szymon: Not StarWars :) Abandoned Yugoslavian...

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Not StarWars :)
Abandoned Yugoslavian Monuments by Jan Kempenaers

Today during my lunch break I sat between the Met Opera House and the plaza with the trees and reflecting pool. I was next to one of the public pianos, and people kept sitting down to play. When some high school kid started in on one of the Yann Tiersen waltzes from Amelie, I thought to myself: this is perfect, this is where I’ll have to have lunch from now on, even if the construction from the theater is right on the other side.

A few hours later I was headed with my mother to a wine-and-cheese party at a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Someone she used to volunteer with is now the Borough President’s Chief of Staff and some sort of trustee with the Brooklyn Public Library and, you know, just one of those people—a real community activist and whatnot. They’ve just put air-conditioning into the library, a big thing what with today the last day of the public school year, and they’re both celebrating that and having a little community fundraiser, because, after all, budget cuts.

It’s funny, but when I spent most of my time in Chicago I forget that people just don’t talk like that in the Midwest. They just don’t act quite the same. I spend all my time thinking people aren’t so different, especially not in big cities, especially not when I have friends all over the country, and then I come home to Brooklyn and realize that it really is something else. Something subtle, but something else all the same.

I don’t quite fit in there, of course, I don’t talk, don’t act, like that myself—at least, not in ways I’m conscious of—but it’s comforting all the same. Like sitting on the bench in the sun listening to passers-by play sad waltzes on the piano.