The Visible Woman...February 24, 2001

Saturday

February 24, 2001

"The myth of corporate intelligence is that stealing trade secrets and monitoring your competitor's every move automatically gives you an edge. The truth is, corporate intelligence tells you mostly what you should know already--or what you don't need to know. Even worse, it can make you think that your competitors are on to something, when they may be just as rudderless as you are."

James Surowiecki , The New Yorker, February 19, 2001, The Financial Page, Cloak and Dagger, Inc.

thanks to ebay traders for images of old postcards

the book crawl

We decide to visit a few book stores that are listed in the book we have bought. You might say we 'collect' bookstores. This habit is not the same as collecting books but it does, inevitably, lead to some accumulation of books. Because we always end up buying a few.

We begin precisely at 10AM at The Argosy. It is a wonderful store on several levels (and it is also litterly on several levels with a basement area accessible in the back and other floors by a rickety elevator). But we don't really need to go much further than the 'Selected Reading' shelves on the main floor where they have assembled a number of books that I could see myself buying. I end up choosing just one. It is book of a series of articles profiling art dealer Joseph Nuveen. The articles originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1951. The book is illustrated with Saul Steinberg drawings. It pleases me very much. Later, I will describe it to our opera companions. They profess to never read The New Yorker. This surprises me since I consider it one of the keys to an intellectual life.

We continue up the east side. The Park Avenue Cafe presents itself about 11AM. (73rd & Park for those who will be intrigued by the culinary apex I'm about to describe). We don't have a lunch reservation anywhere. It's a little after 11AM and we are hungry. Inside, the menu looks good and I pick a kind of Eggs Benedict with a little lobster thrown in and potatoes and leeks instead of English muffins. FFP decides on fish. But the waiter has presented an intriguing special.

"Raisin oatmeal with sherry maple syrup topped with foie gras," the waiter offers. "I thought," he added, "How is this going to be tasting? But it's good."

Now I'm conflicted. That is surely the weirdest thing I've ever heard about. The waiter offers to split one and serve each of us an app portion before our other choices. It was the best thing I've had that pretended to be breakfast. Ever. And it was a pretty fine way to eat foie gras. Period. Cool.

We continue wandering. We go into one bookstore that is on the seventh floor, ring a bell, get admitted among the first editions. It's the closest you get to getting in someone's home without knowing anyone. The guy goes about his business, wrapping and labelling prints. We look at expensive first editions including a Memoirs by Tennessee Williams that FFP hopes is available in some other edition than this signed, limited to 250 copy one...which costs $450 here.

We inform the guys at Crawford Doyle bookstore, our next stop, that the little 50 Best Bookstores in New York has their address wrong. I buy some memoirs of Vanessa Bell and a little book of photographs...entirely of shop windows in Paris.

Time to ready ourselves for the opera. We meet our friends who have rushed from visiting with some elderly aunts of his who have lived forever in New York. We have a great meal at a place very close to Lincoln Center on 64th Street, O'Neal's. I have liver and onions and it is great. It's great having our buddies so we can easily drink a bottle of wine without getting too sleepy for the opera.

L'Italiana en Algeri.. Comedy all the way, including the music. Music can be, by itself, funny, an article in the program says. Yep, it's true. Sam Remy is good as the hapless tyrant. Opera comedies have even more unlikely plots than dramas. The tyrant wants to ditch his wife and get an Italian woman. A ship wreck conveniently washes up one who happens to be the lover of a man he enslaved earlier.

We lose track of our friends at the coat check. So we walk back by ourselves and leave a message on their phone apologizing. As we make our way into the hotel, there are a lot of policemen and a photographer.

Someone says into their cell phone, "You know who Gary said all day was here?" Pause. "Yeah, they are here!"

Our friends call us back and we all wonder who caused the hubbub.

We figure we wouldn't even know who they were and make our way to our room. On Sunday, we will receive an e-mail from our friend from lunch Friday asking if we knew there was a birthday party for Chelsea Clinton in the hotel. Nah. I hate chasing celebrities.