Plus CA Change

By Robbie on February 16, 2009

We officially moved to New York a week ago and already it feels a month.  Our neighborhood, Windsor Terrace, just off of the southwest corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, is perfectly fabulous, evocative of Archie Bunker with its grey-brick buildings and plain-folks residents but very un-New-Yorkish in its small-town civility ("Hi, Tennessee!" a little girl calls to my nine-year-old on our way out of a flower shop) and sheer peaceableness.  It is near midnight Sunday as I write this, and if I apply the test where you stop everything and just listen, in the expectation that you can always hear six discretely identifiable sounds, I can count only three: the hum of the refrigerator, an occasional plane overhead, and my tinnitus (does that even count?).  I expected to be seeing a lot more of my Manhattan peeps once we got settled here, but now that we're settled into the Terrace I'm not so sure about that.  

I have three first impressions about living in New York -- or "first," because I did live here 25 years ago -- that I hope aren't too Larry Kinglike.  First is that no matter how often I visit here and no matter how distant grow the 1980s, I am constantly overwhelmed by how fast and completely Manhattan has transformed from a violent, seedy hellhole to a secure, slightly seedy consumerist amusement center.  All to the good, for sure, though the new happy regime has possibly brought on some behavioral adaptations of the kind anticipated by Tocqueville in his nanny-state diaries.  The touchy senior citizen on the lower floor of Symphony Space who earlier this evening during a screening of "Gone With The Wind" glared at Tennessee for whispering -- I invite her to time-travel back to 1980 when that room was called the Thalia Theater (God bless it!) and hipster cineastes such as myself sat in the back rows blowing thick clouds of cigarette smoke over the germy-slippery backward-sloped floor and onto the heads of the unfortunate non-smokers, separated from us by a three-foot-wide aisle, a border as Maginot-like as the one separating the cancerous from the virtuous on the Greyhound buses of the era.

Second, the stereotype of the rude New Yorker is a bald canard.  People here are as considerate and polite as anywhere else and maybe a little more so. Third, the schools are a disaster.  We had three weeks to research the system and enroll our two school-age kids in public schools, and we needed every minute of them.  (No, they don't have to take you just because you live in the neighborhood.  How naive can you be?  Do you know the term "catchment"? Consider yourself blessed if not.)  That labor ended well enough, with our boys accepted at decent and safe schools -- as opposed to the other 95% of them, as they appear in those state accountability reports and insideschools.net's very useful parent and student reviews. 

Some of the subways here are emblazoned with ads, running most of the length of a car, drumming up heartening P.S. stats: more books and funds than before, a rising graduation rate, wonderful diversity, and a rip rap rippedy-do.  The already overstimulated commuter is put in mind of Stalinist braggadocio on wheat production.  Speaking of the graduation rate, a friend here teaches drama at a school in Manhattan where it was 37% last year....but rising, comrades!  A critical mass of the bright and the white abandon the public schools by 6th grade, and the results (see the ethnic-breakdown pie charts in those state reports) are thoroughly depressing for anyone who likes to think our society has progressed very much since 1954.  It's too bad -- NYC would be such a cool place to be a kid, if he wasn't trapped for seven hours a day in the kid-equivalent of a post office job.  If you can't send them to Packer or Brearley, my advice is to keep them down on the farm.

I'll send more word on my NYC adventures soon, but in the meantime, let me announce that our new site premieres in just another day or two.  The main difference is that the design, which is brighter and cleaner and just all-around designier.  I am very thankful that Mr. John Gibbons and his wife Martha dropped out of the blue and into my ken back in 1998, and this sleek new tool of commerce and communication that he has shaped must be the triumphal climax of these 11 years.  I think it's one of the best-looking sites any musician has on the web.

The new robbiefulks.com incorporates a few features that I have long envied on other artist sites.  People who aren't fans but happen on the site for whatever reason will be able to click a button and hear a song right away, as well as see video.  I have links to friends' sites and other places on the web I think highly of. The commercial layout and the presentation of tour dates are a little clearer and cleaner, and so I expect that buyers will be able to get in and out faster.  The new 50-song music package is of course front and center, and will be for a good while. 

I'm taking away the archived My Days, whose days are over; and most of the antiquated press selections will be gone too.  I raised the price of merchandise by a dollar, because the average overseas postal cost has risen to the point where I am actually losing on orders every now and then -- and a little upward tick after a decade without increases felt not inappropriate.  The chat room, now the province of six psychos who don't even chat about me very much, doesn't leap out from the homepage as it does now.  You have to hunt for a minute to find where it went; but, my psycho friends, it is still there.  (And if you're glad it is you can thank John, because I dearly wanted to get rid of it...but he pulled rank.)

Au revoir, old site!  Here's looking at you, cruddy blue color scheme!  Don't let the USB portal hit you on the way out, queer flower-sniffing header photo!  Hiya, sweet second-decade Helvetica freshness!  Come on in out the rain, hope 'n' change!  You too, extra dollar!