February 2006 Archives

Without too much trouble, this should be a finalist for Most Unnecessary Foodstuff of 2006. First off, there’s only one cookie in there. Why cookies on the label, plural? It’s like the opposite of Triscuit.

And to state the obvious: cookies for breakfast? How about some Cookie Crisp? Or, dude, just grab some Chips Ahoy! and a fistful of vitamins. Yeah, each Quaker Cookies has five grams of dietary fiber; however you’ll also note it’s not a low or reduced-fat product, because if it was, it’d be the first thing you’d notice on the label, not the impish grin of a porky Christian.

If you’re able to keep yourself from making a no-talent joke stemming from the word “suck,” don’t you think re-embattled British pop star George Michael resembles a lamprey?

At least he does in this picture; It’s the first association my mind made, anyway. Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against George, or the lamprey, for that matter. I still enjoy the songs “Faith,” “Father Figure” and, when I’m feeling saucy, “I Want Your Sex.”

It’s just...lamprey.

The East Village contains a lot of really good looking people, even on a sunny, bitter winter day like today when many of them are bundled up like surly Michelin mascots. I was in the neighborhood rooting around for a few hours in the basement of Norman’s Sound & Vision, now my second-favorite shop to snag cherry used CDs, after Academy Records. Root you shall at Norman’s: some of the best deals are to be found under the cabinets holding the higher-priced items, or thrown into milkcrates and cardboard boxes on the floor. If you go, make sure you’re not wearing your fancy pants; they may dirty as you scoot around on the floor like an arthritic breakdancer. Among my finds was a Samantha Fox greatest hits CD for $4.99! What? No, I’m not ashamed.

Because the owner of her apartment building is converting it to condos, Katie found a new apartment in Jersey City and will move in next weekend. In the meantime, she wanted to paint the place and I volunteered to help.

I stopped by her old place to pick up some preliminary supplies: white paint, brushes, pans, dropcloths, masking tape and brushes from the last time she painted, chairs and a stool (since we had no ladder for reaching the tops of the 10-foot-high walls in the new place), boom box and CDs, soap and towel, garbage bags, and pistachios, peanuts and Triscuits.

Katie’s new place, a third-floor walkup, is in a hipper and nicer neighborhood than her previous apartment, even though it’s less than 10 blocks away. It’s in a tall, handsome brick building a stone’s throw away from an upscale apartment complex that used to be the Dixon Pencil Factory, still sporting two 150-foot smokestacks. Built in the mid-1800’s, the stout, sprawling red-brick structure housed manufacturing operations for the yellow Dixon Ticonderoga pencil, friend of standardized test-takers and crossword puzzlers the world over.

This photo depicts only part of Katie’s living room with its richly colored hardwood floors. The front door is just to the left and part of the bricked-over fireplace is on the right. The windows are bordered with simple but distinctive Art Deco-style molding and the ledges extend in such a way that one can stand on a sill and do a full-body gyration-dance to the delight of strangers passing by outside. Or so I would imagine. Behind this view is the long kitchen leading to the bathroom and the bedroom.

After dropping off our stuff, we spent a really, really, really long time at the flagship location of Siperstein’s, New Jersey’s signature family-owned paint store chain. We bought more brushes and dropcloths, rollers, toxic paint-remover fluid and one of those metal keys that opens paint cans and beer bottles. And we bought paint. It took time for Katie to select the perfect colors. She shuffled the paint chips under the fluorescents (and near one of the store’s windowed doors to see what the colors would look like in natural light) until she found the perfect Dutch Boy ultralight orange for her living room and the perfect green for the bedroom. I’d call the orange “Albino Circus Peanut” and the green “1960s Light Green,” which is the color of the “Pistachio” KitchenAid mixer and at least one Vespa model I’ve seen.

I liked that Ralph Lauren Home has a whole line of paint, “Urban Loft,” that includes at least 19 hues named after Manhattan streets and neighborhoods. Beyond the one named Washington Square, which resembles New York University’s regal purple, I was stumped by the associations: a lavender Chelsea, creamy Tribeca, rust-red Village, and deep blue for both Hudson and Sullivan. Of course, the same copywriter has to assign names to 25 extremely similar shades of white, so I can understand why he would lose it and feverishly start randomizing names with colors.

As for Katie’s selections, when she arrived at the sales counter with the winning chips firmly in hand, she was informed that they didn’t have the bases to mix Ralph’s color. Oh, or the Dutch Boy color. In fact, two different guys squinted at the Ralph Lauren chip with “where’d you get this?” looks of confusion, as if Katie had handed them a Yu-Gi-Oh card and asked for two gallons. One of the guys eventually volunteered to try his hand at approximating the colors, and after appraising some hastily mixed tests smeared on litmus strip-sized pieces of paper, Katie approved the hand-mixed knockoffs. Ralph should not only fret over the clothing counterfeiters of Canal, but the alchemists at Siperstein’s as well.

We had just started with the trim in the bedroom when Kelly and Megan arrived. Painting is a long, thankless process, but we made it more fun listening to bad ’80s music on the boom box and cracking wise. Here, Kelly and Katie work over a wall with roller-brushes.

After we began to flag, Katie got the number for Lombardi’s and ordered sodas, beer and two big pizzas: one with mushrooms and onions, the other with breaded and fried chunks of eggplant on it and lots of garlic. Kelly and Megan bowed out after a few hours, and Katie and I finished around midnight, after an estimated three coats of paint. The room looks good and I don’t think we got too much paint on the carpet and the ceiling.

I wrapped up reading Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which one of you got me for Christmas or my birthday or something. It’s not bad; it’s not strictly a “language book,” like Simon Winchester’s excellent The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary, and it’s not strictly a guide like Strunk & White’s classic Elements of Style, but a blend of both. This means it’s a fun read, but that I’m unlikely to refer to it as a reference, even though it somewhat attempts to be one.

Yet she’s able to turn a confusing system into something of humor and interest. She’s what would be known among readers of William Safire’s “On Language” column as a member of the “Gotcha Gang.” She takes pride in spotting examples of bad grammar in public and sharing it with others, alerting the signmaker or merchant, or correcting it herself—in the photo on the book’s dust jacket, she is poised, marker uncapped and ready to add an apostrophe to a Two Weeks Notice movie poster.

I enjoyed her capsule histories of each punctuation mark and her cheeky, learned citations, everything from James Thurber’s eternal comma wrangling with his editor Harold Ross, to Dorothy Parker’s denunciation of more or less every mark of punctuation. There are copious self-referential examples of correct usage, many featuring Opal Fruits, also known as Starburst.

I went over to Andie and Eric’s tonight with a bottle of Pinot for a dinner she cooked: lamb, with roasted potatoes and red-wine risotto. Tummy-warming goodness on a bitter winter night.

Speaking of bitter, as we ate, we watched women’s Olympic skating and marveled at the curt commentary of announcer and former skater Dick Buttons. He’s a snob, and hard to please beyond a perfectly executed split jump, but at least he’s consistent in his grousing, entertainingly so.

I’m one of many, I think, who rallied in support of the return of Nicolas Cage’s patented sad-sack funny-guy role in Adaptation. You know, the one he originated in the ’80s, playing H.I. in Raising Arizona and the one-handed baker in Moonstruck. Brilliant.

Unfortunately, this archetype peaked with Leaving Las Vegas and for the rest of the ’90s, Nicholas “Call me ‘Nick’” Cage was Mr. Best Actor big-budget action movie star, resplendent in his personal trainers and expensive hairpieces. My eyes water from the stink: The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off, Snake Eyes, 8MM. Things improved with Bringing Out the Dead and by Adaptation, Cage had returned to shouldering the saddlebags of sadness in all his schlubby glory.

So I suppose I can’t complain about his most recent film, The Weather Man, which I watched tonight on DVD. It was just too much for me to have his character constantly shit upon by this cruel world. His sodden grimness blankets the film like its dark Chicago winter. There are welcome flashes of comedic brilliance, but most of them were given away in the trailer: Cage’s sudden infatuation with archery, a building joke that never quite pays off. Him getting pelted with various fast food items thrown by passing strangers (physical comedy is my weakness and my favorite here has him talking on his cell phone as he gets nailed square in the head by a six-piece box of Chicken McNuggets, in extreme slow motion, no less). And the straw-that-breaks-the-marriage’s-back “Don’t forget the tartar sauce” directive by wife Hope Davis, which we witness him forget during a voiceover of rapid stream-of-conscious thoughts as he crosses the street to the store.

Some funny bits not in the trailer that I’ll give away are Michael Caine, as Cage’s father, in what’s certainly the high point of an illustrious 50-year acting career, carefully describing what a cameltoe is. Then there’s the grimly funny results of a botched “trust-building” marriage counseling exercise with Cage’s now extremely estranged wife, wherein they each write down the worst secret they’ve kept from one other, then exchange papers, promising never to read them. Guess what happens! Ha ha!

Other than that, the script meanders and seems to have at least two endings, neither of which is wholly satisfactory.

A girl I know who lives in Jersey near the Passaic Falls had never heard of William Carlos Williams’ poetic ode to the city they’re in, Paterson, so I offered to lend her my copy. Tonight, while paging through it, I found this bookmark.

What an awesome bookstore that was. It was located in my college town of Bowling Green, Ohio, on Main Street, sandwiched between a bar frequented by underclassmen and the 24-hour diner they’d stumble to afterhours for alcohol-absorbing hamburgers. As a creative writing and journalism major at BGSU in the early-’90s, and because the Wood County Public Library was located conveniently just across the street, I spent entirely too much time at Pauper’s. I was surprised to learn years later that the place was still whisperingly referred to as an anarchist shop. I’ve been in anarchist bookstores before; they need an anarchist name (“Viva la Books!”), prints of Che hanging all over the place, and a battered card table in the back where subversives can meet, drink too much coffee and write manifestos. Now maybe Pauper’s sold a few rabble-rousing rags, but it had no additional anarchic features other than a sense of organization. We’re talking literally piles of books. That “drive you simply nuts” slogan on the Pauper’s bookmark isn’t only a cheesy clipart pun. Far in the back of the store, there was stack upon toppling stack of boxes and those flat boxes grapes are wholesold in, filled with books and reaching the ceiling.

You can get a small sense of this disarray looking at these photos I took during a trip back to Bowling Green in September 2002, although they don’t represent the store as packed as it once was. That day, as you can see from a sign in one of the photos, the merchandise was 50% off. The store was struggling to stay open then and was to close for good a year later.

For a journalism class assignment, I had to write a business-related article and I chose to interview Pauper’s owner, Leo Schifferli, a skinny, gray-bearded fellow with Le Corbusier-like spectacles. He spoke slowly and with care and seemed to know everything about any book. I wasn’t surprised when he told me he didn’t have an inventory management system for his thousands of books. Not only that, he had only recently upgraded to the computerized version of Books in Print from microfilm, although I frequently saw his 386 on but unused and him still squinting at projected pieces of film that he shifted expertly under glass. But he didn’t need an inventory management system. He remembered where everything was in the store and he was willing to go the extra yard to seal a deal. When I asked him for that copy of Paterson he knew there wasn’t one in the store but offered to bring in the spare copy from his home collection, a handsome New Directions paperback edition from 1963.

He’s the one who told me about Amazons, the infamous faux-memoir Don DeLillo wrote pretending to be the first female NHL player. He offered to sell me a hardcover copy for a reasonable sum and I wish now I would have bought it, if not only because it’s been wholly out of print since its original run in 1980 and is considered one of the great contemporary books written under a pseudonym—in fact, Keith Gessen wrote an article about it in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, “In Search of the Great American Hockey Novel.” Leo was a well-read gentleman who could make recommendations of new writers or classics books based solely on the last few books you had read. Learning what I liked, he introduced me to Richard Yates, selling me Eleven Kinds of Loneliness for $4.75. It remains one of my favorite short story collections.

My college roommate Scott and I were surprised to find Leo at the door of our apartment late one night, moonlighting as a deliveryman for our favorite pizza parlor, Pisanello’s. He was wearing the same gray knit watchman’s cap he always wore in his unheated store and was making his way across town for his deliveries on his beat-up 10-speed. Was he delivering pizzas because his store wasn’t making enough money or because he wanted to get out and about more? With Leo, it was probably a bit of both; he had a weird, absent-minded sense of humor. He’s the one who told me, “Pocket Books are called that for a reason” and would sometimes have fire-sales of moldy pulp-fiction paperbacks from a tall metal spinner rack he’d put out on the sidewalk on sunny days. He was kind of hoping people entranced by the cool retro covers would steal them and he wouldn’t have to regret throwing them in the trash.

Carol Reed directed the famous The Third Man in 1949, but the year before released a drama, The Fallen Idol, that has become lost in those looming film noir shadows. Although Fallen Idol was Oscar-nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay (by Graham Greene, no less, the novelist who also wrote Third Man), it’s still unavailable anywhere on video or DVD.

I saw it at Film Forum tonight and the plot is very like something Hitchcock would have been proud of. A French ambassador’s nine-year-old son, Phillipe, living in an sprawling embassy in Chelsea, London, befriends a butler, Baines, and unwittingly learns of an affair he’s been having with another member of the staff. Late one night, Phillipe witnesses a murder, and flees in terror, running barefoot in his pajamas down the streets of Chelsea in an image that closely prefigures Joseph Cotten’s famous chase of Orson Welles down the wet cobblestones of Vienna in The Third Man.

One of the most startling images I’ve seen on film occurs during a scene in which the child is awakened by Mrs. Baines, the butler’s spiteful wife, hovering over him with a crazed stare—one of her bobby pins drops to his pillow with a dead plop.

The second half of the film is the murder investigation that involves misplaced suspicion, lies and ends in the child nearly getting the wrong suspect convicted. I’m no fan of precocious child actors, but Bobby Henrey does a first rate job as a free-spirited, nosy child that is annoying only when his character is supposed to be, which unfortunately or not is for a lot of the script, as he unwittingly blurts out secrets he shouldn’t have and poses questions better left unasked. He can’t even really be considered a child actor as he was only ever in one other film, which may have something to do with his fine, unactorly performance.

I watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade tonight for the first time in a while, and Sean Connery as Harrison Ford’s father bugged me more than it has in the past few times I’ve seen this movie.

First of all, the guy only looks and acts a dozen years older than his son, perhaps because that’s the actual age difference between Connery and Ford. And second, he has an outrageous Scottish accent, something Ford doesn’t have except in that brief scene where he’s not so cleverly disguised as a lord in search of castle tapestries.

If Spielberg is going to go to the trouble of showing us where Indiana got that scar on his chin that Ford has in real life, maybe he should have cooked up an elaborate backstory for Connery’s accent. Or maybe he thought that leaving it unexplained would somehow fit the movie convention of characters from non-English-speaking countries that speak English but with a British accent.

For the dinner of my Stick’a-Butter Saturday, I wanted eggplant parmesan. The recipe I viewed at Epicurious.com was too involved for a dish so simple, so I called Mom for her recipe. If you want to immpress someone, make eggplant parmesan with your own tomato sauce and fresh mozzarella. But if you are hungry for eggplant parmesan and feel you can skip the razzle-dazzle, this recipe’s gold.

The only thing holding me back was that I didn’t have a baking dish. I was happy to not have to trek out to Target in the cold, instead finding one at my local ferreteria, which turns out isn’t a polecat repository after all, but a hardware store. It’s unclear why this hardware store had Pyrex baking dishes, but it was exactly what I sought, only required me to walk a block, cost $11 and will provide years of culinary happiness until I drop it.

With the long holiday weekend calling, I rolled up my sleeves and did some cooking. By the end of the day, I had used most of a stick of butter.

For breakfast, I made pancakes from a recipe I saw mentioned on megnut.com. It’s from Epicurious, Condé Nast’s recipe collection reprinted from its Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines. This one’s from the April 1998 issue of Bon Appétit.

I learned some things making this dish. Bread goes stale more quickly if you spread it out. I stacked mine on a plate which I covered with a sieve to make less accessible for bugs that may have happened by my kitchen counter. A day later and only the top piece was truly stale; the others were just less soft, which isn’t saying much when you’re dealing with commercial sandwich bread pulsing with multisyllablic chemicals. Instead, I should have put the slices on a cookie sheet and kept them in my unheated oven for protection.

Also, and I admit I had this same problem when I began making grilled cheese sandwiches: once the pan is greased and heated, turn down the damn heat. The first few pancakes were flash-fried and blistered with shameful char spots. The next few, I dampened the flame, but used too much butter, so the pancakes ended up more like crêpes, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Refrigerating leftover pancakes: it may have been because I hadn’t allowed mine to cool completely, but after stacking and sealing them in a Ziploc bag that I refrigerated, I discovered later several of them had glued together.

But most importantly, how did they taste? Rich and custardy. I thought that with the addition of bread cubes, they would resemble cross-sections of conglomerate rock, but that’s not the case; they look like pancakes. I recommend serving them with U.S. Grade A Dark Amber maple syrup. Some readers on Epicurious.com insisted on adding cinnamon, nutmeg and/or vanilla to spruce up what they perceived as blandness, but my batch’s unadorned sugary-butter-warmth taste was satisying.

Combining elements of a cafeteria with a vending machine, entrepreneurs Joe Horn and Frank Hardart opened the first Automat in 1902 in Phiadelphia, following it with New York City’s first such restaurant ten years later on Times Square.

The concept was simple. Small, glass-doored comparments lining the walls were chilled, heated or neither, depending on the single serving of food nestled inside. Each compartment had a corresponding coin slot, and patrons shuffled down the line with a tray, inserting nickels to unlock the doors and remove the food of their choice. Unseen staff working on the other side of the walls refilled empty compartments. Coffee, tea and other beverages were dispensed by placing a cup under a spigot, then inserting a coin. Customers with laden trays then gathered silverware and seated themselves. Automats were fine places for quick, cheap meals and to overhear snatches of only-in-New-York coversation among the establishment’s thrifty patrons.

Automats hit paydirt during the Great Depression, by which time there were more than 42 in the city, collectively serving hundreds of thousands of meals to cash-strapped patrons daily. Irving Berlin wrote two odes to the Automat in 1932: “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” which became a jingle for Horn & Hardart, the chain name now synonymous with Automat, and “Lunching at the Automat,” which imagined New York’s social elite reduced to rubbing elbows with commonfolk at mealtime:

Times are not so sweet,
But the bluebloods have to eat,
So the best of families meet
At the Automat.

. . . .

The Morgans and the Whitneys
And the other big shots
Change dollars into jitneys
And drop them in the slots.

Although meals could be had for nickels, grifters paid even less with substitutes ranging from slugs, purchased 15 for a dime, to foreign currency valued at far less than five cents but equal in shape. Five-pfennig and two-sou coins worked well.

In 1936, Berenice Abbott photographed the dessert section of the Automat at 977 Eighth Avenue just south of Columbus Circle, popular among area musicians, cabaret-goers and other nighthawks.

This Otto Soglow cartoon published in The New Yorker a few months later suggests how the Automat had worked itself into the popular imagination.

For World War II rationing efforts, Horn & Hardart hired “Sugar Girls” who doled out the sweetener that used to be kept in bowls at every table. Customers purchasing coffee or tea had to tell the Sugar Girl how much they wanted, limited to a maximum of two teaspoonfuls per cup.

Automats began to disappear during the following decades as fast food chains rose in popularity and inflation made nickel-only purchases obsolete. By the early ’60s, there were only six items at the Automat that still cost five cents: three varieties of buttered roll, servings of buttered bread or toast, and a doughnut.

While campaigning for Nixon’s 1960 presidential bid, multimillionaire New York governor Nelson Rockefeller showed he was a man of the people by lunching on a cruller and coffee at the Automat on Union Square. I like to think Irving Berlin got a kick out of that, just as he would have been saddened to hear that the city’s last Automat, located on Third Avenue and 42nd Street, closed in 1991.

So New York residential brokers really are jerks, and hard up for money and attention, too, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. An item in the New York Daily News today noted 28-year-old Coldwell Banker broker Jason Lewis is selling snow from the Blizzard of 2006 in a Ziploc freezer bag.

“I got the idea when someone sold a hot dog from an NFC championship game for $4,000 or $5,000. ... If it sells, I’ll find some dry ice and pack it up, or if it’s close, I’ll hand-deliver it.“

Lewis wants a minimum of $9.99 for the frozen precipitation collected in front of his apartment building at the corner of Fulton and Gold Sts.

Last I checked, Jason hadn’t received any bids. Maybe he would have had more success with the type of cheaper, more direct approach I saw on Union Square a few winters ago: some guy sitting on the sidewalk, selling snowballs for a dollar.

You’ve probably seen this photo before; it’s Dorthea Lange’s Migrant Mother. You may have seen it in a history textbook, in an art, photography or photojournalism class, or in an museum. Maybe you know you’ve seen it before, but can’t recall where. For you, the image may represent “the Dust Bowl,” “the New Deal” or “the Great Depression.” Lange took five other photos that day in 1936 of the same mother and children. She also took photos of other migrant mothers, as did some of the 21 other photographers in her Farm Security Administration group. Certainly many other photographers have captured images of weary mothers and children.

So why that photo?

For discussion on this issue, I went to the The New School’s Tishman Auditorium tonight to hear a panel session, “What Makes an Image Iconic?”

The moderator was the director of exhibitions for the Aperture Foundation, the nonprofit organization and publisher. The panel was comprised of the director of the George Eastman House, a contemporary photography collector and the director of photographs at the auctioneer Phillips de Pury & Company.

The auctioneer argued iconic photos are almost purely market driven and he made an interesting case. Looking up key photographers in the Price Database of artnet, he found that that different prints of the same image surface at auction time and time again and command the highest bids: William Eggleston’s The Red Ceiling and Tricycle, Ansel Aadms’ Moonrise Over Hernandez, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Michel Gabriel, Rue Mouffetard and Hyères, 1932, and so on. But Migrant Mother cracks this argument; unlike those other images, there are no known clearance or cost restrictions on reproducing Lange’s original photo.

A confluence of factors would seem to be at work in making an image iconic: popularity and promotion of a certain photographer, often a passing of time after the photo has been taken and critical acclaim slowly builds, a highly original image presented in a certain symmetry, a capture of emotion or of a single startling moment in time. The collector, who had a thick Spanish accent and a colorful grasp of English, defined it as an image that “turned his stomach,” although he clearly didn’t mean in a negative sense.

One obvious reason for an image’s iconography may have been sitting right in front of me. An iconic image is one a large number of people have seen, and who is more responsible for that than the critic, educator or publisher who writes or talks about it; the museum director who displays it; the auctioneer who gives it value; and the influential buyer or seller involved in that transaction. In his defense, the museum director stressed that the Eastman House doesn’t play the icon game in that its mission is to acquire the complete works of a photographer, not piecemeal greatest-hits. But you can’t tell me that when that director plans an exhibit, say of Albert Weston’s photos, he’s going to leave out Pepper No. 30, a photo the director also happened to mention is a personal favorite. It made me think of the film I saw recently on art curator Henry Geldzahler, who promoted the art he loved, only to see it commoditized.

Intriguingly, the panel claimed that there have been no iconic pure-art photos since the early ’70s, the same time the market for “classic” photography began to take off. There have been iconic political or journalistic photos since then; the panel cited the photo of the lone protestor standing before the line of tanks on Tiananmen Square. Audience members made cases for the hooded Abu Gharib prisoner photo and the photo of firemen raising the flag at Ground Zero, but others countered that there are many such prisoner and 9/11 images that could be considered equally iconic.

I’d add that iconography can be debilitating, blinding a viewer to other works by the same artist, or of a lesser known artist, that may be as good if not better. I would think that after stewing in limelight long enough, an image could even lose its impact, iconic or otherwise.

February 17, 2006 Update: This wasn’t mentioned by anyone at the session, but according to a Photo District News article I came across today (“Steichen Photo Breaks Auction Record” by Daryl Lang), the 1904 photo by Edward Steichen, The Pond-Moonlight, sold for $2.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York on February 14. That price is more than double that of the previous auction-sale record, which was set by a Richard Prince photo. Two other images exceeded the Prince record that same night, both prints of Georgia O’Keefe from 1919 by photographer Alfred Stieglitz: Nude and Hands. They sold for $1.36 million and $1.47 million, respectively. Interestingly, Steichen and Stieglitz are both well-known, highly regarded photographers and the photos are representative of their style; however, they’re not particularly iconic selections.

Garlic is highly hygroscopic, which I know because whenever I need it for a recipe, the cloves are bloated and spongy, lurking in the dark of my cabinet like plump maggots. Eww. So I stopped by Williams-Sonoma tonight and asked the greeter, an overweight woman with a high-pitched voice, where to find “one of those ceramic things you put your garlic in.”

“Actually, sir,” she said, “ours are terra cotta. They’re in the far back on the right.”

As I passed the KitchenAid mixers, Le Creuset cookware and gleaming stainless steel implements, I wondered how sexy Williams-Sonoma could make a garlic cozy, or whatever they might call it. Well, I can tell you without a doubt that Williams-Sonoma’s garlic cozies exude less style than most any other item they carry, including their coasters.

The cozies sat in a row on a low shelf near some bland salt and pepper shakers. They’re tiny terra-cotta pots, unfinished on the outside, glazed on the inside and topped with an ill-fitting lid. Three holes have been added to the face in an uninspired fashion. They reminded me of miniature versions of those pots designed for planting Hens and Chicks. For $10, I demand more flair from my garlic cozy. I recall seeing glazed ceramic ones shaped like garlic bulbs. Where can I get those, anyway? Target doesn’t have them, and now I know Williams-Sonoma doesn’t, either.

As I was leaving empty-handed, the greeter asked, “Oh, were we all out?”

“Nah, I just didn’t like them,” I said. “But they were right where you said they’d be, so in that sense, your help was a success.”

I hadn’t meant this to be funny, but she laughed this high-pitched laugh as if my response was the funniest thing she had heard all day. Or she was just humoring me, another potential customer leaving without a proper garlic storage device.

A third of U.S. adults say they’re very happy, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. Another half say they are pretty happy and 15% consider themselves not too happy.

Two of the report’s findings surprised me:

1. These percentages have remained stable for more than 30 years. Pew and similar sociological survey firms have been posing the question “How happy are you these days in your life?” since 1972 and there’s barely a blip in the levelness of the responses.
2. Pet owners are no happier than those without pets. Well aware that millions of cat and dog owners would sit bolt upright and screech like shivved banshees at this revelation, Pew hides it at the very end of its report (“A Closing Note on a Delicate Subject”), adding: “We’re at a loss to explain.”

Not as revelatory are that republicans have been consistently happier than democrats, rich people happier than poor, and religious people happier than heathens.

Pondering the results, I put more thought into the question being asked. This isn’t meant to make you muss my hair and say, “Aw, Jason, you’re such a cynic,” but how many people are really “very happy”? I’m serious: Are people aware what that phrase could encompass in their lives?

I’d like to ask these very happy people, oh, really: Are you happy when you’re sleeping? How about when you’re commuting to work? Or when you’re shitting, taking a shower or on that conference call at work? You may not be sad when doing these things, but I don’t think very happy is the right descriptor, either. I’m plenty happy, but I wouldn’t say “very happy.” Go back to your macramé and your reality television, very happy people, and stay out of New York; your type gets mugged.

After getting off easy in December and January, Old Man Winter made up for lost time by throwing down on the East Coast today. New York City got its deepest snowfall ever, according to various news reports, at least 26.9 inches in Central Park. I stayed inside nearly all day listening to music, reading the paper from cover to cover, drinking a lot of coffee and trying to assemble one of my new chairs but giving up after about an hour. I finally ventured outside for the first time all today around midnight to take out the garbage. I thought I’d take some blizzard aftermath photos, but it looked just like the blizzard last year, so I couldn’t get too worked up about it.

Breathless is best summed up in two words: Citizen Kane. Not that it involves Orson Welles or sleds or shares the same level of pop culture recognition, but because it’s a movie more often discussed than seen. It’s style over substance and it’s still being visually quoted in movies today.

It was tough to see Breathless for what it was when it came out in 1960: one of the first films to make use of jump cuts, handheld camerawork and characters breaking the fourth wall. The lead character, Michel, is played by Jean-Paul Belmondo as an emotionally detached, occasionally violent smooth-talker, an archetype that extends directly through (and perhaps inspired) characters in films from Bonnie and Clyde to Pulp Fiction. But there’s more humor in Breathless than those films, in both the action and dialogue.

The plot is loose, to say the least. After killing a policeman, Michel gads about the streets and cafes of Paris, stealing a car when he needs to get somewhere or mugging someone for money when he needs to buy something. He pesters his on-again off-again American girlfriend, Patricia, played with pixie hotness by Jean Seberg, to run away with him to Italy. Belmondo isn’t particularly handsome, but his smooth recklessness makes up for it; he reminds me of Steve McQueen in that way. There’s an extended scene of Michel and Patricica together in her hotel-room bedroom, mostly sparring verbally, flirting, philosophizing and chain smoking, that perfectly encapsulates the carelessness of youth.

I saw Breathless at one of the Museum of Modern Art’s two theaters, a few doors down on West 53rd Street from the museum. My MoMA membership gets me into the movies for free and it’s a mystery why I didn’t begin taking advantage of this perk sooner. The theater, the audience and the the film’s introduction reminded me of my longtime filmgoing experience at the Cleveland Cinematheque, only with more comfortable seats—those stereotypical red-cloth upholstered recliney ones, about 200 of them.

To kick-off the screening, some woman got up and stood behind a podium at the right-hand foot of a low stage, above which was the screen. She introduced the film, then introduced someone who I think was either Godard’s wife or sister—some old French woman, anyway, who said a few words and left. During the film, a nice New York touch was the occasional rumbling subway heard through the rear wall, the E or V, I presume.

People’s experiences and memories are so subjective. It makes you wonder about the whole idea of ’historical fact.’

Johnny Cash, Cash (1997)

In that quote, Cash was referring to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, but he could have been talking about his own biography, or his biopic, Walk the Line, which I saw tonight with Jimi, the Man and Mike.

I’m not the biggest fan of biopics, particularly the ones like Line that follow the formula: 1.) obscurity; 2.) popularity; 3.) downfall; 4.) redemption. I cringe at the clumsy visual cues (usually briefly glimpsed newspaper clippings) and verbal nudging (“Hi, I’m Sam. Sam Phillips.”) to identify lesser-known details in the subject’s life. Plus there’s the Oscar-baiting inherent in playing a beloved but “complicated” musician (see also: Ray, Amadeus, Shine).

Truth be told, Cash’s story fits the formula well, particularly because even he didn’t sugarcoat his own life story while he was still living it, chronicling his amphetamine addiction, infidelity and inability to ever see eye to eye with his father. The film deals with the best chunk of Cash’s life, from his late-1950s country music superstardom playing with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, through to his infamous Folsom Prison concert in 1968, the same year he married June. Joaquin Phoenix does a fine job channeling Cash. He sings well, too, or perhaps I should say, like Cash, although the real Man in Black’s register was richer and lower. Reese Witherspoon doesn’t get as close to mimicking June Carter’s voice, but I get the idea her sass and her spunky attitude, particularly in the male-dominated country music world, is closer to the truth. Some of the movie’s warmest scenes are when John and June meet cute while still married to other people, or when they’re singing together.

Mattel, which has had several quarters of declining sales and an 18% domestic sales drop over the holidays for Barbie, its largest and most profitable line, decided to shake things up by today rolling out a new look for Ken. Like the last time Mattel pulled a stunt like this, two years ago when Ken and Barbie broke-up, the announcement made headlines.

Ken’s new look, you see, is “aimed at making a love reconnection with Barbie,” although I don’t think it’s gonna work out.

One of the new Ken styles has him decked out in “torn, rough jeans, a weathered, motocross leather jacket, vintage t-shirt and rugged boots,” while the other has him dolled up as a beach boy with less poufy, “sun-kissed” hair.

Hollywood stylist Phillip Bloch, who advised Mattel on the new designs, says Ken’s new look reflects how the character has “spent time exploring the world and himself.”

Ken has revamped his life—mind, body and soul. Everyone knows how difficult it is to change, especially when you’ve lived your life a certain way for more than four decades.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Ken=GAY! Or at least a Jude Law caliber metrosexual. Look out Barbie; before you know it, Ken will have more personal styling products in the bathroom than you do.

I received a nice, chastising email from our head IT guy, copied to about a dozen other offenders as well as some key upper executives. The subject line of this scarlet letter was “Your mailbox is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over the size limit” and I was proud that I was ranked with the fourth largest mailbox size in the company: 1.5 GB.

I’ve been in an argument with our IT guy since I first exceeded my mailbox limit, sometime back in 2004, because of the way he has my account set up. As you might suspect, the mailbox size is due to an accumulation of attachments: high-res images, Word and Excel documents, and the like. Many times, I’ve saved all attachments to my hard drive, then removed the attachments from the emails. Alas, my email is mirrored on a server somewhere and whenever I relaunch my email program Entourage, it dutifully synchs the mailbox on my computer with the mailbox on the remote server, which never, ever gets the message that I’ve deleted any attachments. So I watch in horror as the attachments magically reattach themselves and my mailbox size reinflates; these are zombie attachments and I cannot kill them.

The chastising IT email didn’t give any archival suggestions, only vaguely stating that we should aim for a much smaller mailbox size. As examples of this fitness, I was amused to note he included the line, “To place things in perspective, Bill        and Eric          have mailbox sizes under 349 MB.” Those two guys are, coincidentally, the CEO and CFO of our company, respectively. I hate to be the first to tell you this, IT guy, but there’s a reason these guys’ mailboxes are so small: 1.) they don’t actually do any work, in the strictest sense of the word; 2.) they have people to manage their email for them.

After talking to the IT guy, what it turns out I needed to do was delete the entire email, including the attachment, from my computer. It’s like those Roundup commercials that point out how you need to kill the root of the weed, not just its flowery top, to totally eradicate the little fuckers. I was vaguely aware of this option but didn’t want to take it, as I like to keep old emails around for purposes of memory and blackmail. My eventual solution was to copy all of my sent items and pre-2005 received items, sans attachments, to local folders on my hard drive, then delete the messages wholesale from Entourage.

Now my total mailbox size is only about 128 MB. Everybody wins!

I finally got around to hanging the fish mobiles my friend Joe got me for Christmas/Birthday 2005. They were thoughtful gifts because they’re meant to integrate with the “Under the Sea” theme of my bathroom I started with my fishy Target shower curtain.

The Ocean Mobiles, as they’re called, are from HQ Kites & Designs and are appropriate for damp environments because they’re made of sturdy nylon. Crisp, colorful designs, and they arrive fully assembled. Seven different sea creatures are available, including dolphins and sharks.

Once upon a time in the twentieth century, the subjects of art were abstract or represented pure emotion. Then, in the late ’50s, the individuals that would become the Pop Art movement said, “Screw that. Let’s get realistic again.” Only instead of painting landscapes and bowls of fruit they reproduced the images and bombastic colors of the media and movies, cartoons and commerce: in short, Americana.

This wasn’t a problem for a lot of these guys, because they’d been doing it already. They had backgrounds in ad illustration (Warhol), billboard-painting (Rosenquist), graffiti (Haring, Basquiat) and assembling window displays for Tiffany’s (Johns, Rauschenberg). Pop Art may have come naturally to them, but the public and would-be patrons didn’t know what to think. Paintings that looked like ads or cartoons or pages torn from celebrity gossip rags? Sculture resembling Brillo boxes and Ballantine beer cans? Falling shoestring potatoes? “Isn’t this just a joke on the public?” a perturbed interviewer asks Warhol in Who Gets to Call it Art? “No, it gives me something to do,” Warhol deadpans.

I saw this documentary after work tonight at the Film Forum and strictly speaking, its subject is the Met’s first contemporary art curator, Henry Geldzahler. Even better, it’s a heady capsule of New York City’s art world in the late ’50s and 1960s.

Geldzahler knew he wanted to break into the art world from an early age. With a Bar Mitzvah gift of $1,000 cash, he purchases a Stella for $600 and the balance on a Poons. During his sophomore year at Harvard, he’s offered a job at the Met, which he says is “an encyclopedia with a volume missing,” and instead has aims on getting work at the Whitney, which champions his beloved contemporary art. He eventually settles with the Met and soon after becoming a curator there, aggravates the board with his close public ties to contemporary artists.

A short, stocky, balding, often bearded dandy with bookish spectacles, Geldzahler wouldn’t seem to fit in with the artist-types he champions, but there he is at the Factory schmoozing with Warhol. And there he floats in a surreal performance piece by Claes Oldenburg, smoking a cigar on a rubber raft in a makeshift swimming pool the artist built in a Downtown loft. And there he is, like Waldo, popping up in the works of his favorite artists: Stella, Warhol, David Hockney, Alice Neel, Larry Rivers, Marisol, George Segal.

Geldzahler makes an indelible mark with an exhibition that takes nearly an entire floor of the grand old museum, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970. (Ironically, the corporate sponsor is Xerox, which conjures Warhol’s endlessly reprinted soup cans and Marylyn Monroe portraits.) The Met is shaken down. The Museum of Modern Art frets for its own reputation. Art critics are irritated by Geldzahler’s monomania forming the exhibit, his extension of the “New York School” movement, his key exclusions (Marisol, for one) and dubious inclusions (a half-dozen reportedly sub-par Pollocks).

But the exhibit is a double-edged sword; although it’s a watershed in informing the public on Pop Art, it also piques the interest of collectors, dealers and trendsetters, who descend, cash in hand. The movie concludes with Sotheby’s infamous Scull Auction of 1973, for which the subversiveness of Pop Art is squashed and elevated to Capital Letter Status as works once sold for a song command exceptionally more. Two pieces by Rauschenberg originally bought for $3,400 total, for instance, go for $175,000 at the auction. And as anyone who’s recently been to the Met can attest, contemporary art remains relegated in a lonely, sparsely attended few rooms in the back.

It’s comfortable to get lost and caught up in the bygone art era presented by Who Gets to Call it Art?: the freshness and excitement of a new movement, affordable Financial District lofts, “happenings,” paint-spattered pants, the Factory and Screen Tests, and a time of rough music by free jazz artists, the fuzzy rock of the Velvet Underground, and the beautiful cacophony of experimentalists like John Cage.

How terrible it must be to be Face Transplant Woman. Not because of the whole mauling and face transplant thing, but because she’ll only ever be known as Face Transplant Woman. No personal achievements or accolades will ever change that. Even if she were to join the competitive eating circuit and win the Nathan’s Famous contest by consuming 52 hot dogs with buns in under 12 minutes, the headlines would read, “Face Transplant Woman Eats 52 Hot Dogs” or “Woman Crams 52 Hot Dogs Into Transplanted Face.”

In the pit of fleeting, dubious celebrity, she is stuck on the lowest level. The highest contains those 15-minuters whose deed is forever free-associated with their name: Lorena Bobbitt, for example. The middle level includes people who need a qualifier to jog the memory, such as Former Mideast Hostage Terry Anderson. On the lowest level are those like Face Transplant Woman and The Runaway Bride, who go nameless and summarized by a succinct catchphrase.

Good luck, Face Transplant Woman. Maybe we’ll see you soon on Oprah with your new book.

Let’s start an annual tradition, shall we?

The smiles are genetic. The glasses too, possibly.

I like to think that not many people have lost a bag of Allen bolts in East Harlem, but New York being New York, it’s probably happened at least twice before and I’m only the latest of the Allen bolt casualties.

The bolts I lost were for assembling a pair of used iron chairs donated to me today by my friend Kelly, the author of the play about Ménière’s disease. Recently, she was moved by my plight of having little furniture. It’s a shame I’m getting furniture out of that line, because I like repeating it, repeating that the only furniture I have is a love seat and a bed. I don’t actually want to receive furniture; I usually bring it up at bars when I can’t think of anything else to say, which is often.

My reasoning is, and I think you will agree, that it’s uninteresting for someone to say to you, “Hey, I have a kitchen table with four chairs, a couch, a recliner, two end tables, a halogen lamp, an entertainment center that has my television, Tivo and Xbox in it, a desk with a chair, a computer stand, a bed, a dresser, a nightstand, and a hamper.” But you hear that all someone has is a love seat—unloved, apparently—and a bed—well, what’s with that guy? Tell me more, you would say. And I will. Sometimes, I add that I have constructed an end table out of three cardboard boxes, one stacked upon the other. The top box is the one my Calphalon came in. People want to hear that story. Or at least people in bars do, or pretend they do.

Perhaps that was the clincher for Kelly, who agreed to give me her unused chairs after hearing my sad tale. They had co-starring roles as props in her play and they’ve been lounging around her apartment ever since, disassembled in boxes that are taking up valuable space. The catch was that I had to go get ’em, which was fine by me.

Uninterested in taking the weekend-unreliable A train or performing the obnoxious backtrack-then-transfer business on the 1 that I’ll spare you the details of, I instead got off the 1 at West 125th Street and crossed all the way over to Kelly’s, which is a haul. It’s like, say, walking from my previous apartment on the Upper West Side through Central Park to the East Side. I haven’t done much walking in Harlem, and I can report that it still adheres closely to its trait of having a lot of black people in it. I can also tell you that Harlem smells like coconut and incense, particularly around the Apollo, although I’m unsure why. In addition, there is a Jimmy Jazz store.

Kelly’s building is a few blocks north off Lenox Avenue and there was a gentleman standing on the stoop as I arrived, casually smoking a joint. After getting buzzed in, I took the stairs up and noticed a hand-lettered sign taped to a wall of the top-floor landing that read, “Don’t Throw No Garbage In The Stairwell,” on which some William Safire-type had scribbled out the “No” with a ballpoint pen. It must have done the trick because the stairwell was litter-free.

Kelly has at least two roommates and Paddington, a friendly black cat with an eye infection. The chairs were boxed up near the door and ready to go, bound in twine and lashed to one of those collapsible metal wheelie-cart contraptions that the elderly and the obese use for hauling groceries. I insisted on just taking the boxes, grasping them by the bound twine and telling Kelly it would not be a problem. It wasn’t much of a problem, except that I skinned my fingers where they rubbed up against the cardboard and nearly blew out my flimsy arm muscles. Plus it started raining on the way back to the subway, which is when I noticed the bag of Allen bolts must have fallen out. At a crosswalk, I happened to glance down at one of the boxes and saw a suspicious bag-of-bolts sized hole as well as a pictogram of a crossed-out umbrella suggesting that I shouldn’t be getting the boxes wet.

When I arrived home, I opened the boxes and inventoried their contents, realizing that the bag of bolts I lost was for just one of the chairs. The other box included a full bag of bolts, so I have one potential chair to add to my love seat/bed/end table family. I don’t, however, have an Allen wrench, so after a trip to Home Depot for that and more bolts, I can get cracking on my chair assembly.

Have you noticed that many pop songs from the ’80s feature smoky saxophones, either in solos, breaks or prominently in the backing?

Here are a dozen of my favorites:

• Billy Ocean :: Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car
• David Bowie :: Modern Love
• The English Beat :: Save it for Later
• Exposé :: Seasons Change
• Glen Frey :: The Heat is On
• Glen Frey :: You Belong to the City
• Hall & Oates :: Maneater
• INXS :: What You Need
• Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam :: Lost in Emotion
• The Rolling Stones :: Waiting on a Friend
• Roxy Music :: Over You
• Wang Chung :: Dance Hall Days

I like celebrating the birthdays of coworkers. Not the obligatory herd into the conference room for grocery-store cake and wordlessness, but the signing of the card. I put thought and personalization into my messages. The one I just wrote, for a girl in the production department that I’m buddies with, read:

You are the patron saint of the company. But one of those pagan-style saints. You know, the fun kind. Happy feastday,
Jason

My rules are that the messages must be concise and not what everyone writes in interoffice birthday cards, which is “Happy birthday!”, “Have a great day!” or both. For people over 30, they will additionally allow, “You don’t look a day over 25!” For people under 30, it’s “Don’t drink too much tonight!” (Or maybe that’s just me.) Sometimes I challenge myself by fabricating rules, such as that I’m not allowed to use the word “birthday” or “happy.”

Here are two other recent birthday tidings I remember writing. This one was for the grumpy editorial assistant; I like goading her into greater grumpiness, although I admit it’s not much of a challenge.

You are the sunshine of my life. I don’t like the sun very much. Enjoy your special day anyway,
Jason

And for my previous boss, the one with olfactory hallucinations:

Do you smell something burning? That’s all the candles on your cake.
Jason

I never get feedback on my messages. Maybe people don’t read all those tiny, hastily scrawled congratulations. Maybe, like Dave Coulier, I’m not as funny as I think I am. I’ll keep writing them, though. It gives me something to consider at work other than real estate.

The nominees for the 78th annual Academy Awards were announced yesterday. Some thoughts:

• From a marketing standpoint, the nominee list did exactly what it’s meant to do: made me want to see a bunch of movies.
• Best actor: Heath Ledger’s nomination is well deserved; as is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s. As for the other guys, I can only lament that I gotta get out and see some more movies.
• Best actress: Again with the “must see more movies thing.” I can, however, offer two observations: I would sooner nominate Keira Knightley’s flawless teeth for her leading role in Pride & Prejudice than I would her sandwich-starved self. And allegedly, Jimi was so convinced by Felicity Huffman’s performance in Transamerica that he didn’t realize she was a woman playing a man who wants to be a woman.
• Do you know what Paul Giamatti talked about when he unexpectedly received a SAG Award over the weekend? That the best part about being an actor was hanging around the craft services table, joking with the crew and eating donuts. Paul Giamatti rocks. If he wins this award (for the same supporting role he got the SAG Awards for, in Cinderella Man), it’ll only be because the Academy just smacked itself in the forehead realizing it should have nominated him for Sideways.
• Did that torture scene with Clooney in Syriana make you squirm? It made me shifty and I previously only squirmed at scenes of dental- or eyeball-related torture. Should he get the Supporting Actor award just for that? Maybe. I’d rather it be Giamatti, though.
• Better Clooney or Giamatti than Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, anyway. As much as I enjoyed that flick and previous lead roles of his (like in Donnie Darko), his shallow performance in Brokeback didn’t match that of his campfire buddy, Heath Ledger.
• Grizzly Man was not a contender for Best Documentary Feature because it didn’t get enough votes.^* Good!
• Why We Fight was not a contender for Best Documentary Feature because of a technicality involving the Academy’s idiot no-broadcast-before-theatrical-release rule.^* Bad! Don’t make me have to lump this movie in with Crumb, another critically acclaimed doc that got snubbed by Oscar.
• And they say we hate the French! Well, March of the Penguins is a shoo-in for Best Documentary Feature. It’s got it all: Life! “Love”! Hardship! Death! Redemption! Salvation! Freeman! And those penguins are just so darn cute! It’s got everything but handicapped and Jewish people, and I still think it’s the top contender.
• I would like Noah Baumbach to win the Original Screenplay award for the blisteringly real dialogue of The Squid and the Whale but my hopes are low because his competition is stiff.

^*Source: “And the Documentary Nominees Aren’t . . .” by John Anderson, The New York Times, January 29, 2006. [back]