Yo, where you at?

[Photo Credit: Mamrie’s Weblog]

Jeremiah Moss, who runs the most excellent blog, Vanishing New York, has a piece in the Times about the location of Edward Hopper’s famous painting, “Nighthawks.”  Moss dug through archival photographs and microfilm to pinpoint the exact spot only to discover that the scene Hopper painted didn’t entirely exist in the first place:

Back home, I dug through my bookshelves and unearthed Gail Levin’s “Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.” The book is autographed by the author — I had gone to hear Ms. Levin read in a bookshop that is now gone — and dated from a time when I was still new to the city and knew it largely, romantically, as a sprawling Hopper painting filled with golden, melancholy light. In the book, Ms. Levin reported that an interviewer wrote that the diner was “based partly on an all-night coffee stand Hopper saw on Greenwich Avenue … ‘only more so,’” and that Hopper himself said: “I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”

Partly. More so. Simplified. The hidden truth became clearer. The diner began to fade. And then I saw it — on every triangular corner, in the candy shop’s cornice and the newsstand’s advertisement for 5-cent cigars, in the bakery’s curved window and the liquor store’s ghostly wedge, in the dark bricks that loom in the background of every Village street.

Over the past years, I’ve watched bakeries, luncheonettes, cobbler shops and much more come tumbling down at an alarming rate, making space for condos and office towers. Now the discovery that the “Nighthawks” diner never existed, except as a collage inside Hopper’s imagination, feels like yet another terrible demolition, though no bricks have fallen.

I’ve come to appreciate Moss’ blog–it’s a regular stop for me–but I don’t share his disappointment here because I think an artist’s natural inclination is to combine his (or her) imagination with what they see in real life. Once it becomes a picture, on the canvas, it has its own rules, and isn’t meant to be a document like a photograph. And this picture gets at one of Hopper’s most compelling (and enduring) themes–“the lonliness of the big city.”

 When I look at the painting, actually, my eye always goes across the street to the empty store front on the left-hand side of the canvas, the triangle-shape of green in the middle window above that store. I love how it gives balance to the scene inside the diner. It is an empty space but sturdy and sure.

I lived in Los Angeles for a little over four months when I was working for the Coen brothers on The Big Lebowski. An old college pal was good enough to let me crash on his couch in Santa Monica. We spent many weekends down at another college friend’s crib in Venice, hanging out on the balcony, checking out the scene on the boardwalk by the beach.

A record by a group named Sublime was on heavy-rotation at the time. It wasn’t the kind of record I usually go for, or even have the opportunity to hear for that matter, but there was something catchy about their pop, surfer sound, and it seemed entirely fitting to that time and place. So the record is forever linked to my memories of L.A. and the beach. I never did buy it–though later found out that my wife (who has some of the most finicky musical tastes of anyone I’ve ever met) loves it.

Here’s one of the tunes that brings me back to the beach with a smile:

Milo Manara

Okay, you want something healthy? Dig this tasty-looking tomato, mozzarella and farro salad from food52. Food goddess Jennifer Hess (who writes the devastatingly delicious site, Last Night’s Dinner) gave it a try and liked it muchly.

R.I.P. Rammellzee

Over at New York Magazine, a guy named Harry Hanrahan put together a list of the 100 greatest movie insults of all time. He would have been wiser to just call it 100 great movie insults because his choice of movies shows an extremely limited range (only one Groucho line and no W.C. Fields or Mae West).

Still, it’s a smile, with lots of cherce cursing.

Enjoy:

Andre Franquin

Ever been livid watching a movie? I’m such a prig there is no shortage of movies that have gotten my red ass going, especially during my high school and college years (When Harry Met Sally, Thelma and Louise, Born on the 4th of July, and The Crying Game come to mind). But the first time I was angry watching a movie came much earlier, when I was ten-years old an my mom took me to see Chariots of Fire. God, that theme song, which was played on the radio for the longest, never failed to angry up the blood:

So: movie fury. Whadda ya hear, whadda say?

Time for some “happy rap.”

This song never fails to put a spring in my step, as it did this morning on my way to work. Who cares if Greg Nice doesn’t know what instrument Dizzy played.

Over at the New York Times, Harold Mcgee writes that the secret to ribs is already in the kitchen: the oven. Peep, don’t sleep. And here are some more ideas for the grill…

[Photo Credit: A Yankee in a Southern Kitchen]

Hugo Pratt

Tango…

What makes the Hottentot so hot? …Courage, y’all, courage…

As Bugs Bunny would say…”Gasp.”

Times two…

Sticking with comic book artists again this week, let’s go spanning the globe.

First, up, the legendary Herge:

Since it is hotter n July today, why not check out a scene from this classic NYC summer flick:

I remember seeing this on opening day near Times Square (my friends and I were the only white kids is the audience). I’ll never forget how we were introduced to Rosie Perez, shadow-boxing of sorts over P.E. Man, the movie, and that theater were charged–hyped, as they used to say.

I don’t think Do the Right Thing is a great movie, but it’s as close as Spike has gotten and I think it is his best, even though it is deeply flawed. It is funny as hell, Ernest Dickerson’s photography is weird and evocative, and Spike really captured a moment in time. When this movie dropped, he was hottest thing in town.

Cool like a cucumber, that’s how we roll in the summertime.

There’s all sorts of ways to flip cucumbers (here’s a recipe for the salad picture above). When I used to wait tables the Amigos in the kitchen would slice cucumbers and sprinkle salt and chili powder on them, followed by a squeeze of lemon. It’d be a macho thing to see how much chili powder you could stand.

I usually have ’em plain with some kosher salt.

All-City.

[Picture by Bags]

There is no higher…