cookies

The problem and the beauty with New York is that it is always whatever day you will make it and never the today that exists in the newspapers.

Point in fact. About two weeks ago when it was still a summer night in the hot and sticky apple, two friends and I were walking down the street in Hells Kitchen eating chocolate chip cookies. The cookies had been purchased earlier at from the Big Booty Bakery in Chelsea and had been saved as special post-dinner treats. B had insisted that I make the trip downtown for the very purpose of experiencing these truly remarkable cookies, and being a bit of a sugar addict, I could not refuse.

Biting into their soft and buttery edges, I was sold – these were the best cookies I’d had in a long time. Maybe even better than the cookies from the Overland Café in LA. But what is more amazing than the deliciousness of the cookies themselves is the reaction they garnered from passers-by. A man with buzzed gray hair in his late 40’s walking out of a bodega nearly jumped in front of us demanding to know where we got these cookies. They were huge, their chocolate chunks still glistening. His 15 year old daughter would kill for one of these cookies. She was obsessed. But explaining that the cookies were not to be had within walking distance, the man promptly changed the subject and started telling us Bush jokes that supposedly his daughter had told him. However, as it became more and more apparent that the existence of said-daughter was highly unlikely given the content of the jokes, B cracked a few dead baby jokes and we moved on.

How bizarre to be stopped on the street because of a cookie, we remarked! Only in New York, we said.

But then, not even two blocks later, still nibbling at cookies that might as well be called “as big as your head,” we were stopped by two young African American women pushing strollers asking where we got those cookies! Explaining yet again that the cookies were from the Big Booty Bakery in Chelsea (we felt like sales people) the girls contemplated whether they might make the trek. We talked about the relative merits of the cookie compared to the distance, and one of the girls joked that if she knew me better, she’d ask for a bite. And since I figured we now knew each other as well as anybody, I broke her off a piece and we went along on our merry ways.

I went home smiling. Feeling like this city was my city and that we were one big happy family. Because in New York we live for these cookies. These walks. These experiences.

Meanwhile, out in the real world Sarah Palin was getting away with murder in the media and the stock market was teetering on the brink of a precipice that everyone blithely denied. Real people in real places lost their jobs. And I was happy about a cookie. Feeling that the cookie was all the world really needed. Oddly reassured and discomfited that sometimes the cookie is all that really matters.

Just a Perfect Day

Do you know that Lou Reed song, Perfect Day? It is grand. Anthemic. It has the feeling of bright rays of sunshine running through it, and today I kept hearing it in the back of my mind.

An old boyfriend put the song on a mix cd for me when we were first dating, and although it has been a long time since I fancied that the song might have been about us, it has stuck with me as an anthem of the simplicity of sunlight and a well spent day.

Oh it's such a perfect day,
I'm glad I spent it with you.

It started out with a simple mission: to explore some of the record stores participating in the little known holiday of 'Record Store Day,' which features special concerts, in-store DJs, and sales. Since leaving Los Angeles, I have been disappointed by the lack of record stores (read: Amoeba). I've been waiting to be impressed. Of course, such missions are never as simple as they seem and M and I wandered through the throngs of Chinatown's street scene for a while before we found ourselves finally at Other Music on E. 4th Street. The small store rang with the lovely richness of vinyl and I remembered how much love wandering through the crowded aisles of music stores, assessing new titles and scavengering for the albums on the invisible list I keep in my head. In the jazz section I'm always rubbing elbows with those who probably think I should keep my filing fingers to myself. Finally, I emerge with Jorge Ben's Forca Bruta and Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet. Content. The orange plastic bag swinging at my side.

M, who always has all the brilliant plans, led us into Central Park where we were rained upon by blossoms, but with the quick change of plans made possible by mobile technology, we were soon shuttled to the Boat Basin for drinks with friends down on the Hudson River. Everything glowed in the haze of a late afternoon near the docks, and I couldn't help but feel jealous myself. It's easy to feel rich when you're overlooking yachts and sipping daiquiris.

Conversation flowed between hospitals and hipsters, boat fashions and immigration, roommates and life-mates and sing-song language... and I wonder how it is that I am so lucky. To have such fond friends. To live in a beautiful city where spring has finally arrived...

Just a perfect day,
Problems all left alone,
Weekenders on our own.
It's such fun.
Just a perfect day,
You made me forget myself.
I thought I was someone else,
Someone good.

repetition and difference

Endless rows of houses extending out their modern lines and sunset colors like strips of pastel monopoly houses comprise the imaginary rendering of my neighborhood and every neighborhood in Northern California that I can envision. Rows of matching domesticity zagging across the golden rolling hills haphazardly and regardless of terrain. Driveways extending strait as sunbeams from cul-de-sacs. Dry and dusty sidewalks and a lone tennis ball hanging near the gutter from yesterday’s street hockey match. This is the image my mind has preserved of the anonymity of my childhood neighborhood. But it was not always this way.

It’s difficult to tell at what point as a child you begin to notice that some things are the same, and some things are different. You look at the oranges in a bowl on the kitchen table as you’re eating breakfast and you know that all those round things are oranges, and that their color is orange, and the towels in the upstairs bathroom are also orange, but not in the same way. Just close enough that you can call them both orange.

But there are plenty of things that are almost the same that we don’t even recognize as being the same. Objects like houses seem as though they are completely unique. Except as any ex-suburban kid from California will tell you, they’re not. One day as I was sitting in the backseat of the car and Mom and I were driving toward home, it struck me that a lot of the houses on our street were the exact same house as our house, but in different colors. How had I never seen it before? They all had the one peaked roof with the triangle windows. The front door off to the side. The massive garage doors on the front. It had never occurred to me that the reason I instinctively knew where the bathroom was in my friend’s house up the street was because it was the exact same house as my house. Her brother’s bedroom had high ceilings like mine, and her parents had a big bathroom like my parents did, except theirs was a mess and had toothpaste splattered all over the mirror and dirty clothes piled in the bathtub instead of the hamper. And their house, which was my house, had the tv in the wrong corner of the family room, and had a strange smell in the kitchen. Also, they didn’t have a dog, or a hot tub, and we did.

After this realization, I found that when entering some neighbor’s house which was the same as my house I would immediately compare its interior and its backyard to my own and find ways in which it was inferior and in no way comparable to my own home. Blue mini-blinds Mrs. Chu? Bad choice. No steps to the front door? Decidedly less grand. I was embarrassed by the idea that we lived in a track-home and that there was nothing special about our high ceilings because my best friend’s father designed custom homes, and she lived in a house that was like no other on the street.

Of course, now that my parents no longer live in California or that house, I can see the beauty of the open floor plan and note that reproducing such an ideal plan for family living was a smart and efficient thing to do, no different than the way each floor of an apartment building mirrors the one below. It’s only now that I am beginning to unravel the sullen pinwheel of monopoly houses to remember the way our street curved down a hill and toward an old oak tree that nearly divided the road.

Song of the Subway

After riding the subway over the course of many many months, it is not surprising that a person will begin to develop a nuanced relationship not only to its multicolored pathways, or to the differing widths of a train’s cars, but also to its sounds. When approaching the stairway into a station, the familiar whoosh or screech tells you if a train is leaving or arriving and whether you ought to bother pushing past the couple ambling down the steps with the stroller. In that same moment, a keen ear can also detect whether the low hum of the approaching train is moving uptown or downtown, and whether one ought to risk jumping the turnstile when her metrocard just won’t register on the machine.

Yet these are relatively common skills among the average subway rider, and the sounds they are able to identify are not especially pleasant. But over the last several months I have made an eerie discovery about the sounds of the new trains they have begun to install on the 2/3 and 4/5/6 lines. Most people recognize them by their violet bench seats, but I think of them as the trains that sing the opening line of “Somewhere” from West Side Story. If you know the tune, sing the first three or four words “There’s a place…” It’s a unique melody because the first interval is a minor seventh. It’s dissonant. Foreboding. It resolves to the sixth, but the whir of the subway does not settle there.

The first time I heard it, I thought it was just a coincidence, but I began to realize that all of the new trains sing the same song. There must be a very simple mechanical reason for this, but it made me wonder if somewhere deep in the subway factory some funny little fellow with a love of this song engineered the subway to sing it just so.

How to Scat

The first thing I learned about scatting is that no one can actually teach you how to do it. This is a problem for college-aged girls in a Jazz Vocal Ensemble at an institution of higher education. At the beginning of class last year, those who had never attempted to scat before asked the “how” question, and instead of receiving a set of rules, our teacher at the time, Miles, cackled, and screamed, and wailed, and told us that he was going to “shoot us” and make us “get crazy” in a faux Caribbean accent. The other girls in my ensemble stared at him. His outburst was completely unhelpful to them, but I think I understood. Scatting is just like talking… if you happened to be crazy. Week after week during vocal jazz rehearsals Miles would stand before us wailing on the microphone, and then tell us it was our turn. If someone asked a question, he would sing in response. While it was inspiring to listen to Miles’ vocal acrobatics, our own attempts at scatting were squeaks and whimpers by comparison.

This semester, the Jazz Vocal Ensemble has a new instructor, Christine, and her approach is much different. She thinks there are things one can learn about scatting, and she uses language to try to pull sounds out of us. She tells us to “open up” and “use all of our range.” She asks us to sing minor seconds. She pulls out a ‘lick’ as we are singing and asks us to repeat it as a “motif.” One of her strangest commands is that we “color” our voices or “dirty” the tone. Using her words, she gives us visual imagery to shape our sound because, unlike a pianist or trumpeter, the singer’s instrument is inside, and in its way imaginary.

For the past couple weeks, Christine has been sending us home with recordings of Chet Baker and Charlie Parker so that we can “learn” their solos with repeated listening. As we mimic their sounds and phrasing, I cannot help but think of babies mimicking their parents when learning their first words. The only difference is that with scat-singing we never really get beyond the baby talk.

Singing Praises

From Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain:

"Deutsch and her collegues.... see absolute pitch, what ever its subsequent vicissitudes, as having been crucial to the origins of both speech and music. In his book The Sining Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen takes this idea further, suggesting that music and language have a common origin, and that a sort of combined protomusic-cum-protolanguage was characteristic of the Neanderthal mind. This sort of singing language of meanings, without individual words as we understand them, he calls Hmmm (for holistic-mimetic-musical-multimodal)-- and it depended, he speculates, on a conglomeration of isolated skills, including mimetic abilities and absolute pitch....

I was once told of an isolated valley somewhere in the Pacific where all the inhabitants have absolute pitch. I like to imagine that such a place is populated by an ancient tribe that has remained in the state of Mithen's Neanderthals, with a host of exquisite mimetic abilities and communicating in a proto-language as musical as it is lexical. But I suspect that the Valley of Absolute Pitch does not exist, except as a lovely, Edenic metaphor, or perhaps some sort of collective memory of a more musical past." 129-130

I suppose I do not really wish to journey back to the days of Neanderthal man, but to be able to experience absolute pitch and to converse as easily and emotively with music as with language... what a beautiful thing this must be!