I have a crush on Richard from Gawker

because of this, because it speaks to my ongoing battle with New York:

Goodbye! The city said. She wandered off, so did he. And the camera hovered. Somewhere in the East Village a girl sat while her laundry rolled around and around and around in a washer. She thought about Oregon, about Danny, about her mom. She missed all of them. On the Lower East Side an old man stood waiting for the light to change. How the neighborhood had changed, he thought. How everything has changed. The walk signal came on, and he pressed on. In Gramercy a husband rolled over in bed and pulled his wife close to him and began falling in love with her all over again. In Hell's Kitchen a boy looked across the bar at another boy and they both felt that something dangerous was about to happen. In Times Square a tourist stood lost and bewildered and amazed. In Harlem a man waiting for the bus watched skeptically as a stream of new arrivals came spilling out of the subway. Kids. College kids. In the barrio there was a party for Danielle, who got the job. In the Boogie Down a dad saw his kid sleeping in the car seat next to him and things made sense again, for a moment. Over there in Astoria they opened a second bottle of wine. They yelled in Jackson Heights because he was gone and was never coming back. In Greenpoint they spoke Polish on the phone, they told jokes that couldn't be translated. In Red Hook they finished moving the last of the furniture out of a TV show loft. In Park Slope a writer said goodnight to an otherwise empty apartment. In Midwood, the wait was worth it. The pizza was delicious. In Brighton Beach they watched the waves. Spring was almost here. In Tottenville a mother walked the quiet house and thought about summer camps, beach vacations, the spit-spit-spit of the sprinkler she'd need to get out of the garage.

And there was Whitney still, wandering lost and utterly unaware through this place. This wonderful place. These blocks like bones, these buildings like skin, these trees like hair. This mystery. This love. This sad stony expanse. This bright gleaming embrace. This hope, this fear. This silly, marvelous home. This City.


sampled from Richard's review of the final episode of MTV's The City.

A brief service announcement from Rachel

"Hey Brutus...what the fuck?"

Beware the Ides of March, all.

A brief service announcement from Rachel

On the Fancy Food Show due in New York on June 28-30th, 2009:

"Why do we have to wait? Why do we have to wait so long? Why can't it be now? Why can't it be every day? Oh God -- I have a problem. I have Fancy Food Showitis!"

New York, I'm Yours

I was listening to The Decemberists on the way to work this morning -- "Los Angeles, I'm Yours" specifically -- and it made me wonder: why do I stay in New York? Reworking some already well written lyrics, here's why:

There is a city in the sea
A restless company
I don’t suppose you want to
And as it yells its angry tale
In sadist detail
Its affinity will haunt you
Its streets and avenues
Manics and ministers it hears
A destructive harmony
Shattering symphony
Hope and hopeless on the shore,
New York, I’m yours

Oh fellows, cocksure with allure
Empty of the pure
You can see my fear
And all the boys you drag about
A weeded crescent fount
From Saturdays to Saturday
You up and downtown crowd
Eyes hanging at your lips
We hope for the realest thing
As ancient choirs sing
One anxious cherub wheels above
New York, my love

Fuck, what a surge of pained brio
Seething on senses
Salient and surrogate
But oh, the smell of destiny
The heartache and vanity
It only makes me stoned
Oh great catastrophe,
Ditch of iniquity and tears
How I abhor this place
Its sweet and bitter taste
Has left me wretched, retching on all fours
New York, I’m yours

never have I loved since then.

Because nothing has really changed and everything has really changed, today I default to last year.

Thank God I have The Tents to get lost in. Saved by Fashion Week. Who'd of thought?


to love.

I double fist.

With my blogging that is.

I'll be contributing regularly to Gastrononymous (my friend's, Lauren Murphy, food blog) with recipes, restaurant finds and anything else that relates to my epicurean endeavors in New York and beyond. Yummy.

a great way to start the day.

This is one of those things you discover that makes you smile...and then makes you hate yourself for not being so simplistically creative. Alas.

via I LEGO N.Y.

I, Seth Plattner

hereby claim that I would like to donate my DNA for the purpose of cloning so as to prove, disprove or simply elucidate the genetic link between hetero- and homosexuality. In order that such an experiment be rightfully and scientifically accurate, I suggest, but do not claim with any authority due to my lack of scientific accreditation, that multiple samples of my DNA be acquired, cultured and subsequently cloned in a multitude of controlled and non-controlled environments to determine if, when and how homosexuality becomes realized from conception to fetus to birth and so forth. I, an open and obvious homosexual, will serve as the control, while my clones, the variables. Please feel free to contact me at any time, day or night, for recruitment. I only require a small fee for my services and worldwide acknowledgment. Thank you.

Disclaimer: I, however, take no responsibility for whatever ethical or moral questions, concerns, riots, murders or gene manipulations by right-wing or religious groups may occur. Again, thank you.

the magazine industry is a vicious, vicious world

friend: oh wow. guess who just folded?
me: yeah. i heard.
friend: i just saw them all in their conference room. yikes. how did you hear before i did? i share a floor with them.
me: an editor here told me.
friend: i'm gonna steal a good chair from them.

Great Paragraphs

From The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen.

He turned to the doorway where she'd appeared. He began a sentence: "I am--" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren't uniform, weren't an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he'd encountered the world "crepuscular" in McKay's Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he'd seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn't just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he'd sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he'd entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods -- "packing my suitcase," he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He'd betrayed nothing.