E Train to DateLand

I recently went on a date with a man I met in the subway. It was my second subway date of the last four months, but this time it was not with a strange New Zealander given to inadvertent Flight of the Conchords quotations. The newest SS (“Subway Stranger”) shares my fondness for screenwriting, my obsession with Woody Allen, and my college career path.

“Yalie-E-Train-Subway-guy” hosted me at his apartment for a home-cooked meal of spicy chili and his custom ginger-molasses ice cream. He brought me a pair of airplane socks to keep my feet warm while we watched Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog. The evening was PG-pre-Halloween hominess, not at all what I would assume to come out of picking up dates on the E train.

However, that evening I was in for a dark twist. While walking back to my maid’s quarters from the E train, I passed the St. Regis Hotel and stopped in for a glass of champagne as a glamorous change of pace. I quietly sipped rosé at the King Cole bar, mulling over the plot of my novel, when a well-dressed older man approached me with a quick and simple proposition whispered in my ear: “1535, a grand, for fifteen minutes.” Translation: he was staying in suite 1535 and offering me $1,000 for 15 minutes of sex work. Manhattan is full of indecorous surprises in the most elegant of environments (and decorous ones in the bowels of the E train). I suppose I found my WW (“Wanker of the Week”) after all.

P.S. The above photo is NOT the St. Regis Hotel but the Home Delivery exhibition at the MOMA.

Vertigo

I am obsessed with 390 Park Avenue (Lever House). I pass the building almost everyday on my way to the E train at E. 53rd Street. The International Style glass box skyscraper feels like an appropriate hub for the shoe-shined foot traffic of Park Avenue bankers striding to-and-fro. The courtyard’s plein air art gallery is alive and white with the bloated Hello Kitty sculptures that are divine in their kitsch lewdness.

Lever House resembles the green glass skyscraper in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, but the actual office of the wrongfully accused and endlessly dapper Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is the CIT building at 650 Madison Avenue.

I snapped the above photo of the Lever House first-floor exhibition space during the opening gala of Liza Lou’s new installation, “Maximum Security.” The piece consists of two long corridors of chain link fencing swathed in reflective glass beads that give it a diamante effect. The suspicious man standing in the center of the photo looks just like Alfred Hitchcock, overseeing the art in his usual fashion of pimp omniscience.

Speaking of the H bomb, the horrendous screenplay I read today (at my film internship) was an LA-Mexican-drug-bust-sex-colony-blood-bath spin on Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Tom, Gilbert, George, by Gob!

I recently attended the Brooklyn Museum’s Gilbert & George retrospective. The Italian-British duo has been creating art together since the early 1970s, a divine time to break out into large-scale neon pseudo-sacred collages heavy in urban boy love imagery. My personal favorite is the above-pictured Hope from 1984. The series of six lusciously coiffed floating heads across the top evoke David Bowie.

Themes of boy love call to mind my recent run-in with Tom Cruise on the street in front of the trendy West Village eatery, the Waverly Inn. He was short, cute, wearing sneakers, and talking on a cell phone. I stared at him inappropriately, because I thought he was a cute guy bearing an uncanny resemblance to Tom Cruise. We maintained eye contact until I crossed the street and looked back to find him gesturing at me, as though to ask, “What? That’s it? Where are you going?” I would have invited him to dinner, or to jump around on a couch with me, but it was not until later that I realized it was Tom Cruise and not his youthful doppelganger.

This afternoon I bumped into Will Arnett, Arrested Development’s favorite “sexually deviant magician,” Gob Bluth. I charmed him with my juvenile autograph solicitation routine. He promptly asked, “Are you visiting from out of town?” It seemed like an unseasoned Gob Bluth pickup line, but the encounter was intriguing due to the excess of Arrested Development re-runs I have watched in the last week.