what a cool way to view paintings!

what a cool way to view paintings!

downtown is where it's at

The Los Angeles metro is an honor system, and even more, it's packed when I ride it to find the library, so although people are constantly telling me that it doesn't go anywhere, there are still lots of people taking it to places that are obviously somewhere. If nobody takes it, then who are these somebodies? The stations are so slick and whimsical, but also so delightfully seedy and safe at the same time; weird people come up and ask me if I'm lost. The security cops wave me away when I ask how to verify my ticket. Silly tourist!

and popping out into downtown, I had this really weird feeling that I could also be somewhere in downtown Mexico City although I've never been to Mexico City. Weird stalls selling hip hop hoodies from handsome latino men with fades, but I'm too broke to buy what I really want, and it's all sized for men anyway, and the stuff they offer women is just weird floral tight crap, and i don't want to look like a spandexed sausage. Nobody knows enough English to give me the right directions to the library, which is an opportunity to get lost in the crowds.

And it feels so wonderfully much like some weird NYC downtown, only with Chinatown style stalls opening up onto the street spilling out all manner of weird leather jackets, gangster t-shirts, and weird plastic charms and toys. Passing by the Biltmore hotel, you can see the gaudy and excessive opulence inside and the annonymous cars with tinted windows pass by with their annonymous rich people who are shuttled in and out and never take a step onto the street on the weekend in the daytime.

I was here last Friday and it was so empty, a strange experience, maneuvering the rental car into a scary parking garage. I looked so ridiculous and lost that the security guard followed me down, worried that I was going to hurt myself. At night downtown is so airy and dark, bicyclists flying by and then the film crews with their men hanging from cranes in the air filming cars trailing them packed with actors reciting lines.

O, and last Friday night, it was delightful to hear dubstep so loud and out in the open. Outside! You couldn't blast that kind of bass outside anywhere in Berlin, or the neighbors would call the police. It was a weird and intensely pleasurable experience, and the crowd really really loved the music, which always makes me happy. I like parties at just that size... just enough so that the DJ can see the faces of the people and react to them, and the girls are really so pretty here and can dance. But there are always dancehall queens & kings, and I just love the raw and spontaneous emotions that seem to swim out of these California people so freely.

The Los Angeles Central Library looks like a huge Egyptian temple made into a skyscraper, and while it's impeccably clean and slick, it's also six floors of books and more books, and there is even a massive foreign language section to boot. There are all sorts of strange people waiting in line, and the librarians are even stranger still, but so friendly and helpful and handling some kind of yelling drama somewhere.

It's surreal to ride up and down the escalator 3 stories below, to pass the fancy Stanford admissions reception table staffed with proper ladies in nice dresses herding young people into large conference rooms full of fruits and pastries. There are bookstacks full of books about the history of economics and huge rows of shelves full of Lonely Planet and Moon guidebooks, and then there's always a peaceful corner in the back to read and read and read the day away.

I love libraries and the Los Angeles Central Library gets my thumbs up. It atones for so many sins! And then the librarians themselves are always whiling away the time with strange insider conversations that we are privy to, conspiracy theories and gossip about what the people upstairs are doing. What a wonderful place to escape the relentless sunshine outside...

easy enough

New York City is shockingly easy this time around. Although there are too many things to do this week, and jumping across the Atlantic is always a bit of a challenge, there's a strange sensation of weightlessness. As if switching from running in water to running in thin air, you get the feeling that you're flying.

I have such deep relationships with cities, and I'm wondering if so much of this place is just not suited for the very young, and now that I am grayer, all of the invisible obstacles that were so puzzling before are so easy to navigate now.

The only difficult aspect is seeing the many friends who are truly important to me. There just isn't enough time. Now friends and family span multiple continents, and I'm already starting to miss my Berlin people and really appreciating their slower, quieter ways even though it drove me a little mad when I had to live in it all the time.

There are just too many beautiful little moments here, so many little dramas and people. You can really read a lot out of all the men and women here by looking into their eyes and seeing into their souls. I like staring at the all of the myraid patterns of fabrics, especially in the suits and ties of all the men going to work, and then the bright colors all the hunky dredlock boys sport with their shiny new kicks. Inbetween doing a lot of important stuff and filing through papers and waiting in offices, it's these quick encounters that make me remember why I love New York City so much, as dirty and chaotic and moneygrubbing as it may be.

I made a late night fried chicken run down the street, and there was just something so Berlin when all the shaved-head Polish boys came in with their hoodies, jostling at each other. They reminded me of the German Plattenbau/project kids that would flood the techno parties, impossibly tan and blonde, or maybe their hair dyed black, getting drunk and yelling really crazy things to show off for their girlfriends. It's not that Poland is the same place, but it has the same sense of geography.

Even with the rain, America is so shockingly bright, the sun shines brighter here, and the bling blings more intensely. I can see how it would overhwelm a lot of people, but I'm embracing the liveliness, because I need it to live!

the second time around

Suddenly, walking into the Goethe Institute in New York, it was as if so many years that had passed had not passed. The same lady with the long white hair was still there, so lovable and gruff in a way that still kept me in an anxious fear of her. The library is the same as it was when I had left: peaceful and often empty, filled with books and magazines and cassette tapes of thousands of words of text in German.

I pick up a literary magazine and started reading about the life of Ingebourg Bachmann but had to stop because it was too much of a train wreck. I don't enjoy the fact that so many brilliant women end up destroying themselves, and men likewise, but why can't you see the beauty of the world without slashing your wrists if you have ovaries?

I remember where the secret bathroom is: on the second floor, inside the wall, although you would never know it was a door unless you were looking for it or if someone pointed it out to you. The chandeliers are still there too. I used to come here looking for something; then up the street was the neue galerie where L worked. These were thoughtful and quiet places in a place where nobody stopped to think, where things were always rushing way too fast and it still is so easy to forget what happens five moments before. Unfold your fingers one by one and it is so obvious: you forget! everything.

There are always mirrors in the women's bathrooms. You can stare at yourself, either satisfied or dissatisfied, or as you get older, just indifferent. Going to these same places where I used to go so often, I always get hit with a wave of nostalgia. It was me as I was many years before, just with lines around my face, and maybe a calmer approach to life as well as some rich experiences which I hope I can shape into something meaningful.

Or maybe it's fine to just leave the experiences alone, for sometimes you just live life and see things without trying to mold it into something that will be useful to you later on.

It's the same face, but I broke my glasses a few weeks before when I was on the bed coughing with a bad case of the flu, and this whole week the cough has been lingering and my voice is artificially ragged and deeper than it usually is (which is fine, because I have to modulate it artificially anyway to avoid sounding like a 14 year old mousketeer). And my eyes are dry and uncomfortable in these new glasses which age me somewhat and make me feel like a different person.

Down in the library again, flipping through the latest issue of the Zeit newspaper, a weird periodical that i reserve for lazy sunday afternoons or times like these, when i'm not so interested in learning about the current events in the world as I am in of skimming over really attractively designed layouts and photographs and snipping small bites of experience from random articles without every finishing everything. Their articles are beautiful and long and rambling anyhow; always an investigation into an idea that you had that was never really totally right.

Suddenly a man comes in, nodding to the librarian--does he come here every day? With a paper bag and takes off his jacket and then opens a secret back glass door and in a shock I realize that there's a garden in the back where you can sit. It's a pretty little garden, visible through our little atrium, so surprisingly peaceful and quiet considering we're across the street from the Met and avenues over from the hubbub of Park and Lexington and the Upper East Side stroller mafia.

He stares back at me curiously, because he probably considers this to be his library and his place and his garden. I can't help watching him eat the apple, wondering why I never tried to find the garden when I lived here so many years ago.

That's the lesson, one of them, I think I have learned as I pull away from my youth and enter middle age. It's such a cliche but it's true. The older you get the more you realize how little you know, and even what I know is a loose fabric of thoughts and experiences and that there are so many things that I have overlooked or forgotten. It pays to come around a second time to pause and take a look around and see what you missed the first time.