Why yes, I've always liked Richard Estes. Thank you. Of course, he was a painter, which is leagues beyond me, Mr. Shootencrop. He's still alive, at 92.
Snowed this morn, so it was shoveling before work. Wasn't much. When I left for the office I saw a neighbor's sidewalk crew removing the snow with a gas-powered leaf-blower - don't see that often. Seems like a cheat. You allow that, you've no arguments against flamethrowers.
Walking to work I noticed that there's another mountain in the hotel parking lot:
Looks worse than it is. A student of snow and its varieties will note the powdery coating, which indicates a fresh dusting; the grey outcroppings indicate dirty snow scraped from the parking lot, and subject to a melt-freeze cycle that turns them into boulders. This, in short, is painful water.
You can get painful water if you boil it, but for the most part in places where people wish to live, painful water does not occur naturally. I should also note that the temps occupied a particular niche where there's lots of slush in the gutters and street corners, so if you don't watch your step you soak your shoe with cold, grey water.
"It's the last month of winter!" said the clerk at the store the other day. I gave her a long look intended to express concern for her mental well-being.
"The last month," I said.
"Yes!"
"You're not from these parts, are you."
"Born and raised! In March you have St. Patrick's Day, you spring forward, and you remember last yeat it was in the 60s!"
"True. But there's also false spring and second winter. Late blizzards. Snowbanks on tax day."
"Just wait," she said.
I suppose there's no harm in living in hope. Eventually you're right. Or dead! So there's that.

What do you think?
No, I’m not doing engagement bait for money. Well, we’re all doing that in one way or another, but you know what I mean. What do you think?
It’s a proposal. Reading around here and there I infer that the current MSG in in bad shape, and there’s talk of relocation. Some scoff at the matter of relocation because it’s right on top of a transportation hub, which is good for getting people into the facility, and it won't move. That means the neoclassical overhaul is just a facade, a skin for the old structure. So? All facades are skins for a structure.
If you’re thinking of the old Penn Station facade that faced the Hotel Pennsylvania, this is the other side. The Hotel is gone, having been demolished for a proposed tower with the worst name ever: PENN15. In this date and age I don’t know how anyone didn’t realize what a ribbing they’d take for that. What a reservoir of ribaldry waits to be released. Tip: run all building names past someone with an adolescent sensibility.
Anyway, sure, I’d like it. But only if it felt solid. Don’t clad it with blocks of ersatz stone. Use materials that weigh a ton, because we can tell when it’s fake and when it’s real.
Speaking of a juvenile, immature, adolescent sensibility: the other day they attached new chains to the fire hydrants on the hotel next to my building, and I couldn’t resist.
A No-Prize awaits the first to explain this to the rest of the class.

Aptent sem nulla curae posuere potenti eleifend. Massa primis rhoncus inceptos torquent sodales posuere. Elementum fames velit risus; inceptos conubia tincidunt metus. Pellentesque dapibus amet fermentum hendrerit erat nam vulputate id. Sem nullam sollicitudin dis fusce rutrum tellus augue nostra ligula! The opening music tells you whether this is an ordinary crime episode, or one of the unnerving kids-today eps that dives into the crazy, drug-fueled world of Today's Youth.
Those guitar-crazy kids with their sinuous saxophones.
There's a shoplifting gang working the department stores. Or rather a gang that uses shoplifting as its initiation. They catch a kid who begs Friday and Gannon to let his friend bring the clothes he stashed at a gas station, so he can change before his mother picks him up.
I mean, look at him! The very picture of degeneracy!
We meet the ringleader, who has that smirky contemptous attitude that makes him the most punchable person you'll see on TV tonight:
He'll get a good speech before the day's over. But the encounter leaves Gannon unnerved:
Yes indeed it is, Joe. Yes indeed. |