I would like $5000 so I can buy a pair of shoes, preferably with 6" heels, to beat Julia Allison to death with.
I wasn't gonna ask for the cash, but if you think it will help?

But... I already have a camera and a complete lack of artistic talent.

I'm keeping my $10.

He should just do what any self-respecting, independent, gainfully employed, financially stable, creatively inclined thirtysomething New Yorker would do: borrow the money from his parents.

He should ask Stephen Merritt.

I have 50k of student loan debt. Is cyberbegging cool again?

Maybe he should get a Flickr account--only $25.

He should ask for a couple more bucks for the Flickr Pro account.

I hear he needs advice on whether to apply the five grand to hard drive retrieval or landscaping on his second home upstate.

xpost dammit!

Eh, maybe if he had restrained himself on the "macro" button once in a while ...

And xpost! Flickr is like a photographer's insurance policy - $50 could've saved him $5,000.

Is this what happens when ILM gets shakey? Xposts everywhere?

Did anyone see "Hot Fuzz" There's a scene where the old man police officer stares straight ahead and just says "cock."

I don't know, something about that story brought this into my head.

You know, this gentleman should do what any other modern member of the digital workforce would do following the loss of a personal hard drive--get a bottle of Nyquil Flu and curl up in a foetal position under their desk, crying.

And if he's paying 5$k to a digital file recovery service for wrecked hard drives, he's getting boned--doesn't he have a genius 14-year-old brother who can do this, yet who's socially inept?

I don't get it. Does this guy have actual fans of his photography (nevermind his criticism)?

Also, just for the record he's an asshole and a homophobe, yet strangely flaming in person.

Look, Tidybeard, sometimes the universe sends you a message.

He should do what everyone else does for quick cash: fake an injured or cancer-stricken pet that needs emergency medical stuff or something. Create a grand sob story and find a cat and take pictures of it. Post it up on your LJ with a paypal button beneath... voila!

Trust me, the pet-o-philes will starts liquidating their ING accounts right quick for that. A hurt kid or an eviction notice? Human, please.

Au contraire, mon Frere-Jones.

jones has officially lost his place as my #2 literary crush.

a.o. scott, i'm all yours now babycakes.

Maybe he could use Patrick Leahy's 17-year-old neighbor, you know, the kid who's going to retrieve all of Karl Rove's e-mails from the RNC server.

Sasha, fuck you and your hyphenated name. You make more money than me (God, I hope! If not, give up!), you've got your New Yorker cachet, you're older than me, and you don't have 5 grand in some sort of savings or even a credit card?

Maybe I'm just jealous that I have too much pride to up and do some entitled begging for shit that I want but don't want to pay for?

It's called BACKING UP TO DVD OR CD people. May I call this guy an asshole? Asshole.

I just got my tax refund. I've been a sugar daddy to far worse characters.

@Tippy and Bad Girl: Is this what happens when ILM gets shakey? Xposts everywhere?

World conquest is nigh. Again.

@In Other News...: like anybody ever really does that ...

There is simply NO way retrieving data off an external hard drive costs 5000 dollars. Even for a whole Terabyte, I REFUSE to believe that it costs 5000 dollars. Methinks he's also factoring in the price of REPLACING said hard drive.

Which makes his a weasely little chisler whom the ghost of karma has rightly fucked up the ass.

Either:

1.) You're good enough that newly-taken photos can earn the extra 5K, which means you shouldn't be begging

2.) You suck and can't earn the extra 5K because nobody wants your photos, which means you shouldn't be begging

What's the common thread?

What I love is that there's no guarantee he'll recover his photos. It's like donating to the Katrina funds.

gimme a d. gimme an o. gimme a u. gimme a c. gimme an h. gimme an e. what's that spell? sasha!

If I read between the lines I think he is saying that he spent three years downloading stuff off Pirate Bay and the only way he can retrieve it is to buy a new hard drive and a backup and then he will commence re-bittorrenting of Tori Amos bootlegs.

@Pope John Peeps II: It's pretty expensive to retrieve data from a fried drive - we had to deal with that at work recently. A new drive costs much less.

The real question is: what kind of a tool wants their donation to this idiot made public?

Isn't there anyone at the New Yorker willing to pony up for this?

Good prose earns almost-unconditional love where I'm from -- and sometimes it even lucks into cash.

Maybe he'll get a book proposal together, net a few multiples of $5K, and finally live down praising Nelly McKay.

@uncle_wiggly: I think you're on to something. October 2003 - December 2005 = approximately 800 days. To fill up a 1 TB drive, you'd have to save over a gigabyte of image files every single day. That's a hell of a lot of snapshots of turkey sandwiches.

Anything on there about how, if I don't contribute, I'm a rockist & ergo a racist?

I used to love Sasha's New Yorker essays. She was so witty and she made me feel like I was right there with a real sister, grooving on hip-hop and discovering amazing artists. Then I found out she was a white man and I lost all respect for her.

Is that wrong?

Knowing that the New Yorker doesn't pay SF-J enough to come up with a few thousand on his own makes me hate him less. Knowing he's tacky enough to ask for money for such a lame, selfish cause, on the other hand...

I would surely love to hear what Remnick & co. think of this wheeze. Please, please reveal if you find out.

Art is about process, not product. If you haven't sold the product, get on with the process. The work that is lost is in the past, and if you can't reconstruct it from people who have copies of it, then it is gone with the wind, buddy. Be glad that you can start from a clean slate - the Universe has done you a favor.

Of course, he brings up an interesting idea about capital reallocation - why doesn't everyone do it and soon all the money is spread around to everyone, right? Wait, maybe not a good idea. Gawker, do NOT go all Times Select on us!

please. he has $5,000.

$5K for data recovery? WTF?

Are they giving it back to him on a solid gold CD?

If this is a Mac, the leading repair facility in town (which shall remain nameless because they're not paying me to say so) charges $500 tops.

You know y'all, I really had my eye on this $2000 handbag

Good job, dipshit. Way to keep two years of data on an external disk with no backups.

And by this:

"or your data is stored in bits spread across multiple drive-in an enclosure containing either two or four separate hard drives-and one of those drives dies."

Is (Was?) he RAID striping critical data? What a complete tool. Eat the loss, and either get a flickr account or learn to back up your shit. Retard.

I think you're all being too hard on Sasha Frere-Jones. Ok, we're at war. Yes, pestilence and poverty are ravaging the globe. But there may well be additional photos of the United Palace marquee in that cache of lost data. You can't put a price on that. Ars longa, vita brevis, y'all. Now everybody proceed directly to Paypal and give Sasha all your money.

He needs the cash to stake a Britney Spears comeback album. He doesn't have enough faith in studio engineering to put up his own money, but maintains a sneaking suspicion that a glowing review in a somewhat respectable periodical could push the return on that $5k to at least 10%.

I smell a sex tape in his future.

Not to be impertinent, but why would taking another "job" to "earn" the "money" to fix this problem be out of the question?

At least this is a better reason to beg than that stupid twit Karyn (of savekaryn.com "fame") had.

@zibby: Rockist.

"The blog is a nice model for storage, too. The words and photos are on one private server, but millions of personal computer nodes. It's a public file cabinet. My recurrent apocalypse dreams often resolve with a G-rated coda, kind of like Threads meets Babe: Some kind stranger has my words and photos backed up on their 1985 Macintosh SE and I can get my work back without going through some institution that's blacked out all the naughty words. And it's free. Free. Free free free." -- Sasha Frere-Jones

i bet he's writing a stunt book.

Sorry, SFJ, I gave all my money to the Floyd Landis' Fairness Fund.

Between a membership to Flickr and renter's insurance, this public plea for help and the ensuing wisecracks could have been entirely avoided.

He should have used Jerry Falwell's old ploy: "God spoke to me and told me that all of you have to give me $10 million or I will die." Strangely, both things happened.

I heard that Alex Ross will stop writing about the death of the death of classical music if we pony up for a new trundle bed and a cock-ring.

Any Conde Nasty who's too stupid to figure out how to expense-ify this and make Uncle Si pick up the bill deserves to be demoted to Assistant Fact-Checker at an extremely niche B2B that nobody's ever heard of, preferably in New Jersey.

This is my favorite blog post in the history of blog posts. What a bum, huh?! Save all your free cds and trade 'em in for some change, brah. You do that, right?

Anyway, this guy sounds like a creep especially if he's got no problem with putting out such an embarrassing plea for cash. Nice way to out-douche your rival Nick Hornby, dude.