Michael Musto Finds a Blog Home, At LastAll together now: three snaps up, in a circle. Legendary Village Voice scribe Michael Musto has entered the blogosphere! He told us last night while we were out at (where else?) Beige, but before we could do a scoopy post, his publicist sent out a press release. “Complimenting his immensely popular weekly ‘La Dolce Musto’ column, readers will be tipped off to breaking news items and get the most crucial news from the world of nightlife, entertainment, politics,” explains the breathless missive. Musto will do one post a day, he told us last night. We could not be more excited. Musto is hilarious and raunchy — in fact, he’s the only gay writer who makes fart jokes. In the whole world! “I’m really nervous about finding things to write about,” he explained, but judging by today’s entry, he should be fine. Here’s our favorite part of today’s post (which does a much better job of selling it than the press release), in which the shy Musto is confronted by gay performer Ari Gold (yes, really) and accused of not giving Gold enough publicity:
Gold feels that as an openly gay artist, he deserves a heaping of attention from me, who champions homo talent all the time. In all candor, I told him I don’t write much about music, but he shot back, “I don’t buy that” — not the most gracious response to a gracious response, but again, very singular. Another valid excuse is that I don’t automatically write about someone just because they’re openly gay. If that were an instant ticket to publicity, there’d be a lot more artists bursting out of the closet (which would actually be fabulous — maybe next week I’ll plug every single out person there is, but perhaps not the murderers).
Welcome to the blog underworld, Michael! We’ve been awaiting you. Just don’t get injured, ya hear?
The Daily Musto [VV]
in other news
Keith Olbermann Creates a Perfect Media MomentSo if Balk’s Cock writing from under the desk at Radar to apply for Alex Balk’s old job at Gawker.com wasn’t meta-media enough for you, take a look at this video. It’s Keith Olbermann on his Countdown show reading aloud Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon “Bill O’Reilly’s Very Useful Advice for Young People,” which appeared in the Village Voice last week. Olbermann reads the panels (at length) in O’Reilly’s voice, including the parts about how Olbermann himself has a small cock. Click the image above and let us know: Is it boring? Is it genius? Is it just plain confusing? Damned if we know. But to add another meta-layer to this post, why don’t you just imagine it was written by Daily Intel’s cock. Makes everything funnier, no?
Olbermann Channels Tom Tomorrow Channeling O’Reilly [VV]
in other news
‘Village Voice’ Still Totally Crushing Out on SpitzerVillage Voice vet Wayne Barrett finally lets loose on the lame “Troopergate” scandal with a withering cover feature that, frankly, made us a bit nostalgic for the alterna-weekly’s better days. Joe Bruno, of course, is overzealously pursuing Eliot Spitzer for overzealously pursuing Joe Bruno, and, legislatively speaking, zilch is getting done as a result. To Barrett, it’s a GOP smear campaign pure and simple, with the bonus effect of keeping the spotlight off Bruno (who probably did abuse his airplane privileges). “The Republicans are trying to depict Spitzer as a tyrant who will use police powers to silence or defeat them,” he writes, “and they couldn’t be happier to have [Andrew] Cuomo as their witness and cheerleader.”
in other news
‘Village Voice’ Calculates City Migration in Terms of HipstersVillage Voice blogger Michael Clancy takes a look at comptroller Bill Thompson’s analysis of city migration today, and decides that since twice as many people leave the city annually as arrive, the city must specifically be getting fewer hipsters. We have to question this logic, as it seems like there are more and more of them every day, and fewer and fewer people who wear jeans of an appropriate tightness. In fact, just recently, we couldn’t happen to notice that when the dive destination Spitzer’s Corner opened on Ludlow and Rivington, the vast space was immediately filled with hipsters, the way a hole dug by a child on the beach too near the ocean inexorably fills with water. And there was no dent in the population of hipsters everywhere else on the Lower East Side! Anyway, we digress. Thompson’s study also explains that it’s lower income families that are fleeing the city, especially those with young kids — and young unmarried college grads are replacing them. Interesting, right? Also, did you hear the MisShapes aren’t drawing people to the city any more? Now that’s news!
City Getting Less Hipsters [VV]
company town
Facebook Exerts Yet More PowerFINANCE
• Kathleen Corbet, the president of Standard & Poor’s, agreed to step down after her company failed to accurately rate subprime bonds. Deven Sharma, an executive vice-president at S&P, will take her place as president. [Bloomberg]
• An angry Facebook group convinced HSBC, Britain’s largest bank, to stop charging interest on overdrafts by recent grads. You see, interest rates are so Web 1.0. [Times of London via DealBreaker]
• With few big M&A deals on the horizon, it may seem like investment bankers could just stay in the Hamptons for the rest of the year. But the backlog of big deals from the halcyon days of last spring should keep them plenty busy — as long as the deals don’t fall through. [Deal Journal/WSJ]
NewsFeed
Food-Labor Discord Spreads to Laborers If our recent coverage of the deliveryman revolt caused you to imagine a Utopia in which once lowly restaurant workers pour bubbly on their bikinied yacht passengers while singing “I’m a go-getter,” think again: A feature in today’s Village Voice indicates that all is not well within the Restaurant Opportunity Center of New York (ROC-NY), the group that protests alleged labor-law-flaunting restaurants like Daniel, Smith & Wollensky, and the Fireman Hospitality Group’s eateries. The nonprofit is being sued by former members who allege that they were cheated out of a fair share of the ROC’s pioneering co-op restaurant, Colors. And that’s just the start of the beef.
Fork Off [VV]
Related:
Deliveryman Revolt Continues With No Check in Sight [Grub Street]
The Delivery Man’s Uprising [NYM]
in other news
Rudy Giuliani, Nasty Man — Even to His Kids
Wayne Barrett, the professional anti-Giuliani, has a piece in this week’s Village Voice considering what might have made America’s Mayor’s daughter, Caroline, grow up to be a Barack Obama supporter. Some fun details of life at home with the Giulianis:
1. Rudy brought Caroline to City Hall on Take Your Daughters to Work Day in 1994 and 1995, his first two years as mayor, but never again — because by 1996 “the relationship between Giuliani and his twentysomething press secretary had so poisoned the marriage that all such family events were impossible.”
in other news
‘Voice’ Undercuts Giuliani’s Entire Candidacy, No One NoticesThis week’s Village Voice — yeah, we’re a day late, but, be honest, it’s not like you’ve read it already — carries a cover story by Voice vet and professional Giuliani antagonist Wayne Barrett titled “Rudy Giuliani’s Five Big Lies About 9/11.” In it, Barrett examines a speech the former mayor delivered in Maryland two months ago, arguing that he had the most and best terrorism-fighting experience of any candidate for president. But Barrett isn’t buying Giuliani’s claims; in fact, he says they’re a bunch of lies. How so?
The Orange Line
Riding the B Line: Georgia on Our MindSomewhere in the world there may be a train line that covers more gastronomic territory than the B and V subway lines, which start in southernmost Brooklyn and end deep in Queens, but if there is, we don’t know about it. For the next twenty-odd weeks, we’ll be riding the B and V from Coney Island all the way to Forest Hills, jumping off frequently to rave about our favorite restaurants and food stores near the subway.
This week: The Sheepshead Bay B Stop
in other news
Suits of Armor: The New Suits of SeersuckerSo you’re sitting there on the subway, bored and crowded and sort of hating your life (which is sort of inevitable in New York in August), and you see one of those School of Visual Arts ads promising the much more fun and fulfilling things you could be doing if you just took one of their classes. Yes, I would like to turn my passion into a program, you think. Or: Yes, I would like to learn to take pretty pictures of birds like the guy in that poster. As the always-angry Copyranter points out today, in SVA’s latest campaign, as seen in the Voice, you now also have the option of becoming a knight. Or a blacksmith. Or something. All of which, we’ve got to tell you, seem even less pleasant to be doing on humid 90-degree-plus days than squeezing onto the downtown Lex. Maybe it’s nice to know that things could be worse?
School of Visual Arts Doth Prepare Thee Well, Young Apprentice [Copyranter]
company town
A Last-Minute Bid for TribuneMEDIA
• L.A. Billionaires Ron Burkle and Eli Broad jumped back into the Tribune contest, offering $1 per share more than Sam Zell. [NYT]
• After Joy Press left for Salon, new Voice editor Tony Ortega rehired former editor Brian Parks to edit the arts and culture section. [Eat the Press/HP]
• Former Times public editor Dan Okrent appears in the upcoming film The Hoax, playing a publishing exec engaged in fraud. [WWD]
company town
Hovering Parents Overtake Corporate RecruitingFINANCE
• Big firms concede to overinvolved parents and now include them in the recruiting process of recent grads. [Career Journal/WSJ]
• Happy belated 70th birthday, Ivan Boesky! [DealBreaker]
• The management maxims offered in business books might just be bull, not foxes and hedgehogs. [Forbes]
company town
‘Voice’ Voiceless, AgainMEDIA
• David Blum out at the Village Voice. He was the fourth editor there since December 2005. [Gawker]
• Flummoxing DVR users everywhere, ABC green-lights a sitcom based on the Geico cavemen commercials. [WSJ]
• Pulitzer judging starts today at Columbia University; judges from Willamette Week, the Indianapolis Star, and others read actual printed copies of newspaper articles. [E&P]
the morning line
The Cost of Utopia
• The city’s doing so well financially that some City Council members — Democrats, even — are raising the specter of a tax cut. With the Independent Budget Office projecting a $688 million surplus in 2008, why not? [NYP]
• A souped-up playground is coming to South Street Seaport. One suggested game: groups of children “loading containers with sand, hoisting them up with pulleys and then lowering them down to wagons.” David Rockwell designs the kiddie labor camp, pro bono. [NYT]
• Time to check in with our pal Koral Karsan, Yoko Ono’s driver turned attempted blackmailer, now that the full text of his demand is public. Stalking points: Karsan frames his $2 million demand as compensation for “pain and suffering,” threatens to expose John as a “wife-beating asshole,” and boasts friendship with “NY media.” And yet, Koral, you never call anymore. [NYDN]
• Say what you want about the new Village Voice, but at least it’s not afraid of readers’ letters. From the new issue’s crop: “You … take a dying paper and kill it over and over again.” “The Village Voice is dead.” “Reader’s Digest is edgier than you are.” [VV]
• And a city Department of Sanitation cap is apparently a huge seller and a nascent fashion staple; Scorsese, Liv Tyler, et al have been spotted in them. So reports the Scotsman, our trusted source for apparel news. [Scotsman]
21 questions
‘Voice’ Gossip Michael Musto Still Catty, GayName: Michael Musto
Age: Between 40 and death
Job: Social arbiter, The Village Voice
Neighborhood: Kips Bay
Who’s your favorite New Yorker, living or dead, real or fictional?
Alice Kramden.
What’s the best meal you’ve eaten in New York?
Mama’s holiday lasagne with meatballs and ice cream.
In one sentence, what do you actually do all day in your job?
Delete spam e-mails.
obit
Ellen Willis, 1941–2006Ed Bradley wasn’t the only notable journalist to pass away yesterday. Ellen Willis — the New Yorker’s first rock critic, golden-era Village Voicer, radical feminist, and founder of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU — died of lung cancer in her Queens home. “Ellen was an extraordinary generator of ideas,” said friend and fellow critic Robert Christgau. “All rock criticism shows her influence.” At the New Yorker, she pioneered a critical approach to the public persona of the artist, rather than the work itself. As a feminist, she co-founded two influential groups, Redstockings in 1969 and No More Nice Girls in the eighties, and famously wanted to “smash monogamy,” arguing in favor of pleasure, choice, and pornography. At NYU, she was respected by students who remember her as a formidable teacher and a shy mentor. “I really loved Ellen, because she was so nurturing, in a totally unsentimental and charmingly awkward way,” said former student James Westcott, who is now an editor at ArtReview in London. “She ‘got’ all of us and championed all of us.” Willis lived in Queens with her daughter Nona Willis-Aronowitz and husband, Stanley Aronowitz. She was 64.
— Emma Pearse
Ellen Willis, 64, Journalist and Feminist, Dies [NYT]
Selected Writings [NYU.edu]
the morning line
Like Candy From a Little Leaguer
• Yesterday we told you that Queens assemblyman Bruce McLaughlin was about to surrender on some corruption charges. That was, it turns out, an understatement. The Feds cuffed McLaughlin for stealing a cool $2.2 million in awesome ways and from awesome sources — including Little League teams. [NYDN]
• A report by the state comptroller (yes, our chauffeurless pal Alan Hevesi) says Wall Streeters earn an average of $289,664 — more than five times the city’s average. Even more spectacular, the financial industry’s pay rates grow faster — a shocking 36 percent over the last two years. Of course, someone has to pay for bottle service. [NYP]
• The battle is on for the title of the 300 millionth American (Manhattan’s splendidly named Zoë Emille Hudson is but one contender). The Times raises a great and uncharacteristically naughty point: Why does everyone assume that yesterday’s arrival was born yesterday? And not, say, smuggled across the border? [NYT]
• LIRR is shifting 2,000 feet of track to fix the dangerous gap between the train and the platform at Shea and plans to do the same at other stations. Each year about 60 people fall in; we recall that last month one such victim was a former state senator. Coincidence? [amNY]
• And the Village Voice’s “Best of NYC” issue is out, complete with the ailing weekly’s trademark mix of picks offbeat (Best Aroma Inside an ATM), earnest (Best Bus), and unfortunate (Best Performance Art Space for Dinner and a Movie goes to Monkeytown, which announced its closing weeks ago). [VV]