capitalnewyork:

A few of our favorites for your end-of-the-year reading.

Takeout story: Behind bulletproof glass and out on a bike for a Chinese restaurant in Mott Haven by Kevin Heldman

You go to that drawer full of menus with dragons or pandas or bamboo on them, and the random Chinese characters, and the obligatory promise of fast and free delivery. And in 25 minutes or so a Chinese man on a bike will come to your door and you’ll maybe drop him a xie xie with your tip and he’ll give you a bye bye and he’s gone. End of story.

But there’s a different version of that story that goes on in many parts of this city. And that version is about money, class, race, and education. And in that version people are robbed, assaulted and killed, and people live in fear, constantly on guard and under threat over Chinese food.

Tales of a skirt-chaser: On the radically democratic theory, and autocratic practice, of being Bill Cunningham by Tom Scocca

Photography is an aggressive act, and especially street photography, as practiced by Cunningham, shooting people in public and without permission. He is humble and mild and self-effacing, and he spends his days puncturing the illusion of privacy in public—when people dress for the street, Cunningham’s work says, they are making an impression, not an expression. Most but not all of New York, or the eye-catching part of New York, welcomes the attention. The socialites who sit and talk to the movie camera adore and are a little thrilled by the gentle violation it involves, the idea that they, or maybe their legs, might end up in the Times simply because they ventured out into the street where Cunningham was stalking.

On the other hand: “Don’t take a picture of us,” one of a pair of dressed-up girls, non-socialite, non-fashion-industry, snaps at Cunningham. “I’ll break that fucking camera.”

Chow time: Mimi Sheraton and Andre Soltner on what’s changed since Lutece by Zachary Woolfe

“I think the whole Brooklyn thing must be greatly exaggerated,” said the eminent food writer Mimi Sheraton.

“I’m from Brooklyn,” she continued, “but it would take a lot to get me there for dinner. When Lundy’s was Lundy’s, I’d be there. When Gargiulo’s was Gargiulo’s, I went. I certainly went to Gage and Tollner. There were one-of-a-kind things there, but so far anywhere I’ve been to there has not been worth the trip from Manhattan. I haven’t been to Al di la, because you have to wait on line, and I’m not going to Brooklyn to wait on line. Not when there are 10 good Italian restaurants in Greenwich Village. The Times has certainly been very exaggerated in its Brooklyn coverage, because most of them live there. They begin to see it as being better than it is because it’s so close to them. I would go to Brooklyn if it were exceptional.”

The kingdom and the power of David Carr by Tom McGeveran

But if Carr has become a broker of the Times’ image and its relationship with the rest of the media, he is an unusual one. He has neither the sententiousness that has usually characterized the paper’s top brass who speak for the paper, nor quite the rashness of its youngest reporters, the ones who are still internally referred to as “Times material,” still in formation. Carr is not “Times material,” as he tells Sorkin; it’s a part of his shtick and his story that he’s there by a sort of chain of accidents, and how could he possibly complain, and what would he ever do to jeopardize that? By his own confession in the movie, the maintenance of his special connection to the paper is a fairly major focus of his life.

Don’t let the green grass fool you: The Roots are one of the most respected hip-hop acts in the world; why can’t they leave the sad stuff alone? by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

Like those albums, undun is tasked not just with being music but also with delivering up a counternarrative. What it produces is an elegy for a group of men whom America has largely forgotten. And I suspect that when we look back on these strange years of our first black presidency, during which nearly half of all young black men who do not have high-school diplomas also do not have jobs, when one in five black homeowners in America is living under the threat of foreclosure, when the execution of Troy Davis, an almost certainly innocent black man, shifted the international gaze to our deeply flawed justice system—well, I suspect that once the “post-racial” rug that poor black Americans have been swept under is lifted, undun will be the record that reminded us to watch not the throne but the streets instead.

11:35 am  •  29 December 2011  •  29 notes