Sick Transit, Gloria
Get in loser, we're going apartment shopping.
Where can you live? If you move to Omaha Nebraska, have a spare $1.5 million, and you’ve heard of a little musical group named “The Beatles,” you could buy what Alex Yablon called “the most divorced house I’ve ever seen,” a four bedroom, five bath apartment that looks like the place a Hard Rock Café tries to hook up with a Cheesecake Factory. The couch has headlights. The amps are full of beer. The shower runs hot Axe body spray. It’s what you’d get if you fed Mick Jagger, Jay Leno, and Andrew Dice Clay into GPT-3 and then told it to design “the place where the unwanted advances occurred.” It looks the way the phrase “rich Corinthian leather” smells. It also has a ping-pong table.
At the other end of the tastefulness scale is the Brooklyn Heights house from “Moonstruck,” on the market for only $12.5 million. Four stories, five bedrooms, and off-street parking. I have no jokes to make, this place is incredible. It’s the house version of how Matthew Schneier describes the Olson twins’ fashion brand The Row in NYMag today:
It speaks in the hushed tones of perfect propriety, of connoisseurship. It is crafted just so, cut just so. It is not original and doesn’t pretend to originality. It is chic in the excellent, unfaultably appropriate way that reminds you that true chic may be the apotheosis of boring.
I mean look at this:
You can’t live in “Difficult People” creator Julie Klausner’s 750 square foot Manhattan apartment, but you can admire its exuberant decor in Apartment Therapy, which is a style she describes as “quirk with edge” and I’d describe as “grownup Lisa Frank.” There are cakes, her cat’s name in lights, dessert wallpaper, and a kind of thrift-store-dazzle-camouflage bathroom. It’s an apartment that absolutely doesn’t care what you think of it, in a good way.
If you believe in nonsense, you could live in space, at least briefly and at minimum 6 years from now. Orbital Assembly is promoting its “space hotel,” as seen in the respected astrophysical journals The Daily Space Mail and The New York Space Post. So far it appears the company has developed an advanced multi-participant video conferencing technique, which will no doubt be crucial to orbital communications, so I guess they’re well on their way.
If you were on the first season of “The Real World” you could be living in the show’s newly fancied up original 1992 SoHo loft for “The Real World Homecoming: New York,” a reunion show that Willy Blackmore calls “pure, uncut Gen-X nostalgia bait” in Curbed. But no matter where you live, Polygon’s Ryan Gilliam thinks you should have three televisions there.
Sick Transit, Gloria: “Pompeii Archaeologists Have Unearthed the ‘Lamborghini’ of Chariots, Used to Chauffeur the Elite During Ancient Festivals.”
Congrats to Donald McNeil on his new gig:
The new video game in transphobic author J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise will allow you to create transgender(ish) characters. But will it let you shit directly on the floor? Zoe Schiffer in The Verge: “Glitch workers sign tech’s first collective bargaining agreement.” Good for them! More of this, please. In The New York Tabs, ex-Mitt Romney staffer and useless consultant-class parasite Oren Cass advances the idiotic claim that “money itself does little to address many of poverty’s root causes.” Read this if you’re feeling sleepy and need a good shot of cortisol to get through the rest of the day. Northwestern University’s Medill Spiegel Research Center reports that nearly half of digital news subscribers never visit the websites they subscribe to. Uh oh. Not Tabs subscribers though, right? Anyone? Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, a person who is obnoxious even by Boston sports fan standards and was most recently in the news for losing $700,000 in Gamestop, is launching an ETF so he can lose your money instead of his own. Finally, this Joshua Rothman New Yorker story about an Australian engineer’s lifelong effort to develop a viable artificial heart made me realize belatedly that the Family Heart Center ad in Robocop was, in fact, satire.
Today’s Song: I’m so sorry.
~ And the four right tabs can make me cry ~
Did you know you can pay me to link to your stuff in a special section on Wednesdays labeled “Classifieds?” We now have two flavors: light and breezy or extra-fancy! Check them out. We are registered as “lightly viral” @fka_tabs and “brand tweets only” @TodayinTabs. The beach gives a feeling an earthy feeling.