i feel relatively neutral about new york
DESCRIPTION
Have you ever loved something, but also totally not loved it at the same time? Would you like to "heart" New York, but you're not quite ready for that kind of commitment? Have you ever had the feeling that other cities probably have pretty good pizza, too? This light-hearted skewering of the Big Apple sets the record straight with semi-informed opinions, questionable charts, and some slapdash Photoshop work. On a scale from one to spectacular, we give New York a five. And after reading this book, we think you’ll agree! Or whatever.TRANSCRIPT
CAN YOU MATCH EACH P IZZA SLICE WITH ITS PLACE OF ORIG IN?
ANSWER: NO. NO, YOU CAN’T.
5
2
3
1
4
GUAM
BOSTON
SAN FRANCISCO
NEW YORK CITY
SEATTLE
E
B
C
A
D
66
GREENWICH V ILLAGE
Do you know the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan? On the cover is a picture of a twenty-one-year-old Dylan with his then-girlfriend, strolling arm in arm through Greenwich Village in 1963. If you have the album, queue up the song “Bob Dylan’s Dream” for the remainder of this page. Various keywords in the next few paragraphs will sync up perfectly with certain moments in the song. It’ll be like watching The Wizard of Oz while listening to Dark Side of the Moon.
Anyway, the song just seems to sum up everything about hope, and youth, and closet-size apartments where friends come over and hang out, and you have a few drinks and laugh, and everything is, for the most part, swell. Sure, later on there’ll be the the awkward 3 a.m. conversation when you try to decide if your buddy is too drunk to make it home on his own. You’ll feel guilty if he gets hurt, of course, but at the same time, your studio is tiny, and you’re a light sleeper, and you’d really rather not listen to somebody snore or cough all damn night.
But back to the album: Dylan’s pictured on the cover, walking through the Village, and if you go there today, you can sense that some seriously neat stuff happened there. Maya Angelou and Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were around, doing their things, and you can almost physically feel it. It’s pretty great.
At the same time, the Village these days is mostly just a bunch of American Apparels and Starbuckses. And there are these NO STANDING and NO HONKING signs, even though standing around and honking is sort of what made Bob Dylan famous in the first place.
PROS: Bob Dylan once walked these streets. CONS: He’s gotten a better apartment, probably, since then. CONCLUSION: If only we could’ve been here forty years ago.