A tipster writes:

Studio 54, now a theater company, turns 30 this year. New York magazine sent aged historian Philip Nobile to kick around the entrails of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager's 70's hotspot. Have the intervening three decades yielded any insight? Why yes, they have!

This Canadian news clip is old as the hills (circa 1993), but it's so perfectly charming that many still contend it's fake. I tend to think that it perfectly combines reportorial cluelessness with objective tediousness such that it must be real. Worth it for the "Internet enthusiast" who marvels at the "restraint" and that "there's not a lot of cursing or swearing" or "putdowns" or "screenfuls of 'go to hell.'" Marvel at the magic of "emoticons," plus perhaps the first recorded Internet misspelling of the "definitely." Then there's the suspicious British guy who says he loves the Internet since it allows him to indulge his "deep and abiding passion for all things Thai." I doubt he means sticky rice. Clip after the jump.

Madonna just wandered along like everyone else. I recognized her as the girl who went to my gym—as the girl who would sit around naked longest in the locker room. Now that I think back on it, how could either of us have afforded a gym membership? She still had a last name at that point, and when I told her I worked for the Voice, she said, "Oh, that's so funny. They're reviewing my first single this week."

Ah, yes. It was that mystical, halcyon time that archeologists call The Pre-Thursday Styles Era.

The Sun notes something today that's been troubling us lately, too:

God we love pissed off old New Yorkers.

So we're sitting in a Dunkin Donuts on Second Avenue, having just checked the front window of the Second Avenue Deli ourselves, when we see Eater has beaten us to the punch. The above sign, affixed to the beloved and bygone deli is worrisome, sure. But we also agree with our foodie friends' assessment: It's clearly a hoax.

The complete script of a new Partnership for a Drug-Free America ad we saw for the first time during The Simpsons last night:

The rather curious blog A Dress A Day directs our attention to a snippet from a 1960 magazine article by Gay Talese, "Vogueland":

Though we know saying so irrevocably labels us as pretentious, if only upper-middle-brow, snobs, we admit that we rather enjoy City Center Encores — a series of one-weekend-only concert versions of old, relatively unheard American musicals. There's a huge onstage orchestra and always a great cast, and it just feels like a very New York-y kind of evening, at least if your image of very New York-y evenings was shaped by a childhood of New Yorker cartoons. And so we thought it was an excellent sign last night when we walked into the first performance of Kismet and rather quickly noticed among our audiencemates Stephen Sondheim, Kurt Vonnegut, and the once publicly editing Dan Okrent.

Well, yes. So Atoosa Rubenstein might be a touch retrograde and anorexia-inducing in her off-the-cuff fashion pronouncements — "I feel like I want to start starving myself so I can wear those clothes now," she said of a Fashion Week collection — but at least she hasn't revived as a promo for her Seventeen an old Mademoiselle premium MUGger Charlie Suisman pointed us to today: The Manhunt Scarf, copyrighted by the Conde Nast Publications in 1963.

Jack Lebewohl's workmen didn't cart off every last bit of Second Avenue Delitritus last week. One last relic remains: This Deli-logo'd garbage can. Streetwalking photog Bucky Turco sends along the above image and reports that the thing is a hell of a lot harder to remove than you'd think. But if you show up with a crew of stout-hearted men, we're sure you can finagle it.

[Click to enlarge.]

When news broke in the Times last week that the Second Avenue Deli was shuttered, at least temporarily and perhaps more permanently, in a rent dispute, it seemed partially tragic but also partially perhaps just a particularly intense game of real-estate chicken between the hondlers who own the deli and the hondlers who own the building. The latter option seemed increasingly likely when the second-day story revealed that the rent increase sought by the building's new owners was in fact built into the existing lease, negotiated 15 years ago.

We're as excited today as the next Manhattan fag and fag hag that Christine Quinn was just elected City Council speaker, becoming, as the Times dutifully reports, the first openly gay person to hold such a high-ranking position.

We know it's particularly easy to say this when you work from home and can spend all day inside, and when it's early and calm and just starting to get bright, and when there are those big, fluffy flakes. But, still: New York is awfully pretty when it's snowing.

Alas, alack, and so on. We all have this ideal in the back of our minds, some general conception that once upon a time the Voice was something interesting and vital and, well, worth the mild irritation of walking to the box on the corner to pick up. (It is now none of these things.) We know that it allegedly has a hallowed history, that it was once something you had to read to be one of the cool kids, and that at some point in the past people were even willing to pay for it. Today, of course, it's barely even worth not paying for (although it does serve an important purpose when you have a long subway ride to Brooklyn ahead of you and realize you left this week's New Yorker in the apartment). Even despite all that, it seemed sad when the anti-globalization, anti-conglomeration, anti-just-about-everything-that's-a-reality-today Voice — of all places — just the other week was swallowed up by the big chain of so-called "alternative papers." It seemed to be the John-is-killed nail in the coffin that would ensure the glorious past would never be relived.

Who says it can't be both?

With a full head of hair.






[As you may realize, this is not the image we originally had here. For reasons not worth getting into, we've decided to remove the original picture, from Cross's college days. Here's a tip, though: If you don't want things appearing on Gawker, don't send them to us. Crazy concept, we know.]