A band called Battles

Tonight, I went to see Battles perform at the South Street Seaport Music Festival. The night was fun for several reasons, but the two biggest are (1) the concert was free, and (2) Battles is the greatest live band I have ever seen.

Okay, the second reason is hyperbolic and possibly wrong. But consider: I have not been to a U2 show, and I have not been to a Lightning Bolt show. Lightning Bolt released my favorite album of 2005, Hypermagic Mountain, and their live show is the stuff of legend (one of my co-workers attended a Lightning Bolt show in Brooklyn and told me that the crowd was so brutalized by the music that they started tearing umbrellas apart). I've also never seen Radiohead live, nor the Rolling Stones, nor Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, nor Rush. So it's possible that I'm missing out on something better than what I saw tonight. However, I have seen Mute Math. And I love Mute Math. I've spoken to Paul Meany, the lead singer of Mute Math, and Roy Mitchell-Cardenas, the bassist. Mute Math is one of my all-time favorite bands.

But here is the truth: Battles is better than Mute Math. Battles is what Mute Math will be in fifteen years.

Anyway, about the concert: I got there really early. The stage was set up outdoors on Pier 17 at the seaport, between a giant schooner and a giant Pizzeria Uno, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. There were already people waiting in front of the stage. The crowd was made up of really skinny boys and the not-so-skinny girls who love them. All the girls had blond highlights in their hair. Even the blond girls had blond highlights. One guy sitting at the front was reading Schindler's List and chainsmoking Kool XLs.

I sat and waited along with everyone else. A young man wandered over and asked me who was playing tonight, and when I said, "Deerhunter. And Battles," he looked at me like I'd just spoken Swahili. I'll bet he was expecting me to say, "Radiohead."

The opening band, Deerhunter, came on at 7:25 PM, almost an hour after I'd gotten there. The lead singer was the skinniest guy I've ever seen. This is not hyperbole at all. Every time he stepped on his stompboxes, I thought he would break a hip. But he didn't. The rest of the band wasn't nearly as interesting, but the bassist would do a stately bow to the audience at the end of each song, which was kind of funny and helpful at the same time because if he hadn't bowed, I wouldn't have known the song was over. Deerhunter made very competent noise-rock music with some ethereal banshee vocals, but they're young and have a while to go before I'd consider buying one of their albums.

Deerhunter played a forty-minute set. The guy reading Schindler's List moved on to Jodi Picoult's The Pact, but he never got up from the ground and barely looked up from his book during the entire set. This was awkward because he was sitting right at the front, and right at my feet. I figured he was just waiting for the main act.

Battles finally came on at about 8:30. The bassist came up first, noodling around with his instrument all by himself, making the signal loop and feed back into itself. Then, one at a time, the rest of the band got up on stage. Complete sonic mayhem ensued. Unless you've heard a noise-rock band, or a really loud math-rock band, I have no adequate method of describing what Battles songs sound like. I suppose you could listen to the samples on their Myspace site, but samples can't properly convey the layered noise that proceeded from the speakers tonight. I tried to put myself in the position of someone who'd only ever listened to, say, the Beach Boys. These are the questions I'd ask: Are their instruments in tune? Are they even playing instruments? Are all their amplifiers broken? Why does the drummer have to play his drums using the butt-end of his sticks? Doesn't he know that it will make his drums sounds too loud? And why do the other guys insist on playing multiple instruments at the same time? Why are they pulling cables and wires in and out of their keyboards and computers and signal processors in the middle of a song? Why all the fiddling with knobs? What? Why can't I hear you?

This reminds me of the general inability of Americans to accurately describe the smell and taste of durians.

That's the unfortunate thing. I had a blast at the Battles show, but I can't explain it to you. You'll just have to go to their Myspace site, listen to the track called "Atlas" and imagine the band performing the song live, exactly the way it sounds on the recording. And if you can imagine finding joy in seeing and listening to that live performance, in understanding how those bizarro noises are generated on stage, and in headbanging to the ruthlessly consistent drum beat along with three thousand other people, then you can imagine how it was tonight.

A hairy tale

I've just now gotten back from my haircut at one of the most interesting barber shops I've ever been to, a dandy's paradise called Freemans Sporting Club. Freemans is actually a men's clothier; I asked how much a made-to-measure suit goes for and was told, "about $3000." For that princely sum, they'll make you a suit that fits like a glove, from virtually any material, including deadstock wool manufactured in the 1950s. But I'm just here to get my hair cut, and the barbershop is in the back of the store. The haircuts are much, much cheaper than the suits.

Freemans Barbershop looks like it was built in the 1920s (to see what I mean, check out a picture here), but it wasn't. It's only eleven months old, so the whole place is anachronistic. The barber chairs were made in the 1920s, but there's a 21st century stereo system playing rock n' roll on a window sill. There's a rack of this month's men's magazines (GQ, Details, Esquire) by the waiting bench, but there's also a secret stash of Penthouse issues from the 1970s under the bench. The amply tattooed barber is an amiable 30-something chap who is privy to the latest in technology -- he's looking to import a hot new Japanese hair product into New York -- but wears a porkpie hat and uses a straight razor. And his name is Shorty. It says so on his business card.

How was the haircut? Quick, unfussy, and nuanced; Shorty knows his stuff. I'll be going back, but next time, I'll bring my own reading material.

More short notes

First, an explanation: Every time I write some short notes, like I'm doing at this very moment, it's not that I have nothing to write about -- it's that I have too many things to write about. I wrote on Monday that I occasionally have about fifteen things in my head at the same time, waiting to be typed out in little digital letters on a too-small monitor, all vying for the spotlight. I used the number fifteen then because I needed a random number, but tonight, I really do have fifteen things to write about. Is that just an incredible coincidence, you might ask, or is Darren lying through his teeth? We shall see.
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The last thing I wrote was number one. This is number two: I've been given the day off tomorrow (Friday), a fact I should be celebrating but strangely am not. Days off from work are few and far between, even in a creative industry like mine, so I end up using them for things I have to do rather than things I want to do.
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Which means, in all likelihood, I'm going to get a haircut tomorrow. In a previous post, I told you how much my laundry bill is. There's no way I'm going to admit how much I have to pay to get my hair cut. That's the problem with hair -- it grows back! And when my hair is long, I look like the kid Bruce Lee beat up in high school.
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The good news is that after I get my haircut, I'll still have time to visit the Museum of Modern Art, my single favorite art venue in the world.
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Also, I'll be attending the Seaport Music Festival in the evening.
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So it looks as if I'll be having a well mapped-out, eventful day tomorrow. But to paraphrase Robert Burns, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. And let me tell you something: there's no better place than New York to make a man feel like a mouse.
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At the very least, I'll have an extended weekend. Monday is the federal holiday known as Labor Day (not to be confused with May Day, which is celebrated on May 1st outside the United States).
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This is item number eight of fifteen: I found out Cameron Diaz is in New York shooting a movie. An acquaintance of mine sat next to her at a Korean restaurant, and that very same day, I was walking home from work and saw that the street was going to be closed off to accommodate a film crew. There were signs posted up on buildings informing the public that parking on the street was disallowed because Twentieth Century Fox was shooting something called What Happens in Vegas... So I went home and looked it up on IMDb, and guess who's starring in it.
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Here's my connection to Cameron Diaz. Remember Prince Street Cleaners, the laundromat I go to around the corner? [Read this post to refresh your memory.] Well, a few months ago, I stopped by to pick up my laundry, and John, the guy who runs the place, told me that if I'd dropped them off later in the day, I would've bumped into Cameron Diaz. She'd ducked into the laundromat to get a button re-sewn, and had waited inside as patiently as the paparazzi had waited outside, cameras in hand. Now, I don't particularly care for Cameron Diaz, but she obviously has superb taste in picking laundromats.
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Actors are in the city all the time, because at any given time, there are countless movies and tv shows being filmed in New York. But no matter how common this is, people will still stop and gawk. When they were shooting You Don't Mess with the Zohan a few weeks ago, I met a woman who told me she was waiting by the side of the street for Adam Sandler's limo to drive by. Never mind that there was no guarantee of even catching a glimpse of the actor behind those tinted windows. Ridiculous, I thought, as I took out my camera and waited with her.
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Number eleven: Speaking of ridiculous, there were two topless sunbathers on the roof of the building next to my office this past Tuesday. Tuesday was cloudy.
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Twelve: Oh, who am I kidding? I don't really have
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fifteen things
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to write
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about.

For those about to rock we salute you

A few days ago, I wrote a post entitled Are you experienced? in which I listed several things I have yet to do in New York that I consider part of the "New York City experience." I left out two things that I never got to do and never will: (1) Go to the top of the World Trade Center, and (2) See a punk band perform at CBGB.
Today, Hilly Kristal, the founder of New York's iconic punk rock club CBGB, died of lung cancer complications (read about it here). I didn't know Kristal personally, of course, but I used to read his recollections as they appeared on the official CBGB website. And I used to wonder why I hadn't yet found the time or opportunity to catch a show there, especially since CBGB is not more than several hundred yards away from my apartment. Did I feel too un-cool to attend a show in one of the most revered performance spaces in rock history? Was I intimidated by the lo-fi, derelict aesthetic of the place? I once spoke to Matt Thiessen, lead singer of one of my favorite bands, Relient K, over the phone (I was interviewing him for Relevant Magazine). When he heard I lived in New York, he said that he wanted to go back to New York and play a show, possibly at CBGB. Would I have gone if one of my favorite bands was playing the venue?

I'll never know the answer for sure -- Relient K never played CBGB, and never will, because the club closed last year (read more here). So I never got to enter the space where legends like the Ramones, Blondie, Television and Talking Heads made not just music, but history. I'm no punk, except in my wildest, most implausible dreams, and I can't even consider myself a real punk music fan (I don't even really like the Clash). But I've been musically influenced by so many bands who have played CBGB, including Social Distortion, Green Day and many others. Punk rock informs even the music I play in church, which may sound antithetical, but really isn't, if you think about it a certain way.

So tonight, in honor of Hilly Kristal, and in memory of the greatest rock venue I never went to, I'm wearing my CBGB t-shirt to bed. Good night.

How to speak like a New Yorker III

If you've ever spent a significant amount of time enjoying New York City nightlife, you've probably heard the term "B&T" or "bridge and tunnel." This term I actually don't recommend using, only because I think it's derogatory and exclusionary in its most popular sense; B&T refers to people who aren't Manhattan residents but come into the city (via the bridges or tunnels) for dinner, drinks, or entertainment. The Urban Dictionary says it succinctly. Wikipedia has a more comprehensive description. My question is: are you still B&T if you came in by the Staten Island ferry?

Short notes

I haven't blogged since late Friday evening, so for those of you awaiting a new post, I apologize for the delay. Sarah and I were in New Jersey for most of the weekend, sharing a Chilean syrah with old friends, having dinner with relatives, and occasionally doing things completely unfamiliar to us. For example, I got to pick shiso leaves right off the plants in my in-laws' backyard, a new and somewhat exciting activity for me. I love shiso. If your experience with Korean food is anything more than cursory, you probably know what it is. An old roommate, who is Korean, used to insist that the leaves were also called "beefsteak." I used to insist that he was insane. But now, years later, Wikipedia has proven him right. The moral is, some crazy people are right.
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If you've ever tried writing daily in a diary, journal or blog, you'll sympathize with my struggle with discipline and consistency. On some days, I can't think of a single thing to write. On others, I want to write about fifteen different things, yet since those fifteen things all seem equally important, none of them seem particularly worthy. Regardless, I consider the self-imposed pressure to write every day to be healthy. Writing is more an act of will than a response to spontaneous inspiration. I read somewhere that the easier it is to read a piece of writing, the harder the writer had to work on it. Like many snippets of wisdom, I have no clue who first wrote this, so if you know, please leave a comment, so I can properly credit the source.
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Speaking of comments, I disabled the login requirement for commenting several days ago, so you may comment away!

Without me, without you

I'm fairly familiar with the giants of science fiction cinema and literature: Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, etc. I love reading a good sci-fi book, and I fondly recall reading massive short story compilations that were invariably edited by Asimov and/or Martin H. Greenberg back in the early 90s. But my mind is better wired for visual stimulation, which partly explains why the covers on some of those compilations were more fascinating to me than the stories themselves. This also explains why the last scene from Back to the Future so affected me when I first saw it in the late 80s that all I did for weeks afterward was draw DeLoreans, even during school.

My favorite thing about how "the future" is portrayed in paintings and movies is not how strange or unfamiliar everything looks, but precisely the fact that there are recognizable elements to even the most futuristic scene. For example, I once had a history book written for teens that described what archaeologists have to do in order to appropriately study a long gone civilization. I cannot, for the life of me, recall anything substantial about the book except for a series of paintings in the final chapter that showed how a riverside community in the year 1500 might progress from tents to log cabins to trading outposts to factories to skyscrapers and onward, all in the span of 600 years. The most memorable illustration was the one that depicted the same community in the year 2100, now a gleaming city with neon lights, flying cars, tubular buildings and glass domes. And yet, it was still positioned by the river, and the geography of the place, though much altered from 600 years before, was recognizable. But the book went on to suggest that 500 years after that, if people had abandoned the city, it would just be another archaeological site, overgrown with trees and inhabited by wildlife.

Have you ever wondered what a megalopolis like New York would look like if humans just disappeared? Personally, my thoughts have never been that morbid, but it's fascinating all the same to see a visual interpretation -- an artist's rendering, if you will -- of the notion. Check out this slideshow of images, based on ideas in The World Without Us, a new book that asks what our environment would look like without the impact of humans. And try not to think depressing thoughts.

On the fringe

Tonight, we attended a play staged as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. [There are Fringe festivals all over the world now, the largest of which is the Edinburgh Fringe, the original inspiration for the New York one. The Adelaide Fringe is the apparently the second-largest in the world. Who knew?] Sarah and I have seen our fair share of plays in New York, most of them very good. But it'd been over a year since our last one, and I'd forgotten how fun it is to enter a small, dark theater where everything is painted black, and watch real people perform on a stage. Theater acting can be exhilarating to watch -- I'm always a little nervous to see if someone will flub his or her lines. When two characters have a conversation or a confrontation, and the actors perform with nuanced rhythm and drama, it's better than watching most cinematic action scenes, by far. This sounds obvious to people familiar with theater, but I suspect there are millions of people who hold motion pictures up as the paragon of entertainment. I do not necessarily agree.

Tonight's play was a bit of an uneven affair, unfortunately. The first act was poorly written and poorly performed, but after intermission, the play picked up speed and became quite enjoyable. Also, one of the characters pulls out a pistol in the second act, which always makes for high drama. When someone waves a semi-automatic handgun around on stage, you just know it's going to go off at some point. In fact, I think it's a playwright's duty; once you introduce a gun, you owe it your audience to write a scene in which a character uses it. [It's one of the unofficial rules of screenwriting too, except I can't attribute it to anyone because I don't remember where I read it.]

Short notes

Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, the first Catholic cathedral built in New York, is right across and down the street from our apartment. I was on my way to work this morning and I saw a man in a black hat walking into the cathedral, looking a tad tired and downtrodden for 9:00 AM. He was wearing a black sweater with "Larry Flynt's Hustler Club" on the back. I wanted to ask him many, many questions, but that would have been rude. I left him alone.
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Tonight, I made dinner for my brother-in-law, Aaron, and a family friend, Al. I couldn't decide what to make, but Sarah suggested I make fish, so I looked online and came upon this stellar recipe for grilled tuna steaks. If you decide to make it, I highly recommend making a cold cucumber and carrot salad to go with it (just julienne some fresh cucumber and carrots into very, very fine strips and place in a pile on top of the fish after grilling).
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I'm going to see Battles, a math-rock band, at the Seaport Music Festival next week. I'll blog about the experience and perhaps take some pictures.

Are you experienced?

For years, I've wanted to come up with an "Experience List" -- a collection of things to do. I'd have to put it online, I thought to myself, and make it interactive so people can check off the things they've done, and get an Experience score at the end. Swum with a pod of killer whales? Check. Climbed a coconut tree? Check. Driven a yellow Ferrari more than a hundred miles? Check. Run in ten inches of snow with no shoes on? Check. You are more experienced than any living person ought to be. Consider a career in outer space exploration.

[This reminds me of the fact that even though I love watching films and consider myself a movie buff of sorts, I still haven't seen Raging Bull, It's A Wonderful Life, On the Waterfront, Casablanca, Taxi Driver, Seven Samurai, Scarface, Annie Hall, North by Northwest, or Ben-Hur. Yes, yes, it's a shame...]

I haven't come up with the Experience List yet, but I have thought about the many things I haven't yet done that are virtually essential to living in -- or even visiting -- New York. Some of them are a bit "touristy" but it doesn't make them any less worthy of doing. I'm sure I will think of many more in the year to come, even as I try to check the following experiences off the list:

• Dine at Nobu.
• Get a pastrami sandwich at Katz's Deli.
• Tour the Statue of Liberty.
• Visit the Bronx Zoo.
• Attend Shakespeare in the Park.
• Run the New York City Marathon.
• Catch a major league baseball game involving these guys or these guys.
• Be a member of the Museum of Modern Art.
• Listen to Les Paul play at the Iridium Jazz Club.

"Wow," you might think as you peruse the list, "this fool hasn't done anything!" Not true -- I have done some things, including:

• Rollerblade down Broadway.
• View the city from the top of the Empire State Building.
• Hike the largest remaining natural forest area in Manhattan.
• Visit the Brooklyn Aquarium.
• See dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History.
• Dine at Peter Luger Steakhouse.

Anything else I should add to either list?

Falling water

Today was wet. It rained throughout the day and into the early evening, and even though were clots of tourists unflappably trudging around NoLIta, one look inside the jewelry and clothing boutiques on Mott Street told me that the proprietors weren't expecting stellar sales. On days like today, I try to stay indoors for as long as possible, but I still had to leave the office at 1:00 PM for lunch. I have one of those compact umbrellas that close themselves at the push of a button -- it cost me $25 at Macy's, which is much more than I'd spend on a black folding umbrella, but it works better and has lasted longer than anything else I've used. Once, I bought a $5 umbrella from the umbrella woman at the corner of Prince and Broadway (she's known as the umbrella woman because, well... she doesn't sell pirated DVDs, that's for sure). My $5 investment broke after two rainstorms. Don't buy anything from the umbrella woman.

It seemed to me, after living the last three years in the city, that it rains most in the months March through June, and then again in October and November. I've never been to Seattle, Washington, but if I had to make an uneducated guess, I'd say it rained in Seattle all the time, all year. I hate making uneducated guesses, so I looked it up.

Good thing I did. As it turns out, the likelihood of precipitation in NYC is almost equal regardless of what month it is. And in Seattle? Expect falling water between the months of November and January. These, and other interesting statistics, are found here.

Wag the blog

I've been following the exploits of Lucky and Flo -- two black labrador retrievers trained to sniff out hidden stashes of potentially pirated DVDs in Malaysia -- for months now, and I found out today that they're coming to New York City. This is exciting for several reasons. Except for a delinquent stint in college, I don't download illegal music or movies, and as a musician and music-lover, I support only legally acquired tunes. And I love dogs. And Malaysia. And DVDs. Yes, I know Lucky and Flo's impact on the global piracy problem may be a mere drop in the ocean, but it's encouraging (in a bizarre kind of way) to know that the price on their heads proved they were doing something right. Who knows what they will or will not be able to do in NYC, where peddlers will offer you pirated DVDs while you ride the subway. All I know is if I see them on the street, I'm buying each of them a hotdog.

Close quarters

People ask me all the time how large our Manhattan apartment is, and for years I couldn't say exactly. The best I could offer was, "Trust me, it's smaller than your living room and kitchen put together." Sometimes, I'd say, "It's a shoe box," and people would nod and laugh as if they knew exactly what a shoe box-sized apartment was. Tonight, I decided to measure the apartment and answer the question definitively; consider this the authoritative word on precisely how big a "shoe box-sized" apartment is*.
Here's a diagram of our place. Don't bother with the calculator, because I've done the math -- our entire apartment is about 317 square feet. To put this in some sort of perspective, the average home size in the United States was 2,330 square feet in 2004.

Obviously, there are various challenges and inconveniences that come with living in such a small space. But there are also perks. The apartment is easier to clean because there's less of it to clean, and since storage space is almost non-existent, we are never tempted to hoard any junk (accordingly, our trash and recycling bags and are enormous). And should we ever get around to decorating the place properly, we could always enter the annual Smallest, Coolest Apartment Contest.

*These diagrams and measurements are for informational purposes only. By posting them, I do not intend to imply that our apartment is insufficient for our needs, nor am I ignoring the fact that many people have to make do with less. It's likely that the majority of the world's population live in spaces much smaller than ours, and many millions of people live without homes altogether. We're thankful for what we have.

Railing against the train

Sarah and I travel to New Brunswick, New Jersey, every weekend, for church. We don't own a car, so our variegated options cut a wide swath across the price spectrum. The cheapest options are not necessarily available every week, and they may not be the quickest. Here are the various ways to get out of the city if you don't own a car, along with the price of each trip per person:

• Option 1: Take two subway lines from our NoLIta apartment to the Port Authority on 42nd Street ($2.00). Take a Coach USA bus to New Brunswick ($8.35 one-way).
• Option 2: Take two subway lines to Penn Station on 33rd Street ($2.00). Take the New Jersey Transit rail service down the Northeast Corridor line to New Brunswick ($10.50 one-way).
• Option 3: Take one subway line to West 4th Street ($2.00). Walk five blocks to the PATH rail station on 9th Street (free). Take the PATH to Grove Street in Jersey City ($1.50). Get picked up by one of our Jersey City friends and driven to New Brunswick (free).

From a financial standpoint, it's obvious we should choose option 3. But we almost never do, because I often have to be in New Brunswick very early on Sunday morning (as early as 8:00 AM), and our friends aren't exactly clamoring to do the same. As often as possible, however, we do take advantage of their generosity on the way back to the city.

Unfortunately, option 1 isn't a viable choice for the early-morning commute either, because the first Coach bus doesn't leave New York until 8:00 AM on Sunday. That leaves the train, by far the worst option due to the higher fare, longer travel time due to constant stopping at various stations, and general lack of comfort.

So we're always finding ways around having to sacrifice an arm and a leg for New Jersey Transit. For example, instead of leaving on Sunday morning, we travel to New Jersey on Saturday evening and stay with friends overnight, taking advantage of the bus. Our travel plans are seldom consistent from week to week, and most of the time, we rely on the good graces of our good friends. But I find myself wishing for a better solution, especially since our options put us in situations in which we have very little control. While on the bus, I've experienced mechanical problems (we had to switch buses on the NJ Turnpike), accidents (the driver chased down the truck who hit us), and traffic delays. The train gets delayed more often than not. The PATH only runs about once every 20 minutes on weekends, so if we miss one, it's a long wait for the next one.

And this, among other reasons, is why we're moving to Jersey City.

How to speak like a New Yorker II

Good day, class. Today's subject is NoLIta (an abbreviation of "North of Little Italy") a neighborhood in Manhattan which, until fairly recently, was considered part of SoHo (the area south of Houston Street). Most of NoLIta is encompassed in the 10012 zip code.

NoLIta has a reputation for being a somewhat trendy spot for shoppers and foodies who wish to avoid the pomp and bustle of more "touristy" places. It's also a bit "arty" -- you're more likely to see film director Jim Jarmusch or musical artist Moby strolling around NoLIta than a Wall Street-type in a business suit. That being true, it is not overly crowded with independent art galleries the way SoHo and Chelsea are, nor does it boast a large and popular club scene like the Meatpacking District. In fact, NoLIta seems to have and do everything in moderation. It is, therefore, the perfect place to live for a certain young married couple working in fashion and advertising.

Usage example:
Your friend: "I'm really craving some chocolate bread pudding. Is that weird?"
You: "Ooh, I know this great restaurant in NoLIta that has an amazing bread pudding."
Your friend: "Okay, yeah, let's go to Lolita."

Short notes

Alicia Keys was in the office today, though I'm not sure exactly why. She was in a meeting in the conference room the entire time, probably discussing some kind of endorsement for one of our clients. As I left for lunch, I saw her drinking Dasani right out of the bottle. This made me extraordinarily happy.
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I didn't leave work until 9:00 PM tonight, which is the latest I've stayed at work for the last two weeks. The latest I ever stayed at work was until 8:00 AM the following morning, and that wasn't the only time I've seen the sun creep into the east windows of the office this year.
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"It turns out the conventional wisdom is wrong: The city, it seems, won’t kill you. Quite the opposite. Not only are we the safest big city in America, but we are, by this measure at least, the healthiest." According to New York Magazine, the life expectancy of New York residents is increasing at a faster rate than that of most Americans. Read this and other surprising -- and encouraging -- facts here (and make sure you have some time, because it's a long and interesting read).

Lunch meet

Many of my co-workers at Anomaly go out and buy lunch during work. Here are some of their options, all within walking distance of our SoHo office (restaurant, cafe and supermarket names are in brackets; prices are close approximations):

• Japanese lunch box (chicken teriyaki, rice, green salad and gyoza) [Mikaku] $6.00
• Freshly cooked pasta with choice of ingredients [Cafe Duke] $9.00-$10.00
• Freshly prepared gourmet hot sandwich ['Wichcraft] $7.00-$10.00
• Pad thai noodles [Lovely Day] $8.00
• Cuban burrito [Cafe Habana] $8.00
• Freshly tossed salad with choice of ingredients [Cafe Cafe] $9.00
• Japanese pre-cooked meal (usually a rice dish) [Sunrise Mart] $7.00
• Burger and fries [SoHo Park] $8.00-$9.00
• Freshly prepared cold sandwich [Parisi Bakery] $6.00
• Various pre-cooked hot entrees [Gourmet Garage] $6.00-$10.00
• Masala dosa [Hampton Chutney Co.] $8.00-$12.00

A ten-dollar lunch every day really adds up over the course of a month, which is unfortunate because the SoHo area is full of great places to eat. I'm one of those people who don't have time in the morning to make lunch and bring it to work, but I just can't spend $50.00 or even $30.00 a week on lunch alone. Plus, relatively cheap lunches, like Mikaku's lunch box above, are barely enough to keep me satisfied until 3:00 PM, let alone dinner time.

The solution? I go home for lunch four days a week, taking advantage of the fact that I live four blocks from the office. Of course, almost no one else at work has that luxury, so I feel left out sometimes. But the monetary savings are worth it. Consider my homemade lunch options, with estimated grocery costs:

• Veggie burger with lettuce, onions, cheese, and baby carrots $2.00
• Fried rice $2.00
• Turkey sandwich with alfalfa sprouts, cucumber, cheese, and Sunchips $3.00-$4.00
• Leftovers from last night $2.00

Of course, I have to prepare these meals myself, and usually, they don't taste as good as a dosa from Hampton Chutney. But they're much healthier than virtually anything out there, and I decide exactly what goes into my fried rice.

How to speak like a New Yorker I

Today I begin an absolutely irregular series of posts entitled "How to speak like a New Yorker." These posts will have nothing to do with the stereotypical Noo Yawk accent, i.e. the New York dialect you might associate with Robert De Niro or, um, Fran Drescher. In fact, the majority of NYC's population does not have that accent, and many New York residents have speech patterns that correspond to English speakers from other continents (and by "In fact" I mean "I'm just guessing").

The truth is that tourists to the Big Apple give themselves away immediately by mispronouncing place names, or being unfamiliar with the basics of the subway system, or not knowing the difference between a street and an avenue. I'm not an expert in all things New York, by any means, but I have lived here long enough to be mildly annoyed when someone mispronounces the street I live on. This series is an attempt to help the uninitiated visitor avoid similar bloopers.

First in the series: Houston Street. Commonly mispronounced as "HYOO-stin," after the largest city in Texas, it is actually pronounced "HOW-stin." I hear this error all the time because I live about 50 yards from Houston Street, which happens to be a fairly long and well-known thoroughfare in Manhattan. You can read more information about it here.

Dirty laundry

For years, I did my own laundry. In college, I'd spend $10 on a bottle of liquid detergent and a box of dryer sheets, which would last me an entire semester. Every two weeks or so, I'd carry my laundry basket to the basement of whatever residential hall I was living in, remembering to separate lights from darks, and read a book while the aging washing machines first hummed gently, then threatened to explode. During my last two years in art school, I drove from my apartment in New Brunswick, NJ, to a laundromat in nearby Highland Park staffed entirely by 4-foot-11 Hispanic women.

Our apartment in NYC does not have a washer or dryer, so "doing laundry" means stuffing my clothes in a bag and dropping it off one block down the street, at Prince Street Cleaners. In other words, I don't spend any money on detergent or dryer sheets, but I do pay someone else to do my laundry for me. That someone is John, the amiable Indonesian immigrant who runs Prince Street Cleaners. Like many recent immigrants, he's an enterprising guy -- when the Sony PlayStation 3 was released last year, he waited in line for a week to purchase one of the first units, and then sold it on eBay for a 500% profit.

Perhaps to some of you reading this, paying for someone else to do your laundry is unconscionable, even ridiculous. After all, there are self-serve laundromats all over the city. Sometimes, even I question the economics of it all. I certainly don't pretend that I wouldn't rather have my own washer and dryer. But really, I'm paying for the convenience. I drop off the laundry in the morning on the way to work, and I pick it up on the way home, every pair of boxers neatly folded, every t-shirt turned right-side-out. In college, I had the time to sit and wait for towels to dry in the spin-dryer. Now, I barely have the time to pick the towels off the bathroom floor.

So how much do I actually pay? Today, I dropped off 15 t-shirts, eight pairs of boxers, five pairs of socks, and two pairs of shorts, for which I paid $11.30 (the cleaners charge by weight). If that sounds like a lot, well, I did say that John was an enterprising guy.

Judging a guitarist by his guitar case

Do you wear or carry anything that constantly draws conversation? You know what I'm talking about -- I'm talking about that skinny Jack Spade necktie that has all your co-workers asking where you got it every time you wear it. I'm talking about hearing random strangers say "I love your dress!" every time you wear your favorite muumuu. [I actually don't really know what a muumuu is, so I kind of made that one up.] This sort of thing happens to my wife all the time. She gets compliments about her clothes, her bags, her sunglasses and her jewelry, but because she has superb taste and works in fashion, this is not surprising. She gets compliments about her husband too, but really, would you say anything bad about a woman's husband to her face?

Me, I get more compliments on my occasionally spiky hair than anything I wear, though this doesn't happen often. But almost every time I carry my guitar case around, someone will ask me about it.

A guy on the subway asked me if I had a keyboard in there. [It's a hardshell case in the shape of a long rectangle, so I forgave the error, even though it has "Parker Guitars" embossed on the side.] Another guy asked me if I was Jimi Hendrix -- I told him I wasn't but that people mistake me for him all the time. Last month, a record producer ran to catch up with me and asked what kind of Parker was in the case -- he was a big fan of Parker and owned one himself.

This morning, I was getting off the train on the way to church, my guitar case in hand. I walked past a guy eating his breakfast at the door of the train station, and he yelled out, "Whatchoo got in there? Fender?" I told him it was a Parker, and he gave me a slightly confused look which I've come to expect, since even seasoned guitarists have never played a Parker. We quickly traded vital statistics: how many years we've played, who with played with, what countries we'd been to, and so on. When he heard that I'd played for 17 years, he said, "Oh, so you're good," which was a premature and erroneous evaluation, given he hadn't seen my unstudied technique and inability to play anything outside of the pop-rock genre. Ironically, he seemed unimpressed when I told him I couldn't read music and play only by ear. But he gave me some friendly advice ("never stop practicing") and wished me good luck.

I have these sorts of conversations all the time, but it's the guitar case that does it. It's big and black, with chrome latches and a sober heft to it. Anyone carrying it would look like a serious musician. And musicians automatically share a camaraderie, because, as every musician knows, it's hard to make it out there, and you need friends. When I carry that guitar case, I feel as if I have a friend on every corner.

August shower

It's about time for the Perseid meteor shower, an annual opportunity for people in the northern hemisphere to watch "shooting stars" streak across the night sky without the aid of telescopes. Living in NYC makes it difficult, of course, because of light pollution. So what's a New York resident to do? Well, according to people who seem to know what they are talking about, I'd have to leave the city and travel way out in the boonies to get maximum enjoyment out of this year's light show. And when I say boonies, I mean the Catskills or Adirondacks. Oh well, maybe next year.

Eat at Joe's

Tonight we had dinner at Joe's Shanghai, a Chinatown mainstay on Pell Street known for their xiao long bao, or soup dumplings. It was crowded as usual, and since they don't take reservations, we had to wait outside for a while and eavesdrop on other people's conversations (which would have been more fun if the people standing closest to us weren't all speaking Russian).Once we got in, we barely needed to look at the menu -- Sarah always orders the jellyfish, and I always order the dumplings. Everything was predictably yummy.On the walk home, we were stopped on the street by three women dressed for a Friday night out. "Do you know where I can find Double Happiness?" one of them asked us. We were doubly sad to tell her that we didn't know.

The director speaks

Quickly now: here are Rocket Science director Jeff Blitz's thoughts on the premiere we attended this week (via Gothamist).

More than a supermarket

Weird or cool? Our local Whole Foods is hosting a singles event in a couple of weeks, where you can meet other single people who, like you, enjoy organic groceries, toilet paper made from post-consumer pulp, and ten-cent rebates when you use your own shopping bag instead of a plastic bag.

I still tell people that the best place to meet other single people is church. The crazy thing is that shopping at Whole Foods kind of feels like going to church: you visit regularly, everyone is friendly, you give them your money, and at the end of it all, you get fed.

Check Out, A Singles Event at Whole Foods
Whole Foods = church? (Church of the Customer)

Kitten caboodle

For some reason, every time I tell people we have a cat, they are shocked. I guess we don't seem like cat people. What's worse is that none of our friends have ever really seen our cat, Meg. This has more to do with our apartment being much too small to host visitors comfortably than Meg's skittish personality. But here, I present proof of her existence, and her fondness for ice cubes:Keeping a cat in our tiny one-bedroom apartment is difficult enough. I don't know how dog-owners do it. One of our former neighbors was a single woman who shared her apartment with two ginormous dogs. Imagine a wolf weaned on whale milk and growing up on a steady diet of elephants and bears. Now imagine two of them in a 300-square-foot apartment. I don't know how she kept them quiet, but I never heard them bark.

Lights and cameras

Things I learned from last night's Rocket Science premiere:
1. Paparazzi lining the red carpet have no idea who it is they're taking pictures of until someone yells the person's name. Then they all seem to not only know his name, but be his best friend as well. This is especially true for relatively obscure actors, like much of the cast of Rocket Science.2. New Yorkers are not the friendliest people in America, but they become much nicer when standing outside a theater waiting to catch a celebrity sighting. This is because they may have to ask the stranger standing next to them who that woman walking down the red carpet is. Some New Yorkers also happen to lack normal observational skills, like the guy who asked me what movie all this hubbub was for, just as we stood by this poster:
3. Being a celeb is hard, because you have to smile and look good all the time. Ah, but maybe it comes naturally to them. And maybe this is why I am not a celeb.4. I wish I learned more, but that's about it. Oh, I also learned at the after-party that warm figs and goat cheese are a magical combination that will set off divine little fireworks in your mouth. Just like kalbi and kimchi.

Weird weather

Tornadoes in Brooklyn, flooding in the subways, 100-degree heat. Happy August.

It really is "Rocket Science"

It's after 1:00 AM already, and I just got home from the premiere of Rocket Science. I'll post pictures and write more about the experience tomorrow, but for now, I'll say that it was a delightful affair. We caught up with some friends we made at Sundance, and made some new friends. And I got to be a member of the paparazzi for a few minutes and snap photos of the cast as they posed on the red carpet. All I can say is that I'd hate to be a movie celebrity.

Coming to a theater near you

The first and only movie premiere we've attended was the New York City premiere of Spike Lee's She Hate Me. What, you've never seen or even heard of the film? It's probably because She Hate Me had most critics saying, "We hate this." I myself was appalled by much of the film, but I applauded its technical merit and thought-provoking content. It inspired this film review I wrote for Pixelsurgeon, a review I convinced Roger Ebert to read (but that's a subject for another post). The bottom line was I enjoyed seeing the film before anyone else in the world had seen it, and seeing it in a theater with Spike and many of the other cast members.

Tonight, Sarah and I will be attending our second NYC premiere, but it's for a movie that we've already seen: Rocket Science. We saw this at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT, earlier this year and thought it was fantastic, especially since my brother-in-law is one of the leads.

I'll blog about our experience at the event. In the meantime, watch the trailer here.

Cabbie fever

This morning, just as I was arriving at work, I heard a guy yelling on the street, right at the corner of Broadway and Spring Street. It turned out to be a cab driver who had gotten out of his vehicle and was screaming at the driver of a Boar's Head delivery truck in the next lane. At least it would have been the next lane but for the fact that they were on a one-lane street. The cab driver threw his coffee cup (or fat-free raisin bran muffin or something -- I couldn't really tell) at the truck. The truck driver ducked inside his vehicle, and passersby were literally running for cover. Then the cabbie realized he had nothing else to throw, so he popped his trunk and got a tire iron. That's when the truck driver drove off. And that's when I slipped inside my building.

Someone was obviously having a case of the Mondays.

More about cabs and cabdrivers in New York City:

NYC Taxi Cab Rider Bill of Rights
NYCabbie - lots of cab-related information
New York Hack - a female cab driver's blog
And finally, an article about Ahmed Ibrahim, a 52-year-old cab driver who plays matchmaker with his passengers. My wife and I had never heard of him until we happened to hail his cab about a year ago. We got in, told him our destination, and he said, "Have you ever heard of Cupid's Cab?" Our driver turned out to be a minor celebrity.

"But we just went grocery shopping!"

If you live in the suburbs and need to go food-shopping, chances are you get in your car, drive to the supermarket, and buy a few days' worth of groceries. It's also increasingly common for people to join a members-only "warehouse club" and buy food in bulk. But in NYC... let's just say that there is a reason why you probably have a 10 lb bag of chicken wings in your freezer and I don't.

There are three sources for 98% of our grocery needs in Manhattan, and they are all within six hundred feet of our door. Whole Foods is where we buy chicken (naturally raised, air-chilled chicken breasts), eggs (Omega-3 enriched), and virtually all our other groceries. The Met is a NYC-based supermarket chain that has a branch around the corner. On days when I really, really have to have cilantro and Whole Foods doesn't have any, I'll go to the Met. Finally, the local Korean-owned deli, SoHo Garden, is where we get kimchi and dried seaweed in a pinch.

There are no warehouse clubs in our area; thus, no 10 lb bags of wings.

Not surprisingly, having three grocery stores within walking distance has changed the way we shop for groceries. For example, we usually only buy enough groceries to last us a day or two. While this was initially a weird and wasteful practice to me, the wife tells me that this is what people in France do all the time. French people will buy one loaf of bread for the day. The next day, they'll buy another loaf of bread. By my complex and esoteric calculations, that means stopping at the local bakery 365 times a year, or so. [To be fair, baguettes in France don't last longer than a day anyway because they are made with no preservatives.]

Obviously, the moral of the story is that by living in New York, we are becoming more and more French.

Everything you ever wanted to know

I'm still amazed when I read some facts about New York City. For example:

• Out of 216 U.S. cities with populations of more than 100,000 in 2002, NYC ranked 197th in overall crime (with about the same crime rate as Provo, Utah).
• The average New Yorker consumes less than half the electricity used by a resident of San Francisco and nearly one-quarter the electricity consumed by a resident of Dallas.
• Chocolate is New York City's leading specialty-food export.

Wha? Apparently, in 2003, NYC exported more chocolate confectioneries than peanut butter, frozen foods, or spices (by dollar value). Why is this information important? It's not! But it's included in Wikipedia's entry on New York City -- everything you ever wanted to know about the Big Apple on one page.

New York City - Wikipedia

Background check

Some of you may be asking, "What makes your point of view so interesting? After all, there are many blogs out there written from a New York resident's point of view. In fact, the whole "One Year in New York" idea isn't even all that original -- there are other blogs with the same name!"

It may help to explain a little about my background and what puts me in an interesting observational position to write this blog. I was born and raised in a relatively small town in Malaysia, didn't come to the United States until I was 18, and only moved into the City three years ago. To go from a suburb in an obscure resort town in South East Asia to a megalopolis of over 8 million people is a transition that still leaves me wide-eyed. Everything around me is interesting and noteworthy, if not easy. For example, my living expenses are stratospheric, I don't own a car, and my apartment that I share with my wife is not much larger than my college dorm room. But these restrictions are what makes life unique in the City. And even if you're a fellow NYC resident for whom these things are familiar, I'm hoping you'll relate to my experiences and enjoy reading about them.

Some of you may wonder what I hope to achieve by spending time every day writing about all this stuff. It's still early in the process, but for now, I'm thinking of this blog as an open diary and a news bulletin of sorts. People who know me can keep up with everything that's going on in my life, and people who don't will, at the very least, get some idea of what urban living is like. Plus, I'm interested in all the things you're into as well: food, music, movies, art and design, sports, community, work, and politics. My understanding of and interest in these subjects will color the next twelve months' of posts.

Let me know what you think!

The beginning is the end

Welcome to One Year In New York City. For the next twelve months, I will be blogging about what it is like to live in one of the great cities of the world. This will be my only window of opportunity to attempt such an endeavor, because in exactly one year, if everything goes according to plan, my wife and I will be moving out of New York City. The beginning is, therefore, the end.

This blog is especially written for friends and family who do not live in, or have never been to, NYC, and would like to know what it is like. Before I moved here, New York had always been a bizarre place: a concrete, steel and neon jungle populated by fashion models, investment bankers, artists and businessmen. It was always busy, loud, crowded and intimidating, certainly not a place to call home. But when we got married three years ago, my wife and I moved to the City in order to reduce our commuting times to work. And I've come to realize that although NYC will always be bizarre to a degree, it has become our home, and what was once weird is now familiar and comfortable.

Obviously, the things I write about here will be especially pertinent to my own background, interests and activities. But every good blog is shaped by its readership as much as by its author, so I look forward to your comments and questions because they will eventually inspire new posts. After all, by creating this blog, I'm letting you into my life -- the least I can do is allow you to enrich and contribute to my life in some way.

Ready? Let's go.