From Gay Talese's 1961 book New york: A Serendipiter's Journey: At 7 a.m. a floridly robust little man, looking very Parisien in a blue beret and turtle-necked sweater, moves in a hurried step along Park Avenue visiting his wealthy lady friends--making certain that each is given a brisk, before-brekfast rubdown. The uniformed doormen greet him warmly and call him either "Biz" or "Mac"
because he is Biz Mackey, a ladies' masseur extraordinaire.
Mr. Mackey is spry and straight-spined, and always carries a black leather grip containing liniments, creams and the towels of his trade. Up the elevator he goes; then, half an hour later, he is down again, and off to another lady--an opera singer, a movie actress, a lady police lieutenant.
Biz Mackey, a former featherweight prizefighter, started rubbing women the right way in Paris, in the twenties. He lost a fight during a European tour and decided he'd had enough. A friend suggested he go to school for masseurs and six months later he had his first customer--Claire Luce, the actress then starring in the Folies-Bergere.
Dear Friends,
I'm getting married. That's me in the World War I Italian Infantry uniform, holding a rose. The woman behind me in traditional housewife garb is my fiancée. Her name is Ana Mascarenhas Heeren. I met her the first day I ever came to New York back in 1999. That's long enough to know she is brilliant, beautiful and Brazilian. Also that I love her and will forever. Nuptials are set soon (August 29) at City Hall for families. At some point after that, we'll have a much larger raucous celebration.
JDS
Clay Davis is alive and well and living as a ballsy Mexican lady who isn't afraid of lions. [NYT]
Once again in a failed attempt at satire, the staff at the New Yorker has managed to publish an incendiary cartoon cover. It seems like last week's Obama kerfluffle didn't teach them anything. This week's cover depicts a bunch of affluent whites carousing while their crustacean dinner escapes through the kitchen window with the aid of a red-and-white tablecloth. Clearly this is a veiled attack against the Jews. In this case, the humanoid character with the Semitic nose (on the right) is shown drinking some sort of red wine. Not only are lobsters a food no self-respecting Jew would eat (shellfish aren't kosher) but this diner is shown with a glass of red wine in front of him. Red wine does not go with lobster. Karen MacNeil, chair of the professional wine studies program at The Culinary Institute of America recommends an Albariño from Galicia or a Oregon Pinot Gris. At any rate such an insulting depiction of American Jewry should not go unmentioned.
Then there is the issue of the lobsters, a noble and brave species, who have in the past, faced their fate with the sealy Stoic resolve of a true warrior. Like good Soviet soldiers, they would never retreat. Better to die nobly than live as a coward. This cover, in which the lobsters prefer ignoble escape, is an insult to homards worldwide.
How did John Paczkowsk, the senior editor at the website All Things Digital and a graduate of Brown University somehow rise to the primo spot in Google Image Search for "John," one of the most common male names? How did Josh Trentine, the CEO of Overload Personal Training, become the prince of all Josh's on Moderate Safe Search All Images? And Peter! Professor Peter Guttorp, a Swedish Professor of Statistics. These men have no right to crow from atop their perches. Especially John. Peter, I'm completely happy with. "He received a B.S. in mathematics, mathematical statistics, and musicology from the University of Lund, Sweden, in 1974, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley, in 1980. He joined the University of Washington faculty in September 1980." That's great. Also, the top three Peters all have full beards.
As for Josh, though I'm not entirely happy with an orange bodybuilder representing visually my namesake, it's slightly better than 2nd place:
On a recent trip to Atlantic City, I escaped the Las Vegas colonial outpost for the seedier spectacular boardwalk. There was a light drizzle and the boardwalk was mostly empty. Crap souvenir shops faced the dunes beyond which the Atlantic Ocean stretched darkly. Cheek-to-jowl, stores sold t-shirts that read, "Atlantic Fucking City" or that pictured Tweetie Bird in baggy shorts. (I thought that trend disappeared in the nineties but perhaps it's resurgent.) One store proudly proclaimed, "American Owned" (right) which, yay! Hey! I'm American too. We all love our country right? Then I noticed a woman in a sari in the store next door (left). Ah, I thought. I get it. You, sir, are forming a dialectical pair! What you are really saying is "Don't Buy From the Dirty Foreigner/Terrorist!" Why didn't you just say so? I will buy my creepy clowny AC t-shirts from you, my fellow American because implied racism masked as patriotism is something all Americans share!
Introducing a new and hopefully one-time feature in which we feature a sentence found in the pages of the august publication The New Yorker which induces its reader to dry heavee while reading the said sentence on the J train, much to the displeasure and discomfort of his fellow passengers. Today's sentence comes from Atul Gawande's essay on itching called, The Itch. Without further ado, presenting "It Came From the New Yorker" June 20, 2008 edition:
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.
Please join us next week for "It Came From the New Yorker" and have your air sickness bag ready!
Right now I am at the Water Club, the new non-gaming hotel in Atlantic City which is adjoined by a long interminable passage way to the Borgata, a newish gaming hotel in Atlantic City. The external architecture is all aviator glasses. Inside--in the gaming portion of the hotel--it smells weird and reminds me of hell. It's a modern voluntary Gulag where the old go to lose their money and the young to lose their youth. I feel like I've somehow entered into an automated phone system like Dennis Quaid in Innerspace. Logic, to the extent to which it exists here, is completely internal. The outside world is sealed off and 27 floors below me. And down there too are sad fat people in khaki and Hawaiian shirts who haven't yet figured out that the house always wins. This perhaps explains why I've blockaded myself into my room where, thankfully, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West is on.
There are now ten million millionaires in the world. Every floor of a new 1,378 foot tower in Dubai will rotate 360 degrees, separately. A dog with cancer was voted the Ugliest dog in the world. A dog with no front legs gets wheels instead. It may be the cutest dog in the world. Pussy hound Anthony Weiner wants more models to receive H1-B visas to stay in America. Mastercard, along with Visa, agreed to pay American Express $1.8 billion. Top Chef is coming to Williamsburg. Real World has already come to downtown Brooklyn.
The space that used to be the old schooly Buffa's Restaurant in NoLIta was recently taken over by Hecho Inc--the design company behind the Box--and turned into something called Delicatessen. I walked by it today. Plywood is down. Windows are up. In short, it'll be yellow and glossy on the outside with garage-type glass doors a la Soho Park which is across the street. It looks a lot, in fact, like a downtown version of Cafeteria, the Chelsea restaurant owned by Mark Thomas Amadei, one of the co-owners of Delicatessen. It's like Cafeteria mixed with the color scheme from S'Mac. Dicey maybe delicious but for now, dicey.
I posted a while back about the soon-to-be karmic reckoning of Kristian Laliberte's perfidy. He's not happy about this and sent me a lengthy and insane email. He thinks I'm writing a story about him. I'm not. God, that kind of seems like torture. Also, Laliberte--even while defending himself from throwing his friends under the bus--throws his friends under the bus. Particularly absurd parts are in bold:
Hi Josh,
I wish I didn't have to write this email. I have to leave for the airport in about one hour, but I wanted to send this to you before I got to a computer free area.I have received several texts, calls, and emails regarding an article you are writing about me. I am sure you've managed to scrounge up enough testimonials from former friends or writers at "serious" publications to construct an amusing account of my alleged actions.
>You claim you have proof of me sending reports of people to contacts at such illustrious and trustworthy news outlets like Gawker (your former alma mater) and Page Six. I'm sure your story is based on emails sent from someone who hacked into my gmail and forwarded emails (mostly doctored) to an anonymous yahoo account (gaydavidvid@yahoo.com), and also hacked into my facebook and wrote a string of graphic, disgusting, and damaging emails to specific individuals. The self-same person had interactions via my gmail with people who assumed it was me writing. I am not perfect--I've made mistakes, but the extent and depth of the perpertrator's obsession with discrediting me has led him or her to severely alter the truth.
I know you have certain strong feelings for me, as evidenced by your blog. I get that your line of work is to infiltrate people's private lives and dig up dirt that may or may not be true. I understand that you have to pretend to like people like me when you interview us when your whole plan of attack is to trash us (even though that particular aspect of your personality scares the shit out of me). I even realize that you have no scruples about sending my private correspondence to you to other sites to further publicize your career at the gossip rags you so eloquently write for.
However, the particular article you are now writing is based on a series of events you can have little knowledge of, despite how much information your "sources" may have provided you. I am in the midst of a criminal investigation against the individual (s) who broke into my facebook and my gmail. This criminal investigation will result in said individuals charged with crimes ranging from identity theft and fraud to harassment and stalking.I don't want to have to rope my lawyer into this conversation, but I feel like I have little choice if you continue to question people who have been involved in this sick person's singular vendetta against me.
I know for a fact that the people behind this sinister prank will be revealed in as little as two weeks time. They made a lot of stupid mistakes--logging in from a private computer, sending information to people that I never knew, talking about events that I was out of the country for, etc. I really don't want you to be involved with hindering a criminal and legal investigation--which I think your baseless article will be doing. I'm sure you have some fantastic pull quotes from unscrupulous editors or people that I have never been friends with---but again, they mean nothing in the face of the fact that someone HACKED into my gmail and facebook and manipulated and twisted information.
I readily admit I've made mistakes. I was naive to trust people like you when I moved to New York. I didn't understand the toxic nature that defines the very insulated social world that I work in. At this point and time however, I know who my real friends are, I love my job and my family and I have very little time for anything other than those three major components of my life. Your suggestions of me air kissing those who hate me are so off base it's laughable. I'm a germophobic and notoriously shy. I rarely approach someone unless I'm introduced to them--although I'd probably make an exception for David Beckham :).
Please let me know if you need to speak to the defectives or lawyers who are in the process of identifying and prosecuting the people behind this pretty despicable act. I don't know who had the time to mount such a crazy campaign to hurt me, but I can hazard several guesses.
I don't dislike you, although I have every reason to. I actually enjoy your writing style, even though you divulge more personal information than I'd be comfortable revealing. However it's clear that you despise me. I am not even sure if a lawyer's cease and desist letter will stop you from doing what you want, but again, I don't want it to come to that. I have no vendetta against you, and I can't believe I even have to interrupt my packing to address this ridiculous article.
This line from your blog doesn't even make sense: . He's sent items to nearly every single gossip columnist reporting on the relationship-breaking contretemps of nearly every single friend he's had.
If you knew me even a little, you know that I've kept my friends I've had since day one in this city except for two people, one of whom has written an expose betraying all those he/she used to work with (and is writing a follow up about the very "socials" she/he befriended) and the other who's severe drug problems, thievery, rampant stds, and bulemia forced me to cut off the friendship. As for your allegations concerning anyone involving socialiterank.com--I never knew who wrote it until they themselves revealed it. I certainly would never send tips to a website that consistently and cruelly trashed me. I guess I'm just so confused about how much time you think I might have to do all you are intimating. I am not sure about writing freelance, but starting a clothing and a pr firm takes so much time that by the time I'm out I'm just there to spend time with my friends, not gossip about them. I know personal information that about people. If I had been a "rat" that information would have long been known. The fact that I still have the same friends that I had when I graduated Columbia in 2005 says alot.
Please just leave me alone . I don't know if your homophobic or what--but its starting to creep me out. Your investigative campaign is hurtful in the extreme. Stop emailing my friends about me. Stop writing about me. Stop thinking about me. Just leave. me. alone.
Thanks so much for your time,
I hope this email may have somewhat illuminated your clarity of what you are attempting to write about.
Best,
Kristian
