January 2006 Archives

I don’t mean to suggest I’m some kind of genius, but my Page-a-Day Boggle Brain Buster today required me to find the names of seven animals in the following grid, and I found 12. Any more I’m missing? I say singular, common nouns only, so no BALTO, you wisenheimers.

For my solution, highlight this hidden list:
1. ANT*
2. BAT
3. CAT
4. CRAB*
5. GNAT*
6. MINK
7. MITE*
8. MOLE
9. MOTH*
10. PIG
11. RAT
12. SLOTH
*=Not given in the official Boggle Brain Buster solution.

Figuring he has enough printers in his apartment, Jimi donated to me his circa 2003 Epson Stylus Photo R300 ink jet printer. I stopped by his apartment after work to pick it up. It’s intimidating in size and weight (14 pounds), and that it takes six individual ink cartridges. A nice feature is you can print photo files directly from a memory card, such as CompactFlash. The printer also has a CD tray that allows you to print directly onto an ink jet-printable CD-R or DVD-R.

I went over to Andie’s for some of her tasty split pea soup and to watch The West Wing, until we realized The West Wing wasn’t on tonight. Instead watched the pathos of the SAG Awards, then a boring episode of Crossing Jordan. At least the pea soup was good.

I bought a shirt at Urban Outfitters as part of their 50%-off sale, stopped by Andie’s Barnes & Noble to say hello, then went over to Jimi’s. Mike, The Man and I decided to get Indian food, so the four of us walked a few blocks over to Baluchi’s.

Eh. It was O.K. My mango lassi was cheaper than I expected at $3 for a medium-size drinking-glassful. But the saag paneer I ordered, like I usually do at Indian restaurants, had fresh spinach yet was bland overall. I imagine the benefit here is the same as at most chains: you get a consistent level of food, presentation and cleanliness. It’s just that this particular consistency isn’t all that thrilling. But with so many other Indian restaurants in the city, you’d be better off going local.

Baluchi’s

• 240 W. 56th St. (one of 16 NYC locations)
• (212) 397-0707
• Meal 7 of 52: mango lassi ($3) and saag paneer ($10.95).

After work, I took the F train over to Park Slope in Brooklyn and had fun escaping from the aboveground Fourth Avenue/Ninth Street station, which resembles a haunted castle. I was on my way to Ned’s, who resembles Keith Haring¹ and is the brother of a friend, Megan. In addition to the siblings and myself, Katie showed up. Until they left to go see Munich, some sub-letters of Ned’s from Amsterdam were hanging out, too: Antony, Rosa and their white yarn-haired dog, Max. Actually, Max didn’t go to the movie, instead staying with us and moping around for lack of attention after we stopped petting him.

After we determined Franny’s, one of the area’s most-lauded newish pizza joints, didn’t deliver, we pored over a flurry of takeout menus and settled on Aunt Suzie, Ned’s favorite Italian restaurant. My eggplant Parmigiana was rich and tasty! They were out of tiramisu (blast!) but the replacement cannoli were mighty good; Aunt Suzie doesn’t fill them until they’re ordered, so the shells stay nice and crisp.

We convened at Ned’s primarily to watch Trapped in The Closet, R&B musician R. Kelly’s “hip-hopera,” which began its deformed life as a music video, expanded to several and is now available in 12 “chapters” on DVD. It is the foresworn duty of Ned and Megan to promote Trapped in the Closet as the next so-bad-it’s-good Rocky Horror Picture Show-like cult classic. I think they’re on the right track; it’s already been mocked by South Park and Mad T.V. (“Trapped in the Cupboard”).

Man, is it ever bad. It’s like a poorly acted community theater play without dialogue, only R. Kelly’s monotonous describe-the-action song lyrics and the rare sound effect. He stretches a lot on these rhymes, pairing “Beretta” with “dresser” at one point, or when he can’t think of one, rhyming the same word. He also has trouble pronouncing the “th” in certain words, like “baffroom.” He plays the lead character, Sylvester, as well as “the narrator.” The plot, a convoluted tale of infidelity, is pitted with gaping holes, unlikely coincidences and a cast of characters that grows larger and more caricatured until it includes a woman named Bridget, which necessitates the rhyming inclusion of a midget and subsequent appearance thereof.

We decided we hadn’t enough punishment and watched the whole thing again with director’s commentary, which is R. Kelly sitting in a darkened room, smoking a cigar and watching his film on a widescreen. He turns around frequently to mug at the camera, explain what’s going on in a particular scene and why it’s genius, and talk about the “cliffhangers” that join the chapters, one of which involves a woman brandishing a spatula, which he speculates is a cliffhanger because it’s not a cliffhanger, an anti-cliffhanger, if you will. The whole mess culminates in a comment along the lines that “the whole world is trapped in a closet” and a threat that he will continue releasing Trapped in the Closet chapters until he is stopped.

We followed this up with the documentary Grizzly Man which is about Timothy Treadwell, who lived among the giant grizzlies of Alaska under the guise of protecting them, even though they live in a national park and exist in numbers great enough that it’s legal to hunt a certain percentage of them each year. Treadwell captures frequently amazing footage of the bears, particularly a scene of two of them rearing up and attacking each other on a beach, where they resemble extremely tall sumo wrestlers. But most of it is Timothy’s self-videotaped ruminations on himself and the bears, which he’s given cutsie names, and scenes of him getting really, really close to them and then acting surprised when they lash out. Not to ruin anything for you, but Treadwell and his girlfriend end up getting killed and eaten by a bear, their remains, collected from the ground and the euthanized bear’s stomach, filling four garbage bags. Idiots.

We agreed that if we would have been in high school, our assignment at this point would have been to compare and contrast the two movies, focusing on the narcissism of the protagonists. Instead, Katie, Megan and I took the F train home because it was like 3 a.m. at that point. Good times.

Aunt Suzie

• 247 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn (Between Carroll and Garfield Place)
• (718) 788-2868
• Meal 6 of 52: eggplant Parmigiana with salad ($11.90) and half a cannoli ($2.90 for whole cannoli).

¹ Katie and I had each met Ned once before and I had mentioned to her earlier the Keith Haring comparison. She wasn’t in a position to agree or disagree because she didn’t know what Keith Haring looked like. Then, when we arrived at Ned’s apartment, what should he have hanging at the end of a hallway but a large, framed Keith Haring print. That still doesn’t help out Katie with what Keith Haring looks like, but maybe it suggests Ned is aware of the connection. I don’t know; I forgot to ask him. [back]

Researchers at the University of Leicester in central England have determined that “internet downloading and mp3 players are creating a generation of people who do not seriously appreciate songs or musical performances,” the AP reported earlier this month.

The researchers concluded that because of greater choice and accessibility, music is now a commodity to which we have a passive attitude. Although we may well have a “complex and sophisticated” relationship with music in our in everyday lives, “it is not necessarily characterized by deep emotional investment,” the researchers sniff.

This isn’t news. You have to reach back at least before the Ohio Express’ “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” to tag an era when this might have been still true, and the researchers do, pining like Miniver Cheevy for the nineteenth century, when “music was seen as a highly valued treasure with fundamental and near-mystical powers of human communication.”

Ha ha! The nineteenth century! Of course, in addition to their apparent shamanistic music beliefs, the enlightened commonfolk of that time also thought biological evolution was a fanciful notion, blacks and whites were two distinct species, and microbes were generated spontaneously. Fucking idiots.

I think more to the point is that digital music sharing and downloading don’t create listener apathy—they can brew new passions for the medium. Music downloads for me, legal and otherwise, have helped me discover music I never would never have crossed paths with otherwise. It’s inspired me to buy CDs, attend concerts and share my appreciation with others.

When I was younger, my musical interests were influenced by top-40 radio and friends whose interests were informed by top-40 radio. Now, in the great days of the internets, I not only invest more time listening to music because of what I pick up from LimeWire or the iTunes Music Store, I regularly read snotty indie music review sites. I learn about and sample obscure or forgotten music at passionately written music blogs such as Spoilt Victorian Child. I peruse and listen to what music-aficionado musicians like David Byrne are spinning in their spare time. And I use programs such as Pandora to unearth new music based on what I already like.

It may not be deeply emotional, but it’s hardly passive.

Now here’s a documentary to inflame both liberals and conservatives. Liberals, because it’s an ultra-condensed smack to the face about everything wrong with American imperialism from World War II forward, our military-industrial complex and our politicians. And conservatives, because liberals hate freedom and dare to question our president, or something; I’m just taking a stab here, but I’m sure it’s along those lines.

The movie has no resolution and numerous answers are given throughout to the repeated question, “Why do we fight?” What it does is present the staggering growth and power of the American military, wars started by lies, half-truths, commerce and the urge—nay, need—to stretch thin and spread the American way of leadership and life over the globe. We hear from the politicians, advisors and think-tank wonks that keep the war machine fueled for one reason while telling us another. It’s nothing new: we spend lots of money on defense, the military spends lots of money on ads and recruitment, war makes many people very rich and as such, will not be phased out anytime soon. Unsettling facts and figures roll one after another, incessantly, often interspersed with newsreel footage of soldiers, war and death, cheeky propaganda clips from the 40s and 50s and ironically cheerful songs. You sit there like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, brainwashed, eyes pinched open.

Several additional and unnecessary cut scenes suggest not so subtly that we Americans, in addition to our war glorification, are also a bunch of lumbering, shitstained water buffalo. We get shots of our ubiquitous highway fast food/gas station strips, gravy-intensive country buffets, American flag windmills, airshows and their crowds of white trash, etc. Yes, we get the point and we hang our oily, imperialistic heads in self-loathing shame.

But for anyone who despises the current Bush administration and its militaristic ties past and present, the most recent clips alone are an ultimate Greatest Hits package: Dick and Halliburton, the African uranium debacle, the fairytale Iraq-9/11 connection, Rummy chummy with Saddam, Bush with that megaphone at Ground Zero, precision bombing in Iraq, and a bunch of those cringe-worthy patriotic soundbites from W. The elderly woman sitting next to me kept tsking and sighing loudly and I thought she might soon hurl something smelly at the screen.

The most heartfelt stories among a dozen or so talking heads in the film are both coincidentally New York ones: the Vietnam vet/retired NYPD cop with ties to 9/11 who initially backs the war, and the young, confused kid whose mom just died and is enlisting in the Army. I kept thinking, “These guys need to meet up for coffee downtown and talk things over.”

A fine flick and one you’re likely to leave sad and angry.

With a name like Sushi A-Go-Go, how could I not go here? True to the sixties spirit, the place is light and fun, with large decoupage flowers on the walls. Apparently, Wednesday is “theater night” in the city (I thought every night was theater night in New York) and because this place is so close to Lincoln Center, it was packed. I had the choice of waiting 20 minutes for a table or sitting at the sushi bar and I chose the latter.

There are five seats there and I was stuck with the center; on each side was a couple of which the man seemed to be trying to impress the woman. On my right, the guy was rhapsodizing on the varying grades of sake and talking about trips he’d taken to Paris. On my left, the guy ordered a good half dozen different combo platters of sushi and kept telling the woman “Try this! It’s great!” Then he got into an argument with the waiter over bringing him a certain sauce that he was unable to describe, other than he thought it was dark colored and sweet and he’d had it once in New Jersey and it was great. I’m not sure how well these guys’ ladies were getting on because they didn’t get much of a chance to talk.

I had miso soup, served in a wood bowl, and an order of spider rolls, which were large and attractively presented with pieces of lettuce sticking out like sails. I ordered one bottle of warm sake, then another, while watching white-smocked Asian sushi chefs behind the counter smoosh fish bits into artful shapes with their bare hands.

Sushi A-Go-Go

• 1900 Broadway
• (212) 724-7340
• Meal 5 of 52: miso soup ($2.75), spider roll platter ($9.50) and two warm sakes ($6.50 each).

I received my external 250GB LaCie hard drive today at work via UPS and it was a wonky thrill to look forward to taking it home and formatting it. After I did, I copied over all eight DVDs of The Complete New Yorker which took a few hours. If you have enough hard drive space and The Complete New Yorker installed on a Macintosh with Tiger (which comes preinstalled with MySQL, a program you need for this exercise), it’s easy, or easier than I thought, at least, to force the program to recognize all the issues on an external drive.

Most of these instructions I gleaned from the net, tested and clarified; I had to research and experiment with creating symbolic links (aliases) using the command line. That really took me back to my Amiga days with the Shell and CLI.

Nerd!

1. Copy the complete contents of the Issues folder from each DVD, as well as the contents of the folder /Library/Application Support/The New Yorker/Issues on your local hard drive, to a single Issues folder elsewhere. In the case of this example, it’s located on an external hard drive: /Volumes/External HD/The New Yorker/Issues
2. Now that you’ve copied its contents, delete the /Library/Application Support/The New Yorker/Issues folder. (We’ll create an alias folder to take its place in the final step.)
3. Make a back-up copy of the MySQL database, just in case; the file’s path is:
   /Library/Application Support/The New Yorker/ny-sqlite-3.db
4. In the Terminal (located in your Applications/Utilities folder), enter the following command. It updates The Complete New Yorker database to indicate that each issue is now stored in the Issues folder on the local hard drive:
   sqlite3 "/Library/Application Support/The New Yorker/ny-sqlite-3.db" "update Issues set DiskID = 9 where DiskID <> 9;"
5. Of course, each issue isn’t stored on the local drive; they’re now all on the external drive. So enter the following command. It creates an alias so that every time The Complete New Yorker attempts to access the Issues folder on the local hard drive, it will be automatically redirected to the Issues folder on the external hard drive. (Obviously, you’ll need to change the segment /Volumes/External HD/The New Yorker/Issues to reflect where you copied the Issues files on your own system.):
   ln -s "/Volumes/External HD/The New Yorker/Issues" "/Library/Application Support/The New Yorker"

Whew. The bottom line: Now when you launch The Complete New Yorker, it will atomatically fetch issues from the external hard drive. Ultra-fast searches and no swapping among eight DVDs. It is beyond me why the fine people at the magazine could not simply condense all of this tomfoolery into an installation option.

After Andie, Katie and I finished dinner at Angus McIndoe, the ladies shared a dessert, a decadent chocolate-raspberry concoction. Then we walked over to Theater 5 (311 W. 43rd St.) for NEUROfest, four one-act plays centered around a neurological disorder, which I thought was a clever idea.

We wanted to be there to show our support because our friend Kelly wrote one of the plays, Vestibular. The neurological condition she referenced was Ménière’s disease, characterized by a constant ringing in the ears and loss of balance from frequent dizziness. Her characters, a classically trained dancer and his nurse, converse about independence and balance, related both to the disease and, by extension, to their lives in general. It was well done and probably had the best acting and best written dialogue.

The other plays were a one-man show starring a creepy bearded guy and his trunkful of hand puppets, a woman who could taste colors and moan the letter “O” for seven-second stretches, and one that had something to do with dementia and was appropriately hard to follow.

An excellent touch was that afterwards, a panel convened on stage, comprised of a moderator, Kelly, a doctor familiar with aural neurology and a woman with Ménière’s. It was an informative discussion on a disease I didn’t know existed. It’s often misdiagnosed because of its rarity, and it most often affects the left ear of women in their 30s or 40s; no one knows why. It was flabbergasting to hear what she goes through—taking Antivert (meclizine) to combat vertigo, never again playing the oboe (which used to be her passion), avoiding salt and stress, and the worst, living with constant tinnitus. I was suddenly hyperaware of my sense of hearing and newly thankful that my auditory nerves are still helping me keep upright when I should be.

Andie, Katie and I met up for dinner at Angus McIndoe, apparently the owner’s actual name, as Andie discovered when she enquired about the restaurant’s party room and was told to give the fellow a call.

The server was obnoxious although it didn’t seem she was trying to be. In addition to her constant gum chewing, she gave me trouble when I asked in earnest about my soup options. (Dialogue recall likely only 60% accurate, as I wasn’t talking notes.)

Me: Do you have any soup specials?
She: We have a chicken curry soup.
Me: What’s that?
She: [trying to be cute, as Katie said later, but failing] It’s like chicken soup with curry in it.
Me: So it’s just curry-flavored chicken soup?
She: No, it’s got little pieces of, like, pasta in it.
Me: You mean like couscous?
She: Kind of, but a little bigger. Balls. [“tee-hee” moment with herself] Balls of pasta. But tiny.

I opted out of the soup. The burger I had wasn’t bad. It was lightly charred on the outside (which I like), indicating an actual grill with rungs was used, and perfectly cooked medium in the middle, as I had requested. The rest of the menu was basic but decent, and the place is certainly conveniently located for anyone going out to a show afterwards, Broadway or otherwise.

Angus McIndoe

• 258 W. 44th St. (between Seventh and Eighth Avenues)
• (212) 221-9222
• Meal 4 of 52: glass of Murphy’s Irish Stout ($5), hamburger with Swiss cheese and bacon and a side of fries ($13), coffee ($2.50).

Before watching The Fall of Fujimori at the Film Forum tonight with Andie and Katie, I knew nothing about Alberto Fujimori, the president of Peru from 1990 to 2000. It’s a tale equally strange, violent, funny and cautionary.

Fujimori looks like a man born to lose a Peruvian presidential election. He was born in the country, but of Japanese parents, and appears especially goofy campaigning in the billowy, colorful dress of certain Peruvian native groups. But we see him canvassing hard in the jungle countryside and the poorest neighborhoods in Lima, puttering around in his preferred campaign vehicle, a wagon hauled by a tractor. He’s welcomed as an outsider and greeted affectionately as “El Chino,” the Chinaman.

He wins, and although I don’t recall the movie noting this point, his opponent in 1990 is Mario Vargas Llosa. A popular novelist, running for president! Against whom appears to be some Japanese guy!

Peru had only a decade earlier become democratic after a dozen years of military rule. Fujimori’s first term drastically improves an economy hampered by staggering inflation and curtails the guerrilla activity of the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA).

To give himself more power in dealing with terrorism, he enacts an “auto-coup” takeover of his own government in 1992. He rewrites the constitution, alters the judiciary and enacts antiterrorism laws and punishments that border on terrorism themselves. We see suspects cuffed and dumped in car trunks, people arrested after terror attacks who say they were only walking down the street, minding their own business. (Let’s not encourage our own president to watch this movie; he doesn’t need any more brainstorms in this respect.)

Throughout the latter part of Fujimori’s presidency, it’s whispered that his national intelligence director, Vladimiro Montesinos, who features one of the worst comb-overs you’ll ever see, is secretly appointing death squads against suspected terrorists or putting them up in squalid prisons.

During his hectic second term, Fujimori divorces his wife, Susana. While she is still living in the presidential palace, and indeed still having dinner with him, she becomes a publicly vocal opponent of him and his administration and announces plans to challenge him for the presidency. She doesn’t succeed and in her place, Fujimori appoints his oldest daughter as First Lady.

Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the Shining Path known as “Presidente Gonzalo,” is captured under Fujimori’s watch. In one of the movie’s more surreal moments, the president has Guzmán clad in a black-and-white horizontally striped jumpsuit, something he admits he did because he saw it in a movie. Then he has Guzmán placed in a huge walk-in cage draped with a tarp that’s slowly removed to reveal the angry, pacing prisoner for an assembled crowd to gawk at and photograph.

In December 1996, MRTA militants seize the Japanese embassy, holding several hundred hostages, in part to protest prison conditions and Fujimori’s authoritarian rule. The standoff goes on for more than four months before Fujimori orchestrates a swift, brutal retaliation. All but one of the hostages survives; all of the insurgents are killed. We see Fujimori observing the corpses and passing over them to inspect the embassy’s structural damage.

In the spring of 2000, Fujimori is elected for an unprecedented third term using his argument that his first term didn’t count because of his own self-instated coup. By later that year, scandals involving Montesinos have been proven: he’s caught bribing officials in an endless procession of secretly recorded videotapes. He’s sentenced to a prison he ordered built, the same one housing Guzmán.

Soon thereafter, during a planned flight to Brunei, Fujimori’s plane changes course to deposit him in Japan, a move he apparently makes without telling his family, including his First Lady-daughter, whom he leaves alone in the Presidential Palace with her dogs. From Japan, Fujimori faxes-in his resignation as president. He’s been living there ever since and if he ever leaves, he’s likely to be arrested; he’s wanted by Interpol for assault, forgery, fraud, kidnapping, hostage taking, murder and organized crime.

The movie omits some key political points, foremost what Peru’s relations with the U.S. government were like during Fujimori’s reign. I seem to recall, for instance, wrangling over the degree of U.S. involvement in what was then Peru’s super-booming cocaine trade. Oddly, the movie also doesn’t mention what happened after Fujimori’s self-imposed exile. What happened was this: Alejandro Toledo was elected in the spring of 2001. His presidency has since been hampered by allegations of corruption.

And I thought politics in the U.S. were problematic.

The Complete New Yorker: this thing is great. Every issue of the magazine—literally reproductions of every page, covers and ads included—on eight DVDs, accessible on Windows or Mac computers. I’ve read plenty of reports that the interface could be more intuitive, that you can’t copy and paste article text, that it’s slow and that the need to swap DVDs frequently makes nerds reminisce unfondly of the mid-80s when they would play King’s Quest and have to swap 5 1/4" floppies every five minutes.

Pshaw! Although The Complete New Yorker lists for $100, you can get it for a shade more than $60 with free shipping from Amazon.com. I daresay you get what you pay for. Yes, the interface is clunky with a completely unintuitive search screen that frequently turns up strange or incomplete results. Disc swapping is slow only when you’re tracking the “complete works” of an author or a topic over time: “television” or “the Yankees,” say. But enterprising individuals have released a hack that shows you how to copy every issue to an external hard drive and access the content from there, drastically improving article retrieval speed. (I intend to do this as soon as UPS delivers my 250GB external LaCie drive.) And, yeah, you can’t copy and paste text, but if you could, it’d be a probable copyright law violation. But the pages print crisply-I don’t want to squint-and-scroll on my PowerBook’s 12" screen to read a 15-page feature anyway.

But the bottom line is that $60 figure. That’s a lot of hits for little cash. For me, highlights includes every Pauline Kael movie review and essay. Every James Thurber and Roz Chast cartoon. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which was first serialized in the magazine, and a 1957 interview he conducted with Marlon Brando.

Susan Orlean, whose piece on orchid-hunter John Laroche appeared here before it became the book that became Adaptation, has turned out other profiles on diverse people and topics, including the Shaggs, Corcoran Group broker Jill Meilus and the World Taxidermy Championships. Calvin Tompkins, meanwhile, has profiled the most original artistic and cultural minds of the twentieth century: Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Buckminster Fuller, Georgia O’ Keeffe, Paul Strand, Julia Child, Claes Oldenburg.

Certain content is indispensable for New York history aficionados. You get E.B. White and James Thurber’s original “Talk of the Town” pieces, an early one of which, from 1928, encapsulates an anecdote of Thurber sitting a few rows behind Rachmaninoff as the great pianist first hears the theremin played.

A lengthy 1950 profile of Hemingway catches him during a New York stopover en route to Italy. “This ain’t my town,” he grumbles. “It’s a town you come to for a short time. It’s murder.” The reporter tags along as the author drinks constantly, shares Perrier-Jouët and caviar with old friend Marlene Dietrich (“the Kraut”), begrudgingly purchases a new coat and belt at Abercrombie & Fitch, appreciates art at the Met and, throughout, speaks in the clipped, precise tones of one of his own characters.

You also get the ads, humorous curiosities that should prove invaluable to pop culture fanatics and graphic designers. In the mid-’50s alone, we learn that the BarcaLounger “can work relaxing wonders for a tired man...or a frazzled housewife” and that a full, “legation blue” men’s suit retails for about $69.50 at Saks on 34th Street and “stretches from the conference table to the cocktail hour to an evening of entertainment.”

More business meetings all day today in Philadelphia with my boss, eight in a row. That’s tiring. But we’re getting plenty of great speaker ideas and potential topics to cover at our Philadelphia real estate conference this Spring.

Like you care, but the hottest topics in Philadelphia real estate are:

1. Condo Conversions. The city’s becoming more 24/7 (as New York is) as older office space downtown is converted to condos that cater in price to young professionals or even baby boomers that are moving into the city from a house in the suburbs. (Suburban sprawl in Metro Philly has reached the point where the highway infrastructure is no longer sufficient and there are traffic jams of nightmarish proportions.) Developers are so ape over conversions, they’re converting factory space, warehouse space, apartment space and in one case, an entire parking garage. But how many condos are too many condos, and is there a lack of affordable space?
2. Gambling. Donald Trump has his busy hands in a project to bring a few slot-machine casinos to the Downtown area. On one hand, who wants that influx of shitmongers that is attracted to gambling? On the other, the city could use the taxes generated by such ventures, particularly since it’s still in the python-like grip of an inexplicably anti-business stance, tax and incentive-wise. This in part has resulted in:
3. Office Vacancies. There are more of ’em downtown than some Philly real estate execs are comfortable with, and although job growth is positive there, it’s nothing to write home about. How can the city attract business to locate or relocate in Philly? Will developer Brandywine build a second Cira Centre skyscraper, as has been rumored, and what effect will that have on an already generously available inventory of space? And what effect will there be from the Comcast Center tower, slated to open next year?

On the train back, I got to listen to my boss have a cellphone conversation with his young son about how he (the son) had been throwing up for most of the day. We sat in the dining car, recapping the day and our notes, while eating bad nachos and drinking canned Budweiser. They gotta start including perks like this on the subway.

I got smacked by the battery of business meetings in Philadelphia today with my boss, seven of them in a row, pretty much every hour, on the hour. Fortunately, all of the meetings today and the ones tomorrow are in Center City, a fancy term for “Downtown Philadelphia” and the weather is unseasonably nice, so the transport is not hectic at all. We walked to most of the appointments and took a cab to a few. We’re meeting with locally based commercial real estate executives—a mix of brokers, developers, owners and bankers—to get ideas for topics and speakers for our Philadelphia real estate conference this year.

At my boss’ insistence, we had dinner at one of his favorite Philly spots, The Continental [Warning: link leads to obnoxious Flash site], a kitschy-hip Martini bar serving tapas-style food and 80’s pop hits over the sound system on three floors. The concierge at the hotel said the place didn’t take reservations, but we’d have no trouble getting a table at 7:30. We ended up waiting at the bar for 45 minutes, but the location was comfortably convenient and we drank plenty. The crowd was a strange mix of young families and 20-something hipsters. We tried five different dishes: steak, spinach ravioli, samosas, fried calamari (served in a newspaper cone, like they used to serve fish and chips in Britain), and my favorite contribution, lobster macaroni and cheese, which was a valiant attempt, but needed more lobster and less orzo, which substituted for the macaroni.

Philadelphia is strange. It’s like a weird cross between the urban Midwestern-ness and architecture of Chicago and the density and culture of New York City, but with quietude and no good public transportation. It was so eerie, it took me a day to realize how quiet it was on the streets, even during rush hour, because almost no one honks their horn here, whereas in New York, most people start honking as soon as they leave their parking space, just in case, and, well, you know, everyone else is doing it.

After work, I took the train to Philadelphia to meet up with my boss (who had been in Washington, D.C. for meetings) for two solid days of business appointments tomorrow and Friday.

We’re staying at the Radisson Warwick, built in the late 1920s in the English Renaissance style and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. My boss had left me a cellphone message to meet him at the fancier of the hotel’s two restaurants, the Prime Rib, a Zagat-recommended steakhouse that was fancier than I thought it would be. My first clue was when I was required to check my coat, informed I needed a jacket, and realized I had already had my bag containing my suit sent up to my room. The Brooks Brothers loaner I ended up with was a good three inches too short in the sleeves, but the restaurant was tastefully dark so I don’t think anyone noticed, much less cared.

After work, I went to the Knitting Factory’s Tap Bar, located in the cozy basement of the TriBeCa club, to hear Rebecca Gates. With drummer Scott Plouf (now with Built to Spill), she was the other half and lead singer of the ’90s college-rock duo, The Spinanes. For the past two weeks, she has been serving as hostess for and playing at a series of musical “residencies” at the Factory. Last week, her featured guest was one of the chief voices of the ’90s slacker generation, Stephen Malkmus, previously of Pavement.

Tonight, Rebecca’s buddy was Richard Buckner. He seems best known for being lumped into that “alt-country” category that includes Wilco, Calexico and Son Volt (with which he toured in 1996), although I think he sounds more folksy. He also had one of his songs (“Ariel Ramirez,” from his 1998 album, Since) placed in a 2004 Volkswagen Touareg commercial.

I don’t go to a lot of concerts, particularly small-venue ones like this, but I suspect guys like these are usually in the audience, as they were tonight: a group of three frat-boy chuckleheads that talked loudly among themselves the entire concert, mainly about their reputed capacity for alcohol and deviant sexual activities. Why did they pay money for a concert to sit around and talk? How exactly did any of the acts appeal to them? Wasn’t there anything better to do in Jersey tonight, like barfighting or rape or whatever it is these Biffs do with their spare time?

But it wasn’t enough to deter me from enjoying my $6 Guinnesses and Gates’ hour-long set. With nothing but her sultry voice, an electric guitar and an effects pedal, on which she laid down some loops and backbeats, she played new songs and songs from her sole solo album that I liked but wasn’t familiar with. She did reach back to play some “oldies” from her Spinanes days; I enjoyed hearing “Lines and Lines” and “Oceanwide” from the 1996 album, Strand.

She played with her dark, shaggy hair in her face like Breakfast Club-era Ally Sheedy, and there wasn’t much chatter between songs. Setting her guitar to an especially fruity tuning for a new song, she broke a string three times in a row and was more or less forced to speak with the small crowd while hastily rewiring. She had one of her opening acts, a writer friend of hers, bound out on stage to tell some really stinky jokes (“What do control-top pantyhose and Brooklyn have in common? Flatbush!”). But she brightened while coooking up some random topics to talk about:

• Her and Buckner had been embroiled in a friendly argument backstage over which competing 1970s religious musical has better songs: Godspell or Jesus Christ Superstar. After heated debate, punctuated by song-and-dance examples, no clear winner emerged.
• Unlike certain unnamed counterparts of hers in the alt-chick-rock world, she wears underpants, so we shouldn’t get our hopes up should she be wearing a skirt (which she wasn’t) and hike up a leg on a monitor while rocking out, not that there’d be anything we’d necessarily want to see, she said.
• You meet strange characters on the bus in Portland, Oregon.
• “You’re the Reason Our Kids are Ugly,” the 1978 duet by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty, is a near perfect country song. She sang bits of it and explained why, convincing me of her case.
• She never breaks strings; what the hell’s the deal with breaking three in a row?

The crowd stayed friendly and patient during the delay and enjoyed the banter. She never did get the guitar restrung; Buckner ended up graciously lending her his acoustic, retuned for the new song. She had to thread what appeared to be a clothesline around the guitar to use as a strap because Buckner didn’t have one.

I figured I’d see Capote before it disappears from theaters or gets madly popularized by Academy Award nominations, so I caught the 3:55 p.m. show at the Lincoln Center theaters. Not an original idea. The cordoned line snaked the length of the theater lobby and back again. In front of me on line, I overheard a bearded, bookish-looking man in his early 50’s praising the merits of Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale. I’d agree, but oh how the tides have turned for New York liberals to be extolling the merits of Jeff Daniels when they should be blowharding about someone of Marshall McLuhan caliber, like that scene in Annie Hall.

I’ve liked Philip Seymour Hoffman in his previous roles, especially as a sweaty, masturbation-obsessed loser in Happiness. He shines, too, in roles with less screen time: the clueless boyfriend of Hope Davis in Next Stop Wonderland and the humorless manservant in The Big Lebowski. I’ve never seen video footage of Truman Capote, but from what I’ve read, Hoffman well embodies the poised and theatrical motions of the real deal with a voice thin, high and pinched like a cartoon lamb’s.

Most of the film is Capote and his friend Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener) canvassing the broad Kansas landscapes gathering information and interviews on the unsolved shotgun murders of the Clutter family. To gain the confidence of a young girl who was friends with one of those murdered, he confides in her: “Ever since I was a child, people thought me pegged because of the way I talked. They were always wrong.”

It seems strange that Capote is able to get as much access has he does, with the way he talked, dressed and acted, in remote Kansas during the early ’60s. (By way of contrast, I was reminded that the story of the repressed lead characters in Brokeback Mountain takes place at roughly the same time in the same part of the country.) But the movie explains Capote’s apparent charm among the locals by way of clever reasoning and apparent empathy so strong, he’s able to ingratiate himself into the home and life of the case’s lead detective, played in strong silence by Chris Cooper. It’s this same attitude that initially allows Capote access to the killers, too, although it turns into something closer to love and betrayal with the introverted of the two killers, Perry Smith.

During the six years of interviews, writing and waiting for the fate of the killers to be made known, Capote declares he’s creating what he calls a literary first, “the non-fiction novel,” which sounds like what so-called New Journalists like Tom Wolfe were writing around the same time, combining facts with elements of literary fiction. James Frey, anyone? I was interested to learn Capote never took notes or recorded his interviews; he listened and remembered, claiming in the film he has “94 percent recall of all conversation.”

Later today I learned that for his role, Hoffman won a Golden Globe for best actor in a drama. I’d like to see him get some recognition by the Academy, but I fear he’s still in that cursed category of not-popular-enough-to-win and he’ll end up in one of those “the nomination is the reward” situations. We’ll see.

My ex-roommate Andie’s boyfriend, Eric, had a birthday soirée this evening at the old apartment. Andie made some great soup, perfect for the bitter cold weather. Erica offered and artfully described the fine cheeses she purchased from the store at which she works, and Sherry brought some scrumptious cupcakes from Billy’s Bakery. Martinis, Beefeater gin-and-tonics and bottled beers flowed freely; a rousing time was had by all.

On my way home, on the uptown platform of the 1 train at the 86th Street station, I found dropped or discarded on the ground two scraps related to music. First is this note about keys and instruments.

I also found a photo. It looks to be from the late ’50s or early ’60s, although it’s a reprint on modern Agfa paper. There’s something sublime in the woman’s smile that bewitches me. The lad on the right reminds me of myself at the same age, with the glasses, that overbite and bowl cut. And are those spats?

Where are they now? Do the kids fondly remember Mom’s skilled squeezeboxing, or did she play inexpertly to the feigned delight of those around her? Was it a passing fancy that Christmas or did the family make her drag it out for a quick polka on special occasions? Did she play traditional Lawrence Welk favorites like “Lady of Spain” or break it down with sassy versions of current pop hits like “Duke Of Earl” and “The Loco-Motion”?

Reading and reflecting on Adtunes.com’s “Top Ad Music of 2005” list, I sheepishly admit that I do discover and rediscover songs I enjoy from television commercials. It’s not much different than when I hear a good song when I’m at a friend’s, shopping (usually at Urban Outfitters or American Apparel, where I do more browsing and music listening than purchasing) or at a bar (the kind that isn’t playing “Brown Eyed Girl” every hour).

Sometimes a commercial features a song I own but haven’t listened to in a while, so I rejuvenate it for myself by adding it to my iTunes Music Library and iPod. When it’s a new song I like, I’ll buy a CD it’s on or download it. In this sense, the commercial has become a promotion for its soundtrack and not the product being peddled. And this from a guy who claims he doesn’t watch any TV.

Here are some of my favorite songs that I heard in television commercials throughout 2005.

“Simply Irresistible” by Robert Palmer / Applebee’s
I imagine that old pop music in commercials often serves to remind boomers they’re aging, as when they’re being courted to buy a SUV or sportscar with the strains of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones. This mortality reminder for me started head-on in late 2004 when Circuit City commandeered “Just What I Needed” by The Cars. But it hit me even harder with “Simply Irresistible,” which I remember from constant radio play in my childhood. With the black vinyl-clad vixens from the video and Robert’s explanation that his girl was unavoidable, he was backed against the wall, and she was giving him feelings he’d never felt before, what song wouldn’t make more sense to advertise the Most Stupidly Named Product of 2005: Applebee’s Irresist-a-Bowls.

“Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa / Nextel
Are all the kids where you live using Nextel-like walkie-talkies to talk to each other instead of cell phones? They’re fucking everywhere in my neighborhood, and branded into my brain is that digital chirp sound you hear every time someone presses the “speak” button. Anyway, “Push It,” another song I remember fondly and unironically from my youth, is used in this commercial to represent three whitish businessmen “cutting loose” after a job well done, facilitated, naturally, by their chirpy Nextel walkie-talkie. Ha ha! Get it? Businessmen can be uptight and that is why the commercial is funny.

“Do Ya” by Electric Light Orchestra / Monster.com
The use of “Mr. Blue Sky” by ELO in the trailer and commercials for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind reminded me that I really do like the cheesy bombast and AM-Gold haze of the band. But only the use of the gleeful headbanger “Do Ya” in commercials for Monster.com inspired me to buy an ELO greatest hits CD for myself as a Christmas gift. And I didn’t regret it.

“Everybody Got Their Something” by Nikka Costa / Pantene
Nikka’s been a busy bee shopping this song around since she cut it in 2000. According to Adtunes.com, it’s been appropriated for Sears and Mitsubishi Endeavor commercials, and a promo for ABC’s Desperate Housewives. But as the backdrop to a Pantene commercial starring Maria Menounos was the first I’d heard of it. Funky.

“Heartbeats” by José González / Sony
This song was used to strangely relaxing effect for a European commercial for Sony Bravia featuring the hills of San Francisco and 250,000 superballs. Just go watch it. Funny now that an “advert” can get its own web site, like a movie or a celebrity. Not a bad song, either, if you’re the sort of person who likes Nick Drake or long walks on the beach with someone who looks like Nick Drake.

“Hello Tomorrow” by Karen O / Adidas
Early last year, Spike Jonze directed a commercial for the Adidas_1 shoe. Karen O, lead singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, provides the musical backdrop. The result: a mindbending, nonsensical video with a song to match.

“There She Goes“ [originally] by The La’s / Ortho McNeil
If you’re a drug manufacturer, it can tough to represent your product, its use or really even its effects in a television commercial. This is especially true with drugs relating to sexuality, like Viagra or the pill, because you can’t show certain organs on TV in the U.S., at least not during prime time. So instead you show shiny happy people, often holding hands or laughing. In this commercial for the Ortho Tri-Cyclen birth control pill, you’ve got a bunch of willowy, earth-mother types spinning around like ballerinas because they’ve got a tingly good feeling in their uterine linings, or something. The soundtrack boasts a breathy folksinger covering The La’s “There She Goes,” which only serves to emphasize to me that “There She Goes” by The La’s is such a perfect pop song, it doesn’t need anyone to cover it, especially when there are plenty of Cranberries songs available for pushing your norgestimate/ethinyl estradiol.

Katie and I met at the Film Forum tonight to see Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three.

I’m a fan of Wilder’s hits, especially The Apartment, Sabrina and Some Like it Hot, but I had heard good things about this lesser-known film from 1961, which stars James Cagney as a Coca-Cola bottling executive in Berlin. It’s an extremely rapid fire farce, with the jokes, gags and physical comedy coming every line; half are dated groaners (were they ever funny?) while the other half are snicker worthy or laugh out loud funny. There’s a lot of overt political satire from the time that hasn’t aged well, but inspired yelping laughter from some bigmouth sitting directly behind us. Also, Katie wasn’t amused by the embarrassing depiction of most of the women in the film, particularly Cagney’s ditzy secretary, whom it’s implied he has had an affair with and whom he ends up giving to a trio of buffoon Russians to pay off a favor.

The plot has to do with some silliness about Cagney keeping an eye on the free spirited young daughter of his American boss, her marrying a young East German communist who Cagney first has arrested, then ends up having to liberate after discovering the daughter is pregnant. He spends the long third act of the film in an extended sequence making the unruly young man presentable for the daughter’s parents in order to save the relationship and his own promotion.

It’s exhausting keeping up with Cagney, who talks a mile a minute, flags not once, and seems to be shouting every scene. He also has that old-movie-convention of talking the same monotone way on the phone in the film as he does in his face-to-face dialogue.

We calmed ourselves afterwards by walking over to Christopher Street to Kettle of Fish, a bar that in its original location in the 1950s was favored by Dylan and the beat poets. Now it has more of a sports bar attitude, with framed team photos lining the walls and an unhealthy fascination with the Green Bay Packers. But at least Guinness was on tap and the familiar green glass bottle of Laphroaig on the shelf.

A tall, rakish cad in his early 30s with impeccable posture, unflappable nature, ninja-like skills, a way with the ladies and a receding hairline? And his name is Jason? We’re talking about me, right? Well, yes, but also Jason Statham, star of Transporter 2, which I watched on DVD tonight.

I didn’t see the original, but I would wager the two films are more or less the same. Jason plays Frank, a by-the-rules courier who’s ex-Special Forces, and his latest charge is the son of a prominent drug enforcement agency official in Miami. This is complicated by some other cliché plot elements: a smooth-talking, thick-accented Colombian crime lord, the kidnapping of a child and the threat of a mass-viral infection by some sort of purple liquid. I kept expecting Caruso and company to pop up in the background, or at least Crockett and Tubbs.

Thankfully the film has a strong sense of its own ridiculousness, which keeps it from turning to the dark side of action-adventure, such as anything directed by Michael Bay, whose productions are grim forays into macho jingoism. I bet you a McRib that Transporter 2’s lightheartedness has to do with the fact that the screenplay was co-written by my main man Luc Besson, who also wrote and directed the wry violence-fest Léon and the fruity sci-fi extravaganza The Fifth Element.

For example, read some of these key dramatic lines spoken by the villain, Gianni, and tell me they don’t sound like something out of McBain:

Gianni: Not what you expected when you reported for work this morning, is it, Frank?
Frank: Is that what passes for wit in this circle?
Gianni: [chuckling] In this circle, my friend, wit is not a requirement of the job. Brutality, yes. An ability to inflict pain, absolutely. A certain psychotic moral ignorance, blind obedience—all required. But not wit.

And this one, which made me laugh:

Mr. Billings: What guarantee do I have that you won’t harm my son?
Gianni: [sinister chuckle] Guarantee? Mr. Billings, I’m not a car dealer. Don’t let my charming accent and my grammatically impeccable syntax mislead you.

Of course, the film isn’t about the chatter. Because Frank is a “transporter,” the action features some ridiculously rambunctious chases via automobile and jetski. Every driving surface in this film has been freshly sprayed with water, even the parking garage. (Movie production people often dampen pavement, particularly for night shots, because wet pavement reflects light sexily; dry pavement on film is as thrilling as bingo night at the senior center.)

Frank is what you might call a stunt driver. He is able, for instance, to remove a bomb affixed to his car’s undercarriage by speeding up, launching airborne, then rotating the vehicle roughly 90 degrees in midair so that a hook dangling from a tall crane knocks off the explosive just as it detonates. This from a guy who keeps in his trunk a spare suit, neatly pressed, folded, shrink-wrapped and ready to change into after the one he’s wearing is rent asunder and besmirched by villain blood.

The Frank-takes-on-12-bad-guys-at-once and Frank-whups-the-big-black-thug are choreographed and cut by action-scene director Corey Yuen to resemble something lovingly filched from Jackie Chan. In one such scene, Yuen even rips off himself; Frank dusts some henchmen by whipping about a firehose with laser-like precision, much as Jet Li does in Romeo Must Die, for which Yuen was the martial arts choreographer.

Andie and I tackled our hunger at the Malaysian outpost on the Upper West Side, Penang. After settling down at a table that wasn’t all wobbly in the low-ceilinged downstairs lounge, I ordered the Penang house cocktail, which tasted orangey, like liquid DayGlo. After some soup made with minced pork and shrimp wontons, I ordered Andie’s entrée recommendation, the rendang, made with big, tender chunks of beef, cooked with a paste of ground onions, lemon grass and chili, then simmered in rich coconut curry gravy. I had it with hainanese rice, which is made with chicken broth. Mmm.

We left just as the jazz band arrived, which was just fine, as we had wanted to eat and talk, not listen to music.

Penang

• 240 Columbus Ave. (at West 71st Street)
• (212) 769-8889
• Meal 3 of 52: Penang Cocktail ($9), wonton soup ($3.50), beef rendang ($12.95) and a side of rice ($1.75).

My previous boss at my real estate job takes a slightly different footpath from Penn Station each morning to our office building, and as we entered the elevator together this morning, she told me about a guy either passed out or sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the methadone clinic a block away on Eighth Avenue. Have New Yorkers become so jaded that we’ll literally walk over someone, she wondered.

Having not lived in New York longer than I have, I can tell you that there are two prevailing views of the city:

1. It’s chock full of heartless, illiterate jerks and people sleeping on the sidewalk, so why’d you want to live there anyway.
2. It’s the world’s capital, home of the best art, culture and tradition, and why’d you want to live there anyway ’cause it’s really expensive.

Some blocks away, at a nearby midtown hotel off Sixth Avenue, during a sweltering summer day in 1948, E.B. White wrote an essay, Here is New York, that encompasses both of these categories.

At the time, White hadn’t lived in the city in years, and hadn’t in fact traveled much at all. But he’d been a fixture in Manhattan for a full decade earlier, writing for The New Yorker and holding court with friends like James Thurber and Dorothy Parker. After that, he’d retired to a farmhouse in Maine to write children’s books about the spiders and mice that lived in his barn, and to live out his life. But that day, he was in town to write about the city, which he first noted, “can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

Reading Here is New York now is to realize that nothing and everything have changed in the more than 50 years since. There are bums on the sidewalks now, there were bums on the sidewalks then. White writes of the “cold guilt” walking the Bowery late at night, drunks sleeping on the “free bed” of the sidewalk. “Pedestrians step along and over and around the still forms as though walking on a battlefield among the dead.“

In a city that’s always been in motion, White focuses a deal on changes startling to him then, that remain ongoing today: gentrification, crowding, growth skyward, a change of “tempo and in temper.”

He touches on the resilience of New York, and this quality of his essay has caused any number of people to trot it out post 9/11, particularly in his conclusion, which foreshadows that event:

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

But what Here is New York mostly is, is a homage to its neighborhoods, camaraderie, celebrity and multicultural character.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without a doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

I keep getting these damn “You Win 1-Liter Coke Product” caps on the 20-ounce bottles of Coke products I drink for lunch. But the thing is, at least in Manhattan, there appears to be no such thing as Coke in a one-liter container, which if my math and memory are correct, would be about the size of those glass bottles all soda used to ship in.

The best part about this was that just now, when I Googled for availability details and subliminally mistyped “one-liter Pepsi.” Half of the top-ten results referenced the following quote from 2004 that contains more detail than I sought:

Retired rapper and Beyoncé fiancé Jay-Z has ‘the biggest dick you will ever see in your life, but boring,’ according to U.S. mag Ozone. For their November sex-themed issue, the hip-hop mag asked people to spill the beans on famous people they’d shagged. And spill they did. While Jay-Z is supposed to have a penis ‘like a one-liter Pepsi bottle... It could block the sun,’ the mag’s informant says he’s boring in bed and ‘screams like a bitch when he busts.’

I think this is my new favorite penile simile, narrowly edging the Lenny Bruce classic, “like a baby’s arm with an apple in its fist.”

As part of the Film Forum’s Essential Hitchcock festival, I saw To Catch a Thief (1955) tonight.

It takes place in the French Riviera with Cary Grant playing the supposedly reformed jewel thief, John “The Cat” Robie, and Grace Kelly playing the young American debutante who falls for him.

Grant suffers from a basketball-hide tan throughout the film (or it’s the makeup or bad color on the print) and whenever I hear him speak, I can’t help but think of Tony Curtis’ wicked vocal impression in Some Like It Hot. But you can’t deny the guy is suave; I’ve always imagined that similarly poised modern fellows like George Clooney have studied Grant’s tapes extensively. I do know that whenever he was gallivanting about his villa or the countryside in Thief, my mind kept wandering to questions like, “Where did he get that fabulous sweater?” Kelly, is, well, Kelly: posture perfect, fresh scrubbed and radiant blonde, and not even some downright ugly Edith Head costumes make her stoop, especially that chaps-like swimwear-and-a-hat getup she wears in the hotel lobby; you just know Hitch got a boner picking that one out for her.

The movie is a slog to sit through, with pacing as languid as the sunny Riviera weather onscreen. Several dialogue-less car chase scenes are an especially sleepy chore. The 1950s saw some of Hitch’s sharpest, most engrossing plotting; consider Strangers on a Train (1951), Dial M for Murder and Rear Window (both 1954). Yet the whodunit aspect of Thief is boring.

Instead, see the film for the rapid, sharp verbal sparring between Grant and Kelly. (The screenplay’s by John Michael Hayes, who also wrote Rear Window.) Many of the funniest lines are bestowed upon the two chief secondary characters, Kelly’s blunt-spoken, flirty mother, played by Jessie Royce Landis, and John Williams as the staid British insurance executive, H. H. Hughson, who befriends Grant’s character.

For The New York Times’ fifth-annual Arts & Leisure Weekend, I went to the City University of New York Graduate Center to hear an interview with author William Gibson.

The interviewer, Brent Staples, an editorialist for the Times, I disliked immediately for his lime green socks and the red silk scarf draped over his otherwise black Manhattan ensemble. (Gibson, on the other hand, was dressed in solid black, as you’d expect, except for forest-green socks. Strange.)

But worse than Staples’ wardrobe was his inability to ask a clear, concise question. He’s one of these guys that blathers, whether editorializing, mentioning himself, fawning over or misrepresenting the author’s work, and just as you’re wondering if there’s a question in the near future, he drops one, and more often than not, it could have been asked without the windy prelude and/or it’s a near non-sequitur. Here’s a sample question, regarding Cayce, the protagonist of Pattern Recognition, as “an agent of standardization”: “Now, does that frighten you or is it just neat?” There were some snickers from the audience, but we were laughing at Staples, not with him.

Gibson wasn’t as dynamic as I thought he’d be, with a voice resembling worms dying, as he’s described it. Face it: you too thought he’d have a rich British accent, even knowing he’s an American living in Canada. I blame the moody Anton Corbijn photo of him that circulated circa his novel Idoru.

But, no, Gibson was raised in a town called Wytheville in southwestern Virginia, and my ear caught a curl to certain words he spoke—high school, them, endless, turns up—that could have been repressed Southern.

As have many writers branded Sci-Fi, Gibson began writing to escape the “extreme poverty of information” in his surroundings. He recalls subscribing to sci-fi fan-zines, crude precursors to blogs, with their fevered, mimeographed articles debated by post. At 14, he read Burroughs, believing surely he was the only one at that moment in his hometown to be doing so.

The most interesting theme in his writing that he discussed was what constitutes a sense of place and how that’s eroding. This crops up often in his work— for those unfamiliar with Gibson, he is best known with coining the word “cyberspace” in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. The “specificity of place erodes as more of us come into this circle of the expanding world,” he said, noting that he misses what Cayce calls “the mirror world,” or London’s small, strange differences from New York City.

In the U.S., he misses “the complexity of small places,” which have been replaced by prepackaged dullness: “Am I in Atlanta or the outskirts of Los Angeles?” In the world at large, he bemoans the fact that, say, Spain and France used to have “very distinctive flavors,” but that they’re running together into a generic European form, with the same ten shops on their High Streets, and standardized currency and electrical outlets. The world is tilting to a “Lonely Planet version” of itself where “every square inch of the globe is annotated.”

Gibson’s self-deprecating nature arose when he discussed how he has evolved technically in his writing. “When I started writing fiction, I didn’t know how to write characters,” he admitted, specifying that he took pains to give the ones in Neuromancer excuses as to why they had no discernable emotional depth. With each novel he’s also tried to stick more to a single point of view in real-time with not as much jump-cutting. As for his ritual of writing, he said, “If it didn’t get harder [to write each successive book], I would worry that I wasn’t doing it right.”

He’s also evolved to write more about the “real world,” instead of within the Sci-Fi genre he said he’s always had a friction with. He allows that he has a “European’s view of the future,” in which much at present remains recognizable, a vision proven to Gibson when he saw Blade Runner in 1982. “The future always consists, for the most part, of the past,” he said.

These “real world” themes, which featured strongly in his most recent book, will extend to the one he’s writing now, for which he gave up three small slices of detail. In it, he will deal with what he termed the “illicit facilitating” practiced by the people the “bad guys” hire to do their own dirty work, much like the Cowboys in Neuromancer.

“The NSA ECHELON base in Sugar Grove, West Virginia, will be mentioned at least once,” he added, carefully.

The only characters he mentioned were “America’s smallest ethnic crime family,” a Cuban-Chinese group by intermarriage that has “translated themselves” to living in Manhattan for the past decade, headed by a patriarch who used to be part of Cuba’s equivalent of the KGB.

Afterwards, I attended the event’s afterparty, held in a busy, dimmed room filled with couches and lounge-electronica. Because it was sponsored by a tasteful brand of alcohol, each attendee received a ticket for a free beverage. I ordered a martini with two olives, which I drank while eating crackers and wandering aimlessly among the crowd. With the lucidity of vodka, I caught a view of my seemingly rakish self in the restroom mirror and had a sudden simultaneous urge to be in the company of a beautiful woman and to purchase a book of Borges.

I took the subway down to Union Square, walked to the Strand, and found a single, excellent-condition used hardcover copy on the shelf for $20, as if it’d been waiting for me. One out of two isn’t bad. I thought about going to a bar by myself, but I must be going about such ventures the wrong way, because either the place is too crowded or it’s not crowded enough, and there’s no one at the bar but single guys such as myself, drinking their drink and possibly reading the newspaper.

Although the phrase sounds to be an oxymoron, there are five above-ground subways stations in Manhattan, according to nycsubway.org.

1. West 125th Street (1 line)
2. Dyckman Street (1 line)
3. West 207th Street (1 line)
4. West 215th Street (1 line)
5. East 148th Street (3 line)

They’re much more popular in the outer boroughs, but a rarity here in the city, where my home stop is one of them.

As you’d expect, there are downsides to stations outdoors. Cold weather or precipitation are not fun when enclosures or overhead coverage are minimal. There are more stairs to climb, although straphangers using the West 125th Street station get off easy with a pair of tremendously tall and narrow escalators. And as with the University Circle stop on the Red Line of the Greater Cleveland RTA Rapid System, I am distressed when I can see myself miss a train from blocks away, although I’m not sure why; unlike in Cleveland, another train here will arrive quickly, typically within five minutes.

On the other hand, it’s relaxing to bask in the sun and fresh air of an outdoor station when the weather’s agreeable, instead of lurking about a dim, urine-scented vault. You can look out over your neighborhood or directly into adjoining top-story apartment windows, if you’re some sort of pervert. From my station, I can see the train approach from about three-quarters of a mile away. At night, I can spot whitish-blue sparks of light bounce off distant buildings when the train’s wheels scrape the tracks, just before it rumbles into view, like lightning preceding thunder.

I’ve complained before about the absence of a portable eBook reader, and although there still isn’t one that’s flexible and truly pocket sized, yesterday at CES, Sony unveiled the U.S. version of the Sony Librié eBook reader. Named the Reader, it will hit store shelves here this Spring; no suggested retail price has been given yet, but the Librié was $380 when it debuted in Japan in mid-2004.

Random House, HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin-Putnam, Simon & Schuster and Time Warner Book Group have all agreed to support the Reader. Many independent and specialty publishers will also have eBook titles available for purchase and download to the device. Sony didn’t say anything about Digital Rights Management in its press materials, but I’m sure such offerings from major publishers will be crippled with copy protection, like iTunes Music Store tracks.

A major plus is that Sony will let users upload their own (or, theoretically, third-party) eBooks, among other digital content. Via USB, the device will accept unencrypted MP3 files (take that, iPod!), Adobe PDF documents, web pages and RSS news feeds from sites and JPEG photos.

According to reports I’ve read, the Reader’s text is more legible and crisp than even newsprint, at a variety of viewing angles. It doesn’t have a backlight, however, which makes it just like a book, in that you won’t be able to use it in the dark. (But unlike on an LCD screen, the text is visible under bright sunlight, Sony points out.)

The device looks clunky—dig all the buttons necessary for “one-handed navigation.” But it is only a half-inch thick and weighs less than nine ounces. The Librié runs on off-the-shelf batteries, but the Reader uses an “internal rechargeable battery,” by which I take to mean proprietary—Sony estimates “roughly 7,500 page turns” per charge. Out of the box, it will hold 80 average-length books and can store hundreds more with the addition of Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick technology or off-the-shelf Secure Digital Flash memory cards.

Hurrah, Sony. It sounds as if they’ve covered all the bases and not made too much of the device proprietary, concerning uploadable files and memory (but apparently not the battery). I’ve still curious about the cost of the device itself and its media, and whether it could ever become as popular as an iPod among the literary hipster set.

My high-speed internet was finally activated today. What a long, irritating trial that was.

I ordered DSL service from Verizon soon after I moved in October and after three postponed activation dates, threats from myself, speaking with managers and receiving pleading “please give us another chance” letters, the service was switched on December 24.

Naturally, there was something awry with my telephone jack, which necessitated a service appointment. The technician bailed on the first scheduled appointment on Tuesday without explanation, then showed up today and fixed it. Props to my super, Rodolfo, for letting the guy in with my spare set of keys. I wasn’t about to wait around my apartment “between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.” for some jackass techie to maybe show up.

I still had to spend a half hour on the phone after work today with a patient tech service rep because the CD-ROM Verizon supplies Mac users to configure the modem doesn’t work under the Tiger operating system. (It claims one doesn’t have administrative access privileges, even if one is the sole user and therefore administrator of one’s computer, as is my case.) I had to configure all of the name/password stuff and networking preferences manually.

I hooked up my Airport Express and nerdily christened my new wireless network Argo. Soon after viewing some pornography online to ensure the connection was working, my Mac stubbornly refused to locate the wireless network, although if this is a true and persistent problem, it will be the first that hasn’t been Verizon’s fault. I can still surf the web if I plug my Ethernet cable directly from my PowerBook into the modem, so now it’s just getting the wireless bit up and running, and I’m set.

I can honestly say I missed the internet the past two months at home only for checking the weather, directions and movie show times. I admit it was a pain to compose blog entries at home, then cart them to work for uploading during my lunch break. But on the whole, I spent most of my no-internet wilderness time reading books. Although as an omnipresent and all-knowing reference oracle, I welcome the ’net back into my home life.

Truth be told, I’ve been here before, but I only drank a Diet Coke, then picked at a side salad, rearranging it on my plate so it looked like I’d eaten more than I had.

This was when I was an editor with the real estate magazine and was being asked out to lunch by some PR flack every week. The one who took me here was a run down middle-aged woman whose agency name included her own last name, and whose clients were insignificant or irrelevant to the magazine. I designed to eat little, if anything, because although she was paying, I didn’t want to give the idea I was keen on her services. She ended up causing a scene when she knocked her glass of wine over the table and ended up confiding to me that she was having some sort of operation the next day and was nervous about her prospects. That was weird. Whatever happened to that lady?

I went to Lazzara’s after work today for dinner and it was dead. When I was there before at lunch, it was packed, as I’m sure it often is, because the chief fare is billed as the Garment District’s best thin-crust pizza, and it ranks highly be me.

I ordered the John’s Special, made with the restaurant’s fresh-tomato and basil sauce, diced spicy pepperoni, red and green pepper slices and fresh mushrooms. The crust was crisp, the pizza entirely greasy and satisfying. I could only eat three of the six squares (Lazzara’s pizzas are rectangular), but the other half will be my dinner tomorrow.

The decor is pleasant and dark at Lazzara’s, with warm traces of the building’s original ornaments: small leaded glass windows in the outer front door, wood floors, scuffed black-painted chairs all at two-person tables, ceilings of painted pressed tin bordered by decorative molding. The doorway directly into the dining room has a handsomely inconspicuous stained-glass transom window, and hanging on the walls were giant, lingering Christmas wreaths, big framed mirrors and a turn-of-the-century print of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Lazzara’s

• 221 West 38th Street (between Seventh and Eighth Avenues)
• (212) 944-7792
• Meal 2 of 52: John’s Special pizza ($16) and a nice chianti ($6).

It’s strange that the Port Authority Bus Terminal should have a 30-lane bowling alley on its second floor. But it’s a good thing if, like me, you’re a longtime fan of the ol’ tenpin.

Manhattan isn’t a bowling borough; aside from the Port Authority’s Leisure Time lanes, the only other options are Bowlmor Lanes and the AMF Chelsea Pier Bowl. Leisure Time has perhaps the best deals ($30 flat rate per hour for up to six people) and most convenient location, and at Samantha’s invitation, I met up with her, Iggy, Alan and Ritchey there early this afternoon for a round of beer, snacks and a few games.

The occasion was Ritchey’s birthday, which was strange, because he was not much of a bowler, although he took it in stride. We had the gutter-blocking rails raised for the last game and it made for some fascinating bank shots. I stuck to my normal gameplay and didn’t intentionally use the rails because I didn’t want to get used to such a wildcard factor. They do make the game more fun and slightly more equitable for the gutter-ball prone, such as the small children who were playing on both sides of our lane.

We had a raucous good time. I missed out on the first game, Alan won the second, and I squeaked by in the tenth frame of the third (with a strike!) to win, even though my score was an inconsistently achieved 130-something, a far cry from my heyday in high school bowling club, when I averaged 180.

Yes, it was good.

Goodburger

• 800 Second Avenue (at East 43rd Street)
• (212) 922-1700
• Meal 1 of 52: Goodburger with the works (ketchup, mustard, mayo, purple onion, lettuce, tomato and pickles) ($5.25), fries ($1.95) and a regular Diet Coke ($1.75).