Stupid media tricks

Anything for a story, but New York Magazine sinks, if possible, to a new low about desperate Greenwich residents hocking their jewelry to buy food.

Once a handsome, genteel suburb, Greenwich, Connecticut, has fallen into disrepair over the past year, as its residents struggle with increases in crime, unemployment, and vermin. Now, a new horror: Some of the city’s relatively poor denizens have taken to wrapping themselves in last season’s Chanel and selling their gold jewelry on the side of the highway. “They show up dressed very fancy, maybe wearing their Rolexes,” the president of Westport, Connecticut–based Cash for Gold, which has been holding appraisal sessions at the Hyatt Hotel off 95, tells Bloomberg. But one look at the sellers’ hollow eyes and starved bodies, and he can see the truth: They’re desperate. Selling this jewelry is their last hope. The gold is the last match in their bundle.

Hollow eyes? Starved bodies? That’s the standard Greenwich look, you moron.

update: okay, writer was being sarcastic. Still dumb.

Hey, here’s a surprise

Main stream media discovers the deficit. Meanwhile, Instapundit has been running this chart since February. 

No question that it’s all Bush’s fault but riddle me this, Batman: if Bush’s $400 billion deficit was a bad thing, does tripling the deficit make it better? 

And raising teachers’ salaries won’t help a dime

115 high school students pregnant in just one Chicago school.  No wonder Obama’s got his girls in a Washington private school. I’d be curious to see how many of these empowered young ladies graduate high school, finish college and make something of their lives. 

But that kind of follow up story isn’t done.

When I hear the word, culture, I reach for my revolver

Some readers have expressed disbelief that Peter Brant’s latest effort to annoy and offend his fellow residents is deliberate, and speculate instead that the “Santa with Butt Plug” he’s planted on Conyers Farm (and there goes that neighborhood) really depicts Santa holding a Christmas tree, or something like it. El wrongo. Here’s the art world on the artist in question:

Over the past four decades, Paul McCarthy‘s work has gone from intimate performance videos to spectacular public sculptures — all without sacrificing its unnerving psychosexual tone. While the artist’s recent show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York surprised many with its unornamented structuralism, its restraint was comically upstaged by the unmooring of his giant inflatable dog turd at Switzerland’s Zentrum Paul Klee, which left a trail of downed power lines in its wake. It was as if McCarthy’s art had unleashed on the Swiss countryside the cartoonish extravagance that had been put on the back burner for the Whitney.

Not that McCarthy hasn’t paid tribute to the twisted pop-mythological deities of the American psyche. “I’m interested in caricatures — from Miss Piggy to Popeye to Santa Claus — that are cultural fabrications,” observes the 63-year-old artist from his LA home. “Santa is one that I’ve hung on to longer, that I repeat more. There’s the whole thing of Christmas and consumption and commodity, and its relationship to capitalism and Western culture and Americana. The character itself is this roly-poly patriarch with a beard — almost a godlike figure.” In fact, he notes, one of his earliest childhood drawings is of Santa Claus.

The old elf has surfaced often in McCarthy’s oeuvre, from the outrageous fecal-smearing bacchanalia of the mid-’90s Tokyo Santa(1996) and Santa Chocolate Shop (1997), to an entire series of recent sculptural works based on a Santa figure holding aloft a tree-like butt plug. This latter series culminated in Chocolate Santa (2007), McCarthy’s warped take on entrepreneurship in the form of a fully functioning “Chocolate Santa with Butt Plug” factory, churning out $100 gift boxes at a rate of 1,000 a day in New York’s Maccarone Gallery.

If there’s anything more comical than unmooring a giant inflatable dog turd I haven’t seen it, although that kid in Colorado might come close. Of course, funniest of all is seeing a fool parted from his money.

 

Oh, Peter, is all that for me?

Reader Poll: a new name for Round Hill

The few remaining unindicted residents of Round Hill must be sweating as one by one their neighbors are manacled and led off to the paddy wagon. Once a synonym for success, and the most prestigious road in Greenwich, Round Hill is in danger of becoming the laughing stock of the elite. Something must be done and as a public service, FWIW offers this forum for generous readers to suggest a new name for the road. Judge Judy will select the winner.

 

Makes sense to me

Rajaratnam funded Tamil terrorists and Democrats.

Name change?

With Round Hill Road quickly becoming known for its rogues and thieves rather than the successful people who once lived there, I smell property devaluation and I suggest a name change before more money is lost. How about “Hooker’s Lane”? Cos Cob doesn’t want it any more.