Westward Ho!

OK, I'll Bite

Time capsule for 2057, you say? Here are three things I'd throw in.

1) The Tower Records sign. It might be a more relevant artifact of 1980 than 2007, but at least it's still meaningful to many of the people that watched the chain close this year and divebombed the liquidated stock with glee. This entry comes to me as I sit in Dialog Coffee & Bakery, across the street from the erstwhile Sunset Strip Tower, temporarily rechristened Icky Thump Records as a promotion for the White Stripes' new album.

2) Comedy clubs (well, just one for posterity). A concept that hangs by a thread after somehow surviving into a new century, as Tower was before those final days. Every one I pass now looks so worn and sad, secreting desperation from every crooked letter on the marquee. Along with our comedy club we can also bury a homebrew DVD-R with footage and news coverage of Michael Richards' standup meltdown.

3) Circulars (the ever-present print advertisements and coupons that clutter up our newspapers and mailboxes). I'm hopeful that 50 years from now we'll be inching closer to the paperless society we were once promised, and businesses can learn to be less wasteful, saving some money and some trees in the process.

Postcard from Rio

I've been here since Sunday morning and I miss Los Angeles already. When I moved to L.A. I thought things were very laid back in contrast with NYC, but I've gotten used to L.A.'s rhythm and am now endlessly frustrated by Rio's glacial pace. It's disorienting, because people walk slowly, do business dealings slowly, wait tables slowly -- but the cars on the roads are quick to come within an inch of your life, and I've heard from multiple sources that the pickpockets do their jobs reliably and expeditiously. I don't know yet how I feel about this place. It's all the things I look for in a big city -- bustling, diverse, messy, dense, rich with art and culture and food and mystique and history -- and yet I get all of that back home. And I miss my comfort zone: my language, my privacy, my cell phone, being able to walk the streets and ride the bus unaccompanied without too many people warning me against it. There's someone I wish was here to conquer the New World with me. I apologize to him in advance for not taking a picture of the "Laguna Beach" t-shirt I saw in a store window on Praia de Botofogo.

The food's good... some of it. We've been straying from typical "Brazilian" meals since Rio attracts people from all over the world and is such a whirlwind of races and ethnicities that native Cariocas don't have hangups about local authenticity. The Japanese food = great. The white-tablecloth Italo-Brazilian = great. The Portuguese = pretty nice (one of my co-diners ordered a dish that reminded me of my Jewish mom's pot roast, always a plus). The pizza = not inedible, but not something I'd ever recommend to an out-of-towner. When I leave, I'll miss the complimentary hotel breakfasts most of all -- a daily buffet of fresh tropical fruits and juices, coffee, Brazilian pastries, and a variety of eggs, meats, etc.

There's a lot more to see. I'm counting on Brazil's natural beauty to seal the deal for me. Tomorrow we hit Corcovado; Friday we're exploring our project area, Barra da Tijuca (we're thinking about how to clean up the polluted lagoons around Barra and Jacarepaguá  in an effort to stimulate tourism and improve quality of life in a growing area that currently has inadequate sewage disposal.) The manmade beauty is another selling point: Rio is the domain of Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx, and the iconic Christ the Redeemer.

At the moment I'm in the hotel room in Flamengo, watching an SVU rerun (in English, with Portuguese subtitles) and listening to juvenile delinquents setting off firecrackers downstairs. It's 12:12 a.m. and the Catholic holiday has just started.