Thursday, April 19, 2012

*Everyday Chatter

Williamsburg is cracking down on hipster brunch crowding. [Eater]

Help Beat poet and feminist Diane DiPrima with her medical bills--donate now. [GF]

Save the Neighborhood School's library--on the budget cut chopping block. [EVG]

Chinatown Fair Arcade returns May 5--but what about a chicken comeback? [BB]

A look behind the scenes at Robert Longo's "Men in Cities" street art. [FP]

See what has become of Park Slope's Timboo's. [OMFS]

A message to MePa? On 8th and Horatio:


Bloomberg now wants to outlaw smoking cigarettes in the privacy of your own home. [Gothamist]

Hollywood stars moving to Avenue B? What planet are we on? [Curbed]

New York is turning into LA--and now LA might turn into New York. [NYT]

The Mob returns to San Gennaro--maybe they can run out the Nolitans. [NYT]

What will the books of the future look like? [NYT]

9 comments:

Brendan said...

Bloomberg does not want to "outlaw smoking cigarettes in the privacy of your own home." He wants to require buildings to have written policies on smoking, which will likely result in more non-smoking buildings. I don't know enough about this issue to say whether that's a good idea, but saying he wants to outlaw smoking in private homes is a pretty big factual error.

Re: Timboo's, I never went to the place but the photograph of the new place is chilling. I have a sense that the kind of people who design such spaces, and the people for whom they are designed, must be so different from me that I could never relate to them on any level.

JAZ said...

You gotta love these people; it's not enough to hypergentrify neighborhoods until their true identities are gone; you also need to be as smug as possible about your disdain for what was already there;

http://www.boweryboogie.com/2012/04/assessing-the-over-gentrified-bowery-2-0/

it's like a cultural eminent domain

ShatteredMonocle said...

Peeked in on the new Timboo's myself. What is with people's taste in bland, brown and tan bars with no decoration, color, etc? It's like drinking in a shitty hotel room or a waiting room in a dentist's office.

Ed said...

I'm finding airport bars much more tolerable now that there is not much difference between them and the "normal" bars in the city outside the airports.

Media stereotypes between NY and LA are now really out of date. Increasingly New York has first become a one industry town, with the industry being finance, and now that the financial sector has been shedding jobs is now a city for beautiful people to congregate in, alongside a vast immigrant underclass. While LA now has a much better mass transit system, if you don't limit yourself to subway-subway comparisons (a very NY attitude) and include the busses.

The spread out suburbany LA was created mainly due to two accidents of history. The local establishment were hostile enough to the nascent movie industry, with their Jewish investors and executives, that it decamped from the business districts to satellite cities just west of the city limits. This moved the center of gravity of the city away from the city center. Its as if the next big set of employers in New York were all located around Secaucus. Then the existing streetcar system was dismantled. Robert Moses gets alot of negative press, but the fact is that in New York the highway system were overlaid on the existing street-and-subway system instead of replacing it. But the underlying mountainous geography of LA county encourages density almost as much as NYC being built on a group of islands.

e said...

Bloomberg or Midwestern ignorance is really a bliss. I want some of that kool-aid too.

Apartments in buildings are home. Bloomberg requiring buildings to have written policies is his way of sneaking or snaking to ban smoking in residential buildings. Next, he's going to require homeowners or neighborhoid communities/districts to have written policies on smoking. Then it'll be the car owners. First, it's smoking, who knows what's next. Salt? Chocolates? Ice cream? Pork? You get the picture. Anything that Bloomberg would deem unhealthy. It's an infringement on one's individual's freedom and choices. Bloomberg is creating a Big Brother state. He also wants everyone to be like his own image.

Anonymous said...

I would love to live in a smoke-free building. I hate inhaling the second-hand smoke stink that seeps into my apartment from my downstairs' neighbors. I also hate having to walk through a cloud of smoke whenever I enter or exit my place of work. It's a disgusting habit, and it would be one thing if it didn't affect non-smokers but it does.

laura said...

i am allergic to smoke. i would love to have smoke free lobbies, hallways, public bathrooms, & certain restaurants. i am also a libertarian first. people should be able to smoke in their apts. if you are a non smoker & you are buying an apt, it may be nice to know the seller was a non smoker too. it would be a good selling point, but a private choice. the worst that can happen is that that the non smoker buyer has to re paint before moving in. or as fast as they can. for restaurants, there should be smoking restaurants, non smoking & some w/special sections for both. its freedom of choice something for everyone. btw, i agree about the sunday brunch law. there has to be on one day which is somewhat more quiet. that is in the old testament, they knew this thousands of years ago. why should it be different now???

e said...

All habits that one find offensive should then be banned. If not, then maybe people should start living in a bubble, literally. The exhausts from the vehicles are also disgusting. Bloomberg should require vehicle owners to have a written policy on exhaust emmision, thereby eliminating driving in the city. Yet he's doing that already with the bike lanes.

You know what else is disgusting, texters and walkers and loud mouth people yapping in their cell phones louudly in public. Those may not be detrimental to one's physical health, but it they are certainly in one's psychological or mental health. Bottom line, live and learn; individuals should use common sense and courtesy and not let Bloomberg or the government dictate those for them.

Michael said...

I find Jehovas Witnesses offensive, can we ban them too. They crowd the street in front of their mega church near me like 3 days a week. Also the door to door solicitations get really old.