Category Archives: Uncategorized

You haven’t changed a bit

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EDIT: I was dissatisfied with the Bergdorf window pics so I replaced them with better ones and included a few detailed shots. Quality control!

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Not long ago, I reread Lolita. When I first read it in my 20s, I found it to be a well-written, comedic romp across America. Now that I have an 11 year old daughter, I didn’t think it was so goddamn funny. Mostly, I was mortified that I once laughed at it. At a recent appearance by author Zadie Smith, I related that story to her and asked if she was a “one-and-done” kind of reader or if she revisited books from her youth. She said it’s important to reread books from time to time. She teaches the same titles in her class each semester (she’s a Lit professor at NYU) and gets something new out of them each time. For her, a subsequent reading of Middlemarch revealed Dorthea to be a bit of a whiner!

I’ve been putting off rereading To Kill a Mockingbird for decades. Long-time readers know that if it weren’t for that book, I wouldn’t be the man I am today. I wouldn’t be typing these words and probably never would have lived in New York City. I’d be something more tragic and sad. I once wrote as much to Harper Lee and she immediately responded with a heartfelt note of thanks. I didn’t want to reread Mockingbird because I was afraid that, over the decades, I had blown it up to mythical proportions in my mind’s eye. What if it wasn’t all I remembered it being? What if it was merely good and not life changing? Wouldn’t that degrade an important memory? That can happen, you know.

I finally pulled it off my shelf last week. I got 18 pages in and Scout said this:

…I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Look, I don’t know about you guys, but that really floored me. I sat there with a big, stupid grin on my face and read those lines over and over again. What a relief. I might write another note to Ms. Lee.

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We decorated our Christmas tree over the weekend. Look where 6-Year Old Daughter hung my Shakespeare ornament:

singws 1Everybody sing!

William the red-cock playwright
Had a very shiny…okay that’s enough of that.

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Here are a couple of holiday windows at Bergdorf Goodman. Strangely, they have nothing whatsoever to do with the holiday. The theme is jazz-era/art deco and while lacking in ho-ho-ho-ness, they’re pretty impressive, just the same. You should click on these and blow them up. They’re interesting. This first one should appeal to the white-plumed fetishist in your life.

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8photo 2These are best of the bunch. A high society, all-girl jazz band. It’s like a Robert Palmer video from 1929. The display was mounted up against the wall so that your view is looking down on them. Pretty brilliant. When I lived in downtown Brooklyn, I had a kitchen floor that looked just like that.

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House of Worship

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I attended a jewelry party in Manhattan last week. It was held in someone’s apartment. It’s quite common. Not too far removed from the Tupperware parties of the 1950’s. You invite your friends to a party and proceed to sell them your products. Or you host a party and receive a generous discount or free merchandise.
In this case, it was the latter. One of my oldest friends—someone I met when I first moved to New York—invited me to her girlfriend’s jewelry fête. She knew I couldn’t buy anything but we hadn’t seen each other in quite some time. I can count my close, long-term friends on one hand and she’s one of them. It was great to see her. We can go long periods of time without hearing from one another and once we’re together, we pick up the thread of our last conversation as if we just spoke yesterday. It’s magic.
The apartment was on Broadway and 10th Street. It was in a building I’ve walked passed thousands of times. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live there. It’s in a perfect location. Only three blocks to The Strand bookstore. Four to Union Square park. The East Village one block east. A delicious slice of the town.
They have a balcony and because it was so freakishly balmy for a December evening, we took our glasses of vino outside to catch-up. We dished on our families and relationships. Her dog, Buddy, just passed away and she was sad. I did a post about Buddy once. He kept chasing porcupines and ending up with a quill facial. Each time it happened it cost her $400!
The apartment was on the 8th floor. In my delusional apartment fantasy, I’ve changed my mind about what to demand from the real estate agent. I will no longer insist on a unit above the 30th floor. I’ve decided that being closer to the street is the thing to do. Too high up and you miss out on all this fantastic detail.
Just look at this balcony view. My God, how some people get to live. This is looking north up Broadway to Union Square with Grace Church on the right. The ornamental floodlights pouring down are on the roof of the building across the street.
church1The light spills into the church courtyard creating creepy renaissance shadows. In the distance, steam rises off the crown of the Zeckendorf Tower. The blue clock tower is the ConEdison building on 14th Street. Were this mine, I would take my New York Times out onto the balcony each Sunday morning with my coffee. This is my idea of a house of worship. From the horrified looks on their faces, you’d think the other guests had never seen a grown man weep.
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Here’s another festive holiday snapshot for you. GIANT RED BALLS in a fountain across the street from Radio City Music Hall. Everything in this town is over-sized. Ornaments. Egos. Problems. Everything.
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Defective (cont’d)

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This past week there was a gigantic lottery payout here in the U.S. The jackpot was a staggering $588 million. Over half a billion dollars! I didn’t buy a ticket. I like to fancy myself a super sophisticated student of the odds and at, literally, 175,000,000 to 1, I felt it was a boorish bet to make. I won’t even lay 35 to 1 at a roulette table.

While on my arduous commute home, past the petroleum refineries and chemical plants of northern New Jersey, I did what every red blooded American did. I stared out the window into the dusk and imagined what it would be like to suddenly win that preposterous amount of money. My first thought was, of course, no more life-sucking hours spent commuting. The second was the cliché palatial apartment overlooking Central Park. “Please don’t show me anything below the 30th floor,” I would instruct the real estate agent.

Then, very quickly, my mind drifted towards all the trouble it would cause. The relentless phone calls and pleadings for help. The whacked-out investment schemes and long, lost family, friends and ex-colleagues who would emerge from the mist of my intentionally forgotten memories. The unrelenting tsunami of temptations and guilt.

Do you see what I did there? I took a fortuitous event like winning the national lottery and immediately fashioned it into something bleak. I turned it into a problem. What the hell’s the matter with me? I don’t understand how my mind works sometimes. I lead a pretty decent life. From what deep, dark crevice does all this angst emanate from?

Do you know the plot device in the Harry Potter novels whereby memories and thoughts can be extracted and shared? In the films, those thoughts and memories are depicted as long, sparkly, glistening threads. I’ll bet my thought strands would be brown and dripping with rust.

Not every post can be pizza commentary, casino hijinks and theater boasts. Nor should they be.

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Self portrait #7. The Canine and I are getting along much better. I haven’t been bitten or seriously growled at in quite some time. Just in a playful way.  Still, if I were a wizard, I’d dramatically slice the air with my wand and turn her into a cat.

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City sidewalks, busy sidewalks.
Dressed in holiday style.
It’s Christmas time in the city.

Here’s the first of several holiday shots of the city. I love Christmas for purely secular reasons. The town gets all gussied up like a cheap, glittery, 10-cent transvestite. People are genuinely nicer to one another and I like the music. I’m not even bothered by the holiday throngs that residents constantly complain about. If you hate crowds so much, why the hell did you move to New York City in the first place, you idiot? Go live in Omaha. I hear they have room to breath. Merry Christmas!

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The Sins of the Father

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There’s a dangerous new distraction in my hometown of Cleveland, OH. We drove nine hours west to visit my family for the big annual Thanksgiving face-stuffing. In an attempt to commit as many deadly sins as possible, I visited this new pleasure dome located in the heart of downtown.

casinoI don’t know what legal rational they conjured up to circumnavigate the anti-gaming laws—clearly this isn’t tribal Indian land, which is the usual justification—but I’m glad they did it. Don’t get me wrong. I think generating revenue via casino gaming is a HORRIBLE idea. The unchecked spread of gambling is going to create a nation of addicts. But if I don’t have to travel too far out of my way to belly-up to a craps table, I’ll go. The moths-to-flame metaphor has never been more appropriate.

I made two passes through this hallowed cathedral. Once with an old friend and the next day with my sister and brother-in-law. God, I love crap tables. Roulette is a fine, elegant game. Casually paced with an old world charm. But dice release the endorphins we’re all aching for. (Pair of dice = paradise.) I love how they feel in my hand. If you squeeze them tight, the pointed edges leave little marks in your palm. I love the language of the game and the cataclysmic highs and lows.

You can strengthen the bonds of a friendship at a crap table. You celebrate the drunken success of a hot roll and console each other when you stupidly throw away $100 in :20 minutes. “We’ll get it back,” we tell each other. And sometimes we do. That’s the truth and beauty of the game. I’ve witnessed significant amounts of money lost by people who had no business whatsoever being inside a casino. Who doesn’t love to watch a good meltdown now and then? As long as it’s not you. How’d I do on my two visits? I never kiss and tell.

Gambling is a curse that I inherited from my father. The only time that guy ever paid any attention to me at all was when he gave me a weekly football pool to fill out. You don’t need an advanced degree in psychology to figure out what happened. I plan on keeping The Daughters as far away from the casinos as possible and to skillfully mask the raw joy that gambling affords me.

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Aside from the gourmet feast served up by my sister on Thanksgiving, I also treated myself to this beauty:

16pizza1201401You want to lick your monitor, don’t you? I suppose it’s because I was raised on it, but for my money, the Cleveland style of pizza is the best. It’s not the thin, cardboard crust served in New York City and not the doughy Chicago deep dish style, either. It resides somewhere in a perfect middle. Just like the city itself.
Nobody likes anchovies. Those are some fat, fine examples above. I usually have to go solo. You can’t go half and half because the anchovy oil permeates the entire pie. My kid’s culinary fussiness in regards to anchovies might be attributable to the Irish blood flowing in their veins. But what a bunch of piss-poor excuses for Italians on my side! No green olives either!? Do we even have the same mother? Sometimes I wonder.

1 week. 3 storms.

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Why punish a region just a little bit when you can punish it a lot? It wasn’t enough to get hammered by Hurricane Sandy. A few days after that, a powerful nor’easter rolled in off the Atlantic bringing with it a staggering amount of wet, heavy, snow.

Most of the trees haven’t shed their leaves so the snow settled on the branches and weighed them down until their tips touched the ground. Many limbs snapped under the strain. Our power was knocked out AGAIN. I thought the girls would be cowering in abject fear because of the storm and darkness but when I walked in the door after a 3:30 commute through a raging blizzard, I found them singing Christmas carols by candlelight.

My property suffered more damage from this nor’easter than it did the hurricane. Mrs. Wife and I were lying in bed reading when we heard a few pops and then a long, loud, slow-motion, unmistakable cracking. Timber! A massive tree in our back yard split nearly in half. It missed Casa de Unbearable, but not the wooden fence surrounding my back yard. It’s a mess. Good God, what next?

In order to get to work the following morning I had to brush several inches of snow off my car and clear  debris from the driveway. The city was a slushy mess but most of the snow was gone by midday. Here are few Central Park shots.

The park was closed because of the storm damage. You could only walk around the outside perimeter. It looked kind of spooky without any people in it. I Am Legend stuff.

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This is not my doing. Art is all around us.

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The third storm of the week was the emotional fireworks and pathos put on display by Al Pacino as broken down real estate shark Shelly “The Machine” Levene in David Mamet’s scorching Glengarry Glen Ross.

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Pacino’s name is above the title, author and director because he’s the guy who puts asses in seats, but the entire cast is great, especially oily John C. McGinley. I question the director’s choice for pacing. Mamet’s dialog should be thrown at you with machine gun rapidity. Here, the delivery is more measured. When I see one of Mamet’s works, I don’t want to have time to think.