Continuing the Johhny Depp summer of love, I watched Finding Neverland on DVD with Andie tonight. It’s a testament to Depp’s acting chops that one moment he’s a loony dandy candymaker, then an imaginative playwright with a Scottish brogue, and you’re convinced in each case that he is who he plays.

For those among you ladies and gentlemen who deem Mr. Depp “mantastic,” you’ll find his role here easier to shoehorn into your naughty fantasies than his performance as Willy Wonka.

The story is based a bit on reality. After meeting the Davies family one sunny day in Kensington Gardens, writer J.M. Barrie befriends the boys, becoming their surrogate father, and writes a hit play based upon their literal flights of fantasy and of pirates, Indians and fairies: Peter Pan. It may have been the first play with so much of its action centered around special effects—when it debuted in 1904, it was one of the first that allowed the actors to “fly,” via an elaborate apparatus of pulleys and cords. In the film, Peter Pan’s audience gasps, astonished at what they see.

I enjoyed the way the movie cut seamlessly between reality and the fantasy world. A scene where Barrie and the boys are playing pirates, for example, is intercut between their playacting and their adventures on an actual pirate ship pitching about a stormy, surrealistic sea.

The film ends predictably with a tragedy, racking up further Chick Flick points with several weep-worthy scenes. Andie, for one, cried and said she liked the movie.

A front-page story by Patrick McGeehan in today’s New York Times Metro Section says it all in its title: “A Week of Random Backpack Searches Yields Little Drama.” The past week has resulted in several thousand searches of the bags of passengers in more than 400 subway stations. Results? According to police and transit officials, one arrest for possession of illegal fireworks, no legal challenges (yet) and “minimal resistance,” despite the fact the NYDS is not tracking how many people decline to submit to a search. The Port Authority Police Department, which oversees the PATH trains, did keep track and of the 8,010 briefcases, backpacks and purses searched (without any arrests), only five people refused and walked away without incident.

I went and saw Charlie and the The Chocolate Factory tonight. I don’t remember much of the book or Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory other than the songs and the grotesque ways in which the bad children are dispatched.

At this point, these movies are like a finely tuned machine for Burton and his buddies Danny Elfman, who has composed music for 12 of Burton’s films, and Johnny Depp, who has starred in five of them.

A lot’s been made of Depp’s performance and appearance resembling that of Michael Jackson. Appearance, maybe. He’s got the black pageboy haircut, lipstick, powdery white face and a penchant for frocks and canes. But in his performance, Depp reminded me more of the benevolent creepiness of Mr. Rogers, only with mildly hostile sarcasm and bigger teeth.

For me, the best parts of the movie occur before Depp even gets any face time. Burton’s most impressive achievement is the staggering way in which he creates his own world in painstaking detail, an exaggerated reality equal parts cartoon and gothic, like that of Edward Scissorhands. It seems clear that with movies like these to his credit, Burton would be the favorite filmmaker of Hans Christian Andersen.

As the movie opens, the fairytale world in which Charlie lives unflolds as a 1940s-era London town with the mysterious, gated Wonka factory at its edge. The Bucket family lives in a wind-slanted shack in the middle of a scrubby lot, Charlie’s four grandparents sharing a bed and Charlie sleeping in a loft above where he can look through holes in the dilapidated ceiling.

The sequences that reveal the lives of Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregarde, Veruca Salt and Mike Teavee, each of whom win a Golden Ticket to tour Wonka’s factory, are fabulous cutaway sequences rich in detail and caricature.

Strangely, the sequences inside the factory itself failed to instill me with childlike awe or even interest. I found myself waiting for each of the kids to get knocked off, accompanied by an obligatorily mind-melting song-and-dance routine by the Oompa-Loompas (played by one actor and multiplied digitally to strangely appropriate effect). I particularly enjoyed the way in which Veruca was tossed down a garbage chute in a seamlessly eerie combination of live action and computer effects. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that she’s dispatched the same way she is in the book, not the way she is in the 1971 movie. If I were a young kid, I’d be freaked out by this stuff, even though the audience is shown at the end of the film that each of the kids turns out O.K., if not slightly worse for the wear.

Running “late” at 8:20 this morning (I’m usually at least an hour behind that time), I entered my usual subway stop at W. 86^th Street and Broadway and experienced my first random bag search checkpoint.

Although by “experienced” I mean I saw it and kept moving through the turnstiles. It was manned by four uniformed cops, silently standing around and looking mischievously bored, as only the NYPD can look. (Or maybe they were counting in their heads 1...2...3... because they had to stop every fifth or tenth person for a search. I wasn’t going to hang around to watch or ask them as I wasn’t in the mood for a brisk bag-riffling.) One of the guys was holding a megaphone. They also had a semi-professional sign made with blue vinyl press-type letters and temporarily tied at eye-level to the back of the exit gate. It read: “Backpacks And Other Containers Subject To Inspection.” I imagined that the cops themselves made the sign and that their commanding officer had awarded them each with a gift certificate for a free 99-cent menu item at Wendy’s for their expeditious and top-rate craftsmanship.

Four cops seemed intensive for my lowly station, which has no connections and only one line passing through it. On the other hand, it’s on a direct route to both Times Square and Penn Station, which probably accounts for its selection. You could see why it could be the choice of subway suicide bombers as an entrance point: it’s far enough from those big stations to be out of the limelight, but not so far that you nod off on your train on the way there. Plus, we have a quiet, accommodating neighborhood. It’d be a perfect place for the potential bombers to kick back before the big fatwa Downtown. They’d be able to find a great parking spot off West End Avenue, maybe pick up a Snapple at Gristedes.

The 86^th Street station actually has two entrances—the main one consists of a block of four separate stairway entrances, covering the uptown and downtown trains. Then there’s a lesser-known mini-entrance at Broadway and W. 87th Street that’s only open for downtown trains during the morning rush hour. I noticed that entrance wasn’t covered by the cops at all.

This guy on the subway this afternoon seemed a little suspicious to me. Maybe he’s a terrorist. Aren’t terrorists often religious zealots?

At the very least, those two exclamation points are terrorizing me.

After yesterday’s post about terrorist-spotting, I didn’t think I’d read anything more surreal about the NYPD’s training. Then I read a front-page article by Ellen Byron in today’s Wall Street Journal that the force is bringing groups of newly promoted officers to the Frick to examine paintings in order to improve their observational and analytical skills.

Although the course began last year, presumably it will be useful for spotting terror suspects on public transportation, a keen concern of cops these days. Specifically, it seems to be aiding the NYPD in its profiling efforts of suspicious-looking Middle Eastern men¹.

Standing in front of El Greco’s “The Purification of the Temple,” David Grossi, an NYPD captain, recognized Jesus as the painting’s central figure, characterized the scene as chaotic and explained the work’s use of light and color.

“The gang unit would probably be called in,” he continued. “It appears there’s grand larceny here, felony assault there, and Jesus would probably be charged with inciting a riot.” Counting 17 people in the scene, he added: “Good thing there are plenty of witnesses.”

¹ Although Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday that the massive, heavily armed police response to reports of five Middle Eastern men with backpacks aboard a NYC tour bus on Sunday was the fault of the bus company’s report, not the NYPD. The men didn’t have backpacks and were Sikhs from Britain on vacation. Nonetheless, Bloomie encouraged the public to continue reporting “suspicious activity.” [back]

I’m sure Letterman has already gotten plenty of mileage out of this one, so I’ll just flat-out report it.

According to an Associated Press story, in light of the London attacks, the NYPD issued a memo late last week to its officers on what sorts of suspicious behavior to look for on NYC subways, trains and busses. Commuters are also being urged to be vigilant about reporting any signs of trouble. Here’s what to look for among your fellow passengers:

• clenched fists. “In past attacks, suicide bombers have used explosives that require them to maintain pressure on hand-held triggering devices until detonation, police said.”
• nervous feeling under or patting down of his or her clothes.
• excessive use of cologne. It could be a sign of someone trying to mask the scent of explosives.
• profuse sweating.
• avoidance of eye contact.
• mumbling or chanting.
• wearing clothes unsuitable for the temperature, such as a coat in summer.

And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
Tryin’ to anaesthetize the way that you feel.

Elvis Costello, “Radio, Radio” (1978)

Sony announced today it has agreed to a $10 million settlement for bribing radio stations with cash, vacations and electronics equipment to play songs produced by their labels. Today, New York State attorney general Eliot “Mad Dog” Spitzer released some of the damning evidence against Sony in the form of emails between it and station execs:

In one case, an employee of Sony BMG’s Epic label was trying to promote the group Audioslave to a station and asked: “WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET AUDIOSLAVE ON WKSS THIS WEEK?!!? Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen.”

In another case in 2004, the promotion department of Sony BMG label Epic Records paid for an extravagant trip to Miami for a Buffalo DJ and three friends in exchange for adding the Franz Ferdinand song “Take Me Out” to the DJ’s station’s playlist.

And in another, a program director for Clear Channel radio station WKKF-FM, or KISS-FM, sent an e-mail to a Sony executive saying: “Looking for a laptop for promotion on Bow Wow,” a reference to a rapper.

But how is this news? I’ve always assumed pay-to-play is the way commercial radio works and why it sucks so wildly. I do know such payola is the backbone of other industries, especially those that aren’t scrutinized by federal regulators. A good example is the grocery industry. Major grocery chains charge their suppliers “slotting fees” for placement and/or prominent placement in their stores. Those Lay’s potato chips you see at eye level on the store shelf? It’s not an accident they’re at eye level; that’s thousands and thousands of dollars in the store chain’s pocket.

And a $10 million fine (with no criminal charges, I might add) for a company like Sony? Ha ha! That’s funny. That’s, like, Beyoncé’s clothing allowance for six months.

Also, I notice that although Sony admitted it engaged in “wrong and improper” practices, it also didn’t exactly say it’d reprimand the employees who were involved, merely that it would be “defining a new, higher standard in radio promotion.”

I think the highest standard would be to cut out the middleman: hang the DJs and use their warm, pudgy corpses as attic insulation. This is essentially what’s happening with these new automated radio stations. Do these exist where you live? If so and you’ve listened, comment. Now that I’ve aged, I can’t listen to most radio without bleeding internally, so I’ll leave it to BusinessWeek Online commentator Burt Helm to describe the DJ-free radio format, most of which have men’s first names. The most popular of these is Infinity Broadcasting’s “Jack.”

The rules guiding a Jack-formatted station are simple: Unlike a typical radio station, which regularly plays 300 or 400 hits of a particular genre, programmers on Jack stations select 700 to 1,000 songs of completely different genres. Then, they sequence them to create what radio programmers call “train wrecks”—Billy Idol will follow Bob Marley, Elvis after Guns N’ Roses, and so on. And Jack stations often (but not always) use a smart-alecky recorded voice, rather than a live DJ, to make short quips between songs.

That’s right, you nerds out there with sharp memories—it’s exactly as foreseen in that 1994 Simpsons episode with the DJ-3000: “It plays CDs automatically and it has three distinct varieties of inane chatter.”

Yet Jack seems to be working. Infinity launched its first Jack station last July at KJKK-FM in Dallas. Since then, the station has improved its rankings from 28th in the market to 5th and is now the most listened-to station in the valuable 25-to-54 demographic. New York City just got Jack on June 3 when Infinity launched the format on WCBS-FM.

Have fun with your new, payola-resistant robo-DJs, radio-listening public. I’m stickin’ with my iPod.

I wish I could tell you that I spent my teenage years suffused in the coolness of music from R.E.M., The Smiths, The Pretenders, Talking Heads, Public Enemy, Tom Waits, Prince and Sonic Youth. But while I sure enjoy this music today, what I actually listened to in the late 1980s was comparatively the aural equivalent of frosted sugar donuts.

On cassette, I owned Def Leppard’s Hysteria, Invisible Touch by Genesis, Aerosmith’s Pump and Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses, but I particularly enjoyed top pop singles of that era. I may be embarrassed to admit recalling such songs, but even now I still know them and can listen to them all the way through without getting nauseated. I’m thinking here of songs like “Rock Steady” by the Whispers and “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac, poppy hits by established acts that probably made their long-time fans weep. One-hundred-and-one multi-tracked Carly Simons are dancing in my head!

Even better, I recall one-hit-wonder-style songs such as “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau, “Waiting for a Star to Fall” by Boy Meets Girl, and “Seasons Change” by Exposé. Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about; each of those three songs alone made the top-five on Billboard’s Top 100 Pop Singles charts and were inescapable during certain weeks of ’87 and ’88.

Like good pop songs should, these deal mostly with love/lust, in a perky and lightheaded manner, swollen with synths and drum machines and inspiring spontaneous dancing sing-alongs. The choruses are dangerously infectious and often loaded with a smoky sax sneak-attack or sphincter-tightening falsetto.

Many of these can be classified as one-hit wonders while others have been appropriated for the New Ironic Era. For example, When in Rome’s “The Promise” is on the Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack, while Salt-n-Pepa’s “Push It” was selected for service in a GM/OnStar commercial, perhaps by the same ad exec who thought “Lust For Life,” Iggy Pop’s recollection of drugs, liquor and prostitution, would be an appropriate fit for family-friendly Carnival Cruise Lines. Late last month, I heard my first commercial-appropriated radio song that was a favorite of mine in my youth: Robert Palmer’s Grammy-winning “Simply Irresistible” from 1988 is now being used by Applebee’s to promote something called Irresist-A-Bowls. Now I know how you old people felt when you first heard “Happy Together” and “Sunshine of My Life” in the zombie service of jingles for Golden Grahams and Minute Maid.

In 1967, more than 60 acres of buildings were demolished in Lower Manhattan to make way for redevelopments including the World Trade Center, a process documented in photos by Danny Lyon now on exhibit.

I walked over to the Museum of the City of New York this afternoon and checked it out. I’d never been to this museum before and after having been to the park and the dog run named after him, it seemed serendipitous that there should be a larger-than-life statue of DeWitt Clinton standing outside, rebuking me stiffly for poking fun at him.

It’s one of those museums that used to be an old house, handsomely built of red brick, renovated and well-kept, with pleasantly creaky floors. On my way to it, a few blocks south, I walked past the Guggenheim and noticed it was swarming with summer tourists, so I feared equally dense crowds at the city museum. But the there were only a handful of elderly patrons that looked as if they could die at any moment and become part of an exhibit.

The museum’s motto is a quote by Abraham Lincoln that begins, “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives,” a stark contrast to the Lyon exhibit. I don’t know what was in the water in New York City in the ’60s, but I don’t want any of it. In addition to the vast swaths of chiefly 19th century buildings leveled below Canal Street, you’ll recall from a recent entry that the elegantly original Penn Station was razed in 1963.

I imagine many of these buildings were beyond repair and had to go. Others, Lyons suggests, were architecturally and historically significant, torn down at a terrible loss. For instance, at 258 Washington St., on the northeast corner of Murray Street, was the first cast-iron building erected in New York (1848) and possibly the oldest cast-iron building in the world. It was demolished.

Lyon risked limb by sneaking into structurally unsound buildings to photograph their interiors, surprised that some still seemed to have people living in them or people who had been recently evicted. His photos document empty Coke bottles in a kitchen, a child’s bedroom containing deflated balloons and an artist’s loft with some sketches strewn on the floor. He photographed the foremen and their crews, too, known as “house wreckers,” looking weary but determined.

The exhibit’s title, which Lyon chose in the ’60s, is the eerily prescient The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, and the exhibit hints at the irony that a grand neighborhood was destroyed to build the Twin Towers. For me, the exhibit illustrated the line between preservation and renewal. The photos, posted mostly without commentary, seem to speak obliquely against renewal. (Lyon is more direct in his convictions, claiming in a recent interview with The Village Voice that the U.S. is committing “architectural suicide” through renewal.) But renewal seems to be an unstoppable fact of New York as a whole and Lower Manhattan in particular. One fact I learned from the exhibit, for example, is that West, Greenwich and Washington Streets are all built on garbage. They became streets when they were surveyed as such in 1723. Prior to that, they were all underwater.

I found a simple recipe for black bean chili from a list of 100 “healthy” recipes that’s been making the rounds on the internet. Each recipe is billed as requiring less than 30 minutes of combined preparation and cooking time, but this one took me more like 40 minutes. It’s thick, hearty and spicy. Great leftovers, too.

In a sudden development announced only today, starting tomorrow morning, the NYPD will begin randomly searching the bags of people riding the city’s subways, trains and buses.

Since 9/11, New York has instituted bag checks at museums and sporting events, and the police have sporadically checked bags during large public assemblies, like the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. But according to The New York Times, the police have never previously extended such searches to mass transit passengers, “even after a firebombing on a subway station in Lower Manhattan in 1994, a deadly sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995 and a foiled plot to bomb the subway in Brooklyn in 1997.”

So the London bombings inspired this announcement, right? Well, officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told the Times that “internal discussions about random checks had been going on for several weeks—before the bombings of subway trains and buses in London on July 7 and again today.”

Yeah, O.K. By “internal discussions,” I think they meant two junior MTA employees talking about it for 15 seconds at the urinals, after which they launched into a spirited debate over the merits of Being Bobby Brown.

Random searches! Remember when the Transportation Security Administration adopted those and a day couldn’t pass without some hack writing a snide little column about how he personally saw some 85-year-old grandmother being given a patdown at the airport? I can’t wait for those. But New York is historically more fond of racism than ageism, with officials pre-emptively whispering assurances that they will “take pains to avoid racial and ethnic profiling.” They’ll also have to counter the ACLU, which is denouncing the searches and shrieking about a little thing called the Fourth Amendment.

So how random are we talking about here? How big will the sample size be? As I mentioned on Tuesday, Penn Station alone hosts 500,000 commuters a day. I’m too lazy to look up how many people take public transportation throughout the entire city daily, but rest assured it is A Very Big Number. What, will the cops stop anyone with a big bag? Every fifth person no matter what? Form a nice, New York-style slow-moving line? It seems no matter which course is taken, folks will be inconvenienced.

The last thing we need is soul-crushing lines in the subway stations, particularly now, when they’re all hot enough to brown a roast. (Although the terrorists might like it because then instead of bombing the trains, they can bomb the stations, filled with long lines of people waiting to be searched.) I mean, look how inefficient and useless the lines are at the airports now, and recall that they’ve been at that idiot semblance of security for what, almost four years now. I think if you instituted two lines at the airports, one for the usual TSA gauntlet and another year 2000-style line billed as “Skip Security and Take Your Chances with Terror! Proceed Directly to your Plane after Check-In,” they would have to leap out of the way to avoid being trampled by the rush of people.

We’ll see. As the searches unfold here starting tomorrow, there’ll be more details; I’ll keep y’all posted.

July 22 Update:

• According to the MTA, New York’s subway system, which is the prime target of the random searches, is the largest in the U.S., carrying about 4.5 million passengers on an average weekday.
• No delay for me on the subway this morning. I didn’t even see any searches, but then, I rise and leave for work early, before the crowds and the potential terror.
• Still no details on the frequency, location and duration of the searches.
• However, they actually started on a small scale yesterday, July 21. At Union Station, a reporter observed officers stopping five men over a 15-minute period during afternoon rush hour. “In each instance, the officers peered briefly into their bags, then waved them through.”
• If the cops find non bomb-related arrestable offences in your bag (drugs or such), they can arrest you, even though that’s not what they were searching you for.
• They’re sidestepping that legal snare by saying the searches are conducted with your consent, in the sense that if you enter a subway station and see cops searching bags, you’re allowed to leave without being searched or pursued.
• Great quote from Mayor Bloomberg: “We don’t plan to stop people on the streets. We probably don’t have the legal right to do that.”

The building on Fifth Avenue that houses my dentist’s office has some cool old-style faceplates for the elevator buttons.

There’s a reason great scenes in New York-based movies take place in the Main Concourse of Grand Central, instead of that terminal’s Midtown brother, Penn Station—Grand Central is beautiful. Hundreds of bustling commuters there suddenly start waltzing in The Fisher King, while in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a couple in love rushes through the concourse as people in the crowd around them disappear one by one.

Meanwhile, Penn is a workhorse, serving 500,000 commuters daily as the busiest public transport station in America. It’s also confusing and ugly, inside and out. I should know; I’m in it daily to get to and from work. But the original Penn Station, built in 1910, was as grand, if not grander than Grand Central. Look at these beautiful gelatin silver contact prints taken circa 1935 by Berenice Abbott and you will agree. Click each one to view a large version in a separate pop-up window.

Foremost, you’ll notice the massive steel uprights, with lighter steel tracery, arches and vaults above. A close second are the marvelous windows and skylights. None of that is present in the current Penn Station. Not even close. If ever there was a station deserving the stereotype of an underground pit packed with dreary crowds blinking under harsh florescent lighting, it’s Penn. “One entered the city like a god,” architectural historian Vincent J. Scully wrote of the station. “One scuttles in now like a rat.” Governor Pataki recently characterized Penn as “horribly inadequate,” while others have referred to it as “a bland hub” and “a large basement.” I’d say the structure it most closely resembles is a parking garage, with all the wamth and character that implies.

So what happened? Blind civic ambition and a misguided attempt at renewal.

In 1963, the station building, which spanned two full city blocks from W. 34th to W. 32nd Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, was demolished to make way for the Penn Plaza office skyscraper and Madison Square Garden.

Only now is the city moving forward to right this wrong. Just west of the Garden sits the James A. Farley Post Office, New York’s largest, and designed by the same architects, at the same time and in the same style as the original Penn Station. On Monday, after about 10 years of financial and logistical bickering, the state named the development team that will combine half of the post office and an improved version of the current station into a new Penn Station, its design mirroring the old. The new version, for instance, will feature tall, steel arches atop which will rest a huge, lightweight skylight. The front of the post office, boasting a grand staircase and a long row of 53-foot-high Corinthian columns, will serve as the new station’s main entrance.

It’s expected to be completed by 2010 at an estimated cost of $930 million, serving as the new catalyst for West Side redevelopment now that the $2.2 billion plan for the Jets Stadium has been squashed. My hope is that the station will bring back some of the area’s architectural beauty.

Michael, who I’ve never seen before, was taping his sign to the inner door of my apartment building’s foyer when I arrived home from work. By 9:30 p.m., someone had already torn it down, and there was no evidence it had existed other than some sad corners of paper stuck to the glass.

I’m glad I photographed it. I’ve never seen the word balustrade in a handmade sign before, and the photo is so lovingly composed and framed, with the butts, bird crap and dead leaves. And I appreciate the specificity of Parliament cigarettes.

On the subway to work this morning, I read an article in amNewYork about the ongoing renovations at The Strand, the best bookstore in New York City, and therefore the world.

If you haven’t been there in the past year, you’d be surprised at the sudden changes, which I believe began without fanfare sometime late last year.

First, they’ve completely replaced the stairway between the ground floor and the basement, and added an elevator to bring the building up to code. The stairway’s now a standard wide-width, with sturdy handrails and steps covered with non-slip rubberized grips. For those who’ve never had the treat, I should explain that the old staircase at the Strand was like one out of a horror movie, creaky and twisty, and you would wonder whether you’d make it back up alive. Only one person could descend or ascend at a time, which lead to games of “chicken” at the halfway-point landing. The only way the old staircase could have been less accessible to the handicapped or elderly would have been to coat the steps with Crisco.

Also new is a loft area on the ground floor. The Strand is in an old building of very high ceilings, typical for that part of town and beautiful to behold, but when you get down to it, a waste of space, especially in a bookstore. Well, now, near the new elevator (which itself is right by the new stairs), is a mini treehouse-like loft that houses books of some genre I must not be interested in, because I’ve never been up there.

According to the amNewYork article, the Strand’s owners are in the process of adding even more sale space (although the author doesn’t specify how or where), as well as air conditioning for the ground floor. In the old Strand, on a summer day like today—86 degrees with 80%-90% humidity—the place would heat up like a Nazi crematorium, only not quite as comfortable. I don’t know how the old or the obese survive in there on a day like today. For me, and perhaps others, the lack of air conditioning was an invaluable sales tool for the store. After a sweaty trek throughout the ground floor, I’d stumble down the rickety stairs because there’s a drinking fountain down there and it was a good 20 degrees cooler in the basement, even though it was also teeming with review copies of books no one wants and the occasional cockroach. I’d spend enough time recouperating down there that I’d end up buying stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise.

I’m glad to have experienced the Strand in “before” mode, unlike many other landmarks old-time New Yorkers like to gripe about, like Times Square and the Chelsea Piers. It sounds as if the place will still contain much of its grubby, cut-rate, crowded, largely unorganized charm, so I can’t complain much about the renovations. In fact, I think the place will become even more popular because of them.

Jimi, The Man and I took the train down to Jimi’s old West Village neighborhood and got brunch at Garage. It was a “jazz brunch” and we were treated to loud jazz renditions of classics from the ’80s, including Madonna’s “Material Girl” and a festive medley of Police songs.

While we were in the neighborhood, we did a lot of shopping. First was Banana Republic, where we witnessed two shoplifters bolting from the store right as we arrived. The Man, who decided a change was in order with his current ensemble, purchased khaki shorts and a handsome new short-sleeved shirt on sale, and wore the clothes out of the store. Next was Origins, where an enterprising young salesman demonstrated a new microdermabrasion product on Jimi’s hands, which Jimi then purchased. At the Jonathan Adler store, which resembles a funky early-’70s bachelor pad, Jimi pondered purchasing some small flower vases and a ceramic elephant, while at the Louis Vuitton store, he priced a bag he’s had his eye on, as well as some jewelry and dog collars for his dogs, Couscous and Bingo. Jimi one-upped the salesclerk with his superior knowledge of Vuitton bags. She admitted she was new but when we disparaged a hard-sided Vuitton vanity case as bulky and cumbersome, she noted it could be used as a stylish weapon to fend off a mugger. We popped in the Apple Store, then back to Jimi’s, with a brief stop in between at the Jamba Juice on Times Square for refreshments.

Then it was off to the DeWitt Clinton dog run on 11th Avenue just off W. 52nd Street. Lucky is the man who not only fathered the Erie Canal (and was a mayor of New York), but has Hell’s Kitchen’s only dog run named after him. It’s also the only dog run I’ve seen with a kiddie swimming pool in it, although it’s most definitely for the dogs; if you placed a child in this pool, the child’s bacteria content would instantly quadruple. The Man attempted to teach Bingo how to fetch a ball, but Bingo has so far only learned how to chase a ball and pick it up, after which point he loses interest, drops it, and wanders off to rip around elsewhere.

Couscous, meanwhile, greeted this drooling mostrosity of a dog, which vigorously and almost constantly attempted to mate with some other guy’s dog at the run.

Jimi revealed an ambitious new meal plan he and The Man have devised: to eat at every restaurant on Ninth Avenue between W. 42nd Street and W. 57th Street, in order. They’re starting on one side of the street, then working their way back up the other side. There are a few rules: Carryout is not allowed. They don’t have to eat at coffee shops, bars and delis, but they do have to eat at fast-food places. And if they’re not in the mood to eat at the next restaurant on the circuit, they can eat elsewhere, as long as it’s off that stretch of Ninth. Good luck, Jimi and The Man!

I had the unstoppable urge this morning to upgrade my Mac’s operating system to the newest version, 10.4, otherwise known as Tiger. It was introduced by Apple in April but I wait a spell after major ugrade releases for the company to squash the inevitable bugs with updates. With such fixes, they’re now at version 10.4.2, so I figured I was generally safe.

I took the 1 train down to the CompUSA near the Time Warner Center and bought a copy. I could have saved about $30, mostly in taxes, if I would have ordered from Amazon.com, but as I said, I was a man on a mission.

I spent the past few days backing up vital files on my computer. I’ve noticed the problem I’ve had as hard drives get bigger is that I’ve gotten lazier about keeping my files archived. HDs used to be so small, I had to archive things like mp3s and digital photos frequently, simply for want of hard drive space. But now that I have a 40GB drive (which itself isn’t even considered large anymore), I only back-up my files whenever Apple releases a major OS update and it’s been a year, so that’s a lot of files. It’s also not a good idea, as I’d likely weep if my hard drive crashed and took nearly 20GB of un-backed-up document files with it. But after I put down $20 for a big stack of 50 blank DVDs from Best Buy and set aside some quality time for copying-and-burning, I was good to go.

I noticed Apple seems to have got half-hearted with the whole jungle-cat marketing concept. When the first major OS X update was released, OS 10.2, it was dubbed Jaguar, replete with jungle-print themes on ads, packaging, desktop pictures, and metaphors wherever you looked (“Jaguar pounces!”). OS 10.3 was dubbed Panther and the theme was even less pronounced. With Tiger, it seems to have all but vanished. Even the packaging seems to have reverted to the matte black design with a large, mysterious X, like back when OS 10 was first introduced.

Installation went smoothly. In true Jason fashion, the feature I was most excited about was the complimentary dictionary/thesaurus application. I’d been previously using a third-party version of the American Heritage Dictionary, but it had some shortcomings, like the inability to copy-and-paste text from definitions and non-hyperlinked definition text, two features present in the Oxford American Dictionary version included with the new OS.

Some of the other features look promising, but I need time to fiddle with them and work them into my workflow. The most interesting bits to me are Spotlight, a Google-like search feature, and Dashboard, which is an rejuvenation of the Mac’s classic “desk accessories,” little programs that put a calculator, clock, calendar, weather forecaster and other dinguses on your desktop, and accessible at a click of the mouse.

On my way to Academy Records, waiting for the 1 train in the Christopher Street station, I saw this sign. Crafty folks like to pass the time waiting for their trains by spelling new words with these universal signs, but this was the first time I’d seen this particular arrangement.

I also scrutinized the “public art” wall murals in the station and noticed for the first time that one depicted Marcel Duchamp in drag. It’s not every day you see cut-tile illustrations in a subway station of a French dada artist dressed like a woman. I later researched Duchamp’s connection to the West Village and discovered that not only did he have a studio there, but in 1917, he and some cronies camped out atop Washington Square Arch, setting off balloons and declaring the Village “an independent nation,” a notion that holds true to this day.

Before my usual weekly trip to Academy Records, I took a brief detour to Jimi’s old laundromat on W. 4th Street to buy more Homies for my burgeoning collection. Alas! The Homies vending machine had been unceremoniously replaced by one dispensing tacky smiley-face necklaces and plastic-bejeweled rings for young pimps-in-training. I’ve gotta find a new source that’s more convenient than the Lower East Side, or Brooklyn, god forbid.

This afternoon, Veronica Williams, a 49-year-old homeless woman, stepped out onto W. 36th street between two parked cars, was struck by a large truck and killed. It happened at 2 p.m., right off Eighth Avenue, across the street from my office building. People jaywalk all the time in New York and I work within blocks of two of Manhattan’s most dangerous locations for pedestrians, but it’s not often that someone is killed.

Soon after it happened, everyone in my office rushed to the windows on the west face of the building to look down at the carnage. By that point, the body had been covered by a white sheet. A coworker took a photo of the scene from our 17th-story view.

When I left work at 5:00, W. 36th was still blocked off and choked with emergency vehicles, yellow police tape and gawkers. I was in a grim and contemplative mindset.

Then, as I passed the accident scene, my mood changed. In front of me, there was a guy walking down the sidewalk on Eighth, a smiling young boy perched on his shoulders. The kid was turned around and happily rapid-firing one of those plastic guns that emits a flurry of soap bubbles. Most everyone in the kid’s wake, a hot and weary crowd of rush-hour pedestrians, was getting nailed by bubbles. Some seemed amused, while others scowled and tried to dodge the bubbles, which only made the scene more joyous to behold.

July 19th Update: I was just reading David Byrne’s blog and he wrote about Veronica Williams on July 16th, noting that the incident happened “in my neighborhood.” Byrne lives in Midtown? I would have guessed SoHo or the Village. But Midtown? That’s just weird. But then, so is Byrne.

If you correspond with me via email, you may have noticed I’m not the sort to forward chain letters, photos of cats, conspiracies quickly debunked on Snopes (a.k.a the “Urban Legends Reference Page”), or links to idiot Flash animations.

But that’s not to say I don’t appreciate the funny and strange stuff the web has to offer. This girl I work with frequently forwards me weird links and I always try to one-up her with my own. We usually fire off a minimum of two and sometimes as many as eight daily, usually before work or during lunch, lest you think I shirk at work. Some are “global,” while many are NYC-based (we’re a selfish bunch). They range from groans or quick, one-off laughs to genuinely handy or inspiring deposits of information.

A lot of the best links originate in that best-of-the-best weird-links depository, Boing Boing. I get a lot of mine serendipitously through link-farms such as del.icio.us or from top-secret sources. I decided to pull my three favorites from each month of this year’s first half. I typically have a disproportionate number of Boing Boing, Flickr and Wikipedia links, but I’ve attempted to under-represent those here. Have fun and enjoy ’em while they work.

January

1. Photos of girls eating sandwiches. Is it just me or are these strangely erotic?
2. Make deadly weapons out of office supplies. The “60-second shiv” made me laugh out loud.
3. A New Yorker profile of Johnny Carson. From 1978.

February

1. A cat gnawing on a hot dog. “Smelly cat, smelly cat/What are they feeding you?”
2. The life of a Times Square McDonald’s bathroom attendant. This locally based group of merry pranksters rocks. Check out more of their escapades, including mass subway de-pantsing, on their site.
3. Take better digital photos at night.

March

1. Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974. I am suddenly not hungry. Maybe that’s how Weight Watchers works.
2. Create your own comic strip.
3. What song was #1 when you were born? And what does it mean? (Mine’s Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.” My god, what a weenie song that is.)

April

1. The New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Strangely addictive. The inspiration for my popular blog entry, “95 Years Ago.”
2. Express Train. Travis Ruse takes one photo a day in NYC’s subway system.
3. Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey. Remember these? From Saturday Night Live? Ha ha!

May

1. Photoshopped romance novel covers.
2. Random live webcams. Select the “Display Mode” menu at the bottom of the page and change it to “Animation of last snapshots.” Marvelous.
3. Baby’s first T-shirt. Warning! Not-for-Republicans-style humor!

June

1. Rejected “Love Is...” comics. Warning! Not-for-Mom-style humor!
2. Stuff On My Cat. Self-explanatory.
3. John Doe, worldwide. Steve, a previous boss who’s British, says “Fred Bloggs” instead of “John Doe.” And I thought it was just him.

My mom called this weekend to let me know that she had just watched The Royal Tenenbaums on DVD and thought that the movie’s running-joke references to gypsy cabs were funny, since she had first learned of their existence from reading about them in the blog.

I believe director Wes Anderson was referencing the ’70s brand of New York gypsy cabs, which were seedy unlicensed characters driving their own beater cars around the city, trawling for passengers. These days, gypsy cabs are more often livery vehicles that trawl for passengers when they’re legally only supposed to respond to calls.

But whatever; the “gypsy” in “gypsy cab” refers to wandering, which applies to both cases. Other than the cabs, I think Mom thought the movie “weird.”
In its defense, I pointed out that a lot of it was filmed in New York, even though Anderson took pains to not represent any particular skylines or landmarks. Also, the interiors and exteriors of the Tenenbaums’ quirky house were the interiors and exteriors of an actual house, renovated and dressed for the movie and located in the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem.

It’s monumentally tacky, but the first thing I thought of when I heard about the London public transportation attacks on Thursday was Sliding Doors. In the film, there are two concurrently running and radically different storylines: one in which Gwyneth Paltrow’s character catches her train in the London Tube and another in which her train’s doors close before she can get on.

This probably wasn’t too far from the truth for an untold number of people, and for one specifically that The New York Times reported about on July 9:

Paul Dadge overslept. That meant he reached the subway late, boarded a train at King’s Cross late, and ended up two trains behind—instead of possibly inside—the one ripped apart by a bomb deep in the tunnel outside the Edgware Road station at 9:17 a.m.

New Yorkers were reminded of the bombings whether they wanted to be or not. The day after the London attacks, the NYC public transit system was put on “high alert,” which meant a temporarily increased presence of uniformed cops wandering around the stations and subways. I found out later that the city had literally assigned one officer to every train in the city during rush hour, amounting to thousands of police officers, state troopers and National Guard members, standing around looking bored or vaguely menacing.

Having a uniform on every train is a weak semblance of security, and something that can’t and won’t practically continue, but really, as I suggested last month, there is no protection against terrorism. That’s why it’s terrorism. It seems kind of obvious to state but the AFP ran a story on the topic on Friday:

With millions of people converging daily on the subways of the world’s major cities, analysts say it’s nearly impossible to stop determined assailants carrying out attacks like those seen in London.

Militants have targeted public transport as a relatively easy way to sow terror in urban populations, which often have little choice but to use trains that are dangerously exposed to attack.

It went on to mention that the Tokyo subway system, which is the world’s largest and which has had tight security since the 1995 sarin gas attacks, is taking the additional step of removing most of the few trash cans still remaining in its stations. Authorities will also pay closer attention to passengers’ baggage but admit there is no foolproof security. Even hand-checking every rider’s baggage wouldn’t work as there other options for bomb placements including restrooms, trash cans and public areas.

9/11 was a blockbuster of an attack, but looking at the bigger picture, the events in Tokyo, Madrid and now London suggest that terror attacks in general have evolved to be quick-and-dirty, nearer the ground and hitting closer to home for many in the world’s largest cities.

“We always knew there was going to be an explosion in London,” said Dadge, the Brit who overslept. “It’s a question of when, not if. It’s pure coincidence that I was there then.”

Jimi had a small gettogether at his place this evening for my previous job’s bosses, Steve and Teresa, who are in town for the Fancy Food Show. My friend Tina and I were there, along with Jimi’s boyfriend The Man, and friends Lee-Ann and Junior.

We had mojitos and, at the request of Steve, caipirinhas, along with a cheese and fruit platter. Later, we ordered Indian carry-out from the restaurant below Jimi’s and it was mighty good. Before I left, I played four ceremonial rounds of Mario Kart: Double Dash!! on the GameCube with Jimi, The Man and Junior. I was relieved that gameplay is nearly identical to the original Super Mario Kart, which Nintendo introduced for the Super NES in 19992 and was the favorite console videogame of my college years.

In a delayed reaction from July 4th, I had a sudden craving for a hamburger this evening. I waffled for a solid hour on whether I should buy one at a restaurant or make one myself, eventually deciding on the latter because of the cheapness and ingredient control. By that I mean that I made blue-cheese turkey burgers on rolls that were billed as low-carb, but that I bought because they were foxy looking.

I learned I’m better off sprinkling crumbled blue cheese atop the freshly cooked and still hot hamburger, letting it melt into an unappetizing-looking but ultimately tasty goo. Initially, I had crumbled the cheese into the raw meat before cooking, but it evaporated in the process.

Katie and I met up on the Lower East Side tonight at the Millennium Film Workshop. A filmmaker she knows, Shannon, was having one of his short films screened in a group exhibition.

The evening started out with the building’s fire alarm going off. Katie and I were still standing outside the theater so we didn’t have to move far. The false alarm attracted three fire trucks. After the excitement, we the small crowd of about 35 people entered the building and walked to the screening area, which was in the musty-smelling basement. A riser set up in from the big-screen sported about 50 seats neatly lined up in rows. They looked as if they had been scavenged from an office building in 1962, but they were comfortable.

Shannon got up to introduce the films for the evening—four of them—and joked that we shouldn’t think we accidentally had stumbled onto an Asian film festival. (The filmmaker group Shannon belongs to is comprised of a large number of Asian directors and actors.)

The films all seemed to have been shot on digital video and all took place in New York. The first, which had no dialogue, dealt with a guy and a girl on a subway (the N train to Coney Island, if memory serves). The guy is reading a book and pretending not to notice the girl, who is pretending not to notice the guy. It ends suddenly, with the guy exiting the train, having said nothing to the girl, or she to him.

The second film was about some crazy guy and his bicycle. Or something. I didn’t really get it.

The third film was Shannon’s and it dealt with a tortured artist who spends his days working on a painting in his bedroom, getting more and more frenzied with the paint and the art, until he believes he hears the painting speaking to him, at which point he gets an axe and “kills” the painting.

The last film was abstractly about a fraying relationship, a subtle series of conflicts culminating in a segment at the end with some excellent acting, a Raymond Carver-esque monologue from a girl questioning her half-asleep boyfriend about the other woman he was chatting up at a party.

In a sense, I felt like my Mom has always said she does when she reads a collection of short stories—just as she’s caught up in the action and caring about the characters, the story’s over. Then again, some of the acting made a 15-minute-long film seem even longer.

Since late April, The New Yorker has replaced its end-page, which had typically contained a supposedly witty essay by the likes of Steve Martin, with The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. And I had thought Tina Brown was dragging down the intelligence of the magazine.

The only captions being accepted and awarded in the contest are those in the “New Yorker style,” a fact already lampooned by literary hipsters. That style, with a reliance on the New York Liberal urban life of business, dinner parties and strained relationships, has become as much a recognizable part of the magazine as its typeface.

As much as I hate to begrudge a fellow writer from Ohio, James Thurber, who was on the magazine’s first staff in the 1920s, contributed a lot to this aesthetic with his cartoons, the subjects of which can be summed up by one of his book titles, Men, Women, and Dogs. Yet Thurber remains a favorite cartoonist of mine because he was forever sneaking in more innovative subjects with a what the hell? flavor of humor I find tasty. I’d rank one of his New Yorker submissions in my top-five all-time favorite cartoons. It was originally published in the issue of April 6, 1935. Here it is:

I’d prefer the New Yorker to get back to including more craziness in this vein, or perhaps some Dada-inspired randomness, because that’s great, too. I recall reading about a time that a newspaper accidentally switched the captions of The Far Side and The Family Circus, vastly improving each.

And no mention of The Family Circus and captions gone awry is complete without citing The Dysfunctional Family Circus, perhaps the first popular caption contest. The DFC website allowed users to submit their own captions to The Family Circus panels that had their original captions removed. Most submissions were bad, some were insane and a few were laugh-out-loud funny, which you could never say for that cartoon’s original captions. Launched in June 1995, in its heyday, the DFC received 50,000 to 70,000 page views daily, until late 1999, when it was permanently shut down by a cease-and-desist order from King Features Syndicate. It’s one of the few websites I still recall reading regularly when I was in college. You can view a single scavenged page from the site here.

In the spirit of this, the next few posts will be dedicated to my own caption contest, using some idiot single-panel cartoons I found on a stock-art CD from 1995 and removed the actual captions from. Get to it.

When I was younger, I collected matchbooks and matchboxes. For a short spell a few years ago, I collected old Polaroid cameras. Now I’ve started buying Homies, based mostly on the fact that I see my coworker’s expansive collection every day, lined up on the partition wall between his cubicle and mine; it’s like semi-subliminal advertising.

If you’re unfamiliar with them, Homies are figurines designed by artist/designer David Gonzales. Each is typically 1-and-3/4-inches tall and represents a Mexican American person. They’re getting to be like baseball cards; the first set of the six original figurines was issued in 2001, after which each set consisted of 24 figurines. They’re up to set 8 this year and they seem to get more fun as time passes. Set 4 introduced two dog figurines and a guy in a wheelchair named Willie G. Set 6 has an ice-cream man. Set 7 even has a grim reaper, La Muerta, that I’d love to get my hands on.

In short, Homies are barrio Smurfs.

For sets 4 though 8, you can buy the full sets of 24 figurines directly from the supplier, athough they cost $24. The true collectors buy the figurines for 50 cents each from vending machines, the kind that typically stock gumballs or superballs. Not only are they 50% cheaper than buying them in a set, the potluck style makes it more fun. If you get a duplicate, for instance, you can haggle a trade with another Homies’ collector from his or her duplicate stock.

The two other people in my office who collect Homies both live in hipster Brooklyn and have no trouble finding vending machines that stock Homies, but I must have searched 101 bodegas near where I live and work to no avail. Vending machines in general just aren’t as popular as they were when I was a kid, when you’d always find them in KMarts and any drug store. I don’t think chains like Walgreens, CVS and Duane Reade even allow vending machines anymore.

But today, I got lunch down in the West Village and for some reason remembered there was what I thought was a Homies vending machine at Jimi’s old Laundromat on W. 4th, so I checked it out, and sure enough, it was there, so I bought my first Homie. Later, back at the office, I got a tip that there was another Homies machine on Eighth Avenue near W. 49th, so of course I checked that one out, too, and ended up buying six more. I’ve got to contain myself lest my Homies collection run as wildly out of control as my CD collection; but maybe if I’m lucky, the Homies will overtake my want for CDs. They’re certainly cheaper.

Finally, I can’t decide if I should be offended by Homies. I mean, it’s not like I’m collecting, say, “mammy” cookie jars, but Homies could be close, right? Gonzales certainly thinks ethnic themes are a fine idea. Last year, he introduced the Palermos, Homies-like figurines that are Italian-American, with names like Teflon Tony and Nicky No Neck.

On the left, Takeru Kobayashi, who won the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest by scarfing down 49 hot dogs in 12 minutes.

On the right, a poster that I saw walking home today, located outside of Lincoln Center and promoting actor Tatsuya Fujiwara in Yukio Mishima’s Modern Noh Plays.

Coincidence?

Yeah, probably. I didn’t have anything better to write about.

If there was ever a nation unlikely to celebrate an independence day, it’d be Thailand, which was founded in 1238 and has managed to keep Europe’s damn hands off it ever since, which you can’t say for any other country in Southeast Asia.

So Thai food didn’t seem all that patriotic for my Fourth of July luncheon with Andie, but Brother Jimmy’s was closed and she had read a blurb on this Thai place in Time Out New York.

It’s called Land. It opened back in March and the chef, David Bank, previously slaved over the hot stoves of the Mercer Kitchen, the informal yet swanky 200-seat restaurant at the Mercer Hotel in Soho.

It’s been a while since I’ve eaten at a restaurant for The Project that’s been as overall good as this one. The place is clean and small but not cramped. The long, thin space has only enough room for about a dozen two-seat tables, but it has high ceilings and the whole front of the restaurant opens to the sidewalk in fine weather to let in the breeze and sun.

The streamlined decor includes putty-colored plastic chairs (with a booth stretching nearly the length of the restaurant on the other side of the tables). The red brick walls have little lights nestled in squared-out nooks. The small tables have a fake wood-grain pattern that somehow works. Andie appreciated the cigar-sized brown brick rests for the silverware.

The service was speedy. We received our dishes only after about 10 minutes after our order. The dish I was served wasn’t right but our server noticed the gaffe before I had a chance to flag him down. He whisked it away and a minute later had replaced it with the correct dish.

The price was right. The prix fixe lunch was $7, astoundingly cheap for Manhattan, and included an appetizer and an entree of satisfying proportions. I ordered two spring rolls and my favorite Thai dish, Pad See Ew, a mix of meat, seafood or tofu (I usually get the tofu, but I tried the beef variety today), flat rice noodles, egg, broccoli and cauliflower, and a sweet soy sauce. Andie got the vegetable dumplings for an appetizer and, for her main dish, the drunken noodle with chicken, which included wheat noodles, tomato, basil, water chestnuts, bok choy and chili sauce. We added a pair of Thai iced teas to the tab, a generous portion served in a glazed earthenware jar, for a mere $3 each.

The place was doing a bang-up business, turning over tables quickly, and we’re talking lunch on a national holiday. Here’s hoping not too many more people find out about the place, causing the fine prices to rise.

Land

• 450 Amsterdam Ave. (between W. 81st and W. 82nd Streets)
• (212) 501-8121
• Meal 19/52: two spring rolls and beef Pad See Ew ($7, prix fixe) and a Thai iced tea ($3).

After waiting in line for tickets for Shakespeare in the Park, Andie, Eric and I stopped in for brunch at the Popover Cafe. It’s not a coy name; you get a popover the size of Merlin Olsen’s fist served up with most brunch orders. They’re light and flaky, with a bit of strawberry butter on the side.

Eric and I, while waiting in line for the tickets, started talking about the tastiness of bacon for some reason, so I naturally had to order a side at brunch. And it was good. My egg-white omelette was made with fresh mushrooms, not canned ones (yay!) but was served somewhat cool in temperature (boo.). I forgot to write down the prices and their damn web site doesn’t list them, but I don’t recall the bill being all that reasonable for what amounted to basic fare (except maybe the popovers). Then again, you’re going to pay a lot for any meal—including brunch, the cheapest—in our neighborhood.

Popover Cafe

• 551 Amsterdam Ave. (on the corner of W. 86th Street)
• (212) 595-8555
• Meal 18/52: fresh mushroom egg white omelette, which includes a popover and strawberry butter, a side of bacon and coffee.

Almost a great a tradition as attending Shakespeare in the Park, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this summer, is waiting in line to get tickets for Shakespeare in the Park.

In a strangely equitable fashion, the Public Theater has made the tickets free, a catch being that one must pick them up on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of the performance at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, which is where the shows are performed. (For the idle rich or handicapped, who won’t or can’t wait in line for hours, the theater sells a limited number of tickets, but assigns them to alternate rows, “to preserve the democratic character of Delacorte Theater audiences.”)

The tickets are passed out beginning at 1:00 p.m. and people arrive as early as 6 a.m., bearing determination and sleeping bags. Eric got there fairly early this morning, around 8 a.m., yet ended up a few hundred people back, near the Pinetum. When I woke up, around 10:30, Andie had left me a note stating that if I wanted tickets, I had to get on over there myself and wait with Eric—another catch is that each person is allowed a maximum of two tickets.

I threw on some pants and picked up some water, juice and bagels from H&H, walked over to the park and located Eric, craftily folding myself into line using the “hey man, I’m back with the bagels” gambit. Those who know me know I’m not typically the sort of dick that cuts lines, and in fact gets silently bitter when someone else does, so I compensated by penitently offering a bagel to the stranger in line directly behind us. She politely declined, as she was engrossed in annotating some paperwork involving flowcharts and long words. People brought all sorts of stuff with which to pass the time in line for Shakespeare: Frisbees, portable video game systems, musical instruments, lawn chairs, paperbacks, small dogs, iPods, a significant other to roll around with in a slightly naughty fashion on a blanket, their kids, their laptops, the trustily dense Sunday edition of The New York Times. The line snaked through the park, over grassy knolls, pathways and benches, and the weather was cool and breezy. I am certain it was the most relaxed queue ever in New York City. Me, I stretched out on the lawn and took a nap.

As in lines of this length, there was the usual rumor-mongering, that our position was too far back for tickets today and that we’d be mercilessly slapped with reserve tickets, which require you to return later and wait in line some more. But once we got to the front, we saw those fears were unfounded and we got our five tickets. (By this time, Andie had joined our party in order to secure tickets for Katie and Mark, who weren’t present.)

We all returned prior to the 8:00 p.m. performance to enjoy a picnic dinner of sandwiches, potato salad, chips and wine. We spread out on the southern fringe of the Great Lawn, within view of Turtle Pond at the base of Belvedere Castle. It was like Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (The Picnic), only with slightly less nudity.

Then, the play. I thought it was capital. The Delacorte is an open-air amphitheater, the seats in a semicircle around a pitched circular stage. The play was As You Like It so the venue was perfect—most of the play takes place in a forest, and the theater area is surrounded by real trees.

A draw to Shakespeare in the Park is that there’s often a token celebrity—I don’t know, Meryl Streep or someone—who has grown bored and dour with his or her movie career and wants to inflict some Shakespeare on the public. Then that line is really, really long. But I was glad there were’t any celebrities at all in this performance, keeping the hotdogging and fawning to a minimum. The closest brush we had with celebrity was directly before the play, when a recording of Liev Schreiber came over the PA to credit the event’s corporate sponsors and provide the ground rules for the audience during the performance, his stern voice implying he would personally kick the ass of anyone disrupting or illicitly recording the performance.

The regular readers among you with sharp memories will recall I already saw this play this year, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January. But I liked that I could compare and contrast the performances. I’d say the Academy performance was more traditional and staid, more “theatrical,” with professional lighting and sets and vaguely fascist-looking costumes.

The performance in the park was more like fun for the whole family, with fake trees and stage decor that looked like some gradeschoolers whipped it up one afternoon with some papier mâché and poster paint. The costumes were bright with primary colors and breezy. The acting had more emotion in it and more closely resembled actual speech, which is the point, really. I got the feeling the actors knew what the lines meant as they said them, particularly the guy who played Jaques (he of “All the world’s a stage”-speech fame), allowing Shakespeare’s densely packed and oddly ordered phrases to flow more naturally and understandably. (Walking back home through the park after the play, I overheard a grandma-aged lady say, “To me, it sounded like it wasn’t Shakespeare. It was very clear. Did they change the words?” They didn’t, but I knew exactly what she was talking about and I think it was a great compliment to the actors.)

I noticed lines I hadn’t before because of the way they were read, laughing this time at Jaques’ line, “in his brain,/which is as dry as the remainder biscuit/after a voyage, he hath strange places cramm’d/with observation, the which he vents/in mangled forms.”

Also regarding the reading of the lines, I was reminded of what Mr. Moderick taught me in high school honors English: that while some people persist in thinking Shakespeare penned grand and hallowed verse, he in fact wrote large chunks of his plays to entertain the groundlings, the grubby blue-collar masses that paid their penny to get in, then gathered ‘round the foot of the stage in the hopes of catching some sex and/or violence, much like today’s fans of Oprah and professional wrestling.

For instance, when Touchstone the jester says “He that sweetest rose will find/Must find love’s prick and Rosalind,” he’s referring to more than one kind of prick, if you catch my drift. The Touchstone in this production added a carefully placed wagging finger to drive home this point and the audience laughed. Well done! As You Like It also contains a wrestling match, hunting, lesbian overtones, some annoyingly bombastic musical numbers (Shakespeare only wrote the lyrics, but both productions I’ve seen put them to song) and plenty of cross-dressing, so everyone goes home happy. I sure did.

Andie and I have been known to knock back a martini or two in our day, so this extended holiday weekend, she purchased a handsome stainless steel cocktail shaker from Williams-Sonoma, along with the celebrated ingredients for success depicted here, including gourmet olives, not those nasty jarred ones with reconstituted pimento.

After a previous violent experience with gin, I prefer vodka martinis, but when one is offered a complimentary martini, one does not complain.

Delicious!

Last month, the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation began counting and logging data on every tree in the five boroughs. Surprisingly, this survey has been conducted only once before, in 1995, so this second round will allow the city to examine citywide trends and changes in its forestry for the first time.

Each of a thousand or so volunteers participating in the survey will be given a training manual, a diameter measuring tape, a clipboard, data collection forms, survey zone maps and a tree identification form, with which the size and condition of each tree will be recorded, including “infrastructure conflicts,” such as birdhouses. They’ll have a lot of ground to cover. The first census tallied about half a million trees lining the city’s streets alone. When you add the trees in parks and yards, the number grows to five million.

The census won’t be finished until October, but in an article in the May 23rd issue of The New Yorker, Bram Gunther, the city’s deputy director of forestry, predicted Manhattan’s “favorite” tree would be the Callery pear, the most popular variety of which is the Bradford pear. Although they’re structurally weak and easily damaged by wind, they grow easily, hold up well against street pollution and have white blossoms in the Spring, which likely accounts for at least some of their popularity.

A runner-up most popular tree in Manhattan, according to Gunther, will be the ginkgo, another species that’s pretty, hardy, and resistant to pollution. I’m partial to the beautiful fan-shaped leaves of this tree, which is unique in that it has no living relatives. I’m happy that on my block, there’s 14 of them on my side of the street alone.

The only downside is that when the seeds from the female trees fall in the autumn, they smell like vomit, particularly as they are ground into the sidewalk by passers-by. I’ve been informed that the Callery pear stinks something nasty when it’s in bloom, too.

Isn’t that just like New York to embrace trees that encapsulate its own character—occasionally smelly, uniquely beautiful, thriving and tough.