A $365 Foam Roller? It Exists

Well, we gotta give it to the New York Times style section writers: they take Ecclesiastes 1:14 literally and strive after flatulence  the wind. This week it's a handmade, $365 foam rolling pin with bubbles called the "RolPal." Strap yourselves in with some luxury bondage apparel, dear readers, it will be literally a bumpy ride.

As Donald Fowler, buyer at a Dallas home goods emporium where you can purchase a $5,400 cabinet with painted with the figure of a masked Elizabethan woman that "whispers 'regality,'" explained, you don't want to bring home a "cheap, utilitarian prop[] like the foam roller -- the often grimy-looking logs used to massage tight muscles and connective tissue." In Monsieur Fowler's words:

“Those big black wormy things,” Mr. Fowler said with obvious distaste, “are not something you’d want lying around your living room.”

Thankfully, the RolPal has come to fill, with its "well-designed, upbeat, almost 1960s mod" appearance, that gaping luxury fitness hole in your life, however you want to think of that hole. We chose not to and let rich person protégé and Times amanuensis Courtney Rubin do it for us:

Amazon offers more than 1,000 kinds of foam rollers for self-massage in various colors and densities, from swimming-pool-noodle gentle to digging-in-an-elbow painful. Most cost less than $30. But exclusive gyms, hotels and 1-percenters are snapping up the RolPal, which can be made just six at a time over two to three days in Sunset Park. The pop star Shakira has one with her name laser-etched into it. At E, Equinox’s $26,000-per-year club at Columbus Circle, which is entered by a retina scan, there are seven on the floor for its 50 members.  

Clearly it's a bigger hole in some parts than others, particularly if you use a retina scanner to enter your gym. Does it scan for brains? Is the criterion to enter whether or not you've lost all sense of reality? That seems to be about the measure of who would own a RolPol, to judge by Anna Kaiser, fitness impresario and star of the lobotomy-aid DVD "Happy Hour":

 This week, Anna Kaiser, whose $475-per-month dance-cardio classes have cheeky names like “Sweat Dream” and “4Play,” will begin using the rollers in a class in her new NoMad studio called “Sexy Mofo Fascia Release.” (The fascia are the connective tissues that surround and separate muscles.) Ms. Kaiser said she thinks the showy props will hook clients. “It’s like: ‘Wow, this looks so cool. What is this?’ ” she said. “It pulls you in.”

And not only fitness entertainers and celebrities have adopted the RolPol as their latest psychological consolation in life. "Former" executives in the tech word have embraced it as well in increasingly feverish tones:

Dae Mellencamp, a former president of Vimeo, said she tried all manner of foam roller, from the softer blues and greens to the harder, denser black, on up to one with a metal bar, hoping for relief. Then she found RolPal. 

“There’s just nothing like it, and nothing goes as deep,” said Ms. Mellencamp, who is training for a mud run. “It’s like an addiction.”

Whatever the stresses the RolPal's early adopters operate under, it takes a true savant of the pain of the rich to imagine a $365 piece of foam over a rolling pin. Ms. Martin masterfully zeroes into the inner concentric rings of insanity emanating from Park Slope and the demented but perhaps brilliant mind of one Dièry Prudent:

Visit RolPal’s president, Dièry Prudent, and it’s easy to understand the roller’s genesis. Mr. Prudent, a personal trainer who lives in a featured-in-interiors-magazines 1870s brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is the sort of exacting guy who bristles if you refer to the roller as a tool. “Tools are for carpenters,” he said. “This is an instrument.”

When a reporter arrived for a demonstration breathless, late and sweaty, Mr. Prudent, 53, handed over a glass of water and gestured toward a platter of Paleo-diet-friendly snacks: strips of bresaola, the meat as intricately folded as origami, so uniformly spaced it looked as if a ruler had been involved. “Relax,” he said. “This is supposed to be an experience.”

 If you were wondering if there were a semantic basis for Mr. Prudent's distinction between a tool and an instrument, you might look here as we did. If you want to get a good look at a tool, Park Slope might not be a bad place to start. We digress. As is said, behind every person with an extravagant and bizarre contraption...we forget the saying. But Mr. Prudent knows a thing or two about high-strung personalities from his wife:

His wife, Mariza Scotch, an accessories designer and the chief creative director at Skagen, a Danish lifestyle brand, was unimpressed. Ms. Scotch can’t stand “visual dissonance,” he said, so he worried he’d have to rescue it from the trash or the recycling bin, like some of his other projects.

Little wonder, their kitchen was featured in New York magazine and described as "indestructible."  The family's kitchen lacks a conventional refrigerator because as Ms. Scotch reasonably put it, "I don’t want to hear the zooming and groaning of a motor.” The rows inside this house sound like they would put George and Marta from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to shame. But you gotta give ti to Ms. Scotch, she knows a good thing when she sees it:

He decided to sell the RolPal for $189, but business was slow. His wife, steeped as she was in luxury branding, knew the reason. “Your price point is too low,” she told him. 

“No one is going to take you seriously unless you charge more money.”
And so the price nearly doubled, to $365 — “a dollar a day for a year,” Mr. Prudent likes to say, though the RolPal should not need to be replaced in a year, he noted. If it does, fans are likely to pay up for another.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, we are instituting a $365 a year subscription to the Weekly Hate Read. Maybe then you will start taking it seriously.

The pain of the rich can't be soothed cheaply, can it?

Wealth therapy tackles woes of the rich: 'It’s really isolating to have lots of money'

The Weekly Hate Read has been on a short hiatus enjoying analog life and its various travails. Sorry, even haters have to do the dishes sometimes. But we've been lured back from a mini-sabbatical (the latest craze in corporate academia, didn't you hear?) by a especially choice tip from comrades over at Kitchen Flânerie (making that circumflex accent took the wind out of us). This week its The Guardian that delves deeply into the inner lives of the 1% by speaking to a therapist with the professional scruples of a Wall Street banker.

Enter Clay Cockrell (née Cockroach?) banker-turned-therapist. He walks and talks through Central Park or Battery Park "as a confidant and counsellor to some of the [sic] New York's wealthiest." Why walk in Central Park? Well, we suspect that the rich like to survey their real estate around the park and institutions that bear their names. But take it from "Jim," who wrote a testimonial for Mr. Cockrell's website: 

I was in therapy when I was in grad school. I hated it. The small office, the bad art, the fake plants – the therapist sitting there and saying: "uh hm, tell me more". What was the point? So when I needed to address some things in my life, I was determined not to repeat my mistakes and went looking for the best and most unusual therapy practice in New York. I found it. So THIS is what people talk about when they say how much they love therapy and won't miss it for anything. Thank you!

Mr. Cockrell's website is a veritable Wunnderkammer of the rich's neuroses, self-regard, and bad faith. But back to the horse's mouth in The Guardian: 

“I shifted toward it naturally,” he said of his becoming an expert in wealth therapy. “We are trained to have empathy, no judgment and so many of the uber wealthy – the 1% of the 1% – they feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are. A lot of therapists do not give enough weight to their issues.”

Yes, he might be revealing his client's problems and exposing them in a major online newspaper, but isn't that just the fault of other mental health professionals, who simply don't understand? It can be hard to hear that you're not paying your fair share of taxes or that your company's buying up formerly affordable housing. Take it from another psychologist to the Gulfstream set:

“The Occupy Wall Street movement was a good one and had some important things to say about income inequality, but it singled out the 1% and painted them globally as something negative. It’s an -ism,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist and founder of the Wealth Legacy Group. “I am not necessarily comparing it to what people of color have to go through, but ... it really is making value judgment about a particular group of people as a whole.”

[...]

“You can come up with lot of words and sayings about inheritors, not one of them is positive: spoiled brat, born with a silver spoon in their mouth, trust fund babies, all these things,” she said, adding that it’s “easy to scapegoat the rich”.

Occupy Wall Street was a "-ism"? What "-ism" was it? Socialism? Communism? No, apparently OWS unleashed a wave of prejudice against the wealthy akin to racism. We could go on about that unhappy comparison, but we will say that Dr. Traeger-Muney need not worry about too many "ultra-wealthy" individuals of color in her practice as only four people of color, or less than one 1% (how's that for elite status?), figure among the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Thankfully, Dr. Traeger-Muney did her part for the cause by getting her PhD at a for-profit institution and hiring no therapists of color in her practice.

But what particularly creates mental unease among the rich out are protests from those teeming with prejudice. In October 2014, workers protested outside of "Walmart heiress Alice Walton's $26m, 6,346 sq ft New York condo." Though the 26 arrests in the protest far outnumbered the arrests for police officers accused of shooting unarmed Black men, "[t]hese types of protests can be very stressful for the rich."

The rise in wealth in the last three decades has also meant the wealthy feel like they have fewer friends. Here's Mr. Cockrell:

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the income gap has expanded and the situation “has gotten worse for the wealthy”, Cockrell said. The main reason? Not knowing if your friends are friends with you or your money. 

“Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don’t want anything from you! Never being able to trust your friendships with people of different means, I think that is difficult,” said Cockrell. “As the gap has widened, they [the rich] have become more and more isolated.”

Honestly, who would want a midlevel executive Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, or Enron hanging around in the guesthouse? Do you even like me or is it just my exquisite crudités? The wealthy have chosen instead, sometimes, to keep their wealth in the closet. Here's "Dr." Traeger-Muney:

“People say: ‘Oh, poor you.’ There is not a lot of sympathy there,” she said. “[Wealth] is still one of our last taboos. Often, I use an analogy with my clients that coming out to people about their wealth is similar to coming out of the closet as gay. There’s a feeling of being exposed and dealing with judgment.”

We were  unable to find data on how the wealthy experience rejection from family and friends, harassment from coworkers (or employees?) and colleagues, violence from strangers and acquaintances, and discrimination in employment and housing at record numbers. But we believe you, Dr. Traeger-Muney, we believe you. Still, we offer a hot tip to all the millionaires and billionaires ashamed of their wealth, who think they can't shed it like Blackness and being gay: you can actually give the money away.

You can also have your spine surgically removed to gain wealthy friends