Ramones – "53rd and 3rd" (1976)

53rd and 3rd, standing on the street

53rd and 3rd, I’m trying to turn a trick

53rd and 3rd, you’re the one they never pick

If you’re a regular reader of this wildly popular little blog, you know that 2 or 3 lines  knows pretty much everything there is to know about pretty much everything worth knowing about.

The burden of being the ne plus ultra of experts – “The Experts’ Expert,” if you will – is that I am constantly being asked for advice.

For example, I was recently asked for help by a DC-area fan who was going to New York City for the first time, and felt overwhelmed by the prospect of planning the trip. 

Here my recommendations for the perfect three-day visit to “The City That Never Sleeps.”  

How to Get There

If you live on the east coast, the best way for you to get to New York City is by taking Amtrak.  (Flying is expensive and doesn’t really save you any time if you live along the Northeast Corridor.  And if you’re thinking about driving into Manhattan, my advice is fuhgeddaboutit!)

Unless you’re made of money, just go coach on the regular Amtrak Northeast Regional trains.  Business class costs a lot more, as does travel on the high-speed Acela trains.  (The Acela can easily cost three times as much as a regular Amtrak train, and it saves you only about half an hour.)

Don’t expect a lot from Amtrak, and you won’t be disappointed.  Sure, the bathrooms are usually a mess and the food is pretty bad.  (Pack a sandwich or a salad for the ride – not only is the food on Amtrak bad, they often run out of stuff before you get to your destination.)

A Northeast Regional train pulling
into the BWI Amtrak station

On the plus side, you get more space for your luggage, wider seats and more legroom on Amtrak than you would have if you had flown – and the seating is two by two, so there are no middle seats.

Here’s a pro tip for Amtrak travel.  Pay the few extra dollars it costs for “Flex Fare” – that way, you can reschedule or cancel a trip at anytime prior to your train’s departure and get a full refund.  

Where to Stay

There are a zillion hotels in New York City.  Most of them are ridiculously expensive, and the ones that aren’t have the tiniest rooms you’ve ever seen.  I’ve been in rooms without windows, rooms where one side of the bed is against a wall (so a person sleeping on that side has to roll over to the other side to get out of bed), and rooms where there’s so little room between the foot of the bed and the wall that you have turn sideways and shuffle your feet to get from one side to the other.

On my last trip to the Big Apple, I stayed at the Blue Angel – which is a Choice Hotels property – in Midtown East.  

It was reasonably priced and the rooms weren’t too small.  There’s no free breakfast, no swimming pool, and no room service.  But it’s conveniently located within easy walking distance of two important subway lines, and it’s on a quiet street.

Day One

Your train will deliver you New York’s Penn Station.  If you’ve never been there, be prepared – it’s a more hellish place than you can imagine.  

If you took my advice and reserved a room at the Blue Angel, head straight for the A/C/E subway line and take the uptown E train to the Lexington Ave/53rd Street station – only five stops away – and walk two blocks to the hotel.  (Pay attention!  If you don’t, you may get on a downtown E train, or – even worse – an A or C train.)

You don’t need to buy a fare card to ride the New York subways if you have a contactless credit card – you just tap your card on the reader and push through the turnstile.  (Your credit card is contactless if it features a series of four curved lines resembling a Wi-Fi icon turned sideways on your the front or back.)

P. J. Clarke’s

After you check in, have lunch at P. J. Clarke’s, a storied old New York joint which is only a block from the Blue Angel.  Johnny Mercer wrote “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” on a bar napkin at P. J. Clarke’s, Buddy Holly proposed to his wife there, and Woody Allen spent a lot of time there in his younger days.  Also, it’s mentioned in a Truman Capote short story and Strangers on a Train, was a hangout for the Sterling Cooper crew in the Mad Men TV series, and was the inspiration for the fictional “Nat’s Bar” in The Lost Weekend.  

Don’t overthink things when you get there – just order a bacon cheeseburger like everyone else.  (Nat King Cole dubbed the P. J. Clarke bacon cheeseburger “the Cadillac of hamburgers” back in the fifties.)

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A lot of people who visit New York City spend a lot of money to get a view of the city from an observation deck.  The traditional spot to go for that is the Empire State Building, but guess what you miss by going there – you miss seeing the Empire State Building!  

There are some newer observation decks that are even higher and feature all sorts of extra bells and whistles – like the SUMMIT One Vanderbilt and the Edge at Hudson Yards.  

The rooftop bar at 230 Fifth

But I’m not a fan of heights, and I’m not a fan of spending money – so I recommend heading to 230 Fifth, a spacious rooftop bar that gives you not only a birds-eye view of the Empire State Building, but also a chance to gawp at the crowds of trashy-looking young people who come there to sip overpriced frozen drinks served in plastic bags with straws like a kids’ juice pouch.

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Next, it’s time to head to the Theater District to see a show.  You can choose a tried-and-true musical like Chicago or something more serious – the revival of Death of a Salesman would be a good choice.  

Theater tickets aren’t cheap.  Once you do a Google search to find out what is playing, you’ll be deluged with social media ads offering discounts for dozens of productions.  You can try the TKTS booth, or show up when the theater opens and hope you get a cheap “rush” ticket, but I recommend not wasting a lot of time trying to save a few bucks on ducats.  (If you’re that hard up for do-re-mi, you have no business going to New York in the first place.)

If you had a sufficiently late lunch at P. J. Clarke’s, you can get away with skipping dinner and grabbing a post-theater slice of pizza on a paper plate from one of the seemingly infinite number of pizza joints in Manhattan.  Sure, most of that pizza kind of sucks, but grabbing a slice is part of an authentic New York experience.

A New York City pedicab

The New York subway runs all night, so don’t worry about missing the last train back to the Blue Angel.  Alternatively, you can flag down one of the neon-lighted, music-blaring pedicabs that will swarm your theater when the play ends.  (Doing that is a dead giveaway to everyone that you’re a clueless tourist, but that’s already pretty obvious from the way you’re dressed.)

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In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll give you my suggested itinerary for the second day of your three-day New York City trip.

In the meantime, click here to listen to today’s featured song, which was released in 1976 on the Ramones’ eponymous debut album.

“53rd and 3rd” refers to the intersection of East 53rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.  (Always give the street number first, then the avenue number – not the other way around.)  

The song was written by the late Ramones bassist Dee Dee Ramone (né Douglas Glenn Colvin), and is supposedly based on his personal experience working as a male prostitute to support his heroin habit.  I’m not  sure if he actually solicited tricks at 53rd and 3rd – which is just a short walk from the Blue Angel – or if he just liked the way “53rd and 3rd” sounded.

Click here to order “53rd and 3rd” from Amazon.    

Nancy Sinatra – "Bossman" (2004)

Winter, summer, fall

Passes us by

Both you and I

My Sirius/XM subscription allows me to listen to broadcasts of New York Yankees games – and the games of every other major-league baseball team – while driving.

My car has a feature called “Personal Assistant,” which works the same way Siri works on an iPhone and Alexa  works on Amazon devices.  You can ask it what the weather forecast is, or get directions to your destination, or tell it what radio station you’d like to listen to, and it repeats your request back to you before executing it.  (You can set the Personal Assistant to speak in a male or female voice.  In my old car, I was able to get the female voice to speak with a British accent – I wish I could get my current car to do that as well.)

I’ve noticed that when I say “Play Sirius/XM New York Yankees baseball,” the Personal Assistant says “Sirius/XM New York Yankees baseball” – indicating that it understood my voice command – but it always takes me to the New York Mets broadcast instead.  When that happens, I have to hit the button on my car’s “infotainment” touch screen that takes me to the next channel – which is the Yankees channel.

Recently, I decided to try a different tactic.  I asked my car to “Play Sirius/XM Yankees baseball.”  The Personal Assistant responded by saying “Sirius/XM Oakland Athletics baseball,” but took me to the Yankees channel.

What do you think?  Should I take my car into the dealer, tell them about this, and ask them to fix it?  The car is still under warranty, so it wouldn’t cost me anything – although it might make my service advisor think I’m a total douchebag.  (Which is not a big deal to me – a lot of people already think I’m a total douchebag . . . probably because I am a total douchebag a lot of the time.)

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“Bossman” was released on Nancy Sinatra’s eponymous 2004 album:

That album includes songs written by Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), and Morrissey (the Smiths) – all of whom appear on the album.  If you had asked me which musicians were the least likely to collaborate with Nancy Sinatra, those three would have been very high on my list – yet there they are, big as life and twice as ugly.

Click here to listen to “Bossman.”

Click here to buy “Bossman” from Amazon.

Van Halen – "Finish What Ya Started" (1988)

Come on, baby

Finish what you started

I’m incomplete!

A couple of Christmases ago, one of my children gave me a year’s subscription to the Criterion Channel, a streaming service that allows you to watch thousands of classic and contemporary films from around the world.

Those movie offerings are supplemented with trailers, introductions, behind-the-scenes documentaries, interviews, and commentary tracks.

My only problem with the Criterion Channel is that it’s hard for me to choose which of its many films to watch on any given night.  It’s like having access to a great wine cellar – how do you decide which bottle to open when there are so many great ones to choose from?

Like many streaming services, the Criterion Channel allows you to save titles you’re interested in to a list that you can browse through whenever you’re trying to decide what to watch.

That function is a disaster for people like me because I spend more time browsing through the channel’s film library and clicking the “add to my list” button as I do watching movies.

Currently, my Criterion watch list contains no fewer than 407 titles.  The chances of me viewing all those films are infinitesimal.  Nevertheless, I keep adding movies to it.

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If you’re a regular reader of 2 or 3 lines, you know that I’m the poster child for people who don’t actually have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (“OCPD”) but act like they do.

Given my OCPD-ish personality traits – e.g., striving to do things perfectly, devotion to being productive, and preoccupation with details, rules, schedules, organization, and lists – it should have come as no surprise to anyone that when I got interested in Alice Munro’s fiction, I first obtained copies of all 14 of her short story collections from my public library and then read each of 140-plus stories in those books in chronological order.  I also meticulously recorded the titles of each of those stories along with the date that I read it in a notebook – which is how I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve read for almost 50 years.

Likewise, it should come as no surprise to anyone that I took an equally systematic approach to choosing films to watch on the Criterion Channel.

After viewing a few random classics that I had heard about but had never seen – like Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, and Bergman’s The Seventh Seal – I decided to focus on French films.

My original plan was to start with The 400 Blows – Francois Truffaut’s legendary 1959 movie, which I had seen when I was in college – and work my way through the films of Melville, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and the other French New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague) directors.  

I went to the library and checked out a comprehensive history of French cinema, which I planned to use to identify the movies I should watch.  But after reading the first few chapters of that book, I decided I needed to start by viewing the French “poetic realism” films of the thirties.

I began by watching Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, and then worked my way through the movies of Julien Duvivier (Pépé le Moko) Jacques Feyder (Carnival in Flanders), Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game – a truly remarkable film), and especially Marcel Carné, whose three-hour-plus Children of Paradise – which I had never heard of – is considered by many critics to be the greatest of all French movies.  (I wouldn’t argue with that judgment – it’s epic, dude!)

It took me a little over a year to work my way from Zero for Conduct to Henri Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at 21, the 1942 movie that was the subject of a recent 2 or 3 lines post.  Altogether, I viewed about 30 French classics from the thirties and forties.

I didn’t watch old French films exclusively during the last year – I also saw movies by Kurosawa, Scorsese, Peckinpah, DePalma, John Woo, Tarantino, and Richard Linklater (my personal favorite) as well.  

I know all that because I’ve started keeping track of the movies I watch in the same notebook where I record the books I read.

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Who am I making that list for?  Who do I think is going to read it?  I suppose one or more of my children or grandchildren might flip through my notebook someday.  If they do, they might find it somewhat interesting that I bothered to keep such a comprehensive list of the movies I watched and the books I read – but I seriously doubt that they will spend much time mulling over my viewing and reading choices, much less let the movies and books I listed influence their own choices.

(If my father or grandfather had left behind a notebook listing the movies he had seen and the books he had read, I’d be fascinated by it.  That’s no surprise – someone who would keep such a list would be interested in someone else’s list.)

The fact that I keep such a list is very interesting to me.  But what’s even more interesting is the particular way I’m now choosing the movies I watch and the books I read.

Why?

Why did I read 140-odd Alice Munro stories?  And why am I going to watch roughly a hundred classic French movies over a two- or three-year period? 

No one assigned those tasks to me – I’m not a college student whose professor assigned those stories or movies to his or her students.  

And no one would give a rat’s ass if I stopped reading Munro halfway through her oeuvre, or suddenly switched from old French films to the Fast & Furious franchise.  

Except me, of course.  I would not be happy with myself if I didn’t finish what I started.  

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All this nonsense almost certainly has something to do with the fact that I’m almost 74 years old.  I rarely think about dying, but I’m not stupid – I know what it means to be that age.

And what it means is that I have limited time left.  And what that means is that I feel the need to accomplish more than I’ve accomplished to date.

I’m not sure why I felt the need to read all of Alice Munro’s stories and watch all the great French films the Criterion Channel has to offer before my time runs out.  

What I am sure of is that if it hadn’t been Alice Munro, it would have been someone else – Marcel Proust, perhaps.  (I’ve been planning to read all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time for years.  Better late than never!)

And if it hadn’t been classic French films, it would have been Japanese films or finally getting around to watching all five seasons  of The Wire (which I’ve been saving like a squirrel saves nuts).

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The problem is that it doesn’t matter how many of these self-assigned labors I complete – there are infinitely more books to read and movies to watch than I have time for.  

Nonetheless, something is driving me to accomplish as many of these tasks as I can.  

At the same time, something is making me waste a lot of time every day – by lying in bed scrolling on my phone . . . or worse.

I keep hoping that writing about this stuff on 2 or 3 lines will help me figure things out.  But I think that what ends up happening is that I just dig the hole deeper and deeper.

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“Finish What Ya Started” was released on Van Halen’s 1988 album, OU812.  That was the band’s second album to feature singer Sammy Hagar instead of David Lee Roth.  

(Having trouble figuring out what the album’s title means?  Think about it, people.)

Click here to listen to “Finish What Ya Started,” which has nothing to do with Alice Munro stories or French films.

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.