Merrily, Merrily

Week two’s over in New York, and the most reoccurring thought I’ve had is “I’ve been duped.” After a fall quarter of waking up, toiling away on homework before class, wolfing down some rice and beans after class in order to get straight to homework so that I can fall asleep on time to finish my homework the next morning, I feel like I’ve emerged from a stinky subway platform, and into a proverbial city of real life.

It occurred to me that my affinity for this city is equal parts lack of homework and legitimate love for New York itself. Since I last wrote, I sat in on a meeting with former British MP and Scottish Parliament hopeful, “Gorgeous” George Galloway, saw the Budapest Festival Orchestra play the Lincoln Center, ate raw octopus wasabi ceviche, attended a warrior paint party, went to an experimental music and dance performance, took the metro to Coney Island to eat Uighur food, went on an epic thrift store excursion, met the only reporter present at the MLK shooting, read the New York Times cover to cover, and walked from Wall Street to Chelsea all while working 40 hours a week… because I didn’t have homework! It is glorious. I realize that expounding over 10 pages about Hawtorne’s bacchic symbolism in Maypole of Merry Mount might help me develop my… wait, what?! I don’t regret going to school, but I am less distressed and more adrenalized for graduation with every day I spend devouring this city.

When I first arrived, I found New York impossible to grasp. Even while thousands of feet above the lights in an airplane, you can never look upon the city as a whole. This intimidated me at first, but its vastness is accepted rather than conquered by tourists and locals alike. Ironically, it takes less cognitive effort to navigate the city on the serpentine tangle of metro lines than day-to-day transportation in Ann Arbor. I find I can slip on my headphones, space out and even sing along, reveling in my anonymity. I am one in eight million gliding with the current and no one gives a damn. As soon as I assumed this nonchalance, people started asking me for directions daily.

Home, by contrast, is a six-story den filled with warm light and conversation [pictured]. Kids in the program have internships ranging from ballet administration, to sports journalism at The Daily News, to working for Saturday Night Live’s music department. Everyone comes home tired and filled with funny stories. Apparently Nicki Minaj rolls very deep, and Peewee Herman invokes intense consternation upon contact.

I have yet to meet any major celebrities on the job with Pacifica, but it’s exhilarating all the same. Today, the doorman called me “Zeke,” and I felt like a Wall Street fat cat riding the high-speed elevator up to the tenth floor. The fund drive starts tomorrow, so we’re nearing the home stretch on collecting counter-culture premiums to offer listeners. That has taken up most of my time over the last couple weeks, and the strange fruits of my labor are arriving in boxes labeled “Curing Cancer from the Inside Out” and “The Mafia Principle of Global Hegemony.”

Tomorrow, the phone lines open for what is sure to be nine hours of hardcore fund driving (whatever that might entail), but for now, I’m off with a couple housemates to sip tea and stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge.

First Week, First Impressions

It's been two weekends and one workweek since I began my New York Arts Program internship. I’m living in a partitioned townhouse smack in the middle of Chelsea with 30 other art interns from the Midwest and Texas. My roommate from K, Emily Townsend, and I are rooming together again. We managed to squeeze our belongings from our old, spacious room at K into a closet with barely enough space for our single bunk bed. With the tapestries on the wall, familiar books on the shelves and goofy conversations, it feels like a hornet hive tucked into the heart of the world’s busiest city. Our front stoop view of Times Square makes Trowbridge’s vista of the library or downtown Kalamazoo seem like doll houses. The drag racing, drunken fighting and sirens never sleep, but with our curtains drawn and guitar plucking, we do.

I have come to appreciate the tameness of the city of Kalamazoo since my arrival, as I realized how little class work I could justify completing in this electric environment. Last weekend, some housemates and I bought tickets to a “surprise guest” comedy show two blocks away. After squeezing into the standing room area, Aziz Ansari from Parks And Recreation strolled onstage and explained he would be playing Carnegie Hall the next night and wanted to fine tune his act. While walking home and recovering from an hour of snorting laughter, we ran into Ben Stiller’s film crew shooting a movie one block from our front door.

I started work on Wednesday at a station that broadcasts throughout the tri-state area. The office overlooks the East River. The location in the heart of corporate America is ironic for the self-described hippies at the station, but walking into the studio is walking into a world apart. Although I’m only just getting to know my colleagues, they all seem engaging and diverse. My official boss, the station’s program director, is a former stand-up comedian with a long ponytail who swears at his emails.

February is fund drive month at the station. For now, my daily responsibilities include tracking down materials to offer donors as “premiums.” It’s the simple things, like contacting publishers at the behest of my boss that inform me about what a future in public radio journalism might hold.

Each day, my workload builds as I attempt to reverse my Midwestern reputation (not that I’m actually sure how that characterizes me; all I know is the inflection people use while they say, Oh, so you’re from Mi-chi-gan…)

On Thursday, I wrote two promotional spots (one in Spanish) to be read on air. Although my dyslexia and air-fright prevent me from desiring a career as a live host, I have to admit it’s exhilarating to imagine my voice enveloping New York from the station’s signal atop the Empire State Building.

My boss is a cool-headed director and I enjoy compiling information onto spreadsheets in his office while watching the radio world rotate through his door. So far, I can tell that each day, there are fires to put out, and each day something interesting falls into your lap. In only three workdays, two hosts couldn’t come into the station for their shifts, they squeezed a ten-person funk band into the tiny studio for a live performance, and while I was on my way to the Democracy Now! studio, I found out the entire crew had shipped off to Sundance with only a moment’s notice, all of which led to raucous moments of improvisation.

Above the clamor in the office, I can always hear the station’s output, which gives me this meta experience of watching the future product assembling while enjoying the manufactured good, as though from the future. Tune in online and listen with me.

Start Spreading the News

I'm sitting in my boxed-up bedroom at my parents' house, ready to take off for today's treacherous twelve-hour road trip with a stranger. If the synergy of working out a ride to Chelsea is indicative of the next few months, things will be complicated and lucky. My Kalamazoo College roommate, Emily, and I were planning on riding up together, but car snafus complicated matters until my dad found out a friend-of-a-friend was driving out to New Jersey on the same morning we had planned. My first New York moment, and I haven't even left.

In New York, I'll be living in a college-sponsored townhouse in Chelsea and working on Wall Street at a radio station. The college's program allows me to forgo one quarter of classes in order to intern with a host in the arts. Because the New York Arts Program committee was gracious enough to include news media as an art form, I get this amazing opportunity. Emily is interested in radio journalism, and she landed an internship with The Moth Radio Hour. We'll be rooming together in Chelsea as well. We want both internships at once. Hopefully if there are enough hours in a day, she can sneak down to Wall Street and I can come to some readings.

Emily and I visited New York in December to interview. She bought me a milkshake at the Chelsea Market first thing on the morning I came in. We also walked around a stilted park called The High Line, SoHo, Ground Zero and Wall Street. The energy of the city infected both of us, and there was much screaming like little girls.

I was nervous to interview with the station, though I had already been offered the internship. The office is perched above the East River in a beautiful building with an art deco door. On the tenth floor, Pacifica Radio's office was buzzing with the Julian Assange leak story. My future boss, an ex-comedian, was skeptical about the authenticity of Assange's motives, but the station had just decided to read the leaks in their entirety. I'm so excited to be working in a place that decides what news people should hear and how they hear it.

It's been a fantastic break living with my family and visiting friends from high school, but Ann Arbor is getting a little too comfortable, though, and I'm ready to be leavin' today.