I’m out on Long Island, NY, where I’ve spent a couple of weeks visiting my friend, Tom, who was my neighbor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 25 years ago, when we were both childless, unmarried and young.
Well, I was in my early-30’s. Tom and his roommates were recent college grads, starting their careers in the biggest city in the world. NYC was spectacular and singularly massive at the turn of the millennium. We were intoxicated and alive.
Tom is younger than me by seven years. In the time since I saw him last, he climbed the ladder in two separate career paths that crashed due to financial crises and has now climbed the ladder in a third: wine and spirits. He is an accomplished and successful Director of middle management.
He’s raised three children and supported his mother, and theirs. His father passed away; and his brother, an Iraq War vet, committed suicide.
Tom tracked me down four years ago after his father died. He told me he thought a necklace I gave him, cursed him. It brought him so much bad luck.
Close readers of this blog will remember when I threw the accursed necklace into the sea, but click the Tom and the Opera link and read about it if you haven’t.
When we reconnected, Tom and I had both just lost our fathers. His brother died some years before, and I have since lost my sister. We are brethren at mid-life. We often have half-hour to hour long phone conversations about enduring this world in our times. Since we reconnected, I’ve tried to give my friend a way to separate himself from his troubles.
In the last two and a half years, I showed up to help Tom move into his post-divorce apartment – when we went to the Metropolitan Opera for Rigoletto from center box seats. I flew him to Amsterdam for a four day vacation before the first ‘Thanksgiving and Xmas with split households’. And I paid for him to go to Africa to build a school with his daughter and her classmates.
I’ve also treated us to several lush meals in diverse locations. The latest was at Blackstone here on Long Island. We had really delicious oysters from Canada, tuna sashimi, a Vietnamese-spring-roll-style sushi roll, lump crab, and a tomahawk Wagyu steak. I had a beaujolais. Tom had the banana cream pie.
It’s a fine dining restaurant in an area of strip malls. The interior was made to feel old-school, wooden, warm. Yet, the exterior is contemporary suburban monoculture – sigh, I guess that’s everywhere now. Here though, they take things they want and put them together for the convenience and then make them at the highest quality available in the same place … good steakhouse and good sushi, has emerged. The fish was fresh, prepared very well. The steak, unique, delicious.
Spending time with Tom has been exorbitant fun, controlled chaos and a good re-bonding experience. I know we’ve been helpful to each other, though we don’t discuss it. I worried about him when things were looking bad, I don’t now.
Tom, like many New Yorkers, does for himself and his own, but won’t ask for assistance. He will take what’s offeredwithout guilt and enjoy it lustfully, which I find fun and uplifting. Until it’s not. Then he gets arrogant and deaf.
I was walking through Golden Gate Park two weeks ago when my cel flashed, indicating my phone was ringing. Seeing it was Tom, I answered.
“Thought you were coming out this summer, ” he said.
“Well, there’s only Labor Day pool party left, unless you want to come New Year’s Eve for Phish.”
I put the phone down, bought a one-way ticket to JFK, booked a hotel in Long Beach for a week, and bought tickets for Arthur Ashe Stadium at the U. S. Open tennis grand slam.
It had been a year and eight months since we hung out and I knew I wouldn’t make NYE in NY. I rationalized, too, that Tom wanted me to visit so I could see that he’s cool now and things are going well.
I had been trying to help get him away from it all to process his thoughts. That’s why I took him to Amsterdam and the Opera and supported his travel to Africa – to wholly extricate him from his own life as a break.
Our meals in Manhattan, in Amsterdam and here, are all, in part, a separation from our lives – to talk deeply about things that matter. I was thrilled to help him travel with his daughter and their class to Senegal.
The Labor Day Pool Party at Tom’s townhouse in Lido is the final party at the pool before it’s closed for the off-season. All the families and friends of families enjoy swimming, food, drinks, music, a raffle, and the most important events: games!
The table tennis and cornhole tournaments are highly anticipated and competitive. Yet from the moment I arrived, Tom told me, “I’m winnin’ that.”
He crowed to every neighbor we saw for two days that he was winning the cornhole tournament. It got so ridiculous, at one point when we were alone in the car, I said, “Yo, man, you are talkin’ a lotta smack about this cornhole thing.”
Now cornhole, like shuffleboard, requires team play. I know these tournaments use random selection for team mates. How could he possibly guarantee he’d win? But the thing about Tom is …
It was done and dusted.
That’s something Tom gives me – and I think he gives it to everyone he knows – chutzpah.
It was a great time. I saw Tom’s mom and family. We all jumped in the pool together at the end of the party, by tradition. The food was great. Lovely day, wonderful people. I felt welcomed.
So for my contribution on this trip, I took Tom to the USTA Center in Flushing for a match at the U.S. Open Grand Slam tennis tournament, something he and his neighbors would never do.
I grew up with tennis because of my Indian parents. Tom’s people prefer hockey, football, basketball and baseball. I know I expand Tom’s cultural landscape, as I know he expands mine.
Through luck of the draw we got a match featuring perhaps the greatest tennis champion ever, Novak Djokovic, and, in a stunning upset, Nolé was defeated by Australian Alexei Popyrin.
I concluded it was because of fatigue from playing in every previous Grand Slam Final and then meeting in the Olympic Gold Medal match that Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz, world number two and one respectively, were eliminated in the early rounds at New York.
Apparently the men’s endurance limit is four championship tournament finals. But it was pretty cool to see Nolé combat the Aussie Popyrin at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
By contrast to my material gifts, Tom has been generous with things that have no calculable value, including counsel and trusted conversation. He has picked me up, dusted me off and demanded I go at it again more than once.
On brief occasions, over the last four years, we’ve enjoyed food, wine, weed and travel as single men in mid-life.
We’ve shared meals and conversations and consulted one another on these occasions, separate from our responsibilities, to decide how we will make our way. He has lifted my spirit and confidence. This is priceless.
Tom has introduced me to his friends and family, who keep a tight circle. I am, for the first time, meeting his oldest friends and the people he has known for four decades, a community within which he is now the eldest surviving male of his family.
We both battle depression under the weight of our self-perception. We both do it in solitude, often not sharing it with anyone else.
Instead of staying in the city and visiting for a night, I’ve come out to LI to stay in Long Beach, with Tom for a couple of nights and in local hotels .
It’s now the season they call “locals summer,” when the tourists leave and the weather is pleasant and locals get to enjoy what the island has to offer before it gets too cold. It is a lovely, peaceful beach town now.
Long Island’s a place that has been described so often by others that it’s hard to put it in original terms anymore. From The Great Gatsby to Jaws to Everybody Loves Raymond, the literary, artistic, social, and now digital, presence of the place masks the reality.
The reality, which I am gaining an understanding of through Tom and his community and my extended visit to the area, is private, energetic, vibrant and physical. Long Beach is more diverse than I imagined. Other areas of Long Island are not.
Meanwhile, many helicopters and private planes still pass by the beach and overhead daily – shuttling the wealthy back and forth between the City and the Hamptons, or Montauk or wherever.
It’s half-September.
Many of my friendships have faded because all I do is get really close to people and then leave disgusted with where I am. For example, I could never live here.
New York remains a place that repels and attracts. I hate the way people look at me here for my long hair and wearing bright colors. I feel an almost constant basic racism of otherness. It’s a famously white and restricted place that demands you behave to belong.
My unwillingness to be treated less than for being exactly who I am has meant friends have faded from my frame of reference away into their own lives.
Now, at mid-life, some old ones re-appear. I find they are younger than me by just a few years and they are all going through what mid-life brings us: break-ups and deaths and a powerful existential energy.
The French call it “l’energie d’age.” Which is such a better term than “mid-life crisis.”
This was a really cool kite flown at Long Beach, Long Island
Since I’m on the East coast, I decided to try and see some other friends who, like Tom, reconnected with me just after Dad died, in that fateful Spring when the pandemic plunged us all into various solitudes.
These friends, a married couple with two sons in college, have been dealing with enormous soulache from numerous deaths in their family and community, including a fraternal suicide and a very recent loss to cancer.
The emotional weight of it is staggering. But when I saw them I was inspired by their resilience. It falls to us, in our 50’s to bear and manage the circumstances. We’re the adults now.
My rediscovered friends here on the East coast impress me deeply with their strength and fiercely organized approach to the spiritual and practical demands of mourning. They press on.
Though busy with funerals and memorial services, they were able to break away for a couple of days to spend time at a forested property in New Hampshire, where we had a good walk in the woods.
and lovely vistas of trees.
Though the visit was short, it was affirming. It’s good to trust others again.
When we returned from New Hampshire, I was in a suburb of Boston, with time on my hands. This gave me the opportunity to visit Fenway Park, the oldest major league stadium and a baseball-lover’s bucket-list destination.
This was indescribably wonderful. It’s an intimate place where they adore baseball. You can read about my first trip to Fenway on Giants Baseball Corner, my baseball blog, if you click that link.
and here are the Red Sox fans, in their glorious baseball Ashram, enjoying their song, Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond:
And here are some stills of Boston I took from the windows of various cabs:
I also managed to sneak in a visit to MFA Boston, the Museum of Fine Art which is, remarkably, open until 10pm on Thursdays and Fridays. I’m sure Friday it’s packed, but to have that place all to myself on a Thursday for four and a half hours was fantastic.
I will write a separate blog about that when I get a chance. Here’s the train back from Boston:
She’s 17 years old. I’m 57. So it’s a May/December relationship.
Last August, I put a search bot on Craigslist with three terms: “manual transmission, high performance, under $10,000.”
On Leap Day, February 29th of this year, after six months of poor responses, I received pictures of Sylvie from San Antonio, Texas. I flew there, and met, fell in love with, and bought her.
Sylvie and I have just completed the 1100 miles from San Antonio, Texas to Sedona, Arizona by traveling in the early morning and at night to avoid the heat.
The highlight of the journey was when Sylvie achieved 100,000 miles on her odometer at 7,000 feet altitude in her 17th Year!
We stopped in Pecos,
Albuquerque
Roswell
and Sedona.
It’s a route I’d recommend and will take again so I’ve named it (PARS).
Here’s sunset on US285 between Roswell and Albuquerque
It was like walking into a university show in Soho in the ’90’s – Kusama, Warhol, Haring, Basquiat, Koons and Hirst – then suddenly it was like street stuff from the aughts: banksy, Stik, Invader.
Then Hayden Kays and KAWS and Takashi Murakami and Abloh is how it morphed into stuff I had only seen over the last five years because Google throws it up on my projector on heavy rotation ad nauseum thousands of miles from here – like Dream. (to old heads, I say big ups to Oaktown DREAM, rest in power). Then there was a Hirst and a Koons and a Warhol and a sweet roomful of Yayoi Kusama.
Moco Amsterdam is housed in the Villa Alsberg, a townhouse overlooking Museumplein in the heart of Amsterdam (between the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum). The building was designed in 1904 by Eduard Cuypers, nephew of Pierre Cuypers, designer of Amsterdam Central Station and the Rijksmuseum.
It is a good collection of very specifically well-known contemporary art, linked only by their pop. They don’t hide it, Moco calls itself a “boutique museum.” They have a second location in Barcelona. I heard the immersive digital art installation by Studio Irma was the same there.
What is this show exactly? I found out about it from posters slapped around town:
Wait – what? I was standing there in the street thinking that looks like clickbait for a museum exhibition produced by the marketing department. Here’s 4k video of my visit to Moco Amsterdam … check it:
Moco’s building was a privately-owned residence and one of the first family homes built along Museumplein. It was inhabited until 1939. Then, the house was let to priests who taught at the Saint Nicolas School in Amsterdam. Later it was converted into an office for a law firm.
Moco took over the Villa Alsberg and opened the museum in 2016, a traditional Amsterdam townhome on the museumplein, converted into a walk-through collection. But it is densely packed with the art and difficult to navigate when crowded. I was here on a rainy Thursday and it was claustrophobic. They should show less and allow for more space before the art.
Some artists received better purchase, weirdly (read: banksy). The one Warhol inclusion was pretty cool – diamond dust. Kusama is boss. Banksy’s tenner is great. The sculptures in the garden by Marcel Wander were precious. Studio Irma’s digital immersive art was low-tech, high-concept and cool. But it’s a densely installed collection. It was difficult to appreciate a large canvas by Hayden Kays, mounted in a small room. The Harings were also installed in a small square room, jammed with people. It was awkward.
Koons and Hirst were kind of just stuck in the hallways. Rooms were grouped loosely by era, but not distinctly so. They had these vague categories – Modern Masters, Contemporary Masters. It may have been an attempt to contrast-gain through equanimity but the install just felt crammed and poorly considered.
Prints were indicated to have been authenticated by the artists. The provenance for the Invader piece was credited to Jared Leto. Things that were new to me that I enjoyed were the playful works of Marcel Wander, the digital immersive stuff by Studio Irma and the large canvases (panels?) by The Kid.
The Kid, a contemporary painter using oils to create large photocollage-style paintings, had exquisite technique, though the work was conceptually immature. I wondered if there were painters in this land that spawned Rembrandt, Hals and Hooch and Vermeer and Van Gogh – and if so, what were they into? As a young artist, The Kid is into deeply personal concerns at the moment, but he will be good to watch evolve as a painter. I admired his use of pseudonym and rejection of nation-state in the establishment of his identity. Smart kid.
Ultimately, though, the artists were equalized in the hyper-capitalized gift shop that was tragically post-ironic: Campbell Soup Can skate decks beside decks that had banksy’s girl and balloon – where’s that dough going? Basquiat crowns as lapel pins. Is the Basquiat Estate or somebody who owns some weird rights making money here? on hundreds of euros worth of cheap, chinese-made kitschy derivative chunks of plastic? Is this a non-fungible token (NFT) emerging into totally fungible bullshit (TFB) in the museum culture?
Sure enough, the exibit includes NFT: The New Future, which they claim is, “Europe’s first dedicated exhibition space to the NFT phenomenon.” Beeple. It feels half baked. Exhibition spaces for non-fungible things.
Your ticket comes with a free gift from the museum and a discount for the gift shop. The shop was cringe. There were totes and hats and pins and cards and posters, lots of pink and the generalized motto of the museum: In Art We Trust. I mean. Look, it was a decent show or a weird collection of highly successful names in art since like 1990, in a house, but … what is this?
The curatorial sense here seems to be: throw as many recognizable names up as possible to herd in the stoned masses visiting the museumplein. Oh, and cater to the ever-increasing LGBTQ+ tourism euro, by featuring gay cultural icons and the color pink. This show wasn’t so much curated as listicled. Superficial.
By my observation, the corporate partners of high-profile museums in city centers of the colonial era are amidst a reformation, post-George Floyd – a Black Lives Matter effect is international. Woke culture expects more. Millennials are uninterested in the old narratives. Moco seems to seek to fill a void in perspective over traditional museums – that of street art and free expression. But superficial listicle curation for tourist-culture, and capitalist reduction of profound cultural expression, is gauche.
Moco resides somewhere between traditional museum culture and the modern art marketplace. It’s like a brick and mortar pop magazine on the museumplein.
We took a room at The Pickwick for a night and streamed The Maltese Falcon online so we could watch it in the hotel where it was filmed.
John Huston’s classic 1941 version of the Dashiell Hammet novel, The Maltese Falcon, was filmed in part at The Pickwick Hotel in San Francisco. The film stars Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade and features Peter Lorre.
The next day we checked out and walked down to AT&T Park to watch the Giants vs the Reds on 2002 Team Bobblehead day – we got two Barry Bonds bobbleheads.
California secedes from the U.S. and joins forces with Japan to become a non-aligned, pacifist, non-nuclear-powered, green, tech-producing powerhouse in global digital and computer science.
Here’s the flag of the new most prosperous nation on Earth.
I hereby announce my Candidacy for General Secretary of The Republic of Calipan to anybody living in Aztlan or the Land of the Rising Sun who agrees Calipan exists.
In autumn of 2006, for a traveling project by Rigo 23 that he calls Tricycle Museum, I researched and purchased three-wheeled vehicles from South India and shipped them to Madeira Island, Portugal. Here are some of the best of the many auto-ricks I photographed.
They are arranged in reverse chronological order for the most part and the last one is a 1958 model that was still running on the roads in Coimbatore in 2006!
In autumn of 2006, for a traveling project by Rigo 23 that he calls Tricycle Museum, I researched and purchased three-wheeled vehicles from South India and shipped them to Madeira Island, Portugal. Here are some of the best of the many cycle-ricks I photographed.
November 22nd didn’t happen for me.
It disappeared in the space-time void caused by crossing the dateline and traveling for 20 hours on a 777 from SFO to Seoul.
Now it’s the 23rd, Thursday at 315am in Singapore where the airport is pretty quiet. But for teenagers with semiautomatics, managers with clipboards and baristas, pie-eyed at their coffee stands.
A girl slept at one of these – I could have taken anything … from her coffeeshop and she would never have known.
I was tempted. But didn’t.
Landed and watched “Live and Let Die”
In the free movie theater they have here .. what a weird zone.
I can sleep for six hours in a hotel for $40 I have $255. I slept well on the plane and so figure I’ll stay up as long as possible so I can get the most of my six hours sleep time when I finally take the room – if I take the room
I don’t really feel tired. A little hungry … but not for something gross.
Enough about what I am feeling all the fucking time. I feel like Nathaniel Hawthorne.
edits are the slicing away of all that shit toward a clean expression.
Wickedy.
Off to munch.
Next entry will be November 23.
k
I found this interview I did with Eric Drooker on the Great Lawn in Central Park. Before I post it on the date it took place, I’m putting it here – because I think more people will hear it that way. Hope so.
Known at this time throughout the English-listening audience on the island of Taiwan – ICRT, Intercontinental Radio Taiwan – as the sports and news reporter, Carter Ryan:
This story begins lying on its back in a small, one- bedroom hole in a creaking, dripping, grey, 18-story building in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong.
There, on a morning that would turn into a beautiful spring day, I wake up and hear the sound of rats scurrying around in the dark, and the sounds of wheels turning and gears clicking. I hear unnamed sounds.
I get up, pack my stuff, throw it on my back and go down to the first floor of the Chung King Mansions. This volatile, multicultural conglomeration of dirt, sweat and international odors stands just off Nathan Road in Kowloon surrounded by rows of pricy hotels: The Peninsula, The Hilton, The Hong Kong Empire.
The Chung King hostels have been the cheap place to stay for the shoestring traveler since the 1970’s. Other than brief alterations due to fires that have erupted in its corridors over the years, it hasn’t changed.
Out front, there are Indians and Iranians, bearded and red-eyed, sitting on the street railing. Foreigners from every corner of the globe are walking by. The little Chinese guy with the $8.00 USA Todays and Penthouses and Time and Newsweek and Rolling Stone, is unrolling his papers and magazines.
At dawn, the crowd are all hanging around wrapped in cotton, ear-ringed, nose-ringed, tattoed, goateed. They are either leaving for work or just getting in from play. Several of the turbaned Sikhs are asking me if I want a good place to stay or great Indian food or to go to the best restaurant in Chung King. The rest of them hover around the moneychangers offering black market rates. A German couple is buying watches, a Canadian is buying Nikes, a Frenchman is selling perfume. It’s early and a lot of people are just getting going.
Traffic is still light. Light for here. The sidewalks are peppered with people. Bright red doubledecker buses and taxis glide by. There are light, low-lying clouds over the bay. It is a bit dewy, but you can smell the sun behind those drops, burning the clouds away. The blue sky is already cracking through. By 10:00 it will be 30 degrees.
And on this morning, as I look across the street at the Hilton, I see an anachronism. He’s an elderly Chinese man with greying temples under a flat, grey, Maoist cap. His rope buttons are worn and his ancient Chinese clothes are from a time before all of this.
The free port of Hong Kong rises around him. Six major hotels. More foreigners than Chinese. So many shops. Everybody here is either buying or selling. And he, clearly, is not.
He stands in the middle of all this looking completely foreign, and he begins to fight it.
Standing on the corner of Nathan road in front of the Hilton, he is screaming at the top of his lungs probably the only two English words he knows. Probably the two words he learned expressly for this purpose. He is standing on the street corner screaming and throwing his hands up, hitting the sky with his fists and begging:
“Go Back! Go Back! Gooooo Baaaaack! Go Back!”
His voice is cracking now. He cannot keep this up. These two words are booming down the street in the quiet morning calm; kicking back and forth off The Peninsula, off Chung King Mansions, through the corridors and dripping alleyways:
“Go Back! Gooooo Baaaaaack!”
His voice is coarse and harsh now breaking and cracking. And still he screams. It’s been about five minutes and now I’m standing beside him.
He isn’t looking at me. He isn’t looking at anyone. Unfocused, his eyes open and close with the jerking of his head and hands as he puts every ounce of energy into his request.
I stay put and now I am looking at everyone else.
They stare at him, they smile and they continue to walk. Another Chinese man is standing a few feet away clicking in Cantonese and laughing at the old man. A young couple respond to him and they all laugh. A group of white businessmen walks, uninterested. Another man videotapes from across the street.
In front of Chung King, the Indians, Iranians and other foreigners look over for a time and then go about their business. Now they are looking at me. They look long and hard. My pack is slipping. I hitch it up and turn and walk away.
MTK The Writist 