Hey look, it's yet another nonsensical Skin Deep piece in the Times' Style section that has a Recessionista peg. How many ways can one person write this thing?

This week Natasha Singer turns her analytical mirror compact onto the recession's effect on the plastic surgery business. Yes, yes, while some people worry about their foreclosed homes, others wonder whether they will be able to afford their butt implants. Singer begins with a series of very serious questions: "But now, as the country plunges into recession, will financial hardship demote the pursuit of physical perfection? Will the vogue for a smoothed face in which only the mouth moves, or a mix-and-match body of mature breasts atop boyish hips become outmoded? Will aesthetic values loosen up, allowing the occasional wrinkle to take on a certain measure of authenticity?"

OMG, the Dow crashed and the Botox backlash has arrived! Excuse us while we hurl into our pockets.

The experts tell Singer that cosmetic surgery is "going to become the new S.U.V., something that you can do without," and that people who formerly made cosmetic surgery a necessity will give it up so as not to feel, er, overly extravagant compared to their friends. That's a good kind of peer pressure! Oh, except for this shit:

Against a tide of people eschewing cosmetic medicine in the new economy, she also predicted a counter current of consumers having procedures to feel proactive."People who would not have considered it, when they get laid off at 45, 50, 55 and are back on the job market, might consider it as they try to enhance their human capital," she said.

Please, no. Just use scented résumé paper a la Elle Woods instead -- it will render the same, exorbitant, useless effect on your "human capital" without freezing your face and eating your non-existent 401K.

"Putting Vanity On Hold" [NYT]

Did you know that the Brooklyn Museum has a Twitter? Well, they do. And they want you to follow them: starting January 3rd, the first of their Target First Saturdays events for 2009, the museum will launch a new social networking membership initiative. An even $20 annual fee will get you paperless benefits and notifications via the aforementioned tweets, Facebook, and Flickr, plus exclusive entry to their popular First Saturdays, during which the museum stays open till 11pm with free admission beginning at 5pm.

The best part? Artists from Swoon's studio will kick things off in January, creating prints on found paper provided by the digitally connected 1stfans. Cure your post New Year's blues in the Beaux-Arts building.

"Another Manhattan," by Donald Antrim.

I should probably mention that the link to this story is subscriber-only, which is just as well, because outside of New Yorker subscribers I can't think who'd be that interested in a comedy of manners concerning antidepressants, alcoholism restaurant reservations, Upper West Side flower shops and infidelities among two upper-upper-middle-class, late-middle-age couples.

It's a pretty satiric, well-timed stuff with people juggling each other on cell phones, and actually really good about the particular claustrophobia of New York in the winter: too hot inside and too cold outside; hissing radiators, bitter winds, and a crowd right at the vestibule as you're stepping outside. Still, an aura of who-cares seems to dominate; Antrim is ultimately more interested in using a flower-shop girl as a projecting screen for his protagonist's psychosis than he is in acknowledging the obvious class difference at work. Which is true to his characters, but still.

Drastic times call for drastic measures, which has led to us to this wild and fantastic moment in history. The latest, hottest, biggest, baddest trend in media is here: Don't print it! Blog it, ya'll! OMG WTF is happening? Is this thing on? Where are we?

It appears that New Yorker editor and world's classiest e-mailer David Remnick has answered our call for more esoteric high-low rock star snark stuff, although it won't be appearing in his magazine. It's going online instead! In this week's Observer, John Koblin writes of Remnick's edgy decision to hire a web-guy to "badger writers into coming up with more ideas to write Web-only content." This is hilarious:

On Dec. 16, George Packer wrote a takedown of Sean Penn's cover story for The Nation on Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro. Mr. Packer's post was bloggy in every way—dripping with sarcasm ("veteran foreign correspondent Sean Penn," or, describing Christopher Hitchens as the "world-famous hedge-fund executive and philanthropist"), snarky and a pretty frank and vicious attack. And it even got a link on Romenesko—not exactly a familiar place for New Yorker stories.

Gawker already noted that television critic Nancy Franklin used the text-y expression "4ever" to describe her lurve for David Letterman.

Now, if they could all just blog with the prolific regularity of Rick Hertzberg and SFJ -- especially Talk of the Town writers (Lauren Collins and Lizzie Widdicome are our particular heroines), who we are convinced could change the world if they shared a Tumblr -- we wouldn't feel half as guilty about our lapsed subscription. It's free to read it online, remember?!

"At Magazines, It's 2.0 Steps Forward, 1.0 Step Back" [NYO]

The American Society of Newspaper Editors is interested in changing the name of the organization and broadening its horizons. Member Charlotte Hall has suggested leaving off the "paper" in "newspaper." Politco's Michael Calderone reports this is a reflection of "the decline of print," which is only a piece of the proposal: it would also offer full membership to news websites, including those without a print publication. Plus, it puts forth the -- revolutionary! -- notion that quality news organizations aren't merely defined by the word "daily."

So, death of print or increased validation for web? This might not exactly be the robust future we were all hoping for, though it is a start. A highlighted piece of the memo, after the jump.

We are all way beyond ink on paper, and so the word "paper" would disappear from our name to reflect better what we do today and where we are going. Our new name, pending your approval, would be American Society of News Editors. This change maintains our valued brand, ASNE, and our logo, ASNE Leading America's Newsrooms.

To assure a robust future, we also need to broaden our base of members. Thus, our proposal includes offering full membership to editors of news websites, including those without a print product, as well as leaders in journalism education and journalism foundations. More and more, news organizations are not defined by "daily." Thus, this requirement would be removed from membership requirements.

Exciting and horrifying new book deals!

Publisher's Marketplace reports the pre-empt sale of a new memoir this week, written by 78-year-old poet and writer Margaret Robison. Name doesn't sound familiar? You might know her sons, instead: Robison is the mother of established memoirists Augusten Burroughs (Running With Scissors, Dry, A Wolf at the Door) and John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye). This is her opportunity to "tell her own story her way," according to Publisher's Marketplace. Possible code-speak: I'm beyond irritated that my disrespectful kids wrote mean things about me and became best-selling authors with movie adaptations and lots of fame. Time to get them back! (Running With Scissors portrays Robison as a cold-hearted, brutal sort of abandoning monster-mom.)

Robison's forthcoming book, A Place to Come Home To, will be published by the Spiegel & Grau imprint of Random House. It draws on journals and diary entries to chronicle her life in southern Georgia, an abusive marriage, and raising two sons "whose own memoirs would become publishing phenomena." After recovering from psychosis and a massive stroke, Robison sat down to spin her the tale of her life. Here's a snippet of an All Things Considered profile on Robison, which, if anything, makes it clear that the chapter she devotes to Burroughs in particular -- his birthname was Chris -- is sure to be a doozy. She calls Augsten Burroughs, the person, "fiction."

I don't want to stay at your party, I don't want to talk to your friends, I don't want to vote for your president, I just want to eat the delicious delicious things featured in The City Sweet Tooth, Abby Denson's regular comic-column about yumminess and related subjects. Today, we go to Three Tarts, and eat stuff.

Okay. The Times's homepage recently refreshed itself with a new, scary graph courtesy of Reuters. See our screen-grab above, carefully tucked away into our desktop "Pictures" folder so that, eventually, we can make a digital scrapbook about how screwed we are, for free. No need to spend our life savings on one of these books. But maybe it's all going to be peachy! Because we are once again in a "new era," reports the Times.

The Fed did something slightly more extreme than they were supposed to do in the first place, but hah hah it's a good thing?... um. A number of "unorthodox new tools" were outlined by that bald kook Ben S. Bernanke, who really doesn't have such a fantastic track record anymore. Also, someone who understands this better than we do noted that cutting interest rates in 2003-2004 was how we got into this shitocratic stinkhole in the first place. So, we're fixing this thing by doing more of what broke it! Yessss! Let the dancing in the streets begin!

"Fed Slashes U.S. Interest Rates to Basically Zero" [Wonkette]
"Fed Cuts Benchmark Rate to Near Zero" [NYT]

The call girl-screwing, wife-cheating, financial column-writing shamed politico was spotted at Happy Ending (should we bother with the obvious massage parlor joke?) last night for Slate's seasonal drink party. The Financial Times's John Gapper got the dirt:

I went over afterwards to ask him how he was enjoying life as a columnist. "It sucks," he said with a grin. "I used to be governor of New York".

Hey, now, Spitzy. Once Jacob Weisberg gets wind of how highly you regard your new gig, you might not have it anymore. Jobs in journalism are in kinda, um, in demand these days.

Almost as bad as blogging about how much you hate your media job: telling someone with a well-read blog that you do.

Art Catch is a weekly online column by The L's Patricia Milder

It would be a mistake to interpret the connections between any of Pina Bausch's dreamy, smooth compositions that flow together seamlessly as anything other than perfectly planned. She doesn't so much read your mind as create images on the stage that influence thoughts through color and movement, then precisely responds to those thoughts.

My favorite instance of this happened halfway through the second act of Bamboo Blues, when the black floor reappeared all white. White silky, billowing fabrics that hung from the ceiling highlighted the bright color-coded (by this I mean the woman in the red dress is fierce, the woman in the pale pink dress is soft and moves like butter) dresses on the female dancers. Bausch's gorgeous, strong, and stoically masculine male dancers were, in contract, wearing messily un-tucked black suits or white wrap-around fabrics, with few exceptions.

Just as I was thinking about the extremes of this contrast between the sexes (and as I found out later my color-oriented friend was pondering the blatant exception of the yellow on stage) a man walked out in a bright yellow dress and said with innocent enthusiasm and a heavy accent something along the lines of "yellow, it's bright, it's the color of strength and courage. It's even the color of curry," with characteristic Bauschian humor. The solo that followed, when another male dancer came out in a full, flowing white dress with a pink flower pattern, was not drag by any means. It was a display of purity – of moving body, flowing fabric, and poise; the kind of display that stays with you, competing in your daydreams only with those other unbearably lovely moments of the performance.

Pina Bausch and her troupe, Tanztheater (dance theater) Wuppertal Pina Bausch, traveled to India this year to research the inspiration for Bamboo Blues. Last year's Nefes was inspired by Turkey, where they group also traveled together, but both pieces are more Bausch, more everyday, more relationship and emotion driven than they are studies in location. The colors, smells, food and culture of both places resonate as feelings and dreams rather than literal depictions. The spectacle of Nefes – the pouring rain on stage, the hammam, the color – is not absent in Bamboo Blues, but it is more subdued.

The complaint against Bausch this time around is that she sometimes enters too polished perfume ad territory, which is a fair critique in the sense that gritty isn't a word you'd use to describe her work. But with a simple 2 by 2 diagonal march across stage in heels, wrapping and unwrapping sari-inspired fabrics, her dancers put you in a trance (the Indian/electronic music helps) and manage to hold a space that is both aggressive and amusing, and simply, appealingly on beat. There's nothing vacuous about the romantic and painful tableaux: a smiling couple lay, exquisite, on a flat bed that rolls back and forth over two bamboo poles; a woman in a red dress dunks her head in a bucket of water until an man comes from offstage to pull her out.

Anyone looking for straight narratives or strict interpretations of India will be confused, but what Bausch does is so much better. From Bollywood to traditional dance, references are made, but they are well digested, and they don't need to make sense. That's not the point. In an interview with Dance Teacher, Bausch said, "the co-productions always have something to do with certain countries or cities. In Italy we are busy with the whole culture of Italy or certain people you meet or normal life, or whatever. But otherwise, it's just – life is there and we are there. And that's it. I try to make visible what we all feel."

It's probably clear by now that I'm a fan – if Bausch is selling, I'm buying, thank you very much – but there's a reason this enigmatic choreographer has a cult following like no one else creating work right now. There are a number of ways to get to know her – Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her is one – but Bamboo Blues is running until the 14th and it is an exceptional production. If it's sold out, find a scalper. It's worth it.

Pina Bausch: Bamboo Blues
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave
through December 14

In this report, the second in a series, Jessical Hall, our regular Street Stories NY interviewier, documents her attempts to navigate government and nonprofit bureaucracy in an effort to secure housing for a homeless friend. Last week, she and J went to Common Ground, with uncertain results.

J rang my buzzer one day with an application for food stamps. On the application, he pointed out, was a place for a representative to sign. In light of our challenges getting the letter J wrote to establish me as his representative in his search for housing notarized, J decided to establish precedent by having me as his representative in acquiring food stamps. This seemed a sensible strategic move, and so I agreed. Looking back, I also think that he needed some help in apply for his food stamps. Not from a lack of understanding — he is the one teaching me about these systems — but because after years of interacting with the beauracratic process his tolerance for is almost non-existent.

We arranged to meet on a Thursday morning to go to the food stamp office on West 14th Street. It was a rainy cold morning when J rang my buzzer. I tried to make an argument for the bus, but J wanted to walk across town. He's a dedicated walker, and will often glide ahead of me, disappear into a crowd, then reappear before me, waiting with his hands in his pockets, smiling broadly at my confusion.

The food stamp office is in a large building with a flat and featureless gray front.