Oh sweet Jesus. People are trying to get Mayor Bloomberg’s girlfriend, Diana Taylor, to run for Senate, in Gillibrand’s seat. Why is New York state so insane?

Some historical perspective: A long time ago there was a magazine called CMJ New Music Monthly which came with a CD offering 15 or so recent tracks from generally obscure bands that pretentious young white people like myself favored back in the days when this nation was so carefree that its biggest obsession centered around a figure skater and her skeevy boyfriend who had attacked a rival figure skater and her friend Ron Goldman. Or something. Anyway, CMJ New Music Monthly was pretty great, because back before the Internet you had to rely on your friends or your local college radio station to find out about new bands, which was fine in theory except sometimes your friends tried to get you into shit like Infectious Grooves and the DJs at most college radio stations were unbearable because they affected these terribly desperate airs of terminal hipness even though, come on, you’re a fucking DJ at a college radio station, the only thing that could make you less cool is if you wrote for the newspaper. So sometimes the system broke down. And that’s why we were happy to have CMJ, even though it was kind of expensive and that one time they included that Youssou N’Dour collaboration with Neneh Cherry you kind of got the feeling they were doing it because they thought they were supposed to and not because they were super into it.

Anyway, at some point in 1994 I scrounged together some singles (which is what we used to call one dollar bills back when they were good for anything) and got the latest CMJ. The disc included the track “Strange Powers,” by a band called the Magnetic Fields, of whom I had not previously heard. It knocked me sideways. I mean, immediately, I was like, “This is a sound I need in my life from now on.” I went down to my local record store (an amazing place called Waterloo Records; younger readers are probably not familiar with the concept of the “record store,” but they were these terrific shops that had physical inventory on the premises for you to peruse and sometimes even listening stations where you could hear a record before you decided whether or not you’d buy it; to learn more about record stores, you can read a very amusing novel from the 20th century called High Fidelity by Nick Hornby) looking for Holiday, the album from which the song came, but it was on an obscure label called Feel Good All Over and they had to “special order” it for me, which was something else record stores did a hundred years ago. They did, however, have a copy of another Magnetic Fields album called Charm of the Highway Strip, which I immediately bought, and by the time the folks at Waterloo finally called me four weeks later to let me know Holiday had arrived, I had LIVED with Charm in a way you only can when you have not yet fully become an adult, to the point where all my friends were like, “I’ll drive, because if we go in Balk’s car we’re going to have to listen to that DRONY MOTHERFUCKER with the suicide voice,” which is true because that was pretty much all I played but also worked out well because even back then I liked to drink a lot so it was nice to know that basically I would be able to get hammered that night and not have to worry about transportation. Anyway, Holiday came and I did the exactly same thing I had done with Charm, which was listened to the fuck out of it.

I had no idea who Stephin Merritt or any of the other band members were, and because they didn’t get a lot of coverage in Spin or Rolling Stone, which were the Time and Newsweek of music magazines back in an era when being Time or Newsweek (or Spin or Rolling Stone) actually meant something to music (or magazines, or the wider culture), I didn’t learn a whole lot more about them. A couple of years later, having moved back to New York, I was in the HMV, a new-to-the-city chain record store that had a pretty good selection of imports (which is what we used to call records that were difficult to obtain because they came from other countries; can you imagine that people once lived like this?) and they had a new record from the band called Get Lost that I had no idea had come out but did not seem to be available in domestic form, at least at that particular HMV, so I shelled out for the French version (which, it turned out, had a different sequence from the American version, something strange that record labels used to do back when anyone actually paid attention to the running order of albums). It was a very different sounding record from Holiday and Charm: fuller, less machiney. And while it didn’t capture my heart the way the previous two did — and, really, how could it? You can only develop those kind of affections for a certain amount of time, and after that things just become preference — it was still pretty excellent. At some point after that I saw in the listings section of the New York Press — an alternative newspaper (and this may require the greatest feat of imagination of all on your part, young folks) that was actually quite vibrant and amusing at the time, even though half the jokes were of the button-pushing, “Hahahaha, you care about poor people, fuck you, loser!” variety — that the band was playing at Brownie’s, an old club with terrible acoustics on Avenue A — and this is JUST when that street had pretty much lost its edge because all of the white people who had moved down there to shoot heroin had wised up and decided that they could sell more records by doing rockabilly and Elvis impressions — that subsequently became a bar called HiFi. The band went on late, and Merritt was still drinking at the bar when his drummer Claudia Gonson yelled at him to get on the fucking stage already. I had never seen him before. He was TINY. I’m not sure how I ever pictured that disembodied voice, but it wasn’t that guy. Kind of shocking, really. Anyway, they did a cover of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” that night, and Merritt and Gonson had pretty much already established the stage patter that you see today, although he was a lot drunker then.

Then 69 Love Songs happened, and all of a sudden they were no longer my band, which was a stupid way to think about a group that I first learned about from the pages of a magazine that wound up inspiring the bowel-evacuatingly irritating music festival that plagues this city once a year, but we all have these ideas of “ownership” over certain things we love. Whatever, I was old enough at that point that I was happy for them. I wanted more people to hear them. I’m glad they got big. Or, you know, “big.” Watching them last night at Town Hall it was hard not to reflect on the fact that pretty soon it will be 20 years since I first heard of the band. Things change, I guess. Anyway, they put on a really great show. If you were there, maybe you heard me. I was the jackass who yelled “wooo” every time Gonson said, “This next song is from Charm of the Highway Strip.”

by Natasha Vargas-Cooper

Natasha: Can I ask you something?

Choire: Yes!

Natasha: Do you ‘get it’?

Natasha: Like Gaga overall.

Choire: I *largely* get it. I mean, obviously I groove on the, I guess, excitement level? And I don’t despise the music, although it’s remarkably unremarkable. But I get it!

Natasha: Good! Let’s talk about this videeeeoo.

Choire: You mean: the night the Internet exploded?

Natasha: The night of broken Internet glass. Did it shock you?!

Choire: Part of the excitement with this Important Short Film was that everyone was sort of group-excited? Like pockets of Twitter were going “kablammo” and definitely all of Tumblr that wasn’t talking about racism was like “UM TELEPHONE”?

Natasha: Which in itself is pretty mind-swaying is as how this is over a MUSIC VIDEO — a medium which was sacrificed largely by its maker

Choire: And not one made by actual prisoners in the Philippines or whatever. There’s one thing that happened last night.

Choire:

Tom Scocca: I have not even watched.
Choire: Is a Tarantino pastiche mostly?
Tom Scocca: So… pastiche pastiche?

Choire: Which: right. So can we start with talking about Tarantino??? Who you and I are both largely on the same page about which is: yes please, QT.

Natasha: So a Tarantino pastiche — about ladies.

Choire: Right, the lady element is key. And I do wonder why the video is sort of like way more than just a tribute to Tarantino??

Natasha: So you have the pussy wagon, the girls bent on vengance, the kind of altered state feel of the whole thing a-la- Natural Born Killers —

Choire: Um and you have the HAIRDO on Beyonce from Death Proof, etc. On and on.

Natasha: Tarantino visuals are kind of a lingua franca to the youth organically.

Choire: Because your generation grew up all on him?

Natasha: Yep exactly. But what I think offsets everything, in a good way, is the LADYNESS of it.

Choire: Yes! That’s what’s I love and also what takes us back to Madonna again.

Natasha: She resonates with the ladies so furrriously. I think that it’s largely because she comes out of theater instead of being a recording artist. The one way to snap your audience awake is by being grotesque. In the traditional sense of the term. Outrageous and over the top. Transgressive. And speaking of trans!

Natasha: The girl on girl trope is so tired but here we have here surrounded by surly dykes, leathery cholas, and forbidding black ladies. So here’s where it gets transgressive because unlike say Madge, who leaned over and kissed Britney on a “GEE ARENT ME NAUGHTY” trip.

Choire: Well, you know, I *just* looked through Madonna’s 1992 “Sex” book the other day. Because we found the opened and the unopened copies in the back of the closet. (Which: LOL, gays!)

Natasha: Were you scandalized?

Choire: Oh America came to a standstill back in 1992. I mean it was on the TV and stuff and there was “shock.”

Natasha: Tell me what is was like the Before Time, Pa.

Choire: Well, you must not forget that people were enraged about “Beavis and Butthead.”

Natasha: How do the “Sex” and “Telephone” compare in terms of visuals?

Choire: A WHOLE LOT of the imagery we’re seeing in today’s Very Important Video is not that different? Weird race spectre stuff, lesbian hot making-out, bondage, etc. etc. The thing I like more about the Gaga video is the color super-saturation and the timely updates. Also the Steven Meisel stuff in the “Sex” book was all very “arty”? Like, post Bruce Weber arty? Which didn’t age particularly well. And “Telephone” might not age well but it does look very NOW. And it’s more camp and outrageous and jokey, I mean, SMOLDERING CIGARETTE EYEGLASSES, which, I am still LOLing. The Madonna book was sometimes humorous but it was never like “HA HA SUCKA!”

Natasha: Yeah, what the Video definitely had was our Black President calls the fierce urgency of NOW-WOW! To it. I’d also say that while “Sex” was a scandal it was all highbrow.

Choire: Oh yes. It was Very Upscale.

Natasha: Like it was, here’s a serious art piece libertine adults could put on the coffee table. Where as this is sticky crude pop — in the tradition of Tarantino. Like YAAAAYYYYY GET CRZYYY ON YOUR (VIRGIN MOBILE) TELEPHONE!! Let’s talk about GaGa as a sex symbol. Because I think that’s what makes her so important that she 1) actually does something different 2) and what she does is scary and exciting.

Choire: You know, Madonna spent most of the early 90s dealing with her trademark. She tried to get Club Madonna, the famous strip club in Miami Beach, to change its name; when she started Maverick Records, she paid a band called The Mavericks $25,000 for the name; she got into it with Madonna Jewelers for the trademark of the name. And I cannot EVER see Gaga being involved in something like that? She seems more like a cult leader than a business entity, and that’s where Gaga is more interesting to me (despite maybe being a worse musician???) and what keeps her scary and funny and fun.

Natasha: Yeah. Her music is unremarkable. Except it is perfect dancing in your bedroom music for girls. Which is something we all do.

Choire: Sure we do! Look, that product is EAR CANDY. What’s amazing though is that if you listen to Britney Spears’ last two records, the production is radically more inventive and challenging than Gaga? And yet Britney is dullsville.

Natasha: This is where I think the theater thing matters. She’s a performer first. Not a PR construct. Also, there is so much more honesty in GaGa’s game.

Choire: Well she’s her own construct. And sure, from Day One: Fame Monster, hello. Wait, can I tell you my fave thing about the video? Speaking of transgression? It’s from the director’s Wikipedia page: “Jonas Ã…kerlund was a Masonic member of the Swedish black metal band Bathory from 1983 through 1984 and openly worships Satan.”

Natasha: You see, people take the Viking Metal Genre for granted. It’s at their own peril.

Choire: FOR REAL.

Natasha: I think the reason why people, espesh, ladies of their mid twenties, are excited about Gaga as much as they are…

Choire: TELL ME ABOUT THE YOUNGS.

Natasha: …is that we matured during the Britney Days.

Choire: Oh, because you were all raised on crap and Nickelback!

Natasha: Madge was already brittle and creepy and a fading icon.

Choire: Whereas we had Kate Bush.

Natasha: Snd so here comes Gaga who has the kind of shamelessness of a reality tv star. In the sense that she’s like “BOOM. MAKE ME FAMOUS.” Which seemed a taboo thing in the before Britney? Who was like, “I just love to sing yall (covered in oil, grinding on a giant snake.” And not only that but instead of the virgin slut bullshit.

Choire: I guess at least you guys had Tori Amos. But right. None of the “girls” in your time were allowed to be like, MAKE WAY BITCHES. Or be like, “I’m a horny lady!”

Natasha: We get the pain/pleasure. scary / twisted. And Tori was for Wiccans at my high school.There was Garbage and Manson. But every one was trying to hard to build their brand on shock or being an outsider. The triumph of GaGa is how mainstream she is.

Choire: The time now was right. And that stuff plays very well on Long Island, “IN DA CLUB.”

Natasha: And ultimately, she clearly doesn’t think girls will run screaming if she frenches a leathery dyke!

Choire: WHICH, WHO KNEW?

Natasha: AND as a fan? That makes me feel good! Gaga trusts me! Gaga ain’t talking down to me! Gaga knows I like it rough! BECAUSE MOST GIRLS DO!

Choire: *runs, hides*

Natasha: **eats blood**

Choire: Well what seems great to me is that the lingering effects of Riot Grrrl are still with us. Like this video wouldn’t have been set to dance music 15 years ago! But then it also wouldn’t have co-starred who I guess is the MOST POPULAR SINGER of our day? But when you look at it, everything in it is punk, from the Klaus Nomi outfit in the “strutting down the jail” scene, to the chains, to the vinylwear, reminiscent of the late great Poly Styrene and company.

Natasha: And yet it maintained the girly fantasy aspect of it — like some half clad broads running around in bras being BAD.

Choire: Totes. And more ephemerally, the “attitude.” Also you know KILLING EVERYONE. Ha. But can we talk about Beyonce? Because that part is baffling to me!

Natasha: Yes B is, how we say, PROBLEMATIC.

Choire: She has always been so image conscious? And always willing to rip her kit off down to panties basically, but you know, “classy”-like.

Natasha: What I find interesting is the GROWL. Like she can do that empowered black woman angry growl? Snd she does it on the track. But she has no VISUAL GROWL. Fierce but not scary.

Choire: Because she’s sort of winking and backing away. She’s the good girl who hangs out with the bad girls sometimes.

Natasha: She’s not ugly and doesn’t know how to be. And let’s be honest. Gaga is average looking.

Choire: OH sure. That’s why I like her. I mean she’s emaciated. And she cleans up real pretty. But she’s One of Us. (Not you, honey, you’re gorgeous.)

Natasha: Oh I’m mistaken for Beyonce all the time. But Gaga, she does her make up like broken cabaret dancer! A woman on the edge! In a society that is falling! I also love the cyclical nature of her videos.

Choire: Well right, she loves drama. All she wants to make are dramatic moments. My problem with the Gags is that she’s all tableaux? And hence there’s some cyclicalism, yes.

Natasha: Like she’s angry! She’s kissing! She’s dancing! She’s making food! She’s killing!

Natasha: Which for ladies, is how WE FEEELLL. We don’t feel like Britney crucified by our own fame.

Choire: I have always wondered What It Is Like For A Girl. (In your Rhythm Box, etc.)

Natasha: It’s like that! We have cycles!A vibrant pastiche of emotions!!! That can kill!! So I think that’s why she resonates so much. I feel like she gets lady-ness from the inside and then paints it with fashion and music and images. Also, QUIT CALLING ME IM DACINNNNN’. And poor Yonce, who is a dynamic performer and force of her own, seems stilted and two dimensional. Because, well, she kinda is!

Choire: But she’s the Actressess!

Natasha: Oof please. Let’s talk about the ‘acting.’ It was so John Waters to me! Beyonce is no good. But the dialogue, the super unnatural way it was delivered, the cheesey lines…. It was all so Crybaby.

Choire: You mean: Broad Strokes? But most of that was Tarantino too? A little John Waters? Where they meet, in camp heaven? My favorite stilted camp part is Gaga waiting tables, just standing there. Like, GREAT BRECHTIAN ACTING.

Natasha: YES!!!!

Choire: Hence the countdown in German? IDK!

Natasha: ALL BRECHT ALL THE TIME!! There is that 90’s vitality that they’ve exploited, without feeling retro. It feels new.

Choire: Could you do me the favor of rating your top three Tarantino movies in order?

Natasha: This is like my Sophie’s CHOICE!!

Choire: “LOL”

Natasha: 1. Pulp, 2. Inglorious, 3. Kill Bill 2.

Choire: I don’t think we should ever talk again!

Choire: Mine goes: 3. Inglorious Basterds 2. Death Proof 1. Jackie Brown

Natashia I think what the Tarantino and gaga have in common is that an angry woman, a jilted woman, bent on doling out justice to those who done her wrong is something the two get and show well and seem to believe that women have a higher moral authority. So when they got done wrong, they do bad! Snd not bad in the ‘oops my bras showing spank me’ way.

Choire: Yeah, that coy little girl BS.

Natasha: But bad like put me in jail and pump iron with cholas and then go on a glorious blood soaked rampage. THE SANGUINE SEX.

Choire: Finally, I do find something angry making: that they promise “to be continued.” Cuz you know that is a lie.

Natasha: They repurpose the pussy wagon! I believe that they will! I think this just means future collaborations, if Yonce can keep up (doubtful). I’m seeing Rihanna as a drifter, with John Mayer’s sacrificial head on a spike. Also, one last thing, and I’m not sure where it fits in, but girls want to be famous. It’s the same reason as teenagers we stare at ourselves for hours in the mirror, and make photo collages on out notebooks, and tend so diligently to our MySpace pages.

Choire: Isn’t that about “attention”?

Natasha: Beyond that. We want an audience. An adoring audience. This is something a lot of girls grow out of. But I think it’s a very teenage desire.

Choire: You were all jeals of the lonelygirl.

Natasha: MMMHMMMM But the kind of fame Britney had? That was terrifying and not real. Something about the way GaGa does it makes me feel 15 again lip synching in the mirror and pretending there’s an audience on the other side.

Natasha: I just realized that’s what my Tumblr is.

Choire: Well of COURSE that’s what EVERYONE’S Tumblr is!

Choire: But also this kind of fame? It involves your skin being scrubbed digitally in every single frame, because, MAN.

Choire: And anyway yeah, what do you people think you’re doing on the Internet? You’re starring in your own music video!

Natasha: Jerking off on Chatroullette?

Natasha: Oh one more thing. What did you think about the dick joke? And how the dick rumor is still like the favorite gag of a certain website

Choire: Oh, I enjoyed it, though I thought it wasn’t narratively consistent with the clearly delineated lesbianism of the matrons? I have a lot of thoughts on the rest of that whole issue which I plan to put forward at a later time! It is, as they said in the 90s, “problematic.”

Natasha: I think that reaction to her is the strangest.

Choire: Well and it’s pretty obviously phobic right?

Natasha: Yes! And a testament of how she’s grinding up against sexual norms that make people uneasy while selling millions of records. Pretty spectacular.

Choire: In the end? The fashion in this video is IMPECCABLE.

Natasha: OH. BEYOND.

Choire: And that’s sort of all I care about!

Natasha: I see all movie fashions” Chinatown, Dr. Strangelove, Rocky Horror Fishnets — then the high concept hats!

Choire: It’s ALL good. There is nothing in there that is not good. And that’s the true victory of this joint.

Natasha: Yes. It belongs to the ages.

by Dan Kois

Are you looking for an authentically grim Russian culture experience, but don’t have 12 hours and ferry fare to Governors Island to spare? A new graphic novel by Kevin Baker — the historical novelist behind such Brooklyney favorites as Dreamland — brings an ex-Russian soldier to Coney Island and gets him wrapped up with the local mob. It also calls to mind a recent, similar, much better comic, which was mostly ignored when it first came out but is finally available in collected form.

In Baker’s Luna Park, Alik — at loose ends, damaged by the disastrous war in Chechnya — winds up an enforcer for the Russian mob, and plans one final job that might get him and his lover, Marina, out of the life. It’s a time-honored plot, and Baker carries it off pretty well. And the novel’s embrace of the ghosts that haunt Russian storytelling is enthusiastic and gutsy, even if it doesn’t work all the time. It’s mostly worth recommending for the strength of Croatian-born Zezelj’s high-contrast artwork, which is so vivid and beautiful that it fills in the gaps in Baker’s story with authority.

It’s impossible to read Luna Park, though, and not remember Brett Lewis’ The Winter Men. Originally published to minuscule sales and attention by DC’s WildStorm imprint in 2005 and 2006, the series shares with Luna Park arresting, sharp-edged artwork (by John Paul Leon), a fascination with Russian history, and a hero whose psychic scars from Chechnya nearly send him over a cliff. The difference? Winter Men is grim and hilarious where Luna Park is just grim. It’s also a fantastic mystery, a gripping adventure, and — in the end — a not-unwelcome spin on the Superman story.

Kris Kalenov is a fixer for Moscow’s mayor, living down the ignoble end of his military career, which was spent in a secret unit called the Winter Men. When a little girl is kidnapped from an apartment by ex-Spetznaz mercenaries, Kalenov investigates, and finds his curiosity piqued by the professionalism of the job, and by the girl’s tiny handprints charred into the paint by her crib. She’s not just a kid — she’s a weapon.

What follows is part action movie, part boozy picaresque, as Kalenov — accompanied by some of his old compatriots, including Nina the assassin, Nikki the pig-fucker, and Drost the soldier — searches for the girl, and those who took her, from Brooklyn to Siberia and back to Moscow. The Winter Men also serves as an amazingly detailed look at the way a kleptocracy works, as Kalenov expertly navigates not just Mafiya meetings and back-alley knife-fights but the mayor’s office and debriefings with the CIA. He helps Nikki the gangster defend the business under his “roof,” and fights a Russian superhero that some thought imaginary.

The centerpiece of the book, though, is “Citizen Soldiers,” a standalone story that barely mentions the little girl, the Winter Men, or other major plot points of the series. Instead, it follows Kalenov and Nikki through a long, vodka-soaked day as they conduct bizness, steal a table from McDonald’s for Nikki’s breakfast nook, grab a guy some lady-judge wants brought in on charges, and exchange Soviet-style wisdom, witticisms, and fisticuffs.

“Citizen Soldiers,” like all of The Winter Men, is charming and funny, and surprising, and brutal. Its ending will flat-out kill you. It is the best short story in any medium I’ve read in years. And the whole book is almost as good.

Dan Kois writes about movies and plays and non-comic books, too. Also, he has a new book out, about that Hawaiian guy with the ukulele.

“Indeed, while landing a large plane on a highway might seem easier than, say, landing one in the Hudson River, history suggests that’s not necessarily so.”
–The more you know…. THE LESS YOU WANT TO KNOW.

Okay, let’s see what we got here: Adorable animal in jeopardy? Check. Mournful average folks expressing their emotions? Uh huh. Deep, meaningful pauses in narration from the reporter? That’s a big 10–4. Yes, folks, I think we may very well have located the platonic ideal of a local news clip. I’m glad we were all able to experience this moment together.

An extremist Orthodox Jewish organization has written a letter to Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli asking her not to marry her non-Jew American boyfriend, Leonardo DiCaprio.

In the letter, as Haaretz reports, a representative of the Israeli nationalist group Lehava writes:

“It is not by chance that you were born Jewish. Your grandmother and her grandmother did not dream that one of their descendants would one day remove the family’s future generations from the Jewish people. Assimilation has forever been one of the enemies of the Jewish people.”

But wait. It was my understanding that it’s the mother’s Jewness that matters in this regard. I myself am half-Jewish. But on my father’s side. So while I was raised Jewish, went to temple and Hebrew school and all that, when it came time for me to be bar mitzvahed, the rabbi said I would have to be officially converted beforehand, in a ceremony that would involve me being ritually RE-CIRCUMCISED at the advanced, yet still very tender in some ways, age of thirteen years old!!! Now, if you think for one minute that there was any way in hell I was going to let those crazy motherfu… Well, let’s just say that another rabbi, a family friend, was able to pull some strings and and sign some papers and I stayed far away from the mohel’s glistening blade. Anyway, even after I was bar mitzvahed, on a trip to Israel almost ten years later, I was stopped at a gate near the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem by an orthodox guy who started asking me all these questions about my family and when I told him that my mom was, in fact, Christian, he wouldn’t let me into the area nearest the wall. If my mother had been Jewish, he said, it would have been okay. So what’s going on? Wouldn’t Bar Rafaeli’s children be automatically Jewish under Jewish law, by virtue of her Jewish womb, despite the traife, goyishe seed it incubated?

Also, isn’t it strange that boys have a “bar” mitzvah and girls have a “bat” mitzvah and yet Bar Rafaeli is named Bar? Wouldn’t that be like an Italian guy being named, like, Bella Donna? Woah. Wait a minute. Is Bar Rafaeli actually a man?!

Word on the new Goldfrapp record: “It’s by no means their best album, then — that accolade may for ever belong to Felt Mountain in 2000. But on a sunny day with an unbroken stretch of road ahead of you and the desire to remember the gauzy, giggly languor of new love, this is the one you’ll reach for.” I’ll take it.

Union Square’s sad transformation into Times Square proceeds apace: Construction to turn the former Zen Palate space into a TGI Friday’s is in full swing, while uptown barbecue chain Brother Jimmy’s has already opened and is happy offering sustenance to suit-wearing douchebags for whom the cuisine of Heartland Brewery is a bit too “ethnic” or “challenging.” If you stand on the corner of 16th and Union Square East, you will find yourself victimized by the cruel tyranny of choice: Which of the two equidistant glazed dough providers wares will pad your colon, Tim Horton’s or Dunkin Donuts? Don’t worry about the calories: A brisk trot across the park to Starbucks will give you some much needed exercise, and should there be a line you can return to the east side, where another Starbucks helpfully awaits. (Those of you working on advanced fitness routines will want to go the extra avenue to the Starbucks on 3rd.) Not all of the changes are for the worse, though: This weekend marks the resumption of Daylight Saving Time, when the clocks are set one hour ahead. This is excellent news for the giant monstrosity which hovers above the former Virgin Records: Having been off by an hour for the entire winter, it will finally display the correct time, give or take a couple of minutes, once more. It’s the little things!

It’s the American dream: a 47-year-old man can, in Las Vegas, while wearing Birkenstock sandals to work, earn $150 an hour. There is some sex involved but really, how is this not appealing as a lifestyle choice?