Lassies Of The Evening

Post Spitzer, the rent-a-pet story has new resonance:

“There are a lot of people out there looking for companionship,” said Chris Haddix, 28, who runs the New York branch of Flexpetz. There are usually five or six dogs available for rent, many of them on display in the Wet Nose storefront window, attracting crowds.

[Sarah] Stevenson explained why she was a customer: “I’m single and moved here from Scotland two years ago, and it’s been difficult to meet people because everyone in New York just kind of goes about their business. But when I’m walking around with Oliver, I seem to get into so many conversations about him. It becomes a nice way to meet people.”

But it isn’t cheap. A monthly membership, which includes four one-day rentals, costs $279.95. Additional rentals cost $45 for a day, or part of a day.

Anyone interested must first register at www.flexpetz.com before meeting Mr. Haddix. “I ask them a lot of questions,” he said. “I want to know if they have ever owned a dog, why they can’t own a dog full time, how renting a dog benefits them, stuff like that.”

If the head office in San Diego gives the go-ahead, there is a mandatory one-hour training session on handling and training. Then members can choose one of the dogs pictured on the Web site for rental.

Mr. Haddix said his customers were a mixed bunch.

“There are people from other states and other countries who couldn’t take their dogs with them when they were transplanted to New York,” he said, “and there are families with small children who enjoy taking these dogs on vacation with them.

“There are also people who live in places that do not allow pets, and a lot of single people who wouldn’t mind just hanging out with a pal every now and then. There are all sorts of reasons for renting dogs,” said Mr. Haddix . . .

Stuff That Makes You Want To Relocate To Duluth Includes . . .

. . . the word “bicoastal”:

Eve Levine, a 34-year-old real estate broker, recalls fondly the five years when she was, as she calls it, “low-cost bicoastal.” Her primary residence was in Brooklyn — first Williamsburg, then Bushwick and now Greenpoint — but she also had an apartment in the Fruitvale section of Oakland, Calif., that she visited for long stretches.

The apartment, actually a warehouse, was really big and inexpensive, she said. Friends paid the rent, but Ms. Levine said she could come back whenever she wanted, because they were friends.

In the fall of 2005, she severed ties to her West Coast warehouse.

“If you are trying to build something, whether a career or a bank account, you need to make a choice,” she said.

These days, she is a host of a gathering in Williamsburg called Home Buying for Hipsters, at which she explains the idea of Tenancy in Common, a form of ownership that enables people to combine their resources to buy a house jointly instead of just renting together. It is popular in the San Francisco Bay Area, she said, and she hopes to bring it to Brooklyn, where there is a similar pool of young people who have a history of sharing apartments through their 20’s.

. . .

Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa.

Other communities across the country also fit this bill, but what Brooklyn and the East Bay share is proximity to more cosmopolitan centers — Manhattan and San Francisco — where the “creative class,” many of whom are freelancers, can earn a living.

“You can make money in both cities,” Ms. Levine said. “Can you make money in Portland, Ore.? It’s a cool city, it’s got lots of hipsters, but can you make money?”

. . .

If there is an aesthetic credo to Brooklyn and the Bay Area, it is Do It Yourself, which connotes more than using an Allen wrench from Ikea. D.I.Y. can mean everything from wearing locally designed T-shirts to attending concerts staged in someone’s warehouse apartment, to riding a bike to work.

Several businesses that have opened in both Brooklyn and the Bay Area exemplify the aesthetic. One of them, Rare Device, a home furnishings and fashion store in Park Slope, sells felted throw pillows and “wildcrafted soap.”

The Pathetic Thing Isn’t That You Can’t Understand Why Potential Suitors Would Be Troubled By You Blogging Dates . . .

. . . no, the pathetic thing is that the model for what it means to be a woman living in New York is the creation of a misogynistic gay man:

[Name redacted so as to mitigate obvious over-the-top self-promotion], who is 27, came to New York soon out of Georgetown University four years ago. Along with many of her peers, she was drawn in part by HBO’s comic but near-anthropological chronicle of the living and mating habits of a certain set of New York’s single women.

Ms. [redacted] knows the adventures and misadventures of Carrie & Company by heart, and she uses them as something of a road map for her own life.

She frequents sleek and buzzworthy bars with her girlfriends. She has danced at Bungalow 8, the celebrity-rich club in West Chelsea. She has devoured cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery, and she can sprint in five-inch heels. And, of course, she has written publicly about relationships, both for Time Out New York and on a blog of her own, among other places, with all that entails.

Ms. [redacted] has taken her devotion to “Sex and the City” further than most. She dated a onetime boyfriend of Candace Bushnell, whose column in The New York Observer inspired the television series. For the British version of the magazine Marie Claire, Ms. [redacted] analyzed how her life compares to the lives lived in the series.

“If Carrie Bradshaw were coming to New York today,” Ms. [redacted] says with no hint of self-consciousness, “she would be me.”

Ms. [redacted] may be extreme. But she is hardly alone.

It has been a decade since “Sex and the City” arrived on television, yet the adventures of Carrie and her pals continue to enthrall. This spring, even as Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of the series, turns 43, the “Sex and the City” movie will make it to the big screen. Although the film won’t officially arrive in theaters until May 30, Carrie fever is running so high that the publicity campaign began almost the moment plans for the movie were announced.

Yet young women coming to New York these days in search of Mr. Big, or at least the perfect Cosmopolitan, are finding that money and technology have altered the urban paradise that Carrie inhabited.

The city has become such an expensive playground that much of what Carrie and her friends took for granted — a Manhattan apartment, taxis for any trip longer than a half-dozen blocks, dinner at the newest four-star restaurants — is no longer easily in reach of a young woman on a budget, much less a young woman on a writer’s budget.

. . .

Alyssa Shelasky, another New Yorker who tried to follow in Carrie’s footsteps, discovered just how fast one’s fortunes could rise and fall on the Web two summers ago, when she was asked by Glamour magazine to write a blog about finding love again after a particularly heart-rending breakup.

The blog made it tougher.

“Men were freaked out by it,” Ms. Shelasky said the other day over coffee and a brownie at City Bakery on 18th Street.

With long, soft brown hair framing her open face, Ms. Shelasky has a down-to-earth, girl-next-door quality. But it is hard to be the girl next door when you’ve also been the girl about town on the Internet.

“Within five minutes on the computer,” she said, “men could find out everything I had done the night before and the night before, and that this guy did this and it really turned me on.”

In many respects, Ms. Shelasky is Carrie rewritten for the Internet age. “If I didn’t like a guy or never called him back,” she recalled, “a few childish men in particular would use the blog to retaliate.

“They would be like, ‘This is Sneakers Guy, we made out, and she was like this,'” she said. “And I was like, ‘Wait, this is my blog, and I get to decide how much of me we discuss.'”

You Want To Film Here . . . Sure, Why Not?

These days, even Community Boards are tripping over themselves to suck up to location scouts:

The boards, which each have about 3 paid workers and 50 volunteer members, constitute the city’s most local form of government, serving from 35,000 to 200,000 people apiece. While they wield little direct power, the boards have a wide range of advisory responsibilities, like reviewing applications for liquor licenses and soliciting public comment on major public and private projects.

Now the boards are bracing for cuts that many of their leaders say would seriously hamper their ability to function. Although the city pays for rent and utilities, last year each board had nearly $200,000 to pay for all other expenses, including salaries, phones, office supplies, equipment and technical services. Except for the sum available for salaries, which is set apart, board officials contend that their allocation has not been increased in about 15 years.

In the past two months, the mayor’s office asked each board to plan $9,995 to $15,690 in cuts that, if approved by the City Council, would take effect July 1.

. . .

Some boards are already raising money privately, and the budget cuts may force more boards to do so. In October, Board 3, which covers the Lower East Side, earned $1,500 for renting its offices to “Law & Order” for the overnight filming of a scene set in a community newspaper office. Susan Stetzer, the district manager, said a spinoff of the show had scouted her office for a scene set in a city agency, “but we were too old and decrepit-looking.”

After A While It Just Gets To Your Head

And your loved ones look at you like you’re Richard Dreyfus sculpting mashed potatoes:

Residents of one of the city’s noisiest neighborhoods are honking mad at hacks who lean on their horns — so they’re cooking up creative ways to quiet the nightly cabby cacophony.

The Lower East Side’s Community Board 3, which has registered 6,133 noise complaints since July, the second most in the city, voted last week to ask the Taxi and Limousine Commission to consider installing a light atop taxis that would glow when a cabby beeps the horn.

This would make it easier for cops to ticket the driver for breaking the city’s noise code, which prohibits excessive horn honking.

“Right now, the police actually have to see a cabdriver honk the horn to issue a ticket, and that’s obviously hard,” said Board 3 district manager Susan Stetzer. “This would allow the police to see exactly who honked and make it easy to enforce the rules.”

The board will include the suggested tattletale light in a letter to the TLC, which is soliciting public feedback as it designs the taxi of the future.

But that’s not the only anti-honking measure the community is clamoring for.

Residents want to see cabs equipped with horns that blare as loudly inside the taxi as outside, creating a natural deterrent.

Next on the list: a meter that knocks $1 off the fare every time the horn honks.

“If the driver lost a buck every time he blew the horn, that would stop him real quick,” said Lower East Side resident Avram Fefer, who called the din on Ludlow Street “absolutely horrible.”

“What Times Square is to the eyes, Ludlow Street is to the ears,” he said.

. . .

And if the community’s suggestions fall on deaf ears? “A very vigorous egg-throwing campaign” might be the answer, according to Fefer.

Why not two levels of horns? A quieter one for when someone is right in front of you and a louder one for real danger? Or at least when you’re six cars back and you want to know what the hold up is . . . (seriously, the culture of honking here is absurd!)