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AOL-Time Warner concert
Wednesday, July 31 2002
a new kind of panhandling
After a marketing run around Park Slope, putting up more flyers, I hit Key Foods and did a little shopping for this evening's picnic in Prospect Park. Tonight Gretchen and I will be seeing a live outdoor performance of the New York Philharmonic.
As I was returning to my bicycle, I somehow caught the eye of a woman in a white Chevy Blazer. She pulled to a stop, rolled down her window, and asked me simply, "Will you help me?" She was a fat, homely woman with a kid. "Sure," I said, helpfully. Then she motioned me towards her and I immediately realized it was a scam. But I did as directed, and she asked, "Are you Jewish?" "No," I said. "Okay, well, I'm Jewish," she said without elaboration. Then she launched into a long incoherent story about her husband and her kid and not knowing what to do. "So what do you want me to do?" I asked. What she wanted me to do was give her money, but she wasn't going to be so crass as to actually ask for it. She said she wanted me to hold her jewelry while she went and did something or another. At this point I was supposed to just say, "No problem," and give her money. But what I said instead was, "I'm sorry, I can't help you." She tried again to reconnect with me, motioning to another woman on the street who "helps me." But it wasn't working. The things in her Chevy: her gleaming cell phone and inflatable child (okay, maybe it was a real child) all looked suspiciously new.
After that encounter, the "other woman who helps me" walked up to me and asked, "What did she say to you?" I couldn't really remember, just that it seemed like a scam to me. "I gave her $20," the woman said, shrugging. "I guess you can make a lot of money in New York that way," I observed.
New York Philharmonic AOL-Time Warner concert in beautiful Prospect Park
Before setting out at 5pm, I organized the things I'd be bringing to the park picnic: a six pack of Genesee, a copy of Catcher in the Rye, the latest New Yorker, a large bottle of water, and a distinctive pole so Gretchen would be able to find me in the sea of faces. The pole I made was a simple thin wooden slat crowned by a white cardboard box, about the size of a VHS videocassette. On either side of this box I'd painted a large red uppercase F. Why F? Because it's a distinctive letter (even from a great distance) and because the box already had some markings on it that could be covered with an F.
After making a loop around the Vale of Cashmere, I emerged with Sally into the Long Meadow to find no evidence of any outdoor concert whatsoever. The Long Meadow is, it stands to reason, long, so we walked south towards the other end until we saw the white tent looming in the distance. After making a loop around a large fenced-off fireworks area, we set up temporarily in the shade just above the baseball diamonds and waited for the sun to go down. There were still three hours to go before the show and a few other people were there already, but it wasn't anywhere near as crowded as a similar event in Manhattan would have been at this time.
Up on the hill about thirty feet behind me there were a couple middle aged white women sitting on a blanket with a Jamaican woman. The white women were talking very loudly and making the most completely inane observations about nearly everything their senses perceived. For example, the workers setting up the stage had Ray Charles blaring through the PA system and the woman actually debated for a moment whether or not the singing they heard was live before deciding it probably wasn't. Then they started clapping along to the beat in unintentional syncopation seemingly calculated to most perfectly destroy the listening experience. I also heard the women say that the music coming from the PA sounded like Louis Armstrong (presumably because "they" all sound the same). I think they were trying to impress their Jamaican friend (or was she the maid?) with their appreciation for the music of black people.
When the sun had dropped enough that its rays had begun to weaken, Sally and I relocated up near the stage and staked out our picnic site, erecting my F pole. The biggest downside of setting up so early was that I made myself easy prey for the various people selling candy, soliciting petition signatures, and hoping to expose me to their candidates. After signing a petition to get some marijuana-law-reform politician on the ballot, I wondered, "Hey, is this some sort of a trick?" What if John Ashcroft was using a pleasant-faced hippie chick (actually one of Bush's daughters in disguise) to collect the names and addresses of everyone in New York who supports the repeal of marijuana laws? To what fascist purpose could he apply such a list? Mark my words: it's just a matter of time before the war on terrorism goes stale and the USA-PATRIOT Act starts being applied to the war on drugs and other dubious perpetual wars: the war on file sharing, the war on gay marriage, and the war on masturbation.
Gradually others filled in the grass around us until there was very little left showing. Periodically someone would go to the microphone and welcome us to "today's New York Philharmonic AOL-Time Warner concert in beautiful Prospect Park." What with its sterile hyphen and wadded-together nonsense string of words, the quasi-possessive "AOL-Time Warner" is a terrible addition to the name for anything. It used to be that a New York Philharmonic concert was just that, but now a corporation can expect to buy its way right into the name of anything. I wonder if we will begin to see a rollback in these concessions to corporate domination now that corporations (including AOL-Time Warner itself) are on the defensive. The defiling extent of their reach has gone to such laughable extremes that a backlash is now not only overdue, but necessary for the preservation of a culture worthy of pride.
Gretchen hadn't yet arrived, but nonetheless my F pole was proving helpful to others giving directions to their friends over their cell phones.
A little before the show began, Gretchen arrived with several bags of goodies. We'd forgotten to bring any food for Sally, so we fed her people food instead. We gave her carrots until she didn't want any more, then we gave her crackers until she'd had her fill of those. Then it was corn chips. Not wanting her to be troubled by flatulence, we only gave her once slice of cheese, but it's doubtful she would have self-enforced any limit for that.
Playing to a general audience, tonight's concert featured what you might call pop-classical music, the sort of stuff even kids can get into. It opened with Rossini's William Tell Overture, and all the little kids in the audience could be seen jumping up and down and galloping imaginary horses when the doo-doodle-doo-doodle-doo-doo-doo part kicked in.
The second piece was Cello Concerto No.1 by Saint-Saëns, which featured what appeared to be particularly agile cello work.
There was an intermission before the last piece, and this seemed to coincide with some unusual behavior coming from Sally. She seemed to want to go away from our picnic spot, but in so doing she kept intruding on other people's picnic spots. "Maybe she has to go pee," I suggested. Jesus Christ, did she ever! The moment I'd gotten her away from the crushing human densities near the stage, she proceeded to pee for what seemed like an entire minute. It's interesting that she has the social skills to hold her bladder even outdoors when there are so many people around.
Tonight's music concluded with Symphonic Dances by Rachmaninoff. It was a curious work, because, though written in 1940, it sounded superficially much older. There were subtle trappings of modernity here and there, particularly when one started asking questions such as "What key is this written in?" As usual for an outdoor orchestra concert, there was much applause between movements, something Gretchen characterized as "gauche." I joked that such clapping was a feature of concerts in Brooklyn, but you'd never hear inter-movement applause at a concert in Central Park.
I haven't gone to all that many orchestra concerts in my day, and tonight was the first time I noticed that the motions made by conductors usually proceed their effect in the orchestra by a beat. Meanwhile, though, the conductor is also moving synchronously with the orchestra. Not only is he sending out a stream of data about the future, he's doing this superimposed on a stream of data about the present. It's rather impressive when you think about it, though I'm sure much of it comes naturally to an experienced conductor. [Art Winer writes to tell me that the delay I observed may have been due to the speed of sound, since even the PA system is delayed to be in sync with sound coming from the stage. I thought the delay was greater than what one would observe from this distance, but I might well be wrong.]
After the show, there was a dramatic (though brief) fireworks display. Sally was so frightened that she began shivering, but she recovered rapidly once the grand finalé was done. We treated her to a visit to Dog Beach on the way home, where she frolicked with a half dozen other canine individuals.
A dragonfly lights on my F sign.
The glasses are cool, but is a tattoo that resembles
a metastasizing ass crack really such a good idea?
Note the yellow grass.
Sally having an okay time.
Today is the sixth anniversary of my online journal keeping. 1996 seems so long ago in so many ways.
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