Two weddings and a shipwreck.
Plus a Keith McNally movie, and songs about The Bowery Hotel.
Hi everyone.
It’s officially summer in New York. My husband put the air conditioner in this morning. I slept with the ceiling fan on high last night. There is ice cream melting everywhere on the street. I got sprinkles stuck in my shoes yesterday.
Today’s letter includes: the sign of a true pop star is name dropping The Bowery Hotel in a song, SNL’s Lorne Michaels optioned Keith McNally’s memoir, I’m cautiously bullish on Violet Grey, and the reason why you’ll probably never get into New York’s most exclusive pilates classes.
A few weeks ago, I was on a post-Hellbender, post-Rolo’s, post-Mr. Melo, double date at Bamonte’s. We were drinking coffee and eating tiramisu, when I realized there was no service to call a car home. I went outside, and the only text I had was from
— he sent me a Twitter link to the Mexican Navy sailing ship hitting the Brooklyn Bridge. For the next few days, Teddy was the only person who I spoke to who reacted to that tragedy the same way I did. For some reason, the combination of the bright lights, balmy city air, and the footage of people taking iPhone photos of the disaster while it was happening stuck with me for a few days.But it stuck with Teddy for a few weeks. Today, he wrote something a bit different for his Feed Me column, Stay Tuned. Instead of an essay about a new movie (I want him to write about Mountainhead) or a list of predictions about what comes next for Mubi after that $100mm investment, he wrote about collision, random violence, and New York City in the summer.
** Content warning, some of it is a bit violent.
Before we get to Teddy: are any of you on Nantucket this weekend and want to help me report on a story? If so, shoot me an email.
Stay Tuned is a guest column on Feed Me written by Teddy Kim. In this column, Teddy writes about when entertainment comes in contact with tech — and the implications of that. This week, it’s something a little different. You can read his last column about the TikTokification of The White Lotus, here.
The peonies I bought for Mother’s Day were wilting, but downtown Manhattan was springing up with violet graduation robes, always in full bloom this time of year. The Knicks, improbably, were still alive in May, and through sheer force of will, playing in the Eastern Conference Finals after a quarter-century drought. Even the violence felt seasonal. When you get sucker punched on the train, it’s because crime is up. When it happens by MSG, it’s because the Knicks are.
After a winter as long as it was cold, you could finally feel New York coming alive when my parents and I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on the way to the wedding of a family friend. It was a perfect hour to take in the city with the crisp morning light, the maritime pageantry of the East River and the harbor punctuated by the radial staccato of the steel cables affording us that vantage. A bit closer below us, our vista filled up with a barque moored by the Seaport, its titanic flag billowing gallantly from its stern. Italian? We guessed at the green, white, and red before catching the eagle at the center, the symbol of Mexico-Tenochtitlán, capital of the old Aztec Empire.
At the wedding, the outdoor ceremony paused periodically to observe the BDNQ trains thundering across the Manhattan Bridge. I looked around to see the ship again but only caught the edge of the glass-encased carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park where a few years ago my then-girlfriend and I lied together with our backs on the grass, gazing up at solid stone and planning out the rest of our lives.
It was only when I got home that night that I saw it again. The Mexican navy ship, the ARM Cuauhtémoc, was all over social media where people had posted videos of it slowly crashing into the Brooklyn Bridge, its masts breaking like long fingers, one after another. The news reported over twenty sailors were injured and two, 20 and 23 years old, had died. Videos showed sailors dangling from the rigging and onlookers by the water were filming, transfixed by the spectacle, driven by the impulse to capture it all.
In bed I replayed my own scene from the bridge, examining it like a forensic painting, like Brueghel’s Icarus. Somewhere in the picture were the two sailors. Perhaps there was something visible in a corner, an omen of what would happen to them mere hours later. If not the future, maybe there were preserved marks of things past, a bruised eddy on the water where last month a whole Spanish family fell from out of the sky.
“But as history would have it, the bridge held and the ship broke and the sky is not yet falling down. Two sailors died on a beautiful day and New Yorkers remain free to cross the river.”
 | A guest post by
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