strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Jul 30 03: fore! (…five!…six!…)
The rage goes away eventually.
It gives way to a sullen resignation and an awareness that the old men are piling up behind you, because you need to hit the damn thing three times for every one hit by your so-called friends. The others tell you that what you’re seeing—the complete lack of predictability, the inconsistency, the sense of crushing despair, the urge to be really really surly in your dealings with your companions—are to be expected, and that the first year or two of your life as a golfer will be pretty much like this. Resist, therefore, the temptation to lash out in response to the well-meaning critiques of your stance and your swing; also the desire to make a brave martyr’s announcement that you’ll just accept the eight-stroke maximum score and to then retire to the cart. Fight on; keep working your way towards the *&^% green until the old men behind you complain to the ranger. For that matter, resist the cart when possible. If you’re going to spoil a good walk, you might as well at least get the good walk.
This is the game that has the western hemisphere entranced? How do its enthusiasts get through the early stage?
Sometime between now and November, I need to achieve enough proficiency to fake my way through an afternoon of this without crying. Today was the first step. Excellent.
Jul 27 03: cradle: rocky
Lara Croft is the goddess of wanton property damage. She wears her creamy coral lipstick everywhere, and too much eyeliner, even when she’s at the bottom of the ocean, and somewhere Indiana Jones and Lord Carnarvon are screaming for her head on a pike.
Yeah, we did a Pico Movie Expedition tonight, in keeping with tradition. This evening’s feature: Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.
It is bad.
Ms. Jolie can act, but she only gets to do so two or three times, and never for more than twelve seconds or so at a shot. So the movie has to rely instead on (a) her pneumatic lips etc.; (b) the action sequences; and (c) the plot. It should be noted that as far as (c) is concerned, there isn’t one really. I mean, there is, and many lovely antiquities pay the price, but it doesn’t really make a lot of sense or have much bearing on the way the film unfolds. On the drive home we played “My Favorite Thing that Made No Sense.” (There are many. Why not put your own in the comments section?) As to (a), there’s a lot less boobage than there was in the first, although yes that silver wetsuit is pretty fab. Actually, once again she has an Ambiguous Love Interest with a truly spectacular torso—consensus was that those who prefer boys to girls may have gotten the better part of the deal this time. But most damningly, the (b) action sequences are freakin’ boring. Flashy, yes. Loud, sure. Exciting? No, not really. And this is a summer action movie! What were they thinking? At best, it managed a few moments of fabulous stylishness and a few flashes of the actorly charisma that made Ms. Jolie the ideal choice for the role.
Disappointing. We all wanted this to be fun, even when we had kinda been warned that it might not be. To make up for this failing, we’re toying with seeing Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl later in the week. Why are film titles getting longer and longer? We don’t care. Aarrrrrr!
Jul 26 03: journey / escape
Greetings from Mattapoisett, Massachussetts. It’s time for our annual retreat to Bob’s family’s house on Pico Beach: a week of eating, drinking, reading, sleeping, cards. Based on prior experience: on my first swim practice after returning to the City, I’ll doubtless feel like I haven’t been in the pool in six weeks. But my soul will thank me for it.
Here at present: John, Bob, Cesar, Pablo, Sari, JJ, Scotto. The first game of cards has been played, and I won it. Drinks have been poured and poured again. Fried seafood has been consumed. John is presently obsessed with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on Bob’s XBox. All is right with the world.
If you don’t hear from me much in the next week or so, now you know why. Let the relaxation begin!
Jul 24 03: NY moment #25,317
On my way to this evening’s mob I saw a sign in a dry-cleaner’s window.
Your clothes can be tested for SHATNES
By the SHATNES LABORATORY
Huh? SHATNES? I figured it was either (a) some kind of Jewish thing—in these parts, frequently a good bet in moments-of-unfamiliar-vocabulary—or (b) it was a toxic chemical, like PERC. Those all-caps seemed suspicious to me. Or maybe it was (c) some kind of Star Trek reference: Do your clothes make you look like a polyester starship captain with a bad rug and diction issues? Our laboratory can find out.
Anyway, this is why I love the internet: it took me mere moments to find out that the answer was (a). Kosher clothing! I knew about the ‘no mixed-fiber fabrics’ rule, because it comes up in the same abominations-unto-god list as ‘no queers.’ (Thank you, Leviticus.) If you, like me, have wondered if there was anybody who gave both rules the equal gravity that god apparently intended…wonder no longer.
MOB #5 — tweet release
Oh, now this one was genius. The theme: Bird Calls and Nature Appreciation.
As usual, our orders were to get ourselves to one of four bars by a certain time and to await further instructions. I got to the Dublin House early, so I bought myself a Guinness and watched it go from an emptyish bar with scattered burnt-out regulars to Hipster Central. The hipsters clustered around the designated meeting area, a jukebox near the back with an outstanding collection of ’80s tunes. There wasn’t a great deal of room by the jukebox, so the density got kind of laughable in short order. The crowd gradually filled in all the available space between the jukebox and the door—and as far as I could tell it spilled out onto the sidewalk, again. Our most noteworthy topic of discussion, while we waited, was that we kinda hoped we’d start seeing a more diverse crowd at these things. We’re still a new phenomenon, and the folks who go tend to be geeky white hipsters or people who have geeky-white-hipster friends.
And then it was 6:55PM and The Drop was made. A man with the traditional 4x5 handouts wandered through. Here were our marching orders:
***MOB #5***
THE SITE: Central Park West—near 81st and Central Park West. Enter between 80th and 81st, across from the museum. Make your first hard left, merge with another path, then turn left again. Walk to the right in front of the ridge and face CPW. [also a helpful map, not reproduced here]
START TIME: 7.18 DURATION: 8 minutes. Disperse at 7.26: no one should remain at the mob site after 7.28.
- Stand still and stare straight forward. For the first 3 minutes, make as little noise as possible. If you can make a realistic bird call, you may occasionally do so.
- By 7.21, you may all make bird calls, unrealistic or no.
- By 7.23, you may also mumble, “bird noise.”
- By 7.25, you may also call out, “Nature here! Come get some nature!” to passersby.
- By 7.26 Chant “Na-ture” for 20 seconds; cheer, and disperse.
Please do not take photographs at the mob site until 7.23.
Please do not interview anyone at the mob site until 7.26.
Response from the protomob was immediate and enthusiastic. Dang, did that bar empty out quick. The group tended to stick to the most direct route to our destination, which meant that rather than filtering through the intervening blocks and suddenly materializing on target we were more of a Geek Parade. Subtle we weren’t. But that was also fun.
And then we were There. We stood atop a huge boulder just inside the Park, staring out through the tree canopy at the Museum of Natural History. Crammed on the ridge as we were, those not at the absolute front of the mob couldn’t even see the street, so the presence of media and secondary mobs didn’t have the distracting effect that it did the last time. Ars gratia artis, baby.
The birdsong reached Agitated Pet Shop pretty quickly. I think it was the sheer effing briliance of the plan that did it: the mob was so wired that they started earlyish and ran with it too soon. And there’s no holding back a mob, you know, so we pretty much had to follow the vanguard. I was particularly proud of my ‘unrealistic bird calls:’ TWEET…. CHIRP. EEDLE-EEDLE-EEDLE-EEDLE-EEEEEP! And then the shouting, and the chanting, and the raucous cheering.
And then we went home.
Media: I counted one radio crew and one TV crew as I left. It’ll be interesting to see what the media coverage ends up like, if only because for all that the Times photog made her presence known at Mob #4 I never did see the Times run any pictures.
Cheesebikini? is the nexus of all Mob coverage. Hail Cheesebikini? ! Nice photos, again, at Satan’s Laundromat. If you want to join a mob, email themobproject@yahoo.com.
Jul 21 03: let’s do the flash mob again
The announcement for MOB #5 has gone out. It’s on Thursday evening. I’ve passed it along to various folks, but if I skipped you and you want it feel free to drop me a line. Cheesebikini? continues to document the dispersal of the phenomenon. It’s everywhere! Seeing how it moves along has been kind of fascinating. I’m also curious as to how long these will be fun. No signs of fun-abatement yet, it should be noted.Jul 20 03: so far. so good.
It’s a beautiful Sunday in NYC! And! We are doing interesting things with it! Thus far we have watched 6 TNYA swimmers do the Race for the River (from Chelsea Piers to Battery Park, 2.4 miles, and I am so proud of my friends, and what a beautiful day for an open-water race, and I think I’m going to have to swim it next year); walked along the waterfront promenade of the Hudson River Park (it’s amazing what the city has done with it, it’s a jewel and a boon to West Siders); visited Bob (who is nearly packed for his Tuesday move); bought four lantana at Chelsea Garden Center for our window box (lantana love our fire escape, providing us with wave after wave of those amazing polychrome blooms; we, in return, cram them into a much-too-small bed that keeps them from becoming their habitual six-foot thickets); reserved a tent to sleep in on the lawn at Pico next week (oh yes). Next up: lunch and the gym, then perhaps a nap, then thinking about what we’re cooking for Sunday dinner when the gang comes over. Outside there’s a classic blue summer sky with high puffy clouds; a breeze ruffles the leaves on the London plane trees in front of our building.
I am suffused with gentle, faintly effervescent joy. Hope you are too.
Jul 17 03: call for CSS help
Anybody with a knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets—or who knows somebody with a knowledge of CSS—is hereby asked for help. Specifically, why does the <DIV> in which this text appears not display a margin-bottom of 18px? There should be an 18-pixel black band between the bottom of the white box and the bottom of the page. I would swear I had this working once, but I had to recreate the stylesheet a while back (don’t ask) and it certainly isn’t working now. If you need to read the html, you might wish to use my resume instead, as the code is much less convoluted and the problem affects all pages on the site. Feel free to examine the stylesheet itself as well. The problem is browser-independent, although I’ve only tested it on Macs.
I think other other sites use tricks like this. Why can’t I? What the hell is going on?
MOB4: shoes, media, metamobs
Today’s Big Event—other than shoehorning all my cousin’s worldly goods into an ancient Honda so she could move to the other side of the frickin’ continent, not that I’m bitter—was the Fourth NYC Inexplicable Mob. (See my earlier entry if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)
Sari and I gathered in one of the four staging areas (read: bars), all of which were down near Broadway and Houston. Even before the ball got rolling, we could see some of the handwriting on the wall. This one was gonna be big. There were dozens of people crammed into the area by the door at Puck Fair, all waiting for their marching orders. There were people on the sidewalk who couldn’t fit into the bar. There were members of the media.
Yup. We hadn’t even gotten to the actual mob yet, and we could already see one guy interviewing somebody for radio and a couple of people with extremely professional-looking cameras. The cat is clearly out of the bag on this social experiment.
Eventually, we got our Magic Slip of Paper. Our mission: to arrive at Otto Tootsi Plohound, an extremely hoity-toity shoe store just two blocks away, and spend five minutes impersonating a busload of dazzled tourists from Maryland. (See the note’s full text on The Official Record.) Sari and I meandered into a candles-and-martini-glasses store next to the target and waited for our moment, which was 7:18PM.
At 7:18:45 we left the tchotchky shop and advanced on the shoe store. And then we learned that forty-five seconds is an eternity where a flashmob is concerned. Easily two hundred people were already inside, milling around, looking thrilled to be surrounded by the Gothamite glamour of it all. You wear these? On your feet? An upset-looking man barricaded the glass door with a hairy forearm, so Sari and I pressed up against a wide plate-glass window instead. Every now and then a helpful co-conspirator inside held up a sandal so we could get a closer look. We oohed and aahed appreciatively. I even called Paul on my cell, as per instructions. He couldn’t understand why I was getting so excited over a bunch of shoes, but I wasn’t really listening to him anyway. It would have spoiled my rhythm.
I should note also that every other person seemed to have a camera at this thing. It worked well with the busload-of-tourists conceit, too. Pros and participants snapped the shoes, the staff, one another with glee. Inside the store, people stood on the benches for better angles. Media were everywhere. At least three radio reporters worked the crowd—two of them apparently from Germany. Germany? Those who hadn’t made it inside crowded the sidewalk. One photojournalist seemed obsessed with the bus-stop sign behind us; we couldn’t tell why.
All this, of course, created a metamob: a throng of onlookers who really, really wanted to know what the hell was going on. “I think it’s a mob!” said one woman. Her friend cooed appreciatively, in a way that meant that she had no idea what woman #1 was talking about. They kept wading through the crowd, bound for Pravda and apple martinis. People spilled out into the street; they started to clog traffic on the opposite sidewalk. The radio people dashed around. The bus-stop-photos lady moved to put us in the background of her sign photos.
And then it was over. The general rule is that we’re supposed to disperse, as quickly and mysteriously as we had arrived. But this time that didn’t happen. There was only one door, and Hairy Forearms Man took a while to realize that nobody was trying to come in it anymore, so a major traffic jam formed. People swirled around on the sidwalk, waiting for friends to escape the store or posing for pictures or talking to radio people. The onlookers lingered, seeking enlightment. So much for mystery. We even ran into Cesar, on his way to dance class. Signpost lady took the signpost’s picture, again; we posed nonchalantly in the background. She eventually left, with an assistant in tow carrying her stepladder. We headed out ourselves. On the way to the subway station I had a chance to read the sign.
BUS STOP, it said. NO STANDING.
The next Inexplicable Mob is scheduled for Thursday, July 25. To get on the mailing list, email themobproject@yahoo.com. For further coverage of this one, check the always-reliable cheesebikini? plus the photos on Satan’s Laundromat.
Jul 16 03: MT Head
Well, I think that most of the dust has settled and the Space Mango has done its work. Not a lot of newness yet, beyond the comments function, and I still don’t quite know how this whole TrackBack thing works, but the basics are all where they need to be. I think.
(Space Mango? Right. If you tried to hit the blog via a bookmark over the last 30 hours or so, you got the following, of which I’m kind of proud. I often wanted to play with the text some more instead of working on the migration, but I resisted.)
something happens
“Well, I’m inside…but there’s nothing here. Are you sure this is the right place?”
“What do you mean, there’s nothing there? There should be text all around you!”
“Nope, no text. This place is empty. No, wait, there’s something…”
“Kiddo, this is really wrong. What’s the something? What do you see?”
“Shhh. There’s a sound…it’s…oh!”
“What? What? Talk to me. What about the sound? There shouldn’t be a sound there unless there’s a posting in progress.”
“No, it’s not that kind of sound. It’s coming from a…thing. There’s something patched into the wall here. It looks like…like a big shiny mango or something…”
“A what? Kiddo, did you say a mango?”
“Yeah, I did. Trust me on this. And…whoa…this thing has been busy—I’m seeing signs of mangotech all over the room. I thought they were part of the underlying structure, but they’re not…”
“Kiddo, I want you out of there. Whatever’s going on, I don’t want you caught up in it. Post an eye in there and get out.”
“Maybe it’s a tech migration?”
“Maybe. But if it is then you really don’t want to be inside the space until things re-stabilize. Post the eye. We’re pulling back to a safe distance for 24 hours.”
“You are so no fun.”
“That’s why I’m the boss. Post the eye and come back in. Now.”
“Fine. On my way.”
Jul 14 03: man at work
This blog is likely to go down for a while sometime in the next 48 hours. I’m moving the whole ball of wax over to Movable Type. Blogger is buggier than ever and I want to be able to do some tricks that MT will make easy. In theory.
So when you come back and get some kind of placeholder, don’t despair. You’ll find a way to endure the outage, I’m sure. Why not go out and take a walk? It’s not good to sit in front of your computer all the time anwyay.
an embarassment of riches
So yes, I stopped at Coliseum on the way to the gym and picked up Changing Planes. Most exciting. When I got home I stopped to tidy the ‘books to be read’ pile—boy howdy, do I need some built-in bookshelves in this office—and realized something.
I have a whole lot of books waiting for my attention.
Sure, it’s a wonderful sort of burden to have. And I have a week-long beach trip coming up. But I’m just startled at how much, over the last several months, my acquisitions have outstripped my ability to keep up. Here’s what I’ve unearthed so far:
- Life at Blandings: An Omnibus, P.G. Wodehouse
- Changing Planes, Ursula K. Le Guin
- Winter Hours, Mary Oliver
- The Translator, John Crowley
- The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2001, Edward O. Wilson, ed.
- The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
- McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Michael Chabon, ed.
- City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer
- The Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon
I don’t even know where to start here. But I’m really looking forward to that beach trip. (If you have a suggestion, drop me a line. I really need to get that comments feature on this thing, don’t I?)
[editor’s note: I do of course endorse purchasing your books through a local independent bookseller whenever possible. don’t you?]
Jul 13 03: tech report
EL Wire is cool. 
another hero down
I’m not a caviar enthusiast, but I feel strongly nonetheless: it’s bad enough that Russia’s caviar sturgeon are being poached rapidly towards extinction. But that in order to protect this short-sighted stupidity someone would order a contract hit on a cat boggles the mind. Except that it doesn’t really.
[Further notes on sturgeon poaching: you’ll need a big pan, and be ready to spend lots of time picking bones from your teeth.]
seasons
Made two deeee-lightful discoveries this evening. First, that Ursula Le Guin’s new collection of short works is out. The book, Changing Planes, is a series of the anthropological fictions that Ms. Le Guin does better than anybody else. She writes compassionate, wise studies of beings who live in worlds like or unlike our own but who (though they may have feathers or fins or mechanical hearts) give us a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. (How do I love Always Coming Home? Let me count the ways.) Can’t wait to pick it up. One of the stories, “Seasons of the Anserac”, is online; I’ve read it a half-dozen times since I stumbled across it several months back, and I found it as moving the last time as I did the first.
Second, I found out that Coliseum Books has re-opened at long last in its new digs on 42nd Street, across from Bryant Park. It closed—what, a year and a half ago? Two years?—when it lost its lease, and readers all over town mourned. Now NYC’s best independent book emporium has returned to us: cause indeed for rejoicing.
Guess what I’m doing tomorrow?
Jul 12 03: geekery
I grow ever more enamored with the idea of migrating this thing to Moveable Type. In spite of—or possibly because of—the logistical nightmare of installing and configuring it and then importing several months’ worth of posts. Anybody with advice or objections should speak up right quick.
science fashion
Erika is throwing a wingding tomorrow night, a farewell to New York and all its glory. Simply everyone will be there. People are coming in from other cities to attend this thing. (In the words of Sari: “How the hell does she know this many people?” She has ways.) The decorations guy has been working on the setup since sometime this afternoon. As much as it pains me to acknowledge her departure, I’ve realized that I have no choice. So I’m doing it in style, baby. Her directive to attendees is to ‘dress outrageously.’ Do you think a kilt and twenty feet of EL Wire (2.3mm, blue-green) will suffice?
Jul 11 03: thought for the day
Today’s thought—and yes, you only get the one, so make the best of it—came in via the discussion list for Studio Foglio’s sublime Girl Genius. It doesn’t have much to do with Girl Genius at all, but I love it. So here it is, for your edification:
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.—James Nicoll
Jul 10 03: shout-out to a stranger
I made a curious discovery today. Examining the site’s incoming traffic logs, I discovered that Kathryn Cramer has put my blog on her blogroll.
Who is Kathryn Cramer, you ask? Prior to this afternoon, I didn’t know either.
She’s an “anthologist, editor, and writer” living in Pleasantville, NY. I think she found me via comments I’d left around on weblogs about the Mob Project. Although (in an interesting bit of synchronicity) her blog entry for today suggests that it might also be because I’ve been posting about the SF genre. (Not in a while, but I guess it’s still true.) Who is she beyond that? I’ll need to read her blog for a while before I would dream of trying to answer. She and I read a few blogs in common, though, which makes me think that she must have a keen intellect and discerning tastes. Her interest in this thing notwithstanding.
Greetings to Kathryn and to anybody who got here via there. It’s very weird indeed to find myself on a total stranger’s list of ‘blogs to read.’ I wasn’t aware that anybody beyond a smallish circle of friends and relations even knew this thing existed. Now, my tiny island has been mapped into a much larger archipelago.
Canoes for everybody!
call for input
I’m considering geeking further out and moving the blog over to Moveable Type. Among other things, people keep asking for a comments feature, which this would enable. Anybody with opinions pro- or con- is encouraged to contact me, probably soon.
another mob!
I’ve received the instructions for Mob #4. It’s on Wednesday the 15th and will clearly be somewhere downtown, vaguely in the vicinity of the Angelika. I’ll be sending it out to various likely suspects, but if you want them feel free to drop me a line.
bang-bang-whimper
The weekend of the Fourth was excellent. Better than I’ve had in ages. Highlights:
- Spending the Fourth with my sister and her husband and my deeeee-lightful niece. Avery has doubled in mass since her birth—a mere two months! She weighs eight pounds now. We’re so proud of her. I pointed out that at this rate she’ll weigh just over eight tons on her second birthday. This is cause for some concern: how do you say “no, you can’t have another cookie” to an eight-ton two-year-old? However, I, being her uncle, will never have to say that to her. During the afternoon, we went to the beach. In the evening, we went down to the Port Jefferson harbor and watched a fireworks display by the Grucci family. In keeping with the Grucci’s world-class reputation, the fireworks were excellent.
- Driving our rental car onto the Port Jefferson ferry to Bridgeport. Cool, breezy, sunny…a capital way to travel. Sailboats everywhere.
- Picking up Sarita at the Bridgeport train station and making our way to Mattapoisett, Massachusetts and the Pico Beach house. This is the house in which Bob and John and Cesar and I, and Sari and Paul and Whitney and Kathleen and various other beloved friends, have spent at least one week of each summer for several years. This trip was not that trip, though. We were there for Bob and Whitney’s engagement clambake. We met Whitney’s parents. We ate chowder. We walked on the beach. Then we left.
- Spending the night at Deb and Kurt’s house in Falmouth, on Cape Cod. Before we even got to the house, we met our hosts at the local trade school—for another fireworks display! Two in one weekend! How cool is that? We stood out in front of the school for a good while, kicking mosquitoes at each other. By the time Deb & Kurt arrived, most of Cape Cod seemed to have driven past us already, headed for the football field. We wondered where we would sit.
Then we walked back to the field ourselves. For one thing, most of Cape Cod was there. Easily more than a thousand cars—this field was big. Pretty much every kid under the age of eleven had one of those necklaces filled with glowing green liquid. The sun had just set, so we found ourselves on a rise overlooking a field patched with luminous rings and stripes and chains, like a plaza full of space-alien cultists. Then the show began, and our attention was elsewhere. Right over our heads, the sky was spitting and crackling and burning and whizzing and popping and bursting into outrageous flower. It went on and on and on and on. Suddenly it made sense that this immense mob would pack themselves into this campus, prepared to spend an hour or two waiting to drive out again afterwards: they were great. The Gruccis’ show was more expensive-looking, but this one was more fun.
- Okay, so then we went to Deb and Kurt’s house. Paul and Sari and I got there before our hosts did, so we waited on the front porch. Meanwhile, their three enormous dogs raved at us from the other side of the living-room window. This was the point when we discovered that Sari has a Serious Thing About Big Dogs. She made a few small noises of alarm that were obviously larger noises of alarm being viciously suppressed. Deb and Kurt soon arrived and let us in, and from that point their hostility melted away. Only one of the dogs seemed interested in us at all, actually, and of course it was most interested in Sari. That was König, who isn’t so much a dog as the Beast of the Apocalypse on a three-cola high. König, a Rottweiler, is a behemoth with a manic, natural-catastrophe enthusiasm that suggests that if you don’t scratch him behind his big floppy ears he’ll snap off your hand without really stopping to think about it. Sari maintained her composure admirably, given that we could tell that she was clinging to her sanity by her fingernails. Eventually König was shut up in a bathroom for the night. Sari was much better after that, but she was also very very happy to drive back to the City the next morning.
Jul 2 03: flashmob!!
Paul and Erika and Sari and Andrew and I just participated in an inexplicable mob. The first one appeared in a store that sold ‘accessories’ and was covered by NPR; the second appeared in Macy’s and was covered by Wired (and NPR again, and others); the third showed up in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt New York. Having missed the second one, I was damned if I’d miss the third one as well. So I didn’t.
MOB#3 was called Grand Central Mob Ballet. The e-mailed marching orders told us to be in the dining concourse of Grand Central Terminal at 6:45; we were to give a code phrase to anybody we saw reading the New York Review of Books in exchange for further instructions. We were to show up in comfortable shoes accompanied by a prepared one-dollar bill, marked with the word ‘MOB’ where the word ‘ONE’ usually appears, to the right of George Washington’s head.
I found a book-review guy. He gave me a slip of paper, and here’s what it said:
And that’s pretty much what we did. Once again, cheesebikini? has come through with photos and links to other people’s impressions of the event. We had a lovely time, the applause was raucous, and I’m sure we confused the hell out of the tourists who were standing around in the lobby at the time. The security guards looked as if they’d have freaked out if we had been there much longer—but as it was they only made it as far as bewildered.*** MOB #3 ***
Change of PlansIf you are reading this, we have decided to change venues.
(1) By 7:02, walk out to 42nd St. and look for the main entrance to the Grand Hyatt. Enter and take the escalator up one flight to the main lobby. Loiter until 7:07.
(2) At 7:07, start taking the escalator and elevators up one floor, to the wraparound railing overlooking the lobby. Stand around it, looking down. Fan out to cover as much of the railing as possible. If asked why you are there, point down to the lobby and say, “Look.”
(3) At 7:12, begin applauding. Applaud for fifteen seconds, then disperse in an orderly fashion.
(Note: the exit on that floor is not a pedestrian exit.)
What was with the dollar bils? And the shoes? Unclear, but given the title of the event I suspected that we were to be dancing to the buskers who were playing in the Grand Central’s Main Concourse, then paying our musicians with the money.
I think Grand Central was abandoned quite late in the game, organizationally speaking. This morning the 1/2/3/9 Trains were shut down for hours due to a bioterrorism scare (at last report, nobody knew what the mysterious white powder was, but they knew it wasn’t anthrax). And then shortly afterwards something happened at the Brooklyn Bridge—apparently a man was offered money to drive a stranger’s car across it, and he alerted the NYPD. But Grand Central was definitely full of cops and National Guardsmen and god knows who else. I’m thinking somebody felt this would have been a bad place for an inexplicable mob.
Whatever. Even the replacement script was fun. We played ‘Who’s here for the mob?’ in the dining concourse. We pretended not to know each other as we passed time in the hotel lobby. We felt the hair on our arms rise as we casually diffused into the balcony. We tried to look blasé as we stood around looking down upon the fountains and elevators and unsettled security folks. We cheered, wildly. We filed out, trying to maintain the same air of “who, these people? No idea” under which we had arrived. For ten minutes, we were an inexplicable mob. Even better, we were art.
Viva DaDa, baby.
(Want to join a mob? E-mail themobproject@yahoo.com)