On an Otherwise Ordinary Day,

you are minding your own business when suddenly you are the one person a day on the planet for whom the universe folds, or wrinkles, or aligns up its dark matter and in that instant before normality reasseerts itself you choose to step through or you choose to stay. Perhaps counterintuitively, I think that the happier your life has been the more likely you are to disappear, as they say, without a trace.

I actually have this thought fairly often, but watching once again Werner Herzog's superb documentary on Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, and the wonder that he brings to the continent and what lies within it and beyond it, only redoubled the thought. And now back to an ordinary Saturday....

Photography at the New York Historical Society

We went to a preview recently of two new photography exhibits at the NYHS. Both have value; both have flaws that make them less than they could be. The first is of designated historical landmark buildings in NYC. The photographs, nearly a hundred, are in black and white, by mostly unknown photographers. Just the act of grouping together photos of such landmarks is a great informative service and the NYHS is apparently only the latest on a world tour of the exhibition, bringing the best of NYC architecture to sometimes surprisingly remote places around the globe (Pietermaritzberg, South Africa for one). But the photos themselves often do not do justice to the real buildings and the stenciled wall description of the project mostly describes the bumpy life of the Historical Preservation Act, rather than add any depth to the exhibit. It is about as mis-aimed as any exhibition commentary I have ever seen. By contrast, though, the individual accompanying texts at each photograph do a wonderful job of describing the building, its location and its history.

The second is a series of photos taken over 30 years in Harlem by the photographer Jose Vergara. It received a rave review in today's NYT. My enthusiasm is more muted. The idea of photographing the same location over a period of time is hardly new (see the fine film Smoke, for example), but Vergara's photos in that style mark Harlem's changes well. You see decline, dereliction, abandonment and rebirth, sometimes all, sometimes stopping at dereliction or abandonment. My problem is with the texts more than the pictures. They and the accompanying quotes from Vergara seem to me to mourn the loss of much of Harlem's rundown storefronts to national chains. That's wrong, I think. The point is the ongoing second Harlem Renaissance and while a more indigenous flavor would be a a excellent thing, the tragedy is not box stores, but the long deterioration that preceded them. At times the exhibition's commentary almost apotheosizes that decline. In fact, Harlem and the city are much better off rid of much of what Vergara has photographed over the last 30 years. So see the photos, ignore the commentary. My personal favorite -- the wall or store front painting of a drug dealer descending from Heaven on his motorcycle. The halo is a particularly nice touch.

How Skilled a New Yorker I've Become!

The other night leaving Yankee Stadium after the Yankees eighth or ninth win in a row we pressed in among the mass heading through the subway turnstiles at 161st and River Ave to head back to Manhattan. There's always the tourist or the clueless who can't make their card work or they try six "insufficient fare" cards in a row from their pocket. The line behind presses and groans and, when I used to come to visit or in my first year or so living here, I'd worry that I too might slide the Metro card wrong or too slowly and stall the stampede. But this night, yes this night!, I swiped the card so perfectly that the LED "Go" indicator on the turnstile from the previous person didn't even turn off before it clicked me through. Kind of like the newly minted boy scout A-Rod timing a 3-2 pitch perfectly and ripping it deep into the left field bleachers. OK, maybe it's not quite that superb a skill, but it's a skill!

We Built This City

Every once in a while I draw great guilty pleasure from a truly awful song. Case in point this morning -- We Built This City. Terrible in ways almost too numerous to count -- the monotonous music, the laughable arrogance (built this city? Come on, we're talking about San Francisco here, 60 years recovered from a devastating earthquake before Jefferson Airplane ever first flew.), the name calling at corporate mediocrity when corporate mediocrity defines Starship in its precipitous and endless decline from the joyous Airplane days a couple decades earlier in the Fillmore Ballroom. Listen to the lyrics and add to this list.

But, but...although my iTunes version sadly doesn't have it, in one of the many versions of WBTC, there is a spliced in voiceover of an anonymous (to me at least) SF dj from the glory days of KYA or KFRC AM Top Forty and every time I hear that I am thrown back to all those sunny Sixties days driving across the Bay Bridge from Berkeley into San Francisco and the wonder of what-comes-next.



And even more, in Buenos Aires, 1984-85, when WBTC would unexpectedly show up on Argentine radio, and I'd grab the then baby Joe, toss him up into the air, singing along, changing "city" to "baby" in the lyrics, and Joe laughing in that "this is scary, this is great" way that babies have before they discover that the laws of gravity rule them as well. It's about where Ellison is now.

Sam Sees A Cat

Watching television, sitting on the couch with us and cats. These three things the dog loves intersected the other night. We were rampaging through several episodes of Six Feet Under, having missed it entirely in its HBO run. As an aside, Nate and Brenda have precisely the same impact on me as Jack and Kate in our other TV junket, Lost. Whiny and annoying, they sow chaos whenever they turn up together. (Brenda and her brother Billy, on the other hand, are way beyond annoying, deep into creepy.) Anyway, thinking of the four of them I sometimes wish for a television, time-travel, and scientific first -- sychronized spontaneous combustion.

So Sam is snuggled between us on the couch when for one of the few times in the series an animal appears. He leaps off the couch to follow the cat. And as it moves from the left of the screen to the right, Sam walks alongside, trying to make friends, and when it moves off screen, Sam continues on the path, still friendly, and moving his head all around, looking for where that cat could have turned and hidden.