Summer Begins
Originally posted July 14, 2006. See above for further entries.
Having never lived in New York City before and only rarely visited during the summer months, it's a new life here that I've already settled into. It's a summer of wheatberries, popsicles, shaded sidewalks, and sunburns. Working in the western fringes of SOHO and living deep within the gentrified carcass of Williamsburg gives me ample opportunity to enjoy the life of the street. Cambridge, a city where sidewalk cafes and for that matter any kind of street life are outlawed, has dulled my expectations for the public realm. How refreshing a loose fire hydrant cant be! The neighborhood children appear so excited to play in a stream of water that it makes one wonder if there's a corporate sponsor.
Walking
When living by foot being a 'regular' has much more meaning. The places you frequent become havens and essential stops along the way not only for the services that they offer but also for the respite. In this manner, the morning coffee is fashioned into a ritual. A winding path to lunch, during which lungs of conditioned office air are exchanged for the super-heated vitality of the city, are more about motion than sustenance. Forgetting for a moment the long hours of some deadlines which preclude these pleasures, embarking on the subway at any stop but the nearest is a specifically urban delight. These are acts of ritual: purposeful reroutings of functional plans to induldge a life your own.Hopper's Wide Windows
Having watched a summer storm through the wide windows of Mooncake upon first arriving to the city, a certain tempo has been set for the summer which I find myself trying to recover. The place itself, situatated along the line-up to the Holland Tunnel, is an unlikely marriage of Nighthawks and infrastructure. Nevermind the fact that the food is delicious and thoughtful, Mooncake is such an unlikely triumph that it became a fixture in my routine instantly and without thought. Yet the power of place is unavoidable-- bourne true by the fact that meals taken away from Mooncake, despite being very good substitutes, are just not as nice those eaten in-house.
Pordenone, Italy
One finds a town of maybe 60,000 at the center of which a small Fascist-era piazza is filled to the brim with 5,000 World Cup fans armed with road flares, colored smoke, face paint, flags, beer, and raw pride. To an outsider, and perhaps particularly to an American, it was a surprising show of solidarity. Even I, shy of crowds and a bit jet lagged, was drawn by the power of the public body. A friend commented that "it's almost like being at the stadium," with each goal, penalty, or skillful maneuver on the piazza-sized projection screen drawing a row of cheers. Elsewhere in the town were restaurants reconfigured as auditoriums, with all chairs oriented towards large plasma screens and dinner plates uncharacteristically rested upon laps.Most interesting, however, was the almost total lack of commercial effort. There were no tchotchke salsemen mobilized by this event. Not even drink vendors were present. Nor was there excessive commercial adornment of the screen which everyone was fixated on-- of the four sponsors which had modest banners across the top of the scaffolding one was the city of Pordenone itself! The Italians remain some of the most skilled craftsmen (and women) of public space and World Cup 2006 was simply a wonderful reminder of this.