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Allentown, Pennsylvania
We sat in the corner had the bar hand throw the game on
My first ever Banana Ball experience took place this summer in Allentown at a game where the Party Animals played and defeated the Texas Tailgaters although, if you know anything about Banana Ball, you’ll know that the least important part of any Banana Ball game is the game itself. Unlike baseball (which I do actually like) Banana Ball is meant to be non stop, exhausting, distracting and, at all costs, entertaining, all in a good way. At any moment, two, three or four things are going on at the same time, with (most of that time) the baseball game being the least important one.
Of the five baseball games I saw in person this year (a somewhat high number for me), two were Banana Ball games, one was at Fenway and the other two are pictured here- a minor league Somerset Patriots home game an a major league Mets home game. Both were enjoyable (although obviously not as entertaining as a Banana Ball game) although the Mets game was pretty damn painful to watch, as the image of Mr Met on the scoreboard suggests. The Mets just didn’t come to play that day and its highly talented lineup produced only one hit in the entire game, but on the bright side, at least it was nice to be outside on a warm summer afternoon.
I was back at Citi Field again this year for a concert (The Lumineers), my first live concert in some time. Not all that long ago I was all about live music, but now that I’m (a little) older than I was, I find myself more concerned about not wanting to go to bad venues or going to a venue with no seats. It’s not like I lost the ability to stand for two hours straight, it’s more that a few bad experiences made me realize that I no longer want to stand too close to the front and get crushed, or stand too close to the back and listen to all of the disinterested people talk the whole damn time. Of course that makes you think there is some sort of magical sweet spot in the middle where you can breathe and enjoy the concert, but even then it slowly becomes one or the other or, in a worst case scenario, both.
We’ll stay in Queens where (not too far) outside of CitiField is the Unisphere. As for this picture, I’m sure there is a good story about this Lego minifigure and why this picture was chosen for the slideshow, but for once I’ll just leave that story up to your imagination.
If the Lego minifigure and I are going to go all the way out to the Unisphere, you just know that we’re going to take things just a little further and see the Queens Museum and its spectacular Panorama of the City of New York, one of the great sites to visit in the city. The model was built for the 1964 World’s Fair (where, according to that They Might Be Giants song, eighty dolls were yelling “small girl after all”) and has been periodically updated, although there are some major inconsistencies, other than the famously out of scale planes departing JFK and La Guardia. The biggest one is probably the World Trade Center site, where the twin towers still stand but then things start to get wacky. The new Goldman Sacks Tower and ferry terminal was added but the old 7 World Trade Center remains while the Deutsche bank building and pedestrian bridges are missing, creating a mini city that never existed.
We’ll stay in Queens to stop by the Noguchi Museum in Astoria, a fantastic small museum that featured an exhibit celebrating itself. The exhibit, Against Time: The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation, was all about Noguchi and the Noguchi Museum, proving what we all suspected all along: that there is no better place on earth to celebrate the Noguchi Museum than the Noguchi Museum.
I keep track of a lot of things, but not how many times I go into the city each year, or how many times I ride New Jersey Transit or the PATH trains, but this year it really felt as if I spent a lot more of my summer than usual riding NYC Ferries, especially along the East River. The service is usually pretty solid, even though (on weekends) it is often late and often filled with tourists who are either too cheap or too smart (or possibly both) to take the Circle Line instead.
One of those places that NYC Ferry can take you to is Roosevelt Island, where I walked from one end (and the giant FDR head) all the way to the other end (and the tiny lighthouse) and back.
I found myself on Roosevelt Island three times this year, which feels at least two more times than normal. The first was to see the cherry blossoms- I went later on the same day that I walked the entire length of Branch Brook Park, despite the crowds trying to get a decent photo of the few trees still in full bloom. The second visit was on a nice summer afternoon where I started at the subway station, walked south to the memorial, north to the lighthouse and then south again to the ferry dock. What brought me back a third time was a temporary art installation, Camouflage by Ai Weiwei, which saw the FDR Memorial covered with, well, camouflage.
It’s somewhat easy to mix up Roosevelt Island and Governors Island, after all both are islands, although honestly they really don’t have much in common beyond that. Roosevelt Island is residential and Governors Island is still, all these years later, in the act of becoming whatever it is going to be. There is a lot of progress, the trees in the hammock grove are starting to become the forest that was promised and it always seems like there’s something new there every year, although there are still a lot of areas to develop and historic coast guard buildings that still feel under utilized or abandoned. Back in the pre-pandemic years, Roosevelt, um, I mean Governors Island was an annual summer stop, usually on the same day that I visited Warm Up at PS1. There used to be more interesting summer art installations and exhibits and festivals here, especially in the glory days of the Bloomberg Administration, and there was always a reason to come here. Now it’s certainly busier (the line for the free ferry was so insane that it drove me away and I just took the busy but manageable NYC Ferry instead) but it also feels more skippable, somewhere that I can always go to next week or next month or next year instead, Although after a few years absence, once you’re actually there, it’s easy to remember why you used to always make sure to visit at least once ever summer, whether you (honestly) had a good reason to or not.
