NYC Nostalgia Trips and More

A little link roundup for you.

Getty Images

I tend to read, watch, and listen to an awful lot of Oldsterish content. Now and then I’ll pass some of it along to you in a link roundup like this one.

---

• “I said to everybody, “No more cuchi-cuchi. If you invite me, I will play my guitar.”’ She released her first guitar album, ‘Guitar Passion,’ in 1994, and she has since been twice voted the greatest flamenco guitarist by the readers of Guitar Player magazine.” It’s time to reconsider Charo, aka María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza. In the New York Times, Amanda Hess profiles the Spanish-American guitarist (trained by Andrés Segovia) , singer, actress and comedian—who is either 71 or 81 depending on how you do the math, but who’s counting?

• As an erstwhile East Villager, and a descendant of Ukrainian shtetl dwellers, I’m loving New York Magazine’s package on Ukrainian culture in New York City. Jason Diamond’s gastronomic tour, “A Journey Down the Borscht River: Eating my way through my ancestors’ food, again and again and again” left me especially nostalgic for old haunts—not to mention hungry.

• More downtown nostalgia: Helena Fitzgerald eulogizes recently shuttered Angel’s Share, a beloved East Village speakeasy of sorts that opened in 1993.

• Okay, one last hit of NYC nostalgia for this installment: Tina Jordan and Erica Ackerberg’s Remembrance of Bookstores Past in the New York Times.

• We recently learned 67-year-old actor Bruce Willis is retiring from acting because of a cognitive condition called aphasia. At the Huffington Post, Bobbi Dempsey writes about her experience with the debilitating disorder.

• Imagine working until 100 before retiring, like venerated park ranger Betty Reid Soskin just did. Via the National Parks Service.

• Growing Old With Superchunk. In the New Yorker, Craig Morgan Teicher pays homage to the band he’s been obsessed with since 1994, when he was 15.

• “Most of all, I remember my old friends: Tracy, Neal, Leon, Danny, Maura and especially, Bernadette, my first TV crush, or crush in any medium, real or fictive. Bernadette did this magical thing while swinging her arms, a kind of butterfly fluttering effect, that entranced my 7-year-old brain and heart.” At WBUR, Ethan Gilsdorf reflects on 70s children’s television phenomenon Zoom.

• At Loudersound, Briony Edwards, Polly Glass , and Fraser Lewry feature 50 Women Who Changed the Course of Rock’N’Roll Forever.

• Check out The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty, a beautiful new book from portrait and travel photographer Ellen Warner, with a foreword by Erica Jong. In BookPage, the wonderful Susanna Felts calls it “a book bristling with energy and wisdom.”

• Do you still ruminate on bullying incidents that occurred in childhood? I know I do. Filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt made the Oscar-nominated HBO Documentary, When We Were Bullies, to make sense of one such incident in fifth grade, 50 years ago.

• Thanks for reading! Extra thanks to those of you who support my work and the work of Oldster contributors as paid subscribers. Sometimes people get confused about what Oldster Magazine is and how it works. The newish “About” page is here to help you with all that…