Category: New York

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[un oddities]

Gothamist reports on mysterious white powder at the UN, which it turns out was just flour.

They also link to the New York Post’s Page Six jab at “Hated Annan,” whose farewell party will, they say, be underattended. Keep in mind that the Post is ridiculously right-wing and provides no evidence for this supposed hatred beyond the annoyance of the staff union — and how often does the Post take the side of a union over someone who wants to cut jobs and reduce goldbricking — and the fact that lame-duck John Bolton won’t be attending (he also skipped Ban’s swearing-in and reception), but that could have more to do with how much Bolton is hated.

Don’t believe all the bullshit about Kofi Annan. He is not the saint some have tried to portray him as, but neither is he the corrupt and venal monster of the right wing (whose religious arm, let us recall, are huge fans of a series of novels in which the UN Secretary-General turns out to be the Anti-Christ). I have not read it, but I hear that James Traub’s new book takes a more nuanced view, arguing that Annan was a man of good intentions who was thwarted in many of them by the failings of the institution he heads. And remember, it’s the Member States, not the Secretary-General, that set the direction and mandates and provide (or don’t) the funds and resources to achieve them.

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[immaculate reception?]

Secretary-General-Designate Ban Ki-moon had his swearing-in ceremony (RealMedia) today before the United Nations General Assembly — on my way to lunch, I passed the president of the General Assembly, Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa, still in her frilly swearing-in blouse — and tonight, the South Korean Mission is throwing a bit of a party.

We initially invited a mere 1200 people to attend, and only 800 RSVPed right away. This may not sound like that many people, but keep in mind that we don’t have anything like a ballroom. Most of our receptions that draw more than a hundred people feel crowded. To cope with the throngs expected tonight, they’ll open up the second floor, which has some elegant conference rooms but a smaller total footprint than the first floor because of the soaring spaces below. There is also a party tent out in front, which unfortunately has the effect of blocking off a good chunk of the frontage space where people might otherwise have stood around.

Security is another concern. I have no idea what the plan is, or whether there’s even a plan. There were some NYPD barriers stacked up out front, so it looks like local taxpayers will be helping to keep the evening orderly.

I will definitely be attending tonight — I wouldn’t miss it — so watch this space for news on whether a grotesque fiasco is averted, who shows up for the crush, and whether the crowd is so dense that I can’t get to the hors d’oeuvre table.

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[for what it’s worth]

Here’s how I intend to vote tomorrow.

Governor: Eliot Spitzer (D)
Spitzer was a strong, creative attorney general for the State of New York, holding corporations accountable for their malfeasance. He was fortunate to inherit a well-run office from his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani — good fortune that will not be repeated upon his arrival in the Governor’s Mansion in Albany. Nevertheless, his demonstrated competence and the grim state of New York politics combine to make Spitzer the obvious choice.

Lieutenant-Governor: David Paterson (D)
Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m a yellow-dog Dem this year. But why vote for a lieutenant-governor who will hamstring your choice of governor?

Comptroller: Alan Hevesi (D)
In this season of accountability, it pains me to say that I’ll be voting for a candidate I know to be corrupt (Hevesi had the state pay to chauffeur his wife around for years). Here’s my admittedly twisted logic: Hevesi is likely to be forced to resign after the election, at which time he’ll be replaced by an appointed Democrat, whereas electing his opponent, Chris Callaghan, means having a Republican in office for the next four years. And even if Hevesi does stay put, see my endorsement for lieutenant-governor.

Attorney General: Andrew Cuomo (D)
Another no-brainer. Cuomo leaves much to be desired, but the alternative is a Republican attorney general, and I really, really, really don’t want a Republican setting the priorities for law enforcement in New York.

Senator: Hillary Clinton (D)
I genuinely like Hillary Clinton as a Senator. She’s worked hard to serve her constituents and to build bridges to Republican leaders Upstate. I see no reason not to send her back to the Senate, where I hope she will serve with similar focus and competence for another six years.

Congress (11th District): Yvette Clarke (D)
I voted for Yassky in the primary, but Clarke is the Democratic candidate, we need a Democratic Congress in this country, and besides, she’s going to win by a ridiculous margin anyway. Who else would I vote for? The Freedom Party candidate?

State Senate (25th District): Ken Diamondstone (Working Families)
Diamondstone lost his primary bid against veteran State Senator Martin Connor, but as with Joe Lieberman in Connecticut, Diamondstone has a second chance. Diamondstone opposes the Atlantic Yards project, while Connor does not. More importantly, Connor is part of the stasis in Albany that has made our state governance so abysmal, while Diamondstone would be a fresh voice. From what I can tell, Diamondstone has already given up, but his name is still on the ballot, so I’m going to pull the trigger for him, just like I did in September.

State Assembly (52nd District): Joan L. Millman (D)
Woof! Woof! Heeeere, yellow dog! Have a tasty vote! Enjoy a delicious assembly seat! Good yellow doggie!

State Supreme Court Justices: Abstain
For 80 years, New York has had a corrupt system in which parties nominate judicial candidates at show-conventions, giving voters essentially no choice. This year, for example, we have two candidates to choose from and two votes to hand out. What this has to do with democracy is anyone’s guess, but the party nomination system was recently ruled unconstitutional, so let’s hope we have some competitive judicial elections in the future.

Civil Court Judge (1st District): Abstain
In this case, it’s one candidate for one slot. Ick. See above.

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[joelicious]

Josh and Jenny at Joe's ShanghaiNew York City life is not all politics and broken windows. With Jenny working these days down near Wall Street, I thought it would be nice to end our week by meeting somewhere in between for dinner. My colleague Young decided to join us and suggested an excellent Chinatown restaurant we’d never tried, Joe’s Shanghai.

Tucked away on narrow Pell Street, Joe’s is pretty much the quintessential New York Chinatown dining experience. There’s only the barest stab at decor, you have to wait for a table that you’ll share with other parties, and the service is rapid and minimally communicative. The only thing that could possibly distinguish Joe’s from a dozen similar joints is the food, and Joe’s pulls it off.

The specialty, of course, is soup dumplings (pictured above), which are filled with ground meat swimming in their own little pools of rich, vinegary broth. But their other dishes were also exquisite. We tried the shrimp fried rice cake, which consisted of chewy medallions of sticky pounded rice that was somewhere between a noodle and a dumpling, and bean curd home style, which was exquisitely crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside. Joe’s Shanghai is definitely worthy of return visits!

On our way back to the subway, we stopped for our usual Chinatown desert of egg tarts, this time opting for the Portuguese style, which involves caramelized sugar on top.

I love Chinatown.

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[how i spent my saturday morning]


We park our car on Lena’s Place. This is not the actual name of the street. The actual name is Huntington Street, and we park in the alleyway that dead-ends at the Gowanus Canal, with cement factories on either side and the elevated F-line subway looming overhead, wrapped in its protective black matting to prevent chunks of decaying concrete from falling on peoples heads (and cars).

The block where we park is not a pleasant block. There are piles of broken glass, random garbage, heaps of charred refuse. Lots of used condoms. With no residents, no one seems overly concerned that the city does not in fact clean this particular block. Ever. Which is why we park there: anywhere else and we’d have to move the car for weekly alternate-side street cleaning. But not on Lena’s Place. Also, the street is wide enough that we are less likely to get sideswiped and lose a mirror than on other blocks.

The reason we call this block Lena’s Place is because that’s a better name than Crack Alley, which is what we were calling it before. I have never actually seen anyone do crack on Lena’s Place, but it seems like the sort of thing one would do there, or the sort of place where one would do that sort of thing.

In any case, Lena’s Place was the name we gave to a restaurant in our little neighborhood of Seoksu Sam-dong back in Korea. We never worked out the restaurant’s proper name, but for some time we’d been calling it the Staring Place, in reference to an uncomfortable meal we’d eaten there during which an elderly Korean woman sat across from us and watched the entire time, occasionally giving us complex verbal instructions that we obviously couldn’t understand. The restaurant was, however, not half bad, plus they had worked out how to deliver to our apartment without giving us trouble. So we decided we needed a better name for the joint than The Staring Place. It turned out that the owners were the parents of one of my students, a young girl who used Lena as her English name (so we didn’t even have her name right). In honor of this middling student whom I occasionally caught cheating, we began referring to the restaurant as Lena’s Place rather than The Staring Place.

Unfortunately, renaming can take you only so far. When I went out to the car today to run some errands, I found that the window on the passenger-side door had been smashed in, filling the interior of our car with tiny bits of glass. The vandals had stolen almost nothing — our change tray was tossed on the floor and the change was gone, but a dollar bill was left sitting on the seat, as was a pile of admittedly not very marketable CDs — Pimsleur Russian, a Boss Hog album, some Central Asian music. But the window was gone, glass was everywhere, and worse yet, there were downy feathers all over the interior of the car. Either some pigeons flew in and made sweet love, or else the vandal tore his down jacket on the broken glass. I hope it was the latter, both because that’s far less disgusting and because the fucker deserved it.

Fortunately our insurance will cover it. I sort of assumed that if we parked on the street, eventually we would lose a window, so I got the deductible waiver for glass repair. I took it to a place on Fourth Ave. where a pleasant, balding fellow named Mohamed took care of everything in a couple of hours.

So with all the windows back in place, I took the car back home and parked it — where else? — right back on Lena’s Place.

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[phone scripter to the stars]

As many of you know, I have been pitching in a bit to help Steve Harrison’s Congressional campaign, mostly doing bits of writing and editing.

As part of that effort, I did some major editing of a phone script for automated calls, to be delivered by none other than President Bill Clinton. Someone from the Harrison campaign was kind enough to let me hear the finished product, and sure enough, Bill Clinton is reading the script I handed in!

I have been promised a WAV file, but not until after the campaign, just to be sure no obscure regulations or rules of protocol are violated. As soon as I get it, I will of course link to it.

In the meantime, there have been a lot of great developments on the Harrison front, including an extremely tepid endorsement of Fossella by the conservative Staten Island Advance (punchline: “On balance, [Fossela]’s the better candidate for Congress, though we’re less than thrilled to concede that”) and a very strong endorsement of Harrison from the New York Times. You can read all the latest news on Harrison at Blue Spot.

Go, team!

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[agast report]

For all those in search of my AGAST report, don’t worry. It’s on the way, but it’ll take me some time to organize all my notes and write the thing up. If you’re one of the many artists I met on Saturday and Sunday, thanks for stopping by, and I’ll send you an email when I post the article.

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[brooklyn and queens by the numbers]

Gothamist has a fascinating post that demonstrates just how closely population density is related to subway access in Brooklyn and Queens. The graphic, unlike the official MTA subway map, is to scale, and it reveals just how much more to Brooklyn and especially Queens there is beyond the reach of the trains.

Most of us who live subway-oriented New York lives have little notion of what exactly is out there in those territories beyond the subway. Who lives there? Where do they work? How do they get around What do the neighborhoods look like?

It also raises the question of what, if anything, the MTA is doing to expand subway service and bring those less densely populated areas into the NYC fold, so to speak. After all, population pressures are intense along the main subway lines, and the whole purpose of the subway from its beginning was to get people out of the overpopulated sections and spread them across the five boroughs.