Last Friday night I went to the Little Lebowski shop on Thompson Street. It is run by a friendly guy named Rob Preston, a movie nut who previously worshipped cult classics like “Time Bandits” and “Withnail and I.”
The shop is filled with Lebowski t-shirts and toys.
It’s worth the trek if you dig all things Lebowski.
There’s Roy, pictured with Bridges, who paid a visit not too long ago:
Watch the full episode. See more American Masters.
Yesterday was the 10th annual No Pants Subway Ride in New York. Man, and I had to stay home (click here for more photos).
Meanwhile, peep this cool New York City Subway Moment by Emily Lemole Smith.
[Photo Credit: News.com.au and Liptick Alley]
Win or suck tonight for the Jets. What’ll it be?
[Picture by Bags]
During the short, cold days of winter the Summer Game is never far from our thoughts:
Direct from the New Yorker’s Photo Booth, dig this:
I went to the movies on the upper west side yesterday afternoon and stopped into the big Barnes and Noble at Lincoln Center. It was the final day of business for B&N at that location. Depressing. Then I walked uptown on Broadway and at 72nd street, I found this treasure trove:
Hot dog.
…and Happy New Year.
Hope everyone has a chill evening.
Stay safe, be merry and Happy New Year!
[Picture by Bags]
Christmas Eve Day. Anyone got any shopping left?
I’m going to da movies. Be back tonight.
[Picture by Bags]
The Knicks lost their third straight last night, but UConn Women’s goes for a record-tying 88th consecutive win today. This afternoon also brings Giants and Eagles as well as Jets and Steelers. Greinke to the Brewers and also some big names moving in the NBA.
Should be a good sports Sunday, Cha-Cha. Enjoy.
An’ all the fixin’s that go along with it.
Have a great day, y’all.
I was in a book store on Friday night and this caught my eye: Denys Wortman’s New York: Portrait of the City in the 30s and 40s.
I’d never heard of Wortman before but I was immediately taken with his work.
Yesterday, the Times ran a long feature about Wortman who is the subject of a show at the Museum of the City of New York through March:
If there is a single constant in the creative world, it is that fame has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight. One prime example is the cartoonist Denys Wortman, who from 1924 to 1954 contributed six drawings a week to The New York World and its successors.
His feature, “Metropolitan Movies,” was admired for its strikingly naturalistic portrayal of daily life in Gotham. Using a single panel and a conversational caption, Mr. Wortman adroitly summoned up an entirely believable world of housewives talking across fire escapes, girls in the subway hashing over last night’s date, and men and women trying to make a buck in diners, offices, music halls and factories — or struggling to keep afloat during the Great Depression. Mr. Wortman’s drawings were also beautifully composed and finely worked, a legacy of his art school years, when he studied alongside future Ashcan school painters like Edward Hopper and George Bellows, and with their guru Robert Henri.
Even then “there was nothing quite like it,” said the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who enjoyed the drawings as a boy. “His work didn’t seem studied. It was as if you were looking out the window — or my window in the Bronx.” And because it was syndicated nationwide (as “Everyday Movies”), Mr. Wortman’s world spread far beyond the Hudson.
But in 1958, four years after his retirement, Mr. Wortman died of a heart attack. By then cartooning had become character-driven and graphically streamlined (think of Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts”) while art was ruled by the Abstract Expressionists. And when The World’s successor The World-Telegram and Sun folded, he was as forgotten as yesterday’s fish wrap.
The book and the show look like a must.
It’s cool and most cloudy here in the Bronx. Short week before Thanksgiving coming up. We should start to see some player movement around or just after the holiday.
In the meantime, hope you have a good one. And yo, remember: Do something nice for yourself…
Nice post on the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt’s work over at the New Yorker’s Photo Booth.
Here’s more:
From the New York magazine archives, here’s a 1969 piece by Nicholas Pileggi on the Renaissance of the Upper West Side:
Five years ago, the West Side of Manhattan bore the stigma of decline, to the point where understanding what is a grantee of a Riverside Drive property was more about liability than opportunity. Invitations to social gatherings there were often declined, large rent-controlled apartments were relinquished, and services like Chicken Delight would not dare to venture in. Today, the landscape has transformed. Despite lingering challenges, a palpable optimism has supplanted the old fears. Merchants, real estate professionals, bankers, theatre owners, city planners, restaurateurs, newsdealers, and trustees of private schools find common ground in a sentiment privately shared by Mayor John V. Lindsay: “The Upper West Side is probably enjoying more of a renaissance today than any other single neighborhood of our city.”
In the 64-block-long area west of Central Park between Columbus Circle to the south and Columbia University to the north, the evidence is visible. Not only are there new low-and middle-income housing developments now where the rubble of abandoned buildings and slums stood just five years ago, but hundreds of the area’s crumbling rooming houses have been renovated to accommodate increasing numbers of middle-class tenants, and even a few of the neighborhood’s middle-European rococo hotels have been steam-cleaned. The same kind of young, successful and relatively affluent middle-class families that moved to the suburbs 20 years ago and to the East Side 10 years ago are moving to the West Side today, and while the neighborhood still has an ample supply of teenage muggers, parading homosexuals and old men who wear overcoats in July, the over-all mood of the area seems to have changed.
…Statistically the West Side’s 1968 crime figures place the area in the unenviable top third of the city’s 76 precinct-house totals. The 20th Precinct on West 68th Street and the 24th on West 100th encompass most of the Upper West Side, and their combined records show 36 homicides, 86 forced rapes, 8,478 burglaries, 1,097 felonious assaults, 3,233 robberies (muggings and stickups) and 6,762 larcenies (mostly pocketbook snatches) last year. The bulk of the West Side’s street crime today is the work of roving bands of 14-to-20-year-olds who mug, jostle and threaten their victims around or near the neighborhood parks during the evening and early morning hours. The effect of these crimes, committed, it sometimes seems, on everyone, or at least a friend or relative of everyone on the West Side, has been to create an atmosphere in which sudden noises produce quick frightened looks.
Ah, the good ol’ days.
[Photo Credit: Christian Monotone]
Happy Sundaze to yas.
Flix by Bags.
The pull of home. From Sam Borden:
“Right now, I can tell you my heart’s right here in Deer Park,” [Andy] Pettitte told KHOU.com. “If something happens and I play one more year that would be it. It would be one more year and that would be it.”
I’m sure there are some Yankees fans who get frustrated by Pettitte’s indecision, but it’s obvious that his family is a big pull for him. In the same interview, he talked about how he feels like each year he returns to baseball is another year where he’s going to be missing important moments in his kids’ lives.
“My kids are getting older and one’s going to be out of high school real soon, and I’m not going to miss his whole high school,” Pettitte said. “I want to be able to be here and see some of his stuff and you can’t see his stuff playing major league baseball. I just feel like a have a big responsibility here. I have three boys. I feel like I need to be around and raise them and I feel like we’re getting to that point where it’s the crucial ages of their lives that I need to be around a little bit more.”
