Friday, June 20, 2008
Alphabet City...it heats up when the sun goes down!
Anyway, from here on out, I'm only dressing like Vincent Spano.
Movie trailers have sure come a long way since 1984...
Bonus footage!
[Thanks to jeremizle for posting these.]
And another film called Alphabet City in the works...?
Thursday, June 19, 2008
The vernal igloo of Tompkins Square Park
4ft x 3ft x 7ft apartments nearby are going for what now these days, $1,750? (And is that Emile Hirsch in the video?)
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Claim: Bruce Willis doesn't own any part of the Bowery Wine Co.
“Basically, he’s not really a partner,” confessed Bowery Wine Company co-owner Chris Sileo, one of two people whose names actually appear on the controversial wine bar’s liquor license (Mr. Willis not included).
“We’re old friends,” Mr. Sileo said of the famous action-film hero. “He lets me attach his name to the place to do me a favor because he knew it would help me. We just say he’s involved in the project.”
Given all the fuss stirred up by Mr. Willis’ supposed involvement in the place, however, Mr. Sileo might want to rethink his celebrity endorsement deal.
“I could do without it,” he said of all the recent hubbub. “I think most of it was because Bruce’s name was attached, and they saw an opportunity to get in the paper.
“I have no problem with activists,” he added. “But it is totally misdirected.”
Echoing the sentiments of fellow Bowery retailer John Varvatos—whose splashy opening of a trendy clothing store on the site of the hallowed CBGB rock club sparked similar demonstrations this past spring—Mr. Sileo said his small business is not responsible for the overall upscaling of the neighborhood.
Blame the landlords, he said; not the tenants: “If you want to direct it at Avalon, fine. But don’t direct it at some New York guy who happens to open a place in the Avalon. We could’ve easily opened down the block; we just opened there because it was a decent location and we got a decent rent.”
Bonus: Bruce Willis from his wine cooler days!
Raising the bar
So the Times debuted its Social Q's column in the Sunday Styles section this past, er, Sunday. Written by Philip Galanes, the column aims to "help with an awkward social situation."
I'm looking forward to seeing the following question, "I moved to the East Village a few months ago. There are so many bars! It's sure not like it was in [HOME STATE]. How should I behave when I'm in a bar? Is tipping customary?"
Anyway, in recent months, I've noticed that this new crop of young professionals -- 21 to 25 years of age, give or take a year on the legal side -- aren't very savvy at the ways of a bar. (I'm not a bartender -- just someone who sits in too many of them for too long.) Generally speaking, they're a self-centered bunch who embarrass themselves without even realizing it. Plus, is it really so difficult to know what you want to drink? One young woman came into one of my favorite neighborhood spots and asked what kind of red wine they had. The bartender said they only had a Merlot. "I'll have a piƱa colada then." How do you go from red wine to that? Or the young group of women at the same bar who asked the bartender for a recommendation on what to drink. Or the woman who asked to see the drink menu at the Grassroots.
So, generally speaking, what's wrong with some of today's neighborhood-bar-going young generation? (Clarification: I'm talking about regular-bar bars -- props to Brooks of Sheffield for that phrase -- not some bottle-service club.)
For starters:
They act as if they've never been in a bar.
They want to pay using a credit card because...
They rarely have cash on hand.
They leave things behind. ("Did you find a black leather bag with a Lumix digital camera inside...?" Heard a variation of that one too many times.)
They always want the jukebox turned up, which is annoying because...
They always play the most obvious songs on the jukebox.
They will rarely buy rounds for each other. Instead of one person coming to the bar and asking for four drinks, each person comes up and orders individually. (And then pay with a credit card...)
They rarely read a book, newspaper or magazine while waiting for a friend. Instead, they send text messages or play with their iPod.
They aren't aware of their surroundings. (It's just fine for the two of you to take up five seats at a crowded bar.)
They carry too many shopping bags.
They are careless with their possessions. (Hey, it's cool to leave your open purse on the bar, I'll watch it for you!)
They need to be stimulated -- forget conversation, give them Big Buck Hunter.
They wonder why they're aren't more TVs.
They always ask what the happy hour special is. And then still try to bargain.
They like to think they are special because they are in your bar.
They think snapping their fingers or clapping their hands will make the bartender respond much quicker.
I'm sure I've left out many annoying habits of the bar-going Yunnie. And you can likely do better. Feel free to add more in the comments. Oh, and if you're a youthful bargoer, please feel free to defend yourself.
The Lower East Side/East Village: The neighborhood continues to go (AGAIN AND AGAIN AND...)
On Sept. 2, 1984, the Times took a similar look at the neighborhood in a piece cleverly titled "The gentrification of the East Village."
To some excerpts!
WHEN Susan Kelley looks out her window she sees a beginning. ''There are so many young professionals sitting on the stoops, ties undone, just talking,'' said the 24-year-old Wall Street real-estate broker as she surveyed East 13th Street, where she has lived for two years. ''There's a feeling of togetherness, of movement. A feeling that things are different every day.''
When Barbara Shaum looks out her window she sees an end. ''I see them walking down the street in identical blue suits with their briefcases and I think, 'There goes the neighborhood,' '' said the leathercrafts maker who has lived in a loft behind her studio on East Seventh Street for 21 years. ''Why are all these people coming here, where they're so riotously out of place? I don't want my neighborhood to change.''
In the meantime, residents of the East Village live in a mixture of past and present, hope and anxiety.
The neighborhood is now home to people like Miss Kelley, who graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton two years ago with a degree in art history and works for a Wall Street real estate broker. She moved to her renovated two-bedroom apartment on 13th Street because the rent was low - $900 a month, which she splits with a friend - and ''because it was an adventure - I liked the idea of being part of the change.''
It is also home to people like Mrs. Shaum, who watched her neighbors come and go in waves for more than two decades - first immigrants, then flower children, then drug dealers and now young artists and professionals. The rent on her store and adjoining loft was $200 until last year, when her landlord tried to evict her and renovate the building. After a court fight he agreed to give her a three-year lease at $450 a month for the first two years, $500 a month for the last year. ''But when that is up,'' she said ''he's going to try to make me leave again.''
Their neighbors are people like Sally Randall, a fashion editor whose tastes run toward magenta eye glitter and who moved to the area as a student nine years ago and stayed because ''I liked the atmosphere.'' Or Carolyn Dwyer, a clothes designer who opened her boutique, Carioca, on East Ninth Street eight years ago ''because I didn't want to live someplace slick like SoHo.'' Or Mark Clifford, a business writer who has lived near Tompkins Square for three years and felt the need to defend the red Lacoste shirt he was wore to brunch one Saturday morning. ''I'm not one of the preppies everyone's railing against,'' he said. ''This shirt happens to be older than me.''
They recognize the changes they and their peers have brought to the neighborhood.
''When I took these spaces over, nobody wanted them,'' Miss Dwyer said. ''It was a mess outside. People threw garbage in my doorway. I cleaned up, I did my time. To be threatened after you helped to make it a nice place is an insult.''
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
If you're thinking of living in: The East Village
Among them are developers and people who cannot afford or will not pay the high rents and condominium prices prevalent elsewhere in Manhattan and hope that the East Village will give them every New Yorker's dream - maximum space for minimal outlay.
Indeed, its proximity to midtown Manhattan and Wall Street is catching the eyes of an increasing number of New Yorkers who view it as the next likely alternative to chic Washington Square, the trendy Upper West Side or the East Side.
* Condominium prices and rents for rehabilitated apartments, while lower than in established Manhattan neighborhoods, are rising fast and are likely to keep rising for the next few years.
* Crime, particularly crime related to drug abuse, is prevalent. Drug deals are made openly in Tompkins Square, the neighborhood's only park, and burglaries have risen markedly, according to officials of the Ninth Police Precinct, which serves the area.
* Quality-of-life problems abound. Residents complain that garbage remains uncollected for weeks, graffiti are endemic and the Fire Department says the East Village is among the most arson-prone areas in the city.
Despite its problems, the East Village has in recent years emerged as perhaps the most artistically avant-garde neighborhood in the city. Its boutiques are stocked with kamikaze clothing and its galleries with doomsday art, adding yet another layer of diversity to its traditional ethnic heterogeneity.
The cultural mix has been further enlivened by an influx of an increasing number of students from New York University, Cooper Union and other colleges, as well as young professionals.
Condominium and co-op prices vary widely. Sponsors of a new co-op in a building being rehabilitated at 613 East Sixth Street are asking $165,000 for a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment, with maintenance of about $500 a month.
Things that I do not want to know about
Monday, June 16, 2008
OTBs will stay open
The agreement allows the city’s 68 OTB parlors to open on Monday, averting a shutdown the mayor had threatened for Sunday that would have put hundreds of people out of work.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
More Yunnies out to destroy the past
Post scribe thinks turmoil in Africa is so trendy in the news right now!
Then there's the column called "The Socializer" by "woman-about-town" Kelly Killoren Bensimon. She wants to be a real-life Angelina Jolie (or something) and see Africa. You just have to read her column for yourself. (Click on the image for a better view.) Content from the magazine is not online.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
At the Bowery Wine Co. protest Friday night -- in pictures
Friday, June 13, 2008
At the Bowery Wine Co. protest Friday night
As I note in the post above this, I was only able to stay for the first leg of the protest, which, as Jeremiah reports, continued on to CBGB/Varvatos, the Bowery Hotel, 47 E. 3rd St., then down to Avenue A, through Tompkins Square Park, and finished at the Christodora House. His Flickr pool is here. Bob Arihood was also with the group the entire time. He took many compelling photos, as usual.
For the weekend: Seven songs
"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to."
My list seemed fitting to include here. For starters, I just entertained my 21-year-old nephew for a few days here. He's really into Britpop now, and wanted to know more about great New York bands. Of course, I quickly got out the album that started it all here: Vampire Weekend!
[Ducking beer bottles being thrown my way...]
For real though, I went about trying to give him a variety of New York bands. Yes, some are obvious. But it's a good place to start with a 21-year-old whose mother's favorite band is the Monkees.
In any event, since we played these songs the other day, I've continued to listen to them -- making these my favorite songs right now. (Ask me tomorrow, and...)
Lou Reed, Coney Island Baby
New York Dolls, Trash
James Chance and the Contortions, I Can't Stand Myself
Sonic Youth, Teenage Riot
Unsane, Body Bomb
Pussy Galore, Dick Johnson
Sugar Hill Gang, Apache
[Cheating] Bonus, for the summer season:
The Ramones, Surfin' Bird
Now for my seven tags...I don't have that many friends...this may take some effort!
Believe Me
Hmm...
Fire trucks on St. Mark's Place
Appreciating the classics
Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is, of course, the most realistic film ever made about New York City. As the review on AllMovie.com notes, "Screenwriter Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese place this isolated, potentially volatile man in New York City, depicted as a grimly stylized hell on Earth, where noise, filth, directionless rage, and dirty sex (both morally and literally) surround him at all turns. When Jason attempts to transform himself into an avenging angel who will "wash some of the real scum off the street," his murder spree follows a terrible and inevitable logic: he is a bomb built to explode, like the proverbial machete which, when produced in the first act, must go off in the third."
[Hey...wait a minute here! C'mon, it has been a long week...In all seriousness, there are some unintentionally hilarious moments in Part 8...You get the idea just be watching the opening...]
"The neighborhood was desolate, so underpopulated that landlords would give you a month's free rent just for signing a lease"
In November 2003, new editions of the bible, Luc Sante's "Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), included an afterword, which was also published in The New York Review of Books on Nov. 6, 2003. (I have an old copy of the book, and was unaware of the essay. By the way, the essay also appears in the booklet that accompanies the Stranger Than Paradise Criterion Collection.)
Here are a few of the many compelling passages from My Lost City:
I drifted down from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side in 1978. Most of my friends made the transition around the same time. You could have an apartment all to yourself for less than $150 a month. In addition, the place was happening. It was happening, that is, in two or at most three dingy bars that doubled as clubs, a bookstore or record store or two, and a bunch of individual apartments and individual imaginations. All of us were in that stage of youth when your star may not yet have risen, but your moment is the only one on the clock. We had the temerity to laugh at the hippies, shamefully backdated by half a decade. In our arrogance we were barely conscious of the much deeper past that lay all around. We didn't ask ourselves why the name carved above the door of the public library on Second Avenue was in German, or why busts of nineteenth-century composers could be seen on a second-story lintel on Fourth Street. Our neighborhood was so chockablock with ruins we didn't question the existence of vast bulks of shuttered theaters, or wonder when they had been new. Our apartments were furnished exclusively through scavenging, but we didn't find it notable that nearly all our living rooms featured sewing-machine tables with cast-iron bases.
[For more amazing photos by Marlis Momber like the one above, please visit her Web site.]
Things are getting really tough at the Fed
Bonus (Or, perhaps, Punishment):