Blog Archives

Big Nick’s was a burger spot on Broadway between 76th and 77th streets. Been there forever. It closed recently and is apparently moving uptown. My stepmother used to live a block-and-a-half away and I’ve known about the place since the mid-’80s. It served overpriced but fabulously greasy burgers. The atmosphere was cramped and humid, like being jammed into a fogged-out fishbowl. Terrific New York characters worked the grill and waited tables. It was a neighborhood fixture, for sure.

I walked by a few days ago and was sorry to see it, like so many other joints, was no more.

Life in and around the Big Apple according my pictures over on Instagram. 

“View Into The Artist’s Garden” by Philipp Roth (1909)

Ivan Nova squares off against the talented Mr. Weaver.

Brett Gardner CF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Curtis Granderson DH
Alfonso Soriano LF
Lyle Overbay 1B
Eduardo Nunez SS
Chris Stewart C

Never mind getting ahead of ourselves:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Kevin Hulsey]

Kevin Cyr via the so so def Jhalal Drut.

Appetite for China does cold sesame noodles.

Just the two of us.

[Painting by Elmer Bischoff]

Golden Years by the most-talented Kendrick Brinson.

“Orange Sweater” by Elmer Bischoff (1955)

I saw this kid on the subway this morning. Sitting next to his girl, plump and black with a gap between her two front teeth. She wore a black T-shirt and black shorts, white socks and flip flops.

I remarked on the kid’s tattoo and asked if I could take a picture. The train was moving so I didn’t get a good shot but he was happy to let me photograph him. Maybe it’s a generational thing–kids are used to putting themselves out into the world now.

They are from Tallahassee, Florida and have been in New York for a week.

I wonder what he’s done to make him ink “Forgive Me” on his neck.

Jimmy Picker’s 1983 Oscar-winning short.

Well, Goddamn. The Score Truck and an old fashioned Bronx beat down. Remember them?

The game was close, the Yanks were behind early, but then they proceeded to beat the snot out of the Angels, and after a late rain delay, and an unfortunate performance by Dellin Betances, the Yanks won by a touchdown, 14-7. Couple of homers and 6 RBI for Lil’ Sori; 4 Ribbies for Nunez, a win for C.C.

Yeah, it was a good night.

It’s C.C. C’mon Big Fella, we got your back.

Eduardo Nunez SS
Alfonso Soriano LF
Robinson Cano 2B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Vernon Wells RF
Curtis Granderson CF
Jayson Nix 3B
Lyle Overbay 1B
Austin Romine C

Never mind the raindrops:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Martha Cooper]

Buck O’Neil meets Jay Dee. A little something we threw together a few years ago:

[Photo Via: Haphazardous]

Over at Narratively, Shannon Firth profiles our man, Michael Popek (aka “unmoderated”):

Michael Popek remembers visiting his grandfather’s four-story home in New Jersey, where anything that could be collected, was—stamps, toy train cars, cap guns, autographs, baseball cards. “There was a standing order not to touch any of the WWI grenades,” Popek says. As far as his grandfather knew, these were still live and active.

Those visits happened long before Popek, now 35, started gathering his own assortment of collectibles: things left between the pages of books, or as he calls them, Forgotten Bookmarks. It seems destined to happen, given that Popek comes from a family of collectors. He grew up in an old farmhouse in Oneonta, a small town in upstate New York. His father, Peter Popek, a former UPS deliveryman, started a book business in the mid-eighties, but only after coming upon a too-good-to-be-true deal at a local auction.

The offer was 5,000 books for $10. He paid an additional $10 for delivery. According to the elder Popek, no one wanted these books, including him. “We had no interest in books. We didn’t know anything about them. But we didn’t want to waste ‘em,” Peter Popek says. Within a few years, Michael’s father had filled a barn in the backyard with over 20,000 books. The Popeks also bought and sold antiques and owned a small shop in town, not far from their house. Slowly, though, the book collection muscled its way into the antique shop and took over much of the space.

[Photo Credit: Jessica Bal]

Minced pork salad is just one of the dishes featured in Saveur‘s Thai-inspired feast.

[Photo Credit: Penny de los Santos]

Cool post on the apartment building in the shadow of Yankee Stadium over at Scouting New York.

Held over until next Tuesday is the Film Forum’s run of Intolerance.

Here’s Glenn Kenny:

If you have not seen D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance since film school, or film appreciation class, or years ago on public television, etc., or worse yet (or maybe better yet, as it happens) have never seen it at all, get yourself down to Manhattan’s Film Forum starting tomorrow and catch it, in a stunning new restoration released by The Cohen Film Collection. It is nearly one hundred years old and I will put money down that it will be the most spectacularly vital film running theatrically in the five buroughs as of its first screening.

Why? Well, it’s not just the structure: in making this ostensible “answer picture” to the (completely justified) protests pertaining to his 1915 The Birth of a Nation, Griffith conceived four tales of this movie’s title theme, each set in a different age and place, and interwove them cinematically, with one of the key effects being, as Kevin Brownlow has so memorably described, a sweeping up of the viewer into four separate and equally engrossing climaxes in the film’s final third. This was/is admitedly a daring storytelling gambit, and not a whole lot of conventional narrative filmmakers have tried to meet this challenge since (although in a mildly ironic coincidence, noted Griffith disapprover Quentin Tarantino has performed structural tricks that Intolerance certainly set a kind of precedent for, in both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown). That’s the thing I absorbed pretty well on my first screening of Intolerance long ago, so it didn’t knock me out this time around. Nor, for that matter, did the content, although it is quite fascinationg. The discursive “modern day” story finds Griffith wrestling with his inner Victorian to concoct a condemnation of priggish reformers. The conception of the fall of Babylon has an interesting proto-feminist component in the person of a character named “Mountain Girl.” And so on. All good stuff. Pauline Kael has noted that the film contains the seeds of every kind of silent and then sound studio film that came immediately after it. And more than that: the movie has surprising scenes of nudity, quasi-nudity, and extreme violence and gore. There’s a beheading or two; the effects for these are not particularly convincing, but hey, they were in there pitching. In this respect, and given the movie’s still staggering scale of spectacle and set-construction (it’s almost impossible to believe that Griffith conceived, produced, shot, edited, and released such an elaborate movie in a mere year after his prior one), what Kael says still goes.

R. Crumb drawing, 1964 via The Bristol Board.

Wonderful post about NYC record stores over at Flaming Pablum.