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A Small Spalding Gray Memorial

June 19, 2008

I’ve been to the area about five to seven times; Tompkins Square Park. One of my favorite spots is the Temperance Fountain. That fountain was established a hundred years ago to provide fresh water and (hopefully) wean people away from alcohol.

I had never noticed that the pavers around the fountain had dedications. Not all of them, but a bunch. As I circled it and looked (‘cuz I’m that kind of guy), I spotted a familiar name: Spalding Gray.

I never knew him or met him. I best remember him in the movie “Swimming to Cambodia”. He was something of a mezmerizing storyteller.

The paver reads “To The Best Dad in The World Spalding Gray All our love Marissa, Forrest Theo”. According to Wikipedia, Marisa was his stepdaughter and the other two were his sons. (And Wikipedia spells Marissa with one “s” whereas the paver has two. I don’t know the right one.) [UPDATE: Spalding Gray webmaster John Boland has provided the correct spelling: “Marrisa”. So the paver ought to read “To The Best Dad in The World Spalding Gray All our love Marrisa, Forrest Theo”. This would correct the spelling of Marissa/Marrisa.]

But I do know that I enjoyed his monologue in Swimming to Cambodia. Absolutely riviting. I saw parts of “Monster in the Box” and enjoyed that, too.

-H

Categories: Celebrity Points, Greenwich Village, LES, Manhattan, Wanderings

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Wall Street Subway Stop

June 18, 2008

Strange as it may seem, one of the first subway stops I ever used in NYC was the Wall Street stop.

It’s strange because I’ve only been through it about five times in four years and it was perhaps the second stop I used (having started from Grand Central). And as grand and huge as Grand Central is, the Wall Street stop is tiny and blech.

It’s about as small a station as you’ll ever find in NYC. You think about how many people must come here, and how tiny the space is next to the tracks.

But then, they don’t come to this stop to wait around and enjoy the view.

-H

Categories: Manhattan, Wanderings

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Re-Visiting the Berlin Wall

June 17, 2008

I’ve posted on the New York City Berlin Wall exhibit before. I was walking by it again last Sunday and knew it was there. I just peeked over and noticed it was deserted. No big deal. I had my camera and took a quick snap. Once again, no big deal. I doubted I’d get a post about it…or rather, I doubted I could figure out an angle to share some more pictures of the Berlin Wall in the blog.

But I have.

It’s one of the rules of tourism. Nobody sees nothing until somebody sees something. After a few moments, I walked over to the wall, and all of a sudden at least three groups of people converged on the spot. They may have seen me taking a picture or just staring at the Wall and then joined in, having noticed the Wall themselves. Or they saw other people watching me looking at the Wall. Or maybe…

Or maybe they wanted to take a look at the Wall themselves and had come thousands of miles to see it in solitude and couldn’t ’cause some guy spoiled the one moment that the Wall was undisturbed. (Not pictured, a Japanese couple who had me take their photo up against the Wall.)

-H

Categories: Manhattan, Mid-town, Wanderings

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Library Walk on 41st Street

June 16, 2008

Leading from Park Avenue and stopping at Fifth Avenue, right in front of the New York Public Library is a nice little memorial/salute/whatever. It’s Library Walk. On the sidewalk, in fact on both sides of the sidewalk, are brass plaques with literary quotations.

Well, the first one doesn’t have a quote. It simply states that the Walk is a celebration of the world’s greatest literature and that it was sculpted by Gregg Lefevre in 1998.

I still stop and read one or more when I walk on the street. And I walk on that street a lot. It’s a little sad that most people on the street don’t seem to notice them at all; but I do enjoy seeing a few people stopping and reading them each in turn.

Some are long; the one below by Gu Cheng is about the longest, and some are really short.

Some are old. The one below is from Francis Bacon. It reads: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

The next one is a bit desceptive. And I like it. It’s from Willa Cather and despite looking long, there is really only one message to it: “There are only two or three human stoires, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before…” It’s from “O Pioneers!”

There is an underlying theme to these plaques: literature and the human condition. I have probably read each of them a half dozen times, and some a lot more than that, and it’s always pleasant.

Like I said, literary in nature. Well, in the below case it gets philosphical (“Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light” from Tom Stoppard). Okay, they are all philosophical, too.

Incidentally, there’s one of these plaques about every 10 feet or so.

Literature and international counterfeiting! These aren’t real coins. If they were, the homeless in the area would have chisled them out a long time ago.

There’s a dirty little secret to Library Walk, though. The plaques on the south side of the street and the plaques on the north side. Well, they are duplicates. The artist appears to have run out of grant money or literary inspiration.

-H

Categories: Manhattan, Mid-town, Wanderings

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Adventure NYC Event in Central Park

June 15, 2008

On Saturday, there was a special exhibition being performed in Central Park. It seems to be called “Adventure NYC” and was pretty cool. The weather was hot and sunny (although it stormed much later in the day) and the biggest sight was a welcome one for a lot of kids and parents. A temporary water slide.

The line for it, as you might suspect, was huge. But the speed of the throughput of people was pretty minor

Near the waterslide were some tents/kiosks. They had a variety of items there. I managed to get a free sample of some pretty good Greek yogurt. There was a backpacking place. And a place that was showing off their one-man tents.

But the biggest thing around? A half-pipe for bikes. It was set up right in the middle of the Park and there were a lot of people around watching bikers going on it.

Because it was temporary; no elevator. At least no internal elevator. Instead, they had a cherry-picker that would take up two bicyclists at a time. One on this side of the half-pipe and one on the other side. That is, four bikers would meet on the same side of the actual pipe, but two came up a cherry-picker on one side and the others on the other side.

Here they are going up on the cherry-picker. It was 50 or 60 feet up, I would guess.

They would come down the same side one at a time. It took maybe 90 seconds for all four to finish each round and then new riders would go up. Here’s a shot of how they would come down the side.

Once they reached the top of the up-ramp part of the half-pipe, they didn’t seem to do any tricks. They’d just go for big air and a little hang time. This picture below is about the best one I got of the big air. Once they came down, they’d just ride off the ramp. They didn’t go back up the side they had originally come down.

And the half-pipe was only for registered riders. The public was just allowed to watch.

Nearby was a set of three artificial rock climbs. Two were in pretty good use, but the line was much smaller than for the water slide.

But the thing I liked the most was a trampoline set up near the clam shell.

It was a group of trampolinests called “Flying Aces”. It consisted of five guys from Utah, Texas, and New Jersey. They had two trampolines set up side by side.

Apparently, these guys ski and snowboard in the winter, but in the summer they trampoline. They pulled out their skis and snowboards to perform tricks, but they are probably just their training exercises for their real jobs.

One of them is up for the Olympics from what the announcer said. Who knows?

Nevertheless, they did one heck of a lot of stunts. They guy below was a real showman. At one point he did some stuff so high I couldn’t believe it. You just feared a puff of wind that would knock him ever so slightly off course.