A word-cloud from my recent blogposts, courtesy of Wordle:
A Chip off the Old Karadzic
Last weekend, I wrote about my Sunday sidewalk brunch with Samuel Delany. I should have known something was wrong, the way Chip kept looking down the sidewalk and back into the restaurant, the way he kept nervously fingering his beard, the way he patted me down and confiscated my phone before we sat at the table.
But I didn’t understand why he kept trying to explain how the biggest influence on Dhalgren was actually the poetry of Dragan Dabic, in between complaints about how Marko Jaric was disastrously underused by the Timberwolves last season.
Now it all becomes clear: I wasn’t having lunch with Chip Delany! I was having lunch with Radovan Karadzic!
We’ve gone through the looking-glass, people.
F*** You, You Whining F***: 7/21/08
In today’s Wall Street Journal, there’s an article about how customers are asking Starbucks not to close their favorite locations, following the chain’s disclosure of the 600 stores is plans to close. The two complainants in the article come from different worlds, Bloomfield, NM and Manhattan. The person from NM contends that her townspeople won’t miss the store itself, but that its absence may keep other businesses from seeing the town as a good place to set up shop. Since I live in a town that has no Starbucks but does have a Chinese restaurants where, in the words of my wife, “it doesn’t even taste like food,” I can understand that business stigma.
However, the other person they interviewed was priceless:
Ms. Walker is in charge of consolidating 525 people from seven of her company’s New York offices into a new building in January. The Starbucks inside that building, at Madison Avenue and 44th Street, “was something that we were using to psych people up” about the move, she said.
Her hopes were dashed last week when Starbucks released the list of the stores it plans to close. She jumped on the Internet to find a phone number for the company’s main office so she can ask officials to reconsider. “Knowing Starbucks, there’s probably [another] one within a few blocks,” she said. “But that’s probably two blocks too far.”
Two things for Ms. Walker:
- go to the Starbucks Store Locator and you’ll see that there’s a Starbucks across the street from your building as well as another one down the block on your side of the street, and
- f*** you, you whining f***.
I’m hoping to make this the first installment in a series of smackdowns. If you can think of a better title for this, please send it over.
It’s always the end of the world for somebody
Courtesy of Hit & Run, here’s a neat article from World Affairs on how the current crop of “America-in-decline” books & articles is nothing new:
As with the pessimistic intellectual troughs that followed the Depression, Vietnam, and the stagflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, there is a tendency among declinists to over-extrapolate from a momentous but singular event—in this case, the Iraq War, whose wake propels many of their gloomy forecasts.
It’s always easier to
- call for the end of the world, and
- pretend that now is how things are always going to be.
What It Is: 7/21/08
What I’m reading: Against the Gods
What I’m listening to: Court and Spark
What I’m watching: Dazed and Confused, and Sunshine (not the 87-hour Ralph Fiennes movie of the same title)
What I’m drinking: Rogue Dead Guy Ale
Where I’m going: A mini-class reunion in Philadelphia next Thursday night, allegedly. I write, “allegedly,” because it’s taking place a hipster bowling alley, and I know of only one other attendee. I thought about using my frequent-flyer miles to take a 30-hour Fri-Sat round trip to San Diego for the Comic-Con, but decided against it, in favor of hitting my company picnic on Friday and trying to have another quiet weekend like this past one.
What I’m happy about: A new Paul Weller album
What I’m sad about: My dad almost destroyed his car by getting gas from one of those discount stations. On the plus side, he saved 8 cents per gallon, which would add up to a whole dollar in savings, based on the fuel tank in my car.
What I’m pondering: Why Roche had to go and bid for the remaining shares of Genentech about a day or so before my Top Companies issue comes out, in which I praise Roche for leaving Genentech independent. (I realize the integration is more about back-office functions, while letting the R&D functions stand on their own, but that trick never works.)
The Week that Was
Sorry I didn’t write more last week, dear readers. Last Sunday evening, I had to pick up my dad at Newark Airport, but his flight was delayed an hour or so, and my ensuing late arrival at home led to a short night of sleep heading into Monday (we get up at 5am to start the day). That sequence left me off-kilter for the rest of the week. Since most of my work-days were spent working on my conference and trying to write code for the web-edition of our Top Companies ish, I never got settled enough to start a-writin’.
If you’re interested in the highlights — brunch with a semi-famous author, a shoot-from-the-hip panel discussion at a media relations class, and a fancy dinner that led to the final-straw decision to buy a GPS unit — then click “Moreâ€!
Continue reading “The Week that Was”
Unrequired Reading: July 18, 2008
I have come back to tell you all . . . it’s time for links!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: July 18, 2008”
Sign Language
I was in the running for this job, but the competition was cutthroat. BWAH-HA-HAH!
Fall of the Mall
Yesterday’s WSJ had a neat article about the bankruptcy of cheap-chic clothing retailer Steve & Barry’s. It explores the practice of malls essentially paying S&B’s to open up shop in large, unoccupied spaces. This subsidy tied into the company’s business of “nothing above $9.98”. Sez the Journal:
For mall owners, large anchor spaces, which were once occupied almost exclusively by department stores, are especially important. Their role is to draw lots of shoppers into malls, enabling owners to rent their smaller spaces to specialty stores. When anchor spaces go dark, clauses in the leases of smaller tenants often permit them to pay lower rents.
This led the company to go from 31 stores in 2004 to 276 stores by this year. It looks like the company came to rely on the upfront payouts from mall owners, which fueled a rapid expansion in new stores, which fueled a greater need for more upfront payouts (esp. as the economy slowed and sales dropped), which fueled rapider expansion, which. . .
Well, you can guess what happened; the company went bankrupt a few weeks ago. The story’s a little more complicated, and also touches on the company’s celebrity-branding strategy, including its Sarah Jessica Parker line, “Bitten.”
I found the article pretty compelling, despite the fact that I’d never bought anything in one these stores. Still, I like to try to gain an understanding of how retail works, and sometimes fails to, while also trying to grok what the ebb and flow of different types of stores and product mixes says about us as consumers. For the moment, access to the article is free, so check it out.
That’s one fierce embrace you got there…
A few weeks ago, I goofed on NYTimes writer Nicolai Ouroussoff’s starchitecture rimjob about planned cities. I contrasted it with a second NYTimes article that discussed the moral quandary of taking commissions from dictatorships.
In yesterday’s NYTimes, Ouroussoff managed to top himself, going gaga over the starchitecture in Beijing, conflating events in Beijing with those throughout China, condemning the west for not allowing starchitects like Rem Koolhaas the opportunity to build whatever is capable of being built — whoops! I meant, “probe the edges of the possible” — and concluding that modernism is going to redefine the public sphere in China, where they have a “fierce embrace of change.”
In one of the article’s early non-sequiturs, the writer contrasts the new airport and its transportation hub to, um, New Orleans (?):
This sprawling [transit] web has completely reshaped Beijing since the city was awarded the Olympic Games seven years ago. It is impossible not to think of the enormous public works projects built in the United States at midcentury, when faith in technology’s promise seemed boundless. Who would have guessed then that this faith would crumble for Americans, paving the way for a post-Katrina New Orleans just as the dream was being reborn in 21st-century China at 10 times the scale?
Mr. Ouroussoff’s doesn’t seem to find faults in modernist architecture, focusing instead on how generic office buildings and slums highight the inequality of the city’s economy. For the article’s climax, he waxes rhapsodic about Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV building, in a passage I have to quote in its entirety, because there’s no way I can do justice to this level of bullshit:
But the [CCTV building] is a formidable challenge to all of our expectations of what a monumental building should be. Like Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron, Mr. Koolhaas is part of a generation of architects, now in their late 50s and early 60s, whose early careers were shaped in opposition to the oppressive formal purity of mainstream Modernism. They fashioned asymmetrical forms to break down the movement’s monolithic scale and make room for outcasts and misfits. The problem they face now is how to adjust that language for clients that include authoritarian governments and multinational corporations.
In his design for the CCTV headquarters, Mr. Koolhaas begins by obliterating any trace of the human scale from the exteriors. There are no conventional windows, no clear indication of where the floors begin and end. The forms completely distort your perspective of the building; it seems to flatten out from some vantage points and bear down on you from others.
As a result it is almost impossible to get a fix on the building’s scale. Seen through the surrounding skyline of generic glass-and-steel towers, it sometimes seems to shrink to the size of a child’s toy. From other angles it seems to be under a Herculean strain, as if fighting to support the enormous weight of the cantilevered floors above.
This is not just a game. Mr. Koolhaas has set out to express the elasticity of the new global culture, and in the process explore ways architecture can bridge the gap between the intimate scale of the individual life and the whirling tide of mass society. The image of authority he conveys is pointedly ambiguous. Imposing at one moment, shy and retiring the next, the building’s unstable forms say as much about collective anxieties as they do about centralized power.
Then, complaining about the reflexive repression of a totalitarian regime that can afford to impose Mr. Koolhaas’s vision on the cityscape, Mr. Ouroussroff notes, “For now, however, it is not the architect who will determine the degree of openness at CCTV but the company’s government-appointed board of directors.” Earlier, he points out that the government plans to block roads to the building and restrict access to CCTV employees. See, when it comes to “the dividing line between public and private spheres,” that gets written by the guys with the guns, not the guys with the girders. (There’s a dividing line between spheres?)
I think it’s awesome that China is a “great laboratory for architecture,” even though the Mr. Ouroussoff doesn’t appear to have traveled beyond Beijing. After all, China’s a small and uniform country, right?
Still, I bet the parents of the kids who were killed, maimed or buried alive by collapsing schools in the Sichuan earthquake last May would be willing to trade the new national theater building, the new airport and even the CCTV building for decent architecture and construction standards outside the big city.