“Taste is mostly genetic. But appreciating a fine bottle of wine can be learned.”

Book Purchasable

This is available, and while I cannot tell you what to do I can certainly make suggestions.

by Brendan O’Connor

The PRConsultants Group (slogan: “National Strength. Local Power.”) has declared October 22nd to be “Snark Free Day.” We emailed with the members behind the endeavor — Atlanta-based restaurant publicist Melissa Libby, of Melissa Libby & Associates, and Louisville-based Nicole Candler, of Nic Creative — about their hopes and dreams for the national discourse.

What started all this?

Nicole Candler: The idea developed out of a discussion among our PRCG Directors. Melissa and some others were commenting on how ugly online communication has become and the role that PR consultants must play in helping clients prevent it, monitor it and respond (or not respond) to it.

Melissa Libby: It kind of boiled up at our last PRConsultants Group conference in January. Started with us complaining about complainers and ended with us deciding to do something about it.

What are the kinds of complainers that PRC folks have to deal with?

Melissa: Everyone with a smartphone can be a complainer and so many of them are. PR people are often tasked with helping our clients keep a positive image so we are concerned about what is being said and whether it is accurate and/or fair. I am not referring to people with a legitimate, constructive complaint. That is completely acceptable. I am talking about people who are just trying to be funny or mean and hurt a company’s reputation in the process.

Are any of your clients involved in the project?

Melissa: I have several clients who are “attending” the event, as do many of our PRCG colleagues. I represent Chef Kevin Gillespie (“Top Chef” finalist, Season 6) and he was lamenting the negativity on social media at our meeting on Friday. I told him about Snark Free Day and he said he would absolutely support that!

Nicole: Our clients aren’t specifically involved, but we are glad to see that among the 400+ people who have signed up for the Snark Free Day Facebook event, many of them are our clients, vendors, family, high school buddies and much more.

Do you have any personal examples of snark impacting your lives?

Melissa: Personally, it wears me out. My Facebook news feed is full of it every day, from snarky comments about what someone is wearing on “Good Morning America” to all the hateful arguments about the government shutdown and/or healthcare.

Nicole: Snark hurts. Developing this campaign has certainly put me on notice to watch what I say and write and remember who I’m speaking to. We don’t claim to be perfect, we just hope to create a new awareness about how we communicate with one another. I’ve had to apologize for my sarcasm on more than one occasion and there are probably many times that I didn’t even catch myself doing it.

Totally. I see (and perpetrate) plenty of it myself. But isn’t it sort of harmless? It doesn’t hurt the person on GMA’s feelings when somebody tweets something mean. Plus, they’re in public! Aren’t you running the risk of criticism anyway?

Melissa: Celebrities are people too and it does hurt their feelings. It’s true that they are in the public and that they have accepted this risk. But does that make it okay? Does that make it nice? When is making fun of people acceptable? I think it was funny at one time when it was few and far between. I used to laugh about it. But after so many people doing it for so long it’s kind of a drag.

What about your jobs? Does the prevalence of snark make doing PR harder?

Melissa: I represent restaurants and snark is prevalent in this industry. It’s so easy to take to the Internet to criticize a chef or restaurant, rather than just speaking to the manager about what can probably be fixed while you are still dining. It’s amazing to me that people will post a negative review on Yelp from their chair at the restaurant but won’t give the manager a chance to make it right. It’s like that would spoil all the fun. So as a PR professional I am left to deal with all of these people and comments. In a broader sense, all of the PRCG members find ourselves stuck between wanting every single member of our clients’ audience to be happy but realizing that this is impossible. It would be so much better without all the snark. Then we could spend time where it’s most effective.

Nicole: Responding to criticism is difficult and teaching clients to step back and think about their response before they say or write is a challenge. Biting back is a natural reaction, but it doesn’t produce the results we would like. This was most difficult for me to coach when I worked with political candidates. People are highly critical of candidates and elected officials and hearing negative feedback is tough. It’s even tougher to craft a calm response since most media want a witty and snarky sound bite.

There’s something honest about snark though… “derision” is a Real Feeling. Whether or not it’s helpful is a different question, but it’s not inherently insincere. Is it the customers’ job to make your job easier?

Melissa: While we are a group of PR professionals, we did not develop Snark Free Day to make our jobs easier. We saw a negative trend and wanted to find a way to make it better. I honestly believe a day without snark could be a day when most people will feel happier.

Are you optimistic that you might change people’s thinking?

Melissa: Sure! As a group we’ve all taken a look inside and realized we might be a little more snarky than is good for the world. So if has changed us a little then surely there are others. Plus we plan to keep this up. Next year there will be t-shirts and awards and more surprises!

Nicole: I think that Snark Free Day can have a great impact because it gets people thinking. If that’s all it does is get people thinking about what they are saying and how they are saying it, then we’ve been successful.

What is PRCG’s stake in this issue?

Nicole: Just like we would coach our clients to stop and consider the impact of their words, we think that asking everyone to do the same will bring a little bit of kindness to the world on Tuesday… and maybe beyond.

Secondly, PRConsultants Group does amazing things every day for our clients and this project has been great fun for us to work on together. We pride ourselves on being National Strength. Local Power. Snark Free Days lets us show how each of us in our own little local markets can start a national movement when we work as one.

Melissa: We want people to stop being so mean.

Brendan O’Connor is a writer living in New York.

If my sense of our readership’s demographics is in any way accurate what you probably want to hear today is the new Arcade Fire track that is going around, but you can find that plenty of other places, so instead why not make some time for “the hottest Syrian speaker-slayer at work in the West”? I mean, this is the first I’ve heard of him too, so I’m not trying to pretend like I am cooler than you are and I look in derision upon your Arcade Fire fandom because my ears are more attuned to the music of the world or whatever. Seriously, I’m not, I like the Arcade Fire just fine too. Jesus, you’re so sensitive. Everything’s fine! Look, I’m sorry. Will this make you feel better?

I hope we’re all around in 2030 to hear what Mario Cuomo thinks of Goodfellas

.

You think Healthcare Dot Gov is a national disaster? Well let’s not forget this:

In June, 2001, the F.B.I. awarded the contractor Science Applications International Corp. (S.A.I.C.) a fourteen-million-dollar contract to upgrade the F.B.I.’s computer systems. The project was called Virtual Case File, or V.C.F., and it would ultimately cost over six hundred million dollars before finally being abandoned, in early 2005, unfinished and never deployed. V.C.F. was then replaced with a project called Sentinel, expected to launch in 2009, which was “designed to be everything V.C.F. was not, with specific requirements, regular milestones and aggressive oversight,” according to F.B.I. officials who spoke to the Washington Post in 2006. But by 2010, Sentinel was also being described as “troubled,” and only two out of a planned four phases had been completed. Sentinel was finally deployed on July 1, 2012, after the F.B.I. took over the project from the contractor Lockheed-Martin in 2010, bringing it in-house for completion — at an ultimate cost of at least four hundred and fifty-one million dollars. In the end, the upgrade took the F.B.I. more than a decade and over a billion dollars.

NATO’s already got the rest of the world in its grip: we just have to stay strong:

The United Nations Climate-Change Conspiracy Theory — the idea that human-caused global warming is a false construct invented by the U.N. to justify government control of economies and people’s daily lives — is alive and well in the United States…. I asked Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, about the conspiracy theory. By phone from her office in Bonn, Germany, she initially laughed at the question.

“I’m serious, this is a real thing,” I said. “Are you aware of this?”

“Yes,” she responded, still laughing.

“Is this happening anywhere else in the world?” I asked her.

“No!” she said.

We’re alone now.

http://giphy.com/gifs/euYz83GfIvXpu

1.

Before he goes to sleep, between 11 and midnight, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, typically checks in by e-mail with the same reporter: Mike Allen of Politico, who is also the first reporter Pfeiffer corresponds with after he wakes up at 4:20. A hyperactive former Eagle Scout, Allen will have been up for hours, if he ever went to bed. Whether or not he did is one of the many little mysteries that surround him. The abiding certainty about Allen is that sometime between 5:30 and 8:30 a.m., seven days a week, he hits “send” on a mass e-mail newsletter that some of America’s most influential people will read before they say a word to their spouses…. He bursts in and out of parties, at once manic and serene, chronically toting gifts, cards and flower arrangements that seem to consume much of an annual income that is believed to exceed $250,000. Allen — who is childless and owns no cars or real estate — perpetually picks up meal and beverage tabs for his friend-sources (the dominant hybrid around Mikey). He kisses women’s hands and thanks you so much for coming, even though the party is never at his home, which not even his closest friends have seen.

2.

Joe Weisenthal wakes up around 4 a.m. most weekdays, afraid that in the five or six hours he has been sleeping, something happened that could move financial markets. His alarm is his cellphone, and after he silences it so that his wife can sleep, he rolls from bed and starts to type, still in his pajamas, in the darkness of his apartment at the edge of the Financial District. And the first thing he types, the first of about 150 daily messages he posts on Twitter, is almost always this: “What’d I miss?” […] During the course of an average 16-hour day, Weisenthal writes 15 posts, ranging from charts with a few lines of explanatory text to several hundred words of closely reasoned analysis. He manages nearly a dozen reporters, demanding and redirecting story ideas. He fiddles incessantly with the look and contents of the site…. He is like the host of a daylong radio show, except no one speaks out loud. He rarely makes phone calls. His phone almost never rings.

3.

[Tim Burke] works from home here, in what his colleagues call the “Burke-puter,” for its seamless integration of man and machine. It is less an office than an organism: a flashing, beeping, glowing, thrumming assault of screens, wires, remotes, tuners, phones, receivers, computers and general electronic effluvia wrapped around a person (“the monitor situation up there is insane,” said Burke’s wife, Lynn Hurtak.). Burke sits here alone in the dark day after day, for about 100 hours a week, watching dozens of sports events simultaneously.

To start his day, Burke organizes his desk. He then organizes the games he wants to watch on the various monitors. He makes sure his three Mason jars are filled with water so he will not have to leave the room on the account of thirst. He keeps track of Twitter feeds, Deadspin and breaking news on a monitor he has programmed so he can keep abreast of the many things he needs to keep abreast of.

On one of his computers, he has nine hard drives, which he uses to store the data that he has amassed. He built it himself, “out of components,” he says vaguely…. Since he joined Twitter in 2008, he has written more than 56,650 Twitter posts.

by Jenni Miller

If you’d like to see Peaches and her Fatherfucker Dancers reenact her rise to fame — complete with a giant bed that looks like a vulva, dancers in pink zentai that are orgiastically unzipped, and a surgery gone awry, then Peaches Does Herself offers all of that and more. Besides Peaches and her dancers, “Peaches Does Herself” stars Sandy Kane, of New York City public access fame — she’s a former stripper in her sixties who wields a dildo and a filthy mouth — and Danni Daniels, a transgender porn star who plays the singer’s lover.

Peaches Does Herself is playing at the Quad Cinema at 34 West 13th Street. Current showtimes are 1:00‎ ‎3:10‎ ‎5:10‎ ‎7:00‎ ‎9:30 p.m.

On stage and screen, Peaches is a glittery trickster, on a mission to screw with our perceptions of gender, aging, and female sexual desire. In real life, she’s petite and personable, and although she definitely looks like a rock star — the mohawk streaked blonde, the silver meat cleaver pendant, the all-black ensemble — it’s seems oddly normal to hang out with her and chat in a conference room during the day.

So, um, thank you for representing badass Jewish ladies — I think we kind of get a bad rap about being hot and sexy and cool –

And speaking our minds.

Yeah, we get a lot of shit for that, right?

Yeah, absolutely. But really, it’s ’cause they love it…/ In the way that people love when people speak their mind and are themselves. Because I’m me. It’s not that I’m a cold, hard bitch; it’s that I’m doing my thing. Are you gonna come along or not? ’Cause that’s what it is.

There always has to be — hopefully many someones — that are gonna be like, in society, saying the stuff that everyone else wants to say but is afraid to.

I’m not saying anything people — I don’t understand how people can not say things. How they sleep at night when they don’t say those things, you know? It’s weird. But I didn’t grow up in America.

You’re one of my favorite Canadian Jews. You and David Cronenberg.

Oooooh, that’s nice company.

Tell me what it’s like creating art in Berlin versus other cities.

It’s a cool place to live. There’s a lot of space, still. I’m very fortunate. I have a cheap studio space that’s really big in an old — I have this fingernail I don’t know what to do with, I’m gonna do that [flicks a piece of fingernail] — you know, I used to have my studio space in an old squat that was turned into like a cool place and then turned kind of sour, but I had a space in there any way. And then another kind of abandoned building that we turned into spaces, and then another cool place — you know, like, all these weird awesome places. Right now, I have [a studio] in an old public swimming pool, and I have the old showers and sauna, so it’s funny and weird, with a big, deep pool, but nothing works. It’s just for music.

People come there because they wanna work on their art, they wanna, you know, be bohemian or whatever. I just kind of moved there ’cause a small label was interested in me. I really was not thinking about the whole history of burlesque performance dating back to, like, the twenties and thirties. I wasn’t thinking about David Bowie. I wasn’t thinking about that stuff, to be honest. People are like, “Yeah, right! Bullshit, Peaches!” No, I actually wasn’t. When I arrived and I was doing my thing in Berlin, it was something — something was changing there again. There’s always something changing. In the 80s, the Wall was up, and on the West, people loved that there was that decadence because there was that edge of, right over the Wall is completely opposite. As extreme as possible. Really feeling the freedom of the West, even though they were kind of an island, you know, in Berlin, surrounded on all sides.

And then the 90s, of course, when the Wall was down and all artists moving into the East, sort of Mad Max world, and now it’s more like, turning into a little bit of hipster Disneyland. I’m not bitter; it’s still great. There’s still a lot of space. There’s still a lot of places to go. Untouched areas and things like that. There’s a little Brooklyn there, somehow. Not that I’m — I’m just noticing, of course, there’s a lot more English. And in my area, that used to be cool where I lived, now it’s all just families and babies. And I’m away a lot, so I’ll come back and be like, “Oh, I hear another baby being born!” I don’t want to sound bitter; I’m just telling you observations.

I recently was part of a program at the Jewish Museum. It was a modern interpretation of questions, because the Jewish way is to always answer questions with questions. And it was based upon a quote from a rabbi. I’m not gonna get it right, but it was something like, “Rabbi, why do Jewish people always answer a question with a question?” “Why not?” Or something like that. So the whole exhibition was based on questions, like, with an artistic answer, so there were things like, what is being kosher? Or, can you really tell what a Jew looks like? Some things, Jewish people would be like, “What the fuck, I can’t believe they went there!” So it was like that.

And the most controversial thing they had was a plexi-glass box, and under it said, “Are there Jews in Germany?” And they invited a Jewish person to sit there for two hours so people could come up and talk to them about what it’s like to be Jewish. I was like, “What?! I need to do that.” Because I don’t know what that is. So I actually got to do that on the last day, and it was really interesting because, you know, there’d be like these German people from all over. First of all, they’re in the Jewish Museum, so they’re already open. It’s not like, you know. I’d be, like, “HI!” [looks askance, affects German accent] “Hello…” Nobody talks to you. They’re a little bit like, “Hello…” Germans [are] kind of reserved. I’m like, “Where you from?” “Heidelberg….” You know, and I’m like, “Oh! Lotta Jews where you grew up?” “No…” “Ever meet a Jew?” “No…” You tell a New Yorker that, they’re like, “Pass the sugar.”

So if you think about it, there’s 200,000 Jews in a population of 80 million in Germany.

I read recently that, I can’t remember the statistics, but it was a study in Europe of how many people were afraid or reluctant to say that they were Jewish.

[assistant enters with coffee]

I grew up in Texas, and there were a lotta Jews in Texas, if you would believe that.

[Peaches sniffs the coffee.]

Is it bad?

I don’t know, it smells garlicky. Maybe she burped and then gave it to me. I’m gonna let it air out a bit. Or the person who made it burped in it. All right. [laughs]

Well, it’s New York.

No, it’s just the coffee! Now it smells like coffee.

Okay, good. Yeah, it’s a weird thing to think that –

Yeah, it’s just a weird thing, especially growing up in Toronto or spending a lot of time in New York. It’s just strange. And it’s strange to be a Jew at this time, this day and age, too, because you’re not, you know, it’s not like you’re kind of — you’re not the victim, in any sense [laughs]. And it’s controversial.

And it’s like, is it an identity? Like, I don’t go to shul.

I don’t keep kosher.

I’m psyched for the full moon tomorrow. Like, whatever.

Yeah, why not? Of course. Any organized religion. You just think like, what does that really mean? And I grew up, like — I did not have Christmas. I did not have access to Christmas. It doesn’t mean anything to me. The cross doesn’t mean anything to me, although I’m wearing an upside down cross today, but that’s a better sort of —

It’s more flattering.

It’s more flattering. So, you know, I don’t have this, like, “But it’s Christmas!” Actually, it doesn’t mean anything to me. And people kind of get angry at me, like, “What do you mean?!” I’m not trying to play any sort of controversy, it just doesn’t mean anything to me. An image of Jesus, of Mary, they don’t mean — I don’t have that nostalgia. I didn’t grow up with that. And then people say, “Well, you did ‘Peaches Christ Superstar’…. the whole ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ as a one-woman show. What was that about? Were you trying to grapple with religion?” No, I think that that musical is just [a] powerful story of a human being trying to tell people, “Hey, we gotta be good to each other, or else shit’s gonna go down!” And then people starting to mistrust [each other]. Don’t we see that in every form of human life, in relationships, in bullying in school, in goverments? Fuckin’ shutdowns! [laughs] It’s like, that’s just the situation where people are not trusting. Like, all the fear about Obamacare. A Canadian finds that just completely ridiculous.

It’s bullshit.

It’s total bullshit. It’s unbelievable.

Your documentary — it ends with this awesome–

Oh, don’t give away the ending!

Okay, I won’t! But let’s just say, “Fuck the Pain Away.”

Well, of course you know it’s gonna end with “Fuck the Pain Away” because that’s the song everybody’s waiting for. I’m the “Fuck the Pain Away” girl. I know that. It’s okay. It’s allowed me to do whatever the fuck I want, which is great.

Are you ever like, “I don’t wanna fuck the pain away. I wanna go take a Xanax and a hot bath.”

Sure, of course. But first I’ll fuck the pain away. [laughs] I mean, if you gotta be stuck to a job or something, you know, I’m pretty lucky. I’m so happy that that’s my signature song.

Oh, I just meant literally.

Yeah, of course. I know what you meant. But I was just bringing it back to the performance. That’s why it’s kind of deconstructed — like, you know why the ending [of “Peaches Does Herself”] happens that way, too. Which for some people, I’m sure they’re like, “I’ve never heard this song, and why is it happening like this, and this is whoah,” or whatever.

You’ve got Sandy Kane and Danni Daniels, who’s exquisite, and this sort of stage play with full frontal dick-shakin’ everything. What was the response…?

Banned from iTunes in Canada, even before we started anything else. I mean, there’s full frontal tranny nudity in Hangover 2, but it’s only from — it’s not a main character.

Right, and it’s not sort of celebrated. I didn’t see Hangover 2, or maybe I did and forgot.

Yeah, you’re right. It’s a celebration. It’s not like, “WHOAH!!!! A dude!”

She’s exquisite. A lot of people kind of find offense with the word “tranny,” and in the write-up, the media blast uses the term “she-male.” Is that something…?

Yeah, I actually didn’t use the term “she-male” so…

Is that a word that you think is loaded?

I’m sure that any — in different levels, people find all words loaded, you know? And only transsexuals can say “tranny,” and anybody else can’t. Like, certain groups can only — you know, if we’re Jews, we can call ourselves kikes but nobody else should say that, you know? Whatever. So, yeah, I’m not an expert on that so I can’t say what everybody — I’m not trying to offend anybody in that, I’m trying to celebrate it. And I know that Danni is not offended being called a him or a her. It’s like, “No, that’s fine.” I have to go with Danni — you have to go with what the people you’re working with or who you’re relating to.

I went to Sarah Lawrence, so I’m always like, “Ahhh!”

Sarah Lawrence! JD Samson went there.

She, I believe, lived in my dorm one year. Some of your more recent songs have dealt with aging. Sandy Kane, I felt like all these different feelings when I saw her, and I know that has a lot to do with my own feelings about aging. Like, uncomfortable, do I laugh, do I cry, what do I do?

And, I mean, Sandy’s not acting. That’s just Sandy. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen her or seen her in Times Square, because she’s the Naked Cowgirl in Times Square every day, and that’s Sandy’s life. That’s her. She’s really — that’s the real deal. You can’t really direct her. Like, it was a big deal for her to be part of someone else’s [project] or to even leave America, you know? And actually, we got quite close, because she’s quite guarded. I really wanted to show Sandy as she is, because I feel like maybe — and I’ve said this in a lot of interviews already — maybe if I was born when Sandy was, maybe I would have been more like Sandy. Or is that my future? In a different sort of generational sense. And then, you know, Danni is also not an actor or really into performance — Danni does porn. That’s what Danni does… She used to be a ballet dancer. They really had to be themselves. That’s important to me.

I was having brunch with one of my best friends, and we were talking about, like, I don’t want to call anyone out but — someone we grew up admiring, someone we dressed up as in our bedrooms, taking out all our slutty clothes and dancing to her pop music, and we were kind of hoping to have someone to show us how to age fiercely, and maybe that person isn’t, really…

I think it’s difficult for that person that you’re talking about [laughs]…. Hopefully people will look at that person and how they dealt with aging and then find a new way. But it’s really not fucking easy ’cause you don’t look as — yeah, “your inner beauty,” whatever, but you’ve got fucking wrinkles. I look at my face and I go, “Oh my God, I do not look young.” Sometimes I go out, like, yes, I’m appreciated if I go to a club or anything, but definitely, like, whatever, I’m fully confident, but then I’ll be like, “They’re fucking going, ‘Who’s that old bitch in the club?’”

My friends and I, we’re approaching our forties, early forties or whatever, and we’re like, okay, how are we gonna be feminist and badass and sexy?

Exactly. But there’s some really good role models, and there’s — I don’t know if this is a good example, but I was watching the new “American Horror” –

I was gonna ask you if you liked that!

And right now it’s so fucking cool with the older women! Jessica Lange is kicking ass. She’s always kicked ass, ever since “Frances,” you know, that Frances Farmer movie is crazy good. And now she’s kicking ass again. I think even in this season I like her more ’cause she’s more like a modern woman. She’s doing cocaine and telling everybody to fuck off. And then Angela Bassett, like, hot. Isn’t she like 50? She’s looks amazing. But whatever, whatever they look like, they’re giving a personality to that age. Catherine Keener, she’s not in the series, but I’m just saying, will forever be a great role model. When did you ever see her wearing makeup? [laughs] … I fully feel like someone like Ellen Page — you can tell she’s just going to be herself… She’s just a fantastic, I don’t want to say role model, she’s just, like, doing her thing and being real. So that’s the thing. We just have to be out there…

More and more, we have to realize that, I don’t want to use the word marketplace, but there’s just an interest — women who are 40 and older, they’re smart and they’re independent and they have a life and it’s not like — my new thing is like, mid-life crisis? That’s a bunch of bullshit. Why is it called a crisis if you’re kind of figuring out that there’s like a post-adult? So from your twenties, you just start figuring out that everything’s like, wow, so fresh, but then you turn forty, you’re like, oh, now I’m just supposed to hand it over? And a lot of the women, their kids are grown up. It’s like, oh, I can have another life. Gotta start having that life, you know?

I love that you watch “American Horror Story.”

Well, I don’t know why or what. I just love Jessica Lange so much. And I didn’t know that this season would be so — and it’s funny, with the young girl [Taissa Farmiga] with her [clears throat] power — it’s so “Liquid Sky,” which is one of my favorite movies.

Yes! “My pussy has teeth.”

She’s like, “I kill with my pussy.” That’s what that was!

Jenni Miller has been writing for fun and profit since the age of six and can be found bathing in the glow of the silver screen, playing video games, inhaling books, and examining pop culture with a savvy, feminist eye for a variety of publications. This interview was lightly edited. Photos by Vanda Marques and Laurence Barnes.

★★★★ Light skimmed the side of the Norwegian Breakaway down at its pier, raising a grid of white dots from the cabin balcony dividers and making it look even more like a terrestrial apartment building than the cruise ships usually do. The two-year-old galloped up the avenue in the morning breeze. A dyed hot-pink feather swirled on the sidewalk. There were lurid yellow leaves overhanging the playground swing set, and lurid pink charity gear showing through the chainlink fence beyond. The first-grader had picked out a short-sleeved t-shirt for himself, and was now grumpy from the chill in his windbreaker. He brought a vest out in the milder afternoon, and it ended up hanging from the handle of his brother’s stroller. Dogs barked, and the toddler barked back at them. Ducks cruised slowly on the Harlem Meer, into oncoming ripples that made them seem to be speeding along. The older boy threw a few twigs into the water; the younger one tossed in a pale pink leaf. Between their efforts and a nearby toddler’s, a small flotilla formed up in the waters near the shore. Mallards perched quietly in the dark shelter of a willow, its leaves barely swaying against the sun. Black walnuts bobbed in the shallows, their husks green as tennis balls. The rubber playground surface past the eastern edge of the Meer was scattered with gingko leaves and smeared gingko fruit. On the long, curving bench by the path, an man teased whoops and bloops and shuddering beats out of a green Stratocaster and a quietly overdriven miniature amp. “He is playing a bunch of nothing,” said a woman with an intentionally brassy dye job and a Dalton sweatshirt, walking a dog. Outside the Park, the cobblestones gleamed like ingots. The two-year-old, taking a shoulder ride, waved his arms and hollered at the leaves overhead.