Crazy Fingers

It appears that Pier 64’s days are numbered. Bonnie reports:

Well, from the barge parked alongside, and the orange netting festooning the upper levels, it looks as though they’re getting ready to tear down the old piershed at Pier 64.

Random Pier 64 Links:

• Harry Spitz’ pictures.
• Wired New York’s page.
• The Hudson River Park Trust’s plans.

Bonnie and my affection for Pier 64 probably results from the fact its neighbor, Pier 63, is our kayaking home base (although kayaking is highly theoretical for me at this point).

I stole the picture from Bonnie’s blog. It’s one of the fabulous pictures she’s been taking and posting lately, such as the pre-Lunar New Year pictures in this post.

• Grateful Dead News does a blog roundup, such as this most recent one. They always seem to catch my most innane posts, and miss the stuff I post about the Grateful Dead.
• David Dodd has a blog! He’s the guy who wrote the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics book and maintains the website.
• My newer iPod is completely busted. It’s going back to Apple, for warranty repair. In the meantime, I’ve been using my older iPod, which has 40 megabytes of Grateful Dead music on it. However, for some reason, changing iPods has shaken up my listening patterns, causing me to listen to things I haven’t been listening to, such as a sweet Jerry band show from 1/24/80. The “Masterpiece” is stellar.

Gym after work tonight, then the Urban Outings Mixer.

Tomorrow night Brian and I are going to a Chinese New Year party.

I’m hoping we’ll have a mellower weekend than the last two. No closet construction, no power tools, no alarm clocks, no visits to Home Depot, Bed, Bath and Beyond, or The Container Store.

Well, maybe we’ll get another shelf or two. And maybe a king-size bed (we haven’t been sleeping well, perhaps because of the slight difference in our schedules, perhaps because of the noise from the street or the light — although we finally hung shades in the bedroom this week — or maybe because we’ve been sleeping in a full-size futon and we’re both big boys). And maybe bar stools for our kitchen counter.

And MAYBE I’ll finally unpack, and get the piles of my crap out of the second bedroom, so Brian can start moving his stuff in.

On another front, I just spoke to my landlord’s rental agent. They have an application on my old apartment, for a February 1 occupancy. Woo. Woo.

• Last Saturday, when I picked up my car, the guys at the garage at which I park my car informed me that the garage would close at the end of the month. It is becoming an art gallery. (What a Chelsea cliche, huh?) When I returned the car Sunday night, they informed me the garage is closing on the 27th, not the end of the month. This has created the need for me to make other arrangements for my car, pretty much by the end of the coming weekend.
• Another thing I’m going to have to do this weekend is return the cable hardware (converter box and cable modem) from my old apartment. Time Warner won’t shut off the service until I return the equipment. They wanted to make an appointment to come pick it up, but they would only pick it up from me, at the old address, not the doorman at the new address.
• On the other hand, we got the first bill from our new cable provider, RCN. Although the service is supposed to be costing us $70 a month (an introductory rate for the first 6 months), the bill was over $140, and the itemization include a bunch of things that were complete mysteries to me.
• My iPod is frozen at 0:00 of a particular song (which happens to be Saint Stephen from 7/16/76) and the hard reset sequence won’t work. The backlight remains on. I’m hoping that if I just let the battery run down, when I plug it in to charge it, it will reset then.
• Brian and I have two pieces of furniture (a small couch and a full-size futon) in our 2-bedroom apartment. My computer is on an overturned moving box. We won’t have more furniture until he moves in, probably on March 1, and in the interim, the apartment isn’t all that comfortable. Unfortunately, before he moves in (i.e., this weekend), we have to install shelves or something in our two huge closets (my stuff is just piled into the extra bedroom), and at the moment, that’s occurring for me as an unspeakably complex task, and something else I’m
  going to have to deal with this weekend.
• The “Bin Laden” tape. The Bush administration authenticated it? And we should believe them, why? What could they want us not to pay attention to? The Abramoff scandals? Domestic spying?
• WordPress post-by-email is flaky, or maybe I just don’t understand it well enough. It’s adding an equal sign at the end of every line.

A few days ago, I pointed out that deadlists.com lists a Grateful Dead performance at the Chelsea Hotel on 8/10/67. [Check out the comments on my original post.]

In Searching for the Sound, Phil Lesh shared his recollection of that gig at the Chelsea:

The Diggers had decided to export their trip to swinging London but didn’t have the wherewithal to get there. Their chief honcho, Emmett Grogan, knew some people in New York and set up a sort of benefit on the roof of the Chelsea attended by such luminaries as Shirley Clarke, the theatrical director, and artist Andy Warhol, who entered looking like an ambulatory black hole. The idea was to hustle ticket money for Grogan and a couple of the other Diggers; hence the name “Trip Without A Ticket.” We played a few tunes, and even did a little vocal rap — “it’s the money, honey” — and to this day I don’t know if they ever got their tickets covered, or even got to London at all. It was kind of cool, playing on a rooftop in New York, but whatever energy we could muster fell flat on the floor, oozing over to Warhol’s feet where it disappeared into the singularity. Not a fun event; the New York vibe was asserting its darker side that night.

In Box of Rain, Robert Hunter said the song “Stella Blue” (which was part of the Grateful Dead repertoire) was “written at the Chelsea Hotel in 1970.” A copy of the handwritten lyrics for Stella Blue appears to the right. Click the picture to see the full-size image on Hunter’s website.

David Dodd cited Hunter’s comment on The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics site, and then went on to elaborate about other works created at there:

Written, according to Box of Rain at the Chelsea Hotel in 1970. This places “Stella Blue” in distinguished company. It’s where Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: a Space Odyssey; Bob Dylan wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”; and Arthur Miller wrote After the Fall. It’s been home, in its hundred-year plus history (built in 1883), to Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, O. Henry, Hart Crane, Nelson Algren, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Vladimir Nabokov (see note under “Stella Blue”, below, for more on Nabokov), Jane Fonda, Charles Jackson, Milos Forman, Edie Sedgwick, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Brendan Behan, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, Edgar Lee Masters, and a slew of others. For a good article on the Chelsea, see Helen Dudar’s article “It’s Home Sweet Home For Geniuses, Real Or Would-Be,” in The Smithsonian, December 1983, p. 94.

Living With Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog referred to The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics.

According to deadlists.com, the Grateful Dead played on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel on 8/10/67. However, deadlists offers no setlist and no further information. I have no idea if this is true.

Since I walk past the Chelsea Hotel every day, I often fantasize about having been up on the roof that day when the Dead played.

If you have any information about the Dead’s performance on 8/10/67, or better yet, a recording of it, please contact me.

(Chelsea Hotel picture from mtkr on flickr.)

Granted, I graduated from high school over 25 years ago, but I was happy to see in Gothamist that Ward Melville still seems to be a decent school. (Ward Melville has a wikipedia topic.)

It’s that time of year again - when the semi-finalists are the Intel Science Talent Search are announced! The NY Times says that NY State “dominated” the list, with 140 students coming from the Empire State - and there are only 300 semi-finalists total. While Long Island’s Ward Melville High had 12 semi-finalists …

Ward Melville also does well in lacrosse. Members of the lacrosse team (and sometimes the entire team) provided many youthful fantasies for me. Lacrosse players have amazing legs (and big sticks). The team has a championship record going back to 1970. This Ward Melville alum went on to play lacrosse professionally.

The school is named for Ward Melville. I once hooked up with his grandson (like 25 years ago). After doing the deed, I was going through his address book (he left it out; in those days people had actual address books, not Blackberries and Palm Pilots), and I saw an entry for “Ward Melville.” I was like, “why do you have my high school’s phone number in your address book?” He said “that’s my grandfather.”

Check out this New York Times article about people who moved back from the suburbs into the city. It totally resonates with me (recall that I moved back into the city in 2006 after I broke up with my ex).

Paragraphs like this, for example, indicate exactly what life is like for a suburban commuter:

What pushed him over the edge, he said, was the “drama” of his commute by car into Midtown. At 5 a.m., when Mr. Torossian ordinarily made the trip to avoid traffic, it took as little as 17 minutes. But coming home took three or four times that (two hours or more in foul weather), partly because of the bottleneck at his Midtown garage. “Calling ahead doesn’t work because everybody leaves at the same time,” he said. “If you don’t bribe the guys there, you wait 15 to 20 minutes for your car.” He said he spent $100 a week in tips.

I would leave the house by 5 am, at the latest, and hit the gym before work, in order to avoid traffic. Going home would be a total crapshoot. And if I tried to commute by train, it very often went down like this:

“I spent many depressing nights at the Hoboken station,” he added, waiting more than half an hour for a connection. “If you go out for a drink with friends, you’re always watching the clock,” he said. Adding insult to tedium, Mr. McCaul suffered through the suburban version of the Freshman 15, putting 10 to 15 pounds on his normally thin frame, which he attributed to his mostly nonpedestrian lifestyle.

The article is also of particular interest because one of the couples it discusses lived in a house a few doors away from my house on Gregory Avenue, and that house was captured in one of the pictures which illustrates the article.

“You go to these little towns and they are very charming and sweet and have all these cute little shops,” said Brian Lover, who put his West Orange, N.J., house back on the market just three months after moving there. “But I think when you live in these areas full time, those neighborhood shops aren’t so cute. And those neighborhood restaurants that look so great, you know how bad they really are.”

Mr. Lover, 42, a vice president at the Corcoran Group, and his wife, Kristina Rinaldi, 41, an interior decorator, decided to give up their one-bedroom rental on West 55th Street when they had a daughter, Tallulah. They wanted to live in Montclair, N.J., a popular magnet for exurbanites. Outmatched in bidding wars, they expanded their search to neighboring West Orange. There they became besotted by “an old English Tudor with a slate roof, character, an acre and a half of land,” said Mr. Lover, who worked as a fashion advertising director for Esquire magazine at the time.

In July 2001 they bought the house for $480,000; it came with a tinge of unreality. “Every day when I came home, I would say to myself, ‘I really am a king and this is a castle, and who do I think I am?’ “

My house had a lot of problems (such as two leaking oil tanks, a bad roof, and much more) on top of the normal stuff there is to do, constantly, in a big house. That may be why we never got around to decorating very well. There just seemed to be an endless stream of stuff to do.

Though the Sweeneys’ house was many times bigger than their old two-bedroom apartment, it exerted an unforeseen undertow. “All of a sudden you find all these projects to do in the house,” she said. “It keeps you indoors more than you ever thought.”

I got up early this morning and went over to the gym to do cardio. On the way back, I stopped at Gristedes to get some of the new Dannon Splenda-sweetened Lite n’ Fit yogurt. They’ve only recently started sweetening it with Splenda, as opposed to aspartame. I’m psyched! I try to avoid aspartame, so now I can enjoy sweetened-yogurt again (I also try to avoid sugar).

I also discovered Quaker’s new Splenda-sweetened Lower-Sugar Oatmeal, which I haven’t tried yet. Brian is more of an oatmeal eater than I am, and I think he’s really going to like this.