RIP HAT
“The Hat may not have been a great restaurant — apart from its excellent name — but for a long time it was a necessary one. It was a place where a poor twentysomething with $40 in his pocket could eat and drink like a king on a Friday night, and, for one hour, not think too badly of the way New York was treating him.”
Apartment Bought For Rental Purposes
I have always thought of “airbnb” as the best way to figure out the minimum amount of money you would accept to let two strangers fuck in your bed, but it turns out this guy has come up with a way to get around that concern. [Via the new Digg, and in a tangentially-related link, here is a piece about the old Digg.
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Chvrches, "Lies"
If you’ve ever had the fantasy where it turns out that everything you’ve been going through over the last few years is actually just a series of hallucinations experienced during the final moments of your life after a shadowy military agency’s secret experiment on your battalion with a drug that increases aggression went horribly wrong during the war in Vietnam, only to snap out of it and realize that no, that is actually the plot to an old Tim Robbins movie and really you are trapped in a hell of your own making, I cannot offer you any solace except to say that you are not the only one who feels that way some days, and it’s not a terrible thing to daydream like that if it helps distract you from all the anguish for even a couple of minutes. Maybe this video will also take your mind off of things for a bit. Whatever works, right? [Via]
Clock Change Hurts Heads
If you start having headaches over the next couple of days — intense, painful headaches that happen at the same time each day and feel like there is a remarkably tenacious creature inside of your head who is armed only with a sharp metal implement and a desperate desire to escape — blame the end of daylight saving time.
Henry Blodget Has A Body Count
Recently a man wrote on his blog about how he feels anxious about the presence of bathroom attendants while he is trying to pee. The man was Henry Blodget, and the restaurant was SoHo’s Balthazar. Now the owner of Balthazar has fired his bathroom attendants.
Goodbye forever, Balthazar!
Photo of a delicious Balthazar meal by “Ed G.”
Today In Sentences That Would Have Been Incomprehensible Only A Few Years Ago
Greta Gerwig danced in a Spike Jonze-directed Arcade Fire video on last night’s YouTube Music Awards: http://t.co/x0HKsdDtd9
— Vulture (@vulture) November 4, 2013
If you woke up this morning from a coma you went into in 2007 and the first thing you saw was this tweet you’d want to go back to sleep immediately, right?
https://player.vimeo.com/video/78491391
(Here’s the video if your answer is “no.”)
NYU Student Loses Faith In Authority
In the curious case of an NYU student who went suddenly missing — he was trapped in a tiny space between two buildings, down at 80 Lafayette, for much of the weekend! — students blame the campus for inaction:
[Student Michael] Yablon says he asked NYU Public Safety officials on Sunday morning to search security footage of the Lafayette building for any sight of [Asher] Vongtau. Public Safety officals told Yablon that the footage was kept at a location only open Monday through Friday, and at that point Yablon said, “we decided to take matters into our own hands.”
Vongtau went missing early Saturday, after hanging in a dorm room. (“I don’t want to elaborate on what we were doing in there,” Yablon told The Post.) They took their campaign to Facebook (obvs) but also to the dorms. (Good for them!) Eventually they found their pal, improbably compressed in a wee gap between buildings. He had not bitten off his arms. But the experience has bitten off their hopes and dreams.
“I’ve lost faith in the authorities. They would have failed had it just been left to them doing their thing. They would not have succeeded in saving him,” said Yablon. “They should be thanking us. John Sexton doesn’t want that kind of press on his hands.”
Glad everyone’s okay! But now we have a few more disillusioned young people on our hands. The future will scorn us.
Nine Things To Read: This Week In History
2012
A Guide to the Spooky Scary Secret Monsters of Every State
John Wenz | October 31st, 2012
Brooklyn Smug Reaches New Hideous Heights
Choire Sicha | October 31st, 2012
The United States, In Order Of Their Contribution To American Music
2011
The Cordial Enmity Of Joan Didion And Pauline Kael
Evan Hughes | October 31st, 2011
The Livestream Ended: How I Got Off My Computer And Onto The Street At Occupy Oakland
Lili Loofbourow | October 28th, 2011
The Night Occupy Los Angeles Tore Itself In Two
Natasha Vargas-Cooper | October 28th, 2011
2010
The Rally and the Velvet Rope: Is Jon Stewart Still Our Fellow Citizen?
Maria Bustillos | November 1st, 2010
DJing a Halloween Loft Party in Midtown
“David Shapiro” | November 1st, 2010
The Rally to Restore Sanity in Pictures: Arianna’s Bus to Magicland
New York City, October 31, 2013
★★★ In the dark, humid morning, what must have been a mosquito — a mosquito, on the last day of October — had raised a welt on one shoulder. It was warm enough not to worry about layering thick coats over costume tops, so warm that there was no excuse or argument worth making in favor of costume pants. By the time the fleecy dinosaur had been dropped among the other creatures and personages at the preschool, an adult could walk back in short sleeves. A thin, dampening rain fell for a while after lunchtime. The hallways and stairwells were comfortable for a cowboy to roam in; the dinosaur, tail streaming behind him as he tore around corners, had to shed the saurian top of his head, horns and eyeballs sliding back from sweat-matted hair. After bedtime, the thick outside air glowed with trapped light, shining around and through the shade, as insistent against sleep as a giant nightlight or veins full of sugar.
A Poem By Molly Brodak
by Mark Bibbins, Editor
Net, Web
I land fully formed like a cherub.
Nothing pleases me. You
least of all, with your fingers
poking their grime
on dreams. Behind thick drapes
my code is plain and can’t
account for your dismal nerves,
twitchy joys and wounds. This
is what you wanted.
Guarantee of unplumbable lake.
Forget you are greatly eased
or disturbed by smells, where and how
your nerves directly touch the air. Here,
you will always have everyone
wherever you go.
Molly Brodak is the author of A Little Middle of the Night (University of Iowa Press, 2010) and three chapbooks of poetry. She lives in Atlanta and teaches at Emory University.
You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.