Hash

Here’s one thing I just don’t understand: why do New York City diners serve soggy breakfast potatoes, rather than crispy hash browns the way they do in the rest of the country? It’s a total travesty.

Fortunately, I’m now down the block from Landmarc, which appears to be one of about three places in all of NYC that serves real hash browns.

Even better, breakfast there overlaps with the night staff from CNN upstairs stopping in for post-work drinks. If you’re slightly hung over at 8am, it’s somehow oddly soothing to see a group of people still getting actively drunk.

August 16, 2015

Fountain

Another upside of the new apartment: we’re across the street from my favorite spot in NYC.

lincolncenter

August 15, 2015

Bummed

Ten years ago, I was an early adopter of flushable wipes.

Then I moved into a pre-war building, with pipes so old that they were literally plumbed (from lead, or ‘plumbum’ in Latin) by hand, rather than assembled from pre-existing copper and galvanized steel lengths and bends as plumbing is today. Given those small and uneven pipes, wet wipes more or less instantly gummed up the works, so it was back to traditional toilet paper.

Freshly moved to a modern construction building, I’ve been asked by a bunch of friends about the building’s amenities. Sure, there’s a pool and a roof deck. But what I’m particularly happy about is the flushability. I may be wrecking the NYC sewage system as a whole, but I feel cleaner than I have in years.

August 14, 2015

Nested

Yesterday, I moved into a new apartment. I was supposed to have moved in on the 1st, but due to some construction snafus, the space wasn’t ready at the start of the lease. So, for a week and a half, I was essentially homeless. Thanks to the kindness of friends and family, the dogs and I had places to stay. But, whoo boy, was it a pain in the ass.

Previously, I’d always thought of myself as a potential digital nomad. Needing nothing more than a laptop and the contents of my suitcase, ready to work and live on the fly from anywhere with a bed and an internet connection.

Turns out, that’s not so much the case. Perhaps it’s a result of corralling two small dogs through the process, or just of aging in general, but I felt out of sorts the entire stretch. And now, back in a more permanent spot, my brain is ready again to engage with work and the world.

August 12, 2015

Frieze

Friday evening, Jess and I drove out to Randall’s Island, the little patch under the Triborough bridge that houses the Manhattan Psychiatric Center and the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center for the criminally insane. This past weekend, appropriately enough, it also housed Frieze, New York’s largest contemporary art fair.

For three days, nearly 200 galleries from around the world set up shop in a long, serpentine, tent-like building, displaying their priciest, most inscrutable pieces on white pop-up gallery walls. A few of the pieces were spectacular (we coveted a pair of large Alex Katz’s in particular), and a handful were disturbing, thought-provoking or funny in memorable ways.

But, by and large, the art was eclipsed by the crowd. Collect the arterati from New York, Berlin, Tokyo and beyond, and you have an amazing array of people all trying their hardest to look like they’re not trying hard at all. The ennui was palpable, and I spent most of the time with the Ben Folds Five’s Battle of Who Could Care Less stuck in my head. “Do you not hear me anymore / I know it’s cool to be so bored / I know it’s not your thing to care.”

Jess spent most of the time marveling at the clothing worn, most of it a far throw from the carefully-proscribed strictures of Fashion Week cool that she’s used to seeing. The dominant Frieze style appeared to be “expensive basics assembled mismatchingly by blind drunk”, though at least a few people also seemed to be wearing stuff pulled from Zoolander’s Derelicte.

Then, of course, there were the Milanese and Roman galleries, instead full of young men wearing impeccable suits with sprezzatura. Proving, as ever, that an excellent suit is never out of place. Or, at least, that we should all wish we were Italian.

May 18, 2015

Weather or Not

One interesting upside of owning dogs is that I’m far more attuned to New York City weather than I was in my earlier, dogless life. Sure, a ten or fifteen degree swing makes some difference when you’re running from office to subway; but when you’re standing out in that weather for a solid hour, moseying slowly while two small canines consider where they’d most enjoy pooping, even a few points fahrenheit makes a huge difference. This morning, with temperatures unexpectedly back to the wintry 30s after a stretch of balmy spring 60s and 70s, I wished I’d brought along gloves and perhaps a hat.

But the arrival of spring is always a fraught time in NYC. After months encased in full-body cladding, we suddenly see pasty, puffy skin overexposed en masse. It’s a good time for gyms. While the rest of the country sees its peak gym attendance only at the start of the year, New York has a few other surges of gym attendance: one at the start of September, when everyone returns from the Hamptons with a sense of ‘back to school’ vigor, and another in late April / early May, when everyone realizes there’s perilously little time until they might need to show up in public in a bathing suit.

I’ve enjoyed watching restaurants, too, struggling each day to decide if they should open for dining outdoors, with chairs and tables appearing and disappearing. Granted, as a great New York Times piece observed a few years back, outdoor dining in NYC is still well short of the Continental ideal in even the best of circumstances: “nothing sauces roasted chicken like the exhaust from an M104 bus and there’s no music more relaxing than the eek-eek-eek of a delivery truck in reverse.”

So, with the weather swinging, we muddle through. Bundling up against intermittent cold, preparing to enjoy pending warmth. At some time in the next month, I’m sure the weather will hit its perfect, crisp spring ideal, holding there for a few weeks straight. It’s the time when I, and everyone else, thinks, “yes! this is why we live here!” Sure, after that brief interlude, the city becomes a humid, stinking, summer shithole, and we all fantasize about moving somewhere, anywhere else. But then, in the fall, we have another perfect, beautiful, crisp three weeks. Which carries us through the freezing, slushy winter to another year. Rinse and repeat.

All of which is to say, spring is (sort of) here. Let’s enjoy it while we can!

April 24, 2015

Juno Flu

flu1

While the blizzard was a bust, I figured out a good way to spend my snow day nonetheless: in bed with the flu.

Gemelli and Penne have been keeping guard over me, and Jess has been kindly covering nursing duty on top of doing her own work from home.

Working on bouncing back fast!

January 27, 2015

Nuts

gemtree

Every morning, Gemelli and I head to Riverside Park for a walk. Before 9am, dogs are allowed off leash there, and Gem is wild with freedom. As much as he’s thrilled to explore, and to look for ladies (in human years, he’d be in his late teens, making chasing tail his primary hobby), what he really wants to do is poop in privacy.

Normally, he stays fairly close to me, rarely wandering more than a dozen feet from my side. But once we hit the Riverside Park Promenade, he takes off sprinting. A hundred feet or so ahead, he ducks behind a tree, and drops a morning deuce.

Frankly, I understand. After the embarrassment of pooping at leash’s end the rest of the day, the luxury of going solo seems well worth the effort.

Recently, however, a handful of squirrels have taken up residence in the trees above Gem’s favorite poop spot. I assume they must be harvesting the acorns, though they’ve been at it for at least a week, and I can’t imagine there are enough acorns still in the trees to sustain the effort. Nonetheless, if you’re under those trees, a regular barrage of acorns comes dropping down around you. I’m not certain that the squirrels are trying to hit you, but the proximity of the drops seems pretty suspect.

Gem seems more interested in observing the tree squirrels – occasionally barking at them, considering ways of reaching them ten feet up – than in pooping. After five minutes of chasing bouncing acorns, we move on. But it isn’t until I put his leash back on some twenty minutes later that Gem seems to realize he still needs to go.

On that final stretch of the walk, Gemelli looks at me repeatedly with a mournful expression. And then, somewhere close to home, he crouches and squeezes out an unhappy poop. He won’t make eye contact while he’s doing it, or for the rest of the walk home. Clearly, he’s been robbed the high point of his day.

September 3, 2014

Auto-Ambulate

A few months ago, one of our upstairs neighbors told us a story about a dog who lived in our building thirty or forty years back; I didn’t believe it, until another of our upstairs neighbors told us the same thing, and told us that it was her dog.

Apparently, when her Yorkshire Terrier needed to go for a walk, she’d call the elevator, press the first floor button once it arrived, and then let her dog ride down alone. From there, the dog would walk past the doorman, down the front steps, and over to Broadway, where he’d walk himself down to 79th street, over to West End Avenue, then back up towards home.

When he arrived back at the building, he’d patiently wait next to the doorman’s desk, until somebody led him back to the elevator, and pressed the twelfth floor button to send him up.

Very convenient.

August 19, 2014