May 2013
6 posts
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Noon, Chair Five
As he circles my chair, the man with the gold shears tells me about his non-day-job work. The real work. He knows some collectors, he says, but he would rather know more. He knows dealers and gallery owners; he wants to meet more. The group show in Chelsea was nice, but he wants a solo one.
“I want more, damn it,” he says with a laugh. “But it’s time and it’s luck....
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Void If Detached
A reunion of sorts, with Professor Okie (in town for two days) and the former Chelsea Narrator (who, since leaving Chelsea, has moved on to a transitional phase in Park Slope).
The last time the three of us were in the same room together was about six years ago, in Inman Square. Before that, it was probably in a triangular common room while watching the Toby Bailey air ball. But I could be...
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Ticker Tape
The tick-tock dream. I’ve got two variations.
Variation No. 1 involves an audition. Growing up, I went through a lot of auditions, mainly for violin sections of orchestras. (The last one was for a college orchestra; I didn’t make the cut.) In Variation No. 1, the audition is an hour away but I still haven’t practiced for it. The plan is to cram: practice like a maniac for...
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G is for grudge, R for repurpose. Grrrr.
The Ocean Hill narrator (formerly the Prospect Heights narrator) explains to me her policy on exes.
“There are still things that I like about them that I liked before, when I was dating them,” she says. “So why shouldn’t I try to keep them in my life?”
I don’t question the why; it’s more about the how.
My policy, on the other hand, does not require any...
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April 2013
14 posts
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“Hokum Stomp (1930) — This song repeats the harmonic structure of Brownskin...”
– Stephen Calt, Nick Perls, and Michael Stewart, in their liner notes for The Young Big Bill Broonzy (Yazoo 1011).
I always appreciate an earnest hokum scholar.
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Conventional, Pt. 4
In about nine hours, including the layover, I’ll be home. On my way to the taxi stand, I run into W—— just outside the hotel. He doesn’t recognize me, as it’s been a few years, but I decide to wave and say hello. He scans my badge for a second.
“Oh — howsit going, 張? Been a while, hasn’t it.”
W—— is technically retired, but every once in a while he turns up in a consultant emeritus role for my...
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Conventional, Pt. 3
One thing I have trouble getting used to is all the belly-button stalking — the friendly, smiling people sneaking a glance down at that badge hanging at the end of the black lanyard.
“張! How’s the Big Apple?”
“張! I went to college with someone named 張!”
You’re supposed to reciprocate and then address the addresser by name when this happens, but...
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Conventional, Pt. 2
One of my vendor contacts requests that we meet in person. (Up to this point we have only exchanged e-mails and talked on the phone.)
“Maybe we can meet up near the booth,” I suggest.
At the scheduled time, I notice a gray-suited middle-aged man on the expo floor waving an arm at me from about twenty yards out. He has never seen me before, never seen a picture of me, and the exhibition hall is...
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Conventional, Pt. 1
I get a message that the marketing team has secured a table for twenty at a steakhouse near the convention center. It ends with Join us if you can.
Unfortunately my flight gets in late — at least that’s what I plan to say — so I miss out on a night of managers ordering martinis and predicting fallout from the next round of restructuring.
At the check-in desk, a man tells me...
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“Dude, he’s got like this spiritual jazz, late-Marvin Gaye song thing...”
– A bearded guy on Frankencorner — who, it should be known, had this dismounted-bike, skewed-tweed-driver cap, Noxzema-sheen talk thing going.
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Criteria Collection
A Korean, a Hawaiian, a Filipino, and a Chinaman walk into a taco joint. (I feel the need to do this from time to time: listen to the youngsters talk.)
“I don’t date Asians,” the Korean declares. I remember hearing this spiel when I first met him a year and a half ago.
“Why not?” asks the Hawaiian.
“White girls are just more fun,” he replies. “I...
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Wabbit Season
The guy at the end of the table — let’s call him Kemosabe — asks me, “So what part of the Philippines are you from?”
“Actually I’m from Indiana.”
“Oh really — your parents, too?”
“No. They’re from Taiwan.”
The man’s wife, who is sitting next to me, decides to clarify (more for her husband’s sake...
March 2013
17 posts
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One-Thirty, Chair Five
A stocky Asian man in a black leather jacket appears and starts going around, chair to chair, handing out his business card. In the mirror I can see some heads perking up — including the one on the guy standing behind me with the clippers. He turns around, and the Asian man promptly opens up a thick black binder full of photos of Yamako Shears.
“Can I see a number six?” my...
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Tracers
I will never know exactly what set it off. It might have been the panic I felt in the cab ride to the ER, or the sight of a syringe of lidocaine being emptied through the callus at the base of my left pinkie, or the audible squoosh as the orthopedist yanked the joint back into place. (“Makes a funny sound, doesn’t it?”) Maybe it was the tetanus shot. Or a reaction to the...
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“I’ve been listening to him since I was a teenager growing up in Pakistan and got...”
– Mohsin Hamid, on John Lee Hooker (New York Times)
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Court
I share the post-game table for five with the Captain, a newlywed, and a secret couple that has been recently outed.
This couple met on the court, and I was there. Actually, all five of us were there, but it happened right in front of me, close enough that I almost feel like I was part of it. He was late for the game, she was the new kid on the roster, and as he walked onto the court she asked...
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“I lived there for three, four, five years. I guess it was almost eight years.”
– One of my friends, on his tenure in Williamsburg. I, too, am a frequent disseminator of aggressive rounding errors. An eight might round down to three, or a ten down to a five. In other words, I am seventy-nine years old.
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Cartographake
What if you could selectively scrub from your Google/Yelp maps all the places you’d rather forget (instead of waiting for them to vanish on their own)?
What would the map look like for, say, eight million users? The Top 100 Most Willfully Forgotten Places in New York — what do these places have in common? Just bad feng shui? There must be something else…
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Detour
It’s an easy walk from Queensboro Plaza to Court Square (a stretch that used to be well-known, I’m told, for picking up hookers), but with the windchill as it is I’m better off bailing from the 7 near Café Columbia and catching the bus from Williamsburg. (“Weekend Service” they call it. Service schmervice…)
By eight o’clock, the grate is pulled down over the front window, but the lights are on...
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krinklekut asked: You posted about a dog with it's head within the bars of a fence not too long ago. Just wanted to let you know that that dog's name is Aura. (:
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February 2013
12 posts
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Harmony Five
As I wait for the next R train to Astoria, a quintet of stocky black men walks over to the bench on the platform. Two of them sit down next to me while the other three gather around. One of the younger ones is asking, “Front or back? Front or back?”
The shortest one standing is the leader — he’s older, with a white beard and a blue coat. He’s holding a hat full of...
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Presence
Who comes to work on Presidents’ Day? At my office, a majority. The absent minority falls into a few categories:
Married staff with young kids.
Divorced staff who have the (young) kids over the long weekend.
Single, Gen-Y staff who are skiing, sightseeing, or road-tripping somewhere.
For the ones who choose to come in, the office feels older, quieter, less hectic. As we do our work, some of...
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Nose Job
The frames feel snug, but the man sitting across from me with the optical pliers has his doubts.
“Now…you have the hayseon bridge,” he says, squinting again at my nose. “So today we adjust but maybe if not quite working you always can come back and we try again, okay?”
I nod. Then it hits me that with a market of a billion-plus hayseons, surely there must be...
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Map Quest
At the post-game table for three, the captain reveals to us his plan for Thursday — pick her up at the airport, flowers, Shari’s Berries, late dinner.
“Whatchew guys up to for Valentine’s Day?”
“Nothing going on,” I say. (This could be a lie, I realize.)
“I’ve got a B-school mixer on Friday,” says our ringer. “Not so sure about...
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Junior
On the walk over from the gym, I notice a guy from one of the opposing teams tagging along with us. He’s a friend of a friend of someone I know, and now he is talking to me.
“You got hops, man,” he says.
“Thanks…Uh, you play in one of the leagues?”
“Naw, naw. In fact, this is the first time I’ve played in twenty years.”
“You played in...
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Deficit
I’ve been walking less and less. Is it because there’s now less time to mosey? Or is it something else — maybe a lack of reasons to ramble?
I leave early so I can walk through the park for a few minutes, which is long enough to catch a poodle donning a purple sweater and an interception in a touch football game. I forgot my hat and my ears are starting to sting. In fifteen...
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Slice and Dice
Over a post-game slice on the Upper West Side, I listen as the driver grills a marketing strategist on her trajectory from entrepreneur to tech start-up hire to Bain Capital consultant to MBA student to her current gig at an incumbent bureaucratic hierarchy.
I suppose it makes sense — that after exhausting yourself on the court, you let the workout mentality bleed into life outside the...
January 2013
11 posts
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Late Night Criteria
I remember standing in the cold with these two a year ago on a subway platform thirty blocks from here. We still trade notes on people and restaurants, watch bad movies, talk about silly things — like “top five celebrities you would bang,” for example.
“Ryan Reynolds. Ben Affleck. Ryan Gosling…um, Michael Ealy. And that guy from Sweet Home Alabama.”
...
