"Ms. Gilbert is not a provocateur in the style of Banksy, and she is not making a political statement. Her work, filled with shining suns, wizards and dragons..."

"... is warm and incorporates inclusive sayings like 'Be seen' and 'I love all of you.' The message is perhaps muddled by the price tag. Reserving all of a subway station’s walls and other surfaces, a package advertisers sometimes call 'station domination,' can cost more than $250,000 per month, said Seneca Mudd, a managing partner at Brand Bravery, a marketing firm helping to coordinate Ms. Gilbert’s plan. He declined to give the total cost of the ad-space purchase, but said that it was over $1 million, including station rentals and marketing expenses...."

From "The Mystery Artist Filling Subway Ad Space With Whimsy/Sue Sarah Gilbert, a Rockefeller descendant in Seattle, raised $1 million to place her drawings in New York City stations" (NYT)(gift link, so you can see the charming artwork).

From the comments over there: "I see this story a lot differently than the journalist. A woman from a family of billionaires uses her financial connections to fund a vanity project so full of itself that it includes QR codes for people to send photos of themselves enjoying it. The art itself is simple and juvenile, like something a grade schooler would draw. This is the type of art a parent would put on a fridge, but because Ms. Gilbert has friends with deep pockets it’s being put up for months in the New York subway."

"Mr. DeCock hasn’t left New York in as long as he can remember. He barely even goes to Brooklyn."

"'Everything I do is in the neighborhood,' he said.... What Mr. DeCock doesn’t do, he said, is buy clothes or shop for much of anything, including groceries. He does not drink coffee at home. His fridge is empty.... Mr. DeCock... stopped cooking after the pandemic, when he admitted to himself that he was terrible at it. Now, he goes out for almost every meal — although he often skips lunch or dinner without noticing. He might run across the street for an order of the $27 seitan scaloppine at his favorite vegan restaurant, or walk a few blocks to a Mexican restaurant, where he’ll order the vegetarian enchiladas for $24.50. When Mr. DeCock is home and not working or sleeping, he’s often watching television. His big splurge is cable, his Spectrum bill is $250 a month. He also pays for Netflix, $19.99 a month, and Hulu, $18.99 a month. A Colorado native, Mr. DeCock sometimes misses nature, so he compensates by watching reality television shows about people who have to survive in the wilderness."

I'm reading "Affording New York/How a Hairdresser and Painter Lives on $70,000 a Year in Chelsea" (NYT). The 750 square foot studio apartment, in the Hotel Chelsea, costs $2700 a month.

"Affording New York" is a series. I love seeing how people express who they are by how they economize. This is the case of someone who's really splurging on food and television and making it work by harshly scrimping on travel and anything that might be shopped for. Gerald DeCock, 67, lives in a great part of town and he just stays put, getting the most out of that precise place. It's not just money he saves.  He saves a lot of time by avoiding all shopping and staying off the subway and every other form of transportation. Frankly, this way of life is appealing quite aside from the question of making it fit $70,000 a year. 

"You can get married at the New York Marble Cemetery on Second Avenue/The Balloon Saloon in Tribeca has the best gag gifts and the biggest fake poops in town."

"Avoid trampoline parks at all costs. Throw a less chaotic kids’ party instead at Twinkle PlaySpace in Williamsburg. For $399, hire NY Teacup Piggies to bring in three piglets for the young partygoers to play with.... Call Beverly Fish at Chezzam for out-of-the-box entertainment — think actors in rat costumes serving a cheese platter.... You can hire a babysitter to walk your child (ages 4 to 15) from school to your home (or wherever they need to go) using the service Trot My Tot. You’ll pay a maximum of $25 per hour.... Cheeky tweens tend to enjoy the 'butt scavenger hunt' at the Brooklyn Museum; ask for it at admissions.... "

From "259 Things New Yorkers Should Know/The second edition of our annual handbook will help you make the most of the city" (NY Magazine).

I looked up the "butt scavenger hunt" so you don't have to:

"It seems like a kind of arms race. You have people becoming more and more assertive about including dogs everywhere and then..."

"... on the other side, people becoming more and more assertive about their resistance to having dogs everywhere."

Says Jessica Pierce, "a bioethicist studying human-dog relations," quoted in "Where Does a Dog Belong? In restaurants or grocery stores? Tensions between canine lovers and other New Yorkers are boiling over" (New York Magazine).

“If there wasn’t dog shit all over the sidewalks, then I don’t think dogs would necessarily be coming to a boiling point,” one Greenpoint dog owner in his early 40s reflected. It wasn’t as though he had never pushed the boundaries with his 50-pound supermutt. Yet if he didn’t always follow the letter of the law, he believed he observed the spirit, though he understood that not everyone agreed. Recently, he’d been in Transmitter Park with his dog — who, yes, was off-leash, but people do that there — when a guy in the playground area with his kid leaned over the fence. “He was not even in the vicinity of where my dog was,” he says. “He said, ‘Excuse me, you see the sign? It says NO DOGS.’ And I kind of looked at him like, Hey, you must be new here.” Why did he feel so entitled, the guy wanted to know. “And so I told him, ‘Hey, man, you’re here with your family, and I’m here with my family.” In seemingly every argument, someone brings up children. “Well, my dog,” someone inevitably says, “is better behaved and less disruptive and more pleasant than your disgusting child.”...

AND: From the comments over there:

I'm reading "How a Family of 3 Lives on $500,000 on the Upper West Side" in The New York Times.

Excerpt:

Their household income is roughly $500,000 per year. While they make a good living, they try to be frugal and are saving money to buy an apartment. They moved into their roughly 800-square-foot rental eight years ago when it was just them and their dog, Peabody, a Maltese poodle. Now their son’s crib is steps away from their bed. They installed a curtain between the bed and the crib to keep the light out.... Since they share a room with their son, he often wakes them up around 5 a.m. 'In the sweetest and most adorable way,' Ms. Gossai said.

They make $500,000! $500,000 and they've got a makeshift curtain separating their baby from their bed and are resorting to framing the situation as adorable. 

I wonder how much thinking went into referring to the dog as a "Maltese poodle," rather than a "Maltipoo." Is this a sign of the great turn against the -oodle? Or is this run-of-the-mill resistance to cutesiness?

"This new kind of city is a sharp break with the past. For most of human history, people lived and worked in the same place..."

"... and cities grew up around that basic fact. They transform, rebuild after fires and disasters and become richer and sometimes poorer, but they draw their resilience from their rootedness, the fact that people feel they belong there. To say 'I am a New Yorker' or a Londoner or 'I am from Pittsburgh' or Detroit or Rome or Barcelona — that is not just a map. It conveys a deep sense of history, belonging and meaning, a personal identity, not just a transaction. Those identities are messy and unequal, but they are substantial. They are one of the primary ways people answer the basic questions of who they are and where they belong. And they are part of what brings people back to hang on and rebuild, no matter what.... Place, kinship and a shared way of life were the basic materials of human identity...."

Writes Richard Florida, in "Could This Be the End of Dubai? (NYT).

"The war is a reminder that no city, no matter how go-go and glamorous, can buy its way out of the forces of history and geography.... For many, [Dubai is] not a real home. And so when the going gets rough, why would they stick around?"

The man in the video stammers: "Oh my, they's over the beach club. It's fucking mental. Look at that. Literally literally directly above us. That is insane. They were so loud. That is fucking mental. That is that is that is that is oh my god. I have no words. In the safest country — uh, city — in the world. Wow."

AND: What I get from Florida's presentation of the problem is that it's a mistake to want to live in "this new kind of city" like Dubai. It lacks meaning and humanity. It's "not a real home." But some people do relocate to places like this, and then if war spills over into it, they're surprised that something real happens. They thought they were in a disembodied paradise, so the intrusion of reality seemed "fucking mental." But it's the disembodied paradise that's insane. You're a human being. Live somewhere human or be flummoxed when humanity arrives. 

Hasn't Canal Street always been funky?

Man takes a stroll through New York City..

This place is absolutely COOKED. 💀💀 pic.twitter.com/Lc9Yx5kPUd

— American AF 🇺🇸 (@iAnonPatriot) February 22, 2026

I watched that video, and yes, it looks awful, but has it "metastasized" and "gone insane"? It's Canal Street. The voiceover declares it's the "most expensive" part of New York and calls it "Tribeca" and "Soho." It's Canal Street, being Canal Street. 

I looked at those wares vendors had laid out all over the sidewalk, and I'd like to bring some lateral thinking to the problem. The product you see there is almost entirely women's handbags. It could become utterly uncool and dumb to carry a handbag. A handbag is literally a burden. It makes you vulnerable to theft. You don't need it. Designers whose clothes you may not be able to buy make a customer out of you by offering this carrier of their name, causing you to feel that you need it more than you do. Wake up to the post-handbag world and those guys hawking handbags will disappear. 

What, beyond your iPhone, do you need to carry these days? The closer you can get to nothing, the better you are. That's the idea to sell, but who is motivated to sell it? I know I'm being silly, at my age and my distance from New York, to try to influence the anti-handbag trend, which has to hinge on the pleasure and freedom of the consumer, not hatred of street vendors. These are guys making a living, and if your aim is to walk down an uncluttered, uncrowded street, reroute off Canal Street.

By the way, I used to live in NYC — from 1973 to 1984 — and 2 things about me back then: 1. I avoided Canal Street, unless I was swooping into that one place where I bought art supplies, and 2. I never carried a purse, I went out of my way to figure out how to carry everything in various pockets, I had a whole feminist/hippie conception of what I was doing, and I regarded women with purses as embarrassingly uncool. 

"I want to give all the glory and thanks to God.... I would die for my team."

JUST IN: Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza gives all glory to God, breaks down in tears after winning the College Football National Championship.

“I was a two-star recruit coming out of high school. I got declined a walk-on offer to the University of Miami, full circle moment… pic.twitter.com/jhufc5yvVN

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 20, 2026

Chuck Culpepper at WaPo — "Indiana wins a national championship that is almost too much to fathom" (gift link) — begins:

Maybe sometime this month or this summer or this century, all the fans and alumni widely known as Hoosiers and all the people who follow college football might scale a deeply human mental hurdle about the rousing theater of Monday night. They might find a way to believe what they saw. They might believe the gobsmacking truth that when a storybook five months ended, the confetti in Hard Rock Stadium rained down Indiana crimson-and-cream. Many of the 67,227 might comprehend that, indeed, as the videotape shows, they hung around with their joy and their goose bumps and belted out “We Are The Champions.” They might grasp that they heard a revolutionary 64-year-old coach in his second Indiana season tell of “waxing tables” among the unglamorous tasks of a Division II coach a decade ago, at which time, of course, “I never really thought this was possible."... The first 16-0 team in the top level since Yale in 1894 was the losingest program in college football history as of 2023 when it hired [coach Curt] Cignetti from James Madison to very little national ripple on an innocuous Thursday in late November....

Hoosiers fans sing “We Are the Champions.” Incredible. pic.twitter.com/y6LWVXnKqt

— Blake Toppmeyer (@btoppmeyer) January 20, 2026

AND: Little fuss was made over it, and he wasn't the center of things, but Trump was there:

The crowd at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami roars as @POTUS is shown during the Star-Spangled Banner 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/gqQ3ojBXho

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) January 20, 2026

PLUS: A Cignetti quote that sounds Trumpy: "It’s a great story, a tremendous story. Probably one of the greatest stories of all time."

ALSO: Hoosiers take to the streets of Bloomington:

Safe to say Bloomington ain’t sleeping tonight
pic.twitter.com/vEcr7FU9tp

— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) January 20, 2026

AND:

Never Daunted. Tonight, our tower lights will shine in cream and crimson for one hour to celebrate @IndianaFootball winning the College Football Playoff National Championship! pic.twitter.com/S9a8tI7xbD

— Empire State Building (@EmpireStateBldg) January 20, 2026

"Subway surfing, in which people ride atop or hang off the sides of fast-moving trains, has been around since the transit system’s earliest days more than a century ago."

"But it has grown more deadly in recent years, especially among teenagers inspired by sensational videos of the practice, city officials say.... City and state officials and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have ramped up efforts to dissuade young people from subway surfing. Since 2023, the police have used drones to catch subway surfers in the act. The M.T.A. has been working with social media platforms, including Instagram and TikTok, to remove subway surfing footage...."

From "2 Girls Found Dead Atop a J Train in Suspected Subway Surfing Accident The teenagers, found unconscious on the roof of a train in Brooklyn, appear to be the latest casualties of a popular and deadly game" (NYT).

The New York subway system began in 1904, and I wondered about those early incidents. Here's a report in the NYT from May 16th of that year:

"I think a lot about the somatics, which is how the sound feels in your body."

Said Karl Scholz, the D.J. quoted in "What’s Loud, Pink and Drawing New Yorkers Together?With his Karlala Soundsystem, Karl Scholz is using nightclub-grade audio to ensure that neighbors gather" (NYT).

Ping-ponging around the makeshift dance floor was a bearded man in flamingo pink joggers carrying a laptop. Karl Scholz, 41, was using the computer to tune the sounds coming out of each of the six hulking stacks of speakers along the street, each painted the same bold pink as his pants....

If you don't like the noise, don't live in the city.

"President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to find ways to make it easier to forcibly hospitalize homeless people with mental illness and addiction for longer periods...."

"The order... instructs agencies to prioritize funding for mental health and drug courts — and to not fund 'harm reduction' programs that the administration said facilitate illegal drug use. It also called for agencies to prioritize funding states and cities that to the 'maximum extent' enforce laws on open-air drug use, prohibitions on urban camping, loitering and squatting.... Dozens of states have added to or expanded involuntary commitment laws during the past decade. That includes states controlled by Democrats, an illustration that political momentum has shifted toward a more aggressive approach to dealing with the inextricably intertwined crises of mental health and addiction...."

I'm reading "Trump order pushes forcible hospitalization of homeless people/Trump’s executive order could increase hospitalization of homeless individuals with mental health and substance use disorders" (WaPo).

Looking for an existing tag that will fit this issue, I stumbled on "Trump's urban renewal." That could work for this... but what was it that led me to create it?

The oldest post with that tag was "Asking for the black vote" back in August 2016.

More relevant to today's post is this from July 2019: "'We have to take the people... And we have to do something... We may intercede. We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up.' Said Trump, about the homelessness in San Francisco and L.A." 

"For 35 years, Bill Dilworth tended a Manhattan loft filled with dirt, otherwise known as 'The New York Earth Room,' a monumental artwork by Walter De Maria.... 280,000 pounds of dark, chocolaty soil, about two feet deep..."

"... on the second floor of an early artists’ co-op in a former manufacturing building on Wooster Street, in the heart of SoHo. It was installed in 1977, in what used to be the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, and it was intended to be temporary, a three-month-long exhibit.... [T]he artists who colonized the building and the area have mostly moved on, and the neighborhood, like the city itself, has evolved. 'That’s what makes the Earth Room so radical,' Mr. Dilworth said.... 'It’s here, and it remains the same.'... He watered and raked the soil, plucking the odd weed or mushroom. (The mushrooms were edible, and delicious, by Mr. Dilworth’s account.)... 'I found the art world to be something that doesn’t appeal to me.... This is about as close as I’m comfortable getting to it. But making art has been vital to me always. So how do you make art and not be in the art world? This job allows me to stay tuned to my own art-making — just by the freedom of thought and all that.'"

From "Bill Dilworth, Caretaker of ‘The New York Earth Room,’ Is Dead at 70/For decades, he tended a SoHo loft filled with dirt, made by the conceptual artist Walter De Maria. People made pilgrimages to see it — and Mr. Dilworth, its magnetic steward" (NYT).

"I’ve been wanting to come for weeks and weeks and weeks. I’m excited that the spring is happening and she’s really activating the girls to touch some grass — literally — and get outside."

Said Lydia Burns, a model, quoted in "These New Yorkers Are Touching Grass" (NYT).

I'm a devotee of ritualistic nature walks myself, but I still laughed at:

This Sunday, at 10:30 a.m. sharp, a group of stylish, mostly 30-something New Yorkers gathered at the Hare Krishna Tree in the center of Tompkins Square Park. Despite a few complaints of hangovers, they had made it there on time for a plant and history tour of the park led by Olivia Rose, who handed out tote bags and forest green zines she had made for the occasion....

I loved the video snippet of the stylish, youngish folk walking quite slowly, each holding a disposable plastic cup of something brownish and milky. Plastic cups, tote bags, zines — zines! — nature is so great.

Here's the Wikipedia article on Tompkins Square Park, where I learned that the park is the namesake of Daniel D. Tompkins, who was once Vice President of the United States.

"Neighbors soon grew frustrated with the constant hubbub at the house. They saw people coming and going carrying gun holsters..."

"... as the security team ballooned along with Mr. Musk’s safety concerns. Though Texas has permissive gun laws, the activity stood out. 'I call that place Fort Knox,' said Mr. Hemmer, a retired real estate agent who lives across the street and is president of the neighborhood homeowners association.... Mr. Hemmer, who has long owned a Tesla, grew so frustrated with his neighbor that he began flying a drone over the house to check for city violations, and he keeps a video camera trained on the property around the clock. Last year, he complained to West Lake Hills officials about Mr. Musk’s fence, the traffic and how he thought the owner was operating a security business from the property. Mr. Musk’s security team also contacted the West Lake Hills Police Department about Mr. Hemmer, according to city records. One security official accused Mr. Hemmer last year of standing naked in the street, according to the records. Mr. Hemmer denied that he was naked and said he was on his property wearing black underwear. On another night, he said, he was walking his dog fully clothed and stopped when he suddenly needed to urinate — which Mr. Musk’s camera captured. 'The cameras got me,' Mr. Hemmer said. 'It’s scary they have guys sitting and watching me pee.'"

I'm reading "Won’t You Be My Neighbor? No Thanks, Elon Musk. Residents of an upscale enclave outside Austin, Texas, learned the hard way what it’s like when a multibillionaire moves into the mansion next door. Some of them have started a ruckus over it" (NYT).

Some screwy details in that story — Texans bothered by holstered guns, flying a spy drone into your neighbor's airspace then complaining that he's got cameras aimed out at the street where you took the liberty to pee, that whole nakedness-or-black-underwear conundrum....

In any case, doesn't Elon have his own city now? I'm reading "Voters Approve Incorporation of SpaceX Hub as Starbase, Texas/A South Texas community, mostly made up of SpaceX employees, voted 212 to 6 in favor of establishing a new city called Starbase" (NYT).

"The TV show 'Girls' is a right-wing show.... [That's] some labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact."

"But what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences.... about [what]... society wishes were true about these people. So my thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right wing art..."

I'm listening to Jonathan Keeperman on Ross Douthat's podcast in an episode called "The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Offensive":

 

The quote above is Keeperman's. Douthat responds: "Then you’re saying all great art is somehow right wing." He thinks there can be some great art that is "left coded," but he agrees about "Girls," because "it’s a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city."

Keeperman denies that he's saying "if I like it, therefore it’s right wing art, or if it tells the truth [it's right wing art]." Click on the embedded video if you want to hear Keeperman clarify or hear Douthat wedge in the concept of "vitalism" ("a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence, and an anxiety about equality and democracy as... enemies of human greatness").

That reminds me of the time — back in 2005 — I incurred the wrath of lefties by saying "To be a great artist is inherently right wing."

But back to "Girls." Why talk about "Girls" now? The reason for me is that Lena Dunham has a new essay in The New Yorker: "Why I Broke Up with New York/Most people accept the city’s chaos as a toll for an expansive life. It took me several decades to realize that I could go my own way."

"But if each of us moves about to a separate soundtrack, then is that even living in the city?"

"Or to put the question another way: If all space is private space, then what is public space even for?"

Asks the architecture and classical-music critic Justin Davidson, in "Public Space Has Become Earbud Space" (NY Magazine).

"Urban planners fit out plazas with a variety of seating, for instance... to accommodate a maximal range of groups and conversations. But most of those users just want to be left alone.... And yet I often suspect that... many people don’t actually like the isolation they permit. Lorde’s video ends in Washington Square Park, where the singer convened fans by TikTok for an impromptu concert that the police shut down for lack of a permit. When she did finally show up, that was the climax of an ultimate un-earbud moment...."

"Young people in the city are very boring now. I am only in my early 30s but the difference between 10 years ago is stark."

"When I was in my early 20s, you would go out and meet new people every bar you went to. Every night had a funny or interesting story. Contrast that with the Gen Zs you see out: they sit glued to their phones, are scared of speaking to new people, vape constantly, and are only interested in the latest viral tiktok they saw. If you are in New York and spend all your time hanging with other transplants from your same home city, scrolling your phone, and order delivery from a franchise for all your meals, why even live here? You can eat chick fil a and watch TikToks in any city in the US. Guess I'm getting old!"

Says Bud Weiser — if that really is your name — in the comments section of "Why Are These Clubs Closing? The Rent Is High, and the Alcohol Isn’t Flowing/The financial decline of some of the city’s most popular clubs has put a spotlight on the realities of nightlife" (NYT).

Agreeing with Bud is Clark:

"As Jolie moved through the rooms of her gallery with a cup of tea, she paused to take in the unlikely scene. 'Sometimes I think, what are we doing?'..."

"A clutch of women had found their place beside her, urgently wanting to talk about art and activism. 'And then I think, no, this is everything.'"

From "Angelina Jolie Wants to Pick Up Where Warhol and Basquiat Left Off/The actress is building a community of artists, thinkers and doers of all kinds, in a storied building in downtown Manhattan" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see the art, the artists, and the artsy spaces).

Jolie listened intently to Neshat, the Iranian visual artist and filmmaker, a striking figure with kohled eyes. “Art doesn’t come from intuition,” Neshat said. “It has to come from the life you have led. It has to relate to the world.”

Meanwhile, Jolie's ex, Brad Pitt, is running into trouble with his real-estate-based humanitarianism: "Brad Pitt Suffers Major Setback In $20M Legal Battle Over Defective Homes For Hurricane Katrina Victims" (Yahoo).

The actor had built homes for these individuals in the wake of the natural disaster, but the homes reportedly developed dangerous mold, leading to the class action they filed.... Pitt had spent $12 million through his Make It Right Project to build these homes, which were designed to be ecologically sustainable....

"There are orange 'smart composting bins' on many street corners. But you’ll have to sign up for the NYC Compost app to open them...."

"You can also find a drop-off site with green bins that do not require an app. But the hours they are available may vary. The law says that any building with four or more apartments must have an area that’s accessible for compost drop-offs. What 'accessible' means is open to interpretation.... '"Accessible to residents" is going to look different in every building' and does not guarantee that a composting bin will be available around the clock or that there will be a bin on every floor...."

From "New York Is Getting Strict About Composting. Here’s What to Know. Starting April 1, buildings that don’t separate compostable waste from trash will face fines" (NYT).

Commence the ritual of atonement for your amorphous environmental sins. Or just eat every bit of every damned food item you buy. So: bone-out meat, fruit with edible peels, dried whole egg powder, etc.

"This is how I put a bunch of raccoons in trench coats inside of a secret art gallery."

A great art project....