Odd little incident on St. Patrick's Day.

    May's last day was St. Pat's Day, so she'd stayed uptown and had a properly alcohol-soaked send off with her co-retailers.

    I decided I'd hook up with Dean and an amigo of his, a tall Dutch ex-pat by the name of Kris, short for the unlikely name of Krisoijn. We shot the shit for a couple of hours at the post-gentrified 119 near Union.

    After I don't recall how many beers, I took my leave to head back home. Walking to the train, I became aware of a profound need to talk to a man about a horse – an urgent need, the man was a serious buyer, if you get my meaning. Unfortunately, New York suffers from a scandalous lack of public restrooms. Even many large stores, such as the Virgin Megastore on Union, have moved to a token pseudo-pay system. Mercifully, the Strand, just a couple blocks south of Union, has nice restrooms available to any needy individual that walks in. There was a time, late 90s, when the Strand's john was notorious - a filthy little closet from which a seemingly endless succession of ODed junkies were constantly being extracted, like some demented William S. Burroughs version of a clown car. Though those days are past and the redesigned water closets and the Strand's generous hours of operation make it a recommended alternative in this head-scarce town.

    After the horse trading session was successfully concluded, I decided to look at their New York section. I've got a modest library of books about various odd aspects of the city at home and I'm always gathering more of the literary detritus of the city to add to the junk heap.

    On the shelf, missing its cover jacket, was a faded ivory book with the curious title Body, Boots & Britches. I took it over the shelf and opened it. The inside cover spread showed a map of New York state, but instead of noting major cities, noted historic events, major thoroughfares, or what have you, this map include the locations of things like "The Devil Throws Rocks at Connecticut," "Wilson Fools the Scarecorw," and "Captain Kidd Hides Treasure." There seemed to be no organizing principle to the thing and real incidents ("Body of Colonel Ellsworth, First American to Be Embalmed") mingled with the, I presume, fictional ("Trial of the Witch of Mad Dog Hill").

    While flipping through the pages, a black and white photo of what appears to be two young couples, from the late 1920s or early 1930s, all dressed in evening clothes, fell out of the book. Strangely, exposure of the film or abuse of the photograph itself made the head of one of the young men fade out completely. He's just got a white void where his face should be. The others smile blankly, as if something truly horrific has happened to their companion but nobody wants to ruin the party by admitting it.

    On page 225, pressed into the book, between two pages describing the infamous Loomis family of Oneida county, dried to a brittle dark brown, was a four leaf clover.

    The book cost me $10.

Saturday: Movie

    May and I caught V for Vendetta and we both enjoyed it. I've never read the comic and am not much of a fan of Moore's work, but I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. I think the movie benefits greatly from a superlative cast of secondary characters. Like the earliest Batman movies, the main character remains a somewhat a cipher while the secondary cast plays of him. In the first Batman movie, this brought mixed results. I though it worked extremely well here, and the strength of the numerous side characters is the main reason it did.
    It is still, ultimately, an action movie. The politics are heavy handed and, in typical Hollywood fashion, we managed to boil down every political point to a personal and emotional issue. Nobody ever wants to take down a government because the system is corrupt – they want revenge for the killing of [fill in relative or lover] - and this dovetails nicely with the system also being corrupt. That said, it is a well made, well acted, and (compared to most of its co-genre brother and sister works) thoughtful. Both May and I recommend it.