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The Cry of Tarzan

by 10/11/2011
Neighborhood: Midtown, Uncategorized

Back in the 1970’s, my girlfriends and I decided to spend a Saturday night without boys at a restaurant in midtown called Jacques. Long gone now, Jacques was a cool, elegant white table-cloth place that stayed open late and served delicious Hungarian food. We looked lovely walking in, in our pretty summer dresses and soft [...]

Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood Reading, September 23 At Happy Ending

by 09/16/2011
Neighborhood: Lower East Side, News

MR. BELLER’S NEIGHBORHOOD READING SERIES HAPPY ENDING in the Lower East Side Friday, September 23, 8:00 PM A Free Evening of Non-Fiction In The Lower East Side. Reading on September 23 will be: Rob Williams - Bear Patrol  Lily Shen - It Is Easy To Speak Chinese Kenneth P. Nolan - Farrell’s Nathaniel Page - Spanked  The host is Connor Gaudet - Hung Out [...]

To Mars And Back

by 08/02/2011
Neighborhood: East Village, Featured

The painting of a luxury building marked one of the walls of Mars Bar. It was in grey and black and in dull city lights it looked like a building out of a Batman comic. Above the door a sign read “Thank you for the memories.” It was the Friday before Fourth of July weekend. [...]

The Day the World Did Not End

by 07/08/2011
Neighborhood: Harlem, Uncategorized

The world was supposed to end on May 21, 2011. One man I spoke to at a bar was a little disappointed when Earth was still turning at 12:01 AM on the 22nd. I guess that’s what you would expect from someone who is sitting by himself. His face was ruddy with alcohol and he was [...]

A Bar called B-Side

by 04/17/2011
Neighborhood: East Village

A skinhead handed Henry a beer. When you’re alone, other loners find you, and they are often alone because they’re fucking weird and the Lower East Side of New York City has the most professional weirdoes on the planet. “Mickey Skin,” he said. He ran his hand over his scalp, then held his fist in [...]

Wurst Lust

by 04/11/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Jackson Heights, Uncategorized

What is it, I wonder, about the German fondness for the flesh of the pig and the Jewish abhorrence of it? Like lust, revulsion too is a visceral thing fueled by the same hunger, only in reverse, a passion linked to the salivary glands that passes down the gullet to tantalize and taunt the gut. [...]

Low Point at High Point

by 04/03/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Park Slope, Uncategorized

As I walked past High Point Coffee on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, a heavy bag of groceries in each hand, I was surprised, even alarmed, to see that the windows were dim. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet on a warm April evening. However, I reflected as I approached, I am High Point Coffee’s only [...]

1981

by 02/14/2011
Neighborhood: East Village, West Village

Everyone on the scene thought operating an after-hours club on top of a 14th Street theater was a good idea and Arthur Weinstein opened the Jefferson on New Year's Eve 1980. During the week the loft was home to Arthur, his wife, daughter, and best friend, Scottie. On the weekend hundreds of revelers unwilling to [...]

Ride the Lightning

by 07/04/2010
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

Outside the shop where we'd just bought ice cream, my wife and I were sitting on a bench against the window, my wife with a cone and myself with a small cup. It was sunny. We'd just come over from Riverside Park, where we'd been leisurely biking, and where people were already starting to gather [...]

Portrait of The Bagel as a Young Man

by Thomas Beller 03/29/2004
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

His hands were large. My resume lay flat on his desk. He had cleared a space amidst the clutter, and he ran one of those big, sensitive, but also violent looking hands over it again and again while he studied it, as though his hand was a scanner and would impart some key bit of [...]

Smalls is Dead

by 06/15/2003
Neighborhood: West Village

Smalls–a tiny, 50-person-capacity club in a West Village basement where for the last ten years you could watch the city’s rising jazz stars grow up before your eyes, where the jam sessions kept going past dawn, where musicians (and sometimes the customers, it seemed) often lived in some of the club’s back rooms–is dead! On [...]

Notes From the New East Harlem

by 05/22/2003
Neighborhood: East Harlem

There’s Antenna Lady, the black woman who stands in front of the building next to mine with the silver antenna-thing pierced through her face. Though she must be in her forties, her face is studded with all sorts of St. Marks-like piercings, the most shocking being the long one poking out of her left cheek. [...]