
The usually raven-haired lead singer of My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way, is now sporting a much much different hairdo.
Thoughts?????
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The usually raven-haired lead singer of My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way, is now sporting a much much different hairdo.
Thoughts?????
You might be wondering what Alternadad author Neal Pollack has been writing about lately. Oh, the same thing he's been writing about for years now—quotidian life with his five-year-old son, Elijah. (We've been on the campaign to make him stop.) Still? you might ask. Seriously? Yeah. But isn't Elijah going to hate him for this when he gets older? Yeah, probably! Latest essay: how he's trying to toughen up his son, who's a wuss like him.
A few months ago, I had a flashback. I was drunk and listless at a bar in Austin, Texas, 4 or 5 years ago, when I ran into a friend. He started giving me crap about something. My lizard brain stirred. I began to shriek, much like my son does when he's having a tantrum, and I flailed my hands crazily. I hit my ex-friend on the side of the face with a beer bottle, chipping one of his teeth. As the bouncer tossed me onto the street, I didn't feel tough. I felt like a drug-addled idiot.
I started thinking about what I'd tell my son in the future about that fight. Would he be proud of me? Probably not.
Actually, one drunken episode is fairly excusable. But Elijah ain't gonna be proud about the years of publicly-accessible essays chronicling his toddler foibles, including his crying jags and failure at karate.
Remember, privacy begins at home. The first step to stopping writing about your child is admitting you have nothing else to write about. Actually, Neal, you might try for a NYT Magazine story out of your struggle to stop child-blogging!
Everybody has dysfunctional relationships—even those young marrieds who refer to themselves as "we." With that in mind, Gawker alum Doree Shafrir writes in the Observer this week about the power of the question-statement. Example: "Oh, I was just checking to see if you had a ring. But you guys aren't engaged?" Maybe that's for the best?
"I recently got back in touch with another friend—we'll call her Catherine—I hadn't seen since college, except a couple years ago when we ran into each other in the West Village, right after she'd moved back to New York from Los Angeles. Anyway, we've been hanging out. She's single. The other day she was telling me that most of her friends from college (except for me and a couple others) are married, and most of the married friends have at least one kid. Catherine was in a sorority, and I'm convinced that there's a correlation between sorority membership and getting married by 27 and having the first kid by 29. My younger sister, who is 24 and was in a sorority, seems like she will bear this theory out, though she got offended when I proposed it. Then I found out she had shown our mom engagement rings on the Tiffany's Web site, just in case her boyfriend should turn to my mom for advice.This Is When You Know [NY Observer]
...A friend of mine—we'll call her Natalie—is moving in with her boyfriend in brownstone Brooklyn, even though everything's so fucking expensive these days that you might as well just move back to Manhattan. She met this guy at work; at the time, she was involved in a torturous long-term relationship with another guy, one of those relationships people get into in their early 20s and then wake up one day and, hell, they're 28 or 29 and nothing has changed, he's still the same guy they were vaguely annoyed with all those years ago, except now they live together and he does things like punch walls when he's upset."
Sometimes, the idea of cutting-edge art is worth more than the actual existence of said art. In the case of the new "luxury lofts" of 151 Wooster, the virtual proximity of a mural by Basquiat and friends might be worth a lot. The apartments are going for about $8 million (with a maintenance of $42,000 a year). The Times reported back in June: When they were tearing into the place, a mural was discovered on the eighth floor behind layers of sheetrock and plumbing. It was, if you're into this sort of thing, beautiful—a collaboration between Jean Michel Basquiat, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000 and others. Basquiat was friends with a previous dweller, art-magazine editor Edit deAk, who lived there in the early 80s when it was probably little more than a coldwater flat. The mural has been renamed "The 151 Wooster Wild Style Wall" and is now the centerpiece of "Gallery 151." And last night was the grand opening!
First of all, just how authentically artistic is the space at 151 Wooster? "The Heart of Soho... The art of so many. Ten luxury lofts, two extraordinary penthouses... a loftier way to live," intones the website.
Last night there were lots of people dressed in puffy Reeboks and neon spray-paint print shirts, listening to a DJ playing 80s music. Everyone was drinking free vodka like there was no tomorrow and ignoring the art, which included works by Fab 5 Freddy, Keith Haring, Kenny Sharf and Ero.
As for the mural, it was there—sort of. About a quarter of the original wall was on display, and the rest had been, well, Xeroxed. A photo had been taken of the original wall, printed onto vinyl and stretched across the wall. It's possible that the original was too fragile to be moved, as it had been bisected by pipes over the years.
Perhaps this was a statement about using art to create a feeling of authenticity that sells overpriced lofts, or maybe a remark about the loss of originality in a city where no place is safe from gentrification?
The program (which is riddled with typos and punctuation errors) had an interview with Fab Five Freddy. He says it all: "Twenty years later it's the preverbal [sic] mark on the wall."
Edit: We have been informed that the majority of the mural is currently on the 8th floor, where it was discovered, undergoing a conservation process so that it can be donated to a local museum. The gallery exhibit was on the second floor, where the copy of the mural (and a small part of the original) was on display.
[Photo: Robert Wright]
Paper magazine blogger and faded it-boy Fabian Basabe is still really enjoying his new adopted hometown of Los Angeles. Did you know that it's sunnier there? "When in New York City, people are struggling with the incoming cold weather, meetings, sirens and crowds, while everything is so pretty out here in LA! People are genuinely happier and I mean... why not? Everyone is good looking! And on my part, today I had a killer meeting about a new show concept, ate lunch outside, and came home to sit in my jacuzzi for 45 minutes and now I am watching TV while trying to focus. Not bad right? Work AND play! And did I mention everyone is good looking in LA?" Careful, Fabian: Before you put your money down and buy a car, consider that all the stars who never were are selling cars and pumping gas. [Paper]
Melena Ryzik, the one-time sharp-elbowed Times Boldface Names party stringer who went on to write that paper's daily culture email Urban Eye, has gone fulltime for the Times culture desk. We hear Urban Eye is looking for a new... email-blogger? Direct-mailer? What shall we call these new modern forms of journalism? Better find out fast, because these are the jobs of our time. Update: We hear she's keeping Urban Eye as part of the new job. What can't she do???