The funniest thing about this is that it’s the top story, but there is still plenty of humor to be found throughout. [Via]

“Since 2007, their kombucha blends like Straight Up, Red Ginger and Lemon Drop have been sold in bottles and on tap at New York’s food markets and grocery stores. As business began to boom, Eric and Jessica found themselves with a lot of extra ‘buch on their shelves, so they started cooking with it.”

For those who like to collect stories of Mayor Mike being a dick, here’s a pretty good one from Chirlane McCray:

She remembers going to a reception [at Gracie Mansion] in 2006 for council members and spouses. Chiara de Blasio — now 18 and a sophomore at a college in Northern California — had just begun middle school, and Bloomberg’s Department of Education had instituted a ban on student cell phones. McCray approached the mayor. “I said, ‘Mayor Bloomberg, you are my hero! Because you instituted the smoking ban, which is so important and has done so much for people who have respiratory problems in this city and for our children. I want to thank you for that. But the cell phones in the schools’ — and as soon as I said the words cell phones, he turned his back and walked away from me,” she tells me. “I was so shocked. I had never had that experience before — someone just turning and walking away like that! Bill shook his head and said, ‘That’s just how he is.’”

“’Distracted walkers’ rely on the assumption that the rest of us will navigate around them. Let’s see what happens when we don’t.”

There is not much more to say about Lou Reed than everyone else has already since word of his passing came yesterday. For so many people his work provided some of the earliest glimpses of another world that existed beyond the safe and colorless margins in which they felt trapped and penned and the opportunity of escape they revealed offered hope to both those who needed it most and to those who didn’t need it at all but felt a little better knowing that it was out there. Every “Lou Reed changed my life story” tells you more about the person whose life was changed than it does about Lou Reed, so let’s use this space to note that over the years “Lou Reed” became as much about the difficult persona, legendary impatience and the various periods during which he embraced, personified and rejected so many outrageous forms of what were then considered “alternative lifestyles” that it took up almost as much space as the “Lou Reed” who was about the work he created and the worlds he portrayed in song, which does a serious disservice to just how great the music actually was. (Here are the tunes he did with his band, a catalog that would have made him legendary even if he had stopped there.) I’m not going to belabor how impressive a legacy this is except to say two things: When a man has put together a body of work that will last long after he is gone and still provide the comfort of possibility to people who have yet to be born you have to say he did something pretty special with his time here on earth, and what happens at 2:25 in this song and runs through until the end is one of the most amazing things to ever occur in popular music. Lou Reed was 71.

by Esther C. Werdiger

At work, when I don’t want to be at my desk, but also don’t want to be trawling the daytime shit-show streets of Midtown West, I hang out in the office bathroom. Our offices used to be on the Upper West Side, and our setup was a subterranean joke, but each of our bathroom cubicles was a tiny room equipped with a sink, a mirror, and ample floor space. If I had time to kill, I’d snap some selfies, adjust my entire outfit from the undies up, or try on whatever I’d ordered off ASOS. And when, by accident, I cluelessly got the tiny nonprofit I work for charged a large amount of money by Google Ads, I had a small space in which to go and curl up and wish for death, before summoning up sufficient boldness to go talk to my boss about it.

In our new offices, we share bathrooms with all the other offices on our floor. For the first while, I used a luxurious and expansive wheelchair-accessible bathroom on our level that I’d stumbled upon. One day, I discovered it to be locked and no longer accessible to me, though luckily not before a gynecologist appointment which rendered me in need of a cold, tiled floor to writhe on, in solitude, for 40 minutes. But now it is locked and I have to use the regular bathrooms, along with everyone else, reevaluating my appearance, looking in the mirror side-on, applying lipstick, makin’ my faces etc. in the company of whoever else might be there.

I do this a lot lately because I’ve been thinking about makeovers. There is nothing vaguely superficial about the desire to look different. Surely, a wish to alter one’s appearance must have something to do with wanting to actually change. I curse the wretched fashion industry on the daily for giving me another reason to be dissatisfied with my appearance. I always believed that if I were just thinner, I’d look awesome all the time, a sexy vision of tailored edginess! Anyway, I am a bit thinner now and I still don’t look all that great. Back in my freelance WFH days, I’d change several times a day; fancy pajamas, dresses, hats made out of literally any item of clothing, shoes just comfortable enough to make it to the coffee shop down the block.

Come Thanksgiving, it’ll be one warp speed year since I moved to New York and plunged into the pee-warm and chlorine-y deep end of full-time office work. I’m 29 and this is my first full-time job, ever. I still have not figured out how to exercise sufficiently, bring food from home, not have the highlight of my morning be a Venti hobo-latte, or get enough sleep before my iPhone marimbas each morning. And the same three outfits I wear each day are killing me. What I’m craving in a makeover is versatility — both in appearance and lifestyle. I want to be Secretary Esther one day and Stevedore Esther the next because what I really want is to not be in an office doing roughly the same thing each day, and for the same people. I want to seamlessly glide through worlds. I guess what I want is to do whatever the fuck I want — most especially, the things I’m good at.

Last week in the bathroom, while exiting after washing my hands, a middle-aged lady in a hijab yelled after me, “You broke my watch!”

“What?” I said, turning around, still in the doorway. But there it was, on the floor. A broken watch. The face was fine; it was the absurd ceramic band that had broken. Her keys, wallet, phone and watch were spread around the sink and yes, I guess it’s possible that I brushed against her belongings on my way out.

“You were walking too fast!” she said, clearly in a panic, as one would be, I suppose, after having a valuable item surprise-broken. She should definitely not have had her shit all over the place in a busy bathroom, especially, I’m sorry, the stupidest watch Anne Klein has conceived. I’m bad in a crisis — I have frozen at the phone when a power line exploded outside my parents’ house, deferring the job to an older sister; I have watched my baby brother, whose floaties I forgot to put on, almost drown in the pool before another older sister rescued him; I have stared at my tiny, anaphylaxing niece while other, more capable family members ran for the EpiPen. And so here I was, speechless, consumed with the feeling of being in trouble. “It’s from Nordstrom!” she yelled, turning the name into a three-syllable accusation with serious chant potential. Nor-de-strom! Nor-de-strom!

A few weeks ago I got in trouble with another older lady. A comic I’d made about meeting an elderly, long-lost relative had been published on the entire back page of a Jewish newspaper, mostly read by old people in New York. Ordinarily, I publish my comics on fun blogs online — blogs I actually read, and the readership that comes with that is fairly obvious to me. But when this newspaper agreed to publish the piece, I didn’t rethink my audience. I was super-excited to be in print, and getting paid (rare!). When I received an incensed letter in the mail, sent by certified post, typed, signed — I thought, of course she saw it.

Oh and, I used her first name, which itself is a diminutive of her proper name, but still. I knew I shouldn’t have done it. I knew I shouldn’t have done it while I was doing it. And I did it anyway. So, she was furious. When I opened the letter, my eyes scanned the first line. I caught a snippet; “the evilness of what you have done.” My eyes skipped to the end; “make this right or I will” — I couldn’t even read it. I handed it to my boyfriend, who read the whole, lengthy thing. When he was finished, he lowered it. “This woman,” he said, “is crazy.”

“Still though!” I said, “I was careless.”

“Yeah, but, whatever you did, does not warrant this,” he said, waving the letter.

“Just send her some flowers, and a really nice card before Rosh Hashanah,” said my mum on the phone.

“If someone I hated sent me flowers,” I said, “I would throw them straight into the rubbish.”

“Just ring her up,” my dad said, “and just say, outright, ‘What would you like me to do?’”

I did not call her and ask her what she wanted me to do. I did not send her flowers for Rosh Hashanah. I wrote her a letter, apologizing as well and respectfully as I could, and I left it at that. I had done a dumb thing, and this was the best thing I was willing to do in order to fix it.

This was what came to mind in the face of fuming-in-the-bathroom watch lady. Nor-de-strom! My father’s advice flew out of my mouth: “What would you like me to do?”, my voice, perhaps, glazed with a very watery version of sarcasm. But I messed it up; I did not wait for a response. I should have definitely waited for a response. I should have allowed for a moment to open up, a moment that may have sobered us both. I did not wait! I followed my question with another: “…Buy you a new watch?”

“Yes!” she said.

What? I sighed, memories of stupid parking lot car accidents flooding me, the exchanging of details, the dread that comes before having to tell your parents about something you did. I told her I’d come back in a second with a pen and paper. I wanted to disappear but I thought, Do the right thing! Which, at that moment, was buying this lady a new stupid ceramic-banded watch from Nordstrom so she’d stop yelling at me. While rummaging for a pen and paper in my desk, she barged in, impatient and suspicious. She asked to see my boss (“Excuse me, this has zero to do with my boss!”) and asked for proof that I actually worked in this office (“This is my desk; I sit here literally every day!”) — all my answers exciting my mouth with a little more sass than intended.

She finally left my office and went back to her own. But by the next day, I realized that I did not have to actually buy her a watch. That would be ridiculous. So I sent her an email, apologizing and saying that it wasn’t my responsibility, but if she really felt it was owed to her, I would pay for half of the new watch. By the time she got back to me, a day later, to tell me that she thought it was a fair agreement, I had decided that actually I didn’t feel comfortable paying for any of it. I’d also called the Anne Klein watch repairs department and found out that repairing the band was pretty easy, and not expensive. I emailed her with this information, with email addresses and phone numbers. “They’re pretty friendly,” I added, and then requested that she not contact me again, or come into my office. It had taken me a couple of days, but I finally felt like I was actually doing, more or less, the right thing.

I spent a few days going to the bathroom as infrequently as possible, and made those trips spartan, with no dillydallying at the mirror. I imagined her waiting for me, swinging a bike chain, flanked by tough co-workers. Those fears have since faded, but I’m still slightly haunted by Suggested Posts of that fucking watch on Facebook, but also with the feeling that I’m doing a whole mess of things wrong, that I will never know how to best respond, and that I’ve done things that cannot be undone. Maybe this is why I am thinking about makeovers.

Esther C. Werdiger is a writer and artist from Melbourne. Her essays, comics and illustrations have appeared at The Hairpin, Saveur, The Toast and in Lilith. She lives in Brooklyn and also has a podcast.

★★★ Little leaves and the sharp shadows of little leaves swirled together on the pavement. The toddler, in a hoodie over a hoodie, insisted on riding his scooter to preschool, through the deepening cold toward the river, bearing down on an oncoming sun-struck pedestrian. People seemed to be walking in the sunny half of the sidewalk under the scaffolding. Scarves were out, scarf after scarf in the train car. The clouds in the afternoon sky were attractive cumulus, well spaced and a little elongated. The late light attended to the faces of the buildings like a preservationist. A child wore a stiff pale vest that looked like sheepskin, over a color-saturated dress, an outfit from an income bracket so distant as to constitute a foreign tribe. Leg muscles ached a little from the cold, and a thumb slipped drily and helplessly over the Metrocard nestled in its wallet pocket. In the night, on Broadway, the air was too clear to trap any light, and the leaves were still thick enough to blot out the street lamps.

I am glad that there is such a thing as Russell Brand, and I was as impressed with his recent conversation with Jeremy Paxman as everybody else was, for I share his egalitarian and environmentalist views. It is beyond refreshing to see someone in the public eye willing to speak out in this way. I’ve read Brand’s books and seen some of his comedy and movies, too, and heard a little of his old radio program, and am generally a fan.

However I believe his calls for “revolution” are the absolute worst, even if he means the Velvet kind, as I hope and believe he must.

Brand is very far from being the first person ever to become utterly exasperated with the horrible condition of Western Civ. — so much so that he’s ready go all “we don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn.” Moving and sincere as he is in the Paxman interview, it is a little boggling, the way he appears almost to believe he’s the bringer of some kind of revelation. In any case, this Burn It Down mentality has never worked, not ever, to secure a fair and just society. And it’s been tried!

The chief problem is that revolutionaries never reckon with the survival of their ideological opponents. But they do survive, they always survive. For example, when I was a girl I was certain that John Lennon’s generation was going to get in charge and fix everything by the time I grew up. They were so obviously in the right! Peace! Love. What could be more obvious. And look what happened! The Piggies are fatter than ever. George W. Bush is six years younger than John Lennon would have been, had he lived.

In the U.S.A. we now have many different gangs of ideological purists who no longer care what happens to a corrupt and incompetent government. Each of them believes so strongly in the rightness of its own cause that somehow or other everyone will, everyone MUST, come around eventually to their way of thinking, because it’s so obviously true and right. The Tea Party is one such gang, and as I am sure Russell Brand knows, they recently tried and failed to take the world’s economy hostage in order to subvert the constitutional operations of the U.S. government. This was a newly violent, destructive development in modern-day American politics, and it provoked general horror and dismay. Yet these people are doing exactly what Russell Brand suggested to Jeremy Paxman ought to be done.

In order to achieve an ideologically pure society constituted according to their convictions, the Teahadists would have to kill me (and millions and millions of others,) because I’ll never agree with them and cannot be made to. When revolutionaries start getting their way, that’s just what happens. This we have seen, over and over again, and it never results in a better world. It only results in a nightmare.

So the reason why the needle of our politics can hardly be made to move is that we have to share the world with our ideological opponents, and we just don’t want to kill them. It’s no more complicated than that. If we tried to get along with them a little better (and they with us), we could move it a little farther.

As for voting, I am in total agreement with Brand that it does little to nothing to alter the status quo. However it is sometimes useful for averting abject catastrophe. In the U.S., that is all that voting has been good for pretty much all my life. I am very, very angry over the broken promises of the Obama administration, particularly with respect to transparency and whistleblower protections, which were explicitly promised. I worked hard to get Mr. Obama elected, and I am real mad. But every time I think about the bare possibility of a President Palin I immediately begin to fan myself with relief and all my regrets vanish instantly. Sometimes it is worth voting. Faute de mieux! Isn’t that basically the mantra of adult life?

My own hope is that it will be increasingly possible to field progressive candidates and fund them with grassroots money. In the U.S., I believe, the Man fears the very thing I hope for: hence all the frantic attempts to permit private money to influence elections, yet another of which currently awaits the uncertain verdict of Chief Justice John Roberts.

It seems to me that Brand has got a very warm nature, and he has this tendency to get all wound up and make a real mess. I was particularly disappointed in his attempt to cheapen Jeremy Paxman’s appearance on “Who Do You Think You Are?” — in which he described the hard but admirable life of his grandmother, Mabel. Why couldn’t he see that this was Paxman’s way of drawing attention to the same things Brand claims to care about — oppression, inequality!! Paxman has always treated Russell Brand really well, so far as I know, kindly and respectfully. So this rant against Paxman was a real lapse in judgment, and I think that Brand should apologize to him. If he wants to involve himself in issues of politics and social justice — and I hope he does — Russell Brand will maximize the good he can do by trying to be a little more… politic.

Maria Bustillos is a journalist and critic in Los Angeles.

by Alan Hanson

Katy Perry’s PRISM

This album is a nearly perfect pop album if you happen to be a Katy Perry fan. If not, I don’t know what to tell you. I like her. I like her enthusiasm. I like most of her songs, I like the way she looks and I like the sound of her voice. What else do you need in a pop star? Though I have a feeling this album is a bit of a “something for everybody” type recording, especially as it’s a bit too long, and fans of hers will have varying likes and dislikes (“Walking On Air” sucks! It sucks so hard!). It’s a deft mix of classic pop themes and production that’s simultaneously very Katy Perry and very 2013. The rest of this article will use songs from PRISM as a rating rubric.

PRISM Rating: Love Me

Balthus “Cats and Girls” Exhibit at The Met

Simply put, Balthus was a punk as fuck Polish-French artist who largely painted young girls lifting up their skirts, sweating, and lounging around with cats. Come to think of it, Balthus was probably a big influence on Terry Richardson and a couple billion Suicide Girls photo-shoots. The real gem of the exhibition, however, is called “Mitsou” — forty drawings made by Balthus when he was about 11, chronicling the friendship and eventual loss of his cat. The young, raw, and vibrant emotion portrayed in the forty tiny black and white drawings was wholeheartedly arresting. I locked eyes with another Met patron as we both welled up and felt the true power of art’s emotional connectivity, both between she and I, and us with Balthus from one hundred years ago. I left the museum, almost buckled passing Hoppers “Office in a Small City,” and then fought back tears as I watched the sun set in a crisp, autumnal Central Park. This was the exact moment I felt something substantial for New York City.

PRISM Rating: Dark Horse/This Moment

New Arcade Fire

The album is streaming now and though I angrily detested “Reflektor,” the single, “Afterlife,” iced my chill-bones, and I wonder what the German compound word for fame-erases-all-original-honesty-bred-from-unknown-struggle and through-evolution-a-new-type-beautiful-cognizance-is-bread is.

PRISM Rating: Ghost

Oh, a couple more shootings for fuck’s sake

You know that episode of The Simpsons when Homer gets his arm stuck in a vending machine and the fire department has to come to save him but they discover he was still holding the soda can and if he had just let go he could have pulled his arm free and also when they were “helping” him an entire lumberyard burned down? Well, that’s a ridiculously microscopic sized fraction of the idiocy with which this country is handling gun control as our citizens drop it like it’s lead-hot right in front of our stupid fucking gawking helpless faces.

PRISM Rating: The horrible breakdown during This Is How We Do

“Chasing New Jersey”

There’s a local channel called “My 9” which just wrapped up a two-hour block of mostly season 4 John Swartzwelder “Simpsons” episodes and is now playing “Chasing New Jersey.” “Chasing New Jersey” is in the exact same format as TMZ. Several diverse adults group around a “newsroom” and discuss the latest developments in front of reality TV cameras with an overseeing “editor” of sorts. But on “Chasing New Jersey,” they’re not chewing celebrity fat, they’re hashing out New Jersey politics and public affairs. It’s a third of the way into the episode and Bill Spadea is listening to a bunch of nobodies practice their non-regional accents and say absolutely nothing about Cory Booker when my cell phone buzzes. My dad is calling me and I’m struck with the idea that if I were to hear news about my father becoming ill that it would occur during a bizarro-world episode of TMZ because this is the perfect level of surreal boringness for said news to arrive in. I answer the phone at the last possible ring and he tells me he’s having unexplained chest problems and the latest tests are inconclusive while Bill Spadea video chats with a stripper who was Tweeting at Cory Booker.

PRISM Rating: Choose Your Battles

Alan Hanson is a Californian writer living in Harlem.

“Critical Hit is a video game music tribute band headed by composer Jason Hayes, performing original arrangements and electrifying live concerts of music from the most celebrated video games of all time,” which seems fine to me given that if Bach were alive today he’d be composing a Candy Crush cantata and also it is finally Friday.