Rich Mintz  

Because people who work with me and for me regularly do it, and I’m not a precious flower, I decided on the spur of the moment today to take the BoltBus to DC rather than Amtrak. I figured why not save a bit more than a hundred dollars, since it takes only about an hour longer when traveling in the middle of the day when traffic is relatively light.

So here I am on the New Jersey Turnpike speeding along in the left lane at a bit more than 70 miles per hour.

A few observations:

We left 15 minutes late but were through the Lincoln Tunnel in five minutes, are making excellent time and I suspect will arrive ahead of schedule. The bus is direct – board near Penn Station and ride to Union Station, with no intervening stops.

The boarding experience on a sidewalk near Penn Station is not elegant, but (given the context, which is a man in an orange vest yelling at a motley crowd while traffic streams by) is orderly and tolerable.

I booked my ticket 90 minutes before departure and paid $16, which, seriously, is a ridiculously small amount of money.

The bus itself is fine. Seats are newish and comfortable, there’s wifi (not as fast as my AT&T 4G, so I’m not using it). They’re a couple inches too close together, but it won’t kill me. The driver is professional and obviously competent. Air conditioning is operating,

They filled every last seat with standby passengers. I’m near the back, so the air is a little urinous (rookie mistake), but I’ll live.

The crowd is way less low-rent than your typical bus customer was 30 years ago — the vast majority being what I would consider “normal people,” albeit not necessarily wealthy or trendy. I will say that I am one of only two or three people on board who is dressed in business attire (by chance I’m sitting beside one of the others), but nowadays that’s often true on airliners, too.

Bus etiquette is different from train etiquette — people are in conversation, some people are watching a movie together audibly across the aisle — but put on your headphones and it’s fine.

Would I do this again? Sure, anytime my exact arrival time is somewhat flexible.

I’m about a hundred pages into Nadine Gordimer’s new post-apartheid novel, and it’s not any easier slogging now than it was the other day. I’ve read plenty of thinky fiction about Africa (including what felt at the time like 10,000 pages of Norman Rush) and it’s definitely the book, not the subject. (It doesn’t help that the digitization was sloppy.)

Anyone would think this book was heavy. I think even its characters, in whose minds most of the slow, significant, non-action happens, would set it down after 50 pages and go do something else. But I’m going to try to stick with it.

I did, however, take a break to read Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur, an incisive and approachable book of cultural criticism. Rewarding as expected. Klosterman’s one of the smartest people writing on popular culture at the moment, and one of those who seems to have the least to “prove.” It takes significant art to convince me to read an essay about basketball and an essay about Weezer in the same 12-hour period, so there you go.

I’m reading Nadine Gordimer’s new “post-apartheid” novel, No Time Like the Present, and I’m finding it rough going. Stilted phrasing and roundabout locutions, preachiness and messaginess — this isn’t my first Gordimer, but so far (about 30 pages in) the book hasn’t been gentle. Hope it loosens up, because if not I’m not sticking with it for another 400 pages.

Thanks largely to decades of incentive zoning, Manhattan is full of privately owned, municipally owned, and institutionally owned plazas, arcades, and other types of quasi-public space. Some of these spaces are gorgeous (I’m looking at you, Elevated Acre); but many are windswept plazas with a few sad chairs, or cavernous semi-climate-controlled lobbies patrolled by wary security guards.

New Yorkers are desperate for public space, though, and even when we don’t love these places we use them intensely. One of the most frustrating things about Occupy for the other (OK, I’ll say it) 99% of us who live and work in lower Manhattan is that it effectively privatized Zuccotti Park, a surprisingly well-trafficked park, recently renovated and refreshed, occupying a tight square block in this dense neighborhood.

One of my favorite public spaces in the entire city has been open for three years, but I only discovered it recently, and since I did I’ve been back over and over. It’s the grand glass lobby of the 2009-renovated Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. As The New Yorker’s Paul Goldberger wrote in 2009:

In terms of its configuration and the precision of its details, this is probably the most urbane lobby at Lincoln Center. It avoids the grandiosity of Philip Johnson’s space at the State Theatre and the sappy romanticism of Wallace K. Harrison’s Metropolitan Opera lobby. One wall of the new lobby is covered in muirapiranga, a Brazilian wood, set in narrow tongue-and-groove panels. There is a huge freestanding café bar made of Portuguese limestone, with one end sculpted in the form of a flying wedge. It looks like a model of a building by Zaha Hadid, but more elegant.

Because of the soaring glass curtain walls, this lobby is in effect a grand indoor plaza, feeling fully open to Broadway and to 65th Street on two sides. When you’re there on a sunny afternoon, as I was recently, the sunlight streams in. Half the room is furnished with cafe and bar tables, open to use by anyone (the lobby seems to be open to the public at all hours of the day and evening), and in the afternoon and evening, an excellent cafe/bar counter (from the school of “art institution catering,” i.e., artisanal beet salad, not hot dogs) serves reliable, interesting small plates and stocks a full range of beverages. The other half is the open entrance lobby for Alice Tully Hall, which serves as overflow cafe and sitting space during the day.

Because of my schedule I’m typically there in the late afternoon or early evening, when the daytime crowd is starting to give way to a well-dressed and usually older (depending on the evening’s program) night crowd. You get the full people-watching experience, both inside and out, something to eat, and a cheery public space with a pleasant bustle to read your email or whatever.

Just a brief shout-out on behalf of the Star Force series by B.V. Larson — I’m on book 2 and can’t stop reading. It’s proof that just because something has bypassed the big publishing houses (this is from the Kindle imprint) doesn’t make it junk.

Brief plot summary: alien ships land on earth; humans are commandeered into an alien fighting force; stuff happens; it becomes clear that two alien races are fighting each other on our turf. More stuff happens; crisis averted for humanity (barely) on the final pages of Book One; but a surprise at the start of Book Two starts everything rolling again.

It’s obvious that this was written by a certain type of man — the only female character of any significance in Book One is a “coed” — but then so was Heinlein, and we still read him, so there you go. There’s also a bit more deus ex machina than I prefer (replicators, etc.), and Larson’s a bit loose with the science. But if you get into the spirit, the story rolls along.

Swarm: Star Force Series #1

The Google Glasses project that everyone’s talking about is, well, I guess my main point is, sure, it’s going to be awesome, but why is everyone so amazed? There’s really no debate about the fact that this is coming.

It’s obvious that, within my lifetime, not only are we going to have the Internet always with us in cybernetic devices (that cow is more or less out of the barn), we’re going to have it implanted into our bodies in an always-on manner.

I predict (and you can hold me to this): Google Glasses with consumer pricing, i.e., “Internet on our heads,” in 10 years; hearing-aid-type network device accepting subvocalized commands, i.e., “Internet next to our heads,” in 15 years; true implant accepting thought-impulse commands, i.e., “Internet inside our heads,” in 25 years. I plan on staying alive long enough to get the last one.

This stuff has been all over science fiction (of both the utopian and dystopian varieties) for a couple of decades. In fact, at the moment I’m reading M.T. Anderson’s Feed, in which implanted always-on connectedness is a major plot point.

In Feed, told from the perspective of a teenager about 20 years in the future (I’m guessing this because one of the dads in the book says “dude” a lot), kids go to the Moon for spring break, and everyone has a flying car, and (for the 73% of Americans who have always-on feed implants) basically every interaction with the world is shopping-focused and mediated by a corporate information aggregator. It’s awesome that you can chat your friends in your head; some of the rest of it (like the fact that the President of the United States can’t put together four coherent sentences), not so much.

Please take a moment to contemplate Momentum, a new cycling magazine that’s meant for people who use bikes the way you likely do — as stylish and functional accessories to their daily lives, probably in a city.

It was a free-distribution mag for a while and they recently upgraded it to more pages and started charging. It’s really cheap ($20 a year) and I heartily encourage you to subscribe. The copy and ads are more useful than those in Bicycling magazine (which I also read, don’t you worry), and it’s a lot more fun.

That’s what this dude on a fixie said who plowed his bike at about 10 miles an hour into a fat guy in a suit getting into a taxi on 6th Avenue yesterday afternoon. (I was standing about 10 feet away, on the sidewalk, holding my bike handlebars, with a helmet on.) He basically bounced off (fat guy, remember), and nobody was hurt, but everyone involved was embarrassed and pissed off at everyone else.

Not to be uncharitable, but “I don’t have any brakes” isn’t much of an excuse, and neither is “I was going too fast.” The poor cabbie had done his job and stopped in traffic with the bike lane clear; the suit just took a little long to get into the cab, and bike guy wasn’t looking far enough up the road. (LESSON ONE. Enough said.)

Ten points for honesty, there, but hey, watch out! And if you can’t stop in 50 feet at the speed you’re going with the equipment you have, you either need to get some goddam brakes or, I dunno, maybe not ride so fast in the curb lane on congested 6th Avenue? And before you lay into me (I don’t know what “you” I think I’m talking to, this doesn’t apply to anyone I know personally to be reading this blog, but anyway), yeah, I know the fixie “riding experience” is more authentic, and brakes “are no guarantee of stopping” and so forth, sure. I’ll even buy a fixie eventually (I predict it’ll be my eighth bike). But the whole point of riding in the city is not to plow into things, so, you know, TAKE NOTE.

It’s hard to believe that as of two or three years ago I hadn’t ridden a bicycle in ages and ages. Oh, I owned one — when I moved to Atlanta in 1999, I bought a new one with grand plans — but I almost never rode it anywhere, had no riding stamina, and certainly wouldn’t have taken it out in the rain. (What, me get wet?)

All that, as you know, has changed. Not only am I now a cyclist, willing to ride in bad weather and eager to get back on a bike when I’ve been away for a few days; I am also a Cyclist, someone whom my friends and colleagues look to for bike advice, with whom they share bike jokes and videos, of whom they’re a little afraid lest I show up at an important meeting or, say, a wedding in a funny outfit riding my latest two-wheeled acquisition.

This is all a bit baffling, not least to me, because I think of myself as, number one, a completely unathletic person, and number two, not an insider or a joiner at all. Yet I’m now, number one, on a bicycle almost every day for somewhere between two and ten miles, and, number two, incontrovertibly, a member of the NYC cycling “community,” a group that has no membership test or dues or requirements but that nonetheless obviously does exist, in the eyes both of those who are in it and of those who are outside it shaking their fists at it for taking away their precious parking spaces or whatever.

How did this happen?

As with most fortuitous yet unplanned things that happen to us, my taking up of bicycling was the outcome of a virtuous cycle. Approaching my mid-forties, I found my doctor yelling at me for sitting on my ass all day. I felt the need to lose some weight. (That didn’t happen, but my weight distribution got much healthier and my stamina increased markedly, so I don’t care.) I discovered that I didn’t hate being on a bicycle. I learned that I enjoyed the sense of freedom and mastery of the city that it bestowed. I learned that being on a bicycle could be stylish and playful and colorful, instead of serious and dudish and douchey, while still conferring all the same health benefits.

At the end of the day, though, what happened is that I got off my ass and onto a bike, I liked it, and I got back onto it again the next day. I repeated this about 30 times, enough to realize that there were things I could do to make the riding experience better (get proper lights, a messenger bag, adjust my wardrobe), and I did them. This made me more inclined to get on the bike again, and I did it about fifty more times.

At this point, since I was on the bike so much I started paying attention to other people’s bikes, and this led me to do research, and this led me to buy a better bike, which led me to buy another better bike (and so on), which in turn led me to ride more.

Once I’d gotten on the bike another fifty times or so, I started noticing that not only was I participating in bike-related conversations (including #bikenyc on Twitter), but other people in those conversations were acting like I had the right and the standing to be in them.

Fast forward about another year, and nobody disputes that I’m a Cyclist, not even me. But, I repeat, the single most important thing I did to become the expert, the aficionado, the frequent rider that I am was to just get on the bike, and then get on again. After a certain point you just stop giving a shit whether the “insiders” think you’re one of them, because you know as much as they do and certainly have enough experience to act like one.

It was exciting when I first realized that I was riding fast enough that I overtook a lot of perfectly competent-looking cyclists in the course of my ordinary ride to work. But the real turning point for me, probably, was the moment when I realized that I would rather ride to work in the left lane up Church Street and Sixth Avenue, even with all the traffic, than go out of my way to take one of the separated bike paths. I’d reached the point where I was a competent street rider, not particularly anxious about traffic, capable of taking the lane, not afraid of the occasional honk. I had arrived.

All this was easier for me, I grant, because I have nothing to prove. I literally do not give a crap how some 23-year-old with an 11-pound fixie and a 20-pound bike chain around his waist thinks I look on my upright BMX with the big basket in front. I don’t even care what he thinks as he swerves around me (into oncoming traffic, without looking) as I stop for a red light. I don’t care if I’m the fastest, I don’t care if I’m the coolest-looking (and with that blinking red light on my helmet, I certainly am not). I just have fun, and (knock wood) try not to get hit by a car while doing it.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed that I take the National Organization for Marriage, the anti-gay hate group masquerading as a pro-family organization, very seriously. I push back in earnest at @nomtweets on Twitter, call out lies and distortions, and generally act as though I care what they say.

I might well do otherwise. Even in America, slow as change is to come here, marriage for gay people will be routine in a generation. The shaving cream is out of the can, and it isn’t going back inside. NOM is on the wrong side of demographics, and of history. An organization that calls itself “pro-family” while it spends donors’ money trying to find children who will denounce their parents on camera shouldn’t be surprised to be treated as a bunch of laughable hypocrites. Besides, I have twice as many Twitter followers as they do, so what does it matter?

It matters.

In 1980, I was fourteen years old. I was already a gay person then (for that matter, I was already one a decade earlier, but that’s a subject for another post). But the overall tone of press and the public discourse about gay people, even after a decade of sexual revolution and social liberation, was one of pity and scorn. Gay people, even in big cities like Los Angeles (where I grew up) and New York (where I live now), were not real people or full people in the eyes of the mainstream media.

Gay people did, of course, exist, even in the media. They had jobs, mostly in fashion or hairdressing or flight-attending; they had boyfriends, or even “lovers.” The really edgy ones had “domestic partners.” And, as everyone knew, all of them had sex, and quite a lot of it, too.

But despite surface similarities, gay people weren’t Like Us. They lived in the city and didn’t even mind! (suspicious behavior, in those days). They stayed up late! They were stunted, big children with no responsibilities; they spent their money on fun and frolic; but at bottom, their lives were empty and sad.

You may think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. The American Psychiatric Association didn’t remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders until 1973, and the rest of the culture took 20 years to catch up.

Like every gay person who lived in those times, I absorbed the trivialization of gay people, of our lives and our loves. As recently as 10 or 15 years ago — when I was 30, 35! — the idea of gay marriage startled me, because I had been conditioned to think of my love as somehow not real love, my family as somehow not a real family. The inevitable consequence of that is that one comes to think of himself as less than fully human.

Now, I’m a relatively healthy person with loving family and friends and a sound sense of self-respect, so I survived. And I had come across examples in my own life of gay people who were fully realized human beings and paid no mind to anyone who said or thought otherwise, so I grew into a more or less comfortable gay adult.

But not everyone has my advantages.

Who I marry will make absolutely no difference to the life of anyone in, say, Missouri. But every time the odious Maggie Gallagher goes on TV to sneer at gay families, every time a NOM “social scientist” “publishes” a “study” “proving” that the children of gay parents are stunted and lead empty lives (sound familiar?), every time the name of Jesus Christ is invoked in order to mock the holy and human experiences of people like me — every time these things happen, a few thousand fragile kids in Missouri learn false lessons that they will spend the rest of their lives trying to unlearn.

They learn that their feelings are bad, that their experiences aren’t real, that their choices are indecent, that there may never be anyone to love or understand them. They learn to conceal themselves from those who most love them, and to live lives that aren’t true in order to protect themselves from pain and sadness.

I emphasize again that I grew up very fortunate: intelligent and well educated, in a financially stable family, loved and encouraged by parents who were not afraid to let me roam the world, taught to question and think for myself.

And it still took me twenty years of adulthood to come to understand that the way God made me was good and right.

The voice of the anti-gay American right wing (because, at this point, in the Western world, this sort of frenzied, spluttering denial of the humanity of gay people is largely confined to the Christianist American right wing) is mistaken. Its message is false. It’s simply wrong. Gay people are real people, fully human; our experiences are authentic and true and good; as a community, our lives and our loves can survive provincialism and fear and negativity.

But as the fragile individuals we are when we are alone in the dark with our thoughts, we are hurt by all that vile nonsense, discrimination masquerading as science, angry clannishness masquerading as the word of Jesus Christ (who would be startled and shamed to hear the things said in his name).

The relationship between NOM mouthpiece Brian Brown and his God is a matter for them to work out between themselves. But the God who (as Brian believes) sent his son to clear away the old covenant to make way for a new one, and to die for the sins of lepers and prostitutes and swindlers, is not a God who would countenance, for instance, pitting black people against gay people, or encouraging children to denounce their parents. Or, for that matter, as is currently happening in Minnesota, sending hate squads into Catholic high schools to teach young people that gay people are a cancer on society. (Again, a matter for another post.)

So speak out against hatemongering; speak out against fear. Speak out for happiness, yours and those of others. Speak out and say that you are fully human, fully American, fully Christian (if that’s what you are). Say that your experience of life is real and legitimate; describe it; help others to understand it, that they may protect you from those who (through fear, or malice, or whatever — it’s not your concern) undertake to hurt you.

Speak out.