Cobb

Central Parking

It took me about three hours to appreciate Central Park in three ways I really never had before. It was a good day.

Item 1: Cycling & Benching
Just across from the Tavern on the Green the busy bike path has a great deal fewer rollerbladers than when I last got here on a regular basis, circa 1994. I cannot tell you what a singularly purifying impact that has on my estimate of Central Park. It is a treasure slightly beyond reckoning. It shows something about my twisted psyche that I think Osama would have been a damned sight more clever to hit the park than the towers. I took in a wash of humans and noticed several things about New York that seem new but that's just me.

First of all, I think NYC has become the capitol of Men Pushing Strollers. For the past ten years or so, I have been shouting out to dads anywhere out in the son walking with their offspring. Hey Dad! I know the joy of that exercise, but these newbs are a bit too much for me. A backpack or a frontpack? Yeah, that's the way to do it. And I can even go with the jogging deally with the three big pram wheels, but the standard stroller? Sorry, but the man card is called.  

And an equal percentage are walking the small dogs. Hoboken and the Upper West Side are pug central and miniature bulldog central. Just once I would have liked to have seen a Jack Russell, but no. So I'm just wondering what the hell is going on here, and I never got the answer. What I did get was the dude with both the stroller and the dog. Oh the humanity. 

I guess I just have to give props to the old men (just 15 years my senior) sitting on the bench next to me reading the NYTimes old school style - the two of them sitting side by side open to the same page discussing the stories.  

Item 2: Vollyball & Sheep
The Sheep Meadow was right behind me, and across in the distance I could see volleyball courts. Since I was wearing shorts, I decided to see if the players had improved any since '94. What in fact has happened is that they have mutated the game. It's street volleyball of an odd variety.  

The ball is bouncy and since I could only get into one game, I didn't have enough time to adjust. My sets and serves were off. They play let serves and rally point scoring to 21. We played fours on the asphalt except there was me, the fifth. I never got a good hit, but punched a few tight balls and managed a number of fine digs, but my whole timing was off. Plus I was wearing my glasses and couldn't move quite as quickly as I wanted. It made me mad. I want to get into perfect shape just to show these cranks a few things. So I suppose I have that mission in front of me again.

Item 3: The Ramble
It's hard to imagine that I have never been, but it's true. Maybe it was closed when I first started coming. My favorite spot had been a rock outcropping over near the Belvedere Castle with a great view of the Beresford Building. But that has been replaced by all the simple wonderment the Ramble offers within a city of concrete canyons. Yes you've heard the metaphor before. It still functions, as an eternal human constant loves the garden near the bricks. 

What a perfect romance. Fountains, boats, paths. Aww.

 

Zurich Ramble

I'm wide awake at four in the morning here in southwest Germany. I had an extraordinary day yesterday in Zurich, and it has biased me in an interesting way about Europe. Here's what I think of the place. It's already paid for. 

That is the miraculous thing about Western Europe. It is fabulously liveable and lush. The Rhineland is actually worth fighting several wars over. There's no way not to want to covet these hills and lands and forests and farms. You look, you see, you want, and you realize that you can sustain property disputes for hundreds and hundreds of years, and then you're certain that is what is going on. What is so amazing is the quiet. Zurich airport was as quiet as a tomb when I arrived on the red-eye. It's new, fresh and clean, and the huge panes of glass frosted with the Camel cigarette adds clearly warn in Helvetica that Smoking Seriously Damages Health. On an impossibly beautiful September 11th, I walked off my plane knowing exactly what else can kill me.

I walked down the Bahnhofstrasse and there is closed beautiful jewelry store after closed luxury clothier. It's just that there's no Sunday business, but I imagine when they all could go out of business. When will people tire of jewelry?  Middle aged and elderly Swiss couples walk hand in hand dressed impeccably. You look at them and know they never came up with a new idea in their life - they never had to. They just inherited some fraction of this civilized world quietly or bloodily. It almost makes no difference because they are quiet and are enjoying the moment with as much dignity as they can possibly muster.

Lake Zurich will always be here, and the real estate business will always be more or less good.

There's not a lot of traffic here. The whole place seems to have that kind of pacifist order that you can maintain when all the cranes in town are restoring old buildings, and there are more of them than homeless beggars in the streets. And thirsty tourists pay CHF 4,50 for a plastic bottle of water just to take a little boat ride on this old lake. There are sunburnt old men in 13 foot boats with eight horsepower Honda outboards and one line over the side. They're going to be here all day.

Everything that's new here is an expensive public accomodation, and that makes sense in Europe because everything that's old here is never going on the market for the middle class. The middle class pay their dues and push their prams. The youth are nowhere to be seen. There are no skateboarders in Zurich. I actually did go to the biergarten and listened to a 20 piece oompah band for about 3 embarassing minutes. I already ate on the boat and blew my CHF 60. I'm saving my time of beer and music for company.

The Hauptbahnhof is everything a neoliberal would want it to be. Everything in every language, perfectly sensible iconography that is universal, people waiting for trains that run on schedule to everyplace on the map. A grand old restored building mixing the old and the new and people of every imaginable size, shape and color (almost) behaving in a busy, semi-purposeful and uncannily civil manner. All the culture, ie flyers and posters announcing various sorts of performance art, are vaguely rebellious like an old school hiphop or nerdily sentimental like a Sunday quiz show on NPR.

Scads of people in flipflops sip coffee and blithely blather in massive sidewalk cafes that never overcrowd. I keep thinking that this exactly would New Orleans would look like if it weren't so affordable to so many low class American tourists with money. This part of Europe is all sorted out, you see. There's nothing left to chance and no dynamism of millions to upset any expectations. All that is quietly priced out of the system. Zurich simply doesn't generate enough of the right kind of traffic. The place has evolved fully, so all the energy you have for the new is satisfied by enough solar powered public toilets and hybrid electric bicycles, which are used by all of the youngish middle agers. It's a wonderful place to be predictable.

It it just me or are people obsessed with shoes here? Every other tiny tiny shop is a shoe store. Oh and by the way, the new Apple Store is the biggest brightest thing on the Bahnhofstrasse, it too was closed on Sunday.

 

A Change of Scenery

It's a big country. A really big country. I am amazed by its sameness and its differentness. Why? Because these days I'm no longer in Cleveland's Winter, but in Washington DC's approaching Spring.

I have only been to Reagan National before it was Reagan National. I only recall that there were some sort of strange transport vehicles that took me out to the plane. It had to be more than 20 years ago. College days swiftly pass. So I was in no way prepared for Dulles. IAD is probably the most strikingly beautiful airport I've ever been in, and it was a complete surprise. 

What wasn't a complete surprise, but a pleasant one nonetheless is how different Virgin America is from every other airline. I've never been on Jet Blue, so I cannot say, but now I'm sure there are only three airlines in America. Southwest, Virgin America and the undifferentiated rest. The mind-numbing sameness of every airline is so apparent - I start to wonder if anybody in the others even try to care. They must be nursing such fiscal pain and organizational gridlock that nobody even bothers. Their food has gone from bad to worse to practically nothing. Their inflight entertainment blows chunks, and everything else about them is the same, dreary hellacious bore. Having been a frequent flyer on and off for the past 15 years, I can assure you that the most exciting thing about flight has been getting a good price and a window seat, which doesn't happen nearly enough times. 

Virgin has it all. Pay per view, inflight wifi, seat to seat chat, 110V electric sockets, Google Maps, and food you order by touchscreen. For that I'd pay premium, except Virgin doesn't require that I do. Further, its website is zippier than Expedia's. And get this. I had to change my flight twice before I went to DC. In the end, my seat was cheaper than the original amount I paid. The website remembered my $130 credit and applied it to my next flight. I didn't even have to speak to an agent. United has cheated me several times on that score. 

I recall several months ago there was a marketing blitz by Marriott to show off their new Courtyard hotels. I generally try to stay away from Courtyard if I'm staying for a week because they never had room service. Courtyard was a good idea in 1999, $120 good basic business travel rooms, standard around the country. But it got killed by Westin's W, which was so simply luxurious by comparison... well. It made the extra 50 or 75 a night seem like not much - after all, you only pick a Courtyard for a short stay. So Westin reinvented the hotel bed by giving a broad variety of pillows and a new mattress, and all the mattress companies have been trying to sell us that for our homes on AM radio for the past three years. It seems that I have finally got to one of those Courtyards that Marriott redid. 

People keep telling me it's because everything looks good compared to Cleveland. Maybe so, but the Courtyard at Chevy Chase is noice. I suppose that's what I should expect for the hotel that's next door to Brooks Brothers and catty corner to Tiffany, but I still got a great corporate rate. I didn't know anything about Washington DC, really I didn't. And I know that the neighborhood came before the comedian, and that the comedian was trying to say something classy about himself, but.. this place is sporty even with the grimy snow. And now that I've browsed several times over the past week, I finally understand why women rage over Jimmy Choo. 

Well yes it's true that my new customer is Fannie Mae. I have to say that it has been a long time since I've seen a happier bunch of employees. I rather expected to see everybody over there staring at their shoes in shame, but nothing could be further from the truth. I get the feeling, after only a week, that the work they do there is extraordinarily complex and that nobody has taken the time to straighten up the inevitable kinks and spaghetti that results from adding layer upon layer of system. Without speaking out of school, there seems to be some fairly serious bureaucracy that slows down things but that's not exceptional. They seem to have adapted clever ways of getting around it, whereas at Cisco, for example, they make so much money that nobody bothers to get around it. So yes what I'm saying is that the bureaucracy at Fannie Mae is more efficient than that at Cisco, and their security is more intrusively painstaking as well.  So far, though Cisco is a far sexier place, I'd rather work in DC. 

You would have had a hard time convincing me that I would enjoy taking the bus to the point at which I would wear a buspass on my retractable ID. I take the 31 or the 32 or the 37 express if I can. I took the subway by mistake and ended up hiking a mile up Van Ness from UDC. Weirdest houses I've ever seen. Shabby Tudor Gothic duplexes each the size of a McMansion. I think only a college professor could dig that, but there were the plastic toys in the snow of one of those silent brick sentinels. Kind of like an upscale Detroit brick neighborhood, except here the street is narrow. The telephone poles show evidence of digital cable; dog walkers don't bother to curb their animals; the bus stops are only on one side of the street. 

Just behind that slope across from the ruined turf of the athletic field at UDC stands the fortress of the Chinese Embassy. I could tell that it was a highly secure building but at the time I had no idea what it was. Odd and apart from the 70s concrete of UDC - a new graduate facility perhaps? I eyeballed the patrol. No. Something completely apart. Just behind this castle was the Intelsat facility - reminding me of the old Fluor HQ in Irvine with its turrets. One of the smartest women I ever worked with once loved her employment at Intelsat. An Egyptian named Heba who took entirely too much shit from her scrawny husband later in Texas. 

By Thursday I was refreshed. I found enough of my old friends and relatives to declare Tuesday Homie Night in DC. I visited more of my project sponsor's staff in Herndon (or is it Reston?). It all looks like Irvine to me. A stunning number of modified glass box corporate parks with big names. Everybody's got an office in the Capitol, or in this case, across the river in VA. There's a lot to see out here, and I reckon I'm going to be getting to know much more.

Yeah I would be one of those inside the Beltway. Sans doubt. There is sophistication here, the isolating kind I'm sure - but then again I'm where America comes together, binges and purges regularly in the flow of democratic orderly change. Smart money is here, or at least money. I'll be working across the street from Sidwell Friends, where the Obama children will attend school. The ship that's DC is not going down anytime soon - believe me, the rest of the American empire will crumble to dust and blow away before the lawns of Chevy Chase turn brown. The Capitol of America is entrenched. Entrenched I say. Like Wall Street I think, it has its own happy imperviousness. The young attorney working on cases at the bar downstairs at Clydes. The smooth fop with his pipe and scarf outside of Sushi-Ko looking like Don Cheadle after the Ocean's Eleven payday. The first date couple, he from the Levant, she from the Virgin Islands in the corner at Indique Heights. The young married couple, both working non-profit organizations, living and loving handsomely. They're young and beautiful, smart and strong, and they are living well in this corner of our nation. 

This edge of the city is as multicultural as Los Angeles. The vibe is similar, but less East Asian. More Middle Easter, more Indian. For a cosmopolitan mix, it seems odd. The black is more upscale than anywhere I've seen but downtown Atlanta. The white is more attorney and older than anywhere I've seen but lower Manhattan. The latins are rare, and then they're Castillian. The Indians are plural but far less female than expected. The Chinese, as usual, are marking time and hiding their kung fu. The kids are the same kind of upscale feral as we have here in Redondo Beach, but oddly respectful. That's what I'm seeing on the daily in Friendship Heights, where even in the winter the bus stops and the man in the electric wheelchair moves from his spot on the curb as the bus kneels for his needs without missing a beat. The electronic female voice calls off the streets "Veazy Street, Stop Requested". It's a city, as the old Russian detective said in her trip to America, full of written signs as if nobody knows the place but everybody can use the place.

There's energy. But is there balance? I don't know. Next Tuesday night, a report from Eatonville.