The Electric Egg Cream

Living in a city such as New York requires a certain degree of grace under fire and disappointment. Each and every day brings with it an additional letdown that is routinely tallied-up as symptomatic of big city life, then resignedly accepted by the majority of its jaded inhabitants and gradually forgotten (or absorbed). Almost anything could happen whether through neglect or incompetence or sheer inevitability beyond each sunrise (and usually does) and one must maintain a sense of humor when “castles burn” or risk intense despair.

There was a time in this city (perhaps imaginary) when “creepie-crawly” things, such as roaches, and “furry little things,” such as rats and mice, were famously and popularly confined to the more sordid regions of town. As if there existed an instinctive caste observance amongst the city’s vermin population (not including the two-legged kind, of course) that areas such as upper-Manhattan were off-limits to them. Even during NYC’s 1970s recession, when most of this city was in the midst of financial collapse amid the squalor to prove it, would anyone expect to find such things as mice in Lincoln Center. Those expectations are now dampened.

Coming on the heels of the NYC Department of Health finding mice in F.A.O. Schwartz on Fifth Avenue, one of the world’s most opulent toy stores, the department also detected mice at the Metropolitan Opera, one of the world’s most opulent opera houses. During an April 9 inspection, “evidence of mice or live mice present in facility’s food and/or nonfood areas” were found. The Met wasn’t served with a violation notice because it had only 13 violation points (15 points are required in New York for a notice to be served…they have 2 points to go!!!).

Yahoo News further reports that: “The nation’s largest musical organization also was cited for ‘food not protected from potential source of contamination during storage, preparation, transportation, display or service’ “……”On March 28, the department said the Met had ‘plumbing not properly installed or maintained; anti-siphonage or backflow prevention device not provided where required; equipment or floor not properly drained; sewage disposal system in disrepair or not functioning properly.’ ”

In the words of Neil Young, “It’s only castles burning.” Besides, it could’ve been rats and I’m sure that they’re just around the corner.

Souce: Yahoo! News: news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080528/ap_…

The 1960 collision between a TWA Constellation and a United Airlines DC-8 over New York ranks as one of this city’s greatest disasters. I was 6-years old at the time and I’ve never forgotten that incident; in fact, I’ve always been haunted by the horrors that went unseen by me. Lacking any existing video documentation of the tragedy, it remained an event buried in history but resurrected in imagination.

This YouTube video does just that. As seen through the eyes of a ten-year old attempting to recreate that tragic day through imagination, the video provides a taste of what it looked like via a documentary-styled simulation. That’s what I’ve been doing for nearly 48 years, but had it confined to the inner-recesses of my own imagination.

For more on this, please go here:

electriceggcream.com/2007/09/28/30

Restored war monument highlights NYC Memorial Day ceremony
5/26/2008, 4:08 p.m. EDT
The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — “As the nation marks Memorial Day, New York City officials have unveiled a newly refurbished Civil War monument in Manhattan’s Riverside Park.

The city and the private Riverside Park Fund have paid more than $1 million for new plantings, chess tables, lighting and other improvements to the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. The work included cleaning and restoring a pair of 1865 U.S. Army cannons.

The nearly 100-foot-tall marble and granite monument commemorates New York State residents who fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. It was finished in 1902.”

syracuse.com/newsflash/index.ssf…

“The Bible says that God created the universe in six days. It took slightly longer for a Sunset Park artist to tackle the epic task of painting every one of His Old Testament commandments.

Indeed, Archie Rand spent five years painting all 613 commandments on individual canvases in a ‘Mad magazine style,’ and in doing so, he may have broken a few along the way (’Do not make human forms even for decorative purposes,’ was commandment number 31, according to Maimonides’s system, and  ‘Do not derive benefit from ornaments of idols,’  number 55).

‘They are very vulgar images and they are painted in garish colors,’ Rand said of his canvasses. (Vulgar? Garish? Watch out — this self-described secular Jew may be racking up sins left and right.) … …”

[read more at the link below: "It's Art, For God's Sake" by Mike McLaughlin, The Brooklyn Paper]

brooklynpaper.com/stories/31/21/…

Today marks the 125th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge. Stretching 5,989 feet across the East River to connect Brooklyn to Manhattan, it’s one of the oldest and most famous bridges in the world. Designed by John Augustus Roebling, the bridge is one of the city’s most treasured icons and it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964.

For years upon decades and countless sunrises and moonrises, New York City has included the Brooklyn Bridge (understandably) high on its list of premium tourist attractions. The bridge is located within neighborhoods rich in history, and the views from the bridge’s footpath (or walkway) and along the waterfront are breathtaking. However, while it’s (obviously) a cinch finding one’s way to the vicinity of the bridge, it’s an ordeal finding pedestrian access to the bridge itself.

While the Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods leading to and from the bridge may be historically significant, these areas also saw major changes over the past 125 years. Redevelopment and construction, often ill-planned and not very far-reaching, occurred at frequent intervals over the last century, especially during the decades immediately following the bridge’s construction and over the past twenty years.

Depressed rows of countless tenements were replaced with warehouses and factories, themselves falling into disrepair and usually abandoned. Additionally, burgeoning highways and overpasses sprouted up in the 40s/50s to further clutter an already cluttered situation. The Brooklyn Bridge became somewhat lost in this inevitable yet frenzied technological growth. Tourists, endeavoring to find the bridge’s footpath were even more lost, while they wandered streets going nowhere and down lanes that went somewhere else.

The Brooklyn Paper reports that “Sign-maker Andrew Simons created a multi-faceted project that includes not just a huge map and tourist guide, but “Welcome”-mat style concrete slabs positioned at the opening of the stairwell that leads up to the Brooklyn Bridge.

But the most impressive part of the project is light artist Linnaea Tillett’s piece, “This Way,” whose network of fluorescent bulbs steer misguided travelers to their destination.”

This is yet another “Why didn’t we think of that sooner?” stories. But while “necessity is the mother of invention,” a lost tourist is the mother of direction.

Source: Dana Rubinstein, The Brooklyn Paper

brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/1/3…

“Following news that Kennedy has a malignant brain tumor, national radio host Michael Savage opened his show by cutting audio of Kennedy with clips of reporters discussing his diagnosis and audio from Kindergarten Cop in which Schwarzenegger says, ‘It’s not a tumor.’” He later played a Dead Kennedys song saying it was ‘in some respect for’ Kennedy.”

read more | digg story

This isn’t a New York story, but since this creep Michael Savage emanated from this city I thought to include it on my blog. If anything, it’s a matter of simple human decency and compassion, which is (or should be) universal. Even though I vehemently differed with Ted Kennedy’s politics, this vehemence would never carry over to mocking his current illness (almost certain to be fatal in the near future). I don’t know what Savage is drinking these days, but whatever it is I hope that I’m never that thirsty…I wouldn’t want to become marinaded in my own ego.

Bordered by Bleecker Street to the north, Bayard Street to the south, and by Lafayette Street and the Bowery respectively to its west and east, a neighborhood called Little Italy (now Chinatown) lay situated in Lower Manhattan. This sordid area of dilapidated tenements, broken streets, and impoverished but ambitious people, was, out of necessity, called home. Life was difficult and uncertain, despair and sickness were always near, and the promises which America offered were oftentimes unfulfilled. The fanciful dreams many immigrants entertained of America having streets “paved with gold” quickly faded when they wound-up in neighborhoods such as Little Italy. As one anonymous immigrant from this time and place once observed, that “not only weren’t the streets ‘paved with gold,’ they weren’t paved at all and we soon learned that we had to pave them.”

Upon arriving in this country as a little girl from Naples in the late 1890s, my grandmother lived in one of these tenements on Mott Street. I don’t know which one, and as I study this distant image (above photo) suspended in time, it’s as strange to me as it probably is to most of you. Her mother, father, three sisters and one brother were crowded together into a four room cold flat while America entered the 20th century with hope and promise.

I, on the other hand, who grew up in the post-war years of the jet age, knew little of this time of depressed tenements, horse-drawn wagons, public baths and toilets, and so forth, now relegated to black-and-white photography. Even though my life was far from luxurious and even farther from being palatial, the streets were paved if pot-holed and the buildings were sound if cracked. My family was American, in the span of generations; even though we, at this time, lacked the American Dream goals of a house and car, we did have a television set (albeit, a tired and eccentric one).

My grandmother served as the Nestor-like oral historian, whose tales of distant times and places seemed real yet unreal, pure fact yet unconsciously exaggerated. In her broken English which, to me, sounded like fluent English (or maybe it was broken Italian which, through some Brooklyn-motivated metamorphosis, came through as perfect English), she told me of a long ago which is now even longer.

Lacking the dynamic artistry of Sergio Leone and Francis Ford Coppolla in such films as ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA and THE GODFATHER II, respectively, my grandmother was nearly as dynamic in her simple narratives of Little Italy. A fetid clamorous atmosphere which hovered over congested households, alongside crime- and rat-infested alleyways ,wherein life persevered in its daily obligation towards work, religion and family, supported yet perplexed by lingering customs at odds with a new American lifestyle.

As contrastive as Mascagni’s opera CAVALIER RUSTICANA, where love and hatred, joy and sorrow, piety and murder, held sway, the Little Italy of my grandmother’s memory and imagination emerged. These were some of the non-fictional fairy tales which were a staple of my childhood entertainment: a personal history which oftentimes defied actual history and made it more profound with its natural richness.

The maestro of fierce celluloid Martin Scorsese has teamed-up with those rockin’ vagabonds of rock The Rolling Stones for a new documentary. Filmed at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 2006, the documentary features two concerts which the Stones performed there for a select and small audience, including 30 members of the Clinton clan (and Bubba).

In this intimate setting, seating 2,800, the Stone’s nitty-grittiness, seasoned with age and mellowed with years (including wrinkles), comes through loud and clear. Interspersed with archive material from the good old days and the inevitable candid snippets, the film is as close (yet again) to a live performance as film can reach.

As Catherine Hickley of Bloomberg News observes, “it preserves for posterity a band whose popularity won’t fade away any time soon. At the front of the crowd are a lot of young, preppy, attractive women, waving ecstatically. I couldn’t quite banish the suspicion that they’d been instructed to come forward in a vain attempt to perpetuate the Stones’ long-gone sex- god image for the movie….Still, they did know all the words.”

As a kid from the good old days myself, the Stones were an essential part of my cultural distraction and merriment. While learning piano, the rumor went, via the romantic virtuosity of Rachmaninoff, I was actually learning chord progression from that of Nicky Hopkins, the Stones accompanying pianist (studio musician extraordinaire to the stars). While Hopkins is, unfortunately, deceased, it’s good to see that the Stones (alas, minus Bill Wyman) are alive and well and still doing their own thing in their own time which seems an eternity…I’m happy that Rachmaninoff is nearby (somewhere), as well, for fatherly advice.

Source: Catherine Hickley, Bloomberg News iht.com/articles/2008/02/11/arts…