IPW

The Update

The traps are set. What did I use? Nutella. Apparently peanut-butter works pretty well, but this is a household with condiments of the more continental variety. After all, mice eat cheese don't they? I put the trap down somewhat out of the way where I won't step on it and trap myself, breaking my pinky-toe and flinging Nutella in my eye at the same time. No signs of the mice in a couple days. Well, one day. I'm thinking my theory about the iron is right and they all ran away since I didn't find any cheese alters. Keep an eye for the outcome of this fascinating saga.

Perhaps slightly more fascinating are our activities over the weekend. The activities that didn't involve battling miniature mammals. On Thursday we went after work to an opening that my friend Eirik Johnson was having at the Yossi Milo Gallery. I've been friends with Eirik for a while now, since high-school which means long in the rear-view. He is just one of the many people I graduated with that went on to great things which is slightly troubling. The opening was well attended mainly with the usual free booze crowd. There was also a spontaneous high-school reunion which I wasn't really expecting, NY being a few thousand miles away from high-school. Strangely enough, and coincidentally, the opening was followed on Friday by a "Seattle Party" like I mentioned before. It was attended by most of the people we saw at Eirik's on Thursday and a few hundred other of the Seattle ex-pat as they are called. I'm wary of the ex-pat title as it connotes intellectuals discussing their mutual disdain for whatever place they were patriotic to. The idea of an ex-pat in my mind is somebody who left a unenlightened place for an enlightened one. This may be true with Paris in the 1930's, but isn't necessarily true of New York vs. Seattle today. Seattle doesn't have the hustle bustle of course, but it is an intellectual enclave in the west, the weather being so poor that there is little else to do but stay inside and git smart. I think mainly what Seattle lacks is a crush of humanity which most of the really big cities of the world have and that's what the so called ex-pats flock here for. Perhaps a bit more of the 'real world' People who don't look or think like you, and who are in your face. That's what I like about this place anyway, and I hope that's what other people come here for. I suspect it might just be for the parties though. Anyway, Eirik's show was a big success and I was proud of my buddy who had made it big.

Now, some time has passed since I started the above, that was after all a week ago, I was younger man then. Since then We've done some things that will be easier describe in lists:

1. Brunch with said photographer Eirik and his wife and Gabe and Carolina on Saturday at 'Paul's Boutique', the original building and corner store on the cover of the Beastie Boys album of the same name. It isn't a crappy little clothing store anymore but an upscale and small coffee place. The crappy clothing stores in the lower east side are drying up, I already miss them even though I personally have never bought anything in any of them and am slightly disgusted by them. Am I disgusted by how wonderful they are? I think so yes. The whole area though has a history of them and city has made a half-hearted(assed) attempt to save them by proclaiming the area the Orchard Street Shopping District, and closing Orchard to traffic on Sundays. It basically looks the same on Sundays that it does any other day except that there are no cars. Unfortunately or not, market forces are driving the prices up and every day one of these little stores closes and is taken over by a trendy bar ironically called, "Paul's Boutique" or "Tenement" or something derivative of the place that just went out of business in order to make way for it. I liken it to the Europeans wiping out the Indians and then in a sad-assed and much belated show of respect for the dispossessed, naming a baseball team after them. But such is progress and eventually it will shift again, I just won't be around to bemoan it.

2. Sunday we went to lunch with a big group of friends, David (one of the three avid readers of this blog and my "boss" who I should never offend in any way, like for example putting "boss" in quotes), Joe and Kate, Chace and Leeorah and ourselves. No we weren't there....uh. Anyway we attempted to go to dim-sum, but being that it was the first day of Chinese New Years it was pandaemonium. It put the "panda" in pandaemonium (what the hell is wrong with me?) I don't really need to comment right now on Chinatown since our Doctor's is there and I believe I've somewhat covered that area of town. I'll just say that there were lots of people there, mostly of Chinese descent, setting off explosions resulting in blizzards of colored confetti. Instead of braving the two and a half hour waits (at the dim-sum restaurants) we moseyed up to the paradoxically named L'Orange Bleu. It is a French-Moroccan place which felt worlds apart from Chinatown in the throws of celebration, though only a few blocks away. It was delicious.

3. Saw Munich. Very powerful. Finally convinces me never to work for Mossad.

4. Saw Midnight Cowboy, finally, starring my pal Jon Voight. You might think I'd seen this excellent film but I missed it somehow, along with a few other classics that people look at me like I stole a baby when I tell them I haven't seen. Like what? Oh, Wizard of Oz. There You see? Maybe I SHOULD go steal a baby.

5. Went to gym twice. That's a weird place, the 14th Street YMCA. Especially the locker room. Basically take any form of public transport, the bus in your town for example, I like to use the F train here in NY since it holds every layer of social strata. Separated the men from the women. Take their clothes off. Have them stand around talking about the most random things in the world and you'll have the appropriate picture. One nude old man told another one the other day that young girls had started looking at him again and smiling. The other one suggested they were laughing at him. It's quite a scene.

Well I guess that's about it. Work is busy, at the office and at home so little time to blog, but I'm putting off several important projects tonight to make sure everyone out there knows exactly what's going on over here and why.

P.S. No mice in the Nutella trap. Maybe I should put a new one down with hummus.

Posted by ian at January 30, 2006 10:24 PM