Mallory&#39;s Camera

How did that book get into her dream?

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The City and The City!! :-)

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Well, it's been called that for some time. That's near Crown Heights, right? Bordering the southeast corner of Prospect Park?

It went by that name when I was a NYC cabdriver in the late 70s. Nice area. That line of apartment building on Ocean Avenue facing the park is really snazz.

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In which case, I was there just a short time ago, to attend that poly picnic.

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I thought you might have been! The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens was one of my hangouts when I was a kid. That and the library at Grand Army Plaza.

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We just hung out around the boathouse in the park, but now that I know how to get to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens I'll have to go back and see it!

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I've been longing to revisit the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens forever. Perhaps that can be our adventure when we finally meet in real life. It's beautiful in the springtime.

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That would be great! Let's keep it in mind.

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old-cutter-john.livejournal.com

Me too! Until the fall of '63, more or less. I still have some original Kodachrome slides that I took in the Garden.

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Would love to see those slides sometime. Do you remember the parrot they used to let fly around loose in the greenhouse?

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old-cutter-john.livejournal.com

I stayed out of the greenhouse. I was a male teenager. Autistic, too, though I didn't know that at the time. I expected to be hassled by whoever was in charge, like I was hassled for going upstairs to the adult reading rooms in the library.

I'll keep you in mind for the slides, right behind the scanner I got for them a year or so ago, and still haven't unpacked.

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Oh, I remember the fist time I ventured into the adult reading room! I was 12 but exceedingly tall for my age, having already reached my full 5'10" height. So I expect they thought I was a teenager.

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Well, if you were there 31 years ago, you could have hailed my cab.:)

I drove for a company called Scull's Angel's. The doors of the cab had little skulls with wings on them. Really.

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I left NYC in 1968 to go to college on the west coast. Have gone back to visit but never back to Brooklyn. I grew up on the upper West Side and the changes there were hard enough on my inner Thomas Wolfe.

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Huge swaths of NYC become utterly unrecognizable to me about every ten years, but other parts seem eternally the same. I have to say though that I understand now why old people are sometimes cranky. They (we) have seen enormous change in the course of their lives, and not all of it good.

The last time I was in NYC, I did a lot of walking, and found that a number of places I used to live had been demolished. It was like someone was following me around with an eraser. The rathole my first wife and I lived in in the mid 70s, on 45th street between 5th and 6th (an area I used to refer to as being "just 50 short pimps from times Square") has been torn down, in fact two thirds of the whole block, including the old Seymour Hotel, has been mowed and replaced by glass towers.

The Algonquin, around the corner on 44th, was still there, but the lobby lounge was filled with Japanese tourists, rather than the Cheeveresque types who used to hang there. And no sign of the house cat.

Jeez I just realized I've dated myself by referring to it as "6th Avenue." Even in the 70s, when I was driving cab, most of my fares called it "Avenue of the Americas."

I guess what pisses me off the most about New York is how effectively actual New Yorkers have been pushed out of the city. It's like the entire borough of Mahattan has been turned into a giant theme park for fashionistas and rich college students. They come, stay a few years, drive the rents further up while drinking $14 crantinis, and move on.

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I guess what pisses me off the most about New York is how effectively actual New Yorkers have been pushed out of the city.

Yeah, that pisses me off too. At the time I was growing up on the Upper Westside, it was a lower middle class neighborhood -- with some enclaves of wealth, of course: I lived right in back of the San Remo twin towers and used to babysit for the daughter of a Broadway producer named Lewis Allen. But half a block away it was walkups and low rents. Don't think you can live in Manhattan now on an income of less than $150,000 a year.

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Don't think you can live in Manhattan now on an income of less than $150,000 a year

Maybe so, but I've got phone #s in my rolodex for at least a half dozen jazz musicians who get by on less than a quarter of that. Of course, they have to live like a rat, and occasionally I'll get word of "rent stabilization casualties" like my pal Marc Ribot, a guitar player who appears on a lot of late period Tom Waits albums. The last time I was in NYC (2007) he told me his rent had gone from $2000 a month to $3700 a month in one swell foop. "That's it brah," he said. "I'm in Jersey."

He also pointed out something that's really obvious to most musicians, but totally under the radar of the general public; one big reason jazz is so much healthier in Europe than in America is, performance spaces in Europe are almost always subsidized in some way. Even places that look like freestanding jazz bars, like the Bimhause in Amsterdam, turn out to have been donated to the local jazz society, or leased to them at some token, dollar-a-year rate.

Meanwhile a club like Tonic in Manhattan is always going under and throwing last-ditch benefit concert to raise money to cover shortfalls, then a year later they're back in the hole again. The truth is, you simply can't present live music, ANY kind of live music, in a space that costs $20,000 a month to rent. You just can't.

I read a book years ago called something like the Death of American Bohemia or something, that posits the dearth of intellectual and artistic life in America is really a function of rising real estate prices and little else.

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The same Lewis Allan who wrote "Strange Fruit" and "The House That I Live In"????

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Where on the Upper West Side?

I'm trying to remember the name of that bar on 110th and Broadway, near Columbia, that used to advertise 100 different kinds of draft, and "student food at student prices." They had jazz for a while too. I played in there in 1979, with Al Grey from Count Basie's band.

Was it the West End Cafe?

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Yep. The West End Cafe.

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It's so weird to me to think of autumn in full swing. Monday I went to one of the highest points nearby to look down on the trees and see whether any sign of autumn is showing yet. The trees are only just starting to look a bit tinged with red and brown, with no sign of orange or yellow yet.

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