Live From the Imperial City: Kurt Andersen on Super Tuesday
I just came home from my neighborhood polling place in Brooklyn with my daughter, who turned 18 two weeks ago. She was excited to be voting for the first time — and for the first time in a very long while, I was excited to be voting as well. (Full disclosure: Obama.)
There hasn’t been an election this interesting in my sentient lifetime, and I’ve never followed a campaign as closely. Maybe it’s the same for you. I’ll be back online by 8:30 or so to blog in real time — about the election results, about the coverage of the election results, about my excitements and disappointments as the night grinds on. The polls in California don’t close until eleven eastern time, so I expect I’ll be jabbering here until midnight EST or later.
So let me quote Margot Channing: “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
intel
Wilmer Valderama, Marquee, Apparently Both Still AliveThe only thing worse than being on an e-mail list where you get spammed with invitations to Wilmer Valderama’s birthday party at Marquee (aren’t they both 70 years old by now?) is being on an e-mail list where you get spammed with invitations that are ALSO pleas to join a summer share in the Hamptons. “Please contact us if you’d like to do a Hamptons Share this summer!” read the chipper text of the e-mail that came with the invitation here. Wilmer Valderama? Sharing a house with people you don’t know? Trashy, overcrowded nightclubs? Wow, whoever these Rachel and Adam people are, we have to hand it to them. They’ve done the impossible: They made us look outside and thank the heavens that it is dark and sleeting out there. Summer, and the Hamptons, can not come slow enough for us.
Hamptons Holidays [Official Site]
video look book
What the Auteurs Are Wearing These Days
Amy Larocca discovered NYU film student Hunter Shaw sitting on a stoop mulling over his latest screenplay. Though he couldn’t seem to make the script work, he was pleased to share his fashion muse Frank Booth from Blue Velvet and his favorite store with us: “Trash & Vaudeville that’s where I buy all my pants.” Will Shaw find creative relief from a neighbor in pink bottoms? Find out in this week’s Video Look Book.
Hunter Shaw [Video Look Book]
the morning line
New York Is Full of Hot Air
• According to a new study, New York City is responsible for a full one percent of the nation’s greenhouse-gas emissions. A remarkable thing about the study: It was commissioned and publicized by our own mayor, who’s basing an emission-cutting program on it. [MetroNY]
• Citigroup is laying off 17,000 employees in a major slimming-down operation, and its New York headquarters is expected to be hit hard, alongside the megabank’s London and Hong Kong hubs. [NYT]
• A female teacher at the Newark Boys Chorus School is the latest inductee into the tabloid pantheon after an alleged dalliance with a student; she is charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault and one count of child endangerment. [WNBC]
• Notoriously cash-poor Columbia University is in the money, as 92-year-old billionaire John Kluge is giving his alma mater $400 million for scholarships to the needy. Somewhat weirdly, the money will be distributed among already accepted students. [NYP]
• And in a cross-platform twist on an old story, a CBS News producer was fired for plagiarizing, “almost verbatim,” a Wall Street Journal article — which Katie Couric proceeded to read in her video blog. Those bloggers: No scruples, we’re telling you. [amNY]
party town
They’ve Come So Far Since Benny Hill• Hot Fuzz premiere. Walter Reade Theatre, 140 W. 65th St., nr. Broadway, 7:15 p.m. Hot Fuzz is brought to you by the folks who made the Will Arnett–narrated Don’t portion of Grindhouse’s fake-trailer interlude, and thus we endorse Hot Fuzz despite not knowing anything about it. The always-entertaining Kevin Smith will be on hand to interview director Edgar Wright and star Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the film.
photo op
David Wright! David Wright!
In last week’s magazine, David Amsden convinced us that Mets third-baseman David Wright is just about the greatest, charmingest, friendliest, cutest, talentedest, bestest baseball player ever. So it comes as only good news to learn that good people at Madame Tussauds feel likewise, today unveiling his likeness at the Times Square waxery. Is this town big enough for two David Wrights? One can hope.
Mr. Clean [NYM]
in the magazine
Imus in the Seventies“There are those who would claim that Imus occasionally lapses into good taste,” Mike McGrady writes in New York. “If true, this may well be a result of several lengthy discussions he has had with the station manager and the program director, his ‘Mr. Vicious’ and ‘Mr. Numb.’ The upshot of those discussions is that he will never, never, not ever do any more jokes about Chappaquiddick or, for that matter, anyone else involved in a personal tragedy.” McGrady’s profile is from the April 3, 1972, issue. The I-Man was 31 years old, freshly arrived at New York’s WNBC, and he was a new and jarring force in radio. He was also, it seems, very much the same guy he is now. Which New York radio personalities did Imus admire?, McGrady asked. “David Steinberg —he’s very funny for a Jewish person.” We’ve dug the profile from the archives; you can read it as a PDF.
Radio Therapy: Shock Treatment in the Morning [NYM, PDF]
developing
Pretty, Affordable Housing for Brooklyn?
Maybe visionary architects can do more than concoct condos and museums in this town. A competition to design affordable housing in the South Bronx, which ended with the January selection of U.K. architecture firm Grimshaw and local good-guy architect Richard Dattner, went so well that the city’s Department of Housing, with other agencies, is planning another, similar competition for later this year. The city will collect proposals for a 150-unit complex, dance theater, and retail space in Brooklyn, near BAM, by May 4, Housing commissioner Shaun Donovan said at the Center for Architecture last night, when he also announced another, unspecified competition for later this year. Architect Markus Dochantschi of StudioMDA, part of the runner-up team for the Bronx project, told us that he and his group will submit to the Brooklyn competition, and last night, for the first time, he showed off their Bronx proposal — a scheme of colorful mid-rise buildings that absorb sunlight and eschew dark hallways. The Brooklyn winner would face Frank Gehry’s Miss Brooklyn and her gargantuan friends — unless, of course, it’s built while lawsuits keep all those titanium panels waiting on the loading docks. —Alec Appelbaum
