Crunch crunch, sounds like leaves underfoot

We are a few weeks into what I hesitantly and tentatively consider (knocks on wood, throws salt over the left shoulder, rubs lucky rabbit foot, no whammy no whammy stop) an honest to goodness autumn. I hedge so very thoroughly because we live in an age of global warming induced seasonal switcheroos. Growing up in Northeast Ohio, I was accustomed to the “Fool’s Spring”, a string of days in March where we would get a reprieve from the bitter ass end of winter with a few days of sunshine before plunging back into the cold gray sludge straight through to Easter. These days, we’ve become chillingly accustomed to global warming induced anomalous weather patterns. And yet, I’ve enjoyed a prolonged stretch of the cooler, crisp days. The kind that make me wonder if I should get a professorial blazer to add to my layering options. I haven’t participated in some of my fall rituals like purchasing one (1) ceremonial Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks, drinking half, and throwing the rest away because its too sweet or convincing myself that I’m actually going to use that whole jar of apple butter before it winds up condemned to the rear of the condiment shelf and thrown out in a shameful spring cleaning¹ , but I have been enjoying some of the other spoils of the season, like taking in the robust stoop decorations of Brooklyn.

I saw this while out on a run and stopped so abruptly to take a photo, I risked tearing my ACL. This is how its done, folks. First off, congratulations to Walter White for joining the Men in Black. How in the hell are these people supposed to get in and out of their home? I’ve been staring at this image for about five minutes trying to observe every detail and I am honestly in a better mood than I was before I started. I’d like to think in my day to day life I am like the E.T holding court with the bags of Reese’s Pieces, but I’ll concede that I’m actually probably closer to E.T wearing a little traditional witch’s hat (even though that’s probably self-inflation and in reality I am non-E.T alien with a spider on its head).

These autumnal delights have autumnal ends. I recently redoubled my efforts towards an activity that I started well before autumn but is definitely an autumn activity: Finishing a Really Big Book. I have been re-reading Robert Caro’s masterpiece The Power Broker² , a biography of the builder Robert Moses that functions as a history of the infrastructure of New York City in the 20th century, a primer on how power and influence works in government and civic organizations, and an infuriating insight into why traffic sucks and how we got screwed on public transportation.

At some point over the last few years I started to find myself in a particular kind of social situation with a noticeable degree of regularity. I would experience a sublime dissolution of the individual self, giving way to merging with a collective organism, that organism being “group of men in their 30s standing off to the side at a party, gassing each other up talking about Robert Caro.” It is a bit embarrassing, it is a bit cliche, I don’t care, I love it.

Caro, the author and journalist who wrote (and is still writing) the definitive works of biography on Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson³ , is a few years into a fresh wave of celebration and notoriety. In 2019, he published Working, a memoir about the craft of biographical writing, which started to bring the nerds out of the woodwork. There was some Power Broker buzz in 2020 because people would conspicuously position a copy on their bookshelf in their Zoom background⁴ to indicate sophistication and literary endurance. In 2022, Lizzie Gotlieb’s documentary Turn Every Page premiered, chronicling the working relationship of Caro and his editor, Bob Gotlieb⁵ . And now in 2024, The Power Broker is turning 50 and the requisite retrospectives have brought the Caro-issaince to a fever pitch.

I’ve been working through the book while listening to a monthly companion podcast from the show 99% Invisible and been having a blast all along the way. Caro’s writing reads like a novel and is so chock full of information, I often feel bad for not remembering more of it, especially considering how thoroughly he researches. It helps to have chosen strong subject matter. Moses was a fascinating man and a real bastard (this chapter gives you a taste) and reading about his rise and fall is like riding the world’s tallest and slowest rollercoaster. On a side note, I am performing in a show about The Power Broker at Caveat in a few weeks, and you should check it out.

And really, what could be more autumnal than penning a meandering blog that has footnotes aplenty and not much of a point? What can I say? I’ve been drinking the occasional Oktoberfest, I’ve been eating nails watching postseason baseball, I haven’t had an iced coffee in weeks⁶ . ‘Tis the season.

¹  SMH why are my first two fall rituals centered around buying shit?

² I had previously listened to it as an audiobook because I didn’t want to lug around a physical copy. The narrator had a voice that oozed gravitas like you wouldn’t believe.

³  I love that my man Bob takes his sweet time writing his books and that he has spent his decades long career only writing six of them, unlike that hack David McCullough who crapped out 11 tomes in a similar span of time.

⁴  Zoom, you may recall, was a video communication app that many of us used to conduct business and drunken game nights while we stayed at home during the onset of the novel coronavirus covid-19.

⁵  I saw a screening of this at Film Forum at 5:30pm on a Thursday, which is as perfect an alignment of time / place / film as seeing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at midnight on Halloween projected onto the wall of a haunted slaughterhouse.

⁶ I had one like two days ago.