April 2007 Archives

When Escape From New York came out in 1981, its premise could have been considered a distant possibility—that by the late ’90s, Manhattan would be a maximum-security penal island, blocked on all shores by a 50-foot wall and patrolled by helicopters and jets. Other than that, the only rules are once you get chucked in there, you don’t come out.

Kurt Russell is about to get chucked in there for robbing the federal reserve, then cuts a deal to guarantee his freedom if he can rescue the President of the United States whose plane has crashed on the island and who’s being held captive by a bunch of goons ruled by a twitchy-eyed Isaac Hayes.

The fact that like only one scene was filmed in New York City kind ruined everything for me. New York had to have been gritty and deteriorated and filled with enough unsavory locals to make it work, although probably not without the theft of some cameras and John Carpenter’s wallet.

I do like that Kurt seems to be channeling his sneering rasp directly from Clint Eastwood (and like Eastwood, seems to have spend an awful lot of time blow-drying his silky hair for an alleged tough guy). I also appreciated that the President of the United States, whom Kurt succeeds in saving from certain peril, has a British accent for no discernable reason.

I don’t like to admit I read Rolling Stone occasionally, but I do, usually on flights because it goes down real simple, like that diet of plain white toast and water you get on right after you’ve been vomiting a lot. The magazine’s celebrating its 40th anniversary, or at least that was the most recent issue put out at the lone gift shop in the Akron Canton Airport, but I did learn a few things:

1. Putting his fearsome musical prowess to the side, McCartney still comes across as sort of a twat to me.
2. Bob Dylan is the most difficult musician to interview because he’s not up on the whole “talking about his methods of composition” or “answering yes or no questions.” Jann Wenner spends approximately half of the interview chiding him for being so catty and asking each question multiple ways to elicit answers that never arise.
3. I thought it was kind of funny that they would run one of those high-school humor sexist ads for Axe body spray adjacent the opening page of Jane Fonda’s interview.
4. Chip Kidd explains that the meaning of his cover design was to enlarge the letter combination “Ro” in the Rolling Stone logotype until it resembled a “40.” But in fact it merely resembles a blown-up “Ro.”

I was talking with someone (perhaps several people) recently about how difficult it can be to answer the question, “What’s your favorite Madonna song?” When you are dealing with a pop priestess of her prowess, it all depends, really.

Are we talking favorite Madonna song to club-dance/roller-skate to?

Are we talking favorite slow-dance/couples’-skate song?

Are we talking "personal favorite" Madonna song, perhaps an “obscure” track or one no one else likes (or will admit to liking)?

Or are we talking favorite Madonna song to hear in the car so that you sing along and pound the steering wheel for emphasis and it gets to the point that not even the gawking passengers of the car pulled up next to yours at the stoplight are enough to deter your passion? (Favorite Madonna karaoke song would also fit here.)

In that case, my favorite Madonna song is, respectively, “Holiday,” “Crazy For You,” “Who’s That Girl,” and “Like a Prayer.”

I flew in to Cleveland yesterday evening to visit my family and was struck by the differences between the Midwest and New York City. All of these differences of course have been around all the other times I've visited home since living in New York, but they seemed more crisply in focus this time. Must’ve been the weather.

First off, people in Cleveland really are kind of porky. I remember being surprised, as I think some other Clevelanders were, that the city was ranked the unhealthiest in the nation awhile back, probably because everyone thought the same thing, "Really? What about [fill-in name of hillbilly-infested city]?" But, no, it's pretty bad, and you notice it more once you've been in a sea of harried, comparatively more trim people.

There are also many flat, wide open spaces here, and those that aren't wide open seem to have been clogged by strip malls. I've noticed before how when I walk on sidewalks in Cleveland now I get a weird sort of apprehension because there will typically be no one else walking on the sidewalk as far as the eye can see. (Perhaps this is related to the above point about Clevelanders being so porky.) Whereas in New York, the sidewalks are streams of surly humanity and if you were ever to find yourself the only person on a sidewalk there, it would be because: a.) you are in a horror movie and unknowingly about to be eaten by a zombie, or b.) a neutron bomb went off, but apparently you were in the can at the time.

On the plus side for Cleveland, there is a lot of green, which is pleasing to see this time of year: verdant lawns, explosions of flowers (mostly dandelions, I’m afraid), budding trees, etc. It's all over the place whereas in New York such bounty is confined to the parks and sad little patches.

This isn’t all-time drinking songs (“Margarittaville,” “Tequilla,” “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,“ more or less any song classified country or Pogues) but rather a few lesser songs about drinking I enjoy. In my fashion, I don’t think these are ones that would pop up in Family Feud but my personal favorites, ones that haven’t dimmed for me with pop-popularity and repetition. And although they’re not strictly songs to listen to while drinking, most of them fit that bill anyway. Oh, I have more than five favorite songs about drinking, but I want to save some others for a rainy day, as I might an old single malt. If you have a speedy connection and gumption, you can listen to a watery mp3 of each by clicking the song title.

1. “Gimme That Wine” by Annie Ross and Dave Lambert. For a few seconds, I thought this was Ray Charles when I first heard it at a trendy bar.
2. “Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You” by John Prine. The cracker in me loves this forgotten hillbilly tune. Prine never seems to have gained the cred of his 60s-70s country-ish contemporaries, like, I dunno, Neil Young or the Flying Burrito Brothers.
3. “Alcohol” by the Kinks. Yes, those guys that did “Lola.”; they were nothing if not versatile. Sounds like they rustled up a Salvation Army band and a few jugs of moonshine for this one from their Muswell Hillbillies, a sort of concept album about the British lower middle-class of the early ’70s
4. “St. Ides Heaven” by Elliott Smith. Quite a few of this fellow’s songs mention drinking or sadness or both. I like this one because it namechecks 7-Eleven and is about not only being drunk but “high on amphetamines.”
5. “I’ll Regret It All In The Morning” by Richard and Linda Thompson. A sad-sack song by the under-rated English folk-rock duo. The fine harmonies remind me of good times.

This guy standing on a street corner in Chelsea asked me where Gansevoort and Greenwich Streets intersected. He looked lost, as a tourist would, and what initially lead me to believe his out-of-townness was that he pronounced Greenwich “Green Witch.” Strangely, he pronounced Gansevoort correctly, so I couldn’t correct his green gaffe, and regardless I have no idea where Gansevoort is, other than somewhere in the Wicked Witch of the West Village.

After the MS Walk yesterday, I accidentally left my cell phone behind in Katie’s car. I called her from work and told her I’d stop by that night to retrieve it. “I’ll call you when I get there,” I said, not realizing until I had walked halfway to the PATH train station on Herald Square after work that I did not have a phone with which to call anyone. Thankfully there is at least one operable payphone still standing in Jersey City, its handset bright yellow enough to kill germs at both ends, located across the street from the Grove Street station, so I made my arrival announcement from there.

Katie and I took part in 19th-annual MS Walk organized by the Greater North Jersey Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. It was held at Liberty State Park, which affords fine views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. In fact, I don’t remember seeing this on past trips to Ellis Island but there’s a hidden service road built on a pier that extends from the park to the rear of Ellis Island, presumably for swift delivery of employees, exhibits, merchandise, food and other supplies.

I used to walk and run in events like these more often and I can tell you they usually have water stations, particularly because you’re dealing with a bunch of amateurs. But there weren’t any and it was a bright, sunny day. I cursed myself for not bringing any and for instead having consumed a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and donut, which I assumed would give the sugar I needed to get me going in the morning. It wasn’t enough refreshment but at the halfway point, there was a child’s plastic swimming pool filled with ice and generic soda, and a picnic table lined with sandwich cookies and crackers and “energy bars” suspiciously reminiscent of candy.

Later, Katie and I drove out to the wilds of New Jersey where her horse lives. Here’s a photo of Colandi looking sassy in her summer coat.

I know I’d seen The Long Goodbye before, and at the Cleveland Cinematheque, because—bless the place—but it has the most uncomfortable lecture-hall-style wooden chairs from the ’60s ever.

From my much more comfortable seat at the Film Forum, I mused I’d forgotten how funny Goodbye is, particularly film-noir gumshoe transplanted to the creamy yoga center of 1970’s Los Angeles Elliott Gould with his dopey looks and dry self-deprecating humor. Witness the strangely extended opening sequence where he learns he’s out of cat food, drives to the grocery store to buy more, discovers they’re out, reluctantly buys a different brand, returns home, opens the off-brand can and scoops it into an empty can of the cat’s usual cat food, then makes a big show in front of the cat about pretending to serve the cat its regular food. Of course, the cat knows it’s the wrong brand and refuses to eat it, which the audience has expects all along, but it’s really funny somehow anyway.

I have to imagine guys like Gould must have been a true mystery as leading men of ’70s cinema. How did these mugs become stars? To my point, see also two other not-especially handsome, alternately endearing/annoying, frequently charming guys (and also from Brooklyn!) from that era, Richard Dreyfuss and Woody Allen.

Wandering around the East Side before the movie, I regret to inform you I missed an awesome New York photo-op. On the Bowery I noticed that a League of Their Own style tour bus had just pulled up outside the Bowery Mission. A group of Amish people had just stepped off, the ladies clad in plain shapeless dresses and wearing those lace kerchiefs on their heads, while the men had on plaid long-sleeved shirts and black pants. They started photographing the various transients who were lounging around smoking and napping. One guy sitting on the stoop outside the door was all like, “Here I am. C’mon, muthafuckas, I’m right here,” with his arms raised, so they all clustered around and started taking even more photos like they were at the zoo and they’d just come across a surly emu. Meanwhile another mission resident off to the side was hastily scribbling a beggar sign on a scrap of cardboard.

Somewhere on my rockstar circuit to our nation’s “Ph” cities, I picked up a nasty head cold, which, if you know the size of my head, makes for a tremendous amount of phlegm. Along with feelings of low-grade fever and Carter-caliber malaise, I sound as if I’m speaking through a bucket of mud. I’ve taken to telling people I have laryngitis to avoid going into detail and save what’s left of my voice. They either can’t understand what I’m saying or respond brightly, “You sound awful!” Thanks, I reply, and attempt to soldier forth in my primeval rasps, coughs and gurgles. Awful is not the word for this. I sound like Tricky doing a bad Don Vito impression.

A coworker of mine is one of those sporty and energetic young go-getters, so she went for a jog on a winding path near the base of Camelback Mountain last night. She promptly tripped and fell on a cactus. There weren’t any injuries other than to her pride, and as for removing the needles, the hotel keeps a large bottle of classic white Elmer’s Glue at the security station for just that purpose. You squeeze it over the affected area, let it dry, then peel it off, just like you did when you were in grade school and pretended like it was fake skin that you were ripping from your zombie hand. Which you can still do, only in this case it also pulls out the cactus needles.

I had finished ironing my dress shirt, all proud of myself that it was still wrinkled, but less wrinkled than when I pulled it from my bag. I pushed the cord-retract button on the iron and as it whipped back, the plug clocked me. I now have a prong-shaped welt pockmarking my noggin. What fun.

I would be remiss if I did not mention I am in Phoenix today, cactus country. It’s like 82 degrees here, breezy. There’s a man bringing a Patron Silver-and-Grand Marnier margarita to my door, along with some chicken tacos, the handmade tortillas bundled in foil. Everyone gets his or her own hacienda here. I feel like any moment I will gain two roommates and a reality TV show crew.

My dinner will be a relaxing reprieve to a busy day that included a man on my flight who kept leaning onto my armrest and mashing the channel-changer buttons for my personal mini television which I otherwise kept rooted on VH1 Classic. Lots of great videos I’d never seen before and This is Spinal Tap in its entirety. What a bargain.

A short Hispanic man with a mustache just knocked on my door and asked if my room needed refreshing. It did not, I told him. ‘Would you like some chocolates” he asked in a thick Spanish accent, while thrusting at me a clear plastic bag sagging with candy. I found this funny and called my coworker for her to keep an eye out for the door-to-door chocolate man and his reverse trick-or-treat schemes.

I ate my chocolate squares sitting out on my personal patio. It’s eerily quiet here except for the wind in the trees and the occasional air conditioning unit kicking in a few roofs over. Strange coral-like trees sway in the breeze and the branches of a tall red-flowered bush scratch against the roof of the metal patio umbrella over my head. I completed this balmy romance of the desert by walking full force into my closed screen door. O tequila.

They actually have a subway system here! I don’t think I knew that. But it’s one of those that doesn’t run between midnight and 5 a.m. Philly’s starting to get some press that it’s a true 24/7 city, but that’s either the real estate people’s PR people talking, or I’m in the wrong part of Center City, or both. There’s no one out at night but bums and ne’er-do-wells.

Took the train to Philadelphia today. Near Trenton, the water had completely flooded the tracks and the train slowed to a crawl. It was as if we were on a monorail in some sort of low-tech urban floor adventure. “And if you look to your left, you’ll see a mobile home with water up to its windows.”

Rain, rain, rain. Went into work again today. My jeans got totally soaked.That’s no fun.

I went into work this weekend but I was determined to do something fun for lunch. Let’s see: fun in Midtown. Nothing legal immediately jumped to mind. It was too early to start drinking and I didn’t feel like bowling. So I just walked around. Always a good idea in New York.

Serendipitously, I came across the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market, which has been in the back of my head list-of-things-to-do seemingly forever. All kinds of great things kitsch, retro and vintage. The two chief items on display are funky women’s clothing (though there were a preponderance of men’s hats) and antiques (old postcards, medical dictionaries, cigarette cases, paintings). In attendance were a number of trim women wearing those gigantic oversized sunglasses that I have a strong suspicion were fashion designers trawling for ideas and boutique owners with visions of markups floating in their heads. I watched a man in sunglasses and a corduroy suit carry away a black bear’s head mounted on a wooden plaque, which included, on separate-but-attached wooden islands, its paws. Also I saw a trim woman try on a snug-fitting zebra-print dress from the 50s (60s?) over her T-shirt and jeans, checking it out in an antique mirror leaning against a card table and considering the advice of a fashionista friend of hers (“We could always take it in a little.’).

Can’t see how I missed Repo Man until now, bound in grittily real-yet-surreal textures. Unexpected and violent and silly. Kick-ass punk/new-wave soundtrack, too.

Our PR man from Schenectady has taken to the ether. Let us bow our heads and pray for his blessing.

You emerge aboveground from the subway; now what? Which way do you walk to get back on track to your destination? It can be a problem here in New York, New York. If it’s a familiar route or neighborhood, there’s no trouble. If not, it can be tough to orient. If I’m in a rush, I’ll take one of two methods:

1. The Dirk Gently “Zen mode” of navigation: spot someone who looks as if he knows where he’s headed and follow him.
2. Or I just stride briskly in a particular direction instead of wasting time thinking about it. One in four: I like those odds.

This guy advocated stencils, which makes a lot of sense, but hasn’t caught on.

Usually it’s not that bad and there are of course tips.

If you’re the scouting sort, you can spot the sun and situate yourself that way. But not if it’s set, out of season, obscured by weather or skyscrapers, or it’s noon.

At the very least, if you’re “in the grid” in Manhattan (generally above 14th Street), you can orient yourself east-west easily because avenue blocks, which run east-west, are much wider than street blocks, which run north-south.

Often if the view is unobstructed and it’s day, you can see the street sign on the next block over. If it’s numbered, you’re set, since they increment northwardly.

Some stations label the exits underground with signage, so that you know, for instance, that you’ll be on the northeastern corner on the surface.

Looking for familiar landmarks is always a good idea, particularly tall, famous buildings. In Manhattan, looking for the Hudson or East River also helps, if you at least know you’re on the East or West Side.

Everyone has his preferred directional methods. When Jimi first moved here, he carried a small compass to know where to head upon exiting the subway. Andie has told me her method is to know which way the subway is oriented and headed, then recall that direction on the surface. This involves solving often complex spatial relations problems, particularly in larger stations with twisty passages and multiple staircases. I’ll stick with the random direction thing, which is more my forte.

October 16, 2007 Update: The New York City Department of Transportation announced today that it is adding “directional compass decals on sidewalks at subway exits in Midtown Manhattan.”

I’ve familiarized myself with repeated listens of the new Arcade Fire album, Neon Bible, that I can fall asleep to it, as evidenced by my drowsy trip into Penn Station this morning on the 1 train. It’s the newest addition to my shortlist of albums to fall asleep to. Do I slumber at this music because it’s conducive to that or because I’ve heard it so many times it’s a lullaby? Probably some combination of both.

• Dummy by Portishead
• pretty much anything by Radiohead; the robot voice of "Fitter Happier" from OK Computer always throws me off, so I banished that one from my iTunes library
• Sea Change by Beck
• Rather Ripped by Sonic Youth (silence in music is not a prerequisite for my drowsiness, as evidenced by this ruffianly entrant)
• pretty much anything by Björk or Thievery Corporation
• The Greatest by Cat Power
• Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement
• A Love Supreme by John Coltrane
• Zidane by Mogwai, which you wouldn’t initially think possible, given it’s the soundtrack to a documentary about a footballer best-known in the states for a wicked-infamous headbutt
• Rock Action, also by Mogwai, except for that last song, which includes a drum, piano and Liberty-style bell miked so closely the resonance loosens my teeth
• generally any album by PJ Harvey except Rid of Me, the quiet-loud-quiet pattern of which is more useful for waking up

It’s weird that Kill Bill: Vol. 2 contains all the back story and exposition of the first one didn’t. Only a few people die and there’s plenty of rambling, stilted Tarantino dialogue. Couldn’t have he just made one shorter film with equal balance kung-fu and chatter?

Another reason for purchasing that cast-iron frying pan was for the express purpose of preparing a bewitching recipe from 1966 reprinted recently in the Times Sunday Magazine, David Eyre’s Pancake. They’re a heavenly cross-bred crepe-pancake. I served mine with Swiss blackberry jam. Oh yes. This recipe is exceedingly simple but puffs up all brown-crusted and rich and eggy like you sweated soufflé-levels hardship into it. This one’s a greasy lil’ keeper.

Our mumbly mountain man (Marky Mark, with the pornstar name of Bob Lee Swagger), a war veteran let down by the government he believed in, is called back to duty to protect the president¹ from a long range rife assassination. Whoops! He’s set up and accused of capping the guy standing right next to the president. He’s on the run! The opening of Shooter sorta resembles The Fugitive and sorta exciting, as long as you suspend the fact that he seems to drive his getaway car around Philadelphia in full sight of 1000 helicopters and police cars and is not noticed or stopped by any roadblocks that would have instantly arisen.

But later in the movie, things get darker, like a shinny 2000s version of Charles Bronson or Dirty Harry as Mark gets all extroverted-Kaczynski, exacting self-righteous murders of the shadowy men who did him wrong.

¹ Casting “the president” in your action movie must be a thorny task. You’re not making a parody so you have to make sure your man doesn’t resemble any presidents past or present or else the audience will laugh or think you’re trying to make some ham-handed point. Yet the guy still has to look “presidential” and what’s that, really? The casting call can probably be boiled down as, “Tall white guy, mildly charismatic, late 40s/early 50s, nice hair.” [back]

I ordered a Lodge cast-iron frying pan and it arrived today via Amazon, crammed in a cardboard box and cradling a Haruki Murakami hardcover like literature destined for deliciousness. I ordered the book partially because I wanted it and partially because it tipped my total order into free shipping territory, saving me a good $15 on a utensil as dense and weighty as a bowling ball. The pan I ordered because I always sort of wanted one and because the Times magazine last Sunday ran a bewitching recipe from 1966 for something called David Eyre’s Pancake, a cross between a crepe and a flapjack. And, you know, cooks are always going on about the miracle of their cast iron, as if it was a particularly dim and stocky yet hard-working child of theirs.

For a utensil this rugged, seemingly smithed from a block of iron the size and sturdiness of Chuck Norris, then forged in the fires of hell or South Pittsburg, Tennessee, I expected chuckwagon simplistic care and handling. But its instructions read like a babysitter’s list of dos and don’ts. Don’t use soap. Dry it thoroughly always. Apply a light coat of oil before and after. Store in a cool, arid place. And for the love of all that is holy, do not violate all of the preceding rules at once by sticking it in your dishwasher. In other words, you never want to actually clean it, just gussy it up from time to time, like superficial Stradlater in Catcher in the Rye, spic and span outside, crumby inside.

The thing has the heft of a deadly weapon, perhaps literally, as Andy Capp’s wife taught me. Since my Amazon orders arrive at work, I had to haul it home in a bag. I kind of hoped I could have prevented a mugging by winding it up and clocking someone with it.

I wanted to source the quote “News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising” and what better reference than the internet. Or not.

Unbeknownst to me, this “news/advertising” aphorism is stockpiled often by those grubby quote-compilation sites, nearly none of which ever source anything. I like sourcing. I need sourcing. It’s my journalistic background tapping my shoulder.

Google muddied the waters. One site alleged the words were spoken/written by Harold Evans, an editor of the London Times. An Australian site begged to differ, offering Henry Northcote, also known as “the first Baron Northcote.” The majority of the sites pinned the quote on Rubin Frank, billed as a former NBC News president, except that his name isn’t Rubin it’s Reuven. And there are a growing number of sites purporting the quote to be one from Bill Moyers. It’s easy to see how this evolved: a 2003 article in the Christian Science Monitor quoted Moyers as saying “We’re trying to get the truth behind the news.... Someone once said that news is what’s hidden; everything else is advertising.” And before you know it, sites were attributing the quote to Bill. According to one of these:

“I came to see that news is what people want to keep hidden, and everything else is publicity.”

—Bill Moyers in speech responding to charges by Kenneth Tomlinson of liberal bias at PBS.”)

In short, sourcing stuff on the badlands of the net can be a futile exercise. Take a browse through urban-legend debunker Snopes.com to find many examples of attributable text that, seemingly the instant your Mom emails it to her bridge group, suddenly gets misattributed, added to, deleted from, then misattributed some more, like, most classically, that Mrs. Fields cookie recipe or more recently, this Dave Barry list. Why would someone mangle something written by someone else or switch attributions for no discernable reason? “Dropped on their heads at birth, perhaps?” guesses Barry.

But this is the natural progression of notable quotes, merely sped by technology. There was a great article by Louis Menand in the February 19th issue of The New Yorker, a review of the Yale Book of Quotations that notably notes, “Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.” At length:

Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in Casablanca says “Play it again, Sam”; Leo Durocher did not say “Nice guys finish last”; Vince Lombardi did say “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” quite often, but he got the line from someone else. Patrick Henry almost certainly did not say “Give me liberty, or give me death!”; William Tecumseh Sherman never wrote the words “War is hell”; and there is no evidence that Horace Greeley said “Go west, young man.” Marie Antoinette did not say “Let them eat cake”; Hermann Göring did not say “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun”; and Muhammad Ali did not say “No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street,” does not say “Greed is good”; James Cagney never says “You dirty rat” in any of his films; and no movie actor, including Charles Boyer, ever said “Come with me to the Casbah.” Many of the phrases for which Winston Churchill is famous he adapted from the phrases of other people, and when Yogi Berra said “I didn’t really say everything I said” he was correct.

Here’s where the smoothness comes into play:

What Michael Douglas did say in Wall Street was “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” That was not a quotable quote; it needed some editorial attention, the consequence of which is that everyone distinctly remembers Michael Douglas uttering the words “Greed is good” in Wall Street.

I know what Menand’s saying. An English professor of mine in college frequently used the quote, “We live by selected fictions,” which he attributed to Lawrence Durrell. It was one of my favorites then (and still) though I wavered when I read Durrell’s novel Balthazar years later and discovered the actual wording is the much more prosaic and less memorable:

“We live,” writes Pursewarden somewhere, “lives based upon selected fictions.”

Essence distilled, lesson learned. I must adapt to live with misattribution and inaccuracy, at least in my spicy quotes.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1: a revenge plot Velveeta-rich with kung-foolery. It sank for me as soon as Uma and Vivica A. Fox rock the suburbs with that spectacular dust-up at the beginning.

I found a ten-dollar bill on the sidewalk on 35th Street today during my brisk lunchtime constitutional. Unfortunately, adjusted for the cost of living in Manhattan, that’s like finding a one-dollar bill anywhere else in America. It was probably the high point of my day anyway.

So you don’t have to, I listened to the actor/director’s commentary on my super-deluxe edition of Say Anything tonight and watched the alternate/deleted/extended scenes. The most amusing group of extras concerns the famous shot of our hero Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) hoisting a boom box to serenade his girl Diane (Ione Skye) as she sleeps with the wistful strains of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”

In the movie, it comes together perfectly (if a touch sentimentally) and the image of Lloyd has become something of my generation’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.

What’s amusing is that director Cameron Crowe originally scripted the boom box music to be Billy Idol’s “To Be A Lover” and as the scene was filmed the song actually playing was a then-favorite of Cusack’s, Fishbone’s “Turn the Other Way,” neither of which fits the scene; Idol is too fast, Fishbone too funky. Gabriel’s song works on an emotional level and the lyrics are written as if for the scene.

Even better is that although it seems perfectly obvious now that Lloyd must elevate that boom box with the confidence and pride of a boxer hoisting the championship belt, alternate takes reveal that Cusack and Crowe first tried every other possible combination of Man with Boom Box before settling on the iconic image just as they lost their light of day.

“This is the first round of holding up the boom box,” says Crowe regarding these first few shots, from footage taken on March 25, 1988, and apparently meant to take place across the street from Diane’s house. “He’s not happy about it,” Crowe adds, unnecessarily, over footage of Cusack handling the boom box like it’s a poo-filled diaper.

The next round of boom box takes (a session that included the one used in the finished film) were shot in a comparatively more scenic park on May 2, 1988, although most of them are ruined by inexplicable and out-of-character gum-chewing by Cusack. “I think that the chewing gum and anything of that sort of indifference was going to be wrong,” comments Crowe, when he probably should have just shouted at Cusack, “The world is full of guys. Be a man!”

Manhattan is filled with so-called secrets: secret parks, secret rooms, secret stations, secret menu items, countless “exclusive” clubs and bars with unmarked entrances and at least one ultradubious “Best Kept Secret”. There are some secrets I cannot reveal, lest I lose my budding New Yorker status. But, really, on an island of millions it’s tough to keep anything to yourself.

Case in point: the secret burger joint hidden at Le Parker Meridien hotel. When I read about it—and it’s gotten more press than any secret I’ve ever known—I imagined it would be the Starwood marketing department’s approximation of a greasy spoon, much as how any eating establishment (particularly in a mall or an airport) billed as “authentic” isn’t.

From the hotel’s lobby of polished marble, glass and mirrors, just past the registration desk on the far side of a giant tan curtain, there’s an unmarked dark, narrow hallway lit at the end by a small neon sign of a steaming burger and a red arrow pointing right. Follow it and it’s like Lucy through the wardrobe, only instead of a snow-dappled fairyland there’s a nasty diner. There may have even been a faun in there. It was very crowded and who’s to say; the Burger Joint is the size of an average Manhattan apartment and jam packed with lines: lines waiting to order, lines waiting to pick up orders and lines waiting to sit, with people needing to grab a straw or a ketchup packet from the counter cutting all over the place. I know, sounds charming, right? But the bustle of it is oddly exciting.

Above the counter, from which orders are taken and dispensed and behind which are the grills, deep fryer and a poor overworked blender for the milkshakes, hangs a grid of rough wooden shelves, wrapped with Christmas lights and laden with institutional-sized jugs of condiments and pickles, stacks of bagged hamburger buns and a mismatched collection of bobblehead dolls (Spider-Man, a hula girl, Archie, some Yankees player, a leprechaun). Two signs are affixed to the shelves, both written in Magic Marker on crudely cut pieces of brown corrugated cardboard. One, in a classic New York blend of courtesy and hostility, reads, “We don’t spit on your food so please. . . Don’t write on our walls.” (It’s unclear whether the sign went up before or after the far, white-painted brick wall got covered with Sharpied graffiti.) The other sign, twice as large, offers ordering instructions in neat block capitals, as curt and hassled as the counterstaff:

THE FASTEST WAY TO GET IT RIGHT

STEP 1: HAMBURGER -or- CHEESEBURGER

STEP 2: HOW D’YA WANT IT COOKED (RARE, MED. RARE, MEDIUM, MED. WELL, WELL)

STEP 3: WHAT D’YA WANT ON IT (LETTUCE, TOMATO, ONION, PICKLE, KETCHUP, MAYO, MUSTARD)
WITH EVERYTHING CALL IT “THE WORKS”

BE READY OR ELSE YOU GO TO THE END OF THE LINE

Cellophane-taped to the fake wood-paneled walls are random movie and TV show posters (Narc, Sex and the City). The ceiling is one of those hated acoustic drop-tile numbers. Greasy formica tables, only about 12 of them, line the perimeter, with a shared table and tall stools near the counter. Classic rock hums in the background and there was a phone forever ringing somewhere that no one ever answered.

It’s good they didn’t as it would only distract from the flame broiling. You couldn’t ask for a better burger: thick and juicy on a toasted bun, plenty of toppings, swaddled in waxed paper. You get the fries plunked on a plate or in a small brown paper bag that quickly spots with grease. The shakes are rich and sweet. Good stuff. The secret is not safe with me.

“The Burger Joint”

• 118 W. 57th Street (off Sixth Avenue)
• 212-708-7414
• Meal 14 of 52: cheeseburger with the works, fries and a shake ($14).