Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts
Koch Lovers
Get ready for the grimiest 80 minutes of your week:
I'm seeing Wolfen, Saturday Night Fever, Dog Day Afternoon, Midnight Cowboy, Death Wish, Cruising, Superfly, The Warriors, Rosemary's Baby, Taxi Driver, French Connection, Husbands, Three Days of the Condor, The Odd Couple, Author! Author!, Klute, The Boys in the Band, Hi, Mom!, Superman, Scarface, The Landlord, American Pop, Mean Streets, After Hours, Wild Style, Panic in Needle Park, Fame, Downtown 81, Tootsie, Fritz the Cat, Serpico, Serpico, Serpico, and so many other movies I'm desperate to see.
I'm seeing Wolfen, Saturday Night Fever, Dog Day Afternoon, Midnight Cowboy, Death Wish, Cruising, Superfly, The Warriors, Rosemary's Baby, Taxi Driver, French Connection, Husbands, Three Days of the Condor, The Odd Couple, Author! Author!, Klute, The Boys in the Band, Hi, Mom!, Superman, Scarface, The Landlord, American Pop, Mean Streets, After Hours, Wild Style, Panic in Needle Park, Fame, Downtown 81, Tootsie, Fritz the Cat, Serpico, Serpico, Serpico, and so many other movies I'm desperate to see.
Unclear Holocaust
This feature length collage of seemingly every shot of New York's imagined destruction is extremely entertaining until they start splicing in actual 9/11 coverage and it starts being very squirm-inducing.
MoMA Highlights 3/29/13
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| Georges Vantongerloo Rapport des Volumes 1924 |
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| Lebbeus Woods Lower Manhattan Ink drawing 1999 |
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| Sophie Tottie Written Language (line drawings), # V and # VI India ink on paper 2008 |
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| Sophie Tottie Written Language (line drawings), # V [detail] India ink on paper 2008 |
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| Anatole de Baudot Project for a great public hall Model in cardboard, paper, and cloth c. 1900 |
My First New York
There was no one specific moment when the rigorous self-consciousness gave way to authenticity. It was more of a dim realization that the very act of playing the "Are we a New Yorker yet?" game means you aren't one yet. But it eventually happens, dawning on you after the fact, tapping you on the shoulder after you've passed it. It comes from an accretion of shitty jobs, deeply felt friendships that last, deeply felt friendships that end, funerals, marriages, divorces, births, and betrayals, and you wake up one day to realize that you passed the eight-year mark decades prior; that you are older than all the characters in Manhattan, with the possible exception of Bella Abzug; that you have been to a party in the garden at MoMA and watched the sun come up over Sutton Place and the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and decided that, in the end, you'd rather stay home; that only a rich moron would buy his groceries at Dean & DeLuca; and that, as fun and Margo Channing as it might seem to be drunk and witty and cutting, it's probably better in the long run to be kind. These are all realizations endemic to aging anywhere, I am sure. It must happen in other cities, but I've really only ever been a grown-up here.
ICP Highlights 7/29/12
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| [Check for two murders], 1939 |
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| Weegee [Accident on upper roadway of Grand Central Station, New York], 1944 |
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| Weegee Balcony seats at a murder November 16, 1939 |
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| "Speaking of Pictures . . .," LIFE, April 12, 1937, pp. 8–9 |
Ka-Boom!
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| Click to enlarge |
Found this in a Heavy Metal magazine from the 80s. If I recall correctly, the World Trade Center was the command center of a fascist future government. See also DMZ.
Amor Towles — Rules of Civility
About a thousand feet off the ground three green lights entered our field of vision heading southward over the park.
— See those, Eve said pointing. I'll bet you a good night's sleep they circle the Empire State Building. The little planes always do. They just can't seem to help themselves.
F. Scott Fitzgerald — On Booze
from Selections from the Notebooks
Yes mam, if necessary. Look here, You take a girl and she goes into some café where she's got no business to go. Well, then, her escort gets a little too much to drink an' he goes to sleep an' then some fella comes up and says, 'Hello, sweet mamma,' or whatever one of those mashers says up here. What does she do? She can't scream on account of no real lady will scream nowadays—no—she just reaches down in her pocket and slips her fingers into a pair of Powell's defensive brass-knuckles, debutante's size, executes what I call the Society Hook, and Wham! that big fella's on his way to the cellar.
You can order it in four sizes: demi (half a litre), distingué (one litre), formidable (three litres), and catastrophe (five litres).
Drunk at 20, wrecked at 30, dead at 40.
Drunk at 21, human at 31, dead at 51.
Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died.
from The Crack-Up (1936)
Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
This led me to the idea that the ones who had survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no parallel to a jail-break when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be forced back to the old one. The famous "Escape" or "run away from it all" is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the south seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist. So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person—to be kind, just or generous.
from "Show Mr. and Mrs. F. To Number—" (1934)
We got out as soon as we could because we had been there so many times before—it is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
from My Lost City
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb up to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to thereof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood—everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground. That was the rash gift of Alfred W. Smith to the citizens of New York.
Previously by F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Fire in the Hole
Fighter jet shoots missile into Union Square subway station (from DMZ Vol. 9):
[Click to enlarge]
Woodland Flyover
While trying to learn when the second third of the High Line will be opening (mid-may?) I came across this upcoming feature that looks cool, The Woodland Flyover:
In response to the microclimate created by adjacent buildings, which supports dense plant growth, a metal walkway lifts off from the High Line level and allows the landscape to fill in below. While an undulating terrain of moss and shade groundcover blankets the High Line bed, the Flyover carries visitors upward, into the shady canopy of a stand of sumac trees.
On a related note, check out my friend Derek's mid-story forest photos he's been taking.
190 Bowery
I never understood why the massive building on the corner of Spring and Bowery hadn't long ago been sold to developers. I assumed there was some kind of property dispute or other court hang-up keeping it from joining the mushrooming up-scale development of the Bowery and got so excited to snap this picture of what I assumed to be the light of a solitary squatter but then I found out the truth. The building is a six story, 72 room single family home of an artist who bought it in the 60s for $100,000! Check out this article on New York's website and the following interior shots:
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