Pershing Square

Walking along 42nd street, looking for some place to land around Grand Central Station. Discouraged by the cold store fronts of fast food chains designed to force you through their calorie-ridden food fare at a break-neck pace. Tired. Feeling the sultry air of a city summer morning. Sunday. Lazy and lax.

There under the viaduct of Park Avenue, tucked away like a pre-war mirage, Pershing Square beckoned, calling me like a black and white movie, full of intrigue and mystery.

I crossed the street, somewhat wary. Pershing Square seemed both out-of-place and strangely familiar. I had the eerie feeling that if I walked through the door, I would enter the world of Bogart and Bergman. I half expected that Peter Lorre would greet me with his fiendish smile and hand me a menu as he escorts me to an out of the way table surrounded by characters from Casablanca. Lorre leans over to me, shielding his face with the menu, and whispers that he can get me out of here to a safe place, for a price.

I push through the fantasy and enter Pershing Square. It is a large space, the front inhabited by cane-backed chairs and tables set for a continental-style breakfast. Looking past this vesitbule, I find a huge restaurant with a sumptious bar to the right. Somehow I have tumbled into a wonderland of the forties. It is quiet, as though waiting for something, for someone. For me, maybe. Mostly empty. A few people give me the once over as I am taken to a prominent table across from the bar.

Almost mysteriously, coffee is poured and water placed to the side, setting the stage for the waiter, an Eastern European from Hungary or Romania, looking like a young Peter Lorre. He regards me suspiciously, asking me if I am ready to order. I order eggs over easy with sausage. He takes the menu from me and asks "you mean instead of bacon?" I nod. "That's right, sausages." He gives a look of approval as though I had successfully said the right code word and disappears.

I pour the cream into the coffee and slowly stir as I look around the dining room. It has a confortable feeling, in spite of its size, and although there about twenty-five people, the restaurant seems strikingly empty. There is a man at the bar, watching some soccer game, some world "football" fare, while the bartender moves about his business. Both men appear to glance over at me, noting my presence while pretending to ignore me.

More quickly than I had expected, the food arrives, the waiter whisking the plate from behind me to the table in an almost frantic gesture while he half whispers urgently, "...careful...the plate is very hot!" He gives a glance and disappears.

I try to understand the meaning of this and begin to carve up the sausages. The plate IS very hot, and I figure this is a common practice of the restaurant to ensure that the food arrives at the table piping hot. The breakfast is excellent, laid out as extravagant fare, a separate dish of strawberry jam and a slab of butter, and an endless supply of coffee.

Suddenly I am struck by the intense silence of the room, punctuated by murmurs and laughter from several tables. No background music!

I look around. I am disappointed that there is no piano near the bar. It is too quiet. Pershing Square is the epitome of another time, a time gone by, and I want to lean over and whisper to the piano player, "Play it again, Sam, for old time's sake, play it again."

Marking Time

Music has always meant so much to me because of its immediacy, a felt connection with Time that vividly etches a streaming existence --- a metaphor of melody unfolding from the silence in a declaration of being. Music is Being.

I suspect it is this quality of immediacy that gives music its special niche in contemporary life. Music made in the moment makes us feel our authentic selves. Even recorded music provides a window of connection with our primal beat, our pulse shaped as the musical evocation of Now. Music is Now.

Music and dance are inseparable. Moving to music has become the social norm, mutual connection to the beat is a form of greeting and acceptance. The essence of musical movement is shaped moment to moment, and correctness is the hipness of Now. Ringtones are the new musical mantras, and dance is the tribal gesture of life. Music is Dance. Music is Life.

In the frightening zero state of ourselves, we are compelled to make music to cover the silence of non-existence. Music marks Time, reminding us that we Are. Music is Time.

The Troubador

Sitting there in Silver Spurs with steaming coffee, a trunk and guitar to the right, the Troubador took a sip and looked straight at me. I recognized the songster surrounded by everything defining a musical identity. In a five-foot square of space, all of the Troubador's belongings sat neatly tucked away alongside the small square black table. A wardrobe trunk, a guitar case and satchel, all black, carved out a space in the diner like a moveable office or studio, the top of the trunk holding the business of the day. On the table with the coffee, lay a gleaming white laptop. and on the laptop lay a mobil phone, silent but poised for action.

The Troubador smiled and moved to the music playing in the background, grooving with the mood, the tempo, and zeitgeist of the moment, perfectly content and comfortable as though this space was a permanent haven. Thoughts surfaced like music rippling through the diner in counterpoint to the countless conversations of customers at nearby tables.

The phone rang and the Troubador flipped open the phone and quietly streamed a phrase, the patterns connecting with sounds defining the perimeter, music flowing in and out of the moment. It was though everything the Troubador touched turned to music. A stranded song maker, caught in the routine of a Monday morning, shaping time with the rhythm of ideas bursting from the imagination.

The food came...eggs over easy with sausage, homefries, and toast. Without missing a beat, the Troubador incorporated the breakfast into the routine, even this was a musical texture weaving a web around the space, a place for music as presence, as sounding silently in the immediacy of awareness, torso dancing in place to the tune of a different drummer.

Putting down the phone, the Troubador connected with the music in the background, arms waving to the beat. I looked at the Troubador and saw a child of the future bursting through all impediments to become a singing poet of a new age. I looked at her, a youngling barely eighteen, long black flowing hair, intense dark eyes, music pulsing through her like sonic circulation.

She looked at me, and for an instant, we recognized each other, troubadors passing through time to different refrains and distant destinations.

Morphing into There

There is nothing new under the sun" was a mantra that my mother often used, usually an assurance that comforted her that there was nothing really to worry about. Like many truisms, the surface glistens with the self evident "truth", but underneath are the shadows of reality looming ever larger. Actually, there is nothing old under the sun. Time and Space are dimensions of change, and we are in the midst of such transformations. Even growing older is a newness of sorts.

So I come to realize that age itself is an agent of Time just as our body is an agent of Space. My perception is an awareness of morphing, for as Time and Space move through us, we are changing into some newness that we do not yet recognize. I don't mean this in the biblical sense of "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:", but rather in a more cosmic sense, fashioned from the debris of the space/time eruption sometimes called the "big bang" ---just another foolish notion from our limited understanding that something must have started things.

I experience this in a phenomenon akin to phasing in sound. My phase cycle is changing, expanding. I am becoming more and more out of phase with what one might perceive as the present (actually it is just a sense of the present that specific people inhabit). There is a subtle likeness between phases of being and orbits of spheres. In my expansion, my phase, my orbit is elongating into unknown regions, eliciting entirely new awareness, briefly, but soon, more and more. Mostly I am here, but I am gradually morphing into there.

I like to think of the "mansion with many rooms" as actually the universe with many dimensions, which may exist as intersecting and parallel universes. But maybe this kind of thought is just another manifestation of morphing into the thereness of myself.

Kill Memory

I just finished reading Kill Memory, a novel by William Herrick. The title attracted me because the problem of reality and memory has always been a theme in the context of my own thinking, which was why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has been one of my favorite films. The title is from a Russian poet:

. . . Kill Memory . . .'' (the title comes from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova - ''So much to do today: / kill memory, kill pain, / turn heart into a stone'')

The novel deals with Elizabeth, in her 70s, and not growing old gracefully. She is tormented by her memories. The novel begins with "Elizabeth was not crazy, she was old." Thus we enter her world where her memories range from her lovers, and perhaps one true love she betrayed for the war, to the atrocities she performed in the name of a cause that was the revolution of the masses, that was itself betrayed.

The book is taut, economical, and well written. We glide effortlessly between her meaningless rituals of the present and her memories of the past that ultimately become too much to bear. It is a stream of consciousness narrative that is treated effectively by an experienced and accomplished author, who has been described by some as an American Orwell.

Even though we intimately share Elizabeth's thoughts, it is difficult to become emotionally involved with her plight. Herrick has been careful to provide an objective distance so that we can consider her life intelligently and understand the issues from an intellectual perspective.

Often I am attracted to a title such as Kill Memory as I project what I might create in the context of such a provocative depiction. Might memories be so full of rich experiences and emotions that they torment us as we grow old because they are becoming more and more distant and are ultimately facing extinction? Or might the killing of memory be an involuntary act in which the past crumbles in the onslaught of time and human frailty? Or maybe we have a character who battles the ravages of Time on a quest to Save Memory, to resurrect moments that continue to exist even as constellations still radiate their light from the remote and vivid past of the big bang.

Think Coffee

Just when I thought there was a conspiracy to rid the Village of its best coffee retreats (Space Untitled became a polyglot, music blaring, product showcase, and Coffee Cuisine surrendered to Leo's Place which then went out of business), Think Coffee quietly appears, almost like an afterthought, an "oh, by-the-way" place that makes its predecessors seem childish and awkward.

I'm not talking about a Starbucks kind of place which has become such a formula that you can almost measure the smiles and hospitality, or the first genuine coffee houses in the Village like Caffe Reggio and Cafe Figaro. I'm talking about the new-style, Internet-savvy hangout where coffee, conversation, and connectivity are all part of the same process.

Perhaps there is nothing suspicious about Think Coffee inconspicuously appearing across the street from the Courant Institute of Mathematics where physicists and mathematicians have been working on String Theory as it has evolved to M Theory with the discovery and validation of the 11th Dimension. Perhaps... and yet...

My own discovery of the place was through a colleague who was openly hostile to the thought of Starbucks. We were meeting for coffee and conversation. It was raining, and we were about to settle for Starbucks a half a block away, when she remarked that there was a new coffee shop "over there" and waved her arm in a south easterly direction. I followed her hand and surmised the street she meant. I remarked "I think you must be hallucinating because I know that street very well and there's nothing there but a Gristedes and a few closed storefronts. She insisted, "Well it's there. It's narrow in the front, but then opens into a huge space in the back."

So we struck out in the rain, and as we reached the corner of the next block and looked south, there was the simple, unassuming marquee proclaiming "Think Coffee." We made a run for it, using the marvelous trees in front of Courant as umbrellas (I am from Texas and she is from Colorado, so neither of us have any respect for carrying umbrellas---but that's another blog).

Inside, it was just as she described except that everywhere I looked I saw people sitting with their laptops and coffee, and others engaged in deep conversation. Suddenly I knew I was home. In fact, I am writing this blog from Think Coffee and enjoying my iced coffee at a table tucked away in the back. Tonight there is a free showing of a film and animation, so it looks like I've found the reason I was headed for New York City so many years ago...

Yet, I am somewhat certain that this Think Coffee is actually a portal to the eleventh dimension that the folks from Courant use as a front for their comings and goings as they journey through that fantastical new universe. You can see someone peering from behind a laptop, and then surreptitiously slip away for a while, disappearing unceremoniously, and returning later with a look of mysterious satisfaction. That is, of course, how they are coming up with such exciting visuals for those specials on the Science Channel.