Category: Observed (Page 9 of 24)

Frank Bruni writes today how restaurants have shifted from blase to dismayed at his canceled reservations.
I’ve been warily surveying my own neighborhood, and my actions, too. Our neighborhood Italian joint of choice is still jam-packed, even at 5:30 in the evening. But this is a restaurant that can serve two people a three-course meal with a glass of wine for $70. One might expect it to thrive, which so far, it is.
I’ve had a couple of fancy dinners the past few weeks where there’s been no second seating–by 9 p.m. the restaurant has scattered empty tables. Ruby Foo’s in Times Square defied this trend, but countless other restaurants are starting to feel the strain.
At home, I’m ordering in less frequently; the urge to save money is trumping the 20-minute neighborhood quickie once or twice a week more than it used to. (Also, there’s no good Chinese food near me. An open letter to the restaurant owners of New York City: please open a decent Chinese place on the Upper West Side! Everything uptown is mediocre at best, and heaven knows all these people should stop eating at Saigon Grill.)
The city in general is going to look far more bleak next spring than it does right now. Come February, I expect a rash of store closings, restaurants and otherwise, which will leave the city pockmarked like my local stretch of Broadway. One can only hope things don’t get that bad.

Fun videos and gewgaws from assorted other blogs in my reader:
~ Bio-Bak, one of the more insane (and fun) personal sites I’ve seen in many years–it reminds me of Superbad (which I kind of miss)
~ This guy sings “Thriller” in 64 a capella parts… it’s quite a montage
~ And then there’s this guy, who custom built a drum kit to play Guitar Hero 3, then beat the hardest setting. hoo wee!

Junglier
Puttiers
Ecotage
Miauled
Plastron
Nuncles
Sordine
Vendeuse
Ectozoa
Cresylic
Kurbashes
Elaterin
Linguica
Entamebae

While America celebrates Barack Obama’s victory–particularly for what it represents–Americans would be wise to remember that his win, while strong, was far from a landslide.
The media in 2008 like to speak of mandates and sea changes, but in fact, Obama’s victory is far less decisive than some other recent elections, and McCain’s showing was not half bad.
Via Wikipedia, I compiled a list of victory margins by electoral votes for all the presidential elections since the electoral college expanded to 538 votes in the 1960s. Obama’s win is mid-pack:

  Year Elected            Won Lost
1984 Reagan             525  13
1972 Nixon              520  17
1980 Reagan             489  49
1964 Johnson            486  52
1988 George H. W. Bush  426  111
1996 Clinton            379  159
1992 Clinton            370  168
> 2008 Obama              349  163 <
1968 Richard Nixon      301  191
1976 Carter             297  240
2004 George W. Bush     286  251
2000 George W. Bush     271  266

(Note: two states are still being decided; this post will be updated when the final votes are tallied and declared.)
Obama’s victory in terms of the popular vote tells a better story but also comes with a caveat. First, a tip of the cap: his 64,908,616 votes as of this writing are the greatest number of votes ever recorded by a presidential candidate. That is a figure to celebrate.
However, John McCain received more than 57 million votes of his own. Obama’s margin of victory by popular vote is 6.3% (which is to say, if the U.S. had a straight democratic vote instead of an electoral college, he’d have won, 53 to 47 percent).
This is a sound victory. But it still leaves 9 out of every 20 people in the other camp. Four elections in the 538-electorate era have had a greater vote margin between winner and loser. Richard Nixon beat George McGovern by 18 million votes out of 77 million; Obama beat McCain by 7.5 million out of 120 million. Yesterday’s win was solid but not overwhelming.
Still, this is an academic exercise–Obama earned a far stronger win than either of George W. Bush’s campaigns, and his victory forever alters the political landscape in terms of campaigns, backgrounds and style.

As much as anything I am astounded by the emotional reaction Obama supporters, including me, are having to the election result.
Hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets, celebrating, as though our nation has won its independence. People are elated! Full of pride, hope and excitement, invigorated in a way this country has not been in years, if not decades.
Today marks a seismic shift in how America views itself, and how the world views America. We can elect a minority candidate to lead our nation. We can back and accept an intellectual who does not hide his intelligence or pander to the ignorant (to which I refer Clinton as well as Bush). We crave pragmatism, we crave leadership, we crave class. We are ready to grow beyond the baby-boomer ideals and standards that have defined us for decades. We are not afraid of change.
The United States is no longer a country defined by narrowmindedness or simplicity. Our president-elect is wordly, clever, and cool. The nation is excited to follow his lead. Remarkable.

Tonight I am, for the first time in a long while, proud to be an American.

Emily Magazine: The kind of crazy you get from too much choice.

The truth [about living in New York City] is that we try to make it hard for ourselves by creating a lot of tasks and rules and very, very specific needs. The arcane evidence fills the shelves at every big Korean deli in Manhattan and every bodega in gentrified Brooklyn: we need almond butter and organic tempeh and unbleached cotton tampons. We might even need specific brands of these things. We need 24-hour access. We need to never be more than two blocks from an ATM. We need taxis and car services that know how to take us anywhere. We need free wifi and bottled unsweetened iced tea and perfectly decent sushi that costs less than $10. We need fresh lemongrass and thai basil and epazote and coconut milk and three different kinds of artisanal ginger beer and cane-juice-sweetened dark chocolate. We need $40 moisturizer from Kiehl’s and perfect $10 bras from Target and Japanese bubble tea and two eggs and cheese on a toasted whole wheat bagel prepared in under a minute.

An absolute truism of Manhattan residents is that we define our existence by our cravings. We sacrifice significant comforts of space and money in exchange for convenience and specificity.
I can write a paragraph just like Emily’s. My family lives in an utterly charming apartment, filled with light and two minutes from the subway, that also happens to consume an extraordinary percentage of our take-home pay and has no closet in the baby’s bedroom. We have several boxes of Mighty Leaf tea (15 packets, $9) alongside the Lipton (48 bags, $4) in our cabinet. We bring our Chinese and Japanese food uptown from the Village because we haven’t found restaurants on the Upper West Side that meet our tastes. I have over the years switched drycleaners no fewer than 11 times. My wife craves nice shoes like Sigerson Morrisons, of which she a pair, and also Sigerson Morrisons from Target, of which she also has a pair. Our stroller retails for nine hundred dollars and barely fits in the trunk of our car. That we even have a car is considered a luxury; that we share and street-park the car is considered cheap.
Yet this lifestyle is by choice, and it’s one we are pleased to have made. We are in Riverside Park nearly every day with our son and our dog. We do have a 24-hour specialty grocer around the corner, and six places with baked goods within a five-minute walk, and we take full advantage. I ride my bicycle to work twice a week alongside the Hudson River. Our home is full of century-old detail that can only be found in an urban dwelling. We see award-winning theater on a whim, shop in fascinating locally owned stores, eat at world-class restaurants and walk home.
In some ways it is a peculiar living, but it is also a spectacular one. We made a conscious decision to stay in Manhattan, at least in the near term. And I, for one, don’t regret it in the least.