And a Wee bit more. . .

I wasn't able to download this picture for some reason, but here is a link to see it online.
Oh, and here's the original post.
Enjoy.
D-Blog

Weehawken - a little deeper

Well I've gotten myself intrigued.

Here is a little write-up about my new favorite street (the 4 of the last 7 entries or so). Here's another.

Interesting. The city never ceases to amaze.

How to ride a bike - Addendum

So, upon further experimentation, the easiest way to implement the shoulder release technique is to simply roll the shoulders forward - not up, but forward. This removes them from their sockets enough that they are properly relaxed for the shock absorber effect to work. And it's easier than just trying to relax them.

Good luck

D-Blog

Weehawken

There used to be a magic store on 18th St. Or was it 19th St.?

Not the kind of magic store you're thinking of with fart pillows and vampire's teeth. Magick with a "k." The kind for real honest-to-goodness Crowleian occultists. It was, in its way, the Wal-Mart of magick stores. Whether you needed a robe, a dagger, a pentacle, or any manner of rues, candles, or incenses you could find them within 5 minutes of exiting the 9 train at 18th St. (as was).

Where did it go? The space was amazing- huge, in that way that Chelsea could be, that New York could be before it was divvied up for profit and exploitation of the poor or the trendy.

Well that all seems to be gone now. The way of Urban Archeology on Lafayette, or even Ernie's on Boradway. Any grand space in the city seems to have been appropriated by the big box monstrosities. They either supplant the old guard outright or price them out surreptitiously by turning the neighborhood into a suburban development retrofit. Sad, really.

It is the source of my prayer against the 2nd Avenue subway - and the possibility of there ever being a 9th Avenue one.

Remoteness is important. Conquering every inch of a territory is an affront against the Gods, and in a circumscribed space, like the island of Manhattan, a certain amount of self-restraint is required. Fortunately, when we push too hard, the Gods usually push back, and we have been spared from hosting Jets games on the vast, wild city-prairie along 11th Avenue. If it were me, I'd declare West-Central Manhattan as a national park, preserving its industrial heritage and wide open spaces. Perhaps we could even throw some buffalo on the land to give it that North Dakota feel.

It's why I was so happy with my discovery today: Weehawken Street.

But before we go into that, let me recount one of the happiest cab rides I've had in the City. I was staying at my friend Steve's house on Horatio St. and had a suitcase of stuff with me. I went down to the sidewalk to hail a cab to go back home. Across the street, a hot, meat-packing girl was stumbling onto the sidewalk trying to flag him down, but the guy passed her by and pulled up beside me and got out to help me with my suitcase.

"I'm sorry, man, I'm not going to the airport, only uptown." I told him.

He said, "It's ok, I saw you first, so that's how it goes."

This was off to a good start.

On the way uptown, the driver told me that this was his shift, the night shift, and that each night - for over 10 years - he always saw something that he'd never seen before. Some street, some building, some congregation of weirdos - something that surprised him.

Let me say that nothing warms a New Yorker's heart more than hearing this kind of thing. Our love for New York is something we wish everyone could feel- probably the way the Jesus people feel about, well, Jesus, in Kentucky. It's just awesome.

It turned out this guy was from New York himself, so it made his constant reacquaintance with the city that much more inspiring. We spent the whole ride chatting about how things had changed, where he goes to pick up late night fares - no longer in China town or the UWS but Chelsea, K-Town, and the Lower East. We talked about our favorite restaurants and about how all of the crazies had not been driven out by Giuliani - a point I had to take his word for outside of Zabar's.

It was one of those joyous experiences that I did not want to end. I remember being grateful for each red light to prolong the ride. One of the greatest trips I'd ever had- and the kind that I don't remember having had since I was a boy.

Well last week when I discovered Weehawken Street, I thought of the old cab driver and wondered if he knew about it. Weehawken Street- named, I imagined for the part of New Jersey that it was closer to than it was to Time Square - is nary a block long. An afterthought, or maybe a favor to a friend of a city planner. It is a street of no real consequence and one whose absence would never have been noticed if it had not been put there at all. And that, to me, is what makes art art- the luxury of superfluousness and unnecessariness. But that's for another post and another blog.

The most notable thing about Weehawken Street was the one house that was in the middle of it. It was an old, wood shingle house with a stairway running parallel to the street. It looked like somebody's random home out in Queens, only it was a total one-off, not part of a tract the way so many of the lower middle class places are out there. Maybe it was the only house on the block at one time. Or maybe just on that side of the block, since it faced a lovely older structure that had fantastic, peeling gold leaf letters atop the door that tastefully - but pridefully - proclaimed the address.

It was the house that struck me, though. Every neighborhood now has a hold-out from the 80s- some barber shop, diner, or supermarket that didn't get heaved up in the 90s to be replaced by banks and Starbucks. But this house on Weehawken looked like it had skipped that cycle and was a holdout from the one before. Or maybe even the one before that, so off the beaten trail was it that it seemed impervious, oblivious even, to the passage of time and the constant turning over that is the lifeblood of real estate in New York City.

Obviously I love obstinacy. And usually the obstinate ones who truly succeed are not the willful ones, fighting against progress, but the ones who simply refuse to progress themselves and live seemingly unawares that anything at all has changed since their own personal high period.


I didn't knock on the door. I half expected some old shotgun granny would be waiting on the other side in a rocking chair like they do in Carolina or New Mexico. Truth is, it would almost be worth getting shot for, just to see what was inside.

But I'll save that for next time.

I biked along Weehawken Street, doubled back to get a second look at the old house, and pedaled on.

And then it was done.

I had moved back into contemporariness and the West Village, and my journey outside of time had come to an end.


Still, I remembered Weehawken Street for the rest of that glorious day, as I biked past the old magick shop that hadn't been as fortunate (or perhaps as obstinate) as the Weehawkeners. If I was at the right place, it was now some martial arts center called Tiger Jewish-something. An appropriate use of the space, but definitely an affront to the spirit of the old magick shop.

The new tenants were well-meaning self-defense nerds, upstanding, teaching sportsmanship and self-esteem to neighborhood kids, fighting obesity, teaching character, and all that. And it could have been worse (Chase, Duane Reade), but it still stank to me of the sterilization the city underwent during the Giuliani era. These were not generally the wholesome, pasty, soulless midwesterners who flocked to the city during the Seinfeld years. But they were the ones teaching those people's kids karate.

So maybe this was the Chelsea version, slightly hipper, but still sanitary. The old-schooler in me knows that any of these kung fu Stuyvesant students is going to catch a bullet in the brain if he ever tries to use any of that stuff against a mugger or a street gang- if he ever encounters one, that is. Genuine fear, though harder on the self-esteem, is superior to blind confidence- particularly in the face of the arsenal employed by the kids that couldn't afford to go take karate lessons after school- or who just had better things to do with the money they made selling coke to the kids at Collegiate.

Anyway. . .we're getting off track here, but I somehow relate the tenants and customers of my old magick shop more to the scary hoodlums than to the skinless chicken breast babies that tenant the place now. There was an immediacy that has been lost as the stability and comfort that the Central timezone people have inflicted on our once tumultuous entropy settles in. And I still don't like it.

But on a beautiful day in October, I tasted a bit of the thrill of discovery my old cabbie inspired me with. And for that, I can certainly be grateful.

How to ride a bike

Wow, gentle reader, it's been a while, hasn't it? I hope my other blogs have been keeping you entertained while this one has been on the bench. The truth is, there has been much travel in recent months- some of it very eventful but my thoughts have been elsewhere, and it was not until now that I have something pressing to write about.

And I'll get right to it.

I'm in New York. Have been for a while really. And while traveling out of New York is sometimes a pain, traveling within New York can be every bit as adventurous as a trek through the Sierras.

What I'm talking about here is biking. The life and death video game of NYC survival and recreation. I love my bike, and i love taking it around Manhattan and the boroughs almost as much as I love anything.

People often worry out loud about the dangers of biking in NYC- semis, cabbies, horse draw carriages, and regular old pedestrians are constant threats to your fun and safety. But perched a good foot above most car height, you are mostly safe from these wayward obstacles, provided you are paying attention. The real danger, as far as I can tell, is the semi-ubiquious pothole. Especially if you are tailing a vehicle or riding at night you may not see one of these road gashes until it's too late. Then boom. Even going slowly a pothole can dethrone you (I recently spilled while sliding up against an electrical wire going 0 miles an hour. Painful to both body and soul).

But there are potholes and there are potholes. The deep trenched that can throw you no matter what are actually somewhat rare, but the medium grade dips that can interrupt the inattentive are almost everywhere- 9th ave., the Village, and all over Brooklyn.

I ride a hybrid now, and there are no shocks. I've never ridden with shocks, really, so I can't say whether they would help with these. But in the past I have taken the approach to loosen my grip around the handle bars and let the bike slide around my hands as it bounces over the road pocks. But recently (after a spill) I found that there could be a better way to do this- and that would be to create your own shocks.

The Beta version of the technique went like this: grab the handlebars firmly. Firmly. Then relax your elbows, as much as possible, thus creating your own arm-shocks. Thus, if the bike was severely tossed by the turbulence, it would still not slip out of your hands. And you would get the shock absorption from the loose elbows.

This was a distinct improvement over the original loose grip technique which, in severe bumpage, could lose you the bike and much else with it, all the while reflecting why it is the girls' bikes with the low cross tube.

As I thought about teaching this new method, I realized that the real trick would be isolating the wrists from the elbows. After all, the arms like to work as a whole unit, and tightening the fingers while relaxing the elbows can be a bit of a mindfuck, even for yogis and drummers who are used to isolating their different muscle sets.

So today, a newer version dawned on me: forget the elbows. Relax the shoulders.

And this worked. You get the shock absorption you want from loose elbows, the tight grip on the handlebar, but somehow the isolation is less scratch-your-head-rub-your-tummy than the Beta version.

So go forth and experiment for yourself.

Run over some railroad tracks if you live in the sticks, or, better yet, go to the other side of them where the roads aren't maintained. If you've got an improvement on the shoulder technique, I'd love to hear it. But for now, I am set on my survival tactic for dealing with the mean streets and shallow craters that make New York City biking some of the most exciting in the world.

Nice

"The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man extinguished his."

-Hugo St. Victor, 12th Century.

Old Guys

An excellent salute to Old Guys. For those of us born as Capricorns, this is, sadly, how we feel even when we are young, so aging is really a process of watching everybody else catch up, while we've already changed two or three pairs of laces on our waders.

This is just too fabulous

Occasionally I have my faith restored in the good ol' US of A.

Click here for a wonderful story.

Airports

I've taken the LAX-JFK flight at least a dozen times by now, and it's getting that I no longer need to look at my gate assignment. If I'm going from LA to New York, all the people are dressed like they're in Sex and the City. If I'm going to LA, everyone looks like they're on American Idol. It's almost foolproof- also going to LA they're always a little pudgier. . .
D-Blog

omg

Staff of Life - Santa Cruz
Raw Spinach Hummus. Like nothing else.

So Dear Friends. . .

For those of you who are old time readers of this blog and are looking to catch up on some half-read agenda piece from 2008, I have an announcement.

In order to better serve my loyal readership, I have split Home for Now into 3 different blogs, arranged by general subject matter.

Home for Now will remain as it is, as it was always meant to be, a travelogue.

Poli-Blog will be for all things Political and Policy-Oriented.

Sci-Cult-Blog will be for Science, Culture, and the Arts

In the works will be a blog dedicated to the many strange people I know.

Stay tuned. . .

D-Blog

Israel

There is something deeply humiliating about Israel- its very existence as such. It is this humiliation, I believe, that is at the root of the state's hyper-militarism which is unabated after nearly 60 years of statehood.

To draw a parallel as to why the Israeli consciousness is anchored in humiliation, let us turn today to Iraq. Thomas Friedman, myself, and others have argued that part of the motivation for the civil strife and anti-Americanism in Iraq is simply a response to the humiliation the Iraqis feel at the fact of being liberated at all. What an embarrassment. To live in fear for 30 years and then to have some external power walk in and in a couple of weeks have plucked out the great terror of your lives? What were you so afraid of if the US can just roll in and do what you, the Iraqi people, wish you could have done for so long. It is a concrete symbol of your impotence.

So. To combat that feeling within, one must turn on the liberators to make them feel your pain, to show them that you are a force to be reckoned with and not some weak, backwards nation. So you fight and lash out against the very people who "saved" you for the very reason that your needing to be "saved" was so insulting.

To feel one's power as a nation one wants to *earn* nationhood. Through warfare, through exploration, through revolution- whatever. It is not something to be bestowed if it is to have its grounding in virility. The Iraqis are now - and have been for 5 years - earning their country by driving out the tyrant-savior. The war will go on until the humiliation is expunged.

Israel, then. Israel was formed by a charter, not by war. It was granted. In the Jewish religion it is Yahweh who will grant us our nation- not the British. This arbitrary land grant, in response to collective European embarrassment at the holocaust (which could have happened in any European country experiencing the kind of recession Germany experienced in the 30's), feels sketchy under the feet. After all, if land can be granted it can be un-granted too, right? No one would think of revoking the British charter to England. They earned it through settlement and warfare over centuries. The American charter was won largely through measles and smallpox but it was won nonetheless. Greece, China, Japan, Mexico- these countries all have proud traditions of manly conquest to settle their territories. But Israel was a gift out of the goodness of the world's heart. Not convincing.

In fact it would appear to be another plank in the long line of Jewish complicity with the going master-power. Jews made deals with the Romans for political protection in exchange for subservience and compliance. Similar deals were made throughout history as an exchange for being guests in others' lands. The feeling is not so disimilar today, at heart. It is a permeating humiliation.

That Israel continues to rely today on support from the US and England, the current global master and its lapdog, reeks of history. And Israel will never feel like a true home so long as Jews are still entangled in this traditional role as serf- or really worse, "guest."

So how to overcome this feeling of emasculation? Well obviously through warfare. And like the Iraqis, it is not a matter of winning, but of venting, of raging until the manhood is restored, until one effectively can tell oneself, "If I had fought this hard, I would have won the land for myself in the first place." That is what Jews, Iraqis, and all "liberated" people (including, I would say blacks and women in the US) are fighting for- to feel as if they have the power to do for themselves what others have patronizingly done for them.

This struggle can last a lifetime. It can last forever. Ultimately, history can not be unwritten in this way, and so the wound of liberation is ongoing. Perhaps over time the memory will diminish, or perhaps, as in Iraq, the continuing pressure of Israel on the US will turn US opinion against the tiny nation. Perhaps this is what Israel really wants after all, a confrontation with the master. And the pushing, like a spoiled child, for every allowance and concession is unconsciously designed to push away the smothering parent. Would Israel want war with the US? Absurd. But to be freed from US protection, it would be free to test its own strength in the world as a truly independent nation, no longer an obsequious guest of the going king-state.

The Iraqis are ahead on this one. Jews haven't resorted to terrorism since the Maccabees in Greece, but perhaps they can learn something from their Arab cousins about how to stick up for yourself. It is a tricky situation, no doubt, but the stakes are real. The land grant was won some 60 years ago, but at huge cost. But that cost, that holocaust, was the anchoring on which the state's claim to be was laid.

But mass murder and victimhood do not form a stable basis for a nation. All other peoples who suffered such a fate gave up their nationhood and were absorbed by those who won. The German war crimes were horrifying but, sadly, only really by modern standards. Such barbarity was the daily practice for pre-modern cultures, many of whom, it should be pointed out, were barbarians. The scale and perversity of the crimes was new, commensurate with the technology and population of the time. But cultures have always killed their enemies (and their scapegoats), but those enemies are never given land in exchange for losing.

And this is the strange predicament of the Jews, the cultural anachronism that did not die but waited to receive its land from Yahweh as promised in the Covenant with Abraham. Have we lived to see that covenant fulfilled? I do not know.

But to me it doesn't feel right. The restoration of power was not granted by divine exaltation but by surviving holy hell. There is a strong connection between land, territorialism, and virility. To defend land you have been given is not the same as to defend land you have fought for. It simply isn't. And I feel sad that the Israelis will spend a good deal more time thrashing around on their gift before they can really call it their home. We shall see what happens.

Of Menonites and Meteorites - a Flashback and a Detour

So something about me is that I'm a bit of a misanthrope. I love humanity, but I hate people. So I have found a good compromise for myself in being something of an anthropologist, looking at people through the lens of their groups and cultures and trying not to deal with them too personally if I can help it. Of course this is a pretty good definition of a racist, but I believe my intentions are slightly less self-interested than those of racists. I crave diversity and take the same dispassionate view of my own people as I do of 'others.' And that's just the way I am. So in my travels I have taken a peculiar interest in, though always at a distance from, American religion.

American religion scares the hell out of most people, and there's no reason it shouldn't out of me too. But for some reason, I feel good humored enough to engage my heterodoxical peers without feeling like I will wind up bound and ass-fucked on the river side like that guy in the Burt Reynolds Movie.

Nonetheless, I have a couple of stories that I usually like sharing about my experiences in America regarding the foibles of provincialism in middle USA.

The first is a simple conversation I had on one of my first visits to Salt Lake City. As many of you will know, the Mormons have a thing about genealogy. it's got something to do with knowing everybody's bloodline for the hereafter and so forth, so they do their best to track down all the birth records and match them up with folks and put it all onto the computer.

Well I have a thing for genealogy too, and while I was in the shopping mall in town I noticed they had a little darkened room with a bunch of computer terminals in the back. Standing out front was this tight little old lady who looked remarkably like Dana Carvey. I decided i would like to go in there and do my little search to get more info on my ancestors, so I approached the little old lady.

Now I was cautious. My dad had warned me as a kid that most folks don't take too kindly to Jews, so I decided to keep it on the down-low as I walked over to the woman.

"So," I said, in my most gentile-like voice, "You guys have genealogy records here, huh?"

"Yes, we do."

"Well, I'd be interested in looking up my ancestors. Is there a fee?" Damn! Blew my cover. . . But no, she didn't notice.

"No there isn't. Our software is open to the public."

"What if. . ." here goes, "What if you're not, you know, Christian?"

"Oh we have records for Catholics too."

That was it for me.

"Thank you, ma'am. I'll check back a little later." The flashbacks to Hebrew School came in a wave. . .kicked out of Sumer, kicked out of Babylon, kicked out of Greece, kicked out of Syria, kicked out of Persia, kicked out of Utah. . . Wait a minute. This was America. The Mormons are an oppressed minority, surely there's some simpatico there.

After a quick walk around the bookstore I came back to the little old lady who had not moved or changed expression for the intervening 15 minutes. It was a little like the gatekeepers and wizards in the Legend of Zelda who never seem to recognize you no matter how many times you enter their lair asking for magic.

"So do you have records for everybody?" I asked.

"We try to get records for as many people as we can."

"What if you're like. . .I don't know, Buddhist or Hindu or something, do you have records for them?"

"Well yes, everybody."

Phew, so maybe she would think I was a Hindu.

I walked in and sat down at the computer, typed in my parents' names and shazam, up came the names of my maternal grandparents- birthdays and death days with location. I was impressed. . .what else did they know about me?

Not much, apparently, just that I was some stray Hindu who walked into their shopping mall on a cool Autumn afternoon. . .



Well years before that I was driving around Arizona on highway 10. That's a pretty lonely road once you're outside Phoenix and Tucson. But somewhere out there, there's a road marker that says, "Meteor Crater site, 40 Miles." That comes to about an hour round trip off the freeway, but I wanted to see the thing, so I took the turn-off and drove along an even lonelier desert road until I got to the crater museum.

It's actually pretty spectacular there. Once you navigate past all the RVs and find a parking spot, you walk into the museum part that leads onto a deck that surrounds most of the crater. It's impressive.

The idea is that a rock came flying out of the sky at incredible speed and struck the earth, leaving this huge, well, crater in the ground. And it was still there. I was looking right at it.

Part of the museum was a little movie theater where every 15 minutes they would show a movie about how the crater was formed- a rock flew out of the sky, hit the earth and bounced a few miles in one direction. Scientists recovered the rock and it is now sitting in the middle of the museum on a pedestal for you to look at.

Well I was no fool. I knew how craters were formed. What I found most interesting about the movie was the people sitting in front of me. There was a husband in his late thirties perhaps, a wife, four sons and about five daughters, all sitting next to each other - the boys first, then the girls, in order of height (and presumably age). The father wore one of those beards like the Amish that made us pancakes at Reading Terminal Market in Philly- full beard but with the moustache shaved off. The women all wore little bonnets and aprons like little house on the prairie, each one identical.

I was mesmerized. What a country, that these people can live like this, that I can live the way I do, and that the German tourists seated across the aisle could be there too- three different centuries of culture under one roof watching a movie, and nobody was killing each other. I was proud.

The movie ended and we all wandered out into the main room of the museum to see the big meteorite that had hit the ground out here in Arizona. The thing was mounted on its pedestal by a steel rod, and the helpful museum curator informed us that even though the rock was only about the size of a terrier, it weighed something like 4,000 pounds (I may be making that up, but it was especially dense).

At this point, the man with the beard looked over to the curator.

"This thing came from outer space?" he asked, almost scoffing.

"Yes it did," came the answer, "In 1936 at over 400 miles per hour."

The man looked back at the curator, the scoff now fully realized.

"Well, I don't believe that." And he walked away with his wife and children.


I was beside myself. I had never seen such assurance in someone's faith before, standing up to a multi-million dollar science exhibit complete with grad student curator. It's hard to describe, but I was almost in love. The sheer stubbornness to flat out reject science like that without any counterargument or discussion. I was beyond envious. I was adoring.


When I used to read books about homeschooling, I was very careful to separate the "true" homeschoolers who let their children unfold in a natural, self-directed way, from the religious nuts who brainwashed their children even worse than the schools would have. I used to read about homeschooling families that wouldn't register their children as citizens when they were born so they wouldn't have to pay taxes and could live free on the land. They wouldn't need vaccines and they would never be drafted to fight in some God-forsaken country overseas.

At the time I was convinced these people were nuts. But the more I read, the more I realized- there were a lot of people like this. And the more I read, the more I realized that they're really a lot like me. I have no faith in government, vaccines, or school. I am not interested in having my children fight in Iraq or Afghanistan. And while I don't believe the earth was created in 6 days 6000 years ago, I find the scientific explanations utterly inadequate. (With a margin of error of half a billion years, they are hardly ones to be casting stones.)

So perhaps this American, from so far away- both culturally and geographically - was really more my brother than I would have suspected him to be, perched on my 4th floor apartment on Columbus Avenue. That different people could have such different beliefs and still, in this day and age of standardized knowledge and culture, maintain their loyalty to themselves- I find miraculous. And while I'm glad I will never have a real conversation with this man, for him and his people I am still most grateful.

After all I'm a bit of a misanthrope. Hate people, love humanity. . .