Photo in the 86th Street and Lexington Avenue subway station by Jay Israelson:

Setting: 3AM, 6 train from Spring Street to 86th Street.  Probably the fourth time I’ve run into Alden a.k.a. Karim Fonda from Team Facelift on the subway in the middle of a weeknight.

Me: What are you working on now?

Alden: Right now we got an album coming out on Duck Down Records.  (((At this point a guy standing near us waiting for the subway chimes in that he’s heard of Duck Down and we talk to him for a minute.))) We got Junior Sanchez who’s sort of a legendary New York House guy to executive produce it and I’m also working on a project with a chick named Tigga Galore on some voguing music.

Me: What do you mean by ‘voguing’?

More on 3AM Imromptu Subway Interview with Alden aka Fonda from Team Facelift

Yesterday, Monday morning, around 3:30am, a small homemade bomb went off outside a Starbucks on 92nd Street and 3rd Avenue.  The blast destroyed an outdoor bench, shattered some of the store’s windows, and was heard and felt by nearby residents.  So far, surveillance footage and one witness implicate two teens in the crime.

I strolled by the victimized Starbucks later in the day, around 7pm.  A few news vans were parked in the area, but the bench and broken glass seemed to have been replaced and the place was up and running, packed with coffee drinkers.

And across 3rd Avenue, Ron Burgundy was on the scene, interviewing the locals.

Links:
Small Bomb Goes Off Outside Upper East Side Starbucks [NY Daily News]

You know what’s kind of crazy? When you’re drunk, walking home from the subway at 4:55am, it’s still dark out and you’re surrounded by a deafening choir of chirping coming from the cherry blossoms, which you didn’t remember were even there earlier. (87th St. between Park and Lex)

Last year I acted for the first time- in a movie, a musical actually, called Fashion Party, written and directed by Alec Coiro.  I play Topsy Van Aston, a 20-something year old Upper East Side WASP.  While shooting one of my first scenes I interrupted saying I think there’s a typo in my script…

So I’m just another pathetic social doing her [handbag] vanity project!

“Shouldn’t it say “socialite?” I asked.  Alec said “No, they call themselves socials.”  What?  It just sounded wrong to me but Alec knew all about this world- he had worked for Quest and New York Social Diary.

Months later, long after I had accepted and become used to the term social I was watching The City (season 1, episode 4) on MTV and was delighted by the following exchange:

Olivia Palermo: Just to give you a heads up, like who’s coming, mixture of editors, socials, celebs, Vogues… Rsvp-ed for socials we have-
Whitney Port: What are socials?  Like as in socialites?
Olivia Palermo: Yeah, (embarrassed smile) it’s just like, an abbreviation.

Olivia Palermo photo via Olivia Palermo Fansite

A friend of mine posits that the word social was originally used by upper class philanthropists to refer to themselves and that socialite is a derogatory bastardization of that word, implying the subject is a poser.  Therefore a true social would know better than to refer to themselves or their peers as socialites.  This friend also claims to have schooled Olivia to the usage of the word social not long before The City began filming.

But meanwhile, another friend of mine said she started hearing the term social about two years ago from a friend who worked at a PR firm and that it is a PR industry term.  She says that the real, old school, upper class philanthropists never refer to themselves as socialites or socials, and they don’t like these social(ite)s, i.e. girls seen on Patrick McMullan, because they just borrow dresses and don’t help out with causes.  She also says socialite was not always a derogatory term.

Wikipedia currently only has an entry for socialite with no reference to an implied tone of mocking or the word social. And in online dictionary’s the only definition for social as a noun is a social gathering.

The origin remains a mystery to me for now.

Martin Monnickendam (Dutch, 1874-1943), Portrait of Jacques Goudstikker, image via The Jewish Museum
(Reclaimed begins with this portrait of Jacques Goudstikker, a handsome young man at age 19.)

Reclaimed: Paintings From the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker at The Jewish Museum is partly an exhibition of Dutch, Northern Baroque, and Southern Renaissance paintings, and more interestingly, the story of a Dutch Jewish art collector and taste maker, the Nazi looting of his collection, and the eventual restitution, decades later, of part of the collection to his heirs.

Jacques Goudstikker’s grandfather had founded the Goudstikker gallery and his father was an art dealer as well.  After studying in Amsterdam, Leiden and Utrecht, Jacques joined the family business at age 22.  He brought immediate drastic change to the Goudstikker Gallery as well as the entire Dutch art market by More on Come See: RECLAIMED

Someone in Manhattan House (200 E 66) has put a picket fence on their deck:
More on Details

I’ve been watching the John Adams HBO series starring Paul Giamatti and feeling a little patriotic so today my friend Mike and I walked around looking for a plaque commemorating the execution site of an American Revolutionary War Hero, Nathan Hale, and eventually we found it on the side of a Banana Republic.

According to a NY Historical Society plaque on the West side of Third Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets, Nathan Hale, the American Revolutionary war hero, was hanged by the British, “probably within a hundred yards of here.”

The hanging site of Nathan Hale is significant because it is where he uttered his famous last words (there are many conflicting accounts of these words, but all accounts give the same general sentiment which boil down to what follows),

“I only regret that I have but one life to give my country.” More on American Hero’s Last Words and Execution on The U.E.S.

Carnegie Hill is changing fast.  I go to the West Coast for one week and Petak’s closes! Katie texted me while I was in Las Vegas and I was shocked.  I walked by the empty store the other night and passed a man carrying a Petak’s bag- I looked at the sign on the store window, then at him and he returned a knowing, sad look.  Soon the plastic Petak’s bag won’t be a UES accessory like the Fairway bag continues to be on the West side.

LISTS FOR CARNEGIE HILL (confined to my limited walking area)

CLOSED/MOVING

• Petak’s = Closed (I lament the loss of their chicken noodle soup, chicken nuggets, and skinny potato pancakes they had only during holidays, among other things.)
• Bolton’s = Closed (always wondered who shopped there except my grandmother when she used to visit from the nursing home in Philly when I was little.  Bolton’s was in that spot for at least 30 years?)
• Didi’s Children’s Boutique = Closed  (out of all the baby stores I did think this one was kind of cool because of all the wooden German import toys.  Could find unique gifts.)

More on Petak’s Closed WTF!

I saw this antique, supposedly German mannequin head for sale on eBay several months ago (the listing is long gone.)  It doesn’t look like any other antique mannequin head I’ve seen. Not that I was looking for one- they just pop up now and then in the categories I like to search.

Images: Top row via eBay. Bottom row, Left via ParkAvenuePeerage, Right, via KenemBijoux.

After a minute of staring at the serene head trying to figure out who it reminded me of, it came to me- it could only be Jessica Joffe- the stunning journalist/model/style expert, who I believe is also German, at least in part.

I’m not saying they look exactly alike- just that there are some uniquely similar qualities about the two- which is a little spooky since unlike in the Seinfeld episode where that weird guy meets Elaine on the subway and then models a mannequin after her, this particular mannequin head came into existence at least half a century before Joffe.

Physically similar features are the red hair curled at the ends, the “dainty” red lips, the straight, slim nose, the uniformly linear eyebrows (although exaggeratedly arched on the mannequin,) and light-colored eyes.

Antique mannequin heads are cool because they record ideals of beauty and style from other time periods.  This one is from around the 1920’s – 1940’s.  Joffe, who modeled in several Banana Republic campaigns, is beautiful in my opinion, but neither in today’s weird-looking model way, or the button-nose jail bait way (to name two of many of today’s visible types.)

Images: Left via Pravda, right via Woohoo
(Actually I find the girl on the left adorable, but I want to see her on an episode of Star Trek.)

Looking at this mannequin head makes me see something of old Hollywood in Joffe- definitely in the hair- and something about her facial expression and oft-seen fancy dress evokes a doomed German aristocrat at the start of WW2 like in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned.

Photo via Cinemorgue.

Photo via Flickr: HillyBlue

Here, at the corner of the mouth, you can almost see Joffe’s smirk.