September 2007 Archives

I don’t like to shop, especially for clothes, although I’m trying to get better at it lest I end up that guy unironically wearing his Members Only jacket. I’m still searching for that mythical store that will allow me to pick up all I need to dress nicely for work—pants, shirts and ties—in one swoop but I haven’t found one that meets my demands for competitive pricing and crisp styling.

I think I’ve solved the shirt portion of the puzzle, though. I must give credit to the folks at the Japanese¹ chain Uniqlo, which has planted its sprawling U.S. flagship store on Broadway near Prince Street, and whose shirts I’ve come to appreciate for their trim European-style tailoring and colorful yet relatively conservative styles.

Since it opened here in late 2005, Uniqlo has been compared to The Gap, and they do carry unfussy styles and just “the basics,” but their tailoring is much nicer and their quality finer than The Gap, with a price hovering somewhere between the merchandise of that chain and Banana Republic. Plus, their small fits me more or less perfectly, where the sleeves of that size anywhere else would be too short. A few weeks back I bought a few Uniqlo “fine wrinkle-free” long-sleeved button-down dress shirts to see how they’d fare under multiple wearings and washings, and I was pleased they returned from the laundromat pucker-free, unshrunken and not faded. Best, I can confirm they are indeed wrinkle-free. I’ve already been back to purchase a few more. Yay, Uniqlo!

¹ Although as with many other apparel merchants, most of their stuff is made in China. [back]

Crossing Nagle Avenue in my neighborhood this morning on my way downtown for some belated used-CD shopping, I ran into Vincent and Megan who were on their way to help my neighbor Kelly move a futon into her new apartment. I decided to join the merry band and we walked the dozen blocks uptown together to the woman who’d advertised the sofa-bed on craigslist. If we’d had more time, we would have stopped by the intersection of Cumming Street and Seaman Avenue for a quick photo-op at that infamous signpost.

Let it be said: futons are a bitch to move. The mattress easily weighed as much as a tackling dummy and this one even looked like one once we’d bound it with twine and bungee cords and propped it up on a hand cart to wheel haltingly down Broadway. We took turns pushing it and hoisting the unwieldy wooden slats and frames we’d disassembled and by the time we’d deposited everything in Kelly’s apartment, we had a thirst for cold beers.

Despite my moaning that there’s not a good place to get general diner-style food in my neighborhood, Kelly proved to be much more perceptive than I by leading us to the Park View Cafe for lunch, near the corner of Dyckman and Broadway. It’s got a full-featured diner-style menu with many salads and sandwiches, steaks and pasta, and tasty omelet-intensive breakfasts served late daily. Although they’re not 24/7, they’re open daily until 10 or 11 p.m. And they deliver! I chowed down on a portabella mushroom sandwich and fries with a Negra Modello.

Park View Cafe

• 219 Dyckman St. (just off Broadway)
• (212) 544-9024
• Meal 44 of 52: portabella mushroom sandwich platter ($7) and a cold beer ($3.50)

I can’t say I enjoyed Oldboy, a recent Netflix rental; I thought it would be more in the vein of chop-socky/gunplay/action-adventure when it’s instead a discomforting psychological thriller about torture, revenge and masochism, set to a pleasant orchestral score, much as A Clockwork Orange is set to a pleasant orchestral score. Consider that Oldboy’s squirm-worthy scenes include but are not limited to:

• tooth removal by hammer claw
• tongue removal by knife
• vivid hallucination of ants under skin
• man jabbed in eye with toothbrush
• man killed with compact disk
• consumption of live octopus

A set of automatic doors at the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport, the ones just beyond luggage carousel #1, has been rigged to play prerecorded messages as part of a Broward County public art piece called “Talking Vestibule” by Jim Green. I’ll bet this guy knows of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its inanimate objects infused with “Genuine People Personalities,” including doors with “a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”

With Green’s doors, about once every three opens, there’s a synthesized multinote chime, then the disembodied voice of a man or woman states one of the following, with the diction, cadence and enthusiasm of Mr. Moviefone:

• “Hi there! You’re going to have a great day!”
• “You’re beautiful!”
• “Hello there! You’re looking good today!”
• “Hi there! You make me smile!
• “It’s a beautiful day. Nice shoes!”

The reaction among the travelers passing through the doors wasn’t notable as I observed while waiting for my checked bag to emerge onto the conveyor belt. But I appreciated the contrast between the dueling sets of airport recordings: the vestibule’s cheerfully declarative mood versus the airport’s monotone imperatives about threat conditions, unattended vehicles and clear plastic zip-top bags.

Green’s other sound installation at the airport is part of luggage carousel #1 itself. Instead of a grim buzzer signaling the waiting crowd to press forward for the lurching procession of bags, a jaunty 10-second merry-go-round pump-organ ditty plays, which garnered a few incredulous laughs.

I don’t know the correlation between strange doodles and real estate conferences, but like at least twice before, I happened upon another odd scribbling at a real estate conference today in Orlando. It resembles a demented Homer Simpson.

Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, has been trying for nearly a decade to determine how Manhattan would have looked to its first European explorers, circa 1609, in an effort he’s named the Mannahatta Project¹. When it’s completed, it will include, as a recent New Yorker profile on Sanderson noted, “a virtual re-creation—a three-dimensional computer map—in which you will be able to fly, as it were, above the island, land wherever you want, and have a look around. In place of your local cell-phone shop or O.T.B. parlor, you may see a trout stream, or a black bear browsing amid blueberry patches.”

I’d read this article on my flight to Orlando this morning and was thinking about it after arriving at the hotel here that I’m staying in tonight, the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center.

As its centerpiece, the hotel boasts a 4.5-acre, perhaps dozen-story-tall glass-enclosed atrium that includes “a variety of themed environments”: there are streams and ponds and actual alligators and giant lizards in the Everglades section, there’s a giant yacht floating in Key West on which businesspeople can throw parties, and throughout there are towering palm trees, flowers and other plants, pools of koi, waterfalls and rocky outcroppings.

All of it is lit by the sun through the atrium dome, like a biosphere, although the glass is thick enough and angled as such that I couldn’t even hear when it was raining, to the degree that I was startled when I walked outside to find it storming. Indeed, the atrium trumps the outdoors and its swaths of scrub grass run through by highways, new subdivisions and strip malls.

Earlier, I was checking out one of the ballrooms for a meeting my company’s staging here tomorrow and while a hotel staff member was pointing out the grand balcony accessible through a set of double doors, she noticed a ubiquitous-in-Florida small lizard skittering around at the base of the door. She cracked the door, patiently shooed out the lizard and apologized. Gotta keep the environment at a controlled level of reality.

¹ I find it interesting that Inwood, my neighborhood and Sanderson’s favorite part of Manhattan because of its largely unchanged topography and forestry, is one of the few parts of the city where one “can get around successfully with a 1782 map.” [back]

Authors of course draw on experience from travels for fiction. They can’t make up everything from scratch, after all. This isn’t a revelation: Hemingway’s adventures in World War I informed his novels and Melville’s trips at sea informed his, and so on. But I read two articles today discussing a novel and a screenplay centered around spur-of-the-moment journeys, each of which were written based on trips taken explicitly to inform said novel and screenplay. Which also probably isn’t unique, though I find the coincidence appealing.

In a review of the Beats in general and of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in particular, reviewer Louis Menand writes in the October 1st issue of The New Yorker that although Kerouac began the book before his first cross-country drive with Neal Cassady, the trips for On the Road “were made for the purpose of writing On the Road. The motive was not tourism or escape; it was literature.”

Likewise, in a profile of Wes Anderson this week in New York magazine (“The Life Obsessive With Wes Anderson”), author David Amsden writes that Anderson and his cowriters, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, reserved a month to travel through India by train in order to write most of the script for the director’s newest film, The Darjeeling Limited:

“I guess we went to India as research,” says Anderson, “but the more precise-slash-romanticized description would be that we were trying to do the movie, trying to act it out. We were trying to be the movie before it existed.”

A USA Today article further notes the trio ended up in the Himalayas with a bulky printer in tow, just like one of the characters in the movie. “We literally finished the script on the highest mountain we went to,” Anderson says.

Taking out my trash this afternoon, I came upon Rodolfo, the building’s super, sitting out back on the patio with two roosters. A friendly fellow with a shaved head and omnipresent cigar, Rodolfo explained that he ran into some friends in the park who asked if he wanted the roosters and he thought, why not. So now they bunk in the building’s basement adjoining his apartment. He feeds them corn and sometimes bread, lets them roam around in the garden, and hoses them down when it’s hot and sunny like today.

The young one is two months old and spends most of his time flopped on the ground, as if still exhausted from the rigors of birth. But when I tried to pick him up, he came alive and darted around in annoyance, then stood just out of reach to bob his head and train a beady eye on me to gauge the possibility of further encroachment.

The older one is six months old and already the archetype rooster, with regal red comb, a frisson of earth-tone feathers covering his neck, wings and bulbous body, and sticklike yellow legs ending in feet with curiously elastic toes. He seems to spend most of his time preening and investigating bits of gravel and cigarette butts as potential food sources.

I asked Rodolfo, who’s from the Dominican Republic and whose English isn’t great but a dictionary better than my Spanish, if the older rooster was crowing yet. He didn’t understand my verb, so I said, “Is he, you know—cock-a-doodle-doo!”

Rodolfo laughed and said not yet, confirming that the onomatopoeia is different in Spanish: “In my country, every day at 5 a.m., quiquiriquí!”

Saturday, September 29, 2007 Update: I heard a rooster crow for the first time today. It happened at 11 a.m. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Never in the illustrious 2.75-year history of the 52 Meals Project has a restaurant I wanted to attend been closed upon arrival. Until tonight.

I’d called ahead to get the hours for Cafe Glechik, a Russian place on Brighton Beach recommended by a Russian ex-coworker, and a woman had, in hesitant and broken English, claimed the hours of operation for Saturdays were “10 to 7,” which didn’t seem right. The place was shuttered and locked upon arrival; so much for the plastic bottle of cold Smirnoff in my bag (Cafe Glechik is B.Y.O.B.). Which lead to another first of the 52 Meals Project: in a strange and unfamiliar neighborhood, how does one find a decent place to eat when all appears closed or bodega-related?

Why, stop a stranger.

“How about . . . that guy,” Carmella said, pointing to a random pedestrian in the fast-moving crowd on the sidewalk of Brighton Beach Avenue. He was a solid man, stubbly and balding, with a furrowed brow, as one often is in this city while striding purposely forward with a briefcase. But after I excused our intrusion and explained our plight, he was happy to discuss our options in a thick, Eastern-European (Russian?) accent. The Russian restaurants on the Boardwalk are fancy, he said, and too expensive, which he defined as having entrees in the $20 range. He was keen to steer us toward a Turkish restaurant instead, but supplied directions for both it and the Russian joints before we parted ways. Carmella and I decided to give the Turkish place a try and biked off to Istanbul Restaurant.

Our waiter, Sohrab, had a mystical stare that seemed to pass through us as he took our orders and presented our dishes; we thought maybe it was a Turkish thing but probably more likely drugs. I had the baby lamb shish kebab, which arrived, as the menu promised “grilled to delight” while Carmella opted for the Izgara Köfte meatballs, which were actually mini meat patties. Everything was O.K., perhaps bland, and we weren’t flabbergasted; the presentation wasn’t engrossing, either, as both of our entrees arrived with the same slaw-based accouterments and garnishes, as if churned out of a cafeteria assembly line.

The view from our sidewalk seating of the bay was picturesque, with a mist in the distance and low buildings lining the water, strangely pretty and unlike New York, resembling Amsterdam, or California, we thought.

I notice now, at the bottom of the receipt, the slogan “Our place is yours until you are full.” We certainly were, but I can tell you there’s nothing better to burn down a belly of Turkish meats than to take an hour-long bike-ride through Brooklyn on Ocean Parkway, home to the nation’s first bike path, upon which we ignored the “bicycles permitted on west mall only” rule and discovered that Carmella’s newly installed dynamo-powered bicycle lights don’t work despite looking really cool.

Istanbul Restaurant

• 1715 Emmons Ave., Brooklyn
• (718) 368-3587
• Meal 43 of 52: shish kebab ($15.95), cheese roll ($6.95), Ispanak (spinach spread) $5.95 and two glasses of red house wine ($6.75 each)

And to think once upon a time, not so long ago, I was wide-eyed about film crews in Manhattan. I’ve seen so many since, they’ve blended into the background, one more thing blocking my sidewalks.

Making my usual Friday trek to Academy Records, I had to walk down the middle of 18th Street to bypass the trucks and equipment set up to film a scene of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit at Books of Wonder, a children’s bookstore a few stores down from Academy, where the staff was equally blasé.

Random Woman: They could film in here!
Academy Guy Behind the Counter [eying sweaty, pudgy loner pawing through the 99-cent bin]: Yeah, we got our “special” victims.

Later in the evening, walking the wrong direction looking for the Upper East Side American Apparel store, I came across a building on East 64th Street off Park Avenue, floodlit and with gels in the windows. A weary man, part of a large black-shirted craft services crew lounging around and pulling down union scale, guarded the beverage and snack table on the sidewalk and told me that they were filming a scene for Sex and the City: The Movie. Again, no reaction from me. Other than, man, would Sarah Jessica Parker really miss one small bag of Fritos?

And they keep affixing Post-it notes to the cases.

This first one is a loaner from an editor, John, who volunteered a few choice selections from his jazz collection after I asked if he could help build a soundtrack for an afterparty at an upcoming real estate conference my company is producing. Let the record show that John is irritated by “Un Poco Loco,” a 1951 track with Bud Powell on piano, Curly Russell on bass and Max Roach on drums.

This one is from the requisite cool guy in the production department, who’s a native New Yorker and lives in a loft in Brooklyn in which he built a small recording studio. He’s been trying to bring me up to speed on the popular pop the young hip white kids are listening to these days, in this case Bring It Back by Mates of State, which is too hypercheerful and brassy for my tastes. I didn’t ask him for a loaner but I think he may have thought I was lavishing too much praise on the Kinks album I recently loaned him and figured my appreciation of American rock stopped at 1970.

Bonus mp3: “Bouncing with Bud” (1949) by Bud Powell (piano), Fats Navarro (trumpet), Sonny Rollins (tenor sax), Tommy Porter (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums).
Bonus mp3: “For the Actor” (2005) by Mates of State.

There was a shrieking baby in the main dining area at Spain Restaurant & Bar, the not-so-cleverly named Spanish restaurant Andie, Katie and I met at for dinner tonight, so we requested a little one-table nook—a separate room, about the size of a largish elevator—that we’d passed on the way back. Our request was granted and we dined in peace and splendor. There’s an abundance of free tapas appetizers—oysters, spareribs, shrimp in garlic butter sauce—and we filled up on those and the sangria (made with maraschino cherries) before our entrees. Those were adequate. The chicken Katie and I ordered was hit-or-miss: one of the quartered chunks might be delectable, while the next was dry. Andie wasn’t wholly satisfied with her paella, either. Our private room was a nice touch, though.

Spain Restaurant & Bar

• 113 W 13th St. (between Sixth and Seventh Avenues)
• (212) 929-9580
• Meal 42 of 52: chicken dinner and like two pitchers of sangria ($33 total, tax and tip included)

Don’t jump on me: I’m registered to vote but I’m not affiliated with any party. I’m not big on groups, political or otherwise. I nearly forgot that, because of lone-ranger stance, I couldn’t vote in the city’s primary election today.

Although I do have two observations: nearly none of my city-dwelling coworkers were even aware there was an election today, which the unnervingly prolific New York Times writer Sewell Chan has been driving home in a series of snarkily titled blog entries (e.g. see “Election? What Election? Oh, That Election” and “The 2007 New York City Election. Really.”). In fact, Chan’s notes were among the few I could turn up when researching the election online.

Which leads me to point two: if I had been allowed to vote in this election, how was I expected to get information on any of the candidates? I’d think in this age of everything-in-the-world-on-the-Internet there’d at least be a nonpartisan page with links to the candidates or even a list of their bios.

Maybe it’s out there and I missed it. The city does have a poorly designed website from which I scrutinized an exhaustive PDF list of all of the city’s candidates. But the only information it includes is what seat they’re running for and their address. Party-registered voters in my district, for instance, had the opportunity today to select seven out of 21 candidates for “Delegate to Judicial Convention.” What’s that, first off? And what’s all these people’s stories? They all live in my neighborhood and one even lives on my street; maybe I’m expected to stop by and talk with them about it. I’m certainly not going to make my decision based on the flyers and postcards people have been thrusting at me outside the subway station for the past two weeks.

I like this weather: the coming chill. I leave my windows open and before bed, I put on my stocking cap, long-sleeved T-shirt and pajama-like pants, and roll up in my tan comforter like a corndog until my alarm goes off and I don’t want to leave the comfort. We’ll see how let quaint this gets when the snow and the ice arrive.

I met Carmella this afternoon at the Red Hook Ballpark, where I’ve been once before, for a sunny, hearty lunch of grilled corn-on-the-cob and Salvadoran pork-and-cheese pupusas while kids played soccer on the field nearby. We biked over to check out the monolithic New York Port Authority Grain Terminal nearby, then pedaled up to Borough Hall for the Brooklyn Book Festival, where we learned many of the panels require free but advance tickets and waiting in really, really long lines.

I bought a bicycle today. It’s been on my B-list of things to buy since moving to New York, a list that also includes a new suit and an air conditioner. For the long run, I decided, a bike would be best for my health and provide me with the longest-term exhilaration.

I think it was the correct decision although the purchase was an odyssey. To begin: I was convinced I could buy a bike for $100 or less and set out with confidence. The first place I checked, Recycle-A-Bicycle in DUMBO, seemed promising, but their entry-level used bikes are $175 and require repair/fine-tuning (read: more $$$) before they can be ridden. However, I must give them props for the concept of their shop: busted-up bikes are repaired for resale by New York City public schoolkids as part of a “youth training and environmental education initiative.”

Then, Megan, Katie and I tried the storied flea markets of Hell’s Kitchen/Chelsea this afternoon after our beer bash. The first we stopped at, on 17th and Sixth Avenue, had even crappier bikes—like banana-seat crappy—starting at $175. I passed.

We slunk further downtown and in a far darkened corner of the West 25st Street market (between Sixth and Fifth Avenues) we came across a sleazy flea-market dealer who called to mind a beardless Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and represented like a used car salesman who had an unnatural and highly vocal infatuation with Katie. After some quick discussion, she agreed, temporarily, to make the Yogi think it was she who was purchasing the 17" green Raleigh C30 cross/hybrid I had my eye on, a seven-speed, made-in-China entry-level model that first debuted circa 2003. We figured she could snag a foxy-lady discount, but he wouldn’t budge from his price and merely toyed with his bead necklaces and requested Katie stop back later for a date. At one point, he increased his asking price by $1, and when I asked him why, he said that I had been making him talk too much and he needed to buy a soda. Suffice to say, the bike was eventually mine for “$100 or less” in cash (no receipt) and as I walked it back uptown with Katie and Megan to buy a chain and lock, I tried not to think too hard about the embittered New Yorker the Yogi probably stole it from.

Megan, Katie and I convened on the Lower East Side at Counter for what was hopefully billed as the city’s “first annual” Organic Beer Bash. It was set up like a wine-tasting, only featuring organic beers and ciders. At nine tables stood representatives from organic brewers across the country who would pour a sample into a non-biodegradable plastic cup (whoops) while describing the drink and fielding questions.

Stouts were in short supply, though I liked the Butte Creek porter, hailing from Chico, California, which featured a rich choc lately tang. And Wolaver’s, of Middlebury, Vermont, which was proclaimed to me the best organic beer brewer in the country by reps at two competing tables, had a deliciously dark oatmeal stout with nutty, cocoa notes. My increasingly sloppy annotations to my program indicate “goes well with fries” (they were made from chickpeas and beer batter) and “bitter, like Katie,” which I think was a joke because the beer actually was bitter. Wolaver’s Wit (wheat) beer sort of exemplified most of the other lagers and IPAs (India pale ales) I tasted today: a might too light with lots of conflicting, astringent flavors, often due to the utilization of a specific type of hops. In the case of the Wit, it was coriander and orange peel, but I think I merely need to develop my palate and appreciate these beers since I’m not used to tasting anything in a light beer but the sickly carbonated sweetness presented by the average American mass-market brew.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is convincing in SherryBaby as a heroin addict who’s released from prison and has to come to terms with the fact that her brother and his wife have become surrogate parents to her daughter. The movie mostly sidesteps “Give me Back My Baby!” Hallmark-special melodrama by presenting Gyllenhaal as a strong, conflicted woman driven to rehabilitate herself and regain the respect of her kid. Also, this is definitely the movie to see if you’re interested in viewing Ms. Gyllenhaal’s breasts, as she appears topless during several scenes.

This mix features slow and sparse piano-driven tunes, good as background for your dinner party, visit from the parents or for that Sunday morning when your mind is still swollen from the previous night’s rambling and alcohol and you can’t yet wrap it around things like drums and guitar solos.

Vincent treated me tonight to a dinner of crisp and savory Korean fried chicken at Bon Chon Chicken. We got one basket of soy-flavored drumsticks and another of spicy, the latter of which was clear favorite, providing a nose-running punch in the head and warmth in the belly.

Megan and Kelly, also present, represented vegetarian and got some noodle or soy something-or-other that was also spicy but didn’t appear to be as hearty as our manly fare.

Bon Chon Chicken

• 314 Fifth Ave., Second Floor (between 31st and 32nd Streets)
• (212) 221-2222
• Meal 41 of 52: chicken! beer! Vincent paid for everything!

This weekend I stopped into the Manhattan Portage store off of Canal Street and after some browsing, the guy behind the counter walked over and started staring at my bag, which astute readers will recall is a Manhattan Portage, shown here in a file photo.

Or so I thought.

“Where’d you get this bag?” he asked.

“The Manhattan Portage store on Elizabeth Street,” I said.

“The Token store?”

“I think that’s what it’s called.”

“It’s a fake,” he said.

He had me look inside for a tiny white “Made in the USA” label that wasn’t there, but that he showed me in a bag he pulled off a nearby hook.

“This is made in China,” he said. “See?” He picked at the red Manhattan Portage logo on the front of the bag. “That’ll come off eventually.” He compared the stitching of the label on my bag to the one he was holding, but they looked the same to me, and I assumed that any looseness in my label was from knocking the bag into walls, doors and assholes in my way on the sidewalk, all natural in the course of a day for a Manhattan commuter.

I don’t know if I believe this guy but he was supremely certain and made me feel like some sort of fake-bag buying jerk.

But his contention is suspicious. The store at which I bought the bag, Token, is listed on the Manhattan Portage website itself (unless that’s a fake) as an authorized reseller. And the bag I bought appears to look the same (at least from the front) and share the description of the bag depicted on the website. And I find it amusing that I had reviewed the “Copies, Counterfeits & Imitations” section on the website (scroll down to bottom of the linked page to view) before I bought the bag. Why would anyone bother to clone such a non-luxury brand, I wondered. Coach, Louis Vuitton or Rolex: you can easily find knockoffs of these for sale any day from the sidewalk on Canal.

But duplicating a Manhattan Portage bag would be like duplicating, I don’t know, a Hanes T-shirt or a can of Del Monte peaches. My Manhattan Portage label doesn’t resemble the obvious knockoffs shown on the website and appears to meet all the other criteria for being the genuine article. And frankly I don’t care if it’s a fake. It’s held up to repeated abuse and its seams haven’t melted away in the rain, so I’m happy with it no matter its lineage. Though until I get some CSI guys on the case, I say it’s real.

Headline

The title of the new Indiana Jones movie [will be] Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Jason

Wasn’t this the title of a Nancy Drew Mystery?¹

O.

Christ, I thought it was a Harry Potter book.

Jason

Now we just need to fire up the tired jokes everyone will make or has already made about Ford’s agedness.

Jason

Indiana Jones and the Slightly Soiled Adult Diaper

O.

Indiana Jones and The Tower of Cialis

Jason

Indiana Jones and the Sansabelt Slacks

O.

Indiana Jones and the Early-Bird Special

Jason

Indiana Jones and the Low-Battery Hearing Aid

O.

Indiana Jones and The Clapper (costarring Paris Hilton)

Jason

Indiana Jones and the Jaundiced Pallor

Jason

Indiana Jones and Those Damn Teens

O.

Indiana Jones and the Redolent Smell of Urine

Jason

You win.

O.

Oh, I’m just getting started. Indiana Jones and the Wraparound Sunglasses, Indiana Jones and the Ostentatious Red Convertible, Indiana Jones and the Inappropriately Young Girlfriend, Indiana Jones and the Colonoscopy of Evil, Indiana Jones and the Wobbly Walker of Death

Jason

Cut it out, spazz.

¹ Almost, as it turns out. Legend of the Crystal Skull will be the name of the newest Nancy Drew video game, to be released next month. [back]

Sherry and I caught the Frogs: A Chorus of Colors exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History this afternoon in its last day. We agreed that in addition to being a confusing space with not enough directional signage in general, the frog exhibit had some of the worst graphic and typographic design ever, with conflicting hard-to-read fonts (and too many of them), rainbow-gradient horizontal spacers reminiscent of a webpage from 12 years ago, and the florescent palette of the Ocean Pacific clothing line, circa 1987.

Many of my questions went answered by the explanatory text on the placards. Do poisonous frogs secrete poison at will or is it on their skin all the time? At what point is a predator going to stop eating a poisonous frog? (I’d think a good chomp from a bird would be enough to permanently disable both predator and prey, which crimps the Darwinian cycle and doesn’t do either party any good.) A placard on mating noted the embrace lasts anywhere from a few hours to a few days, but didn’t mention how frogs might avoid predators the whole time they’re doin’ it in this sitting-duck stance. Also, what’s with the weird names? The Kermit-colored fellow pictured above? Waxy Monkey Tree Frog. No, I don’t get it, either, and that was one of the more normal names. I’m aware that you or I can find the answers to these questions and so much more on the internet, but when I’m paying $15 for an exhibit, I’d like it explained to me then and there, and via an eye-appealing design.

The frogs themselves, on the other hand, are pretty cool, although they don’t do much. Occasionally, I saw one slowly making its way down a tree trunk, or breathing, but mostly they sat there, unblinking. The poisonous ones were the most active and also the most colorful, although some of the others featured such an unnatural shade and sheen of green that they seemed to have been molded from plastic. I expected that if I turned one over, raised text on its underside would indicate “Made in China.”

I think as a general rule, larval is the most disturbing stage of animal development. Maggots, for instance, get no love, other than from hungry birds and reptiles. In the case of frogs, we agreed that tadpoles are creepy, those translucent, featureless fluke-like beings that propel themselves through water by some strange magic. “They look like fish,” mused Sherry. “They’re not fish! They’re tadpoles!” piped the precocious human larva who seemed to be following us and who’d earlier demonstrated that by smacking the plexiglas terrariums, she could annoy the smaller frogs enough that they’d hop. In fact there were many children running around the exhibit area, wreaking havoc. Is it possible this show was geared toward kids and that’s why we didn’t enjoy it as much as we could have?

Shifting the day to more adult activities, we stopped by Blondies Sports Bar, which is the place to be if you wish to root for your favorite sports team while wearing the jersey of your favorite sports team, as many were today for the Browns/Steelers game. Because the Browns were getting crushed and the place was packed tighter than a rush-hour subway car, we retreated back to Amsterdam for a late brunch at Monaco.

Monaco

• 421 Amsterdam Ave. (at the corner of West 80th Street
• (212) 873-3100
• Meal 40 of 52: goat cheese and portobello mushroom omelet, with home fries and wheat toast ($12.50) and two mojitos ($9 each).

On July 6, 1973, Stephen Shore had pancakes for breakfast at the Howard Johnson’s in Lima, Ohio. Afterwards he drove to the nearby city of Delphos¹ and took three photos: of the intersections of 2nd and 4th at Main, and of the Pitsenbarger Supply Company on 3rd, its brick side wall painted with a small square advertisement for Scherger Monuments (“Preserve Ancestry for Posterity”).

Having taken his photos, Shore then did something unusual: he left some photos. Rather, they were photos of similarly nondescript scenes from similarly nondescript small towns that he had taken earlier then had professionally printed as postcards. He left 30 of them in Delphos that day; he didn’t say where, but the way he worked was to place them into drugstore postcard racks with the others when no one was looking. Then he moved on. By lunchtime, he was in Battle Creek, Michigan, taking more photos and leaving more postcards.

Shore crisscrossed the country that year doing this same thing. He’d printed 5,600 postcards, so he had a lot of ground to cover, and he kept track of it all in a ledger that included copies of his prints, notes on meals he ate, where he stayed and what he watched on TV in his hotel room, ephemera like business cards, gas receipts, parking tickets and, in neat block print, lists of “Exposures Made” and “Postcards Distributed.”

Pages from the 1973 ledger, some of the postcards, and photos Shore took throughout the ’70s and early ’80s are on display at the International Center of Photography in an exhibit titled Biographical Landscapes, and it’s great in its similarities and ordinariness. The large-format color photos show anonymous architecture of highways, intersections and side streets, billboards and signs, gas stations and parking lots, hotel rooms and fast food meals. This stuff would have been completely ordinary and probably boring to someone then, but now the clothing, the cars and the graphic design have a mystical quality and it’s hard to believe any of it ever really existed.

What’s the point of Shore’s work? He’s a New Yorker, born and bred, so a viewer’s first instinct might be to label him a parodist of the oft-maligned middle part of the country, although his images are presented almost exclusively without comment or irony. It may just be, as he said later, that the ledger was borne from “a fascination with how certain kinds of facts and materials from the external world can describe a day or activity,” and that the photos were records of these days and transitory memories. It’s as if he collected traces and evidence to prove to himself that he was where he was. It reminded me of a quote I’ve saved by Cornell University anthropologist Sam Beck: “People need to create their own history, to leave traces of themselves and of the meanings they generate....to leave trails, to say, ‘we are here’....”

Shore’s gone digital and since 2003 has been using Apple’s iPhoto photo-book service, in which the company will professionally print a hardcover book of a digital photo album. There was one at the exhibit that included photos he had taken in New York City a few years ago of pedestrians, signs and cars, and sure enough, I found it dull. But how about in 35 years?

The exhibit didn’t mention whether Shore ever revived his postcard project, but it amuses me to think he may have, just as it amuses me to imagine that Shore’s postcards from the ’70s could lie pressed and yellowing in family scrapbooks, depicting places the senders never were.

¹ Until she married, my mom lived in a tiny farm village just outside of Delphos, which is sort of why I selected it for this anecdote. [back]

At the third-annual Art Parade this afternoon, performance pieces and artistic floats advanced down West Broadway between Houston and Grand Streets. It recalled a miniature Village Halloween Parade, except more surreal, if that’s possible. The Halloween Parade, for instance, is slightly less likely to feature a float resembling the corpse of Snoopy.

I didn’t get a photo of this one so you’ll just have to trust me. A bunch of guys strained forward to haul a wheeled platform on which the large papier-mâché puppy lay, in his familiar atop-the-doghouse repose, except that he appeared to have been dead for some time and ravaged by vultures, his ribcage arching up from his skeleton. A party of followers held thought-balloon signs filled in with various non-sequiturs.

We didn’t understand it, but it was fun to watch and see if the next group in the parade could top the act before it. Also, we had catbird seats at the bar, then a table on the sidewalk facing the street, at a bistro named Diva, where we knocked back numerous drinks and ate an early pizza dinner.

A few sticks of dynamite sprinted by, as did a bunch of chefs with others dressed as food. I walked to the barricades between the street and the sidewalk to get a closer look and some photos.

There was an apparently unironic mariachi band, and a full marching band that appeared to have wandered over from a high-school football game halftime show as it played “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”

A man in a head-to-toe costume of plastic shopping bags paused at intervals to lie on the street, which Beth noted didn’t seem very sanitary, even for a hulking human wad of garbage.

A circle of maidens approached, each girl’s long hair braided together with the hair of the next. They moved gingerly with their heads held rigid and bringing up the rear was a girl whose pigtails were held aloft by a pair of helium balloons.

I appreciated this lone gentleman whose conical head covering tapered to the ground with a wheel at its terminus.

After the parade, Beth and I stumbled around Canal Street among the tourists and the men who sell them fake watches and luxury handbags. We spotted a large bright light a few blocks away and decided it was safe to approach as we didn’t appear to be near death. According to a brisk gentleman in a headset blocking foot traffic, Nickelodeon was filming a commercial. It appeared to involve kids dressed as bees throwing black and yellow paint on one another.

At the famed discount art supply store, Pearl Paint, we climbed the stairs to the markers floor and rifled through the small sketchbooks used for testing the writing utensils, then removed some of our favorites.

A short jaunt up Broadway and we arrived at Pearl River, where we fiddled with the tin wind-up toys, the alarm clocks and the parasols. I bought a golden, two-inch-tall figurine of a roly-poly pig with a different face on each side like Janus and Beth said she’d return to buy the string of lights mounted in colorful wicker spheres.

We had dessert at Souen, a natural/organic/macrobiotic restaurant on Sixth Avenue at Prince Street. My fruit compote was paved with a busted-up heap of homemade granola while Beth’s tofu cheesecake, glazed with a fruit gel, was softer and more gooey than cheesecake has a right to be.

Diva

• 341 W. Broadway
• (212) 941-9024
• Meal 39 of 52: goat cheese and black-olive pizza ($12.00) and several mojitos (?$).

This Post-it wasn’t stuck to my monitor at work, but to one of the monitors in the production department. I’m fairly certain this guy’s Mac remains tamper-free but you can never tell with those production imps; I overheard chatter about the classic fill-the-credenza-with-Ping-Pong-balls prank.

The first book review I wrote in adult life was in 1996 for a writing class in college for a deadpan-comic dystopian-future collection of short stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders. He’s come a long way, baby, now author of a novella, a children’s book, two more story collections, far-flung assignments from GQ, and a column in The Guardian. He’s not exactly a household name, but in the same world in which Dave Barry can win a Pulitzer Prize, it’s sensible that Saunders should win a MacArthur Fellow “Genius Grant.”

Tonight at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble, he read three selections from his new book, The Braindead Megaphone, his first collection of non-fiction and humor pieces. During the Q&A, he explained that he gradually shifted from writing exclusively fiction to much more nonfiction, or “journalism lite,” as he called it, because of 9/11 and the Iraq War and subsequent occupation. Elements of those events kept creeping into his fiction in ways he didn’t like or found overly didactic.

He first read a few short sections from “The Great Divider,” a very funny article written on assignment from GQ, which cast him into a group of militiamen in Texas who’ve taken it upon themselves to guard the Mexican border against illegal crossovers. It’s written in the style of the best type of travel writing, casting a regular person into curious environs populated by even stranger people. He noted later that he took the plunge to do more travel writing when one of his daughters asked him to name all the exciting things he’d done in his life, and he realized with a start that they all dated to the late 1970s.

A professor of creative writing at Syracuse University, Saunders arrived sort of looking like one, with thin-framed glasses, a full but neatly trimmed graying beard and a dark suit that could have been corduroy. His hairline has receded from his high forehead, save two gossamer tufts that jut forward like a small but majestic bird taking wing from his brow.

This guy is literate and funny. He could do standup, no question. He talks at a rapid clip but clearly, and in a pinched tone. When he read the story “Nostalgia,” it was creepy how nearly his content and delivery reminded me of Woody Allen, back when he wrote for The New Yorker in the ’70s and still did standup, complete with the perfect pauses between the tumbling phrases, self-obsession and self-deprecation, even non-aspirated H’s in words like “huge” (e.g. sounding like “euge”).

A strange question from the audience asking about his obsession with theme parks and roller coasters in his writing revealed how he came to realize he’d be better off as a humor writer than a realist. The first time he wrote about a roller coaster, he said, it was because he’d pictured one in a dream. At the time, he’d been attempting to write stories like Hemingway, but they kept turning out as watered down imitations. So he used writing about roller coasters and other lighter topics as a writing exercise to block his literary pretensions.

He also offered an interesting tidbit that I hadn’t seen mentioned elsewhere, that CivilWarLand had been optioned for a movie, and that two years ago, Saunders wrote script for Ben Stiller’s production company, though he hinted the project was now in development hell. (A Variety article from December 2004 noted the adaptation was Stiller’s “true passion project” at the time.)

Andie works not far from the Chelsea Barnes & Noble and was burning the late-night oil, so after shaking Saunders’ hand, telling him I enjoyed the reading and having my book signed with a double-looped scrawl that resembles neither “George” nor “Saunders” nor any of the letters that comprise those words, I met up with her and we got a bisque-and-salad dinner at Markt on its new location on Sixth Avenue at West 12th Street.

Walking back to the subway, we passed a bus stop at which sat the mumbling woman from Andie’s commute yesterday, an odd coincidence.

I was standing in front of someone on the train who was talking to herself and she kept saying:

FIT... Muslims... Turkey... Airplane... Basement.

They were all part of her story but those were the only words that were intelligible and I was dying to know what she was talking about because it sounded like a fascinating story but unfortunately she was mumbling.

Leslie Feist’s voice on her newest album, The Reminder, appeals to me, tangled and tired at times, like she just woke up on a Sunday in that cool and lazy span between teeth-brushing and brunch. Her songs, though consistently run through with piano, echo and close-miked, double-tracked vocals, shift across the board so that she channels Astrud Gilberto-style bossa nova (the leadoff “So Sorry”), late-night Norah Jones-ey such-and-such with brushed drums, standup bass, vibes and chimes (“The Water”), even bits that remind me of Björk (the five-note knell-loop of “How My Heart Behaves” recalls a similar riff from “Possibly Maybe”). There are general points of comparison with Cat Power, “but more interesting and less overrated,” as The Onion A.V. Club sniped recently. In general, I find Feist cheerful, fresh and unexpected; case in point: “1234,” the second single from The Reminder, the most sprightly, Sesame Street-ready song about numerals since De La Soul’s “The Magic Number,” rife with banjo, piano, strings, trumpet, handclaps and Polyphonic Spree-caliber chorus.

If you’d been keen on spotting the majority of our camping group clad only in its underwear near the vicinity of Hawk Falls, today would have been your lucky day.¹

After a 0.7-mile hike into the woods, we came across some gangly boys leaping from the slippery rock outcroppings a dozen or so feet into just-deep-enough pools at the base of the falls’ top ledge, which sounds dangerous and irresponsible, but these were kids of the age at which common sense is as firmly developed as a newborn’s skull.

So we opted instead to jump off the slippery rock outcropping of only about eight feet or so into the just-deep-enough pool at the base of the fall’s lower ledge. Actually, Susan, the resident accountant and otherwise model of reason in our group, decided to go first, which resulted in the obligation of most of the rest of us to follow in taking the literal and figurative plunge, but not before stipping down to our skivvies.

Floodwaters from a melting glacier created Hawk Falls and it would seem that most of the water contained therein remains at a historically low temperature, because while jumping in was an adrenaline thrill, it was the liquid equivalent of a heart defibrillator.

We all loved it and jumped again.

Soggy but happy and tired on our way back, half the group convened at Dairy Queen for an undercooked dinner, while the other half opted to go local and give the local Mexican restaurant a try. It was hearty but spicy in what’d I’d call a Penn-Mex sense, more ketchup-and-kindness than salsa-and-spice. After depositing the final members of the party on the East Side, I drove back to New Jersey and promptly got lost, though after a frantic call to Megan, got back on track to the return point at the Sheraton by Giants Stadium.

Before I dropped off the keys for the rental car, I gave it a final frisking and located loose change, The Sadies’ In Concert, Vol. 1 CD, a lid without a pan, a Tupperware bowl without a lid and a smattering of tragically folded maps. The trunk appeared to have been used by a hobo for shelter, as it contained a confetti blanket of wood chips and splinters, onion skins and funky odors that included sunscreen, sweat, wet socks, beer, nearly spoiled food, and, as I noted just before slamming shut the trunk for the last time, a strong whiff of good times.

Bonus photos: View a Flickr photoset from the camping trip. (Yes, I finally have a Flickr account.)

¹ No, I don’t have any photos of this, you pervert. [back]

So Boulder Field, a National Natural Landmark in Hickory Run State Park, is, um, this giant field with a bunch of sandstone and conglomerate boulders in it, like a paving-stone patio for a giant. They’re not “as far as the eye can see,” because they’re ringed by forest, but it’s impressive nonetheless, requiring mountain goat agility to cross the 16.5-acre field at a consistent pace.

Later most of the group splashed in nearby Sand Spring Lake and lazed on the beach. Aaron and Kate made a sand mermaid, complete with shades and dangling cigarette butt.

After strapping on corset-like life jackets and signing liability waivers willing our remaining usable organs to Pocono Whitewater Adventures in the event of death and/or dismemberment, our camping group sat through a perfunctory training session conducted by a buff guy named Rip or something. He had mirrored shades and a goatee and cracked wise about how the speed by which he would paddle to our aid in an emergency would be directly proportional to how intently we were paying attention to his instructions. It was hard to tell to what degree he was kidding, because of the mirrored shades and all.

Some background: there are six classes of whitewater rafting. Class I and II are for families and brittle or pregnant people. At the other end of the spectrum, Class V and VI are for crazy people in helmets and wetsuits, raw adrenaline and Clif Bars coursing though their veins. Lehigh River Gorge is ranked in the middle, at Class III, or the “Adventure Class,” which features “numerous irregular waves with drops and holes.”

After a short ride on a decommissioned school bus to the launch point, we loaded our group into two of the rafts. It started innocently enough, as calm and smooth as Huck and Jim on the Mississippi. All of a sudden, we spotted a flurry of low whitecaps ahead, rocks scattered throughout, and everyone started paddling madly and shouting contrary directions. Then serenity returned, followed by angry torrents, and the cycle repeated, good-cop/bad-cop all the way down the Lehigh River Gorge, with a 30-minute break for lunch. We quickly got more adept at navigation once we’d secured a captain, determined what “back-paddling” actually meant and realized that our warning cries needed to be more specific than “there’s a bunch of rocks ahead!”

We’d planned to be there today because it was a dam release day, which is when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tires of the sudoku puzzle book it’s been working on all week, so it turns a valve in a dam control station somewhere upstream to top off the gorge a bit. This means the water level is high, which makes for prime rafting but it also means normally visible rocks now lurk just beneath the surface, ready to snag unsuspecting craft like ours with a rubbery whump that pitches everyone forward like crash-test dummies.

In retrospect, we probably should have paid more attention to Rip, or whatever his name was, because when Vincent and Megan were flung overboard from the Blue Raft, we did two things you’re not supposed to do, namely:

1. try to rescue both people at once, which inevitably results in neither person being rescued.
2. lean over the raft to pull them onboard, which offers the vessel a ripe opportunity to capsize.¹

Reason prevailed and we were able to haul both to safety with a minimum of injury and no loss of property, though the second half of our trip was haunted with multiple beachings against large flat rocks, which required one of the expedition’s three kayak-borne guides to maneuver us free.

Afterwards, we sat ’round the bonfire at the Pocono Whitewater Adventures base-camp to dry our shoes and socks and clothing, let the lactic acid cool in our arm muscles and talk about how, yes, we need to do this again.

Back at our campsite, I think tonight was chili night and it was delicious, as all of our camp meals were, although we forgot a chili pot so we traded the friendly family from Pennsylvania at the site next to ours a carton of Tropicana orange juice for temporary useage of their stew pot.

Our provisions throughout our trip included a minimum of canned ingredients (mostly beans and such for the chili) and those in charge of our consumables packed fresh staples within three separate coolers refreshed with ice daily: eggs, butter, sour cream, milk, cheese, sandwich meat, peppers, bananas, lettuce, tomatoes, blueberries, apples, sausage and hamburger (and fake sausage and veggie-burgers for the vegetarians). We also had a bag each of potatoes and onions, two loaves of sliced bread, buns, cooking oil, instant coffee, S’mores ingredients, salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard and a few spices. There were many creative turns of ingredient usage: one evening we could have baked potatoes for dinner, cooked wrapped in foil in the red-hot coals of the campfire, followed by homefries the next morning for breakfast. Very hearty, chuckwagon-style grub.

¹ You’re supposed to lie on your back on the bottom of the raft and extend your arms over the side like grappling hooks. Or something like that. I wasn’t really paying attention to Rip. [back]