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My movie-going pal Sara Vilkomerson agrees about the difficulties of “Cloverfield”:
After seeing I am Legend, with the haunted empty Manhattan streets, and the rabid virus-mutated zombies, and the German Shepherd, etc., you might think you’d be prepared to watch Cloverfield.
And you’d think wrong!
And the Times review is brutal.
Emma Goldman on Maxim Gorky, 1914:
We in America are conversant with tramp literature. A number of writers of considerable note have described what is commonly called the underworld, among them Josiah Flynt and Jack London, who have ably interpreted the life and psychology of the outcast. But with all due respect for their ability, it must be said that, after all, they wrote only as onlookers, as observers. They were not tramps themselves, in the real sense of the word. In “The Children of the Abyss” Jack London relates that when he stood in the breadline, he had money, a room in a good hotel, and a change of linen at hand. He was therefore not an integral part of the underworld, of the homeless and hopeless.
On 8 p.m. on Friday the 18th—hey, that’s tomorrow!—there’ll be a totally fun-nuts-sounding anti-war cabaret party-performance at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square Park South, New York City. The organizers promise nudity, beer, song, dance—and no donation requested. (This is highly unusual!) Performers include Larry Krone, Julian Fleisher, Miguel Gutierrez, Kenny Mellman and something called the “Channels of Blessings Choir.” (Added bonus: I should be there with my hair down, having finally thrown off the shackles of the tyrant blog-emperor Kottke.)
While you were having a life, this was taking place quite rapidly on the tubenets.
I’ve turned my T.V. on just one time in 2008. I rarely miss it at all, except for a very few moments when it’s like missing heroin. (Some relief coming: eight episodes of “Lost,” beginning January 31; ten episodes of “Battlestar Galactica” coming in March.) Yesterday for a job I was talking with two bigwigs, an actor and an actor-director; they said they were both in a weird state of both crunch and inactivity because of both the Writer’s Guild strike and the maybe-upcoming Screen Actor’s Guild strike, which I had totally forgotten about. (That 120,000+ member union may strike in June, over the same issues—profit from new media—that sent the Writers Guild out more than two months ago.) That’s when I realized: I can’t take a world without actors! Sure, they’re not as useful as deli owners or baristas to my life. But I like looking at them! Maybe it’ll be averted: The Directors Guild is close-ish to a settlement, which might be a template for the writers, which might be sort of a template for the actors. In any event, I asked the nice Oscar-winning lady what sort of things she liked about working: “I have health insurance, that’s enough,” she said. Mm, I should get a union then! Some health insurance sounds good right about now.
Letter to the editor, New York Times, August 25, 1993:
(Yes; today you are all being the victims of a project for which I’m urgently neck-deep in research.)The East Village is awash in criminal activity and antisocial behavior, which blatantly occurs all through the day and escalates as the sun goes down. At 7 A.M., when I walk my dog, the area looks like a war zone. Crack vials, human feces, used condoms and hypodermic needles litter the sidewalks, building entryways, halls and stoops. Junkies are roaming the streets uprooting flower beds to look for the drugs they hurriedly stashed the night before.
This summer will be the 20th anniversary of the Tompkins Square Park riot. From the New York Times, August 6, 1993:
In a playground off Avenue A, Gerry Griffin watched Emily, her 18-month-old towheaded daughter, run after flying bubbles. Ms. Griffin said she enjoys the renovated Tompkins Square Park.
“For people with kids, it’s a dream come true,” she said. “I was against what they were doing, but I am really enjoying the effects of it.” […]
“They said they tore down the bandshell because people slept in it,” said Ruth Silber, who has lived near the park for 26 years. “Pretty soon they’re going to destroy all the subways because homeless people sleep in the subways.” […]
Farther up Avenue A, two officers on mopeds sat inside the locked gate, talking about Saturday, the fifth anniversary of the 1988 battle. They told visitors to come back then if they wanted to see some action.
Do they expect trouble? “I hope so,” one officer said as he rode off.
Letter to the editor, New York Times, June 23, 1993:
If landlords could double or triple the rent on vacant apartments, it would be a compelling incentive for them to try to drive current tenants out by any means necessary. (During the East Village’s gentrification in the 1980’s, my landlords neglected or cut off heat and hot water, called us late at night to tell us to leave, let crack addicts stay in warehoused apartments and rented storefronts to drug dealers.)
Under luxury decontrol, what would stop them from renting only to tenants who make more than $100,000 a year to get apartments permanently deregulated? Warehousing would burgeon as landlords kept apartments vacant for months waiting for a sucker to pay top market rent.
New York Times, September 29, 1991:
She began asking $132,000 for her studio in 1988 and has since lowered the asking price to $115,00, but has not had a bid.
Another owner in the Christadora House bought her 1,100-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment for $270,000 in 1986 has been trying to sell it for 14 months. She first asked $305,000 and has lowered her price to $260,000. Her only offer so far, which she rejected six months ago, was for $220,000.
Two blocks away, on 11th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B, the owner of a two-bedroom co-op on the top floor of a renovated five-story tenement has received a bigger blow. He paid $186,000 for it a year ago and has been trying to sell it for four months at $89,000. So far, no takers.
New York Times, October 23, 1994:
These days you can walk into the St. Marks Bookshop and find his second novel, “The Ice Storm,” on the same shelf as James Michener and Cormac McCarthy, thanks to alphabetical order…. [H]e makes nearly all of his income from writing. And lives in a state of at least intermittent dread. “This minute I’m sitting here being interviewed,” he mused, “and in five years I won’t be able to get published.”
Most hide behind a smile because they are afraid of facing the world’s complexity, its vagueness, its terrible beauties. If we stay safely ensconced behind our painted grins, then we won’t have to encounter the insecurities attendant upon dwelling in possibility, those anxious moments when one doesn’t know this from that, when one could suddenly become almost anything at all. Even though this anxiety, usually over death, is in the end exhilarating, a call to be creative, it is in the beginning rather horrifying, a feeling of hovering in an unpredictable abyss. Most of us habitually flee from that state of mind, try to lose ourselves in distraction and good cheer.
Two major media companies issued statements about workplace values in the last 24 hours or so. From New York Times owner Arthur Sulzberger’s in-house “diversity and inclusion” reminder email this morning: “Our Company is committed to diversity and inclusion, and our goal is to provide a stimulating, supportive environment where employees can thrive and grow, sharing their many experiences, attitudes, cultures and viewpoints.” Okay, fine!
But here’s from new Tribune Company owner Sam Zell: “Discrimination based on gender, age, race, religion, national origin, marital status, sexual orientation, disability, or any other characteristic not related to performance, ability or attitude, protected by federal or state law, or not protected (such as inability to tell a joke, the occasional poor wardrobe choice or bad hair day), is strictly prohibited…. Working at Tribune means accepting that sometimes you might hear a word that you, personally, might not use. You might experience an attitude that you don’t share.” Wow. (PDF download, via LA Observed.)
And there’s also this in the new Tribune manual: “Under Rule #1, you may want to think twice before you enter into an intimate relationship with a co-worker. When you start, it might seem like a good idea. It’s when you stop, or the wrong people find out (and they will) that you could discover that perhaps it wasn’t.” That is THE BEST ADVICE EVER. Does Sam Zell live… in the real world? Also in the new Tribune Manual: “It’s good judgment not to put in writing what you don’t want printed on the front page of a newspaper. Or posted on a web site. Or heard on the news.” This thing reads like it came out of some wacky internet startup. (Disclosure: I’m taking money from both companies. Uh, for now!)
“In what will be history’s largest gathering of U.S. veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Iraqi and Afghan survivors, eyewitnesses will share their experiences in a public investigation.” Washington, D.C., March 13 - 16, 2008.
The Kronos Quartet is playing at Carnegie Hall late next month—and on the program is Clint Mansell’s “Requiem for a Dream Suite,” which is its New York premiere, sort of.
I had to go uptown to interview some people this afternoon and Laurie Anderson’s “Live in New York” came on the headphones on the way, which made me think about “Cloverfield” and 9/11 and “too soon” again. “Live in New York” was recorded at Town Hall on September 19 and 20, 2001. Is it in my mind, or does she sound uncomfortable singing “I feel like I am in a burning building and I gotta go” on “Let X=X” (iTunes link)? Nexis doesn’t deliver any useful accounts of the concert—just a review from Newsday which is appreciative but not very descriptive. (Also, though, now we know that the name “Laurie Anderson” has appeared in the New York Times an astonishing 799 times, and, yes, nearly all of them are her.) Also I’m not convinced she doesn’t get choked up during (iTunes link ahoy) “Slip Away.” (“What’s this? A little dust in my eye.”) Anyway, somehow that wasn’t too soon.
Novelist (and former “Jeopardy” champion?) Arthur Phillips talks to Robert Birnbaum:
RB: I haven’t managed to read writers who I now see as cultish-Proust and Wodehouse.
AP: I have enjoyed him enormously. I don’t know that I’d read all 95 or 150 or 300 books or whatever it is-
RB: There’s an example of productivity or hypergraphia.
AP: There is a famous story-I’m going to get the details wrong, but he was in New York for a while and someone asked if he was hanging out at the Algonquin and he said, “I don’t know how those guys get any work done.” That’s the problem with Brooklyn-you have to really try not to meet other writers.
The audience at Saturday’s not-quite-Wu-Tang but still Clan show (it was minus RZA) was “almost uniformly white.”
Saw a screening of “Cloverfield” last night. New Yorkers say “too soon!” sarcastically a lot—but you know what? If we—me and another downtown Manhattan-residing friend—spent half an hour after the movie talking about what we did on 9/11, then it’s not imaginary that the film actively, consciously, and ill-advisedly uses such imagery. What’s weirder is that it was, like, the cast of “The O.C.” doing 9/11. Debate on this is ongoing on various internets. But also the movie is totally rad, in an amusement park/horrorshow way. CONFUSING.
Harm reduction programs, in which health workers work to reduce dangerous behaviors with both education and materials as near in time and space as possible to those behaviors, still get opposition in health departments. But for years we’ve known that teenagers who join abstinence-only programs are actually less likely to use condoms when they do have sex, and that they have STD rates nearly equal to teens who do not. Just last month, needle exchange was legalized in D.C., ludicrously late.
Yesterday afternoon, I talked to Joshua Volle. For the past few years he’s been the New York City Department of Health director of HIV community prevention programs; his last day at work was Friday. (We talked for a column I wrote for today’s New York Observer about the ongoing rise in new H.I.V. cases among young gay men, and it probably isn’t something most of you here want to read, as it is lewd, crude and sarcastic, so maybe don’t!) Volle, 50, left DPH largely because he has become a minister, but also: “I wasn’t in a place, in a position, where I could speak the truth that I know from my experience,” he said. “I was basically a bureaucrat middle manager, and that’s not my personality—nor is that why God sent me on this planet.”
There are still, Volle indicated, policy camps in conflict in the Health Department over HIV prevention policies. New York State has something called the Sanitary Code; in the City, it is still used to shutter gay sex establishments from which reports of unsafe sex are received. But in the rest of the state, closure is used as a threat—and establishments are not closed if such places work in cooperation with community-based organizations that promote safe sex on-site.
The City is now assessing its current policy, and is in receipt of recommendations from “a local alliance of health professionals, activists and club owners.”
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an incidence where a government has been able to control people’s behavior,” Volle said. He used Prohibition and drug laws as an example of how government crackdowns push people to the margins, away from the reach of harm reduction workers. Now, in New York City, private sex parties have become ever more difficult for health workers to find and enter. (Volle stressed that he was a fan of his former boss, Department of Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden, and called him a smart man who obviously cared deeply about the health of New Yorkers.)
“We are still seeing an increase in HIV,” he said, “so if the Sanitary Code was actually working, wouldn’t we not be seeing that increase? If we try going in full force with our community partners, to do risk reduction, maybe we could get a handle on this epidemic. But we don’t know, because we’ve never been given a chance. ”
“What we’d like to see is sex venues be kind of certified by the Department of Health, if they have these partnerships set up by community-based organizations,” he said. “And those that refuse? Guess what, you’re still out on a limb, you could be shut down, because the law is still on the record.”
“Rent,” the worst musical in the history of musicals, grossed more than $280 million dollars on Broadway since April, 1996—and grossed another $330 million in national tours. (The 2005 movie version of “Rent,” by the way, only grossed $31 million worldwide.) Because I’m a terrible judge of everything, I was convinced at the time that it would close in workshops. Now, at last, “Rent” will close on Broadway this June. Too late!
I may or may not be headed out to South Carolina this weekend—their Democratic primary takes place on January 26th—and the new way of learning about places before ya go is YouTube tourism. Apparently there is a lot of hunting (yikes!), fishing, and drag queens in blackface (double yikes). And then, on a much more serious note, there’s this short video of “Jared trying to live it up a few days before being sent to basic training at Fort Jackson, SC.” It’s posted a woman who wrote that “I am twenty years old..believe it or not. I am missing my husband terribly. He is at basic training in Fort Jackson, SC. He will be graduating in March. I can’t wait!”
Joe MacLeod, America’s best newspaper columnist, takes the art of phoning-it-in to dizzying new heights in today’s Baltimore City Paper:
Hey! It’s time to run a whole year of my every-other-weekly “column” through the “AutoSummarize” tool on Microsoft Word. This year it’s 20,684 words, boiled down to 4 percent of original size. Fun!
Apparently there is a new (and exceedingly posthumous) Klaus Nomi album; there are three way-out mp3s from it on this site. Today’s Village Voice published a little oral history of the East Village legend. There is also this incredible performance on YouTube—which, oddly, is of quite nearly exactly the music (or at least the harmonic progressions) from Michael Nyman’s “Memorial” from “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover”… which came out in 1989, though it was apparently first performed in 1985; Nomi died in 1983. Update: Ah ha! Rumors on the internet say the tune is based on Purcell.
In their ongoing quest to be the world’s greatest sports website—heck, the world’s greatest anything website—The Wizznutzz “found” some “never-before-seen personal letters from Pres. Richard Nixon written to Kevin Loughery shortly after the Washington Bullets lost in the 1971 Finals to the Bucks.” There’s a long meditative section on watching crows in a field in winter that is particularly stellar.
Jenny Holzer says it all. Any day with a trip to the oral surgeon is a day of ill omens. Hey, good news though! We’re getting Olafur Eliasson waterfalls on the East River! Here’s one of his 1998 waterfalls.
Gmail released a new mobile version. It is bulky, slow to load, and pretty yet irritating on the iPhone. I couldn’t be less happy about it, and had a fit in midtown last night trying to get my email. I suppose, like all new things, I will grow accustomed to it.
Vanity Fair’s Proust questionnaire, February, 2008:
Vanity Fair: “Which words or phrases do you most overuse?”
Karl Rove: “‘Fabulous!’ After that, ‘Look…’ followed by an explanation.”
The JobsNote is going on right now—ooh, shiny new Apple things. So far they’ve announced a movie rental program for your iPhone but there is still no cut and paste?
People are going whole-hog bananas today over a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, in which gay men arriving at hospitals and clinics in San Francisco and Boston were showing high incidences of truly nasty drug-resistant staph infections. Let’s panic! After all, Matt Drudge is teasing the story with an invented quote: “STRAIN OF SUPERBUG ‘MAY BE NEW HIV’…” But that language doesn’t actually appear anywhere, much less in the Reuters summary to which he links; it does not even appear in this story that uses that phrase as a headline. Mmm, fake horror! The study began sampling patients four years ago. If this was the new super-plague, we’d all be neck-deep in boils already.
91-year-old NPR man Daniel Schorr has had it up to here with you kids and your internets. [Warning, print link to avoid stupid registration window.]
Q: In some commentaries, you touch on the latest journalistic trends, sometimes in not so complimentary a way. Such as blogs and citizen journalism. Is this a form of news gathering that you embrace?
A: I can’t embrace it. Not after what I’ve been through at the hands of the copy editors’ desks. I have suffered many, many arguments about what I’ve wanted to say — whether it was grammatically correct, factually correct and all of that — and I want everybody to have to experience what I experienced. But today, your blogger is totally free. He is his own reporter, his own editor, his own publisher, and he can do whatever he wants.
A person like me who believes in the tradition of a discipline in journalism can only rue the day we’ve arrived at where we don’t need discipline or anything. All you need is a keyboard.
He suffered, so you should too, you undisciplined mouthers-off! Update: A reader writes: “You are not giving the man the respect he deserves. He did not suffer—he honed his craft in an environment that expected professionalism, balance and honesty. What is unfortunate today is that today’s professional media are not held to the same standards. Most, if not all bloggers, do not rise to the quality of a Daniel Schorr. Unfortunately, neither do most of his younger colleagues.”
Hedge fund manager John Paulson and investor Jeff Greene both became insanely wealthy over the subprime mortgage crisis. But how? (Parsing the Wall Street Journal is hard!) So Paulson “had to think up a technical way to bet against the housing and mortgage markets.” His guys bought up “collateralized debt obligation” slices, which are repackaged mortgage securities. (Kind of lost already!) His firm also bought up “credit-default swaps.” Paulson then opened a hedge fund shop, taking $150-million in mostly European money to back his scheme. Then he hung on. Now “he tells investors ‘it’s still not too late’ to bet on economic troubles.” Neat! Paulson’s ex-friend Greene did much the same thing, getting an investment bank’s participation for assets for the swap. Then… something happened and he bought three jets and a 145-foot yacht. Finance for idiots explanations eagerly sought! (And is there any small-scale way to do such things? Or do the abilities of regular people to make money on a crisis stop at short-selling and investing in Halliburton?)
WTF, America! Apparently they have banned drivers younger than 18 in the greater Chicago area after 11 p.m. on weekend nights. (That this then dismantled a program of teen-aged designated drivers is sad-hilarious.) I spent the vast majority of my 16th and 17th years in Chicago in either Paule’s giant boat-mobile or in the backseat of Ajay’s slick little number. And we were responsible! For instance, from what I can hazily recall, we usually tried to drink or smoke up while the car was not actually in motion. (Hey, it was the 80s, man.) Anyway, guess such laws make sense in a country where you can come home from Iraq and still have to get someone to buy your beer for you at the 7-11 in Vegas. Update: A reader named Fred writes: “Jason, please tell this ‘genius’ that is babysitting your blog this week to do a little research before she posts. The law she sarcastically wrote about is a state statute that took effect January 1st and covers the complete state of Illinois, not just the Chicago area. It is an intelligent response to a serious problem of teenage drivers dying from more than just drunk driving accidents…. While I believe in anyone voicing their opinion on something, I believe that they should make sure their facts are correct before they spout off. She didn’t bother to check her facts, and that makes you look bad since she’s posting on your blog.” Oh, wow.
So I ditched out of “work” early yesterday for MoMA, because it was the last day of the Martin Puryear show. (This is why everyone everywhere should quit his job!) Elsewhere in the museum—on view through July—is a sprawling collection show called “Multiplex,” which is apparently about art since 1970 and, according to the opaque curator’s text, the flowering of, um, a “complicated artistic terrain.” (Yeah. Well, it’s been almost 40 years, go figure.) There are three groupings of work: abstraction, mutability, and provocation. (I dunno either!) There’s a Gursky that’s really one of the worst, an incredible Tacita Dean painted photograph, and a Julie Mehretu painting that is just wowza. (Seriously, you should go see that one.) Also, I’d never seen this Clemens von Wedemeyer video “Big Business,” a two-channel wingding that’s technically a remake of a Laurel and Hardy film, but which, more importantly, stars two really hot German guys destroying a house. It is all kinds of awesome! I wanted to watch it twice more! But that (and some other nice items) doesn’t mean this show isn’t a bizarro mess. There’s a whole lotta wall text to make their gussied up case. And the tiny end section, “provocation,” contains some of the least provocative contemporary art going. (There’s a mild Philip Guston painting from 1972! Huh?) Is it that MoMA’s collection just doesn’t have work down in the basement that could deliver some incitement?
I have finally found the guy I want to marry. Seriously, this is my favorite YouTube video right now, and I’m not even sure that I can explain why. Something about the soft color, and the quiet. And he’s so sensitive. (I sure hope he’s 18 or older or I’m gonna feel real bad inside.)
Every gay in America (okay, in coastal America) is flapping his hands today over the New! Magnetic Fields! Album! that is apparently out tomorrow; Pitchfork gave it an 8.0 today. According to my gays, it is streaming on the MySpace. I hope the Magnetic Fields MySpace is not taunting teenagers to death though.
I’ve gotten totally re-obsessed with Kathy Acker, the East Village writer who died in 1997. It started with this recording of Acker reading a poem [Warning: audio, 2 minutes, 28 seconds, and not really safe for work!] that was released in 1980 on the LP “Sugar, Alcohol & Meat” by Giorno Poetry Systems and recently digitized by UbuWeb. Her New York accent is one that has largely disappeared since; she sounds amazing. Then I found this, which is an incredibly long mp3, the first 3/4s of which is a Michael Brownstein reading. The end, though, is a monologue which then becomes a stageplay by Acker about a woman, her suicide, her grandmother, and her psychiatrist. It is absolutely not safe for work, what with its endless use of a certain word for ladyparts that goes over well in Scotland but not at all (yet!) in the U.S.
Dying to see this video now showing in Chelsea of a dance performed by lawyers, including John Sloss, a film attorney, and Scott Rosenberg, who I think is with Legal Aid. It’s playing with another video, of four day laborers hired to create an earthwork on the beach; both are by Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom.
When I go back and read journalism from the ’70s and ’80s, I can see that there has been little, if any, innovation in the form since. But! While they may not be drastically “new,” there are at least two bits of excitement in internet journalism today that seem somewhat radical. First, Brian Lam at Gizmodo talks overtly about the twisted relationship between tech companies and journalists. (“As one reporter put it while chiding me, ‘Journalists are guests in the houses of these companies.’ Not first and foremost! We are the auditors of companies and their gadgets on behalf of the readers.”) And over on another Gawker Media blog (my former employer, and one that I have deeply conflicted feelings about), Jezebel’s Tracie Egan writes an astounding and reallly not for the faint-of-heart (or crotch) account of schtupping this guy she met in Vegas. It’s BANANAS. And probably NSFW. And a great read.
For a long time, I wanted to write a profile of the designer Tom Ford—and I realized the only way to do so properly would be to have sex with him and write about it. I sent an emissary to him; he declined the opportunity. I was relieved.
In 1984, Maureen Dowd, now an op-ed columnist, was a reporter on the “Metropolitan staff” of the New York Times. This excerpt (from a 5112-word piece) ran in the Times magazine on November 4, 1984, with the headline “9PM TO 5AM.” (It’s behind the paywall here.)
On Monday nights, Area offers ”obsession” nights—with fixations such as sex, pets and body oddities. At a recent ”sex evening,” nude jugglers and whip dancers moved in and out of the crowd while an ex-nun heard sexual confessions in the ladies’ room and an old man played with inflatable dolls in a pool.
This evening, the theme is ”confinement,” and the club is decorated with dolls in pajamas chained under water, a caged rabbit and go-go dancers armed with guns and dressed in Army fatigues.
”Where’s Andy Warhol?” asks a young punk, dragging on a joint and scanning the crowd. ”I want to get a good look at him.”
”I think he went to Limelight,” says his friend. At Limelight, a church- turned-club on the Avenue of the Americas at 20th Street, halolike arcs of light stream from stained-glass windows.
”We should go there,” says someone else.
”We should go there immediately,” says another.
They scurry off to Limelight, unaware that their quarry, wearing corduroys and a backpack, is standing unobtrusively at the bar.
”This is the best bar in town,” Andy Warhol says. ”You could take everything out and put it in a gallery.”
Matt Dillon, Vincent Spano and Mickey Rourke, each confident in his role as a teen idol, make their separate ways through the crowd, as young girls reach out to touch their arms, backs, anything. Director Francis Ford Coppola is talking to the actress Diane Lane.
Nearby, Don Marino, an up-and-coming actor, is talking to Brian Jones, an up-and-coming director. ”L.A. is a whole different world,” the actor says. ”You go to the A party, the B party and you are home in bed by 11 for your 5 o’ clock call the next morning. In New York, you’ve got to be seen at night, you’ve got to get around.”
The young director scans the room. ”I know people Coppola knows,” he says. ”I wonder if I could go say hi.”
Stats.org presents their list of Worst Science Stories of 2007. Topping the list: San Francisco’s confusion of phthalates with polyethylene terephthalate, which resulted in a ban on plastic water bottles. Gosh yes, I make that mistake all the time too! (via Romenesko)
Update: Okay, lots of mail about Stats and how they’re some secret evil thinktank that takes scary libertarian money. Well, that’s true! Here’s from the editor of Stats, Trevor Butterworth: “STATS is, like CMPA, an affiliate of GMU. But as I live in New York, and write about whatever I want, so what? Yes, the University’s Mercatus Center is a citadel of free market economic theory - and again, no big secret there. Do I do Mercatus’s bidding or take industry money. No. Does STATS take industry money? It’s not our policy. We’re sure as hell not rich. And we are affiliated with the Communications department and the math department. Make of that what you will. As for chemical exposure, it’s the topic of the year - and one that is riddled with error. The rest of the worst stories concern sex, race, and drugs.” Disclosure: I have been out for a drink with Trevor one time.
Jeff Jarvis rightly recommends following Time.com’s Ana Marie Cox’s Twitter feed as she follows the Republican Presidential candidates around the country. A recent, uh, tweet: “Myrtle Beach: McCain staffers very excited and pleased about the prospect of ‘Team McCain: California’ jackets.” These are the sort of details I wish made it to publication, but Twitter is, I suppose, a publication of its own, right?
Hey, New Yorker classical music critic (and blogger, and my summer neighbor, and Kottke interviewee) Alex Ross was quite rightly nominated for a National Book Critics Award over the weekend. (How could any book blurbed by Bjork not be?)
MySpace is having “a press conference to make a major announcement in regards to Internet safety” today at the Sheraton in New York at 11 a.m. EST, according to their press office. (If you want to listen in, citizen journalist, you can dial it up and listen in at 800-895-0231 or 785-424-1054, with conference ID: ABCDE.) Quite possibly related: Today, the New Yorker takes on the so-called “MySpace Suicide Hoax,” in which 13-year-old Megan Meier hanged herself after being taunted by neighbors posing on MySpace as a teen boy. In the neighborhood drama that ensued, an innocent foosball table was also destroyed.
Lesley Stahl of ‘60 Minutes’ did a big piece last night on Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (It followed Anderson Cooper’s horrifying story on rape in Congo and the spillover of Rwandan terror into the country; unreal.)
The worst part (about 3 minutes in, on the online video) came when Stahl said Facebook was the new Google. “You seem to be replacing [Google co-founders] Larry and Sergey as the people out here who everyone’s talking about,” she said. Zuckerberg didn’t say anything. “You’re just staring at me,” she said, almost immediately. “Is that a question?” he asked her. Then: “We were warned he could be awkward,” she said in a voice-over. Actually no, Lesley, that was a savvy response to a terrible, no-win question.
In 2007, 30-year-old New York City-based graphic designer Nicholas Felton had 58 vacation days, performed 2 karaoke songs, spent 4.7 days on planes, read 26% more book pages than he did in 2006, ran 190.5 miles, and thought Josh & Ellen’s wedding was the best of the year. You may view his annual report here; the print version costs a mere $5 and ships in February. In this year’s report, just as in his 2006 report, Felton noted he may have consumed alcoholic drinks that went unrecorded. CHEATER.
Good morning, and thank you for attending. Should you have advice or ideas for me this week, I can be reached at choire [at] choire sicha [dot] com. I love mail. A brief moment of self-referentiality follows. Over the last nearly-decade, Kottke (the work product, not so much the actual person) has become incredibly (sometimes overly) smoothed and honed. When I first wrote a story for the New York Times, a very wise editor there told me this: That it was not the paper that made writers sound Timesey; instead, writers most often made themselves Timesey in anticipation of the venue’s expectations. That was usually a bad thing! But in the case of Kottke (the site), perhaps a good amount of impersonation of or loyalty to its conventions is in order, don’t you think? (That effort may fail as this week progresses.) So to those who are pre-gagging over my appearance here this week, I can only offer the same response that Joan Didion offered a letter by John Romano in the New York Review of Books on October 11, 1979.
Fresh off his exit from Gawker and covering last week’s New Hampshire primary for the New York Observer, Choire Sicha will be handling a slightly easier, less glamourous, and potentially more spiritually rewarding job: editing kottke.org for the next week.
Choire has written for Gawker (on two non-consecutive occasions, making him Gawker Media’s Grover Cleveland), the NY Times, the Observer, and a host of other publications, but I remember him mostly from from the olden days of the blogosphere. He was one half of the tandem that wrote the now-defunct East/West, an early blog detailing the lives of two friends who live on opposite ends of the US. He’s also done a bunch of other stuff but I’ll let him share or not share about all that. Welcome, Choire!
Modern big wave surfing requires a knowledge of oceanography and wave dynamics…and quick wits out on the water.
After committing to a wave, the surfer must confront the sheer tonnage of hurtling water and hit a 10-foot-wide slot of the best spot to launch a ride with pinpoint timing, a maneuver that Washburn has described as akin to “trying to place a Dixie cup on the horn of a charging rhino.”
PETA — that’s People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — recently revealed that in 2006, they put to death more than 97 percent of the cats, dogs, and other animals they took in for adoption.
The scale of PETA’s hypocrisy is simply staggering.
And somehow that seems like an understatement. (via wider angle)
Update: This press release was put out by the Center for Consumer Freedom, a group that holds some questionable views:
The Center for Consumer Freedom has drawn criticism from several groups for its startup funding from the Philip Morris tobacco company. It has been described as an astroturf group that portrays itself as a grassroots organization while actually being funded by the fast food, meat, and tobacco industries. It is also criticized its efforts to portray groups such as the Humane Society of the United States as “violent” and “extreme”, and for its opposition to banning the use of trans fats. The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has also campaigned against the CCF’s validity as a non-profit tax exempt charitable organization, filing an IRS complaint in 2004 attacking CCF’s claims that its advocacy campaigns were “educational” in nature. Some corporations, including PepsiCo and Kraft Foods, have declined to work with CCF, saying they do not agree with some of the group’s arguments or its approach to advocacy.
A factsheet on PETA’s site says they are in favor of animal euthanasia is some cases.
Because of the high number of unwanted companion animals and the lack of good homes, sometimes the most humane thing that a shelter worker can do is give an animal a peaceful release from a world in which dogs and cats are often considered “surplus” and unwanted. PETA, The American Veterinary Medical Association, and The Humane Society of the United States concur that an intravenous injection of sodium pentobarbital administered by a trained professional is the kindest, most compassionate method of euthanizing animals. The American Humane Association considers this to be the only acceptable method of euthanasia for cats and dogs in animal shelters.
Some other stuff I read online indicated that PETA rescues pets who were going to be euthanized under inhumane circumstances in order to provide them with more compassionate deaths. A complicated situation, to be sure…not sure what to think. (thx, gwen, chris, and jason)
Michael Oher, the subject of Michael Lewis’ book, The Blind Side, is undecided about declaring for the NFL draft after his junior year.
Oher was named to the all-Southeastern Conference first team after the season and is considered one of the top offensive linemen prospects in the country. He has already shown the promise scouts predicted when he was a homeless 16-year-old who didn’t know how to play football.
Meanwhile, the movie adaptation of The Blind Side is proceeding…word on the street is that Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, and George Clooney are interested in starring.
Update: Oher declared for the draft. (thx, michael)
Update: On second thought, Oher reconsidered and is remaining at Ole Miss for another year. (thx, michael)
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