Category Archives: New York

The Morning Commute

Radiohead “Hail to the Thief”Two anecdotes from my daily walk to the office: First, it was a beautiful morning to release a new Radiohead album; the skies were a calming, solid blue and the sun is finally, after weeks of miserable precipitation, pouring down clean, bright light again. There’s a Virgin Megastore at Union Square and as I walked past it I saw one satisfied consumer after another exiting its doors with a copy of “Hail to the Thief,” happily heading off into the springtime. I walked a little further into the park and I saw a young woman sitting on a bench beneath an old, old tree, already listening to the CD on her Discman and reading along with the lyrics intently.

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Hat Trick

Customized Baseball CapMy girlfriend is due back from her ~3-month backpacking tour of Asia tomorrow evening. She was away for her birthday on 25 Apr, and in spite of the extra few weeks of present-shopping time, I still hadn’t bought anything for her until this afternoon. At Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street, I passed this kid with a card-table full of cheap baseball caps. He was customizing them in a graffiti style with paint pens, charging customers on a kind of sliding scale of decorative typography: simple tags for five dollars, block letters for ten, and shading and filling for fifteen.

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The Man without a Face

Behavior is located on West 27th Street, just north of Chelsea and the Flatiron District. It’s not generally considered a dangerous neighborhood, as evidenced by the several luxury high-rise apartment buildings that have been built here recently. And yet, we were made aware today that there have been two very recent rapes within five minutes walk from our offices, both thought to have been committed by the same suspect, and one of them happening on 27th Street itself. (As reported by The New York Times here.)

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Tokenism

NYC Subway TokenWhen I first moved to New York five years ago, it was already too late for the venerable subway token. Though I had used tokens for access to the subway system on most all of my prior visits, by 1998 the Metro Card had already become practically ubiquitous and, like so much else at the end of the nineties, tokens had begun to seem unnecessarily awkward in the new, digital age. After fifty years of use and at least five years of descent into obscurity, tokens are finally laid to rest: as of today, the MTA will no longer sell tokens at all, and by 04 May, they will no longer be accepted anywhere in the system.

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Fool’s Cold

April Fool’s DayMother Nature’s little April Fool’s Day joke for New York this year is unseasonably cold temperatures to follow the past week and a half of beautiful, moderate weather. It was 34º F when I walked to the office this morning! Crazy. In any event, one origin of April Fool’s Day asserts that the tradition is based on ridiculing those societies who continued to celebrate 01 Apr as the first day of the new year — as per the old Julian Calendar — long after the Gregorian Calendar, as it was implemented by the British, had designated that day as 01 Jan.

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Word to the Weiserman

Buddy WeisermanIt’s hot enough to fry an egg in New York, and therefore hot enough to fry a dog’s brain. It’s so hot it’s got to be unhealthy.Anyway, I’m staying indoors, staying cool, and reading crap like the hilarious adventure of Buddy Weiserman and the Gold Treasure of Sierra Leone. The name Buddy Weiserman, a riff on ‘Budweiser,’ is a prankster’s invention, and this site details Buddy’s hilarious email exchanges with a so-called prince that claims to have a stash of gold to unload at below-market prices. It’s a classic Nigerian 419 crime, and you may have received spam along these lines yourself, which makes it funnier to see someone turn the tables on the con artists. [Human error screwed up this post, which was supposed to have appeared on Wed 03 Jul, so I’m appending it here.]

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Subway Gold

1974 MTA Subway MapOn my way home from a weekend trip to Washington, D.C., I passed a guy selling random goods — used books, used records, discarded knick-knacks — on the First Avenue sidewalk. I’m not talking about a flea market table, even; this stuff was literally spread out on the concrete. Among the items he had for sale was this beautiful 1974 NYC Transit Authority subway map, based on the original 1972 design by Vignelli Associates. He sold it to me for US$2, a real find! I’m totally elated to have a copy of this design classic.

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Village Veloce

Bar VeloceIt’s hard to believe that this throwback to the era of random violence happened just three blocks from where I live now and just a block from where I lived for two years: “Patrons of Bar Veloce in the East Village were held hostage by a man who sprayed kerosene on them and then threatened to set them afire early [Sunday&#93, according to the police. Three people and the suspect were shot.” — Al Baker, The New York Times.

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