I’m Not Going to Do This Every Day

Remember the guy who was trapped alone in an elevator in NYC for an entire weekend? This week, the New Yorker has some amazing footage from the surveillance camera inside the elevator.

It’s part of a nice Nick Paumgarten piece on elevators, which are perhaps the single most important element in the lives of New Yorkers, even the poors like me who live in walkups. The lesson, of course: Never get on an elevator without food and water. And maybe a copy of War and Peace.

Sign on a store down the block from me on Delancey Street:

WE CARY PLUS SIZE SKINNY JEANS

Awesome.

comes from Alex Balk, who responds to Susannah Breslin’s fine bit for my corporate lord and master with this:

I was reading Susannah Breslin’s great piece on why guys fuck whores, and this jumped out at me:

Often these guys aren’t just looking for sex. Many are depressed or stressed, lonely or bored, looking for intimacy or a connection, no matter how transient, no matter the cost. One john who was rejected on a regular basis in the dating scene wrote that, in contrast to the women he met at bars, prostitutes saw him as “a normal and charming guy.”

It’s hard not to read that and just be simply heartbroken. The idea that a fellow human being feels so rejected, so unwantable, that he needs to pay someone to simulate an interest in him makes me want to cry. There are a lot of terrible things in this world, but for whatever reason, the idea of loneliness is the one that makes me the saddest.On the other hand, what do I know? The guy could be a real dick. Isn’t it more likely that he’s actually one of these jackasses who won’t let a couple of girls get a drink after work without asking them whether or not he should buy a wallaby? But then it’s just as easy to turn that one back around: Maybe the guy’s that way because he is so cripplingly lonely and sad and awkward and that’s what he thinks is somehow going to help him get that spark, make that connection he so desperately craves.

I guess what I’m saying—or not saying—is who the hell knows why we do what we do?

This is so true. I mean, for instance, who the hell knows why anybody reads David Brooks’s incomprehensible cries for help? Yet, somehow I can’t look away…

But I digress. Balk’s bit really is very nice; read the whole thing here.

There’s not so much that hasn’t been done or said on the Spitzer thing, so I’m steering clear. But this blog, Letters from Johns, sheds some interesting light.

(h/t Gothamist)

from gothamist.com posted with vodpod

I’ve long been an admirer of Colson Whitehead (seriously, check out The Intuitionist), and not just because I shamelessly steal his ‘you know you’re a New Yorker when’ line all the time (”You know you’re a New Yorker when you can look at a place in the city and say ‘that used to be something else’” (I may not be remembering this exactly, but it’s kinda like that)). Today he’s got a nice bit in the Times about being a Brooklyn writer. Favorite part:

A lot of my writer friends live near me, and that makes people think we just hang around with one another in cafes, trading work and discussing Harper’s and what not. But I rarely see them. We’re home working. I mean, sure, when I was feeling a bit stabby I could always ring up Norm Mailer and he’d talk me down (I miss you, brudda), but that was the exception. Every couple of years, I’ll ask a friend or two to read a manuscript, and it happens. You can see it in their eyes. “I hope it’s better than his last one. Or at least shorter.” I know what they’re thinking because that’s what I’m thinking when they ask me. “How much is this friendship worth, in terms of page count?”

The latest from the Improv Everywhere folks (h/t Gothamist)

from gothamist.com posted with vodpod

Today in the Housing Crisis:

This, from the new issue of the Atlantic Monthly, is interesting–an argument that the coming slums in the U.S. will be located in the suburbs. Yet another reason why I’m going to be kicking myself for not buying a place in Manhattan.

This, from NPR, makes the case for ditching those slum houses before it’s too late.

This

which is down the street from me, is finally getting some repair, and is both a fascinating story and a reminder that there are still places in Manhattan where you can have a roof (sorta) over your head for $100 a month.

The brilliant p. stack once did a post about songs that you would make you look hard while listening to them on your iPod walking down the street. Sadly, I can’t find that post now. I can, however, say that this song somehow fits the bill…

from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

If I ever leave depart this fair city to someplace where I’d have to come in by train, I’d make sure that my train ended up in Grand Central Station, a lovely place that almost by itself makes commuting worthwhile. This, from the group Improv Everywhere, is a fun bit:

though it doesn’t match the inspiration of the bit from The Fisher King: