Noise Between Stations

Category: Dear Diary

The Clearing

Once in a while the Monopoly game of life tosses us Second Prize in a Beauty Contest card. Last night, courtesy of the nice people at the New Yorker and Johnny Walker, I saw a preview of the film The Clearing with Robert Redford, Willem Dafoe and Helen Mirren. The plot was thriller, but the genre was drama, focusing more on the characters than the suspense, which was fine with me as the extensive dialog between Redford and Dafoe is music to the ears. The event included hor d’oeuvres and scotch (of course) and capped off with a Q&A session with director Pieter Jan Brugge and writer Justin Haythe, all in the theater of the Tribeca Grand hotel. It all felt very priviledged and very New York.

5/25/2004
Happily Engaged

11/27/2003
Liebe

11/27/2003
Photos from Vacation in Hamburg

Some curiosities seen in Hamburg, Germany:

The U.S. Customs Services erected a kiosk to receive comments and suggestions…

…but after booting up it awaits a password

What new office buildings look like

My First Sony. I love the three progressively bigger green buttons to adjust the volume. Oddly, the arrows on the rewind button point to the right instead of the left. This is because the tape winds to the left, but I wonder if anyone actually uses that little window to judge how much tape has played, especially 3 year olds? This is aggravated by how the tape goes in “upside-down,” tape first, which fooled some people using it. There’s a little icon and arrow to the right that tries to help with that. In spite of these little faults, a neat little way to bring music to children.

In the bookstore in the mall, two shelves devoted to books about tieing knots. Notice the supplied red and blue rope.

The apartment we stayed in had these little water heaters underneath each sink instead of using one big, centrally located heater. A small challenge to my notion of what infrastructure in a house should be centralized. Unlike most German appliances, they worked weakly and inconsistently.

In New York’s JFK airport, the Brooklyn Beer Garden. And we wonder why U.S.-German relations are strained.

4/14/2003
Car Free

Finally sold my Beetle. Sniff. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss her until a week before the sale. Still, it’s good to be a carfree city dweller.

Tom tracked me down using the Internet. He flew in from Wyoming to get the car. He works as a coal miner, and his wife teaches. They have four daughters. We had a drink at the hotel bar, signed some papers, and talked about how cold it’s been this winter and his drive home. Then I walked across the street to the airport and rode the monorail (which has a voice like Data’s from Star Trek) to the Airtrain (which has a logo designed by Pentagram) to the subway (wherein a man chewed potato chips in such a way that many fell out of his mouth) which brought me to 3/4 of a block from my apartment. I walked up the steps to street level and peered straight through the clear sky to the brilliant moon and stars.

3/15/2003
The Quietest Place in Central Park

I’ve tried to determine the quietest place in Central Park, which I think is in the northwest corner, about a block east of 103rd St and Central Park West in a hilly, wooded section. I hadn’t thought of this question in terms of time, but on Christmas night almost the entire park was silent, with a heavy snowfall continuing late into the night. The Pinetum was magical, which I just discovered is by design…Evergreens played an important role in the original design of the Park. Olmsted and Vaux created a “Winter Drive” along the western carriage road from 102nd to 72nd Streets. Groupings of pines, spruces, and firs added color to the winter landscape and provided a backdrop for deciduous shrubs and oak, ash, and maple trees.

12/28/2002
Travels

11/14/2002
ASIS&T 2002 Philadelphia

This weekend I’m heading to Philly for the ASIS&T Annual conference. You too? See you at the hotel bar on Saturday, 7:30.

11/14/2002
A Day in the Sun

Homeless man sits and reads newspaper behind Metropolitan Museum of Art

Descriptions of beautiful day in New York.

Museum patrons don’t seem to notice.

How rear of museum borders Central Park.

A giant grid of modernist glass forms backdrop.

Just inside, figures and busts from Romans and Greeks.

10/21/2002
The Sound Late at Night

7/23/2002
Pastina

Did anyone else have an Italian grandmother that would cook them Pastina? An earliest food memory for me, I recently picked up a box in the market, along with all the ingredients in the chicken-soup-with-pastina recipe on the side. Mmmmmmm, comfort food. And good for you.

What’s the earliest food you can remember eating?

7/10/2002
Tall Buildings

There was a fire in the building next to ours. Our elevators don’t work, nor does our air conditioning (and it’s a humid 93 degrees F outside). The connectivity goes in and out, the lights flicker, we smell gas, and the office is on the top floor of a 10-story building. I’m feeling a little vulnerable.

6/26/2002
Isn’t That Quaint?

Over beers with Meghan in marketing:

Meghan: Wow, you’re still with the fish? What do you do?
Me: I don’t know if you’re familiar with all our titles…I do information architecture…
Meghan: Oh my god, I remember all those ridiculous titles. What the hell were we thinking?

5/14/2002
Beetle for Sale

She’s lovely, but this city is no place for her. She wants to run and jump and play. Won’t you adopt her? Details.

5/7/2002
Moon Over 87th Street

The full Moon rising over my block tonight.

4/27/2002