new york
After dinner, Andy and I stopped by a bookstore that was next to St. Mark’s Comedy Club. Unorganized, lots of underground poetry, ended up getting “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and a preface to Plato. I asked the guy if they had any Ed Sanders (his Tales of Beatnick Glory shaped my sense of history of this neighborhood). They had that same book, signed,
... See moreImpressions on the standup comics and crowds in Midtown for the East Village.
Midtown: Long-Island like, sports and sex jokes, louder, more stereotypically New York, Mitch Hedburg, played into racial stereotypes, comfortable, comedy as a hobby, beer culture.
East Village: nuanced, less obvious punchlines, more believable personal stories, drug/marij
On that big escalator going up into Grand Central, and I visualized a full longitudinal section of Manhattan (from Battery Park to Central Park, showing the bedrock differences, and also the famous facade of GC). I imagined myself as a little scale figure in that architectural drawing, and as I moved my hand in real-life, a little pixel updated in
... See moreOn 2nd Avenue & St. Mark’s, there’s a noise band performing on a rooftop near the intersection, and as you walk east, the nature of the sound reflections change in weird ways.
The Long Island highways are flashing “ARRIVE EARLY, STAY LATE,” to warn everybody of the upcoming eclipse-induced traffic surge.
I’m sure someone’s written about the romanticism of bookstores before, or at least a “How to Bookstore” manual. There’s a kind of Keuroacian self-bullshit I experienced going to the Strand, some grand narrative, some story on the lifelong pursuit of logos. Then the first 10 minutes is a whimsical flick through the carefully curated on-display books
... See moreThe church near the Strand bookstore on 13th/14th. Walked by this so many times; now I know where it is. It also reminds me of that AI recolorized video from the 1920s, where people walked on this lawn outside these buttresses.
The NY post office (up on Lexington) looks like a structure that could have been as grand as Grand central. Now it has a tiny Fedex at a corner, a WeWork, and probably some commercial office space inside.
Coming through and out of Grand Central, I experienced something like “alien thought” for the second time in this place. It was exotic, amoral, strangeness; a weird mix of color and shape-sifting sci-fi scenes. Then there was something like “snare drum shamanism,” where I could hear and see the buzzing rolls of wooden sticks on a tight drum head, a
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