A blog about New York City, my books, and my cats. Mostly.
I took some pictures of the crowd that lines up everyday outside one of the Marc Jacobs stores. I wanted to show everyone how insane it is. When I uploaded the pictures to my computer I noticed one face in the crowd. (Close-up below.) (Oh and by the way, this is nothing compared to how it’s going to get.)
She doesn’t look happy with me, does she?
I see boarded up windows and I fantasize about renovating and moving in. This is on Bleecker Street, though. In reality it would be a noisy, horrible place to live. That block is busy, it’s also across the street from a church that has a school which means screaming kids every day, so yeah. Not ideal. But living on top of Pet Central. That would be the one convenient part.
I was just posting the other day about living on the top floor of a 5th floor walk-up. What am I going to do 10, 20, 30 years from now if I’m lucky enough to still be around? My neighbor and I were just worrying about this earlier in the week. She mentioned the dumb waiter which the landlord closed off years ago. Maybe we could repair it on our own?
I guess I just have to not think about it. It’s not like I can do anything about it for the foreseeable future.
This is the picture I referred to in the post below. This is me and Anne on the highway days after 9/11. This is not the most flattering shot of me, I don’t think. And something is off about one of Anne’s eyes, I just noticed! There must have been something on the scanner. It looks like her right eye is missing. Oh well.
I know we look ridiculously cheerful, considering. You had to be there. We weren’t really feeling cheerful, but we were doing what we could at the time, so we felt better, and a friend was taking the picture and maybe she said smile and we obeyed.
In the days following 9/11 when we stood along the highway holding up thank you signs for the rescue workers, my friend Anne wore a tshirt that read “New York Fucking City.” I was so proud. It was like saying to the terrorists, “Fuck you. We’re still here.”
I’ve always loved New York’s edge, that we talk like that. It pissed me off when my book “The Restless Sleep” came out and all these people said I was trying to sound like a cop because I said fuck a lot. Hello?? No! I talk like that!! Really! I was writing exactly how I talk. My singing proposal has the word fuck six times on the first page.
Except I’m probably going to take that out. First, I don’t think people “hear” the word the way we say it. And second, we don’t really talk like that anymore. New York, well Manhattan anyway, has gotten so homogenized. I don’t want to get into a whole thing about the New York of my youth that is gone, gone, gone, it’s boring, I know.
I just wanted to explain why I took this picture. I saw these tshirts and thought, ‘We’re not that city anymore.’
Lisa, a librarian from Madison, Wisconsin and ex-New Yorker, saved the musical day!! The song I was looking for was When This is Through by Rotor Jambreks (I’m checking out other songs by them and I really love them). Thank you, Lisa! I got it from itunes and I’m listening to it right NOW.
In my very clean apartment. It doesn’t look any different, does it? I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned for days. Technically, you could eat dinner off the floor underneath the couch (which is insane I know) but it doesn’t look a bit different! It feels different though. There’s nothing like the feel of a freshly completely cleaned home.
