How can you not drink in January when drinking is the only thing that makes January bearable?

A very happy 50th to Nicolas Kim Coppola, an actor so idiosyncratic that you might assume YouTube was invented solely to host video compilations like the one above. While I have you: Is Birdy one of the most underrated movies of the last 30 years? It says here yes.

Local blogger Jon Nicosia also happens to have a long history as a con artist. He came out today, because Capital New York has been reporting on him, and he wanted to get “ahead of the story.” (He works for a site called Mediaite, a publication of, by and for TV talking face Dan Abrams.)

In one incarnation, Nicosia — whose name is Zachary Hildreth — swindled investors in a fairly classic investment con. (At 24, he was indicted on 11 counts of grand larceny; then, in January of 2001, he was indicted for two counts of larceny.)

In a later and more disturbing incarnation, he serially seduced gay men, stole their money, and then, when confronted, turned “violent and abusive.”

In his “confession” today, Hildreth writes: “in 2005, I was back in the spotlight when my ex-boyfriend was charged with a crime against me (he was found not guilty).” That’s a pretty short summary. In general, when you read Nicosia’s story, you think: hey, good for him! It’s great when people move on with their lives! (And that is true, and I hope he has.) But mostly you get that sensation because it’s a fairly self-serving story. (As all our stories of ourselves are, sure.)

In 2006, Hildreth actually testified in trial against one of the men he’d conned, who was up on assault charges, because Hildreth said he was attacked; a “jury will decide whether a former emergency room physician from Weymouth charged with slashing the neck of his boyfriend with a shard of glass was an assailant or a victim,” wrote the The Patriot Ledger. So yes, at this trial, Hildreth’s boyfriend was found not guilty of attacking him. But the trial was as nasty as can be, with the attorney for Hildreth painting the boyfriend as a crazy drug addict who believed in aliens. (The boyfriend “said it was Hildreth who talked of aliens from space, at one point claiming to be one, and that he did not believe him.”)

Can you imagine getting charged with assault and losing your license to do your job and then being painted as a crazy in court, all because you started sleeping with some dude you met online who was lying about his name and pretty much everything else?

In any event, that doctor is practicing medicine today, which makes it pretty obvious that Hildreth was just devoted to the con and would say anything to ruin his life. Bay Windows made a pretty convincing case about how this situation was a classic example of law enforcement being unable to identify the aggressor in same-sex domestic abuse situations. Hildreth, totally unable to let it go, then filed a civil suit against the doctor. Pretty sick shit.

UPDATE

On the afternoon of January 9th, Nicosia sent out a mass email. (He did not respond to solicitations to speak on the record; his employers would only communicate via vague and sweeping off-the-record emails, but I think it’s safe to say that they wished to dispute these characterizations, which were previously reported by the former incarnation of the now-defunct Blade.) Here is his statement in full, which adds to the record that there was a settlement in the civil suit mentioned above, but does not elaborate on any other incidents.

Following my confession about past bad behavior in my life there has been an enormous amount of reporting into my background and past. Some of it true, much of it inaccurate. I felt my heartfelt piece placed on the record was everything I wanted to say.

But some of these stories have accused me of wrongdoing and even criminal conduct in connection with a 2005 incident with my then boyfriend. The record is clear that he, not I, was prosecuted and tried for assault with a deadly weapon. To this day I live with the physical scars from that incident.

This was the same district attorney’s office that had prosecuted me previously for crimes I described in my piece. There is no doubt that if they thought or even suspected that I had engaged in criminal conduct, I would have been the one on trial, not him. My boyfriend was eventually acquitted and we settled a civil lawsuit I filed against him. We have both moved on with our lives. Again, I am trying to move on with mine.

Thanks..

Is Britain full of ferret thieves? In a country where the prime minister can honor his barber for “services to hairdressing” I suppose anything is possible.

by Ben Dolnick

On the off chance that you haven’t yet decided which unrealistically ambitious exercise regimen to undertake this winter, I’d like to make a pitch for one that might seem, initially, only a few ticks less dubious than a fat-melting jiggle machine. I speak of FOCUS T25, the latest set of workout DVD’s from Shaun T., former Mariah Carey-backup dancer and creator of both INSANITY and Hip-Hop Abs. These DVD’s aren’t just the best workouts you’ll encounter in 2014; they may — and I’m pretty sure this is not just the endorphins talking — be the best works of art you’ll encounter all year too.

For months a friend had been recommending T25 to me, but I’d resisted. There was the idea of mail-order DVDs, first of all, which seemed (along with CD box sets and Microsoft Encarta) a relic of the age of shrieking modems. Then there was the price (three monthly payments of $39.95, not including shipping and handling). And finally there was the website for Beachbody LLC — the company responsible for Shaun T.’s DVD sets, not to mention Brazil Butt Lift — which, with its reek of protein powder and sleaze, could just as well have featured a banner reading, OUR BUSINESS MODEL DEPENDS UPON THE SAD AND GULLIBLE.

A more basic skepticism, though, was that I had no interest, really, in becoming fit in the way that T25 seemed to promise. The ads were full of taut, desiccated women and men who resembled erect penises, throbbing with Red Bull and fury. I’ve always been basically content having a body that’s just, you know, a body. Capable of most of the things I ask it to do, as long as those things don’t involve extreme weights or touching my toes. It and I have long had an unspoken understanding: it will behave itself, and I won’t ask more of it than is strictly necessary.

But curiosity and the terrifying ease of One-Click ordering eventually prevailed. Soon all nine discs, not to mention a complimentary resistance band and nutrition plan, were arrayed on my living room carpet. I felt the same wave of post-consumer regret and sadness I felt upon first using the Power Glove as a child: reality is always so much more dismal than the advertisement.

This disappointment lasted until precisely the moment that I popped in a disc and chose, more or less at random, a workout called Speed 1.0. What you see on your screen, when you begin a FOCUS T25 workout, is a group of five or six highly fit adults arranged around the kind of brightly lit, wood-floored gym that you might find in a suburban mansion’s basement (a suburban mansion that just happened to have T25 printed in six-foot neon letters over one wall). At the front of the group, wearing a tank-top and an earpiece microphone, stands Shaun T.

Shaun T., in case you haven’t made his acquaintance, is that rarest of combinations: he’s as fit as the diagram on a piece of exercise equipment, and he manages to project the ease and kindness of an ideal therapist. Most extremely fit people seem, after you’ve watched them for a minute or two, like one of those life-sized cardboard figures with the head cut out — you see past the impressive physique to the inner self (scrawny and sallow, doughy and angry) that the muscles were meant to hide. Shaun T.’s inner self, you get the sense, has a six-pack. In the middle of a set of up-and-overs, he can barely contain his smile.

Within a minute or two of starting, you realize that T25 is not one of those self-improvement schemes in which you’re told one weird trick for burning belly-fat, or told to sit in a chair that will trick your metabolism. It’s actual exercise, genuinely difficult. Squats and pushups and Russian dance type kicks. The minutes seem to contain more seconds than ordinary minutes — you check the clock, thinking you must be about halfway through, only to find that twenty-two minutes and thirty-seven seconds remain. You reconsider the entire endeavor.

Which is exactly, as it happens, where the workout-DVD-as-art concept comes in, because the success of FOCUS T25 depends, as much as in any novel on the Modern Library Top 100 list, on the willing suspension of disbelief.

If you’re going to get through the many valleys of despair that punctuate each of these workouts, then Shaun T. needs for you to accept the premise — accept in the same way that you accept that there really once was a young man from North Dakota named Jay Gatz, or that Anna Karenina really did fling herself under a train — that he, Shaun T., can, physical reality be damned, see you, and that he cares deeply what you’re doing.

This is, of course, a common artifice. Every time a QVC host looks into the camera and tells you that there are only five of these bracelets left in stock, or when Ira Glass tells you that you really owe it to yourself to just pick up the phone and donate already, your social circuitry is undergoing an attempted hijacking; you will, if they’re doing their jobs, hear them not as strangers in studios but as friends. This job is, I’m going to posit, a great deal harder than it seems. No TV infomercial, however much I might long for an easier way to chop vegetables, has ever inspired in me anything other than a vague sadness. No chummy NPR host has ever convinced me to do anything other than change the station.

But Shaun T., in addition to his physical gifts, is a genius at the peculiar art of cultivating a connection with hundreds of thousands of people he can’t ever hope to see. “I’m looking at you right now!” he’ll occasionally say, staring into the camera with particular intensity, and for a startled second you believe it. I don’t know if it’s a matter of vocal intonation or workout-sequence or if it’s the way he deploys “focus” as a noun and a verb and a kind of all-purpose mesmeric pocket-watch, but whatever he’s doing, it works. The original miracle of TV — usually recoverable only extremely late at night and/or while drunk — is made manifest: a human being, actually separated from you by enormous distance in space and time is suddenly present in your own home. When, at the end of each workout’s “cool down,” he gives a brief farewell (“Alright, you nailed the workout, you kept your focus…”) I often find myself clapping and pointing back at him, as if we were two good friends parting after a particularly meaningful chat.

Every artist carries within him the hope of creating something so engrossing that the audience’s actual lives will be, however slightly, altered. I was so into your book that I missed my flight. I stayed up until midnight watching your movie. I was laughing so hard that people stared at me. Nearly always these hopes go unrealized: if you happen to see people in the act of consuming your art, they usually look as if they could be calculating the tip at a restaurant. But consumers of Shaun T.’s art are actually standing up, alone in their living rooms, leaping and sweating and (again, assuming I’m not alone in this) crying out to their TV’s. The workout video — the good workout video, anyway — is, I’ve come to believe, a rudimentary-seeming art capably of highly sophisticated engagement: to make you not just see or hear but do.

And this engagement is all the more impressive, of course, because what Shaun T. is asking you to do is not merely to stare at a painting on a wall or some words on a page: he’s asking you, armed with neither an immediate threat nor an immediate reward, to physically exert yourself. FOCUS T25 isn’t just any old work of fiction, then; it’s a work in a genre that has been out of fashion for the last few centuries: the morality tale. He wants you, so badly that his eyes bug out and he raises his fists in front of his face and falls to his knees, to do what you know, in your innermost core, that you ought to be doing anyway.

To this end, each workout is a short story culminating in a carefully timed catharsis (known, in T25 jargon, as “the burnout”). And the astonishing thing is that these catharses aren’t merely experienced by you, the consumer, as a shiver on the back of the neck, or as an internal nod of recognition that finally the dramatic moment has arrived — these catharses are actually cathartic. First you feel yourself arrive at a point at which something within you, the thing you usually just call you, concludes that you can’t possibly continue. There’s a Joseph Campbell-ish neatness in the fact that Shaun T. often narrates these moments by saying, “I know you’re dying right now.” And you are. But then, if you persevere — and you do, because Shaun T. is watching you with his precisely calibrated blend of menace and encouragement — you feel yourself reborn. Three more spider pushups? You could have done dozens. You have, for one half-hour anyway, in one aspect of your life, matched your actions with your intentions.

The problem with workout regimens, self-help schemes, resolutions, fad diets, isn’t that none of them work. Almost all of them work. The problem is we who carry them out — or don’t. There’s some inner kernel of resistance, a senseless demonic nubbin of anti-self-interest, that is as tireless as we are lazy, as persistent as we are distractible. And it’s in the war with this nubbin — carried out day after day, month after month — that Shaun T. really earns his $119.95.

Giving twenty-five minutes a day to something we know will make us happier and healthier ought to be easy. It’s less time, after all, than we probably spend snoozing after the alarm goes off. And yet it’s massively difficult. It’s the strangest thing. The dimension across which Shaun T. implores you isn’t time (since it’s only, as he never tires of reminding you, twenty-five minutes of your day), or space (since you don’t have to go farther than your living room). It’s a subtler, inner dimension — it’s the same one you must traverse in order to quit smoking, or to be kinder, or to finish that novel. And this happens to be the field that governs not just the shape of your abs and your glutes but the shape of your life, the thing you will some day look back on and deem satisfactory or not. And it’s on this field — where the countdown clock is forever ticking silently away, where all the yard-lines are imprinted with your own face — that Shaun T’s artistry really shows itself, and across which he may just, one burpee and power squat at a time, propel you. If you focus.

Ben Dolnick is the author of At the Bottom of Everything and other books.

★ Furnace plumes pointed up and eastward from the building tops, against the gray morning sky. Trees and sidewalks down below were wet black-brown against the snow; the river was mirror-calm, reflecting details of the buildings on the New Jersey side. Then the plumes and the river were both lost in fog, and rain or drizzle streaked the windows. Some of whatever was falling was frozen. The cold snap had broken something in the building’s plumbing, and flooding had closed the playroom. Outdoors was soggy, too, the deep freeze having subsided into slushy bleakness. Icicles hung from the angled concrete column-molds stacked by the construction site, and ice sheathed a new leaf put forth by a misguided tree. Sheet ice fractured and slid underfoot, on its way to being ground into more slush. The farther up Amsterdam, the looser and more treacherous the footing. Outside the Rite-Aid, someone had spilled milk or something milky, and it had flowed underneath the sidewalk ice and spread bluely there.

Awl pal Rob Walker looks back at the lives they lived, epic poetically. Yeah, sure “epic poetically” is a description. Well, it is now. Jesus, what’s up with you today?

You cannot imagine how horrified I am to discover that I have apparently been using “ratchet” wrong this whole time. The shame burns. [Via]

“Another pal of Bloomberg’s griped in a May 1 email about a Citi Bike station placed directly outside his daughter’s tony Greenwich Village co-op. The dad, whose name was redacted in the email, told the mayor that his daughter was aghast at the 39-bike station situated directly outside her apartment at 175 13th St… ‘She’s not going to be happy as she loved her apt and street and might choose to sell it now at a much lower value,’ the dad wrote. The email also included his daughter’s written grievances, which noted the station limited the movement of traffic and made it hard for her to tote her guitar and amp in and out of a taxi outside her building.”

by Brendan O’Connor

Bill de Blasio, who is very tall, opened his new home at 88th Street and East End Avenue to the public this Sunday, shaking hands and taking pictures with the citizens of the city of which he is the newly-inaugurated mayor.

Four thousand tickets were released for the open house; scalpers immediately took to Craigslist to hawk their holdings. Despite the cold, rain, and ice, New Yorkers were lined up to see their new mayor as early as ten a.m. (The doors wouldn’t open until noon.) Volunteers passed out handwarmers called “Little Hotties.”

Susan Krakenberg, formerly of Brooklyn Heights and currently of Midtown East, is happy to have de Blasio as her new mayor. I asked her what she would say to him if she had the chance.

“Please do everything in your power to save the libraries,” she said. “We need librarians, not wedding planners.”

Krakenberg sees de Blasio as a true reformer; her husband is more skeptical.

“Things won’t change until there are riots in the streets,” he said. “Food riots.”

“You know,” he said later, “if the city had more money, there’d be someone out here serving hot chocolate.” He did not seem likely to start rioting about it.

Just was we approached the metal detector, several members of the press were ushered to the front of the line, cutting in front of an old woman with a walker.

This was the first time Gracie Mansion has ever been opened to the public for the mayor’s inauguration. When President Andrew Jackson was inaugurated in 1829, the White House was opened to the public for the first time. All sorts of people showed up, from the “highest and most polished down to the most vulgar and gross in the nation,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. “I never saw such a mixture. The reign of KING MOB seemed triumphant.”

Once the booze came out — orange punch, apparently — the whole thing turned ugly and Andrew Jackson had to escape out the window. By all accounts, the White House was left in a bit of a state.

Unfortunately, there was no orange punch at Gracie Mansion on Sunday; mostly people just took pictures of the Christmas tree.

One gentleman, a professor, spoke excitedly of the parking space he had found on 87th and York. He slipped on the ice getting out of his car, he said, “But it’s good until 8 a.m. tomorrow, so it was worth it.” With any luck the rain would have melted the ice by the time he needed to move his car this morning.

Not long after taking office in 2002, Michael Bloomberg privately (and anonymously) put $7 million towards renovating Gracie Mansion. Even before the campaign to replace him had truly started, Bloomberg declared that it would be inappropriate for his successor to move into his empty lair.

“The mayor should not live there,” he said. (Bloomberg of course had his own and better home; the first mayor to live in Gracie Mansion was Fiorello La Guardia, who moved in with much alleged reluctance.) “What they’re doing is they’re costing this city a lot of money and depriving the rest of the city of one of the great facilities any city has.”

Maybe they were just happy to be in out of the cold, but as I surveyed the serpentine line of New Yorkers waiting for their photo op with the mayor I saw only smiles. Nobody seemed particularly upset that the de Blasios are moving from their Park Slope townhouse to Gracie Mansion.

“Thank you for being here,” the mayor said as we shook hands. I’d like to think he meant it.

Later I made my way home from the remote outpost, and waited for the subway at Union Square. A pair of musicians sang through a repertoire of Motown classics. One was Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Perhaps it will! But first let’s get ourselves some hot chocolate.

Brendan O’Connor likes houses. Photo by “mitch59.”