Pictures by Ezra Stoller via This Isn’t Happiness.

Reading is Fundamental, y’all.

Bleecker Bob’s is gone but Rock and Soul is still around. I stopped by on Saturday afternoon to visit my friend Mike who works there. He wasn’t around but I went to the back and looked through records anyway.

A middle-aged woman stood above the record player and played a 45 of  “Top Billin'” for a boy who couldn’t have been older than 8 or 9. When it was over, she flipped the record over and played the instrumental. I told the kid that the record is a classic and he said he liked it a lot. He was dancing in place.

So very cool.

Stupefaction celebrates the end of an era as Bleecker Bob’s closes for good.

Still building…

[Photograph Via: Eye Heart New York]

It was warm again yesterday but by the time I got off the subway in the Bronx in the evening it was cool. Felt like spring “for reals,” as the kids say.

Something was stirring in the air and just before I arrived home the sky was dark and the wind kicked-up and it was exciting–a spring storm.

This morning gives sun but the ground is still wet, especially the dirt where the flowers are starting to bloom.

Sweet.

Nothing better than magic hour in the city, especially when it’s warm out. I was reminded of how much I enjoy those precious moments when I saw this picture by our man Bags.

I saw a pregnant woman on the subway this morning. I was standing and tried to make eye-contact with her. If she looked at me I’d ask if she wanted to sit and then I’d see if someone would give up their seat for her.  There was something girlish about her though her hair was completely gray, cut right around her shoulders and she dressed like a woman not a girl. In one hand she held a cup of coffee, in the other, she gripped a bagel with jelly. I wondered if she’d be embarrassed if I asked someone to get up for her.

She ate the bagel like she was mad at it. But she didn’t look annoyed just ravenous. It was amusing, even arousing, and I imagined making a video of her. It would be a family joke for years to come.

But I didn’t know her so I just admired her eating the fuck out of that bagel.

[Photo Credit: jkingsz]

I was in a cab last week. The driver was from Afghanistan and we got to talking. He told me about the political history of his country since the early part of the 20th century. Sometimes it was hard to hear him so I leaned forward in my seat. After awhile, I asked how long he’s been here and he said twelve years. Then I asked him what he likes most about America.

“Freedom of speech,” he said. “Where I am from you look but you cannot see,” he covered his eye with his left hand. Then he put his hand over his ear, “You listen but you cannot hear.” He touched his forehead. “You think but you cannot speak.” He looked at me in the rear view mirror.

“I am a passionate man. Here, I can speak my mind and not be afraid of going to prison.”

I felt aware of how I take the freedom of speech for granted. But in that moment, I appreciated it like never before.

New York architecture by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Jim Dwyer on Mike McAlary and the final work by Nora Ephron, “Lucky Guy”:

If memory serves, sometime around March 1999 a caller to The Daily News introduced herself as Nora Ephron, and how about dinner?

She was thinking that the life and death of Mike McAlary would make a film. Ephron told me that she couldn’t remember ever meeting him, but that she had read the obituaries a few months earlier, after his death at 41 on Christmas Day 1998. Seen from a distance, the contrails of his life were the stuff of myths.

Fueled by high-octane swagger, McAlary had been a star columnist at the city tabloids for a decade, specializing in police corruption and police heroics. Near the end he fell spectacularly on his face and was written off, prematurely and in some circles, gleefully, as a sloppy, self-aggrandizing hack. Terminally ill, he bolted his own chemotherapy session one summer morning to sneak into the hospital room of Abner Louima, who had been grotesquely tortured with a plunger by police officers. A few months before he died, McAlary was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the columns that made the case a national scandal.

What Ephron needed from me, and others, were not bold-type headlines, but brush strokes. There were things I couldn’t be much help on. McAlary and I were not bar buddies — he was a night life Olympian — and for most of the decade, we worked at different papers. But we were the same age, both writing columns three times a week and we spoke almost every day to help each other feed the column furnace, swapping names, phone numbers, angles.

He began practically every conversation not with hello, but by announcing, “This is good for us.”

[Image Via: Iconoclast]

Alex Witchel profiled Bobby Cannavale in the magazine a few days ago:

Cannavale turned serious. “I don’t come from an intellectual family,” he said. “I fly them in for the opening night of whatever show I’m in, and it’s great, they love me, they’re proud of me.” He paused. “But we don’t ever talk about what the play is about. So I was always in search of people I could talk to. I guess you could pull apart psychologically why it’s always a guy this happens with. My father-in-law” — the director Sidney Lumet — “was like a dad to me, and we talked about this art form ad nauseam.”

That was another way his life changed because of “The Normal Heart.” Jenny Lumet saw the closing performance. “We met in July, got married in December and had Jake in May,” he said. “He was born two days before my 25th birthday.” The marriage lasted nearly a decade, though his relationship with her father lasted until his death, in 2011. Among the films Lumet directed were “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” both starring Pacino. For years, before a performance, Cannavale would psych himself up by saying, “Pacino’s coming tonight.”

It does boggle the mind to think of this Jersey boy suddenly hanging out with Sidney Lumet. Not to mention Jenny’s maternal grandmother, Lena Horne. “Sidney was the most down-to-earth guy you could meet,” Cannavale said. “He loved me because I didn’t have anything and he came from nothing. By the way, I didn’t know who she was,” he said of Horne. “But I think she liked that I was a little dirty.” He smiled. “She, like Sidney, would love to say around her friends, ‘Bobby, tell that story,’ and I’d tell some story they would all be charmed by.” His voice held no edge. “Nothing is more charming than poor folks.” He leaned back into the couch. “They were all great, but it was Sidney, that guy,” he said quietly. “To the end, he was like a dad to me.”

Man, just a perfect day for stickball, huh?

Photograph by Bruce Davidson, 1959.

Coming Soon…

I have almost no interest in it. Maybe it’ll be good, who knows?

[Photo Via: It’s a Long Season]

The freaks come out at night.

[Picture by Ed Vebell via This Isn’t Happiness]

An oral history of New York Food.

Oh, baby.

Queens get the money…

Picture via Ryan Panos.

Got off the train on 231 and Broadway one night last week and saw a guy selling books on the street. The man was barely holding it together and he didn’t look to have much of anything but then I saw this: Heinz!

Torn cover, sure, but a first edition. I gave him a couple of bucks for it. He was grateful and so was I.

Ann Street Studio gets us ready for spring with these lovely shots of the Ansonia Hotel.

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