The Year in: Bathrooms

Bathrooms that I know and love, from the East Village and Williamsburg. See if you can match the bathroom to the coffee shop/bar/venue!

The Year in: Vampires

Part I

It all started in January (years are like that). It was a cold morning and the office was nearly dead. The only other people there when I arrived were a couple marketing types who seem to relish getting in when everyone else is still asleep. Music was coming from one of their desks; something fresh and young-sounding, with a hint of the exotic. "What is it?" I asked.

"The new Vampire Weekend," he said. I had never heard of the band, but chalked that up to the fact that I am not a marketing type.


He lent me the cd. The album hadn't been released yet, so it was just a promo copy - no pictures, no lyrics sheet, no liner notes. Nothing to give me an idea of the band's aesthetic. There was a brief piece of publicity from Rolling Stone on the back cover: “Guaranteed to make you at least forty percent happier than when you put it on”—an ominous promise of renewed life, of resurrection.

I have to admit that without any knowledge of the band, I was briefly seduced by the music. There was something rejuvenating about it - I attributed it to the lively West African guitar riffs and Caribbean rhythms the (very American-sounding) band members drew on. It all seemed innocent enough at first.

[to be continued]

New School Occupied by Students

Last night, students from the New School and other city colleges occupied the University's library at 5th Avenue and 14th Street in order to protest the policies of president Bob Kerrey, a former senator and governor of Nebraska and Navy SEAL during the Vietnam War. On December 10, Kerrey received a vote of no confidence from the New School faculty because of mismanagement, evidenced by his handling of a recent university budget crisis, and by the fact that he has gone through five provosts during his eight-year tenure.


After a day-long sit-in, police cut off access to the library. While a group of protesting students remained inside, a crowd gathered outside in solidarity. Some received periodic updates from the group inside via textmessage, which they transmitted to the crowd.


At about 11:45 pm, Bob Kerrey exited the library, escorted by police. Students shouted for Kerrey to resign as he made his way to his townhouse on 11th Street, which was also guarded by police.



This morning, the library had re-opened in time for students to continue working on final papers. A maintenance worker began repairing a window on the side of the building that had been broken last night during the occupation.

Jousting Monkey; Post-Box Cinderella

Tah-Poozie, Greenwich Avenue.

West Village.

Keep on Moving it On

Last night, after looking over the accumulated notes and drafts for an essay I spent far too long writing, I could not escape the feeling that I had written the same thing over and over again, circling back over the same thoughts page after page and month after month.

I recently started a new job. My employer, a book dealer, is paying me to construct a narrative out of his family's papers - the snapshots, videos, certificates, cards a letters a family piles up during its first hundred years in the United States. At lunch on my first day of work, I was talking to one of the girls who helps run the book dealership when something she said off-hand made me realize that her father is a poet and professor who had interviewed me for a job just the week before. (Incidentally, the job with the poet would have involved sorting through some things - mostly manuscripts and books of poetry and accumulated correspondence - that still lay in boxes after his recent move.)

Taking a bus out of Manhattan about a month ago, having left the familiar circuits of downtown, we passed through a remote northern section of Harlem. It is a neighborhood I almost never visit. One building after another looked strange, out of place, inexplicable, and yet captivating. How had I never seen these places? I suddenly had a vision of a rat in a maze, the floors of which are made of sand, so that with each navigation of the maze (it is a small maze), the rat unwittingly digs deeper into the floor, while the walls, which were at first low enough that the rat could see over them if he had looked, quickly become so high that the rat forgets there is a way out of his downward spiral.

Just now, I was looking back through an essay by Emerson to find some quote I half-remembered. I hoped it would recapitulate a point I wanted to make about faith and science. I was unsuccessful. Instead I found this:

A character is like an acrostic or an Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, thought I mean it not and see it not.

These were the circles my thoughts had been running in when I heard about Odetta's death. My memory jumped to the evening of October 19, when I saw Odetta perform at Hudson Studios on West 26th Street. Before she took the stage, I had in mind pictures of the folk singer from the 1960s, so I was momentarily stunned by the shrunken, stooped women who sat in front of me, wrapped in shawls and furs, with something of a fortune teller's aspect. But there was no woodenness there - there was no looking back, for her. The first notes out of her mouth obliterated that other Odetta, the one in the black-and-white photographs I remembered. Her voice lifted up and carried high over her head the weights of a lifetime. It was only when she arrived at the chorus of that first song - "If you can't walk, crawl!" - that I realized she was seated in a wheelchair.

Some people in the audience seemed able to view her only through the prism of those former Odettas. "Isn't she amazing," I heard people say, "just imagine her in 196-..." As if now she were only the shadow of some more real presence that had already passed from view, instead of an accumulation and realization of all those former presences - the highest point on a rising spiral.

This was one of her last performances. She had hoped to sing at Barack Obama's inauguration. But I think something of Odetta's spirit - still lifting up, still looking beyond - will be there when we begin that new cycle.