Category: etc.

Living in both towns for a few years, I should be used to this by now, but it never fails to amuse. The Washington Post dispatched a correspondent to uncover rumors of hipness in Williamsburg. Brooklyn. You know, to distinguish it from the expensively fabricated, “keepin’ it real” dress-up themepark built with lots of parental money:

… Grand Street is a rich gallery row: The “chess set” of pedophiles and their victims at Ch’i disturbed; a collection of deli coffee cups at City Reliquary amused; and Martin Gurfein’s kaleidoscopic scenes of daily life at the Hogar Collection dazzled….
…I assumed that the gig by Montreal’s Bell Orchestre would be a casual CD-hawking session in a corner of the shop. But Sound Fix hides a back room that’s like a slice of fin-de-sicle Vienna, a dimly lighted, sofa-filled bar/coffeehouse with pressed-tin walls. It was crammed with Billyburgers who clearly knew of the band…

With this much hipness sloshing around the scene, I predict that one day soon, someone will write a book about one of these young, edgy, emerging musicians, and it will be a smash.
No, Not That Williamsburg [wp via gawker]

I’m totally with her on the Calypso Hamptons hegemony, but for someone with spreads in Southampton and Montana [or is it Wyoming? or both?], Alex Kuczynski sure spends a lot of time thinking about Pottery Barn.
In the Sort-of Ethnic Home [nyt]

Regine posts about British designer Tom Hawes’ line of skateable street furniture which, despite having come about “by recognizing skateboarding as an unstoppable urban pathology,” makes me feel good. Finally, someone’s thinking of the children.
skateable furniture [via wmmna]

The sagest exegesis, however, comes from one of three short, squat, mushroom-Afro’d white teens who emerge from Royce Hall in Acid Mothers Temple T-shirts with ehhh-whatever sneers on their faces. “It’s not that I don’t like feedback,” one of them shrugs, clearly at the beginning of an aesthete’s lifelong journey of cred-proving. “It’s that I don’t like this feedback.”

Terry Riley’s birthday concert; armchair juroring Berlin’s baldfaced copy of the Turner Prize; the New Yorker Festival’s fashion panel.
It’s not all whipped cream these days at the Artforum Diary; there are some sweet berries of art experience there, too.
Deaf Jam [artforum diary]

Rang dang diggity dang-de-dang…
Just when you think this remix of George W. Bush covering “White Lines” couldn’t get any better, comes this line about two minutes in:

Some a**hole took a picture
of Kate Moss doing lines,
And now she’s being victimized
for imaginary crimes

White Lines, sung by a guy who knows [thepartyparty via waxy]

Rang dang diggity dang-de-dang…
Just when you think this remix of George W. Bush covering “White Lines” couldn’t get any better, comes this line about two minutes in:

Some a**hole took a picture
of Kate Moss doing lines,
And now she’s being victimized
for imaginary crimes

White Lines, sung by a guy who knows [thepartyparty via waxy]

This is apparently going down tonight, 9/18. I hope someone called craft services. Remember, you heard it here third:

The Los Angeles Lunar Society advocates the secession of Venice from the city of Los Angeles, and does not preclude the use of revolution to achieve this end. However, many Lunar Society members are involved in work of one kind or another for the Hollywood dream factory and we were therefore forced during August’s full moon meeting to recognize that a Venice revolution might interrupt some production schedules.

–An Army Of None [theresalduncan.typepad.com]

Garrison Keillor is going after Rex for his “A Prairie Ho Companion” t-shirts. As if Keillor wasn’t unfunny and annoying enough already.
A Prairie Homeboy Companion [mnspeak, via fimoculous: “oh yeah, I got cease and desisted.”]

For several months in 1999, it seemed the only reason I even had an email account was for sending and receiving copies of this article from The Onion. Then the chain was broken, The Onion had no online archive, &c., &c., no need to bore you with the details. Now that the paper has made their entire archive available online, I have a reason to log back in to my hotbot account. Thank you, The Onion!

“I was at the Olive Garden by Woodfield Mall,” Koechley said, “when I noticed a small sign stating that the restaurant was one of over 1,500 Olive Gardens nationwide. I didn’t think about it at first, but later on it hit me: There are only about 40 of them in Schaumburg. Where are all those others?”

Schaumburg Man Dimly Aware Of Shadowy, Non-Schaumburg World Out There [theonion.com via waxy]

“Reasons for ever wearing anything like this have nearly disappeared from my world, and yet I love this pervy and glam Christian Louboutin shoe.”
A quote from artist/screenwriter/NY-expat Theresa Duncan’s newly launched blog, The Wit of The Staircase [named after l’Esprit d’Escalier, French for “what you should’ve said instead”]. Like the protagonist in Patrice Lecomte’s sublime film, Ridicule, Duncan’s an observer/participant in the deeply superficial royal courts, only hers is Hollywood.
Perfect for playing Six Degrees when you need to go from Pynchon to Christian Lacroix.
The Wit of the Staircase [theresalduncan.typepad.com]

The other Greg Allen, I mean. The Chicago one. The Neo-Futurists, of which that Greg Allen is a co-founder, are performing next week at the Fringe Festival. What are they doing, you ask? The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen. It’s part of a Chicago fringe theater mob takeover of the East Village.
The Neo-futurist’s site has info on the production, while the Int’l Fringe NYC site has info on the performances. So break out that $20, and you get change back.

Walking along the street dividing Shibuya-ku and Minato-ku (ku’s are wards, as if the Lower East Side had its own government bureacracy), I was startled to find a life-sized bronze cast of Michelangelo’s David, as the central element in an ugly, low-rise concrete office building. There’s a granite plaque at the foot of the statue, but it only gives basic info on the original. And the stone’s grain is so pronounced, it’s nearly impossible to read. All very odd.

This is the entrance to the Women-only train car on the Tokyu line. There are enough pervs to require this sort of thing, it seems.
Meanwhile, although the Japanese have 42 different words for “excuse me,” there is no way to say “Rethink the hair.”