Carter Is To Spy As Irving Is To Salmagundi

Letters recently unearthed reveal that Graydon Carter was always a douche:

In a 1985 letter to [Spy co-creator Kurt] Andersen, Carter envisioned a city magazine that would “investigate the great commercial machines that fuel the city, the behind the scenes stories in art, literature, journalism, broadcasting, theater, fashion, banking, business, show business and the law. . . . A hundred years from now, the graduate student sifting through the racks at the New-York Historical Society will, with relish, throw himself upon old copies of Spy to get a feeling for what it was to be young and smart and living in New York in the eighties.”

I think I just reconsidered my desire to revisit the Wilt Chamberlain 20,000 women number crunching . . .

God Help Iraq

While young men and women put their lives on the line for the future of Iraq, this country’s best and brightest are doing a shit-ton of business there:

Last week, [former New York City police commissioner, onetime Homeland Security nominee and Jeanine Pirro adviser Bernie] Kerik put his contentious role in the [Pirro] campaign behind him for the more welcoming world of international terrorism, sneaking into Iraq for two days (ducking the media). There, it was as if the glory days were back. Vintage Kerik was on display: hulking, crisply dressed, a meeting with the minister of the interior. “A lot of it has to do with international funding for some of their national-security programs,” said Kerik when asked about the mission, which was unofficial. “There’s some things I may be able to do for them.”

Enter San Man

The anthropologist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation shows she can hang with a san man, and yes, she mongos:

[Director of N.Y.U.’s Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought Robin] Nagle, who is forty-five, has been researching the Department of Sanitation for the past several years, while working on a book, “Picking Up.” At first, the san men were convinced that she was a plant, from one of various surveillance agencies. “We are from different worlds,” she acknowledged. “I have tried to close the gap between us. I walk in, I’m female, I’m an egghead, I’m older, I have a Ph.D. — for some reason, they foreground that. My response is ‘La-di-fucking-da, I have a Ph.D. Whatever.'”

She said that she had earned her commercial driver’s license in 2004, and pointed to a Teamsters Local 831 jacket hanging behind the door, with “Robin” embroidered on the front. “You have to know what you’re doing or you’ll end up killing somebody,” she said. “As one of my instructors told me, if a car can be a weapon, a garbage truck can be a nuclear weapon.”

Nagle’s interests lie more with the trash collectors than with the trash, although the two intersect on the subject of “mongo” — sanitation lingo for “redeemed garbage” or the act of collecting it. (Nagle consulted a lexicographer, looking for help in tracking down the etymology, to no avail.) “Within the department, if you mongo or if you don’t — there’s kind of a dividing line,” she said. “‘He mongos.’ ‘Do you mongo?’ ‘Oh, mongo, are you kidding? I wouldn’t mongo.'” She paused. “Hell, I mongo, absolutely. And I have some pretty nice things.” A book cart to her left bore a sticker that read “NYU Asset Management: Authorized for Disposal.” She had found it on the curb. Maps on the walls outside her office were rescued from a Dumpster. And her winter wardrobe draws heavily from a stash of cashmere sweaters that she found in a garbage bag behind the Dakota, while accompanying a san man known as the Mongo King on his rounds, in 2003.

The New Knitting

I don’t know — sounds sorta self-consciously oddball to me:

A chic bar in Park Slope hosted a master class on how to mount dead animals.

Taxidermy, of course, is an activity more commonly associated with union halls upstate than with Union Hall, the bar on Union Street.

But at 5:30 pm last Saturday night, Scott Bibus, a member of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists, sat down at a long table in the pub’s trendy basement, for once church-like in its silence.

Bibus put his scalpel to the breast of a white-feathered chicken, and sliced it down the middle, all the way to its “vent,” an industry euphemism for anus.

Then he took his latex-gloved finger and inserted it into the carcass to begin separating its delicate skin from the “inner anatomy.”

. . .

Afterwards, there was the inevitable taxidermy contest, an experience that was, arguably, even more other-worldly than the master class.

Brooklynites converged on the makeshift stage with every manner of preserved animal body.

The competing specimens included a mounted chicken skeleton called Genus Nicoleais Richias, the testicles of a dog named Merlot preserved in a jar of rubbing alcohol, an Indonesian “tringaling,” and a naturally mummified rat.

But the top prizes went to a pair of squirrel testicles mounted on a plaque, a pigeon specimen, and two gaffes — a Fiji mermaid and a Coney Island “searabbit.”

The Botox Theory Of Urban Revitalization

Affluent whites set their sights on Fulton Mall:

Fulton Mall is a commercial heavyweight, according to its merchants association. It draws 100,000 shoppers each day, rings up more than $100 million in annual sales and commands rents of up to $250 a square foot, among the highest of any retail district in the city.

But few of its customers are from the nearby brownstone neighborhoods.

“The challenge the Fulton Mall has is a lack of retail diversity,” said Joseph Chan, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, the leader in the effort to renovate the mall. “There are certainly a lot of cellphone stores and shoe stores, for example. But in terms of retail that cuts across a broad socioeconomic spectrum, there’s not a lot right now.”

The first order of business for Mr. Chan is a makeover of the streetscape — streamlining sign clutter, installing new bus shelters — to which the city has committed $9.5 million. As for new stores, Mr. Chan said, the choice will largely be driven by the many newcomers.

“Basically,” he said, “you’re adding thousands of people who are going to need a quart of milk at 10 at night.” Local brokers say the new residents will also need a wine store, a specialty supermarket, new restaurants, dry cleaners and perhaps another bookstore.

“There are no good restaurants, there’s no midrange apparel or accessories,” said Faith Hope Consolo, an executive with Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate, which handles many of the store rentals in the downtown developments.

“What we’re aiming for is a better neighborhood all around,” Ms. Consolo said. “That doesn’t mean Gucci, but maybe HMV, maybe Zara, maybe Equinox. We’re addressing chain restaurants like Cheesecake Factory and Legal Sea Foods. We’re not asking anybody to leave the street. We just have to bring in new stores in a way that everybody can work together. We’re Botoxing Fulton Street Mall.”