Incredibly Rich Professionals Get Married and Insist on Letting Us Know

Enjoy your ceremony, but keep it out of the Times, please.

Alright, we're all used to the annoying profiles of rich people getting married and bragging about it in the New York Times. But here's one that I'm having some trouble stomaching, as it is just so irrelevant to normal people -- even to normal rich people! It's like the universality of this situation has gone completely down the drain by the sheer pervasion of wealth, fancy job titles, and name-dropping of classy Manhattan bars and restaurants. Hope you'll see what I mean in the case of Thursday's profiled wedding.

The bride, Mina Guiahi, is a portfolio manager at Millenium Management (she's since moved on to other high-profile companies). Her parents, described as "wordly and secular college professors," are members of the Iranian elite, having moved to Huntington (Long Island) right after the start of the 1979 revolution, living in Paris briefly before emigrating. The groom, Jesse Levinson, is a Jewish/Catholic-raised adviser for the State Dept. in Washington on Palestinian economic affairs (he's no slouch, either).

Their story? They met at a swanky Seattle wedding. They both lived on the Upper East Side and started training together (running) in Central Park. They broke up. Two years later, they met again at Underbar in the W Hotel in Union Square (um, seriously, do we have to know that?), and had a great kiss. They ran into a guy struggling with a flat tire and Ms. Guiahi gave him a few hundred dollars (?!?!) to get him going again. Rrrright.

"And then he [meaning Mr. Levinson] was gone," the article dramatically puts it. "While other couples nuzzled at the NoHo hotspot Bond Street," Mr. Levinson informed Ms. Guiahi of his decision to take a year-long post in Iraq, causing the couple to be heart-wrenchingly separated. Especially since might never come back from war...... OH WAIT! He was working with an elite government institution!!! (And seriously, the "NoHo hotspot Bond Street"?! What is this, Sex and the City? Can't you stop name-dropping for a New York minute?).

Still, at least Mr. Levinson might have been in actual danger. You know what Ms. Guiahi's big "risk" was at this juncture in life? "Co-managing her first portfolio at Diamondback Advisors as the financial markets crashed." Boo Fucking Hoo!!! Something tells me you'd be A-OK even if you lost your fancy financial job.

I only clicked on this article so I could read about how a couple stays together when one partner goes off to Iraq and the other cannot see him/her for a whole year (because that's what the headline intimated). But this is quite another scenario. Not only did the bride and groom indeed see each other over this year of cross-global suffering, but they took romantic rendezvous (plural) in places like Paris and Istanbul. If this weren't enough to bear, we have to read about their their cutesy ways of adapting to each other and their lavish, culturally-diverse wedding ceremony at (wait for it) THE HARVARD CLUB!!!

Are you fucking serious, New York Times? Why must you unceasingly endorse self-indulgent stories of the Elite that nobody, except for their friends, can relate to?? Stories about rich people are fun, but only when they involve crazy pictures or drug scandals (and anyway, that's why we read Perez Hilton and US Weekly, not the Times). This BS should never have made it past the couple's wedding slideshow or toasts, let alone to my computer screen.

Shoeless Schmuck Does Shanghai

I wouldn't be surprised if this 'Sole Man' were a 'Sole Bachelor,' too.

My favorite yuppiehipster-hater just tipped me off to a piece of journalistic gold: an NPR snippet on English filmmaker Arthur Jones, who has decided to spend a year barefoot -- in China. During the barefoot mission, which is taking place in the "urban jungle" of Shanghai, Mr. Jones continues to conduct business meetings and do his "job as a filmmaker," whatever that could possibly entail (actually, I'd rather not know).

And why, you may ask, is this well-off Brit voluntarily forgoing a luxury that, I think it's safe to say, literally millions of people in China cannot afford? Because, he claims, "It opens your eyes. You're suddenly in touch with everything around. And it feels like you're a little child discovering the world for the first time." A few lines later, he shares the downside to barefooting it: "You don't take anything else in; you spend the entire time staring at the floor" (...Could NPR have meant this satirically? Let's hope so). Clearly this guy has no idea what he's talking about, and hasn't even gotten his media spiel down pat.

We do, however, learn of the supposed health benefits to going barefoot -- the kind of shit that yuppies find orgasmic. Mainly, it's been determined that shoeless runners put less stress on their feet, suffering less impact. There's even been a study showing that rickshaw runners in India and China who did not wear shoes had fewer cases of foot fungus and infection than did their shoe-wearing counterparts. Maybe it's just me, but I have a feeling that a case of athlete's foot becomes irrelevant when you're living in a dirty slum and likely to die from a host of horrendous diseases. I'd like to see Mr. Jones shack up with a rickshaw runner and compare foot health with beggar children: hopefully he'll get a sense of how fucking lucky he is to have the option of wearing shoes at all, while others must risk stepping on dangerous materials, not to mention garbage and sewage, everyday.

In fact, unless this filmmaker extraordinaire is willing to buy slippers for every beggar child in the city (and upgrade every middle-class kid's Nikes), he should put his fucking shoes back on. This fool makes Chinese businessmen in $5,000 Gucci loafers seem justified and normal. What an ungrateful moron.

To the self-proclaimed 'Sole Man," who plays childish games in the street like jumping on white lines to avoid scorching pavement, I hope a shoeless Chinese child rips all the clothes off your back and snatches your camera equipment so he can buy himself his very first pair of real shoes. Boo Fucking Hoo, you barefoot hippie.

Wall Street Won't Take You: Try Vaudeville Instead

Sorry, you're not getting your "shot" here.

"New unemployment claims slip; housing starts tick up," is the title of this USA Today article. The gist? Fewer Americans have been requesting unemployment benefits (claims haven't been this low since August 2008), indicating that the economy might just be getting better. Also, more people are building real estate and buying imported goods; in short, Americans are "confident and willing to spend." As I am neither a statistician nor economic analyst, to me this is a run-of-the-mill optimistic update, and I'll accept it as news. It's nice. It's helpful. It'll do.

But it's also infuriating. Why? Because when it came to choosing a photo to accompany this article, some idiot did not choose an image of new construction, Holiday shoppers, or smiling New Yorkers on the rush hour train (I'm sure you could think of many more acceptable choices). Instead, he/she picked an AP photo of a Santa-hatted, 20-something dreamer named Jesse Paloger, who was found standing on Wall Street with a cardboard sign touting his many assets, including "experience in sales, marketing, management" and a degree in accounting and economics. Mr. Paloger's sign also points out that he's a "Go-getter from California looking for my shot," and "ready to interview" (First, is this the Grapes of Wrath reversed? Second, please, please tell me you wouldn't actually interview on Wall Street with a Santa hat on).

The problems with this photo:

1. It has nothing to do with the article. The article isn't about how recent grads and yuppiehipsters can't find jobs so they have to live at home and do chores so their parents won't hate them (though, god knows, we've seen enough of those). It's not even about a lack of jobs at all. It's about a supposed decrease in unemployment. So why are we looking at some unemployed rando in a Santa hat?

2. Of all the people affected by the job market and trying their best to find jobs in uncertain times, THIS guy was chosen as a representative. This guy, who has so much time on his hands that he's standing on the street essentially impersonating a panhandler in the cold, when he could be working or applying to jobs, or reading a book or something. And god help him if his goal was actually to find a job this way (I'm guessing he's trying his luck at amateur comedy), because last time I checked, a Wall Street hopeful has to either know somebody very important or really have his act together. This guy clearly has neither advantage.

3. As much as it pisses me off that this well-dressed idiot with the hubris of a recent degree (which clearly didn't help him at all, in the job or brain departments) is standing on the corner impersonating a homeless person, it's far more bothersome that the AP reporter who took this photo was so goddamn intrigued by Mr. Paloger's lame comedy act that he deemed it newsworthy. And as if that weren't bad enough, someone at USA Today then chose this guy's photo as a perfect accompaniment to an article that has nothing to do with it (it's not even like Mr. Paloger is applying for unemployment or something). What idiocy: an insult not only to panhandlers, but to college graduates actually trying hard to find jobs, and the parents who paid for them to go to college. 

Alas, the hipster-pandering media curse strikes again. 

NYC Nomad Has Lots Of Baggage

If the decadence of the '20s was characterized by jazz-age consumption, the '50s by rampant consumerism, and the '80s by drug use, the decadence of this generation is fueled by youth self-indulgence. The 2010s are an age of self-gratifying, liberal-arts overload;  of well-to-do Westerners who wish to grace the developing world with their graciousness and the blogosphere with their trendiness and "authenticity"; of young adults who seem to be more self-aware than ever. Sure, nobody could have been more "artistically" self-absorbed than John Keats and his Romantic cohorts, but at least they didn't have Twitter and tumblr with which to update their dew-worshipping friends every 5 seconds.

Unfortunately, Ed Casabian does. This 29-year-old, who calls himself "The NYC Nomad" on his spiffy tumblr blog (http://thenycnomad.tumblr.com/), was just featured in the Times for his intrepid couch-surfing (er, air-mattress-placing) New York lifestyle. Having chosen to forego conventional adulthood after a disastrous breakup with a girlfriend of 7 years, Mr. Casabian starting moving to a different apartment every Sunday, spanning the boroughs and social stratospheres, all the time sustaining his job as a web financial analyst at a company that sounds mysteriously like Digg. He stays with friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends -- whoever will take him in -- and documents each stay in neat little pictures of him and his new buddies doing hipster-friendly activities in cute little settings. He even uses the blog to solicit for places to stay -- and to gloat about finally making it into the Times (of course, by ridiculing him I'm just helping to expand his media reach, but hey: his name, when circulating around YuppieHipster world, will no doubt garner enough Google hits to put me on the radar, too). So let's soldier on.

Mr. Casabian, who hails from Massachusetts (no doubt from behind the Tofu Curtain), claims to have fallen into his current way of life after leaving the co-op that he and his girlfriend bought, and riding his bike around Central Park in a wave of depression. Then, in a bout of spunky post-adolescent exuberance known only to the likes of highschoolers and Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City, he decided not to settle down anywhere and chose a "nomadic" (::cringe::) life instead.

Of course, Mr. Casabian has had his fair share of "look how much I endure to be free spirited in the big city" moments, many of which are all too embarrassing. At one point he asked the company that manufactures the air mattress he carries around to "sponsor" him on his journeys, and the proposition was declined (News Flash: most respectable money-making institutions, unlike the New York Times, are not willing to enable the idiot shenanigans of overgrown hipsters who are "finding themselves" in ways that no normal people have enough time or money to do -- or for that matter, would ever want to). Second, he was able to use one very temporary Central Park South address to pick up a girl uptown, only to be refused a second date when he moved soon after to a "not so chic" spot in Queens (Why he assumes it was his living locale -- and not his clear unwillingness to grow up -- that turned her off is beyond me).

But in the end, Ed Casabian is not our everyday bike-loving NYC-dwelling hipster extraordinaire who brags about his BoHoNomadic lifestyle on the Internet. He's more of... well... an emo kid. I started this post with the purpose of expressing my contempt for the infuriating self-indulgence involved in the NYC Nomad's desire to document his childhood romp through the boroughs. But now, I am left not wanting to say "Boo Fucking Hoo," but just a regular old "Boo Hoo," for real. Ed Casabian, it seems to me, is a manchild on the run from any kind of stability, stunning hosts with an "uncanny ability to fall asleep in weird places," and leaving the overall impression of a lost, homeless puppy. Cearly unable to get his life together after a longterm relationship turned sour, he seems to be clinging at best to a strange persona that I'm not sure he's even cocky enough to uphold. To me, it's apparent that he devised this media-bait homelessness scheme primarily to get noticed by the hipster blogospohere and the ever-pandering Times. More than reviling or fury-fueling, his story is just ...pathetic.

Find the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/nyregion/13nomad.html?_r=1

Rich Kids Pay Big Bucks for Ghetto Life

Ah, yes. Yet another lovely Times article ("The Price 20-Somethings Pay To Live in the City," 11/12/10) touting the courage and steadfastness of unfortunate rich kids who must live in the city in apartments paid for by their parents. This fine piece of journalism might be a month old, but it chronicles an ongoing problem for the well-off recent grads of NYC. Their apartments (like nobody else's in New York, obviously), are pretty freaking small.

And they're also sometimes in high-crime areas. Abe Calvin Quezada, a 22-year-old interning at a recording studio in Manhattan, recently gave up his sub-par room in a loft in Bushwick for a renovated tenement near Marcus Garvey Blvd (that's in Bed Stuy), which boasts a tiny 10-by-6-foot bedroom. He thinks this apartment is nicer than his Bushwick flat, but finds the neighborhood downright "fishy," recalling gun shots outside his window and a sighting of a handgun-toting motorcycle rider on a Sunday afternoon. He doesn't feel very safe, especially since he works late.

If I heard this story from someone living in this neighborhood who grew up there, or because it was literally the only place they could afford (with a legit paying job), or because they had no other choice, I'd sympathize with their complaints. But to Mr. Quezada, who chose this spot because it was something Mom was willing to subsidize so he could keep his unpaid hipster lifestyle going, Boo Fucking Hoo.

As for further "tales from the front lines" (more on that terminology later), there's Stefan Rurak, 26, an Oberlin-educated furniture maker who moved to New York 5 years ago and currently lives in an illegal, 9-by-12-foot space in the back of a former furniture store in Greenpoint. He gains some of my favor by at least admitting he "lucked out" by finding this place for so cheap, but loses it all when he insists that the area isn't yet swarming with "college kids in tight pants," and that's why he likes it (leave it to a hipster artist to get all excited when he thinks he's still the only one in the neighborhood. It's like the thrill experienced by the first Jamestown colonist)."It's not that I like New York so much," Mr. Rurak says. "But things happen here that wouldn't happen in other places."

Yup, you're right, Stefan. Only in New York City do people like Mr. Quezada have the privilege to live in and finance tiny apartments in shitty, crime-ridden neighborhoods to fulfill their "dreams," whereas many people living there would literally kill for something better. Only in New York do privileged dweebs find immense self-gratification in downgrading their lifestyles, whereas everyone else is busting their asses to upgrade theirs. Only in NYC does someone like you, Stefan, get a flat-out burst of praise in the Times for living in an illegal room in Brooklyn, when poor families are so often being thrown out of shit holes like that for legal and monetary reasons, even while working full-time, backbreaking jobs and having literally no where else to go.

Paid work is hard to get -- I know that. If you can afford to have an unpaid internship, and if Mom is willing to pay your rent, that's seriously great. But you better feel lucky. Don't expect people to feel sorry for you because you live in the ghetto (or a window-less closet) to sustain your artsy hipster lifestyle, when you could have stayed in your parents' house or in a huge apartment back in Cleveland or wherever you're from. Cut the ego trip: you're not suffering; you're living large.

And to the folks at the New York Times, please refrain from using war lingo like "front lines" in idiot pieces like this -- I don't care if you're being "ironic." Save it for articles about actual war and global tragedy (last time I checked, you guys report on that stuff too). It's obnoxious, disdainful, and makes a mockery of just about everyone on the planet.

Article Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/realestate/14cov.html

A Man With A Big, Irrelevant Problem to Consider

Believe me, the dumb polaroid format is only the tip of the iceberg.

Thank you, New York Times. Lest I go a single day without a well-manicured interview of a self-indulgent, privileged New Yorker, you are there to reassure me that these people's random stories are not only representative of all of NYC, but are relevant to everyone as some kind of "big news." Obviously, we'd never read about the commonplace dilemma of a middle class black woman, a random old person, or a Pakistani immigrant, etc.; these people don't seem to exist at all to the Times unless there's an actual issue involved, or if one of them does something really notable, really bad, or is tragically killed. But somehow stupid, quotidian stories of well-to-do "trendy" people always get top priority, as if everyone cares. The unrelenting yuppie-pandering aspect of the Times is part of what makes today's account of one 30-year-old's very unimportant dilemma ("A Man With a Bicycle To Consider," 12/06/10) especially banal and infuriating.

Matthew McLaughlin, a sweater-wearing dude who teaches science in the Bronx (he began, not surprisingly, with Teach for America), is undergoing the very tough process of buying a fabulous apartment in the city. And so far, his prospects are pretty good. He's got a reasonable budget, "enjoys experiencing life in different areas," loves diversity, and all that jazz. The catch? He has to accommodate his lifetime companion and transportation aid, his just-trendy-enough bicycle.

Like loads of other bike-riding yuppiehipsters who just looove New York, Mr. McLaughlin takes great pride in saying that he previously lived in notorious parts of upper Manhattan like Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood, where each of his apartments was simply great, save for certain downfalls -- "poor maintenance, excessive noise, no view," and in one case a toddler dribbling a basketball all day long (No view?! A toddler dribbling a basketball? Boo Fucking Hoo). At the start of his recent apartment search, McLaughlin applied to live in two co-ops in Hudson Heights, but got denied (good thing, our vegetarian hero rationalizes, as the veg options are decidedly limited there). ...This speaks for itself.

If you're not already vomiting at the sheer inanity of this article (which, I remind you, is located in arguably the greatest news source in the Free World), let's read on. All would be just peachy for Mr. McLaughlin if only he did not have to accommodate his dear bicycle. Since he must be able to ride back and forth to work, he cannot live in Brooklyn (he claims it's because he doesn't want to switch schools, but maybe he's just afraid that the A-List hipsters there will rag on his bike). He simply will not tolerate a public bike room (the two-wheeled beauties must be kept conveniently stacked against the wall, in a hallway dedicated exclusively to that purpose). And he needs a suitable view so that he can "witness weather patterns developing" (as much as I'm gagging, I have to at least give the guy credit for wanting to know whether to use his water-resistant messenger bag instead of his sensible backpack).

He ends up choosing Astoria, hands-down, in an area located right across the RFK bridge from the Bronx. But the dilemma rages on. One nearly-perfect apartment has only a "partial view" of Manhattan, which is simply too much of a sacrifice for Mr. McLaughlin (what, weather patterns don't develop in any part of that vista?). Others don't have the requisite bike-leaning hallway he desires. Finally, he finds a perfect spot, where "every window had a view of Manhattan. There was a hallway for his bikes. In the living room, he could create a seating area around the television as well as a dining area with a table for six, just the right size for playing board games with friends." Not too soon after, he moves in with his cat, Parvati (please tell me it wasn't named after the Harry Potter character). To this day, he is thrilled with the place. On occasion, our hero even skips the elevator and hauls his bike up the stairs (which, he boasts, are nothing compared to the ones he climbs with his bike on the RFK bridge en route to work).

Before you get positively ill over the image of Mr. McLaughlin playing Cranium with his bearded Teach-for-America buddies or making the Everest-like trek up his apartment stairs with his bike in tow, consider this: what he loves the most, after all that biking and teaching underprivileged kids in the Bronx and eating expensive vegetarian cuisine, is seeing the "twinkling lights of Manhattan," which are far preferable to the daytime cityscape.

I'll suspend my nausea for a hot minute, as I have a definite sore spot for the nighttime skyline, too, and appreciate a guy who cares for his bicycle (plus, he's probably got great legs). But the fact that Mr. McLaughlin's disgustingly privileged and commonplace story has not only reached outside the confines of his moleskine, but has made the New York Times, fills me with nothing less than bitterness and contempt. Boo Fucking Hoo: your story is useless.

Article here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/realestate/05hunt.html?hp

Would You Like Some Boo Fucking Hoo With That Deli Sandwich?

Things have been pretty tough for Greg Corkett, former Senior Operating Officer for HSBC. For the past two years, instead of analyzing and negotiating mortgage packages worth up to $500 million from a cozy NYC office, he has been out in the field, “toiling at the low end of the housing-loan food chain as a mortgage broker in Great Neck, N.Y.”

And “toil” it must be indeed. Not only must Mr. Corkett help affluent people buy homes in one of the most exclusive areas on Long Island. He must also, due to his measly $95,000 yearly salary (down from somewhere in the 400k’s in past years), deprive himself of a luxury that practically everyone, even those with very little money at all, can afford.

He sometimes skips lunch.

And that’s not nearly all. When Mr. Corkett isn’t skipping lunch, which we can assume is just about every day he has time for it, he does something far, far worse. He orders from “the local deli.” If that’s not indicative of his crippling poverty, I don’t know what is. Plus, something tells me this “local deli” is no dirt-cheap bodega, but rather one of those alliterative, dual-named luxury spots, like Dean & Deluca or Guy & Gallard. Rather, since he’s working in Great Neck, I’m guessing it’s an overpriced Kosher sandwich shop, where a bagel & lox goes for no less than $8.95.

“It’s an awful lot of work for, frankly, a small fraction of what I used to make,” Corkett said about his corporate downgrade.

But seeing as this “small fraction” is still at least 3x what most New Yorkers make, and that his “toil” (a word that conveys nothing less than Gulag labor) is a cushy real estate job, this is what I have to say to Mr. Corkett:

Boo Fucking Hoo.

Article Here: http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2010-12-03-lesserjobs03_CV_N.htm