As Clive Owen put it in the brilliant last line of Children of Men, “What a day!” It started (late) with a very fine lunch at Bar American (the old Judson Grill at Seventh and 52nd) with my old and dear friend from Spy days, John Connolly, now a contributor to Vanity Fair, and his old friend and my new fellow True/Slant blogger, the acclaimed TV newswoman Diane Dimond. We had a lot of fun, talking about the corrupt private investigator Anthony Pellicano, a man who once threatened my life without ever having had the benefit on laying eyes on me (John’s writing a book), the water boarding of Christopher Hitchens (the undisclosed but most relevant figures: 13, 16), the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Witness Protection Program, the secrets of Morning Joe, the peculiar mysteries of Eliot Spitzer‘s downfall, why Diane likes courtrooms (“this cauldron of human soup!”), why Gucci shoe repairmen are a vanishing breed, and lawn and gardening tips from the heart of New Mexico. Oh, I do miss the occasional lunch!
Afterwards, I headed up to the Museum of the City of New York on 103rd and Fifth to catch their new exhibition on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Dutch in New York. The exhibit does a nice job of reminding everyone that while the period of Dutch control was relatively brief–by the 1680s, possession had passed to the British–their influence was enduring. There’s the obvious heritage–names of locations like Bleecker, Bowery, Yonkers, Spyten Dyvel, Brooklyn, Bushwick, Harlem, venerable Dutch families like the Roosevelts–but there’s the more subtle legacy of tolerance. The outpost of New Amsterdam was a commercial trading center, and a person’s ability to produce something useful and profitable 
counted a lot more than his/her religion, race, national origin, and so on (not that these factors were irrelevant–this was the 17th century!) But this attitude of tolerance for diversity and free-thinking was unique in the colonies (so unlike those stiff-necked Puritans!), and that led directly to an appetite for democracy, as Russell Shorto showed in his brilliant Island at the Center of the World. It’s not at all a stretch to say that as New Yorkers, we are all Dutch. 
Pictured, a model of Henry Hudson‘s vessel, The Half Moon. (Also on view: an illuminating exhibit on the life and creations of legendary clothing designer Valentina, whose creations for Garbo, Dietrich, Hepburn, Oberon and others defined elegance and grace in the thirties and forties.)
Finally, my pal Ken Smith came to my magazine writing class at Marymount Manhattan and talked about magazine design and the sometimes close, sometimes haphazard collaboration between designers and editors that goes into magazine creation. The members of the class posed a lot of interesting questions that certainly never would have 
occurred to me to ask, and it was kind of refreshing to talk about the mistakes magazines have made that are the result almost never of bad intentions, but of good intentions poorly executed, poorly perceived, and ultimately incapable of being taken back. Everybody really seemed into the conversation. (Pictured left: Ken in repose; right, Action Art Director Ken.)
A couple of days later, Ken put his thoughts about the class, and about design, on his blog.