December 2006 Archives

For its photo-of-the-day earlier this week, the awesome NYPL Digital Gallery featured this black-and-white studio portrait from 1931 of an unnamed young lady who was a dancer in a Broadway revue at the New Amsterdam Theatre. It caught my fancy as a candidate to hand-tint in Photoshop. I’m one of many, I’d imagine, who has a copy of Photoshop on his computer but is only able to harness 5% of its power, but I found hand-tinting isn’t difficult. As the risk of offending the Photoshop experts who read my blog (both of you), here’s the technique I used:

1. Change the photo’s image mode to color (Image->Mode->CYMK Color).
2. For each element of the photo you want to tint, create a new layer (Layer->New->Layer...).
3. Change the new layer’s mode to Color.
4. Select a foreground color.
5. Use the brush tool (and for me, the eraser tool) to paint in the area.

In the end, my layers window looked like this:

Here’s the tinted photo:

That’s it. I also discovered that instead of fiddling with the Color Picker to find an exact color, it was easier for me to choose a general color then decrease the layer’s opacity until it reached an old-fashioned muted hue.

For Samantha’s birthday party celebration last night, a group of friends met at the rooftop bar of the Library Hotel. I arrived early and before I entered the hotel, I noticed it’s catty-corner from Park Avenue Liquor so I stopped in. Yow! I need to frequent this place.

In addition to a representative bank of liquors for mixed drinks and a robust wine selection, this place has the largest mass of single-malt scotches I’ve seen. A friendly salesperson handed me a brochure the shop produces quarterly, listing all single-malts they carry, and it enumerates 162 distinct varieties from Speyside alone. In addition, representing the highlands, there are 39 varieties from the north, 22 from the south, 19 from the east and four from the west. The lowlands have 20 selections, 59 more are from Islay and more than 50 combined represent a few other smaller regions. Prices range from a piffly $28 for a Glen Moray 12-year-old 80° to a 50-year-old Macallan bottled in a Lalique decanter for $9,000, the availability of which is so exclusive, according to a recent Times article, it’s exceedingly tough to come by, even if you’re a bonus-flush wanker from Goldman Sachs.

I favor the peaty Islay Laphroaig and before I visited home for the holidays, I asked my folks to try and track down the more exclusive 15-year variety but it was not to be found in Cleveland. Happily for me, it was right there on the shelf behind the counter at Park Avenue Liquor, snuggled between the 10-year variety I’ve been drinking and a 30-year-old for a cool $250.

I bought a bottle of the 15-year and can report that it’s lighter in color and cleaner tasting than the 10-year. I also found the finish to be more astringent than the 10-year. The aftertaste was oddly olive-tasting, like that of a dirty vodka martini. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been drinking the 10-year for years that I think it’s better, but I think I’ll stick with it. Or better yet, as Samantha and Iggy mentioned at the party, I need to get in on the free whiskey-tasting events held in the city. One way to get invited is to subscribe to the emailing-lists via the websites of the whiskey producers. Will do!

Best Known As

• Gerald Ford: “oldest former president”
• James Brown: “the Godfather of Soul” and “the hardest working man in show business”
• Advantage: Brown

Legacy

• Ford: replaced Nixon
• Brown: “I Feel Good” and many other fine songs, including a #1 R&B hit about hot pants
• Advantage: too close to call

Low Moments

• Ford: pardoned Nixon; “Ford to City: Drop Dead”
• Brown: domestic violence charge, subsequent hideous mug shot; “Living in America”
• Advantage: ?

Hobbies

• Ford: golf; falling down
• Brown: sweating; feelin’ like a sex machine
• Advantage: Brown

Saturday Night Live Impersonator

• Ford: Chevy Chase
• Brown: Eddie Murphy
• Advantage: draw

Provided Own Voice on The Simpsons?

• Ford: no, twice
• Brown: yes
• Advantage: Brown

Mourning Public

• Ford: will be allowed to file by coffin in the Capitol Rotunda
• Brown: will be allowed to file by coffin at the Apollo Theater
• Advantage: Brown

Funeral Tunes

• Ford: military music
• Brown: “Soul Power”
• Advantage: Brown

Funerary Attitude (according to New York Times coverage)

• Ford: “less pageantry than the funeral of former President Ronald Reagan”
• Brown: “pomp, circumstance, chants and song”
• Advantage: Brown

Coffin

• Ford: flag-covered
• Brown: 24-karat-gold
• Advantage: Brown

And the winner after 10 rounds is Brown.

Fortress of Solitude:

Cone of Silence:

Agony Booth:

On my subway ride back from my plane ride back from Cleveland tonight, I read an engrossing article in Vanity Fair about Esquire in the ’60s, when its editorial and design departments kicked ass (“The Esquire Decade” by Frank DiGiacomo.)

To gain heavyweight champ Sonny Liston’s trust for this now-classic cover photo, the salty and savvy adman/designer George Lois invited a cherubic, white eight-year-old girl to the shoot so Liston wouldn’t be as much his surly self and drop as many F-bombs. An outtake photo shows the boxer forcing a smile in the Santa hat as the smiling girl cuddles up to him, probably an infinitely more discomfiting cover image to the cracker Esquire-buying public in December 1963 than the shot that was used.

Sports Illustrated later noted that Liston looked like “the last man on earth America wanted to see coming down its chimney.” And Esquire’s ad director, who suggested at the time that Lois “refrain from putting a black Santa on its cover until Saks Fifth Avenue put one in its stores,” later estimated the magazine lost $750,000 in revenue from advertisers who pulled out of the issue. But that year, Esquire would hit an all-time high circulation of just under 900,000 and was on its way to becoming perhaps “the great American magazine of the 1960s.”

The buttons on my winter coat have a name. They’re four-hole corozo buttons, named, I think, after the tropical palm that bears corozo nuts, which were once used to fashion buttons, though I suspect mine are plastic. I learned this when I bought a few of them at M & J Trimming, purveyor of beads, braids, buckles, buttons and such, and brought them home to Cleveland so my sister could sew them back onto my coat where two had fallen off.

I’d been walking around these past months with the buttonless top of the coat unfastened, which looked rakish in autumn but now allows frigid air to mug my neck. Dana sewed them on in no time. I probably should have had her teach me how to sew in case other button-related emergencies arise. After all, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. But teach him to sew and he can repair his own damn coat.

It’s a time-honored tradition to rearrange Mom’s holiday décor.

A portion of the menu-board above the counter at an Arabica Coffeehouse in Parma Heights, Ohio.

Flight into Cleveland. Family liquor nook check: A-OK.

(The beer, nog and margarita mix were in the fridge, the wine in the wine nook.)

My favorite Christmas movie fills me with cheer and testosterone.

Today, Donald Trump forgave Miss USA 2006 Tara Conner for her alleged trespasses of underage drinking and hot girl-on-girl action. This reminds me a lot of my own New York story.

‘She left a small town in Kentucky and she was telling me that she got caught up in the whirlwind of New York,’ Trump said at a news conference. ‘It’s a story that has happened many times before to many women and many men who came to the Big Apple. They wanted their slice of the Big Apple and they found out it wasn’t so easy.’

Jimi, The Man and I had dinner last night at one of their new favorite places, Whym, a restaurant that shares owners with the nearby Eatery. Very hip and tasty. I had the thick and juicy pan-roasted organic chicken breast, topped with a pistachio-eggplant caponata and crushed tomato vinaigrette, complemented by a glass of cabernet sauvignon. For dessert, my pear cobbler was served with toasted almond streusel, cinnamon gelato and four plump blackberries placed at compass points on the plate. As he cleared the table, our server pointed out I had missed eating one, but at that moment I was ready to burst from the goodness. He also pointed out, sort-of seriously, that the owners are suspicious of diners who photograph their food. That’s how the competition poaches presentation ideas, he explained. Luckily for him and his competition, these are crappy photos.

Whym

• 889 Ninth Avenue (at 58th Street)
• (212) 315-0088
• Meal 36 of 52: chicken breast ($18.95), glass of wine ($10) and pear cobbler ($8.95)

Art collided strangely with technology at the Interactive Telecommunications Program Winter Show I attended today at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. It was a crowded exhibition of about 125 projects developed by students and professors of the program and set up like a science fair. You could stroll by and watch demos, participate in interactive projects and ask the inventors questions. There were a few hundred people in attendance, milling down the halls and into offices and classrooms where the exhibit tables were pitched. If you were a pornographer so inclined, this event would be the perfect casting opportunity for a feature film called Hot, Barely Legal Nerds.

As you enter the exhibit, you see a large octagonal frame containing a grid of 830 flat wooden tiles. Designed by Daniel Rozin, the Wooden Mirror is connected to a hidden video camera that captures a digital stream of what’s in front of it, interpolates the data on the fly, then activates any number of hundreds of tiny motors hidden behind the tiles, tilting them in and out of the light, resulting in a rough representation of the “reflected” image. Think of it like this: standing before the mirror, you see a crude pixilated representation of yourself. Sometimes you need to stand back and squint, but it’s there. What’s amazing is how swiftly the system reacts: wave your hand in front of the mirror and there’s a hushed sound of scattering as the tiles rearrange themselves to follow your movement.

The most practical invention was the solar swimwear developed by Andrew Schneider. It looked like armor made from a disco ball, dozens of photovoltaic strips of film stitched onto a bikini with conductive thread. On a sunny day, it harnesses enough power to charge an iPod, which can be plugged directly into the waistband. “There is no way I couldn’t do this project,” Schneider explained, and I believed him.

One of the least-flashy exhibits but appealing to me as a writer was a program written in Java by Sai Sriskandarajah that collects the words and phrases a writer deletes when composing a document. These “lost words” can then be output as an abstract poem. I’ve always wanted a program like this!

Here’s a curious invention for the harried New York City pedestrian and commuter: Urban Sonar. Developed by Kate Hartman, Kati London and Sai Sriskandarajah, it records a user’s “personal space” as it relates to her anxiety over an extended period of time. As the team members explain:

The user wears a jacket with four ultrasonic sensors that measure her proximity to other people and objects to her left, right, front and back. The sensors communicate with a Java-enabled mobile phone, which records these four proximity values along with the user’s heartrate. The data can then be uploaded to a server for playback at a later time, allowing the user to consider, with a degree of critical distance, her spatial experience over the course of fixed period of time.

Demo output on a computer showed a stationary red dot centered onscreen representing the user, surrounded by a constantly shifting blue shape indicating the distance of the nearest object on all four sides. This could be even cooler if the output occurred in real time, like those impending-doom proximity detectors used in Alien.

Although there wasn’t enough room at the exhibition to demo it, Sonic Body Pong by Tikva Morowati was one of the funniest inventions. Based on the classic table-tennis video game, Sonic Body Pong pits two human opponents against one another in real-time. They represent the paddles and the ball exists only via a “spatially correct” sound based on where they’re standing on the court. Through headphones, each player can hear the ball approaching, hitting either paddle or banking off a “wall.” The creators displayed a video of sample gameplay, which, without the sound, was essentially two people facing off and stutter-stepping or lunging laterally. I can’t imagine this had much to do with the science but each of them wore a headpiece, presumably containing the location-tracking sensors and headphones, comprised of a hardhat topped by a large green paddle made of foam.

Hanging out in SoHo this afternoon, I walked by 11 Spring Street, which has been overtaken by the Wooster Collective for this weekend only. In an unlikely collaboration of art and real estate, the development company that purchased the vacant building has allowed graffiti artists and street artists to use it as a canvas, inside and out, before restoring it for residential sale.

It’s a beautiful building, with or without the art. Built in 1888, the 14,000 square foot palazzo has more than 60 arched windows and was once a horse stable. On the outside, it’s long been known to feature some of the most intriguing art in the city, including stickers, posters and graffiti. Every time I’d walk by, something would be slightly different.

And the outside was all I got to see today; the wait to enter and see the art there was over 2 1/2 hours when I walked by at 3 p.m. A volunteer broke the news to those at the end of the line that because the exhibit was only open until 5 p.m., they needed to break it up and try again tomorrow.

What I like most about 11 Spring Street is that at least the art inside won’t be destroyed after Sunday but walled over during the redevelopment process, preserving it as if in a time capsule that may be rediscovered someday.

Katie held her birthday celebration tonight in the East Village at the Beauty Bar, where several of us had been before but not recently. This was made clear when we noticed most of the other people there looked to be in their mid-20s, with their Urban Outfitter apparel and ironic facial hair. We had a rousing good time anyway. The place is a converted beauty salon where you can get a manicure or nail-painting while sitting in a barber chair or under one of the original “chrome-dome” hair dryers. Smells like nail polish and cheap beer.

My previous hometown, Cleveland, is the poorest big city in the country according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but it still seems to have a scrappy sense of pride.

Then I read an Associated Press article today about how Cleveland-based American Greetings test-marketed a card there based on those “Greetings From” tourist postcards. It showed a man in a black-and-white photo walking past an urban landscape and the message was “Season’s Greetings from Cleveland ... America’s Poorest City!” Inside, it read “Happy Holidays.” An American Greetings spokesperson explained:

Obviously, our intent is not to make light of the issue. It’s just a satirical form of humor that plays well with a certain segment of the population. We realize it’s not for everyone.

Ha ha! I guess. Although I’m unsure what segment of the population would find this funny. If you’re well off, you’re spending your money on tastefully expensive cards with a nice heavy paper stock and bland statements of cheer. And I don’t know if the poor are frittering away their money on Christmas cards but if they are, I’d think they’d want to concentrate on the positive aspects of the holidays instead of making light of their economic situation.

Referencing predictions in the Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007 that the U.S. Census Bureau is issuing tomorrow, USA Today noted today that next year, Americans will spend nearly half their lives consuming media, whether watching television, going online, listening to music or reading. Specifically for TV, each person will spend 1,555 hours watching in 2007.

If there was ever a wakeup call for me to purchase a TV, this is it. Clearly I have a lot of catching up to do. Also, I notice via another study that I can no longer make excuses by saying a TV is an unnecessary expense.

According to a paper by two professors of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14 percent of people who live in the Ivory Coast on $1 a day have a TV and 45 percent of those there who live on $2 a day have one.

There’s so little emotion in The Holiday, it’s criminal to bill it as a romantic comedy. It’s a movie written by robots, for robots, with its glacial pacing and the empty sentiment of Avon’s holiday catalog. Much of the dialogue sounds straight-from-a-script, not how people actually talk; if I concentrated, I could smell the stale sweat and rotisserie chicken of the writers’ room.

Things begin badly by taking forever to unfold the premise, which the audience already knows from the trailer. Kate Winslet, a writer for London’s Daily Telegraph wedding pages, and Cameron Diaz, a movie-trailer editor, are just exiting painful relationships with their caddish boyfriends. They need a vacation! For two weeks, they switch houses, initiating the deal by instant-messaging one another as they read aloud exactly what they type. Hot dog if they don’t find romance in their fish-out-of-water environments.

Kate, implausibly giddy over Los Angeles and the bland but spacious house of Cameron, first befriends an ancient screenwriter who wanders the neighborhood with his walker. He imparts crusty meta-wisdom to her, explaining what a meet cute is and how she needs to be the leading lady of her own life, not the “best friend” character. Too much time later she ends up with Jack Black, who looks as if he may explode under the repression of his mugging. He’s just barely able to keep his trademark smirk and eyebrow cock in check, illustrating he should stick with the manic-sarcastic characters on which he’s built his fortune.

Meanwhile, Cameron christens Kate’s fairytale country cottage by shagging Jude Law, the mere sight of whom caused several women in the audience to launch into estrus. Undeniably smooth and British, he comes off to Cameron as a player, until his terrible secret is revealed: he’s a widower with two young daughters, each as sweet as a can of frosting crammed into a ten-pound bag of extra fine cane sugar. Jude and Cameron spend most of their time together glancing at one another with longing, then they shag some more.

Would you be surprised to learn this tale ends with everyone celebrating New Year’s by hugging, dancing and gamboling ’round the hearth as the camera cranes away?

That’s right, it’s finest quality menthol, not that low-grade shit. Treat yourself to the best, dammit.

From the “Tables For Two” restaurant review of Boqueria by Leo Carey in the December 18th New Yorker:

The deep, vinegary tang of a lentil stew is heightened with ingeniously thin round crisps of Serrano ham—porcine Communion wafers—and poached egg.

The phrase is superfluous but “porcine Communion wafers” might be so bad it rounds the circle to goodness again.

Jason

I love how Jayson Blair is now writing about bipolar disorder, which he says played a “huge role” in his plagiarism problems.

H.

And he’s self-employed in a “profitable retail business.” Translation: He’s working the hot dog counter at Wal-Mart.

Jason

I wonder: Can we take him at his word that the franks are all-beef? What’s his source?

H.

I think the franks are mostly baloney.

What to get this Christmas for the tycoon or mad scientist in your life who has everything? How about his own private island? Although I do note a suspicious lack of information about the presence of vicious dinosaurs and/or giant evil robots on said islands.

Hark, the herald angels sing! They’re singing, “You need to finish your Christmas shopping. Also, buy more furniture so you can have people over to your apartment for the holidays without fretting about your lack of chairs.”

Good advice, loud celestial beings in my head. And what better place for my needs than Ikea?

Katie and I headed out there this morning and on the way to Elizabeth, we took a wrong turn, which afforded her an opportunity to point out the grassy marshes the mafia favor for dumping corpses. Upon arrival we hit customer service and Katie tried to return the dish-drying rack she bought during our last visit, but the clerk wouldn’t accept it because he said the store no longer stocked it. Perhaps, Katie suggested, that was because it was a flimsy piece of shit that would sooner allow dishes to roll off the counter than it would dry them. Unmoved, the clerk wouldn’t even give her store credit.

Although Christmas is fast approaching, the crowds today weren’t any worse than usual. We moseyed along and checked out the showrooms, several of which contained weary customers taking catnaps on the display beds. I wanted a coffee table, but the nice one that matches my kitchen table was too expensive for me this month. Katie put much consideration and browsing power into purchasing a chandelier for her living room, but she couldn’t find a model with all the features she wanted.

I bought a kitchen chair to match the one I already have and went a little nuts with the impulse purchases. Those included a brick of 100 tea lights and four equally inexpensive glass holders, a new shower-supply caddy to replace the rust-cornered one I have now, silver-and-gold Christmas wrapping paper and a floor lamp to illuminate the love-seat reading area of my living room.

I never find more helpful salespeople in chains such as Sephora, Origins and The Body Shop than I do during the holidays. I like to imagine these outfits ramp up their help for confused gentlemen such as myself, who flood the stores this time of year to buy fancy bath products for ladies as Christmas gifts but end up stymied by the array of liquids, scents and packaging.

I must give a shout-out to the helpful and courteous saleslady tonight at The Body Shop on the Upper West Side who answered my most pressing question: What’s the difference between shower gel and body wash?

Ready? There is no difference. They’re both meant as substitutes for glycerin bar soap in the shower. I didn’t get into it with the saleslady why this name game is necessary, although I assume it has to do with marketing.

To over-generalize using the examples in my photo above, the Bergamot Body Wash seems positioned more as a masculine item. Citrusy and strong, the fragrance is an element of the original eau de cologne. Plus it’s in that manly dark-green bottle with a black cap. The Vanilla Spice Shower Gel, sparkling honey-gold in a transparent container, seems more of a stereotypically feminine scent.

So perhaps “Body Wash” was chosen for its descriptive bluntness, kind of a dumbing-down of the language for guys: Whatdaya do with this stuff? You wash yer body with it, just like Lava, only fancy-smelling. Whereas “Shower Gel,” like a lot of those mysterious cosmetic items ladies store in the bathroom, is more vague, positioned for experienced users only.

The boss of my boss, the capo di tutti capi, must be celebrating his birthday soon, because the obligatory card made the office rounds today in an unmarked manilla file folder for all employees to inscribe. I couldn’t think of anything creative to add to the platitudes already on the card, so I wrote good riddance, signed my name and passed it on. Brevity counts.

We had our office holiday party tonight at The Supper Club. It was the first public whole-company gathering since our merger and it was surprising to see how many people are now officially my coworkers even though I still have no idea who 98% of them are.

D.J.: playing music too loudly and too out of date. Food: looked good but I didn’t eat any of it, as I had gorged on Chex Mix and free Jet Blue garbage-food on the plane back from Florida. Alcohol: good and plenty.

Sadly, to my knowledge, no one made an ass of him/herself this year.

I laughed at a quote by Taco Bell president Greg Creed in today’s New York Times (“E. Coli Sickens 39 in New Jersey and New York” by Robert D. McFadden). Addressing the E. coli outbreak of food poisoning traced to his company’s chain, he said, “Health officials have indicated that there is no immediate threat and whatever may have occurred has most likely passed through the system.”

Aside from the intense vagueness required by the corporate catastrophe first-response playbook (indicated, no immediate threat, whatever, may have and most likely), I was struck by the phrase passed through the system. Ha ha! When you’ve made your customers shit blood, you may want to watch your double entendres, Greg.

I flew in tonight to the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport for our South Florida real estate conference here tomorrow. The venue is the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood in Hollywood, Florida, a smoky slice of Vegas in an otherwise boring part of the Sunshine State. You can see the hotel rise a half-mile out on the Ronald Reagan Turnpike, sprawling tall and spotlit gleaming white. Three toothless turrets jut up from the structure, lending a palatial air. Out back in a thicket of palm trees is a massive pool that I saw not a single person use. An island plunked in the middle is accessible by footbridge and features waterfalls, waterslides and the sorts of thatched-roof bars that serve drinks festooned with skewered fruit and tropical flowers.

I had been joking that I wanted to get my photo taken with Meat Loaf’s jacket, but inside, the hotel has seemingly every outerwear garment but the Loaf’s, displayed on headless mannequin torsos behind glass. I saw concert-costume jackets belonging to Prince, Aerosmith, Cher, Isaac Hayes, James Brown, the Yardbirds and James Taylor. John Lennon was represented by a pair of boots from the early years of the Beatles. Strangely, no jacket of Elvis’ was in the house, only a pair of ripped corduroy pants, for which I had no time to read the explanatory placard. I assume they were from one of his movies or perhaps the end of his life when he let himself go, gorging on fried food and amphetamines.

The rooms of the hotel are decked out in a lot of sexy halogen lamps and the clothes hangers and room service menu are upholstered in faux leopard fur. Snippets of song lyrics are printed on various items. My extra roll of toilet paper, for instance, was wrapped with a paper band printed with Steve Winwood’s “roll with it, baby.” My room didn’t contain any rock-star memorabilia but my TV was flanked by a framed black-and-white photo of Bruce Springsteen rocking the mike with Lil’ Steven and one of that guy from Cheap Trick with the five-necked guitar.

December 7, 2006 Update: Per an MSN Money article this morning, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which operates the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, is paying $965 million to buy the entire Hard Rock business (except the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel & Casino), which includes a chain of 124 Hard Rock Cafes, four Hard Rock Hotels, a pair of Hard Rock Casino Hotels and one of the largest collections of rock memorabilia.

A few weeks after the “one to two weeks” promised and I’ve received my New York State driver license, my first form of local ID since I moved here, other than that autographed David Caruso photo I’d kept in my wallet until it disintegrated recently.

My photo turned out O.K., save some glasses flash glare. Also, I appear to be thrusting my mighty chin outward in a patriotic fashion, probably a result of trying to stand up straight for once.

I’m mesmerized by the overlap of psychedelic copyproof and tamper resistant measures that are part of the November 2005 security redesign of the license, including a sinusoid hologram (you can see it streaking over one side of my face), watermarks, merging color gradients and a strange Teflon-like finish. By merely holding the card at arm’s length and tipping it two degrees left then right, I can hypnotize small mammals and halal cart vendors to do my bidding.

While Christmas shopping today in Chelsea, I saw this graffiti commentary scrawled on the signage for a condo building under construction at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 18th Street. As a real estate professional, I can confirm that the “easy formula” sums up the city’s situation well.

Andie and I headed out tonight to see an urban reinterpretation of The Nutcracker at the Abrons Arts Center on Grand Street at Pitt (a.k.a. Avenue C). It’s so far east it’s just about under the Williamsburg Bridge and neither Andie nor I felt we’d been in a section of Manhattan less Manhattan-like. It was as if we were in New Jersey or deep in Queens or somewhere with all the industrial decay, oddly inactive housing projects, shuttered storefronts and lack of pedestrians, all of which you may see in the city during odd hours, but this was around 7:00 on a Saturday night. We thought we’d find someplace quaint to eat dinner; we found nothing and bought Pringles and bottled drinks from a bodega.

The play was not bad. There was a mix of dance students with professionals, whose every leg, arm and back muscle was clearly defined, and who can contort their bodies with ease into the most unnatural yet graceful positions. The “urban reinterpretation” part of it was half-assed. Occasionally backbeats would funk up into the recorded Tchaikovsky or the cast would start clapping its hands rhythmically as someone all the sudden started breakdancing. Other than that it was a basic interpretation, from what I can remember of the original, although with added jubilance from the young kids in the cast.

Remember this happy little fellow? I played with one very similar to it as a tot in the ’70s. There’s a thin plastic pull-string attached to the front (and not visible in my photo). The wheels wobble and squawk when they turn and the eyes move up and down. And every turn of the dial produces a ring-ring, a feature I imagine has annoyed generations of parents. Only now do I realize it’s strange that a phone from an educational toy manufacturer should make an incoming call sound every time a digit is dialed.

Stranger still that Fisher-Price has produced the Chatter Telephone for at least the past 45 years even though phones with dials fell from regular use decades ago. The newest model has been cutesified, is too plastic and curvy, and the colors are all wrong. See here:

During the middle of last month, I developed an uncontrollable urge to have my own Chatter Telephone as I remembered it, so I bought a worn 1961 model on eBay for $20 from a guy in New Jersey named Rick. (It’s the one in the first photo above.) It has a solid wood base with a pasted-on cartoon face, a candy-red plastic handset I remember attempting to chew on and a string cord connecting the handset to the base. It arrived today and stealthily, I showed it to a select few old-timers around the office who I knew would remember it.

My classic toy reminiscences began when Jimi mentioned that The Man insisted on queuing-up at the holidays-obnoxious Toys “R” Us on Times Square just to buy the Hasbro pop-up game Perfection, which he remembered fondly from his childhood. With that one, too, I see they’ve bastardized the colors; if memory serves, they were yellow and orange.

Surely I’m not alone in thinking the toy designs of my own youth were the best ever.