Hipsters exercise? Cognitive dissonance! Observed in their natural habitat, one might conclude the beloved New York hipster maintains his or her waif-like shape through a steady diet of cigarettes and cocaine. But dont be deceived! Like anything else a hipster does, a nose-candy-slim physique is carefully cultivated.
Hipsters exercise? Cognitive dissonance! Observed in their natural habitat, one might conclude the beloved New York hipster maintains his or her waif-like shape through a steady diet of cigarettes and cocaine. But dont be deceived! Like anything else a hipster does, a nose-candy-slim physique is carefully cultivated.
We’ve made our list and checked it twice, and now it’s time to remember who’s been naughty and nice in 2008. Santa’s helper is Allanah Starr (pictured here and featured on the cover), the perfect emblem to sum up this year’s crazy brew of excitement and vice—since she’s often caught in between things. The adult film star (she won AVN Award for Transsexual Performer of the Year in Jan. 2008) makes her living being naughty but is super nice, handwriting thank-you cards whenever we feature her in Bash Compactor. Everyone on our list—from the bad man who swindled billions to the new celesbian who wants to be a Jew—could learn a thing (or two) from her.
Unconvinced by the limited stereotypes of the Chosen People, the New York Press got in touch with our some of our fave local Hebrews to find out what they think about Christmas and just what it is they do while others chug eggnog and wear silly hats. Gideon Yago, Host, The IFC Media Project “I usually wake up and start drinking because I think it’s OK for Christians to be hammered at 11 a.m. Then I spend most of Christmas Day hanging out with my other Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Celestial or Satanist buddies playing video games. And then I go out for Chinese. Winsome anecdote: Last year I ended up getting seated at an enormous table at Joe’s Shanghai with N.Y. Senior Senator Chuck Schumer! Clichés are clichés for a reason!”
The single empty seat for the high-definition simulcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s 125th Anniversary opening-night gala (stick with me here) was in the back of a crowded Chelsea Clearview Cinema theater. I was balancing a Diet Coke in one hand and a small bag of popcorn in the other, when I heard the guy who I was about to sit next to comment to his friend under his breath— but, you know, loud enough so I could hear it—“Oh, Gawd. Here comes the popcorn...” This situation may be familiar to many opera fans who, over the past two-and-a-half years, have eagerly attended the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” movie theater simulcasts, where $22 gets you a live performance, equal access to sound and stage and the freedom to dress casually and snack during the show.
Dusk is settling over Avenue A and Phil Hartman, dog-tired Two Boots founder and punk rock mythologist, is unwittingly acting out a canonical hymn in his church of East Village Preservation. I can’t get the soaring chorus from Television’s famous 10-minute Punk fantasia, “Marquee Moon”—“He’s standing under the marquee moon … hesitating”—out of my head. The marquee in question is the small un-illuminated signboard of Hartman’s recently closed Pioneer Theater, not the imposing black-and-white neon that jutted out from Max’s Kansas City’s in the early 1970s. A faint echo of the song’s original symbolist imagery.
On the three-block stretch in the East Village that was once at the heart of the city’s counter-culture, there are still cheap sunglasses, T-shirts and teenage punks drinking on stoops. There’s also a Chipotle, a Pinkberry and snazzy, million-dollar condos. “The changes are certainly reflective of the chain-storing of the East Village,” says Andrew Berman, executive director of The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. And he’s not kidding—even the Continental looks more like Mars 2112 than Mars Bar these days. To get a sense of how the St. Marks stretch has changed, we look back at four St. Marks strongholds that could not resist gentrification.
I had been invited to witness a typical “brothers hang,” as Nathaniel Rich had dubbed it over the phone from the Paris Review office in the Tribeca, where he works as an editor. It was a mid-August evening, and Nathaniel and his younger brother Simon and I surrounded a four-person table at Waterfalls, a family-style Middle Eastern restaurant in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. This is a place the Rich brothers know well; they both live within a few blocks of it—six blocks apart from each other—and they order takeout from there several times a week. This night, they deviated slightly from their custom and visited the place for a Tuesday dinner. Every now and again, the sound of a blender making fresh juice dominated the tiny, tiled space with walls the color of a ripe tangerine. This marked the last time the brothers would hang out for several weeks. Twenty-eight-year-old Nathaniel would be out of town for a 10-day vacation with his mother, then return to a pile of manuscripts to read before the Paris Review’s next deadline. And in one week, Simon, who is 24, would begin his second season as a staff writer on Saturday Night Live. His second collection of humor pieces (or as he prefers to call it, his second book of jokes), Free-Range Chickens, would be published the following week by Random House.
HOW DID GUS Van Sant, of all camera-wielding hipsters, come to direct Milk, this year’s official gay martyr movie? Van Sant once expressed his reluctance to be pigeonholed with the gay political movement—a bold, intransigent stance and personally justifiable considering the gap between political posturing and artistic achievement. Yet Milk, the story of San Francisco’s first openly gay politician, County Supervisor Harvey Milk, who in 1979 was gunned-down along with Mayor George Moscone by Dan White, another County Supervisor, turns out to be a bizarre manipulation of the gay political impulse. Not that Van Sant’s hypocritical. He has the right to assume new political positions; to choose or refuse his alliances, or come into new awareness. But orthodoxy is the last inclination one feels in Van Sant’s other work—such lascivious, nihilistic, proudly degenerate art projects as Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park. Van Sant’s tireless boosters have acclaimed the latter three films a “Death Trilogy” and the assassination climax in Milk, based in historical fact, seems an addendum to that macabre series. He counts down to mortality, with famous liberal-actor Sean Penn safely assuming the role of a now non-threatening historical figure. (What’s next? Denzel Washington scurrying about for Bayard Rustin scripts?) It’s strange when a film that finds apotheosis in death also poses as a memorial to social activism. There’s some dangerous slip into macabre commercialism. It recalls Spike Lee’s domestication of Malcolm X, inevitably weakening the subject’s subversiveness. No wonder the media—mainstream, gay, alternative—has already bowed down to Milk’s sentimental vision. Freaky Van Sant puts gay activism in the ultimate closet: the grave.
Thanksgiving is hideous. Some folks are trekking to whatever backwater burg they hail from to see their hillbilly parents and explain yet again why they’re broke, sickly and surly all the time. Others take the subway to see their families, thinking about getting home, getting high and digging into a pile of leftovers. For a large group of New Yorkers, though, it’s all about avoiding family. Whether that means hosting your own meal, going to a friend’s place, volunteering or getting invited to someone else’s family dinner, managing to do Turkey Day with as little fanfare as possible is perhaps more appetizing than the big-deal meal itself. So if you’re just now realizing that you’ve made no plans, don’t fret. Follow our guide to surviving Thanksgiving in the city and the holiday—not to mention your mashed potatoes—will be as smooth as possible.
While recently browsing the video clips on Comedy Central’s site, I came across an oldie but a goodie: Chappelle’s Show. Feeling nostalgic, I clicked on “Reparations 2003,” a sketch where Dave Chappelle imagines what would happen if black people actually received the trillion-dollar compensation advocated by some as an apology for slavery. Having seen the clip before, I prepared myself for some surefire laugh-out-loud laughs. But they never came. Jokes about black folks buying truck loads of menthol cigarettes
After years of grassroots activism, the High Line has been saved. Or maybe not. The well-loved elevated railroad on the West Side is set to become a public park and green space by next year. Friends of the High Line, the organization that fought developers’ demolition efforts, unveiled the plans created by the design firm Field Operations earlier this year. The first stage of the $170 million project (between Gansevoort and West 20th Street) is set to open to the public in spring 2009, and the second stage (between West 20th and 30th streets) may be completed the following year. New buildings by international architects have already begun to rise up along the structure, and the Whitney Museum plans to build a new outpost along the park as well. But while community groups and fans rejoice, preservationists say it’s not time to become complacent since the entire structure is not safe from destruction.
After years of grassroots activism, the High Line has been saved. Or maybe not. The well-loved elevated railroad on the West Side is set to become a public park and green space by next year. Friends of the High Line, the organization that fought developers’ demolition efforts, unveiled the plans created by the design firm Field Operations earlier this year. The first stage of the $170 million project (between Gansevoort and West 20th Street) is set to open to the public in spring 2009, and the second stage (between West 20th and 30th streets) may be completed the following year. New buildings by international architects have already begun to rise up along the structure, and the Whitney Museum plans to build a new outpost along the park as well. But while community groups and fans rejoice, preservationists say it’s not time to become complacent since the entire structure is not safe from destruction.
Albany is very real.With a fiscal crisis expected to balloon to a $47 billion deficit in the 2011- 2012 fiscal year and the source of 25 percent of the states tax income still unstable on Wall Street, Governor Paterson is asking for help and suggestions.
“Who the fuck is Fu Manchu over there?” I’m standing near the entrance to the stage at Webster Hall, when a sandy-haired prole sticks his fat finger in my face and asks me the question. Fat Finger jerks his head in the direction where a guy with a goatee and long jeweled braids topped with a cowl had been standing. I explain to the gentleman that Fu Manchu is Paul K, a Satanist art photographer from Los Angeles who, because of the recent economic turmoil, has recently lost half his trust fund. Then I get belligerent.
Let’s face it: Barack Obama is hot. As we move into the final days until the election, it’s become more apparent, however, that people are not making rational decisions based on voting records or even debating skills. They are voting with their emotions, their passions, even their fantasies about who they would rather kiss, fondle or fuck. Bammers has single-handedly inspired the kind of adoration usually reserved for cultural icons like The Beatles, Elvis or Tom Cruise (circa Risky Business). That’s right, he’s a Barack star.Women weep at his rallies. Photos of him frolicking shirtless on a beach get splayed across pages of People.The media can’t get enough of him. He’s America’s sweetheart.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum entrance is an opening to a time capsule. History is everywhere: There are dirt-encrusted tiles on the floor; soot-covered paintings on the wall; grime-caked sheet-metal ceilings. Unlike the rest of the neighborhood—which is pocked with salons and fancy clothing boutiques, glass high-rises and gourmet restaurants—the building appears the same today as it was when millions of immigrants began jamming the neighborhood 150 years ago. Inside the individual apartments, you see where generations lived, worked and died (often in the same two- or three-room flat). In one room, 20 layers of wallpaper and scattered artifacts found during the building’s early-1990s renovation and excavation are a reminder of the transient bustle of the time.
NO PROBLEMS BOOKING that massage, right? Dialing a telephone number has never been a stretch. Remembering to get those low-fat yogurt as well as the vinaigrette is a no brainer. For sufferers of schizophrenia, though, even such simple tasks are a struggle.
IN A RECENT interview, Woody Allen, perhaps the worlds most famous neurotic, wondered aloud whether he could have achieved artistic success without regular psychoanalysis. People would say to me, oh, its just a crutch, Allen told Adam Moss in New York.
Often jeered as the death of nightlife, as the idea that exterminated fun in downtown clubs, the prick-friendly practice of bottle service is taking a well-deserved hit. Some of those poor, poor bankers on Wall Street have fallen on such hard times that they can no longer afford to buy their way into nightclubs with even one measly $350 bottle of Grey Goose. As a result, clubs that have grown dependent on such gentlemen, who would often use $10,000 tabs to secure their welcome, are taking revenue losses in the neighborhood of 30 percent. Such venues now face a decision to either adapt or die off, opening the potential for a revolution in New York nightlife.
If the court is known for anything other than some highly publicized cases dealing with celebrities (think Woody Allen and the Astors), it is patronage.The next judge to be elected to Surrogate’s Court must be qualified to tackle patronage and be open to reform in addition to having an astute legal mind and experience.
Luis Garden Acosta was walking down Kent Avenue one day when he noticed a radioactive hazard symbol on a side door. “I was pretty shocked,” he says. “I knew that symbol well, and I was just confounded to think that there would be anything [radioactive] one block from a public school building, or in a residential neighborhood.” The building belonged to Radiac Research Corporation, which handles and ships chemicals and low-level radioactive waste. The chemicals come from
