Recap

I have a long and loserly tradition of spending a morning each year, just before New Years, thinking through the past year, and formulating goals and plans for the next.

This year, looking back, it’s pretty clear 2007 has been a decidedly mixed bag.

On the excellent news side, there’s getting engaged (I love you Jess!) and opening and building a thriving CrossFit NYC gym (I don’t love you, CFNYC members, but I at least strongly like you!).

And, on the less excellent news side, there’s Cyan, where – due to both unexpected outside forces (including, primarily, someone contracting Mad Cow Disease [yes, seriously]) and inside ones (including, primarily, me being an idiot) – we basically treaded water for the entire year.

Still, in this very last week of 2007, Cyan seems to be surging ahead – we’ve had three big pieces of positive news in the past three and a half days – so I’m hopeful that I can hit the ground in 2008 running, once again, at full speed on all cylinders.

Looks like it should be a busy year.

|  

Dropping the Ball

For the past five years, I’ve lived in Hell’s Kitchen – a fast-gentrifying neighborhood to the west of Times Square. And I really like Hell’s Kitchen. Especially as Ninth Ave., between 42nd and 57th, is full of an ever-increasing array of interesting little restaurants and bars.

Jess, however, hates Hell’s Kitchen. She thinks it’s dirty, overrun by tourists, and perhaps not even really a neighborhood (a contention backed earlier this week by my cousin Barbara, an editor at the NY Times).

This time of year, from Thanksgiving through New Years, a part of me can’t help but agree with her.

My previous commute, to an office in East Midtown, took me daily through Rockefeller Center. Except during the holiday stretch, when I’d walk five blocks out of my way, just to avoid the tree-gawking crowds.

Now my commute takes me just a couple of blocks through Time Square, to the 49th St N/R/W subway stop, en route to Cyan’s newer Union Square digs. Yet most evenings this month, emerging from the subway, I’ve barely been able to elbow my way back home, past tourists so overwhelmed by the display of neon lights they apparently lose their ability to walk or step the hell out of the way.

And it only gets worse. On New Year’s Eve Day, the police barricade off our corner, as people begin streaming in by 9:00 in the morning to secure themselves ball-watching spots. Getting in and out requires ID, or (as in past years, before I relinquished my Californian license) toted phone and electric bills.

Which is one reason why, ideally, Jess and I may not be heading out at all. Despite a handful of celebratory possibilities, I’m not sure any of them compete with mini egg rolls, pigs-in-blankets, crap champagne, and a chance to stay quietly in our apartment, pretending we don’t, at the stroke of midnight, live a few blocks up from the temporary epicenter of the entire world.

|  

Setting it Straight

I was waiting in line to buy lunch today, when the movie Old School came on TV, just in time for me to catch this scene:

Frank: I told my wife I wouldn’t drink tonight. Besides, I got a big day tomorrow. You guys have a great time.

College Student: A big day? Doing what?

Frank: Well, um, actually a pretty nice little Saturday, we’re going to go to Home Depot. Yeah, buy some wallpaper, maybe get some flooring, stuff like that. Maybe Bed, Bath, & Beyond, I don’t know, I don’t know if we’ll have enough time.

Which, I think, is a totally unfair portrayal of real relationships. Because in my case, it was actually Sunday rather than Saturday, and The Container Store and West Elm rather than Home Depot and BB&B.

|   

Release the Animals

If you live in New York and have kids, or know someone who does, consider catching the Greenwich Village Orchestra’s annual family concert tomorrow afternoon.

I got roped into subbing the principal trumpet part, and by the looks of this morning’s dress rehearsal, the concert should be a lot of fun: built around Saint-Saen’s “Carnival of the Animals”, replete with narration, costumed dancers playing the animals, and a post-concert ‘instrument petting zoo’.

Takes place tomorrow (Sunday, December 16), 3:00pm at Washington Irving Auditorium (Irving Plaace between 16th & 17th).

[As a bonus for attending, you can also marvel at my terrible, terrible attempt at playing a horse whinny sound on the trumpet at the end of the ‘Sleigh Ride’ finale. Giddyup!]

|  

Tickets Please

An inside tip for any New Yorkers whose taste for cultural events exceeds their budget for cultural events: join play-by-play.com.

The idea is simple: theatre producers don’t like empty seats at their shows, as it makes people wonder whether they made the right choice in shelling out big bucks for tickets. So producers turn to services like Play-by-Play to fill unsold seats.

Conversely, theatre-goers can join Play-by-Play for $100 a year, then pay $3 a pop for any of those seat-filling tickets.

The obvious question is: what kind of crappy production has to resort to free seat-fillers?

And the answer is: surprisingly many.

Yesterday, Jess and I scored tickets to Things We Want (directed by Ethan Hawke, and starring Paul Dano and Peter Dinklage), which we’d long wanted to see. As those two tickets would have run us north of $150 on Ticketmaster, the annual cost of Play-by-Play membership paid itself off in a single evening.

This Saturday, similarly, we’re off to see Molissa Fenley and Dancers premiere Dreaming Awake and Calculus and Politics at the Joyce; another $80 saved.

What else can you find? Some Broadway, more Off-Broadway, and even more Off-Off. Plus dance, music, comedy, staged readings, and the like. For $100 a year, it’s a hard deal to pass up.

|  

Taxi Stories II

He picked the guy up in front of Veselka, on the Lower East Side. Fat, bald, just past middle age. Clearly Eastern European, and completely drunk.

Hey, guy, where are you going?

No answer.

Guy?

Snoring from the back seat.

He pulled over the cab, came around back to wake the man up.

Hey buddy, where are you going?

“Take me New York!”

You’re already there.

“TAKE ME NEW YORK!!”

This is New York.

Confused: “What? How I get here?”

|  

Taxi Stories

[I talk to taxi drivers. I know most New Yorkers don’t. But I’m curious to hear their stories, their thoughts on our city. Hence this new intermittent reporting series, relaying at least a bit of what I find out.]

The lady got in the back seat, thoroughly sloshed. It was shortly after 4:00 in the morning. They were at the southwest corner of fifty-fourth and eighth.

“Take me to fifty-fourth and eighth,” she slurred.

They went back and forth a few rounds – he explaining they were already there, she (increasingly vehemently) telling him to shut up and do his job.

So he drove across fifty-fourth, turned down Broadway, back onto fifty-third, then up eighth. A perfect one block circle.

Which corner?

“The near right, please,” she replied. Exactly where he’d found her.

She opened the door with some difficulty, leaned back to slip a twenty through the divider.

“Thanks,” she said. “And keep the change.”

|  

Screen Player

Given my job, it’s a bit embarrassing to admit that I rarely watch movies. And I don’t mean rarely watch them in theaters – a common condition; I mean rarely watch them at all.

There was a time, early in the life of Cyan, that I was cranking my way through a good five or six a week – my own little Good Will Hunting hundred bucks of Netflix membership rather than hundred thousand of NYU tuition film school. By now, if I see one movie a week, I’m doing well.

Terrible, I know. And much as I wish I could blame this on Jess, she watches many more movies (and reads more books and magazines, is generally just far better informed on both popular and high culture) than I.

I have no good excuse. Sure, long work hours, helping run a gym, work and play social obligations, etc., all make it tough to block out two solid hours of time at a stretch. But lots of movie buffs have waaaaay crazier lives, yet seem to make it work.

So I’m particularly glad that, in the last four days, I’ve seen two movies. Even better, I’ve seen two movies in theaters. Granted, one (The Golden Compass) was a disappointing atrocity, and the other (The Great Debaters) might have made even Lifetime viewers roll their eyes. But still, I watched them! The whole way through! Both of them! Mere days apart!

Even better, for the first time in months, there are scores more movies out I really do want to see: Juno, The Savages, No Country for Old Men, just to name a few. So I’m trying to build this new momentum, to get back in front of a big (or at least small) screen ASAP. If nothing else, as one of the few people who can write off movie tickets as a business expense, I figure I should do my best to abuse that privilege.

|