Highline Park

Industrial Manhattan died and went to heaven. You can visit by climbing the stairs up to Highline Park.

New York City built the park between 12th Street and 20th Street on a 1930s elevated freight rail track. Surrounded by the ruins of old terminal buildings and views of the Hudson River, walkers stroll along paths of wildflowers. Young women sun themselves in bikinis on teak longers. Walk under the hulks of old buildings and you're instantly cool.

When I lived in Los Angeles, I used to dream of a time when trees and vines would break through the cement and asphalt of the freeway overpasses and reclaim the land. Highline's designers evidently had a similar vision, and they've executed it brilliantly.

You can refresh yourself along the walk by buying fresh fruit libations from a stand run by Caribbeans. I bought a coconut water drained on the spot from the shell, took a seat on a little chair in the breeze and worked on my novel. Another stand in the shade sells coffee and croissants. On the streets below are all the enticing restaurants of the Meatpacking District, not to mention the fantastic food bazaar at the Chelsea Market.

Stocks and the Dollar

Jimmy Rogers, Warren Buffett, Joseph Stiglitz and the sages at Pimco all have been saying the dollar is on the way down. That's coming from a pretty broad range of interests. So if everybody's saying, get out of the dollar, where do you go?

If I'm a foreign investor, I might be reluctant to hold stocks denominated in a currency that is weakening against my own.

If I'm a U.S. investor, maybe I don't care. The U.S. economy may be weakened, but it's still standing. Pick the right companies, and you might do OK even in a volatile market.

What's the alternative?

BRICs? They're at the mercy of hot money and heavy government hands. Commodities? A natural choice in a time of inflation -- but insanely volatile.

Let's say I'm a cowgirl who nails every top and bottom with my pearl-handed Colt sixshooter and is ready to ride out of Dodge, BRICs, U.S. stocks and commodities at the sound of gunfire. I still might want to stash some coin in CDs.

Unless I call market tops and bottoms just right (and there are plenty of annoying people who claim to have done so), I've probably lost some money over the last two years. CDs may not pay much, but at least I don't lose much. Citigroup is paying 2.25 percent for an 18-month note, and a friend of mine just got 2.5 percent for the same duration just by walking into the bank.

But all these smart people are telling me to get out of dollars...gee, what do I do? Frankly, I'm too stressed out by the market to make a choice right now.

Daniel Boulud: DBGB

How good is the service at a Daniel Boulud restaurant? I was at DBGB tonight and dropped my knife just as I was about to dig into a Tunisian merguez sausage. I raised my eyes in despair. The waiter who brought me my food, already halfway across the noisy restaurant, heard the knife drop, turned, nodded at me reassuringly, and immediately brought a replacement, simultaneously summoning a busboy to arrived post haste to pick up the fallen knife.

Wow.

I found this instance of the legendary Boulud service particularly amazing because DGBG (housed in the old Bowery digs of CBGB -- is the newest and most downscale of all the Boulud restaurants.

I told the waiter: "You're good!" And tipped beyond the usual.

Darwin & the Arts

Here's a link to a great Cambridge exhibit on the cross-fertilization of Darwin's ideas and the arts.

From the program: "Darwin’s ideas resonated in art of many different kinds, from landscape and animal painting to portrayals of prehistoric man and contemporary society. The interchange between science and art was a two-way street, and the exhibition explores both directions: the sorts of visual imagery that filled Darwin’s own mind and imagination as he formed his theories, as well as the central Darwinian themes that inspired artists-the vast age of the earth, the fierce ’struggle for existence’ that led to natural selection, and the evolution of man himself from an apelike ancestor. Darwin’s response to the beauties of nature and sense of kinship between humans and other species equally gave rise to some of the most lyrical art of the nineteenth century.

Thanks to John Watson for the link.

Exhibition sections:

Darwin’s Eye
The History of the Earth
Struggle for Existence
Animal Kin
The Descent of Humankind
Darwin, Beauty and Sexual Selection
Darwin and the Impressionists

The Bacchae

Seeing "The Bacchae" performed at the Delcorte Theater in Central Park was satisfyingly cathartic. The play contains perhaps the best surviving description of the ancient worship of Dionysus, or Bacchus, but its appeal is hardly limited to scholars. Both worshipers and detractors falling victim to the wrath of this strange god, inventor of wine, lord of ectasy and dance -- an insight that resonates deeply with modern audiences.

Jonathan Groff, playing Dionysus, channeled the Sixties rock star Jim Morrisson, very appropriately. The Philip Glass score was surprisingly effective; I had become accustomed to thinking of Glass more as a maker of musical wallpaper than as a composer, and I was impressed with the beauty of his post-postmodern tonality. The dramatic effects and timing were sharply executed. The one thing lacking was dance; director Joanne Akalaites could have used a talented choreographer rather than limiting the female Bacchantes to waving their arms and prancing around the stage.

Thanks to the brilliant acting, it struck me for the first time that the heart of the play comes not at the very end but amid the unfolding terror of the denouement, in which the king who sought to outlaw Dionysus is torn limb from limb by Bacchantes including his own mother, who screams with horror when she comes to her senses. The message is delivered by the seer Teiresias in subdued, humbled tones: "It is best to fear God and live a simple life."

The thing about Bacchus is that wine may be the only thing that eases grief, but it also causes grief -- tearing of limb from limb, banishment, horror, collapse of kingdoms and what have you.

The Playbill, for once, contained some excellent background material on the play, including recommended reading. First on the list was one of my favorite books in the world, Roberto Calasso's "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" -- a brilliant exploration of Greek myths.

Socializing the Kids

In Manhattan, Topic No. 1 for parents, above real estate and the market, is Preschool. When I'm about and about with my 3-year-old, I'm often asked, "Where are you sending him to preschool?"

I reply, "I am homeschooling him. I take him to classes."

This always elicits a lengthy lecture on how kids need the socialization provided by preschool. The lecturers don't ever want to hear about what social opportunities Aubrey actually has, or what kids in the past might have had. The presumption is that I am ignorant of the concept and need to be brought up to speed.

The most recent lecture took place with an elderly female doctor in the playground by my house. After five minutes of it, I edged off to another area. She followed me and continued with the socialization.

I hear stories about how kids wake up and want to go see their friends at school. Even in summer.

Isn't all this socialization a fiction created by a socialist state meant to inculcate kids with the vision of a belonging to a harmonious community? Did Ben Franklin have socialization opportunities of this sort? Did Mozart have socialization? Isn't socialization just the preparation for the warehousing of the educational system to come?

What a Bunch of Losers

I hear that the "editors" of the web site Scholars and Rogue met with the Obama guys to get their marching orders for selling the health care debate. These guys claim to be journalists? Give me a break. There is a word for them, and it's not "journalists."

The View From Manhattan

More stores are being shut down every day. The former tenants are always careful to erase their names, so passersby think: "What was there? Was it X?" I get a creepy feeling from these anonymous board-ups.

Even creepier is the silence. Manhattan used to be full of traders talking about the market, about business, about margins. No more. The restaurants in Tribeca, near Wall Street, are either completely empty or full of people with other things on their minds. If, by chance, a market-related conversation does occur, the person discussing it is a painfully obvious loser.

Not that I have been doing much better. I'm just too stunned to talk about it.

Once in a very great while, perhaps once every two years, I get an English-speaking taxi driver interested in talking. Most of the drivers now are from Bangladesh or are totally non-conversational types named Mohammed or the like. (I am convinced that these latter either work for Al Qaeda or the FBI, or perhaps both.) Anyway, I had one of these rare articulate birds the other day, and he said the recession is not as bad as people think. He said his business is way up. He also opined that the last thing a woman will give up is the manicure-pedicure, and that he is seeing no dropoff in the trade.

I checked with a couple of female friends, and indeed, they reported that NEW mani-pedi outlets have been opening among the boarded-up windows.

These green shoots, however, are dwarfed beside the giant sequoias still falling. While work continues on the new Deutsche Bank building here in Tribeca, the World Trade Center site is still a wilderness. Giant cranes are parked around the site, but do nothing. Tourists peek through the fence onto a vast waste.

J.P. Morgan just put its huge Chase Manhattan Plaza digs up for sale, along with two other choice Manhattan properties. The brand-new financial buildings along West Side Highway seem to be unoccupied. I never see the lines of limos parked outside the old Merrill Lynch digs at the World Financial Center any more, not since early this year when they were signing over the firm to BankAmerica.

My Citibank branch by City Hall is kaput, boarded up, no name, already forgotten. Citi is offering larger-than-normal CD rates, shades of Wamu. I just money out of my trading account, where it has been doing nothing but shrink anyway, and I'm going to put it in a big fat Citi CD. It will be sooooo amusing in a post-2008 kind of way to see which bank it migrates to when Citi is sold off into tiny bits.

The only thing that keeps me amused these days is Thomas Pynchon's new noir detective tale, Inherent Vice. And my 3-year-old son, Aubrey, who is riding a 19-inch Specialized all over and boogie-boarding in the building pool.

It's 86 degrees here in my green building, because all of the "green" air conditioning units went out at the same time and the parts had to be shipped from Canada. Somehow, it took them three weeks to get to customs in Buffalo. Supposedly they will be here tomorrow. This has done nothing to improve my mood.