Bike Trip to the Pallisades

Today I took advantage of the great sunny weather and biked with Stacey and Ryan and Mark, a couple of her class mates, over the George Washington Bridge to the Pallisades in New Jersey. After the monumental ride over the bridge, 10 minutes of cycling hell going the wrong way down busy vehicle streets full of roadworks got us to cycling paradise: towering sandstone cliffs, the expanse of the Hudson and the illusion that you have a stretch of unspoilt nature all to yourself.

(Non)Resident Alien

The IRS calls me a 'nonresident alien' - I love this term so much, Stacey gave me a t-shirt with it on as a gift. Here is one mean alien and his cool friend:

Brooklyn Night Life: Orthodox Jews and Monkey Town

I wanted to go out in Brooklyn this weekend to get to know my new burb better, and made the last-minute decision, after my coop shift, to head over to Monkey Town in Brooklyn which I had read about some time back in the New York Times. Its in Williamsburg, which takes about half an hour by bike (longer by subway!) and the bike ride is interesting, because its one of those trips that passes through a shifting sequence of ethnic neighbourhoods. Most distinctive is the Orthodox Jewish area of South Williamsburg. On Saturday night at around 10:30pm it was abuzz with bearded men in huge furry hats and white leggings and women dressed in dark simple dresses with prams.



MonkeyTown was a real treat: its a bar-restaurant in which the back portion is dedicated to multimedia shows, with the help of four giant projection screens on the walls of a cube-shaped room. Comfortable sofas line the screens and you can lounge back and be washed over by sound and images. This show had a line-up of ambient electronic bands (Xela, Zelienople and Helios). The music reminded me a little of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. It was unexpectedly relaxing, and a really good evening's discovery of what Brooklyn has to offer.

A Small Piece of Socialism: Tasty and Cheap

In America, the politics are so skewed that words like 'liberal' or 'socialist' are demonized. Even something which might maybe in passing be construed as vaguely left-leaning leaning gets damned as 'pink'. So it is odd that my move to Brooklyn has brought me into something which is as socialist an experience as I've had so far - more so than anything I experienced in a year living in communist China, or in socialist Zimbabwe in the 1980's.

Since January, I have become a member of the Park Slope Food Coop on Union Street. This place is something of an institution in Brooklyn; it was founded in 1973 and is now one of the largest member-run coops in the US. Food coops are fairly common here - friends of mine have talked about them before - and they work something like this: the coop, which looks like a supermarket, is either only open to members or members get special discounts, in return for which they are required to work for no pay. The Park Slope Coop is members-only; they check your ID at the door. They mark up everything they sell by 20%, which means it is significantly cheaper than a normal supermarket. And better yet: the food is really good quality; almost all of it is organic, and a lot of it is sold in bulk (read: minimal packaging).

I have to put in 2.5 hours every four weeks, on a regular shift. I am in receiving, which means I bring stuff out onto the shop floor and pack it onto shelves. This particular shift, I spent most of my time in the produce section. It was actually really enjoyable to pack fresh fruit and vegetables onto the shelves, in the same way that gardening can be enjoyable. Here's me stocking the lettuce:



There are only 20 full-time employees at the coop. Its in an old building next to a fire station, compact space which can get really crowded but there is high turnover, so the food is always fresh. It is strange to go in their and see beautifully coiffed women working the tills, or people who look like - and probably are - graphic designers shouldering bags of beans.

Schunnemunk in Autumn, schunnemunk in Spring

The first hike of 2008 and the last hike of 2007 were both at the same location: Schunnemunk Mountain, close to both the Hudson and the Westpoint Military Academy, about an hour's drive north of New York. It was really great to get out of the city again - small things like the colours and the textures of tree trunks were fascinating; it felt as though I were in a refreshing sensual shower, even though the landscapes showed no sign of spring. Here are some photos from this year:

















And these ones are from last year's Autumn trip; I never got around to posting them.

American Slang

Here's some slang which I've heard a lot here in New York but never outside the US.

• back in the day - some time back in the not-too-distant past
• like - most young Americans say this word about 5 times in every sentence, meaning 'to say' 'to be' or just as a random filler with no meaning, as in 'she was, like, get out of here'
  
• to luck out - contrary to what I thought, this means to be lucky
• ghetto - as in 'that supermarket is so ghetto' or 'isn't the B-Train ghetto?', both of which have been said to me. Means poor and, implicitly, black.
• douche bag - an insult, literally a bag for squirting liquid into body orifices
  
• hipster - Brooklyn is full of these, its what young arty people are before they morph into yuppies
• sketchy - is the American equivalent of dodgy in British slang - uncertain, or dubious
  
• junk - penis, as in 'man, that urinal is all open - anyone can see your junk!'
  

More Than 1% of US Adults Behind Bars

This story was on National Public Radio this morning as I listened it, working from home with a cold:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

States spend on average 7% of their budget on the prison system. In the NPR interview, they were talking about the 'Prison-Industrial Complex' which was offering jobs in depressed areas. I'd never heard the term before, but there is even a Wikpedia entry for it.

Gives a whole new meaning to America being the home of the free.

Network of Supreme Court Cases

One of the courses I am doing this semester is 'Networking Theory' under Professor Dragomir Radev from the University of Michigan. I've just been working on the representation of the Supreme Court decisions as a network. I didn't get any good visualizations yet, but I'm hoping to carry on with this for a later project.

Tenement Museum

I'm trying to carry on the momentum of discovering New York that I had last semester with the fabulous History of the City of New York class. Today I went to the Tenement Museum with Sampada - its an old tenement building on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. They are tracing the stories of the 7000 (!) people that passed through there between the 1870's and 1931. The museum shows how hard the lives of the people that lived there were - but also tells a lot of interesting stories on the way.

Damn -forgot my camera.