Powerful Men or Powerful People? Let's Get Philosophical.

Especially after reading Maureen Dowd's October 22 takedown of Judith Miller I wondered whether the Times just should print its own daily, maybe weekly, supplement dedicated this entire WMD/Miller/Libby/etc. episode. I wager the Times' credibility is being doubted by some at about the same rate that George Bush is dismantling the government.

Dowd ignites the entire scene with typical Dowdian comedy, introduced by a headline that is New York Observer in spirit: "Woman of Mass Destruction."

The column's second paragraph reads: "The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy -- her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur -- have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types."

My annotated version reads: "The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy {REPORTERS ARE KNOWN FOR BEING DRIVEN CRAZY}-- her tropism {BIG WORD NOT OFTEN SIGHTED} toward powerful men {LAST I CHECKED, GEOPOLITICALLY SPEAKING, MEN WERE THE ONES IN POSITIONS OF POWER. MEANWHILE, DON'T MANY TIMES REPORTERS GRAVITATE TOWARD POWERFUL PEOPLE? EAT DINNER WITH THEM, ETC.?} , her frantic intensity {WHAT TOPSPIN!}; and her peculiar {WHAT A BACKHAND!} mixture of hard work {I'M TEMPTED TO SWITCH TO THE SHOOTING-FISH-IN-A-BARREL METAPHOR} and hauteur -- have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types." {WE THOUGHT YOU ENJOYED MOVIE STARS.}

Never mind that the Times shaped Judith Miller. Who's going to write the column, the Op-Ed, The Piece, that will explain for us its quote-unquote peculiar stance toward accountability? It can't be somebody inside the fishbowl, and it can't be somebody who works for the Times. Maybe Jeffrey Frank, maybe a playwright. Maybe culture and media historian Dan Czitrom. Joan Didion? Janet Malcolm in conversation with David Mamet?

I can't help thinking about the arc of the Times' very existence, its "objective reporting" duds, and its place in this cultural moment. Somebody once told me that magazines were bound "books" of advertisements with editorial text stuck between. What does the Times think it's supposed to be doing? Who and what are its reporters supposedly impressed by, and who and what actually impresses them? What *is* the Times any more? And who outside of satirical channels is covering it ?

Clearly Maureen Dowd is covering herself, among other things.

Edible English

National Geographic Traveler has a story this month featuring photos of the Greek island of Lesvos. One photo shows a menu blackboard. On offer: "Lobster Alive."

This is the kind of English I crave.

How to be Competitive

Or was that NYT article about how to raise children to be successful in a competitive world? I recently read an interview with a dean of a top graduate program. One of his best points was that prospective students be themselves.

If parents foster this, that's one way to teach kids how to survive the competition.

Post-post, December:
That article, in the Sunday New York Times, was about the authors of the book "Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers - and How You Can Too." Being a high achiever is not the same thing as being competitive, although (obviously) the two are related. My opinion is the same, though. If parents don't begin with recognizing how their kids' strengths are unique to those children, nobody's going far anytime soon.

If parents, say, are analytical and logical and their kid excels at being dreamy and floaty and nonlinear, then getting the kid to take dreaming seriously might be a better idea than trying to mold the kid into somebody who speaks the same logic as the parents. Dreaminess has its own logic.

David Brooks and John Tierney

Why do the Sulzbergers like them?

Why, why, why?

Cheese Toast?

The Wallace & Gromit warehouse burned completely this past Monday.

See the story at the inconveniently unhooked-up link, http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1588867,00.html

Between this and Disney animation going computer, I'd say it's been a bad year for animation. Anime may be another story. Certainly holding its own in porn world.

Did Ahab Litter?

I wonder. I'm reading Moby Dick.

Below is a little something from Sable Island's website. Sable Island has wild horses I admire from afar.

"During the 1980s the island was used as a sampling station to monitor plastic pollution in the waters of the Scotian Shelf region.  The study [from that time] described trends in litter accumulation, identified types, relative proportions, and sources of plastic litter, and established a baseline for future comparisons.  Plastic litter, measured by both number and weight was found washing ashore at a monthly rate of roughly 200 items/km, or 8 kg/km.  Considering that Sable Island is 40 km in length, the study indicated that plastic litter was coming ashore on north beach at a rate of 8000 items per month."

As it turns out, visitors to Sable Island do more than observe the horses. They also leave behind plenty of plastic tableware, something to be remembered by.

Black & White

So taken was I with a truly good black & white milkshake served at the 3 Guys coffee shop on Upper Madison, I completely forgot

1. The ice cap is being divvied up by "visionary" plutocrats/businesspeople.
2. Kashmir is in bad shape
3. Apparently, U.S. forces are still banging away in Iraq
4. To do my laundry

B&W's are at 1232 Madison Avenue, near 88th\ (Ph: 212.369.3700, Hours: Daily 6 am - 10pm). I recommend the kid-sized version because it comes in one of those slightly pudgy looking short glasses and 3 Guys has either good dishwashing agents or a good dishwasher, or both.

Speaking of English

Personality: A profession a parent cannot explain to a grade-school child.

"I get it": A phrase meant to convey empathy, apprehension of meaning, and general hiptitude. In sync with entire adolescensization of grownup culture. Variation: "I get you/him/her," "She gets me/her/him."

Transition (no longer a noun but a verb): I am transitioning. You are transitioning. He/She is transitioning. We are transitioning. They are transitioning.

Comprised: A word currently used instead of "composed" in its transitive senses, viz. The committee was comprised of five students. [Ed. note Currently in use in better magazines throughout Media City, and not in the New York Times.]

Sarkey: slang for "sarcastic."

Eat Like a Cabbie

Late last night, I picked up some curry on Crosby Street. At least four cabs were parked outside. It was around 10:30 and I couldn't remember what time Housing Works closed, so I walked down Crosby to find 1. That it was closed and 2. That the hole-in-the-wall Indian food (or is is Punjabi food?) place on the way to it was open. Apparently, it's open *all night.*

All night? I instantly considered all the ways an all-night Indian food place could come in handy. Many ways--many! Cravings are funny things.

Was it the best curry ever? Not exactly. Did I think about Dawat? Yes. Did I consider Suvir Devi's restaurant? Of course.

Did I worry about the man wanting to warm my chicken dish in the microwave (that is, if it wasn't being kept on simmer, what kind of bacteria might be growing in it, or something--I don't pretend to understand the ins-and-outs of all-night food-keeping)? I worried!

The main point wasn't the food. The main point was that I was buying $4 curry from a place that served it all night to "South Asian cab drivers" (as the Daily News pointed out in a reviewlette) in a neighborhood where all-night curry isn't *that* easy to come by I don't think. Late-night maybe but I don't think all-night. Very international. Only in enormous cities can a place like Lahore exist. It made me happy to be in NYC, and my good mood eclipsed my worry.

At least two cabbies said the tea is very good.

A Word About Phones

There are some old booth phones in the underground garage by the 79th Street Boat Basin. A fine place to kiss somebody or wipe an eyelash off their nose in relative private.

My favorite telephone ring in the world is Italy's. It's sorta raspy. When I was researching a piece this year for Metro-the-subway-paper, about mozarella, I called up a so-called mozarella bar (well, the Times printed an article that stretched *that* one just a bit, it turned out) in Rome. The ring made me so happy, I called once again when I knew the place would be closed. I could have fallen asleep to its version of electropurr. Certainly linked me to exquisite drops of time from my early 20s, and to the happy memory of language skills that actually improved with wine. In Italy, things were often backward in ways that turned out well.

In any case, maybe if we had phone booths once again in the city, it would add some much-needed inefficiency. Especially if they were situated in zones where there isn't any cell phone reception. George Bush would appreciate them; he could do a photo-op running out of one in a Superman costume.

Please vote For Your Favorite World Genuine Landline Telephone Ring. Operators are standing by.

Ten Minutes of Protest

I went to LaGuardia Place today to support Landmark West's call for the Landmarks Preservation Commission to hold a public hearing regarding the fate of 2 Columbus Circle. The building sits on the south side of Columbus Circle, which, if you haven't noticed, is not the same kind of circle it was for Judy Holliday in It Should Happen to You.

What it is is a makeover dreamed up by some of the best suburbanish minds around, I have no doubt. That Time Warner Center, with four star restaurants upstairs from . . . clothing stores. The new Center of the Circle hangout mall, thoroughly bland and hackneyed. And now comes the mayor's plan for Edward Durrell Stone's quirky Modernist building with the striking facade.

You know the facade and the building. . . . Very white marble with porthole windows. Venetian palazzo detail, like. Originally it was Huntington Hartford's art museum.

Landmark West circulated an email letter to supporters; the letter was signed by many, many architects and architecturally minded people. Nobody at City Hall seems to be listening.

The Mayor says, Why should I give the public a chance to comment? It will only slow the timely development of this almost-cursed property. A brownfield gets more attention these days than does Columbus Circle--and Judy Holliday is no longer with us, so the billboard gimmick is out. A market town is a market town, and this is a real estate issue, and I couldn't give a fried chicken leg if the Museum of Arts and Design wants to slice up 2 Columbus Circle like a toast caddy. It's an ugly building, all the architects say so. (Okay, only the architects I want to listen to but still.) (And why should I notice that 30 years after Ada Louise Huxtable denounced it as a "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops" she began to actually like it?) The Museum is a fine new tenant. Tourism! Culture! Shopping! Enough is enough.

Mr. Mayor, I, for one, haven't had a enough (granted, I put all those words into your mouth). The sign I carried today read, "AIA, You Don't Speak for Me." You don't have to be an expert or an architect to know what works in the city and what doesn't. I've been in the Stone building dozens of times, and know that I like it inside and out. I miss too many destroyed buildings to let this feature of the cityscape go without a peep. So I peeped.

Actually, the main peeper on the march was a portly man with the kind of voice that belongs in the middle of a Franco Zeffirelli set. Unfortunately, he was booming, "Down with Bloomberg!" I could barely speak to the general contractor who stopped by on his bike to see what was what. We were all having a little bit of a hearing problem.

From across the street, a man shouted, "Peace and quiet!" The portly booming man yelled back something about this being America. Then a man came down the block and started asking him to be quiet. Now came a retort about the Constitution. The word asshole was somewhere in there (from the complainer), and then the complainer said, "There's somebody on a deathbed four stories above here."

The booming man did not care. I considered the man's deathbed friend. Dying to baritone strains of "Down with Bloomberg," well, it seemed very New York somehow.

The complainer marched away almost beside himself. The good news is that the portly boomer did not yell after him, "Edward Durrell Stone's iconic 1964 building is on its deathbed!"

Even though: it is.

Getting Nowhere

SINCE GRADUATING from college, I have moved, on average, every two years. I have boarded, shared, house-sat, cat-sat, and, in one location, been a long-term guest. This means that over the past 20 years, I’ve lugged belongings from Christopher Street to Greenwich Street to Weehawken Street to East 12th to East 84th to West 77th to West 113th to West 69th to Henry Street to East 56th to Berkeley Place to Third Place, then back to the Upper West Side, then into Brooklyn again, with first stop at Bergen Street, and, finally, at Sackett. This is without sharelike situations in Chelsea, Gramercy, and Little Italy with serious boyfriends, and discounts the five apartments I lived in up until college.

There are only so many moves left in me.

I used to laugh at friends’ complaints about their messy address book entries for me, how they had to keep my address in pencil. This was just part of what people did, wasn’t it? Heaving boxes from place to place, shedding books along the way, selling furniture when necessary, pruning wardrobes. Praying that enough men, cash, and good weather would show up on moving day.

INEVITABLY A WALK around the city forces a plaiting of memories, the places I’ve lived with the places I’ve visited. An errand in Murray Hill brings to mind the apartment where the boys once threw pizzas onto the ceiling. A walk around Sutton Place conjures the best holiday spread I knew. The Upper East Side still breathes the sounds of a book party for a journalist who a few years later would be murdered. In Tribeca, there’s a sunny loft where the schmatte people held a break fast. On Jane Street apartment, there was a bris. Near Morningside Drive, the townhouse with the Valerian root juice in the fridge.

I am comforted that the buildings are still there.

For several years, until about three years ago, episodic memories crowded my brain. Now they’ve ebbed into a calcified zone I can consider from some distance. Now I can remember versions of myself, and where I was in that version, but the only venue I grasp with five senses is generally wherever my eyes happen to be actually looking. From this vantage point, the future threatens to lap the present, and the past is very over.

THE CAREFREE attitude with which I conducted my impassioned game of leap-frog began to wane considerably sometime between the spring and summer of 2002. That was when I fell for a man who did not fall for me. No doubt this was lucky for me, but I think I wanted to colonize a future with his particular bundle of appeal by my side; I was ready for a view that wouldn’t change.

Our parting rendered the city null but also marked like a giant dance card with our footsteps. The urge to move came over me, only this time, it was to move away. My West 71st Street studio was an organized shoebox fitted out with custom-made shelves and desks but it felt utterly beside the point.

I BECAME placeless, emotionally and otherwise. I moved my stuff into storage and became a house sitter for eight months at the home of people who had precious little experience with the realities of such a set-up. What was I doing in New York, again? Don’t people in Detroit and Madison and Amherst have more livable lives or something?

I signed a lease on a sunny floor-through on Sackett Street and retrieved my belongings. The first box I opened contained my dishes; I kissed them.

Still, the title of a Dominick Dunne novel comes to me: Another City, Not My Own. His book was about something that has nothing to do with any of this but the title sticks to my ribs. After years of running around the city well beyond childhood perimeters, I see that the place is enormous, gigantic, and fairly indifferent to my movements. It’s only the recognition factor that makes it feel so small, running into somebody from high school, for instance.

I finally feel as rootless as I’ve probably appeared to friends all these years. Where once I felt I was moving along, my anchor to drop when Providence decided, I now feel that I’m simply in motion, and only by default.

MY CITY DREAM home is a brownstone with a bee hive on the roof, a laundry chute for slide-rides, a working dumbwaiter for non-slide rides, a large kitchen, a separate pantry, at least three bathrooms (one a shower room with a drain in the center of the floor), quiet, safety, and floods of sunlight. Rent: $125 a month with an option to buy at the end of a year for not more than a hundred times the rent.

Have I spent years buoyed by daydreams? Is that one of the byproducts of a leased life? Or does it just sound nice to say so?

WHEN I WAS in my 20s, I dreamed of a Get Out of New York Free Card. It entitled me, the future holder, to either a clean getaway or a penthouse apartment, whichever came first (yes, a penthouse is at odds with a brownstone). When this calling card would present itself, I didn’t know; I simply knew it would turn up.

Certainly the “clean” part can no longer apply. Maybe all that will turn up is the ongoing recognition that my life is shifting from one distinct period into the airspace of another. Oh: and I have seven months left on my lease.

Bite-Sized

.017) The Supreme Court is shaping up to be something, isn't it? When George W. Bush gets to that big compound in the sky, I think the first thing he's going to do is knock back some milk and crackers with Al Capone.

.029) Children love those who feed them. How's that working out in the hate camps? I wonder. If they fly Thomas Keller and Mario Batali and _____ [fill in appropriate chef here] over, would that be considered Western intervention, or a really smart way to further endear the kiddies to the men with big assault weapons?

.5) I had a red carrot today at the Union Square Greenmarket. It's a beautiful root vegetable. Bright orange in inside. I asked somebody, If this carrot were a designer, which designer would it be?

.7) One can't bring up designers, in this time of Court Nominations, without thinking of Chanel, whose clothes were worn by Osama Bin Laden's mother.

.99) In years to come, will Bush most be remembered as the most innovative President, for trying to smoke ObL out of a cave; or being the most effective President since Ronald Reagan?

.9984) New York Times Easternmost headline today on A1, "Bush Fends Off Sharp Criticism of Court Choice." Then the inverted pyramid: "No Memory of Discussing Position on Abortion, President Says."

How to Be Jewish in New York

Go to church!

This evening, I celebrated Rosh Hashanah in the sixth row of St. Bartholomew's Church, something I could never do while a kid attending Temple Emanu-El. Sitting with an enormous rose window off to the right (at least, I *think* it was a rose window) lit in stained glass blue made me feel right at home. The joke about Emanu-El was that it was a cathedral. St. Bart's felt a little more Christian, less Judeo, I have to say. Something about the large mosaic crosses.

Because I was raised Jewish and Christian, I'm still trying to decide just what I am. Maybe a typical New York Jew.

In any case, this is the year to decide. It's unlikely I'd give up Midnight Mass. But it's nigh impossible I'd give up Passover seders. Some days I think I'm Jewish just for the food holidays. A good break fast is a fine event. And so is Easter dinner.

Argh!

Meanwhile, question: are New York Jews more tolerant than Jews (250 or fewer?) who live between the coasts? Does all this churchgoing make them more expansive? Or just tepidly Jewish?

I thought of my grandfather, who, in a small Connecticut town, moved his family into what I've heard was the Christian section. Many years later, I was among the first Jews at my church kindergarten. I'm not sure what these divisions mean any more and would be grateful if Budd Schulberg would explain that key passage in his novel What Makes Sammy Run?, and sooner than later. The idea of non-existent Jewishness comes up in Gentleman's Agreement, too.

[If the links were working better, this note would be expansive.]