I saw this peeling, yellowed and filthy sign offering “Easy Credit” in a neglected storefront around the corner from my apartment the other day. I wonder if the store went out if business as a result of offering Easy Credit, or if it went out of business long before credit collapsed in this country.
Somebody came along with a marker and edited the sign to say “Easy Credit For Homicides.” I know there’s some serious gang activity in South Williamsburg – the wave of gentrification hasn’t created nearly as high as it has on the North side – but man, I hope that particular credit market has locked up, too. I just signed a yearlong lease by the Marcy stop on the JMZ …
Emmet is my neighbor. He’s a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. His owners found him in a gutter in Louisville, Kentucky, a tiny little neglected piglet crying and dying in a pile of wet leaves. They rescued him, nursed him back to health and it looks like he hasn’t missed too many meals since.
Emmet is the physically densest mammal I have ever seen -he feels like he is made out of warm, bristle-covered cannonballs. He loves having the spot between his little piggy shoulder blades scratched.
I only ever see Emmet on misty, overcast mornings – the kind of mornings that really activate New York’s greyness, the ones that give this grey city some serious character and color. It’s like Emmet emerges from the city’s hazy, sleepy dream state. Nobody else is ever around to see him except for me, my girlfriend, and Emmet’s leash-holders.
We always talk about the South, me and Maggie and Emmet’s people. We talk about how great it is, what an amazing, rich and Gothic creepiness the South has and how we are so glad it runs through our blood. And how glad we are that we moved up here, too.
The South is a spectacular place to be from, but not always a good place to be at. Love the culture, hate the crippling willful ignorance, I say.
(I’m not even gonna try to source this. I saw it on someone’s Flickr, who yanked it from someone else’s LiveJournal, who stole it from someone else’s Photobucket. If you took the photo, drop us a line. Otherwise, relax and enjoy.)
The five minutes I spent seeing the band below play on the L train platform at Union Square were way better than the hour and a half I spent in the theater watching “Bruno” immediately afterwards.
But this isn’t a film review here – this is exactly why I live in New York. I just spent a little time in Missoula, and while there were plenty of dirty dreadlocks and bongos out in the street out there, there wasn’t NOTHIN’ like this. This was like The Flaming Lips meets Soul Jazz with just a touch of the bear-and-a-BJ clip from the Shining.
I accidentally covered the mike on my phone with my thumb there for about 30 seconds or so. The sound’ll come back, don’t worry:
One of my best friends from high school is a GED teacher for some really, really bad kids. He recently turned an act of classroom disrespect into a “teachable moment,” schooling the youngster in the art of writing an apology letter.
A while back, I came across a 1968 Big Little Book featuring Aquaman, in a story titled “Scourge of the Sea“. The book is beat to hell, with the binding glue failing and pages falling out, the cover is creased in half with Aquaman’s face gouged out by repeated scribbling with a ballpoint pen, and there are a few holes where the assailant then stabbed the book with said pen… but the contents are gold. Specifically, the captioned illustrations… which are weird and wonderful little self-contained tableaus when taken out of context. I plan to share these illustration pages here for your quiet reflection, in no particular order and without their supporting story text, whenever I feel like it.
This is… Aquaman Zen.
