Posted in Books, Business, Economy, New York City, Sex & Gender on February 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »
“The Oscar Wilde Bookshop in Greenwich Village, which is believed to be the oldest gay and lesbian bookstore in the country, will close on March 29, its owner announced on Tuesday, citing “the current economic crisis.” The announcement came nearly five years after the store was about to close, only to be given a last-minute reprieve when a new owner purchased it.”
(via NY Times)
Posted in Business, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Food & Wine, New York City, Obituaries on February 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »
The New York Times ran an obituary yesterday about Joseph Ades, “the white-haired man with the British accent, the expensive European suits and shirts,” who had been a fixture among the vendors at the Greenmarket in Manhattan’s Union Square. I was drawn to the article not because of a remembered encounter with Ades but because of my interest in the legal obstacles facing street vendors, often immigrants and people of color, in New York City. In the Times’ obit, David Hughes, the operations manager at the Greenmarket, noted that Mr. Ades conducted his business on the fringes of the market “because he never obtained a permit to do business there, and if he staked out a spot too close to the vendors, someone would complain and security guards would be alerted.” Although Ades managed to persist through this wink-wink arrangement, most street vendors are not so fortunate.
New York’s Urban Justice Center, a non-profit organization that serves “New York City’s most vulnerable residents through a combination of direct legal service, systemic advocacy, community education and political organizing,” several years ago established the “Street Vendor Project” to assist vendors who have been victims of New York’s aggressive “quality of life” crackdown (vendors have been denied access to licenses, restricted from streets closed to them at the urging of powerful business groups, or penalized with onerous fines for minor violations).
The most successful of the project’s public fundraisers is the “Vendy Awards,” a juried competition between five or six of New York’s best “street chefs,” with the winners determined by the attending public (who pay for the pleasure of sampling the various fare – all proceeds going to support the project’s work) and a panel of food “experts.” This past fall, the judges at the fourth annual event, held at the Tobacco Warehouse in DUMBO, included well-known food writer and journalist Calvin Trillin.
As to Mr. Ades (R.I.P.), his story, as told in the obituary, is a romantic one, to be sure, but better to ask almost any New York City vendor for his or her story if you want the real word on the street.
Posted in American West, Art & Artists, Food & Wine, U.S. Travel on February 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Marfa, Texas, long a tourist destination for devotees of paranormal phenomena who journey to this remote desert outpost for a chance to experience the Marfa Lights, is still in many ways a typical small Texas town where languorous locals are animated by talk of high school football. But when I visited Marfa two years ago while en route to Odessa, Texas for a reunion of my wife’s family, the entire town seemed like a mirage: there, deep in the heart of George Bush country, were art and photography galleries, a public radio station serving “Far West Texas,” and a coffee shop, The Brown Recluse, providing customers with reading copies of such un-Bush publications as “The Nation” and “The New York Review of Books” while serving some of the best fresh roasted coffee (organic and free trade) on either side of the Rio Grande. Marfa owes its current status as an art destination to the American painter and minimalist sculptor Donald Judd who moved to town in 1971 with hopes of realizing his art on a “grand scale.”
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Posted in Food & Wine, Sex & Gender on February 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »
“Of all the truly seismic shifts transforming daily life today — deeper than our financial fissures, wider even than our most obvious political and cultural divides — one of the most important is also among the least remarked. That is the chasm in attitude that separates almost all of us living in the West today from almost all of our ancestors, over two things without which human beings cannot exist: food and sex.
“The question before us today is not whether the two appetites are closely connected. About that much, philosophers and other commentators have been agreed for a very long time. As far back as Aristotle, observers have made the same point reiterated in 1749 in Henry Fielding’s famous scene in Tom Jones: The desires for sex and for food are joined at the root. The fact that Fielding’s scene would go on to inspire an equally iconic movie segment over 200 years later, in the Tom Jones film from 1963, just clinches the point.
“Philosophers and artists aside, ordinary language itself verifies how similarly the two appetites are experienced, with many of the same words crossing over to describe what is desirable and undesirable in each case. In fact, we sometimes have trouble even talking about food without metaphorically invoking sex, and vice versa. In a hundred entangled ways, judging by either language or literature, the human mind juggles sex and food almost interchangeably at times. And why not? Both desires can make people do things they otherwise would not; and both are experienced at different times by most men and women as the most powerful of all human drives.” (via Policy Review)
[Rodney Dangerfield had a bit about food replacing sex in his marriage, something along the lines: “I’m telling you my love life is terrible. My love life is so bad, food has replaced sex in my marriage – things are so bad my wife and I even installed a ceiling mirror over our kitchen table.”]
Posted in New York City on February 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »
After 11 years in New York, illustrator Christoph Niemann moved to Berlin with his wife and young sons. “During the cold and dark Berlin winter days, I spend a lot of time with my boys in their room. And as I look at the toys scattered on the floor, my mind inevitably wanders back to New York.” (via NY Times)
