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Boing Boing noted today (via Kottke.org) designer Richard Howe’s photographic documentation of every street corner in Manhattan, “The Manhattan Street Corners.” (Howe’s site was temporarily unavailable with an exceeded bandwidth limit when I tried checking it out.)

It reminds me of Caleb Smith’s resolution (which, like Howe’s project, took two years) to walk every street in Manhattan.

It also reminds me of conceptual artist/photographer Dylan Stone’s plan to photograph not only Manhattan's street corners but the four sides of every block, for a series he named “Drugstore Photographs, Or, A Trip Along the Yangtze River.”

For comparative purposes, Howe took 11,000 photos covering every corner in Manhattan. Stone, who reckoned he’d need “between one and three rolls of film” per block to accomplish his feat, had taken 26,000 snapshots by the year 2000—and he never finished the project, having covered only the blocks below Canal Street.

“My project, at heart, is about conservation,” Stone wrote. “It is a living, precious photographic archive of an entire city.” And this statement gained resonance after 9/11, as part of his mundane city record included photos of the World Trade Center.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Monaco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diva

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therapy

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

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

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

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

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

Raymund’s Place

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

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

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

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

The Smoke Joint, a new BBQ place in Fort Greene, has been getting press lately over what “style” of barbecue it serves. Where another rib place would drawl on about Texas or Tennessee, the guys at Smoke Joint have seen it fit to reply, bluntly, that their BBQ is “Brooklyn style,” whatever that might be. Even after eating it, I don’t know, other than it’s cheap and delicious and I’d get it again. Juicy, spicy and tender summed up my “tips and bits,” which didn’t seem to be a hearty portion for $7 at first, but which probably works out to nearly a rack of ribs, without the bones and large fat deposits.

The styling of the place is as no-nonsense as the food: functional-basic décor, regular tables and chairs with a semienclosed, sort-of porch area sticking out into the sidewalk and napkins that appear to be the same tri-fold paper towels dispensed in restrooms. Even the soundtrack is straight-up classic radio: Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps,” the Raspberries’ “Go All the Way,” Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” and the 11-minute-plus version of Traffic’s “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys.”

The Smoke Joint

• 87 S. Elliott Place, Brooklyn
• (718) 797-1011
• Meal 31 of 52: “Tips and Bits” ($7), a beer ($4) and BBQ beans ($3).

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

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

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

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

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

My Mom’s side of the family is rural German and I fondly recall dinners of my childhood for which she’d make cabbage rolls and sauerbraten, and roulades fashioned from thin-sliced beef rolled up with bacon and a dill pickle.

Yesterday, Gridskipper ran a list of the scant few German restaurants in New York, and reading it, I realized I hadn’t yet been to a German restaurant yet in New York, so I gave Hallo Berlin a go. In addition to many stray umlauts, it serves a cornucopia of wurst, including the prefixes weiner, Alpen, bock, knock, bauern, brat, curry and liver.

I gave their roulade a try and it was bland and sopped in a sad brown gravy. The spaetzle was greasy and flavorless and the red cabbage and string beans on the side tasted fresh-from-the-can. It wasn’t all a bust, as my large glass stein of Köstritzer black beer had a pleasantly sticky-sweet bitterness about it. It seemed like bar food, although the staff and regulars were pleasant. The bunch of delivery guys at the bar were engaged in a long and heated discussion about the film versions of American Psycho and Trainspotting versus the book versions. The consensus reached was that the books are more graphic and therefore better.

So though I didn’t like my dish at Hallo Berlin much—maybe I’d have been better off with some of that wurst—I still respect my heritage and do not begrudge the country of Germany and its heavy food at large. To show there’s no hard feelings, here’s a file photo from January 2002 of me enjoying a pig ride in Köln. Where does the time go?

Hallo Berlin

• 626 10th Ave.
• (212) 977-1944
• Meal 30 of 52: roulade with red cabbage, string beans and cucumber salad, plus bread and butter, and soup ($18) and a stein of Köstritzer ($7).

I tried this tip for assembling a “$15 Mont Blanc pen.” At Staples, I bought a two-pack of black Mont Blanc rollerball refill cartridges and a pack of Pilot G2 gel ink pens, then swapped a Pilot pen cartridge for a Mont Blanc cartridge. Per the Instructable, I first had to snip a bit of plastic off the end of the Mont Blanc cartridge to make it fit in the Pilot casing.

It works, although the push-button mechanism of the Pilot sticks frequently; I have to slightly loosen the segments of the pen to “unclick” it. (This could be because I cut too little or too much off the Mont Blanc cartridge.)

The Frankenpen writes smoothly, and the ink smudges very little, which is a fine attribute in a roller-ball pen, but I don’t notice an appreciable difference over the Pilot Precise Rolling Ball pens I currently favor. And really, as I think someone else pointed out in the comments for the Instructable, the point of a Mont Blanc (other than to convey to people that you make a lot of money and are not opposed to sinking some of it into overpriced writing utensils) is that the casing is tooled and weighted for the Ultimate Writing Experience, or whatever the marketing phrase might be.

The real estate development and investment firm that owns the New York Mets occasionally invites employees at my work out to ballgame functions and tonight we had reign of a private loge, the Diamond View Suite, from which we could watch the Pittsburgh Pirates get crushed, 6 to 3. It was my first time to Shea Stadium, and it is worn and dumpy, or as we say in real estate parlance, particularly when the owner of the asset is standing right there, “tired.” Not to worry: Citi Field, the new stadium, is under construction next door, and when complete, old Shea will revert to a parking lot.

We had a fine first baseline vantage point and all the hot dogs and Cracker Jack we could handle, though it took me a while to get over the distraction of airplanes continually taking off from LaGuardia. Also I was dismayed to learn that the Cracker Jack people apparently no longer include toy prizes inside their snack but instead small paperboard cards featuring riddles and triva with rub-to-reveal answers. Lame.

Waiting afterwards for my Long Island Railroad train to arrive, I immersed myself in the drunken and ecstatic throng of fans on the platform. A particularly loud group of guys had obviously had a lot to drink, judging by the several of them who stepped down off the end of the platform to urinate near the tracks, all the while shouting, “Let’s — go — Mets!”

Guys

Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Mets!

Speaker

Westbound train arriving on track number 1.

Guys

Westbound train! Westbound train! Westbound train!

As the train pulled into the station, they moved down the platform to the last car, where a woman in a business suit was waiting to board.

“I am not getting on the same car as you guys,” she said to them, holding up her hands as if to banish them. She walked to a different car but the leader of the drunk guys shouted, “Follow her!” and they stumbled off in pursuit. On board, I could hear them shouting “Let’s go Mets!” from a car away until either they debarked in Queens or the businesswoman subdued them with her briefcase.

Shea Stadium

• 123-01 Roosevelt Ave., Flushing
• (718) 507-8499
• Meal 29 of 52: a hot dog with mustard and onions (free).

Well, other than the puking kind, I suppose.

Graffiti photographed on 18th Street, behind the Union Square Barnes & Noble.

Beth and I hung out at the Siren Musical Festival on Coney Island today, the highlight of which was M.I.A., who almost didn’t make the show because of her troubles securing a visa to re-enter the U.S., possibly due to her dad’s association with a militant Sri Lankan secessionist group.

She’s been a darling of the music critics with her electronica/hip-hop/Bhangra (lotsa tabla!) blend of bass-thumpin’ body-rockin’ singsong such-and-such and sometimes she reminded me of the saucy chant-rap of Missy or, uh, J.J. Fad, which I mean as a compliment. She performed her hits but I’m behind the times and didn’t recognize anything other than what I believe was a crawling cover of the Pixies’ “Where is My Mind?” The crowd at large was deeply into the performance and its composition was likely among the most diverse at the Festival, lamented in recent years as the sort that gathers for whiny white-boy rock. This crowd, in which we were sandwiched tighter than panini cheese, experienced breakouts of freak-dancing, crowd surfing directly over our heads, on-point sing-alongs, religious ecstasy style arm flailing, beachball batting, and more pot-smoking that I’ve experienced at a concert in recent memory. Two crackers in front of us shamelessly sparked up and later became deeply entranced by their gallon jug of Poland Spring water, then did that thing where you become momentarily hypnotized by your own fingers.

Another guy in front of us sported a blonde Mohawk and was hoisting above his head a giant circa ’85 boombox, Lloyd Dobler-style; it wasn’t playing anything, he was merely hoisting it, as one might hoist a lighter at a particularly rambunctious rock concert.

M.I.A. busted out fresh threads for the occasion. If I had to describe them in one word, it would be “sequins.” Vest with gold-sequined shoulders. Tight pants fully spangled in black sequins. And Chuck Taylors coated in silver sequins; they glinted in the setting sun when she occasionally propped one up on the monitor speaker. She also wore a cap that she appeared to have swiped from the captain of Captain & Tennille, then adorned it with a red feather, and at one point she had her DJ pause so she could apply some lipstick and don a pair of Grace Jones-style sunglasses. There were some technical difficulties with a malfunctioning microphone and Siren’s requisite crappy sound doesn’t bring out any subtleties, but the DJ kept the beats flowing and M.I.A. rocked the mike with but only a few brief breaks. Good show. Check out some much better photos of it here.

The forced variety of my meals resolution obscures the fact that one of my favorite food groups is Latin American, usually Mexican. Also, I just don't eat a lot of it because the real deal is tough to find in New York. That changed today when I stopped by Red Hook Park to enjoy lunch from the Latin American food vendors there. Bienvenidos Red Hook!

Man, what a find. The vendors began ostensibly, about 10 years ago, I’m told, to feed the soccer players and fans at the adjacent field. These days (roughly May through September, on the weekends) most people show up for the food. Flanking the southeast entrance to the park are about a dozen vendors—Mexican, Ecuadoran, Salvadoran, Chilean—each set up under a makeshift tent, usually a temporary aluminum frame propping up a tarp or plastic roof, under which the food is prepared and distributed from long folding tables. Adjacent most tents are communal tables and chairs; upon placing an order, you’re asked, as you are in restaurants here, “to stay or to go?”

Selecting a vendor to patronize wasn’t difficult. I don't know if it's because I hail from a corn-intensive part of the country, but whenever I catch that robust aroma of a foodstuff featuring fresh-cooked corn, whether corn on the cob, cornbread or cornmeal mush, I get a little slobbery. That’s what drew me to one of the Salvadoran pupusa tents, which had its own array of aluminum foil-skirted griddles lined up on a folding table. The saucer-shaped treats of masa (corn dough) tortillas sandwich a selection of toppings, including beans, white cheese, a variety of meats, and unexpected vegetables, such as zucchini and loroco flowers. Each is made to order, so it takes shape slowly.

It was worth the wait for the nicely browned, bean and white cheese variety I ordered, crispy, delicious and filling, with the cheesy-beany guts creeping out the sides of the squashed disk. The elder woman of the tent who scooped the dough from a large bowl, rolled it into a ball, and passed it to the ladies on the grill to flatten, fill and fry. She formed the doughballs rapidly, without even looking at her hands or the bowl, while carrying on conversation with customers in both Spanish and English.

You could call this street food (and it’s certainly cheap and filling like street food), but the atmosphere is accommodating and communal like a picnic, and not just because it’s in a park and there’s some dudes playing soccer right over there. The spicy purple-cabbage slaw was resting in one of those 20-gallon plastic utility tubs with rope handles and my tangy-sweet cashew fruit drink was dispensed from a large picnic-style beverage dispenser.

If the vendors of Red Hook Park sound appealing to you and you are a New York local, I urge you to go while you still can. I’ve since read a Grub Street article from earlier this summer that reports the Department of Parks and Recreation will not renew the vendors’ permit because it would rather ferment a bidding war among commercial concessionaires, presumably the ones that serve the same food and drink at seemingly every street fair in New York. As it stands, September 8th will be the final day for the current vendors. This angers me and I am interested in expressing my displeasure to Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Julius Spiegel, ideally by punching him directly in the cock.

Red Hook Park

• corner of Clinton and Bay Streets, Red Hook, Brooklyn
• Meal 27 of 52: two bean-and-cheese pupusas, a side of purple-cabbage slaw and a cashew fruit drink ($5.50).

My coworker thought I was nuts for photographing these ducks, which were wandering around a parking lot in Orlando. But they don’t look like any ducks I’ve ever seen. I mean, look at ’em. They appear to be wearing little red luchador masks.

I saw a movie poster for the recent stinker Captivity on the C train after work today, and my eye was drawn to the MPAA ratings reasons. These things are great and it’s obvious moviemakers love them, particularly for R-rated movies; they’re meant to warn but they’re essentially mini-reviews that boil down the movie to its essence for any teenager hoping to catch a glimpse of a disembowelment and/or Elisha Cuthbert’s cleavage.

Anyway, as shown in my photo, the ratings reasons for Captivity are

FOR STRONG VIOLENCE, TORTURE, PERVASIVE TERROR, GRIZZLY IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND SOME SEXUAL MATERIAL

Whoops! Unless there really are brown bears trundling amid the ultraviolence, the copywriter meant to suggest the images are grisly.

With four of ’em under my belt, I think it’s time the recurring “Just Because You Spellchecked” posts got their own tag; so let it be written, so let it be done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To promote The Simpsons Movie, 7-Eleven has temporarily transformed a dozen of its stores to resemble the Kwik-E-Mart convenience store from the animated series. What’s more, those 12 stores, plus most of the chain’s 6,000+ other North American locations, are carrying products previously available only in Springfield: Slurpees have been redubbed Squishees and customers can also buy Krusty-O’s breakfast cereal, Buzz Cola and donuts with pink frosting and sprinkles.

At the Kwik-E-Mart I visited tonight, on 42nd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, the decor is well done, from the striped Kwik-E-Mart logo covering the store’s original external signage, to the show-quoting signs and giant cutouts of the series’ main characters posted inside. The clerks even wear lavender and green shirts inspired by Apu’s own uniform. On the donut case I noticed a small sign referencing Apu’s rebuff to Homer’s overzealous self-service donut-topping that “A Mounds bar is not a sprinkle. A Twizzler is not a sprinkle. A Jolly Rancher is not a sprinkle, sir.”

The level of Simpsons fandom is such that a reference to the show cannot be obscure; it can only be slightly less-referenced. My favorite among these is the life-size image of Jasper trapped in suspended animation inside a freezer case. (See ““Lisa the Simpson.”)

I realize 7-Eleven chose to develop the most-recognizable and multi-referenced food/beverage items from the show because they can’t afford to be too obscure with stuff that’s taking up valuable shelf space. But I spot at least three missed opportunities.¹

1. Duff beer. “Can’t get enough of that wonderful Duff!” That shit would’ve flown off the shelves and instantly appeared on eBay and at frat parties nationwide. The reason for its non-existence, according to an Associated Press article today, is that 7-Eleven and Fox felt that selling Simpsons-themed alcohol to promote a PG-13 movie may very well have been “a tough call” but “didn’t seem to fit.”
2. Cheers for Krusty-O’s. Jeers for not including a Jagged Metal Krusty-O inside each specially marked box. C’mon, it could’ve been just a plastic jagged metal Krusty-O.
3. My background in the candy business requires me to ask: why no Krusty Klump Bar and Krusty Klump Bar with Almonds? Get the lead out, private-label chocolate manufacturers.

Yet judging by the crowd of nerds taking pictures for their blogs and judging by the Kwik-E-Mart-style gouging on the Simpsons merchandise (I bought a 12-ounce can of Buzz Cola for 96 cents), this could be a profitable publicity stunt for the chain.

¹ Among readily conceivable foodstuffs, that is. Because, yes, as a white male, age 18 to 49, I would like to buy some Nuts and Gum and Skittle Bräu. But let’s be realistic. [back]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girl

How about Night of the Hunter?

Boy

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

Girl

How about Purple Rain?

Boy

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

Yay! Another robot for the military that resembles those from Short Circuit. The Ranger III from FLIR Systems Inc. can track vehicles from 12 miles away and will be stationed along the southern U.S. border by the Department of Homeland Security.

But does it feel remorse if it accidentally squashes a grasshopper?

I was considering a third pint of Sam Adams Summer Ale until I noticed the guy sitting next to me at the bar and his pockmarked ass. As you can see, it has crept over the line from plumber’s crack to waxing gibbous, or 98% of a full moon.

I travel light in New York but if I’m going to be away from my apartment for a day, whether for work or a weekend activity, I combat-load my man-bag with what I consider to be the essentials. See here. (And note that I took these photos in the same scale as the photo of the bag, to emphasize the relative sizes of the objects.)

Reading & Writing. my Moleskine and pens for note-taking and note-reference. A book and magazines to read. Any smallish book will do and for magazines, I favor Time Out New York and The New Yorker and occasionally New York, which I can usually pick up free at work because the guy who owns our company publishes it. I tri-fold the Manhattan subway/bus map, a Streetwise “Mini Metro,” and stash it in the back pocket of the Moleskine; those big, free subway maps distributed by the MTA are only meant for tourists, gift wrap and shelter.

Summer Stuff. I regularly cart around a Nalgene bottle of water and sunscreen during the hot months.

Shelter. Cap and umbrella.

Pharma. Duane Reade stuff. There’s aspirin, antihistamine, sugarless gum and travel wipes which are good for sanitizing hands, refreshing a sweaty face, or, um, can be useful if you simply must take a crap during travels. Not shown, on account of tininess: nail clippers.

Electronics. iPod with headphones and cell phone, fully charged in advance at home if I know I’ll be out all day. (Not pictured for somewhat obvious reasons: camera, also fully charged. Also not shown, also on account of tininess: keychain-size flash drive, for storing documents and other files to transport back and forth from work.)

Other somewhat obvious items not pictured because they’re not in my bag but on my person or in my pants/jacket pockets include my wristwatch, keys, handkerchief, change and a bunch of scraps of paper with notes written on them. In my wallet of course are cash and credit cards, but I like to always stock two MetroCards: my monthly plus a declining balance, which I try to keep around $10. I use the latter when the monthly runs out unexpectedly, I’m in a rush and don’t want to get cockblocked by the turnstile with an INSUFFICIENT BALANCE message. It’s also ideal for riding the PATH train, the turnstiles for which don’t accept declining-balance MetroCards.

Additional item I may carry when the forecast calls for a torrential downpour include a spare pair of socks. And stuff I don’t carry that others may consider would include portable food items (snack-size bags of nuts or granola bars are nice), sunglasses, lip balm, and various lady-type items if you are a lady.

I like to think I have typical New Yorker stuff in my bag (in addition to The New Yorker, ha ha), but who knows.

That voice: a tenor, so soft and naive. I didn’t know whether a man or a woman sang “My Funny Valentine” until I saw William F. Claxton’s photos of Chet Baker, trumpet in hand, jutting jaw, pompadour, full lips, high cheekbones, heavy brow. Sexy bastard. I guarantee Chris Isaak and Morrissey have at least one photo of Chet taped up in their locker.

Another photographer, Bruce Weber, made a kind of documentary, Let’s Get Lost, a eulogy in high-contrast black and white, as the jazz trumpeter/singer haunted Europe and California in the late ’80s. Chet floated then—floated like that voice, really—in a fog of cigarette smoke and methadone, recall so ragged he nearly couldn’t remember the name of a son by his first of three wives.

But that love was a long time ago, when he played with Stan Getz and Charlie Parker—imagine, this Okie trumpeting with those guys and epitomizing West Coast Cool. Chet latched onto the expat jazz scene in Paris of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Drugs dragged him down further and he spent a year in an Italian jail for possession. Back in the U.S. in the ’60s, a group of toughs jumped him and knocked out his teeth, or so he says. He never let the truth intrude if it didn’t need to.

In Santa Monica, he’s 60 but looks 80, and in the tightly cropped shots of him seated glassy eyed in the back seat of a speeding convertible at night, he resembles a more fiercely weather-beaten Kris Kristofferson. One or two anonymous pretty women accompany him wherever he goes. He horseplays on a beach and rides in bumper cars with some young fans. They’re giddy to be in his presence although they don’t much know him beyond the fact he used to be famous for something. One asks if his trumpeting sounded anything like that of Miles Davis. Not to anyone with two ears, Chet says.

A few months after the release of Let’s Get Lost, he fell from a hotel room window in Amsterdam and died. According to Weber’s postscript, Dutch police on the scene initially reported they’d discovered the body of a 30-year-old musician.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

En el limón cortaron los cuchillos una pequeña catedral.
Cutting the lemon, the knife leaves a little cathedral.

Pablo Neruda, “Oda al limón” (1957)

Manhattan Beach, California.

This was in the tape deck of my business colleague’s Jeep throughout our multiday trip of meetings in the Inland Empire, but instead we listened to Jack FM and, with the sunroof open as we hurtled down the expressway, we sang along to a Jet CD, poorly but passionately.

Bicycle, Southern California.

I’d like to volunteer myself as the copy editor for the ironic new-vintage T-shirt division of Urban Outfitters, as I am familiar not only with pop-culture clichés but the hortatory subjunctive.

Related: Just Because You Spellchecked... Part II and Part I. Also, coincidentally and oddly, the hortatory subjunctive was in the news this week.

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

Ah, Brazil. My memory flits to the Spanish-Latin mash of Portuguese, cold rain, hot cheese sandwiches on Varig, the favellas of Rio, a soapstone giant, monkeys in the trees, potato-shaped mountains and the ocean.

There’s a little place on the corner of Elizabeth and East Houston, Colonial Cafe, which I’m legally bound to refer to as “charming,” that offers a concisely representative menu of Brazilian cuisine and fine sidewalk seating. I enjoy sidewalk seating on warm, breezy days like today although my cheap aluminum chair had been manufactured by the Hitler Youth for maximum spine-jabbing and lower-back discomfort.

My grilled free-range sirloin steak was tendony but reclined in juicy ease on a bed of mashed potatoes and topped with a black bean lime salsa and salty sautéed kale.

Throughout my meal, as a sort of serenade, a dowdy woman wearing large dark sunglasses and with two large black dogs in tow, yakked on her cell about various recent sexual escapades she’d taken part in. Fortunately I was able to devote most of my attention to enjoying people-watching, eating my dinner and enjoying my two caipirinhas, tart and bracing.

Colonial Cafe

• 276 Elizabeth St. (at East Houston)
• (212) 274-0044
• Meal 19 of 52: steak ($18) and two caipirinhas ($7.50 each).

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

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

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

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

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

Megan led us on a grand walking tour of Williamsburg that ended up lasting longer than expected when she discovered the restaurant she’d chosen for our group had newspapered windows and a curt notice of closure from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. So instead she led us further and deeper into Brooklyn, and after asking several pedestrians and drivers stopped at lights for directions, passing under the BQE several times by my count, learning there are actually two Grand Streets, plus making our way through a neighborhood of Puerto Ricans getting juiced up for their home country’s big pride parade tomorrow, we came upon Taco Chulo.

By then we were all hungry enough to gnaw off our own legs so it worked well that the food there is delicious and inexpensive, though we quickly sought to nullify the latter half of that value by purchasing a large amount of liquor. Any Mexican restaurant that offers tequila flights, as this one did, cannot go wrong by me, so it was a special bonus to discover the food was also great. Our chips came with the freshest salsa I think I’ve ever tasted. I had a vegetarian burrito, which can be pedestrian enough, but the starkly fresh pico de gallo punched it up, with shredded cabbage, sliced radishes and sautéed potato chunks livening the taste and texture of the refried-bean-and-avocado base. They’re as large as the ones at Chipotle but much more flavorful and textural and I didn’t feel like a McDonald’s-supporting stooge when I laid down my $7.50.

Here I am sitting at the table making a face about something. Definitely not the food. Very tasty, Taco Chulo.

Taco Chulo

• 318 Grand Street, Brooklyn (between Havemeyer and Marcy Streets)
• (718) 302-2485
• Meal 18 of 52: probably like a whole basket of tortilla chips ($1 per basket), a flight of tequilla (three one-ounce shots for $13) and a vegetarian burrito ($7.50).

I was excited to learn today that I can get film for the late-’60s Polaroid Model 20 “Swinger” Land Camera I bought for about $5 many years ago at a Goodwill in Cleveland. What a fine specimen, this hefty yet ergonomic white molded plastic that feels solid in my hand. A bank of faceted flash reflectors surrounds the faceplate of the lens. Turning the bright red knob adjusts the exposure, and like some sort of mutant Magic 8 Ball, the word “YES” appears in a window below the viewfinder when it’s set correctly. At last, pressing the white button on the tip of the red knob takes the photo. The instructions are molded in raised type on the back of the camera.

Polaroid began phasing-out SX-70 film for Land Cameras like the “Swinger” in early 2006; I’m surprised it didn’t happen years sooner than that with the popularity of digital cameras. As an alternative, Polaroid recommends messing around with its 600 or 779 film cartridges to sneak them into Land Cameras, but I didn’t want to do that. Then I read that a variant of SX-70 film, SX-70 Blend, is available and has the same vivid colors, saturation and a slight blue cast as the original stuff. It’s made in the Netherlands and only available in Europe unless you go through a U.S. distributor and its hefty markup, which I did. With any luck you’ll see soon the fruits of this expense when I post some scans.

Kind of like the bridge of a low-rent Star Trek knockoff.

I checked out the Eugene de Salignac photograph exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York recently. I haven’t written about it because it didn’t rattle my bones as an excellent exhibit should. But one of Eugene’s photos, of workers in 1918 assembling a sign for the Williamsburg Bridge, reminds me of the cover for the new CD by Maroon 5.

That is all.

The New York Public Library is exhibiting a fine selection of photos from the Midtown Y Gallery, the late, great non-profit organization that let photographers, famous or otherwise, exhibit their works in the ’70s and ’80s when there were surprisingly few options in the city. (Prior to the ’80s in New York, few galleries showed only photography.) The exhibit spans the life of the gallery, from ’72 to ’96, with a focus on street photography from the late-’70s and early-’80s, offering a time-capsule depiction in gelatin-silver prints of the storefronts, the clothing, the people and the mood during a key era of the city.

There are amazing photos of Brighton Beach swimmers and bathers from the mid-’70s, nuclear disarmament rallies of the early ’80s, and, in the exhibit’s centerpiece, a series spanning a wall the length of the room called “14th Street,” taken on that crosstown artery of Manhattan from 1979-1981 by Sy Rubin and Larry Siegel. Although some of the features remain recognizable, the May’s Department Store is now a Whole Foods Market, while Jullian’s Billiards, Lüchow’s and the Palladium at Irving Place (where the Plasmatics are shown playing) have made way for New York University buildings.

Yesterday I wrote of pre-sullied shoes, and lo and behold, the fresh new kicks I ordered online from Adidas arrived today. They’re Gazelles, upmarket cousins of my favored three-stripes variety, Samba soccer shoes. I’ve always said my favorite color is red yet demonstrated scant evidence to back this up, so I went for the maroon fabric variety. Supremely comfortable and stylish, if I may be so bold.

Remember when I was complaining about my gleaming-white new Converse All-Stars and wondering why shoe manufacturers couldn’t pre-distress them, as they do with jeans? Nike’s taken the idea and run with it. According to a brief in the New York Times today:

Last year, for Junya Watanabe’s Spring 2007 show in Paris, Nike recreated its classic running shoes from the 1970s to look as if they actually had been made in the 1970s—with yellowed mid-soles and washed-out suede patches.

Now the box-fresh, predistressed shoes are going on sale for $220 at Comme des Garçons stores next week. A broader release of $120 styles will reach Barneys New York, Urban Outfitters and Scoop stores in July.

Coney Island is changing. I was there recently and hooking in on the Q train, just past the storefront signs in Cyrillic, you can’t hurl a brick without hitting a vinyl banner draped over available beachfront real estate from Thor Equities, the developer angling for a 10-acre, $2 billion overhaul of Astroland, the area’s central amusement district. This is all slated to go down sometime next year when the City Council votes for the rezoning.

Thor has already thunderbolted a bunch of the grubbier establishments off the island, including assorted food merchants, the go-karts, batting cages and bumper boats, which is a mixed blessing: Coney Island is a shithole. But it’s fun and one of the most relaxing and democratic parts left in the city just because it’s so laid back, welcoming and affordable to everyone. To sashay in with a Cedar Point-caliber water park or Vegas-style vacation destination (as some reports claim), plus the usual luxury condos over ground-level retail, is just going to muck it all up.

If I can be thankful it’s in knowing the iconic Cyclone roller coaster and the Wonder Wheel, which are owned by the city, are staying put, as is the Parachute Jump Tower, also city-owned and doubly protected with historic landmark status. I’ve also read that the Boardwalk staples Nathan’s Famous hot dogs and KeySpan Park, home to the Brooklyn Cyclones minor-league baseball team, aren’t moving. And for those worried about the most venerable of trashy entertainments, an amNewYork article today cites a Thor spokesperson’s reassurances that the developer is “very open” to retaining “quality” Coney tenants, specifically Shoot the Freak.

Every so often, as the song goes, I like to drink my liquor from an old fruit jar, so I mixed a batch of sangria in two Ball Half-Gallon Wide Mouth Mason Jars I bought upstairs at Zabar’s a year ago for no good reason.

Sangria arose as a quick and cheap party punch so conventional wisdom dictates bottom-shelf jug wine and overripe fruit. The soft fruit I’ll allow, but even though I’d be watering down and sweetening up the wine, I didn’t want cheap-wine migraines so I chose Yellow Tail merlot, which is to me on the upper scale of mass-market wines.

Buying my ingredients, I wanted a peach but they’re not in season yet so I selected an orange, a pear and a red apple. The true secret to successful sangria is to let the fruit soak not in the wine mixture solely but beforehand in another liquor. Brandy works best because you can get it cheap and, like the wine, was grapes at one point in its life.

After chopping the fruit and soaking it, I mixed equal amounts into a half-and-half blend of the merlot and lemonade. Then I shook in a few teaspoons of caster (superfine) sugar. (A sugar tip I found online is if you don’t have superfine sugar, which dissolves much more smoothly and cleanly than the typical big-crystal stuff, you can grind down regular sugar in a coffee grinder or food processor.) I screwed tight the metal banded lids of the jars and shook vigorously to mix. Amusingly, prior to my blending, the wine sat haughtily atop the lemonade in a distinct layer as if it would have no relations with that tart mistress Minute Maid.

Because of the lemonade, I found after taste-testing I didn’t need to add any more of sugar, but I figured I could always add more later if the brew turned too tart. Very refreshing, served over plenty of ice.

Window washing? That’s ballsy. Nothing but rickety scaffolding and mere ounces of ballistic nylon straps between you and a plummet to death.

Two window-washers showed up tonight to clean the filthy windows in our office. They brought a harness but left it on the floor just outside my cubicle, where it stayed the entire time they stepped out onto the foot-wide window ledges of the seventeenth floor to swipe at the grime with a squeegee and soapy water while holding onto the sash with their free hand.

This window faces south; the skyscraper looming in the washed-out background, One Penn Plaza, ranks among the city’s top-20 tallest. Standing on our window ledges is not for the vertiginous.

It was windy out today and very sunny and it may have been hard to concentrate with some jackass inside taking pictures of them, but nothing fazed the window-washers. Probably if one fell, the other would be obligated to throw the harness out the window after him for insurance purposes.

“Where you guys from?” asked our not-especially politically correct office manager, after she casually mentioned that a man who lived in her apartment building hailed from Ghana. “Africa,” they said simultaneously and mischievously in accents I couldn’t place. The guy in the yellow shirt thought it was funny I was taking photos and even funnier when I offered to email them to him.

I must move beyond mere ballsiness in reference to these particular window washers and award them the Gold-Plated Brass Balls Award, with clusters and bonus testicle.

The recipe hinted that one chipotle pepper would be enough but this black bean soup could have used at least two. My grocer carried no less than six brands of canned chipotles in adobo sauce, a thick and spicy tomato purée that accents the natural smokiness of the chiles. I made my choice based on a label that appears to depict the cartoon head of Frida Kahlo emerging from a pile of giant raisins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strong and nimble men balancing on beams a story above the sidealk assembled a sidewalk shed today that will run the length of my office building’s block on Eighth Avenue. They hefted long and heavy planks and poles that wavered in their grip. Pedestrians underneath glanced upwards with concern and hastened pace. I figure these hard-hatted fellow know what they’re doing although I momentarily amused myself with this thought: sidewalk sheds protect pedestrians from falling construction debris; but during the construction of sidewalk sheds, what protects pedestrians if bits of that structure fall?

Nothing can change the character of a New York City street more quickly than a sidewalk shed. They narrow and confine the sidewalk and make it seem more crowded as fast-moving foot traffic slows and constricts. People congregate under them in inclement weather and smokers seem to clot there at any time. Sidewalk sheds block the sun, the sky, streetlights and the building they serve itself, turning familiar routes strange. At night, bare-bulb lighting beneath makes it seem as if you’re traversing a mine tunnel. Sometimes sidewalk shed structures extend into the street, around obstacles and corners. Combined with eight-foot-tall plywood construction fences, they become miniature mazes. This being New York, these semi-concealed passages soon collect illicitly pasted-up ad posters, graffiti, garbage and a pungent scent of urine. It’s always a shock when the day comes, typically months later, that the shed is disassembled, and the street reverts back to its familiar character.

I received an email from the jokers in the production department this afternoon: “Congratulations on making the cover this month.” Attached was a PDF image of the cover for one of our regional real estate magazines.

Seems this one fellow, a random real estate executive, resembles me.

Maybe. I think he’s more my evil twin. I fancy my ears are more handsome.

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

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

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

Our PR man from Schenectady has taken to the ether. Let us bow our heads and pray for his blessing.

Another reason for purchasing that cast-iron frying pan was for the express purpose of preparing a bewitching recipe from 1966 reprinted recently in the Times Sunday Magazine, David Eyre’s Pancake. They’re a heavenly cross-bred crepe-pancake. I served mine with Swiss blackberry jam. Oh yes. This recipe is exceedingly simple but puffs up all brown-crusted and rich and eggy like you sweated soufflé-levels hardship into it. This one’s a greasy lil’ keeper.

I ordered a Lodge cast-iron frying pan and it arrived today via Amazon, crammed in a cardboard box and cradling a Haruki Murakami hardcover like literature destined for deliciousness. I ordered the book partially because I wanted it and partially because it tipped my total order into free shipping territory, saving me a good $15 on a utensil as dense and weighty as a bowling ball. The pan I ordered because I always sort of wanted one and because the Times magazine last Sunday ran a bewitching recipe from 1966 for something called David Eyre’s Pancake, a cross between a crepe and a flapjack. And, you know, cooks are always going on about the miracle of their cast iron, as if it was a particularly dim and stocky yet hard-working child of theirs.

For a utensil this rugged, seemingly smithed from a block of iron the size and sturdiness of Chuck Norris, then forged in the fires of hell or South Pittsburg, Tennessee, I expected chuckwagon simplistic care and handling. But its instructions read like a babysitter’s list of dos and don’ts. Don’t use soap. Dry it thoroughly always. Apply a light coat of oil before and after. Store in a cool, arid place. And for the love of all that is holy, do not violate all of the preceding rules at once by sticking it in your dishwasher. In other words, you never want to actually clean it, just gussy it up from time to time, like superficial Stradlater in Catcher in the Rye, spic and span outside, crumby inside.

The thing has the heft of a deadly weapon, perhaps literally, as Andy Capp’s wife taught me. Since my Amazon orders arrive at work, I had to haul it home in a bag. I kind of hoped I could have prevented a mugging by winding it up and clocking someone with it.

When the Germans captured photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson during World War II and tossed him in a POW camp, the Museum of Modern Art feared the worst and began preparing a memorial retrospective. Imagine their surprise when Cartier-Bresson escaped, heard of the effort and offered to help compose his own requiem. The 300-some photos he selected, spanning his best work from 1932 to 1946, are on display as a group for the first time in a half-century at the International Center of Photography.

It was literally a scrapbook he prepared, of photos taken with his trusty Leica, printed playing-card sized and mounted in a leatherbound album embossed with the gilded archaic phrase, “Scrap Book.” Most on display are these small versions; this is an exhibition necessitating repeated bows and squints, so as to scrutinize Cartier-Bresson’s often serendipitous detail. Thankfully, some of the best prints are presented in larger versions, as they were in the original MoMA exhibition—in fact the blowups are literally from the MoMA exhibit, whites yellow-tinged with age.

My favorite photo, crappily reproduced here but presented in both small and large versions at the exhibit, is this one, Madrid, taken in 1933. (The whole series he took that autumn in Spain of peasants, prostitutes, gypsies and everyday people is genius.) Madrid has an utterly calming symmetry, the balance of frozen human movement grounding the scene as a constellation of windows hovers above, and if Bresson’s favored shooting method is to be believed, this was taken without any specific aim. That makes it a composition with beauty of staggering chance. I wondered how many shots or even rolls Cartier-Bresson exhausted during the same session before he got this one.

In the most revelatory element of the exhibition, I was surprised to learn that Cartier-Bresson cropped Behind the Gare St. Lazare, one of his most famous photos and a personal favorite of his. Normally, cropping would not be worth mentioning in a photo exhibit but Cartier-Bresson rarely cropped, preferring moments de grâce. The museum has on display the only extant copy of the original St. Lazare, complete with crop lines grease-penciled down the left side of the proof, hash-marking into oblivion an out-of-focus slab of fence.

I also enjoyed the photos Cartier-Bresson took in Paris in the mid-’40s of celebrities in the worlds of art and philosophy—Picasso, Braque, Éluard, Bonnard, Satre, Camus—including a small series of Matisse, seated comfortably at home in Venice, holding a dove in one hand while sketching it with the other.

Next to my cubicle at work is an empty cubicle. Rather, it used to be empty. Soon after the girl who worked there quit, more than a year ago, the cubicle progressed through the stages of white-collar clear-cutting. First, someone purloined the stapler, maybe because it was slightly fancier than their own or maybe they just wanted a backup. Then the electric pencil sharpener disappeared, because, hey, electric pencil sharpeners are nice, and no one was using this one, sitting there in an empty cubicle. The power strip was next to go, followed by various pens and pushpins and trays. At last, someone wheeled away the chair, replacing it with their own brokedown model. Picked clean of accouterments, the empty cubicle now was the loneliest cubicle. If there happened to be wind on the 17th floor, it would have whistled through this cubicle with melancholy as a tumbleweed trundled by.

Then, as in New York at large and in particular at a media company focused on commercial real estate, people recognized space was at a premium. So they started dumping their junk in the empty cubicle. Half a dozen busted chairs collected in there and now spill out of the entrance. Next arrived a sprawl of old newspapers, empty three-ring binders, Bankers Boxes of anonymous paperwork from the late ’90s, outdated desk calendars and other random crap. I’ve taken to calling it New Fresh Kills and I’m pretty sure I saw a homeless guy sleeping in there the other day.

The company at which I work is just large enough that there was a chance no one would have noticed this pileup and it would have continued attracting trash until it began emitting methane. But it’s located directly across from the glass-doored conference room, so most everyone sees it on a regular basis, including, much to the consternation of the higher-ups, besuited out-of-office visitors to the conference room. I’ve heard that the big boss will be sending out a Clean Office Initiative memo very soon, written in that corporate style of “we all need to keep a clean work area” and “thank you in advance for your participation,” because as much as he wants to, he can’t just blurt out “somebody fucking clean the garbage cubicle.” But seeing as how its donors have been largely anonymous, I wonder who will be responsible for this task?

The weather warmed slightly from the cold and snowy weekend so folks were out shoveling today. This guy was on the roof of an 18-wheeler parked on W. 37th Street, knocking large, flat chunks of solidified snow onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing pedestrians.

Soon after my friend Jimi moved to New York City, still in the initial grip of its charms, he told me he was fascinatated that he could buy a Big Mac any time he wanted. He wasn’t addicted to fast food, merely relaxed in the confidence that should he require a Big Mac at four in the morning, one could be readily procured at McDonald’s Times Square.

New York provides. Your want of any thing isn’t limited by what’s available because everything’s available. The only concern is, “Can I get it delivered or will I have to pick it up?” Earlier this year, for instance, I was convinced I needed a six-foot sheet of translucent Colorplast for a project and sure enough, a store on Canal Street sold just that.

To my dentist’s chagrin, I also want soda made with sweet, superior sugar. When I wrote excitedly last summer of finding Coke in San Francisco made with sugar instead of the high fructose corn syrup it’s been made with domestically since the mid-’80s, I had assumed it was the most conveniently available source. For shame. I should have checked New York first. Even more reliable than finding gray-market Mexican imports of sugar-Coke at local bodegas, I learned this weekend of a more consistent and legal stock bathed in semisecrecy.

According to a frequently bandied-about statistic, the New York metropolitan area is home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside Israel. Chametz, a law of Passover, dictates that certain grains cannot be consumed during the holiday, in some cases including corn, the source of high fructose corn syrup. So in order not to lose a segment of potential consumers, Coke adds a kosher-certified variety of its namesake beverage made with sucrose (sugar) in the weeks leading up to Passover, from mid-March to early April.

Compounding this small window of opportunity, availability is limited. In cans and two-liter bottles, you can find it in New York and a few other large metropolitain areas, which according to the Orthodox Union include Boston, Baltimore-Washington, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Kosher Coke made with sugar can be spotted by a telltale yellow cap printed with a Hebrew phrase and the OU-P symbol (as well as sucrose in the ingredients listing).

Soda connoisseurs perpetuate and fret over the hoarding and small stocks of sugared Coke, but by merely striding toward the beverage aisle at an Upper West Side Gristedes, I noticed about half of the two-liter bottles of Coke on the shelves were topped by yellow caps. It’s interesting that they weren’t segregated or designated kosher/made-with-sugar by a sign or display. Possibly only observant Jewish folk, sugar-soda lovers and readers of certain blogs know the secret.

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

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

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

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

I grew up in the suburbs of Middle America surrounded by mutant meal items made with convenience foods, entrées like hotdish and fruit-cocktailed Jell-O salads that I forget are chiefly a Midwestern Thing now that I no longer live there. For our office department’s St. Patrick’s Day party tomorrow, I wanted to bake something tonight different than the soda bread I made last year so Google found me a recipe for grasshopper bars on the Betty Crocker website.

“Grasshopper bars? What are those?” was the response from people around the office, their minds filling with a plague of chirping, leaping insects.

“You know, like grasshopper pie but in bar form,” I explained.

“Grasshopper pie?!”

“Crushed Oreo crust, Cool Whip or marshmallow cream filling with crème de menthe . . . ?”

Nothing but stares. I’d Suburbanized myself again. But I was determined to make the recipe anyway. It looked easy, tasty and had that requisite holiday color.

As I prepared the simple brownie base, I wondered why anyone would ever bother using a prepackaged mix when it probably takes only an additional minute to measure out the flour, cocoa, sugar, vanilla, baking powder and salt to blend with the eggs and oil/butter. Scratch tastes better, is “all natural” and most cooks will have the majority of those ingredients hanging around their cupboards anyway.

The bars end up very similar to petits fours with that sugar-butter frosting. But baby, they got real ugly once I cut them into squares. The thin chocolate coating chipped and splintered, giving the tops wear patterns of polished nails after three weeks.

Friday, March 16th Update: My coworkers said they liked the bars as they scarfed down the entire pan faster than the soda bread someone else supplied this year. But I don’t think I’ll make them again. In addition to the chocolate-chipping issue, the frosting was too thick and powdered-sugary plus not as minty as I’d have liked. Perhaps my dusty, forlorn bottle of crème de menthe, the lowliest of the liqueurs, had lost its efficacy. I also learned not to use a metal knife to cut thick bars made in a new Calphalon pan, which now appears to have been mauled by Wolverine.

The guy on the right is holding a paper-wrapped bunch of flowers, which didn’t turn out as clearly as I’d hoped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The floor swam with skaters, moving quickly en masse, generally in the same direction, bumping one another in the rush. It was reminiscent of the center 2/3 platform at Penn Station weekday mornings, except with more falling down. There were skaters of all kinds: Girls wearing short shorts and those high, striped tube socks. An old man who resembled Alan Arkin skating slowly in his own worl