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Ok, back to New York
It's still Saturday afternoon, and I'm behind, so I'll critique less art this issue.
I'd just picked up the Japanese art I had commissioned, and we
continued walking.
That's a busy-ass part of town, 53 Street and Fifth Avenue...
Next up was St Patrick's Cathedral, where America has said a lot
of sad goodbyes.
Helluva building, so to speak.
The doors were open, we went in. The doors must weigh 400
pounds each.
I had to lineback the door to make it move.
There was a mass going on.
The smell of hundreds of candles hasn't hit my nose in
decades.
They do that, they use that aroma therapy to dull your
senses.
Even yearlings file that smell, so as to trigger the shame
and self-doubt later.
At twenty months, that organ music sets the tone, too.
The frankencense, the hushed and reverent tones, the slamming
of the kneelers...
...it formats the brain for dependence on the ghosts with the losing percentage.
Sorry, now isn't the time...
On the other side of the street was NBC and Rockefeller
Center.
We looked at the Cheers t-shirts and the Friends
coffee mugs...
You can buy ER scrubs, if you're into buying silly
stuff.
It got boring real quick, but at least it was a rest from the
walking.
Continuing on, Mrs. BartCop spotted a street vendor with $5 jewelry.
She bought so much stuff we had to make a run back to the hotel
to dump it all.
My knees were hurting big time by then.
Remember the toe
I broke last year?
New York reminded me of that night, a little more than once per
second..
But - the Lord provides!
Mrs. BartCop gave me a Vioxx, and I was Jesse Owens.
We called CAL and Ray from the hotel and said, "Let's go walking!"
We took a subway to Manhattan's foot.
From there, the four of us walked to Battery Park.
Nice place ...clean, ...intact, ...grass was cut, and it
was right on the water.
- remember what they said about Mussolini?
This park ran on-time!
Walking, telling stories, telling lies and laughing, and the weather was perfect.
Here's a boat, shot from the Esplanade
A shot of the sun starting to set.
Being "arty" with my camcorder
We walked so far south and then so far west, I glanced back east.
Tall buildings
A Smirk tax cut means another boat for
the rich
This is the water entrance
to the World Trade Center
Close-up of a tall building
Oh, it's the World trade Centers!
Let's go up to the top floor and have a drink.
Everybody excited?
It was 7:45
Just like the Rio, they closed so the tile people could come
in.
We did a SnackDown at the Krispy Kreme.
Ray'd never been to one before.
I suggested the raspberry tart.
(Picture not available.)
Back on the streets...
My dawgs was starting to bark again, but there were more
sites to see.
It was fully dark now, and we were wandering the streets of lower
Manhattan.
Not sure, but that's a cool shot
Looks like a movie poster, doesn't it?
I think Zore the Gatekeeper lives there.
Then, a sad note.
The grave of Alexander Hamilton
It makes sense that he's buried here:
Sidebar:
See how much faster we're moving?
I did some cypherin' and figured out if it took
me two days to explain each day,
it's be a long time before we got back
to smackin' Smirk, and I'm ready!)
From the NYSE, we walked to Staten Island.
Damn, that's a long way.
Lucky, we had a ferry.
NY skyline from the Staten Island Ferry
This brought a tear to my eye.
It reminded me of the old days,
when we chose our president by a citizen vote.
Back on the mainland, after 10 PM, back to the subway.
Look how clean the subway is on a Saturday night.
You know who we have to give some credit to?
...and they say fascism isn't a viable system?
We got off the subway near Ray's Original Pizza at 11th
Street and 6th Avenue.
They say this is the best of the Ray's Pizza's, which is New
York Pizza.
This 11th at 6th Ray's has signs saying,
"We are not affiliated with any other
Ray's Restaurant.
We are the only original
Ray's."
Damn, that's some fine pizza.
More on that in the big Thursday issue.
After pizza, we walked over to Washington Square Park.
Guess what?
As we stepped foot into the park, a NY cop was proclaiming:
"This park is closed, you must exit
the park immediately!"
...New York, ...Las Vegas, ...they close when they see BartCop coming.
We took a cab back to the hotel, where a Van Gogh print hung on the walls.
...end of New York Part III.
Tomorrow is the Empire State Building, Times Square, Grand Central
Station,
CAL and Ray, Brooklyn, Mexican food, The Sopranos, Super
Brownies and more.
Back to New York
Gotta speed this up, gotta give fewer details.
Sunday morning we were up with the sun.
Not sure why, but the sun was up at 5:30 on the east coast.
Perhaps it's another Giuliani directive to fight crime.
Non-sequitor Sidebar:
One funny thing?
In K-Drag, if you live between 25th Street
and 26th Street,
your address will be something like 2540
E. Whatever Street.
Not in New York.
In New York, if your address is 1125 E.
Eighth Street, you're between 11th and 12th, right?
In New York, if your address is 1125 E
Eighth Street, you might be between 25th and 26th.
It makes no sense - no wonder those Iraqi
cabbies can't find your hotel.
They need to start next Monday and redo
all the addresses in New York City
to make them logical and more user-friendly
to the bread-and-butter tourists.
I also forgot a good line Ray had when we tried to go to the
top of the World Trade Center.
We were right next to the building entrance, so I reached out
and pulled on the door and said,
"Well, should we go to the top of the tower?" and Ray said, "You may
never be closer."
ha ha
That was a damn good line, Ray.
Today's agenda included the Empire State Building.
That meant ...another cab ride.
During the ride, I asked cabbie Rolo Hassain how much a cab would
be to the Newark Airport.
(We had to plan for next Saturday) Rolo said, in whatever language
they speak where he's from,
"If you ask a taxi to take you to Newark
Airport he will kiss you. You make him rich"
Hey, he picked us up in Chelsea, so there's no telling what he was thinking...
This is the best map I found of New York, posted inside every
cab.
With this map, I'm an expert on New York.
See that "pill" in the upper left?
That's Madison Square Garden, it's in Chelsea, where our hotel
was.
Just below Chelsea is The Village, where they have all
the shops and restaurants and bakeries.
The arch in the center is Washington Square, the buffer between
The
Village and Soho.
Soho exists to be a buffer between The Village and Little
Italy. (They don't get along)
Flashback:
Just above the pill is the Garment District,
which reminds me:
Friday nite, our first night when we saw
superstar Bob Simon?
The Garment District, was one of
the many districts we walked that night - we saw models.
One young thing in particular was really
striking.
She was very young, I'd say 15-17, and
she was about six feet, rail-skinny, straight blonde hair and
cuter than Phoebe Cates in that red bikini
in Fast Times. She was just standing there, gorgeous
as hell,
talking to some lesser models outside,
on the street, just hangin' with the other supermodels-to-be.
I wasn't lusting after her, at least not
like you'd think, but it was just so damn interesting
to see a real-life gorgeous mammacris
in it's natural habitat. I didn't have the camcorder, dammit,
but it would've made a real good picture,
like some Benneton ad without the shame.
Back to the Empire State Building, or we'll never finish this.
They open at 9:30, maybe, I forget. We got there Sunday morning
a half-hour before they opened,
which was smart because my boss went six months ago and stood
in line four hours to see the ESB.
I told CAL, I wouldn't stand in line four hours to see Angie
Harmon nude.
After just 15 minutes, they sold us tickets and herded us into
a new elevator.
Damn - I was hoping to ride a century-old elevator pulled up
with a frayed rope.
The plate on the elevator wall said, "This
is a Helmsley Property."
Wanna bet Leona voted for President Weak & Stupid?
Here we go, are you holding onto something?
Grab your stomach, this goes real fast.
Damn, that was fast - you OK?
The doors open on the 80th floor.
80th floor?
I thought it was 100 stories high...
They pushed us out the elevator and down the hall with the cool neon lights.
Then we go into another elevator, that takes us to the 86th floor.
I asked if we could go higher, and the usher said, "That
part's closed."
The city that never sleeps?
Maybe, but they sure close a lot of shit.
We took the last elevator to the 86th floor and there we were.
Looks like a still from Cuckoo's Nest, doesn't it?
It was a pretty clear day, we saw lots of stuff.
You can probably guess what this is - a shot
downtown.
Did I mention is was cold?
It was only in the 50's or so, but the wind blew harder than
Strom on his last birthday cake.
See the Statue
of Liberty, towards the right?
This is my favorite shot from the top.
It's the only time I saw THE bridge.
Did you know they only built the Brooklyn Bridge after the Eads
Bridge (over the Massabama River
in downtown St Louis) proved it could withstand it's own weight?
That's a true story I should tell sometime - how the GOP riverboat
moguls swore a bridge over the Massabama
would never hold because they wanted to keep their lucrative
steamboat monoploy alive instead of allowing - gasp -
people to cross the river without paying their outrageous fees?
Just like BIG OIL is doing today.
They could be developing wind and solar energy, but it's FREE,
and there's no reason for BIG OIL to give up
those trillions just to do the right thing for America.
Look - it's Madison Square Garden, where they shot the Led Zeppelin
movie.
Click Here to hear
Zeppelin go from Whole Lotta Love into Black Dog.
It was their 2/12/75 encore at the Garden - from the BartCop
Live Concert Collection.
Check out this floor design, shot as we were leaving.
Not only is the ESB tall, it's historic and it's art deco.
Done with the tall building, we started walking - again - this
time towards Times Square.
It was close, less than a mile, I think, and my dawgs
are starting to bark after a while.
This is for my buddy Rich - no, not the drummer.
Rich won the first vintage Corvette ever given away
on bartcop.com
Rich sometimes hangs at BB's on weekends.
Walking onward, look what we saw!
The theater showing the greatest Broadway show of all times.
On the next block, we found out what happened to Frasier's ex-wife, Lilith.
Lilith without pants.
Now we're full into Times Square. Check this building out:
You can't really see what's going on, but the whole curved building
it a TV screen.
Besides the 120 x 70 foot TV screen U2 toured with in 1998, it's
the biggest I've seen.
Great colors, too, for the sun being so bright.
Then I turned around and clutched the pearls:
Chris the Screamer on the Jumbo Tron
in Times Square
Walking further, knees are just about to give out by now...
This next photo is untouched.
At the Whore Street Journal, they've turned into
such obvious prostitutes
that they put up a giant "PINK"
sign over their front door.
They want everyone to know what's for sale (or rent) at
the Whore Street Journal.
The knees were getting weaker and weaker, but we knew Grand
Central Station
couldn't be more than 10-12 blocks from here, so we pressed on.
There it is - it was really something.
I thought, there must've been hundreds of millions of
people who've passed
thru these doors, with two world wars and millions of tourists
for decades.
It was time to go back to the hotel and re-group (read, "sit down")
From the cab, we saw another highlight of the trip.
We saw three blind people on one dog.
No, not like that - you should be ashamed of yourself.
It was funny as hell.
A blind guy had a cane in his right hand and the dog harness
in his left.
A second blind guy had his left hand on the first guy's right
shoulder, and a third
blind guy had his left hand on the right shoulder of the second
blind man.
So how did that happen?
Twenty minutes ago, they were having coffee when one suggested
they walk to
the corner restaurant and the second one said, "Who's
dog should we take?"
They decided, perhaps to save energy, to all go on the same dog?
Mrs. BartCop thought it was sweet.
...and don't write and say I made fun of the blind.
It's a funny thing we saw.
What, ...I can mentiion something funny I saw if it involves blind
people?
Don't they have a sense of humor?