Graffiti – Tats Cru

I dragged a friend up to the South Bronx one sweltering Sunday afternoon to do a tour of the area and see some graffiti by Tats Cru. There weren’t many people about, and a couple of the places we wanted to go in were closed, but we ended up sitting in a leafy square watching the kids play out on their bicycles, thinking how you don’t often see children playing outside these days.

TV Review: NY77 The Coolest Year In Hell « Blissed Out

Downtown New Yorkers often hanker after the old days, when Manhattan wasn’t overrun with Masters of the Universe and sleek, expensive condo buildings. This VH1 documentary remembers 1977, a year when the city was in crisis.  Son of Sam was on the rampage, a mayoral election was being fought and a blackout brought anarchy to the streets. But out the desperate conditions came disco, hedonism, hip hop and punk. And it’s the loss of NYC’s edginess, its f*ck it, let’s do it, sod the consequences, we ain’t got nothing to lose attitude, that people mourn.

Find a link to the show and read a full review here: TV Review: NY77 The Coolest Year In Hell « Blissed Out

Watching it reminded me of the similarities between NYC and Manchester (England) – industrial landscape, warehouse buildings with iron fire escapesand a creative scene born out of poverty, urban decay and social unrest, before regeneration and gentrification. Dave Haslam wrote a great book, Manchester, England that chronicles the rise and fall of Manchester from the start of the industrial revolution up to the end of the twentieth century, a story inextricably linked with the evolution of  Manchester’s music scene.

Wonderful Town, Ed. David Remnick

USPS in Chicago, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Men, it appears, don’t like to read fiction. To serve them, The New Yorker contains fiction seeminlgy written expressly for men, that is, devoid of anything that might arouse passion or provoke an unsettling emotion; fiction written as if by scientists.

Look at Nerve, the sexiest dating site in NYC. Note that a good proportion of the men advertise themselves as readers of The New Yorker, as a testament to their intellect and literary leanings.

But look closer and you’ll find their New Yorkers piled high in a dusty corner of their bedroom next to the furniture they’ve designed and built themselves and 600 thread count sheets, carefully arranged to woo women looking for literate, sensual men who are good with their hands.

The romantic ambitions of these men are apt to go the way of their literary aspirations; a triumph of ennui over achievement.

To save room in your bedroom, a selection of short stories from The New Yorker has been collated in Wonderful Town so, in the unlikely event your date asks what you last read, you can talk with the necessary confidence and intellectual swagger. But an admission that you don’t read it because you don’t get on with the font is likely to reward you with relief and probably a snog at the end of the night.

Whether you choose to go back to theirs to inspect their (alleged) stack of New Yorkers in person is entirely up to you.

 Where to read: Bryant Park Reading Room in summer or New York Public Library in winter

Legends of the Chelsea Hotel, Ed Hamilton

The Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street has built its quirky reputation on its infamous residents, who read like a Who’s Who of the 20th century art, literature and music scenes.  This book,  chronicles the lives of some of the more recent inhabitants (who more often read like inmates) of  the hotel , but it’s a depressing and  increasingly irritating read.

The author sets out to write about the darker side of the hotel and its residents, (which I like), but there is no real narrative (which I can live with) and the portraits of his fellow residents are unsympathetic and humourless (which I can’t). Even the hotel, which should be a character in its own right, isn’t particularly well evoked beyond repeated references to people in various states of mental imbalance “wandering these halls”.

This misanthropy seems to extend his girlfriend, who he credits with the idea for the book, much of the research, all while holding down a stressful job to support them both, yet she doesn’t merit a co-author credit. For some reason she’s introduced as Debbie in the introduction and afterword, but is referred to as Susan all the way through the book.

The author describes the book as  “a mix of history and biography, myth and legend, fiction…and nonfiction, memoir and anecdote”, and on reading, the book I agree that it doesn’t really know what it’s supposed to be. When there are so many great  characters living in the hotel  shoudn’t be necessary to throw in some fictional ones.

Although the book fails to give us any real insights into the Chelsea Hotel, it does give us the portrait of a particular type of New Yorker, who comes to NYC from a small town, aligns themselves with whoever they think is ‘coolest’ in the hope that they become cool by association, and then proceeds to look down on everyone else – fellow Chelsea artists (who, as described, seem to have very little talent between them),  hipsters (no sense of irony there), people from (God forbid) ‘the outer boroughs’ and people working in the ‘commercial’ arts such as film, rather than starving  for their ‘art’.

The author slates Ethan Hawke’s directorial debut Chelsea Walls, but interestingly, the criticisms levelled at the movie could equally apply to Legend of the Chelsea Hotel, which seems to be some kind of poetic justice.