It Came From the New Yorker

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!

Portrait of The Artist As A Young Punk

When I was just a baby, my mama told me, "Ace, always be a good boy, don't ever pierce your face"
But I shot my face full of metal, just to watch her sigh.
Now when I see those older photos
I hang my head and ask why?

Blogging Live from the Borgata

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.

Leaving New York

Someone with very nice handwriting is moving away from New York City to Austin. He spent a great deal of time making a To Do list before he left. Then he left the list on a sidewalk in Soho. His loss is our gain. The abandoned list provides not only some life lessons but a primer on what a strategic evacuation from the city might look like:

So sad! Return Blue Jeans! Return Toothpaste to work!But also: I believe in karma!

Wednesday In Review

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.

There Will Be Yellow

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.

Rejected Tiger Accepted By Dog!

More Laliberte Insanity...A Lot of It

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

The Axe Detailer!

I got a sponge bath and wrote about it for the NY Times. [NYT]

Jay Z Bites Kanye In New Lil Wayne

In the outstanding new Lil Wayne album I thought one of Jay-Z's rhymes quite outstanding and also outstanding familiar. In "Mr. Carter" Jay says:

"I see Euros

That's right, plural "



Meanwhile, in Kanye West's song Gone, the mercurial rapper shanghais these words into his rhyming scheme:

"My dawg worked at Taco Bell, hooked us up plural

Fired a week later the manager count the churros

Sometimes I can't believe it when I look up in the mirrow

How we out in Europe, spend in Euros

They claim you never know what you got 'til it's GONE"

File Under Cassandra Complex: GABE STULMAN OUT AT LITTLE OWL

I! TOLD! YOU! SO.

Ghost Riders in NYMag

Also a piece I've been working very hard on and that means a lot to me just ran in New York Magazine. It's called Ghost Riders and tells the story of every one of the 35 cyclists who have died in New York City whose deaths are memorialized by Ghost Bikes. Other victims--whose Ghost Bikes have been removed or neglected--aren't included. [Photos by Christopher Griffith]

Beyond the Velvet Rope...

This Sunday my story about clubs inside of clubs, the fetus in fetu of nightlife, came out in Page Six Magazine. Check it out. [JPG/ Text]

From Russia With Love

Happily I awoke on Sunday morning to see a line of young buxom women in bikinis and wet t-shirts, chests protruding, on the cover of the NYT online. Supposedly it's a story about Russia [NYT]

The End of the World Is Nigh

26 Dolphins Commit Mass Suicide in Cornwall [Guardian]

Confessions of A Freelancer

I'm writing about a slightly amoral but charming guy---you'll read the piece soon, I promise--and wanted to describe his actions as immoral and negating all that is good in the world. I tried "uncalculatingly Jarrysian" after Alfred Jarry but that got spell-checked to Parisian. Then I thought, and this is embarrassing, "uncalculatingly Hobbesian" sounds good. Sadly, I have no idea what Hobbesian means, other than it has to do with Thomas Hobbes. But I'll use it anyway. Function follows form! Fake it til you make it. Etc.

Lower East Side Roller Coaster Mall Mystery Revealed!

Back in the shitshow days of my youth when I lived in a tiny fifth floor walkup in the Lower East Side, I came home from work one day severely put out and what I thought was the latest nail in the coffin of the neighborhood: a large sign for a huge mall with a 200' roller coaster protruding out of the top of it. I was working at Gawker at the time and conjectured it was a prop from J.J. Abram's movie that was filming then. I was wrong. This weekend I went to see You Don't Mess with The Zohan, after reading a breathlessly Jewy review by A.O. Scott. Long story short, it's not J.J. Abram's that was responsible for the mall. It was Adam Sandler. (Slightly less satisfying) The mall is part of a plan by evil developer in the movie named Walbridge played by boxing announcer Michael Buffer.

How are Bdelloid Rotifiers Like Married Couples?

From Olivia Judson's NYT blog:

As far as anyone can tell, the bdelloid rotifers are ancient asexuals: they appear to have been living entirely without sex for more than 85 million years. And each time we learn more details of their lifestyle, the wackier it becomes.

Evolving to live without sex is easy; all sorts of organisms do it the whole time.

HEY-O!

Was Ex-White House Press Man Scott McClellan Once Fuckable?

The year was 1986. The place was Austin, TX. Scottie McClellan was the man men wanted to be and women wanted to be with. A golden child with a tennis racket in one hand, a glint in his eye and a problematic future ahead of him. A high school classmate of Scott's write:

He was a senior when I was a sophmore and there was a golden light bathed around him at all times. He was sweet and smart and all the things that senior boys should be (when you're a brace face sophomore)... He was also on the tennis team (HOT!) and in the Senior Senate with - wait for it- Ian Moore. Ian was in the same class and was, as you can image, completely cool. He was a blonde, beautiful, entitled guy. Outstandingly attractive (although never a big one with the ladies?). Unrecognizable now. It all comes from the Austin High< Yearbook, The Comet/1986.