• Back To Notebook Front
• Back To NY Front

06.24.01
Sunday

Down Fifth Avenue from an almost religious shrine to capitalism - Rockefeller Center – is another religious landmark, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I worshipped this morning. Its ornate twin spires once poked the open sky; now the church holds its own in the midst of the skyscrapers bunched around it on the busy street. The interior, with its vast arches and holy icons, instantly transports you from the metropolis, which I appreciated on a Sunday morning, especially since the noisy Gay Pride parade was getting started outside. Still, I remembered what I have always found difficult about Catholic liturgy: the formality so detaches the congregation, I feel that I am watching something rather than worshipping (ironically, I make an identical complaint about contemporary, keyboard-and-drums-style worship). 

Back at Rockefeller Center, the religious metaphors continued to press on my mind as I made my journalism student pilgrimage to the NBC studio tour. The tour is rewarding despite its overdone tourist trimmings: it begins and ends in the NBC gift shop, two large floors of T-shirts, keychains, plush toys, and things you’d never think of (like an NBC screen-duster and NBC taffy) that make it sort of a New York Disney World. Then up the elevator to the Dateline studio, an approximate copy of the Starship Enterprise designed by Star Trek-loving former NBC exec Neal Shapiro. When watching at home, I’d always wondered about the stairs in the studio – why we are expected to get a kick out of watching Stone or Jane climbing steps.  Our caffeine-overdosed tour guide told us the network suits determined viewers are less likely to flip channels when the anchors are moving. Well, okay then. 

After working at the NBC affiliate in Grand Rapids I knew that TV studios are not the hospital-clean, vibrantly-colored, sci-fi places the camera makes them look like; they’re cramped and overrun with cables like a field with weeds. But I didn’t expect to find things so similar here at world headquarters of a leading network newsmagazine: the floor is kitchen linoleum that has been spray-painted, the gray trim on the sets is duct tape. The tour guide explained that when the switch to HDTV is completed by 2008, such hardware store shortcuts will be obvious and thus need to be refurbished. On the way out, she added that the stage in the corner, which I was standing right next to with my back turned, was where Tom Brokaw anchored the election returns last fall. I squinted and tried to imagine Tim Russert sitting there scribbling on his marker board and fretting about Florida. 

Next was Rosie O’Donnell’s studio, formerly the domain of Phil Donahue. Warner Brothers rents it out for Rosie so she doesn’t have to move to Los Angeles. I had heard from people who had taken the tour that it was small, but I still could not believe it when I walked inside. Rosie’s desk, which faces sideways to save space, is just a few feet from the curtain where she first emerges. In fact, when there are musical guests they have to tape the segment beforehand; they move the desk out of the way and use the whole stage, then rearrange again and tape the rest of the show. The studio is only about 20-30 seats wide; cameras always pan from one wall towards the other, never showing both, and speakers throughout the studio amplify crowd noise. The crowd is somewhat amplified to begin with, having feasted on twinkies and other sweets Rosie leaves under their chairs to sugar them up. Rosie’s off for the summer, so I'll have to get such goodies the old-fashioned way.

The Saturday Night Live studio was next, and this too seems smaller in person, though it’s the biggest room in the building. Originally the home of NBC’s radio symphony, the equipment-stuffed room features the main stage with a collapsible platform for the guest host, flanked by a larger stage for complicated sets and the musical stage (whose beams in the background are not actually steel, which would screw up the sound, but actually wood and paper mache). There are no permanent seats on the floor; a couple dozen are set up for VIP’s but have a miserable view as sets are hauled back and forth in front of them. The second level, for the general public (4,000 of 250,000 ticket requests are granted per year) features seats from Yankee Stadium which were borrowed from George Steinbrenner in the 70’s and now retained out of superstition. Still, we were told, these do not provide a good view – the best angle comes from home. 

The tour helped to confirm the fact, which I can’t completely get to sink in, that I really am in New York City, the center of the world (it also helped that I stuck my head out my dorm window tonight and spotted the trees of Central Park, which oriented me here in Manhattan). Watching all the clips on the tour intro video – old news footage of the Huntley-Brinkley nightly news, Johnny Carson and his plaid suits, the good old days (Coneheads et al) of Saturday Night Live, the antics of Seinfeld – was a tour of 20th Century Americana, and unlike similar tours I’ve had recently at the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame and Michigan Historical Center, this one was in the television capital of the world. I walked out (dodging T-shirts and souvenir videos in the gift shop) with the feeling that I had just scaled TV’s Everest.

I took the bus to the United Nations headquarters – Exhibit A for those who make the case that New York really is the capital of the world. The high-rise is hardly distinctive or post-card ready but the statues, rows of flags, and people around it gave me the feeling I had seen an international landmark. 

Navigating down to Washington Square, which I hadn’t seen yet, was difficult thanks to the Pride Parade. When I did get there, my first glimpse of the arch came as two drag queens danced by on East 8th Street, which sort of seared the moment in my memory. I resisted the impulse to go clobber the meathead wielding the “Repent or Perish” sign (with “perish” framed by flames) on the sidewalk. As uncomfortable as a parade like this is for a guy from the Midwest, where men are men and cut their hair short, I don’t understand the ferocity religious zealots bring to the culture wars over homosexuality. Why speak with such volume when the Bible spills so little ink over it? Why discredit the agonizing stories of those who say they repeatedly try to change their sexual orientation and cannot? I think I know the answer: Fundamentalists are so rattled by the culture change of the 20th Century, in which White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism lost its common-denominator status, that they’re looking for last-gasp battle trenches to dig where they think the digging is good. And few conflicts are as dramatic as WASP-ism versus drag queens (as they see it). Drag just feels so heathen, so un-holy, doesn’t it? It just looks like an assault on family values, so it must be. And it must be that all homosexuals like to wear drag. Hard to argue when the imagery is so striking. 

I chose to take a different view of Pride week. For one thing, I don’t interpret the visibility and promotion of this event as homosexual aggression, as James Dobson moves a lot of newsletters by claiming. The people I saw dancing on the floats seemed to just feel, well, relieved more than anything else, that for one afternoon they didn't have to play pretend. And as for the drag, sure it makes me squirm, but why exactly is that? I think it’s some good old-fashioned Hollywood brainwashing, which glamorizes sex between a certain kind of looking man and a certain kind of looking woman. Hollywood has a hard time positively portraying men who aren’t ruggedly handsome and women who aren’t flowers, and anyone in general who isn’t young and nubile – let alone homosexuals.   (I know, Angelina Jolie is a superhero in a new movie, but I just saw Pearl Harbor, where the gender roles are, as usual, ironclad and the romance simplistic and cookie-cutter.)

So we have Hollywood partly to blame for our discomfort with the kind of folks that I saw. They were, in a way, challenging our society’s fixed ideas of beauty, and I for one welcome that challenge.  Sometimes we get mixed up and think the Bible is our motivation, when in fact in might just be our surrounding culture (fundamentalists in particular stink at realizing this). To wear drag (though again, few do) is to stick it to Hollywood and its Disney-ized plastic romances – not to stick it to God. So somebody go tell James Dobson that Hollywood, so supposedly evil and liberal, is to blame for our society’s continued rejection of homosexuals! 

(For the record, I do not go as far as some and suggest that homosexuality is just a natural variation like being left-handed; I think of it more as, in a vague sense, a sort of handicap. But neither do I accept self-righteous diatribes when the origins and nature homosexuality are in fact becoming more, not less, complicated and mysterious.) 

From the Washington Square Arch I took the subway to Penn Station – what’s left of it. In the city’s heyday Penn Station was a grand terminal with lofty arches, even bigger, I think, than Grand Central. When it was controversially demolished in 1963, it prompted major efforts to preserve other New York landmarks (including Grand Central). Now Penn is a non-descript underground Amtrak hub, looking like any airport terminal. I took the escalator to street level and looked around for Madison Square Garden, which I knew was proximate. Then I turned around and was thoroughly embarrassed: the Garden is right on top of Penn Station! It was built on the occupying the same spot as the old Penn structure. I knew that...

06.23.01
Saturday

Day Two of the South Asian Journalists Association conference here at Columbia, to which I, despite being decidedly non-South Asian, was kindly invited. 

It’s funny: earlier this year we had a visiting African pastor come to our class, and he said that a few years ago when he got off the plane in Boston, that was the first time he ever realized he was black. I had a similar experience this weekend about being white. There is simply no substitute – not “racial sensitivity” or any other PC buzzword – for being a racial minority in a large room to give you an understanding of what it’s like. At the college I go to, which is predominantly white, “diversity” is a thinly disguised code word for people of African or Asian heritage, so it was enlightening to hear people accept my explanation of my presence at this conference and say, “Well, it’s good to have diversity.” 

But the focus this weekend was not on race, but journalism. Most comforting to me was hearing a panel of New York Times reporters talking about their professional weaknesses; they complained of writer’s block when staring at a blank screen, of dreading the writing process after arduous news-gathering, even of being too shy to go out and interview people. I thought only amateur hacks like me had those problems! Of course, I guess I should be a little discouraged by this as well: it doesn’t get any easier the farther you get into this business. 

Other highlights: an enlightening workshop on Web surfing by Jeremy Caplan, 
who showed us, among much else, Colin Powell’s official favorite site: 
RefDesk.com. Now that’s a Web site.  Also, hearing the true confessions of former CNN anchor Riz Khan, who told of the time he was rushed to the set to deliver breaking news, having only been told “Bomb in Delhi!”  The camera came on and he coolly related, “We’re receiving reports of an explosion in the Indian capital of New Delhi, at this time it’s believed to be a bomb. More details after this break.” They make it look so polished...

06.20.01
Wednesday

Went to see Phantom of the Opera tonight – simply a stunning show, especially at the grand and aptly-named Majestic on 44th Street, where it opened back in 1986 . The thunderous score, the goosebump-raising special effects, the spooky story – this is duly a classic, an icon in Broadway history. 

I first saw Phantom a couple years ago in Toronto during its last run at Pantages, where Paul Stanley of KISS was playing the main role. Stanley, an obvious alien to opera (though not to thick makeup jobs) served to highlight the Phantom’s eclectic nature, but on Broadway, Howard McGillin better conveys the Phantom as musical genius and opera connoisseur. 

I read one review that said McGillin is more nuanced than the original Phantom, Michael Crawford – where Crawford was seductive and aggressive, Gillin is lost and lonely, which is not only more endearing, but also more complex. Not having seen Crawford, I can’t say for sure, but I thought McGillin was plenty aggressive; in fact, his portrayal and even his singing seemed slightly labored (same with Jim Weitzer as Raoul) and overly breathy. But this is a debate for the most avid “Phanatics;” overall McGillin is solid, and nails the last scene, when he discharges his blood-rage and collapses into wrenching, solitary ache in one of the most striking changes of tone in musical theater. 

Lisa Vroman as Christine Daae was a treat; she’s ordinarily the matinee stand-in but was the most consistently awe-inspiring, at times even richer in tone than the original Christine, Sarah Brightman, who had a tendency to flatten certain vowels. 

I was perched high above the stage in the steep Majestic mezzanine, which made me long for my orchestra seats in Toronto, but this did provide a fuller view of the layout of the dazzling stage – especially the eerie boat ride through the fog-shrouded, candle-specked underground lake. Phantom also gets a lot of haunting mileage from the simple step of moving the main character to a catwalk above the stage, where he casts down his fury on the world below. 

The show remains so popular because of its bells and whistles, of course, as well as its familiar music. But its themes are resonant in a postmodern age of image worship.  The centerpieces of the face and the mask are as striking as ever as today's mega-media sells facial beauty to a civilization that has turned it into a mini-religion. Working in media, where people are reduced and stigmatized according to their faces, I wonder how much culture in the 21st Century operates according to the “masks” people wear: the physical mask of makeup or the metaphorical mask of disingenuousness. Thus the Phantom’s cry – “Hide your face so the world will never find you” – is poignant today. 

Afterwards I happened to run into a friend from Time Inc. at the Times Square subway station. He was coming back from a Mets game. It’s a small world, even here. 

06.19.01
Tuesday

Technically, it was my first published piece for SI For Kids – a brief comparison of the championship Lakers and the Showtime Laker dynasty of the 1980’s that appeared on the SIKids website. I quickly got acquainted with the journalism reality that what you write and what leaves the editor’s desk for publication do not always compare favorably. But such is life.

50th Street was partially closed for that evening’s filming of Men In Black 2.  I came back to Rockefeller Center to see what was going on, but nothing was. So I took the subway from the sweltering Rock Center station to Central Park, where the Met Opera was putting on a summer showcase. Unfortunately, getting there late relegated me to squinting across the Great Lawn; I vaguely discerned a few figures under the glowing opera shell and attributing distant rumblings to them.  But I was content to lie back on the lawn and become enveloped in the dimming sky.

I spent the rest of the night at the dorm immersed in Ellis’ The Epic of New York City. I found the colonial-era material especially informative: I didn’t know New York was such a hub of the slave trade, or that George Washington’s troops were nearly finished off on the island of Manhattan, but a hesitant British general camping out in Brooklyn let them get away. That’s one of the few things I prefer about New York over Chicago – its still-visible ties to the Revolution.

• Back To Notebook Front
• Back To NY Front
• NBierma.com