The Masticator

Quote of the Day: Steve Albini

2010-09-30T17:26:00.002-04:00

I'm a big fan of musician and sound engineer Steve Albini, partly for his band, Shellac, and partly for what he's said about the music business. (See my post from last November about his article "The Problem With Music".)

So I was delighted to read an interview with Albini on GQ.com. He's articulate and opinionated, and not entirely negative about the state of the music business today.

But the best part was his response to the very last question, How would you describe your fashion?

"I think fashion is repulsive. The whole idea that someone else can make clothing that is supposed to be in style and make other people look good is ridiculous. It sickens me to think that there is an industry that plays to the low self-esteem of the general public. I would like the fashion industry to collapse. I think it plays to the most superficial, most insecure parts of human nature. I hope GQ as a magazine fails. I hope that all of these people who make a living by looking pretty are eventually made destitute or forced to do something of substance. At least pornography has a function."

Animal Camera

2010-09-29T08:35:00.001-04:00

Quote of the Day: Dave Silverman, President of American Atheists

2010-09-28T12:33:00.003-04:00

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people. Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

That's Dave Silverman, the president of the advocacy group American Atheists, quoted in the New York Times today.

Silverman was interviewed for an article about a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that polled 3,400 Americans about religious knowledge. Atheists and agnostics scored the best, beating all other religious groups. Mormons and Muslims were close behind, and Hispanic Catholics scored the worst.

Interestingly, most respondents had trouble with questions about religion in public schools. According to the Times, "fewer than one of four knew that a public school teacher is permitted 'to read from the Bible as an example of literature.' And only about one third knew that a public school teacher is permitted to offer a class comparing the world’s religions."

And there were other areas of notable confusion or outright stupidity. Half of Protestants didn't know Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation. Nearly half of Catholics didn't realize that they are actually consuming Christ's blood and flesh when taking communion. And 43% of Jews didn't know that the philosopher rabbi Maimonides was Jewish.

I took a shortened six-question version of the quiz on religion (via the Times), and I'm pleased to report a perfect score!

(When I tried to access the Pew Forum's website to look for the full questionnaire, I got an error message saying the server was too busy.)

Quote of the Day: William Gibson

2010-09-17T14:15:00.002-04:00

"Give me a new technology and I will give you six sleazy, really disgusting things that people will do with it."

That was science fiction writer William Gibson, speaking on Minnesota Public Radio today. Gibson has a new book coming out: Zero History, the third in a trilogy that started with Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.

My New Blog

2010-08-31T16:55:00.006-04:00

Anyone who checks The Masticator regularly will have been disappointed by a dearth of activity. While I'm not giving up on this blog, I have been focusing my energy on another one: Cocktails & Cologne, a blog about...cocktails and cologne.

Here's my first post, explaining the idea:

What do cocktails and cologne have in common? Both are careful concoctions designed to delight our senses, and in different ways, to intoxicate. Beyond my passion for these elixirs, one for the palate and the other for the nose, they are connected as expressions of masculinity and refinement.

My favorite cocktails are the ones that have few ingredients and don’t try to hide the alcohol with fruit or sugar. I like things bitter sometimes, or spicy. I like to be surprised by new variations or novel ingredients. And while it’s exciting to try an exotic infusion, like the bacon bourbon I recently tried at New York’s PDT (one of the most innovative cocktail bars in the City, hidden inside a hot dog shop), I prefer drinks I could make at home.

For colognes and other men’s fragrances, I like things that remind me of the past, but I’m always looking for something totally new. I’ve discovered that floral scents can be masculine and that some classically masculine scents would, in any other context be considered quite feminine. I prefer subtlety and elegance over bombast. I appreciate luxury but I’d rather have quality, and I’m convinced that quality can come at a modest price.

In both cocktails and cologne, I honor the classics while I search for the unique. This blog will chronicle my search with reviews, recommendations, recipes and stories.

Photo above by Morgan Sheff.

Taxidermy and Beer Together in Horrifying Harmony

2010-07-23T11:08:00.002-04:00

Brew Dog, a Scottish craft beer company, has created limited edition ales at super-strength (55% alcohol, more than the typical whiskey at 40%), contained in bottles with small animal carcasses, like stoats and squirrels, around them. Word has it the animals were not killed by the brewers, but found dead. The brewers say:

This 55% beer should be drank in small servings whilst exuding an endearing pseudo vigilance and reverence for Mr Stoat. This is to be enjoyed with a weather eye on the horizon for inflatable alcohol industry Nazis, judgemental washed up neo-prohibitionists or any grandiloquent, ostentatious foxes.

The video below may tell more of the story.

The End of History from BrewDog on Vimeo.

Homeopathy

2010-07-19T13:53:00.002-04:00

An article in the German newspaper Der Spiegel discusses the dubious efficacy of homeopathic remedies, which are under increased scrutiny in Europe as healthcare costs rise.

2010-07-13T14:34:00.000-04:00

More Creepy Robots

2010-07-06T13:51:00.002-04:00

Quote of the Day: US Airways Passenger Donna Adamo

2010-07-01T15:17:00.002-04:00

"I felt like they were crawling all over me because it only takes one maggot to upset your world. And as they're telling us to stay calm and seated, I see a maggot looking back at me and I'm thinking, 'These are anaerobic, flesh-eating larvae that the flight attendants don't have to sit with.'"

That's Donna Adamo, who saw maggots dropping from an overhead compartment above her on a US Airways flight from Atlanta to Charlotte.

According to the airline, the maggots came from another passenger's spoiled meat.

The Cost of Luxury

2010-06-17T14:18:00.003-04:00

Every once in a while, right around the time I’m paying bills and wondering how my bank account got so drained, I’ll stumble into an article about luxury goods that sets me into a rage. Today, I had the misfortune of finding two such articles: “What Makes E.S. Kluft’s Palais Royale Mattress Worth $33,000?” in the Wall Street Journal and “Domenico Vacca’s new denim line slips us the Mickey—and the Piven” in the Los Angeles Times.

In the first article, the headline says it all: there exists in this world a mattress that people actually buy for $33,000. That fact hardly needs any comment; it is offensive on nearly every level. To me, it’s like Brioni’s $43,000 suit—at this point, the market is testing the limits of the wealthy men it has created by offering them more and more absurd items, stretching the prices by packing products full of rare materials (vicuna fibers, gold weaves) that have no utility.

The answer to the question in that headline is vanity. What else could make a person sleep well after such a purchase? From the Journal we learn that E.S. Kluft, the mattress company, “uses Italian twine to hand-tie coils used in a box spring.” (Emphasis mine.) That among the many layers in the Palais Royale mattress, there are “more than 10 pounds of cashmere, mohair, silk and New Zealand wool.” And that, with the success of this mattress, there’s going to be a $44,000 mattress coming soon. The word recession doesn’t appear once; only this:

“There's an arms race under way in the world of luxury mattresses that jittery economists and sluggish home sales seem unable to stop. Even at the middle-to-upper-middle tiers, mattress prices are creeping up as companies cater to mainstream demand for luxurious sleep.”

Note that last part: it isn’t a better sleep that we demand, but a more luxurious one.

Oddly, luxury today often means wearing jeans that make you look like you work outdoors, with your hands, and on your knees. This is where the second article comes in. Domenico Vacca, an Italian suit maker, undeterred by the fact that the premium denim trend peaked years ago, has launched his own line of jeans (retail: $240-$590 a pair). One model—there are ten, all named after celebrities—looks like it was worn by someone who worked around a lot grease, maybe a mechanic. Another looks like it was repaired haphazardly by a child learning to use a sewing machine.

Vacca in one breath points to his desire “to bring all those little sartorial touches” to the jeans, and in another breath says that the Mickey Rourke model had 30 hours worth of strategic distressing and ripping. Construction, and then deconstruction.

I’ve ranted about premium denim before. It’s like premium vodka: it’s a sham. The only thing premium about these products is their prices. On a much smaller scale, do you really think there’s a demonstrable difference between Levi’s “Original Collectors Edition 501” jeans for $98 and the regular 501s for $58?

Why am I so bitter about suckers spending too much for beds and pants? To paraphrase something I heard recently, it’s not that I want to be included, it’s that I don’t like being excluded. That ain’t how I’d spend my money, but I can’t stand seeing people waste theirs when so many others are wanting these same basic items—a place to sleep, clothes.

I can’t help wondering how easily I could get caught up in luxury, had I $33,000 to spend on a bed. Do people who make enough money suddenly need to ratchet up the base prices of every item they buy accordingly? I guess part of my frustration is that Americans haven’t acquired a taste for exceptional quality—they’ve been infected with a need for luxury, and status symbols are replacing actual status.

Quote of the Day: Unknown

2010-06-10T17:04:00.003-04:00

A guy I was interviewing for a story told me he had a favorite quote: "Quality remains long after price is forgotton." Sounds nice, and vaguely familiar. My interviewee attributed it to the economist John Maynard Keynes. Sensing that this ought to be fact-checked, I did a quick internet search and came up with a number of confusing possibilities:

1. "The quality remains long after the price is forgotten," said Rolls-Royce's co-founder, Sir Henry Royce.

2. "The bitterness of poor quality remains long after low pricing is forgotten!" - Leon M. Cautillo

3. "Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten." - Gucci Family Slogan

4. "The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten." --Ben Franklin

Leon Cautillo is a Christian self-help writer who was probably quoting someone -- Henry Royce? the Guccis? Ben Franklin? -- else.

Does anyone know who said the original quote? What I do know is that it wasn't Keynes.

Punctuation: The Death of the Question Mark?

2010-06-09T13:03:00.006-04:00

Much has been written about the misuse and lack of apostrophes in signs, menus, e-mails and other common printed English: the average American, though educated, seldom seems to understand the difference between plurals and possessives. (And while we all make mistakes, some of us always make the same ones.) When talking about a family, many of us might write the Johnson’s. A menu may feature Egg’s Benedict. This used to bother me.

No longer. Now it’s the missing question mark, and it’s everywhere, making requests or queries sound like stubborn commands. Here are some real-life examples I’ve collected, with all original language intact:

“Have you try to put the two jackets seam to seam.” (Comment from one blogger to another on a blog about men’s clothing)

“Do you want me to change the Quark file also.” (E-mail from art director at a magazine)

“I’m not sure if you can do these changes on line or do you need me to send you a whole new html files.” (Another from that art director)

“Do you have images or something else to add.” (That art director again)

“Can you articulate what you think when you see them.” (E-mail from a colleague)

When I read these, I hear a monotone voice in my head reciting these phrases the way one would a fact: “The bird is flying.”

For some reason, I don’t mind reading messages written without any capitalization. I don’t mind shortcut spellings like nite for night, thanx, and even prolly for probably. There’s a reason for it—it’s saving space and time. But using a period instead of hitting the question mark key next to the period is just sloppy.

2010-06-07T12:52:00.000-04:00

2010-06-01T15:03:00.000-04:00

Osprey Demonstration Mayhem

2010-06-01T14:35:00.003-04:00

During a demonstration landing in a public park on Staten Island last weekend, a Marine Osprey -- a twin-propellered helicopter-like aircraft -- injured 10 people. The wind created by the giant propellers swirled trash, picnic blankets and snapped off tree branches:

More details from the Daily News.

Carbon Motors

2010-05-25T17:22:00.005-04:00

Although this police car looks like a Chrysler 300, it's not. It's a Carbon Motors Corp. E7, the first ever car built just for police applications. The company, which is based in Indiana, doesn't have the funding or the orders necessary yet for real production (they've got 13,000 orders so far), but they're getting closer.

Carbon points out that while many municipal vehicles -- fire engines, postal trucks, ambulances -- are purpose-built, police cars haven't been.

It's got a number of novel features that the big three don't offer -- and since Ford is ceasing production of the Crown Victoria Police Interceptor soon, the company has a chance.

It's powered by a BMW 3-liter twin-turbo V6 diesel that produces about 250hp and 400 lb-ft of torque. It'll do 0-60 in 6.5 seconds and get better mileage than the Crown Victoria (about 28-30 mpg).

Its suicide doors open wide to make putting people in the back easier. There's no light-bar on the roof -- all flashing lights are integrated into the body of the car. Its size is deceptive in the photos: although it's slightly shorter than the Crown Victoria, it's just as wide and six inches higher. And as the photo below shows, the back seats are easy to clean.

According to the New York Times, while Ford is ending the Crown Victoria's long run, it's still trying to stay in the running for police contracts with a modified all-wheel-drive Ford Taurus SHO (a 365hp turbo V6 that does 0-60 in 5.7 seconds).

Dodge's Charger is already in use as a police cruiser, and Chevy is pitching a rebadged Pontiac G8, an Austrialian-built car that was only sold in the U.S. for two years. They'd be calling it a Caprice this time around, a reference to another old police cruiser favorite. The Caprice has a big 6-liter 355hp V8.

The Robotic Dog Videos

2010-05-25T15:15:00.005-04:00

A company called Boston Dynamics released the video below about two years ago, a video of its robot, "Big Dog," that can walk over nearly any surface by learning from its slip-ups. Big Dog is about three feet long, standing near waist-height, and weighs about 240 pounds. It can see, and it can carry up to 340 pounds on its back. It will run at 4 mph and set a record, Boston Dynamics says, for going almost 13 miles without stopping or refueling.

But watching the video is like watching a giant insect: it's disturbing -- this is the robot that will hunt us all down when the machines take over. I joke, but the robot does have obvious military applications. It's so loud because it's powered by a single 15hp go-kart two-stroke engine, driving a hydraulic pump.

It looks like it's alive because the movement is much more realistic (especially when a man tries to kick Big Dog over) than robots of the past, much less mechanical. And it's that life-like quality that's most fascinating and most disturbing.

In this next video, Big Dog is programmed to follow a human leader, instead of being controlled remotely.

Little Dog, another Boston Dynamics project, is much smaller, but equally mobile. Each of its legs is powered by three motors, and its batteries will last 30 minutes.

And of course Boston Dynamics is working on a humanoid version, still in the lower body phase of development.

2010-05-21T15:13:00.000-04:00

Quote of the Day: Mark Williams

2010-05-21T14:38:00.003-04:00

Tea Party talk radio host and blogger Mark Williams apologized for offending Hindus, when he, trying to offend Muslims, called Allah a "monkey god." His apology, in part:

In the course of the article I described the “god” worshiped by terrorists as “a monkey god”. I was wrong and that was offensive. I owe an apology to millions of Hindus who worship Lord Hanuman, an actual Monkey God.

Moreover, Hanuman is worshiped as a symbol of perseverance, strength and devotion. He is known as a destroyer of evil and to inspire and liberate. Those are hardly the traits of whatever the Hell (literally) it is that terrorists worship and worthy of my respect and admiration not ridicule.

So, again, to my Hindu friends I offer my sincerest apologies for my horrible lapse and my insensitivity. It was unintentional, inexplicably ignorant and I am ashamed at my offense toward you.

As comical as Williams sudden contrition is, he inadvertantly brings up some theological questions. First, does he (or anyone) think that Muslim terrorists worship a different god than peaceful Muslims do? And by refering to "Allah," are Christians knowlingly distancing themselves from Muslims, who come from the same tradition (and who actually recognize Jesus Christ as important, if not divine)? And does Williams really have any Hindu friends to offend?

The blog post he apologized for? It's now password-protected. To get the password, you have to read his book, "Mark Williams Taking Back America One Tea Party at a Time." But if you read the book, you can also learn "How the author cured his own liberalism."

But seriously, Williams' blog post was about the Islamic cultural center that's proposed near Ground Zero. A Muslim group bought a building that used to house a Burlington Coat Factory -- a building that was damaged by a chunk of landing gear that smashed through its roof on September 11, 2001. By most accounts, the man who wants to open the center, Imam Feisal -- a Sufi -- genuinely works for peace and understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims: the FBI says he's acted as a go-between for federal investigators and has the blessing and support of some Christian groups.

Obituary: Frank Frazetta

2010-05-11T14:54:00.010-04:00

Frank Frazetta, an artist who created some of the most familiar fantasy imagery and book covers, has died. He was 82.

His covers for Conan pulp novels would usually feature long-haired, under-dressed and absurdly muscled men fighting horrific beasts, often with scantily clad and incredibly curvy women watching.

"I didn't read any of it," Frazetta said of the Conan novels he illustrated, quoted in an obituary here. "I drew him my way. It was really rugged. And it caught on. I didn't care about what people thought. People who bought the books never complained about it. They probably didn't read them."

According to Comics Beat, Metallica's Kirk Hammett may be the buyer who spent a reported $1 million on an original Frazetta painting (possibly the Conan the Conquerer cover painting above).

Frazetta also illustrated covers for Edgar Rice Burroughs novels (including the Tarzan series), a Mad Max movie poster, and rock album covers for Molly Hatchet, Nazareth, Yngwie Malmsteen and others.

Comic Beat has a fine assessment of Frazetta's career here, which includes this summary:

"Frazetta the man was handsome, athletic (a career as a pro baseball player was contemplated) and testosterone fueled. Smashing with every brushstroke the stereotype of the wimpy artist (or Rockwell,, pipe clenched firmly between teeth), Frazetta was the man of action in deed and thought. Accordingly his imagery was violent, shocking, brutal, even brutish. Men stabbing giant snakes; women with their gleaming, globular butts turned to the camera as they were kidnapped by bestial man-like figures; bodies piled up in battle being chopped to stew-sized chunks by bloody swords. This wasn’t subtle stuff."

It certainly wasn't. I confess, as a childhood fan of both Burroughs' novels (Tarzan, the John Carter of Mars series, the Venus series) and Robert E. Howard's novels (the Conan series, the H.P. Lovecraft pastiches and all of the other brutish pulp stories), that Frazetta's art arouses some nostalgia. There's no doubt that he was a skilled painter, but could his art ever rise above its kitschy, pulp fantasy novel teen boy eroticism? I'm picturing walking into a wealthy rock star's palatial estate, and seeing, above a huge stone mantel, a painting of a big-assed nude woman writhing on the ground next to a juicehead wielding a sword against some creature. How could I not giggle?

Is it because Frazetta's book covers weren't subtle? Is it because they were, in effect, advertisements for the books rather than nuanced illustrations inspired by them? Is it the exaggeration of anatomy? Is it because by doing so many of them, his paintings became pardoies of themselves? Was this art for Frazetta, or merely commerce?

Maybe it isn't even fair to ask why Frazetta's art isn't great art. He was essentially a comic book and pulp novel illustrator -- one of the best -- and that's a whole separate category.

Below is a fan video showing some of Frazetta's paintings from the 60s on.

The most comprehensive -- and personal -- obituary I've read so far is this one from the L.A. Times, written by Lance Laspina, who got to know Frazetta during the filming of his 2003 documentary about the artist. A trailer for that documentary is below:

Beverage Deception

2010-05-04T16:58:00.006-04:00

“Whether it has caffeine or not is not really important to me,” said the owner of a Manhattan donut shop, after being accused of serving decaf coffee and passing it off as caffeinated. “I like the flavor like I like the flavor of chocolate.”

This revelation came from a customer who had been drinking coffee there for a year. You want to think that they’d always suspected, but who knows?

It reminds me of a delicious (and expensive) cocktail I had at Pegu Club last weekend, a bar famous for meticulously made classic mixed drinks. It was called a “Whiskey Smash,” and I ordered it because it was their version of a mint julep (the Kentucky Derby was on, and a Southern cocktail seemed appropriate). It was very tasty, but I could barely detect the whiskey.

I had watched the bartender make it—sort of. And when I thought about it, I didn’t see him pour any booze. Was it possible that this highly skilled mixologist had skipped the most important ingredient? Or was it just so expertly proportioned that the alcohol flavor was subtle, even absent? To be honest, the reason I didn’t ask the bartender about it was because I didn’t want him to be embarrassed if he really did miss it somehow. This, I think, is a very Minnesota reaction.

The recipe, created by the famous mixologist Dale DeGroff, is online at the archived Gourmet Magazine site:

3 lemon pieces (cut a lemon in half and then quarter one of the halves, use three of the quarters)
5 mint leaves
1 ounce simple syrup
1 1/2 ounces Makers Mark Bourbon
Lemon wedge for garnish
1 mint sprig for garnish

I tried it at home, and...it tasted just like the one at Pegu Club, which is to say it was delicious, but not boozy. Who knew whiskey could be so mild?

My girlfriend told me a story once about a bartender at Bar Abilene, a Tex-Mex establishment in Minneapolis's Uptown neighborhood. The bartender, a bitter and work-averse sort, was upset by special orders: if a customer asked for a margarita frozen, instead of up, as it's listed on the menu, he would punish them by serving it without any liquor in it. No one noticed, of course. He apparently confided this with some pride to a fellow bartender at another Uptown bar.

This in turn reminds me of another beverage deception. In 2005, some food and wine critics at the New York Times participated in a blind taste test of 20 premium vodkas, with mid-market Smirnoff thrown in as a ringer. And it was Smirnoff, of course, that won, beating out all the Grey Gooses (it “was felt to lack balance and seemed to have more than a touch of sweetness”), the Ketel Ones (it “was felt to be routine and sharp”).

Wrote wine critic Eric Asimov, “What set Smirnoff apart, we agreed, was its aromas and flavors, which we described as classic.”

I chortled, vindicated, as I read this five years ago. Thinking about all the suckers who fell for the marketing of expensive but ultimately flavorless vodkas. (And then I thought about how excited I was to bring home a bottle of Russian Standard vodka from a trip to St. Petersburg. Okay, I’m guilty too.)

We all like to think that we'd be able to detect a placebo, to spot an ambush in a blind taste test. But the same problem exists in other categories, like art. How gleeful we become when we hear about art critics unwittingly praising the scribbles of children or animals as "genius" and "deliberate." Context is everything: marketing will fool us into thinking Coke tastes better than Pepsi, a desire to please will steer us toward one thing over another, and a high price or well-placed praise will boost the stature of the lowliest crap.

Obituary: Leslie Buck

2010-04-30T14:55:00.004-04:00

The man who designed this cup is dead at 87. Leslie Buck, a holocaust survivor born Laszlo Büch in Czechoslovakia, came up with the Greek design as a marketing director for Sherri Cup in the 60s. The cup's pattern, called the "Anthora," was meant to appeal to New York City's Greek diner owners. It did, and it became a symbol fo the city.

It reached its peak in 1994, the New York Times said, at 500 million cups. Ten years later it dropped down to 200 million, and now, although the cups are still used all over the city, the company offers them only as a special order item.

Interestingly, the Times mentions the cup's small size. In New York, when a to-go cup of coffee is often carried by a pedestrian commuter, those awful "tall" cups from Starbucks stay too hot and hold way more coffee than I ever want to drink in one sitting.

The design is sold on ceramic cups now, some for as little as $12, others for as much $38 -- although it's probably the same damn cup.

Quote of the Day: Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal

2010-04-27T17:13:00.002-04:00

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

That's General Stanley A. McChrystal, as quoted in the New York Times. He's referring to the slide above, a PowerPoint slide from a presentation in Kabul, Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” said Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis, echoing a sentiment that information design expert Edward Tufte has been advancing for years.

Why is PowerPoint so bad? Here, I offer a bulleted list of reasons, culled from various sources (mostly Tufte):

PowerPoint slides are too small to offer enough information.
By doing everything in bullet points, they force people to gloss over the connective details that give a true, accurate picture of an issue.
As Tufte writes, "PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis."
PowerPoint shuts down discussions and oversimplifies issues.

Tufte concludes that using Microsoft Word would be better: "Serious problems require a serious tool: written reports."

Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster won't use PowerPoint anymore; he told the Times, “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

Rock-afire Explosion

2010-04-26T17:21:00.003-04:00

A documentary about Rock-afire Explosion, the bizarro animatronic band that performed at Showbiz Pizza restaurants/arcades in the 1980s, is now on DVD. Here's a trailer:

As I understand it, Showbiz merged with Chuck E. Cheese -- its biggest competitor -- in 1984. Miraculously, Chuck E. Cheese is still around, operating more than 500 locations. In fact, it's in every state except Wyoming and New Hampshire. Minnesota still has five and New York has 21, including one in Harlem, one in the Bronx, and one in Brooklyn.

Chuck E. Cheese was founded in 1977 in San Jose, California by, of all people, Nolan Bushnell -- the man who started Atari. Showbiz Pizza began in Kansas City in 1980.

2010-04-16T17:13:00.000-04:00

Outside the Polish Consulate today in Manhattan.

Bad Review: The New York Times on The Addams Family

2010-04-09T16:45:00.004-04:00

It was just a bad idea. Broadway, which is suffering a drought of original productions, has been getting drunk off revivals and re-imaginings of movies and books. So turning the Addams Family franchise -- which debuted in New Yorker cartoons and became more familiar as television show and then became a couple of mildly entertaining movies -- into a musical was a natural shift. Nevermind that the time to capitalize on its familiarity or box office currency has long past.

No, American audiences in both film and theater enjoy recognizing something they've seen before, as New York Times critic Ben Brantley points out: they "snap along" at the borrowed theme song, applaud the characters' first appearance, and give "thunderous entrance applause" to the minor characters of Cousin Itt and Thing. With an audience this easy, it's no wonder the producers didn't try harder.

I have to second Gawker, which chose this gem of a quote from Brantley's review as the most delicious:

"A tepid goulash of vaudeville song-and-dance routines, Borscht Belt jokes, stingless sitcom zingers and homey romantic plotlines that were mossy in the age of 'Father Knows Best,' 'The Addams Family' is most distinctive for its wholesale inability to hold on to a consistent tone or an internal logic."

The 2009 Ojibwe Forest Rally

2010-04-08T16:13:00.007-04:00

When I noticed a post on the blog A Continuous Lean about Audi rally racing and how the Quattro four-wheel-drives changed the sport in the early 80s, I was reminded of a summer a few years ago when I got to watch a rally race in the Northern Minnesota forests near Bemidji.

The most exciting part was a nighttime section fo the race in dense forest. It would pitch black, and then you'd hear a rumbling. The trees would start to glow, like a UFO landing, and the rumbling would turn into screaming as a rally car reached the crest of a hill near where we were allowed to stand along the narrow dirt trail. All of a sudden, the car would burst over the hill with its rows of high beams blazing. The crowd would gasp and camera flashes would barely capture the action.

I'm still looking for some video online from that year's race, but I did find some great footage from other years in the Ojibwe Forest Rally.

Here's a high-speed rollover from 2009 in which both driver and navigator of this 2001 Dodge walk away unhurt:

And here's some dashboard footage from the same race. This Volkswagen Golf is negotiating some twists in the forest in a night stage.

And finally, here's a great video of an Audi in the Pike's Peak Rally in 1987 (the Audi action starts about 24 seconds in):

2010-04-03T23:28:00.001-04:00

Gyotaku

2010-03-31T17:02:00.007-04:00

Gyotaku (gyo=fish and taku=printing or rubbing), the Japanese art of fish printing, dates back to the 18th century. Fisherman would record their catches by brushing them with ink and then pressing them onto paper.

The creator of the video above used Japanese sumi ink, which is non-toxic and easy to find. In the next video, a different artist makes a large print of a mahi-mahi.

Finally, here's a video a tourist in Okinawa took. A woman in a bait shop apparently does prints of fresh catches.

Working Families Party's MTA Service Alerts

2010-03-31T13:51:00.005-04:00

The Working Families Party in New York City created some posters in the style of the MTA's subway service alerts in protest against the drastic cuts in public transportation. The posters were actually designed to be displayed as paid ads in NYC busses and subways, but the MTA rejected them because, according to the New York Daily News, they "imply obscene language" and look too much like real service alerts. The MTA's budget is $800 million short.

Fake MTA posters like this have become sort of a graphic design game in New York over the past few years, with posters like this one below popping up occasionally.

[photo via: flickr.]

That poster was apparently created by the people behind the spoof website newMTA.info, which looks almost identical to the real MTA.info website, except for press releases like this one, announcing a "partnership" with the homeless:

"The plan is quite brilliantly simple" states William Rorschach, the new President of the New MTA Online Beta Testing Operations. "We are providing the homeless the warmth and shelter of our subway stations to run around and do homeless things provided that they are implanted with our latest surveillance equipment and networked to our communication systems. This will turn almost every single homeless person into a walking, breathing, living surveillance camera where we can track commuters and potentially fight crime. Think of it as almost every hairy, cart pushing, popcorn shrimp and ass smelling hobo in our system converted into a new age Scruff McGruff."

Another fake press release announces a 50 cent surcharge for obese passengers.

Below: Another fake sign, creator unknown, via: flickr.

Quote of the Day: Archbishop Dolan

2010-03-31T11:50:00.004-04:00

"The Church needs criticism; we want it; we welcome it; we do a good bit of it ourselves; we do not expect any special treatment…so bring it on."

That's Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, in his blog, talking about all the molestation hubub. "All we ask is that it be fair and accurate," he continues. "The reporting on Pope Benedict XVI has not been so."

Archbishop Dolan's best defense seems to be that this is old news (the Milwaukee priest abused kids from the 50s through the 70s), and that the New York Times seems to have a vendetta against the Pope.

2010-03-29T16:06:00.001-04:00

Quote of the Day: Armond White

2010-03-26T16:50:00.002-04:00

"Over recent years, film journalism has—perhaps unconsciously—been considered a part of the film industry and expected to be a partner in Hollywood’s commercial system. Look at the increased prevalence of on-television reviewing dedicated to dispensing consumer advice, and of magazine and newspaper features linked only to current releases, or to the Oscar campaign, as if Hollywood’s business was everybody’s business. Critics are no longer respected as individual thinkers, only as adjuncts to advertising. We are not. And we should not be. Criticism needs to be reassessed with this clear understanding: We judge movies because we know movies, and our knowledge is based on learning and experience."

That's an excerpt from film critic Armond White's excellent defense of his trade. Film criticism, he argues, has become advertising for new movies.

His essay, which could as easily apply to art criticism or literary criticism, includes some gems from other film critics, like Pauline Kael, who wrote in 1974:

"Criticism is all that stands between the public and advertising."

And Molly Haskell, who said more recently:

"The Internet is democracy’s revenge on democracy."

This all reminds me of a story art critic Jerry Saltz once told in a review. He'd been chewed out by a gallery owner who couldn't understand why he wasn't more supportive of the art market. Bad reviews, her logic went, were bad for business. But, Saltz fired back, they are good for art, and for the public.

As White writes in his essay, "Commerce, based on fashion and seeming novelty, always prioritizes the idea of newness as a way of favoring the next product and flattering the innocence of eager consumers who, reliably, lack the proverbial skepticism." What good is anything when the biggest recommendation one can make about it is that it is new to the market?

The Forgotten Tunnel Under Atlantic Avenue

2010-03-26T14:53:00.003-04:00

Quote of the Day: David Mamet

2010-03-24T17:22:00.002-04:00

David Mamet, the potty-mouthed playwright who turned from liberal to raging, bitter conservative, wrote an indignant memo to the writers of his (now canceled) CBS special forces drama "The Unit" back in 2005 explaining how he wanted the show done. Here's an excerpt:

THE JOB OF THE DRAMATIST IS TO MAKE THE AUDIENCE WONDER WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. *NOT* TO EXPLAIN TO THEM WHAT JUST HAPPENED, OR TO*SUGGEST* TO THEM WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

ANY DICKHEAD, AS ABOVE, CAN WRITE, “BUT, JIM, IF WE DON’T ASSASSINATE THE PRIME MINISTER IN THE NEXT SCENE, ALL EUROPE WILL BE ENGULFED IN FLAME”

WE ARE NOT GETTING PAID TO *REALIZE* THAT THE AUDIENCE NEEDS THIS INFORMATION TO UNDERSTAND THE NEXT SCENE, BUT TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO WRITE THE SCENE BEFORE US SUCH THAT THE AUDIENCE WILL BE INTERESTED IN WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

YES BUT, YES BUT YES *BUT* YOU REITERATE.

AND I RESPOND *FIGURE IT OUT*.

The whole thing, which was posted this week by a film blog, is in caps.

Bush to Black People: Where's the Hand Sanitizer?

2010-03-24T13:25:00.005-04:00

Watch President Bush shake hands with a Haitian, then wipe his hand off on President Clinton's shirt.

And as Gothamist points out, Bush seems to be at best a germophobe and at worst afraid of touching black people. Here, via ABC News blogs, is an excerpt from President Obama's book The Audacity of Hope. Obama is writing about how he, as a new senator, met Bush in the White House in 2005:

“Obama!” he said, shaking my hand. “Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that wife of yours – that’s one impressive lady.”

“We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President,” I said, shaking the First Lady’s hand and hoping that I’d wiped any crumbs off my face.

The president turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.

“Want some?” the president asked. “Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds.” Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

“Come over here for a second,” he said, leading me off to one side of the room.

“You know,” he said quietly, “I hope you don’t mind me giving you a piece of advice.”

“Not at all, Mr. President.” He nodded. “You’ve got a bright future,” he said. “Very bright. But I’ve been in this town a while and, let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot of attention like you’ve been getting, people start gunnin’ for ya. And it won’t necessarily just be coming from my side, you understand. From yours, too. Everybody’ll be waiting for you to slip. Know what I mean? So watch yourself.”

The Gowanus Canal

2010-03-15T11:34:00.003-04:00

Although this odd signage has been up on the Ninth Street bridge over the toxic Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, the multi-colored waterway was only made a Superfund site this month. It actually doesn't smell as bad as it looks.But the most exciting part about the canal is this, as summarized in a 2009 article in New York Magazine:

"Cholera, typhoid, typhus, gonorrhea: They’ve all been found in the water. A team of biology professors at New York City College of Technology have also studied a curious white goo oozing along the bottom, which turned out to be a mix of bacteria, protozoans, and various contaminants. The microbes appear to have evolved resistance to the filth, and the scientists have been trying to figure out whether their disease-fighting mechanisms could be adapted for medical use."

The canal was dug in the 1860s, and the pollution came from the oil refineries, tanneries, and other chemical plants that used it and its shores. The Superfund clean-up should take between 10 and 12 years and cost as much as $500 million. The Bloomberg administration opposed the Super Fund designation; it has an alternative plan that it said was faster (but not by much) and cheaper -- and all to attract developers who are eager for clean (or at least saleable) waterfront property.

2010-03-12T12:14:00.000-05:00

Quote of the Day: Ravi Somaiya

2010-03-12T10:49:00.005-05:00

"By softballing and coddling interviewees, all of television news has helped politicians get away with appalling lies, distortions and… being Sarah Palin.

"Put simply: almost without exception, American political interviewers fawn and simper over their subjects, refuse to ask a question more than once and never call bullshit on blatant bullshit. If anchors, interviewers and White House correspondents did their job — to hold elected officials accountable, by their lapels if necessary — politicians of all stripes could not get away with distorting and outright lying, as they do now.

"Rove-ian veneers would simply be scraped away by the eight words 'that is not true, please answer my question'. Repeated enough on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC they'd mean no birthers. No myths about healthcare or rumors of death panels. No paranoid lies about creeping socialism. No George W. Bush. No Sarah Palin."

That's Gawker's Ravi Somaiya, writing in response to an anti-Fox News screed in the Washington Post by Howell Raines.

Somaiya is right. Watch footage of Tony Blair getting grilled by the British press, and standing up to it without whining. Our journalists just aren't like that. We think backcountry preachers are a good match for bioligists in evolution debates.

But it doesn't just cut one way. All politics -- liberal and conservative -- would benefit from a stronger press, a press that didn't adopt partisan catch phrases or let hysterics and hyperbole stand.

In the Post column titled "Why don't honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?", Raines limited his argument at first to Fox News and the issue of healthcare reform. But he too goes further:

"Why has our profession, through its general silence -- or only spasmodic protest -- helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt?"

Economics is the typical answer to that, writes Raines. The problem, and I think most liberals suspect this and many on Fox News (including Ailes, O'Reilly and Beck) will use it as a defense, is that Fox News is not news; it's entertainment. It's about ratings, and it's a rollicking success.

MSNBC, CNN and everything else still have their feet in the evaporating pond of journalism, while dabbling in what Fox has perfected. Thus, they cannot win. They let Fox create the rules for the game. Get back to real journalism and its aims of truth, public service and open information and, as both Raines and Somaiya argue, Fox will lose some of its magical power of influence.

So what's stopping everyone? It's simple: Fox has created a climate in which arguing with its people and the people it promotes amounts to bias. Act as if you're the standard and everyone else is the deviant and you can accuse anyone of what you are doing, which is biased reporting.

But there may be hope yet. Here's the powerful London PR exec Matthew Freud, who is also Rupert Murdoch's son-in-law (and the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud), quoted in the New York Times in January:

"I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to."

Quote of the Day: Bill Withers

2010-03-10T12:42:00.003-05:00

“You gonna tell me the history of the blues? I am the goddam blues. Look at me. Shit. I’m from West Virginia, I’m the first man in my family not to work in the coal mines, my mother scrubbed floors on her knees for a living, and you’re going to tell me about the goddam blues because you read some book written by John Hammond? Kiss my ass.”

That's singer/songwriter Bill Withers, from a 2005 interview referenced this week by New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones.

Corey Haim

2010-03-10T11:57:00.003-05:00

In honor of the train wreck that was teen actor Corey Haim (1971-2010), here is the trailer for Dream a Little Dream (1989) -- surely the weirdest movie Haim and his frequent co-star Corey Feldman did together. It had a great cast, including Jason Robards, Piper Laurie and Harry Dean Stanton. It was made during Feldman's bizarro Michael Jackson phase (the two were friends, and Feldman dressed up like Jackson again for his funeral).

It's easier to talk about Feldman, even after Haim's untimely death (he was 38; cause of death unknown as of this writing) because Feldman was the more successful actor (Gremlins, The Goonies, Stand By Me), at least as a child actor. Both Coreys slipped into drug abuse after the peak of their fame in the late 80s.

"The Two Coreys," a reality show that followed Feldman and Haim as they tried to get back into acting, aired from 2007 to 2008, at which point Feldman expressed concern about having Haim around his family.

2010-03-08T13:35:00.001-05:00

2010-03-08T12:39:00.001-05:00

2010-03-08T11:42:00.004-05:00

I found this Indian toothpaste at the Jackson Heights, Queens location of Patel Brothers, a nationwide Indian grocery chain. It's a red toothpaste that's flavored with cloves instead of mint. It's also "packed with the power of 13 active Ayurvedic ingredients."

One ingredient advertised on the box, and I'm not sure if it counts as an Ayurvedic one, is toothache tree. Interestingly enough, toothache tree, or Southern prickly ash, as it's commonly known, is native to the U.S. Its leaves' numbing qualities make it good for mouth pain.

Between that and the silica, which is an abrasive decidedly more potent than baking soda, I'm thinking this is a toothpaste for people who have some dental issues.

Also of note: there's no flouride. The absence of flouride seems quite common in non-American toothpastes, lending a little weight to the claims of conspiracy theorists who say flouridated water and toothpaste are a result of American industry trying to come up with a way to make money off of a hazardous waste.

At any rate, brushing with Dabur Red is a strange sensation (not as creepy as the Japanese salt toothpaste I tried a couple years ago) that leaves your mouth tingling and surprisingly fresh-feeling -- given the clove flavor. It also feels scoured, which makes me worry that I'm removing precious layers of enamel.

The best effect of the red toothpaste is the ghastly, horror movie-quality red foam it creates in one's mouth. I highly recommend Dabur Red, but only for special occasions.

Quote of the Day: Richard Nephew

2010-03-06T09:37:00.003-05:00

“Isn’t that the way things go in the American system? It is something new for us to actively get involved in the American political process, but we are trying to learn what works in America, and I guess making political contributions is something that works.”

That's Seneca Nation foreign relations committee co-chairman Richard Nephew, speaking to the New York Times about how his western New York Indian tribe managed to block a bill that would have ended their mail-order cigarette business.

It's a clear case of how the American political system works: a bill making the shipment of cigarettes through the mail illegal had the support of just about everyone, including big tobacco companies who didn't like the tax-free competition from the Seneca Nation. It passed in the House last spring, 397 to 11. But once the Seneca Nation started spending lobbying money, mysterious opposition began to surface. And it's not from Republicans. From the Times:

But at the last minute, two or three Democratic senators told party leaders privately that they might block the bill, according to senior Senate Democratic aides. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

It is also interesting to note that the bill would not effect mail-order cigars. It's easy to see Washington cigar aficionados pulling some strings here, but let's face it: cigars, no matter how cheap, don't pose nearly the same risk for teenagers that cigarettes do.

2010-03-04T15:15:00.000-05:00

Who Would Dare Ban Babies From Brooklyn Bars?

2010-03-03T15:24:00.005-05:00

Babies in bars? This could only be an issue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. And it doesn't stop with small children scrambling around shrieking in drinking establishments; there are stroller traffic jams and mothers who want to breast feed here, too. Union Hall, a large Park Slope bar with indoor bocce lanes and a basement music venue once had a "no strollers" policy, one that may have been put in place after some rumored Fire Department tickets for strollers blocking exits. That policy is no longer in place.

How did this battle start? Young parents began bringing kids to bars more often when New York banned smoking indoors. My generation, the one for which 30 is the new 20, finds itself listening to the same music as its children, and wearing the same skinny jeans. It doesn't know it's grown up. Or rather, it refuses to grow up.

[UPDATE 3/4/10: When I wrote this yesterday, I couldn't recall actually seeing babies in Park Slope bars. Sure, I get run off sidewalks by giant strollers being pushed three abreast by mommies of means. But I hadn't had the bar experience. Until I stopped for a drink on Seventh Avenue after work last night. Damn it if there wasn't a young hipster couple with an infant, coming in for some booze.]

Here are some quotes about kids in bars, mostly via Gothamist, by locals:

"I will get up on the subway for kids. I will be tolerant of them kicking the back of my seat while seeing a G-rated movie. But let me have my bars."

--Julieanne Smolinski, 26-year-old Brooklyn resident (CNN.com, Mar. 2, 2010)

"We're a neighborhood gathering place, not a hard-drinking bar, and we're not jerks about it. But the overwhelming clientele that spends quite a lot of money here can't deal with babies."

--Greg Curley, co-owner of the Park Slope bar Double Windsor, which recently made a 'no-kids-after-5 p.m. rule.' (CNN.com, Mar. 2, 2010)

"I'm not going to keep her out past 7 p.m. When the bar starts filling up, that's when we head home. It's responsible parenting and responsible adult behavior. I'm not knocking back double vodkas while my daughter is stumbling around."

--Matt Gross, freelance writer and Park Slope resident (CNN.com, Mar. 2, 2010)

"My stance hasn't changed since I had my daughter. We've taken her to a bar or two, and she's proving herself to be a very pleasant diner, too—but we take her at times where it's totally square and appropriate. I've never eaten dinner at 5:30 before, but now I do if I REALLY want to go and we don't have a plan. I know a ton of other bar and restaurant owners and I can see them cringe when people bring their kids in at inappropriate times. It ruins the vibe they've worked very hard to create. Bars aren't Romper Rooms, they are dangerous places with pottymouth drunks. Some seem more friendly than others, but they aren't. You can tell if a place is friendly to kids or not and you shouldn't take it personally if they are not. Just go somewhere else."

--Jack "Skippy" McFadden, owner of the Gowanus, Brooklyn bar The Bell House (Gothamist, Feb. 17, 2010)

"No matter what breeders might think, bars are not family-friendly. If I am out drinking and sobbing about a bad breakup, I don’t want my cries to compete with those of an infant sitting next to me. If I go to the bathroom to correct my wayward mascara at the end of a long weekend night, I don’t want to watch a baby being wiped down on the soggy sink counter.

"Nor do I want to be scolded by parents like the ones at the Gate, a favorite bar, where friends have witnessed a few mothers with toddlers actually wagging their fingers when young people cursed too loudly or got a little sloppy, while conveniently overlooking the fact that alcohol, blaring punk rock and drunken partiers are not pediatrician-approved."

--Risa Chubinsky, Park Slope resident (New York Times City Room Blog, Jan. 15, 2010)

"God, they're like ants on Fire Island! Even the wait staff and manager at the restaurant were chagrinned this past weekend when the needy, greedy narcissists arrived back from their summering to ruin what was evolving into a peaceful haven for grown-ups who have enough of a life to leave their kids at home when they want a dinner at what is clearly an adults-only kind of place.

"Provini deliberately doesn't have high chairs, I was secretly told by a waitress, and there certainly isn't any room for strollers, but the exquisite wine list alone should keep kids out, don't you think? Not in Park Slope, where pathetic parents don't want to live with the choices they've made, so they crash everyone else's party. CRASH?! Yep. Everyone turned around to see the glass breaking on the floor at the table with the toddlers."

--Peter Loffredo, psycholigist, blogger, Park Slope resident (Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn, Sept. 15, 2009)

"It was strictly liability. A lot of parents are great and mindful. But some are not that attentive to their kids when they’re in here. This is a bar with an open stairwell and a bocce court. This is a business and we don’t have the staff to police it."

--Jim Carden, owner of Union Hall (Gothamist, Feb. 1, 2008)

"Psychologically, you feel like, 'Oh, my life hasn’t changed that much,' although of course it completely has."

--Christen Clifford, a writer/actress who, according to the New York Times "proudly recalled breast-feeding her son, Felix, at the bar before ordering a martini." (New York Times, Feb. 10, 2008)

2010-03-03T12:13:00.002-05:00

Norman Foster

2010-03-03T10:44:00.004-05:00

There's a new movie about Norman Foster, architect of New York City's Hearst Building, the dome on top of the Riechstag in Berlin and the dazzlingly long and high Millau Viaduct bridge in France.

The documentary, called "How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?", is produced by the Europe-based consultancy Art Commissioners. The group usually makes short films and curates art shows. This is its first full-length movie. Fast Company says it's "soundtracked like a tearjerker," and has the production values and "heavy-handed narrative" of Avatar. Here's a trailer:

“How Much Does your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?” Trailer from www.club-construct.com on Vimeo.

The only architect who makes a grander use of his engineering skills is Santiago Calatrava, the man who should have been awarded the commission to design Minneapolis's 35W bridge.

Cardboard Car

2010-02-24T15:53:00.000-05:00

Rules for Writing Fiction

2010-02-24T13:33:00.002-05:00

The UK Guardian asked a number of fiction writers to come up with lists of rules inspired by Elmore Leonard's "10 Rules of Writing." Leonard cautions against using any word but "said" in dialogue ("The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.") and favors dialogue over character descriptions.

One of the pithiest and entertaining lists came from American novelist Richard Ford, author of The Lay of the Land (2006):

1. Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

2. Don't have children.

3. Don't read your reviews.

4. Don't write reviews. (Your judgment's always tainted.)

5. Don't have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.

6. Don't drink and write at the same time.

7. Don't write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

8. Don't wish ill on your colleagues.

9. Try to think of others' good luck as encouragement to yourself.

10. Don't take any shit if you can possibly help it.

Other gems from various contributors include:

"Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide." --Roddy Doyle

"Read Keats's letters." --Helen Dunmore

"Don't write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris, dans les cafés . . . Since then I've developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity." --Goeff Dyer

"The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator." --Jonathan Franzen

"Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go." --AL Kennedy

"Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious." --PD James

"Stop reading fiction – it's all lies anyway, and it doesn't have anything to tell you that you don't know already (assuming, that is, you've read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven't you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction)." --Will Self

"No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working." --Colm Tóibín

A Bukowski Stamp?

2010-02-24T10:18:00.004-05:00

There's a petition that has been languishing on the internets for the last few months, part of an effort to put the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski on a U.S. stamp. Bukowski, a notorious drunk and disgruntled postal employee, died in 1994 at the age of 74. Is Bukowski a good candidate for a stamp? He hated the postal service, and wrote as much.

Here's the text of the petition:

Dear members of the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee,

I am writing to propose that the American novelist, poet and screenwriter Charles Bukowski be honored with a commemorative U.S. postal stamp to be issued on March 9, 2014, the twentieth anniversary of his death.

Charles Bukowski is uniquely suited for this honor. For in addition to being an acclaimed author with a growing international following, he is also perhaps the most famous American postal worker after Benjamin Franklin, and his landmark first novel "Post Office" is a wry portrait of the inner workings of the service where he was employed through age 49.

Bukowski's popularity among readers is unquestioned, but he has recently received a pair of honors which speak to his abiding reputation in American letters. In February 2008, the small cottage where Bukowski lived for many years was named a Cultural-Historic Monument of the City of Los Angeles, and in 2006 his literary archives were acquired by the Huntington Library.

A Charles Bukowski postage stamp would be a worthy tribute to a gifted soul who transformed himself from a middle aged civil servant into an international literary lion, and who never lost his sensitivity towards the ordinary lives of the people of his hometown of Los Angeles. I hope that you will seriously consider this proposal at your next meeting.

Yours sincerely,
The Undersigned

As of today, 510 people have signed the online petition; the goal is 10,000. The deadline is March 1. Oh well.

Quote of the Day: Jake Dobkin

2010-02-03T13:44:00.002-05:00

"I don't think a paper that loses millions of dollars a year and funds itself by taking extortionary loans from plutocratic Mexican billionaires can be said to be competing in anything, Metro or otherwise. My feeling is you only get to congratulate yourself if you produce a great product and make money doing it— you don't get any points for doing just the first half. And that doesn't just go for you guys— I don't think any magazine or newspaper that supports itself by sucking on the teat of some old rich guy (or his heirs!) should be giving anyone else advice.

"Specifically in local, I don't think the Times has had an original idea in years. It's got a metro staff of what, 60 reporters, and look at all this innovation: Cityroom, which is a fairly lazy and sleep-inducing ripoff of Gothamist, and The Local, a recently closed ripoff of Brownstoner. Five years ago The Times could have bought the best local blogs in New York for a song— instead, they decided they could do it better in-house, and completely surrendered the 20-40 year old demographic to sites like ours."

That extended quote is from Jake Dobkin, the co-founder and publisher of the New York City blog Gothamist.com. It's part of his answer to a question the New York Times's David Carr sent him in advance of his appearance for a panel discussion on local news.

The biggest problem with Dobkin's insistance that the Times needs to start acting more like Gothamist in order to survive -- in his words, "doing less original reporting and more editorial curation" -- is that Dobkin's blog can't exist in its current form without bigger media sources publishing free content created by large staffs of reporters.

But Dobkin addresses that next:

"I've been asked a bunch of times whether I'm worried Gothamist won't have anything left to curate once the Times goes out of business. But I'm not— first of all, new billionaires seem to roll up every year with their vanity media products, dumping tons of new content at our doorstep. Rupert's new retread of the New York Sun has got to be worth a couple of dozen stories a day at least. Between those billionaire rubes, the dozens of mainstream media outlets that survive (radio, tv, local papers), and the hundreds of hyperlocal neighborhood blogs that spring up like mushrooms every year, I don't think we'll ever run out of local content to pass through our curation machine."

This is essentially what blogs like mine and his do: we cut and paste parts of original content from the web and either comment on it or just post it, congratulating ourselves for spotting it, acting as if we're providing a service.

Blogs at their worst are either parasitic aggregators of the stuff other people got paid to create or vanity projects that are little better than teenagers' diaries.

The best blogs either produce a lot of original content (nothing beats real research and reporting, even if it's phone calls or e-mails) or do such a good job amassing outside content that they become, like Gothamist, a valuable clearing house for local information and news. (When I want to know, for example, if there are any new details about a suicide on the subway tracks, Gothamist is far superior to the Times, or even local radio.) The other key to great blogging? Frequent posts. Yeah, I know.

Art Destruction

2010-01-27T10:54:00.008-05:00

After Picasso's 1905 painting "The Actor" was torn at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday when a woman tripped and fell into it, the Times has been compiling similar stories of art abuse.

Fine art insurance underwriter Robert Read told the Guardian in 2008, "The kind of incident where people fall across a cordon in a gallery is very unusual. Far more common is works being wrongly packed, dropped, or left on the tarmac when a plane gets diverted. If you left a painting out on the runway in Mumbai during monsoon season, for instance, you would have a problem."

All of this brings to mind the infamous incident at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in about 2000 when a weary man sat down on a $600,000 Ming Dynasty chair on display, apparently ignoring signs warning visitors not to touch the exhibits. He broke it. The rumor I heard at the time was that the man cried when he realized what he had done. As far as I know, he didn't get into any sort of trouble with the museum, and the chair was fixed.

Or another story about the British artist Damien Hirst, whose 2001 installation at London's Eyestorm Gallery was mistaken for trash from the show's opening and thrown away by the night janitor. Hirst apparently laughed it off -- the piece, valued at six figures, consisted of "half-full coffee cups, ashtrays with cigarette butts, empty beer bottles, a paint-smeared palette, an easel, a ladder, paintbrushes, candy wrappers and newspaper pages strewn about the floor." It was easy to recreate.

Here is a list of art accidents from the Times and other sources:

2006: Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino baron , put his elbow through a Picasso that he was about to sell for $100 million more than he paid for it--all in front of a small audience of friends that included Nora Ephron and Barbara Walters.

2004: A clear plastic trash bag filled with paper and cardboard is tossed from the Tate Britain by a cleaning crew. It was part of German artist Gustav Metzger's "Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art," a new version of a piece he did in 1960.

1980s: A Joseph Beuys piece consisting of a dirty bathtub is scoured clean by janitors.

Artist Tracy Emin, in a string of bad luck, has two paintings in an Edinburgh gallery accidentally damaged by visitors in separate incidents, and then has another piece damaged by the staff of the National Galleries of Scotland.

2006: A 42-year-old man trips down some stairs at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England and crashes into three Qing Dynasty (17th century) vases worth about $800,000.

2000: Sotheby's, the auction house, puts a Lucian Freud drawing still in its packing box through a large shredder, thinking the box was empty. The drawing was worth $157,000.

Rembrandt's huge 1642 painting "Night Watch" has been attacked at least three times since 1900. In 1975, a mentally ill man cut zig-zags in the painting. In 1990, another crazy person threw acid on it.

2001: A glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly valued at about $50,000 is broken during preparation for an evening event at the Victoria & Albert in London.

Recently, an unnamed Upper East Side couple loses four Impressionist works when a housekeeper throws away packing crates (which turned out not to be empty) from a seasonal move from their Hamptons home.

A Giorgio de Chirico painting called “Piazza d’Italia,” hanging in an apartment in the Netherlands, has a hole punched through it when a demolition on a neighboring building gets out of hand.

iPhone Art

2010-01-26T16:24:00.003-05:00

Portugal-born New York-based artist Jorge Colombo has been making sketches on his iPhone with an application called Brushes weekly for the New Yorker since mid-September last year. The idea for the series came after his June 1, 2009 cover for the magazine.

“I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself,” Colombo told the New Yorker. The artist, whose first contribution to the magazine appeared in 1994, said that the Brushes app lets him "paint" in the dark, and also work discreetly in public.

The process is captured with another app, Brushes Viewer, which records the creation of the painting without including the parts that are erased when the artist makes an error or changes.

And for good measure, here's one of the elevated section of the F and G trains in Brooklyn over the Gowanus Canal. This view shows the entrance to the Smith-9th Street Station.

Is Avatar Racist?

2010-01-12T14:24:00.011-05:00

Some critics are seeing racist themes in James Cameron's dazzling new movie, Avatar.

The story, which is told more or less in its entirety through the trailers promoting the film, is simple: An alien race makes their home over a deposit of rare ore on a strange planet. Humans coming to mine the ore are looking for a way to displace the aliens. While scientists study the aliens by using hybrid alien-human bodies that humans control via electronic telepathy, mercenaries hired by the mining company prepare to force the aliens to leave. Our hero, a mercenary, gets the opportunity to control one of the alien hybrids. He falls in love with the aliens, their way of life, and one of their princesses. He turns on his mercenary bosses and he and the scientists that control the hybrid alien bodies, or avatars, revolt against the mining company and try to save the aliens from destruction. You can guess how it ends; it's Hollywood, so it really can't end any other way.

So what about this could be racist? It's the same in many movies. A white man comes in and saves a primitive but more "spiritually enlightened" culture from his own people. As David Brooks pointed out in the New York Times recently, the "White Messiah" theme is central to Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai (2003) and Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990), among many other movies.

"It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic," wrote Brooks. "It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades."

So why would Cameron use such a crude, predictable, even offensive plot? The conservative Weekly Standard's John Podhoretz (whose bitterly negative review called Avatar "among the dumbest movies I've ever seen") had a theory:

"The thing is, one would be giving James Cameron too much credit to take Avatar--with its mindless worship of a nature-loving tribe and the tribe's adorable pagan rituals, its hatred of the military and American institutions, and the notion that to be human is just way uncool--at all seriously as a political document. It's more interesting as an example of how deeply rooted these standard-issue counterculture clichés in Hollywood have become by now. Cameron has simply used these familiar bromides as shorthand to give his special-effects spectacular some resonance. He wrote it this way not to be controversial, but quite the opposite: He was making something he thought would be most pleasing to the greatest number of people."

While Podhoretz's review had many of the earmarks of classic conservative cries against Hollywood liberalism ("Don't smear the profit motive!" admonished Ayn Rand in the 50s), he's spot-on about the pandering, after-thought plot.

No one, Podhoretz included, thinks the plot is the point; it's the effects. But let's take a closer look at these "White Messiah" plots.

Ironically, the White Messiah plot is a liberal device. It celebrates marginalized, colonized and "primitive" cultures, pitting them unfavorably against our more technologically and militarily sophisticated culture. They are weaker, but more in touch with the land. In American lore, they are the "Noble Savage," the Native American. They also represent the desire to leave modern society and get back to basics. They represent a respect for the environment even while they revel in a warrior's way of life.

To me, the "White Messiah" plotline is used by writers and directors of a liberal bent, like Cameron, to create a character that their audience (which they assume in America is predominantly white) can relate to instead of trying to create a sympathetic character from whatever colonized group the story focuses on. Through the white interloper, the audience learns about the colonized culture and, along with that interloper, begins to sympathize with them. Now, to highlight the cultural value of the colonized group, the writers have our hero become their champion. He doesn't merely fight for them, he saves them. Or at the very least, he sacrifices everything he can for them, firmly establishing their cultural and spiritual value by becoming one of them--as much as he can.

I don't believe that it is the writers' intention to appear racist. With a limited understanding of a different culture, and the burden of helping the dominant culture relate to the other, Hollywood has chosen to show us these groups through white eyes. It's a condescending cop out.

It reminds me of cultural critic Edward Said's charge that Napoleon's France stormed into Egypt and studied the culture so thoroughly that it owned it, and taught it about itself as a way to control it.

For a nice antidote to the "White Messiah" story, read Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American. Or see the 2002 film version starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. This nuanced tale effectively predicted the Vietnam War and America's place in it. The story, which was taken in part from Greene's experience as a reporter in Saigon, revolves around a British reporter (Michael Caine in the recent film), an American CIA agent (Brendan Fraser), and a Vietnamese woman in love with both of them (Do Thi Hai Yen). Greene's story criticizes the liberal American temptation to "rescue" Vietnam from both the French colonizers and Northern Communists.

Quote of the Day: Stanton A. Glantz

2010-01-05T12:45:00.004-05:00

“This is like someone just put a bunch of plutonium in the water supply.”

That hysterical outburst is from Stanton A. Glantz, the director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. He is equating the appearance of a character who smokes cigarettes in the new blockbuster "Avatar" with an act of terrorism on our our infrastructure.

The character is a scientist named Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver, who studies a tribe of 10-foot tall blue humanoids on the planet Pandora. In the movie, Augustine and others control hybrid alien bodies through a sort of transfer of consciousness, using a nervous system link.

James Cameron explained the character thus:

“She’s rude, she swears, she drinks, she smokes. Also, from a character perspective, we were showing that Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body, which again is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.

“I don’t believe in the dogmatic idea that no one in a movie should smoke. Movies should reflect reality. If it’s O.K. for people to lie, cheat, steal and kill in PG-13 movies, why impose an inconsistent morality when it comes to smoking? I do agree that young role-model characters should not smoke in movies, especially in a way which suggests that it makes them cooler or more accepted by their peers.”

Cameron told the Times that he doesn't support smoking as a habit, adding, "and neither, I believe, does ‘Avatar.’"

The attitude of Glantz and other anti-smoking crusaders is spastic. No, of course we shouldn't encourage smoking, but nor should we pretend it doesn't exist. Must every feature film be a battle ground for smoking? Do directors and producers have the responsibility to rewrite characters if they exhibit certain vices? Do these films change when such elements are removed? Ask the Mormons; they've censored Cameron's films before.

All of this reminds me of the zeal that removed the barely visible cigarette from the hand of Clement Hurd, illustrator of the children's book, "Goodnight Moon" on the jacket photo. It's just stupid.

It shows a disrespect for history, intellectual property, and art. It also shows an arrogance about indivdual causes, a need, so strong, to keep the world from smoking, that everyone must change their ways to accomodate it. Nevermind that some representations of smokers are either representations of reality or subtler character studies illustrating precisely your anti-smoking message.

How to Sound Smart, Part One

2010-01-04T15:37:00.005-05:00

1. Alternative spellings will make you write smarter. Feces spelled faeces smells much smarter.

2. Alternative pronunciations will make you sound smarter. To every possible proper noun, emphasize the last syllable: Ralph Lauren, for instance, must become Ralph LaREN. Steven Seagal, a name that in lesser hands might be pronounced SEEgul, becomes SeGALL. Instantly more sophisticated.

The Press Junket and the Future of Journalism

2010-01-04T12:54:00.008-05:00

Mike Albo, a freelance writer who penned the Critical Shopper column in the New York Times, was fired by the paper late last year for going on a press junket sponsored by Jet Blue (and others) to Jamaica. The catch was that Albo wasn't going there to write for the Times. Still, his agreement with the paper stipulated that he could not ever accept a free trip. After his firing was examined and re-examined all over the Web from groups as varied as Gawker and Daily Finance, Albo said this to Gawker today via e-mail:

"I am not embarrassed. I am more in awe, and also sad and disappointed that I am no longer writing the Critical Shopper column. I really enjoyed it...I especially loved giving talented, struggling designers and independent retailers well deserved attention. Despite all this, I only have good things to say about the staff and the editors there. Also the Times pays very efficiently. I have always been simultaneously obsessed and grossed out by our commercial culture: how media infiltrates our lives, how we are all becoming part-product, how branding imprints on the brain, how actresses in hollywood are now required to have faces that look like smooth flounders, how Underminers thrive like cockroaches within this system. Pretty much everything I write - monologues, plays, novels, comedy sketches, freelance articles - deals with these themes in some way. This experience has clarified a lot of suspicions I had about the bizarre and blurred Commercial Industrial Complex in which we live. I don't expect to stop writing about these subjects... On the contrary, if anything good has come out of this, it's that my comedo-critical faculties have been given a electric jolt of energy. My knives are sharpened."

While it may on the surface sound like Albo was wrong to take the trip and crazy to think he could get away with it, consider this from Gawker's Foster Kamer:

"The lesson, of course, being that travel stories can only be written to the Times standards when the Times foots the entire bill. In order to do that, the writer has to pay for the story upfront, and after, has to be compensated for expenses. Some problems, here:
1. Do you really think broke freelance writers can afford to do this?
2. Do you think a newspaper that is experiencing buyout after buyout or layoff after layoff can really afford to cover both expenses and a writer's fee?
3. Is it really in the best interests of the Times to fire good writers because they're sticking by rules made when publications could afford to cover writers' travel journalism expenses?
"The answer, for most freelancers in New York, and—going out on a limb, here—for the New York Times, in light of their recent money problems: no."

There are two illusions journalism students have about media that I'd like to shatter. First, that there is some separation between the editorial side of a magazine or newspaper and the advertising side. There are idealists out there, yes, but the truth is that neither print nor online versions of dailies and monthlies can survive without making some concessions to advertisers who, pinched by the recession, need incentives to pony up ad dollars. Not that there weren't major conflicts of interest before.

The second illusion is that writers make a reasonable living, and are immune to gifts, perks and schwag. Freelancers have always worked without benefits and now are often asked to write for cheap or free. Staff writers are told by those at the top of their companies that they may not accept free shit from any advertiser, story subject or potential story subject. But in many cases, particularly in the lower levels of consumer and trade magazines, staff writers are told by their immediate superiors to take what they can get, the message being, "We don't pay you enough, so enjoy it; just don't talk about it."

And then think about travel writing for a moment. How often do you think writers who review luxury hotels and exotic locales actually can afford to pay for those trips? How often would a newspaper or travel magazine (or any magazine that has a travel story in it) have a budget to pay for a writer's days-long stay in fancy hotels with meals at expensive restaurants? And how often do you read luxury travel stories that aren't glowingly positive? What must happen, more often than not, is that local chambers of commerce or tourism boards foot the bill, helped by hotels, resorts and other groups.

This is what's happening in the comfy parts journalism. Constant conflicts of interest, free gifts from the very groups that writers are assigned to scrutinize, and tacit bribes that aren't called bribes because the stakes are deemed to be too low. Now imagine what could happen when you combine the following:

1. Underpaid, overworked journalists;

2. Newspapers struggling for advertisers and owned by corporate interests or wealthy ideologues, losing money every year;

3. Stories about political and corporate corruption in which individuals and groups are paid off between tens of thousands and hundreds of millions of dollars to help ferry in or cover up deals worth much more.

And it all starts with the journalist who lives paycheck to paycheck, watching his or her college chums raking in salaries ten times as high in the corporate sector. Or is the weak link those ad-starved papers who are urged to bury or not pursue the tough stories?

There is no future of journalism. It isn't sustainable for writers or our democracy.

Tiger Woods vs. Terror Attacks

2009-12-21T11:55:00.004-05:00

As Mediaite's Glynnis MacNicol points out, the New York Post ran Tiger Woods' infidelity as a cover story for 20 consecutive days as of Friday December 18, 2009. That beats the 9/11 attacks' 19-straight cover stories in 2001. (See the Post's cover archive here.)

Quips MacNicol, "Tiger Woods is apparently just as good, or better, at selling newspapers and magazines due to bad behavior as he is at selling sports paraphernalia due to good golf behavior."

That's true. But what does it say about the Post's 9/11 coverage? Only that it was another hot cover story.

It's Giant Menorah Season

2009-12-16T12:41:00.004-05:00

Yes, it's Giant Menorah Season again in Brooklyn. This year, the Caton Avenue overpass on Ocean Parkway featured a new, more modern menorah. In previous years, as longtime readers will recall, the Caton Avenue menorah was lit by Colemen propane lanterns. No more: the menorah has gone electric. Now there's an extension cord running from the menorah, along the chain link fence on the overpass, over the frontage road and into a nearby apartment building's basement window.

And the roofrack menorah below was spotted on Brooklyn's Prospect Park West.

More on the Bedford Bike Lane

2009-12-16T12:30:00.002-05:00

"There are people who are trying to play that the nudity is the issue, but it's not," South Williamsburg resident Leo Moskowitz told the Gothamist blog today. "The main concern is the safety of our kids. There are lot of institutions and families on that Bedford Avenue stretch, and we are always really concerned about the kids being picked up and dropped off. There are sometimes small accidents where the cyclists are violating the law because they don't stop for flashing school buses."

And those small accidents are much less desirable than cyclist deaths like this one. And this one, this one, and this one.

Gothamist also reported that 50 nude and scantily clad bicyclists will ride through the 14 blocks of Bedford Avenue that no longer has a bike lane in protest of its removal.

Bad Review: The New Yorker on Artist Urs Fischer

2009-12-14T15:22:00.004-05:00

Since New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl's deliciously nasty review of the Urs Fischer show at the New Museum is so short, I'm posting it in its entirety:

“Why must the show go on?” Noël Coward wondered. The question recurs apropos a desperately ingratiating Urs Fischer exhibition at the New Museum. Frail japes by the mildly talented Swiss-born sculptor—the international art world’s chief gadfly wit since Maurizio Cattelan faded in the role—are jacked up to epic, flauntingly expensive scale. There are huge aluminum casts of tiny clay lumps (you can tell by the giant thumbprints), walls and a ceiling papered with photographs of themselves, and big mirrored blocks that bear images of common objects. When a hole in a wall is approached, a realistic tongue sticks out of it. A faux cake is suspended in the air by hidden magnets. It’s all nicely diverting—but from what? If you spend more than twenty minutes with the three-floor extravaganza, you’re loitering. The New Museum could just as well not have done the show while saying it did. The effect would be roughly the same: expressing a practically reptilian institutional craving for a new art star.

36-year-old Fischer is a Swiss artist who lives and works in New York. The New Museum exhibit is his first solo show in the U.S. The image above shows the detail of Fischer's piece "Noisette," (2009) which the New Museum describes as "a motion-activated plastic tongue
pops out of a hole punched in the wall, in a mischievous slapstick routine."

New York Magazine's art critic Jerry Saltz is kinder than Schjeldahl, but his praise is muted:

"Thrill seekers, be forewarned: There’s bravura work but no drop-dead moment here. Each of Fischer’s three floors is beautiful, and each has an elfin elusiveness and deep material intelligence. They also have dead spots and duds."

Glenn Beck on Art

2009-12-12T13:57:00.000-05:00

Fox News host Glenn Beck played art critic back in September, calling out some old architectural reliefs across Sixth Avenue from News Corp HQ at rival NBC's Rockefeller Center as either fascist or communist. It looks more like an attack on NBC (and his arch enemy, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, not to mention Rachel Maddow) than an honest look at public art and its meanings then and now.

Beck's meaning is clear: Rockefeller was both a communist sympathizer and fascist (jn this case Mussolini) sympathizer. And that NBC and "progressives" in general continue this legacy.

Beck's hysteria about a pair of reliefs showing one man holding a hammer and another holding a sheaf of wheat and a sickle is a bit like the nonsense about "Nazi" swastikas appearing on Indian-made handbags for the Spanish chain Zara (no, the Indian factory wasn't being anti-Semetic; they don't see swastikas the same way, and Zara didn't catch it until the bags made it to shops). In both cases, we have old symbols that gained very specific meanings for European dictatorships, tainting them for the West for generations.

The reliefs were carved in 1937 by Carl Paul Jennewein, an American born in Germany. Tyler Green of the blog Modern Art Notes explains:

The sickle and the hammer have been used separately to signify agrarian interests and workmen or craftsmen in art respectively since at least the Byzantine period. In the 19th and 20th centuries the hammer and sickle were often fused in a range of European symbology, in both provincial heraldry and in state insignia. It wasn't until 1922 that the Red Army adopted them as a state symbol. (It became the Soviet state symbol in 1923.)

Green can't find any evidence that another Rockefeller Center sculpture, one that Beck connects to Mussolini, has any such connection. That sculpture, "Youth Leading Industry," pictured above, was created out of glass blocks by Attilio Piccirilli in 1936. Piccirilli, a friend of New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, contributed sculptural works to monuments all over the country, including the state capital buildings of Wisconsin and Virginia. Sounds like material for a follow up segment on Beck's show. The imagery in Piccirilli's Rockefeller Center piece is pretty benign. Ironically, notes Green, Piccirilli was picked as an artist because he was an American. There was a public outcry after a previous decision by Rockefeller to use European artists like Picasso and Matisse on such projects. Why would Rockefeller have chosen an American artist, one close to Mayor LaGuardia (who served 1934-1945), only to let him depict Mussolini? It doesn't make sense.

Beck's final target is Diego Rivera, who was commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1934 to create a mural for a Rockefeller Center lobby. The mural was called "Man at the Crossroads" (see detail above). Beck's failure to grasp historical fact becomes painfully clear here: he accuses Rockefeller of literally commissioning a piece of commie art, and yet the mural was famously destroyed the year it was made after it embarrassed the family and the building's management. It was recreated by Rivera the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City later.

But Beck won't let history get in the way of his message.

The Williamsburg Bike Lane Debate

2009-12-10T17:54:00.005-05:00

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, generally a friend to bicyclists, has helped get new bike lanes added to busy streets all over the City. These narrow lanes are little more than visual buffer zones for bikers, and they may not protect them from getting doored by parked cars, but some statistics say biker injuries and deaths drop significantly when such lanes are painted in.

Bloomberg ordered a lane removed on a section of Bedford Avenue in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn recently. Why? The story goes that the Hasidic community through which the bike lane flowed was offended by the scantily clad hipster women who rode by. Can that possibly be true? It seems too moronic to be real that even very conservative religious people would think that a bike lane would have any real affect on what some young women wear passing through. It's even more unbelievable that a mayor would listen.

But that's how almost all media reports have it. Here's a synopsis from the New York Post in September 2008:

Leaders of South Williamsburg's Hasidic community said yesterday that bike lanes that bring scantily clad cyclists - especially sexy women - peddling through their neighborhood are definitely not kosher.

The red-faced religious sect is calling on city officials to eliminate the car-free lanes on Wythe and Bedford avenues, and to delay construction of a new one planned for Kent Avenue.

"I have to admit, it's a major issue, women passing through here in that dress code," Simon Weisser, a member of Community Board 1 in Williamsburg-Greenpoint, told The Post.

In the beginning of the month, the City announced that 14 blocks of the Bedford lane would be removed, with bikers re-directed to the Kent Avenue lane. About a week ago, bike riders calling themselves "self-hating Jewish hipsters" videotaped themselves re-painting the lane (see video below). They were arrested, charged, and the lane was removed again.

One bike activist (and notice here that all parties are Jewish, both pro-bike lane and anti-bike lane; only in New York), Baruch Herzfeld, who Gothamist describes as "an Orthodox Jew who runs a South Williamsburg bike clubhouse," had this brilliant rant upon Mayor Bloomberg's trip to Denmark for the climate change conference:

"How can Mayor Bloomberg go to Copenhagen and pose as a green mayor after this? He's a hypocrite, and I believe his office directed the DOT to remove this bike lane as a political favor for the rabbis, who want to keep South Williamsburg a ghetto enclave. There was no discussion with the community, like with the Kent Ave bike lane. And this bike lane was just a visual reminder for drivers to keep their eyes open for cyclists. But the rabbis don't want a visual reminder that there are other people in the neighborhood besides the Hasidim.

"One woman asked me if she should go topless [during an upcoming protest] and I told her no, because we're not trying to create more confrontation with the Hasids, who actually hate the rabbis much, much, much more than I do. The Hasids in the community are not the problem; they give me the thumbs up when I bike by, and even Hasidic women have told me they really approve what I'm doing. They hate the rabbis for trying to control their lives, intimidate them and scare them."

An article in the Jewish Daily Forward from August -- the single-best article about this bike lane mess -- explains that part of the problem is that the Satmar sect of Hasidic Jews who live in this part of Williamsburg are not only averse to men and women wearing shorts. They think that bikes are for children. Adults ought not to ride them.

Herzfeld, who was the subject of the Forward story, has little patience for such restrictions: “For the love of God — I’m Jewish, you’re Jewish, borrow a bicycle. Who are we hurting?” His bike club has hundreds of bikes for local residents to borrow.

But the issue for the Satmar Hasidim is really about isolationism. They resent the gentrification by young hipsters, and the fight against the bike lane is one way they've found to resist change.

David Lynch Cares About New York

2009-12-10T11:22:00.004-05:00

This "public service announcement" was apparently created by filmmaker David Lynch and photographed by Frederick Elmes, the cinematographer who worked with Lynch on Eraser Head (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), and Wild at Heart (1990).

I remember seeing short films and ads like the famous "Crying Indian" public service announcement in school in the early 80s. Before the "Just Say No to Drugs" campaign (and concurrent with all the PSAs about "Bad Touch" and avoiding strangers in vans), the anti-litter/anti-pollution propaganda was everywhere.

Because these messages sunk in so deep with me and most of my peers, it's jarring to see someone tossing their cigarette pack's cellophane into the breeze. In New York, it's often hard to tell if littering is an act of defiance and protest against a city that doesn't care, or a thoughtless reflex to unburden one's self of waste. Either way, it's common.

Quote of the Day: George Lois

2009-12-07T16:37:00.008-05:00

Why do all magazine covers look alike these days? There's a simple formula for many -- it applies to Esquire, Vogue, and Men's Health alike: photo of famous person + cover lines. George Lois, the legendary designer of some of Esquire's best covers from the 60s (including this Andy Warhol cover from 1969), calls this underwhelming committee design process a "group-fucking-grope."

Celebrity covers are a shortcut. With famous people on covers, people who are merely beautiful aren't necessary. And creative design never enters into it -- the only must with a celebrity cover is Photoshop, which is used to trim a woman's waist and pump up a man's arms. We're rewarded for recognizing some popular idiot, then we're pulled in by inanities as "Six Pack Abs!" and "Get a Six Pack: Be a real man," and "Lose Your Gut!" (All on Men's Health covers). And "No exercise diet: what happens when you quit the gym," and "Jennifer Aniston: What Angelina did was very uncool" (both from Vogue).

Lois ranted to Black Book recently. Here are some choice bits:

"Magazine design is almost an oxymoron with most magazines today. It goes for even a great magazine like Vanity Fair. If you get even one inch of white space to breath you’re lucky. Everybody’s just packing in the information. Most magazines you pick up — you choke to death."

Designers are always at odds with editors in the battle for page space. It's even worse now that ad pages are down: editors need every square inch they can get. Lois blames the internet for the need to jam information onto printed pages. It's funny, but the way I've always seen it, just the opposite has been happeneing. Articles have gotten shorter, photos have gotten larger, and magazine writing has been dumbed down. Where else besides the New Yorker among mainstream magazines can you find features longer than 2,500 words? (And often three or four feature longer than 2,500 words in a single issue.)

Here's Lois again:

"The design was the idea. I don’t design, if you know what I mean. If you want Andy Warhol being devoured by his own fame in a can of Cambell’s soup, you just put the can there and you have him drowning in it. Case closed.

"You’re knocked down by the idea, and the fact that it’s got complete clarity visually. Don’t complicate it with busy work.

"That’s the way I do everything. If I was a doing a magazine, it’s not a question of if I’d be having more white space. It’s a question of every third or fourth spread I’d make a spread that would take your breath away — or piss you off. Or something.

"I know, you’re pressured by your editor. If not the editor, the publisher: ‘Look at all this wasted space here.’ Blah, blah, blah. ‘Your readers want information.’

"Well, oh shit. Go fuck yourself."

Now I like that.

Below: covers that don't overwhelm with words or disappoint with pictures. From Vogue, covers from 1939, 1945 and 1952. See more here.

And from Esquire, covers from 1958, 1959, and 1965. See more here.

The Tiger Woods Mess

2009-12-03T16:01:00.003-05:00

The biggest problem with the Tiger Woods media frenzy? It's that the commercial image we have of the golfer, carefully crafted over ten years by his sponsors, is a total sham. He was, and has always been a womanizer at worst and a regular guy at best -- not the family-friendly hero we've been told he was.

Charles P. Pierce, who profiled Woods for Esquire in 1997, giving us a glimpse of the real man, has updated his assessment. Here's an excerpt:

"I can't say I'm surprised — either by the allegations or by what's ensued since Friday's wreck. Back in 1997, one of the worst-kept secrets on the PGA Tour was that Tiger was something of a hound. Everybody knew. Everybody had a story. Occasionally somebody saw it, but nobody wanted to talk about it, except in bar-room whispers late at night. Tiger's People at the International Management Group visibly got the vapors if you even implied anything about it. However, from that moment on, the marketing cocoon around him became almost impenetrable. The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeless brand easily peddled to sheikhs and shakers. The perfect marriage with the perfect kids slipped so easily into the narrative it seemed he'd been born married."

Back in 1997, Pierce was in a limo with Woods when the golfer says to his driver, a former college basketball player, "What I can't figure out is why so many good-looking women hang around baseball and basketball. Is it because, you know, people always say that, like, black guys have big dicks?"

This is Tiger Woods. Brash, awkward, sort of a jerk. (The answer to his question: Women don't hang around golfers because golfers are not athletes.) As amazing as Woods' golf skills are, his acting out may be -- consciously or unconsciously -- a product of all the issues contained in that inappropriate question to his driver: race and sports, race and sex, race and golf. And add to that all of stresses of corporate sponsorship, and it was just a matter of time until he went nuts.

Choice Excerpts From Recent Negative Reviews

2009-12-01T12:15:00.003-05:00

From Alexander Zaitchik's review of the movie 2012 on killingthebuddha.com:

"Moments after the entire Indian subcontinent is violently subsumed by water, Emmerich expects us to bunch our fists over the fate of a yappy purse dog. But we don’t. Even the best-trained American audience has by then long transferred its allegiance to the side of apocalypse. It is simply not possible to make it into the second hour of this film and not root for the cosmic clusterfuck to hurry up and finish its business with every last member of the species responsible for Roland Emmerich. Nothing makes a catastrophic polar shift seem overdue like a stylized product placement for Bentley Motors, set against the death of a billion Chinese."

From James Wood's review of Paul Auster's new novel "Invisible" in the New Yorker:

"The classic formulations of postmodernism, by philosophers and theorists like Maurice Blanchot and Ihab Hassan, emphasize the way that contemporary language abuts silence. For Blanchot, as indeed for Beckett, language is always announcing its invalidity. Texts stutter and fragment, shred themselves around a void. Perhaps the strangest element of Auster’s reputation as an American postmodernist is that his language never registers this kind of absence at the level of the sentence. The void is all too speakable in Auster’s work. The pleasing, slightly facile books come out almost every year, as tidy and punctual as postage stamps, and the applauding reviewers line up like eager stamp collectors to get the latest issue. Peter Aaron, the narrator of 'Leviathan,' whose prose is so pressureless, claims that 'I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me.' Not enough silence, alas."

Is The Baffler Back?

2009-11-20T15:34:00.008-05:00

The Baffler, which was founded in 1988 by Thomas Frank and Keith White in Chicago, was a magazine of cultural criticism. It spawned two essay/article collections (Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age, 1997, and Boob Jubilee: The Cultural Politics of the New Economy, 2003) and helped turn Frank into a respected cultural and political commentator.

But The Baffler ran into problems around the time its offices in Chicago burned down in mid-2001. It all but ceased publication in 2003. Its 17th issue was released in 2006.

When I posted a nostalgic reference to The Baffler yesterday, I got a quick comment from someone who said that it had been revived, along with the e-mail address, contact@thebaffler.com. My message to that address bounced back, and the website, www.thebaffler.com, has little information beyond that e-mail address and the announcement that it is in fact back.

It might be. In June this year, the New York Observer reported that Frank was bringing it back and that some of its former writers and some prominent new ones had agreed to write for it. Its new publisher, the Observer reports, will be Conor O'Neil, who started an ambitious lecture and arts group while an undergraduate at Northwestern. The Observer said the first new issue was scheduled for October.

The Baffler also seems to have a Facebook page, and as recently as November 9, the page was updated to say that new issues would be available in bookstores and newsstands later in the winter.

In the meantime, here's another excerpt from a favorite article from The Baffler, circa the early 90s. The article was called "Harsh Realm, Mr. Sulzberger!" and it was about a hoax played upon the New York Times by an annoyed former Sub Pop records employee named Megan Jasper.

In November, 1992, the Times' Style section ran an article about the "grunge" scene in Seattle, and included a list of grunge jargon. That list was completely made up, as The Baffler revealed later:

"Convinced that 'all subcultures speak in code,' the Times went looking for some colorful argot from the Seattle rock scene and Ms. Jasper was only too happy to oblige them with some of the most inspired fake slang outside of Monty Python. Thus the Newspaper of Record dutifully repeated her comical assertions that youth in the Pacific Northwest regularly refer to their torn jeans as 'wack slacks,' platform shoes as 'plats,' people they don't like as 'Lamestain' or 'Tom-Tom Club' or 'Cob Nobbler,' and that they often spend time 'Swingin on the Flippity-Flop.'"

The icing on the cake was that Seattle band Mudhoney started using some of those terms in interviews to help perpetuate the hoax.

Here, from the November 15, 1992 edition of the New York Times, is the full list of grunge slang terms.

LEXICON OF GRUNGE: BREAKING THE CODE

All subcultures speak in code; grunge is no exception. Megan Jasper, a 25-year-old sales representative at Caroline Records in Seattle, provided this lexicon of grunge speak, coming soon to a high school or mall near you:

WACK SLACKS: Old ripped jeans

FUZZ: Heavy wool sweaters

PLATS: Platform shoes

KICKERS: Heavy boots

SWINGIN' ON THE FLIPPITY-FLOP: Hanging out

BOUND-AND-HAGGED: Staying home on Friday or Saturday night

SCORE: Great

HARSH REALM: Bummer

COB NOBBLER: Loser

DISH: Desirable guy

BLOATED, BIG BAG OF BLOATATION: Drunk

LAMESTAIN: Uncool person

TOM-TOM CLUB: Uncool outsiders

ROCK ON: A happy goodbye

Jasper worked for Sub Pop, not Caroline -- the Times got that one wrong too. Read the rest of the story in Commodify Your Dissent.

A & R

2009-11-19T14:31:00.005-05:00

When a friend used the term A&R in conversation to refer to a record company's talent scout, we realized that neither of us knew what the A and the R actually stood for.

"Artists and Repertoire," says Wikipedia. Scrolling down, I see that this particular page has been vandalized by someone who doesn't like American Idol. Right below the heading for the job description, someone entered:

SIMON COWELL IS A TOTAL SPOILT WANKER.

But scrolling down further, I see a reference to an old article from The Baffler, a great but now defunct periodical out of Chicago that was started by Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America".

The article, called "The Problem With Music," is by Steve Albini, a musician who's been in bands like Shellac and Big Black. He's also an audio engineer and a producer.

This excellent (but depressing) critique of the music business, circa 1993, starts like this:

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”

And he does, of course.

Quote of the Day: Sarah Palin

2009-11-19T13:42:00.004-05:00

"If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?”

That, according to a number of sources, including the Los Angeles Times and The Atlantic Monthly, is the wisdom of "rogue" ex-governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.

She apparently posed the question in her new book, "Going Rogue: An American Life".

I think I have the answer to Ms. Palin's question. I've been thinking about this for some time, and I really think I've got it: God obviously intended for us to eat animals, which are made of meat, because he made vegetables out of vegetation. I mean, it's like how people aren't made of meat. Because we don't eat people, right?

Take that, haters.

2009-11-10T14:42:00.001-05:00

Fake AP Stylebook on Twitter

2009-11-06T14:50:00.004-05:00

Usually, the twits who tweet on Twitter seem less like super-networked representatives of tomorrow's technology today and more like a small group of middle-aged ego-maniacs endlessly updating each other on daily minutiae while a story-starved media "reports" on the finer bits.

But, as in poetry, there are occasional gems. Like the Fake AP Stylebook. As a writer reluctantly bound to follow the Associated Press's thin and vague style guide, I found this quite helpful. Here are some choice examples:

Avoid the archaic term "lunatic." Specify whether the subject suffers from Hulkamania or Macho Madness.

Replace "situation deteriorated/worsened" with "shit [just] got real." Ex: On day three of the hostage crisis, shit got real.

While it’s tempting to call them ‘baristi’ because of the Italian roots, the plural of ‘barista’ is ‘journalism majors.’

Use ‘student’ to refer to college attendees, and ‘coed’ to refer to really hot students.

Robots should only be referred to by gender-neutral pronouns, no matter how sexy they may be.

If you cannot find the source of a quote, make one up. Nobody's reading your story anyway. Get over yourself.

When describing the subject of a story's "assets," be sure to make the next sentence, "You know what I'm talkin' about."

The plural of "vagina" is "vaginas." The plural of "penis" is gross, nobody wants to read about that.

Always capitalize 'Bible.' You don't want to get letters from those people.

Dates should be formated as MM/DD/YY except for the years 1990 through 1992, which should be denoted in 'Hammer Time.'

Use the quintuple vowel to transcribe the utterances of small children, "Daaaaaddy, I waaaant a Pooooony!"

Since the 1986 edition, the plural of McDonald's is officially McDonaldses.

The word "boner” is not capitalized, regardless of size.

Use quotation marks to express skepticism: Cher’s “Farewell Tour,” Creed’s “Best Album,” Jay Leno’s “comedy.”

Quote of the Day: Hank Pantier

2009-11-06T13:02:00.003-05:00

"If you stuff five pounds into a two-pound container, it doesn't make the five pounds smaller. It just makes it stranger-looking and uncomfortable."

Colorado man Hank Pantier, 35, is talking about his wife, 40-year-old yoga instructor Mary Pantier. She's one of thousands of American women who pack themselves, sausage-like, into modern-day spandex corsets from Spanx.

The Wall Street Journal discussed the ins and outs of Spanx -- which has been endorsed by Oprah -- in a recent article featuring some horror stories. For example, women find themselves trying to secretly ooze out of these products before one-night stands; others find it difficult to use the bathroom. Hank Pantier tells his wife she feels like a tire when she wears Spanx.

It's Election Day

2009-11-03T15:30:00.006-05:00

Both New York City and Minneapolis have mayoral elections today. But who to vote for? Here are a few of the candidates you may not have heard enough about.

New York City

Jimmy McMillan of The Rent is Too Damn High Party: McMillan, who looks like a black Hulk Hogan, has a simple platform -- "There Is Nothing Else To Talk About!" he says of the City's high rents. His website is a collage of articles, images, clipart and animated graphics bearing the message, “We apologize for the bad grammar. But... your rent is still too damn high.” Yes, it is.

McMillan, who has run for mayor (unsucsessfully) before, made news recently when the damn Board of Elections made him shorten the name of his party. McMillan argues that the longer name wasn't a problem when he ran in 2005, and that the Board is trying to censor him on religious grounds.

McMillan told New York Magazine:
"I had a hell of a day, man. I would love to put on my website that the Board of Elections can suck my dick, I would love to do that, but I got little children going to my website, I can't do it, the motherfuckers. I would love to, before every one of them go to bed at night, suckin' my damn dick. That's what I'd love to put on my website. Every fuckin' one of them, you know."
So he was forced to change the party name on the ballot to: "The Rent is Too High Party."

His website is full of odd quotes and anecdotes, like this one, next to an animated graphic of a man running:

"Slow down Jimmy
I cant People are getting evicted like crazy.
We gotta do something Rent is too damn high.
Help us stop this 'High' Rent madness. Please, HELP Us..."

McMillan is running against incumbent Mike Bloomberg and Democrat Bill Thompson.

Minneapolis

John Charles Wilson of the Edgertonite National Party: "In May 1982," writes Wilson on his homepage, "I saw my first vision of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who told me that She is God, I was right to be a Communist, and that she would give me a message to preach to the world. I realised this wouldn't endear me to the traditional Communist Party USA, so I planned to start my own political party."

And so the Edgertonite Party was born. Wilson, who calls himself an Author/Minister/Politician/Transit Historian, says he was "a political prisoner in the mental 'health' system from 1983 to 1987."

The Edgerton he refers to is "The Nation of Edgerton," which is a 240-mile radius of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Edgertonite party website explains:
"We are a non-traditional Communist party, based on the ideology of Lauraism: the belief that Laura Ingalls Wilder is God, Communism (public ownership of business) is the best form of government, age of consent laws should be repealed, public transit should be returned to the routes, fares, and schedules of 18 September 1970, the Nation of Edgerton should secede from the United States as a Lauraist homeland, and all people, including children, deserve as much personal liberty as possible consistent with public safety and the rights of others. Capitalism is a per se violation of people’s rights by exploitation."
As creative and amusing as that is, one begins to suspect Wilson may be a little too interested in the freedom of children. In a bad way.

Joey Lombard is Awesome: Lombard explains his party's name on his blog:
"People tell me it's sad that I chose to use 'Is Awesome' as my political idea. They seem to be under the impression that I think simply being awesome will be enough to win an election. That's not the case at all. While I think it's awesome that I'm the first person in Minneapolis' history to be officially designated as 'awesome' and have since decided that being notarized awesome is enough to RUN for office, I know it's not enough to win. I'm not stupid. The reason I said I'm awesome is because I'm on a limited budget. I can't afford to put tens of thousands of dollars into yard signs and mailings. I wouldn't anyway because that's horribly wasteful and I'm a hippy."
That post is signed, Joey Lombard, Practically the mayor. Lombard graduated sub cum laude from Patrick Henry High School in 2005, according to his website.

Wilson and Lobard are running against incumbent RT Ryback and a large pool of others.

Victor Wong

2009-10-30T16:56:00.006-04:00

Victor Wong, an actor who starred in nearly 30 movies including John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness, was a renaissance man who only began making movies later in life.

His face, which for the latter half of his life was affected by a form of nerve paralysis, was widely recognizable for its lopsidedness, a trait that may have helped his film career but effectively ended his earlier broadcast television career.

As an obituary from 2001 in the Sacramento News & Review said:

"He was at varying stages a teenage Christian evangelist, a Protestant minister-in-training, a Buddhist, a visual artist, a poet, a Beat Generation luminary, a Merry Prankster, a pioneering photographer and broadcast journalist, a comedian, a successful stage performer, a teacher, a mentor to younger writers and filmmakers, and, in the end, possibly one of the most famous Chinese-American character actors in Hollywood."

He was born in San Francisco, the son of a poet and advisor to Chiang Kai-Shek (then Taiwan's president) in 1927. At one point he wanted to be a Baptist minister. Later, he went to UC Berkeley to study political science and journalism.

Discovering acting in college, he hooked up with the Second City Comedy Troupe and performed with actors like Alan Arkin.

While in Chicago, he went back to religion, enrolling in the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Theology and studying under Paul Tillich, Rheinhold Niebuhr and Martin Buber.

He was one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and appeared as the character Arthur Ma in Jack Kerouac's novel Big Sur.

In the 50s, he studied art under Mark Rothko at the San Francisco Art Institute, exhibiting his work at his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti's famous San Francisco bookstore, City Lights.

Victor Wong died on September 12, 2001 at his home in Sacramento.

Quote of the Day: Andres Duany

2009-10-30T13:07:00.002-04:00

“When I originally thought of New Orleans, I was conditioned by the press to think of it as an extremely ill-governed city, full of ill-educated people, with a great deal of crime, a great deal of dirt, a great deal of poverty. And when I arrived, I did indeed find it to be all those things. Then one day I was walking down the street and I had this kind of brain thing, and I thought I was in Cuba. Weird! And then I realized at that moment that New Orleans was not an American city, it was a Caribbean city. Once you recalibrate, it becomes the best-governed, cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated city in the Caribbean. New Orleans is actually the Geneva of the Caribbean.”

That's Cuba-born architect Andres Duany, talking to Wayne Curtis in this month's Atlantic Monthly. The article, "Houses of the Future," gives a tour of the new affordable, compact, and high-tech homes of post-Katrina New Orleans -- starting with some built by Brad Pitt's charity.

Duany is not like the other architects who are working on homes in New Orleans. “The high design? That has nothing to do with reality,” he scoffs. “That’s just architectural self-indulgence.”

And not many of the people who have brought their expertise and money to the city know what they're doing, Duany argues:

“All the do-goody people attempting to preserve the culture are the same do-gooders who are raising the standards for the building of houses, and are the same do-gooders who are giving people partial mortgages and putting them in debt. They have such a profound misunderstanding of the culture of the Caribbean that they’re destroying it. The heart of the tragedy is that New Orleans is not being measured by Caribbean standards. It’s being measured by Minnesota standards.”

Duany is one half of Duany Plater-Zyberk, a Miami-based firm. Duany and his partner, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, are among the co-founders of Congress for the New Urbanism.

Duany Plater-Zyberk is most famous for designing the town of Seaside, Florida, a New Urbanist development that started in 1979. The resort town, which has narrow streets and cozy houses with porches, was featured in the 1998 movie, The Truman Show.

My Favorite Horror Movies

2009-10-30T10:16:00.007-04:00

I'm struggling to come up with a common theme in these five films. Some of them are great because they aren't as explicit in what they show. Encounter at Raven's Gate builds tension and doesn't let us down they way War of the Worlds did when it revealed the aliens. But others, like Re-Animator, are so explicit, it's delightful. On the other hand, Prince of Darkness succeeds as a horror movie because it takes itself so seriously. Near Dark takes a tired genre and makes it new with a decidedly un-gothic setting and chracters. Phantasm is an adolescent fantasy done well. Here, just before Halloween, are five of my favorite horror movies:

1. Prince of Darkness (1987, dir. John Carpenter)

Prince of Darkness came out a year after Big Trouble in Little China and featured a couple of the same actors -- Victor Wong and Dennis Dun. The plot was clever: an obscure Catholic order of monks in Los Angeles seeks help from physicists and ancient history scholars when a dark secret that they've guarded for more than two thousand years threatens to leak. Donald Pleasance (who will be familiar to horror fans as Dr. Loomis in 1978's Halloween, also by Carpenter) plays the head priest who goes to Howard Birack (played by Wong), a professor of theoretical physics at a public university. When Birack brings his students and some other professors to study the ancient secret in the church's tombs, bad things start to happen. Look for a cameo by Alice Cooper, playing a demonically possessed homeless man.

2. Re-Animator (1985, dir. Stuart Gordon)

Based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, this gorey horror movie stars Jeffrey Combs, a great character actor who has played at least three species of aliens in the Star Trek franchise. Combs is Herbert West, a medical student who studied under a controversial doctor in Switzerland doing research on...re-animating dead tissue. After a public disgrace involving the death (and failed but near re-animation) of his mentor, he comes to a small town medical school in New England to finish his studies. Not happy being forced to abandon his mentor's research, Herbert West starts doing experiments, and his more conventional roommate, played by Bruce Abbot, is getting worried. This movie is disgusting, offensive, and hilarious.

3. Near Dark (1987, dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

Near Dark, one of the best, most stylish and understated vampire movies ever made, stars much of the cast of the previous year's Aliens. Lance Henriksen is the patriarch of a group of nomadic Southern vampires, with Jenette Goldstein and Bill Paxton as his wife and son. Their younger vampire daughter, Mae, played by Jenny Wright, meets Adrian Pasdar's Caleb in small town Oklahoma one evening. When she can't bring herself to kill him, he reluctantly joins their traveling killing spree. Never is the word "vampire" mentioned in this movie, nor do we really see much in the way of fangs. These vampires are refreshingly unbound by traditional vampire lore and baggage; they are Southern white trash. Despite that characterization, director Kathryn Bigelow (who later did Point Break and Strange Days) gave Near Dark an art film sensibility, as befitted her background -- she studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Whitney Museum.

4. Phantasm (1979, dir. Don Don Coscarelli)

This low-budget classic looked much better than it should have. Special effects like shiny silver flying spheres with retractable blades and drills were apparently thrown like baseballs and then played back in reverse. The story is set in a small town (as so many are). A boy witnesses strange goings on in the local cemetary after his parents die and discovers that the undertaker (played brilliantly by an actor named Angus Scrimm) is re-animating dead people, shrinking them down to half-size, then transporting them to a red planet with higher gravity for slave labor via a portal in the funeral home. Woah.

5. Encounter at Raven's Gate (1988, dir. Rolf de Heer)

This Australian movie is, on the surface, an alien encounter story. What makes it so great (unlike the recent remake of War of the Worlds, which was fantastic up until a certain point) is that we never really see the aliens. Steven Vidler plays an ex-con who comes to work on his brother's farm in the outback. Slowly, this rural community is terrorized by strange incidents. The nature of them -- lights in the sky and power failures, for example -- is the only thing that seprates this tale from a classic ghost story. It's been years since I've seen this, but its creepiness is very memorable.

I'm looking for something great to watch on Halloween. Anyone have any suggestions? Please comment.

Quote of the Day: David Carr

2009-10-28T16:52:00.002-04:00

"It is a riddle of modern magazining that during a period when staffs are expected to file early and often to the Web to make sure that publications have a significant digital presence, all the while still making the print product, that they are now confronted by dramatic cuts in staff that raise practical issues of getting the work done."

Well said. That's David Carr, writing in the New York Times today about all the cuts Forbes is making.

In other news, the owner of a small chain of upscale men's apparel stores here in New York told me last night that his business is back. Why? Finance guys are shopping again. The pen is not mightier than the dollar.

Scenes from Movies I Can't Find on Netflix

2009-10-03T13:02:00.006-04:00

Black Cat White Cat (Serbian, 1998, dir. Emir Kusturica)

Bleeder (Danish, 1999, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)

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Jar City (Icelandic, 2006, dir. Baltasar Kormákur)

Idioterne (Danish, 1999, dir. Lars Von Trier)

Good news: West 32nd Street, a film by Michael Kang about Manhattan's Koreatown staring John Cho (of Harold and Kumar fame) and Grace Park (Battlestar Galactica), is finally coming out on DVD this month.

The Bronchitini

2009-10-03T11:39:00.004-04:00

When confronted with a nearly empty liquor cabinet and a yearning for a cocktail, One must innovate. After a recent bout with bronchitis, I found that I had a nice stock of cherry-flavored cough syrup. A new cocktail was born.

Ingredients:
2 ozs. gin
one-quarter tsp cough syrup

Start with a chilled martini glass. Swirl the quarter tsp of cough syrup in the glass to coat it. Shake 2 ozs of gin in a cocktail shaker with ice to cool it. Pour gin into the cough syrup-coated martini glass.

Notes: I've attempted this drink with a cough drop as a garnish, but it becomes sickly sweet. The beauty of the cough syrup is that it's sweet, but not too sweet. A tiny bit adds a bittersweet edge to the gin, and flavors it quite subtly. I used prescription cough syrup, but over-the-counter varieties would certainly work. I'd avoid children's cough syrup (too sweet). The amount of codeine in a quarter tsp of cough syrup will be negligible, so go ahead, make two.

Urinals of the World

2009-10-03T11:36:00.002-04:00

The New Cooper Union Building

2009-10-03T11:34:00.000-04:00

Cilantro Cocktail

2009-10-03T11:19:00.003-04:00

This is adapted from a drink called a "Puebla" served at Applewood in Brooklyn.

Ingredients:
2 ozs. tequila
2 quarter-inch slices of jalapeño
1 lemon
1 tsp agave nectar
lots of fresh cilantro

Pack a third of a large lowball glass full of cilantro leaves. Squeeze the juice of one lemon into the glass. Add jalapeño slices (the more seeds you leave in, the hotter). Muddle. Add tsp of agave nectar to sweeten it, then add two ozs of tequila.

Shake everything in a cocktail shaker and strain into a large lowball glass with three ice cubes and garnish with cilantro.

Notes: It's easier to muddle in a short glass, rather than a cocktail shaker. Lemons seem to work better than limes in this drink. Honey may be reasonable substitute for agave nectar, but I haven't tried it. The true amount of cilantro will vary by taste, but aim for about one loosely packed cup. Using better tequila will be rewarding.

Cilantro and its Enemies

2009-10-02T10:59:00.005-04:00

A certain percentage of the population, it turns out, has a fierce hatred for cilantro. I had this in the back of my mind as I told a couple of friends about a delicious drink I had at a Brooklyn restaurant, a muddled cilantro and jalepeno-infused tequila concoction.

"I hate cilantro," one friend said. "Apparently I'm one of those rare people for whom cilantro tastes like bleach or dish soap."

My friend is not alone. Not even remotely. How did I not hear more about this before?

ihatecilantro.blogspot.com (there used to be another cilantro hater's website, ihatecilantro.com, but it is now a virus-generating mess -- don't go there.) has a handy "guide to cilantro-free restaurants." The blogger tries to mitigate her hatred by pointing out that she loves so many other things:

"...how could I or you or anyone so passionately hate something as much as cilantro without loving so much else, in fact most else, of nature's bounty, as foodies insist on calling it, or food, as I like to think of it."

People get weird about their food dislikes.

I should know: I hate cheese. I'll eat mild, tasteless mozzerella on pizza, but I'll pull it off if there's too much of it. I won't eat cheeseburgers. The smell of parmesan cheese is like an unbathed European to me. Feta smells like it sounds: like sweaty feet.

My hatred is so strong that I'm convinced there's a genetic component. I've gotten in heated arguments about this, and even ruined a relationship before it got off the ground because of it (The conversation went, "So if I had you over to my parents' house, you would refuse their food?" To which I responded, "yeah, if all they offered me was cheese." It was downhill from there.). But my brother feels the same way, so maybe it really is genetic.

Whatever it is, it's so strong in us that we characterize it as an allergy, partly because it literally makes us sick to our stomachs, partly because no one understands it or takes it seriously otherwise.

There is apparently genetic research that suggests, if I'm understanding this right, that vegetables like broccoli taste extra-bitter to some people, perhaps as an evolutionary mechanism to keep us away from compounds that would inhibit thyroid function. But there's also research that says that people who avoid bitter foods have higher risks of cancer because they aren't getting essential nutrients.

But back to cilantro. In a Wall Street Journal article from February, a cilantro hater recalls driving 20 miles to return a cilantro-tainted burrito, demanding a replacement "immediately."

Why do some people hate it so rabidly? It probably is genetic. An article on NPR.org explains that some people will not smell the lemony/limey freshness, but instead detect only an unpleasant bitter, soapy smell. The rest of us don't get that at all.

There may be another component at play with people who have strong flavor dislikes. So-called "supertasters" apparently have more taste receptors than the rest of us. A New York Times article from the late 90s explains that taste researchers divide the world into three groups:

A quarter of all people tested are nontasters, half are medium tasters and a quarter are supertasters -- people who react violently to PROP [6-n-propylthiouracil]. Medium tasters say the substance is bitter, but they are less sensitive than supertasters to small concentrations. Genetically speaking, two medium taster parents can produce a supertaster or a nontaster child, or a medium taster like themselves.

In looking at people's tongues with a special blue dye, researchers have found that supertasters have as many as 1,100 taste buds per square centimeter of tongue, while nontasters have as few as 11 buds per square centimeter.

I'm clearly not a supertaster; I love bitter foods and spicy foods. The article continues,

Supertasters find many sugary foods to be sickeningly sweet. Frosting is yucky. Saccharine has a strong aftertaste. Coffee is too bitter, and alcohol too sharp. Hot peppers and ginger produce an unpleasant burn. Food should be tepid.

The website supertastertest.com sells the PROP test for $4.95.

As we learn more about why some of us hate certain foods, will we become more tolerant of food quirks? It's hard to imagine not being chided to try stinky cheese by zealous moldy dairy lovers.

Glenn Beck's Mormon Conversion

2009-09-21T16:11:00.005-04:00

Glenn Beck, the weepy-eyed rabble rouser who has been out Limbaugh-ing Rush, converted to Mormonism in 1999. Mormonism, which now boasts at least as many members as all of Judaism (by most accounts, each have about 13 million worldwide), has been called the fastest growing religion in the world.

Then again, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, there are only about 4 million active members, and Seventh Day Adventists are growing faster. And, for every Glenn Beck, there's a Harry Reid, who once said, "I think it is much easier to be a good member of the Church and a Democrat than a good member of the Church and a Republican."

The Future of Journalism

2009-09-21T12:44:00.005-04:00

Fact #1: Journalism is hemorrhaging jobs. From an article in Editor & Publisher:

"Unity: Journalists of Color's 2009 Layoff Tracker Report shows an average 22% increase from month to month in journalism jobs lost from September 2008 through August 2009. The general economy lost jobs at an average monthly pace of about 8% during that time, according to Unity."

Fact #2: Even ice cream men make more than journalists. This former finance guy, Bill Sonner, made $350,000 as a trader at the New York Stock Exchange. Now he makes about double what a lot of low- to mid-level journalism jobs pay -- about $60,000 to $80,000, he says.

Fact #3: A first year cop for the NYPD will make more than I do as a writer:

"Under the agreement, the January 2009 Police Academy class will have a starting base salary of $40,361 and goes to $41,975 on August 1, 2009. When adding holiday pay, uniform allowance, and average night differential; a first-year Police Officer will have a total salary of $46,228 before overtime."

Fact #4: NYC Subway workers, even trash collectors, make more than I do. As of 2005, the year of the transit strike, the average subway cleaner made $40,000 a year. Wrote the New York Times, "According to the [MTA], the average subway or bus operator earns nearly $63,000 per year. The average subway conductor earns about $54,000. The average station agent earns about $51,000."

Fact #5: Freelance writers are not doing well either -- even experienced freelancers. This one is supplementing his income as a lifeguard at a Brooklyn public pool.

Quote of the Day: Ernie Anastos

2009-09-17T13:35:00.004-04:00

As a New Yorker and a casual fan of Fox5 news, I found this apparent gaffe from last night's news particularly amusing. Ernie Anastos, one of the anchors, may have meant to tell weatherman Nick Gregory to "keep plucking that chicken," but it came out as "keep fucking that chicken." As the U.K.'s Telegraph noted (why are they covering American local news?), "Keep fucking that chicken" appears to have no widely-understood meaning." Either way, it's really weird.

Note the look on anchor Dari Alexander's face when he says it.

Slavoj Zizek on Vegetarians

2009-09-15T22:36:00.000-04:00

Quote of the Day: "President" Obama

2009-09-08T15:43:00.003-04:00

"I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things."

How dare you, Mr. "President."

The full text of the speech is here.

Crop Art at the Minnesota state Fair

2009-09-07T12:54:00.007-04:00

Crop Art became a competition category in the Agriculture/Horticulture Building at the Minnesota State Fair in 1965. For years, the late Lillian Colton (she died two years ago at 95) dominated the annual contest with her portraits of famous people, but there have been other great crop artists as well.

Alan Carpenter, who won best of show in 1999 with a triptych of Lawrence Welk, the Mitchell, South Dakota Corn Palace, and North Dakota accordion player Myron Floren showed an award-winning "Self Portrait with First Ladies" this year. This odd portrait depicts a monkey on Laura Bush's back and a parrot on Nancy Reagan's shoulder, with haloed Alan Carpenter in the center.

This Farah Fawcett piece by James Buhler shows great detail and contrast -- very careful choice of seeds for color gradations.

Likewise this official-looking portrait of President Obama.

Below is a 2004 interview with Lillian Colton, showing her making a crop art portrait.

Minnesota's Biggest Pig

2009-09-07T12:52:00.005-04:00

This sleeping boar is 1,310 pounds.

Quote of the Day: Paul Mooney

2009-08-27T11:33:00.003-04:00

“If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they’re not happy.”

So says comedian Paul Mooney in Chris Rock's new documentary "Good Hair". Mooney was quoted in the New York Times yesterday in an article that explored the politics of black women's hair. Is it selling out to straighten it? Is not straightening it a political statement? Or is it fashion? Or is it convenience?

Michelle Obama straightens her hair. But when her 11-year-old daughter Malia wore her hair in twists for a trip to Rome, the conservative blogosphere reacted bizarrely.

“For black women, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” said UC Santa Barbara professor of black studies Ingrid Banks, quoted in the Times article. “If you’ve got straight hair, you’re pegged as selling out. If you don’t straighten your hair, you’re seen as not practicing appropriate grooming practices.”

So which is "blacker," straightening or not straightening? And why is highlighting and dyeing not considered unnatural? White women with curly hair straighten, too, and white women get extensions. And yet the fact that the desire to modify one's hair is universal doesn't seem to make the issue less racial for black women.

2009-08-20T19:15:00.002-04:00

I saw this beautiful shortened Volkswagen bus at the Back to the Fifties weekend at the Minnesota State Fair earlier this summer.

In related news, Britain's "best A-Team van replica" is for sale for a mere £30,000. That's about $50,000 right now. It's normally for hire as a special event limo (£400 for the first hour, £50 per hour thereafter; £1 surcharge per mile from Bristol.).

The Dover-Calais Hovercraft

2009-08-11T13:03:00.003-04:00

When I was in the U.K. ten years ago, a friend and I crossed the English Channel by giant hovercraft. To see one of these things start up, with those giant swivelling propellers, the whole thing rising as the skirt inflates, is amazing. It's at least as big as the Staten Island Ferry -- which is to say the size of a small building -- and yet it glides across the cement landing like it's on ice.

Riding in one is delightful. It's quick, and it's noisy. But it's very comfortable.

Prior to that, my only experience with such a machine was a G.I Joe hovercraft my friend Jeff had when we were growing up. I guess I didn't know whether or not they really existed commercially -- I figured they were more like jet-packs and flying cars.

And so it was sad to see that the U.K.'s channel hovercrafts have been taken out of service. See below.

Dictator Kitsch

2009-08-11T12:03:00.009-04:00

When former President Bill Clinton was in North Korea to rescue former Vice President Al Gore's wayward reporters, he was photographed with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il in front of a huge and garish mural.

It's dictator kitsch, writes, Eric Gibson in the Wall Street Journal this week:

"'Kitsch' has become a byword in the culture for anything over-the-top or tacky. In art, it’s meaning is more specific. It refers to works trafficking in facile, base or false emotions—most often sentimentality—and whose imagery is off-the-shelf and formulaic, a debased version of a once-original aesthetic idea. Need to conjure that warm-and-fuzzy feeling? Cue the fiery sunset. Looking to express fragile innocence? Bring on the shoeless urchin carrying the bird with the broken wing."

Later in the article there's a great anecdote about a Russian artist who was employed by the Soviet Union as a creator of Socialist Realist art. After the fall of the Soviet Union, his transition was clumsy: "so ingrained were his earlier habits that every time he painted the face of Jesus, he wound up with a likeness of Lenin."

In fact, there isn't so much difference between religious kitsch and kitsch employed in the service of totalitarian regimes. Take this poster of Moroni, a character from the Book of Mormon. Aside from the fact that it looks computer-generated, like something out of a late-90s era video game, the rays of sun could just as easily indicate religious themes as socialist ones.

Perhaps a better example, one from the same company Real Hero Posters, is this one of the Bible character Ruth. Here, we see a proud agricultural scene, complete with dramatic sunlight, sheaf of wheat, and a low perspective that makes the figure look large and heroic. This looks positively Soviet, yet it's quite the opposite.

Obituary: John Hughes

2009-08-07T14:05:00.006-04:00

Before today I assumed that any movie John Cusack did prior to 1990 was among writer/director John Hughes' many 80s era teen movies. In fact, Better Off Dead (1985) was wriiten and directed by Savage Steve Holland, who also did One Crazy Summer a year later. The Sure Thing (also 1985) was a Rob Reiner movie, and Say Anything (1989) was written and directed by Cameron Crowe.

So what did John Hughes direct? It's actually only eight movies:

Sixteen Candles (1984)
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Weird Science (1985)
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987)
She's Having a Baby (1988)
Uncle Buck (1989)
Curly Sue (1991)

He wrote far more, including:

Mr. Mom (1983)
Vacation (1983)
European Vacation (1985)
Pretty in Pink (1986)
Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)
The Great Outdoors (1988)
Christmas Vacation (1989)
Home Alone(1990)

He continued to write for Hollywood; his name appeared in the credits for recent drivel like Drillbit Taylor, Maid in Manhattan, and all five Beethoven movies (the ones about the big dog).

Although I've seen enough bits of each to fake it, I've never sat down and watched the entirety of Pretty in Pink or The Breakfast Club -- two of Hughes' most famous movies. As a child of the 80s, I loved Ferris Bueller's Day Off. But looking at his oeuvre, I realize that the sum of it is greater than the individual parts. Making allowances for the teen comedy genre, Ferris Bueller may be the only really good movie Hughes did. None were great. Many resonated strongly with white, middle class and upper-middle class kids who grew up in the 80s.

I was pleased to see a respectfully dissenting view of Hughes' work from New York Magazine's movie critic David Edelstein. "I found it gruesomely unfunny," he wrote of Sixteen Candles. "I often found his films difficult to watch. I didn’t buy the relationships, and I couldn’t get past the self-pity and anger." He was bothered by "Hughes' racist stereotypes" (Sixteen Candles foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong comes to mind here).

Edelstein is as puzzled as the rest of us about what happened to Hughes' career:

"At the height of his success, Hughes got strange, and stories abound of his unpleasantness. (I interviewed him once for a Rolling Stone story I decided not to write and found him neither nasty nor nice—not indifferent, just… neutral.)"

To most of us, he just dropped off the face of the earth, sort of like an 80s moviemaker version of J.D. Salinger. But he was actually more like fellow 80s writer/director Savage Steve Holland, who, after Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer kept working steadily, but did nothing anyone has ever heard of. It's just as sad, really, but at least he made a living.

John Hughes died of a heart attack in Manhattan. He was 59.

Who Dares Question the Scottish-ness of Haggis?

2009-08-07T12:05:00.003-04:00

Not Scottish novelist Alexander McCall Smith. He's defending the offal dish in yesterday's New York Times. Apparently, someone found a haggis recipe in a 17th century English cookbook. But is that proof that the English came up with haggis before the Scots? McCall Smith:

"Of course there was no published Scottish recipe for haggis before then, for the simple reason that it would have been quite unnecessary for Scots to publish a recipe for something that everybody in Scotland knew how to make. Why state the obvious? It’s as simple as that."

He continues, saying that Scots well know that it was their culture that came up with television, golf and whiskey (not the American, Dutch, or Irish cultures).

I should note that there are some who claim that it was the Chinese, those creators of noodles, the compass, gunpowder, paper, and printing who invented golf. And maybe skiing, before the Norwegians.

It's a matter of pride to me that my people, the Minnesotans, invented the post-it note, scotch tape and masking tape, water skiing, frozen pizza, indoor shopping malls, spam, roller blades and the snowmobile.

Haggis, which is traditionally sheep's offal with spices and oatmeal stuffed into a sheep's stomach, is one of my favorite culinary treats.