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Esteban Vicente arrived into the world in Turegano, Spain, in 1903. In 1921, he arrived at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. He arrived in Paris in 1929, and in 1936 he arrived in New York City. His reputation arrived somewhat later. In 1950, Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro included him in their "New Talents 1950" show at [...]
It is winter, it is night, it is cold and I can feel deep down inside of me a bug of some sort beginning to develop. It is far away in my feet, beginning to make my feet ache, but soon I know it will creep up my legs and into my torso and that will be the end of [...]
In medicine, when you see an attending physician walking down the hall and you stop him or her to ask for an impromptu consultation, it’s called "curbsiding." As a medical student, however, no one is ever particularly reliant on your expertise, and the average medical student can walk through a hospital without ever being pulled off track by the lapels [...]
When I was in college, I spent an entire night dancing at the Palladium in New York City with Spalding Gray. We danced and danced to every song- danceable or not. I didn't know who he was but my friends did and he was a very cool older man who seemed to still like the things I'd assumed you stopped [...]
Middlemarch was a bitch: all lace and wayside chapels and conversations hissed behind gloved hands. Eliot's prose was denser than a Dorset garden, and we were all lost. All except for Todd, the grinning mook genius in British Lit class, who would interrupt the torpor with irreverent debates. We craved the distraction. It was the Spring of 1980 at Syracuse [...]
Iso is the best sushi in New York. This is due, mostly, to the freshness of the fish, the portions, which are generous, the style of presentation, the bustle of the place, the color of the napkins and table cloths (an extremely appealing pink), the manner of Iso himself and the other sushi chefs who make the sushi (brusque but [...]
On a Monday night at the Tenth Street Lounge, the Third Wave met the Second Wave. The woman I was dating told me some older feminists were having their works read and asked if I was willing to be a token boy. I'd been a lone wolf studying feminist theory in college in the mid-80s, so I figured I could [...]
A guy with his earlobes stretched around bingo chips and a bullring through his septum pulled a box of nose studs from the glass case. “How do they stay in?” I asked. “It’s a coil and it rests against the outside of your nostril,” he said, making a swirling motion with his finger. I chose the smallest silver stud, trying [...]
It was 1985 at the original Ritz (East 11th Street; now it's Webster Hall), NYC's greatest-ever rock club. Blind Dates, my big haired happy-go-pop band, was the opening act for the then-popular Aussie group Eurogliders. The place was sold out and teeming with what we called "festive new wave nubiles"--the Rat Pack would have called them "hot chicks." My Grandpa [...]
When I first met Lance I was in an altered state. I was sixteen, back in 1963, when you could still buy a Benadryl inhaler, break it open and find a cotton wedge soaked with amphetamine. I'm not sure who first noticed this, but it might have been Jack Kerouac. I hope not, but it probably was. It was late [...]
illustrations: Steve Brodner; Since 1892 New Yorkers have been flocking to The Tenth Street Bath on 10th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A to shvitz, to sweat out the gunk that clogs the pores and clouds the spirit. In the city, we have a fine selection of toxins to choose from: subway juice (that mysterious thick liquid that seeps [...]
We convoyed out to a house in Connecticut. The swimming pool was very warm. There were huge trees in the backyard and they swayed in the breeze, and beneath them, an expanse of lawn. We went shopping at the local Haymarket--which is sort of a Balducci's for Connecticans--and my friend left the key in the car while we were inside [...]
“Graffiti is alive,” is one of several bits of agitprop that appeared not too long ago on the side of the Brooklyn Bridge. The more drastic any act of suppression is, the more extreme will be the reactions to it. In our zero tolerance, quality of life, war on drugs, law and order prison-industry age, you have to wonder when [...]
Esteban Vicente died in January, 2001, shortly before his 98th birthday. He was one of the last surviving members of the famed New York School of Abstract Expressionists. We visited him in his studio in 1993 and are proud to present him as the first our or "Studio Visit" series. Esteban Vicente arrived into the world in Turegano, Spain, in [...]
Lisandra and I both graduated from the same college with writing degrees and hopes of being comedy writers, but after graduation, neither one of us had a job. When I met Lisandra, she was a grad student with a cushy part-time assistant job. She spent her days trolling for MP3s, making copies, and listening to her boss complain, which was [...]
In 1802, Uriah Phillips Levy ran away to sea at the age of ten. He returned two years later, as he had promised his mother, to prepare for his bar mitzvah. Then he apprenticed to a Philadelphia shipowner. In our day of wooden men and iron ships, "learning the ropes" is a cliche. To Levy, it was life and death. [...]
1. Recently, a cousin of mine stopped over on his way from Beirut, a city which now has most of its politics in the street, but almost no sanitation services. Standing outside my door, he looked down the Bowery and marveled, "They keep it so clean!" 2. My most persistent fantasy is that one day, when I'm gathering up the [...]
One February night in1969 a man knocked on my door and introduced himself; he had heard about me from somebody, he said. He didn't say what he heard. He had just moved into #2 with his wife Jamie and his little girl Hannah, they had just arrived from Alfred University; there was something about the SDS and an ROTC armory [...]
I was going through a cycle of uneven haircuts and interesting colors that summer; Franco, my stylist, gave me a discount because I was always underfoot, always fetching him beer, always up for a change in color or fringe. When Allie moved in upstairs from his salon, the three of us spent hours sipping beer and coffee on the metal [...]
We got the phone call on a Tuesday night. It was Nick’s boss telling us he hadn’t been to work since Thursday and hadn’t called in sick either. That wasn’t like Nick, and his boss was worried. Nick was an older man who lived downstairs from us. Since he didn’t have a phone and we were his best friends in [...]
The news crews were outside the old Fillmore East, getting a last shot before the legendary concert hall was razed and turned into apartment buildings. As I walked along Second Avenue to the video store, I saw tv trucks lined up outside. I felt sad; my youth was vanishing. I'd gone past this now boarded up building hundreds of times [...]
Allison and I met on the dance floor at Sway. The sign on the wall indicated "NO DANCING" but defiance was in the air that night, and what's wrong with a little good time anyway? I felt like partying, was out to meet somebody, and always loosen up when dancing. I was wearing my Mariachi-inspired studded black jeans, which I [...]
Several months ago I was stuck in a rut. You know, drinking at the same tired bars, hanging with all-too familiar friends, masturbating in the same routine sock. So in my grand tradition of superficial alterations-buying new shoes, switching from contacts to glasses, wearing headbands instead of hats-I buzzed my skull. And now, several months later, the result was scraggly [...]
Once a month, I take the downtown number 6 train to Astor Place for an $11 buzz cut. Near the corner of Broadway, a red and white awning urges me to Beware of Imitators as dozens of celebrity snapshots are exhibited in the storefront window — Judd Nelson, Susan Sarandon, Rosie O’Donnell, Yannick Noah . . . Inside, a man [...]
“It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.” --Erica Jong I’ve started to go running at 6 am. I am not a competitive runner: I don’t run daily, I don’t clock mileage and I don’t sport special athletic duds. I am a runner for time. Well slept, [...]
In the summer of 1968 I had an apartment on East 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. The rent was cheap, and it was on the top floor of a tenement which meant there was a sooty patch of skylight in my bathroom and a tub with feet where I could sit and contemplate the black starless sky. Decorating [...]
It was just after 2 am on Tuesday, December 5, 2000 at Key Food on the corner of 4th and Avenue A in the East Village. I felt the sudden urge for some Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. After removing a box of Spirals from the top shelf, I proceeded to the check-out. There were a few neighborhood boys hanging around [...]
I tried to break into the Marble Cemetery . One Tuesday, towards midnight, I changed out of my office clothes into jeans, a sweater, and narrow-toed tennis shoes, because I would have to climb a chain-link fence entwined with barbed wire. I gathered up supplies--a bottle of Poland Spring water, a Power Bar, and a flashlight--rejecting the Swiss Army knife [...]
There are few retail establishments in New York that try as hard not to be noticed as Gallagher's Magazine Archive and Gallery at 126 East 12th Street. A sign the size of a Post-it announces the store's presence and directs one down a flight of stairs to the basement entrance. Stepping inside reveals a dim labyrinth of hallways and tiny [...]
New York in the summer of 1981 was everything it wasn’t in the winter of 1979. Punk died instead of disco. The city was no longer bankrupt. Even the East Village showed signs of regeneration, since abandoned tenements can only be burned so many times before the ashes won’t catch fire. People had work. Mine was menial construction on an [...]
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