A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
A township near my home plans to buy out 33 houses on River Road near the Pompton River, level them, and “return the land to its natural state.” The state and feds are kicking in a couple million to do this, since
A federal spokeswoman said Hoffman Grove ranked second in New Jersey — Ocean City is first — in ongoing loss claims. The state ranks fourth in the country.
If you live on “River Road” or in “Ocean City”, you should probably expect to get flooded every so often.
Yesterday was the birthday of the official VM wife, so we celebrated with a fancyish dinner at Mignon, in Rutherford, NJ. Because I’m a practical hubby, I got her Lightroom for photo editing & organizing, and a cover for her Mini Cooper. And because I’m romantic and all-powerful, I also blotted the moon out of the sky for her.
For apps, Amy ordered scallops, which turned out to be less a stand-alone food and more a delivery system for the sauce and other accouterments. I went with a tuna tartare salad, which was dosed with chili pepper straight from Los Alamos. Fortunately, my taste buds recovered well enough to appreciate our Alaskan cut ribeyes. The quirky highlight of the meal, however, was at the beginning, when we were served our bread. In addition to the standard butter, the dish also contained “meat spread,” which was basically a little steak tartare intended to be spread on the bread. It may sound gross, but trust me, it was fantastic. Unless you’re a vegetarian, in which case it really was gross.
Anyway, earlier in the day, my friend Cecily stopped in for a lunch visit, and dropped off a birthday gift for Amy and an early anniversary gift, which is putting the pressure on me to come up with a good one. Only 8 days to go! How do I top that lunar eclipse?
George Will on the, um, evitability of Hillary Clinton, boredom, and the bs of campaign finance reform:
Bill Clinton has said, regarding presidential candidates, that Republicans like to fall in line and Democrats like to fall in love. Which explains the Clinton campaign’s palpable panic: Democrats have fallen in love, but not with her.
Charles Burns, one of the finest cartoonists currently practicing the craft, recently released a book of “paired photographs” called One Eye
A week off has left me laden with uncommented-upon links, dear reader! Enjoy
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Mar. 2, 2007”
Brendan O’Neill attacks genocide vogue. I think he’s had some previous articles where he’s examined the guerrilla warfare and insurgencies that lead to the conditions that the west labels as genocide, and how that fighting gets ignored in favor of a clear-cut recasting of murderers and victims.
In international relations genocide has become a political weapon, an all-purpose rallying cry used by various actors to gain moral authority and boost their own standing. Anyone with a cursory understanding of history should know that the bloody wars of the past 10 to 15 years — in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur — are not unprecedented or exceptional. Certainly none of them can be compared to the Nazi genocide against the Jews, which involved the industrialised slaughter, often in factories built for the purpose, of six million men, women and children. Rather, the labelling of today’s brutal civil wars as ‘genocides’ by Western observers, courts and commentators is a desperate search for a new moral crusade, and it has given rise to a new moral divide between the West and the rest, between the civilised and enlightened governments of America and Europe and those dark parts of the world where genocides occur.
I have a big problem with laws that make “holocaust denial” illegal, because I think those play right into the hands of the denying set, showing how they’re oppressed by the government, which doesn’t want their viewpoint getting out. It’s a free speech issue, so I wouldn’t expect Europe to be out in front on that.
This article also made me think of the “Everyone has AIDS!” musical number from Team America.
Michael Bierut at DesignObserver feels that Dreamgirls misses the soul of the music that it’s trying to capture, and he has some neat remarks about the “production line” of Holland, Dozier and Holland at Motown records. It puts me in mind of Jack Kirby’s most prolific and productive era, in the 1960s, in which he was drawing tons of pages but also inventing (or co-inventing) mind-bending character after character.
In the last few days, I’ve come across a pair of strange articles about New Orleans.
The first contends that a collection of public-housing buildings should not be knocked down, since they’re pretty nice buildings and just need “full-scale renovations”.
Oh, and the low-income residents shouldn’t be brought back in. Instead, the apartments should be sold to middle-class people, because, um, there are enough poor people in New Orleans already. Seriously:
The feds’ impulse to replace such perfectly good housing takes root in the flawed notion that the buildings are the problem with blighted public housing, not the dependent underclass people who live in it. Most residents of New Orleans’s housing projects paid less than $100 in monthly rent. Even if they weren’t on welfare, in other words, they were essentially dependent on government. Also, the complexes teemed with long-term tenants’ sons and grandsons, who terrorized the projects through violent crime. The failure of the city’s elected leaders to police and incarcerate these criminals long ago turned the projects into killing grounds with their own system of murderous street justice.
And nearly 18 months after Katrina, New Orleans certainly isn’t lacking for an underclass. In fact, the city’s murder rate is once again out of control, mainly due to unparented, impulsive young men shooting other unparented, impulsive young men.
What New Orleans is lacking is enough middle-class and working-class residents, who began leaving the city long before Katrina. Without such citizens, the Big Easy won’t have the committed voters and tax dollars it needs to become a functional, healthy city — something it hasn’t been for decades.
But, amazingly, that’s not the strangest and most insulting assessment I’ve read about the city this week. No, that honor goes to Andres Duany, who says, well, I’ve gotta just let him speak for himself:
I remember specifically when on a street in the Marigny I came upon a colorful little house framed by banana trees. I thought, “This is Cuba.” (I am Cuban.) I realized at that instant that New Orleans is not really an American city, but rather a Caribbean one. I understood that, when seen through the lens of the Caribbean, New Orleans is not among the most haphazard, poorest, or misgoverned American cities, but rather the most organized, wealthiest, cleanest, and competently governed of the Caribbean cities. This insight was fundamental because from that moment I understood New Orleans and truly began to sympathize. But the government? Like everyone, I found the city government to be a bit random; then I thought that if New Orleans were to be governed as efficiently as, say, Minneapolis, it would be a different place — and not one that I could care for. Let me work with the government the way it is. It is the human flaws that make New Orleans the most human of American cities. (New Orleans came to feel so much like Cuba that I was driven to buy a house in the Marigny as a surrogate for my inaccessible Santiago de Cuba.)
Keep reading, because his prescription for the city’s future success relies on this, um, lowering of standards.
“You can love completely without complete understanding.”
–Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
Dwight Howard is the best dunking big-man since Shawn Kemp. He got robbed on that “sticker on the glass” dunk during All-Star Weekend, and we got robbed because he didn’t get to bust out this dunk in the next round: