kid you gotta get a gimmick

i'm simone, i live in new york city & i have an rss addiction.

- books in '08
- project 365
- twitter.

here are some things i write about a lot: broadway, tv, feministing, books,
quotes, new york city, & real life

email me - gettingagimmick[at]gmail[dot]com

“ They just came out with a souped-up new version that is very cool yet somehow manages to rank San Francisco the #1 most walkable city in the U.S. and New York City #2. Is Eastern Queens really dragging us down that badly? Doesn’t pretty much everyone have a car in the Bay Area? ”

- Streetsblog » Is San Fran More Walkable Than NYC?

seagull:

Sometimes I wonder if New York is seen as something extraordinarily special by those who live there because they don’t know anything else.  They got an itch, New York City scratched it.  Austin scratched mine.  Maybe another city would have done the same.

Just sayin’.

nope. at least not for me. i can say this with some degree of certainty. i’ve been to a fair number of cities, and they are nice in their respective ways, and i enjoy different things about them.

but new york has sung to me, called to me, for as long as i can remember.

the closest i’ve ever heard someone come to describing the feeling is joan didion.

“ There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. […] Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. ”

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Here is New York: E.B. White

I read this quote on the subway this morning. It struck me as very poignant for a morning commute.

I'm on the upper east

I’m on the upper east side and the city is deserted on a cool spring night & it’s so perfect i could cry.
“ [two white women are leaving a performance of The Color Purple]

Woman #1: So what did you think?
Woman #2: I don’t know. It was good I guess. It was just…
Woman #1: What?
Woman #2: Very… Black or something. ”

-

Outside The Broadway Theatre, 53rd & 7th 

Overheard in New York: I Waited in Vain for a Blonde Ingenue
“ some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the upper East Side that went ‘but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,’ and if it was late enough at night i used to wonder that. i know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before. ”

- joan didion, slouching towards bethlehem.
“

I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live,

But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.

”

- from the essay ‘Goodbye to All That’ by Joan Didion.

there’s this one subway conductor on the 1 line in the mornings whose voice i hate more than anything. it’s nails on a chalkboard-esque. even with my headphones up and the music on loud i still hear a fair bit of it.

this morning if i hadn’t already been running late i would have waited for another train.

it’s the crazy thing about new york - you hear other people talk about the way you start to recognize other people - but it until it happens to you it’s not really real.

Gothamist: Elephant Walk 2008 is Tuesday March 18!

there’s something about the idea of elephants crossing into manhattan and walking down the street that makes me smile.
“

Hipster guy: Yeah, like I’m gonna go see that queer Jersey Boys shit.
Hipster girl: Is there anything you would go see?
Hipster guy: No. Not some faggot-ass musical… Well, I might see Mary Poppins.

—1 train, 59th St

”

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when i tell you this might be my single favorite over heard in new york quote ever, please do not take that lightly.

Overheard in New York | While Taking It Up the Ass?
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