Welcome, Francesco Vitelli, and all other members of the Genevieve Futrelle Background-of-the-Webcam Fan Club!
Other featured guests, from my server log:
New Prada store: Ass! Ass!
The NY Celebrity Sightings Channel on upoc.com alerted my phone on Saturday night that the Prada store on Prince and Broadway was finally hosting a star-studded opening. I was excited to see it, because the space is huge, in the Soho Guggenheim building, and had a lot of buzz: a new experience in shopping! Prada does so much, so well, that I couldn’t wait to see what they did.
Unfortunately, what they did was recreate a lame-ass 1997 shopping environment. The flow is completely wretched. A big, echo-y ampitheater space is surrounded by claustrophobic oubliettes filled with clothes, all accessed by four-foot wide catwalks. If this were your college dining hall, there would be spontaneous, frustration-induced burrito fights breaking out in the lunch line. There are mini-LCD screens buried in the walls all over the place (whoop-de-friggin’-do!), and dressing rooms with clear doors that — get this! — turn opaque at the push of a button! Like Bar 89‘s bathrooms did, two years ago!
The architect is Rem Koolhass, winner of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture and co-author of the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping. “The ultimate luxury is not shopping”, burbles this fecking idiot in a recent gushy blurb. Yeah, I got your not shopping right here, Koolh-ass!
I like silly excess as much as any New Yorker, but it has to be fabulous, timely, beautifully executed silly excess. Two years ago, Prada sold firewood — a bundle of twigs in a leather band, with an enamel emblem, for eight hundred dollars. That was stylish silly excess. This just looked like ass.
My Mom’s new puppy
The dog on the left is Sophie, my mom’s new puppy. Sophie is a Cardigan Welsh Corgi. Unlike Pembrokes (which is the kind of dog the Queen of England has), Cardigans have long tails and bigger ears. They’re cowherding dogs — they’d nip the cows in the heels, then duck under the kick. (I think they tend to have thick skulls for the same reason.)
Okay, so I’m posting pet pictures on my homepage. You want to make something of it, tough guy? Huh?
Hey, I’m gonna collaborate on a giant New Mexican spitting rat! C-o-o-o-o-o-l!!!
I went to Boston yesterday, for a day visit to the Bridgespan group, where I’m working now. When we took off and rolled into a turn, the air nozzles starting blowing out a concentrated stench. The smell was a combination of burned scrambled eggs and wet dog. What the hell was that about?
NoLiTa True Crime, Continued: Gina protects my apartment.
On leaving my apartment yesterday morning, the lock got stuck; the door was bolted, but I couldn’t lock it all the way or open it again. So I called Gina, the super of my building and one of the last bastions of the Little Italy Old Guard. I came home that night to find that the problem was fixed.
This morning, Gina told me how she did it: “Oh, I just told the maintenance guy to crawl in through the fire escape, and come out your front door. But you know where he went? He came out of your neighbor’s apartment!” Gina laughs heartily. “He says to me, ‘Gina, you’re gonna get me arrested, here!” But he got in your apartment okay. You got anything else you need me to do?”
Note to self: extra-big Christmas tip for Gina this year. You know, you gotta pay your respects.
Never Underestimate the Power of Standing Around
There was a fight, or at least almost a fight, on the corner below my window last night. I heard some yelling, and looked down to see seven or eight young hispanic guys, some in aprons, squared off against three young black guys. The hispanic guys had the numeric superiority, but the aprons made me think they were local, so I was rooting for them during the shouting phase. But then thinks got scarier. One kid was swinging a chain, a la “West Side Story” and “The Cross and the Switchblade”, another picked up and threw the metal trash can on the corner, and when one of the black kids popped their trunk and started rooting around in there, I was starting to get worried about stray gunshots.
Then, five cop cars pulled up suddenly, and the cops immediately got out and separated everyone into groups. The cops were also young — maybe late twenties, maybe early thirties — and they were mostly from the Chinatown precinct around the corner. I was impressed by the cops’ method for handling the situation. Once the groups were separated, everyone stood around for a really long time, not doing much of anything. Which cooled tempers admirably. The neighborhood kids that had been gathering on the periphery wandered off, the shouting stopped, and the whole danger level plummeted. The cops made a perfunctory look in the trunk of the car, but I think their main goal was to achieve total standing-around quietude. Which they did. Only after everyone was good and bored did they handcuff the black kids, put them in cruisers, and drive away. After they left, everyone wandered away slowly.
Incidentally, that’s the second time in a week that someone has picked up and thrown the trash can on the corner as an expository device. Last time, it was a drunk woman from Spring Lounge. I blame Hollywood.
The Wrong Uncle (Post in haste, repent at leisure)
To my horror and chagrin, I realized when I got back to my desk this morning that I had misidentified one of my uncles in the Baldwin Family Thanksgiving photos! The man in the cloth cap is not, in fact, my uncle Bob, but is his younger brother Laird.
In my defense, I can only offer this side-by-side comparison, showing a picture of my uncle Bob, taken from his website, next to a picture of my uncle Laird taken from the Thanksgiving photos:
The Baldwin Family Thanksgiving
I have a five-string banjo mothballed in my closet, a gift from my three folkie uncles when I was a teenager. It’s a beautiful old banjo, made by Star in the 1890s, and perfect for playing mountain-style clawhammer, which is the style I learned from them. Like all banjos, it worked great as an attention-getting device*, and I regret that, like the bagpipes, it’s not a Manhattan-friendly instrument. I especially miss playing with my uncle Bob Baldwin, who knows a tremendous number of great old songs. They’re simple and catchy, but elusive somehow — every time I come home from seeing him in Maine, I try to remember the songs he played me, but they slip through my fingers.
Anyhow, here’s an article written by my cousin Max Alexander on the Baldwin family thanksgiving this year, including lots of banjo-picking.
In the tradition of authors from E.B. White to gossip columnist Jim Mullen, Max retired from editing People to a farm in coastal Maine. Which is where everyone on my mother’s side of the family has been gravitating to, for some reason. And is where the banjo-picking takes place these days. Though, sadly, minus the accompaniment of my uncle Stuart.
* To my mixed delight and chagrin, the 1993 Earlham College Admissions Catalog devoted half of its “Campus Activities and Social Life” page to a picture of me banging out “Pretty Polly” on the front lawn. The picture probably was a pretty good choice, though, since it contained almost every possible Quaker school symbol. I had my hair in a ponytail, had my legs crossed showing my tattoo, and was singing to Amy Workman, who was wearing Birkenstocks and straddling a mountain bike. I bet I even had a bag of granola in my pocket.
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