Brooklyn on foot

Taking a break from theater, fellow Drama Desk member and Medill grad Adrienne Onofri has written her first book, Walking Brooklyn, which Wilderness Press will publish next month. The book offers 30 tours exploring historical legacies, neighborhood culture, side streets, and waterways, and the excerpt she gave me pretty much takes me right outside my doorstep to Fort Greene, where Richard Wright wrote Native Son and where Spike Lee and Marianne Moore have called home. Sounds like a good reason to get outside and give my legs a stretch this summer.

My kind of town, still

The city of Chicago, reflecting multitudes. I took this picture by shooting right into "The Bean," as Anish Kapoor's undulating sculpture, a highlight of beautiful Millennium Park, is called by locals. If Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards was going to be like this I'd have no complaints at all and would in fact bring my own shovel to pitch in and help make it happen. Chicago's Frank Gehry component, the Millennium Park bandshell, is a lot more inspired, and inspired, than the "Miss Liberty" (ugh!) planned right across Fourth Avenue from us.

The park wasn't ready when I last visited Chicago in 2001; in fact, I wrote a Stagebill article about the organizers, who were on edge about getting all the necessary funding. But they did, and the results are terrific. Chicago has also stolen some thunder from the "first city" by hosting the first, excellent production of the Brit hit Jerry Springer--The Opera,which runs at the small but commanding Bailiwick Rep through July 8. And I hadn't realized how much I missed stuffed pizza till we hit Gino's East (back at its old location since a move, but in a sleeker, street-level building), Giordano's, and Carmen's (which has the edge on cheese, but Gino's still comes out on top).

We hadn't ridden the El in years till our short sojourn the week before last, on unusually hot days. It's now color-coordinated, and the Red line took us past familiar haunts like Wrigley Field and the Aragon Ballroom to Howard Street (so cold and windswept in winter) and the Purple Evanston line. The hue is of course derived from Northwestern's school colors, but those colors are one of the few things the town has retained since I was there last in 1997. The good news is that those who opposed the McDonald's when I was a student (not me; I went once every week, before my cholesterol and triglycerides started spiking) won the battle; it closed years ago. But the war has been lost. The old storefronts remain, and you can still get a Gutbuster-size Dr. Pepper at Buffalo Joe's, but in place of the Sherman Snack Shop is a Cosi; wine bars, wine shops, and big brand names proliferate; J.K. Sweets serves "international cuisine" along with its cookies; and Carmen's Pizza, a local legend, has been shunted to a dimly lit building in the shadow of an 18-theater megaplex that adjoins a Wolfgang Puck restaurant.

If that thing, around Church and Maple--which, to be fair, looked quite posh from a quick tour of its lobby and has six art cinemas to go along with the 12 showing Shrek the Third--had existed when I was a student, I never would have gone to Chicago as much as I did. Back then, at the dawn of home video time, Evanston had the much-missed Varsity, which became a Cineplex Odeon theater showing nothing but campus favorite The Big Chill till it caught a big chill and shuttered, a theater on Main I think, and a small multiplex on Central that I slogged through all kinds of weather to attend.

While the campus has added a few new buildings, including a moderne complex for the Medill School of Journalism steps away from ivy-encrusted Fisk Hall, it felt happily unchanged, though smaller (well, I was smaller, or at least younger, and thinner, then). Have a look. Just ignore the massive condo projects going up in the back of the frame. I thought we were in Evanston, CA, and not Evanston, IL, but such are changing times.

Desert bloom

With rainy 40-degree weather persisting here it's hard to believe we were enjoying dry 90-degree heat in Arizona just last week, but here's the evidence. I took the picture during a 3.5m hike around Granite Mountain, near The Boulders resort where we stayed, last Wednesday. I'm impatient to trade my winter jacket for shorts for a long spell. I added a picture taken at The Boulders below.

Postcard from HK

"Hong Kong: Live It! Love It!" is the latest slogan my former home is using to drum up the tourist trade. It goes without saying that I love it, and I'm glad to see it intact and in one piece a full decade after its handover to China. "1997" was on everyone's lips when I lived there, but, despite the severe economic downturn the old Crown Colony weathered, and residual nervousness over the Chinese government's intentions in the "one country, two systems" framework, 97 was as much a non-cataclysm as, say, Y2K.

And there is much to love in Hong Kong. Its subway system, a visitor's main tourist artery, is the pride of the world, a model of gleaming efficiency that even the most passionate New York booster will recall with tears of envy when boarding the cruddy old D train upon his or her return. Its ever-increasing verticality makes a happy home for its population of black kites, sleek and beautiful birds of prey who kept me enraptured just be wheeling around the sky level to our 32nd floor perch at a 40-story hotel in Tin Hau. [The hotel's name? L'Hotel. Hong Kongers are mad about anything French. The arrival of Sofia Coppola's vapid Marie Antoinette was a cultural event of some import, and its showcasing at fancy mall cinemas surrounded by shops a-glitter with French designer labels a fitting launchpad.] The Hong Kong Film Archive, opened in 2001, performs a valuable service in preserving that part of its past. The local cuisine is exquisite, particularly if you don't mind feasting on roast pigeon (delicious) and walking through grungy, entrails-strewn cooked food markets to find it. And the Pizza Hut is the best on Earth. Why that is I do not know.

But live it? I'm not so sure. The black kites see immune to the air pollution that smoggily beset most of our time there; never a model environment, HK has worsened since China's rapid industrialization took hold. And its most popular districts, like Causeway Bay and Central, are fast reaching Soylent Green levels of uninhabitability, or at least unwalkability; the streets are simply choked with people, some waiting to board ground transport that adds to the soupy air quality. And bloggers of my acquaintance who lament the passage of time and its toll on landmarks in New York would have a fit in Hong Kong; the picture above that I took of the historic Star Ferry Terminal is rather conspicuously missing the historic Star Ferry Terminal, which was torn down to make way for a new one not long before our arrival. The government promises to take "cultural sensitivity" into greater consideration before the next renovation project, but a little piece of my memories is now rubble.


I did notice that as Hong Kong extends deeper onto reclaimed land from its "fragrant harbor" (which in time will be a fragrant river) it's loathe to tear down too many buildings; the older ones are simply absorbed into the newer ones that front them, like some sort of hybrid organism connected by store-lined passageways. And it is never at a loss for creative ways to use its verticality. When I last visited in 2000, the Mid-Levels Escalator, or "Travelator" (pictured) hadn't quite sprouted the resaturant-laden economy that underlies its snaking to the upper reaches of some difficult-to-walk streets; now a stomach-popping variety of food options is available along its path, from Krispy Kreme to Russian. But here, too, a price is paid. The picture-perfect view of Central, once dominated by the transcendent HSBC Building, is now overly cluttered with too many mediocre skyscrapers, which at night try to outdo one another with fancy, zig-zaggy light patterns along their tops and sides. The skyline has lost its specialness. And I'm leery of some of those chockablock apartment complexes soaring ever upwards. I guess it works for Hong Kong but is that what Atlantic Yards, across the street, will look like?


There is, however, green space in Hong Kong, on the outlying islands like Lamma (pictured is a view not far from our friend Christine's flat). Improved ferry service and the addition of more homes, restaurants, and amenities over time haven't undone its quieter charms. I've lived, and loved, and again left Hong Kong, skeptical of a future that summons Blade Runner more and more insistently but relieved that its some of its smaller wonders are intact.

Where the wild things are

I need to do a deeper, more philosophical post about our recent trip to Hong Kong. But, in the meantime, is this not the coolest place for a seven-year-old to live? Meet Aidan Holmbraker, aspiring paleontologist and rock-and-roll drummer; the mural on his wall surely gives him a leg-up on the former career. The son of our dear friends Bernie and Amy Holmbraker, Aidan said his one condition regarding the mural was "no meat-eating dinosaurs," lest they disturb his sleep. [But he still had plenty of awesome pictures of raptors digging into intestines to share with me.]

When Bernie told me Aidan had a dinosaur mural on his wall, I thought, hey, cute. But I was unprepared for how breathtakingly professional it was; not surprising, given that the muralist, Bernie's Chicago-based sister Susan, has been at this for a number of years. It took her five days to execute this project. I was so taken with it I immediately wanted murals and frescoes of dinosaurs, Godzilla, and maybe Frankenstein and the Wolf Man on our walls here in Brooklyn, but while marveling at the quality of Aidan's artwork, Lora was rather unenthused about my plans. A man can dream. Click to see more of Holmbraker Murals.

I thought I knew a few things about dinosaurs, my life-long obsession, but I'm amazed at how much more Aidan knew, and how adult his books were. Dinosaurs, rock-and-roll, and an Asian address that's reasonably close to Mongolia and fossil finds: the pride of his parents is shaping up to be the 21st century Indiana Jones.