Bombings. And New York.

Dateline, New York City, October 22, 1951.

BOMBS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL THE CONSOLIDATED EDISON COMPANY IS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE FOR THEIR DASTARDLY ACTS AGAINST ME. I HAVE EXHAUSTED ALL OTHER MEANS. I INTEND WITH BOMBS TO CAUSE OTHERS TO CRY OUT FOR JUSTICE FOR ME.

The police found a home-made pipe-bomb cut into the cushions of a seat at the Paramount. 

The above note directed police to the Paramount Theater in Times Square and to a telephone booth in the Pennsylvania Station. A bomb was found at the theater; nothing was found at the train station.

Dateline, New York City, November 29, 1951.
Special to The New York Times

Some weeks after the subway locker explosion, the liberal Republican "New York Herald Tribune" received this note. Like the note above it was written in pencil in block letters. Experts of the NYPD noticed that the Gs and Ys were peculiarly-shaped, leading them to surmise that the bomber might have been educated in Europe.

HAVE YOU NOTICED THE BOMBS IN YOUR CITY – IF YOU ARE WORRIED, I AM SORRY – AND ALSO IF ANYONE IS INJURED. BUT IT CANNOT BE HELPED – FOR JUSTICE WILL BE SERVED. I AM NOT WELL, AND FOR THIS I WILL MAKE THE CON EDISON SORRY – YES, THEY WILL REGRET THEIR DASTARDLY DEEDS – I WILL BRING THEM BEFORE THE BAR OF JUSTICE – PUBLIC OPINION WILL CONDEMN THEM – FOR BEWARE, I WILL PLACE MORE UNITS UNDER THEATER SEATS IN THE NEAR FUTURE. F.P.

On March 19, 1952, a bomb exploded in Port Authority Bus Terminal without injury. In June and then December bombs exploded in seats of the Loews Lexington Avenue theater. The December bomb caused one injury.

In 1953, bombs exploded at the following sites:

• Radio City Music Hall
• The Capitol Theater
• A rental locker near the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal
• an unexploded bomb was found in a rental locker at Pennsylvania Station.

NY Police described the Grand Central bomb as the "homemade product of a publicity-seeking jerk."

On St. Patrick's Day, 1954, "The New York Times" reported this story.

Later that same year, bombs were found in a phone booth in Port Authority and another bomb was found in a phone booth in Pennsylvania Station.

On November 7th, a capacity audience of 6,200 were at Radio City Music Hall viewing Bing Crosby in "White Christmas."  A bomb stuffed into the bottom cushion of a seat in the 15th row exploded, injuring four movie-goers.

This time the bomber got more press. In a front page story, the Times reported the explosion.

Victor Borella, vice president of Rockefeller Center and a member of the board of directors of the Radio City Music Hall was, according to the Times, "convinced the bombing was the work of a "crackpot."

More later or tomorrow.

Hollow Monday thoughts.

The news in New York all weekend long and into this morning is the news of bombs.

There was an explosion on 23rd Street between 6th and 8th Avenues on Saturday night that injured 29 people. Another bomb was found later in the evening in a garbage pail nearby, and this morning, more bombs were found out in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Mayor DiBlasio has been on the radio announcing that New York will see its greatest level of police presence ever. Partly because of the bombs, partly because once again the UN is in town, including President Obama.

Meanwhile, in my quiet Upper East Side neighborhood, things seem calm. I live a block from the private all-girls' school my daughters went to, and a block and a half from another private all-girls' school. Down the street is an elite PS, and just a bit further down, is the Lycee Francaise and still another private elementary school.

Needless to say, the neighborhood is teeming on this raining morning with book-bagged kids making their way to various classrooms. The Brearley girls wear short 1960s-style navy blue minis--trying their best to do everything they can to subvert the school's very austere dress-code.

Men and women holding umbrellas in various states of disrepair are rushing toward buses, subways or car services. 

There are no signs, up here, four miles from the bomb blast and a dozen or so from Elizabeth, that the world is coming apart at the seams. 

I've read my share of Dystopia and it's usually pretty, er, dystopian. But if we are entering--in the case of Donald Trump, galloping into, a new Dystopia, I happen to believe it won't look trememdously different from a normal day.

Young kids will still splash through puddles. Somehow we will still be rushing to work on a Monday morning. Somehow we will go on.

Faulkner said we will prevail.

Frost, prefered fire to ice.

But I think Eliot had it best:

The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz-he deadA penny for the Old Guy

                       I

    We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats' feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar
   
    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
   
    Those who have crossed
    With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
    Remember us-if at all-not as lost
    Violent souls, but only
    As the hollow men
    The stuffed men.

   
                              II

    Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
    In death's dream kingdom
    These do not appear:
    There, the eyes are
    Sunlight on a broken column
    There, is a tree swinging
    And voices are
    In the wind's singing
    More distant and more solemn
    Than a fading star.
   
    Let me be no nearer
    In death's dream kingdom
    Let me also wear
    Such deliberate disguises
    Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
    In a field
    Behaving as the wind behaves
    No nearer-
   
    Not that final meeting
    In the twilight kingdom

   
                   III

    This is the dead land
    This is cactus land
    Here the stone images
    Are raised, here they receive
    The supplication of a dead man's hand
    Under the twinkle of a fading star.
   
    Is it like this
    In death's other kingdom
    Waking alone
    At the hour when we are
    Trembling with tenderness
    Lips that would kiss
    Form prayers to broken stone.

   
                     IV

    The eyes are not here
    There are no eyes here
    In this valley of dying stars
    In this hollow valley
    This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
   
    In this last of meeting places
    We grope together
    And avoid speech
    Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
   
    Sightless, unless
    The eyes reappear
    As the perpetual star
    Multifoliate rose
    Of death's twilight kingdom
    The hope only
    Of empty men.

   
                           V

    Here we go round the prickly pear
    Prickly pear prickly pear
    Here we go round the prickly pear
    At five o'clock in the morning.
   
    Between the idea
    And the reality
    Between the motion
    And the act
    Falls the Shadow
                                   For Thine is the Kingdom
   
    Between the conception
    And the creation
    Between the emotion
    And the response
    Falls the Shadow
                                   Life is very long
   
    Between the desire
    And the spasm
    Between the potency
    And the existence
    Between the essence
    And the descent
    Falls the Shadow
                                   For Thine is the Kingdom
   
    For Thine is
    Life is
    For Thine is the
   
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

Sitting down to my Friday standup.

Just as I was wrapping up last night (the rest of my office-mates had already packed up and left) an account person came by my desk to talk through what I guess could be called a 'strategic problem.'

I had had already a long day. About six new briefs, a couple of intense internal meetings, and three or four--I lost count--client presentations. Not to mention reviewing work, guiding work, or, even, scribbling out a piece of copy to patch a hole.

What's more, there were still a few vestiges of sunlight out and I was hoping for at least a mile walk before complete darkness. 

Finally, my usual Tuesday meeting of "The Battered Husbands of Second Avenue" had moved to Thursday evening thanks to the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha and I really didn't want to miss last night's guest speaker. 

He was giving a talk I was looking forward to, "Window Shopping: Just Say 'Yes.'" And having missed "Does This Make Me Look Fat?," I knew better than to miss two discussions in a row.

I've been a member of The Battered Husbands of Second Avenue since the mid-80s when I enrolled in their 12-step program to help me stop telling wife jokes. I was only able to complete about seven of the 12 steps mostly because my wife thought I was spending too much time out of the house.

So, as I said, when my account person came up to my desk I was eager to extricate myself and get on my way. 

We talked for a while about a seemingly intractable and needlessly confusing problem, and then I politely, I hope, said I really had to go.

I'm not really happy about any of this. The press of work--not to mention the insecurity and what seem to be the ever-increasing demands on my time.

But what's the use of happiness? It can't buy money.

Today. And a day not-so-long ago.

The last time the weather in New York was as beautiful as the weather today, might have been fifteen years ago, on September 11th, 2001.

Then and today after a nasty hot sticky summer, the air has a chill in it. If I were a ballplayer, I'd wear a 3/4-sleeve undershirt beneath my flannels and I'd bring my warm-up windbreaker to the bench with me.

The sun is bright, like the sunshine you'd feel on a mountaintop in Italy. The sky is a perfect azure and there's barely a wisp anywhere of cloud. The breeze is like a lover's whisper in your ear, telling you things you want to believe late at night in bed.

My post-traumatic-stress from that horrible day 15 years ago is attaching to every breathtakingly-beautiful day my memories of that breathtakingly-terrible day.

My daughters were in school and my eldest called me on her cell (she was 14.)

"Dad, Katya's father works in the World Trade Center."

I ran from my office and unable to get a taxi, ran/walked to their school, four miles away.

The kids were all waiting in the gymnasium--waiting for parents or baby-sitters to take them home. Some kids from the outer-boroughs had no one who could pick them up. Trains and buses weren't running.

Like the Pied Piper I led a dozen ponytails home to my apartment one block from school. I put something 1950s and cheerful and Disney'd on the TV in the living-room and pulled out the queen-sized sofabed.

The girls laughed and giggled and plotted and girled as only girls can do. I listened to the news but only in my bedroom where the kids couldn't hear.

My wife arrived home with some friends from her office who were stranded. 

We made phone calls to loved ones and pulled out beds and made a giant dinner of spaghetti and meatballs and ice cream for dessert.

I tried to keep a small bit of innocence alive in the world for just a little bit longer. I wasn't about to let anyone under the age of 18 watch the news or hear the radio.

Sometimes that's what I remember when the sky is blue, the air is clear and there's the tiniest bit of autumn in the air.

A quiet evening in New York.

Last night I left work at the ungodly hour of 5:15 PM and walked east to visit a vanishing slice of New York.

I had read about a discussion at the New York Public Library--that grand old building on Fifth Avenue stretching from 40th Street to 42nd Street--between an author I like, Kati Marton, and the "New Yorker" writer Larissa MacFarquhar. 

So, as I said, I decamped early from an ugly, badly-lit conference room with 11 mis-matched chairs and headed to the Wachenheim Trustees' Room in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. 

New York has a long-tradition of honoring its malefactors of great wealth by blotting their names on our great buildings. I think Carnegie built most of Manhattan's unmatched library system with the trillions of tax-free dollars he made on the backs of the proletariat. Schwarzman has amassed the 100th largest fortune in the world--$12.9 billion--probably by, again avoiding taxes, and by squeezing the pension funds of widows, orphans and cripples.

Nonetheless, the library itself is a fabulous old place, with more marble than ancient Rome and the hush of centuries. 

Both Marton and MacFarquhar wrote parts of their latest books in the place, and thanked it for the stimulation, its resources, its solitude and its utter lack of cell-service.

The talk, was, of course fabulous. Marton is an eloquent speaker. She's incredibly intelligent and has a storied life as the daughter of Hungarian-born diplomats who survived the Nazis, only to be imprisoned by the Soviets as alleged CIA agents. 

Her latest book "True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy," covers the intrigues of Noel Field, an American-born, Harvard-educated (he graduated in two years) agent of OGPU or the NKVD or the KGB, depending on what Soviet agency was ascendant at the time.

In a way, though, the talk was incidental.

I enjoyed an evening of thought and quiet surroundings. I sat amid three dozen variously-accented former communist dissidents looking to thank Marton for her various literary exposes.

Hey, if you live in New York, take a trip on a slow day to the library. Just get a feel for a different time. And soak in the intellectual quiet.

If you're really into treating yourself, pop into one of the old oak phone booths, and call, maybe, an old friend.

All the ads that are fit to make.

I was over at The New York Times building on Eighth Avenue the other day and I overheard what may be one of the central “content” questions of our age.

Since 1897 the Times has had the following slogan on their masthead: “All the news that’s fit to print.” The question for the digital age, to my mind, is when virtual papers are endless, and cost-less, how do you put limits on the amount of content you publish?

The same question is pertinent to our business. How do you limit the number and amount of messages clients turn out? With media in many cases free, and messages producible at low cost (or by machine) is anyone concerned with the aggregate amount of messaging a brand might publish?

I made the mistake some months ago to donate to one of our august presidential candidates. I was immediately put onto about 90 mailing lists, including half a dozen Spanish language ones, and right-away it seemed I was getting messages two or three times a day from each of them.

Maybe they call it media because so many brands are screaming so often “Look at Me! Look at Me!”

I worry that we have moved way past the messaging saturation point. Or, perhaps a better metaphor, we have filled the messaging balloon to the bursting point.

Not only is inundation causing people to turn off, it’s actually getting them angry at brands. The very notion of “re-targeting” exemplifies this. You are a fish on a hook in marketers’ minds and all those re-targeted messages are clubs looking to beat you into consumerist submission.

Agencies, of course, will protest this inundation not at all. Whether or not it is good for a client (and I’d argue it is bad) all those additional messages represent revenue and there’s nary an agency out there that won’t sell its soul for more revenue.

If, as Polonius tells us in Hamlet: "brevity is the soul of wit," then we should look at its inverse and say: "too much content is the soul of shit."

Personally, I think any brand that hits consumers more than twice in one day is like an obsequious waiter who checks in at your table every three minutes interrupting your meal and your conversation.

He may be polite. He may be well-intentioned. He may be a brilliant conversationalist.

But before long, he’s just obnoxious.

Whitman in the Tempus Fugit.

As I do so often when I am tormented by Dame Insomnia, I choose to surrender, rather than fight. It is for that reason that last night, I traveled North--North about a mile or so--to the dim incandescence and friendly confines of the Tempus Fugit.

Readers of this space know that the Tempus Fugit opened in 1924 as a speakeasy and hasn't closed for a minute since. You can get there (only if you know precisely where it is) by finding and winding your way to an old Verizon warehouse on east 91st Street, just off the river, then making your way up and down a series of hallways and stairways, through various galvanized steel doors, then down a precipitous ramp, and voila, there you are, easy as pie.

I arrived at about 3 this morning and the bartender--we agreed years ago to not exchange names in order to keep our relationship on a wholly professional basis--was already pulling me a Pike's (the ALE that won for YALE!) as Whiskey curled into her place and I rested my ever-expanding carcass on the worn burgundy leather of my favorite stool, one in from the end. 

He slid a small juice glass of suds in front of me and then walked over a small bowl of salted Spanish peanuts which I pushed away with my right hand, while downing the Pike's with my left.

I saw at the end of the bar--about ten stool's distance away from me the haze of a thick corona of corona smoke shrouding a wide-brimmed hat above and a forest-like effluence of beard below.

I nodded in that direction to the bartender and said, blithely, and with more California than my soul possesses, "Who's the dude?"

The bartender brought me a second Pike's and slid over the salted Spanish peanuts again.

"You might need these," was all he said. 

I took a small handful and went at them like a snake to a rat.

"It's Walt Whitman," the bartender said. 

"Ah," said I. "And is he well tonight, or lugubrious."

The bartender laughed at my vocabulary and polished with his damp white terry the dark mahogany of the bar top.

Whitman slowly stood himself up and seated himself on the stool to my left. He handed me a cigar, and brandished a long lit wooden match like Lady Liberty her torch. I smoked the cigar, suppressing phlegmy coughs along the way.

He began, "I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,/ But I do not talk of the beginning or the end."

"Can I buy you a drink," was all I could stammer.

He continued without acknowledging my patter.

"There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now."

I watched the bartender make the old man a drink consisting of equal parts gin, bourbon, lime juice and a dash of bitters: the Suffering Bastard.

Whitman downed it like a stevedore. He took a long drag on his cigar and exhaled smoke like an old Moran tug carrying sludge three-miles out to sea.

"My boy," he turned to me. "My boy."

It had been a long time since anyone called me boy. But Whitman, by my calculation was nearing 200, so I let the anachronism slide.

"You are Crossing on the Brooklyn Ferry?"

"We are all Crossing on the Brooklyn Ferry," he smoked. "We are all always Crossing."

He drained his Suffering Bastard and I my third Pike's. Whiskey stirred and stood by me. She had had enough of grumbling and cigar smoke and the sawdust on the floor. 

"We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us; 
We use you, and do not cast you aside--we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not--we love you--there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul."

With that, the Old Man let out a disaster's-worth of cigar haze, shrouding himself in vapor and, when it was gone, he was, too.

I reached into my pocket and removed two twenties to pay for my Pike's.

The bartender pre-empted me, "Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems."

He pushed my money back to me.

And Whiskey and I walked silently and poetically home.