Bob Drops In to Reverend Ike's Place

Bob Dylan has probably played at stranger venues than the United Palace in the Ft. Washington area of far north Manhattan, but at the moment I cannot think of one and I certainly have never been in one.

The theater used to be one of the grand old movie theaters that abounded in the US up through the fifties and sixties. Now, of course, they are almost entirely gone and at some point in the past the Palace was acquired by Reverend Ike,who -- I see from Wikipedia -- had an enormously successful radio ministry in the 70's and went to his final reward in July this year. The Rev gave the old theater a complete makeover featuring a huge organ, enough gild to cover Broadway from Ft. Washington down to about Wall Street, and some heavily Moorish design touches. Prominently displayed high above the entrance lobby are some of Ike's personal aphorisms, including "Life takes from the taker and gives to the giver," "It's nice to be important, but more important to be nice," and, my personal favorite, "There is nothing so bad as a good excuse. The better the excuse the worse it is."

Anyhow, at some point, Ike and/or his business advisers apparently began leasing out the Palace for concerts. Beck and Arcade Fire are among those who have turned up there. The three nights in November, his last concerts of 2009 in The Neverending Tour, were Bob's second stop -- at least -- in the Palace. Perhaps it is a talisman to him, like his Academy Award that is always onstage every time Bob performs. (These nights it had been placed very visibly on an amp at stage front to Bob's left.) My friend Julieta says the traveling Oscar is Bob making an ironic statement. I'll stick with talisman. After all, this is the guy who was shaped by Gorgeous George and Bobby Vee! Not to mention Must Be Santa as a polks, which I just did.

I was at two of the three concerts, the first -- with my wife -- unfortunately featured muddied sound (although that may have been due to our seats far right only six rows from the stage) and a disappointing setlist that included three songs I wish Bob would permanently drop -- the inane Cat's in the Well, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, and John Brown, with its tale of the hideously but ludicously maimed war veteran coming home that reminds me of nothing so much as the knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who continues feisty even as his body parts are lopped off one by one.

But night two, with my son, sublime...a few rows further back, but dead center so the band and Bob's vocals both came through clear and probably the best set list I've heard from Bob including Stuck Inside of Mobile, Man in the Long Black Coat, High Water, Most Likely You'll Go Your Way, and the beautiful new Forgetful Heart. Plus beer in the lobby after the concert was discounted to a keg clearing $2 a glass. We soaked in Ike's wisdom and said to a woman my age and her companion, who were coming back for night three, "tonight was much better than last night." "Oh, no," they replied, "last night was so much better." There you go, as always, Bob's found in the eye of the beholder.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

So why is it that Christmas tree vendors set up shop about every two blocks in Manhattan? My son-in-law's answer: that's about as far as carless New Yorkers can drag their fresh tree back to their apartment. Sounds good to me.

The Hallmark Christmas Channel in a Mexican Bar Restaurant

Who knew? There is actually someone living in New York who walks into a Mexican bar restaurant, looking a bit like George from the Seinfeld show, who asks for bread with his order, is amazed when they don't have it, only tortillas, who asks for the TV remote and pilots it away from the last 30 seconds of Wisconsin-Duke, Wisconsin by 2 and all the FIFA news of the coming World Cup draw, and gives us instead the Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center as reported on News at 11, and then searches painstakingly until he finds the Hallmark Christmas channel and some movie with the one-time world's prettiest boy, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, my son said, (one-time prettiest only because he looked a bit like Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People) dressed in a Santa's helper costume and needing to get his huge dog somewhere by air, so he flies in the kennel through storm-tossed skies with him. I think it would have been bizarre even if my fever didn't feel like 102. Do such people exist in New York? When will I learn that all garden and exotic variety of people exist in New York? Then he proceeded to block the entrance talking on his cell phone when I wanted to leave, get home, walk my little dog, and -- bliss -- get into bed and cover myself with about 17 layers of blankets. Oh, btw, Wisconsin 73, Duke 69 -- yes!

A Cell Phone Time Check

So it was a brilliant evening with my son, dinner at Le Relais de Venise L'Entrecote on Lex Ave and 52nd. One menu item, entrecote steak (you get it four ways -- blue, rare, medium and well, none of this medium rare, medium well over-tuning), frites, green salade with walnuts to start, house wine, and desserts including creme brulee. The waitress, for they are all women and all dressed in black with a little white smock trim, serves you seconds on the meat, heaps on the fries -- fully understanding that life's too short for lukewarm French fries -- and drops by from time to time to see how you are doing, but otherwise let's you have at it. All this -- if you skip wine and dessert -- for just under $25 per person. Crazy prices for New York. And then on the 6 train down to Astor Place and Webster Hall for The Mountain Goats, full band this time behind the chief Goat, John Darnielle, who looks -- in his glasses and short haircut -- like Buddy Holly on speed, but of course Buddy Holly would be on speed today, who can play like a heavy metal wannabe and who writes lyrics that few others his age can even approach. Not to overquote myself but it's past 1 AM and I can't think new thoughts -- here's an excerpt from my Amazon review of his maybe best CD The Sunset Tree: "He sings here of life with an abusive stepfather, a subject not exactly made for easy listening, but The Sunset Tree, a humane and sympathetic freeing from a sad past, is not bitter, achieves strength and -- particularly in Song for Dennis Brown -- addresses some universal and inescapable experiences. This might sound like dreary medicine to take, but instead there is a cheerful, pop (N.B. In concert the pop ramps up to loud rock) edge to some of the music, most notably in Dance Music and This Year. A greater reason, though, is Darnielle's own storytelling -- his stepfather sounds like a monster, but he is not denied his own humanity ("you are sleeping off your demons") and Darnielle even manages -- on hearing of the man's death -- to recall a fragile good memory, going together in an early morning years previously to watch horses work out. It helps too that in this history Darnielle recogizes his own teenaged self as not exactly perfect, describing himself and a girlfriend as 'twin high-maintenance machines.'"

This was the best of the three MG concerts I've seen here in New York, but still, in the encore set, I sneaked a look at my cell phone saw it was 11:26 and said to myself, "by 1 I'll be in bed." The years. Or as Indy said in Raiders, "it's not the years, honey, it's the mileage." One or the other, things add up and wear you down.

W. 23rd and 8th Ave, Chelsea

A little past two in the afternoon of a beautiful Thanksgiving Day, probably 55 degrees, and this is where I sight the first corner Christmas tree stand of the new season. I mean, if you bought one there, today, what kind of condition would it be in by Christmas?

But the wave has started--five miles on the bicycle later, through crowded Central Park, on this perfect day even more than usual every individual's own private Idaho, and onto 11oth, up toward Amsterdam, the support scaffolding is going up for another, nearly-block-long stand, the "We accept credit cards" giant sign already in place.

You can take any almost any scene in this city and write your own script. I saw this one starting the ride, coasting the wrong way down that hill toward 125th. At the bottom a car stops and a woman, late 30's, blonde, plump, gets out, closes the door behind her, no slamming and walks off toward 125th. The car stops, then follows her. In it two children, 6 and 8 maybe, and a man driving. He parks a little up from where the woman must walk and as she passes, first the girl, then the little boy get out and run over and hug her, clinging. The guy never got out of the car. The woman was neither crying nor angry. I watch for a while, maybe three minutes, before heading down to the river bike path. Here's my script -- a family fight on Thanksgiving, she says, "enough, let me out, I'm gone," maybe for the day, maybe for good. The kids, holding on to a leg, an arm, "Mommy, please get back in the car." Both of the adults so calm, so resolute, this has been a long time coming.

Or it could just be a beloved aunt, walking back to her apartment after a visit, and the kids want to hug her some more.

From A-Rod to A-ida

Getting to our seats at the Met Friday night for Aida, an over-the-top crowd-pleaser production that has now been around for 21 seasons (since we got back from living in Argentina, since Reagan was President, for crying out loud), that features horses parading on the stage in Act 2, the presence of big, live animals on stage always greeted by huge applause, sometimes New York is just an overgrown Lodi. Anyway, on the way to our seats, we were passed by two guys dressed head to toe in Yankees gear. They called out jovially, "We've come straight from the parade." Since the parade had ended about six hours previously their parade must have included stops at a few friendly saloons. They made it through Act 2.

I close my eyes and see Matsui's ball rising toward right field, all of us out of our seats and suddenly beginning to believe the crisp night was going to end well.

The Series and the Supreme Court

From a Yankees fan perspective, don't read the Times or the Daily News or the Post or whatever, here's all you need to know about last night:

1) Sitting in the drizzle was miserable. Baseball really does need to stand up to the tail (network TV) that dictates when the dog plays.

2) When the drizzle stopped, it was like watching baseball in San Francisco on a cool night, OK, but hardly optimal.

3) For the Yankees the sooner the game is forgotten the better. The game echoed the old -- and maybe still current -- Supreme Court definition of pornography -- no redeeming social value.

Sometimes, Yes, It Really Is That Simple

Once on the great Six Feet Under, David, like all the Fisher family frequently did, was having a conversation with his dead father. They looked out a window of David's home at a rainy day and David was nattering on about his (very) real and (very) imagined tortures and Nathaniel Sr. said, more or less, "Hey, buddy boy, wake up, you're alive. I'm dead." And, as I remember the scene, probably wrongly, he faded away, leaving David alone at the window to say aloud, "Is it really that simple?"

Well, yes, sometimes, maybe rarely, it is. It's a crisp, colder than usual for mid-October day, DD's birthday, the sky is deep blue with many white clouds, the visibility seemed endless both north past the GW Bridge -- I could see the traffic glinting with sunlight and actually moving in the mid-morning -- and south to the tip of the island on the Hudson River bikeway, almost deserted and I rolled along, nothing on my mind at all except the cold but comfortable breeze bending past it, and an afternoon at the museum and birthday dinner at our favorite restaurant, River Cafe, still ahead. It also doesn't hurt that the Yankees are in the ALCS against the Angels starting Friday and we'll be there.

Boos at the Met

We were in Lincoln Plaza for the gala opening of the new Met season Monday night, the performance inside broadcast on HD screens in the Plaza and a mile further south in Times Square. Tosca by Puccini. This Tosca, the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila , has been plastered -- poised to leap to her death -- for weeks on pretty near every bus and billboard in Manhattan. Director Luc Bondy promised a production that would not get in the way of the music. Still pretty new to all this, I came with no expectations, a rudimentary -- mostly act III -- knowledge of the plot and no understanding of the historical background or, for that matter, that each of the three acts is set in a real place that can still be visited. So for me, the production succeeded. The settings seemed functional, too dark, austere, but not distracting from the music. The palace vamps cavorting with Scarpia (George Gagnidze) at the beginning of Act II were a bit cringe-inducing, aside from most assuredly not appearing in the libretto, but I was OK with Tosca slashing her lover's painting and Scarpia canoodling with a statue of the Madonna. It certainly wasn't the 25 year old Zefferelli production, beloved by many, never seen by me, but it was believable -- Scarpia is a conniving lout, Tosca is jealous and passionate -- and true, I thought, to the goal of letting the music speak. The principals and conductor James Levine received rich ovations at curtain call, but then the storm of boos for Bondy and the production team, took us completely by surprise and seemed to have the same impact on the cast and artistic team. The line of held hands swayed, and seemed for a moment unsure whether to step forward again into the mixed reception, for some cheers had now answered the booing. Here's the lesson: you stay there bowing no matter what the sounds. And here's another: a little controversy is good for box office; the remaining Tosca performances are all sold out. And here's a third: in New York at least, don't mess with an overstuffed warhorse. But the bottom line, I think, is that unlike Mary Zimmerman who last season thought so little of La Somnabula that she had to wrap it as an opera within the opera cliche, Bondy did respect the work and gave it a setting to unleash its complexity and its passion. The singers did the rest and did it well.

Sam Visits the Hospice

On a wonderful late summer day in NYC Sam and I walked up to Riverdale from the subway station, much stopping and being petted along the way, and into the suite of one of my favorite patients at the hospice. Sam led the way; he's familiar with all the rooms we visit, but particularly this one because we've been seeing her for several months now. And it was empty, which usually means only one thing and since E. has been declining rapidly, often sleeping over the last few weeks, I was afraid we'd lost her too. But, no she had been moved to another, larger room so her companion could stay with her. He was out of the room, but she was with two of her relatives from Scotland and, although very weak, wonderfully awake and alert. Because she likes him so well, I take Sam with me almost every visit, hoping to find her like today on one hand and on the other knowing that each time might be her last. In the year we have had Sam, it's been one consolation whenever one of my patients dies if they got to see Sam the last time I visited. I don't know, it feels like a good last stage memory for them. And so it will be for E. -- I lifted Sam up on to her bed and for fifteen minutes she petted him and talked softly to him while he gave her his biggest compliment, a licking of her thin, thin arms. After we saw other patients, and before we left, once more. She was nearly asleep but rallied to wake at the promised return of Sam and again, the two of them on the bed, she petting, he licking and me just glad to be there with them.

2722 and 2723 For Good Measure

I have a picture of the swing Derek Jeter took tonight for his 2722nd hit as a Yankee, breaking Lou Gehrig's record. The hit was a shot just inside the first base line, past the diving Oriole first baseman,Luke Scott. On any other night, the game probably would have been postponed for it rained all day in New York, was raining at game time, was raining when the game started an hour plus late, was raining when Jeter struck out in his first at bat, and rained on and off throughout the game, currently in a rain delay in the seventh inning, nearly six hours after it was supposed to begin. I imagine the crowd size looks something like this now:



These folks were part of the throng of 413 who watched the Yankees lose to the White Sox 4-1 on September 22, 1966.

Derek added number 2723 in the fourth inning, both hits coming after I had to have someone buy me a beer for the first time since I was 19 or so. They card everyone at the Stadium and I'd gone up, once it was clear the game would be played, in my pocketless sweatpants, so no ID. The woman wouldn't let me pay her for it. We were all festive in the rain, at that time 45000 or so. I said "You'll have a great story from tonight, how you bought a beer for a 63 year old man because he couldn't prove he was 21 on the night Jeter broke Gehrig's record."

Later, somewhere in the midst of horrible Yankee relief pitching that turned the game into an Oriole rout I ate institutional nachos and watched the showers fall against the stadium lights and thought that with the temperature 15 or so degrees lower this is how it might be on November 5 when if everything breaks right, Game 7 of the World Series will be played in the new palace. November frigging 5th! There will, however, be considerably more than 413 people hanging around then, no matter the length, no matter the cold, no matter the wet.

Throw Out the Damn Incumbent! Elect Mike Bloomberg!! Oh, Wait.....

Where Rudy Giuliani failed, Mike Bloomberg has succeeded in getting term limits removed so that he can run for another four years as NYC's mayor. He has, at best, token opposition but he is pouring millions of his own money into the campaign just, I suppose, to remove all doubt of a landslide win. Overall, I think he deserves to win, if not the landslide.

Still, the campaign does make for its amusing moments as in the relentless TV and mailers that pound away at New Yorkers's discontent with their transit service. In our mailbox the other day I found a slick four page ad that on its cover showed a long line of citizens standing at a bus stop, the line at right angles to the curb, something you never see in the City, but that's another story. The bus is pulling up (or, more likely, about to whiz by with one of those "Out of Service" signs on front where its route number should be) and into a large font red headline that says, "Sick of Your Lousy Commute?" And at the bottom of the page, in equally large blue, "Support Mike Bloomberg's MTA Reform Plan," as if Mike Bloomberg was the insurgent candidate running against the old Tammany Hall gang instead of the man who has been, uh, mayor of the city and ultimately responsible for MTA performance the last eight years. Ah, politics, such good fun.

SEIZED!

Blondie's is a sports bar watering hole along W. 79th that we pass walking from the 1 line to the AMNH. Nights it's usually packed, several televisions inside and sometimes spillover outside. So it was with some surprise I saw not long ago two orange "SEIZED" stickers from the New York State tax commissioner's office plastered across the doors and windows. They read, "This property has been seized for non-payment of taxes and is now in possession of the State of New York."

A smaller, photocopied note from the bar management apologized for "this unexpected inconvenient situation..." and stated that ownership was "in the midst of resolving the issue when this unanticipated action occurred..."

Let's see here, "in the midst of resolving" -- would that be paying up what we owe? And "unanticipated" -- would that be I don't pay, but nothing bad will happen? No, for the future Blondies has maybe discovered another "inconvenient truth" through this "inconvenient situation" -- taxes need to be paid.

It was a bit like the Simpsons episode where on April 15 Marge asks Homer if he's paid the Simpsons tax bill for that year and Homer says, "Pssh, I did that last year."

Disaster in Central Park

These three pictures graphically portray the damage to the Park in a ferocious microburst thunderstorm late in the evening of August 18. For all Park lovers, it was a tragedy, and a sharply defined one -- everything below 90th Street was completely untouched. Above that? The Parks Commissioner called it the worst damage he's seen in 30 years connected with the Park. I work as a tour guide volunteer for the Central Park Conservancy and will also be manning membership and donation tables this week. One can also donate at the Conservancy site. If you have ever been in the Park or look forward to the day when you first set foot in the Park, please consider a donation.

Michael Vick

Excuse me, but what is the issue here?

Michael Vick was convicted of doing a terrible thing (I write as two dogs lie sleeping at my feet), sentenced to prison for it, served his time and was released. Since that release, he has continued to be mentored by one of America's real idols, Tony Dungy, partnered with the American Humane Society to counter the issues and mentality his crime displayed, and worked with at-risk youth. If the purpose of prison is both to punish and to rehabilitate, Vick appears -- on the early evidence -- to be one of the shining cases where the purpose has been met. The man deserves a chance to continue demonstrating that he has changed and to continue practicing his career, which just happens to be professional football player. Why then the outrage from so many quarters that the Philadelphia Eagles signed him to a contract? Last time I looked second chances were supposed to be one of the things this country is all about.

As he did in the furor about Barry Bonds, the NYT's columnist William Rhoden offers a welcome, articulate, and unhyperventilating view:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/15/sports/football/15rhoden.html?scp=4&sq=August+15+2009&st=nyt

Let's Play George Mitchell Jeopardy

It's easy! It's fun! It's free!

Answer: The Boston Red Sox. Question: For which MLB team's front office has George Mitchell worked?

Answer: The Boston Red Sox. Question: For which MLB team did George Mitchell's 2007 report find no player involvement in performance enhancing drugs?

Answer: The Boston Red Sox. Question: With which team are the two biggest names in this season's wave of steroid use revelations/charges (Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz) most prominently associated?

The NYT on Monday was the first printed reference to this fact that I'd seen, and it noted that the former Senate majority leader denied that his association with the Red Sox influenced his report. And probably that is so, but who among us -- even former Senators -- would look equally thoroughly at allegations regarding our friends and those we don't directly know and like?

Personally, I imagine this sort of dialogue:

Mitchell: "Theo, about the use of performance enhancing substances among the Red Sox..."

Theo Epstein: "Senator, Terry and I have talked to all the guys and they all say no one's doing it. Nothing going on in our clubhouse, no ways."

Mitchell: "Well, maybe I should talk to a few of the players, or maybe a clubhouse employee."

Epstein: "C'mon, George, I told you Terry and I have checked it out. You know we're good."

Mitchell: "Yes, you're right, sounds thorough to me."

Epstein: "Great. Have a good trip to New York. You heard about that former clubhouse guy there...?

Coulda Been a Song Doctor

OK, if you don't know the song by Joe Ely Me and Billy the Kid, first you watch this You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11gxJDrcxq8

I always thought the key line toward the end of the song was "...but I didn't like the way he swayed in the wind when I played him his favorite song," but turns out that Joe wrote "...I did like...". What's that? Exactly what you would expect -- frameup, betrayal, and live happily ever after with the cute senorita in the triangle. I don't think so. Is that the way life works? No, Joe, the twist should be that after you betray Billy and he hangs, you are haunted by what you've done and you lie awake for hours, listening to the pocket watch tick and the wind howl. That's the twist of betrayal. The wages of sin, after all, should be at least guilt.

It's Great to Be Back in NYC

1) At nearly 1 AM Saturday morning, eight hours after I get back to JFK from Seattle, I'm sitting in front of the tube watching the longest scoreless tie in Yankee - Red Sox history when A-Rod gets a hanging curve just above the knees and hits it so hard and so fast that the ball is out of the picture and clearly gone before the mind can even compute that he's hit it. Yankees go on to sweep four, and October here we come.

2) Bianca and I are at the Lincoln Center multiplex Saturday night, in the second row for the mostly entertaining, but just a bit too impressed with itself 500 Days of Summer when a guy sneaks in from another theater in the complex, takes a seat in the front row, takes a call on his cell phone, and spends the next hour in the mostly dark drawing on a sketch pad, sketches that have nothing to do with what's on the screen.

3) Sunday morning 8:15 or so I'm riding home with hot bagels and pedal past a Columbia doorway where a guy in blue hospital orderly garb -- apparently with Blue Tooth activated, but since this is after all NYC maybe declaiming to himself , "I don't want a hooker, I want a girlfriend!"

4) It's now August 10 and for the first time this summer NYC will hit 90 degrees.

5) Pretenders and Cat Power on Summer Stage in Central Park tonight and Leonard Cohen tickets bought for his MSG stop October 23.

Yes to it all.

Sometimes, Yes, It is OK to Judge a Book By Its Cover

Or in this case a CD. Caveat emptor -- never, ever consider buying a CD that on its cover pictures a bearded youngish man sitting on a porch, straight backed chair tipped back, smiling goofily. Even more if he has a guitar in his hands. Let me translate the meaning of this picture for you; it says, "Hi, there, I'm hopelessly derivative of some style whose apex was reached by a group like the Kingston Trio twenty years before I was born, but I've discovered how to love life in all its complexities (I even love my romantic pain!) and sing about it with a summer deluge (which, by the way, I'm watching from this front porch we've specially rented for this picture) of rhyming cliches."

There, my public service announcement of the day.

My Daddy Drives This Bus

We were on the M60, after getting off the Metro North train at 125th on our way back from the coming back from the Botanical Garden a few days ago. Three people boarded at one stop, two young girls -- maybe 8 and 10 -- and their mother. None of them paid and the Law and Order Me began silently harrumphing. Until I noticed the two girls, who were sitting in the front long right side seat running along the aisle, watching the driver, giving small waves and smiles to him. He demonstrated the bus horn for them, a couple soft toots as he changed lanes or crossed an intersection, and then while stopped at a light asked, "How was your day?" By this time I'd figured it out; they were his little girls and wife. Still may have been scofflaws, of course, or maybe free rides for your family is one benny of being an MTA bus driver. But watching these little girls flirting with their dad and being so shyly proud that he was driving the bus, new job? or maybe the thrill of daddy driving never fades, kind of made my day. Contributed to making the driver's too as we got off in front and I said, "Nice family." He replied, "Thank you" and closed the door behind us. Got a schedule to keep up.

The Amazing July

Tomorrow night we fly to Seattle for a couple weeks. It will be like flying to stay in the same place, for New York in July this year has been Seattle in July. Each day dawns cool and clear, warms to the high 70's or no more than the low 80's, with huge clear blue skies speckled with billowed clouds of the sort that make kids say, "There's an elephant, and that's a lion, and that's a...", and -- the best gift of all -- practically no humidity. Central Park is filled, the subways don't smell, even the street scenes seem to move more slower, as if everyone in them cannot quite believe this gift and wants to revel in it. I keep expecting it to end and halfway through the month, it hasn't yet.



Here's a photo from the web of the Stonehenge effect in NYC. Twice a year, in the periods May 28-30 and July 11-13, the sun sets exactly in the middle of the E-W numbered streets along the city's grid. As it gets more widely known each year, it's becoming yet another visitors' attraction.

"Is This the New Normal?"

Twelfth Night closed last night at Shakespeare in the Park. After fruitlessly pursuing the Virtual Line lottery for several days, I got up at 5:15 after an all-night rain and rode down to the park to be in this kind of daily line by 6 AM. Passing all the "Line Continues Here" signs, I saw no one, and no one, and no one until reaching the box office and still no one except a police car, where an amplified voice said, "The line is on Central Park West at 81st." And so it was, all the way, as I kept pedaling, up to 87th. I guess it was outside because the Park is officially closed from 1 AM to 6 AM. Right at six, Public Theater employees started moving us into place in the usual location. Also as usual, there were an astonishing number of people in line who appeared to have raised the money for their free tickets by asking for spare change on Manhattan street corners. Or who were, at a minimum, not your usual Shakespeare crowd. My part of the line inched past all the usual locations, still was not positioned at the Pinetum and still not at the beginning of the reservoir, whose only proximity to the Delacourt Theater is that it occupies part of the Parks 843 acres. Finally, we came to where we would have stationed ourselves and the genial Public guy said, "You people have absolutely no chance to get a ticket. Go home and enjoy the rest of your Sunday." Some woman asked the title question, meaning is it now necessary to get up at 1:30 to get Shakespeare tickets or hire a linesitter. No, he assured, this is closing night, it rained all the month of June -- true, New York has never been so green in summer -- and the reviews for this show were the best in 20 years for Summer Shakespeare.

So I did what Ringo once said, in a different context, the Beatles would do after their run -- got myself a sesame bagel with cream cheese from Absolute Bagels and sat in Riverside Park and moped.

Not the Bible Summer Camp Takeaway?

Richmond is full of vacation bible camps. In most cases, I gather, these are essentially week-long or two week-long summer substitutes for school or day care. Our younger grandson was enrolled in one. The campers are supposed to have a dollar each day to place in the offertory plate. But one day our guy came home, said his mom, with two dollars. When asked why, he replied that he'd bet his (5 year old too) girlfriend that Jesus would not come to the bible school on that day. My reaction would have been to congratulate him on finding what would appear to be pretty much a sure thing bet, but instead his mom marched him back to the church where they left the two dollars on the offertory plate.

Later, as more details emerged, it turned out that each day a teacher dressed as a different bible character visited the campers. And on the day our boy won his bet, it was Mary, not Jesus. Sometimes less information is a whole lot more fun.

He probably would have enjoyed this:

Brooklyn Museum

Another belated discovery of NYC life.

On yet another rainy day in June, Father's Day, we went to the Brooklyn Museum, a wonderful surprise. The immediate destination was the Gustave Caillebotte exhibition. Unknown to me before the exhibition opened several months ago, Caillebotte turns out to not only to have been an influential early impressionist himself, a patron to others -- Renoir, Monet -- and, in the last decade of his short life, a world-class yacht designer and racer who designed some of the first keeled yachts. He is known for his long (recession) views of street and water scenes and for his detailing of light and shadow on surfaces, especially water. The one above is titled Factories in Argenteuil.

Most of the pictures in the exhibition came from private collections rather than from other museums. A reflection of Caillebotte's relative and -- on the merits of this show -- undeserved obscurity?

If we went for the Caillebotte show, we were maybe even more impressed by the Luce Center for American Art, which through eight galleries collects American art by each epoch of the nation's life. Exhibiting paintings side-by-side with, e.g., sculpture, Native American artifacts, and items of daily life is an inspired innovation for understanding multiple artistic elements in play at the same time, but even that innovation pales next to the Visible Storage Center, where a visitor can actually wander into a temperature controlled environment and see over a thousand different pieces from the Museum's American collections as -- in other places -- only a curator might see them.

All this takes places in open, remodeled spaces free of the crowds that would have been found in the Big Four or Five -- AMNH, Met, MoMA, Guggenheim, Whitney -- back in Manhattan on a rainy Sunday.

We'll be back.

Corrupting the Granddaughter

In Richmond, where the kids are doing their usual fine job with this one. She's nearly nine months and yesterday I was noodling around on You Tube while she was bouncing in her hanging jump seat. I started up this Superchunk video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKZyEfG1nw0

and maxed it on the computer screen, turned the sound up and for three repeats she stared immobile at the screen. Grandpa's here two days or so and undoes all their good work. Well, who knows maybe in about 18 years the band will be looking for a new bass player?

And, also yesterday, pretty much nailed down an apartment in Paris for October. The owner called from the UK and said the most important thing to him was that his apartment be taken well care of because "I'm a really neat person." Uh, yes, I think we can do that.

On an Otherwise Ordinary Day,

you are minding your own business when suddenly you are the one person a day on the planet for whom the universe folds, or wrinkles, or aligns up its dark matter and in that instant before normality reasseerts itself you choose to step through or you choose to stay. Perhaps counterintuitively, I think that the happier your life has been the more likely you are to disappear, as they say, without a trace.

I actually have this thought fairly often, but watching once again Werner Herzog's superb documentary on Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, and the wonder that he brings to the continent and what lies within it and beyond it, only redoubled the thought. And now back to an ordinary Saturday....

Photography at the New York Historical Society

We went to a preview recently of two new photography exhibits at the NYHS. Both have value; both have flaws that make them less than they could be. The first is of designated historical landmark buildings in NYC. The photographs, nearly a hundred, are in black and white, by mostly unknown photographers. Just the act of grouping together photos of such landmarks is a great informative service and the NYHS is apparently only the latest on a world tour of the exhibition, bringing the best of NYC architecture to sometimes surprisingly remote places around the globe (Pietermaritzberg, South Africa for one). But the photos themselves often do not do justice to the real buildings and the stenciled wall description of the project mostly describes the bumpy life of the Historical Preservation Act, rather than add any depth to the exhibit. It is about as mis-aimed as any exhibition commentary I have ever seen. By contrast, though, the individual accompanying texts at each photograph do a wonderful job of describing the building, its location and its history.

The second is a series of photos taken over 30 years in Harlem by the photographer Jose Vergara. It received a rave review in today's NYT. My enthusiasm is more muted. The idea of photographing the same location over a period of time is hardly new (see the fine film Smoke, for example), but Vergara's photos in that style mark Harlem's changes well. You see decline, dereliction, abandonment and rebirth, sometimes all, sometimes stopping at dereliction or abandonment. My problem is with the texts more than the pictures. They and the accompanying quotes from Vergara seem to me to mourn the loss of much of Harlem's rundown storefronts to national chains. That's wrong, I think. The point is the ongoing second Harlem Renaissance and while a more indigenous flavor would be a a excellent thing, the tragedy is not box stores, but the long deterioration that preceded them. At times the exhibition's commentary almost apotheosizes that decline. In fact, Harlem and the city are much better off rid of much of what Vergara has photographed over the last 30 years. So see the photos, ignore the commentary. My personal favorite -- the wall or store front painting of a drug dealer descending from Heaven on his motorcycle. The halo is a particularly nice touch.

How Skilled a New Yorker I've Become!

The other night leaving Yankee Stadium after the Yankees eighth or ninth win in a row we pressed in among the mass heading through the subway turnstiles at 161st and River Ave to head back to Manhattan. There's always the tourist or the clueless who can't make their card work or they try six "insufficient fare" cards in a row from their pocket. The line behind presses and groans and, when I used to come to visit or in my first year or so living here, I'd worry that I too might slide the Metro card wrong or too slowly and stall the stampede. But this night, yes this night!, I swiped the card so perfectly that the LED "Go" indicator on the turnstile from the previous person didn't even turn off before it clicked me through. Kind of like the newly minted boy scout A-Rod timing a 3-2 pitch perfectly and ripping it deep into the left field bleachers. OK, maybe it's not quite that superb a skill, but it's a skill!

We Built This City

Every once in a while I draw great guilty pleasure from a truly awful song. Case in point this morning -- We Built This City. Terrible in ways almost too numerous to count -- the monotonous music, the laughable arrogance (built this city? Come on, we're talking about San Francisco here, 60 years recovered from a devastating earthquake before Jefferson Airplane ever first flew.), the name calling at corporate mediocrity when corporate mediocrity defines Starship in its precipitous and endless decline from the joyous Airplane days a couple decades earlier in the Fillmore Ballroom. Listen to the lyrics and add to this list.

But, but...although my iTunes version sadly doesn't have it, in one of the many versions of WBTC, there is a spliced in voiceover of an anonymous (to me at least) SF dj from the glory days of KYA or KFRC AM Top Forty and every time I hear that I am thrown back to all those sunny Sixties days driving across the Bay Bridge from Berkeley into San Francisco and the wonder of what-comes-next.



And even more, in Buenos Aires, 1984-85, when WBTC would unexpectedly show up on Argentine radio, and I'd grab the then baby Joe, toss him up into the air, singing along, changing "city" to "baby" in the lyrics, and Joe laughing in that "this is scary, this is great" way that babies have before they discover that the laws of gravity rule them as well. It's about where Ellison is now.

Sam Sees A Cat

Watching television, sitting on the couch with us and cats. These three things the dog loves intersected the other night. We were rampaging through several episodes of Six Feet Under, having missed it entirely in its HBO run. As an aside, Nate and Brenda have precisely the same impact on me as Jack and Kate in our other TV junket, Lost. Whiny and annoying, they sow chaos whenever they turn up together. (Brenda and her brother Billy, on the other hand, are way beyond annoying, deep into creepy.) Anyway, thinking of the four of them I sometimes wish for a television, time-travel, and scientific first -- sychronized spontaneous combustion.

So Sam is snuggled between us on the couch when for one of the few times in the series an animal appears. He leaps off the couch to follow the cat. And as it moves from the left of the screen to the right, Sam walks alongside, trying to make friends, and when it moves off screen, Sam continues on the path, still friendly, and moving his head all around, looking for where that cat could have turned and hidden.

President Obama's Tweet as He Shakes Hands with Hugo Chavez?

"1 time wannabe golpista, now HR-violating Pres, hands me 40 yr old bk that insults country I lead. Wotta guy!"

I wish!

The New Ballpark

Hard to talk about intimacy in a place that seats over 52,000, let alone in an old place that sat 56,000, but from our Terrace seats in Section 313, while everything else is an upgrade in the new Yankee Stadium, intimacy is lost. Some combination of more steeply angled tiers, wider seats, even the most welcome beverage holders makes the new ballpark in the Terrace level more remote from the action than in the old park. I think it's height mostly; no foul ball came the least bit close today, when in the old Tier MVP location there were often several a game. Once I got one, off the bat of today's hero Jorge Posada, whose fly ball to deep right field stood up under video tape review as a home run even if the ball wound up back on the field after glancing off the Cleveland outfielder's glove. Getting one is not going to happen in this new location.

A major embarrassment for the Yankees has to be the 3/4 empty hugely expensive seats behind home plate. For anyone watching on TV today, the view in from the pitching mound to the batter saw mostly space not fans behind the backstop, giving the impression of a crowd of 10,00 or so rather than the nearly full stadium everywhere else. Even the Yankees having trouble selling tix for up to $2000 apiece in this economy.

As for the rest, it is all fine, more concession stands, more variety at those stands, no increase in prices for the things I buy (although at already outrageous levels that held price line is only a small blessing), more rest rooms -- if a bit oddly designed -- and, especially, the mostly open and very wide concourses, the hallmark of the modern ballparks and a ten gazillion percent improvement over the crowded and claustrophobic old ramps at the park still standing across the street.

And the still standing part is another story, an irritant for many in the Bronx community who increasingly are asking when do they get the pld park gone and a start on the promised replacements for the public park and playfields that were obliterated in the new construction.

The Second Day of Spring

We awoke on the first day of spring to fat snowflakes, no threat of accumulation, just the fall, hypnotic in its way, while the traffic and the trains cut through the white.

Many years ago I used to pass hours flopped on my bed, reading while listening to the radio, usually Top 40 and then through the late sixties to the great SF FM radio stations, and reading. It was a terrible way to study, but a great way to get lost in a novel or travel memoir. Somewhere I got away from that small but perfect pleasure. Could have been kids, could have been living abroad where the music often didn't interest me much, although now Latin is an often first choice. But lately I've been disinterring that pleasure, with the purchase of an iPod dock clock radio. Started last weekend in an upstairs bedroom in Richmond, during a weekend seeing the not-so-new-anymore granddaughter when the sun didn't come out for four days of nearly steady rain and temps that never got out of the forties. Continued during that first day snow and then today as a cold set in.

But, yesterday, that second day of spring, fine, sunny. I gave a great private tour at the museum to two visitors from Florida and then joined New York as it spilled outside, in my case to Riverside Park. The dark blue and lavender crocuses are up, daffodils stems are turning dark green, and even here and there a tulip stem breaks the surface. Couples and Westies were out in force, baseballs flew and smiles broke out on tight winter lips. It wasn't the temperature, which never made it above fifty. It was just the sun and that light spring scent on the air. As if that weren't enough, the shuffled iPod dished up these five songs on the twenty minute jog -- Between the Daylight and the Dark, Mary Gauthier; The Geese of Beverly Road, The National; Different, Acceptance (don't know the band, don't know how it ended up on my iPod, but a good Nada Surf-sounding lead singer); Wrecking Ball, Crooked Fingers; and Just A Girl I Used to Know, George Jones. World's turning again, and welcome.

New Directors/New Films

By far my favorite film festival in NYC. Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater and MoMA get together to screen about 25 films over two weeks in late March to early April. Most of the directors' names are unknown, ditto the actors; the films are drawn from all around the world and while there are many axes ground, they are at least not all laboring at the same one or two dreary grindstones, as in the more elaborate (and endlessly hyped) AmEx-sponsored Tribeca or the NYC Film Festivals that follow later in the spring. Some of the films in ND/NF deserve the obscurity to which they all soon return, but a few become memorable, Red Road from a couple years ago and the poignant The Grocer's Son from last year. Here's the link for this year: http://www.filmlinc.com/

I bought us five sets of tickets today, for Barking Water, Cold Souls, The Maid (I suspect from the film's description that she may have once worked for us!), Mid-August Lunch, and Parque via.

So When Are You, Like, a Real New Yorker?

Maybe this is one qualifier:

When one of the largest March snowstorms in recent memory is predicted and you re-book your flight for a day later, betting that your scheduled flight will be among the hundreds cancelled, only to find that it left a mere 45 minutes late and arrived, amidst the eight inches or whatever, only 40 minutes late this morning.

Leaving you unmoored in what has been for decades your favorite city in the US, on a changeable, but mostly fine, Pacific Northwest day, and little you can find to do except ask when you get to leave for the airport.

If You Have to Leave Hawaii...

here is the way to do it:

1) Traveling in the first class cabin to the mainland.

2) Reading the New York Times special Science section on Charles Darwin, on the bicentennial of his birthday, 2/12/09, the exact same day/month/year as Abraham Lincoln.

3) Making a limited understanding of opera a little less limited with Opera for Dummies.

4) Having the iPod spin up a particularly fine set of tunes from the Shuffle pick as background to the readings.


1) Yes, it's a wasteful extravagence, but here's the rationalization -- first class fares are no longer 2-3 times coach for domestic flights; I'm 6'3" and the flight time to Seattle is more than 5 hours; I don't do any expensive Big Boys toys; I don't spend $40K on a car when $15K will get me from A to B just as well, oops, I don't even own a car at all.

2) Here are a couple links to the articles I found most interesting, but the whole section is worthwhile.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/science/10humans.html?_r=1&scp=5&sq=Science%20times%202/10/09&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/science/10evolution.html?pagewanted=2&sq=Science%20times%202/10/09&st=cse&scp=1

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/02/09/science/20090209-darwin-evolution-documents.html?ref=sciencespecial2

From the second article, these observations: "Darwin is still far from being fully accepted in sciences outside biology. 'People say natural selection is O.K. for human bodies but not for brain or behavior,' Dr. Cronin says. 'But making an exception for one species is to deny Darwin’s tenet of understanding all living things. This includes almost the whole of social studies — that’s quite an influential body that’s still rejecting Darwinism.

"The yearning to see purpose in evolution and the doubt that it really applied to people were two nonscientific criteria that led scientists to reject the essence of Darwin’s theory. A third, in terms of group selection, may be people’s tendency to think of themselves as individuals rather than as units of a group. 'More and more I’m beginning to think about individualism as our own cultural bias that more or less explains why group selection was rejected so forcefully and why it is still so controversial,' says David Sloan Wilson, a biologist at Binghamton University."

3) The lessons in flight were two, the librettist as co-equal to the composer and the opera long-term partnerships of composer and librettist, equivalents of (pop) Lieber/Stoller, Goffin/King, Lennon/McCartney and (Broadway)Rodgers and Hart -- Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, Verdi and Arrigo Boito, Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who collaborated for 23 years, lived just an hour apart and practically never met; and how to read the cues of a score.

4) A bakers dozen playlist. Rhapsody.com, among others no doubt, permits hearing the whole song instead of those annoying 30 second snippets.

Air, Slumber Party
Childish Things, James McMurtry
The Geese of Beverly Road, The National
I'm Not There, Sonic Youth
I Am Weary (Let Me Rest), The Cox Family
Racing Daylight, Kid Silver
No Danger, The Delgados
Elvis Cadillac, Rickie Lee Jones
Diamonds in the Mine, The Broken Family Band
Westbound, Blue, Castanets
Thunderbird, John Hiatt
Disappear, Dolly Varden
Mandolin Wind, Rod Stewart

The Seventh Extinction

If you watch enough daytime TV, as I inadvertently did today working on my mother's taxes and other paper work, you can scarcely help but say "Bring it on" about the Seventh Extinction. There was the button-cute young couple raising their sextuplets (and older twins) before the cameras of -- I think -- TLC. There was Maury, where -- to hoots and cheers of the audience -- men, and today a woman, are tested for truth by DNA and lie detectors. Maury, who looks positively scary, perhaps too much Botox or tanning beds, opens the verdict envelope with the same zeal as an Oscar or "survey says..." Family Feud host. Dr. Phil is still peddling his tiresome shibboleths. And I didn't even get -- thank God -- to the tsunami of Judge So and So shows or The Hot Hormones (oops, I mean, Real) World. And we have the audacity to mock dinosaurs' intelligence.

Hawaii Who Knews?

1. That traveling to the world's most active volcano on the Big Island would feel like driving deep into the temperate rain forest of the Olympic Peninsula.

2. That the current eruption on said volcano has been going on more or less continually since 1983.

3. That the Hawaiian alphabet has no letter S.

4. That for many years the largest ranch in the United States, the Parker Ranch, was in Hawaii and Spanish-speaking cowboys managed the vast herds of cattle.

5. That humpback whales regularly entertain near the shores of Maui from November through about March.

6. That the ski season runs from January to February.

7. That the southernmost point of the United States is -- duh -- South Point on the Big Island.

8. That the bright idea of importing the mongoose to control rats did not work so well because the mongoose is diurnal and rats mostly nocturnal.

9. That the governor is an Republican woman, wildly popular in the state, who campaigned as an outsider and wears stylish glasses.

The Perfect Pisco Sour

You have found the perfect pisco sour when you feel totally normal as you are drinking it and then when you go to stand up you find you no longer have legs. The Pio Pio Restaurant, a Peruvian place on the NW corner of Amsterdam and 94th and one of six in the group in the city, comes as close as I've found in New York to that ideal. Their chicken empanandas are also the real thing, right down to the bit of hard boiled egg and olive inside each one.

http://www.piopionyc.com/

Awards Shows? Who Needs 'em?

With the Sopranos long gone, there is only one television moment in the year, aside from our weekly in-season engagement with Lost, that we need to watch, tonight's Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, where a man named -- honestly! -- Fred Bassett judged the toy group and where Best in Show went to the oldest winner in the 133 year history of the event, a Sussex Spaniel named Stump. He was the people's choice, like the unforgettable Uno last year. Best in Show the movie has nothing on the real thing -- and what dogs they are.

"Say Goodnight, Gracie" "Goodnight Gracie"

A moment this morning walking Sam first thing that channeled that old joke, ancient joke by now, from George Burns and Gracie Allen at the end of their early TV variety show.

Sam met a puppy that was being walked by a young woman. They stopped to say hello and sniff while we owners smiled at each other but kept murmuring to our dogs, as is New Yorkers wont. After a minute or so I said, "Let's go home, Sam. Say goodbye." And from the young woman, "Goodbye."

John Updike

So last week I went off about writers and others who stretch, bend, or otherwise warp their personal histories and work to chase success. A couple days later John Updike died, maybe the 180 degree opposite of that ethos.

Some things, quotes and comments, written about him in his obituary or appreciations -- Updike on his protagonists, "(they) oscillate in their moods between an enjoyment of the comforts of domesticity and the familial life, and a sense that their essential identity is a solitary one -- to be found in flight and loneliness and even adversity. This seems to be my feeling of what being a male human being involves."

Updike in a mid-60's interview: "I like middles. It is in the middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity relentlessly rules." Those last four words .

On his protagonist, Bech knowing he is "a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust." And out of that terrible knowledge comes, I figure, the search for God and, therefore, a way to survive that moment when one begins devolving back to that fleck. The AMNH experience has made being a fleck easier to accept somehow.

Phillip Roth on Updike, "John Updike is our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be ...a national treasure..."

Updike on the great pleasure of being able to write for a living, "To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible...still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act... To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another."

Updike talking to the New Yorker after 9/11 of his conviction that America and its core values would prevail, that "with all its failings, this is a country worth fighting for. Risk is a price of freedom,...mankind's elixir, even if a few turn it to poison." And then that fleck spoke of the towers collapsing and the universe, "(the collapse of the Twin Towers) took your breath away, and shattered your sense of a kindly universe, at least for a while...(but) I tend to give the universe the benefit of the doubt, since it's the only one we have." (Well, of course, that last is questioned by some cosmologists.)

Forty-five years before 9/11, Updike took a walk in my other great post-work enthusiasm of , Central Park: "On the afternoon of the first day of spring, when the gutters were still heaped high with Monday's snow but the sky itself was swept clean, we put on our galoshes and walked up the sunny side of Fifth Avenue to Central Park." He then chronicles what he sees there, ending thus,

"Two pigeons feeding each other.
"Two showgirls, whose faces had not yet thawed the frost of their makeup, treading indignantly through the slush.
"A plump old man saying 'chick, chick' and feeding peanuts to squirrels.
"Many solitary men throwing snowballs at tree trunks.
"Many birds calling to each other about how little the Ramble has changed.
"One red mitten lying lost under a poplar tree.
"An airplane, very bright and distant, slowly moving through the branches of a sycamore."

A great omnivorous voice.

Quick Hits

1. At the Met Saturday night, the most moving scene I've yet witnessed in opera. Orfeo ed Euridice, a black set, its front obscuring the staircase as Orfeo leads Euridice up from the underworld, the stage nearly dark but for the spotlight on the couple as Euridice slows their ascent to beg Orfeo to look at her. She cannot understand his distance and he, because of his promise to Amor, cannot tell her why he will not look. Stephanie Blythe, all in black for her pants role, her physical size conveying Orfeo's stymied power, sings Euridice to climb. She, Danielle de Niese, the perfect complement all in white, sings confused, lost and in love. In the duet aria, Blythe breaks Euridice's heart by not looking, breaks Orfeo's heart by not looking, and -- unable to endure the pain -- breaks the audience's heart when he looks and Euridice dies again. If de Niese did not sing so well, Blythe's tragic mezzo glory would not have been nearly so powerful. But she did, and I just wish my mind had been a DVD to etch it all for the rest of my life, replayable at any moment.

2. It's NYC on a Sunday morning, warming up after frigid days, it's Central Park West, I'm standing at a CP entrance, counting visitors with a Conservancy-provided clicker. A clanging fills the air -- it sounds like a bargain basement church bell, or an all-clear after an office fire drill. Two minutes later it sounds again, another two minutes, again. I have no idea, until walking down to the next entrance for the next count, I pass a 50s GMC pickup, customized with a cab on the truckbed and "since 1941", the sign on the side of the truck informs me, a cutlery sharpener is calling to potential customers. I see the whetstone behind the cab's windows. I see two men inside, one calling to a coop doorman, obviously acquaintances from his rounds. Multi-million dollar coops and a peddler, and since it's "since 1941" presumably a successful one, side by side. I can't even remember the last time I saw a knife sharpener plying his trade, probably my small Peace Corps town nearly 40 years ago.

What Are Blogs For If Not to Rant?

It looks like we now get to add the late Chilean author Roberto Bolano to the list of folks who in the pursuit of fame or something like it choose to fudge or embellish, to create a fiction and call it fact. That people do this is not so astonishing, that people continue to be taken seriously after they do it is astonishing -- to me at least.

It has astonished me since about 1982 or so when I bought my first and only John Cougar album and on it found a song in which Mr. Cougar complained on disc about the record company making him change his name. "Making him?" The only time you have to do something you are told, I remember reading once, is when someone is holding a gun to your head. So Mr. Cougar was not forced to change his name; he chose to agree to have his name changed. I suppose so that he could pursue fame and fortune in the music industry. Fine, that's a legitimate choice, but it's a choice he -- a free man and an adult -- made. Nobody made him sign a record contract. And bit by bit of course, that fame and fortune arrived and bit by bit he reclaimed his name, first John Cougar Mellencamp and then John Mellencamp.

How about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, purporting to be non-fiction and in fact full of conjectures, imagined conversations and impossible to ascertain "facts." This is a work of fiction, yet for years it is listed and still sold as non-fiction. The book contributed to the concept in "non-fiction" today of composite characters -- people who don't really exist, but are put down on the written page with characteristics drawn from several different people for the sole purpose of enabling the author to make a point. There is another word for this practice, a more accurate one -- straw men.

And then there is flat out lying. Oprah got famously fooled, but what about Joe Klein, today an apparently respected political pundit. Some years ago when asked if he wrote Primary Colors, originally billed as by Anonymous, he baldly lied and said, "No." A few days later of course he was unveiled as the author -- how can someone who lies, plain and simple, ever be accorded trust again for anything he writes. A mystery to me.

But it goes on. Just a month or so ago, the non-fiction Holocaust memoir -- oops, it's fiction. No worries, we'll just repackage it and publish it anyway.

And now Bolano who, it turns out, was apparently not in Chile when Pinochet overthrew Allende, let alone detained. He may also have invented a drug habit. His supporters say, "oh, part of his artistry was blurring fact and fiction." Fine, but call it for what it is -- fiction and let the reader guess what fact is woven in.

In a world of great sadnesses, it's too bad -- although just a small sadness -- that instead of art having an impact on the inveiglers of the world, those purveyors of the inflated resume, the fake academic credentials, the official misinformation, their miasmic tendencies spread into art.

Channeling Forrest

How to get enough exercise -- when the weather is unusually cold for January, often with a harsh wind off the Hudson, when I'm on jury duty, when I've got a lifelong aversion to treadmills. And then the solution hit yesterday. Run everywhere. Get the exercise blocks at a time to add up at the end of the day instead of trying to wedge in a chunk of time to do it.

And so that is what I have done for the last two days. Yesterday from the apartment to the subway, from the Chambers Street station to the courthouse and back at the end of the day, to and from the sandwich shop during court lunch recess, and then -- getting into it -- taking the express as far as 96th at the end of the court day and running the rest of the way home. Today again to the subway station, from 79th to the museum, to the post office after the info desk shift, from the museum to Chess and Checkers in the Park to pick up the survey materials, from C and C to the 66th Street station.

In any other place it might be a sight, a backpacker in street clothes running the sidewalks, in NYC, hey, it's New York. It will probably end with today because tomorrow we are due for 2-5 inches of snow, sure treachery, not to mention too wet for tennis shoes. But here's what I found out channeling Forrest -- pretty quickly it feels like anytime you step out of the apartment you should be running, not walking.

What to Do on a Bitterly Cold January Saturday in NYC

1) Get up just before 8, snuggle Sam into his sweater and take him out for his morning walk as the temp reads 6 degrees.

2) Walk next door to the bakery and buy a croissant, warm it up at home.

3) Head to the New York Historical Society to catch "Drawn by New York: Six Centuries of Watercolors and Drawings" from the Society's collection. Two depict the Great Fire of 1835, when temperatures of -17 rendered water hoses useless, contributing to the devastation. New York got paid firefighters the next year. Nearby, in the large Hudson River School Hall, one wall space was nearly bare, occupied only by a small announcement that this painting, View of Yosemite Valley from the School by Thomas Hill, will be behind newly inaugurated President Obama when he sits down for the traditional lunch with Congress tomorrow.



The NYHS and, across Central Park and further uptown, the Museum of the City of New York are our hometown museums, filled with exhibits and stories of the city's past, complementing the world collections of the AMNH, the Met, MoMA among others.

4) Head back out into the weather, now up to 15 degrees or so, and to La Vela, an unassuming neighborhood Italian place on Amsterdam for a late lunch, including a delicious appetizer I don't remember seeing before, polenta and sausage in a light gorgonzola sauce.

5) Get a history lesson of a sorts from Tom Cruise, looking ludicrous in an eye patch and carrying around a glass eye to be popped in whenever he's in proximity to Hitler, in Valkyrie. Mostly accurate in its depiction of the failed assassination attempt by a clutch of German officers, not convinced that the accompanying storyline of a nearly successful follow-on action to seize control of Berlin and therefore overthrow the Reich is so accurate. A bit like when the 4th period history teacher announces a film instead of a class, a diversion and a pretty good teaching tool.

6) Take the 1 line and then, at 14th Street, wait forever for the notorious F line to go to Bowery Ballroom for the Glasgow band Frightened Rabbit. The best rock concert I've seen in months, and -- like the National -- a band still peaking, but already confident enough of its power that it can bury perhaps its best-known song, Heads Roll Off, deep in the middle of a hard-working and raucous set. The song begins with the arresting couplet, "Jesus is just a Spanish boy's name/How come one man got so much fame." (Jesus was also on the mind of the opening act, but much more banally -- Jesus and the Devil are one and the same, duh, there's an original thought.) In their songs, romance doesn't go very well for -- as Bianca calls them -- Scared Bunny, but judging by the clutching and kissing couples to the music, I'm guessing a couple new residents for the planet got their start under warm blankets later that night.

7) Come home, complete February bookings for Hawaii vacation.

Lost

Season five begins next Wednesday. Time for me yet again to paraphrase Peter O'Toole in Beckett, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome doctor?" Couldn't Black Smokey just rip out of the jungle once and carry Jack away forever? Am I the only one who finds the beef-and-dairy cake triangle endlessly tedious? At least Sawyer is amusing, but, aside from their perfect cheekbones, is there anything on the planet less interesting than Jack and Kate? Give me Locke, give me Sayid, give me Sun and Jin, give me Desmond and Penny, give me Widmore, anything but JandK over and over again. But most of all give me Ben, who -- we discover from a Lost website sneak peek -- packs a fine suitcase among his many other talents.

Yelling at the Giants...

is something I've been doing for most of my life. (Not at the above kind) Generally, it's been the baseball Giants. In fact, my wife would probably think their official name is the San Francisco Stupid Giants. At least I've never sunk to the depths of a Giants fan I read about while in Paris in the early 70s -- so angered at some typical idiocy of the G'men against Houston, he reached for his shotgun and blasted out the TV set. But this past Sunday -- and most deservedly -- the yelling was directed at the erstwhile Super Bowl champions. I wrote on and off while yelling and, reading afterwards, it seemed like a pretty good account of a New York week. Here's a condensed version:

Parked in front of the set, with a gin con gin -- drink dating back to the Confiteria Tuninetti after a day in the campo -- in hand, Westie in lap, licking happily, and the first play I see the Giants have two penalties, the second play Eli Manning throws an interception, on the third play the Giants get flagged for pass interference, and on the fifth play the Eagles score a touchdown, and right there the inevitable pattern of the afternoon is set that quickly. Otherwise, it has been a pretty good week. Monday night we went to the museum to hear from volunteers who had gone on dinosaur dig expeditions to very remote locations in the US -- North Dakota in one case, Utah in the second. Would we want to do it? Probably. Utah would be the place, many more fossils. One thing that struck me was how big this country is. They were serious hours from any even medium sized population centers, hundreds of miles from an airport with scheduled service. They spoke about their awe at being the first to find a specimen, an animal that had lived on earth and buried unseen for all the millions of years since its death until they uncovered the fossilized bone. Tuesday we went to see La Boheme at the Met -- we got wet, as we always seem to do this season at the Met and in fact (Manning continues to throw poorly and Carney, who had not missed a FG all year except for two blocks until he missed a very makeable one in Minnesota, misses an even more makeable one here. 7-5 Eagles.) this storm went on heavily for the next 24 hours. La Boheme may not be in the top tier of my favorites, but it was very good. The same Zefferelli production has been mounted since 1981. It's dated and overly precious to some, but new to us, only the third production the Met has had of La Boheme in its history and in only six of more than a hundred seasons has La Boheme not been performed at the Met. The third act was my favorite, outside Paris, outside an inn in winter, as Mimi and Rodolfo pledge to stay together until spring and on the other side of the stage Marcello and Musetta are fighting and separating over fickleness. One thing Puccini gets exactly right, just like Shakespeare did in R&J, is the goofiness and posturing, a constant no matter what the century, of young men who are in fact not quite men, but no longer boys. (Abetted by yet another stupid penalty and the Giants's inability to put any pressure at all on McNabb, the Eagles march straight down the field with less than 90 seconds and only one timeout and kick a field goal for a 10-8 lead.) Yesterday, a snowy day from about noon on, I did both the Views and Cross Park tours and now feel good about them both, ready to lead my first tour on Tuesday.