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benign neglect doesn't really work
Thursday, August 2 2001
When I was walking Sally this morning in Prospect Park, we heard some random woman make the same effusively-surprised inhale-gasp that Gretchen always makes. Sally perked up immediately; for an instant this not-especially-commonplace utterance had fooled her into thinking Gretchen had snuck into the park.
Gretchen was spending the evening with one of her friends so I arranged to meet one of my internet friends, Jami of whatever-whenever.net in her East Village neighborhood at a dive bar called the Holiday Cocktail Lounge. I took the L subway line eastward from 7th Avenue at what turned out to be rush hour and found myself jammed into the middle of a subway car for seven long blocks.
The Holiday Cocktail Lounge on St. Mark's Place and 1st Avenue had a familiar faded and cracked vinyl dinginess permeated by the accumulated stank of many hundreds of thousands of cigarettes. But only a dozen or so people were there at this time and the atmosphere was surprisingly cozy and pleasant. Beer choices seemed to be limited to Budweiser and Heineken, so I ordered one of the latter, suffering this time as I had many times before from temporary amnesia about how much I hate the stuff.
Jami was in one of the cracked vinyl booths not smoking a cigarette, a virtual Neolithic dream girl in the materializing context of sidestreet East Village New York, circa 2001. She was drinking a Budweiser.
So we talked about stuff for awhile; mostly job-related (hers) at first and then on to how her father is just like Willy Loman, the chief protagonist in Death of a Salesman, happily dispensing advice on how to get ahead at business until one day early in her career she was earning more than he was.
After drinking some shots of Jack Daniels and a couple more beers, Jami's action-packed schedule called for a visit to a nearby gallery to look at some "graffiti art" on canvas. Since I had nothing better to do and it was on the way to my subway stop, I joined her.
We came upon a mostly MTV-friendly gangsta scene spilling happily out of the gallery, each constituent carrying a plastic cup of keg beer in hand. I wondered if anyone in need of a beer could possibly keep walking past a gallery throwing such a party; certainly no one there knew who I was and I was able to get a cup of beer unchallenged. But I wasn't especially struck by the art, which seemed constrained and fragmented by the tiny canvases. Graffiti art is all about scale and momentary dazzle, not faux-studious examination up close.
At this particular opening was another of Jami's online/offline friends, one Dante Woo. He was wearing some sort of loosely-knitted white skull cap and keeping a low profile but I felt as if I could talk to him freely since he is, you know, an online person. In New York, by the way, people say "on line" to mean "in line" and it always makes me terribly confused. When people say "I was on line for two hours trying to get tickets," my first interpretation is that they were attempting a bit of e-commerce (people still call it that, right?) and found themselves dealing with an overburdened server across a slow modem connection.
I went back to work briefly to check up on a bunch of changes I've been making to a website for "a major punk rock summer tour." There wasn't anything much I could do at this late hour and I was kind of drunk, so I took the subway home. Gretchen had a bowl of cold pasta waiting for me and I didn't heed her advice to nuke it.
[REDACTED]
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