like a tourist

This afternoon, on the way back from the bank to my office, I was stopped by a gentleman in Times Square handing out tickets to the taping of Letterman. With nothing better to do (aside from, say, actual work), and having never before attended such a thing, I decided to skip out the rest of the afternoon to attend.

In summary: the guests were good (Steve Martin, Amy Sedaris, The Foo Fighters), the sketches and Dave’s jokes were rather bland, and the incontrovertible highlight of the show was the poor makeup woman whose sole responsibility seemed to be sneaking on and off stage to quickly powder Paul Shaffer’s bald head between shots.

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February 24, 2003

roommate blues

Over my last few months absence, paying bills has apparently been a rather low priority item for my roommates. As a result, I returned to New York to find our apartment with no telephone service, no internet access, no cable, and no electricity. Well, actually, yes electricity, but only because I was able to catch the people from Con Edison on Friday morning just as they were turning it off.

Further, it seems part of the flushing mechanism in our toilet broke several weeks back, and instead of calling the landlord to have it fixed, they’ve simply been reaching in to the tank to manually lift that little rubber stopper at the bottom.

It’s been a few years since I’ve had roommates, and I’m beginning to remember why.

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February 23, 2003

back in ny

Went down to the Meatpacking district today to eat lunch at Pastis. On the way back, I passed a man holding an elaborate phone conversation on a banana placed to his ear. Ah, New York City, it’s good to be home.

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February 22, 2003

brrrrr

The snowline in Central Park, a few short blocks from my New York apartment, has hit 19 inches. I’ve been gradually turning up the AC here in LA, preparing for my return.

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February 18, 2003

alone again

I vividly remember, from when I was growing up, the feeling of returning home each summer at sleepaway camp to a bedroom all my own – the sense of vague uneasiness in a space so quiet, so unsharedly still. I felt a twinge of that again this morning, after dropping my colleague Yoav at the airport and returning to our LA corporate housing. For the first time in a month and a half, I had the place all to myself – with my colleagues off at various film festivals, I’m no longer sharing the apartment, the car, nor our workplace. And while the silence is a bit odd, it’s also deeply relaxing. I can lose myself in daydreaming. I can once again hear myself think.

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February 8, 2003

a brief respite

Back to New York for a bit of a break before hurling myself into the fires of Hollywood once more for the ever-intensifying stretch that leads to the start of I Love Your Work shooting on January 8th. Too stressed out, jet lagged and sleep deprived for genuine pith or wit, I fall back upon these two passages on that most unique city of angels to summarize my thoughts.

On Los Angeles versus New York:

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in those streets.

– Jack Kerouac, On the Road

On the lovely individuals with whom I’ve interacted thus far:

The men who work in this town, and, to a lesser degree, the women, display behaviors that would undo them in any other profession. Egomania and greed that would disgrace any executive in, say, the insurance or aerospace industries are here rewarded. And even for those who run afoul of the law and are convicted of crimes, there is an apparently bottomless well of forgiveness. “Nobody cares about that shit,” one studio head said recently. “If you’re a money-maker, you could have killed and eaten your own children. It doesn’t matter as long as there is the perception that you can make somebody some money.”

-Charles Fleming, “Failing Upward in Movieland”

Boy, I can’t wait to go back.

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December 21, 2002

hell’s kitchen

Earlier today, in a bout of productivity, I decided to walk up and down 9th Ave a few blocks in each direction from my apartment, collecting menus from restaurants that deliver. Over a span of four blocks, I collected 23 menus. I’ll never be leaving the house again.

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December 4, 2002

head above water

I’ve made it across to the new apartment, unpacked at least the majority of my boxed worldly possessions, and can now get down to business (and blogging). Lots to talk about, from Thanksgiving break escapades to moving misadventures. Come tomorrow, I should be back on a daily schedule.

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give me your fat, your lazy, your tubby masses…

New York is, from the perspective of the very lazy, truly an ideal city. No place else boasts such a wide array of services catered to those who can’t be bothered to get up out of their easy chairs. Jonesing for a few Big Macs? Don’t worry, because McDonald’s will deliever that fatty-fried “beef” directly to your front door. Out of toilet paper? Call from the john and the corner drug store can get TP into your hand by the time you’re ready to wipe. So perhaps it shouldn’t be overly surpising that it is in this environment that FreshDirect, the largest delivery-based grocery startup since WebVan’s calamitous disintegration, is being launched.

As much as I’d like to prognosticate the firm’s horrible impending failure, I’m actually oddly bullish on the company. I’ve bought my groceries from then for the past three weeks, and it seems to me the company hits the trifecta of requirements for consumer uptake (better quality food, at lower prices, more conveniently provided), all couched within a business model that is based on making rather than losing money on each delivery (leveraging both a rather cleverly technologized warehouse system and a slew of direct-purchase deals with food growers and makers which cut out the pricey distribution tier of middlemen).

FreshDirect’s currently running a “$50 of free groceries for new customers” promotion, so if you live in NYC, you might as well give them a whirl – with the amount we pay for anything in this city, any financial break is a welcome change. Just don’t throw out your Gristedes club card; my positive outlook aside, if these guys don’t build up a customer base quickly, you’ll once again be pushing the cart down the aisles yourself.

Update: Several readers have pointed out that Kozmo is perhaps a better failed dot-com comparison than WebVan, as Kozmo similarly leveraged New Yorkers’ sloth before plummeting out of business. FreshDirect, however, is largely immune to the main problem Kozmo faced: small orders (most Kozmo.com orders were for one or two, relatively inexpensive items). The markup on a single tub of Haagen Dazs isn’t enough to cover the cost of delivery; a cart full of groceries, however, grosses enough to work – hence FreshDirect’s $40 minimum.

Update 2: Several other readers have emailed to say they like to hand-pick fruits and vegetables themselves, something web grocery shopping doesn’t allow. I’d posit, however, that what those readers really mean is that they want their fruits and vegetables to be good – if the quality of the food delivered is high enough (fruit that’s large, mildly under-ripened and completely free of bruises, for example), people are largely just as happy as if they did the picking themselves. Because the FreshDirect warehouse is catered to the food rather than to the shoppers (foods are kept in ideally climate and moisture controlled rooms, and aren’t roughly piled and frequently handled, as in supermarkets), pretty much all of the produce I’ve had delivered is at least as good as what I could hand pick at Food Emporium or even the Amish Market.

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November 16, 2002

hallway woes

In the past year that I’ve lived in my current apartment, nearly every single person coming to visit has cracked a joke about the hallway. Its not just that the hallway is bad – which it is – but rather that it also seems remarkably out of place in a building that is otherwise reasonably upscale.

Entering the building, for example, one passes through a two story high lobby, tastefully decorated with large pieces of Asian art. Then into one of the elevators, marble-floored and oak-walled. Upon the doors opening onto the 24th floor, however, one is suddenly transported from New York luxury building to mid-’70s Howard Johnson: faux-bamboo wallpaper, quasi-psychedelic orange/brown carpeting, and bizarrely overwrought and underlit lighting fixtures.

Sensitive to this issue, the building’s management has been gradually upgrading the halls – jumping ahead twenty years from ’70s HoJo to what strikes me as more of a mid-’90s Holliday Inn. About six of the floors have been converted, and so far as I can tell, there isn’t much rhyme or reason to the order in which they’ve been tackled, so I’m not sure to what I can attribute the luck of my floor being the latest endeavor.

Normally, I suppose, I would be excited at the upgrade. But as I’m only in the building for another few weeks, I don’t suspect I’ll get much time to enjoy the improvements. Instead, I simply get the intensive ongoing construction – tearing out the carpet, wallpaper and fixtures, re-wiring the lighting, adding a drop ceiling and wood moldings, re-painting, re-carpeting and re-wallpapering, and so on. If I’m working from home for the day (as I usually do a few times a week), I’m trapped in my apartment by the piles and piles of construction equipment and materials, serenaded by the sound of power tools and loud Springsteen-esque rock in various foreign languages. In the evenings, after everything has been cleared out, the entire hallway remains covered with a fine, asbestos-like dust of indiscriminate origin.

On the plus side, however, that same dust makes most of my shoes remarkably slippery on marble flooring, allowing me to skate out of the elevator, across the lobby, and onto the street with enough casually-effortless aplomb to make Nancy Kerrigan proud.

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November 3, 2002