Our friend Cat Sitter in the City has a funny post from Friday evening... in which she got a glimpse across the way into one of those new buildings in the neighborhood with the floor-to-ceiling windows...there was a party going on...then!
"At one point, a couple went into the bedroom right off the living room and closed the door. Like the living room, the bedroom didn't have any blinds or drapes.
"The girl foraged through a dresser and grabbed a silky top. She was changing when the guy, who was probably her boyfriend, whipped off his khakis and underwear, threw his arms up in the air and started air thrusting. She doubled over laughing."
In case you haven't already seen it... Lincoln Anderson has a nice piece in The East Villager this week on Harry Greenberg, who's retiring after more than two decades as the supervisor of Tompkins Square Park.
There are plenty of passages to highlight...
Greenberg is quick to credit his staff for keeping Tompkins clean. Actually, the number of his workers has shrunk over the years, forcing him to do more with less. In 1990, he had 15 permanent workers in Tompkins Square Park, and also managed part of Parks District 3, which is contiguous with the East Village and Lower East Side’s Community Board 3. Today, he only has four permanent workers for Tompkins, who also have to maintain 34 other sites in a portion of the district, such as the planted islands on East Houston St., for example.
And!
Although there are drugs in the park, it used to be far worse. Plus, Greenberg noted, “What park doesn’t have drugs?”
“I used to come to this park early in the morning, and there were drug dealers and hookers. Now it’s normal people,” he said, though adding with a laugh, “They could be hookers and drug dealers.”
Seems to be more police than usual in Tompkins Square Park the last few days... Late Thursday afternoon, there were six police cars on the scene... and the only noticeable offense was a man receiving a ticket for an open container... more police cars were prowling around early Friday morning... asking some questions of a few Park regulars, such as John and Hot Dog...
Heh. OK, that was really bad. Just thinking about this story. Anyway, the castle is part of the Yorkiest Block Party on Seventh Street... where there are FREE hot dogs!
Sensitive Skin magazine has been revived by publisher Bernard Meisler and managing editor Tim Beckett... The print version ran on the Lower East Side in the 1990s, and published such luminaries as Richard Hell, Taylor Mead, Herbert Huncke, Bob Holman (who now runs the Bowery Poetry Club), among others.
I want you to tap my mana till I'm all tapped out. Be my Exalted Angel, I'll be your Dark Confidant. Take my Rod of Ruin deep into your Karplusan Forest.
Lucy's has been closed of late (without a note, per usual) ... Didn't get the chance to stop, though, to see what was happening ... a reader had said that she was off on her annual visit to Poland....
Per an alert reader... The De La Vega Museum, run by artist James De La Vega, appears to be closed... the store is all but empty.... (which may explain why he was giving away art recently....) We'll have more on this later...
For a group of NYU students this fall, the only room will be at the inn.
About 50 to 60 students returning to the Greenwich Village campus will be forced to check into a Manhattan hotel because the university has run out of dorm space.
But the young scholars can forget about raiding the minibar or dialing up room service. NYU officials say they'll limit the amenities to phone, cable and Internet service -- but, unlike the dorms, their rooms will get twice-a-week housekeeping.
A friend recently introduced me to the work of acclaimed photographer Flo Fox... I asked her via Facebook if I could post a few of her photos from the 1970s and early 1980s in NYC... she agreed... and here's a sampling...
All this is even more remarkable given her background... Fox, who grew up in Woodside, Queens, was born blind in one eye.
According to her, she was an automatic photographer because she never needed to close an eye to take a picture. She lost the vision in her other eye in 1975 and was declared legally blind just at the time that she photographed herself nude for Playboy and Penthouse. It was at this time that one of Flo’s sisters was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Soon thereafter Flo began experiencing numbness in one of her hands and legs and had herself tested for MS. The results were positive. She has remained determined to not let this news change anything in her career as a fine arts photographer. This has not been easy with her direction in the medium which is predominately street imagery of people and places predominately set in New York City.
When asked how her disabilities have affected her work, Fox said that she started seeing interfering patterns in 1975 and soon thereafter could no longer focus on an image because of dead nerve endings. As her MS progressed, Flo’s muscle tone deteriorated and she went from using a cane to a motorized scooter.
