From Howard Kaplan’s excellent 2006 profile in Vanity Fair:

Joe pushes his gear through the streets on a hand truck, which he in his English way calls a trolley. He and the trolley are often stopped by strangers ready with a heartfelt line: “Sir, you’re the greatest salesman in New York!”

He likes the recognition and is never ungracious, but privately he quibbles over the use of the word “salesman.” “I couldn’t sell one to one,” he explains. “I couldn’t sell real estate or cars, for example. What I like to do is pitch to a crowd, draw a crowd together and have them give me their money.”

More, too, about Mr. Ades at Stir the Pots.

Actually my make-up was wind-swept and tear-stained already after being WHIPPED FROM PILLAR TO POST (OMG -What do you think that aphorism is referencing?) by that asshole Jack Frost when I was walking home from my shrink appointment, but DON’T EXPECT COMPLETE TRUTH in this blog and if you’ve got a problem with run-on sentences SCRAM while you have the chance because I may be a big fan of Joan Didion but I AIN’T HER. Got it?

Update: The blog has migrated to justinbond.com.

In the last several years, the reefs have drawn swift open-ocean fish, like tuna and mackerel, that use the reefs as hunting grounds for smaller prey. Sea bass like to live inside the cars, while large flounder lie in the silt that settles on top of the cars, said Mr. Tinsman, the Delaware official.

According to the article, though, there have been problems with
overcrowding.

The New Jersey Scuba Diver website has an in-depth look at the artificial reef program, with diagrams, video, and amazing photos of the cars being dumped from a barge on to the Shark River Reef.

And from YouTube, here’s a short video of the last Redbird to be in service:

I guess it just brings out the “foamer” in me, or, as Wikipedia gently corrects me when I search for the term, the “railfan.”

Can’t say I shared Muschamp’s adoration of Frank Gehry, but I certainly marveled at his bravura essay on 2 Columbus Circle. Some excerpts:

Early on in the AIDS crisis, the city registered the cultural impact caused by the loss of gay artists. The effect produced by the loss of the gay audience is more insidious, however. An audience retains the memory of a performance. What happens to that memory when the audience is gone?

…

Female impersonators like Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Wayne County and the Hot Peaches were also part of it. They were an alternative modernism, too. Just as the Bauhaus designers dealt with the conventions of industrial production, the transvestites of those years were exploring the conventions of gender production by the image-making industries that were then coming into their own. Goodbye, Henry Ford. Hello, Estée Lauder.

Performers like Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn mattered for a more important reason: they were a phenomenon of the audience, of the city’s new frame of cultural reference. There’s no such thing as a bad drag act. There are only bad drag-act audiences. A female impersonator functions chiefly as a stand-in for the deranged mosaic of theatrical stereotypes that spectators have stored up in their heads. As mistresses of ceremony for this synthetic work in progress, these two personified the shift that concluded the final days of High Modern New York. They signaled the erosion of trust in top-down cultural pronouncements and the commencement of a period when the relationship between High and Low would be extensively reconsidered.

The whole article is here.

“Herbert Muschamp, Architecture Critic, Is Dead,” The New York Times

I suppose it was bound to happen.

Last night, in Evergreen Video on Carmine St., I eavesdropped on another customer’s conversation, and then asked the clerk to confirm what I’d just heard, which was that my favorite video store was closing on June 30.

“Is it Netflix?” I asked, feeling remorse for having joined.

He shook his head. “The owner just wants to retire.”

Which seems reasonable, but still didn’t permit any gratifying indignation at The State of Things.

It’s not only the collective knowledge of the staff and the pleasure of flipping through all those laminated video covers (1940s Musicals, 1970s Comedies, etc.) that I’ll miss—it’s the unexpected stuff, like the episode of “Ready Steady Go!” in which Dusty Springfield introduces the sounds of Motown to a studio audience of eager British teens. Evergreen is also the only video store I know of that boasted a pioneering rock critic on its staff. The plain piece of paper on the door says simply “Paul Nelson, 1936-2006.”

I paid my late fee, picked up the next movie, and looked around. Same posters up, same catalogs scattered on the table, same used DVDs for sale, and in one corner, a stack of flattened cardboard to be turned into boxes.

Mark your calendars:

Caleb Crain, Melissa Plaut, Brandon Stosuy
Tuesday, October 17, 7pm

Clifford Chase, Christopher Sorrentino, Dana Spiotta
Tuesday, November 28, 7pm

197 East Broadway
F train to East Broadway
Free

For bios and more, click here.

Could’ve been the train delays or the general late-night stupor, but it wasn’t long before I swore I could see the screaming pope in the water stains above the Brooklyn-bound F platform at the Broadway-Lafayette station.

Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Francis Bacon