September 2006 Archives

Along with most of Staten Island, I’ve been watching the ginormous Beatles Anthology via Netflix. It’s not too shabby, although it’s literally about 80% concert footage, 5% reaction shots of the screaming, hyperventilating young girls in the crowd, and only about 15% interview snippets from the Beatles themselves.

The series was made after John’s death but before George’s, so you get archival recordings and footage of John for his side of the story and plenty of footage with George that’s sad not only because he’s now dead but because so much of it features him during a phase in his later years when he apparently believed he looked fly with a pencil-thin moustache.

The Beatles don’t tax themselves dispelling their own perhaps literally mythical achievements: biggest concert ever (Shea Stadium), first use of backwards vocals in a song (“Rain”), first music videos (also “Rain,” with the more popular A-side, “Paperback Writer”), that they didn’t discover reefer until Bob Dylan practically forced it on them, all those #1 hits and bigger than Jesus, etc.

But the concert footage is fun, even if it does seem to go on too long—the clips nearly always features entire songs, concert-film style, which can drag after awhile. But it’s the Beatles. It’s fun to watch their styles change and their fans along with them, from the bobbed British wallflowers in horn-rimmed specs during 1962 to the borderline-hippie kids in Kodachrome-colored clothing less than five years on. Musical styles changing, too: the sudden lust for electric piano, George snapping up that sitar, the obsession with Dylan’s folksiness and the Beach Boys’ crystalline harmonies. And I haven’t even yet reached the episodes where persistent touring and infighting soured their outlook and ground them out.

Making the links on the Internet this week has been David Roth’s article in Slate about his job as a baseball-card writer for Topps, which also makes Ring Pops and Bazooka bubble gum. His recollections took me back to my years as a staff writer for a pair of national trade magazines for the candy industry, a job I had when I lived in Cleveland, right up until the point I moved here to New York¹.

Writing about candy wasn’t much more romantic than trade-press writing for other big industries. I dealt with the usual deadline pressures, fended off persistent PR flaks and interviewed executives from private companies who were loath to divulge anything more than press-release tidbits.

The travel perks were expansive and mind-altering. In Chicago, I watched Jelly Belly manufacture its signature jelly beans and conversed with the company’s founders at length about conjuring flavors from scratch. I saw gumdrops, chocolates and kids’ candy parade down conveyor belts in Brazil and Mexico. Every year in Cologne, Germany, I walked miles among hundreds of booths at the world’s largest candy trade show. In a hotel ballroom in Canada, I witnessed grizzled candy executives tear up over receiving lifetime achievement awards. I’ve been to Hershey, a magical place in Pennsylvania smelling of chocolate and cow shit, and stayed at the Hershey Lodge, the large and luxurious halls of which resemble those of the hotel in The Shining.

And I ate a lot of candy. I didn’t gain much weight but by way of cavity-shadowed X-rays and rounds of drilling, I helped my dentist fund his costly hobby custom-building offroad sport vehicles.

¹ Coincidentally, right after I moved here I had an informational interview with a rep from Topps, which is headquartered just off Madison Square Park. But nothing came of it because the company farms out its PR through an external agency and wasn’t looking to hire any in-house writers. [back]

My mom mailed me a shoebox containing a bubblewrap-swaddled gallon Ziploc freezer bag full of homemade Snickerdoodles.

Does any cookie have a more stupid name? No. However, there are also few cookies as delicious.

Someone parked this violent-red child’s desk in the lobby of my apartment building. Affixed to the lid was a Post-it note advertising a diabetes medication on which someone had written “Yours Free.”

It’s mine now! It is the same height as the arms of my love seat so I am pressing it into service as a funky end-table. It also offsets the blue of that furniture in a perky way. Plus, I just like red.

With nerdy excitement, I rode home from work tonight on an R160B subway car. It’s a new model that’s being “revenue test”-driven this month, so I consider myself lucky for the preview.

Peering down the track¹ at Penn Station, I noticed the train’s difference from most others before it even arrived. On the engine car, the R160B sports a glossy black fiberglass faceplate, yoke-shaped and reminiscent of certain cellphone designs. Very modern looking, for now. (View a photo here.)

What grabbed my attention once inside the car was the FIND (Flexible Information and Notice Display) System, a LED strip map that shows the rider’s relation to the next several stations (i.e. a graphical indication that a rider will arrive at Dyckman Street in two stops), as well as any route changes. I think the design is confusing; decide for yourself by viewing these photos. Each car has two (or was it three?) of these maps and they’re flanked by an LCD TV screen cycling basic route information with house commercials and static ads for the MTA. These screens were what really grabbed my attention for two reasons.

The first has to do with logos and design. Some background: older subway cars, which still make up most of New York’s fleet, have the line logo (i.e. the white-“A”-in-a-blue-circle logo for the A train) displayed on the face of the engine car and on the outside of all cars, usually via a low-tech rotatable backlit transparency. The newer cars, including the R160B, don’t have any “permanent” signage; inside and out, it’s nothing but LCD or LED screens. This makes sense. In effect, the MTA is moving even closer to creating a universal subway car that can run on any line², merely changing all signage, as well as interior maps and line details, electronically.

A side effect of this is that the system’s colorful and iconic signage, which I wrote about late last year, seems in danger of disappearing from the cars. But wait: an interesting thing about the LCD screens inside the R160B is that they occasionally depicted a computer-generated white-“A”-in-a-blue-circle logo. Everything old is new again! Vignelli’s ’60s design makes it to the digital age!

The second attention-grabbing aspect of the screens is obvious. The MTA, with its perpetual budget woes, is all about generating revenue. I bet it added the screens with the eventual intent of broadcasting commercials. What advertiser wouldn’t want an audience as captive and diverse as one packed into a New York City subway car at rush hour?

¹ As any New Yorker will tell you, this makes your train arrive faster. [back]

² This isn’t wholly accurate. The lines of the New York City subway system originate from a patchwork of styles and eras. Cars on the lettered lines, for example, are longer and wider than those on numbered lines; the two groups aren’t interchangeable. But it was easier to refer to a universal subway car than it was to interrupt the flow by explaining stuff like I just did here. [back]

The Fancy Restaurant Club met at a place tonight I’d already eaten at twice, the Rosa Mexicano across the street from Lincoln Center, and I feared the magic might be gone. But the food was excellent as usual and do you know who was sitting a few tables over from us, embedded in a large entourage? Janet Jackson.

I can tell you she’s very short, divalike and sports a ponytail the size of a firelog. We heard-tell she was in the area shooting a segment for BET and we definitely noticed she changed her clothes in the restaurant’s restroom, which wasn’t all that unusual until you consider:

1. Two men, each the approximate size of a phone booth, were stationed at the door and wouldn’t let anyone in until she exited.
2. It was the men’s room.

Janet was in there awhile and a long line of guys formed outside, guys likely becoming less and less impressed (if they ever were) that it was Janet Jackson impeding their pee, even with the chance she would improve the smell in the stalls by her perfumed presence. As for the Club, we were not even clear why Janet was at Rosa Mexicano to begin with.

Don’t get me wrong: the place is fancy and we are not called the Fancy Restaurant Club for nothing. It’s also ranked among the Zagat Survey’s top-20 most-popular restaurants this year, although it’s not necessarily celebrity popular. In other words, real people such as you and I eat there, the service is prompt and polite, there isn’t a month-long waiting list, the chef isn’t a loudmouthed penis, and the entrees are very reasonably priced for the neighborhood.

Perhaps Janet was there on a multi-restaurant tour to fuel gossip and gain celeb-sighting column-inches in order to inspire mentions of her album 20 Y.O., available in stores nationwide tomorrow. Look for Janet to appear suddenly at an Olive Garden near you. Don’t take any guff from her bodyguards.

For breakfast, Mom, Dad and I hiked from my apartment uphill through Fort Tryon Park for brunch at the New Leaf Café, an enterprise of Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project, a not-for-profit organization that’s revitalizing grubby public spaces in the city.

I had the challah French toast, served with braised strawberries and, on the side, two plump links of mildly sweet chicken-apple sausage. Delicious. Our server was peculiar in a kindergarten teacher sort of way, not blinking enough as she spoke slowly and obliquely about things like how the gardens at Fort Tryon reminded her of Maurice Sendak illustrations. (The gardens are beautiful, but they’re not Maurice caliber.) Her name was Allison and she signed our receipt with “Allison Wonderland,” which contributed to our suspicions that she was an actor, a stripper, or both.

Afterwards, the garden tour at the Cloisters was informative, although Mom recognized immediately our guide’s mistaken identity of the lavender. “At least she was pointing in the general direction,” Mom said. The tour extended inside to discussion of plant elements in the museum’s famous unicorn tapestries. We learned factual errors, like that pomegranates don’t grow on trees, and that the tapestries teem with allusions to elixirs. Closely grouped but seemingly random varieties of flowers and herbs were depicted to reference the fact that they could be combined to make, for example, an aphrodisiac or a beverage purposed to help women conceive a thoughtful child. Medieval viewers would have instantly caught these references, but to the modern viewer, there’s nothing there but a tangle of plants.

New Leaf Café

• Fort Tryon Park
• (212) 568-5323
• Meal 29 of 52: challah French toast with coffee and orange juice ($15.95).

After breakfast at Edgar’s Cafe in my previous Upper West Side neighborhood, Mom, Dad and I walked through Central Park to the Met for the exhibit Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde. Great works by those two artists, among others by Gauguin, van Gogh and Redon. Because it’s a show focusing on Vollard, a dealer, the placards burst with anecdotes about money changing hands and implied how to become a successful art dealer:

1. Befriend the artist when he and his art are unpopular and buy his paintings cheaply.
2. Offload the paintings when the art/artist becomes popular.
3. Profit!

It was oddly refreshing to have so much of the exhibit concern the intersection of raw talent and raw commerce instead of airy ruminations on artistic method and inspiration. Y’all know the story of van Gogh cutting off his own ear. Well, van Gogh thanked his doctor for that incident with a painting, Portrait of Doctor Felix Rey, one of the works in the exhibit. Rey’s parents hated the thing and used it to patch a hole in their chicken coop. Vollard saw it differently. And now, well, it’s worth millions and hanging in a world-renowned museum.

We checked out Grand Central Terminal, then walked to the Empire State Building. The lines there were aggravating Dad and for good reason: a line to go through security, a line to get tickets, a line to get on one set of elevators, a line to board another set of elevators, a line to take the elevators back down, etc., all the while loud men attempt to sell you package tour deals and audio commentaries. (We could’ve gone to the Top of the Rock, with its newness, better organized lines and timed ticket system, but I heard the voice of Marge Simpson: “It’s wall-to-wall landmarks! The Williamsburg bridge! Fourth Avenue! Governors Island!”) At some point, we upgraded to express passes, which at least allowed us to skip the elevator-related lines. Haze limited the views from the 86th floor observatory to a half-mile, but we could still see Queens, New Jersey and most of Downtown. I pointed out landmark buildings, tried to pinpoint the non-landmark one in which I work and attempted to call Andrew and Jess on Dad’s cellphone just to say, “We’re calling from the top of the Empire State Building!”

Back at street level, we shouldered our way though the wedding party getting its photo taken in the lobby then walked over to Macy’s to check out the wooden escalators. On the subway uptown to dinner at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, Dad had a brief moment resting his eyes that proved the only way to capture him in the wild without having him jerk away from my camera in annoyance.

After dinner we purchased cabernet sauvignon and Jameson 12-year to drink back at the apartment where we reviewed photos from our most recent European jaunts: my trip with Dana to Rome and Mom and Dad’s trip to Ireland.

Mom and Dad, who arrived at my apartment this morning to visit for the weekend, had a crusty Jewish cabdriver drive them in from LaGuardia who told entertaining stories, like that I was smart to be living in Inwood because it’s inexpensive although there are all those Dominicans to contend with. I was happy to hear the ride was much cheaper than I originally quoted; I thought outward fares from LaGuardia were flat-rate like the $45 ones from JFK, but I was mistaken.

We got lunch at Bite, a closet-sized East Village salad and panini sandwich shop that Time Out New York rated best bet for Union Square environs in its recent and annual “Cheap Eats” cover story. I had the toasted and pressed Nutella-banana sandwich (only $3) and it was a mouth-watering mix of warm, sweet, melty and chewy tastiness. Sandwiches in tow, we walked a few blocks south and gathered at the Alamo cube on Astor Place for a Big Onion walking tour of the Bowery.

We were relieved to see our tour guide, David, at least appeared to be the real deal: he was shouldering a canvas bag from the Strand, and was dressed in jeans that kept falling down a bit and what appeared to be a thrift-store shirt. (Later I learned he’s a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Columbia.) He carried a small stack of laminated handouts he’d occasionally pass around, a pocketwatch on a chain that he’d check for time, and a beard that he would stroke not theatrically but with genuine thoughtfulness. He had a passion for facts both entertaining and enlightening, a keen knowledge of local history and a grudge for gentrification and development. He reminded us in some ways of my friend Joe.

We learned the Bowery is one of the two oldest streets in the city (Broadway’s the other) and that its name comes from the Dutch word for farm; most of the area on which we stood, including Cooper Union, two Starbucks less than a block apart and a Kmart, was once part of Peter Stuyvesant’s farm. At Cooper Union, the country’s first tuition-free institution of higher learning, we were told how the founder made his fortune collecting and disposing the horse carcasses that littered the city’s streets. (Because they’re so heavy, owners often left them where they fell.) Giving fresh meaning to the aphorism “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” Peter Cooper started a glue company, then obtained the first American patent for manufacturing “portable gelatine,” a treat that would eventually be known as Jell-O. His 1845 patent application even specified lemon or lime flavoring. What it didn’t recommend was gelatin made from horse hooves; Cooper called for isinglass gelatin, which is made from fish viscera, but let’s not let the facts spoil a good anecdote. As if his school-founding and dessert-inventing wasn’t enough, Cooper still found time to develop what’s perhaps the first steam locomotive prototype.

David also told of Cooper Union’s place in American history as a rallying point for mobs and more recently home to speeches by political firebrands. An interesting architectual detail: the school was built from blocks of brownstone, a mud-colored sandstone considered a shabby excuse for construction material at the time. After the school gained fame, its unconventional look sparked a short-lived brownstone fad, culminating in buildings of that name sprouting up all over Harlem and Brooklyn.

As we headed down Bowery, we looked at and learned of McSorley’s Old Ale House, at 150+ perhaps the city’s oldest pub and one that didn’t even admit women until 1970 when a court forced it to. It was a happy coincidence to hear David reference Joseph Mitchell’s excellent 1945 essay collection, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, which is among my current stack of bedside books.

We also made stops outside flophouses (several of which are still active), the Amato Opera House, the doomed CBGB, the Bowery Savings Bank and McGuirk’s Suicide Hall, one of the most notorious drinking establishments ever, the site of which is now a colossally ugly new glass-and-steel condo complex. I wish for the yuppies who will live there to know that there used to be a bar on the spot that would combine the dregs from the glasses at closing time into a barrel, thread a long tube into the swill, then charge a nickel for one all-you-could-drink suck. Adding a contemporary spin to the seedy topics of the tour, I spotted a fat man near Rivington Street who appeared to be mating with a stove. That’s tough love, man.

The tour ended in Chinatown, so we bought bubble tea at Ten Ren’s Tea Time and took it to drink at Columbus Park, where Chinese men crowded around the game tables to watch rounds of Xiangqi. We walked up to McNally Robinson where we pursued travel guides for Italy and found on a globe Zambia, where my sister Dana may be living and working next. After drinks at Republic, we ate dinner at Craft. For post-dinner drinks and lively conversation, we attended Andie and Eric’s cocktail party. Mom advised Ali, newly a nurse, in the ancient arts of the RN. It was like Yoda and Luke at Dagobah.

Bite

• 211 E. 14th Street (between Third and Second Avenues)
• (212) 677-3123
• Meal 28 of 52: Nutella Banana Ciabatta ($3.00).

The editors at Webster’s New World College Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary have released partial lists of the hundred or so new words to be included in their dictionaries later this year.

They sure take their sweet time on some of these. Ethernet is one of ’em and it’s been around since at least 1976 and in popular use since the ’90s. Ollie, the skateboarding pop-move, was coined in ’77 and unibrow has been around since I was a kid (circa Bert) and likely before that. In addition to these too late words, there are the additions that aren’t even words, like mouse potato (one who spends too much time on the internet) and youse (plural of you).

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: September 20, 2006

Filed at 1:45 p.m. ET

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took his verbal battle with the United States to the floor of the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, calling President Bush “the devil.”

Jojo: Love the Vulcan ears, too.
Jason: Those are *devil* ears. You can tell by the lobes. Plus, Vulcan ears smell like lavender. Devil ears smell like Ball Park Franks.
Jojo: You are truly a twisted individual.

Late to the Bob Dylan game, I recently bought his three-CD set of unreleased material, The Bootleg Series 1961-1991. The included booklet of photos, song descriptions and credits features a scanned brochure of Columbia Records’ marketing suggestions from 1965, the year Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone” and went electric on Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. It’s bracing to remember every popular musician is coveted first by the biz for his “artist product,” but really this list is just funny.

IDEAS . . . IDEAS . . . IDEAS . . .

We have all tried “different” avenues of exposure in promoting our artists and artist product. You have probably done some of these “different” types of promotion on Bob Dylan, but have you tried. . .

• Getting your accounts to position Bob Dylan product in other areas of their stores besides in the folk music section, such as with The Byrds, Sonny & Cher, etc. This will afford the customer a better chance to do some impulse buying.
• Contacting musical instrument outlets and persuading them to use Bob Dylan display pieces in conjunction with their guitar, harmonica and sheet music displays.
• Contacting radio personalities in your area that have “Americana”-type shows and pointing out to them the merits of featuring Bob Dylan in an American Heritage theme.
• Getting in touch with the casual wear buyers in department stores and men’s stores and convincing them to use Bob Dylan display pieces in their clothing displays. His dress may be considered “kooky” by conventional standards, but kooky or not he is a motivating force of the youth of today, and they like to emulate their leaders.
• Contacting the little theater groups and drama groups in your area to convince them that readings of the lyrics of Bob Dylan songs would be presenting modern poetry in its finest form.
• Getting in touch with the local newspaper culture editors and showing them the merits of doing a piece built around Bob Dylan, using a changing times theme.
• Putting your ads in your local newspapers on Bob Dylan is [sic] unusual areas of the paper such as on the sport page, the women’s section or even the financial section...after all, he does mean money...for us at least.
• Putting Bob Dylan displays with displays of men’s boots (he wears them all the time), sunglasses (he wears them all the time) or ANYWHERE that they will attract attention.

Be Different—He Is!

There’s a great Roman innovation that doesn’t get as much play as the aqueducts and sewer systems: satire.

A fine article (“My Satirical Self”) in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine by Wyatt Mason, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, notes that satire began with Gaius Lucilius in the second century B.C., who lampooned all things Greek, a culture he felt his fellow citizens were imitating too closely.

“A cultivated wit,” wrote Horace, a later Roman satirist, “one that badgers less, can persuade all the more. Artful ridicule can address contentious issues more competently and vigorously than can severity alone.”

Juvenal, another Roman, writes, “It is harder not to write satire. For who could endure this monstrous city, however callous at heart, and swallow his wrath?. . . Today, every vice has reached its ruinous zenith. So, satirist, hoist your sails.”

A statistic I’ve been meaning to memorize is one that New York pedestrians should know: how many blocks are in a mile. This varies because only most of Manhattan’s map is gridlike, but in general, if you’re walking “street blocks” (streets in Manhattan run east-west or “crosstown,” as we say) or the much more variable “avenue blocks” (avenues in Manhattan run north-south, otherwise known as uptown-downtown), here are the conversions, according to Michael Pollak in the “F.Y.I.” department of today’s New York Times city section:

1 street block = 264 feet
20 street blocks = 1 mile

1 avenue block = 750 feet
7 avenue blocks = 1 mile

So back when I was living on the Upper West Side and walking to work, I was knocking back about 2.5 miles one way. If I tried that from where I live now, it’d be more than eight miles one way. Yow!

As a follow-up to helping paint Katie’s bedroom in February, I headed out to Jersey City this afternoon to help paint her living room.

The A train and PATH train were running in perfect synch with my schedule, so I arrived in New Jersey early. To pass the time, I sat in Van Vorst Park to read, then walked by the Jersey City Free Public Library, which was throwing out a bunch of card catalogs. I wanted to enact a Dumpster dive mission, though there’d be no way I could lug that furniture back home on public transport.

Andie came over to help paint, too, and everything went smoothly. We even bothered this time to unscrew and remove the light switch, ventilation and electrical outlet faceplates. Katie’s cats were allowed to roam around until it became clear they were desperately interested in inspecting the full paint trays, so we shut them in the bedroom for the remainder of our session.

The room looks even better now, brighter and more cheery with light orangey-brown walls, which sounds gross but looks Martha Stewarty in a good way. We left the distinctive Art Deco-style molding around the windows and kitchen doorway painted white, which makes them stand out.

As a handsome parting gift from our Roman holiday, I received in the mail today a package from my sister in Ireland, a DVD of perhaps my favorite Jim Jarmusch film, Night on Earth.

In Rome, we’d scoured a few record chains for the movie, which is strangely available most everywhere else in the world but the U.S. Unfortunately, the copies I located there were hardwired with Italian subtitles during the non-English segments, so I passed. The version my sister sent me she purchased in Ireland, so it’s in English and, in a happy coincidence, has no regional lockout, which means I can watch it without issue on my PowerBook.

Like much of Jarmusch’s work, Night on Earth is slow, surface-simple and reflective. It’s comprised of five independent mini-movies about taxi drivers and their fares in five world cities over the course of the same night. The dialogue of each segment is in the country’s native language and unfolds like a one-act play, volleys of conversation or monologue about life in general, salted with Jarmusch’s strange humor and occasional bursts of cursing. The story in each of the five cities is a life lesson that could be summarized something like this:

1. Los Angeles segment: Know what you want and go after it. But keep in mind you may not get it.
2. New York segment: ”There are eight million stories in New York City. This is one of them.“
3. Paris segment: Sight may be the least reliable sense.
4. Rome segment: For the love of all that is holy, do not get into a cab driven by Roberto Benigni¹.
5. Helsinki segment: Someone always has it worse than you.

All this, plus a soundtrack by Tom Waits. You cannot go wrong with Night on Earth. Here’s hoping Jarmusch will get the thing on DVD in the states officially to make an honest man of me (and to give me a bonus disc of extras, like he did with the bang-up Criterion Collection edition of Down By Law).

Maybe he’s embarrassed with the poor focus in many of the scenes of Night on Earth, which are obvious on the DVD transfer but which I hadn’t noticed on the crappy VHS copies of the movie I’d seen previously. I’d have to imagine this is a result of shooting most every scene in an actual moving car and not resorting to staged or effects-driven trickery. As Jarmusch stressed in a 1999 interview with Geoff Andrew of The Guardian, “Shooting in a car is really, really difficult and anyone who has made a film in a car interior will tell you, ’Don’t ever do that again.’”

¹ Incidentally, Jarmusch directed Benigni in his break-out American film role, Down by Law, in which the hyperactive Italian had not only the best lines but one that sums up Jarmusch’s oeuvre: “It is a sad and beautiful world.” [back]

I was at the Stoned Crow the other night with some female friends and the subject of My Little Pony came up, probably because we had one right there on the table (long story) and were grooming its mane while drinking beer, eating raw French-Toast Pop Tarts and watching Dirty Dancing on the TV mounted in the corner.

(The Stoned Crow is just that relaxed, although I’m told that of the many photos of handsome male celebrities pasted in the ladies’ room, the one of Antonio Banderas slouched in his tighty-whities is unerotic to the point of discomfort. Strangely, the men’s room also is plastered with photos of handsome male celebrities and one of Patti Smith, so it’s clear straight gents are getting dicked over.)

But back to the Pony: I said I had always thought the toy was at least once named My Pretty Pony, but everyone was like, “Nuh-huh! My Little Pony.” Well the internet claims there really was a My Pretty Pony. It was a 1981-1983 predecessor to My Little Pony, an ur-Pony, if you will. I just couldn’t let this slide.

After much consideration, I renewed my lease today for another year on my apartment in Inwood. If a few of the key Pro items were Cons, I’d have put much more weight into moving; that’s the stuff I really care about.

Pros:

• The building and neighborhood are very quiet. Neighbors in adjacent buildings do play loud music sometimes in the early evening, but on worknights, it’s shut off by an hour appropriate for early-morning rising.
• Rent for a spacious one-bedroom in Manhattan couldn’t be much cheaper.
• Groceries in the neighborhood are cheap.
• I’ve yet to spot mice, rats or cockroaches in the building.
• My street and the neighborhood in general seem friendly and family oriented.
• My apartment is convenient to the A and 1 subway trains, and by car, directly off the Henry Hudson and the Harlem River Drive.
• The super recently planted shrubs and flowers flanking the entrance to the building, which is a nice homey touch.

Cons:

• My rent rose slightly. But rents rose for all rent-stabilized apartments in the city.
• My bedroom doesn’t have a door. Is this really a problem?
• My bathroom door is busted. I’ve got to get the super to fix this. It doesn’t close all the way, which is only an embarrassment when I have company.
• I’m way uptown. But the A and 1 trains are reliable and the commute affords me valuable time to read or listen to music.
• My apartment’s up five flights of stairs. Justification: exercise.
• My building’s in a grubby neighborhood. But that’s New York; I can live with it.
• Water pressure (mostly the toilet and not the shower) is flaky at times. I think I can live with that.

The little televisions mounted in our office building elevators broadcast text news briefs all day and I just caught the announcement “Hurd to succeed Dunn at HP.” All I could think of was that word game where you transform one word to another by changing one letter each turn to form a new word, using as few turns as possible. By the time the elevator arrived at the 17th floor, I had:

1. DUNN
2. DUNK
3. HUNK
4. HUNT
5. HURT
6. HURD

I think I need help.

Kelly, a friend who’s a true old-time movie buff, says that the critics with their lists always rank The General as the best Buster Keaton film, but she made a good argument for Sherlock Jr. being not only funnier but more accessible for viewers unfamiliar with silent film. (Although if you savor stunts involving trains, The General should be your pick.)

If memory serves, I don’t even think I’d seen a movie made pre-1937 before tonight when I saw Sherlock Jr. I hang my head in shame, for I once considered myself a movie buff. Now that the whole era of silent film has been re-emphasized to me, I’ll have to preface that claim with, “but talkies are my specialty.”

I’ve also never seen any Chaplin, the more famous and beloved silent star, but from what I’ve read and from what I saw tonight, Keaton is my man, and not just because of that impassive face. Here’s Roger Ebert, writing for his Great Movies Series about Keaton:

His films avoid the pathos and sentiment of the Chaplin pictures, and usually feature a jaunty young man who sees an objective and goes after it in the face of the most daunting obstacles. Buster survives tornadoes, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders and falls from great heights, and never pauses to take a bow: He has his eye on his goal. And his movies, seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.

As you may have guessed, Film Forum is in the midst of a Keaton retrospective and right off here’s one of several reasons why that place kicks ass: the film tonight was scored live by a pianist sitting off to the side of the screen, just at it was in the ’20s when the movie was first released.

The plot is simple: Keaton and Ward Crane are rivals for “the girl.” Crane steals her father’s pocketwatch and Keaton is blamed. Back at his job as a projectionist, he dreams himself and everyone else in his life into the movie that’s playing. Suddenly he’s a gallant detective on the case of some stolen pearls while avoiding death traps as readily as Inspector Clouseau.

The stunts are mind blowing. You sit watching, astounded and laughing, then wonder how the hell he pulled it off without killing himself, like in the scene where he’s almost hit by a speeding train as he rides down the street and across the tracks on the handlebars of a motorcycle. He falls constantly, including one of the best ever banana-peel slips, where he somehow seems to land on the side of his face. Kelly told us of watching another Keaton film on DVD, mesmerized as she paused and frame-advanced a scene where he flips himself head over heels while holding a cup of coffee, lands and hasn’t spilt a drop.

But the minor stunts, the more slapstick physical comedy in Sherlock Jr., are what sealed the deal for us. My favorite scene has Keaton shadowing a suspect in his case, walking in perfect synch, and often into trouble, as he trails the guy. Katie and Megan, who I saw the movie with, enjoyed the bit where Keaton escapes a gang of toughs by leaping through a window directly into a dress. Disguised as a woman, he shuffles off in plain sight as the goons scratch their heads over where he went.

What this movie and others by Keaton inspired or prefigured must be immense. At the least it includes the whole Wizard of Oz-style dream sequence before that film made it famous; surely one of the first instances of a film-within-a-film; the primitive but effective special effect of Buster’s dream-self leaving his sleeping body; and most importantly, stunts and physical comedy borrowed or ripped off outright for everything from Warner Bros. cartoon shorts to the films of Jackie Chan.

In line for the Cat Power concert tonight at Irving Plaza, I witnessed the smoothest and quickest pickup ever.

“What kind of shoes are those?” the girl in front of me asked a guy standing near her.

She was a short, jet-set dressed young lady in her late-20’s who strove to impress that she was cool or older, mentioning her “friends in Europe” up front while also revealing she said “like” too much. I would describe her hair as “expensive.” He, dressed all in black, resembled Liam Gallagher with a Type-B personality.

He explained they were a special brand of Japanese acupuncture sneakers, “with pressure points in the soles.” I forget the name of the brand, but they’re footwear streamlined to more closely resemble socks. They were sleek and solid black and even the laces looked as if they had been designed in a wind tunnel.

“Wow, I really like ’em,” she said. “Where do you get shoes like that?”

“Online. Or in stores,” he said. “Mostly online.”

“So where are you from?” she asked.

“New York and New Jersey,” he said. “Mostly New York,” he added quickly.

And after that, two previous strangers began conversing freely, smiling and talking the whole time in line, even entering the concert together, a cartoon heart hovering above their heads. So maybe it didn’t work out, but it was impressive to behold in slow motion like that. Inspiring, too. So it’s that easy, I thought to myself. All I need are expensive shoes and the look of a British rockstar.

And then, via a clumsy segue, there’s Cat Power, who doesn’t resemble a rockstar, but is in fact a mousy 34-year-old woman named Chan Marshall. She doesn’t even act much like a musician; she acts like an eight-year-old girl. I was forewarned of her precociousness. Earlier in her career, she was infamous for stopping shows, walking off stage, and starting then stopping songs, all the while barely acknowledging or insulting the audience. Stagefright, mental issues, drugs, alcohol, general diva-ness, a combo of some or all: the reviewers bandied about possible causes, but no satisfactory answer was given. I had a ticket for a concert of hers in February when her label suddenly announced it had cancelled her entire U.S. tour “due to health reasons.”

I hadn’t witnessed her behavior before tonight but she is one strange lady. She had the audience on edge when the show started late with two instrumentals by her backing band. Then she didn’t appear until the musicians recycled through the first verse of the opening song and re-announced her, twice. She eventually sauntered onstage with a lit Parliament and a Solo cup of hot tea in one hand, while with the other she alternately grabbed the mike and presented abstract gestures to punctuate the song’s rhythm and lyrics. She put down her cigarette and drink after the opener, then busied her hands between songs waving to random people in the audience, playing with her hair and fiddling with her lavender kerchief.

These tics extended to her between-song banter, not one word of which made a lick of sense, whether she was rambling about her jet on the roof of the building or blowing raspberries like Lily Tomlin on Sesame Street. “It’s Saturday Night Live,” she said in a deep voice at one point. “Jim Belushi. Newt Gingrich!” I couldn’t tell if any of these non-sequiturs were merely obtuse or private jokes, or just sweet nothings.

During a song later in the set, she grabbed the guitar off one of her musicians, played it for a verse, then decided she didn’t want it anymore, so she held it from her outstretched arm as she continued to sing. Both the keyboardist and a stagehand attempted to convey, via a series of fevered glances and hand motions, who should grab it.

I felt for that keyboardist, the de facto bandleader who alternated songs between a Hammond organ and a piano. When he was on the piano, his back was to Cat, and he spent most of the last halves of songs with his head twisted completely around, while still playing, to catch a signal that the song was ending.

Ah, but the music. On her newest album and this tour, she’s backed by the Memphis Rhythm Band, a brassy sound of the ’70s via seasoned sessionmen including Mabon “Teenie” Hodges, guitarist for Al Green during his glory years and cowriter of “Here I Am, Come and Take Me” and “Love and Happiness.”

The sound mix emphasized the drums, keys and guitars, but squashed the three-woman string section and much of the two-woman vocal backup. Most of the songs seemed to be from Cat’s newest album, The Greatest, which I’m not familiar with, but things heated up when the band left the stage and she hit the piano solo for her cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I Found a Reason,” which sounds nothing like the original but is one of her most haunting songs. She took to a guitar solo, too, to crank out “House of the Rising Sun,” oddly. Most of her songs are like beautiful dirges and she makes other people’s songs her own. Her husky voice hangs and swoops, extending words with a kind of sad longing. It’s good music in small doses, but stacked up in concert has a narcotic effect.

Things picked up when Teenie and the band reclaimed the stage and he knocked out a song of his own. It reinvigorated the crowd and Cat came back for a great final quartet of tunes. First was another cover, “Naked, if I Want To” by Moby Grape, the best song on her compilation, The Covers Record, which she followed with the peppy “Nude as the News” (if memory serves), both songs fuller and more energetic with a full band backing. From there she segued directly into a cover of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” that got the crowd clapping. (That’s about as crazy as you’re going to get for this kind of music among trendy young white people.)

Everyone was still clapping the “Satisfaction” beat after the song ended, so Cat launched into an acapella version of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” an unexpected choice for a woman who counts Bob Dylan and Skip Spence among her top influences. The same girl who didn’t want to get on the stage earlier now didn’t want to get off. They had to turn on the house lights and bring down the curtain (actually a screen on which is projected a moving starfield). But they left her mike on and she kept singing from behind the screen. The audience wondered whether it should leave, but eventually the disembodied voice stopped and everyone filed out, remarking that she’s gotten a lot better.

Katie and her posse visited the Pollock-Krasner House a week ago and she told me that the floor of the studio out back is still spattered with paint: a work of art in itself. (You can walk on it, but you have to wear special slippers.) If ever an artist exemplified intense external emotion best, it’s Pollock. His works are segments of chaos, almost as if that slung paint could go on forever if not for the constraints of the canvas.

I thought about this today as I toured an exhibit of Joseph Cornell’s art from the ’30s through the ’60s on display at the Katonah Museum of Art in the hamlet of Katonah, New York.

Self-contained and insular in his life and art, Cornell is the polar opposite of Pollock. His works demonstrate emotion too, of course, but of reflection or longing, via assemblages he built inside handmade wooden boxes, and more fantastically, inside pocketwatches, antique books and blue-glassed specimen boxes. He’d stock these containers with Boo Radley curios from a lifetime of collecting and hoarding at antique shops and five-and-dime stores. An automobile watchcase contains a tiny silver spoon, fork and knife, with a thin spiral of copper metal and crumbs of pyrite. In a homage to Magritte, Cornell cut uniform coaster-sized discs from photos of the sky and from the pages of a book in French, stacking them neatly in a paperboard powder box along with a lens flecked with white paint.

He spent most of his life holed up in a house in Queens with his mother, crippled brother and an encyclopedic knowledge of art, science, the cinema, ballet, literature, theatre, music and history. He admired actresses and made themed boxed artworks for them. A related work on display at the exhibit, The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice), is a valise box containing detritus from the life of a fictional character: dozens of postcards and photos, a prayer card and a claim ticket, maps, a calendar page from Saturday, August 17, and a tarnished penny.

After Marcel Duchamp befriended and hired him in the early 1940s, Cornell built boxes for the great dadaist’s boîte-en-valise series. One of these on display contains 69 reproductions of Duchamp’s most famous works, including miniature replicas of the Large Glass, a urinal and the Mona Lisa with a moustache.

On my train ride back to Manhattan, a blind couple boarded, each led by a harnessed Labrador retriever trained for public transport. As soon as the couple found free seats, the dogs flattened their bodies and squirmed underneath. Then the man reached down and tucked in his dog’s tail and left rear leg, which were intruding into the aisle. The dogs didn’t appear comfortable with their lack of headroom and the man’s yellow Lab had the doleful look of an animal resigned to its duty. Its head poked into the footspace of the seat behind the couple and the guy there gently bonked the dog’s snout with his shoe by accident before realizing the animal was there. When the couple rose to exit at White Plains, the dogs squeezed out and it appeared as if they were being birthed from the floor of the train.

My first thought was that these photos from our Italian vacation would be perfect for Dana’s and my celebrity READ posters, except that I believe we’re both pretending to read picture books.

The settings are two unassailably cool Italian bookstores. The one I’m in is an expat operation featuring all English books, many of which are used. The one Dana’s in sells bound scripts, actor bios and other film books, plus an awesome selection of original movie posters from the ’60s and ’70s. (Check out the Italian Godfather poster on the right-hand side of Dana’s photo!)

I found this handcrafted advertisement on the sidewalk near my apartment building after work tonight. You can click the scan above to view an extra-large version in a separate pop-up window. Here’s a transcription of the text:

Scarlett Peña          7/18/06

Class 205 will have a
cup cake sail. At the in door
gym. Come to my cup
cake sail.

[drawing of a cupcake?]

At 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Itis so good because itis a
chocoleat cup cake. For ¢50

So if I’m understanding the marketing message here correctly, these cupcakes are superior because they are inexpensive, they feature chocolate icing topped with sprinkles, and they have a miniature rainbow baked inside. Well, I’m sold.

Last Friday, ornithologists at the Max Planck Society reported that birds born in a city are more resistant (probably even genetically resistant) to acute stress than forest dwelling birds.

In their lab, the scientists raised two groups of blackbird nestlings: one collected from downtown Munich, the other from a forest 25 miles outside the city. After a year of restful existence, the birds were captured in cotton bags and handled. As might have been expected, all of the birds freaked out from this jarring interruption. But as the stressors were reapplied every four months thereafter, the reaction of the urban blackbirds was considerably more relaxed than their country cousins.

So, say the scientists: city life alters a blackbird’s physiological coping mechanisms. This is fascinating and begs the question: how does stress-response compare between native New Yorkers and those of us like myself who moved here from bucolic environs? Further study is warranted, although I admit it may be tough to capture us in large cotton bags.

In which Jason is reclaimed by the mothership.

In a related note, via today’s mail I received a CD full of Dana’s digital photos from our recent Roman holiday.

I caught The Illusionist tonight at the Angelika Film Center and it’s not bad. It really captures a time and a mood, with sepia tones and vignetting in its depiction of turn-of-the-century Vienna, where Edward Norton plays a stage magician of the mysterious, bearded type.

I believe in magic. Or at least I used to. When I was a lad, I bought the double-sided coin, the trick deck, the false thumbtip and all that other Archie McPhee stuff, then put on shows for family members. At one point, I even had the Fisher-Price Magic Kit, or whatever it was called. But I don’t think magic translates well to the movies; CGI and the death of whimsy killed it. More immediately, consider that movies are already visual illusion and deception. Then try to depict visual illusion and deception within that illusion and deception and things get unbelievable in a rush.

The audience, in both the film and the theater, gets to see a lot of this cold CGI trickery while learning little of Norton’s motivations or backstory, leaving his characterization as transparent as the spirits he conjures. Same with Paul Giamatti, who plays the town’s chief police inspector, a likeable, ramrod straight, no-nonsense fellow with a loud, clear and confident voice; in other words, all elements the exact opposite of most every recent role Giamatti’s played, which to me demonstrates his fine versatility as an actor.

He’s intent on exposing any tomfoolery in Norton’s act, but things get complicated by a chance meeting between the magician and his childhood sweetheart, Sophie (Jessica Biel), who’s now arranged to be married to a tyrannical prince (Rufus Sewell, from one of the best sci-fi flicks of the ’90s, Dark City). There’s a murder, a mystery, and more magic before a Shyamalanesque ending (or is that Fletcheresque)?) where the misdirection behind the whole second half of the film is explained away in a dialogue-less montage of about 15 seconds. It has Giamatti practically smacking himself in the forehead as the train leaves the station.

It’s reassuring and alarming to know an error like this exists in Microsoft Word. I’d certainly never seen it before. I’m quick to say the document I opened to summon this message wasn’t one I’d composed myself.

Yesterday, our in-house IT manager was dumping a big cardboard box of obsolete cables and peripherals. In addition to me, this girl in the production department is a real scavenger, so we hauled the box over to her desk and started pawing through it like it was a treasure chest of booty. Among the tangle of cords, orphaned connectors, heavy power adapters, busted mice and ancient external drives, I found a Trackball Explorer, which Microsoft rolled out in 2001 for about $75, a king's ransom for such a device at the time. It’s since been discontinued.

I was excited to take it home to play Centipede via MAME on my PowerBook. It worked without having to install any driver software; all I had to do was plug it in and launch the game, and I was committing insecticide like it was 1984. Although Centipede is by far the most famous trackball game, Wikipedia has a list of ’em.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has the world’s largest collection of Edward Hopper’s art—more than 2,500 oils and works on paper. But the museum is small and only a tiny portion of these works are ever on display at once. That’s why I stopped by after work today for the museum’s 75th anniversary exhibition. Through December 3rd, it has dedicated its fifth floor to nothing but Hopper, including callbacks of popular works on-loan (although not the so-iconic-it’s-cliché Nighthawks).

The Whitney championed Hopper and his art early on, and when he died, his estate returned the favor, bequeathing everything to the Whitney, down to the cheap ledgers he bought from Woolworth’s Five & Dime to thumbnail and describe each painting he sold. A few of these notebooks are on display under glass, opened and annotated with short, fictional backstories his wife added, imagining the settings and characters of the paintings existed in reality.

Also interesting are the dozens of preparatory sketches and etchings Hopper prepared before painting. An entire gallery is dedicated to New York Movie, a masterpiece of light and loneliness. Within the room, it’s surrounded by yellowing scraps of paper framed on the walls, depicting details Hopper considered for the work: sketches of seats, drapery, sconces, pillars, ceilings and minute architectural details, which he drew while scouting New York City movie houses; notes on lighting and specific colors, annotating one sketch to resemble a paint-by-number canvas; and studies contrasting different positions and angles for the woman in the painting. Hopper tweaked these preparations many times to his satisfaction before committing the image to canvas.

I’ve often wondered how Hopper’s paintings should be classified, and seeing so many of them in one place begs an answer. Academically, he’s lumped in the New American or Ashcan school of art, which squares with his lifeline (1882 to 1967). But his technique—blocks of thick-brushed-color—is more obviously inspired by earlier painters, especially impressionists like Monet. Then there are his subjects which, as the Whitney describes, “hang, tantalizingly, between staged theatrics and the utterly familiar.” That could just as easily bond him with the Surrealists; I’ve always seen symmetry between him and his contemporary de Chirico. Are the impossibly empty interiors and Sunday morning streets of Hopper’s world any less strange, familiar and desolate than the phantom trains and landscapes of smokestacks and flags that populate de Chirico’s?