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It was my last few hours in New York City, enough time to swig several drinks with a friend before catching a shuttle to La Guardia. I was booked on a red-eye flight back to San Francisco, so with soliciting a few gin and tonics foremost in mind, I headed straight to the bar. Denial was a darkened, narrow den [...]
Nadine had dark curly hair, a slow quiet voice and more stubborn patience then anyone I knew. She was showing me her favorite textile, a small pre-Columbian piece, dated around 500 BC. It was no bigger than a doormat, but she had been working on it for over six months. “These repeated geometric patterns form a god’s face,” she said. [...]
A protestor on 7th Avenue holds a black "W" death pig. This pro-Bush demonstrator standing on the corner of 33rd and 7th Avenue shouted, "You traitors don't love your country." Wave after wave of protestors shouted him down; he withdrew after an hour. A group of 20 or so Republicans stood behind a police barricade near Madison Square Garden and [...]
The young musician met the older musician after a concert. It was in a building just south of Wall Street, a part of the city that morphs into a ghost town on late weekend nights. The concert space was run by an organization dedicated solely to the arts and therefore was unheated despite the brutal January cold snap. Audience members [...]
I’m a long time Texan currently living in New York City, and I recently spent some time in the company of the Lone Star delegation, when they came to New York for the Republican National Convention. Most were esconced at the New York Hilton on 53rd and Sixth Avenue—“Avvnoo of the Amuricas,” as the delegates pronounced it. ** Tuesday, August [...]
--July, 2001 It’s a dark and stormy night. The gothic spire of Riverside Church, on the Western Edge of Harlem, is hidden in mist. Throngs of acolytes huddle around the church doors as though awaiting entrance to the gates of a Medieval city. They are Bjork fans. At noon that day a special one-off show in the church’s chapel had [...]
It was my first day and Beth, who worked in the cubicle across from mine, was talking on her cell phone about sex. I was doing the kind of mindless work that provides a perfect cover for eavesdropping. I kept my eyes on the insurance forms I was stapling and got to know her a little. It seems she’s been [...]
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 [...]
Bill Licht (not his real name) was an obese bookish fellow who had impeccable taste. He would come into our shop choosing first editions of Graham Greene and E. M. Forster, Paul Bowles and Eric Ambler, inscribed Somerset Maugham and Gore Vidal, twentieth century British poets of varying stripes, the odd contemporary American writer. He did not seem to have [...]
I stepped into the crowded subway car and a little girl sitting next to the door yelled something at me. "Hey Mister..." I shot her a look that said: "I don't know if I'm going to pay attention to you, but at least let me claim my standing spot and my pole before I decide." But then my hand met [...]
Midtown is the part that nobody loves, that nobody thinks of as home. The bars have no character and the delis are as uniform as cartoon nurses. If there is an all-night bodega, it must be a joyless one. (I like all-night bodegas. They are an unfailing source of joy and surprise to me. I can spend half-hours marvelling drunkenly, [...]
Dear Angela Cardinale: Sorry to write to you months after the fact but I only just read your piece that was e-mailed to the NY Companion Bird Club. Why didn't you tell us that you were interviewing our club for your article? And the details, Angela, did you write from memory or tape-record us? It was brilliant! I had no [...]
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 [...]
My Uncle Ayman is out of Lemon Snapple. I fish through the drink compartment, a deep bin on the far left of the hot dog cart, and settle for a Diet. "Please. Courtney. Take whatever you want." He always says my name like it’s a sentence all its own. He’s selling hot dogs, lukewarm pretzels, iced teas, and sodas on [...]
In the song "New York, New York," Frank Sinatra claims that "if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere." Theoretically, this might be true, but practically speaking, I think it should read "anywhere [reachable by public transportation]," since New York is one of the only places in the United States where it’s possible to be a fully- [...]
With the groundbreaking of the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, this past Fourth of July marked the latest phase of post- 9-11 recovery. “As we commemorate the foundation of our nation we will lay the foundation for our resurgence,” Gov. George Pataki hopefully explained about the event. But while Pataki may feel it is high time for new beginnings, to [...]
If you are a female who loves shoes (or a male,come to think of it, more specifically of the queenly persuasion), you have not really lived until you’ve seen the Joseph LaRose shoe collection. The collection is showcased at Cherry, a vintage store in the West Village, known for its Fashion Meets Twilight Zone window displays that make Christmas at [...]
I came across a scene today downtown, near Wall Street. Striking iron workers, carpenters, all hemmed into a little alley. They were yelling and screaming. Periodically a group standing on a platform at the front of the alley led them in a chant: "Scabs go to hell!" Some wore hardhats, many had whistles, and a few had earplugs stuffed into [...]
Check out Rachel Sherman's new book! ** No one who does Japanese hair straightening at Hair Village is Japanese. You can't have highlights if you want your hair straightened. You can't touch your hair - even put it behind your ears - for three days afterwards. You can't wash your hair for three days either. You should probably wear a [...]
Morning at a Midtown Manhattan publishing company office. Cubicles house individual workers. Cube walls are six feet high. My coworker, Lilly, is standing in the corner of my cubicle when it happens. In a fit of pique over the latest uncorrected typo, she’s suddenly throwing Kung Fu kicks, whirling, twirling, balletic, her long raven hair whipping around her face. I [...]
It’s like this: I’m bipolar. Manic-depressive. Heavily medicated and mad as a hatter when I’m not. I have had so many days of smelling colors and hearing lights, so many brushes with the law, that I have gathered up the stories and been given the go-ahead by a young, hip literary agent to write the young, hip, bipolar memoir. I [...]
I grew up in Manhattan, and for most of my life the tuneful chimes of the Mr. Softee truck have been a regular feature of the warmer months. That creaking melody is probably one of the most familiar tunes I know. It’s consoling and calming and ever so faintly haunting. Jerome Badanes once remarked that he found it very disturbing [...]
Yes, he was wearing sunglasses inside his tinted command car. He did not exit the car; he exuded suspiciousness. I could see that he didn’t have much room in there. He was surrounded by banks of monitors and servers. Half hidden, he waited for me to explain myself. I told him my particulars, held out my camera and asked if [...]
I live next to the neighbor from hell. B-man is about 5/10, slim and dark skinned. He always wears a black kango and one of his old black suits. I can tell they’re so old because of all the wrinkles in it,cand besides that its faded. On the east side of Harlem on 129th Street and Lexington Avenue is where [...]
I really did try all the conventional methods. Really. I wrote imploring letters to the Office of the Mayor, I called my City Council members' secretary at all hours, I testified at public hearings before assorted half-awake bureaucrats. Nothing and again nothing. It would have been less frustrating to tell it all to the guy at the token booth. I [...]
Rio Mar was a Spanish restaurant that once occupied a little wedge of space between Little West Twelfth and Gansevoort Street in the meatpacking district. It had been there for decades, an obscure treat, and even when flashy Pastis opened directly across the street, it remained esoteric, hidden in plain site. From the outside you hardly knew it was there, [...]
Every high tide harvested beer bottles, oil containers, fishing lines, shiny candy wrappers, and plastic bags onto the sloping shoreline of Pattaya. At low tide I collected the trash into sea-worn rice bags. Within a half-hour the sand was devoid of any human refuse and I could smugly regard the pristine sand with pride. While tourists turned their noses in [...]
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 [...]
They predicted rain, but the sun shone through hazy skies last Wednesday at the School of the Arts protest at Columbia University. I had never been to a protest before. I was angry—I am angry—at President Lee Bollinger for his utter lack of support of the School of the Arts despite his pledge at his inauguration to make us a [...]
Seven o’clock isn’t late, but already it is dark in New York City. On the corner of 111th and Broadway, two women meet; they stand in tune to the pull of wary strangers. The duo, a short Hmong girl and a thin white woman, stand beside a portable table. Kao Yang has on a long, black coat. Sabina, the tarot [...]
We had coffee the other day at a little place in the West Village called The Brewbar with a man named Chistopher Hacker, who used to work there. Past The Brewbar's red-painted window frames, traffic careened silently up Eighth Avenue. The sky persisted with its threat of a Noreaster, but in here Carmen Miranda was doing a tiki-version of "Fever," [...]
At the Outsider Art Fair – held in the Puck Building from January 23rd-25th - there were as many men with ponytails as there were terms to describe the art they had come to buy: grassroots, vernacular, folk, visionary, Nueve Invention. Yet there was little question as to who were the most important artists in the show. Marquee outsiders include [...]
The spray-painted image of Tony’s tightly clipped mustache and smooth fade is beginning to show its age — but his dark eyes still stare out intently from the wall at indifferent passersby. This is still the Loisaida, he might boast: Spanglish for the Lower East Side. Tony’s pupils are guarded, harboring the memory of the violent episode in 1993 that [...]
A few seasons back, Perry Ellis (the company) chose Patrick Robinson (the designer) to resurrect its iconic American style . This past September Robinson staged a renegade runway show where the spectators did the walking, parading past lines of models posing and preening in a cacophony of Spring 2004 style in muted pastels, creamy whites and quirky patterns, not a [...]
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 information that reading never could. [...]
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