A graphic designer once told me something interesting, something that was disputed by another designer when I repeated the anecdote years later.

The first designer said there was a name for the design element that appears on the cover of some magazines. If you look at a cover of a magazine and see an illusion of the top corner peeled back a little, as if to reveal something behind the cover, that visual element is called a VIOLATOR. He was referring specifically to a cover of Sports Illustrated which had the usual full-page cover image and the S.I. logo, but the top right-hand corner of the cover showed a cartoon hand appearing to peel back the corner of the cover, revealing a headline teaser -- something like "S.I. Goes to the Beach! See Page 44!" (I don't remember what the text really said, but it was in that spirit of drawing attention to a certain page of the magazine.)

The term VIOLATOR, in magazine publishing, can refer to that specific type of corner-peeling imagery, or it can refer to anything that could be said to disrupt the expected design of a cover.

A few years later I met another designer who also worked in publishing. We were looking at a copy of the "New York Post" when I pointed out that they used the VIOLATOR on the cover. This fellow looked at me like I was ignorant, and I explained that this other designer from S.I. introduced me to the term. No way, said he. "I've been in graphic design for 15 years and I never heard that term." Then he kind of implied I was an idiot, but I maintained (with, admittedly, only anecdotal evidence) that the term was accurate.

The term appears to be accurate, and I would think that whether the 15-year design veteran's ignorance of the term does not necessarily reflect his competence in the field. It may just be a somewhat esoteric, reasonably obscure term in the field of publishing.

I think of the term VIOLATOR when I see a receipt like this one. The bright pink streak down the middle of this Outback Steakhouse receipt indicates that the roll of thermal receipt paper is nearly exhausted, and that the cashier should replace the paper soon. It is in the same spirit as "Cigarette Burns". Cigarette Burns are those fairly arcane signals that observant movie-goers see on movie screens. The signals are directed at the projectionist, who uses the signals as a cue to switch to a new film reel.

I don't know if there is an official name for this type of streak that appears on receipts. I have asked friends who work in service industries if they know of a technical term for the receipt streak, but no one has had any idea. That does not mean a specific term does not exist. Maybe they, like the 15-year veteran of graphic design, simply have not encountered the term in their work. I think of another friend who was a bartender for 17 years and retired from that realm. In all those years working the bar he had never heard the term "sausagefest," a term of some dismay used to describe a bar that is populated entirely by men. How could a seasoned bartender of so many years not know that term? Just the same as the veteran designer might have somehow missed the term Violator.

If the colored streaks that signal the end of the roll of thermal receipt paper have no official name than I would think they could be called Violators. The use of the term in publishing comes with sarcastic æsthetic implications, as if a tranquil piece of carefully-crafted design has been soiled -- SOILED! -- by rogue splats of outsider art. It may be unfair to compare a common receipt to a carefully designed work of art, its dignity impugned by the appearance of the pink streak. Still, if this occurrence of the Violator is more utilitarian than those seen in publishing then its artistic merits are no less rugged.

The genre of the Violator can, I think, include the receipt streaks.

An abundance of nostalgia inspired me to buy this ticket to "Godspell," a show I thought was under-appreciated. "Jesus Christ Superstar" drew far more acclaim, and perhaps rightfully so, but the more low-key sounds of "Godspell" lingered in my mind since childhood. I believe it is the first staged musical I ever saw. I was in grade school when my sister's high school drama club under the direction of a Mrs. Pratt (man, it's crazy the details you remember) performed this show. I feel like I saw that school production of "Godspell" 40 times, though it was certainly far less than that.

Rather than attending this Broadway revival production I should have simply watched the movie version of this show. The production annoyed me, not least because of the audience participation element. Oh, how I loath performances of any stripe that rely on audience participation.

Another anxiety-inducing feature of this show was the way one of the cast members looked so much like an ex-gf of mine that it was eerie. The resemblance traced itself all the way down to the fat parts of her body -- and I say that with no derision or judgmental commentary, for the heated day of the spotlight exaggerates physical imperfections of any stage actor. It's just that even the veins on her legs and the fatty stuff under her eyes were shockingly familiar to me.

I combed the Playbill for details about that woman, to be sure it really was not her -- there was the remotest of remote chances that this ex could have transitioned her career to the Broadway stage -- but there seemed to be no possibility. Playbill bios are often filled with fantasy (as was my ex's public biography) so I read the summary information like a cryptogram cracker, looking for clues that would connect this woman to my ex. But there was none.

The resemblance was scary at first, but amusing in the end.

I left the show early. The production was giving me nervous tics and the mood was too contemporary. I don't mind bringing current cultural references and sounds into old shows, but for my tastes this went too far. "Godspell" is a hippy, not a hipster show.

A few nights later I watched the DVD of the 1970s-era film version of the show. As I said, I should have just done that and skipped the Broadway revival. The show itself did not live up to my vaunted memories, memories which I know are tinged by childhood nostalgia more than any substantive influence the show had over me.

One thing about the movie surprised me: some of it was filmed on Randall's Island. I did not know of that. I have been in the areas where scenes from "The French Connection" were filmed.

A depressing scene passed me by: for a few moments in the film the cast dances and prances and skips-to-ma-lou atop the World Trade Center. It made me sad. Those mighty towers were more than just blunt icons of capitalism. Even in their ugliness they were aspirational, and inspirational, at least among creative artists. To see a moment of joy at the top of the Twin Towers makes the vulgarity of what brought them down so much more brutal.

I had a feeling of dread as that scene began, with that unique view to the Empire State Building as it could only have looked from the top of those Towers. At first you didn't see where the scene was set, but anyone familiar with that view knows there was none other like it. As some cynics have iterated: the best view of the Twin Towers was from the Observation Deck.

After that scene I decided to watch, for the 4th time, "Man On Wire." My feelings about that film and its players are mixed, but the beauty of the dance is unassailable.

I placed this $333.33 order from Sheet Music Plus on July 5, 2011. It was shipped 2 weeks later, on July 20, and from there it inexplicably sat in a Jersey City postal facility for about 5 weeks. This shipment took nearly 2 months to arrive. That might be a new record for me, as the slowest USPS delivery ever. It was baffling and frustrating to check online tracking information for this package and see that the item was just sitting there, moldering away in a New Jersey postal facility. I don't know if the delays are somehow attributable to fact that the package went through UPS Mail Innovations, a gateway through which shippers that use UPS can deliver to USPS PO Boxes such as mine. I don't see why that would have caused this type of delay, but I know little about the mysteries of the USPS' innards.

On the other hand maybe it is appropriate that this shipment took so long. This centerpiece of this shipment included 5 volumes of the collected piano works of John Ireland, a British composer more familiar to me by name than by his music. In college I read through Ireland's Sonata in F Minor, and years later I checked out a copy of that work from the New York Public Library. The Sonata is a pretty good piece. I also had a copy of "The Island Spell," a lighter program piece.

The delay in receiving this shipment seems appropriate, though, because it took me about 20 years to place the order.

Robert Helps was a friend of mine from back home. Bob was a great pianist, a generous human being, and a pivotal talent in piano music of the middle to late 20th century. In college I worked at the school radio station. Using some money from the classical record budget I booked Robert Helps to play a recital at the school, but unfortunately he got bitten by a tick, resulting in a nasty infection that caused one of his hands to swell to the size of a pumpkin (as he described it). The recital was cancelled, and since I graduated soon after we could never re-schedule.

Bob once helped me out by sight-reading the piano reduction of the orchestra part for Tchaikowsky's Piano Concerto #1. I auditioned for some competition with that piece and when I failed to advance to the next round Bob was vigorously sympathetic to my plight, saying I'd been screwed by the organizers and thrust into an impossible situation. To be honest, though, I can't remember details of the controversy, nor can I remember anything in particular about the competition. I always thought piano competitions were pretty stupid, though, so it doesn't surprise me that I put the incident out of my mind.

About 20 years ago, at his home in Tampa, Bob Helps implored me to check out the piano music of John Ireland. His eyes gleamed when he spoke of Ireland's scores, although with the passage of time I can no longer remember exactly which scores interested him most. If his excitement was tempered by anything it was by the fact that he seemed to regret missing out on John Ireland's music for so long. This was in 1990. I was just out of college, and the only Ireland piece I knew at the time was the Sonata in F Minor. I had explored a fair amount of British music, this research being ancillary to my primary interest in the music of Kaikhosru Sorabji, a British iconoclast whose piss-and-bile essays and ivory tower criticisms seemed entertaining to me at the time. John Ireland's name occasionally rose up from Sorabji's writing, for he and Sorabji mingled in the same social and musical circles, but aside from the F Minor Sonata that was about all I knew of John Ireland.

I think Bob might have singled out Ireland's Piano Concerto for particular praise. I did not order nor do I own a copy of the Piano Concerto, but I know it to be a quality piece, stronger and gutsier than a lot of Ireland's solo piano pieces. Bob Helps could not believe Ireland's music was not better known or appreciated and, by extension (because I trusted his instincts), neither could I.

Bob always found energies to explore unknown and new-to-him composers. He introduced me to a set of completely unknown piano pieces by Henri Duparc, a composer known for his songs and not much else. In return I thinkI introduced Bob to some of the Russian futurists, composers like Arthur Lourie and Nikolai Roslavets whose works trickled in to American conservatories and concert halls during the late 1980s. I have slight misgivings about claiming I introduced Robert Helps to these composers, since I find it hard to imagine any composer with whom Helps was unfamiliar.

I first heard Bob in concert while I was in high school. It must have been 1983 when I saw him play the 24 Chopin Etudes in concert. This was the first time I ever heard Chopin's "Double Thirds" etude, Op. 25 No. 6. The visceral sound made by Robert Helps tearing up and down the keyboard, searing the Etude like he was torching the hall with a flame thrower, left me utterly dumbfounded. To me, at 14 years old, those combinations of double thirds seemed nothing short of impossible. Bob Helps ripped that notion out of my mind.

Years later I would read accounts of Vladimir Horowitz's concerts, in which audience members felt like they were in the presence of a demon, or a force that could overwhelm them. As much as I wish I could have had the experience of seeing Horowitz in concert I can at least say that I, too, know that feeling. I was in the presence of something so awesome to me that it crossed into the realm of terrifying. I clutched the armrests of the seat in which I sat, as if the concert hall was taking off like an airplane, and I held my breath for what seemed like the duration of that Etude.

I always intended to follow Bob's advice and explore the piano music of John Ireland. So what if it took me 20 years to do it?

The other items on this Sheet Music Plus order include York Bowen's Sonata, Op. 72; the piano sonatas of John Field; and some Nocturnes by Francis Poulenc. That's all good stuff, too, though I've had little time to adventure through those scores.

This purchase, by the way, is one which probably would have been better made at a retail store, versus self-serve online ordering. I paid $40.95 each for 5 volumes of John Ireland piano music. This even includes Volume 5 priced the same as the other volumes ($40.95) when that slim volume contains a single work and about one-third as many pages as the others. Had I done better hunting I might have found that the exact same series of scores was available through the same web site for significantly less money. Volumes 1-4 go for $12 less per copy, and Volume 5 goes for $19 less, meaning I threw away $67 on the purchase of these scores. This link illustrates my point:

www.sheetmusicplus.com/search?q=john+ireland+collected+piano+works

The more expensive copies are priced at a premium because they generally ship more quickly than the cheaper copies. The cheaper copies usually ship from Sheet Music Plus "Within 3 to 4 weeks", while the higher-priced copies usually go out "Within 2 to 3 weeks." This puts a $12 premium on getting these volumes one or two weeks earlier. Under this pricing model it almost seems like items available for immediate shipment should be given away for free.

By paying $67 extra I should have gotten these copies earlier than if I bought the cheaper copies, but as I mentioned earlier, this delivery only reached me after a record-breaking 2 months in transit, a USPS delay which I don't blame on Sheet Music Plus but which nevertheless erased any benefit I might have imagined myself to have gained from the higher prices.

Ah, well, it's only money.

Does this mean I will go to a retail store next time, one where I can trust the sales reps to understand these pricing schemes and possibly find me the best deal?

I think it does.

I avoided buying this expensive book for quite some time, even though its content obviously complements my Etude Magazine project. The "Index to Music Published in the Etude Magazine" is a sturdy volume, feeling to me like a high school science textbook. My memory of this may be off base, but I seem to remember that this volume used to be considerably cheaper than it is now. Nevertheless, $136 isn't that much coin to blow on a book that has already proven valuable to me in my project.

This book immediately answered one question which had been in my mind for years: Did "The Etude" ever publish music by Charles Alkan? Alkan's music interested me greatly through high school and college. My conquests of some of his more extravagant piano exertions consumed many long hours of misdirected energies while at the conservatory, and later in life.

"The Etude" did Alkan no favors with its choice of composition to publish in its pages. In the October, 1922, issue of "The Etude" (page 686) is a short Prelude Melodique by Alkan. I was not familiar with this piece, which bears no opus # or date of composition.

Alas, this vapid little trifle would have done little to spark interest in Alkan. Assuming the editors were fully familiar with Alkan's oeuvre I would have expected them to choose either the "Barcarolle", Op. 65, No. 6, or the "Song of the Mad Woman on the Seashore", Op. 31, No. 8. The Barcarolle is easy enough for moderately advanced students to play, but more importantly it is among Alkan's most perfect compositions. The "Song of the Mad Woman", well, I would not necessarily expect the editors at "The Etude" to chose such a weird and mysterious piece as that, but on the other hand if you are going to introduce people to Alkan then I think you might inspire interest by starting with his strangest sounds and working toward more normal forms.

Alkan's music is characterized by exaltations of banality alternating with quality worksmanship and memorable melodies. The "Song of the Mad Woman" is a tune I find myself whistling at times, while the G-Sharp Minor passage at mm. 105 of the "Quasi-Faust", in my opinion, rivals Schubert's most cutting melodies. In the pages of that same composition, however, we find passages of bafflingly laborious emptiness and comical clumsiness.

The Prelude Melodique appears to be the only Alkan composition that appeared in "The Etude", though Alkan is mentioned several times in the pages of that magazine by the likes of James Huneker, Theodore Leschetizky, and Isidor Philipp, the latter among the most enthusiastic of early Alkanians. Pianists Raymond Lewenthal and Ronald Smith ushered in the Alkan revival (if that's what you want to call it -- it seems strange to call it a "revival" when there was never much of a "vival" to begin with).

Mr. Lewenthal's performance of the above-mentioned "Barcarolle" is as perfect as the composition itself, conveying a still and shadowy loneliness. To me it is among the most perfect piano recordings ever made. Ronald Smith's account of the "Le Festin D'Ésope" (on an authentic period piano) is probably my favorite of his recordings, but Mr. Smith's greater contribution to the world of Alkan was in his scholarship and evangelism for the cause.

In addition to answering the Alkan question I also made quick use of the "Index to Music Published in the Etude Magazine" to answer another intriguing question. An e-mail correspondent who found my "Etude Magazine" site wrote to ask if I had the December, 1929, issue of that magazine, and if so, could I please tell her if a composition by a certain friend of hers appeared in those pages.

I checked my copy of that issue, but found nothing by the composer in question. It seemed that the composer (who is now quite elderly) said that when she was a child she wrote a piano piece which was published in "The Etude" of December, 1929. I was not told this woman's age but I would guess that she is about 90.

To make a long story short, this turned out to be a bit of a goosechase. The woman's memory was faded, or perhaps wholly inaccurate. I was happy to help, and her name was one of the first things I looked for when I got this Index, but I found nothing.

I recently had a similar experience with faded, foggy memory. I had a childhood memory, seemingly crystal clear, which said that a single payphone at Grand Central Station in New York held the Guinness Book of Records title for the "World's Busiest Telephone." I was even quoted in the New York Times on this vital matter, though evidently their fact checkers either didn't find the error or didn't think it merited research. Whatever the case, I recently purchased copies of the Guinness Book of Records from the 1970s to see if I could find that reference. Indeed, I did find reference to the world's busiest telephone, but sadly for me it was not at Grand Central but at the Greyhound Station in Chicago. Bummer that. I'll do more hunting, though, to see if Grand Central held the title at one time only to be usurped by the Greyhound station. That is my hope, that is my dream.

As much I tried to enjoy this movie, and for as sympathetic as I felt others were in their experience with Littlerock, I came away feeling unmoved, and let down. In some ways the problems I had with this film serve to summarize why I hate movies, and why I watch so few of them: inattention to detail. Why were the characters listening to LP records and cassette tapes? Was the film supposed to be set in the 1980s? Apparently not, since Cory uses a cell phone early in the film. I may have missed it but there was no explanation as to why everyone in the cast favored LPs and cassettes, versus CDs or digital formats. If that seems like a small point then maybe it is, but it nevertheless leads me to assume and hunt for other discontinuities. The two Japanese tourists are heard writing letters home, suggesting they made this trip with no means of communication. Yet Atsuko is once seen with a modern-looking laptop which would presumably have some means of connecting to the Internet. A friend of mine who attended this same showing said she saw numerous intrusion of the microphones entering the screen. I did not notice that but I believe her when she says she saw them. The most inspiring scenes, for me, came when the two tourists made the trip to Manzanar. Even this, as interesting as it turned out to be, came with so little context that it was almost surprising. They had mentioned Manzanar early in the film, and maybe I would need to it again to verify this, but I do not recall being told by the characters what Manzanar was. I had never heard of Manzanar, and only learned what it was when the characters got there. The closing scene raised my hopes that at least there would be a quality payphone moment of note to add to my collection of payphones in film, but alas, the scene was just annoying. Nevertheless, I liked all the actors. I can't think of a single dud player in this film. I simply wish Littlerock was more solvent.

I stared at this receipt from February 10, 2007, for several minutes before remembering what the K-Cafe was, and why I was there.

The K-Cafe is a food stand at the K-Mart inside the Metropolitan Mall in Middle Village. Middle Village and the 11379 zip code are not in Flushing, as recorded on this receipt.

I was in Middle Village on cemetery detail, searching for a grave on behalf of a correspondent in Iceland whose forebears are buried at Mt. Olivet Cemetery. Mt. Olivet is next door to the mall, and partly visible from the upper-level parking lot.

This encounter with the Iceland family tree-tracer was particularly and surprisingly unpleasant, and partly accounted for my exit from the practice of finding graves for people.

I usually feel a need to explain the value and purpose of cemetery photography, though maybe this need to explain is manufactured by my self-doubt and pretensions. At any rate, since it is not exactly a mainstream activity, let me explain.

For a few years I did cemetery photography, grandly called forensic genealogy, on a semi-professional basis. People contacted me with information on burial sites of their forebears at New York City cemeteries, and I would walk or take a bus out to the yard to find and photograph the grave stones. By some estimates as much as 40% of the American population had some ancestors who lived in New York City. On account of that estimate it is further surmised that a significant percentage of Americans have ancestors buried in the area.

The value in this pursuit is in finding information on the tombstone that exists nowhere else. I helped many researchers, family tree-tracers, and even police detectives and lawyers connect some dots. But I also managed to open up new mysteries for families in faraway places who saw these tomb stones and found names they never knew.

"Who," one woman asked, "is that woman on my grandfather's tombstone?"

Other correspondents made similarly vexed comments when my photos arrived. The most surprising thing I learned from this pursuit was how many tombstones have errors on them. Dates of birth are often wrong, names are misspelled or missing altogether, and other attempts at factual information are frequently blundered. The expression "set in stone" sounds different to me now. In the past I might have thought it described something of factual authority, or even gospel. Now I think of it as something unchangeable, even when erroneous.

There was real joy in the pursuit for me. My contribution is far from the depth of mapping one's genome to illuminate their heredity I think that I helped bring people's pasts alive. These tombstone photos made random and unexpected connections for people trying to piece together and understand their heritage.

I did this for free for some time but found that there was enough demand for the job that I should charge a nominal fee if only to justify the sometimes laborious task of finding these grave sites. It could take hours to find a burial site, particularly at cemeteries with which I was not familiar (such as Mt. Olivet).

The fee ended up being a wash. Most genealogists never paid me at all, a symptom (perhaps) of the Internet-induced presumption that everything should be free, including people's time and efforts.

I never pursued non-payments. The money was never as important to me as the quest and the reactions from the families or researchers who were invariably happy to see the grave stones, or simply satisfied to know that no marker existed.

The encounter with this individual in Iceland, however, was different. She was just an unpleasant person, lobbing anti-Americanisms and suggesting that I was an incompetent liar when I found that her ancestors had no tombstone at their burial site.

A large portion of burials at Mt. Olivet are unmarked, I explained, so it should come as a disappointment but no great surprise to find that the location had no marker. Indeed, the burial she sought was in a particular field which had virtually no tombstones for any of the burials.

Her reactions were so needlessly rude that it was weird, but it was not just her prickly attitude that turned me away from the pursuit of forensic genealogy. Unmarked graves were becoming my most common find. The futility of coming up empty-handed so often got depressing. The lack of agreed-upon payment from most of the genealogists did not help, but the surprisingly brusque altercation with this Icelander was a last straw. I decided to just forget about it.

I still help people out if they contact me directly and pay me up front, but I no longer solicit my time or services for cemetery photography. I still wander the great yards of New York (mostly in Queens) where I get photos of tombstones for the purpose of researching the names on the Internet. I have discovered a number of interesting people this way, people whose reputations might merit only a footnote in history books but whose accomplishments and livelihoods interest me.

This receipt records what appears to have been the last purchase I made at Food World before the place got new management and changed over to Key Foods.

Part of the space occupied by Food World used to be filled by a bar called McGrath's. I only barely remember that place. I never knew it, and never entered it, though I passed it every day on my march to corporate. When McGrath's closed I had never entered a bar or pub in the neighborhood, spending most of my nights alone at home. I imagined bars to be dangerous places, and in some cases that assumption proves true, but over time I found myself sitting at the corner pub, whiling away my days with inane conversations and good laughs. At times I think I should transfer my social endeavors to church or poetry readings, but in the end I think it makes no difference.

I grew up in Florida, and in my town it seemed like bars were not good places. I think I was biased in this belief by media coverage or simply by my surroundings. Those places seemed like dens of iniquity, places in which bad things went down, things bad in ways I could not imagine or understand. These were not places of evil acts or murder but of dark and ghastly worlds, traps within traps that fed upon themselves. If you had asked me what I thought went on in those places I would have had no answer. In my mind I drew a picture of an amorphous cloud of people, their heads and shoulders only partly present, smoke and toothy grins glimmering in the gloom as the bodies darkly moved in a dance of the subconscious. It was not so much that what happened at the bar stayed at the bar (to paraphrase a tourism tag line for Las Vegas), but that what happened there was inextricably intertwined with the place itself.

After McGrath's closed a few folks who had worked or drank there opened another place on the same street, about 4 blocks east. That bar set up shop in a space once occupied by a place commonly described to this day as a "crack house". The present bar is a dive, but a good place in its way.

I believe that city governments should provide a listing of every business that has occupied a place. If the listing is not available at the front door then it could be found online, or by filing a request with the Department of Commerce. These lineages are the stuff of local lore in some places, with old timers and not-so-old timers happily rattling off a list of every place of business that once filled the space, and that rose from the ground beneath their feet.

This passing on of local heritage (some would say hyperlocal) is a point of pride for some people. The past use of a space is sometimes described as if it should be impossible to believe: "This pharmacy used to be a bike shop!" or "This parking lot used to be a cemetery!" The present use of the space is, like one's relationship status, described with affirmative vigor, as if no other reality made sense.

I try to remember notable encounters involving this Food World, but they are few. One evocative memory comes from a cold, cold night in January, when a friend came to the neighborhood. He called when he got to the area, asking me for directions to where I was. He said "I'm looking at the Food World," to which I replied, if "If you're looking at the Food World you need to go to the right, under the subway, then on to ..." That use of the Food World as a point of reference occurred 6 or 7 years ago. A similar reference to this Food World occurred a few months ago. A friend from back in school was travelling the world and we had planned for him to stay at my place for a couple of nights. He called when he reached the neighborhood. He told me he was looking at a fruit stand. I asked "Food World?". He paused, I assume he looked around for affirmation that the fruit stand was at Food World, and he said yes. "OK, then," I said," you need to head west on 36th Avenue..."

He interrupted me, saying he had no idea of west, or east, or south or north, just that he was looking at the Food World.

I sometimes forget that I seem to be the only person I know who knows which direction I am facing at any given moment. I am not a directional savant. In my mind there is no needle locked in sympathy to the north, no spinning directional frames of reference on a watery pool. If asked, though, I can usually determine which way is north.

I did not always possess this instinct. Indeed, it is not even an instinct, but a deliberately learned behavior, one guided mostly by Manhattan island as a blunt guide to which way is up and which way is down. The Twin Towers used to be my always-visible frame of geographical reference, and I still look for them out of habit.

In the past I thought of direction as part of a romantic flourish. Looking east from the Daytona Beach I remember thinking "Africa is directly that way," and that one day I would swim to Morocco. A sense of direction opened my mind to the farthest destinations, however unlikely my arrival there.

Does that sense of geographical direction extend to stationary space? Is space stationary? I see ghosts of bartenders wandering the aisles of a grocery store that opened where the pub used to be. In so doing I create a frame of reference equal to north/south/east/west, but those directions have no relevance. The earth beneath our feet is the same but the dimensions of experience create the stationary sense of movement and direction.

Sabrina, the cashier on this transaction, was not pleased with my purchase. I placed the celery sticks on the conveyor belt and she stated, witheringly, that I needed to get a life if this was all I was going to purchase at Publix.

"Big time" was the first phrase she used, followed by "Big spender!"

If this sounds like it might be humorous, well, you did not hear the indignant manner in which she said it.

I used to have a slight dread of sitting down at a diner and asking for a cheeseburger deluxe. I imagined that the wait staff was bored to desperation not with their jobs but with their customers, and that if one more customer ordered one more cheeseburger then they'd just have to call it quits.

"Why," I imagined a waitress complain, "can I not get interesting orders? Why can't a customer ask for Lithuanian veal, cooked liberally, with exotic spices and a sprinkling of rare Belgian wine? When will a customer challenge me with an order of intelligently mixed vegetables, organized by dietary needs, and then consumed in synchronicity with twice-yearly lunar phenomena? No, no, it is not to be this day. Chef, another cheeseburger, please. Medium well."

Of course it doesn't work like that. Most wait staff are happy to toss off a routine order for a cheeseburger, and are probably perfectly content when such a no-nonsense order comes through. I did feel somewhat conspicuous purchasing nothing but a package of celery sticks, but Sabrina's ridicule was unexpected both in substance and in its sustainedness.

Compared to New York grocery stores I find that these Florida Publix stores massively expansive, like vast rooms in which screams disappear. The infinitely out-of-reach ceilings and casino-esque lack of timepieces and other frames of reference make a Publix feel like the airy walkways at JFK International Airport.

Such grandeur as this Publix lords over its customers would seem to render anything but a large purchase insignificant. I have similar feelings about churches, and massive cathedrals which are intended to uplift and inspire but to me they virtually humiliate, and make me feel insignificant.

This purchase of celery sticks seemed like a waste of this fine Publix, as Sabrina made certain I knew. What added insult to her fresh indignity was the one cent she handed me in change. That, to her, seemed to embody to worthlessness of my purchase, this penny serving as a token, or a reminder of what my patronage of this Publix was worth. She handed me the penny disdainfully, her index finger lingering on the coin, like she was pushing a button, mockingly seeking assurance that this precious coin was securely in my hand.

I remember similar encounters with retail clerks and store managers who were visibly unimpressed with my purchases. A small music store near Lincoln Center had a bargain bin of cheap scores, most of them priced at 25¢ and less. A friend and I browsed through the shop for quite some time, poring over the books on the full-price shelves before discovering the cheap stuff. At the cheap stuff we lingered for what seemed like an hour, commenting on what we knew about the second-hand and sometimes obscure scores sitting therein.

I do not remember what I purchased that afternoon but when I approached the cashier rang up my items he said, with dismay, "That'll be 75¢." Recognizing the imbalance of the situation, that I had spent considerable length of time at the store only to spend less than a dollar, I laughed a little, as did my friend, to which the cashier replied "Next time bring some money, guys."

Thinking about it now, I do not know how genuine was the sullenness in his voice, but the store clerk (I think he was the owner) had made amiable conversation before. I believe his little music store closed long, long ago.

At a Staples on Queens Boulevard I was given the evil eye whence purchasing a Mini Composition book for 99¢, if not the single cheapest object sold at that spacious shop then certainly among the cheapest.

There are times when the refuse and rubbish that surrounds the purchase of an item exceeds the physical substance of the item itself. Some retailers are wont to lavish any paying customer, however meagre the amount of their purchase, with wastefully lengthy receipts containing advertising and customer feedback information, not to mention the colorful, fabulously wasteful coupons printed separately and at great expense of time and consumables. Coupons such as these are printed after the purchase is complete, and I have at times been gently stopped from leaving the store, not in any forceful way but at the behest of the cashier, who stated that these coupons were customized to my interests. What? I wanted to leave but it would have seemed rude to leave the cashier standing there with coupons printing.

In the case of the Mini Composition notebook purchased at Staples I would think that the purchased item had greater mass than the receipt, the shopping bag in which the receipt was placed, and the plastic wrap in which the notebook was packaged. But there are times when the bag, the receipt, and the other excesses lavished upon buyers by sellers seems to exceed the value and/or physical weight of the item purchased.

The imbalance of transactional costs extends most conspicuously into the realm of debit and credit card purchases, transactions in which store owners absorb a percentage of the purchase price for the convenience of allowing customers use their cards. The banks which issue the cards and who charge these fees to vendors allege that the ability to accept cards brings in more business than would otherwise be seen, a claim that I would think is hard to dispute. Banks and vendors reach loggerheads, though, over smaller purchases, in which store owners literally lose money on a transaction. It is like getting robbed. Many smaller business attempt defy this trend by announcing that credit cards can only be used for purchases above a certain amount, usually ten or fifteen dollars. This is patently illegal, and all store owners know it is illegal, but the minimum-purchase requirement for credit and debit cards persists.

When I worked at Tower Records I remember how customers would sometimes ask if we had a minimum purchase requirement for credit cards. Tower had no minimum on card purchases, and at the time this was a point of pride for the company, for it signaled that the place did so much volume and sold so much quantity that they could handily absorb losing money every few-dozen purchases. To those guys getting robbed on credit card purchases of $3 and less was a sign of their primacy over other record stores which had minimum purchase requirements.

I guess there comes a point at which getting robbed is an honor. I was robbed once, at knifepoint (the other guy might have had a gun, too, or maybe he was just happy to see me). Unlike the management at Tower Records I did not consider getting robbed a privilege. I was not robbed of any great fortune in that incident, for I have little excess wealth of which to speak. I was, however, amused when a friend diplomatically referred to the incident as a "redistribution of wealth". It failed to put a righteously positive spin on things, but it temporarily neutralized my anxieties, briefly replacing them with the dangerously haughty self-importance of a "have" whose objects are coveted by the have-nots.

I bought "Modern Ruins: Portraits of a Place in the Mid-Atlantic Region," for a date night, but the anticipated date night never happened, so the book sits on the table unopened, with two other books of similar vintage.

The other two books secured for the failed date night: "Vanishing America: The End of Main Street Diners, Drive-Ins, Donut Shops, and Other Everyday Monuments" and "Ruin: Photographs of a Vanishing America."

I don't know if it seems strange that I would plan a date night around leafing through images of bombed out buildings and decrepit relics of American ruination. I tend to think that such images inspire better conversation than do beautiful things. Indeed, I believe that blanks walls and empty spaces inspire the creative mind for more robustly than feeding off the content of others, and I believe that mediocrity inspires greatness with a motivational canny that the masterworks cannot deliver.

I would rather have a window view of urban blight or a seedy street corner than of a park or a beach, for there is nothing so boring as a beautiful view.

At my first real job in New York I started as a temporary word processing operator, sitting at a makeshift desk in a hallway, my very self an object of idle fascination to the many people who passed by each and every hour of each and every day. As I progressed through the org-chart I found myself in a series of inside offices, some of which appeared to have been re-purposed storage closets. Those offices are where I felt I worked best, but progress comes with compromise and as I reached the pinnacle of my travels through that particular corporate sprawl I found myself in an office space with a floor-to-ceiling view of Central Park. The months spent at that desk were among the laziest and least productive I can remember, my presence in that space seemingly imbued more with prestige than substance.

Similar experiences followed years later as I found myself in ever-larger corner suites and palatial conference-rooms-turned-into-my-office. The hugeness of these spaces made me feel conspicuous. This was not strictly on account of self-consciousness but also because I felt that the work I did and the contributions I made toward society whilst at these jobs did not merit the prestige assumed to surround those who occupy such grandiose spaces. At one point I was in a corner office that was about five times the size of my first apartment in New York, about twice the size of my second apartment, and possibly the same size as my third apartment in this town.

An office is, of course, a place to work, yet the aspirational innards of corporate culture suggest that office space is a reflection of prestige, and esteem and personality within the organization. The costs of office space and the various services expected therein add considerable financial overhead to corporate employment. If public filings of employee compensation at corporate entities appears considerably inflated when compared to said employees' actual take-home pay this is most likely because the full cost of employing a human being at a company goes well beyond their paycheck. Office space, health insurance, support personnel, etc., are all part of the snowball of money that surrounds an employee. I am no economist but if you ask me, the economics of corporate employment scarcely make any sense.

These economic facts are occasional targets of corporate design consultants and Human Resources directors who determine that cost-savings and efficiencies that will save the company from ruin will materialize when office space is combined and the organizational hierarchy of the company is flattened. Offices are chosen randomly. 30-year veterans of the company will find themselves sitting in an inside closet-turned-office as easily as the summer interns might find themselves in offices the size of their college stadium.

Some consultants will attempt to reverse the status quo by putting Vice-Presidents and Directors in inside offices and open pods, while secretaries and temporary word processing operators sat in 8-window corner spectaculars. According to corporate design fads of the 1990s this would maximize productivity on all sides, a theory I find impossible to believe, but which I think might have merit insofar as the "upper level" workers are involved. Lower-level workers are not the most aspirational members of the corporate milieu, and offering extravagant accommodations in which to perform menial tasks will not raise their enthusiasm or sense of privilege. It will simply raise their conspicuity, and expose their weaknesses. (That term "lower-level" makes me wince, but so does almost everything else under discussion here.) Executive-level workers, on the other hand, could be motivated not by beautiful oak desks and in-office cappuccino machines but by their outsize salaries and irrational compensation structure, as well as the authority they wield over their underlings in the corner office.

I don't think I buy it, though. To be sure, there is a distinct personality type which simply does not care what kind of office space they occupy. Within reasonable scenarios such workers can focus on their job anywhere, at any time. For the most part, though, I believe that Important People need their Big Offices.

I don't know when I might have the privilege of the date night in which to share and discuss the pages of the picture books of ruin which presently sit on the table next to the couch. If/when such an event occurs I do not think that the 100ft Ethernet Network Internet Cable which also appears on this receipt will make an appearance, but you never know. I bought two of those cables as backup in case one of the cables currently in use fails, or slithers away. I could imagine using these extra cables as examples of waste, or potential waste, in keeping with the spirit of the books of ruin, and in keeping with a senselessly compelling desire to rationalize the simultaneous purchase of photo books and ethernet cables.

Having played piano since the 3rd Grade I am surprised, not-quite-horrified, but maybe a little embarrassed to find that it was not until the last month or two that I played through the complete works of Robert Schumann.

Whilst growing up it was sometimes uttered that any pianist pursuing a career, or intending to remain in the field of piano music on some level for their livelihood, would be expected, by the age of 18, to have read through the complete Well-tempered Clavier of Bach; the complete Beethoven sonatas; the Schubert Impromptus, Fantasies, and the mature sonatas; virtually all of Chopin's works save perhaps for the chamber music and the songs; all the concerti of Beethoven; Tchaikowsky's First Concerto; Rachmaninoff's Second and Third concerti. I remember one particularly bold assertor who claimed that anyone who has not played the Tchaikowsky First Piano Concerto by the age of 18 never will, nor will they ever find success as a pianist.

Some of these benchmarks and lists are interesting, others are frivolous, but lists are numerous, and I feel no need to recall them from memory at this moment. I only mention them in order to recall my failings, or more diplomatically I should call them my sins of omission. The sonatas of Schumann never even crossed my radar until after college, and many of his other works made little or no impression on me until about that same time. In fact it seems virtually certain that I did play through much of this music at some point, but it simply did not settle in the way other composers' music has. These three volumes of Schumann's virtually-complete piano œuvre have opened some undiscovered country for me, with the third sonata in particular providing grosse abenteur.

As I remember it now, Schumann was something of an enigma to me throughout school. Others felt the same way. A friend whose opinion I respected said, flatly, "Schumann's music fucks me up." He said he just didn't get it, and that anything of Schumann's that he knew sounded confused and incoherent.

He, like I, may have quietly decided that Schumann's work was synonymous with his insanity, or an outright manifestation thereof. In high school I may have thought that the later works of Schumann, written whilst his mind deteriorated, would impel me to throw myself into the Hillsborough River in sympathetic imitation of Schumann, who attempted suicide at the river Rhine.

Whatever the case, I knew Schumann's great Fantaisie, op. 17, mostly through the influential performance by Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall. I could not afford Horowitz records in school, though, so I got an Abbey Simon recording of the Fantaisie on what I think was the Vox discount record label. The A Minor Concerto was also frequently heard, but then as now I never regarded that piece very highly. I also knew of Schumann's Toccata, probably also through a Horowitz recording played repeatedly on the radio.

The most influential Schumann work in my youth was the Kinderszenen. This suite of short pieces was played in relay form by all the students in my piano teacher's studio. I think there were 6 or 7 of us, and each played 1 or 2 of the pieces. I don't remember which ones I played, but the standout from our recital performance of this suite was when Dorothy played "Wichtige Begenbenheit" ("An Important Event"), the 6th in the suite of 13 pieces. Dorothy's performance is the greatest recital disaster I ever saw. It hurt to be there, and yet the callow, youthful, asshole competitiveness in me felt some schadenfreude at seeing an older student fail so spectacularly.

Dorothy played the first full measure perfectly until the last beat, an F#-Minor/6 chord which flummoxed her. I think she tried to play the next 3 chords all at once, making the correct sequence of chords impossible to figure out. She stopped, started, stopped again, started again, the auditorium towering in a silence which I interpreted as unkind and imperious.

Had she been younger then I think a teacher or en elder might have appeared to delicately usher her away. But she was an older student, a high school senior who was supposedly going on to study piano in college, and whose example was meant to impress the younger ones.

She attacked the opening of the piece at least a dozen times but the result was always the same: she could not play it. She sat on the piano bench, pressing her index and middle fingers into her face, her thumbs symmetrically resting on her lower jaw bones, her fourth and fifth fingers standing up. All eyes and ears pressed down on her as she dove in again, each time producing a fresh and unique cacophony. It was the sound of buildings crashing to the ground, of mighty towers falling, of the Merrill Lynch bull gone wild in those halls of delicate glassware.

I don't know if that performance influenced my relative apathy toward Schumann, but that 3rd Piano Sonata which so enthralls me these days is one which I don't think I could have appreciated in school. It sounds modern to me, like it could have been written last week, with gravelly dissonances (some of which I think are actually typos) swirling under and around a righteously crazed swarm. Some of the dissonance are cruel. I have read no analysis or contemporary review of that sonata, but I imagine critics of Schumann's day found the opening statements as dissonant and brutal as do I.

Critics of Chopin's day found his 2nd Piano Sonata to be painfully dissonant. This surprised me when I first learned of it, but at the time I believed Chopin was unassailable, and that his greatness was not just permanent but immediate. Playing through that thicket of notes right now I hear the dissonance, not just in the chordal masses but in the near-vulgarity of the gestures. That left-hand piano-pumping sequence in the opening theme is almost obscene, and nearly ludicrous, while the broad, fistfuls-of-notes-triplet driving into the end of the first section and on to the development are hurricane insane. The joy is vulgar, and the vulgarity is psychedelic.

My appreciation for dissonance increases with age. I, for one, believe that there is no dissonance, that it simply does not exist. What I think is becoming sharper with age is my appreciation for what others consider or considered dissonant.