It’s adorable to watch Amy Sacco, the woman responsible for turning West 27th Street into the bridge-and-tunnel police state it has become, take a crap on New York nightlife. “Most everything’s overrated. Even I’m overrated!” [NYDN] Funny! And true! New York’s nightspots are playgrounds for bottle service and exclusivity, which has become a commodity itself, which means we get to stamp an “overrated” label on it. Case in point? Room Service, which billed itself as a lounge with all the amenities of a hotel, is heading into the crapper, and that unbearable pair of haunts, Home and Guest House, are “closed until further notice.” Sacco, meanwhile, continues to let Bungalow 8 whore itself out to those grasping on to its expired coolness factor. Oh, and she’s “developing a club at the Hard Rock in Vegas and touts London as much more interesting than NYC.” Two so very underrated destinations.
“A bouncer at an East Village bar called Sing Sing Karaoke took a bullet to the chest early Saturday after breaking up a series of melees, police and witnesses said.
“As someone belted out Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” on stage, Carlos Salome staggered into the bar around 3 a.m. screaming that he’d been shot.
“‘He was yelling, ‘My arm, my arm!” said playwright Marissa Kamin, who was inside Sing Sing at the time of the shooting.” [NYDN]
Ya know who’s not excited about Ugly Betty moving to New York? The production crew that’s being left behind in Los Angeles, where the show has spent the last two years filming. So upset are they at losing their jobs, and the possibility that other shows could follow suit to the Big Apple, where tax credits for filmmakers have tripled, that they’re taking out a full page ad in Friday’s Variety “that begs state and Los Angeles officials to do something to keep productions local.” [DHD] They’re going after folks like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to do more to increase incentives to keep Hollywood, well, Hollywood. The text of the ad below. CONTINUED »
Oh, irony. “On the same day that a New York Post editorial claimed racial profiling was not a growing problem, one of the Post’s own reporters filed suit against the city claiming to be a victim of such profiling.” [E&P] It’s as if the paper’s departments don’t communicate with each other to fine tune their message; this would never happen at Fox News. (The editorial is here; the Post’s own story on the lawsuit, appearing today, is here.) Now if only they could get noted bigot cartoonist Sean Delonas on board and whip together a third opinion.
New York City’s recent tax credit increase for filmmakers is sure to bring plenty of indie YouTube uploaders to our fair town, but it’s also attracting the majors. Namely, ABC’s Ugly Betty, which normally shoots in Los Angeles but is said to be eying the city’s willingness to subsidize some of its $3m-per-episode budget. So expect sightings of Vanessa Williams at the Waverly, Eric Mabius at the Chelsea Market Building, and America Ferrera at Daffy’s.
Like a mutating beast, New York’s ever-evolving. And the art scene’s no different.
With the opening of the new New Museum on the Bowery, our Lower East Side’s again becoming an epicenter for urban artistic activity. Gallerists Dennis Christie and Ken Tyburski couldn’t resist the pull and recently unveiled their DCKT Contemporary’s new location just down the famed road from the Museum.
We have a friend who doesn’t mind picking arguments with the help. Cab drivers are the help, right? So yeah, there we were, stopping off in the West Village to meet some friends at a bar, and said friend went to pay the cab fare with his credit card. Except the driver, worried about losing a few pennies to the transaction’s surcharge, sneakily disabled the credit card option immediately after it popped up on the screen. And once that little touch-screen button disappears, there’s no going back, or so these cabbies tell us. He insisted that we had to tell him ahead of time that we were using a credit card, which is absolutely not true and, if we’re going to get technical, likely illegal. Grudge-holding as our friend is, he refused to let the matter go, threatening not to pay the fare unless the driver let him use his credit card. The driver threatened to call 911 and involve the police; our friend said “make my day”; the driver pushed some buttons on his phone and, perhaps, only pretended to dial 911. While we sat there waiting for a perhaps imaginary cop to show up to mediate this matter, we finally came to our senses: If we just paid with cash and got out of the cab, we’d be drinking alcohol much sooner.
So that’s what we did, and we were cocktailing in no time.
What’s the point of this whole story? Apparently our friend is in the minority, because 87 percent of you are still paying your cab fares with cash, even though four-fifths of New York’s cabs are credit card-equipped. Don’t you people know how to make use of your corporate cards?
Tonight, at 7pm at the Union Square Barnes & Noble, “memoirist” Augusten Burroughs will read from his latest book, A Wolf at the Table, about his childhood relationship with his father, not-so-affectionately referred to not as “Dad,” but “Dead.”
It’s Burroughs’ first manuscript in five years. Perhaps he was waiting out the James Frey-fueled witchunt for authors who try to pass off fables as actual parts of their lives. Perhaps he wanted to lay low after settling the 2005 lawsuit filed by family members who claimed they were inaccurately portrayed. Why don’t you ask him tonight?
Or maybe you could check whether any of Wolf’s tales are true, like whether his father actually let little Auggie’s guinea pig starve to death, or whether Dead chased him through the forest like he was a werewolf. And did his father’s severe psoriasis actually bloody his shirts? Was Dead’s arthritis so bad he couldn’t play catch?
All entirely plausible scenarios. But now, we’re going to question every single one of them.
Sean Bell’s dead and the cops have been cleared of all criminal charges for their role in his death. As finite as those two things seem — Bell’s never coming back to life and the cops aren’t going to jail — the situation is far from over. There’s the inevitable civil case and federal investigation, which the New York Times editorial board hopes will provide “answers” that the criminal trial and subsequent verdict did not. There are the officer’s jobs, which the New York Daily News editorial board thinks they should be fired from, pronto. There’s the matter of police being allowed to shoot 50 rounds into the car of an unarmed person, which the New York Post editorial board thinks is A-ok.
The New York press corps has outdone itself with incessant pope coverage, from the tabloids staking out the synagogue he visited, to every local TV news outlet yesterday hitting Ground Zero to cover his prayer for those lost in the World Trade Center attacks, to his final visit, to Yankee Stadium, where he threw out the first pitch. (KIDDING! He led the crowd of 60,000 in a mass service.)
But between yesterday and today, a funny thing happened on the way to the New York Times: You know America, “the land of the free”? Apparently we’re merely “a country that prizes individual freedom.” CONTINUED »
The Thomson Corporation, the finance-health-research info mega company, is quite proud of its just-completed $16 billion takeover of news giant Reuters. That’s why it’s spending another large sum to throw the new name of its company, Thomson Reuters, in your face: It’s taking over subway stations in New York, Toronto, and London, as well as the buildings of the stock exchanges there. And if you make your way through Times Square today, perhaps you’ll catch even more inundation as the digital displays force the logo upon you. This will be different than your normal Times Square, where you can at least eat, drink, or drive the usual marketing messages.
You know Passover is a’coming when … CONTINUED »
How come the Chelsea Barnes & Noble, right down the street from Jossip HQ, had to close its doors after 14 years? Because the broker re-negotiating their lease “came in and put crazy numbers in [the landlors’] minds. We can’t pay those kinds of rents. We’ve been looking two, three years for a replacement. We have not been able to find a suitable location at rents that are affordable.”
So what type of rents, exactly, did B&N’s propery owners want? One rumor we were hearing before it was announced the location would close is $2 million per month.
Not that you’ll actually miss the brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble. Don’t you people buy your books on Amazon.com like normal people?
The layout of crazy-person institution Bellvue is more suited to be reinvented as a hotel than the luxe condos city officials originally imagined. [NYP]
Madonna, who’s worth about $50 or $500 million, misses the New York City era where there was “synergy between the art world and music world and fashion world that was happening in the 80s.” New York “doesn’t feel alive” to Miss Madge any longer, she tells Vanity Fair. In the meantime, she pines away with a London estate, property in New York and who knows where else, and by writing songs like “I Love New York.”
Exciting new New York-only services for the extremely lazy. Rob Rizzo’s Wakozi, which bills itself as a reinvented Kozmo, lets you place orders at participating stores in your neighborhood and have them deliver your beer and condoms to your doorstep. And Scott Sinclair’s The Box Butler takes self-storage to a whole new level of YOU’RE A FAT ASS: Pack your belongings in their pods, create an itinerary of what’s in what, have them drive away with your crap, then call them up whenever you need access to your stuff and they’ll have a hot model (no, really) ride up in a truck to drop it off.
Do viewers still care about Lady Liberty and its surroundings? HBO sure thinks so, which explains why they’ve got what sounds like 10 different series about New York City on their plate. [WWD]
When The Simpsons took over suburban 7-11s, we pointed and said, “Oooh, cute. Crusty-Os!” But now, with the movie’s DVD being released today, New York City must brace itself for an ugly onslaught of yellow marketing.
“Anyone in Midtown will find it difficult to miss the yellow-jacketed street teams, the “Simpsons on Ice” show at Bryant Park, the giant inflatable Homers and the Empire State Building lit up yellow in the landmark’s first-ever movie tie-in,” writes Variety. Not only is this evidence as to how smart some are to be moving their companies’ HQs to Hudson Square, but apparently, it’s evidence that New York once again has a relevant role in society.
You see, Will Smith’s running around the city looking for humans in I Am Legend scored big, Denzel Washington’s violent side in American Gangster got you hot and bothered in Harlem, and next year’s Sex and the City movie has attracted more interest than Samantha’s va-jay-jay could hope for.
So rejoice, Manhattan. You’re cool again. Just don’t mind Marge and Bart skating around Bryant Park.
Can you survive two days without being able to stick up your hand and scream “TAXI!” in the dirty and overcrowded recesses of midtown? Most likely! Fortunately, however, you won’t really have to since the “strike” only seems to have moderately diminished (rather than eliminated) the presence of yellow cabs circling around Manhattan.
That said, even in its early stages, Day 1 of the strike was not without its fair share of casualties, such as sort-of annoying Boston consultant Joshua Olken, who found himself stranded at Kennedy airport waiting in a slightly longer taxi line than usual this morning.
“There’s a lot of pieces of crap here for a lot of money,” Bass complains. “And I don’t think anyone here has any style. I was looking at fully furnished places and it was like, you can either have a bunch of floral prints or some dusty couch from the 1960s.”
Angry words! Especially coming from the self-proclaimed style connoisseur who once wore this. And this. And, lest we forgot, this.
In other news, does anyone else find it strange that the main advertiser for the Lance Bass Picture Gallery (at www.teenidols4you.com) is none other than…WSJ Online?
[via Queerty]
Editorial Director
