October 2006 Archives

‘I might be a little disappointing,’ Junpei said. ‘A pianist could play you a tune. A painter could draw something for you. A magician could perform a trick. There’s not much a writer can do on the spot.’

from “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day” by Haruki Murakami

The Fancy Restaurant Club had its monthly gathering at the Carmine’s off Times Square tonight and it was O.K. but it’s another joint I’ve been to before. In honor of having been the first of the Club to buy and bring along the just-published Zagat 2007 New York City Restaurants, I was persuaded to choose next month’s restaurant.

I like some of celebrity chef Danny Meyer’s restaurants, especially Blue Smoke and the Shake Shack (others, less so), so I selected new Zagat entrant and 16th most-popular restaurant in New York City, The Modern. I’ve been to the casual side of the Modern before; it’s called the Bar Room and it’s fancy, but compared to the Modern proper (known as the Dining Room), it’s supposedly like eating at the kids’ table.

I was hesitant in my decision, but the sign arrived that I’d made the correct one when on my ride home late on the A train, the woman in the seat directly across from me was reading Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, Danny Meyer’s new book. This was hard to miss because she was reading it like she really wanted everyone on the train to know she was reading it. Somehow she was single-handedly holding the weighty hardcover raised to her face, the cover splayed so I was looking into the PhotoShopPhotoshop-smoothed face of Danny, his elbow resting rakishly on a tabletop draped with white linen, as if to say, “Come, bask in my dining experience, Fancy Restaurant Club.”

Moosewood soup for chilly weather! This one was better than I thought, with its quarter-cup barbecue sauce imparting a smoky-spicy-sweetness. Hearty and goes well with Fritos.

When I mentioned to my coworkers that for Andie’s movie-character costume party tonight, I was dressing as mailroom clerk Norville Barnes, The Hudsucker Proxy protagonist played by Tim Robbins, I was met with responses ranging from “No one will know who that is!” to “What?” But of course everyone at the party got the reference, from “I’ve seen that movie, like, five times,” to “That’s the one where the guy jumps out the window, right? And Paul Newman’s in it?”

And that’s why these people and I are friends.

Here are some photos of Tim and myself dressed as Norville.

Costume Ingredients

• shop apron. The apron in the movie is dark gray but a dark blue denim one was the closest I could find. I was thinking of sewing buttons to the top corners like Tim’s, but I can’t sew. Plus, who cares. I bought it from a supplier in California called PK Safety Supply via Amazon.com for a mere $3.50. That’s about what it’s worth: the edges frayed and curled after I laundered it. Fortunately, the shoddy stitching of the breast pocket made it easy to remove for purposes of ironing-on the Hudsucker Industries logo using...
• Avery Ink Jet Dark T-Shirt Transfers. A pack of five iron-on sheets for $14.99 at Staples. I learned this about iron-on transfers: for dark fabrics, definitely use the “dark T-shirt” variety, not the standard “white T-shirt” variety, which will transfer barely visible to a fabric like denim. And all iron-on sheets are meant for transferring solid blocks or blobs of graphics, not detailed things like logotypes. In other words, instead of directly transferring the background-less type, I had to print the white letters on a square colored an approximate denim-blue. It turned out O.K. for the low-light environment of a typical party. I built the logo in FreeHand, opting for solid type instead of the inline type used for the “Hudsucker Industries” part of the logo. The internet identified that typeface as the anachronistic Bodega Sans (Bodega Sans Oldstyle for the S’s) and the design posse at work helped me approximate the typeface used for the logo tagline, “The Future Is Now,” as Harlow Solid.
• brown shoes. These were “Walk-Overs” from George E. Keith Co., pride of Brockton and donated a few years back by my previous boss in Ohio.
• dress shirt. I used an old J. Crew pinstriped variety I’d been planning to donate to Goodwill.
• bow tie. I couldn’t find a mostly solid-colored maroon one so I purchased a ’50s-vintage blue and silver rayon and acetate Botany clip-on. I got this at The Family Jewels, one of those funky thrift shops in Chelsea I hesitate entering because it’s never clear whether they carry any clothing for guys. I’m happy to say they have a handsome collection of bow ties piled into a velvet top hat resting atop a counter in the back corner. It cost $26, which I didn’t mind because I like supporting local shops like this. Yet it pained me to see the original 1950s price-tag still attached: $1.
• visor. Norville wears one in a few scenes, such as when he’s sorting mail. I bought a sporty denim model from Conway on the north side of W. 34th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, a Garment District stretch of intense clothing cheapness. $2.99, although I had to wait in line 10 minutes.
• trousers. I got a pair of tan Claiborne cotton dress pants in my waist size but cut “long” for hiking up above my waist ’50s style for $4.99 at the Goodwill on W. 181st Street, purchased that day I was called Papi.
• suspenders. I had a tough time finding these, unless my problem was that I wasn’t looking in enough geezer shops. I ended up getting a burgundy clip-on Y-back pair online from JCPenney for $14.99.
• a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it. In the film, Norville keeps a folded up piece of paper with him and at a moment’s notice will unfold it for display, explaining, “You know...For kids!” No one knows what the hell he’s talking about and then he goes and invents the toy based on his idea, the Hula Hoop, saving Hudsucker Industries from financial ruin while getting himself and his costume promoted from shop apron to tailored suits.

There should be (if there isn’t already) a New York subway bingo game featuring squares for all the crazy stuff you can witness as a passenger, because all of a sudden today, I had two brand new subway experiences.

The first was guy-on-my-car-collared-by-a-cop, which I’d nearly experienced before, although it was guy-arrested-right-outside-my-car-for-pushing-a-woman-onto-the-tracks (she was O.K.). The best part was this cretin got pinched for attempting to board a jam-packed 1 train at 66th Street by leaping the safety gates between two cars. That’s a spectacularly bad idea because although people will do this when the train’s stopped, it’s possible the train will start moving again before they’re done clambering. Just last week, some idiot was pulped in this way. The guy on my train made it on board, but he neglected to account that he did so in plain view of the token booth clerk. A small, scrappy woman, she burst out and started shouting at him, causing a cop to materialize from seemingly nowhere and barge into my car. Of course, now that the suspect was on an ultra-crowded train, he had nowhere to go. The cop grabbed him with ease and drug him off, yelling, “You know how stupid that is?”

My other new subway experience happened very late on the uptown 1 train. I entered a half-empty car with joy, which goes to show you I’m not quite a New Yorker. I quickly realized my mistake. There’s almost never a catch-free half-empty subway car; likely, there’s Something Bad in there, such as:

• no heat in winter
• full heat in summer
• ranting lunatic
• lurking pervert
• gang of hoodlums
• shrieking baby
• obnoxious teens
• stinky bum
• stupendously bad odor in general
• extremely loud or malfunctioning loudspeaker
• large flying insect

In my case tonight, it was a fresh puddle of puke on the floor.

It was brown, chunky and didn’t smell that bad, but it had cleared half the car. I sat across from it because I was sleepy and I like end seats, bodily waste be damned. It was fun to watch people stride on board only to stop in their tracks with disgust as they spotted the ralph. One guy walking through the car didn’t even notice until he’d trod through it, then had to angrily shake off his sullied sneaker while nearly slipping with his other.

It was chilly this morning and I had my light coat on. Though shivery, I nodded off on the subway. When I woke up, the car was full and I was sandwiched between two plump women in the seats on either side of me. It was a warm and toasty feeling that I didn’t want to leave behind, just like those mornings these days when you’re cocooned in covers and want to stay there when the alarm goes off.

Reminiscent of another strange sketch I found earlier this year is this “snappy” doodle I found on a table after a real estate conference here in New York today.

Nothing’s new, so I readily admit that these TV plot pitches I developed while walking from Penn Station to work this morning may have already been piloted, suggested or exhausted, but I figured I could at least capitalize on my unfamiliarity with TV shows past and present for your entertainment.

1. Cheers proved barflies were a goldmine of sitcom hilarity, while The Office showed white-collar comedy, like white-collar crime, often pays off. Why couldn’t a show be dedicated half and half, like Law & Order: the characters work during the day, then hit the bar at night. Dramacomediarama!
2. Why is it that television kids have to be “cute”? I think it’d be fun to gather a bunch of older-than-their-years child actors often typecast in serious, hard-bitten roles (assorted Culkin, Dakota “Jodie Foster” Fanning and that kid who saw dead people and then got charged with drunk driving) to enact a courtroom drama or gritty detective show where there’s never any recognition made that they range in age from 12 to 18.
3. A bunch of arcade-game characters from the ’80s move into a boarding house. Hilarity ensues! Pac-Man can’t stop eating and chain smoking because he insists ghosts are after him. Donkey Kong goes on malt liquor benders and hurls furniture at people. He harbors a grudge against Mario, who has a mean Italian temper and a serious case of plumber’s crack. And nobody likes Tempest because he’s always knocking stuff off the mantle. Wait, make that a haunted house.

I was beginning to think that all it took for a hip new restaurant in Manhattan was a one-word name rendered in a crisp sans-serif logo. Not anymore. I ordered the chicken shawarma at Chickpea and it was a flavorless fistful of grease gopped into a pita. Much worse and more costly than the same dish I could have bought at any number of Middle Eastern joints in the city. Maybe Chickpea’s other menu items are better but I don’t know if I want to risk a return.

Chickpea

• 210 E. 14th St. (between Second and Third Avenues)
• (212) 228-3445
• Meal 33 of 52: chicken shawarma pita ($5.95).

It’s another exciting video quiz featuring exterior station signage for the 1/9 and 2/3 New York City subway lines! Similar to the previous subway signage quiz, each image below is from a movie and it’s your duty to determine which. You’ll have to trust me that the symbols of the 1/2/3/9 are just visible through the falling snow in the upper-left corner of the first screencap and that the out-of-focus entrance sign in the background of the second screencap reads “Franklin St. Station.”

After visiting her horse, Katie and I returned to civilization and spent the rest of the day at the annual Jersey City Art Tour.

What a great idea! You pick-up a self-guided tour map that indicates dozens of spots across the city where artists are exhibiting and selling their work, then you stop by to check out whatever sounds interesting. We didn’t ever get a program, just a map with a bunch of numbered dots on it, so we made random stops. The cool part was that it wasn’t just studios and galleries exhibiting. Sometimes we’d show up and find the “gallery” was someone’s garage or second-floor apartment, a bowl of pretzels sitting on a table and people milling around like it was a impromptu party. Or it’d be a bar or a restaurant with the art hanging on the walls, inside and out. One of the fancier galleries was nestled under a muddy highway entrance ramp and for refreshments they had a styrofoam cup-full of snack-size Snickers and Butterfinger bars and a bottle of pinot grigio with bits of cork floating in it. Throughout the tour everyone was friendly and cool and there wasn’t any pressure to buy anything.

Among the more intriguing stuff we saw were small handmade blank books, knit cross-section replicas of internal organs, photographs of lightning and hand-tinted Polaroids of Europe, a dress made entirely from unused tampons and other feminine hygiene products, and sculptures of fish made from scrap metal with cranks you could turn to move their fins and mouths.

After the end of a long day, we had dinner at Tania’s, a mighty fine Polish restaurant where we chowed down cheap and tasty pierogi, potato pancakes, sausage, beets, cucumber salad, and Polish beers that our waiter assured us were unavailable in New York outside of Greenpoint. Then it was off to buy cat food which we dropped off for Katie’s cats, then set out again to a party organized by William, a coworker of Katie’s from her Barnes & Noble days who’s an accomplished artist and was one of the exhibitors on the Art Tour. He has a small and comfy apartment crammed with his large oil canvases, sketchbooks, random furniture, records, CDs and books, mannequin heads and loads of knicknacks. The party soundtrack included the Pixies, Mates Of State, some sort of krautrock and an awful lot of Joy Division. A nice touch was a green plastic bowl of cheap and fun party favors, including carpal-tunnel wrist braces, a rainbow-colored elastic headband, a cellophane-wrapped necktie, a laser pointer, compasses and assorted dollar-store toys. When the bowl got low, Katie and I refreshed it with items we stealthily removed from William’s kitchen counter and cupboards: a wrapped white candle, a half-empty tube of Krazy Glue the feline furball remedy, PetroMalt, and a small jar of gravy.

Katie and I headed into the wilds of New Jersey this morning to the farm where she keeps her horse. It’s nestled amid rolling hills clustered with vivid autumn foliage and there’s a farmhouse, stables, silo, goober stable-hands and a rascally golden-haired dog who’s always getting into trouble. Very storybook. I was introduced to some of the riders and their horses, both new and longtime, and with all the comings and goings and gossip, I’m convinced a horse farm would be a perfect setting for the next reality series.

I brought along a bag each of carrots and starlight mints. Horses do like peppermint, but candy isn’t good for their teeth. It’s also not good for human teeth, but we have capacity for higher thought and opposable thumbs so it’s tougher to keep us away.

When feeding a horse a carrot, Katie told me to offer it grasped in my fist. Handing off the carrot in the traditional fashion exposes carrot-shaped fingers to an animal that may not appreciate the difference, and listening to the crunching sounds amplified through that giant skull further convinced me not to tempt fate or the safety of my digits.

I found that it’s also not a good idea to dangle the remaining bag of carrots in plain sight. I got nosed several times for additional carrots, which was still cute despite the fact that the snout was attached to a creature that weighs as much as a Volkswagen.

I learned other things. Don’t walk behind a horse because you can get kicked accidentally. And anyway, walking aside a horse lets it keep an eye on you and any carrots you might have hidden in your coat.

Horses will piss and drop loads of crap with little or no notice. I also was amused by the power and duration of horse farts. It reminded me of a few guys I knew in college.

Horses have eyelashes. I don’t know what made me think they wouldn’t.

Like detailing a car, cleaning a horse is a time-consuming process because of the extensive surface area. There’s currying, brushing, washing, picking dirt and stones from hooves and inspecting for tick bites. Insect repellant for horses smells like Murphy Oil Soap.

Katie let me test-drive her horse as she lead it, which was a thrill. She had it move faster for a few spells which was not as much fun because my nuts got jostled and squished. Is this why cowboys were such solitary men?

After the movie, Jimi, the Man and I braced ourselves against the cold wind on our walk to dinner at Cafe Luxembourg, an Upper West Side restaurant with Belgian fare and seemingly the ritzier overflow from the French Roast. I had the apricot-glazed pork chop, a good inch thick, with garlic green beans and German potato salad as sides, and to drink, a homebrew Weihenstephan wheat beer, golden and cloudy but tasty. Dessert was awesome: a fantastic blend of two of my favorite autumn pies, pecan and pumpkin.

Cafe Luxembourg

• 200 W. 70th Street (off Amsterdam)
• (212) 873-7411
• Meal 32 of 52: beer ($7), pork chop ($29), pumpkin-pecan pie ($10) and cappiccino ($4).

That the characters of Running with Scissors are based on those of Augusten Burroughs’ actual immediate and extended family is shocking. What a fucked up childhood this kid had.

His father’s an alcoholic (played to sodden perfection by Alec Baldwin). His mother Deirdre (Annette Bening, angling for an award of some sort) fancies herself a poet destined for fame. Instead she sinks into drug-addled madness and pawns off her son to her possibly insane shrink (the excellent Brian Cox) and his wacky family. Running with Scissors is creepy and slow with manic bursts of energy and gallows humor (and a great ’70s soundtrack); the ending feels tacked on, but there are some fine performance burried here.

People who use foot and inch marks instead of typographer quotes drive me to distraction. A foot mark is ' and an inch mark is " and both are poor substitutes for an actual apostrophe (’) and double-quote marks (“”).

But I admire the designer of the logo for S’Mac, the new mac-and-cheese restaurant I supped at today, because its apostrophe resembles an elbow of macaroni. The cheesy connection extends inside to the pasta-colored wood floors, injection-molded orange plastic chairs and especially the hanging lights with orange and yellow shades and bulbs that bathe the front window and interior in the glow of the ’70s or of those heat-lamps that warm movie popcorn and McDonald’s fries.

Each variety of mac-and-cheese is served piping hot in a small, medium or large cast-iron skillet and can be made with traditional macaroni or whole wheat pasta if you demand a fractionally healthier meal. Optionally, your mac-and-cheese can be topped with breadcrumbs. Oh my, yes; I highly recommend the breadcrumbs. They brown up all crispy and crunchety and so very tastily. I am salivating now recalling this meal.

Fans of cheese must go to S’Mac. I had the four-cheese mac-and-cheese, made with Muenster, American, Gorgonzola and topped with a separate stratum of cheddar, which sounds impressive. But they also have goat cheese, Gruyere, Manchego and Brie varieties.

Being located in the East Village it goes without saying that the busy dinner crowd hunkered over its skillets was disproportionally clad in chunky glasses, ironic T-shirts, thrift-store sweaters and expensively tousled hair. But if you can put up with that and more of the same on the L train ride across town, S’Mac’s a winner.

I wonder about the shelf-life of “one dish” restaurants like this. In theory, they’re gimmicky, and Manhattan has a strong bullshit detector. But it seems at least to have worked for restaurants that, say, slather everything with peanut butter or serve nothing but sushi from a buffet the length of an aircraft carrier. And mac-and-cheese is such an American tradition, I think it’s a safe bet for success. Live long and prosper, S’Mac.

S’Mac

• 345 E. 12th St. (between First and Second Avenue)
• (212) 358-7912
• Meal 31 of 52: small mac-and-cheese ($5.75).

My company conducts a semi-monthly raffle for which an employee can receive two tickets to a Broadway show or dinner for two at a fancy restaurant, tax and tip not included. Odds have it that the winner will be among the 300-some lawyers and lawyers’ minions who toil in our flagship Park Avenue office, not one of the 35 folks here on Eighth Avenue. But today I was selected for the dinner-for-two and the amount of praise and congratulations I received from my coworkers for doing nothing was on the par of winning a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Nobody here likes lawyers, much less lawyers’ minions.

Immediately, too, I was besieged with offers from lady coworkers to step in as my dinner companion. I am not a shallow man but I don’t want to dine with someone I work with; I get enough of them here at work. Plus, I guess I am a shallow man because several suitors would appear to rank eating within their top-three hobbies.

So I turn to you, my beautiful readers and allied tradespeople, with an offer to dine with me. Explain why you think you should be the one to join me at March or San Domenico. Reviewing your entries, I will ignore the fawning, select whomever I want and alienate most everyone. It’s all in good fun!

But first, a little about me. What should you expect from Jason as your dinner companion? All of this writing about meals here and you still may not have a clear picture as to whether I’m an Andre or a Wally when the dinner bell rings. Here are the facts:

• Don’t be concerned if I eat little. I don’t exercise so I don’t eat much, a health philosophy practiced by four other people in America.
• I have no idea how to select a wine, which will be fun because the price-per-bottle limit of my dinner-passes is $100.
• I will drape my napkin upon my lap prior to dining but during the meal you will catch one or more of my elbows resting on the table edge.
• I usually chew with my mouth closed and I don’t gesture with my utensils when making a point.
• Why, yes, I will try some of your entrée.
• Yes, it is delicious.
• Favored topics of conversation include current events, Manhattan news, celebrity sightings, movies, books, poetry, photography, art, music, computers and Cascading Style Sheets.
• If you’re going to discuss who got voted off the island or America’s top model or whatever it is TV fans are always going on about, I will feign interest but actually I will be gauging the symmetry of your eyebrows. Alternately, imagining you naked.
• I enjoy vicious racial humor, but only in the company of the race that’s being mocked, only after at least a two-week familiarity with that person and only if it’s reciprocated with a good cracker joke.
• When conversation lulls, I will ask my dinner companion to select and rank the most attractive people in the restaurant.
• I carry exact change and my Visa card has a reasonable credit limit so you should not be alarmed that it is illustrated with a photo of Lake Erie.
• For digestif purposes, I’m a Scotch man. Cognac is for rappers and pussies.
• As I’m leaving the restaurant, I’ll load-up on the free stuff at the register—mints, matchbooks, business cards, unguarded menus, little boxes of crayons—but I’ll try not to make a big deal about it.
• I may insert a toothpick into my mouth, but only after I have exited the restaurant and only because I think it makes me look tough.
• If pressed to complete the phrase “dinner and ------,” my first five free-associations would be “a movie,” “conversation,” “dessert,” “dancing” and “casual sex.”
• I like long walks on the beach. I usually take these alone at Coney Island, barefoot and head down like the “Jason is Sad” montage of my biopic, but really I’m just scanning the sand for broken glass and stingray barbs.

So what do you think? Who’s hungry?

I suppose there are worse movies to fall asleep to than Contempt, which features Brigitte Bardot naked. Or was that just a dream? Hmm.

Tonight at the Film Forum I saw Robert Altman’s California Split, a great movie about gambling, a not-bad buddy movie and one full of supersaturated stylings from 1974 Los Angeles.

George Segal ostensibly has a job writing for a magazine but he only ever seems to argue on the phone with his bookie or sneak out of his office to the track. He’s a bundle of nervous energy with a home and a job, but not for much longer as he sinks deep in debt. At last he pawns his typewriter and car, skipping town to Reno on a Greyhound with Elliott Gould for a last chance at the big score.

Gould, with his relaxed gait and charmingly goofy long face, cracks wise as he drifts through life gambling, his only ambition to wonder where he might gamble next. He wears a series of button-down shirts with collars wide enough to generate aerodynamic force and with designs so explosively hideous, I became mesmerized, then desensitized, then convinced that they looked cool.

As the movie opens, the two meet and become friends while scamming suckers at cards and as it closes they've gone their separate ways after counting their chips. In between there’s little plot and a lot of odds-beating. They play poker, blackjack, craps and roulette. They gamble on basketball, boxing and horseracing. After many beers at a dive bar one night, they even bet on which of them can name all Seven Dwarfs and neither gets further than three valid dwarves and Dumbo. Gould later disappears, then shows up unexpectedly days later at Segal’s house wearing a giant sombrero and bursting with tales of Tijuana track dog racing.

Altman’s trademark everyone-talking-simultaneously¹ is the low, constant current that powers the film and at points, it’s like when you’re in the middle of a busy party or family gathering, cocooned in the warmth of friends and conversation. There’s a great breakfast scene taking place the morning after Segal and Gould get jacked for their cash. They crash at the home of friends, two heart-of-gold hookers (Ann Prentiss and Gwen Welles), nurse their bruised flanks with a dubious remedy of warm shaving cream, then sit down to breakfast on sugar cereal. Clad in a bathrobe, Gould cracks open a can of Budweiser to complement his bowl of Lucky Charms. They’ve just lost their money and you can sense their weariness, but everyone at the table is joking and talking and eating at once, and, dammit, that’s a breakfast you want to be in on.

With its grittiness, wavering camaraderie, bursts of violence, black humor and desperation, this film is like Trainspotting, the thrill of the bet substituting for smack.

¹ There was a wonderful meta-moment during the film when a couple seated a few rows in front of me got so caught up in the constant overlapping conversation onscreen that they began talking themselves, apparently thinking it would blend in naturally. The angry coot sitting in front of me shouted, “COULD YOU PLEASE TAKE YOUR CONVERSATION OUTSIDE. THANK YOU.” The couple said nothing further but finished their large bag of popcorn slowly, chewing very, very loudly. [back]

I like those second-person pronouns you can use when speaking with a friend or on friendly terms with a stranger. These you-substitutes in the Midwest tended towards “man,” as in “Hey, man; how’s it goin’?,“ or “guys“ in plural, even if the addressees weren’t male (“You guys going to the concert tonight?”).

Bodega and deli counterjoeckeys here in New York have mastered this turn of phrase. The guy at the bodega on the corner of my street calls me “sir.” The Indian guy at the snack shop in the lobby of my work building calls me “boss” and a popular alternate along these lines is “chief.”

I got my first non-English pronoun lobbed at me today while Halloween-costume thrifting at the Goodwill on 181st off Amsterdam. Approaching a blue-vested woman working the second floor, I pointed to what I thought were the changing rooms and asked if I could try on the two pairs of natty slacks I had draped over my arm. “That’s storage, papi,” she said. “Changing rooms are downstairs.”

Papi! I’d overheard that one in my neighborhood before, along with mami, but never had it applied to me, so I felt honored. It’s used by Spanish-speakers in America to refer not only to family members but as a general reference to anyone, regardless of age or familial status.

After my usual tall-man-in-a-small-dressing-room antics, the cashier downstairs rang up the pair of pants and two ties I’d selected and started, “Nueve ochenta...” before glancing up and realizing I didn’t appear to be someone who spoke Spanish.

“Sorry...Nine dollars and eighty-five cents.”

“No problem,” I said. “If I’m going to live here, maybe I should learn to speak Spanish.”

“It’s a beautiful and difficult language,” the girl admitted.

One of her colleagues standing nearby said, “It’s a backwards language. You know what I mean, right?”

The other girl stared at her.

“You know what I mean. Say something in Spanish.”

The countergirl thought for a second and said, “She is stupid. Ella es estúpido.”

The other girl narrowed her eyes and said, “No, you know: backwards.”

I slipped away from this strange argument and only after I’d left and walked five blocks did the phrase casa blanca pop into my head. I realized by “backwards” the girl probably meant how nouns in Spanish precede adjectives.

Walking through Chelsea for dinner after work late last week, I realized at this time of night, in this season, I was once a kid in the suburbs of northwest Ohio, dressed in my hooded sweatshirt, playing tag or Mr. Fox with friends in the backyard. The streetlights would sputter on earlier than ever and our parents would call out to us from home that it was time for dinner.

Up there on my list of childhood comfort food, especially for chilly autumn nights like these, would be meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, various meat-and-potatoes casseroles, and last but not least, chicken. I headed downtown to Dirty Bird To-Go, purveyors of the best fried chicken in New York City, at least for a trendy white neighborhood. I’d been wanting to try this place since reading a positive capsule review of it in The New Yorker.

It’s all free-range chicken so I guess that means you’re meant to savor the rich taste of avian leisure, not the acidic tang of birds who lived and died cooped in mosh-pit pens, angry with the world and wobbling from the weight of their hormone-swollen chests.

Included on the menu are rotisserie and “chicken fingers,” but an evolutionary craving for hot and hearty fried food dictated my order. The goods at Dirty Bird are far removed from the greasy and salty catcher’s-mitt meat of KFC: they’re brined overnight, soaked in buttermilk, double-coated in a thick and sweetly spiced batter, then deep-fried until golden brown. Golden brown is an overused phrase, but in this case it’s literal. This is skin so crisp and succulent, biting into it sounds like audition day for a potato chip commercial. It’s hot and seals in the juiciness of the meat, which is still steaming because they don’t fry your order until you place it. For a side, I got the “dirty” rice, made with chopped shallots and giblets, among other mystery organ bits. Rounding out the dinner are two triangles of cornbread the consistency of fried mush (not a bad thing).

Décor is clean and basic, with six orange-painted wooden stools arranged at narrow ledges in the front windows and the walls aside the order/kitchen area. Reportedly they do a brisk takeout and delivery business.

Dirty Bird To-Go

• 204 W. 14th St.
• (212) 620-4836
• Meal 30 of 52: two-piece fried chicken with one side ($8.99) and a Boylan Black Cherry Soda ($2.00).

I met Andie at Radio City Music Hall after work tonight for an Indigo Girls concert. It was a different experience from when I saw them perform at the Newport Folk Festival because here, they brought along their backing band from their newest album: a bassist, drummer and keyboardist. It emphasized even more strongly that they’re equally adept at storming rock or thought-provoking folk. Like at Newport, the Girls’ fans are voraciously participatory, singing along and going nuts when they hear the first few bars of their favorite song. The Girls even let the crowd take over vocals wholly for a few verses here and there.

I’d never been to Radio City before and it’s cavernous and spartan. During the concert there was a light show of spinning rainbow-colored discs splashed on the crowd and undulating psychedelic patterns projected on the domed ceiling that made me even dizzier than I already was when I stood up from our upper mezzanine seats, located in the row directly in front of the low balcony railing.

Setlist from IndigoGirls.com:

1. Little Perennials
2. Pendulum Swinger
3. Heartache For Everyone
4. Get Out The Map
5. Three County Highway
6. Run
7. Ozilline
8. Hammer And A Nail
9. Devotion
10. Trouble
11. Rock And Roll Heaven’s Gate
12. I Believe In Love
13. Dirt And Dead Ends
14. Closer To Fine
15. Shame On You
16. Lay My Head Down
17. Three Hits
18. Power Of Two
19. Let It Ring
20. Fill It Up Again
21. Go

Encore

1. Last Tears
2. Tether
3. Galileo

Below I’ve pasted a fine review by David Pogue from today’s New York Times of the Sony Reader, which I wrote about early in January. It answers most of the questions I had about the eBook reader: Intuitive interface? No. Mac compatable? Apaprently not (yet). Ability to accept uploaded text and PDF documents? Yes. Totally awesome screen technology? Yes.

Plus, check out the mention at the end of the article that Amazon.com is developing not only on its own eBook store, but its own eBook-reader device. Cool! Nothing like competition to spur innovation.

State of the Art: Trying Again to Make Books Obsolete

By David Pogue

“The market for downloadable books will grow by 400 percent in each of the next two years, to over $25 billion by 2008,” predicted the keynote speaker at the 2001 Women’s National Book Association meeting. “Within a few years after the end of this decade, e-books will be the preponderant delivery format for book content.”

Whoops.

The great e-book fantasy burst shortly after that speech, along with the rest of the dot-com bubble. In 2003, Barnes & Noble shut its e-book store, Palm sold its e-book business to a Web site and most people left the whole idea for dead.

Not everybody, however. Some die-hards at Sony still believe that, properly designed, the e-book has a future. Their solution is the Sony Reader, a small, sleek, portable screen that will be introduced this month in some malls, at Borders bookstores and at sonystyle.com for $350.

E-books may have flopped the first time around, but you can’t deny that they offer some intriguing advantages. You can add dozens of them to your luggage without adding any more weight or bulk. You can adjust the type size. You can search the whole book in seconds, or insert an infinite number of bookmarks. No trees are destroyed to make e-books. And you can read during lunch without having to prop open your novel with a dangerously full can of soda.

If you’re sold on the idea, then you’ll find a lot to like in the Sony Reader—and a few things to dislike.

It’s a handsome half-inch-thick nine-ounce slab, a bit smaller than 5 inches by 7 inches, “bound” in a protective leatherette cover. You can turn pages individually, or jump ahead 10 percent of the book at a time. A “mark” button produces a visual dog-ear on the page corner.

What distinguishes Sony’s effort from all the failed e-book readers of years gone by, however, is the screen.

The Reader employs a remarkable new display technology from a company called E Ink. Sandwiched between layers of plastic film are millions of transparent, nearly microscopic liquid-filled spheres. White and black particles float inside them, as though inside the world’s tiniest snow globes. Depending on how the electrical charge is applied to the plastic film, either the black or white particles rise to the top of the little spheres, forming crisp patterns of black and white.

The result looks like ink on light gray paper. The “ink” is so close to the surface of the screen, it looks as if it’s been printed there. The reading experience is pleasant, natural and nothing like reading a computer screen.

There’s no backlight, however; you can read only by ambient light. Sony would probably argue that this trait makes the Reader even more like a traditional book, but it also means that you can’t read in bed with the lights off, as you can with a laptop or palmtop.

On the other hand, once those microspheres have formed the image of a page, they stay put without consuming any power. Amazingly enough, that means that you don’t have to turn the Reader off, ever. When you’re done for the night, just lay it on your bedside table; the current page remains on the screen without draining any battery power. (According to Sony, one prototype Reader in Japan has been displaying the same page for three years on a single charge.) Every instinct in your body will scream against leaving your gadget turned on all the time, but you’ll get over it.

The only time the Reader uses electricity, in fact, is when you actually turn a page. One charge is good for 7,500 page turns. That’s enough power to get you through “The Da Vinci Code” 16 times (electrical power, anyway). You can recharge the battery either from its power cord or from a computer’s U.S.B. jack.

The Reader can also display digital photos—they look surprisingly good, considering they’re being depicted using only four shades of gray—and play music files (noncopy-protected MP3 or AAC format) through headphones. With a good deal of preparation, you could even read along as the same audio book plays.

There are two ways to load up the Reader. You can copy your texts, photos and music to a memory card (Memory Stick or SD), which goes into a slot on the left side. That’s also how you can expand the Reader’s built-in storage (64 megabytes, enough for 80 books).

The other option is to import files into a somewhat buggy Windows program called Sony Connect. It’s the home base for the Reader in much the way iTunes is the home base for the iPod, although Sony Connect requires you to drag files manually; it doesn’t offer automatic synchronizing with the Reader.

This software is also the gateway to the Reader’s online bookstore. The catalog includes more than 10,000 books from a variety of publishers. Some, like “Freakonomics,” are priced like hardcover editions ($16); others, like “The Devil Wears Prada,” are priced like the paperbacks ($8). If you buy a Reader before the end of the year, Sony will include a coupon for $50 worth of books.

These books are copy-protected, of course. You can read them on a total of six machines, counting Readers that you own and Windows computers. You can’t give away or sell a book when you’re done with it, much less return it to the store.

The Reader also accepts standard plain text files and Word documents (only basic formatting survives), which means that you can help yourself to the 19,000 free, out-of-copyright books at Gutenberg.org. The Windows software can also download Web news stories (RSS feeds), which you can copy to the reader for daily train reading. PDF documents open on the Reader, too, but most are too big for the Reader screen, so the text winds up shrunk down to illegibility.

That’s not the only fine print, though. The Sony Reader has a few kinks to be ironed out.

Like an Etch A Sketch, the Reader’s screen has to wipe away each page before drawing the next one. Unfortunately, the result is a one-second white-black-white blink that quickly becomes annoying.

Tapping the “size” button cycles through three font sizes; holding it down rotates the page 90 degrees. The largest type is soothing to over-40 eyes, but also means that you have to turn pages more often, enduring even more of those distracting double blinks.

Sony has dreamed up some fairly baffling controls, too—not an easy feat on what should be a very simple machine. For example, the next/previous page buttons are at 2 and 8 o’clock on a dime-size desk. A circular control might make sense if it had buttons at all four points of the compass—but only two?

There’s no search function, video or clickable links, either. So much for those key e-book advantages.

Still, Sony got the big stuff right: the feel of the machine, the pleasantness of reading, the clarity of type. It’s not the only company hoping to resurrect the dream of electronic books, either. A spinoff from Royal Philips Electronics, iRex Technologies, sells a “work in progress” called the iLiad, which uses the same E Ink technology but offers wireless networking, a bigger screen, 16 shades of gray and a touch screen for scribbling notes, for $700. And last month, bloggers discovered that Amazon.com is working on an e-book reader (and store) of its own. (Search Google for “Amazon Kindle.”)

Is that it, then? Is the paper book doomed? Was it only a transitional gadget, a placeholder that came between stone tablets and e-books?

Not any time soon. The Sony Reader is an impressive achievement, and an important step toward a convenient alternative to bound books. It will make certain niche groups very happy: gadget freaks, lawyers with massive document stashes, doctors and pilots who check hefty reference texts, high school students with 35-pound backpacks and anyone who likes to read by the pool for 20 weeks at a time.

The masses, however, may continue to prefer the more established portable-document format. Those older reading machines never run out of power, cost about 2 percent as much and don’t break when dropped. You know: p-books.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

I suspect that I would eat better if the America’s Most Wanted-style counterguys at the bodegas where I buy my dinnertime Pringles and Campbell’s Cup-o-Salt Soup were replaced with concerned matronly types.

“You need to get some fresh fruit instead, dear,” they’d tell me, refusing to ring-up my quart of Cookies-n-Cream Häagen-Dazs. “And for only twice the cost of that malt liquor you’re planning to purchase, you could make yourself a hearty vegetable and pasta soup at home.”

A great story today from the Associated Press. Go here for Part I.

Typo will cost Michigan county $40K

Tue Oct 10, 5:08 PM ET

Grand Haven, MI—Ottawa County will pay about $40,000 to correct an embarrassing typo on its Nov. 7 election ballot: The “L” was left out of “public.”

A total of 170,000 ballots will have to be reprinted.

The mistake appeared in the text of a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would ban some types of affirmative action.

The word “public” was misspelled one of the six times it appears, county Clerk Daniel C. Krueger said Tuesday. Five or six people in his office had proofread the ballot, but it was an election clerk who found the mistake early last week.

"It’s just one of those words,” Krueger said. “Even after we told people it was in there, they still read over it.”

From what I remember about Paris (and my memory sucks), smoking is allowed most everywhere, either freely or in designated sections: hotels, restaurants, cafes, airports, cabs, theaters, etc. But on Sunday, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced a new smoking ban in schools, public buildings and offices around France as early as next February. Anyone caught violating the ban could be slapped with a fine of 75 euros (about $94.50). I thought the New York and New Jersey bans were tough news, but man, those French people really like smoking. I wonder how this will shake out.

Mainly I’m worried about David Sedaris, who if I recall his essays correctly, moved from New York City to France in part to escape the grip of smoking laws here. This, remember, is a guy from a family in which the children would receive cartons of menthol cigarettes from Santa at Christmas.

If I were to ask you why you sleep, you might reply, “Because I get tired” or “I need to rest and recharge” or maybe even “Oh boy, sleep! That’s where I’m a viking!”

It seems like an obvious question. But reading a LiveScience article today about the sleep patterns of migrating thrushes, I learned that scientists don’t know the answer.

The need for sleep is nearly universal in the animal kingdom, but scientists still aren’t sure what purpose it serves. Some studies suggest we need sleep to organize the memories we amass during the day and to give our bodies time to rest, but both theories remain unproven.

Then in the New York Times Book Review today, in a review by Natalie Angier of D. T. Max’s The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, she writes:

If you stop sleeping altogether, you will suffer in ways you didn’t think possible, you will lose all bodily control and dignity, and you will finally, inexorably die a horrible death.

I figured there are many unsolved mysteries of the mind and body, but I didn’t know sleep was one of them. The word “nearly” in the first quoted paragraph above piqued my interest, too, and it may be inaccurate. I think most every animal has a state that could be referred to as sleep, although some can go for long spells without it. For instance, newborn dolphins don’t sleep for weeks.

My electrical-engineer dad would have enjoyed the tour I took today as part of the annual Open House New York weekend. It was of IRT Substation #13, designed to generate power for the New York City subway and one of the oldest.

It opened in 1904, the same year as the first subway. The mayor, governor and, apocryphally, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, among other dignitaries, arrived at the substation-warming party in horse-drawn buggies.

Old #13 has operated continuously since and today powers the 1 line, which old-timers still call the IRT. Although it houses sinister-looking modern equipment, the substation serves as a de facto museum because it contains original machinery, the centerpiece of which is the Westinghouse 1,500 kilowatt rotary converter. Incredibly, this 50-ton wheel didn’t go offline until 1999.

Our guide, a chief overseer of the city’s transit substations with the foresworn duty “to preserve our electrical history,” as he said, was an amiable bearded fellow by the name of Bob. It was big of Bob, a 37-year MTA veteran, to even give the tour because about the same time it started, a building in Corona, Queens collapsed, narrowly taking a chunk of the 7 line with it, so he likely had other matters on his mind.

Bob used a lot of electrical-engineer talk, but as a seasoned guide he let the kids on the tour flip old switches and offered everyone entertaining bits of trivia. One of these, confirmed by MythBusters, is that it’s safe to pee on the electrified third rail of the subway track, but only if you’re more than six feet away, as one of the show’s hosts learned the hard way.

We were also told those blue lights in subway tunnels mark the location of an emergency power switch. Anyone can pull it to deactivate the third rail, a potentially lifesaving maneuver if someone falls or leaps to the tracks. Bob said these oft-fatal actions happen much more often than you’d think: two or three times a day. You only read about them in the Post when they involve a pretty white person or are particularly gristly.

The substation is located on West 53rd Street, directly behind the Ed Sullivan Theater, where the entire back wall and stage floor are grounded to shield Dave and his guests from electrocution.

Here’s a back corner of the substation where the walls bristle with old-fashioned signals, switches and signage.

Nearby, Bob demonstrated where workers could light cigarettes on exposed bits of metal coursing with 600 volts. After checking with someone over his walkie-talkie, he popped an active circuit breaker (13F11, if you’re keeping track at home), an action that arrives with a heartstopping BANG.

Jessica Simpson looks weird. It’s like her head was squashed in a vise, spreading her eyes and mouth to nonstandard widths. And her breasts, at least in Employee of the Month, which I saw tonight, are unnaturally spherical and thrust upwards, just sitting there like two lead shot on a salver. Then there’s her skin, which has the peachy-orange hue of Barbie plastic.

Her personality is pleasant enough, and she’s of course the love interest in the film, competed for by two buffoonish employees of a Sam’s Club-like warehouse store in a race to prove their worth by winning Employee of the Month. Their good deeds are rewarded by management with a gold star stuck to a chart in the break-room and when scruffy underdog Dane Cook got his first star, our group lead the theater in a round of applause over this ridiculous formulaic plot development.

There are a few laughs here and there, some fun physical comedy of people getting injured and a cool clubhouse where Dane and his friends drink and play cards. It’s hidden way up in a hollow among the stacked, cube-like pallets, accessible only by forklift.

Afterwards, Jimi, The Man and I headed to the Film Center Cafe to see if it had reopened from its renovations. It has and now it’s annoyingly fancy, with a DJ booth and resulting DJ-style music, too-bright lighting and waitresses dressed like those girls in that Robert Palmer video. Gone is the dim atmosphere and the large sturdy tables good for groups. Our sever messed up the order and the food was only O.K. Worst for me, Guinness has been taken off the drink menu.

This guy sitting right next to me on the 1 train this morning was wearing English Leather cologne. He wasn’t marinated in it, but the scent had reached that tipping point between pleasant and noticeable. Given all the other New York-style odors he could have been emanating, I fell back asleep unperturbed to halting dreams of acid-washed jean jackets and Ocean Pacific T-shirts, for you see, I once regularly wore English Leather myself. I thought I was the bee’s knees, but I was in seventh grade and also thought Def Leppard was the bee’s knees.

Later I recalled a report in Monday’s London Independent that the UK drugstore chain Superdrug is reviving so-called “heritage scents” such as Brut, Old Spice and Hi Karate for those gents who “embrace all things retro in an effort to smell like their parents did three decades ago.” I’ve always thought scents like these were for four certain groups of males:

1. Old people.
2. Kids.
3. Those with worse odors to hide.
4. Gentlemen from New Jersey who favor black leather jackets, hairgel, a plug of gum to chew and a free Friday evening during which to barhop and talk loudly in the West Village.

The way I look at it these days is that, in general, soap, shampoo, deodorant, shaving cream and toothpaste are already scented, so why must one add another smell to the fantasia?

Yes, yes, I can hear your protestations: “What about the ladies, Jason?” you are shouting at your computer screen. I have no problem with ladies wearing the occasional pleasing scent, because your average lady knows about portion control. A man given a bottle of cologne will go too far. (This is true with many objects and men. Paintball guns, for example.)

Masculine fragrance dispensers should be required by law to administer only a certain amount of fragrance over a given time, like a morphine drip, to prevent overapplication and the near-literal appearance of wavy odor lines radiating from the subject. You can’t expect your average guy to know how much cologne is enough when we have enough trouble picking out our clothing.

Does anyone really know what a good wine tastes like?

At one end of the spectrum, you’ve got screwcap hobo juice and wine-in-a-box that tastes like melted plastic. Everyone knows it causes macular degeneration, but they drink it anyway because it’s handy for picnics and fishing trips and those sorts of parties where at least one person ends up passed out in the bathtub. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got super-expensive wine. Everyone knows that tastes good because it’s super-expensive.

But there’s a great gray swath of middle ground littered with wines known in the trade as “sorta expensive.” It’s so subjective and anyone’s best guess or personal choice as to which of these taste “good.” I usually choose my mid-priced wine by identifying the best-designed label. Or I try to track down the $14.99 bottle that Robert Parker has anointed with a 90, only to find it has been sold out and the other vintages taste like feet.

Tackling this pressing issue with gusto have been some Japanese scientists who embrace my philosophy that robots are the answer to many of the world’s problems. Think of the Sony AIBO, which keeps us company and performs synchronized dance routines to Madonna songs when no one else will. Or consider the iRobot Corporation, whose robots clean our floors and help our armed forces kill swarthy evildoers in foreign lands.

The team of researchers at NEC System Technologies and Mie University, according to an AP story yesterday, dedicated two years of their lives to design a robot that can “taste” and identify wine, just like a sommelier, but with less condescension. Apologies if I’m venturing into the land of stereotypes here, but I was not surprised to see that this robot appears to hail from Super Mario World.

This eye-candy design masks what’s really just a computer-backed infrared spectrometer. The way it works is you place your wine up against that sensor, the robot zaps out a beam of infrared light, then the liquid’s chemical composition is analyzed in real time.

When it has identified a wine, the robot speaks up in a childlike voice. It names the brand and adds a comment or two on the taste, such as whether it is a buttery chardonnay or a full-bodied shiraz, and what kind of foods might go well on the side.

The robot can even be “programmed to recognize the kinds of wines its owner prefers and recommend new varieties to fit its owner’s taste.”

But the best part of the article is near the end, where it is revealed the robot can sense whatever is placed before it, not just wine.

When a reporter’s hand was placed against the robot’s taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.

Don’t panic; have a glass or two of full-bodied shiraz. But keep your eye on the robots. They’ve got a taste for flesh now.

The New York Times reports today that Coliseum Books, “a Manhattan bastion of independent bookselling since the early 1970’s,” is closing permanently by the end of the year. Same old story:

The reasons may be obvious to anyone who has shopped for book discounts on the Internet or spent time pawing through books that they have no intention of buying at one of the thousands of chain bookstores across the nation.

I’ve never been to Coliseum, but I must redouble my efforts to patronize the independent booksellers I like, such as the Strand, Westside Books and McNally-Robinson, instead of buying my books online, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately.

It’s just so tempting to me and my thriftiness to take the Amazon.com route. There, for instance, I can buy Haruki Murakami’s new short story collection today in hardcover for $16.47, without tax or shipping fees. An independent is likely to list-price the title at $24.95, not including New York’s 8-point-whatever percent sales tax.

An even more tempting bargain are goods purchased via Amazon Marketplace Sellers, third-party merchants that sell new and used media through Amazon’s site and order system. For example, George Saunders’ newest book lists for $23.95, is carried by Amazon.com for $16.29, but is available as a clean new non-remaindered copy via a Marketplace Seller for a mere $11.75. You do the math, as they say.

But consider those extra dollars for the independent-bookstore book are helping fund my favorite parts of book-buying: browsing amid funky décor, mingling with a clientele passionate about reading, the thrill of the hunt for a new favorite among the creative displays and staff recommendations, and most importantly, the knowledgeable, friendly and often cute salespeople. I should more carefully allocate my book-buying dollars.

The most simple musical instruments are percussion and I had thought the most elemental among those would be a drum. You need only a stick to strike a membrane affixed to a hollow object, say, an animal skin stretched taut over a wooden cylinder.

Yes, the triangle and the cowbell are also very simple percussion instruments, but you need fire to forge those bad boys.

Then I thought of the guiro. For it you only need a stick and a gourd (or another piece of wood). You need notches in your gourd, but you can probably do that with another stick or a stone.

And the guiro is actually featured prominently in various commercial recordings of the 20th century, or at least a few my foggy memory could muster from the depths of my CD collection. I’ve made available these guiro tracks below for academic purposes.

R.E.M. even give the guiro a shout-out in the liner notes to their 1996 album New Adventures In Hi-Fi as “the ultimate in musical usefulness.”

I’ll admit that listing the Valle track is a copout; if the guiro can be considered common among a specific nationality’s music, that nationality would be Latin American. But I enjoy the track’s cheesiness and that its title seems to reference the guiro’s sound.

Have a listen and bask in the ratchety splendor of the guiro.

• “Electrolite” by R.E.M. (1996)
• “Os Grillos (Crickets Sing For Ana Maria)” by Marcos Valle (1967)
• “Tell Me What You See” by The Beatles (1965)

As in most Woody Allen films, those of young director Michel Gondry, though much fewer in number, are shaping up to feature protagonists that stunt-double for the director’s own arrested development. Although for Gondry, these emotions are less along the lines of self-loathing and angst, and more along the lines of repressed emotion. Woody Allen, for instance, seems slightly less likely to feature a dream sequence in which the surrogate-protagonist smacks-down his boss with a pair of giant foam hands worn like mittens¹.

Consisting mostly of dreams, Gondry’s new film, The Science of Sleep, excels during these flights of fancy. An artist frustrated with his menial job at a calendar printhouse, Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) has these dreams of telling off his coworkers, shagging the moderately foxy receptionist and wreaking havoc on Paris, which he levels and rebuilds from cardboard with a sweep of his arm. Gondry fashions the film’s dream-sequence props and stop-motion animation from an explosion of found objects and Kindergarten art supplies—cardboard boxes and tubes, egg cartons, paint, yarn, cotton gauze, cellophane and tinsel. These childlike elements fit the story’s whimsical mood snugly where CGI just wouldn’t do.

As Stéphane takes more notice of his next-door neighbor, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), she becomes a highlight of the dreams. There they’re together, but in reality he’s an emotionally stunted boy who makes clumsy or unwelcome passes at her in the hallway and still sleeps on bedsheets printed with cartoon cars. Their initial meeting is especially fun as he helps her move in to the apartment across the way and they’re earnest yet each a tad too self-consciously nonchalant. Soon, he’s involved himself with her arts-and-crafts projects and bestows his crazy handmade inventions on her, perhaps in his dreams, perhaps not. These include genuine 3D glasses, a one-second time machine featuring a Polaroid flashcube, a mind-reading device fashioned from two bicycle helmets connected by a string, and an animatronic felt pony that later turns real.

Trouble is, Stéphanie isn’t particularly interested in Stéphane as any more than a friend. He soldiers on and tries to win her over with methods increasingly realistic in his dreams but increasingly desperate in real life. Both he and the audience have more trouble telling the two apart, and by the un-Hollywood ending, he’s regressed in emotion to a taunting child, pouting over what he can’t have. What a happy, sad and confusing film.

¹ O.K., so maybe Woody would have done this circa Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex..., which featured a breast the size of a small house rolling down a hill and Woody himself dressed up as a sperm, but those days are long gone. [back]