This is a story about my bicycle. It was built for me by Danny, the man behind the infamous karaoke show.
Danny bought a pretty sweet bike, an early ’80s Raleigh Grand Prix from the time just after Raleigh was bought by Huffy, before the quality dropped off. It was too small for me, but I fell in love with it. I told him to find me one if he had the chance.
Three weeks later, he called and told me he had it in my size. You’d be surprised what Danny’s capable of.
In the first six rides I took with it, I had three accidents. Danny thus christened it “Trois Clangours”. Jerk.
Today marks the seventh anniversary of my move to New York.
I first heard this song as the backing track to a fan-made commercial for the iPod touch. I was intrigued by it then, but didn’t pay it much mind.
Then, a few weeks later, I saw what appeared to be the same commercial on TV. Confused that what I’d thought was a fan project was on TV and officially advertising the product, I did a little more research.
Turns out, Apple had hired the fan, Nick Haley, to direct a professional version of the commercial he’d made, licensed “Music Is My Hot Hot Sex”, and put it on the air for real. I found that inspiring.
You know what else I found? A song that makes me shake my ass.
I woke up that day the same, sort of, as many other days, with my mom rousing me to wake up and get dressed. I’d just started college a few weeks before, still living with my parents, still getting into the rhythm, and still amazed by how early a 9:30 am class could seem even though I had been used to getting up for school that started at 7:50 for many years.
There was something different that day, though, a note of panic and surprise. “Someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center!”
It was cold there, that late in the winter and that close to the water. I didn’t expect the first time I ever saw seagulls to be concurrent with a snowfall; I’d always associated them with warmer climates and those beaches that I still had not ever visited. Yet there they were, wheeling through the air in their presumably inexorable search for food, occasionally blowing out of existence when the wind gusted and threw a blast of snow across the scene.
I was huddled in the tunnel under the pedestrian bridge in the park at East End Avenue. It was the only place I could go to get away from my house, not the most wonderful place in the world at the time.
Remembering nighttime rides across the Williamsburg Bridge on my way home, the wind biting just a little. Looking up at the pretty city night lights over my head and across the river and in my heart.
Last week, I was interviewed by Margaret Durfy for her dissertation. Her subject is city living, urban subcultures, and hipsters. For whatever reason, she was put into contact with me by my friend Katie, who long ago fucked off out of NYC to go grad school in Boulder and, you know, be all successful and stuff.
Anyway. I met Margaret at Joe on East 13th Street. Despite my oft-professed misanthropy, I found her very affable, not least because she wanted to ask me all about my favorite subject: me!
I saw The Darjeeling Limited on Saturday.
To start with, things like this are among the reasons I love living in New York City. Knowing that a huge number of good movies will open here long before they open elsewhere—if they open at all—is very gratifying to me.
The movie itself was quite good. It fits well into Wes Anderson’s oeuvre of dysfunctional family stories. It comes across as a bit strange, though, compared to the intensive melancholy that has increasingly become the focus over Anderson’s career. It’s much more manic than The Life Aquatic, and this is probably a good thing.
In short, I’m still not clear, exactly, on how I feel about it. The themes are the same as usual, but it’s so wildly different in how it goes about addressing them that it strikes as a bit weird. Nevertheless, it comes recommended, as does its prologue/part 1, Hotel Chevalier.