very simple

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.

This afternoon, I was minding my own business, running errands and generally wandering around the ‘hood. When I came out of the Virgin Megastore, the guy who had been standing against the wall with two other guys runs out into the sidewalk just to get my way, keeps his arms outstretched and won’t let me pass. As I bark at him to get out of my way (with a few profanities for good measure), he says "Do you like comedy?". Huh? I didn’t stick around to find out what it was all about, but I’m just wondering, if they were a legitimate group of guys trying to busk through humor, they’ve really got to get a better tactic. Because physically blocking the path of single women walking down the street, is going to get them hurt. Not the women, the guys. Because the immediate "fight" part of the "fight or flight" reaction that I had was to kick the guy in the balls. I didn’t, but if he took one more second to get out of the way it very well could have happened.

I get approached quite a bit on the street, by all sorts of people, and I know it has to do with the fact that I’m apparently completely non-threatening looking. I’d say that 90% of the time, I’m more than happy to help, but it’s somewhat amusing to then watch the reaction when an utterly Bronxian (thanks, mom and dad!) profanity-laced invective comes out of my mouth.

I added one more photo to yesterday’s album – the rain has finally stopped (briefly), and as I was leaving work I thought 6th Ave towards Radio City was somewhat cool looking. This was actually taken directly on my office building’s corner. You may begin to understand why I have such frustration with holiday season tourists.

Also, I had included this picture [ed note – that picture is no longer functioning correctly, so it has been removed from the album], not because it was anything particularly artistic, but because as I was walking home last night, I realized that it is now going to be the 5th or 6th restaurant to open in this space in the 5 years that I’ve lived here. It’s just somewhat amusing, because every time it turns over, they do a complete overhaul of the interior. I think the most successful business to run out of there was when I first moved in – back then it was a Dunkin’ Donuts, but it was also 1999 and I’m sure the owner of the building figured he could get 5 times the rent from a high-end restaurant. Well, that’s only true if they ever actually open.

My personal favorite restaurant to fail spectactularly in this spot was the one that immediately preceded this current incarnation – it was called "Choice", and it was literally open for three weeks, before all of a sudden the doors were sealed up and notices were placed in the windows that the property and furnishings had been seized by federal marshals for failure to pay taxes. That probably amused me significantly more than it should have. I mean, you go through all of the trouble and investment to get a business up and running, but shoot yourself in the foot by not paying your taxes. And not just being a little late and having a penalty assessed.

Anyway, the new restaurant looks like it’s going to be an outpost of Haru, which is actually in a few locations around the city. It’s actually the preferred times square/pre-theater destination for my family. I’m not quite sure that we need another sushi restaurant in the neighborhood, being that Yama (my favorite, and where I had dinner tonight) is on 17th, Hamachi (my dad’s favorite, from back in the days when he worked in my hood) is directly across from my apartment on 20th street, and the uber-trendy Sushi Samba is on Park between 19th and 20th. And that’s not even counting the 800 "hole-in-the-wall" sushi bars that litter the neighborhood. And that’s just sushi. I was looking at a copy of the 2005 Zagats today, and I realized that at least a third of the restaurants in the to 50 were between my apartment and Union Square (Danny Meyer and Bobby Flay really like the neighborhood).

Oh, and in one more neighborhood-related piece of news, Ian Schrager has purchased the Gramercy Park Hotel, and is selling off all of the furniture (including full ashtrays) before it gets renovated. It’s actually somewhat sad, because it’s a somewhat legendary hotel in the rock and roll lexicon. The bar recently re-opened after a two-year renovation (which is apparently going to be redone, again), but prior to that it was still full of it’s original 1960s/1970s era glory. If you’ve ever seen the movie Almost Famous, you’ve seen the interior immediately prior to the renovation – the near-final scenes when they’re in NYC and William tells the band that they’re going to be on the cover of Rolling Stone, before he spots Penny? That was shot on location. The Gramercy and the Chelsea hotels were pretty much the biggest haunts of folks like Dylan back in the day. Definitely the end of an era. But the beds are bound to be significantly more comfortable. And the elevators will probably work with more regularity.

Lately, I’ve taken up the habit of carrying my camera around with me everywhere. It’s actually a trait that I picked up from one of my bosses, who is a big photophile. Once in a while, I’ll be walking around and realize that there’s something cool that would be a great picture. Here are the first couple of pictures from the last day or two. They’re a little spotty, because it’s been raining here, and the rain and the glare from the lights causes some massive visual disturbance once you add a flash to the mix.

Also, this was my first opportunity to try out something new with the web coding as well. For all of my older photo albums, I had essentially hand-coded everything (using stylesheets of course), but I finally downloaded Galerie (I’m not sure why it took me so long, since it’s free software), and I made myself some custom templates that work off of my existing stylesheet. This album is the first test of that, and at least on my iMac, it looks perfect. Please feel free, however, to let me know if it’s completely screwed up anywhere else (except of course, IE for windows, because I just don’t care about that outdated software).

[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, photos now appear below.

Christo’s massive, 23-mile art installation is starting to get installed in time for it’s February 12 opening. The first work of Christo that I ever saw was when I was in Berlin in 1996 – while the long-defunct Reichstag was getting a new roof, he had wrapped the entire building in fabric rather than force Berliners to look at some ugly scaffolding. I always thought that, at least conceptually, that was a fabulous idea.

According to an article that appeared in the Times a few weeks ago that I can’t seem to find right now, Christo first developed this project more than two decades ago, and has been trying to get it installed ever since. Not only that, it’s not costing the city a dime – Christo and his wife have raised all the money for both the installation and related security themselves as a condition to getting permission to put up the fabric. And the city is thrilled, because this thing is apparently going to attract a whole lot of artsy tourists (hotels around the park have been filling up) during a period of the year when the city is ordinarily dead to tourists.

Public art is truly one of the wonderful benefits of living in this city.

Apparently, the MTA was surprised by the fact that when they raised prices, people in New York immediately changed their metrocard purchasing habits to something more advantageous, leaving a really big shortfall (again) in the MTA budget. Wow. It’s almost like they assumed that we’d all be so stupid that we couldn’t figure out that they were fleecing us.

I personally don’t really have an option when it comes to my metrocard buying habits – I get mine through my office’s transitcheck program, which gives me a yearly (yes, yearly) metrocard and then takes the cost of a monthly card (right now $70, soon to be $76) out of my pre-tax earnings. At my old office, the program allowed us to choose either a monthly or one of the "flat fee" cards – I used to just get two $30 (now $40) cards a month. Because I actually don’t take the subway all the time, this was actually more advantageous for me when I sat down and did the math (i.e., the monthly runs out at the end of the month whether you’ve used it once or 100 times, but the fee-based cards can get carried over, and I could actually accumulate them, and then just not get a new card for a month or two). But apparently the MTA thinks that the ordinary rider isn’t quite this sophisticated. Heh. If nothing else, NYC residents are a pretty financially savvy bunch.

Anyway, there’s a bunch of other transportation-related news today, including the fact that there is going to be a new ferry service from lower Manhattan to LaGuardia Airport. I wish I could take advantage of this, since I absolutely love boat rides around the city, but since I live and work near the midtown tunnel, it would be monumentally stupid for me to drag my luggage all the way downtown to take a boat. I would certainly eat up any of the advertised time savings trying to get myself all the way to lower Manhattan.

Oh, and then the outer borough bus strike is still going on. Yep, that’s the way to get the city to not take over your routes. Not.

…given the recent news out of Asia, but I was incredibly saddened today to learn that Jerry Orbach had died. To most people, he was the ultimate New York cop, Lennie Briscoe, on Law and Order, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that he first made his name as one of the most prolific song and dance men on broadway, including originating the role of Billy Flynn in Chicago. Last month I actually tivo’d (and am only halfway through) the PBS documentary about Broadway, and Orbach is all over the thing – it was really amazing to see how young (and suave) he looked in the clips…

Between Orbach and Susan Sontag, we’ve lost two quintessential New Yorkers in the past few days, both to cancer. I’m wondering who the third is going to be, because these things do always come in three’s, don’t they?

The last of my Christmas/Holiday related parties was last night – My friend Vinnie closed his restaurant and cooked a lot of food, and invited a bunch of friends to partake. Certainly the best tasting party that I’ve been to this season. And the only one that had nothing to do with work. I went with my dad and stepmom, who is actually the reason we know Vinnie (they’ve known each other for about 15 years). Anyway, it was fun – we all drank too much and ate too much, and today I’m going to do the traditional “jewish christmas” which consists of going to see several movies (I’ve already bought tickets to Ocean’s 12 and The Life Aquatic) and eating Chinese food for dinner. I found out last night that there’s also a New York City coda to that – you can eat Indian food instead of Chinese, so that opens up the options a little bit more.

Some pictures from last night:

New York City in the weeks leading up to Christmas is generally overfilled with tourists (who I’ve complained about before), but all of a sudden, Christmas Eve actually shows up and the entire city empties out – I walked over to Gonzo at around 8 p.m., and this is what 5th Avenue looked like:

Here’s Vinnie – the bestest Italian chef (and I don’t just say that because he gives me free food whenever I stop by):

And finally, me and my dad, and my dad and stepmom, who are now on their way to Buenos Aires and Patagonia for two weeks, and as of dessert last night hadn’t finished packing. Travellers after my own heart:

Since it’s actually Christmas today, I’ll just sign off with a Merry Christmas (and Happy Holidays) everyone!

Pamie and Dan are two of my favorite bloggers, so when Dan said to check out his friend Darren’s new blog I ran right over to read it. It’s quite amusing. His first entry was actually about some of his odd neighbors, which made my think of my own recent encounters.

I got home one night last week, at an actual reasonable hour, to find that several of my neighbors had put up one of those "safety-gates" in the middle of the hallway. Why would they do this? why, in order to create an artificial play area for their little dogs. Part of me found this amusing, but the part of me that had to actually get to my apartment on the other side of the gate was somewhat annoyed (and yes, they did move it for me, but still).

Here’s the thing. I love dogs. I grew up with both dogs and cats (2 of each). But the reasons that I don’t keep a dog in the city are that I have a crazy schedule and a small apartment. There’s a certain amount of common sense that goes along with having a pet as well, and part of that is recognizing that dogs (like children) don’t give you carte blanche to start ignoring the rules of society. Carpeted hallways? not play areas. Particularly not play areas to set up fire hazards in the middle of. If you don’t have the time/energy/inclination to take your dog outside for exercise (or the money to pay someone else to do it?), particularly when one of the nicest dog runs in the city is only a few blocks away? you shouldn’t have one. And yeah, I know I was just complaining about the cold weather, but if your dog is too fragile to handle it, buy it a damn sweater.

Heck, my dad spends so much time in Central Park with his and my stepmother’s unusual menagerie of three dogs (two jack russells and a Bernese Mountain Dog) that several of my friends have mentioned seeing him, even though they’ve never met him. As soon as I describe the dogs, they’re like "oh, we see that guy in the park all the time!".

I guess it’s really that I was less irritated by the dogs themselves, which were cute, than by the idea that these new (human) neighbors were apparently not taught proper boundaries.

After a surprisingly pleasant late fall, winter finally arrived last night/this morning.

Walking home from the movie last night was certainly cold, and it had started snowing (first snow!), but I was quite shocked when I walked out of my building this morning (which wasn’t helped by the fact that I accidentally left my UGGs at work last week in order to attend of of the 103 work-related parties I have this season). It was bitterly cold. And it probably didn’t help that it was still in the 40s over the weekend. walking to the N/R/W train, which is only three blocks away, I started thinking of ways to cut my outdoor commute shorter (let’s see, I can take the 6, which is only half a block away, to 59th street, then switch to the N in the other direction…)

The flip side of my commute is always easy, as I can just get off the train at 49th street and walk through the labyrinth of underground tunnels that connect all of the buildings around Rockefeller Center – it’s pretty nifty, except for the fact that it closes at 6pm, meaning that I only get to take advantage in the morning.

I’m debating whether to attend another party tonight, this time it’s the NY Office party. Employees only, which means about 1000 people. It’s at Lincoln Center this year, because there aren’t a whole lot of spaces that can accomodate us. Last year it was at Madame Tussaud’s in Times Square, which was kind of cool because it’s the kind of place that I would never go to otherwise (Have I ever mentioned that I’ve lived in the NY area for my entire life, save college and law school, and I’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty?). One of these days I’m going to take a weekend and be a "tourist", and force myself to go do all of the things that I never do as a native…