For everyone keeping score, here's how American justice is panning out this summer:
- Limited liability caps may not be raised in the wake of the BP oil spill because the oil industry is less concerned about the oil hitting Gulf Coast beaches than it is about the sand in their collective vagina.
- Lindsay Lohan will spend 90 days in jail and 90 in a rehab program for failing to attend alcohol education and, according to the judge's sentencing speech, proving she has a penchant for lying and not learning her lesson.
- The federal government is suing Arizona over its immigration laws.
- Soda taxes are struck down by the soda lobby; meanwhile Albany adds a new $1.60 tax to the already highest-in-the-country price tag of cigarettes in New York, not because they're trying to do the public any good, but because they're running in the red despite keeping 89% of New York City's tax revenue for themselves.
- The Mariners are already trying to get rid of Cliff Lee.
- At least four federal lawsuits have been brought against Apple over the iPhone 4's reception.
- Roger Ebert has sort of acquiesced on the "Video games can never be art" front, admitting he hasn't played one since the medium was in its infancy.
- George Lucas and Lucasfilm have sent a cease-and-desist letter to a laser manufacturer for selling a product that looks too much like a light saber, however no one has yet sued Lucas for ruining their childhood.
To top it off, it's roughly a million degrees outside.
A couple dining at Katz's Delicatessen were asked to pay a $50 fine after the girl lost her ticket, according to an email to Eater. The boyfriend, who explained to the staff that a busboy had cleared the ticket from the table, refused to pay the fine on top of the $45 bill for their meals, which brings up an interesting question: if the tickets are so goddamn important—$50 dollars worth of important, in fact—how did Katz's know what to charge them for the food? Ah:
They write the price of your check on *one* of your party's ticket, so there's no reason why everyone has to present their ticket... Also: they write a proper check that they just don't give you.
Well, that makes good sense. Not like, say, having an antiquated raffle ticket system at a restaurant where half of the orders are pastrami on rye.
Ah, summer. People coming into New York to enjoy a little leisure time, bringing their coolers filled with suds and sunshine and, uh... leaving them in front of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square until someone reports it as suspicious. The Square has been evacuated and given the all-clear, depending on how up-to-the-minute/reliable your sources are. The fear, of course, is a repeat of last weekend when a Nissan Pathfinder was found with the makings of a car bomb—well, a shitty one, at least, with the wrong kind of fertilizer and a relatively low chance of actually exploding. But anyway! What are you doing still sitting in your chair? You should be cowering in fear! Wait, aren't you terrorized? Really? Oh, right. Only tourists go to Times Square.
Patti Smith, speaking to Jonathan Lethem at Cooper Union, gave this advice to artists looking to come to New York: "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city." Meet the new old person, same as the old one. It's safe to say that the New York City that coddled and heralded Smith in her early years as an artist are long gone—the Bowery is no longer flophouses and heroin addicts, CBGBs is now a fashion boutique for the clinically retarded—but her lack of distinction in this advice is startling. Had she said "Manhattan" instead of "New York," the gripe factor would be halved, maybe quartered, but it's probably fair to guess that, just as it is with a lot of people who don't know better, Manhattan is New York to Smith. It certainly is that way for my uncle, a long-time New Yorker who once quipped that he'd "been to Brooklyn once."
That's fine and good. In thirty-five years, when the hot mess of the '10s is giving advice at the 92Y Park Slope, telling artists to stay away from Brooklyn—when she really means Park Slope and Williamsburg and Prospect Heights and so on—it'll be the same thing. But it will be no more true that it is today, from the mouth of Patti Smith. It's also disingenuous: the great thing about artists and young people is that they are required by biological law to disregard anything they're told by 63 year olds. Even more so when Jonathan Lethem is in the room. Hell, the people Smith is probably hoping to reach very likely don't even know she's still alive.
The place for artists to be is where artists are. It's a simple rule that holds when held up to every point in the cultural timeline. No one's taken New York away from the artists—what's really going on here is that they've taken Patti Smith's New York away from Patti Smith. And she could have it back, too, if she wanted it—if you want the Bowery in 1972, try Broadway in Bushwick in 2010—and the people she's advising to find a new city have already found the new shitty places to lament thirty years, without any help from the city's retired vanguard.
This is making the rounds, so for the sake of SEO, we present PIXELS:
Yesterday a woman hurled herself in front of an F train at the Seventh Avenue stop in Park Slope. The train was going too slow to have a Suicide Club-level impact, and she ended up underneath the train, probably wishing more than ever that she was dead. Here's the thing about people who off themselves with trains: they not only hate their own lives, but they want you to have yours. It's incredibly selfish. Unlike a nose-dive from the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge, the folks who have had it with life and want to slow up train traffic as well as assholes. Not only that, but with subway service the way it is, halting the F train for forty minutes (and the G train too, for that matter), just makes everyone else suicidal. We can only hope that somewhere north of Seventh Avenue, someone else was waiting to throw themselves in front of a train that never came.
As if getting on the A train at Chambers Street wasn't bad enough—as if just having to ride the A train wasn't torture enough—these guys from the University Of Oregon's acapella group "On The Rocks" felt it would be cool to Rickroll passengers on the uptown train:
Tips for filming these things: don't stand in the spray zone of the beatboxer.
Still, it beats the guy who smelled like taint and Brie across the train from me last week.
The Parks Department has tested the water in Prospect Park and declared it to be clean, which begs the question: who or what is killing all of our local fauna? It's been two weeks of dead animals—from turtles to possums to ducks—showing up in the park, which culminated in the death of a swan people liked so much it had a name. The animals haven't been testing all along, and it took two weeks for the water to be tested, so who knows what might have been wrong with the, uh... verdant waters of Prospect Park when the Tiny Trail Of Tears started. From now on, park officials will test any dead animals found in the park, as well as increasing patrols to make sure no one's been slipping the wildlife roofies.
In a related note, has anyone tested the dead animals for traces of baseball bats or machetes?
Via Brick Underground comes the story of a family all set to buy a nice little apartment in an Upper East Side co-op. Why is this a story? Because the co-op board rejected the buyers based on their kids' Facebook profiles. This isn't as surprising as it might seen initially; after all, who doesn't Facebook stalk on occasion? It helps allay the fear—omnipresent, seemingly, among New Yorkers—that everyone is, at the bottom of it all, a raving lunatic waiting to snap. But!
“The board looked at all of the kids’ Facebook pages and there was something a little strange on one of them,” says our source. The page apparently revealed ties to a hate group.
That's strange, I was always under the impression that co-op boards—much like the storied Community Boards here in New York—were also hate groups. BU goes to Steven Goldschmidt, a realtor who also sits on an Upper West Side co-op board, for his expert opinion on looking up potential buyers and leasees, and the drift of the quotes is "I look for any reason, online or off, to shoot down a candidate."
So, long story short, no one should be caught off-guard by being creeped—by people you've just started dating, exes, employers, and even, yes, members of co-op boards—on Facebook. There's no excuse anymore for being caught with your profile hanging out. It's unfair to judge anyone based on their Facebook or Twitter profiles, anyway—it's the people who still have MySpace that should be judged.
Last night, a 21 year-old Texas man foiled the machinations of the Empire State Building's observation deck and made it all the way down to the sidewalk in front of Bank Of America to make an early withdrawal from life. A sad thing, to be sure, but those who have been up to the 86th floor of the building know that suicide from that spot is hard-won. There are plenty of things to stop you: crowds (none last night due to New York's Wettest Month Ever), colossal ten-foot curved metal fencing, and the memory of Kermit the Frog's best performance. Not only that, it's extraordinarily difficult to clear the Empire State Building's lower floors successfully after you've made it to the other side of the fence, as Elvita Adams, who jumped from the observation deck and landed one floor below with a broken hip, could tell you. For a building that was built during the worst years of the Great Depression, the Empire State Building has seen probably the exact number of suicides you'd expect, and the retaining fence was built in 1947 only after nearly twenty suicides had happened, including a three-week span that saw five people attempt suicide from the 86th floor.
Other ways to die at the Empire State Building, for the infinitely patient:
- wait for a B-25 to crash into the floor you're on.
- find a 69 year-old Palestinian teacher and piss him off.