sundries

[rm]

We've just seen Patty's parents off and now are each doing work things. Prior, omlettes and goat cheese were involved.

Last night we went to Lincoln Center and walked around. The tent was still up from Fashion Week, but all that was over. And we went up onto this weird sloped park that's on the roof of a restaurant. It was the weirdest, most delightful urban space, and it made me very happy. Like Millennium Park in Chicago, it reminds me of the future.

Last night we also went to a bookstore where I finally picked up the Cyteen sequel. And, while we were there I saw Romeo & Juliet & Vampires in the YA section. I can't decide if this is brilliant, a more adequate than usual response to a current fad, completely annoying because of the power differentials in the way it's structured (Juliet should be hunted, hunted by Romeo), or just something I wish would stop already since pretty much most iterations of this trend are completely phoned in. I am torn. I feel like I'm not evaluating fairly as I'm having an inappropriate low-culture/high-culture moment about it, as opposed to really thinking about it.

Awesome death/mourning query sent out. Yay me.

Bed bugs are horrific. However, I find myself oddly entertained by the bed bug alarm and how we're processing it here in New York. Mainly, by using photoshop inappropriately. Sorry about those GIANT bed bugs, Nike.

New Yorkers continue to have questions about the recent tornadoes. These things are very novel to us, and we don't know why the sky is green.

Edward I. Koch was the mayor I grew up with. When he left office, I was glad. He was emblematic to me of one more politician who wasn't doing enough about the right things -- like AIDS -- and someone who used race in an incredibly self-serving way when New York was at its most divided. Since then, though, we've had Dinkins (lovely, but ineffective man who I met many times in my first public relations job), Giuliani (who didn't clean up New York so much as destroy its grit; then was eloquent when we needed him to be, and yet later thought that that gave him a right to exploit our city forever), and Bloomberg (who has done great stuff in terms of public spaces, is a force of benign or peculiar neglect on most other issues, and has been awesome on the Muslim community center issue). Which makes me say, yeah, Mayor Koch had a lot of flaws, but was also sort of awesome, or maybe it's just that New York has always been something special when fighting for its own survival.

Manfred Gans served in the British military during WWII, after his parents German-Jewish parents sent him to England to escape the Nazis. After helping to free his hometown of Borken, he then went in search of his parents. And found them. Alive. Gans died today, at age 88.

Comments

[elainasaunt.livejournal.com]

Sigh. Typical of the Times to run an obit that carefully makes Manfred Gans' story sound as undramatic as possible, then quotes an expert at the end as calling it "epic".

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I got into a huge argument with a friend not too long ago. About the fact that Giuliani kind of shoved all the poor people away, without actually dealing with poverty (which is what I said), my friend said that crime in New York was down because of that - she'd lived in the States and near NYC for many years, I merely visited it a few times.

When I was in NYC 4 years ago, I basically couch surfed and slept in Washington Heights and apparently I was lucky to make it out of there alive.

Manfed Gans' story is a real miracle. There's no other word for it. May his memory be blessed.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I tend to have little patience for anyone (especially people who live near but not in NYC) who doesn't live in NYC talking about OMG, the CRIME! Safest big city in America. Poverty does not equal crime. And this is something too many New Yorkers, and especially too many people who live on the outskirts of NYC refuse to get.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

No kidding.

This is something I see in Tel Aviv as well. My favourite neighbourhoods are OMG! Crime Filled! You'll Be Raped!

It's really aggravating.

Once, I actually did get lost while I was there, during my few excursions there as a teen and this was during the time when cellphones were just becoming ubiquities and I did not know what to do, so a random sex worker asked me if I needed a cab and I was like thank you!
This is still a story that shocks people.

Safest big city in America.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Safer per capita than most U.S. cities, and some large towns.

[forest-rose.livejournal.com]

I felt rather as you do about Romeo & Juliet & Vampires when I came across some comic books of Shakespeare's plays. And then I realised that they are almost like seeing a play, and you can't complain about that! But they seem to have other titles too now - I'd like to see how good they are before passing judgement.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

maybe it's just that New York has always been something special when fighting for its own survival.

I wasn't even *in* NYC in 2001, and Ed Koch has always been the odd-looking old bloke on NY1 for me, but I concur with that point - NYC has its own certain can-do spirit in a crisis, but one that is unlike anything you're likely to find elsewhere in the States.

That weird sloping park is something I'd like to visit - it is an unexpected green space.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I just updated a post with a link to the park if you haven't seen it yet.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

I've seen odds and ends of it when going to concerts at Lincoln Center from time to time, but that's a good link - thanks!

[rm.livejournal.com]

It's SO COOL. You can also look into the Julliard student lounges from it. It's very much a "check out the life you're not living" moment.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

NYC is special. Future generations will say that the modern world was born there.

[byzantienne.livejournal.com]

I have so many issues with the Cyteen sequel. And I say this as someone who uses liking Cyteen as a 'can I date you?' litmus test. That book is important for me.

I'll be interested to hear what you think of Regenesis.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oh! Cool. I don't know a lot of people who love the book. My reaction to the first read of it was "I LOVE THIS," my reaction to the second read was "I LOVE THIS, BUT NOW I WANT TO PUNCH PEOPLE IN THE FACE" because it made me so angry about all sorts of weird crap in my life.

I'm not sure it's a book that should even have a sequel, but I certainly hate mouthing off too much about stuff I've not seen or read, so this is overdue.

Do you know about the somewhat infamous Harry Potter fanfiction Pawn to Queen then?

[byzantienne.livejournal.com]

I love it somewhat beyond reason, identify way too much with Ari I for me to ever be comfortable loving it, and keep tripping over the questions it raises in all my original fiction work.

And oh yes, I know about Pawn to Queen. I am one-degree-of-Kevin-Bacon removed from the author.

commenting to both of you

[lorem_ipsum]

\o/

I love Cyteen, although the first time I read it, I started with the only volume I had (vol 2) and my reaction was about three-quarters "bzuh?"

I picked up Regenesis a couple of months ago, and--focusing on the trivial so as to avoid spoilers--it got me back to musing about which slash archetypes Justin/Grant can be mapped onto.

You've seen the Yuletide fic, "A House in his Head"?

Re: commenting to both of you

[byzantienne.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes I have, and I adore that fic.

(I really wish Yuletide would bifurcate the Alliance-universe books into Cyteen and not-Cyteen, because I'm so much more comfortable writing the former...)

[yarram.livejournal.com]

Cyteen is a book/series I wish I'd read as a teenager. It would have explained SO MUCH about human social behavior that I just didn't get.

Hopefully without spoilers: Regensis is, IMHO, not quite as good as Cyteen. It is also triggery as hell for me, for reasons I won't go into here. Nevertheless, it is a good/worthwhile follow-up to Cyteen, and I kind of still hope we learn more about the downstream effects of Ari Two and any possible successors.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I find Cyteen to be really triggery for me (one of the very few things that is -- but the way young AE2's life is medicalized completely sets my shit off), so I'm curious if this will be worse.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I cannot, cannot wait for the whole classic/horror mashup fad to die, die, die! It may have been moderately amusing once but by now the joke is beyond dead.

Juliet should be hunted, hunted by Romeo

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

It would make more sense as an adaptation if Romeo were the vampire. Just saying.

[chaos-by-design.livejournal.com]

I grew up with Koch too. My dad hated him, otherwise I didn't really have an opinion of him at the time. I was too young and didn't really know anything about politics[1].

You make me feel nostalgic about NY though, which is odd, considering my relationship with the place.


[1]Interestingly enough, the more I learned about politics, the more left-leaning I became.

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

My overall feeling about literary/pop mash-ups is that they're fantastic when they're novel and well-wrought.

Which is to say that when they become a genre of their own that publishers are churning out like mad because they're hot right now, I stop trusting them as a reader and start looking for something else. I don't that's an issue of high v. low culture -- at their best these things are complex in their own right, in general they're interesting as a phenomenon -- so much as it's a statement that factory farming these things makes it harder for them to be good art.My overall feeling about literary/pop mash-ups is that they're fantastic when they're novel and well-wrought.

Which is to say that when they become a genre of their own that publishers are churning out like mad because they're hot right now, I stop trusting them as a reader and start looking for something else. I don't that's an issue of high v. low culture -- at their best these things are complex in their own right, in general they're interesting as a phenomenon -- so much as it's a statement that factory farming these things makes it harder for them to be good art.

And really, shouldn't we all be busy penning bedbug infestation epics by now?