I Love Nwe Yrok

Illiteracy at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Quite Possibly The Most Hilarious Consecutive 100 Seconds Caught on Film

Holiday Gift Ideas from OUT

Are you looking for gifts for your loved ones? You don't have to be a 'mo to like these gifts, this guide or, apparently, to star in the videos. Check out more of them in

Out's Annual Gift Guide

Awesomely Passive Aggressive Illustrations

The New York Times opens a review of the most annoying vegetarian book by the most annoying vegetarian author with an "illustration" by carnivorous designer Paul Sahre of a pig's decapitated head with the book in it's craw. You can read my even less enthusiastic review of the book at Boldtype.

Update: Confirmed: A real pig's head was used.

A Thing I Am Looking Forward To

Gainsbourg - Vie Héroïque - Trailer HD [VF]

FergusStock: The Lost Illustrations

On Friday I headed over to The Breslin for night two of FergusStock 2009. I wrote about it for The Moment but here are some extra illustrations. Enjoy.

Typos I'd Like To See

[NYT]

The Saddest Washer Review In The World

The saddest washing machine review ever. Click to enlarge. [via]

Spotted at the Minetta Tavern 9:30pm

Standing by the pedestal: Sick fuck Simon Hammerstein, with his beard Jessica Joffe. Take that as you will. In the back, scruffy Serge Becker. Floating from table to table, Keith McNally. Let it be said: There was a higher incidence of pocket squares tucked squarely in the pockets of gentlemen's blazers than any other room in New York City at a commensurate time except perhaps the 21 Club. And also that that Black Label Burger is highly but not over rated.

Meet The West Village Monster

Remember the Montauk Monster of last year? In the West Village yesterday, its cousin washed up in a trash bin on the corner of Greenwich Avenue and Charles Street. I tried to take him home but his tail was gone. Monster.

I Dated Jenny Petherbridge

I read the following passage the other day and it so strongly reminded me of an ex-girlfriend of mine I began to believe in time machines, that Djuna Barnes somehow travelled to New York a couple of years ago, studied this woman then said, "Fuck this," hopped back in her tin-foil space craft and headed back to 1920's Paris.

Her walls, her cupboards, her bureaux, were teeming with the second-hand dealings with life. It takes a bold and authentic robber to get first-hand plunder. Someone else's marriage ring was on her finger; the photograph taken of Robin for Nora say upon her table. The books in her library were other people's selections. She lived among her own things like a visitor to a room kept "exactly like it was when--"

...

When anyone was witty about a contemporary event, she would look perplexed and a little dismayed, as if someone had done something that really shout not have been done; therefore her attention had been narrowed down to listening for faux pas She frequently talked about something being the "death of her" and certainly anything could have been had she been the first to suffer it...Hovering, trembling, tip-toeing, she would unwind anecdote after anecdote in a light rapid lisping voice which one always expected to change, to drop and to become the "every day" voice,; but it never did. The stories were humorous, well told. She would smile, toss her hands up, widen her eyes; immediatey everyone in the room had a certain feeling of something lost, sensing that there was one person who was missing the omporance of the moment, who had not heard the story; the teller herself.

...

No one could intrude upon her because there was no place for intrusion. This inadequacy made her insubordinate--she could not participate in a great love, she could only report it. Since her emotional reactions were without distinction, she had to fall back on the emotions of the past, great loves already lived and reated, and over those she seemed to suffer and grow glad.

When she fell in love it was with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty; she became instantly a dealer in second-hand and therefore incalculable emotions. As, from the solid archives of usage, she had stolen or appropriated the dignity of speech, so she appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora's for Robin, She was a "squatter" by instinct.

Bad News: Toby Young In On Next Season of Top Chef

Bald viscous piece of shit Toby Young has, says a well-placed tipster, been confirmed as a judge in next season's Top Chef. Fucking Bravo piece of shit idiot producers. Padma's beauty can't sustain Young's shittiness for another season. It barely did this last one.

Everything that is Wrong With a Certain Type of Woman and Vanity Fair in Two Paragraphs

Hello. Look this Vanity Fair blog post and you'll see why, despite Graydon Carter being a fucker par excellence, the magazine is despised. It is also why young Harvard-educated writers who write for Vanity Fair and live in the UES are also despised. (Above right) If you are like me, when you read any sentence in bold you'll spit out, "You Fucking Fuck, Fuck You!" Why so angry? Though so clear it obviates the need for explanation, here it goes. Kate Ahlborn, Harvard 07, insists on adopting this inane exoticization of Brooklyn which is not funny and makes her look like an asshole. She also makes the obligatory Bard reference and Feist-drops as if she is the only finishing school twat to have liked the video. They all did. They all spent time at Bard! Argh! But equally infuriating is the entire tone of the piece which boils down to, "I went to an art performance. It made me uncomfortable. It was weird. I didn't like it." People like this should not write things down and certainly not anywhere where anyone must read it.

Somehow it happened that in all the years I’ve lived in New York City, I’d never been to Brooklyn. But when I heard that choreographer Noémie Lafrance had a new show opening in Williamsburg, I decided it was as good an occasion as any to venture beyond Manhattan for the first time. I loved the music video she choreographed for Feist’s “1234” in 2007, and “Rapture”—her piece for aerialists staged on the side of a Frank Gehry building at Bard College—was undeniably awesome. So on Tuesday night, I boarded theL train (heading away from the West Village) and made my way to hipsterville. I’d heard from my more global friends that Brooklyn is a charming borough inhabited by cool young families, gourmet cheese shops, and creative intellectuals. It has parks! And trees! And slow walkers aren’t mowed down on the sidewalk!But I’m what you might call a bona fide Manhattanite. Or, to be more precise, a bona fide Upper East Sider. I’ve traveled the world, I said to myself—how exotic could Brooklyn really be?

Perhaps my tweed J. Crew jacket and Tory Burch ballet flatsweren’t the best wardrobe choice for that day, but I overcame the fact that I was a total Williamsburg misfit and hoped my foreigner status wouldn’t be glaringly obvious to the natives. (It was.) After narrowly escaping death by skateboard on the Bedford subway platform, I made my way to a rickety building in what felt to me like Brooklyn’s outer banks. (It wasn’t.) A sign instructed people heading to Lafrance’s performance to go up to the second floor, where I was warmly greeted, asked to surrender my coat and bag, and told to wash my hands.

Kate Ahlborn, go back to the Upper East Side. Watch Scrubs. Listen to Feist. Stay the fuck out of Brooklyn.
[Photo: Nick McGlynn]

Who's Who in the Monkey Bar Mural

I wrote about the Graydon Carter's soon-to-open Monkey Bar today for Urbandaddy What didn't make it in to the piece is the part where I interviewed Ed Sorel, the guy responsible for the mural in the backroom. With great surety, I can assure you that a large part of dinner conversation at the Monkey Bar will be a pissing contest game wherein one Associate Editor for a dying dead tree magazine will try to outdo another by recognizing who is depicted. It won't be easy. But, in the interest of pissing better, here's Mr. Sorel to give you a guide:

There was a question of who to put in, and laying it out. It took months, the question is the theme. The theme of the waverly inn was the Greenwich Village. The theme was at first Graydon had wanted it to be cafe society between the wars but who constituted cafe society was a kind of a blur so we decided essentially on a who's who of who is in New York between the wars. We have Fred Astaire, this is the Fred Astaire who appeared on Broadway with his sister. There's also Henry Luce, Herb Ross, Conde Nast, Blanche and Adolph Ochs, the Fitzgeralds--Zelda and F Scott, Billie Rose, Dorothy Parker and Edna Ferber.

So start Google image searching like a fiend and try to get your friend at Conde--like stories of whore fucking, everybody seems to have at least one!--to get you a reservation.

[Photo: Courtesy of the one and the only, Urbandaddy.]

Fucking Ikea Piece of Shit Crapssuck

Ikea, Swedish utopian lifestyle supplier, is one of those places where everything works great until it doesn't and from then on, you are doomed and there is no escaping your doom. This weekend, Wifeana and I went to Red Hook to by desks. They fucked up one of the orders and didn't include hardware. Today I went back to demand I get screwed. Screw me they did. After waiting for an hour for them to move through 4 numbers at the Returns desk, the obese woman finally called my number--385. But of course, she didn't know what part I was talking about and, after fifteen minutes of research, when she finally did figure out that yes, it was indeed purchased yesterday at IKEA and yes indeed they do carry it (which I knew because I purchased it at Ikea yesterday). After a half hour of aimlessly lolling about amongst the Blue Bins, she returned with a baggie full of screws. Only later when I returned home did I realize she had given me the wrong screws. What do you expect from people who can't spell Thursday? Now I have to reenter this crapsuck cycle of shitty Ikea bullshit and I'll never--I feel--be able to escape. Is this what being an undocumented immigrant is like? I think so.

But the real point of the post is thus: Ikea's uber simple sans serif straightforwardness only works as long as they maintain a base level of competence. Usually their system of cheap and easily assembled products does work. But there exists no mechanism, or no well working mechanism, for remedying what happens if something does go horribly wrong. The system can't cope and can't fix itself. Instead, it sucks you into a blue-and-yellow inferno which stretches from here to the last Thrusday in hell.

Psychological Evaluation of JDS, Age 9

In 1991, when I was nine years and five months old, my parents took my to a psychologist to be evaluated. Last weekend, over my sister's wedding, my mother thought it would be a good idea to finally show me the evaluations. This is what I learned: Over the course of eighteen years, I haven't changed at all.

Where Hipsters Come From....Surprisingly Not Only From Hell and Exurbs

From 1967's Hustlers, Beats, and Others by Ned Polsky:

[Beats] resent any label whatever, and regard a concern with labelling as basically square. But insofar as they speak of themselves generically and are forced to choose among evils, they prefer the word "beat." Until recently "hipster" meant simply aone who is hip, roughly the equivalent of the beat. Beats recognized that the hipster is more of an "operator"--has a more consciously patterned ifestyle (such as a concern to dress well) and makes more frequent economic raids on the frontiers of the square world--but emphasized their social bonds with hipsters, such as their liking for drugs, for jazz music, and above all, their common scorn for bourgeois career orientations. Among Village beats today, however, "hipster" usually has a pejorative connotation: one who is a mannered showoff regarding his hipness, who "comes on"" too strongly in hiptalk, etc. In their own eyes, beats are hip but are definitely not hipsters.

Although beats are characteristically ignorant of history, even of their own history, most know the oft-discussed origin of "beat" as applied to the postwar disaffected but all are in the dark about "hip." The few Village beats with any opinion suppose that it comes from the "hep" of early 1940's jivetalk. Actually "hep" and "hip" are doublets; both come directly from a much earlier phrase, "to be on the hip" to be a devotee of opium smoking--during which activity one lies on one's hip. The phrase is obsolete, the activity obsolescent.

The Subtle Charm of the Economist

From a Correction on page 61 of the current issue of The Economist.

This Woman Has An Amazing Voice

If all law school classes are this fun, sign me up. Let me in, give me financial aid, then sign me up.

Ben Bearly

My friend Ben got married to Emily last weekend at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Lovely ceremony. Ben made a crossword puzzle that went in the wedding program. My favorite clue was "Gustapo" [sic]. The answer was SS. During the toasts someone brought up this video which I had forgotten about but which is wonderful. Embedding is disabled but it's worth the click through.

Ben Bearly [Youtube]

Heavenly Light

No big fan of the New York Times' Vows section I but Katie Orlinsky's photograph of Christie Love and Rev. J. Lee Hill Jr. in today's edition is pretty wonderful.

A Very Sad Video from The Rocky Mountain News Now Defunct Newsroom

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Understatement of the Month: "Complex Relationship With the News Media"

RIP: The Business Lunch

Free lunch used to be one of the few perks of freelancing. The sting of Freelancer's Union shitty expensive health insurance was offset by editors who put your cheeseburger on the company card. No longer. No one wants to pay checks. This woman, a movie producer whose picture accompanied the New York Times article on said phenomenon, apparently has no problem paying for elective surgery. She's from LA. Obviously. [NYT]

"Fucking Shit," he realized, "I live in the new McKibben Lofts."

Update: Totally just ran into the dude on the stairwell. He apologized and turns out he's super nice. Maybe I'm just a crotchety old man,

My wife and I live in a former factory on Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick. The building is directly off the Morgan Avenue stop in a neighborhood sometimes idiotically called Morgantown. When we moved in two months ago, we were one of the first tenants in the building. Like pioneers, we had neither heat nor electricity. We built a sod hut and burned old copies of The Nation to stay warm. I read Willa Cather every night by candlelight. But now the apartments are filling up, warrens of cubbyhole-sized drywall rooms are being erected and last night, a truly horrendous loft party was thrown in one of the empty apartments. The techno lasted until 7:30 am. Fucking shit, I realized, we had moved in to the new McKibben Lofts.

The party was thrown in the apartment of a 34 year old anime loving Brazilian graphic designer. It featured the truly uninspiring music of No Regular Play. How do I know? It was on this kid's fucking Twitter. But it was more than the mmm-tsk mmm-tsk music that kept me up. It was the pure rage, blind seething impotent rage. Why would someone listen to this music? Why so loud? Why so late? Could they not have given us a quick heads up. "Hey guys," he could have said, "I'll be playing horrible music very loudly all night long on Saturday. Just wanted to let you know." I even entered into the den of techno--it was lit by a blue light!--at six in the morning to ask that they turn the sonic rape down. "I'll ask," said the party's host. Ask? ASK? FUCK YOU MEAN YOU'LL ASK. IT'S YOUR FUCKING PARTY. YOU TELL! TELL!

But it was more than just his bad taste in house music and sullen sodding indifference that drove me mad. I was angry that this building, which we had simply through the timing of our arrival come to think of as at least partially ours, was being hijacked by the beer-drinking sticker-sticking bad house music-listening twenty somethings. (Even if the primary perp was fucking 34 years old.) But the true waking nightmare wasn't the moment. My anger and fear wasn't inflamed merely by the hellish bump of the music nor the smoke wafting from the hallway nor even the beer pooled in the stairwell. It was that this might just be the future.

Look Ma, I'm On the Front Page of the NYTIMES!

A Few Recent Pieces

I've been writing about The City for The Moment, the New York Times "blog that spans the T Magazine Universe"

I also wrote about Michelle Obama's fashion at the inauguration though that is old news now.

I filled in on Gawker for a weekend. Stressful. Fun

I profiled Sandra Lee and Andy Samberg for March's OUT magazine

I'm finishing up the 3rd edition of StyleCity's guide to New York City

I'm actively looking for freelance gigs! Send 'em my way.

I'm also actively looking for a couch.

Fuck, Marry, Kill: Oscar/Top Chef Edition

I'd go with effing Padma, marrying Kate and k'ing Blanchett, if only because of that unforgivable modern dance in the gazebo scene in Benjamin Button. You?

Australia Australia Australia We Love Your Men

The only two worthwhile things Australia ever gave us are Cory Delaney and this swarthy pigeon smuggler. According to the BBC,

Australian customs officials say [two] live birds were wrapped in padded envelopes and held to the man's legs by a pair of tights under his trousers. Officials also found two eggs in a vitamin container in the man's luggage. Australia has strict quarantine rules on the importation of wildlife, plants and food. The man, 23, could face up to 10 years in jail...Customs officials say they also seized seeds in the man's money belt and an undeclared aubergine, following the flight on Sunday.

As for the rest of that continent's contributions: drunk fat girls on the Tube, condiments that taste like shit and Mel Gibson.