Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Hampton we have a problem.
Hamptons homeowners are facing foreclosure at a staggering rate, a new report has found.
The number of property owners on the East End of Long Island missing three mortgage payments skyrocketed 230 percent in the last quarter of 2009, compared with the same period a year before, according to court filings compiled by PropertyShark.com
Overall in 2009, there were 566 such first-time filings -- called lis pendens, or suits pending. That's an 84 percent uptick over the year before.
The priciest of the bunch is 80 Further Lane in East Hampton, a tony beachfront home with an $8.5 million mortgage, said PropertyShark.com CEO Bill Staniford.
The owners of 80 Further Lane, Gia and David Walsh of Bronxville, could not be reached for comment.Lis pendens filings are triggered when the homeowner misses three mortgage payments, but the records do not indicate if the debtors catch up or take other action to rectify their situation.
Ted Bourie, who has overdue payments on a $3.4 million mortgage on his home at 220 Little Noyac Path in Watermill -- the second-largest loan in the records -- declined to comment.
It is often hard to tell whether affluent areas are sharing the difficulties the recession has brought to the nation's poorer quarters, because wealthier homeowners are often savvy enough to find ways to make deals and cut their losses before foreclosure.
They can, for example, arrange for short sales to sell at the best price and have the banks eat the difference.
But the statistics show that even the Hamptons are now feeling the pinch.
Nevertheless, record-breaking home sales have also been seen on Long Island's jet-set playground.
Race-car-driving hedge funder Charles Ray Langford also recently sold his Sag Harbor home for $14 million -- double that area's previous home-sale record.
www.nypost.com
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
word.
My boss texts me that I’m 45 minutes late, my grandfather floods my inbox with chain mail featuring jokes you have to be at least 40 to appreciate, and my mother calls to correct the spelling of my Facebook status. My life is an intricate Web and a mess of wires. This technology that keeps me connected is used by a wide age range, including Generation X, Generation Y and the one to which I personally subscribe and call fondly Generation I.
Generation I is my term for the slightly self-absorbed generation at the forefront of the social media movement. Each member has an arsenal of social media tools, Facebook being the most prevalent. Not surprisingly, a study published in September 2008 by researchers at the University of Georgia found Facebook could be used as a means of gauging narcissism. In the first analysis of its kind, researchers observed that the quantity of friends and wall posts people amassed on their profiles was indicative of how narcissistic they were in daily life.
Facebook provides a rather accurate method of ego estimation because this quantity-over-quality online attitude mimics real-life behavior in which narcissists concern themselves only with how things appear to others. I am by no means condemning every one of Facebook’s 175 million users as raging egomaniacs, but the whole concept really is a transparent spectacle of self-promotion.
Facebook permits any narcissist with Internet access to assemble an army of pseudo friends, employ the help of a thesaurus in writing contemplative wall posts and upload only photos in which the subject’s nose looks almost proportionate. By controlling every aspect of one’s profile, a user can create a compelling identity similar to the one that person implements in reality, but better.
When I created my own Facebook profile, I justified it by saying it was a means of staying informed about the lives of my friends as we chased our dreams and the miles between us multiplied. Then I discovered the “info” section. Later, as I was doing the final spell check on my alphabetical lists of interests, favorite music and must-reads, it was pretty useless denying, even to myself, that Facebook is designed more as an outlet to showcase every detail of one’s life than to stay in touch with friends.
It’s this kind of blatant egocentricity, popular among members of Generation I, that has enabled Facebook to flourish. In preparation for writing this article, I spent an evening appraising my friends’ Facebooks. After a few hours of procrastination barely disguised as research, I concluded egotism isn’t just for the egotist anymore. Mark Leary, a psychologist at Duke University, told ABC News that social media such as Facebook promote narcissistic behavior, even in an unpretentious person. It seems everyone has an inner narcissist who is responsible for the Facebook status.
The status is uncontested as my favorite component of Facebook. Not only does it bestow upon users the far-too-rare opportunity to speak in third person; it allows them to habitually update their friends on the most inane details of their lives. For example, “Rachel Gaynes is writing her editorial,” or “Rachel Gaynes is making a marshmallow sandwich,” or “Rachel Gaynes is hung over and still writing her editorial.”
This isn’t, however, merely the work of the inner narcissist. The Facebook status is the result of a significant shift in thinking within Generation I. The concept of being social has adapted, now requiring that a person be eternally connected and no longer differentiate between personal and public information. Young people have accepted that sharing private information about themselves is simply a part of having friends. The advice your mother provided long ago finally makes sense: Sharing is caring.
Facebook is the embodiment of an online world in which users share secrets as if they were shaking hands. It is a strain of narcissm, but it’s far more evolved than that. We are witnessing the initiation of a modern custom of absolute exposure, a side effect of the information age. I can only imagine the ways in which this candor will continue to grow.
RACHEL GAYNES
Columbia Daily Tribune
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
jonathan zawada
Jonathan Zawada is a Sydney based artist who works as a creative director and designer for music, art and fashion clients, such as Modular Records, The Presets, Tina Kalivas, Coca Cola US and China, Fanta, 18th Amendment, Myspace Fashion, BMW, V, Ksubi, General Pants, Universal Music, Westfield, and Silverchair. These commissions have included website design, illustration, fabric prints, art direction of photo shoots, and book and magazine art direction. Being involved in the Modular business for a number of years, in addition to working on album cover and touring artwork Jonathan has also developed a line of merchandise for the label which is sold in boutiques in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, USA, UK & France. He also conceptualized, edited and art directed the Modular Magazine, M is for Modular.
Jonathan, along with Shane Sakkeus and Annie Wright, is a founding member of Tru$t Fun! He produces the world's first fashion comic named Petit Mal! which has attracted press from Style.com and proposals of collaboration from V Magazine. Tru$t Fun produces limited edition accessories and TF has worked on commissions including, most notably, a viral clip for the Presets and BMW.
In 2005 Jonathan exhibited his first solo show "Semantic Webs' at Monster Children Gallery. The show sold out. His second solo show at Monster Children Gallery was in February 2008 and was entitled 'Boolean Values' which also sold out in Sydney, then traveled to the Lee Gallery in Melbourne.
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