We drove by the New York State Pavilion from the ’64-’65 World’s Fair.<\/p>\n
I’m used to being on the Van Wyck, on the other side of the pond where Elliott Murphy’s dad used to run the aquashow.\u00c2\u00a0 From that side you can see into Shea Stadium, the Unisphere is ensconced in greenery, and the rotunda and the tower of the New York State exhibit are off in the distance, in pristine relief.<\/p>\n
But up close and personal they’re derelict.\u00c2\u00a0 Reading about the deterioration in the "Times" I thought they were fixable.\u00c2\u00a0 But they appear too far gone.<\/p>\n
That’s all that remains of the World’s Fair.\u00c2\u00a0 The Unisphere and the New York State Pavilion.\u00c2\u00a0 The World’s Fair was a highlight of the sixties, where we drove in Mustangs at the Ford Pavilion and experienced touch-tone phones for the very first time.\u00c2\u00a0 The show went round at the GE exhibit, and we learned it was a small small world.\u00c2\u00a0 I rode the monorail and heard "Satisfaction" blasting from the speakers as we rounded up the family to go home.<\/p>\n
That was over forty years ago.<\/p>\n
Back when I still used to play baseball.\u00c2\u00a0 The season never began before April.\u00c2\u00a0 This exact time of year.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, we might have gone to the park in late March, but Little League didn’t start.\u00c2\u00a0 But tryouts and cuts and uniform issuing all happened in three weeks, by my birthday, the games began.<\/p>\n
It’s not quite cold enough to be winter, but it’s not quite warm enough to be spring.\u00c2\u00a0 By the end of the month, there will be one of those seventies days.\u00c2\u00a0 When the temperature soars and you wear shorts and you believe the summer will finally arrive.<\/p>\n
It’s funny returning.\u00c2\u00a0 Because on one level, I’ve never left.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything’s familiar, from the West Side Highway to the cancer in the exposed iron structures.\u00c2\u00a0 From the homeless people wandering the streets to the ethnicities performing the service roles.\u00c2\u00a0 Everyone’s thrown in together in New York.\u00c2\u00a0 But somehow it works.\u00c2\u00a0 It might look like chaos, but there’s a strange order.\u00c2\u00a0 And a pulse.\u00c2\u00a0 Crawling through traffic looking at the edifices and the people on the sidewalk you get the feeling that this is where it’s happening.\u00c2\u00a0 That we’re just playing in the rest of the world, but the down and dirty, the important effort, is being made right here.<\/p>\n
At least financially.<\/p>\n
But in the twenty first century you’re local everywhere.\u00c2\u00a0 Just a click away from New York City even if you’re in Tijuana or Taipei.\u00c2\u00a0 Denver or Deer Valley.\u00c2\u00a0 Our world has shrunk.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a twenty four hour cycle.\u00c2\u00a0 We’re plugged in.\u00c2\u00a0 And the more we come together, the more photos and information we disperse, the less the center holds.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything is flattened, nothing rises above.\u00c2\u00a0 Broadway is just another choice.\u00c2\u00a0 Like listening to terrestrial radio, satellite radio or your iPod.<\/p>\n
And speaking of iPods, this hotel has got a combo alarm clock\/radio\/iPod speaker contraption.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s how embedded into the culture Apple’s device is.\u00c2\u00a0 Pay $4 and you can insert an iPod jack in any device you want.\u00c2\u00a0 We the public are starting to expect plugability.\u00c2\u00a0 The public is always ahead of the industry, just like the mainstream media is behind the public regarding politics, regarding the election.<\/p>\n
Maybe that’s all that rises above anymore, our tools.\u00c2\u00a0 Our mobile phones, our laptops, our automobiles…\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s why we discuss them endlessly, they’re points of connection.\u00c2\u00a0 We used to discuss movies and music, back before everybody went his own disparate way, when we started living in a Tower of Babel society.<\/p>\n
Like Dan said last week in Utah, no one can keep up anymore.<\/p>\n
But it’s hard to accept that.<\/p>\n
Landing at JFK I think of all the exploits I want to have in the city.\u00c2\u00a0 Alas, I only have two days.\u00c2\u00a0 And, I won’t be able to say I can always do it in the future, next week or next month, because I only live fifty miles away in Connecticut.<\/p>\n
But like in "Harry Met Sally", you never do take up so many opportunities, not only do you not have sex on the kitchen floor, you don’t go to the local museum, you’re too busy watching television or surfing the Net.\u00c2\u00a0 Then you’re dead.<\/p>\n
But when you’re in NYC, you feel positively alive.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe that’s why everybody’s drawn here.<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We drove by the New York State Pavilion from the ’64-’65 World’s Fair. I’m used to being on the Van Wyck, on the other side of the pond where Elliott Murphy’s dad used to run the aquashow.\u00c2\u00a0 From that side you can see into Shea Stadium, the Unisphere is ensconced in greenery, and the rotunda […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s96vPs-nyc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}