June 2007 Archives

Yay! Another robot for the military that resembles those from Short Circuit. The Ranger III from FLIR Systems Inc. can track vehicles from 12 miles away and will be stationed along the southern U.S. border by the Department of Homeland Security.

But does it feel remorse if it accidentally squashes a grasshopper?

For the New York Asian Film Festival at the IFC Center, I was keen to see the one with sneak-attack breakdancers but Sherry convinced me to see Dasepo Naughty Girls instead. I must give naughty girls a slight edge over sneak-attack breakdancers. Without breaking a sweat, Dasepo should qualify as the strangest movie I will see this year.

Let’s see: it’s a candy-colored teen sex-comedy/soap opera/musical, kind of like if you captured Baz Luhrmann, Porky’s and Grease in a sack and ran it through the “English to Korean” filter on Babel Fish.

Among the horny students and teachers at No-Use High School are a poor girl forced into prostitution who becomes best friends with her first john, a paunchy middle-aged cross-dresser. He’s uninterested in sex but obsessed with putting on makeup and schoolgirl outfits to pose for cellphone snapshots, giggle and gossip about boys; later he becomes the girl’s manager for her sudden and unexpected musical career. There’s another student with one eye who has a transgender sister (brother?). And there’s a teacher who likes getting spanked. Frequently the characters break into song, the Korean lyrics highlighted syllable-by-syllable across the bottom of the screen, just like in karaoke.

The reptilian-eyed principal brainwashes the class into model students while restoring their long-lost virginity. At the showdown conclusion, a Medusa-like dragon-lady emerges from the principal to smite the students, but they gather and use the cosmic power of group masturbation to defeat her. Then everyone assembles in the gym and starts dancing.

I’d say there was something lost in translation but, no, I think Dasepo Naughty Girls is just that weird.

I was considering a third pint of Sam Adams Summer Ale until I noticed the guy sitting next to me at the bar and his pockmarked ass. As you can see, it has crept over the line from plumber’s crack to waxing gibbous, or 98% of a full moon.

I like music and if a story’s about mix tapes, I’m bound to read it. High Fidelity: naturally. The hipster coffee-table book Mix Tape: the Art of Cassette Culture: yes. Even lesser-known classics of the genre, like Sarah Vowell’s “Thanks for the Memorex,” a tale of a long-distance love affair by cassette tape: “While we cared for each other, we cared little for each other’s taste in music. I sent him lovey-dovey lullabies like Blondie’s ‘In the Flesh’ and he sent me back what could have been field recordings of amplified ant farms by bands with names like Aphex Twin and Jarboe.”

So it was a given I’d eventually read Love is a Mix Tape, the thesis of which is “Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.” It’s a memoir by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield of his girlfriend-then-wife Renée, and how their shared love of music and mix tapes shaped and enlivened their relationship until her sudden death at 31 of a pulmonary embolism.

Renée was a saucy Southern girl raised in Appalachia with coal-miner grandfathers. She was obsessed with funky clothes and fabric swatches and made her own dresses. Her (presumably) Southern-isms, made me laugh, aphorisms like “If it’s got tits or tires, it’s gonna cost you money“ and “we’re shittin’ in tall cotton now!” Crushing on Evan Dando, she says, “He must get more cookie than the Keebler elves.” As an adventure-seeking, outspoken woman, she’s exactly the right counterpoint to Sheffield’s introvert. They meet when they’re each 23, at a college bar in Charlottesville, and learn they not only both love Big Star but share the same favorite Big Star song (“Thirteen”).

It’s an easy yet humorous and heartfelt read. I’d invested enough in Renée’s character and her relationship with Sheffield that I’m not too ashamed to admit I cried at the point in the book where she dies. The book’s of definite appeal to a Rob Gordon-type such as myself. Each chapter is prefaced with the actual mix tape playlist that was part of Sheffield’s life at that time, from the late ’70s through last year. Musical references abound: favorite songs, worst songs, songs that stoke memories and crack heartstrings, songs modified for personal reasons (“The only one who could ever reach me/Was the Makin’-the-Pizza Man”).

Music sneaks into the mix indirectly, too. Part of a pop song, often edited slightly to fit the surrounding sentences, will pop up in the middle of Sheffield’s narrative¹. There’s Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (“Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.”) and Human League, by way of Philip Oakey and Giorgio Moroder (“Together in electric dreams”), among other picks absent from the college-radio-DJ playlist, like, um, Poison’s “Fallen Angel” (“Rollin’ the dice of her life”). None of these are attributed and to Sheffield’s credit, they fit where they’re placed although they distracted me at times.

The writing gets looser and more rumpled in the chapters after Renée dies, which I guess I can chalk up to the narrator himself getting shoddy. He lives a widower life on frozen steak burritos and Bushmills and sits in his back yard at night, staring into the woods at nothing. All of Renée’s things are boxed and left out in the apartment and it all reminds him of her. After too many nights dining alone at Applebee’s and returning home to watch old movies on TV, he snaps his act together, leaves the South and Renée behind and moves to Brooklyn. There’s a marvelous bit of closure during which he walks the row of benches on the fringe of the Great Lawn in Central Park and leaves one of Renée’s hats on each: a derby, a pillbox, a straw hat. Stuck to each is a Post-it on which he’s written, “Free,” and when he returns 20 minutes later, every hat is gone.

¹ Maybe you have and maybe you haven’t noticed topical references to songs and lyrics in my post titles. Glancing at my post log, this year so far I’ve referenced R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Les Applegate, Rod Stewart, They Might Be Giants, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra, Mariah Carey and the Hungarian suicide song. [back]

There are exactly nine tables for two in Westville, a comfy diner approximately the size of an A train car. Some diners (or “American traditional” restaurants, or “restaurants that serve comfort food” as they can be referred to now in New York) try too hard to meet expectations of the archetype—chrome, a Chuck Berry-intensive jukebox, checkerboard patterns on the tile floors or the menus or the tablecloths—when all I want is a clean, well-lighted place to sit, eat a sandwich and read.

Westville is just that place. The only things on the walls other than the menus are a few photos, two mirrors and a hand-painted woodcut of a trotting horse. Near my table, a glass vase of fresh flowers sat on the shelf among the extra ketchup bottles. And by the order-in window, a small rack of hooks had hanging on it someone’s purple backpack and a lavender canvas tote screen-printed with a stencil of Debbie Harry circa 1976.

I was in an odd dinner mood, craving both fresh vegetables as well as the opposite of fresh vegetables, which is bacon, so I ordered a salad special that featured four jumbo scallops wrapped with prosciutto atop arugula salad greens, orange segments, purple onions, cherry tomatoes and avocado slices: an unusual yet flavorful summery mix. My side of fries arrived in a white ceramic salad bowl big enough to serve four, easily. “Is this really a side portion of fries?” I asked my server. She said, “I always tell people, ‘Are you sure you want the side of fries? It’s a lot of fries.’” Which was strange because I don’t remember her revealing this. She was however able to sway me to try the peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream. It wasn’t as crusty as I like it but there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues like cobbler.

Westville

• 210 W. 10th St. (between Bleecker and West 4th Streets)
• (212) 741-7971
• Meal 25 of 52: salad with prosciutto-wrapped scallops ($17), Bass Ale ($5), giant salad bowl of fries ($5) and peach cobbler with ice cream ($6).

I travel light in New York but if I’m going to be away from my apartment for a day, whether for work or a weekend activity, I combat-load my man-bag with what I consider to be the essentials. See here. (And note that I took these photos in the same scale as the photo of the bag, to emphasize the relative sizes of the objects.)

Reading & Writing. my Moleskine and pens for note-taking and note-reference. A book and magazines to read. Any smallish book will do and for magazines, I favor Time Out New York and The New Yorker and occasionally New York, which I can usually pick up free at work because the guy who owns our company publishes it. I tri-fold the Manhattan subway/bus map, a Streetwise “Mini Metro,” and stash it in the back pocket of the Moleskine; those big, free subway maps distributed by the MTA are only meant for tourists, gift wrap and shelter.

Summer Stuff. I regularly cart around a Nalgene bottle of water and sunscreen during the hot months.

Shelter. Cap and umbrella.

Pharma. Duane Reade stuff. There’s aspirin, antihistamine, sugarless gum and travel wipes which are good for sanitizing hands, refreshing a sweaty face, or, um, can be useful if you simply must take a crap during travels. Not shown, on account of tininess: nail clippers.

Electronics. iPod with headphones and cell phone, fully charged in advance at home if I know I’ll be out all day. (Not pictured for somewhat obvious reasons: camera, also fully charged. Also not shown, also on account of tininess: keychain-size flash drive, for storing documents and other files to transport back and forth from work.)

Other somewhat obvious items not pictured because they’re not in my bag but on my person or in my pants/jacket pockets include my wristwatch, keys, handkerchief, change and a bunch of scraps of paper with notes written on them. In my wallet of course are cash and credit cards, but I like to always stock two MetroCards: my monthly plus a declining balance, which I try to keep around $10. I use the latter when the monthly runs out unexpectedly, I’m in a rush and don’t want to get cockblocked by the turnstile with an INSUFFICIENT BALANCE message. It’s also ideal for riding the PATH train, the turnstiles for which don’t accept declining-balance MetroCards.

Additional item I may carry when the forecast calls for a torrential downpour include a spare pair of socks. And stuff I don’t carry that others may consider would include portable food items (snack-size bags of nuts or granola bars are nice), sunglasses, lip balm, and various lady-type items if you are a lady.

I like to think I have typical New Yorker stuff in my bag (in addition to The New Yorker, ha ha), but who knows.

That voice: a tenor, so soft and naive. I didn’t know whether a man or a woman sang “My Funny Valentine” until I saw William F. Claxton’s photos of Chet Baker, trumpet in hand, jutting jaw, pompadour, full lips, high cheekbones, heavy brow. Sexy bastard. I guarantee Chris Isaak and Morrissey have at least one photo of Chet taped up in their locker.

Another photographer, Bruce Weber, made a kind of documentary, Let’s Get Lost, a eulogy in high-contrast black and white, as the jazz trumpeter/singer haunted Europe and California in the late ’80s. Chet floated then—floated like that voice, really—in a fog of cigarette smoke and methadone, recall so ragged he nearly couldn’t remember the name of a son by his first of three wives.

But that love was a long time ago, when he played with Stan Getz and Charlie Parker—imagine, this Okie trumpeting with those guys and epitomizing West Coast Cool. Chet latched onto the expat jazz scene in Paris of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Drugs dragged him down further and he spent a year in an Italian jail for possession. Back in the U.S. in the ’60s, a group of toughs jumped him and knocked out his teeth, or so he says. He never let the truth intrude if it didn’t need to.

In Santa Monica, he’s 60 but looks 80, and in the tightly cropped shots of him seated glassy eyed in the back seat of a speeding convertible at night, he resembles a more fiercely weather-beaten Kris Kristofferson. One or two anonymous pretty women accompany him wherever he goes. He horseplays on a beach and rides in bumper cars with some young fans. They’re giddy to be in his presence although they don’t much know him beyond the fact he used to be famous for something. One asks if his trumpeting sounded anything like that of Miles Davis. Not to anyone with two ears, Chet says.

A few months after the release of Let’s Get Lost, he fell from a hotel room window in Amsterdam and died. According to Weber’s postscript, Dutch police on the scene initially reported they’d discovered the body of a 30-year-old musician.

It’s criminal I’d never been to Two Boots before today. It’s a New York pizza institution! Their shtick is tastily topped pies named after celebrities and fictional characters, many of which happen to be personal heroes of mine. "The Dude," for example, is a Cajun bacon-cheeseburger confection with tasso (seasoned pork), ground beef, cheddar and mozzarella that sounds as if it’d go well with two oat sodas. I tried "the Larry Tate," a white pie with spinach, plum tomatoes and fresh garlic, while Katie opted for "the Tony Clifton," wild mushrooms, Vidalia onions, sweet red pepper pesto and mozzarella. Very tasty. Plus, the crisp crust-bottoms at Two Boots are dusted with semolina, which makes for a messier eating experience and a less-burnt crust but lends taste and texture not found in average pizza crusts. Cheap, too.

Two Boots

• 74 Bleecker St. (at Broadway)
• (212) 777-1033
• Meal 24 of 52: a slice of pizza ($3.50) and a Boylan cream soda ($1.75).

I started late getting out to the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, then had to deal with an inoperable 1 train, a poky local A and a Q that puttered across Brooklyn like the Little Engine that Could. When I arrived at the end of the line, I had to pee something fierce but the crowds and the parade creeping noisily and colorfully down Surf Avenue blocked my way to the restrooms on the beach, so I headed into town to find a public restroom. I think it was Woody Allen who once said that you can’t consider yourself a true New York City walker until you know all of your options to pee en route. So true. A half-dozen blocks inland, wondering whether the alleys and tall bushes I passed would offer enough cover, I found a McDonald’s. It wasn’t an original idea and I had to wait in line for a solid 20 minutes.

By the time I’d returned to Surf Avenue, the bulk of the parade had passed, and there were only a few stragglers, mostly paunchy, tattooed sirens and a Neptune boasting an iridescent trident and more back hair than befitting the god of the sea. I walked the beach, ducking Frisbees and darting children, and waded in the surf for a spell. On the subway ride back, I found Sam[antha] had left me a voicemail about an impromptu mini karaoke gathering with her, Iggy and myself, so I called her back and we arranged to meet at Japas 55.

We sealed ourselves in our regular private room for a few hours. In honor of Katie, we poured one out and opted for a rousing group sing-along to one of her standards and favorite Elvis song, “Suspicious Minds.” Then we called her and sang directly into the phone, adjusting the lyrics slightly. You may know the part of the chorus that goes like this:

We’re caught in a trap
I can’t walk out
Because I love you too much, baby

We changed that last line to, “Because we love you too much, Katie.” (Later I learned she listened to our serenade while sitting on a PATH train lingering at the World Trade Center station, holding her phone to her ear for the length of the song as she laughed but said nothing, which may have caused a few fellow passengers to nervously shift away from the crazy lady.)

Surprisingly, Sam, Iggy and I had even more fun when we ventured out of our room into the higher-pressure but much, much cheaper common area. Because the photos I took of Sam and Iggy dueting didn’t turn out, let’s just say this is a photo of them, even though it’s actually two strangers we met who belted out heavenly harmonies, in Japanese, no less. It captures the Sam and Iggy spirit, at least.

After a few songs, Iggy ingratiated himself with a drunken Japanese family, headed by a Dad with a Walt Disney moustache and a wavering stance. Every time his teenaged son sang a song (in Japanese), Dad would walk around the room proudly stating, “That’s my son!” The kid was really good but Dad’s boasting would have soon gotten annoying. Luckily for us, by his second round of praise, Dad also refilled everyone’s mugs at his end of the bar from a pitcher of cold Sapporo. In addition, for our little group only, he bought a giant round of the most potent sake I’ve ever tasted, with the bite and mind-jellying vapor action of low-grade jet fuel. After a few unsteady sips, Dad had planted his elbow atop the bar to try and prop up his head on the back of his hand, only he kept nearly missing. It was clearly time for the family to go, so we engaged in hugs, handshakes and vague promises to email each other our incriminating photos. We immediately claimed as our own the four untouched glasses of sake that the family left behind.

Here’s a picture of Iggy taking a picture. It’s good his eyes are obscured because to look into them is to look into the diamond-hard eyes of Lucifer himself.

A time later, a small group of actor/singer theater types arrived and sat near us. One gentleman, short with a red ballcap, was so moved by Sam’s strong rendition of perhaps the best Power Ballad ever, “Alone” by Heart, that he earnestly and sincerely asked her permission to sing it, too. (“That’s such a great song!”) Sam agreed and it was eerie that this guy nailed all the high notes, which she appreciated but which kind of wigged-out Iggy and I, and probably Ann Wilson, too, had she been around and tanked on sake.

Chelsea newcomer Hill Country is not only the friendliest BBQ restaurant I’ve been to, it’s perhaps the friendliest restaurant I’ve been to, period. And that unnerved me. I half expected Charlton Heston to burst through the door mid-meal and shout that my ribs were made out of people.

The Hill Country cult begins with the charming young lady in a white smock and a navy Hill Country logo baseball cap standing outside the door. Unexpectedly, she was stationed there not to fast-talk me inside, but to greet me as I entered. Fucking Bob Evans doesn’t even do that.

Inside, another woman wearing a white smock and a navy Hill Country logo baseball cap handed me a meal card and asked if I’d been to the restaurant before. I grow leery when a restaurant staffperson asks me this because it often signals a gimmick of preparation or presentation, something like, “For every entrée you finish, we will release a cascade of party balloons directly over your table” or “Once you’re seated, you should expect our in-house mime to enact the wine list.”

And the meal card thing is a little gimmicky, but it sort of makes sense. You pick up a cafeteria-style tray and take the card first to the beverage area, which is a vintage 1950’s style corner-shop soda cooler. There you pick your Pabst or from a variety of other bottled beers and a smattering of old-time-favorite sodas (Welch‘s Grape! Big Red!). Then you move to the station with the pork, beef and chicken, sold by the pound and stickered with a deli-style UPC. Finally, you make your way to the side-dish station for yams and mac & cheese and baked beans and such, and if your eyes are bigger than your stomach, the “Sweets & Treats” station featuring pies, cobblers, cakes and, direct from Texas, Blue Bell ice cream. Everything ordered is duly checked-off the card, which you present at a register near the front after you’ve seated yourself and eaten.

At the beverage and food-group counters, everyone is as cheerful as costumed theme-park mascots. I tell you I am not exaggerating: behind the meat-and-sausage counter stood six guys, each wearing the smock/cap uniform and each burly but friendly in a “guy behind the meat counter” sort of way. Each also had an overeager smile and attitude, poised at the ready to serve my every need, or at least every one involving a meat product. It was eerie. They all smiled and stared at me as I scrutinized the menu board above their heads and glinting teeth. After I’d decided on the pork ribs, the meat man nearest me advanced to dish out my selection and nothing appeared to give him more satisfaction then when he plunked them onto a sheet of brown butcher paper, weighed and stickered the order, then twisted the ends of the paper and crinkled up the sides to form a cozy nest of fatty, smoked goodness.

As usual I’m being a tad unfair for attempted entertainment purposes because I was eating at 5:30 p.m., when dinner hasn’t yet entered the average New Yorker’s conscious. As the time wore on during my meal, the place filled with customers, steadily necessitating those brigades of cheerful meatmongers and other servers.

The ribs were great: jumbo and oak-smoked with a crackling, snappy skin. They were dry-rubbed, so no sauce, though there was some in a caddy atop the table, along with the silverware (in a mason jar, naturally) and—hurrah!—a big stack of those individually rolled heavy-duty wet-naps. Rustic charm abounds: wood-plank floors, unfinished straight-backed wooden chairs and tables, big ol’ stacks of firewood in the back, various old photos and signs all over the place, like an antiques barn or eBay exploded in there. Seems like a great place for parties, and for people who really like really, really friendly service.

Hill Country

• 30 W. 26th St. (between Sixth and Broadway)
• (212) 255-4544
• Meal 23 of 52: a mess of pork ribs ($15.40), a small mac & cheese ($4.50) and a PBR ($4).

The sun doesn’t so much rise in Southern California as it does simmer through the smog.

En el limón cortaron los cuchillos una pequeña catedral.
Cutting the lemon, the knife leaves a little cathedral.

Pablo Neruda, “Oda al limón” (1957)

Manhattan Beach, California.

This was in the tape deck of my business colleague’s Jeep throughout our multiday trip of meetings in the Inland Empire, but instead we listened to Jack FM and, with the sunroof open as we hurtled down the expressway, we sang along to a Jet CD, poorly but passionately.

Bicycle, Southern California.

I’d like to volunteer myself as the copy editor for the ironic new-vintage T-shirt division of Urban Outfitters, as I am familiar not only with pop-culture clichés but the hortatory subjunctive.

Related: Just Because You Spellchecked... Part II and Part I. Also, coincidentally and oddly, the hortatory subjunctive was in the news this week.

All hail! It’s Andie’s birthday fiesta! Enjoy these contrasty snaps, taken by various people with my camera.

Keep your eyes on the street: July will be Predistressed Sneaker Month. As I noted in late May, Nike sneakers resembling grungy versions from the ’70s are hitting the mass market next month.

Then, today via Gothamist.com, arrives news that Converse Men’s Ramones All Star Hi, a beat-up version of the classic canvas kicks, will be ready to ship from Eastbay in July. Knowing they’ll soon be commercially available makes me not want them, despite my request last summer. I just like to complain.

In a short review on Monday, positive about the food at Ed’s Lobster Bar, less so about the rest, The New Yorker singled out the staff’s complacency and the restaurant’s “unaccommodating space.” Agreed.

When I walked in tonight, the long bar at which to dine had available only a spotting of undesirable single seats, recalling the body-bumping jamboree of the 1 train at 7 a.m. I strode purposely to the far end to survey the situation more clearly and got flagged down by the cock behind the bar (Ed?) with a “Can I help you?”

“One for dinner,” I said.

“You can sit anywhere at the bar,” he said with the open arms of a simpleton. No deal, barman. I didn’t want to sit at the bar. As a frequent single diner, I already knew the dozen small tables in the cramped back room were off limits. But the marble ledge with five stools opposite the bar appeared open and accommodating, so I took my seat there. As punishment, I was ignored by the floor staff for the next 10 minutes. No, they weren’t too busy. I’m a patient man and I’ve played this game before. It concludes with a server stopping by with an exaggerated look of concern to ask, “Oh, have you been helped yet?”

“Don’t mind me,” I didn’t say, failing to add: “I like sitting in restaurants, reading The Onion from cover to cover. I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I’m done with this Janeane Garofalo interview.”

Nah, I’m a nice guy, so I devoted my full attention to the server, not only because I was hungry, thirsty and wanted to place my order but because she was cute as a button and also wearing a halter top, the restaurant’s apparent idea of a nautical dress code. She pulled the classic Appetizer Upsell and sold me on the fried oysters, which arrived piping hot and crunchy, in an overally extravagant presentation, nestled in half-shells filled with homemade chunky tartar sauce and assorted greenery.

The lobster roll, which is the entrée at Ed’s everyone’s gabbing about, really is that good: chunks of fresh lobster meat blended with a smidge of mayo on an ultra brown-buttered oblong roll. For $23 (“market price,” according to the menu), it’s steep. I washed it down with two pints of the smutty porter, thick and bitter, with the deep taste and color of cocoa.

Ed’s Lobster Bar

• 222 Lafayette St. (between Spring and Broome Streets)
• (212) 343-3236
• Meal 22 of 52: fried oysters ($10), lobster roll (“market price,” which today was $23) and two pints of porter ($6 each).

Do you have the feeling that I’m cramming in my dinner outings to catch-up on the 26-meals-by-the-end-of-June midpoint milepost of the 52 Meals Project? If so, you are correct. But also I have been much less busy at work and therefore leaving at 5 p.m. sharp, that I might dine sumptuously and write about it for purposes of your entertainment.

So tonight I went to the Lucky Strike. Not bad but it’s more of a bar that happens to have better-than-average bar food. It’s of the comfortable yet archetypical Soho bistro, with heavy wood-plank floors, high-ceilings, age-fogged mirrors behind the pressed metal bar, etc. And the tables are copper topped! That’s neat. The place also seems to be a haven for creative young professionals just off from work. On my left, a guy was telling a girl about his trip to Cuba for business purposes. On my right, a writer and a book editor were talking about . . . writing and editing.

My penne pasta entrée featured fresh asparagus, pine nuts and shavings of what I think was Manchego cheese. Delicious, as were my two passionfruit mojitos.

What really made my day, though, was just after I exited the restaurant. On the sidewalk outside, a stooped man in a black garbage-bag poncho hassled a pair of middle-aged ladies for a handout. I overhead him mumble, “Spare some change? Penny, nickel, quarter?” Then he saw me striding his way and sized me up. “Spare a dollar?” he asked hopefully, turning on the Keane eyes as I passed him by.

“Looking sharp,” I thought to myself.

Lucky Strike

• 59 Grand St. (between Wooster and West Broadway)
• (212) 941-0772
• Meal 21 of 52: penne pasta with asparagus ($14.50) and two mojitos ($9 each).

“Eat me!” demands the cursive fiberglass mustard strung on the blatant red frankfurter hung outside Crif Dogs, an East Village snack shack. It fits like a pair of Lou Reed’s Levi’s to have that command/curse overlook this slouch of sooty brick and peeling paint on St. Mark’s Place, named for the patron saint of barristers, Venice and an Old New York that barely exists. Grubby vestiges of the latter near Crif include a tattoo parlor, thrift shop, record store, yoga studio, a place that sells a hundred different kinds of tea, a bookstore whose musty pulp-fiction scent reaches the sidewalk, a hipster cafe I’ve been to before, a famous Led Zeppelin reference and pedestrians who appear to be cloned from the DNA and clothing of Sonic Youth, circa 1986.

As soon as I’d walked in the Crif doghouse and passed the vintage Ms. Pac Man and Centipede cabinets, the pierced and tattooed countergirl, clad in strategically torn clothing, welcomed me as buddy and continued to call me that. “Yeah, you, buddy,” she added with friendly mischief after I turned to ensure there wasn’t someone more buddy-like standing behind me. She took my order and delivered it within five minutes, during which time Morrissey moped through “Will Never Marry” and the Dead Kennedys churned out “Viva Las Vegas” over the bipolar sound system. A bedraggled old guy wandered in and ordered two dogs with everything. After a pregnant pause, he wavered unsteadily and shouted “And a Pabst!” (“Comin’ right up, buddy!”)

Whatever your condition, hot dogs hit the spot. Add them to the golden scroll of foodstuffs that become improbably even less healthy yet more scrumptious when deep fried, which is Crif’s shtick. I got mine topped with raw onions and mustard so I could savor that extra-snappy, fryer-fresh knurl. Yummy, buddy.

Crif Dogs

• 113 St. Mark’s Pl. (between First Avenue and Avenue A)
• (212) 614-2728
• Meal 20 of 52: a Crif dog ($2.25) and a Stewart’s Root Beer ($1.25)

Ah, Brazil. My memory flits to the Spanish-Latin mash of Portuguese, cold rain, hot cheese sandwiches on Varig, the favellas of Rio, a soapstone giant, monkeys in the trees, potato-shaped mountains and the ocean.

There’s a little place on the corner of Elizabeth and East Houston, Colonial Cafe, which I’m legally bound to refer to as “charming,” that offers a concisely representative menu of Brazilian cuisine and fine sidewalk seating. I enjoy sidewalk seating on warm, breezy days like today although my cheap aluminum chair had been manufactured by the Hitler Youth for maximum spine-jabbing and lower-back discomfort.

My grilled free-range sirloin steak was tendony but reclined in juicy ease on a bed of mashed potatoes and topped with a black bean lime salsa and salty sautéed kale.

Throughout my meal, as a sort of serenade, a dowdy woman wearing large dark sunglasses and with two large black dogs in tow, yakked on her cell about various recent sexual escapades she’d taken part in. Fortunately I was able to devote most of my attention to enjoying people-watching, eating my dinner and enjoying my two caipirinhas, tart and bracing.

Colonial Cafe

• 276 Elizabeth St. (at East Houston)
• (212) 274-0044
• Meal 19 of 52: steak ($18) and two caipirinhas ($7.50 each).

The Paris of Paris, Je T’aime, 18 short films by as many directors taking place in the city, mostly serves as a backdrop for stories that could have taken place anywhere, save a few particularly French threads: xenophobia, parking problems, mimes and a general sense of fabulousness. And, of course, a love/hatred of Americans. When they pop up, they’re generally transplants, either tourists (in the segments by Alexander Payne, Wes Craven and the Coen Brothers) or actors (Natalie Portman in the Tom Tykwer segment and a hash-addled Maggie Gyllenhaal in the Olivier Assayas segment).

Love and loss unite the segments more than the city: there are first and last meetings of love, grief over a dead child and a dying spouse, all spiced with comedy both broad and sly, plus a touch of melodrama. Also, vampires, and one segment that somehow manages to outfruit the fruitiness of Moulin Rouge. In short, there’s something for everyone here, if you don’t mind becoming invested in the characters just as each segment ends, often without a denouement. (Although it works favorably the other direction, too: if you hate the scene or the characters, no worries, because you won’t be stuck with them for long.)

The Payne segment, about a Midwestern Jean Teasdale-type who reaches the sad realization that Paris is the only reciprocal love of her life, garnered the most laughs. She sports a fanny-pack and a high-school grasp of French, demonstrated at length in her stilted voiceover, which the audience at my screening couldn’t get enough of. Knowing beforehand that Payne directed one of the segments, this one is unmistakably from the same guy who helmed About Schmidt. In this respect, I liked how the time constraints placed on each director magnified his style; blindfolded and spun, I could have matched each segment with its brand-name director based on the combination of stars, staging, camerawork, editing and dialogue.

For example, Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy and Good Will Hunting) still has a thing for pretty, milk-skinned young men. Tom Tykwer double-times his film speed, slicing in manic cuts, with Natalie Portman taking over Lola duty. Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) opts for a single fluid shot tracking a walk-and-talk between a young girl and Nick Nolte, who looks and sounds as if he’s eaten nothing but ashtrays of unfiltered cigarette butts since his arrest. And the Coen Brothers assault a wordless, hapless tourist (whipping boy Steve Buscemi) trying to mind his own business in the Tuileries station of the Metro, in what plays like an outtake from a French remake of Barton Fink.

In one the funnier segments, Craven films in Père-Lachaise and opts not for the lurking horror I expected but the ghost of Oscar Wilde materializing to dish out relationship advice to Rufus Sewell, who’s just tripped and conked his head on the playwright’s famously ugly tomb.

A painful attempt to unite the characters of some of the segments louses-up the movie’s conclusion, featuring multi-screen edits and a jaunty, inspirational soundtrack that turns the whole thing into an HP commercial. But in general I enjoyed the multi-director/same-city concept. Let’s do this for other world cities, especially New York. Yes, yes: New York Stories, but how about that with more directors and rapid-fire segments.

I know a lot of people in the book business and I would have guessed that the book release party I was invited to tonight, for a picture book about Brooklyn strongman Charles Atlas, would have been a prim, family-friendly affair decked out with cake, stuffed animals and furniture with a minimum of sharp edges. Well, there was a cake, shaped like Charles; I got a mangled piece with one of his eyes. But other than that it was a funtime Brooklyn apartment party with no kids in sight and lots of literate, attractive hipsters. Could Knopf have done better? I doubt it.

The party was in the slightly grubby Spanish segment on the fringes of Williamsburg in the basement of an apartment building. On our way there, before stopping at a bodega for Tecate, we passed the fruitcake factory depicted below, which I like to imagine is haunted. It sure looks that way in my grainy, ominous photo. When has there ever been great enough demand for fruitcake to necessitate an entire factory, one member of our band wondered later. A fair question, and possibly the reason the factory is abandoned and haunted, or so I’ve heard.

We learned the party building overlooked the Hewes Street stop off Broadway on the J line when we made our way through a thicket of bicycles and up several flights of ancient wooden stairs to emerge on the roof with a panoramic view of Brooklyn, and Manhattan in the distance, with various bridges and airplanes visible. We were suprised to learn the group of party people on the roof actually belonged to a different party somewhere in the building, so we eventually retreated back down the spooky stairwells to the basement.

In the den area, someone was projecting episodes of The Prisoner from a PowerBook onto a painted brick wall, interrupted intermittently by shadow puppets and also when a millipede skittered onto the floor from under a couch. The apartment’s resident cat pounced on the insect and ate half of it. As the other half of the millipede attempted to escape, someone stepped on it.

There was plenty of beer and liquor, wine and champagne, and some PathMark brand cheese balls that were too salty. And speaking of salty, I enjoyed this note, scrawled on an envelope and pinned to a wall near the bathroom.

Megan led us on a grand walking tour of Williamsburg that ended up lasting longer than expected when she discovered the restaurant she’d chosen for our group had newspapered windows and a curt notice of closure from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. So instead she led us further and deeper into Brooklyn, and after asking several pedestrians and drivers stopped at lights for directions, passing under the BQE several times by my count, learning there are actually two Grand Streets, plus making our way through a neighborhood of Puerto Ricans getting juiced up for their home country’s big pride parade tomorrow, we came upon Taco Chulo.

By then we were all hungry enough to gnaw off our own legs so it worked well that the food there is delicious and inexpensive, though we quickly sought to nullify the latter half of that value by purchasing a large amount of liquor. Any Mexican restaurant that offers tequila flights, as this one did, cannot go wrong by me, so it was a special bonus to discover the food was also great. Our chips came with the freshest salsa I think I’ve ever tasted. I had a vegetarian burrito, which can be pedestrian enough, but the starkly fresh pico de gallo punched it up, with shredded cabbage, sliced radishes and sautéed potato chunks livening the taste and texture of the refried-bean-and-avocado base. They’re as large as the ones at Chipotle but much more flavorful and textural and I didn’t feel like a McDonald’s-supporting stooge when I laid down my $7.50.

Here I am sitting at the table making a face about something. Definitely not the food. Very tasty, Taco Chulo.

Taco Chulo

• 318 Grand Street, Brooklyn (between Havemeyer and Marcy Streets)
• (718) 302-2485
• Meal 18 of 52: probably like a whole basket of tortilla chips ($1 per basket), a flight of tequilla (three one-ounce shots for $13) and a vegetarian burrito ($7.50).

I was excited to learn today that I can get film for the late-’60s Polaroid Model 20 “Swinger” Land Camera I bought for about $5 many years ago at a Goodwill in Cleveland. What a fine specimen, this hefty yet ergonomic white molded plastic that feels solid in my hand. A bank of faceted flash reflectors surrounds the faceplate of the lens. Turning the bright red knob adjusts the exposure, and like some sort of mutant Magic 8 Ball, the word “YES” appears in a window below the viewfinder when it’s set correctly. At last, pressing the white button on the tip of the red knob takes the photo. The instructions are molded in raised type on the back of the camera.

Polaroid began phasing-out SX-70 film for Land Cameras like the “Swinger” in early 2006; I’m surprised it didn’t happen years sooner than that with the popularity of digital cameras. As an alternative, Polaroid recommends messing around with its 600 or 779 film cartridges to sneak them into Land Cameras, but I didn’t want to do that. Then I read that a variant of SX-70 film, SX-70 Blend, is available and has the same vivid colors, saturation and a slight blue cast as the original stuff. It’s made in the Netherlands and only available in Europe unless you go through a U.S. distributor and its hefty markup, which I did. With any luck you’ll see soon the fruits of this expense when I post some scans.

Kind of like the bridge of a low-rent Star Trek knockoff.

I checked out the Eugene de Salignac photograph exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York recently. I haven’t written about it because it didn’t rattle my bones as an excellent exhibit should. But one of Eugene’s photos, of workers in 1918 assembling a sign for the Williamsburg Bridge, reminds me of the cover for the new CD by Maroon 5.

That is all.

Looking for something unrelated, I came across this slice of a book review relating an infamous incident involving Elton John and the Pink Pussycat Boutique on West 4th Street in the Village, which Jimi used to live next door to. (Warning! Naughty language ahead!)

... legendary WNEW deejay Scott Muni once conducted an on-air interview with a very drunk Elton John, who insisted on playing deejay. (When? Possibly the ’80s; [the author] doesn’t tell us.) John read a carefully worded commercial for the Pink Pussycat Boutique, a New York sex shop, crafted to avoid an FCC indecency fine. But the glam-rocker ad-libbed: “Do you like to rim your boyfriend? Or do you just like to eat pussy? So if you’re the world’s biggest faggot, or you just like to fuck, visit the Pink Pussycat Boutique.”

Ha ha! Oh, Elton.

In a press release promoting a book on the same topic, Houghton Mifflin lists an arbitrary, A-to-Z inclusive 100 words every high-school grad should know. Lists like these make me cringe (and not the least because lists are laaaazy excuses for writing). I do favor an expansive knowledge of vocabulary. But it’s one thing to know these words and another to know when to use them in speech or writing. And the general answer to that is never, unless you’re a lawyer, a tweed-suited intellectual or a dead author such as Jane Austen.

For instance, there is seldom an instance where loquacious works better than either talkative or something colloquial like windy or wordy. I could make a similar point with half the words on the list: haughty for supercilious, steep for precipitous and so on. Yes, yes: there are degrees of meaning among synonyms. But I say, in general, if it’s Latinate (look for that telltale rattail, ous), one should suspect there exists an Anglicized word that works more clearly than that multisyllabic 16th-century antique.

And words like infrastructure and paradigm are so misused and overused, they should be banned from the dictionary. Or lexicon, as Houghton Mifflin would say.

In short, keep it simple, stupid.

Arrrgh, another summer and again the waves and cannonballs crash as the chow-mein face of Davy Jones waggles, but the biggest special effect and richest treasure of the Pirates of the Caribbean series remains Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, the unflappable, flamboyant cad. Like the previous installment in the series, this one’s too long, with a convoluted, overpopulated plot and not as much swashbuckling as befitting a summertime popcorn flick. But you can’t go wrong with Capt. Sparrow bickering with and comparing telescope sizes with Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush). And during a particularly vivid hallucination in exile, Jack gets to argue with dozens of replicas of himself. Oh, and the Keith Richards cameo: a waste. He’s got like 2 minutes screen time, lazing about while strumming a guitar and speaking in a voice that seems to be electronically modified to sound deeper and clearer than the slurring scoundrel we’ve come to love via Depp’s homage.

The New York Public Library is exhibiting a fine selection of photos from the Midtown Y Gallery, the late, great non-profit organization that let photographers, famous or otherwise, exhibit their works in the ’70s and ’80s when there were surprisingly few options in the city. (Prior to the ’80s in New York, few galleries showed only photography.) The exhibit spans the life of the gallery, from ’72 to ’96, with a focus on street photography from the late-’70s and early-’80s, offering a time-capsule depiction in gelatin-silver prints of the storefronts, the clothing, the people and the mood during a key era of the city.

There are amazing photos of Brighton Beach swimmers and bathers from the mid-’70s, nuclear disarmament rallies of the early ’80s, and, in the exhibit’s centerpiece, a series spanning a wall the length of the room called “14th Street,” taken on that crosstown artery of Manhattan from 1979-1981 by Sy Rubin and Larry Siegel. Although some of the features remain recognizable, the May’s Department Store is now a Whole Foods Market, while Jullian’s Billiards, Lüchow’s and the Palladium at Irving Place (where the Plasmatics are shown playing) have made way for New York University buildings.

Yesterday I wrote of pre-sullied shoes, and lo and behold, the fresh new kicks I ordered online from Adidas arrived today. They’re Gazelles, upmarket cousins of my favored three-stripes variety, Samba soccer shoes. I’ve always said my favorite color is red yet demonstrated scant evidence to back this up, so I went for the maroon fabric variety. Supremely comfortable and stylish, if I may be so bold.