I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I learned this years ago when I used to live off Washington Square and in the West Village.
The fastest way to get crosstown on a bicylce, from Greenwich Village to the East Village, specifically between Sixth Avenue and Avenue A, is along 8th Street and Saint Mark’s Place.
And about a month ago, I noticed that the Department of Transportation began to mark a bike lane on 8th Street, between 6th Avenue and Astor Place, to give cyclists an initial clear path along this crosstown corridor.
To be sure, there are other bike routes. You can ride eastbound on 10th Street and westbound on 9th Street. You can also navigate along Bleecker Street, to get from the west side until the street terminates on the Bowery. And, although it doesn’t have marked bike lane, you can take 4th Street from the West Village all the way to Avenue D. But the problem with these routes is the incessant red lights. A speedy but safe cyclist will encounter a red light at just about every intersection.
However, whether it is by design or by coincidence, you get a pretty consistent wave of green lights on 8th Street and then on Saint Mark’s Place, until you get to Avenue A at Tompkins Square Park.
Although it came a decade after I left the neighborhood, it’s great that we cyclists have a safe efficient route to get cross the downtown area.
A week ago, it seemed like the US was on the cusp of having its first woman president of the United States. We had been preparing for this moment for a very long time, and as early as May, well before the party nominations were wrapped up, the New York Times published this map. They projected Clinton to carry these states.
Were Clinton voters and democrats living in a filter bubble, similar to the one Mitt Romney supporters inhabited that made their candidate’s loss in 2012 unthinkable? Did the Democrats think that they could just run anyone against Trump and that the voters would reject an emotionally unstable, intellectually vacuous, and bigoted white man from New York?
The shock of a Trump presidency has been very difficult to process. It’s embarrassing that we as an electorate voted this way. A man who who has been a huckster and a charlatan will be a peer to the Roosevelts, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson. A man who’s name signified tackiness enshrined in gold will be the chief executive of the country. A man whose companies have declared bankruptcy several times will be the one who will be negotiating treaties and passing budgets. (I wonder what will happen when the debt ceiling will need to be raised in the March 2017: my guess is draconian cuts to spending and an attendant economic recession.)
No matter how embarrassing it is to watch Americans install a caricature of a successful businessman in the White House, the prospect of who will be running the federal government is an even more chilling prospect. Are we setting up to live in an autocracy? It certainly seems feasible with a pliant and spineless Republican Congress who will choose party over country every time. Our only hope is that the petit bureaucrats in Washington do their thing and bring sensible inaction to their jobs, but when did they ever come through for us?
Around here, the election and the aftermath has been a lot like a death. Many of us are in mourning, knowing that a lot of the the progress we made in the last decade will almost certainly evaporate. Many us fear what will come in terms of deportations, anti-semitism, rampant racism, misogyny, science denial, and good old fashioned crony capitalism. And we are stung by the unthinkable reality of an uncertain future as a failed state. As in mourning, emotions overwhelm rational thought.
But once we start to think more clearly, weren’t we unsatisfied with Hillary Clinton as the standard bearer for not only the Democrats but also for American women. Back in the spring, I wondered whether the ascendance of Bernie Sanders as a viable candidate was partly due to women supporting him—not Hillary Clinton—because they were hoping for someone better to be the first woman president. Sanders was more aligned with their interests, despite being a man, than Clinton was simply for being a woman. It reminded me of the days when the Democrats would try to put forward someone like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton as the first black presidential candidate of their party. We deserved better. And in time, we got Barack Obama. We deserve better than Hillary Clinton and someday we will know who that better candidate will be.
And after this mourning period, we start to move on and begin to see silver linings. One such bright spot Trump’s victory is that the Democrats and the nation have finally gotten rid of the Clintons and their moderate liberalism. They not pulled this country so far right that Richard Nixon could be a liberal Democrat today, as Lawrence Lessig pointed out last Wednesday morning, they unabashedly [sold the party out to Wall Street]. He published that piece hours after many of us awoke to realize that Trump would be the 45th president of the United States, and, at the time, it was cold comfort for what the future could hold. In time, we’ll excitedly move on.
And that is what must happen after the death of a loved one or a similarly stunning loss. We will move on. Things will never be the same again, but we will cope, and as a country, we will get through it.
When I first started working at CUNY in 2008, I signed up for the Commuter Benefits Program offered to its employees. The program, now administered by WageWorks, allows you to set aside an amount of your choosing to be deposited onto a Commuter Card. The amount you set aside, up to $255 per month, will be deducted from your paycheck, pre-tax, meaning that those contributions won’t be taxed and you pocket the savings. 1
For New York City employees using WageWorks, the Commuter Card can be used to buy rides on the following systems:
Another way you can use your Commuter Card is to pay for uberPOOL rides. But before you start booking rides on POOL instead of riding the train or bus, be aware of a few nuances that might make using your Commuter Card a little onerous.
You will only be connected to drivers in full-size vehicles that can carry six or more passengers.
Your ETA may be longer when requesting uberPOOL or $5 POOL with your commuter benefits prepaid cards.
While I appreciate the creative thinking that made possible using transit funds for a certain Uber rides, I would love to be able to use my Commuter Card for bike share expenses. It’s something that other New Yorkers have desired, but alas, that is not yet the case.
Starting this year, New York City requires all employers with twenty or more full-time employees to offer this program for their full-time staff. ↩
To be fair, none of these trivia nights were especially tricky. I’m basically splitting hairs here.
Sadly, the Local Hostel in Long Island City has apparently stopped their Thursday trivia night. I went a handful of times in 2014, but stopped once I left the neighborhood for fear that I’d run into my ex. Also, I usually teach Thursday nights.
Honorable mention:Amity Hall, Wednesday nights, for being difficult but only warrants a mention as it’s in Manhattan. It relies on a broad knowledge base. Bring friends.
Did you miss the screening of Los Sures and the presentation of the Living Los Sures project last month at NYU?
Good news, then! Beginning tomorrow, Metrograph—New York City’s newest independent film venue—will be screening Diego Echeverria’s 1984 film Los Sures and shorts from the continuing Living Los Sures project. The theatrical release will run from April 15–21.
Los Sures is a 1984 film about the “southsiders” of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The film was reemerged in the last few years because it captured the Brooklyn neighborhood that has dramatically changed and all but disappeared—and not necessarily because I screened it in my New York Independents class back in 2006. Union Docs has been working on the companion Living Los Sures project as an oral history to document the current state of the neighborhood and its changes.
The Tribeca Film Festival starts next month, and I will be observing ten years of skipping films screening at this festival. I last went to a film screening at Tribeca in 2006, when I saw two films. One was the worst film I ever watched in a theater, and the second was the site of the worst Q&A session I’ve ever endured. After these two experiences, with some very oblivious film viewers, I vowed to never return.
The Worst Film
Choking Manseemed promising at the time. It featured Mandy Pantankin, who I held in high regard from appearing in the Showtime dramedy Dead Like Me, and it took place in Queens.
The apparent inspiration for Choking Man (2006), the last film I ever watched at the Tribeca Film Festival.
I haven’t revisited the film since watching it at the festival: I have not re-screened it nor did I follow up to research the filmmaker’s vision. While it’s true that filmmakers sometimes find inspiration in the strangest places, this film seemed to be informed by two morsels of inspiration:
The colorful “Choking Man” posters that appear in every New York City–restaurant. At the time, there was a version with a lemon wedge and a fish. It was hard not to notice it.
Some New York Times article that revealed that there are a lot of languages spoken in Queens. Who knew?!?
As far as substance, these two bits were all the film had to offer. The characters in this film are all very flat, and the flimsy plot was immediately forgettable. I didn’t leave the screening, but I did mentally “check out” once Jorge, the Ecuadorian immigrant at the center of the film’s fish-out-of-water story, starts doing magic. If this was intended to be a moment of magical realism, whoever included this in the film needed to pay more attention in his Latin American literature class.
After the screening had ended, there was the requisite Q&A. The audience loved the film and expressed their gee-whiz fascination with Queens and brown people, and they marveled at the area “by the airport.” They showered the filmmaker with praise and mid-2000s–era platitudes, such as “poignant” and “transcendent.” I never wanted to vomit in public as bad as I did then. It probably didn’t help matters that I saw this film with a girl I had already broken up with, but we decided to watch the film together anyway because we did want to give up our tickets. (Hi, Tori.)
One could be forgiven for thinking that the audience was just being polite. After all, why would any want to be mean in public…especially in New York? But days earlier, I witnessed the Tribeca audience draw their “critical” claws. And it wasn’t pretty.
The Worst Audience
Two hours and forty-eight minutes is a long time to sit through a movie. No one I knew at the time would go with me to see this film, but Free Will [Der freie Wille] was one of the boldest films I had seen at the time. The story profiles Theo, a convicted rapist, after serving his sentence at a mental institution. Now free, he struggles to suppress his urge to rape again.
At first, Theo comports himself, but as the film continues, he finds himself consumed with his urges. On a cognitive level, he’s aware that it is wrong and that violating his parole will bring dire consequences. But he’s clearly sick, and serving time did not heal him. With each subsequent scene, the visuals in the film become more unstable. The pace of the editing quickens. The film stock becomes “faster,” which makes for a more grainy and noisy image. Perhaps most noticeably, the cinematographer starts to hold the camera in his hand, and the image shakes considerably.
The duration of the film also exacerbates the difficulty of identifying with Theo. Throughout the film, we want Theo to control his urges, but by the end, we share his exhaustion. Much like Chantal Akerman needed nearly three-and-a-half hours to show Jeanne Dielman’s dreary life, this film needed to torment its audience for it to experience Theo’s demons.
For the people who remained through the entire screening, their questions were harsh. Not only was Matthias Glasner, the film’s director, in attendance, but the actor who played Theo, Jürgen Vogel, was also present. The audience interrogated both Glasner and Vogel. Some questioners seemed to forget that they had seen a fiction film and treated Vogel as if he was an actual rapist. Others grilled Glasner over the “shaky” camerawork towards the end of the film. One viewer even asked, “Couldn’t you find a cameraman with a steady hand?” Both Glasner and Vogel seemed dumbfounded. At the time, the world held the US in pretty low esteem because of George W. Bush and his War in Iraq. This Q&A did not help elevate our global status.
I Can’t Sit With You
To be fair, Tribeca screens well over a hundred films each year at its festival, and this was the first or second year after it had expanded north of Canal Street. With so many more films, there were going to be “duds.” But it was the audience’s taste, not the selected films, that really bothered me.
This week, the New York State Assembly will finish their proposed state budget for the following year. The budget process includes negotiations between the state legislature and the governor, but this year, the City University of New York is in precarious position after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo suggested in his State of the State address in January that the city of New York should be responsible to fully fund CUNY. Last year, the state contributed $485 million to CUNY and placing that kind of financial burden on the City of New York is tantamount to defunding CUNY for that amount. It would be a catastrophe for public secondary education in the nation’s largest city.
If you’re a resident of New York State, ask the state legislature to reject Cuomo’s budget proposal and to contribute to CUNY and the livelihood of the state.
Eight years ago this month, I moved to Long Island City with my girlfriend-at-the-time, Sarah. Having lived only in Manhattan since I left Santa Barbara six-and-a half years earlier, I dreaded the thought of ever moving to Queens as it signaled reverting to a sub-urban existence, except that the weather was a lot better in Santa Barbara than in Queens. However, as we deliberated over neighborhoods to live, we chose Long Island City as an ideal locale. It was very convenient to our jobs—and my softball games, and it had thus-far escaped the attention of Annoying People that were overrunning trendier neighborhoods in Brooklyn and in Manhattan. We also knew a tight-knit community of artists that were scattered throughout the neighborhood.
Although there were no full-service grocery stores, drug stores, or hardware stores, it felt more like home than any other New York neighborhood I had lived. There was a cheap Chinese place, a great local bar that would let us store our apartment keys for the inevitable lockout, and, crucially, a place to cut my hair. A Colombian native, David the Haircutter owned the shop below our apartment. When I visited every four-to-six weeks, he chatted with me in Spanish and asked about my family. He also accepted and held my mail from Sarah that went to my old apartment after we split up. Over the years, I also configured his Wi-Fi router and helped him sell a shampoo bowl on Craig’s List. Perhaps, most flatteringly, he honored the 2008-era price of $20, years after he raised his base men’s cut to $25. Even after I moved across the Pulaski Bridge, I still returned to David’s Haircutters on Vernon Boulevard.
The financial crisis of 2008 only postponed the inevitable, and, eventually, those Annoying People found Long Island City to be an ideal place, too. Renters were priced out, property owners cashed out, and another cycle of gentrification pushed out the earlier wave that I had ridden. Overwhelmingly, talk of real estate replaced impassioned discussions of art.1
On Saturday, though, I went there for the last time. He told me that he had sold the remaining ten years of his twenty-year lease, called it quits, and packed up for Florida. He leaves tomorrow, and a nail salon will take over the space in the coming months.
While I’m happy for David—and a tiny-bit annoyed that I have to find a new haircutter, I’m sad for Vernon Boulevard and Long Island City. It has finally arrived as a true neighborhood in the Manicure Capital of the United States.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
To be fair, almost every blog about Long Island City has ever really been about real estate, and the artists were usually solitarily too holed up in their structurally deficient studio spaces to actually debate aesthetics. ↩
About a year and a half ago, I let my annual Citi Bike membership expire because the bikes never made it to Long Island City, where I lived at the time. Although I left the neighborhood for a different one on the banks of the Newtown Creek, it was more convenient to ride my own bike than participating in the bike share.
A lot has changed in the last eighteen months.
First, the bike share operation was acquired by another company, which has since invested a lot of money in the operation. The software was revamped and improved. Newer and better bikes started to appear at newer and farther flung stations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and even Jersey City. After many delays, the bike share was finally available in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Long Island City, the neighborhoods where I spend the most time.
Those systemwide improvements were certainly reasons for my revisiting the local bike share, but there were two even more compelling reasons for actually renewing:
As a member of the NYU Federal Credit Union, I am eligible for a $60 annual membership rate. Although the current annual rate of $149$155 is considerably higher than the launch-day rate of $95, it is still a great deal. This is especially true when you consider that a 30-day unlimited Metrocard costs $116.50 and that $150 is about what you’ll spend for a decent bike lock and tires that won’t go flat every week. But being able to renew at $60 per year was simply irresistible.
The most compelling reason for joining the bike share was that I wanted a “winter bike.” Each winter, I have to decide whether to continue cycling or to wedge himself into a crowded subway car or bus. Continuing to ride requires some modifications to my bike, including adding some fenders and installing fatter tires, to navigate the wet and slushy roads during this time of year. Sadly, my single-speed frame won’t accept those modifications too easily. The bike and I end up caked in salt and road mush after a few short miles. To avoid this, some riders go as far as getting a dedicated winter bike, and although I considered doing that, I remembered my own advice for using the bike share as your first bike. Citi Bike could be my firstsecondthird bike.
In short, I renewed because, for sixty bucks, I now have access to a winter bike for riding on wet or slushy roads. I have saved myself the trouble of buying overpriced, ill-fitting fenders for my single-speed bike, I will ride with better traction due to the wider tires, and I will keep my drivetrain relatively clean. I’m also hoping that bikes will be actually be available, especially in my neck of the woods, as ridership presumably decreases during the colder months.
Of course, this solution has its limits. This past weekend’s historic storm shut down the bike share for five days, and I don’t feel comfortable riding any bike on icy roads in the city.
For those days, I will have to make do with the G train and a Metrocard.
Memory can be horribly unreliable. A long time ago, back when I used to watch MTV in the early 1990s, I remember hearing on MTV News (or some similar program) that World AIDS Day was observed on December 1, as that was the day in 1981 that the New York Times first published an article on a “strange cancer” afflicting gay men in the city. It turns out that I was wrong on two counts:
The first World AIDS Day was held on December 1, 1988 for strategic reasons: to hold people’s attention after the US Presidential Election of 1988 and before much of the western world commemorated the midwinter holidays, such as Christmas.
Nonetheless, I noted yesterday that today, December 1, is World AIDS Day. I was biking home last night at 11:30 PM, along the East River Waterfront, and noticed that the Empire State Building was illuminated in red.
Seeing the all-red lights atop the Empire State Building reminded me of the day and began a rabbit hole of reading about the AIDS epidemic in its early days. Here are some notable findings:
AIDS in New York: A Biography. Back in the summer of 2006, New York Magazine published a list of significant events concerning the emergence of AIDS in New York City. Though it is less a biography than a timeline and is peppered with typographical errors, it is an informative reminder of how the city—and the world at large—struggled to make sense of the disease, particularly in its early days.
Timeline of HIV/AIDS. Similar to the New York Magazine timeline, Wikipedia has a more comprehensive list of events as it covers developments throughout the world outside of New York City. It also cites some other great sources.
“The man who transformed how The New York Times covers the gay community”. Journalism professor Samuel Freedman recounts how working with Jeff Schmalz, a New York Times editor, both endured the disease and the silent homophobia of the New York Times newsroom in the 1980s to ultimately change the way the venerable paper covered AIDS and gays.
“Getting Closer to a Cure, Perhaps”. And just in time for World AIDS Day, HBO will be premiering an episode of the VICE News series on recent, promising developments in finding a cure for HIV and AIDS. As a grumpy old man, I have a distrust of VICE, not of their journalistic accuracy, but of their opportunism…perhaps. As Media Life‘s Louisa Ada Seltzer notes, airing the program tonight “could boost viewership tonight, at a time when the Vice media group is eager for extra exposure…. Vice aims to launch [a] new channel early next year.”
Although it still afflicts millions of people, many of whom don’t have access to live-saving treatments, it’s remarkable how our collective understanding of AIDS has changed. Looking through the timeline reminded me of how overmatched we were by the disease: we had no idea how to medically treat the disease nor how to socially treat its early sufferers, particularly the alliteratively named populations of homosexual men, Haitians, and hemophiliacs.
It’s remarkable to see how we have basically eradicated the imminent death sentence that an HIV diagnosis was a generation ago. In the mid-1980s, we would have given anything to get where we are today, where we didn’t have to helplessly watch its sufferers waste and die. Or, at least, that’s how I remember it.
