from Galleycat.com
Last night, ETP swung by the 92nd Street Y, one of the more established epicenters of Jewish cultural life in Manhattan, to hear the New Yorker's Patricia Marx and Adam Gopnik talk about what they love and hate about New York--and riff off the fact that they happen to live in the same apartment building. The 92Y has been around for a long time and so, it seemed, had been much of last night's audience. It was therefore notable that the 92Y made an effort to invite a bunch of bloggers and other new media types to cover the event, even going so far as to reserve the first couple of rows of the lecture hall for the kinds of folk more accustomed to shooting spitballs from the peanut gallery. For the schmooze and booze reception before the talk, Andrew Krucoff, who runs the 92Y Blog, helped draw in the likes of Radar's Jeff Bercovici, Cookie blogmaster Peter Feld, New Yorker-phile Emily Gordon, Jason Kottke, Galleycat's Ron Hogan, Eater's Ben Leventhal, Gothamist's Youngna Park, Felix Salmon, am New York's Julia Allison, Kvetcher David Kelsey, Esther Kustanowitz of Jewlicious, Lilit Marcus of Jewschool, Eli Valley, Rebecca Wiener, Jessie Bodzin and Sarah Maxwell of Heeb Mag, jewcy's Izzy Grinspan and Amy Odell, Steven I. Weiss aka the Canonist, and a guy who ETP can't help but think was Timothy "Speed" Levitch with a haircut.
During the talk, Marx (whom Gopnik calls "Patty") and Gopnik (whom Marx calls "the human Google") swapped amusing stories, such as the time Marx crashed to her building's basement in an elevator and water started pouring in (she was fine, but there were cockroaches in there), the equally gross ginormous sewer rats in the basement of Gopnik's old Soho loft (back when young writers could afford to live there), and Charlie Ravioli, the imaginary friend of Gopnik's daughter, Olivia, who was always too busy to play with her ("I keep getting his machine!"). In addition to providing pithy observations about life in New York, they also served as a pat illustration of same:
Gopnik: I got married within about 72 hours of arriving in New York...but you've been single here for most of the time, right?
Marx (who lives happily with her boyfriend), also read from her new book Him Her Him Again The End of Him which draws on her experience as a writer for SNL (and, presumably, being single since that's a big theme of the book) (perhaps she was waiting for Charlie Ravioli to call). Then the talk wound up and the bloggers scattered into the night, or around the corner for drinks, because that's what bloggers do.
Above, host Andrew Krucoff tries to touch Gopnik, lightly, oh please just once.
Update: Emily Gordon's take at Emdashes.
