Guest Blogger, Mrs Hempel is blogging from NYC and the US of A more generally from 30 May to 30 June inclusive. Just don’t call her a ‘Kiwi mum’ ‘on the loose’ in the ‘Big Apple’.
Thursday June 21 2012 Brooklyn, NYC The temperature hit the high ‘90s in New York today, with records set across the Tri-State Area and for Central Park in particular, and health authorities issuing warnings for society’s most vulnerable members: babies, the elderly, the 8 million dogs in the city and pet snakes. (If you’re worried, take your snake outside and pour bottled water on it, and under no circumstances...
Sunday June 3 2012 Brooklyn, NYC Disclaimer! Disclaimer! I’m iffy about ‘street style’.* It was 12 months ago that I started to hate Scott Schuman and his seminal website The Sartorialist. (Toooo seminal, that site, and not enough ‘ovular’, as my excellent feminist friend Smitty would have it.) It had something to do with the shark-jumpy, insider vanity of his self-portraits, model portraits and girlfriend portraits; something squirmily 90s-minded...
Saturday June 2 2012 Brooklyn, NYC The phenomenon of hipsters clashing with Hasidic Jews in well-past-trendy (but still Hasidic) Williamsburg in Brooklyn* has been well documented and much ironised.** It’s still a sight to see, though. Right now it’s interesting to see what happens when the hipsters’ older and less hip counterparts (or selves?) move into neighbouring Greenpoint to settle and – inadvertently – to interact with the denizens...
Brooklyn, NYC Sex and the City sometimes leads to mommies in the city – and it does so now more than ever, with a 26 percent rise in the number of 5-year-olds in New York from 2000 to 2004 – and growing. In addition – as everywhere – breeders are trending to stay put, close to their hip hoods post push (or likelier, C-section), instead of heading out to...
Thursday June 8 2012 Brooklyn, NYC In contrast to the previous night’s divey excesses, this evening was exceedingly sensible – shopping and laundry – but no less exciting for the wee frisson of celebrity brought by the former, and the iconic Americana of the latter. Shopping took place at the Greene Hill Food Co-op , where the organic produce is bounteous, the 2D design witty and cute, the checkout...
Wednesday June 6 2012 Brooklyn, NYC I am – as they say – a ‘huge fan’, both of Neil Young and of the rock biography genre. And of Patti Smith, for that matter. And the entire history of punk and post-punk music in New York.** Today at Book Expo America, I got the astonishing chance to see Neil talking to Patti*** in person about writing, in advance of...
Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine: the Bergdorf-Goodman shoe sale. Friday June 9 2012 Brooklyn, NYC Where has the week – and too much of my money – gone? Into repairing my broken laptop computer.* Grrr. Hence the long silence. But like publishers everywhere, I’m still digitising the sketchy backlist/backlog so the rest will be up super soon, and in no particular order. Meanwhile, I accidentally go shopping. Ah,...
Friday June 1 2012 6:00pm Brooklyn, NYC Fact: There is no greater prop than a borrowed dog for masquerading as a local*, and no greater city in which to do so than Brooklyn. Today Lucky Luciano (for that is his full name), ‘my’ lucky Tree Walking Coon Hound and I, took to the warm and leafy streets of Fort Greene/Clinton Hill/Bedford-Stuyvesant to see what we could see. (Or...
Friday 1 June 2012 11:00am Brooklyn, NYC Midmorning. I’m right under the Brooklyn bridge, bent double and staring at a steaming, gloopy pile of dog shit in the dust – and it’s neither made of plastic, nor from Chinatown – when a seething pack of dogs, incl a pit bull, a Great Dane and a truly enormous Irish wolfhound, bowl into me at high speed. Unpleasant and scary as...
May 30 2012 12:00am Sky above JFK Airport, NYC Roughly 24 hours later (I’ll spare you the details of the pat-down in LA), here I am hovering above JFK airport. I watched the lights get denser and denser, and more and more arterial (like All Roads Leading) and, yes, felt a helpless excitement when that lit-up, golden, slightly out-of-focus lump, Manhattan, banked into view.* Fill in your own...
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