November 2005 Archives

In 1998, a writer for The New York Times Sunday Magazine asked John C. Waddell, a Museum of Modern Art curator, what he’d like to acquire as the epitome of modern design: his choice was the signage for the city’s subway system.

“When I think of the East Side, it’s green; when I think of Lincoln Center, it’s red,” Waddell said, referring to the 4/5/6 and 1 lines, respectively depicted as green and red on the MTA’s New York City Subway Map. “Massimo and Lella Vignelli did that to my head.”

Born in Italy, the Vignellis moved to New York in the 1950s and in 1965, Massimo co-founded the design studio Unimark International. Only a year later, the firm was commissioned to design maps and signage for the subway. The MTA map circa 1966/1967 (depicted below) was the first to show each train route in a separate color, but despite Waddell’s comment, it’s not entirely clear Massimo himself chose the colors for the system. If he did, though, it’s astounding that an individual could be responsible for a collective memory.

I’ve seen at least one New York City guidebook that referred to the subway’s “green line” or “yellow line,” a misguided and oversimplified way to educate tourists or others new to the system—most often, trains with differing destinations run on a single colored line. Instead, the lines are correctly referred to by their associated letters or numbers.

But I admit to the feeling of geography associated with a line’s color that Waddell describes. Because of where I live now and before, and where I work, the red (1/2/3) and blue (A/C/E) lines color most of the city for me. Red still chiefly conjures the Upper West Side, while blue runs the gamut from my current neighborhood, down through Central Park West, Greenwich Village, all the way to JFK Airport. There is another, more oblique red-and-blue association; looking at the two colors wend their way through the boroughs on the map reminds me of the cat I dissected in Mr. Dewey’s high school bio class, the blood vessels injected with colored latex, red for arteries and blue for veins.

Other colors I associate with areas of the city are the green line (4/5/6), appropriately matched with the well-moneyed Upper East Side, and the bright tangle of gold (N/R/Q/W) and orange (B/D/F/V) at the bustling core of Manhattan and the Lower East Side. The shuttle to Times Square (the S), the shortest and straightest route in the system, is appropriately a brief, slate-gray slash, with the lighter gray L cutting a swath lower across Manhattan and hooking into Brooklyn.

New Yorkers adapted well enough to the sudden bursts of color in their commutes, but by the mid-1970’s, there was enough hubbub over the not-based-to-scale aspect of the new map that it was redesigned to the more geographically accurate style used today. A typical flap over Massimo’s map: See the rounded tan square in the left-center? That’s Central Park, which is in reality closer in aspect ratio to a golden rectangle.

Although Massimo’s map may have been ultimately maligned as a victim of design over function, his subway signage has stayed more or less the same, with a letter or number in the Helvetica-mimic typeface Standard Medium boldly punctuating a circle. (For the station-name lettering, one big change was to reverse-out Massimo’s black-on-white lettering, shown in his 1966 illustration above, in order to discourage graffiti.)

And the colors remain, the most memorized design, intentionally or otherwise, in New York City.

According to Quinnipiac University, which polled 895 registered New York City voters and released the results today:

New York City voters love their city more than ever, with 61 percent who say they “love” New York, 22 percent who say they “like” New York, 15 percent with mixed feelings and 1 percent who say they “hate” the city, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Prior polls by the independent Quinnipiac University show the love factor ranging from a low of 46 percent June 3, 1999, to a high of 59 percent November 25, 2002.

“It’s a metropolitan love affair—not just casual affection,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “Why doesn’t that 1 percent of haters move back to Boston?”

Among the 40 messages awaiting me in my Inbox upon my return from Thanksgiving vacation this morning was this spirited attempt at spreading a worm via a zipped attachment named list.zip. Here’ the email’s text:

From: Department@cia.gov
Subject: You visit illegal websites

Dear Sir/Madam,

we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites.

Important:
Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.

Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison

++++ Central Intelligence Agency -CIA-
++++ Office of Public Affairs
++++ Washington, D.C. 20505

++++ phone: (703) 482-0623
++++ 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., US Eastern time

Illegal websites? I wasn’t aware there was such a thing here; this isn’t China, after all. I suppose the content on a site could be illegal, like if someone’s abusing trademarks, selling bootleg Disney sweatshirts or spreading viciously libelous rumors about Lou Diamond Phillips, but a site itself being illegal? The worm authors could have cast a wider net with a subject-line like “You visit porn websites” or “You visit cretin Flash-animated sites that your Mom and coworkers email you links for.”

Also, the phone number is a legitimate one for the CIA’s public affairs/press relations office; when you call it, a recording says, in effect, to just delete the damn email and stop bothering Steve. Ha ha!

To herald the holidays and complement the Christmas lights and decorations many of my neighbors put up last week, the super placed a petite Christmas tree in the foyer of my apartment building while I was away.

As an even better holiday treat, he seems to have fixed my Phantom Toilet during my absense. It would occasionally flush itself and continue running. This wouldn’t usually be a huge issue, but the toilet is one of those vacuum-flush varieties, and to have it suddenly start running in the middle of the night would intercut my dreams with perilous whitewater rapids until I woke up to groggily jiggle the handle.

After many valiant attempts by Jess’ Mom to snap a family photo featuring each of us with his or her eyes open and looking moderately sober, a feat as of today unperformed in a few years, the Young children took off for lunch at Tommy’s in Cleveland Heights.

Along the way, we pointed out buildings that were new or gone, businesses that managed to remain and those that had disappeared. We stopped by Mac’s Backs bookstore, peered in the windows at the late, great Centrum movie theater, which appears to be under renovation as an improv comedy theater involving robots, and checked out the expanded Big Fun toy store (for those familiar with the Coventry area of the past 10 years, it’s still in its original space but has opened a large satellite location just across the street where High Tide Rock Bottom used to be).

Wonders do never cease: the Akron-Canton Airport, the same age and size of a Young Mens department at a Montgomery Ward, now has free wireless internet access. Note to self: bring laptop next trip. It will come in handy for passing time waiting, as I had to do today when a suspicious parcel threat shut down LaGuardia temporarily and delayed all flights an hour.

In a sad conclusion to an otherwise fine holiday, when I arrived back at my apartment, I watched Bewitched, a terrible, terrible movie during which I laughed not once.

With a day full ahead of visiting the grandparents, Andrew, Jess, Dana and I set out by fueling both the Taurus (with petrol) and ourselves (with Starbucks coffee and Def Leppard’s Hysteria), then headed south on I-71. There was much chatter and more fine music (They Might Be Giants, Violent Femmes, Weezer) as we cut a path diagonally across the state, over a river or two, through woods, with a brief stop in Bucyrus at Wal-Mart for a restroom break and the purchase of a small bouquet of yellow roses for Grandma, which was totally the ladies’ idea, but a good one.

Grandma recently moved into an assisted living facility and I was imagining something depressing, with the scent of urine. But the place is quite fine. We agreed it’s nicer than our own apartments: she has two bedrooms, kitchen, bath, living room, balcony, and all of her comforts of home, as most of the decor and furniture was moved over from her house.

Lunch was served in a cozy common area downstairs with wood tables and chairs, a fireplace, and there were friendly staff members stringing lights on a Christmas tree. The fare was served up cafeteria style and nothing fabulous (the pizza I had whisked me back momentarily to high school), but at $3 per guest meal, I could hardly complain; plus, the price included tapioca pudding. Importantly, Grandma knows many of the other residents, whether because they’re friends or relatives (it’s a small town) or just because she’s a cordial lady. She was saying hello to many, and showing off us kids, which is a top duty of any grandparent. Back at her place, we caught up on our lives and Dana showcased her photos from Ireland on her laptop.

One of my uncles and his family stopped by and it would have been nice to speak with them longer, particularly to find out what my cousins have been up to lately, but it was time to bid farewell and head up north to Toledo.

Grandpa’s doing well for a 92-year-old. He’s unsteady when walking now and uses a cane, which inspired some of his oft-made grumbles about not being able to do all the stuff he used to, like rebuild transmissions and saw down trees and stuff. But he’s got a house full of youth to rub off on him. Living with Grandpa are my uncle Doug and his lady Sandy, who recently added another child to the group, Mason. He’s quite the cute tot, depicted here curious as to how my camera works. I let him play around with it but he was more interested in poking the lens than taking any snapshots.

Like his two-year-old brother, Dustin, it took Mason a spell to warm up to us strangers, but once he did, he was in high spirits, all smiles as he rotated around on the floor (he hasn’t yet mastered crawling), performed an amusing jig while seated and generally acted like World’s Best Baby.

Doug, who was spraying cellulose attic insulation all over the upper floor of the house and himself, stopped by the living room for a few guest appearances, often wearing a gas mask to prevent too much shredded newspaper from entering his respiratory system. We got a tour of another cost-saving energy invention of his: heating the house using a wood burning stove outside, which is connected by underground pipes to a heat-dispersion system in his basement that was crafted of complicated piping, a modified window fan and what appeared to be some car parts.

Thanksgiving! The usual embarrassingly hearty bounty of food was consumed. This year’s spread featured the requisite turkey with Dad’s secret-recipe giblet gravy (the package of organs stored in the turkey’s orifice revealed a random assortment of two livers but no gizzard, though I noticed no difference in the resulting gravy’s succulent taste), mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce.

There were also homemade crescent rolls, fruit compote (the new dish this year), sweet potatoes (a special recipe that last appeared in 2003, reprised this year in a giant 13x9-inch pan), green bean casserole (that suburban favorite, topped with French’s fried onions), and pumpkin pie. Oh, and stuffing, which we discovered afterwards in the kitchen, settled grumpily in its serving bowl and totally forgotten. Lots of scotch, wine and beer, including the eight-pack of Guinness that Dana lugged all the way from Ireland just for the Young lads.

After watching lots of bad TV, we kids played some rousing rounds of that game that’s a hot-potato speed-round of trying to get your teammate to say the secret word or phrase without you saying it.

I rose at 5 a.m. to catch my early flight to Cleveland for the holidays. The plane departed 45 minutes “late” yet managed to land at the Akron-Canton Airport on time. Dana picked me up there and after the sad realization that it was too late for me to purchase an Egg McMuffin, we carried-out soup and sandwiches from Panera for lunch at home with our parents.

Afterwards, Dana and I drove around Lakewood and Rocky River to visit some of my favorite used CD shops, stopping for a caffeine break at Phoenix Coffee, marveling how such a comfortably bohemian little shop could still exist in a city rife with Starbucks, Caribou and another local chain, Arabica. On our way to pick up Andrew and Jess from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, we conducted some Christmas window shopping at Great Northern Mall, stopping at Best Buy for a chatty mp3 player overview by an overly helpful young sales clerk. We perused the sweets at a Malley’s store and Dana bought some amusing socks at Marshall’s.

Having written much about Sony’s futile efforts to copy protect its audio CDs comes an Information Week article yesterday that the newest protection can be defeated by applying a small piece of Scotch tape to the outer edge of the CD.

For those of you keeping score at home, you can add this to the list of other simplistic methods used to defeat various varieties of Sony’s protection:

• Shift key
• Sharpie marker
• Macintosh
• software written by some kid probably living in his Mom’s basement
• protection-defeating instructions from Sony itself

The Information Week article also has a fabulous conclusion on Digital Rights Management made by analysts at the Gartner research firm:

After more than five years of trying, the recording industry has not yet demonstrated a workable DRM scheme for music CDs. It will never achieve this goal as long as CDs must be playable by stand-alone CD players.

Sony seems to finally understand this, and according to the article, is ending at least its most recent copy protection tactics, recalling unsold protected CDs and exchanging already purchased ones for unprotected versions.

Kicking off the busiest travel week of the year comes news that if you’re flying into LaGuardia, JFK or Newark airports, there’s essentially a one-in-three chance your flight will be delayed, which gives those airports the worst on-time arrival records in the nation.

Yesterday, New York Senator Chuck Schumer issued results from a study based on Bureau of Transportation statistics that revealed, based on the nation’s 33 largest airports:

From January through September 2005, 33% of flights to LaGuardia were delayed, making it 32nd out of 33. In 2004, 27% were delayed and it was ranked 31st, and in 2003 LaGuardia had 24% of flights delayed and was ranked 29th. JFK had a similarly disappointing record. From January through September 2005, a full 30% of flights arrived late, placing it 31st among the nation’s 33 large airports. But in 2004, JFK had a 24% of flights delayed with a rank of 25th, in 2003 it has only 20% of flights delayed and ranked 23rd. Newark has consistently posted worst or second to worst. Now it is ranked 33rd of 33 with 34% of arrivals delayed.

In a related local note, Cleveland is the 10th busiest route both into and out of LaGuardia, and so far this year has had 30.3% delays on inbound flights and 25.2% outbound. (In general, the stats for delayed departures from LaGuardia, JFK and Newark aren’t quite as bad as the stats for delayed arrivals.)

But overall, the pokiness has been worsening and it can’t be chalked up solely to elements such as weather; the survey makes an accusation: “there is something structurally wrong with how the FAA and air traffic control are managing the traffic in the New York City area.”

Something for me to think about while my plane sits on the runway at LaGuardia this Wednesday, which is when I depart for Cleveland to visit my family for Thanksgiving.

I traveled this afternoon to Washington Heights, the neighborhood just south of mine, to check out Trinity Cemetery. It was once part of the farm of that painter of birds, John James Audubon, who’s now buried there. So is the guy who wrote “A Visit From Saint Nicholas,” and on Christmas Eve, carolers visit his grave.

Trinity reminds me of a smaller version of another great garden cemetery from the late 1800’s, Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. There are steep, heavily wooded hills, crooked stairways of rough-hewn stones, twisty paths, an exquisite collection of both mausoleums and headstones, and a compact urban setting. It’s situated on a steep incline from Riverside Drive up to Amsterdam Avenue between W. 153rd and 155th Streets, with vantage points of New Jersey across the Hudson River. It’s a great time in general to be visiting cemeteries, with the leaves vibrant colors and acorns and buckeyes scattered on the ground, much to the delight of the frisky gray squirrels I saw.

When one thinks of Manhattan, one doesn’t think of farms, but the place was once crawling with them. In the 1920s, they began disappearing, and by 1930, the last had shut down. It would have been located in my neighborhood in the northernmost tip of Manhattan, because, as I’ve learned, the subway system’s creep north at the turn of the century served as a herald for urban development. For a brief point, the farms and the subways would have coexisted and it amuses me to think of emerging from a station in the middle of a field or right next to a nonplussed cow chewing its cud.

There’s still a farmhouse in my neighborhood, the Dyckman Farmhouse, located a few blocks northwest of my apartment, and it’s carefully billed as Manhattan’s sole surviving “Dutch colonial style farmhouse,” but I think it’s safe to say it’s one of the only complete farmhouses still standing here, period.

It was built around 1784 by William Dyckman (who has a main street and two subway stops in my neighborhood named after him) and housed three generations of his family, then was donated to the city and first restored in 1916.

Because I’m an Ohio boy myself, my first question for the volunteer guide inside regarded crops. What kind of farm was this, exactly? Most guide books definitively list the Dyckman Farm’s crops as cherry and apple orchards, but if there’s public-record proof of that, it has yet to be unearthed. While not discounting the romance of a fruit orchard, extant public records suggest the Dyckmans sowed more pedestrian crops of corn and turnips. Whatever the crops, the British burned them down during their occupation from 1776 to 1783.

The farmhouse is downright inviting, snuggled on a half-acre corner on Broadway at West 204th Street, and it’s enough to whisk you away from the not-go-greatness of the urban environs, including the gas station across the street in the front and the brick apartment building visible through the trees in the back. The farmhouse features Dutch doors, white clapboard siding, wooden shingles, and two porches, each running the width of the house’s front and back. I noted the doors to a storm cellar on the one side of the house, and on the south side, there was a summer kitchen; detached from the house, such kitchens were built in pre-air conditioned days to dissipate cooking heat during hot weather.

Inside are relics and furniture from the period. The collection is slim and several rooms remain closed because the place is still under renovations and building upon its collection—it only reopened November 17th after having been closed since 2003 for heavy-duty restorations.

Out back, not exactly serving to downplay the crop uncertainty, is a large black cherry tree. There’s also a garden, a smokehouse, and, incongruously, a small Lincoln Log-style hut, of the sort that Hessians would have camped in during the British occupation.

Walking to our lawyer media overlords on Park Avenue at E. 25th Street this morning for a work meeting, I nearly passed by a guy with grizzliness levels approaching those of Santa Claus who I thought was begging but merely wanted to know where he could catch the IRT. Oldschool! I’m not so unhistoried that I didn’t know New York’s subway lines were once independently owned and named, but I had to ask which line he was referring to. After determining it was the 1 he was after, I directed him west toward Seventh Avenue, and we went our separate ways.

A shelver at the Strand had some fun with the P-touch in the psych section.

Needless to say, the street on which I live looked different 82 years ago.

My PowerBook power adapter must have died in the last day or so. Last night, right in the middle of ripping “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” by Bonnie Tyler, my computer suddenly alerted me that it was running on reserve battery power, which was strange, because it was plugged in. A quick check determined that although it was indeed plugged into the wall outlet, no power was making it to the Mac, and in that second, the battery died, effectively trapping my Billboard Greatest Hits: 1983 CD inside, which could be a good thing, depending on your point of view.

After work, I took the suspect adapter to Jimi’s and by plugging it into one of his own PowerBooks, he confirmed that the adapter was busted, not my computer, which was a possibility.

A walk over to the CompUSA at Columbus Circle yielded an empty shelf where the adapters should have been, and the floor staff was supremely unhelpful in checking availability. I’ll have to make do with a trip to the Apple Store tomorrow, or, failing that, Tekserve or J&R.

I’ve decided I can live for now without television and the internet, but it’s tough to give up my PowerBook. All my music is on it, it’s serving as my DVD player and lately I’ve been composing blog entries on it, copying them to disc and posting them at work.

November 16, 2005 Update: I bought a new adapter at the Apple Store in SoHo, which had several dozen of them in stock. The PowerBook is back up and running like a charm, to the tune of about $80.

I’ve read that some cities, Los Angeles among them, have succeeded in pressuring Paramount to remove billboards for Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the semi-biographical film starring rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. They depict his well-muscled bullet-scarred back with arms outstretched, gun in one hand and microphone in the other. Compounding the self-aggrandizing nature of such imagery, I saw that one of the billboards still existed a block away from my apartment and was topped with more fine messaging for urban youth: a Dewar’s whisky billboard.

Serendipitously, a day later, Fitty had been replaced by a Spanish-language billboard for Chase.

After a short tour of Grand Central Terminal, Joe, Andrea and I moseyed over to the Museum of Modern Art. We brezzed through the fourth and fifth floors in a Greatest Hits tour (Dali’s Persistence of Memory and van Gogh’s Starry Night among them) and perused a special exhibit called Safe, which displayed many objects, futuristic and present, by which humans clothe, protect, shelter and transport themselves from elements such as harsh weather, harm, injury and death. (The exhibit brochure was well designed, with a circle graph on the cover that entertainingly ranked the top non-health-related ways in which humans can be killed, the most popular of which was sitting in a motor vehicle.)

The Modern, which includes a swanky dining room that isn’t open Sundays, and The Bar Room, the more casual dining and bar area where we ate. The chef, Gabriel Kreuther, created the menus for both rooms, and they’re different, with the Bar Room fare less expensive but just as innovative. I had a cactus pear margarita that emanated the strong woody odor of the tequila and was a vibrant purple color that made me feel slightly less of a man to drink. But I made the most of it.

I also ordered the pumpkin soup and the horseradish-crusted salmon, both excellent and attractively presented. I can’t say how much we all spent because I didn’t save a receipt and a menu I located online was out of date, but suffice to say it was costly but worth it.

In fact, below I’ve listed some handy menu keywords and types of phrases that you can search for to determine how expensive a restaurant is. If you spot at least three of them on a menu, it’s an expensive place, more so if there are a few in a single menu item description. If you can locate none of these words, or a menu at all, tip that cap back and settle into those dungarees, sir, because you are not in an expensive restaurant.

• anything baby (baby squash)
• endive
• crusted
• emulsion
• any French word
• wilted, but used in a positive fashion
• phrases in quotation marks and it’s not immediately clear why (“Potato Gateau,” a “Folly of Herbs”)
• foods normally meant for bovine consumption (chickweed, fennel pollen)
• Frankenstein-like taste combinations (mint-anchovy)
• items that don’t actually exist (white coco beans)

After realizing with a start that we had little time to spare, we avoided some tempting dessert options, paid, and crossed the street to the MoMA Design Store, which had in stock the two styles of Christmas cards that Joe wanted. I purchased them with my membership card for a mighty discount, along with some more Muji pens for myself.

We rushed back to the apartment so Joe and Andrea could grab their bags and take the subway to the bus to LaGuardia, and Andrea called later to say that they had just made their plane.

Good times!

The Modern

• 9 W. 53rd St. (between 5th and 6th Avenues)
• (212) 333-1220
• Meal 32 of 52: cactus pear margarita, pumpkin soup and horseradish-crusted salmon.

After grabbing some sweet and flaky Spanish pastries from a bakery on Dykman, we traveled via subway from the tip top of the borough to the very bottom, the Bowling Green station in Battery Park, to stand on line awhile for ferry tickets to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

I now know that in order to go up into the Statue, you need to reserve tickets in advance, because there weren’t any available. Fortunately, we were more interested in Ellis Island, so we didn’t even get off the first ferry stop at the Statue (although we took many photos, including of Lady Liberty’s be-robed ass), then departed at the Island stop.

We spent awhile at Ellis Island, poring over the exhibits, which go into every detail of immigrant life, covering who they were and where they were from, why they came to America (typically to join family already here or to get a job and make some money), what they ate, what they brought with them, the battery of medical and mental examinations they were put through, as well as careful consideration of their value to American society—quite often, the diseased, potential beggars and contract laborers were barred.

For lunch, I tried to locate the Cowgirl Hall of Fame (where Joe and I ate and had a rowdy time at almost exactly a year ago), but got lost and coincidentally ended up across the street from the Corner Bistro, an oldschool bar/burger shack in the Village I’ve been meaning to try. After a brief wait on line, during which we quaffed McSoreley’s Dark Ale, we got a booth in the back and ordered our Bistro Burgers, which come with bacon, American cheese, a slice of raw white onion, lettuce and tomato, served without pretense on a small paper plate. The shoestring fries were good, too.

After we were informed that a police investigation uptown was severely delaying our 1 train, we instead walked over to the A, during which time I pointed out Jimi’s old apartment and the various sex paraphernalia shops on West 4th Street. Uptown, we rushed through St. Patrick’s Cathedral because there was a service in session, then walked to Rockefeller Center where there were already folks ice skating. The giant Christmas tree is up, too, although it’s mostly shielded from view before its lighting on the 30th. After poking around the NBC gift shop, we went to the Top of the Rock in a glass-topped elevator, on which is projected a brief audio-visual show and through which you can see various theatrical colored lights bouncing around the elevator shaft.

At the top are some great views north and south, particularly of the Empire State Building. If you stare at the skyscraper long enough, you can see the camera flashes of tourists from that building’s observation deck, just as they certainly could see our own flashes. During the day, the view north would be a spectacular one of the entirety of Central Park, but at night, it’s a large, mostly dark rectangle. We also determined you can only see a sliver of Times Square, because surrounding skyscrapers block the view.

Coincidentally, sort of, we ran into a class from the school Joe teaches at, which was wrapping up its multi-day bus tour of the city. Joe was kind to take a group photo of the students, standing on the observation deck one story up from the kids to get an all-inclusive top-down view.

For dinner, we met up with Andie for an Italian dinner at the Upper West Side neighborhood-favorite, Celeste, topped by one of their famous ten-cheese tasting plates. Mmm-mmm, good!

Corner Bistro

• 331 W. 4th St. (at Jane Street)
• (212) 242-9502
• Meal 31 of 52: two mugs of McSorley’s Dark Ale ($2.00 each) and a Bistro Burger ($6.00).

After some challenges getting from the bus to the subway, my friends from Ohio, Joe and Andrea, arrived this morning for their weekend visit. Because they’re both fans of Broadway shows, I thought we’d start the day with breakfast at the Moondance Diner, a funky 1930s classic in SoHo complete with neon moon signage and vivid brush-script lettering. The Broadway connection? Jonathan Larson, who wrote Rent, worked there for about 10 years as a waiter. It also happens to serve decent food, which I learned when I had breakfast there with Jimi many years ago during a visit.

Alas, I couldn’t remember that the name was Moondance (I thought, “Moondust? Stardust? Stardance? Moondance?”) and without the internet, I’m at the mercy of the telephone. When I called one of several possible numbers and asked the girl who answered if it was the diner associated with Rent, she said she didn’t know (it was, as it turns out). As an alternate, we went to that Upper West Side old-faithful, the French Roast.

Afterwards, we trekked down to the TKTS booth for discount same-day show tickets, only to find they didn’t open until three, so we took a tour of some Times Square shops, including the Hershey Store and a trip to Toys “R” Us where we reminisced over toys and marveled at the Ferris wheel inside. We also walked up to Macy’s and discovered not only does it have seemingly endless floors of merchandise (and that some of the escalator steps on the upper floors are made of wood), but that if you’re able to present a non-local ID at Guest Services, you are given a coupon for 11% off store merchandise. I procured one with my still-valid Ohio driver’s license and the guy behind the counter said, “We’ve had a lot of people from Ohio today.”

Back to Times Square, we waited on line an hour and a half and purchased tickets for The Light in the Piazza at Lincoln Center, then it was off for a late-lunch/early-dinner at Republic on Union Square, after which we browsed books at The Strand.

The show was held in the cozy Vivian Beaumont Theater and we enjoyed it, although I think we all agreed we would have liked it more had we not all been so tired. (Joe and Andrea had to rise around 3 a.m. to catch their flight out of Detroit.) There was also lots of Italian, which can be hard to process for the weary. The show received six Tony Awards, including one for the lead, Victoria Clark, for Best Leading Actress in a Musical, and she excelled as the tart Southern mother determined to end her daughter’s romance with a smitten young Italian. She also really belted out her finale song.

At the Kmart above Penn Station, I finally located some drapes in the appropriate size and the color I like (blue). Also, they were well priced at about $20 per two-pack. I bought two sets for the windows in my main living area and two light-dampening blind sets to replace the grungy ones in the bedroom.

Bruce has the wrong email address. I got this from him on my Hotmail account:

hey mate good news about the little one. hope she doesnt have your looks??? we could be right behind ya, planning for this time next year. hows things going in swansea? ros and i bought a place in papamoa, areyour olds still there? are you home for xmas?

take care mate hi to viv

Bruce

With the “mate”s and “olds” (parents), I wonder if this message hurtled to me from down under. I see that at least one Swansea is in southeastern Australia (there’s also one in Wales, one in Canada and a few in the U.S.) and Papamoa is a popular retirement city of white sandy beaches in New Zealand.

In a sure sign I’m getting older, I laid down big money tonight for a Calphalon eight-piece set of nonstick aluminum pots and pans. Later, while walking around my neighborhood, I noticed someone was throwing out one of those yellow and black metal Fallout Shelter signs, which I’ve wanted since I was about 15, to the point of giving some thought to sneaking around at night and prying one off the brick wall of the local grade school. Surprisingly, I did not stop to retrieve this booty from the trash and take it home, for any shelter housing Calphalon is too upscale to feature ironic metal street signs nailed to its walls.

After my adventures with bedding, it should come as no surprise that I had difficulty tonight buying drapes. Having measured my windows as roughly 39 inches wide by 73 inches tall, I bought a two-pack of handsome blue window panels, which according to the packaging are “82 x 63 inches.” Because the packaging gave no further details, I assumed that 82 inches was the height, as curtains are well known for their longer heights to shorter widths. Wrong! 82 inches is the total width of both panels and 62 inches is the height, so after I put them up, they weren’t long enough and resembled Gilligan’s pants. Is this yet another thing about consumer goods that’s never implicitly stated but that I’m expected to know, like that the first number in jeans’ sizing is the waist size and the second is the length?

On the new neighborhood front, having walked around more to absorb the local flavor, I’ve determined a good descriptor for the area is “musical.” People blast their jaunty Spanish pop and rap from the windows of their homes and cars. In my building, on the lower floors, someone practices trumpet, and one floor down from my apartment, someone is learning to play piano or teaching lessons. The piano doesn’t bother me because it’s not played after 10 p.m., and in fact has a warm, lonely resonance, filtered through the wood floors and the walls of big rooms. The crescendo, as it were, of my musical musings occurred late tonight, as I returned from a bodega with a Goya pear nectar. Just across the street from my apartment, there stood on the sidewalk a quartet of young fellows in a loose circle and they were beatboxing. They weren’t playing for a crowd, they were just doin’ it like it was 1984. That is totally awesome.

Paul, my mover, showed up at 8 a.m. sharp to haul all my belongings uptown. Because his bread-and-butter is hauling furniture, he only had an older Nissan flatbed truck, but was able to stack and pack everything densely and securely, like the Beverly Hillbillies jalopy. We made two trips on account of the loveseat, which did fit in the elevator of my old building, but wasn’t much fun to carry up the five flights of stairs in the new one. At several points, I thought surely I was suffering from heatstroke or heart arrhythmia, and I was breathing like Chubby Checker in a buffet line.

After the move, I headed out to Target again for a Brita water pitcher, some clothes hangers and other miscellany. On my way to the grocery, I checked out my neighborhood, passing a taco truck and a group of old men playing dominoes on a folding table they had set up on the sidewalk. I bought some basics: a block of cheese, generic Honey Nut Cheerios, Pringles, cranberry juice, Granny Smith apples and a coconut-flavored soda named Coco Rico. By the end of the day, I had finished most of the cleaning, which involved spraying-on Lysol and wiping every horizontal surface. I put away about half my stuff. I assembled the bed, hung my clothes and filled the closets. I still need to put together my modular shelving, store my DVDs and hook up the stereo, and there’s plenty more shopping to do, foremost for kitchen supplies and drapes for the main room and bedroom, as well as a cover for the light in the bedroom which someone made off with at some point.

While cleaning and storing, I found the usual stuff one finds laying around a recently vacated apartment: instructions for the radon detector, spare change, a stray screw. However, I also found porn.

Cleaning a high shelf in a closet, I spied rectangular black plastic that I assumed was part of a roach trap. Standing on a milk crate to extend my reach, I retrieved four VHS tapes with black-and-white laser-printed labels. Because I don’t have a VCR, I’ll offer some reviews based on the labels:

• Fuck Holes #31. That’s a lot of fuck holes! This one is a bit alarming as it uses the same typeface as Arabica, a popular chain of Cleveland coffeehouses, although I don’t think there’s any relation. Brought to you by a company called Legend Direct, this tape’s second feature is Disgusting Fat Girls #2, which reminds me of that dialogue from The Silence of the Lambs:

  Jame Gumb: Was she a great big fat person?
  Clarice Starling: Why, yes, she was a big girl, sir.

• The hygiene-challenged fatty fetish continues with Filthy Fat Fuckers #3. The only hint into the majesty of this one is a subhead on the label that reads, “Approximately 240 Min.” and a note that it’s produced by the sunny folks at Sunshine Films, Inc.
• Another hit of Sunshine is the more tamely named Latino Sexpots #4. Do people still use the word sexpot? I think “sexpot,” I think Vargas girls. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing from a porn standpoint, I suppose.
• Finally, a classic from Vivid Video has a title that makes me titter: Behind on My Mind. A label note helpfully suggests, “Adjust Tracking for Clearer Picture,” when it just as easily could have read, “For Clearer Picture, Buy a DVD Player, You Cheap, Horny Bastard.”

You never know how much stuff you truly own until you cram it into cardboard boxes. Most everything I have fit into one smallish room, but seemed never-ending while I was packing it up, using heavy duty Ingram and Barnes & Noble boxes donated by Eric and Andie, and my noisy new 3M tape gun. All told, it took one full day last weekend and most of today to sort and box everything. I’m not labeling any of the boxes because I like to be surprised, like at Christmas, plus it will force me to unpack them sooner as I don’t know what’s in which box.

To wind down, I had dinner with Jimi, the Man and their housemate Michael at the Dallas BBQ in Chelsea. Dallas is the workhorse of the NYC BBQ chains, probably the most heavily advertised, large and basic, with a fast table turnover. The grub is moderately inexpensive and plentiful. I got a heavy glass goblet containing 20 ounces of Budweiser for a mere $4.50 and my entree featured a full rack of barbecued baby back ribs (with a sweet sauce heavily reminiscent of the Open Pit I remember from barbecues of my childhood), a huge cube of cornbread and a pile of fries.

Dallas BBQ

• 261 8th Ave. (at West 23rd Street)
• (212) 462-0001
• Meal 30 of 52: 20-ounce goblet of Bud ($4.50) and barbecued baby back ribs platter ($10.99).

My friend Joe and his special ladyfriend Andrea are visiting me next weekend. She’s never been to the city before, while Joe’s been here a few times, so in addition to the usual circuit of favorite and new restaurants, I’m trying to cook up activities for us that are New York-stle fun but not too sterotypically touristy. Any ideas? Here are a few I have so far:

• I’m not familiar enough yet with my new neighborhood to recommend stuff there, other than the live poultry shop I noticed near W. 207th Street the other day, but I think a visit is in order to The Cloisters, which is within walking distance of my apartment.
• A stroll through Central Park, of course, perhaps on our way to the exhibition of Van Gogh drawings at the Met.
• Views from the Top of the Rock, the 70th floor observation deck at Rockefeller Center that just reopened on November 1 after extensive renovations.
• A Circle Line boat tour of Manhattan. Although I’m strongly considering a bus tour of Manhattan instead, per Jimi’s advice, because you get a lot closer to the hustle, bustle and historic buildings
• I’m told the ladies like shopping, so perhaps we could stop by some of the finer shops on Fifth Avenue.
• And I suppose just seeing (or shopping on) Times Square is a must if you’ve never been here, although we may be able to sightsee while we’re waiting in line at TKTS for our Broadway show tickets.
• I know we’ll be going to the Museum of Modern Art because Joe wants to buy Christmas cards at the MoMA Design and Book Store.
• As a history buff, Joe mentioned Ellis Island could be fun.

After writing about Sony’s difficulties copy-protecting its audio CDs, I enjoyed reports yesterday that the company is again under fire for the practice. Now Sony has been outed for selling audio CDs over the past eight months that have silently installed “rootkits” on Windows computers, copy-protection software that hides itself in a hacker fashion.

According to Wired News, the rootkit enables any filename that begins with $sys$ to be hidden from Windows, which is not such a good idea because a hacker could name a truly malicious file beginning with $sys$ and wreak all sorts of shenanigans. Sony promised yesterday to issue a patch that will allow virus protection software to keep an eye peeled for such files, but didn’t seem to say anything about actually getting rid of such a bad idea.

As the risk of sounding like Paul Harvey, when did listening to music get this complicated? Whatever happened to putting a CD in your CD player (or computer) and listening to it? Not only is Sony treating its listeners like criminals, Wired News points out that the company may have committed a crime itself under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which slaps fines and prison terms on

anyone who ‘knowingly causes the transmission of a program ... and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage, without authorization, to a protected computer.’ Corrupting Windows so it misreports the contents of a hard drive sounds a lot like ‘damage,’ and the click-wrap license agreement on the Sony disk amounts to pretty thin ‘authorization’—disclosing only that ‘this CD will automatically install a small proprietary software program ... intended to protect the audio files embodied on the CD.’

November 10 Update: A MacInTouch reader says these Sony discs will install rootkits on Macs, too, but only if the user manually runs an application in the Enhanced Content partition of the disc.

When you cross from Manhattan to the Bronx on the 1 train, suspended above the Harlem River, you may expect to be greeted by wondrous sites visible through the subway car windows, as you pass from one mighty borough to another. Instead, out the eastern windows, as the train delivers you to the West 225th Street stop, you see: a Target store.

And not just a Target, which opened only last year, but a Marshall’s, a Radio Shack and an Applebee’s, all in a tidy little strip mall area that looks out of place. I felt magically whisked away to suburban Cleveland, especially with that Applebee’s.

New York has Targets in every borough now except Manhattan (because of space issues, my real estate cronies tell me) and Staten Island, the freak borough (although one is scheduled to open there in March 2006). The Target in the Bronx isn’t much different than any other Target you’ve been to, except that in true New York space-saving fashion, the parking is on the roof. Also, there are guys outside on the sidewalk with grill carts, bags of charcoal and hand-lettered signs that you can get two hot dogs and a soda for $2.50.

Inside for the first time, without thinking or looking at signage, I walked precisely to my destination, the towel aisle. I think a large chunk of America’s collective memory is reserved for floor plans of mass merchandisers, which don’t seem to vary much from store to store.

At the checkout are the typical heartbreakingly long and slow lines, and hauling the bags home through the subway turnstiles can be challenging, but I suppose it’s convenient and saves a few bucks, all the while contributing to the decline of Western Civilization.

It’s National Author’s Day and I’ve been reading Second Space, the final and posthumous book of poems by Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz, who died last summer. There’s a lot of wrestling with Catholicism in these poems, but the best of them are ruminations on his life, sparked with crystalline details delineating his past (he survived World War II in German-occupied Warsaw), his loves and his misfortunes. As a relative youngster myself, I find it strange and beautiful to read a 90-year-old’s reflections on life, particularly in this excerpt from “I Should Now.”

I should now be wiser than I was.
Yet I don’t know whether I am wiser.

Memory composes a story of shames and amazements.

The shames I closed inside myself, but the amazements,
at a sun-streak on a wall, at the trill of an oriole, a face,
an iris, a volume of poems, a person, endure and return in
     brightness.

Such moments lifted me above my lameness.