Jailbait, But Really Hot Upper East Side Jailbait

In New York Magazine David Amsden writes one of those pieces you want to believe — hope against hope — is some Stephen Glass-esque fabrication:

Inside a vaguely South African–themed nightclub called Cain, a pale-skinned, blonde-haired girl named Sophie is on the dance floor. She sports a yellow blouse with a plunging neckline, white jeans that look grafted to her skin, and shimmery ice-pick heels. Yesterday, Sophie graduated from a certain all-girls private school uptown, and she is still three years shy of being legal in such an establishment, though right now that’s irrelevant. Right now, Sophie is a woman in her twenties, just like her I.D. says, and just like she told the guy in the preppie blazer with the gelled-back hair on the dance floor. He’s sort of annoying. But sort of cute too. And very likely graduated from high school right around the time Sophie was born.

“Him? Yeah, I think he’s like 35, or even 40,” observes Sophie’s friend Audrey. “She hooked up with him last week at Lotus.”

Audrey is also 18, also pale and blonde. When she imagines herself in ten years she sees a successful woman working as “a representative of some corporation. Like if I’m doing press for JPMorgan, that’s fine.” She is slouched in the banquette running alongside the dance floor, sipping her second Grey Goose and cranberry. Next to her is Lana, 17, all long brown hair and big, drowsy brown eyes. The three girls (whose names have been changed “because otherwise our parents will freak”) are jaunty, sweet-natured, sophisticated, and acutely self-aware. They know which is the dessert fork. The last time any of them looked their age, they were in elementary school. Like so many privileged New York kids, they have been taught, since they were small children, never to act like children.

“Apparently I hooked up with him last week at Lotus, but I don’t remember” is how Sophie had described the incident to her friends earlier that day over lunch at Nello, on Madison Avenue. “That was totally uncharacteristic, and you know it. I don’t just randomly hook up with people. I can count the number of guys I’ve kissed on”—Sophie did some math with her manicured fingers—”two hands. But I’d only had a sushi roll for dinner, and we drank way too much.”

For their part, the older men seem to view this arrangement as some sort of mini Thai holiday:

The girls decide that Hiro isn’t happening tonight, and head over to Gypsy Tea, a club on 24th Street that feels a lot like Hiro. They sit at the owner’s table and dance on the dark couches. Around them, like a halo, stands a ring of older men staring, hoping, debating first lines in their minds. “My feeling is that if they’re in here, they’re 21,” says a ruddy-faced man in his forties with a crew cut. “And that’s where I stop asking questions. So you can tell me they’re 18 and I’m basically just like, ‘Shut the fuck up.'”

A thirtyish guy with slicked-back hair in a pink polo shirt approaches Lana, sticks out his fleshy hand, and says, “Dance with me.” A moment later she is sandwiched between him and his friend, who’s wearing a blue polo shirt. Eventually, Sophie and Audrey pull Lana away. The polo pals high-five each other.

Pink shirt: “I’m just here to get laid.”

Blue shirt: “But it never happens with little girls like that.”

Overhearing this, a 31-year-old wearing a black suit and baseball cap shakes his head. “It kind of disturbs me to see all my friends hitting on girls twenty years younger than them,” he says. “I guess the girls just don’t care. Maybe they just care about the money, I don’t know. It all comes down to that because, come on, it’s not like they’re going to fall in love in a place like this. They can’t possibly think they will. I’ll tell you, I feel really terrible for women my age, in their thirties and forties. There’s no market for them anymore. Everything is about girls like these.” He takes a sip of his Heineken and suddenly changes his tone. “But, God, they’re the hottest people in here, aren’t they?”

Oh, my aching head. Please someone reveal this is just the latest “Hack Heaven”.

Impenetrable! Impregnable!

Of course the way to stand up to the evildoers and show we are not cowed is to rebuild — starting with an impenetrable 20-story concrete base — oh yes, that will show them:

Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled a radical redesign of the Freedom Tower planned in Lower Manhattan yesterday: a 77-story glass-clad skyscraper that would sit atop an almost impermeable 200-foot concrete and steel pedestal, sheathed in ornamental metalwork, overlooking the memorial intended to honor those who died at the World Trade Center.

The redesign was worked up in a matter of weeks after an embarrassing setback for the trade center redevelopment, when the New York Police Department deemed the first version of the Freedom Tower too vulnerable to attack by car or truck bomb.

The newly configured building would have no occupied space other than the lobby for its first 200 feet. It would be set at least 40 feet farther away from West Street-Route 9A, a heavily trafficked state highway. Many of its windows would be tempered, laminated and multilayered for extra protection against explosions.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a statement released after the unveiling that the “new design provides for a level of bomb blast mitigation consistent with the N.Y.P.D.’s report on the Freedom Tower and adequate to the threat” described in federal safety guidelines.

. . .

The first 30 feet of the 200-foot-tall pedestal would be completely solid. The next 50 feet would have some openings, allowing light to be brought into the lobby from above. The rest of the base would be occupied by four floors of mechanical equipment. Stainless steel, titanium or aluminum panels would mask the concrete wall.

Sounds lovely!

Meanwhile, Times Art Critic Nicolai Ouroussoff unsheathes his thesaurus and unloads, bemoaning the design’s “impregnability”:

The darkness at ground zero just got a little darker. If there are people still clinging to the expectation that the Freedom Tower will become a monument to the highest American ideals, the current design should finally shake them out of that delusion. Somber, oppressive and clumsily conceived, the project suggests a monument to a society that has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness. It is exactly the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the outside world.

. . .

The temptation is to dismiss it as a joke.

. . .

But if this is a potentially fascinating work of architecture, it is, sadly, fascinating in the way that Albert Speer’s architectural nightmares were fascinating: as expressions of the values of a particular time and era. The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear.

. . .

Absurdly, if the Freedom Tower were reduced by a dozen or so stories and renamed, it would probably no longer be considered such a prime target. Fortifying it, in a sense, is an act of deflection. It announces to terrorists: Don’t attack here – we’re ready for you. Go next door.

He Is Our Whale

Looks like somebody’s writing a novel — Anthony Ramirez in today’s Times on the Nathan’s Famous hot dog-eating contest qualifying rounds:

Call them Ishmael.

In a pursuit not at all reminiscent of “Moby-Dick,” a group of competitors gathered yesterday to hunt and subdue the ferocious unseen eating machine known as Takeru Kobayashi of Japan.

Mr. Kobayashi, 5-foot-7 and 131 pounds, is ferocious because he has defeated rivals many times his weight.

He is an eating machine because he has won Nathan’s Famous hot-dog contest four years in a row. Last year, he ate a record 53½ frankfurters, buns and all, in the required 12 minutes, or roughly one every 13 seconds.

And he was unseen because yesterday was not the Fourth of July and Pier 17 at South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan was not Coney Island.

The contest, held in the shadow of a tall ship at high noon, was one of several regional qualifying rounds leading to the final July Fourth showdown at Nathan’s. As the reigning champion, Mr. Kobayashi didn’t have to be there.

Still, the news media converged, the curious stopped to watch and George Shea, the master of ceremonies, summoned up all the gravitas that can attach to a man wearing a straw hat.

To the beat of Eminem’s “8 Mile,” Mr. Shea declared: “They say that competitive eating is the battleground upon which God and Lucifer waged war for men’s souls, ladies and gentlemen. And they are right!” Mr. Shea is co-founder of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, which oversees the Nathan’s contest.

. . .

Among the 14 men and 2 women, the favorite was Eric Booker, 36, a subway conductor on the No. 7 line. At 6-foot-5 and 420 pounds, a Nathan’s T-shirt straining at his Henry VIII girth, Mr. Booker looked every inch the nine-year veteran of the competitive-eating circuit.

. . .

Mr. Booker won. Chewing like a gerbil, if a gerbil wore a backward baseball cap, his cheeks distended like those of Dizzy Gillespie, Mr. Booker ate 22½ franks.

The number was less than half of Mr. Kobayashi’s record. Will Mr. Booker be ready for the Big Show?

Yes, Mr. Booker said, observing that he had recently eaten 41 Nathan’s franks, though not in competition. And, he acknowledged, “they were the supermarket kind,” easier to find than the Coney Island kind but skinnier.

Still, Captain Ahab-like, Mr. Booker said about Mr. Kobayashi, “I’m not going to stop until I get him.”

MTA Retreats Like The Weepy Little Dogs They Are . . . For Now

Thanks to the unrelenting scrutiny of the Daily News, the MTA has postponed a full board vote of the proposed new rule changes:

The MTA’s proposed rule revisions for subways and buses has become a tempest in a coffee cup.

A vote on a host of new regs – including bans on drinking beverages and walking between subway cars – was postponed for at least a month yesterday amid questions, objections and confusion.

“We do listen,” MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow said after a board meeting. “When people say something to us, we do think about it. We’re actually not ashamed to admit we might have gone too far.”

About Those New Rules

The Daily News perseverates on the MTA’s new proposed rules, noting that sipping water, among other things, will become a ticketable offense:

Beware, New Yorkers: The subways are filled with potential lawbreakers.

They’re the fiends who put their feet on seats. They sip water – or worse, coffee.

They might even be you.

The Daily News hit the subway yesterday and caught dozens of commuters flouting soon-to-be adopted rules revising the transit system’s code of behavior. The new rules, which also include a ban on walking between cars, will take effect Oct. 1.

Feet on the seats, sipping liquids and walking between cars are obviously associated with other behaviors subway officials must stop (sleeping or spending all night on the train, drinking alcohol and panhandling/performing/selling candy), but the logical extreme does seem a little . . . extreme (thus the pretty good headling: “A Rail Jolt”).