Stop That Mullet!

Saturday’s story in the Times about the picky doormen at Chelsea’s Marquee club had one of the best ledes in recent memory:

The German guy with the mullet never had a chance.

Of course it didn’t help that his female companion seemed to think an aggressive display of cleavage might neutralize her urgent need for orthodontia.

Wass Stevens considered the couple for just a moment before muttering, “Let me crush ’em,” out of the corner of his mouth.

As the doorman at Marquee, the model-and-celebrity-magnet of the moment in Chelsea, Mr. Stevens had already dashed the party plans of several hundred people who swamped the sidewalk on this cruel, cold winter night. When it came to the German tourists, Mr. Stevens approached the task with evident relish.

There’s something about this whole milieu that makes you side with the doormen against the masses:

After two decades on the ropes of New York City clubs, Mr. Stevens has become a skilled alchemist prized for his ability to gauge and mix a room. Too many Europeans can be stultifying, too much testosterone can ruin the vibe, and too many women can create a different sort of tension. “Women come to clubs to be desired, adored and taken care of,” Mr. Stevens said. “If you go over 70 percent, the women start getting catty and competitive.”

There is no surefire way of making the cut. Packs of men are almost always turned away, and Mr. Stevens seems to frown on women of limited height. “My father always taught me that there are winners and losers in this world,” he said. “My job is to make sure this place is full of winners.” Standards, of course, vary depending on the night, and are more stringent on weekends.

By midnight on a recent Friday, several dozen shivering people were lined up awaiting judgment, smoking incessantly and to trying to mask their anxiety. On the wrong side of the velvet rope, milling about with agitation, the recently rejected worked their cellphones, trying to reach people they imagined might be able to spin some magic on their behalf.

Then there were the big spenders, cocky businessmen who stepped up to the rope with impressive wads of cash. Although they readily accept clothing, designer footwear and tips from patrons already on the inside, the doormen are forbidden to accept entry bribes. Still, over the course of the evening, at least a half-dozen people indiscreetly proffered amounts as high as $500.

When Mr. Stevens ignored a man who held out a brick of bills, the man, a Chinese-born tech entrepreneur who gave only his first name, Simon, upped the ante to what he claimed was $1,000. “Confucius said that everyone has his price,” he explained, counting out the money for all to see.

Mr. Stevens countered with his own axiom: “Flashing a pile of cash is a complete and total admission that you don’t belong here.” Defeated, Simon got back into his BMW and drove away.

Confucious said, “Flashing a pile of cash is a complete and total admission that you don’t belong here.” Brilliant . . .

iPods Are the New Rubik’s Cubes

The concept of “killing time” is — or at least should be — anathema in such a city, but sometimes its residents have no choice. After several apparently related/apparently unrelated (depending on who is speaking) recent subway mishaps (or if you’re writing headlines for a tabloid, “snafus,” as in “subway snafus”), even the subway-riding Mayor is venting about the subway’s troubles.

Lest the obvious answer seem too obvious — Read the newspaper! Read the Times, even! — the Times gets into the heads of New Yorkers to discover how they kill their time:

A barometer of just how bad the recent subway delays have been can be found in Sacha Newley’s reading habits. Mr. Newley, a painter from the Upper West Side, has certain books that he reserves only for subway reading. Two months ago, around the time the delays began, he picked up his latest: “Moby-Dick.” He’s now on Chapter 107.

A great book, Mr. Newley said, but a paltry coping technique when faced with the angst of a serious delay, when a quick hop underground turns into an interminable wait on an ever-crowding platform with no more information than an occasional belch from the loudspeaker. He and hundreds of thousands of other passengers have found themselves in that very situation over the past two months, forced by an epidemic of power failures and track fires to count the tiles, reread Us Weekly, stare forlornly into the abyss or debate whether to give it up and take a cab.

There are two things wrong with this next passage:

. . . [W]hen one is still standing on a platform and already 10 minutes late to work, it does not really matter whether the recent delays are just a run of bad luck or the first rumblings of total breakdown. The iPod might work well as a distraction, just as the Rubik’s cube did 20 years ago. But more than anything, waiting is a mind game.

“I’m planning my wedding,” said Whitney Burrell, 30, a medical student who lives on the Upper East Side. “I think about everything that could go wrong. Every permutation that could go wrong. The photographer doesn’t show up. The hairstylist doesn’t show up.”

When she snaps out of it, Ms. Burrell said, it isn’t so bad to be standing on a subway platform. Anyway, it’s a way to pass the time.

The first is obvious: the vision of commuters working on Rubik’s cubes while waiting out a track fire is just not plausible — though if I were working on a 1980s period piece, I might be tempted to put the image into the script. (Side note: is Times writer Campbell Robertson really equating the satisfaction one gets from an iPod to the passing distraction of a Rubik’s cube? Has he never used an iPod? Does he forget what a waste of time Rubik’s cubes were? Perhaps he’s a Rubik’s cube champion — though a cursory Google check suggests not.)

The second thing wrong with the paragraph is that even being trapped on a train for hours — in the dark — could be preferable to planning a wedding. Poor comparison. Please go back to the field to collect another quote!

But maybe the reason you rarely hear folks in New York talk about “killing time” is because they have a euphemisms for it — “existential aspects,” being “zenlike,” “zoning out”:

The feeling of helplessness, which prompted one young man on the F train to muse on the subway’s “existential aspect,” is a recurring theme brought up by frustrated commuters.

“It’s the subway system,” said Connie Robinson, 27, a house manager at Studio 54. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Though Ms. Robinson, who lives in the Bronx, said she had been seriously delayed at least once a week in the past few months, she said a Zenlike approach was the only way to cope.

“If you don’t have a book you don’t have a choice but to zone out,” she said.

And the Times becomes the new Rubik’s cube, we discover that, as perverse as it seems, even New Yorkers kill time.

Manhattan Preschool Admissions More Competitive Than Harvard

The Post notes that the the preschool admissions process is more competitive than Harvard’s admissions process, with 15 applicants for each spot compared to Harvard’s 11:

Manhattan toddlers have a harder time winning acceptance to private preschools than students have trying to get into Harvard.

An average of 15 applicants vied for every spot in about 200 preschools in Manhattan, said consultant Amanda Uhry, founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors.

Harvard had 11 students competing for each of its approximately 2,030 slots.

Thousands of New York parents received notice last week that their children had been rejected or put on a waiting list for preschool.

“It is a very punitive process,” said Roxandra Antoniadis, admissions director at St. Hilda’s & St. Hugh’s, on the Upper West Side.

“Think of how educated New York City parents are, how sophisticated, how accomplished their children are,” she said. “When they don’t get in, it is horrible for them.”

. . .

Brick Church School, on the Upper East Side, had over 300 applicants for 53 spots, director Lydia Spinelli said. Next year, its annual tuition will range from $12,000 for half a day to $15,400 for 4- and 5-year-olds.

Uhry, the consultant, advises her clients to try 12 to 14 schools. Parents then may have to wait in lines for applications, take tours, write essays, have their toddlers tested and observed at play or even interviewed, and secure letters of recommendation from friends and family members.

Playing Homeless

The city’s homeless census took place last night. In this week’s New Yorker, Ben McGrath looks at the control decoys in the city’s homeless census:

Dr. Kim Hopper, a medical anthropologist at the Nathan Kline Institute and the former president of the National Coalition for the Homeless, is the architect of what the city is calling the Shadow Count, and the man in charge of implementing its “plant-capture” method: you plant a known quantity of itinerant decoys among the street population at large, and see how many of them you can spot in a night’s worth of searching for actual homeless people; the percentage of decoys missed ought to resemble the percentage of the true population unaccounted for in your surveyors’ ledgers.

The guidelines for playing a homeless person:

Prospective decoys—Hopper wants a hundred and fifty—will be handed an instruction card shortly before heading out to assigned locations, at midnight, for three hours of role-playing. The card begins, “Your job is to pass for a homeless person on the street tonight. But you will be unusually stable, well-behaved, dressed for the weather, and approachable.” As props, Hopper recommends bringing along only a blanket and “a crummy hat.”

Booze? “Several people have asked if that’s O.K.,” Hopper said last week, in the midst of final preparations. “We had to develop some artful answer: ‘You’re employees of the research foundation for mental health; these are work hours for you and the usual rules apply.’ But if people feel like misbehaving in a civil fashion on their own, I can’t police them.”

Reading material? Hopper’s inclination was to say, “Yeah, whatever helps pass the time.” But one of his students asked if he could bring his homelessness textbook along. “That’s probably not the thing that ordinary homeless folks would be doing,” Hopper cautioned.

Then again, Hopper isn’t calling for total hobo impersonation. “We would like very much if the students saw this as a research study rather than an audition,” he said. “We don’t want people begging or accosting passersby, or whatever they think homeless people do when they’re out during the middle of the night.”

Blue Vs. Red

This past week there were two significant victories in the continuing struggle against Red State Encroachment in New York. The first one came when developers abandoned plans to include a Wal-Mart at a proposed development in Rego Park. Now we hear Brooklyn says “fuhgeddaboudit” to Cracker Barrel (Did I have to fall back on that tired cliche? Why yes I did!):

Brooklyn has yanked the welcome mat out from under Southern food chain Cracker Barrel Old Country Store due to accusations of discrimination.

Borough President Marty Markowitz, who invited the company to check out Brooklyn, dropped his Southern hospitality following outrage among black and gay leaders over a history of discrimination claims against the chain.

“I do not believe they are ready for Brooklyn,” Markowitz said yesterday.

“It is our greatest source of pride that Brooklyn’s diversity of races, faiths and ethnicities is unrivaled anywhere in the world, and any company that is interested in doing business in Brooklyn must respect and celebrate that diversity. We have no plans to meet with Cracker Barrel.”

But before you cry “cheap and easy grandstanding,” take comfort in Clyde Haberman’s contrarian take on the Wal-Mart decision:

Wal-Mart was to be part of a new shopping mall in Rego Park, Queens. That was before an alliance of labor unions, small businesses, environmentalists and neighborhood groups persuaded politicians that this was the worst idea since Lincoln chose to take in a play.

With the City Council getting ready to give it a hard time, the mall’s developer decided that running into walls was not worth the pain. It dropped Wal-Mart from the project.

Never mind the usual concerns about traffic and the collapse of mom-and-pop stores. Wal-Mart’s child-labor practices, its aggressive anti-union philosophy and its imperious air were all guaranteed to punch the alarm buttons of New York politicians given to social engineering.

The fact that many Americans happen to like Wal-Mart because it keeps prices down got relatively scant attention. While they prefer to see themselves as a breed apart, New Yorkers have been known to enjoy low prices themselves.

I swear I’m not a Wal-Mart apologist — it’s just that I had no idea McDonald’s didn’t make it to New York until the 1970s:

It might help to take a short journey through time, back to the early 1970’s, when McDonald’s made its first inroads here. The issues then were different from today’s. But the attitude of many New Yorkers was much the same: the barbarians were at the gates and had to be repelled.

Not that the city was unfamiliar with fast-food operations. It had the likes of Nedick’s, White Castle, White Tower and Chock full o’Nuts. But McDonald’s terrified people. Protesters marched through Greenwich Village. Upper East Siders rallied. The end, all agreed, was near.

Typical was the lament of a woman who appeared in 1974 at a community board hearing to oppose a planned McDonald’s franchise on East 66th Street. “It would be a smelly, noisy pestilence,” she said, predicting plagues of rats, garbage and exhaust fumes. No less worrisome, she predicted, were the unsavory types “who would hang around such a place.”

One man rose to add his own battle cry. “Winston Churchill,” he said, “gave the boys at Eton just six words of advice: ‘Don’t give up. Never, never, never.’ ”

So much for those playing fields.

In case you didn’t notice, the golden arches are everywhere in the five boroughs – 250 outlets, the company says. Somehow, the city has managed not to collapse. Nor have McDonald’s employees been observed waylaying people on the street and dragging them inside to be force-fed Egg McMuffins.

Quite simply, many people enjoy eating there. And they might similarly want to shop at Wal-Mart if given the chance.