newyorkette

I love neon drawings.

This guy in front of my laundromat reminded me of a Spanish joke that either my friend Juan or Pajaro told me:

A man goes to a famous sculptor and asks to become his apprentice. The sculptor gives the apprentice a block of marble and a chisel and says: ” ¡ Sácame San Francisco ! ” (transl.: Get me Saint Francis out of that piece of marble!) So the apprentice begins chiselling away. Days later, he’s still chiselling. Two weeks later he’s chiselled the block down to a rod as thin as a pencil. “But what is this? What are you doing? Are you crazy?” asked the sculptor. And the apprentice says, “Don’t worry, boss! If Saint Francis is in there, I’ll find him soon!”

And while we’re on the subject of Hispanophones, Viva Ecuador!

The C-Town on Broadway, somewhere around 155th street.

The Rosa bakery on Broadway between 137th and 138th.

There have been a lot of birthdays coming up lately, so this one goes out to everyone!

How’s that for a “come up and see me sometime” ?

Since this is what we started the week with, this is how I’m wrapping it up. In blue. I snapped this pic with my phone as I arrived at my favorite place to get my hair cut three times a year, Ultra.

These articles about “Big Blue” (I’ve decided that’s what I’m calling it, rather than the more distinguished, “The Blue Building”) are the first things I saw on Monday morning:
Gothamist on “Blue.”
NYTimes on “Blue.”

And hey! I just realized! Today is the anniversary of the day I finally left home in September 1987, with a one-way ticket outta here!

They say when in New York you should look up. But sometimes you should look down: this is one segment of the south sidewalk on 26th street between 10th and 11th. (Or possibly 11th and 12th! I’m very bad with remembering numbers!)

I love my neighborhood. I’ll miss it someday.

The view downtown, more easily accessible with the livingroom windows removed. (For replacement, of course.)

(Brighton Beach, August 2007)

I like to call these girls my Brighton Graces.

Related: My first Brighton Beach Babe painting, “Coney Island Venus,” here.

My parents met at Roseland in 1961. I’d never seen it before today. Did it really look like this back then? I wonder.

(the back of the ice cream truck on my block).

Need I say more?

Above: “The Shortcut,” as it’s locally known. It is on the property of the Long Island Railroad, behind the fence (the one with the hole cut in it), on the shoulder of the train tracks, and technically in Nassau County.

I know. It’s a little snooty to use the Latin, but the day I had to translate a piece called “Scala Coeli” in my Medieval Latin class, and realized it meant “Stairway to Heaven,” I decided I would use that phrase every chance I got, at the drop of a hat, if possible.

Anyway, having dropped that hat, I’d like to direct you to the polaroid above: it was taken long ago, sometime before the year 2000. What you are looking at is the handiwork of my eccentrically resourceful father. Before this stairway existed, the commuters of our neighborhood used to clamber up this little hill in their good shoes and business suits up to the train tracks, walk along them for about twenty feet, then climb up the emergency ladder to the platform. All this to avoid walking the long way around, which would have taken five extra minutes.

You may think that’s very lazy and petty of them, but when your commute is more than an hour and a half door to door, every minute that ticks by while you’re not being paid feels like one more hack into the liver of Prometheus by that giant eagle, you being a commuting, 9 to 5, Prometheus. You can see how five more minutes to sit at their breakfast table reading The Post would be very important to them, burdened as they were with the bitterness of the gainfully employed.

My father used to mow the grass that led to this slope, as a matter of commuter hygiene. But one day he must have got tired of slipping on wet leaves or loose gravel. He improvised a stairway, deploying some discarded railroad ties he found near the tracks. Slapped on a coat of reflective paint, for higher visibility in the dark of early winter mornings and weary overtime nights. The LIRR soon discovered the precursors to the stairs in the photo above and ripped them out. My father put them back. They ripped them out again. He put them back again, this time with deep piles embedding them into the side of the slope. They ripped them out again and caused a landslide that nearly displaced the tracks above. They also removed the emergency ladder from the platform, to further discourage sleepyheaded commuters from walking along the train tracks and causing the conductors of oncoming express trains to suffer daily morning rush hour panic attacks (and perhaps the occasional nightmare).

Most of the commuters continued to clamber up through the rubble, having evolved to wear black Reeboks instead of nice work shoes. Deprived of the emergency ladder, they crossed the tracks instead, in complete defiance (or perhaps in fed-up death-wish mode) of the third rail, then used the overpass to get to their desired platform. My dad, not one to risk his life for an extra five minutes of anything, got a rope ladder. Eventually he found the rope ladder a little heavy to bring to work and back. He put abrasive tape on the metal supports of a billboard anchored to the train platform’s handrails, and got some well-treaded sneakers…

Every morning till he retired he performed an incongruously Spiderman-like stunt (not bad for a near senior citizen with a danish in his bag), occasionally startling a newspaper-absorbed, coffee-slurping woman by calling out a very businesslike, “excuse me!” from below to make sure she’d understand he was not interested in gazing at her panties but only impatient to climb up under the handrails and on to the platform.

For the walk home, he kept a stash of long, thin branches for his private use by the base of the billboard, and they served the purpose of waving away spider webs that had formed in his path during the day.

Nothing worse than spider web in your face in the middle of the night.

(The Hudson River, last weekend, as a slushy.)

Brrr!

The view from 137th street, facing northwest.

Who lives in that giant building? Something I wonder all the time. And more importantly, where’s the snow?

The view from the 25th floor of the Chrysler building, whose shadow you see projected upon the Met Life building. At about 10am, Wednesday.

(The view from 1441 Broadway, on the West side.)

Have a nice weekend everyone!

(The view from 1441 Broadway, from the fire escape, (aka, the smoker’s sanctuary): that’s the Empire State Building in the reflection!)

I took pics of all the views I could see from the 25th floor of 1441 Broadway, where I spent the week doing showroom for Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans. They were very nice to me, fed me for free, which is really all a person wants from a client, besides getting paid! I even got a Tables for One out of it (coming up on a Monday near you).

CORRECTION! Below is the view from the fire escape! The view above must be the view from the other side (where the Empire State building is reflected). Whoopsie!

The view downtown from the Metro-North Harlem-125th Street platform.

I’ve always loved outdoor train platforms. Here’s my new favorite one. Views of the Hudson from the train next time.

And I’ve been dying to point to my latest cartoon in The New Yorker, but the Cartoonbank hasn’t received its magazine yet (it got lost in the mail), so it hasn’t been able to scan this week’s cartoons into their database yet! That may make anyone out there who’s still waiting for their magazine to arrive in the mail think “ha ha!” I’ll put it up as soon as they do! Or maybe scan it myself after work.

PS - ATTENTION ALL NEW YORKERS! If you still have your Christmas tree, this is the weekend to bring it to one of the Parks Department’s mulching centers! For all you RSS-ers, just click on the “Mulchfest” link on the upper right of newyorkette’s main page for more info. (To reach the main page, click on the newyorkette heart above).

UPDATE:
here it is! Here it is, finally!

The inspiration was the movie, In the Heat of the Night, the scene where Rod Steiger says to Sidney Poitier, “Boy, it would give me great pleasure to horsewhip you, Virgil!” It just sounded funny. And the next time I got mad at a friend of mine, I thought of those words, and then the second clause (“but it’s not sexual” came to me).