up in even more isolation from the world. The hatred in that region is insurmountable.

No wonder I am in a bad mood.

Poor Tourists Part II

Thanks to my friend Cynthia, who misses NYC so much she is now reading the New York Post, here is a lovely breakdown of everything that drives New Yorkers crazy.
I agree with all of them, and then some.
Here's my own abridged breakdown:
1. Street Fairs. I loathe them. They sell the same awful shit all over town, they create traffic and they leave garbage. Speaking of garbage, why is this city so goddamned filthy?
2. Honkers. Why this is not on the list is beyond me. People who honk should be paralyzed with a silencer. Forever.
2a. The noise level at restaurants. We don't have enough noise on the street that we need more inside? Bloomberg should fine restaurants with deafening decibel levels. Even better, close em.
3. People who block subway doors. Also: Men who sprawl themselves on the seats as if they were in a jacuzzi. People who sit their packages on the seats. People who get into the subway before letting people out. Young, sturdy people who do not give their seat to the pregnant or elderly. And I don't even use the subway that much.
3a. The MTA.
4. Slow walking tourists. Yeah. Those who walk 5 deep too. And who decide to look at their map pinkt on the corner, blocking everybody's way. Move to the side, dears.
5. Hipsters I hate more than panhandlers. And more than panhandlers I hate those dudes from Children International or Greenpeace who block the street with their moral loftiness, closely followed by the people who want to give you a free haircut. I also hate people who give free hugs. Creeps.
6. Cabdrivers on cellphones. Cabdrivers who brake as if they want to torpedo the passenger through the windshield. Cabdrivers who drive like maniacs. Cabdrivers who HONK. Stinky cabs. Also: people who steal your cab.
7. Surprised that no one mentioned parents with military style prams that yell "excuse me!" as if the very Son of God was bundled in there and was late to his appointment to save mankind. This is not the Red Sea and your son/daughter is not Moses. Chill.
7a. I don't mind film crews at all. I do mind idiot PAs with attitudes. 
8. Bike delivery guys I don't mind as long as they follow the rules and don't ride wrong way within inches of colliding with pedestrians. Oh, wait.
9. People who act deliberately crazy in Washington Square Park. We have plenty of authentic nutjobs down there. Don't be cute.
9a. Skateboarders in public spaces. Go to your room.
10. Drunks who leave bars in the wee hours and scream at the top of their lungs. Newsflash: people live in Manhattan, you idiots. Pipe down.
11. What's with the tip jars?
12. Big groups of girly girls on nights out who drink appletinis and start hollering as if they swallowed a microphone (same goes for guy-ey guys). Composure, ladies (and gents).
13. Staten Island. 
13 a. Rats. 

Having said this, I love New York.

I'm Not Making This Up

From the catalogue of a spiritual retreat in upstate NY which shall remain nameless:
• Wild Roots, Woodslore and Wildwoods Wisdom -- WHERE'S THE BAR?
• TangoZen™: Tango with the Buddha -- ISN'T THE BUDDHA TOO FAT TO TANGO? 
• Dance of Liberation®
• Boot Camp for Goddesses® -- EUPHEMISM FOR FAT FARM?
• Overcoming Underearning® -- BY OVERPAYING THE UNDERMINER.
• Naam Yoga™ and Universal Kabbalah -- DO WE GET TO COMMUNE WITH ESTHER?
• Detox Flow® Yoga
• Yoga Tune Up®
• Purna Yoga™ 
• Satyananda Yoga®
• Embodyoga™
• Anusara Yoga®
• Jivamukti Yoga® -- IN WHICH WE MEDITATE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ® AND ™
• Breema™ -- WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?
• Tai Chi Easy™
• ChiWalking®
• ChiRunning®
• VortexHealing®  -- VOID WHERE PROHIBITED
• The Power of Personal Vibrations -- BUMMER. I THOUGHT IT SAID PERSONAL VIBRATORS
• Mindfulness Tools for Living the Full Catastrophe -- I BET THIS ONE IS FOR JEWS.
• Awakening your Authentic Soul Signature -- IS IT LIKE MY VISA SIGNATURE?
• The Art of Extreme Self-Care -- NARCISSISTS WELCOME
• Spring Ecstatic Chant -- ME AFTER SOUP DUMPLINGS AT JOE'S SHANGHAI
• A Gentle Introduction to Skydancing Tantra -- WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR ROOT BEER
• Tree Whispering™ -- WILL I BE SUED IF I DO IT ON MY OWN?
• Social Media Training -- HUH?
• FireWalking: Feel your Fear, Find your Power -- EASY FOR YOU TO SAY
• John of God -- TOO BAD CRUCIFIXION WENT OUT OF STYLE
• How to Write and Publish Spiritual Books -- AND MAKE MILLIONS DOING IT?
• Our Lady of Weight Loss EnLIGHTens -- AMEN, SISTERS
• Creating Photo Prayers -- GIVE ME A FREAKING BREAK
• Off the Mat, into the World® -- AND STILL AN ASSHOLE AT THE END OF THE CLASS
• Self-Healing through Latin Dance -- NO MAMEN 

AND MY OVERWHELMING FAVORITE: Corporate Yogis Unite!

In Other News...

Here's a digest of stuff currently running through my brain.

• Crisis? What Crisis?
Last week I somehow ended up in Times Square 3 times. I saw two Broadway shows (both meh) and took visiting friends to a Jazz gig at Iridium. To judge from the stampedes of tourists, most of them evidently American, running around Times Square like the bulls in Pamplona, I can announce to you that the economy, both national and foreign, has recovered. Otherwise, how do we explain the hordes of tourists that have descended upon our fair megalopolis? I've been living in this city for almost 20 years and I have never seen so many tourists. And so many American tourists. They are going to Broadway shows in droves, which ain't cheap, even if they're buying tickets in bulk. They are staying in overpriced hotels and they are being happily ripped off at  tourist traps. New York is expensive.
So stop the economic whining, Red Staters, cause I'm on to you. You are not so bad off, and you secretly love New York and wish with all your might you could be so cool as to live here. Alas, you are not.
I am an unapologetic New York snob, (and with good reason: I live here!) but do not misunderstand me. I do not dislike tourists. I love helping them find their way. And telling them what to order at Joe's Shanghai. And steering them away from eating in Little Italy. And trying not to strangle them when they walk 5 deep in slow motion on the street.

• Bendygate!
Don't get me wrong, but Sarah Palin reminds me of Hitler. Wait! Let me explain why. Because I'm deathly afraid of her, that's why. Because I cannot fathom how there could possibly be people who don't see her for what she is: a dangerous, ignorant arriviste, resentful, mean-spirited, provincial, petty, arrogant and hungry for power.  That there are people out there who are still drinking her Kool-Aid (with bendy straws!) is very worrisome to me. This latest fracas is a gift for those of us people of sense who can tell a psycho-hypocrite-demagogue when we see one. Turns out that her "public speaking" demands (as if what comes out of her mouth is speech) outstrip any entertainment diva's.  Suffer the little people. It is not in her interest that the "folks" who so adore her find out how craven and two-faced she is. So people have to fish out the details of her speaking contracts from the garbage, which, if you think about it, is where they rightfully belong.