Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Sorry for the lack of posts this week…. anyone?…. is this thing on? [tap, tap, tap]

Long Island City. Sunday Afternoon.

Rachel and Bobby invited me, along with their friend Dave from Raleigh, to the Socrates Sculpture garden in Queens. This was done by a friend of Bobby’s.

It was a beautiful cool day. Even Queens seemed really nice. Rachel pointed out a series of crumbling houses in the middle of nowhere that she planned on remodeling.

This Toni Braxton van may be the most GF thing I’ve seen on the streets of NY since I spotted that Burberry Escalade. I think this was meant to promote the Broadway production of Aida. I had no idea those shows had their own commemorative vans. I’m impressed.

The Jefferson Market Regional Branch Library on Sixth Avenue is one of my favorite buildings in the West Village and was a key location in one my favorite films, They Might Be Giants with George C. Scott running around town thinking he’s Sherlock Holmes. I saw a new favorite tonight, American Splendor at the Sunshine. In one scene, the main character looks in the mirror and says ‘Another reliable disappointment’ and his wife says, ‘Why does everything in my life have to be a complicated disaster.’ Plus it will make you want to move to Cleveland.

While I was digitizing tapes tonight, I walked out on the terrace to take some pictures of my spectacular/generica Manhattan view.

Okay, I admit it: this was all just a ploy to test how much I could open the f-stop on my camera and still have some focus…

Why… yes… actually…

I saw this flier on the corner of 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue and all the little tear off phone numbers at the bottom had been torn off! I think it was for aroma therapy or something dumb. Since there was a little tiny bit of chill in the air, I thought I’d walk around a bit and do some errands tonight. I hung around Barnes and Noble for a while looking at books about After Effects. Pretty dry stuff, I promise. I guess I was delaying going to Old Navy. About a month ago, I bought some pants for Jeremy that were on sale. The cashier left the little plastic theft-guard tag on them. I’ve tried to pry them off with a variety of tools lying around the house with no success. And of course I lost the receipt. Earlier today I was joking that taking the pants back to the store was going to result in some kind of George Costanza style debacle and was told that I was just paranoid. So I saunter into Old Navy and there’s a small line. I wait for a bit, a little nervous that I couldn’t walk right up to an idle cashier and she could see me coming in and taking out the pants from my back pack. When it’s my turn, I explain what happened and take the Old Navy bag out of my back pack.
And she’s all like, “You got a receipt?”
And me, trying to seem like, oh-these-things-happen explain that alas I do not. And then things get really ugly.
Then I’m instantly being accused of stealing these pants. It was really strange. I said, “But you saw me walk in!” I made a big point of making eye-contact with her when I walked inside. She said she did not. It quickly escalated to Costanza status and I was accused of having an attitude and me threatening to rip the pants in two if they didn’t remove the security tag (in retrospect, I really doubt I’m that strong). Ultimately, a manager came along, though the cashier and I were both trying to tell her two different versions of my story over each other. I walked over to some machine, where the tag was removed. Then I turned around to make a mean face at the cashier and she was gone. Was she ever there??? I split, swearing never to be wooed by affordable cargo pants again.

The final inconvenience of the blackout was revealed this morning: no internet service at work for the next few days. I’m not sure why this happened or what we did to deserve it. I found myself constantly, habitually, going to check my email or look something up on the net and then being like, ‘fuck!!!!’ You could see the caginess in everyone else’s eyes as well…
Strangely, if you stand in one of the few ‘hot zones’ around the office with a WiFi enabled laptop you can pickup a signal from a neighboring office without needing a password. It’s a bit like dousing for water though and doesn’t lend itself easily to long internet reveries that eat up so much of the work day (oh, the whole day, anywhere, anytime).

Rachel proudly stands in front of her dream house (!) near Prospect Park in Fort Hamilton.

Okay, first of all. I’ve read everything on the internet from all the local newspapers and NOBODY wrote anything about the black smoke from yesterday. No pictures. Nothing. What? Did I imagine this?

So the power was back when I got up this morning, but the subways weren’t running and the phones at my work weren’t even ringing, so I immediately got on the web to see what was what. The mayor was on TV saying not to go to work and that was all I needed to hear. I went over to Bobby and Rachel’s apartment. Yesterday, they met up at their friend Ben’s house and then made their way back to Brooklyn. Bobby told me about a sushi place that had an ‘all you can eat’ sign out front. They hung out in the city a lot later than I did and so the Chinatown area was incredibly stinky from all the rotting fish. Upon exiting the bridge, back in Brooklyn, somebody called Rachel a ‘white bitch’ (which she’s definitely not), but otherwise they had it pretty easy. It turns out, all my shouting at their window was in vain because they were at Freddy’s, where all the tables were dragged into the street and a mini-Gowanus opened up and was a big party. This is pretty shocking since there’s a police station just a block away. But I guess that didn’t matter and it seemed like all the cops were driving past my house with their sirens blaring. I tried to tough it out, but found some Ambien and went with that. Brooklyn was back to normal today except that everyone had off and the line at the ATM on Flatbush was a little bad. We headed down to Snookys and ate a ton of food. There was freezing cold AC inside and ice water was constantly refilled and it seemed like heaven since no one really ate dinner last night. And though it was a million degrees, we decided to walk around after that and headed to Prospect Park. It wasn’t that much fun (though I did think I saw a woman walking around naked from about a 100 yards away, though it was just her black thong bikini bottom). So Bobby suggested checking out Greenwood Cemetary. We couldn’t get over our good luck to have a three day weekend and felt a little guilty about it, but Rachel kept reminding us that the mayor wanted us to hang out in Brooklyn, so what could we do?

The cemetary turned out to be closed, though I’ve decided I should really check it out one Saturday morning. Heading back to 7th Ave, we saw this crazy optical illusion. I know the photo sucks, but it’s trying to show this smokestack that was positioned directly under the Statue and the heat waves coming out of the smokestack made it look like the Statue was vibrating or dematerializing. It was so insane and a tad disconcerting.

By late afternoon, still no subway. It sounds like people stuck down there had it the worst of anybody.

Then I dragged Bobby and Rachel to one of my favortie places in Brooklyn, the McSweeney’s Store.

There was this amazing window display about Marcel Dzama celebrating his new book McSweeney’s just published.

Please bear with me as I bore you with too many pictures of the store. Bobby and Rachel had to pry me out of here. These dinosaurs playing chess inside a wooden cabinet is the coolest thing in world.

After drooling and trying to advocate that Rachel should buy these beautiful (and affordable) 50’s Eames chairs, we headed down Timboo’s, where I’d never been before.

This is the place famous for serving mini six pack bottles in buckets full of ice, which was the most refreshing liquid ever consumed after walking around Fort Hamilton and Park Slope for five hours on one of the hottest days of the year.

There was a sprinkling of old drunk crazy men. At one point dancing broke out amongst them though the only thing playing on the jukebox the time we were there was nothing but heavy metal. An old lady with a crewcut and exceptionally bony arms got up from the bar and walked over to us and told me I had the most beautiful voice she’d ever heard and that I should really be an announcer for TV. We were dumbstruck and I said thanks.

Parakeet’s just don’t get any respect on 9th Street. Finally: the blackout and it’s romantic promise on Craigslist

Oh! And shocking newsflash. Rachel told me today that Between the Bridges is closing forever in a month and a half! The owner has sold it and it will be bulldozed so they can build condos on the site. Aaaaaaah!!!

Not a good sign.

Some of us at my office went out to the fifteenth floor terrace to smoke a cigarette when the lights went out. Strangely, we were trying to look down to 11th Avenue to see if the traffic lights were working. One guy, Tim, had binoculars (!) on him and confirmed that they weren’t. Then somebody noticed the very ominous black smoke and everybody started to freak. Everybody started trying to use their cell phones and no one could get a call out. Some of the older people in my office with kids scattered around the city made a bee-line for the door. That’s what really got my heart pounding. Then the PA system that’s built into our office’s fire alarm kicked on and told us to evacuate the building. I headed out with Mike, who also lives in the general Slope area.

Now I’ve had to ‘evacuate’ the building before, but somehow didn’t manage to notice this insane 20 story air shaft. I know it’s hard to get a sense of scale from this picture, but standing next to it in the stairwell created instant paralyzing vertigo. Plus it looked like a painted perspective out of an old Fritz Lang silent UFA film.

Once outside, there were a lot of people of the streets, but everyone was pretty calm. Chelsea to the West Village was quiet mellow and there were actually quite a lot of outside diners who kept on eating like nothing was wrong. Though at this point everyone on the street was talking or trying to talk into a cell phone and I was overhearing little snippets of things like ‘terrorist attack’, ‘not a terrorist attack’ and ‘entire Eastern seaboard without power’. So Mike and I were getting pretty nervous. We had decided not to head east right away because from the terrace you could see about a million flashing lights from cop cars. My thought was to avoid Broadway/5th Avenue and Canal Street(because of what turned out to be a SEA of people), while heading to the Manhattan Bridge.

Further downtown, there were suddenly lots more people on the street. It was very strange. Like downtown, yet it looked like Midtown at lunch hour. By the time we hit the Manhattan Bridge, I was soaked with sweat and dying of thirst. There were millions of people and cops and cars driving totally scattershot.

It took almost two hours to get to Flatbush Avenue, where I saw this truck which I thought was hillarious despite the circumstances.

9 pm: Now I am sitting in my pitch black apartment, typing this on laptop battery power. When I got home, I sat on my stoop until the sun went down and read for a while, though there were lots of distractions and the cell phone kept ringing. Now there is no light in the street, though you get an occasional flashlight and you can hear the neighbors on the stoop. Occasionally someone will yell something like, ‘Lashandra! Where are you?!?’ or something. When it was getting dark, I went over to Bobby and Rachels apartment and screamed out their names a couple of times, but I couldn’t see any light inside. Now I’m regretting not giving into that paranoid impulse of ‘preparing’. Since I have no candles (all I can think of is ‘ugh! I should have bought those candles at Yankee Candle Factory in Baltimore when Dan was practically forcing me to buy the ones that smelled like baking cookies’… this would be so much more pleasant if I had the smell of baking cookies) or transistor radio or food in my apartment. And of course the cell phone has stopped working after hours of working fine, though it’s big screen makes a handy flashlight (another item it never occured to me to buy — wait, I take that back. I just found the ViewMaster Show Beam that Kim gave me for my birthday last year. It’s an old toy from the seventies that I think she found at a flea market in Florida. It’s basically a flashlight that also works as a slideshow. This one has a cartridge that tells a story about Popeye. You press a button on the side to progress to the next slide. The thumbnail plot outline is that Popeye and his girlfriend, Jessica, get into some kind of scrape and then a can of boiled spinach works as a deus ex machina to save the day).

10 pm: I don’t know how else to say it, but sounds like the blacks are going wild on the streets. Or at least Prospect Place. Don’t believe me, listen to THIS. The chanting just kept escalating until a cop siren barked a few times and it stopped

Has anyone ever smoked Homer cigarettes? Jon??? I just got a group emailing from a competitor of my mail order cig. company (freecigs4you) that was offering a carton of Homers for $8.99, which is about the going rate for a pack in New York. I’m almost curious to get these just to see how bad they are. I worked pretty late last night and shared a car service ride with Tina. It was the scariest one I’ve ever had. First, the windows in the back seat were tinted so black you could not see out of them. I tried to roll them down the second I got in because my instant claustrophobia, but THEY WOULDN’T GO DOWN. Thanks to Jami, I’m always thinking of the Bone Collector. But the guy let me roll down the windows without a fuss. The best part was this giant, realistic crucifix in the back seat, which stretched from the back seat to the roof of the car, like god as the backseat driver. I was even more alarmed by that than the windows and the whole ride home, kept worrying that it was going to dislodge and hit me on the head.

Wow! That’s great news!

The archive project begins to kick into overdrive…

I predict this will become Jeremy’s favorite web site.