I’m not really at the beach but I’m close to it and hanging at a hookah/coffee bar plus it’s a great excuse to post this photo of my Dad’s which is probably circa 1956.
Here are some things on the shelves. They also have a walk-in humidor for cigars here.
Hookah tobacco is like incense for the lungs. Sometimes it’s only half-tobacco while the rest is dried fruit, honey or artificial flavorings.
I watched a series of low-budget indie movies in which the details made the movie. In Bruges had a sweet hotel proprietor and a movie within the movie and the amazing city of Bruges; The Visitor featured the djembe drum as well as dastardly true-to-life detention system; Red Road’s main plot device was the surveillance cameras which are never mentioned by the characters. I was going to go on about this but an old friend is IMing me…. crap.
Just an observation. They built the new part right around the airport and you see the Empire State Building when you take off. Some dickwad thought that up. I was disappointed there were no slot machines at the airport. Lettin me down Vegas.
Find the matching set!
The gears of garbage trucks woke me up. On Tuesdays, my block is often blessed with the garbage truck followed by the recycling truck and they hold up traffic so with luck, we also get honks and yelling. It’s not much worse than being woken up by “The Takeaway” on WNYC. I’ll take that apartment across the street facing the courtyard with southern exposure now please. Thank you.
Heading to California for a week for Turkey Day with the family. I hope to have cheerier photos, however, I will also strive to make Orange County look as creepy as Manhattan at night.
Oh, those Swedes! Nina Ramsby has one of those voices that gets under your skin… well, my skin anyway. Say you’ve been sleeping with the pillow over your head because of garbage trucks outside and someone has to wake you up. It could be Nina, sure. Her melodies are beguiling while the lyrics sometimes border on the paranoid obsessive–which might be good or bad depending. Anyway, she’s got three major music projects: Salt, which was a grunge band in the vein of Nirvana from the 90s (I’m pretty sure I saw them open for a crappy band at Brownie’s in NYC); Grand Tone Music, who are a good deal mellower; and then Baxter, a drum-and-bass electronica outfit (not to be confused with American punk band Baxter). I like the latter the best but all three are worthwhile explorations. Lately, she’s been singing solo in Swedish and fiddling with experimental jazz and folk and other electronica.
A new Baxter is said to be ready any minute now.
Choice bits from this month’s Harper’s Index (these aren’t posted yet):
Percentage by which the $750 billion bailout exceeds the total U.S. GDP of a century ago, adjusted for inflation: 50
Percentage by which it exceeds the cost of the entire New Deal: 33
Factor by which it exceeds the cost of the 1990 savings-and-loan bailout: 3
Percentage of the Fortune 500 companies that own a Web address in which their name is followed by “sucks.com”: 26
Same block ten seconds later.
Smurfs frolic here or they make smurfs here in vats of blueberries with lots of sky, ocean, space, and blue algae. There are aquariums with blue whales, bluefish, and aquatic murals on the walls with all kinds of fish.
I went for a ride today (to 71st and CPW and back if you must know) and my gloves weren’t cutting it. What does arthritis feel like?
Politics are on the backburner for the most part but Ken Silverstein lists the reasons Hillary Clinton should NOT be Secretary of State.
Make crappy art with your crappy photos!
I hate receiving a Netflix disk, looking forward to a good movie with the cats and popcorn sprinkled with olive oil and parmesan and cayenne, only to open the red envelope and find a cracked disk. What, I have to read that totally awesome 600-page novel again? (Still finishing House of Leaves… I got caught up with magazines and the election.)
In the Sriracha hot sauce group on Facebook, some poor student recommended making soup with Ramen, Sriracha, and peanut butter. I won’t say it was delicious, but interesting and a fine junky belly-filler on a cold day. One of the anecdotes on the Frontline show about Lee Atwater was that he was crazy for hot sauce. He thought Tabasco was for wussies and I didn’t think I could agree about anything with Atwater except good blues. So what’s his favorite hot sauce? They don’t say but at least Tabasco got bitch-slapped. Who makes hot sauce concentrate?
Later, I rode my bike up to 138th and Edgecombe without gloves. It’s hard to ride a bike when your hands are in so much pain and on the verge of frostbite, you just want to chop them off.
This is the Bike Path Contraption They’re using to finish building out the Hudson River Greenway bike path north of the 79th Street Boat Basin and right next to the Hudson River Parkway, a project to be finished in 2009. (This is shot from the detour portion of the path in Riverside Park.) Who knew this is the most-used bikeway in the United States? I was looking at the virtual tour of the path at nyc.gov and they should really redo it with some whooshing wind sound and witty commentary: “And on the left we have another City Ugly Project by Donald Trump…”
I enjoy watching old movies shot in New York partly to see how much of it has changed and how much is still familiar. These are from Port of New York (1949) which is to the second season of The Wire, as Blue’s Clues is to A Scanner Darkly. There’s a long scene shot in the old Penn Station but the cinematographer chose not to do a decent set shot.
Aerial view, downtown
Canal Street El station, IRT
Ferry terminal, Battery Park
Update: Great nonfuzzy photos of New York from the 1930s here.
Update II: We must also acknowledge the work of Berenice Abbott. See external links at the bottom.
