Month: September 2006

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Unrequired Reading

I’ve decided to make Unrequired Reading a regular post on Friday mornings. It’ll consist of the same stuff I was posting at random in the past few weeks. Which is to say, thanks to the miracle of RSS feeds, VM goofs around online so you don’t have to.

As my friend Mitch put it, “You know you’ve bottomed out when Bobby Brown says you’re an unfit mother to his children.”

(It’s Mother’s Day, not All Everybody Day!)

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Here’s a slideshow about Jonathan Ive, the design guru at Apple.

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10 Highly Pretentious Musical Instruments

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You stay classy, Cleveland.

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You are your Netflix Queue.

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Visiting Kandor?

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Firing tons of people — even Japanese people — does not automatically make you a success. I can’t stress this enough. Restructuring by “cutting fat” is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily put a company in the position to succeed in the future. Carlos Ghosn is trying to stay ahead of the game by allying with an American automaker and firing a ton of people.

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A wide-ranging (by my lights) interview with U of Penn Architecture Department Chair Detlef Mertins, author of a book on Mies van der Rohe.

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Paul Wolfowitz is running into trouble as president of the World Bank, due to his policy of not lending money to corrupt regimes.

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ZOTZ!

Because I’m an absolute freak, weird phrases stick in my memory for years. For example, there’s a paragraph that’s stuck in my mind from a New Yorker article about Mars exploration SIX YEARS AGO:

“It’s a difficult road to Mars,” Charles said. “There are many years of hard work ahead of us.” Already, though, there’s active discussion within nasa about what kind of astronaut would be best prepared for deep space. “If young,” he continued, “they may be the most fit. But then you run into the problem of radiation, which could zap their gonads, so they would not be able to have kids.” A case could also be made for choosing older astronauts, seasoned by previous missions, for the first Mars voyage.

Why did it stick out? Because of that line about cosmic rays zapping someone’s gonads. Just thought it was funny.

Until yesterday. That’s when I received an e-mail from a friend of mine in his mid-60s, in which he wrote

Sorry I’ve taken so long to get back to you. But yesterday morning at ten, I got my prostate nuked. (They fill you full of painkillers and antispasmodics, then do it — by sticking a microwave coil up your pecker — right in the doctor’s office. Takes an hour — and it’s a bitch!) Supposedly the sucker is now two-thirds the size it was before, and in two or three days I should be able to pee like a normal fellow.

I have nothing to add to that.

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Will on Wal

George Will on the Democrats’ strategy of attacking Wal-Mart:

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America’s political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce — yes, announce — that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.

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Here we are

We visited Ground Zero on Saturday, so we could see Jon Hyman’s photo exhibition: 9/11 and the American Landscape. We took the ferry over from NJ, then a subway down to the site. It was the first time I’d ever taken the subway to that area. The station is inside the pit, so we saw Ground Zero from a different perspective as we headed for the street.

This morning, I dreamed I was arranging a trip to Australia to see an Underworld concert.

I got my tattoo the Sunday after 9/11. While I was in the booth/studio/parlor (?), the girl at the front desk came in to ask if it was okay if a guy came in to watch. He was planning to get a 9/11 tattoo and wanted to see what we were doing.

I assented, and a burly guy walked in. He told us that he worked in WTC #7, and then related the story of Tuesday morning. After the first plane hit, his building went into lockdown. They didn’t want people running around in a panic while the first responders were getting into action.

When the second plane hit, the #7 workers revolted and started streaming out of the building as fast as they could. I don’t remember what he told me about the buildings’ collapse. I hadn’t slept much that week, and some details are lost. Others come back when I least expect them.

The exhibition had some wonderful photos, but it focused more on murals and graffiti, with only a half-dozen examples of 9/11 tattoos. It did, however, include The Big One, a tattoo covering the entirety of firefighter Tiernach “T.C.” Cassidy’s back, including sky-blue ink for the background. Jon showed me that one when we were going through his portfolio. I can’t find his picture of Cassidy online, but here’s another photo of him:

I’ll try to scan it from my exhibition program, but if you’re in the area, you really should go to the exhibition to see Jon’s pictures.

Amy & I had lunch at the World Financial Center after the exhibition and we talked about our memories from those days, intercutting world history with personal anecdotes, criscrossing apocalypses, affairs, paralyses, sightsoundsmells: The American Landscape.

I thought about the incalculable permutations of our lives, about all the things that had to go right for us to meet and fall in love.

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This week in Unrequired Reading

Stories that have been sitting in my RSS feed this week:

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine muses on the 40th anniversary of Star Trek:

And finally, [Star Trek is] a story of a powerful belief in what the franchise represents: the right of individuals, through machinery, weaponry, or barehanded intelligence, to live, be free, and pursue happiness, no matter how horrific the results (and we can all agree that Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture was as slow and agonizing as any torture devised on that evil Enterprise from the “Mirror, Mirror” episode in which Spock has a beard). Put all these ingredients together and it’s clear: Star Trek is the story of America.

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Mary Worth and Nothingness

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Tom Spurgeon interviews Sammy Harkham, the only “young” cartoonist whose work I’ve started to follow. I have an unfinished post from earlier this summer, about the MoCCA comics festival in NYC. The post was all about my realization that I’ve become a boring old fart, because I couldn’t think of any cartoonists whose work I discovered in the last five to eight years. Fortunately, I picked up one of Sammy’s comics then, and found a small book of his a few weeks later that impressed me.

Sammy edits an anthology called Kramer’s Ergot, and the interview discusses the process of putting the most recent edition together. As ever, I find this stuff fascinating, but you may not.

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George Will reviews a 9/11 novel that doesn’t sound very interesting to me, but that’s because the 9/11 novel I published tanked:

Messud’s Manhattan story revolves around two women and a gay man who met as classmates at Brown University and who, as they turn 30 in 2001, vaguely yearn to do something “important” and “serious.” Vagueness — lack of definition — is their defining characteristic. Which may be because — or perhaps why — all three are in the media. All are earnest auditors and aspiring improvers of the nation’s sensibility.

Uh, yeah.

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BLDGBLOG interviews author Jeff VanderMeer about the intersection of architecture and the novel.

As a novelist who is uninterested in replicating “reality” but who is interested in plausibility and verisimilitude, I look for the organizing principles of real cities and for the kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that occur within them. Then I take what I need to be consistent with whatever fantastical city I’m creating. For example, there is a layering effect in many great cities. You don’t just see one style or period of architecture. You might also see planning in one section of a city and utter chaos in another. The lesson behind seeing a modern skyscraper next to a 17th-century cathedral is one that many fabulists do not internalize and, as a result, their settings are too homogenous.

Of course, that kind of layering will work for some readers — and other readers will want continuity. Even if they live in a place like that — a baroque, layered, very busy, confused place — even if, say, they’re holding the novel as they walk down the street in London [laughter] — they just don’t get it.

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Times UK restaurant reviewer Giles Coren visited Croatia for a column:

The language is called Croatian these days, except in Serbia, where it is called Serbian, and it hasn’t got any easier. Chapter two of my Teach Yourself Croatian book was about counting to ten, and gently explained as follows: “The number one behaves like an adjective and its ending changes according to the word which follows. The number two has different forms when it refers to masculine and neuter nouns than when it refers to feminine nouns, and is followed always by words in the genitive singular, as are the words for ‘three’ and ‘four’. The numbers 5-20, however, are followed by words in the genitive plural. . .”

This is why you never see Croatians in groups of more than one or less than five in a bar. Because it isn’t actually possible to order the right number of beers.

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Official VM buddy Jecca reviews the second issue of Martha Stewart’s Blueprint (which, as I type it, sounds like something she came up with while she was in the joint, a la that Prison Break show).

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Gorgeous pictures of the world’s greatest libraries. There’s a book about it.