July 2006 Archives

To avoid hassles with the public and the paparazzi, the Fancy Restaurant Club is loath to reveal the site of its outings too far in advance. Our resident calligrapher and messenger, Amanzio, has taken to writing the upcoming restaurant’s name on ornamental scrolls or small colored cards that he secrets away in the city, along with a series of cunning clues hidden elsewhere to lead the way. To learn the location of tonight’s outing, I was required to learn phonetic Belarusian, infiltrate the abandoned subway station at 91st Street, and at last, scale the locked gate of Gramercy Park late one humid night last week, to pluck a cream colored card from the hand of the Edwin Booth statue. In Amanzio’s steady script and iron-gall ink was written “Union Square Cafe.”

If only the end had justified the means. For starters, there’s no flair in the décor there. The upholstery pattern of our booth seating, for example, was blocky and grey, like from an Applebee’s. In an especially meta-moment, we consulted my travel copy of the Zagat Survey for next month’s outing, while hanging on the wall above our table was a cheesy Matisse-ish painting depicting a bottle of wine, a table set for dinner and a 1997 copy of Zagat’s. Was this a clever reference to Union Square Cafe’s vote mongering among the local food fanatics? This year, the guidebook ranked it the second most-popular restaurant in New York City. We were ready to be blown away, but we were only touched by a light breeze. Literally! The air conditioning wasn’t running full-throttle in our cozy corner, so the lady of the table waved a dainty paper fan from her purse.

Our meals were adequate and only our appetizers creative. The black bean soup ordered by one was hearty, served with a slice of lemon and an optional pour of Australian sherry. Me and my sweet tooth enjoyed the stone fruit salad of mixed wild greens, fresh peaches, black cherries and candied pecans, drizzled with a white balsamic vinaigrette and sprinkled with savory shavings of Manchego cheese. As a sometimes-cook, dishes like this make me smack my forehead and wonder why I can’t dream up combinations this fresh and exciting. They seem so obvious upon reflection.

As for main dishes, my shell steak was all right, though a tad too smokehousy and salty, even if I wouldn’t have shaken salt on it before a taste. Other entrées served at our table included salmon and scallops, and they were deemed O.K., but nothing to make us tumble from our seats.

Desserts were presented attractively. A peach tart was flaky but not as perky tasting as it should have been. The chocolate fudge cake was incredibly moist yet firm. Perfectly smooth scoops of sorbet, the size and shape of eggs, nestled in miniature ceramic cups by flavor. The lemon variety had the harsh, super-sweet flavor of eating Minute Maid frozen lemonade concentrate directly from the cardboard can.

The popularity of the Union Square Cafe mystifies me. Part of me wants to admit the experience doesn’t differ greatly from Craft, but while the Craft entrées are also prototypical “New American” dishes, they’re prepared and seasoned more attentively. And the atmosphere at Craft is darker, richer and more luxuriant without being smarmy. Union Square Cafe must be doing something extraordinary for a large segment of the Zagat-voting public. Maybe there’s a special room in the sub-basement where the food and atmosphere are peerless.

Union Square Cafe

• 21 E. 16th St. (between Fifth Avenue and Union Square West)
• (212) 243-4020
• Meal 26 of 52: summer stone fruit salad ($12) and grilled smoked Cedar River shell steak with mashed potatoes and frizzled leeks ($32).

As much as I’d like to stop mentioning eBooks, I don’t see how you could write an essay as Rachel Donadio did in today’s New York Times Book Review without so much as mentioning them while lamenting the ability of the publishing industry to latch onto the Long Tail.

If you’re unfamiliar with the tale of the Long Tail, it’s the subject of a bestselling book by Wired editor Chris Anderson that theorizes businesses, particularly those online, can profit as tidily by selling lots of second-tier items as they can a handful of blockbusters. iTunes and Netflix are examples of this trend; they stock loads of unpopular or obscure items for little or no warehouse space. They make money off stuff that otherwise would be unavailable or catching dust in a brick-and-mortar store.

Donadio writes that book publishers haven’t figured out how to capitalize on the Long Tail because books take up too much physical space; it’s impractical to keep thousands of low-selling titles in a warehouse. She even quotes a Scribner publisher as saying the Long Tail would only work by employing “some kind of print-on-demand,” a costly and imperfect technology.

Maybe I’m missing some fine point of Economics 101, but wouldn’t it make sense to start selling books electronically for publishers to capitalize on this trend and open their back catalogs to moneymaking? I was under the impression juggernauts like Amazon and Google were already busy scanning and otherwise digitizing books for online viewing and searches, so it seems a practical extension to put those works in a format consumers can purchase and read on their iPods, Palms, PSPs or whatever the next great all-in-one portable media device is going to be.

I love books but aren’t they destined for extinction? Music has gone 100% digital triumphantly and movies are headed that way, with DVDs doomed for replacement by downloadable versions and all-digital on-demand services. I find it hard to believe publishing houses aren’t gunning to go digital, maybe at least with their back catalogs, and leave behind the expense, impracticality and storage demands of printing things on pulped trees.

Two and a half hours! Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest could have used a cutlass in the editing room for the expository blather and the too-many scenes and subplots that don’t or marginally feature our heroes three: Johnny Depp, again resplendent in Richards; Keira Knightley, who has either started eating or received cheek implants; and Orlando Bloom, handsome and bland.

There’s fun, Buster Keaton-style physical comedy in the swashbuckling of Captain Jack and the lads escaping a cannibal island and swordfighting atop a waterwheel rolling through the jungle. But too much exposition! Too many subplots! As much as the filmmakers would like it to be Pirates of the Rings, especially with their filming-multiple-sequels-at-once shenanigans, this franchise has neither the scope nor majesty of Middle Earth and Tolkien’s storyline. Give me back mindless summertime movies that don’t deaden my ass. There was a big ol’ fishstick of fun to be had here, but it was mostly breading.

The most enlightening part of my moviegoing experience was the realization that one can enter the trio of wide, barren terraces, presumably reserved for receptions, on the upper floors of the AMC Empire 25 that overlook the lights and sprawl of 42nd Street between Times Square and Eighth Avenue. It’s very windy up there, which makes it difficult to spit with accuracy on the tourists queued up for Madame Tussauds, but you can’t beat the skyscraper panorama and the clear view west to the Hudson and Jersey beyond, where a sherbet sunset hovered and eluded my attempts at a majestic photograph.

On the terrace below, a kid in a mohawk and expensive sneakers was hacking away on his laptop, presumably downloading porn or posting a blog entry about Colin Farrell’s Miami Vice moustache.

Lunch at Craft’s breakfast/luncheon division, ’wichcraft. Yeah, it was just chicken salad, but chicken salad with roasted tomatoes, pickled red onions and frisée lettuce on multigrain bread.

Mmm...expensive sandwich.

’wichcraft

• Bryant Park (four kiosks on the Sixth Avenue side between 40th and 42nd Streets)
• (212) 780-0577
• Meal 25 of 52: chicken salad sandwich ($9.50) and a bottle of Boylan Sugar Cane soda ($2.25).

There’s an intriguing trio of exhibits at the International Center of Photography.

Unknown Weegee, about 100 seldom-seen photos from the master New York City tabloid shutterbug, runs the range of high and low society. His images of minor celebrities and “normal” people at functions, dances and in public still have an Arbus-like creepiness, as in one of my favorites, a woman reclining languidly in a car and signing autographs for the boys crowded outside her window.

Then there’s Weegee’s usual special blend of Bowery drunks, strippers, bums, Coney Island disasters and murder victims. If this guy isn’t the patron saint of the New York Post, I don’t know who would be, particularly with his championing of the “If it bleeds, it leads” tabloid philosophy (on display is a $35 receipt to Weegee from Time for “Two Murders”) and his rampant editorializing. One photo of a jailbird is captioned in Weegee’s hand as “Behind Bars . . . for Being a Dope.” Others seem to have been captioned out of context, like the couple making out awkwardly while wearing what appear to be hand-crafted space helmets, above Weegee’s phrase, “Boy meets girl—from Mars.” My laugh out loud moment came courtesy of the photo of a poster from the early ’50s, with an illustration of a stern nurse accosting the viewer, and the command, “Protect the genetic future of your country: Give generously to your local sperm bank.”

Another exhibit of about 40 images downstairs, Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt, serves as a fine companion piece to the Museum of Modern Art’s Dada exhibit. Made from the mid-’20s to the early ’30s from newspaper clippings and original photos pasted to board, Brandt’s collages have a pleasing symmetry and a strange cohesiveness considering the breadth of her source material. In a few pieces, you can still see lines and arcs penciled to the board where she considered the exact placement of each puzzle-piece-like element of the whole.

The gallery upstairs is reserved for a few giant, crisp prints by Korean contemporary artist Atta Kim. Strange stuff. A curious series of photos, Monologue of Ice, Portrait of Mao, depicts an ice bust of Mao melting in stages, with a fourth photo depicting 108 glasses of water placed precisely on steel and glass shelving. Concerned with time and movement, he digitally superimposes many takes of his portraits with varying degrees of transparency, so the final image of the individual is overlapped to the point of seeming three-dimensional or resembling those lenticular images that you tilt to change. Kim also favors photos made with extremely long exposures, eight hours in some cases. Much too long to register movement, this timing gives his landscapes a ghostly quality, devoid of people and vehicles, whether they’re of the surprisingly lush Korean DMZ or busy intersections of New York at dawn.

Now that I finally have a Netflix account, I’m renting and rewatching movies and TV shows that freaked me out when I saw them as a kid. One of the first such shows I thought to review was from the ’80s revival of The Twilight Zone, specifically a segment from the first episode named “A Little Peace and Quiet” and directed by Wes Craven.

I would have seen this on TV in the autumn of 1985, and the story is simple enough I remembered it fairly well. A stressed out housewife unearths from her flower garden a golden necklace with a small, sundial-shaped pendant. She puts it on and discovers she can stop time by saying “shut up” and restart it by saying “start talking.”

This comes in handy for enjoying relaxing breakfasts without her four demonic children screeching and her idiot husband complaining that she hasn’t laundered something of his. She freezes time in the supermarket to nab the last box of Choco Poppers cereal. Later at home, two young preppies going door to door stop by to raise her awareness about the alarming growth of the country’s nuclear weapons arsenal. She zaps time, drags their stiffened bodies down her walk and lays them flat on her lawn. Then she retreats indoors and restarts time, much to their confusion.

This vague threat of nuclear annihilation runs through the episode, popping up in a radio broadcast early on and later during a televised newscast about stalled peace talks. And it all ends with the Russians launching the Big One, apparently directly at the housewife’s neighborhood. She freezes time at the sound of air raid sirens and wanders outside in her robe to the town’s square, where everyone is panicked and motionless. As she comes to an old man staring at the sky, she follows his gaze to see the missile of doom suspended in midair.

O.K., discard the frozen-time effects, especially earlier in the episode when the actors strain so hard to stand motionless that they waver. Definitely discard that missile, a blatantly cheesy effect even for the mid-’80s. (Sample writer-director commentary on the DVD: “We would have done that a little differently,” followed by laughter.)

Nuclear paranoia wasn’t keeping me up at night in the mid-’80s, but it may have been responsible for a certain malaise, particularly with haunting nuclear-holocaust entertainments like The Day After and the “Russians Are Bad Guys” streak in lighter fare (Rocky IV, Rambo III, etc.).

But what really freaked me out was the idea that this Twilight Zone woman was trapped forever in a purgatory of her own creation: if she restarts time, everyone dies. As I rewatched the episode I realized I had forgotten that it ends simply with a stillframe of the missile. In my mind, I had extended the story to include the woman wandering alone, taking food and making shelter wherever she needed, roaming the abandoned country, maybe at some point growing so lonely or desparate that she restarts time and ends it all. That still kinda freaks me out.

Subway stations here house some of the most intriguing found art in the city. Many stations have these refrigerator-door-sized frames on the walls inside for paste-up posters promoting movies, TV shows and consumer goods. They’re torn down, layered over and defaced, and between postings resemble modern collage. There will often be a dash of pop art present, as in the second poster shown here with its Bud ad fragment.

I wanted pizza for lunch, but where’s the challenge in that, so I took the A train over to Brooklyn to get some Grimaldi’s. Although the pizzeria has been around in New York since the ’60s in various guises, Grimaldi’s has been in its current location since 1990, but under slightly different names, a result of the usual factions and legal squabbles of successful family-owned businesses.

They promote themselves as being “under the Brooklyn Bridge,” which they aren’t quite, but close enough, and they’re definitely a draw for hungry local businesspeople and tourists too. As I stood outside waiting for my carry-out, what appeared to be an entire class of rowdy grade school students attempted to enter at once. Just as quickly, they exited, followed by a surly fellow in a black Grimaldi’s T-shirt, who explained to their leader that eight of them could enter at a time.

Grimaldi’s is famed for its oven-fired pizzas, which you notice as soon as you step in the large square dining room. The stone oven is straight in the back, behind the buffet-like station where dough is tossed and toppings applied, and you can see the flames lick at the arms of the guys who shuffle the pies in and out of the coals.

The signature taste of these sorts of pizzas is a slight sootiness. Check out the nearly burnt crust in the lower-right corner of the photo. What’s great is that it’s gently charred on both sides, but not burnt to a crisp. The bottom is speckled with ash while the edges boast deliciously crisped blisters where the dough has bubbled up and singed. The crust is slightly puffed and crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside and not at all greasy. We’re talking about an inch wide on the edge all around the pie, which is my kind of crust.

Grimaldi’s also uses fresh mozzarella, placed in thin-sliced rounds on the dough, appealing in its fresh white color and chewy texture, in contrast to the greasy goo that blankets most chain-store pizzas. The mushrooms were fresh, the pepperoni thick, and a few basil leaves were sprinkled about, lending a tannic tang.

It’s not all fun times at Grimaldi’s. Lunch is very busy but dinnertime gets so bad they bring out the crowd-control stanchions to the sidewalk. The prices are moderately high; $12 nets you a toppingless 16" small pie. And there’s a laundry list of “no’s”—no slices, no credit cards, no delivery, no reservations, and no entire classrooms attempting to enter at once. But I can put up with it all because the place offers one of the tastiest pies I’ve sampled.

Grimaldi’s Pizzeria

• 19 Old Fulton St. (“under the Brooklyn Bridge”)
• (718) 858-4300
• Meal 24 of 52: small pepperoni and mushroom pie ($17.40).

I decided to at least start thinking about chucking my old B&W Chuck Taylor All Star high-tops, which I’ve had since high school, when they were $20 and Kurt Cobain hadn’t yet made them cool again. The rubber is disintegrating and the soles are thin enough for me to get my feet wet if I wear them in the rain. Canvas worn to a buttery perfection, they’re so comfortable that I can’t bring myself to dispose of them, despite the fact they resemble a coal miner’s lungs.

Recently I bought a new pair from Zappos.com, a great site if you know your size and enjoy sidestepping sales tax and shipping fees. I can’t bring myself to break them in just yet. They have the faint odor of a tire store and the white trim and laces are as gleaming and blatant as the teeth of Tom Cruise. To wear them now in public would be to wear a pair of floppy clown shoes, inviting stares and derision, imagined or otherwise.

Burried somewhere on Converse’s website, I spotted a banner image promoting the All Star line. Instead of depicting a spotless new pair hovering on a lightboxed background or cocooning the arches of an adonis, it was a scuffed, grubby pair, worn by a guy standing on a cobblestoned European street. It’s clear Converse knows the look most guys are after who wear these things: we want ’em scruffy like the Ramones, not fruity like Punky Brewster.

I beseech Converse to sell pre-sullied All Stars. Manufacturers of jeans have been weathering and poking holes in their product for years, so why not the shoe guys? The breaking-in period on these things will be a burden. I must refrain from throwing them in a dryer with rocks and topsoil.

The three-day Animation Block Party wrapped tonight at the BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn with a screening of 15 animated shorts, each under 15 minutes.

The biggest draw at the event, which focused on narrative works, was Henry Selick’s first solely computer-generated production, Moongirl, a fairytale of a hayseed kid who catches a jarful of fireflies. He’s spirited to the moon and meets its keeper, a girl named Lorelei who lights the satellite using the insects and an enchanted carousel. Selick made his fame as the stop-motion animator and director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, but the imaginative design and movement of his characters doesn’t translate well digitally. The large-headed kids of Moongirl are too smooth-featured and creepy, like those dolls whose eyes roll open when they’re held upright. Matters aren’t helped by dialogue stuffed with wide-eyed kid-talk clichés. As the credits rolled, I was surprised to learn the dreamy orchestral score was provided by They Might Be Giants in what’s the least They Might Be Giants-sounding music I’ve ever heard from the guys.

One of my favorite shorts was The Wraith of Cobble Hill, directed by Adam Parrish King, a film student who submitted it as the thesis project for his master of fine arts degree at the University of Southern California. He also submitted it to Sundance earlier this year and won a Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking.

It’s refreshing to have a production of wire, latex and clay mimic life instead of the surreal cartoon universes of Selick or Aardman. The antihero here is Felix, a Brooklyn teenager who lives with his apathetic, alcoholic mother. He’s entrusted by the owner of the corner bodega, from whom he shoplifts regularly, to watch the store while he’s away on vacation. The story’s quiet resignation, like something out of Raymond Carver, is a tiny epiphany of trust and duty.

It’s filmed in 16mm B&W on a Bolex, the Fisher-Price My First Camera setup of film students, but the smudged, vignetted look of the picture works in its favor, contributing to the settings of a wet winter and bleak urban interiors. King handled the sound design, too, which is amazing, especially the music and voices Felix hears muffled through the walls of his apartment. There’s some wonderful incidental dialogue, too, as Felix and his friends climb a fire escape to their building’s roof to drink 40s and he debates the merits of Space Invaders with his incredulous friends.

Sprinkled among more staid or experimental works, the funniest short of the evening was The Moustache Contest by artist, animator and comedian Mike Hollingsworth, a black-and-white stick-figure production. It revels in the ridiculousness of four sea creature buddies who challenge each other to grow the baddest-ass moustache. You can watch it here.

The most informative short and one of the most beautiful was McLaren’s Negatives, a 10-minute documentary about the films of Norman McLaren, directed by Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre using footage of and narration by McLaren, as well as his own animation techniques. These involved drawing directly on film, producing thick-lined rotoscopes, even generating sawtoothed music by hash-marking the soundtrack portion of the physical filmstrip as one would transcribe notes.

The gazpacho I made this afternoon from a 1968 recipe reprinted in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine tasted bright and refreshing, but the color was off. It may have been the anemic plum tomatoes I used, but the hue ended up a sort of brownish-Creamsicle. I wonder whether food dye would have make it look more palatable, as one guy recently found making Pepto-Bismol ice cream. Or maybe I should have tracked down some redder tomatoes of the hothouse variety.

Girls with various combinations of dyed hair, tats, fishnet tights, short skirts and attitudes forcibly copped from Joan Jett. On roller skates. How could I pass up a chance to see a Gotham Girls Roller Derby match?

It was the Bronx Gridlock versus the Brooklyn Bombshells at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus, so I took a nearly two-hour subway trek out there, spending most of my time held up by construction-related slowness and lounging around the bowels of the West Fourth Street station waiting for a train that never arrived. (Note to self: the B train doesn’t run on weekends.)

The venue, Schwartz Athletic Center, was the most architecturally sexy college basketball arena I’ve ever sat in. It used to be a grand 4,000-seat movie theater called the Paramount and the high, domed ceiling and parts of the upper walls still drip with golden rococo scrollwork and reliefs. During basketball games, an organist plays the giant four-keyboard Wurlitzer that was built to accompany silent films. The theater’s plush chairs have given way to bleachers that flank the court and seat 1,000, which they did tonight for the sellout crowd. Most of the fans rooted for Brooklyn, although there was a guy down in front hoisting a yellow posterboard that read “Bombshells’ Mom Smells” on one side and on the other, “We’ve got Bronxitis!,” apparently a loud, obnoxious affliction.

The announcer warmed up the crowd and introduced her color commentator, a confused-looking sportscaster from a local Fox affiliate. Each team member was called forth individually by name and catchphrase onto the rink, a rubbery blue covering placed over the basketball court with an oval track marked in theater-style pathway lights. All the derby girls choose their own numbers and names, half of which are puns; I was partial to Anne Phetamean and Penny Larceny. Although it seems to be a semiprofessional affair, I overheard a fan mention that the teams have to pay for the venue, don’t get a cut of ticket sales, and must foot their own insurance and equipment fees when they join the league. So it’s kinda like A League of Their Own, but with more piercings.

Before calling the start of the bout, the announcer offered a prediction in earnest that “both teams have a similar skating style, so it’s really going to come down to a mental game.” That was funny to me but I was in no position to agree or disagree, as I’m unfamiliar with the sport. Gameplay and strategy were lost on me despite a full explanation in the program, illustrated with diagrams of team positions and referee penalty signals. I learned that both hands over the ears, for example, is the refs’ call for “whining.” The basics of the game resemble NASCAR racing: round and round an oval track with most excitement inspired by crafty maneuvering and spectacular wipeouts. There’s elbowing and checking aplenty, girls tumbling down and hitting the ground with a sweaty slap or bowling over some poor photographer on the sideline. Shoving plays an expected defensive role and doubles as an offensive maneuver to advance a teammate into a better pack position.

The halftime show was performed by a tall, skinny, frizzy-haired blonde, clad in aqua-sequined hotpants, a pink bikini top and abdominals visible from the cheap seats, who hula-hooped to the club remix of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Then both team’s cheerleaders preformed a dance routine, one group in Bettie Paige hairdos and black Lacoste-ish shirt-dresses, the other in red kerchief do-rags and tan Dickies coveralls.

By the time the two 30-minute halves concluded, Brooklyn had lost a heartbreaker to the Bronx, 69 to 87, but most everyone in the stands had a rowdy good time reveling in the badass splendor.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend has been getting whipped by stinky reviews, but when I saw it tonight, I laughed a lot and awarded it my favorite Mass-Market Hollywood Summer Blockbuster Movie so far this season.

My feelings may have been inspired in part by my moviegoing environment. The composition of the sold-out theater off Times Square was my preferred type: the model New York City crowd, equally attentive and boisterous. Even a tourist in the audience would have recognized this from the start. The trailer for Pathfinder was booed loudly by nearly everyone, while cheers were bestowed upon Will Ferrell’s newest, the promising Stranger Than Fiction, in which he plays a man shocked to learn he’s a character in a novel.

The general reaction to My Super Ex-Girlfriend was laughter and although the film is nothing super overall, the dialogue, characters and situations are engaging and lowbrow silly. (It’s likely relevant that director Ivan Reitman also helmed the beloved Ghostbusters.) Uma Thurman¹, who makes me want to spell hot as hawt and add several t’s, plays a rare and welcome comedic role as Jenny Johnson, a mousy bespectacled art gallery owner who moonlights as the superhero G-Girl. Despite having the worst name ever, she saves Gotham from crime, fires and errant missile strikes with the standard superpowers of strength, speed and flight. Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson) falls for Johnson after a romantic subway/purse-snatching encounter, only to learn her secret identity comes with an intense overpossessiveness. He dumps her and takes up with his true love, the blandly angelic young hottie in his office played by Anna Faris. Doubly enraged, G-Girl spends most of the rest of the movie exacting psycho revenge on Saunders, doing unspeakable things to his apartment, car, goldfish, forehead and sanity, then gets him fired. Wilson, whose movie characters are often quietly befuddled types, is the perfect everyman foil to Thurman’s split persona.

Amusing support is presented courtesy of Rainn Wilson (the jerk with glasses from the American version of The Office), who plays Saunders’ wizened-sarcastic coworker/friend, a character required by law in romantic comedies, and Eddie Izzard as the least charismatic supervillain ever, which is why he’s so funny, actually. He keeps a keg-sized meteor that can sap G-Girl’s powers in his refrigerator, right next to a ham.

The special effects seem purposely cheesy, especially a wince-worthy approximation of the Statue of Liberty, from which Saunders is suspended upside-down after a particularly nasty spat with the ex. When the special effects are good, they’re used in situations unbelievable to the point of hilarity, as when G-Girl winds up a live shark and pitches it at Saunders through his apartment window, where it thrashes around the floor, snapping at him and taking large bites out of his furniture.

The editing is rough around the edges, plot elements are introduced and never followed-up on, and I think there were continuity issues with G-Girl’s costume, which seemed slightly different each time she suited up. Of vexation only to New Yorkers are the disjointed circuits through the streets of Manhattan, wherein a character emerges from a building downtown, then turns the corner onto an uptown street.

Despite these flaws, I was entertained by My Super Ex-Girlfriend. So sue me. It won’t win any awards or, apparently, any other sorta-positive reviews, but I found it funny.

¹One of our frequent Friday Night Movie guests, Jason, who’s a designer at a religious trade press in the city, said he had lunch once with Uma’s dad Robert, a tall religious studies professor at Columbia who sports an ill-fitting glass eye. Jason said the prof had trouble eating his salad without getting it all over himself, but that one would be hard pressed to notice the mess when there was that eye to avoid staring at. [back]

This is a streetlight in my neighborhood, on Nagle Avenue at Arden Street.

That’s a hula hoop up there with all those shoes. Impressive.

You can have your John Hancocked Declaration of Independence. Today I was more interested in seeing the early draft on display at the New York Public Library.

Probably every writer has felt miffed over having his words pulled or mangled by an editor and Thomas Jefferson was no exception. On July 1, 1776, he sent his finished draft of the declaration to the Continental Congress, which made additions, deletions and other edits before ratifying it on Independence Day. Proud of his work, Jefferson handwrote copies of the original version for five or six friends, underlining the passages that had been altered or deleted. Only two of these copies survive intact.

The one in the library is on temporary exhibit in a tiny, dim room with marble walls and a wood parquet floor. Known as the Fair Copy in Thomas Jefferson’s Hand, it runs two double-sided pages, each of which is sandwiched between glass plates mounted upright and suspended in a glass box, so you can freely read both sides. When you approach these boxes, a motion senor activates a thin spotlight to illuminate the text temporarily.

Each page is sized a bit longer than a standard 8.5-by-11" sheet of paper. They’re the color of sand, creased and worn where they’ve been folded into quarters, as if to stick in one’s pocket. Jefferson’s cursive is neat and small in brown ink, lined precisely and double-spaced except for page three; the last few lines there are crammed onto the page, where it seems he noticed too late he was running out of room. Although most of the fruity Noun Capitalization was added later, Jefferson’s spelling and punctuation errors are preserved; in one passage, he even confuses it’s and its, which should be of reassurance to millions of poor spellers.

The text stands off the page in two places, where Jefferson breaks from his script into printed block capitals. One is the phrase UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in the document’s title. The other is within the document’s most significant deletion, the word men in a paragraph condemning slavery: the “execrable commerce” of an open market “where MEN should be bought & sold.” The delegates from Georgia and South Carolina weren’t keen on this passage, so to appease them, it was cut.

While the content of this draft is sobering and inspiring, I was immediately struck by its mere existence: edits noted on the page of a handwritten copy. These elements are nearing extinction in the computer world. Authors composing documents now in word processors make edits that aren’t recorded. Correspondence is similarily affected. Authors like Jefferson were active letter writers, often explaining the public texts they’d produced. Letters like these still exist, but digital documents are more perishable than paper, deleted and disappearing easily as systems, formats and machines change.

The British Library is one organization that’s recognized this problem. In 2004 it launched a campaign to obtain and digitally archive the emails of the UK’s top authors and scientists, including poet Ted Hughes and evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton. As paper is abandoned, more efforts like this will be needed to preserve edits and the words behind the words. Looking at an LCD screenful of historic text may not have the same drama as a few worn pieces of paper in a moodily lit room, but it’s the future.

Jack Lemmon makes me laugh. My weakness at the movies is slapstick comedy and as Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce opens, he’s just a cop named Nestor twirling his nightstick while walking his beat on the Rue Casanova in Paris. Already I was snickering at his loose gait, the slow turn of his head and the slight scrunch of his round, open face when he realizes something is awry. It’s the rubbery expressions and tics of Jim Carrey combined with the aw-shucks stammers of Jimmy Stewart.

Nestor’s brand new on the job and slow to gather that his street is favored by the local prostitutes, who lounge on the sidewalk outside the by-the-night hotel for convenience’s sake. He’s honest and naive, and calls a raid, for which he’s chewed out and fired by his boss, a coincidental “guest” in the hotel at the time.

The real goofiness takes off after Nestor defends the honor of the most popular girl by dusting her abusive pimp in a barfight. She’s Irma (Shirley MacLaine), known for her green underwear and Coquette, her small, Champagne-drinking dog that she takes with her everywhere. She’s in high demand and expertly raises her take with tales of woe that she fabricates on the spot. She welcomes Nestor in as her flatmate and de facto manager, but as a man smitten with her and unhappy with her line of work, he schemes to get her off the streets and with him exclusively: by disguising himself as an eccentric and anonymous British lord who hires her into a room for 500 francs a night, during which time they only talk and play double solitaire.

It’s an exhausting and costly ruse that Nestor must soon supplement by working in the wee hours at the local outdoor market, stacking produce and lugging meat. I laughed watching him stagger across the cobblestones with a beef carcass slung over his shoulder, like an ant attempting to make off with a hot dog bun.

Nestor’s “Lord X” persona incorporates a bowler hat, gray suit with cravat, dandy walking stick and a pair of large false teeth and bushy eyebrows both of which Lemmon waggles overtime in concert with a hilarious mock British accent, complete with all the sticky wickets and capital!s. It’s childish, ridiculous, and an excuse for scene-seizing by Lemmon, but I enjoyed it immensely, laughing those laughs that make one euphoric for having expelled them.

The movie itself goes on far too long—nearly two and a half hours!—dashing over a brief imprisonment for Nestor and an even faster wedding ceremony, after which Irma births their child right there in the sacristy. Irma la Douce is middling as a technicolor fairytale of prostitution, but it’s Lemmon’s over the top performance I’ll recall most fondly.

The New York Times printed the word shit today in a story about what President Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair after the Group of 8 summit, unaware his mic was live:

“I feel like telling [Secretary General Kofi Annan] to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen,” he said to Mr. Blair, referring to Syria’s president, Bashir Assad. “See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,” Mr. Bush said.

Gawker wonders if this little shit is a first for the language-conservative Times. It’s not, but it’s extremely rare. This is a paper, after all, that’s squeamish about printing hell or damn unless they’re used in combat reporting or similar “extreme circumstances.” As for stronger obscenities, the paper’s trusty Manual of Style and Usage notes that “[e]xceptions have been made only a handful of times” to the rule that “The Times virtually never prints obscene words.”

Short of a thorough LexisNexis search, one of the few instances of shit in the Times was in 1974, when it published transcripts of White House conversations that figured into the Watergate scandal. “Expressions highly objectionable by Times standards were printed because of the light they shed on a historic matter, the possibility of a presidential impeachment,” explains the style manual.

Plus, let’s face it, I don’t think The Times liked Nixon much. I don’t think it likes Bush much, either; but at any rate, the paper seems to have relaxed its shit standard, seeing as how the current president’s comment is nowhere near as damaging or inflammatory as the Watergate tapes.

Pop quiz, hotshot: Can you name the source of these three screengrabs, each featuring exterior station signage for the 1/9 2/3 New York City subway lines?

Hint: each image is from a commercially produced video source, so I’m not putting up anything too obscure. Challenge: as you can see, when widescreen screengrabs are proportionally scaled to my blog-standard image width, they gain the size and quality of a Bazooka Joe comic.

The line for tonight’s 9:40 show at Film Forum snaked out the doors and down West Houston. I was towards the end of it and the couple in front of me was displeased about the crowd. “It’s an obscure movie from 1951,” the man moaned. “It’s Ace in the Hole,” the woman added, stressing the title with exasperation, as if we were there to see a preschool puppet show.

Don’t these people read the papers? I was there foremost to see a Billy Wilder drama about a journalist. But also, as I suspect most of the rest of the line was, to see an exceedingly rare breed of film: one that’s been forever unavailable on VHS or DVD (at least legally). The internet holds more than a few tales of Ace in the Hole fans like the guy who cherishes his tape dubbed from a late-night TV broadcast somewhere in Florida in the early ’80s.

The film looks pristine despite its scarcity and age, with rock-solid black and white, great contrast and clean sound, but it’s not a lost gem. During its first 15 minutes, I thought it might be. The film’s star, Kirk Douglas, has admitted himself that he relished playing son-of-a-bitch roles, which he does here with an added dash of comedy.

His character, Chuck Tatum, a fast-talking traveling newspaperman from New York, rolls into Albuquerque sitting in a car under tow, hops out and tells the driver to keep it running. He’s looking for a job by bragging about the number of papers he’s been fired from along the way. He talks himself into the office of the local-paper editor-in-chief Jacob Boot (Porter Hall) by promising him $200, which he then explains is the amount of money Boot would save monthly by hiring him for the reduced salary of $40 a week.

“I’ve done a lot of lying in my time,” Tatum admits to Boot during the job interview. “I’ve lied to men who wear belts. I’ve lied to men who wear suspenders. But I’d never be so stupid as to lie to a man who wears both belt and suspenders.” Tatum eyeballs this wardrobe anomaly and after the perfect pause says, “You strike me as a cautious man, Boot.” My kind of humor.

Boot hires him nonetheless, soon finding he now has a pacing firebrand on his staff who obsessively builds matchstick ships in empty liquor bottles and isn’t content to cover rattlesnake festivals or any other soft, middle-of-nowhere news. A year passes quickly, by which time Tatum himself is sporting the belt-suspender combo and complaining about his lot, including a scene in which he says the most unlikely phrase ever by a Douglas. Let’s just say it was a touch of movie magic for me to hear him exclaim “Chicken tacos!” in his gravelly, anguished voice when told they’re the closest substitute for the chicken livers he’s requested for dinner.

This fun passes soon. The film grew tiresome for me when the moralizing kicked in, foretold in the opening scenes by the embroidered credos hanging prominently in the newsroom that read, “Tell The Truth.”

Tatum smells a big story and his way to bigger and better newspapers when a cave wall collapses in a nearby town on Leo (Richard Benedict), the owner of a shabby roadside curio-stand/diner. Barging his way through a rickety-walled tunnel, he consoles the poor guy and takes some exclusive photos of his predicament, legs pinned under rock. His resulting story is embellished as “Ancient Curse Entombs Man,” featuring a sensational backstory that Indian spirits caused the cave-in because Leo was stealing tribal pottery to sell at his store.

His story well-received, Tatum realizes a trapped man is more valuable to him than one who’s free, or as he puts it, “Bad news sells best because good news is no news.” (Later, he chucks out that chestnut about “yesterday’s news” and fish-wrap.) He’s able to convince others: Leo’s wife (Jan Sterling) was planning to leave him, but decides to stay on because the Mourning Wife makes for better copy. And once the gawkers start showing up for a glimpse of Leo and up-to-the-minute updates on the rescue effort, they spend lots of cash at the diner. Tatum even convinces the rescue team’s engineer to put a photogenic drill atop the mountain that will bore a rescue tunnel straight down. The task will take nearly a week, many more news cycles than the 16-hour plan the engineer had originally, to merely shore-up a passageway to Leo with timber to save him easily. As the effort crawls forward, onlookers arrive in caravans, turning the desert floor into a sprawling parking lot.

A midway spouts up, complete with Ferris wheel, souvenir stands and a band that performs ballads about Leo while selling copies of the sheet music. A circus rolls in and pitches its big top. Following these amusements are newsmen from other papers, TV and radio, who embed themselves in a makeshift tent on the outskirts of the hubbub, not necessarily because it’s a newsworthy event, but because everybody else is there to cover it. They’re displeased their requests for details and quotes need to be vetted by Tatum, who has convinced the sheriff to keep his competitors at bay and his access to Leo exclusive. After a while, the newsmen wonder aloud whether Leo even exists.

I’d have liked Ace in the Hole better if it had sustained its madcap comedic opening throughout and became more of a Wag the Dog-style media farce. Maybe Tatum could have been unrepentant about his bullheadedness in getting (or really, creating) the Big Story. Maybe Leo could have been assigned some unredeeming characteristics to balance the good-hearted simpleton he is; as such, every painfully long scene of him in that cave, flat on his back and eventually succumbing to pneumonia the morning he’s to be rescued, is meant to tug at our heartstrings but instead is excruciating. Most of the film, I felt like I was stuck in a mountain myself.

The Delta Grill is one of those Cajun-ish restaurants with décor I can best describe as “bait shop,” with its craft-paper tablecloths, worn wooden signs, old photos and other curios on the walls. There was even a bluegrass band in the corner loudly covering the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” complete with accordion. I had a barbecued pork po’ boy, which had a sweet sauce and fresh-cut pickle and tomato slices. Not too shabby.

The Delta Grill

• 700 Ninth Ave. (corner of 48th Street)
• (212) 956-0934
• Meal 23 of 52: pulled pork po’ boy with French fries ($9) and a glass of iced tea.

Like Welcome to Collinwood, The OH in Ohio is a well-meaning but stilted movie taking place in my old hometown of Cleveland.

Parker Posey, the Queen of the Independent Pictures, plays a economic development executive for the city who’s so repressed, she’s never had an orgasm, although she’s memorized the number of times she’s had sex with her hangdog high-school bio teacher husband (Paul Rudd, who was Alicia Silverstone’s stepbrother Josh in Clueless).

She blames herself, though, for her orgasm-free life, and takes a new-agey sex-ed class taught by Liza Minnelli, who encourages the women, clad in white robes and standing at easels, to write down a pet name for their vaginas. In a cutesy script, Parker writes down “Vagina.” After careful consideration, she adds “My” above it. Later, with hesitation, she buys a vibrator at a sex shop staffed by an uncredited Heather Graham and before you know it, she’s a masturbation addict, and after nights on the town with various random men, a full-fledged sex addict.

The pinnacle of her satisfaction comes from a fling with local swimming pool magnate Danny DeVito, whose cheesy TV commercials she grew up watching and whose own pool has a waterslide so high, you can see the entire downtown Cleveland skyline standing atop it.

Meanwhile, Parker’s husband moves into the garage, then into an apartment building on what appears to be Euclid Heights Boulevard called the Manly Arms (that’s this movie’s type of humor, if you haven’t already guessed). There he has a fling with an overeducated student of his, played by Mischa Barton, who looks a lot older than her 20-year-old self. His midlife affair inspires him to clean up his act, as he gets in shape, trims his beard and dresses more sharply, but both his character and his storyline disappear mysteriously by the film’s conclusion.

I liked that one of his last scenes takes place in Vidstar Video, the tiny independent video store on Coventry Road that I used to visit nearly nightly when I lived in Cleveland Heights. There are many other great Cleveland locations in The OH in Ohio: another scene on Coventry by the parking garage, exteriors and interiors at Jacobs Field and the Frank Gehry-designed Peter B. Lewis Building, and Cleveland Heights High School, which Jimi attended. These scenic touches revived memories both fond and pained among the Cleveland expatriates in our group, but the movie as a whole left us disappointed.

Jimi likes technology and feature-laden gadgets and although I poke fun at his conspicuous consumption, I think it’s to mask a whiff of jealousy. Jimi’s newish waffle iron, for instance, a gleaming masterwork of Bauhaus economy that cost more than my entire necktie wardrobe, is mounted on a gimbal and double-sided, so it can make two giant Belgium waffles at once.

Tonight I was over at his apartment, bemoaning that I could never keep the lenses of my glasses clean and streak-free, especially in sweaty weather like today. What happened next I can only describe as “informercial.” Without taking a step, Jimi reached over and grabbed a small device from a shelf in his kitchen and placed it on the counter. It was an Automatic Eyeglass Cleaner from Sharper Image.

This thing takes the cake. It’s mostly a plastic reservoir of cleaning solution that you change every so often. You open a compartment on the top, clip your glasses by their bridge to a little clamp, snap the lid shut and press the start button. Cleaning solution whooshes around inside. After a spell, the lid opens automatically as an electric-blue light ignites and beams through the water, making it resemble a scene from Cocoon, only instad of a youthful Wilford Brimley rising from the liquid, it’s your glasses, lenses transparent as the day they were ground. Then the machine hums as it gently quivers the glasses dry.

You know, I could further mock this spectacles spectacle, but my glasses were squeaky clean. And what a show! I’ve seen off-Broadway productions with less drama.

I remember when I was a kid, it drove me nuts to hear a new song I liked on the radio, then not have the DJ mention its name or who sang it. Usually those guys wouldn’t shut up, breaking into chatter during the song’s outro, most often when I was trying to record a clean copy of the song on my one-deck Panasonic boom box.

I’ve found now, with the search powers of the internet, that it’s easier than ever to track down any song, even one that I only know a vague phrase from. For example, I enjoyed a particular pre-movie tune played at Film Forum one recent evening, so I scrawled down a sentence of the lyric in my Moleskine: “If you’re ever gonna kiss me, it had better be tonight.”

When I got home, I Googled the lyric in double-quotes with the added word lyrics. Once I got the name of the song, I plugged it into the iTunes Music Store and listened to a few of the 30-second samples to find out which version of the song I’d heard; this particular song was a standard and recorded by a number of people. I solved the mystery in a few minutes, whereas in 1986, I’d have had to wait until the weekend for the American Top 40 to have Casey Kasem tell me who was responsible for the marvelous composition I’d heard days earlier, probably “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” by Billy Ocean. That’s the progress of technology for you.

The song, by the way, was “It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Sta Sera),” a Mancini composition originally from the Pink Panther soundtrack, although the version I heard and appreciated was by Buddy Greco, with half the lyrics in English and half in Italian. I like it because it reminds me of They Might Be Giants’ cover of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” another gleefully chugging jitterbug of a song.

• “It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Sta Sera)” by Buddy Greco (1.8 MB mp3)

I’d wondered about Bar Pitti, a Tuscan Italian trattoria on Sixth Avenue in the Village that I often pass on my way to Film Forum. Summer nights especially, its wide outdoor seating section is always packed with people. Then this past weekend, I was listening to Wes Anderson’s director’s commentary on the The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou DVD and he mentioned not only that he’s a Film Forum fan, but that he and Noah Baumbach wrote most of the film’s script at Bar Pitti. They’d meet for lunch, start writing and usually still be there by dinner. They even went so far as to record the DVD’s commentary at the restaurant. In the background you can hear diners talking and silverware clinking; at one point, someone drops a glass.

Despite the driving rain this afternoon, it was as good a time as any to try the place, so I stopped in for dinner after work. It’s my kind of neighborhood restaurant: popular enough to attract celebrities but locals, too, with an unassuming décor inside (plain walls with wicker-seated wooden chairs for the dozen or so small tables), and outside, the extensive sidewalk seating (about 42 seats under a sturdy awning, where I sat protected and watched pedestrians try to dodge the deluge). The menu features the basics of Italian cuisine, in fine-sized portions at even finer prices. This is one of those places where the glass of wine is likely to cost as much as the entrée.

The waiters, most of which spoke Italian, were brisk but courteous, and knew most of the locals, whether they were stopping in to eat or just passing by. They spread the cheer around, joshing with the guys at Da Silvano, another Italian restaurant next door, as well as themselves. “Would you believe this rain?” one asked the other, letting his wide, animated gestures do most of the talking. When a mom and her son walked by, the kid trailing an orange helium balloon, one of the waiters joked, “Hey buddy, don’t fly away!” These guys had genuinely good spirits, which is all the atmosphere I need in a restaurant.

My eggplant Parmesan was rich with cheese and tasty. I had it with a glass of the house red wine, a generous 12-ounce or so pour in a sturdy glass. For dessert I had an espresso and a lemon tart, the crust of which seemed to be made with actual butter in taste and texture, while the mouth-watering filling radiated a refreshing chill.

Bar Pitti

• 268 Sixth Ave. (between Bleecker and Houston)
• (212) 982-3300
• Meal 22 of 52: Eggplant Parmesan ($8.50), a glass of house red wine ($7), lemon tart ($5) and espresso ($3).

I took a train up to Greenwich, Connecticut today. The ride took 50 minutes, not including the time it took to get over to Grand Central from my office building. Then I attended a meeting that lasted maybe 25 minutes. And then I took a 50-minute train ride back into the city. What a time waster. On the positive side, I find train rides relaxing; is it because the constant gentle rocking of the traincars in motion lulls one into a rock-a-bye-baby state of drowsiness? I think so.

Not only do we in New York City get all the movies before most of the rest of the country, we also get customized advertising for nationally sold products.

I’m partial to Volkswagen’s new campaign for the Rabbit, which the company is “reintroducing” this week by relabeling its Golf car, which has been selling poorly. (“Volkswagen customers want a relationship with their cars. Names like The Thing, Beetle, Fox, and Rabbit support this,” explained Volkswagen’s Director of Brand Innovation in a press release.) I like the campaign’s play on two of the most ubiquitous animals in the city, after people.

I’ve had the same suit for about 10 years and it’s time I started thinking of purchasing a new one, so I asked Jimi, my fashion consultant, for advice on which designers I should be pursuing. My current suit, a Jimi-recommended purchase dated to our perilous youth in Cleveland, is from Hugo Boss and I credit the brand-name quality for it lasting all these years, physically and stylistically, although I’m starting to suspect it has dated and people aren’t sure how to break the news to me. People other than Jimi, that is; “Are those shoulder pads?” he shrieked the other day. As my fashion consultant, it’s his job to make these tough calls.

Jimi’s top three recommendations for a new suit were Burberry for its slim cuts, Brooks Brothers for its classic basicness and Armani Exchange, which is Armani for the poor.

To warm myself up for suit shopping, I’ve been tackling a more pressing clothing need by updating my semi-fancy wardrobe, that which I will wear to work and parties. My trip to Rome next month is a good excuse to update this segment of my wardrobe, most of which is now bordering on five years old. My goal today was to buy at least a pair of pants, a dress shirt and shoes, but exhaustion set in quickly and I was able only to buy a lone pair of pants.

I considered some from Armani Exchange, but Giorgio’s fascination with pinstripes mystifies me. Expense wasn’t as a large a consideration as I would have expected at most of the clothing stores I stopped by at the Time Warner Center because they were in the midst of summer sales. Although nothing grabbed my fancy at A|X, Hugo Boss or J. Crew, I ended up with a nice basic pair of black cotton trousers from United Colors of Benetton, with just a touch of synthetic fiber for stretch and fewer wrinkles. I was drawn in by the 50%-off signs in the store windows, followed by confusion over the European sizing. A saleslady said I was a 48, and the first pair I tried fit in a stylishly trim way, which I decided I need to take more advantage of before my body sags out to inevitable middle-age doughiness. I wanted gray pants, too, but the salesperson said the ones I liked were only available in black. Benetton’s other gray trousers were shiny polyester, which wouldn’t have as lasting style-strength as I’d like. Back to the drawing board.

Aren’t you annoyed at all the charger cords and electrical adapters you need to keep track of and/or lug around for all your electronic devices? Each device—cell phone, laptop, digital camera, mp3 player, PDA—has its own proprietary charging system. Wouldn’t it be easier to have a universal cable/charger?

It would, but it’s not going to be developed any time soon by major electronics manufacturers, for the simple reason that they make a lot of money on those cables and adapters tangled around your life.

The Wall Street Journal’s Water Mossberg asked Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony, about this at a conference last month, and the executive replied:

“I have a sneaking suspicion it’s because the last three years, the most profitable business at Sony was the component division,” which makes such accessories. When the crowd laughed, he said: “I’m serious.”

Not only can margins on these cables and batteries top those of the devices themselves, Mossberg adds, many companies believe the varying designs of the items offers a competitive advantage.

“It seems to me,” he writes, “that the majority of common laptops, cameras and phones could evolve toward using a few standard battery and charger designs that could be made by third-party battery companies and sold at drugstores.”

It’s a great idea, but wishful thinking.

A Scanner Darkly: I don’t think I understood what was going on here. I also think maybe I wasn’t meant to. If your movie takes place in a dystopian Californian near-future (something like “10 years from now”) and deals with mind-warping designer drugs that have literally captured a weak public’s imagination, you have a lot of leeway in terms of the linearity and clarity of your plot.

The computer-generated rotoscope animation allows for some nice effects, like the dizzying “scramble suits” that DEA officers of the future wear to make themselves appear as if they’re wearing a constantly shifting slideshow of disguises.

The scenes I enjoyed the most were those in which the film’s addled protagonists simply bantered about their paranoia, conspiracies and sweet nothings. Motormouthed Robert Downey Jr. gets some of the best patter with his untrustworthy, double-crossing, loose cannon of a character. Keanu Reeves per normal seems to strain in conjuring emotions other than blank stares. Playing his character’s girlfriend/dealer is Winona Ryder, who has just enough screentime to make everyone wonder what the devil she’s been up to the last few years.

The Lost Weekend is one of Billy Wilder’s more award-winning films, netting Oscars for his direction and co-written screenplay, as well as for Best Picture and Best Actor in a Leading Role (Ray Milland), but it’s tedious.

And I’m not a fan of character-defining disorders or anomalies, although they can be good for two things Hollywood likes: hammy acting and Best Actor Oscars. Consider the Oscar payoffs alone from blindness, autism (with savant abilities), obsessive-compulsive disorder, paralysis, cerebral palsy and schizoaffective disorder, among others.

Milland plays an alcoholic within a straight-as-an-arrow plot in what amounts to a one-man-show of borderline-believable drunk act. He tells his sob story to his bartender (Howard Da Silva), worries his too-forgiving girl from Toledo (the wholesome hotness of Jane Wyman) and hides bottles from his pointdexter brother (Phillip Terry). By the end he’s scared himself sober after hallucinating, falling down a flight of stairs and landing in Bellevue. Then he vows to write that great American novel that’s always been on his mind. His girl takes him back and his bartender returns the typewriter he left in the street while on a bender. Good for them; I just couldn’t bring myself to care about these characters or this film.

Katie invited me to tag along with her and Kelly to a party at a friend’s apartment on First Avenue in the 20s, directly across the street from Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the U.S. and a name synonymous with psychiatric hospitals in general, although not always in a positive sense. More importantly for Independence Day purposes, the 11th floor apartment had a balcony facing east, which meant we could clearly see the fireworks launched from the East River.

And if we turned our heads to the right, we could just see the South Street Seaport fireworks, a separate holiday bombardment geared for those located south of the Brooklyn Bridge.

At times, it was a pyrotechnic simulcast, and the explosions in the sky were intense enough to rattle windows and set off choruses of car alarms. A visual trend that was new to me were the Fireworks That Explode Into Shapes Other Than Circular Bursts: there were five-pointed stars, cubes and Saturn-like ringed spheres that hovered momentarily in midair like cartoon constellations before radiating out and fading away. From our vantage point, we not only enjoyed the light and sound, we pitied the crowds of plebeians below, clogging the streets and craning their necks for a view.

The party itself was a small, fine affair, organized by a bookseller Katie used to work with. She prepared pastry-like cheese crackers, a quiche-like thing, hummus, guacamole and even homemade lemon ice cream topped with strawberries. The decor was strictly books. A wall by the door bristled with bookshelves, there were books on every available flat surface and several metal spinner racks displayed even more. A stack of books near the door consisted solely of extras or other books-for-the-taking that I regret not sifting through. On the bathroom wall were hung reprints of classic Nancy Drew covers. Most of the guests I conversed with had a book-work connection, although I talked with a laser eye surgery technician about gentrification in the city; a public defender from Brooklyn about the correlation of weather with crime; and the hostesses’ boyfriend about the ethics of World Cup diving.

I returned to the Film Forum for more Essential Wilder and tonight it was A Foreign Affair, a fluffy comedy about the shenanigans of U.S. occupation troops in post-war Germany and the congressional delegate on a mission to expose any conduct unbecoming. Critics in 1948 were miffed that Wilder would find comedy in the bombed-to-hell city of a vanquished enemy so soon after the war’s close, not to mention visual jokes involving Hitler and swastikas (which actually are funny).

As the story goes, Iowa Congresswoman Phoebe Frost (the prim Jean Arthur) is on a fact-finding mission to gauge the morale of the U.S. peacekeeping troops stationed in Berlin. What she finds are gleeful GIs profiteering from the black market and taking advantage of the fact that there are many suddenly unattached fräuleins living among the ruins.

We’re introduced to Marlene Dietrich, as the ex-Nazi-sympathizing nightclub singer Erika Von Schluetow, in the least-divalike way imaginable: as she brushes her teeth, then spits it playfully at her boyfriend, Captain John Pringle (John Lund), who has just traded a chocolate birthday cake from his girlfriend in the states for a mattress.

After some undercover work for which she pretends to be one of the aforementioned fräuleins, Frost suspects Pringle’s fraternizations with the enemy, so he switches sides and starts putting the moves on her instead. I got a kick out of watching him loosen her from a tense, by-the-books politico to a full-fledged showboat, peaking in her getting sauced at a bar then launching into her state’s actual unofficial song, “The Iowa Corn Song,” the chorus of which is:

We’re from I-o-way, I-o-way
State of all the land
Joy on ev’ry hand
We’re from I-o-way, I-o-way
That’s where the tall corn grows.

A Foreign Affair is stuck as a lesser entry in the Wilder oeuvre, but it’s still an entertaining one, even if it has lost some of its satirical political bite.

New Yorkers have a tendency to abbreviate the names of sections of the city. The oldest abbreviated district is SoHo, which appears to have entered common speech in the late 1960s. A New Yorker Talk of the Town item from the summer of 1970 quotes an author living in a factory loft on Spring Street “in the section of town—bounded north and south by Houston and Canal Streets and east and west by Broadway and West Broadway—that is called the Factory District, or, alternatively, the Cast-Iron District, or, alternatively, SoHo.” The fellow is none too pleased over his part of town’s newfound popularity and commoditization. In particular, the name game galls him.

I live in the Factory District. I dislike the name SoHo, and I dislike the person who thought up the name, though I don’t know him. He must have been very pleased with himself when he thought the name up. The Factory District is south of Houston Street. Get it? South Houston. I bet he wrote a letter to the Village Voice when he thought it up.

But SoHo was only the beginning, followed necessarily at the close of the ’70s by NoHo (north of Houston). In the early ’80s, there was Tribeca (Triangle Below Canal Street) while the name-of-the-’90s was the dopey Dumbo (the District Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).

These abbreviations are about exclusivity and real estate, of course. Former industrial spaces become luxury lofts that draw artists, actors and models, then lawyers and investment bankers. Boutiques, clubs, bars, restaurants and art galleries pop up. Rents skyrocket.

New abbreviations are constantly in the works, striving to someday evolve to SoHo popularity. I was told this weekend with apparent seriousness that WeHa (West Harlem) and SpaHa (Spanish Harlem) are two nascent names making the rounds. It got me thinking that my neighborhood of Inwood could use an abbreviation upgrade to make gentrification more buzzworthy, something stupid like NoWaHi (North of Washington Heights) or SoBro (just South of the Bronx).

Looking over the schedule for Film Forum’s new series, Essential Wilder, I’m reminded not what a great director Billy Wilder was, but what a great screenwriter he was, a character creator. He said as much himself, that he was taught restraint as a director, to be unnoticed. “He should be invisible,” Wilder explained. “You should notice the characters.”

For instance, I don’t recall The Seven Year Itch so much as a whole as I do Marilyn Monroe’s character explaining that she prepares for hot summer days by keeping her “undies in the icebox.” And everyone, even those who haven’t seen the film, knows the iconic image of her white dress briefly lifted by a gust from a subway grate.

Wilder’s scripts are writerly, especially when you consider his fondness for scene-setting and character-establishing voiceovers. Here I’m thinking of a beyond-the-grave William Holden in Sunset Boulevard (“Funny, how gentle people get with you once you’re dead.”), Audrey Hepburn as the title character in Sabrina (“Once upon a time, on the north shore of Long Island, some 30 miles from New York, there lived a small girl on a large estate.”), and Jack Lemmon in The Apartment:

On November 1st, 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. If you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of five feet six-and-a-half inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts like this because I work for an insurance company, Consolidated Life of New York. We’re one of the top five companies in the country. Our home office has 31,259 employees, which is more than the entire population of uhh... Natchez, Mississippi. I work on the 19th floor. Ordinary Policy Department, Premium Accounting Division, Section W, desk number 861.

Double Indemnity, which kicked off the Essential Wilder series tonight, uses a similar setup, but beginning at the end, with insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) shot in the chest and spilling his tale of fraud and murder into the Dictaphone at his desk.

He’s been crossed by the sly blonde Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), clear winner here of the Worst Wig Ever Award, who has charmed Neff into taking out a policy on her husband without his knowledge, then having Neff bump off the guy. Neff’s a cad himself; they banter and gambol sexually in the confines of Hays Code prudishness and the number of times he refers to Dietrichson as “baby” are as irritating as his dead monotone throughout. He’s quick to leap into the scheme and a relationship with her, but he’s unaware she’s been suspected of murder previously, a hidden fact that eventually fouls his best-laid plans.

Being in the business of exposing rackets like the one he’s perpetrating, Neff formulates his scheme meticulously. What he doesn’t count on are the insights of his boss, Barton Keyes (the sparky Edward G. Robinson), who chips away at Neff’s resolve through clever reasoning. Keyes’ own boss has a misguided pet theory that the death was a suicide and the scene in which Keyes literately and speedily punctures his argument while telling him off as a front-office buffoon who’s never read an actuarial table, is the best in the movie; people at my screening applauded it. Just as Keyes has all but pegged Neff as Dietrichson’s partner in crime, relations sour between the two criminals. Neff unwisely tries to pin the racket on her in a last ditch attempt to save himself. Too bad he didn’t know about that gun of hers.

Double Indemnity is classic film noir, steeped in sex, murder and double-crosses, spiced with the dark humor that’s Wilder’s trademark.