I apologize for the relative slowdown again. Put simply, I’ve reached another nervy point in my ongoing struggle to re-insert m’self in to the workforce wherein something might be about to happen. Or not. I’ve been here before and seen it fall apart, so I’m trying to stay grounded. Time will tell, truth will out, etc.
Rest assured that I do have some longer stuff in the works. Stick around for that. In the interim, here’s something that just struck me last night.
I’m again being buried alive under a stack of books I want to read. I picked up a copy of Elvis Costello’s sprawling autobiography, but have not gotten around to it. Similarly, I’m very excited for Ada Calhoun’s “St. Marks is Dead,” as well as Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel “City on Fire.” I must say, however, I’m a little wary of the latter for two reasons. For a start, it’s a novel, and I’ve sort of lost my taste for fiction (despite the fact that it’s about NYC in the oft-rhapsodized “bad ol’ days.”) Secondly, it’s evidently upwards of 900 pages, which is a bit daunting. I tend to take my time with books. Moreover, I’m concerned that I’ll spend less time enjoying it and more time being insufferably pedantic about its attention to chronological and geographical detail. But, y’know, we’ll see.
I’m somewhat ashamed to say, meanwhile, that I’m still paging through James Wolcott’s “Lucking Out.” This isn’t to suggest that it’s not a quick, engaging read, but rather that I’ve been more caught up in the circumstances detailed in the first graph above to spend as much time reading for leisure.
That said, I picked it up again last night, and the passage beneath jumped out at me.
It turned out that the [Talking Heads] were sharing a loft on Chrystie Street that I visited with my then girlfriend. Reaching Chrystie Street, south of CBGB’s and pointed towards Chinatown, was not a stroll undertaken in the midnight hours without all of one’s bat faculties primed. The bordering Roosevelt Park was well stock with furtive hands ready to reach out for a rude gimme, and the nearby remaining Bowery flophouses, these remnants of the Depression with their last-stop Dreiserian stale aroma of defeat and spiritual malnutrition, drew panhandlers and derelicts to those cheerless streets looking for drink money if all the indoor cots were taken. The area also featured what [David] Byrne would describe as the skankiest hookers in New York, though of course that’s a subjective evaluation. But I had never been to an artist’s loft before and was a total Heads convert when the invite came.
As I complained before, Wolcott does suffer a bit, to my mind, from a pointedly Christgauian penchant to overwrite, but I do like certain turns of phrase above, notably “furtive hands ready to reach out for a rude gimme” on “those cheerless streets.”
I think what fired my imagination about this particular passage was that I was in that very pocket of the city just the other day. Taking a meandering route back uptown after dropping one of my kids off for a playdate just below the Brooklyn Bridge (in what they now somewhat cloyingly call “FiDi” …pronounced like FeeeDeeee), I wound my walk through portions of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Even in 2015, I’m still intrigued by this patch of the city. While most of the fabled grit has been literally and figuratively scrubbed clean, I still find myself straining for a whiff of that old scent of badlands. And while it’s hardly the dystopian nightmare Wolcott describes above, I still wouldn’t advise anyone to whip out their wallets and count their allowance in the middle of Roosevelt Park during certain parts of the day. Incidentally, it was in Roosevelt Park wherein Bob Egan and myself solved that Pussy Galore photo puzzle from last year.
Anyway, the other factor that struck me about James Wolcott’s description of “those cheerless streets” was a fluffy story that splashed across the local media last week. Evidently, there’s a new bar at 174 Rivington. On a street which splays to the east off Roosevelt Park, just north of Delancey, Stay Classy New York is now open for business, … basically a self-descriped “Will Ferrell Character-Inspired Bar with Retro Pin Up Bartenders.”
Now, I’m sure the folks who are employed at this establishment are fine, hard-working individuals, but I find the notion of a Will Ferrell-inspired bar to be somewhat unspeakably depressing. Yes, I do enjoy the odd Will Ferrell movie, but this endeavor just further affirms that the Lower East Side is now basically perceived as nothing more than a destination for high-fiving frat bros and woo girls (to say nothing about the brunch hordes that flock its streets on the weekends).
Sure, some may quibble with my romanticized preference for Wolcott’s era (and the eras that immediately followed in the 80’s and early 90’s), but call me crazy for opting for a culturally diverse, affordable-if-sometimes-dicey frontier for artists, musicians and bohemians over a nightlife enclave for boozy, vape-crazy douchebags.
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