Street Scenes
May. 4th, 2004 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stakebaitGirls! Girls! Girls! Novellas!
Looking out the bus window, I notice an "All Kinds DVD" store, which for those who missed the Guiliani crackdown is a porn store by another name. (Many of them are also good sources of ungodly cheap old mainstream movies and kitschy kung fu flicks, since they have to justify that All Kinds with something.)
Anyway, the blacked-out windows were relieved with hot pink neon signs reading "magazines, novelette, toys."
Wait, novelette? I'm as fond of medium-short fiction as the next girl, but it's not usually considered that big a draw. Are porn consumers really that savvy about the distinction between that and your common or garden novel? I'm pretty sure they meant "novelties", but I spent the rest of the ride imagining the cheap and tawdry paperback bookstore and its illicit genre thrills.
Ceci n'est pas un nut cart
A couple weeks ago I took the subway down to my beloved![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
captainnancy's house. I was feeling lazy and knee-poppy and generally disinclined for stairs, so I took the elevator up to street level in City Hall Park.
I stepped out, blinked in the sun and tried to orient myself, wondered vaguely what the gaggle of miscellaneous people to the left was gaggling for and then dismissed the question as irrelevant to my life, and then saw a nut cart just in front of me.
Ooh, I thought, nut cart. Maybe it has coconut. (Note for non-New Yorkers -- virtually all of the sugar-coated warm nut vendors have signs that offer coconut, but most of them don't actually have any.) There were two people in front of the nut cart. I vaguely waited, reading my book as Mers are wont to do, until they vaguely stepped aside, and then asked the guy if he had coconut.
"I'm sorry, sweetheart, this isn't real," he said.
"Um, 'kay," I said doubtfully, and turned and started walking away.
Well, that was weird. It *looked* real. Cart, check, little wax paper packets of nuts with the corners twirled, check, vaguely sworthy smiling man standing behind it, check. Also, who would make a fake nut cart? And then bother to stand behind it all day? Had I stumbled into an alternate universe? A conspiracy? Was he some kind of ominous, Man Who Was Thursday kind of cryptic warning?
I had gotten about 20 paces down the sidewalk when I noticed the black canvas chairs.
I'd walked into a movie. I mean, *right* into a movie. The random couple of people who stepped to the side? Were presumably the stars. The gaggle of people were goggling at the movieness of it all. And I, oblivious, just wanted some coconut. Well, that was embarassing. I spent most of the next street blushing at looming white trailers. But the guy on the next corner had coconut, so all in all it was a good day.
My kingdom for...
When I went down to my office mailroom the other day, one of the guys told me he'd just seen a runaway horse speeding down 23rd Street. He seemed pretty bemused about it, especially the part where the cops were chasing it with lights and sirens blaring. So it's not true that nothing fazes New Yorkers.
Mer
Looking out the bus window, I notice an "All Kinds DVD" store, which for those who missed the Guiliani crackdown is a porn store by another name. (Many of them are also good sources of ungodly cheap old mainstream movies and kitschy kung fu flicks, since they have to justify that All Kinds with something.)
Anyway, the blacked-out windows were relieved with hot pink neon signs reading "magazines, novelette, toys."
Wait, novelette? I'm as fond of medium-short fiction as the next girl, but it's not usually considered that big a draw. Are porn consumers really that savvy about the distinction between that and your common or garden novel? I'm pretty sure they meant "novelties", but I spent the rest of the ride imagining the cheap and tawdry paperback bookstore and its illicit genre thrills.
Ceci n'est pas un nut cart
A couple weeks ago I took the subway down to my beloved
captainnancy's house. I was feeling lazy and knee-poppy and generally disinclined for stairs, so I took the elevator up to street level in City Hall Park. I stepped out, blinked in the sun and tried to orient myself, wondered vaguely what the gaggle of miscellaneous people to the left was gaggling for and then dismissed the question as irrelevant to my life, and then saw a nut cart just in front of me.
Ooh, I thought, nut cart. Maybe it has coconut. (Note for non-New Yorkers -- virtually all of the sugar-coated warm nut vendors have signs that offer coconut, but most of them don't actually have any.) There were two people in front of the nut cart. I vaguely waited, reading my book as Mers are wont to do, until they vaguely stepped aside, and then asked the guy if he had coconut.
"I'm sorry, sweetheart, this isn't real," he said.
"Um, 'kay," I said doubtfully, and turned and started walking away.
Well, that was weird. It *looked* real. Cart, check, little wax paper packets of nuts with the corners twirled, check, vaguely sworthy smiling man standing behind it, check. Also, who would make a fake nut cart? And then bother to stand behind it all day? Had I stumbled into an alternate universe? A conspiracy? Was he some kind of ominous, Man Who Was Thursday kind of cryptic warning?
I had gotten about 20 paces down the sidewalk when I noticed the black canvas chairs.
I'd walked into a movie. I mean, *right* into a movie. The random couple of people who stepped to the side? Were presumably the stars. The gaggle of people were goggling at the movieness of it all. And I, oblivious, just wanted some coconut. Well, that was embarassing. I spent most of the next street blushing at looming white trailers. But the guy on the next corner had coconut, so all in all it was a good day.
My kingdom for...
When I went down to my office mailroom the other day, one of the guys told me he'd just seen a runaway horse speeding down 23rd Street. He seemed pretty bemused about it, especially the part where the cops were chasing it with lights and sirens blaring. So it's not true that nothing fazes New Yorkers.
Mer
