Book Review: "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" by Ken Kalfus

Our Town downtown
January 22, 2007

“A Disorder Peculiar to the Country”
Ken Kalfus
Harper Perennial
$13.95 (paperback)

What does it take to feel truly connected to an earth-shattering event? Yes, it varies from person to person, but what varieties can be held up as the general responses to a tragedy? Is there an automatic rush of emotion that you either feel or don’t feel with your degree of self-absorption taken into account? Is it something a person cultivates after meditating on something that’s happened, after reading news report after news report, and then looking at the remnants of the tragedy until it finally sinks in? Or is it something you can attach yourself to, really attach yourself to – Iraq, September 11th, fill in the blank – only if you have a deep, unforced attachment to the event in question? The loss of a loved one is probably the prime example of this.

Maybe you are like Marshall, one of two main characters in Ken Kalfus’s satirical novel about a bitter divorce, set against the backdrop of the 2001 terrorist attacks, who was actually in the Trade Center when it was hit and saw people dying just steps in front of him.

Last year, 9/11-themed fiction made headlines because several writers – Kalfus, Jonathan Safran Foer with “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” Jay McInerney with “The Good Life” and Jess Walter with “The Zero” – published novels taking on the subject. (Foer’s book originally came out in 2005 in hardcover, but was released in paperback in April.)

Critics have often wondered whether it is “too soon” for 9/11 fiction in print or on-screen. They’ve asked this now-trite question in terms of its ethical implications, much in the same way they’ve singled out people for selling 9/11-themed t-shirts on street corners. They’ve also asked it in terms of perspective; don’t you need distance, in other words, a lot of years, to write good, reflective fiction about history?

Marshall and Joyce are a couple in their thirties with two young children, who live together in a Brooklyn Heights co-op, only because they have reached an impasse in terms of who will get to keep it after their divorce is finalized. Like mismatched roommates, they avoid each other whenever possible. Marshall gets the bedroom. Joyce gets the couch. They don’t speak save for the occasional screaming match.

And from the beginning, it’s pretty clear that there’s not going to be any sudden reconciliation, no Hollywood ending where they suddenly halt the proceedings and, we assume, begin to reconstruct their damaged home after the credits finish rolling.

Joyce sees the south tower fall from her office window, she incredibly feels a “giddiness, an elation,” knowing that Marshall works there. Similarly, when Marshall hears about Flight 93, the plane that was hijacked and crashed in Pennsylvania that day, he thinks Joyce is dead, thinking, incorrectly, that she is on it.

There are two main problems. The first, which is something Kalfus probably couldn’t avoid, is that it probably is “too soon,” trite as that observation may be by now, to write fiction about September 11th. The newsy pieces of exposition, intended to give the reader context, come across instead as awkward wire report excerpts, cut and pasted onto a manuscript: “The first morning of February saw the Columbia’s destruction, after NASA’s unequivocating, hard-faced experts ignored warnings that repeated damage to the shuttle’s foam insulation made it unsafe to fly.” Maybe in another fifteen years or so passages like these won’t sound so forced.

The other big stumbling block is that we are presented with two people who, we are told, once loved each other, and now seem to hate each other with a passion, yet we have no idea why and Kalfus never lets us in.

There’s an attempt to explain away Joyce and Marshall’s lack of personal history by way of saying their mutual hostility is so rabid that no one remembers what the original argument was about anymore. But that just seems like a copout: “On the last several occasions on which they had attempted sex … they had only deepened their anger with each other – anger about the sex, but also anger about the laundry and the squalling babies and the AmEx bill and the spilled milk.”

This is closer to what’s really wrong with the book, which despite its flaws is a breezy, and, once in awhile, entertaining read.

Even if you put aside any reservations you may have about what’s in good or bad taste, and accept that you are reading a black comedy about a man who saw someone nearly decapitated next to him as he fled the World Trade Center, and as bodies hit the ground nearby – there has to be some kind of consistency. It’s believable that Marshall has bottled this experience up inside of him, and maybe suffers from some variant of post traumatic stress disorder. But who knows, really, because it’s almost never mentioned except when people at his vaguely described job in finance are awed by the fact that he is a Trade Center survivor.

There are a few chuckles to be had in this “black comedy.” These “humorous” subplots revolve around Marshall and Joyce’s often picaresque attempts to undermine each other – above all, to make the divorce negotiations as difficult as possible for each other. Marshall maneuvers to screw up the wedding of Joyce’s sister from behind the scenes, and tries to meddle with Joyce’s 401(k) over the computer, so it will become worthless. These detours are funny. Kind of.
Marshall, Joyce and the secondary characters have a kind of satirically cartoon-ish quality, but most of the “jokes” in the book, which is marketed as a “black comedy,” fall flat.

One of the worst parts of the book is when Kalfus narrates the story from the perspective of the couple’s four-year-old daughter. Safran Foer got slammed for “Extremely Loud,” which more or less employed this technique from beginning to end. But at least that book, a sophomore slump, was earnest.

“A Disorder” is as unbalanced as Marshall increasingly gets. It’s an imbalance between absurdist humor and dramatic development. And it really goes off the rails in the later scenes, such as one ridiculous section where Marshall finds bomb-making instructions on the Internet, builds one and tries to blow himself (and his family) up in their apartment. When it fails to ignite, he throws it on the floor next to his dirty laundry and cries into his pillow. Reading it, you get the impression this is supposed to be some fragment of an absurdist comedy skit, but it just comes across as a non sequitur.

If the point is that, warts and all, life goes on in the face of tragedy, that comes across. But by ignoring the most crucial parts of what could have been a compelling story – mainly the roots of Marshall and Joyce’s marital problems, and their relationships to the 9/11 attacks on a deeper, inner level – the biggest impression that emerges is of a thin, callous, uncommitted exercise. Kind of like a bad marriage?

-- Matt Elzweig

Q & A with Billy Leroy: Owner, Billy’s Antiques & Props

Billy Leroy inside his tent. Photo by Lucia Di Poi

Our Town downtown
January 22, 2007

Ever wonder what that tent-greenhouse-barn thing is on East Houston Street? Formerly Lot 76, Billy’s Antiques & Props, perhaps downtown’s last true roadside attraction, was first pitched in 1986. Billy Leroy, an employee, took it over in 2003, after the original owner got sick.
Among other things the store’s got a taxidermied lion, a fortune-teller in a glass box (similar to the one in “Big”), subway signs, a Burger King sign, horror movie props made of silicone and plenty of antiques.

I didn’t always realize this was an antique shop.

The thing is, if you ask any New Yorker, ‘you know that crazy place, on Houston Street with the shit on the top?’ everybody knows it. I don’t need advertising.

My favorite type of antique is old courthouse benches, chairs, that old kind of—if you watch old film noirs from the 40s, that furniture. I see my stuff, all the time, in those movies… stuff that they used in the 30s and 40s is really good quality, and it’s solid wood, and it’s fantastic. But it has that great old New York look to it, [and] it’s the last bracket of American furniture that’s reasonably priced, that hasn’t gone into the stratosphere.

You’ve got artwork here too.

I love East Village art and I buy a lot of that. I really believe it was only a 30-year period from 1965 to 1995 where, in this area, artists flourished. And they really haven’t been showing anything like that, and I love that stuff. Cause it’s really like that hardcore—junkies, prostitutes—what this was. And it doesn’t exist. You know, the pitbull’s been replaced by the black lab. It’s totally, totally changed. And it’ll never be the same, ever. And we’re the last ones that kind of like keep that tradition going.

Are you an artist yourself?

Yeah, I went to art school [for] college, for painting and sculpture. And, I would say I loved it, I had talent, but I didn’t have the discipline. I like buying and selling. That’s what gets me going: finding [something], people appreciating it, and then selling it.

I want to start to get into representing artists of the East Village and pushing that. It’s American—it’s historical. It’s very historical. I have a friend right now who has documented the entire East Village, from the late 70s to the late 90s. And he has pictures of the Tompkins Square riots; Rakowitz, the guy that cooked his girlfriend and fed her to the homeless. He just has these documents, like so amazing, of like, what it was.

Do you see any upside to the gentrification?

Well, New York City as a whole has been gentrified. See I grew up in the 70s, on the Upper East Side. I went to prep school and all that shit. And coming down here was like fucking amazing man. It was like ‘whoa’ you know, ‘holy shit—New York really is a scary kind of dark place. And it was fun. But I don’t know about upside of gentrification. I mean, I guess the customers buy more, you know. I guess that’s good for business. But then the color of New York—I have real mixed feelings, cause I love art, I love crazies, you know. I just like it.

Are you confident you can survive it?

Well, everything has to do with my landlord, who’s really great. He’s the best. You know, he could’ve made—he could’ve made that a Starbucks a long time ago. And, the rent I give him doesn’t pay his dry cleaning bill.

Who shops here?

I have celebrities wandering in, very rich people, and I have the worst, of the bottom, that come in. Because we’re like, to someone that’s like, [a] marginal kind of a person that’s living on the street, they see this place, it’s all lit up and the doors are wide open. They walk in—and I, I welcome them, I’m like ‘yo, what’s up?’ I give out more handouts than I’d like.

I’ve been attacked. I was beaten into the sidewalk by three big guys when they were drunk [last year.] The reason is they were picking on a smaller guy. I couldn’t tolerate that. I’m a guy that, when I see that, it really bugs me, to see bullies. So then they turned on me and there was too many of them. But I didn’t get hurt that bad.

Thats must be the ‘dark side’ of the store you mentioned.

The old Bowery and the old, old New York—[our] neighborhood was full of junkies, and bums, and alcoholics. And we keep that tradition alive [laughs]. But it’s the last of the stores that really has that old feeling of how stores were 20 years ago, or even further.

In terms of antiques, all that’s in the area is exclusive boutiques—high end antiques where you just get sticker shock. Some of it kind of looks similar to mine, which is cool. Everybody should make money. But, it’s just that I’m trying to keep the old Bowery feeling alive at the store.
But it also has a fun side. Like, you come into my store—people walk in there, like ‘holy shit, what is this place?’

What about bad weather?

It’s a tent. It was a dirt lot when [the original owner] got it, and he erected a tent. And then he made it a little nicer. And it has holes and rips. We have no electrical, we have no toilets, we have no heat. We run off a generator. No fax, no e-mail. You come in, you make a deal, you know, it’s cool. And I get a lot more compliments than criticisms.

Two years ago, we had that monstrous blizzard? I cranked up the Motorhead, opened the doors, just like went for it, you know. Course I didn’t make any sales. But it’s important for people to see that we opened.

[We do a] lot of fashion shoots. One shoot [that] was supposed to go through and it didn’t cause of the weather was Penthouse. And I was totally like, I was, you know ‘yeah man, shut the doors…” I was really psyched for that.

Can you talk about the haggling?

They expect it at my store. I’ve become very good at weeding out the buyers and the non-buyers, cause a lot of people just come to bullshit. If I sense the deal—you know, say it’s a hundred bucks, I’ll give you a deal on it, you know, knock it down ten or twenty bucks. But on certain pieces that I really love, I’m really tough. Only on the artwork. On the run-of-the-mill furniture, there’s always [an opportunity to bargain], unless someone says to me “how much is that rickety table?” The “rickety table” you know? I bought it, I know [what kind of] table it is. I go “it’s more. Cause it’s rickety, it’s more.” I guess [there are] a lot of ball-busters.

What’s your Rottweiler’s name?

Kill-Joy [like the witch’s dog in “Wicked.”] So any joy you might have, she quickly terminates… The reality is when I got attacked, she didn’t do jack shit… She’s always hanging out in the corner, waiting for a rat to run by. By the way, we have rats the size of footballs because it’s a lot.

Are you actually an antique store or something else?

I think it’s more because of the location and the style over the years of the Bowery. It’s just developed into this really weird kind of—you know even my sign, it’s kind of a Western kind of—like the last outpost.

I have a lithograph from The Herald Gazette from 1881. It’s a lithograph of a guy in front of a tent like this, and it’s all paintings, and it is exactly the same dimensions as my entrance in my tent. And it’s from 1881. And the kicker is, it says “Night Scene On The Bowery.” And it’s like whoa, that’s like just Twilight Zone-type stuff.

—Matt Elzweig

Your Body for Science: Clinical trials are not just for guinea pigs.

Beth Israel's Dr. Peter Homel, wearing an experimental device used to treat carpal tunnel syndrome. Photo by Lucia Di Poi

Our Town downtown
January 15, 2007

Edward Gallardo’s troubles began about ten years ago. Since then, the actor, playwright and Chelsea resident has been through prostate cancer-related surgery, multiple back surgeries and complications from both.

“This last one was for lumbar fusion. It’s been fun,” he says with a laugh, in the Hollywood Diner, across the street from his apartment.

A look at a dated photo on his Web site makes it clear that Gallardo, who says he was healthy prior to his prostate and back ailments, is a shadow of his former self. He moves the way he talks, with a lot of effort, and gets around with the aid of a cane. He can walk about two blocks, tops. Yet harsh as that may sound, he is feeling much better these days and credits his participation in one of the many clinical trials that take place at downtown research centers, with making him feel better than he has in a long time.

Gallardo has not worked in years due to severe pain, and has been on morphine since about 2004. His regimen includes one long-lasting pill, three times a day, and another short-lasting, but more potent pill, every four hours as needed.

The morphine helps, but for a long time, it had a nasty side effect, narcolepsy. He would fall asleep abruptly, without warning, even while standing, up to what he estimates was 12 times a day. This was particularly dangerous because he is a smoker. “[I] have woken up and the cigarette’s on the floor … in my apartment … more than once.” He was also afraid of passing out in the street or in another public place.

He complained about the problem to his doctor at Beth Israel Medical Center, who told him he would be a good candidate for a drug trial being conducted at the hospital’s Pain Medicine and Palliative Care unit.

The drug was Modafinil, a stimulant normally prescribed for sleep disorders. The aim of the study was to see how effective it was in treating sedation and excessive daytime sleepiness in patients on pain medications. Gallardo took it every morning for four weeks, and filled out a daily sleep chart to measure how long and how soundly he slept, when he wanted to sleep, and how many times he fell asleep when he didn’t want to.

Gallardo says the results were “astounding,” and that he knew it wasn’t a placebo within two hours of taking it for the first time. “The only time I fell out would be like when I was watching a DVD or something … And that would be, I’m sure, because I don’t sleep well.” Otherwise, he had more energy than he had had since he began taking morphine two years ago. He could walk more too.

Throughout the trial process the researchers were available to answer any questions he had and he describes the experience as “wonderful.”

The researchers told him about all the possible side effects, but he “felt very safe taking it.” And the only thing that scared him was what would happen when the study ended, since he received the medication for free while he participated.

The study ended on January 5th, and now Gallardo is trying to convince his insurance company to pay for the drug. He says he expects they will.

Not all trials are as invasive as those that involve taking a new drug or undergoing experimental surgery.

Beth Israel is also testing a device called Carpal-Ease, that was developed by a small start-up in New Jersey to treat wrist pain associated with carpal tunnel syndrome, wrist arthritis and wrist repetitive stress syndrome.

The Carpal-Ease is a small device worn around the patient’s wrist, and transmits a low voltage electrical charge that’s supposed to reduce swelling and pressure on the median nerve. The desired effects are greater freedom of movement and, more importantly, less pain for carpal tunnel sufferers.

A small study, the researchers are only recruiting ten patients for the first phase, and are working with a budget of about $30,000, which according to Dr. Peter Homel, Director of Biostatistics in the pain unit, is modest. “For like, major drug studies we’ll get anywhere from 28 to a couple of hundred patients,” he says in a telephone interview. And budgets for big drug studies are typically in the $200,000 to $300,000 range.

A lot of the studies at the pain center involve opiates. Some come from drug companies who ask researchers at anywhere from five to twenty sites to test new products.

And others are “investigator-initiated,” where doctors at the center take existing opiates like morphine or oxycodone, for example, and test out how well they work when they’re applied in new ways, or test out new formulations they’ve come up with on their own. Typically, drug companies or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are approached for the funding of investigator-initiated studies.

Study participants, like Edward Gallardo, are often existing patients, recruited through other parts of the hospital or its network, for trials that apply to a specific condition they have. But investigators also launch aggressive campaigns that utilize the media and the Internet. (An advertisement for the carpal tunnel study was posted on Craig’s List.) NYU Medical Center advertises its studies in newspapers, on the radio, on its Web site and on television. There are even ads on buses to get subjects to come in and participate in trials.

For some studies, outreach workers go into the field and recruit people cold. Project ACHIEVE (AIDS Community Health Initiative Enroute to a Vaccine Effort), a part of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, is holding HIV vaccine trials at its Union Square location. The group’s outreach workers recruit men off the streets of Chelsea, and in gay bars and clubs to participate in clinical trials.

Beth Israel’s Dr. Peter Homel says that that the number of institutions conducting research and the number of individual trials is very high, so the competition between them to get volunteers is intense, and “people are practically inundated by ads.”

For the carpal tunnel study, he put up flyers in departments that would deal with the syndrome – neurology and the pain clinic were a few – and even put them up in local health food stores. Fredda Smith saw one in the Sol Goldman 14th Street Y, where she volunteers, and signed up for the study.

Smith, who has carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists, didn’t realize until after two preliminary interviews that she would be paid for taking part. From that point on she received fifty dollars for each session. (She says the device had no effect on her.)

Typically research volunteers are compensated. “You’re asking for them to come in and give up their time … It interferes with their life, their work. It’s travel costs, all those sorts of things,” Homel says.

Beau Gostomsky, who directs clinical trials at NYU Medical Center, says that in the majority of studies research institutions pay volunteers for their travel expenses, and a small stipend if they’re going to have to stay for an hour or two.

If it’s a long-term study where the subject has to stay overnight and undergo lab tests, he or she
is usually paid per-hour, “based on time and effort,” he says in a telephone interview.

But Gostomsky stresses that despite popular notions about professional guinea pigs, the incentive to participate in a medical trial should not be money. He says that people do approach him with money on the brain, though. “We have to be very diligent … from an institutional standpoint to make sure that compensation doesn’t appear as an incentive or is not an incentive, or isn’t a coercive incentive.” And his concern about this goes well beyond his own institution. “The federal government is very concerned that a study doesn’t come through and [say] ‘listen, if you participate, we’re gonna pay you $10,000’ … That would unduly influence somebody to participate in a clinical trial.” For this reason, he says, compensation is “minimal” and should only cover “time and effort.”

Potential benefits aside, some people are hesitant to volunteer for medical research for fear of side effects. Federal law mandates that all potential side effects of a particular drug are made clear in the informed consent documents a patient signs before they take part in a study.
But Gostomsky says that the informed consent process is not just signing off on an initial waiver form and hoping for the best. And if it was, it’s not now. Informed consent is an ongoing, active process, a dialogue between the subject, the investigator and the research team, he says.
“It’s very much focused on, you know, continually informing the patient and continually encouraging the patient as to whether or not they want to be, and continue in, the trial. A patient can withdraw from a clinical trial at any time for any reason.”

And there is an institutional review board in place at most hospitals to safeguard the rights of patients, and ensure that all clinical trials are ethical.

Any clinical trial in the U.S. must gain approval from an institutional review board before it begins. According to the NIH, these boards consist of doctors, statisticians, researchers, and community advocates among others, and periodically review ongoing research after it’s approved.

A.J. Walker had heard rumors about HIV vaccine tests, but had no idea he’d end up participating in clinical trials for one. Walker, 27, lives in Chelsea and is a writer.
He was at Splash, a gay bar on 17th Street, when he was approached by a member of Project ACHIEVE’s outreach team who was looking for men of color who have sex with men. He was interested, but for a reason he can’t recall, wasn’t applicable for that particular study. But he volunteered for another one the outreach team suggested. “They interviewed me and asked me a ton of questions, which fortunately for me, I consider myself an open book, so that wasn’t a big problem,” he says in a telephone interview.

He entered the first part of the study last spring and went in for vaccinations once every two weeks at first. Now that he’s in the later stages of the study, he goes in every six months. His last visit was in August.

Walker never had any reservations about participating, although he admits that he has “friends who were very sort of neurotic, like ‘oh my God, you’re gonna take a risk. They’re gonna infect your blood’ and everything like that.” His thinking was that, having worked with HIV positive populations in the past, having done research on the virus, and considering all the modern safeguards for patients, there was “no way on earth that anything would be allowed to be operated in this day and age that had more than perhaps a tenth of a percent of risk of me being infected [with] HIV.”

He says he could only see good coming out of participating, and while he is “99.9 percent safe,” in terms of sexual activity, being a part of the study is helping him to analyze his own sexual behaviors more effectively. “It causes you to really reevaluate the situations that you’ve been in and how safe you’ve been, and how safe you could be.”

The Union Square site is one of three locations where Project ACHIEVE conducts HIV vaccine studies. The other two are at Columbia University Medical Center and in the Bronx.
The HIV Vaccine Trials Network is international and its headquarters are in Seattle.

Project ACHIEVE is in the middle of a phase II trial and currently has the highest enrollment for the trial in the country, according to John Bonelli, who supervises the recruiters and organizes outreach activities for the group.

Krista Goodman, who oversees clinic operations, describes the different stages of research, in a telephone interview. “Phase I trials are the first step of human experimental testing, which is really determining the safety of the vaccine.” Over the years they’ve conducted about 15 at the Union Square site.

“If they seem to be safe … and there’s some sort of immune response, it can move into a phase II trial.” Phase II looks at a vaccine’s effectiveness. Specified populations take the vaccine, with their likelihood of contracting HIV taken into account.

They are compared with a control group (that doesn’t get the vaccine), and if the results are promising the study can move into phase III trials. “This is really looking at efficacy, and does this vaccine work.”

Goodman says only one phase III trial has ever taken place in the United States and that the results were disappointing. “There was absolutely no difference between people who got the vaccine and people who didn’t, and the number of infections that occurred.” She estimates that it ended in 2003.

The current phase II trial is promising, “anecdotally,” but she says none of the data’s been analyzed.

Goodman and Bonelli agree that the most realistic answer to the AIDS riddle is probably a vaccine, rather than a cure, largely because of economics; though more and more medications are being developed to help people with AIDS live longer, the majority of people worldwide cannot afford them, and a cure will likely be very costly. “It’s really about preventing new infections. I think that’s where the push is,” Goodman says.

Studies like the ones the network are conducting take a long time to complete and analyze. Goodman says individual studies take four to five years to conduct, so it’s not possible to imagine when a working vaccine will be discovered. To illustrate this she mentions that the data from some of the ongoing studies were projected to be available in 2011.

The importance of studies like these, Bonelli says, is that even though findings from each one are pieces of a much larger puzzle, the science keeps advancing with each small discovery.
Speaking about the project’s work in cooperation with other network members around the globe, A.J. Walker says he thinks the project is “a case of building blocks.”

And asked whether he would have been as quick to take part in a clinical trial, before he got sick, Edward Gallardo (who took part in the pain medication study) says that if there were something he felt were important enough – he happens to mention a hypothetical AIDS vaccine – he “definitely” would have.

Recently, he read about a doctor who built a bladder out of stem cells and was intrigued, since
complications from prostate cancer have left him incontinent. He says that if he could find a clinical trial for it, he “would do it in a nanosecond.”

-- Matt Elzweig

Movie Review: Notes On A Scandal

Our Town downtown
January 15, 2007

Cate Blanchett (left) and Judi Dench (right).

Playing at: Angelika Film Center, Chelsea Clearview Cinemas
Run Time: 92 min.
Rating: R
Director: Richard Eyre

There is almost no physical violence in this film adaptation of a 2003 Zoë Heller novel. But in the same way the anticipation of sex can give the act itself (depending on who it’s with) a run for its money, “Notes” more than manages to send out shiver-worthy tremors of uneasiness, every step of the way.

And sex is a big part of this tale of two teachers, one old, one new, one young, one old, both repressed in different ways that lead them dangerously close to self-destruction.

Sheba (Cate Blanchett) is the new art teacher at a boys school in suburban London and is immediately set upon by the appropriately named Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), a no-nonsense history teacher who has long ago dropped the noble ideals of transforming each and every one of her working class pupils into “gems,” during her thirty or so years in residence. She’s a disciplinarian and is unfazed by what she sees as the unduly complex, ultimately superficial efforts of her younger, more liberal counterparts. There’s that, and also the fact that she hasn’t been laid, it is implied, ever.

Though she sees herself as a “moral guardian” for the faculty, she has quietly established herself as a stalker, and seems to hold everyone around her in contempt. That is, except for her cat, Sphinx, and her most recent object of desire, Sheba.

But Barbara isn’t the only one competing for Sheba’s affection. If it weren’t bad enough to know that Sheba is married with children (to her former college professor, played by Bill Nighy, a man about 20 years her senior), Barbara learns that she’s begun a clandestine affair with one of her 15-year-old students.

To Barbara, this salacious piece of knowledge is a golden egg, and she uses it, or rather the threat of making it public, as a way of burrowing herself deep into Sheba’s existence.
Like the mythic sphinx, Sheba is very hard to read. In the way she opens up to Barbara, even before her secret is revealed, it is hard to tell if she’s incredibly naïve about the woman’s volatility, whether she’s sympathetic to her loneliness (Barbara has no other friends at school), or she’s just in denial. The great thing about Blanchett’s performance and the screenplay is that at different moments it’s conceivable that she is one of each. And when Barbara is affixing gold stars to pages in her diary (for the days that merit them), her shockingly mean thoughts pick up where her acid tongued retorts at work leave – but Dench mixes them with words, thoughts, and expressions of longing and vulnerability, bringing out all of her character’s dimensions.

In this way “Notes” doesn’t shy away from showing that like the fallout that can come from acting on impulse, the fact that human beings are often completely irrational creatures is inescapable.

In one of her interior monologues, Barbara describes the affair that led to Sheba’s marriage as the kind of “incautious, immediate intimacy” that members of Sheba’s privileged class are prone to.

Intimacy comes up again and again, and the possibility that it might just be functional, except maybe in the luckiest of pairings, is lurking around every corner. The shadows of this unromantic notion are cast on Sheba’s relationship with her husband, with her teenaged lover and with Barbara, and in their relationships with her. It’s a suggestion that most of us live in our heads and are alone, really.

This may sound bleak, but it drives the action. And it is far too suspenseful to descend into a moping melodrama with lots of forlorn eyes gazing out through windows at nothing in particular.

-- Matt Elzweig

Q & A with Michael Nowlan, Professional Organizer

Photo by Lucia Di Poi


Our Town downtown
January 8, 2006

The earliest indication of Michael Nowlan’s career path was a pantry he tidied up for his aunt as farm kid in Australia. But he had no idea he would one day study feng shui, and that he would move to America. He arrived in New York in 2002.

“But you don’t do any feng shui until you’ve cleared your clutter,” he says, and “nobody in the feng shui world was prepared to go in and help you get rid of your clutter.” So there was a gap, which is more or less what inspired him to set up his business.

He says New Yorkers are wasting valuable real estate to store their junk. “You’re paying a thousand bucks a month rent for this apartment (well if you were you’re bloody lucky, it’s cheap). If you can save twenty percent of the stuff in here—you’re not using it, you know, it’s just storage—that’s 20 percent of a thousand bucks a month for storage. So you pay 200 dollars a month to store all this stuff in your apartment that you’re not using.”

“One of the things that amuses me most—you know it’s 2007 now, we live in Manhattan, it’s a 24/7 city—people will still go and live in a 300 square foot apartment, and buy a pack of 48 toilet rolls. Why? 48 toilet rolls takes up enough space for a lounge suite. You can get it on the corner at any time of the day or night. ‘Here’s a tissue.’ ‘Oh, I save money.’ Yeah. Right.”

So how do people become disorganized?

It’s not hard to collect clutter cause every time you’re on the street somebody’s shoving something in your hand, whether it’s a piece of paper, it’s an invitation, it’s a best buy, it’s a new phone, and then just, people just inherently take it. You go [to] the shops and you buy something [and they’ll] shove something else in your bag—another piece of advertising. You open your post box and it’s full of junk mail. You can’t stop it. It’s like a disease. I never take anything from somebody on the street because, I didn’t want it five minutes ago, why do I want it now?

Can you describe some of the types of solutions you come up with for people?

Don’t go out to your container store and buy … 12 plastic cups [to hold things in]—please don’t do that. It’s a waste of money.

If we can use something in the apartment for another purpose, then yeah let’s do it. You know, armchairs can be used as end tables, or ladders can be used as magazine racks, anything you can.

What are basic things that people can do to reduce their clutter on their own?

There’s no right or wrong place to start. The system that’s gonna work is the one that works for you.

One of the reasons why people become cluttered is they don’t have a specific place to put stuff. Don’t view the project as a whole. Just do one little thing. Allocate yourself time, like you would an appointment. Put the music on and keep your focus. And if you do one little thing, and then another, and then another little thing, it gets done.

At our apartment, if something new comes in, something old goes out. Don’t think about it as throwing stuff away. Think of it as more of giving it a new life. [I have] a lot of clients give stuff to Housing Works.

Tell me about some of your toughest and most memorable cases.

Well there was one situation—it was a good job, and he was a really nice guy, but I’m telling you, what’s on the surface is not what’s underneath. This apartment was disgusting. I mean I had to literally shovel stuff out of there. It was on 59th. He was a really nice guy, well-presented you know, professional person. You would never know. But he would buy takeaway food and just throw the container on the floor. Empty cans of juice or drink or plastic bags, sticky sauces from Chinese food. And newspapers and magazines and stuff. Number one it’s a health hazard. Number two, there were vermin—cockroaches and stuff like that. I had to get pest control. I did some follow-up sort of stuff with him, but he was one of these cases that no matter how hard I tried, he was gonna go back to his old ways. Some people are just born lazy, man. There’s nothing you can do about that.

Some people are obsessive compulsive; one guy had not thrown out a newspaper—for 25 years. He had a sickness and was getting treatment for it, but I saw 25 years of news in America or wherever he was from.

I love the before and after shots: I worked with a working girl, and one day we were sorting through clothes. We had to do the work gear. She had a wardrobe for herself and [another] for the working gear. So that was a funny day. She wanted to try everything on, from knee-high patent leather boots to strapless, braless, crotchless, strap-on chains, whips, whatever, you name it, like feathers. We did it all. We would go through it and see what still worked, what needed D batteries and what wasn’t doing it for her anymore. It amazes me—this woman must’ve had 17 handbags, not to mention, she had probably 25 coats. And these weren’t all because she had different reasons to wear them; these were just hoarding unnecessarily.
Some people don’t look after their pets very well. You know the cats pissed everywhere or shit under the bed. It’s not always pretty. Sometimes it’s rubber gloves and a face mask. And a very long-handled broom.

— Matt Elzweig

Upside Down: Amsterdam Billiard Club Rolls Into Union Square

Hoping for a good break on Amsterdam Billiards Club's last night uptown. Photo by Lucia Di Poi

Our Town downtown
January 2, 2007

On New Year’s Day, Amsterdam Billiard Club will move from the Upper West Side, two days early, to the former site of Corner Billiards, on Eleventh Street between Third and Fourth Avenues.

About one year ago, The Related Companies gave notice to brothers Greg and Ethan Hunt and their business partner, the comedian David Brenner, that the building that had housed their upscale billiard hall since it opened in 1990 was coming down to make way for a luxury condo development.

Greg Hunt, who, like his brother, quit a job on Wall Street to start Amsterdam, said it took “virtually every day of the year” to find a new space to house the club, in an interview just prior to the move.

The search took so long because in addition to budget constraints, Hunt said that current zoning laws prohibit pool halls from “about half of Manhattan.”

He estimates that he personally looked at about 60 potential locations around Manhattan.
Hunt called the New York City zoning laws “archaic” and said that landlords are still cool to the idea of renting to billiard clubs. “Even though the image has changed quite a bit there’s still the lingering image of the old smoky pool rooms that we all grew up with.”

The new location is slightly smaller than the old one, and houses 26, versus 31 tables.
This room is not as wide-open as the uptown club because it has several floor-to-ceiling columns.

It has a gated arena for exhibitions and VIP visitors (the club boasts a long roster of celebrity clientele) that will hold two tables. (A regulation tournament arena holds six.)

Like the original, it is modeled on the type of “classic old billiard club” common in the 1940s, Hunt said. Designed by architect Glen Coben, whose most recent project was Mario Batali’s restaurant, Del Posto, the idea was to create a space that looked fifty years old, and felt like being in “someone’s living room.”

As of this writing, Hunt put the construction tab at $2.25 million and counting. He estimated the final cost would total close to $2.5 million.

Hunt attributes the demise of Corner Billiards to “absentee ownership.” Whereas the Hunts were inspired to create an upscale pool hall by a love of the game that developed after their parents bought a table from Blatt Billiards in 1970, the owners of Corner were primarily in the business of real estate and did not spend money on necessary improvements.

He described the move as a “friendly merger and not a hostile takeover” of Corner. For one thing, he hired Corner’s general manager, and he hopes to absorb Corner’s customer base. He expects that most of his existing customers will follow Amsterdam downtown, but acknowledged that the demographic is different and that the marketing of the club may have to change. The “late night, walk-in traffic will be more reflective of [the] neighborhood as opposed to” the uptown business. “Virtually all” of the 500 year-round league players who play at Amsterdam will head to the new location, he said. And he is confident that he can count on corporate parties, which make up a solid chunk of his business, to remain steady too.

Though the well-to-do and upwardly mobile crowds that frequent Amsterdam and other clubs like it – Slate, in Chelsea, will be Amsterdam’s main competition – may want to steer clear of the game’s traditional subterranean atmosphere, there are plenty of downtowners who like their pool extra grimy. They play in more Spartan halls, bars, and under bodegas too. They play in leagues, for money or just for fun.

One such player is Cary Conover, a photographer who lives on the Lower East Side and started playing pool in his grandfather’s basement, just north of Wichita, Kansas, not far from where he grew up.

He plays last pocket, which requires a player to hit the eight ball into the same pocket where they sank their last ball, stripe or solid, at the Hamilton Fish Recreation Center on the Lower East Side. But since the crowd is mostly representative of the neighborhood’s big Latino population, he feels a little out of place there.

He’s more at home at Sophie’s, a bar in the East Village, where his APA (American Poolplayers Association) league team is based.

In a telephone interview, Conover, who has a photoblog dedicated to pool, said that most leagues in NY are eight-ball leagues – the standard professional game is nine-ball – and that the leagues the APA oversees are broken down more or less by neighborhood. Those good enough to make it past the city league and regional championships get to compete in Las Vegas.

Conover said the atmosphere is laid-back and friendly, and that there’s a handicap system so that hacks and sharpshooters can play each other. The players vary from hobbyists to skilled players who play in pool halls when they’re not competing in league games in the bars.
“I like the bar scene … I mean just the kind of dive bar that’s got a pool table … and you put your name on that list and you’re just really … itching to play and once it’s your turn … you just try to play as best you can and like hold on to that table, see how many games in a row you can win. One time I won like 15 games in a row … That like happens to me once a year.” Other nights he’s off. “You wait, you know, 20 minutes to get your turn to play, and once you play you scratch on the 8.”

Conover described some of his teammates. One, who goes by “Caveman,” drinks black and tan beer straight from the pitcher and looks kind of like a cross between a Hell’s Angel and “a dirty Santa Claus.”

Another is a black man in his late fifties named Joseph Williams who has been called “Slima” since childhood. “I believe that’s Hebrew for ‘peaceful one.’”

Conover assumes that there are people out there playing for big money, but thinks the heyday of high-stakes games in backrooms and hustlers who traveled the country trying to score big are probably over. “I think maybe pool’s sort of not quite in a booming period.”

What it needs, he thinks, is another big movie like “The Color of Money,” to serve as a “new, big, popular culture reference to pool … that could probably … cause an upswing.”

This movie also came up when I spoke to professional pool player Tony Robles, who teaches at Amsterdam, and is ranked as the UPA’s (United States Professional Pool Players Association) number 16 player.

Robles said that after “The Color of Money” – in which Paul Newman reprised his classic role as Fast Eddie Felson from “The Hustler” – came out in 1986, people began building upscale pool rooms and going into the billiards business.

Though Amsterdam is the lone survivor from that period, there were other early upscale pool halls built around that time. The Billiard Club on 19th Street, which went up in 1987, was one, and Chelsea Billiards (now Slate) was another, according to Barry Dubow, a spokesperson for Blatt Billiards, the high-end equipment dealer.

Upscale pool hall construction in the 80s was the initial push that allowed the sport to begin chipping away at the seedy associations that had kept large segments of the city away from pool for decades. But also, these clubs finally started to obtain liquor licenses, which is something pool rooms weren’t able to do before. Ron Blatt, whose family has run Blatt Billiards since 1923, said that this was the most important boost to pool’s reputation around the city, in a phone interview. “Once they were able to get a liquor license, then they set up like a café … and you know, a nightclub scene and all of that, and … it became a whole different atmosphere. And now the women started to come. So when women start to come, I mean, the men are gonna follow. You know that. … Now it’s a social event.”

In fact, this newer type of pool – the pool hall as a more wholesome kind of social center – may be closer to a renaissance rather than a revolution.

Shortly after Michael Phelan popularized billiards, a game that had originated as an indoor version of croquet in France, in the 15th century – by publishing a book of rules in 1859 and writing articles about the game – he formed a company that would later merge with Brunswick, the pool table manufacturer; the company would then create a standard business plan that made pool halls fairly easy to set up.

And according to Barry Dubow, there were 4,000 rooms in the five boroughs at the turn of the century – the billiard room had become a way to network.

Once technologies like film, television and the automobile developed a presence, though, that number began to decline. Dubow estimated that today there are 30-50 actual pool rooms that “cater to the sport” in Manhattan.

R.A. Dyer, who writes a column for Billiards Digest and is the author of “The Great Shootout” (due out from The Lyons Press in fall 2007), said in a phone interview that in its long history of pool, New York is “sort of famous for really heavy duty action” – “action joints” being pool rooms frequented by gamblers.

There was Paddy’s 7-11, located above the Honeymoon Lane dance hall on 47th Street, which attracted a lot of gamblers since it was open 24 hours. “During the 1950s and into the 60s, it was where a lot of really, really, really sort of monstrously talented pool players from all over the country would come and hang out and gamble for some pretty high stakes” – players like Jersey Red, Three-Fingered Gus, Wagon Head (a player who always wagged his head when he shot), New York Blackie, Joey with Glasses, and Bicycle Charlie.

Cranfield’s was in Washington Heights. Babe Ruth and his teammates hung out there, and it had the approval of Minnesota Fats, the most famous pool player of all time.

Minnesota Fats himself, whose real name was Rudolph Walter Wanderone Jr., was from Washington Heights. According to ESPN.com’s “Page 2” he actually changed his name to Minnesota Fats after “The Hustler” was released in 1961, although he claimed to have been the inspiration for Jackie Gleason’s character of the same name in the film.

Ames was a pool hall on West 44th, and was where director Robert Rossen filmed “The Hustler.” According to Dyer, Rossen spent $20,000 to make the place look decrepit – putting in dilapidated furniture, spittoons and adding texture to the walls.

No matter how much more mainstream pool has become, it is still associated with gambling.
Tony Robles, whose own nickname is “The Silent Assassin” has not gambled for 13 years.

Robles, 40, fell in love with pool as a teenager in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and spent a two-year period practicing for 12 hours a day, six days a week, after high school.

Robles welcomes the era of the posh pool hall, but when we spoke in what was the former corporate VIP rental room at Amsterdam’s old location, he reminisced about the days when there was more on the table than just bragging rights. He originally gambled because a mentor told him it was the only way to learn. He once played a friend of his for 21 consecutive hours at Chelsea Billiards when he was in his late 20s. Over the course of about two weeks he beat this friend for a total of $8,000.

But Robles, who comes across as modest and laid-back, says that’s nothing – this friend played his own brother and beat him for $14,000. In one night.

Robles eventually gave up gambling because he realized there were other ways to develop the skills of a champion, and because he saw the problems it created, though nothing he witnessed ever got violent.

What first attracted Robles to the game was the simple sound of the ball hitting the back of the pocket, the first time he walked into a pool room, at 13. He read one of the few books on pool technique that was available at the time that same night, and was hooked.

“Next I started learning mastery of the cue ball and how to place it in one area and the other, and that’s when I started up with the game and I never looked back since.”

He is encouraged by the increased amount of information available to people who want to take up the game now.

“Last year, a [16-year old] Taiwanese boy [named Wu Chia-ching] won the world 9-ball championship. He had been playing since he was 6 years old. So that’s scary. So a lot of these young kids are getting better a lot quicker than we used to.”

Robles said a lot more women are playing pool these days. Women have had a growing presence for a long time though. Among the most well known are Allison Fisher (“The Duchess of Doom”); Jeanette Lee (“The Black Widow”), who was once a cocktail waitress at Amsterdam; and Karen Corr (“The Irish Invader”). Jean Balukas was “sort of a Bobby Fischer type” who “no one could touch,” according to R.A. Dyer, and is the youngest member of the Billiard Congress of America’s Hall of Fame. According to the BCA Web site she “competed in her first BCA U.S. Open when she was nine years old, finishing seventh.” Balukas retired several years ago after a dispute with the women’s tour promoter, and is said to be working at her family’s pool hall in Brooklyn. Dyer said that there has been a lot of effort to get her to return to the sport.

A message left for her at Hall of Fame Billiards in Brooklyn was not returned at press time. But the man who answered the phone acknowledged that she would be back later.

-- Matt Elzweig