In my last post, I alluded to the view from the Top of the Rock as being especially delightful because it included the Empire Street Building. Well, I certainly don’t want anyone to think that the view from the Empire State is any slouch, either.
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If you should ever decide to have some fun with the US Department of Homelands Security and their many minions, and you are willing to work past the immediate notion that this probably means you’re certifiably crazy, well then, here’s an idea: pack one of these into your airport carry-on luggage:
Yep, it’s a sealed tin of that much-reviled, much-loved* world’s best-known luncheon meat.
* By which I mean that if you have a positive opinion, it will be because you were a starving Berliner when the American occupying army moved in after the Nazi surrender in 1945… vs your negative opinion, which you will hold if you are… well, pretty much anybody else.
If you read the fine print in this image (which should be achievable by clicking on it), you will notice it is a special custom-labeled can crafted exclusively in honour of the Broadway musical SPAM-a-Lot.
Which of course is why I bought it. Not for me the more typical souvenir like a t-shirt or CD of the musical’s songs. Nope, I had to buy a can of preserved luncheon meat. (Offspring is cut from the same cloth. She did buy the t-shirt, but also purchased a packaged pair of real coconut shells that came with a sheet of instructions for “bangin’ ‘em together”. Fortunately, there were no US Food and Agriculture inspectors at the border or the coconut husks might well have been quarantined. But I digress – and so back to my little border adventure.)
I think that even as I placed my carry-on bag on the conveyor belt that funneled it under the X-Ray, I knew deep down in my malicious little heart of hearts that it was going to be a cause for some concern. As I waited on the other side, after having passed myself through the people scanner, I saw the carry-on luggage X-ray monitor watcher suddenly sit bolt upright and wave his colleagues over. OK, I thought, time for a bit of trouble prevention. So leaning over the emerging conveyor belt, I said, loudly and clearly, “It’s a can of SPAM.”
Unfortunately, rather than nodding in the full light of understanding, three separate security guards shifted their gaze from the X-ray screen to me like I was somewhere south of my rocker.
“Um…,” I pressed on. “We went to the Broadway play, SPAM-a-Lot and that’s a souvenir.” At least my insistence that it was something other than a brick of C-4 persuaded them that it would probably be OK to open the suitcase and yank the tin out. Now they gathered around and turned the can over and around, examining it from every possible viewpoint, like chipmunks examining peanuts before jamming them into their cheek pouches. Finally there was some mutual mumbling and apparently a tacit agreement to let me restore it to its place in my carry-on suitcase. “The issue is not that it’s a can of SPAM, sir,” one of them told me. “It’s that our scanner is unable to see inside the container.”
And of course he was right. So my snarkeurator dove for deep cover as I expressed my genuine appreciation to them for the generosity of their decision. Because I had already mentally steeled myself for having to leave the can behind, in which case I would have removed the label and brought the paper wrapper home as my souvenir. So let me make it clear here that I am entirely grateful to the La Guardia security staff for allowing me to return home with my can of SPAM intact.
But man, if I ever get Osama bin Laden within throwing distance, I am SO going to bean that son of a bitch with a never-opened can of SPAM. Because I remember when flying was fun.
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Thanks to my father-in-law, I now know (know now? No, “now know”) where you can get a superb steak just half a block off Broadway in mid-town Manhattan. It’s a place called the Palm Restaurant and it is one in a national chain that bills itself at every one of its 75 or so sites across the US as “The Classic American Steak House”. You know it’s a good restaurant from the moment you walk through the door when you observe that the table staff is almost entirely middle-aged males.
** Digression alert! ***
I once had a boss who explained this phenomenon to me when we noticed it in a small but pricey Quebec City restaurant that was known to be frequented by senior bureaucrats and elected officials in the nearby provincial government. He told me it was because people in the rarefied echelons of power would occasionally arrive in the company of someone with whom they were not supposed to be in company. And to encourage such power to feel free to conduct such * ahem * business, such restaurants would hire middle aged men to work the floor. Because, so my boss explained, they were the only staff who could reliably be entrusted to keep what they knew, or observed, entirely confidential. I never asked my boss what circumstances led him to acquire this knowledge, neither have I ever encountered anyone else – anyone else – who has regaled me with such a story. Even Google is really thin on “restaurants, older male waiters”, as in, at this writing, “did not match any documents”. But that story always crosses my mind whenever I observe such a demographic in a restaurant’s table staff.
My suspicion is that it’s more mundane than that. In a restaurant, the front lines on tip collection are those troops who soldier among the tables. I suspect that, for many more women than men, waiting is not really perceived as a major career, but rather as a means to help pay for university, or is perhaps one of three or four jobs they’re holding down while trying to establish themselves in a better, steadier job that is more traditionally associated with a “career”. As a result, they’re rarely going to move into a position of seniority, yielding those positions to the people who have been there longer – the older male staff who, commanding first choice among the available work stations, will naturally opt for those that earn them the tips. (This perception, I might add, is buttressed by a few Google hits. So there!)
*** End of digression. Normal nonsense traffic resumes. ***
It’s also the kind of place that makes you take leave of your senses, for some reason.
It may have been the style of the place; or it may have been heaven-only-knows-what. It took only a couple minutes of chit chat for our waiter to establish not only our out-of-town-edness, but also my absolutely radiant dweebosity. And yet, in response to the inevitable, “And would you like a drink to start with?” I replied, “Yes please, I’ll have a Grey Goose martini.”
I’m still wondering where in hell that came from. I know I wanted something different; I also know that I’d read somewhere not so long before that Grey Goose vodka was soaring in popularity among trendier clubbers. Whatever brought it to my brain and thence to my tongue at that moment, it was quite fun to watch the waiter actually do an eyebrow take when I delivered an order that specific. (Of course, he might just as easily have been thinking, “Right doofus… so c’mon, when are you going to say ‘shaken, not stirred’?”)
But if anyone’s taking notes, it was delicious. The Palm apparently makes its martinis with the vermouth acquired from the condensation of fumes wafting out of the open vermouth bottle as they pass the martini glass over it for a second or two, but Grey Goose is a very smooth vodka.
But the waiter’s cocked brow when I delivered my request gave me pause to wonder what the impact on the dinner’s final bill might be – which turned out to be right in line with what any ol’ martini would have cost. Leslie remains grateful that at least I didn’t order a Diva martini.
Here’s another tip when you’re ordering a meal in a more upper-scale-than-you’re-normally-used-to restaurant, especially in the US. When you order a steak, you get – a steak. After specifying the cut and doneness, I expected the waiter next to ask the upscale version of “baked, mashed or fries”. Instead, what he asked was, “And would you like anything else?”
“Um, what does it come with?”
“Nothing.”
“Not even potato or vegetable?”
“No sir, those are extra.” (Any blip on the “panache” meter I might have earned as the result of my having ordered a brand-specific martini thus went with the wind.)
But I recovered quickly and asked, “What do you recommend?”, which seemed to please him. That got me a recommendation for what apparently is a popular side dish with one of their steaks, and is a Palm signature – their hash brown potatoes.
I also ordered a green veggie – garlic seasoned broccoli, I think it was – again because he said it was also popular and very good.
The Palm’s hash browns are well worthy of the lavish praise our waiter said they receive. What they do to the lowly tubers to make them so tasty I’ll never know. But they make them with way more care and flavour than you might at first think when you read “hash browns” on a menu. (I’m not alone in thinking this. Googling “Palm Restaurant” and “hash browns” will turn up almost unanimously positive adjectives, including this brief blog profile of Ruth Reichl, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine: “She also claims that the perfect potato accompaniment to a good steak is great hash browns, and that the best are from The Palm.”)
For the record, the steak was superlative. In consequence, I remain sadly not a friend of PETA and will happily continue to perceive some ruminants as members of a food group first and pets second.
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I am not by nature a passionate fan of art museums, preferring those with more historical bases for their having been called into existence. But I confess there is something powerfully evocative about entering a galley and seeing, there on the wall,
the painting that moved Don “American Pie” McLean to pen a song about it. I also confess to being staggered at the sheer number of iconic names gracing the artworks in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). And even a Philistine like me can be brought up short by the absolutely breathtaking grandeur of a wall-sized work such as Claude Monet’s massive 1920 triptych, Water Lilies, that measures six and half feet in height and an incredible 52 feet in length.
One aspect of MoMA that really surprises me is that there is nothing to prevent you getting close enough to touch the works – it’s forbidden, but there are no devices to reinforce the admonition such as a barrier between you and bazillions of dollars worth of priceless art. Not even a velvet rope. Neither are there any sorts of shields to prevent vandalism such as someone might entertain with a small bottled agent like ink or paint. Similarly, there are no prohibitions against photography. Flash photography is officially forbidden but there were no shortage of camera flashes while we were there – usually followed by a gentle, “Please no flash photography sir / madam” from a guard. But I never heard the sound of someone being manacled in leg irons and dragged from the gallery.
On another day, offspring and I visited the Museum of Natural History. This is another place into which I could easily sink a day. Museums, of course, do have to appeal to the populists in the world so I understood why I first had to work my way past oodles of paraphernalia for sale arising from the museum’s role as the star of the movie, “A Night at the Museum”. But once in its depths, I was lost in the archaeology, anthropology (physical and social), biology, theology and however many other “ology”s you would care to name. (Not, I hasten to add, the depths reached in the Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's “Relic” novels, some of which takes place in the Museum’s sub-basements.) I especially enjoyed the gallery devoted to so-called “primitive peoples”, the practitioners of their medicines and shamanism and the incredible ceremonial clothing they wear – the sort of thing a James Bond film costume designer would produce if the script called for a scene involving voodoo.
So how to bid adieu to New York in bloggery? I think the same way I began, with a lyrical reference – but not among songs, rather among poems. Google quite happily gives returns on a search for “best poem written about New York”. Unlike Palm Restaurant hash browns, however, there is no unanimity coming from this search, but there are a lot of people who still think Walt Whitman nailed it (perhaps surprisingly, given he lived from 1819 to 1892) in his work, Manahatta.
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And here’s an update for anyone who still recalls what, by internet standards, is a bit of my ancient history – from a big, big bunch of months ago. Way back when, I had said I intended to launch myself into a project to convert my vinyl records to digital format. My intent at the time was to recraft my record collection as CDs.
Well unfortunately, what I really launched myself into was my usual frustration and short fuse where high tech is concerned as I discovered that while it could certainly be done, there was no easy way to accomplish it. “Easy” pretty well encapsulates my first (last and only) requirement from technology and I was finding there was nothing that would make converting vinyl to digital “easy”.
Until now. Say hello to my newest techie toy. You may think – “Big deal! You bought a turntable.” Well, not entirely. What this photo doesn’t show is the short line of cable connections across the back, one of which is a USB cable that plugs this little baby directly into my computer. Out of the box, the NuMark TTUSB comes with a disk upon which a program called “Audacity” resides and two very, very friendly manuals – one to show you how to set it up, and the other to walk you through how to use it to effect the music transfer from grooved vinyl into digital. It’s also available in Canada and, as it turns out, in an Ottawa store on Rideau Street called Steve’s Music.
In essence, with this device and the "Audacity" software, I just have to follow a few short and (by comparison to previous how-to explorations) almost laughably easy steps: make sure the TT (turntable) and my computer are talking to each other; open “Audacity”; play the song, which "Audacity" promptly records and saves as a digital file; “export” it in mp3 format to a folder; and, from there, import it into my iPod. Bob’s your uncle.
There were a few set-up glitches which (no surprise here) my soon-to-be-university bound daughter solved for me. And now, after only a long weekend’s worth of copying, I have already converted a couple hundred songs from my 45 rpm single collection and will soon begin the process of converting albums in whole or in part.
I’m frankly having a ball because it’s been so long since I played these singles, I find that I’m dredging up lots of associative memories of actually being younger and (hard to believe, I know) stupider, mostly from my high school days.
I’m also turning up a few records that I would call rareties. For example, most people in my generation can recall when then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was famously caught saying the “f” word in the House of Commons. Asked about it later the same day, he only would admit to having said “Fuddle Duddle”.
That led to the production of this addition to Canada’s musical legacy, a single that was recorded and pressed so swiftly there was no time to cut a “B” side of the disk and the same song is actually pressed into both sides.
Some of my singles also come from a time when everything in this country had to have an anthem. In the wake of Bobby Gimby’s ubiquitous 1967 Canadian Centennial hit, “CA-NA-DA”, we heard tunes like the Ontario anthem, “A Place to Stand” (“A place to grow, On-tair-ee-air-ee-air-ee-oooh”), The execrable Ottawa Song (“Ottawa, it’s plain to see why she’s the country’s capital siii-ihhh-teee”) and the one I consider to be the absolute best of the lot, this one.
The theme from the 1969 Commonwealth Games, “Look Out World” has a fixed-in-1969 lyric, “Look out, look out, look out world, we’re makin’ a move. Look out, look out, look out world, we’re starting to groove…”
And if record label mistakes will ever assume the value of postage stamp misprints, then this one is a collector’s item. The Swedish pop group “ABBA” is a band named for its four members, Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn and Anna-Frid. “Waterloo” was their first major hit on this side of the water and its label, clearly, was printed before their record company even had a handle on who the band members were.
As you can see from the fine print, Agnetha doesn’t appear at all, and Anna-Frid has been cleaved in two as Anna and Frida. (Think of it. Had the names on this label been accurate, they might have been “FABB”, but for the fact that another certain “Fab Four” had already demonstrated they had trademark ownership of the name.)= = = = = = = = = =
And finally, this probably isn’t fair, because I guess after spending two years away from Canada in a Mexican prison, you can probably be forgiven for forgetting how a canoe works:
“[Brenda Martin]’s tears were replaced with quick wit in describing her shock at being flown home from Guadalajara May 1 in a ‘rock-star’ private plane that reportedly cost the Correctional Service of Canada about $82,000 to charter. ‘If they had sent me a canoe with one oar and said row your way home and we'll be the small powerboat ... following your progress up the Pacific Coast, I would have taken that,’ she laughed. ‘Or a mule!’" (Toronto Star online edition, May 11)
For the record Ms Martin, a canoe typically is propelled by one device per user. It’s called a paddle, not an oar, and you don’t so much “row” with it, as you do “paddle” with it.
But PS, welcome home.
A la next time, when we'll discover that bureaucratic bafflegabbery is alive and well on both sides of the border! (Or did you already know that?)