April 2008 Archives

Rounding the corner of West 37th Street onto Eighth Avenue this morning, I overheard a short, dumpy guy in baggy jeans and a saggy backpack, speaking over-confidently on his cellphone with one of those wired earpieces: “He’s the epitome of a marshmallow. Me? I’m a stallion.”

My home internet’s been down recently and I had an intense craving for brownies tonight with no way to look up a recipe. Then I realized there’d likely be one of the back of my Nestlé baking cocoa container—and there was. These turned out so well that this may become my default “base” brownie recipe (e.g. in the future, I’d like to experiment with different types of nuts and chocolate chips.)

No one outside of my regulars has ever emailed me about my blog until recently. Someone Googled a phrase to the effect of “roller coaster wedding cake” and was directed to my post on the wedding of my friends Joe and Andrea, the reception for which featured a clever roller-coaster cake. I enjoyed the correspondence between Shane and Joe, in which Joe reveals behind-the-scenes cake construction details, so I decided to reproduce it here. Next time a “roller coaster fiend” who’s getting hitched wants details on a themed cake, maybe Google will kindly direct her here.

The request:

Hi there! I came across your blog while searching for “roller coaster cakes” and up popped the image from your friend’s wedding. I was wondering if you happen to know anything about who baked the cake or where they got the coaster car and rail pieces from. My fiancé and I are planning a roller coaster themed wedding next June and we’d love to have a cake with similar stylings. If you don’t know but your friend might, please feel free to pass along my email address. It is a gorgeous cake and we’d be so excited to have something similar. Thanks very much and have a great day!

Sincerely,
Shane
Bride-to-be/roller coaster fiend

The reply:

Hi Shane,

Jason forwarded your email onto me. Congratulations on your upcoming wedding.

We are glad you liked our cake. It was a hit at our own very roller coaster themed wedding. I’ve never been to a wedding where there had been such interest in the cake. When they finally cut the cake people lined up from the one end of the reception hall to the other for a piece.

The cake was done by PM Frosted Fantasies which is a local home based operation that we had met during a cake tasting event. Originally the cake was going to be a traditional looking wedding cake with flowers and piping with the coaster around it, but as we continued planning polka dots became a theme and we switched to the dots on the cake, which we think turned out much better.

From my understanding, the cake people wound up with Plan D for the coaster track. I believe originally the thought was to make it out of licorice. The track is actually black pipe cleaner and the supports are wood. The coaster car is rice crispy treat covered in fondant. They took a seated bride and groom statue and cut off the legs. We still have the entire coaster car cake topper sitting on our mantel. The tunnel in the center was a PVC pipe. One of the things we really liked about our cake people were all the flavors they had, and keeping with our theme two of the four flavors were cotton candy and caramel apple.

Some of the other roller coaster touches in our wedding:

Our invitations had a very stylized roller coaster design to them. You can see them on my wife’s knot bio.

Our save the date magnets we made with our on-ride photo from our engagement.

Our signing mat was a caricature we had done of us on the Magnum in wedding attire. We scanned the caricature and made it into our thank-you cards.

All of our tables where named after coasters, which I had fun assigning guests to.

My wife’s brother-in-law manages a restaurant and he and his bartenders came up with signature drinks that we named after coaster at Cedar Point based on their color—those were a huge hit. They had to go out and get more of the ingredients.

Good luck on your wedding and if you have any other questions or would like some photos of things let me know.

Joe

If your ad is little more than nine giant handwritten words, take some extra time to copy edit.

I was wondering when some Lynne Truss type would add the missing comma to one of these ubiquitous Forgetting Sarah Marshall subway posters. It’s necessary because it sets off an expression of direct address, Universal Studios. The period’s still absent, though, and I’m not crazy about that capitalization.

This recipe from Mollie Katzen’s New Moosewood Cookbook sounded appealing to me on paper except that the squash doesn’t hold everything together as solidly as I’d have liked it to, resulting a vegetarian goulash that resembles something that might be served in prison. Vegetarian prison.

What do the books above have in common? As you may guess by this post’s title, their jackets were designed by Chip Kidd. That’s more than I thought I’d have on my shelves. But Kidd’s designed at least 800 jackets, according to his autobiography/retrospective, Chip Kidd: Book One, so the odds were good I’d have a few. At least one I hate: that wooden head sculpture on Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002) freaks me out and the arced type already seems dated. And at least one I’ve always liked: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) and its juxtaposition of a small segment from a lush Bosch mural atop a grainy black-and-white photo of a nomad in a sandstorm.

His most famous design was for Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, Jurassic Park. You remember it: white jacket, blue title, red author name, a T. Rex skeleton silhouette and nothing else. Kidd drew every bone himself with a Rapidiograph mechanical pen and although he conducted research on dinosaur anatomy at the American Museum of Natural History, he reveals the skeleton is “cheated,” simplified and exaggerated in parts for dramatic impact. In an unlikely twist for a book jacket illustration, Chipp’s dino design was sold to MCA for a pittance; as a salaried employee of Knopf, he had neither rights to it nor say in its usage. It was then integrated into the movie’s logo and signage, both onscreen and off, and became one of the more recognizable logos of the ’90s.

Throughout Book One, Kidd fires potshots at the paperback versions of hardcovers he’s designed. Some, like Jurassic Park, utilize the hardcover design, at least for early runs. But Kidd takes pains to point out those he did not design—the jackets toned down for wider appeal. The English Patient is a good (meaning bad) example of this. The movie tie-in paperback, which I remember well from when it was released during my tenure at an independent bookstore in Cleveland, is based on one of the film’s posters and features an extreme amber-colored closeup of two of the characters locking lips. A cover line announces, “Now a Major Motion Picture From Miramax Films.” (Kidd notes that “Independent booksellers actually complained about it and demanded the original be restored, which it eventually was.”) Of course, the jackets of affordable trade paperbacks target possibly indecisive, “everyday” readers whereas hardcover books and their higher retail generally target “serious” readers willing to pay a premium for a sturdier format that will also look nice on their bookshelves.

Kidd admits early in his book, “I’ve been described as not having any recognizable style and that’s one of the greatest compliments I could hope for.” If he does have a signature look, it may be his self-admitted “fall-back design,” which he’s used on jackets from Cormac McCarthy to David Sedaris: a bisected, often quirky photo taking up a horizontal half of the jacket with simple type placed in the other half. Another signature look may be his “magpie method” of deriving his central image from an odd print or Polaroid, or a purchase from a flea market or antique shop that’s been scanned or photographed expressively, repurposed items that have included cheap toys, cowhide, scrapbook items, cigar boxes, linoleum patterns and type from ranch brands and playbills.

His designs are often “clean,” simple with direct imagery and uncluttered type, recalling the classic Esquire covers of George Lois. In this era of declining subscription sales and ad dollars, plus the presence of wordy cover-wraps and cover-lines, a mass-market magazine couldn’t get away with a Lois design today. But Kidd’s in the enviable position of “design for design’s sake” with his jackets, which are subject to differing market pressures than magazines or paperbacks.

Even his more eclectic jackets—or at least those more gimmicky by design—maintain a solid simplicity. Brett Easton Ellis’ Glamorama (1998), which appears inspired by Paul Rand’s “holey” die-cut jacket for Nicholas Monsarrat’s Leave Canceled (1943), simply lists the title but the white jacket is riddled with tiny die-cut holes through which color headshots of celebrities are visible. (The printer had to send the jackets through the punch-press thrice; fewer passes and chads would have gummed it up to a halt.) I also like the simplicity of Deen Koontz’s Intensity (1996), which features an abstract pileup of concentric triangles in Day-Glo orange and yellow, a pun on the title but a refreshing avoidance of a typical suspense-thriller design.

Here are ten miscellaneous things I learned about Kidd and book jacket design from Book One:

1. Chip Kidd is gay.
2. Chip Kidd has always hated Matisse.
3. Chip Kidd loves Macs.
4. Chip Kidd is “a shameless ham” who will “use the slightest excuse to go before the camera.” Whenever his jackets depict a photograph of hands or a head in silhouette, it’s likely Kidd’s.
5. John Updike supplies sketches for his book jackets and “is nothing if not thorough” in the design process. Kidd demonstrates this by showing his mock-up of The Afterlife (1994) plastered with twelve Post-it Notes worth of handwritten edits by Updike.
6. Chip Kidd designed a Swatch watch, the “Swatch decoder,” which looks like something Dick Tracy would wear.
7. Chip Kidd often recasts the Knopf logo, a borzoi (Russian wolfhound), which appears on the book’s spine: it’s been turned into a mutant with five legs, a cartoon, a skeleton and a pit bull, among others.
8. Chip Kidd’s first published jacket design was for The Photographer’s Sourcebook of Creative Ideas by John Hedgecoe (1986). It doesn’t hold up well today.
9. A rejected design for David Sedaris’ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim mimicked that of an actual teach-yourself-Swahili textbook. “If I saw someone carrying it I think I’d feel a little sorry for him,” Sedaris wrote Kidd. “It seemed like a book a person was being forced to read. This was exactly what I’d wanted, but when I saw it realized I understood that it might present a problem.”
10. One of my favorite rejected jackets was for Richard Schickel’s biography of Clint Eastwood. It features an extreme color close-up of Eastwood’s squinting face from one of the Dirty Harry films riddled with three die-cut bullet holes. Schickel denounced it as a disrespectful aberration. Kidd counters: “I just liked the idea of some thug firing at the book and having no real effect on it other than just pissing off ‘Dirty Harry’ even more.”

This is New York so no matter how much you wish to imbue your barbeque joint with hickory-smoked authenticity, you can’t garnish the entrance with a screen door or tack an oilskin tarp over the bare doorframe. So I like the weird compromise of Wildwood BBQ: they replaced the glass panels of a standard revolving door with wood.

Arriving to Wildwood after work for dinner, two workers stood scrutinizing this door with concern; it appeared to be revolving improperly. I learned only after my meal, when my sever Yvonne, wearing a black T-shirt with the Wildwood logo and the phrase “Get Sauced!”, perkily informed me I’d been her very first customer, that the restaurant just opened today, which may have explained the kinks in the door. It also explained the dozen servers clustered in the rear of the place with ready-for-the-rush alertness and apprehensiveness, as if they needed giant catcher's mitts to field the expected barrage of customers. That’s right: another BBQ restaurant has opened in New York City.

This one at least has tasty enough fare. My half-rack of baby back pork ribs was sweet, smoky and unexpectedly spicy. The sauce was supposed to have a raspberry element, which was part of the reason I’d ordered it, but I couldn’t detect any such flavor. Drinks were good: a nearly too-sweet julep made with proper pebbled ice and fresh mint sprigs, followed by a straight Buffalo Trace from the comprehensive bourbon and whiskey menu. I automatically deducted points from the mac-and-cheese for being made with miniature shells instead of proper elbow macaroni, but it tasted rich and cheesy.

The architecture features a lot of heavy, bolted wooden beams and distressed steel at odd angles, lending the large, tall dining room a lodge-like vibe. The whole thing with the severs’ custom T-shirts (others read “Wingman” and “I [heart] BBQ”) and a big-city marketing agency’s idea of a “BBQ joint soundtrack” (“Bad to the Bone” and worse) reeked of theme-restaurant cheesiness. And unfortunately the location on Park Avenue near Union Square means the place attracts one of my most despised elements, especially when dinner-for-one means I eat at the bar: the white-collar After-Work Get-Together. Tonight they were all loosened ties and Banana Republic skirts, jostling me as they talked loudly about their day in the office.

Wildwood BBQ

• 225 Park Avenue South (between East 18th and East 19th Streets)
• (212) 533-2500
• Meal 24 of 52: a julep ($11), a Buffalo Trace bourbon ($8), 1/2 rack babyback ribs ($15.50) and a side of mac-and-cheese ($6.95).

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences, everything gets distorted. Language is just no damn good; I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it.

Marcel Duchamp, from a New Yorker profile by Calvin Tomkins, February 6, 1965.

Recently my department’s art director was building an ad to appear in one of our event programs and had been directed by the client to use this stock photo.

The model resembles the singer Cat Power, down to the fake beauty mark.

The positive conclusion to this was that the art director had never heard of Cat Power so I loaned her Cat’s three most accessible albums, The Covers Record, You Are Free and The Greatest. And fake Cat Power gained real Cat Power a new fan.

I like it when I get a roll of film developed and there are shots on there I’d forgotten. Case in point: this photo that I took last September of the eerie New York Port Authority Grain Terminal in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

No disrespect to New York City’s status as the cultural center of the world, but since I’ve moved here, I’ve been equally impressed by its proximity to natural wonders. In the thick of a metropolitan bustle of hot asphalt and skyscrapers, take a subway about an hour south and you’ll arrive at Coney Island and the Atlantic Ocean, a teleportation as strange as passing through a wardrobe to enter a fairyland of fauns and witches. Take a train about an hour in the opposite direction and you’ll find yourself amid mountains.

A band of nine of us took that route this morning from Grand Central to the charmingly named Breakneck Ridge, located in upstate New York in Hudson Highlands State Park, which borders the Hudson River and straddles Putnam and Dutchess Counties. The Metro North train station there was built solely for the purpose of hikers such as ourselves and in fact there’s little other reason to debark at it. There are no ticket machines, billboards, parking lots, roads or even garbage cans. There is a large “Breakneck Ridge” station sign on posts that someone or something had knocked it down. We showed our appreciation to the MTA by placing assorted change on the rails in order to later retrieve the train-flattened discs, unaware our winding trek would take us 5.5 miles south to the town of Cold Spring.

The trail rises 1,250 feet around the first 3/4 mile alone, rocky with strenuous and tricky climbing. But there are flat spots at which to pause and take in awesome views of the river and the surrounding hills, heavy with forest and tops invisible with morning mist. During our initial ascent, buzzards circled lazily overhead, presumably hoping the “breakneck” half of our place-name might come true. At an outcropping planted with an American flag on a tall pole, we could better see Bannerman Island, home to a castle built in the early 1900s to store munitions and now in ruins. As we watched a freight train skirt the west bank of the Hudson, I realized I’ve never been at a vantage point at which I could see an entire train laterally at once; the thing must’ve stretched a mile.

Wind and overcast skies shrouded the hike until the afternoon sun burnt off the gloom; I discovered later I was a literal redneck from sunburn. It was good hiking weather but I frequently peeled off layers only to put them back on a short time later. In the woods, kamikaze clouds of tiny black flies dove-bomb us; waving around the stalks of wild chives we picked didn’t deter them for long although we then smelled more of onions than sweat.

I learned that Dr. Martens shoes make for not-unpleasant hiking boots. They’re heavy and 90% comfortable—the skin over the lower part of my Achilles tendons wasn’t blistered but sore by the end of the day. But the traction of the thick, grippy soles facilitates clambering up and down rocks and the shoes’ sturdiness won’t bend a foot that slips between rocks. They also worked well when I ventured off-trail, attempted to navigate a steep decline, slipped on a pile of leaves and slide-tackled Vincent.

We packed water, light lunches and fruit and everyone seemed to have brought his or her own trail mix. Here’s the recipe for mine. It’s salt-free, energy-packed and sweet (the only added sugar is from the dried cherries) and probably moderately healthy. Its yield I will describe as “filling a gallon Ziploc freezer bag to bulging capacity so that everyone says, ‘That’s a lot of trail mix!’” I still have a bunch left if you want some.

Having lost sight of any blazes near the end of our descent, we exited the woods through the backyard of rich people, their low-slung house of long horizontals resembling something by Frank Lloyd Wright. After a detour through a centuries-old graveyard, we wandered the streets of Cold Spring, lined with quaint clapboard homes featuring wraparound front porches and carefully tended gardens. As I’d assume is the case with many small towns of the Hudson Valley, the main street contains chiefly antique shops and restaurant-bars. We chose Cold Spring Depot, nearest the train station, and negated any health benefits gained from our exercise by knocking down greasy food and several beers.

I took these snapshots during the hike with my Lomo LC-A on Kodak 100UC film, which is overkill for a camera this cheap. I then had jpegs output directly from the negatives by a nice guy at the Penn Station Duane Reade. They turned out blue but were even bluer before my quick-and-dirty Photoshop Auto Color adjustment.

A few weeks ago, I overheard two young ladies on the 1 train speak ecstatically about the brunch they’d just had at a place called Freemans, and as I’m usually still sleeping at brunch time, I made a mental note of the place and tried it for dinner last night. I gather that a lot of its allure swirls around its location through an unmarked door at the end of a blind alley on the Lower East Side, an actual alley with grafittied walls and rear windows for an art gallery and a barber shop. As such, Freemans seems to draw a clientele easily impressed by perceived exclusivity (more on that below).

Appealing to me is that the place aims for the vibe of a rich gentleman’s hunting club: a maze of connected rooms with little nooks and crannies, fireplaces, unfinished rough-hewn wooden floors, darkness punctuated by Edison bulbs, walls hung with mounted animal heads and large oil paintings of anonymous bearded men. I would be not surprised to find a trophy case or possibly some large leather chairs in another room.

I started with the fennel tomato soup, rich and topped with a pair of large and crusty toasted-bread croutons, and for my entree had the barbecued heritage pork spareribs, which arrived topped with shredded pickled jicama and artfully crossed over a bed of cheddar cheese grits. The accouterments were bland but the ribs were smoky and tender. From the “light drink” menu, I had a honeysuckle (rum, lime and honey syrup), followed by a Freemans Cocktail off the “dark drink” menu, too sweet for my taste; it was made with rye, lemon juice, pomegranate molasses and orange bitters.

I was sitting at a table for two in a high-traffic spot near the smaller of the two bars, and there was another table for two sidled up next to mine. The host attempted to seat two jackass ad executives at that table for two and the louder of them, in expensive hair, pink dress shirt and chunky platinum important-executive watch, kept bitching to his companion that “I didn’t think we asked for a table for three.” The bided their time waiting for a waiter to appear to loudly discuss the book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster and how Pink Shirt had recently secured Sears as a client, which required The Other Guy to one-up Pink Shirt with a list of his equally bland clients. Once a waiter arrived, they complained enough that they were moved and replaced at some point between my soup and entree with a trio (the third pulled up a chair). After listening in to their conversation, it transpired they were just-as-annoying but much quieter PR executives.

So the crowd wasn’t ideal but the atmosphere was great and the food was good.

Freemans

• At the end of Freeman Alley (off Rivington between the Bowery and Chrystie)
• (212) 420-0012
• Meal 23 of 52: cocktails ($12 each), soup-of-the-day ($7) and spareribs ($21).

I found this handwritten flashcard on the floor of the A train last night. There’s not an answer on the back and the suspense is killing me: anyone know which valve has the lowest transvalvular velocity?

Having read Nick Paumgarten’s entertaining and trivial profile of elevators in this week’s New Yorker, I will share with you my new knowledge on the subject.

1. In most elevators built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. “It is there mainly to make you think it works,” writes Paumgarten, who adds that firemen have keys to activate it in the event of a fire. It’s clear the door-close buttons in the elevators of my office building don’t work but impatient passengers stab at them anyway, presumably connecting the eventual closing of the doors with the fact they were pressing the button. This is similar to the way prayers and miracles work.
2. Have you heard that you can survive a freefalling elevator by jumping just before impact? Yeah, that won’t work. You’d be moving too fast to counteract elementary laws of physics. Regardless, you wouldn’t know when to jump.
3. Another element of elevators dictated by physics: “A single elevator can climb no higher than seventeen hundred feet.”
4. It sucks to be trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. You can even watch a video of it!
5. Despite what numerous explosion-intensive movies have led you to believe, you can’t escape through the hatch in an elevator’s ceiling. By law, it’s bolted shut from the outside. “It’s there so that emergency personnel can get in, not so passengers can get out,” Paumgarten explains.

[Neil Diamond] said fans will be wowed by [his new tour this summer], which includes what he calls “technical wizardry . . . we can do things on this stage that we’ve never dreamed were possible.”

Still, when asked to give details, Diamond was mum.

Dare to dream! I’m picturing:

• the Diamond Dancers, a chorus of writhing, bejeweled backup singers
• glitter cannons
• robot version of Neil to sing harmony alongside actual Neil
• Neil takes the stage parachuting from the crown of the Statue of Liberty
• Neil departs the stage on a jetpack
• combination illegal-immigrant roundup/chorus-line during “America”
• low carbon-emission laser effects
• custom vocoder that digitally enhances sandpaperiness of Neil’s voice
• instead of confetti, 50,000 pairs of Levi’s “Slouch Straight” 504 jeans dropped on crowd during “Forever in Blue Jeans”
• special guest: Cher, facial structure and costume circa “If I Could Turn Back Time”
• And for the win, a coworker of mine submitted, “Before going on tour, Neil will have surgery to wrap 169 small LED lights around his heart so that when he sings “Heartlight’ the LEDs will flash and spell out H-E-A-R-T-L-I-G-H-T during the choruses.”

Ah, the French Kicks. Damn New York hipsters. Poppy, somewhat garagey guitar-rock, like an old-new Kinks-Strokes hybrid. I recognized the cover of The Troggs’ four-chord wonder, “With a Girl Like You.” Loud.

We did the right thing by finishing the most of our drinks and conversation beforehand at Max Fish, the ’round-the-corner bar that antidotes Mercury’s A-train-at-rush-hour vibe with a gently undulating bar, an explosion of vibrant color and weird yardsale stuff on the walls, decent drink prices, honest whiskey pours and most of Hunky Dory on the soundsystem.

It’d be convenient if there were websites or even software that could help me file my taxes. Or what if there existed a person or people I could pay to do my taxes for me? That’d be awesome.

But now that I’ve settled here in New York, my taxes aren’t tough to do myself. After locking myself in my office's conference room after work today with a stack of paper, pen and calculator, it took me only about 1.5 hours. I must be making more money now because I owe both the federal and city/state governments much more money than usual, possibly because I never bothered to adjust my deduction or whatever you call it.

So BKLYN #2—a dinner awash in a frisson of samosas, homemade curries and exotically spiced soup, and cardamom coffee—totally rocked, but the talk of the dinner was cham-cham we had for dessert.

Have you eaten this before? Is it an elaborate prank-food? Chris was fairly certain the Indian lady at his local Indian store recommended it to him just to see if a Westerner would purchase these vaguely doody-shaped donut-things, dripping with a naughty sucrose syrup. Indeed, each appeared to contain enough sugar and fat to send even the paunchiest average American into a porky coma. And this coming from a guy (me) who’s previously eaten clumps of brown sugar directly from the bag when there’s been no other food in his apartment.

BKLYN #2

• Angela’s apartment
• Meal 22 of 52: a bunch of awesome homemade Indian food. Also, cham-cham.

Let this be a lesson should you ever shop for buttermilk: short of churning your own, there is apparently no longer such thing as “buttermilk” available at retail. I needed some for the saag paneer recipe I’m making for dinner tomorrow and I wanted it to be the true full-fat variety, as it and yogurt were the sole ingredients providing the dish’s creaminess—and I wanted it to be super creamy.

After hitting seven grocery stores in my neighborhood, then seven other grocers on the Upper West Side, including New York stalwarts Zabar’s, Citarella, Fairway, Food Emporium and two Gristedes, I can tell you I’m next to certain you can’t purchase buttermilk with milkfat content any higher than 1.5%. The real slap in the face was the label on the buttermilk I settled on, which alleged that it contained 50% less fat and 20% fewer calories than regular buttermilk—regular buttermilk that was nowhere to be found. I just don’t know; maybe full-fat buttermil exists and it's my bad luck or a New York thing that I couldn’t find it.

After a trip to Kalustyan’s for a pound of paneer, dried peppers, chutneys and spices for the Indian-themed dinner this weekend, Allison, Angela and I had lunch at one of their favorite spots, Tiffin Wallah, which features a kick-ass vegetarian all-you-can eat Southern Indian lunch buffet for only $6.50. It’s Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and includes various curies, two kinds each of rice and flatbread, sundry chutneys and relishes, salad and dessert, which is a spiced fruit cup sweetened with condensed milk. I really wish this place was located nearer my office.

Interesting bit on the restaurant’s name from its website:

Tiffin Wallah translates as one who carries the box. Tiffin is an old English word for a light lunch, and also the name of the multi-compartment metal lunch box that carries it. Tiffin Wallahs originated over a century ago when the many Indians working for British companies disliked the food served at work. Tiffin service was created to bring home cooking to the workplace.

Tiffin Wallah

• 127 E. 28th St.
• (212) 685-7301
• Meal 21 of 52: all-I-could-eat vegetarian Indian fare ($6.50).

For us young ones who only remember Jack Palance from his aged turns in Batman, those one-armed push-ups at the Oscars or that Skin Bracer commercial in which he urged viewers to agree that “confidence is very sexy,” it’s startling to see him, in his first movie role, as the spindly villain of the bioterror/noir Panic in the Streets. The dude’s 6'4" with a rasp and sharply angled face custom-hewn for a black-and-white thriller. Very sexy, in a sinister fashion.

Walking down Eighth Avenue to meet Andie for a dinner of shepherd’s pie and Guinness, I overheard some dude in a parked van direct a shout-out to a duo of young ladies passing by on the sidewalk.

I’m embarrassed for my gender to admit catcalls frequent my work neighborhood: random young men, of the slouchy jeans set, will holler after a lady. Typically it’s a highly obvious, frequently offensive and always unoriginal commentary on her walk or a specific part or region of her body, as if there’s a chance she’d stop and coo, “Take me now, you silver-tongued lothario!”

The guy I passed was directing his affection toward a young lady wearing black Chucks, jeans in the Barney-iest of purples, a jacket in a giant black-and-white houndstooth pattern and huge triangular earrings that appeared to be made of pewter formed to resemble bamboo. But I must give mild respect to this guy, for after his initial “Hey!” and a honk of his van’s horn for emphasis, he suggested that he sought a sassily dressed girl with street smarts by shouting “Bamboo earrings, at least two pair!” quoting one of my favorite rap classics of all time. The ladies paid him no mind. And yet: a refreshingly inventive holler, my good man!

The music of Explosions in the Sky, whose show I attended tonight at Terminal 5, is a little like life: sometimes quiet, mostly loud, and more things suggested than said outright. It’s long, instrumental “post rock,” which is a critic’s way of saying it’s updated, less wanky prog rock. We’re talking 10-minute songs of swirling guitars, all three interlocking, unraveling and entwining while the band members loped then sank, as if under the weight of the music, to mash their effects pedals and conjure squalls of precisely spectacular distortion. It’s moody, heady stuff—and loud; if these guys made arena-rockstar money, they’d be ramming their axes into the amps as an encore—and because I like Mogwai, I like Explosions. Sometime in the summer of 2001, I remember hearing their first album played on a car stereo of a friend of a friend, a DJ whose musical tastes didn’t mesh with mine, and the hair on my arms stood up and I had one of those “Who is this?” moments everyone gets with a favorite band heard for the first time.

After work, stopped by the Flatiron Lounge for a few more cocktails. I tried a bracingly crisp Mint Jules (90-proof Buffalo Trace bourbon, muddled mint and smashed limes) and a Ward 8 (rye whiskey, lemon and orange juices and grenadine). Both were deliciously expensive.

I bought a set of Colorware dinner plates at Fishs Eddy today, coincidentally 25% off. I couldn’t decide on a single color so I bought one of each. Now I have seven vibrant dinner plates. Hooray.

I don’t regret the concerts I attend but because I’m a young white guy with black plastic-framed glasses, most of the action at these concerts is onstage. By which I mean the crowd is not hipping, hopping, swaying or bodyrocking. Which is why it was nice to attend the edIT show at the Knitting Factory tonight. It’s not a concert I’d choose of my own volition; Sherry follows-up on all of her invitations and is persuasive.

I liked edIT immediately when he took the stage wearing a homburg and a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. His energy and skills at the turntables impress. He creates glitchy hip-hop electronica for neither strictly robots nor breakdancers but for breakdancing robots—in slow motion. Yes.

Beforehand we’d gotten Indian food in the Curry Hill region of New York at Banjara, which Sherry had chosen in large part on the basis that it wasn’t stereotypically decorated with strings of colored Christmas lights (although it did have a loose mosaic of mirrors glued to the ceiling).

Banjara

• 97 First Ave.
• (212) 477-5956
• Meal 20 of 52: saag paneer ($10.98).

After a half-day of jury duty, spent sitting in the clerk’s room during which my name was (again) never called, I was sent home (or in my case, back to work) with a handsome certificate indicating I’d served my duty in the largely uneventful criminal justice system of New York City and cannot be called to serve again for six years. For dinner, I caught up with Vincent and Megan at Los Dos Molinos, a dark, packed and cozy Mexican restaurant where the margaritas are literally something like $12 apiece.

Los Dos Molinos

• 119 18th St. (between Irving Place and Park Avenue)
• (212) 505-1574
• Meal 19 of 52: a black-bean enchilada or something, with expensive margaritas.

I could postpone no more and reported for jury duty this morning. For this round, I was at 100 Centre Street, across the way from Walter, the “snowy-haired clerk of jury room 1121.” Instead a guy named Lenny was my clerk, curt but funny and with the requisite accent for having been at this job for 20+ years.

My duty involved a lot of sitting, mostly in a courtroom as prospective jurors were called at random from my group, seated in the jury box and vetted by attorneys from both sides and the judge.

The case centered around attempted first degree murder of several New York City cops, so the same question the lawyers managed to ask a dozen different ways was, “Can you, prospective juror, recognize that even a cop can lie, forget or deliver inaccurate testimony?”

There was bickering. The judge kept interrupting the attorneys. Philosophical arguments flew forth. Those prospective jurors plainly dissatisfied they’d been chosen were eventually dismissed and replacements called forth. My name was never called, so I sat in the back of the courtroom on a hard churchlike bench from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with an hour break for lunch (soup dumplings, cheap and piping hot, from New Green Bo), and listened to the same questions and arguments over and over again.

I caught the sold-out Beach House show tonight at the Bowery Ballroom with Beth. I was expecting sweet boy-girl harmonies, in the vein of the Fruit Bats or Mates of State, but it a little more oblique, like, uh, Brooklyn’s own Fiery Furnaces around the time they starting producing concept albums involving their grandmother.

Mainly the Beach House lady sang solo and played keyboards and beatbox pedal-effects while the dude played guitar and a faceless drummer knocked out the backbeat. They were clad in Elvis-style white spangled jumpsuits that suited the spacey atmospherics. One of the openers played a Hammond organ, which I liked.

Before the show Beth and I met for dinner at Congee Bowery, which is nearly as conveniently close to the Ballroom as the Bowery station of the JMZ. I enjoyed my hot and hearty fresh mushrooms and fried bean curd and appreciated the tapioca-like concoction served as a surprise, complimentary dessert.

Congee Bowery

• 207 Bowery (between Spring and Delancey)
• (212) 766-2828
• Meal 18 of 52: fresh mixed mushrooms and fried bean curd ($12.95).

Jhumpa Lahiri read from her new book tonight at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. It was sold out and the crowd was mostly women. The reading was adequate; the most memorable part was the repeated pre-reading instructions from the noble Barnsies on staff involving increasingly complex details as to how and what Jhumpa would sign, how the lumpish cretins “saving” seats had to give them up, and how those of us with books to be signed were going to line up in a calm and orderly fashion afterwards with our dust-jackets tucked in the appropriate fashion for ease of title-page signage.

Going into it, I expected fireworks; Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize when she was 32 for her first book, the short-story collection The Interpreter of Maladies, which I like. I realize she's a writer, not an entertainer or a motivational speaker, and that her stories are about everyday people in everyday situations, only, you know, the Bengali-American thing. But the affair was as solemn and dry as a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing on proposed budget estimates for the Department of Education’s upcoming fiscal year. Even the Q&A session was dull, with Lahiri offering vague answers to all three questions, the groaner of which was, paraphrased, “Being a female, is it a challenge for you to write such believable male characters?”

Which is like asking a lumberjack whether it’s a challenge for him to cut down all those trees. Because if you were to ask a lumberjack that, he’d turn off his chainsaw and ask you to repeat your question, then tell you, “No, because cutting down trees is what I do. It’s my job.” Which is how Lahiri should have responded—not necessarily mentioning chainsaws and lumberjacks, although that would have been more exciting than her rambling answer which was, in effect, “No, because writing is what I do.”

Afterwards, Allison, Jovito and I took a short walk to the Flatiron Lounge for cocktails. It was busy so we sat on stools at a narrow wooden ledge in the long arched entryway of the bar. To our right, Hiroko Masuike was photographing drinks she’d positioned on the ledge, for a New York Times feature on Martinis in the paper’s Travel section. She asked for us pose with the drinks—which were apparently props and undrinkable—so as for us to appear blurry in the background as people having fun and enjoying their fake drinks. This sort of happened to Allison before and I’m beginning to think she attracts photographers: after attending an outing of the secret-dinner society Bite Club early this year, she found that she appeared blurry in the background of a photo in an accompaning Page Six Magazine article.

[April 12, 2008 Update: None of us appear in the photo published in the article (“Places That Put the Proper Prefix on the -tini” by Seth Kugel for the April 13, 2008 issue.). Although that could be us, blurry in the background.]

Post drinks, we ate dinner at LAnnan, a Vietnamese join that by nature of its proximity serves as a sort of cheap yet charming antidote to the hipster-mess-hall of Republic. I had a spicy curry made with string beans, eggplant, onions and peppers. It also featured okra, which, like sweaters and girls, I appreciate much more now that I’m no longer a child. My favorite awkward English menu moment was the “Steamed Grandma Recipes Soup,” wherein it is not immediately clear whether grandma is angry or the soup is hot.

LAnnan

• 121 University Place (corner of 13th)
• (212) 420-1179
• Meal 17 of 52: curry ($7.50) and Thai iced tea ($1.50).