Places I've Been: Long Time Gone Blowout Edition

I've been on a little hiatus from this blog, as you've probably noticed. It started when my former Spain roommate and traveling partner Erin came to visit me a few weeks back, and it just spiraled from there. (Haven't made it to the gym much either lately. Oink.) But in the meantime, I've been to lots of amazing restaurants and bars that you should consider popping into if you're ever in town:

RESTAURANTS
Serendipity 3, on 60th Street between 2nd and 3rd avenues (Upper East Side), is the restaurant from the movie "Serendipity." The place is filled with Tiffany lamps and there's an extremely random gift shop. Their specialty, pictured above, is frozen hot chocolate. Don't ask. Just drink.

UN Delegates' Dining Room, at the UN headquarters, 46th Street and 1st (Midtown East), is a good place to go if you're a tourist but don't want to feel touristy. Serves food from around the world, and the dessert table alone is worth the $20 buffet price tag. A good view of the river, plus you can eavesdrop on important people having important conversations. Reservations and dressing up are required. Get there at least half an hour early because you have to go through security.

Meson Sevilla, on 46th between 8th and 9th (Hell's Kitchen), is a tapas bar that has most of the good stuff I remember from Spain (mainly, tortilla and croquetas). But more importantly, there's cafe con leche — the champagne of coffees — and, naturally, sangria.

Veselka, at 9th Street and 2nd Avenue (East Village), is open all night. The service is terrible, but it's cheapish for manhattan. And there are pierogies. Like ten different kinds of them.

L'Express, at Park Avenue and 20th Street, is a French restaurant that's open all night. Menu has one page of food, three pages of beer and wine. I wasn't terribly impressed with the food (I had calamari), but hey, it's open all night. Also, probably the only French restaurant where you can hear "Ice, Ice Baby."

BARS
Ulysses, on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, is what CitySearch calls a gold-diggers' goldmine, and they are not making it up. If you want to meet yourself a hedge-fund sugar daddy, this is the place to be. And it's open until 4 a.m. every night, so take your time and be picky.

I'm not quite as impressed with Beauty Bar (14th St between 2nd and 3rd, East Village) now that I know it's a chain. But it's a cute little place, with old hair-dryer chairs and a dance floor. Go there to get a martini and a manicure for $10. Hospital-grade sterilization it's not, but I didn't get eaten alive by fungi and the polish lasted me a good week.

SUSHI
As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a certain subset of New Yorkers who love their sushi. And since that same subset tends to settle in Hoboken, there are more sushi places here than you can possibly imagine. On Hudson Street is Sushi Lounge, as well as a place directly across the street. Pretty self-explanatory: eat sushi, listen to lounge music. But if you want better sushi, head a few blocks down to Sushi House, at 1st and Bloomfield (There's one around 14th and Washington too, but I've never been there).

Random cultural note

In New York, knowing about that little (insert ethnicity here) bakery/restaurant that's been in the same family for 114 years is a skill with equal social value to having actual cooking/baking skills. Or possibly greater value, if said establishment has a unique specialty item that's obscure and yummy and ethnic.

Things I didn't know when I lived in Harlem

Governor Paterson has an apartment about 3 blocks from where I used to live. Sen. Chuck Rangel does too. Actually, he has four of them. In the same building. All rent stabilized. One gets used as an office, which you're not supposed to do in a rent-stabilized apartment. Interesting.

memorial memories

Happy belated memorial day everyone! I hope you all took a moment to honor the sacrifices of our brave men and women in uniform, and another second to honor those of our high school band geeks in wool uniforms, providing you with painstakingly memorized and endlessly practiced patriotic entertainment while sweating profusely and praying that the good Lord will have mercy on them by allowing them to lose consciousness. Those were the days!

My big Memorial Day adventure was that they stopped the train before I went to work because there was an accident so I had to take the bus (AGGRAVATING) to another train and was 20 minutes late for work. The joy (if you can call it that) of living in New York though is that it happens to everyone occasionally so the boss was pretty chill about it.

Memorial Day weekend also means that, give or take a few days, it was a year ago that the other interns and I got dumped off at Penn Station. Ah, DJNF boot camp. If you want some idea of what boot camp was like, they have a blog this year. I think I spent most of my first weekend in New York sleeping. It was pretty amazing. Speaking of which, I think it's time for me to go to bed.

Edit, 2:44 a.m.: I just heard the garbage man outside the building. As he was throwing the bags onto the truck he yelled, "Best smell in the world! WOO!"

OK, I'm really going to bed now.

When life gives you lemons, paint that shit gold

Here's a fun time-waster, as a promo for atmosphere's new album, which I recommend.

On an unrelated note, I would just like to say that I hate Times Square with a burning passion. Well, not so much Times Square, but the tourists. Not so much the tourists in and of themselves, but cram a hundred thousand of them together within a few blocks and they all adopt this hive mentality that sucks out all of their common sense. You know, that part of your brain that tells you not to stand in the middle of the sidewalk when you choose to stand and gawk at something or not to stop and take pictures IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BLOODY ROAD. And the part that acknowledges the guys who try to sell you comedy tickets, therefore encouraging them.

Get Lite

The kids at Harlem Live are all about this. or at least about trying to do it.

Get Some.

My city has its own brand of condoms. Does yours?


I'm too lazy to look but I'm sure the condoms were a Mayor Bloomberg idea (doesn't seem like something Giuliani would have been into). He's all about public health initiatives (farmers market stands in poor neighborhoods like mine, calorie counts on fast-food menus, $7 cigarettes ...) I don't follow city politics enough to make an informed judgement, but how did Mike Bloomberg ever convince people he was a Republican? To me he seems almost european-style socialist. Mind you, he still gives TONS of money to the GOP, so go figure. Maybe it's just that he's so obscenely rich that he can do whatever he wants.

From what I understand, he does do a fair bit of pleading and cajoling and bullying to get what he wants, and the NYC government is not exactly a squeaky-clean organization so I'd take them all with a grain of salt. But I'll give Bloomberg the benefit of the doubt, because, at least as far as I know, he's not cashing out big time on everyone else's economic suffering.

Ladies and gentlemen ...

This is an important message from the New York City Police Department. We are aware that our trains smell like all kinds of nasty things, but PLEASE REFRAIN FROM SPRAYING YOUR CHEAP-ASS COLOGNE ON THE TRAIN. In the event that you choose to spray your nasty cologne and other passengers bludgeon you to death with canes, purses and stiletto heels, the MTA will not be held responsible. Thank you for riding New York City Transit, and have a safe day.

Hooty hoo!

It's spring in the 'hood ... which means that about half of the locals are no longer in winter coats and hats. I myself walked to the gym in capri pants and a sweatshirt, because I just can't pretend it's cold out anymore.

Also, I need some new music. What are you all listening to?

Midtown Beyond the Clusterfuck

Today I accidentally went to work early. So I walked around midtown and took some random pictures.

Also, I have now caught two different instances, on different desks, in which I have had to call editors after seeing stories ready for print that mistakenly called the National Republican Congressional Committee the RNCC (Not to be confused with the RNC. I swear those republican bastards did that to confuse people). So I'm using my dirty past in service to the big bad liberal media.

Also also, I miss trees.

Overheard

I was on the subway today when a boy and a girl, about 6 or 7, sat down next to me. Their conversation went something like this:


boy: Do you like to look out the window on the train?

girl: yeah.

boy: Did you have sex with 100 men?

girl: What?

boy: Did you have sex with infinity men?

girl: Six?

boy: sex! Like when you're married.

girl: no.

boy: oh. I saw a rat on the train track. ...

Also, if I were on the Green Bay City Council I'd propose a resolution to ban the conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham from the city.

Oh, and I am very glad that we here in New York are finally starting to shut up about eliot spitzer, but this man has a point.

Yet another disaster of the week

Yesterday, a crane collapsed in East Midtown, killing at least 4 people and leveling a bar. This happened right before the Saturday budget meeting at work, so we had a little talk about how one of the effects of working in the news industry is that you're constantly aware of all the crazy things that are happening in the world. And they happen in Manhattan quite often.

There seem to be random disasters almost every other week in this city ... if you count the Eliot Spitzer debacle, we've been on quite a roll lately.

Last year when a steam pipe exploded near Grand Central, someone at work commented how people were abuzz, almost faintly excited, that something big was happening. I think that part of the mystique of post-9/11 New York City is that there is that chance at any given time that you could, just possibly, get blown up, or, more likely, find yourself stranded with millions of other people in a large-scale public services disaster. But it's not in a fearful, orange-alert kind of way, but more of a realization that even if you're careful, these things happen, and you deal with them ... and at least it gives everyone something to talk about.

Update: Spitz Quits!

I'm glad Eliot Spitzer decided to be a grown-up, admit his mistake and get out of office so as not to totally disrupt the state government when he most likely goes to trial for transporting a prostitute across state lines and/or money laundering.

I think a decent number of Democrats will forgive him in the end, after they get over their disappointment. Even if he gets convicted and disbarred, he'll end up writing a book or getting some plush consulting or lobbying job down the line. Also, his lieutenant governor David Paterson is pretty well-respected on all sides, not to mention that he'll become New York's first black governor and the first legally blind governor anywhere. Ultimately, it will all be OK. Except, probably, for Mrs. Spitzer.

That being said, I would enjoy nothing more than to see Bush get busted in a sting on a prostitution ring, preferably a sting that involved wiretapping (oh the irony). Sure, he may be able to reinvent executive privilege, openly support torture and oppose health care for poor children, tell the American people 935 flat-out lies on the subject of the Iraq war alone (none of them under oath, sadly), but you'd best believe that if he got busted Spitzer-style, his ass would be impeached faster than you could say "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

"Mr. Clean" gets dirty — and pays $5,500 an hour for it

Gov. Eliot "Ness" Spitzer, who after fighting corruption on Wall Street as an AG graduated to the cesspool that is Albany with a promise to clean it up, was forced to publicly apologize today after a months-long IRS investigation revealed that he had been visiting prostitutes.

You can bet that the investment-broker types downtown are drinking themselves silly right now in celebration. You can read an entire tome of Times metro section coverage (or check out any other major paper, political blog, 24-hour news network or highly vocal street person, for that matter). You can read the Times editorial in which you can almost feel the palpable anger. You can think that while, yes, he broke the law and betrayed his wife and flouted his anti-corruption ideals, maybe people are making a little too big a deal about the whole situation (I'm leaning toward this option.)

But really, all you need to do is watch the video of Silda Spitzer, standing next to her cheating husband as he goes down in a flaming ball of hypocrisy.

EDIT: I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this. The mere time that it takes to say "five thousand, five hundred dollar-an-hour prostitute" would cost you about $20 with such a practitioner. And if Eliot Spitzer really wanted to cheat on his wife, I'm sure he could have found someone who would have happily complied, without risking a decade's worth of his public reputation. So I take it back. Legal and ethical considerations aside, Eliot Spitzer is too big of an idiot to be running a state. Kick the bum out.

And Dick Cheney Said, "Let There Be Light!"

Happy (belated) Daylight Savings Time everyone!

Do take a few seconds to contemplate:
a. the fact that our dark overlord has the power to rearrange the clock for two weeks out of the year (OK, so Congress has to agree to it. But back when this was passed that was rarely if ever a problem).

b. that this is the only context in which you will ever see the words "Dick Cheney" and "sunlight" occur in the same sentence.

Not that I'm complaining. Not at all. I'm all about sunlight, especially when there's more of it at a time of day when I'm awake to appreciate it.

I probably would have forgotten to set my clocks ahead if it had not been for a homeless woman on the train. After she finished telling us how if we didn't give her money her daughter would have to go hungry that night, she reminded us all to reset our clocks or we would be late for church.

I gave her a dollar.

bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb bob-omb

Yesterday, after I heard that a tiny bomb had exploded the night before at the Army recruitment center in the middle of Times Square, I left for work 15 minutes early to go gawk at the scene. By the time I got there, 13 hours after the fact, there was really nothing to see except some Army men in uniform and a few reporters having what appeared to be an impromptu press conference.

This morning the New York Post made a complete ass of itself by conflating some nutjob's completely unrelated letters saying "We did it" with a confession to the bombings. Oops.

Our Possible Future President is Sexier than Your Possible Future President

You are not a proper New Yorker if you cannot say "stand clear of the closing doors" in less than five syllables. Listen for it if you ever happen to be in the city on one of the trains where the stops are announced by a human being instead of a machine. I have no idea how they do it.

Today I bought a corner bookcase from a Housing Works thrift store. Which would have been a pretty decent deal if I didn't have to drop $45 on getting it delivered. But housing works helps homeless people with AIDS, so at least it was for a good cause. And there's no assembly required.

After I left the aforementioned Upper West Side thrift store, I went to a cupcake bakery down the street. Awhile back, cupcakes became trendy, which I think is the fault of the Times style section. They even have a cupcake bakery in Eau Claire. The concept makes sense though when you think about it. Cupcakes are a lot like donuts, only cuter and more festive. Plus, they are kind of a pain in the ass to make compared to, say, cookies or cake or dessert bars, so why not get them from the bakery?

I also decided that I'm going to help out with Harlem Live, which is an online newspaper run by high schoolers. They had an ad up for people to help edit their stories and maybe come in and mentor kids. So I'm going in on Friday to talk to them more about that.

But to change the subject completely, Barack Obama recently was interviewed for Us Weekly:

US:
So, boxers or briefs? Bill Clinton said he wore boxers in a 1992 interview with MTV.

OBAMA:
I don't answer those humiliating questions. But whichever one it is, I look good in 'em!

Snow: More bad-ass than New York City

Slug (of the hip-hop group Atmosphere) did an interview with Spin, I think it was, a few years back about what he liked about living in Minneapolis. One of the things he mentioned was that thugs don't like the cold. I think the East Coast thuggery would probably agree (well, unless there are gangstas in Maine ...) We had about an inch and a half of snow accumulate today, and it was amazing how much everything slowed down. Everyone was driving so slowly and carefully, and there was noticeably less honking. In Wisconsin, people would still be speeding on the highway. Or, to paraphrase Aunt Sarah, [New Yorkers] JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND!

I was reading a story today about some families of 9/11 victims who are suing to get the (pulverized) remains out of a landfill. Do you know what this landfill is called? FRESH KILLS. I kid you not. If I were the judge in the case, my utterly unqualified non-legally-based opinion would be that it's impractical to sift (again) through all that garbage, I'd at least see what I could do about getting the landfill renamed.

Also, here's some YouTube goodness for the day.

Ugh.

If you are ever at a New York deli, never, ever eat anything containing breaded chicken or (especially) slices thereof. Because I promise you it is not chicken. More like greasy chicken-flavored rubber that will fill you with loathing upon consumption. I have had this experience in at least 3 or 4 delis that were otherwise at least tolerable.

Moving on ... I love how Wisconsin is, yet again, a battleground state. It trips the hell out of me to see Appleton and Oshkosh and Madison datelined in the New York Times, and even more so, to see my alma mater get a mention. (On that note, this fine publication is also doggedly following the campaign season in Blugold country).

I know that the primary system is designed for the maximium benefit of special-interest groups, and it does drag on for an excruciatingly long period of time. But it does have the side effect of forcing politicians to go to electoral pip-squeak states like Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and at least pretend to listen to their concerns. And since there was no coronation after Super Tuesday, the pandering continues. As Lauren Fox of Shorewood, Wis., puts it, "having zoomed from ignored to adored in one day, we might as well put on tons of sparkly eye shadow and enjoy ourselves, because no one will remember our name in the morning."

Of course, being that it's Wisconsin they'll be back to pander some more before the general election. I already miss living in a purple state, at least for now. But I've always had a love-hate attitude toward politics. It's the ultimate reality show, in that it has pretty much the same ratio of reality to utter ridiculousness as most reality shows. But follow it too closely and you'll start to lose brain cells and possibly your lunch.

But to end on a positive note, I the best story I edited today (well, besides the Wisconsin one, which was from the same series) was about the caucuses in small-town Maine. I think Jennifer Finney Boylan has a brilliant take on the Democratic race:

Toward the end of the event, though, someone asked, So what was it like, to grow up as the daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton?

Well, she said, one day, when she was 6 and living in the governor’s mansion in Arkansas, Chelsea decided she’d like to have a coconut. So the Clintons went out and got one. When they got it home, though, the first family faced the traditional problem when it comes to coconuts: how do you open one up?

Chelsea allowed as how her father and she had gone outside, and thrown the coconut again and again onto the hard asphalt of the governor’s mansion’s driveway, hoping to make a dent. But the coconut, alas, refused to yield.

Finally, Hillary came outside with a hammer.

The point being, Chelsea said, that her mother knows how to solve problems.

In the 2004 election, voters repeatedly said that they’d rather have a beer with George W. Bush than with John Kerry. This election, it seems as if the question for Democrats is this: Whom would you call if you really, really needed to open a coconut? Hillary Clinton, with the Hammer of Experience? Or Barack Obama, with the Machetes of Bipartisanship and Change?

I've got sunshine ... on the No. 2 train ...

Yesterday I was on the train to work when this (black) guy came in with a guitar and a small amp.

"This song is for the white lady standing in front of me," he said.

I, of course, was the only white lady on the train.

"She looks like Britney Spears!" he said.

I told him I wasn't sure if he meant that as a compliment or an insult. He said to take is as a compliment. He then started singing "My Girl" to me.

"My girl ... my girl ... my girl ... the white lady is ... my girl ..."

Then he sang "La Bamba" to a Mexican woman* on the train and serenaded a black woman with dreadlocks with a Bob Marley song.

Gotta love subway performers.

On an unrelated note, I started a 2-week trial at a gym yesterday. There is a poster on the door that says:

Some states are red,
Some states are blue,
Mike Huckabee lost 100 lbs.
So can you.



*SIDENOTE: Never assume that someone is a Mexican, as they could be from Puerto Rico or South America or wherever. But he must have been right, because the woman didn't seem to mind.