Who knows where the time goes but my life sounds even more impressive¹ when weeks worth of greatest hits are edited and compressed into an entry. Have I learned my lesson? Will I resume updating daily? Let’s hope so. Hold on as I whisk you back to that magical month of November 2008.

On Halloween, I bade farewell to Inwood and moved into a new one-bedroom apartment in a mostly Caribbean neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I’m on Eastern Parkway a few blocks from the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Prospect Park and various peeps. I can see the Empire State Building from my bed and I’m still trying to get Raul the Lazy Super to fucking install my required apartment-to-front-door intercom/buzzer. Otherwise I’d invite you over in a heartbeat.

On Monday, November 3rd, I happened upon a great New York City stand-up storytelling competition staged by a nonprofit group I’d never heard of before, The Moth. Admission is only $6 and I’ll be attending more of these, for sure. A topic is agreed upon beforehand; at the show I attended, in the crowded basement of Union Hall, it was appropriately “sweat&rdquo). Participants independently develop a five-minute routine mentioning the topic or incorporating it as a subject. The night of the show 10 of them are picked at random from the audience to take the stage and perform; some stories are straight-up personal recollections and most are styled like comedy bits. Judges vote on each participant. Great fun.

The next day, some guy was elected President. I had pizza and beer.

On Thursday, November 6th I waited in an around-the-block line to catch a free Comedy Central “Comedy Hour” taping of a Jo Koy standup routine. His ethnic jokes bored me but I enjoyed immensely the pussy and dick jokes that dominated the second half of his set; they made me laugh those cathartic laughs that purge crankiness and worry from my system.

That weekend, I ate the best jelly donut ever, and you can only get one starting at 8:00 a.m. on weekends at the Trois Pommes patisserie on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, one of Ed Levine’s possibly top-three bakeries in New York City. They go quickly but while they’re available in a small basket on the counter, they’re still warm and filled with a homemade-tasting raspberry jam. They cost $3 each and they’re worth it. I bit into mine with vigor and blasted powdered sugar all over my hooded sweatshirt.

Later the same morning, Saturday, November 8th, I traveled to Edgewater, New Jersey for the annual bluefin tuna carving ceremony at Mitsuwa Marketplace. The crowd there pressed forward around a team of men armed with extremely sharp knives to buy the fattiest cuts of the 400-pound specimen as soon as they were cut. The fish’s head was planted in an ice-filled red plastic bucket to the side where people posed for photos with it. Later I learned that although bluefin is among the world’s finest and exclusive fish for sushi (I ate some at Mitsuwa from a bluefin carved earlier and it was amazing), it’s an imperiled species and that I shouldn’t have enjoyed myself as much as I did. I made amends on our drive back to New York by stopping at the amazing Philippine Bread House in Jersey City and eating an ensaymada, a traditional Filipino slow-death method via five ounces of donut-like pastry that’s fried, sugared and topped with cheese. So bad, yet so good!

On November 10th, I tracked down the small, great and inexpensive Mexican restaurant I knew was somewhere in my neighborhood, Chavella’s.

I now know this about Tony- and Academy Award-winning playwright/screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard, who I heard November 11th in an interview onstage with New Yorker editor David Remnick: if I took a whiskey shot for every time Stoppard said “as it were,” I would be drunk. But: despite being wickedly smart and well-read, he’s funny and self-deprecating, uncomfortable talking about himself, a topic that arose often about his new translation of Chekov’s play, The Cherry Orchard. I plan to see it after it opens at the BAM Harvey Theater on January 2nd. Stoppard said he’s striving to make it conversational and incorporate contributions from the actors to improve its familiarity. But amid talk of great Russian authors and the challenges translating them, I was most excited by Stoppard’s lowbrow revelation that he not only contributed uncredited dialogue for Sean Connery’s and Harrison Ford’s characters in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but that the idea for the “leap of faith” invisible-bridge challenge was his.

On Monday, November 17th, my boss and eight other people in my office got laid off so the company could save money. But I don’t want to detail that here because you never know who reads what on the internet. Which reminds me: my company is swell and I certainly don’t plan on stealing a bunch of office supplies when we move down to 120 Broadway in mid-December.

That night, I saw Iron & Wine in a sold-out show at Terminal 5. I enjoyed Mr. Beam (and his sister, who sang harmony). He’s a funny guy who’s still in some awe that he can draw such a crowd. He playfully chided the crowd for bursting out into applause as soon as he hit a chord, pausing to say something like, “That’s just one chord! You guys don’t know what song it is!” I was happy he played two of my current favorites, “Resurrection Fern” and “Boy With a Coin,” and he encored on the acoustic with “Trapeze Singer.” I enjoyed his acoustic stuff more than I did the full-band jamboree. Also, I was curious to get to the bottom of the point in his web bio that “[i]n conversations with Sam while mixing The Shepherd’s Dog, he confessed to finding spiritual inspiration in Tom Waits’ pièce de résistance, Swordfishtrombones.” That’s one of my favorite Waits albums but I didn’t notice many connections other than the songs-as-stories and a pleasing amount of marimba.

I organized a Brooklyn bowling outing on Saturday, November 22nd at Melody Lanes in Sunset Park². I like this place and not just because the decor can be summed up by the digit 1989: the music is loud and mostly bad. And there was a young boy at the lane next to ours inexplicably dressed as Indiana Jones. Also, I am happy to report that Al, New York City’s Angriest Bartender, remains just that. At least to me. Here’s what happened when I ordered a pitcher of Bud. Al poured it and set four plastic cups on the bar.

Jason

Thanks. But I’m with a group, so I’ll need eight cups.

Al

[testily] I can’t give you eight cups. You’ll have to order another pitcher and I can give you four more.

Jason

[pause] O.K., I’ll take two pitchers.

Al

Or I can give you these eight smaller cups instead of the four large ones.

Jason

O.K., let’s do that.

Al

So, two pitchers of Bud.

Jason

Well, if I get eight cups, I’ll just take the one pitcher for now.

Al

[exasperated] One pitcher, two pitchers! Make up your mind!

Everyone else in the group who made a drink run reported Al was nothing but pleasant. Short and squat, resplendent in his giant ’80s eyeglasses, red suspenders and slicked-back silver hair. But pleasant, so I guess being surly with me was enough. Later, when I returned to him for another flagon of Bud, he claimed he was out of pitchers and that I’d have to bring him back an empty one.

The next night, I caught the seldom-screened and exceptionally low-budget UK punk documentary from 1982, Rough Cut and Ready Dubbed, which I enjoyed, especially the concert-riot sequences, as well as all of the angst and acne in the talking-head segments featuring Q&A with and concert footage from groups including the U.K. Subs, the Cockney Rejects and the Stiff Little Fingers, and the likes of influential BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel and Factory Records founder Tony Wilson.

On Monday, November 24th, I bought decor and other apartment stuff at the new Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with a pleasant pit stop at LeNell’s, the best liquor store in the city. LeNell Smothers is a charming Southern woman who poured me several wine samples while a Hank Williams song played. I purchased from her a bottle of Four Roses Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey for purposes of making my own bacon-infused bourbon, plus a pricey jar of genuine marasca cherries from Luxardo for assorted cocktail-development purposes.

I had a deliciously extensive Thanksgiving dinner at Jimi and Will’s newish apartment in Washington Heights. I learned I am not so great at playing Mario Kart Wii. I also made a cranberry relish recipe I clipped from the November 12th issue of The New York Times and it was delicious but next time: less onion.

And the next evening, Friday, November 28th, I finally made it into wunderkind chef David Chang’s reservations-difficult, 14-seat East Village restaurant, Momofuku Ko. Upon review, I see my notes on this disintegrate because I can’t read my handwriting on account of the wine-pairing option, which amounted to often a full glass of expertly complemented wine, champagne or sake served with each course. All 13 of them.

And I don’t believe I understood a word the sommelier said. For example, describing a red amid a string of incomprehensible adjectives and Spanish and maybe Spanish adjectives, I picked up on the keyword Mendoza and said brightly, “That’s in Spain, right?”³ when what I was actually wondering was “Wasn’t that the name of one of the bad guys in Dirty Harry?”⁴

Chang’s fixed-price menu, which isn’t printed publicly, changes often, so every day the courses are conceivably unique. I started with some sort of fancy pork rind; a neat cube of moist, peppered biscuit; and a non-jumbo shrimp with tomato chutney. I’m missing some matter in the descriptions there, and some ingredients, but let’s get to the big stuff. The pinnacle was the daikon soup with chunks of lamb belly, fried lily palm and fried purple mustard greens, paired with a Pinot Noir. The most beautiful dish, a smoked hen egg, its yolk broken and burst onto the plate, came garnished with a generous constellation of caviar, fingerling potato chips and sous vide onions and scallions.

Next: hand-torn pasta, cubes of snail sausage and pecorino cheese. Then: monkfish with uni and mitsuba. And: something with pine nuts and lychees topped with finely shaved foie gras which was of velvet-textured tastiness despite me not remembering what it even was.

With the plating of the most pedestrian course—roasted chicken with Brussels sprouts and mushrooms;—I was very, very full (also: drunk; in retrospect, the stop at Decibel for sake and shochu beforehand was unnecessary). But I had one more entrée to go. It would have top-ranked had I not perceived our corpulence to be approaching that of Henry VIII’s: large shavings of beef cheeks that had been braised for 36 hours, mitake mushrooms and charred jalapeños.

Done? Not yet: two dessert courses arrived with glasses of Muscat champagne and sherry, respectively: mandarin orange sorbet with juniper and segments of bitter orange (mouth-wateringly sweet and sour) and pretzel ice cream (is that correct? or even possible?) with a yogurt-Granny Smith sauce and tiny spheres of deep-fried cheddar cheese. The pleasurable and unusual dining experience flew by and I was at Ko more than two hours; in fact, I literally closed the place.

A few days later I realized the Asian guy behind the counter the whole time whom I’d assumed was David Chang was, in fact, David Chang, which made me wonder whether I should have engaged him in conversation deeper than discussion of Mitchell, one of his chefs, and how he tried to break into the restroom while I was in there.

Update, 3:40 p.m. Hold up: the guy I thought was David Chang may have been Peter Serpico, shown here. We may never know.

Also: David Chang likes Bob Dylan. The restaurant’s soundtrack is supplied by his personal iPod and I counted no fewer than five Dylan songs amid the shuffle of Joy Division, Public Enemy, Elton John, The Flaming Lips, Neil Young, Jurassic 5, Cake’s cover of “I Will Survive,” and a song named “We Here” from some group from Singapore.

And that’s not even all I did on my Summer Vacation, I mean, November. But that’s all I’m writing about. Because I don’t tell all. Also, I’m tired. Could I have a more exciting month? Oh, probably. Bring it, December.

Trois Pommes

• 260 Fifth Ave. (near Garfield Place), Brooklyn
• (718) 230-3119
• Meal 45 of 52: a jelly donut ($3) and a coffee ($2).

Chavella’s

• 732 Classon Ave. (between Park Place and Prospect Place), Brooklyn
• (718) 622-3100
• Meal 46 of 52: quesadilla flor de calapaza (cactus flower) ($4.50), a giant bowl of rice pudding ($4.25) and two Pacificos ($4.00 each).

Momofuku Ko

• 163 First Ave. (between 10th and 11th Streets)
• (212) 500-0831
• Meal 47 of 52: a bunch of mind-blowing food and drink ($150)

¹ I know! I didn’t think it was possible, either! [back]
² I am not forgetting my Manhattan-based brethren and will plan an outing with y’all soon. My life is torn; a children’s book written about me would be a tender tale entitled Jason Has Two Boroughs. [back]
³ No. [back]
⁴ No. [back]

After work, I drank my favorite, a Double Fill Up (rye, muddled mint, lemon juice and pomegranate syrup), at Death & Co. then bought a pair of Kubrick-like miniature toy figurines at Toy Tokyo and gave the Peecol one (a guy-in-a-hazmat-suit designed by low-res German art collective eBoy) to Vincent when we met later for a manly dinner and drinks at our favorite local honky-tonk, Rodeo Bar & Grill. According to the character’s bio, “Hazma never landed his dream gig as a chemical cleaner, but he heads to his desk-job in a Level A suit anyway.” In between this frivolity, I somehow procured a new hardcover copy (for half-off!) of John Hodgman’s new book, More Infomration Than You Require, even though its sale date is October 21. Hooray for rifts in space and time!

This theater group Kelly knows, the Anthropologists, canvassed Fort Washington today, collecting from passers-by six-word stories, a literary form that legend has originated with Hemingway. Then, this afternoon, in the luxuriously grassy front lawn of Fort Washington Collegiate Church, they acted-out improv mini-plays based on the stories. Curious and clever, and with free baked goods donated by a local bakery for refreshment; I had my first black-and-white cookie and it was good. Some photos I took of Kelly and Joe are, as of this writing, at the top of my Flickr page.

I am glad Allison informed me of New York Craft Beer Week, September 12 to 21, or my mood may have festered into regret. She, Jovito, Laura, Michael and I met, (simultaneously, as it turned out in an odd coincidence) at the Chelsea Brewing Company on Pier 59 for the Manhattan Cask Ale Festival. Around 45 “firkins” of craft-brewed, cask-conditioned ale at cellar temperature were available on a pay-as-you-go basis: at the door, we purchased “bingo cards” for $20. Each square on the card represented 50 cents and depending upon how much the cost of the specific beer or food item (they served satisfying bratwurst and pulled-pork sandwiches), that number of dollar boxes would be checked-off the sheet by the server.

I had a Blue Point Cherry Imperial Stout, from Patchogue, New York, sort of a fruit-beer/imperial stout hybrid that was my favorite. The Livery Herb Superb Black I.P.A. from Benton Harbor, Michigan, was lively with hops.The Brooklyn “Black Ops,” which I fear many people ordered solely based on the fact it had the third-highest ABV on the menu, tasted what I expect used motor oil tastes like. On the bright side, I wouldn’t have wanted to have saved the best for last, so I made the most of it and enjoyed a night of great drink, friends and views of New Jersey from our vantage on the east shore of the Hudson.

It is the mission of Tina and I to eat at every Mexican restaurant in New York City, starting with the Upper West Side. Cilantro, our choice this evening, was not bad. Simple touches, like plantain chips mixed in with the standard complimentary basket of tortilla chips with salsa, was a nice touch. Comprehensive magarita selection with various grades of tequilla. Sidewalk dining is an option there, if you like that sort of thing. We do.

Cilantro

• 485 Columbus Ave.
• (212) 712-9090
• Meal 44 of 52: a Patron Blanco margarita ($10) and a vegetable enchilada ($15).

I attended Kate and Justin joint “welcome to our new apartment”/“we’re gettin’ hitched” shindig. Their new place is the top floor of a house in Astoria near Jackson Heights. Their tiny, shared front yard features decorative cement pineapples, big fake flowers and, as Kate points out, “a Jesus statue and a tiny secondary Jesus statue at the foot of the big, primary Jesus statue.” It was an easy place to find even though I was unfamiliar with the neighborhood.

We grilled hamburgers and such on their equally small patio out pack. It was my first time viewing what’s a staple for house-dwellers in Queens: the garages behind the houses are topped with tall steel poles. From the pole to the house is strung a clothesline on a pulley for line-drying freshly washed laundry. I’m told a certain generation of Queens-dweller has burned into his brain the distinctive squeak of rusty laundry-line pulleys.

When it began sprinkling, we retreated back around front and up the steep staircase to the top floor, where Kate and Justin have a large collection of defunct media (VHS and audiocassette tapes), wind-up tin toys, dolls, taxidermied alligator heads, a few animal skulls, a tangle of homemade mutant sock moneys, and various prints and paintings, including an etching of the Ebola virus that Kate made and was unsure what to do with. Everyone shouted at once: “Etsy!”

When we were good and drunk, we went to Chuck E. Cheese’s, where a kid can be a kid and apparently also brazenly steal your Skee-Ball the moment you’ve inserted your token into the machine. We bought a chocolate cake to-go and ate it with our beer and cocktails at a local Irish bar that was authentic in that it featured actual Irish drunks.

A dozen years ago, writer Cintra Wilson opened her epitaph for her best friend and lover, Kevin Gilbert, with the paragraph below. I’m reviving it because it’s wasted on the dead and it’s a good description of what my friends mean to me.

Certain people are like big good anchors in your life that hold you to the world, that give you a sense of exalted, meaningful belonging and true comradeship in the highest sense. They are co-conspirators, people who get all the jokes. When someone understands you that well, you can never truly feel alone in the world.

In Memoriam, Cintra Wilson, Salon, May 27, 1996

I got drinks at Clover Club and dinner at Pó with Allison tonight. Mario Batali was originally the chef-partner but now has no longer anything to do with the place and I’m guessing it’s better for it. I’m pretty sure we shared the white bean bruschetta and that I had the Spaghetti all’Amatriciana, made with onions, chilies and tomatoes but also “guanciale”—unsmoked bacon made from pig’s cheeks—which sounds right up my alley.

Pó

• 276 Smith St., Brooklyn
• (718) 875-1980
• Meal 43 of 52: white bean bruschetta ($2) and Spaghetti all’Amatriciana ($14).

Indian Lake is quiet and meditative. Not only is it in the middle of nowhere (no one has had a lick of cellular reception since arriving here Saturday afternoon), most of the other campers have departed by today to return to work, some from our group but mostly from other sites.

I sat on the rocks at the southeastern edge of our island this morning and watched a pair of ducks take off from the lake at least 100 yards away and I could hear their wings flapping. Other than that and the wind in the pines, there was silence.

We had to be off the island by 11:00 a.m. so we weren’t able to cram in much more activity than breaking-down and packing-up both campsites, breakfast, sandwich prep (for lunching on the road) and a bit of skinny dipping.

Before we left, I asked the old guy at the marina shop (not the same guy who’d warned us of beaver fever) to recount the history behind the name “Indian Lake.”

“Whelp,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “I’d guess it has something to do with Indians.”

Other than taking an hour scenic route, as my dad used to call them, during which our Google Mapped directions got away from us, the drive back to the city was uneventful. The van passengers got cellular service back at about the same time and our van was a flurry of digital tones, texting and returned calls (“You have [pause] 12 [pause] new messages.”) It signaled an unsubtle shock back into civilization; although Manhattan is also an island, I’m hyperaware it’s everything our Indian Lake island was not: loud and crowded and with garbage floating in the water at its shores. I have a feeling I’ll adjust. Eventually.

Bonus: You can check out the camping photos I took with my Lomo LC-A in a set on my Flickr page.

Norana patched a hole in my khakis with the emergency sewing kit in Vincent’s well-stocked first aid kit. Apparently I had crouched and split a seam from just under my fly on down. Someone said, “Did you know you have a hole in your pants?” and I said, “Yeah, these are my camping pants, so they have a few holes...” and I looked down and realized I’d been unknowingly flashing a large portion of my boxer-briefs to everyone for an indeterminate length of time.

This afternoon, Megan and I swam to the eastern shore of the lake. Although that might be an understatement because at some point between childhood and now, I’ve forgotten how to swim. So I pulled on an orange life vest and sort of bobbed, kicked and doggy paddled my way over. It was exhausting. We stopped a few times to sun ourselves on the craggy mini-islands that poke from the lake and I got myself a nice sunburn on my head, shoulders and back.

For dinner, we made one of most ingenious campfire entrées ever: personal pizzas. Butter or olive-oil both sides of a round of pita or nan. Grill one side over red-hot coals. Pile sauce, toppings and cheese atop the grilled side. (We had garlic we’d roasted on the fire, onions, tomato sauce, canned tomatoes, pepperoni, portabella mushrooms and a few different kinds of shredded cheese.) The pizzas are then covered with tinfoil and returned to grill, ungrilled side down and cover. About 10 minutes later, the crusts were crisp, the cheese melted and they were ready to eat.

Afterwards, each person around the campfire relayed a favorite joke or two but I couldn’t think of one. As I write this entry a few days later, I realize I do know one joke, so I suppose it’s my favorite. Here it is:

An American businessman gets into a cab in Mexico City, gives the driver his destination and takes his seat. The cabbie rockets off and immediately speeds through a red traffic light.

“Are you crazy?” says the suit. “The light was red!”

“It’s okay,” says the cabbie. “My brother does it all the time.”

Just as the businessman’s heart rate returns to normal, the cabbie blows through a second red light.

“Jesus! That one was red half a block ago!”

“Relax,” assures the cabbie. “My brother does it all the time.”

So the cab approaches a green traffic light. And the cabbie brings the car to a halt.

“Now what!” screams the businessman. “The light’s clearly green!”

The cabbie settles back unpeturbed and says, “My brother might be coming.”

Megan, Josh and I are the only remaining campers at the southern end of the island, so we took a canoe ride back together. Somewhat addled by Jack Daniel’s, we turned off our lantern and our flashlight and let the wind and current carry us down the lake. With Megan at the bow and Josh at the stern, I rested on my back on the bottom of the canoe and the three of us stared up at this dome of constellations and tried to describe the grandeur of it and we couldn’t. Instead we lowballed it and murmured things like “awesome” and the only comparison I could make was to a planetarium, except that this firmament enveloped body and soul and made me feel comfortably small. And other than our own sounds, all we could hear was the aluminum of the boat gently cleaving water. Huckleberry Finn said it best:

Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. .... It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened...

After a satisfying breakfast of blueberry pancakes from our propane-powered Coleman stove, a day of excitement followed on Indian Lake, with swimming, canoeing, motorboating and plain old relaxing.

I’ve been surprised that there have been next to no mosquitoes or black bitey flies here, the latter of which Indian Lake is apparently infamous for. I hasten to add that if you are skittish about daddy longlegs (and I am not), camping on Indian Lake may not be for you. Even though they’re of the comically harmless variety, many of them frequented spots where one often does not like to find arachnids, such as the picnic table, the inside of a tent and one’s hair.

We closed the night with a rave that included glowsticks, flaming stick-juggling from Josh, black lights trained on our bedsheet-banner that we'd strung between some trees and painted with florescent paint, flashing lights, a hula hoop, and house music blasted through a boom box. We also played the song “What What (In The Butt)”, which was greeted with such vigor that it became the official song of Giardiasis Island, narrowly edging out “Indian Lake,” the top-10 hit of 1969 by The Cowsills.

Susan drove me in a Zipcar from Chelsea to Orange, New Jersey this morning to pick up our van for our camping adventure to Indian Lake, located in the Adirondack Park Preserve. We do not recommend the Subaru Outback, our sole Zipcar rental choice. It’s got a crazy, semiautomatic shift option and before we realized it existed, we wondered why the car was revving and sounding as if its gears were processing a 10-pound bag of unshelled walnuts. Also, it’d been poorly cleaned after its previous occupants. In the glovebox, we found a nest of receipts, a half-smoked Newport and a CD-R of the Linkin Park album Minutes to Midnight which Susan later regretted forgetting to take with her.

After a pause at a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru for coffee and the cruel truth that the chain refers to the cake donuts I favor as “old-fashioneds,” we reached Epic Auto Rental, which is located next door to a grocery store named Super Supermarket, which in what’s surely a record concentration of superlatives in New Jersey, is located next door to Super Discount Liquors. Epic is chiefly a repair shop and looks it, which worried us. But it opened at 8:00 a.m. sharp as advertised. Unfortunately, our van wasn’t ready to be rented as it was being driven in from a satellite location so we were over an hour late driving into Manhattan to return the Zipcar and pick up the camping crew from outside Vincent’s apartment on Second Avenue. To smooth things over, Epic upgraded us for free from a minivan to a 12-passenger Ford Econoline van, I believe it was, which was a good thing, as we had more stuff than we’d planned to cram in there.

The drive upstate was mostly uneventful. Our longest detour was to the Wal-Mart in Saratoga Springs, where we purchased provisions and ate a late lunch at the in-store Blimpie. I snuck next door to The Spirits of Saratoga Wine & Liquor to pick up my friends Jack Daniel’s and Jose Cuervo, plus a bottle of Captain Morgan Parrot Bay coconut rum, the Official Sport Beverage of Susan and Toisha, our trip’s organizers.

When we arrived in Sabael, a hamlet on the northwest side of Indian Lake, we unloaded our supplies from the van to the marina launch, then from the launch across the dock to our two canoes and 14-foot aluminum Smoker Craft utility boat. The guy behind the counter at the marina office, who’s lived since birth at Indian Lake, recommended not drinking the lake water, either pointedly or by accident, as a previous camping group had allegedly contracted Giardiasis, or “beaver fever,” a disease that caused equal amounts paranoia and running jokes among our crew.

The first approach to the island as the sun set was marvelous. Oriented roughly north-south, it’s long and narrow, a quarter of a mile long and 175 feet across at its widest. (You can see it on a map here; you’ll need to zoom-in manually.) Although skirted with small cliffs and boulders, a pair of tiny patches of beach serve as excellent landings for the boats. At the north and the south tip is a cleared campsite with a fire pit and grill, and an outhouse. In between the camps lies a dense forest of underbrush, pines and white birch. And it’s all ours for $36 a night.

By the time everyone and everything we needed was on the island, night had fallen, but we squeezed in a dinner of brats cooked over the northern site’s campfire. Although our island is known officially and sadly as “sites 7 and 8,” I’m confident a motion to rechristen it Giardiasis Island will meet with approval.

After a late brunch this afternoon, Tina and I checked out the “Golden Legacy: Original Art from 65 Years of Golden Books” exhibit at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. I enjoyed seeing original artwork from The Poky Little Puppy, Scuffy the Tugboat and one I’d completely forgotten until I saw the illustration of a bunny in a yellow shirt and red overalls hiding under a mushroom from the rain, I am a Bunny. It was written by Ole Risom and illustrated by Richard Scarry in 1963 and it was a weird emotion to remember after many years the simple story of a bunny that looks forward to the changing seasons.

Tina and I roamed the museum, dodging children that ranged from Alien-style speed-crawlers to Dora-loving shriekers, and ensured the hands-on interactive exhibits were jerk-proof. Alas, we found this clown that is not only creepy but that can almost spell “tits” with its rotating letters.

Because I hadn’t ridden my bike since autumn but had planned a trek for today, I wheeled it uptown for maintenance by my friend Joe (not to be confused with my Toledo-area Joe).

Joe is a computer programmer. He sudos fearlessly and has a two-monitor setup at his home workstation, just like you see in the movies.

He’s also an avid cyclist and owner of multiple bikes, including one that literally folds in half. Joe builds these bikes from scratch, most recently for his girlfriend and friend-of-mine, Kelly. Given rims, tires and a pile of spokes, Joe has even handmade wheels, which I didn’t even know was possible. But it’s all for fun and he’s adept at it.

After raising my bike from his kitchen floor with a lower-tech version of a garage lift, he degreased then regreased my chain, realigned my brakes (the grip of the rear one was exerting less force than an arthritic grandmother petting a kitten) and balanced the off-kilter rear tire. All the while, he explained what he was doing and why so that I might do it myself and drip filthy bike grease in my own apartment.

I took notes. I learned Simple Green is the best, most cost-effective degreaser. I learned that chains should be cleaned ideally every two months of regular riding or every 60 miles. I learned a little bit of chain grease goes a long way. I learned which screws and nuts to tighten or loosen to improve braking performance. And so on. I think he may have thought I was kidding but I told Joe he should have Kelly video-record his sessions on bike building, maintenance and riding technique, then post them to the internet to educate biking beginners or provide more savvy cyclists with handy tips and tricks. I envision this miniseries as This Old House, but instead, you know, it’d be called This Old Bike and star Joe as the affable host with reassuring facial hair who can explain things like gear ratios in plain English.

During Joe’s tooling and advising, Kelly heated up a raspberry pie she’d returned with from a recent Hamptons vacation and served it with coffee for breakfast. (“You boys need your sugar!” she chided.) Alas, she couldn’t make the bike trip with Joe and I because she had auditions.

Kellyless, we made our way from Inwood down the Greenway on the West Side. Many families were capitalizing on the sunny, breezy weather by barbecuing and picnicking along the path and many of their children attempted to die early by inadvertently flinging themselves at us just as we were passing them.

Once downtown, we cut crosstown just north of the World Trade Pit at Warren Street. There, a short cyclist with a soft Southern accent noted that he’d been ticketed several times by a cop for riding his bike across the West Side Highway crosswalk. We walked our bikes across the West Side Highway crosswalk.

We boarded the Brooklyn Bridge, dodged hundreds of pedestrian tourists, including the many who were unaware a full half of the walkway is dedicated to bike traffic, and stopped near the midway point to view Olafur Eliasson’s temporary public-art project in the East River, The New York City Waterfalls, cycling cascades of water from scaffolding nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty. From the bridge, you can see three of the waterfalls; the fourth is under the bridge.

Because our pie-energy had waned, Joe asked for a lunch recommendation, and after entering DUMBO, I found Grimaldi’s without much trouble. But even at the relatively weird dining hour (around 3 p.m.), a large, waiting crowd spilled down Old Fulton Street. We instead chose Front Street Pizza for a few slices (with one topping, $3 each) and some glimpses of a sweaty Clint Eastwood in In the Line of Fire on the TVs mounted near the ceiling.

Crossing back into Manhattan, we rode our bikes under the bridge to better view the waterfall there. We noticed a half-dozen fire trucks, lights flashing, idling nearby and moved in closer to investigate. Around the bridge’s tower foundation nearest shore paced an FDNY rescue boat, two NYPD speedboats, a motorized black rubber raft with wetsuit-clad police divers, and a police helicopter that flew under the bridge, twice, while apparently searching the site or just showing off. When the divers reached one of the speedboats, they boarded and began operating its winch. “Oh boy! They’re going to bring up the body now,” we thought. But no: the cops merely winched the raft into the speedboat, then left, as did all of the other craft.

Returning up the East Side, first on First Avenue, then back on the Greenway, we passed a Native American ceremony, complete with garb, headdresses, music and dancing. After a pause for sports drinks to replenish our electrolytes and quench our man-sized thirsts, we headed further north then cut back to the West Side through Harlem. A darting squirrel in Marcus Garvey Park ran onto Joe’s foot while he was riding, which was a neat trick that surprised Joe and squirrel in equal measure.

We eventually made it back to Inwood, so that I might tell my tale, and I’m pretty sure I sunburned myself again, plus my ass hurts; I’m walking like John Wayne and I think I may have bruised my prostate or something. What caused this? Here are some theories:

1. My bike’s frame is too small for my build. Perhaps my form is warped and causing undue ass-stress. Based on my inseam, Joe recommends a 20" frame; my current frame is 17".
2. My seat sometimes shimmies when I’m riding; also, I discovered it can rotate like a periscope. Joe was initially alarmed about this because you don’t want a seat to fly off and leave your large intestine vulnerable to perforation by your seat-post. However, he believes my particular post problem can be fixed by buying a new one for about $7 online.
3. My seat is not providing the cushioning my ass desires. But Joe doesn’t think that’s the problem; he’s a proponent of smaller seats. The wider models favored by the elderly and wide-assed can throw a rider’s form out of alignment and allow for too much stray movement.
4. I have a delicate ass. Do my pants need better padding? Should I eat more donuts to fortify my ass region?
5. I’m already a pain in the ass. I just wanted to get this one out in the open before any of you could suggest it.

Regardless of my pains, I look forward to future adventures with my biking buddies.

After a dry patch with the ol’ backing tracks and wireless mikes, I introduced a selection of my Manhattan-based friends to a trio of my Brooklyn-based friends for two hours of private-room karaoke at Japas 55. Our room was small and the singing was loud so it was impossible to intermingle or converse freely, but I think the group had a ton of fun. Andie, crafty lass, keyed in “Hello” by Lionel Richie without me noticing and sprung it on me for a solo with but a few seconds to get into a Richie mood: how did she know my secret weapon?

Beth and I headed out to the Siren Music Festival this afternoon a bit late, around 3:30, 4:00 p.m. or so, so we missed Film School, which she’d wanted to see. But I enjoyed catching the end of the Beach House set, and The Helio Sequence, which has the happiest drummer I’ve ever seen. They played a cover of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which was crazy. I bowed to Beth’s wishes to see Broken Social Scene vs. Stephen Malkmus. I don’t know anything about BSS or its songs but it was a raucous show; all that brass and all those guitars, plus Siren’s infamously loud and horrible speakers, made for an overwhelming sound. None of the band’s ladies made it (there was a potshot about how some of them were over on Sesame Street) but the band had a random acquaintance named Audrey come onstage to sing one song; she was wearing a summer dress made of lotteria fabric which was totally boss. We were standing front and center, about three rows back from the VIP barricade, and there was nearly a literal mosh pit going on towards the end. Hot, sweaty good times, although later I discovered some raw-meat red spots of sunburn on my right forearm where I’d accidentally rubbed-off my SPF 2000 sunscreen. Another sting was to see a “bubba,” as Beth called him, wearing a charming racist T-shirt.

Did you notice a slight disturbance in the force tonight? It may have been just a china-rattling quiver, depending on your proximity to Manhattan, but it was definitely there. I can explain: it was Vincent’s birthday celebration. The wackos were surely out, and not just in our group. Walking from the 6 train to the east side, I caught up with Andie and Eric who were speaking about local real estate with a woman I’d never seen before and whom I assumed they knew. After she walked away, just before we entered the Pinetree Lodge, Andie and Eric revealed that the woman had been a complete stranger who had noticed them contemplating a nice leaded glass window on an apartment building door and that she’d sidled up to them and started pitching the neighborhood and various buildings exactly as if she was a broker. But she wasn’t; she was just a New Yorker.

Anyway, Pinetree is nice. As Megan says, “it’s nearby, cheap and you can drink outside.” I would add that they have numerous animal heads mounted to their walls, including a moose you can accidentally hit your head on, as well as Big Buck Hunter, which almost but not quite makes up for the fact that their jukebox selection sucks.

Astronomically, summer began last month but technically, it began tonight at the Clinton Hill backyard BBQ bash of Jill, Laura and Liz.

These girls totally need their own Sunday morning cartoon, in which they fly around the five boroughs, enacting drudgery-busting Super Party-Powers and Dance Magic on an unsuspecting public. Their relentlessly promoted merchandise would include T-shirts, puffy stickers, Lite-Brite templates, breakfast cereals, Colorforms and a very special After School Special, The Girl Who Drank Just Enough.

The party featured 60+ guests, grilled meats (fake and real) with a bevy of sides, fresh summer tracks on the jambox, a jumbo tub of iced beers, and Citronella candles and Tiki torches in the chair- and blanket-strewn backyard, which was accessible by a fire escape ladder I was convinced someone would fall from and crack their head but no one did.

Fashion note: although white leather plimsolls soil quickly with New York grime, they retain Dance Magic.

I experienced the birth of my friends Joe and Andrea's first child this morning via Facebook, which was an unusual and thrilling experience. I page-refreshed often to keep up. Updates were offered as Andrea’s “Status Update” on her Facebook Profile page. For a while, I wondered how she could be at the hospital, birthing, yet find the time to report casually on her cervix. But it was soon revealed that her sisters had hacked into her account and were providing updates on her behalf.

From yesterday:

• Andrea is 4cm and on pitocin. 1:28pm
• Andrea is 5cm and holding, but comfortable with an epidural. 5:48pm
• Andrea is at 6cm but moving slowly (and sure to regret giving her sisters her FB password :) ). 7:42pm
• Andrea is at 6-7cm and getting some rest. 11:42pm

And then today:

• Andrea is at 8-9cm and hanging in there, unfortunately so is the baby!! 1:07am
• Andrea is at 10 and waiting to push! 3:23am
• Andrea is the proud mom of a beautiful baby boy!! GAVIN arrived at 6:33 this morning 8 lbs 14 oz and 22 inches long! Mom and baby are healthy and happy! 11:25am

The due-date was Independence Day but, as I pointed out to Joe when we spoke this morning, apparently his baby hates America because it arrived a day later. Congratulations, Joe and Andrea!

In January 1960, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth to Manhattan, which he’d never seen before. He spoke little English but immediately started planning and assembling a sculptural homage to the city—a self-destructing machine, actually—that he decided needed to be exhibited in the outdoor sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art.

The museum gave him permission and an acetylene torch, then stood back. Tinguely built the machine in part with steel tubing, used motors, a powerful electric fan, an orange weather balloon, 80 bicycle wheels, smoke signals, a car horn, a radio nailed to an upright piano and an address-labeling machine rigged to strike a bell.

Once completed and activated before a large crowd, Homage to New York smoked and trembled. The piano caught fire but continued to play a three-note dirge. A rhythm was tapped out on a washing-machine drum. The labeler thrashed and chattered while the horn shrieked. The crowd loved it and although the machine didn’t fully self destruct, “it managed nevertheless to execute a great many wholly unexpected and startling feats,” according to art critic Calvin Tomkins.

I recalled this tale tonight at the sold-out Sigur Rós¹ concert Allison and I attended in the Museum of Modern Art’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, which looks out into that sculpture garden through a two-story wall of windows. The sun set over the city as the band began while giant spherical lamps on posts positioned just outside the window-wall glowed with shifting colors and patterns. The band’s music wasn’t as cacophonous as Tinguely’s yet just as unusual, transcendent and loud.

Through interweaving layers of delay, distortion and echo, lead singer and guitarist Jón Þór Birgisson crooned in falsetto—often in a made-up language—and sawed his electric guitar with a cello bow with such ferocity that he frayed the bowstring to a chaotic bundle of filaments, which he then whipped into the audience. Bassist Georg Hólm bounced out a constant rhythm on his bass with a drumstick for the song “Hafsól.” Drummer Orri Páll Dýrason rocked the brushes on more introspective song segments but for the loud bits whaled through several sets of sticks. Most of the band, including keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, got a chance on the boards—synths large and small, an organ, a glockenspiel. At times all four band members were playing keys at once.

I’d never seen Sigur Rós perform before now. They’re young guys from Iceland so most publicity shots I’d seen depicted them in cable-knit sweaters, crouching impishly on a caldera, but tonight Birgisson and Hólm were dressed in what resembled crisp, modern versions of Les Misérables-era activewear, accented with a few Adam Ant-style feathers. It seemed strangely appropriate the band shared stage space with Rodin’s craggy bronze sculpture of a robed Balzac.

A string quartet of young ladies dressed like flappers sat behind the band and provided symphonic swells, pizzicato and, for one song, exchanged their strings for cavalry drums. Midway through an early song, a male brass quintet, dressed and gloved in white, uniforms laced with golden braids and buttons, faces speckled with pearlescent glitter, marched down unexpectedly from the second-floor galleries while playing along. Later they emerged unaccompanied, awkwardly clutching sheet music, to play an impromptu and stirring rendition of the Icelandic national anthem in celebration of the country’s independence day as a republic (June 17th, 1944). The crowd was invited to sing along but only the flappers seemed to know the lyrics.

The band played my favorite of theirs, the soaring, eight-minute “Olsen Olsen.” Towards the end of the set, the audience clapped along to the speed-freaky “Gobbledigook” until its collective hands got sore. After the encore and a joint theater-style line-bow from every musician onstage, we exited over the piles of plastic cups and empty Grolsch bottles, strange debris for the stately slate floor of a world-famous museum, though less strange than the burnt machine-remains that once littered its garden.

Bonus Link: Concert photos by Brooklyn Vegan. Note the second shot from the top, in which I appear to be clutching my junk.

¹ Pronounced, according to the band, sih-ur rose; roll those R’s and say rose very quickly. [back]

I admire anyone who creates—musicians, artists, actors, writers, mothers, a guy who can whittle a tiny toy duck from a scrap block of pine.

But what’s bad-ass is singing. Singing a capella. Singing a capella live.

For that you’re not using any tools or utensils. You don’t have a costume, a canvas or a band to hide behind. There is no editing of the process. Sure, there are people who’ve coached you and will direct you, and those who will sing alongside you. But you’re the only one responsible for the ultimate outcome: making noise, hopefully joyous, possibly unto the Lord, if you believe in that sort of thing.

My friend/coworker Allison, she of the pitch-perfect alto (and, I’ve heard, a mean karaoke rendition of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black”) sang in a women’s chorus in high school and a women’s a capella group in college and wanted to get back into singing, so she successfully auditioned for Amuse, a 16-voice women’s ensemble here in New York City. Tonight at the small, century-old St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church on the Upper West Side, the group’s guest-conductor, Penna Rose, the chapel music director at Princeton University, lead the group in a 15-song program of songs about Mary. The pieces were in English, Latin, Italian, Hungarian and Slovenian, some traditional aves and salves but all either arranged or composed by 20th century composers. (One was even in the audience and when called out by Penna, rose and delivered a thankful bow.)

Without air conditioning, the church was stifling. The propped-open front doors admitted a tiny breeze and the sound of the rain with traffic swishing by and buses braking on West 87th Street. But the audience stayed silent and rapt. Rightfully so: these voices could lift mountains. I liked that during some songs the group imitated instruments or added sound effects such as wind. Throughout the night it stormed but that only made the songs more poignant. As the choir stood sweating on the steps of the chancel, postured statue-straight with songbooks in hand, lightning flashed through the rose window behind them; loud thunder tried but failed to interrupt their beautiful harmony.

Without difficulty, the Tibetan restaurant Tsampa qualifies as the darkest restaurant I’ve ever eaten in. The only way it could have been darker would have been if the tiny white votive candles at each table were blown out. Andie, Katie and I took turns raising the one at our table to review our menus. Our waiter may have noticed our predicament because he later brought over another candle, which brightened things but not much. If, as a child, I’d been caught by my mom reading in this level of light, I’d have been chastised to turn on a light lest I go blind.

I drank a beer although I sort of wanted to try the traditional barley drink, described by our server as having the thickness of a milkshake and the sweetness of a dessert. Tiny tofu cubes and hot pepper topped my eggplant sauté and overall the dish was so un-spicy that I dumped a bunch of hot sauce on it to amp it up.

Afterward, we walked over to East 4th Street for drinks at KGB Bar and continued the low-light-level theme of the evening with goofy snapshots.

Tsampa

• 212 E. 9th St.
• (212) 614-3226
• Meal 34 of 52: a bottle of Singha beer ($5) and eggplant sauté ($9.95).

Allison and Jovito staged a mini dinner get-together at their apartment tonight, the centerpiece of which was lamb burgers made with fresh mint, cooked and served “Slider-style.” They were amazing, especially topped with the co-op bacon Angela and Chris supplied. Chips and homemade salsas complemented the meal: a black bean variety from Laura and a garlicky mango-guacamole from Angela. For dessert, Chris supplied his patented Rice Krispies Treats made with Fruity Pebbles. How were they? I tasted a rainbow of fruit flavors. “It’s like there’s a party in my mouth,” I said, and Chris completed, “and everybody’s invited.” The rooftop deck of Allison and Jovito’s apartment building affords kick-ass views of the city and environs. If I had a deck like that, I’d be up there all the time, hypnotized by the lazy parade of incoming flights.

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a fan-made video of a dude dressed up like a Catholic priest, wearing shades and a giant grin, dancing and shimmying down the sidewalks of the West Village. Oh, also he’s wearing a pink tutu. It was so good, we demanded to watch it twice.

This was part of an inaugural “Gen-X Singalong series” at Pianos Lounge, which involved creative types making one music video each for every song off the Smiths’ 1986 album The Queen Is Dead. Each video had subtitles and the crowd was encouraged to sing along. The dancing priest accompanied the song “Vicar in a Tutu.” Kelly tackled “Frankly Mr. Shankly” with a creative camera mount (her bicycle) and character (a Mr. Blonde action figure), making it appear as if Mr. Shankly is superspeed-walking through Manhattan.

I had a lot to drink and then walked into a low table and knocked a quarter-sized chunk of flesh off my left shin that I didn’t discover until the next day. Later we had a late dinner gathering at the “Always Open” greasy spoon, Sidewalk. I had a fruit-covered waffle, I think. When the receipt for our group arrived, it indicated we’d “been served by Jason #14.”

Bonus video: Kelly’s version of “Frankly Mr. Shankly”

Sidewalk Bar & Restaurant

• 94 Avenue A (between E. 6th and E. 7th Streets)
• (212) 473-7373
• Meal 26 of 52: waffle and coffee!

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.

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.

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 but 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, it was Indian food in the Curry Hill region of New York at Banjara, 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 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).

While enjoying several drinks in the Village last night at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame with Katie, she abruptly began motioning and whispering to me not to turn and look at the person I could then sense standing directly behind me at the sparsely populated bar. Of course, nothing made me want to turn around more just then. But I didn’t. I thought it was a bum or someone with crazy hair who wanted to know whether I’d found Jesus.

After the mystery person paid for a purchase and turned to leave, Katie gave me the O.K. to turn and check him out. It was James Gandolfini, smaller and more cherubic in person than I imagined. Before leaving, he gave a fleeting, knowing glance to everyone at the bar who was pretending not to notice him. This would be the closest I’ve knowingly been to a celebrity in New York, excluding concerts and book signings.

I’m glad the bar-crowd was of the “treat the celebrity like a regular person” mindset instead of the autograph-seeking rush-mob it could have been. I chalk it up to today being St. Patrick’s Day, for which faux Irish bars citywide attract tourists and people from New Jersey who aren’t as cool as Katie, leaving decidedly un-Irish spots like the Hall of Fame as secret neighborhood hangouts, which is sort of why we went there to begin with. Although if I’d elected to attempt small talk with James, I would have skipped the tired and obvious Sopranos chatter to mention how much I appreciated his nuanced performance as Big Dave Brewster in The Man Who Wasn’t There.

After further discussion, Katie and I decided a mistaken-identity route could have been even more fun. For example, I could have told Mr. Gandolfini that I loved his work and owned all of his albums, similar to how Katie wanted to tell Ric Ocasek, a frequent browser at her old Barnes & Noble, that her favorite vocal performance of his was “Drive”, a song actually sung by the Cars’ bassist.

Vincent called me over to his apartment this afternoon for an impromptu Wii party with Megan, Norana, Austin, Kelly, Joe, Steve and Josh. It was my first time playing this videogame system, so I relegated myself to the smaller television on which I created an avatar that resembled me and used him to play tennis, bowling and golf on Wii Sports. I enjoyed swinging around my buttersick-sized controller to represent my onscreen character’s arm—lofting it for tennis serves, arcing it for golf swings (the system even accepted my left-handedness) and penduluming it for bowling rolls. I smacked my real-world colleagues with it only twice, accidentally. Meanwhile, the alpha-nerds at the other Wii, which was hooked up to a big-screen TV the size of a sofa, embroiled themselves in the epic quad-battles of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which resembles an epileptic seizure. There was much shouting, taunting, cursing and revenge.

Later, we confirmed, as if we were conspiracy theorists analyzing the Zapruder film, that Kelly actually appears roller-skating in the background of a scene from the controversial documentary about Golden Gate Bridge suicides, The Bridge. She was even able to unearth a photo she took of herself on that same day in 2004. (FYI, in reality, Kelly has awesome hair; that’s a bike helmet she’s wearing in the photo.)

Andie left me an urgent voicemail at work early this morning, then gave me a follow-up call, to relate two distressing developments in her commute today.

First, a bum took a crap on her in-motion downtown 1 train, causing all passengers in a 15-foot radius to surge to the far end of the car and cling together like the final passengers alive aboard the Titanic.

Then, upon arriving to her gym prior to work, she came across a guy who had died while working out. Paramedics on the scene continued unsuccessfully to resuscitate him.

I believe the pooping was more traumatic because death doesn’t smell as bad, at least not initially.

As I foretold, Allison staged the first installment tonight of the Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner series, BKLYN #1, a potluck with a “local/sustainable/seasonal” theme. It went down at the Clinton Hill/Bed-Stuy apartment of her and her boyfriend, Jovito. I love this part: the building used to be a Tootsie Roll factory.

The dinner party included Allison and Jovito, my friend Beth and I, Allison’s friend Angela, and her sister Laura. Also present were the resident tabby, Ra, who warily shares space with the resident shelter-mutt, Manute. He’s a blend of black Lab, Great Dane and black German Shepherd named after Manute Bol because both are long-legged shot-blockers who like having their bellies scratched.

We started with three New York state sheep’s milk cheeses, Berkshire pork prosciutto and membrillo (quince paste), purple grapes and candied walnuts. For "local" drinks, we drank rye-stiffened Brooklyns throughout the evening, inspired by a recipe Allison procured in an entertaining fashion. On Tuesday, she and Jovito attended a reading featuring Brooklyn-based cocktail authority David Wondrich, whom I’ve written about before. As he signed her copy of Imbibe!, she mentioned the upcoming dinner and her consideration of serving locally invented cocktails, namely Manhattans and Jack Roses, the latter a classic New Jersey drink in honor of Jovito’s home state.

Wondrich concurred then rattled off the ingredients for a Brooklyn, a cocktail curiously absent from his book. Realizing the recipe would be a tall order to remember, he removed a piece of paper from his pocket and scribbled it down. Meanwhile, Allison told him I’d wanted to attend the reading but couldn’t, then blurted that I had a man-crush on him, so after laughing nervously, he autographed the recipe as a sort-of-wish-you-were-here keepsake.

The man-crush thing is true. What human wouldn’t lovingly admire another who can mingle alcohols to their tastiest and most potent permutations? Although I had to tell Allison that men will not often admit a man-crush to one another. Regardless, it netted me a scrap of cocktail ephemera that I’ll treasure always until I spill bitters on it. Here’s a scan of it. You’ll notice Wondrich spelled liqueur wrong, unless liquer is an archaic cocktail-maven spelling.

After the first round, shaken with ice and served in old-school coupes, Allison deviated from the handwritten version of the recipe to the one I’ve reproduced below. I must say that rye in its 100-proof form is excellent for clouding one’s mind in the best way possible.

Ah, and for the food. Beth made butternut squash soup with a plain-yogurt and cilantro topping. Laura made a shredded carrot and toasted almond salad. Angela made a Sicilian-style potato gratin with capers and Parmesan. Allison made tender, braised short ribs with chocolate and rosemary. We also had baguettes with Brooklyn-made butter. The dessert course brought out ice cream sandwiches made from oatmeal toffee-chip cookies and almond/English-toffee ice cream from the Adirondacks. I supplied my Gâteau Aux Pommes apple cake, made with apples and eggs from upstate New York. In short, great good, great drinks, great music, and great company.

Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner

• Meal 12 of 52: a heap of delicious food, home-cooked by friends.

How many Japanese people does it take to change a light bulb?

Two.

Three if you count the guy who appeared to be supervising.

At least that’s how many it took tonight at Megan’s birthday party at Karaoke Duet. To be fair, it was a large bulb in a custom housing and meant solely for beaming on the disco ball in our private karaoke room, so two people was appropriate for the task. We needed that hot disco-ball action to accompany our songs. All of the hits from yesterday and today: Madonna! Bon Jovi! Peter Cetera! Kelis—certainly Megan’s milkshake brings all the boys to the yard! Good times.

Did you ever do that thing where you stand in a doorway and push out hard against the frame with the backs of your hands, then step out of the doorway with your body at rest, and your arms raise themselves? It’s to demonstrate muscle contraction triggered by calcium ions—you know, for kids.

Anyway, that’s how my arms feel now—rubbery and hyper—after indoor rock climbing tonight. I’ve never done that before. I should have read up on the subject beforehand because mechanical systems confuse me, especially regarding levers and pulleys, and when I’m concentrating on not killing my partner, the climber, while I’m belaying. So I eventually learned the lingo, as you can see, and the levers and pulleys, and I didn’t kill Beth, not that there was danger in that, as she’s scaled ragged mountain faces in Wyoming and is as lithe and surefooted as Tom Cruise’s stunt double in the opening scene of Mission: Impossible.

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation runs 15 indoor rec centers in Manhattan and Iggy works at the only one with a climbing wall, on W. 59th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues. It’s a compact, maze-like building, smelling of sweat, chlorine and old wood, its exercise facilities reminiscent of an elderly but clean high school’s. There’s a basketball court, a pool in the basement, and men’s and women’s locker rooms with showers. A full-sized air-hockey table sits outside the climbing room, which is run by the City Climbers Club, a non-profit organization comprised of a bunch of crazy-folk with excellent muscle definition. They started out rappelling in Central Park and because there wasn’t any place to climb indoors at the time, built the 59th Street climbing wall from scratch on a disused racquetball court. The room’s festooned with signs warning everything from “This is not the lifeguard training room” to “Climbing is Inherently Dangerous.” Synthetic-rock handholds and footholds, marked with colored tape blazes indicating paths of varying difficulty, have been bolted into plywood masking the room’s original walls. Some of the climbing walls angle outward or are pitched upside-down for a more challenging climb.

Iggy is a climbing supervisor for the Climbers Club and runs its private parties, after-school programs and kids’ events, which is fortunate, because he was patient in teaching me the basics and repeating instructions, like, five times. Only at the bar afterwards did I learn he wanted to punch me in the neck because I was exasperating him.

I had a fun but tense time and learned I need to visualize my path in advance so I’m not wasting time and energy clinging to the wall, jerking my head around to locate the nearest tiny piece of white tape. I must also more efficiently utilize my long legs to push myself ceiling-bound instead of pulling myself upward with my comparatively weaker arms. On my final climb of the night, my upper limbs were too weak to grasp the uppermost hold. Muscles I never before realized I even had, like abs and triceps, ache now, but in a good way.

Although I thought it was a good idea to see the Chinese Lunar New Year parade this afternoon in Chinatown, it turned out to be like thinking Times Square on New Year’s Eve is a good idea. Crowds obscured the floats and undulating dragons. Swept up in the mass of brightly colored confetti and people wearing Mickey Mouse Club-style rat ears, Beth and I nixed the soup-dumpling lunch plan, broke free of the throngs by Little Italy and walked up to McNally Robinson for a lunch recommendation from Katie. She not only sold Beth a book, she sold us on the diner around the corner, the American, where a sales-rep recently bought her a tasty lunch and a hazelnut milkshake. Decked out like a traditional diner, the place attracts an incongruous crowd smacking of Eurotrash rockstar, which affords views of scruffy and skeletal physiques in tight black clothing, if that’s your passion. Feeling a vitamin deficiency from my convenience-food dominated diet of the past week, I ordered the veggie tacos, made with soft corn tortillas, onion, cilantro, a medley of vegetables including mushrooms, hot sauce and a side of homemade chunky guacamole. It hit the spot. A hungry Beth got a burger and proclaimed it awesome; it was the archetype of a burger, a giant, toasted bun, fresh lettuce and tomato, like what you’d get if you were a photographer and ordered a prop burger.

After lunch, we wandered uptown to play darts at the Bleecker Street Bar with Iggy and his climbing buddies. “Is that Lafayette over there?” I wondered aloud, squinting through the snow flurries. “Yes,” said a helpful but grumpy passerby, reason #88 why I love this city. I find that if I’ve been drinking, I excel at darts, up until a point.

The American

• 235 Mulberry St. (between Prince and Spring Streets)
• (212) 966-6616
• Meal 7 of 52: veggie tacos ($8) and a pint of Guinness ($5).

Here are the top-three new songs in my karaoke repertoire, animal-tested tonight during a Japas 55 outing with Katie, Sam, Iggy, Megan and Vincent.

1. “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” by Joe Jackson, although I kept laughing at the call-and-response line:

   Jason

   Look over there!

   Everyone Else

   Where?

   Jason

   [laughing] Here comes Jeannie with her new boyfriend.

   Also, this was a good one to save until later in the evening, when my voice was rougher, so as to elicit the emotion-scuffed, tremulous vocal stylings of Mr. Jackson.
2. “Hello” by Lionel Richie. I laughed during this one, too, because Katie reminded me about the blind girl in the song’s video who sculpts Lionel’s giant head out of what appears to be deli sandwich spread. Also, per Wikipedia:
   

   Grown Iraqi men get misty-eyed by the mere mention of his name. ‘I love Lionel Richie,’ they say. Iraqis who do not understand a word of English can sing an entire Lionel Richie song.

   So you see, I had to sing this song; it was my duty as an American and a patriot, for if we let the Iraqis seize our Lionel Richie karaoke, the terrorists have already won.
3. “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon & Garfunkel. Because it’s in my range and who doesn’t like S&G (or “Mrs. Robinson”)? Koo-koo-ka-choo.

Runners-up:

1. “Two of Us” by the Beatles. It’s from Let It Be; my requisite non-single Beatles track. Plus it’s a superb song if you pair-off with someone who can sing the harmony, as Iggy can.
2. “1234” by Feist. Joyous! We were surprised Japas 55 had this song; their song directories are not known for their freshness of selections.
3. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” by Kylie Minogue. When one has been drinking, certain songs seem like an excellent choice, but they are not. This is one of those songs.

Afterwards, Iggy, Sam, Katie and I tromped over to Columbus Circle, where you can order food by the pound at the Whole Foods Market and eat it right there, cafeteria-style, in the basement of the Time Warner Center. I was so hungry, I pilled a literal pound of food into my plastic bowl before I realized every selection hailed from the cold-food bar. My delicious-looking dumplings and soba noodles were not warm as I’d thought. Meh. I was hungry and it was delicious regardless. As we stuffed ourselves, we talked loudly about something I don’t recall but which must have been offensive because the old couple sitting to the table next to us rose silently and moved themselves and their food to a table far away from ours.

Whole Foods Market

• Time Warner Center (10 Columbus Circle, downstairs)
• (212) 823-9600
• Meal 6 of 52: 1.04 pounds of random cold food at $7.99/pound ($8.31) and a bottled water (59 cents).

Megan, Vincent and I were going to try the Clinton Street Baking Company on the Lower East Side for brunch but the wait for the hipster spot was two hours so we gave the Remedy Diner on Houston a try and it was just fine. They even put cinnamon and wafer-thin slices of orange on their French toast, which is made with a hearty, challah-like bread. Also, the servers wear tuxedo T-shirts and the place is decked out with tables, chairs and decor from a vaguely 1970’s European kitchen.

Later I got dinner with Beth at Song in Park Slope, which I’ve ordered-in from before, and we caught a show nearby at Union Hall, which is decorated like a rich old white-man’s mansion, all dark, rich woods, floor to ceiling bookshelves, oil portraits, roaring hearths, and two incongruous full-length bocce ball courts in the back. The concert was downstairs, with Andrew Kenny and the folksy, string-sectioned Ghosts I’ve Met opening for Ola Podrida, strummed acoustic guitars and the soft, tremulous voice of singer David Wingo (reminiscent of Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam) with a country tinge, recalling lonely middles-of-nowhere. Their live act is louder and faster and makes them sound like a wholly different band than on their only album, which I only previously knew via the Interpol cover art “scandal”. But it’s great music (I just ordered the CD) and there’s no bad publicity.

Remedy Diner

• 245 E. Houston
• (212) 677-5110
• Meal 5 of 52: French toast, a coffee and an orange juice.

Tonight I played Settlers of Catan, a German game of world domination that doesn’t involve genocide, with Andie, Katie, Eric, Megan, Vincent, Kelly and Joe. I enjoyed it. I didn’t think I would but I did. Probably because you can say things in earnest like, “Have you got wood for sheep?” And now that I know the rules, sort of, I look forward to one day kicking Andie’s ass.

Another round of karaoke at Karaoke One 7. Although I didn’t sing anything, I had fun. Here are some arty photos of Andie, Katie, Ian and I taken by Andie.

Megan is house-sitting for Andie and Eric while they’re off for the holidays and she invited Vincent and I over tonight for some homemade curry and board games. We played a game of Big Boggle and, although I was loathe to try it because I am easily confused by the rules of games, we also played Guillotine. It’s a fast-paced and fun card game in which one gains points by beheading French nobles.

Walking back to the subway, I noticed something I hadn’t before: the United Methodist church at W. 86th and West End that I passed hundreds of times when I lived on the Upper West Side is named the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, coincidentally patron saints of myself and my brother, respectively. That’s weird.

Good times with great friends as always at Andie’s annual New Year’s Party. Lo, the wine flowed, the music played. My photos turned out like ass so feel free to view Kelly’s photos of our clique.

We kicked off the evening with a surprise birthday celebration for Katie at the XR Bar on West Houston involving good friends and many tasty drinks, then scooted over to Karaoke Duet 35 for the moving-to-San-Francisco going-away party for my camping buddies, Toisha and Susan. You know what’s great about karaoke if you’ve been drinking enough? It doesn’t matter if you don’t know a song’s lyrics or even its melody; if you are loud enough and passionate enough, it can be your song, such as “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” as popularized by Gene Pitney, as well as Vincent and I. Vincent and Megan memorably dueted on “Punk Rock Girl” by the Dead Milkmen which, sadly, I don’t think a lot of people recognized. We closed it off with a bittersweet take on “Auld Lang Syne.” Later we wandered around in the sleet for more drinks and fried chicken. We ended up hitting the sack at the same time most farmers are waking up.

Kelly has revealed a cunning guessing game she calls Trophy Dots that I suspect has existed for some time under similarly stupid names. It goes like this: one person in a group of people begins by telling the others what Trophy Dots like and what Trophy Dots don’t like. “Trophy Dots like pork but not beef,” for example, followed by, “Trophy Dots like margarine but not butter.” It is the rest of the group’s task to understand the commonalities hidden in these statements to determine what it is precisely that Trophy Dots dislike. Once someone has picked up on the solution, he or she can chime in with the leader, adding, for instance, “Trophy Dots like celery but not carrots.” In this case, what it is that Trophy Dots don’t like is “words with double letters.” Got it? It’s fun.

I helped chaperone the 16th birthday party of the kids of Andie’s boyfriend Eric.

O.K., let’s be honest: more competent people did all of the work, stamping hands (no re-entry!) and handing out the raffle tickets at the door while monitoring the balconies for illicit activity.

At one point, there was a vigorous makeout session going down on the west balcony, but we let that one slide. We were also on the lookout for substance abusing, dirty dancing, trash talking, F-bombing, close dancing and general hormone raging, although that one’s not really to be helped when you’ve got a bunch of teenagers bouncing around to the danceworthy tunes of yesterday and today.

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.”

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).

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.

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.

I caught the Frogs: A Chorus of Colors exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History this afternoon in its last day. 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, tadpoles are creepy, those translucent, featureless fluke-like beings that propel themselves through water by some strange magic. “They look like fish,” mused someone. “They’re not fish! They’re tadpoles!” piped the precocious human larva 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 I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have?

Shifting the day to more adult activities, I 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, I 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).

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 ($12.00) and several mojitos (?$).

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.

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]

A group of us planned a Labor Day Weekend camping adventure at Hickory Run State Park in eastern Pennsylvania. But how best to escape New York?

Rental car companies jack up rates for prime travel holidays like Labor Day and with New York already besieged by stratospheric prices, a cheaper alternative is New Jersey. Megan and I met at Penn Station this morning and took a 1:28 p.m. Northeast Corridor train, transferred at Secaucus and arrived at Rutherford around 1:53 p.m. And then we waited for the complimentary Enterprise Rent-A-Car shuttle. And waited.

Then we waited some more.

Then I bought some sodas for us to drink while we waited.

Then Megan fielded increasingly vexed calls and text messages from our camping compatriots waiting in Manhattan for us.

Half an hour later, a shuttle showed up, but it was for two other people who’d reserved a pick-up about half an hour before us and were that much more bitter. And, no, we couldn’t share a ride because it was a pickup truck, and apparently it’s against the law for live humans to ride in the bed of a pickup in New Jersey, so there was no room for us and our rapidly diminishing patience.

Megan and I decided the new tagline for Enterprise should be, “We’ll Get You There... Eventually.” Finally, an animated cherubic-faced Italian-Jersey fellow by the name of Michael showed up, full of apologies and anecdotes about how he himself had tried camping several times, but kept getting hampered by the weather, which didn’t sound as bad to me as getting hampered by a delayed courtesy shuttle.

He said things in earnest like “Yous guys” and noted at one point that he lived with his mother. We tried to rush him through the car inspection but he was keen on crouching in the lot and studiously inspecting our Ford from various angles, looking for scratches longer than two inches and dents larger than golf balls. His business card, which he handed to me just before our departure, gave his title as “Management Trainee” and we complimented him on a fine job. I’m sure his mother is proud.

Upon arriving at Vincent’s apartment complex on the East Side, we combat-loaded the cars with coolers, supplies and people. I took off in the Man Car with Vincent, Aaron and Paul and there was periodic bickering over GPS-obfuscated shortcuts and temperature control. By the time we arrived, the folks already at the site were cranky because we were late, and it was dark, and they’d seen a black bear in the woods, and why the fuck were we off buying beer when our car contained all the equipment? Surliness swirled like campfire sparks in the dark but it was O.K. because the real adventure was to begin tomorrow.

After work today, I joined Andie in her three-bedroom apartment hunt in my neck of the woods. The first, on Cabrini near the upper 190th Street station on the A train, was too small. Another grubbier place further downtown was also too tiny and claustrophobic to boot, with very high ceilings and a distinct lack of windows. The broker, Meg, grew up on Arden in Inwood, which made me glad I didn’t rag on the neighborhood too much.

In discussing the gentrification of Upper Manhattan, she kept starting sentences with, “Back when I was growing up here,” which made me want to say something like, “You mean last week?” because she appeared to be in her mid-20s. She seemed to be nervous about showing us around, unable to unlock the door of the one apartment in less than 10 tries, and mousily shuffling through scraps of paper in her binder trying to find the address of another place she thought Andie would like when we should have told her not to bother.

She had a curiously impassioned defense about the infamous murder rates in Washington Heights in the ’80s and ’90s: the mafia, not fully sold on the wonders of New Jersey marshlands for disposing of corpses, had been using Fort Tryon Park as a dumping ground, she told me, and, apparently, murders are tallied where the body is found, not where the murder took place, so WaHi got a bad rap back in the day. O.K., maybe, though it seemed a little too much information for a real estate broker to be revealing, as talk about murders and crime rates typically don’t do much in the way of assisting a sale.

Afterwards, Andie and I had dinner at The Heights. The rooftop eating area was full but we were seated in the center of the giant second-floor picture window overlooking Broadway, the famous red neon sign of Tom’s Restaurant visible through the trees. My chicken timpano was billed as lasagna-like but was really a salmagundi of tortillas, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream, shredded chicken, and other staple Mexican ingredients. It was fresh and hearty though not what I’d expected.

The Heights Bar & Grill

• 2867 Broadway
• (212) 866-7035
• Meal 38 of 52: chicken timpano ($10.95), chips and salsa ($3) and a margarita ($7).

I’d passed through cities and towns with bucolic names and rashes of strip malls yet had no clear idea where I was other than the enticing signage on the Long Island Railroad platforms indicating I was headed “to Points East.” I was in a rush at Penn Station and had no map, so I trusted the prerecorded voice of the conductor would tell me when to transfer at Huntington and when to depart at Smithtown.

It did, and later on the strip of beach where I found a smooth white rock that would have made Brâncusi smile, Tina crouched in a clearing among the pebbles and shells.

“Long Island is sort of shaped like a fish,” she explained, drawing it with her finger in the wet sand, the peninsulas of North and South Fork forming the tail fin, the arcs of North and South Shore its body. She indicated our position in Nissequogue, near the dorsal fin, and I realized that given the once-upon-a-time shipbuilding communities and whaling ports nearby, the fish is an apt simile for the country’s most populous island. Now, though, the ghost of Gatsby haunts the shores and forests of old-money packrats and nouveau riche commuters.

I’m neither and was there because I needed some R&R from the bustle and dirty-bomb paranoia of Manhattan and because Tina’s parents are in Italy for their first vacation in 10 years, so we had run of their sumptuous, spacious home, acquired for a steal-worthy sum in the ’60s and upkept by the shiny rewards of shrewd investments and a lucrative family-run scrap-metal business.

In the back yard, just past a pair of scraggly pines, the lawn drops off into a cliff, beyond which lies Long Island Sound.

Inside is tastefully weathered furniture, hardwood floors, a beautiful but unruly macaw and most immediately, a rowdy quintet of Brussels griffon, which sounds like the name of an investment bank but is in fact a toy breed dog with a face that appears to have been struck with a dictionary. Their eyes bug out, their noses are squashed and their tiny teeth are revealed in an underbite. Their breathing sounds labored and congested, like a fat man snoring, though they make a purring sound when they’re content. They did that protective thing where they barked at me and snapped at the back of my pant legs before ascertaining I wasn’t a threat, but after I’d left and returned to a room, the cycle began anew. I found that when I sat, they were more calm because I wasn’t 10-times taller than they were and they could easily investigate me, often by walking over, pawing and licking my ticklish self all at once, like a bum rush by a gang of slobbery Tribbles.

The recent looming of the Check Engine light in her Volkswagen convinced Tina to rent a car for the weekend until she had more time to take it to a garage, and Enterprise offered us the Pride of DiCaprio, a Toyota Prius, in Environmentally Concerned Gray. The gasoline-electric hybrid doesn’t appear much different than other midsize automatics, excepting its push-button starter and park buttons, with a tiny joystick-like gearshift mounted below. There’s an impressive-looking video display on the center of the dash that indicates the fuel consumption of the car in motion via advancing numbers and bar graphs. Tina didn’t like it. The acceleration was slow and throaty, with dodgy visibility out the bisected rear window.

We drove out to the furthest point of interest, Port Jefferson, where we toured the village center and encompassing park, then had cones of mint chocolate chip and Moose Tracks at Port Jefferson Frigate, billed as the largest ice cream/candy shop on Long Island. On our way back to Smithtown, we stopped by some more parks and nature preserves, via various Scenic Routes. In a spicy mood for dinner, we had enchiladas at a Spanish restaurant, Casa Luis. Back at the house, we watched the not incredibly thrilling Rear Window remake for teens, Disturbia, then half of the languidly paced Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I had a touch of trouble getting to sleep with the constant whir of crickets and cicadas outside the guest bedroom window. The next morning, after pointing out to Tina a dry shell left on a walnut tree by a molting cicada, I learned she’d never before noticed these exoskeleton-like curiosities. When I was a kid, we used to collect these; they were easy to stick in people’s hair without them noticing.

Storms this morning washed out the full function of nearly every line in the subway system and on the streets, irritated commuters fought for cabs and clustered among dozens waiting for full busses that didn’t stop.

My own 1 train made it downtown to 137th Street before going out of service due to flooding. After a pair of halfhearted attempts waiting for a bus, I decided to walk, and surprised myself when I was able to make the entire 100 blocks without sore feet or tiring. It took about an hour and 45 minutes, though I did stop for a cinnamon raisin bagel and some orange juice at H&H Bagels on the Upper West Side.

After work, after buying a plum-colored polo shirt from American Apparel to replace my sweaty work shirt, I met up with Andie, her coworker Ian and some of his friends at Therapy, a gay bar/lounge in Hell’s Kitchen. We were there to watch So You Think You Can Dance, which the bar broadcasts on a large screen on the second floor. Here are Andie and Ian, voguing during a commercial break.

The dancing was impressive but I think this is one of those shows that requires a long-term investment in the characters to vote accurately and consistently for the “best” dancing.

For dinner I had a turkey burger and fries, which were not bad, and two mojitos, that were also not bad but extremely expensive. I was most impressed by the fishbowl of free, elusive NYC Condoms at the door.

Therapy

• 348 W. 52nd St.
• (212) 397-1700
• Meal 33 of 52: turkey burger and fries ($11.07) and two mojitos ($18.45).

I caught another free concert at McCarren Park Pool this afternoon with Beth and friends. As before, we delighted in spotting noteworthy fashions among the crowd both impressive and wayward, including bikini-clad ladies in cowboy boots, some dude in corduroy short-pants and two sets of sneakers featuring an eye-searing array of DayGlo.

After sitting around near the back of the pool to better people-watch and listen to the openers (one of which resembled the Polyphonic Spree and covered Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” to much delight and confetti), we moved front and center for the headliner, Blonde Redhead. As the crowd waited for the band to take the stage, the guy to the left with the shaved head and the foam earplugs was engrossed in EJ Hobsbawm’s potboiler, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality while the girl to the right wormed her way through a soduku. The guy directly in front of us, in shades and curly blonde hair, grabbed any beach balls that bounced his way, deflated them and snuck them into his backpack.

I’d heard of Blonde Redhead but hadn’t heard them until today, very lush in both lowercase and capitalized forms of the word, blending Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, with ethereal vocals by a self-admittedly drink-addled Kazu Makino (depicted below), and from the Pace brothers, washes of electric guitar with odd effects and solid, crafty drumbeats, plus a few odd synths and samples thrown into the mix.

After refreshments at a local bar, Beth, her sister Katie, their friend Brett and I were famished and spotting a restaurant name similar enough to the girls’ own last name made the selection of Raymund’s Place automatic. It featured an animal skull mounted festively on the wall, which pleased Beth, and served Polish home cooking. We feasted on potato pancakes, beet soup and pierogies, those doughy lumps of goodness I remember fondly from Parma, Ohio. The pierogies at Raymund arrive not only with a bit of sour cream, but a small side of bacon bits nestled in their own liquid grease: genius.

Raymund’s Place

• 124 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn
• (718) 388-4200
• Meal 32 of 52: potato and cheese pierogies with cucumber salad and beets ($6.75).

I haven’t seen many films that have been able to nail the elusive character of the prototypical hard-boiled New Yorker, that mixture of gumption, aggravation and good humor, but The Taking of Pelham One Two Three gets close. Film Forum snuck it into its “NYC Noir” five-week festival but it’s not especially noirish. First, with such snappy and funny dialogue, it’s more of a comedy. It’s not even in black and white as I had assumed but simmering with the alternately grim and garish hues of mid-’70s Manhattan, the latter best exemplified by Walter Matthau’s lemon-yellow necktie and a button-down shirt patterned in a multicolored checkerboard pattern resembling the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever.

Matthau plays a exasperated yet savvy lieutenant in the MTA’s police division whose workday takes an unexpected turn when he learns a subway car’s been hijacked and the passengers are being held for a $1 million ransom. For a film focusing mostly on this non action-packed standoff (and surprisingly little on the hostages, which are stock characters), the storyline managed to keep my attention, not only by slowly revealing how the four hijackers are planning on escaping with $1 million from a subway tunnel, but by bringing to life the city-worker characters: the salty coworkers of Matthau’s, the cranky flu-ridden mayor (the Koch-like Lee Wallace), and various cops bound by procedure and red tape.

After post-movie drinks downtown, instead of taking the subway home, which would have been only appropriate after watching perhaps the greatest New York City subway movie ever made, I took a cab, which I almost never do. I don’t recall seeing one of these before but my cab had a TV screen built into the back seat to bombard me with commercials, though at a push of the touch-screen, brought up a map that refreshed every few seconds to show the position of the cab as a green dot. Not very useful to me but mesmerizing anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girl

How about Night of the Hunter?

Boy

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

Girl

How about Purple Rain?

Boy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andie held a small get-together this afternoon combining Kentucky Derby festivities with Cinco de Mayo. We forewent the mint juleps and knocked back some ghetto sangria of her assembly, fruit juice concentrate revived with a bit of water and a whole lot of “big bottle” red wine. Here’s a serving of it posing next to a colored glass candle holder of Andie’s that splashes little colored ovals of light across the room when the sun hits it.

Settling in for the lengthy pre-race commentary, interviews and pre-recorded inspirational human-interest segments, we got serious and placed our bets: would Katie arrive in enough time? Unfortunately, no. She got caught in traffic on the George Washington and drove figure-eights between West End and Riverside trying to find a parking space. We taped it for her and enjoyed the replay when she arrived. Quite a comeback to have Street Sense rocket up the rail from second-to-last place to win by two-and-a-half lengths.

Later, we played Scattergories. How have I not played this game until tonight? Seeing as it’s been around since when I was in junior high, I’m going to sound like someone’s gramma who just discovered “the internet” while writing about it, but here goes anyway: I have rarely if ever had so much fun playing a boxed game. I laughed a lot and Andie even warned me that I had my “big smile” going, even though we kept rolling awful letters, like “K” twice.

One round of the game, probably meant to take a brisk half hour or so, seemed to last for hours because of the impassioned debate, dictionary consultation and internet searches over challenged answers. Some particularly thorny and/or funny ones:

• Are mushrooms vegetables?
• Can an arm be considered replaceable?
• How many brothers Karamazov were there?
• Is “the airplane” a dance?
• Are garrisons uniformed?

I’d also like to state that a 20-sided die, such as the one used in the game (every letter of the alphabet but Q, U, V and the last three), is an icosahedron, not a dodecahedron as I suspected. I obviously was not an avid player of D&D in my youth.

After the MS Walk yesterday, I accidentally left my cell phone behind in Katie’s car. I called her from work and told her I’d stop by that night to retrieve it. “I’ll call you when I get there,” I said, not realizing until I had walked halfway to the PATH train station on Herald Square after work that I did not have a phone with which to call anyone. Thankfully there is at least one operable payphone still standing in Jersey City, its handset bright yellow enough to kill germs at both ends, located across the street from the Grove Street station, so I made my arrival announcement from there.

Katie and I took part in 19th-annual MS Walk organized by the Greater North Jersey Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. It was held at Liberty State Park, which affords fine views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. In fact, I don’t remember seeing this on past trips to Ellis Island but there’s a hidden service road built on a pier that extends from the park to the rear of Ellis Island, presumably for swift delivery of employees, exhibits, merchandise, food and other supplies.

I used to walk and run in events like these more often and I can tell you they usually have water stations, particularly because you’re dealing with a bunch of amateurs. But there weren’t any and it was a bright, sunny day. I cursed myself for not bringing any and for instead having consumed a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and donut, which I assumed would give the sugar I needed to get me going in the morning. It wasn’t enough refreshment but at the halfway point, there was a child’s plastic swimming pool filled with ice and generic soda, and a picnic table lined with sandwich cookies and crackers and “energy bars” suspiciously reminiscent of candy.

Later, Katie and I drove out to the wilds of New Jersey where her horse lives. Here’s a photo of Colandi looking sassy in her summer coat.

A combination of slushy sidewalks and brittle hips meant few matinee-favoring elders were in attendance for the opera at the Met this afternoon, which was a shame, because Faust concerns a bitter coot exchanging his soul to Méphistophélès for youth.

Newly brisk and handsome, in a tenor sort of way, Dr. Faust saunters about town, knocks up a young hottie then abandons her for drink and carousing with his new buddy satan. When she’s imprisoned for murdering her illegitimate child, Faust tries to bail her out. But she refuses and angels whisk her away via a deus ex machina similar to the one she rode in on, billowing white and floating in the heavens over a rainbow. Love lost, Faust grows old again and though hellbound, has at least experienced all his missed pleasures of youth. Now he can retire in comfort to the lecture circuit to promote his new book, Soul-Selling for Fun and Profit.

After the show, Andie, Eric and I trekked up to Big Nick’s for dinner. We scaled small unplowed mountains of snow in our path and leapt over those seemingly solid pools of slush that collect in dips at the curb near crosswalks.

The warming glow of pink and red neon signs surrounding our table made us feel as if we ourselves were in Faust or maybe Taxi Driver, although instead of angels, a framed photo of Homicide’s Detective Munch (Richard Belzer) hovered above us.

After we’d downed a few free shots of 12- and 18-year-old Jameson Irish whiskey during a tasting at Columbus Avenue Wine & Spirits tonight, Iggy, Sam and I trudged down to Bella Luna for dinner.

It’s a comfy Italian restaurant catering more towards the well-dressed Upper West Side crowd. Lots of potted palms and trim waiters who, in addition to the fresh ground pepper log, make the rounds separately with a fresh ground Parmesan grinder, which is a nice touch. Food was moderately inexpensive and rich. I had the Rigatoni Alla Norma with tomato sauce, eggplant and ricotta. For dessert, I had tiramisu and a cappuccino.

On my walk back to the subway in the howling bitter weather, I reasoned that Wintry Mix resembles Chex Mix in that both generally appear for a limited time near the holidays and both sting when flung in one’s face at high velocity.

Bella Luna

• 584 Columbus Ave. (between 88th and 89th Streets)
• (212) 877-2267
• Meal 12 of 52: rigatoni ($10.50), glass of Chianti, tiramisu and a cappuccino.

I took a Metro-North train from Harlem up to Westchester County early this afternoon because that was the nearest location of After Hours, which is not a gentlemen’s club but the formalwear chain my friend Joe has selected for his wedding party’s tuxedos, two-button Tommy Hilfiger models with long ties and “truffle vests.”

After a relaxing half-hour ride, I set out on foot from the White Plains station, spotted a large blue Sears sign, then walked over and entered the mall it was attached to. There was no tuxedo store to be found. After calling Joe, I learned I was in the wrong mall. Joe mapped my predicament online then relayed to me via cellphone that White Plains has a pair of malls approximately eight city blocks apart and I was in the more ghetto of the two, the Galleria.

After arriving at my correct destination, the Westchester Mall, I took in its modern architecture, carpeted floors, Apple Store, Sharper Image, Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus and roving packs of Asian teens. I stood in line at After Hours with a bunch of gawky high-schoolers whose older brothers were getting married, had various body parts tape-measured and tried on two in-store “test jackets,” smelling of sweat and cigarettes, to pinpoint my size (37 long, for those keeping score at home).

I took an express train back to Grand Central because I had plans to see The Lives of Others, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last month. It’s reminiscent of Coppola’s Hitchcockian The Conversation, in which a snoop (Gene Hackman) thinks he’s heard a murder in a wiretapped apartment through his headphones. To a lesser degree, I thought of 3-Iron, in which a young couple lives for moments at a time in the vacant apartments of strangers.

In Lives of Others, Ulrich Mühe plays a member of East Germany’s Stasi in the Berlin Wall-divided early ‘80s. Resembling Stanley Tucci from certain angles, he’s an expert interrogator who switches to the passive end of the business when he takes on a life-consuming wiretap stakeout of a writer who’s suspected of harboring a subversive streak. The same stone-faced officer who’s patient and exacting enough to sweat the “truth” from suspects at the station has difficulty finding fault in a man whose complicated life he’s exposed to in conversations the writer has with his girlfriend and friends. The end, sappy yet satisfying, gets choppy with jumps in the timeline of multiple years at a time. But I’d recommend it.

And, yes, I still think it deserved Best Foreign Language Film over Pan’s Labyrinth. That film, while wondrous in its effects and imagination, had a predictable fairytale plot and little character development. Lives of Others is more unexpected and focuses on the nuances and complexities of human nature and expression. Katie disagrees. “I guess you don’t care about the plight of a little girl,” she snapped in disgust, as she, Andie and I briefly discussed the films afterwards. I didn’t take it further because I’m not smart enough to win an argument with her. She should consider a career in politics.

I cannot roller skate. At one time I could, I swear. I have fond memories of grade school outings to Ohio Skate, but if I concentrate on these hazy recollections, what pops up is eating pizza, playing Tempest and hoping the D.J. would play the best roller skating song ever, “Jungle Love” by The Time.

When Iggy, Sam and I met at the storied ’80s nightclub Roxy tonight for the third-to-last skating party before it’s demolished to make room for apartments, I thought I’d be able to complete at least one circuit. I laced up my size 11s and stepped gingerly onto the parquet rink. As the friction between my feet and the ground all but disappeared, never was it made so clear to me that I’m nearly six feet tall with comparatively little mass. My legs stiffened and I teetered precariously. I pitched and bobbed as stormy seas of fluid raged through my vestibular system. In a flash I wondered what happens to your stuff when you die without a will. I was a flailing physics equation and after grasping for the boards, I took a side exit from the floor and spent the remainder of the night standing there watching everyone else skate and wondering why nearly the only song I recognized was “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” by Michael Jackson, the second-best roller skating song ever, incidentally.

The floor swam with skaters, moving quickly en masse, generally in the same direction, bumping one another in the rush. It was reminiscent of the center 2/3 platform at Penn Station weekday mornings, except with more falling down. There were skaters of all kinds: Girls wearing short shorts and those high, striped tube socks. An old man who resembled Alan Arkin skating slowly in his own world. Muscularly lithe black guys with shaved heads who appeared to be enjoying their night off as Madonna’s backup dancers. Girls with glowsticks, that nerd with the headband, most everyone sweaty.

I thought that maybe if I jettisoned some shame, I could see whether I could make this plan work: I am a guy who clearly cannot skate. Is there no fair maiden who will come to my aid and “show me the basics?” Unfortunately, Sam explained, the way it works for heterosexuals at the Roxy is that you have to be a fellow who’s, like, the Scott Hamilton of roller skating, then rove the floor flashing your flair and your moves to less experienced young ladies, much as a male peacock will unfurl his iridescent fan of feathers as he roller skates by an inquisitive female.

The girls were working it, too. There was this one Sam pointed out who was wearing dark-blue Jordache jeans, a pink top out of Flashdance and matching earrings, each of which was a big plastic triangle. She was mostly skating backwards and kept bustin’ this move where she’d nod her head rhythmically or shimmy slowly as she ran both of her hands through her blonde bob and flipped it out, like she hoped she might pass a strapping man in a polo shirt or a talent scout from Clairol. The funny thing was she resembled Andie and her exaggerated motions were exactly the ones Andie would make if she were imitating an exotic dancer.

On the sideline, a sarcastic clot of girls laughed and mimicked Ms. Pink. But this girl knew what she was doing: She was eventually joined by three friends, other girls in jeans, equally nice hair and slightly retro tops that were each a different solid color. They skated for a time holding hands in a loose circle, a whirling Lacoste coven hoping to ensnare an unsuspecting man in their nexus. I figured their alternate plans for the evening involved rocking out in their garage band and/or solving a mystery in a big old haunted mansion upstate.

At the end of the night when I returned my skates, I realized they were radiating a pungent five-cheese odor that in no way could have been spawned by my own feet. Then I saw it: the counterjockeys were not deodorizing the returned skates, just chucking them into large blue plastic tubs, then fishing them back out and handing them over to the next customer who requested that size. Believe me when I tell you, through the footholes of Roxy’s skates, I witnessed the morning-breath yawn of Death itself.

I went, again, to Ikea today, this time with Jimi, The Man and Johnny. I thought they might make some purchases of their own there so as to downplay the fact that I seemed to be using them for their rental car, but no dice. We had a nice lunch involving cheap meatballs and sandwiches in the cafeteria. Later, we learned that thrifty bibliophile-beloved particle-board confection, the Billy bookcase, barely fit in our vehicle with all but the driver and front passenger seats tucked down. I scrunched up in the back and Johnny fell asleep laying on top of the large flat boxes. Upon waking, he was surprised to learn my building doesn’t have an elevator so we all got to experience arrhythmia and shortness of breath lugging that lumber up all those stairs.

Stars align, planets turn, an asteroid angles to blindside earth: mere trifles of the universe. After all, it’s Iggy’s birthday. The man is cooler than you; give it up and deal with it. Do you have full Fu-Manchu facial hair? Did you steal James Brown’s soul while his body was still warm? Does your coat contain at least three arrestable offenses, including shuriken? Have you ever sat on a sofa with a bathrobe-clad Miles Davis? I didn’t think so; to the back of the line with you.

So, you see, to bacchanalate properly we needed a venue alive with pleasure. We tried this East Side Moroccan joint, Zerza, but it was only just O.K. and shall receive my bile.

It’s good the 12 of us (14? 13? I wasn’t paying attention to begin with and I fully lost track after a few drinks) were such a giddy fun-loving bunch because my dish wasn’t. What was billed as a vegetarian casserole was a watery bunch of TV dinner peas, some carrot chunks and a scatter of lonely chickpeas. Thankfully the mojitos, although expensive, were tasty, as was the baklava.

But worst, we’d selected the place for its promise of gyrating, ululating, finger-cymbal rocking, vision-questing entertainments. To wit, we were told there would be a hookah; there was no hookah. We were told there would be belly dancing; there was no belly dancing. (Other than, eventually, among our own group; but this is a family blog and I can divulge no further detail.) ¿Dónde está belly dancer? “She left,” our waitress said, not so helpfully. Later, perhaps taking stock of our mojito-fogged minds, she suggested the tip wasn’t included in our colossal bill when in fact it was. That ain’t right. The free flutes of champagne the manager dispatched to our table didn’t make up for these transgressions but we drank it anyway.

On the gleeful slouch back to our respective subways and trains, we stopped at Astor Place to rotate The Alamo in Iggy’s honor. Some imps had pranked the top of the hulking metal cube with LED throwies, glowing like candyraver fireflies. We spun ol’ Alamo so fast, it began to shudder. “It’s oscillating! It’s oscillating!” Iggy shouted, and I thought it might whip loose from its pivot and hurtle down the Bowery, taking us with it.

Zerza

• 304 E. 6th St. (at Second Avenue)
• (212) 529-8250
• Meal 8 of 52: vegetarian casserole thing (something like $14), mojitos ($10 each), baklava ($?) and an espresso ($?)

On the way back uptown from Megan’s birthday soirée.

So what happened, see, was Kelly trained her camera on Katie, Andie and myself. Next, she shouted out the name of a random emotion. Then we three had but a second to compose ourselves into a tableau of that emotion before the photo was taken.

This one’s my favorite but it’s not representative or fair: after Kelly said “tantric,” Katie and I conspired to stare at Andie.

Drinks and décor courtesy the downstairs lounge at the Flatiron, where a group of us were celebrating Megan’s 30th. You’re best off viewing the full set on Flickr.

Lately Andie has been considering bangs, which apparently are again in vogue. Critics claim “an instant tuneup to any hairstyle!” and “look better in berets!”

I told Andie I’m all for it. For inspiration, I emailed her this photo of Jane Birkin and her bangs from the ’60s. Jane was known then as a singer/actress although her performance in either field could be described as “insubstantial,” or, better yet, “breathy.”

I’d say she’s more famous for appearing nude on film and nearly so on her record covers. The Vatican, the BBC and several countries censured one of her singles, not for the cover, but the orgasmic lyrics and moaning therein. And as legend has it, Hermès named one of its most exclusive bags after her.

I am confident that, with bangs, Andie can meet or surpass these achievements in foxiness.

I always have fun at karaoke but usually so much fun—also alcohol—that I remember little the next day, when my voice resembles Marge Simpson’s and my head contains fading waves of “Forever in Blue Jeans.” This is bad because karaoke success depends on consistency. Sure, you can go off on a bender from time to time and sing wild songs, but you should at least:

1. Have a signature, well-practiced song or two with which to impress and/or make the audience overlook your shortcomings.
2. Know your weaknesses in terms of song selection and pitch and so on.

So when Samantha and Iggy invited me out tonight for the happy-hour special at Japas 55, I took advantage of the small-group dynamic to whip out my notebook and record what everyone sang. I’ve recreated the playlist below. This is useful, believe me, because looking at it now, I remember much more clearly what worked and what didn’t.

For instance, anyone vaguely familiar with the White Album can sing the first part of “I Will” by the Beatles, but for those such as myself not intimately familiar with it, confusion sets in by the middle-eight. Same thing with Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face,” which has a tricky rapping bit towards the end that I forget exists until it’s too late.

Another problem I recall by this list is my trouble sticking to one style of singing. For instance, “Ziggy Stardust”: Should it be sung with British accent or without? The correct answer is “with” but I couldn’t make up my mind and meandered back and forth. Even worse was Björk’s “Hyper-Ballad.” I kept threatening to select a Björk song (“It’ll be fun, right?”), then I did, thinking either I would receive backup or it would be an amusing trifle, neither fantasy of which came true. For you see, I realized too late that Björk is the only person who can sing Björk songs. The sole constant in my delivery was shifting from cloying falsetto to my “normal” singing voice, bending and cracking as if I was hitting puberty over and over again. I made even myself nauseous and if Björk would have happened by, she would have punched me. And then Matthew Barney would have dumped a bucket of petroleum jelly on my bruised head.

“Here Comes Your Man” was my biggest success, in part because no one ever picks that song and even people who don’t know the Pixies or hate them in general cannot deny the tune is catchy pop greatness. (The lyrics are another story.) In general, too, country is good for me (“Folsom Prison Blues” and “El Paso”) because of the repetition and lower-voiced simplicities therein. And if you wonder why I chose to sing “Thirty-Three,” no one’s favorite Smashing Pumpkins song, it’s because that is my age. Oh, I am clever. Also, Billy Corgan generally sings with a range poor and/or basic enough for anyone to mimic. (I feel the same way about many songs of Bono, which is why I favor U2’s “One.”)

But enough about me. Turning to the people in the room who could really sing, Iggy proved he is a master of style, voice and pitch, sliding seamlessly from Barry White (complete with lusciously deep voice and spoken-word asides) to Michael Jackson (with ad-libbed hoo-hooos). He is king of the soulful oldies: see his choices from the Platters, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder, etc. Ain’t no mountain high enough for Iggy to conquer. For those of you who do not know him, I should point out that, as near as I can see, Iggy is not black. But I feel he should keep holding out for an honorary designation from the NAACP.

Samantha has a repertoire of awesome signature songs, particularly Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic,” which reminds me of The Motels’ “Only the Lonely,” another song she rocks on. She is queen of the strong voice, staying on key and hitting high notes with laserlike accuracy. As special bonuses, she will take requests (her skin-tingling rendition of Cyndi Lauper’s “All Through the Night” is a favorite of mine) and also dance along at no extra charge. For instance, she did the Robert Palmer Video Girl moves at my request during “Simply Irresistible” and, on her own, grooved “She’s a Bad Mama Jama” like a Fly Girl on Red Bull. She’s not too cool to provide backup (the repeated Les yeux sans visage in “Eyes Without a Face”) and graciously sang a Rod Stewart song Iggy accidentally keyed-in (“Love Touch”) even though she thinks Rod is a wanker.

And O those starry-eyed duets: “I Got You Babe” (more cute than corny) and “Groovin’” (self-explanatory). Well done, kids.

For the closer, “Sweet Caroline,” we belatedly activated a feature present on most newer karaoke units that tracks a singer’s key, tempo and portamento. (Portamento? I think that’s what it was.) When the song’s over, you receive an animé bar graph speckled with Japanese characters and a number. Ours was 83, which is good, I guess. We need to investigate this feature further.

As our night of song drew to a conclusion, I proved I hadn’t lost it in matters of quickly forgetting. It wasn’t until I had nearly said my final goodbyes to Sam and Iggy, heading up Eighth Avenue to the subway, before Iggy gently pointed out I hadn’t paid for my share of the festivities. That made me feel like a jerk, but it was not my intention to flee the bill and I explained more or less accurately that I usually have a stranger or someone such as Andie handle delicate financial matters when I’ve been drinking. “Here’s my wallet,” I’ll say, handing it over. “I trust you.”

Katie held her birthday celebration tonight in the East Village at the Beauty Bar, where several of us had been before but not recently. This was made clear when we noticed most of the other people there looked to be in their mid-20s, with their Urban Outfitter apparel and ironic facial hair. We had a rousing good time anyway. The place is a converted beauty salon where you can get a manicure or nail-painting while sitting in a barber chair or under one of the original “chrome-dome” hair dryers. Smells like nail polish and cheap beer.

When I mentioned to my coworkers that for Andie’s movie-character costume party tonight, I was dressing as mailroom clerk Norville Barnes, The Hudsucker Proxy protagonist played by Tim Robbins, I was met with responses ranging from “No one will know who that is!” to “What?” But of course everyone at the party got the reference, from “I’ve seen that movie, like, five times,” to “That’s the one where the guy jumps out the window, right? And Paul Newman’s in it?”

And that’s why these people and I are friends.

Here are some photos of Tim and myself dressed as Norville.

Costume Ingredients

• shop apron. The apron in the movie is dark gray but a dark blue denim one was the closest I could find. I was thinking of sewing buttons to the top corners like Tim’s, but I can’t sew. Plus, who cares. I bought it from a supplier in California called PK Safety Supply via Amazon.com for a mere $3.50. That’s about what it’s worth: the edges frayed and curled after I laundered it. Fortunately, the shoddy stitching of the breast pocket made it easy to remove for purposes of ironing-on the Hudsucker Industries logo using...
• Avery Ink Jet Dark T-Shirt Transfers. A pack of five iron-on sheets for $14.99 at Staples. I learned this about iron-on transfers: for dark fabrics, definitely use the “dark T-shirt” variety, not the standard “white T-shirt” variety, which will transfer barely visible to a fabric like denim. And all iron-on sheets are meant for transferring solid blocks or blobs of graphics, not detailed things like logotypes. In other words, instead of directly transferring the background-less type, I had to print the white letters on a square colored an approximate denim-blue. It turned out O.K. for the low-light environment of a typical party. I built the logo in FreeHand, opting for solid type instead of the inline type used for the “Hudsucker Industries” part of the logo. The internet identified that typeface as the anachronistic Bodega Sans (Bodega Sans Oldstyle for the S’s) and the design posse at work helped me approximate the typeface used for the logo tagline, “The Future Is Now,” as Harlow Solid.
• brown shoes. These were “Walk-Overs” from George E. Keith Co., pride of Brockton and donated a few years back by my previous boss in Ohio.
• dress shirt. I used an old J. Crew pinstriped variety I’d been planning to donate to Goodwill.
• bow tie. I couldn’t find a mostly solid-colored maroon one so I purchased a ’50s-vintage blue and silver rayon and acetate Botany clip-on. I got this at The Family Jewels, one of those funky thrift shops in Chelsea I hesitate entering because it’s never clear whether they carry any clothing for guys. I’m happy to say they have a handsome collection of bow ties piled into a velvet top hat resting atop a counter in the back corner. It cost $26, which I didn’t mind because I like supporting local shops like this. Yet it pained me to see the original 1950s price-tag still attached: $1.
• visor. Norville wears one in a few scenes, such as when he’s sorting mail. I bought a sporty denim model from Conway on the north side of W. 34th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, a Garment District stretch of intense clothing cheapness. $2.99, although I had to wait in line 10 minutes.
• trousers. I got a pair of tan Claiborne cotton dress pants in my waist size but cut “long” for hiking up above my waist ’50s style for $4.99 at the Goodwill on W. 181st Street, purchased that day I was called Papi.
• suspenders. I had a tough time finding these, unless my problem was that I wasn’t looking in enough geezer shops. I ended up getting a burgundy clip-on Y-back pair online from JCPenney for $14.99.
• a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it. In the film, Norville keeps a folded up piece of paper with him and at a moment’s notice will unfold it for display, explaining, “You know...For kids!” No one knows what the hell he’s talking about and then he goes and invents the toy based on his idea, the Hula Hoop, saving Hudsucker Industries from financial ruin while getting himself and his costume promoted from shop apron to tailored suits.

Mom and Dad, who arrived at my apartment this morning to visit for the weekend, had a crusty Jewish cabdriver drive them in from LaGuardia who told entertaining stories, like that I was smart to be living in Inwood because it’s inexpensive although there are all those Dominicans to contend with. I was happy to hear the ride was much cheaper than I originally quoted; I thought outward fares from LaGuardia were flat-rate like the $45 ones from JFK, but I was mistaken.

We got lunch at Bite, a closet-sized East Village salad and panini sandwich shop that Time Out New York rated best bet for Union Square environs in its recent and annual “Cheap Eats” cover story. I had the toasted and pressed Nutella-banana sandwich (only $3) and it was a mouth-watering mix of warm, sweet, melty and chewy tastiness. Sandwiches in tow, we walked a few blocks south and gathered at the Alamo cube on Astor Place for a Big Onion walking tour of the Bowery.

We were relieved to see our tour guide, David, at least appeared to be the real deal: he was shouldering a canvas bag from the Strand, and was dressed in jeans that kept falling down a bit and what appeared to be a thrift-store shirt. (Later I learned he’s a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Columbia.) He carried a small stack of laminated handouts he’d occasionally pass around, a pocketwatch on a chain that he’d check for time, and a beard that he would stroke not theatrically but with genuine thoughtfulness. He had a passion for facts both entertaining and enlightening, a keen knowledge of local history and a grudge for gentrification and development. He reminded us in some ways of my friend Joe.

We learned the Bowery is one of the two oldest streets in the city (Broadway’s the other) and that its name comes from the Dutch word for farm; most of the area on which we stood, including Cooper Union, two Starbucks less than a block apart and a Kmart, was once part of Peter Stuyvesant’s farm. At Cooper Union, the country’s first tuition-free institution of higher learning, we were told how the founder made his fortune collecting and disposing the horse carcasses that littered the city’s streets. (Because they’re so heavy, owners often left them where they fell.) Giving fresh meaning to the aphorism “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” Peter Cooper started a glue company, then obtained the first American patent for manufacturing “portable gelatine,” a treat that would eventually be known as Jell-O. His 1845 patent application even specified lemon or lime flavoring. What it didn’t recommend was gelatin made from horse hooves; Cooper called for isinglass gelatin, which is made from fish viscera, but let’s not let the facts spoil a good anecdote. As if his school-founding and dessert-inventing wasn’t enough, Cooper still found time to develop what’s perhaps the first steam locomotive prototype.

David also told of Cooper Union’s place in American history as a rallying point for mobs and more recently home to speeches by political firebrands. An interesting architectual detail: the school was built from blocks of brownstone, a mud-colored sandstone considered a shabby excuse for construction material at the time. After the school gained fame, its unconventional look sparked a short-lived brownstone fad, culminating in buildings of that name sprouting up all over Harlem and Brooklyn.

As we headed down Bowery, we looked at and learned of McSorley’s Old Ale House, at 150+ perhaps the city’s oldest pub and one that didn’t even admit women until 1970 when a court forced it to. It was a happy coincidence to hear David reference Joseph Mitchell’s excellent 1945 essay collection, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, which is among my current stack of bedside books.

We also made stops outside flophouses (several of which are still active), the Amato Opera House, the doomed CBGB, the Bowery Savings Bank and McGuirk’s Suicide Hall, one of the most notorious drinking establishments ever, the site of which is now a colossally ugly new glass-and-steel condo complex. I wish for the yuppies who will live there to know that there used to be a bar on the spot that would combine the dregs from the glasses at closing time into a barrel, thread a long tube into the swill, then charge a nickel for one all-you-could-drink suck. Adding a contemporary spin to the seedy topics of the tour, I spotted a fat man near Rivington Street who appeared to be mating with a stove. That’s tough love, man.

The tour ended in Chinatown, so we bought bubble tea at Ten Ren’s Tea Time and took it to drink at Columbus Park, where Chinese men crowded around the game tables to watch rounds of Xiangqi. We walked up to McNally Robinson where we pursued travel guides for Italy and found on a globe Zambia, where my sister Dana may be living and working next. After drinks at Republic, we ate dinner at Craft. For post-dinner drinks and lively conversation, we attended Andie and Eric’s cocktail party. Mom advised Ali, newly a nurse, in the ancient arts of the RN. It was like Yoda and Luke at Dagobah.

Bite

• 211 E. 14th Street (between Third and Second Avenues)
• (212) 677-3123
• Meal 28 of 52: Nutella Banana Ciabatta ($3.00).

As a follow-up to helping paint Katie’s bedroom in February, I headed out to Jersey City this afternoon to help paint her living room.

The A train and PATH train were running in perfect synch with my schedule, so I arrived in New Jersey early. To pass the time, I sat in Van Vorst Park to read, then walked by the Jersey City Free Public Library, which was throwing out a bunch of card catalogs. I wanted to enact a Dumpster dive mission, though there’d be no way I could lug that furniture back home on public transport.

Andie came over to help paint, too, and everything went smoothly. We even bothered this time to unscrew and remove the light switch, ventilation and electrical outlet faceplates. Katie’s cats were allowed to roam around until it became clear they were desperately interested in inspecting the full paint trays, so we shut them in the bedroom for the remainder of our session.

The room looks even better now, brighter and more cheery with light orangey-brown walls, which sounds gross but looks Martha Stewarty in a good way. We left the distinctive Art Deco-style molding around the windows and kitchen doorway painted white, which makes them stand out.

I was at the Stoned Crow the other night with some female friends and the subject of My Little Pony came up, probably because we had one right there on the table (long story) and were grooming its mane while drinking beer, eating raw French-Toast Pop Tarts and watching Dirty Dancing on the TV mounted in the corner.

(The Stoned Crow is just that relaxed, although I’m told that of the many photos of handsome male celebrities pasted in the ladies’ room, the one of Antonio Banderas slouched in his tighty-whities is unerotic to the point of discomfort. Strangely, the men’s room also is plastered with photos of handsome male celebrities and one of Patti Smith, so it’s clear straight gents are getting dicked over.)

But back to the Pony: I said I had always thought the toy was at least once named My Pretty Pony, but everyone was like, “Nuh-huh! My Little Pony.” Well the internet claims there really was a My Pretty Pony. It was a 1981-1983 predecessor to My Little Pony, an ur-Pony, if you will. I just couldn’t let this slide.

The locusts, joined by a rooster for good measure, woke me this morning, heralding another fine sunny day in Rhode Island. During breakfast, I watched Howard, Laura’s cockatiel, cautiously creep inside an empty cereal box, where he composed a whistly tune. If translated to English, it would be a punk song with the lyric “I’m in a cardboard box” shouted over and over again.

For the second and final day of the Newport Folk Fest, Patty Larkin opened on the main stage, with some twangy-folksy songs I liked, particularly “The Book I’m Not Reading,” which makes me want someone to read me stories, and a cover she dedicated to one of her two kids, the Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday.”

There was also Abigail Washburn, fingerpicking a guitar and singing country songs—in Chinese—with backup by Ben Sollee, who plays cello as one would play a fiddle. Patty Larkin performed again, joining a troika of Muriel Anderson, who sang sappily but played a mean harp guitar and virtuoso jazz guitarist Mimi Fox. Here’s a photo of Patty from that set, snapped from our awesome seats three rows from the stage.

Through the day we also heard Madeleine Peyroux, who was too Norah Jonesey for me, though I liked her cover of Randy Newman’s “I Think it’s Gonna Rain Today”; Odetta, the husky-voiced African-American folk pioneer of the ’50s and ’60s, who had a great run on Ledbelly’s “Bourgeois Blues”; and the standup bass/steel guitar combo of the Wood Brothers.

One of two hands-down highlights was the closing act, the Indigo Girls, who inspired the crowd to sing, clap and dance along by playing a blend of fan favorites (“Chickenman,” “Dairy Queen”), radio hits (“Galelio,” “Closer to Fine”), at least four cuts from their forthcoming album and a two-song encore that included a haunting rendition of “Kid Fears.” They even awarded their guitar tech a cheesy trophy for 10 years of faithful service.

The other bright spot was infectiously cheery bluegrass singer-songwriter David Rawlings and his unbilled guest, musical partner Gillian Welch. They knocked out raucous versions of Dylan’s “I am a Lonesome Hobo” and Jesse “the Lone Cat” Fuller’s “The Monkey and the Engineer,” a silly song about a curious monkey that seizes control of a locomotive and cranks it up to 90mph on the mainline run.

We hit the road home directly after the festival, over cathedral-like bridges toward the fireball sunset. Dinner at an Applebee’s near Mystic was crappy, but the remainder of the trip was fun as we sang along to ’80s songs on the radio until losing ourselves looking for the Saw Mill River Parkway.

Laura called to see how the festival played out and how our drive was proceding. She also told us she discovered a horned owl in her barn and that she was stung by a bee today for the first time ever, a wonder considering her years of gardening. It was a tense moment as she waited to see whether she’d have a severe allergic reaction. She didn’t.

The locusts in Laura’s backyard made a valiant attempt to wake me but the earlier-rising jackass with the lawnmower won out. After a quick breakfast of hazelnut coffee and Peace brand breakfast cereal, purchased from the local dollar store and billed as “70% organic,” Katie and I took a 30-minute drive off the mainland onto Newport Island for the Newport Folk Fest.

I imagined it’d be populated by arthritic hippies, and there were a few, both onstage and in the crowd. But it may be inaccurate to call it a folk fest when performers represent not only that genre, but soul, funk, pop and country. Katie put the name game to rest by saying folk is a mindset. If I were cynical, I’d suspect the diverse lineup was to boost attendance; BostonHerald.com reported that the crowd of 4,000 today was one of the smallest in 20 years. But with a bow to brotherhood/sisterhood, love and Ben & Jerry’s Peace Pops, I’m satisfied with Katie’s definition.

Really though, 4,000 appeared like a lot of people to me and didn’t even account for the freeloaders in sailboats, yachts and kayaks that pulled as close as possible to the island to overhear the music. There was something for most everyone on the three stages of various sizes, which were positioned just outside the looming shale and granite block walls of Fort Adams, the largest coastal fortification in the country. Vendors stationed about peddled crap like dreamcatchers and didgeridoos, and I wished the fort could have been temporarily remilitarized to cannonball them into the harbor, especially mismatched and roundly mocked corporate sponsor Dunkin’ Donuts. Some of the stuff for sale wasn’t bad; Katie bought a straw hat with a beaded turquoise band and a plum-colored peasant skirt.

We listened to a lot of music, planning our movement between the stages and staying for sets by folksy The Duhks, ’60s soul diva Bettye LaVette, and Sonya Kitchell, a too-breathy 17-year-old who had trite lyrics, but a smooth, lush pop sound cranked by a stellar band. We had just a touch of Rosanne Cash, too dislike her daddy for my tastes. Closer David Gray drew the biggest crowd and dismissed his band at the end of his set to grab an acoustic for two covers: the appropriate finalé of Soft Cell’s “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Mansion on the Hill,” inspired by the grand old mansions visible on a far shore.

Highlights were Chris Smither, who sang his humorous tales solo, then shared the stage with Darrell Scott (who resembled Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski) and Jeffrey Foucault. All of them picked and strummed like men possessed. Katie and I also liked Louisiana singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier (pronounced go-shay), whose clear voice and lyrics tell sad and funny luck-down stories, including one referencing microwaving a chicken TV dinner, then getting drunk while eating it. Her between song banter was funny too, mentioning that Dylan has made it tough for folkies by stealing all the good rhymes, but that she cooked up a doozy with kitchenette and cigarette.

Hot and tired, we headed back around 7 p.m., stopping at a beach boasting a marvelous pink and blue sunset. Sandpipers skittered in the surf and in the distance, a wedding party posed for a photographer. We discovered an eroded sand castle and what appeared to be a tangle of Poseidon’s dreadlocks washed ashore.

Katie decided we should drop by Bruce and Elizabeth’s place, located directly on the Sakonnet inlet of the Atlantic. The tide comes and goes under their house, and they have a long picturesque dock. As we waited for the coals on the grill to heat for dinner, I asked Bruce, a salt at heart, how one would boat to the ocean from his place. He described the various inlets, the historical sources of their Indian names, and that the official name of the smallest state is the longest: the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Just as the anecdote was getting lost at sea, he was called to tend the meat, which he said was for the best, admitting he was boring himself.

Excepting the salad, the dinner was grilled: juicy London broil, zucchini halves topped with olive oil, fresh spices and cheese, and crusty bread. Dessert was more Gray’s ice cream, only this time topped with rainbow jimmies. Elizabeth spoke of Australia’s male chauvinism and Bruce of its blockbuster sailing, which he related with anecdotes as a cast member of Wind, the America’s Cup film that starred Matthew Modine and Jennifer Grey.

Later as Bruce and I sat in the deck chairs out back drinking whiskey, the ladies put on a Tom Jones greatest hits CD loud enough to warn errant craft, then performed a goofy and scandalous dance routine in front of us on the tiny waterfront lawn. “What is it about Mr. Jones that makes the ladies crazy?” we wondered aloud.

Katie picked me up early this afternoon and we set out onto I-95 for a weekend visiting her relatives in Rhode Island and attending the Newport Folk Fest.

We stayed with a cousin, Laura, in Tiverton, a quiet resort and residential town of about 15,000. She lives in a classic New England shingle-style farmhouse that dates from the mid-1800s and although it’s supposedly not haunted, workers did unearth a century-old cistern under the house that no one knew existed.

Upon our arrival and greeting cousin Erica, who was already there in the middle of her own Rhode Island mini-vacation, we got cracking with iced bourbon-and-ginger-ales while I toured the heavily flowered grounds. It’s rustic. Out back there’s a barn and a now-ornamental outhouse. Next door, over a hedge of green bramble, is a pasture of sheep. In the yard on the other side, chickens roam. Laura pointed out nearly every flower, tree and shrub on her grounds while her cat, Mr. Fur, his coat the sleek gray of a weimaraner’s, followed us covertly, master of all he surveyed. His claims to fame are disappearing for days on end and depositing the occasional mouse segment on the deck.

During the garden tour, we discussed which flowers would look best cut and placed in vases, and Laura instructed us obliquely on how to build our own arrangements, much as Mr. Miyagi taught Daniel bonsai in The Karate Kid. Here’s Laura helping me achieve a visual balance with my floral work-in-progress.

Somehow our arrangements turned out and fit snugly into Laura’s homestead, already comfortable in its tastefully weathered and mismatched antique furniture, wooden floors, and hundreds of curios and books. I think the fresh, sunlit air was combining chemically with the sulfured well water or something, because my central nervous system was so depressed, I thought I might soon start talking with the hypnotic cadence of Martha Stewart, never to fully return to big city life.

Despite promises to the contrary, it was a classically late family dinner. Laura’s brother Bruce, his lady Elizabeth and their kid Emerald came over and we started eating around 11 p.m. at a candlelit table on the screened-in porch. The spread included barbecued pork ribs and grilled kielbasa, salad, couscous with diced fresh vegetables and wine. Dessert was black cherries and famous Gray’s Ice Cream. I recommend the ginger and coconut flavors. I felt at home with the strange, educated debates at the dinner table; the chief one tonight was a heated discussion about the history of snuff production in New England. Erica taught Emerald one-handed Zippo tricks while striving to avoid self-immolation.

Before we retired for the night, Laura, Katie and I took what Laura called a Lions, Tigers and Bears Walk down her lane and onto the road, which has almost no traffic and no streetlights. Stars speckled the sky. Katie and I saw a meteor, but we didn’t feel the need to wish upon it.

Back home and assigning my room for the evening, Laura explained that town zoning issues dictate she can only house two bedrooms on her property because of the size of her septic tank. So Katie got the guest room and I slept on a firm air mattress in what appeared to be a hallway, but with windows and overstuffed bookcases.

Jimi likes technology and feature-laden gadgets and although I poke fun at his conspicuous consumption, I think it’s to mask a whiff of jealousy. Jimi’s newish waffle iron, for instance, a gleaming masterwork of Bauhaus economy that cost more than my entire necktie wardrobe, is mounted on a gimbal and double-sided, so it can make two giant Belgium waffles at once.

Tonight I was over at his apartment, bemoaning that I could never keep the lenses of my glasses clean and streak-free, especially in sweaty weather like today. What happened next I can only describe as “informercial.” Without taking a step, Jimi reached over and grabbed a small device from a shelf in his kitchen and placed it on the counter. It was an Automatic Eyeglass Cleaner from Sharper Image.

This thing takes the cake. It’s mostly a plastic reservoir of cleaning solution that you change every so often. You open a compartment on the top, clip your glasses by their bridge to a little clamp, snap the lid shut and press the start button. Cleaning solution whooshes around inside. After a spell, the lid opens automatically as an electric-blue light ignites and beams through the water, making it resemble a scene from Cocoon, only instad of a youthful Wilford Brimley rising from the liquid, it’s your glasses, lenses transparent as the day they were ground. Then the machine hums as it gently quivers the glasses dry.

You know, I could further mock this spectacles spectacle, but my glasses were squeaky clean. And what a show! I’ve seen off-Broadway productions with less drama.

For Andie’s birthday party tonight, each guest was directed to write a poem or bring one, then read it. I think only Andie’s Dad wrote one, and it was a clever and funny rhyme that she read from her iBook. Everyone else’s selections covered a wide variety, although Shel Silverstein and Charles Bukowski were favorites. We had some laughs over a D.H. Lawrence orgy of words, and Andie read a passage of Jeanette Winterson, prose like poetry. Red wine flowed freely, there was birthday cake and cupcakes, and the room was filled with flowers. The audience was a fine group of greatest-hits friends and family; here are Gary, Andie and Megan, conversing in a corner.

And here’s the arrangement that was on the living room table, which features a particularly rare specimen of an in-bloom Katieflower.

I thought I’d never eaten tapas before, but I was wrong; upon close inspection, it turns out they’re actually appetizers. I’ll stop there because I’m sure Seinfeld wrung any unfunny humor from this foodstuff back when it first became popular in 1992 or so.

The tapas in question were delicious and eaten at La Paella during a dinner commemorating The Man’s birthday and featuring him and his mom, Jimi, Lee-Ann, Mike and myself. This photo shows, from left, Jimi, the Man and his Mom.

Some of the table also got paella and although I passed because I had gorged on a medley of fillet, chicken and vegetarian tapas, it was an oceanic bounty, including those jumbo shrimp that still have their eye stalks attached.

We drank sangria and for dessert, it was flan aplenty and some warm chocolate cake. Because the waiters weren’t up to it, we all sang “Happy Birthday.”

Afterwards, the kids took the subway uptown from Eighth Street before we went our separate ways. We joshed around while waiting for our train and if a production executive from NBC Entertainment would have happened by and overheard our banter, he would have optioned our act immediately as a mid-season replacement for whatever sitcom is starring John Lithgow. We’re like Friends meets a United Colors of Benetton ad, plus sexual innuendo, vicious racial slurs and “yo mama” jokes.

La Paella

• 214 E. 9th St. (between Second and Third Avenues)
• (212) 598-4321
• Meal 19 of 52: lots of tapas, sangria and flan that Jimi graciously paid for, unless I owe him money and don’t know it.

The Man planned a cunning and elaborate surprise for Jimi’s birthday today. A limo picked up our party—Lee-Anne, The Man, Jimi, Mike and myself—outside Jimi’s apartment. Jimi attempted to drink a full glass of ginger ale as the limo lurched around and ended up having to drink most of it at stoplights to avoid slopping it all over the place. We were dropped off for a delicious family-style Italian dinner at Tony’s di Napoli. You must try the sangria; we had two pitchers. The spaghetti is primo, too, with extra-tasty homemade meatballs the size of racquetballs. Jimi ordered a fresh berry parfait dessert, which arrived topped with a candle and a gaggle of servers belting out “Happy Birthday.” The table of hyperactive kids across the room even joined in.

We were then whisked again by limo to Leisure Time for beer and two games of bowling in the near-dark, under strobelights and black lights that made the bowling balls, white clothing and teeth fluoresce.

Tony’s di Napoli

• 147 W. 43rd St.
• (212) 221-0100
• Meal 17 of 52: spaghetti with racquetball-sized meatballs ($19.95, serves two to three) and sangria.

In a reprise of last weekend, Jimi invited me over for waffles again, only this time I was ready to accept. It was a perfect brunch for a rainy Sunday. The waffles were rich and delicious although The Man said the texture was a bit off: too chewy and not as good as the previous batch. The only change to the recipe was not including the egg yolks, so that may have been the culprit. I thought they were mighty tasty, though, especially when served with fresh-squeezed-into-a-carton orange juice, sausages from Whole Foods, a mix of fresh strawberries, blackberries and blueberries, and some “lite” pancake syrup that Jimi didn’t remember purchasing and thought may have been in his apartment before he even moved into it. Afterwards, the lads packed up to head out to Javits Center for the New York International Auto Show, but I declined, as I’m no big fan of motor vehicles.

Katie, Kelly and I saw the new 35mm print of Days of Heaven tonight at the Film Forum. Terrence Malick is the J.D. Salinger of directors: reclusive, revered (often overly so) and with few finished works to his name, having only cranked out four features in my lifetime. After completing Heaven in 1978, he wouldn’t direct another film for 20 years, The Thin Red Line.

Heaven’s dialogue could fit into a short story and the editing is choppy. Much of this has to do with Malick’s infamous style of rolling for miles of film, sometimes without a script, then creating the story in the cutting room. As such, his films aren’t as much plot or character driven as they are expressionistic meditations on life and death, alternating between carefully composed widescreen landscapes and the minutiae of nature, and culminating in sudden manmade savagery.

As for that plot, Bill (Richard Gere, when he was a strapping, handsome lad) and Abby (the oddly pretty Brooke Adams) are iterant laborers harvesting wheat in Texas in the days before World War I. Although they’re lovers, they pretend to be brother and sister, which leads to an entanglement with the farm’s sickly owner (Sam Shepard), who fancies Abby. Linda Manz plays Linda, a chain-smoking tomboy in her early teens who may or may not be Bill’s kid sister. The length of the film features her voiceover, like a New York-accented version of Huckleberry Finn, grammatically askew but clear-eyed and frank, meditating on her and the other laborers’ station in life. The movie winds down with plagues of fire and grasshoppers of Biblical proportions and concludes with a pair of inevitable deaths.

This is a film truly made to be seen on a large screen, with shots of trains traversing the countryside, herds of buffalo, infinite stalks of wheat undulating in the breeze, the sprawling fields dotted with workers at dawn and dusk. The background of most of the harvest scenes features the overseer’s looming farmhouse, lonely in the distance and lit at night, with the angle and Gothic shape of the one in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. Much of the dialogue seems poorly recorded, but it may just have to lend even more weight to the sounds that serve as themes in the film: the spinning meteorological whirligigs atop the farmhouse, the whirling white noise of the mechanical threshers, the buzz of insects descending, the wind.

After the film, we wandered the neighborhood to find a quiet place to enjoy a drink. Kelly chose Jekyll & Hyde Pub on Sixth Avenue and although she’d been there before, Katie and I hadn’t. It’s like T.G.I. Friday’s of the Damned inside. The menu is generic burgers and fries, but you go for the funhouse ambiance. Televisions mounted near the ceiling loop trailers of old black-and-white B-grade horror films, and all around on the walls and shelves are skeletons, macabre artwork, preserved insects, phrenology busts, and other carnival curios. The restrooms are hidden in a back hall behind a long wall of bookshelves and the staff isn’t supposed to tell you where they are exactly. You end up full of drink and addled, with a desperate need to pee, then find yourself fumbling with the book-lined walls for a secret latch or lever and pining for the aid of Nancy Drew.

To decide who would pay for the first round, I challenged Katie without warning to an arm wrestling duel right there at our table. She’s surprisingly strong. The matched ended in a draw, although to Katie’s credit, she partially lifted me out of my seat with the power of her mighty forearm.

Kelly ran into an actor friend of hers named Jason who works the pub part-time as the voice of several monster heads mounted on the walls. To explain, much of the décor at Jekyll & Hyde’s—skeletons, mummies, werewolf heads and such—is rigged with hidden cameras and speakers, and has eyes and a mouth that can be animated remotely. In a secret control room upstairs are video monitors, animatronic controls and microphones to make the things “speak” at just the right moment. What this boils down to is you’re some Australian tourist trying to eat your $12 hamburger, when suddenly the werewolf head mounted to the wall above your table comes to life and starts making fun of your accent and taunting you to get up and dance along to Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle” until you finally just get up and do it.

After his Australian taunting, Jason came back downstairs and told us a bit about his acting career. For one of those true crime programs on cable, he’d played a Missouri teenager who bludgeoned his parents to death with an axe handle. But his most recent gig was starring in a Troma Entertainment film called Poultrygeist!, billed as “the world’s first horror-comedy film to feature zombie chickens, American Indians and a bit of singing and dancing!”

After a plate of curry fries and several beers, we left around midnight, disappointed that the previously agreeable temperature had dipped to near-winter levels.

Andie invited me over for a picnic lunch in Central Park. She advised me to apply sunscreen and I was glad I did because it was nearly 80 degrees and very sunny outside. I wanted to borrow a cap from her as well, but we couldn’t find one suitable for my husky head. Fortunately, the small rock outcropping we staked out just west of the Ross Pinetum was partially shaded and included a randy flock of pigeons that attempted to mate with one another. We ate sandwiches and pasta salad purchased at Broadway Farms and played a game of Travel Scrabble; Andie kicked my ass handily.

Afterwards, we set off in search of challah bread for a French toast recipe I wanted to try, but despite the Jewishness of the Upper West Side, could find none. In fact, the bread lady at Zabar’s not only told me they were sold out for the day but corrected my pronunciation of challah. The way I’d explain it is that it’s like “holla” only the H should be pronounced like you’re trying to expel a wayward gnat that just flew into your throat.

Andie and I then checked out the charming Westside Books on Broadway between 80th and 81st, which has a nice selection of used literature at reasonable prices. There are books atop books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves downstairs, and all the way up the tall, narrow staircase leading up a loft housing the “underground” books, comics, first editions, large art books and, in a dark corner, a life-size cardboard cutout of Angelina Jolie from Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. I snagged a paperback of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop for $7.

Manhattan power couple Sam and Iggy invited me out for another one of their famous Leisure Time bowling extravaganzas. (Off topic: Check out the high-profile missing apostrophe on the Leisure Time website: “We’re not your parents Bowling Alley.”)

As my high-school bowling club coach, Sister Marie, used to say: “Bowling is fun.” The groop included Sam and Iggy, myself, Ritchey and two young ladies who were rock climbing chums of Iggy’s and also both PHDs, which made me feel inadequate on several fronts. One had never bowled before, which resulted in some amusements. The other had bowled often before and had this awesome exaggerated stance that contorted her body, upon release of the ball, to precisely resemble the form of that golden statuette guy typically found atop bowling trophies.

I drank too much beer and ripped off part of my thumbnail like I usually do while bowling. I do trim my fingernails beforehand, but it doesn’t help prevent rippage. I must have a vitamin deficiency or genetically brittle nails.

It was a beautiful warm spring day today; what better a time for two young Americans to go shopping. I took the PATH train to Katie’s new apartment in Jersey City early this morning and after hopping in her car and stopping for beverages and bagels, we got on the turnpike and headed to Elizabeth, home of Ikea.

We ended up missing our exit because we were talking about a flurry of unrelated topics: the recently released 9/11 911 recordings, Malcom Gladwell lurking in the cafe of Katie’s bookstore, and the 101.1 Jack FM robo-radio station playing as the backdrop to our chatter. So we took what my dad would call a scenic route through Elizabeth, which seems to have an obsession with recycling. After it became obvious we wouldn’t be finding our way to Ikea via the Elizabethan backroads, we relocated the turnpike and got back on it, advancing to the correct exit.

For my first time to Ikea, it was a marvelous experience. I thought the whole outfit would resemble a Home Depot, but only the last bit does, when you get to strain yourself hefting large flat boxes of unassembled furniture onto your cart right before the checkout.

We spent the bulk of our time in the showrooms upstairs, each of which is packed with all manner of Ikea merchandise. You can hang out in a kitchen, for instance, that’s constructed, furnished and lit like a movie set, and inspect the knife block, wall clock, wine rack and window curtains—everything, all for sale. If you open the cupboards, why, there are Ikea dishes and glasses inside. Signs on some rooms exclaim hopefully, “Buy this whole room for $800.” In addition to several kitchens, there are fully furnished home and corporate offices, boutiques, bedrooms, bathrooms, board rooms, living rooms, dorm rooms, kids’ rooms, ultility rooms, laundry rooms, wine rooms, closets. Each leads directly into another, swarming with dazed shoppers, and there is no escape from the circuit. Your mind starts swimming with unpronounceable Scandinavian names in soul-soothing Futura and you feel as if you’re trapped in the infinite dream house of a man named Sven.

But when you get down to it, most of the stuff Ikea makes is cheap and nasty. The company relishes in the impression that its merchandise is handcrafted by tall Aryans in lab coats when in fact the majority of it is “designed and commissioned” by the Aryans, then manufactured by less tall people in Asia from the finest plastic and laminated particle board. What I found most valuable during my showroom appearance, in lieu of ordering from ikea.com, was testing sturdiness and quality. The word I overused today was “flimsy.” I sat heavily in chairs. I eyed imperfections in glassware. I opened and closed drawers. I rambled about the room of kitchen tables, shoving and taunting the merchandise like a furniture pimp. I scoffed a lot.

I took notes and consulted with Katie, which was another nice touch over online shopping: getting an immediate and trusted human opinion with more style savvy than my own. In return, I advised on her purchases, which included a reading light, a coat-hanging unit, a dish drying rack and a bathroom mirror to replace her ugly existing one, which we were amused to discover was made by Ikea.

It was a long day. I think we spent six hours there. We had to stop halfway through to rejuvenate with coffee in the cafeteria, resplendent in the faint odor of meatballs, and listen to a couple on drums and accordion riff through polka adaptations of songs like Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.”

As for my final purchases, I settled on a sturdy birch kitchen table that had Björk in its name, which of course helped seal the deal, and a wooden chair with padded slipcover that combines a paradox of comfort with construction that prevents slouching. How European! I picked up a lacquered wood tray for breakfast in bed or dinner while couch-sitting. The three large glass jars with stopper-top aluminum lids I got will be perfect for holding dry ingredients like noodles, sugar and flour. I located a similar model jar, but tall, in which to store my spaghetti. And for only $4.50, I picked up a set of six red wine glasses so I can cease drinking my shiraz from tumblers like a wino. My sole impulse purchase was a small clock, on clearance sale for $2.99, that sports the plastic boxiness and primary colors of Lego bricks. I shall place it in my bathroom where it will complement my brightly colored fish motif.

After we returned to Katie’s apartment, I goaded her to pry off her old bathroom mirror, which is adhered strongly and directly to the wall, using a paint-can opener, but she only succeeded in cracking the thing and getting glass slivers all over her sink. For a late dinner, we carried out a large mushroom and fried-eggplant pizza from Lombardi’s which we ate listening to Beck and Kate Bush, while Katie’s cats sniffed around her new purchases.

Tasty chili-from-Andie night! A different recpie than the last time: black beans (not canned), fake meat that tasted like real meat, red peppers roasted by putting them directly on the rangetop gas flames, cheddar cheese, the Colonel’s secret blend of 11 herbs and spices. And cornbread made the cowboy way, in a cast iron skillet over the fire. I mean, in the oven.

While I was over, I cropped some shots that Andie had scanned from square-format professional film (6x6-centimeter 120 film, I think), but that the local photo shop had muddled by including random bits of frame on the edges of the scans. I busted out my Photoshop skillz with some proportional cropping.

We also watched two episodes of My Name is Earl and I didn’t want to laugh but did anyway.

Continuing the surreal theme of the day, I went to the Paul Klee exhibit Klee and America at the Neue Galerie, a converted mansion on the Upper East Side with a small permanent collection from the likes of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele on the second floor and four rooms on the third floor for the Klee exhibition. Spread through three of these rooms are 58 works by Klee, chiefly from the ’30s and ’40s when he was first being discovered in America. His champions included one of the twentieth century’s original Power Couples of art, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the latter of whom declared Klee the world’s greatest “child/poet.”

Ironically, Klee’s recognition in the U.S. came just as he felt he was gaining it in Europe. Nearing the cusp of his popularity there, he was dismissed from his Bauhaus teaching post in Germany by the Nazis, who had classified his work, along with most of the modern canon, as degenerate art.

The style of Klee is hard to nail down but he’s best known for what one of my art history professors in college called “subconscious doodles,” thin, strange stick figures and symbols he usually sketched in pen or pencil. While he adhered to these instruments, oils and watercolors as his core media, the surfaces on which he worked varied greatly: cardboard, cotton, canvas, wood, many types of paper, burlap (by itself and primed with other media, such as chalk), and black casein ground. Each leant a unique texture. The casein ground, for instance, brought the paint’s pigment, rather than its oil, to the surface, for a result akin to colored scratchboard. Combining watercolors and paste paint on cardboard, the color and texture of The Sick Heart resembles frosting on sugar cookies, while in Orpheus, watercolored cotton conjures the luminous swaths of color in a stained glass window.

Klee often used a technique (which he may have originated) called oil transfer drawing that gave his works gently shifting translucent hues, juxtaposed by his sharply drawn caricature. The famous Red Balloon (depicted above) is an oil transfer drawing and was described in 2003 by the Guggenheim Museum for its show From Picasso to Pollock: Classics of Modern Art:

He brushed a thinned oil paint onto one side of a piece of paper, then like making a carbon copy, he drew on the back of the painted sheet with a pen or stylus. The resulting lines have a feathered, smudged quality, as the artist stated, ‘saving transfer of my fundamental graphic talent into the domain of painting.’ Devised during Klee’s Bauhaus years, the oil transfer method was used for watercolors and oil paintings that are among the artist’s most idiosyncratically playful images.

I had an early dinner at the museum’s Café Sabarsky, which specializes in Viennese cuisine. I got the hearty Gulaschsuppe mit Kartoffen (goulash with potatoes) and Glühwein, heated red wine with spices, orange and cloves that smelled more pleasant than it tasted. Overall better than the stereotypical museum café fare of overpriced, uninspired sandwiches.

For after-dinner drinks and company, Andie invited me over to her apartment to join her, Eric, Katie and the girls’ parents, who are visiting this weekend. We had carry-out tiramisu from Carmine’s and reviewed the group’s adventures, which included a trip to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, Macy’s and the New York City Opera for the revival of Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, starring family relation Lisa Vroman.

Café Sabarsky

• 1048 Fifth Avenue (at 86th Street)
• (212) 288-0665
• Meal 8 of 52: potato goulash ($12) and mulled wine ($10).

Because the owner of her apartment building is converting it to condos, Katie found a new apartment in Jersey City and will move in next weekend. In the meantime, she wanted to paint the place and I volunteered to help.

I stopped by her old place to pick up some preliminary supplies: white paint, brushes, pans, dropcloths, masking tape and brushes from the last time she painted, chairs and a stool (since we had no ladder for reaching the tops of the 10-foot-high walls in the new place), boom box and CDs, soap and towel, garbage bags, and pistachios, peanuts and Triscuits.

Katie’s new place, a third-floor walkup, is in a hipper and nicer neighborhood than her previous apartment, even though it’s less than 10 blocks away. It’s in a tall, handsome brick building a stone’s throw away from an upscale apartment complex that used to be the Dixon Pencil Factory, still sporting two 150-foot smokestacks. Built in the mid-1800’s, the stout, sprawling red-brick structure housed manufacturing operations for the yellow Dixon Ticonderoga pencil, friend of standardized test-takers and crossword puzzlers the world over.

This photo depicts only part of Katie’s living room with its richly colored hardwood floors. The front door is just to the left and part of the bricked-over fireplace is on the right. The windows are bordered with simple but distinctive Art Deco-style molding and the ledges extend in such a way that one can stand on a sill and do a full-body gyration-dance to the delight of strangers passing by outside. Or so I would imagine. Behind this view is the long kitchen leading to the bathroom and the bedroom.

After dropping off our stuff, we spent a really, really, really long time at the flagship location of Siperstein’s, New Jersey’s signature family-owned paint store chain. We bought more brushes and dropcloths, rollers, toxic paint-remover fluid and one of those metal keys that opens paint cans and beer bottles. And we bought paint. It took time for Katie to select the perfect colors. She shuffled the paint chips under the fluorescents (and near one of the store’s windowed doors to see what the colors would look like in natural light) until she found the perfect Dutch Boy ultralight orange for her living room and the perfect green for the bedroom. I’d call the orange “Albino Circus Peanut” and the green “1960s Light Green,” which is the color of the “Pistachio” KitchenAid mixer and at least one Vespa model I’ve seen.

I liked that Ralph Lauren Home has a whole line of paint, “Urban Loft,” that includes at least 19 hues named after Manhattan streets and neighborhoods. Beyond the one named Washington Square, which resembles New York University’s regal purple, I was stumped by the associations: a lavender Chelsea, creamy Tribeca, rust-red Village, and deep blue for both Hudson and Sullivan. Of course, the same copywriter has to assign names to 25 extremely similar shades of white, so I can understand why he would lose it and feverishly start randomizing names with colors.

As for Katie’s selections, when she arrived at the sales counter with the winning chips firmly in hand, she was informed that they didn’t have the bases to mix Ralph’s color. Oh, or the Dutch Boy color. In fact, two different guys squinted at the Ralph Lauren chip with “where’d you get this?” looks of confusion, as if Katie had handed them a Yu-Gi-Oh card and asked for two gallons. One of the guys eventually volunteered to try his hand at approximating the colors, and after appraising some hastily mixed tests smeared on litmus strip-sized pieces of paper, Katie approved the hand-mixed knockoffs. Ralph should not only fret over the clothing counterfeiters of Canal, but the alchemists at Siperstein’s as well.

We had just started with the trim in the bedroom when Kelly and Megan arrived. Painting is a long, thankless process, but we made it more fun listening to bad ’80s music on the boom box and cracking wise. Here, Kelly and Katie work over a wall with roller-brushes.

After we began to flag, Katie got the number for Lombardi’s and ordered sodas, beer and two big pizzas: one with mushrooms and onions, the other with breaded and fried chunks of eggplant on it and lots of garlic. Kelly and Megan bowed out after a few hours, and Katie and I finished around midnight, after an estimated three coats of paint. The room looks good and I don’t think we got too much paint on the carpet and the ceiling.

I went over to Andie and Eric’s tonight with a bottle of Pinot for a dinner she cooked: lamb, with roasted potatoes and red-wine risotto. Tummy-warming goodness on a bitter winter night.

Speaking of bitter, as we ate, we watched women’s Olympic skating and marveled at the curt commentary of announcer and former skater Dick Buttons. He’s a snob, and hard to please beyond a perfectly executed split jump, but at least he’s consistent in his grousing, entertainingly so.

I went over to Andie’s for some of her tasty split pea soup and to watch The West Wing, until we realized The West Wing wasn’t on tonight. Instead watched the pathos of the SAG Awards, then a boring episode of Crossing Jordan. At least the pea soup was good.

After work, I took the F train over to Park Slope in Brooklyn and had fun escaping from the aboveground Fourth Avenue/Ninth Street station, which resembles a haunted castle. I was on my way to Ned’s, who resembles Keith Haring¹ and is the brother of a friend, Megan. In addition to the siblings and myself, Katie showed up. Until they left to go see Munich, some sub-letters of Ned’s from Amsterdam were hanging out, too: Antony, Rosa and their white yarn-haired dog, Max. Actually, Max didn’t go to the movie, instead staying with us and moping around for lack of attention after we stopped petting him.

After we determined Franny’s, one of the area’s most-lauded newish pizza joints, didn’t deliver, we pored over a flurry of takeout menus and settled on Aunt Suzie, Ned’s favorite Italian restaurant. My eggplant Parmigiana was rich and tasty! They were out of tiramisu (blast!) but the replacement cannoli were mighty good; Aunt Suzie doesn’t fill them until they’re ordered, so the shells stay nice and crisp.

We convened at Ned’s primarily to watch Trapped in The Closet, R&B musician R. Kelly’s “hip-hopera,” which began its deformed life as a music video, expanded to several and is now available in 12 “chapters” on DVD. It is the foresworn duty of Ned and Megan to promote Trapped in the Closet as the next so-bad-it’s-good Rocky Horror Picture Show-like cult classic. I think they’re on the right track; it’s already been mocked by South Park and Mad T.V. (“Trapped in the Cupboard”).

Man, is it ever bad. It’s like a poorly acted community theater play without dialogue, only R. Kelly’s monotonous describe-the-action song lyrics and the rare sound effect. He stretches a lot on these rhymes, pairing “Beretta” with “dresser” at one point, or when he can’t think of one, rhyming the same word. He also has trouble pronouncing the “th” in certain words, like “baffroom.” He plays the lead character, Sylvester, as well as “the narrator.” The plot, a convoluted tale of infidelity, is pitted with gaping holes, unlikely coincidences and a cast of characters that grows larger and more caricatured until it includes a woman named Bridget, which necessitates the rhyming inclusion of a midget and subsequent appearance thereof.

We decided we hadn’t enough punishment and watched the whole thing again with director’s commentary, which is R. Kelly sitting in a darkened room, smoking a cigar and watching his film on a widescreen. He turns around frequently to mug at the camera, explain what’s going on in a particular scene and why it’s genius, and talk about the “cliffhangers” that join the chapters, one of which involves a woman brandishing a spatula, which he speculates is a cliffhanger because it’s not a cliffhanger, an anti-cliffhanger, if you will. The whole mess culminates in a comment along the lines that “the whole world is trapped in a closet” and a threat that he will continue releasing Trapped in the Closet chapters until he is stopped.

We followed this up with the documentary Grizzly Man which is about Timothy Treadwell, who lived among the giant grizzlies of Alaska under the guise of protecting them, even though they live in a national park and exist in numbers great enough that it’s legal to hunt a certain percentage of them each year. Treadwell captures frequently amazing footage of the bears, particularly a scene of two of them rearing up and attacking each other on a beach, where they resemble extremely tall sumo wrestlers. But most of it is Timothy’s self-videotaped ruminations on himself and the bears, which he’s given cutsie names, and scenes of him getting really, really close to them and then acting surprised when they lash out. Not to ruin anything for you, but Treadwell and his girlfriend end up getting killed and eaten by a bear, their remains, collected from the ground and the euthanized bear’s stomach, filling four garbage bags. Idiots.

We agreed that if we would have been in high school, our assignment at this point would have been to compare and contrast the two movies, focusing on the narcissism of the protagonists. Instead, Katie, Megan and I took the F train home because it was like 3 a.m. at that point. Good times.

Aunt Suzie

• 247 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn (Between Carroll and Garfield Place)
• (718) 788-2868
• Meal 6 of 52: eggplant Parmigiana with salad ($11.90) and half a cannoli ($2.90 for whole cannoli).

¹ Katie and I had each met Ned once before and I had mentioned to her earlier the Keith Haring comparison. She wasn’t in a position to agree or disagree because she didn’t know what Keith Haring looked like. Then, when we arrived at Ned’s apartment, what should he have hanging at the end of a hallway but a large, framed Keith Haring print. That still doesn’t help out Katie with what Keith Haring looks like, but maybe it suggests Ned is aware of the connection. I don’t know; I forgot to ask him. [back]

Andie’s boyfriend, Eric, had a birthday soirée this evening at the old apartment. She made some great soup, perfect for the bitter cold weather. And Erica offered and artfully described the fine cheeses she purchased from the store at which she works. Martinis, Beefeater gin-and-tonics and bottled beers flowed freely; a rousing time was had by all.

On my way home, on the uptown platform of the 1 train at the 86th Street station, I found dropped or discarded on the ground two scraps related to music. First is this note about keys and instruments.

I also found a photo. It looks to be from the late ’50s or early ’60s, although it’s a reprint on modern Agfa paper. There’s something sublime in the woman’s smile that bewitches me. The lad on the right reminds me of myself at the same age, with the glasses, that overbite and bowl cut. And are those spats?

Where are they now? Do the kids fondly remember Mom’s skilled squeezeboxing, or did she play inexpertly to the feigned delight of those around her? Was it a passing fancy that Christmas or did the family make her drag it out for a quick polka on special occasions? Did she play traditional Lawrence Welk favorites like “Lady of Spain” or break it down with sassy versions of current pop hits like “Duke Of Earl” and “The Loco-Motion”?

It’s strange that the Port Authority Bus Terminal should have a 30-lane bowling alley on its second floor. But it’s a good thing if, like me, you’re a longtime fan of the ol’ tenpin.

Manhattan isn’t a bowling borough; aside from the Port Authority’s Leisure Time lanes, the only other options are Bowlmor Lanes and the AMF Chelsea Pier Bowl. Leisure Time has perhaps the best deals ($30 flat rate per hour for up to six people) and most convenient location, and at Samantha’s invitation, I met up with her, Iggy, Alan and Ritchey there early this afternoon for a round of beer, snacks and a few games.

The occasion was Ritchey’s birthday, which was strange, because he was not much of a bowler, although he took it in stride. We had the gutter-blocking rails raised for the last game and it made for some fascinating bank shots. I stuck to my normal gameplay and didn’t intentionally use the rails because I didn’t want to get used to such a wildcard factor. They do make the game more fun and slightly more equitable for the gutter-ball prone, such as the small children who were playing on both sides of our lane.

We had a raucous good time. I missed out on the first game, Alan won the second, and I squeaked by in the tenth frame of the third (with a strike!) to win, even though my score was an inconsistently achieved 130-something, a far cry from my heyday in high school bowling club, when I averaged 180.

Samantha’s birthday was today, so her husband Iggy arranged a surprise get-together for her at Japas 55 with a tight-knit group of friends and a birthday karaoke celebration, with plenty of gifts, sushi, sake and beer to go around. We started out, appropriately enough, with “Birthday” by the Beatles, quickly discovering, as most have, that we only knew the refrain. (Even more embarrassingly, this happened with Europe’s “Final Countdown,” which I don’t think anyone actually knows the verses to.)

Surprisingly, neither Billy Joel nor Zeppelin made appearances at our party, but we pulled out what are by now, after several karaoke outings featuring most of the same singers, traditional group favorites:

• “Love Shack” by the B-52’s
• “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes
• “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” by Phil Collins
• “Hotel California” by the Eagles
• “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis
• “We Built This City” by Starship
• requisite David Bowie song (“Modern Love”)
• requisite Madonna song (“Like a Virgin”)

We also snuck into the ’60s with “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas, “Hazy Shade of Winter” by Simon & Garfunkel and “Daydream Believer” by the Monkees. My shining moment was helping out Katie with the lead for U2’s “One,” which wasn’t a problem, because Bono’s range is nearly as limited as mine.

Sam has a clear, strong, beautiful voice, and can really hold down a tune, so we faded back as she took the lead on “Only The Lonely” by the Motels, “You’ve Got a Friend” by Carole King, “We’ve Only Just Begun” (if memory serves) by the Carpenters, and, oddly but successfully, “Land of Confusion” by Genesis and “If I Only Had a Brain” from The Wizard of Oz. Hooray for karaoke!

My ride home was a barrel of monkeys. You must give credit to the Metropolitan Transit Authority for waiting until the wee hours after midnight to conduct trackwork and construction. Alas, while the number of riders to be inconvenienced is vastly diminished at that time, those riders that there are tend to be very sleepy, drunk or both, making navigation of already confusing rerouting directives and temporary service cancellations moreso.

In my case, the A express train uptown was running on the local track at 59th Street, so I instead took the D express train, exercising care to get off at 145th Street, lest I end up in the Bronx. I then transferred to another A train, also running on the local track, and at 168th Street, to the grumbles of many, the conductor announced that was the train’s final stop.

Then there was an announcement over the PA that the only way to access uptown express stops on the A (like my home stop) was to take a local shuttle train running on the downtown express track. But when it pulled up and its passengers has departed, the conductor shouted to keep off because his particular train was headed back to the station. Neon-vested MTA grunts had to make a sweep of the still-open cars to shoo out the stubborn, the non-English-comprehending and the hard of hearing.

With a sigh, I took an elevator down to the fifth circle of hell, land of the Wrathful, Sullen and 1 train, which after taking a long while to show up, eventually got me home by 2:30 a.m. Yet, as recently demonstrated, subway service is better than none.

I exchanged Christmas gifts with Andie this evening, since we’ll be out of town over the holidays.

She got me a Boggle page-a-day calendar, which offers a regular board each day to play that also contains bonus hidden words, the names of six animals, for example. I also received a deck of Knowledge Cards featuring trivia on American Presidents and Nunzilla, a tiny plastic toy that, when wound, waddles forward shooting sparks from its mouth, a familiar sight to anyone with a strict Catholic gradeschool upbringing.

We had dinner at Land, which was packed, and afterwards met Katie and her friend Chuck at that Irish pub on Amsterdam Avenue we frequent.

My company’s holiday party this afternoon, like last year’s, was held at the Met Lounge, the upstairs area of Tonic, a bar/restaurant/club near Times Square. The company rented the top floor and lounge area for good eats, two open bars, music and mingling.

Continuing the Office Space theme to my gift-exchange purchases, I got my secret-Santa the film on DVD. She seemed to appreciate it; I thought she might, seeing as the movie’s tagline is “Work Sucks” and she’s easily the crankiest person at work and has been with the company 16 years-she’s an editorial assistant, and I used to work with her when I was editing the real estate magazine, having her send faxes, transcribe interviews from audiotape and other drudgery.

A few hours after the holiday party, I headed back out for Katie’s birthday celebration at Tom & Jerry’s, a cozy bar on Elizabeth Street just off Houston. The name isn’t a reference to the cartoon, but more likely to the liquor-spiked hot eggnog beverage of the same name; lining shelves behind the bar are vintage punchbowl sets, many printed with the phrase “Tom & Jerry.”

Any bar without the obnoxious pretenses of the average SoHo establishment, teamed with Guinness on tap and Laphroaig on the shelf, is O.K. by me. Also great was that on a large movie screen at the end of the bar they played a cycle of classic black-and-white films from a range of eras: Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Buster Keaton’s The General and Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law.

Garry, who’s visiting from Columbus, along with Andie, Katie and myself met at the Barnes & Noble Andie works at, then headed out to view the Christmas trees and decorations at both Lincoln and Rockefeller Centers. Cold and festive, although the streets around Rockefeller were choked with tourists and guys selling counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags.

I visited the old apartment after work today, meeting up with Andie and Katie’s friend Garry, who’s in town from Columbus and staying with Andie and Eric. After Katie stopped by, she, Garry and I went to dinner at Celeste, then had some drinks at a nearby Irish bar. Garry and Katie fed a lot of money into the jukebox to play some rockin’ hits, but the jukebox mysteriously would intersperse each selection with two songs not selected by us. I would have liked to have stayed around longer to hear “Synchronicity II” by The Police, but I was too drowsy from my Guinness and left early.

After a short tour of Grand Central Terminal, Joe, Andrea and I moseyed over to the Museum of Modern Art. We brezzed through the fourth and fifth floors in a Greatest Hits tour (Dali’s Persistence of Memory and van Gogh’s Starry Night among them) and perused a special exhibit called Safe, which displayed many objects, futuristic and present, by which humans clothe, protect, shelter and transport themselves from elements such as harsh weather, harm, injury and death. (The exhibit brochure was well designed, with a circle graph on the cover that entertainingly ranked the top non-health-related ways in which humans can be killed, the most popular of which was sitting in a motor vehicle.)

The Modern, which includes a swanky dining room that isn’t open Sundays, and The Bar Room, the more casual dining and bar area where we ate. The chef, Gabriel Kreuther, created the menus for both rooms, and they’re different, with the Bar Room fare less expensive but just as innovative. I had a cactus pear margarita that emanated the strong woody odor of the tequila and was a vibrant purple color that made me feel slightly less of a man to drink. But I made the most of it.

I also ordered the pumpkin soup and the horseradish-crusted salmon, both excellent and attractively presented. I can’t say how much we all spent because I didn’t save a receipt and a menu I located online was out of date, but suffice to say it was costly but worth it.

In fact, below I’ve listed some handy menu keywords and types of phrases that you can search for to determine how expensive a restaurant is. If you spot at least three of them on a menu, it’s an expensive place, more so if there are a few in a single menu item description. If you can locate none of these words, or a menu at all, tip that cap back and settle into those dungarees, sir, because you are not in an expensive restaurant.

• anything baby (baby squash)
• endive
• crusted
• emulsion
• any French word
• wilted, but used in a positive fashion
• phrases in quotation marks and it’s not immediately clear why (“Potato Gateau,” a “Folly of Herbs”)
• foods normally meant for bovine consumption (chickweed, fennel pollen)
• Frankenstein-like taste combinations (mint-anchovy)
• items that don’t actually exist (white coco beans)

After realizing with a start that we had little time to spare, we avoided some tempting dessert options, paid, and crossed the street to the MoMA Design Store, which had in stock the two styles of Christmas cards that Joe wanted. I purchased them with my membership card for a mighty discount, along with some more Muji pens for myself.

We rushed back to the apartment so Joe and Andrea could grab their bags and take the subway to the bus to LaGuardia, and Andrea called later to say that they had just made their plane.

Good times!

The Modern

• 9 W. 53rd St. (between 5th and 6th Avenues)
• (212) 333-1220
• Meal 32 of 52: cactus pear margarita, pumpkin soup and horseradish-crusted salmon.

After grabbing some sweet and flaky Spanish pastries from a bakery on Dykman, we traveled via subway from the tip top of the borough to the very bottom, the Bowling Green station in Battery Park, to stand on line awhile for ferry tickets to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

I now know that in order to go up into the Statue, you need to reserve tickets in advance, because there weren’t any available. Fortunately, we were more interested in Ellis Island, so we didn’t even get off the first ferry stop at the Statue (although we took many photos, including of Lady Liberty’s be-robed ass), then departed at the Island stop.

We spent awhile at Ellis Island, poring over the exhibits, which go into every detail of immigrant life, covering who they were and where they were from, why they came to America (typically to join family already here or to get a job and make some money), what they ate, what they brought with them, the battery of medical and mental examinations they were put through, as well as careful consideration of their value to American society—quite often, the diseased, potential beggars and contract laborers were barred.

For lunch, I tried to locate the Cowgirl Hall of Fame (where Joe and I ate and had a rowdy time at almost exactly a year ago), but got lost and coincidentally ended up across the street from the Corner Bistro, an oldschool bar/burger shack in the Village I’ve been meaning to try. After a brief wait on line, during which we quaffed McSoreley’s Dark Ale, we got a booth in the back and ordered our Bistro Burgers, which come with bacon, American cheese, a slice of raw white onion, lettuce and tomato, served without pretense on a small paper plate. The shoestring fries were good, too.

After we were informed that a police investigation uptown was severely delaying our 1 train, we instead walked over to the A, during which time I pointed out Jimi’s old apartment and the various sex paraphernalia shops on West 4th Street. Uptown, we rushed through St. Patrick’s Cathedral because there was a service in session, then walked to Rockefeller Center where there were already folks ice skating. The giant Christmas tree is up, too, although it’s mostly shielded from view before its lighting on the 30th. After poking around the NBC gift shop, we went to the Top of the Rock in a glass-topped elevator, on which is projected a brief audio-visual show and through which you can see various theatrical colored lights bouncing around the elevator shaft.

At the top are some great views north and south, particularly of the Empire State Building. If you stare at the skyscraper long enough, you can see the camera flashes of tourists from that building’s observation deck, just as they certainly could see our own flashes. During the day, the view north would be a spectacular one of the entirety of Central Park, but at night, it’s a large, mostly dark rectangle. We also determined you can only see a sliver of Times Square, because surrounding skyscrapers block the view.

Coincidentally, sort of, we ran into a class from the school Joe teaches at, which was wrapping up its multi-day bus tour of the city. Joe was kind to take a group photo of the students, standing on the observation deck one story up from the kids to get an all-inclusive top-down view.

For dinner, we met up with Andie for an Italian dinner at the Upper West Side neighborhood-favorite, Celeste, topped by one of their famous ten-cheese tasting plates. Mmm-mmm, good!

Corner Bistro

• 331 W. 4th St. (at Jane Street)
• (212) 242-9502
• Meal 31 of 52: two mugs of McSorley’s Dark Ale ($2.00 each) and a Bistro Burger ($6.00).

After some challenges getting from the bus to the subway, my friends from Ohio, Joe and Andrea, arrived this morning for their weekend visit. Because they’re both fans of Broadway shows, I thought we’d start the day with breakfast at the Moondance Diner, a funky 1930s classic in SoHo complete with neon moon signage and vivid brush-script lettering. The Broadway connection? Jonathan Larson, who wrote Rent, worked there for about 10 years as a waiter. It also happens to serve decent food, which I learned when I had breakfast there with Jimi many years ago during a visit.

Alas, I couldn’t remember that the name was Moondance (I thought, “Moondust? Stardust? Stardance? Moondance?”) and without the internet, I’m at the mercy of the telephone. When I called one of several possible numbers and asked the girl who answered if it was the diner associated with Rent, she said she didn’t know (it was, as it turns out). As an alternate, we went to that Upper West Side old-faithful, the French Roast.

Afterwards, we trekked down to the TKTS booth for discount same-day show tickets, only to find they didn’t open until three, so we took a tour of some Times Square shops, including the Hershey Store and a trip to Toys “R” Us where we reminisced over toys and marveled at the Ferris wheel inside. We also walked up to Macy’s and discovered not only does it have seemingly endless floors of merchandise (and that some of the escalator steps on the upper floors are made of wood), but that if you’re able to present a non-local ID at Guest Services, you are given a coupon for 11% off store merchandise. I procured one with my still-valid Ohio driver’s license and the guy behind the counter said, “We’ve had a lot of people from Ohio today.”

Back to Times Square, we waited on line an hour and a half and purchased tickets for The Light in the Piazza at Lincoln Center, then it was off for a late-lunch/early-dinner at Republic on Union Square, after which we browsed books at The Strand.

The show was held in the cozy Vivian Beaumont Theater and we enjoyed it, although I think we all agreed we would have liked it more had we not all been so tired. (Joe and Andrea had to rise around 3 a.m. to catch their flight out of Detroit.) There was also lots of Italian, which can be hard to process for the weary. The show received six Tony Awards, including one for the lead, Victoria Clark, for Best Leading Actress in a Musical, and she excelled as the tart Southern mother determined to end her daughter’s romance with a smitten young Italian. She also really belted out her finale song.

My friend Tina, who moved to Florida recently, was in town on business, so I stopped by to visit her, appropriately enough for a toy inventor/designer, at the International Toy Center, a two-building complex at 200 Fifth Avenue and 1107 Broadway connected by an enclosed pedestrian bridge on the 9th floor.

The 1107 Broadway segment was built in 1911, and at 16 stories tall, was one of the highest buildings in New York. (This record means little as it was being broken rapidly at the time; the nearby 21-story Flatiron Building, for instance, was completed in 1915.) But the timing coincided with an influx of German toy manufacturers to the U.S. prior to and during World War I, shifting the industry from a European one to an American one by the end of World War II. By then, most toy companies were headquartered in the Madison Square area and New York was the toy capital of the world.

Of course, that’s far from the truth today. Lately, the building has served as temporary showroom and office space for toy manufacturers and suppliers in town for the Toy Industry Association’s trade shows held every October and February at the Javits Center, the International Halloween Show and the American International Toy Fair.

Then, in January, real estate developer The Chetrit Group bought the complex for about $360 million with plans to turn it into apartments starting early next year. (In March, a similar fate hit the 1 Madison Avenue complex located across Madison Square Park from the Toy Center. SL Green Realty Corp. bought it for $918 million and plans to convert its signature 50-story building, topped with a clock tower modeled after the one at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, into luxury condominiums.)

When I checked in with the security guard in the Toy Center lobby, telling him I was there to see Tina in 1510, he squinted at me like I was an idiot. I saw why after I got off the fancy elevator (depicted above): the building now is mostly vacant in preparation for the gutting. I passed bank after bank of deserted offices, the sound of my footsteps echoing off the walls as I walked down the unlit hallway. I saw through some windows that the adjoining Toy Center building was empty, too. Tina had a small, unfurnished office in the back that she was using as a showroom for a new project and with all the packaging and the samples and prototypes of toys strewn about the room, it looked as if a children’s birthday party had exploded.

We headed out to a simple little restaurant with cozy booths, Mustang Sally’s, a block away from the Fashion Institute of Technology, and frequented by Tina during her time there. It was halfway decent, with a standard salad, sandwich and steak menu. I had a burger and fries, which were rather costly. Tina had the salmon and shrimp Caesar salad, which she said was tasty.

Parting at Penn Station, Tina gave me her paperback copy of The Inner Circle by T.C. Boyle. Because she’s on the Long Island Railroad much of her time in New York, she reads a lot and shockingly revealed to me that sometimes, as she finishes reading a page, will tear it from the book, so by the end, all that remains is a limp cover with a jagged paper spine. Less to carry that way, she explained. I was glad such a fate didn’t fall Inner Circle because so far, it’s a good read, even with the shrieking infant on the 1 train and his father who shouted shut up! enough that even the jaded New Yorkers were getting a little shifty in their seats.

Mustang Sally’s

• 324 Seventh Avenue (at W. 28th Street)
• (212) 695-3806
• Meal 28 of 52: Mustang Burger ($9.95) with sautéed mushrooms ($1.50 extra), fries ($3.95) and a Diet Coke ($2.75).

Jimi, The Man and I took the train down to Jimi’s old West Village neighborhood and got brunch at Garage. It was a “jazz brunch” and we were treated to loud jazz renditions of classics from the ’80s, including Madonna’s “Material Girl” and a festive medley of Police songs.

While we were in the neighborhood, we did a lot of shopping. First was Banana Republic, where we witnessed two shoplifters bolting from the store right as we arrived. The Man, who decided a change was in order with his current ensemble, purchased khaki shorts and a handsome new short-sleeved shirt on sale, and wore the clothes out of the store. Next was Origins, where an enterprising young salesman demonstrated a new microdermabrasion product on Jimi’s hands, which Jimi then purchased. At the Jonathan Adler store, which resembles a funky early-’70s bachelor pad, Jimi pondered purchasing some small flower vases and a ceramic elephant, while at the Louis Vuitton store, he priced a bag he’s had his eye on, as well as some jewelry and dog collars for his dogs, Couscous and Bingo. Jimi one-upped the salesclerk with his superior knowledge of Vuitton bags. She admitted she was new but when we disparaged a hard-sided Vuitton vanity case as bulky and cumbersome, she noted it could be used as a stylish weapon to fend off a mugger. We popped in the Apple Store, then back to Jimi’s, with a brief stop in between at the Jamba Juice on Times Square for refreshments.

Then it was off to the DeWitt Clinton dog run on 11th Avenue just off W. 52nd Street. Lucky is the man who not only fathered the Erie Canal (and was a mayor of New York), but has Hell’s Kitchen’s only dog run named after him. It’s also the only dog run I’ve seen with a kiddie swimming pool in it, although it’s most definitely for the dogs; if you placed a child in this pool, the child’s bacteria content would instantly quadruple. The Man attempted to teach Bingo how to fetch a ball, but Bingo has so far only learned how to chase a ball and pick it up, after which point he loses interest, drops it, and wanders off to rip around elsewhere.

Couscous, meanwhile, greeted this drooling mostrosity of a dog, which vigorously and almost constantly attempted to mate with some other guy’s dog at the run.

Jimi revealed an ambitious new meal plan he and The Man have devised: to eat at every restaurant on Ninth Avenue between W. 42nd Street and W. 57th Street, in order. They’re starting on one side of the street, then working their way back up the other side. There are a few rules: Carryout is not allowed. They don’t have to eat at coffee shops, bars and delis, but they do have to eat at fast-food places. And if they’re not in the mood to eat at the next restaurant on the circuit, they can eat elsewhere, as long as it’s off that stretch of Ninth. Good luck, Jimi and The Man!

Jimi had a small gettogether at his place this evening for my previous job’s bosses, Steve and Teresa, who are in town for the Fancy Food Show. My friend Tina and I were there, along with Jimi’s boyfriend The Man, and friends Lee-Ann and Junior.

We had mojitos and, at the request of Steve, caipirinhas, along with a cheese and fruit platter. Later, we ordered Indian carry-out from the restaurant below Jimi’s and it was mighty good. Before I left, I played four ceremonial rounds of Mario Kart: Double Dash!! on the GameCube with Jimi, The Man and Junior. I was relieved that gameplay is nearly identical to the original Super Mario Kart, which Nintendo introduced for the Super NES in 19992 and was the favorite console videogame of my college years.

I had many pints of Newcastle with the coworkers tonight at Local West, the company’s bar of choice for employee send-offs. Not one but two ladies, neither of whom I worked with directly, are leaving the real estate racket for other jobs. It was a big turnout and we overtook half of the bar’s back patio, which affords nice views of the 57-story One Penn Plaza and the Delta Airlines mural at the corner of W. 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, which is sort of a C-list tourist attraction.

The best part of the evening was when I was in the restroom and some dude at the crowded wall o’ urinals was simultaneously peeing and talking loudly to no one in particular.

“Man, I just got back from Panama!” he declared while unzipping. After peeing a bit, he shrieked “Oh, it burns!”, peed some more, then bellowed, “I’m telling you, it’s like St. Elmo’s Fire!” After a pause, he quietly added, “She said she was a virgin.” I’m certain he was some drunkard having a little fun but still, I couldn’t stop laughing. Meanwhile, everyone else was hurriedly exiting the restroom or averting their eyes like they’d do when confronted by some scabby beggar on the subway.

As a semi-surprise for Andie’s birthday, Eric, Katie and I rented out a room at Japas 55, a karaoke bar on W. 55th Street. Actually, I didn’t do anything other than show up at 7:00 p.m. Eric scouted out the place and reserved the room. Katie invited everyone and brought the cake. It was a fun time with a great group of folks. For the karaoke-shy, it’s an ideal setting because you get your own supposedly soundproofed room, with comfy seats, a few wireless mikes, remotes to select the songs and screens that show cheesy video accompaniments to each song and look as if they were filmed in 1980.

There was lots of sake, beer and wine involved so I don’t clearly remember what all was sung. I do recall nearly tearing my diaphragm belting out Harry Nilsson’s heart-rending and exceptionally high-pitched “Without You.” Andie and I of course sang our theme song, “Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now),” by Phil Collins, at least one and a half times, by my count. There were a few Madonna (“Crazy For You”) and Billy Joel (“Pressure”) songs in the mix, with a Spice Girls and a Britney song for good measure. For the golden oldies, there was much passionate screaming during several Zeppelin tunes and a fun singalong with Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” My only disappointment was that there was only one Elvis Costello song (“She”) to select and I had been pining to sing “Allison” or “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes.”

Outside of the private rooms, in the front of the place, is the bar, and if you want, you can sing right there. An Asian couple was turning out a spookily accurate rendition of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” with the lady hitting all the high notes. A few karaoke songs at the bar were sung in Japanese, with the Japanese lyrics appearing on the screen and accompanying 1980s-style cheesy videos featuring Japanese actors. To clarify, the following photos are from the party, not the videos.

I met up with Jimi, his parents and his significant other, and his friends Lee-Ann, Lee-Ann’s fiancé Brian, Ari, Q, and Junior, at one of Jimi’s favorite restaurants, Choga, for dinner. There’s a photo of the groop on Jimi’s blog, but you can only see part of my head.

I sat next to Junior and as he knocked back three Jack-on-the-rocks, I talked with him about white hipster music, his most recent skateboarding injuries and our shared appreciation for oldskool videogames like Super Mario Kart. He also showed me how to text-message on my cellphone. Junior once made a belt out of a seat belt that he somehow managed to remove from his seat on an airplane, for which I shall always remember him as the crazy fool that he is.

Andie, Eric and I got a late dinner at Celeste again tonight, that tiny, neighborhood Italian restaurant. We were honored with a coveted corner table which has a lot more open space surrounding it than the other ones which are right on top of each other. I got the prosciutto/artichoke/mushroom/fresh basil pizza, which arrived cut into four slices, each topping dedicated to its own slice, which perturbed me. Other than that, it was a fun time.

While Jimi’s in Williamsburg, Virginia for the Candy Hall of Fame this weekend, I’m watching his cats, so I stopped by his new apartment after work today to pick up the keys.

We ordered delivery from Daisy May’s BBQ, which was the first entry in the 52 Meals Project. At that time, I tried one of their sandwiches, which was great, but for dinner tonight, both Jimi and I got an order of the sweet-and-sticky Kansas City pork ribs. They were amazingly good; I tend to like my ribs super-saucy and these fit the bill. They were well-trimmed, meaty and filling; both of us were too full to finish our full order. Of course, we also got the mashed potatoes with red eye gravy and the peaches in bourbon, which I heartily recommend. I was also highly impressed with the delivery time; granted, it was only a Thursday evening, but it only took 20 minutes and the food was still piping hot upon delivery. Highly recommended!

I have re-evaluated Edgar’s Cafe, which was a recent entry in the 52 Meals Project. I wasn’t impressed with the place because my lunch there was bland and overpriced. I theorized the place was better suited for coffee and desserts, and after trying out that combo tonight, I must say it ranks more highly with me.

I went there with Andie and Eric, and Andie’s friend Mickey and a friend of his. We all tried something different (cherry pie, chocolate cake, gelati), and we all enjoyed everything. Especially noteworthy was the frutti di bosco tart that Mickey ordered. While he was eyeing it in the glass display case soon after we walked in, an Italian woman standing nearby pointed out that Edgar’s actually flies their version of the wild berry treat directly over from Italy. We all tried a bite and agreed it was excellent, while we entertained notions of the tiny dessert buckled snugly into a first class seat for its flight to the states.

I worked most of the afternoon wrapping up the script I’m writing, then topped off the evening with a trip down to Jimi’s to make sure what I wrote synched with the audio/visual portion of the presentation that he’s managing.

For dinner, Jimi deep-fried some tater tots and fired up some hamburgers he had ordered from Omaha Steaks, making them into swiss-cheeseburgers, with tomato, lettuce, pickles and ketchup. Mmm-mmm good!

Not many of us can honestly say that Lindsay Lohan is preventing us from doing something.

Completing that all-too-common ouroboros of blogs linking to one another, I’m happy to officially report that Jimi found an apartment today.

He’ll be moving out of the Village soon for a new two-bedroom place in Hell’s Kitchen, on Ninth Avenue at W. 53rd Street. Jimi points out the location’s proximity to lots of fine shopping, which includes Columbus Circle (featuring the Shops at Time Warner Center) and Times Square. There’s also a lot of great restaurants in that ‘hood, including one that Katie coincidentally recommended to me a few weeks ago, Mangia e Bevi, which is right at Jimi’s new intersection. And finally, he’s now closer to where I live, so instead of a 20-minute subway ride, I can enjoy a 10-minute subway ride. Yay, Jimi!

Andie and I went out to dinner tonight to Celeste, a small Italian restaurant near our apartment, at 502 Amsterdam Ave., between W. 84th and W. 85th Streets. It’s the sort of place inevitably described as charming, and it is, with all the cozy warmth of a neighborhood favorite. And keep in mind, in New York, where all space is at a premium, cozy is code for “the tables are approximately one inch apart.” Which they are indeed at Celeste.

But the great food makes up for it. I tried one of the restaurant’s specialties, the thin-crust pizzas, which are cooked in a wood-fired oven. I ordered the margherita variety ($11), a 10-inch pie boasting lots of fresh melted mozzarella, fresh basil and the damn near freshest tomato sauce I’ve tasted.

Afterwards, we walked over to Hollywood Video and rented When Will I Be Loved, which I can recommend if you would like to see former Party Of Five star Neve Campbell naked and hear her curse like a sailor. But other than that, no, I can’t recommend it.

Happy Groundhog Day. Eric and I celebrated by ordering a large pepperoni pizza from Big Nick’s, drinking Yuengling lager and watching two episodes from season 3 of The West Wing on DVD.

Katie and I got dinner before Kelly’s birthday celebration tonight at Yaffa Cafe at 97 St. Marks Place in the East Village. You can’t throw a brick in the East Village without hitting five quaint bistros and a bass player resembling Tim Burton, but this place took the cake. It’s decorated like a ‘60s bachelor pad exploded into a Bollywood musical featuring Andy Warhol. With Christmas lights. (And no photos, again, dammit.) It’s a cozy, fun little place, specializing in the required high number of Middle Eastern dishes (hummus and falafel) for that part of town. Katie got a burger, served in a pita with veggies, that she said wasn’t as good as it was the last time she ordered it. My spicy chicken wrap was nothing special but hit the spot. We split a slice of chocolate chip cheesecake for dessert. Our black-and-white marbled tabletop, resembling the cover of one of those classic Mead Composition Books, was hypnotic and distracting only when we weren’t looking directly at it, yet it somehow added to the charm. Lots of random kitschy objects cover the walls (a turquoise mattress cover, paintings on velvet, a small ceremonial fountain) suggesting the decor of a TGI Friday’s hopped up on nostalgia and amphetamines. And they have their own CD collection from which they spin a heady blend of white hipster pop-rock. Radiohead’s “Optimistic” was followed directly by Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without A Face,” followed up shortly by R.E.M.’s “Crush With Eyeliner” and U2’s “Vertigo,” and, as we were leaving, Blur’s “Girls & Boys.”

Kelly’s birthday bash was at Rififi, a dive bar at 332 E. 11th St. between First and Second Avenues that has the redeeming graces of a reverse happy hour on Monday nights (starting at 10 p.m.) that offers up $3 pints (including Guinness!) and free horror movies projected on a semi-big screen in the back room. They were showing Warlock and ’Salem’s Lot, but we had enough fun conversing at the bar, knocking down pints and shots of Grand Marnier. The good music seemed to have followed us from Yaffa as we got to hear choice cuts by David Bowie and Tom Waits followed by an inexplicable yet welcome rash of hair metal classics including Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher,” Winger’s “Seventeen” and Motley Crüe’s “Kickstart My Heart.” Bitchin’.

Today was the last day of watching Jimi’s cats and lurking around his apartment. I’ll miss it, and I’m disappointed I didn’t get a chance to lie to anyone that it was “my place in the Village,” you know, where I spend my winters.

I won’t miss the crowds of bar-goers hanging around directly below Jimi’s second-story windows, arguing drunkenly, smoking and, as I heard on Saturday night, spontaneously breaking into a screamingly loud rendition of the chorus for Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend.”

What I will miss are the heaters in his apartment that are much more easily regulated than the ones in mine. I’ll miss the large amounts of space in which to vogue along with to Madonna songs, the three AirPort Expresses, the Calphalon, the friendly cats and the neighborhood’s trendy charm.

Also, I never realized how much more convenient it is to take the ACE trains from W. 4th Street to Penn Station; they’re considerably closer to both my origin and destination than the 1/9. Plus, because I was taking the ACE uptown in the morning and downtown in the evening (the opposite of my commutes on the 1/9), I went against the rush-hour crushes and the cars were sparsely populated. And the trips only took 15 minutes instead of the typical 30! [Then again, five years can be a long time to wait for the C train. Jan. 26 Update: The New York Times reported today that the Transit Authority has revised that five-year service disruption period on the C down to nine months, tops. That’s still quite a wait. ]

But if I like Jimi’s place that much, I should make an offer. He’s moving out by the end of March February for a nicer place in Chelsea Hell’s Kitchen. Good luck, Jimi! You’ve come a long way since Harlem, apartment-wise.

I’m staying over at Jimi’s again to catsit, starting tonight through Sunday, and after cleaning the hairy cat vomit off the comforter, I was ready to turn in for the night. I turned off the lights in the main kitchen/living room area and was impressed with the number of tiny lights still active, mainly power indicators on Jimi’s A/V and computer equipment.

The scary thing is that only about two-thirds of the equipment in the room was on; there’d be even more lights if the other printers, scanners and videogame systems were powered-up.

Jimi, meanwhile, seems to be keeping busy in Cleveland. Tonight, he took some QuickTime VR panoramas of my two previous bosses, Steve and Teresa.

I wouldn’t have believed it if Andie hadn’t said it several times: our apartment really can hold about 30 party guests. In the pix below, the blur represents the excessive wine consumption; the warm colors, the heatwave generated by the huddled masses. Multiple fans, open windows and doors and even the air conditioner strived mightily to quash the heat; our group was so spicy, it was difficult.

At midnight, we shouted the countdown as we watched the Times Square ball drop on TV. We blew party horns, made noise with noisemakers and pulled the strings on those mini plastic kabobs that pop with tiny paper streamers. Champagne was passed around while wishes for a happy new year and promises of resolution were exchanged.

Things quieted down a notch around 2 a.m. after the troll next door started beating on the wall with her meaty paw. We dimmed down the music and started sending out serious “OK people, time to go” vibes.

As the night wore on some more, there was a little drama. (Don’t worry; none of it involved anyone you know.) Most of it centered around an incident involving the guy who brought a fifth of Dewar’s White Label to the party, drank all of it and a ton of wine, then made out with a girl who was distinctly not his girlfriend, who happened to be standing right there at the time. Shouting, belligerence, bitter recriminations, weeping, the loan of our hide-a-bed to the scorned girl. By 4 a.m., things were settled and we were nestled all snug in our beds.

The morning—um, afternoon—was nice, with temperatures in the high 50s and a fresh, brisk wind. Of course, we strived not to experience this until after getting up around 2 p.m. or so. Sleeping in was a challenge. The God of Bad Timing saw to it that the local air raid siren be tested promptly at noon, then ensured an excitable, extra-chirpy bird perch on the fire escape directly outside my bedroom window for the better part of half an hour. For brunch, it was coffee, leftover Orangina, potato chips, brownies, cookies and cheese. I took a walk in Riverside Park, where the breeze just about blew over the haggard looking couples in sunglasses strolling carefully down the walk. Before Andie left for work, she, Eric and I carefully reviewed our party photos and confirmed that, no, it wasn’t just the alcohol talking—we have some really hot-looking friends. Ah, to be young and beautiful; try not to hate us. And happy New Year!

After Andie left for work early this afternoon, Eric and I spent most of the day cleaning and prepping for the New Year’s Eve party. I did much of the last-minute shopping, although the hassle was nobody’s fault but my own, as I've known about this fiesta since November 21. I went to:

• Jack’s 99¢ Store by Penn Station for really cheap plates, cups that turned out to be too small and assemble-them-yourself plastic champagne glasses.
• the Super Kmart at One Penn Plaza for kitchen garbage bags and some cups that were also too small.
• Price Wise Discount for Solo plastic party cups in red and blue. At 18 ounces, they were just the right size; if you’ve been to a college kegger in the past 10 years, you’ve drunk from one of these.
• Citibank for more dough.
• Mitchell’s Wines & Liquors on W. 86th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway for three bottles of wine, including one called Bogle that I bought only because of the name’s proximity to a certain scrambled word game.
• Gristedes for five two-liter bottles of soda.
• back to Mitchell’s for another bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and to check on the Champagne prices.
• that deli across the street from the Raccoon Lodge on Amsterdam, which was the only place in a five block radius selling a copy of today’s New York Times, which I promised Eric I’d buy.
• back to Mitchell’s again, dammit, this time with Eric, to purchase 12 bottles of Korbel Brut California Champagne and lug them home.

Andie made her patented Tasty Salsa and some guacamole that was precarious because we were unsure the avocados were ripe enough. (They were, and the guacamole was polished off by party’s end.) Eric made brownies from scratch, as well as some buttery lace cookies. Then we had the usual spread of exotic cheeses and olives, soda, crackers, cashews and almonds, and tortilla, banana and potato chips. Folks brought cookies, beer and more wine to complement the case of Louis Jadot Beaujolais-Villages (2003) Andie bought.

About 30 people showed up and everyone seemed to have a great time. Conversation was fun and lively, particularly as more of the wine was consumed. Throughout the evening, a few objects were dropped and/or broken, as is required at parties:

• glass flower vase of tulips bumped off windowsill. Result: water spillage, no breakage, no problem.
• Champagne bottle falling on one of Andie’s decorative plates, illustrated with old French beverage ads. Result: one plate badly chipped on the edge.
• Jason’s PowerBook knocked to the floor (the dancing got a little out of hand). Result: another scratch; unfortunate resetting of party playlist; no immediately obvious lasting damage to complement the existing dents from when I knocked it to the floor last weekend.

When the computer was restarted after its spill, it was playing only Andie’s half of the playlist, which accounted for nearly all 50 of her songs being played but only about half of mine. It still ended up a jaunty mix. I was pleased Eric’s one song pick got played (“Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash) as well as my and Andie’s “New Year’s song” picks, “Pretty Good Year” by Tori Among (Andie) and “This Will Be Our Year” by The Zombies (mine). And if “Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)” by Mr. Phil Collins hadn’t made the cut, there would have been a riot—it was the only song that both Andie and I chose when assembling our individual 50-song party playlists. Here are all the tunes that played during the party, along with which of us chose each one:

After getting out early from work at 2 p.m., I met my friend Tina in the lobby and we walked many blocks uptown to check out FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue. The sheer number of tourists crowding the sidewalks was astounding, and the line to get into FAO wrapped around the side of the building. I’d never been there before, but Tina said I missed out on what used to be a truly magical store. When it came under new ownership recently, FAO degraded to more standard decor and merchandising techniques, probably to generate more sales per square inch, which is what it’s all about in retail these days. But there used to be a bunch of crazy kid-loved features to the store, like a robot-shaped elevator to take folks up to the second floor; merchandising displays that were fully integrated with the toys (stuffed monkeys for sale that were hanging from a giant tropical tree, for example); and a downstairs (where all the boys’ toys are) that was tricked out like a cool den, with low lights, carpet with glow-in-the-dark stars, pinball machines, and the like. Now it’s all boring, fully lit with few design accents, and much of the magick is gone.

Tina bought some Word World Magnetic Letter Sets for her sister’s baby, which hasn’t quite been born yet. The toys are stuffed animals and vehicles made of the individual letters in their names, each of which is magnetic. Tina got the Bug and Dog varieties.

Later, I went down to Jimi’s and he forked over my birthday gifts, two CDs that were on my Amazon Wish List: Give Up by The Postal Service and Movement by The Gossip. After Jimi went off to get a manicure, he, his friend Maurice and I walked over to Choga, a Korean/Japanese restaurant on Bleecker Street that’s a long-time Jimi favorite. We met up there with some friends of Jimi’s who he met through the blogging universe, most of whom live in New York. Some of them had some pretty crazy jobs. One guy works for Google’s east coast operations here and helps procure/code those little text-based ads (“Sponsored Links”) that pop-up on the right-hand side of your screen after you’ve gotten your search results. Another guy works in customer support at the original Barnes & Noble on 18th Street, which is the textbook store. Since the building dates from the late 1800s, it has its share of rat-related issues. The guy noted a group of not-so-well-fed cats is kept in a large cage in the building’s basement. At night, after the store’s closed, they’re let out to roam and hunt. Apparently this is a common practice in many older or rat-prone buildings in NYC.

Katie and Eric came over tonight and we had pizza delivered from Big Nick's on Broadway and W. 77th Street. Andie arrived from work soon thereafter to join in the hot pie action. We got the Big Nick Special, which was a crispy-crust variety with beef, onion, fresh garlic, mushroom and a dash of curry. We also got the Athenian Pizza, with feta, olives, tomatoes, onions and green pepper. Mmm.

For my birthday, Katie got me the book Instructoart by Matthew Vescovo, which contains illustrations that mimic the style and design of those emergency procedure cards you find in your seatback pocket on an airplane. But they're for everyday things, like doing the Hokey Pokey, performing an airkiss or signaling for a check at a restaurant. Andie got me Created in Darkness By Troubled Americans edited by Dave Eggers, which is a recent compilation of pieces from McSweeney's, the online and print publication I've come to know and love.

Andie hung up some more Christmas lights today for the New Year’s Eve party. Also, I finally settled on 50 songs for my half of the party playlist using a surefire method: I picked them without looking at the Internet, my music collection or my iTunes library. This ensured a nicely varied list since my memory is so riddled with gaping holes. It took me about half an hour to think of 50 party-style songs all on my own; I think it may have been worth it.

On a related note, at work today, I overheard the office ladies discussing a New Year’s Eve theme party one of them had been invited to. The theme was to arrive dressed as the theme or title of a song. It wasn’t clear from their discussion whether one was to reveal which song one was dressed as, or make the other partygoers guess. Nor was it clear whether one had to be in possession of said song, which I would think would make for a nice, truly random party soundtrack.

The girls were discussing some possibilities based on “Billie Jean,” “Lola,” and “California Girls,” among others. I think that if I were invited to such a party, my theme song would be a theme song itself, from Miami Vice by Jan Hammer. I would dress in shades, a smart white linen suit and a pastel shirt. I would be sockless, in deck shoes, and I would be cocksure about my casually spiked hair, renegotiating my contract with NBC and signing Ron Wood and Stevie Ray Vaughan to participate on my vanity record album.

Accompanying me to this party would be my special lady, whose theme song I would insist on being LL Cool J’s “Around The Way Girl.” A smile like sunshine, she would have extensions in her hair, bamboo earrings (at least two pair), a Fendi bag and a bad attitude. A New Edition Bobby Brown button would be affixed to her sleeve, indicating her love of dancing to the rap jam. Her lip gloss would be characterized as “shinin’“ and she would be in the mood for winin’, dinin’ and/or lovin’.

Mmm-hmm. Party time.

My parents left town this afternoon, but before that, I had to open my birthday gifts from them. I got Bill Bryson’s A Short History Of Nearly Everything, which I myself had given several people for Christmas. I also got curtains and a curtain rod, to replace the dishtowel I’ve been using as drapery over my bedroom window since moving in. Mom’s been planning that gift since the last time they visited and Dad secretly took measurements of my window.

Dad had some work to catch up on and wasn’t too keen on hanging around outside in the bitter cold, so Mom and I took the subway up to W. 110th St. and Lenox Avenue to visit Lasker Rink, one of two ice skating rinks in Central Park, both of which are owned by Donald Trump. Lasker is “more intimate” than Wollman Rink, which is code for “a lot smaller, but with no tourists.” In fact, because of its proximity to Harlem, there’s hardly any whitey at all at Lasker, which is refreshing.

Although the last time Mom and I remembered skating was at the BGSU ice arena, we got our bearing pretty easily. The first few times around, we were gripping the boards for dear life, but we soon got into the swing of things and managed not to fall or trip over any of the kamikaze children, who specialized in speeding by at 45 mph, then collapsing with limbs splayed directly in front of you.

Afterwards, we met Dad at French Roast on Broadway at W. 85th Street for lunch. Soon thereafter, Mom and Dad left town, with plans on the way back to stay over in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which I know best as the home of Marshmallow Peeps. But apparently, the town gets really gussied up for the holidays and has lots of Mom-style places to shop, like the Moravian Book Shop.

There’s been a lot of giving and receiving going on ’round these parts recently. Yesterday, we handed out and received coworker gifts. From my boss, I got a $25 Barnes & Noble gift card and a tiny box of Russell Stover chocolates. I got her $25 worth of Ben & Jerry’s gift cards because I had overheard her mention once that ice cream was her Achilles’ heel. She said she appreciated them and even went around the department taunting the other ladies with them.

From the editorial department ladies, I received some nice stuff, too. One of them, whose husband is a chef, got me a box of pants-busting, freshly made holiday pastry desserts, including a brick of fudge, mouth-watering cannoli and a deadly delicious Boston-crème-dark-chocolate-covered-banana thing. In return, I got her the Bill Bryson science book “A Short History Of Nearly Everything,” which is an inside joke in that she knowingly comes across as a scrappy, sassy know-it-all, but also likes to read. My other coworker got me a holiday coffee mug filled with wrapped chocolates and a small, airline-sized bottle of rum, brownest of the brown liquors. Because she shares my love of cheesy, late-’80s hair metal, I got her a “Monster Madness” compilation CD, which she thought was hilarious.

The ladies were griping that I was trying to make them look bad by putting thought into my purchases, while the three of them handed out identical gifts. I told them that next year they are all getting McDonald’s gift certificates.

The gift-giving love continued this afternoon, when Jimi and I exchanged gifts over lunch at (you guessed it) Harry’s Burritos. I got him Spider-Man 2 and The Bourne Supremacy on DVD, while he also got me DVDs, an extremely generous combo of seasons 3 and 4 of Futurama. Ah, the magic of Amazon Wish Lists.

But wait, there’s more! After work, Andie and Katie exchanged gifts with me, because my parents are shipping in tomorrow, while the girls are shipping out to visit their own parents in Cleveland.

From Sacco, I got Andie some crazy Andie-style winter gloves, made of shredded rainbow-colored silk rags. They resemble Chewbacca’s hands, but multicolored instead of Wookie brown. I also got her a herbal/decaf tea sampler from Porto Rico Importing Co., a popular store on Bleecker Street that sells whole-bean coffee and loose tea. Finally, I got her The Gingerbread Man Salt Scrub, which has something to do with exfoliation. Oprah likes it (she anointed it a “Holiday Favorite” last year), so I figured Andie would, too. I bought it at Sephora, an upscale chain of makeup stores containing a high percentage of confused-looking men conducting Christmas shopping for the women in their life, and a gaggle of middle-aged women in fur coats hoping to look young again, or at least smell like hibiscus flowers, or something. Andie got me a tinned Candy Land board game (it’s the 2003 edition but the board is just like the one I remember from my childhood), “The New Smithsonian Book Of Comic Book Stories: From Crumb To Clowes” (a perfect complement to the formidable McSweeney’s Issue 13) and a spiral-bound book in which to record movies I’ve seen and movies I want to watch.

Katie sometimes bemoans her CD collection, so my gifts to her were intended to beef it up. I selected three great albums from the 2000s, all of which are from NYC-based acts: You Are Free by Cat Power, Turn On The Bright Lights by Interpol and Fever To Tell by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I'm also giving her one of the free printers I got with the purchase of my eMac (which I've since sold). Now I just need to get her computer up and running so she can actually use peripherals. Katie got me the book “Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories” (which contains the top suppressed articles and topics of 2003 and 2004) and a small blank spiral notebook illustrated with a piece of the MTA subway map on the cover. It’s sturdy and pocket-sized, a perfect replacement for the scraps of paper I keep in my pockets for notetaking.

Got my haircut for the holidays, my barber singing along in Spanish to the Christmas carols on the radio, then met up with Jimi and Tony to g’on over to Queens for Lee-Ann and Brian’s holiday party. Not only were we traveling afar, we were bearing gifts, so we took a cab. I was packin’ a 12 of Yuengling lager and among the other gifts, Jimi had a large Calphalon pot filled with a broccoli-cauliflower-cheese casserole. He also got Lee-Ann, who recently became engaged, a wedding planner, which was a very thrilling moment, as she shares Jimi’s passion for organization. Here’s Lee-Ann, Tony and Jimi.

It was a cozy get together, about 15 people total, including two babies. For dinner, we had turkey and stuffing, honey-baked ham and other fixings, with tiramisu and spiced (and alcohol-ed) apple cider for dessert. As part of the festivities, we decorated the tree, which was a bit like Tom Sawyer getting other folks to whitewash the fence, but I think the holidays bear giving my cynicism a temporary rest.

We also got to watch the will-you-marry-me video that Brian, Lee-Ann’s fiancée, made on a DVD using Adobe Premiere, putting together an impressive A/V show made up of years of photos of them combined with their favorite songs. Jimi, Tony and I were the first ones to arrive at the party and ended up having such a great time we were just about the last to leave as well. We took the 7 back to the island, discovering as we exited Lee-Ann’s building that the first snow of this winter had begun.

After working until 7 tonight, it was relaxing to head down to Revival, a bar on East 15th off Union Square, for Katie’s birthday celebration. It’s an inconspicuous little place, with nooks and crannies for sitting and talking, and music that’s not too loud but funky. I particularly approved of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and my favorite Sly & The Family Stone song, “If You Want Me To Stay.” There’s an upstairs and downstairs and a back deck planted in the center of a mass of tall buildings, which is probably much nicer when it’s not raining incessantly like it was all night. Citysearch sums up the place succinctly: crowded, trendy, romantic or good dancing? No. Good for happy hour, after work and for the social scene? Yes. That’s my kind of bar, baby.

When we got there, a small group of us huddled upstairs in a corner, trying to stay clear of an office Christmas party that had overtaken the area, and even worse, left large platters of cheese and other appetizers laying tantalizingly around that we were threatened not to touch. We moved downstairs and, as our posse grew, we overtook the back room there. We had no cheese, but we had ’tude.

Here's a small portion of the party (although a record seven people for one of Andie’s self-taken photos). Clockwise from me are Dave, Andie, Laura, Sam, Erica and Katie. It was a fun time, with lots of Katie’s recent ex-coworkers from the Union Square Barnes & Noble, many of whom have become friends of mine. In fact, the celebration was double-billed as her farewell to B&N and her birthday, which isn’t actually until Sunday, at which point she’ll be...um...as old as I will be later this month. Despite having despaired last night during The West Wing that she had gone shopping for some new birthday celebration clothes and found nothing, just nothing, she managed to “throw something together” out of some existing clothing of hers, and still look great. Andie took plenty of her patented crazy photos of the group, posed and non. I was whupped as a donkey’s ass from work and left after two Guinnesses around 10 p.m.

From noon to 4 p.m. today, we had our company holiday party at the Met Lounge, located at the Tonic Bar off Times Square. The company rented the lounge out for that time, so we had it to ourselves; they even let us bring and play our own music, which was broadcast over the entire bar’s sound system.

I’m not a big fan of forced corporate cheer, but I must admit it was nice to speak with folks from other departments (circulation, art and sales) that I normally don’t get a chance to talk to at length, if at all, during the work day. Our company’s head honchos handed out American Express Gift Cheques to everyone for gifts and we also had our “secret Santa” gift exchange. Fortunately, I somewhat knew the girl whose name I drew because she’s also a writer/editor, but for the online division. I bought her a red Swingline stapler, unsure if she’d get the reference. It turns out I needn’t have worried because most young folks who work desk jobs have seen the movie. Also, in her case, it was a bonus because it turns out red is her favorite color.

The gift I receiv