The Ex files

Remember these stupid fliers plastered all over the neighborhood...which turned out to be a viral campaign for the new CBS series "The Ex List"....?

Anyway, the show just got canceled.

Transportation in New York circa 1951

Five photos taken in the back of a cab that was probably going a little too fast during a rainstorm Tuesday evening

Wow, that headline is really concise! On West Broadway then Houston.

The layers of Fulton Street (aka, that big hole in the ground)

I've been keeping my eye on the looooong-delayed and increasingly expensive Fulton Street Transit Center at the corner of Broadway in the Financial District. It doesn't seem as if much progress is being made. The top two photos here show the construction site last week.



Here's what it looked like in July. I can't really see much difference.

Meanwhile, the Fulton subway entrance pictured below has been shuttered during the recent construction. The businesses shown here in July have been relocated to other parts of Fulton Street. These mom-and-pop shops that line entrances and exits of the subway give this city a little character, a little of which continues to die.

Red Square has Lenin; Cooper Union now has Stalin

City Room explains.

EV Grieve Random: A touch of evil

Roger Ebert recently trashed an independent movie that he only watched for eight minutes....Which prompted Miami Herald critics to share their worst review experiences. As pop music critic Michael Hamersly notes:

I was tempted to destroy my stereo with a sledgehammer probably two minutes into Deborah Harry's ironically titled October 2007 release Necessary Evil. It's an excruciating CD, full of random, cheesy musical styles (smooth jazz? hair metal?) and embarrassingly inappropriate lewdness (the 60-year-old woman sings about the devil's d--- and her curlies, for God's sake).
But whether it was professionalism or, more likely, morbid fascination, I stuck it out. Sure, I gave the album no stars (and got plenty of hate mail for trashing the icon), but I felt the ex-Blondie singer's star power warranted a review, good or horrid. If the artist had been a nobody, I would have simply ignored it.

MORE NYC album art

Well, Alex has been running laps around me in our NYC album art back and forth. So, in desperate times like these, I'm breaking out my secret weapon: boobs. OK, OK, I mean, it sort of has something to do with NYC...The original cover of the third record by Jimi Hendrix, "Electric Ladyland," showed a harem of nude women. The cover was banned in the United States...but was OK to use for the U.K. release.




Meanwhile, a few other NYC-related covers that I like...

An examination of hipsters

Meanwhile, in Australia, Lisa Pryor at The Sydney Morning Herald weighs in with a screed titled "How to be a bona fide hipster -- try to be different by being the same." Here are a few excerpts from the article:

Hipsters are hard to describe because they are so full of contradictions. But like a toupee or AIDS-related wasting, you know it when you see it. Hipsters hate fashion but take meticulous care achieving exactly the right degree of rumpledness. They value originality while looking the same as one another.

Thanks to these contradictions, hipsters find themselves always hurtling, psychically, towards a black hole of self-hatred, denial and irony, both intended and unintended. Ever seen someone walk into a cool bar and say "Oh my God. Look at all these try-hard wankers" not realising they look exactly the same? Classic hipster.

This week I am writing to you from the world headquarters of hipsterdom, the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Williamsburg. This slice of New York is the Haight-Ashbury of ironic self-loathing. In Verb Cafe on Bedford Avenue, a sign reads "Missing: brown felt fedora". Only four guys in the cafe are not wearing fedoras. Young men with messy hair, forearm tattoos and full beards abound. Around the corner at egg, an uncapitalised cafe, the beardage rate tops 50 per cent.

Whether they live in New York or Sydney, hipsters share many of the same qualities, particularly in the love-hate relationships they have to the hot topics of gentrification, fashion and queueing.

First, gentrification, a topic on which hipsters have passionate, confused views. They hate watching property prices rise in cool neighbourhoods partly because they do not want to see the earthy, quaint, ethnic working class displaced by white professionals with modular sofas who love painting their front doors red, but mostly because they realise they can no longer make a killing by buying cheap terraces and later flogging them off. And despite hating gentrification, they refuse to move anywhere that has not been gentrified.

A Pioneer no more?

Ugh. This one hurts. New York magazine has the story:

Another East Village institution is shuttering: Two Boots Pioneer Theater, which specializes in indie, underground, and cult fare, will most likely close at the end of the month. “I’m still hoping for a reprieve,” says Two Boots owner Phil Hartman, who’s seeking a partner or new owner. “But it was always a labor of love and never commercially viable.” Hartman and his wife founded the cozy 99-seat cinema in 2000, but the venue seemed older: It attempted to resurrect the lost atmosphere of old, offbeat downtown movie houses. Now it’ll share their fate, done in by a looming rent increase and tough times in the exhibition business.

Looking at the neighborhood circa the late 1970s

A friend gave me a used copy of "The Lower East Side: A Guide to its Jewish Past" by Ronald Sanders. The book, published in 1979, provides a straightforward history of the neighborhood from the 1870s to the 1920s. Text aside, I appreciate the many photos (99 in total) taken by Edmund V. Gillon, Jr. Here's a sampling of them, circa late 1970s:


Eighth Street and Avenue B.


10th Street.

Second Avenue near Sixth Street.

On Second Avenue (a cross street wasn't given).

At the Christodora on Avenue B before it was refurbished.

NYC's coffee boom

The Times today examines the number of new (non-chain) coffee places that have opened in the city the past few years...places that serve "well-made, well-prepared coffee." Including in the piece are East Village favorites Abraço Espresso on East Seventh Street and Ninth Street Espresso. "There are so many of these places that some people claim that New York is experiencing a coffee renaissance," writes Ted Botha, who did the piece for the Times. Here are a few passages from the article:

“What you see going on now is a de- Starbuckification, if you will,” said Suzanne Wasserman, a food historian who is director of the Gotham Center for New York City History. “People are yearning for authenticity.”

It will probably be a while before specialty coffee shops are as prevalent in the city as wine stores. Most New Yorkers must still travel several miles to find the perfect espresso, and price is often a deterrent to patronizing these places.

Nancy Ralph, the director of the New York Food Museum, describes paying more than a dollar for a cup of coffee as extortion. She also doubts whether $4 mochas will be enough to cover ever-rising rentals in the city. “You’ll have your answer in a year,” she said.

Because I'm a Creeper

Some members of the younger generation in my office were discussing seeing Saw V this weekend.

Yuck.

This is more my speed...Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Via the magic of Hula, here's a Halloween warmup. This episode from 1956 is titled "The Creeper," in which a serial killer known as the Creeper (duh) is terrorizing the women of New York.



[Apologies for the Dove ads...]