Bambi Edlund

I went to New York this week to see the fabulous new play Hello Failure by Seattle's own Kristen Kosmas at P.S. 122, and to take care of some business, get into some trouble, and check in on some friends. I'm reporting to you now from the exotic and glamorous Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, which is not, apparently, the namesake of Houston rapper Bushwick Bill of the Geto Boys, but which is the latest Brooklyn neighborhood to be infested with the plague of conformist Williamsburg hipsters seeking cheap rent who are incrementally destroying New York in every direction. (No offense to the conformist Williamsburg hipsters who let me crash at their place and use their computer.)

Yes, it's another glorious week in New York for your humble columnist, starting at JFK airport, where, in the process of helping a charming little old lady (probably a pickpocket) negotiate the proper series of shuttle and train transfers to Manhattan to visit her ailing sister-in-law, I groggily got on the E train with her, not on my train at all, and proceeded to spend the morning of my first day on a leisurely tour of many, many different subway stops across the boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. I was heading to a 9:30 meeting down on Wall Street, not because my indie-rock fortunes require that I personally monitor the stock exchange, but for altogether more tragic and hilarious reasons. In the aftermath of 9/11, most of the banks and investment brokerages started hightailing it out of the financial district and setting up shop in the relatively more bustling areas of Midtown, where they could kid themselves that they would be safer from terrorist attack at least until the terrorists got hard-ons for Radio City Music Hall. Unfortunately, that area was the traditional home of all the record labels and TV networks, and as the rents started rising and the suits started pouring into the neighborhood, the first people to be displaced were the smaller labels and publishing houses operating on the lower floors of Rockefeller Center. Those small labels and publishers went where the office rents were cheapest, down in the now half-deserted canyons of Wall Street. The juxtaposition of rock slouchers and financial district bluebloods is a treat for the eye.

After my high-powered showbiz meetings downtown, where it was agreed that we were all soon to realize fantastic riches from humping the bloated corpse of indie rock as long as I was assiduous in keeping my artistic integrity absolutely intact (damn!), I had the first of 13 meals I was to have that day. Ah, New York, you make such a delightful roast beef sandwich. I walked up from the Battery to 14th Street, through Chinatown and the East Village, shaking my moneymaker on Avenue A with the walking American Apparel ads in Ron Wood fright wigs who make up the downtown scene. Ten thousand Serpicos and not a single Annie Hall. Eventually I migrated to Park Slope, where I searched high and low for a jar of maraschino cherries to take as a gift to a dinner party later that night. My host, a popular comedian who plays the role of an unhip brand of computer in TV commercials for a hip brand of computer, had asked me to bring the cherries as some kind of test or as a private gag, for when I arrived at the dinner and presented him with the cherries, he simply nodded, smiled, and put them aside, using them in neither the dinner nor the drinks. I suspect it may have been the first of many Comic Guild initiation rituals I'll be asked to perform before I'm finally trusted enough to be introduced to Jerry Stiller. One of the other guests at dinner was the guitarist Kaki King, who has a new record released this week called Dreaming of Revenge I can heartily recommend. Conversation around the table ranged from a discussion of Thomas Dolby's performance at the recent TED Conference in Monterey, Calif., to a long story about an affair the actress Sean Young had with Patrick Stewart's teenage son during the filming of Dune. Standard high-geek fare.

By 2 a.m. I was back at Little Frankie's on First Avenue eating lasagna with a group of Seattle theater expats. A particular filmmaker sat at my right elbow while I ate, babbling with increasing hysteria about owls and Freemasonry, and seemed genuinely baffled when I made the suggestion that perhaps his habitual drunkenness and massive drug intake contributed to his perception that he was being watched by plastic birds. Let that be a lesson to anyone who tries to kick their drug habit by moving to Manhattan.