I written down the ground rules that I've set myself for this blog, inspired by Lisa Williams' post.

posted: 4:21:41 PM  

I saw Andy Goldsworthy's installation on the roof of the Metropolitan. The two beehives of hewn logs are octagonal in plan, about 20 feet high, and they surround towers of round stones that remind me of Brancusi's Endless Column. The rooftop, especially away from the edge of the terrace, feels like the quietest spot in New York. As I explained to someone who asked me about the piece in the elevator, everything falls down eventually; Goldsworthy just makes a virtue of this fact.

I also visited the Neue Gallerie, which turns out to be disappointingly small. But there are good Schieles and Klimts, a sprightly Viennese cafe, and a well-stocked bookstore.

From my hotel room I could see an interesting building that would have been at about Seventh Avenue and 44th Street. It was topped by a globular dome and a clock. I can't figure out what it was/is, and my reference books are no help.

Waiting in Houlihan's for the train back, a baseball fan borrowed pen and paper from me to get the autograph of Keith Hernandez, former first baseman for the Mets. Always keep a pencil with you, kid.

posted: 3:03:47 PM  

Sort of on short notice, I took a 2-day trip to New York this past Memorial Day weekend. On the train up, I read William Langewiesche's American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center.

I went to the World Trade Center site. I worked for several weeks in 1999 as a consultant to Merrill Lynch at their offices in the World Financial Center, just across West Street from the towers. I would get donuts from the Krispy Kreme at the foot of one of the buildings; I used the Cortlandt Street IRT subway station (perhaps the stuffiest, hottest station in the system) to go uptown to the movies. There was an audio documentary about the WTC that I heard bits of, and it included the thub-thump sound of the revolving doors in the tower lobbies. I remember that sound. It's like a heartbeat. The doors and the Krispy Kreme store are gone now, and the IRT skips that station on its way to the Staten Island ferry terminal. I went to the World Trade Center site, because I had to see for myself that it was gone.

I felt a little emotional smack as I rounded the corner into Church Street. There's not much to see. The PATH trains to New Jersey have a new station, and there's been some preliminary work toward the rebuilding. The slurry wall that surrounded the foundation and kept the Hudson River from rushing in is exposed; the escalator that led to the Customs House in WTC 6 is still there, ruined. Seeing that escalator hurt a little bit. The whole site is surrounded by a fence, strong and high enough to discourage anyone from scaling it out of some weird sense of memorial, and equipped with light fixtures for evening visitors, and yet its design tells us that it is clearly temporary, that it shouldn't be taken as anything more than a fence around a construction site. When I was there on a Saturday morning, there were many people around, a few souvenir vendors, a derelict homeless woman who homed in on me as a tourist when she saw my camera, two middle-school-aged girls just hanging on the fence and looking, looking.

posted: 2:43:42 PM  

Marc Weingarten interviews Don Herbert ("Mr. Wizard") as they view an episode of his sixties-era science-for-kids TV show, newly released on DVD.

I loved this show when I was a kid. When my local station cancelled it (more likely, dropped its syndicated reruns) for a local public affairs program, I wrote an impassioned letter of complaint to the editor of the TV section of the newspaper. When the Dayton Daily News printed it, I learned a lesson about how foolish one's indignance appears once it's in print.

posted: 10:00:10 AM  

There's something special about using a shot of the New York subway in a movie. We lean forward to read which station we're in—is it the Upper East Side on the Lexington local? the A train to Harlem?—because each station so precisely specifies the neighborhood we're about to visit, much more so than an El station in Chicago or (God help us) Washington's Metro. Jim McKay's Everyday People opens with a shot of the IND subway in Brooklyn, but, alas, we can't see exactly where we are.

We're in a Kubrickian Brooklyn scrubbed clean of most of the grime, a world where no line is a throwaway, where every conversation is framed with importance. McKay's ensemble drama follows a dozen or so people affected by the closing of Raskin's, a family-owned restaurant located in a seedy neighborhood at risk of Disneyfication: a real estate developer has plans to open a Hard Rock Cafe and a Banana Republic.

There are some good scenes of people trying to connect with one another, but the material struggles to escape from McKay's sludgy directorial pace. The flick explores racial dynamics among the whites, blacks, and Jews of today's New York.

And there are slivers of genuine life: a character tells another not to be "anti-Semantic;" we see a man carrying a baggie of goldfish home on the train; we watch a chef expertly preparing vegetables; another character considers throwing over her waitressing job to work as a lapdancer.

Raskin's, improbably, has a counter for breakfast service, a fancy bakery, tables for lunch, cushy booths in the back, a wood-trimmed cocktail bar, and live music in the evening. Why is the family looking to sell the business? Perhaps because only five people can be seen at work in the sprawling kitchen; the dishwasher, who spends all of his time pontificating and making the sellout owner feel guilty, never washes a dish.

With this movie HBO seems to have isolated a niche market, one that it first probed with Real Women Have Curves: films that present the working-class experience preserved under cling wrap. Take a pass on this gritless wonder.

posted: 12:27:25 AM