Rich Mintz

Two memorable WordPress spam comments (click to expand). I find the first one particularly curious (which of the five topics in the posting, I wonder, is Jesus alleged to be exercised about?).

This kind of thing aside, and you bet I laughed (not to mention this kind of thing), there is a lot to love about New York.

There’s the daily drudgery, and the filth, and the rats, and the anomie. And then there are moments when the sublime pokes its head above the mundane and shakes its hairdo at you. Last night, around midnight, I was walking east on Warren Street (or was it Murray?), and I came up on Broadway, and raised my eyes and saw this:

That’s the statue of “Civic Fame” atop the Municipal Building, rising above a nest of treetops in City Hall Park. The photo doesn’t do it justice.

That’s not all. Here’s the Woolworth Building taken from almost the same spot:

And here’s the fountain in City Hall Park, about 50 paces away:

And here’s the fountain and the Municipal Building together:

That’s all. But I get to walk past this stuff every day. Isn’t it kind of awesome?

Last night’s dinner (and this night’s too): an asparagus risotto that’s SO EASY that even you can make it.  Lots of people have a terror of risotto, but it is very difficult to screw up, and beginning to end, it takes only about 40 minutes.  Adapted from Mark Bittman.

What to do:

• Wash about half a bunch of asparagus, break off the woody ends, chop into roughly 3/4-inch pieces, and nuke them in the microwave in a covered bowl for about 2 minutes.
• Take an ordinary saucepan, pour in a quart (32 ounces) of stock (I used a Tetra-Pak of chicken stock), and turn the heat on low.  You want it to be hot, but not boiling.
• Chop a medium onion — minced if you’re a good chopper, or just rough small pieces, it doesn’t really matter.
• Put a second (heavy, if you have it) saucepan on the stove.  Melt about 2 tablespoons of butter over medium heat, and when it’s sizzling, drop in the onion.  Cook for a few minutes until the onion has started to get soft (but not brown).
• Measure about 1 1/2 cups of Arborio rice, pour it into the buttery onion, and stir it around.
• Add some salt and pepper.
• Pour about 1/2 cup of white wine (whatever you have handy) into the rice-onion mixture, and stir it over medium heat for a few minutes until most of the liquid bubbles away.
• Add about half a cup of stock to the rice mixture.  (I just dip a mug into one pot and pour it into the other.)  Keep the heat medium-high on the rice mixture and stir/scrape intermittently with a wide spatula, to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom or sides.
• As the stock bubbles away from the rice mixture, add another half-cup of stock and stir.  As it cooks, the mixture should be neither soupy nor dried out.
• Keep repeating this.  It will take between 20 and 30 minutes for all the stock to be absorbed into the rice.  Stop adding stock when the rice tastes cooked but still a little chewy.  You may have a little stock left over, which you can feed to the cat.
• In between dealing with the rice, grate about 1/2 cup of good Parmesan and set it aside.
• When the rice is done, fold in the grated Parmesan and adjust the seasonings.  Then fold in the asparagus you cooked in the microwave.  Then serve with a crusty bread.

Today was Yellow Pages Day in Manhattan — that public holiday of long standing in which elves scurry about throughout the night and into the wee hours of the morning, depositing identical yellow books, shrinkwrapped in groups of six, on doorsteps throughout the land.

I passed several of these parcels, unwanted and unloved, on my walk from the subway to work this morning. I even momentarily fingered a copy of the 2010-2011 Yellow Book, thinking “I should take this home, maybe I’ll need it.” Then I stopped myself. For what? What could possibly be in that book that I can’t find more quickly, search for more effectively, evaluate more usefully online? I set it down, walked into the office… and found a copy of the 2010-2011 Yellow Book already sitting in the office recycling bin.

Like the landline that it once existed to serve, the Yellow Pages is on its way out. Even nine years ago (!), when I was trying to promote my fledgling bookstore, the ad salespeople were already desperate. (I didn’t bite. What they were charging was ridiculous, and even in 2002 the Yellow Pages already felt “over.”) Now they must be apoplectic from the stench of their own imminent obsolescence. This is a business that still exists only because certain parties (ad salespeople, printing companies, certain types of traditional businesses and conservative businesspeople) are locked in a cycle of mutual addiction and denial, reinforced by a dollop of voodoo and magical thinking. Of all the types of advertising your small business could possibly pay for in the current environment, the Yellow Pages must be one of the least trackable, and it’s certainly one of the least nimble.

Which is why you saw things like this on the street today in Manhattan:

The first three photos above were taken about 7pm, roughly 15 hours after the elves made the last of their deliveries. That last photo was taken at midnight (approaching 24 hours after dropoff) in the lobby of an apartment building. I repeat: in almost 24 hours, nobody in this 10-unit apartment building took a copy. To the constituency allegedly intended to consume it (whose consumption of it is the product being sold to advertisers), this product is literally worth nothing. Why is this thing still being produced again?

…or, obviously, not exactly like this person, but with the same desire to nail a precise stylistic look and the same determination to carry it off. And I don’t think she was on her way to, like, her waitress job at Medieval Times, she appeared to be just going to class like a normal person, only dressed like that. And she was perfect. My raggedy-ass surreptitious iPhone pic doesn’t do justice to her painstakingly conceived outfit and her numerous accessories, including a coordinating two-fingered ring on her left hand. (Not pictured: her coordinating bejeweled sandals.)

There are only a couple cities in America in which you can get away with a look like this and not seem absolutely ridiculous (or worse), and New York is the only one where you can do it at any time of the day, any time of year. She was too put-together to get away with it in San Francisco (although, to be fair, nobody in San Francisco would say so to her face), and in L.A. she’d just look ridiculous unless she was on her way to an audition. But in the New York subway, at 9:15 in the morning, she looked terrific!

…namely, that “if your aim is to attract people, food and drink are the main attractions,” in the words of Philip Myrick of the Project for Public Spaces.

The occasion is this story about cafe life in Portland — you can read it. Myrick’s point is that if you want people to organically gather on the streets of your neighborhood, you need food and drink, suitable for all ages and stages in the community, sold and served in a way that lets people consume them in an organic fashion outdoors or visible from the street.

All true. But argh!

I don’t disagree with any of this, it’s all true, and I mean no disrespect to the exceptionally committed people at PPS — my reaction is more a sense of frustration and missed opportunity that this isn’t intuitively obvious, that it has to be said, and re-said, and re-re-said every decade or so, to every generation. If you, dear reader, are just figuring this out now, what have you been doing to your own downtown for the past 25 years? And how many young people have you driven away, how many working-age people have you effectively locked in their office buildings all day for how many days/weeks/years, how many old people have you consigned to spend their waning days sitting in their apartments (or, worse, sitting on a bench in the mall) because there’s nowhere worth going to?

Let’s get with it, America!

Anyone older than about 60 who grew up in a healthy community probably already knows that food is at the center of everything social. Nevermind community events like church socials and picnics — every town over a thousand people had a drugstore, with big plate-glass windows and a soda fountain or lunch counter, once upon a time, where you could see people going about the private business of eating in a semi-public way. And even younger people know it, if we’ve lived part of our lives in a healthy big city. I was living in the newly minted municipality of West Hollywood when the first round of modern artisanal coffehouses appeared in the early 1990s; the moment cafes started to appear, whole new populations began to use the street. Nothing has driven the sidewalk re-revitalization of Santa Monica Boulevard over the past decade more than streetfront dining.

Closer to home, think of New York: the most transformational change to the streetscape in the five years I’ve been here has been the simple addition of lots of chairs and tables all over the place, including in what used to be traffic lanes in the middle of Times Square. People want to sit down and, very often, eat and drink, in public. What are the healthiest public spaces in Lower Manhattan? One of them is Stone Street, which today is given over almost entirely to street dining. (Photo above: the pop-up cafe thrown up by the DOT on nearby Pearl Street last month.)

Or look at the opposite case. I was on a message-board thread this week about Fulton Mall, the tattered retail strip in downtown Brooklyn that (due to the volume of people passing through, and the lack of local alternatives) commands among the highest retail rents in New York City, despite the fact that nobody can stand it. Sure, Fulton Mall is filthy and disorderly and way too crowded, but if you’ve ever been to, say, the Venice boardwalk in Los Angeles, you know that filth and disorder and crowds are not sufficient to make a place unlovable. There’s something else. And something landscape designer Gil Lopez said on the list reminded me that one of the reasons everyone hates Fulton Mall is also one of the most obvious: there’s nothing to eat except junk, and there’s nowhere to sit down and eat it!

I have the Rockford Files (as often happens) on in the background tonight, and at the beginning of this episode, Angel (Jim’s troublesome ex-cellmate, played by perennial character actor Stuart Margolin) is walking into the fleabag SRO where he lives, and over the mailboxes is a sign with the quote “Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.” I had to look it up; it’s from Daniel Webster, the last person I expected to see associated with a cheesy ’70s TV series. But the quote is actually not a terrible thing to see up on the wall of an apartment building full of hopeless people trying to turn their lives around in a bad neighborhood, at least viewed through a generous paternalistic lens. And certainly in context it’s humanizing. Some propmaster or Minister of Scenery or whatever, back in 1977, decided to put that up (or leave it up); nice touch.

I’m watching a “Rockford Files” episode in which Nazis are about to figure (so it seems) in the plot, and something occurs to me: in 1977 when this episode was made, the Nazi era was precisely as recent as the Jimmy Carter/Ronald Reagan era is now.

To me, Nazis are part of “history,” but I remember Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan perfectly well, not as history but as lived experience from my childhood. In fact, in 1980, I was practically old enough to vote for (er, against) Ronald Reagan, so it doesn’t feel so long ago. But Jim Rockford (and, for that matter, James Garner) in 1977 would remember Nazis not just as childhood experience, but from their (earlier) adulthood.

As a child, I often wondered why so much of our popular culture (TV, movies, etc.) was “about” World War II, and Nazis in particular. Some sliver of this presumably had to do with the fact that the crimes of the Nazis were so extreme, and some part of it presumably had to do with the overrepresentation of Jews in Hollywood. But I realize now that most of it was simply due to the fact that World War II was a big disruptive thing that had recently happened to all the grownups in the world. Even my parents, young as they were, were old enough to have been affected by it — my father was even stationed at Great Lakes Naval Station in Waukegan, Illinois for a time, although the war ended before there was time to deploy him.

Similarly, I wonder whether the young political people I work with are curious about why Ronald Reagan looms so large in the popular consciousness. Part of it is no doubt due to the fact that he was larger than life even in life, and part of it due to his charisma, and part of it due to his ideas; but part of it is simply due to the fact that Ronald Reagan was a big disruptive thing that happened to all of the grownups in the world. Everyone my age and older — that is, basically, everyone old enough to have kids in middle school now, or older — has personal memories of that era.

And if you really want to blow your mind, consider this: when my grandmother was born (and she is still alive and well), the Civil War was as recent an occurrence as the Vietnam War is now, give or take a year or two. And I remember the Vietnam War, or at least the end of it; and I’m not that old. So my grandmother must have interacted with people in her childhood for whom the Civil War was part of their adult lived experience. And the oldest of those people, in their childhoods, would almost certainly have interacted with people who remembered the Revolutionary War from their adult experience. That’s a pretty remarkable formulation of the short duration of American history to date.

My video game of choice for the summer, as you know, has been Civilization IV. But with Civilization V due in less than a month, I’m giving it a rest, and resurrecting two other favorite diversions for the waning days of summer: Scrabble, and Sim City 4.

First, Scrabble. I have to blame the Boon Companion for this; he got me addicted to iPad Scrabble, which we’re still playing at home. But most of my playing is via Lexulous, which is the Facebook game once known as Scrabulous, given a new name and a slightly different board configuration after an encounter with Hasbro’s lawyers. It’s still on Facebook, where you can play both in real time and via the correspondence method (“You have a move to make on Lexulous, Rich”); but I prefer to play on lexulous.com, where there are literally hundreds of Scrabble fanatics sitting in chat rooms 24 hours a day waiting to play with you immediately.

It turns out I’m a moderately good Scrabble player — but I’m an even better timed Lexulous player, and most of the fanatics on the site want to play timed. Timed games fit well with my satisficer personality, which races to find the best move available that can be thought up in the first 30 seconds, i.e., roughly the 85% move on average, and then gets bored and anxious trying to come up with something that’s 5 points better. Typically I play 8 minute games with a 10-second Fischer delay, but as I get better I’m going to inch the time limit down little by little.

(Side note: I saw Bobby Fischer in an elevator when I was going to the pediatrician’s, in Century City in L.A., when I was about eight or nine. This would put it in about 1974 or 1975. I was with my mom, who recognized him; she explained who he was, and I remembered hearing about him on the news — I was kind of a chess kid. I think that was both the most famous and the craziest person I met up to that point, at least until we saw Farrah Fawcett in the grocery store a few years later. Or I think it was Farrah. Anyway, I digress.)

The other game is SimCity 4, with the Rush Hour expansion pack, which I played for months before I started playing Civ IV. I figure it’s time to give it another shot, playing a bit more strategically. I’ll have more to say when I get a city to a more interesting point in development, but here’s the one I’m working now:

I have to confess that in the past I’ve only been able to take the comedian/actor/artiste David Cross in small doses, and have once or twice given voice to the thought. (The Boon Companion can confirm.) I think it may have been after seeing him on Bill Maher’s show, which tends to encourage the kind of pontificating I find hard to take, so I’m not sure Cross is entirely to blame.

But after watching most of Season 2 and part of Season 3 of “Arrested Development” in less than a week, I have to apologize — David Cross’s portrayal of Tobias Fünke is one of the consistently funniest, most creative, most boundary-pushing comedic characterizations I can remember seeing anywhere. And it just goes on and on, episode after episode, and somehow he plays these unlikely situations, delivers these absolutely impossible lines, without busting up laughing.

Here’s a little snippet of Cross on politics:

And here’s an itty bitty snippet of insight into Tobias Fünke: