July 2007 Archives

Having viewed the recently released trailer, I’m anticipating the Coen Brothers’ newest, No Country For Old Men. After years of lighthearted goofiness, Old Men suggests the second coming of Fargo, which does feature goofy moments yet remains bleached by dread, murder and desperation. It’s based of the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy and I was amused to come across a line from Jeffrey Lent’s review in The Washington Post a few years ago that, “His descriptive passages are lucid and visual—this novel needs no film adaptation.” Tough luck, Jeffrey. If anyone can pull off lucid and visual, it’s the Coen Bros.

Dr. Mohamed Ahmedna, a food scientist at the North Carolina A&T School of Agriculture and Environmental Science, has reportedly developed a “simple” yet mysterious process to produce allergen-free peanuts.

Along with tree nuts such as walnuts and cashews, peanuts rank among the nastiest food allergens. I’ve been allergic to peanuts since I was a kid and my revulsion to them is such that I don’t think I’d want to eat an allergen-free peanut even knowing it wouldn’t make my throat swell shut. But I’m still intrigued by Dr. Ahmenda’s work; he sounds like a modern-day George Washington Carver, having developed “a process to remove a common mold toxin from peanuts, a low-fat, high protein meat substitute, an infant formula, and antioxidants from red peanut skins.”

I think it was Joe who first mentioned that I had missed seeing Galileo’s middle finger when I was in Florence on vacation last summer. I’m still kind of bummed about that. Here’s a summary of the digit that I recently discovered at Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, which condensed the tale from Curious Expeditions:

It is a remarkable bit of irony, that finger. Venerated, kept in reliquary, subjected to the same treatment as a Saint. But this finger belonged to no Saint. It is the long bony finger of an enemy of the church, a heretic. A man so dangerous to the religious institution he was made a prisoner in his own home. It sits in a small glass egg atop an inscribed marble base in the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, or the History of Science Museum in Florence, Italy. ... As with a fine wine, it took some years for Galileo’s finger to age into something worth snapping off his skeletal hand. The finger was removed by one Anton Francesco Gori on March 12, 1737, 95 years after Galileo’s death. Passed around for a couple hundred years it finally came to rest in the Florence History of Science Museum. Today is sits among lodestones and telescopes, the only human fragment in a museum devoted entirely to scientific instruments. It is hard to know how Galileo would have felt about the final resting place of his finger. Whether the finger points upwards to the sky, where Galileo glimpsed the glory of the universe and saw God in mathematics, or if it sits eternally defiant to the church that condemned him, is for the viewer to decide.

Kelly moved from east Harlem to Inwood today so I’ve now got a good neighbor one street south. We’ve already considered stringing tin cans across the way so we can communicate treehouse style, and we may have to if the reception on the Cingular cellphones of Vincent and I are any indicator; her new apartment was a no-bar dead zone for us save the small bathroom and at one point, Vincent and I were both in there on our phones, voices echoing off the tile. It would have made for an amusing photo had anyone else been able to cram in there.

I am jealous of Kelly’s apartment, which costs a bit more than mine but is laid out in a much more modular and appealing fashion, with a small antechamber off the front door, a separate kitchen, and a clearly defined living room. Then again, I imagine every new apartment appears spacious and rich with possibility when there’s nothing in it but a friendly cat named Paddington and some guys on their phones in the bathroom.

The first carload of stuff to arrive was mostly boxes and bags—a lot of books—that Vincent and I shuttled upstairs to the Inwood apartment while Katie and Megan drove back to Harlem to pick up the next load. As soon as I saw Vincent’s badass black fingerless movin’ gloves, I knew he meant business, and we made sure and short work of shuttling the stuff up to the third floor. I’d thought we could cool down by breaking out the heavy oscillating fan I’d carried up but was surprised to find the box packed full of CDs. Instead we bought some Negra Modelo from a corner bodega and sat on the stoop to drink and chat while we waited for the ladies.

On the second trip, the car arrived with Kelly’s mattress lashed to the roof. The twine had been looped through the door frames to secure the mattress but because the scissors had been misplaced in the car, the ladies were unable to open the doors. They were not tremendously happy to see us on the stoop drinking beer as they sat trapped, exasperated and double-parked. We freed the doors eventually by picking at the knots by hand and used a comb to worry at the twine, attracting a small clot of neighborhood children who wondered aloud what we were up to.

The third trip brought the boxspring and miscellany and by then we were all tired and hungry. After a comically excruciating conversation regarding toppings, we ordered two pizzas from Pizza Nova and scarfed them down in record time. Later we sat out on the stoop with our beers and Twizzlers and chatted until late. I hadn’t realized how refreshing it would be to merely stride around the corner of a block to arrive home instead of taking a 30- to 40-minute subway ride as I normally do when I hang out with friends.

Mr. Harvey Weinstein
Miramax Films, Inc.
88 Central Park West
New York, NY 10023

How’s it hangin’ Harv? Low and to the left as usual? Seriously, though, I hadn’t seen you in forever and I can say, as your friend, the Atkins is doing a world of good. You’re down at least one chin and no less of a holy terror for it. Nothing better to temper a man’s fat than by laying low on the pasta and uncontrollable rage for a few months. I speak from experience here; scriptmen know but two kinds of exercise: jack and shit.

Anyway, I thought about our brainstorming session down in St. Barts last weekend and you were right to option Rubenstein’s article on the rare dime transporter; you don’t have to give newspapermen big billing or points and we can take fuck-all liberties with the material sans reprisal. Bottom line, we’ll do it but it needs a punchup and your patented pacing.

O.K., ready? Nic Cage plays rare coin dealer John Feigenbaum on a cross-country flight with the world’s rarest dime. I’m thinking we’d ask him to play the browbeaten shtick he’s banked on recently, plus a splash of Con Air ruggedness, and probably the hairpiece and suit from Lord of War. No one saw that one, right? Does he keep those hairpieces in storage or what? Small favor, Harv: don’t tell Nic I asked about the hairpieces.

So the entire flight, he doesn’t sleep. He’s worried about the dime getting lost or pinched. He’s in first class but drawing glances because he’s dressed in jeans and flip-flops. But let’s make ’em Crocs and pull in a triple-digit placement fee while they’re still hot. And we’ll need suspicious seatmates for Nic, to add color: maybe someone who’s down on the deal, or paid to get tight with him and cop the coin. I don’t know, fill the seats as you will, maybe a turncoat femme fatale, eventual love-interest, Helena Bonham Carter-ish. Or maybe hit younger with a tech-startup computer-expert sort. Can we get Dane Cook? The idea is it’ll be like The Narrow Margin or one of those Agatha Christie everybody’s-a-suspect things.

Now, after the flight lands at Newark, they transfer to a sedan to Manhattan, and we’ll want to spike a chase in there post haste. I mean, we’ll have been locked on the plane for hours, with the taut, psychological thriller stuff, so we need to slap awake our popcorn-stuffing ticketholders. Let’s get the guy who did the stunts for the Bourne movies. I want rolling police cars. I want explosions in Midtown. I want shit flying at the camera so the audience ducks. I think you’ll agree, Harv.

So they beat the gauntlet and arrive at the vault. Maybe the driver’s been clipped just as we started to warm up to the guy; make him a scrappy youngster with a Queens accent. Wait—maybe this could be Dane; can he do Queens?

And for the New York coin dealer, let’s get someone literate and respectable, British, gravitas: Ian Holm, Gary Oldman, Alan Rickman, whomever. Plummy is your expertise, friend; call in a favor from your period drama heyday. I’m thinking there’s a double-cross, with Feigenbaum dropping off the coin to what he thinks is the buyer’s vault—only it’s a setup!—then we can bring it all back home on a Die Hard-style run through the building.

On second thought, let’s not consider Holm. He was in Lord of War and if we already got the hairpiece and the suit, we don’t want to swipe much more.

So as you can see, we need to make some edits, though one thing Rubenstein got spot-on: this cross country trip is the stuff of intrigue! Can we get something like that on the poster? Needs finesse, but you get the idea.

You pitch ’em, I hit ’em, Harv. By the way, the check is in the mail for that JetSki. I said it in St. Barts and I’ll say it again: that dolphin came out of nowhere.

Yours,

J——

P.S. Title ideas: this is your bailiwick, Scissorhands, but consider: Spare Change, Flight of the Dime, The Rarest Coin. And so on.

My Mom’s side of the family is rural German and I fondly recall dinners of my childhood for which she’d make cabbage rolls and sauerbraten, and roulades fashioned from thin-sliced beef rolled up with bacon and a dill pickle.

Yesterday, Gridskipper ran a list of the scant few German restaurants in New York, and reading it, I realized I hadn’t yet been to a German restaurant yet in New York, so I gave Hallo Berlin a go. In addition to many stray umlauts, it serves a cornucopia of wurst, including the prefixes weiner, Alpen, bock, knock, bauern, brat, curry and liver.

I gave their roulade a try and it was bland and sopped in a sad brown gravy. The spaetzle was greasy and flavorless and the red cabbage and string beans on the side tasted fresh-from-the-can. It wasn’t all a bust, as my large glass stein of Köstritzer black beer had a pleasantly sticky-sweet bitterness about it. It seemed like bar food, although the staff and regulars were pleasant. The bunch of delivery guys at the bar were engaged in a long and heated discussion about the film versions of American Psycho and Trainspotting versus the book versions. The consensus reached was that the books are more graphic and therefore better.

So though I didn’t like my dish at Hallo Berlin much—maybe I’d have been better off with some of that wurst—I still respect my heritage and do not begrudge the country of Germany and its heavy food at large. To show there’s no hard feelings, here’s a file photo from January 2002 of me enjoying a pig ride in Köln. Where does the time go?

Hallo Berlin

• 626 10th Ave.
• (212) 977-1944
• Meal 30 of 52: roulade with red cabbage, string beans and cucumber salad, plus bread and butter, and soup ($18) and a stein of Köstritzer ($7).

I tried this tip for assembling a “$15 Mont Blanc pen.” At Staples, I bought a two-pack of black Mont Blanc rollerball refill cartridges and a pack of Pilot G2 gel ink pens, then swapped a Pilot pen cartridge for a Mont Blanc cartridge. Per the Instructable, I first had to snip a bit of plastic off the end of the Mont Blanc cartridge to make it fit in the Pilot casing.

It works, although the push-button mechanism of the Pilot sticks frequently; I have to slightly loosen the segments of the pen to “unclick” it. (This could be because I cut too little or too much off the Mont Blanc cartridge.)

The Frankenpen writes smoothly, and the ink smudges very little, which is a fine attribute in a roller-ball pen, but I don’t notice an appreciable difference over the Pilot Precise Rolling Ball pens I currently favor. And really, as I think someone else pointed out in the comments for the Instructable, the point of a Mont Blanc (other than to convey to people that you make a lot of money and are not opposed to sinking some of it into overpriced writing utensils) is that the casing is tooled and weighted for the Ultimate Writing Experience, or whatever the marketing phrase might be.

The real estate development and investment firm that owns the New York Mets occasionally invites employees at my work out to ballgame functions and tonight we had reign of a private loge, the Diamond View Suite, from which we could watch the Pittsburgh Pirates get crushed, 6 to 3. It was my first time to Shea Stadium, and it is worn and dumpy, or as we say in real estate parlance, particularly when the owner of the asset is standing right there, “tired.” Not to worry: Citi Field, the new stadium, is under construction next door, and when complete, old Shea will revert to a parking lot.

We had a fine first baseline vantage point and all the hot dogs and Cracker Jack we could handle, though it took me a while to get over the distraction of airplanes continually taking off from LaGuardia. Also I was dismayed to learn that the Cracker Jack people apparently no longer include toy prizes inside their snack but instead small paperboard cards featuring riddles and triva with rub-to-reveal answers. Lame.

Waiting afterwards for my Long Island Railroad train to arrive, I immersed myself in the drunken and ecstatic throng of fans on the platform. A particularly loud group of guys had obviously had a lot to drink, judging by the several of them who stepped down off the end of the platform to urinate near the tracks, all the while shouting, “Let’s — go — Mets!”

Guys

Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Mets!

Speaker

Westbound train arriving on track number 1.

Guys

Westbound train! Westbound train! Westbound train!

As the train pulled into the station, they moved down the platform to the last car, where a woman in a business suit was waiting to board.

“I am not getting on the same car as you guys,” she said to them, holding up her hands as if to banish them. She walked to a different car but the leader of the drunk guys shouted, “Follow her!” and they stumbled off in pursuit. On board, I could hear them shouting “Let’s go Mets!” from a car away until either they debarked in Queens or the businesswoman subdued them with her briefcase.

Shea Stadium

• 123-01 Roosevelt Ave., Flushing
• (718) 507-8499
• Meal 29 of 52: a hot dog with mustard and onions (free).

Well, other than the puking kind, I suppose.

Graffiti photographed on 18th Street, behind the Union Square Barnes & Noble.

After watching the new extended cut of the silent, historically top-ranked classic Metropolis, I wondered how this film was received when it was released in 1927. Was it relegated to the art-house circuit, as it is now, or was it the Transformers of its time? Its special effects, (then and in some cases still), likely entertained to the degree of the latter: Blade Runneresque Art Deco cityscapes, sprawling at the beginning, collapsing by the end; a Dali-like fever-dream sequence; hundreds of extras, running in panic or marching solemnly but always en masse. On the other hand, the lack of a soundtrack results in some comically exaggerated acting and the social commentary about the “heart” mediating the “head” (upper management) and the “hands” (the proletariat) is propaganda. But there’s something for everyone here, including a scantily-clad-lady sequence of the sort the Hays Code would effectively stamp out only a few years later.

Mezcal’s, in Park Slope, has a dining area out back, on a fenced-in patio snuggled between two quiet apartment buildings. That’s cool.

Mezcal’s Mexican Restaurant

• 396 Fifth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn
• (718) 965-6050
• Meal 28 of 52: quesadillas rancheras ($5.95), black bean soup ($3) and two margaritas ($6 each).

Beth and I hung out at the Siren Musical Festival on Coney Island today, the highlight of which was M.I.A., who almost didn’t make the show because of her troubles securing a visa to re-enter the U.S., possibly due to her dad’s association with a militant Sri Lankan secessionist group.

She’s been a darling of the music critics with her electronica/hip-hop/Bhangra (lotsa tabla!) blend of bass-thumpin’ body-rockin’ singsong such-and-such and sometimes she reminded me of the saucy chant-rap of Missy or, uh, J.J. Fad, which I mean as a compliment. She performed her hits but I’m behind the times and didn’t recognize anything other than what I believe was a crawling cover of the Pixies’ “Where is My Mind?” The crowd at large was deeply into the performance and its composition was likely among the most diverse at the Festival, lamented in recent years as the sort that gathers for whiny white-boy rock. This crowd, in which we were sandwiched tighter than panini cheese, experienced breakouts of freak-dancing, crowd surfing directly over our heads, on-point sing-alongs, religious ecstasy style arm flailing, beachball batting, and more pot-smoking that I’ve experienced at a concert in recent memory. Two crackers in front of us shamelessly sparked up and later became deeply entranced by their gallon jug of Poland Spring water, then did that thing where you become momentarily hypnotized by your own fingers.

Another guy in front of us sported a blonde Mohawk and was hoisting above his head a giant circa ’85 boombox, Lloyd Dobler-style; it wasn’t playing anything, he was merely hoisting it, as one might hoist a lighter at a particularly rambunctious rock concert.

M.I.A. busted out fresh threads for the occasion. If I had to describe them in one word, it would be “sequins.” Vest with gold-sequined shoulders. Tight pants fully spangled in black sequins. And Chuck Taylors coated in silver sequins; they glinted in the setting sun when she occasionally propped one up on the monitor speaker. She also wore a cap that she appeared to have swiped from the captain of Captain & Tennille, then adorned it with a red feather, and at one point she had her DJ pause so she could apply some lipstick and don a pair of Grace Jones-style sunglasses. There were some technical difficulties with a malfunctioning microphone and Siren’s requisite crappy sound doesn’t bring out any subtleties, but the DJ kept the beats flowing and M.I.A. rocked the mike with but only a few brief breaks. Good show. Check out some much better photos of it here.

The forced variety of my meals resolution obscures the fact that one of my favorite food groups is Latin American, usually Mexican. Also, I just don't eat a lot of it because the real deal is tough to find in New York. That changed today when I stopped by Red Hook Park to enjoy lunch from the Latin American food vendors there. Bienvenidos Red Hook!

Man, what a find. The vendors began ostensibly, about 10 years ago, I’m told, to feed the soccer players and fans at the adjacent field. These days (roughly May through September, on the weekends) most people show up for the food. Flanking the southeast entrance to the park are about a dozen vendors—Mexican, Ecuadoran, Salvadoran, Chilean—each set up under a makeshift tent, usually a temporary aluminum frame propping up a tarp or plastic roof, under which the food is prepared and distributed from long folding tables. Adjacent most tents are communal tables and chairs; upon placing an order, you’re asked, as you are in restaurants here, “to stay or to go?”

Selecting a vendor to patronize wasn’t difficult. I don't know if it's because I hail from a corn-intensive part of the country, but whenever I catch that robust aroma of a foodstuff featuring fresh-cooked corn, whether corn on the cob, cornbread or cornmeal mush, I get a little slobbery. That’s what drew me to one of the Salvadoran pupusa tents, which had its own array of aluminum foil-skirted griddles lined up on a folding table. The saucer-shaped treats of masa (corn dough) tortillas sandwich a selection of toppings, including beans, white cheese, a variety of meats, and unexpected vegetables, such as zucchini and loroco flowers. Each is made to order, so it takes shape slowly.

It was worth the wait for the nicely browned, bean and white cheese variety I ordered, crispy, delicious and filling, with the cheesy-beany guts creeping out the sides of the squashed disk. The elder woman of the tent who scooped the dough from a large bowl, rolled it into a ball, and passed it to the ladies on the grill to flatten, fill and fry. She formed the doughballs rapidly, without even looking at her hands or the bowl, while carrying on conversation with customers in both Spanish and English.

You could call this street food (and it’s certainly cheap and filling like street food), but the atmosphere is accommodating and communal like a picnic, and not just because it’s in a park and there’s some dudes playing soccer right over there. The spicy purple-cabbage slaw was resting in one of those 20-gallon plastic utility tubs with rope handles and my tangy-sweet cashew fruit drink was dispensed from a large picnic-style beverage dispenser.

If the vendors of Red Hook Park sound appealing to you and you are a New York local, I urge you to go while you still can. I’ve since read a Grub Street article from earlier this summer that reports the Department of Parks and Recreation will not renew the vendors’ permit because it would rather ferment a bidding war among commercial concessionaires, presumably the ones that serve the same food and drink at seemingly every street fair in New York. As it stands, September 8th will be the final day for the current vendors. This angers me and I am interested in expressing my displeasure to Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Julius Spiegel, ideally by punching him directly in the cock.

Red Hook Park

• corner of Clinton and Bay Streets, Red Hook, Brooklyn
• Meal 27 of 52: two bean-and-cheese pupusas, a side of purple-cabbage slaw and a cashew fruit drink ($5.50).

This is kind of typical of me. Because I organized a small karaoke outing tonight and because it featured both new and infrequent members, I brought along a list of what I thought would be fun songs to sing as a group. I’d prepared this in advance, drawing on my own knowledge of easy-to-sing pop favorites as well as mining the advice of the requisite hip-guy-in-a-band in our production department. I compiled and edited the selections, then alphabetized a few dozen of them in an Excel grid, Bangles through Wang Chung.

Believe me, when you’re paying by the hour and you have but a scant two to cram in as many songs as possible, you don’t want to waste time with your head buried in the karaoke song directory.

But we didn’t need the list because we came up with fun group songs on our own, including the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” “When I Come Around” by Green Day, “Piano Man” by Billy Joel, “I Want You to Want Me” by Cheap Trick, “Here Comes Your Man” by the Pixies and “The Way You Make Me Feel” by Michael Jackson. Also, more of my friends know how to sing the Beatles’ “I Will” than I assumed; there’s no such thing as an obscure Beatles song.

If you’re ever stuck eating at a Don Pablo’s, as I was tonight in Orlando in the middle of a thunderstorm that lashed the restaurant windows so fiercely it was as if the building was moving through a giant car wash, the best tip I can offer you is this: although the $7.49, 27-ounce Lotsa Rita margarita seems a better bargain versus the $7.00, 14-ounce Pablo Rita house margarita, it’s not.

When I asked about the difference between the two, my server, Antwon T., revealed that both drinks contain the same amount of tequila. “It saves you the headache from all that ice and sweet-and-sour mix,” he said, recommending the Pablo.

Point taken. Plus the jumbo-martini-style glass of the Lotsa Rita is kind of fruity. But what really sealed the deal was that I was dining early enough, I received the buy-one-get-one-free special, the only caveat of which was that my server said he was required to bring both drinks to the table at the same time, so I appeared to be some sort of lush-in-training with my jumbo glass goblets of alcohol.

My coworker thought I was nuts for photographing these ducks, which were wandering around a parking lot in Orlando. But they don’t look like any ducks I’ve ever seen. I mean, look at ’em. They appear to be wearing little red luchador masks.

An AP article yesterday noted that the U.S. hasn’t been home to the world’s tallest average people since World War II. Germans are now taller than Americans. Young adults in Japan are about as tall as their American counterparts. In Holland, home to the greatest numbers of tallfolk in the world, men average 6 feet in height. Meanwhile American men hover at an average of 5'10".

That makes me taller than average, or just plain “tall,” at 6"0’ when I stand ramrod straight (which I rarely do). According to the article, which didn’t cite its sources, tall people are healthier, wealthier and live longer than shorter people. I don’t know about all of that. Being tall isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Sometimes if I’ve been crouching for awhile, say, to better investigate the bargain-bin CD’s on the bottom shelf at Academy Records, when I stand up, the blood pooling in my legs shoots back up to flood my trunk and head and I feel a little dizzy. Or that could just be the mint “Monsters Of Rap” CD I found for $2.99.

Plus there’s the hitting of my head on things. (I can only imagine this one, like most of my gripes, can be a real problem for actual tall people: 6'2", 6'5", what have you.) My favorite is knocking my noggin on the handrails above the seats on the subway that I sometimes forget are there until I rise quickly to exit the car and crack my head.

Another favorite is incompatible shower head height. I vaguely recall a lengthy stay in a hotel room in a country with classically shorter people (France? Mexico?) where the unadjustable shower head was positioned only high enough to hit my upper chest so I had to contort myself to wash my head.

Also, the gangly proportions of tall people can complicate shirt-shopping. I find that in a medium, the sleeves are just right but the chest can be as billowy as a pirate shirt. In a small, the chest is just right but the sleeves are too short. In a nutshell, this is why tailors still have jobs.

Lately I seem to be doing a lot of helping short and/or old ladies heft their 200-pound wheeled suitcase into the overhead bins on airplanes. Sometimes I feel like asking these people, “If you’re only 5’2", why would you carry on a suitcase approximately your size and weight when you know you can’t lift it into the overhead using your T-Rex arms?” Then I realize the answer is, “Because there will always be a gallant sucker such as myself to do it for them.”

Don’t get me started on the legroom aboard said airplanes.

On the plus side for being tall: no Napoleon complex, better views at movies, concerts and sporting events and a presumed ability to dunk.

A business colleague I’m going on meetings with this week in Florida has lived here since she was two years old and like a lot of people in Tampa seems to know exactly when it’s going to storm. It storms a lot here in the summer, nearly daily, I’m told. Tampa’s like the thunder capital of the world (or is it lightning?). This morning, my colleague predicted, under bright sunny skies with giant puffy white clouds, that a storm would break around 4 p.m. It sure didn’t look like it to me, but as foretold, round about 4:15 p.m. there arrived magnificent lightning, spiking the sky with light, then a downpour that knocked bark and fronds off the palm trees, which bent back and forth in the high wind. About an hour later, it stopped, the sun re-emerged and evaporated most of the puddles.

I’m in Tampa on business, pretty early on a Sunday because I like flying JetBlue and the only flight they had that wasn’t a total ripoff got me in around 2 p.m. I’ve done my work. Now I’m sitting around watching bad television because there’s nothing remotely interesting to see or do within a two-mile radius, it’s like 95 degrees outside and I don’t have a car. I watched Happy Gilmore and am a little ashamed to admit that although I find Adam Sandler’s movies stupid, he makes me laugh at times, especially when his characters get angry, whether at a golf ball or Bob Barker. I’ve already paced around my hotel room and a brisk circuit of the hotel lobby revealed that the only event being held here tonight is “Mrs. Rosa Quijano”s 95th Birthday Dinner Buffet,” from 3 to 5:00 p.m. at the St. James Restaurant. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, I’ve noticed the catering sales manager at the hotel has the same last name. They’re a rowdy bunch but not so rowdy they’d notice the bored looking guy partaking of their liquor.

I got nothing for today, so I thought I’d lazily link to this post on Boing Boing that is a reminiscence of some of Sesame Street’s creepiest moments. Ah, the memories.

The toughest element of the again-languishing 52 Meals Project is that it’s just so easy to return to a familiar restaurant for familiar, comfortable food. Sometimes I just want food I know I’ll like because I’m not up for the crapshoot challenge presented by a new place. Though I didn’t regret stopping by the Blue Ribbon Bakery Market tonight for an open-faced toast sandwich with cheese and sliced sturgeon because the counterguys were jiving to a lost funk classic from 1975, “Bouncy Lady,” by a group called Pleasure, apparently obscure enough to not even have their own Wikipedia entry. I had to ask the Blue Ribbon guys what song it was because I’d never heard it. I agreed with them that few groups other than one named Pleasure could extol the virtues of a bouncy lady.

In a happy coincidence, given the movie I saw last night, I read an article on the front page of the Marketplace section of today’s Wall Street Journal (“Lead Toxins Take a Global Round Trip” by Gordon Fairclough) that the Chinese are unwittingly returning to America its exported toxic waste. According to recent studies, costume jewelry, of the sort sold in malls and discount stores in the U.S., often contains high levels of lead, which comes from computers and other electronics that are discarded by Western countries, then shipped to China as landfill scrap or for recycling.

This toxin could be racking up serious frequent-flyer miles. Most electronics sold in U.S. are made in China. So the lead starts there, as solder for electronics that are shipped to the U.S. where they’re eventually discarded and shipped back to China where the lead is stirpped, made into jewelry and shipped back to the U.S.

The documentary Manufactured Landscapes makes more of an overt political and environmental statement than Edward Burtynsky’s mammoth manmade panoramas, the results of what he calls “the pursuit of progress”: heaps of waste or recyclable materials; earth scarred from the extraction of copper, nickel and iron ore; literal mountains of coal, photographed from such a distance they resemble densely forested hills.

With a nudge of focus, Burtynsky’s subjects could be Sebastião Salgado’s men bent by the labor of imposing environments. But his most recognized shots don’t feature people at all and if they’re there, they’re included only as yardsticks of scale, dwarfed by their surroundings.

Director Jennifer Baichwal reveals these details only implied by Burtynsky, the creators and tenants of these landscapes, which turns the film into more of An Inconvenient Truth than a documentary on Burtynsky, which is what I’d been hoping for, though the details are engrossing and disturbing. Something approaching half of all computers disposed in bulk (charmingly termed “e-waste”) end up in Asia, where they’re harvested for valuable metals in the circuit boards. In a snip of voiceover from a lecture given by Burtynsky, he notes some villages where this recycling takes place have become so toxic with lead and heavy metals that the water is no longer safe to drink and must be constantly trucked in.

The documentary also highlights China’s manufacturing sector, showing madly repetitive work. A woman assembles a circuit breaker by hand in about a minute: she can crank out 400 per shift, she says proudly, and she’s been at it for six years.

Some of the most intriguing images come from the construction of the Three Gorges Dam project, which Burtynsky was invited by the Chinese government to document earlier this decade. It’s startling that many of the more than one million people displaced by this project have been responsible for demolishing their own cities.

“It’s a very broad view,” says a Chinese man, viewing a Polaroid Burtynsky has taken of him waking through the dam project with a bundle of sticks on his back. “It’s hard to see the details.”

I saw a movie poster for the recent stinker Captivity on the C train after work today, and my eye was drawn to the MPAA ratings reasons. These things are great and it’s obvious moviemakers love them, particularly for R-rated movies; they’re meant to warn but they’re essentially mini-reviews that boil down the movie to its essence for any teenager hoping to catch a glimpse of a disembowelment and/or Elisha Cuthbert’s cleavage.

Anyway, as shown in my photo, the ratings reasons for Captivity are

FOR STRONG VIOLENCE, TORTURE, PERVASIVE TERROR, GRIZZLY IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND SOME SEXUAL MATERIAL

Whoops! Unless there really are brown bears trundling amid the ultraviolence, the copywriter meant to suggest the images are grisly.

With four of ’em under my belt, I think it’s time the recurring “Just Because You Spellchecked” posts got their own tag; so let it be written, so let it be done.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times (“Where Little Is Left Outside the Camera’s Eye” by Mark Landler) asserted that since the Ring of Steel, developed in response to IRA bombings of the early ’90s, video surveillance has become widely accepted in Britain, “viewed as a fact of life rather than an Orwellian intrusion.” With an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras in the country, a Londoner can be caught on tape hundreds of times a day, the article claims.

Then, in the paper today, a story (“New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown” by Cara Buckley) reported that by the end of this year, more than 100 cameras will have started monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, “the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.”

If [the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative] is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.

That staff is a key difference; there are already about 250 cameras placed in high-crime areas of New York City, but that video must be downloaded; the cameras of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative would transmit live video instantly.

Will the city approve and follow-through on this or will it end up the meaningless bleating of politicians aroused, like (apparently) that massive subway station camera campaign (strangely mentioned by neither Landler nor Buckley) that the city announced in response to the London Tube bombings of July 7, 2005?

And even if such a system were to be approved, could there ever be enough staff to track potentially thousands of live feeds? Cameras like these are really useful only in helping sift through ashes, at least until technology gets much more adept at real-time detection of “suspicious behavior,” whatever that might constitute in New York City. The cameras of London, for instance, prevented neither the Tube bombings nor the attempted car bombings last month, though they were useful in detecting suspects in the aftermath.

Due to a plane bedeviled by mechanical troubles, I was stuck late this afternoon at the Toledo Express Airport for two hours and 25 minutes. At one point, I was literally the only person in the main gate area, which leant an otherworldly, 28 Days Later atmosphere. As I eventually did, I learned the other three people on my flight back to Cleveland had retreated through security to the check-in area to await further updates. Realizing I’d miss my connecting flight in Cleveland, I phoned Continental, but they weren’t much help in booking another flight tonight, instead temporarily signing me up for a crack-of-dawn flight in to Newark tomorrow. I was fully prepared to stay overnight at my parents’ house in Cleveland.

By remarkable coincidence, as I deplaned in Cleveland, I overheard that the flight right next door was nearly finished boarding for LaGuardia. Without comment, I handed my now-invalid boarding pass to the check-in woman there, just to see what would happen.

“This isn’t for this flight,” she said after glancing at it.

“Can it be?” I replied, exuding all the charm I could muster through my weariness.

After a flurry of typing at a computer, she printed me a boarding pass and rushed me on board to take one of two remaining seats. I got to be that jerk who boards late and inevitably has a seat at the rear so the other passengers can form a gauntlet of annoyed glances and frowns. I don’t know what sort of strange magic that gate lady cast to get me on board so quickly, but I later noticed the stub of my boarding pass listed my first name as Abraham.

I’ve been friends with Joe since junior high and for a while there in the late-’80s and the ’90s, we’d go to Cedar Point every year. As we left the park at the end of the day, elated and with that compressed-muscle feeling that we were still aboard the coasters, my tradition would be to buy a souvenir map of the park. We enjoyed unfolding it and considering where among the sparse or forested plots of lakefront property the next great ride would be built.

With work and distance, Joe and I don’t hang out as often as we used to, but in the interim, those maps grew fuller, as did Joe, when he met a remarkable woman, Andrea. I realize now that it’d be trivial yet interesting to chart the parallel progress, matching additions to those maps with milestones of their relationship. For instance, the year they saw Gosford Park together, Wicked Twister appeared. I’m sure that means something.

But to the point, Andrea liked roller coasters as much as Joe. More improbably, she shared his passion for reality television, odd eBay purchases, Broadway musicals and their soundtracks, obscure facts of American history and geography, and the sort of murder-mystery parties where at least one guest ends up “dead” on the floor in the kitchen. Both Joe and Andrea are funny, smart and sensible people, yet assuredly not the same person. She provides the brassy counterpoint to his lower register, and I don’t think I have to worry about them buying matching embroidered jean jackets anytime soon.

A guy can make questionable choices in girlfriends. The friends who know him best may find her annoying or inappropriate but remain silent because of their loyalty to him. It happens. But that’s not at all the case with Andrea and Joe and it’s my impression his friends suspected she was The One before he fully reached that conclusion himself. When he called to let me know of the engagement, I said something like, “I was wondering when this would happen, by which I mean all of us were wondering.” This much I didn’t expect: he proposed to her on the Magnum XL-200, which didn’t shock her as much as the fact he’d been carrying the ring in his pocket all day, including aboard rides that went upside-down.

“It’s insured!” he was quick to point out.

At Joe and Andrea’s wedding today, the metaphor of marriage and roller coasters was a theme. It’s true: both are thrilling, with twists and turns, unexpected or otherwise, with dizzying highs and lows. And in this metaphor, friends and family are there, too, because everyone has season passes. We’re “along for the ride,” you might say, and at the end of the day, everyone gets funnel cakes.

Bonus mp3: “Love Rollercoaster” by The Ohio Players (1975).

I’m in Toledo for the wedding of my friends Joe and Andrea and I must say, there are many errands to run. I accompanied Joe on many a trip out for random last-minute things, everything from purchasing pink wrapping paper to picking up the rings. I also helped fold programs for the ceremony, cut the dinner menus for the reception and ate a bunch of the salt-water taffy that will be part of the amusement-park-themed amuses-bouche. It’s shaping up to be the blockbuster event of the summer.

Before today I hadn’t been to Cedar Point in probably 10 years, so it was a thrill to go there with my friend Joe. I will admit there was a moment when I wondered if I was too old for the lines and lurches of amusement park rides and I’m pleased to report the answer is “not just yet.”

Although I had catching-up to do on the newer rides, we started with the Blue Streak, the oldest coaster at the park and one my Mom rode once when she was pregnant with me, which may explain a few things. Afterwards we churned around washing-machine style on maXair. Up to 50 people sit, feet dangling, on the perimeter of a giant wheel which rotates as it swings back and forth on a giant pendulum. Great hang time!

Shaped like a “U,” the Wicked Twister sports 215-foot-tall vertical posts resembling helixes. With riders secured in seats suspended from the track, the thing whooshes backwards and forwards a few times like a demented half-pipe, sans skateboard. Although we didn’t take a front seat, Joe reports that sitting there gives one the sensation that the ride will wing right off the tip of the “U,” visible at the top of my photo below.

For old-times sake, we took the front seats of the first car of the Magnum XL-200, which commands an impressive line despite its age. (I was in junior high and rode it the year it opened!) Its stark, 205-foot first hill, which features the most effectively ominous click-track in the park, affords chilly breezes and grand views of nearby Lake Erie. It remains breathtaking even if it has been rendered surprisingly quaint; the first hill of the Millennium Force, which opened in 2000, is more than 100 feet taller.

I felt as if I was setting a new land-speed record on Top Thrill Dragster, which hurls down a straightway, twists up, over and down the equivalent of a 42-story skyscraper (or phallus, as some insist), then beats a retreat straight back to the station. The whole thing takes about 15 seconds, most of which I spent wondering if my viscera would return to their original, uncompressed positions.

Taking over the real estate and part of the Frontiertown-style mill building of the late, great White Water Landing (“The Log Ride”), the park’s newest coaster, Maverick, is a low-slung, twisty bugger with periodic jet propulsion. We waited the longest for this one as storm reports halted the queue for about 45 minutes. Afterwards, we refreshed ourselves with overpriced Chik-Fil-A lemonade, waffle fries and chicken sandwiches, then took a digestion-aiding ride down memory lane on the Gemini and, almost, the Mine Ride, which shut down due to mechanical difficulties just as we were ready to board.

Closing the day, we queued up for what turned out to be my all-around favorite coaster, Millennium Force, the aforementioned first hill of which felt even more thrilling in the dark. Combining pleasing proportions of hills, banks, twists and tunnels, the ride boasts a super-smooth speed (a maximum of 93 mph!) with none of the head-boxing or vertebrae misalignment resulting from certain other big-‘n’-tall coasters. A DJ in the pre-ride queue spun goofy pop songs while we waited. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” really is more fun when several hundred sweaty people are singing along.

Sam and Iggy invited Andie, Eric and I to an Independence Day picnic at The Pool, a banked clearing in Central Park of tall trees and a pond fringed by willows and algae. It’s probably the most pastoral part of the park, even with the stray basketball floating on the surface and a guy casting for garbagefish. We had lots of great food and drink, and amused ourselves by lazing about and taking photos with Iggy’s wide-angle-lensed camera.

I was aiming for a vodka-tonics-at-the-afterparty vibe with the soft-synth beats and breathy lyrics of this mix. I daresay I succeeded.

To promote The Simpsons Movie, 7-Eleven has temporarily transformed a dozen of its stores to resemble the Kwik-E-Mart convenience store from the animated series. What’s more, those 12 stores, plus most of the chain’s 6,000+ other North American locations, are carrying products previously available only in Springfield: Slurpees have been redubbed Squishees and customers can also buy Krusty-O’s breakfast cereal, Buzz Cola and donuts with pink frosting and sprinkles.

At the Kwik-E-Mart I visited tonight, on 42nd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, the decor is well done, from the striped Kwik-E-Mart logo covering the store’s original external signage, to the show-quoting signs and giant cutouts of the series’ main characters posted inside. The clerks even wear lavender and green shirts inspired by Apu’s own uniform. On the donut case I noticed a small sign referencing Apu’s rebuff to Homer’s overzealous self-service donut-topping that “A Mounds bar is not a sprinkle. A Twizzler is not a sprinkle. A Jolly Rancher is not a sprinkle, sir.”

The level of Simpsons fandom is such that a reference to the show cannot be obscure; it can only be slightly less-referenced. My favorite among these is the life-size image of Jasper trapped in suspended animation inside a freezer case. (See ““Lisa the Simpson.”)

I realize 7-Eleven chose to develop the most-recognizable and multi-referenced food/beverage items from the show because they can’t afford to be too obscure with stuff that’s taking up valuable shelf space. But I spot at least three missed opportunities.¹

1. Duff beer. “Can’t get enough of that wonderful Duff!” That shit would’ve flown off the shelves and instantly appeared on eBay and at frat parties nationwide. The reason for its non-existence, according to an Associated Press article today, is that 7-Eleven and Fox felt that selling Simpsons-themed alcohol to promote a PG-13 movie may very well have been “a tough call” but “didn’t seem to fit.”
2. Cheers for Krusty-O’s. Jeers for not including a Jagged Metal Krusty-O inside each specially marked box. C’mon, it could’ve been just a plastic jagged metal Krusty-O.
3. My background in the candy business requires me to ask: why no Krusty Klump Bar and Krusty Klump Bar with Almonds? Get the lead out, private-label chocolate manufacturers.

Yet judging by the crowd of nerds taking pictures for their blogs and judging by the Kwik-E-Mart-style gouging on the Simpsons merchandise (I bought a 12-ounce can of Buzz Cola for 96 cents), this could be a profitable publicity stunt for the chain.

¹ Among readily conceivable foodstuffs, that is. Because, yes, as a white male, age 18 to 49, I would like to buy some Nuts and Gum and Skittle Bräu. But let’s be realistic. [back]

During the rolled-shirtsleeves vigor of the Great Depression, the WPA built a pool at McCarren Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, larger than three Olympic pools combined and able to hold 6,800 swimmers. Long since dry and in disrepair, it’s become a skateboarders’ paradise and a venue for free open-air movies and concerts. The scabs of aquamarine paint stuck to the ground still smell of chlorine.

Beth and I took the G train over there after lunch for a concert series featuring three bands we’d never heard of. It was free and the weather was sunny and breezy, so why not? Illinois reminded me of a more cheerful, less reverby My Morning Jacket. Dengue Fever arrived billed as ’60s-style psychedelic-Cambodian pop-rock, which made me expect a southeast Asian version of Os Mutantes, but their loungey background music inspired no body rockin’.

The main attraction, Man Man, cranked a rollicking set with barely a breath between songs that included speed-metal fist-thrusters, tribal drum-and-bass and lurching Tom Waits-style wailers with junkyard percussion, xylophone and gruff vocals.

During the quieter moments, Beth and I discussed Vice-style “Dos & Don’ts” in reference to the innumerable hipsters on hand, paying Joan Rivers-caliber attention to the vintage housedresses and ironic T-shirts. Hipster boys, those skintight jeans gotta go; although if anything about the sight of your Slim Jim legs makes us happy it’s that your sperm may be dying horrible boiling deaths and preventing procreation of yet more tightly trousered young Turks. Hipster girls, we love you but sometimes you try too hard. Take a look in the mirror before you go out and subtract one article from your Punky Brewster stylings, whether it’s that orange Pleather belt the width of a snowboard or those crocheted florescent yellow-green leg warmers.

And the tats. My goodness, what variety. It’s no more just stars, flaming skulls and "Winona Forever"s. One guy’s leg featured that iconic sketch from the cover of The Little Prince. A+, you lovably obtuse rascal. Another fellow’s lower-leg ink depicted the bugeyed head of a Boston terrier hidden among a swirl of paisley curlicues. I remain uncertain whether this is a Do or a Don’t.

At one point, as I stood in line for a frosty cup of Brooklyn Ale, I overheard a young couple behind me discuss the SummerScreen film schedule:

Girl

How about Night of the Hunter?

Boy

That has a lot of killing. I don’t know if it’d be good for the kids.

Girl

How about Purple Rain?

Boy

No, they shouldn’t watch that. They should be introduced to violence before they’re introduced to Prince.

What a fiasco for me to subway from home to Park Slope with insufficient planning. The A train magically became an F train south of Fourth Street, so I thought I could transfer to the M at Delancey Street. But there didn’t seem to be a way to take that train downtown from that station and regardless, I learned, the M only runs on weekdays. Criminy. I hailed a cab instead and for most of the ride the driver complained about the suicidal nature of New York City bicyclists as he attempted to ram a few of them off the road.

Lunch at Maria’s Mexican Bistro was spicy and tasty, once I got past a short and snotty young woman who squinted at me as if I were a cretin when I asked her how to get to the restaurant’s secluded patio. In fairness, it’s more of a walled-in garden area than a patio, but still. To show us she cared, the same woman took our order, brought us someone else’s entrées, then whisked them back and eventually got it right.

My vegetable tacos were made with what tasted like homemade corn tortillas and the vegetables were unassailably fresh. Good margaritas, too.

Maria’s Mexican Bistro

• 669 Union St. (at 4th Avenue), Brooklyn
• (718) 638-2344
• Meal 26 of 52: margarita ($6) and vegetable tacos ($6).