Self-Aggrandizement: Best Of Archives

Four
Filed June 20, 2010 11:23 PM.

A bit more than four years back, I got a message on Friendster (a Facebook predecessor that was both cooler and far less cool, all at once) from a girl named Jess. The message was long and rambling and said that she didn't really write this sort of email (as cliche as she knew that sounded), but that I kept showing up on her home page as part of the 'singles near you' feature, and that she had Googled me up and found my website, etc., etc.

Ah, I thought. A crazy girl.

So I deleted the message.

Then, a few hours later, I got another message. This Jess girl had shared the first message with her younger sister who had said that you absolutely couldn't just send that kind of thing to someone you hadn't met, because they would think you were totally insane. So, to prove she wasn't nuts, she then proceeded to essentially do a deep reading of her own first email, explaining jokes, etc., in a message even longer than the first.

Due to apparent technological ineptitude, she sent this second message three times.

By now, I was intrigued.

So, after much back and forth, exactly four years ago today, we met for drinks at Russian Samovar.

I was smitten. After that date, I was the one sending long messages (or, as previously discussed, faxes). And, long story short, Jessica Gold Newman is now sitting next to me as I write this on laptop on a flight back from Portland, Maine, where we celebrated our four year date-iversary, with huge amounts of foodie eats (a win for me), equally large amounts of terrifying vintage stuff and antiques (a win for her), and some time at the beach getting our first sun of the season (a win for both of us, though somewhat reduced for me, as she tans and I [after a solid twelve months locked indoors] hop straight to medium-well done]).

To which I say, god bless the internets. All my love to Jess, and looking forward to another four and four and forty and forty.

Innovation Overshoot
Filed June 7, 2010 8:08 PM.

Among the laundry list of other features Steve Jobs demonstrated this morning on the brand new 4G iPhone was a secondary, front-facing video camera, allowing users to video-chat with each other.

Amazing! Straight out of the Jetsons!

Or, honestly, not so amazing. At least not to me. While I appreciated the wow factor intellectually, Jobs' demo didn't leave me much viscerally impressed. After all, Jess and I already video chat whenever one of us in on the road, using Google Video on our respective MacBooks.

This afternoon, however, I was truly bowled over. I sent a two-page fax. And, as happens each time I use one of those machines, seeing paper going in one end of a fax machine in my office and knowing that a copy was coming out the other end of a fax machine somewhere hundreds of miles away completely boggled my mind.

Obviously, as compared to even plain-text email, the fax machine and its simple transmission protocol is roughly akin to cave painting. Which, perhaps, is why it so impresses me. I can just barely comprehend the engineering involved in faxing, the difficulty of somehow turning my paper into a series of screeches that another machine can translate back to scribbles on a page.

Whereas by the time I think about email - or certainly video conferencing - my mind can't even begin to grasp the complexity.

As Arthur C. Clarke famously observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indestinguishable from magic. Which, perhaps, is the problem.

Growing up, I loved magic - learning tricks, watching magicians on TV. But magicians like David Copperfield, whose tricks (I recall seeing him walk through the Great Wall of China) were completely inscrutable, never really stuck with me.

My heart, instead, belonged to Penn & Teller. The plucky pair would gleefully give away the secret to their tricks, then re-perform them. And, the second time through, I'd be doubly impressed, marvelling at the skill and dexterity I suddenly realized that pulling off the tricks required.

So, perhaps, to really appreciate that 4G video chatting, I'd simply need to spend some time puzzling through the technology involved. Apple engineers, if you want to send along a crash course, feel free. And if you really want to wow me, you can send it via fax.

McGyver's Kitchen
Filed May 24, 2010 5:18 PM.

These days, in the professional cooking world, sous vide [for those who don't speak French, it's said 'soo veed'] is all the rage. The term literally means 'under vacuum', and was developed in the mid-70's, though it's only come broadly into vogue within the past couple of years.

The idea itself is simple: vacuum pack food (say, a steak), then place the food into a contant-temperature water bath. After a sufficient period of submersion, the food cooks to the same temperature as the water.

Which, in a professional kitchen, is excellent. You can't overcook a steak if it's sous vide - after one hour or five, if the water is 128 degrees, the steak will similarly still be 128 degrees, a perfect medium-rare. You can sous vide an entire evening's worth of steaks in advance, then pull them out, unseal them, and quickly sear a nice brown finish onto either side in less than two minutes apiece.

But beyond convenience, sous vide won converts through sheer deliciousness. After even an hour or two marinating in their own, vacuum-sealed juices, each of those aforementioned steaks would be far more juicy and tender than after any other mode of cooking. And the same applies to poultry, pork, seafood, vegetables, even eggs - at exactly 146 degrees, an egg is perfectly poached every time.

The downside: most home kitchens don't come equipped with the requisite constant-temperature water-circulation baths, which are giant and hugely expensive.

Late last year, the very smart physician and nutrition author Dr. Michael Eades, fed up by that problem, brankrolled the development of a smaller, cheaper unit for home chefs - the Sous Vide Supreme. But, even then, "small" and "cheap" are relative. We barely have room for food on our NYC apartment's kitchen countertops, much less for yet another appliance. And at $500, I was pretty sure I couldn't justify it to Jess, who could surely line up several dozen smarter ways to spend that money.

So, the Sous Vide Supreme moved to my 'someday' wishlist. But my sous vide curiosity still stood.

Enter the beer cooler.

Somewhere in my web trawling, I stumbled across an article on Serious Eats about a ghetto-fabulous sous vide substitution: put the food into Ziploc bags with the air squeezed out, as a substitution for vacuum packing; and then pour water heated on the stove-top into a cheap beer cooler as a substitution for the water bath. At least for foods that can sous vide quickly - in less than an hour or two - a beer cooler can keep the temperature steady for long enough to do the trick.

Obviously, I was intrigued. But also fairly skeptical. I picked up a small cooler from Duane Reade for $14.99, or roughly 97% off the cost of the Sous Vide Supreme. Surely, I thought, something - everything - must be lost in that kind of translation.

Still, as we were on the way home from the Barnes Foundation yesterday (a separate blog post coming, but, in short, an inexpressibly amazing place to visit), we stopped at a Costco in New Jersey to restock some essentials in bulk, and I picked up two nice looking flank steaks. I rationalized that both together were still cheaper than one would have been back in the city, and that I'd have the second on standby if my sous vide attempt destroyed the first.

At home, I placed one of the steaks in a Ziploc gallon freezer bag, then tossed in a liberal amount of salt, some pepper, three or four garlic cloves, and a sprig of thyme. Then I sealed the bag, doing my best to squeeze out the air, before laying it at the bottom of the cooler.

On the stovetop, I boiled water, checking the temperature every few minutes. 110 degrees. 115. 120. I stepped away to slice some vegetables, then came back to find the water had overshot to 150 degrees. So I turned off the heat. A few minutes later, it was 148. So I dropped in some ice cubes, lowering the temperature to about 140. As Jess likes her steak on the medium side of medium rare, and as I figured I'd lose some heat while pouring across, I hefted up the pot, and dumped the water on top of the steak, then quickly sealed the cooler closed.

After which, I did the laundry. We live a life of nonstop glamour.

Two hours later, I popped the cooler, to find the temperature had slid down to about 130. Close enough.

When I pulled out the bag, however, my heart sank. It had leaked.

Or so I thought. The liquid, I quickly realized, was the jus from the slowly cooked steak. I poured the liquid into a small bowl, then pulled out the steak itself, before slicing off a small chunk. Beautifully cooked.

I heated some oil in a saute pan until smoking, patted the steak dry with a paper towel, then laid it down in the pan for about a minute on each side, until it turned a nice golden brown.

I put the steak aside to rest, deglazed the pan with a splash of wine, then poured in the jus from the bag and a little chicken stock, reducing to a pan sauce. And then Jess and I sat down to eat.

Somehow, in that stupid $15 dollar cooler, with nearly no work on my part, the chewy flank steak had transformed into something literally as tender as filet mignon, but flank's robust flavor.

Even the pan sauce was delicious.

So, in short, I'm sold. And I'm pushing the Sous Vide Supreme a bit higher on the wishlist. But, in the meantime, cooler it is. Just as Homer Simpson observed, "ah, beer; the cause of and the solution to all of life's problems."

Max iPad
Filed April 11, 2010 4:49 PM.

Back in my tech days, I used to attend the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And it was there, in 1999, as I was walking past the smaller booths towards the back of the show, that I came across a little Canadian company called Research in Motion. The RIM booth wasn't pulling many people in, but for some reason I stopped to check out their product. It was called a Blackberry.

The pager looked just like the Motorola two-ways that were all the rage at the time, but this one didn't send pages - instead, it sent and received email. Crazy!

I looked at the thing. I played with it a little bit. Then, for reasons I still can't fully explain, I plunked down a credit card, and bought one right there.

In those days, I was still a student, and I knew better than to show something that dorky to college friends. But I was also running a company, and I made it down to New York City two or three times a week for meetings. The people I was meeting were largely in the finance world. And I'd show them the Blackberry.

Invariably, their reaction was the same: "I'd never carry something like that. Not in a million years."

A few years later, when the iPod came out, I convinced my parents to buy me one as a birthday gift. At that point, people told me similar things: it would never catch on; they would never buy one; shouldn't I have asked for a Nomad instead?

And now, as I eagerly await the 3G-enabled version of the iPad dropping later this month, I keep hearing the same complaints. That people aren't buying one. That I shouldn't bother. That it doesn't do anything, does too much, is too big, too small. That, in short, it's an overpriced and essentially pointless toy.

But the thing is, they're all wrong. I don't know why I think so. I've barely even had the chance to play around with an iPad directly. But I'm sure. The iPad is the future. And I'm looking forward, in five years, when the next big thing hits, to gloating about this one, too.

Chicken Soup
Filed July 9, 2007 1:18 PM.

[I am a story repeater. Mainly because I have terrible, terrible memory for what I've said, when, and to whom. But also because some stories are too good to give up.

So, though I briefly blogged it in the past, though I recounted it on the first episode of my and Sarah Brown's podcast, when Chicken Soup for the Twenty-Something Soul contacted me for a submission, I had no choice but to retell my infamous beans-throwing date.]

Shortly after I moved to New York City, I met a girl at an art gallery. She worked for the gallery, I was there for the opening of a friend's show, and we hit it off making jokes about the snottier-looking patrons.

I asked her out on a first date. To play things safe, I pushed for early evening drinks. That way, if the date went badly, I could keep it short; if it went well, I could *still* keep it short, end on a high note, and leave her wanting more.

Fortunately, the first date - at a Gatbsy-esque bar in Midtown - went off without a hitch. So it was with high hopes that I headed to our second date, dinner at a trendy Mexican restaurant on the Upper East Side.

That date, too, started strong. Until the waiter didn't bring us our basket of chips quickly enough.

"This is ridiculous," the girl exclaimed. Ridiculous? We were talking about *chips*. No big deal.

But to her, apparently, it *was* a big deal. So, after two or three more chip-less minutes, she got up, found the waiter, and yelled. Then, for good measure, and at ever-escalating volume, she found the manager and yelled at him, too.

By this point, it was immensely clear that my date had absolutely zero relationship potential. I had somehow found the highest maintenance girl in all of New York City. But I vividly remember thinking, "I'm out of college, I'm an adult now; I should at least be civil, and make it through the rest of the evening."

I thought, perhaps, that a round of margaritas might help calm things down.

I was wrong.

By now, of course, the waiter hated us. My date had yelled in his face, had gotten him in trouble with the manager. So, not surprisingly, he was a bit rude. To which, in response, my date was even ruder. Over the course of appetizers and a few more drinks, the situation continued to devolve.

The waiter delivered our main courses with a snide comment. My date said something in reply. Back and forth they went, until something he said crossed her final line.

My date picked up her plate of beans. And threw them at the waiter.

She was seated on my left, the waiter stood to my right. So the beans flew, as if in slow motion, right in front of my face.

I remember wondering, beans mid-air, what might happen on impact. Would the waiter punch her? Punch me? Throw something back, leaving me smack in the middle of a giant food fight?

With a splat, the beans hit, and the world caught up to speed. The waiter, however, didn't. He stood there in shock, a mass of pintos slowly dripping down the front of his shirt.

My date stood up.

"Well, I never!" she declared. And she walked out.

This was a small restaurant - maybe twenty tables. By this point, every single patron was staring at me.

"Get out!" the manager bellowed. "And never come back."

Mortified, I backed my way slowly across the floor, apologizing profusely - to the waiter, to the manager, to anyone still willing to make eye contact.

I opened the front door, stepped outside, and found the girl standing there, fuming.

"Well," she said, "where are we going next?"

At which point, I turned, and started running down Lexington Avenue as fast as I could. And I still remember thinking, finally looking back over my shoulder a few blocks later, "well, at least she doesn't have my phone number."

Japanese Roulette
Filed June 14, 2007 6:28 PM.

Game theorists say that, if you intend to tip well, you should do it before the meal. Which my friend Ophir does, at least at sushi restaurants. He'll sit at the sushi bar, slip the chef $50, and order Omakase - "at the chef's discretion". I've seen him do it several times when we've met for dinner, and each, the sushi served has been nothing short of extraordinary.

Ophir is vocal in his praise and appreciation as well, which spurs the chefs on even further. And whenever he orders a bottle of sake - something that, over the course of one of our average dinners, we do several times - he pours a glass for the chefs.

Which is how, a few months back, we found ourselves still sitting in the back of Bond St. Sushi, the restaurant long since closed, presented with course after course of ever more inventive and expertly prepared sushi and sashimi.

And, at the end, the coup de grace: a piece of fugu, each.

Fugu, from Takifugu, a Japanese pufferfish of the genus Diodon. A fish famous because its internal organs contain lethal amounts of tetrodotoxin. Prepared right, with just a bit of the toxic liver lining the meat, a small dose of the poison supposedly provides an unparalleled taste and texture sensation. But, a bit too much, and the poison paralyzes the diner's muscles, leaving them fully conscious as they slowly asphyxiate.

So, in short, not something I'd previously placed high on my 'foods to try' list. And, certainly, nowhere on my 'foods to try when prepared by red-faced sushi chefs who might have shared in just a bit too much of our three bottles of sake' list.

Still, though the chefs swayed smilingly behind the bar as they stood, each deft flick of their knives betrayed their decades of formally trained muscle memory.

Or so I tried to convinced myself, as I stared down the chunk of fugu on my plate. I glanced sideways at Ophir, who, looking equally dubious, shot a glass of sake. Then glanced up at our new friends, the sushi chefs, who grinned on expectantly.

Eyes back to the fish. Then to Ophir, who raised his eyebrows and shrugged. My heart thumping, I picked up the piece of fugu, and put it in my mouth.

The next morning, all the New York papers ran stories saying that Bond St. Sushi had sustained major fire damage late the night before, just an hour or two after we left. And while I can't be sure that our drunken chefs played any part, held even indirect fault, I couldn't help but imagine that they did.

Which made me feel doubly relieved. First that, despite it all, I was still alive. Second that fugu in particular hadn't been my last meal. Because, truth is, despite the hype and the near-death experience, it just doesn't taste that good.

Weekender
Filed March 27, 2007 4:30 PM.

After too long under fluorescent lights, Jess and I headed down this past weekend for a very brief jaunt to Miami Beach. The trip started off well enough, with a smooth flight down on Friday morning, and a free rental car upgrade to a new VW Beetle - which drove sort of like a turbo-charged go-cart - in the early afternoon.

We pulled up to our hotel, however, a 'boutique' designed by Richard Meier, to discover an alarming array of rust stains running down the side of the building, and a valet parking attendant wearing, as a uniform, a pit-stained t-shirt and thoroughly yellowed khaki shorts. Further bad news inside, when we discovered that the hotel would shortly be razed to make way for a new, high-end Richard Meier condo, and that things had essentially been left to seed since the replacement had been planned, apparently a good five or ten years back.

As a result, the room, for instance, featured badly stained carpets, walls and ceilings, including what was clearly dried fecal matter crusted to the bathroom light-switch plate. The sheets looked dirty and threadbare, the closet doors hung at odd angles, and everything was pervaded with a slightly 'pungent' scent.

But, in an attempt to be good travelers, Jess and I looked past the room, and the crumpled used tissues littering the hall near our door. Instead, we figured, we'd head down to the pool and the beach, and simply spend as much of the weekend outside as possible.

Lo and behold, however, we discovered that the 'private beach' was actually a weed-ridden patch of shady sand, well removed from any observable body of water, scattered with rusted lawn chairs, and featuring an aging leathery woman sunning her low-hanging fake tits while chain-smoking Newports.

Still holding up our chins, we headed back to the pool, set out looking for towels, and were informed that we'd need to fork over an extra $25 'towel fee' for the day. With that last straw, it was back to the room to retrieve our laptop, then down to the wifi-ed lobby to kayak.com an emergency transfer to anywhere less piece-of-shit.

As the weekend fell smack in the middle of spring break, we were unable to find anything for Friday evening - instead sneaking in to the nearby Sheraton's pool, and wandering the adjacent Shops at Bal Harbour, before sleeping fitfully on top of sheets we tried to touch as little as possible. But, early Saturday morning, we hopped back in the (delightfully comparatively clean) Beetle, and headed down Collins Ave., to the National Hotel in South Beach, a beautiful old art deco property, with a long, slender waveless lap pool (designed for Esther Williams), and rooms regularly cleaned and poop-crust free.

The downside: apparently, the hotel was also the home for a weekend DJ convention, featuring showdowns by some of the best trance, deep house, and otherwise thumpy music spinners in the world. Which, while making for a remarkably MTV Spring Break scene and attracting long, long lines of pierced and tattooed visitors to the hotel, also left sunbathing a bit less relaxing than it might otherwise have been.

Still, I didn't mind. We were joined for part of the weekend by Jess' wonderful younger sister, and generally enjoyed the chance to sunburn our way out of the winter doldrums, horse around in the pool, sip pina coladas, and feel condescendingly glad we didn't look like most of the people wandering up and down Miami Beach.

Summer, bring it.

Blame Our Mummy
Filed November 20, 2006 10:48 AM.

What happens when my brother and I are left with an hour free and several leftover rolls of toilet paper deemed insufficiently soft for actual wiping use:

A Tale of Two Showers
Filed October 16, 2006 7:36 PM.

Right: Redken Pommade
Left: Neutrogena Shaving Cream

Guess which one I smeared through my hair this morning after shower number one, and, resultantly, before shower number two?

Easy IPO
Filed September 19, 2006 7:14 PM.

The girl is head of marketing for a high-end maternity-wear company; as such, I got a chance to visit their New York boutique, and was quite impressed by the stylish pairs of women's jeans stocked there, with top few inches of fabric retofitted with stretch spandex.

And while, certainly, the market for such pregnancy-friendly women's clothing is well documented, I'm convinced a men's version of those same jeans could easily become the anchor of a similarly succesful product line.

Consider this: you've just eaten Thanskgiving dinner, or an overly generous mid-summer helping of baby back ribs. Your pants are uncomfortably snug around the waist. If only your jeans were able to stretch accomodatingly around your distended stomach. If only, in short, you were wearing a pair of of Eatin' Pants(tm).

Despite what seems to me a compelling business case, the girl remains unwilling to jump ship from her current job to launch such a no-fail startup. So, entrepreneurs of the internet, I gift this concept to you. All I ask in return is a free pair from the sample run. 30" length; 29" waist before I start eating, and perhaps 36" after a third helping of turkey, stuffing and cranberry come November 24th.

Expedition
Filed August 27, 2006 3:09 PM.

About a year back, I was struck by the idea of walking Manhattan from tip to tip. Foolishly, I shared this with my long-standing friend Jenny, who liked the concept enough to actually agree to do it with me.

The trip is 13.4 miles as the crow flies, and closer to 15 along any walkable route, which should have led either of us to conclude that's more than anyone is meant to walk in an afternoon. But, as Jenny recently won the New Jersey marathon, she's clearly missing the part of her brain that tells her to stop after hoofing some reasonable distance. In my case, I have no other defense than that I'm a complete idiot.

So, yesterday, just before noon, we headed up the 1/9 subway line to the 215th Street stop. Yes, the 215th Street stop. Apparently, Manhattan has lots and lots of streets. And nearly a third of them are below Houston, once you run out of numbered ones.

Nonetheless, we subwayed up, and we started walking back down. At first it was along streets like Nagle and Isham that I'd never even heard of before, much less realized were major thoroughfares on this island where I live. In upper Inwood, the Siberia of Manhattan, we passed stores selling live chickens, and stopped to use the bathroom at a McDonalds where I was nearly unable to purchase bottled water, seeing how none of the people behind the counter spoke English.

We trekked through Washington Heights and saw adds for sodas (Energy 69!) that absolutely don't exist below 125th St, and arrays of dresses on sale in front of small shops for under five bucks a piece. Then down through Harlem, where we passed McDonalds and Papa Johns' on every other corner, trekking all the way to Morningside Heights and the top of Columbia before we spotted our first Starbucks or sushi joint.

By the time we'd made it to the Upper West Side, we were less than halfway, and already looking rough. The day was overcast and muggy, we had sweated through our clothing, and we were possibly hungry, though too churned up from constant walking to want to actually eat.

Near the Museum of Natural History, we stopped in at my brother's apartment, where he handed off a pair of rum and Cokes like Gatorade passed to long distance runners.

A bit further still, at Columbus Circle, we decided maybe eating wasn't such a bad idea after all. So, we stopped at Bouchon Bakery in Time Warner Center, relishing the sitting even more than the first-class eats.

In Hell's Kitchen, I stopped to lance the blisters that had formed on the back of both of my feet, and to drop off an apparently unneeded, but somewhat pokey, umbrella hauled in my backpack. And then we got back on the road.

It was at about this time that I started trying to pansy out. I had several good ideas, such as subwaying down to the next-to-last stop then walking the final stretch. Or calling it for the day and picking up the second half of the trek on a subsequent weekend. Both, I reckoned, qualifying as tip-to-tip travel, at least with explanatory footnote.

But, Jenny, being far more used to motoring mechanically through such minor problems as excruciating knee pain, kept us moving ahead. By this point, clearly neither of us were enjoying the walking, though we had reached a point of sufficient delirium that we were still happily laughing through it, talking loudly about people we passed and wondering what they might be making of our bedraggled, foot-shuffling duo.

We walked through Chelsea, the West Village, SoHo, and TriBeCa, though by that point my recollections are largely a blur. I do recall stopping at a firehouse, ostensibly to get an estimate of remaining distance, though mainly so Jenny could put the moves on a cute firefighter.

We kept walking. Down past Ground Zero, through the financial district, and, limpingly out to South Ferry. By 6:15, we stood looking at the Statue of Liberty, wondering why we didn't feel accomplished and elated so much as in need of somewhere flat to lie down.

The South Ferry stop on the 1/9 was closed. So, one foot placed gingerly in front of another, we walked back up a bit, staggering down into the Whitehall subway station, then slumping into the seats of an uptown R train.

Back at the top of Times Square, I saw Jenny off on her ride further uptown, headed home, showered, then went back out the door. And while dinner at Blue Smoke and drinks at Pete's Tavern were both excellent, it's nearly a miracle I made it ambulatorily from one to the other.

This morning, scuttling plans for vacuuming on the grounds that it involved even small amounts of moving around my apartment, I instead searched online to price out Rascal and Jazzy scooters. If I ever walk again, it will be too soon.

Bediquette
Filed August 24, 2006 6:40 PM.

First, there's the issue of side. Which, if I'm sleeping alone, is the left. But I'm flexible on that one. Either side of the bed works well enough for me, making the choice an easy first concession.

Then there's pillow selection, which I'll also happily give up, for the good karma, and the illusion of being accommodating.

The trouble sets in with sleep position. Left to my own devices, I'm largely a stomach sleeper, with occasional side forays. Most girls, however, seem to covet the shoulder/neck nook as pillow, which necessitates back-sleeping. Or, rather, back-not-sleeping. Because, as comfortable as the position actually turns out to be, I can't really sleep in it. Spooning's a bit better, though I'm never quite sure where to keep my bottom arm.

Sooner or later, it's some slightly separated yet leg-intertwined position. Which works well for the most part. Except that a surprisingly large percentage of girls seem to kick involuntarily while deep in REM. Some, the former soccer or field-hockey players the worst amongst them, kick hard. All deny it once awake.

And, of course, all girls steal the blankets, somnolently bunching comforters with reckless disregard for their co-coveree.

A large percentage, too, are total insomniacs. Or, perhaps, just a large percentage of the ones I like, given my prodigious ability to develop crushes on smart yet totally neurotic girls. They can't fall asleep. They toss and turn. They wake up in the middle of the night, then wake me up to announce that they're awake. Or they steal my computer and respond to their work emails from three until four in the morning. Or they do both. The same girl, night to night, is utterly unpredictable.

Or, at least, seems so at first. But, inevitably, there's (some) method to the madness. Which is what bed-sharing - and, perhaps, relationships in general - is really all about: spending enough time with someone to figure out their idiosyncrasies, to determine how those line up with your own, then compromising, practicing. All in the name of somehow finding that comfortable, sustainable, "I could sleep like this for the long-haul" groove.

The Usual
Filed August 3, 2006 10:04 AM.

[Meant to post this on Tuesday, but my week has been a mess.]

Monday night. My brother David comes over to cook dinner with me, then gets a call from a mutual friend, Robbie, a big dude from Georgia who recently moved to NYC to further his stand-up career and audition for Broadway musicals.

Robbie swings by my apartment as well, and we toss back a few rum and cokes, then head out on the town. As it's a Monday, most bars are closed or dead, so we head up Broadway to Ava Lounge, atop the Dream Hotel. The place is packed.

We grab a table, order up a round of drinks, and begin intently discussing which Disney character is the hottest, which degenerates into our singing "Part of Your World" in falsetto. Ranging from one topic to the next, we're cracking ourselves up, and people surrounding us stop their own conversations to intently listen in.

In any bar, people fall into two groups: the observers and the observed. Some tables are just clearly having more fun than others. Our table, that Monday night, is patently obviously the most fun one in the bar.

The waitress starts spending more time talking with us. Then another waitress, who comes bearing a round of Tequila shots, starts hanging out at our table as well. A middle-aged couple walks by in formal wear. "How was the prom?" my brother asks. They pull up seats.

With sufficient mass, the gravity of our group increases. Next drawn in are three Dutch lingerie salesmen and the cadre of blonde Canadian girls they'd picked up earlier in the night.

An attractive brunette in glasses walks clear across the bar, announces that we're 'more real' than her friends, and plops down at the table as well.

A rock-paper-scissors tournament ensues. Free drink are poured. We learn how to say "may I kiss the baby" and "show me the way to the nearest keg" in Dutch. Phone numbers are exchanged, laps are sat on.

Two in the morning. We close the bar, stagger down to the street, and head our separate ways.

The next morning, my eyelids stick to my eyeballs as I first try to open them. Coffee, black.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Dick Move
Filed July 26, 2006 6:01 PM.

1. Sit at the bar.

2. Look for a table full of women.

3. Get the bartender to fill a bunch of highball glasses with ice water, garnishing each with a piece of fruit.

4. Get a waitress to bring the garnished ice water to the table of women; have her tell them that the the drinks are "compliments of the man at the bar."

5. Graciously acknowledge with a small wave and nod.

6. Wait for them to realize you've sent them water; let the hilarity ensue.

Mamma Mia
Filed May 14, 2006 9:32 AM.

One afternoon, when my brother and I were about 5 and 8, respectively, our mother picked us up from school in the family Volvo. She then drove down the road about five hundred feet before announcing that she wasn't our mother, but rather an alien, who had come to kidnap us.

Obviously, a debate about this ensued, with my brother and me insisting that she was, in fact, our mother, and her insisting, no, in fact, she was an alien, but that the other aliens had just done a remarkably good job in making her look precisely like our mother. The debate raged for nearly the entire ride home, with my mother holding out just long enough for my brother and I to start developing serious doubts.

To this day, I'm not entirely sure what possessed her to do that, but if she were to do it again, I also wouldn't be terrribly surprised. Because, while she's smart and articulate and logical and organized and successful, my mother also jumps on beds and pushes people into swimming pools without warning.

Or, at least, without much warning; by now, my brother and I have both learned to recognize that certain gleam in her eyes which serves as the signal for both of us to run for our lives.

Apparently, my mother inherited this troublemaking streak from her own mother, who once, while measuring her for a skirt she was shortening, poked my mom in the posterior with a pin, "just to see what would happen."

So, on this Mother's Day, to any readers who have been following along with self-aggrandizement and wondering what the hell is wrong with me, I say: go ask my mom. Much as she'd deny it, her genes clearly account for at least half of the whack-job traits I possess today.

Happy Mothers Day to moms everywhere, but especially to my own, because, frankly, she's better than yours.

Do You Know What it Means
Filed May 12, 2006 1:54 AM.

Ever since my first visit, well over a decade back, I've loved New Orleans. Aside from New York and San Francisco, it's the only place in the continental United States I daydream of, feel the need to return to, over and over.

Yet, as I drove along I-10 towards the Crescent City earlier this week, my stomach churned with apprehension, unsure of how the city - and my love of it - had fared Katrina.

As we closed in, the highway was lined with downed trees and abandoned strip malls, buildings reduced to shells and piles of rubble. We parked just outside the French Quarter, amidst broken windows and shutters hanging loose on their hinges.

Iberville Street was oddly empty as walked to the Acme Oyster House, to join some local friends for lunch. The restaurant, at least, was full, and, waiting for a table, I spoke with some Louisianans at the bar. And, in that one conversation, all my fears subsided.

I recognized the way they talked of the hurricane, of their surprise that friends and relatives would even suggest they consider uprooting their lives and moving somewhere else. I recognized it because I had said and felt precisely the same things, living in Manhattan in the wake of 9/11.

I don't know if some cities have a spirit and character that carries them through disaster, or if, like a cornered animal, nearly any would pull together in that same intense yet casual way were its existence threatened.

But I knew, at least, that New Orleans had. That, as we in the rest of the country worried on their behalf, fretted and opined about whether the city would ever be the same, the people who lived there had already set aside such academic debate, consumed instead with the day-by-day process of carrying on with life.

By the time I left Louisiana the next morning, continuing on I-10 towards Austin, my thoughts were already drifting back towards the city behind me. If it ever slept, I'd tell New Orleans to wait up for me; it won't be long until I'm back.

The Looking Glass
Filed May 1, 2006 10:27 PM.

`Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. `Come, it's pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on. `Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'

`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.

`I don't much care where--' said Alice.

`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I've long been fascinated by the neurobiology of attention - the interactions of parts of our brains like the hypothalamus and the reticular activation system. Each day, all day, we're bombarded by sensations; yet, somehow, we filter out the vast majority, letting through a select few. Reading a book, we lose ourselves in the pages, blocking out completely the world around us. Or, talking at a cocktail party, we tune down others' conversations, focusing in on just the words of our conversational companions.

I'm reminded of that particularly when I buy something new. I remember, in college, purchasing a Toyota Celica, and suddenly finding myself passing hundreds of other Celicas on the highways and streets. Not because, of course, people had suddenly rushed out to lease similar cars; but, rather, because my brain decided the ones that had always been out there were, for the first time, interesting enough to pass through to my conscious mind.

All of which is to say that I believe the brain is largely cybernetic. Not in the computerized sense of the word, but closer to it's Greek root, 'kybernetes', which means something akin to 'steersman'. It begins with an end in mind, then focuses us on and readjusts us towards those things that bring us closer and closer to that goal.

Which leaves us floundering, then, when the target isn't clearly locked; without somewhere we want to end up, like Alice, it doesn't much matter which way we go.

I've been thinking about that a lot lately, mainly in the context of dating, of big city romance. With so many potential partners - an embarrassment of riches - we urban singles are weighed down by the tyranny of choice. There are so many people who might be right, and so many more who might be just a bit righter still than whomever we're currently with.

But most of us, at a very basic level, don't have any idea of what 'right' looks or feels like in the first place. We drink our way from date to date, trying to guess, hoping our hearts or guts or friends or mothers, or even the Cheshire Cat, will somehow jump in to tell us when we've found it.

So, for weeks, I've been brainstorming my way through my own sense of 'right', my own list of qualities I think I'm looking for. I've been quietly analyzing the long happily married couples I know, squaring that with my own experience, adding ideas, crossing off items, and boiling things down to the bare essentials: things I can look for that, alongside the requisite lightning bolt, would leave me happily ever after. In short, a target, an end in mind that my subconscious might, day by day, guide me towards.

And while my list is still brewing, certainly not yet ready for public consumption, I did, earlier this week, find at least one item that seems sure to make the final cut. Dr. Dan Gottlieb, a quadriplegic psychologist and guest on NPR's Fresh Air, related the story of a young woman who he'd seen in his practice. "I feel like my soul is a prism," she told him. "But everybody sees just one color. Nobody sees the prism."

As someone too long practiced at playing social chameleon, I find her concern hits particularly close to home. Which is why, among anything else, I can see the appeal, or perhaps the necessity, of ending up with someone with whom I could always be my full, garishly multi-colored self.

Good Day, Sunshine
Filed April 30, 2006 8:19 PM.

With the spring sun once again radiant atop the New York skyline, I spent this afternoon wandering the streets, mainly observing, in store window reflections, that I am exceedingly, cadaverously pale.

I am, by nature, a light-skinned person - having inherited my coloring more from my red-haired mother than my oft-mistaken-for-Italian father. But, after a winter spent in New York City, blanching under the glow of overhead fluorescents, I've moved well past past 'fair', and into 'look kids, there's Casper!'

Still, there's more than just vanity behind my concern. Research seems to indicate that being tan is actually good for your skin, whereas it's getting tan, and particularly getting tan fast, that's particularly dangerous. And as, during the summer, I'm likely to be spending long hours on at least some days under beating solar rays, I'm hoping to ease myself in, rather than scorch to lobster on a first extended outing.

So, over the course of the next few weeks, I've been trying to engineer my schedule to allow for at least short periods of daily time in the sun. And, equally so, trying to schedule them as, say, shirtless morning jogs; having learned from past years how permanent a base my first spring sun forays can leave, I'm eager to avoid a repeat of one year's redneck-ready farmer tan.

Mainly because I realize I'll eventually want to hit a beach. And I don't own nearly enough NASCAR-logoed bathing suits to back up the look.

Make a Difference
Filed April 19, 2006 11:54 PM.

Last night, I was having drinks with a few friends who work in private asset management for exceedingly wealthy families. A few rounds in, one friend observed that, while such families are inevitably hell-bent on building their net worths, they're also textbook examples of the law of diminishing returns. Which is to say, from a quality of life perspective, the first billion makes a far bigger dent than the second.

At the same time, this afternoon I found in my mailbox a pitch letter for a 'sponsor a young Sudanese refugee' program. For just a dollar a day, it explained, I could change the life of an African child.

And while, certainly, such sponsor programs are exceedingly noble in their goals, they also seem to be a dime a dozen. Which prompted me to combine the two threads - sponsorship and billionaire families - for a brilliantly outside-the-box business idea:

For just $10,000 a day, I can help those families sponsor a young New Yorker. (Namely, me. Though, not being greedy, I'm totally happy to start a list for other such civically-minded volunteers should a sufficient number of sponsoring families take the call to action.)

Like that kid in Sudan, I'd be more than happy to write a monthly letter to my sponsor. I'd even include pictures: me at Nobu enjoying an omakase dinner, at the Hotel Gansevoort with table service and a bottle of Cristal.

And, in turn, I'd even be happy to sponsor a whole village of those little kids in Sudan. Take that, foes of trickle-down economics.

A few friends in the legal world have pointed out that it may be a long road to 501c3 status for this burgeoning nonprofit, given our near-sighted government's narrow understanding of 'need'.

But, I'm convinced that, regardless of donation tax status, smart families interested in really changing lives should be quick to sign on. I'd tell you as soon as they do, but, to be honest, it may take a few weeks to install an internet connection on my new private Bahamian island.

In Brief
Filed April 17, 2006 5:38 PM.

About three years back, I observed that men are loath to part with beloved clothing items: sweaters, jeans, t-shirts, and - particularly - underwear. Given a trusty pair of boxers, I said, "we'll keep washing and wearing... until it's disintegrated to nothing more than a waistband and a few hanging threads."

And while, fortunately, my own have not yet reached that state, they are undoubtedly looking rather rough around the edges. (Literally. One of the first things to go, it seems, is the waistband elastic.)

So, this past weekend, I set out shopping. By broad female consensus, boxer briefs remained the only suitable way to go. But, for reasons I've never quite discerned, nearly every designer - including my own long-preferred Calvin Klein - seems to sell their pairs in only black, navy and heather gray.

On my way to a department store, however, I stopped to pick up a hard drive I had lent to a friend some months back. And, next door to his office, I noticed Gap holding its REALLY BIG SALE. (Capitalization theirs.) With some time to kill, and my mind in shopping mode, I decided to pop inside.

Lo and behold, Gap, of all places, had somehow veered away from the tri-color hegemony. Even better, they had reshaped their boxer briefs' cut, away from what previously looked like foreshortened long underwear to a much hipper 'athletic square cut'. And, best of all, the sale took the price per pair to a scant $6.99

So, now, my underwear drawer has, once again, been wholesale refreshed, au courant with an array of stripes, primary colors, and even one pair emblazoned with little green alligators knit right into the fabric.

I've previously admitted my belief in lucky underwear, and can therefore say I'm particularly excited to discover the effects of that alligatored pair.

They look auspicious indeed.

Old School
Filed April 9, 2006 8:45 PM.

Over the past few months, I've increasingly discovered that, in flirting with women, everything funny back in second grade is now funny again.

Thumb wrestling, rock-paper-scissors, faux magic tricks; phrases like 'dillhole' and 'dickweed'; offering your hand to a girl apologetically after you make fun of her, then, when she takes it, slapping her on the wrist and laughing hysterically at her having fallen for it.

I was taught this last one by the chatty, articulate eight-year old girl who lives down the hall from me, a girl who, since my discovery of the power of second-grade-inspired pickups, has essentially become my personal Hitch.

Just last weekend, for example, she passed along a gem I successfully field-tested at bars throughout the week: mouse races.

Imagine three mice, she explained to me: a deaf mouse, a dumb mouse, and a blind mouse. A mouse race, then, involved me putting out my upturned palm, then letting her draw lines representing each mouse up along my arm, as far as I thought each mouse would go before it stopped.

She did the blind mouse first, and I let her draw about half-way across my hand before I stopped her. Then the dumb mouse, which I let get just past my palm and onto my wrist.

Finally, the deaf mouse. Stop, I said, when she was again just passing my wrist. But, of course, she kept plowing ahead, it taking me two more ignored 'stops' before I got the joke.

After which, my little neighbor dissolved into paroxysms of gasping laughter; as, in fact, have I, the two times I've since pulled this off on others.

But, the odd thing is, rather than being appalled at the stupidity of it all, women apparently find this fun and charming, even want you to write your phone number on their arms alongside the three lines.

Which, previously, I totally would have done. But, now, having increasingly reverted to my second grade self, seems like a rather dangerous idea; after all, those girls are probably covered with cooties.

All Your Women are Belong to Me
Filed April 4, 2006 11:26 AM.

I have, since its inception, heartily resisted joining MySpace, in large part because I liked it better back in 1997, when it was still called GeoCities.

Still, there's something vaguely impressive about MySpace's neo-Luddite approach, its bravery in re-championing the blink tag and eye-searingly fluorescent background art that completely obscures actual text.

Recently, an increasing number of filmmakers have been asking if and how MySpace fits into Cyan's movie marketing plans. So, thinking there might be use in having a presence on the site myself, a few days back, I took the plunge and joined.

Initially, I intended to copy my profile directly from Friendster. But, as it was late at night, it seemed far funnier to forego any charm, and simply paint myself as the sort of misanthrope that, honestly, I usually am.

For my 'about me' section, I put up this:

I'm an obnoxious asshole. I like to play the push-your-buttons game, I derive joy from being difficult, and I like laughing at the expense of stupid people.

Sometimes, people assume that, below the selfish jerk shell, I'm really a good guy. But, in fact, I'm like an asshole onion: peel away the outer layer and all you have is more asshole.

Then, for 'who I'd like to meet':

Anyone who thinks they can hold my interest and keep up with my smartass attitude.

My standards are high. In fact, I probably won't even email you back unless you say something wildly entertaining or intriguing. Yes, that includes you.

All of which, I figured, would put a pre-emptive kibosh on any MySpace socializing.

Apparently, no.

It seems, instead, that the profile is just obnoxious enough to trigger women's love of challenge, their desire to find guys as diamonds in the rough that they alone can hone into something more broadly recognized as precious gem.

In the past few days, I've received more than a handful of emails from women - and, disproportionately so, from rather attractive ones - basically trying to figure out if I'm actually that obnoxious in real life.

So, lest any such women back-research their way to this site, wondering whether my attitude is simply some recent invention, I point to a post from almost precisely a year back, which I will here reprint in its entirety.

FAQ
Filed April 14, 2005 in Disclosures.

In response to the emailed question I most frequently receive:

Q. Are you really this much of a pretentious asshole in real life?

A. Pretty much.

At least I'm consistent.

Spiked
Filed March 28, 2006 5:54 PM.

Though, a week ago, the fu manchu was, according to one blogger I then met, "one of those faint, prepubescent mustaches that look like the wearer has just finished drinking Yoohoo and forgot to wipe his lip," it quickly grew out to something more terrifyingly bushy, something that received even worse reviews.

So, as of this morning, I'm back to clean-shaven, though likely to return - out of equal parts style and sloth - to my scruffy-bearded standard.

At the same time, my hair (as in head-top, rather than facial) has also reached the latter stages of the cut-grow-grow cycle. At the start of each such circuit, my hair spikes up, entirely on its own. So, in an effort to imply intentionality, I often use pomade during that first stage, as if to say, 'yes, it's supposed to look like this.'

Somewhere along the way, however, my hair loses its alfafa enthusiasm, laying down in such a way as to invite (at least when beardless) frequent comparison to Matthew Broderick. And, normally, at that point I stop using pomade.

But, this time through, oddly enthralled with the idea of stylistic self-experimentation (regardless of the distinct non-success of Project Fu Manchu), I've decided to keep pomading, and keep growing, as long as I can get my hair to stand straight up.

I've begun to discover already that doing so requires far more gel than usual - may soon even necessitate a whole new stronger, firmer-holding compound. But that shouldn't deter me. Already, I'm achieving a solid two-plus scalp-top vertical inches. And, god knows, I could use the extra height.

Sucker
Filed March 27, 2006 10:13 PM.

Put me on any flight longer than three hours, and, somewhere along the way, I'll read the Sky Mall Catalogue cover to cover.

I've been doing so for at least a decade. And, in all that time, I've never actually purchased anything from it.

I do the same with a handful of other catalogues: Crate and Barrel, Herrington, Design Within Reach. When they appear in my mailbox, I can't help but thumb my way through, will even dog-ear a page here and there, as if to convince myself that maybe, this time, despite years and years of uninterrupted experience to the contrary, I'll actually whip out a credit card and put in and order.

And It isn't just catalogues. Back before I killed my television, if I surfed past an infomercial - be it for ginsu knives, vacuum cleaners or ab machines - I'd inevitably watch it, transfixed, the rest of the way through.

I don't know why I do, nor why I derive pleasure from simply considering without actually purchasing. But, given the number of flights I take each year, not buying any of those lusted-after Sky Mall items has doubtless already saved me thousands upon thousands of dollars.

So, when I finally do call in to order the indoor electric-powered waterfall fountain, I figure I'm totally, completely justified in buying the really, really big one.

Mashed
Filed March 19, 2006 11:32 PM.

I am, admittedly, both a snob and an alcoholic. Given the two, most people assume I must like scotch.

But, in truth, I've never really been a fan. In part because taking scotch too seriously as a twenty-something always strikes me as effortful, effete. And, in part, because I'm just not a fan of the way it tastes.

Still, every gentleman needs something to drink off the rocks, to sip neat. So, for years, I've been making my way through golden-brown beverage choices, looking for one to call my own.

I came close with cognac - but soon found even low-end choices to be prohibitively expensive across a drink-filled night about town. Barrel-aged rum, too, seemed a near fit, until I discovered the percentage of bars that stock nothing beyond Bacardi - acceptable on the rocks as a fifth drink of the evening, though less so as a first.

A month or so back, however, I discovered a definitive answer - one already sitting in my liquor cabinet.

Colin and I were six or seven hours into a late-night editing session, synching sound for Underground, staring at monitors full of Final Cut until our eyes had long since glazed. My liquor supplies having dwindled dangerously low, and in deference to Colin's Kentucky roots, I pulled down from the back of the cabinet a bottle of Woodford Reserve - a bottle I'd received as a gift, and had left unopened for a year and change, knowing that I don't like bourbon.

Or, rather, believing that I don't like bourbon. Because, it turns out, I do. A lot. Some more than others - Woodford or Makers Mark seeming much more to my taste than, say, Knob Creek.

I haven't yet had time to sample the wide array of base-level consumer choices, much less to test out the slew of high-end options. Still, I'm already sure bourbon is it - is my drink. It tastes right. It tastes like coming home.

The Tube
Filed February 26, 2006 3:30 PM.

I don't have TV.

I don't mean that I don't have a physical television - because I do. I just don't get live programming - cable, broadcast or otherwise. Nothing but DVDs.

And not because of some vague, haughty sense of moral 'superiority'. I'm not one of those no-TV people who, when someone else is discussing a new HBO show, will smile disdainfully, say, "I'm sorry, I don't have a television", then stare off, self-satisfied, into the middle distance.

Instead, it is out of profound inferiority that I don't have television. The problem is, if I do have it, I watch it.

Which, arguably, is the point of having it in the first place. But, as I said, I'm well below average in my dealings with television. I'm addiction-prone, dragged by the gateway drugs of The West Wing and Law & Order onto the icy top of a long, slippery slope that runs down, down, down, through Desperate Housewives, Survivor 8 and re-runs of Full House.

Over the years, I've slowly come to recognize in myself the procrastinatory inertia that makes going out and really doing wonderful, exciting things - the things I treasure for years, even as the rest of my daily endeavours blur behind me into an unrecognizable mass - a constant battle. And, simply put, having television just doesn't help. It's one more temptation, one more internal set of arguments. It's a painless route to forgoing reality in favor of reality TV.

So, in short, I don't have TV. I haven't for the last year and a half. And in that time, as I've slowly forced myself to stop watching and start doing, I've been reminded again: life isn't a spectator sport.

Tore Up
Filed January 13, 2006 5:17 PM.

Last night, following a business dinner on the Lower East Side, I headed a few blocks down to 'inoteca, to eat a second dinner with a college ex-girlfriend.

Following which, she and I headed to Arlene's Grocery, to catch a live performance by a band inexplicably doing it's damndest to become Blink 182.

As I was wearing a blazer and button down, and looking more than a bit out of place in the Arlene's crowd, I stripped down to my undershirt to watch the set.

By 2:00am, Arlene's was closing, and I stood by the bar, buttoning back on my dress shirt while waiting for my credit card to process.

As I did, one female bartender turned to the other and said, "you know, when he's not wearing that shirt, you can see he has nice arms."

"Really?" replied the second. And she reached over the bar with both hands, grabbed my shirt, and pulled.

Buttons flew everywhere - all but the very last having been ripped clean off. And as I stood there, looking at the bartender in shock, she gestured for me to remove the shirt.

Which, actually, I did. But, at least, I didn't leave her a tip. Just a note saying: "saving up money to buy a whole shirt's worth of new buttons."

Weathered
Filed November 18, 2005 6:55 PM.

I remember, as a kid, being endlessly fascinated by vertical cutaway maps of the miles beneath New York City. Layer after subterranean layer, the parking garages piled atop subways atop water mains atop the electrical grid. I loved that each layer seemed to exist in silent parallel to the ones above and below. That each was its own little world.

I thought of those maps again this afternoon, climbing down the stairs to the C/E subway line. While the day's suddenly wintry air whipped along the sidewalks above, thirty feet below, the stop was still, luke-warm, stale. And, as I passed into a waiting subway car, I hit yet another little weather system. Though, during the summer, the subways are brisk, ventilated by strong air conditioning, now, as the heaters are just put back into use, each car bakes slowly in its own languid cloud.

Nine years after coming East from Northern California, I'm still a bit unused to these manufactured ecosystems. Growing up, we had no air conditioning, only ran the house's radiant heat during wintry nights. The difference between temperature indoors and out was usually, quite literally, a matter of degree.

But here, on the East Coast, the little worlds we create seem to operate in complete divorce from/ the larger one surrounding them. In the midst of summer, as humidity threatens to turn spontaneously into midair raindrops and the mercury clears 100, we push air-conditioners to full throttle, toting sweaters to the office to wear over short sleeves. In winter, we bundle layer upon layer to brave snow-bound treks, only to enter homes and stores so blisteringly heated we strip to near our skivvies the moment we clear the door.

Which, for years, always struck me as rather strange. But, today, as I rode the subway and thought of those cutaway maps, started to make a bit more sense. New York, after all, is nothing but a collection of separate little worlds, of sewers and cables and subways below, of streets and buildings and even taller buildings above. And while each might be intimately intertwined with the others, with so many all wedged in to such little space, we've no choice but to pretend they're all separate, parallel, self-sustaining. No choice but, as the wind howls outside our windows, to crank the heat to full high in our little apartments, tied so tightly to the millions surrounding us, yet desperately, willfully, setting ourselves apart.

Snooty
Filed June 13, 2005 8:19 AM.

Growing up in suburban Northern California, with Jewish New Yorker parents, Southern culture was, to put it mildly, not a large part of my early life. So far as I was concerned, America was the West Coast, the East Coast, and a whole bunch of 'fly-over states' in between.

But, over the past five years, largely due to living several of those with a Georgian and a Kentuckian, I've slowly begun to believe there might actually be something good going on in all those places jumbled up in the beach-less middle.

My iTunes library has filled with bluegrass and alt-country. My DVD collection has grown to encompass swaths of 'regional storytelling' - from Matewan through All the Real Girls.

And I've eaten barbecue. Lots of barbecue. With a host of guides ready to toss aside 'Yankee bullshit', I've toured the range of New York options, tasting scores of hush puppies, comparing the merits of vinegar- and tomato-based sauces, and marveling at the wide array of ways to chop up and char-broil the contents of an average barnyard. (Pig snoot sandwiches? Seriously?)

So it was with great anticipation that, yesterday at high noon, I headed down to Madison Square Park to meet James, Colin and Bill at the 3rd Annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party. The event brought together pitmasters from places like Little Rock and Decatur, Murphysboro and St. Louis, Elgin and Driftwood, each carting with them a little slice of home.

Or, as it turned out, a big slice of home. Which was good, because New Yorkers came in droves to the event, yielding hour-long lines at each separate stand. The restauranteurs were ready, having towed along fleets of trailer-hitched industrial-sized grills, and having piled high stacks of animal carcasses, part and whole, bound for fiery fates.

I arrived at the park just after noon, and found James already in line for the Salt Lick's stand. Ten minutes and ten feet of line later, it became clear my initial wide-sampling intentions likely wouldn't work out. Buying plates from just two different vendors, it seemed, would be an all-afternoon affair.

Moments later, however, Colin arrived with our salvation: a Bubba Fast Pass he'd scored from a VIP the day before. The pass took us 'backstage', past the crawling lines and into the cordoned-off sections behind each stand, where the barbecuing itself was actually underway. From that vantage point, we could amble up to any of the serving stations and score selections of grilled goodness in mere seconds.

By the time we left the park, some two hours later, I could barely walk. Sated and sauce-spattered, I was nearly sweating from the sheer effort of ongoing digestion. James pointed out that he was trying not to step too hard when he walked, for fear of triggering an emergency bathroom run.

But, goddamn, that was some barbecue.

As we headed towards the subway, Colin announced he was considering holding his upcoming birthday party at Blue Smoke, a relatively recent addition to the NYC barbecue scene, which brings a rather New York perspective ("you can improve anything, or, at least, make anything more expensive") to it all by serving up what might be called haute barbecue cuisine.

Normally, I'd have been more than happy to pencil that into my calendar. But with the taste of authenticity still literally stuck between my teeth, it seemed like, well, kind of a waste.

Turns out, my Southern friends are right: when it come to barbecue, them yankees don't know shit.

Indisposed
Filed May 22, 2005 10:29 PM.

It is impossible to grow up in Northern California without becoming, at least at some subconscious level, a tree-hugging long-haired hippie environmentalist.

I remember actively resisting this at several points along the way - refusing to finish even the first week, for example, of a summer day camp on a farm commune that made us thank 'the spirits of the fruits and grains' before lunchtime PB&J's.

But, despite my best efforts, the Earth Day attitude stuck. Just this morning, I caught myself turning off the water mid-toothbrushing, a long-standing habit that makes good sense in draught-ridden California, yet far less here in New York City, where rain has been pinging against my windowpanes all weekend long.

Water conservation aside, the thing that produces the greatest environmental guilt in me is disposability. Anything used once and then discarded, I envision piling atop the giant imaginary landfill dump that I carry around in the back of my brain. I can't tear a sheet off a roll of paper towels without questioning whether the spill is sufficiently large to warrant it, can't hear the inevitable register-side 'paper or plastic?' without chastising myself for not carrying around a canvas 'think globally, act locally' grocery bag.

So it is with great regret that I must admit to an intense and enduring crush on Procter & Gamble's Swiffer® line of products. Thanks to the WetJet, my kitchen and bathroom floors are, for the first time, if not clean enough to eat off of, at least no longer cause for alarmed comment from visiting friends.

Just this week, I similarly discovered the Swiffer Duster: little blue squares of what looks dismayingly like roofing insulation, strapped replaceably onto a long, blue, plastic pitchfork. Still, uninspiring appearance aside, with a thirty-second pass the Duster brought my bookshelves back to nearly new, saving me from the sneeze-inducing cloud that previously billowed with each volume pulled.

I've yet to fully accept the convenient, use-and-toss intentions of either of these products - I still occasionally cut deals with my conscience that require repeated use of the same cleaning pad if it's still possible to see some semblance of the initial color. But, day by trash-full day, I'm getting the hang of this whole expendable consumerism thing. Pretty soon, I'll be printing long internal documents on non-recycled paper with impunity, asking restaurants for more rather than less little napkins stuffed in the take-out bag.

Sure, I have years of 'reuse, reduce, recycle' to make up for, but I figure it still shouldn't be more than a decade until I can visit barren clear-cut acres they'll have named in my honor. And I'll be sure to bring several boxes of WetJet refills along. Because I bet, during those long centuries of redwood old growth, nobody ever bothered to mop.

Recess Eats
Filed April 28, 2005 11:20 PM.

My father was always the lunch-packer in my family. Meticulous in his approach, he'd carefully construct the contents of each elementary school bound paper sack, from Ziploc-ed sandwich to frozen box juice.

The juice, in his system, served a sort of critical double-duty - both as a drink, and as an ice-pack to keep the sandwich fresh through a morning of backpack confines.

Problem was, as the box slowly thawed, the outside would accumulate moisture. By the time even the first recess rolled around, each day's lunch bag had entirely soaked through, slowly turning into a moist brown pulp that stuck to the sides of my book bag, and wet textbook corners into slow fan-shaped expansion.

Having peeled off bag scraps, having piled the contents table-top in an undistinguished heap, the problems persisted. Because, even as the bag had been soaking, the contents of each sandwich, otherwise safe in plastic confines, had been similarly seeping through the bread.

Which, at the time, always took me by surprise. Certainly, given a few hours, ketchup should inevitably ooze through all but the hardiest whole wheats. But turkey? Who would guess that a slice of white meat's meager moisture would be sufficient to soak your standard sandwich slice?

Some sense of elementary-school propriety prevented me from telling my father about the problems at the time, though, in retrospect, I'm sure he would have been more than happy to help me solve them. Still, laboring on against the slow disintegration of each home-packed lunch, I always looked forward to the days when I could buy lunch at school instead.

Buy, I suppose, is a relative term, as we traded in not money but tickets for our chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. But, for a seven-year old, those tickets were better than gold - tradable for tinfoil trays of such timeless yet nowhere-else-found classics as 'Mexican Pizza'.

Even better were the prototypical Lunch Ladies serving up each meal, plump women at the far end of middle age, in hairnets and orthotics, hovering above us, spoon in hand, with menace and protective love in equal counts.

As I aged, as tinfoil and tater tots slowly gave way to Yale Dining Halls china and mashed 'potato' served with ice-cream scoops, even as I squared off against such incomprehensible foodstuffs as chunky, brown 'Soylada', school food always held a special place in my heart. Bland, monotonous, and devoid of nutritional value as it may have been, at least it was never a threat to the interior of my book bag, and simple to keep in its atomic, separated, individual, non-seeped-through parts.

FAQ
Filed April 14, 2005 10:53 AM.

In response to the emailed question I most frequently receive:

Q. Are you really this much of a pretentious asshole in real life?

A. Pretty much.

Inked
Filed April 12, 2005 4:58 PM.

I remember, before I knew how to drive a manual transmission, that admiring high end sports cars would leave me feeling vaguely ashamed. What right did I have to ogle a Testarosa, if I'd be completely unable to put it to good use?

After I learned how to drop the clutch like a pro, however, those feelings of guilt transfered over to high-end pens. Like expensive cars, it wasn't so much that I actually wanted to own one myself. Rather, passing through stationery or art supply stores, I couldn't help but appreciate the beautiful design inherent in a $1000 Mont Blanc, yet know my chicken-scratching would doubtless make short work of an 18 karat nib.

Back in January, appalled by the steady downhill slide of my handwriting, and increasingly unable to read my own notes just hours after I'd written them, I decided it was time to take action. So, aided by an online copy of Arrighi's Operina, I set out to learn how to write in Italics, a beautiful 16th century hybrid of cursive and print I'd long admired in Da Vinci's notebooks.

It turns out, in fact, that Italic handwriting isn't difficult to learn at all, and, once mastered, it's remarkably easy to write legibly at high speeds. The Moleskine journal I tote with me daily marks my progress - a slow transition from my prior cramped scrawl to the new smooth chirography that has become nearly habit. For the first time in my life, I have good handwriting.

So, when I stopped at a stationers last week to replace my filled Moleskine, I looked at the fountain pens a bit differently. By the register, I noticed a $15 Pelikano, and impulsively tossed it in alongside the notebook, figuring it was cheap enough to give a shot.

Sitting down at the coffee shop next door, I pulled out the new pen, pressed in an ink cartridge, and wrote my way through a first few paragraphs.

By the end of the page, I was hooked. Aqueous ink flowed effortlessly from the point, at even the slightest touch, leaving a slowly drying trail like a brush of water color paint.

And it occurred to me, dangerously, that while learning to drive manual didn't leave me jonesing for a 911 Turbo, my new handwriting - and the discovery of how well it flows from a nib - did make the Meisterstuck 149 perched in the window next door strangely appealing.

As far as my bank account is concerned, this likely doesn't end well.

the law
Filed March 1, 2005 9:19 AM.

When I was a little kid, say seven or eight years old, my internal alarm clock was completely broken. At four in the morning, while even most roosters snoozed, I'd pop out of bed, wide awake and ready to hit the day.

Obviously, my parents were less than thrilled with this. So, while our household normally had rather tightly controlled television rules (no watching on school days, etc.), that early in the morning, all bets were off. I was, in fact, even actively encourage to plop myself down on the couch, to watch (quietly!) whatever might be playing.

Unfortunately, 'whatever might be playing' at four in the morning is, well, not much. Mostly shows like that perennial favorite, "Modern Farmer". Still, things only seriously ran into a hitch when, one morning, at 7:00 (the earliest acceptable parent wake-up time), I dashed into my parents room to wake the slugabeds with a quick bit of mattress bouncing.

Groggily, my father asked what I had been watching that morning. One of my favorites, I replied: The Law.

The law, he asked?

Yes, I replied. You know, Jesus is the Law.

It was at about that point, I seem to recall, that my parents started stocking up on video tapes and taught me to use the VCR.

first impressions
Filed February 6, 2005 4:38 PM.

My long-standing friend Josh Lilienstein is in town for the weekend, leading up to a med school interview this Monday. And, bucking the common wisdom of a quiet weekend of preparation, he instead spent yesterday rocking New York, beginning shortly after his arrival by Jet Blue red-eye from San Francisco when we headed into Central Park at 9:00am with a bottle of Hennesey and some Starbucks paper cups.

The day went happily downhill from there, with the two of us slurring through a slew of topics; one of the brightest people I know, Josh also has an exceedingly broad range of interests and knowledge, allowing us to - in the course of fifteen minutes - somehow skip from women to adipose biochemistry to Italian liquors to political theory. And while, at varying points of the day, we were more sober than at others, I don't suspect we ever crossed below the legal blood-alcohol limit for safe driving. Thank god for New York's subway-centric life.

So it was still not entirely sober that we headed uptown to Morningside Heights at 10:00pm, to meet the girl I've been blogging about, along with one of her college best friends and her literature PhD cohorts. Needless to say, I was a bit freaked out, as meeting friends is a crucial moment in any nascent relationship. Inevitably, at some point down the road, you'll do something to make a girl really, justifiably pissed off with you, and having her friends either rooting for or against you almost always decides your fate.

While I normally wouldn't much worry, as more than a few of my friends have pointed out, this was essentially our fourth date in just over a week - about the same tally that I usually hit in the first month of dating. So, basically, I really didn't want to screw it up.

The grad student party we first collectively hit was, admittedly, a bit short of the Platonic college party form (which ideally includes such elements as 'chug! chug! chug!'-shouting keg-stands and someone dancing on a table with a lampshade on their head), though I spent most of the first hour or two less concerned about the surroundings, and more concerned about just-starting-to-date etiquette. Within the larger party, she and I were privately carrying out the ritual of a middle school dance: slow progress from furtive across-the-room smiles and eye contact, to adjacent leg-brushing sitting to, finally, eventually, standing naturally next to each other, slightly intertwined, hand on back, arm around waist, or (most adventurous of all party stances!) hand in back pocket.

Through it all, it was actually her friends that saved me, as, fortunately, really liking people is far easier than simply pretending to. With each conversation, I eased back towards my natural self, as I discovered that literature PhD students are pretty much exactly my favorite sort of people: intelligent, neurotically over-analytic ones passionately pursuing some relatively obscure topic of interest. As the girl's closest friends turn out also to be attractive, articulate alcoholics, by the time we left the grad party to head to a nearby bar, I was happily convinced that I'd actually look forward to spending more time with them all.

And, mainly, I realized that I'm looking forward to spending more time with her. So when, a little after 3:00 in the morning, Josh and I finally bid the group adieu, as I kissed the girl goodbye on the stoop of the bar and she asked what I was doing Monday night, although I said I'd have to check my calendar to see, I was pretty sure, whatever it might be, I could probably rearrange my schedule.

typifying
Filed January 21, 2005 2:16 AM.

Though I may, through this site (or, plausibly, in real life) come off as an insensitive prick, in fact, one of the few things I do well is empathize.

I don't mean empathize as a synonym for sympathize, as in sharing someone else's pain, but rather empathize in its purest sense, as in divining what other people are thinking, seeing things from other's perspectives.

Tailoring a sales pitch on the fly to an audience, or searching out the perfect birthday gift, I'm grateful for this knack of putting myself in other people's heads. But, like most things in life, it cuts both ways. Given the weight I put on what other people are thinking, I inevitably end up worrying about what other people are thinking of me.

This manifests itself in small, bizarre ways. Hearing female friends mock the wall-eyed guy at the end of the bar, for example, I'll start to convince myself that perhaps I, too, have some horrible lazy eye and yet have never been told as much, even though it's been secretly discussed for decades by friends and family behind my back.

I can usually cast aside such fears with a moment of reflection. I've seen countless pictures and videos of myself, and I'm sure that in at least the majority of them both of my eyes are looking more or less in the same direction.

Which leaves me to fixate instead on the things I hear and deduce on a regular basis. Some of them ("has anyone ever told you that you look like Matthew Broderick?") don't imply much beyond their surface content (I apparently look kind of like Matthew Broderick). But others I can't keep from analyzing, from tearing apart for their loaded meaning.

One I've heard a lot recently is, "I'd be really, really curious to see who you end up marrying." I've gotten this one, even in just the last month, more times than I can count. I think what this actually means is, "you seem like a judgmental asshole with bizarre and inscrutable dating criteria that make it nearly impossible for me to figure out your 'type'".

I must give off this impression in spades, because if I comment on liking a girl I've just met, friends usually react with, "really? I thought you didn't go for [taller / shorter / thinner / curvier / blonde / brunette / smart / dumb / etc.] girls." As I don't think I say such things directly, I'm curious as to which obliquely snide comments or quirky reactions lead people to those strong impressions. Whatever it is, it's powerful stuff. When people make such comments, there's almost an air of helpful reminding. "Actually," they seem to say, "despite the comment you just made to the contrary, I'm pretty sure you don't like her after all."

Hearing this from enough people, I start to suspect they're right. Maybe I don't like smart girls. Or stupid girls. Or tall blondes or short brunettes. I have absolutely no idea. Looking back through the wreckage of relationships past, I can't quite make sensible patterns emerge.

Which is exactly the point. Perhaps the reason people so quickly rule out possibilities for me is that I'm so slow to categorically rule them out myself. My dating life, taken together, is an enigmatic, jumbled mess. Not a clear shape, but a muddy splatter.

Which makes what people tell me I am (or, more frequently, am not) looking for far more interesting, gives me license to listen carefully to friends' constructive critiques of my crushes. Not because it's likely to yield clues in my own search, but rather because it might give me a glimpse into theirs. Given the spattered mess of my own love life past, I seem to have inadvertently become a walking relationship Rorschach blotch.

gotham high class of '96
Filed November 10, 2004 10:20 AM.

See also: subsequent 'yearbook' installments two, three and four.

As promised, the first chunk of Gotham High's '96 yearbook. Go dawgs!

Chip "Jazz Hands" Goldberg

Activities: Drama Club (Vice President); This Box is Getting Smaller! (Amateur Mime Club, Founder); The Bowl Of Nuts (Acapaella Singing Group); Daddy Warbucks, Fall Production of "Annie"; Willie Lohman, Spring Production of "Death of a Salesman"; Hamlet, Winter production of "Rosencranz and Gildenstern are Dead"

Superlatives: Most Likely To Entertain

Next Year Will Be: Waiting tables in New York

Quote: "No day but today!!!" - Rent

Tripp "Cold Trippin'" Taylor III

Activities: Thug Life Hip-Hop Culture Society (Secretary); Math Team

Superlatives: Most Street

Next Year Will Be: Attending Morehouse

Quote: "I ain't mad at 'cha. Got nothin' but love for ya." - Tupac

K.C. Leviner and "L'il Stuey"

Activities: Hunting And Fishing Club; Survivors Of Incest Association

Superlatives: Most Likely To Be A Grandmother Before Age 35

Next Year Will Be: Working at Winn-Dixie, breast feeding

Quote: "If you see Sherman Meadows you tell that asshole that i'm not gonna leave L'il Stuey in a toilet at a Burger King bathroom no matter what he says. And my baby needs a daddy. Please come home - my momma said you can live with us." - K.C. Leviner

Amber Cocks

Activities: Cheerleading Squad (Captain); Drill Team; Homecoming Queen; Prom Queen; Fashion Club

Superlatives: Most Likely To Fuck A Baldwin Brother (If She Hasn't Already)

Next Year Will Be: Moving to New York or L.A. to model and be an actress and stuff

Quote: "If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends." - The Spice Girls

Donnie "Tay-Tay" Taylor

Activities: Special Friends Club; Special Olympics (Track & Field); Hall Monitor; Study Room Monitor; Bus Monitor; Inspiring Everyone

Superlatives: Biggest Inspiration

Next Year Will Be: Greeting at Wal-Mart

Quote: "I like sauce. I like sauce from apples. Sauce from apples is my favorite. It tastes good. It feels good in my mouth. Apple sauce! Apple sauce! Apple sauce! When I'm alone I can fly." - Donnie Taylor

eyeballing
Filed November 5, 2004 3:23 PM.

Having spent much of my life in photography (and now, in film), I'm anal about seeing with clarity and vision. Which is why, despite my prescription being repeatedly described as 'totally pansy' by those who really need their glasses, I wear mine all the time. I have since getting my first pair, in eleventh grade (bought, initially, to help me read the board from my customary back row seat, rather than force a move to the front).

To be accurate, throughout most of college, I actually rotated contacts in about half the time. But, since moving to New York some three and a half years back, I slowly drifted away from rotating. Perhaps it was my hectic bags-below-the-eyes-inducing schedule, the irritating grit of city air, or a desire for the faux-intellectual look a good pair of spectacles provides. Whatever the reason, contacts fell by the wayside.

I realized as much earlier this week, and have since been trying to work them back into use. And, by and large, it's been an excellent change. The only downside: I awake constantly throughout the night, suddenly convinced I forgot to remove the contacts before going to sleep, which might leave me hours deep in irreparable corneal damage.

I should, at this point, admit that I'm a complete and total hypochondriac. The combination of medical knowledge, vivid imagination, and general neurosis conspire to convince me - often aided by Google symptom-searching ("headache and slight fever? I knew it! Malaria!!!") - that my world is coming to a slow and painful end.

This is particularly true with contacts, due to a booklet I once read at the optometrist's on the potential dangers of sleeping in contacts not approved for 'continuous use'. In pictures and gory written detail, the booklet laid out the risks of 'serious eye infection' and 'abnormal corneal blood vessel growth'. It is the second that most plagues my imagination, as the line between vodka-induced harmlessly bloodshot and slept-in-contacts-induced abnormal blood vessel growth is a distinction admittedly beyond my abilities of accurate self-diagnosis.

Fortunately, unlike in the case of goiter, femoral hernia, or any of the other afflictions I might woefully cast upon myself, shaking slept-in-contacts fears should be rather easy - if I'm not actually wearing the contacts as I sleep, I'm fine. Less fortunately, my contacts-less vision is good enough that, in a darkened room without any distant objects to stare at, I'm often unable to decide whether I am, in fact, wearing them or not, at least without repeatedly poking myself in the eyeball.

Because my contacts are one day disposables, I've now stumbled upon a workable solution: after removing them, I leave them on my night-stand. Waking up at three in the morning, then, I'm able to simply look over at them, slowly drying out, to relieve my worries and put myself back to sleep. Gross perhaps, but certainly better than abnormal corneal blood vessel growth. Or, at least, better than fears of it. As is the case with most of my hypochondriacal self-diagnoses, I happily doubt I'll ever have the chance to experience the real thing.

how to not shoot yourself in foot
Filed September 3, 2004 10:33 AM.

Dear Fellow Liberals:

In 2000, after the polls closed on election night, every single television network was calling the race too close to call. Then, something strange happened. The election statistician at Fox News, who just happened to be George W. Bush's cousin, called the race in favor of Bush. Within minutes, all the other networks similarly started calling it a Bush win. Aside from the AP's article the following morning - which rightly called the count still too close to call - Bush was the presumptive President-elect.

And that too-early call by the networks colored the dispute over the next few weeks. Had things been up in the air still, it might have been a fight between two candidates. Instead, with Bush called the winner before the votes were even counted, it became a fight between the next President and a bitter loser unwilling to gracefully throw in the towel.

I bring this up now as a reminder of how powerful expectations can be. By and large, we get what we think we will - especially in the world of politics. Which is why I find the current liberal defeatism particularly distressing. My friends - intelligent, well-reasoned people - are heading off to protests, all the while saying Bush is almost certain to win.

But the thing is, he isn't. With two months to go 'till election day, the two candidates are consistently polling within the margin of error. And, from the perspective of the incumbent, historically that's not a very good place to be - especially when matched up against a candidate (like Kerry) who's seen his numbers swing up during the final two months of hard, pull-no-punches campaigning in every single one of his prior races.

In other words, this is Kerry's race to lose, not the other way around. But we jeopardize that edge every single time we sigh, throw up our hands, and brace ourselves for four more years of Bush. If you're going to play to win, you've got to say so.

That's particularly important in a race where a Kerry victory hinges on undecided voter turn-out. According to the contours of the latest WSJ/NBC poll, 70 percent of them think the country is headed in the wrong direction, and a very large majority have an unfavorable view of George Bush. By all indications, undecideds are going to break hard for Kerry, but only if they think it's worth their time to head out and vote - only if they think the race is still in their hands, rather than more or less already a Bush win.

Which is all to say, if you want Kerry to win, start talking like he will. Heaven knows the other side takes that approach. The only difference is, in our case, we're probably right.

Sincerely,

josh

over-sharing
Filed May 27, 2004 11:13 PM.

There was a brief stint, after graduating college and transitioning the Silicon Ivy Venture Fund from active investing to working with existing portfolio companies, that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life. In its support stage, the venture fund wasn't really a full time job, and the market wasn't right to raise a second fund. I knew I wanted to start another company or two, but I was entirely unsure of what, exactly, those companies were going to be.

I related as much to Mark Gerson, a long-time friend, one night over dinner. Mark had founded and was running the hugely successful Gerson Lehrman Group, a boutique investment advisory firm that works with some of the nation's best hedge funds and mutual funds. As I had helped Mark out in the earlier days of his company - lining up some of their first clients and early employees - he offered to return the favor, by bringing me in as the firm's Senior Technology Analyst.

In some ways, the job was perfect - I was overpaid, underworked, with about as much power and autonomy as I could hope for in a company that I didn't run.

And I was miserable.

I always knew, at some level, that I was a pioneer, not a settler; that I had to mark out new territory, make new things, rather than just expand existing things ever onward and upward. But I didn't realize how much taking a 'real' job would chip away at me. The psychological stress of being an employee, not an employer, weighed on me constantly, manifesting itself in remarkably strange ways.

Unlike in my current job, where I rarely spend more than a half hour seated at my desk - wandering off instead to internal meetings or external business lunches and dinners - at Gerson Lehrman, I spent most of my day sitting in front of a computer monitor, banging out reports, fielding calls, and generally being (or at least feigning being) productive. And, as a result, I drank lots and lots and lots of water.

Perhaps it was sheer boredom, the lack of anything better to do. But each morning, I'd open up a Crystal Geyser bottle, start sipping away, and soon find I was refilling it from the water cooler throughout the day at nearly half-hour intervals.

As a result, my primary cause for leaving the desk was heading off to the bathroom. And in those bathroom trips, something strange started to happen. Despite definitely having to go, my bladder was suddenly shy. At first, I couldn't start peeing when someone was at the adjacent urinal. Then I couldn't pee if there was anyone within the entire bathroom. Eventually, that parauresis slipped over into my non-work life as well - even in bar and restaurant bathrooms, I couldn't pee when someone else was around.

As strange as it may sound, I didn't think much of it at the time. The problem snuck up on me gradually, and like the proverbial frog in the slowly heated pot of water, I didn't notice it had happened until I was already in deep.

Then, after a little less than a year, I had a series of small epiphanies. I knew I wanted to make movies. I knew I wanted to publish books and release CDs. I knew I wanted to keep working in entrepreneurship and technology, though in ways that helped the world. The Paradigm Blue companies were born. And I couldn't wait to get them started.

I was worried about telling Mark that I'd be jumping ship, worried that he'd somehow be insulted by my suddenly moving on. To my pleasant surprise, however, his reaction was exactly opposite; he was enthusiastic, supportive, offering to help in a slew of ways as I set about getting the first company, Cyan Pictures, off the ground. And while I offered to stick around for another few months if they still needed assistance, he graciously said he'd be happy to let me head off at the end of the week, as he knew I'd be eager to get down to business.

I remember walking out of his office, stopping briefly at my desk, and then realizing I had to use the bathroom. And I remember, vividly, walking into the crowded bathroom, walking up to an empty urinal, and peeing away with reckless abandon.

The shy bladder was gone, and it hasn't, not even once, come back since.

blog zen
Filed May 19, 2004 9:27 AM.

"I just never knew that so much went into organizing a wallet. I would assume that an afternoon with a three year old would produce more material."
- Senora Juego, in an astute comment on yesterday's post.

***

I'll be the first to admit that, when I write nearly a thousand words about wallet maintenance, it's not because I'm wildly passionate about the subject. Instead, it's what happens when, sitting down at the computer, I realize I have absolutely nothing to say.

***

Writers block is a fact of writing. Anyone who writes regularly, who routinely starts new pieces from scratch, has - at least on occasion - faced the terrifying nothingness of a white screen or blank piece of paper.

Novelists bitch and moan about it, drink themselves to death as a result. Working journalists, conversely, tend to simply slog their way through, quality be damned; a deadline's coming, they ain't gettin' paid unless they turn in two thousand words, and so they might as well just put something onto paper.

And, in that sense, we webloggers are nearly journalists. The deadlines may be internal, driven by a sense of obligation to regular posting. But they weigh down none the less. The blank screen looms, and we simply write the first thing that pops into our heads. Quality be damned.

***

Often, when I talk to people who've just taken up blogging, they'll tell me that they don't intend to blog for long. They'll simply go until they've told all the stories they've, for years, wanted to tell. And then they'll quit.

Invariably, this never happens. Through the process of blogging, they come to realize that, in our small daily adventures, the minute facets of our lives, there are literally thousands upon thousands of stories and speculations to tell and share. We could never possibly run out.

And yet, day by day, it's often difficult to see those facets and adventures. They're too small to us, too constant, too much a part of life.

***

There is an old Koan about a young monk who, seeking enlightenment, asks Master Dae-Ju to tell him the path to Zen. Dae-Ju replies, “Zen is very easy. When hungry, eat; when tired, sleep.”

We spend all of our lives doing things without really doing them. We go through the motions. We walk through our parts. But are we really present?

If this is the path to Zen, it's also the path to blogging well. To find material, we needn't change what we do, merely the way we do it. Fully experience each day, and surely in each lies a story worth telling.

Of course, like any truth, it's easier advice to mouth than to follow. Unlike Zen, though, blogging provides constant feedback in that pursuit, a daily test of how well we've stuck to the course of fully living. Do I have a story to tell? And, if not, is it really because nothing happened to me in the past twenty-four hours? Or is it because so much happened that I somehow missed it all, even as I marked my way through?

***

Keeping a weblog, then, is easy. When inspired, write; when finished, stop. Live through today. Return tomorrow. You'll doubtless be inspired to write again.

back pocket
Filed May 18, 2004 10:56 AM.

Dear fellow men:

In case you have not already realized it, women are checking out your ass. And, frankly, if your wallet is so overstuffed as to appear that you've developed a large, cancerous ass-cheek growth, you're probably not helping your cause.

So, if you're looking for love, or simply looking to not be labeled 'ass-cheek growth guy' by the group of cute girls at the end of the bar, it might be time to slim down your billfold.

Thus convinced, start the process by examining the wallet itself. If it is made from cordura (or, really, anything other than leather), you will not have even the vaguest of chances of sleeping with any woman who sees you remove it from your pocket. (In fact, this applies even if the woman in question is a member of PETA; I am fairly certain there's a special exemption to their animal cruelty platform that allows the purchase of leather wallets to keep guys from looking like complete doofuses.)

Also, if you have a crappy five-dollar wallet, every single woman who sees it will instantly know it's a crappy five-dollar wallet. Women spend huge percentages of their adult lives idly searching for the perfect purse and handbag, across thousands upon thousands of stores. They have examined more leather goods in a single afternoon than you have in your entire life. They know the difference. Your five-dollar wallet isn't fooling anyone but yourself.

Additionally, if your wallet is tri-fold, multi-fold, or in any way resembles an origami project, trade it in for a plain old fashioned one that simply folds in half once. Obviously, the more you fold something, the thicker it becomes, and some wallets are a good inch and a half deep even before you start filling them up. If you're still at a loss, just buy this, which I've owned for the last eight years. Thanks to, as you're about to learn, not overstuffing, it still looks new.

Onto what goes into the wallet. To gauge where you stand, remove everything from you wallet, and make four piles: one for money, one for credit cards / id / etc., one for receipts, and one for anything else. These piles are likely rather unwieldy, which is exactly the problem. The goal here is to put as little of what's in those piles back into the wallet.

Start with the money. That's the one thing that incontrovertibly belongs in your wallet. Everything else should be subjected to close scrutiny.

Next work your way through the card pile. From it, place in your wallet: your drivers license, your atm card, one or two credit cards, your metrocard (if you are a New Yorker), four of your business cards, and your health insurance card. That's it. Put everything else in your desk drawer. Seriously.

You simply cannot afford to stuff you wallet full of things you don't truly need. You don't, for instance, need to carry twelve different credit cards all at the same time. At most, you need one for personal expenses and one for business expenses. If you're worried about maxing out your limit (which, frankly, you probably shouldn't be doing in the first place) you can swap the nearly maxed card for another unused one from your desk drawer as necessary.

You also don't need things like your Blockbuster card or your museum membership cards; if they can find you in their computer system given your ID, you shouldn't be schlepping their plastic around. Even if your grocery store doesn't allow you to key in your phone number for rewards club savings, say, you still likely don't need to take your grocery rewards card with you everywhere. If you're just 'stopping by' the grocery store, you're unlikely to buy much; when you head out for a big shopping run, you take the card out of your desk. The rest of the time, you leave the card, and most others, at home.

Now the receipts. Take all of them, put them in a file somewhere, and never, ever again put a receipt into your wallet. Put new ones in your front pocket, then add them to the file when you get home. Receipts are the single largest cause for outlandishly overstuffed wallets. And there is absolutely, positively no reason for carrying those receipts around. Most guys have returned perhaps two items in the past five years. When return number three rolls around, you can damn well pull the relevant slip from the file. The rest of the time, the receipts add bulk, look stupid, fall out everywhere, and generally detract from good wallet housekeeping.

Now the miscellaneous pile. If it doesn't already include it, take a single check, a $20 bill and a $100 bill, and fold them together. Place this in one of the inside pockets of the wallet. This is 'emergency' money, or, more to the point, 'cover dinner after your credit card is declined so that you and your date don't end up in the kitchen washing dishes' money. Not much else from the miscellaneous pile should be added back into your wallet either. If you want to carry pictures, limit yourself to one of your significant other, and one each of any children you have (and know about). Nobody wants to see even the first photo, so please don't torture them with a stack.

That's it. Keeping your wallet organized is easy: aside from cash, and replenishing your stack of business cards, do not put anything new into your wallet. Try it for a few weeks. Then head back to the bar where the cute girls secretly taunted you for your unwieldy buttock-bulge, observe the newfound respect your svelte wallet and resulting slim line engenders, and ask the cutest for her phone number.

And, even then, place the phone in your pocket. Not in your wallet.

freeloading the big apple
Filed March 29, 2004 2:32 PM.

As Times columnist Charlie LeDuff famously observed, "New York is a lot like a shit sandwich. The more bread you have, the less shit you taste." Sadly, with the cost of city living perpetually on the rise, that observation holds now more than ever. Which isn't to say, however, that our fair city can only be enjoyed with a wad of $100's in your back pocket. With a bit of ingenuity, and a willingness to depend on the proverbial kindness of strangers, anyone can live the good life in New York for essentially no money at all. 'How?', I hear you ask. Read on.

Step 1. Eating

Your first stop: high end grocers. The Amish Market, Whole Foods, the Chelsea Market - any of these is packed with enough free samples to make a meal. The secret to avoiding incurring the wrath of salespeople is to look genuinely intent on shopping. Carry a basket. Put things in. Eat some free samples. Take things out. Head back for more free samples. Voila.

Of course, sometimes even the cheapest of individuals feels the need to sit down for a meal. That's where churches and synagogues come into play. Nearly all are brimming with lunch discussions and potluck dinners. Proselytizing and pizza. Can't stomach the holier-than-thou moral integrity these people beam as you take their food? Head over to a twelve step program meeting instead. Plenty to eat, and certainly nobody ready to judge.

Once the weather warms, you can also pop into Central Park looking for barbecues. With a big drunken crowd of revelers, nobody's going to stop the one guy they don't completely recognize in line for a burger.

Bonus tip: looking for dessert? Ten cents will buy you a cone at your neighborhood ice cream store. Then simply request a taste spoonful of all 31 flavors. Compacted together, those little bits easily add up to one (deliciously free) full scoop.

Step 2. Drinking

Of course, real New Yorkers know that food stands well behind drink in the order of life, so you'll be pleased to hear that unpaid liquor flows freely throughout the city. Start the evening at a Chelsea gallery opening. Wander around, glass in hand, squinting thoughtfully at the carefully framed spray-painted sweat socks and the like. If a salesperson stops next to you, look slightly towards them, shake your head slightly, and say something like "intriguing..." That should buy you plenty of time to grab another glass.

If you're a mid-day drinker (or, as we in the know say, alcoholic), kill pre-gallery time at open houses. Scour the Times for any residence listed for more than $2M, then dress the part and bring a date. Free drinks (and, likely, freshly baked banana bread, to scent the house with domesticity) are yours for the taking.

Like to smoke when you drink? Well then Mayor Bloomberg's done you a world of good. No longer able to smoke comfortably indoors, a crowd of addicts has doubtless packed near the doors of whichever establishment you're frequenting. The brotherhood of nicotine, strengthened through months of such enforced outdoors huddling, means you can bum away with reckless abandon.

Step 3. Staying Fit

All that free food and liquor gone straight to your hips? Don't worry friend, because fitness can be had on the cheap in NYC as well. Your first path: trial memberships. Every gym in the city offers them, from one week spans all the way up to a free test month. With over 400 'health clubs' listed in the phone book, by skipping from gym to gym, you can stay fit well into old age.

But let's say you're the trendier sort, perhaps looking to do a bit of soul-soothing Yoga (to balance out the karmic wrongs engendered by all your freeloading). No problem! Just head onto Friendster (you knew it had to be useful for something) and search for the word yoga. There's at least a 50% chance that any females living in Williamsburg whose names pop up are instructors-in-training, looking to log teaching hours. Free private instruction, yours for the taking.

Step 4. Entertainment

Feeling fit, feted and faded from the past three steps, you're now doubtless looking for a bit of fun. Fret not, as New York is known around the globe for its excellent theater, attracting uneducated yokels the world over to things their simple minds couldn't possibly comprehend. This month, head over to the American Airlines theater about an hour after the crowds first file in, and you'll doubtless find a hearty Midwestern couple jumping ship at the first intermission, muttering about why this Pinter fellow can't seem to just tell a story. Ask them for their tickets, and as your daily good deed, point them to their hotel two blocks up Time Square, lest they wander all the way down to TriBeCa before realizing they don't have a clue where they are. Don't worry about the missed first half; most playwrights save the best for last anyway.

Looking for lighter fare? Loiter outside the city's larger movie theaters, looking for women in their early twenties wielding clipboards. They're recruiting for test screenings (a misnomer, as distributors really couldn't care less what you think) for pre-release films. Sure, there's a better than 50% chance whatever you end up seeing will star Ashton Kutcher, but it's free, free, free!

Step 5. Edification

Feeling a bit punk'd by your film, you'd best set out to feed your brain. Head over to Barnes & Nobles, which I encourage you to view as your free lending library of brand spankin' new books (with only small deposit required). In short, buy a book or two that seem interesting. Read them on your own time. Come back several weeks later and say, "I read these two books; they were quite good. But now I'd like to abuse your overly generous return policy to trade them in for two others." Repeat ad infinitum.

If timelier information is what you seek, head down to your neighborhood coffee shop, on weekdays after 11:00am, or weekends after 1:00pm. Copies of the city's countless newspapers doubtless lay strewn on the floor. With a bit of search, you might even find one in which the crossword puzzle hasn't already been partially filled in (erroneously, of course, and in ink).

Step 6. Utilities

Tired out, it's time to head home. Sadly, no tips on how to go rent free, as that pesky landlord fellow seems to get a bit snippy if you try. And don't even bother trying to stay with friends - New Yorkers have a nose for the sort of houseguest likely to overstay their welcome. You won't make it past the buzzer should you hit their front door with bags in tow.

Utilities, however, are a bit more flexible, at least so long as you're willing to whine your way to success. Free phone minutes, months of cable service, they're all yours to be had if you can put the fear of you leaving for a competitor into their customer service rep's mind. Complain, complain, complain. If you're a real New Yorker, it should come easily.

Step 7. Style

Caught yourself in the mirror while wheedling your cell phone company and realized your look's way out, did you? Then it's time for a bit of discount store arbitrage. Pop into Syms or Century 21 and stock up on discounted designer couture. Then train on out to the Nordstrom's at the Short Hills Mall, which sports a return policy even more generous than the Barnes & Noble kindness you previously abused. Enough cycles, and you've pocketed enough money to make the eventual purchase (from the initial discount store, naturally) more than pay for itself.

All dolled up, your unkempt 'do likely looks out of place. Happily for you, New York is full of hairdressing schools looking for victims, er, volunteers to help students hone their scissor skills. Still, word is out and New Yorkers are broke, so waiting lists have begun to spring up at most such establishments. If your mane begins to look too shaggy to weather the wait, I've also heard excellent things about the trainees at either of the city's fine dog grooming academies.

Postlogue
So, there you have it. With no money down, this little beauty of a city can be yours, all yours. Or course, at some point you'll likely realize that all the time spent trying to live on the cheap could instead be channeled more effectively towards such fruitful pursuits as, say, looking for a job, or marrying an investment banker. Even then, only enough scrill to swim through (a la Scrooge McDuck) will lift you into the holy grail of New York High Society. Think Eyes Wide Shut, though with women WASPy enough to write thank you notes.

[Word to Yoav "King of Cheap" Fisher, who helped brainstorm this piece while brewing coffee late yesterday evening.]

classical excitement
Filed March 4, 2004 12:07 AM.

Just got home from a dress rehearsal for the New York Centre Symphony's concert tomorrow night. On the program is Schumann's beautiful Cello Concerto, and while the soloist is astoundingly good (off a recent Carnegie Hall solo performance), the rest of the orchestra, who received their parts only two rehearsals back, is sounding a bit rough. So, this evening, unwilling to settle for a sub-par performance, the conductor ran the group again and again through each difficult transition and harmonically complex section. Somewhere along the way, however, he apparently lost track of the time.

By 9:50, we had still yet to run cleanly through the entire piece in one go, and so we were giving it one more try. Midway through, the building manager, wildly irate, popped through the balcony door to scream down that we'd only booked the space only until 9:30, and that the entire building was set to close in just ten minutes. The maestro, unwilling to stop without at least one smooth run-through under his belt, looked up briefly, turned back to the group, and kept conducting.

Meanwhile, up in the balcony, the building manager continued to shout, showering down obscenities until spittle literally flew out of his mouth. Seeing the conductor was, none the less, still rolling ahead, the building manager pulled the ace from his sleeve: if we didn't stop immediately, he'd turn out the lights and lock us in. Even then, the conductor seemed unwilling to put down his baton; knowing the building manager would have to come down to our floor to turn off the lights, he simply watched the door and started speeding up the piece.

By the time the building manager emerged downstairs, we were on the last page, flying ahead at a frenzied pace. The poor soloist, likely pushed by the technical demands of the piece at even a normal speed, looked ready to crack, large beads of sweat forming on her forehead as her hands flew over the cello's neck. One eye on my music, another on the building manager, I watched the man lumber around the back of the hall as we blazed through the final restatement of the theme. We hit the last chords just as the lights went out, the sound of Schumann resonating in the dark.

I don't know if the building manager next made good on his threat to lock the group in; I was already standing by the end of the last note, case in hand, and was out the door by the time I took the horn off my lips. Still, I promise I'll never again complain when rehearsals seem dull; it's apparently much better than the alternative.

urinal etiquette
Filed March 1, 2004 10:26 PM.

While I was at Yale, the neuroscience major was tied in to the psych department. Because of that, neuroscience majors were required to take a few 'soft' psych classes. Which is how, in my sophomore year, I ended up in Psych 150 - Social Psychology. Frankly, I hated the class. The research we studied was garbage, and the teaching was at a third grade level. When we were assigned a final project - executing a piece of original field research - I realized I had my chance to let the teacher know what I thought of the class. In an effort to mock the careful study of the inane that characterizes social psychology, I chose the topic of urinal etiquette. Ironically, I got an A.

---------------------------------------------------------

The "Number One" Social Norm

Very few social norms are completely rigid; most are violated, at least occasionally or under special circumstances. Riding in an elevator, for example, people will speak to each other instead of simply looking at the door if they already know their fellow riders. Occasionally, even strangers will strike up conversations during an elevator ride. Other norms, like eating with utensils or not sitting on the table, are sometimes ignored as well. Although the violators may be looked down upon, these violators do exist. However, up to the time of my experiment, I had neither seen nor heard of anyone breaking the strict laws of urinal etiquette. For the benefit of my female readers, I must first try to explain the tacit yet complex code that governs men’s room interactions. Central to urinal etiquette is the ‘veil of silence’ that descends upon men in public bathrooms. Female friends have, on occasion, reported actually speaking to each other between stalls, which is frankly inconceivable in the men’s room environment. Male best friends, or even brothers, upon meeting in the bathroom will usually ignore each other completely, perhaps acknowledging each other with a subtle nod. Strangers in the bathroom will never speak to one another, unless politeness dictates a curt ‘excuse me.’ Even these small recognitions are lost when either party is actually using the urinal. At the urinal, people will not make eye contact, and almost never even look to either side. Usually, while urinating, men look straight ahead, scrutinizing the tiles or wallpaper. Looking down, except when zipping or unzipping, is also frowned upon. Another key aspect of urinal etiquette is that of urinal selection. The rules of selection are most obvious in a nearly empty bathroom. If a man is to enter a standard four urinal bathroom while another man is using one of the end urinals, the first man will usually select the urinal two away from the occupied urinal. Choosing the urinal immediately adjacent to the occupied urinal might be seen as a sexual advance, while choosing the farthest away urinal might be seen as an act of blatant homophobia, or some expression of contempt for the individual already urinating. Knowing this, men entering an empty bathroom will even consciously choose an end urinal so as to make urinal selection as painless as possible for anyone who might enter while the first person was still urinating. In bathrooms of other sizes, and in increasingly crowded bathrooms, even more complex formulas govern urinal selection. However, in all situations, the basic principle of creating distance between individuals applies. This basic principle was the first that I violated. Armed with this knowledge of basic men's room conduct, I set upon my mission of systematically breaching this and each of the other tenets of bathroom behavior.

I began my research in the Commons bathroom, beneath Woolsey Rotunda. This bathroom proved to be an ideal site for field research, since the bathroom is rarely crowded, often used only by one person at a time, but still visited fairly frequently. The bathroom consists of a row of eight urinals, facing four toilet stalls at the far end and a couple of sinks closer to the door. In my first set of trials, I decided to violate the situational norm by selecting a urinal directly next to someone else. I waited by a column in the Rotunda, across from the stairs to the bathroom. When a subject would enter the empty bathroom, I would follow him down several seconds later, and take the urinal immediately next to the one my subject was using. Although the reaction that this caused varied, all of the subjects made small moves to create personal space, rotating slightly to face away from me; several subjects also cleared their throats. However, only in one of my five trials did the person I was next to demonstrate unambiguous discomfort. Within ten seconds of my taking the urinal next to him, he zipped his fly and hurriedly walked out of the bathroom without urinating.

I decided to up the ante in my second set of trials by simultaneously violating a second urinal norm, silence. The normative social influence of the situation was so powerful that I myself felt noticeably uncomfortable during these trials. In this experiment, as in the last one, I followed the subject down and assumed a position next to his. In this set of trials, however, I also addressed the subject with either a quasi-rhetorical remark (‘The weather is really terrible today”) or a direct question (“What are they serving for lunch today?”). None of the four subjects that received the indirect remark responded verbally, but the remark seemed to trigger an even greater level of discomfort than my presence alone. One of the subjects chuckled nervously (similarly to the nervous participants in the Milgram ex[eriment), while another stopped urinating within seconds and walked out quickly without washing his hands. The direct question created an even greater reaction. Perhaps this is because the question brought the norm of urinal etiquette into conflict with conversational norms. Usually, not answering a direct question is considered impolite; in the men’s room, however, the ‘veil of silence’ is rarely broken. In the case of two of the four subjects that I questioned, the conversational norm took precedence. However, while responding, both of these subjects looked deliberately away from me. (It should be noted that, despite speaking, I looked directly ahead for these trials.) The other two subjects, those who ignored my questions, also turned to look away from me.

In my third set of trials, I decided to break the third major principal of urinal etiquette by looking at my subjects. Although I intended to run four trials this way as well, I ended up running only two. The second subject, a middle aged physical plant worker, reacted so strongly that I decided to terminate this part of the experiment (mostly for my own safety). The first subject responded to my glances in a manner similar to that of the subjects in the previous set of trials. He coughed nervously, rotated away from me, and left the bathroom very quickly after finishing. The second subject, however, confronted me directly. “You little faggot – what the fuck are you looking at?” he exclaimed. In this trial, I was the one beating a hasty retreat! Fortunately, I escaped unscathed, and with a greater appreciation of the strength of the social norm of urinal etiquette.

Obviously, the normative social influence of urinal etiquette is quite strong. The more interesting question is why. In my opinion, the source of these norms is the biologically driven instinct of self preservation. Culturally, we are conditioned to feel most exposed when naked; pants unzipped, using the urinal, people feel particularly vulnerable. Without any physical divide between the urinal user and others, the urinal user creates personal space in an effort to feel safe. This space can be both physical, in the sense of choosing urinals farther away from each other, and cognitive, by ignoring all of the social norms that acknowledge another’s existence (i.e. eye contact or conversation). Unlike in other social situations, where an invasion of personal space would simply trigger movement away to reestablish a comfortable boundary, the urinal user is fairly stationary. Except for shifting body orientation, there is very little that can be done to reestablish personal space once that space has been violated. This explains the stronger reactions from the subjects that I spoke to or looked at; their personal space violated once physically, violating their cognitive personal space moments later constituted an inescapable double invasion. Clearly, the issue of personal space is at the root of urinal behavior

To gather further support for this theory, I decided to run one further trial. This time, I used the bathroom next to Davies Auditorium. This bathroom is smaller than the Commons bathroom, with only three urinals, all of which are separated physically by wood dividers. In the four trials I executed in this bathroom, I also took a urinal next to the subject, and again addressed the subject with the same quasi-rhetorical remark as before (“The weather is really terrible today.”). In this case, however, three of the four subjects responded (as compared to none in the Commons experiment). The subjects here, even the one that did not respond, showed relatively lower levels of discomfort. Also, until I spoke, none of the subjects appeared nervous or uncomfortable at all. In this situation, the physical wooden dividers between the urinals created the personal space lacking in most urinal situations, thereby negating the strong reactions usually caused by my urinal etiquette violations. Such results support the theory of bathroom behavior as an attempt to generate personal space, perhaps driven by the desire for safety.

wining
Filed February 12, 2004 4:52 PM.

Earlier today, Geese Aplenty's Greg was kind enough to suggest a list of erudite-sounding wine descriptors he uses to cover the fact that, when it comes to wine, he doesn't really know what he's talking about.

Which, on the one hand, I very much appreciated, as I rarely know what I'm talking about, on pretty much any subject at all. But, on the other, I also recently discovered that, when it comes to wine in particular, not knowing what you're talking about doesn't seem to matter.

Just a few weeks back, I was lucky enough to attend the in-house wine tasting of a high-end liquor distributor. Convening a panel of exceedingly educated palettes (plus a few idiots like me, dragged along for the ride), the tasting was used by the distributor to decide how much of various vintages to order, and where to set prices.

I can say, without a doubt, the evening was the most unintentionally funny of my life. I knew it was starting well when one elderly taster (memorable otherwise mainly for an exceedingly intimidating set of bushy eyebrows) described the first sample, a merlot, as "certainly, a slutty little wine." While the evening only improved from there, it peaked when another gentleman described one particular shiraz as "a bit like opening an umbrella on the streets of London on a summer's day, just as the fog begins rolling in."

As I stifled laughter, the distributor smiled broadly and scribbled copious notes. One can only assume an open-umbrella-in-the-mists-of-London shiraz is bound to be a big seller.

sushi nyc
Filed February 5, 2004 12:29 PM.

New York City has a serious sushi obsession. And rightly so, considering it was here that Americans, some forty years back, first tasted the inimitable combination of raw fish and vinegared rice.

Only in the past few years, however, has the sushi trend really exploded. Now, new Japanese restaurants pop up literally weekly; Chinese, Thai and Korean restaurants have begun installing sushi bars as well, apparently courting the "all Asian people look the same to me anyway" corner of the market; even corner delis have gotten into the act, stocking their refrigerators with (rather disturbingly aged-looking) inari and California roll.

The question, then, is no longer "where do I find sushi?", but "where do I find good sushi?" Hence this guide. Armed with an expense account and fond, fond memories of the sushi I ate while living in Japan, I dined around New York City in search of the very best maki and nigiri, then summarized the best of the bunch herein. Itadakimasu!

Unbeatable:

After hitting nearly thirty-five different restaurants, three stood head and shoulders above the rest. Predictably, they aren't cheap. However, sushi, even at its most expensive, is still well short of haute cuisine prices - a dinner at any of these three restaurants can be had for about $60 a head.

Sushi Yasuda (204 E 43rd St, 212.972.1001):
Without a doubt Sushi Yasuda is the king of New York City sushi. I said so when I first reviewed it, shortly after its opening two years back, and this year's Zagat (unfortunately, from a reservations perspective) officially agreed. Chef Maomichi Yasuda, (who trained at Hatsuhana at the same time Nobu's Nobu Matsuhisa did, though now takes a much more traditional approach then his colleague), starts with one of the city's widest assortments of extremely fresh fish, then serves up slightly smaller than average pieces that literally melt in your mouth. Along with the flawless sushi, try the nameko (mushroom) miso soup to start and certainly don't miss the green tea mochi ice cream for desert. The perfection is in the details: the chefs vary the size of the sushi according to the size of diners' mouths; a different type of tea is served with each course; the minimalist blond wood decor perfectly reflects the simple perfection of the food. Book in advance, or learn Japanese and kiss up to the Maitre D' (my favored approach).

Tsukiji Sushisay (38 E 51st St, 212.755.1780 ) :
Exceedingly good sushi that comes in a close second to Sushi Yasuda. The sushi chefs at Sushisay are required to train for a minimum of five years at the restaurant's Tokyo branch, which pretty much sums things up - sushi doesn't get more authentic than this. With a beautiful back room, Sushisay also makes a great location for small private parties or business functions.

Nobu / Nobu Next Door (105 Hudson St, 212.219.0500)
The sushi itself is perhaps a notch down from Sushi Yasuda's and Sushisay's, and trying to book a table is a great reminder that you're not an important person, but the exceedingly inventive fusion dishes help Nobu (and the essentially identical Nobu Next Door) live up to the hype. As pretty much every restaurant guide says, go "omakase," and take whatever the chef recommends.

More for the Money:

Fortunately, there's excellent sushi to be had at a slightly lower price-point as well; both of these mini-chains serve up dinner for about $25 a person, even without a reservation made weeks in advance.

Haru (205 W 43rd St / 280 Park Ave / 433 Amsterdam Ave / 1327 3rd Ave)
In a word: reliable. The selection isn't unusual, but the nigiri is always expertly prepared, extremely fresh, and reasonably priced. Nota bene: The lines are considerably longer at the (original) 3rd Ave location, though the food is equally good at any of the four.

Yama ( 122 E 17th St / 38-40 Carmine St / 92 W Houston St)
The lines can be (literally) around the block, and the atmosphere is more trattoria than traditionally Japanese, but the sushi is excellent, ridiculously large (perfect for those who complain about not feeling full after a sushi dinner) and fairly priced. The appetizers, too, are well above average - consider the Japanese eggplant with miso paste for a start.

Bargain Basement:

If you're jonesing for sushi but will be paying with assembled change rather than dollar bills, either of these places can scratch the raw fish itch for under $10.

Takahachi (85 Ave A)
Worth the trip down to Alphabet City, as there's certainly a lot of sushi for the money. As you might expect, lines can get ridiculously long later in the evening, so it's best to either go early, or resign to the wait. While their sushi is remarkably good for the price, there's also an assortment of similarly wallet-friendly high-quality non-sushi entrees - the beef sukiyaki and tempura soba, for example, are both strong choices.

Go Sushi (982 2nd Ave, 511 3rd Ave, 3 Greenwich Ave, 756 9th Ave)
Frankly, their sushi isn't terribly good, but for sushi dinners starting at $6, what do you expect? The fish is fresh if somewhat inexpertly prepared, so while your palate might suffer the lack of quality, your intestines won't.

Not Sushi:

Believe it or not, the world of Japanese cuisine extends beyond the sushi bar. While a full summary could easily justify another entire article, here are two excellent (though not sushi-focused) spots more than worth the trip:

Saka Gura (211 E 43rd St.)
This one's a bit tough to find, as it's located in the basement of a nondescript office building. Brave the fluorescent lights in the building's entry and the industrial concrete steps heading down, however, and you'll enter another world entirely - a slice of 18th century Japan. More importantly, a slice of 18th century Japan that serves up the city's largest selection of Sakes. Try the tasting sets, which give you little glasses of three or four different vintages; if you're looking for food as well, it's all very authentic - the best bang for the buck are the exceedingly large bento boxes, a favorite with the Japanese ex-pat crowd.

Hyotan Nippon (19 W 52nd St.)
Like sushi, Japanese noodles (soba and udon) can be found all over the city. Nowhere, however, are they served better than this. Nippon makes their noodles in-house, using buckwheat and rice imported from their own fields and paddies. On icy winter days, take the noodles in soup to warm you through; conversely, noodles served cold are a traditional Japanese summer dish. The only danger: after eating here, you may no longer be able to stomach your corner noodle shop's pale-by-comparison attempts.

on making potato latkes
Filed January 29, 2004 2:32 PM.

It is the fourth night of Chanukah and my apartment is empty, my roommates having gone off to their respective families for Christmas. The block of 51st Street outside my front window is oddly quiet as well, as if my neighbors have left to make room for the holiday inflow of tourists that swarms our little island, packs Times Square and Rockefeller Plaza, both a few blocks away.

It is nearly 7:00, and though the sun has set two and a half hours ago, I am only now getting ready to light the menorah. It is a traditional one - wrought brass, burning oil rather than candles. I fill the four rightmost cups, then the shamash, the taller 'helper' flame, placing a floating wick in each. I recite the prayers, rote, in Hebrew: Blessed are you, Hashem our God, king of the universe, who has sanctified us with his commandments, and has commanded us to kindle the light of Chanukah. Blessed are You, Hashem our God, king of the universe, who wrought miracles for our forefathers in those days at this season.

Carefully, I lift the menorah from the stovetop and carry it over to the kitchen window, placing it facing outward, so that passersby on the street below can see it. I turn off the overhead lights, and stand for several minutes in the dark, watching the five smalls flames flicker, leap, and dance for their reflections in the pane of window glass.

:::

I sit down at my desk, intending to slog away at a pile of work, but instead drift into thought about Chanukah - or, more accurately, about Chanukahs past. About, as a child, standing in the kitchen with my family, crowded around several lit menorot, singing. About laughing and clowning in the living room as we exchange gifts - my mother, every year without fail, affixing all the bows pulled from any of our gifts to her hair. About sitting around the table, eating the traditional Chanukah latkes - potato pancakes cooked in oil.

And, unexpectedly, I'm swept by a wave of homesickness, a sudden welling burst of holiday loneliness. I decide the only thing I can do is to create some Chanukah joy in my own home. I decide, in fact, that I'll make a batch of latkes myself.

:::

It occurs to me, however, that I've never actually made latkes. Certainly, in years past, I'd always helped my mother prepare them, but my assistance was solely limited to peeling potatoes. Still, I reason, latkes certainly aren't a complicated dish: coarsely grated potato, onion and egg, pan-fried in lots of oil. I should be able to handle it. I call my parents home to inquire about the proportions - how many eggs exactly? - but as they're out, I decide to simply fake it.

:::

Walking to the Food Emporium, I realize the unfolding latke misadventure might make for good reading. And, at first, the idea gives me pause. I wrote online for years before even obliquely referring to Judaism. Posting about the topic still makes me vaguely uncomfortable, as if it's something I shouldn't share, or at least shouldn't advertise, about myself. We Jews are a culturally paranoid people - it's easy to think everyone's out to get you when, for centuries, they were. These days, bludgeoned as children by hundreds of Holocaust documentaries, we grow up with the message that, sometimes, being publicly Jewish can be rather bad for your health.

With a bit of thought, however, I conclude my tacit 'don't ask, don't tell' policy simply supports anti-semitism. Instead, I decide to push for understanding through openness; if Chanukah is something I'm thinking about, a part of who I am, certainly, I should be willing to share that.

:::

I return from Food Emporium with five exceedingly large potatoes, one large onion and a dozen eggs. Setting them out on the counter, I wash my hands, then scrub down each potato thoroughly. The peeler isn't in the drawer where it should be, and I spend several minutes searching for where my roommates might have placed it. Eventually, I find it - an OXO Good Grip, courtesy of my father, who is obsessed with kitchen gadgetry.

I peel the potatoes over the sink, thinking about the years of potatoes peeled in my parents house. Perversely, I miss the old, less-effective peelers we owned when I was still very young - sparely built metal ones, with orange plastic handles. I have a sudden flashbulb memory of rummaging through the drawer to find them, looking for one of the two right-handed peelers rather than the left-handed one. Which, it occurs to me, was a rather odd possession, considering that my entire family is right handed.

:::

Quartering the peeled potatoes, I place them into a bowl of water to keep the air from turning them brown. Then, without the Cuisinart we always used in my parents' house, I pull out a metal hand-grater, and begin coarsely grating the first potato quarter. I'm careful with my strokes, watching out to keep my knuckles from dragging across the sharp edges, but it is still repetitive, vaguely meditative work.

In the quiet, I begin to think about the story of Chanukah. Or, rather, about the stark difference between the version we Jews learn as children, and the full, historically accurate one that some of us discover as adults. Observe:

The kid version: An evil Greek ruler, Antiochus, tries to destroy the Jewish people. He takes over the Jew's holy temple and turns it into a shrine to himself. The brave Maccabees, led by Judah "The Hammer", revolt, fight back, and eventually win, reclaiming the temple. The ner tamid - the temple's eternal, holy light - has been extinguished, and all the vessels of oil (used to fuel the light) have been shattered. After much search, a single intact vessel is found; though it should last only one night, it miraculously burns for eight, long enough to harvest and press enough olive oil to keep the light burning.

The adult version: The majority of Jews are - much like today - highly integrated into Hellenic Greek culture. They make major contributions to the arts, science and philosophy, and are increasingly involved in sports and popular culture. The Maccabees belong to a violent fundamentalist minority group, the Hasmoneans; they travel around, using violence and murder to coerce integrated Hellenistic Jews back to a segregated, traditionalist lifestyle. Antiochus comes to power, and people recognize him as basically a nut-job - I mean, the guy renames himself Epiphanes (meaning, literally, ''god made manifest'), believing he is a human incarnation of the god Zeus. As a result, he takes stupid military risks, which, combined with the fact that everybody is out to kill him, leads the Hellenistic Jews to figure he won't last long. Further, while he does ask the Jews to bring him offerings recognizing his divinity and put his picture up in their temple, he's otherwise fairly tolerant, and certainly never violent towards the Jewish people. They therefore decide to simply ignore Antiochus for a couple of years and wait for him to get himself killed, letting things return to their previous, unharried state. The Hasmoneans, however, have other ideas. They organize a military revolt and take Jerusalem by military force (causing Antiochus' troops to defile the temple in retreat). The victorious Hasmoneans then secede from Greece and revert the country into a fundamentalist state, cutting off outside communication, outlawing much of the intellectual progress made by Greek Jews, and more or less setting the Jewish people back a couple hundred years.

In other words, if the Chanukah story played itself out again today, I doubt I'd be rooting for the Maccabees. And I certainly wouldn't be frying up potato pancakes in their honor.

:::

I grate as I think, and after several minutes I've made it through the first two potato quarters, knuckles unscathed. Still, I regard the bowl of potato quarters skeptically, trying to avoid estimating how long all that grating is likely to take. Suddenly, it occurs to me that perhaps I do own a Cuisinart. I seem to vaguely recall my parents shipping me their old one a few years back when they replaced it with a newer model. While I've never before used it, I can sort of picture unpacking it from a box full of styrofoam peanuts, and so begin diving through the back of less used cabinets.

To my delight, I find the Cuisinart wedged between an unused toaster and a coffee maker (the result of three roommates worth of appliances moving into one kitchen). I dust off the body, wash out the top, then plug it in. Gaining a whole new appreciation for the miracles of technology, I polish off grating the remaining eighteen potato quarters in less time than it took me to hand-grate the first two.

Pouring the grated potatoes into a strainer, I wash off the starch, then dump them into a large bowl. I'm amazed by the amount of grated potato generated from the five potatoes I started with - the bowl is nearly overflowing. I can't help but laugh, thinking my mother would be thrilled, serving waaaay too much food being the hallmark of Jewish-motherhood.

Once I've peeled and Cuisinart-ed the onion, I decide to dump everything across to a soup pot - the largest container I own - lest I spill over the edge while mixing. I crack in one egg, then another, stirring them through with my bare hands. The mix looks about right, so I pull out a pan, fill it with olive oil, and put it over a burner at high heat.

:::

As the oil begins to sputter and sizzle, I start to reconsider my Chanukah objections. Certainly, I appreciate any number of other Jewish holidays whose origins seem a bit dodgy to me. Consider the holiday of Yom Kippur, the 'day of atonement': while I do believe in some sort of underlying 'force' in the universe, I certainly don't believe some old guy with a long beard is sitting up there in a chair, judging on that holiday whether I'll be smote in the coming year because I've eaten too much shrimp. Still, come Yom Kippur, I pray and I mean it. I'm pleading for forgiveness - perhaps not from 'God', but certainly from the best, most Godly part of myself. Which is to say that, though I don't take the Torah literally, I do take it seriously. I never cease to find value in Jewish tradition, in Jewish practice, no matter the underlying motivation that brings me to it.

Which, frankly, isn't too unusual. After all, Judaism is a religion that values action over faith, sort of a "feel the doubt and do it anyway" kind of deal. Even the word 'Israel' itself means ''he who wrestles with God'. In other words, questioning, considering, doubting - they're all at the heart of what it means to celebrate a holiday as a Jew.

:::

With the oil bubbling, I pack the first latke - balling a small handful of the potato mix, flattening it out, then tossing it into the pan. Though it sizzles and browns nicely, when I try to flip it, it disintegrates, turning from latke to hash brown. I figure the mixture needs a few more eggs, and crack in another two.

The next pass works a bit better - the latke stays together through flipping - though I seem to have packed it a bit too thick, as the outside singes before the center is cooked through. I toss three thinner latkes in, pour in a bit more oil and let them cook. They come out golden brown, not quite crisp. I lay them on a paper-towel-covered plate to soak up excess oil, then break off a piece of one. It's still hot from the pan, and I burn my mouth slightly on the first bite, but don't mind at all. It's absolutely delicious.

:::

Once I get the hang of it, I fall into latke autopilot, quickly browning up the rest of the batch. I realize I've neglected to buy sour cream or applesauce, and so am left to down a plateful straight, no chaser.

Still, I enjoy them, in part because they've come out much better than I'd have expected, in part because they taste like Chanukah to me, because they taste like home.

photo fiction
Filed January 29, 2004 2:20 PM.

He only thought about her when the weather turned cold, when the sudden appearance of fur-lined boots clomping on pavement, of breath steaming visibly from lipsticked mouths, of wool gloves and scarves rustling quietly against thick winter jackets added together to conjure up her memory.

Even then, she came to him in pieces: the soapdish hollow of her clavicle. She came to him in sideways glances: pretending not to look back over her shoulder as she tossed her hair. She came to him as single words spoken, as textures he could almost feel pressed against his fingers.

When she came to him like this, he would stop midstride, concentrate, try to coalesce the parts of her into a full, vivid whole, before the jostling passersby could bring him back to the present, where he stood alone on the sidewalk, feeling oddly hollow, a dull, cold pain in his stomach, his throat, his chest.

how to cut things
Filed January 29, 2004 2:18 PM.

Open your knife drawer. Take out the contents. Place them in the garbage. Then head off to a kitchen goods store to buy some real knives.

The good news is, you don’t need many. Four high quality blades will do you worlds more good than a whole drawer full of crappy ones. I’d recommend Wusthoff Tridents, classics used by chefs around the world. But really, any knife hot-forged from a single piece of metal, whose blade runs the length of its handle (riveted in) should work. High carbon stainless steel is the best choice, with plain carbon blades a close second – standard stainless steel should be avoided, as it can’t easily be sharpened. Also steer clear of any blade advertised as never needing sharpening; you similarly wouldn’t buy a car that claimed to never need servicing. Most importantly, the blades should be heavy – the more weight they carry, the less work you’ll have to do to cut with them.

The four knives you need:

A chef’s knife (also called a cook’s knife), in either 8” or 10”. The longer, being heavier, makes cutting easier. If you’re willing to splurge, move up to the 10” wide, whose slightly thicker, heavier blade yields – you guessed it – even less work. If you’ve not used one before, you’ll likely look at this blade for the first time and think, “holy shit, that’s one big knife. I don’t need a knife that big.” Wrong. This knife is your new best friend; you’ll be using it for nearly all your slicing, dicing, shredding and mincing, with occasional light chopping thrown in as well. Once you cut with this thing, you’ll never go back. Thusly, if you buy only one new knife, this should be it. One more note: if you have big hands, make sure the blade is wide enough at the heel (the point closest to the handle) that your knuckles don’t scrape the cutting board as you push forward.
A 3-1/2” paring knife (all these measurements, by the way, are the length of the blade, not the entire knife), your workhorse for detail tasks (like - surprise, surprise - paring).
A 4-1/2” utility knife, which can double as a peeler, disjoint chickens, and dice small things that don’t warrant the full chef’s knife treatment. You can replace this with a slightly longer knife if you’d prefer – Wusthoff makes a great 6” sandwich knife (which, as it isn’t serrated, I can’t imagine anyone actually uses for sandwiches).
A big serrated knife, to use on the sandwiches you aren’t cutting with the sandwich knife. It also works on anything else with a skin, crust or rind (tomatoes, breads, citrus fruits, cheeses, etc.) where a bit of bite helps. You can’t go wrong with a classic 8” bread knife, though as long as the knife is well made, you have a fair amount of flexibility in terms of length and design.

That’s it. If you’re looking to carve birds, filet fish, or slice up meat in general, you may eventually want to buy a specialty blade or two for that purpose. Otherwise, you’re set.

How to Hone a Knife

While you’re discarding things from your knife drawer, toss any sort of automatic sharpener – it will grind too much away, and quickly ruin your knives. Instead, pick up a sharpening steel – one of those long metal rods you see chefs bandying about on cooking shows. To be correct, these don’t actually sharpen your blades – that involves scraping enough metal off to dull the knife, then carefully reshaping the curve of the edge (which you should have done at a cutlers once every year or two). Instead, your knives cut because they have tiny microscopic teeth along the edge of the blade; each time you cut, those teeth get pushed out of alignment. Honing, then, simply lines the teeth back up, allowing the knife to cut much more easily. Since a sharp knife is both safer and more efficient, it’s worth honing your knives each time you take one out – it only takes a few seconds.

To do it, hold the sharpening steel vertically, tip down on a towel on a non-skid surface (like a cutting board). Pick up the knife by the handle, and put the heel of the blade on the steel, top of the blade leaning out at a 20 degree angle. Then draw the knife back in a downwards arc until you reach the tip of the blade (see diagram). Repeat once or twice or each side and you’re ready to work.

Using a Chef’s Knife

First, how to hold the knife, which is probably radically different from what you do know (likely either wrapping all four fingers around the handle, or perhaps laying your index finger along the top of the blade – either way causes you to tense up you wrist and arm, which makes cutting excessively tiring). Instead, place your thumb and forefinger on either side of the blade, just in front of the bolster (that thick section at the heel). Wrap your remaining three fingers lightly around the handle – as your first two fingers provide all the hold you need, these mainly provide stabilization.

Now on to the cutting. Here’s the big change: don’t press down. I repeat: don’t press down. Pressing tenses up your arm, requires lots and lots of work, and goes contrary to the design and purpose of your knife. Your knife is meant to cut down by being pushed forward. (For golfers, this is a bit like how swinging through the ball – rather than trying to lift it – takes advantage of the lofted design of the clubface and makes your swing much easier.) Initiate the cut at the tip, then push the knife forward across the food until you reach the heel. Again, don’t press down. You’ll be amazed to discover how well this sucker cuts through things on its own, so long as you push forward and follow through. If you reach the heel before you finish the cut, don’t try and keep cutting as you pull back. Your knife isn’t made to work that way – like a saw, it’s meant to cut only on the forward stroke. So simply pull straight back, and repeat the smooth forward push.

For big items, start with the tip of the blade on the object:

For smaller ones, start with the tip of the blade on the cutting board:

In either case, push forward not down. It's definitely worth testing out the technique on a few stalks of celery. See how little downward pressure you can use if you concentrate on a smooth forward push and follow through. You’ll be shocked, both at how easy it is, and how evenly you can cut things.

Though celery practice will likely make you fall in love with your new chef's knife, sadly, that one blade probably can't be used on everything you cut, which means sooner in later you’ll need to use:

The Smaller Knives

These little suckers come in handy on all kinds of tasks – any, essentially, which either require increased dexterity, or where the fact that you (rather than the weight of the knife) are doing all the work won’t tire you out. You can use them to dice small onions and shallots, disjoint chickens, pare apples and tomato, or peel vegetables.

Unlike the chef’s knife, which has only one grip and one main technique (with the tip-up and tip-on-the-board variations), the smaller knives are held and wielded in a large variety of ways. To learn them all (as well as a number of other skills – such as perfect julienning, cubing, and dicing), sign up for a short knife skills class at your local culinary academy. It’s a fun evening very well spent. While I’m tempted to try describing a few basics here, I suspect my poorly written descriptions might cost a reader or two their fingers. Speaking of which:

How to Keep Your Fingers

Sharpen your knives. Dull blades make you push harder, which leads to slippage.
Never use a big knife to cut something you’re holding in your hand (i.e. a bagel). To cut that bagel, place it horizontally on a cutting board, hold it in place with your open palm, and cut through horizontally with several strokes.
Keep knives sheathed (to protect the blades) and in locked cabinets if you have children (to protect your kids)
Point the tip down, whether carrying the knife or leaving it in your dishwasher or drying rack.
Don’t carry a cutting board with a knife on it, and – if you do – for god’s sake don’t try to catch the knife when it inevitably falls off.
Don’t leave knives in the sink – when you’re done with them, wash them, dry them, and put them away, as water stains carbon blades
And, basically, don’t do anything with a knife that would cause your mother to shake her head reproachfully at your idiocy. Trust me. I know that shake all too well.

the hell's kitchen museum of curious deaths
Filed January 22, 2004 9:31 PM.

Welcome to the Hell's Kitchen Museum of Curious Deaths! Or, at least, to the online version of it. In fact, the HKMoCD initially existed in the real world, in our fair apartment at 360 W. 51st St., New York City. It was located there for just one evening, as the backdrop of our Halloween shindig, the Hell's Kitchen Museum of Curious Deaths All Hallows Eve Tour and Punch Party. We went full out for the event, repainting walls, removing all the furniture, tweaking every detail possible for the most complete transformation.

The following afternoon, as we slowly sobered up, we began to realize that, at some point, we'd probably need to put back our couches, beds and bookshelves. Having expended too much time and energy to simply scrap the Museum's content altogether, however, we decided to recreate the experience online. That's what's going on here.

Even More Introduction

The Museum was in large part modeled after the New York Tenement Museum, so it depended significantly on the atmosphere of the apartment itself, rather than simply upon the exhibits presented. Sadly, given the limitations of the web medium, we can't recreate that here. We have, however, as a bare minimum, included below the floor plan of the Museum, as posted near the Museum's entrance:

In the real world, the Museum's exhibits were broken down by room, with each representing a major inhabitant in the apartment's history: first the McGuinn family (from 1856-1906), then Joseph Leibenz (1907-1954), and finally "Gay Johnny" in the modern era. Online, mainly due to laziness, we've lumped the exhibits together as one unmanageably long page of text.

None the less, we hope you'll enjoy the show.

McGuinn Family; The Builder of 360 W. 51st St., 1856-1906

Seamus McGuinn was born in 1810 on the southeastern coast of Ireland in the small town of Kinsdale, near Cork. McGuinn first came to the states in 1830 as a deckhand on board the Caelan Kavanaugh, a merchant ship that regularly sailed the north Atlantic route. In 1834, he married a woman in Newton, Massachusetts, though she died just seven months after their marriage, in the cholera epidemic that swept through Boston that year. McGuinn later joined the Royal Steam Packet Company of Dublin and was promoted to boatswain, sailing the charter voyage of a new route to New London and New York.In 1846, McGuinn became captain of the Fiona Iverna, a clipper with regular service between Dublin and New York. At that time he was nationalized as an American citizen, and moved into a shared townhouse on the corner of Bethune and Washington in the far West Village. He was a popular fixture of the neighborhood, as his name was listed on the register of several private drinking establishments, one of which, on the corner of Perry and Bleeker, was known to be a brothel.In 1852, a disagreement over a cockfight sent McGuinn looking for housing in the area outside of what was then the city. He built a large wood-frame structure on a parcel of land on the current 50th street and 10th avenue block. The area was still being used as farmland at the time, but as the streets were laid out, businessmen bought up parcels of the land. McGuinn settled there with a group of seamen who were eager to purchase land and establish homes away from their work. They purchased a small farm from a Dutchman named Dekker and subdivided the property. McGuinn lived in a wood frame structure he built there, until it burned in 1855.During that time, McGuinn fell in love with Dekker's daughter, and on his 45th birthday, he married the 17 year old girl, Wilhemina Dekker, known as Winnie. He wrote of her often in his diary and bought her fine items of clothing.

1856: Movin' on Up

When, in 1855, their home was destroyed by fire, Seamus and Winnie decided to build a multi-family dwelling for upper-class Irish nationals. They constructed the building currently located at 360 West 51st Street and moved into the first floor apartment. Winnie soon insisted that they move into an apartment further from the street noise, but not so high that they would have to walk up many flights of stairs.Soon after the building was completed, Winnie gave birth to two twin girls, both of whom were stillborn. Seamus insisted on a male heir, and though he believed his wife to be hysterical with grief over the deaths of the twins, he insisted on a male heir. Subsequently, Winnie gave birth to two daughters, Rhiannon and Treasa and a boy, Hamish.In 1867, Seamus was murdered under unusual circumstances. Suspects were numerous, as many in the community resented his wealth and prosperity, rare for an Irishman at the time. Among the suspects were his own wife, who resented both her servitude to him and the age difference between them, and his son Hamish, who cared deeply for his mother Winnie, and loathed his father's tyrannical dealings with her. Seamus was murdered with the spindle of a spinning wheel, gouged through his skull, between the eyes

1878: Movin' on Out

Following his father's death, Hamish took ownership of the apartment, where he looked after his aging mother. His sisters moved into a residence nearby, and Hamish purchased a dry-goods store with part of his inheritance that all three children helped run. Hamish began taking classes at Columbia College, preparing for a degree as an accountantAfter a torrid affair with a Barnard student, who later committed suicide, Hamish dropped out of classes. He subsequently squandered his inheritance in the bars by the port, seeing his sisters increasingly infrequently. In 1874, his mother Winnie died of neglect. Hamish became a drifter, finding his way to the American/Canadian border, then vanishing completely.

Caoilainn and Fionna McGuinn, 1857

The twin daughters of Seamus and Wilhemina McGuin were stillborn in 1857. Wilhemina insisted on naming the infants Caoilainn and Fionna, claiming that “angel-babies need names just the same as grownup-angels.” Caoilainn and Fionna were buried in a potato patch less than 100 yards from this spot, where there is currently a Go Sushi. In February of 2001, a customer of the restaurant fainted after receiving his sushi box. When awoken, the man insisted that he had seen two dead infants, nestled between his soba noodles and spicy tuna rolls.

Hamish McGuinn, 1872

Hamish McGuin, son of Seamus and Wilhemina, became estranged from his remaining family after the unfortunate spindle-death of his father. An impulse buyer with a sweet tooth, Hamish spent much of his inheritance on one-cent taffy and grapes. In later years, Hamish became afflicted with dementia, drifting through New York state. He was last seen selling his “sweetbreads” in the restroom of a cigar shoppe near Niagra Falls.

Seamus and Wilhelmina McGuinn, 1856

Devout Irish Catholics, Seamus and Wilhelmina (who converted from Dutch Protestant) were practitioners of “Fockleyr Gaelg” a Gaelic tradition of spouse shaving. Using warm lather and a straight-edged blade, Wilhelmina (or “Winnie”) would shave Seamus' beard in the style of the day; Seamus would reciprocate by shaving Winnie's stomach hair in the outline of President Franklin Pierce, also the style of the day.

Musical Instruments, 1858

The McGuinn family loved to play music together on Tuesday evenings. The instruments here constitute what old Seamus called an "Irish Orchestra".His diary entry from February 23rd, 1873 reads: "These damn children can't learn to play music like I listened to in the bonny dales of Eirin. The way they play, it sounds like a bleating sheep being taken from behind. It's a damn shame my own children have to be such a humiliation to our countrymen, most of whom can barely afford to play a potato-chip can on the sidewalk outside the White Horse Tavern. It's a blessing I got the clap a few years back from the red-head milliner in the Bloom's dry goods so's I can't hear the bloody racket."The McGuinn children never became musicians.

Rhiannon and Treasa in Tambourine Class, 1867

Rhiannon (lower left) and Treasa McGuinn (upper row, center) participated in a music class for untalented children. Instruments used in class included tambourines, pebbles in bags, pieces of bark, and snap-peas. Later in life, Rhiannon became a world-traveler and married a Swedish herring importer and haberdasher. Her memoir, entitled “My Life With Tweed Pants and Fish,” was published shortly before her death. Treasa became a bohemian, moved to a one-bedroom apartment off of Washington Square Park, and helped found the Society du Lesbos. Treasa never saw Rhiannon again, but whenever she tasted fish she would think of her sister. Both lived to be 105.

Society du Lesbos, Date Unknown

Founded by Treasa McGuinn in the late-19th century, the Society du Lesbos, an organization comprised of mustache-wearing women, was devoted to discussing the politics of sexuality, gaining women's suffrage, and wearing funnels as hats.The Society du Lesbos made their presence well felt in New York by writing petitions, leading discussions in Washington Square Park, and eating a ton of pussy.

Wilhelmina McGuinn, 1874

After her husband's untimely death, Wilhelmina let her body hair grow wild and became a taxidermist, first as a hobby and then, showing remarkable skill, as a career. She worked until her dying day, and in her obituary it was written that her “workspace was filled with wire, tow, string, and wet clay, the pelts drying on wooden forms and the bird skins turned inside out, dusted with cornmeal and arsenic; scraping-knives in the skulls of deer, the odor of stale meat and green bone, the rank odor of water birds' flesh, almost black with oil.”As per her last request, Wilhelmina's daughters had her stuffed and sent on a freighter back to the Netherlands, where she was placed in a tulip garden outside of Amsterdam and fashioned into a windmill.

Neighborhood Stories: Ginny the Librarian, 1896

This photo of Ginny the Librarian, emerging from her place of work, was on the cover of “The New York Times” on March 11, 1896. At the time, Ginny the Librarian was also known as “Bedbug Ginny,” blamed for the bedbug epidemic of the spring and summer of 1896, having apparently spread more than just the joy of reading.In addition to whoring her way through the five burroughs, Westchester, and must of northern New Jersey, Ginny was able to speak six languages (including American sign language), and spent her spare time using a homemade press to convert the literature of Hawthorne and Melville to Braille.

Neighborhood Stories: Li'l Baby Jennifer, 1887

The entire city of New York waited for four sleepless days in the summer of 1887 as Li'l Baby Jennifer, who fell into an open well, became a symbol of the city's hope and tenacity.The fire department spent almost 80 hours attempting to rescue Li'l Baby Jennifer. When she emerged in the arms of a fireman name Giuseppe Cammarino, the entire city sobbed at the sight of what appeared to be a dead child.In fact, Li'l Baby Jennifer was actually not dead, just very, very tired. Her parents, who owned a coffin factory, posed the sleeping Li'l Baby Jennifer in her coffin-bed for this photo, which was on the cover of the August 7th, 1887 issue of the “Hell's Kitchen Farm Bulletin.”Li'l Baby Jennifer died four months later from malnutrition due to a lack of water and food.

Society & Culture: Oyster Eating, 1898

This woman enjoyed eating oysters, as did many other Americans at the turn of the century. Oysters are high in protein and are plentiful off the waters of Long Island.Nothing else is known about this woman, except that she may have enjoyed her oysters with ice cream and lemonade.

Society & Culture: Woman With Beads, 1924

This woman with beads, named Woman With Beads, sold her necklaces at a cute little boutique in SoHo, though everything was overpriced, and they didn't even have Manola Blahnik or Versace back then, so who really gives a shit?Woman With Beads, whose people were raped and slaughtered by White explorers who “discovered” that there were already natives living on “their discovery,” got her revenge by ripping off dumb tourists with her overpriced shitty necklaces. Disney is currently developing a computer-animated film about Woman With Beads' adventures in capitalism. The voice of Woman With Beads will be performed by Brittany Murphy.

Josef Lieben, Entrepreneur, 1906-1955

The Early Century

The building was sold to the Josef Lieben, a german Jew from Prussia, whose cloth manufacturing facility on 38th street and 8th avenue was doing well. His mother had fallen ill, and he wanted to open the building as an insane asylum to help care for her and the other Jewish ladies in the neighborhood, which was diversifying rapidly and growing fast.By 1936, Josef Lieben had managed to build a clothing empire, with retail stores in Cleveland, Syracuse, Buffalo, Pittsburg, and Detroit. His factories, though run by women and children, were cleaner and better managed than many factories that were operating at the time. However, Josef's heart was in caring for the elderly and the deranged. His asylum, here on 360 West 51st Street, was his refuge from the stress of managing his businesses. His mother welcomed him with open arms and the two would spend long afternoons on many days of the week, hoarding money and spinning dreidel. Josef would never make a decision without seeking his mother's guidance, and so much of his time was passed in his mother's quarters, here on the third floor.Lieben's fortunes shifted in the depression. His stores fell on hard times and Lieben resorted to selling bubble tea from a streetcart on the Lower East Side to pay the debt service on the apartment building. Lieben was later murdered by a ruthless Chinese street gang.

Joseph Lieben and Fritz, 1910

Joseph Lieben (left), who never took a wife, is shown here with his manservant, “Fritz.” One of the leading entrepreneurs of turn-of-the-century Hell's Kitchen, Lieben was successfully able to convert 360 West 51st Street into a combination high-cost insane asylum and low-cost brothel. Referred to in the press as a “scoundrel and a robber baron of flesh,” Lieben claimed that it he did it all for his mother's well being. Joseph Lieben disappeared in 1918, and three months later his top hat, his cane, and his moustache were found behind a Chinese laundry on Mott Street. It is believed that he was murdered by a hit-squad sent by the infamous Ghost Dragons, a gang that ruled Chinatown, and controlled the New York shizophrenic-whore industry with an iron fist.

Schizephrenic Whores, 1917

These deranged women, wives and daughters of wealthy Connecticut businessman, were placed in the care of Joseph Lieben, who promptly converted them into garden-variety hookers.The one in the middle had Tourettes, and could swallow a whole potato. The girl on the upper right had seven distinct personalities, and was double-jointed. The little slut sitting Indian style in the front took an entire group of Navy-men at the same time, then stood up, wiped herself off, and asked if they knew where the Army base was located. Modern statistics weren't kept at this time, but it is estimated that the one on the lower left spread syphilis to the entire west side of Manhattan.After Lieben's mysterious disappearance, all of these women were returned to their parents and husbands in Greenwich and Westport. Later evaluation revealed that they were all, in fact, sound of mind.

Uta Leiben (mother), 1914

Very little is known about Uta, the mother of Joseph Lieben, except that she collected hats and lived with a wooden husband.She is mentioned only once in period newspapers, and the article describes the unfortunate circumstances surrounding her death: “Uta Lieben, a woman aged 78 years, attended a hypnotist's exhibition the other night, and while laughing heartily at the antics of the subject under hypnotic control, was seized with a severe fit of coughing which became hysterical and has continued without stop…Unless the coughing can be cured shortly the results will likely be fatal.”Lieben died three days later, leaving 39 hats and her wooden husband to goodwill.

Uta Leiben's Wooden Husband, 1920

Uta Lieben's wooden husband, whom she referred to as “Franz Appledong,” was born of a forty year old hickory outside of Albany, New York.Both a xenophobe and proponent of the eugenics movement, Franz the wooden man despised Cigar Store Indians, and showed his spite by sitting rigidly and silent.In 1954, Franz Appledong was turned into two-dozen shoehorns, and he now resides in New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Missouri, Kansas, Texas, Illinois, and American Samoa.

Gay Johnny and the Yuppie Brigade, 1955-present

Hell's Kitchen gets its Angel Wings

The second half of the twentieth century saw some remarkable changes for Hell's Kitchen. All of the jews moved to the Upper West Side; all the Italians moved into Brooklyn; the Irish divided up the city into six-block quadrants, with each family assigned the task of managing an Irish pub in their quadrant, to serve as a cultural education center and conversation house.With all the ethnic turmoil, the neighborhood became very dangerous. The new Port Authority bus terminal attracted crack pushers and winos, because poor people take buses. Kids in the nieghborhood began attending the Juliard School for dance and musical theater, quickly leading to their joining gangs and fighting each other in a neighborhood wide, large-scale performance art project called West Side Story that involved stylized knife fighting and re-interpreting Shakespeare.Lured by the musical theater, the Gays came into the neighborhood and opened the Electric Banana Bar on 50th street. After the Gays came the creative capitalists, who, like gays, moved in with their Starbucks and their flat-screen televisions. These were the quarter-life crisis Yuppie Brigade who now live in over forty percent of the Hell's Kitchen housing stock. 360 West 51st Street was bought by a white-bread dork named Jeffrey Shotwell, who owned the building until last September, when it passed back into mob hands. Brusco Management now runs the property.

Local Flavor: Gay Johnny

[Image to be added shortly]

Gay Johnny was a prickly pear, who spent the early part of the 1980's instilling fear in the residents of Hell's Kitchen, a neighborhood that he controlled with a tightly clenched fist, and sphincter.Both a chicken hawk and a “bottom who preferred skinny, uncut, adolescent tops,” Gay Johnny fed his crack habit by slinging his butt around like a walking advertisement for a proctologist's office. From the seedy dive bars across from the Port Authority Terminal to the hidden alcoves of the local Boy's Club, Gay Johnny got around.Johnny had an appetite for crack cocaine and looked for the white rock on most afternoons, trolling for tricks to calm his craving on Ninth Avenue between 46th Street and 57th. He'd find horny uptown sugar daddies, and lure them back to his pad (which he called the "Gotham Sugar Shack", a name that remains to this day), trading sexual favors for money, alcohol, and drugs.Gay Johnny also enjoyed doing the Sunday crossword (he was a classics major at Cambridge), building houses with Habitat for Humanity, and stargazing on his roof.On February 9th, 1984, Johnny was registered missing by the man who lived across the way — Ian, a Scottish actor who continues to live in apartment 3B. Ian was out to locate some inexpensive cans of tuna when he discovered a stench worse than the dented canned tuna in his grocery bag. Gay Johnny was dead, and, worse, he had been so for some time.None the less, according to his wishes, Gay Johnny's prostate was donated to scientific research.

Reverse Mimes, 1968

The men in this photo, taken in 1968, may appear shocking to modern audiences.What modern audiences don't realize is that these men are actually “reverse mimes”. During the Summer of Love (in 1968), their group performed on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to absolutely no success whatsoever.“It's performance art, people! Don't you get it?” they were heard to yell at the horrified crowd, shortly before they were pummeled to death by hippies tripping on angel dust.

household vignettes
Filed January 14, 2004 9:53 AM.

While here in Palo Alto, I'm staying at my parents house - in my old room, in fact, though by now my mother has co-opted the space into her office, replacing dressers with file cabinets, piling her paper and research materials onto my emptied bookshelves. The room's front window has been replaced by a much larger one, the overhead light changed, but my bed still dominates one corner of the room, exactly where it sat when I was growing up.

Working from home during the day, between calls and emails, I catch myself simply wandering around, gauging the feel of rooms, of closets, corners and small spaces. Absently, I pick up old knick-knacks to test their weight in my hands, to see what memories might be hidden inside. I crouch to feel the texture of our living room carpet, and can feel again the rug burns from wrestling around on the floor, afternoon after afternoon, with my younger brother.

A few things I noticed this morning:

1. Bedroom Tassel

Bedroom Tassel

My Freshman year at Yale, as first semester moved towards a close, my parents and I developed a running joke throughout my calls home. "I can't wait to sleep in my own bed," I would tell them, the dorm by then still not quite feeling like home. "Actually," my father would reply, "we're taking out your bed. I think we're going to replace it with a Javanese Gamelan. But you can sleep on top of that."

There were other, similar, threatened changes as well, and my response to all of them was the same: "I think you should keep the room unchanged, in perpetuity. Just hang a tassel from the ceiling and make the room into a shrine to me." I was remarkably good-natured about it, I think - I even offered to let my parents keep the money made by charging admission to the shrine.

For a month or two, the joke played on: shrine vs. Javanese gamelan, et al. When I finally came home, dragged my duffel bag into my bedroom, and looked up: hanging from the ceiling was the much discussed red shrine tassel. Apparently, the week before my arrival, my parents had actually headed into Chinatown and picked one up.

To this day, the sight of that tassel makes me smile. It's a reminder that, in my case, the inevitable turning into my parents might not be so bad after all. And that, no matter how office-ified my old room becomes, with the tassel hanging, it's still, deep down, my very own shrine.

2. Backyard Playhouse

Backyard Playhouse

When I was seven, and my brother four, my father decided to build us a playhouse in the corner of our backyard. He built it himself - technically with my help, though I can't imagine the seven year-old me provided much actual assistance. I do, however, vividly recall both painting the house's exterior, then heading down to an airplane parts junkyard in San Jose, where we picked up a variety of cockpit parts (a control stick and wheel, a handful of mismatched gauges) which we mounted to the inside walls.

My brother and I spent countless hours piloting the house to the moon and beyond, defending it from oncoming imaginary hordes, or just hiding from our parents to secretly discuss whatever issues dominate the minds of six and nine year-old boys.

By now, the house is hidden away, tucked behind a bench and a small potted tree. Inside, the linoleum floor is peeling, covered with dried leaves, a few old toys still in a basket in the back corner. My head brushes the roof (at 5'6", an unusual occurrence!). Still, in there, I can't help but feel vaguely delighted, ready to head up to the moon, or just to cause juvenile trouble all over again.

3. Garbage Shed

Garbage Shed.

Towards the front of the backyard is a small roofless shed, gated off from the rest of the yard, to hold garbage cans and piles of recyclables. Before my parents replaced their wood-burning fireplace with a gas-burning faux-fire, we piled firewood out there, and the memory of constantly finding black widows in the pile still raises the hairs on the back of my neck whenever I open the shed's gate.

I must admit, I've always been rather arachnophobic. Sure, I can play tough, carry out the requisite boyfriend duty of spider-removal. But the sight of those eight segmented legs always secretly makes me shiver. Other phobias, I've systematically, purposefully overcome - I initially took up climbing, for example, to conquer a fear of heights. But I'm happy to stay a bit scared by spiders. Or, rather, I don't see any need to get buddy-buddy with them - I do my own thing, they do theirs, and we're cool. Still, if I'm sitting in my parents backyard, and I notice the garbage shed's gate is open, I'll always head over to close it. Just in case.

david newman: the interview
Filed November 26, 2003 12:32 PM.

It is Thanksgiving day, 3:42 pm. At 5:00, twenty-some guests will be arriving for dinner. My brother David, unshowered, in sweats and a pit-stained undershit, lies on the couch watching football, Green Bay versus Detroit. Detroit is winning, 13 to 7. In the other room, my mother is yelling for us both to come in and help set the table.

Me: Dave, mom's yelling for you.

David: [silence]

Me: Okay. In that case, let me interview you for my website.

David: Nope.

Me: You realize I'm going to write about this either way.

David: [silence]

Me: So, basically, I should just say that you spend all day lying here, watching TV with your hand in your pants?

David: [turns to look towards me for the first time since I've come in. Winks. Goes back to watching TV.]

Fin.

Figure 1. Subject in Natural Habitat

color me clueless
Filed September 30, 2003 8:51 AM.

Recently, I spoke with a female friend in the midst of planning out the repainting of her apartment. All the rooms would be white on three walls, she told me, with the fourth a different color in each. She then proceeded to list off the colors for various rooms - the bathroom, the kitchen, the bedroom - hoping to give me a sense of what the final results might look like. And while I nodded my head in understanding as she went through the list, expressed appreciation for the keen visual sense it clearly evidenced once she had recited through them all, I must admit I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

In short, we guys suck at color names. Sure, we might be able to tell you that 'cerulean', 'periwinkle', 'aquamarine' and 'robin's egg' are all shades of blue; but if you were to line up four color samples, there's not a chance in hell we'd be able to figure out which is which.

The problem, I suspect, stems from our Crayola'd youth. While most girls had the six-thousand crayon pack (the one with the little built in sharpener), we guys had the eight crayon standard. Inevitably, we'd even lose one, and not know the name for 'orange' until our early teens.

At which point, even if we were to studiously review every crayon out there, we'd still be doomed to fall horribly behind. Because, once high school rolled around, girls began to pore through the J.Crew catalog, the Banana Republic or L.L.Bean. And while we were just beginning to wrap our minds around the difference between 'orange yellow' and 'yellow orange', girls were contemplating 'heather', 'oatmeal' and 'burnt sienna'.

Sure, a few lucky guys have caught up - graphic designers, for example, or professional painters. But even for them, I suspect it's a bit like learning a foreign language; no matter how good your Swahili, you'll never truly sound or think quite like a native speaker.

In other words, for even our best and brightest, we guys are pretty much a lost cause. We'd blush with embarrassment about it, but, frankly, we're not entirely sure what color we're supposed to turn.

stranger than fiction
Filed September 14, 2003 5:58 PM.

This afternoon, walking in the door to my apartment on the way back from a jazz gig with an all-lesbian big band, my roommate Colin stopped me to ask if I thought we might be willing to adopt Steve Buscemi's cat.

underwear
Filed August 17, 2003 5:22 PM.

For whatever reason, we guys often form bizarre attachments to pieces of clothing, strong emotional connections that effectively prevent us from noticing their increasingly well-loved condition. Favorite t-shirts yellow at the armpits, favorite jeans fray at the hems and zipper, yet we can't possibly imagine actually retiring them. And nowhere is our love more apparent than with underwear; given the choice, we'll keep washing and wearing a trusty pair of boxers until it's disintegrated to nothing more than a waistband and a few hanging threads.

As women rarely hold such forgiving opinions of overly scruffy clothing (and underwear in particular), it behooves any guy with an eye towards impressing the ladies to (at least occasionally) view the contents of his closet (or, at least, his underwear drawer) with a cool and dispassionate eye. This very morning, I did so myself, examining each pair of boxer-briefs, and I'm afraid the results were not good:

Total Pairs: 11*
Pairs in Good Condition: 2
Pairs in Acceptable Condition: 1
Pairs with Weirdly Ruffled Waistbands (ed. note: due to elastic losing it's stretch after too many washings): 3
Pairs with Small Holes: 3
Pairs with Holes in Front Large Enough that the Proverbial Mouse Might Escape the Proverbial House: 2

As much as it pains me to say it, I think it's time for a serious drawer cleanout and underwear shopping spree.

* This is nearing the bare acceptable minimum number of pairs. Guys mainly do the wash only after running out of clean underwear, re-wearing all the cleaner looking pairs inside out, and then sometimes even wearing bathing suits as underwear. Clearly, then, the more pairs owned, the less frequent the need to do the wash.

mail bag
Filed August 2, 2003 6:15 AM.

Earlier this week, I received an email from one [name later redacted] that I below reproduce in its entirety:

Josh Newman is an unmitigated knob. What a narcissistic, little poser bitch.

I must admit that, finding the message in my inbox, I suddenly felt oddly flattered. Not only did something about me, a complete stranger, stir up in [name] the desire (or perhaps even the need) to send off such a charming missive, but my online persona apparently irked him sufficiently to even whip out the thesaurus in search of the perfect 'knob'-preceding word.

Still, warmed as I was by his effort, I must admit that [name]'s work fell a bit short of my high hate mail standards. I'm lucky enough to receive a piece or two every couple of months, and some of them are really, remarkably, treasurably good. Sure, [name] might lack the biting wit (or perhaps simply the intelligence) to really tear into me in Shakespearean style. But, at the very minimum, he could have at least put some effort into structuring the email properly. I mean, consider how much more effective it would have been if written in the second person and ended with a complimentary closing:

Dear Josh Newman,
You are an unmitigated knob. What a narcissistic, little poser bitch.

Drink bleach and die,

[name]

Sure it's a hate letter; but it's still a letter. There's an etiquette to these things.

thanks, i think
Filed June 19, 2003 3:20 PM.

Heading to Rite Aide to pick up a few last pre-trip essentials, I passed a group of black high school girls on their way home.

"Hey mister," one of the girls shouted, "for a white boy, you got a pretty cute ass."

now you've got it!
Filed June 2, 2003 4:09 PM.

In response to one reader who suggested that blogging about my love life effectively rules out a future in politics:

Exactly.

where's my camaro?
Filed May 26, 2003 1:29 PM.

Confirming my fear that Kraft Velveeta Shells & Cheese (which I secretly enjoy immensely) is the white-trashiest of macaroni and cheeses, the back of the box I just prepared is emblazoned with: Velveeta. Ain't No Substitute.™

In other news, I'll be spending the rest of the afternoon grooming my mullet and shopping for a new double-wide.

the smoggy air, traffic jam, suburban sprawl blues
Filed December 12, 2002 7:13 PM.

Despite my initial plan to stay in LA only through today, I've since rearranged my schedule, and will now be sticking it out in the smog capital of the world through December 20th. Which leaves me, first, in a bit of a bind from a clothing perspective - my Tumi rollaboard barely fits four or five days of clothing, so expanding the trip to fifteen will leave me recycling clothes at a rather alarming rate. ("Didn't you wear that sweater yesterday? And Tuesday? And last Monday, Thursday and Saturday?") Second, I fear sticking around for such an extended stretch may push me dangerously close to my absolute Los Angeles lethal overdose limit.

Sure, LA has its upsides. Warm weather. Beautiful beaches. Vacuous, surgically enhanced, bottle-blonde aspiring actresses ("Like, ohmygod, I was totally Juliet in my high school's "Romeo and Juliet" too!"). But after a few days, the downsides begin to grate on me. A thirty minute minimum drive from anywhere to anywhere else. Monotonous, vaguely run down, bizarrely never-ending suburban sprawl. Really, really bad bagels. And a complete and total lack of cultural life. ("Why go to the symphony when so many films have great orchestral scores!")

And, worst of all, film people, nothing but film people, as far as the eye can see. In New York, running an indie production company is quirkily cool. Sort of unusual. Here in LA, nothing could be more painfully run-of-the-mill. I get the sense that, say, a tax accountant could do tremendously well at bars here. ("You add long columns of numbers all day long? That's so exciting!") In fact, for the duration of my trip so far, I've been introducing myself as a forensic diver - you know, the guy who has to fish up the corpses whenever the cops or the FBI are investigating a death in the water. Business has been slow in the East River, I've been telling people, ever since Giuliani started cracking down on crime. Which is why I headed out to LA; jet ski accidents, I'm sure, are the future of the industry.

Of course, even the cachet of such an illustrious imaginary career can't save me; it's hard to schmooze it up an LA night club when you spend most of the evening huddled in the corner, clicking your heels, thinking of New York City, and chanting softly: "There's no place like home... there's no place like home."

i won't grow up
Filed December 5, 2002 11:38 AM.

Today being the first real snow of the season, I did the only sensible thing: constructed snowballs from the snow on my windowsill, and pelted passersby on the street below.

a sunday morning bedroom conversation
Filed May 27, 2002 1:31 PM.

Her: So, you always get what you want?
Him: Pretty much.

button me up
Filed May 24, 2002 6:36 PM.

About a year back, I made the rather poor decision to purchase two custom-made suits. Actually, in most senses, the decision was quite a good one. Those two bespoke suits have since become my favorites, drawing frequent compliments and holding up better than any other suits I've owned. The problem, however, is that I'm now ruined for life; I'll never be able to go back to buying suits off the rack.

In fact, I can no longer even really appreciate my other, previously seemingly fine, suits. While I'd love to toss them all and start again from scratch, the dictates of cost prevent me. Instead, I've simply been going through and upgrading those older suits slightly, adding to them the most important mark of hand workmanship: working sleeve buttons.

Sleeve buttons? I hear you ask. But it's true. Ask any student of the sartorial and you're likely to hear him wax on thusly (this particular waxing being taken from Tom Wolfe's The Secret Vice):

Real buttonholes. That's it! A man can take his thumb and forefinger and unbutton his sleeve at the wrist because this kind of suit has real buttonholes there. Tom, boy, it's terrible. Once you know about it, you start seeing it. All the time! There are just two classes of men in the world, men with suits whose buttons are just sewn onto the sleeve, just some kind of cheapie decoration, or - yes! - men who can unbutton the sleeve at the wrist because they have real buttonholes and the sleeve really buttons up.

Strangely enough, though, adding that key touch isn't at all a pricey endeavor. For less than fifty bucks a suit, your local tailor can operationalize your buttons, giving you a look that says "purchase Armani? How terribly plebeian!"

Now if only there were some similar sub-$100 trick to bump my one-bedroom apartment onto par with the Trump Tower's penthouse suite.

buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks
Filed April 7, 2002 11:43 AM.

That time of year has once again rolled around. Opening pitches have been thrown and fans everywhere have whipped out their calculators to figure the odds of the Yankee's left-handed batters bunting off inside pitches when the team is down by three in the fourth inning and there are two outs.

Or something like that. From what I've observed, people who love baseball, who really love it, are numbers people, and the sport provides endless statistics to compute, consider and compare. Frankly, I don't really care. I mean, I like baseball; I love to head out to the ballpark, and I'll catch games on TV. But I can't list the Yankee's batting order, much less the ERAs of their top pitchers, and I suspect most Americans can't either. Yet baseball remains, indisputably, our national pastime, as quintessentially American as Apple Pie and hating the French.

After brief consideration, the reason becomes obvious: liquor. There are few other sports that you can follow as well as baseball when completely and thoroughly piss drunk. Cross a certain threshold and hockey, basketball or football games just move too fast. But in baseball, there are plenty of strikes, balls, crotch-scratches and tobacco-spits between anything exciting happening. Even once you've reached that precarious point of drunkenness in which, when you turn your head quickly, the world seems to lag a bit behind, you can still handle baseball.

Which is why the start of the baseball season is a happy and patriotic time for America, a time for us to reflect on the American way of life, at least as represented by pot-bellied guys running around a dirt square wearing stretch pants. A toast! Three rude cheers (hey ump, can I pet your seeing eye dog after the game?) and a big swig of Bud Light.

fortune smiles
Filed April 2, 2002 10:39 PM.

Or, an example of my semi-charmed life, wherein I essentially Ferris Bueller my way through and it all somehow works out in my favor.

Setting: A Duane Reade drug store in Midtown. I am at the counter, ready to purchase a can of shaving cream and a roll of paper towels. It is 7:08pm; the drugstore supposedly closed at 7:00pm.

Girl frantically runs up to the counter, sun tan lotion in hand.

Woman behind the counter: We're closed.

Girl: But I leave on vacation tomorrow morning - couldn't you ring in just one more thing?

Woman behind the counter: I said, we're closed. [Gesturing towards me] He's the last one.

Me: She can take my spot.

Woman behind the counter: [Momentarily stunned by the sight of a New Yorker acting kindly] Well...

Girl: [Profusely] Thank you!

Me: [Noticing girl is extremely attractive] Really, it's not a problem.

Woman behind the counter: [Having regained composure] I guess I could check out both of you.

Me: [To hot girl, feebly attempting humor] We're lucky; normally they turn into pumpkins at the stroke of seven.

Woman behind the counter: [Saving me from making further stupid Cinderella jokes] Hey, you two make a cute couple. I think it's fate you both ended up here at the same time. [To me] You should ask her out.

Me: [Embarrassed laughter]

Hot Girl: [Expectant look]

Me: [Suddenly even more awkward] Actually, I would love to take you out for drinks...

Hot Girl: Absolutely! [Jotting down her phone number on a blank prescription form found discarded at the next register]

Me: [Still somewhat shocked by this turn of events] By the way, I'm Joshua...

[Girl and I converse further as we leave the Duane Reade and walk for a couple of blocks in the same direction. We have established a date for next week by the time our paths diverge. I spend the rest of the evening smiling like an idiot and walking on clouds.]

Fin.

paging doctor freud
Filed March 3, 2002 3:28 PM.

I noticed this morning that my dress shirts were organized by color. Which is odd, because I'm the one who hangs up those shirts. And I certainly hadn't intentionally been sorting through my dry cleaning to group blues and greens and purples. Just the other day, however, I similarly caught myself reordering the bills in my wallet by denomination. And for months I've taken guilty pleasure in categorizing and alphabetizing my CDs.

When did this happen? Why isn't there anything on the floor of my apartment? Whatever happened to the younger me who, just five years ago, wasn't even sure the color of the carpet in his room due to the wall-to-wall piles of clothing, books, papers, instruments, athletic gear and other possessions covering it? Somehow I've become anal retentive, and I've got to stop the dangerous progression now, before, one day, I awake to find I've arranged the spice rack by the potency and national origin of each spice.

trouble, right here in river city
Filed February 21, 2002 4:23 PM.

I headed into San Francisco this morning for the meetings that had brought me out West, borrowing my mother's car for the trip. On the way out the door, I grabbed a couple of CDs from my father's collection - by and large, we have fairly similar musical tastes. Without looking, I threw the top CD in and turned up the volume. From the first strains, I new something wasn't right - The Phantom of the Opera? I checked the pile - all musicals. Tossing down the CDs with disgust, I reached for the eject button. But something stopped me. The overture was vaguely soothing, I reasoned; I would just eject it at the end of the song. Or maybe the end of the next. By the third, I was singing along. I mean really singing along, belting it out like it was my job. I listened to The Music Man next, then Les Mis on the way back home.

Reason hit me as I walked back through the door of my parent's house. I would just put back the CDs, return to New York, and never speak of it again. After all, what self-respecting guy likes musicals? And yet, apparently, I do. Bringing my masculinity into serious question as it may, I'm ready to own up to it: I like musicals. There should be a support group for this.

Four Filed June 20, 2010 11:23 PM.

Innovation Overshoot Filed June 7, 2010 8:08 PM.

McGyver's Kitchen Filed May 24, 2010 5:18 PM.

Max iPad Filed April 11, 2010 4:49 PM.

Chicken Soup Filed July 9, 2007 1:18 PM.

Japanese Roulette Filed June 14, 2007 6:28 PM.

Weekender Filed March 27, 2007 4:30 PM.

Blame Our Mummy Filed November 20, 2006 10:48 AM.

A Tale of Two Showers Filed October 16, 2006 7:36 PM.

Easy IPO Filed September 19, 2006 7:14 PM.

Expedition Filed August 27, 2006 3:09 PM.

Bediquette Filed August 24, 2006 6:40 PM.

The Usual Filed August 3, 2006 10:04 AM.

Dick Move Filed July 26, 2006 6:01 PM.

Mamma Mia Filed May 14, 2006 9:32 AM.

Do You Know What it Means Filed May 12, 2006 1:54 AM.

The Looking Glass Filed May 1, 2006 10:27 PM.

Good Day, Sunshine Filed April 30, 2006 8:19 PM.

Make a Difference Filed April 19, 2006 11:54 PM.

In Brief Filed April 17, 2006 5:38 PM.

Old School Filed April 9, 2006 8:45 PM.

All Your Women are Belong to Me Filed April 4, 2006 11:26 AM.

Spiked Filed March 28, 2006 5:54 PM.

Sucker Filed March 27, 2006 10:13 PM.

Mashed Filed March 19, 2006 11:32 PM.

The Tube Filed February 26, 2006 3:30 PM.

Tore Up Filed January 13, 2006 5:17 PM.

Weathered Filed November 18, 2005 6:55 PM.

Snooty Filed June 13, 2005 8:19 AM.

Indisposed Filed May 22, 2005 10:29 PM.

Recess Eats Filed April 28, 2005 11:20 PM.

FAQ Filed April 14, 2005 10:53 AM.

Inked Filed April 12, 2005 4:58 PM.

the law Filed March 1, 2005 9:19 AM.

first impressions Filed February 6, 2005 4:38 PM.

typifying Filed January 21, 2005 2:16 AM.

gotham high class of '96 Filed November 10, 2004 10:20 AM.

eyeballing Filed November 5, 2004 3:23 PM.

how to not shoot yourself in foot Filed September 3, 2004 10:33 AM.

over-sharing Filed May 27, 2004 11:13 PM.

blog zen Filed May 19, 2004 9:27 AM.

back pocket Filed May 18, 2004 10:56 AM.

freeloading the big apple Filed March 29, 2004 2:32 PM.

classical excitement Filed March 4, 2004 12:07 AM.

urinal etiquette Filed March 1, 2004 10:26 PM.

wining Filed February 12, 2004 4:52 PM.

sushi nyc Filed February 5, 2004 12:29 PM.

on making potato latkes Filed January 29, 2004 2:32 PM.

photo fiction Filed January 29, 2004 2:20 PM.

how to cut things Filed January 29, 2004 2:18 PM.

the hell's kitchen museum of curious deaths Filed January 22, 2004 9:31 PM.

household vignettes Filed January 14, 2004 9:53 AM.

david newman: the interview Filed November 26, 2003 12:32 PM.

color me clueless Filed September 30, 2003 8:51 AM.

stranger than fiction Filed September 14, 2003 5:58 PM.

underwear Filed August 17, 2003 5:22 PM.

mail bag Filed August 2, 2003 6:15 AM.

thanks, i think Filed June 19, 2003 3:20 PM.

now you've got it! Filed June 2, 2003 4:09 PM.

where's my camaro? Filed May 26, 2003 1:29 PM.

the smoggy air, traffic jam, suburban sprawl blues Filed December 12, 2002 7:13 PM.

i won't grow up Filed December 5, 2002 11:38 AM.

a sunday morning bedroom conversation Filed May 27, 2002 1:31 PM.

button me up Filed May 24, 2002 6:36 PM.

buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks Filed April 7, 2002 11:43 AM.

fortune smiles Filed April 2, 2002 10:39 PM.

paging doctor freud Filed March 3, 2002 3:28 PM.

trouble, right here in river city Filed February 21, 2002 4:23 PM.