A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
The links are going to go dead in a few days, so if you’re interested in Robert Moses, historical revisionism and crypto-Oedipal conflicts, and the landscape of New York (and who isn’t?), you need to check out these two articles from the NYObserver and the NYTimes.
First, though, you should read the Atlantic Yards Report post on this revisionism (which led me to the articles), and how it’s being used (sorta) to justify Ratner’s plans for Brooklyn.
Oh, and read The Power Broker
Just a picture from my morning drive. It’s the first snow of the year. There’s a little set over here.
A few months ago, I wrote about a strange moment in a Dunkin Donuts on my morning commute. Today, I pulled in to another nearby DD on my way back from lunch, and a woman driving a Jaguar walked in ahead of me. She was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a sweater, with a plaid flannel shawl.
I stood behind her on line, and noticed that she had some sorta loose collar on her neck. It was red, with little silver buttons. A red, heart-shaped “dog tag” was hanging from it, on the back of her neck. It read
PET MONKEY
BILL IS
MY MASTER
I’m just gonna hide under my desk for a while.
It’s a short Unrequired Reading session this week, since I’m still getting over the year-end issue blowout, and I’m trying to take it easy during this little holiday trip to Louisiana.
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 22, 2006”
My weekend started with an 80-minute drive after work Friday evening. I managed to cover nearly 33 miles in that time, getting from Ramsey, NJ to a bar on Amsterdam and W. 83rd St. in NYC. Which is to say, there are certain aspects of living and working in NJ that can be frustrating. Traffic is a major headache, which is why I don’t schedule anything too tightly for NYC on weeknights.
For instance, I was heading in Friday for dinner with friends at a Thai (sorry, “Pan Asian”) restaurant that’s never done me wrong, and I asked them to set it up for 7pm, since that would give me enough time to make it through whatever traffic was en route, as well as some pre-dinner gin to help wash away the week.
I got to meet up with Mark F., a good friend of mine, for that pre-prandial libation. We shot the breeze for an hour or so, discussing the novels of Richard Price (he gave me a copy of Samaritan that evening), the music of Stan Ridgway, Michael Penn and X (the former of which he referred to as “the music equivalent of Raymond Chandler”), and the declining levels of service and professionalism in this world (I dumped my Mahwah Honda story on him). I also gave him his chanukkah present, even though he’s not Jewish. I told him not to open it till sunset on Friday, but we’ll see how that works out.
The easy familiarity of our conversation reminded me of how little I’ve seen of my friends in the past few months. Work has been tiring, but I should’ve been getting out a little more or getting people to come out to our palatial country estate.
I got an even bigger reminder of this at dinner a short time later, when I discovered that one of my closest friends has been engaged since September. She told me that she didn’t want to give me the news in something as impersonal as an e-mail or phone call, so she’d been waiting till we met up in NYC.
For three months.
This is in contrast to what I did after I popped the question back in May 2005, calling friends all over the country as I drove up the FDR on my way back to NJ, then blogging about it. But I’m such a whore, as you know.
Anyway, congrats to Elayne & Tim on their nuptials!
(You know you wanna check out the pix from my meanders in Toronto on Friday)
Home from Toronto a lot easier than my boss, whose flight home on Friday got cancelled due to “the airspace over Boston,” according to his pilot. He asked if this meant the bad weather & high winds we had all over the northeast, and was told that it did not. So, after 4 hours in an Embraer 145, he was allowed to leave and headed back to our hotel, where he sat in the bar and watched hockey.
Meanwhile, official VM buddy Sam and I went to see the Raptors play the Celtics in what Sam called “battle of the worst coaches in the NBA.” Since the Raptors have a game tonight against the Knicks, we figured maybe it’s a round-robin tournament.
We had fun at the game, but it was despite the action on the court. Sam’s now been to two NBA games with me (we hit a Dallas game against Orlando in April 2005), and he’s convinced I have NBA-Tourette’s, in which a constant stream of analysis & invective pours forth from my mouth during professional basketball games. We joined up with my boss after the game for a drink or two. He seemed pretty exhausted by the hurry-up-and-wait. I admit: if I were stuck in an Embraer for 4 hours, I’d probably go bananas.
Earlier in the day, after I visited Sam’s company in Oakville and toured the company’s produciton facilities (not as heavy-duty containment suiting as I wore on Thursday), I wandered around Toronto a little, while the weather was clear.
Unfortunately, this wandering didn’t coincide exactly with the clear weather, and I was stuck in some darned cold rain for a while. Early in my meander, I stopped at the Roots store in the Eaton Centre to get a hat and gloves. But then I decided that they were kinda pricey and, besides, the weather was okay now, so it would stay that way forever.
From there, I exited onto Yonge Street, which I forgot was an interesting amalgam of high-end retail, good record stores, and low-rent strip clubs. I headed off from there to a used bookstore I remembered from a past trip, but didn’t find anything.
I decided I’d walk through the University district and visit the famed comic store, The Beguiling. I spent a while there, hoping the weather would clear again and trying to justify spending $240 (Canadian) for a limited print by Sammy Harkham of a golem walking in the forest. I held off (I’ll wait till the USD appreciates against Canada’s dollar, and I’d probably be fine with a panel from The Poor Sailor anyway).
One of the nice things about having started doing yoga is that rambling ambles like this one don’t seem to give me the slight mid-back pain I was getting the past few years. I’ve only been on it for a few weeks or so, so hey.
During this walk, I came across two things I didn’t take pictures of: the Bata Shoe Museum and the Robarts Library. The former looks entertaining enough, and I bought a postcard from there for Amy, to give us yet another reason to take a long weekend here in the springtime.
The Library, on the other hand, is one of the most overwhelmingly depressing buildings I’ve ever seen. It may’ve been worse because of the rain and gray skies, but I can’t imagine a scenario which the appearance of this building inspires anything but fear and dread. Don’t let 1970s architecture happen to you!
After I left The Beguiling emptyhanded, it was time for another overpriced cab ride back to the hotel. I was amazed by the cost of cab rides in this city, as well as the ones I had to take to the pharma companies, which were outside the city. The flat-rate limo-y cars were also awfully expensive, including $51 CAD for the 20-minute ride from downtown to the airport.
In keeping with my recent post about accumulating all sorts of change and foreign currency, I returned home this morning with about $47 in Canadian bills and change. I feel like George Soros.
Anyway, a really neat thing happened during the short (54-minute) flight today. We completed our initial descent through the cloud cover, and all I could see were brown-gray hills and a few houses and a winding road or two. I thought, “We’re only 15 minutes from landing, but I have NO idea where we are right now.” It looked like Pennsylvania farmland, or far western NJ.
Then I noticed the Sheraton Crossroads to port, and it hit me: I was looking down at my morning commute! Sure enough, Rt. 17 threaded away from the Sheraton, southeast to Ramsey. Our plane followed Rt. 208 for a bit, as I picked out landmark after landmark (the Nabisco plant, the Ikea across from Garden State Plaza, even the Lukoil I stopped in last week). I’ve only had this perspective from a plane once before. Usually, I come home at night, or on different flight paths.
It helps to see things from different angles. Except Raptors/Celtics games.
(check out a couple of pix from my Toronto walkabout)
I’m a man of routines. Once I hit upon a good way to do things, I stick with it. When I was on Atkins, it was no problem for me to consume 3 scrambled eggs, a spicy Thai chicken sausage, a banana, water and black coffee, every single morning. Every single goddamn morning. This practice worked out just fine, until my cholesterol started to blow up.
So I changed things up. Now it’s a bowl of Wheaties with some chopped dates, 1% organic milk, and the aforementioned banana, water and black coffee. It works, and I stick with it almost without fail.
But now there’s a problem. See, when you buy a box of Wheaties, you’re not just buying cereal; you’re buying The Breakfast of Champions. And sometimes General Mills’ idea of champion isn’t the same as mine.
After the Yankees got wrecked in the first round of the playoffs, Amy & I decided that we just couldn’t buy Wheaties with Alex “reigning AL MVP” Rodriguez on the box. It was too insulting, to see that grim demeanor and that looping swing, knowing that he’d been shown up on baseball’s biggest stage as a punk-ass bitch.
For a while, we were able to make do with leftover Shaq & Wade NBA championship boxes. When they ran out, we even started getting the smaller-sized box (Steve Nash), but my persistent case of cheap Jew stereotypism keeps me from buying the less economical size.
The situation is growing dire. The cereal aisle is filled with box upon box of home-run-swinging A-Rod, mocking us with his failure to deliver a timely hit in a big game. Will a new MVP never be crowned?
I fear that if I have to resort to that cereal, I will become like him. Perhaps I’ll write many pages of great editorial in the lesser issues of my magazine, but come October’s AAPS special, or come the July/August Top Companies issue, I’ll wilt.
The risk is too great. Maybe I can get by with BooBerry or the Cap’n.
Will there never be another Olympics?
The rest of the weekend after the reunion? Quiet, generally. I drove home and realized that I needed water and sugar, which the Coca-Cola Corporation was only too ready to provide. Once home, I realized how tired I was, and how tired I was going to stay until Sunday.
So I chilled out with Amy, partook of the hair of the dog, and finished reading Epileptic, a really fine comic by a French cartoonist about living with a brother who has severe epilepsy. It’s an awfully challenging book (about 350 pages, by the way), because David B. doesn’t actually represent anyone in a sympathetic light, except perhaps his little sister. In general, his parents pursue any half-baked cure they can find for his brother, including magnetism, macrobiotics, spiritualism, and other mystic forms. David B.’s “character” (it’s portrayed as autobiographical) concludes at one point that his brother ‘chooses’ epilepsy, and that he uses his disease as a way to avoid life.
Challenging, like I say, because it’s clear the brother’s not in control of his disease at all, but that he’s also not simply a victim of it. Simultaneously, ‘David B.’ plunges deeply into cartooning and storytelling in an attempt to translate his life and his reactions to his brother’s disease. It’s quite compelling, astonishingly drawn, and has a narrative flow that I found absolutely confounding. If you can read comics — and I know plenty of people who simply can’t read them, instead focusing only on the words — you should read this one.
Sunday was going to be a football day, but we kept bailing on games. We left the Jets/Patriots so we could hit a Linens & Things to pick up a new shower rod/curtain setup; we gave up on the Saints/Steelers (Amy knew better about the Saints than I did); and we were too tired to stick with the Bears/Giants. So it was a bits-and-pieces day, but at least we succeeded in dismantling the sliding-panel shower door and replacing it with the curtain.
We’re planning to redo the bathroom once I get a couple of other things squared away (dangerous trees in the yard are getting cut down this week, and I’m getting a plumber in to assess everything that’s wrong with the pipes in this place) and the holiday bonuses are sorted out. In fact, I got all outdoors-ish on Sunday morning, taking down some dead branches, bringing the summer-stuff inside, and wielding that electric chainsaw of mine willy-nilly. Except for the willy-nilly part, which has bad connotations when associated with a chainsaw.
Anyway, the upshot was that I got some of the yard cleared, got rid of the impossible-to-keep-clean shower door, and finished reading a good comic, while also trying to write up the reunion during my free minutes. And that was the weekend.
Monday: now that was a different story. We had an off-site editorial meeting to discuss internet strategy for our magazines. It was at the same location as the sales meeting I attended back in September, but people weren’t, um, “resting their eyes” during this meeting.
Actually, the meeting helped me understand an important difference between editorial and sales personnel. When the online sales meeting wrapped up, the salesmen all headed to the building’s scary bar, where they got a little shikker. When Monday’s meeting finished, the editors were happy enough to get a free lunch out of the deal, and everyone just headed back to the office.
But I got some good ideas for things we can do on the magazine’s website, and also had some thoughts about the redesign for this blog, and the overall site, which still needs to be constructed. If I can get far enough ahead on the 400-page issue of the magazine I’m working on, I’ll take some time off during Thanksgiving week and try to put together the new look-and-feel for this site.
Because that’s supposed to be my idea of fun.
The weekend high school mini-reunion plans changed quickly, so I took a half-day at work Friday and headed down to Pennsylvania for an evening of shooting the breeze over dinner & drinks.
I took the long way down from northern NJ (287, 206, 95), so as to avoid the Garden State Parkway and get a chance to stop in Princeton. I’ve always enjoyed Princeton, though I don’t think I’ve been to the campus more than once (my brother was looking for some Greek texts). This time, I hit Micawber Books and its used section, thought about the piles of books on the floor of my library downstairs, and didn’t buy anything. That was followed by a visit to Princeton Record Exchange, where I picked up a couple of used records (Madonna and Delerium), and got a present for the family who were putting me up on Friday night.
From there, it was off to the races. I got into Media/Swarthmore around 5:30, after the sun was down. I mention this because, due to traffic, I had to drive in from a different direction, and I got utterly lost in the dark. I ended up getting my bearings only when I realized I was about to turn onto the street where my mom lived from 1988 to 2000.
She & I moved down to the area in 1988, just before my senior year of high school. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I’ve managed to stay in touch with many more friends from that single year than I have from the 17 years I grew here in NJ. Before going out to dinner, I talked for a while with my hosts, the parents of my buddy John. They’d always extended kindness my way, including this weekend, when they put me up on little notice.
John’s parents marveled over the impromptu weekend reunion. They said they were amazed at how well this group of friends stayed in touch over the years. I pointed out that it was a lot easier to do so thanks to e-mail, but they felt that I wasn’t giving us all enough credit. After all, plenty of people have managed to lose touch even in the age of e-mail. I conceded, and it got me wondering about what keeps this group of friends together, even when so many of us have moved away, are starting families, have busy jobs, and all the other excuses most people have.
The night’s festivities were in walking/stumbling distance of the house. We had John’s mom drop us off at the restaurant, so we could just amble home at the end of the night. She said, “Now, if you need a ride home at any time, just call me.”
I said, “Don’t worry; we’re not going to steal a car and drive drunk back to the house. John’s a got a one-year-old kid, and if I get one more conviction, it’s my ass.”
She laughed.
About half the crowd was waiting when John & I walked into the Iron Hill Brewery. There was one “outsider” present, but only because one of our guys was trying to cram a ton of friend & family visits into this weekend, so we didn’t give him any guff. For my part, I was hoping to see some Philadelphia friends during this trip, but I wasn’t too optimistic of the prospects for that. After all, I’d been traveling the two previous weekends, and it was awfully important to me to get home Saturday and spend time with my wife.
And that married / single dynamic was evident in strange ways during the night. Once the full crowd for Friday night was assembled, it consisted of six guys who are married — four of whom have kids — and two guys who are single (and, to the best of my knowledge, don’t have kids). The conversation didn’t mysteriously break along those lines, but I realized that the talk among married guys (at least in our set) is a little different than we have with the singletons. It wasn’t “the old ball and chain” sorta thing, just a sense that our crazier stories were behind us.
Similarly, the guys with kids were talking about things that Jim & I weren’t able to relate to. But it was no post-tower Babel; it’s just different frames of reference.
So we had dinner, and we drank (except for one of the guys who doesn’t go much for drinking nowadays, since he got it out of his system at Penn State), and we talked about where we are and what our families are doing, and we goofed on one another in the merciless loving way these guys have, and we looked at baby pictures.
The best aspect of the evening was the ease with which we could all fall into conversation. I don’t tend to be the guy with “news,” but it was nice being congratulated on my marriage by each newcomer during the evening, and asked about the wedding, the honeymoon, “adjusting to married life,” etc.
We traded notes on absent friends, both members of this group who couldn’t make the trip, and the other people we’re still in touch with from school. It got me thinking about some from there whom I have lost touch with, and whether I should look them up.
Speaking of which, the guys were surprised by the story about how my girlfriend from that high school era (1988-89) recently got in touch with me. That was mainly in the “Holy crap! I haven’t thought of her in years! How’s she doing?” vibe. There was also a little of the “How freaked out were YOU?!” line of questioning.
We traded stories about another guy’s high school girlfriend, who’s gone on to become a Lubavitcher Jew. One of the guys in our set couldn’t join us on Friday night because he seems to be going through the same transformation and doesn’t violate the Sabbath anymore. He planned to make up for it by putting together an extensive tailgating bash before the Eagles game on Sunday.
The evening moved from Iron Hill to a couple of nearby bars, with our group diminishing in number with each change of location. We ended up in a cheap-ass, wood-paneled bar that was filled with smoke. It was kinda shocking to me, since NYC and NJ both ban smoking in bars. I have civil liberties problems with this, but I have to admit it’s nice to get home from a night out and not stink of cigarette smoke.
Still, when in Rome and/or Media, PA . . .
The gin quality diminished with each change of venue, dropping from Hendricks to Bombay Sapphire to Tanqueray. You’d think that, by the 7th or 8th G&T, I wouldn’t notice the difference, but you’d be wrong; my gin-snobbery seems to know no bounds.
Fortunately, the conversation stayed entertaining, even as our numbers dropped. In the second bar, one of our guys explained to me the difference in quality of medical marijuana. In the last bar, another guy mentioned that his dad was a Skull & Bones member at Yale. He told us how he and his brother goofed on his dad when a S&B documentary was on TV, and kept grilling him to find out if Geronimo’s skull was really on display in their HQ.
My buddy John later told me how this guy’s dad was a really important figure to them when they were growing up. He was a respected scientist & professor and, besides being a go-to quote for many of their science reports, it also seems he was just really supportive of the kids, and demonstrated an intellectual curiosity that rubbed off on many of them.
Now, I’ve gone on pretty extensively about the way I’ve stayed friends with these guys, and how much their friendship has meant to me over the years. That said, they also have a million anecdotes from long before I got there, years of bonding from childhood on, that I’m just not privy to. And as John related this story about our friend’s dad, it made me wonder how I would’ve gotten along had I been around these guys from the beginning. Knowing me — and knowing what I was like as a youth — I’d likely have been the disaffected, bitter outsider who’d have managed to alienate myself from the whole squad. I was such a retard.
Following all this, John & I ambled back to his parents’ place around 2am. I settled into the twin-bed with the head- and foot-board (meaning I slept diagonally and curled), and woke up at 6:30am when the family dog came by to see who was in the room. Remarkably, I didn’t show much by way of ill effects from the night before, except for my Barry White voice, which is the inevitable result of my trying to be heard in loud bars.
Having gotten my share of gin the night before, I shifted over to my other two drinks of choice — water and black coffee — and got back into conversation with John’s parents. He remained asleep in his old bedroom, pending an 8:30 alarm clock. John’s dad wanted to talk about the election, and the political scene this decade, and it struck me as funny that, over the course of Friday night, that subject never came up once.
The next morning, five of us met up for breakfast at a cheap diner. When I say cheap, I’m talking $2.99 for 2 pancakes, 2 strips of bacon, 2 sausages, 2 eggs, and coffee. In fact, when the bill came, and everyone started trying to come up with change and small bills, I tossed a $20 on the table and said, “Oh, just throw in a tip, ferchrissakes.” Everyone handed me wads of singles instead. Go figure.
Spent yesteday at a barbecue/party with friends in Wappingers Fall, NY. The scenery was pretty on the drive up, but I didn’t feel like stopping to take a picture. There were all sorts of great opportunities for pix at the party, but I brought Amy’s super-camera with me and never took it out of the car. It sorta highlights my dilemma with upgrading my digital camera: I really don’t want a camera that will be hanging from my neck or shoulder, but I don’t know if I can get really good shots with a camera that fits in my pocket.
The party was great, albeit overrun with at least a dozen kids under the age of 4. A bunch of us childless people hung out in the cold on the front porch, bantering while avoiding parental responsibilities.
Anyway, to make up for the lack of pix yesterday, Amy & I (she stayed home Saturday with a cold) drove up to Ringwood Manor this morning and she played with the settings of her camera. She tested the high-color RAW file settings, which yielded some tremendous images. The ones we uploaded to flickr are shrunk and converted to JPG, so some of the detail and color is lost. But the original files are about 14 mb each, so it’s a tradeoff.
