Andy Warhol.

The Barneys NY xmas windows 2006.

The Vasco era...

...is upon us.

brought to my attention by Mr. NS.

We are losers.

Frank Rich on the year we realize how creepy we have become:

As of Friday morning, "Britney Spears Nude on Beach" had been viewed 1,041,776 times by YouTube's visitors. The count for YouTube video clips tagged with "Iraq" was 22,783. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But compulsive blogging and free soft-core porn are not, as Time would have it, indications of how much you, I and that glassy-eyed teenage boy hiding in his bedroom are in control of the Information Age. They are indicators instead of how eager we are to flee from brutal real-world information that makes us depressed and angry. This was the year Americans escaped as often as they could into their private pleasure pods. So the Person of 2006 was indeed you --- yes, you.

Christmas Gift.

Dick in a Box.

Hilarious.

Licensed To Pill.

We couldn't get much higher.

Tracey Thorn is my idol.

Listen to her amazing new song "It's All True".

Vintage New York.

Vintage Poster by David Klein (1965)

"God forbid there should be any fact about me that isn't known to just about everyone."

"I am still waiting for the wash of relief, the thrill of feeling reborn, of escaping death."

"There is nothing like the warm flush of superiority you feel when discovering a fetish you don't have."

The great surprise of 2006.

Who Americans Are and What They Do, in Census Data - New York Times

Graphic from The Huffington Post.

To do this weekend.

11 Spring Street.

Romantic.

Dogpoet puts into words (GREAT READING) feelings I have been wrestling with for the last couple of months (maybe my entire life):

I’d been called a romantic my whole life; usually by well-meaning friends, who’d offered the diagnosis with the kind of look one gives a tender, wounded squirrel limping through our Darwinian jungle.
(...)
I know what I want to ignore; that there are no guarantees in love.

Interestingly enough, he is not the first person to suggest Madame Bovary this week.

Favorite Song 2006.

Even though I can't listen to the original version anymore, my favorite song this year has to be 'Crazy' by Gnarls Barkley. Nelly Furtado's cover is beautiful and so is the one by The Kooks. I guess I've been feeling unplugged lately.

"Does that make me crazy?
Possibly!"

Oh, no!

The light at the end of the tunnel is New Jersey.

I imagine it happens often.

Area Man Accidentally Responds To Own 'M4M' Ad:

"Although the slightly taller man described in the ad is a few years younger, he hopes the would-be mate won't mind."

Brazilian Beefcake.

Brazilian actor Thiago Rodrigues as I found him over at
Made in Brazil.

Sometimes a picture speaks to you but this one screamed at me.

Me & My Selves.

From yesterday's New York Times:

"You might naïvely imagine that you are one person, the same entity from day to day. To the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, however, the idea of a permanent “I” was a fiction. Our mind, Hume wrote, “is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” According to this way of thinking, the self that inhabits your body today is only similar to, not identical with, the self that is going to inhabit your body tomorrow. And the self that will inhabit your body decades hence? A virtual stranger.

The idea of multiple selves may seem like a stoner’s fantasy, but economists who study human decision-making have found it surprisingly useful. Consider: Most people, if given a choice today between doing seven hours of irksome work on May 1, 2007, versus eight hours on May 15, 2007, opt for the former. When May 1 arrives, however, they will find that their preference has flipped: they now wish to put off the work for a couple of weeks, even at the cost of having to do the extra hour’s worth. Why this inconsistency, if the self calling the shots is one and the same?

Further evidence for the fragmented self comes from neuroscience. Brain scans show that the emotional part of the brain, the limbic system, is especially active when the prospect of immediate gratification presents itself. But choice among longer-term options triggers more activity in the “reasoning” part of the brain, located (suitably enough) higher up in the cortex. Now suppose you’re tempted by a diet-violating Twinkie. Which part of your brain — the shortsighted emotional part or the farsighted reasoning part — gets to be the decider? There may be no built-in hierarchy here, just two autonomous brain modules in competition. That is why you might find yourself eating the Twinkie even while knowing it’s bad for you. (A similar disconnect between two parts of your brain occurs when a visual illusion doesn’t go away even after you learn it’s an illusion.)

The short-run self cares only about the present. It is perfectly happy to indulge today and offload the costs onto future selves. For example, recent studies show that teenage smokers do not underestimate the risk of getting lung cancer as an adult (if anything, they tend to overestimate it); they simply don’t mind making the future self suffer for the pleasure of the moment. The long-run self may deplore this ruinous behavior, but its prudent resolutions are continually ignored. Yet it can enforce its will indirectly by shaping the environment to constrain some short-run selves from exploiting others — by, say, putting a time lock on the refrigerator."

World AIDS Day.

My contribution.

My roommate is from Zimbabwe and I'm helping him start a Non-Profit Organization to help children in Africa who became orphan because of the AIDS epidemic.

"Aids in Africa" seems to be all the rage right now with Angelina, Madonna, Bono & all ganging up in a PR blitz that might, at the end, obfuscate people's perception of the real scope of things. It's great to make people aware but they need to be aware of the problem, not the celebrity that is dedicating some of their time to it.

Anyway, when my roommate started this foundation (it's about 2 years old) no one was talking about Africa and now we feel that all this "publicity" might hurt his fund-raising abilities so we are trying to come up with new ideas.

I designed the site for him and, yes, it's based on the template for my blog. We are still working out some aesthetic details and hopefully it will be finished over the weekend but I wanted to put it out here today.

The more I read about Africa the more I get disillusioned. Stuff like this breaks my heart.

I love children and I always wanted to volunteer on something to do with them directly. I heard once about volunteering to hold orphan babies because if they grew up without affection they wouldn't grow as healthy. If you know more details about it or If you have any suggestions onany worthwhile foundation in NYC, please let me know.