New York, New YORK

New York, New YORK

In this episode, Ryan
-rocks it out with Stephen Colbert
-lights a microwave on fire in the meatpacking district
-gets escorted out of a compound by the NYPD

SATURDAY

Not a big fan of flying, I decided that I’d overland it to NYC, and while Amtrak and Via have never had the greatest of reviews in my experience—except from retirees from Australia for some reason—they couldn’t be any more ramshackle than the Hershey Train in Cuba, so screw it man, train it to NYC!

The journey cost me something like $70, which ain’t bad, but it takes a whole day. You leave early in the morning and don’t arrive until late that evening. It was 10 hours, but then it didn’t seem that bad or terribly long, especially when I could kill time with Civ IV and periodic flirtations with the attractive Mexican nanny-student in the seat next to me (who was good enough to share a bag of old potato chips, which—along with an over-priced hot dog from the café, served as my only nourishment for the entire trip).

Arriving underground at Penn Station at night, your first sight of NYC is Madison Square Gardens (known to me as the home of the Rangers, but apparently they have some sort of NBA franchise that’s more popular down there) and the neo-classical columns of the New York Post Office. The motto at the top of the building is like something taken right out of a Western from the 1950s saying something akin to “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Inspirational, yes, and reassuring about the promptness of their courier services, but I’d still hate to be the sucker riding-pony through flood, fire, and hurricane, just so some dude in Alabama can get his monthly issue of Hustler.

Anywho, I did the obvious and hailed a yellow-taxi (what other colour would there be in New York?) which was surprisingly affordable and surprisingly the exact same feeling as riding in a regular taxi. Some though, have credit card slots and television screens to entertain you in the back, should looking out at Manhattan prove tiresome for you.

The hostel I stayed at the first night was like a converted courtyard of apartment complexes and bunkhouses with a confusing array of stair cases, friendly Koreans who seemed too shy to speak to me, less friendly Russians who seemed too disapproving to speak to me, and an older presumably wiser elderly Japanese man with long white bushy moustache and beard and a tie-dyed shirt. It’d be no stretch of the imagination to refer to him as a new Japanese hybrid of David Suzuki and Mr. Miyagi from the karate kid. He also didn’t speak any English, but since I’m always eager to embrace the absurdity of a conversation between two folks who don’t have a single mutually intelligible tongue between them, we hung out in our hot and muggy bunkhouse (despite summer’s arrival in New York, they had apparently neglected to turn off the heat from winter). Giving me some sage advice about life and not wasting it, he sent me off with a mouthful of altoids into the nearby club district of New York.

Okay, granted there’s a few of these, but this one in particular was called “the Meatpacking District” because of the abundancy of butchers and packers that originally set-up shop in the area. Now “the Meatpacking District” is a club district. Feel free to make all sorts of amusing puns and jokes here, I’m sure plenty have. I am curious though about the etymology of the slang term “meat market” referring to clubs where a lot of skin is on display. I heard this mainly during my undergrad in Canada, but could it have originated here in NYC? That would make for some beautiful irony.

Now if you know me—and odds are if you’re reading this you do—I ain’t exactly your stereotypical night-dawg player man. Most times I find myself in a club, I’m not entirely sure what to do with myself, except to drink over-priced beverages and gyrate my limbs in a behaviour that is distantly related to dancing. Being alone makes it that much more awkward, but this would be the only Saturday I’d have in NYC and it seemed sacrilege to not take in the nightlife from “the city that never sleeps.”

Of course though, I’d just spent 10 hours on a train, and all the altoids in the world couldn’t mask the Amtrak hot dog breath, well-trod sneakers, and fashion-sense dictated by charity giveaway t-shirts and shorts that hadn’t seen an iron since the NHL strike. But I carried on, looking for a place free of velvet rope, because there’s nothing that de-humanizes you like standing in line for 2 hours, only to get harassed by a steroid-induced bouncer, rejected by a cute flirt-in-a-skirt who could’ve been one of your TA students, and bankrupted by a bartender who doesn’t understand the difference between dark and light rum.

So I decided on a couple things. No cover, no crap-ass music, and something between sardine-wannabees and drinking alone on a lawn-chair on the moon. Naturally I found myself walking for a bit (which didn’t help my altoid or run-down running shoe situation), dodging the masses of beautiful people who probably spent more on their evenings wardrobe than I would on my entire trip (naturally, you can guess whose expenditure covered more, but hey I wasn’t complaining). I ended up walking by Hogs & Heiffers and rejecting it as being too much like Houstons (a popular nightclub in Brandon, one of 2 or 3) and I ended up on a place whose name I forgot but whose main distinguishing feature was that it had a dark lit-neon blue glow and a “pool room” in the basement, so-named after a pool filled with plastic balls next to the dance floor. (One wonders how often the floating balls become flying balls and the over-exuberant dancers decided to try this “floating” thing themselves). I ended up hooking up with a friendly Manhattanite and her friends whose dresses and well-permed hair made them look a cast-member of Sex and the City. Hearing it over the the thumping house music, my dance partner’s name sounded like “Justyna” but later turned out to be something more Russian sounding like “Nostyna.” Long-story short, soon after the name debacle and the club closing, I stumbled my way back to the hostel for what few hours of sleep remained before I had to check out of my night’s accommodation. On the way, I stopped in an all nite deli (which appears to be a New York word for convenience store) and picked up a Chicken parmigiana wrap, which I remember thinking was a freakin’ awesome culinary revolution.

SUNDAY

Of course, my opinion of the dish would change dramatically once I tried to mike it for breakfast the next morning. The group of ever-so-friendly Russians were hanging out in the kitchen at the time, and subsequent actions would only prove to solidify their disapproval of me, but meh, what traveller hasn’t ignited a microwave in a hostel before? Remember that Chicken parmigiana wrap I mentioned earlier? Well it seems that somewhere between my drunken revelry and my morning sleep deprivation I forgot that part of it was wrapped in tinfoil. If you’ve ever wondered why it’s a bad idea to microwave tinfoil, it’s because the metal produces sparks. These sparks are relatively harmless unless they come into contact with combustible material like oh-I-don’t-know the paper wrapper that surrounded the tinfoil and thus was the cause of my surprise when I noticed bright orange flashes coming from the glass front. Upon closer inspection it became apparent that my chicken parmigiana had become completely engulfed in a ball of flames, and my initial microwave-must-be-wacked-up theory to explain the orange glow soon had a more immediate and self-incriminating explanation.

So I went into emergency mode which for me effectively consists of standing still and eerily calm and trying to figure out what the hell to do. First, I cancelled the remaining cooking minutes. Normally I would have just grabbed it and chucked it in the sink, but the flames engulfed the entire thing, so it wasn’t going to have any of that. I tried blowing on it, but the flames were too big to be put out in such a fashion and ashes spread. I discovered that by closing the door, I choked off the oxygen and the flames gradually began to die down a bit, but by this point smoke was billowing through the hostel kitchen and one of the Russians charged in, grabbed the mostly de-flamed wrap, and doused it in the sink, before handing me the charred and somewhat overcooked remains of my leftovers.

So about an hour or two later, I checked into a different hostel. This one was called the Bowery Whitehouse Hostel, and luckily I had already planned to move to it. Recommended by my guidebook as the place to get a single room in downtown Manhattan for $30 a night, I thought why not? Obviously at that price there’s going to be a catch, and there’s was that the individual rooms were better described as walled-in cubicles (I literally was taller than the room was long, so I was forced to sleep in a quasi-fetal position), but you did have your own closet and bed and visual privacy, although the roofs of each room were open to allow for the communal air circulation (and noise circulation). Noise was a serious problem, as the building was probably almost a century old and the floors creaked to prove it. My room was right next to the entrance, so every time someone came through the door, it sounded like an elephant roller-skating. On the plus side, the bathrooms were communal, which usually I consider a disadvantage, but on this trip I made most of my new contacts at the hostel just waiting for the shower, including the smiley German who spent far too much time on her hair, the long-legged Singaporean who confused me into thinking her boyfriend was her cousin, and a confident Dutch traveler who dressed as liberally as her country’s policies.

I declared Sunday to be “New York Stereotypical Tourist Day” where I would endeavour take in the ubiquitous big apple landmarks that define anyone and everyone’s first visit to New York. First stop, Central Park. I had hoped to find the legendary drum circle—even bragging to a few friends about joining in—but alas my search was in vain and when I asked a park attendant he looked as confused I as I did. Nice park though to be lost in, though. Mind you, while its one of the biggest urban parks in the world, you could find far more nature and have it all to yourself practically anywhere in Canada. Though the skyscraper backdrop is an interesting nature-civilization fusion.

After Central Park, I headed north into Harlem-the city’s famed heartbed (yes I invented a word) of black culture and music, including everything from hip-hop to soul and R&B. Traditionally, it’s also been a rather rough neighbourhood, one of the places where you’d have to watch your back or avoid altogether, lest you end up as inspiration for an episode of Law & Order. These days Harlem, like many traditionally run-down neighbourhoods in North American metropolitan centers, had caught the gentrification bug. So where once stood pawn-shops and payday-loans now you find outlets like The Gap and H&M. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still very much a black community, and I stood out like an albino rhino amidst the pedestrian throngs but the only criminal behaviour I saw was on a billboard advertisement for Grand Theft Auto IV.

Next stop, Ground Zero, site of the World Trade Center. Truthfully, there’s not much to see here except a giant construction site (The Freedom Tower should be rising from the ashes of the World Trade Center shortly) and few souvenir hawkers with questionable ethics. There is a definite sense that something big is missing, and the surviving curtains of escalators near the middle of the site seem to extend eerily upwards. Designed to whisk thousands of commuters in and out of the WTC during rush hour, it’s still functioning although it seems to extend up into a void and the scale of the escalator system alone is enough to remind you of how big and important these towers really were. And yes there are lots of American flags.

So on that uplifting note, I headed south for the Staten Island Ferry, which is free and gives you a nice view of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. You can take a ferry to Liberty Island and Ellis Island themselves, but that’ll cost you some and I didn’t really have much of an interest in Ellis Island (While my Dad’s family did initially settle in New York when they emigrated to North America, this was when it was a British colony and they left long before Ellis Island opened its doors). With the Staten Island ferries, you also run a better chance of riding with local New Yorkers (Staten Island is one of the five boroughs, the other four being Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx) although don’t kid yourself, the tourists’ll be there too. In fact, the only drawback to this plan is it has a tendency of stranding you on Staten Island, which isn’t the most captivating of places to visit. During the day ferries are every 20 mins, but my ferry was later in the day and so I had to wait an hour for a ride back to Manhattan. On the plus side, I got to meet an attractive German-Korean lawyer and her friend and take photos of the Statue of Liberty at sunset.

The next day, the sun shone brightly over Long Island and I decided it was too nice of a day to spend it in a Museum (plus they are often closed on Mondays) so I opted to check out The Bronx Zoo. Like Harlem, the Bronx also has a fairly rough-and-ready reputation, which is no doubt reinforced by the high amounts of barbed-wire and prison fences you cross over on the elevated rail. Also like Harlem, it’s been pacified—and by extension gentrified—in recent years, and the only rumbling that I noticed was my stomach after forgetting to eat before going to the zoo.

Surprisingly, the zoo is somewhat hard to reach by subway—surprisingly in the sense that it is one of the very few places in the Bronx, other than Yankee stadium, where people actually go. I got dropped off amongst a stand of tough working-class brick tenements and waundered until I found a forest and a bunch of grizzled but jolly old men playing poker. Not wanting to interrupt their game, I noticed a NYPD cruiser on the other side of the field, and I moved toward it, noting that the police often prove to be excellent people to ask directions of. There wasn’t anyone in the cruiser however, and there was another one beside it, and another one beside that… and another… and another..

I stopped. It had become clear I had entered a NYPD compound somehow, but since I still needed directions I went further. I had to go a little further before I found a group of officers hanging out on a coffee break. One of them in full uniform, a big black fella something like Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince of Belair, hollered “NYPD FREEZE!” at me. Within seconds he had gone from casual coffee break stance to full arrest position, pointing at me with something black which may or may not have been a firearm (it was likely just been his radio, mind you, but he was still a fair distance from me at this point, so I couldn’t tell).

I froze.

“What are you doing here? What do you want?”

“uh…directions,” I responded, “I’m looking for the zoo.”

The NYPD officer laughed a big belly laugh and immediately withdrew his aggressive stance and went back to coffee-break form. He and the other officers shook their heads and then one offered to escort me out of the compound (which for some reason consisted of me going directly through it rather than backtracking). This new officer, who had a thick Brooklyn accent, gave me a few quick directions and sent me on my way.

The ordeal of getting to the zoo was not yet over. I had an expressway to cross, and something told me a rousing game of human frogger wasn’t going to cut it. I followed the path outlined by the NYPD constable, but it soon became entirely blocked by a fenced off construction site. I ended up following the fence along through a crowded playground and ultimately to a tunnel under the expressway where I met “The Naturalist.”

Well to be more precise he met me. He had come up behind at one point and started shouting “Ian, Ian” at me. Since my name is not Ian, I just ignored him, presuming he was talking to someone else. Eventually though he came right up behind me and since it was obvious now he was talking to me, I turned around.

“You’re not Ian.” He said

I acknowledged that I was not.

According to the Naturalist, his friend Ian is my identical twin, but from the back only. I admitted that I get confused for other people all the time, especially in English-speaking countries (that Wasp blood, we all look alike I guess).

Anyways, we got to talking and he explained that he was a Naturalist, repeatedly. I remember from my undergrad that a naturalist, historically at least, was someone who advocated the preservation of nature as completely untouched by human hand (ie. Extreme conservationist, you set aside a piece of land and ban all humans, including park rangers, from interacting with it). I don’t know if he actually was a naturalist, or how one obtains such a title, but he was proud to call himself one nevertheless. Besides he wore a tucked-in bleach white t-shirt which read “Bronx River Naturalist Society” in big colourful letters which took up the entire front of the shirt, as well as a ball cap, glasses and a shaggy pepper-streaked beard. As far as I’m concerned, these were all the qualifications he needed.

He asked me where I was from, and I at first said Toronto, but when this sparked a serious of questions about small towns around Toronto which I knew little about, I confessed that I was actually from Manitoba, and then he got excited about farm life and rural advantages over life in the city. He asked me if I planned to move back there now that I had graduated and I said I was hoping to stay in Toronto because it had better job prospects. He glared disapprovingly and effectively said only a fool would give up natural paradise to live in a city. I failed to mention that this was an odd view of someone who lived in the largest city in North America.

He led me onwards to one of the zoo’s rear entrances, all the while finding out new ways of explaining that he was a naturalist, and trying to seduce me with secret paths and natural hiking trails that could offer free entry into the heavily forested zoo. Expressing my hesitancy about purposely breaking into the zoo, not so much out of fear of the NYPD (my encounter with them had occurred only 15 mins before) as feeling somewhat silly about trying to cheat what was ostensibly a charitable organization (Granted zoos are somewhat controversial in that they keep animals against their will—as do cattle farmers to the same extent—but this one at least pioneered the concept of open range zoos—ie down with cages—and has been central in efforts to save many endangered species.) Ultimately, he insisted upon approaching the counter and managed to talk the clerk into letting me in for free (apparently he was an official naturalist after all).

After getting me through the gate he went off to go do his naturalist thing, but before leaving he asked me what my faith was. I answered Christian, but admitted to less than regular church attendance. He gave me the same look he gave me when I suggested giving up small town Manitoba for Toronto, but then went on his way, wishing me good luck and remind me again that he was a naturalist.

So I got into the Bronx Zoo for free and wandered around its environs for a bit although I had arrived later in the day and most of the animals had already gone off exhibit. The tigers were cool tho. At one point I took a gondola ride, partly out of guilt of not paying and partly because I wanted a bird’s-eye of view of what animals were still out and roaming around. As it turns out, though, all I saw were tree tops.

After the zoo, I went waundering in the Bronx again, this time in a more commercial neighbourhood. As stated earlier I was pretty hungry by this time, and I was eyeing an Italian joint’s menu when I heard “Canada! Hey Canada!” Once again I didn’t realize he was talking to me at first, but then I remembered that in foreign parts, one’s homeland can quickly become one’s unsolicited moniker.

Sure enough, there was the Naturalist, but this time he had his embarrassed wife in tow. His wife was admonishing him in vain to not stop and talk to strangers (this seemed to be an ongoing issue in their marriage) but he ignored her and was just as friendly as ever (she continued pleading with him the whole time however, mostly in vain). The Italian restaurant I was considering was apparently a personal favourite of his. Naturally, he knew the owner and the family that ran it were authentic Italians (true) and it was popular in the neighbourhood. I took their advice, as the Naturalist’s wife dragged him off into the distance.

That night I checked out Broadway, and while I had initially planned to take in a show, I was disappointed to find that the offerings didn’t really excite me enough to warrant forking over the equivalent of a Leafs game in ticket prices. That is not to say there weren’t interesting productions, the prospect of the musical Curtains which featured David Hyde Pierce (Niles from Frasier) playing a hard-boiled detective. In the end, I ended up going in for an Improv show, which turned out to be a giant ripoff (they charged you $10 on the street, but insisted on a 2 drink minimum where even pepsi was an atrocious $7). For that price you’d expect the cast of Whose Line Is It Anyway live, but all we got were cheap knockoffs who weren’t good at improvisation or comedy. One skit for example, was supposed to have been inspired by an audience suggestion of a famous historical event and the audience did shout out suggestions including the Civil War, the Stockmarket Crash, and 9/11. Granted that last one would be a bit inappropriate, and the Stockmarket Crash would be difficult for a skit that turned out to consist of cast and audience members striking dramatic poses as if in a historical portrait while a “historian” interprets stem, but the Civil War would have worked fine. For some reason though, the host just ignored the audience suggestions completely and went with Declaration of Independence, revealing how canned the comedy was (and if you’re going to can it, at least can the good stuff). Oh well, at least I met a group of outspoken Scottish lassies at the table next to me.

TUESDAY

What the hell did I do Tuesday? Oh right, I slept in. (I really needed some after the previous few days) Then I hit up a couple of the museums. First the Museum of Radio and Television (now called the Paley Center for Media or something). I remember my Grade 9 English teacher telling us that this archive held every TV show ever broadcast, and while I was skeptical about physical possibility of such an archive, curiosity had gotten the better of me and so I showed up on their doorstep. It only took a few searches for “Star Wars Christmas Special” before it became apparent that the claim that they held absolutely everything ever broadcast was absolutely false. They did have a lot of shows though. Primarily American ones mind you, and primarily network shows, although the number of South Park episodes was considerable and composed probably the oddest result titles I’ve ever encountered on an archival search. In the end though, I ended up watching the first post 9/11 episode of the Daily Show and an episode of Strangers with Candy. After the TV museum, I tried to go to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) but it was closed on Tuesday (not Monday as I presumed) so I ended up going to the American Folk Art Museum instead, which might have been more interesting for me anyway, as I’ve always been a bigger fan of folk art than modern art.

The highlight of the day, however, was the Colbert Report. Well I knew there were no guarantees I’d get into either the Daily Show or Colbert. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are practically the only celebrities I might actually go gaga over, so I knew I had to at least try. As it turned out, the day I chose to go was the final day of the primaries when Hillary Clinton ended her campaign and Barack Obama was declared the democratic nominee. The line-up at the Daily Show was huge, so I just basically gave up on it that day (I tried again in vain on Thursday, but it was a pointless venture) and investigated Colbert, where the line was surprisingly short (I ended up #9 in the stand-by line). The wait was fairly long (about an hour) although I met an intriguing Californian couple, the guy a demasked Mexican Wrestler with a beard he could have borrowed from Thor, the girl a San Francisco flower child with dream-filled eyes who happened to be a long-time aficionado of the Burning Man festival (They later told me a great deal of the festival and offered to hook me up with tickets, an offer I’m tempted to take them up on).

So yeah as it became clear that I was actually going to get into the show, my excitement grew and I remember telling the ex-luchador that I felt “like a child on Christmas and Halloween at the same time.” I love that Stephen Colbert, I ain’t gonna lie.

Once we were all crammed into the audience holding tank, one of the Report’s many interns (its amazing how many they actually have) performed crowd control and stalled for time by answering behind-the-scenes questions about the show. Between him and the comedian that warmed up the crowd once we were in the studio, I learned that every stereotype about Willie Nelson is damn true, Stephen Colbert actually did steal Bill O’Reilly’s microwave (he apparently got it past security by telling them “Bill said it was okay” even though Bill had never given him permission and had in fact left his lunch in it), Jane Fonda actually did tongue Colbert’s ear and got him in a whole heap of trouble from his wife, and Howard Dean swears a lot (especially make statements like “Fucking awesome man”) when off camera (He will also magically appear if someone says the magic words “I want to donate $10 000 to the Democratic Party.”) The comedian before was fairly decent, although he was one of those American style audience roasters which can often rub me the wrong way. He asked if anyone was from another country, so I raised my hand he pounced, declaring that wasn’t a real country and then asking if I thought the Toronto subway was clean, to which I responded “uh.. sure.” Apparently he was looking for a more substantial lead to go on, but it became apparent he knew dick all about Canada and therefore had little comedic grounds for satire, but it did remind me how often New Yorkers remarked about the cleanliness of Toronto’s subway (Most Torontonians don’t share this point of view). In New York, I’d say, the subway’s grimey-ness is part of its attraction-repulsion charm, just like its guerilla buskers and its ridiculous complicated system of colours and letters. Based on world averages though—or at least on subways I’ve visited around the world—I’d say Toronto’s is cleaner than New York’s, but the cleanest are in Taipei and Nanjing (both being new subway systems and with much more rigidly enforced rules, such as a ban on food on Taipei’s MRT). That said, in both those cases, the subway’s are clean, but the cities around them are dirty and covered in litter so you take what you can get I guess.

So finally the time came and Colbert himself came screaming out the door like kid who just came off his ridalin prescription. He looks exactly the same in person as on TV, only slightly more 3 dimensional. Seriously, there was something surreal about watching a show you’ve watched countless times being performed live in front of you, almost as if you were watching a jumbo screen with virtual reality vision or some high tech technology (of course the layman might just call it “theater”). Colbert took questions and requests from the audience including “Can you blow the ram horn?” and he did, saying “Mmmm…. tastes Rammy.” Most of the questions were about different characters he played on other shows, like Dr. Fantastic on the Venture Bros, and while it wasn’t my favourite question “Which was more fun to work with Amy Sedaris or Bill O’Reilly?” (the answer’s obvious) Colbert’s exact response was “Amy Sedaris. Bill O’Reilly is a tool.” One smart ass audience member who obvious spent too much time thinking about this (although maybe he should consider grad school) asked whether or not it was contradictory to refer to O’Reilly affectionately as Papa Bear when Colbert despised bears so, and Colbert explained that just because you tell your best fried to “go get’em tiger” doesn’t mean your best friend should actually be a tiger.

I was going to ask if he’d do a show in Canada or did he not have the balls? Unfortunately, he never picked me during question period. Nevertheless, Colbert stayed high energy and running throughout the entire show (seriously I don’t how he does it) including the off-camera moments when he would usually rock out to tunes like Song 2 by Blur. During one of the “Woo Hoos” he saw that I was rocking out with him, so he gave me the old finger guns, and I gave them right back, and so the show progressed (it was the episode about Stephen’s Sound Advice for students finding work, appropriate for me and Hillary’s campaigns demise).

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday rained like a faucet, so I decided to use it as the “museum day” I had saved for just such an occasion. The first museum I attended was the United Nations, which granted isn’t yet a museum, but was something I was personally quite interested in having once been president of my undergrad chapter of Model UN and generally believing that having some place where the governments of the world have to share a table in the cafeteria or potentially find themselves next to each other at a urinal serves the world immensely (and practically ever country is a member, so it seems to be working). The guide, who was from China, was very nice and professional, but I was still recovering from Colbert so my sarcasm was at an all-time high. In the General Assembly I kept asking the poor girl questions like “What happens if North and South Korea get stuck in an elevator together?” which turns out is more probable than you might think. The UN elevators are over 50 years old.

After the UN I went to the American Museum of Natural History, made famous in Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum (although I think it was also famous before that) which has a huge collection of dinosaurs, elephants, and even a full-sized blue whale (brother let me tell you those things are HUGE). They also have an interesting gem and mineral exhibit and that’s where I met another friend, be-spectacled long-time volunteer with an artist’s background whose love for the museum’s rocks was bordering on unhealthy obsession (actually, I’d say she even crossed that border). Basically she was the female equivalent of the Naturalist (the Geologist?), I half-wondered what would happen if the two kooks ever met. Perhaps if thinks didn’t work out with his wife, the Naturalist should pay a visit to the mineral and gems room (Natural History would be up his alley after all), although these two could even be brother and sister for all I know.

She whisked me around the room pointing out complex formulas and colourful crystal formations and as I searched for a polite means to escape. Eventually she showed some bizarre meteorites that had strange etchings on the name. The way she talked about the etchings made me think she was trying to lead me to conclude they were evidence of extra-terrestial life, but I just commented on how similar they were to snowflakes and did the patterns at all follow magnetic domains? She ignored these theories and moved on, although eventually she claimed that Earth was in the path of a supernova and that the world would end in 2012 so use the gift shop souvenirs while you still can.

Based on the German-Korean lawyer’s suggestion, I headed to the Apollo Theater for amateur night in Harlem, which was rather inexpensive (although the Apollo Theater is one fancy-looking joint). There wasn’t anything terribly fancy about Amateur Night as it basically consisted of a glorified gong show, whereby a variety of non-professional acts would take the stage and do their thing amidst cheers or more often jeers from heavily vocalized audience (think Jerry Springer meets Queen Latifah). The decked-out in bling MC spoke in such heavy ebonics that I had no fucking clue what he said most of the time, and seemed like a reject from a Jay-z video. His sidekick was a tap-dancing break-dancing black Jamiroquai, who would be brought out in a politically incorrect costume any time the audience booed at an act of stage so he could break dance them off the stage and dismiss their performance skills with an exaggerated kung fu chop. The acts themselves were often quite decent, even the ones booed off (often I had no idea why the audience was reacting with such distaste), one poor Asian girl was practically booed off the moment she opened her mouth. The winners turned out to be a tie between a male singer and a male trio who while they could perform well, judging by the vast portion of teenage girls in the audience—and their vocalizations of desires—it seemed to have more to do with the tightness of their abs than anything else. All in all tho, I found the show amusing in its absurdity, although my fave flave was the dude who had the gonads to go up on stage with a sandwich saying “boycott rappers” and then proceeded to rap about about how awful rappers were in the Apollo Theater in the heart of Harlem and somehow didn’t quite get enough boos to get kicked off stage. Even he was surprised that he actually got to finish his act and when he was included in the final round of possible winners you could see success was not a contingency he anticipated or planned for. He had my vote.

THURSDAY

This was my last day in NYC, so I used it to make one last (ultimately vain) attempt to attend a screening of the Daily Show (I wasn’t too heartbroken mind you, as I had successfully gotten into the Colbert Report). And to check out Brooklyn, in particular the Brooklyn Museum (which had an exhibit on Murakami a famous Japanese mangaka/filmmaker that had first inspired me to take an interest in anime and later manga) and Coney Island. For eats I had planned to take in a Coney Island hot dog and a slice of Brooklyn-style pizza, although the pizza I found in Brooklyn looked remarkably unremarkable so I ended up going to White Castle instead. Hearing about it in Harold and Kumar movies and as the butt of jokes on the aforementioned Daily Show, it’s discount greasy-spoon fast food attraction-repulsion was enough to entice my curiosity, although the mini-burgers they serve you could best be called “meat paste” or rather “meat-like paste” as they had so little solidity that some of mine literally came folded in half with smooshed bun and all. The famous Coney Island corn dog, which I got from Nathan’s (host of the famous hot dog eating competition), turned out to be little more than a corn dog that’d been in the deep fryer too long, but I guess it’s the experience you pay for… not the taste.

The museum though was very nice, although the exhibited work was very different from most of Murakami’s stuff I had been more familiar with (ie. Spirited Away, Nausicaa, Princess Monoke), and ranged from the absurdly cutesy to the hyper-sexualized with very little in between (although there was some very abstract interpretations which I didn’t realize Murakami dealt in). The hyper-sexualized works in case you’re wondering—and I know you are, so don’t even try to deny it—consisted mainly of the ubiquituous manga school girl in a ridiculously short skirt, a naked cyborg lady who could transform into a fighter jet (for some reason they chose to make her clearly displayed vagina the nose of the aircraft), and a matching naked male and female pair who squirted white fluid out of boobs and penis respectively to create some orb of power around them. Yes, there were many children at this exhibit… many accompanied by parents with amusing expressions. (I wonder what would happen if the exhibit moved to Oklahoma or some such place).

So yeah, overall New York City was a very fascinating place, the kind of city where you’re amazed how much you know it before you even get there (there is an absolutely ridiculous amount of famous landmarks), but it can still surprise you. Yes, it gave me that big skyscraper awe I haven’t felt in many years (especially upon first glimpse after emerging from Penn Station), but it also surprised me how friendly New Yorkers actually were. Yes, there are angry ones, and yes I saw more than a couple verbalized skirmishes between cars, but generally-speaking people were a lot friendlier than I anticipated. Just goes to show you. Every traveler likes to claim the last place they visited was the “friendliest on Earth” but really friendliness is apparently a fairly widespread phenomenon, which perhaps means there’s some hope for our species yet. I just never thought I’d be getting in New York.

Would I go back? Sure, but for now I’ll be working on my Brooklyn or Harlem accent. Peace out homies.