On Being A Homeless Decoy: Maybe Method Acting Will Help

After several years of tinkering, participants in the city’s homeless decoy program develop some guidelines about how to sell the part:

The first rule of being a decoy homeless person: Don’t talk about being a decoy homeless person. Also, don’t read books the homeless wouldn’t read, and don’t haggle with real homeless people over their prime hangout spots.

Those were among the instructions officials gave almost 200 people getting paid about $75 each to pretend to be homeless for a few hours yesterday morning. The decoys were acting as statistical checks-and-balances in the fifth annual citywide census of how many homeless people live on the streets and in the subways.

. . .

A professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, Julien Teitler, said many of the decoys gain an appreciation for what it’s like to be homeless.

If some of the decoys were subjecting themselves to the winter cold for the goodness of their hearts, others were there purely for the cash.

One of them was a costume designer and theater student named Elizabeth Cassarino, who said unabashedly that she didn’t care about the homeless. She planned to use the $75 to buy food and cigarettes.

“I know what goes into being a character. So for this role, playing a homeless person, you have to have the right costume — baggie clothes, layers — you have look sad, you have to play like you’re homeless. You can’t have a smile on your face. You have to do emotional recall, think of a time when you were hungry,” Ms. Cassarino said before deployment. “These are all the things they taught me in school, and now I’m actually getting a chance to perform. You know, my audience is going to be the people waiting for a train at Broadway and Lafayette.”

The Emerging Emerging-Adulthood Majority

Is New York is a city where adults have roommates or a city of adult roommates? The cause/symptom connection is unclear:

It used to be that if you were set on having a place all to yourself, you moved to the boroughs. But while rents are significantly less out there in no-man’s land, thanks to gentrification and rising apartment costs, roommates are still largely necessary. Wiener says, “In Brooklyn, [rents] have been creeping up. They call it the second Manhattan now. I have seen a rental increase almost on par with Manhattan. But still, there are deals to be had there.” Howard Wong, 33, a software engineer who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, shares a place with three roommates, two in their early 30s and one in their mid-20s. Their combined rent is $2,600, only $650 each.

Clearly, having roommates is the financially savvy way to go. But how does living in a style close to dorm life during the prime of life affect one’s transition into adulthood? Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties and editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research, says, “Emerging adulthood is a period of your life where you have a sort of independence and freedom to focus on your own life and your own self-development that you will never have so much of before or after.” Whether living with roommates is a cause or a symptom, the fact remains that many New Yorkers suffer from a mutated strain of Urban Peter Pan Syndrome. Without the emotional engagement required by the old ball and chain and the little chainlets and the responsibilities of home owning, these 30-is-the-new-20 roommates are free to indulge in, well, themselves.

976-CAB-TALK/I’m Into CB!

The New York Sun reports that cab drivers are resurrecting 1980s-style party lines:

It’s not just wives at home or relatives overseas that keep taxi drivers tied up on their cellular phones during work shifts. Many cabbies say that when they are chatting on duty, it’s often with their cab driver colleagues on group party lines. Taxi drivers say they use conference calls to discuss directions and find out about congested routes to avoid. They come to depend on one another as first responders, reacting faster even than police to calls from drivers in distress. Some drivers say they participate in group prayers on a party line.

“Sometimes one person recites, and a group will listen to him,” a Sikh cab driver from India, Satinder Singh, said. Mr. Singh, who lives in Queens and has been driving a taxi for five years, said that only in the past year or so, since he started using T-Mobile, has he participated in conference calls.

Aleksander Sverdlov, a Russian immigrant who has been driving a taxi for 15 years, said he has accumulated about 150 numbers in his cell phone, most of which belong to colleagues he conferences with on and off during his eight-hour shift. “I know everyone,” Mr. Sverdlov said over coffee and breakfast sandwiches in his cab at La Guardia Airport.

It is during this morning routine, waiting for the first shuttle flights to arrive from Washington and Boston, where many friendships between cabbies are forged and cell phone numbers are exchanged, Mr. Sverdlov said. Once drivers have each other’s numbers, they can use push-to-talk technology to call large groups all at once.

Mr. Sverdlov said he conferences with up to 10 cabbies at a time to discuss “traffic, what’s going on, this and that, and where do cops stay.” He estimated that every month, he logs about 20,000 talking minutes on his cell phone.

Just so you’re clear, it is still illegal for cab drivers to talk on the phone while driving.

And if Cannonball Run suddenly popped into your head, you’re not too far off the mark:

Faruq Ahmed, who is from Bangladesh, says he spends about four hours a day on a party line. “I put it on speaker, and under the clipboard, so they can’t see if I’m on the phone,” Mr. Ahmed said, explaining how he has managed to avoid receiving a summons from the Taxi & Limousine Commission. Cell phones, Mr. Ahmed said, are good for business, driver safety, and even benefit passengers because drivers learn from each other about what’s happening on the streets.

Mr. Ahmed also supplements his party line chats with conversation his CB radio. “Usually on the radio, it’s just one or two talking, and many many people listening in,” he said. Different languages are broadcast on different radio channels.

(Thank god this gave us the opportunity to revisit the 976 phenomenon or we wouldn’t have found this, for example . . . or this.)

Just Keep Them Away From Bad Influences Like Mary-Kate And They’ll Adjust Fine

What first appeared to downtown observers to be an influx of chunky Midwesterners on some sort of semester-abroad program turns out to be employees of the new Googleplex:

From lava lamps to abacuses to cork coffee tables, the offices may as well be a Montessori school conceived to cater to the needs of future science-project winners. The Condé Nast and Hearst corporations have their famous cafeterias designed by, respectively, Frank Gehry and Norman Foster; but Google has free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work.

The campuslike workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich, young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan.

. . .

Food is a major perk at the Manhattan Googleplex. Every Tuesday afternoon, tea with crumpets and scones is served. In the cafeteria a dry-erase board lists local purveyors of the ingredients in the meals like a sign at the Union Square Greenmarket. (Dry-erase boards are big in Google culture; ideas flow quickly).

All the free food has created a problem familiar to college freshmen. “Everyone gains 10 or 15 pounds when they start working here,” said James Tipon, a member of the sales team, who actively contributes to the four pounds of M&Ms consumed by New York Googlers daily. “I definitely gained that when I started working here, but I think I shed some of it,” Mr. Tipon said. “I try to be disciplined but it’s really hard.”

Fedders, Friedrich And The Fifth Avenue Social Scene

All over Brooklyn the use of the stoop is declining, leading to a public campaign to preserve the culture:

Brooklyn’s legendary brownstone stoops are little more than speed bumps for the borough’s career-addled, stroller-burdened and iPod-addicted residents, a new Parsons School of Design study has found.

“There are not a whole lot of people taking the time to sit on stoops anymore,” said Chelsea Briganti, one of three Parsons undergraduates working on a report and an awareness campaign that they’ve titled, “Sit Here.”

Briganti said the project aims to understand and address “the decreasing culture of social interaction formerly known as ‘stoop culture.'”

So far the findings have been depressing. The youngest wave of Park Slope residents prefers bars to stoops.

“They all say they wish there was more public culture,” Briganti said, “but they go to Southpaw [a Fifth Avenue rock club]” instead of sitting on stoops.

Well, duh! Wouldn’t you rather go to Southpaw to see something like, for example, Christopher Moltisanti’s new indie band? Exactly:

With the success and awards [Michael] Imperioli has garnered in the acting world, including a resume of roles in films helmed by the prestigious likes of Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, and the media frenzy that’s sure to ignite in April when the final season of “The Sopranos” kicks off, one can’t help but wonder: why is Imperioli launching a rock band now?

With a steady gaze, and some fidgeting with his cell phone, the Tribeca-based actor explained that in part, his decision was based on “living through that 9-11 shit.”

. . .

Imperioli, 40, also revealed that [La Dolce Vita]’s set list primarily consists of original songs — written by the band as well as material Imperioli penned between 1986 and 1996.

. . .

“In some ways, [my songs] were written in a different time period,” said Imperioli, who claims to be a fan of Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices and Courtney Love. But Imperioli’s material is being arranged now with Amitin and Tighe, whom he describes as “great musicians.

. . .

Summing up their sound as New York-influenced, raw and gritty, the trio is humming with excitement over their upcoming Southpaw date, where they will share the bill with Death of Fashion and Generals and Majors. Rather than focusing their energies on long-term achievements like contracts and recording CDs, the LDV boys are just happy for another opportunity to share their music.