Handbill Handout

It is a cold, rainy and dreary Sunday in New York. Today is the kind of day that makes you want to hide, stay in bed, hibernate. It is not a jolly start to the holiday season. As soon as I type this, I'm going to make myself some hot cocoa. Comforting and warm. The food I've eaten this weekend had not always been so comfortable. Thursday was headlined, of course, by a large bird. The turkey I prepared was raised on a farm near Syracuse, New York and involved some correspondence between the Mrs. and the farmer as to timing of when said bird would be "processed" (to use the Orwellian term for "killed, plucked and gutted") and shipped to us. We've been getting closer to the meat that we eat having conversations with a farmer at our local market that includes sentences like "We're sending up two more cows and a few pigs next week so we'll have a brisket for you in three weeks" and so forth. Makes one a little more careful in cooking meat be...

Thanksgiving has come and gone. We are officially hip deep in the holiday season. Once you've passed a certain point in life, holiday seasons present are inevitably triggers to memories of holiday seasons past. So it was that I happened to be driving up Lincoln Avenue today and I passed a now-shuttered storefront that once housed one of the two deli/small grocery stores I did time in to earn tuition, book and beer money in the late 1980s. Across the street from that store were high-rise apartment buildings populated by mainly lower-middle-class residents. Blue collar types mainly: postal workers, cab drivers, construction workers and some retirees living on a pension. There were an assortment of interesting and even sordid characters dwelling there. One of them was an older guy whose name none of us in the store new, but who we called Mr. Schaefer . He earned the name via his purchasing habits. Each and every day he would come in and buy two six packs of Schaefer tall boys (16 oz...

To those of hippie age, it's a cliche. But for me, Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie is an integral part of every Thanksgiving. When I was younger commercial radio was not, well, it wasn't what you might call good for the most part but it wasn't quite as uniformly cookie-cutter across the country as it is today. Each Thanksgiving at noon when I was younger WNEW-FM in NY and then later WXRK when it became "Classic Rock" (whatever that is) would play the piece in its entirety and I would make a point of being near a radio to listen. Of course, I owned my brother's old vinyl copy but back then (Old Fogie statement alert!) you got a sense of community by listening to the radio. Rock radio stations would do things like "concert echo" where they would have someone at whatever big stadium or arena concert in the area was going on and they would call in the setlist of the show and the station would play the songs off the records so you could listen in t...

“This place is giving me nothing” I grumbled to the Mrs. over my third Boreale Rousse . We were in the Cock and Bull, a St. Catherine street pub near the Forum that we frequented regularly in the 90s and less so in the 21st century as we got older and her tolerance for smoke declined along with my tolerance for my fellow drunks. However Quebec has recently joined the rest of the nanny states and provinces in banning indoor smoking in bars (which I’m opposed to in principle but as an asthmatic non-smoker thoroughly enjoy in fact, so call me a hypocrite and then call me a taxi ‘cause I’m in no condition to be driving home from this place, no sir) and we have recently resumed our patronage when visiting the former Ville Marie. The Habs were having another underachieving Saturday night, this time against the Bruins. The bigger crowd was in the shiny new sports bar half a block away while the ol ’ C&B was half full at best with dedicated local celebrants of the fermented beverage. ...

Sometimes… Scratch that. Most of the time I forget how awe-inspiring New York City can be. I don’t mean culturally or intellectually or artistically or anything like that. I mean physically. From certain perspectives the sheer mass of the place reveals itself to you in a way that literally sucks the air from your lungs. Last night I was sitting at the back of the third deck of the ferry in a corner seat. The corner seat is a particularly good vantage point because the windows wrap around from the side to the back of that deck and offer a 270 degree perspective of the harbor. The night outside was cold and sharp and incredibly clear. It had the kind of clarity and visual focus that you only get on a cloudless winter night that makes everything look hyper-real with precisely defined borders, clear angles and perfect definition. I looked at a view that I have seen hundreds of times from ballpark in St. George that faces the city but the view was different somehow. I’m only at th...

Just got the word that a big conference I was supposed to attend in Vegas in March has been cancelled. Just more crappy news on top of no company Christmas party this year and various other cutbacks that have been implemented. Could be worse, I suppose. At least I still have a job. Assuming I think that having this particular job is a good thing which depends on my mood. Maybe the global economic collapse is my fault. I put the jinx on this conference the minute I decided to attend. I'm one of about three or four Americans who have never set foot in the state of Nevada. Gambling's not my thing. Neither is unironic tourist kitsch save for things that have a sentimental attachment to from my childhood like Weeki Wachee . Somewhere in some box that some family member has are a couple of wax mermaids my father and I bought from a machine that poured the liquid wax into a mold and formed the statues before your very eyes. How those machines didn't make it and the squish-a-penny-...

The most famous tribute to the pagan observance of the winter solstice has been erected at its annual sacred spot once again. Yes indeed folks, the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is up. Or so I’m told. I guess I’ll find out the next time I take the bus home since the route goes along 50 th street until Thanksgiving when it is altered due to the masses of humanity that go and gawk at the giant hunk of dying pine festooned with environmentally-friendly low-energy lights. I know what you’re thinking. “He hates the holidays, this is going to be one of those boring holiday-bashing screeds that’s been done a million times.” Not so, my friends. I actually love the holiday season. I did go through a period in my life in my 20’s when I was the prototypical moody Scrooge type like many men that age tend to be. Things change. You learn that you own your holiday happiness and you can enjoy the season by finding the things you enjoy and focusing on them rather than on, say, the swarms of upward...

"So this is where Steinbrenners come to die." I thought. I am in a cab barely air-conditioned in the 85 degree thousand percent humidity torture that passes for November weather on the Gulf coast of Florida. My cabbie vaguely resembles a young Osama Bin Laden and smells of old socks. We roll through palm trees, strip malls, strip malls and strip malls. Eventually we turn off onto a road flanked by single story warehouses, self-storage joints and the odd bowling alley. At the end of a two lane road adjacent to a swamp is a state of the art office campus. This is where TV ratings come from. Time passes, meetings are held, tours are given and eventually the official work part of the day ends. We wind up the night watching the Jets beat the Patriots at the BW3 that shares my hotel's parking lot before having a final nightcap at Applebee's, the only bar in the vicinity open past midnight. Morning comes, a brief work breakfast meeting and off to the airport. It is fortunate...

Well, I'm not even in Florida yet but I couldn't think of a better title for today's drivel. Tomorrow I rise at the ungodly hour of 4:30am to head into the air travel system once again, this time for a quick in-and-out of Tampa on business. I get to spend 8 hours or so in the travel vortex in exchange for roughly 24 hours in Florida. Good times, indeed. Points to you if you can name the song from which I stole the title of this post. These points can be redeemed at the end of your life in exchange for any time you wasted coming up with an answer. The lines in one verse that follow are "I cut class/In school yeah/Now I know I made a mistake." Sums up what led to my career in the exciting world of media pretty nicely, actually. I was on the same bus as the Line Lady again this morning. She was standing on the East side of the bus stop along with Assistant Line Lady. This is significant because as you are well aware the sun rises in the East which meant they were abl...

Take a minute to remember .

Why do restaurant owners think that the dining public wants to eat in the dark? Last night we were at Park Avenue Autumn for, as I mentioned yesterday, the second send-off dinner for a Thailand-bound nephew. I arrived last even though I was 10 minutes early; for whatever reason traffic was non-existent and the drive from central S.I. to 63rd and Park only took 40 minutes so everyone was waiting for me to order. I checked my ever-present black Jansport knapsack, sat down and tried to read the menu. I say "tried" because the menu was printed in 10 point font and the room was exceedingly dark. Granted, I have had cataract surgery on my left eye and still have the damn things in my right but I wasn't the only one in the room picking up one of the candles off the table to read the offerings. It's a good thing I had read the menu online so I had a fair idea of what I wanted anyway but still, ladies and gentlemen of the restaurant world, please, turn up the lights a little b...

We finally decided to release our new cats from their room yesterday and give them full run of the house. They had been sniffing at the door for a few days and seemed eager to get out. So I opened the door and dramatically declared "you're free!" The reaction was fairly predictable. They ran and hid in the room and didn't leave for some time. How many people do we all know that do the exact same thing every day of their lives? Really, how many of us do that ourselves in some facet of our lives? Are you free? Are you really? They have since come out of their room but it seems that they just keep looking for new places to hide. Aren't we all? Where are you hiding these days? This week I'm hiding in restaurants. Last night we went to wd-50 for another excursion into molecular gastronomy mind games. I loved as much as I have previous visits, the Mrs. might've loved it even more and our nephew who is transitioning his life from Charleston, South Carolina to Phu...

I heard from my sister that my late aunt tried to leave her body to science. Science wanted no part of it. Apparently she had used up her physical resources to the point where science had no use for the shell that she departed. My sister said my cousin told her it was the only laugh she got that day. I’m very proud of my aunt and hope they can say the same about me when my time comes. The marathon was last weekend in New York. I’ll never understand the appeal. The brother of a dear friend of mine was a runner. I say “was” because he too has left the planet due to a heart attack at 28 ten years ago. Apparently the marathons weren’t good for an undiscovered (while he was alive anyway) heart defect that he had. One autumn before he passed he ran the NY Marathon. I asked his brother how that went and he said “He told me “I’m spent.”” He got no runner’s high, no revelation, no endorphin-fueled communion with God, no nothing. He was just tired at the end. My friend’s brother was ...

My aunt died yesterday. My aunt was my mother's sister. She was the last living link in my family to my parents' generation. Barack Obama was elected President of the United States yesterday. Barack Obama is black. In 1963 my mother packed lunches for the people from her neighborhood who were going to the March on Washington. My mother was active in the civil rights movement in those days, so much so a family legend is that she and my father received letters with names of "undesirables who should be avoided" one time and my mom was on it. They got the letter because my dad was in the military. So both mom and dad served their country, assuming you think helping reduce racial inequality was a service to this country. I do. If you don't, I don't care. My aunt is gone now. I'm not sure what she thought of my mom's politics at that time. It's a conversation I never had. I didn't have many conversations with my aunt as a grown up, assuming one can c...

Please consider this . Phillies fans should pay close attention to the second spot in particular.

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I am riding shotgun in a rented Prius creeping down Santa Monica Boulevard immersed in afternoon traffic. The driver of our car is becoming increasingly agitated for reasons unknown to me. The traffic is moving, albeit slowly and I thought he had used the bathroom before we left the office. Suddenly, it all became clear. "I FEEL LIKE A GODDMAN CHICK DRIVING THIS CAR!!!!" he exploded. "What?" "I SHOULDN'T BE DRIVING A DAMN PRIUS !!!" "Why not?" "Back home I drive a 68 Chevelle with double overhead cam neelys and 4400 cc woofermatic transmission bicarbonate totally aired out wheels and do my own grease jobs!" At least that's what it sounded like to me. I'm sure he said something different and probably comprehensible to someone with a knowledge of cars. Me, I have no idea at all about cars as fetish objects. To me they're machines that make my life easier (or should). People who get worked up about machines are myster...