#253

#253, Midtown, NYC

They predicted rain; it didn't rain. There was no reason not to do what I did, which was walk through the streets of Manhattan for four hours. No music, though I could have listened to music. No reading on the subway, because I wanted to pay attention. What am I paying attention for? What is it that I am waiting to hear? Of all the days I actually wanted to see Dr. Zizmor and his demonic rainbow and promises of clear skin above the subway doors, and I didn't. Fall half-asleep on the A train waiting for my stop, which could be anywhere. The rush hour lullaby of New York City: stand clear of the closing doors, please.

Why walk for four hours? The east side was giving me no love. The color-stripped, flaking drag of 1st Ave was like a bad dream I've had before; Stuyvesant Square's bright color an improbable piece of taffy. So I walk to the west side, where at least I know I could end up near the high line. I traverse the city on 18th Street for no real reason. I could have chosen 17th or 2nd and it would have been the same. The best recipe for grief is sheer exhaustion. Is the city real? Am I? Are you? Stay away from those thoughts, those abstractions: it's a bad neighborhood. The only thing left to do when you get to 8th Avenue is cross 8th Avenue. That's it. There's nothing more to be done.

Why avoid that street in favor of another? Remember the days when underground, you used to hate the watchful eye mosaics at the Chambers Street stop. Whenever the train pulled into the station, for months, you had to look away. Today you pause at each bike lane as if at a station of the cross. Do you pray to remember or do you pray because you are afraid? Traffic goes by; it pays you no mind. That girl is waiting for you to step out of her line of sight so she can hail her taxi and hit uptown. You smell the shish kabob cart's offerings, listen to its sizzle. Everyone is in such a hurry.

Look up. The answers aren't there, but there is a sign for a bakery with a painted cupcake. There is a glass-fronted condominium you can't imagine who will live in. To look up and not ask why, but only remark, if anyone should ask what's on your mind: I was not expecting sun today.

--For Eliseo

#252

#252, Smith Street, Brooklyn

Call me civic-minded, call me Zen, but there's something about the transient nature of chalk graffiti that appeals to my sensibilities. I've written before about my enduring crush on Ellis G., the street artist who patrols the streets of Brooklyn at unknown hours, drawing beautiful chalk outlines around fire hydrants, street lamps, and bicycle wheels, giving the shadows of everyday objects an odd luminosity. But a few months ago, in a little alcove on Smith Street that was seemingly unloved and abandoned, I was intrigued when this (non-Ellis G.) message appeared on a doorway.

My head filled with questions: Who is the couple? Do they still live there or have they been evicted? Why has the wind and the weather beaten them so, and does that have anything to do with the dismal state of the buzzer? And, of course, the next obvious question that comes to mind: Who the heck is ELBOWTOE?

Street artists can be a notoriously canny lot. Some seek attention; others do their work on the sly. But this one, shall we say, toes the line between the two. So just for fun, I've compiled a list of little-known facts about the elusive Elbow-Toe, just in case you were wondering about the, er, face behind the rest of the anatomy.

1. Yes, the name was inspired by the ubiquitous Neck Face. Yes, he knows it's absurd.

2. By day, Elbow-Toe works as a senior programmer. He probably uses his real name.

3. He used the word "echelon" in an interview.

4. He works in other media: chalk, charcoal, paper, paste-ups, woodcuts, ink.

5. Elbow-Toe likes doorways and alcoves because of how they frame his work.

6. He does his art in Brooklyn mostly because he claims he's too lazy to go to Manhattan. (It happens.)

7. Elbow-Toe listens to Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart.

Hardly exhaustive, but we don't want to give away all the mystique, right? Till then, it's got me thinking of other possible monikers that might pepper the neighborhood walls and sidewalks someday. But between you and me, I don't think I'm ready for the wisdom of Waist Foot.

#251

#251, South Street Seaport, NYC

Once, in a New York City not so long ago, the Fulton Fish Market actually resided on Fulton Street and the South Street Seaport smelled like a proper seaport. That area on the east side of Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge has been stripped of some of its character and sanitized over the years, but vestiges of the old character remain if you know where to look. This brick and terra cotta beauty on Water Street has been holding steady in the same location since it was built in 1888. The Italianate decoration above the door is decorative without being fussy, and the lettering above the door is both quirky and dignified. The uneven spaces between the letters bear the marks of being hand-crafted, and check out the reverse umlauts underneath the No.

One of my favorite books, my desert island book (especially if the desert in question is Manhattan), pays homage to the old Fulton Fish Market. It's called Up in the Old Hotel and it's by Joseph Mitchell, one of the most gifted reporters of the sights, sounds, smells, and characters that made up New York City around the middle of the last century. I know I just described Nabokov as having prose so good you could eat it with a spoon. Mitchell is what happens when you're scouring the very bottom of the newspaper that held your fish and chips, scooping up the salt and vinegar, hungry for more. Finger-lickin' good is what it is. But don't take my word for it. Have a taste:

Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market. I usually arrive around five-thirty, and take a walk through the two huge open-fronted market sheds, the Old Market and the New Market, whose fronts rest on South Street and whose backs rest on piles in the East River. At that time, a little while before the trading begins, the stands in the sheds are heaped high and spilling over with forty to sixty kinds of finfish and shellfish from the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, and half a dozen foreign countries. The smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness always gives me a feeling of well-being, and sometimes they elate me. I wander among the stands for an hour or so. Then I go into a cheerful market restaurant named Sloppy Louie's and eat a big, inexpensive, invigorating breakfast -- a kippered herring and scrambled eggs, or a shad-roe omelet, or split sea scallops and bacon, or some other breakfast specialty of the place.

It's delicious. When I read the essays in this book, an old, would-be forgotten New York comes to full-bodied life. Never mind the fact I'd spit out a kippered herring if you plopped one on my plate. It's prose, dammit, so I can have all that I want.

The Fulton Fish Market still exists, only it's in the Bronx now. It moved there in 2005 and still functions. About a year ago, in honor of Joseph Mitchell's centenary, the New York Times ran a piece about "Up in the Old Hotel", the essay in the book of the same name that pays homage to all things fishy and seaporty. So you can imagine my delight at spotting, in the sidebar of the article, a black-and-white photograph of the author himself leaning in a doorway, looking dapper and attentive. The doorway? No. 251 Water Street. You can check it out here. Hungry for more? Get the book. Bring napkins.

#250

#250, Greenwich Village, NYC

Earlier this year, I was reading the paper in a musty hotel bar in Dublin when I got the news that Patrick McGoohan, the star of the 60's television show The Prisoner, had passed away. I've never been a big television watcher, but reruns of M*A*S*H and DVDs of The Prisoner are my two exceptions, so I was sad to hear of his passing.

The concept behind The Prisoner, for those of you who've never seen it, is vaguely Orwellian. "The Prisoner" in question, played by McGoohan, is a sports-car driving man-about-town who finds himself, after resigning from an undisclosed business/company/agency, subjected to poison gas by a man in a top hat in his flat in London. When he wakes up, he finds he's trapped in a creepily idyllic town known only as The Village. The dress code is mod meets French 60's films meets Disney: lots of primary colors, stripes, and capes. Instead of names, everyone is assigned a number. McGoohan, though he rails against it, is known in The Village as Number Six.

It's hard for me to say I'm going to Greenwich Village, AKA "The Village," without thinking of The Prisoner. Even as I type it, it's on my mind. And as I look at the backdrop to this 250, the bright spot of sunlight reflected here in a Mercer Street window transforms itself into the Rover, the giant white bubble that acts as border patrol for The Village. Try to escape, and the Rover will bump, roll, bounce, and track you down, then envelop you in its outer membrane. In other words, you're toast. Looks like I'll be stuck in The Village for awhile.

#249

#249, Venice, Italy

Because Venetian building numbers are so uniform -- the red stencil/white oval that you see here is standard throughout most of the city -- searching for numbers in Venice quickly became about finding unusual settings more than seeking out numbers themselves. Here, the rolling font of the shop sign caught my eye. These vowels don't have serifs: they are full-blown freaks of nature with tails. And what's up with the half-inverted quotation mark? Something pagan must be afoot here, I thought to myself before slinking off to imbibe more vino.

The shop fronts of Italy, with their well-designed (if cryptic) signs, are a joy to take in and photograph. But striving to capture the signs of Venice came with its own price. While few things in this world freak me out more than a cart full of clown paraphernalia, I was S-O-L in this carnival-loving city. Clown and mannequin crap was at every turn. I had little choice here but to leave a vestige of this shop-window intact, weeping porcelain mask and all.

#248

#248, New Haven, CT

Labor Day weekend is upon us, that harbinger of fall, giver of picnics, and definitive nail in the coffin of summer. The annual emptying-out of New York City has already begun, as urbanites with more money and plan-making ability than I escape the daily grind and flock to greener pastures for the last weekend of summer. Since I plan to spend the weekend here in the city hunkering down to get some serious work done on my novel, I can think of no better figure to evoke than this book-reading contortionist. Not only is he smart (he's a Yale man), doubtless we'll be suffering some of the same eyestrain, mental exertion, physical aches and pains, and moments of occasional beauty as we devote ourselves to our senseless labors of love. I think I'm in good company. Wish us luck, and have a good weekend yourself.

#247

#247, Lafayette Street, NYC

You have to imagine the slash, but 24/7 seems a pretty fitting number for a firehouse.

#246

#246, Tucson, AZ

It's a sad fact of modern life that in nine bands out of ten, the band sticker will outlive the band. Think about it. How many times have you ventured into a venue, strolled over to the bar, and noticed the legion of band stickers plastering the black plywood sound booth? It goes without saying that nearly all the names are for bands you've never heard of: Ninjas Who Met God. Wax Fang. The Suicide Instigators.

Vandalism aside a moment, there's something heroic in it, a tragicomic element to the endless trail of bands who were never big enough to even be forgotten, their clever names overlooked night after night for years, their website addresses dismissed, their industrial strength adhesives enduring far longer than the band itself.

The impulse to stick band stickers on walls: I've never had it, but for years I've been an avid recorder of it. This particular sticker, clearly more transitory than the indoor sound booth variety, was an accidental element to the 246. I didn't even notice it until looking over the photo again. It's tiny, but you can see the shape of the traditional eye chart. It's for Dilated Peoples, an underground hip-hop group based out of California. They're still around. Who knows? Maybe the Dilated Peoples, clinging ardently to a variegated wall in Tucson, will be one of the brave few to outstick the band sticker.

#245

#245, East Village, NYC

Vladimir Nabokov, whose prose I could eat with a spoon, had more than a way with words. He also had an odd perceptual knack when it came to the alphabet. In his memoir, Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes his experience, as a child, of looking at particular letters: "Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl." The phenomenon, grapheme-color synesthesia, occurs when a person perceives letters or numbers as having certain colors. It's one of those gifts, like perfect pitch, that you either have or you don't. I don't, though if you want to see something that's going to mess with your head, check out this picture.

But let me revise that last thought. Just because I don't have perfect pitch doesn't mean I can't recognize when a note is out of tune; similarly, just because I don't have grapheme-color synesthesia doesn't mean I can't recognize when a number's color is "off." I almost didn't want to post today's number. Why? Because the color brown is wrong. It is so wrong for this 245 that it makes me itch. What's up with that?

In the same vein, I've seen examples of text whose appearance goes against their meaning but doesn't bother me at all. A company with a fleet based in my hometown, the Yellow trucking company, has a logo with the word "Yellow" set against an orange background, the sight of which pleases me immensely.

It seems my wanna-be synesthesia only responds in the negative. I don't walk around seeing indigo-colored 4's unprompted. But I could be a quality control inspector for this stuff. I'd give green 87's the thumbs-up and boot off the assembly line red 50's and yellow 185's. But, like many of my other skills (inventing vampire jokes on the spot, for one), there doesn't seem to be much demand for it. Alas.

#244

#244, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn