I'll see you in the ICU!

An unexpected sort of day

I was planning on cramming med-surg all day saturday and sunday, but I got a call in the early afternoon from my friend Becca (the other architect in the ETP program.) She was heading back into the city from the Thanksgiving holiday at her mom's and was vehicular, so she wanted to take me on a scenic drive--who could say no? Well, she got caught in traffic and we got a later start than we had planned, so that cut into our scenic drive (that and the fact that it gets dark here around 4 pm) so we drove around a bit, and wandered back toward her place in Brooklyn.

In San Fran, we don't know jack about the burroughs the way New Yorkers do (and even they don't know about the other burroughs) so I have to tell you guys, I really liked Brooklyn. It's not the Brooklyn of the movies (and, here I can't think of a single movie that's depicted Brooklyn pejoratively, but I guess every time you see a shady character, or a street-wise youth, he's from Brooklyn)

Brooklyn looks a LOT like San Fran to me. The feel is similar to the Haight-Ashbury area, around Page and Webster, or Lyon and that vicinity. The scale was fabulous on the whole--a "human" scale--the buildings weren't imposing and the street width: building height ratio was spectaular--spot on.

The shops were all boutiques, and I kept thinking of the Hayes street area that was once prostitues and IV drug users when the dot coms took over, and then became bistros and boutiques--it's one of the more sought after areas in SF now.

OK, so that's Brooklyn.

We went to Becca's place, a lovely 4th floor walk up, in which she and her husband Joel had the two apartments on the top floor--lovely, loft like renovation, big enough for them and their two teenage daughters.

As luck would have it, they were going to go see Arlo Guthrie at Carnegie Hall (her mom had bought tickets for the entire family) and one of their daughters didn't want to go, so they offered it to me.

I didn't want to impose, but they assured me the ticket would go to waste, and if I didn't mind a bit of family chaos, that I was welcome to it.

So, we went.



Arlo Guthrie is someone I know precious little about--I know of his father, Woodie, but even then, I couldn't name one song for you. I'm not opposed to exposing myself to new things, so it was great. While it's not my preferred style of music, I could see that for the baby boomers this was nostalgia. Arlo was part of the folk music troubador thing that was going on in the beatnik 60s, war protests and so on. I guess with the general feeling about our current government, he's experiencing a bit of a revival.

He did a lot of his father's tunes, and even billed himself as "Woody" Arlo Guthrie, which we couldn't figure out the reasoning behind.

He had the whole family (it seems) up there, playing, singing or just dancing around. His grandson was on drums, his daughter and her husband were singing and playing guitar (and she has an amazing, angelic voice) and his eldest son is on keyboards, and they had a steel guitar player that I couldn't see from where I was sitting. And of course there were the requisite little kids doing gymnastics (the one in the red dress was the daughter of the husband and wife on guitar) Very cute, very family. Even, one of Arlo's grandkids with the super 'fro and glittery red bass guitar came out and joined them for a couple of numbers--it was awesome.



Afterward, we went thru time square (is it "time square" Or "time's square" I dunno)
and Rebecca pointed out one of her past projects--she worked at a firm that did super-mega graphics and she did one of the building signs in Time('s) square, and the business was gone, but her sign was still partly there.

The business that cleared out left a vacancy that was adopted by Charmin (that's right, the same people that make toilet paper) and is now the "charmin toilets" in Time Square.



and it was so obscene, the whole Vegas, Cirusesqueness of it all. Here's the Nasdaq building--the building as television, which seems a popular idea, we saw several buildings that were just LCD panels up the side, with graphics moving around constantly--it makes you dizzy. This one's not so bad:



Right after this, we turned the corner and they dropped me off at the Port Authority (yikes! I'm alone at night in Time's square and...Hellllllp!) but I made my way to the A train and took it all the way up to 168th and walked home the rest of the way.

It was fun, and a nice capper to the week off.
Now I can cross off "see Carnegie Hall" and "see Arlo Guthrie" off my list of to-do's!

posted by sketchmonkey @ 6:53 AM