Remembering 2007
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Liz George is the publisher of Montclair Local. liz@montclairlocal.news More by Liz George
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Cute survey, but if anyone should get suckered into the “you’ve won 2 free Ipod nanoa” scenario, run!!! Complete waste.
I don’t feel sufficiently inspired to vote for any of these things. Sorry. Maybe it’s me. Cynicism is creeping up on me, after all these years. Have I ever told you how much I hate the holidays? Well, I do. I’ve got a post-nasal drip, sore throat. If I don’t get some work done today I’ll face certain doom on Wednesday. I don’t feel like going to First Night but feel I must because of some vestigial civic impulse. Relatives are still here. Kids are making noise. There is no god. How could all my trousers have shrunk in the waist at the same time? The sun is shining, which makes me feel all the worse by contrast. Thank goodness it gets dark at 4:30. Happy new year.
Intermission just ending at the Philharmonic. Walleroo, it’s not just you. I had the same reaction to the survey. This Montclair Council is so disappointing that I cannot even find words or decide on a vote.
Walleroo, thanks for your crazy online jousts with, um, that other guy/gal, that brought many moments of online laughter. That made a difference on many days.
Happy New Year!
I turned down four party and one First Night invitation to stay home. I have absolutely no interest in celebrating the end of a most globally, nationally, and locally dismal year. (A whole day and half of an evening with friends can make anyone crave a bit of alone time. Then tomorrow the brunch and merriment continues, damn it!)
Next year will be better–it ends in an even number. And most likely there will be a Democrat in the White House.
As for the survey, none of those samples appeal to me. Nor do I want a free Ipod, as Robin pointed out.
Why thank you, Nana. I am truly grateful for your comment, and moved by it, too. There have been times in the past year when I have greatly appreciated your candor. I hope to see lots more of it in 2008. And if we happen to disagree on a subject, I hope we can go at it tooth and nail, and hit each other with our best stuff–in a civil manner, of course– and both come out of it a little more enlightened. That goes for the rest of you knuckleheads — Miss Martta, cathar, ROC, prof, cro, crank, curm, conan, duck and whoever else I’ve left out but know who you are.
So, ‘Supe, you stayed up to watch Dick Clark, didn’t you? Don’t feel bad, so did I. 🙂 But I watched it with the sound off while listening to WBGO live from some jazz club in NYC — tasty sounds. Made a resolution to get out and hear live music at least twice a month this year. That one I think I can keep. Good 2008 on you, and to the rest of the Usual Suspects as well.
Back atcha, Conan. As a matter of fact, I did watch Dick last night, with the sound up.
I fell asleep on the couch at 11:30. I think Blake Lewis put me under.
I just noticed the ad over to the left that Copabananas is back! 547 Valley Rd! Woo-hoo! That’s reason to celebrate!
Reason #2: New York Dolls at Stone Pony on 2/15. Who’s going?
A happy & prosperous 2008 to everyone.
Since I (atill) remember when the New York Dolls had all their original members and used to play in Bloomfield, at a Chinese restaurant which tried to be a punk club for a while, I feel very old this morning.
But not so old as not to notice that yon walleroo above posted at an hour when he still should have been out clubbing, or at least annoying his neighbors at some noisome local bash, certainly not at his computer. This suggests to me that he drinks at home, which I find saddening, I’d imagined him a bon vivant among marsupials.
Perhaps he brings his laptop or blackberry out with him, and then finds a quiet little corner in which to post during a lull in the festivities. This would serve to give us stay at home types some “real time” reportage.
I would imagine that it would also prove very enticing to the female of the species.
Croiagusanam (and where did you do your own “first footing” the other evening?, our own first such visitor down south was apparently a palmetto bug), I doubt very much the critter carries a Blackberry or something similar with him. Or that anybody of the fairer sex would find it or him cute for it.
But then, I’m also someone who finds all those studious types hunched over their laptops in a Starbucks much too poseur-like. “Real” writers should continue to do as Kerouac and co. used to, get sloshed someplace like the old West End. Someplace where it’s never New Year’s Eve, where Charles Bukowski would feel right at home. Instead, the marsupial rushed home after First Night to post pictures of an ice sculptor! Gone, gone are the days…
I welcomed the new year in while hunkered down in the Bronx. for reasons never clear to me, visiting relatives always want to frequen places that resemble, exactly, the places they just left– right down to the clientele. I understand a need to seek out the comfort of the old country when one is a new arrival, but for a tourist, awash in euros, to want to spend the evening in a place like the one which, in this case, HE OWNS! back in Ireland, is something I’ll never understand. Nevertheless, there are far worse places to be than the Bronx.
I think the Starbucks scribes are right up there with the types who would sit at a crowded bar with a weighty tome (not a paper, of course. That is one of life’s great joys). Waiting, praying, to be asked “what are you reading?” so that a spiel designed to portray the eejit as an intellectual forced to live in a hostile climate can ensue.
I wasn’t thinking of Bukowski on new year’s eve, but if I had been reminded of him then I’d take comfort in his view on mortality:
“Dripping faucets, farts of passion, flat tires — these are all sadder than Death”.
After a very non-scientific survey (whose statistics we lost during the last part of the research), we discovered that there are more Irish bars in Fordham than there are in Dublin. We think. And Marsupial is totally wired, Cathar — direct from brain-to-blog. It’s a variation on a theme by BlueTooth that only requires minor in-patient surgery.
I don’t doubt the accuracy of your survey, Conan. during my last trip back to the Isle of Saints and Scholars, I was told by a barman that the reason for the appalling carnage on the roads in Eire (it is really terrible, much worse than here) was the huge number of “polaks and them-like” that continued to drink to excess in their ethnic pubs and then took to the roads, driving on the wrong side. In larger cities, you’ll find Polish, Russian, Brazilian and Chinese spots galore. So Fordham Road and environs might well be the place where the Celts will make their next last stand!
With all due respect, croiagusanam and Conan alike, I think the Celts took one last, lingering look at the ethnic vitality of their Mediterranean cousins round Arthur Avenue and then promptly split forever from the Fordham road area. Perhaps to round Durham in the Catskills, and the lace-curtained variety to their summer homes in Brielle, Spring Lake and Sea Girt.
In any case, little of the Bronx is as Irish as it used to be. Not even north of the reservoir. The Italians, however, remained and in the process “won.” So it plainly helps to have a full-service kitchen along with a well-stocked bar.
Can’t deny that the ethnic makeup of NYC neighborhoods is a very fluid situation (pun intended). Murph Guide, the Google engine of NYC bars (www.murphguide.com), lists 40 Irish bars in the Bronx — mainly in Woodlawn and Riverdale; Queens, of course, clocks in with twice that number — many of which are in Sunnyside.