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.

Signs of the End of Times

We can no longer spell. That Playstation ad on Houston and Lafayette is gone. Illy files its "pumpkin latte" drink, already a desecration, under "Reach and Creamy." Soup kitchens--that is kitchens in which soup is made--have lines out the door. And The New Museum, once a sign of a resurgent Bowery with Ugo Rondinone's rainbow sign acting as a beacon of good things to come, has forebodingly changed its message. "Hell ye! Hell ye! The end is nigh!"

Leo Rosten: Insufferable.

Last week I picked up a used copy of Leo Rosten's People I Have Loved, Known or Admired from the one dollar racks in front of the Strand. Yippee, I thought. I had liked The Joys of Yiddish when I found it in my grandparent's basement in Kokomo, IN. So clever, so vibrant, so Jewy. But as I started reading Rosten's book, I realized this guy is truly terrible. All the corny jokes, the volubility, the wisecracking that is lovable when my grandfather does not age well. Read years later, it comes across as bad, undisciplined, try-y writing. One opening paragraph in particular is intolerable.

I've known Wilbur since he was knee high to a romalea microptera--and the fact that I write "Romalea microptera" instead of grasshopper shows you the peculiar influence he (Wilbur, not the grasshopper) has had on my life.

It's like someone is doing that sharp-shooter motion and clicking their tongue after every sentence. Oy!

More Wenn Poetry

• The Hanson Brothers end their barefoot walk bringing attention to the poverty and AIDS crises in Africa, San Diego, California 16.11.08


• Ted Danson seen buying groceries at Whole Foods in Brentwood, Los Angeles-16.11.08


• Lindsay Lohan leaving her hotel carrying a can of CokeLondon, England - 16.11.08


• Actor Arnold Vosloo taking his pit bull terrier for a walk. Santa Monica, California 15.11.08


• Amy Winehouse steps out of her house and approaches a taxi, but then apaprently changes her mind. London, England--16.11.08


• Victoria Beckham shops at Saks Fifth Avenue with her son Cruz Beckham, who is dressed in a Robin costume
  Los Angeles, California - 14.11.08


• Yanni, the famous pianist, out jogging in Acapulco before performing a string of concerts in the Mexican city
  Acapulco, Mexico - 13.11.08