Young Manhattanite

YM is: a) a group blog; b) a putz with a wifi; c) worse than an Anonyblogger; d) a random Tumblr page; e) a media wankfest blog written by a group of new media types who are only slightly less annoying than Julia; f) the sound of one man crapping; or g) all of the above.
Nov 09
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Not that this needs the #Fuckin’Jews tag, but yeah: if this doesn’t get me a postcard from My Babe Abe himself, nothing will. But in all seriousness, fuck Abe Foxman, and fuck anybody who’s ever discriminated against anyone, ever. But really fuck Abe Foxman.

I never got to write about this last week, but yeah: Eli’s show was moving, for me, as someone who constantly wonders what it means to be a Jew and how conflicting some of the feelings I have are about it.

The biggest insecurity plenty of Jews I know who are in the same boat as me carry isn’t an angry persecution complex (those, for the record, are among the #Fuckin’Jews). Antisemitism is both bad and scary, but it just made me feel bad for ignorant assholes and glad I wasn’t them and I moved on. The only real inconvenience this causes me is having to avoid both Neo-Nazi gatherings and Klan Kountry (ugh, God, like I need another problem on my daily commute…), and after going to camp in Northern Georgia for nine years, you kind of just find a way to live with these things, like laughing at them. Some people get angry and want to kill these people - Abe… - but it’s probably better to just take over the banks and media and Hollywood feel bad for them and hope they change.

No, the biggest insecurity they have is about not having big families like everyone else does. Get it? ‘Cause a lot of ours were kinda killed. The only personal consolation I have for this is the Downfall meme, which makes me giggle every time.

So me and them and a bunch of other people are caught between trying to preserve a culture and a belief and certain kind of pride, but also, trying to forge our own identity and not be part of the batshit nationalism and ethnocentrism pumping blue blood into the heart of the scariest geopolitical conflicts happening as we speak.

Somebody, who I really like, was really upset with some of the things Eli said. Even worse, this person’s response was “Well, now I understand why he is the way he is,” which could’ve referred to any number of things, but I’m gonna go ahead and guess one of two: his dad, an Orthodox Rabbi, or his mom, who dated a black convict and wrote letters to her son at summer camp, telling him to fart on the American flag on July 4th. She’s wrong.

That person - and all of the people I know like him, including myself - are the way they are because they’re trying to forge and understand an identity of their own, not the one that was prescribed to them to take and just roll with for the most sanctimonious and pious of reasons. Fuck that.

So! This is both for Eli and that other person. Enjoy. Laila tov!.

Nov 08
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ninety9: My cousin was reading The Outsiders for class. Probably around 1978 or so. It amazes me to learn the book had been around for decade already (I would have pegged it at 1975 or, but then again, I was still of the mind that books were published roughly around the first time I encountered them). I got my own copy, with the cover as presented above. I think of it as the first ‘adult’ book I ever read (I was 9 in 1977, BTW). That or Watership Down. But look at that fucking cover. Can you blame me for not realizing it was set in Tulsa until like, 10 years later? I liked this version.

ninety9:

My cousin was reading The Outsiders for class. Probably around 1978 or so. It amazes me to learn the book had been around for decade already (I would have pegged it at 1975 or, but then again, I was still of the mind that books were published roughly around the first time I encountered them). I got my own copy, with the cover as presented above. I think of it as the first ‘adult’ book I ever read (I was 9 in 1977, BTW). That or Watership Down. But look at that fucking cover. Can you blame me for not realizing it was set in Tulsa until like, 10 years later?

I liked this version.

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anastasiafriscia:

My roommate is starting a meatball shop, which is like a meatball truck but stationary. I haven’t tried the meatballs yet but I’m told they’re very good.

On Stanton and Allen?? Are they looking for a mascot?

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“But what Portuguese gave me that nothing else could have was Brazil’s great mystic writer, Clarice Lispector, a person so dazzling that she was reputed to be that rare woman who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” I went to the Museum of Jewish Heritage today to hear Benjamin Moser talk about Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. If you weren’t there (and if you’re under 60, you weren’t), you should read WHY YOU SHOULD KNOW CLARICE LISPECTOR: There were no faux colonial buildings in her background: despite her alluring reputation, she was born in a Ukrainian shtetl, a tiny town where people shat in ditches, even in good times. 1920, the year of her birth, was not a good time. In the aftermath of the first world war and the Russian Revolution, the country was starving. The Red Cross reported that people commonly ate their dead relatives and Jews were being massacred in a devastating, and today nearly entirely forgotten, wave of pogroms. Against incredible odds (her mother was raped in one of those pogroms) her parents managed to reach Brazil when Clarice was just over a year old. She grew up in the Jewish neighbourhood of Recife, where she lost her beloved mother when she was nine. As a teenager Lispector migrated with her father and sisters to Rio de Janeiro. By the time she reached university she was already renowned as one of the most beautiful women in Brazil, and when she published her first book, “Near to the Wild Heart”, at age 23, it was acclaimed as the greatest novel a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language. The judgment would still hold if Clarice Lispector had not continually surpassed her first book with her own subsequent works.

“But what Portuguese gave me that nothing else could have was Brazil’s great mystic writer, Clarice Lispector, a person so dazzling that she was reputed to be that rare woman who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.”

I went to the Museum of Jewish Heritage today to hear Benjamin Moser talk about Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. If you weren’t there (and if you’re under 60, you weren’t), you should read WHY YOU SHOULD KNOW CLARICE LISPECTOR:

There were no faux colonial buildings in her background: despite her alluring reputation, she was born in a Ukrainian shtetl, a tiny town where people shat in ditches, even in good times. 1920, the year of her birth, was not a good time. In the aftermath of the first world war and the Russian Revolution, the country was starving. The Red Cross reported that people commonly ate their dead relatives and Jews were being massacred in a devastating, and today nearly entirely forgotten, wave of pogroms. Against incredible odds (her mother was raped in one of those pogroms) her parents managed to reach Brazil when Clarice was just over a year old.

She grew up in the Jewish neighbourhood of Recife, where she lost her beloved mother when she was nine. As a teenager Lispector migrated with her father and sisters to Rio de Janeiro. By the time she reached university she was already renowned as one of the most beautiful women in Brazil, and when she published her first book, “Near to the Wild Heart”, at age 23, it was acclaimed as the greatest novel a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language. The judgment would still hold if Clarice Lispector had not continually surpassed her first book with her own subsequent works.
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Riding the food truck craze, I tried to start a rumor about one with meatballs (who doesn’t love meatballs?) last night, enlisted backup, considered planting a fake photo or two this week but didn’t last long because it turns out THERE IS ONE. Should have gone with Frittata Truck.

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Now I “get it.”

Now I “get it.”

Nov 07
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Jonathan Fire*Eater - “Station Coffee”

This song is cocaine. It should be called Station Cocaine. Your Saturday night has begun.

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fek: Nice, Bucky. I assume that unlocks the “Don’t Stop Believin’” Foursquare badge.

fek:

Nice, Bucky.

I assume that unlocks the “Don’t Stop Believin’” Foursquare badge.

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6h057: Talk about a Young Manhattanite. It’s a fake. You can tell by the inconsistent shadowing. Like the Oswald photo.

6h057:

Talk about a Young Manhattanite.

It’s a fake. You can tell by the inconsistent shadowing. Like the Oswald photo.

Nov 06
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Shabbat Shalom Recovery Project: They wouldn’t let me stick her head in the front of the stroller. Family doesn’t “get” art.

Shabbat Shalom Recovery Project: They wouldn’t let me stick her head in the front of the stroller. Family doesn’t “get” art.

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Never forget.

Never forget.

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Since I couldn’t find the baby-shopping-cart-head thing, I just replaced it with the old Florent signage font whatever that 99 found. But the pretty rich people have returned, Bakes. Not to worry.

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Oh, come on, you GUYS. It’s PARADE DAY. WHEEEEEEE!!!!!

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Fix this shit, Foster.

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YANKEES.