The story of homelessness

Uncheerful interior, and an air of many people having recently passed through; the floors were like the insides of old suitcases, with forgotten small things in the corners. Bent window blinds; tragic, drooping, bright-green shower curtain; dark hallway opening onto two bare bedrooms. 

The above is a description of the inside of a homeless shelter in South East Bronx of New York City. 

Ian Frazier writes a heart-stopping story on the homeless of this city and as is characteristic of a New Yorker narrative, there are no discernible heroes or villains held responsible for either exacerbation or amelioration of the malaise of homelessness in what is considered to be the nation's most obscenely wealthy and consumerist cities. 

The homeless themselves become characters in a strange landscape that looks and feels like the landscape of the underworld that has no intersection whatsoever, except in the form of paternalism and policies, with the over world. 

Mayor Bloomberg is a frieze-like figure with a pair of blue eyes" that "twinkle" like those of Santa Clause's in the Coca Cola ads from the 1950s, yet says Frazier, Bloomberg is the contra-Claus person, whose eyes turn "icy" when the homeless look into them.

The best parts of the story are the scenes themselves; while on a warm Saturday night, the city itself is "hivelike, humming, fabulously lit, and rocking with low, thrilling, Daisy Buchanan-like laughter," the shelters pose a starkly contrasting picture:

More families came out, accompanied by a woman with a clipboard. People got sorted out into the right vehicles. Kids slept on people’s shoulders, except for a toddler named Jared, who was stagger-walking to and fro. He bumped against the legs of the man who was sweeping and a woman watching him picked him up and said to the sweeper, “Sorry—my bad.” Soon all the passengers were aboard, the vehicles’ doors closed, and the red tail-lights came on. Slowly the buses drove off, followed by the van. Nighttime departures and arrivals occupy the subbasement of childhood memory. The guy sweeping and the muttering man and the woman with the clipboard and the reporter taking notes existed in a strange, half-unreal state of being part of someone else’s deepest memories a lifetime from now. An orange had fallen from a bag lunch and lay beside the curb. The muttering man picked it up and looked at it and rubbed it and put it in his pocket.

The homeless according to Frazier suffer the kind of instability that exiles experience especially when they acquire the status of the fugitive and the unwanted. Yet homelessness has also morphed into an eerie form of institutionalized city-living as well:

Homelessness is a kind of internal exile that distributes people among the two hundred and thirty-six shelters around the city and keeps them moving. In this restlessness, the homeless remind me of the ghostly streaks on photos of the city from long ago, where the camera’s slow shutter speed could capture only a person’s blurry passing. Of all the homeless people who gave me their cell-phone numbers, only two—Marcus (Country) Springs and a woman I talked to briefly named Rebeca Gonzzales—could still be reached after a few weeks had passed. That their cell phones continued to work made them also photographable, and Springs’s portrait accompanies this article.

Hail to thee monarch Bloomberg, mere mayor thou never wert

I learnt this from reading books on English history: Whenever a particular monarch ruled in England for a long period of time, ushering in relative peace and stability, and subjects got used to the tempo of the prevailing reign, a kind of anxiety set in toward the period's "ending."

Thus a sort of darkness seeped into the national psyche (if there is such a psyche) when the era of the first Elizabeth rolled in; likewise, the long reign of Queen Victoria generated a fear of uncertainty lest she died in the 19th century.

Then there are those longish reigns that people can't wait to see the end of, because in many ways such reigns have been anti-people and the leader has been more disliked than liked.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the leader of one of the globe's most complex urban habitats--New York City--has been disliked by many for his monologic brand of leadership--one in which the leader couldn't care less about having having dialogues with others before making a decision--but his reign of 12 years has been one for the books: Bloomberg somehow transcends judging a political leadership on mere economic and other material grounds. The city has got to be a more economically-stabler entity, and the crime rate is phenomenally negligible, but what makes Bloomberg stands out is his tremendous aura.

As Frank Bruni writes, in the context of the forthcoming Mayoral elections, Bloomberg's stature makes every other candidate look small, crass selfish and even buffoonish (like Anthony Weiner).

Bloomberg has managed to emerge as noble:

He’s just brought us bikes. He’s determined to bring us composting. He means to vanquish smoking, he means to vanquish obesity and he’s intent on protecting us from the ever stormier seas, after which he means to vanquish global warming itself.

Michael Bloomberg, in other words, has become a light in and of itself. So much of a light is he on his own terms, that he tried to persuade Hilary Clinton to run for the Mayorship in 2014. The light that he is, he gave a supremely down-to-earth and yet provocative commencement speech at Stanford University. Compared to what he said, the one's delivered by Oprah, Julie Andrews and others, excluding perhaps, Michele Obama, sounded like baubles.

Here is the speech:

Study in contrasting cultures

A glimpse of street fashion in the Bronx.

When asked about sartorial inspirations, the young residents of the Bronx scratch the surface of the abysmal present. They are inspired by, they say, figures like Rihanna and Kayne West.

They have little sense of history, ergo the responses lack depth.

The one guy wears "Timbs" all year round and he can't explain his choice, except in terms of a personal, whimsical choice. Sounds more comical than anything.

A glimpse of street fashion in Long Island City, an emergent space for hipster culture. 

These guys speak of drawing inspiration from the 50s, 60s and 70s. One dude even describes the buttons on his coat as "boring," showing an eye for detail and a desire to name details.

The responses are studied; you learn more than what individuals wear; you learn a bit of history as well. 

The second culture is more memorable; the first one will disappear in no time, when the Paul Newman jacket wearing crowd will elbow out the crowd that wear "timbs" all year round and carry mismatching backpacks because "girls like it."

Mapping the schmoozing gene

The secret to the success of Russ & Daughters, New York City's iconic store that sells the most delicious smoked fish and other accessories (T and I have availed of it), is "schmoozing."

That's according to Mark Russ Federman, who has written an eponymously titled book on the store and its history.

Joel Russ, a Polish-Jewish immigrant of the early 20th century, opened the store in 1914, after he saved enough money from selling herring on an open pushcart.

When Joel's three pretty daughters came to work at the store in 1935, the store was named "Russ & Daughters."

The book has funny tidbits about Joel Russ:

He had to arrange his daughters' marriages because it was hard for them to date, as they smelled too fishy and were too tired to socialize at the end of an extremely hard day's work. But Joel retained the "right of first refusal" and dismissed potential suitors who were not strong enough to schlep barrels of herring, or smart enough to add up a column of numbers on a brown paper bag. Having ascertained that a certain future son-in-law would look good behind the counter, he would tell his daughter, "fine, you can marry him."

Joel was a non-romantic (as most successful business people reportedly are), and called his wife "Zug" which loosely translates from Yiddish into "Hey you!"

Apart from schmoozing, the business culture of Russ & Daughters has also shown remarkable adaptability and has evolved with the local food culture of the Lower East Side, a locality that is now rife with the culture of hipsterism. 

Now they sell sandwiches with names like Super Heeb, Boychick, Shtetl, The Meshugge. The Super Heeb has Sesame bagel, horseradish cream cheese, whitefish salad, and wasabi-flavored flying fish roe.

Death of a piano

Played, probed, poked, passed by, dismembered.

By the end it's as if there were no piano on the sidewalk at all.

The death of objects is sadder than that of humans, who at least leaves behind some remains, some reminder of having existed.

A museum of the present

MoRUS, or the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space opened yesterday.

MoRUS, as its website says "preserves the rich history of grassroots movements in New York City’s East Village and showcases the unique public spaces for which the neighborhood is renowned."

According to a review, the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space re-conceives the traditional role of the museum by becoming a "shrine" to the "recent radical history" of New York City's East Village:

The radical history ranges from the "1988 riots in Tompkins Square Park, the standoffs with the police and developers over community gardens, the formation of squats, the civil disobedience actions waged by bicyclists for more bike-friendly streets." 

One of the highlights of the Museum exhibits is the famous bicycle-powered generator, which was used to generate electricity during Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Zuccotti Park.

Imagine this: Most museums are visited by folks who wish to have a glimpse of the past. MoRUS's visitors include people who have been part of the events that are enshrined by the Museum as "history." 

According to Bill Dipaola, a founder of the Museum, visitors include "people who got beat up by police in the park who are going to walk in here. They lost their gardens. They lost their homes. A lot of people didn’t do too well during gentrification.”

A new kind of travel

Innovation is everywhere, and why should the tourism industry be spared the ravages of innovation?

A new kind of tourism is said to be blossoming, especially in New York City, and it's called "immersion" or "experiential travel."

Does this mean that traditional tourism was non-experiential? Not quite; perhaps it was a bit fake in the sense that tourists would prefer to tour a place in the conventional way of putting up in a hotel and doing the recommended sight seeing. The experience could've been a faux experience in the way in which David Brooks describes a typical African Safari to be faux.

Writing about the time when he took his son to an African safari, Brooks reflects on how the American teen chose to live in a ramshackle camp under the guidance of a wise tribal chief, instead of living in a Holiday Inn or a Hyatt Regency hotel. Brooks had argued that experientially speaking there is nothing "really African" about living in a comfortable hotel; to experience a new place is to be prepared to be unhinged from comfort. Comfort and convenience can be bought with money, but experience is priceless and extreme inconvenience is part of it.

In a nutshell Brooks junior was able to experience a real African Safari, not one mediated by an English-speaking guide.

Experiential travel is somewhat along similar lines:

[It] implicitly shuns sightseeing as bourgeoisie pillage [...] and is meant to sink you deep into whatever world you are visiting, pushing a vacation toward anthropology. [...] The experiential traveler does not arrive at Kennedy Airport and immediately go shopping on upper Madison Avenue. She takes a drawing class; she rides the Lexington Avenue line at rush hour, she embeds, and presumably returns to Brussells or Seattle with an impressively nuanced understanding of the differences in commercial enterprise between Fifth Avenue and Broadway in the 20s.  

And the new habitation of choice for experiential travelers is the typical New Yorker's home.

Now I was thinking of inviting Scandinavians to truly experience an immersion in the outer boroughs of the city, not just Manhattan. I am thinking of the Bronx. As I speak, I visualize a Swedish immersion in the Bronx.