Baby you can drive my bus

Mood: energetic
The beautiful Chinese-American woman behind the counter at the Hip Cup Cafe in New York City's Chinatown got testy when told her I wanted to visit a restaurant where the Triads hung out as in "Year of the Dragon". The Triads were wiped out years ago, she said. "John Lone is an actor." D'oh. This suggests Chinese-Americans like Italian-Americans still need to develop a thicker skin when it comes to the Soprano-like activities in their communities. ("When the film came out, it was protested against by the Chinese American community for presenting an inaccurate and stereotyped image of Chinatown." - IMDB Trivia) Then again, as Private Joker would say, I think she was f--king with me. In any case, she softened and suggested I visit Canal Street if I was looking for a contemporary version of the same atmosphere featured in the movie.

More than a decade ago, the owner of the Kokopelli Cafe on Broad Street near VCU suggested out of the blue that if I was ever in NYC, I should visit a certain restaurant in Chinatown the Triads frequented. One of those "huh?" moments - I didn't have a clue then as to why the Triads and I would want to get together. I do now, but as my mother used to tell me, I don't want to leave my fight in the gym. Probably for the same reason Ms. Giraffe wanted me to see "The Transporter".

Without getting too Jungian, there are lessons to be learned, themes that run through our lives like deep water currents, and if we ignore them out of convention, conformity, moralism, or idealism, they continue to return again and again. [Reading this paragraph over again, this sounds like so much cosmic slop, but I'm leaving it for educational reasons.]

The Kokopeli Cafe was a cool place but it was the victim along with several other businesses of a mysterious fire in the same building. The owner, who was also a real estate developer, was prescient man. He foresaw the gentification and development of the area surrounding VCU coming long before it happened.

The Hip Cup Cafe at 225 Park Row was the place to get breakfast after a long night's bus journey into day from Richmond that ended under the Manhattan Bridge. The cafe is just above NYPD headquarters and a short walk to Fulton Fish Market and South Street Seaport Museum.

I found it overgrown, supersized (in the MacDonald's bad way), if not metastasized. It looks simply too big to live in, let alone manage. I stayed in Boston for a couple of months while I was in the Shenandoah Valley and found it a city that still had a human scale and was livable, albeit some of the people had that NY drop-dead attitude.

My own theory about "Seinfeld" is that the reason the characters are so neurotic is that they are stressed out by the overcrowding and the sheer effort it takes to make it there. A couple of days of breathing the bad air was enough to develop what I call my pre-asthmatic cough.

While I was there, one of NYC's pre-eminent boho newspapers ran an article about the cheapest place in the city to get shots and beer, all the better to get shit-faced and fall in bed with whomever is around when the tipping point is reached. So much for NYC's life of the mind. I went to the South Street Seaport Museum and found it a tourist trap. There were high school bands from all over the country playing there. In other words, you can travel all the way to NYC and see the same thing you can see in any small town football stadium on Friday night. They had a jazz saxaphone player outside the building. At least he wasn't animatronic. So much for culture. There was a mall inside the building, but frankly, once you've seen a Gap, you've pretty much seen every Gap. I suppose if you're into buying Yankee or Met gear, that's cool, but otherwise, ho-hum.

I always wondered why people commented about how clean Richmond is until I got to NYC. The streets are filled with garbage and the whole place pretty filthy. There's a lot of run-down, excuse me, historic buildings in the city. I used to think that Richmond had a lot of cops, but NYC is crawling with them. I don't want to think about what kind of crime rate it takes to sustain that number of uniforms. As S.J. Perelman observed, "Thinking about New York City brings a lump to the throat, which upon further examination turns out to be a .38 caliber bullet."

Don't get me wrong. I did find a lot of friendly, helpful people and it was cool to lie on the deck chairs on the decks outside the South Street Mall and watch the ships go by. But overall, I think that Richmond has an inferiority complex which is undeserved - at least compared to NYC - and NYC has a superiority complex which is also undeserved, at least compared to Richmond.