True Story. (Craigslist)

Okay, so technically this movie is called True Story, but the synopsis, via Craigslist's P/T paid gigs pages, reads like it was torn from the Capote non-fiction novel:

SYNOPSIS: STORY OF A JOURNALISTS' RELATIONSHIP WITH A MOST WANTED MURDERER AND A CASE OF STOLEN IDENTITY.

Short. Brief. Succinct. To the point. And more adjectives! (We wonder if Mr. Franco himself wrote the entry?)

The IMDB page fill in a little more of the details:

A drama centered around the relationship between journalist Michael Finkel and Christian Longo, an FBI Most Wanted List murderer who for years lived outside the U.S. under Finkel's name.

So In Cold Blood meets The Identity Thief! And with your chance to play a journalist! How hard could that be? Here's the full listing, for those interested in taking the gig. (We'll see you at the Cattle Call, baby!)

You know???? (HBO)

I'm not sure if we have a term in the English language for something like the singularity, except it happens when Craigslist ads for reality shows based on better scripted programs become self-aware, but if we did, the world we lived in would be even sadder. (Presumably because that means this phenomenon happened enough to deserve its own entry in Webster's.) 

So just be glad that the Emmy-Award winning producers behind this new program about Brooklyn/downtown Manhattan hipsters 20-somethings who are trying to figure it all out can only have the one reference like this:

"Are you thinking about that show--Girls? Well we didn't say it, but now that you mention it..."

YOU ARE NOT OFF THE HOOK JUST BECAUSE YOU JOKINGLY ADMIT TO ENCOURAGING YOUNG WOMEN TO ASPIRE TO BE HANNAH HORVATH.

Sorry, we just needed to get that off of our chest. We'll see you at the casting call...calling dibs on Shoshanna right now!

Amber Coffman of the Dirty Projectors (Wikipedia)

You know how much we love Missed Connections. It's our favorite part of Craigslist; displaying the entire spectrum of the world's sorrow and pity (and schadenfreude). See: Missed Connections during a hurricane, from Patrick Bateman: Investment Banker, Missed Connections that aren't even real Missed Connections at all.

But even reeking with desperation, Missed Connections always knew what it was: A place to post your creepy stalker love letters to other random faces in the crowd. Until now.

You are in the Dirty Projectors - m4w - 28 (Chinatown / Lit Italy)

PostingID:3543199578

Wait, was this the Carnegie Hall show? Amber Coffman, watch your back. Or reply to this poor guy! Maybe this could be the great digital love story of our times! Unless of course, it was Haley Dekle or Olga Bell. Which one of you was wearing cool shoes the other night?

A last in a lifetime experience! (Touchstone Pictures)

But, women, we implore you: No matter how desperate you are, don't go taking every two-bit dancing/bartending job listed on Craigslist. No matter how enticing the advertisement may look,  it's always a good rule of thumb that if someone can't be bothered to Google the spelling of their favorite movie of all time, they will not be able to pay you in anything other than sweaty dollar bills stuffed into your thong.

*** Coyotee Ugly Type Brtnd No Exp Nec. (Great Tips)

---

Date: 2012-11-13, 8:36AM EST
Reply to: see below

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The 21 Bar, a very popular Beach Bar located on Broadway & West 184 Street is looking to hire friendly bartenders with or without exp. to work in beach attire at Coyotee Ugly type bar.

Great tips every night

Immediate openings With or W/O Exp.

All types needed, slim, thick, light skin, dark skin Etc. This is a Real people place.

Improve your Bar-tending skills

Professional safe productive environment

One block from Trains and Buses

You must have open availability and be willing to start immediately. Please respond with your Info.

If you need any more discouragement from applying for this position, imagine the leer that might go on some guy's mug as he tells you, "This is a Real people place."

Or you could just read NYMag's review of the 21 Bar:

This tiny Washington Heights dive is known for two things: a two-for-one nightly happy hour that goes for almost every drink, and bikini-clad girls gyrating atop the bar counter to Latin slow jams and reggaeton. Considering the scenario, the joint stays (relatively) classy: no nudity, no lap dances. Pay no mind to the lack of draft beer. Ignore the Taco Bell–style adobe walls, and the choking-victim posters. Take a seat and enjoy yourself, very few strings attached.

Free Room & Board (Rockland NY 10952)

Date: 2012-11-09, 4:20PM EST
fr8sf-3398440925@sale.craigslist.org^{[Errors when replying to ads?]}

PostingID:3398440925

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And, as is the case with most totally legit offers made on Craigslist, males need not apply.

Pancakes, anyone? (Craigslist)

Look, no funny business: This is just a girl MFA student with a mustache, standing in front of a boy all of Craigslist's barter section, asking for him to love her a chance to make some breakfast/artist talk.

Full ad below.

FREE PANCAKE BREAKFAST/ARTIST TALK (Prospect Park South)

Date: 2012-09-28, 12:28AM EDT

Im an artist from Ohio, currently getting my MFA at Brooklyn College and I would like to make you breakfast and talk to you. Let me know when would be good for you, and I will arrange it. Im looking forward to meeting you.

Best,

Dallas

Look, obviously this guy is not looking to score, because this ad, like we previously stated, was in the For Sale-->Barter section, not the Personals. Nothing weird about that. In fact, we kind of think you should go to this. What's the worst that can happen?
http://youtu.be/qq_2GOoFaXE

Three separate shows that have since sold out and infuriated people.

11:01 AM: The shows are announced, along with ticket sales: "TONIGHT: Louis CK works on his new hour of material @BellHouseNY! 7/9/11pm shows! $10 2 tix limit, cash only via our box office, open now!" Anyone who wants tickets would have to make their way to Brooklyn.

1:14 PM: The 9PM show is sold out.

1:21 PM: The 11PM show is sold out.

1:26 PM: The 7PM show is sold out.

Now, despite the fact that this is the most fair way possible to go about selling tickets for a concert—only the most devoted and available fans can go, limited to two tickets each, at a reasonable price, without much room for scalping—two universal facts of buying into a ticketed event in New York City emerged:

1. People are pissed that they didn't get tickets.

"It is really sucky that you can't release some tickets online. I guess this is what we get for being responsible and working."

"doing it on sunday would have been better :( especially for us desk jockies..."

"why aren't you selling them online?! Why must you only reward the unemployed??!!"

2. Despite all the measures taken to deter re-selling, people are scalping the tickets on Craigslist.

2:08 PM: "Please make your best offer and I will get back to you if it's in the ballpark."

4:14 PM: "$30 or best offer."

It'll be interesting to see how that works out, seeing as how ticket buyers to tonight's show will need to present their IDs as the ticket buyers to get in. But the lessons put on show here are pretty clear: Every live event in New York City will inevitably leave someone upset, and supply-demand economics and a capitalist hunger for profit extends to even the most ostensibly respectable of fanbases.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

You talkin' to me? (Paul Lowry/Flickr)

Some are pulling for the dismissal of the somewhat sexist Civic Virtue, but an immigrant group in Queens is defending the bare-bottomed statue in the name of its Italian-American heritage.

The Piccirilli Brothers, a New York City-based Italian group who has worked on various monuments erected throughout the country, apparently collaborated back in the day with Frederick MacMonnies, the sculptor of Civic Virtue, according to the blog Queens Crap.

After already taking offense to the statue’s initial move from a post outside City Hall to a less prodigious place in front of Queens Borough Hall, the group has once again been incited after news that the statue’s next resting spot is a Brooklyn cemetery. Isn’t there an open plot in Manhattan?

The group also poked fun at those who claim the statue exudes sexism and, of course, at Anthony Weiner for attempting to displace the Italian-American monument by placing it on Craigslist.

“The statue, a sterling example of Italian-American artisanry, has been castigated instead of honored,” the group's plea reads. Castrated is more like it.

The Piccirilli Brothers are also known for carving the lions at the New York Public Library and for the U.S.S. Maine Monument at the entrance to Central Park.

From Craigslist to Queens to a cemetery in Brooklyn, the statue’s constant move and subsequent backlash from its creators doesn’t exactly come as a surprise.

Perhaps it was better off in the “free stuff” section.

Rebecca Land Soodak (Photo by Laura Mozes)

Rebecca Land Soodak has to take certain precautions when seeking a nanny to look after her four children. For one, she has to be careful not to include her name or email address in her Craigslist posting.

“I don’t want them to Google me until we’ve talked on the phone,” Ms. Land Soodak told The Observer on a recent Wednesday morning at her home on East 87th Street. The kids were at school, and the penthouse duplex, its walls lined with her own paintings—colorful, Elizabeth Peyton-style portraits of children with dreamy gazes—was quiet.

“And they always Google,” she said. 

Ms. Land Soodak’s debut novel, Henny on the Couch, was published by Grand Central this week, but diligent applicants are also likely to come across the Upper East Side mom’s brief brush with notoriety. In 2008, her domestic life became fodder for judgmental parenting forum—dwellers and snarky downtown news bloggers, when her brash Craigslist want ad for a nanny went viral.

“I work from home, so you get the pleasure of being hounded by me all day long,” the post warned, “And you get to pretend to like me, because I am deeply sensitive. (But well dressed and a know-it-all, a winning combination I assure you.)”

The New York Times wrote about the ad, feigning a sociological interest in Ms. Land Soodak’s resonant critique of the perfectionist parenting set. (Not exactly how she came off in their piece.) Morning Joe and Dr. Phil invited her on. Daily Intel, Jezebel, YouBeMom and their commenters tore her to shreds. CNN called her husband and asked if she was a loving person.

“We still get pitched to do reality TV shows,” Ms. Land Soodak said. With her wiry frame and punky cropped hair, she looked more Bravo than TLC to us.

“I used to think that if people heard my perspective they’d agree with me,” Ms. Land Soodak said of her time in the media blast furnace. “That’s really silly, now. Not everyone thinks it’s O.K. to say ‘My kids are a pain in the ass.’”

Which is exactly how her want ad, dashed off one exasperated day in August, began. As she typed, her 9-year-old son was swinging her 6-year-old daughter around by the arm. She had enjoyed the precious angels’ uninterrupted company all summer and couldn’t be bothered to spell check. She was exhausted and angry.

The listing touched a bundle of nerves. It was unapologetic about wealth (“I do not want to hide my occasional Bergdorf shopping bag”), religious about methylphenidate (“if you are judgmental about Ritalin for ADHD, or think such things are caused by too much sugar, again, deal break city”), and ended on a strivery note.

“Okay, if you’re still reading this ad,” she wrote, “it means I am a halfway decent writer and maybe I really will get that book deal I’m yearning for.”

But Ms. Land Soodak had already had some luck as a writer. She sold a few essays to Salon by cold-emailing editors. She found literary agents by visiting the websites of authors she liked and firing off emails to their agents. No one bought her manuscript, but an intern had fished her sample—essays and a short story—out of a slush pile and asked to see more.

After the Craigslist post went viral, agents were clamoring for a mommy’s take on The Nanny Diaries. In September 2008, Ms. Land Soodak went to Borders and bought a couple of books on fiction writing. She wrote the novel in the lobby of her gym, in the waiting room outside the kids’ violin lessons, and in the fourth-floor bathroom at Bloomingdale’s, where there are couches and an outlet and she didn’t have to buy anything.

“It got expensive having coffee all the time,” she said. 

When she completed the manuscript that would become Henny on the Couch in 2009, she gave it to Elizabeth Kaplan, an agent who had expressed interest in her before she became an Internet phenomenon. It wasn’t the mommy diaries, but the Craigslist ad was all over it. In the novel, Kara, also an Upper East Side mother, juggles her daughter’s learning disabilities, her nanny’s condescension and her husband’s ambition, all while trying to preserve enough of herself to rediscover some long-suppressed artistic drive.

“It’s socially acceptable to deride wealthy white women, particularly wealthy white mothers,” she explained. “I think that’s wrong.”

Kara’s story finds some emotional ballast in chapters set during her turbulent childhood and college days at Columbia, when she falls in with a clique of Basquiat acolytes but finds herself artistically intimidated by her boyfriend, Oliver, who goes on to become a famous painter.

“I was really interested in the idea of what it takes to declare oneself an artist,” she said.

For Kara, it took validation from friends of her adulthood to overcome the insecurities planted in her childhood. For Ms. Land Soodak, it took a diagnosis.

A trained psychotherapist, she moved to New York City from Albany to get her master’s at NYU. After doing postgraduate work at the Ackerman Institute, she supervised NYU Child Studies Center residents in family therapy from behind the two-way glass.

When she and her husband, Mitchell Soodak (who owns Union Square Wines), moved out of their East Village digs and into the duplex uptown, she opened a private practice downstairs.

When ADHD was diagnosed in her son at age 5, she read up on associated disorders and learned that attention-deficit issues are often difficult to diagnose in girls. If they’re smart and obedient, they can get by for a long time. ADD was diagnosed in Ms. Land Soodak soon after.

She began taking medication on Dec. 22, and on Christmas day, she picked up a paintbrush. She had no formal training, but could remember her frustration in high school art class. “With the Ritalin, it was different,” she said. “I was making decisions instead of just doing something that felt good. That was a dramatic time for me.”

Although she cared about her patients, she began to think psychotherapy wasn’t “where her energy should be.”

“There are also only so many hours in a day. I would put my girls to bed and go down and see patients, and it was still rewarding but what I really wanted to do was paint.”

She quit her therapy practice, later converting a downstairs terrace into her studio.

“I’m really in a better place when I can be truthful, imperfect and human,” she said.

Ms. Land Soodak is represented by Gallery 71, but she hasn’t painted much since Internet commenters piled on her paintings post-Craigslist ad. She has devoted herself to writing full-time.

Internet infamy hasn’t made it any harder for Ms. Land Soodak to find a nanny. After the initial conversation, she makes sure to give her full name, inviting potential hires to look her up. Then, the post serves as a talking point and a litmus test.

“Usually people say they thought it was funny.”

The free studio apartment in the Soodak building doesn’t hurt either.

For Ms. Land Soodak, outsourcing the minutiae of modern childrearing is a privilege with feminist implications, a way to stake out not just a room of one’s own (like the Virginia Woolf essay young Kara studies in the novel), but also the mental space to make art and, in fallow times, find inspiration in a gallery show, or a long, angsty walk.

She’s hosting a panel on creativity and motherhood at the Strand in May, featuring Orange Is the New Black author Piper Kerman and Jillian Lauren, the writer, monologist and wife of Weezer bassist Scott Shriner.

“To be an artist, you have to say no,” she explained. “To everything. To PTA, to birthday parties, to knowing what’s going on.”

She doesn’t volunteer at her kids’ schools, although she thanks the parents who do in the novel’s acknowledgments. Some parents know when their kids have tests or deadlines—not Ms. Land Soodak.

“Oh, shit,” she said, giggling, as she remembered a recent episode. Her son told her he needed a check for a swim team event about which she knew nothing. She searched her email, “swimteam,” “check,” and pulled up an email that said the $30 payment was due Wednesday. Her son insisted it was more than that, and on Monday.

“I’m like, ‘It says right here, $30, Wednesday night,’” she said. “I come home and he’s like ‘Mom, you wrote the check to last year’s person.’

“That shit happens all the time around here.”

kstoeffel@observer.com

How much for a night here? (Property Shark)

What's a better way to blow the last few thousands of your Wall Street bonus than on a prostitute?

The market is shriveling up, however. In recent months, The NYPD has made some strong sweeps in removing high profile prostitutes off the streets. Well, out of their apartments—no one actually walks the streets anymore thanks to Craiglist and Rentboy.com.

But some of their apartments are a bit iffy. The Upper East Side madam draws her men into the lair at 304 East 78th Street that the Post so eloquently describes for about $2,000 a night:

Welcome to the Hovel of Love — and help yourself to free Coors Light, instant coffee and only the finest in economy his-and-her pleasure products.

And who needs 900-count linen when synthetic paisley fabrics are so much more washable?

[...] Pay no attention to the plastic Buddha staring at you from the mantel of the working fireplace.

If that's not bad enough, imagine the long proverbial walk of shame—in your town car—all the way back down to the Financial District.

Another prostitute, Stephan Grevings, or "Dave Bruno" on Rentboy.com, was nailed in his Midtown apartment at the Sheffiled by the police back in October. He rents the apartment from an Italian couple for $3,150 a month, the Real Deal reports, though rent that is easily covered by his fees: a session costs $325 and a full night costs $1,700. But the condo building board is taking him to court to kick him out:

The Sheffield’s bylaws prohibit unit owners from using their apartments for illegal activity, and also ban “immoral, improper, offensive or unlawful use,” the suit says. The condo board claims that, in addition to violating the building’s regulations, Greving’s alleged actions put the health, safety and well-being of other residents at risk.

“Since first learning of the situation, the condominium has been enforcing all of its rights and remedies in this case,” Rob Braverman, a partner with Braverman & Associates who is representing the condo board, said in a statement to The Real Deal. “We are pursuing all available legal avenues to put an immediate end to the situation.”

The owners of the apartment—the Italian couple—have not evicted him from the apartment, however. Either something was lost in translation or who cares when the rent check doesn't bounce.

mewing@observer.com