The night before last I experienced the most surreal rest-room experience of my life. It happened in a small, spartan, darkly lighted facility on the top floor of The Standard, the high-style, high-design hotel in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. I need to put this discreetly, but when you “sit down,” so to speak, you’re looking at nothing but pure floor-to-ceiling glass and beyond that the nighttime splendor of Manhattan. I’m talking total exposure, or what certainly feels like being on full display in front of the greatest city in the world.
The glass is presumably tinted on the outside to prevent photography, but it’s hard not think as you’re sitting there that if someone in a nearby tall building had the right kind of telephoto-lens camera with night-vision capability, they could snap a fairly bizarre shot.
All I can say is that it’s an astonishing thing to regard the dazzling lower Manhattan skyline with your pants down. It’s something that needs to be sampled at least once by any visitors to Manhattan with an appreciation for the unusual and the perverse. I intend to re-experience it tomorrow night (i.e., Friday, 12.10) during the after-party for The Fighter following a special screening at the School of Visual Arts theatre.