December 2005 Archives

2005: not bad, considering. Let’s reflect. Great times with family and friends both new and classic. New responsibilities at my job with my company’s real estate conference division. I traveled to Ireland and California for the first time. I got my own apartment. Joe and Andrea visited, and I went back home for the best Thanksgiving with the whole family. I ate much great new BBQ. I survived terror threats, backpack searches and a transit strike.

Thinking about which entries I like best from 2005, they’re clearly ones in which I attempted to write more creatively instead of relating events in flatter journal style. Among the former are the one about the fire drill and the one about the food pyramid and Katie’s cats and the one about the raccoon.

I am engrossed and amazed by this city’s history, architecture and forgotten places, so any of those entries are favorites, particularly the historical review of my previous apartment on the Upper West Side, a brief history of Penn Station, the Marble Cemeteries and the color-coding of the subway system.

I savored writing my Ireland travelogue (scroll down to August 17-24), which you should check out, again or for the first time, because I just filled it out with an additional 15 photos taken on that trip.

As for my New Year’s resolution from a year ago, by the letter of the law, I failed. The count is 32 meals, which, even if you count the stray reviews I didn’t include when I was adhering to the one-place-per-week rule (such as Cafe Yaffa and the first of what was to be many trips to Celeste), isn’t 52. Someone pointed out to me that the whole point of the 52 Meals Project was to get out to try new foods at new places in places of the city I’d never been, and in that respect, the exercise was a success. And I must admit, by far the greatest number of questions and verbal comments about my blog this year concerned the 52 Meals Project. I’ll give it another try. Bear with me. And good fortune to you in 2006.

Crime numbers are dropping throughout New York City, with homicide in particular at 1963 levels, according to the NYPD in a front-page New York Times article today.

As of yesterday, there had been 537 killings in the city. (The record high was set in 1990, when 2,245 people were killed.) Not too bad for a city of eight million people.

The real story, of course, is why crime rates are dropping. Aside from a predictable quote from Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly about the improvements in the city and its quality of life, as well as his cops’ “great job,” the only analysis afforded to this point is saved for the article’s end. A criminologist, Andrew Karmen, points to an improved economy and job opportunities, smarter police work and tougher sentencing. This last point is backed up by a statistic that 97% of murderers this year had a prior arrest record—and more than half of the victims had been previously arrested, as well.

Analyzing the NYPD’s homicide stats further, the Times reveals the most common murder scenario in 2005: a black male, age 25 to 40, shoots a black male friend or acquaintance of the same age. The motive is drugs, and the murder goes down between 4 p.m. and midnight in Brooklyn.

Having viewed in succession The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Weird Science, which Andrew and Jess got me in a three-pack DVD set for my birthday, I can state that it’s not only easier to bask in the magic of Anthony Michael Hall, but to realize one of director John Hughes’ key cinematic themes: the crotch shot.

Here we have the crotch of Molly Ringwald (or a crotch double) from The Breakfast Club:

Here’s the crotch of Haviland Morris (who plays Jake’s girlfriend, Caroline) in Sixteen Candles:

Weird Science doesn’t have what I’d consider a true crotch shot, so I’ll just have to go with this one of Kelly LeBrock’s midsection. Close enough.

Gah! Banana Republic’s website doesn’t work in Safari? How hard can it be to write code for one of the most standards-compliant browsers? What will all those thin WASPs and Asians with their PowerBooks do when they want to online-order something form-fitting and expensive, made of the finest Italian cashmere?

I imagine some fans of the Republic use the now sassier-than-Safari Firefox, which is compatible. And since this incompatibility was first discovered in October, Banana Republic has added the hopeful tagline, “We’re working on supporting Safari. Please check back soon.” But, here we are, three months later, and still nothing for Safari.

Humorously, there’s not a go-no-further warning when I try using the still-supported Internet Explorer 5.2 for Macintosh (Microsoft is officially abandoning the browser this Saturday, citing competition from Safari). However, the site doesn’t work under Explorer either—clicking items for details and potential purchase brings up a curiously blank page.

Samantha’s birthday was today, so her husband Iggy arranged a surprise get-together for her at Japas 55 with a tight-knit group of friends and a birthday karaoke celebration, with plenty of gifts, sushi, sake and beer to go around. We started out, appropriately enough, with “Birthday” by the Beatles, quickly discovering, as most have, that we only knew the refrain. (Even more embarrassingly, this happened with Europe’s “Final Countdown,” which I don’t think anyone actually knows the verses to.)

Surprisingly, neither Billy Joel nor Zeppelin made appearances at our party, but we pulled out what are by now, after several karaoke outings featuring most of the same singers, traditional group favorites:

• “Love Shack” by the B-52’s
• “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes
• “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” by Phil Collins
• “Hotel California” by the Eagles
• “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis
• “We Built This City” by Starship
• requisite David Bowie song (“Modern Love”)
• requisite Madonna song (“Like a Virgin”)

We also snuck into the ’60s with “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas, “Hazy Shade of Winter” by Simon & Garfunkel and “Daydream Believer” by the Monkees. My shining moment was helping out Katie with the lead for U2’s “One,” which wasn’t a problem, because Bono’s range is nearly as limited as mine.

Sam has a clear, strong, beautiful voice, and can really hold down a tune, so we faded back as she took the lead on “Only The Lonely” by the Motels, “You’ve Got a Friend” by Carole King, “We’ve Only Just Begun” (if memory serves) by the Carpenters, and, oddly but successfully, “Land of Confusion” by Genesis and “If I Only Had a Brain” from The Wizard of Oz. Hooray for karaoke!

My ride home was a barrel of monkeys. You must give credit to the Metropolitan Transit Authority for waiting until the wee hours after midnight to conduct trackwork and construction. Alas, while the number of riders to be inconvenienced is vastly diminished at that time, those riders that there are tend to be very sleepy, drunk or both, making navigation of already confusing rerouting directives and temporary service cancellations moreso.

In my case, the A express train uptown was running on the local track at 59th Street, so I instead took the D express train, exercising care to get off at 145th Street, lest I end up in the Bronx. I then transferred to another A train, also running on the local track, and at 168th Street, to the grumbles of many, the conductor announced that was the train’s final stop.

Then there was an announcement over the PA that the only way to access uptown express stops on the A (like my home stop) was to take a local shuttle train running on the downtown express track. But when it pulled up and its passengers has departed, the conductor shouted to keep off because his particular train was headed back to the station. Neon-vested MTA grunts had to make a sweep of the still-open cars to shoo out the stubborn, the non-English-comprehending and the hard of hearing.

With a sigh, I took an elevator down to the fifth circle of hell, land of the Wrathful, Sullen and 1 train, which after taking a long while to show up, eventually got me home by 2:30 a.m. Yet, as recently demonstrated, subway service is better than none.

My flight back from my holiday in Cleveland to New York this afternoon involved checking luggage, something I almost never do. As a single, non-gay gentleman, I can get away with cramming everything I need for dressing during five days into a smallish duffel bag or backpack. Granted, you will see me wearing the same pants for all five days, and may notice the same shirt surface on two of those occasions, but I like to think people don’t pay close attention to what I wear. As long as I’m moderately presentable and emit a pleasant odor, all is well.

But I had to check a bag, all 40 pounds of it, because every time I visit my parents, I’ve been retrieving books from my collection stored there to bring back to New York. When I moved from Ohio, I crammed all my essentials, myself and my sister (who drove) into a car, and that was that. Books, alas, weren’t considered essential at that time, but I’ve found myself missing them, my information-rich, highly flammable, musty-smelling children.

So I throw a few in my luggage every trip back to New York from Cleveland that I make. I went overboard this time. I had made a list in advance, my logic being that any books I desired enough to actually remember I owned were ones I truly missed and therefore deserving of a plane ride back. This list included both stout volumes of the excellent Poems for the Millennium series, two books of Kurt Vonnegut’s non-fiction, On Photography by Susan Sontag, a book of quotations (a small one, not the cement block-like Bartlett’s I own), and Me Talk Pretty One Day, my current favorite David Sedaris book.

Of course, I received three books as gifts that required addition to my cache: a collection of Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales and David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster from Mom & Dad, and the popular punctuation epistle Eats, Shoots & Leaves from Andrew & Jess.

I also had two read-on-the-plane books in my carry-on that needed return: Geoff Dyer’s photography meditation, The Ongoing Moment, which Jimi gave me as an early Christmas gift, and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Inner Circle, which I’ve been reading very slowly and carrying around like a penance ever since I got it in October.

And naturally, I tossed in some extras from my collection that weren’t on my bring-back list: my first edition hardcover of Annie Proulx’s Close Range (because I recently saw Brokeback Mountain and wanted to reread the story on which it’s based), Paterson by William Carlos Williams, My Years with Ross by James Thurber, Blow-Up by Julio Cortázar, and, for good measure, a Dave Barry collection from the early 80s called Bad Habits.

That bag was heavy, man, but it was worth it.

I went out for a short spell with my mom to see if we could capitalize on any post-holiday sale specials. We drove out to Beachwood Place and Golden Gate Plaza in Mayfield Heights. True to my fashion, I only ended up buying some used CDs at the Half Price Books at the Plaza, where everything in the store was 20% off.

For dinner, my mom made meatloaf using one of the KitchenAid silicone loaf pans I got her for Christmas. They’re the consistency and comical red color of a clown’s rubber nose, but the time-tested recipe turned out great. I’ve seen and heard that a lot of kitchen utensils and wares are now made from silicone, but I read a level-headed mini-report in Consumer Reports that mentioned there really aren’t all that many true benefits to using silicone. I suppose you get easier release on your muffins if you bake them in silicone trays, but you still have the usual prep time, cooking time and cleanup.

After dinner, we retreated to the living room, where I built a cheery fire, we uncorked some wine, and watched a terrible episode of CSI: Miami. The wine helped dull that pain a bit, but not too much.

Dana called to tell us that in honor of St. Stephen’s Day, she willingly ran into the ocean. There’s no telling what those crazy Irish people will do next.

Merry Christmas! As I had expected and hoped, Grandma’s gift to me, as well as to my parents, was a generous check. I’ll be putting mine into the Sickles Street Furniture Fund, established last month to rid my apartment of the scourge of end tables constructed solely of empty corrugated cardboard boxes, and a complete lack of chairs. Later, my mom’s brother, John, stopped by to start arguments and lecture us on a variety of topics, including the railroad industrialist Jay Gould, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, his DSL service, and Köblentz, Germany.

For dinner, we had some tasty Cornish game hens my mom prepared with rice stuffing and cranberry sauce.

As always, I got way too many gifts: food, books, music, DVDs. There was the usual passing around of the phone among us to talk with absent family members, Dana in Ireland, and Andrew and Jess in Wyoming.

We drove back home in the afternoon. At dusk, the landscape through the window of a car hurtling through lonesome country resembles a dark, tranquil sea.

We drove down to Grandma’s late this morning for our Christmas celebrations. We hung out at her new place, gorging ourselves on heavily salted snack treats and cookies, Black Velvet and It’s a Wonderful Life, which I realized I’d never seen all the way through.

I hung around with Dad today as he conducted his last minute Christmas shopping, a time-honored tradition for him. As he explains it, it’s less stressful to purchase gifts a day or two before Christmas because he’s more or less stuck with whatever’s left in stock at the store, so there’s not a lot of aimless fretting about to find particular items. We went to Best Buy, Borders and the local mall, where he was able to knock off the majority of his purchases.

Back home, I made a batch of cookies from a recipe I’d saved from the December 4 issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. The recipe is standard for ginger cookies with one major difference—instead of oil, butter or margarine, you use bacon fat, three-quarters of a cup. No, the cookies did not taste like meat. They were in fact savory in their rich scrumptiousness. I think the kosher salt may have even made a difference, pleasantly offsetting the sharp tang of the ginger.

Here’s a sample plate of Christmas cookies: the ginger ones are in the foreground; the rest are new varieties and traditional favorites Mom made.

I met the rosy-fingered dawn to get another overpriced livery cab, this time to LaGuardia Airport for my flight home to Cleveland for Christmas. (Later in the day, I learn that as of 3 p.m., the strike has ended, which will make for a much easier and cheaper trip home and a resumption of normalcy to my transit life.)

I went out on one of my usual used CD expeditions in Rocky River and Lakewood, and while I was in the area, stopped by the offices of my previous employers, ProPress.

My ex-boss Steve regalled me with stories of the airplane model-maker clubs he’s joined, and provided commentary while showing me a video he produced on his and Teresa’s trip to Thailand.

After work last night, I walked all the way up to West 103rd Street before I was able to get an available cab that was willing to take me home, and I think the driver only agreed because he didn’t know until it was too late that Dyckman is so far uptown.

This morning, I took another livery cab in to work. I’m aggravated that I’m pissing away money on this strike; most livery vehicles in my neighborhood are charging a flat fee of $15 or $20. And speaking of money, do you know how much these yahoos make? Under their current contracts, both subway operators and bus drivers earn about $62,500 (including overtime) a year, train conductors average $53,000 and subway booth clerks make $50,720, according to MTA estimates published today by Bloomberg News. And under the new contract being offered by the MTA, an average 3.5% raise each year through 2008. Gee, that’s rough.

Traffic has gotten both better and worse. Better, because commuters are more adjusted to the conventions of the situation. Worse, because everyone that didn’t think of it yesterday is now attempting to take non-striking trains in to work, like the Metro North. A coworker told me yesterday I should just take a cab to the Metro North station at 125th Street and take the train in to Penn Station, saving money and avoiding traffic jams. But I’ve read of hour and a half waits just to get tickets and Penn has never been so packed, to the point that people have had trouble entering and exiting; one person told WNBC the station experience was “like being in the mosh pit of a Metallica concert.”

Because of my isolated location, I’ve determined my best bet is to continue relying on livery cabs. The ones in my neighborhood have taken to congregating across the street from the Dyckman/200th Street station of the 1 train, and commuters have gotten used to the “4 people per vehicle” recruitment pitch, roaming the sidewalks and asking random passers-by, “You need a ride? You goin’ downtown?”

The driver and three other guys that piled in with me this morning were less chatty than yesterday’s group, but spoke in Spanish when they did, so I was in conversational darkness again. The driver, who was understandably cranky about the traffic, emitted strings of what I assume were curses and outbursts of exasperation, which contrasted strangely with Andy Williams on the all-Christmas-music radio station, singing about the most wonderful time of the year, a sentiment surely held in doubt by the vehicle’s fares and a few million other New Yorkers.

Despite getting snared in the same East Side gridlock as yesterday, as well as picking up additional passengers along our route as others disembarked, it only took an hour and a half to get to work. I miss my subway, with its cheapness and reliability.

The union and management of the Metropolitan Transit Authority have been rumbling over contract negotiations for a week, and have made scant progress, so the union finally called a walkout at 3 a.m., leaving seven million subway and bus passengers without transit, myself included. It’s the first MTA strike since 1980. Pity I’ve now moved too far uptown to sensibly walk to work anymore.

I walked over to the Dyckman/W. 200th St. station for the 1 train just to see what was cooking. Inside the station, a web of hot pink plastic tape was wrapped around the turnstile gates as if to say, “We’re on strike! No entry! Time to party!” Outside, there was a clot of people wandering around, pondering their options.

Two of them sidled up to me, a cute 20-something Spanish chick and a short middle-aged Spanish guy, and kindly recruited me for carpool purposes. To explain: weekdays during the strike, between 5 and 11 a.m., the city is disallowing vehicles with fewer than three paying passengers to venture below 96th Street. In other words, it’s “buddy up,” or you’re out of luck, buddy. We were able to snag a black livery cab in about 10 minutes, using a combination of waving and gestures meant to indicate that we were indeed a party of three and we were ready to be seated.

Our driver saddled that fine New York line between “ballsy” and “maniac,” taking freshly-changed red lights as mere suggestions to stop, lurching from lane to lane while speeding for better position, and plenty of horn action. He spoke rapidly and jocularly in Spanish with the other two passengers. At one point, the girl apologized to me for them speaking in Spanish; I wasn’t offended and said no apology was necessary. I did ask what they were talking about, and apparently it was just jokes about the traffic and the strike. Whatever the specifics, the girl kept laughing, agreeing and saying, “Oh dios mío!”

She was destined for East 70th Street and Second Avenue, so the driver expertly stairstepped over to the East Side, going down Adam Clayton-Powell Blvd., cutting over to Malcom X Blvd., then over to Fifth Avenue. As promised, at 96th Street there was a police checkpoint that was bottlenecking traffic. After a visual spot check, we were waved through. At East 84th, the driver, mid-anecdote, nearly slammed into a shouting human wall of NYPD, who were pointing vigorously east, disallowing further access down Fifth. Without much of a choice, we shifted over to Park Avenue, where traffic had slowed to a crawl. After we had advanced only one block in 15 minute, the girl paid her fare and got out to walk the rest of her way. It was clear traffic wouldn’t be improving anytime soon, so I gave up at E. 79th, paid my driver with thanks and a $20 bill, and began walking.

A news report in the car had noted it was 26 degrees, but that it felt like 11 with the wind chill. I’d say that was about right. I cut over to Madison, one of several closed streets (except for the stray school bus and emergency vehicle), and it was eerie for a main artery to have almost no traffic at rush hour. The only sounds were footsteps echoing off the buildings and helicopters hovering low in the distance.

I stopped at the Hilton New York near Rockefeller Center for a restroom break and marveled at the horribly long cab lines. I ended up getting to work at 11 a.m., two hours late. The office was fuller than I expected, but most of my coworkers live upstate or in New Jersey, where transport hasn’t been directly affected.

This is a detail of a can of cut-rate Lucky SuperSoft brand air freshener that’s in one of the restrooms at work. Because of the palm tree photo illustration, I know what they mean by “Marine,” but the first thing I thought was that, even when they’re fresh, marines probably smell mainly like sweat, particularly when they’re “in the shit.”

Using my new Calphalon, I cooked a pot of my favorite soup, Gypsy Soup. My grocery didn’t have fresh yams/sweet potatoes, despite a produce section well stocked with coconuts, baskets of chilies, cactus, yucca roots, guanabana and other botanical mysteries of Spanish cooking, so I got some cans of cut yams.

Whereas my grocer seems to have poor or absent selections of many items I would deem basic, it excels in stocking foodstuffs I consider blatantly unnecessary. Chief among these can be found in the meat department, where my supermarket sells chicken feet. Batches of them are shrink-wrapped to small white foam trays as if they were no different than ground chuck, except that they resemble mutant miniature starfish.

Anyway, the non-fresh yams substituted well, although I had to rinse off the sugary syrup and add them to the pot later in the cooking process on account of their precooked softness.

I also used canned whole tomatoes, which I chopped and de-seeded. The recipe calls for blanching fresh tomatoes, but the ones at my grocery had the color, texture and likely taste of a #2 pencil eraser, so I passed. The canned versions not only saved time, I didn’t notice a taste difference.

What a fine stomach-warming and heartwarming soup!

I exchanged Christmas gifts with Andie this evening, since we’ll be out of town over the holidays.

She got me a Boggle page-a-day calendar, which offers a regular board each day to play that also contains bonus hidden words, the names of six animals, for example. I also received a deck of Knowledge Cards featuring trivia on American Presidents and Nunzilla, a tiny plastic toy that, when wound, waddles forward shooting sparks from its mouth, a familiar sight to anyone with a strict Catholic gradeschool upbringing.

We had dinner at Land, which was packed, and afterwards met Katie and her friend Chuck at that Irish pub on Amsterdam Avenue we frequent.

After popping into the Barnes & Noble on Union Square to purchase what I hope is my final Christmas gift of this season, I swung over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Cinemas, which has that borough’s exclusive on Brokeback Mountain. The place was packed and it’s one of those theaters where the rows of seats are long and only have aisles on the ends, so there was lots of standing, sitting, shifting and nearly getting kicked in the ear as people clambered over seatbacks to jockey for position.

I wanted to see the film because I enjoyed the short story on which the film is based, from Pulitzer-Prize winning author E. Annie Proulx’s book, Wyoming Stories.

I think you’ve probably heard by now that the film is about two men who fall in love with one another in a time and a place that won’t allow it. Most of the audience, I think, was in on it, and there was a palatable tension up until the first sex scene between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). It was difficult for me to judge this movie on its own merits and not merely as “the gay cowboy movie” folks are chattering about.

As the movie gets rolling, Ennis and Jack are 19-year-old cowboys in 1963, watching and herding sheep on Wyoming’s Brokeback Mountain. (The movie was filmed in Alberta, Canada, but you can’t tell the difference.) They part and eventually both marry women, but their love for each other persists. They meet through the years to go on “fishing trips,” until the inevitably unhappy ending, both of them worn and alone.

The rough, brooding Ennis, taught early in life that homosexuality will get someone killed, is racked by sparks of love and emotion he can’t understand, and grows more isolated from his own feelings and others as the years pass. Ledger’s performance amazed me, having previously only seen his blow-dried surfer persona in roles like A Knight’s Tale and The Patriot; I predict a best actor Oscar nomination. Gyllenhaal is good, although I wasn’t as convinced by his acting, and his age progression is depicted chiefly by a cheesy mustache.

Brokeback Mountain is a widescreen marvel. It’s slow, but this country and these people move slowly. The passage of time is indicated by scenes in which the year is mentioned in passing or depicted fleetingly, and through hairstyles and the country pop songs that play in the background in pickup trucks and bars. The sweep of the mountain vistas and wide plains have a silent, calming effect and this is a movie where more is said with a lowered head, a Stetson obscuring the eyes, than is said verbally.

Continuing my trend of renting movies you all saw, like, two years ago, tonight I watched Sideways, which is mainly about two doughy white guys coming to terms with middle age, but surprisingly fun.

It stars Paul Giamatti as Miles, a depressed and divorced eighth-grade English teacher, and his friend-since-college, Jack (played by Thomas Haden Church), who’s getting married in a week but anxious for a final fling. An oenophile, Miles takes Jack on a tour of California wine country. Jack reciprocates the favor by promising to help Miles get laid.

Alexander Payne, who directed, shared a Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award with Jim Taylor, and deservedly so. (Also nominated for Oscars were the picture itself, Church and Virginia Madsen for supporting roles, and Payne for directing.) The dialogue is snap-crackly with plenty of fluid, believable banter between the men, as they lie to others and themselves, debate wine and women, and take stock of their achievements in life, or lack thereof. Miles’ snotty wine talk, interspersed with French phrases, is leavened with more colloquial descriptions for wines he loves (“tighter than a nun’s asshole”) or hates (“tastes like the back of a fucking L.A. school bus”). I enjoyed Giamatti as an actor in Duets and American Splendor, and he’s just as great here, intelligent, sarcastic and self-deprecating. I thought there was a bit of strain in the key winemaking-as-a-metaphor-for-life speeches given by Giamatti and Madsen, but it’s a small complaint.

I remember thinking that I hadn’t seen the work of an American director who could capture this country’s “mundane things” as perfectly as Wim Wenders in Paris, Texas, but after About Schmidt and now Sideways, I think Payne fits the bill. His frames are packed with the objects and scenery we don’t notice but that surround us: the UPC sticker still prominently affixed to the cellophane wrapper on the flowers Jack gives his Mom; that Miles and Jack have to walk on the berm of a busy road, past a Ford dealership, from their hotel to a restaurant, because there is no sidewalk; the backs of suburban houses and electrical towers visible in the background from the parking lot of the church where Jack gets married. The costumes are similarily appropriate. You get the idea Miles is wearing “Relaxed Fit” Dockers for most of the movie, to match his awful short-sleeved knit shirts, while Jack prefers garrish button-downs that are forever untucked.

Remember that near life-size color printout of our publisher that made its way into a company restroom this summer? The imps in the production department were just getting warmed up. They got their hands on the snapshots from our company holiday party and when I returned to the office this morning from our Northern Virginia event, I was greeted with an 8.5-by-11-inch printout of this photo taped to my computer’s screen. Marvel at the requisite Guinness in hand, and my grotesquely slack, pasty face.

Not bad work, especially considering I wasn’t wearing a Santa cap. The wonders of Photoshop!

I got off easy. Two other photos were expertly transfered onto full-size magazine covers and cleverly interspersed with actual real estate publication covers that are framed behind glass and hanging on a display wall near our office lobby for all to see. One particularly saucy photo, depicting two of our salespeople dirty dancing in a pose reminiscent of a certain sex act illegal in some states, magically appeared on the cover of our flagship print publication, complete with custom cover lines (“Sales Keep Getting Stronger, Page 44”).

Another salesguy, snapped with beer in hand and shimmying to his own flabby white-guy dance, appeared on a cover of Men’s Health magazine with cover lines about how to “Muscle Up in 3 Weeks!”, “Never Miss Another Workout” and similar blurbs regarding abs. Both covers resemble professional versions of those “Time Magazine Person of the Year” novelty covers you can get at amusement parks. Holiday hilarity!

Our Northern Virginia real estate event was from 7:00 to 11:00 a.m. today at the Ritz-Carlton at Tysons Corner, Virginia. A fine venue with a crackling fireplace, stockings hung from the chimney with care, and a giant gingerbread merry-go-round. And that’s just the lobby!

Actually, beyond the decor, and the fact that you have to take two separate elevators to get to your room (now that’s classy!), it wasn’t that special. There was no coffeemaker in my room, probably because that’s considered ghetto by Chairman Ritz-Carlton, but the bed was large and mighty comfy. I would be lying to you if I told you I most certainly did not jump several times directly from the luxuriously upholstered ottoman directly onto the bed, where I eventually ended up staying to watch four reruns of Friends in a row while I ate a scrumptious room service strip steak that I will be getting reimbursed for.

Up at 4:00 a.m. to catch my flight from Newark to Washington National Airport. I spent the day roaming the streets of our nation’s capital, meeting with real estate executives to discuss the agenda and speaker lineup for our Washington, D.C. real estate conference, which will be held next year in late February or early March.

I also marveled at how clean Washington is compared to New York, and how wide and accommodating its sidewalks are. Also: much better subway system. Of course in a public transport smackdown, D.C. has the unfair advantage of a system that was built more or less all at once (and not in horribly merged chunks, like in New York). It’s also nowhere near as old as New York’s system. But anyway, here are some pros:

• The best: LED boards telling you which side of the track your train will arrive on and in how many minutes.
• The conductors tell you which side of the train the doors will open on.
• Padded leather-ish seats. (If you installed these in New York, they would be ripped off and/or defaced in approximately 20 minutes.)
• Carpeted floors. These, too, would be ripped up in New York, or soaked in one or more bodily fluids.
• Quietude; not all that scraping and banshee shrieking of New York’s trains.
• People somewhat more polite getting on and off the train. D.C. reminds me of Chicago in that respect; a clean, large actual American city that seems to be populated by people with Midwestern attitudes.
• Creepy-cool stations. It took me a second to realize why, but it’s that the artificial light sources come from the ground up, so everything is bottom-lit, like when you were a kid and told ghost stories while holding a flashlight under your chin. This is more theatrical and flattering then harsh overhead florescent lighting. The large arched concrete stations have recessed panels and strange lighting, too.

One con is that you often must swipe your card not only upon entering the system, but also when exiting, apparently because you pay for the length of your commute during rush hour instead of a flat fee, or something like that. It’s kinda annoying, but not that bad to put up with.

Between my meetings, I had some spare time which I spent photographing the Washington Monument and the White House.

Viewing the exhibits at the National Museum of American History (isn’t that name redundant?), I saw one of Mr. Roger’s orange knit zip-up sweaters and Bill Clinton’s saxophone. I walked briskly through an exhibit called, “Whatever Happened to Polio?” It’s a rather hopeful title, as if the Smithsonian thought people would say, “My god, what did happen to it? Better find out by entering this informative looking exhibit!” But it’s not always easy to get people interested in essentially eradicated viral diseases any more than it is to get the average American interested in American History prior to 1983.

I also viewed the star-spangled banner, of Star-Spangled Banner fame, which has been stretched flat in a massive, spotless workroom behind Plexiglas while it’s being repaired and restored. I was chagrined to learn that before the Smithsonian got its hands on it in 1907, the flag’s cretin owners snipped small and not-so-small bits off to save as patriotic mementos-one of the flag’s 15 white cotton stars, for instance, has been snipped clean away, and other chunks of the red-white-and-blue striped bunting are missing.

After a laundry morning, I went downtown to The Strand Book Annex on Fulton Street for some purchases, including a first paperback edition of H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, Pride and Prejudice to go with my recent viewing of the movie, and another book as a Christmas gift. I had the foresight to clip a coupon from this week’s Village Voice which, with the purchase of any two books, granted me a free, handsome maroon canvas tote bag, emblazoned with the familiar oval Strand logo.

I then moseyed over to the Met Museum Store at South Street Seaport for some more Christmas shopping, then headed out to find what I had really come all this way for: Bodies: The Exhibition.

The cashier at the Met store told me, “You can’t miss it when you walk out—right next to the Gap.” How bad can it be, there next to the Gap, I wondered. The answer: not too bad, if seeing the equivalent of human jerky doesn’t faze you.

If you’ve been living in a cave, or haven’t heard of this exhibit, which has traveled the world, it’s a bunch of human organs and mostly skinless cadavers, preserved, partially dissected and artfully posed, under the guise that you will learn something about physiology. Mostly it’s just cool to look at corpses. There’s a full skeleton literally bursting out of its musculature, and another cadaver, posed like Rodin’s thinker, contemplating its own brain, which is ironically placed in its line of vision. The flayed muscles are marbled with fat and may make you think twice next time you take a forkful of tasty pot roast. They’re a color I can only describe as “preserved pink,” like those desiccated pig ears you can buy for dogs to gnaw on.

Worse, there are a few rooms of atrocities, including livers scarred with cirrhosis, smokers’ lungs, and a full room (complete with a warning placard posted outside) showing fun fetal birth defects.

A wondrous portion of the exhibit for me was the visualization of blood vessels via corrosion casting. For the process, the vessels are injected with a red-colored polymer, then the surrounding body tissue is then chemically removed. What remains is a delicate, dendritic red cluster, like some sort of alien coral.

Later tonight, I watched War of the Worlds on DVD. The instant I saw Tom Cruise operating that cargo crane in the opening scene, I thought for sure he would use it later to defeat the aliens. I was mistaken. Other than that, the movie wasn’t too bad.

I was in the neighborhood of the Angelika Film Center and it was round ’bout movie time, so I stopped in and decided to see Syriana. I liked it, I think. It’s written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, the same guy who wrote the movie adaptation of Traffic. The structure of Syriana is much the same; there’s a lot happening all at once, with plots that entwine and overlap, so I was confused some of the time. As you know, I have enough trouble paying attention to you when you’re talking to me, much less watching a movie with separate storylines for each of its actors: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Chris Cooper, Christopher Plummer, Jeffrey Wright, and others. They’re all leading men, but none of them leads the film; surprisingly, that’s a good thing.

The film’s about oil and greed, governments and corporations, corruption and terrorism, and it’s being called a “political thriller,” but that’s not quite right, because I cared somewhat more about these characters than I would those in some Tom Clancy-ish adaptation: they’re rounded, with personalities, and realistic lives outside of the action of the film. We see family lives and strained relationships, what happens after work, and it’s all still relevant.

PR for Syriana is also taking the “ripped from the headlines” angle, and apparently it’s already been condemned by various smug conservatives. I don’t think that’s quite right, either. There are many elements that seem snatched from the CNN news tickers, but they’re whipped together in an imaginative and newly fresh way. What it’s really about is corruption. Nearly all of the characters are in some way corrupt, politically or morally, and those who aren’t don’t live long. It’s not a cheery prospect, but it’s an engrossing film.

My company’s holiday party this afternoon, like last year’s, was held at the Met Lounge, the upstairs area of Tonic, a bar/restaurant/club near Times Square. The company rented the top floor and lounge area for good eats, two open bars, music and mingling.

Continuing the Office Space theme to my gift-exchange purchases, I got my secret-Santa the film on DVD. She seemed to appreciate it; I thought she might, seeing as the movie’s tagline is “Work Sucks” and she’s easily the crankiest person at work and has been with the company 16 years-she’s an editorial assistant, and I used to work with her when I was editing the real estate magazine, having her send faxes, transcribe interviews from audiotape and other drudgery.

A few hours after the holiday party, I headed back out for Katie’s birthday celebration at Tom & Jerry’s, a cozy bar on Elizabeth Street just off Houston. The name isn’t a reference to the cartoon, but more likely to the liquor-spiked hot eggnog beverage of the same name; lining shelves behind the bar are vintage punchbowl sets, many printed with the phrase “Tom & Jerry.”

Any bar without the obnoxious pretenses of the average SoHo establishment, teamed with Guinness on tap and Laphroaig on the shelf, is O.K. by me. Also great was that on a large movie screen at the end of the bar they played a cycle of classic black-and-white films from a range of eras: Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Buster Keaton’s The General and Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law.

As promised and just in time for the holidays, the New Yorker hotel has lit its giant new red sign, though it looks orangeish in my photo because of the slow shutter speed.

Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shinbone.

Mark Twain, on Jane Austen

If you savor English country dances and tittering young ladies, Pride & Prejudice is your film. While watching it tonight, I kept thinking that Keira Knightley is just a little too hot for 18th century England, particularly her gleaming, perfectly aligned teeth. Her love interest, the brooding, tight-lipped Mr. Darcy (played by Matthew MacFadyen), is positioned as a rather stationary running joke, lurking in the background of nearly every scene to cast smoldering glances towards Knightley’s character, Elizabeth.

I’m told he does a lot of smoldering in the book, too, which I haven’t yet read. But having seen most of Austen’s book adaptations and knockoffs via the mighty Merchant Ivory British Drama Machine, I’m well versed in the conventions: the clash of classes and privileges, the lust to marry, the sniveling bachelor pastor with eyes for the heroine, the sage father and worrisome, meddling mother, and The Big Misunderstanding, in which our hero is mistaken for a jerk when in fact he’s a upstanding fellow who also happens to have huge tracts of land. Yet through it all, I couldn’t help but smile contentedly even though I knew what was going to happen; in that respect, the movie’s a success.

There’s a lot to look at in Pride & Prejudice, plenty of gorgeous castle-like country homes with improbably lush landscapes, soft focus sunsets, carefully casual poses copped from the Renaissance masters, ruggedly handsome men on horseback, etc. It dragged towards the end and the sugary closing scene with The Kiss caused some scandal amongst Austenites on both sides of the pond: the U.S. ending makes it clear that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy have affirmed their love for a lifetime. However, upon the film’s initial release in the U.K., the ending was edited to make their happy coupling more ambiguous. That dénouement has since been replaced by the U.S. version, causing the British publication Entertainment-Wise to gripe about “the cheesy extra ending that was filmed especially for those cringe loving Yanks.”

Ah, yes, we Yanks enjoy cheese with a good cringe, and while we do, take a look at our gleaming, perfectly aligned teeth.

Brad Pitt. Angelina Jolie. They’re the stars of your film. Does a plot really matter? People are going to want to watch these beautiful people no matter what they’re doing. At least that seems to be the idea behind Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which I watched on DVD tonight. Watch them fall in love. Watch them try to kill each other. Repeat. A capital formula for the perfect popcorn flick.

My company produced a real estate conference yesterday at the Roosevelt Hotel, inevitably described as a grand old place because it appears as if they stole your grandmother’s carpet and wallpaper patterns.

Delivering our keynote address was developer Larry Silverstein, famous in real estate circles for completing the largest real estate transaction in New York City history. Unfortunately for him, it was a 99-year lease signed in July 2001 for the World Trade Center. He’s now paying rent on a hole on the ground.

Since 9/11, he’s wrangled with insurers over the Twin Towers’ payout, planned reconstruction of the site and, most recently, soothed fears of safety and high rents to get potential tenants interested in his nearby 7 World Trade Center building. That project opens in April, and in his speech, Silverstein reviewed its technological and construction advances (“the safest building ever built”). But I was more interested in a comment he snuck in about the artwork that will appear in the building’s lobby: a flashing-LED art installation by Ohio-native artist, Jenny Holzer. This had been announced last spring, but Silverstein qualified his comment noting it would be Holzer’s largest permanent installation in the world.

Like the work of many conceptual artists, Holzer’s seems to me more arresting in theory than in fact. She’s best known for a project, ongoing since 1979, called Truisms. They’re just that: truisms, or true statements weakened by repetition, that she reproduces on T-shirts, postcards, signs, billboards and flashing LED signs in public places.

Curiously, Silverstein also made a point of specifying that Holzer’s sayings on the 7 WTC installation will be “real American, motherhood, apple pie.” Although many of her Truisms I’ve read are of Reader’s Digest quotability, an equal number, if not more, are more realistic. Sayings like “Even your family can betray you,” “The desire to reproduce is a death wish” and “The family is living on borrowed time” don’t seem like they’d fit the bill for Silverstein’s lobby, nor would other Truisms of hers that would be particularly appropriate for a building intertwined with 9/11: “War is a purification rite,” “Anger or hate can be a useful motivating force,” “Freedom is a luxury not a necessity.”

I’m hoping the installation really isn’t watered down by jingoism and that Holzer can sneak some truly personal or thoughtworthy phrases into her piece. She could see it as falling in line with other great commissioned art turned subversive, like Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads mural for Rockefeller Center, although I’d wish for Holzer’s artwork to have a happier ending.

During the past few weeks, the James Farley Post Office has been under construction, its facade veiled in a huge off-white drapery.

It’s like a utilitarian version of Christo’s Wrapped Reichstag project from 1995.

Today was the city’s first substantial snow, though it wasn’t more than an inch at most of wet accumulation that allowed the kids in my neighborhood to joyfully pelt one another from across the street with hard-packed snowballs. I walked to Fort Tryon Park and took in the views of my neighborhood from Linden Terrace, the park’s apex, one of the highest points in Manhattan, and the site of a picnic lunch this summer. A couple up there was whipping snowballs at New Jersey, which I think we’ve all wanted to do at one time or another.

I had dinner with Jimi, Mike and The Man at Kiran, the Indian restaurant next door to their apartment building. Jimi has his place all decked out with colorful holiday ornaments and nine personalized stockings, one for each of the three humans, cats and dogs living there.

Garry, who’s visiting from Columbus, along with Sherry, Andie, Katie and myself met at the Barnes & Noble Andie works at, then headed out to view the Christmas trees and decorations at both Lincoln and Rockefeller Centers. Cold and festive, although the streets around Rockefeller were choked with tourists and guys selling counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags.

I visited the old apartment after work today, meeting up with Andie and Katie’s friend Garry, who’s in town from Columbus and staying with Andie and Eric. After Katie stopped by, she, Garry and I went to dinner at Celeste, then had some drinks at a nearby Irish bar. Garry and Katie fed a lot of money into the jukebox to play some rockin’ hits, but the jukebox mysteriously would intersperse each selection with two songs not selected by us. I would have liked to have stayed around longer to hear “Synchronicity II” by The Police, but I was too drowsy from my Guinness and left early.

In what’s become a stupid in-joke (is there any other kind?), whenever this one coworker and I are talking about exacting imaginary revenge on someone particularly despised, we say that he or she needs to be “punched in the neck” or put through “a good neck-punching.”

It’s a phrase I purloined from this guy I used to work with, R.J., who had a lot of bottled up anger and creative turns of phrase. I don’t know why the idea of punching someone in the neck is so amusing to me. It’s not at all that I literally want to punch someone in the neck or otherwise hurt them; I think it’s the specificity of the word “neck.” It’s a funny sounding word, too, and who in their right mind expects to be hit there?

This thought inspired some screen-captures and Photoshop hackwork tonight for a filmstrip-sequence image I’ll be emailing to my neck punch-obsessed coworker tomorrow. (Click image for a larger version in a pop-up window.)

It helps a bit if you’ve seen the movie.