A silver anniversary of spite
The real reason I haven't left New York
Last Thursday night I was all snug in bed, looking forward to a laid-back family outing in Manhattan the next morning, when I bolted upright in a cold panic: I had completely forgotten to cancel the rental car I had reserved “just in case” we decided to skip town, and now we were on the hook for the exorbitant fee regardless of how we decided to spend the day. We decided to go ahead and make an excursion of it, but not until after a long, bloodshot night spent silently berating myself for being so careless with our time and money.
One of the drawbacks of living in the city is how hard it is to escape. The difficulty seems to exist in inverse proportion to the brevity of the getaway. As permanent residents, New York would love nothing more than to spit us out in favor of hungrier or (preferably) richer replacements, but if we try to leave for a few hours of fresh air it throws up the barbed wire and spiked moats as a punishment for our disloyalty.
After a morning being bullied by the barbarians who rule our lawless highways, we found ourselves traversing a country road about fifty miles west of home. Though one of my greatest pleasures is finding lovely little bookstores in small towns, I had intentionally not sought any out because my family finds this habit insufferable. So imagine my surprise when I was urged by both wife and son to turn the car around after they spied just such a business on our route. The reason wasn’t the books, but the sign, which sported a cartoon image of a basset hound. My loved ones are daffy for dogs, so Hope quickly looked it up on her phone and confirmed that, sure enough, the store was named for the hound who normally held court there.
“I’m warning you,” I told them, “with the kind of day we’re having, the dog will be on vacation.” It turns out I was right, but we found something stranger instead: a glimpse of our alternative selves.
As I browsed the shelves (because I can’t walk into a place like that without buying something), the proprietress asked where we had come from. We said Brooklyn, and she lit up: Her family just moved from Brooklyn! It turns out they were pandemic refugees, making the leap to the countryside at the same time so many of us were courting similar possibilities. What’s more, their daughter was exactly Dash’s age and had lived in the neighborhood of his middle school - if they’d stayed in town, the two kids would have been classmates. The woman was able to rattle off the names of several girls in Dash’s class with and urged him to say hello from her daughter.
To leave this whole expensive mess behind and open up an adorable bookshop in a quaint village - does anything sound dreamier? And yet, the petty part of me (which ironically takes up a lot of space) couldn’t help but glow a bit brighter. We held out longer than they did! The woman seemed genuinely happy, and from many angles their lives seem enviable - but on the other hand, they’re no longer living in New York.
Living here isn’t a contest, and no trophies are given - all you win is the satisfaction of one more month in a town that doesn’t want you. Of course I love the culture, the art, the human pageant, the endless fodder for observation - but more seductive than all of that is the pleasure of consistently sticking it to a city that wouldn’t care if I melted into a puddle of piss on the sidewalk.
I suspect this sheer cussedness is a main reason I haven’t yet rolled over and croaked. I’m no longer in it for any kind of career - my creative aspirations have narrowed to something that could fit in a suitcase, and I earn money by working from home with clients based anywhere but here. I’m not even part of a “scene” - reading about things like Dimes Square or the hipster country line-dance craze, I feel as connected as if it were happening above the Arctic Circle. Nope, my condition emanates strictly from within. I suffer from a kind of urban myopia common to many New Yorkers - I’m a Mr. Magoo who can only make out skyscrapers and sidewalks. When we pulled back into Brooklyn last Friday night, my overwhelming thought after parking the car was “good riddance.”
All of which is perhaps a roundabout way of saying that today marks my 25th anniversary as a New Yorker. On March 1, 1999, Hope and I and our roommate-to-be Matt drove down from upstate with a U-haul and a dream. It was just as much of a pain to get in as it remains to get out - we got pulled over on the Taconic Parkway and told we had to schlep the rest of the way on local roads, traversing the spine of Manhattan and crossing the Brookyn Bridge right on time for evening rush hour. When we finally got settled, we went out for a celebratory pasta dinner and were shocked to receive a bill of over $100 - who did we think we were, John D. Rockefellers?
And yet, a quarter of a century later, we’re all still here. So much as changed, and yet nothing at all. We may be more comfortable, but we never “made it.” I still look across the distance at all those tall buildings with a sneer. “Fuck you,” I say to them. “If you don’t want me, then I’ll stick around just to be a pain in your ass.” “Fuck you,” they tell me back. It’s home.
So our primary destination on last week’s trip was actually a place called NorthlandZ, a tourist trap cum outsider art installation located in north-central New Jersey, about 90 minutes from Brooklyn (the “Z” stands for “TOTALLY RADICAL”). It is a bespoke warehouse filled with eight miles of model train tracks winding among elaborate and often bizarre artificial landscapes - the sort of absurdity there’s no room for in our cramped metropolis, both miniature and maximalist at the same time.
We brought Dash to NorthlandZ when he was five, and he’s carried vivid memories of it ever since. When we offered up a few breathless suggestions for our precipitious outing, he jumped at the opportunity to visit again.
The attraction was created by a guy named Bruce Williams Zaccagnino whose hobby burst out of his basement into the outside world, compelling him to build a shrine to his obsession. The warehouse was erected in the early ‘90s and quickly became stuffed to bursting with clanging engines, precarious villages, and surreal topography. NorthlandZ claims to hold the Guinness World Record for world’s largest model railroad track, but so do a handful of other sites. As you walk up and down a labyrinth of hallways and catwalks, the superlatives cease to matter, because you’re essentially wandering through another dimension. In addition to the trains, the building houses two massive pipe organs, kitschy art hanging on all available wall space, and a bunch of glass cubicles crammed with locomotive memorabilia and creepy dolls. There’s even one incredible cutaway dollhouse that’s about 20 feet long:
Apparently NorthlandZ was almost demolished in 2019, when Zaccagnino sold the site to a developer as a warehouse space. But the developer visited the site and decided that it needed to be kept intact, which was the correct decision. What is life other than an excuse to accrue folly and make it available to a paying public?
The site felt a bit less seedy than it did in 2017, but it’s still endearingly rough around the edges - there’s still dust on many of the mountaintops, miniature figurines stranded at the bottom of plaster ditches, and loose panels that expose the workings within. But Dash’s fondest memory proved to be an illusion: He remembered a remote cliff off to the side in one of the rooms, with an impossible-to-reach cottage precariously balanced between elevated tracks, simply labeled “Grandma’s House.” “Grandma” is a bit of a running gag at NorthlandZ - miniature signs report that she is a fruitful landlady who delights in placing inconvenient outhouses on all of her properties - and while we saw plenty of her commodes, we never found her actual house. NorthlandZ is proud of always morphing into new shapes and adding new attractions, so perhaps it was hidden or removed. Or perhaps we dreamed it. Perhaps we dreamed the whole damn thing.
I found myself unreasonably moved this week to find out Maru is still alive. Maru, if you’re not familiar with him, is one of the first celebrity internet cats, a big-boned Scottish fold from Japan who became famous jumping into empty cardboard boxes. His videos are emblematic of a more innocent time online, right at the dawn of the smartphone era, when dopey clips of pets doing their thing were a fun diversion rather than a cutthroat industry.
I hadn’t thought about Maru in years when he popped up in our recommended YouTube videos. I thought this has to be something vintage, but no, there he was! Sledding! On snow! He looks a little more rough around the edges, which can happen when you’re a 17-YEAR-OLD CAT, but he’s still intrepid in his pursuit of pleasure.
Our own beloved Pappy passed at 19 - and that was already three years ago! He would have been old enough to drink now. Maru is still younger than that - but he’s five years older than Dash! The world has changed so much since we first saw Maru, and the fact that he’s still around and enjoying his life made my heart grow three sizes this week. His videos will always be around (according to Wikipedia he’s officially “the most-viewed animal on YouTube”), but it’s heartening to know that, for now, he still walks the earth, innocently curious.
It’s always exciting to share a new piece of artwork, and doubly exciting when it supports a cause I’m passionate about.
Earlier this year we spoke with Dash about getting more involved with the community. His passion is for the environment - and by “passion” I mean “deep, burning fury.” So when I looked up options to get involved in climate advocacy as a family, I stumbled upon the aptly named Climate Families NYC - an organization that it turned out several friends were already involved with.
Something that came up in our orientation call was the fact that the children in the group tend to skew young, but there were enough older kids to spin off into their own sub-group. I was asked if I could design the flyer for our first meeting, so here it is:
In the short time we’ve been involved with Climate Families, they’ve proven to be a warm, highly organized group filled with great people. If you’re in the same situation we were in when we discovered it, I’d love to tell you more!
I haven’t done a good book roundup lately. Here are a few things I’ve quite enjoyed:
My Picture Diary, by Maki Fujiwara. I picked this up because I loved the format: a series of daily diary entries with a full-page drawing opposite a short descriptive paragraph. It looked like a lovely memoir from a sweet artist, which it was - to a point, after which it was devastating. Fujiwara was a well-known actress in Tokyo’s experimental theater scene when she married a successful manga artist, Tsuge Yoshiharu. Her husband had traditional ideas about marriage and forbid her from acting. She began this book as a diversion for their young son, but over the course of a year the tone goes from lighthearted to grim as Yoshiharu’s mental health issues threaten to derail all of their lives. A unique and bittersweet artifact.
Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball, by Jon Chad. Wow, there’s way more to pinball than I even suspected. Not just a history but an appreciation and a how-to guide, this is one of the nerdiest comics I’ve ever read. Chad is a true believer in the power of pinball, which is corny and embarrassing and inspiring and enviable all at the same time.
Treacle Walker, by Alan Garner. Garner is a well-respected British author of fantasy and children’s literature, whose work leans heavily on folklore and legend. I didn’t realize when I picked this up that he’s the author of The Owl Service, a 1970s YA classic which Hope and I watched a BBC TV adaptation of a couple of years ago. Treacle Walker is the story of a young boy who lives along in a strange limbo and strikes up a friendship with the title character, an itinerant medicine man who plies him with strange gifts and advice. It’s a book that takes place outside of time, in a world saturated with a lifetime’s worth of imagination, and clearly seems like some sort of swan song for the 90-year-old author. Lovely and haunting.
The Cola Pop Creemees: Opening ACT, by Desmond Reed. The setup could hardly be less original: a group of oddball characters perform together in a band. Fortunately, Reed’s sensibility doesn’t let you take anything for granted, presenting a psychedelic spin on young adulthood through a series of disturbing, moving, and very funny character sketches. You’ll see a little of yourself in each of these characters, and you’ll hate yourself for it.
Artforum, by César Aira. There’s no pain or pleasure quite like collecting things - especially printed matter (ahem) - so I was predisposed to love this slim collection of autobiographical fictions about an Argentinian writer obsessed with getting his hands on hard-to-find issues of the titular magazine. I loved Aira’s prose and insights so much that I photographed a couple of my favorite bits to quote later:
Can an object love a man? The entire history of animism was contained in that question. But anthropologists who had tried to answer it had never had the opportunity, as I had, to pose it while face-to-face with an object that had offered the supreme proof of love. It was not as impossible as it seemed at first sight. Objects were carriers of information. All of them, from cathedrals to little balls of mercury, were inscribed with their histories, their properties, their user manuals. That they did this in a mute, sometimes enigmatic, language did not detract from their eloquence. You only had to decipher them. Objects called books (and more so, magazines) fulfilled their condition as objects twice over by being specialized carriers of information; they were superobjects, because in their infinite variety and novelty they could supplant all other objects in imagination and desire.
…
They were paper and ink, and they were also ideas and reveries. They reproduced the dialectic of art, with as many or more attributes as art itself. Before, I spoke about the “material trace.” It was more than that: the word is “luxury.” Material made of spirit is the luxurious border where reality communicates with utopia.
Yup, that’s why I love books! No further questions.
To quote Trav S.D.’s book, “Once you leave New York, every other town is Bridgeport.”
I can’t remember, but has Dash been to the Shelburne Museum?