Things I saw in 20 minutes

I went to Freemans Sporting Club, the barber shop I wrote about in this post, to get a haircut this morning, but they don't open until 12:00 noon. So I came back home. It was an interesting trip nonetheless. Here were some things I saw in the 20 minutes it took for me to go there and back.

"Snowman Seeks Skibunny" -- graffiti on wall, Rivington Street

"Angry Fembot Army" -- graffiti on door frame of private home, Freeman Alley

"Fascism Sucks" -- slogan on t-shirt worn by a middle-aged man sitting outside the Salvation Army building

As I walked by a construction site at the corner of Elizabeth and Prince Streets, just two blocks from home, a construction worker sweeping the sidewalk flagged me down and asked if this area was called SoHo. He wore an orange hardhat and had no front teeth. I told him that it was closer to Little Italy than SoHo, and that SoHo was on the other side of Broadway.

"So if I was to tell people where I work, what would I say?"

"Well," I said, "you could say NoLIta. It stands for North of Little Italy."

He didn't like the word "NoLIta" (probably because he didn't know the name and neither might anyone else he'd care to tell) and instead asked if he was anywhere near the Lower East Side. I told him that, in fact, the Lower East Side was a merely one block away, on the other side of Bowery.

"Ah, okay," he said. "Cos I'm like, where the hell am I?!"

We laughed at the absurdity of his predicament. I imagine he's going to go home tonight, and his wife will ask, "So, honey, where did the company assign you today?" And he's going to say, "Well, it wasn't Little Italy, and it wasn't SoHo, and it wasn't the Lower East Side, and some dude told me it was a 'hood called Noriega or Normandy or somethin' like it." And then his wife's eyes will narrow, and she will say, "You weren't at work today at all, were you? You were out drinkin' with your cousin Leroy! Remember what happened the last time you drank before 5:00 PM? Remember how you lost them front teeth?"

Short notes

I've been a little negligent with the blog over the last few days, though not for lack of things to write about. I'm not feeling particularly healthy -- when I get sick, it's usually a combination of exhaustion, lack of sleep, irregular eating, and not keeping warm at night. Currently, my symptoms are very mild: a heaviness in my head, an itch in my throat, a barely discernible fever. It's been enough, however, to lower my spirits and put me off blogging temporarily. But here I am again.
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Last weekend, I ate at the Red Hook Ball Fields. According to the New York Times, "there is no better street-food scene in all of New York," a statement I am unfit to confirm since I don't eat a lot of street food. But it sure beats the San Gennaro festival. I'll post pictures and more about the food later.
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Sarah and I will be heading out to sunny Los Angeles, California, in a few days. The last vacation I took was 14 months ago, so I'm overdue. We'll be attending a wedding (at which Sarah is a bridesmaid and I will be playing guitar with the groom during the ceremony), after which I'll be staying another whole week while Sarah jets over to Milan, Italy, for work. It'll be a good opportunity for me to rest and relax, but an overwhelming urge to go on a food tour of the Los Angeles area has gripped me of late, so this perennially skinny boy may return to the east coast with some excess baggage, if you know what I mean.

I love L.A. One thing I'd like to do is blog about the differences between Los Angeles and New York, two iconic American cities on opposite coasts. Last summer, when drivers rolled their windows down and turned up their speakers on the streets of Manhattan, they played Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," a fitting anthem for the neurotic New Yorker. In Los Angeles, drivers blasted... Coldplay. That's right, Coldplay -- the band whose songs "wallowed happily in their unhappiness," to quote Jon Pareles of the New York Times (he also called them "the most insufferable band of the decade.") That's how persistently nice the weather in the Golden State is: you have to play depressing music to offset the sunshine.
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At the end of this week, I'll be roughly one-sixth of the way through my final year as a New York resident. Highlights have been the free Battles gig at the Seaport Music Festival, attending the NYC premiere of Rocket Science, walking through Richard Serra's immense steel sculptures at MoMA, and our anniversary dinner at Babbo.

My favorite New York website

To get a feel of what it's like to live in New York, I'd say the best thing to do short of actually moving here would be to read Gothamist, the best New York City blog out there. Never crass, jaded or sensationalistic (characteristics that too often define other NYC blogs) Gothamist is fun and informative enough to read multiple times a day, since it covers events, weather, sports, business, and politics. Yet somehow, it's got this small-town newspaper feel to it, too. For example, recent posts have included a recipe for cherry almond chocolate chip cookies, and a news story about a cow on the loose in the streets of Queens. Hey, if Bessie's tearing up the sidewalk on my street, I'd want to know.

Click here to read Gothamist.

Molto buono: a dinner at Babbo

On September 18th, 2004, Sarah and I were married. To celebrate our third anniversary tonight -- and fulfill a long-time culinary goal -- we dined at Babbo, Mario Batali's first New York restaurant and one of Gourmet Magazine's 50 Best Restaurants in America. I know I insisted in this post two weeks ago that we don't often eat at places run by celebrity chefs, yet there we were tonight, feasting on Batali's outrageously delicious Italian dishes: a three-minute egg broken over warm lamb's tongue; marinated sardines with caramelized fennel and lobster oil; gnocchi in a veritable stew of oxtail and tomatoes; lamb chops and mint leaves nestled on a summery lemon yogurt sauce.


We can't keep this up for much longer, for both the expanding waistline of doom and the incredible shrinking bank account will soon stretch us to uncomfortable limits. But it's impossible to think of eventualities when, in the immediacy of celebration and the breaking of bread that accompanies it, you partake in all the riches of God's creation artfully arranged on a ceramic dish. I'm not saying we had a religious experience at Babbo -- a few things detracted from the otherwise excellent meal, including slow service and some over-seasoning. But, man, oh man, food like that makes you believe you can do anything. Like eat lamb's tongue.

Michigan rising

Finally, I see New Yorkers wearing University of Michigan apparel again. When Michigan, a perennial championship contender, went 0-2 to begin the college football season, including a stultifying loss to Division I-AA school Appalachian State, there was nary a maize-and-blue t-shirt in sight. Then, last Saturday, the Wolverines shut out Notre Dame for the season's first win. On Sunday, I saw a guy on the subway wearing a Michigan sweatshirt. And today, on my way to work, I rode the elevator with a gentleman wearing a button-down shirt, necktie, and a Michigan cap on his head.

Shopaholics wanted

I found this sign taped to the front door of our building this evening:

Attention Residents:
Disney Pictures and Bruckheimer Productions are going to be filming a new movie this fall entitled, "Confessions of a Shopaholic". As research for this film, we are looking for apartments belonging to women between the ages of 21 and 28. We would like to take pictures of the apartment for our art department so that they can get a sense of how to design the main character's apartment. This is NOT for filming. If you fall into this category and are interested, please contact Malaika Johnson at 347.528.6709.
Malaika Johnson
Locations Department

We get signs like this one all the time. And film crews set up lighting and filming equipment on our street, on average, about once every two months. Since Sarah is outside the specified age range, we certainly won't be calling Ms. Johnson. But Sarah is likely to be in the target audience for this movie, which, I'm guessing, is likely based on Sophie Kinsella's book of the same title. It may end up being a fluffy chick flick, but at least you'll know the main character's apartment will be based on a real home in one of the best shopping districts in the city.

Winners and losers

My mother in-law, echoing a popular and accurate sentiment, often says, "New York loves a winner." This is especially true for the city's professional sports teams. Now, I'm no sports pundit, and the only pro sport I follow with any true conviction is basketball. Unfortunately for me, the New York Knicks, once an NBA powerhouse, has in recent years been about as exciting to watch as my cat's attempt to remove an ice cube from her water bowl. I did attend a couple of games last season at the famed Madison Square Garden, both times using free tickets, both times leaving disappointed as the home team sort of gave up altogether. I've never really been a fan of the Knicks, though, so it's hardly a personal loss.

For more successful sports organizations, there are always the Mets and the Yankees, New York's major league baseball teams. Confession: Having been born and raised in another country, I only recently figured out the game of baseball. Until about two or three months ago, I didn't know what RBI stood for. Until tonight, I didn't know what ERA stood for.* And I'm still learning. I don't know for sure if an understanding of various acronyms and statistical categories is essential to enjoying the "American pastime," but it sure does enhance the enjoyment for me. Tonight, as I watched the Yankees hold off perennial rivals the Boston Red Sox in the ninth inning to win the game by a precarious margin, it occurred to me that I might be in danger of becoming a fan.

It's not hard to be a fan of the Yankees -- they're the most successful North American professional sports franchise in history, winning 26 World Series championships (by comparison, the Boston Celtics, the most successful pro basketball franchise, have a paltry 16 NBA titles). Fairweather fans are a dime a dozen in this city, but still, you have to appreciate the support from the New York area for the phenomenal success of the Rutgers college football** team, who last year finished the season with a 10-2 record, the best in the school's history. Not too long ago, they were lucky to win two games in one season. When I was at Rutgers, several years ago, I never ever went to a game. In fact, when I was at Rutgers, I didn't even know how the game of football is played.

Rutgers is 40 miles outside of the city, but it's the closest you can get to a winning local college football team in a city that desperately wants a college football team to root for. I was on the train today heading back into New York from New Jersey, and in between standard announcements ("ThisstationstopisMetroparkpleasewatchyourstepasyouexitthetrain"), the driver came on the PA system to announce that "Green Bay is beatin' up on the Giants." Then he reported that "Rutgers is number nine in the country," meaning that the Rutgers football team was now the ninth-best*** college team in the nation, according to the AP Poll. In spite of myself, I let out a celebratory "whoo-hoo!" and the teenaged boy in a Nike baseball cap sitting next to me flinched and gave a me furtive glance, as if worried that I might behead him with my cellphone.

*Yes, I know I could have looked up these things online, or asked one of the many sports nuts I know, but it's been far more rewarding learning the game as I watch it on TV.
**By "football" I mean gridiron, or American, football. Not to be confused with "soccer" which, while indeed a beautiful game and one I grew up playing, is merely the second-greatest game in the world.
***Rutgers is actually ranked 11th. Apparently the train operator's information was as reliable as New Jersey Transit's schedules.

Sowing and reaping in Brooklyn

I first read about Manny Howard, the Brooklyn man who grew a farm in his backyard as his sole source of sustenance, in last week's New York Magazine cover story. But with the likes of Reuters covering his harrowing and only somewhat rewarding endeavor, it looks like the appeal of the story is universal. Make sure you have plenty of time, then read the story here: My Empire of Dirt [NYMag.com]

Italian ice and everything nice

For the next two weeks, Little Italy plays host to the annual Feast of San Gennaro street fair. The San Gennaro festival was once a religious commemoration, but is now closer to a cultural celebration marked by commercialism, entertainment and excess. Not unlike Christmas, come to think of it.

Since the festival occurs around the middle of September every year -- along the length of Mulberry Street just a block away from our apartment -- it's impossible for Sarah and me to avoid, or avoid thinking about. You see, our wedding anniversary falls smack in the middle of the festival. And so we get wistful when we see the tre colori flags being strung up by those ugly wheeled cranes, when dirty blue sawhorses are erected as traffic barriers, when loudmouthed construction workers assemble wooden stalls for rigged carnival games.

Okay, so it's hardly a romantic event. It's a noisy, crowded, sticky tourist trap, but it's enjoyable in small doses. Tonight, we walked through the street fair with our good friend Melissa, in search of the artery-clogging, tooth-melting deep-fried Twinkie, among other culinary delights. I don't know what the international reach of the Twinkie is, but if you (like many readers of this blog) live outside the United States and have never had a Twinkie, let me put it as delicately as I can: Eating a Twinkie is like swimming in the East River -- you should only do it once a year at most, because once is enough to make you sort of sick. And if possible, try to avoid doing it altogether, because the risk of death needlessly increases every time you do it.

Of course, like swimming in testy waters, eating a Twinkie can be sort of fun. Especially when it's coated in batter, deep-fried, and dusted dangerously with powdered sugar. We found one vendor who indeed sold such a monstrosity, for $3 each. On Melissa's insistence, I talked the seller into selling us two for $5. He not only agreed, but also gave us three free zeppoles, which are basically deep-fried nuggets of dough almost the size of tennis balls. They were also dusted with powdered sugar. We ate everything.

This happened after we'd eaten a whole dinner's worth of barbecued pork, sausage-and-peppers sandwiches, and curly french fries, but before the cherry and coconut Italian ices.

Two observations while walking through Little Italy among hundreds and hundreds of Italian Americans: First, Italian women are quite breathtaking.

I don't remember my second observation.

Read more about the Feast of San Gennaro here. Read more than you need to know about Twinkies here. [Wikipedia]

Savvy at Savoy

Tonight, on a whim, we had dinner at Savoy. I'm not going to review the restaurant per se, for that would be redundant. Savoy has been a SoHo mainstay since the mid-90s, and although it was our first time there, it looked like each of our fellow diners was well familiar with the place. I will say that we had a very enjoyable meal of grilled lamb and slow-roasted sockeye salmon, and by skipping appetizers and wine and by sharing one dessert, we avoided breaking the bank as well. That one dessert, by the way, was killer: white chocolate bread pudding with berry sorbet. Phenomenal.

I requested a table in the upstairs dining room, which I knew of by reputation. It turned out to be an intimate space, furnished in a comfortable, rustic way.

We found out that on October 9, Savoy will be hosting something called Nose to Tail Dining, with an English chef named Fergus Henderson. More than likely, the dinner service will make use of every part of an animal, according to Henderson's philosophy and practice of using oft-discarded cuts of meat in cooking. This made me think of The Far Side, a comic strip by Gary Larson that once illustrated the point. In the strip, a group of cavemen are systematically tearing apart the carcass of a woolly mammoth and carrying the pieces off, except for the tail, which lies severed on the ground. A crotchety old grandfather caveman standing nearby points indignantly at the tail and yells, "In my day, we used every goldang part of the mammoth!"

No forwarding address

For a New York resident, here's a not-so-surprising statistic: Only a third of New York City homes are owner-occupied, compared to two-thirds in the rest of the nation, says the Census Bureau. That means that, like Sarah and me, most New Yorkers rent the homes they're currently living in.

We've lived in our apartment for three years, but many people I know have lived in theirs much less longer. I find one particular side effect of this urban nomadism in our mailbox every day: We frequently receive mail addressed not to us, but to the previous resident of the apartment. Today, for example, a postcard came for Amy D. from Joseph S. Tanen, Violinmaker. The postcard invites Amy to visit the soon-to-be-opened Tanen shop at 3111 Broadway, next to the Manhattan School of Music.

So at some point in the past, our apartment was occupied by a violinist named Amy. Did she practice on her instrument here in this very room where I'm typing this? Was she an amateur who simply annoyed the neighbors? Is she responsible for our broken doorbell, the one that has never worked since we moved in? Or maybe she made the hole in our screen window -- the one that lets in flies and bees in the summer -- with an overly enthusiastic stroke of her bow. Only Amy knows.

When we move out of the apartment next July, someone else is going to move in and start receiving our mail. Not the bills and the letters of correspondence and the magazines, of course; we'll make sure we leave a forwarding address for those. But perhaps the catalogs from Musician's Friend. And Guitar Center. And Music123, Zzounds, Sam Ash Music, and Disc Makers.

What will these people assume about me? Only they'll know.

The 11th day of September

There's nothing different about today, on the surface. Once again, I had to stay late at work, making tonight's dinner the second one I've eaten at the office in a row. I left at 9:30 PM and walked past bars filled with people for whom Tuesday night is as good a night as any for a Brooklyn Lager and a hook-up. Outside the neighborhood supermarket, a man hauled black garbage bags to the sidewalk in a cart, the same type of cart they let customers use inside. At the corner of Lafayette and Prince Streets, a New York Fire Department truck sped by; an ugly Dalmatian hung its head out one of the windows, spotted ears flapping in the wind.

The wind is not pleasant tonight -- it is a sickly breeze that chills in a damp sort of way. It rained all day today, and the air smells of wet leaves. In fact, today's weather is the complete opposite of what it was like on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. On that day, exactly six years ago, the weather had been brilliant. It was the kind of day that made you wish you were outside doing things that made you sweaty and thirsty and eager for a lemon sorbet, instead of stuck in a college classroom somewhere in New Jersey, trying to make sense of synaesthetic approaches in art-making, as had been the case for me.

On that day, a little before 9:00 AM, a student burst into the classroom and announced to the class (before our professor's permission was granted) that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

The professor (with whom I had a loathe-hate relationship, and whose classes I failed, twice) said in a drone, "I'm going to wait for confirmation on this news before jumping to any conclusions."

I ignored him and left the classroom, out of curiosity, but also out of concern for my stock trader roommate, who had taken the train into New York City that morning, just like he did every morning, and would have arrived at the World Trade Center at around the time the plane hit. I tried calling his cellphone and couldn't get connected. And then I tried calling Sarah, my friend who worked in midtown Manhattan, the girl I had a crush on, the girl who in less than a month would become my girlfriend, the girlfriend I would marry in 2004. "We're sorry, all circuits are busy. Please try again."

So I went to the coffee shop around the corner, sat in front of the TV with a dozen strangers, and watched the world end on CNN.

Afterward, I went home and waited. New York was over 40 miles away, but that was close enough for the university to cancel classes for the remainder of the day, and the following day as well. I tried looking out the window to see if the smoke from lower Manhattan was visible from where I was (it wasn't). I finally got in touch with Sarah, who told me that she was safe, that there were no vehicles of any kind leaving the city, and that she would be staying at her boss's apartment uptown. I got a phone call from a college buddy, who was living just below the Empire State Building in midtown. He was afraid. He worried that a plane would crash into his building too, but he couldn't leave because the train and bus stations were flooded with people, some still covered in dust.

My roommate finally came home later that night, stone-faced and quiet. He had been riding the escalator up from the PATH train station to the base of the World Trade Center that morning when an explosion shook the foundations of the building. He, like everyone else, had thought that it was a bomb. Then he went outside, into the square between the two towers. The second plane hit a few minutes later, a concussive blast so loud that my roommate, who was also the drummer in our band, fell to his knees. When it started raining people, he wept with the five hundred strangers around him. And when it started raining computers and file cabinets and concrete, he ran.

By some miracle, he'd worn his tennis shoes that day.

That day was six years ago. Today, the city of New York remembered the people who died on September 11, 2001. There were ceremonies held, and speeches given, and flags flown, and prayers said, and beams of light turned on, and though I didn't participate in any of these things (for to me, there was nothing different about today, on the surface), I remember as well.

Late night

No real blog post tonight -- I'm still at work, and it's 11:18 PM. Besides, the only thing worth blogging about today is the fact that there's nothing worth blogging about.

Shiso fine: a dinner at Perilla

If you read this post I wrote a few weeks back, you'll know that I have a great fondness for shiso leaves, which, until just a few minutes ago, I'd forgotten is also called perilla. By coincidence, Sarah and I had dinner at the new restaurant Perilla last night, and I'm happy to say that it quite made up for my "oyster letdown" I wrote about in my previous post.

Perilla, at this point in time, is still only famous for one thing: its executive chef is Harold Dieterle III, winner of the first season of Top Chef. We don't often go to restaurants run by celebrity chefs, which can be pricey, pretentious establishments with good if not great food to match. But Perilla, situated in the West Village, turned out to be neither pretentious nor exorbitantly pricey (entrées, but for one exception, top out under $30).

We didn't have a reservation, so when we arrived at 8:00 PM on a Saturday evening, we were told that there would be a one-hour wait for a table for two. We left our name and spent the next half-hour wandering around the Village, which tends to resemble any given Main Street in any given College Town, USA on a Saturday night during the school year (except in the Village there are way more stores with names like Birthday Suit and Pink Pussycat Boutique). At one point, we browsed through CDs at a dingy record store called Disc-o-Rama, but the smell of reefer was giving Sarah a headache (I think it had more to do with the fact that she was hungry). We left, but not before I noticed that even here, amidst the ganja haze, there was a section with Christian music. I mean, they had the album Shout to the Lord, which came out when Hillsong was still part of Integrity Music, back in 1996! You can't even find that in a Christian bookstore in Tennessee nowadays.

We went back to Perilla at 8:30 and decided to have a drink at the bar while waiting for our table. The bartender, a friendly and accommodating young lass, let us try three different wines before making our selections (Sarah ordered the crisp and well-chilled Grüner Veltliner, I the earthy Montepulciano in anticipation of eating red meat). I don't remember when restaurants began to chill their red wines -- perhaps they've always done it -- but I love that they do.

Finally, at 8:50, we were ushered into the dining room and seated. Here's the thing about the menu at Perilla: at first glance, the list of entrées doesn't knock you out. Nothing seems particularly original or extravagant; it's all pretty basic, and all quite American. There's the requisite strip steak, roasted sea bass, roasted chicken, grilled lamb loin, sautéed skate wing, etc. There is a roasted duckling, uncommon, to be sure, but who hasn't had duck before? At that point, I said to myself that everything had better taste really good. I mean, knockout good. If you're going to serve basics, serve them right.

Here's what we ordered:
Appetizers

• Spicy Duck Meatballs, with Okinawa yam gnocchi, water spinach, and a raw quail egg
• Crispy Rock Shrimp Salad, with baby mizuna, piquillo peppers, and a mushroom soy vinaigrette

Entrées

• Summer Truffle Ravioli, with sheep's milk ricotta, and forest mushrooms and peas
• Grilled Angus Strip Steak, with escarole, bacon and a sweet onion-horseradish sauce
• Faro Risotto (side dish), with an artichoke confit, parmesan and chili-grape salad

Dessert

• Black Mission Fig and Plum Crisp, with Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream and spiced streusel

[This is turning into a full-blown restaurant review, but whatever.]
The spicy duck meatballs were standout. The result is that Sarah now likes eating duck, a surprising and welcome development. The ravioli was also good, coming with white and green asparagus (not listed on the menu) and a wonderfully refreshing citrus flavor, even if the peas were slightly undercooked. The risotto was uncanny -- it was richly flavored with butter and parmesan cheese, yet didn't taste or feel heavy. The steak was much the same -- cooked to a perfect medium-rare temperature, with even the last bite as good as the first, and topped with a whole red onion. The only off-note was the bacon bits served under the steak; too indulgent and overpowering. When I order steak, I want to taste the flesh of a cow, not the skin of a smoked porker.For the first time in perhaps years, Sarah and I wanted the exact same dessert item, so we shared the excellent fig and plum crisp, a fantastic concoction with too little ice cream and more plums than figs.
As for the decor, Sarah didn't particularly care for the mod chandelier that hung over my head, but the restaurant is tastefully and sparely decorated, and expertly straddles the line between cozy and contemporary, especially the bar area. The tables for two in the back, where we were seated, are quite close together, which made it easy to see what your neighbors had ordered. The dating couple next to us, enamored by the ravioli on our table, asked more than once what we were eating. They later admitted that they were skipping dessert entirely and living vicariously through us, too full of steak and duckling and wine.

I understood completely.

More about Perilla:
Perilla Restaurant - Official website
Frank Bruni's New York Times review
The New Yorker review
Time Out NY review

Shell shocked

Yesterday, Sarah and I went to the Riverside Oyster Festival, which turned out to be far less grand than its name suggests. Considering I'd heard about this thing two weeks ago and could barely contain myself in anticipation of going, it was hugely disappointing. I'd envisioned rows of vendors with canvas-roofed carts and grease-splattered aprons, dishing out oysters prepared in all manner of "county fair" styles: fried oysters, oyster po'boys, um, oyster sushi... yeah, okay, so maybe my imagination was pushing the boundaries of reality with oyster sushi, which I've only seen on the specials menu in some Japanese restaurants. But you get the idea.To my supreme dismay, once we arrived at Riverside Park (at 103rd Street, all the way on the West Side of Manhattan), we found that there was only a solitary stand serving only raw oysters. And the "festival" consisted of a whole bunch of people sitting around by the Hudson Beach area of the park, eating raw oysters and cocktail sauce off a plastic plate and ignoring a boorish, grooveless band in the vein of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones playing on a stage in the corner. [Pop culture tip for the clueless: the last time the Mighty Mighty Bosstones were popular, Bill Clinton was still President.] If you were curious what the scenic Hudson "Beach" looks like, here's helpful photograph:
To be fair, everyone knows Manhattan is hardly the first place you'd go in search of a beach. And at least the raw oysters were excellent (harvested in Maine, shucked right here in New York, cold and sweet, and requiring nary a hint of lemon juice or cocktail sauce). But there's a lesson in my disappointment: when in New York, you could attend hundreds of entertaining, unique and well-organized cultural events, or you could go to next year's Riverside Oyster Festival. And sometimes, until you're actually standing on that sand-swept patch of concrete and squinting past the four-lane highway at the rather arresting coast of New Jersey, you just can't tell the difference.

In the books

Today, I did something I haven't done since I was about six years old -- I got a library card. I've spent many Mountain Dew-fueled hours in college libraries, but I haven't borrowed a book from a public library in over ten years. Until today, I didn't realize how much public libraries have changed in ten years, and how much has remained the same.

The New York Public Library has a branch one block away from my apartment, a fact I discovered just a couple of months ago. Today, I made it a point to visit it for the first time. Two things struck me: there are so many computers! and there are so many kids! Both of these things, of course, totally make sense, especially the computers, but I'm constantly amazed that there are enough children under the age of 12 in New York to fill up a room at any given time. I can't really explain this amazement. Young children are everywhere in NYC, but for some reason, I can't allow myself to believe that they do normal things like visit the library, or go to Toys R Us, or play in a playground.

Some of you may wonder if I've read any books at all in the last ten years. The fact is, every book I've read in the last ten years I either bought at a bookstore, or borrowed from a friend. Some of you may then guess that I probably haven't read very many books in the last decade. You are right. I should absolutely read more. There several writers whose works are only familiar to me by reputation: Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Lethem, Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates (both of whom taught at my alma mater, and whose inclusion on this list shames me to a degree), Philip Roth, and Jonathan Franzen. And these are just fiction writers who haven't died yet.

But they're a great start.

iWant

This week saw the release of updated versions of Apple's iPod, and I want at least one of them. Yes, yes, I know I'm just positioning myself as a cog in the whole consumerism machine, and technically I don't need a new iPod, since I own four of them already. You see, I bought a second-generation iPod Mini for Sarah some time ago, and later, I received a first-gen iPod Shuffle as a free gift. When the Mini decided to stop working, I bought Sarah a new Nano, which also gave out after several months. So I bought her a second-gen Nano. It was such a futuristic and unfamiliar-looking thing that when she accidentally left it at church office one Sunday, one of the toddlers coming out of childcare found it and promptly put it in the fridge for safe keeping.

Meanwhile, I was able to revive the old Mini, and now use it. Still, it would be nice to graduate beyond a monochromatic screen.

I've played with the iPhone, a near-magical device so well designed that it may as well have time-traveled from the future. I don't particularly need a new cellphone, and especially not one with a built-in camera that merely captures 2-megapixel images. But an iPhone without the phone and camera is something I'd be in the market for, and that's exactly what the iPod Touch is. So should I get one?

I'll think about it. But quickly.

The 'roo morgue

I don't intend to turn One Year in New York City into a food blog, but to write about living in NYC without writing about food as often as possible is unjust and irresponsible. And so, fresh on the heels of yesterday's post, I find myself reminiscing about the most memorable meals I've ever had, and realize that I've had a fair share of them right here in New York.

I think it's rare for people to remember particular meals based on the food alone, unless, of course, the food was so astoundingly good that it didn't matter what the occasion was. For example, if I think hard enough, I can remember every meal I had on my trip Maui, Hawaii, last year. But that has more to do with the fact that I can remember virtually everything else about my trip. Based on the quality and originality of the food alone, the most memorable Hawaiian meal was the mixed plate I had in Lahaina, a combination of disparate dishes spanning three continents of influence. It wasn't much more than street food, but really, isn't that the best kind of food?

I remember gustatory delights from other travels as well. You won't believe this, but I had one of the best Hawaiian pizzas I've ever tasted in (of all places) Canberra, Australia, in 1997. The most decadent meal I've had was at the Park Lane Hotel in London (at least I think it was there, for aside from the grandeur of the food, I remember little else owing to my host's insistence that I empty the wine bottle). And the best lobster meal I've had by far was in the great state of Rhode Island, where, at a seaside shanty, I feasted on two succulent crustaceans and heaps of coleslaw, butter and french fries for $22.

But what about New York? What of the freshly grated wasabi at Megu, the toro at Koi, the simple garlic french fries at Barmarché, the herbed butter and strip steak at Schiller's, the chocolate bread pudding at Café Colonial, the grass-fed filet mignon and wild asparagus at Craftsteak, or the chicken adobo at Cendrillon? There just isn't enough time, and the scope of this post is too narrow to accommodate the story behind every memorable meal. Plus, as the title of this post indicates, what I really wanted to write about is my new favorite meat in the world: kangaroo.

Some of you will already be aware of my affection for 'roo meat. If you're adventurous enough to try it, and you do so at an establishment that knows how to prepare it properly, you'll be rewarded with a depth of earthy flavor unknown in 90% of steakhouses out there. I'm talking about eating the meat of animals that bounce across the landscape like dropped balls, to quote Bill Bryson. You can't get that kind of flavor from a sluggish, mooing, grain-chewing beast.

Of course, in order to try kangaroo, you might start at one of the several Australian restaurants in the City, of which the most highly regarded at the moment is Eight Mile Creek, a dimly lit place recalling a cramped old English pub (the real pub is in the basement, where you can get your lager on while watching Aussie rules matches). Eight Mile Creek has decent kangaroo -- I ordered the "kanga skewers," a satisfying if slightly unrefined appetizer. The best kangaroo in New York, however, is at Public (although it may be a special menu item, since I can no longer find it on their online menu). Juicy, full of character, and joyfully tender, Public's 'roo steak remains one of the most memorable meals I've had in New York.

By the way, I've learned that there's 'roo on the menu at Knife + Fork as well. If I go, I promise to take pictures.

Gastronomic proportions

I'm going to post a link to one of the best food articles I've read in my entire life. But first, a preamble.

Living in New York to a one-year countdown is like visiting New York with an enlightened tourist's agenda: you have too many things to do and not enough time to do them all. In our case, our adventurous appetites might never get around to finding satisfaction at any number of restaurants in the City in which we aspire to dine. Here's the problem: between Sarah and myself, we like food from virtually every corner of the world. If, for example, neither of us liked French food, we could just eliminate every café, boulangerie, pattiserie and restaurant from our mental lists. But we can't, because even though Sarah is not particularly fond of French cuisine, I love it, especially anything with fromage de chèvre or beurre demi-sel in it. I drool already.

The problem is compounded by the fact that several of the restaurants we would like to visit are -- how shall I put this delicately? -- stupidly expensive. Not that we don't think they are worth it. On the contrary, we have no problem spending money on a fastidiously prepared meal, made from hard-to-acquire ingredients. There are people who spend as much on a new cellphone, or a car payment, or a watch. But it does mean that these restaurant visits are very few and far between; special occasions, if you will.

But.

But, sometimes you read a food article that makes you want to empty the checking account, jump in a cab, and head over to a restaurant where you just might have the best meal in your life, and where that in itself is the special occasion. That's because the article contains these words: [It is] the most expensive restaurant in the country, if not the world. It is also the best sushi restaurant in the country, if not the world. But it's not a story about a restaurant. It's a story about food. I read this article a couple of months ago, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

Please read the whole story, all ten delightful pages of it. At the very, very least, you'll be a more knowledgeable member of civilized society.

If You Knew Sushi [Vanity Fair]

How to speak like a New Yorker IV

If you've ever visited New York City, chances are you've taken a trip in a yellow cab (read my post about NYC cabs here). But a common mistake visitors make is not knowing how to tell the cab driver where you want to go. First, some cab drivers may seem uncouth, but it's no reason to be rude or impatient with them. 90% of all the cabs I've ever been in were piloted by cabbies who were skillful, knowledgeable, grateful when tipped, and polite. And the other 10%? Well, I can be sympathetic to the fact that driving a cab in New York will test anyone's patience.

Second, it's important to give the address of your destination to your cab driver in a way that helps him or her (there are over 400 women cab drivers in NYC). For example, don't tell your driver that you want to go to "532 Broadway." Instead, it's far more helpful to know the "cross-street" (i.e. the street that intersects your destination). So if you get in a cab and say, "corner of Broadway and Spring," you're more likely to get there quicker.*

Third, once you're almost at your destination, you may instruct the cabbie where exactly to pull over. Virtually all the streets in Manhattan are one-way streets, so if you're stopping at an intersection, let the cabbie know whether you'd like to stop at the "near-corner on the left" or the "far-corner on the right" or whatever applies.

* True story: Sarah and I once got in a cab because we were too tired to take the subway back to our apartment. We told the cabbie the cross-streets, but he told us that he'd only been on the job for two weeks and didn't know where exactly Mott Street intersected with Houston Street. It was the first time we ever had to give a Manhattan geography lesson to a cab driver.

Caves of steel

We just got back from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where a stunning if marginally incomplete Richard Serra retrospective is on display until September 10th. If you're not familiar with Serra's unique sculptural works, click here. Most contemporary art enthusiasts will recognize him as the guy who puts up ridiculously large sheets of hot-rolled steel (richly colored with an orange patina) and constructs incidental environments with them. I first heard about him in art school -- his brother Rudy Serra used to teach there. But today was the first time I'd seen his work outside of the printed page, and it was an experience simultaneously new and primal.

New, because as you walk alongside the undulating walls of rusted steel, it feels like an alien landscape. Primal, because your brain desperately tries to make sense of this new environment, so it invents age-old scenarios. When the walls curved outward as they rose, it seemed like you were standing at the bottom of a 15-foot canyon. When they curved inward so as to hang overhead, it was like being in the shade of a cave. It was funny because as Sarah and I explored the different parts of the exhibit, she felt safest and coziest in the "cave" parts, where the walls curved inward. When I pressed her to move on, she'd do so only reluctantly. But she felt instinctively vulnerable in the "canyon" portions, as if her environment left her open to attack. How ironic that ribbons of steel placed inside the geometric confines of an art museum evokes such strong associations with natural geography and the outdoors.
Several steel walls were also placed outside the museum, in the sculpture garden (where the photo above was shot). Fantastic stuff all around.

And of course, we couldn't leave without revisiting the Piet Mondrian gallery, home of some downright brilliant canvases by my favorite painter.

[Click here to view MoMA's microsite on the Serra exhibit, including high-res images and a fascinating time-lapse video of the installation in the sculpture garden.]