CRUISING ON CROSBY

One of the movies that stays with me, when other bigger, more lavish and more serious movies have been forgotten, is The Trip starring Steve Coogan (ABOVE) and Rob Bryon.  It was shown as a TV series in England.  It’s as much an “eating movie” as it is a “walking movie” but the two lead characters do a fair amount of hiking as they go on the male-bond excursion.

Coogan, I think we can say, has had an interesting personal life, including an affair with Courtney Love: well you’d have to given the chance, wouldn’t you?

Now, one of the few things I know about Courtney Love is that she used to live in Crosby Street in Lower Manhattan, a street I used to know pretty well.  And if you were to ask me to name my favorite “unknown” New York street where I like to walk then I’d say crosby Crosby.  It used to look like this:

It’s where John Updike’s fictional hero Beck also had a loft.  “He lived on the west side of Crosby Street, that especially grim cobbled canyon of old iron-facaded industrial structures running south from Houston, one block east of lower Broadway.” Sound pretty cool: who wouldn’t want to walk there?  That passage is from Bech at Bay, published in 1998.

Like everywhere else in New York it’s been gentrified, but there’s only so much you can do with a “grim cobbled canyon of old iron-facaded industrial structures.” Alicia Leys and Lenny Kravitz had lofts there too: all in the same building as Courtney Love, I think, at number 30.   I don’t believe any of the celebs stayed there long, but then I suspect celebs don’t stay long anywhere.

Anyway Steve Coogan is now starring in the movie The Look of Love about Paul Raymond the “soft-porn baron” as he seems to be described in the movie’s press releases (and that is probably the nicest way anybody has ever described him).  

Coogan says, “You realize you can see too many naked women.  It is possible.   By the end of shooting I just wanted to go for a hike in the hills, alone.”