the curatorship of possibilities – ben's blog about urban ethos and connectedness
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I asked this man if he is seeing any interesting birds? He said: “Look, other there is the famous Central Park Red-Tailed hawk Pale Male with his pair”. And sure enough there was this building facing the 5th Ave. and the nest about the arch of the top middle window. The glorious bird flying in and out of it.
I went to breath in the air of the Great Hall of the New York Public Library. Much has changed there since it was my reading room in the late eighties. Only the last three southern rows are specifically computer free. Everyone else is looking at a screen of some sort. There is an annoying constant trickle of tourists taking digital photos, even I took a few… This must be unbearable for the volumes.
Alas the blue recycling bins is a visual insult to the magnificent millwork, far worse than the laptops. But still there is a magic about the room. It must be one of the best places in the world to read and dream.
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Shakespeare in the Park
A friend called me last week to challenge me on my assertion in The Derivative Trifecta – Internet, Jews, Wall St. that Judaism is a derivative religion. He conceded that the culture, the popular ideology is derivative but then there were the mad creative eruptions, the heroic innovations. We went through a glorious list and I had to agree. I was thinking on a bus to NY and realized that I really wrote about this before. But let me try to remodel the expression, being that the Evanston Jew quote is still ringing in my ears:
“Some hide, (Jewish Studies Judaism) some party (Carlebach and Jewish Renewal). Many many turn away from the burden of a historical memory (intermarrieds, secular, Reform), leaving only the pintele yid, a pointillism of sorts, some call it a post impressionism, that sees Orthodoxy as belonging to the world of OCD and psychopathology.”
Evanston Jew calls Jews shearis hapleitah (the remnants of the survivors) and I would add shearis hapleitah b’arey hapleitah (the remnants of the survivors in the biblical cities of refuge). Let me explain. There is a temptation to describe a culture by its highest expression. A repressive ideology forces the crime of a genius to a city of refuge. There a creative sprit can find a reprieve from the blood thirsty mob. There a spirit can hide behind some exquisite grammar studies, poetry, law, etc. But then comes the forgetfulness, the criminals lose track of the geography and claim that they, the citizens of the cities of refuge define the culture outside of the walls. On rare occasions the claims catch on and a sect is born but in general this is exactly what the sign on the gates says – an escapist illusion. This is like saying that the way communism is practiced under the comrade Stalin is not a true communism but few of us here in the Manhattan chapter of the Communist Party really know what the true communism is all about. So please leave the non derivative thinking where is belongs, in the escapism of the cities of refuge, not in Judaism.
Few weeks back I had a pleasure of getting together with the America’s Rabbi Shmuley Boteach at the Carlebach Shule in Manhattan, the famous place where they mastered the melodic lip service to getting high. I don’t think I have ever met a person in my life who can drop that many names per minute, but this is not what I would like to write about. As I was listening to Shmuley it suddenly dawned on me. I was wondering why the average thinkers such as Malcolm Cladwell are so popular and then I read the article about Malcolm in the Guardian where he says: “I’m interested in the slightly dumb and obvious, not the deeply weird and obscure” and “I like to think I’m on the high side of the middle. Upper-middlebrow…” So there, Malcolm Cladwell admits the mediocrity of his populist work but at least he reserves the claim to the effort required in the dumbing down.
As I was listening to Shmuley Boteach I realized this he doesn’t have to lower himself to the low-middlebrow. He is a natural. Why mediocrity of this sort attracts that much attention? When I would tell people – “the merchandise is thin”, they would reply: “I like him because he really means it, he is sincere”. Indeed he is sincere, earnest and enthusiastic in his pedestrian populism. This is really the secret of the popularity of all the “speakers” in that universe. The bar is so low, yet an intellectual midget still walks under it holding his head high. It’s that middlebrow affirmation that the crowds seek so desperately and Shmuley Boteach delivers the smackdown uppercut under the middlebrow effortlessly.
The following is a Manhattan map. Click on the image to see a very large Infographic. Notice the rivers and the original shoreline in the lower Manhattan.
Comparing world rivers and mountains. Is Mississippi really the longest river, longer than Amazon and the Nile? (Note at the end of Volga is Tver, that’s were Tversky name comes from)
My friend tells me that the expression “360-degree turn” is amusing because you end up in the same place. But when you return to the same place after a 360-degree turn you are a different person and you see things differently. Perhaps if you travel to a new place you wouldn’t notice the 360-degree difference.
The ubiquitous Central Park photos are pretty stupid, but I couldn’t resist a few. ►►►read more
Just two or three minutes of this pink glow sunrise and then it’s gone. ►►►read more
Housing is the eternal challenge. It can make or break the entire economy. A home is always on our minds. Yet I don’t think you will find a place anywhere in the world where people talk so much about real estate. You can hardly have a conversation in New York without someone getting emotional about their homes or the homes they are in the middle of moving to. New York is a city where just few blocks separate persistent danger from the most expensive and sought after dwellings. But it seems also that people are moving around New York more that in any other city, even in America. In New York you are more than likely to engage in a high energy conversation about the search for the next home. And this anxiety cuts across all social classes. On Thursday I personally heard the agony of someone trying to unload at $20 mil apartment and the agony of semi homeless person wondering where is the next hospitable door. The struggle for food and dwelling is the theme of our lives, yet looks that the mind share it claims in New York is abnormally high. It takes more out of you.
A delightful put down of the bourgeois, nouveau riche culture around The New York Times Magazine, what is being called there the “Urban Modern”. Leon Wieseltier in The Washington Diarist – Against the Plane:
“…what is being celebrated here is the ideology of no ideology–the ascendancy of the Nora Ephron view of the world, which may be succinctly described as “food and drink and bathroom fixtures.” What moves such a heart most (aside from children, the poor, and the homeless) are amenities and trivialities. The conferring of importance upon the unimportant, and of unimportance upon the important: this is a mark of decadence, the cognitive inversion of people who live “mostly in aesthetic terms” because they have secured themselves materially–or so they would like to believe—against philosophy and pain. They live for lightness and distraction. Their laughter is the sound of luck. They acquit themselves of their intellectual obligations with opinions. The anxiety that arguing may be bad manners is plausibly held by someone whose primary arena of political action may be the dinner party.”
(via bill wasik)
There are several iconic videos about Manhattan food legacy by Anthony Bourdain – Disappearing Manhattan. This is the last installment about the dive bars. ►►►read more
WOW! Plaza Penthouse LLLP v CPS 1 Realty LP: “Plaintiff Plaza Penthouse LLLP signed a purchase agreement for $5.25 million, for what it thought was a two bedroom, park view apartment at the legendary restored Plaza Hotel, without ever laying eyes on the intended penthouse apartment. Upon finding out the apartment had only one bedroom and no park view, plaintiff commenced this action seeking, among other things, the return of its $1.05 million down payment.”
This is Yitzhak Tshuva’s building. There is no name of the actual depositor who plunked $1.05 mil deposit without ever seeing the property, just the front. I couldn’t find there the size of the property but it lists two bathrooms and one 1,393sf bedroom. The entire apartment must be just around 2,000 sf. That’s $2,626 per sf, holy cow! (via city life)
