Add this to a growing list of exhibits I must check out: Mannahatta, a map of Manhattan as it likely looked in 1609, when Henry Hudson arrived, is on display at the newly reopened South Street Seaport Museum. It was assembled from a blend of historic maps, including one from the Revolutionary War and another of farms from the early 19th century. (There’s still one farmhouse left in Manhattan!)

I missed this map’s original showcase at the Museum of the City of New York in 2009. And even further back, in 2007, I remember reading Nick Paumgarten’s New Yorker article about the map. The abstract of that article notes that as late as 1782, “Manhattan had over seventy miles of streams and at least twenty-one ponds. The longest stream was the Saw Kill, which flowed from present-day Central Park to the 71st Street exit off the F.D.R. Drive.”

(link and photo via kateopolis via The New York Times)

What a beautiful computer! What poetic specificity in its settings! Self-proclaimed veteran geek Nathan Zeldes explains (and translates) this camera-setting calculator from the 1920s:

Kaufmann’s Posographe is nothing less than an analog mechanical computer for calculating six-variable functions. Specifically, it computes the exposure time (Temps de Pose) for taking photographs indoors or out (depending on which side you use). The input variables are set up on the six small pointers; the large pointer then gives you the correct time. The variables are very detailed, yet endearingly colloquial. For outdoors, they include the setting — with values like “Snowy scene”, “Greenery with expanse of water”, or “Very narrow old street”; the state of the sky — including “Cloudy and somber”, “Blue with white clouds”, or “Purest blue”; The month of the year and hour of the day; the illumination of the subject; and of course the aperture (f-number).

(link and photo via bughouse)

Last night, I made gougères using the 101 Cookbooks recipe on account of its simplicity and, well, beer. Delicious! I can’t pronounce “gougères” so I’m stealing a name and calling them Cheesy Poofs. They remind me of miniature popovers, only more savory and with creamier interiors. My mom has a Christmas pastry recipe that I believe uses a similar choux technique for the dough. You just wanna pop these things by the handful like they’re salted nuts. They’re a great cold-weather snack that would go great with drinks, or as an appetizer.

In a 2004 “F.Y.I.” article in The New York Times, Michael Pollak and George Robinson get an explanation for one of my favorite quirks of the New York City subway system. If you’re standing on a platform near its center as a train enters the station, you should always see this happen as the train comes to a stop and the conductor sticks his head out his window, just prior to opening the doors:

Q. I have noticed that every subway station has long metal or wood strips painted with diagonal black-and-white zebra stripes. Occasionally I see a conductor point at that object when a train pulls into the station. What’s this all about?

A. “That’s the conductor’s board,” explained Charles Seaton, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “When the conductor is lined up with that board, he knows that the train is all the way in the station and that it’s safe to open the doors.” As for the ritual of pointing at the board, Mr. Seaton calls it “acknowledging the presence of the conductor’s board.” He notes that it is required by the system rulebook, “so that opening the doors isn’t just a reflex action, which could lead to mistakes,” like inadvertently opening the doors on the wrong side.

Why black-and-white stripes? “They stand out from the background,” Mr. Seaton said.

Here’s a photo of one of the conductor’s boards in the Wall Street station for the 4/5 train. (I tried multiple times to get a shot of a conductor pointing at a board but the action proved too fast and furtive to be captured by my slow reflexes and equally slow cameraphone shutter.)

During a brisk lunchtime walk around my work neighborhood, I noticed a curious feature of the American International Building, at 70 Pine St., the tallest building in Lower Manhattan prior to the World Trade Center.

On the building’s Wikipedia page, this feature is noted only in passing, in a photo caption:

A miniature impression of the building is incorporated above its own entrance. The miniature impression contains its own miniature impression.

I’ve been trying to become less of a brand slave in my clothes shopping, but I distinctly remember liking the fabric, fit, and style of the J. Crew Ludlow suit when I first saw it in one of the retailer’s seasonal catalogs last year. Now I learn that many other men feel the same way, according to Alexandria Symonds at The New York Observer, who pins down the inherent Ludlowness of the Ludlow:

...the trousers are narrow, and the single-breasted iteration of the jacket has a two-and-a-half-inch lapel and rounded front corners. In addition, several elements are, discreetly, flattering: a lightly padded shoulder, which lends a more masculine silhouette, and a shorter-cut jacket, which makes men look taller.

So it’s understated yet stylish. On the other hand, Symonds suggests the Ludlow may have the same “loyalty and instant identification” once afforded the Members Only jacket, which aged poorly then ironically, with a temporary resurrection by Urban Outfitters last year. In sum: “it’s just a good-looking suit from a mass-market retailer. That may be exactly why it appeals to the Ludlow brotherhood: it’s cool, but not dangerous.”

All of which makes me wonder: do I still want a Ludlow?

(Ludlow suit photo via jcrew.com; Observer link via Jason Diamond’s Paris Review article, “The Book Club,” a nice read on books “becoming the dressings for brands”)

Probably the most grueling portion of my genelogical research has been skimming the minutes for the Township Committee of Franklin Township, an area of Essex County, New Jersey, that became Nutley in 1902. This is even more grueling than newspaper research because at least those are press-printed, not handwritten in spidery cursive.

The books of minutes themselves, which are stored at the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, are beautiful: five legal-size hardbound ledgers, thick pages ruled in blue, covering the early modern era (1883-1902) of a small town growing fast. They’re scrapbooks, really. Here and there are artifacts, some inserted, some glued, including correspondence, election day announcements, a rules and regulations booklet for Franklin’s first fire department, and a published obituary for a past Committee member. The minutes are exhaustive and exhausting, with details on bills paid, roads paved, sewers proposed, and the passage of many now-meaningless motions.

I’m pawing through these to find mention of my paternal great-great grandfather, Philip, who moved with his family from Brooklyn to Franklin in 1890. He’s on the record at least once that I’ve found so far, complaining in an 1894 letter to the Committee about a damaged slate wall in front of his house. (The Committee resolved to write him back and inform him that it had no jurisdiction in the matter.)

The complaint I’m most amused by, and which appears sporadically over the years, involves random citizens attempting to have the township reimburse them for chickens of theirs that had been killed by dogs. Here’s one from May 1, 1893:

Mrs. Elizabeth Cornell presented bill for 23 chickens killed by unknown dogs $17.25[.] On motion the [above?] bill was laid on table.

Incidents similar to this happened in Nutley well into the following century. On September 15, 1932, an above-the-fold page-one article in The Nutley News mentioned that one of my paternal grandfather’s two younger brothers, Andrew, then aged 17, had submitted a letter to the Town Commission “in which he sought reimbursement from the town for two flocks of pedigreed chickens which were killed by a dog[.]”

Have you ever looked out a window and seen the most spectacular scene as if it were a photo or painting framed by the window? Or perhaps a mundane scene seen through a window became automatically grander because it’d been framed?

Wendy MacNaughton, Mark Likosky, and creative studio Division of Labor made this happen with their Sausalito Street Scene project. I like their cheeky placard, hand-lettered below the sill.

(photos via Division of Labor)

While you were out enjoying yourself this summer, Angus Stevenson, editor of the new, twelfth edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, announced that he had no room for the word growlery, a “place to growl in, private room, den.”

Yes, several of the 400-some entries Stevenson added to his book are small, short-fused firecrackers; I’m looking at you, cyberbullying, domestic goddess, and sexting. But I’m not here to claim this portends the fall of our Language/Culture. Words come, words go, and meanings shift. This flux is and always will be as constant as those who bemoan it.

What I’m here to point out is that growlery is a great, useful word and concept that could stand revival. Stevenson implies it’s obsolete when he defines it as “what we might call a man cave these days,” but that’s not quite right. (It’s also sexist.)

Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, sides with me, noting without discernible sarcasm that “any word defined as a place in which to growl will never lose its usefulness.” Language lovers, the anachronistic, and other “weirdos” are keeping the word alive on the internet, he adds.

Charles Dickens coined growlery in his novel Bleak House (1853) when one Mr. Jarndyce explains, “This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.” But the growlery wasn’t just a fictional conceit. Most famously, Frederick Douglass, the orator and abolitionist leader, had one. His workaday tasks revolved around the book-stuffed study of his Washington, D.C. home. But when he needed the walls to close in and disallow distraction, or just to brood, he headed out back to his growlery. Little more than a high desk, a stool and a lounge furnished the stout little shack. It was his “rustic retreat from domestic society, where he could think, read and write undisturbed,” according to the National Park Service, which has recreated the structure for tourists to view. This is what it looked like, circa 1893, a couple of years before Douglass died.

If and when I ever own property, I shall build a growlery.

(photo via Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, D.C. by Sarah Luria (2006), p. 93, via Google Books)

Last year, James Estrin and Josh Haner of The New York Times lauded Bruce Davidson as “one of the most influential photographers of the last half century.”

Prior to this week, the most current edition (2003) of Davidson’s Subway, a portfolio of color photos he started taking in 1980 in and around New York City’s subway system¹, had been long out-of-print and couldn’t be found online for any less than $300 from grubby resellers. Happily for fans of the New York City subway, photography, and photography of the New York City subway, Apeture reissued the book this week and it’s available online for under $45. I’ve ordered my copy.

(photos by Bruce Davidson from Subway (1980); photos screencapped from Rose Gallery)

¹ The grandaddy of this idea, by the way, is Walker Evans’s Subway Portrait series from the ’30s and ’40s, but not published until 1966 as the book Many Are Called. [back]

A Spanish art collective designed Meeting Bowls, which it describes as “playful urban furniture” where strangers can meet strangers and chat. Although because the Bowls are located in the heart of Times Square, at Broadway and 46th Street, tourists are the likeliest suspects to mix things up in a Bowl.

Lost City praises the Bowls as “teacup-shaped tourist traps” and credits them for “making it easier for busy, rushing New Yorkers to go about their midtown business.” Ha ha! Alas, though, the Bowls are temporary and will be removed by next month.

(link lead by Lost City; photo by Ka-Man Tse for the Times Square Alliance)

Levi’s stashes what it claims are the world’s oldest pair of jeans in a vault in San Francisco.

They date to 1879 (seven years after Levi Strauss and parter Jacob Davis patented riveted denim jeans) and are insured for $150,000. That distinctive “buckle-back cinch” makes them resemble mom jeans!

(link via Coudal Partners Blended Feed; photo via inhavitat via Ecouterre.com)

Here I list some random items from my vacation in Portland and Seattle. (I’d never been to either city previously.)

• Recycling bins outnumber people in Portland and Seattle.
• In fact, it’s difficult to find a garbage can.
• There is a lot of beer there. Most of it is Very Good.
• Unlike New York City, you don’t have to wait until noon on Sundays to be served alcohol in restaurants. You can get served alcohol whenever you want on Sunday. This is as disconcerting as it is welcome.
• There are lot of hippies and other such people that don’t seem to have any discernible purpose.
• There are a lot of VW Bugs. My left bicep still smarts from Punch Buggy but probably because we enacted a bonus “Smart car slap” rule.
• Myth busted: It doesn’t rain all the time in the Pacific Northwest. Only in every month except July and August. Actually, it rains a little in July in August. But it’s more like a strong mist. O.K., fine: it rains almost all the time in the Pacific Northwest.
• There are a lot of loud crows in both cities.
• On the drive between Seattle and Portland, every time we passed a truck hauling logs, I broke into my version of the instrumental theme song from Twin Peaks. It was received poorly.
• The maple-bacon bar at Seattle’s Voodoo Doughnut: Oh, yeah.
• At the Ballard locks, I watched a seal kill a salmon by slapping it on the water’s surface. Then he ate it. How the seal did any of this without hands is beyond me.
• At the locks, there is a pictographic traffic sign for the fish ladder that for all intents and purposes appears to be indicating that fish should take the stairs.
• Public transportation in Seattle is excellent. A well-prepared tourist doesn’t need a car. Portland sprawls more. A tourist would benefit from a car.
• Seattle has a monorail and you can’t help but think of that episode of The Simpsons that Conan O’Brien wrote every time you ride it.
• Favorite Fun Fact from the Nirvana exhibit at the Seattle Music Experience: Kurt Cobain collected “a significant hoard...of canned meat products.”
• The dream of the ’90s is, in fact, alive in Portland, if by the ’90s you mean independent coffee shops, thriving indie print media, dive bars, brewpubs, record shops, bookstores, cafés, and vendors that sell things like wee hedgehog figurines made out of felt and steel wool, sort of like if Etsy were the real world.
• If you add in the number of restaurants featuring “small plates,” expensive but well-crafted cocktails (which were still all under $10), and food trucks, the dream of the mid-2000s is alive in both Seattle and Portland.
• If you relish fresh seafood, you’ve found your final resting place, although I’d describe the raw oysters I sampled from a farmers’s market as “snotty seawater with a sprinkle of grit.”
• I saw an equal number of yard sale signs and “Free Stuff” signs.
• I saw a lot of great signs. A favorite was taped to the door of a 7-Eleven in Portland. It seemed to sum up the overall attitude of the city. It read:

  Coyote Warning

  There has been a coyote in this neighborhood!!

  We want everyone to stay alert and to walk another direction when you see one. If one comes up to you stay as calm as you can and slowly walk home.

  Then there was a photo of a coyote striding calmly down a suburban sidewalk. That’s right. Stay calm. Don’t run. Even the coyote is taking his time. Walk home slowly and take a long, relaxing hit off your bong.
• Bicycles. Everywhere.
• Also: tattoos.
• We picknicked in an Oregon state park named Rooster Rock State Park. It’s called that because it features a rock column that resembles a big dick. This rock used to be called Cock Rock. Even the Native Americans called it that. There is also a nude beach in the park, the first in the U.S. I am not making any of this up.
• The overall impression I got of both Portland and Seattle was that they’re giant college towns. (Although from when I was in college, not you.)
• What’d I do on vacation? Ate and drank a ton. Spent too much money on used CDs and used books. Walked a lot. Avoided coyotes and hippies.

Wondrich calls the whiskey sour “the fried-egg sandwich of American mixology: simply, dull, reliable in a pinch.” But last night, I wanted something similar so I took the deluxe route: the Dizzy Sour.

A basic Dizzy Sour, which apparently predates the trumpeter of the same name, takes a whiskey sour, adds a bit of Bénédictine, that mysterious monk-made herbal liqueur, and replaces 1/2 ounce of the whiskey with a dark rum float. I used Jay Hepburn’s version at Oh Gosh!, which adds egg white for texture and a creamy edge to the flavor, which, as he notes, deepens as the rum seeps through the drink.

I’m a rye guy so I used Old Overholt (and anything nicer would be lost and wasted among the other ingredients). For the float, I chose Goslings Black Seal Rum. A float is bartender code for “top a drink by pouring an ingredient over the back of your barspoon into the glass.” I call it “showin’ off” so I just pour it in slowly directly from the jigger.

This one’s sneaky and, at least without the garnishes, just sweet enough—really a perfect drink to bridge summer with autumn. It’s not an everyday tipple but a pleasant feet-up cocktail-hour beverage; and it’s a keeper in my book.

(photo via Stew*’s Flickr photostream)

Nevermind, one of the archetypical rock albums of the 1990s, turns 20 this year. Just as iconic as the music is the album’s cover, an underwater shot in a swimming pool showing a naked infant floating toward a fishhook baited with a dollar bill.

At the Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibit at the EMP in Seattle, where I vacationed recently, visitors can check out the original photo for the cover, with notes in the border handwritten by who I assume was an art director. One of these notes explains that the bottom of the swimming pool can be airbrushed out for aesthetic reasons. (And it was.) What amused me was an additional note in the top border: “If anyone has a problem with his dick we can remove it.”

Famously, that element was not removed. Apparently, no one had a problem with it. Except maybe the baby, Spencer Elden, who as a teenager regreted, “Everyone out there in the world has seen my penis already, my baby penis.” (I was a young college student when Nirvana hit its commercial peak and I vividly remember a local record store had to tape and retape the wee organ to a promotional cardboard cutout of the baby on display because cretins would tweak it as they walked by.)

Via Wikipedia:

Veronica Foster, popularly known as “Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl,” was a Canadian icon representing nearly one million Canadian women who worked in the manufacturing plants that produced munitions and materiel during World War II. Foster worked for John Inglis Co. Ltd producing Bren light machine guns on a production line on Strachan Avenue in Toronto, Ontario. She can be seen as the Canadian precursor to the American fictional propaganda tool Rosie the Riveter.

(link lead via 19o1)

Here’s a National Geographic photo by Mark Thiessen of scientists in South Carolina drawing blood from horseshoe crabs. Horseshoe crabs! About 20 percent of each crab’s blood is drawn from its equivalent of a heart. (The blood is blue due to copper in the liquid’s oxygen-carrying protein, hemocyanin—it’s like the iron-based hemoglobin in humans.) Then the scientists give each crab a big cookie and return it the sea.¹

Biomedical companies use the crab blood to screen for fatal bacteria in the human bloodstream, including E. coli and Salmonella.

So sensitive is the test derived from the proteins that it can detect amounts as slight as one part per trillion. That’s like one grain of sugar in an Olympic-size pool, says John Dubczak of test producer Charles River, Endosafe.

(link via kateoplis)

(image via this isn’t happiness via The Daily Mail)

I’ve been tearing through Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and tonight I made blueberry cobbler from two pints of New Jersey blueberries I bought yesterday at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket.

I used less sugar than suggested, closer to 1/4 cup for tossing with the fruit. Bittman notes the key is to not overmix the dough, writing: “get it so that it’s just combined, barely holding together, then drop it onto the filling in mounds, leaving space for steam to escape from the cooking fruit.”

Towards the end of the 35-minute cooking time, the berry-juices just started to gently bubble out of the Corningware pie plate I used, so I slipped a baking sheet under the rack to catch any runoff.

Cobbler of course pairs perfectly with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream, but I’m trying to watch my cholesterol, so boo-hoo.

Taken today on Franklin Avenue near Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Cyclones 11, Aberdeen IronBirds 1.

I spent years in a studio doing re-creations of big league games. [...] Somebody hands you a piece of paper filled with letters and numbers and you have to make a ball game out of it. You create the weather, flesh out the players, you make them sweat and grouse and hitch up their pants, and it is remarkable, thinks Russ, how much earthly disturbance, how much summer and dust the mind can manage to order up from a single Latin letter lying flat.

Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997)

For The Untitled Project (2002-2010), Matt Siber removed text from mundane city street photos and mirrored it to the right. Check out his website for the full series.

(link via HiLobrow; photo by Matt Siber via siberart.com)

As David Wondrich puts it in his cocktail history, Imbibe!:

Whenever a recipe calls for “shaved,” “fine,” or “cracked” ice, in the absense of a large block of ice and a shaver, simply take dry, cold ice, put it in a canvas sack and quickly whale the tar out of it with a mallet (this apparatus is known these days as a “Lewis bag,” after the modern manufacturer who revived it[.])

He goes on to say that one can more simply wrap the ice in a large dishtowel, but I ask you: where’s the fun in that? So I commissioned my sister, who recently bought a new sewing machine and is handy with needle and thread, to make me a Lewis bag. I specified plain canvas, about the size of those bags you can squirrel a pair of shoes in, with a drawstring top. She delivered. I got it in the mail on Tuesday and it’s devilishly rugged and handsome.

That night, I busted up some ice in it for a Manhattan. I threw a pair of Tovolo King Cubes in it, drew it shut, grabbed the drawstring and swung the bag hard into the edge of my kitchen table. Multiple times. This was a nice test, as it proved the durability of the canvas and the craftswomanship of the stitching but it was also sort of stupid because now my table has several divots in it. So as to not mar furniture going forward, the best technique turns out to be to whack the ice-filled bag with a wooden muddler. Perfect cracked ice!

I’ve said theater is better when performed outdoors and New York Classical Theatre would agree. I caught a private performance Monday night of their Henry V and it was great.

Most every scene takes place in a different outdoor location here in New York City. There’s little sitting still. The play began outside Castle Garden, which looks enough like a castle. The cast then moved inside through the main castle doors, and the audience followed, regrouping in a close arc around the action. After exiting through the rear of the castle, a slate-paved copse on the Battery substituted nicely for London.

The stand-in for France herself? We all took a ferry to Governors Island, far enough from the city that the only constant noise is the buzz of locusts. The island’s terrain and abandoned structures are used to effect. Battles go down on the hilly grounds around Fort Jay, a former defensive Army post. When Fluellen speaks of Fortune’s foot “fixed upon a spherical stone / which rolls, and rolls, and rolls” he rests his own foot on a small stack of cannonballs just outside the fort. All the talk of the “deep mouth’d sea” and you can hear gulls crying in the background, looping over the harbor. As the sun set, crew members seated unobtrusively on the ground trained multiple flashlights on each performer’s face, making their features pop out of the dim as in a chiaroscuro painting.

At points, the cast members (this production has 40 of them) just about interact with the audience. After the Battle of Agincourt, for instance, one can step over a dead soldier while walking to the next scene, if one is into that sort of thing. During our performance, the French ambassador bearing a treasure-box of tennis balls approached the “stage” through the back of the audience and stared down an elderly audience member in his way until she shrunk sheepishly and moved aside. At various points, we were encouraged to contribute to battle cries.

Is it gimmicky? I didn’t think so. I’d never read or seen Henry V and I got caught up in the action, possibly moreso than if I’d seen the play performed traditionally onstage. It seemed to unfold more naturally in the real world with real scenery.

New York Classical Theatre has been doing productions like these for 12 seasons and I’m embarrassed not to have known of them until now. Best, the performances are free. Check ’em out!¹

A diver has snapped what might be the first photo of a fish using a tool in the wild—a foot-long blackspot tuskfish opening a clam by hitting it against a rock.

July 11, 2011 Update: There is debate among nerds over whether a stationary rock constitutes a tool in this case. It does. If a biped, such as a nerd, were to open a coconut with a large, heavy, flat object such as his forehead or a paving stone, you would call that object a “tool.” It needn’t be a sharpened flint or a corkscrew. It’s a general object being used for a specific, self-benefiting purpose. Let’s not handicap our underwater vertebrae brethern for having no limbs with which to wield Craftsman-like objects.

(link via @GammaCounter; photo via Coral Reefs/Scott Gardner via Wired)

Every year since 1988, François Pasquier stages the Dîner en Blanc (“Dinner in White”), a secret, private and somewhat spontaneous dinner party in Paris with a guest list entirely of friends. “Pasquier calls the party-list formation a ‘pyramide amicale,’ a friendly pyramid; trusted friends invite their own trusted friends,” explains the New York Times’ Liesl Schillinger, who was invited to last month’s Dîner.

It started small but now there are thousands of participants. Guests dress in white and converge on a public and picturesque outdoor location. Past locales have included a plaza at the Notre Dame cathedral and (depicted above) in a courtyard of the Louvre. Guests bring their own food, tables, chairs, glasses and utensils. They eat and make merry. Often, there’s dancing. Then they pack up, clean up, and depart, leaving no trace of the festivities.

Pasquier’s son is bringing a version of Dîner en Blanc to New York City late next month, but it won’t have the same secrecy or “friendly” guest list. Half the picnickers will be given private invites while the other half will be drawn from an online waiting list anyone can apply to. Advance details will be publicized on Facebook and Twitter. And New York City will likely disallow Champagne consumption outdoors.

(photo via the Times via Diner en Blanc De Paris)

New Yorkers can be generous and polite, if they want to.

Photographed by K. this afternoon in Manhattan, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Dominick Street.

(photo via B-B-B-Bobby Digital)

Before G.I. Joe figurines with articulated limbs stormed America in 1982, I played with those generic little plastic army guys. They were packaged in a dark-green orgy of limbs in a clear bag that smelled pungently of vinyl. After they’d been deployed and stationed upright on their wee plastic surfboards, I oversaw battles on the unforgiving terrain of my backyard sandbox. Plosive gunfire fell the infantry. Shells and grenades catapulted bodies around. Conveniently, the dead could be buried in the same dirt on which they’d fought.

So as a kid (and possibly now), I would have enjoyed the Be Your Own Souvenir machine by Barcelona-based collective blablabLAB. Here’s how it works: You get a non-terror-related 360° body scan that’s processed by custom software. Then you’re output in monochromatic plastic miniature by a self-replicating 3D printer called a RepRap. Sounds as if they’ve even been able to replicate that heady plasic odor.

(link via @pruned; photo via Colossal)

Contact sheets illuminate the creative process and what’s going on in the mind of a photographer. One of my favorite examples is Diane Arbus’s contact sheet for Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. for what it shows about her editoral process—her choice of a grotesque frame from an otherwise ordinary roll. Same thing for the contact sheets of W. Eugene Smith, which reveal how he built the photo essays that made him famous. Contact sheets are powerful; the one for Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier called into question whether the shot was taken where Capa said it was and whether he may have staged it.

I was amazed to stumble across the following contact sheet, which I’d never seen before. It was scanned from the out-of-print book The Work of Hipgnosis, which recounts the history of the British design firm behind many memorable rock album covers of the ’70s.

It gives a look behind the scenes of the photo taken by Storm Thorgerson for the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1975 album, Wish You Were Here. Here’s something you don’t see a lot in this age of Photoshop and other digital tools: a guy lit on fire for the sake of rock ‘n’ roll. Observe him, in the bottom row of exposures, booking it to get extinguished. What’s nuts is that whenever I previously saw the album cover, I thought the burning man was a mannequin.¹

(photos by Storm Thorgerson; scan via this isn’t happiness)

¹ Confusing the matter, there are two versions of the album cover photo. According to the internet, U.S. vinyl pressings on Columbia use a shot of the burning man standing straight. European vinyl pressings on EMI (and all U.S. CD pressings) use a less realistic (to me) shot of the burning man leaning forward at a weird angle. [back]

The Orange River serves as part of the border between Namibia and South Africa. Along the banks of this river, roughly 100km (60 miles) inland from where the river empties into the Atlantic Ocean, irrigation projects take advantage of water from the river and soils from the floodplains to grow produce, turning parts of a normally earth-toned landscape emerald green.

(post title by Adam W. King via Waxy.org: Links; NASA satellite photo and descriptive text via The Guardian)

Joanna S. Rose amassed a large collection of American quilts and when her husband asked what she wanted for her eightieth birthday, she thought it might be nice to show them off.

Most of Mrs. Rose’s quilts are red and white and were sewn at the end of the nineteenth century, when that color combination was most popular—the first cheap colorfast red dye hit the market in 1868. Time passed and quilting fell from favor. Mrs. Rose bought many of her quilts for under ten dollars at flea markets in the ’50s. Some were given away, used to wrap fragile purchases. But she’d never seen all of her red and white quilts at once—she didn’t even know how many she had—so she loaned the lot to the American Folk Art Museum , which hired Thinc Design to display them in the hangar-sized Wade Thompson Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory.

Mrs. Rose now knows that she owns just over 650 red and white quilts. Spotlit brightly and draped over cardboard dowels hung by wire, they appear to float from ceiling to floor in cylindrical formations. Viewers can surround themselves by quilts by slipping into the columns. Moving up close reveals intricacies of stitchwork.

It’s a strange and beautiful sight. The quilts’ colors and geometric patterns suggest the backs of classic playing cards and the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when “the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her.”

For my money, music and theater are more memorable when they’re performed outdoors. Once I held season tickets to the Cleveland Orchestra and I recall vaguely concerts I attended at Severance Hall, a venue as boxy, bright and gilded as a baroque music box. But what I won’t forget is Orff’s Carmina Burana, played under a starry sky in the middle of a forest at the orchestra’s summer home, the Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. It was powerful enough a setting (and performance) to extract the cantata from the confines of pop-culture soundtrack cliché.

Here in New York City, the only time I caught Shakespeare in the Park was a revelatory experience, the trees of Central Park closing in on action that takes place mostly in a forest. I remember thinking something like, “The Globe was probably an amphitheatre—all Shakespeare should be performed outside!”

But really I’m just reminiscing here as an excuse to post photos from the Bregenz Festival, held every summer Bregenz, Austria. I’ve never been there but sometimes I think I’ve dreamt that I have been, given how often photos from it pop up on the internet, particularly these from 1999’s grand staging of Verdi’s opera A Masked Ball, loosely based on the assassination of Sweden’s Gustav III. The king’s name, birth year and death year appear atop the book’s open page.

Seven thousand seats fan out from Bregenz’s “floating stage,” positioned over the surface and shore of Lake Constance. It could suffer from a cheesy “watching the Shamu show at SeaWorld” quality but the venue appears more naturally magical than that, dwarfed by sky, water and horizon. The lake itself retains a kind of theatrical quality. Formed by a glacier during the Ice Age, it’s shared begrudgingly by Austria, Germany and Switzerland, all of which contest its borders. National Geographic explains that “Austria, for example, sees the lake as undivided and jointly controlled by the three countries, whereas Switzerland contends that borders run through the middle of the lake.” Atmosphere and lighting aid the drama. Here’s the set for Puccini’s opera Tosca at Bregenz in 2008. Who’s up for a field trip to Austria?

(A Masked Ball daytime photo by AP Photo via The Telegraph; A Masked Ball nighttime photo and Tosca photo via the Bregenz Festival)

On February 17, photojournalist Philip Poupin snapped this shot near the front line in Libya of a rebel pedaling a bicycle with a rocket shell in his basket. Photo District News published a large version of the photo, among others from the same skirmish.

(photo by Philip Poupin)

Cannabis sativa plants, some “as tall as Christmas trees,” once grew both wild and cultivated in the vacant lots of New York City, according to research by Brooklyn Public Library librarian Ben Gocker.

In the summer of 1951 alone, sanitation workers uprooted and destroyed 41,000 pounds of pot. Taken that August, the photo above, captioned Plenty of Dream Stuff, shows the General Inspector of the city’s Sanitation Department, John E. Gleason, with Denis Healy, Sanitation District Superintendent for Greenpoint and Williamsburg, measuring a tall specimen. Gleason headed up the “White Wing Squad” of garbagemen (named after their original white duck cloth uniforms) charged with destroying the plants.

(link via Daily Intel; photo via Brooklynology)

The Metropolitan Transit Authority scuttles retired New York City subway cars in the Atlantic Ocean, where they become artificial reefs. Stephen Mallon photographed the dumping process, noting in his statement: “After being pushed and stacked like a sardine in these subways cars over the past decade, it is nice to see the sardine actually getting one of these as its new steel condo.”¹

(photo by Stephen Mallon; link via Laughing Squid)

Recently, I was boiling water in my kitchen and thinking about Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft. I was imagining that he, a theoretical physicist and computer scientist, could puzzle out a way to improve the speed and efficacy of an action as superficially simple as bringing water to a boil.

I’ve been reading a lot about Myhrvold via the press for his vanity project, a six-volume, 2,400-page cookbook entitled Modernist Cuisine, which he self-published this month. What I find most interesting about him appeared in a sidebar to the article on him in the March issue of Wired: he and his lab staff found ways to prepare food with scientific and medical equipment.

For example, they used an ultrasonic bath, more commonly used to clean lab equipment or jewelry, to brew tea. They also used ultrasound, in concert with other nontraditional techniques, to make “the perfect French fry.” (See the first six paragraphs of the Wired article for details on that.) They extracted weird ingredients—such as pea butter, the small amount of fat in peas—using a centrifuge. They concentrated flavor without heat by using a freeze-dryer, developing ingredients such as prawn powder. And they used an autoclave, typically used to sterilize medical equipment, to make stock and soups.

Science!

(photo via the Modernist Cuisine press kit)

Often, when I’m planning to cook, my first consideration isn’t what specific dish I’m in the mood for, but whether the recipe itself is new or classic. For example, although I may be in the mood for a pasta dinner, my real first question is: do I want to make a pasta dish I’ve make many times before and know I love, or do I want to try my hand at a new pasta dish?

So I have two cookbooks, both of which are three-ring binders filled with recipes in sheet protectors from various sources (printouts, photocopies, clippings from magazines and newspapers) and organized classically (sections for appetizers, main dishes, desserts, and so on).

One is named “Cookbook” and contains only recipes I’ve made before. The other, labeled “Unmade Recipes,” contains just that. It’s my “on-deck” resource. If I enjoy a new recipe, it graduates to the Cookbook, as happened yesterday with that Ribolliti recipe, which had been lounging in “Unmade Recipes” for a year. If I don’t enjoy a new recipe, I throw it out. I often replenish the “Unmade Recipes” binder and I’ve had it long enough that I’ve forgotten what I’ve put in there. It may be a simple and obvious system, but having two cookbooks works perfectly for me.

At Uniqlo today, I noticed they’re selling T-shirts in designs from Jim Jarmusch’s first three films. Those movies were tiny, private, impressionistic revelations to me at certain young ages. (I first rented Down By Law on VHS from my local library in the early ’90s.) So I don’t know how to take seeing them repackaged and slung like fast-fashion hipster hamburgers by what’s essentially Japan’s (or New York City’s) version of The Gap. I imagine it’s a feeling similar to that of a previous generation’s upon hearing Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” soundtracking a Minute Maid commercial.

Remember the premise of the animated film Up, in which an old man ties helium balloons to his house and pilots it like a dirigible? A team of scientists, engineers and hot-air balloon pilots did that in real life yesterday.

They tied 300 colored weather balloons to a 16-by-16-foot model house and piloted it for about an hour to a top altiude of 10,000 feet.

(link via @brainpicker; photo by the National Geographic Channel)

Mathmaticians at the University of Limerick in Ireland theorize that replacing that little plastic dingus you find in cans of certain dark beers (such as Guinness [shown above] and Boddingtons) with a little paper dingus will result in beer with a better head when poured.

Ah, beer science. More, please.

(link via the Atlantic Wire; photo via Flickr user slworking2)

This happened to me this afternoon and I deemed it deserving of my first image macro, starring the Advice Dog meme.

Designer and urban planner Candy Chang made wish-stickers for vacant storefronts. I could use these in my own neighborhood, which is in the slow-motion throes of renewal/gentrification and has reached the “first coffeeshop and it’s not a Starbucks” phase of neighborhood evolution. Yes, there are much more effective ways to enact change in one’s community, but I like the idea of making wishes concrete.

(link via bits; photo via I Wish This Was)

In Lower Manhattan, many streets are named after common things. How did these streets get those names? Part 4 in a series.

Dutch colonists developed a narrow, cobblestone alley in 1658 that was maybe one of the first paved streets in New York City and definitively one of its oldest roads of any type. Shortly thereafter debuted the first potholes in New York City, several of which I imagine still await repair by the New York City Department of Transportation. The alley wasn’t named Stone Street until 1794, though. It was first named Brewers’ Street, then High Street, then Duke Street. Designated a historic landmark in 1996 by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, Stone Street today is surfaced with faux-vintage granite paving blocks, bordered by new old-looking bluestone sidewalks, lit by replica gas lamps and bishop’s crook lampposts, and lined with mostly obnoxious bars and restaurants. People often apply the Disneyesque modifier to Times Square but it’s most disquietingly appropriate regarding Stone Street. I avoid it whenever possible.

(info via Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center and “Commercial Real Estate; Turning an Alley Into a Jewel” by David W. Dunlap in the December 6, 2000 New York Times; Stone Street photo by wallyg on Flickr)

In Lower Manhattan, many streets are named after common things. How did these streets get those names? Part 2 in a series.

The Lenape people who lived in what’s now Manhattan ate oysters. Lots of oysters. They left behind piles of oyster shells, sometimes four feet high, which were noted by early-seventeenth-century Dutch settlers. The settlers passed along their infectious diseases and confusing concepts of property rights, relieving the Lenape of both their land and lives. But they kept the oyster-eating tradition alive. After the Revolutionary War, in a fit of cartographic regicide, Queen Street was renamed Pearl Street with a nod to those pearlescent mountains. The street was later paved with oyster shells. There were oyster stands on the streets like there are hot dog stands today. As New Yorkers continued to enjoy their oysters, they dumped toxins and raw sewage into New York Harbor. This was fine for the bipeds but less so for the bivalves. By the 1970s, the oysters were gone.

(info via articles by Mark Kurlansky in The New York Times: an editorial from 2005 and an excerpt from his book, The Big Oyster (2006); photo Oyster Houses, South Street and Pike Slip, Manhattan taken April 1, 1937 by Berenice Abbott, via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

Citing new data from the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention, The Wall Street Journal notes today that more than half of U.S. dogs and cats are overweight or obese. Specifically, one-fifth of dogs and cats are obese (30% above normal weight).

(link via The Atlantic Wire; and I have no idea where I got that photo)

Related to Stuart Williams’ wireframe landscape made from fluorescent tube lamps is artist Benedict Radcliffe’s Modern Japanese Classic (2005), a lifesize wireframe Subaru—made from wire (actually 10mm steel round bar, painted white).

(photo via www.benedictradcliffe.co.uk)

KitchenAid makes an ice cream maker attachment for its stand mixers. Did you know it? Prior to receiving one for Christmas, I did not.

Last week, I broke it out for a two-quart batch of French vanilla. Oh my, yes. The taste and texture are spot on. Look at the furrowed surface of those scoops! Next up, I aim to try cinnamon or cardamom flavors. When you see me next, take note of my weight gain.

Now this is a sports profile I can appreciate. The best beard in NFL history may well be the one aboard the face of Steelers defensive end Brett Keisel. It has more than 20,000 fans on Facebook.

Full-time professional beard grower Jack Passion proclaims: “It is raw and it is real and it is healthy. It is like the coat of a wolf.”

Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger adds: “It’s its own entity.”

It’s got my vote.

(Keisel photo via brettkeisel.com)

This is getting interesting.

Photographed this morning from my platform at the Franklin Avenue subway station in Brooklyn.

Funny, I was thinking the same thing about Adam Sandler.

Spotted this afternoon on the downtown 1 train platform at Christopher Street.

“Luminous Earth Grid” was assembled in 1993 (!) by designer Stuart Williams.

From above, a 5×5 grid overlays the contours of 10 acres of pasture, like a pre-rendered wireframe model or a landscape from Battlezone. At ground level, the method was even more low-tech: 1,680 fluorescent tube lamps connected by 12 miles of wiring.

(link via this isn’t happiness)

J. D. Salinger’s favorite hamburgers were from crumby Burger King. Like Stradlater and his personal habits, this may qualify Salinger as “a secret slob.”

(Salinger headshot via the A.P.; Burger King crown photo via Miracle Box)

Dammit. I couldn’t get this Seville orange marmalade recipe by David Lebovitz (from his book Ready for Dessert) to work to my satisfaction either.

I tried it on Sunday. I halved the recipe and the only point I deviated from was to put the tidbits of rind—as well as the seeds—in a cheesecloth bag instead of loose in the pot, like the slivers of peel. I figured that’d allow pectin and flavor to leach out while sidestepping a chunky end-product, which was a beef I had with my previous marmalade attempt.

Where’d I go astray? I noticed the mix took an oddly long time to gel (1 hour and 35 minutes!) and by then, I’d over-caramelized the sugar. Once everything cooled down, the proof was in the taste: a slightly “browned” or “cooked” taste up front, followed by a craw-lingering bitterness. Not as much bitterness as in my previous attempt. But it still wasn’t sweet enough.

Yeah, it looks good (although maybe that amber hue reflects the over-caramelized taste). And the consistency was fine. I just can’t nail the flavor. I think I’ve got one attempt left in me before I yield. (And if my temperature and/or timing are off, must I invest in an instant-read digital thermometer? Beware of all enterprises that require new utensils, I say.)

Eight “to-go” coffee cups, arranged neatly on a girder in the Franklin Avenue subway station this morning.

This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried sidewalks. Without the city to tell him where to walk, the pilgrim who first sets out in fresh snowfall creates his own path. Others will likely follow, or forge their own paths as needed.

As a sidenote to trendy Detroit ruin porn, I refer you to a 2009 post from the blog Sweet Juniper regarding that city’s paths of desire, which is where I first learned of that term. (The quote above is from the post.)

With the recent heavier-than-usual snows here in New York, I’ve been thinking again about paths of desire. I haven’t been making any, though. I’ve missed or circumnavigated most of the accumulation, so this photo’s one I took of Minetta Street in Greenwich Village just after the first major Northeastern snowstorm of 2005.

Most rings bore me. This one does not. It’s grown in a lab from the couple’s own bone cells. A diamond may be forever but nothing says “I love you” more sincerely than teeth extracted for decorative purposes.

The scientists extracted the participants’ wisdom teeth to get at a sliver of bone that attaches them to the jawbone.

They then dissolve the bone mineral and extract the bone cells to go into the lab.

These are fed with nutrients and grown on a “scaffold” material called bioglass, a special bioactive ceramic which mimics the structure of bone material.

(link via 19o1 via bioart via a BBC News article from December 2006)

This is a photo by Joseph O. Holmes entitled Nethermead, taken in the meadow of the same name in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. I like it.

For those wondering about the lack of leashes, certain large spans of Prospect Park have daily off-leash hours, enjoyed as much by dogs as their owners.

(photo by Joseph O. Holmes; link via bits)

Seville oranges! (Prounounced seh-VIHL, according to Food.com.)

Have you heard of them? They’re the jerks of the citrus world. Let’s review:

1. They’re sour and bitter (for oranges, that is).
2. They’re packed with seeds.
3. They’re small and thick-skinned, so they yield little juice. I squeezed and strained one cup from six oranges.
4. They have a very small window of availability—December to February in the U.S.
5. They’re tough to track down. I’ve only been able to find them here in New York City at Dean & Deluca.
6. They’re expensive: $5/pound.

So what are Seville oranges good for, other than throwing at your foes? Let me tell you: for making marmalade, and whether muddling, infusing or juicing, for cocktail purposes.

I’m of course going for the latter.

Tonight I made a punch base for which I muddled the hell out of four full peels with a cup of demerara cane sugar. Then I let it sit for an hour in a warm room to let the sugar leach more essential oil from the peels. Then I muddled everything some more. I ended up with a mash of sugar wet with the most amazingly pungent orange scent—I’ve read it’s impossible to extract such pungency from more run-of-the-mill varieties of orange.

Next, over the course of a few separate steps, I added juice and boiling water to the oily sugar, then strained it all through cheesecloth to remove the pulp, seeds and pulverized peel remnants. I’ve since bottled this orange-drink base and stashed it in my fridge. I’d tell you more but I’m now in quiet-period trials to build the remainder of my punch, which will be distributed to a select, limited test-market on Sunday. I will report back if it turns out to my satisfaction.

About a hundred years ago, the Equitable Life Assurance Building in Manhattan had a rough moment.

It caught fire on January 9, 1912. Then it was smothered by ice, frozen from the water of firefighting efforts.

Here are the ruins, photographed on January 11 by Irving Underhill.

(I work in the rebuilt version of this building, erected in 1915 on the site of the old one.)

(Photograph via ck/ck via The Library of Congress)

Behind the scenes at work, we stage Photoshop contests. Inspired in part by Bill Murray’s alleged karaoke adventure, this morning’s challenge was “Bill Murray plus pugilism.” Here’s my entry. My colleagues agree that I’ve come a long way with my necks.

I forgot to tell you this earlier—you know, with the holidays, and all—but someone strung colored Christmas lights on the cab of one of the tower cranes at the construction site of the new 4 World Trade Center, a.k.a. 150 Greenwich Street.

(For non New Yorkers or those who aren’t up on their WTC progress reports, that building and 1 World Trade Center [formerly known as the Freedom Tower] are the only two buildings at the World Trade Center site for which construction has progressed enough to bring them above ground level. Eventually, there will be six towers on the site.)

The lights have been up since mid-December and they were still up tonight when I left work. The camera I use performs poorly in low-light situations without flash and my hands aren’t the steadiest, but here’s a photo.

This classic ’70s dessert, slightly adapted by my mom from the Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book recipe of that era, is as sweet as it is bright. The near-fluorescent glow of the pineapple, studded with bull’s-eyes of atomic-age cherries, can enliven a winter funk! I baked one today for a New Year’s Eve party tonight.

It pleases me that seven slices of pineapple line the bottom of a 9" round pan perfectly—my mom discovered that; the original recipe calls for an indeterminate number of half-rings wedged into a 8" square pan.

(photo by Kat)

Sophie Calle worried that people would forget her on her birthday.

To celebrate turning 27 on October 9, 1980, she invited 27 people to her apartment for a dinner party. At her request, one of these people was a stranger chosen by another guest. Every following birthday until her 40th, she increased the number of guests to correspond with her age and she always invited a stranger.

Instead of using the gifts she received, she kept them “as tokens of affection.” Eventually she displayed them in tall white cabinets, one per birthday. Each has a glass door labeled with the year and a list of its contents.

(information and photo of Calle’s 1980 birthday cabinet from her book, Double Game (1999))

Marina Abramović and her lover/collaborator Ulay perform “Death Self”:

This performance consisted of the two artists seated in front of each other, connected at the mouth. They took in each other’s breaths until all of their available oxygen had been used up. The performance lasted only 17 minutes, resulting in both artists collapsing unconscious to the floor, having filled their lungs with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual’s ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.

(text and photo via 19o1)

While visiting my grandma today, I found this snapshot misfiled in an album of recent color photos. She let me borrow it and when I got home, I scanned the 3" x 4" print larger than actual size. The original would have been taken with a box camera, probably a Brownie.

Taken on Easter Sunday, 1941, the photo shows my grandma when she was 21 and my grandpa when he was 26. They married that summer. Why they’re goofing around on a fence, my grandma doesn’t recall.

Vacationing at my parents’ place for Christmas is tops cheifly for family visits but these are a few of my favorite things:

It’s been below freezing here and I’ve been sitting in the living room rocking chair in front of fires I made, not doing much of anything. (I’ve been able to muster reading Shakey, Jimmy McDonough’s biography of Neil Young; it’s almost 800 pages long and I haven’t even made it past the Springfield but it’s great so far.)

I’ve been listening to albums (all of which, maybe coincidentally, were released in 1970) from my parents’ phonograph collection.

And I’ve been eating. A lot.

I hadn’t noticed this before: unfold the booklet included with the CD edition of the 1963 Christmas-song compilation album, A Christmas Gift For You (most famous for Darlene Love’s awesome “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”), and—yow!—there’s a photo of everyone’s favorite musical murderer dressed up as Santa.

I don’t need a food dehydrator to jerk beef after all! Today I made Rachel Graville’s Black Pepper Jerky recipe from the June issue of Food & Wine. (There’s an accompanying article featuring tips on making it, plus a few other jerky recipes.) The soy sauce gives it a big teriyaki flavor and the cracked pepper spices it up—I found myself brushing off the excess when I couldn’t take the burn.

I saw Weezer at the Roseland Ballroom tonight. Although their nerdy lead singer now has a bald spot, most everyone else at the show was fully haired and oddly young to my eye, especially considering that the concert replayed, song-by-song, their second album, which was released almost 15 years ago (and was considered a flop at the time).

The signs were there. The lead guitarist in the opening act wore a Def Leppard T-shirt unironically. Moshing loosened not only inhibitions but cheap beer from plastic cups. Crowd surfing was in effect. Everyone sang along with Weezer, accurately reproducing the lyrics to every song, even the quiet asides and the trio of B-sides. Cigarette lighters were hoisted aloft; flames flickered in the amplified air.

I must tell you: I sang along loudly and happily to “The Good life” (sample verse: “I don’t wanna be an old man anymore.”) but I’m now too old to go to shows like this.

(photo by C.S. Muncy for The Village Voice)

A sign in the men’s room at Kate’s Joint in the East Village.

I enjoy Dai Haifei’s “egg-style house.”

(link via Coudal Partners; photo by the Beijing Times)

On an errand near my office just now, I was thinking that it’d be cool if the bollards of Wall Street, which resemble large unimportant objects, knocked over (or giant Perfection pieces), could be redesigned by Jeff Koons as miniatures of his colored stainless-steel balloon dogs or rabbits.

Sturdy and stylish!

Plus, they’d allow pundits to make waggish comparasons of the excesses of Koons to those of Wall Street.

(bollard photo via Allen Architectural Metals, Inc.; balloon dog photo via flavorwire)

It will not surprise you to know that a large percentage of food waste occurs at home. So I would like to propose an idea for a new cooking show. It would be called American Refrigerator. (I don’t watch much TV, so I hope this show doesn’t already exist. I sort of assume it must, given that we have room for a show about people who rummage through other people’s storage lockers.)

American Refrigerator contestants would not have to be cooks, or even good cooks, but they would be required to prepare a full meal using food found only in their own home refrigerator (and, possibly, in their cupboards, although that might be reserved for a spinoff show, American Pantry). Judges would be C-list celebrities, loud celebrity chefs, and Dick Van Dyke, whom I’ve come to appreciate lately, and not just because porpoises saved his life after he fell asleep on his surfboard.

No food purchases would be permitted immediately prior to the taping of the show. That would be considered “cramming for the test.” To prevent this, the judges, camera crew and legal representation, waivers in hand, would show up unannounced at your house or apartment and barge in, pausing only to ask the location of a few folding chairs and the nearest free electrical outlet.

That’s right: my show would rely solely on the chlorofluorocarbon-kissed bounty lurking within the average American fridge. It would be a feel-good diversion for a recessionary era, like Happy Days.

I wouldn’t fare well on American Refrigerator unless there exists a recipe for Just-Mustard Fondue. Please note the photo below that depicts the mustard content of my fridge. Like the current national threat level, my current mustard threat level is “Elevated, or Yellow.”

Learn to say ‘fuck you’ to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, gasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, rumbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose-sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pionting, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding grinding grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO.

. . .

Don’t worry about cool. Make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world.

from a letter (circa the 1960s) by Sol LeWitt to fellow artist Eva Hesse, quoted in The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (2005) by Michael Kimmelman

(quote via This Isn’t Happiness, via FPO, which misquotes LeWitt, at least as Kimmelman reprints the letter in Accidental Masterpiece; photo of LeWitt’s Splotch #3 by Michael Grantland via The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Kirk Douglas in 1955

Richard Thompson in 1975

Conan O’Brien in 2010

(Douglas photo by Frank Scherschel from the set of Lust For Life via The Selvedge Yard; Thompson photo from the cover of Pour Down Like Silver via Cdcovers.cc; O’Brien photo via Team Coco)

I love the fact that at Thanksgiving all you do is sit at a table and try to get your stomach into the approximate shape of a beach ball and then go and watch a game of football on TV. This is my kind of holiday.

But perhaps the nicest, and certainly the noblest, aspect of Thanksgiving is that it gives you formal, official occasion to give thanks for all those things for which you should be grateful. I think this is a wonderful idea, and I can’t believe that it hasn’t been picked up by more countries

Bill Bryson, from his memoir, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1999)

(photo via The Triumph of Bullshit)

Sometimes New York brings me down. Punch Me Panda does the opposite of that. Artist Nate Hill dresses as the character and invites punches from passers-by. Each swing costs a penny. Punch Me Panda also makes house calls.

(photo by Rob Bennett for The Wall Street Journal; link via DTYBYWL)

I spotted these on Friday at the Duane Reade on Columbus Avenue at West 75th Street.

NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson looks at Earth from the cupola of the International Space Station.

She was photographed by ISS commander Douglas H. Wheelock who posted the image to Twitter on September 26th, the day after Dyson and several teammates returned to Earth, landing in central Kazakhstan. On Monday, NASA highlighted the photo as its Astronomy Picture of the Day, adding:

The space station orbits the Earth about once every 90 minutes. It is not difficult for people living below to look back toward the ISS. The ISS can frequently be seen as a bright point of light drifting overhead just after sunset.

I’ve been redecorating my apartment. What do you think?

Ha ha! Just kidding. I’m actually sitting in a room built inside the Christopher Henry Gallery. Everything there (except the entrance, the windows and a plant, maybe) has a colorful, obsessively crocheted slipcover. There’s stuff on shelves and tucked away in drawers and cabinets, and it’s all neatly needleworked. The walls and floors have text messages crocheted on them. Crocheted bodysuits dangle from clothes hangers. If you look carefully in the photo above, you’ll notice a dildo on the bureau. Yes, it has a nice crocheted cozy.

This is the work of Olek, a Polish-born artist living in Brooklyn. In her artist’s statement, she claims that she’s chosen to crochet “everything that enters [her] space. ” In addition to the indoor exhibit, this includes at least two bicycles parked on Elizabeth Street and a light pole on Broome. Don’t fall asleep near Olek.

For his latest book, Tree of Codes, Jonathan Safran Foer removed text from Bruno Schulz’s novel, The Street of Crocodiles.

In place of the deletions, rectangles have been die-cut into the paperback’s pages, as if someone had used an X-ACTO blade for redaction.

(link via what i learned today; photo via Vanity Fair)

I just saw a photo of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on the news and realized that, at least in that photo, he reminds me of Winona Ryder.

Is it just me?

A thousand people live in the 200 miles of flood tunnels under Las Vegas, according to the Daily Mail. Reading about this society made me think of two documentaries I saw some time ago: Dark Days (2000), on the tunnel-dwellers of New York City (which I remember seeing at the great Cleveland Cinematheque), and Steet Wise (1984), which director Martin Bell and his wife, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, made specifically to show that homelessness still existed in what was then billed as America’s most livable city.

(photo by Austin Hargrave of the Daily Mail; article link via Cynical-C)

Brian Eno, from an interview with Pitchfork posted Monday:

...I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it— like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it’s a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it’s expensive so you pay attention to how it’s looked after. And, of course, very importantly, it comes in 20-minute chunks, and after 20 minutes you have to do something— listen to it again or whatever. So, I think it’s a big difference from having a CD, which you can play on random shuffle and which is going to play for an hour or more. And then, of course, that’s quite different from downloads, where you can listen infinitely without knowing often what you’re listening to.

So, everything is a different way of listening. But also I think that there’s something that I still like about the fact of a package, like the latest report from somebody. “Okay, this is what they’re up to now; this is what they’re doing; who’s working with them?” It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn’t include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, “Who’s the bass player?” “Who did that?” “Who’s the engineer on this?”

I don’t think it’s just because I’m in the business; I always have wanted to know how the whole thing was done, what the process involved. And I don’t particularly enjoy that my music is stripped of ancillary details, and it just sort of comes out of this big tap called the Internet like water. I like some of my water to be neatly presented in a bottle [laughs]. With a label on it.

(photo of Brian Eno [left] and David Byrne from Paste magazine)

Yesterday, word arrived that several famous/infamous vendors on the Coney Island boardwalk will close as part of that area’s “deseeding” and redevelopment. Among the casualties: Cha Cha’s, “Home of Wild Women and Wise Guys!”

Verena Dobnik of the AP reports:

“They threw us out! These are not nice people!!” said the irate owner of Beer Island who by Monday afternoon had received letters via FedEx for both his open beer garden and a second business called Cha Cha’s that’s a music club serving food.

A former boxing promoter, John “Cha Cha” Ciarcia — “my name is Cha Cha, just Cha Cha, that’s my legal name!” — ran the two spots on the boardwalk for almost a decade, he said.

He has till Nov. 15 to clear out.

“They wasted my time and money, having me submit a proposal for what I was going to do to the places, and evidently they weren’t satisfied,” he said. “I’m very bitter. They never even talked to me.”

Cha Cha’s, conveniently located next door to Shoot the Freak, which is also closing, hosted the wedding reception of my friends, Kate and Justin, on August 8, 2009.

Guests were asked to dress in vintage/retro garb. After the ceremony at Our Lady of Solace, we were handed bowls of Froot Loops to throw instead of rice. With a New Orleans-style jazz band in the lead, we processed with open parasols to the boardwalk, adding a few strangers to our queue on the way.

Inside, Cha Cha’s was grubby but decked out in a comfortable, tacky style, splashed with colored lights. Piñatas and stuffed animals dangled from the ceiling. Belly dancers and fire-eaters took the stage. We wondered what the priest, who was in the audience, thought of The Squidling Bros. Circus Sideshow. We danced. Al Duvall, the newlywed’s favorite local banjo player, played a set.

On the roof, which was carpeted in artificial grass, stood tables of BBQ and tiki-style appetizers. (I remember kabobs of marshmallows and pineapple.) We could see the ocean, the boardwalk and, yes, Shoot the Freak. As the sun set, the Wonder Wheel lit up and loomed large in the background. At nearby MCU Park, the Brooklyn Cyclones lost their game in extra innings but celebrated regardless with a round of fireworks. We had a great view of it all.

Dives seldom survive. Freddy’s, my favorite neighborhood bar, got knocked down in May to make room for the Atlantic Yards. I wish the ghost of its warped bartop would spank developer Bruce Ratner. But New York City always changes and nostalgia is a seductive liar, so I’ll conclude this indulgence. See ya, Cha Cha’s.

As a Hitchcock fan, my favorite Random Internet Photo of a Halloween Costume so far is this Tippi Hedren getup from The Birds. Well played.

(photo via /dev/random)

McKinley’s Delight, a Manhattan variant, has been my drink of choice lately. In The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book (1935), Albert Stevens Crockett writes:

Just why it was McKinley’s delight, I am unable to ascertain. The chances are that President McKinley never found out whether it was or not. In its favor, I may mention that the [Waldorf-Astoria] Bar was a great hangout for the G.O.P.’s of yesteryear, who may have passed their enthusiasm for their candidates across the counter for the barman to translate into terms of liquid intensity.

Here’s the recipe as printed in that book. I’ve bracketed my notes.

(photo of McKinley, with crop marks, via The New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

“Workers on the Empire State Building” (1931), a refreshingly modern photo of the landmark skyscraper’s construction by the great Lewis Hine.

(via The New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

From a review of Jane Brox’s book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light:

...due to electric light pollution, “two-thirds of all Americans and half of all Europeans can no longer see the Milky Way, our own galaxy, in the nighttime sky.” According to [Brox,] the sight of it has become so unfamiliar to people that during the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, “emergency organizations [...] received hundreds of phone calls from people wondering whether the sudden brightening of the stars and the appearance of a ‘silver cloud’ (the Milky Way) had caused the quake.”

Photo taken behind my grandparents’ farmhouse, Delphos, Ohio, March 30, 2002, 9:42 p.m., 15-second shutter speed.

Thirty years ago, in 1980, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City bought Jasper Johns’s Three Flags for $1 million, the first painting by a living artist ever to have a seven-figure price tag.

(photo via whitney.org. Fact via a Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker, “Art And Commerce,” by Rebecca Mead, October 18, 2010, p. 26)

The cover of the September 27, 2010 issue of New York magazine, which I got in the mail today, resembles the cover of The Rolling Stones’ 1976 album, Black and Blue.

That is all.

I know you were wondering how effective that sign in the kitchenette was. While I was on vacation, it was taken down, then replaced with this:

I.
What kind of bug was Gregor Samsa, the guy who wakes up one morning and finds himself turned into...what, exactly?

It depends on how one translates author Franz Kafka’s German. I learned it as either “monstrous insect,” which is vague (Mothra? An angry ladybug?) or “giant cockroach,” which was quaint until I moved to New York City (the Midwest has a low cockroach population).

Vladimir Nabokov, in a talk collected in “Lectures on Literature,” thought Gregor was a beetle that looked like this:

He explains:

A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown.

....

In the original German text, the old charwoman calls him Mistkafer, a “dung beetle.” It is obvious that the good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly. He is not, technically, a dung beetle. He is merely a big beetle.”

Not everyone agrees with this insect-assessment, Nabokov himself admitted.

II.
In my apartment’s kitchen, I’ve been having a slight issue with cockroaches. I have been committing acts of insecticide with Raid Max roach spray, which comes in a dark blue aerosol can, the subtitle of which is Mata Cucarachas. Once dispensed, it smells sweetly toxic, like lawn fertilizer, and as it settles, it smells of kerosene. I keep my kitchen clean, so it’s a mystery where these bugs are coming from. (Although, as noted above, I do live in New York City.) I seal all shelf-stable food in glass jars, Ziploc bags or plastic containers. I empty my trash and recyclable bins and bags often. I’ve kept the floors swept free of crumbs. I wash my dishes and don’t let them languish in the sink.

At work, in the sixth-floor kitchenette, people leave dishes in the sink even though there’s a small dishwasher right there that the kind folks from Office Services run every evening. Long ago, Office Services taped up a sign above the sink. It reads:

Please be courteous to your coworkers.

Place all dishes to be washed in the dishwasher.

Also, do not take kitchen utensils that don’t belong to you.¹

The sign was ignored. Today, someone taped up a sign, which I suspect was not sanctioned by Office Services, right next to the other sign. I appreciate the grammatical errors and the black-and-white cockroach photos included for illustration and emphasis:

Maybe I will name the cockroaches in my kitchen “Gregor.” Better yet, I will name them “Vladimir.”

III.
There’s a featured section on corn in the September issue of Food & Wine magazine, which I got in the mail yesterday. Most field corn in the U.S.—37 percent of the nearly 86.5 million acres planted (in 2009)—is grown to feed livestock. And the raising of livestock consumes two-thirds of the world’s farmland and generates 20 percent of the greenhouse gases driving global warming, according to this Observer article from last week, which also proposes a solution to the “meat crisis”—eating insects.

Professor Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at a university in the Netherlands and author of a UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) paper on the subejct, lays out what he sees as the advantages:

“The world population will grow from six billion now to nine billion by 2050 and we know people are consuming more meat. Twenty years ago the average was 20kg, it is now 50kg, and will be 80kg in 20 years. If we continue like this we will need another Earth.”

Van Huis is an enthusiast for eating insects but given his role as a consultant to the FAO, he can’t be dismissed as a crank. “Most of the world already eats insects,” he points out.² “It is only in the western world that we don't. Psychologically we have a problem with it. I don’t know why, as we eat shrimps, which are very comparable.”³

Yes, insects are high in protein, vitamins and minerals, and farming them produces far less greenhouse gas, methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia than livestock. But what red-blooded American would eat insects, except on a dare? We’d sooner eat our dogs.

I thought this especially after I glanced at insect sushi. One of the varieties mentioned in the original Telegraph article notes that the Argentine Cockroach recipe (“Cut open shell, scoop out meat and fry with butter. Replace in shell to serve on top of salad.”) “has no smell at all, but the texture of tender fish.”

Why should eating bugs be any weirder than eating fish, or a cow for that matter? Maybe because bugs are seen mostly as a nuisance, as noted above. (See also: mosquitos, midges, gnats, wasps and hornets, bedbugs, houseflies, lice, ticks, fruit flies, those parasitic worms that enter humans via their eyeball, etc.) I have never heard of a cow infestation, although clearly that’d be equal parts amusing and disgusting. I’m going to forgo eating bugs and stick with eating less meat.

¹ Yes, I work with some assholes. [back]
² Willingly, that is. 80 percent of the world’s nations, even. [back]
³ One of several reasons I don’t eat shrimp anymore. This is one of the others. [back]

As a kid raised on Pecan Sandies, I can confirm that these pecan shortbread cookies, from the October 2009 issue of Food & Wine (and, by extension, my save-this-recipe three-ring binder), are an excellent and superior substitute. Rich, crisp and savory. And, because they’re a roll-and-slice style cookie, simple to make.

Vanilla beans: nuts to those. They rank in what I’m going to call the Saffron Pantheon of Spices. A jar containing two two-inch-long scrawny strands of bean runs more than $15—at Stop & Shop, no less. I substituted one teaspoon of pure vanilla extract per bean; the version of the recipe I've reprinted below includes this edit.

Also, my yield on the recipe was about 18 cookies while the reported yield was 2 1/2 dozen. Oh, man: but so good. In a sense, I’m glad I didn’t get those reported 30 or else I’d have eaten most of ’em by now.

“Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books,” reads a pullquote by fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld from a magazine spread that’s been making the rounds.

There he is, pictured seated in a room walled with books. A spiral staircase twists upward to even more books. A 2007 New Yorker profile of Lagerfeld states that his personal library contains at least 150,000 books.

I read yesterday about how Camden, New Jersey is planning to permanently close its library system by the end of the year. The city’s three libraries have a total of 187,000 books (37,000 more than Karl’s collection), all of which will be donated, auctioned, stored or destroyed.

I don’t know this as fact but I suspect that the sort of people who wonder why we still have or need libraries, what with the internet and its fruited plain of free, reliable information, are the exact people who haven’t set foot in a library since school, or ever.

Here’s why we need libraries: not everyone has or makes as much money as you do, and libraries offer access to many things for free, namely books. But also internet access; the photo above shows Miguel Garcia and Damarys Rios (with their daughters), looking online for jobs at Camden’s downtown library.

Libraries also offer access to information professionals called librarians; they're like the web, only smarter and containing much less porn.

There are even free movies at libraries. In fact, they’re the largest lender in the country: 2.1 million DVDs a day compared to Netflix’s 2 million per day.

On a soppy personal note, I have proof that libraries whetted my creativity and made me a better, smarter person. I recall fondly a childhood of summer reading programs and volunteering to shelve books and organize card catalogs. Later, in college, I read many interesting articles on microfilm when I was supposed to be reading many uninteresting articles on microfilm for scholastic endeavors. Plus, you know, all those books.

If books are drugs, let’s keep libraries open, lest we suffer withdrawal.

(Camden library photo by Tom Gralish for Philly.com.)

Monday, August 9 Update: The libraries of Camden have been given a reprieve.

Parked blocking a crosswalk.

Regular exercise doesn’t appear to fully undo the effects of prolonged sitting in cars, at desks and on the couch.

Your muscles, unused for hours at a time, change in subtle fashion, and as a result, your risk for heart disease, diabetes and other diseases can rise.

(photo via the NYPL Digital Gallery)

File this under Toys I Haven’t Thought About in, Like, Forever: the Little Professor! I had one of these as a lad. It was made by Texas Instruments in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Instead of an LCD it had a display backed by a row of red LEDs. The yellow buttons were stiff and made a satisfying click when pressed. Note that it looks like a calculator but it’s not (there’s no “=” button); it’s a game that throws up a series of math problems that need to be solved. Ultimately, though, I don’t think the Professor made me enjoy math any more than I already did (and still so).

See also my top-five “kit” toys and my memories of the Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone, which I’ve noticed makes an appearance in Toy Story 3.

(photo via The Science Museum)

Using a chunk of the money my grandma gave me for Christmas, I attended a classic cocktail class taught by cocktail historian David Wondrich at Astor Center back on April 9. Only now have I dusted my notes to write this belated entry.

The word “resurrecting” might be inaccurate, admitted David Wondrich as he served a Russian Cocktail made from a lost century-old recipe—possibly the first on record for a vodka-based mixed drink. No, tonight, we’d dabble in necrology, blowing the dust from brittle bartending guides and back issues of long-folded New York dailies. We’d attempt to reassemble the tipples via modern methods and ingredients, Meddling With Powers We Couldn’t Possibly Comprehend. We’d become mixology acolytes. We’d get toasty in the process.

But one must begin with a clear head. Back in the day, cocktails were more complex. Measurements and techniques were written in a shorthand that no longer exists. Some ingredients are gone and can’t even be Googled. (Well, now they can—it’s gotten challenging to unearth drinks that haven’t been rediscovered by some hip bar or rival cocktail historian.)

For example, the ruhinoy in the Russian Cocktail: what is that? The original recipe, which offhandedly notes the drink has been “much appreciated in the Northern part of Europe” and is now appreciated by connoisseurs at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans, doesn’t say. At first Wondrich thought it could have been a corruption of ryabinovaya (rowanberry liqueur), then learned it’s an extinct Russian cordial made of cherry stones. Cherry Heering mixed with a splash of Kirschwasser served as a substitute. The funky, nutty flavor of the Kirschwasser, a light and sweet brandy distilled from whole cherries (including their pits), lends a lightness not present in the sweet, dark Heering liqueur but found in contemporary Russian cordials.

Wondrich had perfected the Russian Cocktail adaptation beforehand but he hadn’t touched any of the next four on the syllabus, all recipes likely unmade by anyone living today. It was also the first time, he said, that he’d used his two-liter cocktail shaker (allegedly purchased in a classic metric-system conversion error), in order to make drinks for the class at once.

He made for the class a dry martini using maybe the first recipe (1891), with modern equivalents of Plymouth gin and splashes of Grand Marnier, orange bitters and Noilly Prat vermouth, with a twist of lemon peel. Exactitude in small amounts hadn’t a chance—Wondrich defined “a drop” as “whatever spilled off my barspoon there.” He deemed the finished product light, brisk and bracing.

As an aside to break up these woozy blocks of text, here’s a photo of my class workstation, complete with barware, glassware, copious notes and an egg.

Cocktails simplify over time, shedding frills and minor flavors to satisfy hurried barkeeps.¹ The Jack Rose is a great example of this. Here are the contents of a modern Jack Rose: applejack, lime juice (or lemon; each citrus has its camp) and grenadine. Wondrich found a recipe (again: possibly the first!) from the very-rare 1910 edition of Jacks’s Manual and it has more than twice the number of ingredients, yet retains a certain Jack Rose-ness.

I don’t think the drink was named after him but the Jack of the Manual was one Jack Grohusko, bartender at an Italian restaurant on William Street in Manhattan. Things were different then. He would have been familiar with the Wall Street Jigger, for instance. Back then a normal jigger was two ounces but the Wall Street variety was 1.5 ounces for the traders who nipped in for a quick midday drink and couldn’t afford to leave completely drunk. This adaptation uses the classic bonus ingredients but returns the jigger of ’jack to post-5:00 p.m. proportions.

I picked up some handy tips making this one. Sugar doesn’t dissolve well in spirits so always mix a cocktail’s nonalcoholic ingredients first. For the raspberry syrup, Wondrich alluded to its long-ago popularity by noting it “was the St. Germain of the 1910s.” (He used a brand called Marco Polo.) He also pointed out that he prefers to use applejack, a blend of brandy and grain alcohol, instead of Laird’s traditional bonded apple brandy, which is straight 100-proof craziness and often too harsh for cocktails.

Next, the class crafted a drink from the same manual as the Russian Cocktail. It was a disaster. The Venus combined an egg yolk with dry gin, creme Yvette, lime juice and muddled mint. “This hasn’t been made in 99 years!” said Wondrich, by way of a toast. The group sipped and there was a round of silent frowns. He added, charitably: “This needs to be made with cognac, not gin.” One thing I did learn from this exercise was to not overshake a cocktail with mint—for this one, we treated the mint tenderly, muddling it with the Yvette, then discarding it.

We closed class with a Rag Time Cooler from 1912. My notes get sparse at this point for a variety of reasons but this obscure mingling of spirits was made with two teaspoons lemon juice and one teaspoon sugar, stirred with 1/3 jigger each of dry catawba (a semi-dry white wine not included in Astor’s robust inventory but made in Northern Ohio—we substituted German Riesling), cognac and arrack (for a “funky edge”). We then topped it with seltzer, stirred and strained it into a Collins glass and added a pineapple-slice garnish. Refreshing!

That was the official end of the semester and more than 3/4 of the class left. But I lingered because I figured any outing involving a renowned barkeep/drinker would sport some afterhours action. Sure enough, Wondrich said, what the heck, shame to let these leftover ingredients go to waste. He called the remaining 10 or so of us down from our seats to gather ’round and make a Silver Fizz, a restorative concoction about which he’s written, “Before Alka-Seltzer, there was the Silver Fizz. Damn you, progress!” I toasted Wondrich with this one. Good show!

¹ Yet, note that the converse of this is true among the Tiki species of cocktail. The original Trader Vic and Donn Beach recipes are much more simple than the juiced-up, fruit-festooned versions often seen today. [back]

In the ’60s and ’70s, color art photography by the likes of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore¹ bugged viewers, who deemed it “kitschy, garish and vulgar.” It also featured snapshot-subjects, which further annoyed critics then (and now, I suppose).

What I was thinking about today, though, was how the light and color of that time were captured—possibly even created—by these pioneers through a combination of equipment, film and printing techniques that have since become extinct.

In 1994, for instance, Kodak axed the dye-transfer process used by Eggleston to signature effect. And at points in their professional careers, both Eggleston and Shore dropped off their negatives at drugstore photo labs for processing, a service that’s disappearing.

I may forget the color and light of a day long ago, so I rely instead on contemporaneous photos. They’re not as accurate as my memory—they’re singular moments, cropped and reproduced as blends of plastic, paper and chemicals (or sensors and pixels). I wonder: did ’70s sunlight really have a specific shade or intensity? Yet I trust the photos and let their subtle cues of color, contrast and grain inform my recall and fuel my nostalgia.

(Shore photo via International Center of Photography. Eggleston photos via egglestontrust.com. Shore journal via Aaron Schuman Photography.)

¹ Trivia Time: Shore’s photo of the hotel room is 37 years old today. Here’s a scan of his journal entry (more like an index, really) for that day. I wrote about a few details of that day (and that summer) in a previous entry on Shore.

[back]

Suggestive of the American flag, the Emerson Patriot Aristocrat tabletop tube radio was designed by Norman Bel Geddes and manufactured from Catalin, Bakelite and Tenite plastics by the Emerson Radio and Phonograph Company in 1939.

It was issued to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Emerson and is now part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

During the World War II era, Bel Geddes designed additional modernistic radio casings for RCA, Majestic Radio, Federal Telephone & Radio and Philco; the latter sold more than four million of his sets in the early 1930s, capturing 50 percent of the North American market. He’s remembered most for Futurama, the General Motors Pavilion he designed for the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair.

(photo and some facts via a now-ended eBay auction by seller Catalin Radio; additional facts from Designing Modern America by Christopher Innes)

A photo of the rare self-published edition of Upton Sinclair’s novel, Oil! from 1927.

(via AbeBooks.com)

Sunkist navel oranges have hit 50 cents each at Hoon’s, my local fruit-bodega. As it gets warmer, they’ll go lower, but I wanted to get my drink on tonight so I bought one after work and whipped up a Ward Eight or so.

How is it I’d never previously home-made one of these? (I’ve had at least one, a few years back at the Flatiron.)

On account of these tough economic times, I reached for my dusty Old Overcoat. I agree with Wondrich’s commentary on this one: the fruit juices—plus that sweet tad of grenadine—muzzle the rye’s bite without silencing its bark. It’s nice because it occurs to me now the Ward Eight is the closest to a summer whiskey-based cocktail I’ve ever made. I’m sick of calling warm-weather cocktails “refreshing” but dang it, it is, and so be it.

I photographed this note left on a parked car last night in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. The coup de grâce is the crossed-out “1 foot” and the replacement “2 feet” with a different colored marker.

High marks for penmanship, too.

I am amused that this inspirational quote on excellence, which is applied to a wall in my office, uses double straight quotes (otherwise known as inch marks) instead of the correct “curly quotes.”

Someone attempted to make my apartment building’s elevator smell better by hanging this air-freshener in it. Good luck with that.

My Canon PowerShot S500 is dying. It transmutes scenes to buggy robot memories, abstract close-ups of CRT displays with color palettes of sun-leached posters in the windows of old barber shops and failing video-rental stores. (The second one reminds me of the cover of My Bloody Valentine’s late-’80s album Isn’t Anything.)

I need a new camera.

I like this shot because I don’t think there’s ever a clean or accurate-color view of this costume in Blade Runner: either the lighting’s too dark/gritty or Harrison’s running around chasing replicants.

Nice tie.

(photo via You Might Find Yourself)

Los Angeles, 1939: Director Alfred Hitchcock, his wife Alma and daughter Patricia take a morning stroll with their dogs, Edward IX and Mr. Jenkins near their apartment at the Wilshire Palms.

(photo by Peter Stackpole, via junk bond trader)

July 19, 1944: Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman helps his wife Bess make breakfast by putting bread in the toaster in their kitchen in Washington, D.C. Truman is predicted to be a candidate for Vice President of the United States.

(photo via Bettmann/CORBIS)

Who says the credit crunch is all bad?

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.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks resembles my dad.

Then on Tuesday, The A.V. Club published the following photo of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and I thought, holy cats, Jules Feiffer resembles my dad, too!

When they film the biopic of my dad’s life (Forever Young), I nominate Sacks and/or Feiffer as my dad’s stunt double for the bicycle-accident scene.

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?

This is the view I see almost every weekday, walking to my apartment down West 192nd Street from the 190th Street station of the A train. I’ve always enjoyed the “stacks” of apartment buildings rising like a mountain above Broadway.

Here’s the interesting bit: a commenter for Isabel Lugo’s recent blog entry on population densities in the U.S. provided a link to a satellite view of the country’s “densest block” And guess what? That view features the same set of buildings that I see daily.

By the way, the “block” the post’s author and commenters refer to doesn’t have anything to do with a city block: it’s a “census block group,” the government’s definition for which makes me woozy.

Suffice to say, those clusters of buildings I see each day comprise part of the most densely populated area in the U.S. That’s cool.

When I.T. Guy switched out my eye-cancer-causing CRT at work with a brand new 19-inch Dell flat screen monitor, I was amused to note a new benefit: the extended area in which to clutter my desktop with stray files. In my photo, note the barren area on the right third of my desktop. Not for long will it stay that way!

My neighborhood 99-cent store changes its window displays infrequently.

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.

Tonight I found this origami swan made from a $1 bill, perched on the uptown platform of the 1 train at the West 86th Street station

Better living through geometry: that’s inventor-visionary-crackpot Buckminster Fuller, in a geodesic nutshell. The man was bursting with ideas, most predicated on the idea that geometric symmetry is a form of perfection and, specifically, that the tetrahedron was “the most fundamental, structurally sound form found in nature.” The shape appears in most of his designs, including his best known, the geodesic sphere or dome, readily recognizable as Walt Disney World’s Spaceship Earth within Epcot Center; Wikipedia alleges the sphere’s shape and name were inspired, uncredited, by Fuller.

He believed in low-cost, easy-to-assemble structures that could be mass produced. Sensing kindred spirits in the folks at the Butler Manufacturing Co., mass-producer of grain bins (my grandfather had two such “Butler Buildings” on his farm in Delphos, Ohio), he partnered with the firm to develop squat silo-like housing for the military during World War II. The government approved Fuller’s design and the Army put a few hundred to use as operating rooms and houses, but steel rationing killed the project.

After the war, his thoughts turned to all that aluminum that was no longer needed for planes and developed Dymaxion Dwelling Machines, housing for the new suburban masses. On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art within a scale model of an idyllic cul-de-sac, the shiny aluminum spheroids are banded with florescent light. They resemble glowing alien hamburgers. Two people could assemble one in two days; only one was ever produced.

Most of Fuller’s projects unfolded this way: a passionate process of brainstorming and sketches, models and patents, resulting in little practicality. That didn’t stop him, though, and it didn’t stop the seeds of his ideas from sprouting later. I see a connection between Fuller’s Butler and Dwelling Machine plans and the suggestion today to use surplus steel shipping containers as affordable housing.

A black-and-white video of Fuller, standing stiff and blinking in a three-piece suit, shows him discussing the features of his large 4D House, which was suspended from the ground and shaped like a child’s toy top. On tape he doesn’t appear to be the wacky-inventor personality I thought he’d be, but professorial, monotonic and dry. Although that makes for unintentional entertainment when he rattles off selling points, such as how children, should they fall in a 4D House, would literally bounce back from the “pneumatic floors.” They could also, Fuller added, play baseball inside; the tetrahedral windows of the domed enclosure were constructed of certain materials connected so solidly that they could withstand tornadoes and an airplane crash. (Fuller doesn’t mention the impact playing baseball inside his domed home would have on the residents’ furniture, presumably not constructed with roughhouse-resistant geometry.)

Fuller wasn’t all spheres and symmetry: unsatisfied with the distortion in the Mercator projection world map, he developed the Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map, which resembles an unfolded piece of complicated origami. And parked in the Whitney’s lobby is an energy-efficient, three-wheeled Dymaxion car, looking very like a whale and, as evidenced on video, moving very like an agitated fish.

The exhibit features little evidence on the popular reception of Fuller and his ideas (nor popular architectural trends concurrent with his timeline, which would have been useful for purposes of comparison) although I enjoyed the clever acrostic written by avant-garde composer John Cage for Fuller’s 85th birthday. How did those two men connect: Cage, master of chaos, and Fuller, master of order?

Spotted serendipitously on the subway afterwards, a quote from Galileo served as the sum of Fuller’s philosophy:

The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Its symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to understand a single word; without which there is only a vain wandering through a dark labyrinth.

I don’t know what’s more surprising: the erroneous apostrophe on this sign in the unisex restroom at the Roebling Tea Room (seemingly a more-literate-than-average establishment) or the fact that an overeducated hipster with a pen or Sharpie hasn’t yet corrected it.

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).

Beth, Mike and I immersed ourselves in the cacophony of David Byrne’s Playing the Building installation today at the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan.

The second floor of the building hasn’t been open to the public in decades and the lower half of the room in which the exhibit rests has been whitewashed, flat over pipes, molding and wall. An antique organ placed near the center of the room is wired by what looks like surgical tubing connected to devices affixed to the room’s pillars, pipes, walls and other elements to make a different noise with each keypress of the organ: tapping, clanking, clanging, tapping, bellowing, whistling. Very strange. It sounds like this.

Needless to say, we needed a beer afterwards so Beth suggested the Staten Island Ferry: an excellent idea. It's a free 20-minute ride—welcomely breezy on a day like today, stifled by humidity and sun—with excellent views of the Statue of Liberty. Best, they sell beer on board for $3.75. And I’ve now set foot in all five boroughs of New York: to prevent hobos and exhibition-goers from having too good a time, what with the beer and the breeze, the DOT requires all joyriders to exit at Staten Island then immediately reboard the same boat for the trip back to Manhattan.

I spotted this bicycle chained-up across the street from Madison Square Garden on West 35th Street. It was plastered with MetroCards.

Here’s a closeup:

Dana and I stopped by the Roebling Tea Room on a lark for brunch. I liked this place. High ceilings, large arched windows, filled with light, main room has a long bar. The wainscoted walls in the large front room are papered in an old pattern of an English foxhunt. An intermediary area in the back has couches for sitting around with tea or a cocktail. In the back is a smaller room when we sat, open to a fenced-in patio area with a few picnic tables, and divided by windows with flowers and ivy in planters. It’s tight seating but relaxing.

The small menu, which changes daily, is typewritten—items and descriptions from the black ribbon, prices from the red—with quirky spacing and exciting spelling mistakes (“raisen,” “brussel sprout leaves”).

Dana had the baked pancake (cleverly billed as “A Big Baked Pancake,”) which spanned her plate and was easily enough for two. Although billed as featuring stewed rhubarb, it was made mostly with stewed pears, which was disappointing but still tasty. My baked cheddar eggs were simple and satisfying, and had two whole hard-boiled eggs buried in a ramekin of baked cheddar cheese. Another ramekin of grits arrived on the side, accompanied by thick slices of raisin-fennel toast and apple butter.

I drank a refreshing Pimm’s (made with the gin-based Pimm’s No. 1 Cup, cucumber and lemon-ginger tea). Dana had a Supercoffee, a mug of amped-up Irish coffee with whiskey, Irish cream and Grand Marnier.

Roebling Tea Room

• 143 Roebling, Brooklyn, NY
• (718) 963-0760
• Meal 32 of 52: Baked cheddar eggs ($8.50), a side of bacon ($2) and a Pimm’s ($7).

This fellow was perched atop a FDNY firebox on Broadway at West 192nd Street, just outside Los Hermanos supermarket, where I buy my Brooklyn Lager for a buck-and-a-half a bottle. He’s made almost entirely of discarded produce—a literal melon-head with ears of halved oranges and a flower on the peak of his cap.

You’ll be pleased to see that your own computer area at home is not as depressing as you may have suspected.

I found this Polaroid today in the street near the intersection of Seventh Avenue and West 17th Street.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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).

Here’s an idea that wasn’t meant to take off: an airport vendor selling nothing but magnets. This was in Terminal E at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and because the store was shuttered and apparently being overtaken by a Cowboys souvenir store, I would guess it was as useful a specialty store as The Leftorium would be in real life.

Today for Purim, I made hamentaschen. How would I grade the taste? A solid “A.” Texture? “B-.” (I could have rolled the dough thinner.) Fun making the recipe? Also an “A,” maybe an “A+” because I enjoy working with dough.

But the shape? “See me after class.”

See, they’re supposed to be tri-cornered, like the hat of Purim’s villain, Haman, but mine resemble jelly-babies snug in miniature cradle boards. And the cookies that didn’t have tightly pinched corners came undone during baking and resembled large open sores. I, of German heritage, felt I’d defiled a sacred Jewish ritual and that when I next peeked in the oven to check on the prune butter-filled variety I baked following a batch of raspberry, a bolt of pure YHWH would shoot out and punch a hole through my chest just like it did to the Nazis who opened the ark in Raiders.

I don’t know what about “form circle of dough into a triangle” I didn’t understand. This hearkens back to my challenges with spatial relations. Remember those standardized tests you’d take in grade school with a sharp #2 pencil and on the last page there was always that mind-twister with an unfolded paper dodecahedron that had different patterns on each segment and you had to imagine what it looked like assembled, rotated 120 degrees and viewed in a mirror? I was never good at that and grumbled about what use it was in real life. Well, it’s useful for hamentascnen making.

Cities are noisy. There is always noise. Traffic and airplanes and people. Horns and sirens and alarms. Dogs barking. There’s a party across the way or someone playing guitar upstairs. Even in a city’s distant reaches, in the dead of a summer night, the fans of air conditioners thrum.

Maybe the sounds of cities aren’t cacophonies but more like the familiar tumble of an orchestra tuning itself before a symphony: those trills, scales and bleats that soon shake themselves into order. The composer John Cage considered this and wrote scores for two cities, 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs for New York City in 1977 and A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity a year later.

He plotted random points on maps then connected the dots with a straightedge and felt-tip pens. The score for Chicago looks like this:

Cage didn’t offer explicit instructions on how to realize his scores. His own interpretation was to make each point where the map-lines intersected represent a note. Then, in New York, he tape-recorded couples waltzing at each of the 147 intersections and assembled the snippets in random order for playback. In Chicago, he did much the same but let his recorder run without preplanned activity in the background, to capture raw city sound. The result would have sounded like this, neither melodious nor congruous. But as an idea, I like it.

To play the Chicago score in 1982, Cage spliced together random lengths of his city-sound audiotape and broadcast the results from 12 loudspeakers mounted on a steamboat docked at Navy Pier and trained west. What a noise that must have been. And how the city must have felt, startled by the unfamiliarity of its own voice: “Do I really sound like that?”

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.)

One of the guys in the production department, which is so pixelated with digital technology that I don't even think it has a fax machine anymore, was getting testy. A colleague was telling him that a client needed to fax something to our office. “Tell them if they need to fax it, they can just as easily email it as a PDF,” he said. And that was that, for he had decreed a no-fax zone.

Do people still use faxes? They pop up in publishing, the print-heavy industry in which I toil, or at least at our particular company, where insertion orders and registration forms still sometimes arrive over phone lines in bursts of screeches and static. Although more often, these orders and forms are signed, scanned on a newfangled copier and arrive to our inboxes as a tidy PDF, which most recipients then print anyway. So much for “saving a tree”; we’ve died of dysentery on the Paperless Trail.

I suspect also that large corporations and governments, both lovers of the bureaucratic paper trail and useless administrative positions to file said trail, are responsible in large part for keeping the fax from devolving to cassette tape or Polaroid camera status, hoarded and supported only by aficionados, hipsters and grandparents.

I recently spoke with a rep for the newly elected mayor of Philadelphia, who’s a swell guy, and decided to welcome His Honor to keynote one of our real estate events. His scheduler insisted that we handle the invitation by fax. Requesting the mayor’s presence by speaking, as I’d just done, wouldn’t cut it. Nor would an email. I needed to wait for the scheduler to fax me a Request the Mayor’s Presence form, fill it out with a pen, then fax it back. Eventually and incongruously, a week later, someone emailed me to confirm that the mayor had agreed to speak at our event. What an archaic trail and trial.

In 1977, during a fit of poetry, optimism and metallurgy, some nerds at NASA shot into space a phonograph made from copper, plated with gold and jacketed in an aluminum sleeve. They sent up two copies, to be precise, each affixed to the interior of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, courses set for infinity. The hope of the nerds was that eons from now, aliens might intercept the record, listen to its 27 songs representing the world’s countries and cultures, and know more about us.¹

The nerds acknowledged they were dealing with a low and particular form of audio technology, so they embossed pictographic operating instructions on the jacket. They also included a spare cartridge and needle, possibly recognizing that by the time of any interception—no earlier than 1990, when the Voyagers would pass Pluto—that even extraterrestrials would have upgraded to at least eight-track tapes.

Never mind the chance, remotely slim in the vastness of space, that any alien would find this object intact and know what to make of it. Never mind that the inhabitants of Earth, despite widely varying levels of intelligence, invariably assume that life beyond our planet will be an awful lot like us, only sporting pajamas and weirder foreheads. Never mind all that; this was a cool idea, to burn a civilization’s Greatest Hits onto a golden disc.

I’ve been skimming through the book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record², reading of the wrestling over that 90-minute mix, particularly the pop songs and music from America that were debated for inclusion.

In one instance, the resident conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington called the Smithsonian’s curator of jazz at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, awakening him to ask whether the Miles Davis version of Gershwin’s “Summertime” would be appropriate to send to the stars. It was rejected. So was the whole of country music, offered as an option because the people who built the spaceships listened to it. Further bickering arose over Elvis, Jefferson Starship (who volunteered music for the record), Bob Dylan (“would the music stand if the words were incomprehensible?” asked Carl Sagan, a model of perfect diction) and the Beatles, of whom Sagan writes:

We wanted to send “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles, and all four Beatles gave their approval. But the Beatles did not own the copyright, and the legal status of the piece seemed too murky to risk.

C’mon, Carl; you should’ve sucked it up and sent it out. What did you have to lose? You’re slinging the song into a void billions and billions of miles from Apple Corps and its pugnacious lawyers.

But no contemporary pop made the cut. The four pieces of American music pressed to disc were a Navajo night chant and three songs by African American musicians: Louis Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues,” Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

Other than praising Sagan & Co. for sidestepping Armstrong’s most-popular and least-representative track, the sappy “What a Wonderful World”, I’m impressed by the selection of “Dark Was the Night.”³. It’s just Johnson and his guitar, which he played by sliding his pocketknife over the strings; his hums and moans; and his blindness and loneliness. His stepmother blinded him, throwing lye in his face when he was seven. During most of his life, he played on the streets of Texas, “collecting tips in a cup wired to his guitar neck,” writes blues historian Jas Obrecht. Ailing and rejected by the hospital, Johnson died of pneumonia, sleeping on a waterlogged bed covered with newspaper.

For all the American flags waving in slow motion on Earth and those bolted to the moon, for all the space program’s hopeful rhetoric, not as much talk covers the fact that space is big and we’re little, looking for food, water, a dry place to sleep, and company. That’s just what you get—what you feel—with Johnson and his spooky little space-song, mankind’s most appropriate mix-pick.

Bonus mp3: “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)” by Blind Willie Johnson, recorded on December 3, 1927, the same version pressed to the Voyager disc.

Related: NASA’s page on the Golden Record.

¹ Also encoded in the audio spectrum of the record are 117 pictures, greetings in 54 human languages and one from the whales (remember, this was the ’70s) and 19 “sounds of Earth,” but for the purposes of this post, I’m only interested in the music. [back]

² It’s out of print. Snaps to the Strand for having a copy. [back]

³ In the middle of writing this post, the internet informed me that The West Wing incorporated this song and its involvement in the Voyager mission as a plot point. I missed that episode. But now I kind of want to see it. [back]

You know what’s also contagious? Flower-shaped carbuncles. Those look painful. But she’s taking her condition in stride and probably smells nice, or nicer than staphylococcus pus.

My friend Allison is staging a Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner series, the first of which is a potluck with a “local/sustainable/seasonal” theme, so I figured I’d be spending time at the famous Union Square Greenmarket. But hold on: in Manhattan alone, there are 27 Greenmarkets. (Each is sanctioned by the city to promote regional agriculture and give family farmers the opportunity to sell their fruits, vegetables and other products directly to New Yorkers.) After checking a map, I discovered there’s been one in my neighborhood, on Isham Street between Seaman Avenue and Cooper Street, every Saturday year-round. I didn’t know that.

I walked up Broadway to check it out. Because of its location and the season, it’s small—much smaller than the Union Square version—taking up only one side of a block between an old brick school and Isham Park, where a flock of Canada geese scrounged for insects on a muddy baseball field. There were only seven vendors but each seemed chosen to avoid duplication, so that a creative cook could prepare a largely local meal from the Inwood Greenmarket: apples, beef, turkey, eggs, bread, pies and honey.

After several passes by the vendors, I decided I’d purchase locally farmed apples and eggs and remake that apple cake I first made for Thanksgiving. (At a glance, the recipe seems snotty and complicated but in reality it’s neither.) For the apples, I paid a few bucks for a half-dozen red-and-green skinned McIntoshes from Samascott Orchard, which has been growing them in Kindernook, New York since 1901. Different varieties brimmed in labeled wooden crates, resplendent in a natural glory without the wax, stickers, symmetry and surface perfection found in their supermarket counterparts. I enjoyed a sign on the crate of Fuji apples that blamed a particular hailstorm over the Samascott’s farm in May 2007 for the superficial scars on that variety. The apples were the size of peas at the time yet they carried the battle damage to their fully ripened size. After I had my apples weighed, I added a cup of hot cider to my order, which proved prescient, as a mini snow-squall arrived out of the literal blue shortly thereafter.

I also picked up a dozen large white eggs from Knoll Krest Farm, located in Clinton Corners, New York, where the free-roaming, cage-free hens are fed vegetarian diets free from hormones and antibiotics and whose eggs are “hand gathered.” Yee-hah.

Completing the hippie nature of my travels, I carried my groceries home in my canvas tote-bag from the Strand and instead of further depleting my iPod’s lithium-rich battery by listening to “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau, I sang it to myself a cappella.

Bonus mp3: “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau

Looking for kai-lan for that pad see ew recipe, I bumbled around Chinatown this afternoon until I found a store across the street from New Green Bo (which, incidentally, has the city’s best soup dumplings). In addition to fresh, leafy produce, this grocer, 59 Bayard Market, also sold fresh animal life. At the base of the cooler holding the vegetables sat three large, white, water-filled plastic tubs without lids, the contents of each more stomach turning than the one before.

The first tub had a few turtles paddling around in it. O.K., that’s cute. I can ignore the fact that they’re there for eatin’ because the turtle lies in the acceptable range of the Western pet spectrum.

The next tub contained frogs. Not a few happy terrarium-style frogs but a dense, forest-green mass of writhing amphibia, three deep. Entirely uncalled for.

And in the third tub: eel. All the nastiest characteristics of a fish and a snake in one monstrosity! I’m not a fan. They floated darkly in the bottom of the tub; one occasionally twisted his slick, featureless body to poke his head above the surface. “Come closer,” he seemed to be saying, “that I may bite you.” If there isn’t a male version of the vagina dentata, I nominate the eel. I grabbed my broccoli and got out of there.

The recipe turned out O.K., but I had sauce and noodle issues. I don’t think I used enough of the sweet soy sauce. And I used dry rice noodles (instead of fresh, which I definitely want to try next time). They stiffened and clumped after I’d revived them with lukewarm water. It’s possible I didn’t leave them in there long enough, but I didn’t want them to get too soft before tossing them in the wok. Then because they clumped together and stayed that way in the wok, they cooked in masses and got too crispy. So they were too wet; or I should have tossed them with oil before adding them to the wok; or just used fresh noodles. I don’t know but it’s something to iron out next time.

Other than the chewy noodles, the pad see ew was delish. Wok-cooking was new for me and I confirmed that it was wise of me to have to have everything prepared and measured in advance because everything happens so quickly and I’m not the fastest cook on the block. I even had my bottles of sauces, oil and vinegar lined up in correct order to add at a moment’s notice.

Foodies and barhounds alike chastised me. I hadn’t been to Veselka yet? Jesus! I’ve lived in New York how long? Jesus!

The foodies championed the hearty portions of authentic Ukrainian fare. The barhounds championed the prime East Village location for 24/7 pre- and/or post-drunken splendor. And when I arrived in the chill after work tonight, a paper sign on the door alleged that the godmother of punk herself, Patti Smith, would choose to eat her last meal here.

Jesus.

My love and hate of Veselka lies where these lines of reasoning intersect. I cannot deny: I was here once before, in mid-December. After I’d seated myself, not one member of the not-too-busy waitstaff acknowledged my presence. Twenty-five minutes later, during which I absorbed more than my usual fill of sprawling New Yorker bullshit, I left. I’d already been cranky, felt worse then, and didn’t feel like a confrontation. Apparently Veselka’s notorious for its service but this had been foretold by the barhounds: the place is a 50-year-old diner in a grubby part of town with the spotty service that crustiness may imply.

The foodies insisted I give it another try. “The raspberry blintzes alone are worth the ineptitude,” they said. I’m stubborn, so it took some time but, O.K., I’m back and John R., my waiter, is prompt and attentive. He recommends a 300-year-old Ukrainian brand of beer, Lvivske, and yes, that’s good. He recommends I don’t order a side of the horseradish-beet salad because my entrée will arrive with a dab of it and that’s all most people need, and he’s correct there, too. But later he recommends two blintzes, each brown-edged, eggy crêpe rolled fat with farmers’ cheese and served with raspberries on the side, when clearly only someone of Orson Welles’ corpulence could eat two.

So some of John’s advice was right, as was some of the meal. The borscht, made with thick beet slices and butter beans, was topped with fresh dill—a perfect winter garnish—although the broth was almost too sweet. An accompanying slice of potato bread arrived sad and stale on a ceramic plate decorated with an amusing illustration of an interplanetary meatball hurtling towards Earth, perhaps where Patti is scarfing down a veal goulash. My other side dish, a potato pancake, resembled a puck of stone-cold spackle. But my entrée of stuffed cabbage in tomato sauce was great, the ground beef and pork filling flecked with white rice recalling my Mom’s own secret recipe for meatballs. So although the meal was hit or miss, I will give the edge to the foodies. Those blintzes were good, or at least the 1.25 of them I ate. Jesus.

Veselka

• 144 2nd Ave. (at East 9th Street)
• (212) 228-9682
• Meal 11 of 52: a bottle of beer ($5.50), stuffed cabbage entrée with two sides ($11.25), two raspberry blintzes ($11.25) and a coffee ($1.50).

After I bought a large ceramic mixing bowl at Fishs Eddy, I asked a clerk where I could still get breakfast food, being 2 p.m. on a Sunday. Around noon downtown, I’d had an intense hangover-recovery need for sodium and grease and really, really just wanted a breakfast sandwich of the sort many delis and bodegas in New York sell: plain egg and meat and/or cheese on a bagel or a roll. But none of them were still serving breakfast and I was feeling I’d have to go to an actual restaurant. The clerk at Fishs recommended Big Daddy’s, and since I only had to walk down 19th to Park, I tried it. Can’t miss it: there’s a giant script sign above the door, spelled in carnival lights.

It’s sort of like if the Hard Rock Cafe decided to open a diner. Or, better still, if aliens were to have recreated a diner based on a description of its contents. Cheesy ’80s pop burbles from the sound system. Little ceramic holders of vintage Trivial Pursuit cards are set on the counter here and there. The menu cover and an entire length of a wall at the restaurant are plastered with pop culture logos. Shelves of eBay purchases line the wall behind the counter: rusted steel soda cans from the ’60s, vintage lunchboxes and boxes of breakfast cereal. A peeling bumper sticker for Richard Nixon hovered on the painted brick wall near my head. The place is packed with likely tourist-types. Waiting for my order to arrive as I listened to Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” I started to make a list of all of the logos I could see from my seat, but I got exhausted; this is about one quarter of them:

• Atari
• Coleco
• Corey Feldman
• Franco-American
• Hong Kong Phooey
• Hostess
• Indiana Jones
• M*A*S*H
• MTV
• Pan Am
• Rolling Stone
• School House Rock!
• Sesame Street
• Spider-Man
• The Brady Bunch
• The Godfather
• The Monkees
• The Price is Right
• The Rolling Stones
• Tony the Tiger
• Trix
• Tron
• Twisted Sister
• Twister
• Wrangler
• Yogi Bear
• Yugo

The food, like the decor, approximates a diner experience. Yes, it looks nice in the photo, doesn’t it? But the bacon was cold, not frying-pan fresh. The Challah French toast was groggy with liquid egg. And the prices were decidedly not diner-like, as you can see below. I almost would have rather had Denny’s.

Big Daddy’s

• 239 Park Avenue South (at West 19th Street)
• (212) 477-1500
• Meal 9 of 52: French toast and a side of scrambled eggs ($11.94), side of bacon ($3.96), orange juice ($3.26) and coffee ($2.53).

Subway platform monitors, photographed last night at the 86th Street station of the 1 train.

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).

A coworker mentioned a stack of fabulous brandied-cherry pancakes she ate during a recent restaurant brunch. They sounded great and I imagined it’d be easy to substitute a cup of brandied cherries for the cup of blueberries in my mom’s time-tested blueberry pancake recipe. And it worked. Sweet, sweet brandied-cherry pancakes!

After pitting the cherries, I cut each into eighths and soaked a cup of them (about 20 cherries) in brandy. Then I strained them and pressed them so they didn’t retain too much liquid. With a pat of butter, I cooked each pancake in my trusty Lodge cast-iron frying pan and found I could cook two simultaneously, each made with 1/4 cup of batter, which yielded eight hearty pancakes. I also learned I’ve got to rid myself of my grilled-cheese habit of smashing down the pancakes with the spatula; they’re much better when they’re roughly 1/4-inch thick because the fruit stays juicier.

Polaroid phased-out its professional and consumer-model instant cameras over the past two years and announced today that it’s discontinuing Polaroid film, making only enough to last through next year. After that, the Polaroid is gone forever, unless another company keen on losing money decides to purchase a license for the technology.

I’ve been happy with digital cameras for the past six years, but I’ll miss the Polaroid: the chunky plastic bulk of most camera models from the ’80s and ’90s. The loud plastic click of the shutter button, often paired with a gear-grinding sound when the photo was ejected: it was near impossible to take a surreptitious Polaroid. The chemical smell, the gradual reveal of the subject and the contrast of the colors. The strange social custom of arguing over who got to keep a treasured shot, for there’d only ever be one. The weird tic-like actions used ostensibly to speed or even the development of professional-grade Polaroid film: rubbing, shaking, warming the development process under a coat in the cold. Making Polaroid transfers.

My favorite Polaroid anecdote of my own dates from 2000 or so, when I needed a passport right away for an unexpected international business trip. I needed my two identical photos pronto—like, faster than film could be developed, faster than me driving to a drugstore or a photobooth—so I walked next door to the professional photography studio that shared office space with our company and one of the guys there, Wayne, took about 20 black-and-white Polaroid headshots of me, rapid-fire. (Photos for new passports now must be color; in 2000, they could be either black-and-white or color.) We then spread the shots on a table, chose the two that were most alike and trimmed them to the required two-inches square. I saved some of the outtakes. I blinked a lot.

While Kelly’s frolicking in Cancún for her birthday, I’m catsitting Paddington. I appreciated these Post-it notes she affixed to two of the bottles atop her refrigerator. If you can’t make out Kelly’s handwriting from my photo, the one on the right is affixed to an amaretto bottle and reads:

This is not amaretto
It’s whiskey
.... Long Story

The one on the left is affixed to a whiskey bottle and reads:

This is not
whiskey. It’s Bacardi.
God

That Kelly felt the need(?) to label her liquor made me laugh, but also because, yes, there probably is a good story behind these shenanigans.

That’s quite a feat.

With the wind chill factored in, the temperature in Chicago today hovered around zero. I’ve been to the city often on business but never before today in the winter. Dozens of variants of signs like the one in my photo, warning pedestrians of ice falling from the skyscrapers, are scattered about on most of the sidewalk corners downtown.

I don’t recall seeing signs like these in New York. Are Gotham’s buildings better designed to prevent icy accumulation or does the city just not care?

A cabbie here in Chicago today swore to me that every year, at least one person is fatally trepanned by a falling icicle. What a way to go.

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.

I told my super several times to no avail in the past two weeks that my kitchen ceiling was leaking, leaking to the degree that water was pooling between the wall and the paint, resulting in sags like those under Fred Thompson’s eyes.

Jose finally stopped by last night, checked the ceiling, convinced himself I hadn’t imagined the leak, then left. A few minutes later, I heard scuffling and banging from the apartment room directly above my kitchen. Then he stopped back and told me the leak had originated from a pipe upstairs and that he’d fixed it. He’s giving the watery mess three days to dry, after which he says he’ll stop by to repair the water damage and repaint the wall. In the meantime, I look forward to inhaling countless potentially toxic mold spores.

My brother Andrew sorted through a box of his childhood toys that had been in storage in our parents’ basement. Highlights included G.I. Joe, Transformers and random plastic dinosaurs: ah, the memories.

My dad celebrated his 60th birthday tonight with a group of relatives and friends at his favorite local wine bar. At tables set up in the back near the beer coolers, we began with two whites, then five reds, all of which were poured as a professorial type named Reed talked about the wine’s characteristics, its region, trivia about the wineries’ owners and other such hoohah.

I notice increasingly sloppy annotations on my wine “score sheet,” like how Reed started one sentence, as a lead-in to an anecdote on cask-aging: “One time, I went to an oak seminar....” I also seem to have written “Reed hoards port,” which has nice alliteration, and “I thought this guy said he wouldn’t lecture,” which was a gradeschool-style note passed to my sister. Also, here are paraphrased instructions from Reed on how to decant. (He didn’t pun his title like I did; I was feeling saucy.)

How to Turn a Decant into a Decan

1. Stand the bottle upright at least a day.
2. Train the beam of a miniature flashlight on the neck of the bottle while steadily pouring the wine into a decanter.
3. Stop pouring when you spot sediment.
4. If you have a magnum or a double-magnum, you’re fucked.

Afterwards we took what was left of the wine back to my parents’ house for the afterparty, for which my mom had baked two pies (cherry and apple) and, for my dad, apple dumplings, his favorite dessert.

I’d been trying to find a cheap cocktail shaker for a while and while out shopping today in Ohio, I didn’t like the designs or the prices of the models I found at Target. On a whim, I tried Marc’s, which is a great deep-discount chain here, and found a stainless-steel shaker with a classic silhouette for a grand total of $3.09. The metal isn’t the thickest so my hands will get frosty during a good shake, and the stainless-steel surface will attract all manner of water-spots and fingerprints, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay for tasty cocktails.

Inspired by my mom’s rectangular measuring spoons while I was cooking over Christmas vacation, I ordered my own pair and they arrived today. They’re Norpro brand, stainless steel with rubberized grips in standard 1 tablespoon and 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 and 1 teaspoon sizes, and I hadn’t seen them or other squared-off spoons elsewhere (Mom bought hers at an outlet mall), so I tracked them down on Amazon.com through a third-party seller.

These appeal to me because I can fit the spoons—even the tablespoon—directly into jars of spice for easy and accurate measuring. I also like that they increase my accuracy for eyeballing nonstandard measurements—half a tablespoon, for example, for which I can’t be bothered to remember or look-up the equivalent (1.5 teaspoons, in case you were wondering).

I made this coffee cake for breakfast yesterday for my sister and I. The recipe’s from the Amy Sedaris cookbook Jimi got me for Christmas and which I’ve unexpectedly become enamored with. The recipe’s easy and looked especially handsome when I turned it out of the new cast-aluminum Wilton brand “Perfect Performance Plus” fluted tube pan I purchased recently from Bowery Kitchen Supply at the winding, peddler’s alley of Chelsea Market within the old National Biscuit Company. I’d walked by that complex numerous times and always thought it housed an expensive restaurant until someone pointed out I was an idiot. The coffee cake is rich and sweet with nutty-vanilla goodness, and it goes good with, uh, coffee.

My sister Dana and I hung out in Williamsburg, Brooklyn today for sightseeing and vintage-clothing shopping. (The above photo of her and the happy hearts was taken on N. 10th Street between Bedford and Driggs.) At Buffalo Exchange she found and bought a crazy Stussy sweatshirt from the ’80s, pink with blue stars on it. She was impressed by the storied local clothing exchange store, Beacon’s Closet, and its organized-by-color convention but it was very busy and difficult to shop with a clear head.

For a late brunch, we took a long walk over to hit Diner. Despite the odd time of 3 p.m., the place was already/still packed, so we ate at the bar. I liked the typewritten menus and the snug diner-design of the place, and the guy behind the bar who was visibly confused by the extra-long-intro version of Steely Dan’s “Do it Again” played over the sound system. (He wondered aloud if it was an instrumental karaoke version.) In the mood for drinking a unfamiliar drink, I had a Van Vleet, followed quickly by a second. I’d not have guessed lemon juice, maple syrup and rum would conspire for sweet-tart tastiness. Dana got the Gruyere cheese breakfast sandwich and I had the ricotta cheese/fresh herb omelet both of which were fantastic, fresh and appreciated. I will have to return someday for dinner when the menu is more dynamic than the more standard brunch fare. Walking back under the Williamsburg Bridge on our way back to the L train, we noticed this vibrantly graffitied truck, which I photographed for the benefit of my friends named Joe.

Diner

• 85 Broadway (at Berry Street), Brooklyn
• (718) 486-3077
• Meal 55 of 52: two van Vleets ($8 each) and a omelet with roast potatoes ($10).

In search of whiskey in my grandmother’s kitchen cabinets, I came across these liquor bottles which appear to date from at least the 1960’s. I especially like the “hula girl” on the Trader Vic’s pomegranate grenadine syrup.

Christmas at Grandma’s! It was the usual drill: I ate way too much and had fun hanging out with the family. Here’s Grandma, looking regal as she tears into a gift.

Another recipe! This one’s a “classic suburban Mom” fruit salad made from a sweet blend of fruit and convenience foods that makes frequent appearances during the summer at barbeques and picnics involving my family. I believe it’s originally from the 1971 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, which indicates that this salad should be served in “lettuce cups.” I recommend actual bowls.

Instead of making genuine holiday fruitcakes every December that recipients will only pretend to like, my family has been making these Christmas nut loaves most years since 1987. They’re more nuts than cake although retain many classic fruitcake elements, like the candied fruit. The recipe is simple albeit expensive (especially those two pounds of pecans) and requires arms of steel to stir. These loaves don’t photograph romantically but I assure you they are tasty.

Jason:

This is the creepiest American Apparel ad yet.

S.:

Does that skeevey owner bang the senior citizens, too, or just the prepubescent-looking ones?

Jason:

I think he does both. He’s an equal opportunity, vertically integrated skeeve. Although the first thing I thought of was the jolly incest cartoon from R. Crumb’s Joe Blow entitled, “The Family that LAYS Together STAYS Together!” And that’s all I’m saying about that.

S.:

You are a sick, sick individual. Sick. But funny.

Comfortably uptown from the meatball-baited guido trap of Little Italy is Luzzo’s, a really nice trattoria at which to get classic Napoletana coal-oven pizza as well as friendly service from a large staff of Italian-speaking folks.

“You been here before?” asked Pasquale, my waiter. “We were rated best pizza in New York, two months ago,” he said proudly, genuinely proudly enough that I didn’t have the heart to tell him that a.) I don’t give credence to such accolades; and b.) Their rating is a good thing because I’ve been rated Most Important Man in New York City for three years running.¹)

But he was a super nice guy. He let me take a sturdy, lacquered four-top booth instead of an inevitably wobbly table-for-two.

After I attempted to sneakily photograph my meal, I misjudged the position of my bag on the seat of my booth and the camera fell to the unfinished wood floor. My server rushed over and fished around under the table to retrieve it for me. Then he brought me a big stack of paper napkins, perhaps assuming dexterity eating equaled that of my camera sheathing.

Made by a man named Michele with fresh bufala mozzarella, my 12" pizza was a little greasier than expected but thin and delicious, topped with fresh basil. I ate the entire thing while drinking two glasses of nero d’avola (a popular Sicilian red wine) and watching the Italian equivalent of VH1 on the large TV over the bar at the far end of the restaurant. If I would have showed up on Tuesday, according to a flyer at the door, I could have heard “the fabulous Alessandra” sing Neapolitan classics as well as Italian, American, Portuguese and Spanish standards.

¹ As rated by my mom. [back]

Luzzo’s

• 211-13 First Ave. (between 12th and 13th Streets)
• (212) 473-7447
• Meal 53 of 52: mozzarella di bufala pizza ($15) and two glasses of nero d’avola wine ($9 each).

It’s something that comes to mind often during outings for the 52 Meals Project: the whole capital-lettered thing of the Dining Experience. Some places, maybe they’re not all that special but the diner imbues them with his own magic: the combination of a certain time and certain company with a certain frame of mind.

That birthday dinner with Iggy comes to mind. Or that West Village bar, the one I went to with Katie, Andie and Jimi in the blustery winter many moons ago, that one with the white Christmas lights and the worn wood booths and the Russian boxing matches on the TV over the bar. Where was that place? (No, really: Where the fuck was it? I want to go back and confirm whether it’s as great as I remember.)

Other establishments actively strive to create magic, to buttress your own or to do the heavy lifting, should your imagination be in a weakened or absent state. But careful: too much magic-mongering on the business end and, hey presto, you’ve got a theme restaurant. (e.g. any dining establishment within a block radius of Times Square.)

It’s a difficult balance, a confluence of factors, as they say.

Friend of a Farmer excels at this balancing act, though. And we almost didn’t go. The diner across the street had perfectly serviceable brunch, the menfolk grumbled. (They’d been up late, watching a documentary on ants.) But Megan convinced Vincent and I to slog through the first snow of the season to Gramercy Park.

We ate upstairs, up the wood staircase, banister entwined with strands of pine and white Christmas lights; an antique cabinet on the landing held gourds, tin soldiers and Mason jars of dry beans. The second floor was a cozy, clapboard-clad cocoon. Santas and ceramic roosters perched on the mantelshelf above a crackling fire. Yellowed wallpaper of wildflowers enveloped the room. Large, condensation-fogged windows overlooked the flurries on Irving Place, where I kept expecting to see a hansom cab ramble by. A giant Christmas tree huddled in our corner, heavy with lights and ornaments, while lantern style lamps hung from the bare-raftered ceiling.

Practically like my own Grandma’s farmhouse in the wilds of Ohio, or a slightly more idyllic version of it, although Grandma would start at the prices here, and if memory serves, she never hung a hand-calligraphed paper sign on her Christmas tree that read, “Please Do Not Touch Tree.”¹

What sealed the deal was this possibly Grandma-aged lady wearing the ultimate Grandma-type sweater. She sat across from us at a table where she silently read part of the Sunday Times while her husband read another chunk; after a time, they wordlessly swapped sections.

Yes, those are squirrels. I was so excited to document this wardrobe splendor that I almost knocked over my orange juice. Which reminds me: the food fit flush with the experience. My omelet, bulging with cheddar and mushrooms, was served in a frying pan, nestled up to some nicely spiced potatoes. Tracy, our waitress, had on one of those knit caps that cool yet down-to-earth girls always seem to be wearing, and said things in earnest like “You got it!”, “Holler if you need me!” and “Thanks a bunch!” Also, I think I may have heard her address a diner as “Darlin’.” Almost too much.

You know, I run on at times. Megan, on the other hand, summed the Dining Experience in one well-turned sentence: “I feel like I’m being hugged by this entire restaurant.”

Good call, Megs.

P.S. How about that? I’ve now eaten a meal at 52 different establishments in New York City this year and I have nearly a month left. It’s strangely anticlimactic for me, especially recalling the unfulfilled struggles of the 52 Meals Project’s first two years. I’m going to keep counting and reviewing past 52 for any additional new meals I eat in 2007.

¹ Although she did hide a pickle ornament in it. [back]

Friend of a Farmer

• 77 Irving Place (between East 18th and 19th Streets)
• (212) 477-2188
• Meal 52 of 52: country omelet ($12.95), large orange juice ($4) and a mug of coffee ($2.25; free refills).

The New Museum, which opened yesterday, injects architectural excitement into a parcel of the Bowery near Prince Street that remains dingy despite near daily pop-ups of condo buildings. It’s noble the curators steered clear of uptown hotspots like Museum Mile and have attempted to introduce art in an otherwise cultural wasteland. Avant-garde architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have designed a building that looks from afar like a stack of blocks balanced awkwardly by a child. Up close, the facing that appears solid gray from a distance is revealed to be metal mesh cladding the building’s surface. Floor-to-ceiling glass on the ground floor, home to a shallow lobby, lends levity and odd street-level views down Prince.

Inside, the excitement wanes. The galleries feature stark white walls, florescent tube lighting and already-cracked poured-cement floors. And regarding the art itself, I’ll let this graffito from a seventh-floor stairwell speak for me.

I’m not entirely sure this wasn’t an actual artwork because the New Museum is one of those contemporary art museums where it’s unclear whether that fire extinguisher you’re attempting to fathom on an artistic level is part of the exhibit or simply a device that one uses to extinguish fires. Either that or the art resembles, as Kelly put it, stuff you’d find in the back yard of a guy who just got arrested on Cops: a bottle-cap studded mattress, a tube light driven through an old couch, a sort-of artful arc of worn wooden chairs, a homeless-man-style clump of cardboard boxes, paint-slopped sculptures featuring plastic army guys, Transformers and, as Tritia noted, a strangely robust amount of Ikea furniture.

The museum’s biggest captive audience by far clustered around a teepee-like structure of long unfinished wooden boards to which were affixed a web of what appeared to be Salvation Army T-shirts. Its spindly legs had given out and the art had collapsed like an exhausted spider. Museum personnel, including a flushed man who gave urgent updates into his walkie-talkie, attempted to re-erect the thing, at one point resembling the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, until it became clear none of them knew how the art had been positioned initially. They ended up solemnly carting the bundle off into the elevator, probably to reassemble it someplace less shameful.

We completed our visit to the museum with a hike to the top floor, a glass-walled penthouse-lounge that had been completely overtaken by sponsor Target, plastered with logos and a bank of cabinets inexplicably filled with corporate-colored junk food: mini candy canes, cinnamon Mike and Ike, red and white Jelly Belly jelly beans, Atomic Fireballs and yogurt-covered pretzels. On the narrow terrace skirting the building outside were beautiful views of the sun setting over the city and blinding spotlights splashing the Target logo-colors all over the place. I can’t begrudge Target too much, however, because they were responsible for everyone getting into the museum for free yesterday and today. Otherwise, I can’t recommend the $12 general admission.

You know, I like photography, and I like women. I also like meat, but I’d never considered that the combination of all three elements could be interesting. There’s this free exhibit, Maria, at the Rivington Arms, of Pinar Yolacan’s large-format color studio portraits of mostly emotionless Afro-Brazilian women clothed or draped in garments made from cow organs. Some of these articles are immediately obvious as offal, glistening with fresh-butchered wetness, while others require a second look; what appears to be a dainty brooch pinned to the collar of an elderly woman is actually a cow eye. Other than the artist making the connection in her statement between the placenta (an organ that appears in several of the photos) and the femininity of her subjects, I’m not sure what to make of all of this, or what, if any, sort of commentary is being made, but I think I like it.

Shopping in downtown Laramie, Wyoming, this afternoon, we spotted qualifiers for the Just Because You Spellchecked category. Inquire should have been used on this sign for the Herb House; enquire is for the British and illiterate.

This next one’s ironical appearing in a store selling mostly magazines and books; it should of course be Classic or, really, the non-redundant Literature. At any rate, Ayn Rand doesn’t qualify for either.

This one just makes me snicker. Good gas prices, too.

It’s Thanksgiving and I can’t help but notice the staggering, nearly 50-degree temperature difference between New York City and Laramie, Wyoming this afternoon: 64° in Manhattan, 15° in Laramie. But we had a delicious Andrew-prepared dinner of turkey with cornbread stuffing and giblet gravy, mashed sweet potatoes, broccolini and cranberries.

Entertainments, too. A great game even slightly better than karaoke is SingStar, which we played on the PlayStation. You’re judged on your accuracy to hold a tune on a variety of pop songs, the lyrics of which scroll karaoke-style as the song’s official video plays in the background. Battle Mode allows you to square-off by singing alternate verses with a partner. We particularly enjoyed the B-52’s “Love Shack” and Elton John’s “Rocket Man” on SingStar Rocks! and A-Ha’s “Take on Me” and U2’s “Vertigo” on SingStar Pop.

I attended my first sample sale today. They’re a fact of life in this town, especially around my work neighborhood, the “fashion district.”

I’d been tipped about a Ben Sherman sale in particular, and it was located on the second floor of a nondescript building on W. 36th Street, right around the corner from where I work. I checked it out today at lunch, lucking out by not wearing my coat or taking my bag: they make you check everything at sample sales and there’s a big ol’ long line for that.

It was bustling but not maddening, crowd-wise. I didn’t buy anything. I couldn’t get excited about any of the shirts. Pants would require try-on and there were no changing rooms, as I’d been pre-warned. I considered something I actually need, a winter jacket, and they were all $55, down from $150-$250. But they’re all too stylish for me; in fact, everything for sale, even the highly popular $5 racks for sample and “slight irregular” items, were too stylish, which is code for “ugly.”

Did I mention that I’m a lousy clothes shopper? A chucklehead in the production department emailed me this hastily Photoshopped cartoon after learning of my fruitless journey.

I hung out with Beth, Aaron and Nick tonight at the Illinois/Menomena concert at Webster Hall, home of New York’s kindest bouncers and most expensive Jameson ($10 per plastic-cup squirt). Illinois sounded 1000% better than they did at McCarren Park this summer, based on Webster’s superior sound system. Menomena made me tap my foot with its beat-loop-based alt-rock sort of sound. Multifunctional, too: the drummer sang, the keyboardist played guitar and the lead singer played bass, sax, occasionally twirled drumsticks and sort of resembled my younger brother. As Aaron suggested, people of our age are required to be enamored with the sort of band that would parody itself via The NeverEnding Story on its MySpace page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spain Restaurant & Bar

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

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.

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

Or so I thought.

“Where’d you get this bag?” he asked.

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

“The Token store?”

“I think that’s what it’s called.”

“It’s a fake,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diva

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

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

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.

Paddington: quite possibly the best cat ever. I’m checking up on him while Kelly is frolicking with friends in the Hamptons this weekend. As soon as I let myself into her apartment, he ran over, meowing all the way, as if to say, “Where were you? I was worried sick you wouldn’t show.” And by “worried sick” I mean “coughing up hairballs the size of potato pancakes,” because there two were, right in the front hallway.

Kelly had warned me Paddington’s hobby is daily hairball expulsion and although the angle of my photo above conceals it, Paddington is a big tom with a large surface area, so I think he just needed a good brushing. But I didn’t see a cat brush lying around with the other cat stuff, so I took a short trip downtown on the 1 and bought one from a discount pet store.

I wish I could remember the name of this brush (or this type of brush), but it was recommended by a woman I work with who lives with a pair of cats she named Jack and Tyler after the characters from Fight Club. The brush is a simple band of sheet steel, about an inch wide, folded into the shape of a loop with a handle. On the looped end, nubby little teeth have been cut into one side of the steel. They’re not sharp, but when you brush the cat, the loose hair is gently raked off in clumps.

There wasn’t enough hair when I was done brushing Paddington to construct a whole other cat, but there was probably enough for an unconvincing toupee. Paddington seemed to like the brushing (“he likes to be stroked by volatile objects,” Kelly confirmed later), but he enjoyed most everything: following me around, enjoying my shiatsu-style sessions of petting, sitting there starting at me as I talked to him as if to say, “You, sir, are a genius.” I lay on the living room floor for a while because I imagine that short animals like it when you’re at their level. He showed his appreciation by playfully head-butting me until I thought he might break the frames on my glasses, then he curled up next to me with his head on my arm. Awwwww.

Andie spotted this sign after our dinner and drinks at Fred’s tonight and as you can see, it’s caught in a simultaneous Walk/Don’t Walk state, kind of like Schrödinger’s cat, except instead of a 50% chance of having a dead cat on your hands, there’s a 50% chance you’ll get hit by a Fresh Direct truck on Amsterdam while trying to take a flashless photo of a flashing sign in the dark.

Instant ramen noodles constituted a formative brick of my collegiate food pyramid. I will admit eating many a pack of chicken-, sometimes beef- flavored Maruchan Ramen back in the day, bought for pennies apiece and flavored with a salty powder included in a foil square reminiscent of a wrapped condom.

In my adult life, ramen ranks among my favored home remedies of tempering a sinus headache. I hold my face close over the hot steam as the noodles boil, then fork down the gunk to rebalance my electrolytes and ease my fatigue, or something like that.

My sense before tonight of eating ramen in an actual ramen establishment seems informed by dystopic sci-fi movies¹. In The Fifth Element, Bruce Willis learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s been fired. In Blade Runner, Harrison Ford learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s being arrested by Edward James Olmos. “He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard,” quoth the wizened Asian ramen-vendor. “He say you Blade Runner.”

Taking place in a futuristic Los Angeles (“November, 2019”), Blade Runner visually adds, as I think William Gibson has, that you must eat your ramen while wearing an overcoat and seated at a counter of a stall-like street vendor, beneath a florescent-lit awning, as around you, the cold rain pours and crowds mill by under umbrellas with rods that appear to be light sabers.

Well, it was dark and cold and rainy tonight, and New York, at least the East Village, is probably as grittily deteriorated a match to Los Angeles 2019, so I took the L east then walked over, under my unlit umbrella, to Ramen Setagaya, an outpost of a Japanese noodle chain. There are a scant few tables for two and I sat at the narrow counter on a black-lacquered wooden stool. I was only about two feet away from the two cooks, who scurried about the tiny kitchen preparing dishes in clouds of fragrant steam. Each gentleman wore a yellow T-shirt printed with the chain’s logo and, oddly, had a white terry-cloth hand-towel wrapped around his head and tied in the back, as if he’d just exited a shower.

A flat-screen TV near the entrance looped a bewildering array of cooking shows, gameshows, commercials and promotional videos, all of which seemed to feature Setagaya ramen, and none of which had subtitles or a lick of English otherwise. After calling for a Sapporo, I started out with the Oshinko pickled vegetables, none of which I recognized but all three of which were tasty. For my noodles, I opted for the pork BBQ salt ramen (or “cha-syu-men,” according to the mostly Japanese menu, unless that’s actually a pronunciation guide). The tender, thin-sliced pork floated in a rich noodle broth of various chopped vegetables, seaweed and half of a soft-boiled egg with a vibrant yellow, goopy yolk, floating there like a lifeboat.

Unless this is a prank on Westerners, I’m told that in Japan it is good manners to slurp one’s noodles, as if to audibly yet nonverbally complement the chef. Suspicious of this, I ate mine silently and with a minimum of wet whiplash, although two Asian gentlemen down the counter to my right were consistently and noisily Hoovering in large tangles from their bowls. A sideways glance revealed that, with noodles dangling from their faces, they resembled Cthulhu and his “awful squid-head with writhing feelers.”

All told, and as expected, much heartier and tastier ramen than those dehydrated bricks from my youth, and better yet, nothing bad happened to me during my meal, unless you count that giant puddle I accidentally stepped in on First Avenue afterwards.

Ramen Setagaya

• 141 First Ave. (between St. Marks Place and East 9th Street)
• (212) 529-2740
• Meal 34 of 52: pickled vegetables ($2), pork BBQ ramen ($11) and a bottle of Sapporo ($4).

¹ I’ve seen Tampopo, but I’m going to conveniently ignore that here. [back]

Yesterday’s New York Times published a recipe for an eggplant salad that I made soon after returning from my California trip. This may very well be one of the tastiest ever summer salads and I nearly didn’t make it because of the precious little story accompanying the recipe that includes the sentence “But recently I found myself in possession of an eggplant and without a plan.” Via this anecdote, it’s clear the author/recipe-developer assembled this salad with some random stuff lying around her fridge, but it’s a genius combination of crisp and tender vegetables, and vibrant flavors: the green spark of the mint, the strong garlic, the nuttiness of the oiled and baked eggplant cubes, the citrus bursts of the lemon juice and the tomatoes, the salty and earthy feta). I’d surely make this again.

The timing was both good and bad for my cell phone to suddenly break late Friday night. Good because I was headed out of town for some quiet and relaxation. Bad because I’m on business in California Monday through Wednesday and absolutely require a cell phone while there. I couldn’t slack off on this one; I had to get it fixed right away. Begrudgingly, I stopped at a conveniently located AT&T store up on Long Island only to learn that I could only get a replacement for the still-under-full-warranty phone from special AT&T stores. One was in Manhattan, on 42nd between Fifth and Sixth across the street from the central branch of the New York Public Library. Unfortunately, today was the Dominican Republican Day Parade and it was on Sixth from 36th to 62nd. It took me a solid 15 minutes of jostling to cross the street there. The walk back was even more difficult, as the street I’d chosen to cross Sixth, 43rd, was in the process of getting locked down because of an (apparently) bloodied and unruly reveler who had attracted the full attention of a good half-dozen cops, one of whom shouted to the mostly Dominican crowd, “Can’t you people keep the peace for one day?” (“You people.” Ha ha! Good luck, New York City cops!)

Because of the ruckus, I walked up to Rockefeller Center, took a D to 59th Street and transferred to a 1 which appropriately contained nearly all Dominicans blowing whistles and chanting slogans loudly in Spanish.