Mayor Bloomberg: NY Does Not Exist Til Jess Returns

New York City is missing a nut, and vice versa.

Jess, a 20 year old NYU undergrad, loves Paris but she is homesick for New York. She writes home comparing the two cities, two cultures:

People actually amble when they get off the Metro here! If you do that in New York you get run over or verbally abused. But I think all these things contribute to an attitude that is in contrast to one that people used to living in New York have cultivated. I have no patience, a strikingly entitled outlook (I don’t care how Catholic you are, stores should be open on Sundays!), a hurried, intense way of living and an arbitrary sense of safety even in the most dangerous situations.

The no-24-hour-metro thing is a problem in the sense that I am broke and can’t afford to take a cab home every time I go out. (Not to mention it’s not like cabs swarm the streets like in New York)…

It’s not that I hate Paris: quite the contrary. I love it here. It’s just that New York has been so woven into the person that I am that the very idea of it existing without me makes me homesick. My friends here from NYU and I talk about it constantly, and Parisians or people we know from different schools stare at us like we are legit insane. Perhaps we are. We get this dreamy look in our eyes like we are reminiscing about some long ago high school romance… a high school romance with a 24 hour subway system and an intense delivery network that can allow for anything your heart desires to appear on your doorstep within the hour.

I was browsing through friends’ Facebook albums this morning and saw a picture of someone walking up Astor Place towards Broadway. I suddenly experienced this dramatic lurch in my stomach and felt like I might cry. It’s almost as if I’m in this one sided long distance relationship or something, wherein I desperately miss this place and it just ignores me and continues to spit out pollution and embarrassingly pun-laden Post headlines…

Jess et une amie a Paris

Jess, I think I speak for 8 million New Yorkers when I say it’s just not the same without you here. Hurry home!

Photo credit: Jess and Josh Talk About Stuff

Read more about nutty NYU students!

© 2008 NutsInNY.com

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Ginsburg, Seinfeld, Suzanne Vega (plus Tom and St. John)

Flashback to 10 years ago… May 14, 1998… a lifetime ago in New York City…

That was the night of the last Seinfeld episode, a sitcom I had never seen at that time, even though my friend Eamon swore I would dig it. (I belatedly saw a few episodes and… yada, yada, yada… was hooked.)

Anyway, that spring evening my girlfriend Maryam and I strolled from her place on West End Ave over to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to attend a tribute to Allen Ginsberg, who had died sometime earlier. It was a massive event, with musical performances by Patti Smith, Phillip Glass and others.

Maryam and I only became aware of the sitcom finale as we passed a group of Seinfeld fans gathered around Tom’s Restaurant, on 112th & Broadway. The diner, we learned, was used for the exterior shots for the diner frequented by the Seinfeld characters in the show, although it was actually filmed in California.

In this account of the Ginsburg tribute, Livia Sian Llewellyn refers to the Seinfeld fever in NYC that evening. And she reminds me of the Seinfeld mockery provided at the Ginsburg tribute by Danny Schecter (whom I knew vaguely from my days as a “South African musician”, when I wrote a free press-inspired anthem, Keep the Dream in Focus, for a benefit I co-produced at the Knitting Factory for his PBS show South Africa Now):

Danny Schechter broke the taboo, and uttered the name that had been in the backs of all our minds. Schechter gave an angry and hilarious speech about the ineptitude of the media, their attention to the Show About Nothing, while doing little more in the way of coverage for the tribute than a small blurb in the Times, which listed the date as May 15, instead of the 14th. He read a Seinfeld/Ginsberg comparison list, noting the differences between the non-realities of a show about New York, filmed in Los Angeles, and a man who spent much of his life living in and writing about this city. Seinfeld was about nothing, he said, Ginsberg was and is about everything.

Now, fast forward to 2008… Lo and behold, today I learn from Popwatch.com that that UWS ‘Seinfeld diner’ is the same “Tom’s Diner” referred to in Suzanne Vega’s classic song by that name. Who knew?!… (Probably everyone else?)

Vega described the genesis of the song in a blog entry the other day:

I wrote it in the spring of 1982… When I was at Barnard College in Manhattan, I used to go to Tom’s Restaurant for coffee, and after I graduated I also ate there before going to work. It was then a cheap, greasy place on 112th and Broadway, and it still is, in spite of its celebrity… And yes, it is the same one they use in the Seinfeld credits — the neon sign that says “RESTAURANT.”

Via: Popwatch.com

Photo credit: jarhead

© 2008 NutsInNY.com

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From jazz pioneer to Nutty Squirrel

WHO: Don Elliott (1926 - 1984), musician, multitrack recording pioneer and Nutty Squirrel

WHERE: New York City

THE STORY: Don Elliott was “an American jazz trumpeter, vibraphonist, vocalist, and mellophone player… Elliott recorded over 60 albums… He recorded with Terry Gibbs and Buddy Rich before forming his own band… Elliott scored several Broadway productions… He also provided one of the voices for the novelty jazz duo the Nutty Squirrels… Elliott owned and operated one of the very first multitrack recording studios in New York City.” (Wikipedia)

The Nutty Squirrels were “a scat singing imitation of The Chipmunks… Both musical groups featured the defining sped-up voices, but [the] Chipmunks favored popular music while the Squirrels favored jazz… Ultimately, the Squirrels made it to television first (appearing in September 1960), but they were not as popular… partly because of the less popular nature of jazz music…” (Wikipedia)

The Nutty Squirrels on YouTube: Uh-Oh (Squirrely, indeed!)

Copyright ©2008 nutsinny.com

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