11 West 47th Street has such tight security that each visitor must have not only her ID but also her fingerprint scanned on entry. “I guess that’s why they made such a big deal of asking me to bring my ID!” I said to the guard, smiling and trying to be cute, trying to get comfortable – I was nervous. He shrugged and directed me to the elevator that would take me to the 19th floor.

A uniformed cleaning lady sized me up as I got out of the elevator. “What you doing here?” she said, not unkindly. “Um, are there any … radio studios in this building?” I asked as two furry-hatted men passed us, speaking in Yiddish. “This diamond building only. You want diamonds, rubies, emeralds?” “No, I’m not in the market for any diamonds,” I told her as I edged back into the elevator, beginning to sweat.

Back on the street: “Ohh, you were supposed to go to 11 West FortySECOND street,” explained the PA who called to try to figure out why I was already 15 minutes late to an NPR interview that was meant to have started at 4. I hung up my cell phone and started sprinting down 5th avenue.

Almost everyone I passed was not from around here. Almost everyone I passed seemed to be thrilled to be soaking up the version of New York City that television had sold them, and why not? Look at these shiny buildings glittering! Look at the shiny hair of the women exiting the stores, glossed-paper bags in tow, twitching their tiny haunches, revolving their delineated shoulder blades as they flag down cabs! Who wouldn’t give everything to be any kind of cog in this perpetual-motion display of wealth and importance and efficiency? Who wouldn’t want to live inside this myth?


I’d been watching Sex and the City for three days straight by this point — yes, I finished them all — and so, as I rushed down the street I found my footsteps were keeping time with the jingle that was by then irretrievably lodged in my head. I couldn’t stop hearing that antic tinkle, that almost foreboding ending.

Darting through an intersection against the light, I thought about the show's opening credits sequence. Carrie Bradshaw, in a flesh-toned, nipple-revealing top and matching tutu, walks down the street, darts her eyes from side to side with a secret smug smile, tries to hail a cab, and is shamed when the bus, bearing an advertisement for her newspaper column— “Carrie Bradshaw knows good sex … and isn’t afraid to ask,”— whizzes by, splashing her and her tutu with gutter-water. These events are intercut with iconic images of The City: Sunlight glinting off the Chrysler building, the Empire State building, the Brooklyn Bridge. There had been a shot of the Twin Towers at one point, but it was replaced in post-2001 episodes.

Remember the episode when Carrie shoots that bus ad? She’d had some worries about its suggestiveness, she explains via voiceover, as we see her lolling suggestively in her bed as a photographer shouts “Beautiful!” and “More!” But her worries were mitigated when she found out that she got to keep the dress.

Cut to another episode, much later in the series. Carrie is in the ladies’ room of some chic establishment or other when she encounters a woman who she at first thinks is a fan: “I read your column,” the woman says, and then interrupts Carrie’s standard aw-shucks routine by saying, “And I dated Aidan right after you.” Then she makes a face that says “and oh my god, you are a horrible, horrible person.” As the episode wears on, several other people who have been informed of Carrie’s horribleness by this woman—including Heather Graham, as herself—make the same face. “You’re Carrie Bradshaw, huh? Eeesh.(Intake of breath).” Like, “You’re Carrie Bradshaw, huh? Poor you.”

That was sort of how my radio interview went, once I finally made it to 11 West 42nd Street. The interviewer fake-congratulated me a tiny bit and then asked whether I was worried that people would think I was a narcissist, which was a cute way for her to tell me that she thought I was a narcissist. “Do YOU think I’m a narcissist?” I asked her, and she stuttered. Later, the interview was posted on the NPR website with this quote taken out of context, making it seem like I am such a narcissist that I go around asking people, unprompted, whether they think I am a narcissist.

Last week a writer for Salon asked Moe whether she thought Carrie Bradshaw was a narcissist. I guess this is a question that all people — well, women mostly — who write about their own experiences must answer, whether or not said people are fictional.

One of the things people like to write about when they’re writing about Sex and the City is whether the show Gets It Right vis a vis The City. Ways the show Gets It Wrong have been catalogued extensively elsewhere— the girls’ apartments, their clothes, their endless free time, the fact that a collection of previously published newspaper columns merits an enormous book party and a publicity tour, all, apparently, on the publisher’s tab!

But here is how the show Gets It Right. It captures that feeling you can get walking down the street here sometimes on a sunny spring day. You have clean hair and new shoes and for a moment, you can trick yourself into believing that the City is on the verge of opening all its doors for you. All you have to do is be yourself! Things will work out.

But what a TV show will not tell you, no matter how many episodes you watch in a row, is that the people you meet here will only like you or want to help you as long as they can believe themselves to be better — more talented or more successful or richer or smarter — than you. The people you meet here will pretend to be your friends as long as it’s convenient for them or as long as it’s consistent with the versions of themselves they’re performing every day. The people you meet here will never hesitate to say things about you in print that they’d never say to your face. They have made a bargain. They will do whatever it takes to stay here. You came here because you thought you had a lot in common with them, and the thing is, you do. But those things aren’t the things about yourself that you like.


And so, at the end of wondering, here is the City. Now will you do whatever it takes to stay here, with them? How many times are you willing to let that bus spray you as it passes before you stop standing on that corner in that tutu? Are those shining towers worth those showers of muddy bus-spray? And why did you ever agree to have your face on that motherfucking bus, anyway? It wasn’t even really such a great dress.

Earlier: 36 Straight Hours Of Sex (And The City): Season Three
36 Straight Hours Of Sex (And The City): The First Two Seasons

So let me get this out of the way: As an employee, I'm enchanted with our new building on Eighth Avenue. The grand old 18-story neo-Gothic structure on 43rd Street, home to The New York Times for nearly a century, had its sentimental charms. But it was a depressing place to work. Its labyrinthine warren of desks and piles of yellowing newspapers were redolent of tradition but also seemed an anachronism.

Indeed, the de-paperification of newspapers looms large in Ouroussoff's review of a building that "comes to life when it hits the ground" but is "less than spectacular in the skyline" with the "menacing air" of its "battleship gray" steel frame and the "ragged and unfinished" effect of its "disappointing" crown. Because, hey, Modernism or whatever may be on life-support, but: "Journalism, too, has moved on. Reality television, anonymous bloggers, the threat of ideologically driven global media enterprises — such forces have undermined newspapers' traditional mission. Even as journalists at The Times adjust to their new home, they worry about the future. As advertising inches decline, the paper is literally shrinking; its page width was reduced in August. And some doubt that newspapers will even exist in print form a generation from now."

"Depending on your point of view, the Times Building can thus be read as a poignant expression of nostalgia or a reassertion of the paper's highest values as it faces an uncertain future. Or, more likely, a bit of both."

While it's unclear how Kid Nation will challenge the Grey Lady's supremacy as Truth, and—hi mom!—even Gawker posts ain't anonymous nomore, but the sentiments are Lever House-pure. Still, for a critic who tells us that "One of the joys of working in an ambitious new building is that you can watch its personality develop," Ouroussoff is tantalizingly demure about the real building components that deserve judgment regarding capital-"D" Design. That's right, not a word on the men's rooms. So, insiders, has architect Piano solved the problem, apparently endemic in corporate Manhattan, of urinals that either regularly disgorge their contents onto the tiles underneath or, um, encourage their users to "sell short"?

And the stalls: How wide of a stance are we talking about there?

Pride and Nostalgia Mix in the Times's New Home [NYT]

Portfolio said:

Perhaps the funniest moment of the session occurred when Gawker's rep likened working for Nick Denton — who was in the room — to getting hit in the head with a surfboard, drawing guffaws from the crowd.

Emails to Denton seeking elaboration were not returned immediately.

BALK BTW:"Perhaps the funniest moment of the session occurred when Gawker's rep likened working for Nick Denton — who was in the room — to getting hit in the head with a surfboard, drawing guffaws from the crowd."
BALK BTW: Do you think that's an accurate assessment?
BALK BTW: I mean, Tom WAS hit in the head by a surfboard, he knows of what he speaks. [Ed. Note: This is actually true, he was.]
DarkLordBalthazar: Ha — you'd better not be thinking about one of your self-referential quicklinks. The pain of a surfboard collision will be as nothing.
BALK BTW: Perfect answer. It'll be so meta!
DarkLordBalthazar: You'll be pleased to know that you have persuaded me of something.
DarkLordBalthazar: Let this mark the moment when pay-for-traffic changed journalism, forever.

And just like that, I've ruined both journalism and the internet for everyone. Sorry about that. Also, for the record, being hit in the head by a surfboard apparently falls on the lower end of the punishment scale in the online world. Keep that in mind when you're applying for my soon-to-be-forcibly-vacated job!

Silicon Alley Gets Its Close-Up [Portfolio]

Re: Gawker's Best Posts of 2007

• My Cock:
  "It's not the length of the list, it's the craft of the shaft."

Re: Daily Gold Star

• My Vagina
  "Jury has reconvened. Still not sure about the soul, however."

  Re: Goodbye Lockhart Steele
  

• My Left Tit:
  "Lock's already offered both of us a position at Racked, but Righty over here thinks she's too good for it. Uppity bitch."

Over the weekend, friends of former Oddjack editor A.J. Daulerio gathered at popular internet-person bar Lolita to roast the young man. Despite having been canned when that Gawker Media gambling site was shuttered, Daulerio contributes to sports site Deadspin. He is perhaps best known as the superstud of the New York blogger scene, at least if you read the Observer. Sadly, he's taking his well-polished tool back to his native Philadelphia, AKA the sixth borough. (Snarf.) The clip you see above is but a brief tease for the full video (by Richard Blakeley, natch) that will appear on Deadspin at some point this afternoon. Until it does, enjoy A.J.'s heartfelt feelings concerning someone here at Gawker Media who is near and dear to all of us.

Daulerio Going Away Roast [Flickr]

SUBJECT: Which is better for Alexis's Vows column

From: Emily
Diss A Vow or Vowie Zowie?
Or: your suggestion goes here

From: Choire
Beheadings and Fellations.

From: Alex
Furrowed Vows?

From: Emily
Please, keep punning until you get down to the Vowt To Lunch level.

From: Alex
DeVOWered!

From: Choire
VOW, I LUV U!
VOW 'N' LATER.
A VOW TO A KILL.
A VOW TO ARMS.
THE VOWING FIELDS.
THE VOW STANDS ALONE.
RUMBLEVOWS.
ARE YOU THERE VOWS? IT'S ME, ALEXIS.

From: Alex
Der Vow Angel
Vow and Fornever
The Vowtenance Divine
Big Ball in Vowtown

From: Choire
vowbreaker.
vowanista.
voweywag.

From: Alex
Vownity Fair
US Vows & World Report
Avownue
Vowsquire
Vowdar
The New York Review of Vows
Hustler (Vows)

From: Choire
vowcaine
vowanol
crystal vow
vowoin
vowijuana

From: Alex
The SuperVowl
The U.S. Vowpen
Vowbeldon
The PGVow Tournament
The World Series of Vows
Something about lacrosse and vows. And rape.

From: Choire
Dr. Vowlittle
Eating Vows Is Wrong
Mrs. Vowaway
Heart of Vowsness
Sense and Vowsability
Lady Windermere's Vows
Vowslysses

From: Doree
I think everything's been said, no?

From: Emily
In the shower just now I realized that it should be Altarcations, because it is about battling to be the best wedding announcement.

From: Choire
Well that was anticlimactic.

Seriously, if we were Shott, we would've gone with more of a "last days of disco" tone here; the bloggers and bloggy hangers-on quoted are mostly in their mid-thirties. Aka, ANCIENT. Their days of wondering how to simultaneously smoke pot and snort coke while drinking pinot grigio (in bars that are only popular for having once been deserted enough for a bunch of alcoholics more accustomed to IM than actual social interaction to feel comfortable in them) are numbered. Soon they will all have paired off and moved to the suburbs and we'll still be here, mocking their Vows announcements and the fact that they've already registered domains in their kids' names.

Besides, it's well known that the younger, cooler generation of bloggers have their own clubby hangout. We'd never be so gauche as to reveal too many details about it here, but we will say that it docks most frequently on a stretch of the Gowanus canal dubbed "Heaven Triangle."

Blog Ghetto [NYO]