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From skyline to brick wall

My first couple of days in New York sort of suck. But things are better now. I got to see the 30th season premiere episode of The Amazing Race today, and that was a lot of fun. I took a little film of that, you can see that below.

hotel1 — This is the usual view from my favorite hotel in NYC, the Affinia Dumont, which is now closed and turning into condos. I pay for this view, but it’s worth it.

But to start out, I have this favorite hotel in New York, the Affinia Dumont, where the views are spectacular, you think you are living in a postcard. It’s amazing.

Well, after all these years, they were sold and becoming condos, the Murry Hill Marquis, so the hotel company put me at another one of their Affinias up the street, the Shelburne. I stayed there once, and didn’t like it, but figured what the hell, it can’t be that bad.

It is.

hotel3 — This was my view when they changed me from the Affinia Dumont to the Affinia Shelburne.

They gave me a room facing a brick wall. You can see it here! Then they charged me $25 a day for “incidentals,” like wine at the wine bar, $10 worth of things at the gift shop, internet, etc. I’m here 10 days, do the math. I would only use the internet, and possibly the gift shop for a bottle of water and maybe the newspapers. I don’t drink wine, and I don’t mix with total strangers and free wine socials at hotels.

I asked for them not to charge me the $25 and they said that’s the way it is. I could do nothing about it. This was one of the managers who said this to me. Basically, that’s tough, you’re stuck with the bill. Then I asked to change my room from the dungeon that it is and I was told there were no other rooms! The two little bitches at the front desk were quite rude. The manager literally told me that they stuck me in the dungeon room because they wanted to give me an inside room which is more quiet and preferred. I guess she thought I was a mental patient, who need to calm my nerves.

The coup de gras was the next morning when I got stuck in the elevator! A couple from England and I got stuck. This changed everything. I’m not sure why, because it wasn’t long and I didn’t complain, that sort of thing doesn’t phase me, but they were now falling all over themselves at the front desk, the manager called me, he removed some of my $25 “incidental” charges and they moved me to a room with a view. There is sunlight coming in the window as we speak!

The hotel is surley and not friendly, I asked one of the ladies from housekeeping if I could have a bar of soap, Her response – “Call 64 and they’ll bring you the soap.” In quality hotels, she would have brought me the soap herself when she had a chance.

Anyway, I went to Washington Square Park at about noon for the filming of season 30 of The Amazing Race. There were quite a few reality starts there like Cody and Jessica from the recent Big Brother season which only ended a few weeks ago, that was quite fast signing them up. It was fun to watch, Phil Keoghan is a really nice guy, you’ll see in the film below that he approached a little boy, about four years old, who has a sign that says he wants to be on The Amazing Race. Phil is cracking up. He asked the little boy how he know about the show at such a young age.

I think this will show this winter, probably February. They had the little boy’s mother sign a release, so I guess that interaction will be on tv.

The day I confronted the syndicate

cc5 — Batman at last year’s NY Comic Con.

One year I had a plan. I was attending New York Comic Con and I knew that one of the large syndicates would have a presence there. I had it figured that I would go and meet the people and ask why they keep turning my work down. I guess the answer would be, “You are not good enough!” or ” Your work is not funny!” But I had to find out.

I had it all planned to go to the Jacob Javits Center and I got up the courage to approach their booth. It was quite busy and I didn’t want to make a scene so I decided to walk around the convention for a bit and then go back when it was quieter. There were a couple of famous cartoonists singing autographs and meeting fans, so the booth was quite busy.

I walked around for maybe an hour and when I got back to the booth, there was only one girl there. I thought she was a hired model to hand out brochures, but she ended up being a higher-up at the syndicate and she was the actual person that kept declining my work! So we ended up chatting and never did come to a conclusion as to what I was doing wrong. During that time I think the New Yorker in me came out to her midwestern sensibilities, and the clash may have affected her, where it did not affect me. To be honest, I don’t know how the thing ended up, but that was about four or five years ago and to this day, she still rejects my work. And the clash, wasn’t really a clash, it was just my rough around the edges, New York-style, against her quiet midwest ways.

That day, after speaking with her, I headed back to my hotel on the other side of town. As I reached the hotel, my phone rang. It was a call from the town where the syndicate is located. I got nervous. Was she calling me to tell me something good? I answered with bated breath. It was a customer calling about an order, regarding my business.

To that day, I have avoided their booth. All these years later, I don’t want to be seen as stalking them. Is that crazy? First off, they probably don’t recognize me or even know I’m alive, secondly, is visiting their booth, which is set up for visitors, stalking?

But I may stop by this year. I have, what I think, is a clever new comic strip and I would like to mention it to her/them before I send it in for consideration. My problem is that I’m not a good schmoozer. I should be making friends and keeping in contact with them all these years and then pushing my work, but I don’t do that. I don’t know why; just a characters trait in me, I guess.

I almost had my foot in the door, but screwed that up, too. I’ll tell you about that some time.

NY Comic Con is coming up

cc12 I’m headed to New York this weekend in anticipation of New York Comic Con which starts Thursday, October 5. I think it’s the best time of year – October in New York and Comic Con combined. It’s perfect.

Being in Union Square in October is special, too. It’s usually the first thing I do when I arrive in New York. In October, the pumpkins are out and the Union Square green market has all sorts of fall things, completely different than the summer’s Union Square green market.

Union Square Green Market, NYC. Last October.

With Comic Con, I have different memories from different years that blur into each other, but I cover the event for the Huffington Post and I post things on my blog, so that is a diary for me, which differentiates each year.

One year I saw a guy on The View tv show, he was promoting his graphic novel, for some reason, that spoke to me, I contacted the guy through Twitter and we agreed to meet at Comic Con, I don’t know what I would gain out of it, but I’m not one to really reach out to people, so this was a big step. We did meet, ate at his hotel’s bar and chatted, but nothing much came out of it. I sent him my 10 With Tom questions later and he took six months to respond, which I found sort of rude and I just dumped the questions and I don’t think I ever contacted him again.

Another time I had it all planned to meet people from one of the big newspaper syndicates. That did not go well. I’ll talk about that in my next blog post.

The Distinguished Gentlemans Ride

Came upon the 2017 Distinguished Gentlemans Ride on Sunday morning, where they were all meeting up in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood for the start of the 11 am ride. The ride includes classic and vintage motorcycles where the owners unite to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer and men’s health issues. Money raised supports the Movember Foundation. This is a worldwide event and every city’s ride takes place on Sunday, September 24 this year.

Around the world, tens of thousands gentlefolk don their gentle gear and participate. The first ride in 2012, 2500 people took part, in 2016 it was over 56,000.

Over $4 million has been raised so far. Miami’s ride was from Wynwood down south to the Schnebly Redland’s Winery.

After the storm

So I’m back on the grid after Hurricane Irma. Power, internet and tv are up and running.

I had gotten power back fast but went a week without tv and internet, barely, what I mean is that I have ATT U-verse and my upstairs neighbor has Comcast. His Comcast was working so he gave me his password and I managed to get work done using his internet right down here in my own living room Very great neighbor.

The tv I sort of made due by watching shows On Demand on my cell phone, which worked during the outages. And as I previously stated, I would watch a Harold Lloyd movie or two each evening. So I managed.

Of course compared to Mexico’s earthquake and Hurricane Maria’s damage to Puerto Rico, I don’t have any problems and I am grateful. To think of all that damage and in Puerto Rico, they are saying that the whole country, that’s 100%, are without power.

Harold Lloyd

I still don’t have my cable tv back since Hurricane Irma, so I’ve been watching tv on my cell phone, usually day-old shows on demand.

But every night I’ve been watching Harold Lloyd movies on YouTube. He’s so good. I’m really enjoying myself.

I’ve noticed that he reminds me of a friend of mine who has the same expressions and seems to always seems to be in trouble or innocently is the cause of trouble. Their manerisms are the same.

When my cable comes back, I think I’ll still watch Harold’s movies. I think he made over 200 of them, mostly shorts.

This new comic strip I’m doing has a character that is Harold Lloyd. I never realized it, but he looks and acts just like him, minus the glasses. I may add glasses.

Glamping during Irma

It’s been a hectic week. We dodged Hurricane Irma. Luckily where I live, it was mosly just trees down.

I spent four days with family west of here. We were seven people and four dogs! We got along, didn’t get on each other’s nerves and aside from the fear of Irma, we had a good time. We called it camping. I think it was more glamping.

We had everything we needed in the big house, except for electricity, which went out the first day. We cooked on candles! Boiled water for coffee and made hot dogs using candles.

After Irma passed, we barbecued everything.

We went in and out the whole time through a back door, the only opening not boarded up. We charged our phones in our cars.

The day after Irma passed, a few if us drove around checking on everybody’s houses. My father, brother, nephew and I made a day of it.

We really dodged s bullet. I know many people lost homes in the Keys. We were lucky enough to all just have tree damage and broken fences. I live on the bay, mere feet from it. The 15 foot storm surge brought all that water up into the neighborhood, but didn’t fo much damage.

Glad to be getting back to normsl so fast. We have electricity, but no internet of tv, but happy to be home safe.

Diary of a Little Girl in Old New York

I read this book called Diary of a Little Girl in Old New York. I read it on Kindle so I’m not sure how big the book is, but I read it in about an hour or so.

The 10-year-old girl’s name is Catherine Havens and she wrote her diary from August 1849 through June 1850 and there is some of 1851, too, and eventually, it was published in 1919 when her older sister told her it might be a good idea to see if they could get it published all those years later. It’s interesting because it describes so much of old New York, where most diaries are only about the person writing it; this includes so much of what life was like in the mid 19th Century.

I noticed that the whole diary can be read online here. So you don’t have to buy the book.

Catherine comes from a wealthy family and the people she is surrounded by including family and relatives are all in good spirits it seems. For some reason, I always think of people in the olden days as being dour and humorless, but this is not the case. Even her old grandfather has a good sense of humor. Her father was old, he was born before the Revolutionary War. She writes that people would mistake him as being her grandfather.

Catherine writes about her old aunts who lived in a house built in 1733 and of her own mother’s school days back in the 1810s.

Her world seems mostly to have revolved around 9th Street in New York City and most of the stores they visited and the schools were on 9th or near 9th Street. She names names of people who lived then and where they lived up and down 9th Street. She did travel though, to far off places, via boat/ships of the time.

She writes about school and how they did math back then and also how they learned words, starting with the Latin word and working into American English. She tells of how her math teacher rattled off numbers in sequences and the kids had to know the answer.

She mentions her grandfathers’s slaves, by name: “My father’s father lived on Shelter Island, and had twenty slaves, and their names were: Africa, Pomp, Titus, Tony, Lum, Cesar, Cuff, Odet, Dido, Ziller, Hagar, Judith, and Comas, but my grandfather thought it was wicked to keep slaves, so he told them they could be free, but Tony and Comas stayed on with him.”

I love when she writes about her mother’s youth: “My mother says Stuart’s candy store down on Greenwich and Chambers Streets used to be the store in her day. When she was a little girl in 1810, old Kinloch Stuart and his wife Agnes made the candy in a little bit of a back room and sold it in the front room, and sometimes they used to let my mother go in and stir it.”

Here grandfather is one of the first people to have water pipped into their kitchen down on Maiden Lane in New York City.

They even debated about either or eyether and neither and nyther back then!

If you like history, this book is really great, Catherine seems wiser than her 10 years, but maybe that is how the children were back then. It’s interesting see back 1849-50 from a child’s eyes. She wrote that she hoped to live to see the 20th century, but learned in Bible study that in the year 2000 the world would end, so she hoped she would not make it to that age. She did make it to 1939, so she lived to be 99 years old, almost 100. In the diary she mentions that she hoped her mother would live to be 100, and she almost did, she passed away at the age of 96.

Wednesday is “Read A Book Day,” so this might be a good one to read on Wednesday.

Pop-up art galleries

For many years this storefront was a very popular pop-up art gallery. Then when the real estate market improved and new renters took over, the gallery left.

I read an article in Artsy about pop up galleries called Condo New York, which took over a bunch of empty spaces in Manhattan this summer. They lasted for 10 days to three months.

This is not a new concept and while artists pay to be a part of these pop up galleries, for years, in my town, Coconut Grove, Florida, there were pop up galleries that lasted years and their duel purpose was to show and sell art, but they also were filling up spaces in empty storefronts, which the town had a lot of.

For quite a few years, galleries were all over the village and they paid nothing or next to nothing, probably just paying for the utilities while making empty storefronts vibrant and lively.

As the storefronts started renting out and the neighborhood stated changing to higher rents and many more renters, the galleries all but disappeared.

I had a friend who was an artist and a realtor and he would combine the two. He would have a gallery in the condos he had for sale. So the open houses would be an art event as well as a sales event. That’s something I think you would see on the tv show Million Dollar Listing; they are always coming up with some sort of gimmick to show their real estate listings.

But pop up art can be in any empty space. Even during Art Basel here in Miami, there is art in shipping containers, each container being its own little gallery for a week. Heck, any empty room can be a gallery.