Five observations after five years in New York

I moved to New York City from Ann Arbor five years ago this month. Earlier this week I shared a laundry list of tourist tips, in part because visiting friends often ask for “real” guidance beyond what they’d get in a guidebook.

Today’s post is more about the experience of being a New Yorker — five reflections on being a Midwesterner in the largest, most densely populated city in the U.S.

Myth: New Yorkers are rude.

People who’ve never been to NYC often ask in a hushed tone, “Is it true New Yorkers are rude?” Then sometimes someone who’s never been states it as fact.

Truth is, I think most New Yorkers are very polite. They hold doors for each other, they will turn totally sideways rather than bump into someone on the sidewalk, and if a woman is pushing a stroller toward subway stairs, it’s understood that whatever man is nearby grabs the front of the stroller to help.

Open a map anywhere in Manhattan and you’re likely to get swarmed with help. New Yorkers love to share their knowledge of their city, so much so that I’ve had two people stop to help and argue with each other about the best way to get to my destination.

What New Yorkers are is direct, and I think that’s what some tourists take for rudeness.

If you and your family stand at the top of the subway escalator to decide where you’re going for lunch, someone behind you is likely to shout to step aside. If you cross a street against the light and a car is coming, the driver will probably lay on his horn.

When you live in a city with this many people, there’s not time for the passive aggressive glare of disapproval. If someone is doing something that inconveniences others or puts others in danger, for the good of the order, someone needs to let that person know.

Don’t think of it as rude. Think of it as being helpful.

Sidewalks are like highways.

I’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating — in most parts of the country, sidewalks are for strolling and streets are for transportation. Here, many of us live without cars so when we’re on foot, we aren’t just out for an amble. We might be on our way to work or to meet a client or to a hair appointment.

If you want to get along in a pedestrian culture, you need to treat the sidewalks like a busy highway. Would you stop without warning in the rush hour commute? Would you drive four abreast with your friends, craning your necks and taking in the sights?

Some pointers on how New Yorkers walk:

• Keep to the right. Like a highway, people coming in the opposite direction need room, too. That means if you’re walking with a big group, you might need to walk behind each other instead of side by side.
• Pull over. If you need to rummage around in your purse or look for an address, get out of the flow of traffic.
• Don’t block the crosswalk. If someone with a rolling suitcase or someone in a wheelchair needs the ramp to get up the curb, get out of the way.
• On escalators, stand to the right and walk to the left. This lets people who are in a hurry or want a little exercise get past.

New York is a place of ambition of all kinds

One of my favorite ideas in “Eat Pray Love” is that every city has one word that gets at its culture and its essence. Author Elizabeth Gilbert, who sets out from New York on an international journey after her divorce, says New York’s word is achieve.

This is a place people come to play in the big leagues — it’s where numerous media companies are headquartered, the epicenter of American banking, a hub for A-list art galleries, the home of Broadway, a fashion center and more.

That makes NYC an amazing place to meet people.

Take, for instance, our friend Ittai, who we met at a friend’s brunch. After we’d hung out with him numerous times, he invited us to see him play — at Carnegie Hall, where he was premiering a piece that was written for him.

My piano teacher toured with Blues Traveler. A friend of ours was a photographer for the Yankees. I know more than one person who’s been on Martha Stewart’s show.

Here’s the downside: it’s easy to get caught up in the striving. I’m a type A girl and I love to be around passionate, motivated people, but I also want to achieve a level of work/life balance and not constantly compare myself to the rock stars I’m not.

Myth: New York is a big city

True, with about 8 million people, New York is more than twice the size of Los Angeles, America’s #2 city by population.

What I failed to grasp before I moved here, though, was that people don’t really live in New York City. They live in their neighborhood. It’s like a collections of smaller towns stitched together with a public transportation system.

Because of the population density and zoning in New York, it would be pretty easy to live the majority of your life without leaving about a 10-block radius of your home. In many parts of the city, you’d find a doctor, a dry cleaner, a grocery store, a few restaurants you like, a movie theater and more within that short walk.

As a result, where you live influences a lot about your lifestyle. The Upper West Side feels very different from the Lower East Side, and our neighborhood in Brooklyn, on the border of Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, is definitely not Williamsburg nor Park Slope. I’m not sure what the chicken and egg relationship is, but the people and the businesses of each neighborhood are distinct.

For my Michigan friends, think of greater southeast Michigan. Within about an hour’s drive, you can be in Ann Arbor, Novi, South Lyon, Redford and downtown Detroit, and they have little in common except perhaps weather and a dependence on the auto industry. In New Orleans, Uptown is worlds away from the Bywater, the Garden District is not Treme, even though it’s not that far from A to B.

New York is the same, except I think the differences are more stark because as many people might live in a 10-block radius as live in all of Ann Arbor.

New York is best experienced on a smaller scale

When John and I were preparing to move to New York, we bought a ticket package for Carnegie Hall. It was exciting to walk from our apartment to this beautiful, mythical place and hear world-class musicians perform.

Unless you’re a socialite or a Rockefeller — or a Rockefeller who’s a socialite — you’re probably unlikely to do that regularly.

Instead, I love seeing music at smaller places that often have little or no cover, with a more intimate connection with the musicians and other fans. Places like:

• Arthur’s Tavern in the Village
• Radegast in Williamsburg
• Bar Tabac in Cobble Hill

I still need to try Small’s in the Village and John’s eager to try Banjo Jim’s on the Lower East Side … after five years, still plenty of places on the to-do list.

It’s not just about music, though. Maybe it’s a reaction to living in such a big, overwhelming place, but I have loved dining in small restaurants and shopping in small stores where I get to talk to the owners, and going to art shows where we know the artists more than spending a day at the world-class museums.

Some of our favorite New York days have simply been getting a cup of coffee and finding a comfy spot to plant ourselves while we people watch.

These aren’t the only observations I could make after a half decade here. But 1,300 words seems like a good place to stop for now. What would you add or disagree with?

Some random observations about NOLA about one month in

John and I arrived in New Orleans for our quasi-sabbatical on March 25 so we’re approaching one month in our temporary hometown.

I’m already getting pangs about time running short. We have Easter weekend coming up, then two weekends of Jazz Fest, then we pack up for home a few days later.

Weve seen so many artists and musicians since weve been in New Orleans -- but so far, we havent seen a single mailbox.

So after we’ve crossed the halfway point in our stay, here are some random observations about NOLA:

Things in short supply: street signs and mailboxes, apparently wiped out by Katrina and never replaced?

Things in abundance: musicians and artists, rats and cockroaches, potholes

Phrases people use that I don’t think I can convincingly say:

• y’all, although I love it because it fills the “plural you” void in the English language
• making groceries, as opposed to going grocery shopping
• where y’at, which isn’t such an unusual question but there’s something about the pronunciation that sounds funny coming out of my northern mouth

Mudbugs are tasty, especially boiled with spices, garlic and onions -- but whether you call em palmetto bugs, water bugs or cockroaches, Southern weather grows them big and abundant.

Take a sweater: Weather has been lovely while we’ve been here, typically around 80 during the day and 60 at night. I almost always take a sweater with me when we go out, not because it cools off so much at night but because so many places we go are air conditioned like the refrigerator aisle when you’re makin’ groceries.

Really, people, it’s not so unbearable outside that you need that much cold air. Maybe they’re just getting ready for August?

Best tradition ever: the lagniappe. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a small gift given a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase; broadly : something given or obtained gratuitously or by way of good measure.”

It seems baked into the New Orleans way of doing business, far more so than any other place I’ve been. We recently got our second dozen oysters on the house when we hung out and chatted with the bartender at one bar,  and John frequently wears the free shirt he scored when he complimented the fried chicken at one of his favorite joints in the Quarter.

It seems the rule is it’s not an advertised deal — this isn’t about the 2-for-1 drinks at happy hour — but instead it’s at the discretion of the person waiting on you.

I’m not just saying the lagniappe is excellent because I like a bargain. (I do.) But there’s something so endearing about feeling you’ve gotten more than you paid for, that you’re getting treated special. Isn’t that why Cheers was such a great bar, because everyone knows your name?

According to Wikipedia:

Mark Twain writes about the word in a chapter on New Orleans in Life on the Mississippi (1883). He called it “a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get”:

We picked up one excellent word — a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word — “lagniappe.” They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish — so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a “baker’s dozen.” It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop — or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know — he finishes the operation by saying — “Give me something for lagniappe.” The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor — I don’t know what he gives the governor; support, likely. When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans — and you say, “What, again? — no, I’ve had enough;” the other party says, “But just this one time more — this is for lagniappe.” When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady’s countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his “I beg pardon — no harm intended,” into the briefer form of “Oh, that’s for lagniappe.”

Following through on my commitment: a song for my 40th birthday

When I started piano lessons last spring, my approaching 40th birthday was a big motivator.

Something about a milestone birthday triggered my deadline response, and I thought I’d like to be able to play at least one song by my 40th.

Turns out I can do a decent job at several songs, including Scarborough Fair and My Cherie Amour. Not great, but you’d recognize the tune.

Today I’m posting this video for several reasons:

• My musician pal Paul Caluori told me that as soon as I can, I need to play music with people — in part because I need to get OK with playing in front of people. No matter when it is, it’ll be nervous and scary, so just hurry up and get it over with. So this is the first time I’ve let anyone but John hear me play. Done.
• My piano teacher Sheldon Landa reminds me weekly that I need to give myself permission to make mistakes. I think he’s talking about piano, but it’s also a good life lesson. One of my biggest musical challenges is that if I screw up, I just want to stop, and Sheldon urges me to just keep going. The joke is that if you hit a wrong note, play it twice to make it look on purpose.  Yup, I’m posting a video of me screwing up a classic song and owning it.
• We’re leaving for New Orleans next week, so if I’m going to make my public debut playing (and messing up) something, it might as well be “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

The High Colleedays begin the countdown to 40

I’m a little kid about birthdays — I enjoy making a fuss about other people’s birthdays and I love celebrating mine.

Yes, even as a suit-wearing executive with an MBA, I have been known to take a box of cupcakes to work on my birthday, just like you might have in elementary school.

As part of that, we don’t just celebrate my birthday for one day. How could that possibly be enough? No, it’s a week-long celebration leading up to my birthday, and we call it the High Colleedays. (This is followed by the week-long celebration of John’s birthday, known as Johnukkah)

I turn 40 on Wednesday, March 16, so today kicks off the High Colleedays — and probably no one is more surprised than me that it will likely be a low-key affair.

Why?

• I’ll be in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive and John’s not coming with, so I can’t extract my usual daily dose of having him dote on me with whatever meal or cocktail I desire
• Because of SXSW travel plans, we already invited friends to join us to see Dr. John for a Mardi Gras show, so the public birthday stuff is kind of over
• While I started out with plans to throw a giant bash for my 40th, there’s so much interesting transformation going on in my life right now that it feels like life itself is a celebration

Now don’t get me wrong. If you’d like to sing to me on March 16, I’ll totally take it. But I think the real festivities will come when we leave for New Orleans in a few weeks.

And John gets to conclude Johnukkah in NOLA.

P.S. If you’ve landed on this post because you were searching for Preservation Hall at SXSW, be sure to check out Danny Clinch’s new documentary on March 17: Live at Preservation Hall: Louisiana Fairytale and the band plays that night at the Moody Theater.

Goin’ to New Orleans: sinking in to a city we love

Me and our super-fabulous hostess, the bride who's helping make the plan come together. Here we're toasting in her kitchen -- and we will most certainly toast her numerous times in the weeks to come. Thank you, Cara!

It all started with the idea that we might have to skip Jazz Fest this year.

While I’m getting my business off the ground, our cash flow is reduced, so we’re looking at all the expenses we can possibly trim to live within our means. We love going to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival every spring, but it’s optional. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge we’d at least be in NOLA in March for our friends’ wedding.

But then I started putting the pieces together for an exciting little scheme:

• My new part-time role allows me to work from home, so I can do that work from anywhere there’s Internet and cell service
• Likewise, the work I’m doing for my business can be done anywhere
• John’s self employed so he can paint and do graphic design anywhere
• The bride at the wedding we’re going to in March is moving in with her groom after the wedding, leaving her cute house in the Garden District, where we’ve often stayed during Jazz Fest

We began to investigate the pieces so we could stay in New Orleans from the wedding through Jazz Fest in early May, and every sign pointed to it being a good idea:

• The bride agreed to sublet her NOLA house to us at a rate that’s less than our NYC rent, so assuming we’re able to sublet our place, we come out ahead in living expenses
• Changing our flights home from late March to early May would have cost more than $500 — but one-way tickets from New Orleans to New York in May were cheap.
• John has picked up several new design gigs in the last few weeks, which will help keep his cash flow up while we’re away
• I was worried I’d have to put piano lessons on hold — but my teacher here is on Skype and I lined up a place to practice in New Orleans. Maybe you’ve heard of Preservation Hall? I’m helping them with some marketing work around their 50th anniversary, and their marketing director said I can practice there during the day.

John made a painting that's a vision of my life -- see the music and the Mardi Gras beads? This plan is getting more of both into our lives.

Before you post a comment that says “I’m so jealous, I wish I could do that,” let me share with you an excellent blog post from Peter Shankman, founder of Help a Reporter Out. It’s headlined How to Jailbreak Your Life So You Can Live the Way You WANT and it arrived in my email this week, just as we committed to New Orleans.

It’s a long post but well worth reading if you wish you could do what we’re doing. Here are a couple of highlights:

• Is your job to be somewhere in a physical place, five out of seven days a week? If you love your job, I mean truly love your job, love the people with whom you work, love your office, love your commute, then hey, you know what? RESPECT. You’ve got it. Enjoy it, baby. You’re done with this blog post, and I give you mad, mad props. For real.
• We all need to work. We all need to make money. With the exception of trust fund babies, we all gotta find a way to make some cash and live our lives. Some people just choose to do it a different way than others. Some of us choose to work for a living, and some people choose to incorporate work into living. For the past 16 years, I’ve worked harder than almost every person I know, yet I’ve never felt like I’ve worked a day in my life.
• I will never, ever begrudge someone their fear. If what you’re doing works for you, that’s fine, but if you’re jealous, then you got a problem. See, being happy and being jealous don’t mesh. So it usually comes down to you being angry about your fear. But here’s the thing: Fear keeps us healthy. Fear keeps us alive. It’s what got us through the age of mountain lions and other big-ass animals that could have us for tea. But here’s the thing – Fear is built-in because we used to have no other options. Wanted to eat? You had to face your fear and kill something. Back in the age of the stone, Dean and Deluca didn’t exist. Fear now exists primarily to hold us back.

Are you motivated? Are you thinking of how you could ask your boss if you could work from home three weeks out of four so you could go live in your dream locale? Or contemplating how you might live someplace with a low cost of living so you can launch that business you’ve been fantasizing about?

If you aren’t now, maybe you will be in a few weeks when we start filing dispatches from New Orleans.

When I first started blogging, back in late 2005, it was to chronicle a one-month stint in NYC. John and I sublet an apartment on the upper east side to test drive living in New York, and I wanted to share the experience with friends back home. So consider this round two of sharing a cool life experience with you.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Two months ’til 40 and counting

After talking about it for years, I finally started beginner piano lessons last spring, in part because the approach of my 40th birthday felt like  a good deadline.

I fantasized about learning a song that I’d be comfortable playing in public, maybe even hosting a big 40th birthday bash with New Orleans Bingo Show headlining and with me playing my 40th birthday song as a sort of boozy grown up recital.

Today I’m exactly two months out from my 40th birthday and realistically, I don’t see it happening. And that’s OK.

I’ve come a long way since my first lesson: I’m learning to read music, to play scales, to keep time, to have my left and right hands do independent things. I can look at a new piece of sheet music, puzzle out what I need to do, and if I go at it slowly, I can make the song emerge from the page.

But it’s going to be a while before I’m ready to play a song in front of people. I sometimes lose my way, or clunk the wrong note, and am still learning to recover and keep going when that happens.

John and I went to Arthur’s Tavern recently to see traditional jazz with the Grove Street Stompers. I watched the pianist in rapt attention as he effortlessly called over his shoulder to ask the trumpeter what key she wanted the next transition in — he could talk, play and transpose without breaking a sweat, and I’m still working on tapping my foot while I play.

When they took a break, I asked how long he’d been playing. He’d put himself through Yale playing piano — 55 years ago.

Yes, I’d love to play like Dick Voigt, shown here with his Big Apple Jazz Band, but I’m not going to hold myself to the standard of someone who’s got quite a few decades on me.  I think it’s more important for me to celebrate my 40th birthday as part of a journey than to beat myself up about what destination I have or haven’t achieved.

I am grateful for: New York

This is the view from our patio at work. Why hello, Empire State Building, nice to get to see you every single day.

New York is not an easy place to live. It’s expensive, it’s crowded, it’s noisy, it’s dirty.

But the fact that people are willing to tolerate the downsides speaks to the upsides. New York is amazing.

Living here can feel like living in a movie set because New York is in so many movies, TV shows and music videos. Even if you’ve never been, you can probably describe exactly what Rockefeller Center looks like and imagine the front steps of a brownstone.

What’s your favorite food? Better, what’s the most exotic food you’ve ever eaten? I’ll bet you we not only have it here, but it’s probably done exceptionally well and available for delivery at 2 a.m.

What musicians do you love? If they’re touring at all, New York is almost certainly in their plans. And because of the critical mass of talent here, incredible things can happen — like when I went to see Preservation Hall this week at their formal show at City Winery, then they went to sit in with their pal Danny Clinch, whose band was playing a little downstairs bar in midtown. No cover. Maybe 100 people in the whole place?

I could go on and on — or let the Village Voice do it. They have a blog post this week with the headline
50 Reasons to Be Pretty Damn Euphoric You Live in New York City. Among the highlights on this excellent read:

47. There is always someone crazier than you. ALWAYS.

41.We get the inside jokes. Because, actually, we made them up in the first place.

39. Sure, we work out next to Alec Baldwin, Padma Lakshmi, and Bridget Moynahan, and walk the streets with Willem Dafoe, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Tina Fey, but, really, we’re kinda too busy with our own lives to notice.

26. Smart people are the norm, not the exception. (Which doesn’t mean they’re sane, but at least no one’s boring.)

24. When you fly back into the city after a vacation or business trip, no matter how long you’ve lived here, you get that butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling.

So although we’ve talked a lot about New York maybe not being our forever home, John and I are both digging on being Brooklynites right now. It’s spectacular to live surrounded by so many creative, smart, engaged people and to be able to walk to just about anything I could ever want.

And, as the Village Voice said:

37. Because it’s not enough to just love New York. New York needs to love you back, too. Hey, we have high standards.

Woody Allen on the merits of practicing and New Orleans jazz

The Village Voice this week has a wonderful, sprawling piece on Woody Allen and his love of traditional jazz.

Yes, the same Woody Allen, he of the artsy movies that define the neurotic New York archetype, also happens to have a standing weekly gig at the Carlyle. If you’re wondering if they’re any good, it might be worth noting that even at about $100 a ticket, it’s typically a sell out crowd.

But Allen doesn’t consider himself a stellar musician, apparently. He told the Voice:

“I’m not just saying this to be amusing: To be even as bad as I am, you do have to practice every day,” says Allen, with a small, almost imperceptible chuckle. “I’m a strict hobby musician. I don’t have a particularly good ear for music. I’m a very poor musician, like a Sunday tennis player.”

(I loved reading this the same day I’d written a post about having to practice my beginner piano.)

You can judge for yourself whether Allen is as mediocre as he says. Here’s video of Allen and his band:

Another reason I loved the Voice article — Allen is wisely using his fame to expose fans of his films to the music he loves. He says:

“I’ve been a great jazz fan my whole life,” he says. “I certainly like modern jazz as well, but my favorite kind is New Orleans jazz. Something about the primitive quality, the simplicity of it, the directness. It is the one style of jazz that stays with me the most.”

“Early jazz was very pleasurable and very simple,” explains Allen. “After a while, that stuff became concert music, and the chord progressions got very complicated, and the harmonies got very complicated. It became less pleasurable. Not less great—it certainly was every bit as great and, in many cases, stupendously great and greater. But it required more concentration and more effort from the audience.”

Who knew Woody Allen and I were kindred spirits? Traditional jazz makes my heart soar. Listening to Arwulf’s Sunday morning WEMU show back in Ann Arbor exposed me to music I’d never known but I now love. Thankfully we can still listen through the magic of the interwebs.

As the Village Voice bemoans the sad decline of traditional jazz in New York, I’m reminded of another reason Jazz Fest is such a compelling destination for me — whether at the festival, at evening shows around town or just walking down the sidewalks of New Orleans, I’m surrounded by marvelous, joyous traditional jazz morning ’til night. I don’t have to seek it out as much as let it wash over me.

I don’t want to take it for granted, though, and we’ll be making an effort to support more traditional jazz here in New York.

Coming up soon:

• Arthur’s Tavern — the Grove Street Stompers play Mondays
• Sofia’s — Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks offer early New Orleans jazz Monday and Tuesday nights
• Lovin Cup — third Thursday of the month is traditional jazz, produced by Tight Like This
• Nolafunk organizes a whole load of great New Orleans music events in NYC

And sometimes, I even stumble across great trad jazz in New York, like seeing Baby Soda Jazz Band in Penn Station recently. Love those moments of serendipity.

Here they are in Times Square:

—–

Did you like this post?

Share it on Facebook / Twitter / Digg / StumbleUpon / Reddit / Fark / Del.icio.us

My life goals in painting form

My fabulous artist husband, John Tebeau, is doing a painting of me with a few of my favorite things: friends, food, music. The central image is me with my Jazz Fest second line parasol.

After I blogged about New Year’s resolutions, several of you asked the fair question: what are MY resolutions?

The honest answer is I’m still working on my big-picture 2010 goals. I’ve started with some tactical changes: commenting on one other blog every day, doing some form of exercise every day, taking better care of my health.

I have a comprehensive vision statement that touches how I want the professional, personal, creative and relationship components of my life to fit together and I’m giving that a thorough review. We’ve been talking a lot lately about our long-term plans for our life so I’m making sure my goals document is in sync.

Meantime, John is working on a real big picture for me. It’s what he and I have called a spell painting, but you could also call it a wish painting or his interpretation of the popular vision board.

He’s doing a portrait of me surrounded by images of things I like having in my life: good food, happy music, socializing with friends, big dogs. In the center, me with my Jazz Fest parasol. It’s a visual reminder of my life priorities and what makes my heart feel good.

Like Julie Andrews singing My Favorite Things in painting form.

If you had a painting of your favorite things, what would it look like?

Are you free? If you aren’t, is it time to free yourself?

Last night, John and I went to see Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Blind Boys of Alabama – a phenomenal show full of joyous, uplifting music that makes my soul feel good.

One of my favorite numbers of the night was Blind Boys singing the traditional spiritual Free At Last. Though it’s a powerful anthem of the Civil Rights movement, this performance got me thinking about other interpretations.

In an extended version of the song, singer Jimmy Carter led the crowd in a call and response asking “Are you free?” For the largely white, middle-class crowd in Tarrytown, N.Y., the question likely didn’t have the same meaning as to those whose families endured slavery.

But as the song continued, my mind turned over the things that pull us down: bad habits, unhealthy relationships, unfulfilling jobs, poor choices, debt, regret, anger.

Are you free? The start of a new year might be the perfect time to free yourself from whatever keeps the answer from being yes.

Click here to watch the Blind Boys performing in New Orleans, including in the Preservation Hall.