very simple

Back in the days when I used to make attempts at creativity, I got into a fight with my photography professor in the middle of class one day. I had gone to a budget protest rally in Albany and taken a bunch of pictures of the protesters, and they were fantastic looking (if I do say so myself). So when it came time to present them in class, I was quite proud of my work. But this professor kept going, "yeah, they’re nice to look at, but what do they mean?" After a few rounds of this, I finally had enough and just blurted out, "why do they have to mean anything? why can’t they just be an interesting-looking documentation of an event? why can’t they just be great-looking pictures?" I’ll admit that I thought I actually lost the argument, not because my point wasn’t valid but, well, because I disagreed with the professor. But he must have taken what I said to heart, because I ended up with an A in the class (even though I certainly didn’t get an A on every assignment).

The reason why I post this story now? Because I was just watching the news, and they had an interview with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, where Jeanne-Claude had this gem:

Even though I’ve been totally swamped at work (it seems to be a recurring February phenomenon), this weekend is shaping up to be an awesome birthday for me. For one thing, it actually falls on a Sunday this year, making the likelihood of having to work until midnight (like last year) pretty slight. And the Gates are going to open this weekend, so that’s going to be on my itinerary. I’m weirdly excited about it, and I normally don’t get quite this giddy over public art projects. Maybe it’s because the scale of the project is crazy (23 miles!), or that Christo has spent 20 years trying to get the thing done (and is paying for the whole thing), or that it’s orange, but I’m almost giddy with anticipation.

And I certainly don’t want to jinx it, but I’m in an apartment-buying frenzy at the moment as well. I got home last night and spent two hours photocopying tax returns and rent statements for my mortgage broker. So that’s exciting…

How the fuck does Judith Miller still have a job? Dan Okrent, who I ordinarily find spends way too much time making excuses for his Times bosses rather than ombudsmanning them, actually takes Miller to task again, this time for a bunch of unsubstantiated comments she’s made on the teevee:

It was an unseasonably warm day today in the city, and I’m glad I made it out of my apartment to see it. It reached the mid-50s (which was a refreshing change from the sub-zero blizzard weather a few weeks ago). Tomorrow is also the final day of sales tax free week, which is the most awesomest week of the year around here (or two weeks – there’s usually another one around labor day). I hit the sporting goods store to pick up a few things I need to go skiing at the end of the month (visiting my brother in Vail for a few days) and between the sale and the no tax, I probably spent half what I would have on any other day. Love that!

Of course, my radiator-heated apartment (building controlled) doesn’t realize how warm it is, so I had to actually turn on my A/C to counteract the overwhelming heat in my apartment. Still can’t open the windows because of the neverending construction next door. Lately it seems to involve constant use of a blowtorch.

Apparently there’s a really big football game tomorrow, and despite my overwhelming indifference to the sport, I’ve managed to get invited to two parties. My best friend from high school is having folks up to her house in Westchester, and regardless of how nice it would be to see her family, I can’t see myself spending an hour on the train to watch commercials (because really, I’m not going up for the game). A friend from work who lives two blocks from the office is also having a party, and I may stop by there, if only because I have to go to work for at least a few hours tomorrow anyway – It’ll make the day go by much quicker if I know that free beer is waiting for me at the end of it.

It’s going to be just as nice out tomorrow, so I may even walk to the office…

Things that pissed me off this weekend…

• So, the hot chocolate festival was completely lame yesterday – I stopped by, but didn’t even take any pictures because it was actually somewhat pathetic (and after all the hype!). The ice rink? was "synthetic ice" that you could skate on with ice skates, but was so small that you couldn’t fit more than a few people a a time. The "sidewalks piled with snow that would be imported in? was chunks of week old sidewalk snow from last weekend’s blizzard, that was impossible to play in. As I walked down the street I could feel palpable disappointment in the parents and kids that I passed. Oh, and for all the hype about the hot chocolate itself, City Bakery was apparently charging $2 for a sample-size cup. So I essentially walked by making like I was just going over to sixth avenue, lest anyone think this "festival" was my actual destination. I don’t know if they thought the blizzard would negate their need to import snow, or if it was a little too warm to make things work (it was actually in the mid 30s), but it was quite poorly executed. I’m actually mad at myself for telling other people about it.
• Thanks, New York Times, for giving away the "major plot twist" to Million Dollar Baby in the friggin’ headline. Hint: Don’t click on the link if you don’t want to know. And putting a disclaimer in the second paragraph of the article doesn’t exactly work when your headline is "Groups Criticize ‘Baby’ for Message on [XXXXXXXXX]". Some of us actually haven’t seen the film yet, even here in New York where it’s actually been playing.
• And in my personal life, I woke up this morning with what appears to be a stye in my left eye. Which really, really sucks. my eyelid is swollen and I look like I got punched in the face. And I’m stuck wearing my glasses, which also sucks because the lack of peripheral vision will give me a massive headache by the end of the day.
• Oh, and Fresh Direct forgot one of the boxes in my order last night. The one with all of the Diet Coke (among other things). And when I called them, they’re all "we can deliver it from 2-4 on Wednesday," forcing me to point out that the reason I’m scheduling deliveries at 10pm on Sunday nights is precisely because I work during the week. and then when we finally figure out a new deliver time for the missing $20 worth of groceries? The guy is like, "and we won’t even charge you for delivery!" in this tone that is totally like he’s doing me a solid. My response? an incredulous "well I certainly hope not, as you guys fucked up, and not only would charging me for a second delivery in this circumstance be unethical, I’m pretty sure it would be illegal as well…"

Wow. now I feel a little bit better.

So I’m reading through the NY Times RSS feed this morning, and I get to this op-ed, which, in all seriousness, proclaims "drunk dialing" as the newest problem of the information age, thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones.

Uh…OK.

Except it’s certainly not a "new phenomenon", and back in the technological dark ages of my college days, before anyone (let alone everyone) had a cellphone, drunk dialing was a pretty common occurrence. In fact, if they kept records on this sort of thing, I imagine that it’s a "phenomenon" that developed around the same time as the telephone.

Cellphones certainly make it easier to drunk dial with abandon, thanks to stored numbers and the availability of a phone at all times, but that’s certainly not the perspective taken by the op-ed in phrases like this intro:

To the list of the unforeseen hazards that seem to plague the information age, we can now add another: "drunk dialing."

This late-night cellular faux pas joins such exalted company as the "mistaken dial" (when your mobile phone, inadvertently prompted, dials a number in your address book by mistake) and the annoying ring tone that can interrupt big job interviews or Communion service.

But unlike its predecessors, drunk dialing usually limits itself to times long after the close of business and beyond the daily commute.

So, apparently something that existed for decades has been "preceded" by the type of incidents that can only exist in cellphones…It’s only been a week since Safire retired, and they’ve already forgotten how to use the english language.

Maybe I’m just being bitter because, back in those neanderthal college days, I actually almost missed a final exam thanks to the drunk dialing antics of my friend Dande. It was probably my mistake to keep the phone and the alarm clock next to each other, but when the phone rang at 3a.m., I first turned the alarm clock off before realizing that the phone was still ringing. Fell back into a deep sleep and woke up at 8:30 in the morning. The exam, which I ultimately arrived at still in my pajamas, had started at 8.

Tue Jan 18 2005:

Once it stopped snowing this morning, it got gorgeous out. Freezing, but gorgeous. I spent some time running errands, including buying (finally!) a humidifier for my apartment. It’s so dry with the radiator on that it’s like living in the desert. Only stuffy too. On my way around, I took a bunch of photos of the post-snow shenanigans. Some things I noticed today…

This is what the street already looked like only a half an hour after the snow started.

A caravan of city snowplows, none of them actually plowing the street.

For some reason, no one ever takes pictures of this side of the flatiron building.

One of the less well plowed streets.

This guy is going to have a hell of a time moving his car tomorrow.

A documentary I own has pointed this out before, but I can’t help loving it – one of the most amazing things about the grid plan in the City is that regardless of how close the buildings are to each other, you can stand at almost any intersection and see for miles.

[Update 2015] In an effort to reduce the number of holdover pages on the blog, I am slowly (very slowly) integrating these albums into the appropriate historical posts on the blog itself. As such, pictures are now directly below.

So this morning, after being woken up by my super (I knew it was going to happen – they were doing a scheduled changing of all of the locks in the building and I was still asleep at 10:45 when they started banging on my front door), I decided, since it hadn’t started snowing yet, to venture out to run some errands.

Part of this was driven by the fact that FreshDirect had cancelled my order (and all orders) due to impending weather, meaning that I needed to leave the house to buy milk, and I figured that I’d head over to Tekserve to pick up a copy of iLife.

Well, I left my apartment at 11:45 and it hadn’t started snowing yet – about 5 seconds later, the snow appeared. By the time I got home, an hour later, never going more than 5 blocks away from my apartment, there was a full inch of snow on the sidewalk and the snow was coming down so strongly that you had to walk with your head down. And my neighborhood grocery store looked a lot like this. But it’s nowhere near as nice as Fairway (hence the plan for a FD order).

It seems that after a relatively mild winter so far, Mother Nature is finally going to dump some snow on us. But apparently she’s also making up for lost time, by dumping, in the next 24 hours, all of the snow that we haven’t gotten in the past two months. What fun.

Oh, did I say fun?

I meant pain in the ass.

I don’t know if it’s better or worse that it’s going to be on the weekend. On the upside, I don’t have to leave my apartment for the entire weekend (I can even get DVDs delivered to my front door). On the downside, I probably won’t be leaving my apartment for the entire weekend. Part of me does want to get up in the morning and take pictures, because the city only gets blanketed in white very rarely. Sure it snows plenty, but between the salting and the traffic, it generally gets turned into a big brown slushy watery mess in a matter of hours. I just may have to brave it.