T/Sweat Shirt of the Month

We are all familiar with (it's even a frequent crossword clue) "There is no 'I' in Team." But at Patsy's pizzeria on W. 74th the other night, the second generation: "There is no U in Awesome".

Sam's Halloween

Last year he was shamed by having to wear a chicken costume, but this year, ah, that's another matter indeed. It's a real showstopper all up and down Broadway.

The Season of Lost Gloves

As a cold storm sweeps toward NYC and the temperature dropped all through the day yesterday, the season of lost gloves has begun. We saw the first -- full-sized adult -- on the sidewalk coming back to the apt from dinner last night. My guess would be hundreds more to be sighted on the streets and in the stores between now and spring.

T/Sweat Shirt of the Month

This one actually comes from outside Charlottesville, VA where we were apple picking with the Richmond family on a beautiful Sunday: "I'm So Far Behind, I Thought I Was First".

T/Sweat Shirt of the Month

You see some entertaining ones in NYC and they are often not obscene, so for as long as I remember or am interested, a recurring category starting here. This month's winner, which I can already declare even though I just saw it two days ago while ducked into Columbus Circle, waiting out yet another of the city's endless intense rain showers (according to official records, we've had 72.59 inches of rain/snow in Central Park in the last 365 days, with 58.44 since January 1.) before biking home, is a guy who walked past me with Donald Duck on his shirt, Donald in his familiar hopping mad pose, sailor hat flopping, and looking down at his butt. The caption: "Suddenly Donald realizes he never wears any pants."

JFK Landing

We arrived back night before last and I was going up the ramp to the terminal after deplaning with a young woman and her 2-3 year old daughter walking behind me. The mother said to the child, "Take my hand. We're in New York now." Yep, we are.

Ex-Champs, Almost

Life goes on when the title defense is over. The sun comes up, the day begins, typing on a laptop on what will be another scorcher day in the Sierra foothills where as of June 1 we have a second home. The elimination loss to Arizona -- putting paid to already hugely long odds -- was a microcosm of the season, an almost odds-defying inability to bring home runners who managed to get into scoring position ("managed" the word of choice because even doing that was a challenge for the Giants for much of the season) and last night eleven or twelve hits in Arizona produced exactly one run and that a home run by the reviled -- by me -- Orlando Cabrera who, let us hope, will not be back next year. But since I pledged to myself that the wonder of 2010 earns the Giants a pass from me making disparaging remarks about them for three season, through 2013, this is just an acknowledgement that it is over. And attention now turns to the Yankees, the hope for three straight years of WS winners from the two teams I seriously root for. The title of this post merely acknowledges that if the rapture or sudden appearance of a life-ending meteorite does happen in the next months, the Giants will forever be World Champions.

We Go to Ireland

It was a very big collective “we” – DD and me, all three kids, two sons-in-law, a girlfriend, the four grandkids, and DD’s Mom. 13 total, wrangling a group that ranged in age from ten months to over eighty years. The occasion was my 65th, although the actual date of the milestone was the day we flew back from Dublin. We were there for just over a week and the first day it was kind of a wonder that all three cars stayed on the road, given the sleep-deprived state of their drivers. We took an overnight flight from New York to Dublin, picked up the rentals, and immediately drove a hundred or so kilometers north to Kilsaran, County Louth, smallest county in Ireland and the ancestral home of our family name, in all its varied spellings.

In Kilsaran we found one C. headstone in a cemetery, of a poor baby that lived scarcely a year and then we drove a kilometer into town proper to have lunch at a little place we couldn’t find at first because the construction guys at the church gave us a name for the restaurant that had not been used in years, all trace of signage of it gone, but was immediately recognized by residents of the tiny town when we finally inquired after it. Food was OK – OK, as J. said on the flight home, the operative word for pretty much every meal in Ireland. We learned you don’t get bills in pubs, just pay on your way out; we signed the guest book and – sometime after three o’clock – got on the highway to Adare, knowing it was in County Limerick and depending on our GPS guidance.

My heart sank when we passed a mileage sign that said Limerick was still nearly 200 K’s away. (Unlike the States, road signs on Irish highways list the closest town at the bottom of the sign and the furthest at the top.) Of course, everything is in kilometers, not a problem for any of us, but driving is also on the left side of the road and that was a new experience for C. definitely and B. probably, who were at the wheels of the other two cars. D. said later that it was about the time we saw that kilometer distance sign that she was thinking of asking B. to just pull off the road and get a hotel. It was even tougher for the third car for they got separated at once back in Kilsaran because we went wrong out of the restaurant and had the GPS lady constantly, as she said, “recalculating.” But eventually we all made it, drivers awake if few others in the cars, to the villas of Adare Manor, outside the town of the same name.

Day 2, a Wednesday, we spent in Adare, a lovely little town with many ruins and a row of small thatched cottages along its single main street. We also took the tour of the Manor and learned why, along with the Irish flag and the US flag, the Marine Corps flag flies at the entrance to the complex’s golf club. The answer is that the man who bought the property in 1982 is an ex-Marine named Kane, Mr. Kane in Manor employee speak, who made his fortune on Wall Street. The dinner at the golf club restaurant that night, included in the package, was very, yes, OK, or in New York Times restaurant rating speak, “Satisfactory”.

Thursday we drove for half an hour to Bunratty Castle and Village, the village a collection of recreated Irish houses and stores from the mid-19th to mid-20th century. The castle had narrow winding steps that would have given DD severe claustrophobia had she mounted them. Castles are overrated – not quite “seen one , seen ‘em all,” but certainly a few are enough – for me at least. The countryside all through much of the counties is dotted with stone ruins of one sort or another and from various centuries. The land is very beautiful and not for nothing is Ireland called the Emerald Isle, but it had to have been a very harsh existence for much of its history and a very lonely one as well. It rained at least a little every day we were in Ireland. My sister Annie, I said to DD as we were driving back to Adare from Bunratty, would have loved to visit Ireland and could never have lived there, where the best season sees frequent rain and the temperature rarely rises into the 70s.

Friday we caravanned to the spectacular west coast of Ireland, to the tiny port town of Dodin where we took a boat called The Happy Hooker – presumably a reference to its other potential use rather than to the world’s oldest profession – and rode out to the first and smallest of the Aran Islands, Inishere. There we got wet – it was the day of steadiest rain --, climbed up to the highest point on the island to see more ruins and an Irish graveyard, built on top of the remains of a chapel dating to the 11th century. Pretty much soaked, we repaired to one of the island’s pubs for what at the time was our best pub experience, including for me a much more than OK lunch of beef and Guinness stew. Two of the three cars then spent an hour at the Cliffs of Mohor, certainly worth seeing, over 700 feet high, and apparently the most visited tourist attraction in Ireland, but not I think likely to come out a winner in the voting for the World’s New 7 Wonders of Nature. Fully my fault for only two of the three cars getting there and if we were doing this trip all over again, we would certainly have rented cell phones to enable everyone to stay in contact.

On Day 5, we stayed on the manor property and in Adare, touring a Norman castle where we saw the clever construction that widened the openings in the wall inside the castle to make it easier to shoot arrows out, but kept them very narrow from the outside, requiring a lucky shot to get through. Much easier, if only randomly effective, I suppose, to shoot over. Also very interesting that as you climbed down from top to bottom on the steps they are laid out in a clockwise direction so that those defending would always have the right arm free for sword use while the attacker, coming up the steps, would have his arm hindered by the stairwell wall. About this time I realized that we were staying nowhere near long enough in Ireland and also had the revelation while driving that as our travels continue I don’t have much of an urge to go to new places any more, with the exception of Australia/New Zealand and Iceland, but instead want keep revisiting and digging deeper into places we have liked – Southern Africa, Italy, France, Chile/Argentina, Hawaii, and, now, Ireland.

Late in the week the days featured more and more blue sky and in that heat wave – probably 68 degrees – in the wonderfully named town of Dingle (Peninsula of the same name) I saw a kid driving shirtless in a car with his friends on Dingle’s main drag. He had to have been Irish. Like the teenagers Annie used to talk about in Seattle who would doff their shirts any time the sun came out after the long rainy winter, no matter if the temperature was still in the low 50s. The main memory of the Peninsula will be not so much the views toward the water, but the intensely green fields, divided into rough squares or rectangles by the unmortared stone walls and, seen from a distance, the individual white dots against the green – grazing sheep.

Into Dublin then, reaching there shortly past noon of the day before we were to leave. We checked into the Croke Park Hotel, hard by the stadium of the same name, bought tickets to the hop on/hop off bus and set out to explore. In other words, we rode the bus to the Guinness Brewery and spent the better part of the rest of the afternoon there, trying to figure why Guinness tasted different in Ireland than it does in the States when it is all brewed at this site, and then shipped in cans, bottles or kegs. Were we tricked by memory (none of us drank Guinness regularly then, a situation that has changed since we have been back) or is it perhaps that the older beer acquires a slightly different taste than the fresh brewed stuff? Or some other reason? The next morning before we left we saw the Book of Kells at Trinity College and the same day, after a very comfortable Aer Lingus flight to JFK, I walked a bit in Harlem. Just to say I am one of certainly a very few people who have seen the Book of Kells and been in Harlem on the same day.

Dublin, as with the rest of the country as a whole, not nearly enough time. You can see that hard economic times have returned after a decade boom, by all the empty retail space in Dublin and also in Limerick when we drove through there on a couple of occasions. We returned all the cars in one piece, with nary a scratch. Every Irish person we spoke with was cheerful and helpful. As DD and I were trying to figure from the inadequate hotel map just how to get back to Croke Park, a very nice woman and then a very nice gentleman stopped on two different occasions to ask if we needed help. It reminded me of myself in New York on my good days. Another way to celebrate your 65th birthday – inject yourself against deep vein thrombosis in a hotel room in Dublin. It worked fine, again, even as we flew against headwinds that reached over 125 mph on the return flight.

I may have liked the trip best of everyone and am looking forward to going back. D. and B. say they’ve done it, happy they did, but don’t need to go back. B. says she would go back and spend more time. J. can’t see, he says, that every man in Ireland looks like us, long face, high forehead, and skin complexion that ranges from pale to paler to palest. He commemorates the trip with blind taste tests between Guinness brought back and Guinness bought here, except now the brought backs have run out. B. and C. said they would do another trip too. Call them the Guinness Four.

Little Victories

The Bob Seger version is the one I know and enjoy. Matt Nathanson? Not on my radar and a quick listen to his LV on e music suggests no interest in putting him on my radar.

As for my own version of LV -- before I got sick last year I would jog or bike at least five times a week in good seasons and maybe two or three in the cold and wintry times. I've long since been biking as part of the recovery, but avoided riding up to Riverdale in the Bronx where I go to hospice volunteering. Riverdale is along NYC's version of the Palisades across the Hudson in New Jersey, and it is a serious uphill for several stretches from where I live. But yesterday, another perfect post-hurricane day, I made it, with only one small bit of walking just past the GWB and that mostly because I got distracted and managed to drive the bike off the pathway and into the dirt alongside. Then this morning, after returning some stuff to the PetCo at 92nd, I jogged back home, a mile and a half, not much and not fast -- like I went fast anyway before -- and with some serious heaviness in the legs, but I made it. And that made me mighty happy.

After Irene

Everyone expected to be hunkered down, lashed by winds and rain today. Instead, Irene weakened from hurricane to tropical storm and seemed to pick up speed as it passed over New York early this morning. By noon, but for gusts of wind and spare drops of rain, it was over, leaving less damage than widely feared and leaving us here in the city with a different Sunday. Walkers emerged to sidestep the fallen small branches and to figure out what to do with their suddenly uncooped up day. With the threatening forecast Saturday, most restaurants posted closed signs on their doors and -- apparently -- told employees not to come in. No place, for the most part, to brunch, no Starbucks either yesterday or today, little traffic, no public transportation. People wandered, the city that never sleeps looking to wake up; I wandered, down to the West Harlem Pier thinking I'd see if Fairway might be open for we'd told the kids that Sunday dinner was back on. In the Hudson, as choppy and white-capped today as it was flat and placid yesterday in the hours before Irene arrived, a blue Recycle receptacle floated amidst the flotsam and plastic bottles. Fairway was closed; the West Side Highway was closed at the 125st southbound entrance. I decided to check Westside Market on Broadway and 110th and to go there along the Hudson to see if there was a reason for the closure. The river had clearly breached its usual bank some time earlier; debris -- more damned plastics mostly -- littered the west side of the pathway from about the level 110th south for four or five blocks toward 106th, and it was in that stretch that city workers were siphoning water off the highway, looked to be six or eight inches deep. I went through the underpass into Riverside Park a little further on, a trench of standing water a couple blocks long pretty much right above where the railroad tunnel cuts through the park. A few dogs in the dog run. And then up on to Riverside Drive, where I studied the statue of Shinran Shonin (that now has survived Irene as well as Hiroshima) at the Buddhist Center at 331 RSD. For the first time, I noticed that RSD from 104th to 106th is a short historical district, based on the Beaux Arts townhouses there built in the last years on the 19th and early 20th centuries. 331, it turns out, once housed William Randolph Hearst's main squeeze, the perennial starlet Marian Davies. Finally over to Broadway where Absolute Bagels was closed and Westside officially was too, except they were letting people in four or five at a time because some staff had reported for work. And so dinner supplies were laid in. Chili and corn bread.

As the Hurricane Bears Down on New York...

It is a beautiful if humid Friday morning. Walking Sam, we passed a small van parked on Lasalle that, on its side panel, advertised "Humane Wildlife Removal." If you want to avail yourself of the company's services, you simply dial, the panel also adds in larger lettering, 1-888-ALLDEAD. Sure sounds humane to me.

Kind of a Special Day

Gorgeous and cool this morning, approaching 9:30 and today is the first day since my illness hit 20 months ago that I woke up and thought I could again do my old job well -- not that I want to, but what matters is that I felt at last like I could.

Even in NYC There Are Things You Don't See Every Day

Like riding in Central Park to do the tour this morning and passing a guy jogging at a good pace in the opposite direction, pulling a skateboard tied with a rope and on the board, looking positively regal and as if he belonged no place else, a fine specimen of English bulldog like Moose down the hall.

He's Back!

Sighted Scabby yesterday while biking. No camera to record the moment. He was facing in toward the campus instead of onto the Broadway traffic flow.

Missing: One Giant Rat

A labor dispute tool seen now and again around town is "Scabby" the giant inflatable rat. He's found a home for the last month or so in front of the Broadway and 116th Street entrance to Columbia, alongside a banner casting Shame on the Trustees of Columbia University. I haven't looked into the particulars of the dispute, but Scabby went missing this morning. There were a couple guys loitering around the banner and I asked them, "Where's the rat?" (Didn't know his name at the time.) Got a shoulder shrug and "don't know" in reply. Perhaps it's a Rent-a-Rat and the anti-Columbia contract has run out. Or maybe he just sprang a leak and had to be patched. We'll see whether he returns in days to come. In the meantime, here's a photo gleaned from the web and we can all be happy the subway tunnel denizens and street corner scavengers don't grow quite this big.

Two Facts

What I've relearned in this warm New York July:

1) your refrigerator can never have too many fresh Washington State cherries, Bing and Queen Anne.

2) there is no such thing as too much Shakespeare in the Park or on the other stages of the city.

The Dubious "Art" of Liner Note Writing

It's always been a vehicle for hyperbolic puffery, but I found a particularly laughable example when I bought on an impulse at Starbucks (exactly what they count on) a collection of Buddy Holly covers to commemorate what would have been his 75th birthday. Called Rave On, the CD is consistently strong except for -- of course -- Graham Nash and My Morning Jacket, but the standouts are (You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care by Cee Lo Green; Oh, Boy by She & Him; Well All Right by Kid Rock; Heartbeat by the Detroit Cobras; and Peggy Sue Got Married by John Doe. But in the CD booklet notes we find this from the compilations producer: "Songs that always seem to make you feel better about feeling more (what the hell does that mean, anyway?); songs that remind you to be you (like there's any other choice); songs that bring epic romance to the everyday, everyday....(ah yes, the play on one of Buddy's titles)

A Perfect Day Redux

Not sure what Lou Reed's constituted, but this will definitely do for me -- an early summer day with temps in the low 80s, some humidity but not oppressive, large crowds in Central Park, pursuing the abiding pleasures of the park that New Yorkers have enjoyed now for a century and a half, giving an excellent tour to a private group, babysitting the newest and joyfully interactive grandchild for four hours, Skypeing with him DD in California so she could see how he's changed in the near month she has been gone, walking through Riverside Park to the outdoor seasonal bar/restaurant across from the 106th Street dog run, having a couple margaritas in the company of four of my favorite people, younger daughter, son and his domestic partner, and the grandson, and then walking back to the apartment in a warm and soft summer night. A night to end a day in which both the Yankees and the Giants won (the Giants scoring the only run in their game on a 7th inning balk for heaven's sake. They are beginning to be like the joke I heard attributed to Don Drysdale in the 60s. Told Sandy Koufax had pitched a shutout, Big (now gone) Don replied, "Did he win?"), wins that enabled each to move back into first place in their divisions as the baseball season nears the halfway point. And now to bed with my new Kindle and Netherland. Fine.

All's Well That Ends Well, Except It Isn't

Yesterday was Manhattan Borough day for All's Well That Ends Well at Shakespeare in the Park. A great alternative to standing in line in the Park for hours -- if you live in the designated Borough of the Day, you just go to the stated location, pick up vouchers and, by no later than half an hour before curtain, convert each voucher into a ticket at the box office. No line at all at the Museo del Barrio to pick up the vouchers in yesterday's recurring showers and I got four, which at 7:15 we exchanged for four tickets, getting one more in the bargain since the weather (or perhaps buzz about the production) meant not all tickets had been distributed.

And things went downhill from there. All's Well, I read, is considered one of Shakespeare's "problem plays," neither a comedy nor a tragedy. This is hooey; no one dies bloodily on stage. The play is a comedy, pure and simple. (Whether it is a good comedy, even in the best of productions, is of course another question.) Not only does nobody die, but also the petulant, spoilt young brave and horny prince (Bertram) gets his comeuppance, which -- it turns out -- is the opportunity to be happy for the rest of his life, if only he'd show a little wisdom as he ages, with the woman who has always loved him (Helena). This outcome is achieved after ridiculous plot twists and coincidences, as in half a dozen or so other of Shakespeare's plays. The problem with the Shakespeare in the Park take on All's is that none of this is played for comedy by any of the characters, save for Parolles, Bertram's buffoonish aide de camp. But his antics and cowardice are amped up to the nth power (presumably a directorial decision), making him so overdone that he quickly ceases to be either funny or a good character foil to Bertram. Helena is good (after a slow start); so is her deceptive stand-in Diana and the Countess. Still, beyond them, this was an unsatisfying evening in the Park, but -- at least -- only a few spare drops of rain fell on us.

Missed the Memo...Again

Suddenly, at least it seems suddenly, the Upper West Side and our area here in Morningside Heights are awash in dogs who are leashed with a harness-like apparatus across their chests, rather than, as has served now for generations, around the neck. Proving either that it is impossible to be too trendy on the UWS or that -- as my daughter explained to me -- some vets claim a dog's neck gets strained with a neck leash. Six months ago, it seemed that neck leashes were fine, but with the coming of spring and the daffodils and crocuses of March, so too did the body leash explode into sight. It's as if all dog owners got a memo advocating the new way of walking. Today I actually developed a bit of sympathy for the new when my poor little doggie was feeling under the weather and wanted to stop at every patch of sidewalk where grass was pushing up through the cracks and to nibble on the grass. I lost patience after a while and gave him a series of yank/tugs to move him along. At that point I just thought he was a canine malingerer but when he left his food untouched once we got back home, I realized. So, Sam, if I strained your neck a little bit, I'm sorry, but no, you are not getting a doggie harness. It's one unreceived memo I am mentally tearing up.

A Hospice Death

Deaths in hospice are an expected outcome, no surprise. But that does not mean you are unaffected. Sometimes it is very hard to accept, as this past week with F. for we had a friendship that grew as we spent more time together and he gradually became comfortable enough with me to open up and express himself more expansively in Spanish, the language he preferred and used when he wanted to be precise in his conversation, although he could more than just get by in English. I always thought but never told him that in his struggle with and acceptance of his ALS, he was probably the bravest man I've recently -- and perhaps ever -- known. Had I ever told him that, he would -- in a modesty based on his faith -- surely have rejected that characterization. I will certainly miss him, but one part of me is not unhappy that he went rather unexpectedly while he still had some motor function, and before the disease robbed him of all that.

Day of Rapture....Oops!

Damn, are we still here?? Who knew!?

This cloudy, cool Sunday is the last day it will be legal to smoke in any of the public parks in NYC. Good luck with enforcing that one. Very high marks to the Bloomberg administration for its unremitting efforts to discourage smoking. The health dividends for the society are likely to be mostly in the distant future, but that doesn't make them any less real. Still, about once a month I walk through a bit of smoke and get hit with a pleasant blast of nostalgia, especially if it is a cigar or the very rare nowadays pipe. I don't want the smell assaulting me, and permeating everything animate and inanimate, but once in a great while, it is not unpleasant to the senses.

We Begin to Walk

Pretty much since we moved to New York, I'd had the idea of walking the length of Manhattan, but I always thought of doing it in one day and never seemed to block out enough time to get it done. And then Dana Dee said, "Let's do it in segments." Of course, so obvious. And thus it started on a wonderful early spring Mother's Day Sunday. We went from the Harlem River Bridge, linking Manhattan to the Bronx, down to our apartment, just under four miles if you were a crow, near six as we meandered. Food consumed on the way, a doughnut by me, an apple apiece, and toward the end we each had a Mr. Softee -- the truck parked and obeying the law by not playing the inane Softee jingle, second only to "It's a Small World" at Disney World on the Annoyance Factor scale. While we mostly walked Broadway or Amsterdam Aves, we also wandered alone through Highbridge Park, named for the bridge spanning the Harlem River that carried fresh water from the Croton Aqueduct into New York, but we somehow missed seeing the bridge itself. Interrupting the almost entirely Hispanic neighborhoods, we passed by Yeshiva University and, among other students, saw a young man wearing a yarmulke and an Alice in Chains tee shirt, not, I suspect, a common pairing. It took until nearly 135th Street before we heard English spoken around us with any frequency and that only after we saw a quintessential American thing -- a Hispanic man in his forties, dressed in a Chicago Blackhawks hockey jersey and calling out to passersby in English, "Happy Mother's Day." The melting pot, you gotta love it! The beautiful day had everyone out on the street, a prelude of summer days, and more walks down to Battery Park, to come.

Some pictures from the route, including classic Mothers Day gifts.

Getting It Right

Thirty-five years or so before anyone had heard of Osama Bin Laden, the Byrds had it exactly right: "I'll probably feel a whole lot better when you're gone." Personally, nationally and globally, we are all better off than we have been at any time since the brilliant blue morning of September 11, 2001.

New York Film Academy and Common People

Feeling a bit cranky on a spectacular spring Sunday, but that's what blogs are for, right, to vent when you feel a bit or more than a bit cranky. So, it seems like about 95 percent of the bus stop kiosks now are advertising the New York Film Academy where, to judge by the poster, the student body diversity runs the gamut from pale white all the way to light brown. This in the arguably most racially diverse city in the world. And in front of all the depicted crew, a white boy, hair tousled just so, the requisite amount of stubble on his chin, standing next to his cinematographer and squinting at the scene he is about to shoot. A scene, no doubt, of his life story because you can just tell by looking at him, that he is an auteur and like all white boys he has a story to tell. And you know what, having been a white boy myself and having recently conducted a scientific survey, 97.23 percent of those white boy stories are exactly the same.

And then there's Common People, a different story entirely, about which I may have written at some other point in the last four years or so, but worth another post even if I have. One of the finest poseur putdowns (see above para if in doubt about a poseur) ever that launches right from the start with "She came from Greece/She had a thirst for knowledge." Jarvis Cocker has never matched those five or so raucous minutes, but hey, he had them once.

"You Should Have Come Earlier, It Wouldn't Hurt So Much"

I will never be mistaken for an early adopter. Yes, yes, I was comfortable with using computers as soon as they replaced typewriters, and I have kept a journal since 1967, and when the USG introduced an optional new retirement system back in 1986 or so that featured the government version of a 401k called the Thrift Savings Plan, I jumped on it with both feet. And then when we moved to New York in 2005 we dropped our landline telephone service in favor of using cell phones only, which still gets some quizzical responses here in the land of the 212 area code, when I say mine is 202. People think you have, as Nixon's press secretary Ron Ziegler used to do, "misspoken."

You get the picture -- far from a luddite, clearly not cutting edge. So it was out of character that back in 1993 while living in El Salvador, I began getting facials, not exactly a mainstream thing for guys at the time, let alone guys in El Salvador. I like to say that I keep hoping (stupid joke alert!) for a new face, but alas it never happens. But pretty much every three months since then I have repaired to the closest salon to wherever I am residing and get the creams slathered on, the steam across the pores, and the quarter hour or so of what are discreetly called "extractions." When we lived in Chile there once was a billboard campaign for a Nivea product that featured a perky young senorita saying, "Chau, puntitos." If only...

Anyway, when I went this week the extractions were proceeding with some wincing on my part when the cosmetologist -- originally, to judge from her accented English from central Europe -- said, "You should have come earlier, it wouldn't hurt so much." And, I thought, "what...if I hadn't been ten minutes late for my appointment, you would have been gentler?" I was all insulted by this mini-Marathon Man torturer until I realized, crossing the street just after the appointment, that what she really meant was that I should have come sooner, not letting so much time elapse between appointments. Point taken, even if the choice of vocabulary was not quite right.

Grant

This year is, of course, the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. One of the two men most responsible for preserving the nation was murdered before he saw the victory. The other died in poverty and whenever I walk past Grant's Tomb not far from here or when I think about courage, I think about Grant -- the Grant of this picture -- dying of throat cancer in the summer of 1885, the cancer diagnosed the winter before, and racing in great pain and no longer able to speak to complete his memoirs so that after his death his family will not be penniless. Leave aside the question of whether he was a failure at everything he tried except saving the Union (personally, I think he was possessed of a restlessness that drove him in and out of successive endeavors or that he bored easily of a settled life), but you still have to be astonished at two things: that he was able to write those hundreds of pages in such pain and that he had to, when these days completing a presidency is a Go card to piles of money.

Urban Snowscapes

We woke to a couple inches of snow, which is supposed to change to sleet and rain for the rest of the day. I feel like this will be the last measurable snow of the season. Of course I always feel that way once we reach Presidents' Day and spring training has started. Last or not, it afforded these two urban snowscapes. The second was going to be a picture even before the snow, the result of wind and the eternal plastic bags meeting barbed wire on our very gusty Saturday two days ago.

Detritus

Temperatures have struggled above 40 the last couple of days and, while it still covers the parks and other green spaces, the snow along the streets is pretty much gone. Alternate side parking regulations began to be enforced a few days ago and on the first day the merciless ticket writers did something like four times the average amount for a winter day.

Gone too are most of the trash and recycling bags that hugged the curbs, buried under or sitting on top of the piles of snow. What's left is the odd detritus. Many Christmas trees still along the curbs, particularly on W.79th, most of them with needles remaining green from being buried in the snow. And what kind of mentality is it that makes people less inclined to pick up after their dogs when there is snow on the ground? Makes for a huge yuck factor when the snow goes away; makes many more people checking their shoes as well. Also you have the hundreds of cigarette butts outside Manhattan School of Music (students there have to be the largest subgroup of smokers left in the city); single mittens and gloves in the middle of sidewalks, in the middle of streets, amidst the melting snow (if I had started counting when I saw the first one, I'd be up to several dozen by now. Citywide the number has to be in the thousands), bottle caps, old coffee cups, and -- in at least one case this afternoon as I was walking home from the B/D stop on 125th -- prom pictures. Some kind of story there, surely.

The groundhog may not have condemned us to six more weeks of winter, but it already feels interminable on the spirit of the city.

Cleaning the Box

I have this big old wooden box, just like the In and Out boxes that used to sit on some of my desks in the years I worked, where I keep papers that need to be attended, in one way or another. As with the career days, some things just kind of sift to the bottom because I feel no time, or the time is not ripe, to move them. Today I came across one of those -- an appreciation by NYT critic Michael Kimmelman for Thomas Hoving, who preceded Philippe de Montebello at the Met and who died in December 2009, right before my own health issues. I liked both Kimmelman's writing and the Hoving it portrayed. Kimmelman said Hoving "believed that art museums were public repositories of wonderment....he wanted people to feel that same outsize thrill he felt standing in front of a picture, that...rush that comes from knowing something is terrific." I guess I kept the piece because I was then staggering each time I revisited the Waterlilies show at the MoMA.

Kimmelman ends the appreciation by recounting his first contact with Hoving, in the mid-80's, and Hoving's wish that the public feel a sense of both privilege and adventure when entering the Met. He writes of marveling after the meeting that New York "was the most amazing show on earth and thinking that a life fully lived should be a joy ride." And so New York remains, even as we collectively slip, slide away on the frozen streets and sidewalks of this long winter.

Central Park After the Storm

Walked across Central Park last Thursday morning, before bus service got restored after the 'teen-some inches that fell the night before and took these pictures.

We Spend Another Night with Joe Green

Simon Boccanegra this time, and, in keeping with the cold January we are having, there was much coughing in the hall, one loud whisper from above and to our right during one act's overture "Do you want a cough drop?", and the man next to Dana Dee sleeping through much of the prologue and Act I, then roused by the beginning of applause after an aria to enthusiastic applause and "bravo"'s himself. We've had him before beside us, must be a season subscriber as well. Dana Dee figures he'd just come from work; I -- drawing on my own occasional snooze for a few seconds -- figure in the warm hall it's a rare opera-goer who doesn't nod off at some point in the early going.

My own confusion last night came from not reading the synopsis before the curtain rises (always, always! read the synopsis), so I didn't realize that 25 years had gone by between the Prologue and Act I, and therefore thought that Simon was still the upstart pirate allowing himself to be part of a plot against the doge -- as he was in the prologue -- rather than the doge being plotted against as he is in Act I and for the rest of the opera. And, from our seats in the nose bleed section (bad visuals, but best sound, I'm told by people who know)it's hard to tell two singers with similar bodyshape apart, so I had to spend a few minutes disgusted at my erroneous idea that Simon was kissing his unknown-to-him daughter. Incest at the Met, stranger things have happened.

Fortunately, a read of the Playbill got me straightened out at intermission and everybody stayed awake -- and coughing decreased -- for Acts 2 and 3 as the interwoven plots of Italian national identity, jealousy, double identities, and Simon's own personal history of first being a rebel against authority and then the authority, get sorted out to some excellent male singing, especially Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the baritone who sings Simon, and Ramon Vargas as Gabriele who has a showstopping (for me at least) aria in Act II. Only disappointment in the night was that James Levine, who was supposed to conduct and -- so I read -- has a special enthusiasm for this opera, was indisposed with a cold and did not conduct. This did not sit well initially with the coughing audience, which did warm to the work of Levine's substitue.

Yes, As a Matter of Fact, My Purse Is Occupying This Seat

The East Side is like the past and a foreign country -- they do things differently there.

Tonight we got on the M3 bus, to ride near home from a curator tour of the Whitney's "Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time", only to find the front aisle of the bus jammed and all seats filled except for the three person bench seat, the one where you must give up your place should a handicapped person board, directly behind the driver. Two women, apparently not acquainted, sat at either end of the bench, and between them, occupying the third space, sat their two fat purses. Despite the numerous standees, neither made any move to set the purses on their respective laps and there the matter rested for two stops until one of them got up, taking her purse and, at the same time, revealing the cause of the congestion in the aisle -- she had a midsized suitcase on wheels whose pull handle she had fully extended into the aisle, so that the suitcase blocked all access to the rear of the bus. Call her Woman Number One. She got off and, with my wife now sitting on the facing bench, I sat in Woman Number One's place. As I did, I saw a small laminated card, like a club or museum membership card, where she had been plopped. I picked it up and immediately Woman Number Two ordered, "Give me that." Too surprised to do anything but comply, I handed it over and, after examining it front and back, she dropped it into the purse, which did now rest on her lap. I guess I looked like I wanted nothing more than to snatch it.

The curator tour was excellent, how pictures were selected for the exhibition, how they were prepped, and shipped to Europe for two museum runs before opening at Hopper's home museum, how Hopper lived for the last 50 years of his life until his death at 86 in a small fourth floor walkup apartment in the village.

I love Hopper, but I have always thought that the critics have his work completely wrong. He is the artist of isolation and alienation only if you consider the often solitary people in his paintings to be the primary subject of them. Instead, Hopper is, I think, about something else, saying again and again in his work that man is part and only part of something much bigger, the buildings of the modern city and, even more, the openness of small towns and the fields beyond and about them.

Dubious Words to Live By

As another winter night closes in and we head for temps in the low teens before dawn tomorrow, I heard this casual bit of misogyny walking past the General Grant Houses on my way back to the apartment after buying a bottle of wine, "You can lose money takin' bitches, but you can't lose bitches takin' money."

An Unfortunate Business Name

I was walking on W. 86th this morning, heading for the dentist -- where, thankfully, the novocaine shot didn't hurt a bit and it did its job and I dodged the root canal bullet again. Anyway, a van turning off Amsterdam onto 86th had one of the more unfortunate business names I've seen -- Cobra Kitchen Ventilation. Excuse me, if the choice is venting my kitchen or letting a cobra in through the new ventilation, I'll stay with the stale old food odors, thanks!