even more quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a new rolling new york times thread

Ms. Ginn, left, in her rat-pelt dress, and Ms. LaViola chatting with guests before dinner.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/pixel.gif

damn, for some reason i couldn't get that rat-pelt dress picture to show up. maybe a moderator can add it.

i couldn't even save that picture to my computer. the times is tricky.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/07/27/arts/design/20120727-RATS-4.html

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/07/26/garden/26TWENTIES_SPAN/26TWENTIES-articleLarge.jpg

she needs to come along for the ride.

Across the table Mr. Hutchings gnawed on a rat bone, pronouncing it delicious. The dinner delivered on its once-in-a-lifetime promise. “I don’t care about it as art,” he said. “I care about it as something that makes me a more interesting human being.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/07/27/arts/27RATS_SPAN/27RATS_SPAN-articleLarge.jpg

For Ms. Ginn skinning and eating rats represents the survivalist instincts she likes to explore in her work. “To have these sorts of skills, it’s very empowering,” she said. “It makes me feel like I have more control over my world.”

Cheryl
Westchester Cty

It reminds me a bit of the Woman Warrior ( Maxine Kingston) description of the narrator's mother as a Great Eater, one who could literally and figuratively eat any dish set before her without the slightest expression of fear or disgust. But in a setting of extreme comfort, and the best condiments and disguises for the purchased rats, it doesn't seem to signify anything. Now, if all the rats had been "wild raised" in NYC and caught by the participants, that would be a better story... Or perhaps if different rats had been trapped in different restaurants, again, we could compare the effects of different restaurant fare on their taste.... Overall, ick.

jg
San Francisco

How is this any different from the sensationalism of TV Shows like Fear Factor. Rats are disgusting and only eaten in the worst of times. They are in fact disease ridden and thoroughly disgusting. Why does this generation insist on destroying paradigms or structures without any sensible or tangible replacements. Did they learn nothing from the Baby Boomers and the "Me" generation? I hate everything about this from it's pettiness to its barbarism to the sensationalistic and cynical nature of it. Rich people eating rats. Rich indeed.

comments get really real:

Sami
Long Beach, CA

This can be seen as the expected result of the gentrification of New York that has been occurring for the past 20 years or so. Rats, formerly associated with urban squalor, became reified as a kind of aesthetic signifier of "authentic" New York-ness by the post-collegiate hordes of mostly white middle class young people who flocked to places like Williamsburg in the late 90s and early 2000s. These people were ravenous for real urban life, and embraced the rat as a component of a lifestyle they sought - even as their (the gentrifiers) increasing presence destroyed that same reality by displacing working class residents and communities that had been associated with the presence of rats during the Reagan era of urban decline. This event combines the role that art plays in the gentrification process with the gentrifiers obsession with "local" food culture in an ironic glorification of their (Pyrrhic) conquest of the "urban."

something about eating rats that really pisses people off.

sorry, link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/arts/design/dinner-at-an-exhibition-rat-prepared-many-ways.html?ref=dining

Sometimes I feel like the cycle of trolling and being trolled has just become a ritual for the Times style sections, like the commenters are just this chorus of people who "come to boo"

I mean that's what we are, basically

ya they know what theyre doin

Sami
Long Beach, CA

This can be seen as the expected result of the gentrification of New York that has been occurring for the past 20 years or so. Rats, formerly associated with urban squalor, became reified as a kind of aesthetic signifier of "authentic" New York-ness by the post-collegiate hordes of mostly white middle class young people who flocked to places like Williamsburg in the late 90s and early 2000s. These people were ravenous for real urban life, and embraced the rat as a component of a lifestyle they sought - even as their (the gentrifiers) increasing presence destroyed that same reality by displacing working class residents and communities that had been associated with the presence of rats during the Reagan era of urban decline. This event combines the role that art plays in the gentrification process with the gentrifiers obsession with "local" food culture in an ironic glorification of their (Pyrrhic) conquest of the "urban."

― scott seward, Friday, 27 July 2012 04:07 (13 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ rad

I think we can't totally discount the possibility that this artist is trolling us too, like basically going for what that commenter is describing? I mean “I don’t care about it as art,” he said. “I care about it as something that makes me a more interesting human being.”

that sounds like trolling

i don't know, do you think that psychiatrists think their case studies are interesting as human beings, or just... interesting...?

I think we can't totally discount the possibility that this artist is trolling us too, like basically going for what that commenter is describing? I mean “I don’t care about it as art,” he said. “I care about it as something that makes me a more interesting human being.”

― Will Chave (Hurting 2), Friday, 27 July 2012 16:53 (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this wasn't the artist, this was one of the guests

this seems totally fine to me tbh

i hope that they get the plague and die.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/automobiles/autoreviews/you-cant-beat-it-with-a-stick.html

Priced from $26,795, this is the ILX that screams “compromise” at the top of its little 2-liter lungs, with standard cloth seats and just 150 breathless horses from a version of the Civic engine.

the ILX seems limited to fans of zing-it-yourself compacts at a relatively high price.

too much time on nyt

http://storify.com/jcstearns/lessons-from-the-fake-new-york-times-wikileaks-op

hey, in the interest of fair play, i read that article about the girl tavi who had the fashion blog and now has the rookie site and she seems cool and her site looks great and smart.

don't want to hate every young person in the new york times. makes me feel bad.

"in the spirit of sassy magazine" is always a good move. plus, john waters loves her and that's good enough for me.

wish more websites looked like the rookie site for real! so easy to read and navigate and pleasant to look at.

http://rookiemag.com/

ya tavi is awesome

yep rookie is great and i wish i was as cool and smart at 28 as tavi is at 15/16

nothing to hate about tavi.

Rookie is great and I wish it was there to read when I was 12+ years old. So much better than so many teen girl mags.

LONG ILX THREADS HATE THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK:

1. Click on the Permalink of the message right after the cutoff.

2. The URL will now contain something like "bookmarkedmessageid=3669956"

3. Change that number to something smaller and you will be jumped back to an earlier point in the thread without loading the whole thing.

― Godzilla vs. Rodan Rodannadanna (The Yellow Kid), Friday, July 27, 2012 12:52 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark

I feel dumb for not having thought of doing this myself!

i tried it on the long orig breaking bad thread & it didnt seem 2 work

Which part didn't work? The only maybe tricky part is that if you don't make that number small enough, you won't get any older messages. And if you make that number too small you'll be at the first messages. Usually lowering it by thousands or ten-thousands is enough.

i have tried it and it worked

What I do with a long thread is open it at my bookmarked spot and then hit permalink on the first post while the rest is loading.

fyi you can also click on the permalink for the last post before the fold and then just click “view previous page"

View Previous Page has only ever worked sporadically for me.

i enjoy that scott is all 'that tavi girl'

View Previous Page has only ever worked sporadically for me.

― Godzilla vs. Rodan Rodannadanna (The Yellow Kid), Friday, August 3, 2012 4:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/nyregion/four-men-sharing-rent-and-friendship-for-18-years.html

men. living together.

i was looking for a thread on like manchildren or something to post this on but i guess this is close enough because lol nytimes not so much these guys are the ruling class

"Shyaporn Theerakulstit, actor and audiobook narrator"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/fashion/montauk-feels-the-effects-of-too-many-hipsters.html

In the meantime, longtime residents are left to harken back to that first crowd that had to endure an invasion of newcomers, the Montauket tribe. As Mr. Devlin’s wife, Eileen, joked on Friday as the restaurant prepared for another busy night, “Now I know how the Indians felt.”

Nope. No you don't.

it notes clearly that she was joking

yah what gives

Another showed a rifle and the words “Defend Montauk.”

printing hipster shirts against hipsters u might be a hipster

also isnt the fedora more of a broish affectation

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/nyregion/four-men-sharing-rent-and-friendship-for-18-years.html

men. living together.

― goole, Saturday, August 4, 2012 1:57 PM

this was hilarious! The comments, though, are mostly horrifying.

quiddities thread has made me insensitive to the real articles, i want all the stupid setup cut so i can get right to the aughs

so by hipster they just mean young money?

http://i.imgur.com/aXnRN.jpg

well

Quiddities and agonies of the freshman class

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/realestate/college-dorm-room-interior-designer.html

There is something really weird happening at state flagship universities in the South and I'm afraid to try to understand it

I was seriously afraid that the interior designer was one of my freshman roommates who would rearrange my furniture without asking and was fond of pastel pink with floral patterns ….

Seriously though, we had cinderblock walls and nowhere to store the uni provided furniture… it was very much “monastic tradition” aesthetic…

Why did you need to store the furniture??

To make room for their matching credenzas obv

Xp - if you wanted furniture that wasn’t the uni issued furniture… where would you put the uni furniture you aren’t using? 2nd and 3rd year I lived in a house with an attic, which was mostly used for storing the uni issued furnishings

Like … the uni beds were not designed for two people to sleep in… this was obviously a common reason for students to acquire their own furniture

Don't be mad but I have never heard of replacing the university-owned furniture that comes with the dorm room!

Like, sure, those beds are not relationship-optimal but neither is having three dudes sharing a room, you just make do

https://www.thecut.com/article/wealth-gap-between-parents-families-new-york.html

I would not put my name and second home town in the paper if this were me https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/nyregion/voting-absentee-residence-ny.html

nor would i let myself be photographed at the gowanus canal

how tf does an adjunct instructor have two homes is what i wanna know!?!?!

mom and dad

her parents are houses?!

His iirc

IT'S LIKE DOING A GOOD THING IN THE WORST WAY. I only realized after a closer reading that the org MoveIndigo counsels people to actually move places, not just vote from their 2nd or 3rd homes. It's...not a bad idea, I think?

About 10 years ago, an organizer friend vented to me that someone should start organizing to get NYC transplants to out-migrate back to the suburbs & rural America in a coordinated way in order to influence communities and ultimately flip political realities. Turns out she was right and just needed a bunch more letters after her name and probably a lot of money that she didn't have to make it a reality.

This passage is doing a lot imo:

The situation is particularly tense in the Hudson Valley, where an influx of full-time residents from Brooklyn and Manhattan is already reshaping the region in its image

Yes, mostly they are doing that by just moving and becoming part of their new towns and villages. I understand the appeal. You can get involved in community governance in smaller towns in a way that you can't do on a city scale. In NYC you can't run for the school board or the library board or basically hold any office without being a career politician. I should know! I'm technically an elected official, and it was a stupidly difficult process even though I hold literally NO power and yet all of us are STILL being blocked by a corrupt party machine so that no change is possible.

So...people can work remotely now so they move to Hudson or Rhinebeck or Beacon or Kingston, and those towns are changing in complex ways. Beacon has a truly progressive city council wing now! Kingston voted in rent stabilization and good-cause eviction protections a couple of years ago! The housing market in Beacon is horrible/ridiculous but that's also in comparison to how depressed that whole area has been for...50 years? 70 years? Houses used to be cheap because no one wanted to be there, and if you could have afforded something better, you wouldn't have been there either. That wasn't good for the town, it wasn't a mythic past when things were so great before those city people came.

A lot of gentrifying communities are also queer-friendly havens in a super hostile landscape, which also really helps the people who were queer there BEFORE it gentrified. I had a Beacon old-timer sneer at me once about how those disgusting people were ruining his city. I actually thought he was being racist but it turns out it was homophobia. A fun surprise!

i could see people not wanting their town to turn into the park slope food coop but screw 'em they old and their town was crumbling. probably. every old east coast town is crumbling a little. where i am i want juuuuuuust enough gentrifying. just a smidge. lots of people moved here from Boston during the pandemic and i did get a little scared...i mean Boston...but it turned out okay.

those hudson valley people lived through the hippie invasion and people like Frank Serpico moving in. they can take it.

but yeah no houses for sale here anymore. there used to be tons for cheap. now nothing. which sucks for the locals.

the good thing about western mass is that it has always had pockets of coolness via people who went to Hampshire and the like and who just stayed here. i have so many friends who went to Hampshire and then never left. that's how the freakfolknoise was born.

I did my freshman year at Bard (96-97) and the idea that Kingston is now a nice place to live is frankly astonishing. The only reason we ever went there was to buy cartons of cigarettes at the Super K-Mart; it was a quintessential post-industrial hollowed-out town as were several others in the region (though not Rhinebeck, that was already pretty fancy)

Kingston is lovely, I would move to that area in a second. In fact, if I can swing it, we plan on doing so sooner rather than later. Tired of living on top of other people.

xp Totally. All those places were like that, post-industrial all up and down the rivers that previously been the power sources for manufacturing. I really liked Kingston when I visited in 2018-2019 but within a couple of years it was already out of my hypothetical price range. Ditto Coxsackie which now has a big renovated hotel and event (wedding) venue right on the Hudson.

still weird to go to hudson and see everything crumbly and old and then go on that one street where my brother is and all the fancy cars are lined up for muffins and antique chandeliers. kinda like woodstock i guess. but woodstock is basically woods and one main drag of new yorkers buying coffee.

I mean...second homes are bad for communities, I think? There's probably research on this, I don't know it specifically. But just owning more than one property, more than you can live in, is a net social ill. The effect is probably null to slight when housing is ample (or the non-primary property is less livable like a seasonal cabin or something). The homes that used to be housing for permanent residents but are now empty 50 weeks a year or, worse, used as vacation rentals, are horrible for communities. There is a Brooklyn-to-Beacon pipeline but it's actual residents, people are moving there with families and young kids who join the public schools and stuff.

Aha here we go: https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/03/22/nyc-second-homes-hudson-valley-ulster-decline/

“I understand that it’s important to preserve the community we live in. We don’t want it to turn into all short-term rentals. And we definitely don’t want investors buying up all the homes and renting them basically like hotel rooms,” said Heather Cross, a travel agent who bought her second home when she was living in New York City in 2013. She now lives in New Jersey with her family, but spends many weekends in their second home.

Ha...hah?

Speaking of people who shouldn't be talking to reporters on the record.

the airbnb thing is just definitely bad for everyone all over. really bad. venture capital buying up whole neighborhoods.

It's more of a vibe than anything else, but I'm starting to feel like the Montana land rush may be over. There's a new apartment building that opened up on my street a few months ago, and they haven't been able to fill all the units yet, and another building on my street has a couple of empty units, too, and it's about to be winter. Nobody wants to move here in the winter; when I was talking to landlords at the beginning of 2023 they asked when I was coming, and I said in March, and they said, "Yeah, it should have stopped snowing by the time you get here." Meanwhile, they're building literally hundreds of new units (some single-family houses, some apartment buildings) down the road from me and I have no idea who's gonna want to live there.

can someone get me a price on the coat. thanks. Chanel never answers my calls.

Chanel coat, price on request, (800) 550-0005; Valentino tights (worn underneath), $1,000; and Welch’s own dress, headband and jewelry. Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Vanessa Reid

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/17/t-magazine/florence-welch-machine-dance-fever-music.html

Technically this is off-topic - it's the BBC - but mention of second homes put me in mind of this piece on the BBC today. Not the New York Times, the BBC. "Holiday home dream left us crippled with debt", complete with compo face photos of the couple.

It's about a couple who bought a caravan in a holiday park. For £110,000. At first I thought it was going to be one of those cases where they buy a caravan, but the owners of the land suddenly tell them that they're only allowed to live in it for foue weeks at a time, or they don't have the legal right to live in it at all despite the fact that the sellers implied that they could. That would be sympathetic.

But no! They actually bought it so they could make a profit renting it out. The nightmare scenario is that it didn't make as much money as they expected. "The Richardsons said a Tattershall Lakes salesperson assured them they would make enough income from hiring out their caravan to cover their monthly finance repayments of £1,269. (but) The Richardsons said they found themselves "haemorrhaging money" after buying their caravan.

"'We had months where we were taking £1,200 in rental costs, but we would only receive £200 of that because of linen charges, (visitor) passes, cleaning fees,'” said Mr Richardson, 46. The couple soon decided to cut their losses and offered to sell their caravan back to the park. After this offer was rejected, the Richardsons paid £20,000 and handed over their caravan to get out of their third-party finance agreement. "We lost, over a period of two years, in excess of £50,000, which has just crippled us," Mr Richardson said."

So, in other words, they entered into a risky business venture without doing much research, they failed to make the Excel spreadsheet work - that's a topical reference - and bought themselves out, losing a substantial but apparently not life-altering sum of money in the process. I find it hard to sympathise with them.

As mentioned this has nothing to do with the NYT, it just irritated me. If this had been the NYT the caravan would have been a yacht, or an entire apartment in Manhattan, and the couple would have lost $1.25m or something, and they would be in litigation with the owners, and it would have the word condo in it.

I'm pretty sure it would have the word "time share" in it.

A lot of upstate and Hudson valley towns just don’t have much of an economy anymore. I get the resentment toward newcomers from park slope on some level, but those aren’t the people who moved the factories.

Where I live in westchester was also once a thriving industrial center. Now it’s mostly professionals who moved from the city. There’s still a little bit of lingering resentment among some old timer families, but the factories were gone a long time ago

three doors from my house is the building that was the Greenfield Paper Box Company. they did all the fancy gift boxes for cartier and tiffany. those heavy blue things for tiffany. anyway, they sold most of their equipment to another box company and now a funky custom wooden cabinet company moved in. they work and live there. feel like that would have made one of those good quirky nyt stories.
i do get a little wistful when i walk by because my friend ray was going to buy the factory building and the house in front for his bookstore and let me have my record store in the front! three doors from my house. i never would have left my street...
he bought another old factory building TWO houses down from me. and that's where his store is now.

this is the funky new company: https://boxco.studio/

https://boxco.studio/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/about-1.jpg

oh and ray's building is the old Diamond-Electric Soap Factory. i don't even want to know what's under the ground over there...toxic victorian soap leavings.

man alive I thought you were in jersey?

we talked a bit about westchester when we moved back east (not far up, like bronxville, hastings) for the usual reasons people move to the suburbs (quiddities), but it was nixed based on my wife's experience at grad school in white plains ("pod people"). I think if we decided to go she'd insist on further up the Hudson.

Happy to ilxmail you about my experience if you want. Has been good overall. Would not say "pod people." Maybe a little bit of that in any commuter town but mine avoids the worst of it somehow.

For one, they didn’t have the storage space for Rainer’s toys, nor a mudroom for their dirty shoes and the stroller

They are looking for a 1.8 to 2.2 million home in Boston area

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/14/realestate/boston-charlestown-home-sale.html

They don’t look like characters in a Clint Eastwood movie

_For one, they didn’t have the storage space for Rainer’s toys, nor a mudroom for their dirty shoes and the stroller_

They are looking for a 1.8 to 2.2 million home in Boston area

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/14/realestate/boston-charlestown-home-sale.html🕸

what is rainer up to these days? (POLL CLOSES 31 DEC 2044)

President Biden is yet another one-term Democrat hurt by inflation and struggling to free hostages before leaving office. But Mr. Carter’s enhanced reputation offers hope that he too may be remembered more favorably.

Let's see if Diamond Joe has forty years in the tank to make up for it.

lol

Building houses Buster Keaton style

i kinda wonder if anyone would have thought of jimmy carter at all over the years if it weren't for the houses thing. he did a lot to keep his name out there and also become saintly or whatever. like those rich people do now. bill gates, etc.

once biden is out i don't think anyone will think about him at all until he dies. he's pretty forgettable.

oh, i’ll think of him as a senile racist murderer who deserves the gallows, don’t worry.

tablespierre

honestly anyone who speaks positively about Biden should be shown images of Palestinian fathers shaking their headless children as flames burn the refugee camp they are in.

this doesn't really belong here but this article about the royal mint turning a nation's trash into luxury jewelry belongs somewhere. we really have gone back to old time gold-mining days.

https://www.nytimes.com/card/2025/01/01/business/uk-royal-mint-jewelry