A podcast about books & life — not necessarily in that order
The links are going to go dead in a few days, so if you’re interested in Robert Moses, historical revisionism and crypto-Oedipal conflicts, and the landscape of New York (and who isn’t?), you need to check out these two articles from the NYObserver and the NYTimes.
First, though, you should read the Atlantic Yards Report post on this revisionism (which led me to the articles), and how it’s being used (sorta) to justify Ratner’s plans for Brooklyn.
Oh, and read The Power Broker
(Oh, just check out the pictures instead.)
I meant to write a little recap of Wednesday-Thursday this morning, but got derailed by various circumstances, including writing that piece about Jews buying Chryslers.
Anyway, here’s the skinny: official VM buddy Paul Di Filippo was in NYC for a reading Wednesday night at the KGB Bar. I had a press event in the city Thursday morning, and the pharma company that was hosting it kindly got me a room at the Royalton so I could attend the meeting in full bright-eyes-and-bushy-tail-itude.
I got into the city pretty quickly, but that turned out to be my undoing. See, I got in so soon (around 5:30), I actually got caught up in traffic of cars leaving mid-town. So the last few blocks took almost as long as the vroom from Ramsey to 57th St.
After I checked in, I started to walk from 44th to 4th. It was cold as bejesus, so I figured I’d just meander a while until I got too chilly and then get a cab. I walked down 5th Ave. for two blocks when I noticed the glorious sight of Grand Central Terminal, with the Chrysler Building looming behind it. I couldn’t remember ever having been to Grand Central (I’m sure Mom’ll be able to remind me of at least one trip there), so I decided to walk through it.
It’s a gorgeous building, inside and out. I looked up at the painting of the (reversed) constellations, and wistfully thought about reading Little, Big
Coming out the other side of the terminal, I walked another four or five blocks south, but the cold was just sapping me, so I hopped in a cab and sped the rest of the way to the village.
A year or two ago, a friend of mine asked me if I go to readings down at “that socialist bar in the village.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, before the KGB-aspect dawned on me. I never thought the KGB was equatable with socialism; I thought it was more like a state-sponsored terror apparatus, but hey. I told her that I’d never been to a reading at KGB, and that socialism gives me hives.
I admit that I reflexively bristled when I saw the hammer & sickle flag hanging above the bar. I had my usual thought-experiment about how well the place would be received if it hung a swastika in place of that Soviet banner. Then I thought about how the Hungarians made that great park of their old Soviet statues, and converted the stuff into memorabilia. I figured the Hungarians earned the right to goof on this stuff, but I still felt a little tweaked at the hipster-idea that it’s funny to have an NYC bar named after the KGB.
But guess who’s reading too much into things?
Amy was waiting for me at the bar, as was Paul & his partner Deb. There was much rejoicing, even though we’d seen each other less than three weeks earlier. Paul insisted on introducing me to numerous publishers and editors, even though I’ve been out of the publishing game. It was nice to talk shop a little, and I was happy to hear how other people were able to make it work far better than I ever did.
Eventually, Amy’s buddy and former roommate Carl showed up, and we all drank Baltica 4 beer to celebrate the occasion. It wasn’t a bad beer, even though I’m not a beer guy. My problem is, if I have even one beer or wine, I can’t transition over to my drink-of-choice, so I’m stuck.
Paul then read from his new novel, a chapter about a husband and wife in 2006 who keep timeslipping into a brother and sister from decades earlier. It had some good passages, as well as parts that were more cinematic and only transitioned into print with difficulty. For the most part, I enjoyed Paul’s performance.
The second reader was Ysabeau S. Wilce, who read an entertaining selection from her first novel Flora Segunda, Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), A House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog
Following the readings, we shot the breeze for a while in the bar, until a group of us filed out for a late (9pm) dinner at a Chinese restaurant on St. Marks. Ellen Datlow, an SF editor, took it upon herself to order for our table, while I took it upon myself to make conversation by rambling with a British SF editor and game-publisher. We were treated to some fantastic dishes (“treated,” because the British editor elected to pay out bill, over our objections), including pumpkin croquettes and stir-fry lotus root. Amy was in tears over the deep fried strips of beef. “It’s like cracklin!” she cried.
Following dinner, Amy & I finally made our way back to the Royalton, where we promptly collapsed. It’d been a long day for us both.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get much sleep. Although the room looked wonderful (see the pics), the bed itself was as hard as concrete. In addition, construction in Times Square meant there was a near-constant level of noise through the night. It was like having a garbage truck outside the window, except we were on the 11th floor.
I thought this would put me at a disadvantage the next morning, when I met the pharma company and other business-press people at breakfast. But I discovered that their dinner had gone somewhat late that night, transitioning into a night out for some.
So I was able to fortify myself with a half-dozen coffees, a danish, and smoked salmon and bagels. It reminded me of that multi-month stretch last year where the only things I drank were water, black coffee and gin. I mentioned this to one of the pharma-execs, who laughed nervously.
I’ve bored you enough, so I won’t bore you with the details of the press-event, except to let you know that I pulled my “big boy scout” routine. One of the execs was mid-presentation when his laser-pointer died, so I got up, went to my bag of tricks, and produced a new one for him. The PR rep who organized the event asked, “You carry one of those with you?”
“Never know when you’ll get tapped for PowerPoint karaoke.”
(Oh, just check out the pictures instead.)
Not having a ton of family in these parts, I use the time off during the holidays to visit friends. On Friday, Amy & I went down to Lumberton, NJ to visit friends of hers who were in the area for their own holiday family-tour. We had an entertaining afternoon, centering around a lengthy meal at a P.F. Chang and a discussion of why Shawn Bradley never panned out in the NBA. Good times were had by me, which counts for a lot.
Yesterday, we drove up to Providence, RI to visit my friends Paul & Deb. They’d been having plenty of family get-togethers during the week, so it was a nice change of pace for them to get a visit from their weird friends in NJ.
I always love seeing Paul & Deb, because they have an awful lot of diverse interests and are quite passionate about them. We exchanged some holiday gifts — we brought back some neat tea from our Paris trip, and I also made them copies of a few Mad Mix CDs, while they gave us books, fancy knitting yarn, and unique coffee mugs from a local artist, before deciding we also needed to take back an amaryllis and some paperwhite bulbs. And a loaf of sweet bread from a Portuguese bakery.
In between these two bouts of gift-giving, the four of us drove over to the museum at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), which was exhibiting Wunderground: a collection of Providence poster art from the past decade, and a sculptural village called Shangri-la-la Land. I took a ton of pictures of the exhibit, before a staffer ran up to tell me that I wasn’t permitted to snap pix in the exhibition. I apologized and pretended I’d just taken one. Here’s a collection of 19 shots from the show. (The sculpture area was dimly lit, so I tried a few shots without flash, but gave up and started snapping away. I included both types.)
Comics Reporter and official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon wrote a great (and lengthy) article about Fort Thunder, one of the main groups of the Providence arts scene during that period:
Fort Thunder was different. The Providence, RI group has achieved importance not just for the sum total of its considerable artists but for its collective impact and its value as a symbol of unfettered artistic expression. The key to understanding Fort Thunder is that it was not just a group of cartoonists who lived near each other, obsessed about comics and socialized. It was a group of artists, many of whom pursued comics among other kinds of media, who lived together and shared the same workspace.
As an outgrowth of the Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] where nearly all of them attended (some even graduating), Fort Thunder provided a common setting for creation that imposed almost no economic imperative to conform to commercial standards or to change in an attempt to catch the next big wave. They were young, rents were cheap, and incidental money could be had by dipping into other more commercial areas of artistic enterprise such as silk-screening rock posters. Fort Thunder was also fairly isolated, both in terms of influences that breached its walls and how that work was released to the outside world. This allowed its artists to produce a significant body of work that most people have yet to see. It also fueled the group’s lasting mystique. The urge — even seven years after discovering the group — is not to dig too deeply, so as not to uncover the grim and probably unromantic particulars.
We had a great time in the exhibition. Over the years, Paul & Deb had snagged several of the posters from lampposts and walls in town, but they told us that most of the posters were stuck with pretty heavy glue, making it impossible to take home these amazing pieces. I figured it said something about the confluence of art, commerce and paste, but I say that about everything. I think it was also the first museum exhibition I’d been to where the art was held up by thumbtacks.
Before visiting the museum, Paul wanted to show us one of his favorite places in town, the Providence Atheneum. It’s America’s 4th oldest library (est. 1753) and requires an annual membership. Paul pays it gladly, because he loves coming to the place, reading magazines and newspapers, checking out the great collection, and soaking in the ambience.
After the Atheneum and the Wunderground exhibition, we were off to a Portuguese restaurant where I ordered the Shish-Kebab of Damocles, evidently an Iberian specialty.
If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you probably realize that a day that includes
is pretty much as good as it gets.
(If you want to see pix from the whole day, go here. If you just want that Wunderground set, head over here. And you can check out Amy’s pix from that day over here.)
It’s the end-of-year edition of Unrequired Reading, my unrequired readers! We’ve got more long-ass articles and otherwise interesting pieces that I haven’t had time to write about than you can shake a stick at!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 29, 2006”
Amy & I meandered through the French Quarter yesterday, in search of cheap novelties (some voodoo dolls at the French Market), some holiday presents (a couple of higher-end masks at Rumors, and a sweatshirt from the local Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, which my boss contends has the best margaritas around), and coffee and beignets at Café Du Monde.
We took a ton of pictures yesterday, but I forgot to bring the cable for my camera along for the trip, so mine will have to wait till we’re home next week. Amy has been working much more diligently on hers, and has demonstrated an eye for photography that leaves me jealous. She’s also willing to spend time with Photoshop and Lightroom to improve her pix, while my point-and-click mentality seems to carry over to many aspects of my life.
Anyway, the Quarter was pretty full of people, even though we got in pretty early (around 9am). The New Orleans Bowl football game between Rice and Troy had been the night before, so partisans for those two schools were everywhere. In fact, CDM was completely packed when we arrived. The weather was in the mid-50s, and Amy pointed out that you could tell which people were locals because they were the ones wearing scarves and gloves.
After breakfast, we began taking pictures. I brought my laptop along, in hopes that the citywide WiFi service was actually functioning, but the Earthlink-provided network didn’t show up on my menu when we were sitting in Jackson Square, so I dropped the laptop off in our car. Sorry, no liveblogging from the streets of NO,LA, dear readers. Maybe next trip.
When Amy gets her pix posted, you’ll get an idea of how gorgeous the morning light can be in the Quarter. It was the first sunny day since we arrived on Thursday, which got Amy in a good mood. The rain and drear can bring a body down, like it has today.
(In fact, we’ve spent a good chunk of time just hanging out in her parents’ living room. Since I just crossed the 700-page mark in that Berlin Noir omnibus I brought along for the trip, I can attest that we’ve, um, had some time on our hands.)
During our walk yesterday, we stopped at Faulkner House Books in Pirate Alley (yarr!), where I picked up a small collection of post-Katrina columns by Times-Picayune writer Chris Rose, who’s been chronicling the human costs of the catastrophe as well as anybody. I’ll probably read it after I finish the remaining 130 pages of Berlin Noir today.
It turns out the bookstore’s doing pretty well, at least if some of the comments I heard from the manager about the prices they fetched for a few rarities is true. I’m being deliberately vague, but it sounds like they made some serious scratch from selling a couple of New Orleans-related literary memorabilia. It warms my heart that there’s a market for the stuff.
I can’t offer much of an assessment on the city’s recovery. The French Quarter isn’t like the rest of the area and, while there were plenty more tourists than our last trip in July, that’s not adding much to the conversation. During the coverage of the New Orleans Bowl on ESPN, the commentators talked about “how little has been done” down here for the people, and showed a short clip of the student-athletes taking a bus tour through the lower Ninth Ward.
As Amy & I walked through the Quarter, we reminisced about our wedding weekend down here. There are so many landmarks for me (and even more for Amy, who spent so many years in the city), so many resonances, so many reminiscences, that it’s hard for me to imagine that it can go away for good, within our lifetimes.
Last night, at the home of Amy’s grandmother, some family members railed against FEMA, the local contractors, and the state’s governor, who evidently finished a legislative session unable to pass a bill to spend the state’s $2 billion surlplus. Since it’s not their district, these in-laws didn’t directly lambaste the re-elections of Ray Nagin or Rep. Jefferson, who was recently caught with $90,000 dollars in bribe money in his freezer, but they weren’t happy about either of those developments.
After we got back from her grandmother’s place (we were dropping off some leftover chicken tenders & cream cheese wrapped in bacon), we found a documentary about New Zealand on the Travel Channel. There was a segment on Napier, the art-deco city on the north island. It spent a little time showing off the buildings, then explained how it all resulted from a massive earthquake and fire in 1931 that wiped out the city. (In fact, the whole documentary was along these lines: each segment started out with beautiful images and descriptions of wonder and grandeur, then segued into “the dark secret behind it.”)
The third novel in that Berlin Noir omnibus jumps 9 years from the end of the second, from 1938 to 1947. Berlin is in ruins, and the Russians are starting to separate the east section of the city from the west. It made me wonder what the city’s like today, how it integrated in the last 15 years.
The rain’s heavy again today, and they’re issuing flood warnings. Nothing cataclysmic, of course: just enough to overrun the various drainage systems for a while.
It’s a short Unrequired Reading session this week, since I’m still getting over the year-end issue blowout, and I’m trying to take it easy during this little holiday trip to Louisiana.
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 22, 2006”
From some idiot in the Washington Post:
Large populations living in megacities consume massive amounts of the Earth’s energy to maintain their infrastructures and daily flow of human activity. The Sears Tower in Chicago alone uses more electricity in a single day than the city of Rockford, Ill., with 152,000 people. Even more amazing, our species now consumes nearly 40 percent of the net primary production on Earth — the amount of solar energy converted to plant organic matter through photosynthesis — even though we make up only one-half of 1 percent of the animal biomass of the planet. This means less for other species to use.
A few years ago, I was shooting the breeze about the anicent Greeks with a buddy of mine. It turned out that he was devoted to Herodotus’ descriptions of the war against the Persians, while I preferred reading Thucydides’ accounts of What Happened After. In a sense, it encapsulated how our lives contrasted (at the time): as an alienated author, he was interested in the battles and heroism, while as a publisher, I was more interested in how everything gets administered after the heroism.
(I couldn’t come up with any parallels for the Melian dialogues, but nobody’s perfect.)
Anyway, I bring this up because of an article in this month’s issue of Wired. See, it’s one thing for architects like Frank Gehry to come up with never-before-seen organic forms for buildings, but it’s another thing to actually build them.
(You know you wanna check out the pix from my meanders in Toronto on Friday)
Home from Toronto a lot easier than my boss, whose flight home on Friday got cancelled due to “the airspace over Boston,” according to his pilot. He asked if this meant the bad weather & high winds we had all over the northeast, and was told that it did not. So, after 4 hours in an Embraer 145, he was allowed to leave and headed back to our hotel, where he sat in the bar and watched hockey.
Meanwhile, official VM buddy Sam and I went to see the Raptors play the Celtics in what Sam called “battle of the worst coaches in the NBA.” Since the Raptors have a game tonight against the Knicks, we figured maybe it’s a round-robin tournament.
We had fun at the game, but it was despite the action on the court. Sam’s now been to two NBA games with me (we hit a Dallas game against Orlando in April 2005), and he’s convinced I have NBA-Tourette’s, in which a constant stream of analysis & invective pours forth from my mouth during professional basketball games. We joined up with my boss after the game for a drink or two. He seemed pretty exhausted by the hurry-up-and-wait. I admit: if I were stuck in an Embraer for 4 hours, I’d probably go bananas.
Earlier in the day, after I visited Sam’s company in Oakville and toured the company’s produciton facilities (not as heavy-duty containment suiting as I wore on Thursday), I wandered around Toronto a little, while the weather was clear.
Unfortunately, this wandering didn’t coincide exactly with the clear weather, and I was stuck in some darned cold rain for a while. Early in my meander, I stopped at the Roots store in the Eaton Centre to get a hat and gloves. But then I decided that they were kinda pricey and, besides, the weather was okay now, so it would stay that way forever.
From there, I exited onto Yonge Street, which I forgot was an interesting amalgam of high-end retail, good record stores, and low-rent strip clubs. I headed off from there to a used bookstore I remembered from a past trip, but didn’t find anything.
I decided I’d walk through the University district and visit the famed comic store, The Beguiling. I spent a while there, hoping the weather would clear again and trying to justify spending $240 (Canadian) for a limited print by Sammy Harkham of a golem walking in the forest. I held off (I’ll wait till the USD appreciates against Canada’s dollar, and I’d probably be fine with a panel from The Poor Sailor anyway).
One of the nice things about having started doing yoga is that rambling ambles like this one don’t seem to give me the slight mid-back pain I was getting the past few years. I’ve only been on it for a few weeks or so, so hey.
During this walk, I came across two things I didn’t take pictures of: the Bata Shoe Museum and the Robarts Library. The former looks entertaining enough, and I bought a postcard from there for Amy, to give us yet another reason to take a long weekend here in the springtime.
The Library, on the other hand, is one of the most overwhelmingly depressing buildings I’ve ever seen. It may’ve been worse because of the rain and gray skies, but I can’t imagine a scenario which the appearance of this building inspires anything but fear and dread. Don’t let 1970s architecture happen to you!
After I left The Beguiling emptyhanded, it was time for another overpriced cab ride back to the hotel. I was amazed by the cost of cab rides in this city, as well as the ones I had to take to the pharma companies, which were outside the city. The flat-rate limo-y cars were also awfully expensive, including $51 CAD for the 20-minute ride from downtown to the airport.
In keeping with my recent post about accumulating all sorts of change and foreign currency, I returned home this morning with about $47 in Canadian bills and change. I feel like George Soros.
Anyway, a really neat thing happened during the short (54-minute) flight today. We completed our initial descent through the cloud cover, and all I could see were brown-gray hills and a few houses and a winding road or two. I thought, “We’re only 15 minutes from landing, but I have NO idea where we are right now.” It looked like Pennsylvania farmland, or far western NJ.
Then I noticed the Sheraton Crossroads to port, and it hit me: I was looking down at my morning commute! Sure enough, Rt. 17 threaded away from the Sheraton, southeast to Ramsey. Our plane followed Rt. 208 for a bit, as I picked out landmark after landmark (the Nabisco plant, the Ikea across from Garden State Plaza, even the Lukoil I stopped in last week). I’ve only had this perspective from a plane once before. Usually, I come home at night, or on different flight paths.
It helps to see things from different angles. Except Raptors/Celtics games.
(check out a couple of pix from my Toronto walkabout)
Since I moved this blog up to a new version of the WordPress platform, I can do some neat stuff, like putting the rest of this post inside that “more” section, so it doesn’t take up so much space.
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 1, 2006”