Alan Horn's diary

February 14, 2008

Hopefully the absurd, racist campaign against two Dominican baseball players for taking part in their other national sport--cockfighting--has fizzled out. However one may feel about the spectacle of two small creatures tearing each other apart, at least those who enjoy it are not in league with the state to force their tastes on the rest of us like the sinister Humane Society and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

I have never been to a cockfight myself, but the vivid description of one in the Times the other day certainly aroused my interest. The birds are equipped with sharp plastic spikes on their feet to impale each other with, and if neither one is mortally wounded within fifteen minutes they call it a draw. If only baseball would take similarly assertive measures to keep things moving.

February 13, 2008

Saw the documentary Bus 174, about what happened when a small-time attempted robbery on a city bus in Rio de Janeiro went wrong, turning into a hostage drama that played out over four hours on live television.

The hijacker had grown up on the streets in a country where there are as many as twelve million such street children. Thousands of them are killed every year with impunity by police or vigilante death squads. In fact, the hijacker had been among a group of seventy-two children sleeping in front of a church one night when, in an infamous incident, off-duty cops pulled up and sprayed them with bullets. A social worker interviewed in the film recalls that on a radio show that week many called in to defend the cops, saying that this was just the sort of thing that was needed to clean up the city.

The film could have been better edited. While it was necessary to show the hijacking in its social context, the resulting digressions on Brazilian street life, police brutality, prison conditions, and the like went on too long, draining a lot of the tension out of the story.

Descriptions of oppression soon begin to numb, especially when no way to understand it is offered. There was a good deal of commentary in the film, but only of the liberal, how-could-“we”-let-this-go-on type. No mention of capitalism, of course. Certainly no recognition that there may be something basically wrong with a social system that leaves twelve million children to fend for themselves, and with no way to do so but to beg or prey on others.

February 12, 2008

Now that the Maharishi has passed away, as he did last Tuesday at the age of 91, I suppose it will do no harm to reveal his mantra.

He sold it to me at Monaco many years ago in a moment of dire need, having come up short for a rather large drinks order he’d been stuck with. He explained that the mantra had been given to him by his teacher, Guru Dev, after thirteen years of intensive spiritual training. Naturally he made me swear never to disclose it to anyone.

Reluctant as I am to break such a promise, the fact is that while I’ve always meant to work on developing my consciousness, I never seem to be able to find the time for it. Consequently I’ve never had an occasion to use the Maharishi’s mantra. This seems like a terrible waste given that it contains immense spiritual energy and therefore is probably worth more than the thirty-odd francs I paid for it.

So I’m offering it here, free of charge and no doubt at considerable risk to the progress of my soul, to anyone who might be able to make better use of it than I: “Owa tagu siam.”

February 11, 2008

Many times I’m asked what my process is for writing these diary entries. Do I type them directly into TypePad, or do I write them out in longhand first?

It may sound old-fashioned, but the truth is I do write everything out beforehand. Like the Russian-émigré novelist Vladimir Nabokov, I prefer to compose on a series of ruled index cards (but using the unruled sides only) while standing at a lectern. A single entry can take up anything from one to nine cards. I always do the first draft in red pencil, going over it in blue ink for revisions.

I write every morning after breakfast, starting at around 7:45 and breaking off in mid-sentence at 11 a.m. sharp. (If I should happen to have just completed a sentence when it turns 11, I hastily add the word The to start a new one.) The rest of the day I devote to fencing, boxing, entomology, and minor household chores, and the next morning I simply pick up where I’d left off.

February 10, 2008

Sex today with M., who was having sex with B. at the time.

R. was there too, getting blown by L., but he wasn’t paying attention to any of us. The whole time he had his eye on W., who was getting a rim job from K.

When will R. notice me? And why won’t these people tell me the rest of the letters in their names?

February 9, 2008

In an entry here a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the failure of Bob Dylan, or anyone else, to explain his wearing of whiteface makeup on the 1975 Rolling Thunder Tour. But of course Dylan is always like that. As anybody who’s ever read an interview with him understands, he’s incapable of telling anyone what they’d like to know.

I remember reading one where he was asked to account for his appearance on the 1991 Grammys to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award. The Gulf War was going on at the time, and his decision to perform “Masters of War” was generally taken to be an anti-war statement. But the rendition was strangely rushed and slurred, and upon receiving the award Dylan said something thought cryptic even for him: "My daddy once said, 'Son, it's possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your ways.'"

Dylan explains, “I don't remember the time and place my father said that to me, and maybe he didn't say it to me in that exact way. I was probably paraphrasing the whole idea, really--I'm not even sure I paraphrased in the proper context. It might've been something that just sort of popped in my head at that time.”

He goes on to talk at some length about how disappointed he’d been that some other performers originally scheduled to appear along with him that night in his honor had subsequently withdrawn. He denies in passing that “Masters of War” is in fact an anti-war song.

The interviewer counters, “But certainly you knew by playing ‘Masters of War’ at the height of the Gulf War, it would be received a certain way.”

Dylan: “Yeah, but I wasn't looking at it that way.”

So the one element in this murky episode that seemed clear to everyone is off-handedly thrown into doubt.

When pressed to shed some light on his acceptance speech--which, while otherwise hard to know what to make of, at least seems to imply that God can be counted on--Dylan suggests that he believes just the opposite: “If we know anything about God, God is arbitrary. So people better be able to deal with that, too.”

The interviewer asks helplessly, “Is there something about the word ‘arbitrary’ that you would like to clarify or perhaps that I'm not understanding?”

Dylan: “No. I mean, you can look it up in the dictionary. I don't consider myself a sophist or a cynic or a stoic or some kind of bourgeois industrialist, or whatever titles people put on people. Basically, I'm just a regular person. I don't walk around all the time out of my mind with inspiration.”

Which last sentiment, at least, I can certainly identify with.

February 8, 2008

Got up this afternoon and made myself a cup of instant coffee, adding milk to it as usual. Someone had bought one of those great big gallon-sized plastic jugs, and after pouring I set it down a little too hard on the counter. About a third of the milk inside sloshed out all over the counter, the floor, and my new fuzzy slippers. A horrible thing to happen, especially so early in the day.

February 7, 2008

Perhaps the tragedy of Heath Ledger’s early death will not have been entirely in vain if it brings some attention to the dangers of prescription-drug misuse. These medications can be harmful if taken in the wrong combinations. It’s sad to think that all Ledger had to do was to swap out the diazepam with some Ambien and he would still be with us. I’ve taken a similar regimen for years without any problem.

February 6, 2008

I’m afraid I may have been unfair in yesterday’s entry to Martin Amis, the British novelist accused of spreading racist views. Since writing it I have revisited the cogent defense of his recent statements published last November by the journalist Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens begins by pointing out that it is wrong to say--as many people do--that racists discriminate, since to be a racist is precisely to lump those of a particular ethnicity together indiscriminately. Having established this original thesis, the relevance of which it is hardly necessary to spell out, he pursues it to this powerful conclusion: “Thus to accuse Martin Amis of being a racist is to say that he can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another. Now, a moment's thought on the part of his worst enemy would reveal that accusation to be silly and vicious, and baseless on its face.”

I am less sure, however, about Hitchens’s later argument that Amis cannot be a racist because Muslims do not constitute a race. One somehow feels it’s not the Albanians Amis is worried about.

But at least we can now understand what Amis is really saying when he writes of wanting to tell an airport guard searching his daughter’s knapsack to “stick to people who look like they’re from the Middle East,” or when he puts forward the idea of randomly “strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or Pakistan.” He is saying that he can’t tell the difference between one Irishman and another.

February 5, 2008

The British novelist Martin Amis has put out a new volume titled The Second Plane, a collection of the embarrassing essays and stories he’s been writing since a certain date in the fall of 2001 on the threat of anti-Western Islamist terrorism. It took a degree of bloodymindedness to do so, as his views on this subject have been widely--and rightly--criticized. Last year the liberal theologian Terry Eagleton drew attention to an interview from 2006 in which Amis confessed to “a definite urge--don’t you have it?--to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation--further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan….”

Of a piece with this wretched stuff was Amis’s publication in 2002 of the hysterically anti-Communist Koba the Dread, in which he performed an impressive Oedipal feat. His father, the famous novelist Kingsley, was in his later years such a buffoonish caricature of the reactionary that almost anyone could have attacked him from the left. But to denounce him from the right on the basis of his earlier nominal membership in the Communist Party of Great Britain was an inspired move, allowing Amis to kill his dad and to become him in a single stroke.

And become him he did. One gets the feeling from the disturbing interview he did with Johann Hari in the Independent that he has sort of a bad conscience about all the racist and male chauvinist crap he keeps “adumbrating” these days, but simply can’t help himself.

(Update: But see my second thoughts on the matter here.)

February 4, 2008

Barack Obama, one of the Democratic candidates for president, has been campaigning on the idea that there’s no more racism in America, or nearly none. We’re “ninety percent of the way” there, he estimates. That’s something I was certainly glad to hear, if a little surprised.

According to his recent book, the reason black people are ever more segregated, impoverished, undereducated, unemployed, and incarcerated is not racism, for the most part. Apparently it’s largely due to their own ignorance (or, “lack of emphasis on educational achievement”), sexual promiscuity (“the collapse of the two-parent black household”), and shiftlessness (“conservatives--and Bill Clinton--were right about welfare”).

February 3, 2008

In LA for the day to visit a talented friend who hasn’t been feeling herself lately. In fact, she’s landed in a psychiatric hospital for the second time this month. I was going to bring her some magazines but as her face was on the cover of all the ones in the gift shop, and frankly not looking its best, I decided on chocolates.

She greeted me in the distinctive Scandinavian accent I’m told she has adopted since the beginning of her present stay. While I cannot say it marks much of an improvement in terms of her mental stability, it does lend an intriguing, Garbo-esque resonance to her conversation.

There were a number of topics I had been asked to avoid, and most of what she told me I’m not able to disclose. But I can relate that she seems to have developed a good therapeutic relationship with the psychiatrist in charge of her case. In fact he appears to have sparked an interest in her in Reform Judaism, and she quizzed me intently about how one goes about converting. I promised to find out and send her some materials.

Her appetite remains healthy, I was pleased to note. I spent only twenty minutes with her--all that anyone, including immediate family, is allowed these days--and yet I was there a lot longer than the chocolates I brought.

February 2, 2008

Many people have been asking me for my “take” on the Democratic primaries.

There are two major candidates left in the race. While I haven’t finished reading the entire article, here are a couple of things that strike me right off the bat.

I hope it will make no difference that one candidate has the unusual given name of “Hilary.” There are many men called Hilary and even some in public life, albeit mainly in Britain, like the Labour politician Hilary Benn. In any case, the candidate surely did not choose his name, and certainly should not be held any less manly on account of it.

With the other candidate it’s not his given name, unusual as it is in its own way, that gives concern so much as his surname: O’Bama. There is still a great deal of prejudice against the Irish in the minds of too many people in this country, and I hope the candidate’s ethnic background will play no part in their decision.

February 1, 2008

What would it be like to make love to a woman who was totally numb? A woman, that is to say, unable to receive any tactile sensations, due perhaps to some neurological mishap? One who responded to your touch like any woman, but whom you happened to know was just acting and felt nothing?

I don’t know the answer to this question. But I would like to find out.

January 31, 2008

Saw the animated film Persepolis, based on the appealing comic book by Marjane Satrapi about growing up under (and, for a time, in exile from) the early years of the theocratic regime in Iran.

Satrapi’s upper-class, well-connected, Westernized family were supporters of the leftist popular movement that brought down the monarchy in 1979. In its place the leaders of that movement, instead of building a workers’ government, treacherously installed a clerical regime which immediately turned on those same leaders and their constituency. This is all presented fairly honestly, if obliquely and with no political conclusions being drawn.

The film was very good, if not quite as good as the book, I thought. Then again my appreciation may have been impaired to some extent by the roar and rumble of the subway trains passing right under my seat every eight minutes.

Local moviegoers will instantly know which theater I went to. But everyone else reading this must think I’m talking about some low-rent screen in a questionable part of town where a French-language art film is unaccountably rotating with Aliens vs. Predator. Not at all. This is a place that specializes in so-called independent cinema and has the nerve to charge $4.50 for a small cappuccino in the lobby.

Perhaps the Aliens vs. Predator crowd wouldn’t put up with this shit. In any case, I would like to think so. For my own part, I left a strongly worded note in the suggestion box on the way out and once again promised myself never to return.

January 30, 2008

Rumor that a worldwide bergamot shortage threatens to send Earl Grey prices through the roof.

I may have to switch to Lapsang Souchong.

January 29, 2008

While I don’t favor any candidate from either capitalist party, the news that Rudolph Giuliani will soon be withdrawing is good to hear because of a peculiar domestic disturbance he’s been causing. Whenever his face appears on television, Eli Weasel--my pet ferret--gives out a high-pitched whine, flings himself violently and repeatedly against the walls of his tank, and urinates into his water cup.

The violent and repeated flinging, of course, is a normal part of ferret behavior which Eli engages in all the time, but the rest is worrying. I can never figure out whether this reaction is due to the former mayor’s outburst against ferrets and their keepers in a 1999 radio broadcast, or whether--to the contrary--it’s some kind of mating ritual.

But somehow I feel the latter explanation to be more likely. Come to think of it, Eli behaves in a similar way whenever Eliot Spitzer comes on.

January 28, 2008

It seems like I can’t help myself. This morning I once again put on the song “Beautiful” by the popular singer Christina Aguilera, and as usual it set off a crying jag the moment the full band kicked in.

As usual, too, there was only one way to stop it: two full hours of Anal Cunt through my headphones at the maximum volume.

January 27, 2008

On the subway today I noticed a new ad intended to persuade the riding public that littering is bad behavior. Could it be that there are those who know this and simply don't care? I wonder the same thing every time I see one of those ads advising us that clinging to the outside of a moving train can be dangerous.

The photo on the ad I saw, showing a blurred figure hastily stuffing a newspaper under a seat, was obviously staged. In all my years of riding the MTA I have never seen a fellow passenger throw a newspaper under a seat. We leave them on top of the seats, for others to read.

I am not surprised that the MTA tops, not being commuters themselves, would misinterpret what we regular riders consider an act of charity and good fellowship. Some do not stop at that. One evening last week on the seat beside me someone had thoughtfully set out a Styrofoam clamshell more than half full of french fries.

January 26, 2008

Cold out today. Taking Akbar, my Afghan hound, for his morning walk, it was so pleasant to handle his steaming turds through the plastic bag I used to clean up after him that I held onto them for an extra ten blocks, until they’d gone quite cold.

Most of us, if we were really honest with ourselves, would have to admit that as much as we love our dogs, at bottom they’re little more than pretexts for walking around with bags of warm shit in our hands. That’s why I will never switch to reusable grocery bags. I understand the ecological rationale for doing so, but is it really serious enough to compel us to give up what may be the chief joy not only of pet ownership in this city, but--let’s face it--of our lives?

January 25, 2008

Further details emerged today on the circumstances surrounding the death of Heath Ledger, who was either this generation’s James Dean or this week’s Brad Renfro.

No one wants to be found dead in one’s apartment of a possible overdose, but if it should ever happen to me, I certainly hope it isn’t by my “massage therapist.”

January 24, 2008

Continue to follow the Nixzmary Brown murder trial. In court yesterday the attorney for her stepfather produced in his client’s defense a mug presented to him by the seven-year-old victim bearing the words “World’s Greatest Dad.”

How can the judging for this title be so scandalously lax? I never considered entering myself--for one thing I am not a dad, to my knowledge at any rate--but now I wonder whether despite this fact I might not actually have a shot.

January 23, 2008

The death by violence of little Nixzmary Brown is in the news again with her stepfather on trial for her murder. Such cases call to mind the dangers of leaving the youngest and most vulnerable among us to the mercy of their parents and guardians.

Think of all the creeps, morons, psychos, bigots, and bullies one meets on a daily basis. Now reflect that nearly every one of these may be a parent. People you wouldn’t trust to look after your goldfish for a long weekend are not just permitted but required to keep a developing human life under their near-absolute care.

Even with kind, well-informed parents who do their best, the family is a notorious hothouse for every sort of emotional and psychological difficulty. As the poet Philip Larkin wrote in lines that will surely continue to be passed on to the posterity they would avert:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Which is one solution. A better one, like the solutions to most social problems, will have to wait until after the revolution: communal childcare.

January 22, 2008

Caught the new horror flick There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis’s accent. It costars Paul Dano, Kevin J. O’Connor, and Daniel Day-Lewis’s eyebrows, who are all very good. It was without any question one of the all-time best Upton Sinclair adaptations I’ve ever seen.

(By the way, I discussed my personal encounters with Daniel Day-Lewis in an earlier entry.)

That was yesterday. This morning I tried some target shooting in my salon. That may not sound like much of a challenge, but it’s a fairly large room--a good twenty yards from one end to the other.

I pulled out a few old trunks I had lying around and piled some targets on top of them: a bull trophy, an antique clock, a fishbowl, some bibles, several objets d’art. I checked my aim from across the way with a surveyor’s scope, and I’ll be damned if I missed more than half a dozen shots in over 80 rounds. I only wish I could have shown those foolish doctors who keep warning me about my drinking.

It was the most fun I’ve had in ages. I suspect it rattled my valet a little, though he knows better than to show it. Whereas Dolly, my Dalmatian, barely lifted her head the whole time, lying peacefully in her place on the black and white marble floor she matches so well.

This afternoon I may go down to my private lanes and do a little bowling.

January 21, 2008

News the other day that Bobby Fischer, the former chess grandmaster, had died, supposedly of kidney failure.

My own part in this was small. Credit is shared with all my fellow conspirators worldwide, chief among them Arnie Blattstein, Shlomo Roth, Izzie “the Moyel” Meyrowitz, Rabbi Samuel “Boom-Boom” Pearlstein, Boris “the Spazz” and Garry K., Lenny Cohn, Raffi Josefson, Allison Shapiro, Mel “Meshuggeneh” Friedman, Alan Dershowitz, and Special Agent Double Chai. Mazel tovs all around.

January 20, 2008

An article in the Times last week reported that an Indian company has been manufacturing a new, super-compact, inexpensive automobile. It’s called the “Tata Ipod” on account of its small size and severely limited durability.

This may seem like good news, but apparently there’s a problem. The earth’s ecology can’t sustain mass car-driving in both the first and third worlds.

The solution is to impoverish people here in this country so deeply that basic transportation becomes an impossible luxury. Fortunately the capitalists are already working on this, as the impending economic crisis shows.

But this plan may not be necessary. As anyone who’s ever traveled within India by road understands, increasing access to the automobile is the surest and quickest way to reduce the population there. Those new drivers won't be driving long.

City traffic in India is quite safe, being almost completely immobile, but once you get into countryside the situation changes. On my last trip I had to repeatedly remind my driver of the fact that life is precious. I began to wonder whether this wasn’t a new concept to him since, as a Hindu, he had so many to spare.

Of course, the daredevil nature of our journey wasn’t all his fault. Indian highways are frugally equipped with just one lane, so you’re forced to drive directly into oncoming traffic. If you swerve too soon, the other car will naturally seize the advantage to drive you off the road, and vice versa. So cross-country road travel becomes a continual series of head-on near-collisions.

I recommend going by rail, if possible. The railway system is excellent and the trains only infrequently crash into each other or tip over.

January 19, 2008

Put on Bob Dylan’s album Desire this morning. It brought me back to 1975, when I caught the Rolling Thunder Tour in Springfield, Massachusetts on two nights running.

Thrilling music. I do remember being puzzled by the whiteface makeup Dylan wore on stage.

Many people were. But Dylan’s own explanation in a published interview clears thing up: “I saw it in a movie once.”

Desire starts out well with “Hurricane.” Fine storytelling, lovely violin line, good politics. One wishes someone would do something of this sort for Mumia Abu-Jamal. One of the best things about the song is its showing Rubin Carter not merely as a victim but as someone with his own worth and dignity.

But a few tracks later there’s “Joey,” which celebrates the murdered mobster Joey Gallo for, among other things, strikebreaking: “They threw him in the hole one time for tryin' to stop a strike.” It’s an appalling line, as bad as this mix of racism, national chauvinism, and paranoia from the chillingly reactionary Slow Train Coming album: “Sheiks walkin' around like kings, wearing fancy jewels and nose rings, / Deciding America's future from Amsterdam and Paris.”

I notice my copy of Desire is getting scratched up. Could it be time to invest in a compact-disk player?

January 18, 2008

It’s been 18 days now since this diary first went online and so far the page-view statistics have not been meeting expectations, leading me to consider changing the motto appearing at the top of the page from “De omnibus dubitandum” to “J. Lo’s ass.”

The assumption that more search-engine users are typing in the latter phrase than the former, leading more of them to stumble across this diary if it were prominently included there, seems a safe one. Going strictly by my own experience, the numbers should favor “J. Lo’s ass” by something like 145 to one.

This is not to say that such a change would not raise some troubling questions. In particular, I have been wrestling with the possibility that J. Lo’s ass may not be what it used to be, either as a physical specimen or as a topic of general interest.

The first of these issues I’m unfortunately not in a position to resolve at first hand, and authorities on the matter disagree among themselves. About the second one, however, concerning the level of interest the ass in question arouses, I can claim some insight, and it's hardly promising. Again speaking personally, it has been months since I last did a search for “J. Lo’s ass,” and I think I can consider myself representative in this regard.

So I hesitate, lest by reflexively changing the site’s motto to “J. Lo’s ass” (or her “fat ass”--I can’t decide on the wording) in place of some happier alternative that has not yet occurred to me I should limit my potential readership to a relatively smaller and, let’s face it, probably older demographic.

Is there a newer, more popular ass out there that I am overlooking? I will be keeping an eye out.

January 17, 2008

Haircut today. With the busy holiday season just past, I’d missed my last appointment, and as a consequence my hair had grown out considerably. So there was a lot to work with, and I couldn’t pass up the chance. I opted for the retro-classic cut made newly fashionable these days by Javier Bardem in the film No Country for Old Men.

I haven’t seen too many of these in New York yet, so maybe a lot of men are waiting for their hair to grow out first. Could it be that my sloth last month has ironically put me in the lead?

January 16, 2008

“This is clearly unacceptable,” said Patricia Lancaster, the New York City Buildings commissioner, of conditions at the site of the Trump SoHo condominium that had led to eleven violations and finally on Monday afternoon to a partial collapse in which a worker fell forty-two stories to his death.

An hour later Donald Trump was arrested in his office at Trump Plaza and taken to a nearby district courthouse, where he was arraigned on charges of industrial murder.

At least that’s what I assumed from the statement quoted above, until I read the rest of the article and found no such thing. It said only that the Trump organization was referring questions to its contractor, Bovis Lend Lease.

Bovis, let us recall, is the management company that entrusted the complicated and dangerous demolition of the Deutsche Bank building, which had been contaminated by debris from the neighboring World Trade Center, to a mysterious, apparently mob-connected subcontractor with no record of any previous work whatsoever. Two firefighters died there last August. In this building filled with flammable chemicals, there was no working standpipe and commonsense fire-safety measures were never put in practice. Today's Times has an article on the shocking safety record of Bovis's (mob-connected) subcontractor at the Trump site.

In the year ending September 2006, 18 construction workers in this city were killed on the job. The following year this figure went up to 29, and the year after that it was 43.

Officials will obviously say what they need to. Anyone can see that homicidally unsafe working conditions are clearly acceptable to them and the class they serve.

January 15, 2008

There are more tourists in New York City now than ever before, and it can be difficult for them to get reliable information. As a public service, I am devoting today’s diary entry to answering some questions commonly asked by people visiting our city.

WELCOME TO MANHATTAN, CITY OF BANKS!

Q: Where can I find a bank?

Manhattan is a city whose streets are lined with banks, all of them equipped with state-of-the-art ATMs.

Q: Which branch of a particular bank should I visit?

It makes little difference, as they are all exactly the same.

Q: Which bank am I looking at now?

That depends. If it is blue it’s Chase; if red, Bank of America.

Q: This one is a different color.

You have obviously stumbled across one of the many smaller banking chains New York has to offer, which contribute so much to the variety and dynamism of our street life.

Q: How much money can I take out?

As much as you like, up to $600, in multiples of $20.

Q: Aren’t there any places for me to spend the money I take out?

Of course! We have two: Duane Reade and Starbucks.

Q: Is that all there is to see here?

New York is a very convenient city to visit, despite its great size, because all the points of interest can be seen within a few blocks, after which the series is repeated indefinitely.

Q: Why have I come all this way to look at a lot of banks?

Manhattan is a city whose streets are lined with banks, all of them equipped with state-of-the-art ATMs.

Q: Which bank has the most “character”?

They’re all the same.

Q: What’s the funkiest bank in the East Village?

They’re all the same.

Q: Which bank is the most “New York”?

They’re all the same.

Q: Has New York always been a “city of banks”?

No. It started about eight years ago and reached critical mass around November 2005.

Q: Is it true that in Chinatown the ATMs can display your options in Chinese characters?

Yes, and it is quite an experience.

January 14, 2008

If we’re living, as the cover of last week’s New York magazine has it, in a “post-crime" New York, it’s also a postmortem New York, or perhaps simply a post-New York.

Who would have guessed, back when the city was what it used to be, that it was a healthy rate of violent felonies that made the whole thing workable? It kept out the unadventurous. Now that everyone wants to live here, no one can afford to.

Looking back at the magical city this was well into the 80s, the murder of a couple thousand people a year (out of seven or eight million) seems a small enough price to pay. We should have honored them as sacrificial victims to the public good.

January 13, 2008

A Christmas gift to myself this year was a mini-fridge. I have a regular refrigerator, of course, but this one I keep next to my bed to chill the tomato juice I use to mix my wake-up bloody marys. Saves my having to get up and walk into the adjoining kitchenette, as before.

I make four or five of them, one after the other. Then I get up and go into the bathroom, where I run the tap until the water is ice cold. I splash it vigorously onto my face for several minutes, puke up the bloody marys, brush my teeth, do a few sun salutations, and I’m ready to face my day.

January 12, 2008

When I saw that ad in the subway that says, “Last year, 1,944 New Yorkers saw something and said something,” I asked myself the same question as the New York Times did on Monday: how did they arrive at that number?

A Mr. Christopher P. Boylan, deputy executive director of the MTA, squirms away from the question, telling the Times: “I don’t want to say that the accuracy of the number is secondary to the message, but the message that we wanted to get across is that those calls are, in fact, having an impact.”

Well, glad to hear that, but the 1,944 figure is definitely off. I should know: during the period in question I called in 1,952 reports myself.

Whether it’s a suspiciously bearded man lingering beside me on a platform or somebody carrying a large, bomb-shaped package or someone speaking in a distinctly foreign accent, I can usually get in three or four calls on my morning commute alone. On slow days I even throw in a couple of false ones, to keep the FBI on its toes.

To the MTA, I say: “You’re welcome.” And to my fellow commuters: “What on earth are you all waiting for?”

January 11, 2008

Finally got over last weekend to see the extraordinary collection of Georges Seurat drawings on exhibit at the Modern. One regrets the work the artist did not live to produce. Poor Seurat died at the age of thirty-one (my own age, coincidentally). Of measles--a sad case of life imitating art.

Another arts note today: Just a couple of days after the sad news that Philippe de Montebello is retiring after thirty years as director of the Metropolitan Museum comes a reprieve for those of us who will miss his strangely stirring Acoustiguide presentations.

According to a rumor I just heard, Mr. de Montebello will be putting what the Times this week called that "plummy baritone voice [of his]... that made millions of bookish women swoon" to use as host of his own satellite radio program. The show will feature musical selections specially curated by Mr. de Montebello (his tastes range from Crosby, Stills and Nash to the Moody Blues) together with this articulate and passionate man's personal musings on art and life.

January 10, 2008

An article in the Times the other day on gephyrophobia, a little-known yet surprisingly widespread fear of driving over bridges. The article is full of quotes from psychotherapists and other supposed experts who seem to think this is some sort of psychological disorder.

Once again the Times has missed the real story. A mere seven months ago an eight-lane bridge collapsed in Minneapolis. The Times itself reported a couple days afterwards that more than 2,000 bridges in New York State alone, including the ramps of the Brooklyn Bridge, are judged to be “structurally deficient” by federal standards.

Nothing could be saner these days than to fear driving over bridges, along with stepping on potentially electrified manhole covers, walking down streets full of century-old steam pipes ready to explode, and so on. After decades of criminal neglect by the capitalists, the only rational attitude on the part of anyone who dares get anywhere near this country’s flimsy, jury-rigged infrastructure is sheer terror.

January 9, 2008

I can’t believe it’s taken me nine days to figure out that several of my New Year’s resolutions are at odds with each other.

My resolution to grow grotesquely long fingernails conflicts with my resolution to learn Japanese origami, my resolution to become more environmentally aware conflicts with my resolution to worry less, and my resolution to feed dependent family members more regularly conflicts with my resolution to cut down on expenses.

I take a moment to think about who I am and where I’m headed. Looks like origami class, the environment, and that extra food budget will have to wait until next year.

January 8, 2008

When the first movie version of Vladimir Nabokov’s famous dirty novel came out in 1962, its posters all asked, over a coy picture of the film's young star, “How did they ever make a movie of LOLITA?” The answer, as the New York Times reviewer put it at the time, was: “They didn’t.” Director Stanley Kubrick had left out everything of interest, filling out the running time with footage of Peter Sellars doing funny voices.

A second version was released in 1997 starring Jeremy Irons which, as the phrase “starring Jeremy Irons” already implies, was more faithful but no less dull.

So I was glad to see a third version has just come out that, from the look of the packaging, appears to have finally found the right balance between delicacy and frankness. I notice they have taken some liberties, however, transferring the setting from New England to Long Island and even altering the eponymous character’s name by one letter. These are both relatively minor changes. More worrying is the lead actress, who seems old for the part, looking to be at least fifty. Still, I for one am hoping for the best as I look forward to receiving my copy in the mail any day now.

January 7, 2008

Few people know that the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, star of the current action blockbuster There Will Be Blood, is the son of the noted British poet C. Day-Lewis.

As a neighbor of the Day-Lewises when I was staying in London in the early 60s, I was occasionally asked to tea with Jack (as C. Day-Lewis was known, quite arbitrarily, to his friends) and his charming second wife, the actress Jill Balcon. His children were usually not at home, but Jack would sometimes speak darkly about Daniel’s emotional difficulties, which had already come to light.

I’ll never forget my first sight of the boy. It must have been November of 1964. He was only about seven, as I recall, though tall for his age. He was standing in the parlor dressed in a sort of long, coarsely woven tunic and sandals and leaning on a wooden crook. But I was struck less by this outfit than by the boy’s manner, starting with his look of astonishment as I walked in. “God bless me!” he cried. “But who comes here? Welcome, good gentleman! Welcome to Bethlehem!” Taken a little aback, I turned to his father, who muttered something about Daniel’s getting a part in the local church’s nativity play. I understood.

The last time I saw Daniel it was on the sad occasion of his father’s memorial service. Once again his appearance was unconventional. His head was shaven clean, he had a gold ring in one ear, and instead of a jacket he had on a silk pajama top, worn open in front to expose his chest and abdomen. I couldn’t help feeling this was in poor taste under the circumstances, but as everyone present appeared to have agreed to let it go, I decided to follow suit and offer him my condolences. “Hah!” he replied. I mentioned that although I had seen little of his father over the last few years, my acquaintance with him had always meant a good deal to me. “When my father was a king,” Daniel agreed, “he was a king who knew exactly what he knew. Et cetera, et cetera, and so forth!” At this point his mother took me aside to explain that they were doing The King and I at Bedales that spring and Daniel had got the lead.

Update: I finally saw There Will Be Blood and give my impressions of it here.

January 6, 2008

The Times had an article the other day on an alleged current fad for the ancient yogic practice of nasal irrigation, or pouring water up your nose. This disgusting activity, said to help with allergies and colds, is performed using a small vessel called a neti pot. You stick the spout up one nostril and the water runs out the other one.

What the article leaves out is the fact that there are many levels of yogic practice, with a method of nasal hygiene appropriate to each one. The neti pot is well suited for raw initiates and those in the intermediate stages of study. Those of us who have gone deeper dispense with external aids, learning to cleanse the nostrils--those gateways of the breath--using nothing but our own bodies. My own practice, for example, makes use of the tip of the index finger. Those at the very highest grades even eat the results.

January 5, 2008

Before blogs, back in the 1990s, there were zines (pronounced as spelled): homemade magazines that that people would photocopy and distribute by mail. The term is a misspelling, possibly deliberate, of the last syllable in the word design, since the most painfully obvious feature of these publications was that they were wholly designed by their authors.

The origin of the word blog is often debated. Some people think it comes from the blocks of text that compose these electronic journals. I have even heard it suggested that the term is a jocular comment on the typically humdrum or “blah” character of their contents. But in fact it comes from the French blague--a little joke.

January 4, 2008

When I heard the news the other day that Benazir Bhutto had been killed, my second or third thought was: which member of the Bhutto family are they going to put in now? Two days later I read a headline: “Bhutto’s husband, son to lead party.”

Benazir herself had of course been put in after her father was hanged by the military in 1979. Just as in India when Nehru died they put in his daughter, Indira, and when Indira was killed they put in her son Rajiv, and when he was killed in turn they put in his Italian-born wife, wrapped in a sari. That’s how these Eastern dynasties work. Good thing it’s not like that here in the United States, where you would never have two people from the same family holding or seeking the presidency.

If Ms. Bhutto, or Pinky as I called her, had a tragic flaw, it was her lack of thrift. Had she and her husband not squandered the money they stole during her first administration, she would not have been forced to seek power a second time in 1993, and recently for yet a third time. This was a clear case of returning to the cookie jar one too many times. One and a half billion dollars, carefully managed, can be enough for a couple to retire on, even comfortably. With budgeting, avoidance of credit-card debt, and a little common sense, this story might have had quite a different ending.

January 3, 2008

Decided to take the long escalator up from the express tracks at 59th Street and regretted it. There were a lot of people ahead of me and they all chose to stand. Or at least one or two people in key positions did, which comes to the same thing.

Escalators confuse people. Are they stairs or vehicles? Should we climb or ride them?

The answer is they are stairs and we should climb them. Invalids unable to drag themselves from step to step should take the elevator, or, if there is none, stay at home.

January 2, 2008

Many people have been asking about the motto of this diary, “De omnibus dubitandum.” It is taken from Descartes by way of Karl Marx. Marx once listed it as his own motto in answer to a personal questionnaire he filled out with his family and some friends, something people did for fun in Victorian England. It means, “Question everything, especially on the Internet.”

January 1, 2008

Alex Ross, classical music critic for the New Yorker, wrote in a recent article, "Like many people, I started blogging out of an urgent need to procrastinate."

Procrastination is a bad habit that too many of us fall into. Once established, there is no cure, but the tendency can be managed using a simple method first proposed by Robert Benchley.

You start by making a list of the four or five most pressing tasks in front of you. Just getting these down on paper is often helpful.

Next, carefully review your list. Are all the items equally urgent? Pick one as your main goal.

Your natural inclination will be to do anything but the task you have selected. This allows you to get started on some of the other items on your list.

Starting a blog is no small undertaking. Most pen-and-paper diaries, resolutely begun on the first of the year, trail off around January tenth, but at least when that happens there’s no one looking over your shoulder. When the blogger lapses, the eyes of the world are on him. Running a successful blog requires a kind of commitment and discipline that few possess. I know I don’t.

So, pace Alex Ross and per Robert Benchley, I have set the regular updating of this blog as my main goal for this new year in order to finally get some work done.