Category Archives: New York

I, Jury

So I’m sitting there in New York Superior Court this morning, patiently waiting to serve out my jury duty — yeah, I got a summons for jury duty — and I keep thinking back to the last time I was called up for it. That was about ten years ago, when I lived in Washington, D.C., and I’ve never forgotten how I basically punted on my civic responsibility at the time — giving answers to the judge and lawyers that, while not untruthful, probably ensured my dismissal. To this day, I remain pretty ashamed of my behavior then — I can᾿t even remember the rationale behind my need to skip out on jury duty at the time, but it was certainly an insufficient justification.

Now’s my chance to make it right. I found myself feeling not a little bored and uncomfortable on the cold benches of the court room, also actively hoping I’d get chosen this time. The process of selecting jurors from the pool to question is random, but each time they pulled a name out of the hat, I was basically praying it would be mine. Much to my chagrin, it didn’t happen. That᾿s not to say I’m looking to get assigned to an epic, Jacko-style case, but I wouldn’t mind a week or two of court room action. Getting a trial of any greater length than three days, under recently revised state laws, would also have the added benefit of exempting me from further jury service for six years; that’s what you call a great deal. But more than that, I think I just feel compelled to perform this civic duty now. I’m not the irresponsible kid I was at twenty-three, when I was ostensibly civic-minded but more greatly preoccupied with my personal calendar. Basically, I’m an adult now.

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The City in Seventy-Seven

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is BurningIf ever there was a perfect summer book for me, it’s Jonathan Mahler’s “Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx Is Burning,” which I finished last week. It’s a completely absorbing tale of New York in 1977, when the city was besieged by fiscal crisis, arson, serial murders, blackouts and divisive politics, a time when New York seemed literally on the brink of a final, catastrophic end. Through meticulous research and a masterful feat of narrative contrivance, Mahler posits that year’s Yankees ballclub — itself stricken with internal strife between the erratic paranoia of manager Billy Martin and the outsized ego of new addition Reggie Jackson — as a metaphor for the city’s troubles, and uses the team’s progression over the course of the year to tell profound, fascinating stories about baseball and an iteration of New York that, in its very character, is almost unrecognizable from its twenty-first century self. New York, politics and baseball — what’s not to like?

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Replacing iPod Earbuds

iPod EarbudsOkay, I’m getting a little concerned about iPod theft on New York City’s subways, which are up 24 percent over the same period last year, according to recent police reports. It’s been a long time since I really thought that anything I carried about my person was in danger of being stolen — or would make me a candidate for a mugging — in New York, but something about the ubiquity and attractiveness of iPods make that scenario seem not quite so far fetched now. I could just stop using my iPod on subways, but a less counter-intuitive and more agreeable solution would be to replace those telltale white earbuds with something a little more discreet. As a side benefit, it will prevent me from appearing, as a commenter suggested in a previous post I wrote about iPods in New York, to be a “tool of Apple.”

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Day in Court

I had to appear in criminal court today to answer a summons given to me by a NYPD officer in Central Park back in January. It was early on a Saturday, and I was walking Mister President off-leash, which is permitted before 9:00a. But I had unwittingly wandered into The Rambles, a section of the park that technically qualifies as a nature preserve, meaning dogs are never allowed off-leash there. How I was supposed to know that isn’t particularly clear to me, either.

The judge was kind enough to dismiss the charges contingent on six-months of me “staying out of trouble,” and no fine was levied. In spite of my worries that the process would consume the better part of a day, I was done in about ninety minutes. So all told, I have little to complain about.

But I did notice a few things: First, the whole court house was a dilapidated mess, an embarrassment to the idea of justice, and bore only faint resemblance to any courtroom you’ve seen on television. It was clearly underfunded and overworked, and it was depressing just to be there. And second, when I looked around me at all the other people who, like myself, were waiting to stand trial for relatively minor offenses, almost all of them were males of African American or Hispanic descent. It was a stark illustration of who is targeted most often in criminal proceedings, and in what kind of building society feels like those people deserve to be tried.

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Barbarians at The Gates

The GatesChristo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park installation “The Gates” is terrific. I saw the work this morning in clear February sunlight, and understood instantly why they chose to erect this spectacle in bright orange (or saffron, if you must): the long, winding sequence of gates makes for a brilliant, fire-like trail snaking through the leafless trees and gray paths of Frederick Law Olmstead’s naturalist vision in mid-winter. It’s not the kind of art that makes you reconsider much of anything, superficially, except perhaps for how feasible it is after all to have a crowd of thousands converge in the cold to enjoy something that does not involve alcohol, advertising, big media or a sports championship. Which is to say in terms of challenges of attendance, at least, it’s a triumph.

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Walk This Way

If you live in a town where most traveling to and from places is done by auto, you might not experience this phenomenon, but I see it every day: when I walk down the street I pass person after person plugged into a pair of white iPod headphones. In New York, this is almost a given feature of pedestrian life, a subtle way in which Apple has left a mark on the character of the city. The other day I started wondering how many iPods I actually see during, say, my walk from home to work in the morning, was it just a few that seemed like many, or was there really an iPod consumer on just about every block?

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Little Bit of Little Saigon

I would’t discourage anyone from trying any of the Vietnamese restaurants in New York, but even the most well-regarded of them pale next to what can be had in Westminster, California’s Little Saigon area. Being Vietnamese, I’m more critical of these establishments — and of how closely their cooking methods resemble my mother’s — than the average customer. But it’s not just a cultural thing, it’s a matter of dollar value, too. What you can get in Manhattan, in finer restaurants like Cyclo and Blue Velvet 1929 isn’t bad; it’s just disproportionately expensive given the inaccurate and uninspired dishes they bring to your table.

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Painted into an East Village Corner

Howl!The epicenter of the second annual Howl! Festival of East Village Arts is directly across the street from my apartment building on East Ninth Street, in Tompkins Square Park. Along the west and south fences on the park perimerter, the festival organizers have hung a series of makeshift canvases, which, starting yesterday, have been hand-painted and decorated by locals. It’s a democratic idea, but it yields perhaps the most clichéd artwork imaginable — a plethora of artistic bombast and political rants, few of them executed with all that much in the way of imagination.

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Ooh, Ooh, It’s Magic

MagicMy girlfriend’s nephew — all of nine years old and a fount of irrepressible energy — came to stay with us for the weekend, and his new obsession is learning the magician’s trade: dice, disappearing cups of water, card tricks, magic wands, etc. He had a kids’ magic set that his grandmother bought for him, all plastic and barely serviceable enough even for a nine year-old, so on Saturday we thought we’d try to do a little better than that. We looked up “magic” in the phone book and headed to midtown to Tannen’s Magic, one of the oldest magicians’ shops in the city, and newly relocated to 45 West 34th Street.

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Teach a Man to Fish

Fish ClassMy day started very, very early this morning, thanks to a gift certificate that my girlfriend gave to me last December for a recreational class in cooking at the Institute of Culinary Education. For some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to sign up for a one-time session called “Fulton Fish Market Tour and Cooking Class,” noting but not seriously considering the difficulty of its unseemly 05:30a start time.

So even before the sun could be bothered to begin its business, we took a taxi down to the southeastern tip of Manhattan, where the long-standing Fulton Fish Market operates until it relocates (reluctantly) to the Bronx in 2005. The instructor gave us a tour of the market and a quick primer on the varieties of fish sold and how to select them.

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