Tolstoy is so tasty

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‘Making a meal out of books’

Having just polished off my umpteenth Harlan Coben mystery (‘Tell No One’, ‘Stay Close’, ‘Gone for Good’, etc., etc., etc.), I decided to take a break and share my Food Theory of Books.

Which is that books are a lot like food. There are Dinner Books (‘Wolf Hall’, ‘Canada’, to name just two). These satisfy, but don’t leave you feeling bloated or disgusted with yourself (for me that would be ‘The DaVinci Code’). There are Snack Books, which are lighter but still quite tasty (Muriel Spark). And Junk Food Books (by Lee Child, or the afore-mentioned Harlan Coben), that are filling, cheap, and leave you craving more.

Dessert Books are the ones you set aside special, as a treat. For me, that’s whatever is the latest murder mystery by Sue Grafton I put in my Amazon ‘save for later’ folder (‘later’ being when it comes out in paperback).

Then there is the category I call the Mallomar Book. Continue reading

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Horowitz plays the bedroom

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‘Midwestern Girls have all the luck’

When I arrived in New York, fresh from the Midwest and eager to conquer the world of advertising, I faced a most formidable challenge. No, it wasn’t rising to the high expectations of my new employers at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising. It was finding an apartment.

This was back about the time that the earth’s crust was cooling. But then, as now, finding an apartment that one could both abide and afford was a most daunting task.

I can’t remember the precise formula (remember, the earth had just cooled at this point), but it had something to do with rent being a certain percentage of your take-home pay. At any rate, this magic figure fixed firmly in my head, I combed the classifieds.

Most of the listings I could afford sounded dreary and dungeon-like. And those were the good ones. But there among the Continue reading

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Old MacDonald Had a Silo

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‘Gramma Peterson loved this one’

My just-completed jury duty reminds me of my days of going on commercial shoots. You know, scores of random people thrown together for long stretches of downtime and boredom, interrupted by bursts of furious activity.

One thing you were sure to get out of a commercial shoot, though: a great story. Not always the story you went out to shoot, but a great story nonetheless.

Here’s one of my favorites.

I was working with my boss, a great art director and native New Yorker who shall remain nameless. Though if you were active in the business Back In The Day, you may recognize him in the picture above. (Hint: he’s not the one in the blue glasses; that’s me. I guess blue glasses and I go back awhile.)

Anyway. For those of you who don’t know, Continue reading

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(Silly) Signs of the times

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Jury duty today. Lots of downtime, so no more excuses for ‘post procrastination’. While hanging about waiting to be funneled through the metal detector, I noticed several rather daunting signs involving incarceration. Which set me to musing about other signs I’ve seen, some rather (unintentionally, I can only assume) hilarious.

A few of these: The Our Lady of Perpetual Help Business School, the (ahem) Karen Horney Clinic, and the Master Cabbie Taxi Academy — where, during a particularly exasperating period of freelance fatigue, I imagined myself working. I practiced answering their phone, in my best receptionist tones: ‘Master Cabbie Taxi Academy. How may I direct your call?’

But few signs please me more than the punny ones. Laundry and dry cleaning establishments seem to have a corner on the market here. Among my favorites: Continue reading

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What’s up with all the apps?

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‘Silly, Stupid, Sophomoric, and Even Dumb’

Today I sent a NY Times article to the Child (I do this kind of thing with annoying frequency.) Her reply? ‘Write a blog post about it.’ (She’s been urging me to get off my FB-trolling butt and do this Blog Thing for ages.) So, if you made it this far, you are reading the blog post. And if you’d like to go further, here is the article, subtitled ‘Surprising, Scandalous, Serious, Even Inspiring’:

‘Apps for Sharing Secrets and Gossip’

But wait! Before you leave my first ‘real’ post, let me summarize. And editorialize. The article is about some cool new apps that do all kinds of tasks that you didn’t know needed to be done. One of them, Secret, according to the Times, ‘encourages airing information or feelings that might not otherwise be shared’.

Another, Whisper, lets you let the world know Continue reading

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Here we (gulp) go. Kind of

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After, like, a year of false starts, I think I’m ready.

To start, that is.

On this brand spankin’ new blog. I’ve got to get my feet wet sometime.

It’s exciting, and kind of scary. Back later. When I get my courage up. And think of a nifty topic.

Amagansett, New York. August 2014

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