MIKE NGUYEN

How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again—
If your feet are nimble and light
You can get there by candlelight.

     It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my  finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in  the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

     Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

—-

     In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

     I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me about new faces.” It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already spelt with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.

     It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. I was making only $65 or $70 then a week then (“Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands,” I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by an editor of the magazine for which I worked), so little money that some weeks I had to charge food at Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop in order to eat, a fact which went unmentioned in the letters I wrote to California. I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself. At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary but quite inflexible rules. And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of would matter.

     Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. I could go to a party and meet someone who called himself Mr. Emotional Appeal and ran The Emotional Appeal Institute or Tina Onassis Blandford or a Florida cracker who was then a regular on what the called “the Big C,” the Southampton-El Morocco circuit (“I’m well connected on the Big C, honey,” he would tell me over collard greens on his vast borrowed terrace), or the widow of the celery king of the Harlem market or a piano salesman from Bonne Terre, Missouri, or someone who had already made and list two fortunes in Midland, Texas. I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.

     You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.

     Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.

     In fact it was difficult in the extreme for me to understand those young women for whom New York was not simply an ephemeral Estoril but a real place, girls who bought toasters and installed new cabinets in their apartments and committed themselves to some reasonable furniture. I never bought any furniture in New York. For a year or so I lived in other people’s apartments; after that I lived in the Nineties in an apartment furnished entirely with things taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away. And when I left the apartment in the Nineties (that was when I was leaving everything, when it was all breaking up) I left everything in it, even my winter clothes and the map of Sacramento County I had hung on the bedroom wall to remind me who I was, and I moved into a monastic four-room floor-through on Seventy-fifth Street. “Monastic” is perhaps misleading here, implying some chic severity; until after I was married and my husband moved some furniture in, there was nothing at all in those four rooms except a cheap double mattress and box springs, ordered by telephone the day I decided to move, and two French garden chairs lent me by a friend who imported them. (It strikes me now that the people I knew in New York all had curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair staighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated for Sunday supplements. I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engagé only about our most private lives.)

     All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out  the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.

—-

     That is what it was all about, wasn’t it? Promises? Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited. For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day. Nor can I smell Henri Bendel jasmine soap without falling back into the past, or the particular mixture of spices used for boiling crabs. There were barrels of crab boil in a Czech place in the Eighties where I once shopped. Smells, of course, are notorious memory stimuli, but there are other things which affect me the same way. Blue-and-white striped sheets. Vermouth cassis. Some faded nightgowns which were new in 1959 or 1960, and some chiffon scarves I bought about the same time.

     I suppose that a lot of us who have been very young in New York have the same scenes in our home screens. I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with a slight headache about five o’clock in the morning. I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals. The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the tile floor. I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.

     It is relatively hard to fight at six-thirty or seven in the morning, without any sleep, which was perhaps one reason why we stayed up all night, and it seemed to me a pleasant time of day. The windows were shuttered in that apartment in the Nineties and I could sleep for a few hours and then go to work. I could work the on two or three hours’ sleep and a container of coffee from Chock Full O’ Nuts. I liked going to work, liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting out a magazine, liked the orderly progression of four-color closings and two-color closings and black-and-white closings and then The Product, no abstraction but something which looked effortlessly glossy and could be picked up on a newsstand and weighed in the hand. I liked all the minutiae of proofs and layouts, liked working late on the nights the magazines went to press, sitting and reading Variety and waiting for the copy desk to call. From my office, I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building and the lights that alternately spelled TIME and LIFE above Rockeffeler Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer.

     Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing. I liked walking, from the East River over to the Hudson and back on brisk days, down around the Village on warm days. A friend would leave me the key to her apartment in the West Village when she was out of town, and sometimes I would just move down there, because by that time the telephone was beginning to bother me (the canker, you see, was already in the rose) and not many people had that number. I remember one day when someone who did have the West Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.

     And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.

—-

    I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always. There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid. I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings (this was a particularly inconvenient aversion, since I then lived just fifty or sixty feet east of Madison), because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede’s, and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat. I could not go to Times Square in the afternoon, or to the New York Public Library for any reason whatsoever. One day I could not go into a Schrafft’s; the next it would be the Bonwit Teller.

     I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, I cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor, he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and that I should see a “specialist.” He wrote down a psychiatrist’s name and address for me, but I did not go.

     Instead I got married, which as it turned out was a very good thing to do but badly timed, since I still could not walk on upper Madison Avenue in the mornings and still could not talk to people and still cried in Chinese laundries. I had never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year. Of course I could not work. I could not even get dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at Michael’s Pub or at Toots Shor’s or at Sardi’s East. And then one morning in April (we had been married in January) he called and told me that he wanted to get out of New York for a while, that he would take a six-month leave of absence, that we would go somewhere.

   It was three years ago he told me that, and we have lived in Los Angeles since. Many of the people we knew in New York think this a curious aberration, and in fact tell us so. There is no possible, no adequate answer to that, and so we give certain stock answers, the answers everyone gives. I talk about how difficult it would be for us to “afford” to live in New York right now, about how much “space” we need, All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.

Sungjoon, a director who no longer makes films, heads to Seoul to meet a friend. He runs into an actress he used to know, shares a drink with some young film students, and against his better judgment, heads to his ex’s house. The next day, or perhaps some other day, Sungjoon finally meets his friend. They go to a bar whose owner bears a striking resemblance to his ex. The next day goes very much like the first; the one after that, the same. Eventually, Sungjoon has no other choice than to face his “today.” 

Fukk a windows doe.

Klaus Biesenbach, who has an allergy to the “visual clutter of objects,” lived in a nearly empty apartment for years

Used as a verb, “remixing” has been possible (and practiced) ever since the existence of multi-track recording. At the dawn of sound recording, a song had to be recorded directly to the form it would eventually be heard, and there was no way of extracting just the bass or guitar part without taking all the other parts with it. But once sound could be recorded to 4 or more tracks (from which it’s then “mixed down” into the final, combined form you hear), engineers could return to the working versions of songs and “remix” them: make the guitar louder, take out all of the vocals, even make the track shorter or longer.

This isn’t to say that recorded sound couldn’t be manipulated prior to the advent of multi-tracking. Most notable here is William Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique, which took a Dadaist trick of cutting up words to rearrange text and then applied it to the magnetic tape on which recordings used to reside. Musicians like Brian Eno and Genesis P-Orridge used the technique to clip sections, rearrange them and place them in a new sequence—Burroughs characterized this as a “method for altering reality.” Recording engineers did this too, but they called it an “edit,” and they used it not to alter reality, but as a way to, for instance, shorten a long track for radio play by removing an instrumental section or extra verse.

THE artist Doug Wheeler tells two stories, both having to do with light, that go a long way toward explaining why he is so revered by many fellow artists — as a visionary and a relentlessly stubborn perfectionist — and also why his work has been seen by so few American artgoers over the last few decades, particularly those in New York.

The first story takes place at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where several years ago Mr. Wheeler created a complex installation he calls an “infinity environment,” featuring a light-saturated, all-white, rounded room with no corners or sharp angles, rendering viewers unable to fix their eyes on any surface. It invokes an experience of light itself as an almost tactile presence. As Mr. Wheeler continued to tweak the piece, a small boy walked up to the room and hesitated before entering, putting his hands in front of him because his senses told him that the square entrance was a wall, not simply a wall of light flooding his vision.

“I thought, ‘O.K., I can stop worrying so much and being mad about them letting people in too early,’ ” Mr. Wheeler said recently over coffee at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, where he has just opened his first solo New York gallery show at the age of 72, remaking a cavernous interior into a kind of immaculate white vacuum tube — the city’s first infinity environment.

The second story he tells happened in the late 1960s, in a former dime store in Venice, Calif., the studio where he first began creating the ethereal, experiential work that made him a founder of the so-called Light and Space movement, along with fellow West Coast artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Mary Corse. One afternoon Mr. Wheeler welcomed a couple of prominent dealers from a New York gallery — “who shall remain nameless,” he now says tersely — to show off a new work using phosphorus paint and lights to create the sensation of a mistlike plane bisecting part of the studio.

The dealers walked right past the piece without noticing it, making a beeline to some earlier, popular light works that hung on the walls like paintings.

“I just thought what idiots they were for not seeing it,” he said. “Now maybe it wasn’t powerful enough. Maybe it was just my arrogance. But at that time I didn’t think of it that way.”

“What they expected to see, they saw,” he added, “and then they left.”

He bid them a friendly goodbye and never did business with the gallery again.

Structural Packaging: Design your own Boxes and 3D Forms

Art References in The Simpsons

ONE cold, misty autumn morning, I slipped and fell. I was on my way out to do errands, the mossy wooden deck on the north side of my house was slick with dew, I was in a hurry, I skidded, and both feet flew out from under me.

As I fell — danger signs flashing in my brain: falling! falling! — I curled up to protect my head, landing squarely on my tailbone. Pain lighted up my spinal cord. My brain joggled in its cradle. Bright lights dazzled my eyes.

I lay there for a minute or three, gasping in pain. Then the old control center kicked in: “Move.”

Like a computer running through settings during start-up, I wiggled my legs and my arms and moved my neck. Everything was working. Still, the pain in my tailbone was intense.

“You must get up,” I said to myself. But there was another voice in my head, the one cowering behind the control center.

That voice was whimpering and scolding. “This is what happens when you live alone,” it said. “You fall, and there is no one to help you up. If you don’t pick yourself up, you could lie here for three days, maybe even two weeks, before anyone finds you. Lucky you aren’t paralyzed.

“It is not good to live alone.”

Just the evening before, I had driven down my lane thinking about how many of my neighbors were single women, of all ages.

They — we! — have been single for years. They — we! — aren’t showing any inclination to change our status, though I think I can speak for them — us! And, for that matter, everyone in the world! — when I say that, of course, if we were lucky enough to fall madly in love with someone again, we would gladly trade in our single ways and hitch up.

But the key word is “madly.”

Because many women, once released from marriage, seem to feel that it would take an act of madness to move back into a setup that involves not only housekeeping in all its manifold time-sucking beauty but also husband-keeping.

As I lay on the deck aching, another light blinked on in my brain, shining a halo around a question that has been vexing me for years: Why do men hate to be alone?

Maybe it was my joggled brain, but I was no longer capable of subtle thought. Instead, I was overcome by sweeping generalities.

The world divides into two groups: one (men), who think you can fall at any moment, and when you’re down, you’re out, and you need help; the other (women), who pick themselves up and move on.

Judging by statistics, to say nothing of the glaring evidence around me, men do not have any problem remarrying. In fact, most men seem unable to live alone for longer than, say, at the outside … three months.

Most single women I know really love their lives.

Sometimes we suffer pangs of loneliness, sometimes we ache for the companionship of that mythic soul mate, but mostly we cherish our independence. We love doing whatever we want to do, when we want to do it.

Women alone eat breakfast at 11 if we feel like it, lunch at 3 and dinner never if that’s the way the day is winding down. Single women do not worry about cooking unless we want to. And we don’t want to unless we like to.

Single women love not having to get permission to spend our own money on a 10th pair of black boots or a painting or a wood stove.

We love not being judged, not being criticized, not being hemmed in. We love the give and take of making our own decisions. We love putting things down on a table knowing they will be there when we return. And eventually, we come to understand that there is no reason to curl up on “our” side of the bed while we sleep. We no longer have to take sides. We can sprawl across the expansive middle.

Single men could not care less about any of the above lifestyle features.

A marriage is a lot of work. Strike that. A man is a lot of work. Anyone who has been in a bad marriage knows that its defining characteristic is the unspeakable loneliness in which one feels shrouded, a sense of isolation amplified by not being alone.

Until I fell, I never understood exactly why men were so loath to remain alone. Surely it wasn’t just a sexist reliance on having a mate who did the shopping, cooking, nesting, scheduling and child-rearing? All around me were plenty of men who pitched in at least a little on all those things, men entirely capable of taking care of themselves.

After I hit my tailbone and joggled my brain, I lay there, thinking that, by the time everyone compared notes about when exactly was the last time they had heard from me, I could be moldering on the floor. This is, indeed, dangerous.

Home is where I am supposed to be safe.

And that’s when the circuit breaker tripped. Men are hard-wired to feel danger all the time. I know there must be science around somewhere to back up this assertion, but seriously, that’s what makes a man a man. A man is on guard because that is his job.

He hunts and tangles with wild beasts. He does not nest. He gets in the way of nesting. And above all a man does not willingly venture near that snake pit called “feelings.” He avoids danger, aware that only so many arrows are granted to him in a lifetime, so he should husband his resources.

Being alone feels dangerous to a man. No one has your back. No one feeds you. No one nurses you in your sickbed. No one takes up a watch if you vanish or sends out a search party if you wander off the trail.

The world is dangerous enough without adding the dangers that come of being alone.

Women do not walk around alert for danger. Nor do we feel that being alone is dangerous, except in the rare instances when we fall and crack our tailbones. Women are hard-wired to read the signals that keep us from danger, and, when confronted by trouble, we escape, fleeing into our homes. In fact, I have observed that women who have escaped loudly troubled marriages often feel safer when they are alone.

To a woman, being home feels safe.

We love our nests. We tend them, and in exchange we expect them to keep us snug and warm and serene and safe. Which, generally, they do. Because nests are reliable.

As I said, my brain was joggled. Suddenly, everything I learned in the ’70s seemed refreshingly clear-eyed. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Now I understand why a man needs marriage like a fish needs water.

I may be alone down here in this snake pit of feelings, wrestling with questions that slither into the dark recesses of the human soul faster than you can shine a moonbeam at them.

At least, alone, it is quiet enough to hear myself think. But the guys may have a point.

One of the unspoken laws that governs the way New York City works is the truly amazing “Pizza Principle.”

Derived in the eighties through a series of (now archived) articles in The New York Times, the Pizza Principle — also known as the “New York City Pizza Connection” — maintains that since 1960, inflation and other factors have caused the the price of both a slice of pizza and a single ride on the subway to rise at a nearly identical rate. A Times piece from 1980 cites Bronx patent lawyer Eric Bram as an authority on the matter, and the paper wrote about the phenomenon again in 1985.

In 2002, Clyde Haberman charted The Times coverage from the two decades previous, and offered this retort to anyone seeking empirical scientific evidence to justify this somewhat baffling synchronicity of price: “Don’t ask why. It simply is so, and has been for decades.”

Seeing as it’s endured for this long, the Pizza Principle will soon force pizza-minded lunch-seekers to pony up another quarter at their neighborhood Famous Ray’s or whatever: the MTA announced that it has approved higher subway, bus, and commuter train fares earlier today, the New York Daily News reports. The price of a single subway ride will now set New Yorkers back $2.50, and it can only be assumed that the price of by-the-slice pizza will increase accordingly.

Though there is one more option. Haberman wrote about the Pizza Principle in The Times most recently in 2007, when subway fares were on the cusp of the $2.25 precipice. In the piece, he cited a letter to the editor written by a local school psychologist, who recommended that the city finally honor the majesty of its subway-pizza connection by simply adjusting the train fare at each station in accordance with the price of the pizza nearby. This might work, right?

OK, maybe not. Instead, it will totally suck to cough up the extra dollar or two spent daily on pie and rides. But this annoyance notwithstanding, how can you root against the mysterious voodoo of the Pizza Principle? The intrinsic connection between two completely desperate — but completely essential — New York institutions is one of those invisible forces that sews the city together. And if history is to be believed, it’s here to stay.

Plus, our local pizza place knew this was coming: the slice of cheese there has already been upped to that wallet-rocking price of $2.50. That’s right, Rosario’s on the Lower East Side. We’re looking at you. 

A miscellany of archeology, history, biography, geography, political science, psychology, sociology, technology, entertainment, economics, marketing, and merchandising comprises the subject matter of most art talk. But this does not constitute the language of art.

Art is primarily a question of form, not of content. This explains Clive Bell’s “significant form,” often maligned and misunderstood by practitioners, philosophers, dabblers, and connoisseurs. Content is a passive and subordinate yet important partner in this relationship, which is fundamental to an understanding of the language of plastic art.

To discuss the appearance of things is to deal with matters of aesthetics. Aesthetics is the language of appearances — of art, design, the beautiful, and the ugly. Without aesthetics, talk about art is not about art. To talk about, study, teach, or criticize a work of art focus must always be on problems of form in relation, of course, to a particular content.

An artifact is transformed into a work of art only when the conflict between form and content is resolved. The term art, has been bandied about so carelessly that it has almost lost its meaning. For example, it seems that one of the ways a painting earns its place in the pantheon of art is by being rendered in a particular medium: oil on canvas. The so called lesser arts — prints, etchings, graphic design, photography, etc. — are confined to this status by virtue of the mechanical means of their making. Consequently, the medium in which a work is rendered can become as important as its message or meaning. Symbolism has become the measure of value. The recent auction of Jacqueline Onassis’s possessions is a prime example of the power of false values.

Form and content are assymetric. Formal values are very often independent of content. Time can, and does, erase meaning of once familiar artifacts, but time can never erase form. Spontaneity, fantasy, intuition, invention, and revelation also play an important part in the language of art.

Among the many aspects of form, problems pertaining to the principles of proportion, for example, are significant. The rules of proportion apply equally well to the Parthenon or to a can of Campbells soup. The same is true for all formal relationships: contrast, scale, balance, rhythm, rhyme, texture, repetition, etc.

In spite of the fact that aesthetics is the only language of art, the subject has been greeted with indifference and sometimes irreverence. For example, Gwilt’s Encyclopedia of Architecture (1842) describes aesthetics as “silly, pedantic term, and one of the useless additions to nomenclature in the arts.” These and other unflattering references have caused this subject to be brushed aside. On the other hand, such definitions as “aesthetics is the philosophy or theory of taste,” or “of the perception of the beautiful in nature and art” (Oxford English Dictionary) are too passive, to be really useful.

The Greeks considered all subjects a form of discourse, and therefore almost all education is a form of language education. Knowledge of a subject means knowledge of the language of that subject. Biology, after all, is not plants and animals, it is a special language employed to speak about plants and animals.” Similarly aesthetics is not painting, design, or architecture; it is a special language designed to speak about these subjects, namely the language of interaction between form and content.

Confusion and misunderstanding is the result of the absence of a common language. In dealing with the subject of design, knowledge of the history of art and design is just as indispensable as the language of art. “Any subject,” said William James, “becomes humanistic when seen from the stand point of history.” Since both the history and language of art are not part of our common understanding, political, social and technological issues that may have only a remote connection to art arc usually substituted for discussions about the real thing — aesthetics — the language of art.

#FAY (Taken with instagram)