September 2005 Archives

While looking up the last restaurant in the 52 Meals Project, Lassi , I came across a review by a disgruntled restaurant-goer who found that place’s food O.K. but its lassis laughable, chiefly for their size-to-cost ratio. He reported that for truly tasty and inexpensive lassis, one needed to go to the Lower East Side to the Himalayan Cafe. So I did.

The place is small with four four-chair tables and, in the corner by the window looking out onto Houston, a couch draped with a regal purple cover flanked by two low chairs and a small table. It adds coziness to an otherwise scuffed and bare bones decor.

I sat facing the counter and to the right in the corner was a tall, ill-lit cooler containing cans of soda and what appeared to be some of the restaurant’s ingredients: a 25-pound cardboard box of Rome tomatoes, two gallon jugs of milk and assorted metal and plastic mystery containers. On the wall at my table was a small, framed poster of Shri Kalachakra Mandala, a Tibetan representation of the Wheel of Time, featuring a blue, four-faced deity with 24 hands and two legs.

I ordered a menu special from the large chalkboard above the counter, the shapta, a Tibetan spicy beef dish sautéed with ginger, garlic and onion, served with rice or bread. While waiting, I enjoyed the pleasant chopping noises, followed by sizzling coming from the kitchen, which I could see from my seat. My dish was made with both sautéed and fresh green onions and was nose-runningly spicy, which was fine by me. It was a generous portion that I thought nonetheless expensive at nearly $10, although the menu’s many vegetarian dishes are much more reasonable at nearly half that price.

And my mango lassi was refreshing and cheap. Served in a pint glass, it was only $2.50, compared to Lassi’s eightish-ounce serving for $4.75.

Himalayan Cafe

• 78 E. 1st St. (between First and Second Avenues)
• (212) 358-0160
• Meal 25/52: large lassi ($2.50) and shapta with rice ($9.99).

Yesterday, the Metropolitan Transit Authority passed new conduct rules and penalties for subway riders, adding them to an already extensive list. It reminds me of those obscure laws that no one follows, much less knows anything about.

The MTA kept in place an existing ban on open containers (of any beverage, not just malt liquor) and approved a new $25 fine on the activity. The newly adopted rules include a ban on moving between subway cars and taking up more than one seat.

The beverage fine has got folks in an tizzy, rightfully so I think, because it affects those law-abiding citizens who enjoy coffee during their morning commute or water on a hot day, not to mention those who appear to be enjoying a full picnic lunch from the confine of their seat.

The moving-between-cars one is a mixed blessing. Sometimes it’s a relief to escape a crowded car or one that has no heat in winter, no air conditioning in the summer or a mysterious odor. Then again, as every New Yorker knows, most of the time when someone’s switching cars, it’s a beggar or street musician making the rounds, so maybe this rule is a disguised attempt to harass these sores on society’s ass. (That three-piece harmonizing mariachi band that occasionally pops up on the 1 train is exempt from my generalization.)

The one-seat rule will be tough to enforce because of the fat, the burly and the sleepy, not to mention the Surly Man standard of sitting with legs splayed wide enough that you could easily fit one of those plastic children’s wading pools in there.

It’s laughable the MTA would waste time and money formulating these rules, as they’ll likely be loosely enforced—so far this year, for instance, only about 30 tickets have been issued for the beverage ban, according to NY1. Also, riders tend to ignore even the rules that are posted, much less the ones only in the books. We’re not supposed to lean on the subway doors, but we do, and we happily hog the seats labeled as reserved for the handicapped and infirm.

But New Yorkers are keeping an eye on the MTA. Last summer, it tried to sneak in a ban of photography on New York trains, cities and buses, as well as in the stations, which would have dissolved some beautiful sites and a fun passtime. In this case, the photographic, civil liberty-lovin’ and blogging communities raised holy hell and the proposal was dropped. Now let them get to work on that beverage ban.

Another insanely busy real estate conference day, this one for the New Jersey market. The car service driver picked me up from the apartment at 5 a.m., and it was good he did because he got lost on his way to Teaneck. He seemed to expect that I should know how to get there, even though I explicitly provided the dispatcher with the hotel’s address. The high point of the day was either the roast beef sandwich I had for lunch or the beautiful view of the city from the George Washington Bridge.

In the mood for something spicy but not too filling, I went down to the Village to try Lassi, a tiny Indian restaurant. There’s only small red neon sign with the restaurant’s name on the front window and the place is only six feet wide, as if someone decided to set up shop in a hallway. On one side is a narrow ledge and five stools, which I’m told get crowded during lunch, and on the facing wall, chalkboards promoting the day’s menu specials. I took a seat, listening to the Arcade Fire CD being played over the sound system, and noticed while waiting for my order that the place does a rousing takeout business.

With its small-sized servings of Indian street food at the inflated prices typical of the neighborhood, the place recalls a condensed version of Bombay Talkie. It’s tasty, but I’m sure frowned upon by “true;” Indian food fanatics.

Of course Lassi specializes in its namesake yogurt beverage, so I ordered the cardamom variety and it was cool and refreshing. Other intriguing flavors are mango, coconut, rose, coffee, lemon with roohafza (a rose syrup), “salty” and plain ol’ vanilla.

Lassi’s other regular menu specialty is six varieties of paratha, a flatbread that’s basted with oil and fried on a griddle. It reminded me much of Parisian crepes and it’s even served folded over in foil-backed paper so you can eat it on-the-go. I got the keema goat variety, which was served with fresh, bile-green mint chutney and it was delicious.

Each day, Lassi features a different off-menu entree, salad and dessert, each of which I’d like to try sometime, particularly the dessert, as Lassi’s owner was previously a pastry chef and I’ve read of the divinity in her pumpkin halwa, a creamy, spiced pudding topped with pistachios and golden raisins.

Lassi

• 28 Greenwich Ave.
• (212) 675-2688
• Meal 24/52: large lassi ($4.75) and goat paratha ($4.95).

A Reuters story posted on September 19^th that I came across today serves nicely as a nexus of my job (real estate), my apartment search (little space; lots of money) and Dublin, where my sister lives.

10-foot-wide shed sells for $269,100 in Dublin

Startling price for tiny structure highlights Ireland’s real estate boom

DUBLIN, Ireland—A former tool shed built to fill a gap in the middle of a row of Victorian houses in what was once Dublin’s poorest district has found a buyer at a startling price of $269,100 (220,000 euros).

At 10 feet wide and with a floor space of 280 square feet the building was last sold for 500 Irish pounds ($777) in the 1970s.

The red-brick house has no garden and no ground floor windows.

The realtor selling the property said on Monday a sale had been agreed but declined to comment further.

The price tag raised eyebrows even in Ireland where the cost of homes has tripled between 1997 and 2004.

It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. Dublin may not leap to the average person’s mind when he’s thinking of the world’s costliest rental rates, but it ranks highly. Another exmple: According to a study issued last October by international brokerage firm Cushman & Wakefield, real estate on Grafton Street in Dublin is the world’s fifth most expensive, after London’s Oxford Street, Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, the Champs Elysés in Paris and, of course, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Part two of No Direction Home: Bob Dylan picks up where part one concludes, with Dylan’s growing disenchantment with the press and his audience, their anger at him for “abandoning” folk for rock, and the political turmoil that swirled in the ’60s.

There are many more historical clips interjected into this half of the documentary, somewhat clumsily, I thought: Vietnam and the draft protests, the march on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedy assassinations. Although he’s shown playing at the Washington march, Dylan made a point of not attending many rallies or protests, as he didn’t want to be associated as the voice of a generation or as one with the answers to society’s ills. “Spokesman of a generation,” he says. “That I could not relate to.”

Not as enthralling as the rise-to-fame theme of part one is a focus on Dylan’s celebrity. He’s berated by fans and, at press conferences, thrown inane question after inane question, and although he answers with derision or humor, he seems weary. He appears on the Steve Allen Show; hangs out with Andy Warhol for one of the artist’s screen tests; and is shown backstage with Johnny Cash, who Dylan compares to a religious figure and says was the “high thrill of a lifetime” to meet. There’s an amazing impromptu clip of the two harmonizing on Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” accompanied only by Dylan on piano. (In 1969, they’d sing a duet on Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album.)

While fame gained him relationships, it broke others. Joan Baez invited Dylan along to play many of her U.S. performances, and assumed he’d return the favor for her on his European tour, but she’s not invited to perform with him, and they drift apart. “You can’t be wise and in love at the same time,” he says simply. In 1968, Baez released Any Day Now, an album of Dylan covers, including “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word,” which he wrote when they were together but claimed to have forgotten, according to Baez.

The beginning of the end for Dylan’s folk fans was the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when he played electric guitar with a full backing band. A third of the audience booed and hurled catcalls; the consensus seemed to be that rock, compared to folk, was a sellout and a selfish statement. After only 15 minutes of loudly amped playing at Newport, during which Pete Seeger is said to have wanted to sever Dylan’s mic cable with an axe, the band beats a hasty retreat offstange, while Peter Yarrow tries to calm the audience and get Dylan to return with his acoustic. Dylan does, for a brief, spittingly direct rendition of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

Despite what his fans wanted, it’s clear going electric was a foregone direction for Dylan’s music. Typically crusty, he cracks a big grin recalling how Mike Bloomfield, who was responsible for much of the electric guitarwork on 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited, joined the ragtag band: “He had heard my first record and wanted to show me how the blues were played.” Al Kooper remembers Bloomfield, too—Kooper was originally to play guitar for Dylan, took one listen of Bloomfield’s licks and retreated to play the organ. (That’s him playing on “Like a Rolling Stone.”)

The documentary ends with text overlays on Dylan’s debilitating 1966 motorcycle accident, after which he became a recluse and did not tour for eight years. Here’s hoping Scorsese can someday pick up from this point. Although the years covered are undeniably Dylan’s most popular and influential, there’s still a lot more to tell.

Tonight I watched the first part of Martin Scorsese’s documentary, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

Much of Dylan’s youth sounds similar to that of many other folks born in the Midwest in the early 1940s. He talks of growing up on Minnesota’s Iron Range in the early fifties, with its Main Street parades in the summer and duck-and-cover atomic fears. As a child, Dylan bought few albums, but intently listened to music in booths at record stores and on radio stations broadcast from afar, because the local ones tended to play popular favorites like “The Doggie in the Window” by Patti Page. He absorbed early folk, rock and country music, including Bobby Vee, Hank Williams, Odetta and John Jacob Niles. Dylan says he could learn a song after hearing it once or twice and sometimes he’d only borrow an element of it: the rhythm or the picking technique, for instance. “I had a very agile mind,” he says. He talks of being inspired in his singing and songwriting by his first girlfriends. “They brought out the poet in me,” he says with an impish grin, one of the only times he smiles during the documentary.

Woody Guthrie was a mammoth influence on Dylan, who says, “You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live.” Dylan picked up on Guthrie’s protest hymns, his technique, his humor, the way he dressed. He hitchhiked to New York City in 1961, in part to visit Guthrie, who was hospitalized there, but also to play the folk circuit in Greenwich Village coffeehouses and lurk around to hear the other players perform. For his first performance in the city, he opened for John Lee Hooker. Dylan was only 20 years old! Joan Baez, who met Dylan at this time, recalls he resembled a “ragamuffin” and that the first thing she always notices in the photos of him and herself together from the early ’60s is the “baby fat” on their faces. A newspaper review from the time describes him as “a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik.”

His first album, recorded that year in New York, had only two original songs; Dylan says he didn’t want to give too much away. But the city sharpened his focus. In 1963, his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, contained only one cover and several of the dozen original compositions were landmark. Dylan says he didn’t know if “Blowin’ in the Wind” “would be good or bad. It just felt right.” Of course, the song was a hit, although more for Peter, Paul & Mary than himself. The documentary suggests that Dylan’s music publishing profits trumped his early album sales, pouring in from these cover versions, most of them unmemorable, but a handful era-defining, like the Peter, Paul & Mary song and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which Dylan wrote for the Byrds’ first album.

Allen Ginsberg speaks of returning from India, hearing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” (also from Freewheelin’) and weeping, realizing that a generational torch had been passed. Ginsburg speaks of the poetry in Dylan’s lyrics, “words that are powered that make your hair stand on end.”

That year, Dylan, along with folksingers and other musicians like Johnny Cash and Howlin’ Wolf, played the Newport Folk Festival in front of 15,000 people. Part one of the documentary winds down with Dylan and the folk elite—Pete Seeger, Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary and others—in a rousing group rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” But the good times wouldn’t last, the voiceover narration would solemnly intone at this point, if the documentary had a narrator, which it doesn’t, thankfully—that’d be a boring and lazy way to tell a story like Dylan’s.

Overall, the documentary’s interview footage with Dylan is well edited and precisely cut. He’s still got a bit of the ol’ mumble, but he’s more articulate than I thought he’d be. Engrossing, too. At no point did my attention waver and I nearly cursed the lack of commercials (it’s being shown on PBS) because I couldn’t tear myself away to brush my teeth. More than the concert footage of Dylan, I enjoyed the clips of Dylan’s musical influences—in fact, these far outnumber and outlast the clips of Dylan himself. It helps put his music in a historical perspective and realize how much he borrowed and stole from others, for better or worse. The documentary also seems to cut down on the myths Dylan built up around himself early in his career, such as that he grew up among the cowboys and ne’er-do-wells of New Mexico.

So far, so good; part two is tomorrow night.

Since my company was acquired by a law journal publisher last year, it has become much more of a “corporate” entity, because the acquiring firm is much larger than ours and because it’s bristling with lawyers. We now receive all sorts of directives from upon high, including the need for all employees to take a sexual harassment training course.

These courses have come a long way since I was last subjected to an awkwardly produced VHS video on the determents of ass grabbing in the workplace. The one I took was available online via any web browser and there was a quiz at the end to ensure I learned my lesson.

The presentation kicks off with an embedded Flash video that tells the tale of Mav, Beth and Katie. “Things are about to get a little uncomfortable,” the voiceover solemnly intones over a jaunty synth-sax riff, but I wasn’t about to get my hopes up. The plot, such as it is, involves Mav, who previously dated Katie, feeling uncomfortable because of her sexual innuendos regarding the nature and precise location of Mav’s tattoo. Beth plays both the conflicted coworker and token non-white person.

Afterwards, I blew through the “what is sexual harassment” overview, which includes a brief summary on what it is, how to report it, and many grammatical errors, such as, “E-mail create’s a permanent record” and “I’m a cat lover and my co-workers constantly bug me with ‘uses for dead cats’ jokes, is this harassment?” (In case you’re wondering, a.) the grammatical error is a run-on sentence; and b.) it’s not unlawful sexual harassment, although the program demands, “Keep all harassment in check—report the behavior to HR or your supervisor.”)

To finish, the program presented me with a 15-question true-or-false quiz, on which I had to score 80% or better. It’s a good thing I passed, or else they would have moved my cubicle next to the cat lady.

The two questions I got wrong were:

Everyone working in the editorial department of one of our publications is often involved in verbal joking behavior with sexual overtones. The new reporter objects and asks for a transfer. Is it true that he is being sexually harassed?

I thought “not necessarily,” and clicked false. Damn.

The other was:

It is sexual harassment if one of our advertisers makes off-color remarks on the telephone to one of our employees.

That, too, I thought was a “not necessarily” false, particularly as the sentence didn’t state whether the magazine employee was also making off-color remarks (and he probably was, if you know anything about ad reps).

Although I passed the test, I don’t know if I learned much other than it’s against the law and/or company policy to harass someone because of his race, national origin, ethnicity, religion, age, disability or cat-love preference, but it’s only illegal “in much of the country” to discriminate because of sexual orientation. So if you’re insecure in your own sexuality, consult your in-house HR representative before making any fag jokes at work.

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is the official full title of the film I saw tonight, but Corpse Bride would have sufficed. Nowhere else but from Burton will you get such a mix of sinewy Edward Gorey-like characters, macabre plot and details, and every possible pun you can make about death in a PG movie. You’ll also find Johnny Depp voicing a character quite like that milquetoast Ichabod Crane, and similar to many of Burton’s other weird, stunted-kid characters: the Edwards Scissorhands and Wood, Pee-Wee Herman, Batman and Willy Wonka.

Burton began his career as an artist for Disney (he storyboarded The Black Cauldron and was an animator for The Fox and the Hound) and I theorize that while there, he picked up what R. Crumb has called “the Cuteness Curse,” which refers to Crumb’s first-real-job stint as a card illustrator for American Greetings. Only when you mix cuteness with the dark world vision of someone like Crumb or Burton do you get such unexpectedly strange and engaging results as you see in Burton’s works.

Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride boasts stunning stop-motion animation, this time around of silicon-skinned models and supplemented with a few computer effects. The character design is remarkable, especially for Victor, Victoria his fiancée (voiced by Emily Watson), and the Corpse Bride (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter), each wispily thin and with cueball eyes—behind one of the Corpse Bride’s lives a Peter Lorre-like inchworm sidekick. They’ve rendered in ashen porcelain colors and textures, and constrictive Victorian dress, but have surprising fluidity of movement. Equally memorable supporting characters are Victor’s parents, his mother Nell like the Bride of Frankenstein, and his father William, squat and froggy like Tweedledum. I also enjoyed the town crier, who seems to get his news instantaneously and relishes in broadcasting it loudly.

The film isn’t as much as a musical as I remember Nightmare being, with shorter, less memorable songs that don’t serve advance the plot much, other than the impressive “welcome to the land of the dead” number, featuring a bombastic gallery of dancing skeletons and other animated stiffs. Another great scene occurs when the cast of underworld characters arrives in the land of the living to enliven a boring dinner party.

You likely already know the film’s basic story—Victor accidentally marries the murdered bride instead of Victoria. Meanwhile, a cad moves in on Victoria, while Victor tries to figure out how to weasel out of his deathly nuptials. At the denouement is a brilliant and funny mêlée between Victor and the villain, topped with some predictable comeuppance and a happy ending all around.

Tonight, I saw Flightplan because the concept appealed to me: a mystery confined within a very limited, closed space, an airplane in this case. Jodie Foster plays a mom whose child disappears mid-flight—or did she? It could be there is a kidnapping or a terror plot in the works. But was the child ever aboard the plane? Is she dead, like the mother’s recently deceased husband, who’s being transported in a coffin the plane’s hold?

I didn’t like the movie as much as I’d thought because for the first half, it’s a scramble to locate the daughter. After some twists in the action reveal key plot points, the movie falls into more of a Die Hard kind of film. I can’t give too much away because this is a Sixth Sense sort of film with plot twists one mustn’t disclose, except that unlike Sixth Sense, Flightplan makes little sense even after you’ve reached the end and thought back to how and why certain things transpired.

I thought the movie would be a bit more like my favorite stuck-in-a-room dramas, like Panic Room or Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder and Rope. But the reason I like those movies is that the audience is in on the antagonists or the murder plot from the get-go. Hitchcock liked to illustrate this style with the anecdote of a bomb going off suddenly in a room: that’s surprising. But the same scene where the audience is aware the bomb is there, but it doesn’t immediately detonate: that’s suspense. Jodie rambling around a plane for her missing daughter: that’s just kinda boring after awhile. Who cares? Confine that woman and give her a sedative.

A decade after promises, political bickering, lawsuits and inaction, New York City officials announced that freestanding, permanent public toilets will be placed on the city streets, according to the New York Times today.

The firm selected for the job, Cemusa Inc., has also been tapped to revamp the city’s bus shelters and newsstands, but the real excitement are those toilets. Heaven help the heavy drinker stranded in a business district of the city after the bars have closed. There’s nowhere to go, at least not legally; I’d wager many a New Yorker has an entertaining anecdote involving an alleyway or park involving the expulsion of bodily waste products. Savvy citydwellers know that, aside from bars and restaurants, which often crack down on non-patrons using their facilities, Manhattan’s top free-and-ubiquitous bathroom break locations are Starbucks and Barnes & Noble, but after midnight or so, those options no longer exist.

Barring potential legal skirmishes and a completed contract, which is scheduled to be signed by year-end, the new toilets are expected to appear on the streets as early as 2007, and they’ll be the pay models, apparently of the sort commonly found in European countries. Only 20 will be placed initially, but neither Cemusa nor the city are saying where. The usual questions will arise about the potential abuse of these things by homeless people, vandals and assorted miscreants, but I think this is a smart idea, particularly for those of us with small bladders.

My company had its New York real estate conference today at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square. I’d read that Marriott is sinking more than $5 billion over the next five years to revamp all of its hotels and rooms to “the New Look and Feel of Marriott,” which includes crisp, white beds, because one was sitting right there on the Times Square sidewalk outside the Marquis this morning. It was one of the more incongruous things I’ve seen on Times Square and I was disappointed to see that no one, not even the Naked Cowboy, was curled up on it and taking a nap, as you’d expect on the streets of this city.

The bed was part of a PR stunt and demonstration on the new Marriott room design, but other than it, the details are hazy. According to a press release, the new look of the guest rooms will be “clean and crisp, with simple forms, straight lines and uncluttered surfaces,” which describes an iPod as usefully as it does a hotel room. Having traveled much recently for both fun and profit, I can say that all I want from my hotel room is a place to sleep and use the restroom. If I must discuss “features” of my hotel room, here would be my wish/complaint list, for Marriott or any other chain:

• Can you please, please let me open the windows? What, you think I’ll jump? I know you have air conditioning, but either it’s cold enough to keep Ted Williams’ head fresh or it’s dry and warm and smells like one’s armpit at that critical point when the deodorant has just started to break down.
• Can you also stop dicking me over on business center charges? Recent examples (both at Marriott chains) include computer usage for 69 cents a minute and printing of a single-page document for eight dollars. I get reimbursed by my company for this stuff, but cut it out.
• I don’t need eight pillows on my bed. One is fine.
• Marriott is bragging about the “plug and play” capabilities it will feature its new room design. Via an “exclusive high-tech device,” you’ll be able to plug your laptop, videogame system or mp3 player into the in-room television. Wow, just like I did with my Commodore 128 in 1986. How’s about something useful, like wireless internet access in all the rooms, idiots?
• I’m undecided if hotel beds are too firm. I tend to think so, but that’s better than having them slightly lumpy, which more people are going to complain about. But, man, some of these beds, they’re so hard you can play bocce on them. Then again, usually I’m so tuckered out and sleep arrives so easily, I don’t notice.

This guy printed 50,000 speech-bubble stickers and has been smacking them on ads across New York City for the public to fill in.

It’s a fine idea. Folks here are forever scribbling their own speech bubbles on public ads, using a pen or permanent marker, particularly on the paste-up posters in the subway stations because there’s nothing better to do while waiting for a train and they’re much easier to write on than, say, bus stop ads, which are encased behind a plastic window. But these stickers let you deface any public ad! It’s like New Yorkers’ very own New Yorker caption contest, but everyone wins.

I’m gradually filing my blog entries into categories that make more sense. Right now, the organization is out of hand. I have the habit of throwing entries under the “NYC” category when I can’t think of what category the entry should actually be assigned to. I guess in the back of my head, I’m thinking, “Well, what I’m writing about happened here in New York. And I’m sitting here writing it in New York. Ergo: New York category.” Which is no good. If anything, a “NYC” categorization should be default and implicit, as I have “Brooklyn,” “Ohio” and “Ireland” categories for stuff that happens there.

One category I wanted to add was “Clothing.” But was this the precise, catch-all word I sought? My first thought was that “Fashion” would be more all-inclusive for my purposes, but let’s face it, nothing about me screams “fashion” unless I’m singing that David Bowie song. Perhaps “Apparel,” I thought. But what’s the difference between “clothing” and “apparel”?

Here’s the circuit I took in the dictionary that’s built into Microsoft Word X for Mac:

clothes npl 1. garments that cover the body

O.K., garments isn’t listed, but garment is:

gar·ment n a piece of clothing

Hmm. Let’s give clothing the old college try:

cloth·ing n 1. clothes collectively

Then, bringing it all back home:

ap·par·el n 1. clothing or garments, especially outer or decorative clothing

If I take this slithery tangle literally and factor out what I already know about clothes, I still have no idea what the hell clothes are. They could be flapjacks or lichens or good intentions, for all I know.

Anyway, for the purposes of category-naming, “Clothing” it is.

Sherry and I returned to Resfest at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center tonight, this time for a video retrospective of the Swedish design collective, Traktor.

The firm first wormed its way into the short attention span of the American television-viewing public in the mid-’90s by producing Miller Lite’s infamous “Dick” campaign and “Evil Beaver” commercial.

The theme in their work I appreciate is their oft-insistence on hiring actors locally, mostly non-professionals sometimes literally off the street. (The only place they don’t do this is where Traktor’s offices are based, in Los Angeles, where even the street people have agents, as one of the firm’s owners deadpanned.) The unprofessional acting is then complemented by the sets, costumes, and overall style of the ad.

The best in this style are from a series of commercials you may have seen in 2001 for Discovery.com. One features nerds dressed up in asteroid costumes that “burn up in Earth’s atmosphere,” and another where they’re dressed in mosquito costumes and one gets squashed by a giant foam hand.

Another example of the style can be seen in a set of commercials for Fox Sports Net’s Regional Sports Report that ran in 2001 with the tagline “Sports news from the only region you care about. Yours.” They depict made-up sportscasts from other countries for made-up sports, like Chinese tree catching, Turkish cliff diving and Russian strongmen in a face-slapping match. The video style and graphics, locations, actors, extras and dialogue (much of it native and not even translated) make you swear you’re watching televised sporting events in these countries, up until the point where, for example, the Chinese guy gets squashed by a falling tree.

While the Traktor commercials that ran in the U.S. are fresh and great, the collective gets even freer reign for its European ads. Their British spots for Pot Noodle turn the gunky treat into a sexual fetish, with the “Pot Noodle Horn” smuggled in a man’s pants resembling a rather large boner. A few Diesel Jeans ads have the story and scope of mini-movies. And the Axe Body Spray commercials begin like any other deodorant commercial, then literally degrade into a seduction scene from low-rent softcore porn, complete with smudgy VHS video, canned sound, visible boom mics and wooden line readings.

My only beef with the presentation was that there was no identification for any of the commercials, music videos, previously unseen “banned” ads, director’s cuts and other oddities that were screened, so it was difficult to determine what was what, exactly. I learned only afterwards, for instance, that the short film that closed the session, “Swedish Midsummer”, was a stab at an ad for the midsummer sales event held by the German subsidiary of Ikea. Maybe the housewear high-ups thought that by letting some fellow Swedes direct their ad that they’d be communicating on the same wavelength, but upon viewing the clip, that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s a happy mess well described by the company that handled the ad’s post-production:

In the spots, Traktor makes a parody of many of the Swedish Midsummer customs, by creating a surreal pastiche of the clichés about Sweden and exaggerating every detail. We see a group of Swedes dressed in national costume gathering to celebrate Midsummer at a summer house in the countryside. They feast on raw whole fish, have sex in the woods, get raucously drunk, have a fight and dance around a pole. Traktor shot the commercial on location in Sweden to achieve the authentic setting.

Slated to air on German TV in June, the ad was scrapped, likely for reasons other than the authentic setting. On its own, it’s certainly entertaining, but if it would have ran for Ikea as-is, I certainly wouldn’t have ever forgotten the brand anytime soon.

For dinner, I stopped in for cheap tacos at my favorite neighborhood taqueria, the Great Burrito, and noticed a laminated sign affixed to the counter explaining that “due to increases in costs, we are forced to raise our prices.” The message concludes, “Sorry for any inconvenience and thank you for understanding.”

Prices are up across the standard dinner menu items, ranging from 25 cents to a whopping 90-cent increase on items including the onion steak burrito. The heartiest overall price hikes were a full dollar on some sides-menu items, like the homemade flan, which jumped from $2.50 to $3.50. Either that’s some top-notch flan or Madre was holding out for more money to whip up a batch.

Thankfully, my beloved black bean soft tacos only inflated by a quarter to $2.25. That’s still pretty cheap for tasty Mexican grub.

I met up with Sherry at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center for the ninth annual Resfest, a weekend of new and groundbreaking short films, commercials and music videos.

One session, Triple Threat, focused on the music videos, TV commercials and short films of three directors, Jonnie Ross, Nagi Noda and François Vogel. I was particularly interested in Vogel’s work, as he’s the lad responsible for those HP digital print commercials, scored to the Kinks’ song “Picture Book.” As illustrated by several of his short films, he’s been honing the seamless picture-in-a-picture imaging used in those ads since 1999.

We also viewed a slate of short films that included Chris Cunningham’s Rubber Johnny, a “hyperactive, shape-shifting mutant child,” confined to a wheelchair, locked in a basement and filmed on night-vision video. It starts out as creepy as that sounds, then becomes more or less a music video for the Aphex Twin song breakbeating along in the background as the video speeds up and shows Johnny spinning around in his chair and snorting a giant line of coke.

The best short was director/screenwriter/editor Philippe Grammaticopoulos’ Le Régulateur, animated using Maya, but unlike traditional digital animation—it resembled woodcuts or scratchboard lineart in motion. The story takes place in a future out of Aldous Huxley, where a man and woman adopt a child piece by piece, from a fetus-like creature floating in an amniotic bubble, to picking out various body parts, through to the shocking realization that the child has no eyes, merely a frozen grin and dark, empty sockets. It’s unsettling and made even creepier by Ivo Malec’s cacophonous organ music.

Quick: Think of a still image from the Great Depression or World War II.

In your mind, it was black and white, wasn’t it? It was for me, until I took a look at the Library of Congress’ recently publicized American Memory collection entitled “America from the Great Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1939-1945.” It’s like entering the world of Oz.

There are about 1,600 color photos on the site, taken under the direction of the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, and dating from 1939 to 1945. Photographers included the famous (Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange) and many others less so. The black-and-white portion of the FSA/OWI’s collection dwarfs the color one (about 164,000 B&W film negatives and transparencies) which likely accounts for many people’s black-and-white memories of those years.

But the American Memory site is vague in explaining this color/B&W inequality. I’d wager it was because color photography was just emerging at that time. Most of the FSA’s portion of the collection (644 images) are 35mm Kodachrome slides. In fact, although the first branded color film hit the market in 1907, the first truly modern color film was Kodachrome, introduced in 1935, less than five years before the government launched its photography program.

Another note: I don’t know what it is with enormous online historical collections of Americana, but the interface on the American Memory site sucks almost as wildly as my beloved New York Public Library Digital Gallery. But put up with it for a spell and I guarantee you’ll find gold.

My flight arrived in New York at 5:30 a.m. local time and I now understand why people aren’t so keen on taking redeyes. It was packed but quiet, mostly younger people. I slept fitfully and drowsily watched ’80s videos on VH1. I recall Tom Petty’s “Running Down the Dream,” Kraftwerk’s “The Telephone Call” and an endless stream of men with teased hair and frosted lipstick, exemplified by videos including Europe’s “The Final Countdown” and Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home.” Our efficient car service ensured a Lincon was ready and waiting for me at JFK and I lept in like I was Rod Stewart or someone. It was dark and rainy on the ride back. When I arrived home, I slept a few hours, then went into work around noon, which was rather pointless.

Another early morning for the second, full day of our industrial real estate conference.

Many of the panel sessions touched on how the huge ramp-up in foreign trade has made industrial real estate-related work a booming trade on the coast. What industry is California’s biggest employer? You may guess entertainment, but for the first year, the business of importing and directing goods (logistics) has surpassed entertainment as tops. “That’s more of our heartbeat than Hollywood,” as one speaker put it. (In terms of exports, California’s most popular by far is garbage. It’s mostly wastepaper, although scrap metal is also in the top five.)

There was much talk of Asian trade. I knew most of Wal-Mart’s merchandise was from China, but I just hadn’t appreciated exactly how much: $18 billion worth last year, or 70% of its merchandise. Wal-Mart likes to point out that the majority of its suppliers are American, which is true, but they supply only a fraction of Wal-Mart’s total stock.

The retail giant is also not so keen on publicizing the fact that Chinese factory workers are paid the equivalent of 56 cents to 67 cents an hour. An article in today’s USA Today reported Wal-Mart got slapped with another class-action lawsuit yesterday, filed by advocates for workers in six countries (including China) who charge the retailer overlooks labor abuse at factories run by its suppliers. The lawsuit could cover a class of anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 workers, according to an attorney at the firm representing the plaintiffs.

But thanks to this reliance on Chinese merchandise, the U.S. trade deficit doubled between 2001 and 2004 to $264 billion. Yet we keep at it, importing $20 billion worth of goods from the country in 1999, a figure that has skyrocketed now to $50 billion. We are China’s bitch, and there’s not much we can do about it.

Making these figures concrete, the day was topped with a boat tour of the Los Cerritos Channel, an artery connecting the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, which are North America’s largest, accounting for 43% of all U.S. containerized imports. Containers are colorful steel cargo boxes, 20- or 40-feet-long and about eight feet tall and wide, and the only thing more impressive than the ubiquitous stacks of them on the docks and atop sprawling freight ships are the skyscraper-tall stacking cranes that swiftly clamp and lift the boxes with ease, rearranging them in the world’s biggest, most boring game of Tetris.

We tooled around some more, seeing the only lighthouse in the U.S. with a green light that blinks every 17 seconds, and the spot at a coast guard camp where the breakfast-with-Col. Jessep scene was filmed in A Few Good Men.

The boat arrived back at the dock later then expected, so I skipped out on our chartered bus and sped back to the hotel in a taxi to pick up my bags and head out to the airport where I had a redeye back to New York.

I rose before dawn to catch my car to JFK for my 8:30 a.m. flight to Long Beach, California for the industrial real estate conference my company is producing. I took Jet Blue, which I’d never done before, appreciating the personal TV built into every seatback and the continual proffering of brand-name snacks and beverages (Terra Blues potato chips, Planters smoked almonds, Arizona iced tea) to mask the fact that we weren’t getting any lunch. There were only 30-some people on the flight and each got his or her own three-seat row to spread out and relax, or sleep, as I chose to do for a few fitful hours.

I’d never been to California before today and although it was my own fault for not flying in a day early or staying a day later to see the sights, I made the most of my airplane-hotel-airplane trip. It was sunny but unseasonably cool in Long Beach, the airport for which has some of its luggage carousels located outside. I walked around the area of the Marriott and it was a typical business park area with soulless office buildings. I marveled at the tall, skinny palm trees sprouting everywhere and looking perfectly ridiculous, the ostriches of the plant world.

At the corner of Clark and Spring, a small strip mall that I would have normally passed by without notice caught my attention because it was called Time Square and the typography on its signage seemed to have been frozen, like Walt Disney, in 1966.

I stopped at Pop’s, a local greasy spoon specializing in the unlikely combination of hamburgers and teriyaki, the menu split 50/50. I got a hamburger and fries for an unbeatable $4.60—the burger was big and bursting with pickles, fresh-cut purple onion slices, lettuce and tomato and not-so-secret thousand-island sauce. The heap of fries were thick cut, crisp and piping hot, fresh from the fryer. I ate at a fire engine-red fiberglass table and listened to classic tunes from the ’60s, like “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James & the Shondells and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.”

The conference began at 4 p.m. with roundtables for the few dozen people that showed up in the hotel’s ballroom, after which we retreated to the pool for beer, cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. I chatted with a cute L.A. girl who was from an architectural firm and resembled Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles, only with not-as-big hair.

My boss told me I needed to write an introduction for one of the event speakers he was introducing at the conference tomorrow, so I went back to my room and composed it—longhand. Note to self: Bring laptop to future conference events. I was in bed by 8 p.m., the whoosh of airplanes landing a few hundred yards away from my hotel room window lulling me to sleep.

Another exhausting day on West Coast time, staying late at work to prepare for and wrap up stuff for the industrial real estate conference my department at work is producing, and which I’m attending tomorrow and Wednesday. For dinner, I met up at Saigon Grill with Andie and Eric. I got some California and salmon-and-avocado rolls, Andie got a stir fry and Eric ordered the pork chops. Tasty!

Why haven’t eBooks caught on? It certainly hasn’t been for a lack of trying. eBook divisions popped up at major print publishing houses a few years back, only to close a short while later. In 2001 alone, failures included Random House’s AtRandom, AOL/Time Warner’s iPublish, and MightyWords, which was majority-shareheld by Barnes & Noble’s online division. (eTexts live on in places like the great Project Gutenberg, although only for works that have fallen out of copyright.)

At the time, Wired reported that eBook failure could be chalked up to the lack of a universal format and an “eBook reading device with a high quality screen and full PDA functionality” for under $100. To my knowledge, such a device has yet to materialize.

But look what we have now: the near-universal PDF format and, as demonstrated by Apple, the price structuring and marketing savvy to sell portable devices with high-quality screens—and, while not for under $100 and not with screens large enough for reading large chunks of text—sold for a price that hasn’t stopped everyone and his brother from snapping up an mp3 player.

Maybe the length of text involved has to do with eBooks’ failure. I know I get antsy reading anything on my computer’s screen that’s more than 100 words or so and usually I’ll print longer documents to read comfortably at my desk. And I still prefer traditional print news sources to their online counterparts, particularly when reading long articles or features, as opposed to comparatively brief news items.

One company that seems to have recognized this length issue (along with the associated pricing issue) is Amazon.com, which on August 19^th quietly launched the unfortunately named Amazon Shorts section of its store, which offers short story downloads for 49 cents each in PDF format.

This sparks my imagination. Why couldn’t a concept like this be integrated with an iTunes Music Store interface or into the iTunes Music Store itself? Then my copy of iTunes could happily resemble the screenshot below. (Click image for a larger version in a pop-up window.)

I’d argue yet another reason eBooks failed was a lack of consumer knowledge that they were even available, much less where to get them. I can’t imagine most consumers ever heard of AtRandom, iPublish and MightyWords. With a iTunes Music Store-like delivery-system for electronic short stories and essays (eStories) you’d have:

1. a storefront with ultra-high name recognition and ease-of-use
2. a universal and low price model everyone can live with
3. a universal format (PDF, presumably)

I picture assembling the equivalent of short-story mixtapes to read on the subway or an airplane: a “Magic Realism Mix,” “Minimalism Mix,” “Hemingway’s Greatest Hits,” and so on. Readers could discover new authors and genres they love! Kids could illegally trade short stories on the Internet! Celebrity short story playlists!

I would think publishers and authors would embrace the concept of getting their short works online, particularly now that the music companies have paved the way for digital distribution. Recording artists like the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson must make most of their greenbacks off their back catalogs, and as such, embrace avenues like the iTunes Music Store. Why wouldn’t print publishers and authors want to dust off all those copies of The Best Short Stories and various authors’ Collected or Complete Short Stories, rescuing them from the oppressive shackles of college courses and rejuvenating them by throwing them online where they could bask in a high profile and bring in some dough?

Although I think at least one missing piece in this potential equation for success is the lack of an appropriate device on which to read eStories. Although Palm devices could be ideal, where’s my ultra-thin, wave-of-the-future folding LCD screen?

Discussing the eBook matter at brunch with Jimi this afternoon, he suggested another reason for their failure is that people simply don’t want them. Consumers prefer passive entertainments—you can’t read your eBook while you’re driving or jogging, for example, but you can listen to music on your iPod. And comsumers already have the option of digital audiobooks.

But hey, I still want my cheap, high-quality reader for eStories! As Leo, the grizzled proprieter of Bowling Green, Ohio’s late, great Paupers Books, once told me, in reference to an oft-shoplifted segment of his stock: “They’re called Pocket Books for a reason.” I want 15,000 short stories in my pocket!

The kind wonks at Lego recently rolled out a new version of their Lego Digital Designer (LDD), a free, CAD-like program for PC and Mac that lets you drag-and-drop virtual Lego bricks. Completed models can be uploaded to Lego’s website to share or sell, and you can get a list of the physical Lego bricks needed to build the design.

This is the first I’ve heard of the program, although it’s been around in less-powerful versions at least a year. I’m reminded of Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel, Microserfs, my favorite book of his.

It’s about a group of young, overeducated, overworked and sarcastic Microsoft programmers. Some of them are working on Oop! (short for Object Oriented Programming), “a virtual construction box of 3D Lego-type bricks that runs on IBM or Mac platforms with CD-ROM drives.”

The base of this fictitious program does just what the real LDD does, although Oop! has additional features, some of which seem inspired by SimCity. An Oop! brick can be customized to have from eight to 8,000 bumps, custom colors and surfaces, and structures can be destroyed by earthquake, fire, decay or kicking (“elder sibling simulator”). Properly built kit models result in rewards; for example, King Kong will scale a successfully built Empire State Building and plant a flag on top. Maybe Lego can pick up on some of these ideas for the next version of LDD!

Coupland presaged or inspiried at least one other Lego-related development. In February 2000, he wrote on his website that Lego should make a “‘Fluffer’ Amateur Porn Movie Set.” That didn’t happen, but take a look at the lawyer-friendly named Block Structure Porn, posted in 2002 by Drew, the guy behind the Toothpaste for Dinner cartoon.

The city is rife with teaser billboards and ads proclaiming, “This Fall a woman will be President.” (On an unrelated note, shouldn’t there be a comma in there?) This throws me for a loop because I keep thinking of Condoleezza Rice.

Remember your high-school political science? According to the Order of Presidential Succession, Condi would be prez following the death/incapacitation, in order, of George, Dick, Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert, and President Pro Tempore, a.k.a. the senior member of Senate, Ted Stevens (he’s from Alaska, which is why you’ve never heard of him).

But the ads are referring to Geena Davis, as they’re for Commander-in-Chief, the drama in which she’s starring, premiering Sep. 27 on ABC.

I suppose I should be relieved.

Internet access was down most of the day at work, a connection issue with Verizon’s end of our T1 line. A few people left early to “work from home,” they claimed, implying they were stymied without the internet. Our receptionist was edgy because she always checks her horoscope first thing each morning online; fortunately, I had picked up a tabloid paper on the way to work, so I leant it to her, and after reading her day’s fate, she was less jittery.

I hadn’t fully realized how much I used the ’net until it wasn’t there. It was the minor web-based things I immediately missed, like updating my blog and reading those of others, which I often do over my morning coffee if I arrive to work early.

But as my work day began, I went through Google withdrawal. I regularly use it as an all-purpose spellchecker (I type "laise fairee" and Google pipes up: Did you mean: "laissez faire"), as well as a fact checker and especially a White Pages. Several times I needed to call a company where I only knew its name and the city in which it was located. Normally, I would track it down on Google in five seconds. Instead, I had to call the oldschool (xxx) 555-1212 information line, like in the good old days.

I never thought I’d miss perusing the Yahoo! News over lunch at my desk like I nearly always do, which made me realize the internet is my sole source of hard national news Monday through Friday.

Email to and from addresses outside our company was down, too, so I uttered many phrases over the phone along the lines of, “Can you email me that? Uh, I mean, could you read me that over the phone and I’ll write it down?” Most of my job is crafting mighty prose in Word and talking to people on the phone, so I didn’t miss email too much, but I do like it for conveying simple, quick facts. None of this “1,001 word message” or “infinite re:” bullshit that would be better served by a minute-long phone call. Still, I find a surprising number of businesspeople opt for email where a call would get the job done more quickly; apparently, the internet has stunted them to human-to-human communication.

Since in-house email was working, a coworker of mine in the production department and I amused ourselves by rapid-firing each other random photos from our computers’ Pictures folders, since we couldn’t send each other idiot internet links to photos like we usually do. She sent me one of her boyfriend dressed like Tyler Durden and acting crazy inside a Salvation Army thrift store, which was good, but I think I won the contest with this photo of what would appear to be a young Jerry Orbach dressed in a space-age leisure suit.

As predicted last week, Apple’s “iPhone” was announced today, and alas, it really is just a cell phone with iTunes on it. Make than an ugly cell phone.

More sexily, Apple rolled out the pencil-thin, color-screened iPod nano which probably embittered all the suckers that snapped up a screenless iPod shuffle. Next up, the iPod flea.

Apple also introed a new version of iTunes, which makes a big step to v5.0, yet manages to contain no fantastic features, like the synch feature I was hoping for. Take note, Steve: the Yahoo! Music Engine can synch—it mirrors tracks from one music library to another, so that, say, you can listen to all of your music on your work computer and your home computer, ripping tracks or making library edits on either, with changes/additions mirrored on both machines.

Finally, the iTunes Music Store made available for sale every Madonna album ever. (Add the non-album tracks from all her singles and I’ll be happy; probably Jimi, too.) I was amused to note that shortly after the addition of her catalog to the Store, her most-downloaded solo track was still “Who’s That Girl,” one of my favorites, but not Madonna’s, as it appears on none of her many greatest hits and compilation albums.

In the beginning, home video game systems had joysticks, and that was how you controlled the video game. I remember those flimsy Atari 2600 sticks—black, stubby and with but one button. When you moved the stick, the direction would register with by the completion of a physical circuit, a small raised foil dot touching another. I know this because I recall seeing the innards of one, having opened it up to see why it wasn't working. A bout of vigorous joysticking had completely mashed down one of the foil dots, and the circuit was no longer connecting.

Along came directional control pads and controllers encrusted with buttons. They retained and enhanced upon their phallic shape because young boys like to, uh, play video games. Input devices took a step forward to a more organic format in the mid-’80s with the light gun, issued chiefly to shoot ducks.

For the NES, the literal and figurative action started heating up in 1988 with Nintendo’s Power Pad, which allowed players to boogie on a Twister-like floormat that transmitted one’s stylin’ moves to the game. A year later, Mattel’s Power Glove allowed for punching and other hand gestures to be fed to a game.

By 2000, it was more song-and-dance, with Dance Dance Revolution, which expanded upon and popularized the dance-mat concept, and with Sega’s Samba de Amigo, the control for which was a pair of maracas, shaken in concert with a seemingly acid-fortified dancing Mexican monkey onscreen. (My brother owns this game and when I played it a few years back, it was a stone cold riot.) Last year, Donkey Konga debuted, with a pair of bongo drums as the controller.

As video game controllers get more “organic,” what’s next? At the recent Game Developers Conference Europe, the show’s organizers gathered a group of experts to tackle the topic of designing the ultimate video game—for the average grandma. Keita Takahashi, the mind behind the strange and wonderful Katamari Damacy, made the most adventuresome comments. He began by noting current control designs are inorganic and difficult to understand—and for anyone, I would assume, not just grandmas. He then proposed a controller design so organic that it would be inseparable from the game itself—a cat. “The cat is designed to be rested on the old ladies’ knees,” he said, continuing (in an excerpt from a Gamasutra report by Iain Simons):

The game would begin with the family suggesting to Granny that she wear the cat because, for example, her knees looked cold. Embedded in the cat is the capability for it to communicate wirelessly with other cat controllers (on other Grannies’ knees) in the neighborhood. When the cat connects to another one, “...the onboard A.I. kicks in.” This causes the cat to speak, paraphrased as “meow, meow, grandma, meow.” Takahashi explains that the family are required to participate in the game by pretending that they haven’t heard anything, because of this—Grandma begins to build the perception that she is able to communicate directly with the cat.

As the dialogue with the cat develops, it suggests that Granny make some soup—but faster than the other granny down the street who has also received the instruction. A competitive element emerges and gradually the cat suggests more and more group activities that Grandma might engage in, culminating in trips to the park. “...So they all go outside and eventually they meet other old ladies with cats and they all become friends. So it’s a game that involves the participation and love of the entire family.” Takahashi ended the presentation by commenting on the possible production path of the cat, “Namco and Bandai are merging so when I get home I will submit my proposal.”

Takahashi, you crazy fool; go for it! You may snicker at his concept, but anyone who can make a hit video game (and one of my personal favorites in years) out of a little dung beetle-like character that perpetually rolls a ball comprised of progressively larger random objects, well, that’s the fellow to make a video game controller shaped like a cat.

We conducted a massive cleansing of the apartment today, partly in anticipation of me moving out and partly because, let’s face it, the place was filthy. (If you haven’t been briefed on my apartment situation, Eric is officially moving in with Andie and I’m looking for a new place, aiming to find it as early as possible in October.)

Andie tidied her closet by corralling four giant bags of clothing that I will be shuttling via cab to work tomorrow for a special Salvation Army donation that’s being picked up next week and sent directly to folks affected by Hurricane Katrina.

I cleaned my room, which had been starting to resemble a landfill, and re-alphabetized my CD collection, always a Herculean task.

Eric scoured the kitchen, particularly the stovetop, refrigerator and floor, which had accumulated high levels of grime, with splotches of spilled food and beverages. He also tackled the bathroom tile, toilet and tub, installing a new mildew-free shower curtain for good measure.

Andie and Eric shuffled the living room furniture into a pleasing arrangement, relocating the couch against the wall by the window, allowing for a nice breeze and a Rear Window-style view into several of our neighbors’ apartments.

The symbolic finale to our cleaning efforts was celebrated by Andie squashing a frankfurter-sized cockroach scuttling up our wall, his restful existence likely disturbed by a combination of our activity and the rhythmic, somewhat sexual grunting emanating from the players on the U.S. Open broadcast we were watching.

For dinner, we ordered three pizzas from neighborhood favorite Celeste and watched Barton Fink on DVD, spooky and making about as much sense as it ever has.

I capitalized on the city’s Sales Tax-Free Week on clothing and footwear, as well as Banana Republic’s end-of-summer clearance, and purchased a pair of handsome T-shirts this afternoon. Walking back to the subway, I spotted a rummage sale in an unused parking lot at the southwest corner of W. 17^th Street and Sixth Avenue. I’d seen this sale before, with the same vendors of antiques, retro clothing, postcards and such, but the last time, I had no cash. Today I did, and perused one of the vendor’s extensive used CD collections. I got some great stuff and when I asked the guy how much the CDs were, he eyeballed my stack of eight, and said, “Five bucks apiece. But for you, $25 total.” Sweet.

I picked up Stevie Wonder’s The Woman in Red soundtrack for “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and for a well-meaning tune named “Don’t Drive Drunk.” (Although both songs are referenced in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, only “I Just Called” is covered in the movie version, in a rather funny scene starring Jack Black.) “Don’t Drive Drunk” is infinitely worse than “I Just Called.” How can this be? Consider this sampling of lyrics:

Boy out with girl on their first date
Gets pulled over by the law
Officer says, ‘Hey, can’t you drive straight
Or have you been drinking alcohol?’
Boy says, ‘Man, are you crazy?’
Cop says, ‘Hey, then walk this line’
But results from the breathalyzer
Proves he’s charged with D.U.I.

Even better, the background lyrics are:

Don’t drive drunk
d-d-d don’t drive drunk
Don’t drive drunk
Hiccup

I also snagged two of Billboard’s Top Hits compilation CDs from the late-80’s. Writing about one of these discs, Allmusic’s Andy Kellman points out that

the likes of Starship’s “We Built This City,” Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings,” Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On,” John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion),” and REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” are some of the most reviled chart hits of all time. Nephews, nieces, sons, and daughters who are tired of their elders whining about the current state of pop music should bring up this disc as proof that things weren't so hot in the late ’80s either.

Suit yourself, Kellman. I was growing up in the late ’80s and immersed in this music, so I like to drag it out every so often and give it a guilty listen. The glorious guitar solos and synthesizers are, to me, like a candle in the window on a cold, dark winter’s night.

Speaking of the 80’s, one of my other finds was the CD single for one of my favorite songs, L.L. Cool J’s “Around the Way Girl,” which I bought mainly so I could write about it here and perturb Jimi. Also, I was intrigued by the disc’s tracklisting for a remix by The Untouchables (a supergrouping of Johnny Gill, Heavy D & The Boyz and Al B Sure) and an instrumental version that I assumed would be perfect for karaoke. Alas, the remix is boring and naturally not as good as the original, while the instrumental version is of the remix. Damn. I’ll be keeping the CD, however, if not only for the brief liner notes, which refer to the song as “groovin’,” and for the sepia-toned cover photos, which depict around-the-way girls (Lisa, Angela, Pamela and Renee, I assume) decked out in foxy late-’80s streetwear.

Later, in celebration of Labor Day, Andie, Katie, Eric and I ordered a large meal of BBQ ribs and chicken, baked beans, green beans, mac-and-cheese and cole slaw from Brother Jimmy’s, which we ate while watching part of Forrest Gump on TNT, then Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors on DVD.

As a guy who likes sushi, I could’ve done worse than moving to New York City, where, happily, “fast-food” Japanese chains are prevalent. Two of the most popular are Go Sushi and Teriyaki Boy. I’ve been to the Go Sushi in the West Village many times. It’s fresh, cheap, tasty and presumably more healthy than your average fast food, although the atmosphere in those places, with their low ceilings and poured-cement floors, make it seem as if someone just set up a few rickety tables and chairs in a parking garage.

The Teriyaki Boy branch I had dinner at tonight had just as much atmosphere. It was hot and stuffy in there and I swear they only turned on the air conditioning after I showed up (and was the only person in there at prime dinner time). Eventually, a few more folks came in, and it seemed as if TB did a brisk delivery business, in the tradition of most Asian food establishments.

I got the Maki Combo, six pieces each of California roll, Alaskan roll and Tuna roll, and it was delicious and filling, served unceremoniously on a Styrofoam plate upon a bright red plastic lunch tray. My can of Coke cost $1 but for future reference, I noted that the layout of the place—long and very narrow, with the soda cooler separating the front counter-area from the half-dozen small tables in the place—was conducive to sneaking in one’s own, more cheaply procured beverage of choice.

Teriyaki Boy

• (9 Manhattan locations)
• 483 Columbus Ave. (between W. 83rd and W. 84th Streets)
• (212) 874-5633
• Meal 23/52: Maki Combo ($6.99) and a can of Coke ($1).

Ebert’s one-star review yesterday of Underclassman has some nice nuggets that can be applied to the general state of American movies, which I tried to get across in my recent review of 3-Iron. “Why couldn’t the movie have at least tried to do something unexpected[...]?” Ebert writes, continuing:

Did anyone at any time during the talks leading up to this film say, “Gee, guys, doesn’t it seem like we’ve seen this a million times before?” Did anyone think to create an African-American character who was an individual and not a wiseass standup with street smarts? Was there ever an impulse to nudge the movie in the direction of originality and ambition? Or was everybody simply dazed by the fact that they were making a film and were therefore presumably filmmakers?

I can’t get too down about the state of domestic moviemaking, though, because unlike poor Ebert, I’m not forced to sit through and, worse, seriously consider mass-market filmmaking, and can instead look forward to predictably unpredictable stuff from the likes of Jim Jarmusch or Wes Anderson, and Ethan and Joel Coen.

What does New York have against honey-roasted cashews? As you may know, I’m allergic to peanuts, so my typical alternate is cashews or almonds. More often I crave that sweet-savory combo found few places in nature than glazed nut products and honey-BBQ ribs.

I prowled the streets of the city tonight for a good 45 minutes in search of honey-roasted cashews. I left disappointed from many establishments, including:

• Gristedes and Food Emporium, Manhattan’s most prevalent grocery chains
• popular local pharmacy-store chain Price Wise Discount
• the East Coast’s largest drug chain, Duane Reade
• Broadway Farms, our neighborhood grocery
• and no fewer than three bodegas and mom-and-pop grocers

It wasn’t just an out-of-stock issue. I sheepishly admit I’ve made these rounds before in search of my sweet, nutty booty, only I couldn’t recall which of the above stocked what I was looking for. Let it be noted here for future reference: none of them. This despite otherwise embarrassingly thorough nut selections: nuts in bags, nuts in cans, nuts in glass jars, nuts in plastic snap-top tubs. Planters, second-tier brands, no-names. Salted, lightly salted, no salt, smoked. Mixed nuts, beer nuts, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, macadamia nuts, even—and this was a true stab to my heart—pignolia nuts. But no honey-roasted cashews. The closest I got was a cashew-peanut honey-roast mix from Planters, and of course plenty of plain-ol’ honey-roasted peanuts.

I was nearly ready to throw in the towel when I tried one last place: CVS. Jackpot! A can of CVS Gold Emblem Fancy Whole Honey Roasted Cashews, one of two left on the shelf, was mine for a reasonable $4.39.

I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass....

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, (1900)