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Memorial for Tuli Kupferberg

July 16, 2010 in Music, People by Bryan | 1 comment

The family of poet/singer/troublemaker Tuli Kupferberg has announced a public memorial service to be held at St. Mark’s Church tomorrow, Sat. July 17, from 11:45 to 3:00 pm. Surviving members of The Fugs will perform. The first hour will be a viewing. The service will be followed by a reception for friends and family and a private burial service Monday at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

The image above is a screenshot Brooklyn Vegan posted from one of Tuli’s final YouTube missives from the past spring:

The Times‘s full obituary is here; a “popcast” including conversation between Times music writers about Tuli’s legacy is here.

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RIP Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010)

July 12, 2010 in People by Bryan | 2 comments

“who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown”

Short obit from the Times.

Previously on PWHNY.

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RIP Peter Orlovsky (1933-2010)

June 2, 2010 in People by Bryan | 4 comments

When I posted about Ginsberg yesterday I had no idea Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s long-time lover and a Beat poet in his own right, had passed on May 30. He was 76.

The Times doesn’t have an obit up yet, same with the Voice (it’s shameful!), but here’s one from the Washington Post and another from the LA Times‘s Jacket Copy blog.

Here’s Peter’s poem “Frist Poem” (sic). The typo in the title was, if not intentional, then at least ratified by being published that way. As you’ll see, Peter’s spelling was idiosyncratic and he seems to have made a point in not letting other people (or himself) clean it up. The poem was written in 1957 and collected in his Pocket Poets Series volume Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs (City Lights, 1978). You’ll find a couple other poems at Brian Nation’s page on Orlovsky, which is where I clipped this one:

FRIST POEM

A rainbow comes pouring into my window, I am electrified.
Songs burst from my breast, all my crying stops, mistory fills
    the air.
I look for my shues under my bed.
A fat colored woman becomes my mother.
I have no false teeth yet. Suddenly ten children sit on my lap.
I grow a beard in one day.
I drink a hole bottle of wine with my eyes shut.
I draw on paper and I feel I am two again. I want everybody to
    talk to me.
I empty the garbage on the tabol.
I invite thousands of bottles into my room, June bugs I call them.
I use the typewritter as my pillow.
A spoon becomes a fork before my eyes.
Bums give all their money to me.
All I need is a mirror for the rest of my life.
My frist five years I lived in chicken coups with not enough
    bacon.
My mother showed her witch face in the night and told stories of
    blue beards.
My dreams lifted me right out of my bed.
I dreamt I jumped into the nozzle of a gun to fight it out with a
    bullet.
I met Kafka and he jumped over a building to get away from me.
My body turned into sugar, poured into tea I found the meaning
    of life
All I needed was ink to be a black boy.
I walk on the street looking for eyes that will caress my face.
I sang in the elevators believing I was going to heaven.
I got off at the 86th floor, walked down the corridor looking for
    fresh butts.
My comes turns into a silver dollar on the bed.
I look out the window and see nobody, I go down to the street,
    look up at my window and see nobody.
So I talk to the fire hydrant, asking "Do you have bigger tears
    then I do?"
Nobody around, I piss anywhere.
My Gabriel horns, my Gabriel horns: unfold the cheerfulies,
    my gay jubilation.

Nov. 24th, 1957, Paris

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Mighty, mighty Ginsberg

June 1, 2010 in Neighborhood Scenes, People by Bryan | 3 comments

When I first thought of teaching an intensive summer seminar on New York’s downtown scenes — which I just wrapped up last Friday — I planned only to teach the 1970s. Gearing up to write my 33 1/3 volume on Television’s Marquee Moon, I wanted to immerse myself in a broad range of materials from the period detailing a number of overlapping downtown arts scenes.

I quickly realized, though, that much of what I wanted to do with the 70s in class required some understanding of the area’s arts scenes in the 1960s, and so I decided to expand the timeframe to 1960-80. When the final reading list was drawn up, I’d reached back even further: I had a hunch that the work of some particular downtown arts pioneers who created seminal works in the 1950s — Allen Ginsberg and John Cage, especially — would become threads that would weave through the entire course.

Turns out I was right in both cases, but especially in Ginsberg’s. (Other people whose work proved to have lasting effects on the downtown scenes we discussed include O’Hara and Warhol.) Almost without fail, Ginsberg turned up in every day’s discussion over the course of our two weeks, either as a direct influence, a character, a mentor, or a commentator. His appearances ranged from the goofy parka-wearing, pot-smoking version of himself in Pull My Daisy to the author of Howl (which in turn authorized The Fugs’ memorable “I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock”) to the prophet wandering in the background of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back. Jonas Mekas captured him plotting with Barbara Rudin and other LES lefties in the 1960s (we watched the second reel of Walden) and as a fixture on the LES poetry scene he popped up in several of the pieces we read by our friend Daniel Kane. Ginsberg offered astute commentary on Dylan’s lyrics in a PBS documentary on the history of rock and roll. He provided a very memorable scene in Jim Carroll’s memoir Forced Entries, worked with — and claimed to deflower — the downtown composer and scene-crosser Arthur Russell, and befriended Patti Smith. He lived in the same building as both Russell and the members of Television. (Richard Hell still lives there.) In Steven Sebring’s Patti Smith: Dream of Life, which was the very last thing, along with Smith’s Just Kids, that we considered for this course, we see Patti’s very emotional reading at a Ginsberg memorial; later in the film she chants the “Footnote to Howl,” offering all the evidence anyone should need that even Ginsberg’s most idiosyncratic work holds up under someone else’s voice.

I’m still trying to work out exactly what it was that made Ginsberg’s legacy so unique in the materials we discussed. Although I opted not to show it to the class, I privately viewed a late-1980s odd-ball documentary on East Side poetry, Maria Beatty’s Gang of Souls: A Generation of Beat Poets, in which nearly every poet interviewed, including younger writers and musicians such as Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch, and Jim Carroll, singles out Ginsberg as the towering figure of twentieth-century New York writing. Cage’s influence on musicians and artists, by contrast, was subtle, almost imperceptible, though still very much in place. Perhaps Ginsberg seemed to matter because he offered such a clear model for how to make a scene and how to canonize one’s comrades. But he also seemed to matter because he was, quite simply, on the scene for so long, taking an interest in younger writers’ work (and more), offering advice, continuing to read in public. O’Hara mattered as an icon in his early death (and a pioneer of a poetics that clearly took hold among other New York School poets); O’Hara also drew young, aspiring poets to the city, but that hands-on influence was cut short. Warhol mattered as a media mastermind and behind-the-scenes manipulator. But Ginsberg just seemed to be there wherever we turned, presiding, prodding, provoking. In the history of late-twentieth-century New York writing it’s difficult, I’m finding, to come up with someone whose life and work had broader impact.

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Downtown Scene

May 20, 2010 in Film, People by Bryan

Today’s topics: Warhol, the Factory, Warhol’s relation to the poetry world, Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, The Velvet Underground and Nico. I’ll be showing a sizable chunk of the second episode of Ric Burns’s Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, and we’ll be discussing the first Velvet Underground album — both in relation to Warhol’s scene and to the downtown minimalist music scene we began to dip into yesterday. (To get at the latter I’ve had the class read Alex Ross’s chapter on bebop and minimalism [audio supplements here], which culminates in his reading of the Velvets as “Rock and Roll minimalists.”)

Watching portions of the Burns doc last night reminded me of the downtown party scene from Midnight Cowboy, which I hadn’t seen in quite a while. I YouTubed up the clip:

Warhol was apparently supposed to appear in this scene. (Several of his “superstars” do.) But Valerie Solanas, of course, had other plans.

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Lena Horne (1917-2010)

May 10, 2010 in Music, People by Bryan

Just saw the news that the incomparable Lena Horne died yesterday. She was 92. Born in Brooklyn, she joined the chorus at Harlem’s Cotton Club as a teenager. She made her Broadway debut in 1934 at age 17, but didn’t fully establish herself as a nightclub performer, recording artist, and film star until the early 1940s. Much of her early work required tricky negotiations with mainstream American racism: her numbers were sometimes dropped from films when they were shown in the south; when she married an MGM composer/arranger in 1947 they had to elope to Paris because interracial marriage was illegal in California. After making the leap from racially segregated audiences and venues to mainstream stardom, a trajectory complicated further by her being blacklisted from Hollywood film work during the McCarthy era, she participated in major civil rights protests, including the March on Washington. There’s a nice overview of the remainder of her career here.

Here are three of my favorite Lena Horne performances, two more obscure than the third. The first is my initial memory of Lena Horne, in a guest appearance on The Cosby Show. Claire takes Cliff and the kids to see Lena Horne at a swank Manhattan dinner club as part of an elaborate surprise. What I remember about watching this as a teenager is how awesome it would be to have the kind of urban sophistication (and money!) to go see someone famous like that perform for your birthday. It’s an idealized notion of urbanity I cling to and have yet to realize:

I probably had already seen this 1973 appearance on another New York-based show I was fond of as a younger viewer:

And there used to be a great clip available of my favorite Lena Horne song of all, her version of Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When,” which was part of Words and Music, a 1948 film tribute to the songwriting team. The video’s been pulled from YouTube for proprietary reasons, but you can hear her standard recording of the same song from 1941 in this clip. It just may be my favorite performance of any Rodgers and Hart song, which is saying quite a bit. Has there ever been a more romantic recording?

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Cambridge Contributor: Caleb Crain

April 5, 2010 in Books, People by Bryan | 3 comments

The Brooklyn-based writer Caleb Crain is the author of “The Early Literature of New York’s Moneyed Class,” a chapter in our Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York that looks at narratives of New York high life from the mid to late nineteenth century. He is also the author of the 2001 book American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (Yale UP) and a frequent contributor to such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic. He maintains the weblog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, from which he has selected a number of pieces in the print volume The Wreck of the Henry Clay (2009).

Caleb’s piece for the companion could alternatively been called “High Life, with a Glance at the Low,” since he includes a significant treatment of the sunshine/shadow dynamic that structured many accounts of nineteenth-century New York City. But as fascinating as the lower depths were to armchair slummers in the nineteenth century, readers then as now also loved to peek into the world of New York’s elite. Of the insider expert and literary celebrity Nathaniel Parker Willis, Crain writes:

Fashion was Nathaniel’s god. But he wrote about it with more insight, nimbleness, and edge than any of his contemporaries. On a city without an opera: “Like a saloon without a mirror.” On the depreciation of courtesy in New York: “Politeness has gradually grown to be a sign of a man in want of money.” On a sudden vogue for a fabric still posh today: “‘She had on a real Cashmere’ would be sweeter, to a number of ladies, as a mention when absent, than ‘she had a beautiful expression about her mouth,’ or ‘she had such loveable manners,’ or ‘she is always trying to make somebody happier.’”

For all his talent, Willis never wrote a solid book. The need to earn a living fettered him to magazine ephemera, a fate he accepted with a pose of tragic resignation: “The hot needle through the eye of the goldfinch betters his singing, they say.” After he abandoned sacred poetry in early youth, Willis’s ambition took a conventionally serious form only once, in a public lecture on fashion at the Broadway Tabernacle in 1844. In the lecture, Willis made explicit his peculiar, and peculiarly democratic, understanding of fashion, which he called an “inner republic.”

He began by defining fashion as “a position in society” that different cultures awarded to different traits. In France, it went to intellectual and artistic achievement; in England, to beauty and cocksureness. In both countries, according to Willis, the “first principle” of fashion was “rebellion against unnatural authority,” because fashion forced the ruling class to acknowledge people of merit born outside it. The particular acknowledgment that he had in mind was sexual, although he didn’t say so explicitly. Through fashion – that is, through a selection of spouses prompted by fashion – the English upper class ensured that their children would be attractive and bold, and the French, that theirs would be intelligent. Although the principle of fashion might be revolutionary, its effect was conservative, by a kind of sexual engrossment.

What did American fashion reward? “Conspicuousness in expense,” Willis wrote with dismay. (A few years later, he would identify New York as “the point where money is spent most freely for pleasure.”) He hoped that this preference was temporary and that Americans could change it by force of will. But he feared that no one would bother to take the problem seriously. Like Willis himself, fashion seemed trifling to most people. He insisted it wasn’t, because it determined which virtues the ruling class would welcome into their beds and thereby into the elite.

We’re thrilled to have Caleb serve as a tour guide through the fascinating world of nineteenth-century New York’s fast set.

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Adah Isaacs Mencken

March 29, 2010 in People by Bryan

In this morning’s lecture on early-20c Greenwich Village bohemianism, I mentioned an even earlier bohemian literary enclave organized around a bar called Pfaff’s, at Broadway and Bleecker. Its habitues included Walt Whitman and his friend, the scandalous actress Adah Isaacs Menken — sometimes known simply as “The Naked Lady” — pictured above.

Digging around Google for an image of Menken to drop into my slideshow, I was delighted to discover a blog I’d never seen before, The Great Bare, dedicated to Menken. It’s maintained by the writers Michael and Barbara Foster, who are collaborating on a Menken bio. You can also learn more about Menken at The Vault at Pfaff’s, which I mentioned in a post last year around this time. The complicated racial dimensions of Menken’s life and performance are engagingly treated by our friend Daphne Brooks in her book Bodies in Dissent.

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RIP Alex Chilton (1950-2010), by way of NYC

March 18, 2010 in Music, People by Bryan

Jeff Buckley tears up “Kangaroo”:

And the original, w/ photos courtesy Knitting Factory. Was there ever a more judicious use of cowbell?

Brief Times obit.

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Hunkered Down in the East Village: A Conversation with Jeremiah Moss and EV Grieve

September 30, 2009 in Lost New York, People by Bryan

jeremiah.jpg

As I mentioned in a prior post, several local blogs helped us arrive at “Lost New York” as our conference theme, and so it seemed natural to assemble a panel of bloggers to talk about the relationship between writing, new media, and attempts to stave off the rapid transformation of traditional neighborhoods. Some of the folks we invited aren’t able to be on the panel for one reason or another. Two of my favorite anti-gentrification bloggers, Jeremiah Moss (from Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York) and EV Grieve, agreed to a conversation about the nature of their projects and the NYC blogosphere in
general.

BW: Since you both blog under pseudonyms, I wonder: How did you come up with the
names?

JM: As I wrote in a blog post a while back, “Jeremiah” began as a character in a novel I wrote prior to the blog. I’ve never published a novel and this one has not yet been seen by any editors — I am still working it through. In that writing, I enjoyed having an outlet for my most curmudgeonly self, for the anger and powerlessness I experienced while watching the city I loved disappear. Writing is a kind of action, as opposed to passivity, and moving from the novel to the blog enabled me to stay in action about these issues — much more than I expected.

BW: Do you still think of Jeremiah as a character you perform?

JM: I didn’t expect many people to read the blog, and I didn’t think I’d ever be communicating with readers. As that has happened, more and more, the line between me and Jeremiah has blurred even further. Simply put, the voice I use in the blog is me but not all of me. It is, however, an essential part of me — sort of like a sharpened, clarified, angry, righteous part of me, undiluted by my natural tendency to see multiple sides of an issue. As Jeremiah, I can be staunch.

BW: When I read that post about Jeremiah’s origins as a fictional character it really took me aback. It seemed both dangerous and liberating, given that I’ve only ever written online under my own name, though that can be both dangerous and liberating too. It also pushed me to think about blogging in literary terms — as both literary writing and as performance — in ways I hadn’t quite before. Grieve, do you ever think of “EV Grieve” as akin to Jeremiah’s semi-fictional avatar?

EVG: The Grieve name is meant to be about mourning. (And not pronounced as “Gree-vey.”) Definitely Jeremiah’s influence there. Plus I spent $35,000 on focus-group testing for that….

BW: Has becoming Grieve been something akin to Jeremiah’s role-playing? Does being “Grieve” feel different in some ways from being the person you were before/are outside the blog?

EVG: At times. I’ve been out with friends, who don’t know about the site, and I see an amazing urban etiquette sign or something. And I try to think of some perfectly good explanation of why I’m taking a photo of a funny sign or store closing. I’m the same person as before, but it now just takes me longer to run an errand. I’ll meander more and scope every storefront, apartment entrance, etc. At times I’m worried folks might find my behavior a bit daft, that I’m casing the joint or something. And I’ve sort of lost my speedy NYC gait. Jeremiah, do you remember the commenter who thought we were the same person? As if we had the time and energy to do TWO blogs! In two fairly different tones!

JM: Yes, I do! We share a lot in common, but I wonder how people see us. I think I’m the grouchy one and Grieve is the more affable one. I don’t know. Writing the blog has enabled me to enjoy the city more today than I did in the years leading up to the blog. So the irony here is that, through the writing of this angry blog, I’ve ended up feeling less angry. I was seriously thinking about leaving New York a few years ago. Then I started the blog and it held me here.

BW: I think that less-angry side comes through in your eagerness not to be misunderstood, and your sense of fairness when you have readers (sometimes even trolls) who take you to task on some point. I also think I’ve noticed over time a tendency to celebrate things you like — a trumpet-playing bus driver, for instance — and not just to focus on the death and destruction of the New York you loved when you moved here. Grieve, where would you fall on the mourning/celebrating spectrum? Like you said, the name implies mourning … but you were originally mourning the closing of a bar that ended up not closing after all, right?

sophies.jpg

EVG: Yeah. When the news came down in December 2007 that Sophie’s and Mona’s were for sale, I was naturally very upset. While I wasn’t a hardcore regular there, Sophie’s, in particular, was always very close to me. (I think we all have some sort of fond Sophie’s memories….) Meanwhile, I was already a regular reader of The Villager and Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, as well as Bob Arihood’s Neither More Nor Less and Lost City. I was growing increasingly tired of the onslaught of the condofication, bankbranchification, duanereadification and whatnot of NYC, in particular of the East Village. These things all inspired me to do something.

So on a drunken, lonely night (always a good combination for doing something stupid,
like starting a blog! Plus, actually, it was the middle of the afternoon!) I signed up for a Blogger account to create a tribute site for Sophie’s. It wasn’t supposed to be about me. At first, I just collected different news items on the possible sale. Then I thought it could evolve into this project we could all be part of…. making little films about the people, etc., who frequent the bar. Post photos. Chronicle the possible end of days. It would be a document capturing a special time and place.

Before I ever really figured what to do with the site or told anyone about it, it looked as if the bars were staying in the family. So I retired the site on that positive note.

BW: What made you change your mind and come back?

EVG: Well, Jeremiah encouraged me to continue, to turn my attention to other things in the neighborhood. So I did. Didn’t do much at first. I’d get about six hits a day on the site. Was just having a little fun. But I was following this premise for the site: Appreciating what’s here while it’s still here. Remembering what’s no longer here. Wishing some things weren’t here that are here. Doing this awakened the reporter that was in me…. and the site has evolved to be a little more newsy — and hopefully provide a slice of life about a
special neighborhood….

BW: So you slide back and forth between celebrating what you love and
mourning the things that shouldn’t have passed. Oh, and expressing disdain for
guys in pink shirts.

EVG: Well, I don’t mind pink shirts as much as the behavior of the person wearing it
out and about. Anyway, like Jeremiah, doing this site has rekindled my love affair with the neighborhood — and the city. FroYo and popped collars or not. To be honest, I hate having to leave for a long weekend or holiday.

JM: It’s true that I encouraged him. And now look! He grabs up all the East Village news before I can get to it. Seriously, though, Grieve has an amazing ability to be everywhere in the East Village at once, to pick out minute details and spin them into something quietly meaningful. We have a very friendly rivalry when it comes to neighborhood business. Sometimes, I have to call dibs, because I move much more slowly than he does. We encourage each other. Blogging is this weird, lonely “vocation,” something of an obsession, that I think appeals to introverts who yet want to be known, but not too known. So it’s been great having Grieve and other bloggers to connect with through the process.

BW: The literary historian in me wants to ask if blogging is perhaps the next site
of the formation of literary community, one of my long-standing interests in NYC literary history.

EVG: The relationship that formed between me and Jeremiah is one of my favorite things that has come from doing the site…. which makes wanting to crush him that much more difficult! Ha! I wonder if people might be interested in knowing how often we actually do talk via e-mail…. or run ideas by each other…. and, on occasion, read each other’s posts if we’re unsure how it’s working. I also look forward to what he’s going to have on any given day. I truly think he’s one of the best essayists around….

JM: An anonymous commenter on another blog, Jill’s “Blah Blog Blah,” recently referred to the “East Village Blog Mafia.” It was derisive, but fascinating–that someone’s out there imagining that these bloggers have any kind of real power, a bunch of middle-aged people sitting around critiquing the uncontrollable. But there is some kind of community here, in this NYC blogosphere, though I know virtual communities and relationships are much maligned these days. I have mixed feelings about them. Are they any less real than in-the-flesh relationships? When I first came to New York, I sought a literary community. I couldn’t find it. The blogosphere may be the closest I’ve come to
it.

jmad.jpg


BW: As far as content goes, as different as your blogs are I see both of you working
in a time-honored tradition of lamenting the loss of an older and more authentic New York. It’s a pattern of nostalgia that seems especially bound up with the bohemian tradition in New York, from the 1910s forward. That lamentation seems to be part of the bohemian experience itself: either it was over just before you arrived, or just before the next guy did. Is there something quantifiably different in that lament since, say, 2001? Or does pointing to this long-standing pattern distract us from the very real changes that deserve to be critiqued?

JM: The most dramatic change to me in recent years is the people. I sometimes get flack for critiquing people as a group, but super-gentrification, Starbucksification, etc. — none of it happens without people. Many of the people who come to the city and specifically to the East Village today seem different than the ones who came 15 or 20 years ago. Their values are different. Their behavior is different. Their attitude toward the world around them is different. When I think about gentrification and my own role in it, I parse it this way: do you come to a neighborhood because you like the way it is, because you like not just the cute cafes, but also the down-at-the-heels bookshops and delis, and the old people on their stoops, the corner psychotics, and even the stink of the garbage at high summer? Or do you come to a neighborhood with the wish and the intention to change it? Do you see a “project” that needs work?

BW: I hear you. I’ve just been through exactly this problem with my kids’ middle
school on the other side of Chinatown, down by the river. (I refuse to use the label “Two Bridges.”) We came to the school four or five years ago when it was just on the upswing: charismatic principal and staff, a well-rounded set of course offerings, grant money starting to come in for athletics and extra-curriculars like music and a robotics club and Saturday fashion and art classes. And it had real diversity among its students. The school was predominantly Asian and Latino — something like 2% white kids. It didn’t stay that way for long. Now it’s been thoroughly infiltrated by Tribeca and the Village. A couple years ago we were asked to go to our old elementary school’s “middle school info night” to represent our new school. When we were there, it was clear the middle school was already starting to get a lot of buzz. People whose kids weren’t even admitted yet were talking about fundraising and running for PA offices. Pinko intellectual that I am, I said something like, “Well it’s important to realize that we’re entering a delicate ecosystem: there are already some culture clashes and neighborhood histories that make the parents’ association both a challenge and a real opportunity for cosmopolitan learning — parents and kids alike. We’re not coming in here to colonize the place, after all.” And one Tribeca mother looked me square in the face and said: “That’s exactly what we’re doing!” And I’m not kidding, I almost got into a shouting match with her at a parent meeting in the principal’s office two years later, when I couldn’t listen to another moment of her trying to bully and belittle the principal, who was trying to end de facto segregation in the school by slightly altering an honors program that had become skewed mostly toward the new arrivals. I’d guess white kids are up to 30% or so at the school, many of them from wealthy families, and their parents seem very entitled — wanting the city and the school to conform to them and not vice versa. They bring energy and money, but in some ways at the expense of the dignity of the people who were there first.

JM: I think a lot of people now have come to the Lower East Side, the East Village, and other neighborhoods in the city with that attitude. They see “potential.” They see plans for renovation and “renewal.” And there is so much hatred and fear in that — disgust for what and who is already there.

boogieblue.jpg

BW: At the same time, how to stop the wave? We were part of the vanguard of gentrification, after all. Such conversations always make me wonder: do you think 150 years from now a
committee will be formed to save Blue from destruction? (“Save Blue! It was the most unique of all the sore thumbs that invaded the neighborhood in the early 21st century!”) Or are things cyclical? Will it be filled with squatters?

JM: The thought of Blue standing for 150 years is too much to fathom.

EVG: Well, I do believe that there will be people like us 150 years from now lamenting the loss of Blue (“The one-time home of Justin Long!”) and getting excited about the discovery of a hidden 16 Handles ad…. there will always be people who love the city and appreciate its history. I have a friend who has lived here since, well, forever, and he’ll say things like, “Oh, the Bowery hasn’t been the same since prohibition ended!” Not a real sentimentalist, but I understand the point….

JM: Grieve once forwarded me a blog post from a young woman who recently moved to the LES and was now moving out again. She actually said she would not miss the “disgusting stink” of the pickles emanating from Katz’s Deli. To me, if you don’t like the smell of Katz’s pickles, then don’t come live here. Or live here with the intention to learn to love that smell. Or something. Basically, it boils down to a lot of people moved to NYC after 9/11 who seem to hate urban life and everything about it. It baffles my mind to wonder why they came in the first place.

BW: I do think blogs have been crucial in supporting efforts to preserve a traditional sense of neighborhoods. Do you guys have a favorite NYC blog or two you think deserves wider exposure than they’ve received?

EVG: Even though Bob Arihood has been featured in the Times, I think he deserves
more attention. I love what he does… and his photography needs to be in an exhibit somewhere. I also really like Slum Goddess. She’s funny and opinionated. She knows a lot of people. Her blog really exemplifies what a blog is supposed to be — a little bit of everything. Hunter-Gatherer does this very well too — you feel as if you really know the person and his or her interests.

JM: I second all of those choices. And one less-known blog I enjoy is It Was Her New York, by C.O. Moed. It doesn’t get much attention because it’s not about what new cafe opened up on Ave A or how tenement residents are fighting back against noisy luxe hotels. But it’s written by a native Lower East Sider and it’s very intimate.

BW: Thanks, both of you, for taking the time for this conversation! I look forward
to hearing from more bloggers on these questions at our panel Saturday — or here, in comments.

Photo credits: 1, 3: Jeremiah; 2: Grieve; 4: Bowery Boogie

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