Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Ran around Chelsea this morning with Mary and Jonathan checking out galleries. The new Nan Goldin show is highly recommended, especially the landscapes. And it made me want a Leica so bad. Above is from one of the galleries on 26th street. Nothing spectacular, except for this one place that had a warehouse-sized room filled with this psychedellic floral wallpaper and lots of hand lettered print on the wall that told the story of a caveman who cheats on his wife and gets caught. I found it really emotional, even though the caveman looked a lot like Homer Simpson.

The most beautiful space in Brooklyn.

One day I want to make a feature film set entirely in this office on Vanderbilt Avenue. I should take more pictures in the meantime, because it’s obviously going to be destroyed in the next couple of years. And we’ll be ordering Vente Tazo Frappucinos on this hallowed ground. It’s like my Barney Miller dream. I wish I worked here. I really lucked out that I walked past it tonight and all the lights were on and no one was inside so I could take as many pictures as I wanted.

I spent a while on the internet yesterday reading about new york graffiti, which doesn’t really interest me, but the stickers and posters I see around town are great. Seeing these methodically recorded images really got me fired up (i.e. here’s another way to collect things that incorporate my everyday life: it’s perfect!). This was my favorite.

I used to see this sign every morning on my way to work. It’s on 7th Avenue and 22nd street. What was it? The “loves neck face” was new and I later saw it all over the Lower East Side as I walked around.

Friday

Classiest graffiti in town.

Projects.

Dan’s strange t-shirt.

Karen at Green Point Tavern.

Creepy haunted house in midtown.

I got the idea, at the time facetiously, to start riding my bike to work in the morning. It would shorten my commute and I’d get excercise, blah, blah. What nailed it was this morning coming in I saw someone from my office (who lives a block away! on St. Marks!) locking up his bike in front of the building. And then I thought I could do it as well. But I’m really going to miss that part of the morning commute when you’re reading the paper and nodding off at the same time and people all around you are falling asleep. I’d love to do the hidden subway camera/Walker Evans thing of taking pictures of people, in my version, sleeping. It’s supposed to rain and be cold for the next week anyway.

Another form of the absurdity of spring fever hit me today as I sat in traffic in a taxi for a half hour and instead of being frustrated (cause I was so glad to be out of the office and semi enjoying the weather), I started daydreaming about being a taxi driver. Like at that moment, it seemed like a good idea to take a three or four month leave of absense and drive a NY taxi for the summer. But maybe a summer is too long (who would want to do this in late July and August?), so I thought maybe for a day. Like there must be hundreds of guys in offices who wish they were zipping across town in a car all day long, letting fate and passengers direct your course. I checked Google to see if there was a Make A Wish Foundation type service that catered to this fantasy (since there’s a lot of politics and expense and certification to be a real taxi driver), but all I could find were links to articles about taxi driver murder rates.

This has got to be the lamest thing thus far found in my Amazon gold box. I’m going to offer a reward for anything worse.

Saturday morning, Tom’s Diner.

After staying home sick and playing with my computer for about 15 hours on a rainy, CNN-soaked Friday, it was nice to get up Saturday morning and head out for brunch with Katherine, Rachel and Bobby, and Rachel’s sister Rebekah and her husband Stephen. It was sunny and warm and basically felt like late May. But since it’s not, the bright plastic flowers and foiliage of Tom’s, which is all wrapped up in sparkling tiny white lights, you could sort of suspend your disbelief and go with the Spring fantasy. Going to this diner during the winter, I found it claustrophobic and tacky. But this morning, it felt like (what I’d imagine) Xanax must feel like. And my Cherry Lime Ricky and fruit pancakes put me on the verge of tears of joy…

I’d kinda planned to spend the rest of day doing the usual Saturday errands: laundry, grocery, drugstore, etc. But I ended up going to the Aquaduct racetrack in Queens for no particular reason except you’re with people who want to go and know how to get there on the subway. On the way there, we stopped at this amazing old Brooklyn time-warp grocery store.

The track was just as seedy as I hoped. Everyone was smoking and looking at racing forms and screaming at the monitors. The median age seemed to be about 65, but there were some kids running around trying to entertain themselves. The whole place smelled of slow-cooked hot dogs.

Favorite horse names:

Artistic Awareness
Cancel The Suite
Fistbump (the popular favorite)
I’m A Goer
Infinite Justice
Quietly Elegant
Rose Punch
Say Cousin Lenny

Afterwards, we ended up in DUMBO at Between the Bridges and drank until the sun went down.

Stop repeating the ‘Chinese Restaurant’ episode!

One of my favorite things about living in Brooklyn is all the interesting trash. I make out like a bandit usually grabbing up all the free books left . It’s amazingly random what you can find sometimes. And very occasionally you find a usefull piece of furniture. Like I picked up a good chair recently. The above though was just plain weird. I wish I knew what the origin of this piece was. This was spotted on Flatbush Avenue on the way home from O’Connors.

Speaking of weird, I went to Benihana tonight for dinner, which I am told by my more experienced Hibacchi-goers, does not live up to its southern counterparts. I liked our chef, though. He was an Indian guy from South Africa and was funny and self depricating, even if he hadn’t mastered some of those tricks these guys do. I liked how in the course of preparing a meal for seven people he threw out references to James Joyce’ Ulysses, a style of Renaissance perspective painting and allusions to Rosa Parks in contemporary hip hop, all to the deafening silence/bafflement of our table. I thought he was the coolest until Jeremy said that these guys usually set the entire teppanyaki grill on fire, which would have been nice. I’ve been making a strong effort to not keep amassing a bunch of cute useless junk lately (I even managed to visit Toy Tokyo without getting anything), but I couldn’t resist this knife-weilding Pillsbury dough boy collectible Tiki drink glass. My beverage had no discernible alcohol in it, which was nice because most often these drinks taste like Robotussin.

I walked through Grand Central this (Thursday) morning on my way to a meeting. The strangest part were all the reporters and camera crews. I learned later that there was a press conference going on with Pataki. But at the time, it was strange to see all the commotion. Since I’ve now watched about five hours of war coverage, I’ve seen all the little sub-stories about Grand Central being NY target numero uno. Which explains the large variety of armed soldiers. Has anyone else noticed those creepy black leather jackets that some NYPD wear? It’s kind of a gay 1920’s Euro fighter pilot look. Jeremy and I noticed these earlier in the winter in Times Square and we both did a double take cause it seemed like a costume a cop would wear in a movie.
Speaking of police, my sister’s boyfriend, Jonathan, was robbed at gunpoint Tuesday night in Harlem. He works up there and was stopped on his way home and lost his cell phone and eight dollars. After talking to the police, he figured it was a gang crime and was pretty glad to still have his wallet and satety and all that. But the really weird thing is that the little gun-toting kids who robbed him are now using his cell phone. If you call up Jonathan (sorry, I’m working on getting the number) you hear the kid say, “Hey, whatup, yo!” as a new voice mail message. The police told Jonathan not to cut off his service since they’re trying to catch the thieves by tracking their phone signal. But I keep thinking about the ability he has to call the kid(s) who robbed him. Like most people who’ve grown up in New Orleans, I’ve been the victim to a large-ish share of petty/scary theivery and it’s really really traumatic and sudden and over quickly. And then you think about it so intensely for a while. And I don’t think I’d be able to resist calling the perpetrators up afterwards and chatting with them.

Just installed OSX, sorry.

Has anyone seen this yet? I thought it was really funny.

Yesterday, Jeremy and I walked from Wall Street to 34th Street. Like a lot of people, we were out enjoying the bizarrely nice weather. We ended up at B&H Photo, where I had never been. It was like this nightmarish version of FAO Schwartz, which I’d already found pretty nightmarish. The idea of buying a new camera kind of instantly gave me a migraine because all these very specific deal points come to mind: like it has to be light and sturdy with an amazing lens and fast shutter and ability to work quickly. And it’s like that Total commercial where you’d have to eat twenty bowls of the competitor’s cereal to get one ”dream camera”. Like I want something with the picture quality of a Leica or Contax with the ease of a Canon Elph. But B&H is not for the fantasy shopper. They make it almost impossible to exit if you’re not buying anything. So we kind of crawled out there kind of discombobulated and empty handed. On the way to the subway, Jeremy saw a statue of Jesus he really liked and I decided that 34th Street really bums me out.

Early on Saturday morning I noticed that the neighborhood pharmacy is keeping up it’s tradition of melting Easter candy in the store window. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the Wall Street area. The weirdest place was this creepy bum depository that was a subway entrance as well. The whole mall-ness of it combined with all the milling homeless people reminded me of Dawn of the Dead.

I hardly ever see these on the street anymore but they still terrify me.

I got to take a car into work today, which was a first for me because I had this media drive with me that I didn’t feel safe letting a courier service deliver. None of this seemed very interesting until somewhere in the West Village, I drove past the basketball court where the Tina Turner “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” video was shot. And it kind of freaked me out cause I spent an entire day kicking around this neighborhood when I was 18 and helping out a classmate make a documentary about her deceased father. And since I’ve moved back, this has been one of those pockets of NY that I totally couldn’t locate on a map of the city. I spent a lot of time walking around town ten years ago and when I left, I only had this really foggy notion of the layout of town. I think this is mainly because I would always take the subway from neighborhood to neighborhood. I remember someone telling me that you could WALK from Grand Central to Battery Park and I thought they were insane. And this was back in ‘92 before you could buy a pass, so each time it was a buck fifty (or am I completely mis-remembering this? anyone?). And so I started thinking about how cool it is when a town is still these pockets of places that you aren’t sure how they connect. Like when you visit a new town and check it out and when you leave you can’t really draw it on a map. NYC is closing in on me in the sense that I’m getting better at knowing where I am and how to find stuff. But in the end you kind of miss the mystery factor. Though I’m not sure I could find that basketball court if I needed to.
I got the studio forty five minutes early and I was locked out AND it was freezing cold. So I ended up at this fancy diner (above). I was the only one in there except for these women two tables down. And they were totally doing the Sex and City thing. Like they were all meeting before work. One was even wearing surgial scrubs. They were all talking about what they did the night before. It was exactly like Sex and the City. And there was that special joy when you see the fake thing happening in real life.

Does anyone know or ever walked the high line? It’s one of the things I really want to do when the weather finally becomes nice. I’ve seen regular looking people walking around up there. Any tips are appreciated.

I was at this recording studio yesterday morning killing time waiting for some washed up movie star to come in and read a voice over for a spot and I found the room above. I spent about five minutes in there poking around like I owned the place. And more importantly, wishing my apartment was full of all these drawers full of broken electronic junk. No one kicked me out. And I had my camera in my pocket from earlier when I was hoping to spot Heidi again in her Grand Central lair. Incidentally, this facility was right above the train station so that you’re actually looking down on it from an angle that allows you to see in the Park Avenue direction. Just as I was noticing that that awesome statue of Mercury looks really dinky from behind (shear, like a prop on an old movie western [picture didn't come out]), a voice crackled over a hidden PA system screaming about a fire drill. No one flinched except me. But I felt guilty about sneaking around with a camera and waited out the next two hours looking at the newspaper.