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]