Scotch fans, perhaps?

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to deface these hideous ads for Rum. Not bad, people. Oh, why do you know they're selling rum? Because the women are all wearing bikinis and making suggestive faces. Duh.

EV Grieve Etc.: Looking at The Observer

Lots of good stuff in The Observer this week. (And why does my copy arrive Thursday or sometimes Friday? I know I can read it every day online. Still.)
The headline to a piece by Choire Sicha asks, "Who's Running New York? The Council sinks, rents rise, few notice."
Indeed.
He has a nice account of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board meeting from this past Monday, particularly an impromptu speech by Adriene Holder, a Legal Aid attorney and tenant representative.

“First of all,” she said, “I want to know where everybody is.” There were not so many folks there! When confidence in city government runs low, the people abscond.

“The tenants are here but not in the number that you would expect,” Ms. Holder said, “given how important this situation is, and how dire this is to what’s going to happen to tenants here in New York City. Perhaps they’re not here because they’re still working; perhaps they’re not here because they’re working their second job; maybe they’re not here because they’re discouraged, they’re disappointed; and maybe they’re not here because they’ve become weary of a process that guarantees that there’s going to be an increase.

“Increasingly, what we are seeing is two different cities,” Ms. Holder said. “We’re seeing a city that’s becoming increasingly rich, and a city that’s becoming increasingly poor, and a middle or moderate class that is moving away from the city.”

This week's issue also features a terminallly ill singer facing possible eviction from the Chelsea Hotel. Read it here. If you haven't already.

The 2008 Siren Festival, and one more summer at Coney Island as we kind of remember it?

[Photos of Coney Island courtesy of Mrs. Grieve]


Stereogum (and several other sites, actually) had the news yesterday about the 2008 Village Voice Siren Festival. Here's the good-looking lineup thus far:

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks
Broken Social Scene
The Helio Sequence
Beach House
Times New Viking
Jaguar Love
The Dodos
Annuals
Film School
Parts & Labor
Dragons Of Zynth
These Are Powers

I went to the very first Siren Festival in 2001. And it was ungodly crowded. Too many stupid people there for the show. There was a line for Ruby's; people visiting it for the first time started acting as if they owned the place. Regardless! Seeing the festival lineup (I thought last year was it, to be honest) gives me hope for at least one more fairly normal summer at Coney Island, eating more expensive hot dogs at Nathan's and having beers at Ruby's. (They managed to eek out one more summer, right?) I don't know what's going to happen with this whole ridiculous development being bandied about. Still. But I plan on enjoying every moment I'm at Coney Island this summer.







Meanwhile, Gothamist has details on the May 22 rally to save Coney Island from the evil Thor Equities.

Posts that I never got around to posting: What could have been!

Heh.

It has begun

Looks as if street festival season has started up again...Third Avenue between 14th Street and, I'm guessing, 23rd Street was closed off last Saturday. Counted seven of them taking place in Manhattan this coming weekend. (That's SEVEN opportunities to buy four Gap T-shirts for $10 Or bags of tube socks! Or quickie back rubs!) Do these offer any benefit to the local community? I've never heard anyone actually say they look forward to a street festival -- or even admit actually going to one. I'm all for things to bring the community together (such as the various rummage and porch sales different blocks have), but just not the street fairs that seem to peddle the same crap weekend after weekend throughout the spring and summer.

Revisiting an old favorite

In a bit of a lousy mood for various reasons. (The whole city is going to hell -- more than usual, anyway!)

So! In times like these, I watch/listen to an old favorite. (Only seen this a few hundred times. But still.)



Oh, I liked that. Let's do another.

"This is one of the last vestiges of the anarchistic, crazy Lower East Side"

Jeremiah has the scoop that the Tower of Toys is coming down at the community garden at Sixth Street and Avenue B. This, of course, is the work of the late Eddie Boros, a lifelong resident of the East Village...not to mention a legendary regular at Sophie's. (A lot of his artwork still adorns the bar.) Mrs. Grieve and I just had a conversation about the tower over the weekend. The garden had an open, uh, garden on Saturday and Sunday. In the short time that I was there, I'd say some 20 tourists walked by and took admiring photos of Eddie's creation. However much we liked the sculpture, we wondered how much longer it would be part of the garden. (Eddie passed away in April 2007.) For starters, there was the community garden politics: Many people involved there hated the thing. Here's an article from The New York Times dated Nov. 22, 1998, by Karen Angel:

Junk Art Roils a Garden
The junk sculpture on Sixth Street and Avenue B looms above the surrounding tenements like a psychedelic treehouse. From its limbs of raw lumber hang a huge headless Godzilla, a gold mannequin with a horse's head, stuffed animals and other motley objects. For the community garden that houses Eddie Boros's growing sculpture, it has become a source of controversy along with the artist himself, a self-described alcoholic and trash picker who finds his materials in garbage cans and Dumpsters.

Mr. Boros, 66, began building on a 4-by-8-foot garden plot about 15 years ago, as a form of protest. He had been using the vacant land to make carvings, and when the Sixth and B Community Garden was organized, the founders wanted to relegate him to one plot. "I decided to build a little open shed," he said. "I was going up 10 feet, and something started in me. I went up 15 feet, 25 feet." Now the sculpture is about 65 feet tall and occupies six garden plots, and he plans to take it 5 feet higher.

"Eddie is building out of anger," said David Rouge, a founder of the garden. "He has never accepted the authority of the garden." Seven years ago Mr. Rouge led an unsuccessful effort to evict the sculpture. He had to settle for a ruling that forbade Mr. Boros from making it bigger. But Mr. Boros follows his muse, not the ruling.

The sculpture often elicits debate among garden members. "There are these wild raucous meetings with screaming," said Karen Schifano, founder of the garden's mediation committee.

Jimmy Dougherty, a garden member and a film maker, said that most members are defenders of the sculpture. "People are either repulsed by the sculpture, or they think it's beautiful," said Mr. Dougherty, who did a documentary about Mr. Boros that was broadcast on PBS stations this year. Because the sculpture elicits such strong reactions, he said, "it's a successful art piece."

Mr. Boros often climbs to the top of his sculpture. "He sits up there like a pirate in a crow's-nest surveying the neighborhood," Ms. Schifano said. "This is one of the last vestiges of the anarchistic, crazy Lower East Side."

(Here's another piece on Eddie from the Times.)

As Jeremiah notes, you can pay your respects: "Before it's gone, come to An Informal Celebration of the Tower of Toys, Sunday, May 11, 7pm - 9pm at the 6th Street & Avenue B Community Garden."

Anyway, another day, another piece of the neighborhood's soul is lost.

[A reader on Curbed pointed out this video from 1988:]

This is exactly the reason why we'll never get a Wal-Mart in this town

Ha on that headline. Anyway, for whatever reasons, the editors at Time Out New York thought it would be a good idea to ask New Yorkers to strip for this week's issue. And there were plenty of volunteers. See for yourself. (Really NSFW.)

Flour power: "If you're a city slicker like Pam Foster, you come from Waterloo, Iowa. You learn fast..."

That headline is from the intro voiceover in the first video here, a spot for Gold Medal flour from the early 1960s. (What can we take away from this ad? That a woman only needed a bag of flour to be happy...?)
Here are several other vintage NYC-related TV commercials from the 1970s and 1980s...











[$39 for a hotel room in Manhattan!]

Shocker: Rents are probably going up

From the Times:

The board that regulates rents for New York City’s one million rent-stabilized apartments proposed a tentative range of increases Monday night that could lead to larger increases than last year’s.

The city’s Rent Guidelines Board recommended increases of 3.5 percent to 7 percent for one-year leases and 5.5 percent to 9.5 percent for two-year leases. The nine-member board will hold two public hearings on June 11 and June 16 and is scheduled to set a final number, not a range, at a meeting on June 19.

The proposed range of increases apply to leases renewed between Oct. 1, 2008, and Sept. 30, 2009.

The board’s 5-to-4 vote left both tenant advocates and landlord representatives equally disappointed. A landlord group had called for higher increases, while tenant leaders, many of whom are pushing for substantive reform of the rent-stabilization system, supported a proposal by some board members for a rent freeze.

“I’m afraid it’s going to be higher than last year’s increase, and last year’s increase was way too high as it was,” said Barry Soltz, 51, the legal coordinator for the tenant association at the rent-stabilized Janel Towers in the Bronx. He was one of a few dozen tenant advocates at the meeting, which had a low turnout compared to previous years.

Why the low turnout? Reports the Post:

With so much at stake, the board's meeting at Cooper Union in the East Village drew the sparsest crowd in recent memory. It lasted just an hour.

"I want to know where everybody is," said Adriene Holder, one of two tenant representatives on the nine-member board, as she scanned an audience of less than 100 in a room that could hold five times as many.

Afterward, Holder said tenants stayed away because they've come to view the entire process as "a sham."

[Photo: G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times]

Dumpster of the week

Along First Avenue north of 7th Street. Hmmmmmm...Take a big, deep breath, kids.

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?