nonetheless

Song for Whoever, The Beautiful South

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:00:08 -0500

Song for Whoever, The Beautiful South

Some men like to undress a woman with a single gaze; Denis Benitez indulged in a far more...

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 10:00:00 -0500

Some men like to undress a woman with a single gaze;

Denis Benitez indulged in a far more presumptuous pastime. He could wrench the hidden truth from every woman who passed him in the street.

Since in their eyes he no longer existed,

since he was no longer a physical presence in their world,

he had discovered that he had a talent for invisibility

which allowed him to brush by women like a ghost,

to spy on them

and steal their secrets.

~ from the The Thursday Night Men, by Tonino Benacquista

[Somewhat] Mapping Bright Lights, Big City a look at some of the...

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 11:39:00 -0500

[Somewhat] Mapping Bright Lights, Big City

a look at some of the Manhattan locations, along with corresponding passages, in Jay McInerney’s novel.

It’s 6A.M. Do You Know Where You Are

[via Time and Space on the Lower East Side]

When you meet the girl who wouldn’t et cetera you will tell her that you are slumming, visiting your own six A.M. Lower East Side of the soul on a lark, stepping nimbly between the piles of garbage to the gay marimba rhythms in your head.

The Department of Factual Verification

[via Steven Huszar]

It’s ten-fifty when you get to Times Square. You come up on Seventh Avenue blinking. The sunlight is excessive. You grope for young shades. Down Forty-second Street, through the meat district. Every day the same spiel from the same old man: ‘Girls, girls, girls, — check ‘em out, check ‘em out, check ‘em out. Take a free look, gentlemen. Check it out, Check it out.’ The words and rhythm never vary. Kinky Karla, Naughty Lola, Sexsational Live Revue—-girls, girls, girls.

The Utility of Fiction

West Twelfth Street

A man’s home after all is his castle. Approaching your building on West Twelfth Street, you observe the architect’s dim concept of European fortresses: a crenelated tower atop the building conceals the water tank and the entrance is fitted with a mock portcullis.

[Lion’s Head now Kettle of Fish]

You check the fridge; no beer. A finger of vodka in the bottle on the sink. Maybe you will step out and get a six-pack. Or wander over to the Lion’s Head, as long as you’re going out to see if there’s anybody you know.

The Night Shift

You walk down into the Lion’s Head, past all the framed dust jackets of all the writers who have ever gotten drunk there, heading for the back room where the lights are low.

145 West Broadway

The glittering, curvilinear surfaces inside Odeon are reassuring. The place makes you feel reasonable at any hour, often against bad odds, with its good light and clean luncheonette-via-Cartier deco decor.

Linguine and Sympathy

Cornelia St.

You get out at Bleecker Street. Megan takes your hand and leads you into a delicatessen. … From the deli you walk toward Sixth. … Each step takes you closer to the old apartment on Cornelia Street, where you lived with Amanda in New York. This was your neighborhood. These shops were your shops. …

285 Bleecker St

You pass Ottomanelli’s Meats, where the corpses of small animals hang in the window: unskinned rabbits, hairless fetal pigs, plucked fowl with yellow feet. No ferrets. Amanda was always gross out by this.

now [still] an empty storefront

At the Corner of Jones and Bleecker a Chinese restaurant has replaced the bar whose lesbian patrons kept you awake so many summer nights when, too hot to sleep, you lay together with the windows open.

Sometimes A Vague Notion

[via PPS]

You walk up Fifth Avenue along the park. On the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, a mime with a black-and-white face performs in front of a small crowd.

[via atufft]

You go to the Egyptian wing and wander among the obelisks, sarcophagi, and mummies. In your several visits to the Met this is the only exhibit you have seen.

[Dorrian’s* (via Eater)
*neither Friday’s nor on 1st ave., but Dorrian’s on 2nd avenue, which might as well be TGIF…]

In a few minutes you are in singles’ heaven on First Avenue. You start at Friday’s, where you get a seat at the bar and finally succeed in ordering a drink. Prime time approaches, and the place is packed with eager secretaries and slumming lawyers. Everyone has the Jordache look—the look you don’t want to know better. Hundreds of dollars’ worth of cosmetics in gold around the necks of the open-shirted men. Gold crucifixes, Stars of David and coke spoons hang from the chains. Some trust in God to get them laid; others in drugs. Someone should do a very survey of success ratios, publish it in New York Magazine.

How It’s Going

[via wgb]

The first light of the morning outlines the towers of the World Trade Center at the tip of the island. You turn in the other direction and start uptown.

West Village

There are cobbles on the street where the asphalt has worn through. You think of the wooden shoes of the Dutch settlers on these same stones. Before that, Algonquin braves stalking game along silent trails.

[via Steven Siegel]

“Taste,” says Tad, “is a matter of taste.”

[Top 1st pic via StoryboardC]

the blue glow of twilight at Madison Square A French artist’s...

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:27:00 -0500

the blue glow of twilight at Madison Square

A French artist’s moody, magical New York

Thieves Like Us, New Order

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 16:29:40 -0400

Thieves Like Us, New Order

Broadway at Night, by Alvin Langdon Coburn ca. 1910 [from...

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:55:33 -0400

Broadway at Night, by Alvin Langdon Coburn ca. 1910
[from last year’s Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit, Night Vision: Photography After Dark]

“It is only at twilight that the city reveals itself to me in the fulness [sic] of its beauty, when the arc lights on the Avenue click into being. Many an evening I have watched them and studied carefully just which ones appeared first and why. They begin somewhere about Twenty-sixth street, where it is darkest, and then gradually the great white globes glow one by one, up past the Waldorf and the new Library, like the stringing of pearls, until they burst out into a diamond pendant at the group of hotels at Fifty-ninth street. Probably there is a man at a switchboard somewhere, but the effect is like destiny, and regularly each night, like the stars, we have this lighting up of the Avenue.”

I can’t help feeling nostalgic for the Brooklyn I never got to see — the one that existed before Brooklyn was an adjective, an international brand of hip

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:50:30 -0400

I can’t help feeling nostalgic for the Brooklyn I never got to see — the one that existed before Brooklyn was an adjective, an international brand of hip:

“He’d fallen out of love with his neighborhood, a place that had become so shiny and new that it no longer felt like a respite from the corporate world. “I didn’t feel guilty about leaving Williamsburg; Williamsburg had already left me.”

Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, by Edouard Manet,...

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:43:00 -0400

Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, by Edouard Manet, 1863

“Well she’s not wet,” said the woman. “This is not a picture of bathers. Looks to me like she’s deciding which of these two she’s going to bonk in the bushes.” … “Unless she’s already done the deed,” continued the woman. “Look, their lunch is tossed all over the place. That expression on her face—she seems to be saying, ‘Absolutely, I fucked them both. In the weeds. On our lunch.’”

— from Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art by Christopher Moore

go.read.it

Sad, Elton John vs Pnau

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 16:08:49 -0400

Sad, Elton John vs Pnau

communicants: Masculin, féminin (1966)

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:54:02 -0400

communicants:

Masculin, féminin (1966)

This is how I view tumblr on computer, to shield my eyes from...

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 10:31:00 -0400

This is how I view tumblr on computer, to shield my eyes from tumblr “radar”*.

*ads/friends of tumblr staff, irl or virtual/bs

Most of my tumblr posts here have been self-plagiarized from my previous tumblr posts, fabricated,...

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 16:11:00 -0400

Most of my tumblr posts here have been self-plagiarized from my previous tumblr posts, fabricated, made-up, and altered. And the quotes in my posts either do not exist, are unintentional misquotations, or represent improper combinations of previously existing quotes.

At 25, [Redacted] was the most sought-after young reporter…, producing knockout articles for...

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:38:00 -0400

At 25, [Redacted] was the most sought-after young reporter…, producing knockout articles for magazines… . Trouble was, he made things up—sources, quotes, whole stories—in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism.

Guess who? Jonah Lehrer? Jayson Blair? Baron Münchhausen? …

Ceremony, Joy Division (demo — from a rehearsal tape made...

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 15:51:00 -0400

Ceremony, Joy Division (demo — from a rehearsal tape made in 1980)

[not by New Order, although both versions and bands are great]

(one of the last Joy Division songs to be composed, with lyrics written by Ian Curtis)

Streets of London or New York City? First one should be easy (see New York Press for the...

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 12:51:00 -0400

Streets of London or New York City?

First one should be easy

(see New York Press for the answers)

London Street Photography — “images by over 70 photographers who have recorded fleeting moments in London, capturing the faces and lives of ordinary people who populate this complicated and ever-changing metropolis” — and City Scenes: Highlights of New York Street Photography — “30 key works by New York photographers will provide a counterpart illustrating the rich tradition of street photography in New York City” —at the Museum of the City of New York.

Now thru Dec. 2.

And MCNY is now on tumblr

Andrea Nelli - GRAFFITI A NEW YORK, out of print for more than...

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 10:22:00 -0400

Andrea Nelli - GRAFFITI A NEW YORK, out of print for more than 30 years, the book was reissued by Whole Train Press on April 13, 2012. The first edition, which is considered one of the first books ever written about graffiti and street art, was published in 1978 by Andrea Nelli.

Andrea Nelli was twenty years old when he went to New York. It was early 1970’s and most subways were completely covered with graffiti; so did most of the subway and Manhattan walls. He saw BIG-0-116, EVIL ERF14, RAT FINK 131, SUPER KOOL 223. They looked undecipherable codes, written everywhere with black spray. Eventually, he understood that they were always the same names repeated throughout the city. To capture the compositions of the graffitis, Nelli started shooting photos of them, which subsequently got him in touch with the different cliques of graffiti artists who then introduced him into the scene.

Still a student, Nelli focused his thesis on this just born movement but was already quickly spreading. With the explosion of the phenomenon in the following years, Nelli decided to published, in collaboration with New York’s old school street artist icon COCO 144, ‘Graffiti A (in) New York’ in 1978, which showed the phenomenon from the beginning and showcased selections of more than 100 photos taken five years earlier of graffiti names and art. *

“to get your Name around”. The rule of graffiti

GRAFFITI A NEW YORK - Andrea Nelli from Whole Train Press on Vimeo.

Sovereign Light Café, Keane

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:58:00 -0400

Sovereign Light Café, Keane

Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies! get them...

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:20:39 -0400

Mothers of America

let your kids go to the movies!

get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to

it’s true that fresh air is good for the body

but what about the soul

that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images

and when you grow old as grow old you must

they won’t hate you

they won’t criticize you they won’t know

they’ll be in some glamorous country

they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

they may even be grateful to you

for their first sexual experience

which only cost you a quarter

and didn’t upset the peaceful home

they will know where candy bars come from

and gratuitous bags of popcorn

as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it’s over

with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg

near the Williamsburg Bridge

oh mothers you will have made the little tykes

so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies

they won’t know the difference

and if somebody does it’ll be sheer gravy

and they’ll have been truly entertained either way

instead of hanging around the yard

or up in their room

hating you

prematurely since you won’t have done anything horribly mean yet

except keeping them from the darker joys

it’s unforgivable the latter

so don’t blame me if you won’t take this advice

and the family breaks up

and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set

seeing

movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young

Ave Maria by Frank O’Hara

(From “Lunch Poems”, the title refers to both O’Hara’s capacity write the poems while sitting in Times Square during his lunch hour, as well as the ease in which a reader could take the pocket-sized volume along and read it during his own lunch hour.)

Somewhere Else, Razorlight

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 16:02:00 -0400

Somewhere Else, Razorlight

"New York has become like a gorgeous antique that someone bought, refurbished, and restored, then offered back to you at a price you couldn’t possibly afford."

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 09:54:00 -0400

"New York has become like a gorgeous antique that someone bought, refurbished, and restored, then offered back to you at a price you couldn’t possibly afford.":

(h/t)