Thamus's favorite new-york pages, page 1

Last login: 30 hours agoThamus: Thamus is a 90 year old guy from Ireland.; Likes 5,371 pages, 33 videos, 39 photos • 368 fans • Received 157 reviews; Member since Dec 30, 2005

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New York City: The Waldorf Astoria - Traveller Reviews - Its the Waldorf=Astoria…: Mar 22, 3:28pm 1 review travel, new-york, waldorf-astoria
http://www.tripadvisor.ie/ShowUserReviews-g60763-d93618-r14119517-The_Waldorf...; 'It's the Waldorf=Astoria, and it's splendid'

Design and the Elastic Mind: Mar 22, 11:33am 37 reviews new-york, modern-art, moma
http://moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind; Designing artistic concepts for elastic minds If you are interested in design technologies and ideas, then you should dispatch yourself to the Museum of Modern Art as I did during my sojourn in New York. Design And The Elastic Mind is showing until May 27. It is an astonishing journey into 3D Printing, Interface Design, Visualization and Organic Design. It takes the ideas and concepts that excite an Internet readership and offers it for everyone to consider. Quote: "Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace - working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today's instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration." I was utterly astonished to see that two stumblers (chperret and nadimchaudry) reviewing this site have dismissed the exhibition as "Nazi" and "fascist" in concept. You may not like the pace of technology and some of the avant garde design concepts that are scrabbling to make it more user friendly for a bemused public, but to label MoMA's laudable effort to make sense of it all as "fascism" is ludicrous - nay, even malicious - beyond misunderstanding. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Fascism? Sounds more like a socialist vocation to me - would that it worked better. The web site is a splendid substitute for a visit, but do dedicate some time to explore it, as you would in the museum. It is complex and a bit verbose in places, but the images are splendid and the interactive linkages fascinating. [PICTURE: An origami insect and the paper creases it generates. Even origami has come a long way from folded paper cranes, like the iconic cigarette-paper images we remember from Blade Runner. Origami mathematics, computer generated diagrams, and creative ideas have taken ever more sophisticated roads, and hundreds of creases are now compressed into a single diagram to create incredibly complex models.] © MoMA

The Journalist as Novelist of New York - WSJ.com: Mar 4, 10:24am 1 review books, new-york, journalism, irish
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120459199188109063.html?mod=googlenews_wsj; The journalist who became the novelist of New York Pete Hamill, a classic New York newspaper man, is writer in residence at New York University, a long way from gritty city desk journalism. He is the only person to have been editor of both the New York Daily News and the New York Post. In the past 40 years (he is now 72) he has also written 10 novels and two collections of short stories. But the focus of his now established literary life remains the same as in Hamill's newspaper career - New York City. Quote: His stories display the attention to detail and history that are the hallmarks of a seasoned reporter -like last year's North River, the tale of a middle-aged Irish doctor who unexpectedly finds himself raising his 3-year-old grandson during the Depression in Manhattan. "Unlike journalism, fiction is about people one at a time," Hamill says. "I've really been trying to get everything I know about New York into fiction." Mr. Hamill's most ambitious attempt was his last novel, Forever (2002), in which the main character gains immortality (as long as he remains on the island of Manhattan) and lives through 250 years here. Hamill has a fascination with immigration beyond his own family and his own Irish heritage, as his novels and his memoir, Downtown: My Manhattan, demonstrate. He writes about Italians and Jews, about Chinese families in his neighborhood and the the Meatpacking District that used to be full of immigrants from Spain. Quote: Looking at journalism today, Hamill doesn't think papers are going to vanish, but he doesn't feel that the business has "the same urgency to it." So is Hamill nostalgic for an older New York? He could do without the recent smoking ban. "It seemed too drastic, too much of a buttinski view." But he doesn't miss the gritty, crime-ridden 1970s: "I don't think 42nd Street was great when there were guys peddling heroin like Baby Ruth bars."

OctoJAZZarian Profile: Clark Terry & Jazz.com: Feb 24, 6:35am 1 review jazz, music, new-york
http://www.jazz.com/features-and-interviews/2008/1/11/octojazzarian-profile-c...; Mumbles stumbles time, travel, and all that jazz
The winter, like time itself, grows long and tedious. So I took a cab, leaped on a plane and traveled for 12 hours, like a squashed sardine in a box, to New York, where February ice and snow soon make you appreciate the Mediterranean you left behind. I've parked myself on the ninth floor of the Waldorf=Astoria (of which more anon) and set out to brave the icy wind swirling around Lexington and 50th in search of emergency supplies. Being the Waldorf, the mini-bar may be tiny compared to Fort Knox, but it's about equal in value. So I found a wine and spirits store where a bottle of Black Label was about the same price as a packet of cashew nuts in the room mini-bar. The $15 a day Internet connection charge is not so easily circumvented, but a man's gotta stumble what a man's gotta Stumble. Now the fun begins. I team up with B., a friend just in from London and then we run into an old colleague, F. from Athens. She's a Greek woman with attitude who thinks jet lag is a mosquito to be crushed, not succumbed to like a limp lemur. She steers us to the Fat Black Pussycat in the Village where we start lubricating the evening. Across the road is the ultimate objective - the legendary Blue Note jazz club. We note the freezing line outside diminishing, and dive in. Arriving last is good and bad. Bad, because the dark place is already packed to the walls. Good, because we find a place no one wanted - a table for three right by the bandstand. I'm not saying we were close, but the 2nd trombone slide kept missing my knee by a millimeter, and B. complained of trumpet spittle targeting his whiskey. F. raised her glass and yelled "Great!" The big band was loud and astounding. Well it should be - it was the band of Clark Mumbles Terry, still scatting and blowing on stage for a solid two hours at the age of 87 - just as he did with the great Duke of Ellington all through the 1950s, when he ceased to be a jazzman and became a legend. This is big band jazz you rarely hear performed anymore. You don't just hear it - you live it, applaud it, yell "right!" and feel its vibrations right to the bones and marrow. Man - this is living. Clark Mumbles Terry, old father time, and three friends at a tiny table in a crowded Village club, clinking Black Label glasses. And ALL dat JAZZ! [PICTURE, top: It was last night at the Blue Note club in Greenwich Village, but last year Clark Mumbles Terry performed at the White House with singer Nnenna Freelon. He has performed before seven U.S. presidents.]