8.19.07 Red Hook

Biked to the Red Hook ballfields on Sunday — famous for the vendors who on weekends sell “homemade” regional Latin dishes. Salvadoran pupusas, Mexican huaraches, ceviches, super colorful Guatemalan dishes. It was 1PM — lunch hour — so there were lines, but as it was a Sunday no one was in a big hurry.

In recent months the Parks Dept (it’s in a city park) has threatened to evict the vendors — for health violations, expired permits, lack of places where prep can be inspected (the food is often prepped in people’s homes) and risky food storage (on the ground). Items like the latter have been dealt with — but there is more. This from New York Magazine:

The city, eager as ever for the fat stacks that only a bidding war by commercial concessions can offer, has given the vendors notice that their Temporary Use Agreement, the permit given to them by the Department of Parks and Recreation, won’t be renewed. The city wants to open the parks up for concession bids, which will almost certainly mean an end to the makeshift food stalls that have been operating there for over ten years. “They told us that the last day we can operate in the park is September 8,” Cesar Fuentes, the executive director of the Food Vendors Committee of Red Hook Park, Inc. “The only person that can extend our permit beyond this season is the Commissioner of Parks.”

And a food review in the Times.

The blog Porkchop Express has super up to date info — a long letter from Cesar Fuentes about the vendor’s situation and where things stand. Dept of Health is in charge of the regulations for food handling and prep. Odd that the hot dog and halal carts all over town aren’t subject to the same strictness.

This blog also has reviews of each and every vendor/tent — complete with family histories and what’s in each dish.

Here are a couple of pupusas that we ate. One of them with pork and cheese inside and one with beans and cheese. The ensalada is cabbage with some mild salsa.

And here is a huarache — yes, the same name as the sandal (these would be about a size 12) with meat and cheese and pretty spicy green sauce.

To wash these down we had horchata — a drink made with rice, almonds, spices and sugar. It’s a kind of sweet milky drink that goes really well with spicy food (the original version is a Muslim drink made with tigernuts — and Valencia, in Spain, even has a council to regulate the quality of the horchata sold there). I also had some mango slices to which was added hot pepper, salt and lime. They were sweet, spicy, salty and delicious. We were full — so, if things get worked out, future visits will allow sampling of the many other dishes.

The big Ikea blue box next to the ballfields is almost finished. Nearby are some lovely little residential neighborhoods, some brick projects and, further on, a dock for cruise ships — we watched passengers walk the gangplank onto the gigantic Classic Princess and wondered if they’d have a good time. Further down the road a group of hipsters were working on what looked like a large parade float with metal horses lying around ready to be mounted and decorated.

I recently heard about an upcoming forum called “New York: Is it in danger of losing it’s Soul?”. Red Hook, much of it anyway, still has plenty — but as the waterfront gets developed there is always the danger that the lure of big bucks will carve big chunks of that soul away. There are plenty of vacant lots and crumbling warehouses here — there were some suspicious large fires last year. As beautiful as dead tech is, I’m not suggesting that the areas with crumbling concrete and rebar spikes sticking up be kept intact, but that development be allowed to take place on a human scale and at a human pace.

My own neighborhood, South Hell, still has some of what might be called soul — though some would just call it funky and underdeveloped. There are neighborhood restaurants, a butcher, a fishmonger, a baker, a few delis and a vegetable market. Some small theaters and the usual — for this neighborhood — zipper repair places, steel clothing rack makers, pushcart warehouses and tailors. This area used to have a lot more or all of these, but it was a rough part of town in the 80s and 90s — before I moved here — and I think changes in other parts of town took business away from the fishmongers, for example. Now there is just one left. There were lots of prostitutes in the recent past, and before that gangs controlled certain blocks. The whores are pretty much gone, which is a little surprising as the tunnel entrance is right here and often the Jerseyites are prime customers. There are still some halfway houses and a methadone clinic — there are certain times when the junkies can be seen in the surrounding blocks — nodding or frozen like zombies. The local police station says they’re all harmless. Hotels and condos are going up fast — so things will change further — but the huge gouge in the neighborhood that constitutes the tunnel entrance and approaches will permanently stifle the flow and interchange that allows a neighborhood to have character and life. When it was built, that area was maybe the worst in the city, in Manhattan anyway — so tearing it down seemed like a reasonable idea I guess — but to replace it with a dead zone is not exactly a solution.

Here is a website called Save Soccer Tacos — it has links and letters you can send.

8.15.07 Prep Work

All week a series of meetings re the bike event at Town Hall on October 6 (“How New Yorkers Ride Bikes”). Meetings with guys from Transportation Alternatives, Flavorpill, The New Yorker (producers of the event) and conference calls with Dept of Transportation and Dept of Health and Yves Behar, a designer who we hope will create a new helmet. It’s coming together nicely, but whew.

In the discussion with the TA folks I realized that the helmet might be an interim thing. Although they might always be a good idea, the wearing of helmets implies that cycling is dangerous — which is often is in cities like NY and London. In other cities — Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin and Reggio Emilio — the bike paths and lanes are secure, so the riders don’t fell the need to protect themselves. They tend to ride upright, erect and appear elegant, well dressed and sexy. When a car would no more violate a bike lane than drive up on the sidewalk, and where even pedestrians stay out of the bike lanes, then the danger aspect goes away. Maybe some thrills do too. But that might be the price to pay. Living in NY used to be a lot more dangerous in general, but that’s hardly something to get all nostalgic about. So, while we might need a cool stylish helmet for all to be available now, in a more perfect world it will be optional.

8.7.07 Never Mind

An article on Williams syndrome in the Times magazine detours into a larger discussion on a theory of mind — essentially that our brains became bigger to handle the amount of social information and decision making we evolved to need as we came to live in larger groups. No doubt we are social animals and the perception of our relationship to the rest of the group and to potential mates is what consumes us much of the time. It was the need to navigate the waters of social dynamics more than the pragmatic hunt for food that drove the development of our skills — according to this theory. However — there are many other social animals under similar pressures — birds, for example — who tend to have puny brains. According to this theory it was also sociability that drove the creation of language.

We spend about a 5th of our time grooming (and being groomed). Add that to the fact that it’s a small step from talking about social dynamics within a group to gossip and the popularity of US, People and a whole bunch of other supermarket magazines seem less a perversion of human interaction than an accurate expression of it. Gossip is a big part of what we are and how we know what we are and where we stand. Likewise, if grooming is such an natural obsession, then fashion is a obvious outgrowth of that — and as fashion keeps morphing season by season it functions as a natural challenge for the groomer and the groomed to keep up. Within niche communities and demographics the same is true — whether it be skate kids, jocks or businessmen — they’re all extremely aware of nuances of dress and grooming and what they mean.

Do men often try and find workarounds for this? Not too many men engage in obvious small talk — but they bundle their inferences about who, where, how, when and what in conversations about sports, cars and tech. Their gossip is disguised — they’re in denial that they are gossiping.

Part of these social skills involves learning how to deceive others. How much deception you can get away with, how to do it and when you should do it. The ultimate form of deception is, in my opinion, self deception — if you can do that then the other person will more than likely really believe what you are saying or claiming.

I remember toilet paper

I remember parking lots

I remember air conditioning

I remember newspapers

I remember the smell of jet fuel at airports

I remember high-rise buildings

Oh wait, I already wrote a song about this.

8.5.07: Transformers

Went to see “Transformers” last night by Times Square (there are hardly any places to lock one’s bike on 42nd st). It was long, for a CG based action flick. 2 and 1⁄2 hours I think. I realized today, per my earlier post re video games, movies and emotional involvement that video games could achieve what this and a few other recent blockbusters do without too much further development. Add some amusing quips and asides based on “character” and behavior patterns, scattered them here and there, ditto base the actions and gestures on “character”, maybe insert a love (or a pinup, in this case) interest — and then let the fights, battles, puzzle solving and chases commence — the McGuffin, whatever it is, leads one, as it does in video games, to the conclusion of the movie, or the game. The path could vary somewhat, but by clever design one could somehow always return to the main plot thread. One leaves the cinema drained, but energized — one imagines 42nd street (in my case) rocked by alien monsters, fighter jets, tanks and girls in halter-tops. Then, 1⁄2 hour later, the adrenaline rush has worn off, and that’s it. There’s no more of a take home than there is in a video game. When movies aspire to be video games — although on larger screens — they’ve given up already.

I realized that in these movies the military and the government ministries that are involved with them are often portrayed in a flattering light — the military, despite their initial difficulties and surprise, are fairly competent in these movies — there isn’t any evidence of careerist backstabbing, politicking, ideologically based decision making and lame excuses. Granted, those are mostly the arenas of our political leaders, but lately, since the military have been slow to stand up to them, they’ve been infected as well.

8.3.07: Emotional Emulsifier

I think, as of this afternoon, I have finished scoring the 2nd season of Big Love. (Mark Mothersbaugh did the first season.) The last cue for the last show, which is episode 212, got posted today (they’re in LA, so I upload the music files to an FTP site.) I’ve been working on it since the fall, though actual writing to picture didn’t start until the winter. It was an education. At first I had grand ambitions, the scores of Herrmann, Rota and others swimming in my head. I had an idea to base my scoring loosely on Mormon hymns. That would presumably hint at the unspoken spiritual underpinnings that motivated many of the characters’ actions — or justified them, in several cases. I got hymnals and CDs, read up on the Mormon Church and practiced writing “fake” hymns.

I wrote a half dozen of these — not for specific scenes — and had them arranged and recorded with the aim to create a library from which the TV people in LA could draw. I would give them complete freedom to splice and dice my cues, but it would also allow me to be more creative. Few of those themes were actually used. I had to agree with the decision; as score they were outside the characters, they were meta-themes, which, as it turned out, were not suitable when the aim was to get you to empathize with the characters. Big or highly melodic themes like those take you outside the intimate world of individual characters, and the music pulls you back — you view the spectacle from a slight distance. An epic distance, in the Brechtian sense, but it’s hardly intimate.

Walter Murch, the film editor and sound designer, mentions how Nino Rota’s music for The Godfather almost got pulled for this reason. He would write music that played against a scene. In the scene where the guy finds the severed horse head in his bed Rota had composed a sweet waltz. The studio hated it; because it was a counterpoint the music viewed the scene from a removed vantage rather than expressing the guy’s revulsion and horror. (A compromise was reached.)

Murch: “When music makes an entrance in a film there’s the emotional equivalent of a cutaway. Music functions as an emulsifier that allows you to dissolve a certain emotion and take it in a certain direction.”

So, increasingly I wrote less overtly melodic pieces, and more pieces that could play as underscore and gently create a mood or add some tension without resorting to melodrama. I wrote tunes that were less busy and that tried not to draw attention to themselves, though they were still rather melodic, if you cared to listen. As the episodes progressed — I would get sent locked edits on DVDs as they were completed — it seemed that even less melody might be what they were after. I got pretty good after a while at knowing what was wanted, sometimes because a temp score “borrowed” from another film had been plopped into the rough cut to determine what musical mood might work.

News to me, these kinds of TV shows are a writers’ medium. It was usually the producer or the two writers who gave me feedback, and it was obviously within their power to say yes or no. Good for them. In film, at least up to a point, it is a director’s medium; much has been made of referring to the director as the auteur — the author. In film the writer is more or less a hired hand who is dismissed once his or her contribution is done, but in TV, maybe because it is episodic and the characters and setting will need to be consistent for years, the writer sort of has the final say, and it is the director who is the hired hand. I never once spoke to the director of any of these episodes!

Towards the end, in the final few episodes, it seemed to me that there were fewer musical nods to Americana, to an idealized U.S. family (even if this one was polygamous) and to the spirituality of the Hymns. As we neared the season’s end the whole thing became darker and more tragic: sons betraying fathers, evil rival clans emerging from the wilderness and child brides. What began as a study in how to manage having 3 wives in an orderly disciplined manner, and how those wives got along and dealt, devolved into a morass of widespread crisis, bitterness and jealousy — and in some ways the changing moods of the music — and what was needed — reflected that.

I will probably release the best of this music as a CD within a year, maybe by February. To make that CD play better some cues may get expanded a little or amalgamated if they are super similar to one another. It won’t be a pop record by any stretch, so its audience might be limited — but I’m proud of some of it, so we’ll see.