I’ve been working down in Soho for the past several months but now I am, happily, back in midtown Manhattan. It’s where the action is. Casual observation: Soho tourists are all from Europe. Midtown tourists are from the U.S.

My morning walk takes me past the Brooks Brothers store on Madison Avenue. This window display caught my eye. Initially, I couldn’t figure out what kind of nutty theme they were going for with the lemonade stand. I then realized that these clothes are for children!

Who the hell goes to Brooks Brothers to shop for children’s clothing?! Rich New Yorkers are a crazy lot. There seems to be a constant push to fashion their kids into tiny adults. I think a lot of Upper East Side children are treated more like fashion accessories than individual personalities. They’re mirrors that mom and dad can peer into and see themselves. I don’t think they have normal upbringings. Look at these clothes! They’re ridiculous!

Who’d want to wear a blue jacket with a gold Brooks Brothers crest on the breast? And are people still tying sweater arms around their necks? These clothes AREN’T CHEAP and if you have kids, you know that they grow out of them in very short order.

It’s not envy. Even if I had the money to buy The Daughter’s clothes at Brooks Brothers, I wouldn’t do it. I’d feel like a pretentious idiot.

Do you know who buys their kid’s clothes at Brooks Brothers? The same dopes who wait in a line outside Grand Central Station that stretches out the door to buy a $4.95 cup of coffee.

You can walk one block in any direction and get a perfectly acceptable cup of coffee from a coffee cart for $1. No waiting!

Early morning Bryant Park behind the Library. The lawn was watered overnight so all the chairs were removed. Some guy carries an arm full of chairs onto the lawn, places them at equal distances apart in a perfect line, and walks away.

I understand why people feel this place is uninhabitable. Country legend Buck Owens wrote a song called I Wouldn’t Live in New York City (If They Gave Me the Whole Damn Town). But I love this joint and all its crazy citizens.

The job market is steadily improving here in New York and I’ve been on a mad tear interviewing in an effort to shed this consultant skin and get a position that will provide my family and I with fat, juicy benefits. I have some freelance friends who would never trade-in their independence. They don’t want to be beholden to The Man, man, but that ain’t me. The Man has afforded me a pretty decent standard of living and I’ll sign on the dotted line with blood as soon as I find a good match.

To that end, I called in sick last Tuesday (kack-kack) and interviewed at Large Orange Institution inside the elegant Helmsley Building, just outside of Grand Central Station. Originally built in 1929 by the New York Central Railroad Company and known as the New York Central Building, it was renamed in 1988 by a wretched, old gargoyle named Leona Helmsley.

I interviewed with two different Big Shots. After sufficiently charming and dispensing with Big Shot #1, and while waiting for Big Shot #2 to show up, I snapped this photo from the conference room window. This is looking north up Park Avenue. I like this perspective because everything comes to a sharp point.

The third building on the left—the one that juts out a bit—is Lever House. Directly across the street is the Seagram Building. Both are considered influential architectural milestones and if a certain JZ wants to explain why in the comments section he should feel free to do so. The building one block north of the Seagram Building with the gold glow is the Waldorf-Astoria. This is the high-rent district.

Here’s the elevator I took up to my interview. It’s so Olde World New York. It’s red painted wood with an ornate metal façade.

At the center of the abstract design at eye level is an interlocking “NYC” in front of two intertwined serpents. (Click on this one.)

The elevators have an over-the-top Louis XIV interior with a sky mural on the ceiling. It’s flea market elegant.

The interviews went SO well, and my skill set is so suited to their needs, that before the day was over I got a call from the headhunter telling me they’re interested. It would, however, be a three-month contract-to-hire. Nobody hires directly on staff anymore! Here we go again.

Boy, did I need a stiff drink after all that. It feels strange to drink at 3:00 in the afternoon, but when ya gotta, ya gotta. And I knew just the place.

I met CB, who is a writer and keeps very irregular hours, and Bob, who’s visiting from London, at the elegant Campbell Apartment inside Grand Central Station. It’s a little known, stately, watering hole tucked into the corner that looks out onto Vanderbilt Avenue. The drinks aren’t cheap but it’s an authentic New York place to have a libation.

The room was once the office of American financier John W. Campbell, who served on the New York Central’s Board of Directors. It was never actually an apartment.

Light streams in and bathes the dark wood room with midday sun. There’s balcony seating (from where I took these shots) where you can observe all the busy little creatures chasing out their destinies.

I just came from Lincoln Center where I saw a piano recital. I know most people would find that to be a big bore-fest of an evening but that stuff feeds my needs. The program included Bach’s Tocatta and the beautiful Six Moments Musicaux by Rachmaninoff. The pianist was Xiayin Wang and, oh Sweet Mother of Jesus, what a performance! Do you realize the level of musicianship someone needs to attain in order to play at Alice Tully Hall? It takes a superhuman, almost mystical capability. You have to be, quite literally, among the best in the world.

They completed a major renovation of Alice Tully Hall just two years ago. The concert hall itself is a work of art. It’s all soft angles and perfect acoustics and warm wood and full sound. And it’s super-comfortable, to boot. I was sitting on the side balcony, which is the perfect view to watch her fingers dance across the keyboard.

The program had this to say about Bach’s Tocatta:

The intervening slow passage raises questions of its own in its harmonic circling, and has to deal with an early crisis in the form of an extraordinary diminished-seventh tremulation.

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?

What a bunch of pretentious gobbledygook. They could just as well have written this:

Gpungh elwengh crothzen leumbh geewee goygoy fungsell weveweve neng.

The day before I was bathed in Lincoln Center splendor, I passed this on Varick Street in Soho on the way to work:

 Yeah, vermin proof if the lid is on. What kind of twisted city ordinance requires that the garbage bins that are vermin proof need to be labeled as such? Vermin can’t read. I like the lettering. It looks like the cover of a death-metal CD. I am happy to report that I saw this near the Trump Soho Hotel. Make of that what you will.

Since I work on the third floor, I don’t bother with the elevator. I take the stairs up. Right after I saw vermin-proof, I bumped into this little fella right around the second floor:

It looks like someone mushed his little head. They call these “water bugs” but that just a pleasant name for a BIG cockroach. I should have put a coin next to him to give you a sense of scale. He’s a bit larger than your thumb.

New York. You gotta take the world-class pianists with the vermin.

Ai Weiwei is a contemporary Chinese artist. He helped design the “bird’s nest” stadium for the Chinese Olympics and recently had an exhibit at the Tate Modern in London where he covered the turbine hall floor with sunflower seeds that were made from porcelain.

He is currently sitting in a jail cell in China. (No one knows exactly where.) He was snatched as he boarded a flight to Hong Kong. The government said he has committed “economic crimes.” I don’t suppose his detention has anything to do with his outspokenness, does it? China is a terrible, terrible place. They’re not our friends.

A fantastic sculpture exhibit by Mr. Ai, Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, just opened outside of the Plaza Hotel at Central Park South and 59th Street. The exhibit was long planned and he was supposed to be there for the opening, but it’s hard to attend your opening when your legs are in shackles.

The bronze sculptures are 12 heads of the creatures of the Chinese zodiac. They’re much, much bigger than I thought they’d be. I was told by the guy selling exhibit books and tee-shirts that they weigh 800 pounds each!

There’s rat, ox, tiger…

…rabbit, dragon, snake…

…horse, goat, monkey…

…and rooster, dog, boar.

Dragon is, by far, the most beautifully rendered. Click on this and have a look.

The heads are replicas of versions that were made by European Jesuits for the Manchu emperor Qianlong. They were looted in 1860 when the Summer Palace was ransacked and burned by British and French troops during the Opium Wars. The Chinese government eventually retrieved five of them (ox, tiger, horse, monkey and boar). Two of them (rat and rabbit) are part of designer Yves Saint Laurent’s art collection. The remaining five are presumed lost forever.

Unlike Mr. Ai, the exhibit is FREE! FREE! FREE! It runs through July 15th.

The annual Armory Art Show took place this past weekend. It’s a big contemporary art fair that the Manhattan galleries look forward to with great anticipation but it’s something that I’ve never attended. Not once! In celebration of the show, Times Square was transformed into a sculpture garden. Here are a few examples. All photos are clickable. Make sure you click on that first one to see the detail.

This big boned gal is by Niki de Saint Phalle. You can’t tell but she was kind of sparkly. Water streamed out of those upturned jugs.

This oversized happy mouse is the work of Tom Otterness. His stuff is so clever. It’s playful. He makes something as hard as steel look soft.

He had a wealth of permanent fixtures in Manhattan that include playgrounds, subway stations and a hotel on 42nd Street. I’ve got a bunch of photos of his stuff and have been meaning to do a post.

This flock of sheep was grazing right outside the big Marriott.

They were hand-made from heavy paper by Brooklyn artist Kyu Seok Oh.

I was wondering if the whole flock of sheep/gaggle of tourists thing was an intentional metaphor. I hope not. That would be a bit of an insult. We need our tourists. Without tourists, this town would be about as special as Enid, Oklahoma.