Oh that's ok, just no cigs!

A quick laugh that Pete Doherty, who has gotten busted more times than Daryl Strawberry and Keith Richard for drugs and given slap after slap on the wrist, now may be in serious trouble for smoking on stage. The heroin, the crack, the coke, that's OK, but horrors, he had a cigarette on a stage??? Throw the book at him.

Gonna be a long week folks. NYC will be boiling!!! We'll get that nice smell that can only be described as battery acid and tin foil with some rotting meat thrown in for good measure. The subways will turn into saunas and everyone will be just a little testy. But even with all that, it still won't be like the heat waves of the late 1970s and early 80s. I know it is crazy to be nostalgic for what was a pretty ugly time in the city, but at the same time at least back then there was some edge. Now NYC has become very generic.

Case in point, I live on the Upper West Side (UWS). Now it's long been gentrified and now the corporate gentrification is also in full force. We have a Dunkin' Donuts on Broadway and 96th. It's been there awhile so it doesn't bother me too much. But now there is another one that has just opened on the other side of Broadway at 97th. I have never stood on line more than three minutes at the first Dunkin Donuts so I have no idea why they needed another one. My neighborhood is getting so corporately gentrified that a Starbucks actually closed on Broadway and 102nd and was replaced with an HSBC bank, one of the dozen or so between 86th and 110th. I won't even get into the hideous high rises that have gone up on Broadway and 100th, enough ink has been spilled on those nightmares of 21st century architecture.

I know I'm probably somewhat hypocritical here. I lived in Alphabet City in 1987 when one didn't even look at Avenue B much less bar hop on Avenue C. Of course, my moving there then set the stage for what it's like today. Even the UWS has changed a lot in the last ten years. When I lived here in 1991, I got solicited by hookers and one still was a little wary of going north of 100th Street. Now you can go all the way up to Columbia on Broadway. It is a little sketchier on Amsterdam and further east meaning that there still aren't a hundred bank branches, Duane Reeds, Subway shops, cell phone joints and--coming soon--jamba juices. I loved jamba when I lived in LA but I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to them being on every other block in NYC.

I guess where I'm going with this is that sooner or later if I want to buy I'll have to decide if I want to go invade some turf and I really don't want to do that.