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This month . . . .
Tell me that you love me, Judy Blume
Today at our house the last of the young-reader books went the way of all such things, or rather the way we would hope such things would go. In our case it was set on top of a brown grocery bag full of clothes. The clothes are too small for our youngest, or will be when they come back in season this November. The book, lovingly dog-eared, is too small for her as well. The bag will go to friends of ours, who will get the clothes (and book) to the right-sized children.
She had already pulled two sacks of books from her shelves a month ago, paperbacks from different series, light, breezy reads that entertained her in her last days at elementary school. Books about children having the same kind of life as her, struggling to understand what it means to grow up and work hard in school (or not) and make friends and lose them, and win them back again. Books about teachers that turn into (or start out as) monsters, or super-heroes in their underpants. Books about dogs, and cats, and lions and sharks. She sorted these out into "books I don't mind giving away" and "books I want to save to read again, someday, when I'm in kind of a nostalgic mood." Some of those pages had been turned many times. The characters were old friends: Ramona and Beezus; Junie B. Jones; "Fudge" Farley; Big Nate; Greg Hefley. The sum of fifty trips to the bookstore to a dozen bookstores, over ten years. More, even. She has always been voracious, head-down in paper and ink universes.
Duck & Herring
Read This
Book Today
Cafe Press


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Survival Of The Streets
Snake Plissken, the Cro-Mags, and the Persistence of Megatoilet Nostalgia
Aug 31 2009
New York City's comeback has been an odd thing to watch from afar. When I moved out of Manhattan in 1990, the city was every inch the pee-smelling woe zone I'd known since childhood. When I returned this spring, I couldn't even find key graffiti on subway windows. Taxi rides are like something from a science-fiction movie now—not because New York cabs have televisions in them, but because these televisions actually work. People still talk to themselves in the streets, only now there's someone on the other line.
And yet the changes aren't nearly as strange as the nostalgia. A lot of people seem to miss the lawless megatoilet city of a generation ago. In the 1990s, it was possible to write off this wistfulness as a natural reaction to the excesses of Mayor Giuliani. But as the city has grown cleaner and safer over the past decade, so has the melancholy grown more mawkish and the mawkishness more entrenched. In 2006, the schmaltz surged with the drawn-out funeral(s) of CBGB, a dank dive bar that'd lingered two decades past its expiration date. For $24.50, you can still visit the club's original awning at the new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex on Mercer Street. If you have any money left over, you can take the "underbelly tour" through the refurbished South Bronx with Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.
Here's the thing: Outrageous prices and sweeping gentrification are symptoms of the economic booms and collapses of the last 20 years. These problems aren't unique to New York City. The current nostalgia for bad NYC runs deeper than these problems. "There are too many healthy people in New York now," one friend grumbles when I press him on the issue. Most locals I know offer some version of this same beef. The new New York is too soft. Too clean. Too Disney. Not enough dirtbags. Inconvenient for perverts. Inauthentic. No soul.
Writer James Wolcott compressed all these gripes into his article "Splendor in the Grit" in last June's issue of Vanity Fair. Of the bad old days, Wolcott writes,
One key difference between the 70s and today is that in the 70s the tourists looked scared. Getting back to the hotel alive was one of the main items on their checklists. Now they beam as if they find everything on display cute and flaunt their bulging shopping bags like hunting trophies... In the 70s there was a much sharper divide between Us... and Everybody Else.
Wolcott seems unmoved by New York's current cleanliness and security (as of 2002, the city is safer than Provo, Utah). Contrasting the city of the 70s with the city of the 00s, his conclusion is stark:
Really, I much prefer rubble.
How bad were the old days? A brief recap is in order. During the administrations of mayors John Lindsay, Abe Beame, and Ed Koch—1966 to 1990—the city's murder rate jumped 340 percent. In the late 60s, sanitation and transit strikes forced New Yorkers to wade through rivers of filth. By the mid-70s, the city was broke, staring down bankruptcy, slashing jobs, crippling its own police department, and leaving infrastructure to rot. A deliberate withdrawal of firefighting service—the "planned shrinkage" of poor zones—obliterated whole neighborhoods. For every shock of Watergate/malaise-era America, New York City matched the emergency and raised the stakes. Where America had an energy crisis, New York had a blackout; where America had pollution, New York had cascading garbage; where America had failure in Vietnam, New York had failure in the Bronx.
An entire generation of New Yorkers grew up with an expectation of violence and apathy. There was the private shame of "mugger money" that citizens carried to placate criminals, and the public pathos of "No Radio" signs in parked cars. For a year following the bicentennial, Son of Sam terrorized the city with killings and unsigned letters explaining, "I love to hunt." By the 80s, the city was awash in crack and grappling with AIDS, and few public surfaces remained unsplorched by graffiti or bodily fluids.
Add to all this the uniquely New York problem of concentrated mass insanity. After deregulation in the mid-60s and Reaganomics in the early 80s, thousands of insane people scattered across the city, screaming and muttering from doorways and dumpsters. One could plan for crime—crazies struck anywhere. In the mid-90s, Times columnist Bob Herbert described the fear "that from out of the chaos some maniac will emerge to... cast you into oblivion."
It's a safe bet that New Yorkers of the 1880s didn't pine for the time of the Draft Riots. New Yorkers of the 1950s probably did not yearn for the "authenticity" of the Great Depression. Even the current Muscovite nostalgia for Soviet days is at least based on lost prestige. When have people of another city so hankered for a time past when "things"—all things—were noticeably worse? Why does New York look back?
The answer hides in plain sight. Other failed cities don't have awesome movies made about them. New York had four: Death Wish, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, and Escape From New York. And if oral history has driven folklore throughout the ages, imagine how cinema will shape mythology from here on out. These four films—along with their countless derivatives—helped redefine the Big Apple as the Bad Apple, a label that still holds serious weight even now that the city has gotten its act together.
Three of these pictures sprang from the 1970s; Death Wish (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), and The Warriors (1979). In each film, New York is no longer a fully functional city. The police of Death Wish can't protect their own citizens. The Warriors shows nighttime Manhattan as a playground for rampaging street gangs. Taxi Driver crashes urban loneliness into urban violence. And each film had a profound effect on audiences. The Warriors resulted in gang violence in theaters nationwide. Taxi Driver inspired a presidential-assassination attempt.
1970s New York seemed doomed. In Death Wish, there is the moment when a businessman in the Tucson airport tells Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson), "If you ever get tired of living in that toilet, you're welcome here." In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) sees the city as something even lower, telling a political candidate, "I think the president should just clean up this whole mess here, should just flush it right down the fuckin' toilet."
The world "toilet" appears nowhere in the fourth film, Escape From New York (1981). It shows us NYC after it has been flushed.
The baby of the bunch, Escape From New York is very much a film of the 1980s, the only one of the four to overlap Reagan's term. The movie opened three weeks before MTV debuted, and its bold dystopian style—along with that of Blade Runner and The Road Warrior—greatly influenced music-video and production design for the entire decade. Directed by horror wiz John Carpenter, EFNY was written during Watergate but not taken seriously by any studio until he was called on to fulfill a contractual obligation to AVCO Embassy Pictures after the success of 1980's The Fog.
By 1981, New York's decline was old news. Most of the NYC dramas released this year—Nighthawks; Fort Apache, the Bronx; Ms. 45; Prince of the City—took this decay as their starting point. Corruption and crime were backdrops, not novelties (to be fair, 1981 NYC also gave us Arthur and Eyewitness, a curious crime thriller with picnicking and horseback riding in Central Park). In Downtown 81—a time capsule of 1981 New York rediscovered and released in 2000—Jean-Michel Basquiat saunters through a Lower East Side that resembles Berlin in 1945. It looks, he narrates, "like we'd dropped the bomb on ourselves."
Escape From New York gathers every complaint against Lindsay-Beame-Koch New York and extrapolates the whole mess into the future. A narrator takes us to an alternate 1997, nine years after the American crime rate has exploded fourfold and Manhattan has been turned into the country's only maximum-security prison. The city is walled, its bridges mined, and its perimeter manned by the sleek fascistic foot soldiers of something called the United States Police Force. The prison operates with the simple rule of a roach motel (or North Korea's Total-Control Zones): Criminals check in, but they don't check out. Exile to New York can be read as a life sentence or a death sentence. Either way, the verdict is final.
The prison is run by police commissioner Bob Hauk, played wonderfully by aging western star Lee Van Cleef. Although Hauk sports a single gold hoop-earring and the same studded leather wristband Pacino wore in Cruising, he carries himself with the manly grace of yesteryear's Hollywood. Van Cleef spent the shoot in constant pain from a previous injury, but you'd never know it from his performance. In every scene, he towers over Carpenter regulars Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, and John Strobel.
Hauk's squinty resolve stands in sharp contrast to the simpering mollycoddle of an American president, played with great understated relish by Donald Pleasence. En route to a Connecticut peace summit (WWIII rages but has not yet gone nuclear), Air Force One is hijacked by a left-wing revolutionary and crashed in Manhattan. A padded presidential escape pod survives the impact and drops to the prison floor. With time running out, Hauk needs to decide between a rescue mission and a military invasion.
Fortunately, the warden has been blessed with a coincidence of cosmic proportions. Snake Plissken has been captured this very night! Snake is an eye-patched renegade, a war hero gone bad. Given an offer he can't refuse, Snake pilots a glider over New York Harbor, lands on one of the Twin Towers, and descends into the prison to rescue the leader of the free world.
Plissken is played by Kurt Russell as a loose impression of Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's "Man With No Name" trilogy. Russell matches Leone veteran Van Cleef squint for squint—with lesser actors, these scenes would read as hammy and self-referential. But where Eastwood had supernatural shooting abilities, Snake has only his wits and his excellent physique. It's one of many delightful performances in EFNY, and one that instantly transformed Russell's career. By '81, the 30-year-old actor already had more than two decades of family films behind him. His transformation here was a shock to contemporary audiences. It would be as if Zac Efron blossomed into a credible badass overnight.
The nod to the western was in keeping with John Carpenter's gushing love for the films of Howard Hawks, and critics have sometimes viewed Escape From New York as a western dressed up as science fiction. The late 1970s/early 1980s was a time of bleep-bloop Star Wars knockoffs, so the comparison is probably kind (certainly the disastrous, unreleased first reel of EFNY would have confused the issue greatly, as it actually hands the first line to a bleeping droid—a talking Roomba—and then compounds this error by following Snake's getaway on a high-speed commuter train).
It's a hard film to peg. In one scene, Snake takes refuge in an abandoned diner only to run into a character played by Kurt Russell's real-life wife, the actress Season Hubley. The conversation threatens to grow flirtatious when Hubley is abruptly sucked down through the rotten linoleum and the whole thing transforms into a horror film. At other moments—a skyward glance, a mention of secret plans—the film stands solidly alongside Escape From Alcatraz, Papillon, and The Prisoner of Shark Island as a grand island-prison-break caper.
But far more than a genre movie, EFNY is one of the great New York movies, able to hold its own against any Scorsese-Woody-Spike Lee love letter. Inside the prison, Snake encounters a broad range of Big Apple stereotypes: the New Yawk Native (Ernest Borgnine as the 1960s taxi driver who stayed on), the Kvetchy Intellectual (Harry Dean Stanton), the Streetwise Bombshell (Adrienne Barbeau, unruffled in a city of rapists), the Hostile Weirdo (Frank Doubleday, in the single most underrated performance of American cinema).
Then there's the Ultimate Pimp: R&B singer Isaac Hayes as the Duke of New York. As an actor, Hayes had more presence than emotional range (one of his only previous roles had been on an episode of The Rockford Files), which is pretty much what the role demands. But it demands even more style, and on that front the Duke is a little light. After arriving in a marvelously tricked-out 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood with tinkling chandelier hood ornaments, Hayes steps onto the street in comparatively humble attire. With his meager rings, chains, and gold epaulettes, he looks like a poor man's Afrika Bambaataa meets a poor man's Cap'n Crunch.
John Carpenter had to accept a lot of poor man's choices—costumes, sets, effects, backgrounds—and somehow make his thrift look expensive. Accounts vary of the film's budget, but none go higher than $7 million. (For some perspective, that's only $16.5 million in 2009 dollars, or less than the cost of this year's forgettable low-budget comedy Away We Go.) For this paltry sum, Carpenter created an entire ruined metropolis out of garbage, mattes, miniatures, and a shrewd use of affordable interiors. Most impressively, he rigged an existing miniature skyline with reflective tape, then shot this huge diorama under black light to simulate 3-D wire-frame animation. It's CGI before CGI existed—a stunning effect, and one smartly used for a grand total of 60 seconds (another 1981 sci-fi film, Looker, used similar sleight of hand to imagine more ambitious CGI than existed then—or now, for that matter—but the trick was overused and gaudy).
Designing a credible fascist future state is probably an easy thing to overdo. After one quick glance at Lady Liberty (one of only two NYC shots in the film) we are taken to Liberty Island Security Control, filmed in the concrete basin of the Sepulveda Dam, north of Los Angeles. Flourishes of overt sci-fi design are used sparingly. From the police armory, Snake is issued a MAC-10 with an oversize suppressor and rifle scope. The silencer doesn't work—it's one of the loudest guns in the film—but the overall effect is futuristic without being too futuristic. Hauk's office, meanwhile, harks back to New York's past, with the old-timey style of Tammany Hall. (Some art design fails—the blinking Lite-Brite computers in the main compound are less sophisticated than those in Carpenter's ultra-econo 1974 debut, Dark Star.)
The cold efficiency of prison headquarters contrasts sharply with the prison itself. When police helicopters swoop down into the ruined city, we're shown the failed state of a zombie movie. The streets are terrifying trashscapes strewn with a lifetime of furniture, appliances, and auto wreckage (all of which had to be bulldozed aside every morning, when shooting wrapped). Producer Debra Hill intended the chugging junkers of the inmates to suggest the scarcity of post-embargo Havana. New York Maximum Security Prison is revealed to us as the ultimate squat, permanent Katrina, benign neglect taken to its logical extreme. The difference between the blinking machines of Liberty Island and the torch-lit world inside the prison is the difference between Tel Aviv and Gaza.
Many of the prison exteriors were shot in sections of East St. Louis that had been left uninhabitable after a devastating series of fires in October 1976. In an eerie echo of NY's planned neglect of the Bronx, overworked Illinois firefighters had staged a massive "blue flu" sickout and let large sections of the city burn to the ground. It was one of the few examples of urban blight that could match New York.
It also cost a fraction of a New York shoot. East St. Louis allowed Carpenter to shut off electricity for entire blocks, and the abandoned bridge used in the film's chase finale was purchased from (and then resold to) the Army Corps of Engineers for one dollar. The film's beauty seems born of frugal necessity. When Carpenter and Russell reteamed five years later for Big Trouble in Little China, they had three times EFNY's budget. But the special effects on that film rivaled, in sheer loopy cheapness, any mid-80s live-action kids TV show.
It is almost possible to chart New York's decline, at least in popular opinion, by the graffiti in its films. In 1985's Desperately Seeking Susan, the city is covered in what looks like centuries of tags and vandalism, and the scene where Will Patton stalks Rosanna Arquette could have been shot on Carpenter's set in East St. Louis. Five years earlier, Cruising only shows graffiti in Central Park, perhaps to underscore the lawlessness.
The 70s offered a brief time span when directors could still be selective about graffiti. At the end of the decade, the Warriors "bomb" tombstones in a Bronx graveyard, then board subway cars layered in swoops and squiggles of spray paint. A half decade earlier, in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), the city is foulmouthed and recognizably modern, and it looks nude without its graffiti. But when Charles Bronson hunts in the Central Park of Death Wish that same year, we see lots of the stuff on stone walls and sweeping staircases. A year earlier, the writing is back on the streets in Serpico (1973). Perhaps, again, it's there to emphasize lawlessness and corruption. Or perhaps the director just happened to be shooting in the right neighborhoods.
Oddly, the most brutal of all Bad Apple films contains almost no graffiti. Jules Feiffer's Little Murders (1971)—an unrelenting psychotic nightmare disguised as satire—came out a decade before EFNY and easily surpasses the worst horrors Carpenter could think up. Elliott Gould plays an "apathist," a shell-shocked schlub who meekly submits to street beatings and engages the city like a robot. After a sniper kills his new bride—the plucky, Liza Minnelli-ish Marcia Rodd—he slowly embraces violence. This New York is a sordid orgy of rampaging youth, uncaring bystanders, perverts, mashers, rioters, robbers, and vigilantes, but the only spray painting is done to apartment walls, by home invaders, Death Wish-style (both movies also share the portly powerhouse Vincent Gardenia). By the end, Manhattan looks a lot like mid-90s Sarajevo, and Gould and his adopted family are living in a steel-shuttered apartment. It's rough.
It is strange that gentrification, not crime, is the meat of 1983's Escape From the Bronx, one of four early-80s Italian EFNY rip-offs. The film opens in the year 2000, with men in space suits forcing residents out of their homes. The entire borough has been declared uninhabitable, and locals are to be relocated to "solar homes" in New Mexico. Soon our rugged hero, Trash, uncovers the truth: The spacemen are the Disinfestors, the relocation a genocide. A corporation wants to build a suspended future city over the ruins of the Bronx, and the original inhabitants are mere speed bumps to progress.
Trash is played by Mark Gregory, a stunning physical specimen who spent the 80s as Rome's action-film-knockoff champion. He charges around dirty, cheap sets and engages in action sequences set to porno music. In many shots, moving cars are visible in the background—guerrilla filmmaking by default. The gentrification angle is just a strange twist on a familiar vision. If EFNY is a complaint against Giuliani Time, EFTB is a complaint against Bloomberg Time.
Escape From the Bronx is actually a sequel to the even seedier 1990: Bronx Warriors (1982). Parts of this film were also shot in the borough itself, although that doesn't stop Trash's motorcycle gang from driving down to the Bronx River and emerging between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Several of the gangs they encounter seem pulled from The Warriors, and one—the Iron Men—arrives to tinkly piano jazz; its members wear the tap shoes, canes, and gold bowler hats of extras from The Wiz.
Both movies far outshine 1983's 2019: After the Fall of New York. In this Italian reworking, the fake Snake Plissken, Parsifal, grapples with laser guns, robots, ape men, mutants, spaceships, a Mad Max demolition-derby sequence, and two scenes in a Santa's-workshop-style Alaska. The movie opens with a long pan across a grade-school diorama of ruined Manhattan, and the grime and beggary of the entire production is a little stomach-turning. Aside from the American lead, this appears to have been made by people who wouldn't be able to find New York City on a map.
Even in American films, crucial details of New York life slip past non-New York directors. Few films capture the musical tones of the city: the shrill fife note of subway brakes, the chronic percussion of jackhammers near and far, what Laurie Anderson calls "that snare roll that happens when cabs roll over manhole covers." Taxi Driver is one of the very few movies to include the muffled bass of TV and conversation as sifted through apartment walls.
Subways, that special terror of the bad old days, held their own traps for non-natives. Few directors have caught the resemblance of station platform enclosures to holding cells, or those micro-blackouts, never more than a couple of seconds, that used to wink through the cars. The Warriors' own premise—escape by subway, the first thing jettisoned from EFNY—is a harder call. Wouldn't a real New York street gang have just stolen a car? (The 96th Street station where cops chase the Warriors is another casualty of a kinder, gentler NYC; next year the MTA plans to pipe in the sounds of chirping birds and babbling brooks.)
Escape From New York passes none of these tests. Its version of the New York Public Library is missing its stone lions, and the Duke's train yard is unrecognizable. The WTC lobby looks a lot like it was shot in Culver City, California. Then there's the "69th Street Bridge" that gives the film its finale and New Yorkers a snicker. It's all shot beautifully, with the otherworldly glide of Steadicam and the expansive range of Panavision (what Carpenter calls "the ultimate rectangle"). But to locals, the discrepancies are jarring reminders that Escape From New York was made by a bunch of Californians who had no terrifying cities of their own.
Carpenter faced this problem with his first studio feature, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). How to make Los Angeles look scary? Most Bad Apple plot devices don't work in urban California: escaping into a New York City crowd (Death Wish) or disguising ritual killings as random street crime (The Hunger). Even the quintessentially Angelino Blade Runner used the Warner Bros. "old New York street" backlot to drum up some dread. And what other skyline is so friendly to menace? In 1980's Maniac, the badly lit cityscape hints at perversities in the underbrush. In 1982's Liquid Sky, the pointy skyscrapers look like hypodermic needles.
Season Hubley bookended her EFNY role with two classic LA-gone-bad films. In 1979's Hardcore, LA is not so much scary as it is alien, with a nice ten-second stretch of skyline set to blorpy synth yowls. Hubley was a chameleon in her younger days; she appears soft and spry in Carpenter's made-for-TV Elvis (1979), hard-bitten and trannyish only three years later in Vice Squad (1982). This latter version of bad Los Angeles is far more repulsive, but even the parade of human cruelty can't make LA look intimidating. "Jesus, man, the wombats are out tonight!" one cop roars while cruising the Sunset Strip. "I mean, whores, faggots, pimps, and hustlers. Junkies, drag queens, and freaks, man. This city sucks!" Only, it can't suck that much: There are palm trees everywhere.
No film better showcases this divide than 1988's Maniac Cop. The movie climaxes with a car chase on Manhattan's west side, when, almost imperceptibly, the menace evaporates. It takes a moment to figure out what has happened. There is a flash of blocky, non-New York graffiti, then a few frames of an unfamiliar street sign. The movie ends with palm trees waving lazily from the "Jersey" shore in the background. Oops.
Late one night in 1988, I caught a 1 local from Times Square to visit a friend at Columbia University. Somewhere just below my stop, the conductor calmly announced that the train would not be stopping at 116th Street but would instead continue on to 125th. The moment reminded me of that scene in 1984's The Brother From Another Planet when a card hustler asks the visiting space alien, Joe Morton, "Wanna see me make all the white people disappear?" It's an A-train joke, but the punch line is the same. I found myself sharing a subway car with a dozen scared Columbia-bound Caucasians, hurtling into Harlem at midnight.
After some confusion at 125th Street, it was explained that all we had to do was exit the station and cross the street for the southbound platform. I remember all dozen or so of us doing this en masse, making a tight huddle as we crossed 30 feet of nighttime Harlem in the open air. Two images stand out in my memory of this brief incursion into unknown territory: 1) There was a busted fire hydrant, gushing water straight up, and 2) a car was on fire.
Did I really see these things? Main Street Harlem wasn't the South Bronx. Broken hydrants normally gush water out into the street—it takes a major impact to make them fountain upward. And the odds seem kind of high that a car was actually burning, at that very moment, on that very street corner. I have to at least entertain the thought that my memories have been colored by years of Bad Apple films, that my brain—so conditioned to expect the cinematic worst—actually overlaid these false images onto my experience.
This was a common malady of old New York. People moved to the city and found themselves characters in a gritty movie of their own design. Call it Travis Bickle Syndrome. TBS could warp perceptions or actions. I've seen it dozens of times: Yuppies trying to kick through steel doors, businessmen shrieking in intersections, grown men fighting with chains (twice). On 12th Street, I once saw a guy use a police sawhorse as a jousting lance. In other cities, you'd blame such nutty behavior on drugs. In New York, people were just high on the city itself.
Some people moved to New York and caught Abel Ferrara Syndrome. This was a condition that had newcomers take on the physical traits of characters from 1979's The Driller Killer, that superb NY cult slasher movie where all the women look vaguely Laraine Newmanish and all the men look like combos of John Lurie and Richard Hell. It's a bygone look from a bygone world—tough, horsey, and ruggedly emaciated: real New Yorker (some newcomers wound up like Hell himself, in 1982's Smithereens, making a stranger plea: "Please don't do anything weird to me!").
Vigilantes vary in Bad NYC. There are conservative wannabes (Joe) and reluctant liberals (Death Wish). In 1970's The Out of Towners, the vigilantes in Central Park are well-dressed young men, reflecting that strange pause between decades where even the muggers still wore snappy hats. In Ms. 45 (1981), the lead slips from self-defender to vigilante to serial killer to mass murderer in less than 90 minutes.
By the time an actual vigilante showed up in 1984, the city had been primed with 15 years of on-screen street justice. After an unassuming white man shot four black teens on the subway just before Christmas, the NYPD set up a hotline to catch leads on the mystery gunman. The line flooded with calls of support, and local papers gushed over "The Death Wish Shooter." The meek, nerdy Bernie Goetz finally turned himself in, and the public split on the definition of "self-defense." Goetz won against the city, more or less, but eventually lost his civil trial. By then, the case was barely covered in the media; during 11 years of legal battle, New York's crime rate plunged almost as steeply as Escape From New York had predicted it would rise.
It's always seemed curious to me that Hollywood waited until the last year of Ed Koch's reign to get their biggest vigilante property onto the streets. And even then, Tim Burton's cartoony Batman (1989) says very little about the rigors or pitfalls of vigilantism. This film's Gotham City is a silly parody of a massive American city, not quite New York (although the Ed Koch look-alike mayor mentions budget problems), but clearly nowhere else. During the summer of 1989, the ubiquitous Batman-logo t-shirts made everyone in New York a vigilante.
The political upheavals between 1966 and 1990 created weird slipstreams for the films of this era. In 1977's Annie Hall, Woody Allen asks Tony Roberts, "Don't you see the rest of the country looks down upon New York like we're left-wing communist Jewish homosexual pornographers?" He's right, except that some New Yorkers shared this view too. It's interesting to note how the Bad Apple films of the 70s both reflected and shied away from the political turbulence they themselves stirred up.
Death Wish quickly establishes Charles Bronson as a New York liberal, then punishes this perceived weakness with a brutal attack on his wife and daughter. Later, after Bronson has set up his lethal alter ego, he attends a party where fellow urbanites debate whether or not the anonymous vigilante is a racist for killing more blacks than whites. And yet the film doesn't have the courage of its convictions to show any nonwhite rapists during the central attack scene (unless you count a young Jeff Goldblum). Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader created Travis Bickle as an overt racist, but later, during preproduction, the pimp Travis kills was changed from black to white to defuse controversy. And yet Bickle's misguided heroism counters the effete liberal Albert Brooks, who advocates "mandatory welfare" (it's a ridiculous throwaway line—I thought I'd misheard it the first few times).
The Warriors gives us that strangest of all 70s and 80s clichés, the multiracial street gang. No contemporary movie from this period shows realistic thugs operating in actual segregated units (The Wanderers hides in the safety of 1963). Warriors writer-director Walter Hill wanted his film to stay faithful to Sol Yurick's original novel, which involved a gang of blacks and Hispanics. Paramount, mindful of 70s racial sensibilities and wanting a bankable white star, said otherwise. On this one subject, no urban gang film of this era can match the unintentional realism of 1961's West Side Story, even with its street mob of prancing "Puerto Ricans" who look a lot like white people slathered in tanning oil.
Inspired by the gritty look of Death Wish and Dirty Harry, John Carpenter wrote Escape From New York as a science-fiction response to the "urban jungle" genre of the mid-70s. But it's easy to read his movie as the left-wing response as well (ironically, the studio wanted Charles Bronson, then 60, to star). Carpenter's hippie roots are obvious in 1987's They Live, which exposes Republicans and yuppies as alien ghouls, and 2001's Ghosts of Mars, in which illegal drugs save the main character's life.
It's probably a stretch to believe (as I do) that Escape is one of the best films ever made about fascism, far outshining 1984. Ultimately, it's only in the same league as High Noon and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, films that can be viewed through whatever political filter the viewer brings to it. On EFNY's original poster, the Statue of Liberty's head has been ripped off and dragged through the streets. But Lady Liberty has been appropriated by many different groups over the past 120 years, and that forlorn look on her face could signify almost anything. In last year's Cloverfield, itself inspired by that poster, the head signifies nothing more than 9/11 remade as a tacky monster flick.
I caught a screening of Escape From New York in Los Angeles four months after 9/11. It was a typical Hollywood film-revival crowd, low-level film insiders laughing at the references to 1988 and 1997 and Lee Van Cleef's brick-size mobile telephone. And there were big laughs at the scene when a Secret Service agent feebly attempts to break down the Air Force One cockpit door, the mechanics of which all Americans were, by that point, intimately versed in. But there was merely silence at the shot of a hijacked jet soaring toward the World Trade Towers. This wasn't, of course, the only film to foreshadow 9/11 (1998's Armageddon blew chunks out of both buildings, and 1983's confusing and fascinating Born in Flames ends with lesbian revolutionaries—or maybe counterrevolutionaries—detonating a huge bomb atop 1 WTC). But it was certainly the most poetically filmed.
A few months later, I house-sat for friends in SoHo. I arrived on the first beautiful spring day since 9/11. After dropping off my luggage, I walked south to see Ground Zero. Behind the ruined Deutsche Bank building, I found the word "triage" spray-painted on a wall, with an arrow pointing down the alley. When I looked up at the deserted skyscraper, most of its windows smashed out, my only frame of reference was from Escape From New York. It looked like one of Carpenter's mattes. Later that afternoon, I asked my departing friends what I should do in the case of another attack—at that fragile period in New York, more doom seemed imminent—and we all seemed a little stumped (they'd earlier discussed options for escaping from New York but decided against sprinting eight long blocks to the Hudson with a rubber dinghy).
I found the New York of 2002 festooned with American flags. On large buildings, these often hung vertically, as if to underscore the very noncasual patriotism of the moment. In EFNY, producer Debra Hill had the Stars and Stripes hung vertically from the back of the Sepulveda Dam; she'd seen pictures of flags draped like this in Nazi Germany and wanted to evoke a similar feel for a future fascist America. In the movie's novelization, the Duke confronts Snake in the trashed lobby of one of the Twin Towers. "I saw your glider in the street," he says. "All these airplanes falling around here, it's not safe to walk anymore."
A mention is due the novelization, published the month of the film's release by Bantam. Author Mike McQuay must have read the script but not seen the movie; where most novelizations are the weak byproduct of studio marketing, this one lays out a much darker, bleaker, far more hopeless story. In McQuay's version, the imprisonment of New York followed an outbreak of concentrated mass insanity, a consequence of the chronic chemical attacks of WWIII. All male prisoners are castrated. Before the story, Hauk had already lost one of his sons in the firebombing of Los Angeles. After the other son goes insane, robs a supermarket in Chicago, and winds up in New York, Hauk takes the police-commissioner job to find his child.
The book's Snake is first and foremost a disabled war veteran, spending most of the story jacked up on methamphetamines. In the film, his descent through 2 WTC is a matter of a single cut. In the book, it is a passage through 100 floors of corpses, a task of the hereafter. "Even with the meth," McQuay writes, "it seemed like he was destined to descend stairs for the rest of his life."
In the 1740s, Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi completed his "Le Carceri d'invenzione" prints, a series of elaborate sketches of a fictional and impossibly vast prison. The prints depict massive stone vaults and endless stairways leading off into darkness. Here and there, barely discernable figures, specters, skulk in the shadows. McQuay's Escape From New York is closer to those sketches than to the 1981 filmed version. Even if the logic of Hollywood capitalism makes a remake inevitable, I'd certainly love to see a filmed version of this book, WTC and all.
Not that it's easy to see these buildings now without that familiar twinge of foreboding. In years to come, their digital cameos in New York period pieces will probably serve only to heighten this feeling, as if their destruction had winnowed down all possible symbolism to only one awful inevitability (Steven Spielberg used a digital WTC at the end of 2005's Munich for precisely this reason).
These buildings had multiple meanings for films of the 20th century. In Wall Street (1987), the camera lingers conspicuously on the Twin Towers and Citigroup Center as emblems of power. A diorama miniature of the WTC serves the same function in the architect's office of Death Wish. 1983's Vigilante places them in the remote background behind an abandoned, graffiti-covered school, like the spires of a distant civilization, or the Emerald City. Five years later, Maniac Cop has the towers looming ominously over Greenwich Village like craggy peaks in a vampire movie. In 1984's The Pope of Greenwich Village, the WTC taunts the nickel-and-dime schemers from the skyline, a symbol of unattainable wealth. (Midnight Cowboy, filmed while the towers were being built, had to make the same point with Jon Voight listening to stock reports in his dingy hotel room.)
The Twin Towers' use in science fiction has always been a bit trickier. In 1975's The Ultimate Warrior—a dreadful postapocalyptic pap smear that someone tricked Yul Brynner and Max Von Sydow into—the Twin Towers are the sole establishing shot. In the last film the towers appeared in innocently, 2001's AI, Spielberg aged the buildings two millennia and trapped them in ice, probably just because he could. For his part, Plissken parks his glider on one of the towers because, as Harry Dean Stanton points out, there's nowhere else to land.
Snake steers clear of Times Square, probably out of budgetary concerns. It's not until 2007 that I Am Legend finally tackles the Crossroads of the World with nine and a half times the budget, although this abandoned New York actually is abandoned. It's also Mayor Bloomberg's New York, draped in gracefully fading advertisements for XM Satellite Radio and Verizon. The one apartment Snake invites himself into is full of rotting furniture. The apartment Will Smith breaks into features hardwood floors and exposed brick.
One documentary about Times Square sheds some light on New York's baffling nostalgia. Richard Sandler filmed The Gods of Times Square between 1993 and 1998. It's five years of rambling chats with drunks, zealots, hobos, street preachers, and assorted benign schizophrenics, covering the exact period when the square changed so dramatically. There's also some good footage of the Sons of Yahweh, a whackadoodle offshoot of the Black Hebrew Israelites whose disciples looked more like the Duke of New York than the Duke did.
Times Square's Disney Store causes Sandler some grief. Disney attempted to reach backward, past the Bad Apple days to the neighborhood's prewar heyday, making the mistake of referencing a past that almost no one alive had experienced. To those who'd only known the contrast of the Giuliani era, the Disney Store on Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street became an emblem of huge and confusing changes in the city, some real (gentrification), some imaginary ("Disneyfication").
In one scene, Sandler skulks around a parade to honor the new store, clearly unhappy that the neighborhood has been invaded by smiling children. Under massive, groaning billboards, he asks pedestrians what they think of the corporate takeover of Times Square, oblivious to the irony of Times Square's long history as the most heavily advertised spot on earth. Later in the film there's footage of a man shitting in the street, and a brief conversation about why this isn't such a big deal.
Besides John Carpenter (whose first short won an Academy Award in 1970), the only other Oscar winner on the EFNY set was Ernest Borgnine. Ernest won Best Actor back in 1955, for the title role in Marty. In this variation on New York City, Borgnine is a loveless blob of a Bronx butcher. He meets young Betsy Blair, and they spend an enjoyable night together. It's all innocent, chaste fun for Betsy and Ernie, and alien terrain for the modern viewer. Blair can enter Borgnine's dark apartment long after midnight, simply because it isn't plausible that any rapists lurk in the stairwells, inconceivable that he'd long since turned the place into an urban dungeon. The rape and murder of Kitty Genovese is still nine years away. In this world, apartment interiors are stages for intimate dramas and insight into closed worlds, not depravity. The worst thing the city can throw at either of them is the same loneliness it throws at Travis Bickle 20 years later.
There's a lot of this loneliness in Escape From New York, courtesy of a synthesizer soundtrack performed by John Carpenter and collaborator Alan Howarth. A version of Debussy's "The Sunken Cathedral" drones somberly as Snake's fragile glider slips over the derelict financial district—a funeral dirge for an underwater city. Minus one campy cabaret piece lifted straight from the action ("Stab a priest with a fork/And you'll spend your vacation in New York") the soundtrack is a masterpiece of moody electronics, by turns eerie, stoic, mournful, and urgent. What it does not particularly evoke is New York City.
In fact, there was a gap, in the 1970s and very early 1980s, when New York's steep decline was not yet reflected in any music, particularly not in the music of New York itself. Saxophones are fine for conveying glitz, noir, romance, or even loneliness. They do not do such a great job with urban brutality. And for all the belligerence of the original CBGB punk bands, their music had much more to say about mainstream America than New York's squalor and violence. The Ramones' "Beat on the Brat" is a catchy tune, but it isn't the best soundtrack, I suspect, if you actually want to beat someone with a baseball bat. Of all New York's unique music subcultures from this era—the acidic little No Wave scene, the embryonic hip-hop movement, '81's hybrid mutant-disco phase—none of it conveyed urban apocalypse. The Bad Apple had cinematic expression long before it had musical expression.
Perhaps because of the city's musically illustrious recent past, New York's hardcore punk scene started at a disadvantage. These first, late-blooming bands of the early 80s struggled to release 7-inch EPs as the DC, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco scenes flourished. And while some of these bands (Urban Waste, the Abused, Kraut, Antidote) made great music, their great music could just as easily have been made in the Midwest or Canada.
What early New York Hardcore bands lacked in distinctive output, however, they more than compensated for in sheer menace. As the scene coalesced in Reagan's first term, the New York Hardcore scene—known in the shorthand of graffiti and knuckle tattoos as NYHC—injected class into the subculture in a way that no other city could. It was a world marinating in poverty and violence. The skinheads of New York weren't as uniformly racist as skinheads in other cities, but gay-bashing was merry sport, and bystander-bashing a close second. Punk shows in early-80s Manhattan were good places to witness and/or receive a savage beating.
It's hard to see how NYHC could have existed, in its known form, without Death Wish, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, and Escape From New York. In the mid-1970s, Richard Hell (or Television's Richard Lloyd, depending on whose account you believe) walked into CBGB with a homemade "Please Kill Me" shirt. The message was theater. A decade later, hardcore shows at the same club were events where one could plausibly get killed. When I moved to Manhattan in 1987, legends of the ferocious skinhead-Puerto Rican wars of the early 80s seemed like something out of Hollywood. Without a cinematic tradition to step into, the wretchedness of New York could have been something for this scene to overcome, not celebrate.
In 1984, Agnostic Front released their debut album, Victim in Pain. It's an excellent, scrappy, unruly record, but again, the lyrics and music could have come from almost anywhere. The LP bolstered the band's standing as leading men of a scene that frowned on stardom. Actor Matt Dillon arrived at an infamous AF show this same year, got spotted from the stage, and was mocked by the band until he fled. At a different show, a local news crew tried to film CBGB's exterior and had their vehicle attacked.
Two years later, AF delivered their second LP, Cause for Alarm, with a new, heavy-metal sound and a new lyrical slant. In 1984, the band had used the word "minority" to describe themselves—their band, friends, and audience—as a precarious subculture that needed to stick together. On this new album, the word popped up in a more familiar context: "How come it's minorities/Who cry things are too tough/On TV with their gold chains/Claim they don't have enough." The next track celebrated Bernie Goetz. It was as if the hard-hat silent majority had adopted the most berserk counterculture they could find. Phil Donahue called the lyrics racist, and NYHC had an ideology.
Cause for Alarm is a disappointing flop mostly because of its fantastic art. In the mid-80s, illustrator Sean Taggart was unofficial house artist for several local bands, and his cover for this record is a cartoony Hieronymus Bosch meltdown: screaming punks, screaming skinhead demon, flames, a mugger, a junkie, a blob in a business suit eating more screaming figures. It's New York as hellscape, far meaner than Scorsese's Mean Streets. The songs inside can't compete. It's a New York record without New York music.
The missing music arrived this same year. 1986's The Age of Quarrel, the debut album of New York's Cro-Mags, offered another recipe of heavy metal and hardcore punk, only with radically different chemistry. It's a small irony that the album was received with suspicion by the NYHC community. Most of the 15 songs had been reworked from an earlier Cro-Mags demo, and although the vocals were recorded in one day, they're far more polished than anything the band had done before. Released on Profile Records, a label best known for breaking Queens's Run-DMC, the record shines precisely because of its overproduction. Several British bands had already made inroads into this specific hybrid subgenre—Discharge came closest—but no American group had blended metal and hardcore so organically or in the service of such a terrifying worldview. The overall effect referenced another bit of British culture: the 16-ton weight of Monty Python skits.
The Age of Quarrel documents a city whose brutality has no beginning and no foreseeable end, New York under eternal siege, the Tribute in Light memorial as massive antiaircraft searchlights. At one point, someone counts off a song in shrieks of German—it sounds scary even today. Los Angeles glam-metal band Mötley Crüe modeled their costumes (and, in 1983, a stage set) on Escape From New York. The Cro-Mags sounded like Escape From New York, the perfect soundtrack for a city that has been flushed "right down the fuckin' toilet." After 20 years, the Bad Apple of films finally found its voice.
The Cro-Mags were also the first NY Hardcore band to embrace Hare Krishna. Throughout the album, religious conviction is used as both a framework for apocalypse and an apology for violence. In "World Peace," a warning to "hippies," we learn "things are gettin' hectic/It's all gonna end/You don't know what's waitin'/Up around the bend/Open your eyes/Perhaps you'll realize/If AIDS don't get ya then the warheads will." "Survival of the Streets" is all about "Livin' in burnt-out buildings/Livin' in the streets." Then there's the existential beatdown of "Life of My Own": "You come into this world/With nothing except yourself/You, you leave this world/With nothing except yourself."
The original album art reworked this philosophy into a trickier conservatism than Agnostic Front's blue-collar grumbling. Inside a mushroom cloud doubling as a crystal ball, the cover drawing revealed a mix of evils from the Krishna perspective: a slaughterhouse, dogfighting, drug abuse, abortion doctors chucking a fetus, two gay men strolling arm in arm. Profile nixed this art, and the band instead chose a photograph of a real mushroom cloud—the 1954 Castle Romeo test—in what has to stand as one of the all-time classics of truth in advertising.
The back-cover photo was just as important as the front. In a small group shot, the Cro-Mags stand posed in a sinister, graffiti-covered doorway. Four of these five men meet the viewer's gaze with the weary self-assurance of native New Yorkers. In the front, bassist Harley Flanagan stands next to vocalist John "Bloodclot" Joseph. Flanagan, the former child drummer from the Stimulators, leans into a wall, bald and impassive. Joseph, an AWOL navy fugitive, holds a balled fist and seems to be suppressing a slight sneer. Both men are covered in tattoos and seem made out of pure muscle. And by the time of this photo, both men had already lived entire lives of impossible brutality and squalor, living in burned-out buildings and in the street. The Warriors was based loosely on Xenophon's Anabasis; the Cro-Mags personnel looked and acted like characters out of Greek mythology. They also saw themselves as products of a failed New York. In Joseph's autobiography(!), he describes standing by the side of the Queensboro Bridge watching the Manhattan silhouette during the 1977 blackout. Writing from the 21st century, he can only compare the scene to something out of Escape From New York (in the mid-80s, the band opened at least one CBGB set with the garish and creepy theme from A Clockwork Orange blaring through the speakers).
The year after my brief visit to Harlem, I worked at a health-food store on First Avenue, just below St. Marks. Joseph had worked there years earlier, and he or Flanagan shopped there, at different times, every month or so. All the employees were familiar with their music and their reputation, and even though both men were always polite to all of us, a strange hush of terror would settle over the store whenever they shopped. It reminded me of a different Monty Python sketch: the Piranha Brothers, twin brutes so terrifying "grown men would pull their heads off" rather than face them.
One afternoon I was working registers when Joseph came in and asked for a dollar's worth of bee pollen. We sold this, as a nutritional supplement, for $20 a pound. There's no way to perfectly measure out that small an amount on the scale. My hands were shaky because I was simultaneously elated and petrified to be interacting with the singer of the Cro-Mags, and I couldn't get the scale to hit exactly one dollar. "One dollar three cents," I said weakly.
He gave me a look—the kind of look Zeus might give a mortal before erasing them with a thunderbolt.
"Naw, man... I said a dollar."
I heard my voice squeak up into a weird cartoony register.
"Yes sir, one dollar, yessir!" As soon as he left, everyone in the store laughed at me, including all the other customers.
In 1987, the Cro-Mags were approached to perform in The Beat, a feisty teen drama for which they'd already been written into the script as the Iron Skulls. According to the lore of 80s New York, the band only agreed to the film after they found out the producer was Julia Phillips. In her autobiography, Phillips writes, "They love me once they find out I produced Taxi Driver... Is it Travis or the sax solo?" Later, she describes an accident that occurs during the shooting of their concert scene. Pushing through the crowd, she comes upon a badly injured Travis Bickle look-alike sprawled on the dance floor, blood trickling out of his eyes (severed spine: a $3 million settlement).
The Beat is an uncommonly squirm-inducing film. Set in the fictional outer-borough neighborhood of Hellesbay, its disaffected teens speak in the disjointed tempo of actors' improv workshops. There are several long stretches where characters stand together, peer off-screen, and describe what they're looking at. At its best, The Beat could be called a frank look at urban racism, if that's the right name for a movie where someone can and does run on-screen and say, "My man Cheese Pie, he just got shot by some niggers!" The Iron Skulls are at the center of this story, first as their tickets threaten to sell out, then through the inspiration left in the wake of their concert. It's kind of fun trying to picture what the Cro-Mags must have thought of this movie, but still a lot less fun than watching a decent movie.
But then there are those three and a half minutes in the middle. The Iron Skulls' set starts in slurred slow motion, the aftermath of a battle or a terrorist attack. The screams speed closer to real time, and the stage looks a lot like the Riverside Park riot in The Warriors. The band plays the last half of "It's the Limit," then all of "Hard Times." John Joseph, shirtless and triumphant, dodges bodies with the choreography of a martial-arts movie. Several times the camera cuts to inside a mosh pit laced with howls and screams—the seventh circle of Hell. One shot shows the nebbishy protagonist, bruised and disoriented and buffeted by heaving bodies. It looks like the kind of place where someone could sever a spine.
Three months after Escape From New York opened, its nameless president, Donald Pleasence, hosted Saturday Night Live. It was the Halloween episode, featuring the star of Halloween, broadcast from the scariest city in America. I watched this show as a 12-year-old, but I don't remember any of the skits. What I do remember was the musical guest, LA punk band Fear. They performed to a crowd of authentic misfits bused in from various hardcore scenes, John Joseph and Harley Flanagan included. After an incident (the New York Post claimed thousands of dollars in damaged cameras, although accounts vary), the band was ejected from the building and the recording warehoused. NBC never re-aired the episode.
This brief convergence—characters from Escape From New York crossing paths with characters from the Cro-Mags—presented an afterimage of mayhem I had no way to process. People ran across the stage in a blur, collided, and collapsed back into one another. The tiny imported crowd looked like the running anonymous assailants—faceless rabble—of every good John Carpenter film. It scared and fascinated me, and made me want to never visit New York again. Watching the Cro-Mags scene in The Beat now, I feel a slight twinge of this same confusion. For a moment, New York is not the awesomest city on earth—a fact that, in 2009, nobody living outside of NYC seriously disputes—but merely another lost pee-smelling woe zone, and a city I have no desire to live in again. It's a fleeting sensation, and by the time I stop my VCR, I've already forgotten what it felt like.
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This Date In Royals History–August 15, 2002
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Via Philliedelphia
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Table of Contents Here's the table of contents for today's edition of Daily Notes. 1. Top Performances of the Puerto Rican League 2. Mostly Relevant Video: Boston Prospect Jose De La Torre 3. Final (!) SCOUT Leaderboards: Puerto Rican League Top Performances of the Puerto Rican League The playoffs for the Puerto Rican League (PRL) have begun — and, as such, the regular-season...
Mets have Pavano, Marcum, and Vazquez on their radar
Trading away reigning NL Cy Young award winner R.A. Dickey to the Toronto Blue Jays has left the New York Mets with a hole in their rotation to start 2013. If the year were to kickoff today we'd likely see a rotation consisting of Johan Santana, Jonathon Niese, Matt Harvey, Dillon Gee, and ummm, uhhhh, well there's……perhaps….maybe….????? The point is that the team...
Royals still Looking
by John Viril— The recent report that the Kansas City Royals were one of the four teams that sent scouts to see free-agent pitcher Javier Vazquez in Puerto Rico indicates Royals GM Dayton Moore is not completely satisfied with his roster. Instead, he's still looking to improve his starting rotation. This article will examine the remaining available starting pitching options that...
Via The Viril View: On the KC Royals
January 06, 2013 | Discuss
Report: Javier Vazquez 'Impressive' in Winter League Tune-Up with Red Sox Scouts Watching
Javier Vazquez may still have it. The 36-year-old tossed six innings of three-hit ball in front of scouts from the Red Sox, Rays, Nationals and Royals on Friday night in the Puerto Rico Winter League playoffs, according to Rob Bradford of WEEI.com. The team's general manager said in a text that Vazquez was "impressive," allowing no runs and throwing his fastball as high as...
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What is the "thumbnailextractionhost.exe" ?
Our database contains 18 different files for filename thumbnailextractionhost.exe . This files most often belongs to product Microsoft® Windows® Operating System. and were most often developed by company Microsoft Corporation. This files most often have description Thumbnail Handler Extraction Host. Agregate rating is 3(3) stars - based on 4 reviews.This is executable file. You can find it running in Task Manager as the process thumbnailextractionhost.exe.
On this page, you can find detailed information about the file itself, download information, its demographics distribution, security rating given by users, antivirus reports from AV applications, user's reviews and comments for the file and much more, which can help you to decide if the file can be safe or threat for your computer.
Probably you navigated to this page because some problems with this file or in need of more information. Solving a file-based issue can be sometimes very difficult task even for computer experts. For this and for system monitoring purposes we have developed a free tool which helps you greatly to keep your system under control in very easy and user-friendly way. This tool can also help you to solve problems with high CPU loads, find security issues or speed-up your computer.
thumbnailextractionhost.exe is in most cases the Thumbnail Handler Extraction Host which is part of Windows 8 system.
File details of most used file with name "thumbnailextractionhost.exe"
- Product:
- Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
- Company:
- Microsoft Corporation
- Description:
- Thumbnail Handler Extraction Host
- Version:
- 6.2.9200.16384
- f7c576b31dd1d18e8c45a43ae807c5f5
- bd258ef59a474efb7c8ea15d9a33d69a0dd18d15
- ed9a370f3c1c0ea9a8f40fbd3bfc9b68809fec6323fd1136f0ae254ff89aa2a5
- Size:
- 30208
- Directory:
- C:\Windows\System32
- Operating System:
- Windows 8
- Discovered:
- August 9, 2012
- Occurence:
- High
Is the Process "thumbnailextractionhost.exe" Safe or Threat ?
33% of reviewed files are marked as Threat .
33% of reviewed files are marked as System file.
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You can also check the list of newly discovered variants of the thumbnailextractionhost.exe
Download of the "thumbnailextractionhost.exe"
User Reviews of the "thumbnailextractionhost.exe"
Reviews for all files with name "thumbnailextractionhost.exe"
THREATrating from user Wolflair for file C:\Windows\System32\thumbnailextractionhost.exe
SAFErating from user Admin for file C:\Windows\WinSxS\x86_microsoft-windows-thumbexthost_31bf3856ad364e35_6.2.9200.16384_none_ed1804bb0ed17806\ThumbnailExtractionHost.exe (Variant: 12831712)
This file is part of Windows 8.
SAFErating from user craigun for file C:\Windows\System32\ThumbnailExtractionHost.exe
THREATrating from user Esistwar for file C:\Windows\System32\thumbnailextractionhost.exe


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True feelings
(via catchingfiremockingjays)
This goes to my bucket list.
James Dean
Can't stop staring….
"Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today."
James Dean
(Source: vintagegal, via vintagegal)
James Dean
James dean is the ultimate hunk!👑
Awwwww, these pups are seriously cute.
(Source: dudeitsjusthomer, via jennifercarolyn)
hot damn yessss
(Source: a-lone-fool-out-in-the-sun, via fuckyeahkitandemilia)
(Source: gifbuffet)
(Source: taylor-takes-a-tumble)


text:
Word: vous aviez
Added on: 2009-10-31 Listened: 440 timesin: verbes en Français, verbs in French, learning French, conjugate the French verb avoir
Pronunciation in French [fr] Back to French
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by Google Translate English translation:
vous aviez = you had
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text:
Bizav Flight Activity Still Trending Upward
According to TraqPak data released yesterday by aviation specialized services firm Argus, business aircraft flight activity climbed 7.9 percent last month versus a year ago. While this is more than the 4.8 percent year-over-year rise in April, the industry as a whole has not seen the double-digit increases in the first half of this year that several analysts predicted late last year. Activity was positive across all aircraft types: midsize jets led with a 13.6-percent increase over May 2009, followed by light jets (8.3 percent), large-cabin jets (5.2 percent) and turboprops (3.5 percent). Part 135 charter operators saw their flying climb by 8.6 percent, while Part 91 and fractional operators each logged a 7.9-percent increase. Notably, midsize jet activity at Part 135 charter operators soared by a whopping 24.6 percent. The only other double-digit increase was Part 91 midsize jets at 10.9 percent. Meanwhile, both Part 135 turboprop and fractional large-cabin jet flying decreased slightly year-over-year. Argus's TraqPak data "is serial-number-specific aircraft arrival and departure information on all IFR flights in the U.S."
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by Race Coverage
Some great shots from a record day in Chicago. The men's race was won in course record time by Kenyan Sammy Wanjiru, with a time of
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I usually rant; and it's not like I'm not ranting right now. I'm merely raving, as well. I'm raving mad about jackets worn over-the-shoulders, sans sleeves. Even our stylists are loving—and practicing—this 'coats as capelets' trend.
You might have witnessed the following posts on Facebook and Twitter.
There's no need to fear this caped crusader trend. Whether it's a coat, a sweater, or a jacket, it's time to wear it out/over your shoulders. Here's why:
Sometimes we get cold, and if someone drapes a coat over our shoulders, we swoon and tune into our romantic inclinations.
Why wait for a signif' other to forfeit a jacket when you're perfectly warm in the one you put on yourself?
Richy T.—CapeLet it Happen.
You know how going out in a pair of dazzling heels feels as good as soaking your feet in warm water when you get home? I mean, I don't know personally; but judging by the number of girls I see leaving the club in bare feet, there's gotta be some sort of downtime after heel-time. Well here's a way you can relax your feet—and your whole body—in a not-so-dazzling super-sized heel.
Check out these giant heel-shaped soaker tubs.
As real shoes, they are in desperate need of a ShoeDazzle make-over. As bathtubs, they might actually work.
If you get/have one, please let me know .
Richy T. –bathed in shoes.
I feel like many fashion outlets discount the Teen Choice Awards because, well, they're potentially super junior. Let's do the math: If an X teen year old has M million dollars, what does she wear to an awards show? I'm not going to show my work here, but the solution definitely includes edgy, fresh pre-season work from both established fashion houses and up-and-coming designers. Ergo, I'm going to pay attention to teen choice trends
Lilly Collins and Bella Thorne donned Faustino Puglisi pieces that stay true to a palmy print while swapping background colors. Diamond would totally add another layer. If you really think about it, aren't diamond prints tropically reminiscent of pineapples?
What we saw on Sunday was a whole lot of dichotomy; from Miley's sheer vs. sheen ensemble to Rebel's two-toned wetsuit (don't do the wetsuit unless you're in the ocean). Persephone totally knows how to recreate that duality.
My favorite look was worn not by an X-teen-year-old but by Sandra Bullock. That dress is so sparkly, so well-segmented, and so well pattern-blocked. Her shoes look good, but I'm sure that the piecy, disconnected Cady would get a better grade.
Richy T. – Forever ≈ 21
Shark Week was cool, but Shark Weekend is about to get #Uncaged. Here are my favorite ways to dive into the party.
Most importantly, you should play drinking games with your chums while watching what's left. Pick a word that triggers a sip. The word "expert," for example, will throw you overboard in mere minutes of #Megaladon.
Once you're a few deep, feel free to make your own SharkNado-inspired Vines and Insta-Movies. It's easy; vid a clip from YouTube and then cut to you screaming.
After that, dress your pets in sharky costumes (what the duck is going on there?) while eating sushi and drinking blue drinks. Did you know high-end restaurants use sharkskin to grate fresh wasabi? And did you know you can get a Shark Bite cocktail at Joe's Crab Shack?
Then, travel with your pet shark.
You can't shop any retailer who knows what's up without seeing ikat zig across the shelves (or across the screen), but many shoppers zag when they're unsure about getting pieces to match up. I conferred with our stylists and came up with a few suggestions that turn ikat into 'I can'.
I can't tell you how much I love Lila paired with a predominately navy ikat print. Here's a suggestion: blur your eyes when staring down a pattern to see its fundamental color. Lila is fundamentally red, and pieces that are fundamentally deep blue complement her undertones like diamonds.
Can you see how Eye Full towers over busy prints like iIkat without being simply solid? Articles of any single color from a print can solidify a look, but they don't have to be basic about it.
I can see you experimenting with Lenice; she keeps her ikat on the inside and lets you dabble in complementary colors like coral and rust. Oh wait– you left the house in a pairing you later decided you hate? NBD; Just fold her back up into a classic boot.
You can pair plenty with ikat, including more ikat. Just be sure the prints are color-coordinated and sized either super similarly or wildly different; no in-between.
Richy T. — fetching and ikatching.
We all know there are plenty of other fish in the dating app sea, but most are merely "okay" at playing Cupid. If only you could shop for dates like you shop for ShoeDazzle shoes.
Oh wait, you can on 'Tinder' and 'Twine'.
Both are pretty much spinoffs of one of my favorite games, Hot or Not, but on Tinder you get a a profile and "matches" that like the same things (on Facebook) that you do.
Just like real life, there's no gray area; wannabe dates get either "liked" or "noped" and only when two people 'like' each other are they able to communicate via IM.
Twine adds to the fire Tinder started by giving users the ability to ask a question to their smartphone suitors. It's a dating game that makes it easier to win.
A good friend of mine said these sites are 'like ShoeDazzle; if you don't like it, don't buy it because there's always other options."
While we're on the subject of dating apps, how about we talk about How About We. This app lets you suggest random ideas for dates like: "how about we do cartwheels in a park?" and "how about we go drunk shopping?" Anyone interested in partaking can message you. If nothing else, you can get some really great date ideas; it's like a dating look book, inspirational.
Richy T. — save the date.
Image via TMZ/Image via Disney
Here's the truth: As guys' shorts get shorter, girls' shorts (and pants) get higher-waisted. So this is how T. Swift ends up paddling in a (not-my-fave) trunkini. It's only not my fave because you have to be a pretty millionaire to get away with that print. On her, I think it's groovy; you just need the same slimming cut in a solid color to look like a million bucks. Annette would approve.
I wouldn't dare put the kibosh on the Teen Beach Movie trend—mostly because I'm a fashion fan of short shorts and faux surfing.
In the movies, they don't wear shoes, and their hair doesn't get wet when they swim. Clearly, there's a disconnect; they need shoes.
Shoes like Olinda are Jackie O-so-good with vintage looks. But if you want to keep things outta sight, go for something nude like Deandra or Joan.
Richy T. – All souped up.
If you liked it, then you shoulda dripped a ring on it—instead of just nailed it.
Clearly, we've managed to manually cure the common French Tip with creative colors, dazzling decals, and fun filing. So the question becomes "what's my next manicure about?" and "can I handle it?"
Buzzfeed.com reports that a brand by the name of "Beyond" by Rad Nails is nailing the next level of digit-al fashion. It's cute and it's cuticle.
"Another Round," "Your Point??," and "In a Pinch" (in order from top to bottom) invite you to finger it out.
The area just above your nail is poised to become prime fashion real estate this year with both temporary and potentially permanent tattoo options.
Permanent tattoos sound painful, but they might make you reconsider the meaning of flipping someone off.
Richy T. – Go finger.
LA is currently enduring a hot, wet summer. Everybody's paring it down to the basics: T-shirts and jeans. Why? because no one here's used to this weather except maybe aspiring actors from the Midwest.
Personally I'm hot and sticking with beefy-T V-necks and Levi's shorts—but I kind of like it like it because it forces me to step up my shoe game. This week I'm ranting and raving about shoes that elevate, escalate, and go on dates when paired with plain white tees and denim.
Joss because you're wearing stovepipe jeans and a T-shirt doesn't mean you can't accessorize with a turquoise necklace that references one of the many hues in your heels. Moral of the story: feel free to add a dash of color to your crew-neck.
I didn't come up with this one on Myona; I've witnessed plenty of women strolling through malls and on boardwalks in oversized T-shirts, super skinny jeans, and sneaky heels. I complimented them shamelessly and gave them my card. True story.
If you want to Spycee things up, play with proportions. For example: Try high waists, calf cuts, and cropped tops. Cut it out because those looks are getting hotter as we speak/read.
Don't forget your hats, belts, and sunglasses when putting "tee and jeans" looks together.
Richy Tee. – See you monsoon/on Friday.
Remember when videophones were a thing of the future and you could only win them on "The Price is Right" or "Sally Jesse Rafael?" Unfortunately, I do! But thankfully, some sort of revolution happened and the world finally got smart to smart phones.
So, I'm letting you know now—before anything has been "Dazzled"—that in the future you may be able to have your ShoeDazzle shoes sent to you via email thanks to 3-D printing.
This desktop 3-D printer appeared on my Facebook timeline a few days ago, I was ready to pop on some glasses to see it, but turns out, it wasn't that kind of 3-D. This printer by Form1 creates objects you can hold, turn, and definitely throw. How? Lasers harden liquid plastic one itty-bitty layer at a time to form structures from the bottom up. The result is an object (not a print!).
This technology was not developed specifically for shoes, but conceivably, you could order a file from ShoeDazzle and instantly print your shoes straight from your desktop. Of course, we'd offer a wide variety of designer plastics that "laser out" to be colorful, pearly, metallic, matte, all that, and everything else. I imagine it would be something like choosing a nail polish from a great wall of options.
It'll take a while, but I'm sure we'll get there eventually.


text:
The Bronx News
Local news for The Bronx, NY continually updated from thousands of sources on the web.
The 7 Most Haunted College Campuses In The World
3 hrs ago | MTV | Comment?
From Salerno To Armonk Via The Bronx: Zero Otto Nove Has Many Influences
Yesterday | The Armonk Daily Voice | Comment?
Watch: Jennifer Lopez Performs Medley Of Hits At We Day Vancouver
Yesterday | Vibe | Comment?
Derek Jeter prayed for 'big moment' in last Yankee Stadium at-bat
Yesterday | NJ.com | Comment?
Book News: Joan Didion's Life, As Seen On Kickstarter
Thursday | WNYC-AM New York | Comment?
On the Market: Decluttering for Law Offices, Homes and Subway Platforms
Thursday | The New York Observer | Comment?
Fari aa s new superintendents led low-grade schools
Thursday | New York Post | Comment?
Harrison Youth Council Honors Family Counselor Sabina Perez
Wednesday | The Harrison Daily Voice | Comment?
DJ Kool Herc Kicks Off Fine Arts Exhibit in The Bronx
Wednesday Oct 22 | DNAInfo.com | Comment?
Following Bourdain around the world
Wednesday Oct 22 | CNN | Comment?
Hurray for the Riff Raff's Bronx-born Alynda Lee Segarra found a different way of life...
Wednesday Oct 22 | Alabama Live | Comment?
850 people a officiallya over 164 years old: NYC Board of Elections
Wednesday Oct 22 | New York Post | Comment?
Fat Joe And J.Lo Live The Lavish Life In New Video 'Stressin'
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News 12 hosts domestic violence expert
Tuesday Oct 21 | News12.com | Comment?
A "lifeline" for women with breast cancer
Tuesday Oct 21 | CBS News | Comment?
Nyc Dept. of City Planning: Bronx Borough Office Deputy Director
Monday Oct 20 | City Limits | Comment?
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Im doing my *Happy Dance * Thank You So Much That Means A Lot To Me!
- New Stuff Coming Soon :D
Okay- can't wait to see what you tell me :D
Sometimes I wish I could look outside and be inspired like:
But instead, I just look around bored like:
- Uhm - What to do?
someone save me - please)


text:
We really enjoy teaching woodworkers the very best ways that we have found to make handtools work the way they were designed to work: with speed, precision, and a surprisingly low demand on muscle power.
Hand tools force you to have a different relationship both to the tool and to the wood itself. The grain direction forces you to use the correct cutting direction and you can feel the tool react to any change of grain direction. You are also aware of when the blade dulls and the effort to use the hand tool increases. Sharpening and keeping a tool tuned are core skills needed by every woodworker.
We argue that if you can do all the woodworking operations using handtools you will have a much better understanding of how to do the same operation using power tools.
Taking any or all of these classes will help you become a better woodworker.
Note: In 2012 we made an major upgrade in the hand tools at the School. A combination of a gifts of old hand tools and purchases of new tools means that each workbench now has a full complement of jack planes, fore planes, carcass saws, mortice chisels, mallets, marking gauges and hold downs! We've expanded the range of teaching tools to include floats, plow planes and a range of hand saws. Get to experience the full range of traditional hand tools.
After the very positive reaction to Jim's new book - The New Tradtional Woodworker - we're expanding our range of hand tool classes.
Basics of Woodworking - Weekends January - February 2014
Four weekend classes that give you an introduction to hand tools and hand tool woodworking.
Handtool Heaven
April 14-18, May 12-16, June 23-27, August 4-8, September 15-19, 2014
Jim Tolpin's signature course. Discover the joy of working without dust and noise. Learn to use a handsaw, chisels and planes to dimension, finish and join wood while making bench tools.
You may have taken one of the introductory classes above or have self-studied and done the projects in Jim Tolpin's "The New Traditional Woodworker". This class is designed to build on those skills and provide a mentored environment to explore further. We provide both techniques and project classes:
Japanese Carpentry - July 28-August 2, 2014
Japanese tools are capable of scary precision when fully tuned. The Japanese hand plane requires more care and maintenance than western hand planes. Learn the art from master craftsman Dale Brotherton.
Precision with Hand Tools – September 1-5, 2014
Learn to flatten boards to polished smoothness, fair curves, fit drawer faces, make moldings, chamfer edges and cut joinery, and more, while using a wide variety of planes,marking tools, chisels, and saws.
Cabinet Curiosities - September 8-12, 2014
Design and build a small cabinet as you explore the design, details, and challenges of solid wood construction before starting on much larger pieces. You'll delve into strong case joinery, choosing appropriate materials, dealing with wood movement, securing shelves and backs, making and attaching moldings, case corner details,making and hinging doors, and if there is time, make drawers.
"I can now do by hand many of the things I have been doing with noisy, dusty machines.
And I can do it better." -- Don Stromberg
"I am delighted by what we learned, a practical understanding of how to build something using mostly hand-tools, and I am deeply pleased by how we learned, in a safe and supportive environment without pressure or constraint." -- Deborah Rosenberg
"This is truly a class that anyone could take—whatever your skill level learning will happen! I am looking forward to practicing all I have learned at home. I experience great joy as I put together my first joint—Lots of fun and very rewarding!" –Kristi Schroots
"Well timed instruction with clear explanations and lots of demonstrations. Rather than showing all the steps at once, the instructors showed each step after completing the previous step. The pace was fast enough to hold interest, but slow enough to allow for "corrections". We were able to correct mistakes without feeling bad or incompetent—this is an art in teaching!" --Greg Hoerner
"The course was perfect: Careful, detailed instruction; superb individual attention; and the facility couldn't be better (and the cookies were great too!)." –Gene Trobaugh
About the School
Location & Lodging
Our organization
Vocational option
Woodworking Programs
2014 Woodworking Class Schedule
What others say about us
Stay Connected
Email us
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Port Townsend School of Woodworking and Preservation Trades Copyright © 2007-2014. All rights reserved.
200 Battery Way | Fort Worden | Port Townsend, WA 98368 | (360) 344-4455 | email
The Port Townsend School of Woodworking and Preservation Trades is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit. Any donations made to the School are tax-deductible to the extent provided by law.


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HARTFORD COOPERATIVE EXTENSION COUNCIL INC Overview
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Ever-Shifting Downtown Neighborhoods
A recent study has found that downtown Manhattan has the highest rates of transience in the city
By Adam Janos
Many people love living downtown; it's got some the city's most iconic buildings, it's at the heart of public transit, and night life and restaurants are popping up in a decade that has seen real estate values soar. Things sure are booming – just don't expect your neighbor to necessarily stick around with you for the long haul.
According to a study conducted by Social Explorer and the Queens College Department of Applied Research of the Census Bureau, between the years 2007 and 2011, downtown Manhattan had the highest rates of transience in the city. In ZIP code 10005, for example, 39.4 percent of those surveyed had been residents here for less than a year. In ZIP code 10006 (Battery Park), that number rose to 43.1 percent. From the financial district to Gramercy Park to Tribeca and SoHo, rookie residents are making up 20-40 percent of the total population. As a point of comparison, in 10162 (Upper East Side), only 5.8 percent of their inhabitants had been around for less than year.
Downtown is putting the "New" in "New York."
With such a small percentage of people who have been around for the time necessary to bring the neighborhood true consistency, business owners have to come up with different ways to draw steady clientele. At Delmonico's on Beaver Street, general manager Corrado Goglia says that, although the neighborhood has gotten more residential in the last five or six years, he still "sees lots of new faces. After 2007, a lot of people moved about. But between those who stay, the workers, and the tourists we continue to find business." Like many in the area, Goglia is optimistic that those transience numbers will be turning around soon and that – regardless of what the Census Bureau's data indicates – it's become much more of a neighborhood in the fourteen years since he's been general manager.
Others are not so sure. "It's terrible," says John Moran, owner of both the Mercantile Grill and Killarney Rose on Pearl Street. "You don't see the same people from one year to the next… and that's not good for places like this. It's only in the last two years that we've gotten a lot of residents down here."
Which raises an interesting point: is the neighborhood transient, or is it simply growing? According to the Census Bureau, between 2000 and 2010 the population of downtown Manhattan has increased by 40,000. So even though people are moving in at staggering numbers every year doesn't necessarily mean that they replacing others who have departed; it could also be a reflection of the general population growth of the neighborhood and the conversion of banking centers like 37 Wall Street into residential buildings flush with new tenants.
Mathematically speaking, though, even taking population growth into account doesn't fully explain the high rates of new tenancy; as surely as some New Yorkers pursue apartments downtown, others are deserting it.
"I think this proves how important it is to develop and protect affordable housing in lower Manhattan, and in our city as a whole," said Council Member Margaret Chin, who presides over three of the five most transient zip codes. "Rising rents is one of the primary causes of flight from neighborhoods, from Chinatown to the Financial District."
"Over the past ten years, the residential population in the Financial District and Tribeca has more than doubled," continued Chin. "Unfortunately, the development of essentials services, like supermarkets, public open spaces, and community faculties, has not kept up with this population growth."
"We know people want to move into Lower Manhattan," said State Senator Daniel Squadron. "Now it's critical that our government provides the services that allow more people across the economic spectrum to make their lives here for the long term."
Tags: downtown, Lower Manhattan, SoHo, transient neighborhoods, Tribeca
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Karbonn gave another jolt to Micromax by making the Smart Titanium 1 available for Rs 10,990. It is now a even trickier position for many who are waiting to get their hands on Micromax Canvas HD as they now have an even cheaper quad core Android smartphone's option.
Notably, both have Android Jelly Bean operating system.
So let's look at the two smartphones head on to judge which is a better one.
Micromax Canvas HD comes with a high definition 5 inch display with 1280 x 720 pixel resolution. The Karbonn smartphone on the other hand has a 4.5 inch display, which is not that small compared to the Canvas HD. However, the Karbonn Smart Titanium 1's display has only 960 x 540 resolution.
Of course, in this segment both the handsets look equal. However, a closer look will tell you that the Karbonn smartphone has an upper edge. The The Karbonn Smart S1 Titanium is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon quad-core processor clocked at 1.2 GHz. On the other hand, the Micromax Canvas HD has a MediaTek quad core processor with 1.2 GHz clockspeed. The MediaTek processor is not as coveted a brand as Qualcomm and has traditionally provided less polished CPUs compared to Qualcomm's well established Snapdragon chipsets.
Both the handsets come with 1 GB RAM.
The Micromax Canvas HD also scores over the Karbonn Smart Titanium 1 with its 2100 mAh battery against the 1600 mAh battery of the former.
Both the smartphones have dual cameras but Micromax Canvas HD emerges out as the winner as it has an 8 megapixel rear camera along with a 0.3 megapixel front camera. The Karbonn Smart Titanium 1 has a 5 megapixel rear camera and a VGA camera in the front.
Without a real life test, it is not possible to pass a final verdict. As the above comparison shows, both the handsets have their own high grounds. While Karboon Smart Titanium 1 has a better processor, the Micromax Canvas HD turns the table with its powerful battery, better camera and high definition display.
But all is well that is priced well, and thus Karbonn Smart Titanium 1 evens out all other odds as it costs almost Rs 5,000 less than the Micromax Canvas HD. But as compared to Micromax Canvas II, which is priced at around Rs 10,000, the Karbonn Smart Titanium 1 definitely seems a better choice.


text:
Word: рахмат
Added on: 2011-03-20 Listened: 10K timesin: thank you
Pronunciation in Kyrgyz [ky] Back to Kyrgyz
- Pronunciation by Baha (Male from Turkey)
- Could you do it better? different accent? Pronounce рахмат in Kyrgyz
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- Random word: жибердим
by Bing Translator English translation:
рахмат = Rahmat
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