even more quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a new rolling new york times thread

NYTimes writing aside, those suburbs sound pretty nice to live in. If you're a struggling street artist who can only afford an $860k mortgage.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Sunday, February 17, 2013 2:35 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've half considered the hudson valley for a long time. And I thought fed up artists leaving the city and setting up little shops and galleries in those towns wasn't an established tradition. Maybe this is just the new wave.

xpost

The greatest thing about this article is how if frames moving to an $800K house in a trendy suburb as failure.

hasting-on-hudson is a nice town. i used to know a failed musician-turned-lawyer who moved there in 1998 or so.

lol failing upwards

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy_Clys4ul4

he's like a go-to made up trend artist.

The website for his company reads like a parody, too:

synthesis corp. is a New York City based consultancy that lives at the intersection of innovation, strategy and purpose driven culture. ... synthesis works with governments, NGOs, foundations, and corporations at the C-suite level to discover new ways to drive sustainable innovation, rethink business models and improve top-line metrics. ... Our methodology embraces design science, behavioral economics, foresight analysis and data driven hypothesis prototyping to tackle complex client challenges. We then apply systems-based thinking to identify untapped areas of opportunity and deliver comprehensive 4D strategic blueprints. ... We are a process driven enterprise that applies our expertise, insights and network in collaboration with our clients’ core principles, knowledge and experience to deliver best-in-class results. ... We are on the cusp of an entirely new macro/micro economic, technological and social paradigm. What we do now will set the trim tab for decades to come.

Set the trim tab!

that type of incomprehensible/silly corporate web-page speak is sadly very very common, though.

I'm sure that's true. I don't look at too many consulting websites. I'm sort of amazed anyone still says "new paradigm," I thought that died around 1996.

Also, I had to look up what a trim tab is -- which just goes to show how far from the C-suite I am.

that long quote is the reason the word "bafflegab" was coined

i pity the poor foreign translator who would have to translate a web-page such as that into, i dunno, German or Spanish. or more accurately, into German or Spanish corporate jibber-jabber.

hasting-on-hudson is a nice town. i used to know a failed musician-turned-lawyer who moved there in 1998 or so.

― i have a history of enabling your mother. (Eisbaer), Sunday, 17 February 2013 20:04 (48 minutes ago) Permalink

serious q: do you think it's worth a day trip? Was thinking about going somewhere out of the city tomorrow and I don't want a long drive on account of baby.

Ohh, Hasting-on-Hudson is Westchester County, that explains it, for some reason I was thinking it was like this new frontier of yupsterdom. I had family in Westchester County who lived in this compound-type mansion back in the 80s, it's always been like this.

Yeah, it's the classic NYTimes thing of reporting a thing as a new trend when it's just a thing that people do. There are fake trends that no one actually does, and fake trends that are just stuff people always do, like move to the suburbs when they have kids.

serious q: do you think it's worth a day trip? Was thinking about going somewhere out of the city tomorrow and I don't want a long drive on account of baby.

i think it is -- esp. if you are considering moving there. it's been a while since i've been up there, but i remember that it was pretty funky (by Westchester standards, anyway). and it's been so since 1998 (long before this last quiddities article -- dunno if the NYT has noticed it or not before).

then again, i've got high standards for "small funky suburban towns" -- having grown up so close to New Hope, PA/Lambertville, NJ (New Hope being the town that sprang Ween onto the world).

the grow up, have kids, move to the burbs, but keep it a little bohemian thing has probably been happening for just about a century. so yeah, reporting it as a trend is sort of hilarious.

yeah, like Montclair, NJ has been a thing for as long as I can remember -- suburban home of ex-boho ex-manhattanites.

Aw, New Hope. One of my best pals from college is from New Hope.

See also p much any suburban/rural college town, like Northampton MA.

He conducted a Google Maps street-view search of Westchester, and settled on Hastings for his family when he saw Subarus parked on the streets, not Lexus SUVs.

THE ONLY TOWN IN AMERICA WHERE EVERYONE DRIVES A SUBARU

I'm fuckin sick of Subarus let me tell ya

It's that age old challenge of having to live in the suburbs with all the comforts and amenities that brings while still signifying that you're not really the type of person who lives in the suburbs.

livin in the suburbaru

subaru ownership as performance

I found that sentence hard to read, do those people not know that the Subaru is the standard suburban yuppie parentmobile? There are sixty of them (including mine!) parked outside the Whole Foods every single Saturday and I promise you the drivers are not hipsters.

yeah tons of these type of articles confuse rebranded yuppie consumerism with being a hipster

although it's hard to say someone's confused about the usage of a word that has no meaning

anyway, lagooon otm

hipsturbia, shut the style secretion down, this one will never be topped

― lag∞n, Sunday, February 17, 2013 12:16 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

ok, get ready

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/fashion/lindsay-heller-mediates-between-parent-and-nanny.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

It wasn’t that Kimberly Van Der Beek’s new nanny was unqualified. She had come with sparkling references and a gold-star recommendation from her agency. She knew three languages and had philosophies about child development. She was nice and prompt and had an excellent driving record.

Still, Ms. Van Der Beek, the wife of the actor James Van Der Beek and a parenting blogger, noticed that when she entered the room, the nanny was often just getting off the phone. And though the nanny was doing a good job with the Van Der Beeks’ 7-month-old son, Joshua, there was some tension with their 2-year-old daughter, Olivia, Ms. Van Der Beek thought.

And so it came to pass that on a rainy morning not long ago, a black Volkswagen Beetle with the license plate NANNY DR drove up to the Van Der Beeks’ Hollywood Hills home. Ms. Van Der Beek ushered its occupant, a woman named Lindsay Heller, up the back stairs of the house, sat across from her on a couch and began a list of concerns and questions.

“She’s very emotionally invested in my kids,” she told Dr. Heller. “I just don’t know if she has passion about Olivia.”

She went on. “She lets Joshua just lie on the floor while she’s drinking her tea. Put some pep in that step. Put the tea down.” She leaned back and sighed. “I just find that if I’m around, I’m the one taking care of the kids. I like to be preventive about things. If Olivia wakes up from her nap at four, I’d like to know that there’s a snack ready. There never is.”

Dr. Heller listened. “I wonder how much she knows about what your approach is and what you like,” she said.

End life on earth.

Man, I wish I had someone to make sure there was a snack ready when I woke up from a nap :(

Someone in NY needs to start an apre nap snack delivery, delivering hand-crafted, organic snacks at pre-determined post-nap times.

that's my dream career, but not in ny

If you want to do some market testing on that business plan, I volunteer.

it'll have to be in the summer but i'll think about it!

That article was so depressing I hadn't the heart to make fun of the people in it. The ridiculous, horrifying people.

lol yeah saw that, was planning to post it

OOH the people are horrifying

OTOH the entire enterprise of strangers raising your kids, which affects both rich and poor, is kind of horrifying.

mostly not a quiddities article but

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/business/time-inc-and-meredith-prepare-to-join-magazine-businesses.html

As bankers and media executives hammer out the details of creating a new publicly traded company to house the magazine titles of the Meredith Corporation and the lifestyle titles of Time Inc., employees at both companies have been wondering how executives will take on the harder task of merging two very different corporate cultures.

Meredith’s headquarters in Des Moines have an open floor plan; the executives have their offices on the first floor and favor early-morning meetings. A recent lunch at one of Meredith’s magazines featured kale salad and rosemary-infused cucumber lemonade. Time executives tend toward lunches at Michael’s, where the dry-aged steak is a highlight, and after-work cocktails at the Lamb’s Club.

And then there are the postrecessionary approaches to travel: Meredith’s chief executive turned its corporate jets into shuttles with open seating, while Time still allows staff members to expense hotel rooms at the Four Seasons.

rosemary-infused cucumber lemonade

this sounds horrifying

an herbage too far

yuk

also w/r/t the Dr Nanny Nanny Dr article that j posted yesterday this exchange:

Dr. Heller listened. “I wonder how much she knows about what your approach is and what you like,” she said.

Ms. Van Der Beek considered this. “I haven’t been very clear in my approach, I guess,” she said. “We’ve had conversations about philosophies, but not really about what I expect her to do.”

AALSDKJFDLFJS;LDJFSJKFSDLF WTF ARE YOU HIRING A NANNY OR A SHAMAN jesus christ shouldn't expectations be the first conversation uggggghhh these PEOPLE

OTOH the entire enterprise of strangers raising your kids, which affects both rich and poor, is kind of horrifying.

― space phwoar (Hurting 2), Monday, February 25, 2013 12:19 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah

we have a nanny fwiw and for us it's not anything about someone else raising our kid, more about two working parents and not wanting to put him in daycare at this age. i feel like the little dude has responded extremely well. it also helps that my wife works from home 80% of the time.

I know I've said this to you before on here but every time you have one of these posts about fairly grown-up/mature situations I flash back to threads like the couch violation and wonder where the fuck the time went.

we have a nanny fwiw and for us it's not anything about someone else raising our kid, more about two working parents and not wanting to put him in daycare at this age. i feel like the little dude has responded extremely well. it also helps that my wife works from home 80% of the time.

― christmas candy bar (al leong), Monday, 25 February 2013 23:11 (10 minutes ago) Permalink

yeah when/if we get to this point we've said that a nanny would prob be better than daycare

also Ned painfull OTM

http://baseballfordinner.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/indiana-jones-and-the-last-crusade-you-chose-poorly-motherfucker.gif

my mother had a nanny when she was a little girl. she also lived in the UK and the British Caribbean during that time, they had a comfortable upper middle-class income, there were uncomfortable & icky class and racial politics going on (e.g., my mother's nanny in the Caribbean was Indian, and there was a lot of tension b/w white Britons, Indians & blacks). so i always wince a little whenever i read about folks getting nannies b/c of all that. i also have no kids, so i haven't had to face the necessity of having to get a nanny.

(my "nanny" was my grandmother -- unlike my mother, i didn't live in the UK when i was a little kid, my father never would've gone for a nanny & at any rate we wouldn't have been able to afford one.)

'Designer fashion is no longer just for gay men and Europeans.'