by The Awl

Who saves New York City’s trees from the menace of plastic bags? Meet the bag snaggers of the Bette Midler-founded New York Restoration Project. A short film by Aaron Reiss and Jamie Hefetz of Citizen Productions. Music by C418 and Magic Man.

★★★★ Once the soporific effect of the feeble morning light had been shaken off enough to allow a look outside, there was one window of blue in the thick gray overhead. Then sun poured forth from the east, for a moment. Over time, the clouds declined from near-totality to a mere majority, and one declining in influence. By afternoon, it was sunny enough to make a stroll to the river seem like a good idea. Sparrows twittered in the trees beside West End Avenue, by which point the sun had forgotten about the walk idea and vanished behind a cold gray cloud. Wind blowing crosstown forced the jacket and the coat to be zipped up. Gulls swarmed someone feeding them, on a spur where the walking path looped out over the river. A pigeon sat upright and flared out its feathers, impersonating a hawk. Sunlight was falling on the water somewhere down in the 50s, and more sun shone off the western tower of the George Washington Bridge. Finally some of it reached the pier. Garbage and debris floated freely by the shore where the ice had been, and gulls bobbed on the surface. The visible surface of New Jersey lay in shadow, though glory rays raked over it far in the southern distance. The wind on Riverside Boulevard was worse than the wind on the actual side of the river.

by Jeva Lange

“I woke up one morning recently to discover I was a seventy-year-old man….”
 — David Cronenberg’s intro to a new translation of The Metamorphosis.

Be sure to leave this book around everywhere/wave it at people/flaunt it on the subway because A. this cover is amazing and B. everyone will think that you think you’re really smart. And, if you get bored, you can read it! It’s good! Also, David Cronenberg!

“[M]en today have learned the lesson the hard way that if you act like a kind of an old fashioned guy’s guy, you’re in constant danger of slipping out and saying something that’s going to get you in trouble and make you look like a sexist or make you look like you seem thuggish or whatever. That’s the atmosphere in which he operates. This guy is very much an old fashioned masculine, muscular guy, and there are political risks associated with that. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but that’s how it is.”

Maybe Bigfoot Is Letting Himself Get Seen In Michigan In Hopes That Someone Will Get Him The Hell Out Of Michigan

I’m sure this highlights my coastal urban elitism, but I had to Google ghillie suit. Turns out it’s just the actual word for those, like, 3D camouflage pajamas. You know, with the twigs and fake grass on them? Whatever, I am happy to have learned something today.

Soon this town will be so lousy with Liquterias that even the urine you step over will be loaded with wheatgrass.

This has gotta be some kind of Handmaid’s Tale-type trap, right?

by Matthew J.X. Malady

Shit’s getting real at JFK AIRPORT. I just took off my shoes and also my hair’s all fucked up and I just smoked in the goddamn bathroom.

— lennypane (@lennypane) January 6, 2014

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, documentary filmmaker Penny Lane tells us more about a bad airport experience she recently mentioned on Twitter.

Penny! So what happened here?

I am going to Salt Lake City to show Our Nixon at the Utah Film Center. Super short trip. As usual, I get to the airport insanely early, because I am both anxious and stupid. I get to JFK at 4:00 p.m. for a 7:20 p.m. flight, and find out it’s been delayed until 11:30 p.m.

I am sanguine. I have a book to read (The Luminaries — it’s really good!), and I’ve got some flirty things and gossip things going, text-wise, so killing time is no big deal.

I tell friends I’m delayed at JFK, and they all say, “Get drunk!” This is what everyone tells you to do if you’re bored in an airport. “DEFINITELY GET DRUNK!” It’s really stupid advice.

I order a Negroni ($12) from one of those iPad things, and I drink it in like five minutes, because Negronis are delicious. So I order another one, and there’s a button you can click to “double” it for only $3 more, so I do that. And then I did that again. Because: delicious. And: “Get drunk!”

As soon as those three drinks are gone, I am too drunk to read The Luminaries, which knocks out most of the entertainment menu. I’ve only managed to fill 90 minutes of my seven-hour wait. I eat some horrible shrimp thing, and then drink more Negronis. Why did I choose to get drunk so expensively? Because no expense should be spared in alleviating my boredom. Ever.

Now 4G and Wi-Fi aren’t working, probably because of all the thousands of other people sitting at JFK because of flight delays. I can connect sporadically, but not for long.

This is the worst state of affairs. It’s better to have no internet than to have sporadic internet. Sporadic internet makes me feel that there is nothing in the entire world more important than checking my email. Also, what if someone is trying to flirt with me via text message??????

I’m too drunk to read, there’s no internet, I have no videos on my laptop for the first time in my entire life, and I have like three more hours, and my neck hurts from craning over my phone trying to CHECK MY FUCKING EMAIL. This is when I decided I should smoke in the bathroom. You want me to go on?

Yes! So were you super stealthy about smoking in the bathroom, or was it the case that you were so fed up and frazzled that you just didn’t worry about appearances at that point? And did anyone say anything to you about it?

I sat on the toilet and after much deliberation concluded that I could hide the click of the lighter with the flushing sound.

I have like three puffs and then I hear someone in the next stall saying something in Spanish, which is definitely, “I’m going to call the authorities because some asshole is smoking in here!” (I don’t speak Spanish.) I rapidly flush the cigarette and wait for my detention to commence. When she leaves, I repeat the process, but this time I only get one puff in, because there’s a little girl in here now, and you shouldn’t smoke in front of kids. Then one more time I do this, but suddenly there are a lot of people in here and this is not really fun.

I walk to another bathroom in what I think is a less-crowded terminal, but once I get settled in my stall, I notice it smells so strongly of vomit that I decide I’d better just go outside to chain smoke next to an idling bus, since going through security again will be a nice way to kill some more time.

Lesson learned (if any)?

The lesson is that “GET DRUNK!” is a dumb idea if you’re stuck in an airport. Being in an airport drunk is NOT FUN AT ALL! Plus, then you have to get on a plane dehydrated, a little sick, and having to pee all the time. A better plan would have been to just read my book and drink, like, tea.

Just one more thing….

While drunk, I spotted a vending machine with fancy travel-sized toiletries and swiped my card for a $30 Malin+Goetz kit. Every single item in that stupid kit is garbage, and the facial lotion gave me hives. Caveat emptor!!!

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

“de Blasio accepts that today’s rich and powerful will continue to be rich and powerful; he just thinks they should do more to help the rest of us. Warren questions the very legitimacy of their wealth and power.”

I have what barely even counts as the semblance of a theory (because to even tease it out a bit would require more effort than it really deserves) about how as all kinds of distinction break down in the way we are exposed to music and the contexts for which it serves as cue or soundtrack all sorts of genres and styles will come together in some kind of pop singularity. As I said, half-assed at best and, like so many of my other speculations, almost certainly incorrect. Still, I can’t help but thinking there’s maybe the tiniest bit of something to it when I listen to this track, which I once would have enjoyed ironically but now just enjoy. [Via]