quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

how did we miss this

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/dining/28Date.html?ref=dining

WHEN Jenny Kirsten, a producer for the Food Network, went on her first date with Jason Beberman, a chef at Dressler in Brooklyn, they didn’t splurge on a multicourse dinner with wine pairings. Instead, they went to the Rusty Knot, a West Village bar that teeters between dive and chic, for picklebacks: a shot of whiskey with a pickle juice chaser. They split a gourmet chicken liver sandwich — with bacon and red onion marmalade — followed by a couple of Tecates with salt on the rim, and then played the free jukebox.

Whatever, it worked: a year later, they are still together. Now their idea of a romantic meal might be a burger at Back Forty, a neighborhood place in the East Village with epicurean credibility; the burger is made of grass-fed beef and comes with homemade ketchup. They prefer to sit at the bar.

“We can cut the burger and share the fries, and make a date-night toast,” Ms. Kirsten said. She sighed contentedly. “I’m too in love for my own good.”

holy shit

i get SO CLOWNED for chasing shots with pickle juice - shit just ELIMINATES THE COMPETITION tbh

highly recommended

Friend & I once were alternating shots of ALbertson's store-brand Heritage Vodka ($13 a handle) and pickle brine...it was like drinking gasoline.

Instead he and his wife, Sonja Johansson, a Feldenkrais practitioner, find romance in the fried chicken spots hidden on second floors in Koreatown.

the nytimes has this impressive ability to make everything fun seem lame

this second floor fried chicken spot is totally hidden except for the huge flashing sign outside

haha, yeah, apparently Ezra Klein follows this sort of stuff too. He linked to that story this morning with this:

Congrats to the New York Times trendspotting team, which has recently learned that young people occasionally go on dates to hip, trendy gastropubs as opposed to pricey, fussy French restaurants. Reporting!

a story about dates involving Gray's Papaya = something I would read

hot dog; hallway.

there should really be a hallway hot dog place

No results found for "halloway's hot dogs".

Ugh, I would never survive in a relationship founded on the principle of buying one meal and cutely splitting it in half.

this one puzzled me...she was too poor to visit her parents for the holidays, was eating Saltines and Kraft cheese, yet she also has an art collection she's slowly selling off, is taking her time to consider writing a book, and moved to Greenwich?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/opinion/25kolhatkar.html?_r=1&scp=31&sq=october+25+2009&st=nyt

It's not really suspicious that a former art gallery owner has an art collection, and it suggests she moved in with her boyfriend in Greenwich. Also there's a good chance she has debt from her failed business. Not that you should feel sorry for her, I just don't think there's anything puzzling there.

Becky, 43, is not one of the blonde wisps usually seen working at chic Manhattan art spaces — she has a big head of curly black hair and chunky eyeglasses.

she OWNED the gallery

lol everyone knows how rare it is to see people with chunky glasses at art galleries

thinking thats prob new york times style manual for "fattay"

big head

I dunno...she claims to have nothing, yet she also has an art collection (which she has the opportunity to sell off slowly), has the luxury of time to contemplate a new career and the possibility of writing a book...she's in a bad place to be sure, but I'm thinking a lot of people blindsided by this economy would be really envious of her predicament...

LOL you try getting an ex-gallerist to do a fire sale on the secondary market. It's the last thing they'd do because the artists in question have to hold value and they also get very, very pissed off when their work is sold like this.

huh? she's not the worst-suffering person in America therefore she deserves no pity? she was a self-made woman who lost her business/savings/apartment/purpose.

there's nothing in that article that suggests she's a bad person other than that she's dating an ex-finance guy, so I'm not sure why you're so keen on attacking her. so yeah, not all recession stories are poor people becoming poorer, sometimes it's upper-middle class people becoming lower-middle class...

Ilxors rag nyt about it because basically all of the lifestyles pieces there regarding the recession are about upper-middle class or rich people "suffering" somehow. It's not newsy and it's not even interesting reading, unless you want to say, "OMG, this is stupid. Tom, look at this." Brick and mortar trolls.

This week's episode of Frontline reminded me of this thread when I was watching it:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/closetohome/view/

xp - i dunno, maybe i'm overthinking it, but i feel like it's a weird mix of aspirational fantasy and schadenfreude, that yes, is blunted by repetition.

I think that's right.

Some of it is also "Oh how the mighty have fallen"

definitely - but the crux of these stories is - they haven't fallen all that far compared with "the rest of us."

basically all of the lifestyles pieces there regarding the recession are about upper-middle class or rich people "suffering" somehow.

to be fair (not that that's the overarching purpose of this thread), the art-gallery owner was part of an op-ed page package that also included this, this and this. none of which are necessary revelatory or gripping, but they mostly don't involve upper-middle-class or rich people.

His apartment is not “big and lush and grandiose,” he said, “but sometimes you want to have a ridiculous 150 people and a world-class D.J. in your basement.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/realestate/08cov.html

But these days, to afford these sexy-factor places, Mr. Seawood said, bachelors make concessions, either by sacrificing location or by “tag teaming,” as he calls subdividing a space. In previous years, for a $3,500-a-month one-bedroom, “I would have had a few solo guys. Now it’s like, ‘Me and my buddy are going to be here,’ ” he said.

sounds like Mr. Seawood has a rich fantasy life

a two-bedroom condominium in a new building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for which he paid $3,300 a month.

sentences like this make my head spin.

the $500,000 apartment purchase "on a decrepit block in Bushwick" is even more o_0

Uneasy lies the head that strolls a baby

Elsewhere:

Part of the appeal, in fact, is in how the clothes relate not to the runways or the estates of Europe, but to America’s heartland in ways that few fashions do. Country and city men alike have rediscovered old-school American brands like Filson, Orvis, L. L. Bean and Duluth Pack.

...wait, L. L. Bean 'rediscovered'?

Three webpages worth.

the best part about how quickly fashion trends change is that you can write the same article every 9-18 months and still have it be up-to-date

i always wonder what it must be like to write the least important articles for the newspaper of record. would i care more about writing the crappy content our would i still feel proud of where i did it?

the only luxurious aspect of my bachelor pad is that i don't have to pick up the laundry off the floor every day.

where do they find these people?

guys wanna see the front page washington post style story today?

the writers at the SF Chronicle must have internal competitions for who can write the puffiest puff piece.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/11/AR2009111127404.html?hpid=topnews

this was front page of the entire newspaper

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/11/AR2009111115683.html

The culprits could be anywhere -- a crowded train, an SUV on the Beltway

Naked things. Naked, noisy things, unfettered by the restraints of human anatomy
!!!!

Teenager Writes In Indecipherable Street Slang

hippos are pretty fucking important imo.

indecipherable

"where's my pancakes" is not that hard to understand? dude just wants some eats.

Nu-Americana has been a big trend for a couple of years now. Hard to imagine it's not on its way out.

ilx needs more hippos posting

I enjoyed it, though, because my lumberjack beard and flannel made me look fashion-forward rather than unkempt.