NYC contrarities continued

 Kids don't have to walk on the Upper West Side. Like a junior Royal, his father conveys him in a wagon to the market. A man finds a resting place on a subway platform. As always, click to enlarge.

Covid rant

 

Yes, I wrote that I would limit myself to photographs and the contrarities they reveal about our current way of life. I've been housebound for days now, and one of my kind neighbors has been delivering food to the top of my steps, including yesterday a delicious fruit salad with the most creamy, silky yogurt, along with a copy of the recent New York Times Book Review. So, here I sit this morning with my tea, hoping that this may be the day that I trust myself to walk down the steps and outside for some fresh air. I look at the front page of the Book Review on the table before me, and as always with this publication, I take umbrage. Which is my way of saying that I am offended by almost everything I read in it, starting with the headlines. Indeed, the headlines in the NYT are a signal for you to assume the opinion stated therein.

What offends me? Its assumptions, which are those that the loyal New York Times reader is to assume as their own. Let me start with the headline on the front page of this May 15, 2022, issue, which pictures a group of stewardesses -- oh, oh: make that flight attendants.:

TWO NEW BOOKS SHOW HOW FED-UP FLIGHT ATTENDANTS SPARKED A MASS LABOR MOVEMENT

There are two books under review concerning flight attendants. One is a nostalgic memoir of a woman who became a stewardess in the late 1970s when in her twenties. For the reviewer, Fly Girl: A Memoir "leaves out a lot" and reads "like watching a vintage Doris Day movie in which the clueless heroine mistakenly wanders out of the 1950s and into the sex, drugs, and rock and roll that followed ..." The other (The Great Stewardess Rebellion) is a takedown of such nostalgia. The reviewer stakes out her position in the opening sentences: stewardesses served as "sexual bait to lure the nation's burgeoning corps of male business travelers." The writer of The Great Stewardess Rebellion), Neil Wulfhart, is not identified in the review as having been a stewardess, but is, according to her website, a "decision coach." (Go see for yourself.) So, this expert in life coaching has done the investigation and can tell you "the real story": the stewardesses who get fired from gaining weight, the amp dependencies, "the vicious misogyny of all the sexist men ..." who countered the attempts to improve working conditions.

I'm not saying that the Doris Day account is the one to live by, but my objection is to the  assumption that "sparking a mass labor movement" was a good thing. That may or may not be the case, but destroying illusions is a given in the world of the New York Times. Is there some reason why the reviewer could not have given a more measured picture? Being a stewardess in the 1970s was not like chattel slavery. A lot of people, men and women, were trapped in jobs that were oppressive. But there is something very evil about the way that the NYT focuses on people's discontent, and clearly the reviewer here (Leslie Bennetts, author of articles on, among others, Jennifer Anniston) is committed to the arena of femal discontent. Almost every novel reviewed in the NYTBR concerns a topic like "toxic mother-daughter relationships." A headline to such a review reads: "The author suggests that the body is sickened by secrets; everything must come out." Oh, really? Why?

Thus, my disgust with this newspaper. The NYT obviously has an outsized influence on the kinds of books that are published, tales of blame and hurt and self-pity. And one wonders where the great writers have gone.  I feel for my kind neighbor, who reads this NYT trash every day and whose view of society is contaminated by it.

Corporate suck-ups, 1

 I am sure there will be more. Stay tuned.

It makes me think of people who find a gun pointed at their head and begin to whimper in fear.

Mesopotamia? Or New York?

 

Contrarities of modern urban life, 2

 

No. 1 Subway

Madison Avenue

Contrarities of urban modern life 1

It's been ages since I posted, and in fact the blog was closed to readers for a long time. I have decided to reopen it. The lockdown, the pandemic, the virus -- however you want to call what has happened in the past two years -- has made me look at the world around me more intently. I have been carrying my iTouch with me: I need my vax ID to get into a restaurant, right? and the proof is right there in my Photos file. I have loved taking pictures the past two years. There are many things about the life that grab my attention and that I would like to document. But why hide them away in the Pictures file of my Mac? For the next while, until I have a new inspiration, I want to post images occasionally. I choose the above title for today's post, and there will be other contradictions I would like to document: thus, we start with number 1. But there will be other subjects. For the most part, I will only post the pictures. I could probably write essays about them but I will allow them to speak for themselves. As always, click to enlarge.

 

Macy's Cosmetics Dept.

No. 1 Subway Line

Buying Guns in Beverly Hills

I live in New York City and have read or heard about the rise in crime here. I have not been affected (yet), and my neighborhood seems relatively quiet. I have noticed, however, that things are not tidy. It sounds petty, but since the pandemic the street cleaners have not been active in residential streets. Lately that means that the falling leaves are clogging the gutters. (It's not like the street is a forest, but things are looking very messy, )

Lately, it struck me that beggars and homeless people, when on the move, hang out at places where middle-class people like me are to be found: in front of the local bank when I exit after making a deposit, or on the corner near Zabar's. And of course in the subway, a moving procession of the indigent. In other words, they plague the consciences of people who have to go out and earn a living. I say to myself, why do they not hang out on Park Avenue or other places where really moneyed people live? Probably because they would be chased away.

In any case, the title of this post is from a report in Los Angeles Magazine. It was not only Schadenfreude (look it up!) that caused me to be amused to see that California types in favor of defunding the police are buying guns to defend their property. (Yes, I know, I am labeling an entire class of people, but, really, that state is out of control, and mostly because of the pieties of such types.)