PX This.

So! This is What Happened to Mason Reese

believe it or not, every once in a while some anonymous commentator on the interwebs actually says something nice about me. "Old Man" was one of those people.
after a few messages lobbed back and forth here and there between us in cyberspace, i discovered "Old Man" actually has a real name, it’s: mason-reese.

anyways, to make an interminable story long, i accidentally doublebooked my lunch(es) yesterday— one at 1PM and the other at 3:30PM. i scheduled the 1:00 at CentroVinoteca with my friend, tracey. the 3:30 was at BarPitti, to meet mason-reese in real live flesh and blood person for the very first time.
since tracey and i were having so much fun at our 1:00, i didn’t want it to end so abruptly so i asked her to join me for a stroll to BarPitti. and so she assented.

we get to BarPitti a few minutes early, so we decide to have a seat on the benches out front. suddenly tracey blurts out "hey, that guy looks just like mason reese!" i look over to where she’s pointing and i respond: "no, that’s richie-akiva."
she answers: "well, he looks like mason reese."
i say: "wait, what did you say? the guy i’m meeting is named mason reese!"
and the dude to whom richie-akiva is speaking immediately turns his head. lo and behold, it is indeed the person i recognize from my facebook friendships, mason-reese.
tracey asks: "you’re here to meet mason reese?! why didn’t you say so?!"

ha ha ha ha hahahahahahaa. the whole scenario was pretty bizarro. at the time. i guess you had to be there.

so dig this
it turns out mason-reese is this hugely famous actor from like the 70′s! i only know this cuz the way tracey was babbling away about her favorite childhood teevee shows and commercials and whatnot, you could have sworn it was like fucking lee-majors or some shit sitting across the table from her.

oh and it was so much fun, mason-reese had great stories!
like there was the one about how brett-ratner made a short film about mason-reese for his NYU graduation project called "Whatever Happened to Mason Reese?"
evidently this movie won some awards or whatever and even scored funding from steven-spielberg for brett-ratner’s film short. wow what a small planetoid.
then tracey had a notsogreat story about brett-ratner being a big creepie and sticking his hand down her shirt back when she used to work at Nell’s. oh but hahahaaa tracey got to bitchslap brett-ratner in the face, so there is that.

and there were other random fun tidbits too, like how mark-baker used to wear pink spandex leggings to busboy at ummm CafeParadiso (was it? i forget now) or someplace.
and how mason-reese used to own the famous NowBar (where apparently richie-akiva was once a promoter).

i felt really badly cuz i couldn’t remember any of the commercials tracey was talking about even though i totally should have, being such a teevee junkie myself back when i was just a wee tot.
so today i googled all the mason-reese commercials, and holy crap. i soooo recall that RaisinBran one, i musta seen that thing like a bazillion times.

anyhoo
mason-reese owns Paladar restaurant on ludlow street and Destination Bar and Grille (where all the bloggers go and get drunk in the middle of the day) on Ave A.

and so
to answer that decades old burning question—

that’s what happened to mason-reese, bitches.

• Urban Daddy does all you losers a favor by letting you know how you can finally get into theJane. Then the comments section of Down by the Hipster reminds you all again why it is exactly you are such a fucking bunch of losers. -Vanilla Ice

• Speaking of reminders, Joshua David Stein grabs another opportunity to exhibit how he is such a knowledgable and insidery genius, and that Abbe Diaz is just a "batshit crazy, angry, petty" person— by graciously informing you pretty much the exact same shit Abbe Diaz already told you. -Vanilla Ice

• Jennifer Aniston reports on Conan O’Brien that she wants to possibly maybe open a Mexican restaurant— because "usually a great night is had in a Mexican restaurant, no?" And also: "New York City needs a great [Mexican restaurant]."
OH SNAP! Ya hear that, La Esquina? All that hospitality you’ve been showing Jennifer (we’ve spotted her there with our very own eyes on two separate occasions, both times with John Mayer. And we hear she’s "there all the time") is only going to end up with her biting yer stilo and stealing your patrons, à la Graydon Carter and Ron Perelman.
So much for gratitude! -Vanilla Ice

• SPOTTED: Last week at BarPitti, all dining on the same evening— Tony Shafrazi (business), Carmen Kass (pleasure), and Mena Suvari (business/pleasure ?). Look out for the paparazzi pics of Mena Suvari somewhere (she was properly attired and bespackled for them) since the photogs were plentiful and relentless. (Carmen Kass they completely missed, however.)

• SPOTTED: Nightlife impresario Richie Akiva celebrating his birthday over Saturday (September 19th) brunch at Cercle Rouge— with three super-tall babes and one beefy bruiser in tow. And his little dog too.
Nobody sang for him (aww, booo!). And kudos to him for being the only at the table not too hungover and/or stoned to have to hide behind big bugeyed beblackened spectacles.
As they were departing after their meal, one model reprimanded Richie Akiva like his mom, "The waiter just said ‘Happy Birthday’ to you!" And Akiva retorted, "I said, ‘thank you’!"
Yes, he certainly did, and quite sweetly, too. So there.

A Financier, an Operator, and a Blogger walk into a bar…

… order some drinks, get a little tipsy, and start — what else?—- gossiping like a bunch of sewing bee bitches. Here’s the transcript of the part of their discussion about Abe&Arthur/Simyone.

Blogger: Oh! ….And Abe&Arthur will be opening soon I guess.

Operator: Is that that new little place on Waverly?

B: No, that’s Joseph Leonard. Abe&Arthur is the place that used to be Lotus… the restaurant part is Abe&Arthur apparently, and then downstairs will be a club slash lounge type thing called Simyone… ya know, like Bijoux with the party brunch and whatever the upstairs was called.

O: Yah exactly, we don’t even remember the name… Who the hell wants to eat in a nightclub? That didn’t even work for Lotus and the food wasn’t even that bad.

B: People used to eat at Spy.

O: Get outta here, Spy had food? I don’t remember any food.

B: Sure… lobster club, fruit and cheese plate, caviar…

O: Ugh christ.

Financier: People might eat in the restaurant just to go to the nightclub afterward… that’s convenient.

O: Pssh, not if it’s like Lotus. Lotus didn’t guarantee entry to the club afterward just because you had a dinner reservation. That would be a good way for them to go though, because otherwise why would anyone eat there? Too many other good restaurants in that area, so why settle for one place for hours on end? That’s what people like about the meatpacking district… all the bar-hopping…

B: But doesn’t that kill the "exclusivity" thing? Otherwise it’s what— BuddhaBar with dancing?

O: Oh c’mon, in a place that size, how are they ever going to make any money trying to be "exclusive"? They can get the Tenjune crowd, but then what, kill Tenjune? There’s no way they can keep a "hot" crowd in both. But maybe that’s the plan anyway. Now that they milked Tenjune for what it was worth…

B: They can offer it up to the B&T gods? That makes sense.

O: The moneymaker. Does Tenjune charge a cover? They can probably start…. and from what I heard that’s what they probably should do if they going to try to keep the new one exclusive. I heard those guys are in deep with their own personal cash. And they might be cash poor. I know someone who was interviewing for a position… they just lowballed him all day long… it’s like The Inn [at Little West 12th] all over again… We all know how that turned out….

B: I did hear something like that. The way it was told to me is that supposedly they invested a lot of their own money right before the market crash… like "putting a deposit on a pre-construction condo… now that the banks aren’t lending, people either have to come up with the rest of the money some other way, or walk away and take the loss of the deposit… supposedly, this is the boat that those guys are in— they just can’t walk away from the cash already in, so they have no choice but to forge ahead."

F: Banks were never lending to nightclubs, anyway. I’ve never seen a good business plan from one, and that’s all I do all day is look at these things. All that money was coming from guys that may have been in banking but were fronting their own money… I even thought of doing it once…

B: I remember. But you wanted to own the property… I could be wrong, but most of these places are leased, aren’t they?

O: They’re all leased.

F: I know guys that have put their money in clubs. No one ever saw a dime back, but that wasn’t the point anyway.

B: Haa, oh god, I always thought that was a myth.

F: If these guys are dropping a couple grand a weekend anyway, what do you think 50 G’s means to them? It’s all the hype of "ownership" and drinks and the girls…

O: Yeah, you get 10 or 20 of those suckers… no offense…

B: Yeah, but then what about all the celebrities? It’s not like they have problems with drinks and girls…

F: Those are just names. Like, their name is worth money…

B: The place looks nice though… there were renderings all over the internet…

O: Ugh, why do people release their renderings? The actual place never matches the renderings. The renderings are sales pitches by the architects, and the budgets never meet the demands… Then they just look like they’re fronting…

B: Maybe they’re fronting then. Isn’t that the point? If they want to build hype and anticipation…?

B: Oh, what’s the deal with Remm and Tepperberg anyway? I heard they straight up kicked him out of Tao in Vegas halfway through his meal….

O: Remm was never one for making friends…

B: If he didn’t think you’re worth it to him…?

O: … But he shouldn’t be trying to make enemies either…

B: No, he’s got the right idea. I thought I heard he was going around saying he needed a starlet girlfriend, to make himself "next level." Oh! Wait, he did date Shannen Doherty, right?

O: He wants to be Richie Akiva more than anyone else in the world… but the food even sucked at Butter.

B: They do kind of look alike, don’t you think?

O: Shannen Doherty is no Carmen Kass…

B: You know I saw Eugene Remm dive under a banquette to rescue his [former] boss’s lipstick once. There were all these other bartenders and managers around, but Eugene Remm was the only chivalrous one….

O: He was the only one who could fit under the banquette without stooping over?

B: Aww… that’s mean…

F: No good deed goes unpunished…