Polymals on the Loose
I have a funky few days here in Manhattan this week. Usually I’m in New York either to see the kids or for Kim’s singing performances. We did the whole Lincoln Center gig thing last visit and the early kid Christmas activities were this weekend. I’ve been doing early Christmas with the kids for 33 or so years, so I’m pretty used to that program. My older kid’s mother is a real aficionado of the Christmas holidays, so I knew from the get-go that I needed to steer clear of trying to share those precious dates and have always chosen to demure. Wife #2 was fine with sharing or alternating, but it never made much sense given the constraints on the older kids. My three kids treat each other as full siblings, which is what any absentee father would want. So, with early Christmas behind us, Kim and I are filling in until Wednesday, when we head home after attending youngest son Tom’s cabaret performance at Don’t Tell Mama.
Monday was a real business day for me with 6 hours spent engaged in deposition prep for one of my expert witness cases. I’ve done many depositions (both as principal or witness), so all the role playing about “When did you stop beating your wife?” is neither new nor troubling to me. The new part of that meeting involved lunch. It made me feel very old. I spent the day with seven lawyers (three male and four female, which is spot on representative of the relative gender mix in the ranks of law schools these days). The somewhat embarrassing part of all that was that whether at the law firm I work for or the client’s legal department, the men were all the senior players and the women were the junior gofers or, at best, the junior partners. That will change, but when is anyone’s guess. The part that made me feel old was that the whole corporate cafeteria thing at this client’s office in midtown was just so hip that I had to stop and think about how to do lunch. First of all, it was all free, which says more about the client’s culture than the times we are in. However, the likes of Google and Apple have the same thing going on from what I understand, so maybe its a little about both. The part of the lunch that made me feel old was the menu. Everything seemed to have Kale or Avocado or Chia. I thought I was back in California, not good old NYC with knishes and pastrami. Along one entire wall was an array of chromed spigots that had every imaginable type of flavored sparkling water, tea or energy drink. I felt very out of place wandering around looking for the Diet Coke, which was nowhere to be found.
I remember going to London for business at the start of my career. It always bothered me to go to the traditional pub for lunch. Some of that was the pretty awful pre-Big Bang London food scene (think Steak and Kidney pie), but to me the worst of it was that it all happened with a pint of bitters in one hand and was all consumed standing up at some railing inside or outside the bar. I never understood that and to this day don’t know if that was a British manner or a pub manner or simply a mostly liquid lunch with the food coming at tea time. Well, this cafeteria was light on regular tables and chairs and big of high top tables with what I would consider to be lean-in stools rather than proper chairs. People looked decidedly like those London pub-crawlers standing there eating and drinking their tap drinks. It was all a very sociable scene and don’t get me wrong, I like a good cafeteria rather than a tablecloth dining experience for a working lunch, but what can I say, it made me feel old and wanting to sit down to digest.
After our workday, I decided to wander slowly to the Cornell Club on foot, ostensibly to do some shopping for Kim. Nothing like a stroll down Fifth Avenue to remind you about the excesses of New York. Tiffanys was as expected and I learned years ago how to navigate that. Coach was OK since I wasn’t in the market for a big bag. But Sax FIfth Avenue (SFA) was shocking. I remember when it was sold to Invescorp, the Middle Eastern group. That sort of made it like Harrods, I figured, where money was no object. But for a decade now it has been owned by the Canadian Hudson Bay Company, and from what I could see, it hasn’t gotten more economical. I got off on the wrong foot by asking the hostess where I could find stocking stuffers. She answered, “Try Macy’s”. Not the polite answer I was hoping for. When I found the Christmas Shop in SFA, I picked out two little holiday wrapped boxes of candy. When all was said and done, what should have been a less than $15 purchase cost me $62. That’s when I said to the sales clerk, “I should have gone to Macy’s”.
This over-priced theme carried through all of our meals outside the Cornell Club, where the free breakfast was still the best bargain in town. What else should I have expected of Manhattan in December, right? On Sunday when we went to Rockefeller Center so the kids could skate in the sunken rink beneath the gaze of Prometheus and the Rock Center Christmas Tree, my oldest son made the mistake of buying a “dirty water dog” as a midday appetizer. What was a $1 item for many years, was on offer for $8. Wow, I had no idea mustard and sauerkraut had gotten so expensive.
So as not to sound like a complete hayseed coming to the big city and looking up at the skyscrapers and imitating Gomer Pyle with a big “Golly!”, let’s shift the scene on my last day in the City. I was scheduled for a sit-down business lunch near Penn Station with a law firm I am hired to help understand shorting and securities lending. That worked out fine, The morning got scheduled with my friend Chris to see his latest, greatest film (technically TV series) production being filmed at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, at the old Brooklyn Navy Yards. I took an Uber since I am not brave enough to hoof it by subway. As we drove down Park Avenue I kept seeing median art that drew my attention.
Do you remember when the painted cows invaded New York about twenty years ago? Some artist convinced a City Planner that creating dozens of molded cow sculptures (all identical) and letting artists tart them up would make for interesting median art all around the City, in parks and on sidewalks. It was kinda cool and there was a whole cottage industry spawned of mini versions reproduced and sold to remind people of all this artistic whimsy. Flash forward and that seems to have found a new iteration in the form of what are called Polymals. These are animal sculptures that have a certain geometric shape to them but still distinctly look like the beasts they represent. They are then colorfully painted or tarted up and left by the side of the road for all to enjoy, specifically on the Park Avenue medians south of Grand Central. The best known of these looks like a big yellow gorilla, painted to look like what, a banana? Colorful and interesting to be sure.
Once I got to Brooklyn, my imagination had been primed by all the Polymals on the loose in Manhattan. I was ready for the dystopian movie sets both out by the East River waterfront (can you spell Waterworld replica?) and in the sound stages where I felt like I was in a retro version of the guts of the Death Star with all the faux-steel vault doors and mid-century furnishings. Chris is an Art Director who has been trying to explain to this rigid soul exactly what it is he does. I now know he and his Gang design things from stand-up desks (what to Gen Zers have against sitting?). After this visit to the harsh and barren plains of Brooklyn, having passed through the jungles of South Park Avenue, I think I can finally say I know what he does. He basically runs the world of the future and the past all at once and makes sure that the Polymals don’t take over the world…I think. Time to get back to the sanity of Southern California and my many hilltop benches.