Category: Urban issues

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Unrequired Reading: Oct. 20, 2006

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, dear readers. I’ve been kinda busy in the evenings, and a little outta sorts in the mornings. Fortunately, I’m still up for some Unrequired Reading if you are!

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When the official VM wife became the official VM fiancee, we had to go out ring-shopping. (Since I proposed a little sooner than I had planned, I didn’t actually have a ring for her.) She researched a bunch, and decided that the diamond trade was just too venal for us to get involved with it as a symbol of our love. So we went for a gorgeous aquamarine instead.

Here’s a piece (plus slide show) about shopping for the guilt-free diamond.

(Note that I’ve resisted making any comments about using the term ‘conflict-free’ as it relates to engagement rings.)

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Congrats to the state of Oregon, for upholding a law restricting asset forfeitures. I never really understood how cops were able to seize and sell a person’s assets even if the person isn’t convicted of a crime.

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I admit to letting the Darfur slaughter fall off the VM radar since I first wrote about it in May 2004. This is mainly because I believe the western world has failed to stop the Sudanese government and militia from killing the civilians and rebels in Darfur. By failed, I mean it’s gone past the point of no return. To make up for my lack of coverage, here’s an interview with Paul Salopek, the journalist who was imprisoned in Khartoum for a month on trumped-up charges:

FOREIGN POLICY: What is the biggest misconception about the crisis in Darfur as reported in the Western media?

Paul Salopek: Well, I think it’s been oversimplified as this Manichean struggle between ethnic Arab herders who are armed by Khartoum, and these helpless African farmers who are struggling for their rights in this very desolate, Western region of the Sudan. I think that has a fundamental truth to it, and that has been historically a problem that goes back for generations, if not centuries. But I think that perception has to be overlaid with much more complicated tribal rivalries that are then manipulated at the national level in Sudan. Even internationally, there’s a layer of interests that are tugging and pulling at that area of Sudan.

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Holy crap! Discs of Tron was on the Atari 2600?

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Playing it safe with the design for the NYTimes’ new HQ.

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If you have a Wall Street Journal account, you really oughtta read this article about how Holt & Co. blew more than a million bucks trying to engineer the next Da Vinci Code.

Historical thrillers in particular are hot. One theory says readers are seeking a certainty in these books that since the end of the Cold War they’re having trouble finding elsewhere.

“We’re seeing a return to the past because everything was in its place, and people were recognizably polarized in a way that gives us comfort,” says literary agent Richard Curtis. “In the post 9/11 world, we aren’t clear about our enemies. Is the military officer in an Iraqi uniform a friend, or is he a terrorist posing as one? We need to know who to root for and historical fiction provides us with that.”

So Holt went after a novel starring Freud & Jung. No, seriously. (In what may be a first, it looks like Amazon is actually charging more than a bricks & mortar store, since I saw this book with a 50% off sticker in Borders on Wednesday.)

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The new issue of Men’s Vogue (sue me) has an excerpt from the autobiography of art critic Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know. It centers on Hughes’ awful car wreck in 1999 and the legal problems he had after. He was raked by the “meejah” for being an elitist expat.

For of course I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and ufll to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails or someone trying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be iwth as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unles the latter is a friend or relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm arond apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has.

Here’s a review of the book in the Telegraph.

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Why is NYC losing financial jobs? Relocation, relocation, relocation.

The city and state bear some responsibility for the space shortage. A nearly ten-year effort to rezone Manhattan’s Far West Side for commercial development wound up getting bogged down in Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to build a stadium there and lure the Olympics to New York. Potential construction of office towers in the area is thus still years away. The city has now missed two real-estate expansions, going back to the late 1990s, in trying to rezone the Far West Side.

Meanwhile, state and city officials haggled for years over the plan to redevelop Ground Zero, with some observers, including Mayor Bloomberg, pessimistically calling for a reduction in the office space planned for the site, assuming that it would be unneeded. As a result of the delays, only one building, 7 World Trade, is nearing completion — developer Larry Silverstein could rebuild it quickly because it wasn’t part of the site that the government controlled. Other Ground Zero towers won’t be ready for years.

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VM bleg: Anybody know a gin snob who can tell me if Cadenhead’s Old Raj Gin is worth the $44 for a 750ml bottle they want at Wine Library?

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The official VM wife sends word that Cameron Diaz looks like crap.

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Whatcha really get’s a box of Newports and Puma sweats (damn!)

(I just felt like making a 3rd Bass ref; sue me)

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We should go to the Chihuly exhibit at the New York Botanical Gardens next Thursday night! Who’s with me?

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Congratulations to the Cardinals for pulling the upset on the Mets, earning the right to walk into a buzzsaw.

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This week’s non-web reading: Chronicles Vol. 1, by Bob Dylan. The first chapter, covering the period he first arrived in New York, is fantastic. The chapter discussing losing his mojo in the late ’80s, and rediscovering it while playing with the Grateful Dead? Not so much.

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Unrequited reading

Sorry to be writing less frequently, dear readers. I’m in the midst of a work-crunch of monumental proportions. Gotta finish a giant issue of the magazine by next Wednesday, then help put on our annual conference & exhibition Thursday and Friday, then get on a plane Saturday for a chemical ingredient conference. On the doubleplusgood side, said ingredient conference is in Paris, and my wife’s coming along for the trip.

On the down side, the book I just started, Witold Rybczynski’s City Life, is boring me silly, so I may have to drop it. I enjoy WR’s architecture articles on Slate, but the first 50 pages of this book have been pretty dull and pedantic, especially the second chapter’s extended take on how population size does not say much about the importance of a city. Again and again.

Fortunately, Amazon is about to deliver my copy of Shakespeare Wars, the new book from Ron Rosenbaum. Unfortunately, I don’t want to carry a 640-page hardcover with me overseas. So why don’t you suggest a book for me to read, already?

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Unrequired Reading

I’ve decided to make Unrequired Reading a regular post on Friday mornings. It’ll consist of the same stuff I was posting at random in the past few weeks. Which is to say, thanks to the miracle of RSS feeds, VM goofs around online so you don’t have to.

As my friend Mitch put it, “You know you’ve bottomed out when Bobby Brown says you’re an unfit mother to his children.”

(It’s Mother’s Day, not All Everybody Day!)

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Here’s a slideshow about Jonathan Ive, the design guru at Apple.

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10 Highly Pretentious Musical Instruments

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You stay classy, Cleveland.

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You are your Netflix Queue.

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Visiting Kandor?

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Firing tons of people — even Japanese people — does not automatically make you a success. I can’t stress this enough. Restructuring by “cutting fat” is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily put a company in the position to succeed in the future. Carlos Ghosn is trying to stay ahead of the game by allying with an American automaker and firing a ton of people.

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A wide-ranging (by my lights) interview with U of Penn Architecture Department Chair Detlef Mertins, author of a book on Mies van der Rohe.

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Paul Wolfowitz is running into trouble as president of the World Bank, due to his policy of not lending money to corrupt regimes.

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This week in Unrequired Reading

Stories that have been sitting in my RSS feed this week:

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine muses on the 40th anniversary of Star Trek:

And finally, [Star Trek is] a story of a powerful belief in what the franchise represents: the right of individuals, through machinery, weaponry, or barehanded intelligence, to live, be free, and pursue happiness, no matter how horrific the results (and we can all agree that Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture was as slow and agonizing as any torture devised on that evil Enterprise from the “Mirror, Mirror” episode in which Spock has a beard). Put all these ingredients together and it’s clear: Star Trek is the story of America.

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Mary Worth and Nothingness

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Tom Spurgeon interviews Sammy Harkham, the only “young” cartoonist whose work I’ve started to follow. I have an unfinished post from earlier this summer, about the MoCCA comics festival in NYC. The post was all about my realization that I’ve become a boring old fart, because I couldn’t think of any cartoonists whose work I discovered in the last five to eight years. Fortunately, I picked up one of Sammy’s comics then, and found a small book of his a few weeks later that impressed me.

Sammy edits an anthology called Kramer’s Ergot, and the interview discusses the process of putting the most recent edition together. As ever, I find this stuff fascinating, but you may not.

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George Will reviews a 9/11 novel that doesn’t sound very interesting to me, but that’s because the 9/11 novel I published tanked:

Messud’s Manhattan story revolves around two women and a gay man who met as classmates at Brown University and who, as they turn 30 in 2001, vaguely yearn to do something “important” and “serious.” Vagueness — lack of definition — is their defining characteristic. Which may be because — or perhaps why — all three are in the media. All are earnest auditors and aspiring improvers of the nation’s sensibility.

Uh, yeah.

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BLDGBLOG interviews author Jeff VanderMeer about the intersection of architecture and the novel.

As a novelist who is uninterested in replicating “reality” but who is interested in plausibility and verisimilitude, I look for the organizing principles of real cities and for the kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that occur within them. Then I take what I need to be consistent with whatever fantastical city I’m creating. For example, there is a layering effect in many great cities. You don’t just see one style or period of architecture. You might also see planning in one section of a city and utter chaos in another. The lesson behind seeing a modern skyscraper next to a 17th-century cathedral is one that many fabulists do not internalize and, as a result, their settings are too homogenous.

Of course, that kind of layering will work for some readers — and other readers will want continuity. Even if they live in a place like that — a baroque, layered, very busy, confused place — even if, say, they’re holding the novel as they walk down the street in London [laughter] — they just don’t get it.

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Times UK restaurant reviewer Giles Coren visited Croatia for a column:

The language is called Croatian these days, except in Serbia, where it is called Serbian, and it hasn’t got any easier. Chapter two of my Teach Yourself Croatian book was about counting to ten, and gently explained as follows: “The number one behaves like an adjective and its ending changes according to the word which follows. The number two has different forms when it refers to masculine and neuter nouns than when it refers to feminine nouns, and is followed always by words in the genitive singular, as are the words for ‘three’ and ‘four’. The numbers 5-20, however, are followed by words in the genitive plural. . .”

This is why you never see Croatians in groups of more than one or less than five in a bar. Because it isn’t actually possible to order the right number of beers.

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Official VM buddy Jecca reviews the second issue of Martha Stewart’s Blueprint (which, as I type it, sounds like something she came up with while she was in the joint, a la that Prison Break show).

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Gorgeous pictures of the world’s greatest libraries. There’s a book about it.

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Written in flesh

You may or may not know that I have a 9/11 tattoo on my right arm. I got it the Sunday after the attacks. It’s not particularly exciting, as tattoos go. In fact, my artist was a little bummed that I wanted a dull, blocky font, rather than the flourishing cursive he was planning to use.

A few months ago, an acquaintance of mine (Eric Solstein) discovered that an acquaintance of his (Jonathan Hyman) has been photographing 9/11 memorials: tattoos, graffiti and other personal tributes. Eric hooked us up, and a few photos of my tattoo are now among the 15,000+ pics that Jon has taken.

Before the shoot, Jon showed me a bunch of shots from the collection, and they’re pretty breathtaking. He filled me in on the stories of how many gallery shows or museum exhibits he was going to have, and how often the rug was pulled out from under him. While the portfolio was amazing, I admit that my BS-meter was pinging a bit (but I was glad to be part of the collective memory).

Fortunately, I was utterly wrong. “9/11 and the American Landscape: Photographs by Jonathan Hyman” will be open from Friday, Sept. 8 to Saturday, Oct. 7, at WTC #7, 250 Greenwich St., 45th flr. The event is curated by Clifford Chanin and is accompanied by a color catalogue featuring an introduction by Pete Hamill, according to Jon.

I doubt that my photo is among the 63 that are on display in this exhibit, but Amy & I will head in Saturday for the opening reception. The venue (that rebuilt WTC #7) overlooks the WTC site (or the Memorial Hole, as The Onion put it); I’ll try to post some photos from the event, especially for you out-of-towners who wonder what things look like nowadays.

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Unrequired Reading

Stuff I meant to post about in the past week:

Writing about restaurants in New Orleans (with a go-to mention of Finis Shelnutt):

“When people are still mucking out their houses, chefs are living in FEMA trailers, and others are finding out they are going to get screwed by their insurance company, I don’t want to be the guy who is writing about how the foie gras is not quite up to snuff,” he said.

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Why bashing Wal-Mart is not a good strategy for the Dems:

By restraining inflation, intense competition of the sort that Wal-Mart provides eases pressure on the Federal Reserve to do the job with higher interest rates. Note the paradox: At one level, intense competition destroys jobs, as some companies can’t compete, but the larger effect is to increase total job creation by fostering favorable economic conditions.

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Get your picture taken with Jesus.

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NO,LA: It’s the civil engineering, stupid!

Why didn’t the Corps design a consistent, redundant system? In large part, the reason was foot dragging — or worse — by pols on the state, local, and federal levels. In some cases, political opposition prevented the Corps from seizing land to build sturdier foundations. Plus, Louisiana’s local levee boards were lousy stewards. Levee officials were political animals, not engineering experts, and sometimes proved more interested in running ancillary “economic development” projects than working with the Corps to make sure the levees were up to their task. (It’s not because New Orleans is poor and black: the levees protect New Orleans’s richer, whiter suburbs too.) In addition, the Corps warned that many of New Orleans’s manmade canals, obsolete for years, should be closed or at least gated -— to no avail. Moreover, when the Corps, along with state officials, came to understand that wetlands restoration is a vital part of the flood protection system, not a tree-hugger’s afterthought, Congress balked at spending the required $14 billion over several decades for coastal restoration.

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The Chinese village of Dafen is like the opposite of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions:

In just a few years, Dafen has become the leading production center for cheap oil paintings. An estimated 60 percent of the world’s cheap oil paintings are produced within Dafen’s four square kilometers (1.5 square miles). Last year, the local art factories exported paintings worth €28 million ($36 million). Foreign art dealers travel to the factory in the south of the communist country from as far away as Europe and the United States, ordering copies of famous paintings by the container. [. . .]

Some five million oil paintings are produced in Dafen every year. Between 8,000 and 10,000 painters toil in the workshops. The numbers are estimates: No one knows the exact figure, which increases by about 100 new painters every year. But it’s not just professional copy painters who are drawn to Dafen — graduates of China’s most renowned art academy also come here. They complete only a small number of paintings a month and earn as much as €1,000 ($1,282).

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A guy used the graphics engine of the computer game Half Life to make a video tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house.

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Go see Little Miss Sunshine when you get the chance. We caught it yesterday. So did a couple of children sitting in the row behind us. They were less than 10 years old, and I’m sorta wondering if their mom noticed the “R” rating on the movie, or just thought it would be a fun flick about children’s beauty pageants, with that guy from The Daily Show. She may’ve been a little surprised when Alan Arkin was snorting heroin in one of the opening scenes. Anyway, it was a really wonderful flick, with a punchline that almost had us crying with laughter.

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And have a good holiday.

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Housing ka-boom

LONG article about how a popular type of mortgage, the option ARM, does not actually provide money for free, and is about to annihilate a lot of homeowners’ finances:

After prolonging the boom, [option ARM] mortgages could worsen the bust. They also betray such a lack of due diligence on the part of lenders and borrowers that it raises questions of what other problems may be lurking. And most of the pain will be borne by ordinary people, not the lenders, brokers, or financiers who created the problem.

Gordon Burger is among the first wave of option ARM casualties. The 42-year-old police officer from a suburb of Sacramento, Calif., is stuck in a new mortgage that’s making him poorer by the month. Burger, a solid earner with clean credit, has bought and sold several houses in the past. In February he got a flyer from a broker advertising an interest rate of 2.2%. It was an unbeatable opportunity, he thought. If he refinanced the mortgage on his $500,000 home into an option ARM, he could save $14,000 in interest payments over three years. Burger quickly pulled the trigger, switching out of his 5.1% fixed-rate loan. “The payment schedule looked like what we talked about, so I just started signing away,” says Burger. He didn’t read the fine print.

After two months Burger noticed that the minimum payment of $1,697 was actually adding $1,000 to his balance every month. “I’m not making any ground on this house; it’s a loss every month,” he says. He says he was told by his lender, Minneapolis-based Homecoming Financial, a unit of Residential Capital, the nation’s fifth-largest mortgage shop, that he’d have to pay more than $10,000 in prepayment penalties to refinance out of the loan. If he’s unhappy, he should take it up with his broker, the bank said. “They know they’re selling crap, and they’re doing it in a way that’s very deceiving,” he says. “Unfortunately, I got sucked into it.” In a written statement, Residential said it couldn’t comment on Burger’s loan but that “each mortgage is designed to meet the specific financial needs of a consumer.”

This is one of those instances where the financial industry is at fault, but they couldn’t have pulled it off without the help of idiotic consumers. Any transaction I get into worth $500,000 is not going to involve someone who put a flyer in my mailbox.

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C’est Levee, or Once More Unto the Breach

It’s the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s whomping of the Gulf Coast. I’ve been down to New Orleans four times since then. I’ve tried to chronicle a little bit of the reconstruction, or at least my viewpoint on the progress.

My perspective is limited, of course. Amy’s family lives about 25 miles from the city, so the people I see the most down there talk more about the after-effects, not their own property loss. We’ve made trips into the city each visit, but mainly in the central business district and the French Quarter. I haven’t gone through the lower Ninth Ward in any of my visits, but I also don’t visit the South Bronx when I go to New York.

Or does the WTC site serve as a better analogy? Ray Nagin seemed to think so, when he contrasted NOLA’s rebuilding pace with the five-year span since the Twin Towers were knocked down: “You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

It was a cheap shot, but Nagin’s a mentally unstable grandstander, so that needs to be factored in.

How does the city get rebuilt? Darned if I know. I wouldn’t exactly trust a “master plan” developed by the crooked politicos of Louisiana in concert with the ass-clowns in Washington, and the Army Corps of Engineers is already covering its ass about the possibility of the current levees being unable to handle another major storm. I’m having enough trouble just trying to settle on a color for my home office, since the official VM wife objects pretty violently to the deep green currently in place.

(Witold Rybczynski in Slate has a neat piece about how a new-urbanist project in Denver provides an example of how to start putting together neighborhoods, but it all presupposes that the neighborhoods aren’t built in a locale that’s existentially flood-prone.)

I’m having trouble coming up with anything to say that I haven’t gotten at already, so why don’t you, my dear readers, tell me what you make of New Orleans? A bunch of you came to visit in March for my wedding, but I want to hear from those of you who haven’t seen it, too. Tell me what you remember of the city, if you’ve been there before, what you thought if you’ve been there post-Katrina, and what you think of the ways and means of rebuilding a city that wasn’t in great shape before it’s cataclysm.

(Update: I know it’s hard to believe, but Ray Nagin has more to say!)