Author: Gil

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It’s such a perfect day, I’m glad I spent it with me

Today I decided to have lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, A Mano, an upscale Neapolitan pizza place in Ridgewood, NJ. I got there around 2pm, in the midst of a typhoon (nice day to start our Friday summer hours: 50 degrees and pouring). I opened the door, and saw there wasn’t a single customer inside. A waitress stepped out from the back office. I asked, “You open?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Come on in.”

I sat down at a table, ordered my favorite pizza (the A Mano: bufula mozzarella, prosciutto di Parma, arugula, cherry tomatoes, shaved gran cru, and extra virgin olive oil), watched the cook head over to the wood-burning oven to get my pie started, and listened to nobody.

I thought, “Of the top 10 things I love in this world, I have to include

  1. fantastic NJ pizza and
  2. not having to listen to another human being.”

The pizza didn’t take them too long. It was as wonderful as I expected. As I finished it, the waitress came by to ask if I needed anything.

I should’ve asked her to play a Sam Cooke CD on an infinite loop. That’s about the only way the moment would’ve been better.

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Blood club

Here’s an update to last week’s call for blood and/or platelet donation for Nathanael Sandstrom, a young (well, my age) man suffering from lymphoma at Sloan-Kettering in NYC. It’s from his wife, and was passed to me via my pal Elayne, who first sent out the call to all VM friends:

A bit of good news: it seems that the doctors have a dignosis and treatment that they feel confident about. Last week, a new doctor came on the case and suggested histiocytosis as the bone marrow disease that has been keeping Nathanael’s blood counts so low and making him so sick for so long. Histiocytosis is an extremely rare condition, usually found in children, in which histiocytes attack white blood cells and platelets. There have only been 2 cases at MSK in the last 10+ years that our doctor is aware of, and so she consults with the authority who is based in Houston. Apparently (in Nate’s case) the disease results somehow from the original lymphoma.

The 8-week treatment for it (combination of steroids, antibiotics, and a new chemotherapy) has been working, albeit slowly, and so Nathanael has been feeling and seeming much better. In the last few months he’s lost a huge amount of weight and most of his muscle mass, so he’s now focused on rehabing his body. If the trend of the treatment stays positive, he may be able to leave the hospital within the next couple of weeks for an outpatient period. After that, he’ll need to go back in for a bone marrow transplant to replace his immune system. That transplant will be used to ultimately defeat the histiocytosis but also to consolidate the treatment for the original cancer.

This sounds like a lot and it is, and so Nate is just looking forward to getting strong enough to be out of the hospital for a little while.

We are deeply thankful to everyone who has donated blood or platelets here in NY; friends, family, colleagues, and people we’ve never even met but who make the trip and the effort on Nate’s behalf. We are deeply moved.

And thanks to everyone for notes, calls, thoughts and prayers, which sustain us on a daily basis.

Onward. xoxo

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Get low

Happy 60th anniversary week, Israel!

The Dead Sea

Photo of the Dead Sea by xnir. As he put it:

The Dead Sea is a salt lake between the West Bank and Israel to the west, and Jordan to the east. At 420 metres (1,378 ft) below sea level, its shores are the lowest point on Earth that are on dry land. At 330 m deep (1,083 feet), the Dead Sea is the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.

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Mini Driver

I worked at home today, dear readers, in anticipation of a visit from James Maloney & Son Tree Service. In addition to getting The Raccoon Lodge removed, we contracted a whole lot of other work with them, removing some smaller trees from the front yard, getting a couple of hazardous ones removed from the side of the house, cutting too-low limbs from the big trees to get some sunlight onto the yard, and sawing down some stumps so we can begin the nefarious second phase of Operation: Livable Back Yard.

Since I’d be at home, I took Amy to the bus stop today. It’s a quirky logic, but we’re a quirky couple. Anyway, about 10 minutes before the tree guys were to arrive, I thought, “Hmm. Amy’s Mini is sitting right in the driveway, and I bet they’re going to need to get past that in order to take care of a lot of this work.”

Unfortunately, her car’s a stick-shift, and I’ve never actually driven a stick-shift, outside of the one time she tried to teach me in the bus-stop parking lot. Oh, and the time when I was 16 and my pals Jon-Eric & Todd tried to teach me, before we headed to the Kinnelon Cinema to see The Running Man.

I dug deep into that 1987 version of me and tried to recreate the experience of zooming around the parking lot of my high school, but it was to no avail.

Then I looked again into that geeky high school soul and discovered inspiration from another artifact of that era: the Miller/Mazzucchelli 7-issue run of Daredevil! In particular, I recalled this set of panels from the final installment, in which our blind superhero must get behind the wheel of a car:

Emboldened, I went out to Amy’s Mini, took off the emergency brake, put it in neutral, let it roll down to the bottom of the driveway, tried several times to get it to start, tried several times to get it in gear, and eventually made my way up into the garage!

(Where I, um, stalled out and had to push it in the rest of the way so I could close the garage door…)

(Oh, and, before-and-after pix of the yard are pending…)

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Khoi Vinh gon’ be piiiiiiiissed. . .

In this week’s NY Magazine (which you really should check out regularly), there’s a short item about Gay Talese’s work on a documentary about . . . well, let me just run it here in its entirety:

Erstwhile Timesman Gay Talese, whose 1969 The Kingdom and the Power is a classic study of the paper, is back on the beat, working with fellow Times alum Arthur Gelb on a documentary about the paper’s struggles in the digital age. “It’s about why the Times is having difficulty attracting readers when in my opinion it’s still a very good paper, and about the difficulty of convincing young people to read it,” Talese said at the PEN gala April 28.

Is it because young people are reading the paper online? “We’re not interested in their Website,” he said. “We’re interested in our insights as veterans of old-fashioned journalism.” But does he read the Times site occasionally? “Never, and I never will,” he said. “I don’t even have a cell phone. I don’t deal with the technology. I don’t even know how to go into the Web. Maybe Gelb will do it. I insist on being with the people I’m writing about.”

Now, I can understand an old coot of a writer not dealing with the internet, but I’m not sure how many of them decide to make a documentary that’s intrinsically about the internet and refuse to even engage it. How self-important do you have to be to go down that path?

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Beer-goggling at the WSJ

Last November, I wrote about how the Wall Street Journal’s infamous headshot illo-style — which I like to call The Drew Friedmanizer — had a vested interest in, well, portraying Hilary Clinton a bit unflatteringly:

Nowadays, I think they’re more concerned about derailing Sen. Obama’s campaign. Why, in today’s article about how both Democratic candidates are pandering sacks of shit reframing their messages on free trade as they campaign in Indiana and North Carolina, Sen. Clinton has been transformed:

Maybe she visited Glamour Shots by Deb.

(I like the carefully placed flag pin, although I think giving her a pearl necklace is a bit cruel.)

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Caucasian Coincidence

Yesterday, I began reading Lush Life by Richard Price. The lead character/suspect, Eric Cash, is a hipster who’s a little too old to be hip and has to deal with losing his hyphen: as in, no longer being an actor-waiter, and just being a waiter.

At one point, he mentions how in college he got the lead in a play called The Caucasian Chalk Circle. I thought this was some sort of inside joke of a title, or a dig at the absurdities of college theater.

This morning, I received an e-mail from my local alumni association with the subject line, “Don’t miss The Caucasian Chalk Circle”! Evidently,

a) I’m a cultural moron,

b) it’s by Brecht, and

c) another alum is co-starring in it.

Anyway, here’s the website of the theater company (and a review), if you’re in NYC and wanna see one of the final performances (it finishes on Sunday).