Thursday, October 13, 2011

*Everyday Chatter

Is the Holiday Cocktail Lounge doomed again? [EVG]

Having real, live homeless men sleeping in your boutique flophouse hotel is “an asset to the property," where underwear on a railing makes a good photo op. [NYT]

Celebrating American Neon. [NYN]

It's time for New York Comic Con. [NYCC]

Eugenides in Fort Greene attracts a "sea of horn-rimmed glasses." [CNY]

"why would anyone want a high-tech, $6,400 toilet?" Apparently, because it reminds them of their iPhone. [NYT]

"Now, everywhere you go, loudmouths will be addressing their pliant servant," the iPhone Siri. [Restless]

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I seriously nearly vomited after reading that NYT Bowery article.

marjorie said...

I really did feel physically (and spiritually) ill after reading the designer flophouse piece. Credit where it's due, Dan Barry did a great job on everything from the set descriptions to the damning quotes from the owners. More "authentrification"...and it really is like My Man Godfrey. Vile.

Laura Goggin Photography said...

I agree with the posters above. That NYT article made me sick.

esquared™ said...

i'm a francophile -- i like france's food, literature, music, culture, etc.

not all french stuff has to be expensive. carroll gardens and other parts of are becoming a "little france" yet there are a lot of affordable restaurants and little boutiques in those neighborhood. a 'real' french would shop or eat here than bleecker street or meatpacking district.

these french boutiques, the dbgbs, et. als. that are popping up all over mahattan, esp. bleecker street, are tourist traps and are aimed to the midwesterners and the trust fund gossip girls/boys, and the moneyed tourists, who think that just because it's french, or they can't pronounce the name of a brand or food, that it must be sophisticated and expensive. these new boutiques are just like the stores in las vegas or beverly hills: pretentious and catering to those whose lives are empty and fills that emptiness via owning and consuming expensive stuff.

and tout va bien in the theater district is the oldest french bistro in nyc, where the french fleet dines when their in town, and has one of the very few remaining neon signs in nyc that gives the city character and glow.

mingusal said...

Re: NYT Bowery article. Ahhh, proof once again that this truly is a gilded age. And now the extremely poor too have the opportunity to become really cool fashion accessories!

Anonymous said...

Just another sign that the Bowery is NOT the next big thing. It was over before it started. Any developer stupid enough to waste their money here will soon be parted from it.

JAZ said...

I'm sorry, but that Bowery flophouse piece has to be a gag, right? Cmon, we have all been lamenting the slow painful destruction of our city day after day - but no way it has come to this. Because if this is somehow not a joke, then we are actually even more long gone than I had feared.

I don't care how much of a trend following whore you are: when you start using people's dire real life situations as a prop for an Urban Grittyness Fantasy Camp, then you have proven that you have no soul.

I echo everyone else's sentiments. Dan Barry did a great job of letting these cultural vampires hang themselves with their own actions and words... and I too really feel like throwing up.

This is without a doubt one of the sickest, most disgusting things I have ever read.

City Of Strangers said...

Thanks for the link to that Bowery piece. You really can't make this stuff up. Well-written article, but I wish he'd talked to one of the 'attractive, well-connected' rubes paying good money to stay in a freakin' cubicle and asked them - why they're such rubes. This and the article on the 64,000 ipod toilet remind us, if we didn't know already, that the idiocy of the trendy and the affluent knows no bounds.

T.