Every year, I throw a New Year's party, and it's always the same setup. Good people, good booze, and rollicking good time. We don't mess with the formula because you don't mess with success.
The only change this year is a jar on the bar with a sign asking people to toss in a few bucks for the people who have been devasted by the earthquake in Asia. I figure it's the biggest natural disaster since Atlantis sunk, so intruding on the festivities with a little grim begging isn't so bad.
I tossed in some twenties, so people get the point that we're not looking for pocket change. I have some idea of how much I'd like to raise, but I'm sure I'll be unhappy when I actually count out the cash. Even good people can be stingy at times like this.
My girlfriend wondered if we should worry about somebody making off with the pot. I promised her that anybody stealing from earthquake victims would be in for a rough time, and she forbade me to beat people up in the apartment. She said I have to take the person outside if I want to beat somebody up. I really don't think it will be an issue, but it's nice to have the ground rules covered.
I hope everybody has a good New Year's and remembers what they value and why. I have a friend who was supposed to be in Thailand last week (his work puts him there a few months a year). He hasn't responded to emails. I'm not worried yet-- I'm sure he'll turn up on a beach in California, laughing at me.
A friend of a friend is a diving instructor who lives in Thailand half the year. His house was on the beach. He survived by swimming off the top of his house, clinging to anything that would float:
Our house was 150 feet from the beach, that is THE hardest hit beach in Thailand. As water rushed into our house and then ripped open the second story wall, I leapt off our second story roof and swam and swam and swam, riding the wave deep into the jungle, as it destroyed building after building, ripping up trees and spinning diesel trucks into the air. All this with me in the center of it clinging to anything that floats and swimming to avoid the standing buildings or trees that crushed and impaled many others.
The wave deposited me, a small swedish girl and a 60 foot poilice cruiser (medium sized steel patrol boat - around 20 tons) 1 kilometer from the beach - in the jungle.
He spent the day providing first aid and care to injured people. He says his village had a 60% survival rate. The entirety of help offered by the US government to him was "a phone call, a toothbrush, a paperback book and a temporary passport." In other words, things are ugly over there.
If you're hosting a New Year's celebration, put out a jar. Even small amounts can make a big difference.
In France, Santa was mugged while giving out sweets. Apparently some teens were upset when he wouldn't cough up more candy. They started beating him, which is horrible, but because it's Christmas, some passersby chased them off. Too bad they didn't score his swag bag.
Of course, Santa's not always the victim. He has a long and hidden history of torturing children. Santas rival clowns for the down low scary sadism, and finally somebody has put together the proof.
Via The Morning News.
My girlfriend is on a holliday diet. The pants she wants to wear to New Year's are a smidge too tight, and she only has a few days to slim down enough to squirm into them. It's funny and a little sad to see her diet because at 105 pounds, she's never been on a diet before in her life. Her big fear this week is that she'll no longer be a size zero.
She keeps asking her mother for advice on how to lose weight. Her mom responded by heaping more macaroni and cheese on her plate. To mom, this woman will always look too thin.
This morning, she woke up, reached over to the nightstand and ate a cookie. "Shit! shit!", she said. She'll never lose that weight if she keeps forgetting she's on a diet.
My diet recommendation, for all you people that gorged on christmas: Grapefruit juice for breakfast. Grapefruit juice and laxatives for lunch. Cigarettes (or heroin) whenever hunger sets in. And a sensible dinner. It's what all the top models do.
I think all this dieting is stupid. Sure I like thin women, and I'm quick with the fat jokes, but when skinny little things with 24-inch waists are eating like North Koreans, it's a real sign that something is a little out of whack.
I just can't get behind this diet nonsense. I'm going to go buy some brie and see how long she can hold out.
Everybody seems to think Pedro Martinez is worth about $13mm a year, but only the Mets were willing to give him a four-year contract. Although I really don't like Martinez (I'm just glad he's not in pintstripes), I hope the Mets haven't fallen prey to the winner's curse. Pedro's numbers have been declining steadily for a few years. He's still a great pitcher, and he'll be worth $13mm this year, but he's no longer a strikeout king and he'll need better defense and run-support than the Mets have provided since 2001. Four years from now he'll be an overpriced third starter and the Mets will be trying to figure out how to unload him.
Meanwhile, Jesus hates Curt Schilling. The pitcher famously attributed his postseason perfection (that first ALCS game aside) to "the Lord". But now, it seems he isn't recovering from surgery too well and is likely to miss the start of the season. It must really suck to have fallen out of favor with the Lord and it looks like Boston's fortunes will be reverting to the mean.
If your're like me, you're always scrabbling in your shelves for a book to read-- hoping for something you somehow haven't read or perhaps an old book that deserves another look. Too lazy to walk to the library, too cheap to go to the bookstore, you just want books to magically appear in your apartment every few days, Happily, somebody heard my cry.
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I'm all about enjoying Danger Mouse's mashup of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. It gets regular rotation on my music station. In fact, I'm listening to it right now.
I never really thought about video mashing, but when I saw that somebody made a Gray Video (mirror, torrent) from old Beatle's footage and some live Jay-Z stuff, it piqued my interest. It's well done, and even the obvious seams just add to the wonder, like the puppet strings you can see in Team America. - And while we're mashing, check out the Kleptone's Night at the Hip-Hopera. The Kleptones have Disney all a twitter because they repurpose Queen all over the album. I'm on Disney's side for aesthetic rather than legal reasons. They should have ignored Queen in favor of something more like Yoshimi Battles the Hip Hop Robots. Still, Hip-Hopera is worth a listen, just for the creepy, prescient bit that comes at -20 seconds of the ODB remix in track 4.
- And finally, Allan Holdsworth -- synthy, jazzy electric guitar. Musically, it's the most interesting stuff done with guitar since Dylan went electric. He's not on my daily playlist, but is worth hearing, just to expand your conception of guitars.
A new children's book tries to explain marijuana to children. It's Just A Plant is about a little girl who walks in on her parents smoking. Her mom takes her for a bike ride and introduces her to the wonderful world of weed. This work is a long way from the books I read when I was a kid. Illegal drugs! Main characters that aren't white! I just know somebody is going to object to exposing kids to such things.
According to the Morning News, you can get photos of your NYC building, circa 1940, from old tax records. My building is an old armory, and I'm sure it looks much the same as it did 64 years ago, but I can't resist.
India observations from Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen:
Biggest surprise about food in India: How much it draws on Chinese influences, even at the regional level. There is even a uniquely Indian version of Chinese food, which is derived from adding Indian spices and peppers to basically Cantonese dishes.
I can't wait for somebody to bring that taste to NY. The global economy can save New York from the bland fusion food that currently reigns here. Why must every restaurant re-invent food in the exact same way? Blech.
Oh, and file this observation under "Funny 'cause it's true":
Favorite Indian joke about the Chinese: How do we know that Adam and Eve were not Chinese? Because they ate the apple, not the snake.
Lean Left's tgirsch hauls off and tells Yankee fans to cry him a river. Apparently Yank fans don't understand pain. He would love his team (the Brewers) to have such problems as a four-year ring drought. All Yankee fans are to him fair-weather fans.
It's true that everybody loves a winner. And Yank fans love to see their team win. And we're spoiled by the constant winning. But most of us have been here since way before 1996, and most of us will be here long after Torre is mismanaging games for Tampa Bay.
Remember the Yankees of the 1980s? Hell, remember the 1990 Yankees? Their best starter won 9 games and nobody had an ERA under 4. Leary posted their best and worst numbers, htting batters and tossing the ball like he was aiming for the dugout. Their best hitter (Roberto Kelley) batted .285. They won 67 games and came 5 short of losing 100. Even Mattingly, the iconic Yankee of that era was down with the back problems that would prematurely end his playing career. We stuck with the Yanks then and we'll stick with the Yanksnow, but there's nothing fair-weather about Yanks fans.
No matter how many rings and flags the Yanks have, you always want your team to play to their potential and to go all the way. Past success does not soften the blow of seeing your team fall apart and fail to execute when it counts most. The problem wasn't just that they played poorly. The problem was that they could have done better. And should have.
Yankee fans have trudged through the valleys and to pretend we're spoiled brats for bemoaning our team blowing a three-game lead in the ALCS holds us to a ridiculously high standard.
Maybe Curt Schilling hurt his ankle inserting his foot into his mouth. This is what he said before the game: "I'm not sure I can think of any scenario more enjoyable than making 55,000 people from New York shut up."
You gotta love it when a the Red Sox ace goes from champ to chump in just 3 innings. Oh, wait a second. The Sox haven't been champs since 1918. Make that "chimp to chump".
That said, any team that almost comes back from an 8-run deficit has some chops. Sox fans are rightly touting last night as a moral victory. For me, as long as the Yanks keep winning the pennant race, I'll gladly concede victories in the morals race.
It's gonna be a long series if these teams keep swapping momentum every few innings. I stand by my prediction: Yanks in 6.
We've waited all year for this showdown. It's the culmination of the greatest rivalry in baseball, if not in sports. Whoever wins, the World Series will be a letdown after watching the two best teams in baseball battle in the Bronx.
I'm a big Yankee fan, but let's not pretend the Red Sox aren't a threat this year. Schilling and Pedro are the best starting pair in baseball. ManRam and Ortiz are the best 3-4 hitters in baseball and rest of the linup can swing for the Green Monster every at-bat.
The Yankees, meanwhile, have question marks in their middle relef and their starting rotation. Kevin Brown's back is healthy, but only when compared to his hand. Lieber's back is fine, but only when compared to Brown's. Somebody let the lightning out of El Duque's bottle. And while Javy wasn't quite terrible in game 4 of the ALDS, he serves too many 0-2 meatballs when you consider he's not the Yankee nicknamed 'Chef'.
From the other side of the plate, the Yankees have a better 1-9, but the Manny-Ortiz one-two punch leaves you hoping for a double off the Green Monster rather than a homer over it. The Yankees's best hitter is Jason Giambi (whose two solo homers kept them in Game 7 of the ALCS last year), and not only is he no Manny, he's never going to leave the bench.
That said, the Yankees have six guys with more than 20 homers. Lieber in the Bronx is like Ali in Zaire. Brown is on the mend and looking to redeem himself. Gordon and Mo are the best setup and closer baseball has ever seen. And if Mystique and Aura don't win it for them, we can always count on Pedro running out of gas in the 8th inning of Game 7. Yanks in 7.
The NYTimes obits Midcentury Modern and crowns Directionalism the young upstart king. Of course, the only problem with Directional furniture is that it's ugly. Even mid-80's minimal modern pieces are tacky formica monstrosities, so before we let the taste makers from Times Square burn our furniture, let's see if people are really willing to trade their sleek, low-slung Le Corbusier chaise lounges for a giant aluminum cookie-cutter turned on its side.
On Thursday, the Yankees will play the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to make up a game that was cancelled by hurricanes. The Yanks have the best record in the American League. The Rays are 30 games out of first place and their season is over. Anybody want to come watch the Yankees ronk all over them?
Because the game is a make up, tickets for any seat in the stadium are just $5. Also, hot dogs and sodas are half-price. Proceeds from the game go to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.
If you want to get to a ballgame this season, this is one of your last chances. They only play six more games, and three are sold out. If you're an American, you gotta go to a baseball game once in a while.
The game is at 3:00. We'll be there. Who wants to come? Take the afternoon off and let's day trip to the the Bronx. Come play hooky with us tomorrow. It's for charity.
Email any of the Brutal Huggers if you're interested.
Michael Chu has a beautiful cooking blog aimed at people with analytical minds. Recipes are presented as tables, and he works methodically through various issues related to cooking. You'll find informative articles on knives, cutting boards, fats, oils and more. If you approach cooking as part art, part science, check out Cooking for Engineers.
While I try not to burden this blog with it, I am a huge Yankee fan and a huge Steinbrenner fan. Steinbrenner gets slammed for carrying a huge payroll, one that no other team can match. The competitive advantage of outspending your rivals by $100 million can't be denied.
But the Yankees are not just a rich team buying championships. It's true that the Yankees spend a lot because they make a lot of money. But they also spend a lot because Steinbrenner invests his profits back into the team instead of putting the money in his pockets. Other teams (the ones complaining that Steinbrenner is outspending them) are making huge bank off their teams. If they had more money, they wouldn't spend it on player salaries. They'd pocket it. And we know this is true becase as these teams have taken in more money through revenue sharing and the luxury tax, their payroll hasn't increased at all.
Buster Olney, writing for ESPN, wants to see Steinbrenner go to Cooperstown. I agree. When Steinbrenner goes, it will be the end of an era, one that won't be repeated by his successor.
Digital Journalist has a page of 100 Photos that Changed the World. They're all Life photos, they're all mezmerizing, and they're all heart breakingly depressing.
Clicky the linky at your own risk.
Burning Man is over, dude. Black Rock City is going, going, gone. Guess I have to stop neglecting this blog. Soon. I promise.
I've long thought cemetaries to be rather tasteless and ghoulish. I'm not the only person to see that if we insist on burying our dead, there has to be a better, more life-affirming, less mournful way to go about it. And now there is.
Italian artists have designed a biodegradable coffin that holds the deceased in the fetal position. The body is planted in the ground like a seed, with a young tree above it. Over time, the tree grows and is nourished by the decomposing body.
Imagine forests instead of cemetaries, where we tend to living trees instead of cutting back the plants around a headstone. It's hard to change a culture's death rituals, but I hope this idea catches on.
Via Boing Boing.
A woman in NYC couldn't figure out how to use her Metrocard, so she complained to the clerk in the token booth. She asked the clerk for assistance. He refused to come out and swipe it for her. She begged, he responded with insults, she responded with insults, he came out of the both and proceeded to kick her ass.
So far this is a tragic story about a woman who can't figure out how to swipe a metrocard, fiery tempers, and an asshole who beats helpless women. But these kinds of stories happen every day in every city.
Here's the part of the story I love: while this woman and her friends were fighting with the clerk, she dropped her wallet. It was promptly stolen by somebody quitter-witted than the combatants.
I love New York.
Burning Man has released the 2004 map, and the street names are planets, in order from Mercury on out: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Sedna.
I'm sure your first question is what the hell is Sedna? For those of us who haven't taken fifth grade science in a while, Sedna isn't a social disease. It's a recently-discovered planet-like body at the edge of our solar system. It might be a planet, it might just be a big rock. But really, what's a planet if not a really big rock, so call it a planet, call it rock, just don't call it cuntface. If it's anything like my girlfriend, it hates being called cuntface.
And because this is a family-friendly blog all about the educational experience, here's a handy mnemonic to remember the order of planets. You can try to remember it Saturday night when you're tripping your face off and trying to find that guy with the thing:
My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizza Slices
There's a movie about Che Guevara's days of motorcyle wandering coming out. He is played by Benicio del Toro, which is to me just about perfect. Since I've always meant to pick up his scoot diaries, maybe this will prod me. Or not.
I've never really been sure what was up with Che. Lots of people have Che shirts, but they're all young, dumb and full of class guilt or hipster irony. Or they're old, bearded and smell like dirty sock stew. I've never really been into the Che worship.
I did some googling to see what what I could see about Che. Sartre called him "the most complete human being of our age", which would be quite the recommendation coming from anybody but Sartre. I'm not sure what makes Che complete. Maybe it was his relentless womanizing. Or maybe it was his willingness to exact revolutionary justice on the very peasantry he was trying to liberate. That's the kind of thing Sartre really respected.
My favorite Che anecdote is about how he ended up the Governor of Cuba's National Bank. Right after the revolution, Castro gathered a bunch of guys to try to figure out who would do what in the new government. Somebody said, "Is anybody here an economist", and everybody was surprised when Che raised his hand. Who would question Che? He'd cut your fucking balls and shove them up your ass. Che got the job. It turns out he thought the question was "Is anybody here a Communist?"
Ultimately, Che seems like another "sacrifice the peasantry for their own good" asshole to me. I won't be buying his t-shirts any time soon. But I'm still interested in seeing the moto movie.
The movie drops on 27 August. Peep the trailer and go see it.
What would the world be like if a different winner had emerged from Florida in 2000? What if Bush had lost and we were instead ruled by a Florida orange?
Via Boing Boing.
One of the great things about the internet is all the niche content it offers. Everything from low-fi electro synth-pop to vegetarian porn. No matter how freaky you are bent, you can find other people who are bent the same way. People used to have to go to New York to achieve that. Now you can find a Tribe or a Yahoo Group for any kink up you might think up.
Christopher Isherwood is an odd sort of literary figure. He is known best, perhaps, for authoring the auto-biographical books that were adapted as the play (and movie) Cabaret. He also wrote the Berlin Diaries. Isherwood is well-regarded for his works, most of which draw heavily from his life.
What's interesting about Isherwood is that he is known mainly for his memoirs even though those memoirs are the total of his life's accomplishment. Usually we read somebody's memoirs because we are already interested in them-- nobody would be reading Clinton's My Life if he hadn't been President. But we read Isherwood's memoirs because they're just some fine writing.
Isherwood's memoirs and auto-biographical fiction are worth reading even to a reader with no interest in Isherwood himself. He writes about himself and his life, tells a lot of lies, and casts himself as his own main character. Along the way, the reader meets the colorful and distinct people that populate Isherwood's life.
He write languidly, with little driving the plot (if there is a plot) and much time spent on petty things. And yet the reader is drawn and engaged. Perhaps it's because Isherwood tells of rubbing shoulders with all the famous literary figures of his day. Or perhaps it's because he has a first-hand American perspective of pre-WWII Germany. Or maybe we're fascinated by trying to figure out who is the real Christopher Isherwood.
Isherwood is also known for being gay. In his earlier works he cover this up, but eventually he comes clean with the dirty stories. In Christopher and His Kind, he retells parts of his life and it is clear that he was quite the little player. It is fascinating to see how much his memoirs were changed by his writing them from the closet.
There is an article about Isherwood in yesterday's New York Times.
The Washington Post reports that teen-poet, Mattie Stepanek, has passed away. Is it too churlish of me to point out that this teen's poetry was about what you'd expect from a kid? Sure, he chose his words as if he were 15 rather than 13, but let's not pretend we're putting down, say, Seamus Heaney for his stuff. Kudos to a kid with a tough life, but had he lived, his future was as a copywriter for Hallmark, not poet laureate.
The Mo has an interview with Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball. Moneyball is slowly changing the way baseball evaluates, selects and compensates players.
The interview has some great bits of baseball information, including musings on the Red Sox curse, fans and speculation on trading Nomar or Pedro. Lewis also talks about how the ideas he exposed in Moneyball are spreading beyond baseball. People in football and basketball are interested, but more interestingly, people in Hollywood are interested.
Quantifying talent goes against everything we learn in kindergarten, but the ability to determine a person's true contribution is immensely valuable to any effort.
Kevein over at Lean Left thinks Joyce is overrated. I agree and put Joyce in the same box as Faulkner and Woolf-- self-indulgent writers who seek less to communicate than to show off their ability to play with words.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I only say that because I don't understand their genius, etc. But genius isn't always valuable. These folks might have been operating at superhuman level, but given that their art is all about communicating with humans, I'd say that's a weakness rather than a strength.
Everybody has an opinion on the cigarette tax hikes, and that opinion is that the new taxes suck (unless you're some government flunky trying to squeeze every last dime from the yellowed fingers of addicts). And I agree that the tax hikes suck, but I'm reminded of a different kind of cigarette tax, which I call the Pack Tax.
In many bodegas in NYC, you can buy single cigarettes for around 50 cents each. You put down two quarters and the man behind the counter hands you a Newport, then lights it for you with a lighter he keeps by the register for just this purpose.
The young men that hang on the corner in front of the bodega smoke all night long, and they go into the store and buy their Newports one at a time instead of by the pack. They can do the math. They know it's a ripoff. And yet they persist in what looks like economically irrational behavior.
But of course it's not irrational. As it turns out, buying 20 cigarettes at fifty cents apiece works out to be cheaper than buying a pack for $7.00. This is because whenever any of them has more than one cigarette, the other few guys on the corner each bums a smoke. If he only has one, he can say "Sorry, man, it's my last one."
The "Pack Tax" must be more than 6 cigarettes a pack, which erases any savings of buying a whole pack at a time. I'd be curious as to know how much the bodega could charge for individual cigarettes before buying a pack and paying the tax became an attractive option. I suppose it would depend on how many guys were hanging on the corner that night.
Of course, being rational, economical people, a few of these guys were constantly trying to reap the savings of buying a pack while avoiding the Pack Tax. When nobody was looking one would run to the counter and demand a pack of Newports. "Hurry, hurry," he'd say. He'd throw down exact change and shove the pack in his pants. Then he'd buy a single cigarette, calmly wait for a light and saunter outside. During the rest of the night, he'd sneak his smokes from the pack while pretending to buy them from the bodega.
We are all readers. We all have sagging shelves and bursting boxes full of them, books we've loved but will never open again. There's no more room, but there's always more books. And we're all covetous sluts eagerly eyeing the dust jackets at our friends' apartments. More books are both the solution and the problem.
Fortunately, there's help.
On Sunday, June 6, from 2 to 6 pm there will be a book exchange on the roof of my building in Hell's Kitchen. I'll have a grill going up there and a cooler full of ice. Bring your own grillables and some beer, browse the books and take what you want. If you have some books you want to pass on, bring them. If you have no books to share, come anyway. There's more than enough to go around. Oh, and if you want to bring some food for the crowd, that's always appreciated too.
From my shelves, I have pulled three boxes of books. There's a lot of great fiction from Rushdie, Twain, Roald Dahl, Shakespeare, Rushkoff, Homer, Dostoevsky, Joyce and more. There's reference books, new fiction, classics, travel, philosophy, art, sci fi, law, sociology and computer books in there. It's all good stuff, stuff that survived my culling the collection many times over the last few years. I guarantee that you will find something you want to read. And my books are just the start.
Any books left over from this event will be donated to various libraries, communities and schools.
Wanna come? Send an email to gonzo@brutalhugs.com for address and details. See you then! :-)
OK, this game is hilarious. Dick Cheney has recruited Voltron as the latest soldier in his compassionate conservatism army. You lead the forces of Hulk Hogan, Mr. T and He-man in an all-out war to defeat the five lions of Voltron. Watch the intro. It's amazingly funny and includes a cameo by R2-D2.
Note: This game isn't work safe, as it includes a scene of Voltron bending the Statue of Liberty over and violating her in the harbor. That scene alone is worth getting fired for, so go ahead and click anyway.
Say Uncle is building a dog house. He's impressed by the fancy dog houses he's seen, including one with a patio and an air conditioner. He should come to New York, and meet Brutus, an English mastiff with his own one-bedroom apartment, complete with doorman. When Brutus's owner divorced his wife, he endedup staying on Brutus's couch. Talk about being in the dog house.
Say Uncle wrote a nostalgic post about 80's sitcoms dealing with touchy political issues, like drugs and guns. It reminds me of the A-Team episode where Mr. T and company are called in to break the backs of labor agitators. The labor organizers were depicted as cruel, violent thugs in a 30-minute call to patriotic union busting. Ah, the 80's...
If you had to name the most famous virtuous woman in mythic history, you could probably come up with a list that would include 4 or 5 women from cultures spanning both geography and time. If you had to name the most beautiful, you wouldn't need to make a list, for there is only one obvious and indisputable answer: Helen of Troy.
For somebody whose fame rests solely on her looks, we know remarkably little about how she looks. Homer doesn't describes her physical charms directly. Instead, he relies on accounts of men responding to her beauty to convey its force.
And of course describing Helen with any specificity would be impossible. Her beauty is supposed to be of universal appeal. Put her any place any time in front of any person and she will be judged by all to shine the brightest. But tastes vary and change, so the one true Helen is something super human. Her beauty is platonic and can't be described in human terms.
If specific representations of Helen must fail, it is difficult to put Helen in paintings. Artists have dealt with this problem in various ways, but just like nobody wants to paint the face of god, nobody can really paint the unstylized face of Helen. Instead we get glimpses of shrouded figures being adored by dumbstruck men. When they do paint her unabashedly, though, she is the pinnacle of sultry beauty, as the artist sess it.
Moviemakers don't have the luxury of shielding Helen. She is the star of every scene, and the star must shine. So they cast timeless beauties like Elizabeth Taylor and hope for the best. Of course, their notions of timeless beauty are thoroughly rooted in the times.
What all this means is that artistic depictions of Helen don't really tell us anything about Helen. They're hear-say testimony from people that have only heard of Helen charms third-hand. So they fill in the details. And when we look at those details, we learn a lot more about what they think of beauty than what they think of Helen.
And even more than just beauty, Helen represents certain qualities about women. She is not just a pretty face, but a woman to fall in love with (many vied for her hand before Menlaus won it), a woman of such grace that Paris was not her first abductor. And how we describe Helen often tells us much about how we think of love and women. (I guess from this post you could say I think of love, women and beauty as inscrutable and ineffable.) It's no coincidence that views of Helen's character conflict.
Slate has a great slide show discussing and showing different views of Helen from antiquity forward. I will be forever grateful to this slideshow for reminding of the definition of a millihelen-- the beauty required to launch one ship.
So spend some time dallying with Helen and imagine what kind of face could launch your ship.
Washington Square Park has always had more than its share of pie-eyed loonies. These days, in addition to the students, skaters, punks, dog walkers, drifters and performers, there are the Pac Manhattanites. But perhaps even more unusual than these usual suspects is the gentleman offering free hugs.
It's a wonderful idea, and somehow I'm sure he won't mind if you steal it. Go forth and drop the hugga bomb!
The NYTimes writes about new wave cooking, which apparently involves making jello shots out of gin, topping it with olive and vermouth, and calling it an hors d'oeuvre. I've promised some regular dinner guests that I would make it for them. I'll take my martini jiggly, not stirred.
Lots of people use "they" as a singular third-person pronoun. It's standard among everybody except incredibly stuffy grammarians. The slightly less stuffy grammar hawks use "he or she", and the people who care more about grammar than style employ the unpronouncable "s/he". These people believe "they" is for the plural and to use it for the singular is wrong.
But it's not. People have been using "they" to mean "she or he" since before the 16th century. So when the editor who equates esoteric grammar skills with self-worth blue pencils your pronouns, tell them you base your usage on no less an authority than William Shakespeare. And then tell them to get a life.
Elena is a biker. She has a website that doesn't sell anything. She also has a 1000cc Kawasaki Ninja that makes 147 horses. She rides her black Ninja to red line in 6th gear on perfect roads. The roads are perfect because they are deserted, and they are deserted because they are in the Chernobyl dead zone.
Elena's biggest fear isn't radiation. It's hitting a boar at triple-digit speeds, running out of gas or getting a flat tire. There are no phones in Chernobyl, no passers-by to flag for help. If her bike breaks down, she has two options: fix it herself or glow in the dark. She carries a tire patch kit, watches her fuel gauge and avoids chickens crossing the road.
That's not to say radiation isn't a concern. She carries a geiger counter and knows to stay in the center of the asphalt, which doesn't retain as much radiation from Chernobyl's meltdown (wood, though "absorbs radiation like a sponge"). Stepping off the road without a radiation detector is like "walking through a minefield wearing snowshoes".
She brings her own food and water. Anything grown in the zone would likely kill her. She is like an astronaut.
A trip to Chernobyl is a journey back to 1986, when everybody dropped everything or just dropped dead. The fire trucks that responded to the radioactive fire are still there, the firemen having died upon arriving at the scene. Washing hung to dry remains hung. Parade decorations sit forgotten, waiting for a celebration that will never come. People left their clothes, documents, money, photos and everything else. They even left their families. They just fled.
It wasn't just homes that were abandoned. Fleets of airplanes sit, grounded. Barges float loose on the river, and yards of trucks rust as the weeds try to claim them into the ground.
Although the zone is deadly to people, flora and fauna have flourished. Without humans competing for resources, other, more radiation-resistant forms of life have dominated. Chickens can take 2.5 times the radiation that people can. Cockroaches can withstand 100 times more than us. These hearty beasts do pretty well. Horses run wild, boar have moved into homes, and trees have burst foundations from beneath, rising indoors on spindly trunks. Of course, there are stories about horrible mutant creatures, but Elena says zoologists deny them.
Elena has taken pictures of the abandoned buildings, schools, a motorcycle store, a fair grounds and many other places that used to be the center of social life. She accompanies these pictures with sober commentary, and you really feel the tension between the awful destruction and the beautiful freedom of a land overrun by nature, a place that since 1986 has avoided the trampling foot of human progress.
Chernobyl will be deadly for the next 600 years, give or take 300. Elena thinks it will be 300, but she also admits she is an optimist.
Go see her photoessay, Ghost Town.
Via Amateur Hour.
Last year, Pedro Martinez threw almost all the right pitches. The one wrong pitch was the one that mattered, the one that got Grady Little fired. Through it all, he was a primadonna crybaby, refusing to talk to reporters, throwing at people's heads when he felt threatened, and rarely deigning to pitch deep into games.
This year, he's still a punk ass bitch. The big difference is that he's lost a little on his fastball, which means batters should maybe start wearing catcher's masks.
At any rate, he lost the Sox's opener, and I can only hope that's what the season will look like for him. Early struggle, followed by tantrums and another notch in the L column.
My picks: Yankees over Cubs in 6. Sox will take the wildcard, but lose to the Angels in 3.
Via Boing Boing come two beautiful websites showcasing fantastical notions in body paint.
We noticed somebody visited Brutal Hugs by way of Jenn Manley Lee's blog, which led us to her comic, Dicebox. It's beautiful and witty with engaging characters and confident lines. Go read it.
Canadian scientists have discovered that when men are shown pictures of pretty girls, their ability to make rational decisions and plan for the future is impaired. Apparently this is news.
My question is why we always call Helen "Helen of Troy". Why not "Helen of Mycenae"? She started out married to Menelaos in Mycenae and, aside from 10 years in Troy, spent her adult life with Menelaos in Mycenae. So why does the loser of the battle retain top billing?
Maybe it's because her heart was in Troy. No matter that she returned to Menelaos. She'll always have Paris.
Interestingly, Paris is portrayed in the Iliad as somewhat craven and foppish. Maybe this is a case of the victor writing history, but it could be evidence that it is not just men who are swayed by pretty faces.
Everybody knows the story of Rosa Parks, the woman who refused to move to the back of the bus and sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, one of the greatest episodes of peaceful protest in American history.
And now, Rosa Parks, champion of liberty and freedom, has won the right to sue hip hop's smoothest slyest duo, Outkast. In 1998, Outkast put out a song entitled "Rosa Parks", which included the lyrics, "Ah-ha, hush that fuss. Everybody move to the back of the bus." She sued for defamation, trademark infringement, and a few other things. Now that some of the legal dust has settled, she's still suing for infringement of trademark and her right to publicity.
The funny thing about this case is not the notion of stately Rosa Parks smacking down young, brash Outkast. The funny thing is watching the courts try to apply stodgy legal analysis tools to supple hip hop lyrics. The lower court obviously had no idea what the song is about and just gave up without even trying to understand it. The higher court, however, is willing to try harder, and they struggle mightily with the relatively straightforward chorus:
Ah ha, hush that fuss
Everybody move to the back of the bus
Do you wanna bump and slump with us
We the type of people make the club get crunk
In its quest to grok the crunk, the 3-judge panel examines a "translation" of the lyrics
derived from various electronic "dictionaries" of the "rap" vernacular .... The "translation" of the chorus reads as follows: "Be quiet and stop the commotion. OutKast is coming back out [with new music] so all other MCs [mic checkers, rappers, Master of Ceremonies] step aside. Do you want to ride and hang out with us? OutKast is the type of group to make the clubs get hyped-up/excited.
It's less offensive and more clueless than Engrish.
At times, it seemed the court was upset that it had to dirty itself by dealing with rap music, preferring the purity of Parks to the lowdown Outkast. They mention with obvious horror the thought of 90-year-old Parks having to confront profanity, explicit lyrics and parental warning labels. They complain:
In lyrics that are laced with profanity and in a "hook" or chorus that is pure egomania, many reasonable people could find that this is a song that is clearly antithetical to the qualities identified with Rosa Parks. [The song is] nothing more and nothing less than a paean announcing the triumph of superior people in the entertainment business over inferior people in that business.
Ultimately, the case turns on the contention that the motivation for the title of the song was that the title Rosa Parks was "likely to sell far more recordings than [calling] it Back of the Bus". In yet another indication of how little they understand hip hop, the judges think this is plausible enough to merit a trial.
Update: Outkast talks about the music they listen to. Rosa Parks's gospel music isn't mentioned.
Via A Brooklyn Bridge, we learn that the Bottom Line has been evicted by NYU. Rolling Stone also has the story.
The Bottom Line hosted many great jazz, rock and blues artists, including Bruce Springsteen amd Miles Davis. It's an NYU staple, a downtown constant of good live music on the cheap.
I'm going to miss it. They say they might find another location and reopen. I sure hope so.
Keep checking the Save The Bottom Line website for updates and ways you might be able to help, including signing a petition.
I know there are Matrix fans out there, so here's my impression of the 3rd installment, which I saw this morning (I can't believe I saw a movie at 9am-- imagine the people who were in this theater at 9am on opening day). Less ponderous and corny than the second one, but just as pretentious. No big revelation scenes. Less shoehorning of plot into dialog. The plot rolls right along, carrying most of the high speak and emotion along with it. The graphics are much better. Unintentionally funny only a few times. Keanu still can't act, but they don't linger on his facial expression much. Overall, it was not as good as the first (hard to accomplish that), but definitely better than the second.
The plot wraps up much as expected. The big fight scenes that just keep getting bigger reached the point of silly WWF-in-the-air pound pound pound at the end. There's no big, exciting insanely choreographed, all over the place fight scene (like the battle to get the Key Master in the second one). No new monsters with weird new powers, although in one scene the bad guys run around on the ceiling and shoot from there. This was not so impressive, as the ceiling was normal height, so it really made no difference in the battle. Instead of a crazy choreographed fight scene there's the big war scene, which I found a lot less interesting.
Go see it, especially if you saw the first two. You'll enjoy it immensely.
And when you're done watching it, watch the The Meatrix and Pong Matrix.
MOMA's temporary rents in Queens (or QNS, as MOMA likes to call it) are somewhat smaller than it's spacious Manhattan digs, and so most of the museum is devoted to special exhibits and very little of the permanent collection is on view. Not that most of the collection isn't hidden year-round. After all, MOMA boasts more than 100,000 works in its collection. If you want to see something they own, the only reliable way to do so is to see it on special exhibit. Which defeats the whole purpose of the permanent collection thing.
There is a small glimmer of hope, though. MOMA has put up a web page that lists which items from their permanent collection are on display. Now you can sit at home and find out Monet's Water Lillies are rotting in a closet instead of buyinga ticket and being bitterly disappointed. As somebody who has shed angry tears at the absence of favored pieces, this page is more effective and cheaper than 15 years of therapy. Don't ask me how I know this.
Went to RESFEST's By Design show last night because a friend of mine had a cool piece in it. It was kind of Aeon Flux meets Chuck Woolery-- great stuff. As expected of the mostly amateur films, most were crappy or mediocre but the few brilliant pieces made the whole event worthwhile.
The best thing I saw last night was easily Letter to the President, by Dave Ellis and his Barnstormers crew. It was a motion painting, which is basically a sped-up video of the Barnstormers painting a floor, shot from above. They keep painting and painting, covering up the old images with new ones, blacking and whiting out and adding layer after layer of peace art. Highly inspiring, intelligent and funky. The link to buy the DVD doesn't work, but I so wish it did, and so should you.
Another great piece was Nice Weather for Ducks, which features as it's only lyrics "All the ducks are swimming in the water, falda ralda ralda." Go watch it now.
One of the better pieces was also one of the simpler ones. Rosie Pedlow did Tulips at Dawn, which is an animated interpretation of a Roald Hoffman poem. The poem is about chemistry and science books, and how they have changed over time. Where once they were illustrated with line drawings, they now feature lush color photographs. Hoffman notes that the introduction of the photographs coincides with a drop in the ability of students to learn chemistry, hinting that the photos are distracting and that more is sometimes less.
On the other end of the complexity spectrum is Ultraloveninja, by MK12. This piece features a silhouetted ninja doing all sorts of ninja stuff--- he flies around, plays with a sword, kills deer, dances with snowflakes and generates "the heat of the ninja" with his tiny hands. The link goes to a short version of what I saw last night, which was perhaps a tad too long.
Over all, I was impressed. The films were well-produced and I kept wondering how people manage to do these on what I know to be rather small budgets, usually with home equipment. Congrats to all the auteurs.
With a website straight out of 1996, you would expect Mixel Pixel to be some sort of Jeff K. happy slobber punk. But Mr. Mixel Pixel's sound ranges all over lo-fi synthpop, from chill downtempo blended beats to get up and strut stuff. Some people have described it as bedroom electronica. I have no idea what that means, but it definitely doesn't mean this is music to make out to. The band is two guys on drums and guitars plus Kaia on the moog and the violin. Kaia is the burner with the presence and the fierce sound. They're a great, fun live act. It's listening music. And it rocks. Highly recommended.
Mixel Pixel is doing a Knitting Factory show during CMJ. Don't know the date yet, but if you can take CMJ crowds, check them out.
The Whitney has a great exhibit right now called The American Effect. It's a bunch of mildly conceptual pieces in varied media by mostly foreign artists commenting on some aspect of America or American culture. There's a social realist portrait of Giuliani, some disturbing sculptures of Custer's last stand, weird porn stalker video, photos of Germans who are really into dressing in Native American period garb, futuristic views of NYC, a Museum of Natural History-type diorama of super heroes in an old folks home (you have to see this one), and a bunch of other neat pieces.
One really effective work is dialog from stories of American rebellion strobed to an Art Blakey drum solo. You can check it on the artist's website.
Another cool piece is in the series My Grandmothers. Basically, a Japanese artist asked young women to imagine what they might be like in the future. He then created visual works based on their responses for a series. One woman who'd never been to America apparently envisioned herself whooping it up over the Golden Gate bridge in a sidecar with a good-looking guy. You can see it live at the museum, and her thrill is infectious.
Also, it seems that you can get into the Whitney for free. The (rather pricey) restaurant is downstairs, and you don't need a ticket to eat there. When you come up out of the restaurant, you're already in the gallery and nobody is going to ask you for a ticket. Maybe this only works on Fridays, when the gallery opens at one but the restaurant opens at 11. If you're honest, you should then exit the gallery and buy a ticket. Stealing from museums is wrong, so maybe this is something you only do if you're a super poor starving art lover.
Enjoy.
Field Day offers Beasties, Beck, Radiohead, Le Tigre, Blackalicious, Trachtenberg Family, N.E.R.D., Beth Orton, Liz Phair, Luna, Blur, the Roots, Thievery Corp., Ben Lee and more. Live! In concert! Two day festival! See you there?
I shaved before I left tonight, for I thought I might meet Salman Rushdie. I already knew what I was going to say to him. "Hi, you danced with my mom at a Paul Simon/Bob Dylan concert!" I was sure that would hook a conversation. The story of how my mom came to boogie with the greatest writer of the 20th Century will have to wait for another time. Tonight I turn to an altogether different drama.
When I arrived at the Apollo to see Midnight's Children performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, I was disappointed. I had the worst seats in the house. I was upstairs, in the last row, all the way to the right. You couldn't get a further, higher or more oblique view of the play, or of Rushdie, who surely had mid-orchestra seats at worst.
From that high, the air tasted of sour grapes. Rushdie probably wasn't there tonight at all, I figured.
The play, though, was wonderfully done. Many of the actors did such a great job. Salim Aziz never leaves the stage through the whole play. It must be an exhausting role, but he carries it through so many stages of Salim's life, back and forth and up and down. Very impressive.
The play packs a lot into a few hours, and where the book is languid, the play lopes through passage after passage. This is Padma's version. Straight chrono, easy on the speechifying. The perforated sheet, three years of enticing enchantment, becomes 30 seconds on the stage. It's a pity, because where the book has feeling of fate, of interlocked stories that must be as they are, the play feels like shuttling towards the obvious end. Still, for all the hurry up, I enjoyed it.
The play provides much more than the book in the way of historical context, which is helpful. Frankly, the book lost me at times, and I had trouble connecting its major events to the history of the Indian subcontinent. The play used videos and newscaster-style clips to explicitly connect the plot of Salim's life with the struggles of India and Pakistan. The maps didn't hurt either.
The program included a glossary. The first definition in it:
Christian - Believer in Christianity, a religion based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century AD. Christians believe that Jesus, also called Christ, was the Son of their god and that by his death he made it possible for them to enter a realm of bliss after their own demise.
If that doesn't make you laugh, your humor is as shallow as the Lovers of Kashmir.
With the added history and the plot served like courses at a formal meal, the play makes a great addition to the book. I wonder how the hell anybody that hasn't read the book followed it. Aunts, Uncles, Mothers, Fathers, Ayahs over three generations! Who knows who is who anymore? And then there's the middle of the second act, when neither India nor Rushdie can cope with the late 60's and early 70's. Salim is off fighting in a Bengali jungle. This is the Apocalypse Now portion of the play, when Salim is a snail crawling on the edge of a straight razor. He and the play are saved by magicking them back to Delhi in a hamper. I saw several people in the audience frantically turn to each other and say, "What the fuck?"
One thing that was odd about the play was that every 15 minutes there was simulated fucking. Gratuitous, weird, frantic fucking. Much more fucking than in the book. Fucking nymphs. Fucking air. Fucking skeletons. Maybe that's how you update a book from 1981. More fucking!
The play did much with minimal sets. People marched in with just a few props and with lighting and pantomime, they suggested the rest. The backdrop was a video screen. Upon the screen was cast a multitude of images. Midnight's children conferred in Salim's mind. Salim roamed the region of the dead while shirtless in the Lotus position. Old clips of history and family events were narrated by manly newsreel voices. Sometimes it worked, but most of the time, the video was a distraction.
The bottom line on the play is that it's great, but the greatest thing about it is that it reminds you how amazing the book is. This is the best book I've ever read. The Booker of the Bookers. The most complex, intricate, layer after layer of symbols and artistry, fantasy and reality, meeting to mix so many ideas about the birth of a nation and the failure of a dream. A book about hope and failure, creation and destruction. At once savage satire and earnest prayer. The book is a mine of rubies and diamonds.
Last night I went to see Luke Vibert aka Plug aka Wagon Christ over at APT.
APT is often too crowded, too expensive (I'm anti-watered-down-drinks-in-fancy-cups), too annoying to stand. Last night it was fine, though. The crowd that turned out for Luke was mostly white, mostly young (nobody over 30, most under 25), mostly male (and many of the women were obvious bored drag-alongs). The nice thing about that space is the low ceilings with all the speakers. Sound gets everywhere and you can just drop into the music.
Luke spun his usual mix of bright melodies, staccato beats and layers of sound. The first half of his set was his brilliant head trip, just forging out, playing with beats and tunes. The second half was more danceable but less unique. As always, he relied on hiphop, funk, and bits of disco, but he also combed many other bright, melodic genres and idioms with his breaking, rolling beats. He kept twiddling knobs and stabbing button with a big smile on his face.
He wasn't the only one smiling. People were dancing enthusiastically, trainspotting rapt, and indulging in music snob socializing ("I saw you spin last week at Verb. You were great. I'll be on the decks at Open Air this Thursday.")
Luke was adorable and cute. He missed a few beats and apologized. He chain-smoked bidis, drank moderately and danced almost not at all. My friend gifted him a finger puppet and he happily told her his kids (ages 2 years and 4 months) would love it. On our way out we thanked him for the set and he just beamed his jolly smile and wished us good night.
The one thing that surprised me is how few people there were. Granted, this was a Tuesday midnight set, but where's the beat seeking disciples? The place was full, but not uncomfortable. I suppose Luke's following isn't as large as I thought. Maybe I'll rip a song or two and put them here for people to feel him out. Meanwhile, you can listen to samples of his stuff at the listening station.
Next time Luke spins in your world, check him out. Well worth it for both dancing and just listening. If you want to check his music, his tightest album is probably Drum 'n' Bass for Pappa, which he recorded as Plug.