A Year In New York

Today I joined my friend Jen, the erotic filmmaker, on a tour of the Museum of Sex. There! I’m sure you’re sitting up straighter in your chair already, awaiting lurid, revealing details about people’s sex lives. Bummer for you. I am not even going there.
Instead I will share the lurid, revealing secrets I learned about [...]

[Read more →]

Today, as I knelt on my living-room floor, rolling concealing tape over the cord for a new lamp, I looked around and realized I am getting awfully close to finishing the job of moving in. Perhaps too close.
Sure, getting furniture and putting up shelving and arranging the lights takes some time when one moves to [...]

[Read more →]

Just after dark, with the heat still radiating from the pavement, I met my lady Joo at a Second Avenue wine bar called Vino. “One drink?” I asked.
“One drink,” she said firmly. Enjoying New York on a budget is something we’ve been doing with little success, and we are trying a new strategy. Linger over [...]

[Read more →]

Before arriving here, I discovered a reliable way to flabbergast my fellow Californians. All I had to do was announce my plans to commute by bike around Manhattan.
“What?” that Californian would sputter, nearly spilling his Chardonnay into the koi pond. “Are you crazy?”
I might as well have said I would bike through the streets of [...]

[Read more →]

My friend Dane Golden is in town from San Francisco and wrangled us a tour of the offices of Mad magazine, the publication that was honing satire to a lethal edge years before Stephen Colbert and the editors of The Onion were even born.
The office is in a glitzy tower on Broadway near Times Square, [...]

[Read more →]

Every few days this seems to happen in New York. I’m walking down the street on a clear sunny day, minding my own business, when a droplet lands on my head.
I look up – and in Manhattan that’s often way, way up – but there is never anyone or anything to see. Was it [...]

[Read more →]

Today I got off the subway and walked a few blocks through East Harlem to meet a guy named Kenny Pham. He was selling a red chair that I wanted. As I rang the bell, I felt that tingle I get when I play Craigslist roulette. What sort of person will this one be?
Kenny Pham, [...]

[Read more →]

Sometimes on the curb, when the light turns green and the white “WALK” guy appears, I hesitate and watch for the trucks. I guess I don’t entirely trust them.
When I say “truck” I don’t mean a Toyota Tacoma or a Ford Explorer but the big trucks, the 10,000-pound beasts that haul freight, gravel or regular [...]

[Read more →]

Back in 1857, when Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were charged with designing Central Park, they envisioned something both grand as the skyline and as common as grass. “Instead of a playground for the city’s upper crust,” my guidebook says, “they wanted a park where people of all social backgrounds would mingle and [...]

[Read more →]

As we watched the waves from Rodeo Beach a few months ago in California, one of my buddies told me about his visit he’ d made to New York for Fashion Week. “You know what’s coming in?” he asked.
“What?”
“Bright colors. The eighties. They’re coming back. Just wait and see.”
Today, chastised by last night’s sartorial shame, [...]

[Read more →]