Team Party Crash: Papermag.com's Manhattan! Party

Mr. Mickey Boardman: patron saint of all the shit that goes down south of 14th Street.

It's unwritten law that when Paper mag hosts a party, the freaks come out. So naturally, when we heard that the downtown hipster's bible was throwing down to kick off a 30-day art exhibit that celebrates if we may quote the fragile, wounded English major who wrote the press release here "the people who make up the conscience, essence, psyche, nerve, spirit, tradition, chaos, filth and beauty of our beloved city," we had no choice but to send in reinforcements to document the festivities. After the jump, resident paparazzo Nikola Tamindzic and correspondent Jill Singer find out (belatedly, alas) that babies and cocaine don't mix.

[Nikola's entire gallery from the event is available here.]

It's 8 p.m. on a Friday, and as we head downtown with a cabbie who has decided he simply isn't playing Josh Groban's Christmas album loud enough, we start to worry. When we agreed to crash this party, we skimmed the artists' list, saw Ryan McGinley's name and unquestioningly reported for duty. But in our heart of hearts, we admit we have only the faintest knowledge of New York's downtown art scene. We almost dressed up as Edie Sedgwick for Halloween, yes, and we vaguely remember seeing Basquiat, but we don't actually read Paper; we can barely keep up with downtown culture as partially digested and spit out by New York magazine and the Imaginary Socialite. Then again, ignorance has never stopped us from passing judgment in the past.

"No, stop, I'm choking up here. You cry at the end of Grey's Anatomy, too?

"So here's the deal. We tried to go 12-Inch, but Randy borrowed his fake ID from the older brother of the boyfriend of this chick who bartends at 12-Inch, so we were, like, totally busted. So we came here."

Paper, in their ongoing effort to be The Most Downtown Magazine Ever, isn't content to be merely south of Houston, so tonight, the party's in a brightly lit bi-level space somewhere below Canal. (We're sooo psyched for Paper's New Year's Eve bash in the cargo hold of the Staten Island Ferry! See you there!) The theme of this party is Manhattan! (exclamatory punctuation theirs), but from the outset, this party is unlike any Manhattan we've ever known. Seriously, we're not prudes or anything, but this was possibly the most shocking party we've ever attended. At first, we burned with everyday, run-of-the-mill outrage. Example: How is there no coat check? How do you have a party in the dead of November and not have a coat check? And the bar? No Diet Coke for our vodka, no white wine, and the only beer is Amstel.

On the verge of an aneurysm, we take a moment to wonder how Amstel become the "acceptable" light beer. It's gross, and personally, we're partial to Miller. But that's because where we're from, you can get, like, six longnecks in a bucket for 10 dollars. Anyway, where were we? Oh yes. The Outrage! These people are offering us Red Bull! (We don't understand the appeal of Red Bull either. Why not just drink the cough syrup? It's way more badass and probably tastes better.) Oh, and people are smoking! Inside!

We look around desperately for someone to share our pain, and that's when we see the mirror. It's a circular mirror, lazily spinning on a record player, LP-style. The mirror is rimmed with a fat line of cocaine, and it is, naturally, part of an "interactive" art exhibit. We realize that if this is the caliber of work we're dealing with, we have nothing to worry about.

Dude, we know people who work for Bloomberg, and we will enforce the law.

After briefly considering "Eat Shit & Die," the MTA ultimately went with their new slogan: Don't blow the third rail.

Nikola has arrived and is scurrying around trying to find a willing partygoer do a line for the sake of photography. We point to the Logan Huntsberger, who s wearing a tweed blazer and khaki sweater vest with ducks dancing across it. "Ask him to do it!" we whisper gleefully. "We'll take his picture and send it to his yearbook editor at Exeter!"

Everyone is gawking at the cocaine. A small circle has formed, and as a girl gamely approaches the turntable, everyone yells, "Snort it! Snort it! Just sniff it!" We spot a group of our coworkers and make our way over. One of them looks sideways at the coke and suddenly makes the most astute point of the evening: "If this were a real party, that shit would've been gone hours ago."

"This dry campus business is bullshit! I'm bringing a case of Strawberry Hill and no one's gonna stop me."

Ladies and gentlemen: the cast of Fox s perky midseason replacement, Two Guys, a Girl, a Sherpa, and a Chinese Interpreter. Alas, Arrested Development never had a chance.

We finally pry ourselves away and start to make the rounds, which we instantly regret. This is the kind of party where people talk about "underground marketing" and say things like "I worked with Andy Warhol" and you have long conversations with guys who make dumpster couture and sculptures out of garbage. The exhibited art fares no better. There is a black-and-white sketch of a man with a rope dangling out of his ass like a vestigial tail, three photos whose subject looks as if he were mauled by Bjork's Oscar swan, and an exact replica of a sign for "Muzzarella's Pizza." We do have a particular fondness, however, for the color photo of a guy who's keeping forlorn watch over a Jell-O mold.

We did, however, find inspiration: The hairstyles are astounding. We've got men with long stringy hair wrapped in bandanas, dudes with Sacajawea braids, and a bearded guy wearing glasses, a kimono, two neckties, and a spelunking hat, to which he's affixed a streaming white feather boa, as if he'd raped and pillaged Laurel Touby's boudoir earlier this evening. We conclude that this is the most astonishing range of headgear ever assembled.

After the rush-hour screening at Loews 34th Street, Albus Dumbledore stopped by in search of a young wizard to "guide" and "mentor."

In line for the bathroom, our new best friends are a Mexican girl and a guy from Guatemala. "We're immigrants!" they say excitedly. "We're so ESL," the guy adds. "Half of our sisters died on the way here. They got eaten by rats. Now we study art." The girl looks around disdainfully. "There are art shows you go to for the art, and there are art shows you go to for the drinks," she says. "We're here for the Red Bull." They disappear into the bathroom together. Welcome to America, kids.

We're supposed to tell you that this is Kai and Adi, formerly estranged members of the downtown fashion collective AsFour. They are posing together. This is, apparently, exciting news.

So, uh, who else is psyched for Brokeback Mountain?

We thought so.

Steve was, regrettably, without the remainder of Team Zissou.

Roman Milisic, of fashion/art collective House of Diehl, tells us the following story about finding Marquee proprietor Noah Tepperberg's Blackberry in the back of a cab: "I almost crapped myself. There were all these emails from Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan. I thought, should I give it to Gawker? I spoke to Nick Drake [Ed: we sadly think he meant Nick Denton] about it, but in the end I gave it to Page Six." This man is now our sworn enemy.

At 10 pm, our evening comes to a complete standstill. There are two babies in the middle of the party, squaring off in matching strollers. Not one, but two toddlers at a party where we have noted, thus far, liquor, cigarettes, marijuana, and a big steaming platter of cocaine. Who brings a baby to a party? Oh, right. This guy:

"Wait a minute, is it liquor before beer? Or beer before Oh God, these parties make me so flustered!"

Suddenly, Drew Barrymore's whole life is making sense. A woman passes by and throws herself at the children, cooing. She whips out a camera, and the blond baby poses obediently. The dark-haired baby glares, jealous of the photo op. For the record, these are the most stylish tots we've ever seen. The boy wears a blue boucle jacket and red vintage cowboy boots, and sits atop a leopard-print throw. The girl is decked out in a puffy jacket and Uggs. They are tapping their feet together, clearly having some sort of silent baby confab, probably discussing which materials to use in their next installation. The boy drops his bottle. "Party foul!" the girl next to me squeals. Every woman within a 10-foot radius is completely transfixed, even as one of the babies lifts himself out of the stroller and grimaces.

"Oh God," the girl next to me says. "He's shitting right now." Our womb twitches.

At 10:30, the party is thinning out and the cocaine turntable is mostly wasted. "It's gone now!" a girl wails. Indeed, so are we.

Afterparty at the Deitch Projects, yo! See y all there!