February 2007 Archives

I cannot roller skate. At one time I could, I swear. I have fond memories of grade school outings to Ohio Skate, but if I concentrate on these hazy recollections, what pops up is eating pizza, playing Tempest and hoping the D.J. would play the best roller skating song ever, “Jungle Love” by The Time.

When Iggy, Sam and I met at the storied ’80s nightclub Roxy tonight for the third-to-last skating party before it’s demolished to make room for apartments, I thought I’d be able to complete at least one circuit. I laced up my size 11s and stepped gingerly onto the parquet rink. As the friction between my feet and the ground all but disappeared, never was it made so clear to me that I’m nearly six feet tall with comparatively little mass. My legs stiffened and I teetered precariously. I pitched and bobbed as stormy seas of fluid raged through my vestibular system. In a flash I wondered what happens to your stuff when you die without a will. I was a flailing physics equation and after grasping for the boards, I took a side exit from the floor and spent the remainder of the night standing there watching everyone else skate and wondering why nearly the only song I recognized was “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” by Michael Jackson, the second-best roller skating song ever, incidentally.

The floor swam with skaters, moving quickly en masse, generally in the same direction, bumping one another in the rush. It was reminiscent of the center 2/3 platform at Penn Station weekday mornings, except with more falling down. There were skaters of all kinds: Girls wearing short shorts and those high, striped tube socks. An old man who resembled Alan Arkin skating slowly in his own world. Muscularly lithe black guys with shaved heads who appeared to be enjoying their night off as Madonna’s backup dancers. Girls with glowsticks, that nerd with the headband, most everyone sweaty.

I thought that maybe if I jettisoned some shame, I could see whether I could make this plan work: I am a guy who clearly cannot skate. Is there no fair maiden who will come to my aid and “show me the basics?” Unfortunately, Sam explained, the way it works for heterosexuals at the Roxy is that you have to be a fellow who’s, like, the Scott Hamilton of roller skating, then rove the floor flashing your flair and your moves to less experienced young ladies, much as a male peacock will unfurl his iridescent fan of feathers as he roller skates by an inquisitive female.

The girls were working it, too. There was this one Sam pointed out who was wearing dark-blue Jordache jeans, a pink top out of Flashdance and matching earrings, each of which was a big plastic triangle. She was mostly skating backwards and kept bustin’ this move where she’d nod her head rhythmically or shimmy slowly as she ran both of her hands through her blonde bob and flipped it out, like she hoped she might pass a strapping man in a polo shirt or a talent scout from Clairol. The funny thing was she resembled Andie and her exaggerated motions were exactly the ones Andie would make if she were imitating an exotic dancer.

On the sideline, a sarcastic clot of girls laughed and mimicked Ms. Pink. But this girl knew what she was doing: She was eventually joined by three friends, other girls in jeans, equally nice hair and slightly retro tops that were each a different solid color. They skated for a time holding hands in a loose circle, a whirling Lacoste coven hoping to ensnare an unsuspecting man in their nexus. I figured their alternate plans for the evening involved rocking out in their garage band and/or solving a mystery in a big old haunted mansion upstate.

At the end of the night when I returned my skates, I realized they were radiating a pungent five-cheese odor that in no way could have been spawned by my own feet. Then I saw it: the counterjockeys were not deodorizing the returned skates, just chucking them into large blue plastic tubs, then fishing them back out and handing them over to the next customer who requested that size. Believe me when I tell you, through the footholes of Roxy’s skates, I witnessed the morning-breath yawn of Death itself.

You’re really kind of setting yourself up when you name your restaurant Good, don’t you think? I thought for sure I’d be writing that its fare was, “unsurprisingly, good.” But it wasn’t even. My barbequed pork sandwich had no flavor whatsoever-no sweetness, no tanginess, no saltiness, no spiciness-nothing. I could see there was some sort of sauce on that pork. But I could not taste it. It was very strange.

The tomato-basil soup that came as a side to the sandwich had a taste, but it was that of marinara sauce.

Décor was fairly de rigeur for this part of town: craft-paper draped tables, wooden chairs, bare bulbs, a compact but well-stocked bar off to the side selling $10 mojitos and such. The place also had that vague basementy odor that you get when you don’t clean your beer taps or traps well enough. Or maybe it was literally the basement I was smelling.

I did enjoy the article on poisonous spiders in the current issue of the New Yorker.

Good

• 89 Greenwich Ave. (at Bank Street)
• (212) 691-8080
• Meal 9 of 52: barbecued pork sandwich with a side of tomato-basil soup ($9.95).

This flyer, posted on my A train home from work tonight, reminds me that the world needs more tract-style advertisements.

I went, again, to Ikea today, this time with Jimi, The Man and Johnny. I thought they might make some purchases of their own there so as to downplay the fact that I seemed to be using them for their rental car, but no dice. We had a nice lunch involving cheap meatballs and sandwiches in the cafeteria. Later, we learned that thrifty bibliophile-beloved particle-board confection, the Billy bookcase, barely fit in our vehicle with all but the driver and front passenger seats tucked down. I scrunched up in the back and Johnny fell asleep laying on top of the large flat boxes. Upon waking, he was surprised to learn my building doesn’t have an elevator so we all got to experience arrhythmia and shortness of breath lugging that lumber up all those stairs.

Stars align, planets turn, an asteroid angles to blindside earth: mere trifles of the universe. After all, it’s Iggy’s birthday. The man is cooler than you; give it up and deal with it. Do you have full Fu-Manchu facial hair? Did you steal James Brown’s soul while his body was still warm? Does your coat contain at least three arrestable offenses, including shuriken? Have you ever sat on a sofa with a bathrobe-clad Miles Davis? I didn’t think so; to the back of the line with you.

So, you see, to bacchanalate properly we needed a venue alive with pleasure. We tried this East Side Moroccan joint, Zerza, but it was only just O.K. and shall receive my bile.

It’s good the 12 of us (14? 13? I wasn’t paying attention to begin with and I fully lost track after a few drinks) were such a giddy fun-loving bunch because my dish wasn’t. What was billed as a vegetarian casserole was a watery bunch of TV dinner peas, some carrot chunks and a scatter of lonely chickpeas. Thankfully the mojitos, although expensive, were tasty, as was the baklava.

But worst, we’d selected the place for its promise of gyrating, ululating, finger-cymbal rocking, vision-questing entertainments. To wit, we were told there would be a hookah; there was no hookah. We were told there would be belly dancing; there was no belly dancing. (Other than, eventually, among our own group; but this is a family blog and I can divulge no further detail.) ¿Dónde está belly dancer? “She left,” our waitress said, not so helpfully. Later, perhaps taking stock of our mojito-fogged minds, she suggested the tip wasn’t included in our colossal bill when in fact it was. That ain’t right. The free flutes of champagne the manager dispatched to our table didn’t make up for these transgressions but we drank it anyway.

On the gleeful slouch back to our respective subways and trains, we stopped at Astor Place to rotate The Alamo in Iggy’s honor. Some imps had pranked the top of the hulking metal cube with LED throwies, glowing like candyraver fireflies. We spun ol’ Alamo so fast, it began to shudder. “It’s oscillating! It’s oscillating!” Iggy shouted, and I thought it might whip loose from its pivot and hurtle down the Bowery, taking us with it.

Zerza

• 304 E. 6th St. (at Second Avenue)
• (212) 529-8250
• Meal 8 of 52: vegetarian casserole thing (something like $14), mojitos ($10 each), baklava ($?) and an espresso ($?)

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do on my hip East Side restaurants. I could’ve done worse than rekindle my L-train patronage by hitting Momofuku Ssäm Bar at lunch today. The name means “lucky peach” but could it be a reference to the cheap noodle daddy himself?

This I know is true: Momofuku snags enough bloggy snark, it’s got it’s own Gawker tag, which delineates everything from 29-year-old restaurateur David Chang waxing sarcastic on his predicted one-star Bruni review of the months-old Ssäm Bar (it received a “very good” two stars) to the Shake Shackesque “worth an hour wait for glorified fast food?” ruminations on the restaurant’s original incarnation, Momofuku Noodle Bar. But you know you’re blessed with full mass in the NYC restaurant universe when a fangirl grants you your very own Urban Outfitters-style T-shirt.

Ssäm is Korean for something like “wrapped food” and it’s tough not to notice the similarities to the goods of a certain McDonald’s majority-owned burrito chain. You wait on a cafiteria-like line, all gleaming and spotless stainless steel, and direct your white-clad counterman to load up your flour pancake with kimchi, edamame, pickled shiitake or eight other Asian extras. I tried an order of the infamous pork buns ($8 for two baseball-sized bundles) and found them reminiscent of the best street-vendor snacks: tasty, sloppy, foil-wrapped and boasting potent alcohol-absorbing power. The buns, bleached whalebone white, are freshly plucked from a steambox in a Copperfield puff of fragrant steam. Tongue-shaped and spongy like a Dr. Scholl’s insole, they’re folded over a savory wad of pulled Berkshire pork, a slop of spicy-sweet hoisin, crisp pickled cucumber and slaw. It’s all folded-over and twist-wrapped in a sheet of foil for on-the-go goodness.

Those who opt to eat in can sit at the bar or a number of tables, all sleekness and right angles, in grand contrast to the no-name facade brooding on a boring corner across from the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary. But, yeah, I’d eat there again. Damn hipsters.

Momofuku Ssäm Bar

• 207 Second Ave. (at E. 13th Street)
• (212) 254-3500
• Meal 7 of 52: an order of steamed pork buns ($8)

Walking back to the subway from Greenwich Village during my lunch break, the wind whistled at and over my fresh haircut. I passed Jane Street and wouldn’t you know it, this Clark Gesner song from The Electric Company somersaulted into my conscious:

Scene: A montage of New York City street signs. Soundtrack: A group of kids sing-read each as it appears.

In. Stop. Park. Walk.
Yield. Enter. Exit. One way.

Jane Street. Jones Street. Park Avenue.
No right turn. No left turn. What can you do?

Gas. Car wash. Subway. Don’t walk.
No parking. Tow away zone.

Uptown. Downtown. First Avenue.
Home sweet home.

I never appreciated until now how much my childhood regimen of New York-based public television-viewing—not just The Electric Company but Sesame Street—would infuse my Manhattan existence with occasional bursts of barely remembered whimsy. (See also, before it gets pulled: Subway!)

After some of its usual delays, the MTA began testing subway arrival time displays in mid-January. I saw them in action today during a lunchtime jaunt to the East Side. The aim is to eventually extend this system to many more lines, but right now, it’s only active on the L, which cuts across Manhattan’s 14th Street into Brooklyn.

In at least several of the two-dozen stations on the line, small rectangular scrolling-LED signs hang above the platform. The ones at the Eighth Avenue stop weren’t working correctly, claiming arrival times of “0 Min” interspersed with this warning:

At the Union Square station they appeared to be accurate, alternating arrival times of the next two approaching trains from both the east and the west. This photo from the Third Avenue station lists “0 Min” for the Brooklyn-bound train I just exited and notes another will arrive in nine minutes.

I will admit there is a certain comfort in knowing when your train will show up. For instance, knowing it will be, say, 10 minutes would allow you to temporarily sneak up or over to one of those underground newsstands to stand on line for a bag of Doritos or something. And if your platform is above-ground, in inclement weather it’d be helpful to know you could hide out in the shelter and warmth of the station until your train pulls in.

Conceivably, these signs would alert straphangers to big delays on the line; if you’re running late for something important, it’d be invaluable to know your train won’t be appearing anytime soon and you’d be better off cabbing it. Finally, once they install signage like this on lines that have local and express trains running across the platform from one another, it will be useful to check whether you’ll save time exiting the local and waiting to pick up the express.

I’m keen to see how this system will unfold and bring the MTA up to speed with the world’s other big public transit systems. Major cities I’ve visited in the past 12 months—Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Dublin and Rome—already have subway arrival time displays very similar to New York’s test version.

I can’t be certain but I think I dreamed about that brain implant-controlled monkey that feeds itself with a robotic arm, only instead of the monkey secured in a plastic box, it was the freshly shorn and tattooed head of Britney Spears, feeding itself bananas. Do you suppose this means anything?

I got off work today for President’s Day. Other than thinking about cleaning my apartment (but not actually doing anything about it), the highlight was making some soup, inspired by the shipment of fresh vegetables at my local grocer: green beans, zucchini, carrots, leeks. They still can’t secure decent tomatoes out of season, though: the ones on display today were pencil-eraser pink and non-resilient, those classic warning signs of flavorlessness. Fortunately, I’d say the overall most useful non-condiment ingredient in my cupboard is canned diced tomatoes, which I stock up on whenever I have a chance. They’re useful for a multitude of recipes, including sauces, soups, pasta dishes and salsas. They’d pretty easily sneak into my own top-ten base ingredients to have on hand at all times. Anyway, it was a bright, tasty and nutritious soup for a lazy winter day.

Everyone’s always going on about how the “baptism scene” in the original Godfather is a cinematic tour de force. You know the one: at the end of the film, when Michael attends his nephew’s baptism, renouncing Satan and all His works. Meanwhile, intercut with the scene are alternating shots of Michael’s men eliminating the Corleone family’s enemies one by one, all set to a overwrought organ soundtrack. Michael’s not scampering away to Sicily this time to lay low for a year. No sir. He’s proud new owner of the Bad Motherfucker hat. Men will kiss his ring and do his bidding.

Yeah, it’s O.K. But the scene in that movie that always gets me, even again as I watched the movie tonight for maybe the dozenth time, is the one in which Michael caps Sollozo and Police Captain McCluskey during their dinner meeting at Louis’ Italian American Restaurant. It’s nowhere near as complex as the famous sequence of quick cuts in the baptism scene, but I think it’s more effortless and effective.

Part of this is because of where Michael’s at in his development as a character in the film. By the end, at the baptism scene, he’s in charge and unstoppable in his convictions to defend the Corleone name; his actions are an inevitable conclusion.

But the scene in the Italian restaurant serves as Michael’s self-imposed initiation to the family business—will he or won’t he turn to the dark side? It’s unclear. Although he’s a freshly returned war veteran, at this point in the film he’s still very young-looking and, though serious, detached from the dealings of his family.

The scenes directly before the restaurant scene set the stage with doubts as to whether Michael can carry out the job. Clemenza and Sonny repeat advice to him: “don’t forget: two shots apiece in the head” and repeated reminders to drop the gun right after the murders. Michael has trouble squeezing the trigger of the gun as he tests it beforehand, then says “my ears!” after he fires. There’s a tense nearly silent Chinese takeout dinner in the kitchen at the Corleone before Michael leaves on his assignment.

Once he gets picked up by Sollozo and McCluskey, they feign a trip to New Jersey, possibly to shake a tail, possibly to suss out whether Michael knows the location of the meeting. He’s not supposed to, but he does, and he hides this knowledge with a seeming lack of concern.

After Michael, Sollozo and McCluskey arrive at the restaurant, they order. Sollozo talks with Michael in Italian and Michael interjects in English to demand that his father be left alone. Then, as planned, Michael excuses himself to go to the restroom. He takes a time scratching around behind the toilet tank where the gun’s been taped/hidden in advance, just enough time to make you wonder whether it’s there and whether he’ll find it. I don’t believe you can actually see him put the gun in his pocket as he leaves the restroom, which is a great touch. Instead you see his reflection in the mirror as he runs both hands through his hair. (Someone seeing the film for the first time may wonder whether he’s chickened out and left the gun in the restroom.)

Also great is how Michael disobeys Clemenza’s earlier advice to "come out blastin’." (As his father’s son, that wouldn’t be within his character. Although not adverse to swift retaliation, Michael is cautious and extremely calculative. So this could be him doing things his own way, the way he’ll conduct all of his business as don. Or it could be because he’s nervous and forgot what Clemenza told him. Or a bit of both.) Instead he walks out of the restroom, stops, makes eye contact with Sollozo at the table, then walks over and takes his seat again.

The tension at this point is high. Sollozo continues where he left off in Italian—like before, it’s not translated by subtitles, which is appropriate, as Michael’s not paying much attention anyway. The only other sound is an elevated subway rumbling by outside, growing even louder in a rush. Michael’s got a distracted stare into middle distance, occasionally glancing at Sollozo. Then he stands up quickly and cold caps the guys, Sollozo clean through his head, McCluskey in the throat, then through the head. It’s over in seconds; a bloody mist hangs in the air.

He doesn’t drop the gun right away, either, like he was told repeatedly. He’s nearly out the door when he flings it to the floor from his hand like it’s hot.

What a marvelous confluence of acting, pacing, editing, scripting and sound design. This scene, unlike any other in the film (and barely any others in any other films) makes my heart race every time I watch it.

On the way back uptown from Megan’s birthday soirée.

So what happened, see, was Kelly trained her camera on Katie, Andie and myself. Next, she shouted out the name of a random emotion. Then we three had but a second to compose ourselves into a tableau of that emotion before the photo was taken.

This one’s my favorite but it’s not representative or fair: after Kelly said “tantric,” Katie and I conspired to stare at Andie.

Drinks and décor courtesy the downstairs lounge at the Flatiron, where a group of us were celebrating Megan’s 30th. You’re best off viewing the full set on Flickr.

I don’t have as much a problem with transparency and bias in the media as I do with journalists just getting the story and getting it right.

Remember that statistic I referenced last month about 51% of American women living without a spouse? That was from a front-page New York Times article on January 16th that ended up spurring analysis across the media spectrum, plus snide comments about the photo of the single woman petting her cat.

This Sunday there arrived a little-ballyhooed follow-up article on the Op-Ed page of the Times by public editor Byron Calame, who pointed out that the only case in which the 51% statistic is true is when the survey data is expanded to count teenagers aged 15 through 17 as “spouseless women.” As you might guess, nearly 90% of those girls live with their parents.

Although the range of ages used in collecting the survey data was noted in the article, it was buried below the 20th paragraph in mentions that were either inaccurate or minimal. So the central point of a front-and-center article in one of the country’s most esteemed newspapers was just plain inaccurate/misleading.

There’s more: an unsettling suggestion of editorial finagling to promote the story’s position over its clarity. An early draft seen by Calame mentioned the survey’s age range much earlier and more clearly. As a Times deputy national editor told Calame, the assertion that more women in America are living without a husband than with one “probably lifted this story onto the front page.”

Post-Jayson Blair, the Times has sanded down some of its classic self-righteousness by appointing a public editor and running extensive corrections daily. But as these elements make clear, the Times screws up often in ways great and small. Worst, this article was piddly in the grand scheme, nothing like a strong exposé dealing with politics, government or business; makes me wonder what’s getting misreported elsewhere. Trust no media fully!

The MTA encourages conductors to stick to its script. Guidelines require basic announcements when the doors of a subway car are open in a station, including the line, station name and any transfer points. Conductors are permitted to add brief scripted niceties and PSAs: “stand clear of the closing doors,” “the time is now [time],” “thank you for riding MTA, New York City Transit,” “keep an eye on your belongings at all times,” etc. They can also announce delays and their cause.

But every so often, you’ll get a conductor who flexes this policy, mixing up the language to lend a personal touch, or, my favorite, add color commentary, capping stop announcements with a brief note of highlights at street level. Some stops always get this qualifier, but only the iconic ones: “42nd Street, Times Square” and “34th Street, Penn Station,” for example. But to lend a qualifier to most every stop is rare. Since living here, I remember hearing a conductor do this only once, on the 1 train. She offered shopping tips all the way up the West Side, saying things like “79th Street, Filene’s Basement, Circuit City.”

The conductor of my A train home tonight did much the same. He sounded suspiciously like Mars Blackmon and I noticed upon exiting that he sported a flattop. Here’s what he said for each stop:

• “59th, Columbus Circle, Time-Warner Center.”
• “125th, home of the world-, world-, world-famous Apollo Theater.”
• “145th, Sugar Hill.”
• “168th, the hospital.”
• “175th, George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal.”
• “181st.”
• “190th, Overlook Terrace, a.k.a. The Cloisters.”
• “Dyckman.”

As you can see, poor 181st Street, as well as my home stop, Dyckman, got the short shrift. (For Dyckman, I’d have mentioned the underrated Fort Tryon Park). This conductor made me wish I’d entered his train much further down the line so I could have heard what he had to say about stops like Canal, 4th and 14th.

Commuters are conditioned to hear familiar announcements repeatedly from conductors, so unscripted deviations like these can be jarring. Mostly though, when the commentary is different and briefly informative, it reminds me that travel here is never a line on a map but a connection of dots curious and noteworthy.

What the 10 people standing or seated nearest me on the uptown A train were reading around 9 p.m. today:

1. woman with glasses perched atop head: paperback of Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson.
2. girl with Emily Dickinson hair and a scarf striped like a roll of mixed berry LifeSavers: grimly designed hardcover of 31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today by Barry Werth.
3. grandmotherly type: article in current issue of New York magazine: “What Is That For? A Visual Guide to Some of Chinatown’s More-Intriguing Ingredients.”
4. guy with a Crate & Barrel bag containing a Cuisinart programmable coffeemaker: a chapbook entitled Saved.
5. shifty eyed guy in paint-spattered cargo pants: laser-printed copes of emails.
6. fidgety woman: fidgeting so much I couldn’t even read the title of her book. Something like Trivial Secret or Rival Secret, with a florescent green cover.
7. woman with curly hair: a stapled-together photocopy of an Alice Munro short story, the words on the inner edge of the copied pages falling into the shadow cast by the book’s binding.
8. Japanese girl: a yellowing paperback, printed in Japanese, with a woodcut illustration of a bunch of grapes on the front (back?) cover.
9. nerdy guy: what appeared to be a magazine article by Stephen King called “The Secret Garden” (which is weird, because I thought that was a novella he published back in 1990).
10. guy in expensive gray pants carrying New York Sports Club tote: alternately reading a tiny spiral-bound notebook and writing in it.

It’s about time! Within the past two days or so, Google silently added New York City subway station stops to Google Maps, visible at the three most zoomed-in views of the city. Here’s an example from Lower Manhattan.

Microsoft’s MSN Maps & Directions site, also known as MapBlast, has had this feature for years and it bugged me greatly that Google would futz around with monumental eye-candy like Google Earth when they were missing such a basic, essential aspect of their NYC maps. Barring copyright issues, now they only need to add the correctly numbered/lettered and colored line logos instead of the generic white-on-blue “metro stop” icons they’re using now.

My sinus headache and achiness returned and I wasn’t feeling well at work this morning, so I left around lunch to spend an hour sitting in my doctor’s waiting room, reading old issues of Esquire and New York. Her verdict: sinus infection, for which she prescribed an antibiotic.

By the time I caught the subway home around 3 p.m., it was chock full of schoolkids on their own way home. I’m rarely if ever on the subway at that time on a weekday so I’ve never experienced this children’s crusade up close. Seems like the NYPD beefs up its presence at stations (at least at the 66th and 86th Street stations on the 1 line) to cut down on shenanigans. There was practically nothing but kids on my car, their loud chatter and raw hormonal energy bouncing off the walls. Across from me, two girls split a pair of iPod headphones, one taking the left earbud, the other taking the right. As they listened to their music, they put out a constant hum of conversation, referring to many things as “mad hot,” apparently a superior state of being.

After getting my prescription filled, I stopped at my friendly neighborhood bodega to buy ice cream, noticing that despite the fact the flavor was introduced in 2003, they were for the first time carrying Häagen-Dazs Crème Brûlée. As I bought it, the bodega owner and one of her clerks sidled over and asked me to pronounce the name for them, which I did. Then they asked me to explain what exactly Crème Brûlée was, presumably in case they had to field any questions about the “new” flavor. “Is it like dulce de leche?” they asked. Sort of, I said: it’s a custardy French dessert with a caramelized sugar top.

When I got home, I was delighted to discover that the ice cream was delicious. I was not as delighted to learn that I am allergic to moxifloxacin, the new antibiotic my doctor prescribed. Instead of getting spots all over my trunk as I did with that cipro two years ago, my head broke out in welts. “So, just like Chris Elliott in There’s Something About Mary?” my boss said later, in what’s just about a near-perfect description.

Pan’s Labyrinth, a current Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, reminded me of Amélie. They’re both adventures of precocious young women spiced with fairy-tale elements rendered in spectacular CGI. Although, as Andie points out, Pan’s Labyrinth has an awful lot of graphic violence. I read that in Mexico, the film’s producers added stickers to movie posters warning idiot parents that the film isn’t suitable for their children, despite its elements of whimsy.

These elements center around a mysterious, possibly sinister faun who looks as if he’s made of wood and makes spindly wicker sounds when he moves—nowhere near as cuddly as C.S. Lewis’s Mr. Tumnus. He sends heroine Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) on a series of quests deep in the forest and a labyrinth located conveniently nearby. In the real-world plot running parallel to this world of pixies and mosters, Ofelia’s mother is sick while pregnant with the son of a sadistic captain of Franco’s army in rural Spain. The worlds begin to overlap at the corners: the faun helps Ofelia cure her mother with a mixture of mandrake root and milk only to later suggest that she bring the newborn baby to him for reasons unclear. Is Ofelia’s fantasy world actual? Or is it birthed from an imagination formed to escape or confront her fears in real life?

What a great tale and, more vividly, what amazing special effects, bringing life to magnificent creatures and settings you’ve never before seen or imagined.

Argh. Sinus headache all day today. Woke up with it. Decided to take a brief nap around noon but fell asleep until 4 p.m. This is turning into a lost weekend. It hurts to look at things. My system is swirling with generic Sudafed and aspirin but neither is helping. Evil matter drips from pockets in my skull to the back of my throat. Bleah.

I walk funny. I’ve got this hitch in my step that I can’t shake even when I’m carrying something heavy. Short of analyzing my gait with a Muybridge sequence, I think the issue is that I roll my foot forward in a way that I spring up briefly onto my toe with each step.

A loud woman I work with told me it’s the walk of a dancer, but that’s not quite right: I’m nearly always moving quickly, without deliberation or grace. Normally I’m unaware of my walk but lately I’ve imagined it stands out in my neighborhood, where one of the two chief styles of ambulation would be described as “extremely slow.” I notice this especially when I’m running late for my subway and even if one has just pulled into the station, everyone’s plodding up the stairs to the platform like they spent the night baling hay.

The other style of walking, practiced by some young men in my neighborhood, is the equally slow but stylish pimp limp. Michael, Jimi’s adoptive brother who’s African American, demonstrated this urban strut to me one warm day on West 4th Street, which is a good of a place as any to act like an idiot. I just don’t have the relaxed stance for such moves.

I’ve tried dampening my springiness by walking more slowly. But I only start slowly; without realizing it, I accelerate and spring along like usual after a few seconds. Short of buying prescription shoes, I think I’ve done all I can to walk normally.

In a prelude on the DVD for The Asphalt Jungle, director John Huston sums up his characters in a way that could descibe those in some of the better noir (or really even in film overall): bad people with whom an audience can still sympathize.

On one hand, there are noir characters like Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, despicable from the get-go. The pleasure arises from them sinking deeper into trouble: Oh they’ll get their comeuppance. But in Jungle the criminals, while unsavory as they plan and carry out a jewel hesit, carry the problems and desires of actual people: the safecracker has a young child and a worried wife, the muscle (played by Sterling Hayden with a terrible Southern accent that comes and goes) longs for the day he can return to his childhood Kentucky home to see his family and his horses again, and Dr. Riedenschneider, the brains of the operation, has an older man’s penchant for fine cigars and the company of pretty young women. They rob a jewelry store and everything that can go wrong does, from an accidental fatal shooting to a double cross resulting in more death. (The film’s also notable for including perhaps the first standout role of Marilyn Monroe, who stands out so radiantly and breathily among the rouge’s gallery that she’s nearly miscast.)

Why aren’t there more well-rounded bad guys like those in The Asphalt Jungle? Usually the bad guy is so bad the audience’s only currency in him is the clever way in which he’ll be dispatched by the hero. Do we really like our good and evil so clean cut? Is sympathy harder to write into a character brimming with flaws?

Today I took the E train over to the East Side to try Pampano Taqueria for lunch, based on New York magazine’s review of the place as “the closest you’ll get in Manhattan to the taco stands of Acapulco.” Having never travelled that far south in Mexico nor having eaten many varieties of tacos in Manhattan, I can neither confirm nor deny this statement. The trio of pescado tacos I ordered were rich with chunks of whitefish, shredded cabbage and a greasy-spicy chipotle sauce, but I’m not sure they were worth the trip.

What I enjoyed more was experiencing the differences between the workday pedestrians on the East Side versus the ones in Midtown where my office is located. On the East Side, the white collars dress sharply and fashionably, and seemingly everyone has great posture and skin. Meanwhile, my stretch of Eighth, still in the grubby blue-collar grip of its Garment District past, is the opposite. If forced to choose an analogous locale from the Star Wars universe, I would select Mos Eisley, that wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Not that Midtown Eighth isn’t trying to get more fashionable. Perhaps hoping to dispel notions of shirtwaist factory fires and child labor laws, the Fashion Center Business Improvement District quietly renamed the neighborhood the Fashion District in ’93 although everyone I know still uses the old name. The area’s still home to many clothing and fabric wholesalers with low-rent offices inhabiting old sweatshop space. On the other hand, just a few blocks uptown, the New York Times chose to erect its new HQ skyscraper directly across the street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. For the time being, however, the most distinctive people on the sidewalks in this area are the illicit cigarette resellers. Clad in giant puffy winter coats, they hang out near the methadone clinic and mutter “NewportsNewportsNewportsNewports” to random passers-by, so as not to arouse the suspicions of roving beat cops.

Without too much effort, I’m sure I could track down equally ghetto-fabulous tacos on this side of town, probably even cheaper than Pampano Taqueria’s.

Pampano Taqueria

• 805 Third Ave. (between 49th and 50th)
• (212) 751-5257
• Meal 6 of 52: three fish tacos ($2.75 each)

The watermelon pickle/pork belly salad at Fatty Crab, a snug little Malaysian outpost perilously near the Meatpacking District, is genius. Pan-fried cubes of tender pork mingle with hunks of watermelon, bits of pickled watermelon rind, basil leaves, julieanned raw scallions and sesame seeds, drizzled with citrus.

Why should fried pork and watermelon taste so scrumptious together? I think it’s the one key similarity—both are presented as crisp cubes—combined with qualities pleasing in their opposition: salty vs. sweet, warm vs. cool and “rich” vs. “clean.”

My specialty entrée, the fatty duck, was overambitious and looked pretty until I started hacking away at it. Resting atop a small hill of rice were three chunks of duck—one brined, one fried and one steamed so rare, when I poked it with my fork I thought I heard it say “Rabbit season!” Covering the meat and rice were bits of fresh peppers, onions, exotic spices, a sweet sauce, cilantro leaves and more, including sneaky bits of Guatemalan insanity pepper that had me slugging away most of my Tiger. There were almost too many flavors, all throwing a riot in my mouth. One forkful alone would start sweet, turn salty, then citrusy, then that pepper would rear its capsicum.

Fatty Crab’s dining area is small, with carved chairs, sturdy tarred-wood tables for two sporting white candles and slim crocks of multicolored chopsticks, surrounded by deep red walls and lit by bare bulbs sprouting down from the ceiling on unadorned fixtures. At my table against the drafty front windows, a space heater nearly ignited my dangling scarf. To his credit, my server had insisted I’d be more comfortable at the bar but I insisted on the elbow room at the table. A white hipster soundtrack set the mood: several tracks each by The Streets and The Decemberists, that live White Stripes cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” a mashup of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” and, uh, “More Than a Feeling” by Boston (“I love this song!” said two girls simultaneously at the table of six next to mine).

Walking back to the A station at 14th, I passed a German-sounding guy in a peacoat gamboling around the dog run on Horatio with his puggle puppy. He was talking to it and making airplane noises as he ran, as if he was playing with a child. On the subway uptown, I strapped on my headphones and nearly fell asleep to a warm lullaby of dinner contentment and Cat Power.

Fatty Crab

• 643 Hudson St. (near Horatio Street)
• (212) 352-3590
• Meal 5 of 52: watermelon-pork salad ($10), fatty duck ($14) and a bottle of Tiger beer ($6).

Jason, Dana and Andrew, 1982.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, that day when ad agencies thrill to have taken a break from promoting products and services to do whatever they want for half a minute, providing bloggers and white-collar workers grist for excited chatter upwards of 24 hours later.

A theme of physical violence ran through the commercials this year. Characters were struck in the head by a rock, stepped on, slapped in the face, incinerated by comet and felled by office supplies. They leapt off a cliff en masse, tripped into a closed car door and were yelled at for more fries. Great stuff. As comedians such as the Three Stooges proved, insult, injury and death are funnier when they happen to people other than yourself.

My favorite commercial overall was the one by electronics manufacturer Garmin International for its GPS navigation system. In it, a motorist gets lost and unfurls his map, only to have it expand, engulf his car and transform into Maposaurus, a lumbering origami villain.

GPS to the rescue! Another motorist turns into a Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger-style hero in a silver bodysuit who battles Maposaurus in the style of a bad Japanese monster movie from the ’60s. They lunge at each other and knock down the flimsy scale-model trees and buildings. A death metal band provides the soundtrack and appears briefly at the end of the spot over the tagline, “Grab your Garmin/Take on the World.” (Sample song lyric: “GPS power will save the day/Grab Your Garmin, blows maps awaaay!”)

The game had its moments, too, although it got off to a bad start. When Gloria Estefan appeared on the field, I assumed I’d have ample cause to shake my body, baby, and do the conga, but instead she got stuck introducing the surreal stylings of Cirque du Soleil.

During the game, incessant rain added a wildcard Slip ’n Slide element resulting in exciting turnovers and other blunders. Grossman showed off the youthful looks and approximate skill of an eight-year-old Pee Wee player while Manning exhibited post pass-play emotions ranging from angry to very angry.

The highlight of the evening was the halftime extravaganza, during which Prince proved he’s still a sexy mf and The Shortest Working Man In Showbiz. Fireworks and dancers going off all around him, he strut out a fabulously staged medley, the centerpiece of which was “Purple Rain,” in the rain, naturally. In closeup, he appeared to have not aged one day since he last wore ass-baring chaps. Our party enjoyed the Michael Bay fireball that engulfed the stage, the Tron costumes of the marching band and the lingering shot of Prince’s shadow backlit onto a rippling silk banner, dampened by the rain with a humorously unfortunate blot resembling a giant erect penis.

Karaoke at Planet Rose is in the more traditional style versus the private-room setup at the local Japas chain I frequent. Here tonight it was loud and raucous with roving packs of East Side kids crammed into a room with zebra-print couches, alcohol aplenty and two mikes to go around. We were celebrating Brian’s birthday and there were at least two other birthday gatherings occurring simultaneously.

The way it works is you select your song from a thick book of 15,000, pencil it with your name onto a tiny Post-It Note, hand it in, then wait 1.5 to two hours for it to pop up on the screen. Pray you are not in the restroom when it does. I didn’t try to sing because there were a gaggle of people in our crew who could. Bea, Erika and Dale belted out kick-ass renditions of showtunes plus “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and other classics like “When I’m 64.” Strong, clear and pitch-perfect, Bea didn’t even stand up for her songs and she was, like, Whitney Houston caliber, so good that one guy with a song after hers gestured and complained that he had to follow “Miss Broadway over there.” Katie picked “Eye of the Tiger” as her torch song, inspiring everyone to jump in on the chorus and get juiced up enough to take down Mr. T.

There was also the obligatory pudgy white drunk guy in khakis who caterwauled his songs as he lurched around the room. I don’t remember his selections but they were the ones drunk white guys always opt for, i.e. “American Woman.” When his ass thrusting and head bobbing threatened to encroach on our corner, we all took pictures of him until the flashes drove him away. After his song, he returned, wavering unsteadily from drink, and beseeched us not to post any of the photos to the internet. We assured him we wouldn’t but we were lying.

A cheeky hooligan replaced part of one of the regulation “don’t do it” sticker-signs on an A train I took this afternoon. Normally, from left to right, the pictograms indicate “no smoking,” “no littering” and “no boomboxing.”

This edit of the sticker, barely clear in my blurry no-flash photo, seems to indicate, from left to right, “no smoking,” “no pooing” and “no big butts.”

O.K., so, from today’s Washington Post (“U.N. Climate Panel Says Warming Is Man-Made” by Juliet Eilperin):

There is no longer any reasonable doubt that human activities are warming the planet at a dangerous rate, according to a new worldwide assessment of climate science released today by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

With at least 90 percent certainty, the IPCC’s “Summary For Policymakers” concludes human-generated greenhouse gases account for most of the global rise in temperatures over the past half century. Hundreds of scientists from 113 countries prepared the report, which represents the most comprehensive overview of scientific climate research since 2001.

I wonder about that 90% figure, particularly here in the U.S. Why? Let me give you some other percentages of certainty:

1. As recently as last February, 29% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
2. More than half of Americans say God created humans in their present form.
3. More than 75 percent of Americans agree with health professionals that obesity is a serious problem. Yet two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, more than half don’t get the recommended amount of physical activity and 25 percent get almost no exercise at all.

In other words, despite strong evidence to the contrary, people will stick with their own ill-informed ideas and actions. Yee haw! Let’s keep up with those record carbon emissions and continue to scratch our heads over the disappearance of Arctic ice, rising sea levels and record heat waves. I’m pretty sure all those things are temporary anyway and have something to do with the sun orbiting a bit closer to the Earth than normal.

Sources

1. The New York Times/CBS News poll, conducted Feb. 22-26, 2006, cited in “Few Americans Perceive Hussein-9/11 Link,” Mar. 1, 2006, Angus Reid Global Monitor
2. “Poll: Creationism Trumps Evolution/Most Americans Do Not Believe Human Beings Evolved,” CBS/AP poll, Oct. 22, 2005
3. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, quoted in “Americans Missing the Boat on Fitness,” Nutrition Health Review, Fall 2004

I drove by this sign in Atlanta this afternoon, amused by the cocktail-napkin-quality cartoon of the half human/half burrito “fast taco.”

Sweating with fear or exertion, he’s wrenched his head around to steal a bug-eyed glance back. His sombrero just popped off but there’s no way he’s stopping to retrieve it. He will move as fast as his little green cowboy boots will carry him.

What are you so afraid of, burrito man? Who or what are you running from? An anthropomorphic hot dog? Your bratty enchilada children? Wolves? A drunken fraternity? A menial life in Mexico? The INS? Or are you merely making "a run for the border" in a lunch patron’s gastrointestinal tract?

The mind boggles.