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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason

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

Al

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

Jason

[pause] O.K., I’ll take two pitchers.

Al

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

Jason

O.K., let’s do that.

Al

So, two pitchers of Bud.

Jason

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

Al

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trois Pommes

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

Chavella’s

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

Momofuku Ko

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

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

My brother’s been playing Grand Theft Auto IV, which I asked him about because the vidogame takes place in a thinly veiled version of New York City and I was curious what the experience was like. Here is his emailed report from yesterday, which amused me greatly. For the record, I’m unaware of any mini-golf courses in New York City; then again, it’s a big city.

My GTA IV apartment is terrible and I’m under some sort of rail tracks. Plus I went out on a date with this chick and I accidentally sank her car into a mini-golf course lake while trying to take a late night shortcut to the bowling alley. Needless to say our date didn’t end well. You can totally spend a shit-ton of time just looking at stuff, not to mention shopping for pants! The craziest part is that you can watch TV in your apartment in the video game, which is almost a little TOO meta for my liking.

I hardly ever know where I am in this game. Jess makes fun of me because my sense of direction and lack of driving savvy really carry over into the video game world. Without the built in GPS, I would probably always be lost (a real problem I had in earlier GTA games). [. . .] Obviously, I really need to study the map that came with the game, because I’m as confused as I would be in the real NYC. Another awesome tidbit: you can hail cabs and actually look out the window and make small talk as you ride. There’s even an option to yell at the cabbie to “hurry” if you need to be somewhere fast. The details in this game are mind blowing. At one point, somebody ran into me with their car and I lost my $8 Russian hat.

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.)

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.

Yesterday, our in-house IT manager was dumping a big cardboard box of obsolete cables and peripherals. In addition to me, this girl in the production department is a real scavenger, so we hauled the box over to her desk and started pawing through it like it was a treasure chest of booty. Among the tangle of cords, orphaned connectors, heavy power adapters, busted mice and ancient external drives, I found a Trackball Explorer, which Microsoft rolled out in 2001 for about $75, a king's ransom for such a device at the time. It’s since been discontinued.

I was excited to take it home to play Centipede via MAME on my PowerBook. It worked without having to install any driver software; all I had to do was plug it in and launch the game, and I was committing insecticide like it was 1984. Although Centipede is by far the most famous trackball game, Wikipedia has a list of ’em.

I did some stereotypical San Francisco sightseeing today. I hiked up Telegraph Hill to see Coit Tower and a prime view of Alcatraz Island. I browsed the stacks at City Lights, co-founded in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti as the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore and publisher to the beat poets. Fisherman’s Wharf, which I also stopped by, is the Times Square of San Francisco: chain restaurants, dreary hotels, questionable entertainments, beggars, tacky T-shirts and trinkets for sale, and fat people clearly not from the city waddling about. This photo of a seagull in a shitstained landscape, eating what appears to be a bun, just about sums it up for me.

I salvaged my wharfwalk somewhat with a planned visit to the Musée Mécanique, a collection of antique mechanized penny and nickel amusements, including viewboxes for 3D photos (“See what the belly dancer does on her day off!”), player pianos and orchestrions, photobooths, fortune-tellers and palm-readers, love-testers, mutoscopes and slot machines.

It’s too bad it’s not a true museum but a bunch of stuff some daft old bastard collected and threw into a warehouse on Pier 45. There are very few placards describing who made these Wunderkammern and why, how popular they were, or how they work. Or course, there’s also no admission fee to the Musée, so I can’t complain too much.

One of the two most popular attractions was Knock Out Fighters, a primitive precursor to Rock’em Sock’em Robots. They’re these articulated, marionette-like boxer figurines, made in 1928 by a St. Paul-based scale manufacturer, that are completely mechanical and use no electricity. The arms of each player’s boxer are moved independently by two triggers on the gun handle-style “joystick.” A direct punch to the chin of an opposing boxer pushes in a pin that causes the figure to collapse in defeat. The other crowd-favored game was this mechanical test-your-strength arm-wrestler in a luchador mask, favored by gentlemen wishing to impress their ladies.

I also enjoyed this amusement park model fashioned mostly from toothpicks.

Nearby was an intriguing text-and-photo-based history of the roller coaster and the magic year of 1884, when LaMarcus Adna Thompson, a crafty inventor from Ohio, installed the first, the 600-foot Switchback Railway at Coney Island. It topped out at six miles-per-hour and required passengers to exit their car at the halfway point to switch to another track. But even that couldn’t hinder thrill-seekers who waited up to three hours in line to pay their nickel and take the wild ride. That same year at Coney Island, San Franciscan Philip Hinckle installed the first power-chain operated lift-hill coaster, while in San Francisco, two “continuous oval-track gravity coasters” opened, one at Ocean Beach and another at Mission and Eighth. Here’s the text of an ad from that year promoting the latter coaster:

SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.
A Sled-Ride Down Hill Without Snow!
GREAT SPORT!
PHYSICIANS RECOMMEND IT. * OPEN DAY AND NIGHT.
The CALIFORNIA GRAVITY RAILROAD CO.
Cor. Eighth and Mission Sts.
ADMISSION FREE. * FIVE CENTS A RIDE.
Bring your family and enjoy yourselves.
Polite Attendants. Electric Lights.

There are newer exhibits in the Musée as well: about a dozen old video games plunked way in the back. I was disappointed that the only inoperable machine was one of my all-time favorites, Tempest (1980), and to read the instructions revived fond memories. This game was easier than Old Maid:

TO PLAY:
Shoot the approaching enemy and enemy charges. Player loses a life when:
* caught by an enemy
* hit by a charge
* skewered by a spike

Wrapping up a fine afternoon on my long walk back to the hotel, I was able to score some Mexican Coke. No, not the Lindsay Lohan kind. Check it out, baby: hecho en Mexico.

If you wonder what my fuss is about, you are no soda connoisseur. Here’s part of an Associated Press article from 2004:

[D]iscriminating shoppers [...] say the cane sugar sweetener used in Mexican Coke has a sweeter, cleaner flavor than the high-fructose corn syrup in the American version. Many are willing to pay $1.10 per 12-ounce bottle for the imports, even with cans of American Coke sitting nearby for 49 cents each.

I’ve since read not all Coke in Mexico is made with sugar, but I trust that mine is because there’s an official label stuck to the oldschool green-tinted glass bottle by the importer with sugar listed as the second ingredient after carbonated water.

If you believe a recent article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which doesn’t offer any hard data to back up its claim, you can find Mexican Coke “just about everywhere in Latino communities across the United States.” But most of the officially sanctioned product here is found in Texas and Southern California, two of the largest Mexican markets in the country. The rest of the country’s Mexican Coke may be “grey market” stock brought over the border by third-party distributors or retailers. See, the Coca-Cola Co. limits official imports of the stuff because U.S. bottlers don’t get any money from Mexican Coke and that makes the U.S. bottlers sad.

One reason U.S. Coke isn’t made with sugar is that domestic sugar prices are artificially inflated to several times of those anywhere else in the world in order to help poor Florida sugarbeet farmers buy another Olympic-sized swimming pool for their second house.

So drink Mexican Coke and not only is it tastier than “the real thing,” you’re screwing over sugar farmers, the Coca-Cola Co. and its bottlers. Amazing how quickly an American icon can turn renegade. I’m going to lug my bottle back to New York and store it in a cool, dark place. As is done with Dom Perignon, I will save it to drink with a special someone for a special occasion.

I braved the throngs of Puerto Rican Day Parade revelers, who were giddy with jingoism and clad in the island’s colors of red, white and blue, on my long subway ride to Astoria, Queens, for the Kubrick retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image.

The first film of the double-feature was Killer’s Kiss, essentially a student film Kubrick wrote, directed and edited when he was only 27. There are a few flashes of his future cinematic brilliance: the strange angles from odd staging and lens choices, the long tracking shots, and dramatic facial close-ups, including one magnified grossly by a fishbowl.

It’s mostly a love letter to Kubrick’s hometown, with shots of Times Square at night, the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway back when the seats were cushioned with fabric, and spooky warehouses around Fulton Street. The bookending scenes take place in the original Penn Station, which I recognized immediately from Berenice Abbott’s photos from the mid-’30s.

The plot is slow and basic. Davy, a down-on-his-luck welterweight (played by Jamie Smith) takes up with Gloria (Irene Kane), a “dime a dance” girl who lives in the studio apartment just across the way. They catch glimpses of each other at night through their windows and pretend they don’t know the other is looking. Her boss Vinnie (Frank Silvera), the greasy, jealous type, tries to have Davy bumped off, but kills his manager by mistake, causing the cops to implicate the boxer. After chasing one another up a fire escape and over rooftops, the climactic showdown unfolds in a mannequin factory, with Davy hurling plaster limbs and torsos at Vinnie, who retorts with wild swings from a fire axe.

Between the showings, I played Katamari Damacy on a six-foot wide wall-mounted screen in the museum’s ground-floor video game gallery. It’s a mutant arcade combining classic upright games with console systems in a clinical museum setting. So there’ll be a staid little plaque for, say, PaRappa the Rapper (“NaNaOn-Sha, 1996”), affixed to a wall above a TV and a PlayStation encased in a tamper-resistant plastic box. You can take a seat right there and play the game to your heart’s content, or at least until the 10-year-old standing behind you starts casting scowls at you and your amateur gameplay. They also have an original Mortal Kombat arcade game unit, rigged so you don’t have to insert any quarters to play.

Back in the theater, my new seat was aside two elderly women, one with a walker that she rammed into every object between the door and her seat, and the other smelling as if she spent her free time pickled in naphthalene. Both talked throughout Day of the Fight, the 15-minute short preceding the second feature, because they thought it was the second feature. “Is this the movie? What is this?” they kept asking in those voices that old people use when they think they’re whispering when in fact they’re talking loudly.

What Day of the Fight was was a “This Is America” news brief Kubrick filmed in 1951 for use like those Warner Brothers cartoons that used to screen before the main feature. It’s a day-in-the-life story of a New York City boxer and noteworthy for having a bunch of setups Kubrick obviously restaged for the fight scenes in Killer’s Kiss—one, at mat level, shows a boxer sitting in his corner and framed by the legs of the boxer seated in the opposing corner.

The second feature, The Killing, was directed by Kubrick from an adapted screenplay co-written by him and belongs among the best noir. Although it was made only a year after Killer’s Kiss, it had a budget, a director of photography who stayed at odds with Kubrick, and stars: Sterling Hayden as the ex-con Johnny Clay who masterminds a racetrack heist, and Marie Windsor, who’s just as great here as in The Narrow Margin, as the sniping, conniving wife of the milquetoast member of Johnny’s gang. The filmmaking is tighter and more confident than in Killer’s Kiss. Here the tracking shots follow characters as they walk all the way through several rooms of an apartment, and there’s that signature close-up of a static, oddly lit, popeyed face.

The reportedly studio-imposed narration in The Killing is obnoxious, announcing the time and place of most every scene like a police scanner, but the masterfully twisty plot and action make up for it. This is one of the better convoluted-timeline heist stories and you can tell Quentin Tarantino saw this movie like a dozen times and was taking notes, circa Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. You suspect Johnny and his gang of mostly sharp and well-meaning but ultimately outsmarted hoods aren’t going to pull off their caper without a hitch, so the fun is in watching their master plan unravel, the body count mount, the stolen cash literally whisk away, culminating with Johnny in the final scene too weary to outrun or outgun the cops closing in on him and his girl.

On the weekends, no self-respecting New Yorker wants to mingle with the sidewalk-clogging Canal Street tourists, with their maps, bootleg designer handbags and body fat, but I made an exception today for Taste of Chinatown.

Mmm-mmm! Can you taste the excitement? The fourth since October 2004, Taste of Chinatown is a giant neighborhood street fair with crowds, entertainments and, most importantly, 50+ restaurants, bakeries and shops peddling sample plates of their food and drink for the flat fee of $1 or $2.

A map and menu are provided online and one is wise to consult both beforehand because all street food looks tempting when you’re standing there, on the street. After practically leaping from the congestion on Canal, I arrived on Mott, the street featuring the most food choices. I quickly located the famous Peking Duck House because it was the only food station with a 30-minute-wait line, even though it was 1 p.m. and the festival had only just begun. There was a smaller line I briefly queued into until a fellow in chef garb announced that everyone who thought he was standing in the Peking Duck Line was actually standing in the Duck Bones Line. That line remained short.

Back in the correct line, I entertained questions from passers by, mainly “What’s this line for?”, followed by “Is it worth it?” or a derisive snort. The best part of my wait, other than watching small flocks of people cutting into the front of the line, was when some tourist lady passing by stopped an elderly local man with a flower-laden pushcart and asked him if she could take his picture. Then she did so, without waiting for an answer and after physically maneuvering him into the frame so her photo would look more symmetrical. Offhandedly she asked what the flowers were for. “Funeral,” the man said. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” the woman gushed, grasping the confused man’s arm, who was likely only a deliveryman.

Eventually I reached the serving table with its bustle of service and hungry people pressing foward while waving greenbacks. The namesake dish from Peking Duck House was worth the wait and I’d be willing to entertain an entrée portion. The samples today were small and wrapped in a sort of tortilla along with some crisp julienne cucumber. It was tender and just sweet enough, with crackly tasty skin. Wish I would have gotten two.

I followed this up with another respected Chinatown classic, Big Wong King, which offered a selection of roast pork, roast pig (which is apparently something different than roast pork), roast duck and BBQ spare ribs. I opted for the ribs and it was a moist, plentiful portion, tasty and dyed that mysterious Chinese Meat Red.

Lung Moon Bakery on Mulberry Street displayed a marvelous spread of goods and after I selected the angel food cake, craftily baked into squares of wax paper to resemble a tiny bouquet for ease of eating on-the-go.

To help wash this down, I walked over to buy some Black Bubble Tea from Ten Ren’s Tea Time, passing along the way several roving segments of Chinese Dragon, which reminded me of the arcade game Centipede.

Bubble tea, which I understand to be a tired novelty at this point in its lifespan, is milky iced tea in which is floating large caviar-like beads of flavored tapioca. You get a triple-wide straw to suck up these bubbles along with your tea. If you’re lucky, you inhale them directly into your respiratory system.

Other than arriving on-time, hungry and ideally with someone else to talk with in line, the best recommendation I can offer for Taste of Chinatown is to take your meal to eat over in nearby Columbus Park. It’s cliché to call one landscaped parcel or another in Manhattan “a gem,” but I’d call it that anyway and overextend the metaphor by adding “recently polished.”

Although it was designed by celebrated Central Park co-architect Calvert Vaux, Columbus Park opened in 1897 adjacent the unsavory Five Points neighborhood, which features into Herbert Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York and Scorsese’s film of the same name. The park was so filthy at the time, it was dissed in print by no less than Jacob Riis and Charles Dickens.

Well after the turn of the century, improvements arrived in slow order: a limestone rec center in the mid-’30s, a playground and basketball courts in the ’80s and ’90s. Then, last year, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation injected the north end of the park with improvement funding. It now features a plaza with benches, chess and picnic tables, new landscaping, fencing and lighting, and the final element under construction, a handsome stone pavilion. There’s also a soccer field, open to the public but not dogs, with the greenest, most evenly cropped grass I’ve yet seen in Manhattan; I had to touch it to convince myself it was real. You will trust me when I say this is grass to make a hard-boiled golfer jealous. I am clearly an idiot; the grass is fake.

Despite these agreeable surroundings, there were few people from the festival eating in the park. It was mostly Asian guys at the picnic and game tables, playing what may have been Go Xiangqi with small, illustrated discs. These old guys’ discs were wooden and their game drew only three onlookers, including myself. (That’s the pavilion in the background.)

Meanwhile, groups of young turks playing at other tables boasted professional engraved disc sets, as well as small entourages that would call out suggestions, praise strategies and heckle failures, like a Greek chorus, only in Chinese.

I blew out of the Town just as the bitterly cold rain blew in around 3:00 p.m. I read later in The New York Times that by 3:30, the intensified rain caused many restaurants to pull in their tables, effectively closing down the festival early. But there will be another one in October. I’ll be back, Taste of Chinatown. I’ll be back.

Taste of Chinatown

• Meal 16 of 52:
• Peking Duck from Peking Duck House, 28 Mott St. ($2)
• BBQ spareribs from Big Wong King, 67 Mott St. ($2)
• angel food cake from Lung Moon Bakery, 83 Mulberry St. ($1)
• Black Bubble Tea from Ten Ren’s Tea Time, 79 Mott St. ($2)

In the beginning, home video game systems had joysticks, and that was how you controlled the video game. I remember those flimsy Atari 2600 sticks—black, stubby and with but one button. When you moved the stick, the direction would register with by the completion of a physical circuit, a small raised foil dot touching another. I know this because I recall seeing the innards of one, having opened it up to see why it wasn't working. A bout of vigorous joysticking had completely mashed down one of the foil dots, and the circuit was no longer connecting.

Along came directional control pads and controllers encrusted with buttons. They retained and enhanced upon their phallic shape because young boys like to, uh, play video games. Input devices took a step forward to a more organic format in the mid-’80s with the light gun, issued chiefly to shoot ducks.

For the NES, the literal and figurative action started heating up in 1988 with Nintendo’s Power Pad, which allowed players to boogie on a Twister-like floormat that transmitted one’s stylin’ moves to the game. A year later, Mattel’s Power Glove allowed for punching and other hand gestures to be fed to a game.

By 2000, it was more song-and-dance, with Dance Dance Revolution, which expanded upon and popularized the dance-mat concept, and with Sega’s Samba de Amigo, the control for which was a pair of maracas, shaken in concert with a seemingly acid-fortified dancing Mexican monkey onscreen. (My brother owns this game and when I played it a few years back, it was a stone cold riot.) Last year, Donkey Konga debuted, with a pair of bongo drums as the controller.

As video game controllers get more “organic,” what’s next? At the recent Game Developers Conference Europe, the show’s organizers gathered a group of experts to tackle the topic of designing the ultimate video game—for the average grandma. Keita Takahashi, the mind behind the strange and wonderful Katamari Damacy, made the most adventuresome comments. He began by noting current control designs are inorganic and difficult to understand—and for anyone, I would assume, not just grandmas. He then proposed a controller design so organic that it would be inseparable from the game itself—a cat. “The cat is designed to be rested on the old ladies’ knees,” he said, continuing (in an excerpt from a Gamasutra report by Iain Simons):

The game would begin with the family suggesting to Granny that she wear the cat because, for example, her knees looked cold. Embedded in the cat is the capability for it to communicate wirelessly with other cat controllers (on other Grannies’ knees) in the neighborhood. When the cat connects to another one, “...the onboard A.I. kicks in.” This causes the cat to speak, paraphrased as “meow, meow, grandma, meow.” Takahashi explains that the family are required to participate in the game by pretending that they haven’t heard anything, because of this—Grandma begins to build the perception that she is able to communicate directly with the cat.

As the dialogue with the cat develops, it suggests that Granny make some soup—but faster than the other granny down the street who has also received the instruction. A competitive element emerges and gradually the cat suggests more and more group activities that Grandma might engage in, culminating in trips to the park. “...So they all go outside and eventually they meet other old ladies with cats and they all become friends. So it’s a game that involves the participation and love of the entire family.” Takahashi ended the presentation by commenting on the possible production path of the cat, “Namco and Bandai are merging so when I get home I will submit my proposal.”

Takahashi, you crazy fool; go for it! You may snicker at his concept, but anyone who can make a hit video game (and one of my personal favorites in years) out of a little dung beetle-like character that perpetually rolls a ball comprised of progressively larger random objects, well, that’s the fellow to make a video game controller shaped like a cat.

1982. I didn’t own Thriller, but my friend Kevin did. It was cool to own Thriller (in record format, of course) and Kevin had other cool stuff, like a dirt bike, a ColecoVision, mad karate skills, and a way with the ladies. I distinctly recall preferring “Weird Al” Yankovic’s parody version of “Beat It” (one of the many hit singles from Thriller), which was cleverly entitled “Eat It.” Needless to say, I did not have a way with the ladies.

circa 1985-1986. My favorite song during the class roller skate night at Ohio Skate was “ABC” by the Jackson 5. A super joyous rhythm on which to unsteadily circle ‘round, discoball lights flashing on the darkened rink floor. Please don’t forget that the song has the Best Bridge Ever, as shouted out by Michael:

Sit down, girl!
I think I love you!
No!
Get up, girl!
Show me what you can do!

Incidentally, my second favorite song during the class roller skate night at Ohio Skate was “Word Up!” by Cameo.

1988. My junior-high class got to choose a song to play during our “graduation” and we chose “Devil Inside” by INXS, because it clearly summed up our “school spirit,” plus it had a sweet beat. Somehow this choice was overruled and the song ended up being Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror.” Damn you, Mrs. Gray.

late-1990s to present. One of my friend Jimi’s occasional interjections is to say “You ain’t bad! You ain’t nothin’!” in a Michael Jacksonish voice. I never realized what this referenced until he explained that it’s a line of dialogue from the extended version of the “Bad” video. In it, Michael plays a kid named Daryl who berates some hoodlums with the phrase after they try to get him to revert to his “bad” ways. Of course, Jimi also refers to himself as “Jimi” (“Jimi says nothing.”), which apparently is a Seinfeld reference, but I think that one’s just pure Jimi.

today. I’ve been downloading arcade games to play on my Mac using MAME, an emulation program. I’ve long since accrued all the classics from the ’80s, of which Tempest is my favorite. Looking for more recent games today, I came across Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, released into the arcades in 1990 by Sega.

It’s great! The background music includes Muzak versions of Jackson songs like “Bad,” “Smooth Criminal” and “Billie Jean.” Many of the game’s scenes are supposed to be based on the Moonwalker movie from 1988, which I’ve never seen. (But with a cast that includes Mick Jagger, Joe Pesci and Lech Walesa(!), how could I not have seen it?). When you hit the “insert coin” button, there’s a sample of Michael’s high-pitched “whoo-hoo!”; a slower version of this sample is used when Michael “dies” in the game. Ha ha!

Michael’s “special power” is Dance Magic, which causes all enemies on the screen to dance in unison with him until they are magically dispatched in clouds of smoke. Michael can also turn into a giant robot after touching his chimp, Bubbles.

And finally (I really wish I were making this up), bonus points are added by “touching” children in distress throughout the game.

They thank Michael, then they run directly away from him in an amusing fashion.