It Takes A Good Cancer To Stomach Tom Ford

Putting the Tom Ford profile in New York Magazine’s cancer issue was an editorial masterstroke — so if you get disgusted by passages like:

At 45, Ford is still the only handsome male fashion designer, with perfect stubble, manicured nails, and not an ounce of fat: “When my clothes are getting tight, that’s not a sign to me that I need to go to another size — it’s a reminder that I have to stop eating, or suffer,” he explains.

. . .

“I am my own muse,” he says.

. . . you can just follow it with, you know, Rose Tisnado’s first-person account about living out her final days in a hospice:

Hospice embraced me. It’s incredible what they do. If I had money, I’d leave it to them. I called to schedule when I could come in, and they said, “No, honey, we come to you.” Before, I could barely get out of bed half the time; they gave me a fentanyl patch — that’s a pain patch — and I couldn’t believe the difference. Then my hospice doctor put me on steroids, and a day later I was eating like a horse — having fantasies about roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at three in the morning. I called my family, chattering away, and my brother said, “Rose, you sound high.” And I said, “I am!” When I’m sick, you know, I can be a cranky bitch — just roll over and want to die. But when I’m well, I feel absolutely, let’s say, cured! And to continue living my life is obviously what I would want to do. I mean, everybody would.

Or if you get nauseated (sorry, wrong word) when you see something like “‘I feel,’ [Ford] says breathily, ‘that I am keyed into the female consciousness'” just flip back to, say, Jenny Saldana’s account of surviving breast cancer:

Even now, I’ve not gotten used to seeing myself without the nipple. I used to sleep naked, and I don’t anymore. And listen — you can look at me and you’ll never know that I have a tummy tit. But I see the little differences. I see that the new breasts aren’t as full on top. Still, now I’m even more proud of my breasts; I just want to show them, and I want to see if anyone notices the difference. I want to feel normal. I miss my breast. With this one, I kind of feel like I have a turkey stapled to my chest. A month after the surgery, when they took the bandages off my breast, the scar was really raw and black — and I lost it that day. I was calling myself the Bride of Frankenboob.

I’m at the point now that I need to feel like I’m the sexiest girl alive. I’m just starting to feel like a woman again. And it’s very important to be reassured that I’m still attractive. That may sound vain, but that’s what women need.

You Are All Travis Bickle Now

Thirty-something born-and-raised Manhattanites wear subway molestation like a badge of honor:

The rest of the country thought we were goners, collapsed in a sputter of crime, crack and fiscal disaster. There were landlords burning down their buildings — you couldn’t give ’em away! Hookers hanging out on 83rd and Broadway — right near Zabar’s!

But you know what? We liked it.

The dog shit was piled so high in the streets you needed a mountain ax just to traverse the sidewalk — but we liked it. The buildings were so blackened by grime you could barely see them in the dark — but we liked it. The subways were so dangerous you felt you were descending into Hell — and we liked it, we loved it, hallelujah!

For a certain generation of New Yorker — a generation that came of age at the city’s economic nadir, but also in the glory days of Bella Abzug, checker cabs and CBGB — this city of yore seems as perversely lovable as some long-lost episode of The Magic Garden.

“It seems kind of weird to say that one would be nostalgic for times when you were scared to get mugged going out at night and riding the subways was taking your life on your hands,” said Dalton Conley, 37, an Alphabet City kid turned New York University sociology professor, who memorialized his childhood in the book Honky. “Yet I think there is something that’s lost.

“The old New York is kind of like an old spouse that you just complained about the whole time,” he said, “but then, when it’s gone, you realize you loved him or her.”

New York has always been a breeding ground for nostalgia; constant change will do that to a place. But sometime in the last few years, between the outlawing of the squeegee men, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the coronation of Michael Bloomberg, this sentiment has been particularly overwhelming to those natives who took their first bite of chocolate at Barton’s Candy on West 86th Street in 1974 (now a Gap), bought their first Duran Duran album at West Side Records on Broadway, or perhaps got their first human biology lesson from some random guy in a trench coat.

But between the born-and-raised (read: “never-been-west-of-Newark-Airport”) New Yorker and the new New Yorker — “the kind who has just moved to Manhattan with dreams of dinner at Per Se and dancing at Bungalow 8” — exists a truly pernicious third group who moved to the city as adults in the bad old days and now bemoan the departure of treasured institutions like, say, Western Beef. To these people we say “Move along, gramps! It’s twenty and out for you!”

Twenty And Out, we’re certainly impressed by you still only paying three figures for a West Village apartment. That must feel good each month! But we also look at it this way — you live on an island that is well on its way to becoming the modern equivalent of Bruges. And even if we could afford anything south of 191st Street, we certainly couldn’t afford the price of, I don’t know, toilet paper at your local bodega.

So yeah, it’d be a blast to live in “Tribeca” or the “West Village” or “Alphabet City” or “SoHo” (oh those great historical names!) but when you think about it, Flushing is kind of far from there, no?

And let’s be clear — “Twenty and out” should apply to all transplants (god help me if I ever start pining for the glory days before Queens had guidebooks). The real problem could be that New York City is just way too fetishized, in which case everyone should just get over it and finally move to Philadelphia. Besides, I hear they still have a big violent crime problem*!

*This could become the great anti-statistic for upper-middle class thrill seekers!

You Can’t Pick Your Family But You Can Pick Over Their Belongings Right From Their Dead Bodies

Nice:

Moments after his 18-year-old nephew took two bullets meant for him, Earl Samuels did something despicable, cops say.

He flipped the young man’s lifeless body face-up, then started rifling through his pockets and underwear, looking for something to take.

“If you can believe it, he was robbing his own dead nephew,” a police source said.

Police arrested Samuels on Monday, a day after the teen, Wayne Kennedy of Brooklyn, was shot and killed in the Park Hill Apartments in Clifton. Authorities charged Samuels with felony tampering with evidence and misdemeanor obstructing governmental administration.

Just Call It A Car Tax And Then I’m All Ears*

New Yorkers are figuring out that congestion pricing will actually increase traffic and parking problems in certain neighborhoods:

Under the mayor’s congestion pricing proposal, drivers will have to pay a toll to go south of 86th Street in Manhattan. At a City Council hearing yesterday, Councilwoman Jessica Lappin drew a bleak picture.

“There will be a crush of cars circling around 86th Street looking for parking spots that don’t exist,” said Lappin, who feared the downtown-bound bridge-and-tunnel crowd would use her Upper East Side district as a parking lot before catching a train. “I envision idling, and more congestion, and more pollution in the air, because there aren’t places for these cars to go.” Parking in a garage would be out of the question, she said: “The garages up there are full.”

. . .

New parking garages would be an ironic byproduct of congestion pricing, which is meant to reduce commuters’ reliance on cars. The request for city garages was seconded yesterday by Queens Councilwoman Helen Sears, who noted that her Jackson Heights neighborhood only has one and it’s “the most densely populated district in the entire city.”

“Any thought of building municipal garages?” she asked, before complaining about cutbacks in placards that allow city officials to park with impunity.

(Nice dig at the end there!)

One thing though — if the number of taxis and livery cabs in Manhattan doesn’t change and the number of delivery trucks doesn’t change, how much will congestion pricing help reduce traffic? Even if you reduce traffic by ten percent — a huge effect — that only means that there are nine cars instead of ten. Or it could just be about raising money for public transit**:

Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to charge $8 to drive into a large swath of Manhattan would not affect most city commuters, the new transportation commissioner said yesterday.

Just 4.7% of working Brooklyn and Queens residents, for example, commute by car into Manhattan’s central business district, City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said at a City Council hearing.

And many of those motorists already pay tolls at the Midtown or Brooklyn-Battery Tunnels — so they’re already paying part of the $8 fee the mayor is seeking.

Still more could opt to take a subway because they live within walking distance of a station, Sadik-Khan said. That leaves just 1% of workers in those boroughs paying the full congestion pricing fee or having a longer commute if they live where mass transportation is less convenient, Sadik-Khan said. The benefits will include less traffic for those who do drive into Manhattan, less pollution and the health problems it creates, and hundreds of millions of dollars a year to improve mass transportation, she said.

*Besides — I take the subway to work. So what do I care about reducing congestion***?

**Which is fine (just call it that!)

***Unless you actually believe the cost of congestion is somehow higher (.pdf)****.

****And higher than what businesses would do to pass on a $8 congestion fee to its customers.

Disgusting Sex Tourists Robbed; Craig’s List Scammers Found With Copies Of Pimp Rule Book

But in all of my years in the business, I have to say that I’ve never actually seen the pimp rule book:

So this guy from Minnesota comes to New York looking for a good time. He goes on craigslist and sees an ad from Tiffany and a few very suggestive photos.

But when boy met girl at the Intercontinental Hotel Sunday, it quickly became clear that a match made in heaven was not in store.

Turns out the hooker wasn’t Tiffany — at least not the woman in the pictures. And she wasn’t particularly interested in providing an “unrushed session.”

What she was interested in was taking his money.

The tourist, whose name was not released, was assaulted and robbed by the woman and her female partner, who was hiding in the hotel room closet, police said.

Candice Lang, 19, and Cedra Neely, 18, each stand about 5-feet-2 and weigh 110 pounds — but police say they’ve become quite the pilfering pair.

They’ve been arrested twice in the past week for robbing and assaulting their unsuspecting johns in midtown hotels, a police source said.

. . .

“They live by the pimp rule book, which means a trick is a trick, and they’ll get their money no matter what,” said the source.