Plant mystery solved:


Had been kinda hoping for the flower.

liveblogging the view from my window

Update:

new toy at yumee's

jersey

the ultimate choice of all who have a keen faculty of selection

approaching the bowery, 7:45am

"Hey George, how ya doin, gorgeous?"

(The first words spoken to me today, by a pimp with a bundle of clothes in his hands and three ladies in tow.)

lush life

AE saw Richard Price was giving a reading last night and we both felt that as it was free and on the block we had no excuse not to attend. Price was excellent, earthy, funny, a product of Bronx housing projects who spent four years hanging out on the LES trying to capture the neighborhood, an ancestral home. I enjoyed hearing him describe the LES as the most complicated place on the planet—Byzantine; like Egypt in the palimpsests of its fragmentary past; and simultaneously relentlessly now. I’m about to start reading Lush Life and will form a stronger opinion, but chapter one begins with a 35-year-old living in a tenement walk-up on Stanton Street who’s trying to make it as an “artist” who’s lived on the Lower East Side for eight years. And then there’s this parallel:

Richard Price, 2008:

“A hundred years ago there were Jews trying to claw their way out of here, and now the descendants of those people are paying $2,000 a month to live in what used to be their tenements.”

Irreverent Guide, 2003:

"There’s no small irony in 1930’s immigrants working their tails off to escape the Lower East Side, only to find their grandchildren plunking down $2,000 a month or more to live in the very same crumbling buildings.”

A representation of Hell—a stylish shoe.
–G.I. Gurdjieff

And when you spell judgment with two e’s, I’m not sure I trust your judgment

"Mr. Wolff in an unabashed New Yorker (although a transplant from Virginia) and his love shows through the work. Many useful suggestions, but one section makes me question the accuracy of the rest....

"Mr. Wolff, on page 61, asserts: 'The Earl of Oxford would probably be gratified to know all these centuries later his little plays dominate the summer theatre seen in the world's capital. Sure, the plays are published under the name of an actor from Stratford, but the passions and conflict resound just as the Earl wrote them.'

"I hope Mr. Wolff is pulling our collective leg, because if he really is an Oxfordian (someone who believes the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote the works of Shakespeare, instead of Shakespeare himself), I'm not sure I trust his judgement: not because he proposes that outlandish conspiracy theory (many have been suckered into that), but because introducing it into a guide book meant furthering his pet theory was more important than an unbiased, focused work."

Last June the back wall of the lot of the collapsed synagogue across the street got tagged “HARY,” in five-foot-high letters that I had to see first thing every morning. After a few months, somebody put another tag up, partially obscuring the HARY. A couple of months back RUSTY was tagged over the remnants of HARY. Then yesterday Spanish men came and put plastic slats through the chainlink fence. Now all I see is green.

metrosexual diary

The car is running again, six weeks after the Jenny-map-light-left-on debacle. So thanks to everyone who pitched in, dad and Abbot and the folks at the parking garage for their advice, Gary for offering his car, Brian and Yumee for loaning me their emergency battery, Grabcheski for his jumper cables, Amy for her car, the guys at the station who showed Juniper how to get Amy's car's hood open, Juniper for spending half an hour helping me try to connect Amy's battery, and the random dude in the minivan who got the engine to turn over in 5 seconds flat.

Effete. I am really effete.

thirteen years in new york