October 2007 Archives

Kelly and I were talking recently about how there are always those handful of bullet point items you overlook when looking for a new apartment. Such as: Does the building provide cockroach-extermination services? And if so, in what manner? It’s always different and a good thing to know in advance. At my old apartment, the exterminator would hit every apartment the first Saturday morning of each month. Andie’s place has a sign-up sheet in order to schedule a time. And Kelly’s bug-buster only seems around in the early afternoon weekdays, when normal people need to be at work.

I thought it wise and helpful for the future to list some of these questions and points of consideration. Let me know what I’m missing.

General

• Is it an elevator building? A walk-up? Is the stairway wide enough to move furniture easily?
• Top-floor apartments are generally quieter but less convenient. Ground-floor apartments are generally noisier but more convenient.
• Is the apartment located near a potentially noisy stairwell or elevator?
• Are there security bars on the windows that have fire escapes?
• How many electric outlets are there per room and where are they positioned?
• What’s outside the windows? (e.g. parking lot, fire station, busy street, brick wall, peace & quiet, etc.)
• Positioning of windows: Will there be regular sun and is that something you’d want in a given room?
• Rap on the walls: Are they drywall, plaster or concrete? Good to know for noise transmission and hanging stuff.
• Try the faucets and the shower, and flush the toilet: gauge the building’s water pressure.
• What is the number of closets and space inside? Will your wardrobe and other stuff fit in there?
• Are there laundry facilities on the premises? If not, where’s the nearest Laundromat?
• Do the closet doors and others open and close property (e.g. they don’t stick or close completely)?
• Try to visit the apartment at least twice, during different times of the day, to gauge noise levels, light, etc.

Outside

• Where do you dump your trash? Check out this place: Is it neat and clean? If it is, this is a sign of a good super.
• Is there graffiti on the walls of the building or on nearby buildings? If so, it perhaps indicates the level of neighborhood thuggery/annoying teens.
• What is the apartment building’s proximity to subway/bus stops? Proximity to grocery shopping, restaurants, bars and other places you’d attend frequently? Walk around the neighborhood and check it out.
• Parking (even if you don’t have a car, it could be good to know this for guests who may have one): Is there a garage, meters, free spots on the street, etc.?

Kitchen

• Will a kitchen table actually fit in there?
• Are kitchen faucets mounted high enough to accommodate big pots and water pitchers?
• Are the shelves in the cupboards a proper height for whatever you’re going to store in there?
• Is there enough countertop space for food preparation?
• Is the fridge door mounted on the preferable side?

Bedroom

• Will your queen-size bed actually fit in the bedroom with room to walk?
• Will it be quiet, regarding its position to other apartments and the outdoors?

Kelly swung by my old apartment tonight to help clean, so that I might get at least a fraction of my security deposit back. She scoured the stove, rangetop and kitchen counter, while I swept, and cleaned the fridge, kitchen tile and bathroom floor. Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls makes great apartment-cleaning music.

For my move I opted for FlatRate Movers and I have mostly good things to say about their pricing and the move itself. They showed up much later than I wagered. Instead of arriving in the scheduled span of 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. they rolled up at 4:45 p.m. To be fair, they did call to keep me appraised (“We’re stuck in traffic in SoHo!”) but I don’t think they’d ever allotted enough time earlier in their day to reach me by 2:00 or 3:00 p.m.

I stayed out of their way and for most of the 2.5-hour move-out time attacked my shower grout mold with Windex and an old toothbrush.

Because my new building has an elevator, the move-in took only an hour. Moving guys live for elevator buildings.

The only damage I’ve yet to spot is that the top-left corner of one of my Billy bookcases got chipped, but nothing a little love and wood glue can’t fix.

And I discovered later that one of the three guys had taken a massive dump in my toilet without flushing. And I thought movers weren’t supposed to leave anything behind.

Half-Nelson breaks the heart because it’s the only film I’ve seen since maybe Requiem for a Dream that not only portrays a hard drug user (a crack-addled history teacher Ryan Gosling) as sympathetic and well-rounded but more impressively for a movie of this type, portrays a drug dealer (Anthony Mackie) as a fully formed character, and not the cliché he could have been easily. And Brooklyn girl Shareeka Epps is excellent as the old-beyond-her-years middle-schooler torn between these two deeply flawed but possibly redeemable men.

Prescript: I don’t have any photos; maybe later. In the meantime, let your imagination run wild.

Halloween party extravaganza tonight at Kelly’s, jointly hosted by her, Megan and Vincent. Our Guests dressed, respectively as Buster Keaton, Calvin and Hobbes. You cannot deny the cuteness of Calvin and Hobbes as a couples costume but next year I hope Megan and Vincent take me up on my original suggestion that they dress as Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. Assassinations all night long, baby!

Andie dressed as a cowgirl. Her boots were too small and she got a blister, but as a cowgirl will, she brought homemade salsa that was the hit of the food spread.

Katie dressed as a tornado. She had tried to affix miniature toy people, trees and cars to her circumference of billowy gauze but they wouldn’t stick. If she’d done it, more people would have guessed tornado instead of “cloud” as I had. Andie had suggested to me a week prior that Katie would be dressing as “a literary figure,” but that information was dated. When Katie blew in the door to the party, at first I wondered: Is she Virginia Woolf’s depression? One of Mark Twain’s eyebrows? “Postmodernism?”

My costume, an extension of my Coen Bros.’ outfit from last Halloween, was H.I. McDunnough, Nicolas Cage’s character from the Coen’s 1987 classic, Raising Arizona, specifically the scene in which he steals a pack of Huggies. About half the people at the party guessed it correctly. Many had rusty recollections or were just wrong. Katie at first thought I was a pirate, which is fair enough for me thinking that she was a cloud or depression.

The best praise came late in the evening. I had volunteered for a beer-run after the fridge became bottleless and it is inadvisable to venture onto the streets of New York with a panty on one’s head, so I removed that, the wig and moustache and left my Huggies behind. I also put my glasses back on; I can’t see jack without them but I was striving for authenticity and had them removed for most of the night.

When I returned with the beer, a new couple had arrived to the party: the woman was dressed in a modern-day Southern Belle ball gown, satiny and emerald green, curly blonde hair and high heels. Which was not interesting. What was interesting was that her tall, big-shouldered boyfriend was squeezed into a practically identical dress, shoes, blonde wig, makeup over stubble. Before even introducing himself, he flat out said, “That’s the best H.I. costume I’ve ever seen.” (I have to imagine it was the only H.I. costume he’d ever seen, but I understood his point.)

I told him his perception was amazing because I was wearing only half the costume.

“It’s the shoes, the shirt, the whole getup,” he said, adding he’d seen the movie “about 90 times” and that he kept trying to get his girlfriend to watch it, which he took the liberty to point out to her, again. (“I know, I know!” she said, with exasperation.)

Costume Ingredients List

• Vintage ’80s striped shirt. $10 from RustyZipper.com. The one in the movie is knit but I couldn’t find one in that material. The chocolate brown, white and tan color scheme on the shirt I bought is similar, although the material is polyester/nylon.
• Vintage Lacoste jacket. Something I’d not noticed until freeze-framing the DVD: the wee alligator logo on H.I.’s jacket. Imagine my surprise when I found the exact model jacket at Rags-A-Gogo on 14th Street.
• Pants. Straight Fit Gavin Chinos in off-white, on sale from Banana Republic. Nice to have at least one costume element that I can wear as everyday clothing, or at least pre-Labor Day clothing.
• Shoes. My favorite part of the costume: vintage white-weave Towncraft loafers, size 10 1/2. (There’s a brief scene in Raising Arizona of H.I. slipping on a nearly identical pair with a shoehorn then checking them in a mirror.) I bought them unchallenged on eBay for $5.99 from a woman named Natalie in Sioux Falls, South Dakota who described them as "very unique and classy."
• Tan dress socks. My own.
• Wig from New York’s finest cosmetics/costume-shop chain, Ricky’s. In the movie, H.I.’s longish brown hair juts out in the back from under the pantyhose. I cut the brim off an old fitted baseball cap, duct-taped a swath of hair from the wig to hang from the back of the cap, then wore the cap with the panty hose concealing it. Which I think worked well.
• Fake moustache. From one of those here-today, gone-tomorrow Halloween stores, Party City of Manhattan on 14th Street. In retrospect, I should have grown my own as the ladies suggested. When I trimmed this one, it got Hitlerish.
• Pantyhose and a pack Huggies diapers from CVS/Pharmacy.
• Belt. I didn’t allow enough time to get one like H.I.’s, cloth with horizontal colored pinstripes, light brown leather ends and brass-plated buckle. “No one’s going to notice that!” someone had told me earlier. Not everyone understands my recent passion for Halloween costumes. Earlier this month, the L.A. Times published an article (“’Darjeeling Limited’s’ Style Infusion” by Monica Corcoran) on Wes Anderson’s obsession with style and costumes that concluded with a quote by him: “When I was a kid and went to a movie, I might come out of the theater and want to be one of the characters. The first thing I did was try to get the costume right.” I hear ya, Wes.

Postscript, Mon., Oct. 29, 2007: Email excerpt from Kelly: “I just wanted to let you know, in case you were planning on dressing up again, that you left your Huggies in my bedroom. Which is something I’d never thought I’d say.”

One of Sherry’s roommates works for a major rum distributor, which you better believe has its perks. She comped us two tickets to an “epicurean trend” event at Pier 94 this afternoon called “Cook. Eat. Drink. Live.” I’m not sure who this show was targeting, but tickets listed for $300+ and there was tons of free food and drinks, chef demonstrations, a luxury car showroom (an apparent new trend coming soon to a dealer near you: cars with matte paint jobs), and free massages, the waiting time for which was so long, we passed for the opportunity to get seconds of shredded barbecued beef over corn bread from the booth of caterer Great American BBQ Co.

Let’s see: We also tried beef carpaccio with toasted pine nuts and pumpkin seeds from Abboccato Ristorante, savory chicken stew (with nice firm carrots) from Paris Commune, lobster cannellini with butternut squash puree from Cer Té, kobe beef from Primehouse New York, beef kabobs with mushrooms, peppers and onion from Dos Caminos, white stilton with mango and ginger from igourmet.com, salmon with foie gras and aged balsamic from The Forum, and large slices of dry streak sandwiches from Gallagher’s Steak House. Also, Sherry ate a lot of chocolate.

For drinks there were two cachaça suppliers so you better bet we got caipirinhas. I requested an extra-peaty single-malt from a scotch distributor and received a delicious Lagavulin 16-year-old, "the aristocrat of Islays." The bartenders from Sherry’s neighborhood bar, including one who has a 1920’s moustache with waxed tips, poured bourbon into large waxed-paper cups of extra-hot mulled cider. Delicious. And a bunch of wine; each attendee’s complementary vinyl tote bag contained a wine glass, which made it a little too convenient.

“Cook. Eat. Drink. Live.”

• Pier 94 (12th Avenue at 55th Street)
• Meal 47 of 52: about 15 pounds of free food and alcohol.

In a staggered rollout beginning this month, New York City cabbies are being forced to adopt and apply newly designed decals when they renew for their annual vehicle inspection.

I echo the commentary of many when I tell you that I liked the old cab design better. It was a black or red stencil reading “NYC TAXI” above a similar stencil of the medallion number. Even people who have never been to New York City before know what a cab here looks like. It looks like this:

That label’s as simple as a shipper’s name stenciled on a crate of freight or the text label on a can of store-brand peas. It’s even in keeping with iconic New York public vehicle signage style; the garbage trucks here, for instance, are white and labeled with black Helvetica text that reads “Sanitation,” in a no-shit way that belies the high shit content of the vehicle itself.

Nothing more fancy or graphical is necessary for garbage trucks here, much less cabs. In fact, a cab logo is redundant: it’s a yellow car that’s never around when you need it; therefore, it’s a cab. Instead, we now face this hoohah:

My eyes smart. It appears to have been designed by committee in 1995 as a subpar David Carson ripoff. I guarantee the word “edgy” was used at least twice in the design firm’s proposal to the city. The leading makes me twitch and the “racing stripe” (officially known as a “checker stripe decal”) is laughable. The “circle T” dingbat strives to suggest Vignelli’s famous subway signage but instead recalls with horror Boston’s MTA logo.

I finally got Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows, and pleased to report several songs can be classified as crunchy or thrashy (“Bodysnatchers,” with lead guitars even reminds me of Sonic Youth’s newest, Rather Ripped). Plus there’s not only Melody but Several Guitars. Real Drums! Something called an Ondes-Martenot, among other keyboards!

Radiohead being what they are, Rainbows also features cutup vocal effects with bleeps and boops that swaddle lead-singer Thom Yorke’s tremulous falsetto, reflecting the group’s style over its more-electronic brethren Kid A and Amnesiac—these songs are much more warm, catchy. After a few listens, I even found a few stuck in my head. (The songs from Kid A and Amnesiac got stuck in my head, too, but only because I had purchased them on cassette and listened to one or the other ever day for the better part of a year during my work commute in Cleveland.)

Part of the warmth, too, of Rainbows, may be that second-person has supplanted the first-person that featured almost exclusively into the lyrics of earlier Radiohead albums such as OK Computer; in other words, these songs appear to be more about relationships—doomed, maybe, but relationships nonetheless—which lends yearning and hope: “You’re all I need,” “You were not to blame for / bittersweet distractors,” I don’t want to be your friend / I just want to be your lover,” “You used to be all right / What happened?”

The Zogby/463 Internet Attitudes Poll released today reveals that “One in four Americans say the Internet can serve as a substitute for a significant other.”

This intrigued me. I certainly dedicate enough attention to the Internet for it to be considered a significant other. But I’d never really hung out with the Internet as anything more than a casual acquaintance. So I posed some statements and questions to the Internet via Google and culled its answers from among the top search results. What follows is our conversation, edited for style, clarity and length.

Jason

So... How’s it going?

Internet

You know what I’m going to say to that? Fantastic. What could be better?

Jason

Well, want to get dinner sometime?

Internet

I get a lot of, ‘We should hang out’ or ‘Let’s get dinner some time.’ I get it so often that when I hear it now, I usually just brush it off as someone else trying to get nice.

Jason

O.K., how about a movie?

Internet

If you look at market studies, home theater systems are a phenomenon on the rise. More and more, people are starting to reserve space in their homes for an ultimate entertainment experience.

Jason

All right, let’s stay in and watch a movie on DVD.

Internet

Let’s watch The Wire, O.K.?

Jason

I’ve never seen that. Is it any good?

Internet

Yes it is. I think it might have legs.

Jason

Should we get some pizza?

Internet

I’m usually a Pizza Hut girl, but guess what? Domino’s has an Oreo cookie dessert pie, so this girl is going to cheat with the competition!

Jason

You are starting to freak me out.

Internet

Can you prescribe me Chlorpromazine? The trendy antipsychotics don’t agree with me.

Jason

Maybe we should just be friends.

Internet

But friends shouldn’t treat other friends like that. You’re not too friendly when you act like that.

Jason

I’m going to go now.

Internet

Talk to you lata!

Jason

Yeah, I’ll call you.

Having exhausted the merchandising possibilities of box sets, lunchboxes and inaction figures, the executors of Kurt Cobain’s estate have lined up a writer for a biopic of the rockstar. It makes me want to curl up on the couch, strap on the headphones and listen to In Utero because biopics are inevitably a letdown compared to a band’s audio-only output.

Either such films feature that cookie-cutter pyramidal plot I’ve written about before (say, for Walk the Line or Dreamgirls). Or as with Control, which I saw tonight during a sold-out Film Forum showing, they’re no more intriguing when presented as a flat stretch of fanboy facts. Joy Division never had a thrilling career to begin with: they formed, released two alien punk-pop albums that later proved extremely influential, kicked around Europe on tour, then ceased to exist. Their lead singer, Ian Curtis, hung himself in his estranged wife’s kitchen on the eve of a potentially career-altering American tour, forever sealing the tormented-genius-dies-young mythology, an archetype profitable both emotionally and economically.

Ian’s the focus of this film and the actor who plays him, Sam Riley, resembles him very nearly, with the wicked grins, shifts of hooded eyes and robotically flailing limbs the real Curtis exhibited onstage, and sometimes off. Longtime celebrity photographer, first-time director Anton Corbijn has filmed Control in stark beauty; every first frame of each shot is composed so meticulously it could stand alone as a Corbijn photograph in ultrahigh-contrast black-and-white.

The whole thing is just such a slog. Joy Division made mostly glum music, lyrics of isolation bleated in Curtis’ weirdly deep baritone singing voice, as swampy guitars and mechanical drumbeats swirled in basement echo. Stack atop that the gloom of working-class England in the ‘70s, Curtis’ epileptic seizures, his lovetorn confusion between his young wife (a frumpy and deluded Samantha Morton) and his European mistress (Alexandra Maria Lara), a mostly diegetic soundtrack of murk from Bowie, Iggy and Roxy, plus, you know, the whole suicide thing, the buildup for which consumes the final second hour of the film, and Control clouds over as a major bummer.

A scene in 24 Hour Party People suggests that, contrary to popular myth, Joy Division wasn’t all doom and gloom by recreating a scene of the group playing a gleeful cover of “Louie, Louie,” a rowdy club audience singing along. Control tries a smidge of levity, too: Curtis claims his favorite film is The Sound of Music, and after Riley, the film’s best performance is easily the exasperated, profane and very funny Toby Kebbell as the group’s den-mother manager, Rob Gretton.

But it’s all too little of interest and for too long. A woman in my row leapt to exit as the credits hit and I heard a fragment of her complaint—not soon enough—which I would agree with in reference to the movie, perhaps less so regarding the death of Curtis and Joy Division, which can also be good headphones music to listen to on the couch.

Back when I was interested in meeting people who shared my interests in fine conversation and whisky, my friends Samantha and Iggy supplied some great advice: sign-up on the websites of various whisky producers to get invited to free tasting events. I signed up with a favorite, Laphroaig, which netted me a small plot of land somewhere in Glasgow and a certificate stating this fact, but little else. Then today I got an email promoting a “live online whisky tasting.” Which as near as I can tell does not involve drinking whisky but instant-messaging about it. That’s like giving a starving man a cookbook.

Here’s a nice semi-fancy restaurant, up the hill near Fort Tryon Park, where the white people who make more money than I do live, to take friends or family for a well-prepared basic “neighborhood place” meal that doesn’t involve pizza-by-the-slice or fried chicken. Although 107 West did nearly overdo it with the nothing-but-Paul-Simon soundtrack.

Wine: tasty. Field greens salad: fine and basic. Vegetable lasagna: lots of fresh squash and zucchini, still crisp, lots of cheese and smothered with a homemade tomato sauce. And fresh basil, which always gets a +10 from me.

107 West

• 2787 Broadway (at 107th Street)
• (212) 864-1555
• Meal 46 of 52: glass of merlot ($7), tossed field greens ($5.50), vegetable lasagna ($10.95), slice of pumpkin pie ($4.95) and an Irish coffee ($6).

Has someone in South Orange, New Jersey, been re-reading Dave Barry columns? Or perhaps not reading enough Barry? You might remember this bit, which must be at least 20 years old now:

We need to do something about this national tendency to try to make new things look like they are old.

First off, we should enact an “e” tax. Government agents would roam the country looking for stores whose names contained any word that ended in an unnecessary “e,” such as “shoppe” or “olde,” and the owners of these stores would be taxed at a flat rate of $50,000 per year per “e.” We should also consider an additional $50,000 “ye” tax, so that the owner of a store called “Ye Olde Shoppe” would have to fork over $150,000 a year. In extreme cases, such as “Ye Olde Barne Shoppe,” the owner would simply be taken outside and shot.

Because there on the main drag in South Orange, a village as prim and neat as Friz Freleng’s Granny, there’s a shop(pe) called in all apparent seriousness, “Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe.” Truth be told, it fits the setting well, with the weathervane-topped bell-tower nearby, the trees, the parks, the keysmith, the quaint train station we rode into, and something called the Old Stone House by the Stone House Brook. But both Vincent and I thought of the Barry reference and learned we’d both gotten into the writer in junior high and both secretly believed he’d gone downhill since those golden years.

Vincent, Megan and I were in Jersey for a potluck dinner thrown by our friends Toisha and Susan, who I met during our late-summer camping adventure and who rent half a house there, the other half of which is occupied by two old Russian ladies often found sitting out back sharing a jumbo bottle of vodka.

What an extravaganza: board games aplenty and a random but kingly expanse of food that included grilled brats and corn-on-the-cob, two kinds of couscous, Chinatown’s finest roast pork and duck (courtesy Vincent and Megan), mac-and-cheese and stuffed cabbage rolls (courtesy myself, via the fine folks at the sprawling Fairway in Harlem), mulled cider spiked with Captain Morgan’s, and a sweet-lover’s fantasy sequence of desserts, including cheesecake, carrot cake and a chocolate torte, prepared by a pastry chef in training.

The group was fun and one of the youngest attendees was Anna, who was, like, five or something. She wore a tiara and lugged around a toy golf bag that contained plastic clubs and golf balls. Vincent, whose facility with strangers I envy, immediately established a rapport with her, which he attributed to never having lost his sense of childlike wonder. But, dang, most everyone thinks that about themselves. I couldn’t even get Anna to loan me her clubs. “The ball stays here,” she said when I tried to swipe it for putting practice.

Vincent, on the other hand, walked around on his knees (“This is how we walk at parties!”) and had her doing the same, then engaged her with a question-and-answer game (“Where’s the party? Is it in the refrigerator? Is it in the garbage?”) by which time she was giggling and scooting around the kitchen floor like an inchworm. After surmising that he was great with kids and asking how tall he was (“6' 7". But I don’t smell the blood of an Englishman.”), Anna’s mom asked if Vincent would be available to babysit. The dude is good with kids; what can I say? Those of us who view children from a distance as miniature mutants turned to such opposite-of-childlike-wonder thoughts as, “Oscar the Grouch must have smelled terrible. I mean, he lived in a fucking New York City garbage can.”

Afterwards, Vincent, Megan and I took a train back east, then went further that way via subway, winding up at a Barnes & Noble employee’s birthday celebration at Barcade in Williamsburg. May I state the obvious? Bar + arcade = genius, especially to people of a certain age such as mine and slightly younger. There was, however, something initially unsettling about playing the same stand-up videogames I did at Ohio Skate in fourth grade, but while drinking a Jameson instead of a Cherry Coke. My Irish fuel didn’t help me advance any further in Dig Dug then I’ve ever been able to get (level 12) although it did seem to increase my Moon Patrol agility (level K on the first attempt).

Jason

Supposedly the attachment to this email is a photo file. I think the extension is just wrong. Any way to open it? Winner receives a copy of the Madonna CD, Ray of Light, plus a hearty handshake.

O.

I won’t try to open it based entirely on the prize offered.

Jason

Consolation prize is the Madonna CD, chucked at your head.

O.

There’s no data in the document. Tell them to send the correct fucking format.

Jason

Really all I wanted to do was throw a Madonna CD at you.

O.

That’ll cost extra.

Jason

[throws Madonna CD at O.]

As a youth, I read the series The Three Investigators, the biggest Hardy Boys rip-off ever. But awesome nonetheless because the chums’ hideout was located in a junkyard. A concealed corrugated drainage pipe passed under a mountain of stray auto parts and emerged into a buried trailer which the Investigators had refurbished inside as their clubhouse/workshop/crime lab.

I’m signing a lease on a new apartment tomorrow, still in my current Inwood neighborhood but with a better layout and amenities like a bedroom door. It shall become my new hideout, a secret oasis in the junkyard tip of Manhattan. I don’t enter it through a pipe but I do have an elevator. Stop over sometime after my lease starts November 1st, why don’t you?

An upper-level guy at work sent a group email today that concluded with this sentence:

Thank you for being a part of the team and most of all for being my friend.

Which immediately made me think of a certain phrase and image from Pulp Fiction superimposed with lolcat-style typography. I commissioned my peep in the production department to create it and she fulfilled my request in five minutes for free because she thought it was funny, too. Uncertain whether my upper-level coworker would feel the same way, I decided not to forward my lolvincent to him.

In addition to not telling a girl, “I didn’t realize you were that old” upon learning her age, or commenting “I like your new haircut” when you’re uncertain whether it’s merely windblown or a month old, I have learned it is also unwise to ask, “You’re not really going to eat all that cheesecake, are you?” Although it did net me a mangled half-slice of raspberry swirl Junior’s from my disgruntled coworker.

When I think I have it bad with my peanut allergy, I only need to think of Tyler Savage, a 12-year-old British boy who I read an article about today in the Evening Standard. Apparently he can eat only chicken, carrots, grapes, potatoes and apples; everything else makes him spew violently from one or more orifices. The minerals and vitamins he doesn’t get from his five foods are pumped directly into his stomach by tube. This news coincides with the fact that more and more children are developing food allergies; the public is better educated about such maladies so more are being reported, but other than that, there are only guesses as to why so many people these days are allergic.

May I confess something to you? I’ve always thought the word teetotaler referred to someone who drank a lot of alcohol, when in fact it means someone who abstains from it. My misunderstanding had been that I saw the word “totaled” there, which conjured images of “wrecked,” or quite drunk. I knew it had something to do with drinking but I was completely turned around about the word’s meaning.

This explains so much. And the revelation arrived justly, at like 3 a.m. today, after a bout of heavy drinking.

I haven’t been this linguistically pantsless since that day in the mid-’90s when I realized with a start that magnanimous doesn’t actually mean large.

After drinks at an East Side bar, the R train ushered Megan, Vincent and I out to far-flung Sunset Park, Brooklyn, for an exciting apartment-warming party thrown by Carmella and her roommate Helke. Lots of great drinks and conversation and you can’t go wrong with any danceworthy party mix that combines Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott with Kraftwerk.

Best snack ever? It may be the Eden brand “All Mixed Up” nuts and dried fruit mix I bought from an upscale bodega and ate recently while waiting for the A train at 14th Street. It’s a resealable foil package containing a pleasing mix of roasted pumpkin seeds, almonds, dried cherries and raisins. Sweet, salty (but low-sodium), filling and moderately healthy, it hits the spot and is something that I suspect can be made in large batches on one’s own much more cheaply than the $3.99 I spent for a four-ounce bag.

Angelo Mozilo, the short, silver-haired CEO of Countrywide Financial, keynoted our apartments conference in Los Angeles today, which was bold and nice of him to not bail on the engagement considering federal regulators are being urged to investigate his stock trading. It’s one of those situation where he took steps to unload hundreds of thousands of his shares before the company took a plunge. Just in case, he assigned a security detail of four burly gentlemen to follow him around and we had to print dainty attendee badges for them so they wouldn’t appear too suspicious and burly.

I’m working out of our L.A. office today and find it nice to retreat from a week on the road to familiar settings that feature high-speed internet access, land lines and a friendly assistant who orders everyone lunch from the local sandwich shop. The L.A. office houses only six employees and doesn’t have much extra room, so my coworker and I shared a wobbly round meeting table in the largest office. We faced off at our respective computers as if engaged in a fierce round of Battleship and I learned that, apparently, when I type, it is especially obvious on a wobbly table that I strike the keys with undue noise and drama.

I’m in San Francisco on business today and an article in yesterday’s USA Today (“Big Cities Try to Ease Way for Bicyclists” by Charisse Jones) noted that mayor Gavin Newsom wants at least 10% of all trips in the city with within three years to be made by bicycle. Other than its infamously calf-busting hills, I can’t imagine there are too many other major American cities as friendly to bicyclists as San Francisco.

Dedicated bike lanes and racks appear everywhere (city buses even have front-mounted racks for bikes) and bicyclists themselves are such a fixture that vehicular traffic actually seems to expect and respect the riders, as opposed to New York City, where cyclists are treated by motorists like large annoying insects.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is even voting next month on a contract to create a bike-share program similar to ones popular in European cities. A bit behind the times, NYC’s most recent bike advancement is a vague pledge to add 200 miles of bike lanes by 2010 as well as the creation of a special bike lane, between the sidewalk and parked-car lane on a stretch of Ninth Avenue, that will make it much more of a challenge for cars to sideswipe cyclists but just as fun for the latter to get doored.

I heard a thin metallic scraping from my hotel room balcony this morning in San Francisco. Peeking through the curtain, I watched a seagull the size of a mailbox investigate the large sheet of tinfoil that had covered my bowl of room-service clam chowder from dinner last night. Apparently a creamy seafood residue remained because once the gull got a grip on the foil, he alighted unsteadily with his shiny treasure towards the Bay Bridge.

William Safire brings up a question in his “On Language” column today that I’ve stewed over in the past: “Should writers show off their erudition by deliberately using unfamiliar words on occasion?”

Despite being unable to resist a quip that “you’ll always get a few easily annoyed souls who find the use of an unfamiliar locution rebarbative,” Safire agrees that, foremost, plain words communicate best.

On the other hand, he advocates “stretching a readership’s vocabulary” if the audience is “inquisitive” (although shouldn’t any reader be assumed inquisitive?), noting that it’s easy to look up words nowadays with these computers he’s heard so much about.

He also brings up the tired writers’ trick of using a “hard word” in context or near a synonym. That works, although the latter is repetitive and unnecessary; any savvy editor would recognize it as grandstanding on the author’s part and redline it for removal.

My take: Safire’s first point is the best. Cut the wishy-washy; most of the time a writer should keep it simple for the win. See here: the best writers use common, concrete words in uncommon combinations or contexts to create beautifully memorable phrases that remain clear. That’s the best single line of advice I can think to give anyone who wants to write well.

I could go on forever with favorite examples; libraries brim with them: “Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time.” (Herman Melville), “...still he kept up a flow of sarcastic talk, just to exercise his wits and to have the fun of disputing” (Aesop), “Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.” (Haruki Murakami), “The howl of clashing colors, the intertwining of all contradictions, grotesqueries, trivialities: LIFE” (Tristan Tzara) and a favorite lullaby, “Dream tonight of peacock tails/Diamond fields and spouter whales/Ills are many, blessing few,/But dreams tonight will shelter you.” (Thomas Pynchon).

And especially in light of yet more looming from that screenwriters’ strike, the classic brass nugget from 1930s studio executive Irving Thalberg: “What’s all this business about being a writer? It’s just putting one word after another.”

For a while there, Arcade Fire seemed to favor small and oddball venues like decommissioned churches in which to play their rousing pop-rock and smack themselves on the head with drumsticks. Would their act tonight suffer from being staged at the large outdoor venue of Randall’s Island? It didn’t seem so. It started off slowly with “Black Mirror” but picked up swiftly with religious revival-style choruses, playing of the full pipe organ the band had shipped in, manic drumming and the dramatic unfurling of several banners.

The stage show centered around video projected onto not only the rear curtain on the stage but onto a half-dozen manhole-cover-sized white screens atop tall stands that were positioned on points of an arc across the stage, fed live from perhaps a few dozen tiny cameras secreted around the set, including a few mounted to mike stands that offered intimate close-ups of individual band members performing. The video was shown and cut on the fly, tinged with a variety of color effects, giving it all a vaguely propagandistic air.

The opening acts put on a fine show, too. I unexpectedly liked LCD Soundsystem, which is mostly a pudgy white guy lurching around and shrieking over constant staccato drum lines, rubbery bass guitar, and synths. The music reminded me of an updated Happy Mondays, or songs like “Temptation” from New Order’s club-music heyday, the ones that would go on forever, but in a good way.

Arcade Fire Setlist (via brooklynvegan.com)

1. Black Mirror
2. Keep The Car Running
3. Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)
4. No Cars Go
5. Haiti
6. I’m Sleeping In A Submarine
7. My Body Is A Cage
8. Cold Wind
9. Intervention
10. (Antichrist Television Blues)
11. The Well And The Lighthouse
12. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
13. Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
14. Rebellion (Lies)

Encore

1. Headlights Look Like Diamonds
2. Wake Up

I was to meet Megan and Vincent for dinner at Bonita in Fort Greene, only when I showed up, they didn’t seem to be there, despite cellphone discussion indicating otherwise. Were they at the Williamsburg location? They assured me they were not. I even asked the server if the place had a patio out back that I wasn’t noticing. Those sly devils: they were sitting on the same side of a table in the far back, purposely obscured by a partition, and I’m sure the look on my face was priceless when I stuck it back there.

We enjoyed the spicy alcoholic beverages, our hearty traditional Mexican entrees and an especially awesome pico de gallo that turned out not to be complementary. Megan tried a mysterious, unlabeled salsa-like condiment resting inconspicuously in a chutney-style container on the table and it was possibly the spiciest thing she’d ever tasted.

Afterwards we enjoyed drinks, company and a mangled communal slice of red velvet cake in a plastic clamshell container for a friend of a friend of a friend’s birthday celebration at Frank’s Cocktail Lounge on Fulton Street near South Elliot Place. The email invite referred to it as an “old-man bar” and New York magazine’s review praised its “truly authentic kitsch,” which all just means it’s a bar not a marketing department’s approximation of an Authentic New York-Style Bargoing Experience. It featured basic, relatively cheap drinks, generous pours, a small stage in the back for bands, and a poster-based decor that appeared to have been selected and arranged by someone with as much design sense as your dad. I liked the plastic bowl of complimentary snack-sized bags of chips at the bar. Frank, a man in an electric blue suit, leaned on the wall near the stage and kept an eye on things. He ordered our group a free round and after we called our thanks, he nodded in our direction.

Bonita

• 243 Dekalb Ave. (between Clermont and Vanderbilt Avenues), Brooklyn
• (718) 622-5300
• Meal 45 of 52: Two baskets of chips with pico de gallo for the table ($11), an order of vegetarian tacos ($7.50) and two caipirinhas ($7.50 each).

I was in Teaneck, New Jersey today for a real estate conference when I saw an 18-wheeler pass by on the road adjacent the hotel. The entire side of its trailer was illustrated by a giant color photo of a bunch of Marines standing at attention in full dress uniform in what was obviously an official government recruitment ad. But in the vein of how the illustration on a container usually suggests its contents, what I thought of first was that the trailer was packed full of rigid Marines and that the armed forces are really scaling back their troop transport/deployment budget.

With Halloween fast approaching, I’ve been receiving advice, solicited and otherwise, regarding the best places for costume-shopping/thrifting in New York City. Lately I’ve been favoring eBay for hard-to-find stuff and, on the other hand, for actual vintage clothing that’s reasonably priced, very well-described and doesn’t appear to have been photographed with a cellphone in someone’s garage, RustyZipper.com. But if I must shop a brick-and-mortar store, here are my favorites so far.

For costume basics, I like the three-story Goodwill on 181st and Audobon. Per its location far uptown in a scrappy corner of Manhattan, this isn’t a place to unearth buried vintage treasure, although they do have a well-organized small collection of leather and jean jackets on the second floor and a handful of things that could be considered retro-fashionable. I find it to be more of a workhorse for costume basics: for plain, solid-colored shirts, blouses, skirts or pants, this is the place to go for articles under $5, and I always feel better knowing my money will help fund the less fortunate as apposed to helping fund the re-wallpapering of a boutique owner’s Hamtons summer home.

A side note: a young lady wearing a nice turquoise vintage skirt told me recently that the best Goodwill/Salvation Army in Manhattan is the Salvation Army at E. 23rd Street and Third Avenue. Although as I’ve never been, I cannot vouch for this claim.

For vintage clothing in Manhattan, there are pockets of shops around 14th Street. I like Rags-A-Gogo (“Second Hand On The Move”) on that stretch, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, although purists would frown upon its Manhattan pricing. There’s a tight selection highlighted by leather and light-weather jackets, as well as cowboy and Hawaiian shirts, and the proprietor is a butch, tattooed lesbian or perhaps bisexual who, every time I’ve been in the shop (and I’ve been there, like, seven times), is talking with a random customer about sex. Either that or how everyone needs at least one cowboy shirt in his or her wardrobe.

The store in Brooklyn that will make a seasoned thrifter stoop to kiss the floor upon arrival is the storied warehouse-like Beacon’s Closet, on N. 11th Street between Berry and Wythe, right across the street from the Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg. They have a fantastic, frequently changing selection of vintage awesomeness with prices that range from penny-pinching to boutique. As is usually the case, the women win with a selection that’s easily 2.5 times larger than the men’s.

A not-as-often reported fact about Beacon’s is that it would appear to be a prime potential pick-up joint, with its clientele of trim and fetchingly tousled young ladies and gentlemen pawing through the merchandise while glancing discretely at each other’s wardrobes and expensive haircuts. “Oh, are you into terrycloth leisure slacks, too? So am I! Wanna wear ’em tonight and join me at Union Hall for billiards and a PBR?”

If you’re in the neighborhood to check out Beacon’s, you might as well check out nearby Buffalo Exchange, too, which recalls a more condensed version of Beacon’s. It’s on the corner of Driggs and N. 9th Street. (Take the L to the Bedford Street stop to visit both Beacon’s and Buffalo.)

Finally, a costume shopper should always consider the cheap-and-nasty poor-people clothing stores in the Garment District, clustered in Midtown around 34th and Eighth, especially standbys like Conway. Shirts, pants, belts, ties and caps aplenty, often for well under $5.

This isn’t really a Just Because You Spellchecked because it’s plain wrong.

Photographed crappily at the Pax in the lobby of my work building on Eighth Avenue.

I managed to get this far at my job without a Portable Integrated Communications Solution until I.T. Guy admitted it was a mistake I hadn’t received one sooner—why hadn’t I said anything?

So I have a Motorola Q. It was burbling with digital noises while still in the box, so I opened the box, turned it off and closed the box again. It has Verizon cellphone service, can be used to read and compose email (with full QWERTY keypad), and arrives preinstalled with Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0. I think I would maybe like to use it as an eBook reader. I’m certainly not using it as a cell phone as I already have one. And although it will come in handy checking emails when I’m on the road for business and away from a computer, I don’t plan to carry it with me always as I’m already weighted down by an iPod, cellphone and digital camera, and already working enough when I should be enjoying myself with fun social activities to write about in this space.