Runnin’ & Gunnin’ in NYC
925 Words. 4 Minute Read
I’ve met poets, playwrights, media personalities, bankers, architects, lawyers, journalists, haberdashers, professors, nonprofit directors, academics, actors, musicians, ministers, restaurateurs, anarchists, Marxists, and a variety of intellectuals and entrepreneurs. 45 days in the greatest city in the world. And I am exhausted. The Big Apple got its pound of flesh. How arrogant to believe I would be the exception to the rule.
A Record Player in New York
1,000 Words. 4 Minute Read.
Similar to antiquing, I see these records and think to myself that someone enthusiastically went to a record shop with this exact album in mind. They’d been obsessing over it for weeks, like any other music freak. They couldn’t wait to get back home and listen to it, maybe with friends at a cocktail party or by themselves on LSD with bulbous headphones. And now, all these years later, it’s in a Greenwich Village shop with thousands of others, each with its own story.
Discovering Tribeca
1,046 Words. 4 Minute Read
I walked past DeNiro’s Tribeca Grill and started to take in the peculiarities of the pre-Civil War buildings. I strolled up and down wide cobblestone streets flanked by ancient loading docks and warehouses with faded block letters from the companies that once occupied them. Despite the transformation of mercantile factories into galleries and the most expensive real estate in the city, there’s a comforting authenticity to it all, as if nothing will ever change, including rickety awnings and peeling paint on nineteenth-century handrails.
Museum Hopping in LA
1,460 Words. Six Minute Read.
And then it happens—the escalator delivers you into the light! Gone is the infernal darkness as you step into a madhouse of ethereal beauty and gargantuan works of art, like Mark Bradford’s Deep Blue, which is fifty feet long and twelve feet tall, and Jeff Koons’s seventeen-foot-long metallic Tulips. At this point, you’ve been in the museum for all of two seconds. It’s positively overwhelming.
Jazz in West Village with a Spy
574 Words. 2 Minute Read.
Arthur’s is one of those rare places that feels like you’ve been there before on your first visit. They have nothing to prove, and they know it, which makes for a warm environment. We were there in late March, and Christmas wreaths were still up… it’s that kind of place.