Before Hitting the Road...

It's about an hour before the Barany clan sets out from the rustic campus of Rockefeller University to visit the venerable Nobel Laureate and friend/advisor-of-father R. Bruce Merrifield (Erdos number 6). Yesterday was a fantastic scene of contemplative juxtapositions. After spending Monday night ambling through Times square (and the neighboring Hershey's store ), the first stop Tuesday morning was a decided departure from the overt mediocracy and into the subtle, liberal-guilt ridden realm of the sentiment-o-crats. That's right, the number one site on my little sister's to-do list was Ground Zero. As I tried not to read the nostalgiac, oddly romanticized portraits of death and violence tacked by the NY Port Authority to the imposing metal fence in front of the hole in the ground, I couldn't help but imagine Greg launching into a ten minute tangent on the role of spectacle and sentimentality in Western culture. A capitalist critic might have also remarked on the flutist and wierd-Asian-instrument-player-guy issuing forth subdued lamentations for passers-by's loose change. Further from the wreckage, dozens of vendors hawked their WTC wares. There was one remaining impromptu memorial from the original aftermath: a collection of postcards tacked to the inside of an emptied-out public telephone carousel. A shiny black luxury car was parked where tons of debris once crushed thousands of corpses.

After that, my father lugged the family through 6 sets of equally misleading street directions to his and Minyang's (any others?) alma mater--Stuyvesant high school. Put simply, it makes just about any other school in the country seem small and underfunded. We hopped on a cab back to RU just in time to meet up with my uncle's family to catch the subway to Shea stadium. The Mets won in style, and David Wright and Jose Reyes (my two favorites) both had tremendous offensive performances. It helped, of course, that the Astros started one of the most tyro pitchers in the big leagues. At this game, we saw the other side of the spectacle culture: 28 thousand cheering, booze-laden fans shouting at some minorities and bulked-up whities to run in a 360 foot square. It felt chillingly empowering.
Congratulations and commiserations where due...
Gotta run,
Michael