Stranger in a Strange Land

David Freddoso has a Brainwash column on the differences between New York and D.C. I think it’s probably one of those, “Oh shit, I have a column to write, what do I do?” columns that, let’s face it, everyone who has ever even thought about having a column—or any sort of regular writing, really—has written, and that bloggers writer almost exclusively, but it’s really quite good anyway. (Sometimes that happens. Things you write that you think will be TEH AWESUM end up sort of mediocre, and half-assed ideas that you throw together in panic at 1:30am the night before and finish editing three minutes after your deadline end up being surprisingly good. A teacher once told me that most writers only like 30% of what they like. Anyway.)

Freddoso writes:

I’ve been back all of three times since I left in 2001. But The City has a way of seeping into one’s bowels and staying there for years. That’s my excuse, anyway, for telling off that kid yesterday who was panhandling in Union Square, wearing nicer clothes than I own. It’s why I step in front of people at street-corners, keep my eyes straight ahead, and walk as though there’s a tribe of screaming cannibals on the block behind me.

It’s why I could not resist looking at the Subway map for five minutes to figure out how the new (as of 2002, I think) train lines would have affected my old daily commute from Midtown to Bay Ridge.

Just a few friendly hints about the Subway for Washingtonians: Don’t expect to understand a word the conductor says -- it’s actually against the law for them to speak English or any other recognizable language over the train loudspeaker. Don’t refer to the trains by colors, don’t stand back to let people off the train, and DO NOT call it “Metro.” Most importantly, don’t smile or act like you’re happy about life while riding the Subway, or else everyone will know you’re from out of town and you’ll definitely lose your wallet.

Let’s see…the 6 to Bleecker Street, the B to Pacific St., the N to 59th Street, the R to 86th Street -- ah, I’d have one less step in my commute if I still lived here. That is, unless there’s a track fire, or my train derails, or some idiot pulls the emergency brake and costs me 30 minutes on my ride home.

It’s true that when you live in a city like this, at least when living on less than six figures, you become obsessed with public transportation, partly because you spend so much time on it, because the way it works and doesn’t work, its schedules and failures and quirks and unspoken rules, become integral to your way of life. The New Yorker had a great piece on “extreme commuting,” which sounds like a new event at the X games that will eventually become an Olympic sport (sponsored, perhaps, by various coffee companies? The Starbucks Open? The Folgers Annual?), a few weeks back, about how fixated people become on the tiniest details of their commutes:

People who feel they have smooth, manageable commutes tend to evangelize. Those who hate the commute think of it as a core affliction, like a chronic illness. Once you raise the subject, the testimonies pour out, and, if your ears are tuned to it, you begin overhearing commute talk everywhere: mode of transport, time spent on train/interstate/treadmill/homework help, crossword-puzzle aptitude—limitless variations on a stock tale. People who are normally circumspect may, when describing their commutes, be unexpectedly candid in divulging the intimate details of their lives. They have it all worked out, down to the number of minutes it takes them to shave or get stuck at a particular light.

I grew up in what one of my New York-born friends calls “car country,” and the whole concept of public transportation was, for most of my life, as foreign to me as tea time or universal health care, so it was a strange feeling to be lured in and consumed, Sarlac-pit-monster like, by the maze of tunnels and rails that hums constantly under and above the city. I can sometimes even feel the quakes and shimmers of the F train as it passes by under the road near my apartment.

The subway system is one of those things that defines New York, like Central Park, because most everyone uses it, even though everyone knows the city is neurotic about its trains, I get the impression that most residents, especially the lifers, don’t find this all that strange. They’ve been staring at Subway maps since they could walk. But even though I’ve been sucked into it myself, I can’t help but think how odd it is, how mentally-consuming it can be, how in the vast majority of the country, if someone wants to go somewhere, he or she just gets in the car and goes, and they park right out front and that’s that.

But this is New York, and the normal rules don’t apply, and things don’t quite work the way you expect or want, and some people, possibly myself, just don’t and won’t ever get it, while others are lifers, creatures of the city no matter where they are, foreigners anywhere outside the city’s borders. It’s not just those who grew up here; you can move in and find yourself snapping into the city’s structure like a Lego, going native and living the City life. I’ve tried, I think, but it hasn’t happened yet to me. And thus, though I live and work in New York, and love my neighborhood, and know where to get a mate latte in Park Slope and where to get a good sandwich in Murray Hill and am no longer actively annoyed by having to walk two blocks to switch to the 6 train from the F at Bleecker St., I am not now and, I suspect, never will be, a New Yorker.

The Neighborhood

The Park Slope Reader has a nice, fairly accurate (if too short) article about my neighborhood. This and the New York Times... we're totally famous now.

Dating Advice from the Paper of Record

So, single men who sign up for classes should have an easy time of it, right New York Times?

I think the word is, "Represent!"

My neighborhood gets some some profile-love in the New York Times. If anything, the piece--which is quite generous--isn't nice enough to this tiny slice of Brooklyn.

Making Out on Subways

Maybe it’s the onset of sun and warm weather, but I’m seeing an awful lot of this lately. I understand the appeal (obviously), but New York subways aren’t exactly the cleanest locations in the world. Fulton Street, for example, pretty much always smells like either urine, vomit, or a zesty combination of the two. Despite a much cleaner subway system, this never happens in D.C.—or at least I never saw it. What’s to blame? A slightly better developed sense of privacy owing to the lower population density? D.C.’s innate propriety, otherwise known as “I don’t want this to end up as a Roll Call item”-syndrome? Or is New York just better at finding and nurturing lovers? I know D.C. is all button-up and unfun and such, but it’s not like people don’t have sex there.

In other news, the super secretive New York all-girl email list that I am totally convinced exists (they probably have the sort of ID verification that Linden Labs could only dream of) apparently sent out notice that today was Officially Sun Dress Day. Honest to God. It was sunny yesterday, but there were still numerous coats and scarves and boots. And today, bam! Martha Stewart's memo played no part in this. I'm sure of it. No female will admit it, but there is an email list, or a secret message board where someone posts a codeword. Or something. I refuse to believe otherwise.

Dudes, on the other hand, have to resort to things like checking weather.com.

The Battle of the Sexes

Scenes from an all-girl rock (rawk?) show:

The whole all-girl thing—it was weird. Here, a girl steps on my toe, apologizes profusely. Elsewhere (like, say, Dan Deacon at the Silent Barn last Saturday), boy elbows me in the face, responds, "Oh well, I'm a douchebag" and turns back around. Here, people used the word "concert" and "club." Elsewhere, this was a "show" and a "gallery." Here, one girl beside me truly thought she was being clever by hollering, "Free Bird." Elsewhere, she would've gotten a beating—and I would've thought about delivering it.

The Rent is Too Damn High

Yes, it's May; summer is upon and school's letting out, which means that NYT runs the now-obligatory young-people-can't-afford-housing piece. The rents in this city are indeed ridiculous, but so is the story. Last year, the paper ran an almost identical story in which a kid slept in an overhang above a door (I can't find it, but determined Googlers should post it in the comments section). This year it's all about kids who sleep in offices. Look, the housing market in New York is frustrating and insane, but stick to the boroughs and don't get your undies in a bunch when forced to realize that you're not entitled to a 2,000 square foot penthouse with a view of the park. I know plenty of people--myself included--who've found reasonable-for-New-York housing with far less hassle than you'll ever read about in the woe-is-us pages of the New York Times.

Still, nothing I've written here should stop you from checking out the Rent is Too Damn High Party and its silky-smooth, ass-shakin' theme song.

Oh Fine, Mom. How’s Washington?

It’s nice to be back in town, which, in comparison to even the most laid-back, residential parts of Brooklyn feels suburban, even Southern, like the sleepy, sunny small-town Florida I grew up in. Cars clutter the roads and most of the city is designed for driving rather than foot traffic. A few months ago, this seemed perfectly normal, a basic convenience, even a right. Now it looks like a luxury. I can see why longtime New Yorkers take issue with car ownership, especially the hulking SUVs that lumber down so many suburban back roads. It’s appalling to the shoe-and-subway ethos of much of New York’s population. It reminds me, in some ways, of the in-the-city snobbery residents inside the District displays toward those in Virginia and Maryland—a combination of genuine pride in one’s city and justification for/reaction to paying higher rents for smaller apartments and higher crime rates. (I run into the same city/boroughs snootiness in New York, of course, but so far it seems less common than similar city/suburb sentiments in D.C.).

This song played at DC9 last night after the Dismemberment Plan show. I guess they knew I was there.

Fassbinder's Despair at MoMA

Last night, I headed into town for a short visit to MoMA and a screening of Fassbinder’s Despair. Senses of Cinema describes the film simply by putting it in a clump of Fassbinder work that it calls “increasingly garish.” I’d say that’s about an accurate a two-word review of the film as you’re going to get. Going in, I knew basically nothing of Fassbinder and even less of Despair. Scripted by Tom Stoppard, it’s an odd work, stagy, overcooked, full of absurd comic menace; it’s not quite right to call it ludicrous, but it’s in the vicinity.

It’s a story of a well-to-do but thoroughly mad chocolatier (shades of Willy Wonka?) who begins to hallucinate a double, most often while have sex with his pigeon-brained slut of a wife. He sees his own face on a drifter, convinces the drifter to help him commit a crime, and then, after dressing the drifter in his own clothes, shoots him, thinking that others will find the drifter and believe it to be him (they do not). Stoppard squeezes in some clever wordplay here and there, and there’s an enjoyably manic quality to the production, which plays on the protagonist’s madness with its willful disregard for audience expectations. Still, it’s an odd duck, at best a spectacle of stylized mania, but more often just a thin curiosity.

MoMA’s theater is large and comfortable, with ample legroom and good sightlines; it feels more like a theater at which you’d see plays at a medium sized college. The audience was, I think, somewhat befuddled by the movie (lots of murmurs of confusion wafting through the air on the way out), but, as is to be expected, attentive and quiet—rousing only to issue a collective “you’ve got to be kidding me” when a baby started crying as the lights dimmed (the parent and child exited immediately). Still, it’s somewhat irritating that the theater walls are painted bright white, which creates extra reflected light during the screenings. Also, the theater is located underground, which results in the rumble of subway trains passing by (or, perhaps, below), every few minutes or so. I live near a subway line and tune it out accordingly, but it’s still unpleasant to encounter in a movie theater.

It’s a bit of a change coming to museums in New York from D.C., where most of the major museums are free (and others, like the Philips collection, are fairly cheap). MoMA, though, opens its doors for free on Friday nights. This is wonderful, of course, and I greatly enjoyed and highly recommend the Jeff Wall photography exhibit (more on that later, perhaps), but I think I may avoid MoMA's free Fridays in the future. The line to get in fills an empty lot next to the museum, meaning it takes 20-30 minutes to get in. And once in, the place is utterly packed. It’s noisy, chaotic, filled with gawkers and jabbering tourists; it’s like walking around Six Flags during a holiday weekend—in other words, not at all an ideal atmosphere for looking at art. What’s more, the staff seems displeased with how packed and unruly the place becomes, and, while not openly hostile, they’re a bit snippy and surly with the guests. For $75—less than the cost of four visits, I think I’ll join next time I go and, except for film screenings, skip out on future Friday nights.

Lucky Me

Thanks to Ezra, I see that New York has 185,000 more single women than men.

A Good Week to be a Geek in New York

Coming soon: Spider-Man week!

You Talkin' To Me?

It should be noted that the IFC Center is showing Taxi Driver at midnight next Friday and Saturday. This is one of my all time favorite movies; the number of times I've seen it probably reaches into the triple digits. Never in a theater, though, and as we all know, you've never really seen a movie till you've seen it in a theater with a crowd of strangers. Needless to say, I'll be there.

Grindhouse Press Screening at East Village

I know I’ve been remiss on my posting here, but the day job, freelance work, and settling in to unfamiliar territory have kept me busy, scattered, excited, confused, thrilled, frustrated, tired, and, well, pretty much all the other adjectives you’d expect from a first-time New Yorker. I hope to get back to more regular posting, though, as always no promises (when this site starts generating income, I’ll start sticking to deadlines for it).

In the past, I’ve used this as a sort of all-purpose culture blog with a little bit of politics, cultural comment and random day-to-day observation thrown in. Since a lot of that material is going to go elsewhere at this point, what I’m hoping to do is use this space to talk about filmgoing in New York, from the perspective of a longtime movie fan and current (if not full time) film critic. The idea is to write not just about movies in New York (though I’ll certainly do that), but what it’s like to be a movie-goer and movie critic in New York, the locus for movies and movie culture on the East Coast. For New Yorkers, a lot of this may end up being pretty familiar stuff: what I hope to do is to sort of chronicle the ins and outs of seeing movies in New York from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know the town—which is something I would’ve loved to have had available before I moved here (or even now).

Friday night I caught a preview of Grindhouse (which I’ll be reviewing at a later date) at City Cinemas Village East on 2^nd Ave. It was a smart pick for the film—an old, downtown theater with an elaborate dome and a sharply inclined balcony over the main seating. The seats and aisles were somewhat cramped, especially since a lot of people came from the office and still had bags, coats, and other assorted movie theater carry-ons. The theater has a big screen and a pretty solid sound system, which, to the movie’s benefit, was turned out nice and loud. Press got most of the balcony, and the rest of the theater was filled up with lucky preview-goers (who waited in line for quite a while outside). I always feel kind of sorry for those regular joes waiting hours to see a movie early, but at the same time, it can actually add to the experience. I’ve waited in multi-hour lines for movies on a couple of occasions, and it tends to make the movie better—the crowd is jittery, anxious, and when the movie finally starts, it’s a release, even a rush. I think it was a good move to bring in fans off the street for Grindhouse, as it’s a movie that benefits from crowd energy.

The screening setup here in New York is quite different from D.C. In D.C., there are only two companies that handle all the screenings, there’s only one private screening room (at the MPAA), and there are probably less than 50 semi-regular movie critics in the city (a number of whom have other jobs or also cover other stuff for their publications). Once you get on the regular screening list for each of the companies, you don’t have to RSVP to screenings or go out of your way to find out times and get reservations. Screening info is emailed to you on a pretty regular basis, and you can just show up and give them your name and affiliation: you’re on the list and that’s all that’s needed.

Here, screenings are handled by a variety of different companies, and with many of the bigger films, critics (at least for smaller publications) have to actively pursue screening invites. There are a lot of folks in the movie press here, so there are actually tiers of press at the public screenings, with decent seats for the general press and the best seats for the bigger press (I’m assuming New York Times, New York, New Yorker, New York Press—pretty much any pub with the word New York in its title, as well as the other obvious ones: Village Voice, Time, etc…). I also got a gigantic packet of press material: summaries of both movies, interviews with the directors and actors, write ups of all the characters and bios of all the major players. Probably close to 50 pages of stuff. I can’t recall ever getting more than a single page press release for any film I reviewed in D.C.

The show didn’t start till about 30 minutes after the scheduled start time, which was very weird to me—no D.C. screening I went to started more than 3 minutes off schedule—but from the conversation between the two gentlemen next to me, both of whom seemed to be press screening regulars, I gather that late starts are somewhat abnormal in New York as well.

The pre-movie conversation I overheard was dominated by fairly knowledgeable movie-talk. Now you might expect this in a theater full of movie press. But in D.C., at least at the evening screenings, that’s often not the case. A lot of non-movie press and friends of press get themselves invited to the evening previews, usually just to go and see the movie early and for free. I certainly don’t begrudge them this (who doesn’t love free, early movies?), but it often meant that there weren’t a lot of serious movie nerds in attendance. The day screenings were different, of course, though it was almost like a club, as there were only a relative handful of folks who did it regularly and they all spent a lot of time seeing movies together. As such, it wasn’t quite as intense.

Maybe it was brought out in part by the fact that the movie was Tarantino-made movie-junkie-candy, but the room seemed thick with the air of cinema geek, and it was nice to be in the presence of what at least felt like a whole bunch of hardened, devoted, life-long theater goers.

I saw Werner Herzog’s 1987 Cobra Verde this afternoon at IFC Center, and I’m hoping to go back tomorrow to see Killer of Sheep (I was too tired to hack a double-feature today). More on those later.

Big Apple

(Approximation)

Me: Why do the subways here always smell like vomit?
C (not a New Yorker): Cause you don't piss in them enough.

So, I'm sure I'm the ten millionth person to mention this, but the subways, lovely as they are for someone like me who hates driving, kind of reek. I've yet to actually see any human excretions puddled up anywhere, but my nose is pretty certain they're around somewhere.

I am less impressed with New York fashion than I thought I would be. Yes, it's about 10 million steps above D.C., but that's because D.C. is the most fashion-conservative city anywhere. It makes, I dunno, rural Alabama, look positively hip. Anyway, here in NY, there's definitely more variety, and there's a lot more casual approach to things--it really frees you up if you don't have to wear a suit or something like it everyday--but the only things I've really noticed are that guys sport a more scraggly hipster look compared to D.C.'s typical junior prof/journo-geek thing, girls tend to better color coordinate their coats (the day after it snowed they all wore big white coats), and girls seem to do a much better job with boots here--especially the brown boots/black top thing.

This is not to say I haven't seen some very spiff looking members of both sexes, but they're a lot more rare than I was led to believe. People just kind of look and dress like people, you know?

Addendum: The Politico disagrees with me about D.C. And yeah, D.C.'s glamour elite are slowly becoming more noticed, and may even be growing. But the rank and file, even amongst the semi-hip younger people, are still a lot less fashion-forward than in other cities (which is kind of par for the course for a city built on government policy intellect and wonkery).