I hope you had a good week, dear readers! Enjoy some links I didn’t have time to write about!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Feb. 8, 2008”
Welcome to the Boomtown
This week’s issue of New York has a cover feature about the impending recession and how it’ll affect NYC:
See? The Boom Is Bust! Plus: The Upside of the Downside and The Everything Guide to Belt-Tightening.
But as I read the issue (it’s really become a great magazine under Adam Moss), I got the feeling that not everyone’s taking this premise seriously. It’s not that the ads were frighteningly inappropriate (not like a few weeks ago, when the cover feature on finding silence and peace in NYC was filled with ads for gyms that tend to, um, pump the megamix) (oh, and Quebec? Try to find a better tagline than “Providing emotions since 1534,” please); rather, it was a certain passage that betrayed New York’s status as a boomtown. That would be Adam Platt’s review of Dovetail, a new restaurant on the Upper West Side, which includes this gem:
As at other destination joints around town, there is a small private dining room downstairs, and if you have the inclination, you can wash your dinner down with a glass or two of ’98 La Tâche Burgundy ($1,840 per bottle) or, even better, a bottle of legendary ’95 Romanée-Conti ($3,700).
Remember, kiddos: the boom is bust! Better buy that $3,700 bottle of wine while you can still afford it!
LA me down
I’m glad The Best Los Angeles Sports Arguments
- showing up at the beginning of the 2nd quarter
- leaving at the beginning of the 4th quarter
- both!
What it is: 1/28/08
What I’m reading: John Lanchester’s Mr. Phillips
What I’m listening to: Sing You Sinners
What I’m watching: almost finished with the first season of The Wire
What I’m drinking: Balgownie Estate 2004 shiraz
Where I’m going: No trips planned this week, although we’re thinking of visiting our friends in Providence next weekend
What I’m happy about: that the heavy push to get my Jan/Feb combo issue done in time for Informex has left me a little more leeway in putting together the March issue and planning out April and May
What I’m sad about: that one of my best pals just deployed for “parts unknown” with his carrier group, and the dad of another of my pals just had surgery to remove some not-so-good cells from his pancreas
What I’m pondering: how awesome it is that, when I felt a twinge of nostalgia for my old college stomping grounds on Saturday, I was able to zoom in the satellite view on Google Maps, retrace my old travels, and remember that the Amherst Cinema is where I first watched Miller’s Crossing
I Smush New York
At the Licensing Expo in 1997, I met with some Sony executives about properties they were licensing for merchandise. (I also met Gary Panter at that event, but that’s another story). I asked why they were so excited about their new Godzilla flick. Grinning from ear to ear, one of the Japanese execs told me, “Because this time Godzilla destroys New York!”
That movie may’ve been the first to violate my rule that Jean Reno makes any movie good, but it seems to have helped kicked off a trend of movies about New York getting smacked down. This post from a NYTimes Cityroom blog offers a timeline of great New York ass-whompings, pre- and post-9/11, and links to a New York mag Top 10 list of ’em, too.
I’m just glad New Jersey tends to get off easy. Lex Luthor’s the only one who tried blowing us up.
Well, it’s no Gherkin
I first noticed the Hearst Tower during ferry rides over to NYC about a year ago. Last April, I meandered by the building and snapped some pictures. I thought it was a neat-looking building, especially as it poked out of an existing structure like a giant f***-you:
Last November, when I was nearby for the black-tie event where I concluded that I really need to buy myself a tuxedo, I was happy that I’d get the opportunity to see the tower by night.
Boy, was I disappointed. The building was utterly lifeless against the cityscape. Without daylight reflecting off the panes, the structure seemed to flatten, resembling nothing but a standard glass office building, illuminated by fluorescents. I didn’t post — or even bother keeping — the pix I took of it. I was charitable enough to figure I was just missing something. Or maybe I caught it on a bad night.
Not according to Robert Campbell, a fellow at The American Institute of Architects and a critic for the Boston Globe. In Why I Hate the Hearst Tower, starts off by comparing the building to a missile silo, goes on to write,
[N]othing about the Hearst, as seen from outdoors, suggests the possibility of human habitation. It appears to be a cage for a single massive object. [. . .] One of the problems with Modernism, as a stylistic method, is that it tends to ignore the fact that buildings look like other things. And that’s how most people understand them. People say the abstract boxlike shapes of Modernist office towers look like the cartons the real towers came in. The world we live in is a world of resemblances.
and ultimately bashes the heck out of the idea of architecture without context:
[T]he message the Hearst broadcasts to me [is]: that it’s a prototype invented for no particular site or program which was, then, pulled out of its sketchbook and plopped down on this site. Its form not only communicates but insists that it ignores its solar orientation, its site, its Deco footrest, and its internal program of uses. “Put me anywhere, fill me with anything, I’m fine with that,” the tower seems to be telling us. It’s a throwback to Mies [van der Rohe]’s concept of universal space. And let’s remember that Mies’s concept, which worked well at Crown Hall in Chicago, created, in Berlin, an art museum that is as hopelessly impractical as it is handsome.
What it is
What I’m reading: John Crowley’s The Solitudes
What I’m listening to: Angela McCluskey’s The Things We Do
What I’m watching: the first season of The Wire
What I’m drinking: Miller’s gin
What I’m happy about: the Giants reached the Super Bowl
What I’m sad about: the Giants will likely get destroyed in the Super Bowl, similar to their 2000 experience against Baltimore, which Jay Mohr characterized as “like when a white high school team from the suburbs faces a black inner-city school”
What I’m pondering: how to finish writing a post about Charles Schulz that really doesn’t support my initial thesis (that is, how Schulz and Andy Warhol exemplify certain trends in postwar American views of celebrity and art)
Belichick Chemicals?
Yes, clients occasionally put me up in fancy-pants hotels (where amenities include loaner laptops and goldfish) for press briefings.
Yes, clients occasionally take me out to dinner in fancy-pants restaurants.
No, this hasn’t stopped me from hitting a halal street-meat cart for lamb & chicken rice platter.
* * *
Best line from the press briefings: When asked about about the rigorous process his company has for suppliers of chemical ingredients, one of the VPs told us, “One supplier sent us the chemicals in a cut-off sweatshirt sleeve.”
Evidently, the supplier didn’t want to bother filling out proper certificates or taking care of traceability requirements, so they just . . . wrapped the chemicals in a cut-off sweatshirt sleeve and shipped ’em off to a global provider.
“The supplier was based in an, um, evolving economy,” we were told.
* * *
Here’s a picture from the staircase in the restaurant:
And here’s a picture of Greene St., running north of Canal:
Maps and Legends
One of my favorite recent essays was about a subway map. The original version of it was published at Design Observer in 2004, but the author expanded it for that book I keep mentioning all the goddamn time
Bierut’s essay was the first exposure I had to the work of Massimo Vignelli. That is, it was the first time I’d read his name; it turns out I’ve seen his work all my life, in various corporate logos and other pieces of design: Bloomingdale’s, American Airlines, Bennetton, and others.
This morning, taking a break from playing around with the iPhone (a.k.a. one of the finest pieces of design I’ve ever seen), I caught up with New York Magazine‘s issue on Design Revolutionaries, which I’ve been saving for a while (for some reason, the website refers to it as “Home Design”). It turned out that its feature on Vignelli and his wife Lella was minuscule — Martha Stewart received a much longer piece — but it did include a large replica of the (in)famous subway map, so that was nice to see.
More importantly, its splash-photo shows that the Vignellis’ home on the upper east side is the greatest apartment I’ve ever seen in my life:
(Photo by Dean Kaufman)
Seriously: those windows are TWENTY FEET HIGH.
So, even though it’s not like he needs my money, I ordered a copy of Vignelli From A to Z
Unrequired Reading: Dec. 21, 2007
The year-end 400+ page issue is finished at last! This one is dedicated to QuarkXpress, the layout program that includes such features as “This file cannot be opened by this version of QuarkXpress” and “Why would we bother making our font-handling system compatible with Mac? It’s not like the Mac is a computer of choice in the publishing industry!”
Time to embarrass myself and others at our office holiday party!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 21, 2007”