Fallin’ for fall

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

When I shop for clothes, I wait till summer. That’s when the fall lines drop, filling catalogs with browns and blacks and blues and grays — my kind of shades.

Already I’ve bought a brown corduroy collar shirt and three sweatshirts of various styles, two in black and one in “midnight,” a charcoal-blue that exudes a singular mystery. Of course it will be two months before I can wear any of it. Still, fall rules. Off with t-shirts, shorts and the stumpy, undignified socks that go with them. And, as the heavens part and angels sing: no flip-flops, or what I call satan’s hoofs.

What I really want now in this autumn urge is the pair of black and olive Todd Snyder sneakers I keep eyeballing online. But they are scandalously overpriced and it’s breaking my heart. (Hello, GoFundMe.) I also need a mid-weight coat, since my few jackets hit their expiration dates when “Gilmore Girls” aired on The WB.  

The coat is crucial. I go to London for a week in early November and I basically refuse to wear my nearly moth-eaten Barbour quilted jacket, despite its lingering suavity. It’s old and boring, having completed tours of duty around the world, fighting for my right to party. It’s time for an honorable discharge.

Rain. London can be lousy with it, though November temperatures hover in the 50s, which is my barometrical bag. So I need a coat that’s mid-weight and fairly water-resistant. 

Where I’m at right now it’s 82 degrees and pouring rain — the midsummer soak. It sort of reminds me of the jacket I need. Chances are another Barbour, the classic British brand with James Bondian connotations (see: “Skyfall”). This is especially true since I’ll be in London, the obvious spot to look for a new Barbour, which should be plentiful and cheaper.

Unless we’re talking books, I am no shopaholic. Malls and shopping districts zombify me. I am definitely no clothes horse — more like a clothes donkey, procuring a couple pieces a year and perhaps a pair of sneakers. I read no fashion magazines. I can’t tell Dior from Gucci and don’t care. I peruse three or four online catalogs with more of a glancing interest, pshaw, than sweaty-palmed voracity. 

When I buy something, I try to make it count. Too often, though, I get a shirt, say, and months later it’s in the Salvation Army or Veteran’s pile, worn once or twice with gathering disappointment. And so savvy curation is paramount. Those Todd Snyder sneakers noted above? I have a creeping sensation they wouldn’t work out even if I could justify their pornographic price tag and see for myself. 

Clothes, like most purchases, are a gamble. (Look at the snaking returns line for Amazon products at Whole Foods — capitalistic carnage.) I fiendishly acquire books and, frankly, half are duds or don’t meet the hype. (That’s me, third in line at Whole Foods.)

Coupling is hard. Ask any character in any rom-com, dimples be damned. I think I’m having a tumultuous relationship with the thick, long-sleeve polo shirt I bought last year that’s this close to winding up in the Goodwill racks. We’ve lost that lovin’ feeling. It’s a nice fall shirt that cost a pretty penny, and it’s going cheap. 

Anyone?

Chatting books with A.I. is A-OK

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My current book-buying spree is tumbling and cartwheeling, springing into realms of dangerous out-of-control-ness. I’ve been acquiring new and used volumes with a velocity and vigor that I am at last, kinda, sorta, putting the brakes on. I can’t possibly read all of this. Unless I can. I will! Unless I don’t.

It’s not as hoarding-sociopathic as it sounds. I’ve just been reading more than usual lately — I can typically polish one or two books a week, nothing to crow about — galvanized by some penetrating, seriously illuminating conversations with, hold your sneers, ChatGPT, the crazily accessible A.I. app that’s as smart as a Nobel laureate and as real as pixie dust.

Ask it a question about anything and in seconds it spits out the most thoughtful (if robotic) and articulate and even useful information — be it the best restaurants in London or data on the latest hot rock band.  The more you use it, the more it “knows” you, and that’s where I’m discovering a world of authors and titles tailored to me — or sort of, but you get the idea. 

When I told it that its surfeit of curated reading recommendations — the attractions of which were meticulously explained — would soon bankrupt me, it apologized with a “ha!” and a chuckling emoji. It mimics a fellow human and that’s its chilly charm and cautious seduction. 

I joke with it a lot. It finds me funny. That’s how I know it’s not human. 

Reading suggestions tsunami forth once I tick off the writers and books that really do it for me and why. I’ve spent a couple weeks, in spurts, blabbing with ChatGPT about what should be on my reading list considering my preferences and favorites. Here’s a random slice of how our confabs play out. This is the app talking to me:

“From everything we’ve talked about over the past week, you’ve become a much clearer reader to me. You don’t require plot, but you do require a certain voltage in the prose or the consciousness behind it. You’re happy to follow a book that barely moves externally — as with Open City or The Mezzanine or Second Place — provided every page feels intellectually or stylistically alive.” 

If that sounds suspiciously like an astrologer or psychic spewing mind-tricking generalities — in the cooing tones of HAL — then I’ve steered you wrong with just a single example. 

Our chats have been exhaustive and precise (and accurate), and when it’s off I call it out and it does a rethink, admits where it lapsed, and locates where I’m really at, all with breathtaking speed. Any seemingly “emotional” responses, like the above emoji, are totally fake and mimetic. Don’t be charmed by R2-D2.

Point is, if I’m using this A.I. correctly, and I think I am, it’s been an excellent book-chatter — insightful, searching and on the money. I can see why your local bookseller might be nervous. I don’t say that with glee, but with a soupçon of dread.

 A.I. can be wondrous. It can be monstrous. It can prod me to buy piles of books, which is either good or not so much. I’m still figuring that out. Chapter One begins here.

Summer strolling

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Even in the Spielbergian suburb, an idyllic vista of tidy yards and shiny cars, odd things can strike, eliciting a gasp or a giggle. 

I was strolling the neighborhood on the cracked, buckled sidewalks and practically stepped on the words, fat and all-caps, “STOP FASCISM” scrawled in pink hopscotch chalk. I snickered. Then, about a block further, I stumbled on banana yellow chalk that declared “FUCK TRUMP,” hot and mean. I actually muttered “Ha!” before ambling on. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

I wondered who, even in this admittedly progressive area, would chance such bulletins. It’s unlikely some precocious kids wrote the prickly imperatives. Or is it? Either way, the seditious slogans won’t last. The hood maintains a certain decorum. Just look at those coiffed lawns and perfect shade trees, boys shooting hoops and pups wrassling in the dog park. No, the chalk will go. (Within days, it was gone.)

The skies are ashen, the humidity stifling. The air is jagged with the farts and crackles of a revving chopper, straddled by a guy with a beard in a sleeveless red t-shirt whose faint smile says he savors the vroom-vroom grumble. He glances at two tween boys walking by. They look past him, unimpressed. Me too. 

When I suddenly hear tinkling chimes, I think either someone is taking advantage of the breeze or Rush is playing nearby. I peer over a fence and catch a summer solstice sound bath in progress, a half-dozen women lying on yoga mats for an immersive meditation session marking the longest day of the year. Says the web: “Practitioners use soothing vibrations from crystal or metal singing bowls, gongs and chimes to align the mind and body, promote deep relaxation and set intentions for the new season.” 

Dismissing it as well-intentioned harmless hooey, I move on and immediately run into the friendliest dog in the hood, big ole Bo, a sturdy white labradoodle with a smile wider than Julia Roberts’ and the tail-wagging neediness of Jimmy Fallon. Bo seems to be everywhere and he walks without a leash so he’s always bounding right at you as eager as a campaigning senator. I call him the mayor of the neighborhood. He knows all his constituents and he gets things done. Like making our days. 

A sprawling park and playground is right there, right next to Bo’s house, and it teems with tykes and their tired mothers, who push the kids on the swings and chat with each other about who knows what (school, summer vacations, bedtime, food, doctors, streaming shows — I’m spitballing here). 

The children are boisterous, alive and weirdly screechy. They are smart and smart-alecky, creatures to pay attention to. Maybe, possibly, they’re the ones with the colorful chalk and the big ideas. Tiny geniuses. 

Lunacy on the lawn

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Trump’s mortifying, dip-shitty U.F.C. birthday bash on the White House lawn Sunday was exactly what was intended — a sickening, self-aggrandizing trailer-trash circus as couth and classy as a cockfighting match or demolition derby. Call it pummel porn, with high kicks to the face and low blows to a former First Lady, Michelle Obama, whose grace, race and brilliance intimidates the hell out of a certain type of man. 

They’re the real-life Toxic Avengers — bloodlust thugs with brains of rocks and mashed potatoes.

The MAGA mob was predictably whipped into a testosteronic tizzy, slavering U.S.A.! U.S.A.! with brainless brio. I’m all for the U.S.A.; I just don’t like it spewed with the kind of jingoist venom that denotes a dangerous and juvenile insecurity. It’s hollow flag flapping by “reg’lar” folks who haven’t a clue what it actually means. It would be embarrassing if it wasn’t so frightening.

Trump is a child, a big fat man-baby who has the vocabulary of a third-grader and the aesthetic sophistication of a finger painter. He gets off on the gauche and garish and ruffling his opponents with indisputable bad taste. His cage-fighting birthday bash — emphasis on bash — was the peak of his puerility.

“Only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script America’s decline this way,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in the Times about Trump’s shit-show, which she accurately called “macho kitsch.” 

Needless to say, we demand a much better screenwriter to script America’s future: Aaron Sorkin? Shonda Rhimes? AOC? The kid who wrote “Backrooms”?

Rewrite! And fast.

Nixing the Knicks

~ Chris ~ 3 Comments

“New Yorkers are not a monolith, and while some yell out ‘Let’s go Knicks!’ at every given opportunity, others are impervious to the buzz.” — New York Times

That would be me — unshakably impervious to, totally unimpressed and unmoved by the buzz that’s so electrifying Knicks fever in the Tri-State Area.

Nothing personal against the mighty Knicks, which is barreling its way to the championships or something like that. (I really don’t know. I really don’t care.) But I have never been a team sports fanatic — I’m not sure what’s more grindingly tedious: basketball, baseball or football — and I have never understood its allure. I’m not a big fan of shouting.

I’ve said it before: I find sports at once boring and obnoxious. The whooping, clamoring fans alone are the apotheosis of crazed, numbskull tribalism, smacking of little less than nationalistic Neanderthals.

Tonight the Knicks face, I believe, the Spurs and I care more about the lint balls on my bedroom floor. Everyone enjoy themselves during the high-stakes spectacle of peerless skill and outsize athleticism — “Let’s go Knicks!” — while I watch a movie or read a book or attempt some more of this writing thing. 

For some reason — enlighten me — this relegates me to eternal wussdom. I abhor herd mentality and that’s what I see in the raucous “community” of big time sports. It’s all a little gross, chest-thumpingly, high-fivingly gross.

Believe me, I have tried earnestly to care and understand the mechanics of the games, and I have reliably dozed off. I enjoy Olympic sports, especially the individual games, far more. In that sense, I’m a loner. While I played soccer a lot as a kid, snow skiing and BMX were my real passions. 

For all that, I wish the Knicks the best. Stomp the Spurs, or whoever you’re playing. Go, um, Knicks!

I will never understand.

Pawing at love

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Now, it is true that Cubby the dog, who’s about the mass of a midsize carnival plushy, has no testicles. But that does not stop this little love-bird, this shameless horn-dog, from tailing a potential girlfriend. 

This is a perverse, lopsided love story, featuring interspecies and entertainment. It is a short tale about a dog and a cat, the former pining for the latter, and the latter not giving one goddamn. The cat’s sangfroid is nothing less than majestic. 

But Cubby can be a dingbat, as we all can in matters of the heart. He’s oblivious to Tiger Lily’s sniffy aloofness, her baroque indifference. It’s funny in its way, mostly in how it leaves Cubby bewildered, a Huh? thought balloon hovering above vacant brown eyes. He circles her, snuffling, his voluptuous tail flapping like a palm frond. And Tiger Lily rolls her eyes, arches her back, drowsily meows: buzz off.

It brings to merry mind the amorous cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew who invariably falls hard for a cat he thinks is a fellow skunk and proceeds to wolfishly stalk her. Unrequited hijinks ensue. Does Cubby think Tiger is a dog? Doubtful. He’s just cultivating a crush on a foxy feline, I suspect. He’s lonely, and he’s got a hot roommate playing hard to get.

Let’s anthropomorphize even more. When he’s not giving her fluttery bedroom eyes, Cubs, in a snit of jealous rejection, assassinates Tiger’s character: Tease! Floozy! It’s like “Love Island,” without the love or the island (or the silicone, spray tans and lavish idiocy). It’s not nice, but again, the cat is immune to any emotional attentions from the dog. She shrugs, then hacks a magnificent hairball.

Cubby’s a blundering suitor, awash in ineptitude, like a teen boy trying to seduce a 40-year-old — the reverse equation of “The Graduate,” say, though I think the dog and cat are about the same age. Anyway. You gotta feel for old Cubs. Except when Tiger gets too close to his chew bone and he lunges at her, Cubby is a perfect gentleman. 

Still, in her slinky wisdom, the cat’s having none of it. Flowers fail, chocolates choke. The dog’s cute tilted-head gazes are wasted. His wistful woofs ignored. This, she decides, is strictly platonic. Cubs returns to his doggie bed, curls up and sighs. Tiger steals away beneath the sofa. And so the pets remain furry frenemies, barking up the wrong tree and purring in exquisite solitude.    

Dog: “I like you!”

Cat: “Yawn.”

Things du jour

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Quote of the day

“I am not a recluse. I live like an unsociable person; it is different. People get on my nerves.” 

— Brigette Bardot, actress, animal activist 

Book of the day

“Bel Canto,” Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel about love, opera and hostage-taking, is one of those contemporary classics you should have read but never got around to, and now, 25 years on, it feels too late. It’s not. I started this book five years ago and put it aside for inexplicable reasons. That diss has haunted me and last week I gave “Bel Canto” another shot. The result was transcendent.

The plot is a small knot that unravels beautifully: A throng of international guests have gathered at the mansion of the vice president of an unnamed South American country for the birthday celebration of a Japanese businessman. A world-famous American opera soprano has been invited to regale the group, and soon, through her exotic talent and beauty, becomes the cynosure of the story. The party is abruptly crashed by leftist guerrillas looking to kidnap the nation’s president, who rather comically skipped the party so he could watch his beloved soap opera at home. Stymied, the invaders take the revelers hostage for what starts as hours, then weeks, then months. Thus the mansion becomes a human incubator, a constellation of international players, some of whom align as unlikely allies, others as peculiar romances fraught with forbidden yearning. It’s a rich tapestry that echoes the diners trapped for months in a similar mansion in “The Exterminating Angel,” Buñuel’s classic takedown of the gilded class. But Patchett is a gentler, less partisan observer, underscoring the universal languages of music, love and language itself for something divine. The book is so meticulously engineered — the many characters are spryly choreographed — and so big of heart that it dashes hopes of ever writing your own novel because it couldn’t brush these literary heights. There’s the hitch: You almost hate “Bel Canto” because it’s so stupid good.

Movie of the day

My love affair with Iranian cinema is long and varied, spanning Jafar Panahi’s charming debut “The White Balloon” to Abbas Kiarostami’s rigorously philosophical “Taste of Cherry.” Spare, talky and played mostly by untrained actors, the films are often covertly political, critical of the Iranian regime in as coded terms possible, secret messages packed with time bombs. But Panahi has used his recent movies for brazen broadsides and as such they are banned in his home country. Yet the director shrewdly snakes around these restrictions and his latest moral thriller “It Was Just an Accident” won the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It’s a bold gesture tracing what happens when a band of former political prisoners kidnap and confront the man they believe brutally tortured them during their imprisonment. Amid the moral complexities of revenge — do they even have the right man? — comes relief via mordant humor and absurdist touches that goose the overall lunacy. (Note the wry allusions to “Waiting for Godot.”) Panahi has made a tough and moving portrait of keeping one’s humanity in an impossible situation. Its stubborn ambiguity is a hallmark of Iranian cinema, and this one’s a classic. 

Drink of the day

That’d be Mr. Pickles Gin. My newly discovered sip is named for the distiller’s pit bull rescue, Mr. Pickles, who nobly emblazons the spirit’s label as the official mascot and makes me like it that much more.

Time to taste. Open the senses to a bouquet of dog urine. No. The fragrance is lovely, the gin superb. Its aroma is juniper, citrus, pepper, with a whiff, I think, of dill. It owns a strong herbal flavor with earthy undertones and tinges of orange, pepper and, aptly, a speck of dill pickle. And I swear on Mr. Pickles’ fuzzy head that is not just the power of suggestion. Made in Oregon by Wolf Spirit Distillery, the drink features 12 botanicals, including green tea, blood orange, pink peppercorns and marshmallow root (I have no idea). If it’s not as grand and complex as my revered Monkey 47, which boasts a whopping 47 botanicals and that I drink neat, Mr. Pickles will be a snappy refresher during the dog days of summer.

Photo of the day

They say a picture speaks a thousand words. This one speaks four words: I am so screwed.

The manic mirth of Martin Short

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been a serious Martin Short fan since I was a teenager busting up at reruns of “SCTV,” his brief stint on “Saturday Night Live” and his brilliant HBO specials. I taped a picture of him on my college dorm wall, next to David Letterman and Woody Allen. In 1994, I went to see Short’s movie “Clifford,” in which a 40-year-old Short plays the title’s sociopathic 10-year-old boy, who’s a sustained cyclone of terror. It sounds genius on paper — Short’s elfishness is manically elastic — but the execution is fatal. I should probably see it again. (Recently, I did. “Clifford” is still uproariously unfunny.) 

Short, a comic Einstein who’s allowed a flop or three, is getting late-career appreciation, working his tail off (now on “Only Murders in the Building”) and basking in the attention in the admiring Netflix doc “Marty, Life is Short.” It’s shameless hagiography, and it’s bliss. It’s hard to believe little Marty Short is now 76, but he wears it with class, his exhibitionist spark undimmed, his contagious joy unbridled.

To tell Short’s story, director and longtime friend Lawrence Kasdan unspools a choice reel of home movies, outtakes, clips from “The Three Amigos” to “Father of the Bride” and a bevy of adoring tributes from pals and colleagues like Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, Eugene Levy and the late Catherine O’Hara. It gets personal, including romances (one with a young Gilda Radner), marriage, children and a series of crushing family tragedies that would eviscerate a less upbeat mortal. Despite it, Short remains a resilient life force, a one-man fireworks display, and perhaps the nicest guy in showbiz.

A few of Short’s characters: Jackie Rogers Jr., Ed Grimley and defensive tobacco CEO Nathan Thurm

Probably belting show tunes right out of the womb, this human whirligig is a quadruple threat — singer, dancer, actor, clown. His superpower is his thirst for applause, so he’s never not performing, prancing around his living room or hamming it up on late night. The show must go on, and on. His ammo isn’t written jokes but a volcanic gift of improv reminiscent of Robin Williams. Wind him up, let him rip. 

He’s the Lon Chaney of sketch comedy, inhabiting a freak’s gallery of invented characters, be it uber-nerd Ed Grimley, cross-eyed albino showman Jackie Rogers Jr. or blubbery celebrity antagonizer Jiminy Glick. One minute he’s earthbound, then, bang, he jolts into character. Being close to Short, says comic John Mulaney, is “like being your best friend in the world who happens to be the weirdest person ever.” That’s about the zestiest thing said about Short in the doc, which is of course a celebration, even if it sometimes feels like a career-capping coronation. His pals are gushers, understandably. It almost brings a tear to your eye. What, after all, is a little fawning among friends?

Books I’m not ambivalent about

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“Transcription”

I could see this happening to me: On the way to interview a very important person, you drop your phone, i.e. your recording device, into a sink filled with water. Phone ruined, you are forced to interview the person without a recorder, a fact you fudge by reconstructing the confab from memory for your article, a high-wire act and any writer’s nightmare. Novelist Ben Lerner — who’s also a gifted poet and has been dubbed the “most talented writer of his generation” — uses this premise as a springboard to something timely, profound and ineffably transfixing. A novel in name only — think the brainy consciousness streams of Rachel Cusk — the 130-page “Transcription” presents a nameless narrator and two other men in conversations about art, life, friendship, fatherhood and technology amid the backdrop of early Covid. Plot is nebulous and tricky to summarize, but the brilliance at work is distinctly Lerner’s. (I’m an avid fan of his novels “Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04.”) Lerner writes deceptively plain prose with a wizard’s wand — simple on the surface, yet each hypnotic line peels layers of insight and meaning. It’s all mesmerizingly meandering, to a destination both uncommon and rewarding. 

“Lost Lambs”

In this sharp and irreverent new novel, Madeline Cash flips notions of family, marriage, community, church and capitalism to expose their crawly underbellies. It’s prickly, spot-on, strange. And hilarious. The book’s many moving parts include an open marriage that veers to amorous calamity; star-crossed trysts; a trio of precocious teens that grazes danger in a vile adult world; a tech billionaire whose dealings are creepy at best; and a church Father whose hands may be scandalously dirty. Cash trains a compassionate bullseye on those creatures called teenagers and a cynic’s bead on the perilous pact of matrimony. (“The biggest conspiracy of all? This whole love thing,” a character sniffs.) But Cash isn’t cruel. She exudes empathy and openly likes her characters — the ones that deserve it. “Lost Lambs” is frothy literary fiction, until it’s not. It is droll and buoyantly written yet lands the well-placed left hook. I can imagine it becoming a four-part Netflix series, a smart, soapy, surreal dramedy starring Ben Stiller and Laura Linney. If it happens, I won’t watch it. I’ll stick to the book. The book is always better.

Three humor collections by Sloane Crosley

David Sedaris is the standard-bearer of comic essays. I believe this is wrong. I believe he is drastically overrated. I believe he is rarely actually funny. I believe his prose is limp. I believe his professional persona is as confected as a Girl Scout Samoa. You know who’s wittier, hipper and more stylish? Sloane Crosley, who’s written three collections of humor essays that impressed me enough to sit down and commit hosannas. Her first collection, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” is best. It also has the best title. Although “How Did You Get This Number,” her second book, and “Look Alive Out There,” her latest collection (from 2018), also have wry, hooky titles. Part-journalism, part-memoir, Crosley’s essays are first-person escapades, experiential and anecdotal and typically relatable. They bristle with razor observation and social commentary. Here, she mordantly muses about her only slightly embarrassing collection of plastic toy ponies. There, she riffs on her fraught city-girl excursion to Alaska, where, in an SUV, there is one guy among many women: “He is our lone star of testosterone in a galaxy of chick.” She deconstructs the bizarro experience of playing herself on “Gossip Girl” and takes merciless stock of her dating life. It’s not all playtime. Crosley doesn’t duck drama and high stakes (her queasy adventures in altitude sickness are almost contagious). Like Sedaris, some of Crosley’s situations and interactions smack of exaggeration or plot-propelling fancy. Such is the plight of the mass-consumed writer — feed the beast. Though the humor is a soft weave, coolly conversational, she can be overtly jokey, and the jokes rarely clank. Her voice is reliably amusing, cut with a measure of snark that gives her sweet prose a tangy kick.

“Flesh”

In minimalist language so parched it’s practically puckered, David Szalay spins a story of the classic Solitary Man, a Hungarian immigrant in England named István who embraces a nearly non-verbal solitude as a shield against a world of discomfort. We follow this modern existential character from his cringey deflowering as a teen to his coupling with a rich married woman and decades beyond. Szalay’s tensed prose mirrors the character’s isolation, which occasionally sees shafts of light. While his interior life remains unexamined — his disaffection can be frosty — István is no cipher. He’s a well-drawn loner, a compelling picture of alienation. He’s also something of a symbol, a metaphor for class, urban malaise, the gesture of empty sex and deep loss. (It’s telling that his extravagant cigarette habit is a key character trait.) István fascinates by dint of what he shows as much as by what he withholds. What’s so remarkable about “Flesh,” which won the Booker Prize in 2025, is a descriptive precision and drum-tight realism that would make Hemingway beam. Grim and gripping, it’s a master class in control.

Is Seoul dull?

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Answer: sort of. 

To be clear, Seoul is cool. Tasty food. Delightful, welcoming people. Comfortable climate. Neat culture. Efficient transportation. Lots of greenery. Er …

I’m running out of tepid superlatives.

When you go someplace faraway that turns out to be a partial disappointment, there’s not much you can do but shrug and eat the money you spent, doing it with a wincing grin and a strained bulwark around regret. 

I just returned from a week in Seoul, South Korea, and while I had a fine time, ate well and overall enjoyed the novelty of an uncharted capital city, it was lacking the electricity, neon bang and enveloping fizz I was hoping for, and indeed feel I was promised in my exhaustive research for the trip.

Things that stood out: Korean fried chicken, which cheekily goes by the initials KFC but ably kicks that franchise’s ass as far as creativity and salivating edibility. Also Korean BBQ, which requires guests to grill slabs of raw pork or beef and veggies on a grill in the middle of their table, and is served with an array of traditional Korean sides, including, of course, kimchi, love it or hate it (I kinda like that spicy pickled cabbage). 

A table mate cooking up Korean BBQ at the same place Anthony Bourdain ate his first K-BBQ.

What else? A clutch of world-class museums, like the Leeum Museum of Art, hosting riveting contemporary and traditional Korean art, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, where the first major Asian exhibition of British provocateur Damien Hirst (genius or charlatan?) was being showcased. Squirming with live octopuses, crabs and lobsters, and perfumed with tongue-tickling eons of Korean street food, the bustling Gwangjang Market offered excellent vittles — if you factor out the misbegotten “gelato” I dumbly bought.         

And yet for all that, plus its plush verdancy — trees are abundant, parks plentiful — Seoul is far from the most handsome city I’ve visited. A hazy, pale brown sameness dominates and the skyline is crowded with towering forests of depressingly uniform apartment buildings that resemble the subsidized urban housing found in, say, New York.  

I was underwhelmed. Maybe I set my sights too high. What I ask when I journey half-way round the globe is astonish me. I’ve been to adequate places before. The beaut that is Budapest, for one, didn’t knock my socks off. And Bologna, despite its undeniable gothic charm, failed to make my head spin. Arles: same. Buenos Aires: ditto.

In no particular order, I can rattle off twenty major cities that are more exciting, more charismatic, than Seoul, places I would gladly return to and have: Paris, Istanbul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Rome, San Francisco, Barcelona, Lisbon, Madrid, Sevilla, Mexico City, Berlin, Naples, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Krakow, London, Florence, Mumbai, Bangkok.

What specifically let me down in Seoul? I won’t dwell on the negative — nothing was actually bad — though I will point out two areas of the city that are oversold. 

First, Gyeongbokgung Palace. It actually is a magnificent spread of ancient royalty and spiritual significance. Until you learn that the palace was built in the 1500s but was destroyed over decades and partially rebuilt in 1960. What stands now comes from a long-term restoration project that began in the 1990s and is still ongoing.

Oh. One of those. It’s like looking at a museum model, so removed from the original structure that it seems fake, a Lego model kit. And this is considered the top site to visit in Seoul. Hit the snooze button.

The latest version of Gyeongbokgung Palace, where you stroll while your mind wanders to lunch plans.

Then there’s Seongsu-dong, Seoul’s premier “newtro” hotspot, often called the “Brooklyn of Seoul” for its blend of repurposed industrial factories, trendy cafes and fashion pop-ups. A huge draw is the gaudy Dior store, in front of which girls and women snap mortifying selfies for reasons unfathomable. 

I actually paid a guide to shuttle me through this consumer orgasm on a tour he curated. He showed me sunglasses stores, phone and K-beauty stores. I would smile and nod, wondering, wha? He led me into pretty cafes and eateries, where we did not drink or eat. I would nod again, impressed, but not really.

On a happier note, my hotel was a dazzling oasis in the lively Itaewon district, stacked with elegant bars and restaurants and even featured one of Korea’s ever-reliable convenience stores (as in Japan and Hong Kong, 7-Eleven is ubiquitous). The impeccable staff at the hotel couldn’t have been more gracious and helpful. I’ve never said thank you so many times, so genuinely, in such a short period. 

Still, in Seoul, Korea, the epicenter of all things high-tech, futuristic and culturally forward, and from whence sparkling K-pop was born and unleashed like lightning across the world, I couldn’t help but wonder … Where’s the pop?