A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
I should mention that, instead of going to the Magic game tonight, I could partake in the big conference reception/party. Unfortunately, it’s being held at, ahem, Pleasure Island.
I have surveyed a decent sample set of attendees and exhibitors at this conference, and just about 100% of them agree: “Pleasure Island” is a really creepy name, and sounds like a ’70s stag-flick.
Got into Orlando safe and sound. I didn’t think about the fact that a flight here on a Sunday morning would be filled with screaming kids traveling to Disney World. The stewardess didn’t even ask me to turn off my iPod for takeoff.
I took Nightwood with me. It’s the favorite book of one of the authors I used to publish. I read about 20 pages of it once before, but the floridity of the prose tired me out. So I figured I’d make it the only book I have with me, like I did with Foucault’s Pendulum a couple of summers ago.
Of course, I took a break to do the crossword puzzle in the Continental in-flight magazine, but that only took about 20 minutes.
Anyway, the conference/exhibition starts in a few minutes, and I’ve got ironing to do. This place sure is, um, pleasant.
The last NBA divisional preview is up! Go, Northwest! (It’s still a preview even though the season started a few days ago, right?)
Thanks to all who contributed to this year’s preview: Tom Spurgeon, Craig Sirkin, Sam Richezza, and Adam Taxin! I promise to coordinate this thing better next year! As is, you’ve gotta be happy that I bumped it over to its own page!
I’ll be down in Orlando for a conference from tomorrow morning through Tuesday afternoon, so I’ll try to head over to the O-Rena to catch that Washington-Orlando matchup Monday night. If I get close enough to the bench, I’ll pretend I’m trying to serve Gilbert Arenas with a subpoena. Wish me luck!
One of the aspects of This Travelin’ Life that I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned is the complimentary copies of USA Today that hotels distribute. While it’s not a paper I read under typical circumstances, it’s kinda comforting to find the issue waiting outside my door when I head out for breakfast during these trade show trips. This morning, I took my copy down with me and read it over migas and coffee. Lots of coffee.
The lead article in today’s Life section was “Mainline pulls in Protestants,” discussing a trend that may or may not be occurring among christians. I wasn’t interested in reading it until I noticed the headline for the story on its second-page jump: “Like television, religion is now ‘highly fragmented'”.
Those editors sure know how to get my attention.
This almost got trumped by the two articles on page 2 of the business section: “Flat wages, rising key prices a double whammy” and “After trailing inflation, wages rise at fastest rate since 2004.”
Fortunately, the absurdities and contradictions of USA Today’s headline writers was beaten by a giant ad in the News section:
How To Be $1,835,360 Richer
Win 95.12% Of All Trades
And Still Lose Nothing . . .
Even If You’re Absolutely 100% Wrong
On the plus side, the paper did tell me that PW Botha died.
The conference wraps up today, and I’ll be flying back into Newark Airport tonight. Which airport is that? Oh, you know: the one where they had a 90% failure rate in finding knives & explosives in check-in bags during a test, where two jets just “bumped wings” on the taxiway, and where an incoming plane from Orlando landed on the taxiway instead of the runway.
Oh, and I’ll be flying to Orlando next week.
Walking through the gate into the airport terminal, I realized that this is my 4th visit to San Antonio: 3 pharma conferences and 1 car wash industry event (I got my start on a magazine called Auto Laundry News).
I’ve been through a bunch of airports large and small in the last 10 years. Sometimes I don’t remember a lot about them. I didn’t recall anything about San Antonio until I started walking down the long hallway to the baggage claim and ground transport (I was looking for the latter, since I had everything in my carry-on). It was then that I thought, “Oh, yeah! They had that game room with the Addams’ Family pinball machine!”
And, lo and behold, what was in the next doorway to my right? Showtime! Well, not exactly, since it was 11pm and I was too exhausted from the 4 hours in the air, 3 hours in the airport, and the hour or so I’d spent sawing trees and hauling lumber that day.
But it was reassuring to see the machine there.
The flight wasn’t eventful. Most of us were on the way to the conference. When I walked back up the cabin from the bathroom, just about all the laptops I saw open displayed the logos of various drug companies. The woman next to me worked for a French company that handles pharma packaging (glass containers). Her name was Pascaline. I only mention her because I love the name.
I read and listened to music for most of the flight. The guy across the aisle from me was reading, but he didn’t have any music. What he had was a book with the title, The Way Of The Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Woman, Work, and Sexual Desire. I only mention this because of the title of chapter 16: “Women Are Not Liars.”
Go figure. I read about half of that Portis novel, Gringos.
The first day of the show’s done. There are a bunch of hospitality events going on; I’ve been invited to a couple of dinners and other get-togethers. This is usually a good opportunity to get wrecked on someone else’s dime, but I’m feeling pretty tired just now. I might just take the night off, scare up some room service, watch Monday Night Football, and get back to that novel.
Or I’ll be table-dancing to Thunderstruck at a bar on the Riverwalk. I’ll letcha know.
The book I’m taking on this trip to San Antonio? Gringos, by Charles Portis.
Amy’s thinking of getting a Mini Cooper, so I took a look at them yesterday while she was getting her hair cut. They’re awfully neat cars and, if I wasn’t opposed to owning a car from a German company, I’d look at getting one for myself. Alas.
We got home and caught up with Sabrina (1954) and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which remains the funniest movie I’ve seen this decade. I’d never seen Sabrina, and my only point of reference was hearing Mike & the Mad Dog decry the old version in favor of the contemporary edition. When one of them declared that Audrey Hepburn wasn’t that pretty, it became clear to me that all sports radio hosts are actually gay. In between movies, Amy put together an “avocado et crevettes” dish for me, similar to the one we had in Paris. Love is wonderful.
What’s not wonderful is the idea of a musical based on Bob Dylan’s songs. We caught a clip of “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” the, um, Bob Dylan musical. On Broadway. No, seriously. It was on The Soup, and Amy & I just stared agog, like Beavis & Butthead during a bad video.
Fortunately, one of my favorite writers, David Gates, went to see the show, and wrote a column about it for Newsweek. He was even more perplexed than we were.
In other news, I’m headed off to San Antonio tonight for a pharma conference. This’ll be followed by a trip to Orlando next Sunday for another one, but that oughtta wrap up my business travel for the year, unless I make a short trip up to Toronto to visit some clients.
Starting tomorrow, if all goes well (as in, we get everything written and I’m able to get online at the hotel), I’ll begin posting the third annual Virtual Memories NBA Preview! Official VM bestest buddy Tom Spurgeon & I have divvied up the 30 squads and will be offering our jaundiced take on the NBA (with a couple of guest-contributors).
In honor of that, I present the man who got me to watch pro hoops regularly, when I was 14 or so: Patrick Ewing.
A friend of mine recently brought up how “the West has lied,” failing to keep its “never again” promise after Rwanda. I mentioned that, just as anti-genocide forces learned from Rwanda, we should remember that groups that plan to commit genocide also learned lessons from what happened in Rwanda (and other massacres).
A former assistant secretary of state thinks the world’s approach to the genocide in Darfur isn’t helping any:
When pressure is applied to the Sudanese government, there is always the perceived sense, much as there was in Vietnam, that just a little more and Khartoum will cave. Perhaps. But Bashir, admittedly no Ho Chi Minh, is sitting on growing oil revenue, and he can see that the international community is divided and that the demands for more aggressive action are going nowhere.
Moreover, many measures the advocates demand for bringing pressure on Bashir, such as targeted sanctions, an investigation of Sudan’s business holdings or a threat of action by the International Criminal Court, hardly meet the standard of urgency, however much these things may be worth doing.
* * *
It turns out that the solution to U.S. oil independence may come from Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa.
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Theodore Dalrymple reviews Ian Buruma’s new book on the murder of Theo Van Gogh (and all that it may or may not signify):
[Van Gogh] thought he was a licensed jester. His ability to shock depended, of course, upon the persistence in Dutch society of the Calvinist mentality of purse-lipped moralism, now as frequently employed against those who dare suggest that the rank, and deeply ideological, hedonism of Amsterdam is not only unattractive but morally reprehensible as against those, such as fornicators, traditionally regarded as sinners. Scratch a Dutch liberal, and you will find a Calvinist moralist not far beneath the surface.This Calvinism, however, was tolerant to the extent that it did not prescribe slaughter in the streets for those deemed to have insulted it. Its worst sanction was disapproval — precisely what Van Gogh sought. Van Gogh hid under so many layers of rather crude irony that it became impossible to know what he really believed, if anything; and it was beyond his comprehension that anyone would take anything so seriously, or perhaps literally is a better word, as to kill for it.
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China plans to become the world’s R&D hub. I don’t believe it’s going to happen, for reasons that are so full of racist stereotypes that I am both embarrassed to recount them and fully convinced that they will apply in spades. (Which is to say, their best-known invention is more Chinese people, and their best-known export is SARS.)
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I was wrong about the Cardinals getting destroyed by the Tigers in the World Series. But that doesn’t change the fact that I love Tigers’ manager Jim Leyland, not least because of his inability to quit smoking. Which is fantastic. Not the inability. Smoking.
He was being interviewed by then-ESPNer Chris Myers, who was asking him about his well-publicized tendency to smoke cigarettes in the dugout. Leyland paused for a moment, put his head down and delivered the obligatory platitudes about how bad smoking is for you, how children should avoid smoking, how he knows it’s unhealthy. Then he looked directly into the camera, his eyes very wide, and said, “Still. Smokers out there, you know what I’m talking about. That moment, after you’ve had a huge meal, say at Thanksgiving, when you step outside in the cold, light up a cigarette and take a deep inhale … that’s about the best moment in the world, you know? All the smokers out there, you know that feeling. Sometimes, smoking is fantastic.” Myers quickly cut to commercial, and Leyland has never been on the show since.
* * *
A few weeks ago, while channel-surfing, Amy & I came across a documentary show on the Travel Channel. It featured John Ratzenberger exploring the history of stuff that’s Made In America. My first thought was, “John Ratzenberger gets work?”
Amy’s first thought was, “Seriously? Shouldn’t he be wearing a USPS uniform?”
Anyway, that episode chronicled the Maker’s Mark whiskey factory in Kentucky. Out of deference to my southern wife, we stayed with that segment. Here’s a BW piece on the issues Maker’s Mark faces in keeping up its quality as its market share grows. It’s an interesting story because, while the brand is owned by a larger group, it looks like there are very site-specific issues involved in making the stuff. (I don’t think this includes sourcing that red wax they use to seal the bottles, but you never know.)
Have a slide show, while you’re here.
* * *
I’m not only interested in the scaleup of whiskey manufacturing. I’m also interested in the massive infrastructure needed to run something like Google. So is George Gilder, who wrote this lengthy article about the subject. So next time you’re googling about whiskey, remember this blog.
* * *
Does the earth sing to itself? I have Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome’ on right now, so I can’t tell.
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Speaking of music, Roy Blount, Jr. doesn’t like Bob Dylan’s music.
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Like everyone else, New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose has had a rough time in the year-plus since Katrina:
I was receiving thousands of e-mails in reaction to my stories in the paper, and most of them were more accounts of death, destruction and despondency by people from around south Louisiana. I am pretty sure I possess the largest archive of personal Katrina stories, little histories that would break your heart.
I guess they broke mine.
I am an audience for other people’s pain. But I never considered seeking treatment. I was afraid that medication would alter my emotions to a point of insensitivity, lower my antenna to where I would no longer feel the acute grip that Katrina and the flood have on the city’s psyche.
I thought, I must bleed into the pages for my art. Talk about “embedded” journalism; this was the real deal.
He realized that wasn’t smart, and has a LONG column on how he now deals with his depression. You may want to take notes, since you will likely be mighty depressed by the end of this column.
The Sports Guy’s football picks this week are pretty entertaining for three reasons:
1) A great anecdote about Milton Berle’s natural gifts:
I thought of a new gambling theory after last week’s Denver-Oakland game when the Broncos sat on a 13-3 lead for the entire second half: The Milton Berle Theory. In case you didn’t know, Berle was famous in Hollywood circles for being more endowed than anyone else. Basically, he was the Dirk Diggler of Hollywood. (Note: There’s a hysterical anecdote in the SNL book “Live From New York” about this. Highest of high comedy.) Anyway, the famous story about Berle (maybe an urban legend, maybe not) was that somebody challenged him to a “who’s bigger?” contest once, and Berle soundly defeated the guy, then bragged to someone else in the room, “I only pulled out enough to win.” I’ve heard this story 20 different ways but that’s always how it ends.
What does this have to do with gambling? In the age of perpetual putridity, I feel like we’re seeing these games now where double-digit favorites play bad teams straight up, let them hang around for four quarters, then prevail in an unsatisfying, closer-than-we-thought win that leaves their fans wondering what the hell just happened. Well, why does this happen? Because they only pulled out enough to win.
2) An entertaining rant by his wife, who’s beating him this season in NFL picks:
I’ve seen “Devil Wears Prada” four times already: twice in the movies, then on both ends of a cross-country flight last week. Bill couldn’t understand why I would watch it four times so I tried to explain it to him. They don’t make enough movies where there’s a young girl who has no style and can’t fit in, and then, as the movie goes along, she realizes you need to look the part to get ahead. So she finds somebody non-threatening who’s willing to help her understand how to dress and act, and the whole time, everyone’s wearing great clothes, looking great and going to high-society events. And by the end, she’s cooler and more stylish than anyone in the movie. Pretty Woman worked the same way: Julia Roberts was a hooker with no style, then she found a billionaire boyfriend and a new wardrobe and everything turned out fine. I’m glad she fell in love and it was a nice story, but I really liked her clothes more than anything, especially the brown dress she wore in the polo scene.
Bill joked that, if that’s what I liked about these movies, then they should just keep remaking “Prada” in different environments. Like if, instead of a fashion magazine, they tried a high-class gossip magazine, or a black fashion magazine, or a teen fashion magazine, or they could get out of the magazine industry and use an ad agency or a daytime TV show. It could be the same premise every time — a young girl gets a job in a hectic workplace and has no style, people are mean to her and, eventually, she fits in and succeeds at her job even though she has an evil boss. Then she gets a promotion, falls in love and gets her revenge on everyone who thought she was worthless and didn’t have any style. I thought this was a neat idea until Bill said he was kidding. But why is that a bad idea? Bill has something like 50 favorite sports movies and they’re all the same movie — somebody’s an underdog, nobody believes in them, then they win the big game in the end. That’s every sports movie. So how is that different than making my fashion movie premise 50 different ways? I think Bill is a hypocrite.
3) A link to a good article by Chris Rose of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, defending the decision to get the Superdome opened in time for this season:
The arguments posited in [anti-Superdome letters sent to] USA Today seem to suggest that there be no compartmentalization of funding for recovery. In other words, that repairing the Dome prevents homes being rebuilt in the 9th Ward. Or that patching potholes on Bourbon Street is keeping hospitals from opening. Or that reopening the Aquarium of the Americas — or doing anything with federal dollars that rebuilds our economic engines rather than homes — keeps people homeless.
That said, this week’s Sunday NFL slate is so bad that I’m willing to take the day off and go up to the big outlet mall so Amy can do some shopping.
It’s up in the Harriman Park area, so I’m hoping we can go off and take some pictures of the fall color, too. Unfortunately, we got hit with Day-After-Tomorrow-style wind yesterday, so a lot of the leaves may be gone by now.
First, Official VM just-about-closest-friend-in-the-world Ian gets his chief petty officer pin, and now he goes off and pops the question to his One True Love! Much congratulations are in order! Go, Ian!
In additional friends-of-VM news, my buddy Faiz reveals the true reason he couldn’t meet up with me & Amy in Paris: he and his wife are expecting their first kid! (And Paris is evidently inimical to developing life!) Also, I’ve been insanely remiss in not mentioning Faiz’s first children’s book, My Alien Penfriend! Go, Faiz!
That’s the extent of the super-wonderful news. In not-so-wonderful news, it looks like I’ve got an upper respiratory infection, so I’ve got some antibiotics working on that. Go, azithromycin!