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On Sunday I was standing on the 14th street station of the F/V line, and an ancient train pulled up to the platform. It was painted a dark william green, with big fat bolts lining the doors. Inside, the car and seats were carpeted. The old ads were still there, including one suggesting that your man overseas would love a pack of Burma Shave. There were ceiling fans, which made me glad it wasn’t summer. Everyone was taking pictures like crazy but I didn’t have my camera. I had to ride it just one stop, but for three minutes I felt like I was in a Narnia book or something.
Anyone else notice old trains running on Sunday?
I needed a new coffee maker so I burst into a chic housewares store on my street and bought the first one I saw. I’m like that with a task in hand. Then I got home and realized that my coffee maker has the ability to both brew and GRIND. So you can put beans right into this thing. That seemed amazingly complicated to me. It was like buying an ironing board and discovering it has lasers.
It’s also evidence that I shop destructively quickly.
Separately: here’s Al Green singing “I Want To Hold Your Hand”
This is a horrible photo of myself and James Williamson. I know James better as “Brutal” which is the handle he used on the message board of my old webzine Spite Magazine. He’s a smart funny guy and was one of the few we’d let write articles for us. Actually, for a thrown-together, infrequently-updated, vaguely-defined humor magazine, Spite had a fervent message board community. I was part of it from roughly 1997 through 2001, then had to detach myself because I’d feel too guilty about not having updated Spite. Much of that community still converses online, which is cool.
Brutal first started working for his current company Lodestone in something like 1999. He [...]
Check out this photo. Forget the half-thought out vandalism attempt to add some sort of mustache to the woman’s face. What I noticed about this ad was that it does not mention a network or time (EDITED: okay, it mentions a time. And I guess it mentions a network, but only kind of! See the comments: I’m an idiot).
It’s an ad for a news show that also assumes you already know about it. I’ve seen in other places that this is a CNN show — which I suppose I should be able to deduce by this sign’s reference to “Headline News” which I guess is a CNN brand. But I don’t really know that, or at [...]
How do I know I was hungover on Sunday morning? Because it took me half an hour to make a pot of coffee. I no longer really get sick after drinking a lot — I just can’t THINK for a while.
Awesome collection of YouTube clips documenting old and very old New York City stuff. The films of trips across the bridges circa 1900 fascinate me. Via Kottke.org
I cut through Rockefeller Plaza on my way to my office each morning. This morning, a security guard directed me the long way around the building because a construction team was putting up the Christmas tree. Oh yeah, I grumbled to myself — I forgot how completely saturated with tourists this area becomes this time of year. For the next month and half I may as well be working in an office in Tomorrowland.
But then I came around the corner and saw the tree up, and I have to admit it was a glorious site. Sure it’s a pagan ritual whitewashed with a veneer of righteous Christianity, but you can’t deny [...]
That’s where I live — Lorimer St. It’s a lovely Italian neighborhood with nice people and a warm atmosphere, with one tiny exception: The 8-lane Brooklyn-Queens Expressway which tears right through the middle of everything. In the morning, the trucks take over the streets — entering and exiting the BQE with terrific enthusiasm. Crossing even the smallest streets takes a while as vehicle after vehicle speeds by — delivering some kind of product from a warehouse to some store.
But that’s just in the morning. Otherwise it’s pretty nice.
Sufjan Stevens recently premiered a musical piece entitled “The BQE.”
This is a “Greenstreets” area down the block from my apartment. Sometimes when I walk by it in the morning I feel sorry for it, because it’s such a small amount of dirt and trees in the middle of a huge concrete plain, and yet someone still planted a sign proudly stating “Greenstreets” in the middle. Is it worth doing so little, when it risks ending up looking so pathetic? Is it like walking into the middle of 19th-century style coal factory and installing a single compact fluorescent bulb to conserve energy? Or installing an air bag on a space shuttle?
But I guess that’s part of the Greenstreets program — incremental gains all [...]
When my subway arrives at the Rockefeller Center stop each morning I hear the train conductor make an announcement something like this “Now arriving Rockefeller Center, transfer to the B,D,F,V; Top of the Rock.”
“Top of the Rock?” I know what that is — that’s where you can buy a ticket and go to the top of Rockefeller Center and take in the view of NYC. It is a classic Tall Thing to Climb — great for the many tourists who mill around Rockefeller Center hoping to see Al Roker. But how did they get it so that the MTA is advertising for them? That’s such odd product placement. They don’t mention Central Park, or MoMA, or [...]
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