I have been thinking of names for my unborn child since I was five years old. My tastes have evolved since then, so it’s no longer Olive or Pickle: I have become more of a fan of names that won’t get my child beat up after school, because if that sort of thing is hereditary, the kid already has the deck stacked against him. For years I daydreamed about having a brooding, big-nosed, green eyed kid with my ex-boyfriend, the guy I dated for sixteen years, but I lost many hard-fought battles over the subject, and ended up in Planned Parenthood more than once. They should have a frequent customer card there, some sort of points/reward system for girls with no backbone. The last time I was in Planned Parenthood I went with the East Coast Sarah, and she was pregnant too: we had co-abortions, which were kind of like a couples massage but without the soothing feeling, soft music and pleasing aroma. I hadn’t planned on having that abortion, in fact I had told my family and my Boss that I was having a kid, with my boyfriend of 8 years, and that we were very happy about it. But in truth my boyfriend wasn’t ready for a child and in the end I couldn’t saddle him with any more problems than I already had. Dating me was hard enough. They screwed it up though, the nice folks at Planned Parenthood, and I had flown home to Ohio for a Black Tie Dinner in honor of my Dad, and was sitting at a fancy table with most of my brothers and sisters, all dressed up, when I realized something was wrong. The whole thing was a nightmare, and today as I sit at my desk staring at the pregnancy test I just bought at the pharmacy, I am hoping I never have to go through anything like that again.

There should be a group you can join on Facebook that counsels you about how to break the news to a guy you have only been dating a few months, someone who has adamantly declared he doesn’t want to be in a relationship, that you might be pregnant. The group could give you helpful hints, like how to open the conversation, and how to protect the breakable items in your apartment from being thrown against a wall. Mostly I would like to know how to keep him around afterwards, because I am about to lose my job and I hate change, so I don’t think I could take losing my non-boyfriend too.

NEW YORK CITY is always in a perpetual season of change.  Always in constant flux and motion, all tightly tied and twisted like umbilical cords.  You move over the various downtown kids, the genres, trends, fashion pieces, bikes, accessories, drugs, you name it, still you have Paul Sev and co. S-T-I-L-L kicking around. Ah, the power of kicking around.

TIME has been generous to the cool. Especially when fancy upstate, college names and geography (a la states like Connecticut) are involved and yeah, keeping it in the family.  The Sevs are like Waspsy Corleones and show no signs of going away. 

Now…New York isn’t being so generous especially considering Paul Sev’s is the new posterchild of downtown chic with his closed Beatrice (RIP RIP, if it was a pet you might want to stuff it) and now the Jagger fly-by spot, Kemare.  And the annoyingly black and white, travel picture site with soft porn and snaps of artistic children dot the screen over at Purple Diary doesn’t help sever the Sev.

In George Gurley’s fantastic New York Observer piece (2000), Chloe Sevigny’s Big Brother Paul Quits Commodities, Spins Platters its clear this dude is going to (one day!) be a nasty trainwreck to the scene.  Yes, the profile is a decade old but tells the same story.  It reeks of privilege, little to no talent and name drops about everyone including Moby.  Yeah, dawg.

Embedded in the piece: What’s a guy to do?“I never really wanted to be a D.J.,” Mr. Sevigny said. “Eight months ago, I would never have thought it. It was really weird. I’m still adjusting to it. Imagine if you were a D.J. in two months-you’re as far away from it right now as I was.”He pushed away his half-eaten cheeseburger. “It’s the funniest thing,” he said. “I’m sitting here doing an interview. You know, six months ago I was behind a desk. A real, regular life. It’s a New York story, that’s for sure. Would not happen anywhere else. It’s so much tied into the whole Hollywood thing. Besides my sister, there was the whole Dana thing. You could think of it as a negative thing. Everything all at once produced more. My sister gets nominated for an Oscar, Dana gets busted and then all of a sudden I’m a D.J. It makes it all the more interesting.”

Look you should just read the article, but Moby grew up with the Sev sibs in Darien.  Back to the article: “I love the way paul sevigny dj’s,” Moby said via e-mail. “It’s funny cos i’ve known paul and chloe since forever. i remember little chloe as a 12 year old ingenue.”

Mr. Sevigny said that Moby’s approval meant something to him. “That was exciting for me because here’s a guy with a No. 1 album,” he said. “It was one of the first things that legitimized me to myself. Because all the time people come up and tell you you suck.”

Um, well, I didn’t say it.

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Related KITTY BAWLER Articles: Smoking in the Boys Room, The New Max’s Kansas City…I Think NOT, Fallen Rockstars Wear Lacoste, Drum Roll, The Hipster of the Decade!, Vice Throws Itself a Lifeline to ‘05, More Vice Parties.) And, catch up on Kitty Bawler’s other anti-everything related pieces: SSUR vs Purple Diary. Brooklyn Hipsters vs. Purple Diary, Double L’s vs PD, and INTRO 101  The Purple Diary.

(1st/2nd/final: Ruins in Rome postcard, Santa Fe church with birds on steeple, Rory P. Donnelly (brother) in front of Peter Beard photograph @ Arlene Lapides Gallery -Canyon Road, Santa Fe. Father Isaac Jogues Prayer Card B: Orleans, France January 1607 Martyred: October 1646, Cannonized: June 1930.  Jenny Donnelly Yarrow (at the time a vegetarian) in front of animal : “We Are Who We Eat,” Rory P Donnelly in front of hoola hoop Pedestrian Crossing sign and Santa Fe landscape)

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Kate Donnelly’s journals + pictures of old collages, receipts, fashion tear sheets, annoyances, inspirations, and collage style books circa 1998-2006.

(John Malkovich face mask worn during New York premiere party of Being John Malkovich, Harvard Club New York City, 1999).

In the spirit of Alice In Wonderland (which I will not be seeing), I recommend the book, One Pill Makes You Smaller by Lisa Dierbeck.

This is from a review I wrote circa 2003: When mystery pills were still a mystery and the drugs were cool.  You know, people popped Quaaludes and weren’t zapped out on generic antidepressants.  ONE PILL smacks of originality— a tale of Alice & Wonderland gone freaky in New York.  It’s probably hard to capture the seventies drug culture without having been constantly played on little yellow dolls, Peruvian flake and sheets of acid.  Guess what? The author convinces and so does the story. Physically mature Alice (a mere 11 years old) escapes her Aunt’s perved-out boyfriend Rabbit and spends time at a deserted summer camp with a touchy-feely blow dealer and two twin girls (remember the Shining?).  Things get pretty freaky.  The characters glide on autopilot in these pages of counterculture peppered with Houses of Holy albums, shimmering rock stars, mental institutions, and the high-high platform shoes.  The book’s cover has this waxy, leathery NICO or David Bowie thing going on; a she-man wearing those rimless aviators that might conjure up a Warhol image.  Maybe.  Who knows?  This is what I do know: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find books this cool.  Makes you wish you could come up with this shit on your own.  Hey, should you want some supplemental material, go rent Jan Svankmajer’s Alice.  Sleep with your light on; little girls in pink gowns are scary.

Wow, a banner review from the New York Times Roberta Smith on Craig Norton’s New York show.  (I Loved New York mentioned his show at Jim Kempner’s gallery here.). Self taught too; so cool.

(1:  B Sushi Bar Chicago, Cafe El Portal New York City, A List 2006 STL, an envelope from ABB, Deadly Squire tag, Bohemia Beer, Body Worlds 3, Original invitation to the Spring Street Block Party, Foam Free in 03′ brainchild of Mike Poindexter, Tara Om Card)

I Loved New York related piece: Trucker Hats.

The Odeon is the ultimate homage to the downtown old school.  If you’ve lived in Manhattan over five years; you have been to this establishment many times over.  The take-out is always perfect on say a Sunday night, ditto the brunch, and well just about anytime you can walk though the evening doors and sip a dirty martini and hit the Angus Hanger steak or New York Strip barsteak, well, that is a perfect New York night.

Last night, I read the New York Magazine’s revealing albeit entertaining profile. ”The Odeon introduced McNally’s vintage, salvage-based design sensibility and the then-novel combination of good food in a casual atmosphere. From the moment it opened, in 1980, the Odeon became the downtown nexus of post–Studio 54 early-eighties glamour. Janice Dickinson, the model, recalled a night when she strapped on a saddle and John Belushi rode her around the restaurant. It was at the Odeon that Jay McInerney would despoil his nose with Bolivian Marching Powder en route to writing Bright Lights, Big City.”

When I was in Junior High School in Massachusetts, I had a fight scheduled with another girl almost every day after school.  Girls would constantly ask me to fight them, I guess it was because I was really small but I had a big mouth.  I only won one of these fights, and that was because I hit a girl in the mouth who had braces and she started bleeding and stopped fighting me.  All of the Tough Girls at that school hated me, mostly because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut during class; they slashed the tires on my Mom’s car when she came to see me play the drums in a band concert and I couldn’t walk to the local library after school without fearing for my life.  I used to hide on the path between the school and the library until all the Tough Girls left for the day, and I remember distinctly one day a tall girl who was about 16 and still in the eighth grade chasing me down the street while wheeling a baby carriage, cursing at me with a lit cigarette in her hand.  It was a rough town, a small factory town, and not the actual town my family lived in, as I lived in a town too small to have a Junior High School.  We moved away after my eighth grade year and I came back once to visit my best friend and go to the Annual Town Fair.  Even though years had passed, I got followed around that day by some Tough Girl still angry at me for wise cracking at her during Science Class. 
 
I am an adult now, and no longer get into fist fights with girls, but much of the conflict in my life still stems from my Big Mouth, and Hollywood is a lot like Junior High School.  Every day lately, at some point, I start to get the same queasy feeling I got when I was younger and the end of the school day approached: the feeling that sometime later that day, I was going to get the crap beat out of me.  Only one spunky Iranian girl at work has the guts to talk to me, everyone else has been instructed not to speak to me because my Big Boss is afraid I will sue the company for firing me for having Multiple Sclerosis.  I had no intention of suing when this first happened, I was happy to learn I still had a job, but the New Producing Partner is now on a mission to make my life so miserable I will quit, and once again I am being called out to the playground to fight someone twice my size. 

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D-Girl Diary tomorrow!

(d girls image artist Tashina Suzuki)

(Kate Donnelly + Jen Bekman at John Glassie : Bicycles Locked to Poles may 10 – june 11, 2005 show. Location: 6 Spring Street.  Koa Pen/a JS Woods product; a gift from Jimbo.  New York Times Magazine tear sheet of all things aNYthing and trends.

The Unknown Hipster is great site, if not for its chic colorful sketches, but it’s smart storytelling ability.  Off the heels of fashion week, you can see the author is responsive.  His palate and stories on fashion and art read breezy and fun.  I’m quite fond of the Indochine sketch of Carine, André, and Anna tells its own story. I also love the red Louboutin heels at the art show. ATtention to detail…always.

About the author: Jean-Philippe Delhomme.

Born French, Unknown Hipster early moved to New York to become a painter, a poet, or whichever position was available on the Art scene. Once a lead tambourin for « Uneven dusk », it’s unclear what became his main occupation after the band quickly broke-up. All can be said is that Unknown frequently appears at Fashionable and Cultural events without being necessarily on the list.

Regarding the classic speakeasy, Chumley’s it’s still reported via Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York construction is a long, long ways away.

Earlier I Loved New York  pieces on the perennial fave: The Hits…Yes, they Keep on Coming and the overly optimistic post, Showing Signs of Life.

(image: Greenwich Village Daily Photo)