A New York Moment

It happened the other day. Okay, it happened a couple of weeks ago and it’s exactly the kind of thing I should come home and write about immediately. But instead I let it sit in my brain.
I was on a late-morning, let’s-get-ready-for-lunch run to Giacomo, my favorite deli. On West 72nd Street. And the lovely woman who makes the best sandwiches on the planet was there. She was bantering with a pal, a guy who was harassing her from near where I was standing. But harassing in a good, friendly way. She was telling him to get lost. Also in a good, friendly way.
They were talking about her background, her ethnic heritage. I had always assumed that she was Italian, given that she makes the best Italian sandwiches. But she said that since her school days she’s been known as 3P. She grew up in Puerto Rico, but she’s Palestinian and Panamanian.
Almost instantly, that struck me as so New York. All those different backgrounds coming together in one woman, who I think of as Italian.

Finding Faith at the Marriott Marquis

“Retail is my detail,” famed realtor Faith Hope Consolo told a panel last Friday afternoon.
You got the feeling she’s used the line before.
You got the feeling that Consolo, famous for getting her name—and the names of her clients into the papers—has used a lot of her lines more than once. In person, she’s a force of nature. Funny in an old-school way.
I had wanted to see her in person, since I’ve quoted her in newspaper pieces and blog items for many years. And because she sends me stuff with her name on it, like pads and pens. She takes a fair amount of heat for her self-promotion, but she made it clear that she can live with that. If you can’t take the heat, then get out of the kitchen. And all that.
“You take the kisses. You take the hits,” is the way Consolo put it at the panel, which was part of a city real estate expo at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Also on the panel: an old pal of mine, Linda Alexander, a p.r. guru with her own shop, Alexander Marketing Corp.
I love Consolo cause she’s so darn quotable, and so darn willing to share those quotes when an ugly deadline looms. She’s even good at getting back to me to tell me that she cannot get back to me, so that pretty much makes her a journalist’s favorite.
She’s enough of a traditionalist to believe in print, even in a digital age, and she says that her clients want to see their properties publicized in what may seem like an old-fashioned way. She held up an imaginary magazine and said, “They like to say, ‘Oh, my God. She looks terrible.’”
There’s something inspiring about Consolo, about the mix of gritty and funny, about the way she even bothers to have a public persona when so much about real estate in this city has become rote or tired. On Friday afternoon she was weary bright red and passing out candy, taking names and talking about making deals. But the warmth of her jokes and the talent of remembering names only goes so far. She’s tough too.
“We’re not here to make friend,” she said. “We’re here to make business.”

My Kind of Town

San Francisco is my kind of town.
Evidently.
At least that’s what the weird Facebook quiz just told me. In a test to see which city I should be living in, I wound up in California. At least metaphorically.
Granted, I was trying to wind up in New York. That’s why I voted for a place with high housing costs. Or at least said that I don’t mind high housing costs. Cause the places with low housing costs tend to be spots in which I do not want to live. Anyway, I think that my pro-Asian-food answer may also have helped land me in San Francisco. The truth is that I’d just as soon have a pizza, but there was no place to say that.
Usually I avoid Facebook quizzed like the plague. They seem like gigantic time-wasters. But after reading one jerk’s post about how the test sent him to live in Denver, Colorado…well, I began to wonder what kind of response I would get.
It was weird, too, cause I’ve been feeling a little bit under assault in the city lately. I mean that literally. Last night, Halloween, I was in a car that was hit by…was it a pumpkin? Something hard and squishy that landed on the car we hired to bring us back from the Bronx last night. It was no big deal, but it was no small one either. Cause it reminded me of being harassed on the street about two weeks ago at Herald Square. And of that time a couple of years ago I was bugged by a screaming teenager on a subway.
The little assaults start to add up. And I’m at the age where they become a little bit harder to shake off. Or is that nonsense, blaming age? I know the key to this, and to just about everything else, is to bounce back as quickly as possible. My basic rule—the one I carry around in the New York part of my brain—is to say to myself that if I have not been murdered and if there’s no slicing of my skin, then I’m fine. Good to go. Back to the streets of the big city.
The truth, though, lies somewhere else. I feel just a tad less safe than I used to. In New York and in general. I wish this were not so, but pretending otherwise, ignoring how I feel about things, would hardly be a New Yorker's kind of move. We do tend to call them as we see them. Right now I'm admitting to a sense of danger out there, but I also see the amazing interactions each day in this city. The woman in Washington Square who hands cash to the fellow standing next to her who lost it. The oh-so-many people who do things like that for me. The guy over the weekend who picked up the woman who was falling at Whole Foods.
I can think about those people instead of the incredibly flying objects. Think about the people who help instead of the ones who harass. It helps. I may be better off switching thoughts instead of switching cities.

A Near-Marriage Ceremony

Thirteen days ago, we got sorta married.
Well, we did as well as you can do, legally speaking, within the confines of New York City. My boyfiend and I went to the marriage bureau downtown and registered as domestic partners. It’s not like we live someplace civilized, like Boston or Des Moines, where we could get married.
The first big surprise: the New York City bureaucracy not only worked, but it was shockingly pleasant. Everyone we dealt with was professional and speedy and made us feel great about the process, which began online when we pre-registered as a couple. Then we went in and were amazed at how quickly our domestic partnership happened.
We may have been inspired by a recent piece in the Times, in which what seemed like a lovely lesbian couple had a short service to accompany their domestic partnership. We opted out of the service, partly because I liked the whole “elopement” aspect of just the two of us doing this together and partly because we had read that Times piece. In it, the woman representing the city called the women by their last names—and, if I remember correctly, only their last names—and that made the proceeding seem like it lacked warmth.
Now that we’re domestic partners, we’re getting around to studying the rights we have. So far the answers are: not many, and we’d have more if we worked for the City of New York. We’re left feeling a little like second-class citizens in our own town and especially in our own state. The New York Times keeps telling me that Andrew Cuomo was terribly slow to embrace gay marriage here and did next to nothing to push a legal change when he was most needed. I hope he gets a chance his allegedly checkered past on the issue—and that the in the Republican rampage that is coming next week, enough Democratic state senators survive to help make gay marriage a reality in New York State.

Why 'The View' Looks Like Charlie Rose Today

It’s the upside to a freelancer’s life: I can spend my lunch hour watching TV.
Today that meant catching the series premiere of “The Talk.” And therein lies the downside.
“The Talk” is CBS’s answer to ABC’s “The View,” which is a semi-addiction of mine. “The Talk” makes “The View” seem like Charlie Rose.
At least that was the case on Day One, during which the women of “The Talk,” none particularly memorable, spent the first-half hour congratulating themselves on having a talk show. Julie Chen, the ostensible and forgettable host with hair that is a triumph of technology, made me feel better about Whoopi Goldberg. Over on CBS, the one from “King of Queens,” Leah Remini, was okay, although she struggled to be the officially sanctioned funny one. Also there: Sharon Osbourne, who I think is also on every other TV show. Among the others: Sara Gilbert, who I loved on “Roseanne,” explaining that she thought up the show after she joined a mom’s support group. It might have been more honest if someone had mentioned that ABC started a similar women’s panel a decade ago.
The first guest on “The Talk” was Christie Brinkley, who somehow managed not to meet my low expectations. The chatter was about Botox. Brinkley left audience members actually looking like they could not follow her alleged thought process. The whole enterprise came off as incredibly loud, almost depressing so. There was a depressing taped sequence about talking to kids about sex, which was more infantile than the children could ever be. If aliens arrived from another planet and watched “The Talk,” they would assume that women are morons.
Over at “The View,” there’s also plenty of silly chatter, but it’s mixed in amid some surprisingly relevant chat about the political state of the union and even changing sexual and workplace mores. I’ve heard recently that Barbara Walters, the powerhouse behind the ABC show, credited the success of the show with having picked the right women. After seeing the CBS version today, well, I think Walters may actually have a point. Take the dumbest “View” co-host and put her on “The Talk” and she would be my favorite.
Over the weekend, there was another, more subtle development in the women’s-talk-show wars. There was a “View” ad in the Sunday Times. In the news section. I think it was a pretty obvious shot at developing a sense of gravitas about a show that has been much-imitated but not always respected. But the best ad for “The View” ever could be “The Talk.” That’s only based on one episode, but a terribly bad one.

A Not-So-Cool Cafe

I couldn’t help but be horrified. And offended.
My eightysomething mom was in need of a cup of coffee. So we stopped at At65 Café, that glittery new place along Broadway in the newly revitalized Alice Tully Hall. Looks nice. I’d been thinking of going in there for quite awhile. So we did.
Big mistake. The hostess told us that we could sit anywhere along the wall (glass, of course) or outside or in the high bar seats, which I suspected might pose a challenge to my mom. The other, non-challenging seats inside were all taken. There were plenty of seats throughout the room, in what was apparently cordoned off as a dining area for meals. But it was late afternoon, and there was only one table taken—two at the most.
The sullen hostess never looked around to see that she was basically, by way of her instructions, tossing us out of the place. But she was. So we left.
Something else was left, too: a bad taste in my mouth. My mom was supporting Lincoln Center back before this hostess-bitch was born. Mom deserves better.
But it reminded me of something bigger and even worse. Many months back, before the latest round of needed construction at Lincoln Center, there was a mural up to hide some of the work. On the mural were pictures of many people enjoying a newly-revitalized Lincoln Center. It was a nice little hustle-and-bustle scene, a great New York night. Only on close examination did I realize I could not find any old people in the illustration. Here it was, a young yuppie’s dream: a Lincoln Center where nobody is aged.
If the people at Lincoln Center greet other seniors the way they met my mom’s needs last week, the dream could become a reality.
In the meantime, I'm left associating a center I love with some feelings I don't. I think if my mom had been younger and I had been thinnner, if we had been hipsters, we would have been treated more attentively. Or at least allowed to sit down.

That Wild Card Still Feels Wrong

All these years later, it still feels like there’s something wrong with the wild card.
Just reading the back pages of the tabloids this morning reminded me of that feeling.
Yes, having a system with a wild card means that more teams can compete, ostensibly livening up the playoffs. But I’m old enough to be nostalgic about the times when the winners of the AL East played the winners of the AL West. And then on to the series. Before that set-up, I've read, the winners of the American League simply played the top team of the National League. Imagine that.
Having a wild card still feels like cheating to me. There's something weird about losing your division and winding up calling yourselves World Champions. Isn't there?
This all bothered me, at least up until yesterday, when the Yankees landed their wild card ticket to the playoffs. Then it was okay.
No, I’m kidding. It’s not okay. And so this morning I found myself feeling sad about the way the Bronx Bombers are heading into postseason play. Not bad enough to stop rooting for my traditional team this time of year. But bad enough to wonder all over again about the wild card.
I know I’m not alone. The fellow at the front desk in my building yesterday, listening on the radio to a Yankee loss, said that that if the Yanks win and get the number-one spot in their division, then they might just keep winning. But he could not picture the Yankees this year going from wild card status to winning the World Series. Maybe he was just being superstitious. I think what he was really saying was that he could not see this team winning the Series—period.
His skepticism may be earned. The Yanks did not look too good in the last couple of weeks. All shall be revealed to us over the course of the playoffs, which traditionally have been decent territory for the Yankees. We’ll see how wild it gets.

What Looks Like an Awfully Difficult Job

“Oh, to be a bus driver,” the woman next to me said.
Immediately I agreed. She and I had been watching as the complaints kept adding up on a rainy day on the M5 bus. We had seen the old ladies complaining about too much air conditioning and heard the travelers as they berated the driver about how slowly the traffic was moving. Then there was the requisite crazy guy offering tips on how to navigate the congestion.
For most of it, many blocks of the drama, we had not spoken to one another. But once my neighbor broke the silence, I instantly joined in. I said that being a bus driver certainly looked like a job I did not want. Everyone who complains thinks that they are the first too notice whether it’s too cold or whether there are too many cars on the road. New Yorkers are an insistent bunch, which can be a charming affectation or evidence of self-regard and decent character. But on this wet morning, they (we?) were just a pain in the ass.
It’s funny because a few years ago I made the mental leap from the subway to the bus. I began to wonder why I was in such a hurry. I started to like seeing the long journeys from one part of the city to another, especially on my beloved M5, which delivers me almost to my apartment building’s front door. The subway, I started to think, has become more worrisome in post-9/11 New York. The bus was worth the extra time.
Not on days like this, though. Today I was thinking the speed of the subway would be a plus. Less traffic and far less whining from the crowd. The bus driver, God bless her, took it all in stride. She responded well to the streaming critiques. If she had gone mad and began assaulting passengers, she would have been wrong, but I for one would not have eagerly testified against her. Difficult job, indeed.

People Need to Pay Me

I spent a chunk of the day trying to get paid for work I have done. Some of the pieces have been used, some not. Some of the people are pleasant about being behind on the bookkeeping, some not. In all cases, it’s enervating and demoralizing and feels way too much like begging on the streets.
Sometimes I just want to scream, “You people need to pay me.”
Cause they do.
It’s been strange and potentially healthy, this switch from one side of the street to the other. For years, I was an editor who depended (more than he knew, actually) on freelancers to fill the pages of a newspaper and then of a magazine and a web site. I was pretty good in handling these staffers, who were outside of the office and whose health care costs were way outside the interest of the companies where I worked. But I could have been better. More often I should have made the extra phone call, encouraging the freelancer to feel like part of the family.
Now I’m on the other side, provided copy that is met with what feels, even in the digital age, like a shrug. It’s all about content, but those of us who provide it sometimes find our work ignored. Not cause it's bad or even particularly good, but because there is too much crap for editors to wade through on any given day. The editors cannot possibly process it all with intelligence and responsiveness. The freelancers among us crave, meanwhile, crave feedback and recognition and appreciation. We’re lucky to get a returned email.
Which reminds me. Today a guy who I worked for full-time for five years…could not be bothered to return my email. What’s with that?
It’s the understaffing, probably. The lucky few left behind with full-time jobs are doing the work that the rest of us left on the way out. On this particular day, I’m not crying for any of them.

Even More Mad About 'Mad Men'

A couple of weeks ago, someone with taste posted on Facebook that she's disappointed with "Mad Men" this year. I know that this is around the time when most TV shows tend to get soft or silly or both. Jump the shark and all that. But I'm finding this year better than ever.
Everyone from my Facebook friend to Regis Philbin has complained publicly and with considerable enthusiasm about missing those scenes of domestic hostility between Don Draper and his former wife, played weirdly but wonderfully by January Jones. I had had enough and like seeing the exes with new and, in Don's case, various mates. Both characters remain decidedly themselves and it shows how they carry their sometimes menacing character traits with them, regardless of who they wind up with on a given day or night. Not a bad relationship lesson, I'd say.
The other wonder of the season is that Elizabeth Moss as Peggy has gone from being everything from a feminist role model to, in the episode eight days ago, something out of "Long Day's Journey Into Night." I love me some Don and Peggy scenes, and that particular episode sported some exceptional acting and surprisingly subtle script choices tossed in with the dramatic fireworks. A lovely and lyrical mix.
A.O. Scott told the truth in yesterday's Times: TV is often better than its film equivalent these days. Nowhere is that more true than with "Mad Men." I get why some are turned off with the depressing subject matter and the consistent tie-in with historical moments. But so long as there are compelling characters saying funny and scary and sometimes even true things to one another...I'm sticking with Draper and company. And I'm grateful to have them.

New Year's Day, or Something LIke It

I always feel like Labor Day is New Year’s Day.
So this is the day after New Year’s Day, when the holidays are over and it’s time to move seriously into a new year. The age of summer fun ends abruptly.
Of course there’s something about September, still the official back-to-school season. Even if my niece and nephew in Florida returned many days ago to school. There’s something, too, about the fall itself. The kickoff of the big season, especially in New York City, where we gear up for what a friend reminded me this morning is her favorite season. And probably her favorite season in the city. The “When Harry Met Sally” part of the year, as she reminded me. The glorious color. The end of the awful heat. The beginning of the theater season and the TV season and the movies not necessarily produced solely for 13-year-old boys.
With it all, though, comes a responsibility I can feel on my shoulders. Time to get going. Surely this is the time to fix everythin and clear things out, from the stacks of crap on my desk to the extra hair products in the bathroom. It’s time to make a few tough financial decisions about the future, add an extra day at the gym each week and somehow think short-term, medium-term and long-term. All simultaneously. That’s a hell of a to-do list, and so yesterday I spent a couple of hours shifting the lists themselves from a Word document to my Google calendar.
This is when I expect a lot of myself. Maybe too much. And perhaps that’s why, amid all the to-do lists, I want at this time of year to come up with a vacation schedule too. To have some labor-free moments to look forward to during these days just after Labor Day.

Julia Roberts Talking About Being Too Fat

It’s hard to pick a least favorite moment of “Eat Pray Love.” Cause I hated so many of them.
But if pressed, I would go with the scene where she and another gorgeous woman chat about how they are both developing “muffin tops” during their trip to Italy. In this particular monstrosity of a scene, Roberts advises against worrying about weight and going ahead and eating the pizza and the pasta and Italy’s other great culinary gifts. She tells her pal and the rest of us that they will go out later and buy “big lady” jeans. I think that was the comment. Then, unfortunately, we get to see that scene . . . complete with Julia struggling to get into a pair of jeans.
So wrong on so many levels.
First of all, there should be a Constitutional amendment against Julia Roberts talking about being too fat. She’s basically skeletal. Second, she’s making the argument that she does not care about the weight gain or needing bigger pants and then she’s out struggling to get into jeans that are too small. Why the struggle, when the God-awful script just had her saying that the pizza was worth the bigger size? Sorry. My fault for paying attention to any of the words spoken here. Third, there’s an obesity epidemic going on and it’s jarring—it takes the audience out of the movie, way out—to listen to Julia Roberts talk about being too fat. Which takes me back to the Constitutional amendment.
I had read that this was a bad part of a bad movie. Probably right on both counts. Although I did like Richard Jenkins in his one big scene, where he basically gave a lesson in how to steal a film, and I liked Javier Bardem in everything he did, wherein he basically gave a lesson in how to be hot. Viola Davis was the wry, wise best friend, who was right to worry about whether any of this particular trip was necessary. I would have been happier if we had stayed with Davis in the city, seeing up close what it's like to juggle with good humor a job and a mate. Not as scenic as what "Eat Pray Love" offers us, but probably in the long run more useful.

The Waiting Game

What a way to spend an afternoon.
We got to the doctor’s office before 1 p.m. Then we waited and waited and waited. My mom was finally called in at almost exactly 3 p.m.
I don’t want to go all street on you, or street from several years ago, but: Whassup with that? I mean, are people waiting two hours to see a general practioner?
They are in Riverdale in the Bronx. Granted, the cast of “Cocoon” in the waiting room was not going anyplace. Maybe this is the plus of being a doctor for the geriatric set. I sure as hell would not be waiting even an hour to see my doctor. But then again, I don’t love my doctor as much as my mother loves hers.
Sometimes it’s nice being me. This was one of those times. Not while we were waiting, but when we actually got around to seeing the doctor. The phrase “two hours” came out of my mouth within seconds after saying hello. Actually, I’m not sure I said hello before going for the complaint. She took it pretty well. Later, she even agreed to a profile in the New York Post, if my editor in the At Work section decides he would like an interview with her. And once we were in there, she really listened. Which is what I guess my mom likes about this doctor.
As I said to the doc, though: call and tell me that you are running behind a couple of hours. I’ve even had veterinarians do that much. Alas, when it comes to medical care, my cat is more likely to be treated well than a lowly human ever is.

Did Late-August Arrive in Mid-August?

It feels like the dog days came early.
I could be wrong. One of the dangers of freelancing is that I sit here alone in a room—well, you could count the three cats, as I certainly would—and come up with ideas about what is happening out there in the universe. I’m not sure that the notions imagined correspond with reality. Even when I warn myself about that, though, I cannot help coming up with a sense of what’s happening in the city and the nation and the would, what the mood is.
Especially when it comes to the city. And the sense I get on a Monday morning, the one that passed by relatively uneventfully a few hours ago, is that not a lot is getting done in the offices of my hometown. It’s not that I think that everybody is out of town. I worked 50 or so weeks a year in an office for too many years to believe that there are too many completely empty workplaces. But I do have the suspicion that not a lot is happening. People are in Wait Mode, getting done the absolute necessities and not much more. Returning my phone calls not necessarily having scored a spot as an absolute necessity. Unfortunately.
I read recently in one of those not very helpful stories about job-searching that it’s best to go full speed ahead in August. You don’t want to be one of those jerks who is calling prospective employers on the days after Labor Day, announcing to the world that you are back in the game. Better to make it clear during the dog days that one is ready, willing and able to rejoin the workforce.
That sounds sensible to me. Right now I’m after an array of writing assignments, from the full-time gig to the very-very-freelance assignment, but the editors I’m eager to harass are in Wait Mode. Unless, perish the thought, it’s just me.

If An Election Fell in the Forest, Would Anybody Notice?

The headlines about my Congressman, Charles Rangel, continue unabated. Certainly you cannot blame the dailies or the TV networks for noticing the alleged ethics violations, an 80-year-old legislative battler who refuses at this hour to give up the fight. He’s gone from being an inspiring figure to some of us…to an embarrassment. Sure looks like it’s time to give it up, Rep. Rangel. Thanks for proving the lesson of George Orwell’s “1984” all over again: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
An entertaining and newsy lesson. But I wish that more attention would be paid to the electoral contest in Rangel’s district. A few years ago in another election season I interviewed Joyce Johnson. Now she’s among the candidates running against Rangel in the September Democratic primary. She’s barely mentioned, as are the others who want the job. They are not given much of a chance against Rangel, and Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV gets most of the ink when anybody does get around to writing about the actual primary.
Actually, it seems from here like nobody’s writing about the primaries at all. The New York Times has not even gotten around to many of its one-shot pieces about various metropolitan area elections. I live in a district where there are contested Congressional and state Senate primaries, but the only signs of that are, well, the signs with the contenders' photos. Or bumping into the people on the street, which is how I found out the Anna Lewis is running for state Senate in the district that for so long has been the province of Eric Schneiderman, who is now running for state attorney general. See, we've got races.
Alas, we do not have much coverage of them. Maybe our radio stations are doing a fantastic job and I’m just missing it. But I doubt it. I’m pretty much the last person to media-bash, but the outlets that make fun of voters for not turning out to the polls should at least, in the weeks before voting, present the notion that there’s an election. Otherwise, we’re all just helping our Members of Congress and other politicos win re-election without anything resembling a contest. That’s a journalistic ethics violation.

Can Rhinebeck Be Rhinebeck Again?

How weird to see Rhineback go national. Or international. Or whatever the hell happened over the last month or so, culminating last Saturday evening in what looked like a lovely wedding for Chelsea Clinton.
My partner and I stumbled on Rhinebeck a few years back, an unexpected treat that has become something of an addiction. We talk a lot about Oblong Books there. And the fantastic Rhinebeck Department Store, where the selection is smallish but smart. And the movie theater. And the restaurants, including the French one that looks too expensive but that absolutely figured in some of the Clinton-wedding stories of recent weeks. Having one of the world's great culinary institutes nearby does not hurt.
My own passion for the area stretches back decades, back to when my dad took me to Hyde Park to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Museum, the first of its kind. As a kid, I remember the cold day in Hyde Park that marked the 100th anniversary of Roosevelt's birth. The Roosevelt family home is there on the same site in Hyde Park, and in recent year the home of Eleanor Roosevelt, Val-Kill, has become an even more charming stopping point. There’s so much history in Hyde Park, but the modern-day town and its offerings have also grown on me over the years. The farmer's market in Hyde Park on Saturday mornings is worth catching. Eventually, over time, one drives around to neighboring towns and to communities beyond that...which is what we did. That's how we stumbled on Rhinebeck, which has an even more walkable downtown.
It’s fair to ask: will all the hoopla mean anything in the long term to Rhinebeck? At first I thought not, that there was only short-term attention and then Americans would go back to paying attention to other weddings and other towns. But now that I think of it, there really could be some long-term benefit to Rhinebeck.
Why? Because I know that after seeing it just once, being there a few afternoon hours, I pretty much fell for the place. I think that could happen to others, including the hundreds who went to last weekend’s wedding and the thousands of media folks who watched and chatted about the proceedings. If only a small percentage of all these people come back and spend some dollars and lavish some love on Rhinebeck, there may be an upside to the traffic of the past few weeks.
Rhinebeck richly deserves that kind of upside. It’s a lovely place, worthy of attention whether one is attending a wedding or not. How weird to see one of our secret places become anything but.

Smaller is Better, Except When It's Not

There are moments when my freelance career and my life intersect.
It happened again last week when I was working on a profile of Bashir Suba for the @ Work section of the New York Post. The piece appeared today at http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/jobs/some_good_medicine_NsMFE6xxOg6bv0QlJoNuON and I'm pretty grateful. I love being printed in that lively tabloid.
But it was weird to be writing about the independent pharmacy. And it got weirder when Suba told me about how mail-order prescriptions are helping to kill his business. He knew as he said this that I'm part of the problem, using exactly that method to get one of the drugs I wish I did not have to take. But I do. And I don't love hanging out at the pharmacy, even the small independent one where he presides. I also don't like paying more, and I catch a break from mail-order program I use. It's not fair to small independent businesses like Suba Pharmacy.
I'm the son of people who ran a small, independent bookstore back when such a thing existed. Now I have a Barnes & Noble card and think of it favorably, if only because it was (is?) New York based and the Amazon people are out west somewhere. It's weird the emotional connections we feel with merchants, and when we lose the real connections to our small-town businesses we go right on imagining some relationship with a mega-corporation.
There's a wrinkle, though, with the smaller-is-better theory. And it plays out in real life. Like years ago when the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side drove out an independent bookstore and the writer (and my future professor) Victor Navasky wrote about how he was treated better at the superstore. I had something similar happen in Summit, N.J., where I eagerly awaited the arrival of Starbucks, having survived the sloppy service of a small, independent coffee store for years. I still love Starbucks, God help me, and could not help but notice this morning that the service at the Upper West Side place I frequent is nothing short of terrific. Speedy, too.
I don't feel good about it, but I recognize that sometimes smaller is better. Suba should not be at a competitive disadvantage, playing by more restrictive rules than the mail-order companies aligned with insurance giants. But I have enough guilt in my life without feeling too badly about my Barnes & Noble card.

The President Takes a Stand

I’m glad the President called out the Republicans today on their opposition to extending unemployment benefits.
Unfortunately, this is something I know a little bit about. I’ve lived it over the past year. I’ve also lived with the sometimes crazy rules that come the financial assistance, which is appreciated and much-needed.
The Wall Street Journal keeps telling me that I’m being a drain on the economy by taking the unemployment benefits, and that I have no incentive to go out and get a job. Wrong on both counts.
The nation needs me out there buying my Starbucks latte, and as more and more Americans lose the little financial security that comes with unemployment benefits, businesses across the nation will find themselves losing customers at a time when they are desperately needed. As for an incentive to work, I have it. That’s why I’m freelancing as much as I can. But whether I’m motivated or not—and I’m more motivated than the assholes at the Journal who do not respond to my phone calls and emails—there are precious few jobs out there.
It’s a scary time. And it’s easy for a lot of us to feel left behind. Because we have been.
The President was right to behave as though he is that advocate. He was right to take a stand.

Go Ahead, Make My Month

Clint Eastwood could make staying in the city in July seem like the smarter choice.
At least some of us were feeling better about being here after reading the lineup of films that are part of “The Complete Clint Eastwood,” a comprehensive series at The Film Society of Lincoln Center. It turns out that the Walter Reade Theater is playing host to all the films that Eastwood has directed (at least so far), starting last week and continuing through July 27.
I hopped onto my beloved M5 bus and went downtown a couple of hours ago to catch “Play Misty for Me,” which was the first movie that Eastwood directed and is basically an earlier version of “Fatal Attraction.”
This time around Jessica Walter got to play the crazy broad who mistook sex for love. Eastwood cares more for Donna Mills, although it’s hard to see why in this particular context. There are some fine performances by supporting players in the movie, which holds up during the scary parts as decent popular entertainment. The movie, though, is most interesting in the way it represents interests Eastwood would explore in different ways in the years to come, like music and how music plays, literally and figuratively, in the movies. It’s also fascinating to see that two of the African-American actors in the movie, playing smaller roles, seem more three-dimensional in their performances than Eastwood or Mills do in leading parts.
There’s lots more coming. I’m interested to see if “Unforgiven” from 1992 was as good as I thought it was back then. I remember believing it really deserved the Best Picture Oscar that the movie nabbed. Others worth investigating: “A Perfect World” on July 20 and “Million Dollar Baby” on July 25 and “The Bridges of Madison County” on July 21. In the latter, Meryl Streep gives a great performance. Which is not exactly breaking news.
It’s good to have Eastwood’s films on view, especially in such a comprehensive way and in such a respected forum. He’s been such a pop culture icon for so long that it’s sometimes easy to forget that he’s a filmmaker with such a stellar record.

Does That 'Liberal' Label Scare Kagan?

Just once I would like a Supreme Court justice to get to the bench before she begins disappointing me.
Alas, Elena Kagan has already had her sad moment. It came last week on the second day of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Alabama’s gift to the Senate, Jeff Sessions, quizzed Kagan about whether she’s a “liberal progressive.”
Her amazing response: “I honestly don’t know what that label means.”
Here we go again. Back in 1995, Kagan wrote an article calling the confirmation process a “vapid and hollow charade.” This week she proved herself right.
Oh, she had some nice moments. In post-Bork America, we allow our judicial nominees to have a personality. So it was okay when Kagan, asked about what she was doing on Christmas Day, responded with a quip about how she, like all Jews, was probably at a Chinese restaurant.
Personality is fine, but philosophy is not. So when it came time to defend liberalism, Kagan punted. A woman who clerked for the late, great Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall went out of her way to tell us that she was a separate and distinct entity from her one-time mentor. No kidding. He would have answered the question about being a liberal.
How did we get here, to this weird moment in American political life, a time when nobody wants to be called a liberal, especially a liberal? It probably started around 1980, when candidate Ronald Reagan tarred Jimmy Carter as a liberal. Sessions tossed “liberal” and “progressive” together, a legitimate move since around the age of Dukakis the “liberals” started shying away from that term and moving toward “progressive.” And the trend certainly continued through last summer’s confirmation hearings, when Sonia Sotomayor steered clear of any such terms. Then she got on the court and began judging things just like a liberal. At the hearings, though, it's been like a book: Smart Women, Foolish Judiciary Committee Choices.
With Kagan, it’s worse. At least for those of us who spend our days on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Some of us are having a bit of trouble believing that Kagan, raised as a Jewish New Yorker in the age of feminism, never got around to defining the phrase “liberal progressive.” If nothing else, she could go back to the Latin roots of the word “liberal,” which would be “libera,” meaning “free,” and navigate from there. She might realize that a liberal is someone who believes in individual freedom and common purpose and the universal rights of men and women, pretty much as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights back in December 1948. That document was the crowning achievement of former First Lady and international heroine Eleanor Roosevelt. She was, in case Elena Kagan has forgotten, also a liberal.
Liberals are victims of their own success. Good liberal ideas have been so accepted in the culture that they’re considered mainstream, not liberal. But Social Security is a liberal idea. So are federally-secured student loans. Housing and food for people in dire need. Unemployment benefits. Overseas, it’s a liberal idea to give aid to our allies. At home, it’s a liberal idea that women should be as free as men to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, although it took the conservative Reagan to first make that happen. Liberals championed the idea that African-Americans should be allowed to vote without paying a poll tax and that gay people should be allowed to get married. Good ideas.
Still, liberals seem ashamed of their heritage or ignorant of it. Liberals should be explaining their successes instead of going into a kind of linguistic hiding. Cause the jig is up anyway. People tend to notice who’s a liberal and who’s not.
All of which makes Kagan’s dance this week so weird and depressing. This is a person who is going to do battle with Antonin Scalia? Granted, confirmation hearings are no longer the place for extended discourse on such matters. That’s how it is. But there must be some middle ground, some way to permit just a little candid talk about judicial philosophy before we hand over a lifetime appointment. Jokes about Chinese food are just not enough.

Bikes on Sidewalks: Public Enemy No. 1?

“Get off the sidewalk,” the man yelled a couple of hours ago as he was crossing West End Avenue. “Please!”
I thought the “Please!” was a nice touch.
When I first landed as a weekly newspaper editor in Manhattan in December 2000, I began reading letters to the editor and columns about a subject that seemed to bring Manhattan residents to a boil. The hot topic: bikes on sidewalks.
I think back then I thought this was, well, if not exactly much ado about nothing, then at least much ado about not too much. Maybe that’s cause I lived in Jersey. Now I think differently about bikers who ride—and they do not ride so much as they drive and terrorize. They should get the death penalty.
I have not taken to yelling at them, as the me-plus-three-decades guy did this afternoon. But certainly my mindset has changed, thanks to way too many close calls. Some of the offenders are delivery people speedily servicing the neighborhood; the vast majority are of the amateur variety.
Living in this wacky town has taught me a few things. Like the ways in which the world is divided. There are people with pets and people who hate them. There are New Yorkers who know their neighbors and those who want to live a completely anonymous life. And there are walkers and then there are bikers. Sure, there’s some overlap, but on any given day in Riverside Park, the competition is on. And at any given moment, you are either walking or biking. You are picking a side.
The bikers have what seems like an advantage, namely the bike itself, which is often yielded as a weapon. Us walkers have our sense of moral outrage. We won that out of the fear of walking around.

Summer Now, Summer Then

The first day of summer. It’s hard to know what exactly to make of that.
There was a time, which lives vaguely in my distant memory, when summer really mattered. When there was something carefree about the time of year. Well, I’m a freelancer now—the nice word for unemployed—so I can wear shorts. And I am, right now. But the work piles up, whether it pays enough to pay for the mortgage or not, and there are worried about toilet repairs (no, really, that is what I woke up thinking about) or larger problems. I’m an adult. And I think of summer really as a season of childhood.
I don’t want to get too nostalgic about it, especially since I cannot really remember what I thought about those days. Probably even as a young person I was a bit taken aback by the idea of summer, the somewhat forced gaiety of it all. The duty of relaxing. But probably I preferred summer to going to school or handling the regular responsibilities of the fall and the spring.
One summer I remember. The one after high school. The one where I was really dating for the first time. I remember having worked previous summers, but that summer I got a bit of money, scholarship money really, and my mom gave me permission to goof off in July and most of August, until I went to college at the end of the month. That was a hell of a summer. I remember these sense of having fun—and only having fun—that summer. I’m not sure what I did, but there was the notion very much alive that I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I don’t think I’ve felt that way since the summer of 1986. And I don’t think I ever will.

Matt Dillon Evidently Loves New York

There are celebrity sightings and then there are better celebrity sightings.
My partner and I had a couple last Saturday afternoon, during a couple of long and humid walks around town.
The really impressive thing about celebs in town on a night like last Saturday: the fact that they are even here. I mean, it was so hot and gross that it looked like an ideal time to get out of Dodge and get some relaxation somewhere cooler. And anyplace would have been cooler the other day, before the heat blessedly broke.
Our tally on Saturday: Matt Dillon and Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick.
Dillon was the winner. We saw him up in the northern reaches of Central Park. The non-yuppie part of the park. He was surrounded by about five or six drummers. He had evidently just been playing with them. Dillon was getting congrats all around for his performance.
This whole sighting was adorable on so many levels that it’s hard to keep track. Here’s a celebrity diving into New York life, not only behaving normally but actually going out of his way to participate in a wacky urban moment. The last time I remember seeing Dillon—this dude is basically everywhere—he was eating pizza alone in a downtown eatery while reading The New York Times. It was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.
Speaking of sexy, there were Bacon and Sedgwick. They famously lost dough in the Madoff mess, so maybe they cannot afford to get away. On Saturday night there they were, walking down Amsterdam Avenue, looking impossibly glamorous. Seemed to be heading home. Bacon acted like the little kids who were playing at his feet were not annoying. Now that’s acting. Sedgwick looked stunning in a colorful blue dress. Sure, she seems like someone who could use a sandwich or two, but this is modern-day America and we like our stars skeletal.
The thing I like about these three: they are so New York. I’m not sure what I mean by that but—no, wait. I am sure what I mean by that, at least in the case of Dillon. He’s part of the scene instead of apart from it. Unafraid to dive in. Seeing something like that is like watching a star really shine.

A Year

Laid off a year ago.
It was the day after Memorial Day. Now it’s the day after the Memorial Day again.
Not an easy year. Now I’m writing a lot, more than I did working as an editor with some seriously bitchy women. Freelancing these days for just about everyone, or at least that’s the way it feels sometimes. I’m lucky to have some jobs. I’m not so lucky to make so much less money than I did a year ago.
Still not sure how everything will wind up. Like millions of my fellow Americans, I find myself scared when I think about the future, short-term or long-term. I’m willing to change career paths altogether, but wary about picking another line of work. My partner and I were talking this morning about what I should do. Teaching? Something else? When is it too late in life to switch gears in a dramatic way? And when is it more dangerous to stick with what you thought you wanted to do? These are the questions that roll around in my brain.
I don’t want to pick a career path that, like my current field of journalism, is full of people fleeing. And so far I’ve felt that if I’m going to fail anyway, then it might as well be in the field I care about.
Sounds pessimistic, I know.
Some days are that dark. Some are not. I know I am not alone, which comforts me. But it makes it more competitive out there too. My political priorities have changed. I'm a jobs dude now, and even less interested than I used to be in the question of Middle East peace. There are a lot of important issues now about which I give not a damn.
One plus of the past year: I know who my friends are. And I’m exceedingly grateful to them.

Sorry, But It's Time For a Draft

It’s hard not to notice that we need a draft.
Bigtime.
Yesterday.
We’ve got two wars going and now a disaster on the Gulf. Again. But there’s nobody to respond to the B.P. mess because we’ve got too wars going.
We need people. We need to defend American soil, this time from polluters. But there’s nobody to do that job. Watch the news shows. The only people standing on the beach as the oil comes in are TV reporters. We need people with shovels.
I take no joy in calling for a draft. I remember being very nervous when I registered for the draft, especially since it was around the time that Ronald Reagan was regarded as a wacky war-monger, at least in my house, and not as the best president ever. That came later. Anyway, it was daunting to sign up with the Selective Service and think about going off to fight a war.
What we have today, though, is a volunteer army. God bless those who serve. They are brave and smart and capable and being asked to do too much. The government sends off too few people to handle too many responsibilities.
I guess what I’m really asking for is some kind of national service. Leave it up to the young people whether they want to wage war in Iraq or Afghanistan or shovel oil out of the sand on the Louisiana coast. But they need to do something, cause this nation is going from crisis to crisis to crisis and pretending it can all be done without any cost outside of a few unlucky volunteers. Make room for the unemployed, too. There are plenty of people who could help right now.
There are times when a federal response is needed. The B.P. crisis is one of those times. It was cute that the Obama Administration wasted a month pretending that the cleanup responsibilities rested alone with a private company. But once the oil hits, Americans begin to wonder why there has not been a speedier and smarter response on the part of the federal government itself.
There are jobs to do and we need people to do them.

Passionate Primaries

Tomorrow’s going to be an awfully interesting day for fans for American politics.
Two incumbent Democratic Senators, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, both face tough primary challenges from the left. I stink at predicting, but I think Specter is toast. And I don’t know enough about politics is Arkansas to understand what will happen there.
Lincoln has tried to survive by being a centrist Democrat, but ours is not a kind world for centrists. Lincoln was against the public option in a health care bill, so liberals in her own party are taking aim at her. She alienated Republicans in Arkansas—something that I suspect is easy to do—by supporting parts of the president’s agenda. All this prompted Lt. Gov. Bill Halter to run against her, but the New York Times has a piece today(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/us/politics/17pennsylvania.html?scp=3&sq=arlen%20specter&st=cse) in the race where John Brummett, a columnist at the Arkansas News, quips of the Democratic primary: “All we’re doing here is picking someone to get beat in November.” The Republicans are likely to win the seat in the fall.
Over in Pennsylvania, the chickens are coming home to roost for Specter, who has always had a constituency of one: Arlen Specter. He was talking a lot last week about his reputation of bringing home the bacon for Pennsylvania. But his history is long…he’s the guy who trashed Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings a couple of political lifetimes ago…and it will not be all that sad to see him go. His challenger is in the Democratic primary, Rep. Joe Sestak, had the guts to run when it looked like he would not be able to beat Specter, who switched to the Democratic Party last year. Now Sestak seems like he would be as strong as Specter as the Democratic nominee.
The results will tell us something, yes, about the much-mentioned anger that’s alive in both parties, the anti-Washington mood. But turnout numbers always tell us something else, something important about the level of engagement of voters. Those numbers tend to be kind of sad, even in years when our papers and cable TV shows tell us that we’re awfully angry about things. The most important thing, in an exciting election or a boring one, is to vote.

Americans Still Not Fond of Fonda; Up Next in the Culture Wars…Elena Kagan

Well, I like Jane Fonda. But apparently Middle America is still as ticked as ever about her anti-war stance during the Vietnam years.
I did a blog item for Rentedspaces.com about Fonda’s Atlanta loft (http://www.rentedspaces.com/2010/05/07/jane-fondas-atlanta-loft-for-sale-or-rent/). I thought it was a pretty straightforward piece and there was nothing controversial about it, but it’s already received more comments than any other blog I’ve done. I’m fascinated that Fonda remains this polarizing a figure.
But these are polarizing times.
Our next culture clash was introduced by the President his morning: a new nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. I like Elena Kagan. So far as I’m concerned, President Obama can keep picking women from New York City for the Supreme Court until there are nine of them serving. But I’m expecting a pretty fierce debate will surround Kagan. The rightists are not going to be happy with Kagan’s commitment to equal treatment under the law for gay people. Heck, some won’t even like her being single. But I think she’s a qualified choice from a president smart enough to know he will have, come next year, even fewer votes in Congress for his picks. He might as well go for what he wants while he still has a chance.
Jane Fonda and Elena Kagan: women worth fighting about.

News: A Carter Comes to Town

Soft-spoken but equipped with a strong message, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter told an audience at Columbia University today that the way Americans treat the mentally ill remains a “moral issue”—and not nearly enough is being done.
After about four decades of advocating for better care for the mentally ill, Carter has a new book just published. In “Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis,” coauthored with Susan K. Goland and Kathryn E. Cade, Carter is cheered by the medical breakthroughs in study of the human brain. Indeed, she told a Columbia crowd yesterday at Miller Theatre that she is “really optimistic” about what can be done for the one in four Americans who will be touched by mental illness.
But she sounded the alarm, too, stressing that the recommendations she helped spark from a presidential commission during the Carter Administration have never really all been instituted. A later commission, ordered up by President George W. Bush, hit many of the same recommendations decades later, Carter said.
“I am frustrated and even angry,” she admitted. “We know what to do and don’t do it. And millions are suffering.”Carter became interested in mental illness during her husband’s first campaign for governor, she said. Handing out leaflets for her husband at 4:30 a.m., she encountered a woman at a cotton mill leaving her shift. She had lint in her hair and clothes. She told Carter about being on her way home to a mentally ill daughter. “It haunted me all day long,” said Carter, who later approached her husband about the importance of the issue. Gov. Jimmy Carter wound up appointing his wife to be among those to address the issue.
Carter remembered how the anthropologist Margaret Mead, visiting the White House, once said that a society can be measured by how it treats the most vulnerable, including the mentally ill. “We are failing to measure up to Margaret Mead’s standard,” Carter said.
The 82-year-old former First Lady gave an address and then was joined in a panel discussion at Columbia, where she said the stigma surrounding mental illness remains the biggest barrier to progress. While some still think of the mentally ill as potentially violent, Carter stressed that they are more likely to be victims of violence than act out themselves. And people who are mentally ill are far more likely than other Americans to be victims themselves, she said. “And that’s inexcusable,” she said.
Pointing to the bright side, Carter said the recent health care reform law signed by President Obama had some good things in it for mental health advocates.
“Look at all the good things that are happening,” she said. “We have treatments now. We know so much about the brain.”

Theater (and Politics): Molly Ivins, Back From the Dead and More Needed than Ever

I used to hate Philadelphia. Until sometime around last weekend.
I think it had much to do with a best pal from high school, who went to Philadelphia to attend Drexel University and then largely dropped out of my life. I remember visiting him and resenting everything from the passage of time to the dirt of what I thought was a small-town city.
But last weekend I did not see so much dirt. I saw gorgeous architecture and received fantastic service in restaurants and saw Kathleen Turner play the late, great Molly Ivins in a play called “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins.” The show’s running at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, home to the Philadelphia Theatre Company, on South Broad. The show is directed by David Esbjornson, who keeps thing moving along well during a one-act, 75-minute running time. I love that running time.
I also love both Turner and Ivins. Let’s take Turner first. She’s a fine film actress, but she really shines on the stage, where she’s even more physically imposing and gives amazingly nuanced performances. She wuz robbed of the Tony a few years ago when she was starring in an unforgettably good “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Now she’s playing Ivins, not as a caricature but as a larger-than-life woman who knows that she’s in danger of becoming a caricature.
“Red Hot Patriot” has some weaknesses as a play. Maybe more than some. At least there’s not a lot of silly set-up and effort to make this into something it isn’t, but then again the writers, Margaret Engel and Allison Engel, seem most interested in reminding us who Molly Ivins was, and why she mattered. Still does. She was known for her wisecracks—she gave President George W. Bush the nickname “Shrub” and she famously said of Republican Rep. Jim Collins that if his “IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” So we get laughs from Ivins, ones she really wrote, and a sense of what is was like to live in the shadow of a domineering (and downright mean, from the looks of things) father. In the final, fantastic few minutes of the show, we also get a sense of the loneliness of an activist/writer’s life and the unpleasant reality that we are not living up to the standards Ivins set for us as citizens.
I’m reading a book now called “Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life” by Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith, so I was overly prepared for the play. I found myself thinking that “Red Hot Patriot” was too much of a mixed bag (lotsa mixing of Texas political history and bad Republican presidents and the Ivins biography) and not enough of any one thing, but certainly I appreciated seeing Turner center stage, looking and sounding fabulous. Working together across the normal barriers of time and life and death, Turner and Ivins team up to remind us of the importance of speaking up and speaking out.
“Red Hot Pat” winds up being a bit more moving than it deserves to be, both because of the woman who inspired it and the woman who presents it. Both women astound me. Both were worth a trip to Philadelphia, my new favorite weekend getaway spot.

Tweet Time

Okay, I gave up last week and started Tweeting.
I felt like I had very little choice. And as if time had run out on my non-Tweeting days.
After all, the idea had been in my head for many months. Almost a year ago, at a reunion weekend event at the J-school at Columbia University, I went to a great seminar on using social media. A former prof of mine (and so many others), Sree Sreenivasan, argued that Twitter was a powerful tool for journalists. I understood his theory, but was worried about another time-eating technology that would eventually aggravate me. I mean, Facebook has pretty much taught me to hate the friends of my friends and, on a bad day, my actual friends.
In terms of Tweeting, I just made it under the New York magazine wire. I started last week and today the magazine is out with a cover story about Tweeting in the big city. Is this one of those things where the trend is over by the time the mainstream media takes note of it?
I don't know, but so far I am in awe of my fellow Tweeters. I shoulda picked dumber people to "follow" on Twitter, since the hyper-articulate and funny folks I selected intimidate the heck out of me. These writers tend to pack an awful lot of meaning into a few words. I'm a little jealous. Yes, I mean you, Kim Severson and Susan Orlean and Ruth Reichl and there are even some men worth following.
I'm hoping, through Internet osmosis, to learn their ways. For my Tweets and all my writing.

O’Connor’s Call to Arms

Last week former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor came to town, just a couple of days before her former job was back in the news with the announcement of John Paul Stevens's retirement.
When she was delivering her message, though, O'Connor had something different on her mind: how much an independent judiciary matters to America.
Even if most Americans have no idea what that means.
In remarks to the New York City Bar a week ago tonight, O’Connor laid it on the line in a straight-to-the point lecture at the bar headquarters on West 46th Street. She said Americans don’t much understand why it’s important for judges to be independent—and she called for an education campaign to change that ugly fact. This is one woman who is not happy with the study showing that two-thirds of Americans know the judges on “American Idol” but only 15 percent can identify the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
“I say to you, New Yorkers…you have some work to do,” O’Connor said, urging the state to change its merit selection system. O’Connor weighed in against the election of judges, something that still happens throughout the U.S. “No other nation in the world has chosen to elect its judges,” she said.
O’Connor, 80, had some other complaints too: the “flood of money” that comes into judicial elections and the lack of civics classes for young people.
In 2008, O’Connor said, more than $5 million was spent in a race for the Alabama Supreme Court. At least one survey showed that 70 percent of the American people think judges are affected by campaign contributions—and more than one-quarter of judges themselves think the same thing. In her remarks, O’Connor spoke more than once of the courtroom being a much-needed “safe place” where citizens can expect their grievances to be heard fairly.
Another stat: one-third of Americans cannot name the three branches of government. “We can’t have that. That’s amazing,” O’Connor said. “We have to do something about it.”
What to do? O’Connor would like to see states switch away from elected judges, but more than that she called for a massive education effort. That would include old-fashioned civics lessons, but delivered in a 21st-century manner. She recommended www.ourcourts.org, which includes games about civics. She said the games have been a hit with young people.
“The interesting thing,” O’Connor said,” is that while they’re having fun, they’re learning. They don’t even know that they’re learning.”
O’Connor was introduced by New York’s own Judith Kaye, the former chief justice of the Court of Appeals. Kaye called O’Connor “practical and principled.” Then O’Connor went on to prove as much.

After a Facebook Fracas

Surely I cannot be the only one reading Facebook fights this week about health care. I’ve even participated in one of them—with the Friend of a Friend.
Which led me to wonder all over again why the hell I am in touch with people who I let go of decades ago. Was not that a natural progression, to say farewell more or less forever to the people who just happened to be in my second- and third-grade class? What made me think I was wrong to have let the past slide into the past? Why do we need to pretend to be pals with people who were never really our pals to begin with?
Facebook sure as hell makes me wonder about these things. And more.
Sure, I hate the Friends of my Friends. Everybody does. Oh, maybe that’s an overstatement, but you know what I mean. After I finish reading the political views of my supposed Friends, I question whether I even want to be in touch with some of them. Especially this week, when the hardcore Republicans have come to define bad sportsmanship. They like to lose in the meanest way possible.
I’m grouchy, I know. But I’m also serious. There are things about Facebook that I really like. I don’t think the whole thing is a fake community or always a waste of time. I recognize that this may be the way we communicate with large numbers of people, even if I’m put off by the sonograms and the obituaries and all the news that I used to get via a phone call, which did seem a tad more intimate.
Not long ago I had a boss who used the word “friend” in a wildly ridiculous fashion, saying “my friend Kevin” or “my friend” this or that. The people who worked for him were aware that these people were in no way his friend. He wasn’t. It was sad. If anybody had actually liked the guy, they might have told him just how sad.
Now I wonder if we are all like that. We will be in big trouble, won’t we, when we are unable to delineate even a rough definition of the word “friend?" And sometimes I feel like we are headed that way.

Movies: ‘Steal’ Stacks the Deck

Finally got around to seeing “The Art of the Steal.” Which tells the tale of the decision to move the Barnes Foundation from outside of Philadelphia to inside Philadelphia. It’s a complicated, historical and eventually hysterical tale, which the filmmakers tell using bad-guy music (mostly by Philip Glass, cause this is a high-class affair) to tell us which side to be on—namely against the move to the Parkway downtown.
The movie is entertaining enough, at least until it has about three different endings. I thought the story of Dr. Albert Barnes was compelling and interesting. How he chose to exhibit his art and how he fought the Philadelphia establishment, which now seems very much to have the upper hand. Barnes made a mistake we all win: he died. And his will, which he evidently was iron-clad about keeping the art where it is today, did not foresee a whole host of political maneuvers that were to come after his death. I thought Barnes probably made some mistakes along the way, maybe because he let his anti-establishment venom define his decision-making.
I have not been to the Barnes, but the movie makes me want to go before the move. The morning after the movie I chatted with my mom, who mostly remembered from her Barnes visit a lot of trouble parking and rooms that were too small for her taste. “Whoever’s going to move it,” she said, “I think that’s a big plus.”

Theater: Rhoda Gone Wild

It’s the joy of attending a preview performance: you can enjoy the theatrical experience without knowing how much The New York Times hates the show you are seeing.
I experienced this last Friday night at “Looped,” the new Broadway-based bio-play, about Tallulah Bankhead. This one stars Valerie Harper, which pretty much describes why it’s worth seeing. Ostensibly the play is about how the theater legend had to “loop” or re-record a line of dialogue on the last film she ever did. Since she’s drunk and high and generally high-strung, that turns out not to be an easy assignment. Although the basic idea is rooted in truth, a New York Post critic charged Monday that at least one plot point is way off base, historically speaking.
Some of us, though, were there more for Valerie than for Tallulah. Having grown up with Mary and Rhoda, I am a pretty big Harper fan. She delivers in this stage turn, as she has in others. I once saw her turn a play about the writer Pearl Buck into a worthwhile endeavor, so she sure as hell is not going to have a problem making Tallulah interesting. There’s no mistaking that behind the sitcom legend exists an actual actress. Harper’s comic timing was never in question, but she’s a startlingly good physical performer. She knows how to use her body, whether she’s reaching or slumping or commanding the stage, which she does right from her entrance.
Playing Bankhead in full-diva mode, Harper’s aforementioned comic timing gets quite a workout. The script by Matthew Lombardo is not necessarily more than the sum of its parts. But the parts are funny, some of the laugh-out-loud variety. In places it’s predictable or hoary or, since this is the famously promiscuous theater legend we are talking about, whore-y. But I found myself laughing out loud at the jokes about sex, drugs and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. So sue me.
I was hardly alone. This was an audience of Harper fans. “She’ll always be Rhoda to me,” said the woman who bought tickets in front of me at the box office a few weeks ago. Now Harper will always be Tallulah too, but the Times, in the person of Charles Isherwood, expressed a general sense of disappointment about the play once the review came yesterday morning. Isherwood has a point, but I think anyone who has a sense of theater history or appreciates larger-than-life performance might want to catch “Looped.” There are laughs to be had and moments to be savored.

TV: Goodbye, Oscar, ’til Next Year

One woman tells another, standing last night at a newsstand on the Upper West Side, that this year’s Oscar telecast was a good show. Earlier the same day, Cindy Adams reports on a party in Hollywood where the post-Oscar crowd pretty much agreed the show was “boring. Boring. Bo-ring.”
So which is it?I guess I’d go with the folks who thought it was less than the sum of its parts. There was a pacing problem from the start. Don’t get me wrong. I like Neil Patrick Harris. I’m thinking of naming my pillow after him. He’s adorable, and he was great on the Tonys and…then didn’t he even show up on the Emmys? But the Oscars? I thought he was oddly out of place, as was that musical number. By my count, the show started three different times.
The hosts should have been allowed to host. They needed a bit more air time, and I think I know where to get it—cut the God-awful, poorly choreographed salutes to the musical scores and lose the horror movie retrospective. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin could have used a bit more time…and we could have used one or the other, probably. I’m not sure they worked particularly well as a team. But it was worth a shot.
In the end, I’m not sure this show can be saved. It’s just so looooooooooooong. More people watched this year, which is good news for ABC. But the direction seems to be done in some sort of defensive crouch, as if the people behind the telecast do not want to offend anyone. So they wind up entertaining us less than they might.
Still, my unhealthy relationship with Oscar is likely to continue. I cannot quite say the show matters to me the way it once did. But I find it very hard to give up on it altogether.

We (Mostly) Survived February

Ah, March.
I like March. It never really decides what it wants to do, in which season it belongs. There are hints—especially when it comes to the light—of spring. Outside my window right now there is a spring light bouncing off the buildings across the way. It’s spring.
Except of course it’s not. It’s still very much winter, with snow on the ground. But March does at least hint at the spring that’s on its way.
People want it to come. Yesterday I heard a woman tell a fellow who was taking her picture that she is through with winter. I keep reading this on Facebook, too, the new town hall. Where people share their deepest passion. And from what I read the passion is clear and nearly universal: enough with winter. We have had some record-breaking snowfall. I think I heard during the hysteria last week about the weather that we had survived the snowiest February ever in New York City.
The upside to unemployment: I did not have to commute to the office. But I did have freelance tasks and the regular business of errand-going. Maybe the snow is prettier here on the Upper West Side than in Midtown, but my memory of this snowy winter is mostly a positive one. Almost every time I was tempted to complain I found myself, at almost at exactly the moment of frustration, looking up and out and seeing the most stunning presentations of snow. They were like works of art. But they were real life.

America’s Mom Sings Her Heart Out

My partner and I went last Saturday night to see Florence Henderson in her Joe’s Pub appearance downtown. I had not been downtown in a bit, and it felt kinda like visiting another city. Well, it is another city. And it’s a happening place.
Loved it. And loved seeing Henderson, who really is America’s Mom. She led us all in a group rendition of the “Brady Bunch” theme song. She called it “our National Anthem,” and she has a frighteningly good point. The only difference: we all seemed to know every word and every note of the theme song.
Before the act started, Henderson was the star of a brief film clip review. She’s had quite a career, but she goes out of her way here to stress the theater and New York-ish aspects of things. She insists she stumbled into the Brady realm. “You cannot kill it with a stick,” she says of the sitcom. “Believe me, I have tried.”
Actually, she seems good-natured about being identified as America’s Mom and you can feel the love that the audience has for her presence. She plays against type with a vengeance, though, throwing in jokes about Viagra and Tiger Woods. Mostly, though, she likes to reminisce about her days doing Broadway musicals, which clearly remain close to her heart. She lost out on the movie version of “Oklahoma,” she recounts, adding with considerable comic energy, “That little bitch Shirley Jones got it.”
Henderson’s voice is not always up to every challenge, but her show has an oddly deep emotional power. She talks movingly of being embarrassed as a teenager of her family’s poverty. She was the tenth child in her family and has a few candid things to say about how she was unsure of her mom’s love for her. Not what you expect from America’s Mom, but that makes it all the more powerful. And she delivers a killer, from-the-heart rendition of “My Old Kentucky Home.”
If FloHen comes back to the Village or anywhere near you, go. America's Mom has more heart than we even knew. How reassuring.

Michelle Obama's Ill-Timed Food Fight

As if the president’s poll numbers were not low enough, his wife has decided to go around the country telling people that their children are too fat.
Somebody should stop her.
At least that’s what I was thinking this morning, as I watched First Lady Michelle Obama tell “Good Morning America” about her own affection for fast food. “I love burgers and fries,” Mrs. Obama felt compelled to say to Robin Roberts. Yeah, sure, but not as much as the average American.
I looked at my TV and said aloud: “Is she really going to talk about this?”Unspoken was the part where I find myself amazed that she would choose to launch her initiative at exactly this moment, the wrong moment, right in the middle of the Great Recession and her husband’s first most serious political crisis. Not to mention the two wars underway.
Timing is everything in politics. And this timing stinks.
It’s weird cause I agree with the First Lady. Childhood obesity really is an epidemic. And it’s true too that Americans seem these days to be scared of exactly the wrong things, expressing almost unending anxiety about a terrorist attack without realizing that French fries are an even more pressing enemy. A lot more of us are going to die from our diets than any outside threat, no matter how manic the media attention on Al Qaeda makes us.
And still. I cannot help but think that with the Tea Party people in full fury, and even President Obama’s supporters wondering if he overreached in his first year, this is an ill-timed venture. In New York City, we have seen the resentment that can come when the government tells its people what to eat. On our bad days, we accuse Mayor Michael Bloomberg of instituting a Nanny State. Surely the White House does not need the label right now, as it pursues what conservative critics call a government takeover of health care.
With Mrs. Obama, it’s even worse, because the food fight she’s starting also looks a little like the dumbing-down of the First Lady. Mrs. Obama is the second straight First Lady to pretend that she is less intelligent than she actually is. Weird, but not really surprising in a country that took approximately 16 years to warm up to a strong woman named Hillary Rodham Clinton. So rather than use her still-impressive standing with the American people to address the issues of the day, Mrs. Obama is going off on a poll-tested tangent. Such is the life of a First Lady.
Maybe I’m being too critical—which, in turn, could have something to do with losing my job six months ago. Yeah, that’s it. My perspective is off. The problem is that I am hardly alone with this perception problem, and Mrs. Obama will be chatting about children’s diets on my psychological turf. Even with the unemployment rate officially slipping below 10 percent according to last week’s news, a lot of us out here are suffering. We’re either unemployed or under-employed or over-employed, needing to come up with five or six jobs to replace the one that we lost. We’re stressed, we’re fat and we do not need a beautiful thin woman talking to us right this minute about portion control and eating our greens. The East Wing of the White House has seriously misread the mood of the nation, something the West Wing has been doing for about a year now.
So here’s my memo to the First Lady: Let’s not have that chat about childhood obesity right now. Wait until more of us have jobs. Cancel the rest of the media tour. Instead, let’s make a deal. I’ll try to eat less white food and more vegetables and get to the gym three or four times a week—aerobic activity each time. I’ll do yoga on Wednesday nights. And you go back to talking about supporting our troops and working in the White House garden.
If you have any extra time after that, please use it to pass at least a little health care. My COBRA’s going to run out soon.

That Really Was Super

Nothing bored me like football. And I felt some sense of satisfaction this season, when the Wall Street Journal went and analyzed the number of action that actually occurs in a game. I cannot remember the number, but it was less than 20 minutes of playing football on the field. It’s mostly time-outs and the clock running out and blah blah blah.
That said, last night was really something special. My partner and I had the TV on, but I didn’t really move into game mode until the late third quarter. I missed that big post-intermission play (oh, I mean halftime) that got things going, but I saw enough to be very excited. Not because of football, but because of New Orleans. A city that is singular, a place like no other, and one that has been too largely forgotten.
Even today, on the morning after, it is a bit disturbing to hear people who have not visited or even read the city talk about how it is completely back from its Katrina days. That’s not true. New Orleans is a city that still very much suffers and deserves the attention of Americans of all stripes. Our president, like our last president, has paid too little attention. As have the rest of us. But the big game and the even bigger victory by the Saints is a reminder of the spirit of a great people. They know how to have a good time. And after all they have suffered, they certainly deserve one.

Goodbye, Robert B. Parker

My favorite writer died last week.
Not my Favorite Writer, the literary person whose work I would talk about at a cocktail party. Nope. This was the regular-guy writer who still managed to have a literary sensibility. The guy who wrote books that I actually read. Each and every year, for decades at a stretch.
The writer is Robert B. Parker. And if you have not checked out the Spenser novels over the years, you have missed something special.
There’s a practical problem when a writer this good, this essential to one’s reading life, dies. And that’s the simple matter of not having him produce any more books. But I do take satisfaction—and like to think that he would—in the nature of his death. Apparently he died at his desk while writing.
That’s the writer’s equivalent of dying with your boots on. And it fits this Parker fellow, who apparently equated writer’s block with laziness.
Thank you, Mr. Parker, for so many hours of entertainment.

Goodbye to Sutton…During the State of the State

I love a good juxtaposition. And the one yesterday was striking.
There was a funeral for Percy Sutton, the former Manhattan borough president and key African-American figure who was known as part of the “Gang of Four” in Harlem. The other, surviving members of that much-heralded group: Rep. Charles Rangel, former Mayor David Dinkins and Basil Paterson.
The other event yesterday, oddly and powerfully related to the first, was the State of the State Address by Gov. David Paterson, Basil Paterson’s son.
So striking to think of these two events going on simultaneously. Could Percy Sutton, in his youth, have ever anticipated the day when New York would have an African-American governor? Or, better yet, president? I thought the State of the State provided a compelling background for Sutton remembrances…and that, conversely, it must have been something for Paterson to stand in the Statehouse in Albany on the same afternoon, knowing that his friend and a mentor was being laid to rest. If you made a novel with these characters and themes, the critics would say you were stretching things beyond what might be credible.
Something else helped yesterday, namely that the governor gave a good, honest, smart but simple address. He has a long way to go in terms of making himself a viable candidate for re-election, and just about everyone has decided that the state's attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, will be our next governor. But there’s some fight left in this fellow Paterson, enough to make it a more interesting year than it might have been. And he should get credit for being on the right side of history with his remarks, particularly when it comes to his call for ethics reform in a capital city that absolutely needs dramatic change.

Movies: Not ‘Complicated’ Necessarily, but Flawed

By all means, go see “It’s Complicated.” If only to encourage Hollywood to make the occasional film about people older than 25, and of course to see actors of the caliber of Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Or go to realize, as if “The Office” had not already proved it beyond a reasonable doubt, that John Krasinski is a cutie.
But do not go expecting a movie that makes sense.
I saw it more than 24 hours ago, and I am still confused as to who was really in love and which relationship the Streep character should have pursued. Only this morning I realized the extent to which this must be a divorced woman’s revenge fantasy. I had heard as much going in, but it’s really the only way to begin to understand what passes for a narrative arc in this mess of a film.
Again, though, I think it is worth seeing. It’s fascinating as real estate porn, given that Streep’s character—um, did she have a name? She must have, but I have forgotten—finds it necessary to add on to her obviously already-huge home. She’s doing so at exactly the time that she needs less space, as the kids are gone and so is Baldwin, her ex. But in this consumer’s paradise the protagonist would never look around her gigantic living quarters and realize she already has enough—of anything. This is one weird flick, especially for those of us who share studio apartments.
One other awful thing: the scenes between Streep and her pals, played by Alexandra Wentworth and Rita Wilson and Mary Kay Place. Only Place gets the tone right. These scenes are painful to watch, the forced gaiety of fake friendship…the kind that only appears in sitcoms. Or am I wrong? Do women really talk like this when they are alone together? I have no way of knowing for sure. Thank God. But I will admit that I wonder.
What did I like? Baldwin. I almost always like Baldwin. And Street was compelling, as always. And Martin is sweet. And did I mention that Krasinski is cute? The audience I saw the movie with was crazy about him. Every crinkle of the eyes had people howling. It was as if people feel intimately connected to him after his “Office” years, the many hours he has spent in our living rooms. In this sitcom of a movie, audience members may feel most comfortable with an actual sitcom star.