Change Comes to Manhattanville

And it has nothing to do with Columbia's expansion north. Or maybe everything.

Walking to Fairway yesterday, I passed the grandly named "125th Street Tire Corp." between the Riverside Drive viaduct and the Amtrak line along the river and found notice that it had closed, to relocate in the Bronx come January. This corporation changed tires and looked to do a thriving business in retreads, always in Spanish and with a tinny radio playing (mostly) merengues. Many of its customers drove the black hired cars that ply the streets north of 125th, where fewer taxis venture. At other times the place looked like a chop shop for forgotten 70's models.

Notice that the corporation had closed was, like every other bit of information about it -- name and operating hours --, written free-hand in black spray paint on the walls of the old two storey market-like structure where it occupied half of the bottom floor. We had nothing to do with the corporation except to listen, whenever we walked past, to the crowing roosters that lived on the premises. It was like a rush of Latin American campo in one heart of New York. Did they relocate to the Bronx as well?

Stretch Out Those Legs

The next time you are in a numbered NYC subway line and can actually find a seat, stretch out your legs. Then do the same the next time you are on a lettered NYC line. Here's the explanation:

"As the subways grew, so did the demand for them. They represent an evolution from the early days when the subways were privately operated. The first system, run by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, or IRT, comprised the numbered lines, including the 6. Those trains are narrower.

Later, when the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT) and the city-owned Independent Rapid Transit Railroad (IND) lines (the lettered lines) were built, their sponsors determined that they needed larger cars for more capacity, said Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit. The IND included what is now the E line.

For the statistics-minded, the transit agency says its A Division cars, on the numbered lines, are 8 feet 9 inches wide. The B division cars (lettered lines) are 10 feet wide."

The explanation is from the F.Y.I column in the NYT Sunday City section, one of my favorite parts of the paper, ranking right up there with Science on Tuesday and Dining In/Out on Wednesday.

Death at the Olympic Trials

A world class marathoner named Ryan Shay collapsed and died today during the US Olympic Team marathon trials. He was 28 years old. The NYT online had a picture of him standing at the starting line in a black stocking cap and red gloves on this very cool, fine marathon weather morning, looking like he was going to live for another sixty years, and he had maybe 45 minutes. I cannot get this out of my mind. It happened by the Boat House where my wife and I had lunch at a table next to Bono last Monday. I know all of these places now. They are not just names in a newspaper story. Tomorrow or some time day soon I will ride my bicycle past the site. Wakes up this morning thinking about the Olympics and tonight his wife is a widow. As the William Maxwell story I read last night said, a capacious God indeed.

Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down

I will be among the millions this morning giving a thumbs up to Columbia President Lee Bollinger for calling Iranian President Ahmadinejad exactly what he is -- aside from either the first or second most dangerous man in the world -- "...a petty and cruel dictator,...brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated."

Don't know how many will be joining me in giving a thumbs down to the NYT front page story about the Columbia visit where, in its constant need to apply an adjective to the news so that its readers will be guided in their reactions, the Times does not call A's views on homosexuals in Iran and the Holocaust -- none exist and theory not fact respectively -- "lying," "preposterous," "stupid" or even "dubious." No, they were only "bewildering." Lots of things in life, String Theory or why people read about Britney Spears, are "bewildering," but I suspect not many beyond the Times news pages would consider A's statements among them.

To be fair, the editorial page does get it right on all aspects of the visit.

The Amiable Child

On this cool, overcast last day of August, out walking the beagle, with Johnny Cash singing Engine One Forty-Three (yet another cautionary tale of a young man failing to heed his mama's words) on repeat play on the headphones, I decided to visit, as I do from time to time, the monument to An Amiable Child. This small memorial is just off Riverside Dr., down a few steps and a bit north from that much more imposing monument, Grant's Tomb. It overlooks a stand of trees and beyond that, of course, the Hudson. The child was St. Claire Pollock and he was five when he died on July 15, 1797, most likely -- the accompanying historical sign back up on the sidewalk reports -- from a fall off the bluffs above the river. The memorial is of marble, square and simple, topped with an urn. Once when I visited someone had laid a spray of carnations on the marble. Another time there was a used condom on the pavement outside the fence. Today the area had been freshly groomed (it is often a bit raggedy), but the wild rose that grows inside the fence was flowerless. Here is a link from the City Parks about the site:

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/historical_signs/
hs_historical_sign.php?id=6417

and here is another that includes a picture of the monument from about 1900:

http://www.morningside-heights.net/amiable.htm

The monument is inscribed on one side "Erected to the memory of an Amiable Child St. Claire Pollock Died July 15 1797 in the fifth year of his life." On the other there is this from the Book of Job: "Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not." So I think of little St. Claire, happily incorrigible, curiosity leading him to skinned knees and scoldings from his doting mother, and then, one day, accidentally too far. Hearts broke over this Amiable and sorely missed Child. He came to rest here, in what NYC Parks describes as one of the few private graves on public land in the city, because when his father or uncle sold the property in 1800 he wrote to the new owner, "There is a small enclosure near your boundary fence within which lie the remains of a favorite child, covered by a marble monument. You will confer a peculiar and interesting favor upon me by allowing me to convey the enclosure to you so that you will consider it a part of your own estate, keeping it, however, always enclosed and sacred."

It says something good and special about this huge, amazing, annoying city that this modest request has now been honored for more than two centuries.

Come visit the next time you are in Morningside Heights.

Norse Mythology and the AL East Pennant Race

No one will ever mistake the New York Times for Comedy Central or even for the latter's flagship star, Jon Stewart. Remember this is the newspaper once -- and maybe still -- known as the Great Gray Lady and the newspaper that once fired a reporter for adding the "Jake Barnes Award for Valiant Effort" to the long list of agate type awards in a Columbia University graduation. So how pleasant it was to come across this article,

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/sports/baseball/30squirrel.html
?em&ex=1188619200&en=e149305c3ef69252&ei=5087%0A

my favorite of the month, maybe even of this news dreary year.

Meanwhile, in other pennant race news, the Yankees completed a sweep of the Red Sox, leaving for now only the question of why Boston manager Terry Francona wears a long-sleeved tee in Red Sox colors instead of a numbered jersey like everybody else. Is he allergic to doubleknits or something?

And, finally, that quintessential whiner Mike Mussina is "angry" and "hurt'" -- per Yahoo -- about being pulled from the Yankees rotation. Uh, excuse me, Mike, but in a short season where every game matters, you have put together a 17+ ERA in your last three starts and stuck the Yankees in a six run (at least) hole in the first two innings of every one of those games. You deserve another start about as much as I do. People get fired for poor performance in other industries, why not baseball? The only appropriate response for Mussina is to say to Joe Torre, "I understand completely. Let me do some long relief in blowout games until I get my stuff back." But, oh, wait, I forgot -- he's a Stanford grad, impossible to demonstrate such humility.

Go Bears!

We Males Never Change

Confused, chauvinist, insouciant, feckless, drinking too much, and never doing our share of the housework.

Jesse Winchester, Yankee Lady, circa 1970

She rose each morning and went off to work
And she kept me with her pay
I was making love all night
And playing guitar all day
And I got apple cider and homemade bread
That would make a man say grace
And clean linens on our bed
And a warm feet fire place

Superchunk, Driveway to Driveway, circa 1995

From stage to stage we flew
a drink in every hand
my hand on your heart had been replaced
and I thought it was you that I had chased

The National, Karen, circa 2006

Karen, put me in a chair, fuck me and make me a drink
I've lost direction, and I'm past my peak
I'm telling you this isn't me
No, this isn't me
Karen, believe me, you just haven't seen my good side yet


Yes, our good side yet.

A Bunch of Very Rich People Get Hosed -- What's Not to Like?

I find as a regular reader of the NYTimes that, aside from sections like Science on Tuesday and Dining In/Out on Wednesday, in the paper one often has to read through a lot of qualified statements (this or that may happen) or analysis disguised as fact to get a piece of important factual information. So it is with the current sub-prime panic and credit crunch hysteria. Yesterday, in the next to last paragraph of a long article, the Times finally acutely summarized a situation over which it and a bunch of other papers have spilt gallons of hysterical ink, writing, "For all the turmoil in the markets this past week, the number of people involved appears to be relatively small. They are mostly engaged in hedge funds, banks and mortgage lending and they are usually wealthy. Hedge funds, for example, require investors to have a net worth of at least $5 million." In other words, some people comfortably within the top one percent of U.S. household incomes lost some money on bad investments. In a minute way, they contributed to narrowing the disparity between the super rich and the less well off in the U.S.; that's a good thing. And that's also how markets work, even for the super rich -- sometimes you make money and sometimes you lose money when you invest.

The trick of course is to prevent the hysteria over this minor phenomenon from becoming a credit crunch, something those same very rich want because if a credit crunch is deemed to be occurring, the Fed will lower interest rates, rescuing them from some of their losses. So far, to its credit, the Fed is having nothing of it. On Friday it reacted very nicely to that limited possibility of a credit crunch by injecting a bunch of billions into the markets. People who need loans will be able to get them; prudent banks will have the flexibility to make loans to good risks striving to buy their first house. And the super-rich, unless they and their hedge fund managers and improvident lenders can fan the markets into irrational panic, will get to lick their wounds. Sometimes there is justice after all.

Grief

Grief is a planet or an island, inhabitable, inescapable. But you inhabit it and you escape it, and when you do, grief sometimes turns tsunami, overwhelming out of a flat, placid sea, like tonight in the more than 80 degree heat after ten o'clock, walking the dog in front of the MSM residences on Claremont, smoking kids out front and just a few yards past them, the hit, doubling over and eyes shut tight at the disbelief that Annie is no longer here, gone now more than a year.

Ratatouille and So Long, Marianne

Hot summer early evening in NYC, but low humidity is a blessing. The windows are open; the fans are on; the AC is off, no threat to ConEd here. I am simmering my just-made-up version of ratatouille and, with the laptop in the kitchen playing WMP, up comes So Long, Marianne. And I thought, "how long has this song given me pleasure?" In how many places, starting with Berkeley, now in New York, Traiguen, Harare, San Salvador, and a whole bunch of others in between? I doubt that ever a week has gone by in my life without hearing it at least once, and all these years later I still fecklessly identify with "I used to think I was some kind of gypsy boy/Until I let you take me home..." and I still can't keep all the verses straight. But each time I get to hear it, it is a small, welcome gift. Thanks, Leonard -- for this one and so many others.

Some Days You Eat the Bear

And some days bring a different result. Someone stole my bike while I was working up at school today. I came out, walked to the racks where there was one bike -- as there had been (mine) when I parked it hours before because hardly anyone is at CCNY on summer Fridays -- even got out the key to open the lock and then saw it wasn't my bike. Disbelief of course, maybe if I stare long enough this bike will turn into my bike, or maybe it's been temporarily covered by an invisibility cloak and will reappear at any moment, but no, it's gone. Not much of a bike, but I'd had it since Zimbabwe in 1995 and I'd grown fond of it, put on a lot of miles. And then tonight we go to the Stadium where the Yankees, led by another in the endless string of mediocre to poor starts by that Stanford-grad articulate whiner Mussina, contrive to fall behind the D'Rays -- the D'Rays! -- by 10-0 in the first six innings. Yesterday was much better with the advantages of museum membership. It was an early entry to the MoMA for members to see the small exhibit of the centennial of Demoiselles d'Avignon, a fascinating collection of Picasso's nearly year-long and numerous studies for the work, and then as he was composing it, his sudden turn to making two of the faces into African-like masks, and a short description of how the painting came to the Modern. Also there: the 40 year sculpture retrospective of Richard Serra, particularly the huge, curved cast-iron structures in the garden and on one of the floors, disorienting and dizzying to stand between the pieces, like a maze, even with the entry and exit always in sight. But most of all, the delight was having the huge six floors virtually to oneself, shared only by a few dozen others and by the Museum staff.

Reading Today

In the subway, heading home after dropping off the rental, in the NYT review of the Rickie Lee Jones concert it would have been interesting to see, beginning by quoting her, "Songs are like rooms. We all go in and look around, and then we go out again." Her new music, songs based on themes of the teachings of Jesus makes for some very interesting rooms, but then hasn't most of her career?

Later tonight, the New Yorker, in a collective review of several of the anti-religion books that have appeared recently, discusses the Scot philosopher David Hume, who -- though at least a skeptic and most likely an atheist himself -- in his writings "had a horror of zealotry" and "(in) his writings on religion (had) a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work." Different times.

And finally a New Yorker critic very perceptive on Edward Hopper, in the context of his show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Hopper's "preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture." Here comes the knockout --"Imputations, to them, of "loneliness" are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder." And this stunning final half-paragraph about "New York Movie"-- "I comprehend the picture's economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that...assaults the usherette's unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness."

Or as the great Zevon put it -- "Time marches on/Time stands still.../We contemplate eternity /Beneath the vast indifference of Heaven."

Waiting for Godot, or the Electrician...

or Someone Like Him, or, in this recent case, the Cable Guy, RCN to be exact. File it as one of life's inevitable little irritations. You get a three hour block of time, 11 AM - 2 PM. And you know, as sure as you know your name, that in that three hour block of time the service person will show up at two minutes before two. (Unless of course you choose to nip down to the corner deli for a quick purchase, in which case he will come and go in those five minutes, leaving you the "please call to reschedule" note.) Who are the people, where are they who actually get lucky enough to have him show up in the first hour of that window? Never known one. Never been one. They're as invisible as Tony Soprano's guys on a construction site. Except of course when you opt for the 8 AM - 11 AM block and he's there five minutes early, ringing the bell, wondering why it's taking you so long to let him in.

Modern Love

David Bowie's Modern Love, from 1983's Let's Dance, may not be the best pop song ever, but spun up on iPod shuffle on a glorious late spring day while biking along the Hudson and the Yankees on a six game winning streak and heading up to the stadium tonight with Dana Dee, it will do just fine. The lyrical ambivalence ("I catch the paper boy/but things don't really change") doesn't stand a prayer against the music's relentless energy, the wiry intro and drums, then guiter kicking into Bowie's spoken first lyrics. And then after the first verse and out of nowhere a minute ten or so into the song, a punching saxophone as Bowie and the chorus begin trading half-line lyrics:

Bowie: Never gonna fall for
Chorus: Modern Love
B: walks beside me
C. Modern Love
B. walks on by
C. Modern Love
B. gets me to the (chorus joins for) church on time.
C. Church on time
B. terrifies me.
C. Church on time
B. makes me party.
C. Church on time
B. puts my trust in (and again the chorus joins for) God and man.
C: God and man
B. no confessions
C: God and man
B: no religion
C: God and man
B: Don't believe in modern love.

From this peak, it just gets better, a saxophone bridge to the second verse, the chorus repeated twice, and a final 45 seconds of controlled vocal and instrumental chaos that might have happened if James Brown and Motown's finest studio musicians from the glory days had ever done an encore together. I only needed to pedal five miles up to CCNY, but with repeat play, I could have gone for a hundred.

Speaking of paper boys, I am reading the collected stories of William Maxwell (All the Days and Nights), the current one about a paper boy (certainly him in his 1922 youth) and called What Every Boy Should Know. Maxwell, more known as a long-time editor at the New Yorker than for his own writing, has more to say about things that matter and trying to just figure it out than a truckload of writers whose reliance on flash only underscores their lack of ideas or insight. He says it far better in his introduction to the stories, "...three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The cast of larger-than-life characters--affectionate aunts, friends of the family, neighbors white and black--that I was presented with when I came into the world. The look of things. The weather. Men and women long at rest in the cemetery but vividly remembered.... '

Dogs of My Life

From the window of my office I look across Amsterdam Ave and down on a group of artificial turf playing fields. Between the avenue and the fields is a strip of spring-lush grass where dog owners stroll their pets. Twice recently I have happened for no reason to glance up from my desk and see dogs of my life. First, it was Jessica, our chow in Buenos Aires, reddish-blonde coat, blue tongue, alert, and devoted to me. Not a dog that looked like her, her. Then, the second time, one of the numerous bassets that have been in the extended family for more than forty years, just the right mix of brown and white and that classic basset insouciance. Nothing matters, it says, except that now I saunter around for a bit and then go home and eat, and if the food's not quick enough in coming, bark and bay until it does.

Fire Him, Fire Him Now

MSNBC did the right thing. I have been greatly entertained by Imus through the years, but consider this. If a teacher stood in a classroom and used the words Imus did, would that teacher have a job at the end of the day? If a member of a corporate board at the annual shareholders meeting used the words Imus did, would that member still be on the board at the end of the day? If a flight attendant used those words during in-flight announcements, would the attendant's job last any longer than the duration of that particular flight? The only reason Don Imus still has a job is that he generates enormous amounts of money for his employers and, not coincidentally, himself.

It may be the worst incident but this is not a one-time event. Imus's show is, in the end, middle-aged (and older) male locker room humor directed at women, even those that work on the show, and minorities. CBS and the entertainment industry in general are always at the ready to expose the hypocrisy and profit-above-all ways of others. It's time to look in the mirror and recognize that to keep Imus is to say anything goes so long as it helps the bottom line. CBS needs to follow MSNBC's lead and should have done so days ago.

Dashboard Meat Loaf

In a moment of weakness and based on 30 second sound bites, several months ago I downloaded from e-music three or four cuts of Dashboard Confessional. This morning I finally got around to listening to them in their entirety. Oops -- we all make mistakes. Let's just say this: can there be any doubt that Dashboard is this generation's answer to the recently career-resurrected Meat Loaf?

Christmas in Patagonia

A bit late.

Outside Bariloche, December 23, 2006

We had to travel to Southern Hemisphere summer to find the winter that hasn’t arrived in New York. While the rain has stopped, the wind kicks up ripples on the lake, the sun stays mostly obscured and the temperature struggles to stay above fifty. Cerro Negro and the other peaks seen from the hotel are snowy and partly hidden by clouds. If Bariloche felt more than ever overrun by Argentine and foreign tourists shrouded in parkas and surprised by a wet cold in December, the Hotel Tronador, especially when looking back up toward it from the edge of the lake, is unchanged from two decades or even six ago.

We are in the five bedroom family cabin, all cypress exterior, almost yellow and broad-beamed wood. The middle building we stayed in during the visits in the 80’s is next door with its wide sitting room and porch looking out on the lake. Both these buildings, Beatriz says, date from the early 1940s. She and Cristina are instantly recognizable. The first thing out of Beatriz’s mouth was how thankful she was that I helped facilitate visa interviews for her two sons back those twenty years ago. For years I’d forgotten doing that, small courtesy as it was, but it came back as soon as Dana Dee said Beatriz talked about it. A small act for one enlarged through the years for another.

The hotel has been a family business since 1929, without, one suspects, much change in the basic formula. All rooms are full pension, the beds more soft than firm, with plain while sheets and as many blankets as the night requires. The silence then is absolute, as is the dark when the sky is moonless or cloudy as it was last night. We walked up to the falls. The overlooks are now rudimentarily fenced for safety and the tri-level falls – after this week of rain and the heavy snows of the last two winters are full and loud. There is no place to look that does not bring a view to rival great country like Yosemite or the country around Seattle and up into BC.

http://www.hoteltronador.com/

December 25

Christmas morning 8:30, nobody else up yet although Colin in his parents’ room can be heard demanding water. Papa Noel arrived last night by crossing Lago Mascardi in a small outboard motor boat, ringing a cowbell as he approached. For once we did not need more cowbell. His pilot feinted left for a brief moment as if to pass us by because there were no good children at Tronador, but then turned back and docked as we’d all – one, no more than two believers, and a dozen or so complicit adults and older children – trooped down the path to the lake edge to greet him. Santa had slimmed down this year, perhaps Mrs. Pere Noel put him in a Pilates class. He also wore a shiny dark mask that would not have looked out of place on Jason. Maybe he had a backup plan of cat burglar in case this Father Christmas thing didn’t work out. More likely, it was to not be recognized later as the hotel staff member who, as Bobby suggested, had drawn the short straw and had therefore to put on the suit. He proved multi-lingual and with information about each child. He knew that Seb had been a perfect boy on the airplane. Santa’s burlap bag contained small wrapped gifts, chocolates it turned out, and then he went off, more cowbell here, to “see the maids.” I think this was to mean with presents, but it could also have been the North Pole equivalent of a girl in every port. By this time the sun had set and Cerro Negro seemed aflame above its snow and I got a spectacular end of day picture. It was our first warm and sunny day. Some of the roses along the buildings, slowed by the five days of rain and cold, started to open to support the large but now bedraggled ones that had been open for a week or so.

After Santa went to the maids, we went to Nochebuena dinner, the dining room candlelit and showing a skinny tree, decorated with tinsel and round silver ornament balls. Instead of lights, it was filled with unlit candles that, Beatriz or Cristina told Dana Dee, would be lit briefly at midnight and we were invited. Dinner was consommé with sherry, which except for the walnut bits scattered in it, tasted just like every other consommé. Here’s something about consommé though – you always feel healthy when you eat it because the only other time you’d eat it regularly would be as you are recovering from an illness and know you are going to be OK, but still need to watch your diet. Ham and cheese tart and then roast turkey. Seb fell by the wayside then, but the rest of us returned for the lit tree, about three dozen lit candles and a taped version of O Tannenbaum to which the family and those guests who knew the German lyrics sang along. It could have been the year the original hotel opened, 1929. Everyone in the room then hugged everyone else, one by one, and that was the beginning of Christmas. We went out into the clear cold night and Joe and I tried to reacquaint ourselves with the Southern Cross.

Fairway and Van the Man

On this faux-spring Tuesday evening, fortified by leftover Chinese and a couple glasses of Chilean chardonnay, I walked down to Fairway (slogan--"Like No Other Market", meaning of slogan -- "We've Got Everything, but Let's See You Try to Find It"). The colored lights along the shoreline across the Hudson stretched in wide bands on the water back toward Manhattan, reds, yellows and whites, and Van Morrison shuffled up onto the iPod with "Avalon of the Heart." Listening, it immediately threw me back to Astral Weeks, and that gorgeous, perfect opening couplet -- "If I ventured in the slipstream/Between the viaducts of your dream..." That image of riding uncontrolled, powerless, straight into someone else's dream--you get one chance to capture that, and Van nailed it, no one ever needs to try and write it again. It's done, you ain't gonna top it. Recycling is a good thing with trash, not so good with lyrics. Van disagrees. He's wrong. Avalon's a fine song, but "Well I came upon/The enchanted vale/Down by the viaducts of my dreams..." is a retread, plain and simple. But, hey, spring's coming, I'm in a forgiving mood. Watching those river lights, I listened three repeat times.

March

OK, so I didn't wake up a MegaMillionaire. It was only the second time playing and third time's the charm. And what are odds of 177 million to one anyway?

There's still the consolation of March and its weather adventures. Last Saturday 60 degrees and thoughts of spring in Central Park, the blossoms and the baby red-tails vigil through the telescopes by the Conservatory model boat pond. Yesterday the winds hammered off the river and down the avenues, making 20 degrees feel like zero. Today there is light snow, a little on the ground already, no wind and 15 degrees. It is a perfect winter day. The beagle/basset mix I saw being walked on Broadway wearing four cloth mittens on his paws looked like he was having a fine time too.

Never mind that it is only a couple weeks until spring and a few days until the now-earlier switch to Daylight Saving time. For me, it's a day we haven't had enough of this winter, so very welcome. It sets up one more trip to Cannon for skiing. But, in less than a month, looking out from Tier box seats above the green playing surface of Yankee Stadium, it will be just a scrap of memory.

Or maybe not. Once when I was a kid in Detroit I skipped school with some friends and we went to old Tiger Stadium for the second game of the season. We bought cheap seats in the center field bleachers and watched snow swirl through most of the game as some of the few and scattered fans lit fires in the aisles in an attempt to stay warm.

He's No Bob Shepard, but...

In this season when the Rangers are likely to miss the playoffs, they only occasionally come up with a superb game, like tonight's 4-0 victory over the Canadiens, but there's always a reason to go to the Garden. His name is John Amarante (sp?) and he regularly sings the National Anthem and -- on nights when there is a Canadian team playing -- also O Canada!. He'll never be a Bob Shepard since it's hard to imagine someone singing the anthem well into their 90's, but unlike Hillary on You Tube, John -- who looks like he might have taught Ferris Bueller in a different life -- brings both a fine voice and great drama to the anthem. The color guard lines up and he walks out along the carpet onto the ice and launches. It's nothing notable until the bombs start "bursting in air," which Mr. A, holding the microphone in his left hand, punctuates with a punching uppercut from his right. He then builds to the finale, "o'er the land of the free," and as the more restless players start skating circles, he waves his free arm to the crowd, exhorting the building drop-the-puck cheers, and finishes to crashing applause. It's a great show and a great way to start any game. The game DJ was on tonight too, with Arcade Fire's Wake Up just before the Rangers took the ice and then, when they went on their first power play, the synthesizer intro, the crashing first chords, leading into Keith Moon's drumming to open Baba O'Riley, maybe the most exciting beginning ever to an album or CD.

Winter Wishing

Seeking evidence of phantom winter, I went to my first Rangers game for the season tonight. The walk to the subway was cold, promising. The crowd was New York right too, booing the 12 year old boy introduced as the game's honorary member of the crew that cleans the ice during commercial timeouts; naturally screaming "No" when the scoreboard message from Benny asked Gail to marry him (in the third period we saw the happy couple as the Jumbotron informed us "she said yes") and cheering the bald guy in the 400 seats who dances after a fashion to a sound bite of rock at every game during the third period. We also applauded Cyndi Lauper, in attendance and still having fun as her signature song played. I always thought she should have been the one instead of Madonna, but she wasn't. So it was a fine facsimile of winter, and with snow predicted for tomorrow night maybe the real deal to follow, except for the Rangers who spent the evening firing shots straight at Andrew Raycroft's midsection, never followed a rebound and lost to Toronto 2-1. What I've learned between this season and last -- the fastest route out to the subway in the endless corridors of Penn Station.

More Boca, No More Ford Falcons

On to Caminito, one of the major tourist fly traps of the city, where the houses are brightly painted and over the last twenty years the quality of the street art has gotten much worse, and the subject matter of the work has narrowed to two words -- tango crap. You can pose with tango dancers or stick your head through one of the tango or beer belly cardboard cutouts. But there are still deserted tables under Quilmes umbrellas where eventually a mozo shows up and you order a beer and an empanada and watch the young couple in the cement playground across the way dancing tango (it´s not of course the dance that merits the "crap" epithet, it´s the crass industry around it) to recorded music, under the wall photo of this year´s Boca squad, and look forward and back. Here in Boca, in San Telmo, and in Palermo around the corner from our rental, there were four far more eloquent reminders of the military reign of state terrorism than spray painted slogans or even, by this time, grandmothers´ head scarves. Simple plaques in the sidewalk or -- in San Telmo´s case -- Dorrego Plaza reading, "Aqui vivio (name), victima del terrorismo del estado, desaparecido el (date the person was taken away)" At another site in Boca there is a list of union members who disappeared, in one case on the same day, a 39 year old mother and her 17 year old son. There was simply no excuse on earth for it. Argentina now, for all its faults, no longer carries the threat of the cruising Ford Falcons late at night. I walked around the handicraft fair in the Palermo Viejo plaza, seeing some very alternative people and thought that thirty years ago some of them would not have been let alive to sell their trade. Tom Paine -- profiled in a New Yorker review of books about him -- would have had some thoughts about all that. There weren´t -isms in Tom´s days, but it´s a fair bet he would have thought as little of them as he did of religion. To an old woman who came "from Almighty God to tell you that if you do not repent of your sins...you will be damned," Paine replied, "God would not send such a foolish ugly woman as you."

City Tour

One day we took a city tour for an afternoon. First stop was the Plaza de Mayo, rundown, defaced, and to my eyes at least, bereft of much to inspire national pride. It´s one thing to have causes; it´s hard to see how spray painted slogans on national monuments -- the Cabildo, the National Cathedral, and the National Bank, fine old, if not well-maintained buildings all -- advance those causes. (To be fair, a few days later we wound up again in the Plaza and the Cathedral at least had been cleaned up.) On the other hand, the Casa Rosada is surrounded by barricades and scaffolding, getting a facelift and a careful, total new paint job that Dana Dee says she read is driven by historical documents on the exact color. To judge by what has been painted so fair, it should perhaps be re named Casa Salmon. We moved on to La Bombonera, stadium of Boca Juniors, capacity 58000 and so nicknamed because to some, seen from above, it looks like an open box of chocolates. Inside the Boca museum store, among other useful items, one can purchase a computer keyboard in Boca colors of blue and gold, as well as a model Bombonera music box that presumably plays the Boca anthem. There is also a lifesize monument to Maradona, the young, athletic Maradona, not the fat, drug-addled Maradona. He is in gold fiberglass, standing with his hand over his heart as the Himno Nacional is presumably being played. Call it Monument to a Cheat since the "Hand of God" goal that gave Argentina its Copa Mundial in 1986 has long since been revealed to be the "Hand of Maradona." In the US we pursue an African-American who may be a cheat and who doesn´t treat the press nicely by empaneling a grand jury and when it expires without enough evidence to indict, empaneling another grand jury. In Argentina a sporting cheat is a national hero.

One of BA´s great charms, like New York´s, is that it is a splendid city to get lost in and, among all the crowds, to hide out it. The beauty of both places is that you don´t need an absence of people or a swath of empty planet to do either. All you need is a few square feet and the indifference of the surrounding energy.

Calor Sofocante

There have been several days of what the BA newpapers are fond of calling "un calor sofocante." As with the rest of the world, temperature doesn't count anymore; it's the "sensacion termica," which reached 106 F on New Year's Day, the hottest New Year's in a decade. On one of the earlier days like that, we went to the long-standing Embassy steakhouse hangout, the Rio Alba. With each bite of chorizo steak there I sweated more despite the air conditioning. Then that night I jogged around nine, still with the temp almost surely 90 degrees. Dana Dee and I went out later for something to eat and when we stopped at Filippos near our house -- great ice cream and the irresistible pastiche outside its entrance of Carlos Gardel in his standard stud of tango pose with a Filippo cone in his hand -- the rain finally began. It lasted all night -- as it has on two other occasions since we've been here -- and, after spectacular lightning and sleep-shaking thunder, finally ended when we got up around 10. These storms at night are a wonderful part of Buenos Aires and on that particular Sunday morning only after noon did Palermo begin to stir. The NYT Travel feature section quarterly said "Porteños would only venture to this original part of the city to visit the old folks or when the Peugeot needed fixing." Or, as our experience with our Peugeot in the 80's was, when something was wrong that the garage could fix while also nicking something else that would assure I'd be bringing it back in another couple weeks for the same cycle to begin again.