Getting our Irish up ahead of St. Patrick’s Day

St. Patrick’s Day is the time of year when everyone wants to be Irish for a few hours and their definition of being Irish is being an obnoxious drunk. There are actually a lot of nice things about being Irish and Ireland has given us a lot of great things besides a love of the drink.

Among the many positive contributions the Irish have made to the world is music, and around St. Patrick’s Day every year a litany of Irish groups come through the Big Apple to quench our thirst for authentic Irish art.

The Chieftains have been popularizing traditional Irish music since the 1960s and with some luck of the Irish and the busy schedule of generous in-laws, my wife and I scored tickets to see them at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan.

Most of the crowd at the show were well-dressed middle aged people like me or older. I thought I might be overdressed but I wasn’t, which confirms yet again I’ve reached middle age where I can blend in with a crowd that used to look old to me.

But sitting behind us was a loud, possibly drunk, but definitely rude women who acted as if she were in her living room, talking loudly and even shouting ahead to a woman seated in the row ahead of us. After sitting through several songs listening to this absurdly inane and incredibly impolite chatter, my wife asked her to keep her voice down.

The woman took great offense and spent the rest of the show muttering under her breath about how she planned to confront my wife. ‘Go ahead lady,’ I thought to myself. ‘It’s your funeral.’

The Chieftains put on an outstanding performance. They’ve had many celebrated collaborators in the past and had an impressive cast of guest musicians and dancers joining them throughout the evening. A good time was had by all.

Once the show was over and the lights went up, the woman told my wife that she had no right to ask her to be quiet, that the show was for everyone to enjoy and some such malarkey. My wife told her in no uncertain terms that she was wrong and needed to learn some manners. The woman, embarrassed to be called out for such puerile behavior, wouldn’t let go. But my wife can dish out whatever you send her way. The woman’s friends were horrified and did not want to see their friend get thrashed by a visibly pregnant woman.

One of her friends motioned to me and implored me to get my wife out of the building. I told her it was her friend that needed the help, not my wife. The rude woman’s friends eventually corralled her and we all went our separate ways.

No punches were thrown, no chairs hurled through the air. I’m glad for that, though I think it would have been great to watch my pregnant wife knock out this nasty shrew of a woman. I’d take a video of it and then yell, “WORLDSTAR!!” and post it to WorldStarHipHop web site, a popular place to post videos of altercations.

In the end we walked out into the sweet Spring New York night and walked to Times Square, where my wife once reminded me that sometimes you have to enjoy being a tourist in your own city.

We will survive the stupidity of this St. Patrick’s Day as we have survived all others, with pride in our Irish culture intact and our tempers only a little bit the worse for wear. 

My cool Vermin Supreme story

As our American political discourse slides further into the gutter with every new televised debate, it may be worthwhile noting that there are some who saw the satire in our politics decades ahead of time. One such person is Vermin Supreme.

Vermin Supreme, you may know, is a perennial presidential candidate who wears a boot on his head and promises everyone a pony. He’s attempted to turn religious conservative candidates gay by pouring glitter on them and promise to fully fund time travel research.

It was 1992 and as the Democratic primary continued to go on then-Governor Bill Clinton’s only real competition after the early primaries was former California Governor Jerry Brown. Brown was the Bernie Sanders of his day, a more liberal alternative to the establishment favorite who captured the enthusiasm of the younger, more activist wing of the Democratic Party. He swore off corporate donations and set limits on what individuals could donate through a 1-800 number (this was in the days before widespread Internet.)

At any rate, that spring before the New York and Connecticut primaries, Jerry Brown had a rally at the University of Connecticut. This was during my freshman year there. I was a columnist for UConn’s DailyCampus and since I showed up there with a notebook, the campaign staff waved me ahead to the press section where I sat among more serious and established members of the media.

Brown’s rally was at the large theater on campus. The event was well attended and the crowd was enthusiastic. When it was over, I hung out with the rest of the media contingent, most of whom were bored by the whole thing (“Once you’ve seen the candidate’s speech you’ve seen them all,” I overheard one say.) Jerry Brown answered some questions before being whisked over to do a live interview with the local news.

As I watched Brown do the TV interview in the auditorium that was now mostly empty, I noticed a strange figure head down a side aisle unnoticed. He was dressed in a coat made of fur pelts and he had a large boot on his head. He continued walking down the aisle until I lost sight of him. As Gov. Brown wrapped up his interview and hurry away to his next campaign event, I heard a voice amplified by a speaker or bullhorn call out to him.

“JERRY! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT THE WEATHER?!? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT THE WEATHER, JERRY?!?”

Brown looked over in the direction the voice was coming from but didn’t break stride as he exited the building with a gaggle of campaign staff.

As I stood there I spotted this same strange figure coming back up the aisle. He and I made eye contact and he stopped to address me.

“Another candidate avoiding a question about the weather,” he said, shaking his head. He moved on and I had had the strangest political campaign experience ever.

Years later I saw Vermin Supreme on television and was glad that he hadn’t lost the boot on his head and that he was still engaging in the kind of absurd spectacle that has sadly seemed downright dignified compared with some of our discourse today.

I hope Sid Yiddish seriously considers him for his running mate. 

Stuck in Place in New York

New York City right now is a city where people are often stuck in place. Not because they lack ambition or a work ethic, but because the juggernaut of high real estate prices is making life difficult.

I work in an office where most of the people who work there that live within the five boroughs have a commute that is at least an hour on a good day. My commute to work is an hour and fifteen minutes under the best of circumstances and can be significantly longer when things are at their worst. We would all love to live closer to our office, which is in the Flatiron district, but none of us can afford to live nearby.

Even the New York Times, whose primary audience is the more affluent New Yorkers among us, ran a story about retirees who would like to return to the city but can’t because real estate prices are becoming so outrageous.

When I first moved back to New York and was looking for an apartment in early 1998 one of the places I looked for a studio was Wavecrest Gardens in Far Rockaway. They had beautiful studio apartments with ocean views for about $500 per month. There were some drawbacks that kept me away (it would have been a long commute to work and a coworker who moved there said he saw people smoking crack in the stairwells), but the apartments were beautiful and affordable. If prices had simply kept up with inflation, a $500 per month apartment in 1998 would cost roughly $740 today. A studio at Wavecrest Gardens now lists for roughly $1,000 per month today. So rents have moved up at more than double the rate of inflation over the past sixteen years. And for areas that are more fashionable, the increase has gotten even steeper. Parts of Astoria and Williamsburg list small studio for upwards of $2,800 per month, and probably more in some places.

I consider myself very fortunate. I have a steady job with a good salary and my family is healthy and does not want for food, clothing, or shelter. But if we were to try to move to a larger apartment to house our growing brood we would have to take on considerable debt to remain in the same neighborhood, and would not find a place much larger than what we have now for what we could afford.

I have many friends who are bright, hard-working people trying to raise families in safe neighborhoods with good schools. They are not looking for handouts or set-asides. They can’t afford to stay where they are and can’t afford anything else in the area. Some friends and family have fled to New Jersey, some are considering leaving the Northeast entirely, heading to wherever they can make a sound living and provide for their kids.

New York is a place famous for attracting creative people, but creative people need affordable places to live and New York is starting to lose is creative critical mass. Artists and writers don’t need to have the same geographic presence they once did. In the digital age it doesn’t matter if you’re creating your work in New York or Detroit or Tuscaloosa. Most of the Western world downloads its content from the Internet, and traveling to a geographic center to get your work recognized is not as necessary as it used to be.

New Yorkers don’t mind paying a premium to live in the center of Western civilization. And New York is not an anti-capitalist place. It’s the most capitalist place on Earth in many ways. New York is a very tough place to get ahead but at the same time is famous for providing more opportunities than anywhere else in whatever your field of choice. If we want to continue to be that way, then something’s got to be done about the cost of housing. You have to get people to live here and stay a while before they can accomplish things.

If it doesn’t make sense to stay in New York, the middle and working classes will be gone and what will be left wont’ be pleasant for anyone. 

We have had too much God in America

In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel’s protagonist Stephen Dedalus is listening to an argument his father and aunt Dante are having with a Mr. Casey about the place of the clergy in Irish society. The talk was prompted by the scandal surrounding Charles Stuart Parnell, an Irish nationalist leader who was condemned by the Catholic Church. This condemnation set back the movement for Irish independence considerably.

—God and religion before everything! Dante cried. God and religion before the world!

Mr. Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.

—Very well then, he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for Ireland!

           

The passage came to mind as Pope Francis, traveling in Mexico, commented that political leaders who wanted to build barriers to illegal immigration were not truly Christian. He was referencing Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican Party nomination for president, who has made opposition to illegal immigration a central part of his campaign.

Who are we to argue what is Christian with the Pope? We’ll take him at his word: building walls instead of bridges is not the Christian thing to do. Trump is a big phony and a blowhard who is not a good Christian. Sure thing, Francis.

Let’s not jump on the Trump bandwagon, but let’s also be fine with giving Christianity the boot in the ass out of public life that it richly deserves.  Let’s be absolutely fine with America not doing the Christian thing; we’ll be a better and stronger country for it.

Building a society around a holy book isn’t a recipe for success. And like many other religious documents, the Gospel of Christ is full of a lot of very bad ideas. Loving your enemies is masochistic. Turning the other cheek only gets you hit twice. The current Pope comes from the Kumbaya school of Christianity that holds that if we all just love everyone enough, we can create a just and peaceful world. Christianity has (in theory at least) been trying this for more than 2,000 years, I think it’s safe to say it doesn’t work.

Where are the secular social-justice warriors telling the Pope to butt out of our national debate on immigration and sovereignty? Where are all the self-proclaimed “male feminists” objecting to the import of thousands of the unenlightened?

The Christians who are promising love and world peace are just as delusional and self-righteous as the ones threatening fire and brimstone. Both camps will gladly lead us to ruin, if not by the Christian right’s aversion to science and obsession with gays and abortion then by the Christian left’s naïvely embracing those who would destroy us.

Donald Trump is a fraud and a buffoon, and he’s not the answer to our national question. But for all Trump’s idiocy, his campaign understands this simple fact: if you don’t have real borders, you don’t have a real country.

We cannot solve the world’s problems by inviting people from all corners of the world to come live with us. There are other ways to help that won’t harm our country. Any charitable efforts ought to be tempered with a measure of rational self-interest.

Our well-meaning religious friends think that they are doing God’s work and that the magic of their good intentions will somehow turn bad people good and make everything OK. I wish them luck with that, but these beliefs are not a basis for a responsible immigration policy. As a country we need to be the adult in the room. 

Monorail!

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his idea to put in a light rail that would connect Brooklyn and Queens. With the exception of Red Hook and Sunset Park, his light rail system would not be bringing public transit to places that need it but rather add additional tourist glut and uber-gentrifying cachet to areas already overpriced and tourist heavy.

The idea sounds great at first. The public transit system in New York is abysmal and the outer borough are woefully underserved. To get from Southern Brooklyn to Northern Queens would require a lengthy detour through Manhattan or an epic journey of Byzantine bus transfers that would see you grow old or give up on life before you were halfway there.

The proposed rail runs only along the East River waterfront of Brooklyn and Queens. Some of these areas, such as Astoria, Queens and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, are already served by rail system and there are not too many people commuting between Sunset Park and Astoria.  

With our subway dollar stretched thin and the MTA constantly cutting service while increasing fares, de Blasio says he’ll rake in the $2.5 billion he needs to build this light rail system from the increase in property tax that will result from the light rail being built. So he’ll wring money out of rich people who will somehow welcome this sorry trolley outside their homes and this will help the working class people of Red Hook and Sunset Park commute to Astoria where there are no good jobs waiting for them.

Whatever de Blasio’s motives or likelihood of the light rail system coming into being, the issue highlights two central problems of New York City transit: Our transit system is very Manhattan-centric to its own detriment and New York City does not have enough control over its own transit system.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority, though it generally serves New York City, is controlled by New York State. Whatever we need to do here in the five boroughs has to pass through several gatekeepers in Albany. The bureaucracy is twice-removed from the systems it operates, and it shows in every step of the system’s operation. The New York City transit system is among the most extensive in the country and it runs 24 hours, but that’s more of a remark about how sad the state of public transit is in the U.S.A. rather than a statement about how good New York City’s transportation is.

Every weekday morning I give myself an hour and a half to travel 11 miles, and I’m sometimes late. My first day back at work this year after the holidays, it took me more than two hours to get to work, even after I left the subway in disgust in Jackson Heights and took a cab the rest of the way to work.

New York City is comprised of 304.6 square miles and Manhattan comprises only about 33 of them. I have nothing against Manhattan and it makes sense for it to have a large transit infrastructure to deal with commuters going to work every week, but this leaves the most of the city underserved. Even many parts of Manhattan are not well served by the subway system – the Second Avenue subway has been a running joke for decades. They expanded the terrible 7 line so that people can go to the Javitz Center with greater ease – well not with greater ease since it involves having to take the 7 train. That the 7 train is an overcrowded clusterfuck in every way imaginable doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s radar to fix.

This latest proposal from the mayor looks like it will go the way of so many well-intentioned and poorly planned transit fixes. When it gets built, if it gets built at all, it will be way over budget and of limited usefulness.

I wish I could be more hopeful, but the line as planned will not go into any of the parts of the outer boroughs that are not served by a rail system, so the people still unserved by our subways will still be out in the cold, waiting for the bus. 

Chasing down the last vestiges of punk rock youth

The other night I left home to walk to the Parkside Pub in Whitestone, Queens to see an excellent hardcore punk rock show. I love punk rock music and this show was so close it took only a few minutes to walk there. I have loved punk rock for a long time and knew some of the bands that were playing from playing with my own band, Blackout Shoppers (currently on hiatus).

It was late and I didn’t have a lot of time to spend there, but as I set out I noticed an envelope that needed mailing, so I figured I could drop it in a mailbox on my way to the show.

Publisher’s Clearinghouse is a shitty lottery that only requires you mail back a form. Of course my chances of winning are next to zero, but instead of spending two bucks on Powerball I spend only the price of a stamp. That’s a very low-cost form of gambling, though it does come with the added humiliation of having your name on a Publisher’s Clearinghouse envelope.

I didn’t run across a mailbox until I got the block that the Parkside Pub was on. How can I show up at a hardcore punk rock show with a Publisher’s Clearinghouse envelope? Would that make me a horrible old poser? I had no choice. Those Publisher’s Clearinghouse millions are destined to me mine. If I win enough money, I’ll spend part of my fortune on starting a new non-profit arts venue in New York City that will feature punk shows. As I neared the show, I hoped no one would see me drop the sweepstakes envelope into the mailbox. No one did, or at least had the kindness not to call me out on it.

It was glad to see the show was packed. There were people there old and young and the bands were excellent. It was great to see friends from many different bands there. Some of them are my age or even older and many of them also have kids.

Being a parent with serious bills to pay and a job that requires long hours means I don’t get to very many concerts anymore. So any time I can steal away for a few hours and subject myself to the full blasting fury of as much aggressive music I can take.

The show at the Parkside did not disappoint. The bands were excellent. And even if they hadn’t been, it was worthwhile to see people you haven’t seen in a while. There are a lot of people that I know and love to see but only see them in the context of going to shows.

There are people like my friend Pete, who I ran into at the show. I have known Pete for years but don’t know his full name and couldn’t tell you what he does for a living. I’ve seen him at numerous shows for my band and others. I’ve spent hours talking to him at bars and on sidewalks outside of music clubs. I know he lives in Douglaston, Queens and used to have a girlfriend named Nicole and he loves punk and metal music, and that’s all I need to know. We love the music and the scene around it and so it doesn’t matter what we may or may not have in common.

Because while the band one plays in may not last, the friendships and the love of music will endure. People have been writing punk rock’s obituary since the 1970s. It’s still here. And as long as I can stand on my feet, I’ll make it to shows from time to time. No regrets. See you there. 

Real New Yorkers root for the Knicks

There are now two National Basketball League teams within the borders of New York City. The Knicks have been here since 1946, the Nets moved to Brooklyn from New Jersey in 2012. Neither team is doing very well right now, but only one is worthy of your support.

The Knicks are the city’s loveable losers. We got to the N.B.A. finals in 1999 and lost in five games and haven’t come close to that level of glory since.

I was lucky enough to get to a Knicks game not long ago. It was for work and we had great seats. The baseball owner Bill Veeck said a fan’s knowledge of the game is inversely proportional to the price of their ticket and that holds true in basketball as well as baseball. Although Spike Lee probably knows – and I don’t think he was there that night – no fan within the first 20 rows could probably tell you who the Knicks all-time leading scorer is (Patrick Ewing—I had to look that up). These were valuable seats and I wouldn’t have sat there if they hadn’t been paid for by a corporate client that was footing the bill.

People showed up late and left early; that’s not how you should act when you can see the hypnotic pattern on Walt Frazier’s bold brown blazer and see the pained expression on Kristaps Porzingis’ face when he fouls out. If you’ve spent that kind of money on tickets, get there on time.

At any rate, we were lucky that night in that the Knicks actually won the game. It was in overtime and the game seemed to stretch on forever as the Utah Jazz repeatedly fouled the Knicks in order to get possession of the ball (this is a common basketball tactic that rarely helps a team win a game but succeeds in boring the shit out of fans). But the Knicks finished with the win.

The Knicks are New York’s loveable losers on the basketball court. They find new ways to break their fans’ hearts every year, but they are our team. Now some fair-weather fans are supporting the Brooklyn Nets. Since Brooklyn is trendy and the Nets play in Brooklyn, it is fashionable in some circles to support this farce of a team. That they have sleek black and white merchandise I’m sure helps.

Nowhere in sports, until ISIS starts fielding a hockey team, is there a better example of a team that deserves to fail than the Brooklyn Nets. The Nets play in the Barclays Center, which is part of the notorious Atlantic Yards project, a billionaire’s boondoggle that forced middle- and working-class New Yorkers from their homes. The State of New York invoked eminent domain to force people to sell their homes to shady real estate developer Bruce Ratner, who paid off local activist groups to support the effort. It’s a shameful chapter in the city’s history and the Barclay’s Center is an ugly eyesore that is a testament to our sordid age of corrupt politics and the worst kind of crony capitalism.

I don’t care how much the Knicks lose, wearing a Nets jersey is about the most un-New York thing you can do. The Knicks can lose every game between now and 2053, sacrifice puppies center court and I’ll still root for them over the Nets.

But don’t take my word for it. Watch a Knicks game on television and I’m confident you’ll be convinced of their authenticity. It doesn’t matter how much you lose, it’s how you keep fighting and show character that counts. That’s what real New Yorkers do. 

New York City Never Quits

New York City is the city that never sleeps and never shuts down. It take events of epic proportions to knock us off of our game, and even then nothing is ever completely deserted. This is, after all, where the world takes its pulse and sets the pace for Western Civilization, and we take that task seriously.

New York is digging itself out from a winter storm that hit us on Jan. 23. It was as if we got all our winter weather in the span of about 24 hours. When winter started this past December, we had spring-like weather. Seventy degrees on Christmas? That’s bullshit. Old Man Winter got his revenge in a big way and buried much of the East Coast in a blanket of snow. For New York City, it was the second-largest snowstorm on record in the city’s history with more than two feet of snowfall recorded in Central Park.

Preparations started in earnest with people watching the weather reports and making jokes about stocking up on bread and milk as they made sure to stock up on bread and milk. Anyone who had plans for the weekend canceled them if they could, but it was heartening to see from social media that some things didn’t stop.

It was also heartening to see worthy displays of “New York Values” in dealing with the severe weather. The term “New York Values” has recently become an issue the 2016 presidential campaign, with Texas Senator Ted Cruz using the phrase as a smear against Donald Trump. I’m as cynical and jaded as any other long-time New York resident, but there was enough cooperation and good will on display during the storm to shame any friendly Texan. In the parking lot of our apartment building, one of our neighbors helped shovel out part of our truck. We returned the favor by helping shovel out the car parked on the other side of us, with a shovel lent to us by another neighbor.

My social media feed was littered with stories of neighbors helping neighbors with shovel and snow blower alike. A photo of a team of good Samaritans pushing a stranded ambulance out of a snowbank in Manhattan was enough to warm the heart even as your fingers and toes became numb.

City living makes people into blazing assholes, but it also makes people into cooperative souls out of point-blank necessity. When you are surrounded my millions of people, living life isn’t possible without some measure of cooperation. It may take a while to understand the ebb and flow of city life and plug yourself into it in a way that both preserves your sanity and allows you the boldness and hustle to get things done. New York rewards a certain level of aggression, but even the strongest of the strong cannot get by without a certain degree of give and take, there’s just too massive a crush of humanity to fight everyone to the death over every trivial slight. 

Now as we look to get our work week underway, we all expect some of this city camaraderie to sublime like idle snow as we navigate an already overtaxed and incompetently run transit system in an attempt to get to work on time. Wish us luck. 

Sid Yiddish for President

Sid Yiddish is a Chicago performance artist who is runningfor president as a write-in candidate. He describes himself as a “Lincoln Republican” though his politics are more in line with the Democrats, but you are welcome to write him in on whatever ballot you choose; he’s not picky. He is the only candidate promising to invade Denmark.

Why Denmark? “Because it’s there and because I can,” he said. He has performed in Denmark but did his first show with Danish musicians over Skype for the Chicago Calling Festival in 2009. He travels the U.S. frequently. This Friday, Jan. 22 (2016) will find him in Kansas City, Missouri at the Poetry & Absinthe Open Mic at the Uptown Arts Bar.

Sid Yiddish usually dresses like a kind of mischievous cantor, as if The Rocky Horror Picture show took place in a Catskills summer camp or if Fiddler on the Roof was an avant-garde punk rock opera instead of a Broadway musical. With a prayer shawl and Kittel – a traditional garment worn by orthodox Jewish men and a face mask, he both pays homage to and satirizes Jewish heritage with his appearance. When he appeared on America’s Got Talent, Howie Mandel called him a “Hasidic Lone Ranger.”

A Sid Yiddish performance is always an eclectic ensemble of songs, poems, comedy and compelling noise. Each performance will usually involve some form of Tuvan throat singing, which sounds like it is painful to do and can rattle the uninitiated. He often performs with a band, the Candy Store Henchmen. With connections in various cities, his auxiliary of Candy Store Henchman can be summoned to perform on short notice and very little rehearsal.

[Full disclosure: I have known Sid Yiddish for several years and have performed in the New York City version of his Candy Store Henchmen. I met him through MykelBoard, who had the wisdom to write about Sid much sooner.]

His presidential campaign is his latest effort in reaching out to the world. His platform includes heavy support of the arts. “I believe schools should cut sports from schools and give all their money to the arts.” He would also buy everyone a new pair of shoes and hand out bubble gum with good comics in them, not the shabby comics that have become the standard today.

He has extended his reach through some small acting roles. He appears briefly in a Ludacris video and recently hada bit part in the Showtime show Shameless, which stars William H. Macy. There’s an online petition to make Sid a recurring character on the series.

While he revels in his outsider status, he makes an effort to make each show as interesting and participatory as possible, inviting audience members to join his band and play instruments if they choose, even if that instrumentation consists of banging on a table top or tapping a beer glass.

He’s devised a series of hand signals that instructs the band on what to play. One gesture means to stop, another gesture means a free-for-all, other gestures mean other things. If you play the wrong thing, he doesn’t ask you to change, he just may be a bit more emphatic with his gestures. No two Sid Yiddish shows will ever be the same and he likes it that way.

Sid Yiddish describes himself as a late bloomer and suffers from depression. His past is littered with sad memories of where clinical depression can lead. He hopes his work can reach people and help encourage those who also suffer from the disorder. To him, being a performance artist is a redeeming experience that puts him on a good path and colors his worldview. “It feels like I take LSD without taking LSD,” he notes.

His music and acting takes up a lot of his time and he is interested in going to another audition for America’s Got Talent. “I’m a renaissance man, a Jack and Jill of all trades. No one can put me in a category; you can’t pin me down. But sometimes I’ve felt that I’m spreading myself too thin.”

The world has given up a good bit of the civility and thoughtfulness that was more commonplace when Sid Yiddish was growing up, and he offers himself as a one-man protest against that. Instead of waving his fist at the world, his hand gestures conducts a motley crew making avant-garde punk rock symphony. He can take your rejection; he’s faced it all before and just keeps coming back, serving as a reminder that the act of creation and expression is sometimes all that matters and all you have left. 

Outer borough arts explosion

I recently went to a friend’s art opening at Q.E.D., a small art space in Astoria. Going to a friend’s art opening made me feel like I entered a proper adult sphere of being a creative person. Luckily Q.E.D. is as unpretentious as an art space can get without being a punk rock venue or a squat of some kind.

My artist friend, Michael Harper, is a former drummer for my band Blackout Shoppers and has played with Furious George and other punk groups. He is a far cry from the obnoxious snob you would expect to find having their work displayed on the walls of an art space in New York City.

But that is one of the good things that is happening in the city right now. While the high price of real estate had driven many good art and music venues out of Manhattan and the established art world is horrendously pretentious and completely out of touch with aesthetics and real value, the outer boroughs have responded by adapting and setting up their own respective art, literature and music scenes.  Astoria’s Q.E.D. has comedy shows, open mic for poetry, music and storytelling. It hosts performances as well as classes—it is even hosting a Burns Night lecture—all days of the week.

More and more space like this are starting to open up in all of the outer boroughs. The kind of art spaces that used to proliferate our central borough can no longer generate the money they need to stay afloat. There are a few notable exceptions, such as the Lower East Side’s ABC NoRio, that have been around for a long time and manage to stay afloat with government grants, smart fundraising and a thrifty, DIY spirit. But these venues are very rare now. Those kinds of places are now in the other four boroughs.

One caveat to this is that Brooklyn has become so popular and overpriced that it is an outer borough in geography only – it long ago took on the same level of pretension and established demand that has long plagued Manhattan. This wasn’t always the case, of course. Before Williamsburg was the shit show of hipsterdom it is notorious for being today, it was a bad neighborhood where artists and writers fled to after being priced out of Manhattan. Parts of Brooklyn remain a haven for artists today, though time is running out for them even in the farthest reaches of the borough.

And New York’s outer boroughs have always been epicenters for the arts. Jack Kerouac wrote his first novel in Ozone Park, Queens. Louis Armstrong lived in Corona. Stanley Kubrick and Ace Frehley are from The Bronx. Matthew Brady, The Wu-Tang Clan and Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P. hail from Staten Island. New York both attracts millions of creative people and produces great creativity among its natives that there is no neighborhood in the city that has not seen a glimmer of artistic greatness in some decade.

We can do nothing to roll back the clock and stop development and real estate price inflation, but like the good people of Astoria and elsewhere, a great art space is wherever you can make one. The outer boroughs are carving out space for the future of the arts in New York City.  

2016 will be a good time to be a New Yorker

We can argue about the direction that the city is going and what our fortunes are as a city. That argument has been raging since the 1600s and won’t ever end. But whatever you think about the direction that New York is going, there are things to look forward to in this New Year.

Here are some of them:

Giant dinosaur exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. The Natural History Museum is one of the best places in New York to visit. The Hall of Marine Life alone is a full-bore Yankee assault on the senses guaranteed to tattoo good memories into your brain. Like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is a place you will be at peace wandering for hours. You will discover great things and expand your mind. But if you can handle the crush of tourists that will be at the new dinosaur exhibit, it’s coming this month. At the center of the new permanent dinosaur exhibit is a 122-foot cast of a Titanosaur, a giant herbivore that would have weighed up to 22 tons when it was alive.

The 100^th Anniversary of the Irish Easter Uprising. As a long-time epicenter of support for Irish independence and Irish republicanism, New York will no doubt see commemorations of the 100^th anniversary of the Easter Uprising, when a few dedicated Irishmen and Irishwomen pledged their lives and honor on the cause of an independent Irish nation. Many of them paid with their lives. A century later, the dream of a united Irish republic is still unrealized, though the violence in the North of Ireland has for all purposes ended. But just because the Troubles are over doesn’t mean there is real peace or a viable political solution. The Irish have invested in peace for nearly two decades now and Ireland is no closer to unity than it was in 1969. What now? Look to places like Rocky Sullivan’s in Red Hook, Brooklyn to host some interesting events.

Bombastic U.S. political theater. If you can forget that the presidential race might be important to the future of our country and the world at large, then this year’s presidential contest makes for stunning political theater. As of now the campaigns of the two presidential candidates leading in the polls, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, are based in New York, and if they each get the nomination of their respective parties, the Big Apple will be a political circus like never before. I would love to see both of them lose their nominations, but at it looks to me like Hilary Clinton will have a lock on the nomination (don’t take my word for it though, I thought she was going to get the nomination in 2008 and lose to McCain). Although we won’t see much actual campaigning in New York City—our state is usually a safe bet for Democrats—that one or both campaigns may be based in the five boroughs makes our city a player in the national race.

An extra day. This year is a leap year, which means February will have 29 days instead of 28 days. That gives you another day to enjoy New York and make the most of your life. Don’t waste it. 

Happily out of the pop culture loop

Judging by what I see on my much-too-frequent perusal of social media, many of my friends and acquaintances have taken great lengths to see the latest Star Wars movie. I’ve read some excellent reviews and fully intend to see it, but this may be the first time I have not seen a Star Wars movie in the theater. It’s not because I don’t like Star Wars, it’s because I no longer put the same value or effort into pop culture.

I am the oldest person in the small office where I work. I’m even a few years older than the manager, my boss. I work with people who were born while I was in high school or college. It makes me feel old. Very few of them own a SLAYER CD, if they own CDs at all. I recognize some of the names of the people or musical groups they say they listen to, but I’m definitely plugged into another era. This summer my wife and I were talking to her teenage niece about what music she listens to. She mentioned several popular bands that played large venues and I had never heard of any of them.

I am not attuned to what is popular with today’s teenagers and young adults. And I’m perfectly fine with that. I am glad that I’m out of touch on these things and out of the loop, and not because today’s pop culture is all crap and the pop culture of my time was so much better. I watched MortonDowney Jr. and listened to Howard Stern habitually when I was a teen and young adult, I honestly have no business looking down my nose at people who follow the Kardashians (but I still do).

One can make the argument that that pop culture of today is overly sanitized and bears the telltale signs of patchwork social engineering. Because our society’s mass media is trying to appeal to a multitude of cultures in a divided and tribal world, any cultural authenticity has been discreetly purged from it. But pop culture is always a remnant and a reflection of its times, and human beings have a tendency to romanticize the past.  

Being unfamiliar with today’s popular culture doesn’t bother me because I ought to be spending my time more wisely than familiarizing myself with it. There was a time that I was very much immersed in pop culture, but life goes on after high school and college.

It’s a natural part of aging, to be out of touch with the latest in pop culture. If I was well-versed in what is trendy among the younger generations, I’d be a pathetic middle-aged clown desperately trying to cling to some shred of youth. I want no part in that. Acting your age is part of embracing life and living it to the fullest.

The music I listened to and the movies I watched when I was steeped in the pop culture of my time are now decades old and being rehashed for profit. I don’t want to spoil the memories I have of those times by trying to relive the days of my youth with self-congratulating sentimentality. I don’t need to see a movie about N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton album; I had the album on cassette when it came out.

Let’s not be close-minded and refuse to pay attention to worthwhile contemporary art and culture, but let’s be comfortable with who we are and with our stage in life. 

The horror of finding yourself using corporate speak

Though I have been subjected to it for many years, it’s only been in the past year that the language known as “corporate speak” has been creeping into my vocabulary. I must make it stop.

I switched jobs a little over a year ago and moved from the thankless ranks of financial journalism to the thankless but better paying ranks of financial public relations. For years as a journalist I waded through corporate euphemisms and double talk. A journalist’s job is to cut through corporate speak like an explorer cuts through dense jungle. I didn’t loath public relations people, I just knew I could not sound like one when I spoke or wrote if I wanted to be taken seriously.

I vowed to myself that I would not let this nonsensical and vacuous vocabulary creep into my speech, but in some ways it has. There’s no prohibition from sounding like a corporate automaton because now I work in public relations and corporations pay our salaries. Corporations paid my salary when I was a journalist also, but those businesses were depending on me NOT sounding like a corporate mouthpiece in order for my work to me marketable.

Now I AM a corporate mouthpiece, whether I like it or not. None of the companies I serve through my public relations job are ominous monoliths that are trying to cloud the truth or cover up any wrongdoing; they are for the most part small entrepreneurial companies doing some interesting things, but they are companies that expect us to be their representatives to the media. We have to be the bridge between the corporate world and the jaded, skeptical world of journalists and we have to sound the part both ways.

Whenever you speak with someone, you want to sound like you belong, like you understand where they are coming from. If everyone’s slinging the same corporate bullshit, they’re establishing a rapport in some small way. In agency public relations, you are not only selling your clients to media, you’re constantly selling yourself to current and potential future clients. Thus you have to sound like you could fit in at a corporate board meeting, and that’s easier to do when you shovel two-cent words around like so much manure.

So as a writer who takes pride in my ability to find the right works for any situation and a human being who decided long ago to embrace reality-based life, it horrifies me to find myself using corporate speak in any non-ironic capacity.

It’s only happened once or twice, but no matter. Like Ebola or cancer, corporate speak must be wiped out entirely if you wish to survive in the reality-based world.

The one phrase I’ve been guilty of using is “next steps” as in “we’ll discuss next steps” instead of saying, “we’ll talk about what to do next” or “what steps to take next.” Another word that’s lapsed into corporate speak is “leverage,” such as “let’s leverage our resources to gain media traction.” In my own overuse of the word “traction” regarding how to get media attention, I risk making that corporate speak. Now both lever and traction are real words that wouldn’t be corporate speak at all if you were talking about pulleys, debt or driving over snow, but when applied to business situations and overused, they become corporate speak. There are damning lists of useless and pathetic phrases that comprise corporate speak. The list is always evolving.

There are a lot of things I am willing to do to provide for my family. I’m willing to read work emails on the weekend, endure mind-numbing meetings and phone calls that should have been emails, write trite crap about boring topics and be courteous to asshole clients. But I won’t become a corporate speak user. I have my limits.

So I resolve here and now to avoid corporate speak and expunge it from my vocabulary. I will be a better person for it. 

Guns and the fruitless search for moral authority

For the first time since 1920 the New York Times put an editorial on its front page calling on the U.S. to ‘End the Gun Epidemic in America.’ The editorial came in the wake of an Islamic terror attack by a husband and wife team in San Bernardino, California that killed 14 people and wounded 21 others.

The bodies were still warm when the name of the lead suspect in the massacre was made public, and the New York Times played dumb for a few days. The paper first noted that the suspects left “no clear motive” but a day later said that terrorism was an “aspect” of the investigation. After every other newspaper in the world said it was terrorist attack, the Times noted that the F.B.I. was treating it like one. Watching the Gray Lady perform the mental gymnastics of wondering aloud about the motive of these shooters over several days was sad to see. Don’t hurt yourself thinking too hard, New York Times, most of us had it figured out early.

But while the newspaper of record was too chickenshit to call a terrorist attack a terrorist attack, it wasted no time in its front page editorial painting the exercise of Americans’ constitutional rights as a “moral outrage and national disgrace.” The editorial called for “eliminating large categories of weapons and ammunition” and saying that citizens would have to surrender some of their arms “for the good of their fellow citizens.”

What’s galling about the Times’ editorial, among other things, is that the motive of religious terrorists was very relevant when a Christian fundamentalist shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic, but somehow discussing motive is shameful of the wake of the latest Islamic terrorist attack within our borders. The anti-abortion crazy who killed three people at the women’s clinic was spurred in part by anti-abortion propaganda that hinged on fraudulent videos. It’s not anti-Christian bigotry to call out the role of religious extremism in the Colorado terror attack, but somehow Islamic extremism isn’t quite news fit to print, at least for a few days and then qualified by citing the F.B.I.

There are a lot of issues that need to be discussed in the wake of this terror attack. We need to have a more restrictive and security-driven immigration system. Muslim Americans are moresusceptible to violent religious fanaticism than people of other religions and rooting out these elements is going to be a very tough and brutal effort.

But the culture war dictates that the guncontrol issue is pushed to the fore. So let’s address it then.

What gun control advocates don’t understand is that gun ownership is an integral part of America. We wouldn’t have America without individuals owning guns and it’s no coincidence that the first British troops fired upon in Lexington and Concord were there to confiscate guns. The Second Amendment gives the right to bear arms to “The People” and cites the need for a militia because our country’s founders didn’t want what we already have: a standing military with bases in more than 100 countries. The authors of the Second Amendment viewed such professional militaries as a threat to democracy. Getting rid of “certain kinds of guns” is going to be fruitless because technology will not stop developing and there are already many guns on the market that straddle the line between hunting weapons and assault rifle explicitly for this purpose. We can’t eliminate the right to bear arms without amending the Constitution, and anyone who wants only the police and military to have guns is either extremely naïve or harbors some kind of odd uniform fetish.

What some of my fellow gun enthusiasts don’t understand is that we already have the worst of both worlds. Our guns aren’t stopping the government from undemocratic policies and we have horrible levels of violent crime. If the government wants your name they are going to have it, and it won’t take them long to find our guns if we bury them. The law enforcement officers or soldiers we’d be fighting are often gun enthusiasts themselves so I don’t see some great gun confiscation coming, despite the wishes of the editorial scribes of the New York Times. 

So here is a solution that might actually work if it’s ever implemented. What would work is to have one federal system for keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, the mentally ill and extremists. This would be one standard for the entire country. One set of rules for everyone to follow. It would mean passing a basic safety course and background check, and making sure that there were proper training for different weapons (e.g. - operating an assault rifle takes more training, especially with models like the AR-15 so popular in the U.S.). There are safety and security protocols everyone must follow and these would be subject to spot inspections in order to keep your certification. A basic mental health evaluation would be included. How this entices gun owners and manufacturers is that this would END the bans on assault rifles and “high capacity” magazines popular in many liberal states. It would END the absurd and unconstitutional red tape that many cities and states put around the exercise of our constitutional rights (the cost of the gun permit in New York City is more expensive than many guns).

Trying to take entire classes of guns and ammunition out of Americans’ hand is not only going to be unconstitutional but unsuccessful. But creating a system that both embraces our rights and regulates against the very real danger of violent crime will be a welcome solution.  

New York’s non-horrible holiday cheer

New York City is largely spared the horrors of BlackFriday shopping brawls. A security guard was trampled to death a few years ago in Valley Stream, Long Island, right outside of Queens, but within the five boroughs we have a better history of crowd control. And few of our poor people have cars. There’s not a lot of motivation to try to haul a 60-inch plasma screen TV home on the subway.

But that doesn’t mean there’s not enough misery to go around. Last year I was trying to get to a restaurant in midtown the night of the Christmas tree lighting in Rockefeller Center. Not only were the usual crowds heading to the tree lighting, but protesters objecting to a grand jury not indicting police offers in the Eric Garner case were headed that way also in an attempt to disrupt the ceremony or at least get on television. It was the only time in my life I walked towards Times Square to avoid worse crowds.

New York City has some great iconic holiday sights and experiences, all of which most New Yorkers avoid like the plague. The tree at Rockefeller Center, the windows of Macy’s or Saks Fifth Avenue, the laser light show at Grand Central Terminal are all great things that are mobbed with tourists to the point of not being truly enjoyable unless you are a tourist just happy to be there.

Here are some alternative and authentically New York holiday experiences you can consider to keep more money and sanity through the season.

For alternative shopping options, you should go visit The Kinda Punky Flea Market – Holiday Style is set to take place in Brooklyn at the Lucky 13 Saloon on December 20. I can’t think of a better place to shop for people with good taste. The Lucky 13 Saloon is a cool vestige of pre-insanity Brooklyn and attracts the interesting artists and musicians you thought had been run out of the borough entirely. There is also the Morbid Anatomy Flea Market at The Bell House in Brooklyn (there’s a high potential hipster factor at this one, but it might be worth it).

Plenty of people will buy expensive tickets to see Handel’s Messiah at Carnegie Hall. I went there more than a decade ago and deeply regret not screaming “SLAYER!!!” at the quiet moment between the third and fourth movements. Radio City Music Hall’s holiday show is a by-the-numbers holiday show with the Rockettes and Santa Clause, but there are better shows that will give you an excuse to visit Radio City Music Hall. The Holiday Show in Astoria Queens will fill you to the brim with holiday punk rock goodness from some awesome bands. Astoria is not hard to get to and you’ll get a taste of real New York City punk.  If you prefer more traditional holiday classical music, consider instead the holiday concert by the QueensOratorio Society on December 20 in Queens.

The Holiday Train Show at the New YorkBotanical Garden in the Bronx started on Nov. 21 but it runs into the New Year. I have gone on New Year’s Eve and the crowds were not that bad. You’ll be impressed with the models of New York City landmarks made from plants. The trains are interesting too.

And if you would just rather look at some pretty trees and other holiday decorations, then you can avoid the overcrowded Hades of Rockefeller Center and enjoy the Origami Holiday Tree at the American Museum of Natural History or the UNICEF Snowflakes near Central Park. 

Thankful in 2015

Thanksgiving is coming up and there are a lot of things to be thankful for. It is easy to look at the state of the world and feel that our generation got the short end of the stick and that things were better years ago. The human species has a habit of romanticizing the past to a fault. The present always looks lacking to Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular because we are an ambitious people who always see better possibilities.

But if we are living safely with food in our stomachs and a roof over our head, we should be thankful; there are a few billion people who would gladly trade places with us.

Here are some things I am particularly thankful for:

Family. I am lucky to not only have a wife and kids who love me but numerous other relatives and step-relatives who love me also. I can tap into the wisdom of several aunts and uncles, cousins, and my amazing grandmother, the indomitable matriarch who is our rock. My family has demonstrated time and again how to persevere through hardship and loss with grace and strength. I am lucky to be of such strong blood.

Health. No doubt my steady diet of weekend egg sandwiches has left me the worse for wear and my back is a scramble of slipped disks and strained muscles, but compared to many people, I am in very good health. I know too many family and friends who have suffered bad setbacks to take my health for granted.

Employment. While I have known great unemployment and underemployment in my time, I am currently gainfully employed at a stable company. Having worked as a journalist for nearly 15 years, I crossed over “to the dark side” of public relations last year. I landed in a good place with smart, friendly co-workers; a lot of people can’t say that.

Creative Ambition. One of the reasons I am lucky to have the family I do is that I’ve inherited my family’s desire to create. My family is full of writers, musicians, actors and more and I am honored to be among them. Being creative gives you a constant reason to live even when all else looks dismal.

America. While the American Empire is deep into its twilight, the America I grew up with and love is very much alive though casting a cautious eye towards the future. America is the greatest nation on Earth because it is my country. We have a lot of problems, but we have a lot of freedom that many people never see.

New York City. No city inspires as much simultaneous love and hatred from its inhabitants as New York. There is no other place on Earth that is constantly rewriting its own mythology and acts such a magnet for creativity and ambition. New York will outlive us all. As much as we hate to see New York change, we know it will never die as long as the Earth remains intact. 

Daily life with neither fear nor apology

The recent terrorist attacks in Paris will see New York on a higher security alert than usual. There will be more armed soldiers and more heavily armed police in some of our transit centers and crowded tourist areas.

New Yorkers this week will go to work as they normally do. The buses will be too slow and the trains too crowded. New Yorkers will continue to secretly and openly hate one another as is our birthright.

But what we won’t do is let savage lunatics keep us from doing what we need to do. We’d love to stay home and watch the news while eating cheese in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in France, but we can’t afford the time off from work.

And, to borrow an over-used phrase, if we deviate from our miserable daily routines, the terrorists have won. Let’s observe a moment of silence for the victims of these horrors, but don’t dare be silenced by fear. Don’t let the fear of terrorism affect how you live your life and don’t let the fear of being labeled or maligned stop you from speaking your mind.

New Yorkers will be divided on what the Paris attacks sayabout Islam and the Muslim world at large. My social media news feed is filled with people wanting to bomb all Muslims back to the stone age (some are already there!) and people trying to shame us for caring more about Paris than Beirut. All of this is nonsense. New Yorkers care more about Paris because Paris is more like New York and it resonates when people more like ourselves are harmed. That’s not xenophobia, that’s human nature.

The five boroughs are home to as many as 1 million Muslims and most of them are peaceful people we interact with on a daily basis without incident. It’s Muslims who are the biggest victims of Islamic fundamentalists and Muslims who are doing the most to take the fight to these extremists. And it’s also realistic Muslims who will admit that there’s a real problem with Islam today. It’s the religion that has most dialed up the crazy factor something terrible and the Islamic Uma has been home to an ideological war for decades with too many moderates sympathizing with the other side.

New Yorkers are a generally liberal lot and the usual suspects have expressed more angst about possible backlashes against Muslims than about how we go about preventing another terrorist attack. We’re a divided city just as we are a divided country, but after all the hand-wringing and shouting, we’ll still be a buzzing metropolis. We’ve seen terrorism at its worst and we’re still here.

New Yorkers will pause to honor the victims of terror and then keep going to work and coming home every night. We’ve been down this road before. There’s too much life to live here. We can’t afford the fear. 

The Queens ethnic supermarket shuffle

When a local supermarket closes down, people scatter like ants seeking safety. Our area of Queens is seeing two stores close down over the next few weeks. It will be interesting to see where shoppers will go before these stores are reopened.

The scene in the Waldbaum’s on 20^th Avenue in College Point, Queens was a sad one. More than half the shelves were empty. Where abundant displays of vegetables once stood were now vacant. Everything was on sale. Products in the aisles were consolidated onto a few shelves. As I was checking out, a woman asked if she could have my shopping basket when I was done; she couldn’t find another one anywhere.

Local supermarkets throughout Queens are being sold or closed after the A&P, which owned several supermarket chains, declared bankruptcy earlier this year. The local ones near where I live are supposed to be reopening. The Waldbaum’s will reportedly reopen as a Shoprite later this year. The Pathmark near our home is supposed to reopen as a Stop & Shop. Both are closing down in the meantime leaving people wondering where they are going to shop.

Food shopping, like much else in New York City, is a generally ethnically segregated affair. There was a Key Food in the shopping center right behind our home. It closed and is now Good Fortune, a grocery store that mainly caters to Chinese shoppers. All the announcements on the PA are in Chinese and many of the people who work there speak no English. Some of our neighbors refuse to go but it’s not a bad store. If you’re looking for fresh fish they have a lot of it, and they even kept a real deli, but if it’s too early in the day and the deli person isn’t there, none of the multitude of Chinese workers will help you other than to tell you in the best broken English they can that you are shit out of luck.

One thing I noticed when I first visited Good Fortune is that there is no cash register #4. The cash registers skip from register #3 to register #5. The Chinese believe that #4 is bad luck. The word for the number four is similar to the word for death in Chinese, so Chinese will go through great lengths not to have the number four in their addresses or phone numbers. Similarly in western cultures there is often no 13^th floor of an office building because of bad luck associated with that number.

A few blocks down the street is the H-Mart, a Korean grocery store. It’s smaller and does not have a wide selection, though on Fridays you can go through there and practically eat an entire lunch’s worth of food in the form of free samples. This supermarket also has odd sections of electronics and other things you don’t normally find in a grocery store; maybe that’s a Korean thing. Their selection of non-Asian foods is pretty dismal and we rarely go there. A few years ago supermarket union workers protested outside of this store asking people to boycott it because it had no black or white employees. I haven’t seen these protesters in a while. I don’t normally go to this store but I’ve never seen a black or white employee there to this day.

So some people are not going to shop at the Asian supermarkets and they’ll soon get the chance to shop at their old stores, renovated and under new management. Some have taken to shopping at some of the smaller stores in Whitestone and some will shop at the nearby Target. 

New York’s ethnic cauldron will continue to boil and churn. Luckily I don’t mind shopping among the Chinese and will stay well fed. 

The mad carnival that is the New York City Marathon

My wife’s cousin Erin ran the NewYork City Marathon and several of us planned to go meet her along the route. Erin had arranged things so that friends and family would meet her at several points along the 26.2 mile run. We were scheduled to meet her about halfway through the run in Long Island City, Queens.

Taking two toddlers onto the 7 train is one of the most torturous mass transit experiences you can have. We gave them munchkins from Dunkin’ Donuts and that sated their hunger but made them thirsty. We had no water for them, only giant coffee drinks that they couldn’t have. They cried and tried to wrestle free. Where on the 7 train they intended to go we had no idea, but they cried and screamed to be free of us.

Time slows down when you are the couple who brought crying children on the subway, but we eventually reached the Vernon-Jackson stop on the 7 train in Long Island City. Not wanting to take a double stroller onto subway, we brought backpack baby holders to carry them around in, but we had to hustle off the train to have space on the platform to wrestle the girls into those. We emerged from the subway stop into the cool November air. The weather was perfect for the race, and the marathon was close by and well under way.

The New York City Marathon is a somewhat of a crazy carnival. People show up with funny signs and runners often jog by in odd costumes. People show up to push their own causes: people handed out pamphlets for Bernard Sanders and solicited donations; the Jewish group Chabad had a space set up with a PA and hospitality to cheer on the runners.

There were a plethora of inspirational signs: ‘You CAN even!’ and ‘Run like the METS Depend on it’ were two of the more clever ones on display in Long Island City. A few held up signs that read, ‘Welcome to Queens!’ A few groups had enlarged photos of their friends and loved ones in the marathon. A couple near where we were standing had two large neon-colored Ls, their daughter’s initials. She gave them big hugs and was moved by their presence.

The runners reflect the city’s diverse patchwork of oddities as well. There were lots of runners dressed in the spirit of Halloween. I saw one competitor wearing a sheep suit and many more dressed superheroes such as Superman or Iron Man.

The runners are also an inspiration and represent all that is good about New York. They showcase the perseverance of the human spirit. There were runners that looked like they had to be in their 60s or 70s, including one elderly runner hobbling along with forearm crutches. One marathon runner was blind and was being helped along by some guides.

Lots of runners had their names on their jerseys and it was easy to root for them by name. More still had ear buds in their ears and were listening to music and so shouting encouragement to them was in vain. I decided I would shout, “Vive La France!” at French runners. They seemed to appreciate my support.

After tracking her via smart phones, our family group saw my wife’s cousin Erin as she approached us. She was in great spirits and chatted with us for a bit while waiting for her running partner. She munched in a snack, gave us hugs, and was off again. She finished the race in good time.

Here’s to all the marathon runners and everyone hitting the pavement and chasing your dreams.