LES

I watched Cloverfield last night, and I loved it, partly for the reasons that Tyler Cowen gives but also because it is such a great portrayal of lower Manhattan. The more I think about, the more convinced I become that  routinely portraying its destruction or descent into chaos is the greatest flattery you can pay a city.

I’m reading Lush Life, a novel by Richard Price, a NY writer who wrote Clockers as well as a lot of scripts for The Wire. The book opens with a a murder on the lower east side — nothing earth shattering plot-wise, but Price does dialogue really well. In one scene, the cops try to piece together what happened. One cop named Yolanda is interrogating the prime suspect, a 35-year old wannabe actor named who bartends at a place on Rivington: