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):
Old sign of the day
Also, it's a one-sided sign, apparently to attract the one-way traffic moving east on the street.
This former business is directly across the way from the closed-off back entrance of the Blarney Stone, where their neon goodness brightly shines. Must enter through the front door on Fulton.