It was one of those good days, a mood changer. Went down to Chelsea to sign some papers for Joe Cilibrasi
, and then decided to grab some lunch in a barbecue joint, and right at the next table was my friend Sharon Jautz, the former head of HR at Playboy, now blonde and tan and despectacled and, literally, unrecognizable, at least at first. Went uptown to The New York Times and had a very nice meeting with Frank Rich, who was very gracious and generous with his 
time and encouraging. His 13th floor office has windows that face west, and his blinds go up and down automatically–highly distracting, although I guess you get used to it. Before I left, I was able to visit the cubicle of my friend George Kalogerakis; we commiserated about the state of things. Strolled uptown. Got the new Derek Jeter figure at Toys R Us, window-shopped at the NHL store on Sixth (not as much product as the NBA store, and nowhere near as much imagination or pizzazz), had a frappaccino and read the Financial Times at the Starbucks in Trump Tower, and went over to the Sony Building to a screening of a terrific new movie called An Education, directed by Lone 
Scherfig from a screenplay by Nick Hornby based on a memoir by the English journalist Lynn Barber, with terrific performances by Peter Sarsgaard, Rosamund Pike, Dominic Cooper, Alfred Molina, Olivia Williams, and especially the very winsome Carey Mulligan (we will be seeing lots more of her). The sixties looked smashing: chic, smart, sophisticated. (Does no one wish to look like that today?) When it was over, walked down Madison to Grand Central with my iPod on, singing out loud with the Ramones (It’s Not My Place.) No one seemed to notice. Unaccountably, I felt happy. 
(Pictures: a subway car has been given over to an advertisement for Jerry Bruckheimer‘s new TNT series Dark Blue, making it look like the very thing the Transit Authority struggled for so many years to clean up; Harry Potter dominates the Times Square subway station; a window in Bergdorf Goodman has been given over to to Divine, courtesy of Baltimore’s American Visionary Arts Museum; girls in their summer dresses, heading south on Madison.)
