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So I'm on the trail of tears from Blogger to Tumblr.
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A.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
A $500 hammer from New Jersey
Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and Independence Day, sheds some light on Spitzer's mind in today's Washington Post:
I guess he wanted to nail a hammer from New Jersey?
Before everything begins to unravel, Eliot confides to Rick that he's made a mess of things, betrayed everyone he loves, that he isn't even sure who he is anymore. But Rick will tell him not to be melodramatic. It's true he's made mistakes, big ones, Rick explains, but they aren't what Eliot thinks they are. Rick admits he's outraged that Eliot has spent $80,000 on prostitutes, because it shouldn't cost that much to get a little action in America. It's like one of those $500 Pentagon hammers. Downright wasteful. And why order a hammer from New Jersey and pay the shipping? There are perfectly good hammers in Washington -- it's a damned city of hammers when you think about it. Where on earth did Eliot get the idea that New Jersey hammers were superior? All he wanted to do was nail something, right?
I guess he wanted to nail a hammer from New Jersey?
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Nice racket. Great town, New York.
From The New York Times:
In 2006, when Ms. Wall Spitzer showed a reporter around their apartment on Fifth Avenue, she proudly declared that as a rule, only artwork made by members of the immediate family was allowed to hang on the walls.That's how the article ends. It reminded me of this passage from Woody Allen's short story, "The Whore of Mensa":One multicolored drip painting, in a den that the family calls the Adirondack Room, had been signed “Spitzer Wall,” because the two of them had painted it together early in their courtship.
“Eliot and I had been to the Whitney and were looking at a Jackson Pollock, and he said, ‘I could do that,’ ” Ms. Wall Spitzer said, imitating her husband with a braggadocious tone. “So I said, ‘Let’s see you try,’ and then I helped him.”
A wall of books opened, and I walked like a lamb into that bustling pleasure palace known as Flossie's. Red flocked wallpaper and a Victorian decor set the tone. Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. A blonde with a big smile winked at me, nodded toward a room upstairs, and said, "Wallace Stevens, eh?" But it wasn't just intellectual experiences. They were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could "relate without getting close." For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack. For one-fifty, you could listen to FM radio with twins. For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master's, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine's over Freud's conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing - the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town, New York.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Brooklyn is expanding.
A few weeks ago, I went out to dinner with a friend of mine who lives in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Before dinner, he invited me up to his apartment for a beer. As we chatted in his living room, he brought me over to the window and showed me the new building that was built over the last year behind his house. “See that over there,” he asked. “That five story building replaced a lot that just sat there in waiting for the better part of the 20th Century. "On Sunday mornings he used to pull the blinds all the way up so the sun would flood his apartment with warm natural light as he enjoyed his coffee and the Sunday New York Times.
Not any longer, he said. Now, the sunlight bounces off the side of the building, making his apartment significantly dimmer.
To have a new building where there used to be nothing, or next to nothing, is an increasingly common experience in Brooklyn. In all corners of the borough – from the bungalows of Brighton Beach to the train tracks at the Atlantic Yards – new developments are inching higher into the sky.
As someone whose family has been rooted in Brooklyn for over half a century, the scale and pace of development here is a relatively new thing. Whether you are in favor of development or are fiercely against it, what has been taking place for the past ten years (at least) rivals any of the borough’s great booms of the past.
Brooklyn’s historical architecture embodies its marvelous aspirations. Brooklynites are proud of landmarks such as Grand Army Plaza, the magnificent Brooklyn Museum, and the Parisian-style boulevard of Eastern Parkway. They exemplify the borough’s history as its own independent city that dreamed of a world class future.
At the same time, Brooklynites for the most part live in or around low-rise, low-density housing that gives their neighborhoods the feeling of being a small town in the heart of one of the world’s greatest cities.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that this duality has existed for about 100 years.
The reactions to new changes throughout the borough embody this longstanding historical tension - of a city with one foot planted in the past while the other tries to step towards its future.
On the one hand, we fear the loss of the quality of life we’ve known for decades. On the other hand, we hang our hopes on new developments that will carry us into the future.
In the case of my friend’s neighborhood, he told me that when the new building went up, the neighborhood became hysterical. People who had lived on his street for decades stood on each other’s stoops and shared their fears about parking spaces. With five new units on the nearby block, how much farther would they have to travel for a place to park their cars after a long day’s work?
This was a real concern. But the same neighborhood did not demonstrate the same kind of visceral reaction when a much larger real estate development, the Atlantic Yards, was announced. Perhaps it was because the quality of life wasn’t at risk of being inundated by new car traffic, or that its sunny streets weren't in jeopardy of falling under the shadows of the new towers.
Instead, he said, people were excited by new possibilities, like the prospect of Brooklyn having a new professional sports team or a famous architect introducing a new building style to the borough.
I don’t remark on this because I have an opinion one way or another about the Atlantic Yards development. I would be happy if it did not happen. But I say it because I think that there is something remarkably similar between these two reactions.
They both represent something about Brooklyn that perseveres throughout its changes, and that is the desire among Brooklynites to commune with one another. Whether you call it kvetching, bitching, hyping, or laughing, a style of architecture – neither a brownstone nor a skyscraper – will ever change the fact that Brooklynites cannot stop talking to each other about what is going on around them. The changes Brooklyn is going through now are experiences shared among people from many different backgrounds and they lay the foundation for the borough’s next generation, which will have to find its own ways of coping and coexisting.
As we left my friend’s apartment for the restaurant, he mentioned one of his favorite scenes from the Woody Allen movie “Annie Hall.”
“Remember that flashback to the doctor’s office where the boy has stopped doing his homework because he thinks the world is expanding and so doing homework is pointless? ‘The universe is not expanding!’ his mom says, ‘Brooklyn is not expanding!’”
Brooklyn is expanding, I thought, and it’s that very expansion that will hold it together.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
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