By Katherine Guttman
JP’s hands are shaking. The scars on his hand – where their father threw the scalding water onto the boys when they were just six and eight – glare at me white against his tan skin. He goes to set the coffee mug on the counter but it rattles too much so he clutches it tighter.
“That’s George’s backpack.” He gestures with his chin, then goes to take a sip from the mug and can’t seem to get it to his lips. I take a sip of my tea.
Turns out, 8th graders know everything—especially those living in the many-splendored neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Their advice is so concise, so crystal-clear, so cut-to-the-bone, that it makes one wonder why they spent all that money on a fancy college education.
Rather than hoard this wealth of knowledge, I have invited 82 guest columnists to contribute nuggets of wisdom to the public at large. Each week, a certified and licensed 8th grader will impart words of advice on topics such as relationships, chemical dependency, and existential crises.
Hippies is a flat-out wonderful album. Hats off to the gents in Harlem.
But thumbs down to me. Harlem has done interviews where they claim Nirvana as their only influence, they do a mean cover of Goodbye Horses, and their album art (two seemingly homeless dudes killing it in a practice room) rocks. Yet somehow, despite these unquestionable indicators of awesomeness, I was unprepared for the genius of this LP.
You can often experience a lot of art, especially if those two blocks are in gallery-rich Chelsea or perhaps even around 57th Street. Pick any block or two and you can create your very own gallery walking tour, with as much or as little planning and customization as you want. And for added bonus, galleries are almost always free entry, and if you plan your tour around opening nights you might even get a free glass of wine out of the trip.
The listings at the back of New York magazine are usually a good place to get your bearings on what is going on in the city’s gallery world, though the online listings can be more thorough. Another great place to get some ideas, or at least to pick a place to start your tour, is Artlog. It has the most thorough listings I have seen around recently, and you can even search exhibits and events by zip code – which can be quite helpful when you have a general location in mind, be it Chelsea or other.
Back in October a friend of mine came up to NY from Philly, and with her she brought me a very lovely hostess gift: Root Liquor made by Philly collective of sorts, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It’s been sitting on my counter for months (I have been waiting for a special occasion to open it), and well, yesterday seemed appropriate. Plus, the Times wrote a little blurb on it a few days ago, so I figured I may as well write about it now before it becomes passe.
I don’t know about you, but I loved root beer floats as a child. I have very vivid memories of drinking them on humid summer afternoons while visiting my grandma in Chicago. The website for this Root stuff has a bunch of different recipes, but I wanted to make a classic root beer float, which is just root beer and vanilla ice cream.
It was a pretty tragic week for bookworms across the world. On Wednesday we lost history buff, WWII veteran, and all-around genius Howard Zinn. Then reports surfaced that the reclusive and highly influential fiction writer J.D. Salinger had also passed. Double-whammy.
After work on Friday, the teachers from my school congregated for happy hour. Being the dorks we are, it didn’t take long for the conversation to head towards Zinn and Salinger, and eventually, an all-out Catcher in the Rye debate. While we all had different opinions about Salinger’s coming-of-age masterpiece, it was impossible for any of us to deny that the book had a marked effect on us—a feat that not too many other novels can claim across the board.
This week on LYNX, I bring you:
Some interesting local coverage (via EV Grieve, the best place for local news, sorry NY1.)
Something worth clicking (thanks J).
Something so charming it can even make a New Yorker stop being cynical for a hot minute. (via MUG – a good resource for said cynical New Yorker)
The beautiful thing is that you just never know, like, you just don’t, you are getting dressed in the morning and feeling very strongly the privacy of your space. Your apartment is your cocoon and never mind the other eight million people in the city who may also be getting up, trying on a shirt, buttoning it the wrong way and throwing it on the floor. Never mind the million other cups of coffee getting splashed on a skirt, never mind the million frantic watch-glances, just around the middle of eight o’clock AM.
I need to leave my house at precisely 8:23 or else everything falls apart. I need to have a cup of coffee and get my tights on and leave at that exact time, allowing for the broken door handle, the depth of my handbag and the inevitable dig for the spiky key cluster, the potential for ice on the sidewalk, the height of a heel, the geometry of walking.
This post officially kicks off Guten Morgan 2010, and while Wetdog aren’t the best band I’ve ever heard in my life, they make for a pretty solid start to the decade. Basically, they’re a cheeky trio of Brits with a rumbling low end and a strident set of pipes up top. I imagine them dancing around their rooms at a younger age to Talulah Gosh and the Slits and then getting drunk on Laser at some sidestreet punk-rock flat off the Cowley road. ‘Ello, Guvner!
Though it’s true that Mark Ronson loves them, despite their atrocious name, maybe I went too far with the cockney joke. If I wasn’t trying to provide you with an entertaining music column, I’d probably simply have said that the band reminds me of a Slumberland-era Sic Alps as covered by Love of Diagrams.
It’s an extra-good week in Lynx-Land, and I don’t mean Romania though the noble Lynx is the national animal. “Lynx” is also the name for the Central Florida Regional Transportation Authority but what I’m talking about today is the Internet.
Speaking of food: eating (well) on $7 a day.