New York’s non-horrible holiday cheer
New York City is largely spared the horrors of Black Friday shopping brawls. A security guard was trampled to death a few years ago in Valley Stream, Long Island, right outside of Queens, but within the five boroughs we have a better history of crowd control. And few of our poor people have cars. There’s not a lot of motivation to try to haul a 60-inch plasma screen TV home on the subway.
But that doesn’t mean there’s not enough misery to go around. Last year I was trying to get to a restaurant in midtown the night of the Christmas tree lighting in Rockefeller Center. Not only were the usual crowds heading to the tree lighting, but protesters objecting to a grand jury not indicting police offers in the Eric Garner case were headed that way also in an attempt to disrupt the ceremony or at least get on television. It was the only time in my life I walked towards Times Square to avoid worse crowds.
New York City has some great iconic holiday sights and experiences, all of which most New Yorkers avoid like the plague. The tree at Rockefeller Center, the windows of Macy’s or Saks Fifth Avenue, the laser light show at Grand Central Terminal are all great things that are mobbed with tourists to the point of not being truly enjoyable unless you are a tourist just happy to be there.
Here are some alternative and authentically New York holiday experiences you can consider to keep more money and sanity through the season.
For alternative shopping options, you should go visit The Kinda Punky Flea Market – Holiday Style is set to take place in Brooklyn at the Lucky 13 Saloon on December 20. I can’t think of a better place to shop for people with good taste. The Lucky 13 Saloon is a cool vestige of pre-insanity Brooklyn and attracts the interesting artists and musicians you thought had been run out of the borough entirely. There is also the Morbid Anatomy Flea Market at The Bell House in Brooklyn (there’s a high potential hipster factor at this one, but it might be worth it).
Plenty of people will buy expensive tickets to see Handel’s Messiah at Carnegie Hall. I went there more than a decade ago and deeply regret not screaming “SLAYER!!!” at the quiet moment between the third and fourth movements. Radio City Music Hall’s holiday show is a by-the-numbers holiday show with the Rockettes and Santa Clause, but there are better shows that will give you an excuse to visit Radio City Music Hall. The Holiday Show in Astoria Queens will fill you to the brim with holiday punk rock goodness from some awesome bands. Astoria is not hard to get to and you’ll get a taste of real New York City punk. If you prefer more traditional holiday classical music, consider instead the holiday concert by the Queens Oratorio Society on December 20 in Queens.
The Holiday Train Show at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx started on Nov. 21 but it runs into the New Year. I have gone on New Year’s Eve and the crowds were not that bad. You’ll be impressed with the models of New York City landmarks made from plants. The trains are interesting too.
And if you would just rather look at some pretty trees and other holiday decorations, then you can avoid the overcrowded Hades of Rockefeller Center and enjoy the Origami Holiday Tree at the American Museum of Natural History or the UNICEF Snowflakes near Central Park.
Daily life with neither fear nor apology
The recent terrorist attacks in Paris will see New York on a higher security alert than usual. There will be more armed soldiers and more heavily armed police in some of our transit centers and crowded tourist areas.
New Yorkers this week will go to work as they normally do. The buses will be too slow and the trains too crowded. New Yorkers will continue to secretly and openly hate one another as is our birthright.
But what we won’t do is let savage lunatics keep us from doing what we need to do. We’d love to stay home and watch the news while eating cheese in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in France, but we can’t afford the time off from work.
And, to borrow an over-used phrase, if we deviate from our miserable daily routines, the terrorists have won. Let’s observe a moment of silence for the victims of these horrors, but don’t dare be silenced by fear. Don’t let the fear of terrorism affect how you live your life and don’t let the fear of being labeled or maligned stop you from speaking your mind.
New Yorkers will be divided on what the Paris attacks say about Islam and the Muslim world at large. My social media news feed is filled with people wanting to bomb all Muslims back to the stone age (some are already there!) and people trying to shame us for caring more about Paris than Beirut. All of this is nonsense. New Yorkers care more about Paris because Paris is more like New York and it resonates when people more like ourselves are harmed. That’s not xenophobia, that’s human nature.
The five boroughs are home to as many as 1 million Muslims and most of them are peaceful people we interact with on a daily basis without incident. It’s Muslims who are the biggest victims of Islamic fundamentalists and Muslims who are doing the most to take the fight to these extremists. And it’s also realistic Muslims who will admit that there’s a real problem with Islam today. It’s the religion that has most dialed up the crazy factor something terrible and the Islamic Uma has been home to an ideological war for decades with too many moderates sympathizing with the other side.
New Yorkers are a generally liberal lot and the usual suspects have expressed more angst about possible backlashes against Muslims than about how we go about preventing another terrorist attack. We’re a divided city just as we are a divided country, but after all the hand-wringing and shouting, we’ll still be a buzzing metropolis. We’ve seen terrorism at its worst and we’re still here.
New Yorkers will pause to honor the victims of terror and then keep going to work and coming home every night. We’ve been down this road before. There’s too much life to live here. We can’t afford the fear.
The Great Brick Oven Pizza Scam
Walking towards Brooklyn Bridge Park this past weekend on a family outing, we came across the sight that represented everything not to like about Brooklyn. I even took a photo of it because it summed up so much of what is wrong with our city and world.
There was a long line in front of a brick oven pizza restaurant. People crowded into a dense rope line like cattle to the slaughter to pay handsomely for the honor, while a little ways up the street they could have gotten more food for less and eaten with real Brooklynites at the Park Plaza Restaurant. And worse than that, they were waiting to pay for brick oven pizza.
Brick oven pizza is a big scam. It should shame New Yorkers that some of our most heralded pizza restaurants are overpriced tourists traps offering crappy food. Somehow the powers that be have convinced millions of people that there is something authentic about eating poorly-made and overpriced pizza.
Take a good honest look at a brick oven pizza if you are ever roped into going to one of these insufferable establishments. You’ll notice that not only is the pizza weak and thin and the cheese coverage extremely spotty, but there will usually be bubbled and burned parts of the crust. You could take off some of these burnt pieces and use them to make a charcoal sketching if you wanted. Everyone pretends that this is good pizza, and brick oven pizza restaurants somehow get away with this even though there are hundreds of good pizza places that can make a delicious and authentic New York pizza.
If visitors to New York were willing to just travel a little farther away from the well-tread tourist areas, this con game could be put to an end faster. Sadly many New Yorkers themselves have fallen into this trap and gush on about some of these places.
Some of the celebrated brick oven pizza places boast that they offer a clam pizza, which really means they are failures in both pizza and seafood. There are too many good restaurants to get pizza and clams, don’t spend your money on the brick oven hype.
The brick oven pizza deception plays into the innate human trait to romanticize the past. While craft and tradition are certainly worth celebrating when they result in something positive, making sub-par pizza just because it’s old fashioned is stupid. Yes, they had brick oven pizza in the 1800s in New York. Do you know what else they had? Cholera and Yellow Fever. We shouldn’t be eating brick oven pizza any more than we should be commuting to work on horseback or leeching our children when they get colds. Let’s embrace those technologies that have improved our lives, including ovens that can cook pizza evenly.
Many people from outside the city are not aware that pizza making has a long history in New York and they wrongly believe that they must choose between the artisanal and brick oven swindlers and the legion of national chains that are sadly permeating New York neighborhoods. This is a false choice. The five boroughs and many surrounding areas are full of small, independent pizza parlors that can make you a delicious pizza.
Brick oven is a “brand” now. Just like you can charge extra money by calling something “artisanal” or “natural.” I have no doubt that bad pizza makers are baking their abominable pizzas in regular ovens and then just charging extra for it. They’re laughing at their self-satisfied marks who think they are somehow more “authentic” New Yorkers for being dumb enough to get taken by this racket.
It took years for this sham to get its hooks in the public and it may take longer to get people to open their eyes to the fact that they are paying more for less pizza.
So please, say no to the brick oven pizza hustle. There are still many independent pizza parlors that make real New York pizza.
Pumpkin Season Is Upon Us
Autumn is a great time of year in New York. The humid misery of summer is behind us and the holidays are ahead of us. The trees turn brilliant shades of red, orange and yellow and the air is electric with new possibilities. There is a sense of renewal that is similar to that of the spring but with a more ominous edge. The light grows dimmer and there’s a depressing feeling as the twilight of summer is again denied us. It is time to reap the harvest, but time is running on our days and year.
Like the Christmas holiday, the commercial anticipation of Halloween grows larger every year and we saw Halloween pop-up stores appear as early as August in some places. And there are pumpkin spice flavored food and beverages being offered ad nauseam. At the 7 Eleven where I get my coffee, they have a shaker of pumpkin flavoring so you can make your coffee like a pumpkin Big Gulp if they run out of pumpkin spice coffee. I agree the pumpkins spice has become excessive, but let’s not turn our back on traditional greats like pumpkin pie.
But the season of the pumpkin is a good time to embrace the fall. And the increasingly long Halloween season brings with it some worthwhile activities.
My good friend Jay, lead guitar player for New York punk rock band Endangered Feces, invited me and my family to join his family at the Rise of the Jack-O-Lanterns event, which features a walk through a path lined with intricately carved pumpkins. It features pumpkins carved with many different images and strung together in forms as large as dinosaurs, zebras, skeletons. There was a Hillary Clinton pumpkin and a Donald Trump pumpkin, and carvings that celebrated popular TV shows like Orange Is The New Black and Game of Thrones. The security people told everyone no flash photography was allowed, so my photos didn’t come out too well, but it was enjoyable to bring the kids.
It was a nice brisk evening and it wasn’t too long, and brevity is much appreciated when you’re hauling little kids with you. The event we went to was in Old Westbury, Long Island, New York not far outside our city’s borders. Living in Eastern Queens makes it easier to own a car which makes it easier to head to Long Island for events such as these, but you can take public transportation to similar events elsewhere.
You don’t have to go see nicely carved jack-o-lanterns and you don’t have to put any pumpkin crap in your coffee, but it’s important to do something to commemorate the autumn. Watch the leaves change colors, visit a haunted house, hand out non-poisoned candy to children on Halloween. Walk through a corn maze and go hunting. Take your significant other into a cemetery and conceive a child there. Wander the streets of New York on a ridiculously long walk. Get out of the house before it’s too cold.
The season of the pumpkin is upon us. Do not let it go quietly.
The New York Jets and N.F.L. “Infamy”
New York Jets starting quarterback Geno Smith will miss as many as 10 games because another Jets player punched him in the face. Think about that for a minute and how stupid that is to happen on a professional football team.
They wouldn’t be the New York Jets if something completely stupid didn’t happen every year. They wouldn’t be the Jets if they didn’t let a promising young quarterback get injured in some freak sideshow-type incident.
Idemefuna Enemkpali is the linebacker who punched Smith and was immediately cut from the team. Not to fear though, ex-Jets head coach Rex Ryan picked him up for his Buffalo Bills.
The New York Times ran a story saying that Enemkpali had transformed himself into a “figure of infamy” for the New York Jets. Taking out the starting quarterback with a sucker punch certainly runs you afoul of the team and its fans, but you have to do better in the N.F.L. if you want to achieve infamy.
The idea that Idemefuna Enemkpali could achieve some kind of “infamy” is ludicrous in a league rife with serial sex offenders, wife beaters and celebrated cheaters. Enemkpali may have “sucker punched” Geno Smith, but he punched an adult male and apologized for it. If serial sex offenders like Ben Roethlisberger can have a career in the N.F.L., sucker punchers shouldn’t have any barriers to a life in professional football.
The New York Jets have employed worse people. The Jets starting quarterback for many years was Mark Sanchez, who raped a woman in college.
So unless Enemkpali ripped off Geno Smith’s arm and then knocked him out with his own fist, a simple punch isn’t going to make you infamous. I guess there is a dry spell of crimes from N.F.L. players lately and the media needs to make the most of ones that it gets.
And, this happened to The Jets, which makes the story of misfortune that much better. Ridiculous misfortune business-as-usual for Gang Green. And being a Jets fan hasn’t been easy for four decades.
I’m a Jets fan, and I must admit that the Jets misfortunes are somewhat of a badge of honor at this point. I have stayed loyal to sports teams through thick and thin even when others became fair weather fans and attached themselves to more popular, winning teams at the time. I remember when the New York Yankees had the worst record in baseball in the early 1990s. Living in Connecticut, many of my friends supported the Boston Red Sox and made fun of me for my team loyalty. I vowed to them that I would see the Yankees as world champions again (vowing to be kept on life support until this happened if need be). I only had to wait six years.
And so it is with the Jets. Most New Yorkers are New York Giants fans because the Giants have won more Super Bowls within recent memory. The Jets last won the Super Bowl in 1969, three years before I was born. That’s OK. I’ll wait a little longer.
(Temporary) Escape from New York
It is time to escape New York for a week as our beloved city continues to bake in the summer heat. We are headed to Cape Ann, Massachusetts to attend a friend’s wedding and then enjoy the New England coast.
Summers in New York City are marked in part by our efforts to go elsewhere as weekend getaways snarl traffic on Friday and Sunday nights and holiday weekends can send people away from the five boroughs in droves.
I find it more enjoyable to stay in the city during some of the more popular times to leave. Going around the city on Labor Day can make New York feel like a ghost town in parts.
But New Yorkers need to leave the city for long periods of time over the summer in order to maintain our sanity. New York is an intense and crowded place. It can get even more crowded and oppressive in the summertime as our transit system and the areas near where we work are flooded with slow-moving tourists who are often clueless about the way to behave in a big city and slow things down. We don’t hate tourists; we like and need tourists, but their increased presence intensifies an already strained existence.
And the often unrelenting humid heat of New York helps bring our regular misery stew to a high boil. The city traps the heat with its high buildings, blacktop and concrete, jacks it up a notch with the captured exhaust of car and bus traffic and tops it off with some extra hot blasts from air conditioning units. Too many weeks and months of New York City heat can drive you insane and long for someplace, anyplace, where you can enjoy looking at trees or relax with cool grass under your feet.
When I was growing up my family made Lake George in upstate New York our regular vacation spot. Lake George is far enough north that it is cool at night and not obscenely hot during the day. You can see lots of stars in the sky and the place is enough of a popular tourist destination that they have large amusement parks. There are also historic forts you can visit that are rich in history of the Revolutionary and French and Indian Wars.
This is the first year my wife and I are taking our daughters on a vacation. We had a brief visit in Maine with family but we are about to embark on our first vacation of the four of us as a unit and we are heading to Cape Ann, Massachusetts.
My father’s family vacationed in Cape Ann when my Dad was growing up and he and my aunts and uncles were photographed in front of the Fisherman’s Memorial in Gloucester. We plan to recreate these photos as best we can with our girls. Rockport is also going to be having its annual Lobster Fest while we are there and I have promised to attend.
I plan on eating seafood, visiting with friends and otherwise doing as little as possible. It’s not too late to plan your own summer escape from New York. Be sure it’s temporary.
Penn & Teller Are Back in New York
Penn & Teller are back in New York City you should go see them if you can. Penn & Teller on Broadway runs through August 16 at the Marquis Theatre.
I don’t know when exactly I became a die-hard Penn & Teller fan but it was at some point in the 1980s when they appeared on television often and were always funny a way that was smarter and with more of an edge than any other act around. Maybe when they appeared on the first Comic Relief show and they did a juggling act that involved them smoking at a time when the anti-smoking movement was getting stronger. “We don’t endorse smoking unless you want to look cool,” Penn said.
What’s more, they were a magic act that allegedly earned the hatred of most magic acts. They showed you how they did their tricks, until doing it in a way that forced you rethink everything. They don’t claim to have magic powers and they don’t use melodramatic music or ridiculous flourishes. They say they are going to fool you and then that’s what they do. While a lot of magic acts try to play up attachments to the supernatural, Penn & Teller are brutally honest with their audience. They also have a great sense of humor and even when you get fooled in a big way, it’s a thrill to see how they work and manipulate an audience. They are marvelously irreverent in ways that will make you happy to be a curmudgeon.
Before they moved to Las Vegas where they have their long-term residency, the duo was in New York. Penn Jillette would meet at the Howard Johnson’s in Times Square with anyone who wanted to have dinner and a movie with him.
I first saw them live in New York during a rare series of shows in the early summer of 2000. It was at the Beacon Theater and I sat in front of Al Goldstein and felt like a high roller for it. Andy Richter was in the audience too. New York City’s absurd and unfairly restrictive gun laws meant that they couldn’t do their famous bullet-catching trick, so they did a freedom-themed trick where they made it look like they were burning an American flag, only to have it appear unscathed on a flag pole on stage.
I saw them in New York again in 2009 at the Gramercy Theater in a special event called “35 Years of Magic and Bullshit.” It was the only time I’ve ever seen Teller speak on stage as himself as part of the show. The two performed a few tricks, including testing out a few new ones, but mostly were interviewed by a fellow magician and took questions from the audience.
At one point the host asked, “If you didn’t succeed with Penn & Teller, where would you be today?”
“I would still be a Latin teacher,” said Teller.
“I would be in prison,” said Penn.
I got to see them in Las Vegas when I went in 2011—I made sure to get my tickets to their show as soon as I had the flight booked. Vegas without seeing Penn & Teller would have been a big waste. The show rocked.
Penn & Teller meet after the show with anyone who wants a photo or autograph. Teller does talk when you meet him in person. It is rare to see them perform in New York City. Don’t miss out.
Goodbye Alumni Club
The secret to a good bar has nothing to do with what beers are on tap or what its décor looks like. The only valid measure of a bar is its character, it supersedes all other measures. I’ve been in bars that reeked of piss and fruit flies that were a thousand times better than the cleanest, sleekest pre-fabricated gastropub.
Dive bars are often the best bars to visit. One of the finest pubs in the recent history of New York was the Village Idiot, which closed its doors in 2004 and had the most eclectic crowd ever. My first visit there a 6-foot-plus transvestite played pool with some tipsy yuppies while construction workers drank at the bar. Mars Bar had bathrooms that were even filthier than CBGB’s bathrooms, which were legendary for their filth. But it didn’t matter. Mars Bar and Village Idiot brought some of the most interesting varieties of people to drink together.
Of course there’s a certain hip cache to the dive bar now, but you can tell which bars are faking it and which bars aren’t. I like to think I’ve visited enough bars to be able to tell the difference without too much effort, but I’ve been out of the drinking game for more than five years now and my visits to bars are few and far between.
And New York City has lost some of its best dive bars. There are a few though that are keeping things alive. Nancy Whiskey, Rudy’s and The Patriot are all the real thing: good dive bars with real character.
But great New York bars are not restricted to the five boroughs, and one of the finest bars ever recently hosted its last hurrah.
The Alumni Club just outside the city limits in New Hyde Park, New York is a place I discovered through my wife, who was a long-time regular and used to tend bar there. It sat among a row of storefronts and its location was generally unremarkable. You needed a car to get there though theoretically you could take a Nassau County bus.
The Alumni Club was a bar that was both eclectic in its clientele and without pretension. While it had its population of longtime regulars, no strangers were ever made to feel unwelcome. I don’t even drink and I was welcome there. I would even bring in large beverages from the 7-Eleven across the street and no one would mind. I’d always ask the bartender if he or she wanted anything. I’m convinced the bar lost no money on my account; my wife could drink enough for both of us.
There was almost always some offering of free food and the owner or bartender encouraged visitors to eat. Once I went there to catch the end of the Georgia Bulldogs game and found they were in the midst of a “casino night” themed evening. The bar had some system worked out where they weren’t technically gambling there but I wasn’t sure how it worked and I figured the less I knew the better.
But the best part about the Alumni Club was the character and good atmosphere. It was not in a trendy part of the city and had nothing to prove. People who went there were working people who wanted to drink, not people who wanted to be seen drinking.
Needless to say a bar of this caliber of excellence tends to have many loyal patrons and when the bar announced it was going to be shutting its doors, employees and patrons alike began planning the farewell party.
The last Saturday this May was the Alumni Club’s big blowout party that included a lot of food and copious amounts of alcohol. T-shirts made for the event read, “We drank it dry.” Patrons lived up to the boast: when bartenders showed up for work the next day they found that the place had run out of beer.
This week Alumni Club will close its doors for good. Guests and employees will remember their alma mater with pride.
How to Do Spring in New York
Even though the first day of spring was officially several weeks ago, we are only now beginning to get real spring-like weather in New York. That’s fine by me. I hate the heat and like to keep as much distance between myself and summer as possible.
Spring is a great season to be in New York. The blanket of cold is lifted and the blanket of overheated humidity has yet to descend. The hum of outdoor social life returns and the parks become alive again.
I know that summer is coming and that it will be several months of sweltering misery, so let’s enjoy the spring while we have it here. Here are some ideas of how you can best enjoy the springtime in New York City:
Go to Coney Island before it gets crowded. Coney Island is a fun place to go and enjoy the amusements and atmosphere. It gets choked with people during the official summer season (though if you walk far enough along the boardwalk you can find your way away from the worst of the crowds. Ride the Cyclone, visit the freak show at the Coney Island Circus Side Show and visit its freak museum. Get a hot dog at the original Nathan’s. There’s even the New York Aquarium there.
Go bird watching in Inwood Hill Park. Inwood in northern Manhattan is one of the city’s great treasures of a neighborhood and central to that is Inwood Hill Park. Where else in Manhattan can you see eagles and hawks and get lost in the woods? Bird watchers get to see a lot of interesting birds in the park, and not just eagles and hawks. Eagles were hatched in the park years ago to increase their likelihood of returning as adults. Hawks are long-time residents of Inwood (and other city spots). So go and enjoy watching nature’s predation at its most beautiful.
Visit a botanical garden. The city’s largest botanical garden is in the Bronx near the Bronx Zoo, but did you know that Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island all have their own botanical gardens also? Lots of abundant park land and plant life abound at the botanical gardens, plus they often have special exhibits.
Take a historic walking tour. No matter what your interests are, there is history in New York for you. Interested in learning about the American Revolution, gangsters, labor strikes, punk rock? There’s a walking tour for you. When you can walk past something and tell someone something interesting about it, that’s makes you a better traveling companion. You might learn something interesting and historic about spots you walk by every day.
Enjoy some free outdoor theater. There is free Shakespeare in many public parks throughout the city and it’s a shame not to take advantage of that. There is so much good theater, art and creativity to sample for free that you should never jones for your theater fix. The New York Public Theater, New York Classical Theatre and Hip to Hip Theater Company all do a great job bringing free theater to the people of New York.
I Want To Be Poet Laureate of Queens
The Borough of Queens is taking applications for its poet laureate, and I’m going to throw my sweaty hat into the ring. I think my chances of being accepted are low, but fuck it. I’m as good as anyone else and I like this borough very much.
Queens was where I lived when I moved back to New York. I had been away from the Northeast for several years and hadn’t lived in the five boroughs since I was an infant in the Bronx. I grew up mostly in Yonkers and while I came to the city frequently growing up, I am by and large a child of New York’s suburbs.
In college I decided I wanted to be a great American writer in the same way that thousands of other English majors do. I was determined to get myself back to New York City as if that would somehow magically bestow some great inspiration power and let me live a charmed literary life.
I got a job at JFK airport that helped me move back here and I went looking for apartments that were a reasonable commuting distance to JFK. I found a small studio in Ozone Park at $500 per month (it soon went up to $525). It was on 101st Avenue and John Gotti’s old Bergin Hunt & Fish Club was still there and only a few blocks away. That was a selling point that the realtor mentioned. “People know not to mess around in this neighborhood,” he said. Gotti had been locked up for several years by then but the neighborhood still had some old wise guys hanging around.
I enjoyed living in Ozone Park a lot. I would walk around the neighborhood as much as I could and enjoyed how quickly neighborhoods could transition from one to another. Not far from where John Gotti plotted his takeover of the Gambino Crime Family a store sold cricket supplies to the Indian and West Indian immigrants who were moving into Richmond Hill. I was not too far from Forest Park and I could also walk to the small apartment where Jack Kerouac wrote his first novel.
While immediate literary success proved elusive, I managed to publish my first poetry collection while I was living in Ozone Park. ‘Five Borough Blues’ was a small broadsheet of poems published by New Jersey-based Lucid Moon Poetry (RIP Ralph Haselmann Jr.).
Years later, after living in Inwood for a decade, I moved in with the woman who is now my wife and that brought me to Flushing. I got to learn Northern Queens whereas Ozone Park is in Southern Queens.
The greatest borough continues to impress me. I do miss Inwood a good bit, I can’t lie. But Queens has many more great neighborhoods that are still real neighborhoods and not overpriced tourist zones.
Queens has both the greatest number of interesting neighborhoods, real residential neighborhoods with character, as well as cultural institutions and a variety of environments that the other boroughs don’t have. Do you have the beachfront and harbor areas like Broad Channel and the Rockaways in Manhattan? No. Can you find 24-hour Korean barbeque in Staten Island? Good luck.
And without fail, Queens continues to inspire me to write poetry. The entire city does, to be sure, but Queens is my home and it’s where I believe you find the most New York part of New York. It has the widest array of cultural offerings and the largest sampling of interesting people anywhere in the world. It stands between the city and its suburbs. It has all manner of terrain. It even has its own zoo.
I will gladly accept the (unpaid) responsibilities of the Queens Poet Laureate. I will let no excellent verse about this borough go unwritten. Applications are due April 24th (April is national poetry month).
But whether or not I am poet laureate of Queens, I will continue to let the city inspire to create good written works. It deserves no less.
The Iceman Cometh to Brooklyn
New York is the best place in the world to see theater in the English speaking world. You’d have to go to London to come close to what New York has to offer in terms of plays being produced. Chicago has a thriving theater scene, but it still doesn’t compare to New York’s.
The one problem with New York’s theatrical offerings is that there is so much good stuff to see that it’s impossible to see even a fraction of the worthwhile productions, and inevitably stuff gets lost in the shuffle.
I had no idea that a well-renowned production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh was coming to New York until I read a review of it in The New York Times. The production was brought over from Chicago and stars Nathan Lane in the lead role of Hickey and Brian Dennehy as Larry. The play was scheduled for a very limited run, from Feb. 5 to March 15 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
I scrambled to get tickets online and managed to get a couple for last Thursday night.
The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is located in downtown Brooklyn, an area that straddles the line between old-school ghetto and clueless gentrification. There are check cashing storefronts and other run-down areas not far from these stages. And BAM is not one theater but several and it’s easy to go to the wrong place (or in my case two wrong places) if you haven’t been there before.
But once I found the theater everything went smoothly. The BAM Harvey Theater lacks the upscale decorative charm of many of the Broadway theaters but it is otherwise audience friendly. Unlike your average Broadway show, the BAM audience is mostly New York City residents who know basic theater etiquette (I counted only one cell phone going off during the production).
And this production of The Iceman Cometh lives up to the hype. Nathan Lane, who is more of a well-known comic actor, makes a great Hickey. Because the characters he often plays on TV and in movies are so jovial, it puts an added barb to the soul-crushing dialogue and dark personality of his character.
Brian Dennehy’s Larry Slade broods over each act perfectly as well. And the rest of the cast, especially Stephen Ouimette as Harry Hope and James Harms as Jimmy Tomorrow, bring O’Neill’s words to life with gut-wrenching performances.
The play is about five hours long and has three intermissions, but the time passed by easily. When you’re watching a play done that well, you can lose yourself and don’t mind.
The Iceman Cometh resonates very well with audiences because everyone has some part of themselves that’s doubtful, unfulfilled and wanting. No one escapes self-doubt and no one has avoided procrastination and self-pity, though we’d like to think we do. Everyone has a problem facing harsh truths about their own lives, no matter how good your life may be.
Iceman works so well because just about every one of us has been that drunk at the bar, high on liquid courage and doubtless in dreams that we would never see through. Everyone has engaged in self-delusion at some point in their lives, everyone has something in their past that they’re ashamed of. O’Neill’s Hickey knocks the wind out of our sails with his quest to bring us peace by giving up our pipe dreams.
Art this good is always worth the investment of time. If you have a chance to see The Iceman Cometh, go see it.
The MTA Has Snow Excuses
The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is the blessing and the curse of life in New York. Our transit system makes the city a livable place considering its population density. If everyone who works in New York City drove to work, we would be in a state of surreal permanent gridlock.
What the city has seen over the last several weeks has been the MTA at its worse. While the weather has been cold with a lot of snow and ice, nothing we’ve seen this winter is without precedent. It snows in the Northeastern United States. A winter without ice and snow is a rarity. We can understand a lot of traffic delays in the ice and snow, but the train lines should not seize up the way they have over the last several weeks.
We can’t blame the city and state for the steps they took in the face of the January 26 blizzard. The authorities have to go with what the weather forecasters say and err on the side of caution. The forecasts were dire and while the storm didn’t amount to the “snowpacalypse” that was predicted, better safe than sorry. I managed to catch one of the last express trains anywhere in the system on the afternoon of the 26th apparently. The city banned all but emergency transit, including car traffic, after 11 p.m. that night.
Where I live in Queens, on Union Street in Flushing near where it becomes Willets Point Boulevard, is usually a heavily trafficked street. It is close to the Whitestone Bridge, near a shopping center and along three or four city bus routes. Even in the quiet of the early morning hours, it is usual to see regular traffic on the road. The night of January 26th saw the streets deserted in a very strange yet beautiful snowscape. I walked right up the middle of the street and stood right in the middle of the usually busy intersection of Willets Point Boulevard and Parsons Boulevard and so no cars moving anywhere. I did see two cars driving during the time I was outside, whether they were violating the travel ban or were emergency workers I couldn’t tell. They were civilian cars risking a fine and having an accident on roads that were by then heavily snowed and sparsely plowed.
But while the travel bans were quickly lifted, the transit system is still seizing up at the slightest hint of bad weather. The MTA operates in New York City with maddening inefficiency and malfunction. Commuters’ hearts regularly break when they arrive on their train’s platform to find it mobbed with people trying to board much-delayed trains.
I must take two of the most congested and delay-prone lines in the system: the 7 train and the 6 train.
The 7 train is actually among the higher-rated train lines by the Straphangers Campaign, which is a commentary on the MTA. The 7 train can only handle express service in one direction at a time, and that express service is often canceled or delayed. Every train is standing-room only when it leaves the Flushing-Main Street stop on weekday mornings. Trains on the 7 local line often pull into local stations so packed that no one can get on them. People try to push on anyway, passengers argue, and trains are delayed further. Conductors make obnoxious announcements blaming passengers for the delays the MTA caused.
During one of the more recent abominable mass delays on the 7 line, an umbrella on the tracks caused the entire line to go into mass chaos. An umbrella. I’m sorry, but if the worst thing that falls onto the tracks in a day in an umbrella, we should be lucky. Unless this was some kind of James Bond-type bomb umbrella that Al Qaeda managed to toss onto the tracks, there is no excuse for this. A neighbor of mine was stuck on a 7 train with no heat for two and a half hours.
And it’s not just the 7 line. That same evening almost all of the subway lines were facing massive delays. Other rail systems like the LIRR and Metro North were delayed as well.
This recent winter weather should not have wrecked our transit system, but it did. New York is in need of a massive transit overhaul. We can’t shut down at the first sign of snow.
New Skill for the New Year
Swearing off the usual litany of New Year resolutions (except to maybe be kinder to people), the New Year is still a time to do something new or seek to improve yourself. I’ve decided that this year is the year I become proficient at archery.
Hunting is an excellent way to enjoy the outdoors, and while a gun is still the preferred method, a gun usually only gives you 10 days or so each year to hunt per state.
Bow hunting season, however, is much longer. For example, New York State’s deer and bear bow hunting season can be about three months long, depending on area. And on Long Island and parts of New York State closest to the city, where the population is very dense, only bow hunting is allowed for regular hunters. Bow hunting is also a bigger challenge. You have to be much closer to the animal to take it with an arrow and you will usually have to track that animal for a much longer distance once you’ve hit it.
And even if you don’t hunt, archery is an excellent and fun skill to develop. It’s something that city dwellers have the ability to do with several centers within the five boroughs. Archery is also a way to connect to the past and to characters in literature from Robin Hood to Katniss Everdeen.
I decided to visit Queens Archery, which is located not too far away from where I live. I showed up without a reservation but was getting a good archery lesson only a few minutes after arriving. The cost was only $25. That included an excellent lesson using a really sweet compound bow and some arrows on a target.
The young instructor taught me the basics of a proper stance and range safety, as well as other basic essentials that I had no idea about. For example, you NEVER “dry fire” a bow without an arrow in it. It can seriously damage it and cause it to come part. The compound bow uses a hand-held trigger device that one uses to release the bow and shoot the arrow. It was simple and the arrows flew into the target with a satisfying thwack!
A bow has to be set for each individual user and since mine wasn’t set for my specific use, it was not as accurate as it would have been if it had been customized. But with a little bit of adjustment, I managed to do pretty well. The instructor quickly moved me from the five yard line to the 10 yard line.
More newcomers arrived and they were soon shooting alongside me, some with compound bows and some with more traditional recurve bows. They varied in ability but they all seemed to have a nice time and they quickly improved their aim with some additional pointers from the instructors.
The instructor was happy with my abilities and said I might be able to move over to the more advanced part of the archery range on my next visit.
It was very satisfying to see the dozen or so hunting trophies on the wall that the center’s hunting club members had taken using their skills. It felt good to be in the city and be at a place where people appreciated were dedicated to developing skills for the outdoors.
Kindness Isn’t Just for Women and Sissies
Most Januaries are for a plethora of resolutions that don’t normally survive the spring thaw. But here is one that might work and improve your life if no one else’s: do one kind thing every day this year.
I know, I know, imploring people to be kind to each other is for hippies, religious folk and other delusional softies. But hear me out. Doing your best to be kind to people will help you out and make your life better. You’ll be happier with yourself.
Of course you shouldn’t be overly deferential or fall into the trap of pathological altruism, the legions of self-flagellating bleeding hearts are giving kindness a bad name. But a little bit of human decency goes a long way in today’s world.
Don’t be afraid to be kind in fear of it rendering you soft or foolish. Real kindness won’t make you weak. Being kind and humane is in fact a sign of strength.
The truly hard people in the world don’t need to be mean to people, they live the hard life when it counts and don’t have anything to prove. I’ve met armed forces veterans who have killed people in battle, I’ve met former I.R.A. bombers and others who did hard time in prison and I’ve met drug dealers with visible bullet wound scars on their bodies. All of them were nice and pleasant to speak with. They knew who they were and didn’t need to put on a tough guy act.
The person who made the best case for showing kindness on a daily basis was a former Marine who had seen some of the most horrific famine and violence in Somalia. He suggested giving two compliments a day to people and have at least several acts of kindness or generosity in your recent memory when you go to bed at night. I’ve heard the spiel about being nice and paying compliments to people from a lot of sources, but his talk was the one that remains fresh in my mind. I knew he had seen some of the worst the world has to offer, and the Marine Corps is the only institution in the world where it’s a compliment to be called a “jarhead.”
This Marine understood something that is easily lost in our world of cyber communication and online anonymous hate. Human beings have an ingrained need to keep a check on their own humanity. We are social creatures. For all of our individualist motivation, the people who actually do live without connections to other human beings wind up living like a scrambled mess. Simple acts of kindness to other people reassure us that we are still able to function in the world.
In New York, citizens of the Big Apple relish the tough reputation of our city, but also cherish the opportunity to help tourists and strangers where appropriate. Our love of the city motivates us to help others enjoy it and navigate its many quirks.
Be kind this year. You’ll be better for it.
Matthew Sheahan 
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