Remembering New York hard-core

As you can see, the May 26, 1986, issue of New York magazine featured the cover story titled "Hard-core Kids: Rebellion in the Age of Reagan."

(Deeplinking.net has a pdf of the article here.)

Anyway, the article caused quite a stir! How do we know? Because Phil Donahue tackled the topic, in an episode featuring the author, Peter Blauner, and members of Youth of Today, Murphy's Law, Agnostic Front and the Cro-Mags, among others.



What did Blauner have to say about all this later?

[Thanks to flanagan11 and deeplinking.]

"So I came to New York for the reason everyone comes to New York, because it is the city of changes"

So let's continue on with linking to about every article in this week's New York magazine...(Hey, lots of stuff that's of interest to me...)

Such as:

The 25th Hour of Florent Morellet...Florent will be closing soon after 23 years.

Says Morellet:

“I am from Bumfuck, France, okay? And when I grew up I wanted to kill myself every Sunday because nothing happened. So I moved to Paris, but you know what? Paris is awful! Americans, they love Paris, but I absolutely hate Paris. It is always gray, it is always the same. So I came to New York for the reason everyone comes to New York, because it is the city of changes. People forget this is what they love about New York. They get old, they get grumpy. They get … nostalgic.”

Speaking of restaurants, there's a small write up on Kafana, the new Serbian restaurant on Avenue C owned by former Sophie's bartender Vladimir Ocokoljic. (Despite the blog's origins -- see By the Way below -- I didn't know Vlade personally.)

In the movie reviews, David Edelstein likes Sex and the City! He calls it a "joyful wallow." (I always prefered "flounder.")

And finally, in the Approval Matrix, this falls under the "highbrow despicable" category:

"A preservation group calls the Lower East Side an 'Endangered' neighborhood. Should we also landmark the neighborhood from City of God?"

Articles that I won't be reading this week

From New York, a profile of Taavo Somer, proprietor of Freemans, etc. The sub-head alone is enough to scare anyone off:

Coolhunted
For those in search of the next groovy thing, Taavo Somer, proprietor of Freemans and the new Rusty Knot, is the prey of the moment. His downtown anti-style wants to have it all ways all the time—ironic and earnest, neurotic and carefree, cool and cheeseball

Actually, I did read the first three paragraphs, where there was a discussion on the old ice machine at Joe's:

To Somer, however, the ice machine was an object of mysterious beauty. He’d moved to New York to be an architect, and although he’d quit the profession almost immediately, he retained an architect’s compulsive tendency to deconstruct interiors, to take them apart in his head and figure out how they worked. “That ice machine was just kind of awesomely utilitarian,” he says. “The inner workings were right in front of you, not hidden away in some super-refined way.” Somer soon found himself filling drawing pads with studies of dive bars—detailed renderings of fictional haunts where he imagined his friends would hang out. The places he drew looked like Joe’s, with one crucial difference: Everything accidental was now orchestrated, the ice machine a piece of the design. “You don’t know it, but that’s what makes a place like that so comfortable,” says Somer. “That’s why you want to come back every night.”

Do you blame me for stopping after this?

Also, not to pick on New York, a magazine I generally like, there's the cover story on something called Sex and the City. The headline and sub-head here make the article seem sympathetic to the star.

Sarah Jessica Parker Would Like a Few Words With Carrie Bradshaw
The Sex and the City star likes Victorian morality tales, frets about artistic purity, and laments the passing of Old New York. So how did she become the poster girl for the New Manhattan

Let me know how it goes.



Meanwhile! The New York Daily News also thinks New Yorkers care about the Sex and the City movie. What else would explain the paper running an EXCLUSIVE review of the movie 25 days before it opens? Great scoop, thanks! Oh, and Features Editor Colin Bertram gives it a breathless four out of five stars.

Meanwhile, does anyone die in the movie? Does anyone here care?

EV etc.: 40 years and 196 cultural works

This week's New York magazine looks at 196 cultural works "that best defined the city since this magazine began." Which was 1968. Haven't had time to dig through it at all, but I did see the list of movies they have. Pretty much what you'd expect.

In any event, the list reminded me again that it has been too long since I've seen The French Connection. I thought about the film last week when Jeremiah was disucussing the history of Ratner's. I remembered that scene where Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Cloudy Russo (Roy Schieder) do a stakeout at the now-defunct Ratner's on Delancey.

The bowery boys had some nice observations on this classic when it played last summer at the Film Forum.

"Sophie’s can continue sans 'mixologists' or beer sommeliers"

This week's New York magazine has a short piece on Sophie's staying the same, titled "Dive Alive: How did Sophie's survive?"...Nothing new in the story, but it's always nice to see how much the bar means to people. (One note: The article didn't mention Mona's.)

[Photo by Jeremiah Moss]