Category Archives: New York

A Little Bit of Nice

Since I’ve disparaged a New York bodega in the past, it’s only fair that I should mention a little bit of understated kindness that I saw this morning at New Andy’s Deli at 873 Broadway, where I stopped to buy an egg sandwich.

Ahead of me in line was a little kid, must’ve been about ten years old, wearing an oversized backpack that one could say was adorably out of proportion to his pre-adolescent height. This was a city kid, to be sure, on his way to school and unintimidated by the adult world. He asked the woman behind the counter how much it would cost to get an egg and sausage sandwich on a roll, and when she answered “Two-fifty,” he looked away and took a step towards the door with a quiet kind of resignation — it wasn’t dejection or even a ploy for pity, just a wordless acquiescence.

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Manual Dexterity

I found a little bit of old New York in the Flatiron building this morning, when I took my girlfriend’s malfunctioning Olivetti Lettera 35i typewriter to the Gramercy Office Equipment Company for repair. This 70+ year old business is run in a little hovel of an office on the eighth floor by an impeccably groomed, kindly gentleman with a pleasing Brooklyn accent and a preternatural understanding of what makes a typewriter, er, type. Every available surface in the office is stacked up with aging typewriters, office equipment and unfiled paperwork, and when I walked down the very narrow yard of floorspace with the Olivetti, he pulled out a small writing extension from a hulking old steel desk, slapped it with his palm and instructed me to “Set it there. That’s all the space I got.”

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Old Drawings of New York

This Is New YorkI found a copy of M. Sasek’s wonderful, recently reissued book “This Is New York” while browsing for holiday gifts in the children’s section at Barnes & Noble. Its pages exude an immediately gratifying warmth as soon as they’re opened; the illustrations, completed over forty years ago, are evocative of the urban, sophisticated-primitive style of drawing that dominated commercial art in the late 1950s, and which owed more than just a passing debt to the work of Ben Shahn. Though Sasek’s drawings depict a New York nearly a century out of date and are rounded out with more than a heaping teaspoon of naivete, they still communicate the precise pitch and tone of Manhattan᾿s noisy, cantankerous character. There’s no mistaking the sense of limitless possibility in these drawings for any other city, which makes this reprint seem remarkably current.

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Twelve Inches of Fun

We are under a blizzard of snow here in New York City. It’s not exactly twelve inches, but it’s a more significant amount of snowfall than the mid-Atlantic has become accustomed to getting this early in the season. I, for one, am not particularly excited by the sudden transition to sub-freezing temperatures, slush-filled sidewalks and skin-chapping, chilling winds, but I admit it was a lot of fun watching the dog frolic in the snowdrifts this morning — and yet another reminder of his recent anniversary in our household.

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On This Day

A year ago today, we informally closed our office on the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, from fear of some recurrence of terrorist activity and, at least on my part, out of a sense of confusion. It wasn’t clear to me how we as a nation should act or behave, how we should honor the dead, and what bearing my personal enmity for the way that the Bush administration had been prosecuting the war on terror should have on the way I conducted myself on 11 Sep 2002. It seemed best to sit out the day quietly, abstaining from anything remotely inappropriate.

There was a lead-up of anxiety to that one year anniversary, but this year, the milestone seems to have practically snuck up on us without fanfare or expectation. I’d wager that today, much more so than last year, so many of us woke up this morning and headed off to work with virtually no compunction or sense of danger, even those living in or heading to lower Manhattan. Now that it’s here, we still mourn the day’s historical loss, but otherwise we feel a kind of detachment from it, too. To some degree, we seem to feel safer, or to be willing to resume our illusion of safety.

For me, what’s saddest about that day, beyond the tragic deaths we shouldn’t ever forget, is the lasting damage that the attacks have had on the fabric of our life, principally taking the form of a government run amuck, one bearing less and less resemblance to the America that our forefathers envisioned with each passing day. The attacks have, in many ways, achieved their effect of undermining democracy by essentially brokering a willing exchange of civil liberties — the defining trait of American character — for an illusion of safety. I wouldn’t even describe it as safety, but rather a kind of comfort in which danger is displaced to more convenient locales. The attacks effectively installed a regime of mendacity at the helm of American government, and they have led us dangerously off course. We need to replace George W. Bush in the 2004 election for President of the United States.

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Labor Day Weekend, Citysearch-Style

New York empties out for Labor Day weekend, when everybody who’s anybody heads out of town in order to avoid the ridicule of New York Magazine. Over the five years I’ve been here, I’ve actually learned that these are some of the nicest times to be here in the city (this partly explains why my girlfriend and I went away last weekend). Every year at this time, a general calm falls over Manhattan as there are fewer pushy assholes roaming the streets, less competition for the nine o’clock show at the movie theater, and thinner shopping crowds to take advantage of the temporary amnesty from taxes on clothing sales.

It’s also easier to reserve tables at the restaurants that stay open through the holiday, though finding a good restaurant through Citysearch remains as frustrating as ever.

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Scenes from a Blackout

Blackout 2003Here’s my collection of notes from the big blackout of 2003, but first a few thoughts on context: when I was growing up, I thought that the rough and tumble of American history was more or less behind us, and that the modern America of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century would be remembered as a time of calm, of society in repose.

Clearly, I was wrong; in the last five years, we’ve seen an impeached presidency, a stolen presidential election, the attacks of September 11th, an avalanche of accounting scandals, an impending gubernatorial recall in the sixth largest economy in the world, and now the largest blackout to beset urban America, like, ever. This is crazy!

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Where Were You When the Lights Came Back On

About twenty-nine hours after the power went out in New York City, it’s finally returned to the East Village — we were one of the last neighborhoods to be revived, so to speak, and one of the remaining fifteen percent of New Yorkers still in the dark for hours after Mayor Bloomberg and that ridiculous, charlatan of a Governor George Pataki first started congratulating themselves for seeing the city and state through the most widespread blackout in American History. It was a grueling day and a half, which I’ll write more about later, but I’m just happy that the 21st Century has been restored. Hurray!

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Location, Location, Location

Now that I am more or less recovered from my unexpectedly debilitating, week-long bout with the common cold, I’m able to focus my energy on the daunting task of moving into a new apartment later this week. The bad news is that, against my better judgment, I’ve spent the past two and a half years loading up my current apartment with a ridiculous overabundance of books, magazines and computer equipment. Packing up all of this stuff is going to be a laborious process of purging items I can’t justify owning and sorting through items I’m not sure why I want to hold on to.

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Ill Communication: It’s Hot

Summer colds are just about the worst way I can think of to plod through a hot, muggy, New York July, though that may be because I started coming down with one on Saturday afternoon. At first I thought I was just completely wiped out by the previous work week, but then my sinuses started drying up and a soreness took hold of my throat, and now I’m sitting here in bed, blogging under the covers.

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