This NY Life

Well, some people think that people die in threes, I suppose that’s kind of true, but people die everyday. I wonder why people don’t say “isn’t it funny how people dies in 4’s?”. Is it famous people who dies in threes?

Anyhow… we all lost three people within the last few days.

Courtesy sgoralnick's Flickr

Joe Ades was that guy who some have seen on the street corners of New York in various locations around the city selling vegetable peelers. I’ve seen Joe in many different places since I moved here in 1993, the Seaport, Union Square, Midtown and the World Trade Center. He was one of those people woven into our everyday lives who just add to the flavor (horrible vegetable pun) of this city.
Heres a post at Gothamist and Joe’s obit at the NY Times.

Hans Beck was the creator of Playmobil toys. When I was little, I never appreciated Playmobil, perhaps they were too expensive, perhaps not readily available. But since my son is of the age where he is playing with these type of things, I really appreciate the detail and simplicity of Playmobil toys and their incredible range.

Photo: Helle Nilsen

Lux Interior was the co-founder and leader of garage punk band The Cramps. I remember first hearing The Cramps about 1991 and thought the were really unlike anything I had heard before. I was into a lot of hardcore music like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, etc, but The Cramps were really something different and refreshing. Much like The Clash had major influences from Reggae,  The Cramps had major influences from 60’s surf music and rockabilly.Unfortunately I never got to see them live.

Thanks to Brian, I have recently acquired and amazing collection of Lux and Ivy mix CDs which contain an incredible mix of odd surf music gems and assorted other weirdness. Here is an great post on the series and another place to check it out yourself.

RIP to Joe, Hans and Lux.

I was originally going to name this post Random Death, but thought it sounded a bit too Black Metal.

Well, I’m here at work, which has been kind of unsettlingly quiet for the past few weeks and typing this post when I should be doing my status report. If a tree fell in the woods… I don’t know.

We went swimming in the building pool this Saturday and it was great. It’s just really relaxing and every time we go, we always say we need to go more often. Hopefully we will make that happen. The pool is 75 x 35 feet and enclosed and as Will says, no bugs can get in it.

PSP comics are a pretty cool idea and some of them look quite interesting. I’m still working my way through Watchmen, about 3/4 of the way done. It will be really interesting to see how they make the rich stories from the book come to life when they finally get going on the movie.

The Simpsons movie opens on July 27 which reminds me of one of my favorite scenes.

We went out to Mike and Kathy’s for lunch on Sunday and had a great time just hanging out eating, drinking beer, catching up, etc. We even got in some co-op Guitar Hero II action.

I have a renewed interest in R/C cars, though I think I’m a little bit more in love with the whole building procedure than the driving of them, probably because of the lack of space to drive them in. I went to storage and go out the two 1/18 scale cars I have. One of them is complete, with a BMW M3 body, the other is mostly done except for some of the electrics. I have to solder the motor leads and attach the speed control, attach the receiver and clean up the wiring with zip ties. Also I have to paint the body. I have a VW Beetle body shell that needs to be painted, maybe silver.

It’s strange, I think I’m drawn to things that I dont have space for because recently I have been checking out a few sites on Vespa restoration. I think this would be a great project, but only if I had a garage, some place to work on it, etc. Perhaps some day. I love the process though and could read about it for hours.

Recently we cancelled out NetFlix account. While we love the idea and convenience of being able to have a movie on hand all the time, its not too fun when you get psyched up to watch a movie (Match Point in this case), put it in and watch for about 45 minutes then it craps out on you. I took out the disc, cleaned it well, put it back in and still had the same issue. Then I broke the disc in frustration, I think I kind of frightened myself at that point and sent the disc back to NetFlix as damaged. When called about the issue, after waiting on the phone for 15 minutes, they had no problem letting us go as customers. We realize that discs get scratched, but they had nothing to say to us besides “OK, I can cancel your account”. It’s amazing they would rather lose a GIVEN $9.99 a month for a potentially very long time then do something for us. So, therefore, we joined a neighborhood DVD rental place with a good selection of movies ($4 per rental) and with the very few movies we watch in a month, this seems like a good plan. I did remember to print out my NetFlix queue though.

Beer update: Part of the beer has been bottled. When the yeast has run its course by eating all of the fermentable sugars in a beer, additional sugar has to be added to aid in carbonation. I had a case of clean bottles and after adding priming sugar to the still beer, bottled up a whole case. When I was almost done bottling, I realized that I had more beer than bottles. I bottled on June 24th and have let the rest of the primed beer sit for a few weeks now while I had a chance to gather more bottles (drink beer, rinse and save the bottles), this week I plan to re-prime and bottle the rest. The reason I needed to let it sit was to make sure that the priming sugar was all eaten up in the remaining beer. If too much priming sugar is added, exploding bottles could happen, and I don’t really want warm flat beer with shards of glass exploding in our apartment. Maybe if we had a house though, see above…

This past Christmas, I received a gift from my wife… a class at the International Center of Photography called New York at Twilight. My last class was a few weeks ago and I just wanted to share some thoughts.

This was my first class at ICP and I definitely plan on taking more. There were five sessions, two of which we met at ICP, three we went out and shot. The first class we shot a bit too in Times Square. Everyone who attended had a different reason for being there and there were people of varying skills and ages. Everyone with the exception of one person was using a SLR. Two people were using film, the rest of us were digital. The one person not using a SLR was using the Canon G7, which has the ability to shoot manually, however, does not shoot in RAW format, which seemed to be the preferred format. Our shooting locations were Times Square, DUMBO, Madison Square, Smith Street/Brooklyn.

The only issue with the class is that it was only 5 weeks long. Everyone just seemed to be getting into a stride when it was all over. The last class was spent discussing our final images, why we picked them, etc.

Here are the 19 pictures, of 400 or so, I took and liked the best: NY at Twilight

Thanks to our friend, and Planet of the Geeks chief Mike, we were given some tickets to see Cat Power a few Fridays back at The Town Hall. Some thoughts on that to come, but first a word about The Town Hall.

The building finished in 1921 seating about 1500 people and listed as a National Historic Site since 1980, is my new favorite venue in NY. We have been there many times before for shows like Wilco, Liz Phair (Cat Power opened), Aimee Mann and Pink Martini, but it never hit me until last time we were there what a treasure the building is. If you ever find yourself there, make a point to go to the balcony level and look at the presentation of shows past. The gallery features historic reproduced programs of shows by 21 year old Bob Dylan in 1963, Billie Holiday listed as vocalist for a “Jazz Concert” in 1942, Ravi Shankar, Thelonious Monk, and the list goes on.

In addition to musical acts, The Town Hall also was (and is) a place for presentation and political debate. This year Al Gore was in town talking about global warming and plugging his movie An Inconvenient Truth. However in the past there have been such topics debated as “Should the Communist Party be Outlawed in the United States” with speaker Joseph R. McCarthy in 1947 and “What is Humanity’s Greatest Need Today?” in 1938 with author Pearl Buck among others. The earliest meeting shown was with Margaret Sanger in 1921, who was a very outspoken proponent of birth control and is credited as being the founder of the “birth control movement”. 1921! I find that amazing. There was a great deal of controversy attached to Ms. Sanger’s speech, as would be expected considering the time, but the photograph of her shows her mouth covered with a piece of tape (put there by her) in addition to her short flapper style haircut considered at the time to be a symbol of dissent in and of itself. Really fascinating stuff.

You can see more of the gallery at The Town Hall website, and though it will be closed for July and August, I highly recommend seeing a show there and can’t stress enough the importance of supporting such an important, historic contributor to New York City and the entire country.

Every weekday I walk through Times Square, and see the “Hey, do you like stand up comedy” guys, trying to snare people, and wonder if that method actually works. The only people I have ever seen speaking to them always have one half of their body pointing in the opposite direction.

Also regarding Times Square, I wonder if it will be like VJ day when the war finally ends? A romatic thought, but not likely since NY is not the end point for a lot of soldiers coming back from overseas as it once was.

I was left in awe after I saw this article yesterday and, despite the inteviewers goading, Mr. Berg remained calm and rational.

Matthew Friedberger (The Fiery Furnaces) has two (yes, two) upcoming albums and fluxblog has some thoughts on them. Matthew is incredibly prolific, like in a Robert Pollard sort of way, and given he is one half of one of the most interesting bands I have listened to in the past few years, I’m really looking forward to checking the records out.

Here is some information on a planned tribut to one of the most important people regarding moden urban planning, Jane Jacobs. Sad that she is gone now…

This weekend is the 4th Annual Big Apple BBQ Fest and if the weather holds out, it looks to be bigger and better than years past. The organizers have expanded the streets that the fest wll be on adding 24th street between Madison and Park. We have gone the past three years and have always had a good time, plus its for a worthy cause, the Madison Square Park Conservancy. Pictures to come.

If delicious slow roasted pork is not your thing, theres alsways the Puerto Rican Day Parade.

Though there is some tweaking still to be done, I think I have settled on a WordPress theme, any input is most definitely appreciated.

Finally, I took the advice of a friend recently to try a beer in the shower, and I have to say, it was indeed a treat. My beer of choice was a Brooklyn Pilsner.

Happy Weekend!

Pretty interesting thing going on this Sunday at sunset. This weekend is one of only two times a year (again on July 13) when the sun sets directly in line with every straight cross street in Manhattan.

Here is a bit of a preview from our apartment. The windows in the living room point west and some nights, we get a nice sunset over the sliver of Hudson river we see.

Now if I can only figure out how to build a balcony…

Thanks to Gothamist for the heads up.