Happy Halloween!

Rufus’s costume: A greyhound that actually managed to catch the bunny. Photos courtesy of my wife (who’s getting ready to launch a photography business: hint, hint).

11533_1259836377689_1283067982_793997_4255750_n.jpg

11533_1259836297687_1283067982_793995_5096320_n.jpg

11533_1259840217785_1283067982_793999_6653343_n.jpg

11533_1259840377789_1283067982_794003_1948500_n.jpg

Now to wait for the unsuspecting kids at the door. . .

Don’t Tase My Pumpkin, Bro! (Or, You Look Like a Man-O-Lantern)

I haven’t posted a trip to the Drew Friedmanizer in a long time, but this morning’s scroll through the Wall Street Journal was too tempting:

pumpkinhead.jpg

The accompanying article is about Boulder, CO’s annual naked pumpkin run. It’s a 4-block streak in a city famed for its laid-back, hippyish culture. Apparently, it’s gotten so popular that the police are out to crush it and ruin its participants lives:

[Police Chief Mark Beckner] will station more than 40 officers on the traditional four-block route tonight, with two SWAT teams patrolling nearby. All have orders to arrest gourd-topped streakers as sex offenders.

That’s right! He’ll need two SWAT teams in place, in case a group of people without clothes are armed and dangerous! Way to escalate a situation and just about guarantee violence, you fucking moron! Still, the law’s the law, right? Um . . .

Casting about for a law to apply, since nudity per se is not illegal, police hit upon the state’s indecent exposure statute, which makes it a Class 1 misdemeanor for anyone to knowingly expose his or her genitals in circumstances “likely to cause affront or alarm.”

Given that the Naked Pumpkin Run starts at 11 p.m., long after young trick-or-treaters have retired, and given that the route is packed with fans who come out specifically to see the event, runners argue that it’s absurd to think their prank is causing either affront or alarm.

Even if the run does catch a few people by surprise, “the joy it brings overall far outweighs the one or two people who could be offended,” says Callie Webster, who is 22 and a veteran pumpkinhead.

Police acknowledge they have not been flooded with pumpkin-run-related complaints, but say that’s beside the point. A throng of naked people with jack-o-lanterns on their heads is, by definition, an alarming sight, Chief Beckner says. Therefore, it’s illegal.

Keep reading for more of police chief’s bullshit attitude, which even the mayor and the D.A. find to be over the top. Go, Pumpkinheads!

The L Gets An F

For the first time in years, there’ll be no Virtual Memories NBA Preview, dear readers. Neither Tom S. nor I were too enthused by the league this year and couldn’t get motivated enough to put together even crappy one-liners about the teams.

I can’t recall ever seeing such clear lines between champion contenders (LA, San Antonio, Boston, Cleveland and Orland), playoff fodder, and truly horrible teams. The idea that the Atlanta Hawks are a near-lock for the 4th or 5th seed in the east speaks volumes about the league’s mediocrity.

In any case, “my” team

  1. gutted its roster in the off-season in order to save money,
  2. is just the pivot for Bruce Ratner’s giant real estate scam in Brooklyn anyway, and
  3. will be sold to a Russian gangster by year’s end, so it’s possible their new building will actually go up in Sheepshead Bay.

The other local team is going into its second consecutive year of deliberate awfulness as part of its plan to attract the league’s best player. Prior to this, its awfulness was accidental.

My local hoops scene is so bad that I can’t make any jokes about how Tom’s team (he’s from Indiana), stocked with such great white nopes as Jeff Foster, Josh McRoberts, Troy Murphy, and Mike Dunleavy, Jr. on the roster, decided to use its lottery pick on . . . Tyler Hansbrough.

So we’re going to pass on the NBA Preview this year. Go about your business.

What recession?

On Saturday, Amy & I met her pal Claudia for dinner at Marea. We knew going in that it’d be a pricey meal; after all, the restaurant is in the shadow of Masa, the most expensive dinner in NYC (which has a $200 fee if you don’t cancel your reservation with more than 48 hours’ notice(!)).

The meal was phenomenal; I’ve learned to appreciate fine dining this past decade, and my Marea experience was easily a top 5. Both my dates were heavy-duty foodies, and they too were floored by the meal. You can go check out the dinner menu here. For the record, I ordered:

  1. Ricci (sea urchin, lardo, sea salt)
  2. Sgombro (pacific jack mackerel, eggplant caponata)
  3. Polipo (grilled octopus, insalata di riso, fava, yellow tomato)
  4. Cotechino (not on the online version of the menu, but it was a pork, cod belly, wine sauce and maybe some cinnamon, in a mind-blowingly perfect risotto)
  5. and a chocolate panna cotta for dessert.

But as I said, it was a pricey meal. I won’t be so gauche as to discuss the final tab, but I will share with you the exchange I had with the Thomas the bartender when I was looking to get a gin & tonic before the meal.

GIL: I’d like a G&T. I notice you have Old Raj back there.

[THOMAS reaches for bottle]

GIL: Hold on. I had a G&T with that at Tabla once, and it cost $17. So, would you mind just ringing one up first, so I can see what it runs?

THOMAS: Sure! I’ve never served on with that gin before. [touch-pads for a few moments, then turns to look at GIL with shocked expression on face] Uh . . .

GIL: Twenty-two dollars for a gin & tonic?!

THOMAS: That’s what it says . . .

GIL: I’ll have a Hendricks & tonic, thanks.

THOMAS: You want cucumber with that?

GIL: Slightly bruised, thanks.

I’ve never felt relieved to pay $12 for a G&T before. (But it was the first bar I’ve been where they have Q Tonic on hand.)

What It Is: 10/26/09

What I’m reading: When The Shooting Stops . . . The Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story, by Ralph Rosenblum. It’s a book about the art of film editing, with a ton of awesome anecdotes. I also bought a bunch of books off my Amazon wish list last week: Jamilti & Other Stories (Rutu Modan), Mister i (Lewis Trondheim), Little Nothings: The Prisoner Syndrome (Lewis Trondheim), Collected Essex County (Jeff Lemire), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, and Your Movie Sucks (Roger Ebert).

What I’m listening to: Boxer (The National), Dear Science (TV on the Radio), Chimera (Delerium), Oblivion with Bells (Underworld), In Our Nature (Jose Gonzalez) and Bill Simmons’ two-part podcast with Chuck Klosterman. I had a bunch of driving to do last week.

What I’m watching: Bored To Death, South Park, not a lot else. Oh, and Glee because, hey, Jane Lynch.

What I’m drinking: Silverado cabernet sauvignon 2005, during my Peter Luger dindin on Thursday. First time I drank in 2+ weeks.

What Rufus is up to: A fun trip to the Ridgewood dog park on Thursday, but no Sunday hike, on account of parental laziness. We got in at 1 a.m. from dinner in NYC on Saturday night; sue us.

Where I’m going: Maybe to Chillerfest next Saturday, if only so Amy can help Patrick Stewart pay for his divorce settlement.

What I’m happy about: The Years Have Pants, Eddie Campbell’s massive anthology of his Alec comics, comes out this week!

What I’m sad about: I discovered a few days ago that Robert Caro gave a lecture on biogrphy in NYC last month. Two upsides:

  1. I found there’s an audio recording of his speech online
  2. On Saturday, walking through Columbus Circle, Amy & I passed a shoe repair shop that included Mr. Caro on its customer “wall of fame” in the window:

IMG_1620

What I’m worried about: I won’t have a meal as amazing as last Saturday’s dinner at Marea for a long time. And, yes, this description of the ricci by the NYTimes reviewer was apt:

The very first item on the menu at Marea is ricci, a piece of warm toast slathered with sea urchin roe, blanketed in a thin sheet of lardo, and dotted with sea salt. It offers exactly the sensation as kissing an extremely attractive person for the first time — a bolt of surprise and pleasure combined. The salt and fat give way to primal sweetness and combine in deeply agreeable ways. The feeling lingers on the tongue and vibrates through the body. Not bad at $14 a throw — and there are two on each plate.

What I’m pondering: What it’ll take me for me to get on the wall of fame at a shoe repair store.

Publishers at Play

When I was a pretentious young man (I’m older now; but that doesn’t mean I’m less pretentious), the Paris Review Writers at Work anthologies were my Bible. (Or at least my Apocrypha. My Bible was a mash-up of Tropic of Cancer and Inside the Whale.)

I’d seek out the collections at used bookstores. The first volume I picked up, the 5th Series, contained interviews with William Gass (whom I was just then struggling to read), Jerzy Kosinski, Gore Vidal, P.G. Wodehouse, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and more. The interviews were a joy to this self-important, deluded Future Great American Writer, deftly exploring the writers’ histories, influences and literary opinions, while also revealing some of the practical aspects of their writing habits. Each interview was prefaced with a facsimile of a page of the writer’s manuscript or typescript. This was a wonderful touch, a peek into the writer’s editorial process.

(Well, except for the Henry Miller interview, which had a bizarre diagram with the caption, “Manuscript plan of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, ’embracing planetary conjunction; topographical map of region and monuments and streets and cemeteries; fatal, or otherwise, influence of fields — according to type; Major Events; Dominant Idea; Psychological Pattern.” This may be why I never finished Tropic of Capricorn.)

If I found WaW volumes in a library, I’d photocopy the interviews with my favorites. I still have a folder somewhere with Philip Roth, Harold Bloom, Milan Kundera (I said I was pretentious back then) and others. I began looking up past issues of the Paris Review to find other interviews that had yet to be anthologized.

One of my great triumphs came when I was in Bethesda, MD in 1998 for the Small Press Expo (SPX), an indie-comics event. In a used bookstore near the expo hotel, I found issue #105 with the famed (and uncollected) William Gaddis interview!

At SPX, I met Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth. I’d been writing mean-spirited reviews for his magazine, The Comics Journal, for a few months at that time. He thanked me for those, joking that it was good to have someone else writing mean-spiritedly in the magazine, because it freed up his time. Then he noticed the Paris Review back issue in my hand and said, “I see you found the one with the William Gaddis interview!”

I felt like I was in good company.

The WaW anthology series, published by Viking / Penguin, ended after the 9th volume in 1992, near as I can tell from abebooks.com. A decade or so later, Modern Library began publishing Women Writers at Work, Beat Writers at Work, Playwrights at Work and, um, Latin American Writers at Work (?), but I never picked those up. (I did grab The Writer’s Chapbook, which excerpted quotes from the interviews around particular themes, such as the audience, character, potboilers, peers, etc. It was a nice volume, but not as satisfying as having the complete interviews.)

In 2006, St. Martin’s Picador imprint began a new series called The Paris Review Interviews (I, II, and III). They’re the same format as the old WaW collections, right down to the facsimile manuscript page. And they collected the Gaddis interview! I still find the interviews pretty delightful, even though I’m no longer harboring dreams of being a Great American Writer. (I 0-fer-ized two of them here and here.)

George, Being George has a lot of good material about the history of the interviews, including the giddy elation some writers experienced when they were asked by George Plimpton to sit down for a Writers at Work session. Rather than excerpt any of those, I instead offer up a passage about the business of publishing the books:

MONA SIMPSON: [George] was very unhappy at one point with the amount of money that the Review had been paid for the various anthologies of interviews. Viking was paying us very little, and they were delaying publications. So Jay and I volunteered to go to this guy we knew at Simon and Schuster to see about moving our books there, and George was all for it. After an extended series of meetings, we got an offer for twenty-five thousand dollars — the current publisher was offering, I think three thousand — and they were really going to push it and promote it. So we come to George saying, “Okay, let’s sign on the dotted line, it’s going to be great.”

Then, at the last minute, George calls our editor at the other house — basically an old friend of George’s whom he’d been working with for years, who occasionally sent him tickets to a ball game. The editor sends George some tickets to the ball game and the whole deal is off. We realized at that point that we couldn’t just go out in the world and do that sort of thing anymore, not even with his permission, because we found that we basically didn’t have power to go against his personal loyalties. It was very embarrassing, because Simon and Schuster was outraged that we were staying with an offer that was about twelve percent of theirs.

I’ve taken several clients to basketball and baseball games, as well as fancy dinners. I like to believe that our magazine offers great value to our advertisers and that the fun times are sorta ancillary, but I’m sure that “relationship-building” activities like this muddle even the most otherwise clear business decisions.

As I said, George, Being George is a pretty entertaining book. Why, it’s right here at the end of my Plimpton/Review shelf!

IMG_1592

Oh, and the fourth volume of the new series — sorry, the IVth one — is coming out next week, so you should get on that.

Unrequired Reading: Oct. 23, 2009

Last night, I had dinner with pals in Brooklyn and walked in the door at 1:15 a.m. (at least 40 minutes of my lateness was due to a two-car collision in the Lincoln Tunnel and two separate construction zones near the Meadowlands that turned magically turned three lanes of Rt. 3 into one). This morning, I drive down to suburban Philadelphia to deliver a flatscreen TV to the winner of a raffle at my annual conference. Because my publisher doesn’t want it to get damaged in shipping.

So while you read these links, I’ll be cruising along the highway, checking out the foliage, trying to stay awake, and wondering how this ever became part of my job description.

Oh, just click “more”!

Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Oct. 23, 2009”

Park it!

After last week’s 35-degree snap, we have 75-degree weather today. Go figure.

I’m going into the city tonight to meet friends for dinner, but since it’s such beautiful weather, I decided to take a half-day, bring Rufus to the local(ish) dog park, and hope he would finally decide to play with other dogs. (Unless it’s another greyhound, he’s not interested after the first sniff.)

As it turns out, he palled around with a retriever-y sorta dog, chasing along when the dog’s owner threw a tennis ball. This is not that dog:

Neither is this one:

In fact, I didn’t get any pix of Ru playing at all. I was too shocked. Still and all, you should probably check out the photoset.