MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE: Dream House

The mind-altering experience of Dream House, a “sound and light environment” in a Tribeca loft, begins before you enter and continues well after you leave. As soon as I was buzzed through the door of 275 Church Street and began the climb to the third floor, I heard the humming, felt the pulsing, smelled the incense, detected a pink cast to the stairwell light. 

At the top, I removed my shoes and set them beside a Penguin Classics tote bag, a tweed hat, an overcoat, and a pair of battered shoes. I imagined a lone professor bumbling about inside. Instead, when I stepped through the door into the violet light and trancelike sounds, I saw a lithe young couple embracing, surrounded by dingy pillows strewn across a musty wall-to-wall carpet. I felt as though I’d entered the bedroom of a rebellious teenager.

Behind them, windows covered in magenta gels tinted the city skyline pink. An altar featured a propped-up painting of a yogi-type howling at a cloud, incense burning below him in a blue cereal bowl. The air was hot and swirled with incense smoke, and the sound (not quite music) pulsed and droned and throbbed. The subtle pitch changes penetrated to my core.

The Dream House, conceived by composer La Monte Young and visual artist Marian Zazeela, has inhabited this space since 1993. The duo describes it as “a time installation measured by a setting of continuous frequencies in sound and light,” which is hard to conceive of until you are in it. It’s sort of like being inside an electrical outlet where a rave and a meditation session are taking place simultaneously. The sound, which Young created using a Rayna synthesizer, consists of a constellation of thirty-one frequencies that create unique intervals. “[It is] highly unlikely that anyone has ever heard them or perhaps even imagined the feelings they create,” he notes in the installation’s press release.

Not wanting to disturb the couple, I retreated down a neon-lit hall to a second, smaller room. As I moved through the space, the sound changed, becoming shrill with a pounding undertone, sort of like being on a motorboat bouncing across waves. I felt lugubrious yet weightless. I sat on a pillow and contemplated the illuminated shadowbox hanging on the wall before me. 

After waiting a tactful few minutes, I made my way back to the main room. The guy was now seated in the lotus position on a pillow, pressing his finger to his third eye. The girl, in a yoga posture, stretched her arms toward four comma-shaped mobiles, which, illuminated by theater lights fitted with gels, cast luminous red and blue shadows on the walls. Then she dropped to the floor and began to crawl down the neon hall. The guy pressed his hands together in prayer, bowed, then reclined on a pillow, gazing at the ceiling. Nothing moved, not even the mobiles.

When I stepped onto the sidewalk, an incense perfume seemed to permeate the air and my ears tuned in to frequencies I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise: the snores of a Verizon truck intubated to a manhole, the hum of vacant subway tracks, the fuzzy sub-beat of a fellow passenger’s headphones, a distant, sourceless harmonica. 

SOUND: Buzz-a-Rama slot-car racing

In a low-slung gray building on Church Avenue in Kensington, wedged between Dahill Halal Pizza and the Bengla Bazaar minimart, sits Buzz-a-Rama, the last remaining slot-car-racing storefront in the city. Five racetracks fill the room, their eight color-coded lanes turning and dipping and curling around the room like strips of colored taffy.

The space, festooned with checkered racing flags, smells as it probably did when it first opened, in 1965, at the peak of the slot-car-racing craze: of ozone, from the sparks created when a car’s slots don’t connect properly with the track. The old-timers will tell you it’s the same smell produced by electric-train sets, something just as unfamiliar as the slot cars to their successors: the young drivers clustered around the track, small fists on their throttles, mesmerized by the sight before them.

Zinging along the tracks at speeds of up to one hundred miles per hour are the slot cars, and their high-pitched whirring drone fills the room. The buzz and whispery rattle-click of these seven-by-three-inch cars echoes not only the name “Buzz-a-Rama” (actually a reference to the owner, “Buzz” Perri) but the excitement of the hobby. It’s a lightweight sound, with a sharp, metallic quality, from the cars’ chassis, but also the click of plastic, from the shells that provide the aerodynamics and which can be custom designed or purchased as mini-replicas of branded cars (Mustangs, Corvettes, Stingrays). The cars skim along the track in their slots like insects over water. Doo-wop music plays, an ancient fan beats its wings, the children cheer, and occasionally Buzz himself comes out with a megaphone to call the final race.

Each car runs on a twelve-volt DC motor and has a piece of metal on the chassis that slides into a slot along the track. Besides the mechanics, the only controllable factor in slot-car racing is the speed, since the cars stay in their track as long as you don’t “de-slot” them—by running them too fast around a curve, for example, a common error. Buzz or his wife, Dolores, assigns each group to a track and each driver to a colored slot on that track.

They set a timer for those slots, hand you your car and throttle, which plugs into a socket next to track. Slip your car into your assigned slot, take a seat in a folding chair, push in the trigger, and you’re off! 

But though the initial burst of speed is irresistible, it doesn’t take long to realize the advantages to releasing the throttle at the approach to a curve, the correct use of the “pulse,” and how to ease the car back to high speed on the flat parts and straightaways. Some of the curves are banked, which requires different manipulation.

On Saturday and Sunday afternoons—the only times Buzz-a-Rama is open—you typically find a birthday party or two, families sharing a track and righting each other’s cars when they de-slot, and, on the two tracks reserved for privately owned cars, the regulars and aficionados consulting each other as they shave down tires, tweak gears and motors, adjust the chassis to coax their machines to their optimal performance. A dusty shop at the front offers all the supplies an enthusiast needs in a glass case smeared by the curious noses of future Jimmy Johnsons.

For Brooklyn’s slot-car-racers cum health nuts, Dolores sells equally dusty and sun-faded wellness items out of a vitrine alongside one track, including high-fiber crisp-bread, all-purpose seasoning, aloe ointment, and VHS cassettes on improving IQ and nutrition, labels typed on a manual typewriter. An unclaimed Mylar balloon from a party lolls in the air over track 4, but no one rushes to dispose of it. The only things that move fast around here are the cars.

SMELL: Chelsea Flower District at dawn on Valentine’s Day

It’s 5 a.m. in Midtown on Valentine’s Day. The only sounds are the buzz-click of changing traffic signals and the swish of a stray cab through puddles. The sun won’t rise for another hour or so.

But turn onto West Twenty-eighth Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, and the scene changes abruptly. This is the hub of the Chelsea Flower District, and even though the shops are wholesale-only, anyone can wander in--alongside the city’s flower dealers--to begin the day as they do: with a fragrant oxygen rush.

There’s the splat of a bucket of water hitting the sidewalk, the beeping of delivery trucks. Workers hoist bunches of pussy willows and branches into tubs on the sidewalks. Inside, the shops’ wall-racks explode with every conceivable color and type of flower, like psychedelic wallpaper.

I step through the door of Empire Cut Flowers. As it’s Valentine’s Day, roses are front and center. I smile to think of the journeys these bouquets will take from here: into buckets outside bodegas, or wrapped in parchment paper and ribbon, carried on the B train or protruding from a messenger’s bag, presented over dinner at Daniel or on a stroll in Central Park.

The moist green rush of perfume and cut stem hits me instantly—a sweet-and-sour, living smell. But a few steps in, the scent of roses and mingled buds is quickly overwhelmed by other smells: drip coffee (which is available for all in the back of many of the stores, alongside flats of doughnuts and sodas); cologne and body odor; the mustiness of wet cement floors and air conditioning; the astringency of eucalyptus.

Salsa music plays, and morning news radio. A spirit of camaraderie prevails as the dealers greet many customers by name. There’s an undercurrent of instructions and consultations, in Spanish and English—“Twenty-five cream and two long-stems…” “Empire doesn’t have it, check…” “I got some nice delphinium, some daffodils, nice bunches, pink, red, orange…” but no one seems rushed. There’s the crush of empty cardboard boxes as the flowers gradually move off the shelves and out of the store.

Daffodils rest supine, not yet bloomed, in a box. Lavender bundles exude a dry, heathery aroma from beneath a metal shelf. Vats of tulips burst from their wrappers beneath vases of early spring branches. Ranunculus buds rest their heads on a bed of shredded paper. Calla lilies—one of the few unbundled blooms—tempt passing noses with the flute of their single white petal.

A streetlight glows where the sun will rise in an hour, and the asphalt is littered with crushed flower stems and petals, like a gym floor after a prom. A Dutch Flower Line truck disgorges boxes that landed at JFK just a few hours ago.

On my way home, I stop into a Duane Reade. Bouquets of a dozen roses are $17.99. I carry one to the register. “These roses are, like, eighteen dollars,” the clerk says, waggling the bouquet in one hand and raising an eyebrow. “I mean, yesterday they were only twelve dollars. Is it worth it?” he asks.

I decline: I am carrying a bouquet within me, and the day hasn’t even begun.

TASTE: New York City tap water

New York is reputed to have the champagne of tap water. The crust and loft of our bagels and pizza crust have been attributed to its properties. At restaurants, when given the option “Bottled or tap?,” seasoned New Yorkers choose tap without hesitation, and in some spots a carafe of local water is part of the place setting.

I decided to sample New York’s miracle beverage in three forms: straight from my Brooklyn tap (free), from a plastic bottle of Duane Reade’s “New York Spring Water” ($1.56), and from a glass bottle of Molecule Water Project’s ultra-purified tap water ($2.50).

At home, I let the tap run cold, then filled up a glass. The water was clear and smooth with a faint bitterness that turned to sweetness before dissolving. The water was refreshing, clean, and utterly forgettable: exactly what most of us are looking for in a glass of water.

Duane Reade, the iconic New York drugstore, sells its “New York Spring Water” in a plastic bottle with the bar code shaped like the Statue of Liberty. The back of the label states: “Bottled in New York State, for New Yorkers.” The front of the label reassures skeptics and tourists: “It’s clean, it’s natural, we promise.” Duane Reade’s water was crisp and had a resinous tang, but overall it went down pretty easily. I felt energized and refreshed, perhaps because it was chillier than even the coldest water I could summon from my faucet. 

Finally, I went to the East Village storefront Molecule Water Café: a slice of prime Manhattan real estate—gleaming tile, wood counter, bay window—devoted to one thing: selling purified tap water (as well as filters for faucets and showers).

Molecule’s water passes through a twenty-five-thousand-dollar machine that subjects it to an eight-stage process involving ultraviolet light, reverse osmosis, and ozone treatments to rid it of all impurities (chlorine, fluoride, and lead, among others). It costs $2.50 for a sixteen-ounce glass bottle with a tin cap. Molecule recommends drinking water at room temperature so the body doesn’t have to exert as much energy. The handsome packaging, the satisfying glugglugglug as the water passed through the neck of the bottle, and the texture of the glass lip contributed a sense of value, but the water itself tasted the least smooth of the three. Though I’d heard Molecule’s purified tap water described as “velvety” and “round,” I tasted lemony and floral notes, and a decidedly bitter aftertaste that lingered, unlike the previous two waters.

One wall of the café features a row of glass tubes filled with colored liquids. For a dollar or two more, you can supplement your tap water with alkaline and electrolytes, vitamins, or one of several “Signature Blends”: luo han guo and shiitake mushrooms for immunity; biotin and grape-seed extract for hair, skin and nails; holy basil and white willow bark to counteract inflammation; and ashwagandha and rhodiola for energy.

In addition, there are “Suggested Combos” to take the most vigorous New Yorker from dawn to dusk: “Fountain of Youth” and “Body Repair” to get you out of bed in the morning; “Strong Bones,” “Cold Buster,” and “Glamour Shot” to transition from work to a night on the town; “Base” and “Night Vision” to help you keep your bearings; and finally  “Relax,” “Recover,” and “Hangover” (the most popular combo).

I decided to try “Molecule Energy” ($3), a “unique blend of herbs, fruits, and roots from around the world” that promises to “sharpen your mind and enliven your body so you can get out there and carpe diem.” The water in my glass bottle turned a murky green with sparkly sediments. It tasted like weak green tea. After a few sips, I did feel a tingle of replenished energy. Could it have been the caffeine anhydrous? The guarana? Or maybe it was the alchemy of a quaint café, a designer bottle filled from a test tube, and faith that if tap water could be transformed for three dollars, so could I.