Fifth Time's a Charm

Today's off-schedule post comes as a result of the new Freedom Tower design, which will be officially unveiled later this afternoon. We knew that the NYPD's security criteria were certain to leave us with an altered tower; the question was whether this newest version would represent an improvement upon a clearly flawed design, or a disheartening backslide that might jeopardize what public support the project still has.

Any news on the Freedom Tower demands a cursory review of the many steps through which the process has already been steered. Today's new design represents the fifth iteration. First came the six lackluster schematic designs by Beyer Blinder Belle, which were roundly rejected by the public -- and rightly so. It was thus clear early on that people expected more than a generic, cookie-cutter development in which any memorial was relegated to an office park courtyard.

Next, following from an enormously successful competition in which the invited teams were comprised of some of the world's top architects, Daniel Libeskind emerged as the first designer. His winning scheme called for a tower with the symbolic height of 1,776 feet and formal nods to the Statue of Liberty. He envisioned it as a kind of garden in the sky, with green space becoming a major element of the tower's interior. Aside from the arbitrary symbolism (twelve inches of height for each year after the supposed birth of Jesus Christ until America declared its independence), Libeskind's design resonated well with the public on the strength of the master plan, which left the slurry wall adjacent to the memorial site intact and imbued the site with a sense of memory and emotion that was lacking in many of the other plans.

But despite being named the winner, Libeskind was promptly forced to take a back seat to David Childs of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, whom WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein had retained as executive architect for the rebuilding effort. Without direct control of the design of the tower, Libeskind assumed the ambiguous title of master plan consultant, and watched as his plan was steadily chipped away by the more pragmatic (and experienced) Childs.

When the finished design was presented to the public, the strengths of Libeskind's tower had largely disappeared, while many of its problems persisted. The antenna mast, placed off center to emulate the raised arm of the Statue of Liberty, now resembled an awkwardly placed cocktail toothpick. While the 1,776-foot height had been declared inviolable by Governor George Pataki, the height of the occupiable building had shrunk, with office floors at a certain level giving way to an ethereal lattice of cables and an ambitious battery of windmills to provide some of the building's power. The overall impression was that the mass of the building was truncated, a sense amplified by the torqued form introduced by Childs.

Despite its flaws, this was the tower scheduled to begin construction until the NYPD announced its security concerns last month. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and others were beginning to clamor for the original WTC towers to be rebuilt as simplistic (and inadequately graceful) replicas of their former selves.

Now that the new design has been completed, in just seven weeks, the rebuilding effort at Ground Zero is closer than ever before to realization. The projected completion of the Freedom Tower has now been pushed back to at least 2010, but much of the already completed work on the design of its foundations will not need to be redone.

Instead of having a twisted form, the tower now changes from a square to an octagonal shape as it rises, and its antenna mast is centered at its top. Its base is a 200-foot tall square monolith, set back further from the street and designed to resist truck bombs, above which the glass facade begins. Even the glass is to be heavily reinforced toward the bottom. A tower once designed to be light and airy, almost a specter of a building, is now sold and impregnable.

As a form, however, the new design will recall the original WTC towers to a degree earlier iterations did not -- a fact David Childs was quick to point out. One wonders if this was partly intentional, or merely the convenient result of the new security guidelines. Either way, the new tower --innovative as it might seem to New Yorkers -- will be little different from recent towers elsewhere in the world, including even Cesar Pelli's Goldman Sachs building across the Hudson. It is perhaps a fortunate compromise, one that will allow both progressive and conservative tastes to appreciate and support the project. Still, it is a far cry from the kind vision demonstrated by the participants in the design competition, which may have been where the greatest opportunities were left behind, years ago.

Missed Connections

It's always exciting to be greeted on Monday morning by a red flashing "message" light on the telephone cradle. It indicates that while I have been away from the office, someone has been trying to reach me, and is now anxiously awaiting my reply. Perhaps an important client or consultant has thought of an urgent question and dug up my number. Perhaps my crackpot landlady wishes to know why I have yet to donate any "interesting colors" of dryer lint to her friend's jewelry-making operation. Or maybe my HMO has tired of sending me new insurance cards every week, and wonders why I have yet to alert them who my physician is. (Answer: I have already told them, and received yet another new card weeks ago with his name on it. Nonetheless, I continued to receive new cards and angry form letters. At this point, they've probably wasted about $5 on postage and plastic cards. And people wonder why health insurance is so expensive...)

But no, none of these potentially thrilling scenarios ever materializes when I retrieve my message. It is, without fail, "Paul" from the (unspecified) prize department, frantically alerting me that it is in my best interest to contact him as soon as possible regarding the fantastic prizes in store for me. I've yet to call him back, but his persistence is beginning to wear on me. I also have relatively few friends in Washington (they are, in order, my girlfriend, Halfz, a local Ghanaian restauranteur, and the bank teller with whom I regularly discuss Dead Prez, Wu-Tang, and the comings and goings of each). I'd be happy to make a new friend; let's just hope that Paul's 800 number is not designed to conceal the troublesome detail that he does not, in fact, live in the greater Washington area.

Alongside my landlady, my coworkers, my HMO, and my parents, Paul is the only one who actually knows my work number. He just seems to call at the most inopportune times. On the rare occasions when he has found me at my desk, an undetermined problem with the line seems to prevent him from hearing me. "Hello, Paul!" I exclaim, "I've been meaning to call you back -- I've just been swamped." His discipline is impressive. He never deviates from his very businesslike and straight-to-the-point script in the face of these technical difficulties, clearly confident that once the problem is resolved I will contact him straight away.

With any luck, some day Paul will catch me on a glitch-free line. We'll probably take a few minutes to catch up, me asking how things are going in the prize department, and him asking about the Sharkitecture business. Then I'll finally get to hear what amazing things I've won -- cars, vacations, property, or some combination thereof. But it's not so much the prizes I'm concerned about. It is the prospect of finally receiving a call at work from someone other than my boss.

If Nothing Were Ever Lost

I am pleased to announce the following additions to my links section (at right):

Ed Koch's film reviews
Information on rats (for good measure)
Washington's greatest edifice

The link above will take you to Koch's current reviews ("Cinderella Man" and "Deep Blue"), while the permanent link in the sidebar links to a Google search of thevillager.com for his past reviews. (If you ask me, he deserves his own page on their site, not merely a section of each issue.)

In other news, my May 2nd stroll down memory lane set into action a remarkable sequence of events. First, I received a facsimile by email of the now infamous Cock Block/Jock Rock photograph. (A Friendster login may be required to view it. Admittedly, the quality isn't perfect, but the message remains loud and clear.)

Next, a University of Arizona professor contacted Halfz (this was before I began allowing comments) to offer us an extra Fuckly poster she had obtained in Paris back in 2002. The other poster, she explained, was framed and hanging in her husband's office. Ours has yet to arrive, perhaps for wont of postage; I'll have to remind Halfz to ask her if she would like us to send a check. The internets never cease to amaze me.

Finally, the Sports glasses I lost have been replaced, thanks to the good graces of eBay, leaving only the "Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai" Import soundtrack missing from my list. Those eBay ads with the guy finding a wooden tugboat he lost as a child on eBay really do ring true, except in my case the ad would show me leaving my Fuckly poster in my closet in Florence, my sausage-making landlord finding it, looking up "Fuckly" in an English-Italian dictionary, and, perplexedly, putting it up for sale.

When Brooklyn Was the World

Now that I no longer live in Brooklyn, I am always a bit shocked when I return to visit. It is a very different kind of shock than the one I am used to: finding new buildings finished and even newer ones underway after summers spent abroad and semesters of college. Now what I notice are the people.

It is often said that our perceptions of what we have left behind are inevitably altered by our own changing vantage. The overwhelming sense when I graduated from high school was that the place was going downhill, for example, and I am tempted to feel the same way now about college. But when it comes to Brooklyn, I doubt that a similar trick is to blame for my feeling that something irreplaceable is being lost.

Through the mid-90s, Smith Street remained a place of great character and life. There were relatively few bars and restaurants, but there were plenty of Cuban and Dominican social clubs, family-run shoe stores, corner bodegas, and barber shops. Today, Smith Street is known primarily for its night life, with countless bars and restaurants attracting young, hip types from all over the borough. It is easily accessible to both the F and G trains.

Even as the new Smith Street was born, however, there remained for a while a sense of its place in the fabric of adjoining neighborhoods -- Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens. (These three distinct places are now preposterously combined to form a fictional place, "BoCoCa," a term invented by Real Estate brokers and eagerly adopted by newer residents. Never mind that this "neighborhood" boasts perhaps 100,000 inhabitants and at least three major commercial streets.) But every time I visit Smith Street now, there are more Brooklyn hoodies, more ridiculously accessorized babies, more pure-bred dogs. It is a bit like looking at portrait photographs from the 1920s -- the identical slicked hair and the rounded lapels have merely given way to color-coordinated vintage sneakers and carefully displayed forearm tattoos.

The Times' Suketu Mehta presents the new Brooklyn as a place where community persists despite increasing disparity between income levels. Such an appraisal is not altogether inaccurate -- especially in the observation that the hipsters of Billyburgh are in essence a "floating group" who would return en masse to Manhattan at the drop of a hat if rents there were to suddenly fall to levels that 20-something graphic designers could afford. And yes, it would be a mistake to present Brooklyn culture as a fixed, immutable thing given its large and ever-changing immigrant mix. (A high school teacher of mine insisted that if the official population of Brooklyn is given by census data as 2.5 million, the real number, including undocumented residents, must be closer to 4 million. Even if the population is, in fact, under 3 million, this is still a fact most people find utterly astounding.)

But the point has still been missed. Yes, there are $20 million asking prices for townhouses. Yes, it is becoming increasingly acceptable to tell your Manhattanite friends that you live in Brooklyn. But these trends are not proof of revival, but of impending death. The current tide of gentrification did not begin in the 1990s, but in the early 1980s. Floating group or no, mass-produced hipster types have diluted the soup. It is getting harder and harder to meet someone in Brooklyn who was actually born there (indeed, people are often surprised to learn that I was).

The question is this: if Brooklyn is among the most widely recognized place names in the world -- indeed, the most widely recognized proper nouns behind Coca-Cola, Michael Jordan, and Nike -- why should it need to be constantly defended, explained, and repositioned?

On Friday, as I left a Brooklyn Heights Irish pub where a friend had stopped to pee, the ancient Irish doorman looked on as a couple got into a taxi and gave the driver a Manhattan destination.

"There's no ferry, you know," quipped the doorman.

"I know, that's why we're getting a taxi," the woman explained impatiently.

The doorman grinned and looked down the block toward a Subway stop where the 2, 3, 4, 5, R, and M trains can all be found. Her companion took the hint.

"She doesn't get it," the companion said wistfully, and with that they were off.

Brooklyn gets it. And so long as exchanges like these can be witnessed, Brooklyn is not yet dead.

Summer in the City

If you like rats, kickball, and Miller Lite, 18th Street is the place for you

Having lived in the District for less than three months, I would appear nothing short of foolish if I attempted to write about the place with the authority of a seasoned veteran. On the other hand, I have seen enough to understand some of its merits and pitfalls, even if my estimations remain crude and lacking in nuance.

Jessica Cutler, author of the steamy sexposé The Washingtonienne (a reconstruction of her original blog can be accessed here), has famously described Washington as “Hollywood for the ugly,” and an hour spent on 18th Street in Adams Morgan certainly does nothing to quash this appraisal. But there one finds other, more alarming trends than the mere homeliness of the citizens.

For example, there is the utterly astounding number of kickball players walking to and from their games. Halfz has already commented at length about this, but we remain mystified as to how such a dubious “sport” has attained a level of popularity to rival that of virtually any other social activity (more can be learned, perhaps, here). Close examination of a game in progress revealed two disturbing facts: the competition is sufficiently fierce to require the employment of umpires; and the umpires themselves take their jobs so seriously as to use ball/strike counters.

More alarming than the kickballers are the rats. One might think that growing up on the mean streets of New York City would provide ample desensitization to the necessary urban evils of insects and rodents. After all, a rat running along between the rails (or, as I once witnessed, desperately trying to copulate with a female rat) makes the wait for the Subway fly by in no time. However, the rats in Washington are enormous, fearless, and ubiquitous. They scamper about freely not just in the metro or secluded alleyways, but on busy streets and outside fashionable nightclubs. They do not move furtively as one expects of a rat, but instead saunter along casually without a care in the world.

The situation with cockroaches is little different. In most parts of the city, the arrival of 10 pm each evening seems to signal the creatures, who emerge by the thousands and turn the sidewalks into a kind of moving, insect carpet. Entering an ill-lit basement apartment under such conditions is a harrowing experience, to say the least. I could continue at some length in this nauseating vein.

If I were to epitomize Washington by mention of a single, curious fact about its everyday mechanisms, I would point to the habit of metro train doors to remain shut for up to five seconds once the train has come to a stop in the station. Outside advisors identified this as one simple problem that, if remedied, might contribute to more reliable service. The recommendation was ignored, however, and the infuriating lag persists.

3, 2, 1, Tomcat

Misocainea, hater of all new ideas, and I used to spend a great deal of time loafing around on the third floor of a rather sorry looking house in New Jersey. In fact, for a period of about six months, I lived in this house, in a tiny room on the same third floor. There were five of us who actually lived there, but at least 200 who made use of the building, in which the downstairs rooms comprised a private social club. For the time being, these matters will have to remain somewhat opaque.

At a certain point -- I'd like to think it was towards the end of the time I lived there, but I am almost certain it was not -- a cat became the sixth party to reside on the third floor. It was a contemptible cat. Unlike other cats I have known, who look at you deferentially, acknowledging your central role in their survival, this one glanced up with a combination of hatred and fear. It tried desperately to escape down the stairs at each opportunity, but never met with any success. If it had, it would have ended up in the soup for sure.

Misocainea might also be called a hater of new cats. Not all cats -- not the devoted, dog-like cats who know how to earn a man's respect -- just the upstarts. The prima donnas. The cats who cannot or will not appreciate the sheer luxury and ease of their tiny little lives. And so it was, in discussing our shared contempt for this obnoxious, pampered and mangy creature that we hit upon a fantastic idea.

Prudence might dictate that we keep such notions to ourselves. After all, the internets are rife with industrial spies and unoriginal thinkers, desperate to nick an idea that might be their ticket to easy street. But in the interest of developing this particular idea to its fullest potential -- fully projecting the project, we might say -- I will elaborate briefly here.

Our film would be called "Tomcat," although I suppose in this day and age such titles generally carry a subtitle along with them ("Tomcat: Neuter-itory", say). Its protagonist would be a common house cat, preferably a very young one, who is trained by the U.S. Navy to be a fighter pilot. There are all sorts of potential reasons for this: his owner was a pilot who was killed in battle, say; or a freak accident has given him exceptional vision and paw-eye coordination.

The plot would probably be formulaic. Tomcat's wingman would be shot down, sending him on a weeklong bender and nearly to his death. Finally, realizing his sworn duty to defend the United States and avenge his buddy, Tomcat would pull himself together to fight another day, emerging as a national hero.

But before worrying too much about the plot, there are a number of technical questions that must be addressed first. The original plan was simply to strap an actual, living cat into the cockpit of an F-14. This almost certainly would not work, and even if it did the effect would be less than stunning. So we'd either need an animatronic cat (what with recent developments in robot realism this presents only a financial hurdle) or, less desirably, a CGI cat. Surely some of the more intricate battle scenes would need to be computer-generated, but if at all possible we would prefer a physical cat sitting in the cockpit, even if it has to be a synthetic one.

If you think "Tomcat" will never get off the ground, consider that this was one of the better ideas that Misocainea and I came up with. Others included playing soccer with a disco ball, bashing the head off of a mannequin with a baseball bat, and a game (with no particular rules or aims) in which I threw full cups of beer at him while he scrambled around the room, protected by a semicircular piece of plexiglass he was using as a shield. We also devoted countless hours to planning various schemes by which we might smoke in academic buildings without being detected, killing innumberable lady bugs, and throwing tennis balls out of third story windows.

Only Built 8 Cuban Links

Who are we? (If you know the answer, enter it as a comment below)

"I think I dig your style.... It's Thanksgiving time, I love your new blazer
Your sleeves are pushed up, it looks pretty awesome..."

Things are heating up at work, and soon (tomorrow) I'll be moving into my new digs. Instead of the usual, ad-hoc shtick, here are some quick hits. Get them while they're hot (and the links still work):

1. Coming soon to a zoo near you: African people!

2. Chinese elongating selves to compete for jobs, mates

3. Too many cooks in the kitchen at Harvard

4. Crime drops in DC's 3rd district

5. Robots on the rise

6. Fab 5 turn Kevin Millar gay, ruin charity appearance for hurricane-weary Little Leaguers. Ball jokes all around.

7. Waste time at work: 18 holes of miniature golf (Need more? Make it 36)

8. It's raining men -- or pieces of them, anyway

That's all for now.

Baseball N. Beers Would Be Ashamed

A visit from the Wizard of Gore usually means good times: pilfered box wine, interminable cookouts, and citrus fruit affixed to apartment walls by means of cutlery. This time, however, it proved to be a somewhat more relaxed weekend. I’m certain Halfz will make some mention of the more salient episodes in due time.

I am claiming only one event as my own to relate, and it transpired on Saturday evening at the Nats-Marlins game. First off, I should mention that this was my first experience with RFK Stadium, and aside from the generally depressing state of the structure itself it was not a terrible place to watch a baseball game. That being said, I was horrified by the spectacle we witnessed during the fourth inning, after moving from our ticketed seats in section 521 of the upper deck (along the third base line) to a less crowded one in left centerfield.

Occupying perhaps five rows of the section adjacent, conspicuously drunk and emitting the kind of noise one might associate most immediately with a fraternity pledge event, was a gaggle of NoVa assholes. Despite being virtually buried under an avalanche of spent beer bottles, they had just managed – how it was yet unclear – to finagle a beer salesmen into leaving an entire case of his product at their feet.

As Halfz, WoG, and I looked on in horror, not only were the contents of this bin emptied; the process was repeated – twice – before beer sales were cut off in the seventh inning. This is to say that having already consumed perhaps 75 beers among the fifteen of them, the ringleader of this human tragedy thought it wise to spend over $200, on what amounted to about $25 (even at exorbitant Adams Morgan prices) worth of Bud Light. Never mind that case #2 wasn’t even gone before case #3 (only nine bottles this time) arrived. Never mind also that by the sixth inning, the leader of the troupe was so drunk that he accidentally poured half of his beer into his hand in lieu of the sunflower seeds he was holding in the very same hand. His error caught, he resumed pouring the seeds into his mouth four ounces at a time and spitting them – at times, simply pouring them directly – onto his friends’ heads.

Every section worth its salt has a cheerleader – usually an intoxicated fat person – who becomes the self-appointed originator of countless failed attempts at “the wave.” Ours was no exception: several rows below our disgusting, drunken friends, sat one of the fattest people I have ever seen in my life. And as though his four hundred pounds of weight and BAC in the 0.5% range weren’t dangerous enough – we could easily imagine him simply rolling out of the stands at any moment – this person occupied himself between his stints as wavemaster sucking down full flavor cigarettes. Halfz began to wonder how in the world he might sleep at night, considering there was no way his feet could comfortably touch the mattress as long as his oak cask of a gut was in the way.

As fascinating as it was to watch college-age hooligans pay perhaps $400 for beer over the course of two hours, the game itself was painfully slow. In fact, our departure at the seventh inning stretch came nearly three hours after we had arrived, during the bottom of the first. While I learned later that the Nats held on to win, I can remember virtually nothing of interest happening during the game, aside from the bases-clearing double Vinny Castilla hit in the first to tie the game at three apiece.

Japanese People Loooove Robots

Along with baseball, beer, and churlish design criticism, readers should now count robots among the principal subjects of this page. It seems we are on the verge of a robot revolution, and I intend to have a front row seat.

Another great fan of robots, "Baby" Gopal Vemuri of Port Washington, New York, successfully reached his commencement yesterday, and just four years after matriculating, no less. It is hard to say whose surprise was more dramatic – Gopal's, or that of the numerous onlookers who gathered over the weekend to document the rite of passage for themselves.

Gopal means "cow protector" in Sanskrit, but I’ve never seen him defending anything besides cigarettes and beer. On Saturday, I awoke to the comforting sound of Gopal's voice as he opined, "[Mister Sketchee], reunions is just an institutionalized bender."

How right he was. Congratulations, Gopal, and rest of the class of 2005. May you have many, many robots.