The Sold Coast

i hate titling posts

2006-10-09T17:05:00.000-07:00

A few quick notes on today’s news-story and editorial about tree removal in Fitzgerald-Holota Park:

No matter how you feel about the disposability of trees that were there in the triangle – and that argument was made by many, and not only by those who consider Schenkman-Kushner model developers – you’d have to admit that the growing treelessness of Jersey City is becoming a serious problem. Every time there’s a new project Downtown (which is just about every day), the sidewalks fronting the lots under construction are deforested, scraped and hosed down. We’re starting to look like Ho Chi Minh City after a napalm attack.
The Schenkman-Kushner building absurdly called “Grove Pointe” is not going to be a condo-only structure. There’ll be rental units in there, too. This according to my last conversation with the builders. The main problem with Grove Pointe (besides its name) is that it’s now clear that it’s going to be ugly as hell. At least that abandoned gymnasium had some dilapidated charm.
Rikki wanted there to have been more community dialogue about the fate of the PATH Station Park. I’d advise her to be careful what she wishes for. Greenspace advocates are loud and occasionally even articulate, but I’m pretty sure the vast majority of Jersey City-ians couldn’t give a damn and will welcome any kind of restoration, no matter how many trees go down. Nobody liked the park the way it was; I think even the vagrants that used to panhandle there complained about it.
There was community input in the Grove Point redevelopment: after community outcry, Schenkman-Kushner ended up working with the Harsimus Cove Association on the final plan, including and especially the park. What you’re looking at is the compromise.

And that, to me, really is the point. You can get the developers to knock a few stories off of their monstrosities, and plant a greensward, but when it comes down to it, it’s still going to look awful. Developments of this scale suck, and there’s nothing to be done about it. As long as Jersey City keeps approving hi-rises, we’re going to continue our slide into total unlivability.

2006: let's try this again

2006-02-21T09:26:00.000-08:00

Jersey City Vibe has asked me to write a bi-weekly events column for their site. Even though I haven’t been too engaged with what’s been going on in Jersey City lately, I agreed. I’m going to be writing capsule previews of three different musical events. I’ll also be doing a brief, five-question interview with one of the artists previewed. Here’s the first issue of the column – sort of a trial version of what I’ll be doing:

http://jerseycityvibe.com/content/view/224/66/1/0/

The name of the column is Breaking The Silence. During 2005, I’d come to think of Jersey City as the Land of Silence, and not just because 111 was shut down and Uncle Joe’s was knocked down. I’m also breaking my own silence about Jersey City, since I have had very little to say about it since the fall of the Arts Center. I’d like to change that, but I really can’t do it without your help. So if you’re involved in any musical event taking place in Jersey City – or even if you know of a musical event taking place in Jersey City – please let me know about it. I’m actively looking for interesting things to cover.

The next column will likely be posted on Wednesday, March 1.

paging through the charts, part one

2006-01-20T10:45:00.000-08:00

It's been fun putting together the historic charts for the Critics Poll. Leafing through sixteen years of ballots has been instructive, and it's reminded me of lots of great records that have been mouldering on my shelves: Blowout Comb by Digable Planets, Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite, Fun Trick Noisemaker by Apples In Stereo, Ghostface's Supreme Clientele, to name just a few. A few people have written in and asked me whether I regret any of my votes; the answer is, of course, yes, but I haven't changed any of my picks to save face (and I've got the yellowing old ballots to prove it). Instead of doctoring the results, I've decided to go through the charts and add some commentary here.

Album of the year is the category I take most seriously, and I'm pretty sure I only messed up twice. In '93, I picked Ultra Vivid Scene's Rev over Exile In Guyville, and in retrospect, that was the wrong call. But everybody knows who Liz Phair is, and UVS has mostly been forgotten, so I don't regret keeping Kurt Ralske's name alive. You could argue that Sex Packets was superior to Robyn Hitchcock's Eye, and on some days I'd agree with you -- but both had their rough stretches, and in truth, 1990 lacked that one big hit-it-out-of-the-park album. No, '99 was my major boo-boo, and the only year where I allowed myself to vote strategically to influence the poll's outcome. I was afraid that 69 Love Songs was going to win, and I didn't want to have the same champ as Pazz & Jop did. Shamefully, I voted for Olivia Tremor Control, in part, in the hope that I'd tip the balance in their direction. As it turned out, The Magnetic Fields won anyway, and I ended up with a best-of-year pick that, while pretty excellent, was not a genuine top album. Hefner's The Fidelity Wars deserved my vote.

The voters' choices have been pretty decent. I don't think Let It Come Down was the best album of 2001 either, but that was a seriously split decision, and perhaps it was compensation for shorting Spiritualized out of the top spot in 1997. I've got my problems with 69 Love Songs and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, but there's no denying they're both epochal releases. I can dig it that my Jersey voters gave the laurel wreath to the Wrens in '03, but when they turned around in '04 and plumped for the Arcade Fire, I knew something was a little off. But more on that when I announce this year's results.

My single of the year lists are dominated by rap and R&B. Nas has won top honors three times, and really deserved another -- "One Mic" should have been taken the category in 2001. If I could do it over, I probably wouldn't put "Looking Through Patient Eyes" at the head of my '93 list, but I was in the throes of PM Dawn-mania at that time. The voters have, in general, picked stone classics and great songs; "Bitter Sweet Symphony" is the notable, and regrettable, exception.

What strikes me the most about my best singer list is how many of my picks are still my absolute favorite vocalists. Suzanne Vega was my first designee, way back in 1988; she could put out an album tomorrow and she'd be the odds-on favorite to get my nomination in '06. Elvis Costello was tops for me in '89, and runner-up in '03, and I believe he reaffirms his status as the best straight-song singer in rock history with each release. Tracy Bonham, Liz Phair, Laura Cantrell, Erykah Badu: these names show up again and again on my paper ballots. The one name I'm surprised not to see is Sinead O'Connor's. I voted for Robyn Hitchcock in 1990, year of "Nothing Compares 2U", and the only explanation for that is temporary insanity.

The voters like Britt Daniel more than I do (although I like him a lot), and they keep nearly electing Jack White. Time will tell whether they put him over the top in '05. What perplexes me is all the votes for Tori Amos. That woman can do everything but sing; she nearly ruins her own material with those bombastic performances.

Another thing I've learned from paging through my old ballots: I will take any reasonable opportunity to vote for Slick Rick for best rapper. Do I believe that Rick The Ruler is the greatest rapper ever? Come to think of it, I kinda do. Otherwise, my polls are studded with idiosyncratic picks: Ras Kass, Fatlip, Dres of the Black Sheep. I seem to have a peculiar taste for sidekicks, or color commentator-halves of two-men crews -- I like Trugoy ahead of Pos, Big Boi ahead of Andre, and most indefensibly to the average hip-hop head, Mike G ahead of Afrika Babybam (twice). It might read a little weird, but honestly, there's nothing here I feel like taking back.

I'd estimate that over the past sixteen years, there have been about 400 different Critics Poll voters. That means that 399 people who like rap music less than I do have voted in the category. (Sorry, Steven, but you know it's true.) It shows up on the right side of the chart -- Black Thought won twice and placed once, which is pretty inexplicable, and Adam Horowitz, aka the amusing but unskilled Ad-Roc, took the laurels in '92. At least the voters have never tapped Eminem.

Anybody who has followed my rock writing over the past decade can probably recite my choices for most overrated from memory. The left-hand column of this chart is a compendium of my favorite whipping-boys and girls: I voted for Radiohead twice, Beck three times, Madonna three times, and The Roots, Elliott Smith, and Tricky once apiece. Almost nobody agreed with me when I cast these votes, and nobody agrees with me now, but I never look to posterity to ratify anything other that the most watered-down version of contemporary wisdom. In other words, I expect to be coping with Radiohead and Madonna plaudits for the rest of my life. And no, I do not regret my vote for Nirvana in this category. The Critics Poll voters have developed a proclivity for slamming the latest hip act out of New York City; hopefully they'll turn their opprobrium on We Are Scientists and Morningwood in 2006.

Just check out the voters' choices for worst song of the year: with the exception of "Hey Ya", the song that ate Critics Poll '03, this is an unimpeachable catalogue of annoying music. Some of this stuff I'd forgotten about completely -- Dishwalla, for instance, or Live's awful "I Alone". I'm usually Alanis Morissette's biggest defender, but I won't go to the wall for "You Oughta Know" ; and while I liked the Spice Girls fine, I can't fault the voters for slamming the infinitely irritating "Wannabe". My own picks are a little weirder, mostly because I don't really believe there is such a thing as a bad pop song. Thus, I've tended to call out songs that I consider ideologically bankrupt: "Pretty Fly For A White Guy", "Mosh", that unspeakable number by Meredith Brooks. Nonetheless, this category does contain my single biggest blunder in Critics Poll history -- my breathtakingly bad call in '89. "Just Like Hemingway" is actually a really good song: it's an excellent example of fake New Order. I was under the influence of my freshman-year roommate, who loathed anything fey and was always trying to get me to listen to the Seeds and Roky Erickson. Worst of all, my vote blocked me from trashing one of the most loathesome songs in the history of the universe -- "Love Shack", by the B-52s. Forgive me, Blue Clocks Green, wherever you are.

My best producer votes can be broken up into two halves -- the late eighties and early nineties, when I split time chasing Mitchell Froom from project to project and opting for Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine whenever he crawled out of his cave, and the late nineties and early nothings, when I voted for Timbaland every year. Last season's call was probably the most questionable I've made -- I decided to be contrary and tap Madlib, and now I can't remember why. I'm pretty sure Kanye West didn't deserve it, though; he's too conservative, and there are too many genuine envelope-pushers in hip-hop to be voting for a guy with a formula. In general, though, the voters' choices have been impeccable: no matter what you want to say about Blur's fussy period, Stephen Street's production was always pretty tight.

Okay, more later. I'm looking forward to January 28. Get those ballots in, if you haven't already.

meltdown!

2006-01-05T10:50:00.001-08:00

Last September, the hard drive on our year-old computer got erased. Actually, that's the wrong way to put it; we erased the hard drive ourselves by reinstalling Windows upon the recommendation of a Dell customer service rep. This turned out to be a really boneheaded move. There wasn't anything wrong with the drive --our video card had been corrupted, probably from me watching so many rap videos on Launch.

I didn't lose anything from the Tris McCall Report, since I've got the website backed up from here to Indiana. My bright-eyed optimism about the historic preservation ordinance of '04 is still preserved for eternity, or at least until the next big computer virus knocks out the entire grid. But foolishly, I'd never bothered to save a copy of my e-mail list. So in one moment, my preferred means of contact with the outside world evaporated.

I hate phones, see. I hardly ever use my land-line, and I don't have a cellphone. As far as I can tell, the entire purpose of cellphones is to enable people to call you and tell you they're going to be late. I'm not going to participate in that; if you tell me you're going to be somewhere at noon, you'd better be there at noon. If it hadn't been for the Internet and e-mail, I would now be a grouchy hermit living in a cave, rather than what I am today: a grouchy semi-public figure who feigns interest in the world outside the cave.

No, seriously, folks, I love you all; I just don't want to have to talk to you on the phone. Consequently, I built that e-mail list up into a monster: at the time of the crash, it was over a thousand names. And I don't harvest e-mail addresses at gigs, or put people in the database whose full names I don't know. Moreover, I never automated it; when I sent out a mass mailing, I took an hour to scroll through the entire thousand entries and consider to myself whether an argument could be made that the person whose box I was clicking was interested in what I was sending.

In the late Nineties, I used to memorize e-mail addresses; chances are, I still remember a few defunct ones of yours. But ever since I switched over to Outlook Express, I started counting on the computer to do the memorizing for me. This meant that when I was forced to reconstitute my list from memory, I ended up spitting the bit: I blanked even on people with whom I corresponded regularly. Of the thousand addresses I lost, I was only able to recall fifty or sixty off the top of my head. I felt like an idiot.

Our annual Critics Poll has always been great fun for me. After erasing our hard drive, the votes you cast were also incredibly useful. Because 95% of all Critics Poll ballots are submitted through the Internet, I had a record of e-mail addresses dating back to the mid-Nineties. Last year, I complained privately that the poll had gotten too big, and had become more ordinary than contrary; but this year, for selfish reasons, I was super-grateful that so many of you had voted.

Looking back at seventeen years of submissions makes me realize how cool it is that we've been at this game since we were teenagers. It also helps me get some historical perspective. So to hype the poll a little (I am pretty sure it's going to be simulcast on Jersey City Vibe this year), but mostly for my own ill amusement and for yours, I've decided to make some charts of winners and losers over the years. I've started with singers and rappers, but tomorrow, I'm going to make a chart for "most overrated", and continue from there. Poll date has been moved up to the 28th of January, but unless you really want to fill out the five-page torture test ballot, go ahead and submit the online form EZ any old time. I'll be waiting.

posted on the solstice

2005-12-13T07:13:00.000-08:00

Every December I take about a week -- the week of the shortest days, usually -- and write something about all of the radio singles I heard that year. After months of writing hyperbole, wishcasting, and other pieces of hopeful prose on behalf of bands, this is my way of blowing off steam. I get pretty obnoxious. This is because:

I am obnoxious,
Rap music brings out the savage G in me,
There is really no way I can hurt R. Kelly or Tony Yayo with anything I say.

The Pop Music Abstract is something of a yearly tradition. It allows me to pull from a database of lame witticisms when I'm writing up the results of the Critics Poll in early February. It also helps me determine what's important to me, and it helps me understand the year I just lived through. I considered getting with the program and posting it in a weblog-like format, but then decided it didn't really suit the content, or the schtick.

So I posted it twice: first, in that maligned green-and-purple-on-black format that I favor, and then in a black-on-white sissy version, complete with an index. I don't know how many people read the entire thing through from top to bottom (as I admittedly intend them to), but this year, if you'd like to jump around and skip the stuff you aren't interested in, I've made it easy for you.

It is harder and harder to get people to read writing on the Internet if you don't conform to the weblog logic; audiences are unfitting themselves to encounter prose in any other way. I sorta expected that to happen. But I've decided that I'm going to swim in the other direction. I like the way the Tris McCall Report looks and feels, I like all the broken links and dead ends and general chaos. And that ought to be good enough for me. I may do a sissy version of the Critics Poll this year. But I will definitely be keeping it old school.

no pretender can wear this crown

2005-12-09T15:34:00.000-08:00

Well, that couldn't have surprised anybody. I guess there were a few Norcross types in South Jersey who were pushing hard for Representative Andrews, but even they must have caught the scent in the wind. From now on, Hudson County runs this state. And if you happen to be from the sliver of Hudson County where our new Governor lives, so much the better for you. Forget Drumthwacket; state politics now revolves around the Hoboken Tea Company condominium development, and wherever else the new Gold Coast royalty chooses to hang out.

Here in Downtown Jersey City, the current thirteenth district representative is treated like a cartoon villain: a pantomime political boss pulling strings from the top of the palisade. In Union City, where I lived for eight years, Robert Menendez was considered something of a superhero. The truth is in between, of course. I have voted for Menendez six times -- eight if you count the primaries. (I don't). I don't regret any of those votes. The PoliticsNJ piece discussed the congressman's instrumentality in reorienting Hudson County back toward the Democratic party. I think he can be better understood as the manifestation of other trends -- ones that have reached their culmination in the blue glass towers of the waterfront.

I one wrote a song about Robert Menendez that isn't really about Robert Menendez at all. The version that you all know -- the one on Shootout At The Sugar Factory, and which I've performed with the Trippers at Maxwell's and the Mercury Lounge and the Steps Of City Hall -- isn't even about politics. I think of the album cut as a desperate song about why we even bother to create political leaders for ourselves, and that weird, hopeful hallucination we indulge in during election season. But there are two more verses of that song that I almost never perform. These verses are more sinister, more cynical, and more specifically about the local political footsoldiers I encountered while living on the front lines. In honor of the ascension of the Prince of Bergenline Avenue to the United States Senate, I present those lyrics here without further comment. Sing to the tune of "Robert Menendez Basta Ya!"; you all know it by now.

We are your only hope
We are your advocates
Ten in the evening door to door
We keep the master list
We beat the drums and break the thumbs when the money's late
We cover every wall with posters of our candidate

Now there's floodlights and benches in the enterprise zone
And curfew is at ten o'clock so get your punk ass home
We got a seven mile extension on the Number 2 bus
We got a hundred thousand bucks in a slush fund trust

Hey new American
Don't know a single thing
Spend every morning getting drunk out by the jungle gym
You want a steady job?
Want a productive youth?
Round up your friends
Do what we tell you in the ballot booth

They cry corruption and spell our last names wrong
Sometimes they lock us up, but we don't stay in for long
Who gives a damn about you?
Who else will take your calls
When your bastard landlord decides to break your balls?

thanks (mis)giving

2005-11-27T18:21:00.000-08:00

Thanks to everybody who's asked how -- and where -- I've been. I've had so many for-pay assignments to get done, and so many rock shows, that I've neglected this narrative. Yes, we're still here on Grand Street. No, I haven't been looking at apartments. Stephen Mejias guessed that the holiday season is the best time to find real estate bargains, and he's probably right. But I can't imagine moving during Christmas. Once we're all done giving each other presents, I'll look into springing myself from our flat.

Our landlord still seems to have no idea that our lease has ended. He hasn't raised our rent, and as prices in this neighborhood continue their insane rise, we continue to feel like we're getting away with something. That said, he still hasn't fixed the leak in the walls. He did, however, help us drag our old sofa out to the curb.

Many people have also asked after our mold. I am sure the mold appreciates the concern, and I will be sure to relay news of your curiosity to the colony. At the moment, it's out of sight. Hilary stretched plastic over the crack in the wall, and tacked it into place. Beneath the barrier, I imagine it is happily growing. At some point, the entire wall is going to have to be torn out and replaced. I expect we will be long gone by then.

Because the capricious god that organizes my affairs enjoys metadiscourse, I also find myself working on a grand, sweeping article about real estate in Downtown Jersey City. I am doing this for an unpretentious but functional local publication. It's not meant to be polemical or anything, so it's not going to be a confrontational piece. I also don't want to anger any of my sources. But as I write this, I'm also going to need an outlet for my frustrations, and for whatever is left of my social-crusading wit. This space isn't dead yet.

Anyway, I am still here, still queer, and still getting used to it.

my civic failure

2005-11-09T17:52:00.000-08:00

I hate the way the Internet has turned into a new version of talk radio with the number of annoying partisan channels approaching infinity, but at the risk of piling it on, I want to say something else about elections, and, more specifically, why they make me so sad. As I have written many times, I don't like democracy, and I distrust decisions made by majority rule. But this is the system we insist on, and since we do, it's on us to work with it as best as we can.

As I see it, there are three reasons why intelligent people cast votes. Well, four, really, but I'm ignoring those who cast their ballots for friends and neighbors whom they believe will give them favors. Those voters exist – you might even know a few of them – but they're the subject of a separate discussion.

Reason #1: you vote for the candidate who you believe has best demonstrated leadership ability. This could be organizational capacity, a way with people, or some kind of inspirational presence. Jim Florio was nobody's idea of a charismatic or messianic figure, but when I voted for him, I did so because the things he'd said genuinely inspired me. When Jesse Jackson gave that speech about two Americas at the '96 convention – one that has since been ripped off without attribution by every two-bit hack in Washington – that fired me up and inspired me to re-engage with the Democratic party. These were emotional decisions, but they weren't ones made in an intellectual vacuum. The decision to follow a leader – any leader – is always an emotional one, and is always an implicit referendum on that leader's character.

Reason #2: you vote for the candidate who seems to have demonstrated applied intellect and a mastery of policy issues. This strikes me as an inferior reason to support a politician than the first, since no layman can ever approach comprehensive and detailed knowledge of anything other than his immediate preoccupations. But I think it is fair – and probably often right – to generalize from a candidate's public appearances. People often wondered why I was so enthusiastic about Albert Gore, and why I have always been willing to argue so passionately in favor of his candidacies. I did so because he struck me as so much better prepared and attentive to detail than his opponents that he earned my immediate respect. When Bob Dole was senate majority leader (yes, people, I am an admirer of Bob Dole), he took stands on hundreds of issues that were contrary to what I believed would be best for the country. But I always had faith that he'd studied the issue and reasoned his way to a thoughtful conclusion. I may have disagreed with him, but I never kidded myself that I knew better than Senator Dole did.

Reason #3: you vote for the candidate who best resembles you. This is, I believe, the reason that most votes are cast, including, I am sad to say, almost all of my own. In my more big-headed moments, I often compliment myself on the comprehensiveness of my self-education, and I fancy myself peculiarly suited for the ballot booth. But upon extended inspection, I see only the most marginal distinction between casting a ballot for a member of your ethnic group and casting one for a member of your policy or affinity group. Strip away everything you take for granted about political campaigns, and ask yourself: why am I really voting for Senator Jones? Is it actually because I believe Senator Jones is better for America (that abstract and indefinable concept), or is it because I believe that sophisticated and witty Senator Jones looks, acts, and thinks more like I do than Representative Hicks, his folksy challenger? I know very intelligent people who express contempt for "identity politics", and who then turn around and vote for a politician because that candidate's view of the environment or NAFTA or censorship of video games most closely resembles their own. Both acts do the same thing: they attempt to use the politician to extend the dominion of the voter, and to reward those who share her values and punish those who don’t.

Viewed this way, it is actually nobler for an immigrant Latino voter to choose representatives purely because they, too, are Latinos than it is for an educated and sophisticated voter to cast ballots based on individual policy preferences. The former act presupposes a community conscience and a wholesome belief in behaving in concert with neighbors. The latter simply instrumentalizes the candidate and turns him into an extension of the voter’s will. And whether you know it or not, when you vote for Senator Jones because you believe he is best positioned to discharge an agenda to which you swear fealty, you are secretly subordinating the politician to yourself. You have become the assessor, evaluating the candidate on his conformity to a slate of beliefs developed by you and those who think and act like you. Pressure groups actually send candidates policy checklists and administer percentile grades based on agreement with the “correct” positions; online surveys match voters with prospective officeholders based on preference quizzes. The assumption is that You the Voter have the roster in your head, and the candidate who best aligns himself with those on the answer key will win the right to receive the great gift of your vote.

To which I ask: who the hell are you? You are not a senator, or even a senator's aide; most likely, you are an aesthete of some sort with a heart that is at least two sizes too big for your own good, and at least four sizes too big for government. You are, of course, a democratic subject, and you have been taught that your opinion is just as good as the next man’s – or at least, you have learned to insist that it is, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. But because you’ve grown accustomed to fooling yourself into thinking that the role of the politician is to sign on to a policy slate developed by the advocacy group that best suits your taste and social stratum, you’ve absolved yourself of having to think at all. You can rest comfortably, knowing that there is a big enviable Truth burning out there on the plane of ideas – one you know by rote, and one which your local politician will fail to live up to by making any sort of compromise. And when he makes that compromise, he will not be a nuanced student of policy, or a studied, ambivalent thinker, or even a diplomat. He will be a coward, or a stooge, or corrupt, or an Idiot in Charge.

And this is the great failing and flaw of democracy, and the best reason I can think of to quit trying to ram it down the throats of other countries that may be on their way to developing something alternate: it creates contempt for leadership. It makes us disregard and often even despise the leadership qualities of its most prominent actors, it teaches us to insist on rigidity of thought over mercurial and adaptable vision, and in so doing, it drives natural leaders out of government and into the boardroom, or the music industry, or the crack dens. Now, this is the point where people think I’ve become a frontrunner or an establishmentarian in my old age, but actually, it’s just the opposite. Leadership is not the police, or the Big State. Leadership is the only force that stands half a chance against institutional authority – the wind that blows against the big sandcastles. Those with an interest in maintaining the status quo fear leadership most of all, and try to convince us that selecting and following an inspirational leader is tantamount to indoctrination. But it is altogether possible to maintain a critical perspective while responding emotionally and maintaining faith; in fact, it’s probably the only way to be a responsible and genuine civic actor.

I always hope to have the strength to vote for reason #1. Failing that, I will settle for reason #2. But when I am honest with myself, I can recognize that I almost always vote for the third reason: seeking out candidates who have “seen the light” on Important Issues (in other words, those who agree with me) or who live in my neighborhood and can thus be counted on to perform acts of heroism on behalf of my pals, or who somehow remind me of me. At base level, I voted for Jon Corzine because he lives in Hoboken. I’d argue that it’s a baby step toward recovery, since it suggests some rudimentary concern for community and a love for a particular place on the map. It’s instrumentalizing and cynical, and thus not a terribly noble reason. But I have to believe that it’s a better one than voting for Corzine because he agrees with me, or the version of me scripted by NJPIRG, or the NRA, or Air America, or the Democratic Party.

we have arrived too late to play the bleeding heart show

2005-11-07T16:41:00.000-08:00

Nothing good has ever come of a vote, but I vote anyway. It's a compulsion, like nail-biting. Tomorrow, I will push the little button next to Jon Corzine's name, and I will try to have some kind of emotion about it. I am not counting on inspiration or pride. I would settle for curiosity, or the mild excitement I associate with indeterminacy.

In New Jersey, these statewide contests always narrow before Election Day and feint toward drama. Then, the candidate that you always figured would win ends up winning. So much bluster, so much money spent, so much rhetoric, so many attack ads, and so little genuine consequence. In New Jersey, we often pretend that slander and dirty tricks during the course of an election are cute, but here was one was a campaign to test the patience of political enthusiasts on both sides. You might check poll data every day and use PoliticsNJ as your start page. If you weren't turned off when the candidates started using each other's ex-wives and girlfriends as campaign props, then the problem is you.

I have never been enthusiastic about Jon Corzine. In 2000, he spent $34 million dollars to deny Jim Florio the Senate seat he was born to fill. This time out, he's muscling aside Richard Codey. I understand that around here there is no worship as profound as the idolatry of the wallet, but I disliked the sense of entitlement with which he bulldozed both of his more experienced and more qualified rivals. I am pleased that Senator Corzine voted against the Iraq War, but I hardly consider that a politically courageous stand for a New Jersey legislator to take. No matter how many SUVs you see on Interstate 80, this is not tank country.

His opponent, Doug Forrester, accuses Corzine of coziness with the Democratic political organizations that dominate Jersey government. He is not blowing the cover off of anything here. Forrester's entire justification for running is his well-advertised belief that he's the man best suited to clean up the state -- a claim that is undermined by the candidate himself every time he gets on television and opens his mouth. No matter how often the Forrester camp pays for TV footage of Rudy Giuliani testifying to his graft-busting powers, the idea of this colorless, uncharismatic businessman successfully disentangling the cables of corruption and influence is so patently ridiculous that it practically satirizes itself.

An enormous -- though by no means all-determining -- problem with New Jersey politics is that a statewide candidate must commit to two separate media buys in some of the most expensive television markets in the world. This effectively prohibits all but multimillionaires from running for office. Moreover, running a campaign in New Jersey is so extraordinarily expensive that even the nation's richest men can't go it alone here. That means that both national parties inevitably get involved in the fight. The next thing you know, you're listening to debates about left and right and who is George Bush's lapdog. There is so much static in the Jersey air that we can't even have our own arguments.

We get what we deserve whether we participate or not, so I vote anyway. Tomorrow, at this time, surrounded by the usual sycophants, Jon Corzine will be giving his victory speech. Or he'll be conceding, and Forrester, who cannot seriously believe he's poised to steal this thing, will be pinching himself. No matter what the Senator says in his campaign lit, a vote for Corzine is a vote for the status quo: for the party organizations, and whatever is left of the McGreevey camp, the HCDO, and the old Lesniak-Lynch team that put the dumbass philanderer in the governor's mansion. I'll be casting that vote. Then, it'll be back to the rest of my day.

mischief night

2005-10-31T08:52:00.000-08:00

The ghouls are out on Franklin Street. They wear black shawls and keep single file on the sidewalk. At the corner of Greenpoint Avenue, they turn and laugh. The bottoms of their faces are stained red. One takes the plastic knife from his belt and twirls it in the air in front of him. This is how I know they are not real ghouls, but impostors. Ghouls don't use knives: their touch causes paralysis. They claw and bite their victims to death. I have read the Monster Manual, and cannot be hoodwinked so easily.

I am walking back from practice in a crushed shell on Kent, in a district of Brooklyn where every building warehouses bands. The closer I walk to the river, the darker it gets. At any moment, I could be slashed by a fey assailant wielding the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album. South of Greenpoint Avenue, Franklin Street has been rent by bulldozers. It's not the Big Dig or anything, but it breaks the rhythm of the asphalt. It is a work in progress, a new city pushing up through the cracks in the ground, or an old one sinking under the road.

I turn on Oak, and then on Guernsey. Tall, narrow aluminum-sided buildings rise along both sides of the street. A Polish-language version of "Every Breath You Take" plays in a third floor apartment. The band has taken pains to simluate the production of the record, but the singer sounds more like Bono than Sting. I wonder how "bo kazz you see" translates into Polish. Brooklyn is a good place to wonder, because there is always one person there who knows the answer to every question in the world. The trick is finding that person, and making sure she isn't drunk, or stoned, or cutting a take.

McCarren Park is deserted. It's late: we didn't get started until nine o'clock, and then took five, and took another five. Turning the clock back makes the night thicker than you'd guess. Ahead, I can see the lights of Bedford Avenue, the Turkey's Nest, video stores, kids with costumes, the whirl and sparkle of chiming guitars. But that could just be my mind playing tricks on me. You can't actually see music, you know; we rock writers just pretend we can in order to expand our limited metaphoric palettes.

I am boarding the L train, and heading back to the 14th Street PATH Train Station. I am returning to Jersey City for the third ride through the spin cycle. The first was exhilarating and disorienting; the second was old hat. You can only ride the Tilt-A-Whirl once before the patterns of motion become apparent, and the thrill wears off. Tomorrow, it will be exactly three ago that we loaded the last of Steve's things out of the Hi-Vue and into a truck after he'd made the insane decision to move on Hallowe'en. We'd already carted our stuff to Grand Street, and we were preparing to begin the adventure. On November 1, our two-year lease officially expires. Our landlord hasn't said a word about it. I don't know if he will. I don't know what happens next.

hidden in plain view

2005-10-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight I go to Grace Church Van Vorst to do some songs on behalf of the rocks. The Embankment Preservation Coalition is having their annual meeting, and they've invited me to play. I am not sure what they are expecting. I hope they're not counting on something inspirational. The last two songs I've written about Jersey City are neither nice nor hopeful. I've folded the lyric sheets up and stuck them into the inside pocket of my guitar case.

I have also written a song about my City Councilman, who is, as you probably know, my least-favorite person in town. I can't imagine tonight's show turning into an appropriate platform for that song, especially since the Embankment Coalition is counting on the support of the Councilman. But, yes, I could go there tonight and embarrass everybody, especially myself. I could throw my spanner into the municipal works if I chose to.

I encountered the City Councilman yesterday. We were in the third floor gallery in Victory Hall, attending the closing of an exhibition called With Apparent Ease. The couple in charge of the installation were showing the Councilman around. Nobody else was in the gallery. I felt, again, that sense of dislocation and impermanence that has been my most persistent companion at Jersey City events. It is important, I recognize, not to make a scene and jeopardize the Councilman's favor. And again I wanted to be someplace where every battle did not turn on small gestures, and every initiative was not so fragile that we had to tolerate those who are absolutely intolerable.

The Jersey band called Hidden In Plain View does a song called "Garden Statement". That big city feeling, they assure us, is better than suburban dreaming. Surely it is. That big city feeling is a certain useful anonymity, a sense that if you make a misstep and leave an ugly footprint on the street, there's always a parallel road to run. You're not constantly confronted by your own mistakes. But garden-state dreamers cannot afford to hold grudges. There is one cafe on the corner, one flimsy set of arts organizers, one Councilman -- when I speak my mind and anger these people, I've got nowhere to turn.

I am not running for office, though. And I've already got more friends than I deserve. Should I alienate my neighbors, my cardhouse does not tumble. It's those who are engaged in specific local enterprise who've got to keep smiling and making excuses for those whose power they'd like to enlist to their cause. I've already seen enough grotesque fawning here to fill the pages of a hundred copies of Teen Beat, or Roll Call. I understand why it's mandatory, and maybe even forgivable. But it's not something I can manage. And perhaps that, more than anything else, is the reason I don't belong here.

apres le deluge

2005-10-16T17:18:00.000-07:00

The rains are over. Out on Grand Street, the tubes that carried water from the basements to the sidewalks are quiet now. A few days ago, all of the pumps were going at once, transforming the curb into a gigantic kiddie pool. Water poured from holes in the stoops, forming rivulets pockmarked by falling raindrops. Ripples and crosscurrents on the surface of the pool were pulled by tides. Trailblazers in rainjackets felt the waves lap against their boots. And then it stopped.

Me, I was sick throughout. I had the Consultants-MTS cold. I tried to get out of the house here and there, to fetch a can of olives, or to ride the train, or just to get wet. Rain puddled up in my messy hair, and slid down my runny nose. I tried my best to avoid the greasy cafe next door, but I was sucked inside. The windows fogged up with steam, and the smell of burnt coffee beans sat in the courtyard like a cement block. A tube stuck out of the sidewalk loading doors, spitting water all over the steps. The basement of the cafe had flooded, too.

I'd left the house to grab the brolly we'd stashed in the back of the Bubble. Sniffling and coughing, I'd stumbled down the steps, past the bicycles and soaked athletic gear that littered the hallway, and out the door and into the rain. There, on the sidewalk, stood our landlord, looking at the soaked house. Rain poured down the peanut-colored frontage like a filthy waterfall. The landlord stared at his home in the same way that gamblers, hypnotized by the wheel, continue to absently watch the action even after they've been wiped out.

I like our landlord. He has four excellent and talkative children whom he does not appear to have destroyed. It has come to my middle-school educated attention that he likes his smoke. I have seen him when his eyes are the color of Pepto-Bismol. At those moments, peering into the great stoner beyond, he is not at his most conversational.

But as the rain splashed on his flannel shirt, he wanted to talk. These were all warm rains, thick and moist and gummy. The water glued together my puffy eyelids, and coated my cheeks with a slippery film. The basement, my landlord told me, was an absolute wreck. How are our leaks?, he'd wanted to know. I informed him that new corners of the ceiling were soaked, and that water was dripping into the outside hallway. He promised intervention. A man would arrive during the weekend and install gutters.

I wondered how gutters could help. Our interior wall is decaying; most likely, it will have to be removed outright if the house is to be saved. There is a crack in the sheet-rock from where the black mold broadcasts its cancerous message. As I rowed up Grand Street, it occurred to me again: our landlord seems to have no idea at all that our lease is up. He is impossible to read: if I'd told him we were history, he might have implored us to stick it out. Or he might knock on our door on November 1 to introduce us to the tenants who are taking our place.

stroller bomber

2005-10-09T18:23:00.000-07:00

There is an unattended package at the foot of the stairs. From further down the platform, it looks like a bag of tandoori rice. But I cannot be certain at this distance. Moreover, it is not advisable to approach an unattended package. We are told to contact authorities, all of whom have the proper dogs. But telephony is not general at the Grove Street PATH Train Station.

Today, stroller bombers are planning to detonate bombs in strollers on the trains. The mayor of that other city (not my mayor) informs us that his intelligence suggests that the threat level is greatest today. It is not high enough to become tinted red, but it is reddish-orange, or blood orange. There is a young Scandinavian couple on the bench between my seated body (reading the Economist) and the suspicious, unattended package of tandoori rice. They have a stroller with a baby inside. The bomb may be inside the baby.

The sanskrit letters of the unattended package of tandoori rice dare me to read them. An overweight policeman wearing wraparound shades patrols the platform, looking askance at everybody's bags. He doesn't stop us or ask us what's inside -- he just surveils us with cool, obese contempt. We all may be terrorists, stroller bombers, weirdos.

Our train arrives. I am confronted with the decision: which car to take? It is a rolling game of Russian roulette; guess wrong, and I may find myself seated next to a sarin carrier, or an anthrax carrier, or a freedom fighter strapped with explosives. Historically, I have chosen to ride the car that contains the largest number of good looking chicks. But those good looking chicks might be bombs. When anything is possible, the wisest plan is to have no plan. I close my eyes and choose randomly.

I have chosen to ride the car containing the fat policeman. He stands by the front window, playing with his nightstick, his uniform stretched tightly over his gigantic belly. At Newport, two tan-skinned men get on the train. They laugh, and speak loudly in a Middle Eastern language. The men carry travel bags, airport push bags, shopping bags, a gift bag from Victoria's Secret, a gigantic economy-sized bag of Kibbles & Bits. They lean the bags against the steel hand pole. If the bomb is inside the bag of Kibbles & Bits, will the shrapnel explode from within a roiling mass of dried dog food?

Across from me, a middle-aged man sits, eyes closed, praying under his breath. It seems illogical that the insurgents would bomb Christopher Street station, because Midtown is where the big-city action is. But perhaps the insurgents have listened to the mayor (not my mayor), and figure their best chance is to direct their efforts against soft targets such as shopping malls, or nightclubs, or me. Christopher Street may have some symbolic value that I haven't yet ascertained. Quietly, I calculate the possible significance of various stops. Christopher Street: gay sex, Christopher Columbus. 9th Street: cafe culture, NYU, dressing to the "nines". 14th Street: cheap electronics, clothing, meat-packing. 23rd: Tekserve, Chelsea, gay sex.

There is nothing in my bag but a roll of tissue, copies of the Economist, staff paper, and a quickcam I took from Melody Lanes. The staff of the Economist was apparently deeply divided over whether the war was justifiable, though all agree that to leave now would be disastrous. On my way to the Longwave practice studio in Williamsburg to rehearse with Overlord, I am singing Mos Def's words: tomorrow may never show up/for you and me, life is our promise. I could be incinerated in a flash of light and metal, and kibbles and bits. Or these days could progress in the same piston-like rhythm, all steam and grease and pounding. There is no way to know for sure, for good.

this room is yellow (unless it is blue)

2005-10-05T16:06:00.000-07:00

That room is brown and beige. This room is yellow unless it is blue. Within the wall separating the rooms, a black mold conspires to work with me. Spores pour out of the crack in the wall and swoop around the rooms in little eddies. When I turn the ceiling fan on, the spores swirl like a merry-go-round. Laughing, giggling, they pounce on my back and cling to my clothing. They clamber up the ladder of buttons and stream into my mouth and nostrils.

Inside the lungs and skull, the mold spores set up colonies of their own. They develop infrastructure: roads, schools, a civil defense and emergency response system. Occasionally the body attempts to eject the invaders by coughing and sneezing. On such days I expel millions of black mold spores, casting them to the floor of the brown and beige room, or spewing them all over the windexed surface of the computer table. But usually, the body is okay with the colonies. For weeks, they grow in peace, gently molding the valleys of my brain unvexed.

The thoughts come in clouds. It is sometimes hard to tell if it is the mold thinking or the prior brain. A certain musty odor to the thoughts may suggest mold's distinctive influence. A cloud might develop near my right temple and slowly travel toward the base of my spine, trailing thoughts as it goes. Sometimes the world will clap its hands and I will suddenly become dizzy, the brown and beige room swinging around me like a gyroscope. I enter the yellow room and lie prone on the sofa.

The sofa could be a participant. It is old and crumpled. We inherited it from the family, and it carries decades of the family's dust in its cushions. The sofa is covered with loose-fitting cream-covered fabric. Pillows slant down toward the wall. Anyone foolish enough to sit on the sofa slides toward a black hole. We have long discussed killing the sofa -- dismembering it and leaving it out to be hauled to the garbage mountain. But the sofa is still here, emitting soft puffs of dust from decades of the family's dusty actions whenever it is prodded. The dust mingles with the mold spores. It stimulates the corners of our eyes.

We have carpet. I vowed never to live in a carpeted apartment, but perhaps I did not swear loudly enough. When we moved in, the carpet was new and blue, and had the odor of a freshly laundered schnauzer. Uma, our animal, claws at the carpet and pulls its fronds apart. It is now busy with dander: dead flecks of her skin. When I enter the carpeted room, muscles in my throat constrict. I lie on my back on the carpet, tossing a quarter or nickel up toward the ceiling, and catching it in the palm of my hand. When the coin slaps down squarely in my palm, it feels pleasant. Often I will misjudge the toss, and the quarter or nickel will go clattering against the keyboard of the laptop or the ivory control switches of the Vox organ.

When we leave here, the spores will travel with us. I will sneeze on a new wall, and the spores will rush out like a ribbon, and bounce into cracks in the white facades. There, they will establish cliff-face villages, like rock dwellers in the Hindu Kish. Life will be hard for a time. But they will propagate. Some will find their way back into my respiratory system. Reunited with old friends and old ways of life, they will rest together in hot valleys of mold. And will I breathe in and out, typing, always typing, as the colored clouds cross over the inside of my forehead.

this town rips the bones from your back

2005-10-04T15:10:00.000-07:00

Ever since I have been in Jersey City, progressive types have told me that the key to reorienting our urban design is putting head planner Robert Cotter in charge of Housing and Economic Development. But I doubt even the most driven local activist would've wanted to see it happen this way.

My best wishes to Jack Bierne for a full and speedy recovery.

a dream

2005-10-03T06:54:00.000-07:00

She is a graduate student at Columbia University. She has brown skin and long, curly black hair. She is as tall as me; maybe a little taller in her heels. She carries a bookbag and a notepad. We are standing together on the corner of Wayne Street, and she is interviewing me about my writing -- not for a magazine, she tells me, but for a class project. The woman wants to know the scope of my disengagement from Jersey City. Behind us, the sun is setting over City Hall, throwing a long rectangular shadow over Grove Street.

We begin to walk toward City Hall. I do not like to go this way, I tell her, but I find myself compelled to move in this direction. I mention that trips to my vegetable market cause me to walk on Grove Street. Secretly, this isn't what I mean. The crowd is pouring out of Council Chambers. They are jubilant; they have just secured a victory in the battle to preserve the Sixth Street Embankment. They walk to the roadside and take a sharp left toward me, chattering and smiling. It is as it was on a day I cut class, and found myself on Mountain Avenue outside of the high school just as the three o'clock bell rang. I did not want to be in the building -- and yet as I watched my schoolmates from across the road, I felt the ghost's longing for corporeality.

Bodies pass me. I recognize the activist Mia Scanga, always a vocal presence at City Council meetings. Kathryn Klanderman, former president of ProArts, calls me by a name I don't recognize. She walks with a woman whose face is veiled. I turn to introduce Kathryn to the graduate student, but to my embarrassment, I have forgotten her name.

Paul Sullivan takes me aside; he is jubilant. He will be hosting an arts tour of his own in the Heights, and he would like me to provide music. I am suddenly overwhelmed with guilt about my decision to skip this year's Studio Tour to play the New England Popfest. I ask him about what I've missed. He is enthusiastic about the popular response to the tour, and about the new studios that have opened on Jersey Avenue. The art itself he dismisses as "Knitting Factory stuff".

I find this glibness uncharacteristic of Paul. But then City Hall looks different, too -- taller, more ornate, capped with golden domes. A young woman on the marble steps dressed like a stewardess hands out brochures. The facade is grey and imposing, and fills me with fear. For a moment, I worry that I will be arrested. I realize that this must not be Jersey City Hall at all, but instear it must be a museum or civic building in Manhattan: perhaps a courthouse, or a train station.

Sure enough, our railcar begins to move. There is art everywhere: on the walls of the car, on coffeetables, on the covers of periodicals. I pick up a magazine and look at the cover. A woman who looks like Martha Stewart is stretched out in bed. Her body is covered by a thin white sheet. The pose is sexualized, but she appears to be in terrible pain. Paul explains that the photographer used to be a Jersey City local, but has since left for the wine country.

This is a commuter train. We have gone into the city upon the request of my old high school friend Steve Barison, who I have not seen in some time. We are here for a Pixies doubleheader: first, we have seen the Pixies in concert, then we went to see a screening of a movie about the Pixies. The movie, which was not good, was Steve Barison's idea. So many of my high school friends crowd into the railcar. We are returning to New Jersey as twilight falls. I am reminded of a trip I took with these friends when I was very young: to Madison Square Garden to watch Peter Gabriel perform. I remember the frenetic banter on the way back, the fevered comparison of our internal experiences, the slickness of the train windows and the sick yellow color of the seats.

Our train ducks through tunnels. We are laughing and joking. I do not want the car to reach New Jersey -- I want to go on laughing and joking in this cabin as long as we can. Steve Barison's face is clouded, obscured. I tell a joke, and a person I don't recognize at the back of the car begins to laugh inappropriately. What's so funny?, I demand to know. I become angry. Suddenly, I am preaching straight from the Book of Romans. Bible in hand, I speak of sin and salvation. We shall all be restored in the fullness of time, I tell my friends. With each passing trestle, the light in the railcar grows dimmer.

roadrunner once, roadrunner twice

2005-10-02T16:13:00.000-07:00

My Teenage Stride tore it up at the New England Popfest in Northampton this weekend. We played at a club called The Elevens. Last October, the Popfest was held at the Eagles Club, further down Pleasant Street toward I-91. The Eagles Club was little better than a grange hall: candlepin bowling and pickled New Englanders sitting in a downstairs bar, and twee indiepop kids rocking in an unadorned upstairs room with a drop ceiling.

But they had an elevated stage, good lights, and, it turned out, an excellent sound system. Approached from the street, The Elevens looks like the spare room of an adjacent horrid Irish pub. Inside, though, it is more like the Stone Pony: an area away from the dancefloor for equipment, a nice lounge, a well-situated sound booth, good monitors, good mics, and plenty of places to plug in.

From fancy restaurants to Fenway Park, every place in New England seems to be built of thin wooden planks that have been painted green. At Drunky McSwiggin’s, or whatever it was called, we watched Mike Timlin throw a few crucial ground balls. Crowds of indiepop fans, a bit intimidated by the bar, pressed their little bespectacled faces up against the windows. The Red Sox are not twee, but it is twee to be a Red Sox fan.

Around the corner, at Pearl Street, a long line of locals hugged the curves of the sidewalk; across Main Street, singer-songwriter fans crowded into the Calvin for a early show. Closer to Smith College, a wino with an acoustic guitar (not Sufjan Stevens) banged out songs about Connecticut to bewildered passersby. Northampton is singing.

This is the time of the season for parties. By Thanksgiving, Northampton will be positively polar, and even the diehard professional protestors out by the Farmers Market will have to take their No Blood For Oil signs inside. But the music will continue. I went to school in Western Massachusetts, and while that was by no means fun, Northampton was a semi-familiar lifeline for me. I remember seeing Richard Thompson and Robyn Hitchcock at the Iron Horse, where I had my first encounter with horseradish mustard, and taking the PVTA bus from Amherst to catch locals Caroline Know and The Vestrymen open a Pearl Street gig for Mike Watt. Once we’d turned twenty-one, my friends and I would drag our crappy equipment and our cassettes to the basement of Sheehan’s Pub, and we’d play as long as they’d let us. Each time we did, we’d come up with a different absurd handle for the act: Alter Benjamin, Paladin’s Chives, Zapf Chancery. Northampton never flinched.

A decade later, we took the stage at The Elevens with slightly more confidence in ourselves, but with the same faith in Northampton audiences. Hilary surveyed the club and mentioned, again, how very easy and profitable it would be for some enterprising sod to open a comparable rock and roll performance space in Jersey City. And of course she is right – and I’m forced to entertain the question once more. What makes some towns music cities, and other towns music sinkholes?

The folks who run this Popfest are affiliated with Skipping Stones Records, a Connecticut indiepop label. But they don’t hold their party in Hartford, or New Haven, or even Storrs. They make the drive up I-91 to the Pioneer Valley on the well-established pretext that there’s music in these mountains. In Hudson County, we do something similar. Uncle Joe’s aside, we’ve been taking our performances to Hoboken for as long as I can remember. We complain about the yuppies and the crowds of frat guys at Bahama Mama’s, and about the prohibitive real estate prices – and yet when we want to do an important show, there we are in Hoboken again.

Maybe Joseph Condiracci and his band of First Street expats will manage to revive Uncle Joe’s somewhere in Jersey City. But until that or something like it happens, we’re actually worse off now than we were two years ago. Northampton, Massachusetts is no city of a quarter million: it’s a medium-sized, post-industrial college town that’s reinvented itself as a site of cultural interest. They’ve got a place to rock on every block. We’ve got zilch.

You can’t blame the proximity of New York City. Hoboken is a PATH train ride away, too. And you can’t point the finger at our local ordinances, annoying as they are. Northampton – and Massachusetts in general – is one of the most overregulated places on earth, a town where they will slap legislation together in a heartbeat to outlaw anything and everything they can. We experienced this firsthand as we struggled with a ridiculous rule that prohibited us from reentering The Elevens after one in the morning – even to get our equipment. Northampton is further proof of something we all should know instinctively by now: petty rules and tightass elders cannot stop the rock. As long as there are places to play with regular slates of performances, no minor-league version of C. Dolores Tucker can lay a glove on an established indie music scene.

Now, I can imagine townies becoming extremely annoyed with current Northampton. There are places to dance, but no hardware stores. There are upmarket restaurants and art galleries, but no corner bodegas. Walk a block from the red-brick Downtown, and the composition of the streets changes drastically – suddenly, you’re surrounded by big, drafty houses that exude that distinctive New England horribleness. There’s plenty of evidence that Northampton is a much better place to hang out than it is to live. But when the lights go down and the music starts, this Massachusetts hamlet I rejected way back in '94 has it all over my much bigger and much richer hometown.

the sold coast

2005-09-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

I'm at the post office on Washington and Montgomery. A fat middle-aged man in front of me is chatting up the rest of the line in between loud conversations on his cellphone. He is real estate law, I soon learn. Oddly enough, I believe him. He does seem to be the personification of some gauche business principle. He is here, he tells an overburdened postal worker, to deal in property. He and his wife (his business partner, we are told) have a line on some houses. I am watching the pineapples on his Hawaiian shirt as he breathes in and out, swaying as if they have been set in motion by a tropical breeze.

I have seen him all over the Downtown -- not this very insect, but different individuals from the same swarm. They stop on the corners of Paulus Hook, point, and take notes. Or they drive by slowly in big cars, windows half down; one man handling the phone, one man steering. The cars don't always have New York plates. But often they do. They love us here, these speculators. We are hot. We've got what they want.

Housing Maps reveals that a one bedroom "parlor" apartment in this part of Jersey City rents for approximately two thousand dollars. Hundreds of miles and several Great Lakes to the west, fifteen hundred bucks gets you four bedrooms in Detroit. On the waterfront. In Grosse Pointe. It is not enough to say -- as if there is a real estate deity holding the scales and devoted to the cause of fair value -- that something is haywire here. But it is legit to ask: are we getting what we're paying for?

Unless those listed apartments in Detroit are booby-trapped and coated with slime, I believe renters there are well within their rights to laugh their asses off at our folly. We pity them for having to put up with the Midwest. But as prices around here double, triple, and quadruple, our knee-jerk provincialism becomes harder to justify. After awhile, it stops looking like admirable, dogged loyalty, and it begins to feel like we're getting played. They've got bookstores, music clubs, and a real arts paper there, which is three better than we've got. I've heard tell that there are a few rock and roll bands there, too.

We've got our Jersey pride, and our proximity to New York City. But Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods aren't proximate to NYC -- they are New York City. As the gap between prices in Jersey City and those in near outerborough neighborhoods continues to close, by rights, we ought to demand a New York City standard of living. And that doesn't mean more cops on Grove Street. It means we shouldn't tolerate aesthetic dysfunction and incoherence. It means there is no longer any excuse for being a municipal basket case.

My new friend who is real estate law isn't selling to me. When he rolls through my neighborhood, peeking out from behind tinted windows, he is scouting for new flats for commuters working in the financial services industry. His ideal buyer works at the World Financial Center, makes a preposterous amount of money working hours that would exhaust a Spartan, and returns home to collapse. His interest in Jersey City will be passing, at best: will the PATH run on time? Can I get an already-made dinner in the small grocery in my condominium complex? Is my view of the City with which I truly identify unimpeded by new construction? Look, I want to stay here, really, I do. But I can't justify paying Manhattan prices to live in a giant banker storage unit. For thirty years, I've waved the Jersey flag as furiously as anybody this side of Thomas Kean. But the Sold Coast is wearing out my patience.

futuristic

2005-09-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

In the future, chips embedded in our eyes will instantly broadcast everything we see onto the Internet, where it can be classified and categorized. That way, our "souls" can be searched using traditional websearch software. This is another way in which the future will suck, but we are all going there together, so we will make the best of it. It's best to not expect the best, that's the best you can do, says pessimistic Ted Nesseth of the Heavenly States. When you rock like that, people tend to believe you.

Reference is exponential. You don't need any new technology -- two complementary sets of data will do fine. This website combines Google's mapmaking feature with Craig's List apartment advertisements. It takes some of the cartographic fun out of the hunt, but it's still mesmerizing. For instance, who knew that apartments in Downtown Vancouver were so expensive? No wonder the New Pornographers are trying so hard to sell records.

A few cursory observations: I'd assumed that we were priced out of Hoboken, but this map reveals a few places in our range. The first time I did a Craig's List search for apartments in Hoboken, I found nothing but shares. Sharing an apartment in Hoboken means you'd better like beer. I do not. But there's a two-bedroom listed on First Street, and that's intriguing.

Beyond that, looking at an illustrated map of available properties changes your perspective: it's possible to quickly compare neighborhoods and get a sense of where the market rate is completely nuts. For instance, there is no reason that property on Pine Street and Communipaw Avenue in Lafayette should be as steep as Downtown prices. If you'd just limited your search to Jersey City -- as I've generally been doing -- it's possible to convince yourself that this is reasonable. But when you can scroll over to the right and see that several apartments in Carroll Gardens -- where the F train is right around the corner and everything on Earth that you could possibly want waits for you on Smith and Court Streets -- are less expensive, well, it helps you put that red line through Lafayette.

all you stereophiles

2005-09-26T20:24:00.000-07:00

Stephen Mejias wrote a little bit about the Courthouse show on his new weblog -- one he's doing for Stereophile magazine. To be more fair, though, Stephen did much more than that. He helped me put the show together. In fact, were it not for the assistance of Stephen and Hilary on Saturday night, I would have had to check myself in to the Montgomery Medical Center. And as the building is going condo, there aren't any beds there anymore.

To all of you who came to the Courthouse on Saturday: thank you. I know it's an unconventional venue, and some serious cognitive dissonance goes along with any rock performance in a public building. Next month, I'll be playing a show at Rothko, and it'll feel good to be back in a real NYC club. But it's these struggles to get our strange, out-of-the-way buildings to sing that makes me appreciate Maxwell's and the Mercury Lounge all the more.

Okay, show's over. Back to the apartment stuff tomorrow.

bank statement

2005-09-25T17:16:00.000-07:00

I write under several aliases. I do it because I don’t want all my boring, for-pay work traced back to me. It also helps to discipline my thinking, which is dangerously disorganized. And I am enough of a postmodern subject that I enjoy fragmented identities.

So I get checks for several names. When they come in, I sign them over to myself and deposit them in the bank. I have been doing this for ten years. When I lived in Union City, this was never a problem: the tellers were around the way girls who knew me from the neighborhood. During our first year in Jersey City, we found a local branch of the same regional savings bank. I was never asked any questions.

Last year, that regional savings bank was bought out by a giant chain. Most of the old managers and staff were replaced. The day of the switchover, the chain gave out goodie bags containing a mug, a keychain, a promotional t-shirt, and two large cookies. A few visits later, I was informed by a teller I’d never seen before that double-endorsed checks would no longer be accepted.

I explained that if the manager would check the files inherited from the old bank, she’d see a record of hundreds of checks that I’d deposited. Further, I told her that if she wanted to do some digging, she could determine that I’d paid taxes on all of them, and that they’d all been charged to the same social security number. She didn’t do any of those things. Instead, she took my word for it.

For months thereafter, the anonymous tellers at the conglomerate chain bank took my checks. Sometimes they’d look at me funny, but then so do total strangers on the street. Once the teller called our account up on the screen, she’d invariably accept that I’d been a customer for years.

On Saturday, I needed singles. I’d agreed to manage the cashbox at my Courthouse show that evening, and since I’d talked the County down to an eight dollar admission fee, I expected to have to make change. I grabbed my stack of double-endorsed checks, wrote out one of my own to “cash”, and hit the street.

When I arrived at the bank, I was informed that the checks I was using – those bearing the name and I.D. of our former bank – were no longer valid. Now, we don’t write a lot of checks: we do our banking online. But our old neighborhood bank was constantly making us buy new checks and deposit slips. Now those checks were worthless, and only those issued by the conglomerate would be accepted.

This felt unfair to me, and I said so. Not only did I consider it disrespectful to make me buy new checks when I have a huge stack of old ones on my living room counter, I thought it was disrespectful to the memory of the community bank that got swallowed. What, after all, is a check? It’s a piece of paper with a logo and a tracing number on it. The trappings surrounding the tracing number are irrelevant. Therefore, the only objection my new bank could have is to the logo: an insignia, and a memory, that the conglomerate would like to bury.

The teller didn’t want to hear an argument. She called over the manager, who immediately challenged the double-endorsed checks that I was attempting to deposit. I explained (again) that I’d been doing this for years, and that I’d never had a problem – and, in fact, that the conglomerate’s tellers had been accepting these checks for close to a year. Her face went blank. I would have to apply to the state for a special form, otherwise I would be breaking the law. The tellers who’d been taking my checks were lawbreakers, too. I was beginning to get irritated. I submitted that neither I nor any of her tellers, nor any of the tellers at my old bank were outlaws.

The manager turned to her teller. How much money is there in the account, she asked, privately.

And I snapped. All of the frustrations that I’d encountered over the past two years seemed to be summed up in that one utterance. Depending on whether or not I had sufficient money to impress the authorities, an arbitrary and stupid rule would now either be enforced or ignored. It shouldn’t matter!, I shouted. Surprised that I’d overheard, the manager’s mechanical remove fell for a moment. Suddenly, I had no desire to put my money in this bank. I demanded that she give me the checks back. She stammered for a moment about making a one-time exception, but by now, I was too hot. I grabbed my deposit from her, shoved it in my wallet, and walked out onto Newark Avenue.

Going to my old bank was a nice experience. I knew the tellers and they knew me. The bank offered very few competitive services, but I was always treated like a valued customer. Certainly I am not the only person in America who has been displaced by banking mergers. Still, I could take my money anywhere. If I am going to have to comply with irritating regulations and conform to the logic of conglomerate banking, I might as well bring my business to New York City, where the managers actually know what they’re doing. Being in New Jersey has always meant that I can depend on a neighborhoody flexibility to the ticky-tacky transactions that complicate urban living. Recently, I have come to feel like I’m stuck in an alternate-reality Manhattan with all of the impersonality and none of the benefits. As Jersey City continues its transformation into an outerborough – and an uninteresting one at that – I find myself missing both the friendly inefficiency of Union City and the commitment to excellence that I find in Brooklyn. One or the other would be fine. But by now, I know what I’m going to get: neither.

seasons turn

2005-09-20T21:43:00.000-07:00

It's dark as a cockroach in the backyard. All of the lights in the building across from us are out. In the distance, the flat honeycomb of the Mack-Cali tower still glows with activity, but the sky around it is leached purple, like an ugly apron. The only tree left in the courtyard is visible in silhouette. It looks like black cracks in the sky.

Here in the living room, faint orange light shines down from the stovetop. I can make out the remains of dinner on the kitchen island: a jar of peanut butter, a bottle of balsamic vinegar, a green collander we bought in Woodstock, Vermont, a lemon. Pans lean in the dishrack. On the floor, six empty bottles of seltzer water stand in a rough pyramid. They are candlepins for the cat.

A wind is blowing in from the north. It smells like birch and dust. The wind is sweeping down from the middle of the sky, turning calendar pages as it blows. Since it is no longer warm enough for the fan, I switch it off. In the courtyard, the wind is shaking the branches of the tree and twisting the cracks in the sky into purple diamonds. In forty minutes it will be autumn. The wind is blowing past the midpoint of a troubled decade, and pushing down toward the next, turning book pages as it blows.

There is a hurricane in the Gulf again. I have been following its progress on the Internet. Elsewhere, Los Angeles has defeated Texas. Oakland has defeated Minnesota. Joe Crede's walk off piece in the bottom of the tenth leads Chicago over Cleveland. Yahoo reports that there have been seventeen named hurricanes this season, still four shy of a record set in 1933, a year I associate with Carl Hubbell and the screwball. I have seen grotesque photographs of Hubbell's left arm, twisted like a tornado, like overcooked pasta, after defeating Washington in the World Series. The great hurricane of 1933 raked the Atlantic shore during the pennant race, tearing islands from ribbons of sand.

Three red beacons set to warn airplanes crown the beehive. One by one, office lights blink off below. The brick chimneys across the courtyard massage the wind, and send it streaming like a message through the window, turning web pages as it blows. I am sitting, facing north in the blue light of my flat-panel screen, watching the last minutes of summer flow between the branches of the courtyard tree, over the terraced rooftops of brownstones, through the half-constructed windows of hollow developments on the basin, over the red stone walkways of the waterfront park, past boats, ripples, slipstreams and the arms of Lady Liberty, and up into the soft cotton sky.

trumped again

2005-09-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

The campaign to attract artists to the warehouse district of Jersey City has netted its first success: a noted actor, speechmaker and performance professional. Yes, Donald Trump is getting in on the PAD. Technically, the multimedia superstar and all-purpose clown is moving across the street. But the only people who are going to know that are members of the planning board and those who, like me, have the map of the district taped to their refrigerators. To everybody else, it's just going to look like Lloyd Goldman has a new neighbor, and one with whom he shares more than just a tax bracket.

The plan for the development, initially (and perhaps still) called Harborspire, has been around for many years. It was always supposed to be the tallest residential building in New Jersey -- fifteen stories higher than the Marbella, even. So I am not sure what Trump is contributing to this project besides his name and his money.

But that's probably enough. Donald Trump is a come-lately to this party, but his attendance reinforces something that we all already know: New Yorkers working in the financial services industry have embraced the convenience of living here, and are relocating in droves to commuter towers. Sad to say, the stigma of Jersey was the last bulwark we had against total colonization. Trump's enthusiasm for Jersey City ought to finish the job of completely destigmatizing addresses on this side of the Hudson for employees in finance, insurance, and real estate.

But the really tragic thing is that just as Trump's name legitimates Jersey City for financiers, it delegitimates it for everybody else. Those on the outside who consider our Downtown little more that a big sandbox for multimillionaire developers now have Exhibit Z. Likely this is the one that will clinch the case, too -- because while Hyman, Goldman and Dean Giebel have earned an intense local antipathy, we've never had an international villain pulling strings around here before. It's hard to pretend your Downtown is cool, artsy and cutting-edge when Donald Trump is moving in. Posterity, forgive us.

my mathematical mind

2005-09-18T21:11:00.000-07:00

Periodically we are told to buy property. We’re supposed to do this to build equity, which is a capitalist’s euphemistic way of saying that buying a house qualifies us to participate more fully in mainstream American life. We are taught to feel bad about giving money to a landlord; this is money, we are told, that we are flushing down the drain. Instead, by purchasing property and paying into a mortgage, we are putting the money to work for us.

I admit I’ve never understood the argument. Well, I understand it, intellectually; the money we give to our landlord is unrecoverable. But so is the money we pay for food. When we go to the grocery store, I don’t feel like we are flushing dollars down the drain: I feel like we are paying to purchase something that satisfies immediate needs, something we want right now. Often it is a piece of fish or fruit. We take it home, we eat it, and it’s gone. We don’t beat ourselves up about not planting our own replenishable garden with the seeds. Nobody tries to convince us that it is a moral failing of ours that we aren’t subsistence farmers.

When we write a check to our landlord each month, we’re paying to satisfy similar desires. We can’t afford to purchase the kind of property we want in Downtown Jersey City, but we still want to be here: we like being near the PATH train and the turnpike extension, restaurants we dig, and neighborhoods that are interesting to look at and to walk around. For many years, we didn't have any of that. Now that we do, it's hard to imagine retreating to where we once were, even if we were promised the security of home ownership.

If the house we now live in were to go condo, and we suddenly went berserk and decided we’d buy it, our monthly rent bill would morph into a multi-headed monster: mortgage payments, insurance payments, maintenance fees and especially property taxes. Call me a Jersey libertarian if you must, but I feel better about handing money directly to a person I know than I do about sending a check for the same amount to the municipal government. I understand that the screwed-up New Jersey finance structure forces all school costs to be paid out of property taxes, and that my disinclination to shoulder that burden could be perceived as an unwillingness to help the kids. But my landlord has four kids of his own. His are kids I like personally. I’m satisfied he treats them decently. Let our money go straight to him, and he can use it to acculturate and educate his children however he sees fit.

I’m here all day. I wake up in the morning and go straight to the computer. Sometimes I don’t stop writing until night has fallen and it’s time to head to Brooklyn for practice. My life happens at home. So my apartment can never be an investment or an equity builder – it must first be a pleasure. And there is no way that I could ever find a condominium that would be as pleasing to me as a rental: not for anywhere near a comparable cost.

Housing prices in Hudson County have gone totally apeshit during the past decade. You can’t feed a duck on the waterfront these days without getting crumbs all over a real estate speculator. If in ’94 we’d somehow scratched the dough together to buy a crappy brownstone near Van Vorst Park and fixed it up, we’d now be sitting on a million dollar property. Yet before I start counting my regrets over the imaginary money that could have been ours, I have to remind myself: all of the other lots around here have appreciated like crazy, too. Let’s say I cashed out and took the profit. I can’t just put that money in the bank; I’ve got to live somewhere. So what do I do? Well, chances are I end up taking that money and moving it to another mortgage around the corner. Meanwhile, the enormous down payment, taxes, transaction fees, real estate and insurance costs have taken away our liquidity, and with it, the flexibility of our daily lives. The house has become a safe, and the money is locked up within its walls.

It seems to me to be a psychologically unhealthy way to think about home. A residence isn’t a patriot bond, or a Sammy Sosa rookie card. It’s an investment, sure, but a second-order one: first, it's a place where we have to exist. I’m not a broker with a Manhattan penthouse, buying and selling deeds every time I pass Go. Should I ever “flip” property, it means a major interruption in my life, an epochal change, and a complete alteration in my experience of the world. That's much higher stakes than any equities trade. If I ever feel speculative, I’ll get some old X-Men comics and cover them in plastic.

that, to me, was just a day in bed

2005-09-17T19:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry, no apartment update today. I spent all day writing my articles for Music Video Press and doing research for a piece I'm doing on kickboxing in Central Jersey. No, I'm not kidding. Plus, there was all that pennant race baseball to pay attention to. I'll be back at it tomorrow.

this is not the civil rights movement, people

2005-09-16T01:05:00.000-07:00

I'm aware that I used this space yesterday to irritate everybody on both sides of Newark Avenue. I wouldn't have done so if everybody on both sides of Newark Avenue hadn't been irritating me. Not just this last week, mind you; the whole two years I've spent in Jersey City. That there has been a debate at all around this issue is positively bewildering to me. I'm aware that in New Jersey there needs to be a fight over everything, and I have contributed to plenty of those fights, but this one just seems bananas, and I don't mean in that nice, Gwen Stefani way.

There are people in this town who really don't want to give an inch on Newark Avenue. They'd rather see the steel loading grates come down every night than allow the natural course of neighborhood development to seed the block with new bars and restaurants. I've also heard from some people who won't give LITM credit for anything; they refuse to acknowledge that Jelynne and her staff have brought a new life to the SID and created a de facto neighborhood center there. Most of these folks are anonymous, and they have been slipping me hate notes ever since I made my first post to the Tris McCall Report in favor of relaxing restrictions on Restaurant Row.

But over the past few weeks, the pro-relaxation folks have annoyed me more than the atavists ever have. The attempt to push through an ordinance without getting approval from neighborhood groups seemed designed to do nothing but create rancor and divisiveness. There have been community activists working on restoration and reconstruction plans for Newark Avenue for years -- now all of their work has to get shoved aside so that some makeshift task force can reimagine Restaurant Row in a fortnight? And all the self-righteousness and lofty rhetoric from the late-night crowd has really become embarrassing to me. Let me put my feelings to you as plain as I can: I do not see you fighting for any grand cultural vision here or for any sweeping rehabilitation of the Downtown. I see you fighting for the right to get drunk later at night. Period.

So yes, you bet I'm irritated with everybody. What should have been a simple negotiation between old line neighborhood activists and responsible businesspeople has turned into a grudge match between those who believe it is justifiable to move glacially at a time of whirlwind change and those who mistake their desire for inebriation and stimulation for some kind of liberation ideology. If I gave the impression yesterday that I believed that Tuesday's council meeting meant that change on Newark Avenue was bound to be forestalled, then I was being misleading: change on Newark Avenue is as inevitable as the turn of the seasons. But because of the rhetoric and those hardlines -- and because of the unwillingness of some of the major players to communicate -- there are going to be hard feelings Downtown that persist long after the current Restaurant Row ordinance has found its rightful place in the rubbish bin. It didn't have to be that way. But somehow, in Jersey City, it is always that way.

task force newark ave.

2005-09-15T11:06:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read my report from last night's City Council meeting, please do so now. In case I didn't make it clear in that piece, I do not think that anything happened at the meeting that could possibly be interpreted as favorable to the cause of lifting restrictions on Newark Avenue's Restaurant Row. Sorry, guys. The creation of a task force on which everybody and his aunt will sit places a major bureaucratic obstruction between the first and second readings of the ordinance to relax regulations. In fact, it would have been better for their cause if the ordinance had been rejected outright. I was totally mystified by the applause that came from the right side of the chamber, and could only conclude that the people clapping were complete political neophytes.

But then that makes them no worse than our Councilman, who (hopefully) learned two hard lessons last night. Lesson number one is that any politician goes over the heads of the Downtown Neighborhood Associations at his own risk. Steve Fulop tried to sneak this ordinance past the DCNA, and learned that the Association presidents have a hotline to the Mayor and Council President Vega. He'll be serving on the task force with all of these guys; presumably, he'll be sitting toward the end of the table. Lesson number two is that nobody enjoys being embarrassed in the newspaper. When Fulop spoke to Jarrett Renshaw of the Journal without first clearing it with those who support the ordinance, he broke the cardinal rule of political courtesy: don't throw your colleagues on the defensive the night before a vote. Nothing makes an infuriated opposition coalesce faster.

In case you're about to write to argue that Vega's task force is some sort of a productive compromise, let's review who will be sitting on this committee:

Mayor Healy. If anybody still thinks Jerramiah Healy cares about bar hours on Newark Avenue, they haven't been paying attention. If his police officers and his community leaders tell him that extended hours on Newark Avenue aren't a good idea, then there won't be extended hours on Newark Avenue. He doesn't fuck around; that's why we elected him.

Councilpeople Mariano Vega and Steven Fulop. This is Fulop's ordinance and Fulop's district, so barring a complete chickenshit maneuver, he'll continue to back it. In his interview with me, Fulop said that if he couldn't make the transformation of Newark Avenue happen in his four-year term, then he would have failed as a public official. Council President Vega is nominally in favor of some kind of transformation. But Vega always proceeds with the same objective in mind: genteel, inoffensive compromise. If his constituents (and Downtowners are still his constituents, although he is five years removed from Ward E) are upset about something, he's going to do his best to placate their worries. Which brings us to:

The Coalition of Downtown Neighborhood Associations. They don't want this. They're afraid of drugs, parties, litter rowdiness, the Hobokenization of Newark Avenue, and anything else that could potentially damage property values in the districts they've worked so hard to designate historic. Moreover, they are angry with Fulop for completely disregarding their wishes. The DCNA is on the wrong side of history here: with land values as high as they are, there is no way to prevent the invisible hand from giving Newark Avenue a proper shake sooner or later. But the presence of neighborhood association members on the task force ought to be enough to throw cold water on the dreams of LITM even if they didn't have to cope with....

The cops. Okay, let's do this one quickly. Do you think the police would prefer longer hours for bars, or shorter hours for bars? Right, kids.

The Downtown SID. This is the organization that has stuck the restrictions on Newark Avenue in the first place, and who benefit the most from the historic designation of Restaurant Row. The businessmen of the Special Improvement District may believe it is time for a change. But whatever change they approve, you can be certain they'll want it to be their change, and not one instigated by those looking to radically change the tenor of the neighborhood. The SID felt that they already had a good plan for Newark Avenue moving glacially through the normal municipal channels. They believe this is their territory, and they're going to want to punish interlopers.

Add it all up, and what do you get? A coalition of Downtown businessmen, the police, neighborhood politicians, a mayor who has better things to do than worry about a bar fight, and a Council president congenitally predisposed toward compromise vs. a freshman Councilman who just pissed everybody off. Never mind that it'll be December 2077 before that task force actually assembles; if they ever did harmonize their schedules and met, it would definitely not be good news for those who'd like to see a little more action around here.

It just now occurs to me that this piece should have been posted to the Tris McCall Report, and the impressions of the meeting should have been posted here. Ah, well, maybe I'll switch 'em sometime.

italian village

2005-09-14T12:55:00.000-07:00

Here, the Manzo signs are still up. It's as if 2005 never happened. No brick rowhouses here, just irregular three and four story tenements with pastel aluminum siding. Vacant lots don't look like anybody's home, or anyone's property investment, either: they're just vacant. There's a Columbus Club on the corner of First and Brunswick, and a frightening bar called Indio's halfway down the block. It's late afternoon, and the sun is setting behind the Turnpike extension. I am reminded of the declasse section of Weehawken at the foot of the palisade, known to locals as the Shades.

We're still Downtown. But Colgate and First feels further from the Waterfront than Union City ever did. I'm here to look at the top floor of a five story building. It is white, featureless, and rectangular, and it juts, boxily, out onto the sidewalk. This house wears an ugly outfit, but its pals look no better. Nobody cares about looks on this strip. I imagine it's the same inside Indio's.

This isn't a part of town that many renters consider. We are at least seven long blocks west of the Grove Street PATH, and only a few hundred yards east of the highway. Numbered streets to the south of Newark Avenue do not count as Harsimus, and Van Vorst Park doesn't want them, either. The Italian Village is a historic neighborhood; bug them enough and the preservationists will take you on a tour here. I cannot imagine what they'd show. But nobody said that history had to be beautiful.

Over at City Hall, a coalition of activists are stopping the hand of a developer who'd like to raze the Sixth Street Embankment and build luxury housing. They want greenspace. Local businesses have gotten into the act, posting chartreuse "Make My Park" signs in their windows. They look like they were designed by... well, by me. But thanks to Sean Langon, I no longer feel like I've got the ugliest poster in town.

The landlord shows me the available apartment. It's the first one I've visited that is entirely unrenovated. The floor is hardwood, but some of the beams are splitting. In the bathroom, a leaky ceiling has been imperfectly patched. The kitchen is large, but mystifying: there is a water heater in a huge louvre cabinet, separating the stove from the refrigerator and the sink. Cabinets are everywhere, but I think cooking in this apartment would feel like an algebra problem. Out on the staircase, there are holes in the stucco walls.

The current occupant has been enlisted to pitch the flat. He testifies to the attentiveness of the landlord. The landlord testifies to his own attentiveness. I believe them both, but it's beside the point. Back on the sidewalk, the sun has gone down for good, and the humidity is suffocating. There may be traditional Italians behind these amber windows, or they may have all moved to Cedar Grove. I don't see anybody. The street is dark and quiet. A stray dog pads along beside me, panting. A squad car drives by on Brunswick, windows down, chasing the animal into the alley.

the four elements

2005-09-13T09:38:00.000-07:00

I remember the artist who used to be here. He worked in spray paint. He painted huge portraits of rappers: 50 Cent, Fat Joe, Ja Rule. They stared territorially out of the front window of the first floor studio, claiming the sidewalk. Across Montgomery Street are housing projects where broke blacks and Latinos live. Two blocks east is Van Vorst Park, surrounded by million-dollar brownstones. Most of the folks who play in the park are white like me. I like 50 Cent, Fat Joe, and sometimes even Ja Rule. But I do not forget what side of the street I live on.

This is the shadow of the Jersey City Museum. It is a low, squat parallelogram, and it does not go far. Our spray paint artist was a neighbor. His work always felt so much more substantial and evocative than whatever happened to be in the window of the city's gallery. During the Studio Tour, he came in to the Cultural Affairs office, asking to be listed on the map. He'd missed the deadline for official recognition.

I am a rap fan who has probably listened to Get Rich Or Die Tryin' hundreds of times. Many of Curtis Jackson's lines have become touchstones for me, words that come to mind involuntarily as I encounter and process the world around me. For instance, on "Many Men", he says, out of patience with the limited interpretive capacity of his listeners, "do I have to spell it out for you motherfuckers all the time?/ You illiterate, niggas?/ You can't read between the lines?" A great couplet for an arrogant cuss; a motto for poets.

Now the spray-paint 50 is gone. The realtor doesn't know where the artist is now. But his departure prompted the property-owner to make his building over. Two African-American handymen are laying carpeting on the steps and painting the hallways. The first-floor studio has been completely restored: beautiful hardwood floors, track lighting, and marble kitchen surfaces. The closets are enormous. A tall, bald, professional-looking artist is here already, talking to his broker on his cellphone, closing in on the space.

I am here to see the duplex. The price is nothing we could have afforded two years ago, but times have changed. The apartment is on the top floor. The restorers scowl at me as I scale the steps. It could be that they live in Greenville, in hovels, and they resent me for living large off of the fruit of their labors. But work such as theirs is highly specialized. It's more likely that they're very well-paid, and that they've got townhouses in South Orange. It's not about class, because it never is.

The space is spectacular, but imperfect. The floors are impeccably done in dark red hardwood; the tub is whirlpool-sized. A staircase leads from the kitchen to a small penthouse with wide windows, overlooking Downtown Jersey City. Hilary has wanted a roof; "roof life", she says, in that little voice of hers that always kills me. I am sweating under my orange linen shirt. The roof deck is painted silver, and radiates heat; inside the penthouse, sunlight slams through the high windows. All the walls have been painted a soft yellow. I have read that yellow walls make people hostile. At least it isn't yellow wallpaper.

On the street, the sun is insane: it's not supposed to be this hot in September. In Van Vorst Park, there are broke African Americans on the northwest benches again. They smell. We don't hate them, of course, we just wish they weren't there; just like the bums who our City Councilman would like to chase away from the Grove Street PATH Station plaza. Soon the developer of Grove Pointe will rehabilitate the plaza, and the bums will be gone. We will be happier. Our president gets on national television, and, with a straight face, says that race was not a factor in the FEMA's late response to flooding in the Gulf Coast. By now, our spray-painter would have added a canvas of Kanye to his gallery overlooking Montgomery Street. But he's not there anymore. Perhaps we will take his place. Do I have to spell it out for you motherfuckers all the time?

then i remembered i was a songwriter

2005-09-11T21:24:00.000-07:00

For once, writing does not come easily today. I have so much to do: several articles, several reviews, a few revisions to a three-thousand word piece on Jersey City. And I desperately wanted to come up with a few new songs for the Courthouse show on the 24th of September. The music came easy, but I wasn't finding the right words. Generally I will write from a topic -- something that moved me or outraged me. I've already written a song about apartment hunting: "44 Lines About 88 Realtors", cut from the Bottles sessions in 1999. I ought to try to do another, and this time I should keep it serious. I have been at this stuff so long that I should be able to coax a little poetry out of any experience I have. Or so I tell myself.

speed round

2005-09-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

#1: On our street, but closer toward the river, and hence more expensive. The owner is a Russian emigree; she tells me she'd always wanted to be a journalist. She is enthusiastic and smiley, she approves of my second-string glasses. The windows are arched and extend to the next-door unit: they seem impressive from the street, but on the inside, it looks like you're staring at half of a face. Appliances are new standard, and the floors are dark hardwood. One of the two closets contains a boiler. B-.

#2: Third floor, over a nail shop. The staircase is horrible, and it smells like garbage. The apartment itself is best imagined as a long, hooked corridor, with a bedroom on one end and a gloomy den on the other. There is almost no closet space -- the occupants have built shelves, but the landlord informs me that these will be taken down. The kitchen is large, but drab. The rent is $200 more than we're currently paying. Again I am reminded that there is very little correspondence between price and quality. D+.

#3. Right across the street from our flat. Looking at the road from the opposite front staircases is like being held upside down. The owner and occupier is a rocker who is friendly and enthusiastic about Jersey City. The first floor apartment he shows me is oddly configured: the living room is keystone-shaped, with two tiny closets set into the shortest wall. The floor is covered with shag carpet, and the kitchen bears the unmistakeable stamp of having accomodated young postcollegiate men. It is dark. A giant transformer is set into the wall of the spare bedroom. C-.

#4. Snug, but interesting. The wood floor is made of uncommonly broad planks. The renovation has preserved much of the place's character: ceiling moldings, arches around the doorways, some wall detail. The kitchen is cozy, meaning that it's hard to imagine it accomodating a food snob. One of the narrowest refrigerators I've ever seen stands beside a small sink. A leak in the bathroom ceiling has been inexpertly painted over. The kitchen door leads out to one of the largest backyards I have ever seen in a city apartment. This would be ours, as well as a share of the washer and dryer, and the basement storage space. B.

#5. When I ring the bell, a grouchy old man comes to the door. He is not here to show the apartment, he tells me, he is trying to sleep. Gulp. I'm rescued by the landlord, who privately apologizes for his tenant. He leads me to a small top-floor apartment that has been lovingly restored. There's a skylight, track lighting, and exposed brick in the bedroom. It would be ideal for a single person with few possessions; say, a grouchy old man. Beautiful, but really not for us. B-.

#6. We're just north of Van Vorst Park, on a block associated by many Downtowners with hoodlums. I'm fine with hoodlums. The flat is very large, but it's been broken up into six chambers, so it doesn't feel spacious. I'd knock out a wall or two if I could, but tenants aren't allowed to do that, and besides, I wouldn't know where to begin knocking out a wall. The closets are old, but big; the kitchen is a tight yellow alley behind the bathroom. There are north, south, and east-facing windows, and all open out on to greenery. The owner likes us; he wants us to sign an application. We take one. But we're not ready for that yet. B.

squeezing through tight spaces

2005-09-08T12:02:00.000-07:00

I am in the middle of everything. Cars and trucks go by in both directions, barely pausing to avoid pedestrians. My bank is on the corner; across the street is a gallery where I once coordinated a jazz performance. The old chicken shack is to my left, and a brand new cafe is right in front of me. I believe this is the busiest intersection Downtown: a meeting place of neighborhoods.

Years ago, before there was any property market here, I attended a party at an apartment at this intersection for a few gay men and their admirers. Being neither, I chatted with the caterer. She was from Basking Ridge. She told me she had been scared to get out of her automobile. A decade later, she would not be able to afford rent here. It did not frighten me then, and it does not frighten me now.

I don't look my best. I'm unshaven this morning, and direct sunlight turns my hair into a mop of grease and sweat. Usually I fuss and bother over my appearance like a debutante, since I do not like to walk down the street until I can be sure that everyone who sees me will be fascinated by my noble carraige. Today I am settling for ruggedly handsome, or some dweebish minor-league variation thereof. At least I am wearing my second pair of glasses -- the ones without the crack in the lens.

The realtor is not waiting outside the corner tenement as she said she'd be. I am anxious to get out of the sun. After pressing buttons, somebody buzzes me in. I check the mailboxes, and find the names of two former Arts Center tenants. These were real holdouts; there until the bitter end, taking the abuse, and stoically mulling contingency plans. They counted me as a friend. I register their names without astonishment. Although I haven't seen them since they were forced out of the building in March, my strong sense was that they were around somewhere, and that I'd catch up with them at some unspecified point in the future.

That point is now. I am greeted by my old friend as I walk up the stairs. Her husband is working elsewhere, but she is all smiles; she is pleased to see me. It's her apartment that's for rent: the landlord hasn't shown up, so she's been giving the mini-tours today. She is a non-native speaker -- her accent is heavy, and she struggles a bit with English. Inside, I recognize much from her old studio at 111 First Street: books, art supplies, musical instruments. I recall sitting at her table at the studio, drinking tea and discussing development politics.

Chatter in Hebrew on the steps: a party of three Israeli women in their early twenties has arrived. They follow me into the apartment for rent. I sense undifferentiated ego boundaries, like those of college roommates. Their skin is young and tight -- they have not felt the cosmetic drag of city living. They stare at me, hypnotized by the lines of hard experience etched on my face. Okay, they don't.

My friend ushers them around the flat. I stay rooted to the spot and make awkward conversation, and try not to bring up the P.A.D. She isn't leaving for good, she hopes; they're moving in with relations in Queens so they can save money and purchase a building somewhere. In a week, their work will be packed up and carted across the East River, and two more Arts Center tenants will have slipped away to the Empire State.

When you have done your best to defend the rights of a couple to stay in their studio, it is tough to evaluate the place they move to next. It seems drained of significance, colorless and cheerless. These were characters in a drama that seemed worthy of Dickens, and yet here they are, in a nondescript apartment like the rest of us, availing themselves of the same rental ads, and harboring the same wish for property ownership and stability. This is from my romantic perspective, of course. To my friend, this is a temporary stopping-place. She likes it; she has put up shelves. Three big windows bathe the kitchen and living room with sunlight.

The landlord is hiking the rent. It will go for several hundred dollars more than we are currently paying. The Israeli wome seem uncomfortable with the price. Two would have to share a bedroom. I imagine that they also share a job -- taking turns managing a switchboard or call center on a vast international trading floor. They commute together, switching sections of The Wall Street Journal as they do. As I turn to leave, it becomes apparent that my friend had assumed that the three women were here with me. She must have thought they were my harem, or my backup singers, or my vetting committee. Embarrassed, she clasps her hands over her mouth. I tell her it's okay.

On the street, daylight is sledgehammer thick. My reserve pair of glasses isn't the proper prescription, and they make the world feel dislocated. I am to get cat food before I return home. Ducking into a shop, I watch the counterpeople ogle a blonde purchasing a box of pop tarts. She leaves, and they say something in a foreign language; I don't understand, but I get the gist.

From the waterfront, the sun shines high off of the Goldman Sachs tower. It burns through the thin canopy of leaves on Grand Street, and through the lenses of my second-string glasses. My eyes hurt. For a moment, I feel like an insect under a magnifying glass. I shrug off the burn and go inside.

a good one

2005-09-07T15:00:00.000-07:00

Downtown Jersey City is made up of microneigborhoods, all staring uneasily at each other across Newark Avenue, Marin Boulevard, or the Sixth Street Embankment. If Newark Avenue is something like our own version of Canal Street, then Harsimus Cove is to Van Vorst Park as TriBeCa is to SoHo. All are real estate constructs, and political units based on historic boundaries that feel more or less arbitrary at this remove. But the marketing wouldn't work if there wasn't something distinct about the areas, or more accurately, a way for the uninitiated to distinguish them.

When we first arrived Downtown, the Cool School of Jersey City had two contingents: those holding out against the inevitable at the Arts Center on 111 First Street, and those who lived and worked in Harsimus. Balance Hair Salon was there, and the Waterbug Annex, Lismore's home studio, Grisly Labs; later, Glenn Susser would open up his sandwich shop on Jersey Avenue. Chilltown Magazine was published from Harsimus. With no park, no PATH train stop, and a crime rate slightly higher than that of the rest of the historic neighborhoods, property values there were still low enough that reprobates like us could afford rental units.

In Harsimus, I see my first good one; a B plus, eminently liveable. It is on the north end of the neighborhood, in the shadow of the embankment. But the interior is sunny; big bright windows opening up on a leafy courtyard. There's a skylight on the staircase, even -- everything about the apartment has a restless-photon glow to it. The sink is a slab of black slate, and the walk-in closet has room for a computer desk. Nothing is renovated, but everything seems to work properly. The rent is more than we are currently paying, but there'd be much greater room for us here.

It isn't perfect. There's a faint but displeasing smell to the place. The kitchen and bathroom are functional but undistinguished. The apartment has no balcony. Since living at the Hi-Vue, we've grown so accustomed to having a terrace that going without one would feel slightly like being restrained. If we don't have a terrace door to leave open, how will the animals come in and out? At the Hi-Vue, we never shut the terrace, and we kept our bedroom windows wide open, too. One day a blackbird flew into the bedroom to keep us company. Uma, our cat, did not know whether to follow her instinct and attempt to kill it, or to run like hell toward the door. So she froze. Hilary grabbed her by the scruff and deposited her in the kitchen. There was no sense in prolonging her identity crisis -- at least not in front of the bird.

luxury

2005-09-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

My sister, well-meaning, continues to send us on-line listings for available condominiums in Jersey City. They are all aesthetically unsuitable, or far too small, or far too expensive. But constitutionally, I am a renter, not a purchaser. And after a night spent marvelling at our ability to find an apartment in this neighborhood in the first place, I recovered my equilibrium today.

I have my Powerpuff Girls notepad and my telephone. But hesitation has cost me units; some of these places are gone already. During our last search, listings in the Hudson Reporter recurred week after week as good apartments went unclaimed. I doubt that will be happening this time.

The Windsor Apartments on fully-rehabbed Essex Street are the first to call me back. I'd scribbled down their number without thinking clearly after seeing it on an advert banner. I assumed these new faux-brownstones were priced for far more that we could pay; in fact, I didn't realize that these were rental units at all. During my two years in Downtown Jersey City, almost all new developments have been referred to, derisively, as condominiums. I'm now discovering something that any realtor-in-training could surely have told me: agents will sell where they can, and rent where they can't. Not all of these newly-constructed luxury complexes are playing for highest stakes.

The saleswoman is kind and patient with me. She is from the South, she is only mildly corporate, and she is not sizing me up too harshly. I'm wearing my backup glasses, having stashed the usual cracked and krazy-glued pair at home, in the vain hope of passing myself off as the sort of person who might reasonably live at the Windsor Apartments. Everything here is new and streamlined, including the courtyard pool. I don't swim.

The cheapest one-bedroom unit (The Alexander, my brochure calls it) is spacious and serviceable, but a bit antiseptic. The floor is carpeted and the kitchen is large, but it reminds me more of a chain hotel than the lovely brownstone interiors I spy into on a walk home through Paulus Hook. Unlike Grandview, there is very little attention paid to stuffy neo-con style. Just as the nicest Marriott suites still look like the human resources conference room, the Alexander seems drawn by Scott Adams: luxury for those accustomed to spending time in offices and corner cubicles.

Later, I examine a first floor unit in a gorgeous historic building that I have passed hundreds of times, always wondering what sort of extravagance I'd find inside. The interior turns out to be decorated in Early American Frathouse: chipping paint, bicycles chained to the wall, and a pervasive odor of mildew. The smell is even worse in the apartment itself, a low-ceilinged horror with misplaced brickfaces, fold-open closet doors, and a refrigerator and oven that even Holly Hobbie would have found unacceptable. Some molds are historical -- I am told there are gigantic colonies living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that have been there for decades.

Back home with my own mold, I meditate on the notion of luxury. I found the Hi-Vue luxurious because of the stained-glass windows and the spectacular balcony, but the roof leaked and the knobs came off the doors when I turned them. Strangely, I never noticed. An infinitely self-indulgent sybarite, I desire luxury. But it occurs to me that I should ignore the promises of luxury made by realtors, since I cannot depend on anybody to be able to understand my own specific and perverse relaxations. And I can't find my real glasses. Holler if you see me tomorrow, staggering down the street, hands in front of me, feeling my way from apartment to apartment.

gloom in the courtyard

2005-09-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

I do not complain about spending beautiful days indoors, since I don't care for direct sunlight. Still, there is no excuse for neglecting this apartment hunt -- other than the holiday, of course, and the deadlines. So we took walks. The first took us through our own neighborhood; then, after returning to the flat for water, we headed out again in the vague direction of Van Vorst Park. Much later, after the deadlines had been met, we walked along Coles Street toward Hamilton Square.

I took a little notepad for numbers. My pad had a Powerpuff Girl on the front, and scatterd notes from Hilary about Alexander Pope inside. I paged to the back and scrawled down everything I saw. Most referred me to realtors. When I got home, I didn't call any of them.

Paulus Hook is busy with signs: For Rent, For Sale, Condominium Available, Under Lease, Brickface Restoration. Some advertise buildings that are clearly under construction -- some are little more than crossbeams and the promise of concrete. A few adverts bear numbers with distant area codes. "Flipping" is real estate slang for buying property in a hot neighborhood, and then selling it as quickly as you can for a higher price. It works on the same logic as does day trading: get in, get out, repeat, get rich.

A middle-aged woman ushered us into The Grandview, a new complex on the corner of Grand and Greene. This is a mixed-use development that was thrown up in a matter of seconds, or so it seems; every vacant lot in this neighborhood has been purchased and has been framed by scaffolding. The newer structures ape the design of rowhouses much in the way that some musicians record artificial crackling in the midst of their CDs to simulate the flipping of a vinyl album. Nobody is being fooled here. Still, we go inside.

The condominium unit for sale at this open house is smaller than the apartment where we currently live. It is handsome and tidy, and its back doors open up to a large brick patio. The kitchen surfaces are all dark marble, and the refrigerator is jet black. It looks like somebody's idea of a bachelor pad for a well-mannered financial services employee more interested in gardens than girls. The price: 550K. Later, we use an online mortgage calculator to discover how far we are from being able to afford this. I feel financially devastated from by brief brush up against the numbers.

Inland, things are dispiriting. Balloons advertise an open house on Varick, one block west of the park. The house is stately and old, but uncomfortable and somewhat woody. A realtor inside is explaining to a young couple that they'd best look in West New York if they expect to find a unit at their stated price. I do not hear the price. The apartment is unrenovated -- cabinets open and close uncomfortably, and the window treatments seem crummy. The kitchen, a pink sliver between the two other rooms, is entirely unworkable. This apartment is leasing for $450 more than our current flat.

I do not tend to generalize from brief experiences, but for the first time in memory, I have a bad feeling about an apartment hunt. Purchasing a condominium unit here -- even a meagre couple of rooms -- is plainly beyond our means. We fully expect to pay more than we are currently, but a 33% increase is tough to swallow. And yet, conditions in Downtown Jersey City have changed so radically over the past two years that bargain hunting here feels daunting.

From now until we settle our hunt, this space will be updated daily.

the fearsome effects of entropy

2005-08-31T06:33:00.000-07:00

I am watching a little squirrel scratch and bite himself on the tree stump in our courtyard. I miss the tree, and surely the squirrel does, too. To make matters worse, the apartment building directly across from us -- the one that used to be partially hidden by the foliage -- has been repainted an awful, unsightly terra-cotta color reminiscent of the worst excesses of the American Southwest. If all of this new money and new interest is really pouring into Jersey City Rising, why does everything around me seem to be deteriorating?

The Journal has continued its thorough coverage of Arborgate with two pieces -- one an account of Rikki Reich's jailhouse stay, and another about the City Councilman's bail-posting adventure. Unsurprisingly, the police account of the arrest differs dramatically from Rikki's own: the Department claims she struck an officer. I missed the confrontation, so I can't say for sure, but it seems unlikely that Rikki could have posed a threat to anybody in uniform. I suppose that at some point a judge will weigh in, too, and it'll all be he-said-she-said until then, (and probably considerably after then).

Elsewhere Downtown, the wave crashes on. Here on Grand, the first structures that will eventually become the gigantic Liberty Harbor North complex are being glued together and propped up at the side of the road like a great billboard advertising the future. Fourteen blocks to the north, Hamilton Park awaits its own inevitable transformation. A woman named Sheila Kirven wrote to me on Monday, asking if I knew anything about plans to convert the old St. Francis Hospital into condominiums and rental units. I told her I didn't. She pointed me to the website of a local watchdog group. Construction and demolition are spectator sports.

one mistake leaves all the rest in line

2005-08-30T06:19:00.000-07:00

The Jersey Journal did their Arborgate story today. Nothing too new there; the developer wouldn't comment, the police and the jails wouldn't comment, and the City Councilman contributed some bluster about "looking into the situation". When he does, Mr. Fulop will find that there is now nothing to see and nothing constructive to do, and that the time for action and intercession was yesterday.

I posted my own appreciation of Rikki's act of bravery here on the site.

pointe lookout

2005-08-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

I object on principle to any development that calls itself "______ Pointe". "Pointe" is a ballet term that has somehow found its way into land speculation and corporate naming schemes. It reads, surely, as "point". I will refrain from rehashing jokes about what the extra "e" is for. To those few people who actaully follow the ballet, use of the term "pointe" is meant to connote sophistication. For the rest of us, it's supposed to sound vaguely European, and thus as class-stratified and exclusionary as we expect Europe to be.

Still, pointes that are not built at any discernable point are mystifying and cause cognitive dissonance. Grove Pointe is going up at the intersection of Marin and Christopher Columbus, which is a point on the map in the way that an individual Lite Brite bulb somewhere in the middle of a clown face is a point of illumination. There is nothing distinctive about this property besides its proximity to the PATH Train Station.

I have heard good things about both the developers and the development: how they are complying with city regulations and contributing to the clean-up of a PATH plaza that had largely become an open-air derelict holding bin. The new PATH station on Marin, which has probably shaved more than ninety seconds off of my trip to Brooklyn, was built in part to accomodate the expected swell of new residents. I appreciate the convenience. It saves me the trouble of becoming enmeshed on Grove Street in conversations with people I know. Nobody pleasure-walks on Marin.

Yesterday afternoon, Rikki Reich, who owns the Gallery on Morgan Street, called me. Grove Pointe was, for her, a breaking point. She objected to the developer's decision -- backed, apparently, by the City government -- to cut down three trees on Marin that had stood for centuries. One was already gone, another two were in jeopardy. This was, to Reich, more than a metaphor for overdevelopment. She was brought up in the West, she told me, she has respect for all living things, and killing these trees was entirely unnecessary. I thought of the stump that now stands in our courtyard. The City and the developer, suggested Reich, were behaving like bullies, killing simply because they could.

Reich told me she would chain herself to the trees if she had to. She said that a Shade Tree organization from the Heights told her that the City had quietly removed scores of trees this summer. If this is true, I haven't noticed; I'm not a tree person. But I do miss the tree from our courtyard, and thought that the trumped-up charges on which the City saw fit to put it to death were outrageous.

I don't know if Reich actually did chain herself to the trees this morning, or whether she reached some kind of settlement with the developer or the City. But it is only a five-minute walk from here to the Pointe. I have my camera, and I am going to find out.

Read the accompanying article on The Tris McCall Report.

the tours of autumn

2005-08-24T23:48:00.000-07:00

Today Jed said that there is a good chance My Teenage Stride will be offered shows in England during the last week of October. I have never played in England, and the prospect excites me -- J and I recently agreed that touring in Europe would be a thousand times more compelling than touring America. Trouble is, if we do get these shows in October, they'll coincide with the weekend during which we're sure to be moving. Do I miss out on the opportunity to rock London because I have to box up my video game collection? Boy, will that make me feel like the sad girl who gets left out of the party.

To make matters worse, (or better, depending on how you look at it), Steve, fresh off of his star turn at AmsterJam, is setting up a New Jack Trippers show at Rothko. This will also be in late October -- probably the 21st or 22nd. How are we going to pack and move when I am out rocking all the time? There is never a good moment to drop everything and devote your life to gathering cardboard boxes and arranging books, but late October feels like a better -- or just warmer -- bet than late November does. I doubt we'll get a month's extension on our occupancy, anyway. It's a good problem to have, I guess, but it's still a problem.

The lease is up on Hallowe'en. I think it's time I had a talk with our landlord.

on the western end of paulus hook

2005-08-23T05:46:00.000-07:00

We are awakened by the red machines. They are scraping the area behind the Golden Cicada, just before the light rail stop on Marin. They are tying enormous church bells to the back of their trucks, and dragging them over broken asphalt and speed bumps. I can hear the voices of the work crew members. When they are done scraping and dragging the area, it will become Liberty Harbor North.

Then I hear the black machines. The black machines are pounding the area behind the Mack-Cali building, across the street from the Grove Street PATH Train Station. They are coaxing a giant with change in his pocket into a tantrum; he is jumping up and down and breaking the earth. So far, the black machines are scarier than the red machines. When they are done pounding the area, it will become Columbus Plaza and Grove Pointe.

From our living room, we can see the Mack-Cali building and its hundred slit-like insect eyes. Across Marin Boulevard are the original luxury towers that broke the Downtown grid, now looking defensive and outclassed. The sun shines off of the high windows and throws beams of light at us. In the late afternoon, a terrace door sometimes opens in the high tower, and shoots a momentary flash of concentrated sunlight across our living room wall. The flicker, radiant and brief, reminds me of J.G. Ballard's description of the atomic blast in Empire Of The Sun.

J Braun once likened sound to water, and the New York Times though enough of the quote to slap it on the front page. This morning, the original luxury towers south of Marin Boulevard are gigantic gobos. Sound bounces off of the high windows and terraces, and crashes like a wave into our courtyard. On the other side of Grand Street, sound finds channels between old brownstones, dripping between cracks in bricks and pouring through empty lots. It shakes our house, rattling the silverware we've left out on the kitchen island. The cups and knives add a dull metal clink to the scrape of the dragged bell, and the rumble of trucks bringing food for the giant.

I don't know where the cicadas perch. There was a tree in the courtyard, but the city deemed it unsafe, and brought in a work crew to cut it down. They dismantled it with the usual clumsy thoroughness of city work crews, dispassionately lopping off limbs, running indifferent chainsaws through the trunk, and stuffing leaves and branches into a wood chipper. I had assumed that the cicadas lived in the tree, and that once our tree had been murdered, the cicadas would have to find new digs. But they are still here, obstinately singing their big hit song over the construction noise. Perhaps they perch on the sides of buildings. I have seen them do that.

The trees in the City Hall park are filled with cicadas. The choruses roar over the air conditioning in the municipal offices. If you stand beneath the trees in the park, you can hear all three songs at once: the piledriver, the scraper, and the bugs. It sounds like the radio.

What will someday be Grove Pointe and Liberty Harbor North is now desert. The lot across from the PATH station had, for many years, been home to a boarded-up gym. There was an abandoned factory, awesome in its crumbling grandeur, on the property nearer to Grand Street. Derelicts lived there, throwing soiled mattresses on what was once the work floor. Hilary and I would drive past the Golden Cicada, park on the sand road, hop the fence, and photograph the interior of the building. Now it is gone, replaced by the red machines and huge mounds of gravel and sand. On Columbus, two mountains of dirt squat where the black machines have placed them. Over the hills there are desert noises: bells, insects, giants.

In a moment, I will put on a record of my own choosing, and begin work. But now I am listening to the city. It is the sound of adult teeth. Our desert blossoms anew with armchairs and terraces, and insect repellent. What mighty forces push up from the torn ground, singing their songs of blunt renewal as they come. It is not the only hit, but right now, it is the one that matters.

powerhouse

2005-08-21T21:41:00.000-07:00

You have been nothing short of heroic through all of this, and I admire both your perseverance and physical constitution. I’ve got neither. That’s my fault and not yours, but it’s the shortcomings of me and my reprobate peers that you’re up against here, so you may as well begin grappling with them now.

I received your letters. Once again, I was both flattered and alarmed by their urgency. The importance of the next few months to the long-term health of your project is apparent, and it is immensely meaningful to me that you consider me worth salvaging from the wreckage of these days of controversy. But it is best that you know the unbending truth upfront: I will never live in the district you’ve made.

You have done everything you can to make me believe that I am welcome here, and that I would be an asset to the neighborhood you’re building. At times, I nearly believe you. But yours is not the only voice in my ear. For every optimistic projection about what the warehouse district could be, there has been an unpleasant reminder of what it currently is – and how it got that way.

I weigh every word carefully today. Over the past year there have been so many times that I have been inclined to write something, but hesitated out of respect for you and what you have achieved. But our friend the former city councilman said something in a public meeting that I cannot shake: he believed that the municipal government had a moral obligation to bring the members of the Tenants Association back to the warehouse district. He might have been blowing smoke. When I asked our friend the mayor the same question, he said he did not agree. But by then, our friend the former city councilman had not been re-elected.

You have been here far longer than I have, and your relationships with the members of the Tenants Association are richer and more complicated than mine. But during my short association with the Arts Center, I developed an emotional attachment to the community there that was at least as ferocious as any real estate speculator’s dream of flipped properties and quick riches. The claims to sovereignty over 111 First Street made by the tenants were never politically or economically persuasive. But their personal stories were undeniable. They engendered an intense sympathy in me, one that made a mockery of my usual Jersey-libertarian qualms.

So while I can imagine any number of intellectual justifications for cutting the line and seizing a place for myself, I am not psychologically prepared to do that. And nor, I think, will I ever be – not until I am satisfied that the City has given every former tenant forced from the Arts Center a gold-plated invitation to return. I am not, like our friend the President of the Tenants Association, a sculptor with storerooms filled with work. I don’t need a thousand square feet of raw space. All I need is a laptop and a synthesizer.

You are very excited by the possibilities that the renovated warehouses in the districts can offer. You deserve to be. You have moved mountains to convince a recalcitrant government to wring these few concessions out of developers whom they normally will not cross. But when I see these buildings, I do not feel welcomed by them. They do not seem to share any of the haphazard virtues that made the Arts Center feel like a home to me. I am completely willing to accept that this is my own emotional failure. But the front door at 111 First Street was always unlocked. At half a million dollars for one bedroom and one bath, 140 Bay Street will not be.

We have passed laws. To most reasonable people, this means progress. I still have enough social and political conscience that from a certain angle, it could look like progress to me, too. But as I am sure you’ve surmised by now, I am no politician. I am an artist like you are, and like those who were run out of this very neighborhood. I work by feel. And it is my desperate hope that you will forgive me for saying: this does not feel right to me.

what the journal is good for

2005-08-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

Fifty cents is not very much to pay for an emotional experience. This I explain to Hilary, who wonders why I've bothered to buy today's copy of the Jersey Journal. Silly bird, I have no interest whatsoever in the articles. I've begun the scrupulous process of scanning the print classifieds for interesting-looking apartments.

It's too early to call any of these numbers. We're not leaving here until the end of October, and I don't want to run the risk of having to turn down something perfect because the landlord can't wait that long. Ads in this newspaper have a certain urgency that Hudson Reporter listings do not: they are caustic and blunt, and push their apartments like a backalley weed peddler. Heavily abbreviated and terse, they are piled interchangeably atop each other, stuffed into dense rectanguar cells, and left there beyond comment.

We found this flat in the Journal. The ad was buried at the bottom of the page. Unlike most of the Journal listings, it didn't mention a street. We were told it was Downtown. This meant, we believed, that it was far beyond what we'd be able to pay. We expected to stay in Union City, or perhaps to relocate to the Heights. But I forced Hilary to examine as much as we could, because I enjoy the scrupulous process. We visited a house on Van Vorst park that had once belonged to a mayor from the turn of the century. We looked at a ritzy penthouse that the Del Forno realtors had renovated on Newark Avenue.

These places would have bankrupted us had we rented them. Yet just looking at them expanded the parameters of our search -- they convinced us that if we chose to pinch our finances sufficiently, we could fit our lives into a container suitable for much wealthier people. We are no ascetics. Once we see something we like, we usually perform the sacrifices necessary to make it ours. We decided we would move Downtown and force it to work. I figured that even if we ended up in serious debt, we were setting ourselves up for two years of the sort of adventure we were unlikely to find in Union City.

We're not in debt. And it has been an adventure.

There aren't many advertisements for neighborhood apartments in the Jersey Journal. I estimate that there are two hundred and fifty Jersey City listings in today's paper. Only four of these are Downtown. Most landlords in this area prefer to list in the Reporter, which is virtually a real estate circular, or with a real estate agent. But if we can help it, we prefer not to go to realtors. I pretend that we do this to avoid the extra cost. Really, I fear losing control of the search, and missing out on the experience of circling advertisements and wandering into neighborhoods I haven't yet visited. And I confess to a secret fantasy, too: I have occasionally imagined becoming a realtor myself.

The newspaper closes on its own. Maybe that's just the August breeze. Others would advise me to try Craig's List, or to confine my search to online sources. That would save me two quarters, coins that I could use on the Ms. Pac Man machine in the basement of Southpaw, or that I could lend to Jed Smith, a much better Ms. Pac Man player than I am. Save enough quarters and perhaps we could afford the properties listed in the Reporter. We don't want to move to Greenville, and we don't need Section 8 vouchers. But today I am given over to this honeycomb of letters, numerals, dots and lines and dollar signs. Decoding the heiroglyphs in the Journal is where the scrupulous process begins.

the best piece of art i've seen all year

2005-08-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

On the way home I remembered my racism. Then I thought of the best piece of art I've seen all year.

The guards on the platform are supposed to be doing random spot checks. Today there were no guards. I had packages: I'd just bought a network router at J&R. The router box is roughly bomb-sized. It is the Belkin brand, a top of the line piece, the best router you can get. This I was assured by the sales clerk, a kid with spectacles and a heavy Middle Eastern accent. I liked him. He had a scraggly moustache and beard and a shaved head, and he smiled a lot as he answered my inane questions. And he admitted that he didn't know certain things about computers. That's a rarity at J&R.

This router box is a trapezoidal prism, the most dangerous shape you can find. A trapezoidal prism juts out at unpredictable angles, exploding at the viewer. I imagine that the trapezoidal prism appeals to bomb manufacturers at those moments when they are imagining possible shapes for the newest and best bombs. This is all guesswork, now; I have never seen a bomb up close at the World Trade Center station. If I had, I would not be able to write about it. To write about it, I would need a network router powerful enough to tap into my wireless service in the time between observation and the flash. But I wouldn't ask my new friend at J&R about that. I would not want him to think I considered him a terrorist.

Walking toward the steps to the area some call Ground Zero, and others call a PATH station stop, I was approached by a man in a turban.

"This is where there were towers?" he asked me with a smile.

I pointed to the footprints. He laughed. He asked me again if this was where the buildings had fallen. I assured him it was. He thanked me, and rejoined his family on the stairway.

Tourists come here from all over the world. They pose at the fence in front of the hole that Osama made. It is treated like a Washington Monument in reverse: a sightseeing target defined by absence. They snap photographs. It is hard to imagine that anything meaningful will come out of these shoots, even for the people that were there. My experience of digital cameras suggests that the panoramic sweep necessary to capture the immensity of the scene requires a heretofore uncharted number of megapixels. In fact, I would be willing to hypothesize that there is no technological advancement on the horizon that would be high-definition enough, and this may be the hole in Moore's Law that engineers are always searching for. Here, the opinions of the staff at J&R might come in handy. They could offer helpful advice to the tourists, matching them with the digital camera most compatible with the operating system.

The best piece of art I've seen all year is not a photograph. The best piece of art hangs in the rotunda of the Brennan Courthouse as part of the current exhibition there. It is a map of the New York City subway system, painted in oils. The piece is about the size of the fold-outs available at the token booths. The artist has taken great care to render all of the colors exactly as they appear on the official version. In fact, the painting replicates the subway map so well that at first glance, you might be fooled into thinking you're looking at a poster. However, one thing is different: all the text has been painted in Arabic.

Because we do not read Arabic, there is no way for us to know what the writing on the painting means. We can take it on faith that the stops are named as they normally are: Vernon-Jackson and Borough Hall, Times Square, Hoyt-Schermerhorn, the rest of the liturgy. We can assume that the scrawl at the bottom concerns service changes and transfers, and skipped stations on off-peak hours. But perhaps that's not what the painting says at all. Perhaps it says something else.

The painter is clever. He knows his audience. Many of the workers at the Brennan Courthouse take the train every day, and do so with the casual trepidation we've all become accustomed to. They see the guards in the terminals with rifles. They've heard the news from London. A viewer who does not read Arabic cannot be comfortable with this painting: it seems to contain secret messages, inscrutable plans, an unauthorized reproduction, an official document perverted to malicious use. And yet we know that it's far more likely that we're looking at a public service announcement: a reproduction of a benevolent translation meant to help Arab immigrants negotiate the American maze.

I use the World Trade Center PATH Train station whenever I can. There have been many times when it would have been more logical to take the Sixth Avenue line into the city. But I don't bother with it; in fact, I have come to resent the Sixth Avenue line. My preferred interface with Manhattan has become the hole, and when I enter the city by other methods, I feel cheated of excitement. The terminal seems like the place where the city is most alive. I fear that if I move away from this line, the island will slip away from me, and I will be left with movie images, powdery newsreels, hand-me-down stories of Dorothy Parker and Joe DiMaggio.

At night, the hole Osama made is lit up like a television advertisement. We are satisfied that ours are top-quality floodlights. New York City's biggest war wound demands two gigantic megapixels worth of state-of-the-art illumination. Tourists peer through the fences, pointing and puttering around the platform as if they are marking time, waiting for the show to begin. A man in a turban grins as he asks me about the buildings that were here. If I no longer go home this way, what will I forget about myself?

like moving insects

2005-08-17T16:19:00.000-07:00

Every place we have ever lived has been falling apart. We accept this as a logical consequence of living in Hudson County and we do not complain about it. Entropy doesn’t bother us. Now and then, Hilary will be overcome by a fear that we aren’t living as we ought, but normally she is far too preoccupied with her rescue efforts to bother.

We began in a space station on Boulevard East in Weehawken. The rooms had no doors on them, but the flat did have a central vacuum system that I used to chase after cockroaches. I now recognize this as disgusting and reprehensible behavior. But I was twenty-one years old, terrified of bugs, and burdened with a guilty conscience. The vacuum tubes allowed me the illusion that I was magically transporting the cockroaches to a bug paradise somewhere under the house where they would live in happiness and insect stimulation. More likely they were sucked through the pipes to an incinerator, where they died horribly, without even the dignity of a nice manly squashing.

Over the years I have lost my killer’s temperament. As I child, I entertained myself as children in automobile suburbs do: hunting large ants and mashing them under my shoe. Insignificant to me, but sacramental to the insects, who await their inevitable squashing with a combination of stoicism and scuttling bravado. The blue flyswatter was my symbol of power. When I saw a fly, I would hurry to crush its little face with cold plastic. The tip of my flyswatter could break the speed of sound. Its zip, moan, and splatter as it cut through the air was pleasing, like the buzz of a huge predatory bug.

I still have a blue flyswatter. This one appears to have been designed by a believer in the Eastern religious principle of ahimsa. It is slow and bulky, and it does not frighten any of the bugs. I don’t frighten them, either. Instead of punishing them with death, I lamely encourage them to leave via the terrace door. Sometimes I have an accompanying insipid parting comment, too; “run along”, or “see you later”, which is disingenuous, of course. I have no desire whatsoever to see them later. I am lying to the bugs. I am an insect phony.

Instinctively they know this, which is why they are so contemptuous of me. In their discussions behind the wall, their dark strategy sessions, they refer to me, unkindly, as “no threat”. They draw up pheromones maps of the refrigerator, and study them as they squat on the black mold. What do bugs want? Excitement, stimulation of the antennae, a chance to die gloriously in battle with humans. I give them nothing. I am ashamed to show my face to the bugs.

We shared the house on the Union City border with meaty waterbugs, multi-legged abominations that corresponded to no field guide entry I’d ever seen. They moved fast. When pulverized, they disintegrated into powder, paste, and twisted, fibrous limbs. It was unpleasant to scrape the muck off of the wall and the flat of the mop, but at least it didn’t look like a bug anymore. I had no problem disposing of the residue. The insect lord was kind to design them this way: to unravel like a stocking and lose their distinctive bugginess upon reception of the sacrament. But most bugs are not built that way.

One morning at the Hi-Vue, we woke up with the cicada. It was perched, unmoving, in the lace curtains above the bed. We spent an hour in furious deliberation in the kitchen, peeking when we dared through the glass door to the bedroom. In hushed voices we discussed its health: was it sick? dead? just sleeping? Terrified that the monster would start its infernal singing – right there in our house – we crept up to the doorjam. Hilary stood on the bed, grabbed the bronze crossbar, and draped the top of the curtain over the bottom. The cicada, swaddled in the gauze, did not move. Scared witless, we marched the folded fabric to the deck and slung it over the fence. Ten minutes later, we checked through the window and saw that the cicada was gone. It had been alive. I marveled again at Hilary’s bravery. Then again, she had never seen the horror of half-squashed cicada, oozing white pus, flopping and heaving toward its opponent in grotesque futility, chirping spastically for its lost life.

I would prefer not to live with insects. The expectations are unbearable. I am aware of their position on the food chain, and recognize that they, like the smelly farm animals, must exist somewhere. But I know my role, and I don't like it. On our television, there is nothing but violence: bloopers and crashes, people slamming loved ones into plate glass windows, sexual assault, funny jokes. There is a fly on the tiled floor of our bathroom, motionless on its back, its tiny legs splayed. I had nothing to do with its passing.

the crack in the chimney

2005-08-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

Our landlord is broke. We know this because halfway through our tenancy, he was served with legal papers. The attorneys from a local bank informed us that there were already several liens on the house we were inhabiting. We were named in the suit. Generally our landlord prefers to stay out of sight, but that day, he found his nerve and rapped on our door. He wanted us to know what was coming, and that we didn't need to be alarmed.

I wasn't. I've been named in suits before.

New construction projects in Paulus Hook commence without ceasing. Every time a truck rolls by, the floor shakes violently enough to rattle all of the glasses in the cupboard. Semis filled with building supplies rumble down Grand all morning, headed for the waterfront excavations. New residential complexes, plastic and airtight, are rising on Greene Street, overlooking the scenic Merrill Lynch parking lots. These developments strain to blend in with the rest of the nineteenth-century rowhouses that dominate the neighborhood. They fail, of course. There is no chance we will be able to afford any of these units. Yet I am still curious enough about their dark corporate interiors, their track lighting, provocative smells of fresh lacquer and sawdust.

The leak in the ceiling cannot be fixed with mortar and spackling. It's a fissure in an old chimney that needs to be taken to pieces to save. Our mold colony and our ant colony are manifestations of a foundational problem with the house. This structure has bounced and shivered on Grand Street for one hundred and fifty years, and has been designated historic by a city government that is often profligate with its historic designations. From the outside, there is no chance that a passerby would find the building remarkable. It is, easily, the ugliest house on our block.

I believe our landlord would change this if he could. When the front steps break, as they often do, he is out there the following morning with his trowel, bleary-eyed, dutifully and deliberately reconstituting the crumbling brickface. His children charge up and down the steps and bounce their bicycle wheels against the lip of the stoop. Everything busts faster than he can make repairs. While all the other homeowners on Grand Street keep magazine gardens in their backyards, our landlord has let his little plot grow wild. The kids don't miss it. They prefer to play on the street. This makes perfect sense to me: as a child I had no patience for greenery either. I had all of my fun in the road.

Our landlord appears to view the crack in the chimney as an intractable problem, an act of a cruel god, existing on a plane beyond the scope of his comprehension. Every month, Hilary includes a note in the rent envelope discussing the leak in a friendly way: reminding him of the insidiousness of water damage, gently cajoling him toward positive action. When confronted by inaction bordering on negligence, patience is not always Hilary's chosen method. But it is no use getting mad at our landlord. He gives the impression of a man so burdened by the demands of family life that he can barely raise his hand to say hello. It is unspoken: he is in no financial condition to begin reconstruction of his house.

The landlord's wife is an enormous woman with a huge voice. On weekend mornings, she bellows at the children. Her invective is audible from the second floor and across the street as well. The kids are, without exception, well-behaved and well-groomed. They party when they can. When we first arrived in the neighborhood, there were other schoolkids on the block, riding their bikes on the sidewalk with the landlord's kids. In the twenty months since, those other children have disappeared. The U-Hauls that I see from our second floor window each weekend bring only young childless couples, their home electronics, and their new furniture. We never see the children moving out. But they do.

The landlord's kids play American R&B and reggaeton: "Gasolina" by Daddy Yankee, over and over. They bring their radio out to the stoop. A few doors down, a storefront briefly inhabited by the mayoral candidate most favored by the anti-abatement crowd has been converted into a cafe with upmarket aspirations. Sometimes the people in the outdoor seating give me a funny vibe. I walk out of the crappy house with the busted brown door, often with a musical instrument under my arm. Unlike my landlord, I am not Latino, and I am not a banker or an attorney. I look like one of the notorious JC artists, all of whom were supposed to be gone by now.

When Hilary and I lived in Union City, the kids played in the street. Scores of them did, emptying out of the tenements on Eleventh Street, filling the block from Palisade to New York, pelting each other with balls and making life hell for motorists. Unofficial councilors emerged -- slightly older boys who would write on the pavement with chalk and attempt to impose order on the games. We were the only Anglos on the block, a tiny droplet of gentrification in a sealed neighborhood that wasn't looking toward New York City for its cues. We could have been the vanguard of an unwelcome change. Instead, Union City barely changed at all.

As Grand Street renovates, the relative disrepair of our house becomes more distinct: to the neighbors, to the landlord, to us. Rainwater sluices down the front of the house in a thick black cascade, crashing on the windowpanes and spattering droplets into the bedroom. There is a crack in the chimney that won't be fixed, and water is violating our living room wall. It is sloshing us clear of the neighborhood, as it soaks the crossbeams and wood floors and the black mold piles up in the bedrooms of my landlord's children. He is washing away in a flood of unpaid bills. The bank will flush this family from their property sooner or later: our exhausted landlord, his hollering wife and his four children, riding their bicycles, breathing in mold spores. They will float elsewhere, taken by the current to points unknown. The same tide will carry us, too.

living with toxins

2005-08-15T10:10:00.000-07:00

I don’t know the toxicity of our mold colony. Some molds, we are told, are highly toxic, and cause lingering physical dysfunction and disease. Ours is probably such a mold colony, but it’s impossible to tell. By the time our mold could be properly analyzed, we will be long gone from here.

We met our mold yesterday evening. Rainwater was pouring, once again, through the hole in the ceiling. We used a pasta pot as a catchbasin, and draped a washtowel over its side to prevent water from splattering everywhere. It is tough for us to get the catchbasin up against the wall of our apartment on Grand Street because the renovator has ringed the floor with a decorative molding. The molding is split now from water damage, and winged ants and other insects crawl through the cracks and lay eggs in the cool underside of the racks that hold our compact disc collection.

After the last rainstorm, we’d put a full-length mirror over the hole in the wall. Instead of seeing the decay around us, we’d see ourselves. A month earlier, Hilary had scraped the decayed portions of the walls and ceiling and repainted them. The ceiling, we’d found, had been clumsily repaired during the renovation. Gauze, tape, and cardboard had been stretched over the cracks, and the hole had been imperfectly wadded up with newspaper. Hilary, normally fast with solutions, was at a loss. She painted over the newspaper.

Last night, rainwater sluiced down the surface of the mirror and on to the lacquered hardwood floor. When we moved the mirror we saw the mold colony, spreading out across the crack like a great black firework. My first instinct, as always, was protective: this was our mold, a guest in our home, and it needed to live, too. It had probably peeped its head through the crack to see what was shaking. Somewhere deep within its moldy consciousness, it knew our home had surplus of heat and electric energy, good for growing.

Most of us face white walls all day. The white wall is an impassive face, an arbitrary imposition of a boundary on the space we’re meant to inhabit. In our imagination, a wall has no dimensionality. It is the end of a dimension of our habitation. This allows, among other things, for us to forget what is happening inside the wall, four feet from the dinner table and the telephone, Wurlitzer electric piano, and the little wooden cat curled up on top of the ottoman. But I know at least two of the things inside the wall: winged insects and black mold. The insects are unconscionable, but harmless. They are acquaintances. The mold is spectacular, but cold, defiant, malicious.

I murdered my mold this morning. We used a combination of bleach, soap, and water, mixed in the same pasta pot that we’d caught the rain in. The water in the pot turned filmy and thick. I scrubbed the decaying wall with a Dobie pad, my right hand inside a Ziploc bag. Then I sat down at the computer and began this weblog. Having given up on any hope that our landlord will address the decomposition of his two-hundred year old house, I have also dismissed any lingering fantasies about renewing the lease. We do not live in a slum: we inhabit a renovated apartment in the wealthiest neighborhood in town. In two and a half months, we won’t anymore.

The subject of this journal is search: for a new place to live, but also for a deeper and fuller relationship with my community and with Hudson County. Our days on this block were always numbered. If there was a moment where we fit in here, it has passed. My way has been to put a mirror over the mold, and concentrate on the comfort of our reflections rather than the decay around us. It makes for a hothouse atmosphere, a good home. It is, however, garbage citizenship. Like all apartment hunts, this one will be a flight from something. Perhaps by writing myself through it, it can also become a journey into something else.