My office building is built to be flexible so that it doesn’t topple over in the wind gusts that roar over the tip of the island in Battery Park. On bad days, the building groans as it sways back and forth, and I know to have my lunch delivered so as to not mess up my hair. On really bad days, the door in our 25th floor lobby won’t lock because the two walls around it are so far from where they’re supposed to be.
This fascinates me.
It’s funny to find myself nostalgic and grossly sentimental for the city I currently live in. I saw this ring from Henri Bendel in Time Out New York on the train the other morning and had a moment of heart palpitations.
I guess I have a special attachment to the Chrysler Building since dating Kamran, who goes to bed every night with it shining in his window, and since we took this photo in front of it two whole years ago. When I asked my brother-in-law to design a sticker for me and he sent a drawing with a skyline, I specifically asked if he could change one of the buildings to the Chrysler.
I don’t know if I love it enough to special order a $720 gold (gold?!) ring modeled after it, but it makes me sad to imagine not seeing it every day.
I’m interested–are there things in your city you feel this way about?
My boyfriend lives right beside the United Nations building on the East River, so every time some unwanted politician blows into town, we feel the effects more than most New Yorkers. Yesterday morning, I walked out of his apartment building to find a tow truck pulling cars off the street, cops milling everywhere with especially cute and not-at-all-threatening dogs, the sidewalks lined with metal barriers, and 42nd Street blocked off to cars. Which meant that the bus I lazily use to take me the three stops to Grand Central wasn’t running.
After a rooftop barbeque in Brooklyn on Saturday night, our friend Jeff offered to drop us off at Kamran’s apartment on his way home. As Kamran and I buckled ourselves in, we realized that in nearly three years of dating, it was the first time we’d ever been in a car together.
How totally New York City is that?
I saw Harold and Maude in Bryant Park on Monday night. And when I say I “saw” it, I mean it, because I heard exactly three lines in the movie:
1) “Sagging breasts and flabby buttocks.”
2) “Do you enjoy knives?”
3) “I love you.”
And actually, I didn’t even really hear the second line; Beth had to tell me what it said. See, I arrived at Bryant Park for this week’s installment of the Summer Film Festival a full hour and a half before the movie started, but when I met up with my co-worker Steve, he said the place had already been packed for a while. There was absolutely nowhere to sit in the grass, so Steve, Beth, Emily, Jeff, our new German intern Niko, and I ended up on the concrete stairs, miiiiiiiiiiiles away from the screen with our view partially blocked by the motorhome that the movie was being projected from.
I’ve never seen Harold and Maude, but even without being able to make out any of the dialogue, I thought I’d pieced the story together pretty well until I got back to Kamran’s apartment. It was then that he said, “Yeah, wasn’t it totally crazy how [that really important thing] happened?”, and I said, “Oh, I had no idea [that really important thing] happened.” And now the movie’s ruined for me. But not for you, because I save spoilers for the comments section. Love you!
From what I gathered, though, it’s a really lovely movie. Both because Harold is uber-hot in a pasty white boy way, and because Cat Stevens does the soundtrack. The audience was swooning all over the opening credits:
It felt sort of magical, I’ll admit, listening to Cat and watching Harold reject all of the college ladies who want him, surrounded by these giant buildings with the lights from Times Square reflecting off of them. The only problem I had was that there were homeless people there. I felt sort of weird for hating them, because I generally try pretty hard to keep my feelings toward the less fortunate in the neutral to hopeful range. And, like, the outdoors belong to these people, you know?, so it’s almost like I was watching my movie in their living room. But I pay my taxes and patronize summer film series sponsors, and therefore I deserve things like a decent seat away from the less hygienic, am I right?
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