the anti-Chelsea

–anti the new Chelsea.
Our block of 23rd Street still has some of the most interesting shops and venues to be found in the City, although the latest developments here are almost surely harbingers of what is to come in this neighborhood.

On the south side, going from east to west, after the subway stairs there is a branch clinic of a large hospital; a (largely European-oriented, small-budget) modest-sized hotel with a new, small, alarmingly-conventional-in-appearance restaurant on the ground floor; a new, relativly upscale Thai restaurant, with an improbable massage/nails/waxing clinic above; the entrance to a large apartment building; a lively middle-eastern deli; a groovy hair salon; a humble arts supply store; a shoe repair and shoeshine shop operated by Central Americans; an on again/off again (now TWIRL) club; an acupuncture healing center; and a fishing tackle store (with occasional fly-casting demonstrations in the street).
Next there is an important guitar store; the Chelsea Hotel and, below it, Serena’s bar; a tiny Greek tailor shop; a landmark Spanish restaurant; a serious comic book store; a tattoo parlor; a synagogue; a bank; the entrance to a loft apartment building; a 99-cent store (the new Woolworths?); a wonderful healthfood store and counter; the entrance to more loft apartments; another bank; a restaurant with bar below (sometime venue for Hedda Lettuce); a multiplex cinema; a very good Mexican take-in and -out next to a small stationery store, with apartments above both; a pizza and calzone shop; and, finally the shell of the store until recently occupied by a classic coffee and donut counter, with a bike messenger office above, just before the 8th Avenue subway stairs at the corner.
On the north side, beginning in the east again with the 7th Avenue subway stairs, there is a RadioShack and above it, a “multicultural unisex” beauty salon; a classic Andrew Carnegie library; the original YMCA (its future in question or cancelled); a Chinese laundry; a 1-hr. Photo shop where you can get your image printed on porcelain or fabric; a definitely-not-casual mens clothing shop (fifteen years ago a real, genteel ladies dress shop); a great mid-eastern take-out food shop with four or so chairs; the entrance to an apartment building; a tailor shop; a tax services office; a candy shop which sells cigarettes and sundries; a hair stylist; a great sewing supplies center; the American Communist Party headquarters, with bookstore (books now moving upstairs for lack of interest, or of walk-in business); various foot, teeth and eye doctors combined; a fine pet supply center (no pets); a vacant store; a tiny news and LOTTO store, missing only a pot-bellied stove for atmosphere.
Then there is a classic Italian barber shop; a dentist to the right and just inside the entrance of a large coop apartment house (ours), through which a fabulous garden can be seen; a beautiful woman selling incense on the sidewalk daily; a very bouncy quite-gay clubkids clothing shop (we thought it was tiny clothing for real kids at first); a traditional, very-non-chain copy shop; a record shop for collectible rock only (albums in window all faded to blue); a KrispyKreme (yuck) with wigstore above; a vacant store; a “coming-soon” tanning salon above an extraordinary and very attractive gourmet hot dog restaurant; a pseudo-trampy marguerita restaurant (nice picket fence around the sidewalk tree, but it’s gonna choke the Ginko!); a totally boring representative of the chain, Boston Market; the block’s very friendly (and more important than we think) sidewalk vegetable and fruit cart under an umbrella; the neighborhood GAP store, with a large more-or-less-straight-acting gym above; and, finally, the classic sidewalk newstand (with emergency umbrellas for sale if rain is forecast), just before the other 8th Avenue subway stairs.

Not a mall in the country can even think about competing with that!
Ok, I guess it’s not so extraordinary a mix. You could probably make an equivalent list for any number of New York neighborhoods–except for the sacred Chelsea Hotel, of course. Ah, wonderful town.
Instead of boasting about what’s on 23rd Street, I should be lamenting what has left 23rd Street, just in the fifteen years I have been here.
Until the late eighties, what is now the Gap was the site of Woolworth’s, where they still sold goldfish, but turtles were already declared contraband. Yes, it included a full lunch counter with hot entries, oyster stew on fridays, club sandwiches, malts and what all (its demise darn near turned some of my older neighbors’ lives upside down). That Thai restaurant with the not-so-modest prices was the site of ZIG ZAG, which attracted an attractive mix to its attractive premises. Great bar and great hamburgers (even Ethan Hawke seemed to feel comfortable there). KrispyKreme, the pseudo restaurant and the hotdog venue are on the site of several old brownstones filled with rent-controlled apartments.
My inadequate memory saves us all from a longer list, but it would definitely have some highlights. At least we still have the subway, to get us to Loisaida, Brooklyn or whatever.

Chelsea is an adjective

–and a derogation. Yes, it’s nice to know I’m no longer the only homo in Chelsea (as it so seemed to me when I first moved here fifteen years ago), but can’t we attract at least some people who look like they might read a book once in a while or be able to discuss a social issue other than brunch, spotting or clubs? Guy Trebay writes about New York fashion as expressed during the recent extended heat wave, and he ends up in Chelsea:

“Society,” Thomas Carlyle observed in the 19th century, “which the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded on cloth.” Manhattan society, which the more one thinks of it astonishes one the more, is increasingly founded on no cloth at all. And few neighborhoods illustrate that better than Chelsea, where some people are so heavily armored in muscle that clothes can sometimes seem beside the point.
“There is definitely the gay ghetto stereotype of the muscle queen in Chelsea, but that stereotype is being broken,” said Jesus Echezuria, a salesman at a popular Chelsea men’s wear shop called Nasty Pig. Mr. Echezuria was referring to a group of men whose calendars are often marked in steroid cycles and for whom “liposculpting” and “abdominal etching” are by no means alien terms. If, however, the stereotype of Chelsea as a magnet for such men is dated, you couldn’t tell it from the volume of cartoon action figures strutting the streets on a torrid Saturday night.

Conformity and uniformity is stupid and oppressive regardless of the form it takes. Sometimes I think I see hope for the neighborhood in what appears to be the growing visibility of non-whites, women, young kids and even straights, of all ages, but I’m not sure it’s anything more than wishful thinking, so I still worry about the sea of dumb muscle. Help, we’re drowning here!

STOP THIS WAR

The best discussion (and the scariest) I’ve seen yet of the issues raised by what appears to be the administration’s insanely stupid determination to start a real war, one which might mean the end of the world as we know it.

“Is Preemption a Nuclear Schlieffen Plan?” asks a veteran defense analyst, who writes under the nom de plume “Dr. Werther” for the Defense and the National Interest Web site, which is widely read in defense circles. The article takes aim at the “vainglory, worship of force, and threat-mongering” that has characterized U.S. foreign policy rhetoric in the wake of the Cold War and which has been “pumped to epidemic levels” since September 11. Likening the “preemptive strike” policy toward Iraq to “Germany’s neurotic obsession with hostile encirclement” by France in the early 20th century, Werther notes that Kaiser Wilhelm II did away with the careful foreign policy of Bismarck’s era, taking instead as Germany’s central military tenet the dubious idea that France would have no hesitation about violating Belgian neutrality. In the event of war, Germany would then implement the general staff chief Alfred von Schlieffen’s plan, which meant first taking over Belgium and immediately knocking out the French.
Alas, it didn’t quite work out that way. In fact, the Schlieffen plan “guaranteed that Germany would create enemies faster than it could kill them.” (Unhappy with the Belgian invasion, in came the British, along with the French, who weren’t knocked out after all.) And this, despite the fact that Germany “then possessed the most efficient, if not the largest, killing machine in the world.”

but the sky is falling!

An Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes describes it conservatively as an “unrelenting stream of bad news and broken faith,” but anyone who has not lost touch with reality in recent years would describe it as an absolute disaster, but also the inevitable product of our national indulgence in denial, political stupidity and greed.

The country and all its people have lived through an extraordinary year, defined by searing events and inescapable symbols. People are haunted by the deaths of Sept. 11, the destruction of the World Trade Center and the still unsolved anthrax attack through the mail. This was followed by war in Afghanistan, and now the possibility of war with Iraq looms.
Enron came to represent a new kind of villainy, as corporate executives cashed out and employees lost their jobs and pensions. Arthur Andersen did more shredding than accounting. Ken Lay and a parade of other chief executives who had run their companies into the ground slunk across the news. The WorldCom scam was followed by a stock market crash and the shrinking of once-flush 401(k) plans.

But polls tell us that approval ratings for the silly puppet manipulated by those who have hijacked America are still in the sixty-some percentile. What will it take for us to actually come to grips with the incompetence of this regime and the threat it presents to our welfare, and indeed to our lives?
When do we march on the White House and throw the bums out?

straightening out the English

[This post of a letter in today’s NYTimes is for Otto, wherever you are.]
To the Editor:
In “Forget Ideas, Mr. Author. What Kind of Pen Do You Use?” (Writers on Writing, July 29), Stephen Fry said he did not know of any writers who used dictation. Barbara Cartland once told me that she dictated all of her books into a machine while lying on a couch. And then a “nice young man” came over and straightened out the English.
FRANCIS MURRAY
New York, July 30, 2002

Israel surrounded and blockaded!

I can’t stay away from this one, for its effrontery and for almost perfectly representing the government and media’s Big Lie. The oversized (but not for this tabloid) headline on the cover of the New York Daily News this morning reads, “UNDER SEIGE,” referring to the latest deadly atacks in Palestine.

Every day, The Daily News’ eye-catching front and back covers are the talk of the town. [this is the daily’s own online description of its covers]

So a state which monopolizes all military and police power, which is equipped with just about the most sophisticated weapons available on the market today, which illegally occupies and controls every inch of Palestinian territory and which has effectively put every Palestinian under house arrest by closing street, roads and even fields, is described as “under siege” by the popular, yellow press.
We shouldn’t have to take this stupidity or malignancy. It will ultimately destroy us and the world, if left unchallenged.
I’ve written to the offenders.

just not interested

The Washington junta just wasn’t interested in terrorism until September, 2001. They were only concerned about imaginary enemies, like those which would be the targets of their appalling star-wars-defense fantasy and their war-on-drugs fantasy.

The Bush administration sat on a Clinton-era plan to attack al-Qaida in Afghanistan for eight months because of political hostility to the outgoing president and competing priorities, it was reported yesterday.
….
The plan to take the counter-terrorist battle to al-Qaida was drafted after the attack on the warship the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000. Mr Clinton’s terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, presented it to senior officials in December, but it was decided that the decision should be taken by the new administration.
[The Clinton White House outlined the threat in briefings they provided for Condoleezza Rice, George Bush’s national security adviser, in January 2001, just before she and her team took over.]
However, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, was more interested in the national missile defence plan, and the new attorney general, John Ashcroft, was more interested in using the FBI to fight the “war on drugs” and clamping down on pornography. In August, he turned down FBI requests for $50m for the agency’s counter-terrorist programme.

the bogeyman actually lives outside the City

Even I don’t have these problems with “country!” I mean, I have done some camping in my time, and I would never think I could “get away” from New York “an hour north of the city.” Obviously that was the writer’s first mistake. She should have known that you have to go at least two hours away before you begin to leave the pull and culture of New York, and then it’s still only a rather conditional remove.

We knew that the air rising from dirt and pine needles outside the five boroughs just had to be cooler, and we wanted our daughter to get used to seeing whole constellations from beneath tall trees. And I’ll admit that, in the back of my mind, I may have calculated that skipping town on weekends meant we were living in a terrorist target only five days a week, instead of seven.
[Here follows her account of her somewhat harrowing overnight camping experience.]
Soon after, we were glad to give back the car and relax in the safety of the city, where there were hot showers, local police, and people who could, if necessary, hear us scream. And, for better or worse, lots of eyes watching our backs, and watching the people who were watching us.

coming up with the right jingle

The Shrub administration is creating a new public relations office and campaign to help our image abroad.
I didn’t know they cared one whit, but they still don’t care about doing anything to alter our own attitudes or policies, those which have made us look like the real “evil doers,” if not just plain laughing stocks, to those who would otherwise be our friends and admirers. No, they see the solution to the problem as just a matter of coming up with the right advertising campaign.

Graham E. Fuller, a former vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council and a longtime Near East analyst for the agency, said that during years of living and traveling in the Middle East, “I have never felt such an extraordinary gap between the two worlds. . . . Clearly, in a region where we desperately need friends and supporters, their number is dwindling, and we are increasingly on the defensive.”
“How has this state of affairs come about?” House International Relations Committee Chairman [the execrable] Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) said in a speech last month to the Council on Foreign Relations. “How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue has allowed such a destructive and parodied image of itself to become the intellectual coin of the realm overseas?”
Hyde shares a widespread conviction that a major part of the problem has been poor salesmanship.
….
Some critics question whether expanding and improving delivery will help if there is no change in the message. “If fundamental policies are seen to be flawed, a prettied-up package will not make a difference,” Fuller told a recent meeting of the bipartisan U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

But I’ve saved your treat for the end! The best part of this log is the brilliant Danziger cartoon on this story. He gets it just about right.