UTTERLY RANDOM IN BERLIN

waitingforrelease:

strandbooks:

The secret is out.

“If you really need to know, you go to the Strand and ask for Ben.”

….

In recent years, the store has put in place a computerized inventory system, but Mr. McFall relies largely on his prodigious mental map of the tens of thousands of books in the section to keep track of the waxing and waning of various titles.

A pristine copy of Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C. had come in; so had a slightly rare copy of James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head; George Saunders’s new Tenth of December had sold out.

“It seems like a feat, but if it were your house, you’d know where things are, too,” Mr. McFall said while pulling books off shelves, almost without looking at their titles…

A lovely write-up in the New York Times for a beautiful man. We are truly lucky to have him, and so are you!

Now I have to go visit Ben. :)

Ah, now there’s something I miss: 8 miles of books at Strand Book Store.

inothernews:

helveticafutura:

sarah-fincher:

-rosasparks-:

spramped:

wow

OOH SHIIIIT.

Manhattan mini-storage always has awesome ads like this.  A few years ago it had one that said “Your closet is so narrow it makes [Dick] Cheney look liberal.”

Oh, Manhattan Mini Storage. “New York: Seven Professional Sports Teams and the Mets” (or some variant thereof) was one of my favorites. Along with the one that says if you store your stuff with your parents it means you have to visit them.

Best.

Brilliant … I sort of want to go to NY and put some stuff in storage with them. Maybe I should settle for sending them a postcard ;-)

nythroughthelens:

The last days of Mars Bar. East Village, New York City

I have written about Mars Bar and its demise many times now, I know. However, there is something about this image that resonates with me.

It was taken a few weeks back on an oppressively humid and rainy day. I was on my way to my local grocery store which is in the same area and I stopped to talk to a Mars Bar regular who was standing and staring wistfully at the wall in the image in this post. We talked about the history of the street art on the facade, his life in the East Village twenty years ago and he shared some off-the-wall stories about his experiences at Mars Bar over the years. He wanted to know why I wanted photos of “the joint”.

I looked at him and said “I want to possess a relic of that certain something that is long gone from this neighborhood, that something that Mars Bar possesses that can’t quite be found here in the East Village anymore.” He looked at me, took a long drag of his cigarette and then nodded in agreement.

A few days ago, Gothamist published an opinion article called Mars Bar Will Close In “Four To Six Weeks” And That Is OK which incited some passionate comments. A key quote from the article was: “If you loved Mars Bar you should mourn it (you loved it after all) and move on. Trust us, the owners will be fine. But please—oh, please—when it finally closes can we not turn it into the commercialized fake memory that CBGB’s has become, with T-shirts sold to tourists by the truckload? Because, to use a phase often heard in the bar, fuck that.”

I agree with this sentiment. I appreciate the mourning for the loss of Mars Bar because the mourning is really over the loss of many of the things that made the East Village into something special years ago. It’s the loss of that certain something that drove us to the East Village and the Lower East Side initially, the hard edged creativity fueled not by development money but by little more than dreams and gumption. It’s hard to not mourn, quite frankly.

View my store, email me, or ask for help.

Great photograph and nicely worded sentiments … Oh, and Berlin there’s a lesson here for you, so pay attention.