March 2007 Archives

When the Germans captured photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson during World War II and tossed him in a POW camp, the Museum of Modern Art feared the worst and began preparing a memorial retrospective. Imagine their surprise when Cartier-Bresson escaped, heard of the effort and offered to help compose his own requiem. The 300-some photos he selected, spanning his best work from 1932 to 1946, are on display as a group for the first time in a half-century at the International Center of Photography.

It was literally a scrapbook he prepared, of photos taken with his trusty Leica, printed playing-card sized and mounted in a leatherbound album embossed with the gilded archaic phrase, “Scrap Book.” Most on display are these small versions; this is an exhibition necessitating repeated bows and squints, so as to scrutinize Cartier-Bresson’s often serendipitous detail. Thankfully, some of the best prints are presented in larger versions, as they were in the original MoMA exhibition—in fact the blowups are literally from the MoMA exhibit, whites yellow-tinged with age.

My favorite photo, crappily reproduced here but presented in both small and large versions at the exhibit, is this one, Madrid, taken in 1933. (The whole series he took that autumn in Spain of peasants, prostitutes, gypsies and everyday people is genius.) Madrid has an utterly calming symmetry, the balance of frozen human movement grounding the scene as a constellation of windows hovers above, and if Bresson’s favored shooting method is to be believed, this was taken without any specific aim. That makes it a composition with beauty of staggering chance. I wondered how many shots or even rolls Cartier-Bresson exhausted during the same session before he got this one.

In the most revelatory element of the exhibition, I was surprised to learn that Cartier-Bresson cropped Behind the Gare St. Lazare, one of his most famous photos and a personal favorite of his. Normally, cropping would not be worth mentioning in a photo exhibit but Cartier-Bresson rarely cropped, preferring moments de grâce. The museum has on display the only extant copy of the original St. Lazare, complete with crop lines grease-penciled down the left side of the proof, hash-marking into oblivion an out-of-focus slab of fence.

I also enjoyed the photos Cartier-Bresson took in Paris in the mid-’40s of celebrities in the worlds of art and philosophy—Picasso, Braque, Éluard, Bonnard, Satre, Camus—including a small series of Matisse, seated comfortably at home in Venice, holding a dove in one hand while sketching it with the other.

Next to my cubicle at work is an empty cubicle. Rather, it used to be empty. Soon after the girl who worked there quit, more than a year ago, the cubicle progressed through the stages of white-collar clear-cutting. First, someone purloined the stapler, maybe because it was slightly fancier than their own or maybe they just wanted a backup. Then the electric pencil sharpener disappeared, because, hey, electric pencil sharpeners are nice, and no one was using this one, sitting there in an empty cubicle. The power strip was next to go, followed by various pens and pushpins and trays. At last, someone wheeled away the chair, replacing it with their own brokedown model. Picked clean of accouterments, the empty cubicle now was the loneliest cubicle. If there happened to be wind on the 17th floor, it would have whistled through this cubicle with melancholy as a tumbleweed trundled by.

Then, as in New York at large and in particular at a media company focused on commercial real estate, people recognized space was at a premium. So they started dumping their junk in the empty cubicle. Half a dozen busted chairs collected in there and now spill out of the entrance. Next arrived a sprawl of old newspapers, empty three-ring binders, Bankers Boxes of anonymous paperwork from the late ’90s, outdated desk calendars and other random crap. I’ve taken to calling it New Fresh Kills and I’m pretty sure I saw a homeless guy sleeping in there the other day.

The company at which I work is just large enough that there was a chance no one would have noticed this pileup and it would have continued attracting trash until it began emitting methane. But it’s located directly across from the glass-doored conference room, so most everyone sees it on a regular basis, including, much to the consternation of the higher-ups, besuited out-of-office visitors to the conference room. I’ve heard that the big boss will be sending out a Clean Office Initiative memo very soon, written in that corporate style of “we all need to keep a clean work area” and “thank you in advance for your participation,” because as much as he wants to, he can’t just blurt out “somebody fucking clean the garbage cubicle.” But seeing as how its donors have been largely anonymous, I wonder who will be responsible for this task?

Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: About a Girl and as substantial as the cakes and lace that surround her. The anachronistic 80s punk and wispy instrumental soundtrack kicks ass with unexpected choices: Gang of Four? Adam Ant? Shimmering, galloping New Order? Aphex Twin on harpsichord? Yes, please.

But the first half of the movie sags in the repition of lavish dinners and Kirsten Dunst’s Marie wondering when she’ll get porked by Jason Schwartzman’s indifferent Louis XVI. Then it’s off for some garden parties and marathon wardrobe-selection sessions until the angry mob shows up.

As my flight from Los Angeles descended low over Queens, someone seated near me let slip a silent but violent fart, the nosehair-singeing smell of which lingered over row 32. Without a word, the young lady to my left pulled a perfume sample card from her Vogue and fanned the air vigorously over our shared armrest. Although not responsible for this airborne toxic event, I was stymied to clear my name and peerless personal odor.

My fashion-reading seatmate was good looking in the L.A. sense—militantly fit, hypertan, bottle-blonde and Ugg-booted—so no one would believe it could have been her. And anyway, girl farts smell like a floral bouquet with cookie basket gift-set from FTD. Or so I’ve heard.

I thought of saying something to defuse the situation, something like “Sweet Jesus! Is there a dead cat stuffed with month-old meatballs in the overhead bin?” But as I learned in grade school, He Who Smelt It Dealt It, so commentary was out. On the other hand, remaining silent on such obvious olfactory malfeasance could just as easily implicate me.

I could not win and was too tired to care, but sensible enough to breathe only through my mouth until I deplaned to the slightly fresher air of New York.

Despite what Missing Persons once claimed, people do walk in L.A., they just prefer driving. Or need to. That place sprawls.

Our event was all day at the humongous L.A. Convention Center, located right next door to the Staples Center, home of the Lakers. For a moment, I worked with a temp named Stephanie at our accreditation table which is where I learned that I’ve never met anyone who talked as fast as she did, and that she’s an actor who played one of those perky gameshow contestants in a recent Orbitz commercial.

Midway through, there was a monsoon-like storm featuring winds that bent the palm trees and rain that lashed the glass-paned atrium of the center. Twenty minutes later, it stopped. The sun and giant fairytale clouds returned and after another hour, the pavement was as dry as Clint Eastwood’s face. It was as if nothing had happened.

To knock back after an excruciating day, our staff got ripped at the post-event cocktail party then met at a steakhouse for staggeringly large slabs of grilled cow and more drinks. Then, in the coup de grace of any stereotypical business trip, we descended on the hotel bar for yet more drinks. Lots of letting down of guards, general sailor talk and brutal slagging and gossip regarding various people conveniently not present to defend themselves or file suit.

Hello again from Los Angeles. It's unseasonably overcast and "cold" here, which means about 60 degrees. Many of the women I pass on the sidewalk this morning are clutching themselves like Poor Little Match Girls.

I had been told that our Los Angeles office is in the "bad" part of town but that must have a different meaning than in New York. The streets and sidewalks are wide, clean and well lit and handsomely landscaped. (I like the trees here; not just the palms, but a hardy variety I don't know the name of that lines the streets and resembles much larger, fuller versions of Bonsai trees). The buildings are mostly fancy new skyscrapers but the classics are well-preserved; the one containing our local office dates from 1927. Beautiful ornamental scrollwork arcs over the entrance, like that of a gothic church. Even the homeless people here radiate glamor and charm, like they're actors playing homeless people, which I suppose they may just be.

My body's all jangly from the time difference, plus the fact that I forced myself to get up at fucking 6 a.m. local time so I could maximize my East Coast phone-work. Working remotely sucks. I can't access my Excel documents on the home server. My grandma moves faster than this elderly ThinkPad. And I refuse to give out my cell number to casual business acquaintances which means I call my voicemail in New York every half-hour for updates.

Hello from Los Angeles. Nothing much to report. My flight from JFK to LAX was delayed an hour and a half because of mechanical problems on a flight earlier this morning—the domino effect.

A kid with a 15-inch PowerBook in the window seat next to me spent the flight watching Underworld and episodes of South Park, interspersed with feverish song-composition in GarageBand. He had on headphones and bobbed his head a lot. I was hoping to spot some stereotypical L.A. types on the flight but there weren't many, other then the guy in front of me in his stringy hair and holey jean jacket who surely would win the competition for his loving rendition of Eddie Vedder circa 1993.

My cab driver from the airport recommended I catch a late dinner at the 24-hour diner a block from my hotel downtown because it was founded and continues to be run by ex-convicts. Also the food is good. But I was too tired for that and retired to bed after pondering why my hotel room has two full yet separate bathrooms and a creepy-spartan old-world design scheme that suggests John Turturro's room in Barton Fink.

With great satisfaction, I completed assembly today of my Ikea bookcases. After reorganizing the furniture in my apartment, I lined them up against the wall in the nook of my long front hallway, previously underutilized and really not useful for much other than shelves. The three of them together measure approximately 6.6 feet tall and long by 11 inches deep, a cozy space.

I think bookcases are an important step in my development as a New Yorker because in general they count as nonessential furniture and indicate that one means to stick around the city for awhile. The shelves are mostly barren now although I’ve moved my collection of roughly 125 DVDs to a pair-and-a-half of the shelves to make it look fuller, like those professional seat fillers at the Oscars. Eventually of course I want to stock the shelves with books, but the remainder of my collection currently resides in milk crates stacked in an upstairs closet of my parents’ house in Ohio. I’ll eventually get around to moving them, moreso now that I have a home for them.

Until I read a recent New Yorker profile of clothing designer Karl Lagerfeld tonight, I thought I had a fairly decent-sized collection, somewhere in the low-hundreds and just enough to be cumbersome and curse-worthy in a move. But get a load of Karl’s collection:

Some years ago, he bought a mansion in Biarritz, where, he says, he spent millions of dollars refurbishing it, staffed it with servants, and stocked it with a hundred and fifty thousand of his books. In 2006, after realizing that he had not visited the place in two years, he sold it.

Good lord. I think that’s more volumes than most libraries own. And unlike my lowly particle-board shelving, Karl probably had, like, solid leather bookcases emblazoned with diamond-encrusted Chanel logos.

I had dinner last night at Frankies 17, the Manhattan outpost of the original Frankies Spuntino in Carroll Gardens, Brookyln. Walking over from the Delancey Street station of the curséd F train, I had a vision that the Lower East Side is what my neighborhood, Inwood, will resemble in perhaps 15-20 years, after the high rents and whites migrate that far north because there’s nowhere else to go: charming bistros and bars and ugly new condo high-rises nudging up against grubby old-world apartment buildings occupied by Hispanics and college-age kids. (Although the facades of the old buildings on the LES are more beautiful in general than the ones in Inwood, which resemble slices of sheet cake adorned with fire escapes.)

Frankies occupies a narrow cozy space on Clinton Street with checkered tile floors, black lacquered tables and chairs for two, tin ceiling painted creamy white, bare bulbs, a small white candle on each table, etc. The apple-gorgonzola salad I started with was presented with small triangles of Gorgonzola and slices of baked apple organized on a plate on top of which loomed a teetering hill of watercress. It was a Chia Pet gone haywire and I couldn’t even see the cheese or the fruit. Although tasty, it was visually strange.

For my entree, my server gently pointed out that I had pronounced gnocchi wrong, but she bought it quickly and was real helpful, so I couldn’t begrudge her. It was topped with a marinara sauce and fresh ricotta and dense enough, in typical gnocchi fashion, to last several meals. It was delicious but basic and If I dined here again (which I would), I’d try something more adventurous, like the luncheon meatball sandwich I’ve heard good things about, or the dinner dish I was considering and wish I would have ordered instead, the homemade cavatelli with hot sausage and browned sage butter.

Frankies 17

• 17 Clinton Street (off Houston)
• (212) 253-2303
• Meal 13 of 52: apple-gorgonzola salad ($11), gnocchi marinara ($13) and a glass of house red wine ($6).

Although I expect product placements in the recent films of the James Bond series, I don’t ever want to see him driving a Ford again, even if it’s a prototype hand-constructed by Germans in labcoats. That prominent blue oval logo on the grille disturbed me, appearing so soon after the opening scenes of Casino Royale. I thought it a sign that, for the rest of the film, Daniel Craig would sport ill-fitting Gap casuals and demand his Cosmos shaken, not stirred¹. Thankfully he soon switches to a boner-popping 1965 Aston Martin, the purr of which made me forget the Ford until now.

If I may speak for men as a whole, we watch and enjoy Bond films because 007 is more handsome, athletic, suave and tamper-resistant than we are. He’s what we’re not. Because it is within my means to drive a Ford, I do not wish to see James Bond driving a Ford, any more than James Bond would expect me to wear an Omega wristwatch and shag a 27-year-old (Eva Green) so stunning that she actually stops time at several points. Or that may have been just me pausing the DVD to sneak a closer look at her sleek luxury styling.

¹ In general, the number of elements in a drink is inversely proportional to its manliness. Whiskey, neat or directly from the bottle = nothing more manly. Whiskey on the rocks = solidly manly. Whiskey sour = slightly sub-manly. Any drink with 3+ ingredients or fruit garnish = womanly. [back]

Bruce Wasserstein’s private equity and investment firm is exploring a sale of the company I work for. Announcing and explaining this, we received a letter today via email from our CEO and attended a hastily assembled staff meeting, the contents of which can be summarized thusly:

1. We love you. Also, our investors.
2. Don’t panic.
3. Stay the course.
4. We upper-management types won’t share much more information with you about this possible sale but we’re blindly confident any potential new owners will value each and every one of your pretty little heads as much as we do.
5. Get back to work.

Also today, I bought new dress shoes from a “fine menswear” store on Madison Avenue using the gift certificate my boss gave me for Christmas. The salesman, wearing a partially unbuttoned dress shirt revealing a gold necklace and a thatch of chest hair, attempted to upsell me into purchasing a second pair for half-price but I’m not budgeted for two pairs of shoes this month and was really only interested in exhausting the gift certificate before I forgot about it.

A few weeks back I spotted a cockroach perched near the edge of a shelf on my newly assembled bookcase, so I whomped it with a beefy rolled-up issue of Vanity Fair. It crumpled like an aluminum can and none of its appendages twitched, which satisfied me that it wouldn’t be going anywhere just then other than hell.

I stepped away to grab the trashcan and when I turned back to the bookcase to dispose of the corpse IT WAS GONE. It had not fallen to the floor. It had not staggered off to die fully behind a David Foster Wallace hardcover. It was not to be found anywhere, which was eerie and a total horror movie setup. I thought I would turn my head very slowly and see the cockroach lounging on my love seat, uninjured and grown as large and surly as Orson Welles. Or the script would read: "Later that night as Jason sleeps, vengeful cockroaches swarm into his orifices and snack on his organs, much to his consternation."

Anyway, I was reminded of this today when I read a recent Scientific American article on zombie cockroaches, which do exist. Hardy little fuckers. I will now be unsurprised yet still very, very disappointed if I find that mangled bug hiding out in my Raisin Bran.

I was in the elevator this morning, going back down to the sandwich shop off the lobby to fetch a carrot-raisin muffin because the line was too long earlier, and this girl who got on at 16 started talking to me. She made full-on, somewhat startling eye contact and at first I thought she thought I was someone else. Then she said, “How are you doing?” I said fine and asked if she’d just come from an audition, because 16 is where the audition studio is. She said her audition was in an hour and I’m unsure why I didn’t ask what it was for.

I imagined for some reason that she played a musical instrument, possibly because she didn’t have on enough makeup to be auditioning for a show. You recognize those girls in the elevator right away. You also recognize those girls from a block away because their facepaint has been applied to be visible from a mezzanine. Instead this girl was cute in an unobvious way, resembling Chloë Sevigny in Boys Don’t Cry, with a fairy-dusting of acne.

She asked if I was there for an audition myself (which was strange because I didn’t get on at the 16th floor) and I told her, no, but that I work on the 17th floor and could usually hear piano playing, loud acting and singing rising from below.

“That must be annoying,” she said wryly.

“Sometimes. But sometimes, at the end of a long day, it can be soothing,” I said, which was a lie but necessitated by my lack of anything more clever to say on short notice.

By then we’d reached the lobby and she said awkwardly, “Well, have a nice day,” and we parted, never to see one another again.

Now, if this had been a romantic comedy, at the point when she asked whether I was there for an audition, I would have started singing Kenny Rogers’ “You Decorated My Life” charmingly badly and she would have laughed and then we’d have gone out for coffee at The City Bakery and I’d start hanging out at her place, writing lyrics for the songs she’d compose on her viola. There’d be at least one scene in Central Park in autumn of us walking and talking. There’d be some misunderstandings but we’d work them out thanks in part to the advice of my wizened-sarcastic coworker-friend from Brooklyn played by Paul Giamatti.

Or maybe I’m digressing like this because I saw Music and Lyrics tonight, which sort of follows the formula of the above paragraph. He, a washed-up pop singer from the ’80s. She, hired to take care of his plants. Ah, but she’s a closet writer. They burn the midnight oil crafting the perfect song together, on a commission from some sort of Christina Aguilera popstar knockoff. They learn about themselves, they learn to love, they learn to rhyme again. Argh. I did enjoy watching them brainstorming for a day straight over the minutiae of perfect words and chords, which reminded me of that clichéd truth of Twain’s that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is ... the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”

Drew Barrymore left me wondering: Can she turn that lisp of hers on and off like some actors can with an accent? Because she sounded more lispy than usual here. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s charming but obviously I have issues. Hugh Grant plays his patented randy/foppish quippy-Brit character albeit with more pelvic gyrations and an appropriately age-beaten face that no doubt still gets some sort of sandalwood scrub applied daily to its T-zone.

Technical issues: wince-worthy lip-synching by Hugh and Drew to their voice doubles when their characters are required to sing, which is often. Most unforgivable is opening the film by depicting the hit music video Hugh’s character made in the ’80s but not treating the picture to make it actually look like it was filmed in the ’80s (i.e. the music videos from different eras shown in This Is Spinal Tap).

The weather warmed slightly from the cold and snowy weekend so folks were out shoveling today. This guy was on the roof of an 18-wheeler parked on W. 37th Street, knocking large, flat chunks of solidified snow onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing pedestrians.

As a white male, age 18 to 49, I’m required to watch and enjoy director David Fincher jerk the marionette strings of his characters as he maneuvers them onto paths trapped with danger and despair. To a certain degree. I find Fight Club and Seven entertaining and I own both as deluxe dual-DVD box sets, but I wouldn’t rank either among the top-40 films of all time, as the mouth-breathers on IMDb.com have.

Like those films, there’s disturbing violence in Fincher’s newest, Zodiac. It’s a movie about a real-life serial killer, after all. Zodiac’s murders both attempted and successful are depicted as swift, brutal and unexpected, strung with tension until their resolution. Despite what the film’s trailer implies, these assorted scares, shootings and stabbings are but punctuation in a movie long on deskwork and desperation: this is more a gather-the-facts potboiler like All the President’s Men than a traditional action-thriller.

San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) obsesses over the case. He solves ciphers, tracks clues, follows up on leads that turn into dead ends and posits wild-eyed theories. He pesters the cops on the case (Mark Ruffalo and a toupeed Anthony Edwards) who are bogged by overwork, politics and jurisdictional bickering. He also does a lot of hovering around the desk of the paper’s addled crime writer, Paul Avery (a funny Robert Downey Jr.). The case swallows Graysmith’s life, marriage and job. As in real life, the identity of Zodiac is suspected but no one’s ever charged or caught. It’s a bit of a slog to sit through and though the movie is paced briskly for its more than 2.5-hour length, it’s hard work with little payoff for both the audience and the characters.

Kudos to Fincher for crafting his usual dark and rich obsessive-to-detail vision. In Zodiac he captures seemingly every object from the ‘70s, from the rotary phones to the cigarette machines, and fleeting touches I remember from my own childhood in that decade, like a View-Master and a commercial for the Slinky. There are also some nice touches of trademark Fincheriffic computer-enhanced scenes as when he depicts Graysmith envisioning giant hovering versions of Zodiac’s ciphers superimposed over the Chronicle newsroom during a long tracking shot (which is actually just like the shot in Fight Club when Edward Norton imagines his apartment as the pages of an Ikea-like catalog, product names and descriptions suspended over the furniture). And when Fincher flashes forward from ‘69 to the early ‘70s, he does so with a fast-forward speed CG clip of the iconic Transamerica Pyramid being built. Clever.

Soon after my friend Jimi moved to New York City, still in the initial grip of its charms, he told me he was fascinatated that he could buy a Big Mac any time he wanted. He wasn’t addicted to fast food, merely relaxed in the confidence that should he require a Big Mac at four in the morning, one could be readily procured at McDonald’s Times Square.

New York provides. Your want of any thing isn’t limited by what’s available because everything’s available. The only concern is, “Can I get it delivered or will I have to pick it up?” Earlier this year, for instance, I was convinced I needed a six-foot sheet of translucent Colorplast for a project and sure enough, a store on Canal Street sold just that.

To my dentist’s chagrin, I also want soda made with sweet, superior sugar. When I wrote excitedly last summer of finding Coke in San Francisco made with sugar instead of the high fructose corn syrup it’s been made with domestically since the mid-’80s, I had assumed it was the most conveniently available source. For shame. I should have checked New York first. Even more reliable than finding gray-market Mexican imports of sugar-Coke at local bodegas, I learned this weekend of a more consistent and legal stock bathed in semisecrecy.

According to a frequently bandied-about statistic, the New York metropolitan area is home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside Israel. Chametz, a law of Passover, dictates that certain grains cannot be consumed during the holiday, in some cases including corn, the source of high fructose corn syrup. So in order not to lose a segment of potential consumers, Coke adds a kosher-certified variety of its namesake beverage made with sucrose (sugar) in the weeks leading up to Passover, from mid-March to early April.

Compounding this small window of opportunity, availability is limited. In cans and two-liter bottles, you can find it in New York and a few other large metropolitain areas, which according to the Orthodox Union include Boston, Baltimore-Washington, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Kosher Coke made with sugar can be spotted by a telltale yellow cap printed with a Hebrew phrase and the OU-P symbol (as well as sucrose in the ingredients listing).

Soda connoisseurs perpetuate and fret over the hoarding and small stocks of sugared Coke, but by merely striding toward the beverage aisle at an Upper West Side Gristedes, I noticed about half of the two-liter bottles of Coke on the shelves were topped by yellow caps. It’s interesting that they weren’t segregated or designated kosher/made-with-sugar by a sign or display. Possibly only observant Jewish folk, sugar-soda lovers and readers of certain blogs know the secret.

A combination of slushy sidewalks and brittle hips meant few matinee-favoring elders were in attendance for the opera at the Met this afternoon, which was a shame, because Faust concerns a bitter coot exchanging his soul to Méphistophélès for youth.

Newly brisk and handsome, in a tenor sort of way, Dr. Faust saunters about town, knocks up a young hottie then abandons her for drink and carousing with his new buddy satan. When she’s imprisoned for murdering her illegitimate child, Faust tries to bail her out. But she refuses and angels whisk her away via a deus ex machina similar to the one she rode in on, billowing white and floating in the heavens over a rainbow. Love lost, Faust grows old again and though hellbound, has at least experienced all his missed pleasures of youth. Now he can retire in comfort to the lecture circuit to promote his new book, Soul-Selling for Fun and Profit.

After the show, Andie, Eric and I trekked up to Big Nick’s for dinner. We scaled small unplowed mountains of snow in our path and leapt over those seemingly solid pools of slush that collect in dips at the curb near crosswalks.

The warming glow of pink and red neon signs surrounding our table made us feel as if we ourselves were in Faust or maybe Taxi Driver, although instead of angels, a framed photo of Homicide’s Detective Munch (Richard Belzer) hovered above us.

After we’d downed a few free shots of 12- and 18-year-old Jameson Irish whiskey during a tasting at Columbus Avenue Wine & Spirits tonight, Iggy, Sam and I trudged down to Bella Luna for dinner.

It’s a comfy Italian restaurant catering more towards the well-dressed Upper West Side crowd. Lots of potted palms and trim waiters who, in addition to the fresh ground pepper log, make the rounds separately with a fresh ground Parmesan grinder, which is a nice touch. Food was moderately inexpensive and rich. I had the Rigatoni Alla Norma with tomato sauce, eggplant and ricotta. For dessert, I had tiramisu and a cappuccino.

On my walk back to the subway in the howling bitter weather, I reasoned that Wintry Mix resembles Chex Mix in that both generally appear for a limited time near the holidays and both sting when flung in one’s face at high velocity.

Bella Luna

• 584 Columbus Ave. (between 88th and 89th Streets)
• (212) 877-2267
• Meal 12 of 52: rigatoni ($10.50), glass of Chianti, tiramisu and a cappuccino.

I grew up in the suburbs of Middle America surrounded by mutant meal items made with convenience foods, entrées like hotdish and fruit-cocktailed Jell-O salads that I forget are chiefly a Midwestern Thing now that I no longer live there. For our office department’s St. Patrick’s Day party tomorrow, I wanted to bake something tonight different than the soda bread I made last year so Google found me a recipe for grasshopper bars on the Betty Crocker website.

“Grasshopper bars? What are those?” was the response from people around the office, their minds filling with a plague of chirping, leaping insects.

“You know, like grasshopper pie but in bar form,” I explained.

“Grasshopper pie?!”

“Crushed Oreo crust, Cool Whip or marshmallow cream filling with crème de menthe . . . ?”

Nothing but stares. I’d Suburbanized myself again. But I was determined to make the recipe anyway. It looked easy, tasty and had that requisite holiday color.

As I prepared the simple brownie base, I wondered why anyone would ever bother using a prepackaged mix when it probably takes only an additional minute to measure out the flour, cocoa, sugar, vanilla, baking powder and salt to blend with the eggs and oil/butter. Scratch tastes better, is “all natural” and most cooks will have the majority of those ingredients hanging around their cupboards anyway.

The bars end up very similar to petits fours with that sugar-butter frosting. But baby, they got real ugly once I cut them into squares. The thin chocolate coating chipped and splintered, giving the tops wear patterns of polished nails after three weeks.

Friday, March 16th Update: My coworkers said they liked the bars as they scarfed down the entire pan faster than the soda bread someone else supplied this year. But I don’t think I’ll make them again. In addition to the chocolate-chipping issue, the frosting was too thick and powdered-sugary plus not as minty as I’d have liked. Perhaps my dusty, forlorn bottle of crème de menthe, the lowliest of the liqueurs, had lost its efficacy. I also learned not to use a metal knife to cut thick bars made in a new Calphalon pan, which now appears to have been mauled by Wolverine.

With a restaurant name like Burgers & Cupcakes, I expected a sweeter variant of the Luther Burger. But no, it’s just that: burgers, and also cupcakes.

Key are the toppings: six kinds of cheese, vegetarian chili, grilled onions and mushrooms, and more. I chose the mushrooms, avocado and “double thick bacon,” which I asked my server about in advance. “It’s pork but it’s like this,” she said, holding her thumb and index finger a pencil-width apart. “It’s outrageous.”

It certainly was. It was like Beggin’ Strips, with the consistency of pemmicam thick enough to repel my incisors. Delicious, though, especially complemented by the cool avocado slices and the juicy jumbo mushrooms. I rounded it off with a bottle of Stewart’s Black Cherry soda and a basket of fries.

For dessert, I walked up to the cupcake display case and picked out a white-and-chocolate marbled variety gooped with chocolate frosting and sprinkled with tiny candy hearts. My server said, “This one’s on me, sweetie,” and paper-bagged it for me to-go. That was nice. If you stop by, ask for Makeda.

Burgers & Cupcakes

• 458 Ninth Ave. (between 35th and 36th Streets)
• (212) 643-1200
• Meal 11 of 52: burger with three toppings ($7.95), fries ($2) and a bottle of Stewart’s ($2).

The guy on the right is holding a paper-wrapped bunch of flowers, which didn’t turn out as clearly as I’d hoped.

A guy I work with convinced me to enter last week’s New Yorker Caption Contest with him. For this drawing by J.C. Duffy, he developed his potential entries separately (and I never did get to see them) while I cranked out 10 off the top of my head in five minutes and passed them along to him for review.

1. Bring a salad. We’re having rump roast for dinner.
2. Why, yes, I would be interested in supporting a concealed firearms proposition.
3. We tried spraying but every year it seems like there’s more of them.
4. Believe me, it’s not all thrills and wonderment under the big top.
5. Then it hit me: the bars of the cage are wide enough to walk through!
6. No, I’m on a land line. Those are whip cracks, not static.
7. I’m not too worried. Mortise-and-tenon joints are the strongest in woodworking.
8. Just maul him? Now why didn’t I think of that?
9. It’s the only exercise he gets and he could stand to lose a few pounds.
10. I can’t complain. I’ve got my health.

Because the contest allows only one entry per household, our aim was to narrow the list to those most in the New Yorker style. What’s that? As Potter Stewart once said, I know it when I see it. If pressed, I would say it generally caters to a white, well-moneyed, overeducated (people who will feel a secret rush when they “get” a literary or cultural reference that would be lost or overlooked by someone like their doorman), East-Coast or New York-dwelling audience familiar with the regimen of dysfunctional-relationship cocktail-party therapist-couch middle-management desk-job existentialism. I mean, if we’re stereotyping here.

Anyhow, we agreed the most New Yorkerish were 1 and 6. Number 10 is also really New Yorkerish and I like it but my problem with it is that it’s too general and could be applied to any number of the magazine’s man-and-woman or person-and-animal one-panel bon mot cartoons.

I think 3 is funny but I suspect it’s a Far Side caption. (Let me know if you do; I can’t be bothered to look it up.) My initial favorite was 7 because I enjoy the semi-obscure specificity of mortise-and-tenon but as I step back now to consider the caption as a whole, I don’t get it. “Needs work,” a teacher would write on my paper.

The biggest problem arising from some of my ideas is that it’s unclear who in the panel the telephone conversation is referring to, especially 8 and 9.

My coworker and I agreed that, if we were gambling men, 6 would be my best bet. It’s cutesy but not as much as 1, which has a sort-of Gahan Wilson macabre-lite humor. And anyway, first-tries are never right, are they?

But the best part of this anecdote was when I completely forgot to submit my entry by the deadline of 11:59 last night, in part due to my tuxedo adventure. The guy I work with forgot, too. Ha ha! I’ll be interested to see the three finalist captions and whether they bear any resemblance to mine so I can grouse about it.

I took a Metro-North train from Harlem up to Westchester County early this afternoon because that was the nearest location of After Hours, which is not a gentlemen’s club but the formalwear chain my friend Joe has selected for his wedding party’s tuxedos, two-button Tommy Hilfiger models with long ties and “truffle vests.”

After a relaxing half-hour ride, I set out on foot from the White Plains station, spotted a large blue Sears sign, then walked over and entered the mall it was attached to. There was no tuxedo store to be found. After calling Joe, I learned I was in the wrong mall. Joe mapped my predicament online then relayed to me via cellphone that White Plains has a pair of malls approximately eight city blocks apart and I was in the more ghetto of the two, the Galleria.

After arriving at my correct destination, the Westchester Mall, I took in its modern architecture, carpeted floors, Apple Store, Sharper Image, Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus and roving packs of Asian teens. I stood in line at After Hours with a bunch of gawky high-schoolers whose older brothers were getting married, had various body parts tape-measured and tried on two in-store “test jackets,” smelling of sweat and cigarettes, to pinpoint my size (37 long, for those keeping score at home).

I took an express train back to Grand Central because I had plans to see The Lives of Others, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last month. It’s reminiscent of Coppola’s Hitchcockian The Conversation, in which a snoop (Gene Hackman) thinks he’s heard a murder in a wiretapped apartment through his headphones. To a lesser degree, I thought of 3-Iron, in which a young couple lives for moments at a time in the vacant apartments of strangers.

In Lives of Others, Ulrich Mühe plays a member of East Germany’s Stasi in the Berlin Wall-divided early ‘80s. Resembling Stanley Tucci from certain angles, he’s an expert interrogator who switches to the passive end of the business when he takes on a life-consuming wiretap stakeout of a writer who’s suspected of harboring a subversive streak. The same stone-faced officer who’s patient and exacting enough to sweat the “truth” from suspects at the station has difficulty finding fault in a man whose complicated life he’s exposed to in conversations the writer has with his girlfriend and friends. The end, sappy yet satisfying, gets choppy with jumps in the timeline of multiple years at a time. But I’d recommend it.

And, yes, I still think it deserved Best Foreign Language Film over Pan’s Labyrinth. That film, while wondrous in its effects and imagination, had a predictable fairytale plot and little character development. Lives of Others is more unexpected and focuses on the nuances and complexities of human nature and expression. Katie disagrees. “I guess you don’t care about the plight of a little girl,” she snapped in disgust, as she, Andie and I briefly discussed the films afterwards. I didn’t take it further because I’m not smart enough to win an argument with her. She should consider a career in politics.

Bruce, the family member of Andie and Katie’s I visited last year when Katie and I summered in Rhode Island, was an actor in Wind, the Americas Cup movie that finally popped-up in my Netflix queue. I watched it tonight and it’s a fairly standard sporting movie setup with a down-on-its-luck team triumphing over adversity in The Big Game. Specifically it’s:

1. Boy has girl and boat.
2. Boy loses (in order) girl, race, boat and self-respect.
3. Boy spends a few lost months on the salt flats of Utah.
4. Boy regains self-respect, boat and girl.
5. Boy wins race.

Really what’s impressive (and, I’m told, the reason Bruce likes the movie, too), is the graceful and seemingly effortless cinematography and editing of the boats racing neck-in-neck via a combination of tracking shots from other boats, on-boat action footage and helicopter shots, seamlessly stitched together. Even more impressive is knowing this movie was made in the early-‘90s and likely contains little if any CGI trickery, compared to more recent seaborne fare, like, say, Master and Commander, which was a lot of Industrial Light & Magic and a giant water tank in Mexico.

This screencap depicts Bruce as Sheik, looking pensive about a loss in a race. Although mostly he’s seen in the background, toiling aboard the American boat, he’s one of the lead crew members, addressed directly by stars Matthew Modine and mid-nosejob Jennifer Grey, who yell at him during a crucial moment to “put up the Womper,” a giant spinnaker co-invented by Gray and crafty genius Stellan Skarsgård.

You will agree Bruce is a handsome fellow and I can tell you this is doubly so when he’s in manly action, tacking, scrambling up rigging, getting the jib down, and a bunch of other sailing stuff I didn’t fully understand. (Although Wind’s on-boat maneuvers may be a rush of confusion to landlubbers, the movie explains sailing race strategy by unobtrusive and effective cutaways to live footage of a TV commentator and animated graphics of the races’ turning points.)

Late one recent night in Brooklyn, Ned needed to get from one end of the Slope to the other, so he hailed a cab. Of all the taxis in all the neighborhoods in all of New York City, he walked into Philip Frabosilo’s, an overt Christian who preaches to his fares, dishing out smiley-face advice, miniature paperback bibles with orange covers and hand-labeled copies of his own documentary/biopic, Rolling for Jesus. He gave Ned a copy of this DVD after not charging him for the ride, so it was practically a given that it would be first-up in the rotation for Ned’s Movie Night II tonight.

Phil, who’s had his medallion about 37 years, has removed the partition from his cab and tricked out the interior with dozens of photos, inspirational messages and Beanie Babies, in order to utilize it as a “ministry for Jesus.” A big part of this is acting as a bread truck, stopping by breakfast cart vendors and relieving them of their day-old donuts and bagels. He loads the stale dough into plastic bags, crams them in his trunk and tools around the city donating them to the poor, if a fare happens to take him near a shelter or homeless person. In between stints preaching at storefront churches and missions, Phil takes his rods to the East River and fishes for striped bass. (Thank god he doesn’t eat his catches or attempt to multiply them because they’ve got to be among the filthiest, garbage-choked creatures in all the land.)

Most of Phil’s preaching is Praise the Lord boilerplate but when the camera catches him in slightly less scripted moments, he tosses out funny and confused metaphors, like how he’s “discovered that most New Yorkers are like clams, way down at the bottom of the ocean.” Phil’s married but spends more time at his Mom’s place, where she handles all of his taxi and ministry-related paperwork from her kitchen table and owns some of the coolest, most hideous wallpaper ever.

Most of the times he’s shown with his wife, it’s in 30-year-old wedding photos. She’s interviewed separately wearing a denim shirt that she appears to have embroidered and sewn a bunch of decorative buttons to. In the movie’s best line, she admits, in a statement phrased like a question, “I’m proud of Philip but I’m not [pause] proud of Phillip.” Earlier she’s admitted they have a constant “hot and cold relationship,” in part because Phil’s Mom lives in the same apartment building and demands a lot of his time, and in part because they ‘re both argumentative types.

From the documentary, here’s what would seem to be a typical exchange, best imagined with thick New York accents:

Phil

[proudly waves tube of heat-and-serve biscuits] I bought buttermilk biscuits.

Phil’s Wife

[defensively] For who? What kind of diet are you on?

Phil

These were three for a dollar!

Phil’s Wife

Yeah?

Phil

So I bought four of them.

Phil’s Wife

So who are they for? You buy me diet bread [angrily shakes loaf of “Light Style Wheat” at Phil] and then you buy buttermilk biscuits! Where is the logic?

For the requisite bad movie segment of Movie Night, Megan couldn’t locate a copy of Riding the Bus With My Sister on short notice so she settled for Gigli, which also features an offensive rendition of a mentally disabled person, in this case played by Justin Bartha as a watered-down Rain Man. An ultra-guido Ben Affleck mocks and manhandles the kid while getting cutesy/obnoxious with J-Lo in some of the most stilted dialogue ever scripted. After about 20 minutes in, two things became clear:

1. The Christopher Walken cameo would be the movie’s high point.
2. Ned’s head would explode Scanners-style if we didn’t play another movie fast.

So we put in Jesus Camp. You know those kids in the Middle East who are taught that it’s a good idea to strap on belts of handmade explosives to kill their enemies because their god (who apparently is not the same as their enemies’ god) will smile upon them and grant them afterlife bonus prizes of virgins, goblets of honey and all the free cable television they can handle? The evangelical Christians shown in this documentary are just as scary, if not moreso. In one scene, one of the adults even compares the teaching of their children to the education of young holy warriors. And these folks aren’t strangers living in a desert halfway around the world; they’re from Missouri and more powerful than bombs. The movie reminds that the growing ranks of this “religious right” helped bring our current president to office.

Cute as the devil and just as spooky, the spawn of the adult evangelicals attend bible camp, pray, attempt to convert strangers, speak in tongues, weep in religious ecstasy and talk in ways that sound well-coached. (There they are, praying for the souls of the unborn near the abortion clinic, just like regular fifth-graders.) They’re largely home-schooled and essentially brainwashed by their parents and teachers who keep them closeted from the world in their homes and communities. They’re not even allowed to read Harry Potter books (although some of them do anyway).

I have questions and comments for this film: foremost, what were the filmmakers’ motivations for making it? There is no voiceover, few text overlays other than a handful of stark facts about the staggering numbers of evangelicals in the U.S., and no commentary, other than occasional footage of Mike Papantonio, co-host of the Air America Radio program Ring of Fire, during a live show on evangelicals during which he takes their calls and intelligently knocks holes in their dogma.

Also, I’d be interested in seeing what happens, Seven Up!-style, once these kids hit puberty and/or a time when they might have an option to experience the world beyond all they’ve ever known. Do many of them wise up and leave it behind or do they go on?

Finally, as with any documentary, I wondered about what was left unfilmed or on the cutting room floor and what was magnified by selective editing. When we watched the deleted scenes on the DVD we saw the kids goofing around and playing like normal kids their age; but none of this made the movie, where they’re presented as robots.

Ned’s a Herzog fan (you may recall we watched that director’s Grizzly Man during Ned’s inaugural Movie Night) so we caught the first bit of The Wild Blue Yonder. Brad Dourif stars as a wild-haired, conspiratorial and shifty eyed alien, as if he’ll steal your wheel covers as soon as your back is turned. Then there was a bunch of NASA space travel footage cut in and I lost track. You can slag Herr Herzog as you please but you cannot deny the man takes creative risks and keeps his work always unexpected.

To cap the evening, Ned and Megan were shocked and appalled that neither Katie nor I had ever seen H.R. Pufnstuf (“Sid and Marty Krofft?” they asked, dismayed as we shrugged.) I’d try explaining it but mere words cannot do justice to something so surreal. The pilot episode from 1969 that we watched is an acid-tinged version of The Wizard of Oz, so at least I had a shaky point of reference amid the lumbering Muppets, an amphetamine-cranked witch, singing flute and rapscallion British boy.

For sustenance during this marathon session we ordered in from Song, a fine, very tasty and cheap Thai restaurant. I ordered my favorite Thai dish, tofu pad see ew, which is flat rice noodles, broccoli and bits of grilled scrambled egg in a sweet brown sauce. I would have tried the tasty-looking som tam grated papaya salad but like a lot of Thai food, it was rife with chopped peanuts.

Song

• 295 5th Ave. (between First and Second)
• Brooklyn, New York
• (718) 965-1108
• Meal 10 of 52: pad see ew ($6.50).

Google is the Mad Libs of the 2000s. Here’s the current Google-abuse game making the rounds at work: in double-quotes, Google “[your first name] was arrested for”. Hilarity ensues. For example, the top-10 things Jason’s been arrested for are:

1. punching a man who he thought was after his girlfriend.
2. public intoxication and drug possession in Des Moines.
3. an unthinkable crime: murder. It didn’t make sense. Jason was a respected Navy officer.
4. misdemeanor battery after an altercation with a tow truck driver in September.
5. bootlegging, and fined $1,500.
6. underage drinking in Greenville, North Carolina last week.
7. embezzlement.
8. beating Joumana¹.
9. felony theft.
10. for Brian’s shooting. He was handcuffed to a railing and left to die until Nikolas found him.

¹ Which isn’t as bad as beating Joumama. Ha ha! [back]

IT Guy

I will be going around to your computers this evening installing fixes from Microsoft and Apple to correct various daylight savings time issues with your computers. What I do not finish I will be completed tomorrow. If I come desk, let me sit there for ten minutes and then I will be out of your way.

Jason

Has IT Guy been outsourced to a Nigerian spammer?

O.

“If I come desk”???

Jason

“I will be completed tomorrow.”
And then IT Guy rested, for it was good.

I came across a curious coincidence during a memory trip of old music videos on YouTube. Watching the 1982 video for Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love”¹. I had the volume in the YouTube player slid all the way down, when Arcade Fire’s “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” (4.4 MB mp3) started playing in iTunes. Although the songs aren’t the same length or tempo or style, parts of the video’s animation gelled remarkably well with parts of the song. It was oddly mesmerizing. (If I had a million years spare time, I’d cut the two together in iMovie to make it work perfectly. There are parallels in lyrics and imagery and a floaty transcendence about both.) Makes me wonder what other videos can take on completely different songs as backing tracks and still work (for a start, obviously videos with not a lot of lip synching; in other words, not many videos).

¹ That’s right, youngsters: it’s the song Mariah Carey plundered for “Fantasy.” [back]

I was talking today about the subjectiveness of what constitutes art and my point just kind of slipped out: “One man’s Dogs Playing Poker is another man’s Piss Christ.”

Raise the Red Lantern spans the four seasons of a year in ’20s China within a closed compound of a rich man and his four concubines. Each night his choice among them is made known by the ritualistic decoration their quarters, indoors and out, with red paper lanterns, which are lit and remain so until the morning. Three of the women (the fourth is too old to get much play) spend their time exercising juicy Shakespearean-quality levels of vanity, trickery, lies, plotting and backstabbing to get what they feel is their fair share of lantern-lighting. That the lead concubine (Gong Li ) by the end is literally driven mad by unfortunate events she’s set in motion felt like a copout.

Leisurely paced, brilliantly colored, with a painterly symmetry in its staging, Raise the Red Lantern is a stack of mostly long static shots, straight on and centered. And red: lots of red.

Boy, Hitch really liked stories of ordinary men in over their heads, which he never covered more realistically than in The Wrong Man. He even traded his traditional cameo for a brief introduction emphasizing his script was wholly Based on a True Story. Unfortunately that also makes it one of his least engrossing films: linear with few surprises, and, as in many Hitchcock films, dwelling on the director’s phobias and kid fears, in this case, of cops and of wrongful imprisonment. The style and cinematography, unlike most anything else Hitchcock directed, glows like a European arthouse film mixed with film noir, all downturned hats and shadows, and a vivid time capsule of a gritty New York City in 1956. Fifty years later and the bridges and the subway stations look the same.

And what better everyman to play Mr. Guilty Until Proven Innocent than Henry Fonda, a doe-eyed upstanding American with a face like a laborer in a Great Depression breadline.

Vera Miles as his wife portrays a worrisome decent into madness with a beauty you can see would have worked for Vertigo. Hitch wanted her for the role of Madeleine in that film but when she got pregnant, it went to Kim Novak.

I temporarily solved my lack of a bedroom door by putting up a tension rod in the doorframe from which I hung a red velvet curtain. It sounds like I’m decorating the dormroom, but I think it looks kinda classy. There’s something dramatic about parting such a heavy fabric for entry and egress. It’s functional, too: I’ve found it’s thick enough to trap heat in the bedroom and to block assorted dripping faucet, ticking clock and refrigerator motor noises from other rooms of the apartment. Now I just need to trick out my bedroom with a bordello theme and I’m all set.

Jason

O.K., here’s a story for you. I feel most sorry for that dog. Criticism of an award-winning children’s book over the word “scrotum” has brought Susan Patron’s “The Higher Power of Lucky” into the top 40 on Amazon.com. [It’s] the story of a 10-year-old girl in rural California and her quest for “Higher Power.” The opening chapter includes a passage about a man “who had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked ’62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.” Librarians have been debating whether “scrotum” was an appropriate word for young readers, especially from a book with the Newbery seal.

O.

I heard about this on The Daily Show the other night and Jon Stewart said knowing that “scrotum” was in the book would get thousands of kids reading just to get to that part...that in fact, if you wanted kids to read, you’d put “boobs” on every fifth page.

Jason

Yeah! Let ’em read! My response to tizzies like these is: seriously, were these disgruntled people ever children? Kids know the lingo and they’ve seen the pictures. They have the internet, dammit. Their knowledge is rarely 100% accurate but kids of a certain age are hyperaware of the world at large, its pleasures and perversions. Didn’t these librarians ever do that thing where you sandwich your hands together, link them with your friend’s sandwiched hands held perpendicular to yours, then one of you opens his hands and it sort of looks like a vagina in there?

O.

F. used to do that and take pictures of it with his cellphone.

Jason

I’m glad you know what I’m talking about. It’s one of those things that’s easy to do but tough to describe. Like, um, riding a bicycle.