Posts tagged new york

An admirer wrote Helen Keller to ask what she had "seen" while being photographed on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. The blind-deaf author responded beautifully and at length. It's an amazing letter, and stunning how her descriptions are so deeply, richly metaphorical—stunning, but not surprising. "Perhaps," she wrote, "I beheld a brighter prospect than my companions with two good eyes."

re: horizons of the possible, new york, seeing, vision

Nate:

But what of the Empire Building? It was a thrilling experience to be whizzed in a “lift” a quarter of a mile heavenward, and to see New York spread out like a marvellous tapestry beneath us.

There was the Hudson – more like the flash of a sword-blade than a noble river. The little island of Manhattan, set like a jewel in its nest of rainbow waters, stared up into my face, and the solar system circled about my head! Why, I thought, the sun and the stars are suburbs of New York, and I never knew it! I had a sort of wild desire to invest in a bit of real estate on one of the planets. All sense of depression and hard times vanished, I felt like being frivolous with the stars.

New York City, this article says, is the most linguistically diverse city in the world. In a few cases it's easier to find speakers of endangered languages there than in the languages' home regions.

re: cultural worlds, diversity, languages, new york

Nate:

At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.

I'm loving the typography here, and all the other idiosyncrasies (the over-adornment of the band name, the separate "when" and "time" categories, the image of 9–14-year-olds dragging their own drums and pianos to the audition). And as Stephen Dubner points out, any young group with the organizational skills to book a New York room for two weekend days running has a decent chance they'll stick with the enterprise until they're actually good.

re: children, discipline, horizons of the possible, music, new york, practice, talent

Nate:

[Psychologist Anders Ericsson’s] work, compiled in the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson’s research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

A very cool, multicontinental tale of artistic culture-keeping: an Italian town run by artists steps in to save, relocate, and reimagine a Netflix-imperiled New York video rental institution.

re: europe, gardens and cities, horizons of the possible, italy, movies, new york

Nate:

“Kim’s was the cutting-edge; that was always the business concept,” Mr. Kim said the other day in one of a series of conversations about the fate of his video collection. “But ironically, I didn’t prepare.”

Last September, in a move that swept through the Internet at viral speed, he issued a public challenge. In a notice pasted on a wall inside the front door, he wrote, “We hope to find a sponsor who can make this collection available to those who have loved Kim’s over the past two decades.” He promised to donate all the films without charge to anyone who would meet three conditions: Keep the collection intact, continue to update it and make it accessible to Kim’s members and others.

Offers poured in. Every one failed on one count or another. Every offer, that is, except one.

For me Cel-Ray actually seems more plausible than some of the other regional North American soft drinks I've heard about. I remember a college friend once returning from Montreal with some sort of pine-based soda, which did seem like a bit too much (but no doubt has its fans).

re: cultural worlds, food and drink, new york

Nate:

The soda’s origins are foggy. It’s not clear whether an actual Dr. Brown existed, but most accounts point to beginnings on the Lower East Side around 1870, when the drink was marketed as a health tonic. Dr. Brown’s has no official website, and may be the only brand of celery-flavored soda. It’s canned at a plant on Long Island called Pepsi-Cola of New York, though Dr. Brown’s is owned by Canada Dry.

To find out more, I call the bottling plant and reach Rosalie Mileo, the customer service manager for Dr. Brown’s. I ask her to tell me about the company. “There is no Dr. Brown’s,” she says. “It’s just a name.”

Whatever the ontology of the company, she does concede that Cel-Ray lags considerably in popularity behind the other Dr. Brown’s sodas, which include black cherry, cream soda, root beer, diet cream soda, and diet black cherry. A diet version of Cel-Ray was produced until several years ago, Mileo tells me, and Cel-Ray is most in demand in New York and in Florida, “because lots of retired New Yorkers live there,” she adds.

“Are there plans to stop manufacturing Cel-Ray any time soon?” I ask.

“There are no plans to stop manufacturing Cel-Ray any time soon,” she echoes.

“Can you tell me anything else about Cel-Ray?” I ask.

“It’s not popular,” she replies firmly.

Further proof of The Onion's key historical insight: that all compound words can become archaic and hilarious with the simple addition of hyphens.

re: advertising, cultural worlds, new york, noise, sound

Nate:

A police amphibian airplane trailed a tri-motored ship from which advertising matter was being broadcast through a loud-speaker for almost two hours yesterday afternoon.

Mitchell strikes me as perhaps the best example of a writer who sees the value not just in investigating what's behind the everyday, but in really pondering things—figuring out, often over quite a long time, just what he makes of the people and places he's writing about. It's interesting to write elegiacally about Mitchell as the type of writer now rarely seen, considering that his own best pieces were also elegiac—writing about things that were overlooked and, often as not, dwindling as the great mid-20th-century rambled on.

re: cultural worlds, joseph mitchell, journalism, new york, story, writing

Nate:

This summer marks the 100th birthday of the late Joseph Mitchell, who helped to redefine the art of journalism. In 1938, when Mitchell wrote his first profile for the New Yorker, the notion of the reporter as stylist was still a novelty. By 1992, when the omnibus ”Up in the Old Hotel” hit bestseller lists, it was ubiquitous. The recent republication of Mitchell’s finest collection, ”The Bottom of the Harbor”, brings back into focus innovations that have faded into familiarity or fallen into neglect. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Our current crop of reporter-stylists would do well to study the qualities that make this book remarkable.

Chief among these is patience. Contemporary magazine journalism often seems torn between ratifying conventional wisdom and railing against it. The twin temptations of sensationalism and contrarianism hover over online discourse, in particular. Not that technology is solely to blame; as a newspaperman in the 1930s, covering the Hauptmann murder trial and interviewing George Bernard Shaw for the Herald Tribune and the World-Telegram, respectively, Mitchell was near the centre of the media circuses of his day. Once the New Yorker freed him from deadline pressure, however, Mitchell conserved his attention for (and lavished it on) subjects he felt it might dignify.

It turns out just about anything is fascinating if you look at it hard enough. What Mitchell chose to look at, in his increasingly lengthy “profiles”, were the remnants of Old New York that were disappearing beneath the city’s relentless growth: waterfront rooming-houses (“Old Mr Flood”), petty criminals (“King of the Gypsys”), Epicurean ritual (“All You Can Eat for Five Bucks”) and, in “The Bottom of the Harbor“, the maritime life of a city most people forget is an archipelago.