Zucco, the face and owner of Le French Diner on Orchard St. in the Lower East Side, passed away from an apparent heart attack on February 13th, 2010. You will be missed. (Thanks for the link, Chris Sojka.)
Image via Bowery Boogie.
The WSJ interviews people who’ve been hit hard by the fine print of compounding student loans.
[Dr. Bisutti] recently entered a rehabilitation agreement on her defaulted federal loans, which now carry an additional $31,942 collection cost. She makes monthly payments on those loans—now $209,399—for $990 a month, with only $100 of it going toward her original balance. The entire balance of her federal loans will be paid off in 351 months. Dr. Bisutti will be 70 years old.
What’s scary about this article isn’t the stupidity of certain student loans — it’s the pervasive notion that student loans are a good investment. Even with a solid foundation, such as medical school (in Dr. Bisutti’s case), one can still get burned and drown in endlessly compounded debt. I can only imagine the amount of debt that’s going to come out of the past couple of years of college-bound kids — attendance rates have soared in the past decade. What happens when they all get out of school and realize the promise wasn’t all it was cracked up to be?
Via @josermejia.
Why are there no girls in San Francisco? is a blog that explores just that: why are there no girls in San Francisco? If there are any, the author has gone out of his/her way to explain why SF is paltry at best:
Self-aware SF 7s, for example, will, in order to avoid environments in which they might be judged solely on their appearance, do things like promote day culture and frequent wine bars and wear layers and, in order to avoid direct comparison to more physically beautiful women, express a haughty animus towards the “Bridge and Tunnel” chicks or LA girls and anywhere either might show up, and these carefully and studiuosly cultivated attitudes will – for a time – make them feel like 8s or 9s but only so long as larger, more powerful leveling forces, such as a romantic relationship, Perez Hilton or anervous guy on MUNI making a bold move, are squared off and kept at bay, and all of this together tends to make the SF 7s feel genuinely fabulous and superior and also genuinely bereft and alienated. It’s a wierd dichotomy to be packaged together in one person, you can’t decide if it’s cool or pathetic, if they are the tormented Sisyphusean hero or the dumb kid who puts on a cape and jumps off the roof.
Don’t worry. The author doesn’t just leave it at the women:
The paradigmatic example is the guy who is handsome, clever, and well-built but, at the same time, 5 foot 7. Every grad school class or large corporate office has one of these dudes. He is secretly obsessed with his looks and all the cute girls platonically flirt with (but never date) him and even though he is vaguely cool and caddish he somehow doesn’t seem to have any close friends and deep down you suspect he is miserable.
His curse is this: he’s fractionally too short to be a Mark Whalberg man-on-campus and fractionally too tall to be a Dudley Moore diminutive wiseacre. He misses by one and a half inches in either direction. And worse, he lives out his days experiencing these brief, throw-away moments when, because everyone around happens to be seated or Asian or he’s rollerblading, the world actually perceives and treats him as the unchallenged alpha. He’ll spend three months getting used to being above-average ordinary, and then boom! this completely different, totally superior existence is thrown in his face for a moment or two before being ripped away. He’ll never grow that one and half inches, and for this he’s almost certainly doomed to the comparative obscurity of being pretty cool/athletic/handsome for a short guy, but he never feels 100% sure. There’s no one in Palm Beach County to retally the votes and make an official pronouncement. So he can’t let go and he can’t get comfortable. He’s consumed by vain ambitions and counterfactual thinking.
This is pure gold. There’s another good bit about those dreaded San Francisco hipsters, too.
(Thanks for the link, Jose.)
Give the song some time — it builds up to something pretty great.
This is what you get when you mix cheap booze with four hours of Chatroulette (very NSFW).
HBO’s How To Make It In America is the new Entourage repackaged with pseudo-LES scenesters; a lingering scent of yesteryear’s BAPE clothing cameos, skater kids, and limited edition sneakers; and the discovery of — yes, you guessed it — Japanese selvedge denim. The pilot is mildly entertaining save for the formulaic gang of characters. (Of course, the main protagonist is the wimpy white guy who misses his ex.)
It’s the title, however, that bothers me. It almost seems cruel to send the streetwear crowd of millennial kids foaming at the mouth with this new television series. And if we were ever speculating about when Japanese selvedge denim got up and jumped the shark, this might be it. I’m going to spoil this show for you: This is the new shit. It’s from a mythical place called “Japan.” They used to make rare sneakers, but now suddenly it’s this blue stuff that’s really special. $3000 for a roll. Let’s hustle and be the new denim empire of the Lower East Side. Damien Hirst! Or something like that.
Via @eugenekimkan.
Edit: Embedding has been disabled, but you can see where I got the quote from here (full-length YouTube video link).
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