You may or may not be aware that I keep a (lazy, rarely updated, soon-to-be-revived for a special project) photo collection of umbrella carcasses that litter the streets of New York–late victims of their shoddy construction and the wildly whipping wind, and a useful symbol of both consumer culture generally and of the bandaid-on-a-gunshot-wound lifestyle [...]
Relevant: we’ve just finished work on a book that collects classic portraits from the pages of Vanity Fair, along with essays on those portraits, a summary of the history of the magazine, and the following poem. Written by Dorothy Parker about her time as a VF staff writer, the poem is titled “Our Office: [...]
I’m working in my blissfully empty-ass office today, Saturday, and as such I’m not paying for my lunch. I ordered sushi from a midtown restaurant called Haru, and the blurb on the front of the menu is so over-the-top broken that I’m not sure how it was ever allowed to have been mass-produced and dropped [...]
Observe:
Jerry Orbach (deceased actor, best known as Lennie Brisco from the original flavor of the Law & Order empire) Halloween costume spotted on Flickr while I was searching for this slightly bewildering (wait, are you saying he actually wasn’t that gifted of an actor if his greatest role was dying and giving his corneas away?) [...]
I spend a fair amount of time of my life in New York marveling that the island has yet to be reduced to a pile of ashes, what with all the crane collapses and brute squads and whatnot, and that eight million citizens get their needs met by their city government (weird example: I learned [...]
For posterity and giggles, I give you this quite good Craigslist post that originated in my ‘hood, Crown Heights.
who put the dead bird in my mailbox? - w4m
Date: 2008-04-20, 12:56PM EDT
a) how did you get into my mailbox in the first place, it is locked
b) did you kill the bird
c) it died [...]
So, kind of drunk at work. My boss took me to what ended up being a $200 lunch to sort of celebrate that I am his assistant and I am the best at that particular thing and he is glad that I don’t mind when he goes to Mexico for a week leaving me to [...]
Four songs for listening to:
Joe Bataan, “This Boy”
The Caprelles, “Walk on By”
Velvet Underground, “After Hours”
Grizzly Bear, “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)”
To do (tide-permitting): ride bikes to the Red Hook water taxi and take a harbor tour. Their beautifully designed map alone deserves my business.
R.I.P. that dude that wrote “Pony” for [...]
Dear Telepathe and the guy from Black Dice,
So, I just paid the New Museum ten crisp dollars to sit in a stackable wooden chair and stare at the looping video behind your heads. I have not had strong feelings about music or performance generally in a strangely long time*, and to be fair, I subjected [...]
Spotted this evening on my daily machine-facilitated climb towards the earth’s surface at my subway station of choice: a dingy (but museum quality) grilled cheese sandwich with one bite taken, stuck forever in a perpetual buttery jostle at the ever-disappearing top step of the escalator. MTA customers glanced down, stepped over, and moved on, a [...]
