Dancing About At the New York City Ballet's Spring Gala
Lordy, Lordy, 740: Oaktree Capital Chief Howard Marks Buys Ross' 740 Park Co-op for $52.5 M., Setting Record
The Battle of Billyburg: Fresh-Faced Lincoln Restler Challenges The ‘Corrupt’ Political Machine
A Dimon Is Forever ... Right?
Strangers Among Us: The Protagonist of Nell Freudenberger's Novel Is New to America
Rosario Dawson Rails on Moynihan Station: She's Amtrak's Biggest Fan Since Joe Biden
Marc Jacobs vs. The Graffiti Artist, Round 4: Revenge by $10 T-Shirt
Steve Wynn Gambles on Ritz-Carlton Penthouse, Wins for $70 M.
Thinking About Arianna Huffington While Hiking in the Catskills
The Battle of Billyburg: Fresh-Faced Lincoln Restler Challenges The ‘Corrupt’ Political Machine
“Look, this election is a whole lot bigger than just one person, especially a little guy like me who needs to stand on this chair,” 28-year-old Lincoln Restler declared as he artificially towered over a packed room at the Brooklyn Winery in Williamsburg a couple of weeks ago. “The machine has their candidate, they’re going to pour all of the resources they’ve got into this district leader race. But, for every hack elected official that they’ve got on payroll, we’re going to have to reach out to 10 of our neighbors.”
The “machine” in this case is the Kings County Democratic Party and its chair, Assemblyman Vito Lopez. Mr. Restler sees his re-election campaign as a critical aspect of the effort to topple what he describes as the corrupt status quo in Mr. Lopez’s organization.
Mr. Restler, who has the honor of holding the obscure position of district leader, is very aware of the fact that despite the lofty rhetoric of his campaign, he’s talking about an unpaid office with few official responsibilities.
“Any elected office, even an elected position you’ve probably never heard of, is a platform to advocate for one’s community,” Mr. Restler said in his speech, still standing on the chair. The crowd rightfully laughed after “you’ve probably never heard of.” Read More
A Dimon Is Forever … Right?
In the days leading up to JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s bombshell announcement of $2.3 billion in trading losses, chairman and chief executive officer Jamie Dimon faced a delicate predicament. His executives had scheduled visits with banking analysts to discuss the state of affairs at JPMorgan—the company whose stock Mr. Dimon knew was sure to plummet when news of the trading losses were disclosed. These weren’t just any trading losses, of course; they were losses incurred on credit derivatives bets placed by a mysterious trader nicknamed the London Whale and Voldemort by the financial press. And it wasn’t just any bet—it was the same trading position that Mr. Dimon had described as “a complete tempest in a teapot” not one month previous.
“On the inside, Dimon must have been trying to figure out what was happening with the trade, and what to do about it,” said Frank Partnoy, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, currently a law professor at the University of San Diego. “It’s like he has an inside personality, and an outside personality that he shows the world, and the two things must have been in conflict, like what politicians deal with when they’re handling a crisis.” Read More
Strangers Among Us: The Protagonist of Nell Freudenberger’s Novel Is New to America
One of the more recent entries in the annals of literary hype that threatens to overshadow actual achievement is Nell Freudenberger. Back in 2001, when the recent Harvard grad was an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, her short story “Lucky Girls” was published in the magazine, and she soon became known, both in New York publishing circles and beyond, as a wunderkind. She happened to be attractive. “Too young, too pretty, too successful” said the title of an article by Curtis Sittenfeld, in Salon. But then came a well-received first novel, The Dissidents, and a short story, “An Arranged Marriage,” in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction issue, in 2010, and awards, like the PEN/Malamud. And now with her second novel, Newlyweds (Knopf, 352 pp., $25.95), an extended version of “An Arranged Marriage,” comes her most successful effort yet, one that shows a more mature voice and the true triumph of her talent over her hype. Read More
Rosario Dawson Rails on Moynihan Station: She’s Amtrak’s Biggest Fan Since Joe Biden
“My oldest memory of riding the train? I don’t know, that’s hard,” Rosario Dawson told The Observer last Tuesday night. “I was born in Coney Island, but grew up on the Lower East Side, so we spent a lot of time on the F-Train, going to the beach. My dad used to wear his little shorts, and the knee-high socks. He was the most handsome guy on the entire boardwalk.”
And thus the country’s most beautiful railroad buff was born.
Ms. Dawson was standing inside a post office in Midtown, there for a four-course dinner at which she was the guest of honor. She wore a form-fitting black pant suit, ruffled black shirt and black pumps that had to be nine-inches long and sharper than a railroad tie.
This was no ordinary post office, to be fair, but the Corinthian temple on Eighth Avenue known as the James Farley building, once Manhattan’s central post office, and certainly its grandest. From a staff of thousands, there is now a skeleton crew of about a hundred, which has freed up acres of space in the building for Moynihan Station. A dream since the early 1990s of the former New York senator for whom it is named, it will allow for the expansion of Penn Station across the avenue and out of the hell it has resided in for the past six decades, since Robert Moses destroyed the original Penn in 1963. Read More
Marc Jacobs vs. The Graffiti Artist, Round 4: Revenge by $10 T-Shirt
Could this become any more wonderful and/or absurd? Apparently, yes.
Last week, French street artist Kidult took a fire extinguisher full of pink paint, and unleashed it on Marc Jacobs’ SoHo boutique last week, painting the word “ART” over the store. Marc Jacobs had some fun with it on social media, and then, commodtized the ostensible political message by turning a photo of his painted store—which is vandalism or art, depending on how you see it—into a $700 T-Shirt, with the caption “Art by Art Jacobs.” Kidult, the artist, was pissed, and made it known. Read More
Steve Wynn Gambles on Ritz-Carlton Penthouse, Wins for $70 M.
It looks like casino king Steve Wynn‘s unlucky streak with New York real estate has finally come to an end. After selling his pad at the Plaza a few years back, Mr. Wynn has reportedly scooped up a penthouse at another famed New York hotel, the Ritz-Carlton.
According to the Post, Mr. Wynn has put in a winning $70 million bid for Millenium Partners’ founding partner Christopher M. Jeffries’ $77.5 million pad. Read More
Thinking About Arianna Huffington While Hiking in the Catskills
It is May, and time to spray the doors and windows of my home. I trudge, unhappily, out to the garden shed. The insect repellent waits for me, but by the time I carry it back to the house, I’ve already decided I’m not going to spray the fucking doors or the fucking windows. It’s a beautiful day.
And yesterday, goddamn it, was City Day.
City Day is the day, every couple of weeks or so, that I take the train to New York City and wonder what God is waiting for. Read More
Roundup: Michelle Will Catch Me
Bob Kappstatter mused on all things related to Bronx politics.
Michael Grimm is leading the charge to investigate Corzine’s MF GLobal.
Mayor Bloomberg gives contributions to charities in lieu of gifts at weddings.
Robert Mittman exists, or so he claims. Read More
The Yard Man: Meet Madison Square Park’s Secret Weapon
On May 31, Madison Square Park will assemble 300 art world luminaries to toast a man who prides himself on having recently been called “boneheaded.” Two months ago, the park named a curatorial post, its first, in honor of this same man.
“I will treasure forever being described as a bonehead,” said Martin Friedman, who is in his late 80s, and who served as director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for 26 years before retiring in 1989 and, eventually, becoming an advisor to the park. He was sitting in his art-filled apartment (Claes Oldenburg sketches and sculptures, Sol LeWitt wall drawings) on the 12th floor of a building in Greenwich Village last week, reminiscing about the incident that earned him his epithet. When the park displayed life-size sculptures of naked, standing men by Antony Gormley on rooftops two years ago, The New York Post fretted about their being mistaken for potential suicides in an article bearing the headline “Jump Dummy Jump,” that referred to the exhibition’s “boneheaded organizers.” Read More
The 15 Most Scandalous Revelations in Jeff Himmelman’s Betrayal of Ben Bradlee
On Sunday, The New York Times reported that Georgetown society was up in arms over former Jeff Himmelman’s new biography of the legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. The Bradlees icily declined to comment, but Post columnist and family friend Richard Cohen told the Times the Bradlees were “mortified” and “repulsed” by the book, which the Times said cast Mr. Bradlee in a “bad light.”
Mr. Bradlee had opened up his home, his friends and his personal archives completely to Mr. Himmelman (a former assistant to Mr. Bradlee’s protege Bob Woodward) as he reported the authorized biography but was now said to feel “knocked over” and “utterly betrayed” by the final product. Read More
