Smoke On! Several years ago I went to an unusual sporting event, an aerial race around New York Harbor. These were air races of souped-up single-prop planes that were reminiscent of WWII fighter planes (I am reminded of that scene from Empire of the Sun when a young war-torn Christian Bale points at a passing American fighter-bomber and says, “P-51, Cadillac of the sky!”). Red Bull was promoting the event and it involved taking a…
Life on the Tarmac Tarmac is a great word. It connotes so much more than macadam or asphalt. Tarmac says you are going places. It has an exotic nature to it that implies that something is about to happen and that its likely to be something meaningful. If you are stuck on the runway or idling on the asphalt, that sounds bad and wasteful. But is you are poised on the tarmac, you are about…
My Amigo Mike In 1971 I transitioned from high school to college by way of a summer in Cleveland. That was the summer the Cuyahoga River caught fire and the summer I learned how to fend for myself. I arrived in Cleveland from Rome, Italy, where I had lived for three years, skipping over the all-important Woodstock to Kent State years of American life. I promptly rented a room in a fraternity house on the…
Close Friends About fifteen years ago I was between marriages and more conscious than at most times about all my physical flaws. I was walking down lower Fifth Avenue near 15th Street, which was near where I lived on Union Square. I noticed a sign next to a door which proclaimed it the offices of Dr. Joyce Martin, M.D. – Dermatology. I had known a Joyce Martin in college. She was a peripheral part of…
Stranded In the movie The Endless Summer, the filmmaker documents a group of surf bums chasing the eternal wave all around the planet. I think the title and the poster were more famous than the movie itself. As I recall, the narrator sounded a lot like Warren Miller, the guy who made thousands of ski videos with similar narration. He, like Miller was the exact opposite of the people he was portraying. They were wild,…
Wired I just got a message from LinkedIn that told me that “Rich people are looking at your profile.” I was very pleased to hear that. That must be a portend of good things to come, unless you think they just forgot the comma and meant to say, “Rich, people are looking at your profile.” I don’t want to pay extra for the premium service, not because I don’t like to know who is so…
Bermuda Bob did a quick count of his trips to Bermuda over the years and concluded that it was, by virtue of his visits, his favorite place on earth. Bermuda is a twenty-one-mile-long, one mile or less wide, sub-tropical island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It is a bundle of contradictions. It is a British Territory with a clearly British flavor, but it is exactly opposite Britain in weather. It is a blue-water…
Antica Ancora Wherever we live, we like to find a neighborhood restaurant we can call our own. Obviously the food has to be good, but mostly the atmosphere must be pleasant and the service accommodative. Everyone wants a a place “where everybody knows your name” just like on Cheers. Usually we are prone to Italian restaurants both because the food is not hard to like and because my three years living in a Rome and…
What I Signed Up For We ask ourselves some version of that question every day. It most often comes in the form of a negative. We all understand what we didn’t sign up for, but do we really know what we did sign up for? If I don’t know by my age there must be something wrong with me, so I’m going to start with the assumption that I do know, but that I need…
The Obstinacy of Blogging In 2007 I got nailed for having a blog which was mostly about movies. I occasionally mentioned other personal issues, but never talked about life or work at Bear Stearns. At a fateful moment and for reasons which were more than a little suspicious, the New York Times sent a 23-year-old Barnard graduate to write a story about my blog. This was in the era of the CEO of Whole Foods…