the dirty dozen, part 1: back from CA for a week, still catching up on work (hooray!)
01 my new favorite thing about ikea (admittedly, not a hotly contested thing): free shuttles to the new red hook location (where people camped out for several days to score free sofas*) are filling up with non-shoppers. according to gothamist,
The free coach style shuttle buses that deliver riders from two Brooklyn subway stops to the new Red Hook IKEA are filling up with passengers who never set foot inside the Swedish retailer. "I'd say before one o'clock, about half the riders from Smith and Ninth Street don't even go into IKEA," one bus driver told the Daily News, adding that many riders are going to a local methodone [sic] clinic for treatment. And, as predicted, freeloaders are pulling the same move with the free Water Taxi between IKEA and lower Manhattan, an area also renowned for its methadone.
02 while it is not my custom to think highly of bars that think highly of themselves, i did fancy s bar, one of the stops on our one-night-only los angeles bar crawl with little sis and her boyfriend. the s probably stands for (philippe) starck, as he designed the place, but in practice it stands for satan in a most excellent way: the bar is lit by dozens of elegant, mismatched table lamps, suspended upside down from the ceiling. the effect is ever so slightly fucked up - how one would imagine a possessed room might look (the bathrooms give the same vibe: each stall is lit by silent movies playing from televisions embedded in the ceiling). old scratch appears on the menu and a few wall murals, so the devil thing is literal too, but it's really all about the lamps. they (and, okay, the fact that we got past the velvet rope even though joe was wearing his "support the right to keep and arm bears" tee shirt) are the reason i didn't break a bottle and start a bar fight when asked to pay like $16 for souped-up hard lemonade.**
03 two months after deadline, i finally made headway on one of the most infuriating items on my 101 in 1001 list (089 frame my college diploma). my dad's garage was the very last place the wily diploma could have picked as a hiding spot, and it wasn't looking good - until i mentioned that it had been wrapped in some kind of blanket, which turned out to be as significant as the "jesus was a carpenter" line from indiana jones and the last crusade. "oh," said dad, "like this!" - and there, right in a cabinet by the door, it was. thank god, as The University wanted $50 for a replacement diploma that 1) wouldn't have the all-important gerhard casper signature and 2) would say COPY at the bottom (assholes). now i have to frame the thing, which is a new problem: should my frame be identical to joe's? i kind of want to go my own way, but i worry that getting something other than the ol' alma mater special will look weird, since they'll be hanging next to each other. then again, he has a white mat and mine would be black (the design changed a bit over the past few years), so we'd have the spy vs spy effect to offset the cheesiness. hmm.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 what's your relationship with ikea? harvard friends told me years ago that in their circles, thrift store hodgepodge was considered wildly unhip and ye olde mass swedish design was much more acceptable (then again, most of them were tech guys); i'm at the other end of the spectrum, obviously, though i'm also extra-mean about big box stores.
02 would you feel guilty about freeloading on the swedish bus?
03 do those of you in long-term relationships find it weird to hang out at It Bars?
04 what did you do with your college diploma?
*the most horrifying of those was a woman who told a local news crew that she didn't really want the sofa but had "never camped out for anything before."
**which is TOTALLY RIDICULOUS, i acknowledge, but worth it for the one-time design inspiration. my drinks usually cost about $3, so it all evens out in the end.
