My wife’s car is gay.
Watch this space
Back in college, I remarked that the weirdly pointillized head-shots on the front page of the Wall Street Journal looked like they’d been put through the “Drew Friedman-izer”. I’m not sure if it was funnier to make a joke about a cartoonist best known for The Incredible Shrinking Joe Franklin, or to make a reference to the Wall Street Journal at Hampshire College.
Anyway, if there was ever a perfect example of the Journal‘s Drew Friedmanizing process, it’s this pic of Tom Ford from an article in today’s ish:
The article’s about Ford’s post-Gucci career, because he’s about to launch a line of menswear, which will include “classic custom-made suits, shirts, ties, shoes, luggage, jewelry and fragrances.” Here’s some drivel about it:
Mr. Ford says he isn’t aiming only at fashionistas but also at rich businessmen in the U.S. and developing countries who “have been deprived of luxury.” He doesn’t plan any womenswear, “having nothing new to say.”
To me, the only interesting things about the article are that incredible pic and the fact that Ford is launching TWELVE fragrances this month with Estee Lauder. I’m holding out hope that one of them is “Friedman.”
Bigger Than Tina
On the heels of yesterday’s announcement about Faiz K.’s new baby, another dutiful VM reader has great news to share: my favorite Australian is getting hitched!
No, not Jacko! He’s washed up!
No, not Michael Hutchence! He died under weird circumstances!
No, not Paul Hogan! What happened to him, anyway?
The Australian who’s getting married is none other than Tina B.!
Pictured here at Petra, which is nowhere near Australia! Good luck to her and Brendan (the wedding’s not for another 13 months, but hey)! It just goes to show you, dear readers: Love conquers all, including the Coriolis Effect!
(VM Bonus: Tina took two of the greatest photos of me ever: looking cute, and shitscared.)
Update: After Tina’s protest (see comments), I found a pic she sent of her and Brendan at Lord Howe Island. I’m just glad she remembered that I have those terrible pix of her table-dancing in a C&W bar in Nelson, NZ. Fortunately, no photographic evidence exists of me throwing down to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck:
I wish I could fail this well
There’s a bizarre article in the NYTimes today, about the appointment of two editors at Consumer Reports and the mag’s upcoming redesign. It begins:
As it struggles to recover from a recent flawed article about children’s car seats, Consumer Reports has named two new editors and announced a redesign.
Hmm. Sounds almost like the flawed article has led to the appointments and the redesign. We learn that Kim Kleman has been named editor-in-chief, while retaining her position at the mag’s parent company. Greg Daugherty will cover editorial personnel.
From there, we’re told that the incorrect article about child safety seat tests has damaged the Consumer Reports brand:
In a “Safety Alert” article in its February issue, Consumer Reports said that 10 infant car seats failed its safety test and called for one seat to be recalled.
In an editorial in that issue, the magazine’s president, James Guest, wrote that the images he saw of the tests “filled me with dread: Dummies tumbled like Raggedy Anns, seats flew across the lab, plastic bases cracked.”
Within weeks, the magazine’s executives retracted the article and apologized, saying the tests, which the magazine said were conducted by an outside company, had been botched. The May issue contains an explanation of the mistake.
“When Consumer Reports has to come out and apologize in public and in print, that’s big for a magazine that has been trusted for years,” Mr. Husni said. “This is going to require a big forgiveness.”
Wow! This is terrible! No wonder the magazine has appointed two new positions and undergone a redesign! It must be on the verge of collapse! Wait. . . what’s the very next paragraph say?
Circulation did not drop at Consumer Reports, nor has its subscription growth slowed since it retracted the car seat article, said Ken Weine, a company spokesman.
Newsstand sales have reached 160,000 each month this year, twice those three years ago. The magazine, which does not accept advertising, has 4.3 million print readers, and 2.8 million who pay to read its online version, Mr. Weine said.
The redesign will provide more information about the magazine’s product-testing methods, but Ms. Kleman said that the change was not in response to the car seat episode. Instead, the additional testing information will be provided as a way for the magazine to set itself apart from other sources of product information like consumer review sites, she said.
Oh. So, the magazine’s actually doing fine? The safety seat alert and retraction didn’t cause mass cancellations, and newsstand sales have doubled from 3 years ago? The redesign isn’t in response to the alert? (I’ve worked in magazines for more than 10 years; a redesign isn’t something you frivolously roll out.)
All of which is to say, this article is bullshit.
The writer (or her editor) is trying to shoehorn the child seat controversy into an article about pretty standard day-to-day operations at a magazine. Neither appointment appears to have anything to do with that story (that editor-in-chief slot has been vacant since October), the magazine’s credibility is unaffected (except in the eyes of the chairman of the journalism dept. at U of Mississippi), and the redesign is an attempt to create more brand awareness for CR (to help it stand out from online review-sites).
When you get down to it, I bet its retraction of that child seat article was a lot more comprehensive than the corrections that the Times is in the habit of running. Of course, Consumer Reports depends on the trust and goodwill of its readers, since it doesn’t accept advertising.
Life’s Rich Pageant
Design Observer has a neat article about Rem Koolhaas and his CCTV building in Beijing. I’m on record — as much as this blog serves as record — as saying that there’s no goddamn way that building is going to stand up. But evidently it’s at 14 stories and rising.
Anyway, the article discusses Koolhaas’ wacky theorizing vis-a-vis designing such a massive structure in China. The writer, William Drenttel, launches some harsh criticisms of Koolhaas, as we see here, in an excerpt from K’s Beijing Manifesto (in italics) and Drenttel’s followup:
In the free market, architecture = real estate. Any complex corporation is dismantled, each unit sequestered in place. All media companies suffer a subsequent paranoia: Each department — the creative department, the finance department, administration, et cetera — talks about the others as “themâ€Â; distrust is rife, motives are questioned. But in China, money does not yet have the last word. CCTV is envisioned as shared conceptual space in which all parts are housed permanently, aware of one another’s presence  a collective. Communication increases; paranoia decreases.
It’s one thing to build the building. But isn’t Koolhaas sounding like an apologist for the corruption and extreme capitalism of Beijing? His manifesto seems to embrace the language of Mao for a media conglamerate that is one of the the great powers in the People’s Republic of China, and the source of much of the censorship in that country. According to Koolhaas’s thesis of Forward Compatibility: “China is characterized by the need to spread opportunity and information rather than protect manufacturers and other established interests. It could use its dominant position, the force of its numbers, its economic power, and its central government to lead the world into a digital future.” What would lead an architect of Rem Koolhaas’s standing to voice such propaganda? Perhaps Koolhaas is simply taking advantage of the pervasive authoritarianism that is still the Chinese norm. Design approvals? No problem, when everyone serves at the pleasure of the Party! He almost seems to be luxuriating in the absence of the nuisance of the free market.
“Lead the world into the digital future”? Maybe Koolhaas could try typing “tibet democracy” into a search engine in a Beijing internet cafe and see how that central government perceives the digital future.
Anyway, Drenttel condemns the building for using so damn much steel, which appears to be the only way that the thing is going to beat my prediction of tipping over in a stiff wind:
CCTV, at only 55 stories, requires 123,750 tons of steel for 4.8 million square feet of space, or 51 lbs/sq. ft. of steel [compared to 31 lbs/sq. ft. for the Twin Towers]. The punch line is that CCTV is the architectural equivalent of a gas-guzzling SUV. A structural engineer might talk about pounds of steel per square foot as a measure of a building’s structural efficiency. CCTV has a beautiful structural design considering what it is required to do, but any engineer, I believe, would describe it as a “heavy” building. By comparison, the World Trade Towers were a super tall, extreme structure and they were still 40% lighter than CCTV. There is a lot of extra steel (20 to 30 lbs/sf) in the CCTV structure simply to resist overturning because of the weight and stress of its free-floating bridge, even assuming contemporary code and seismic requirements.
The issue is simple: all this steel is there to support a design conceit, albeit a beautiful one, of “an eye catching megastructure which looks like it ought to fall over.” Rory McGowan, the ARUP director of the collaborating structural engineers, “admits that the structural gymnastics have a purely aesthetic justification.”
Getting back to my point about that digital future (and the lies we tell ourselves to make it through), I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many major projects are going to China and places like Dubai, where there’s huge money and an authoritarian government. It must be a joy for architects to work in that environment, at least as much as they can gratify their “creative impulses” without getting derailed by local zoning boards. Of course, the buildings aren’t in a vacuum, and architects can decide how much they’ll take into account the regional politics that enable their personal freedom.
(Bonus VM tie-in: Just as this morning’s Montaigne selection helped characterize my own, um, peculiarities in communication, a quote from the article about Koolhaas’ architecture helped sum up the Gil Roth Experience: “raw, confusing, impersonal, uncomfortable, oppressive, theatrical and exhilarating.”)
Pinky and the — oh, never mind
Here at my illustrious day job, I get a lot of invites to pharma-conferences. Some have good presenters whom I can work with to write articles for the mag. Others are hardcore technical science conferences, which are beyond the scope of what we cover.
Now, the 10th Annual International Conference on Drug Metabolism/Applied Pharmacokinetics, is definitely in the latter class but, on a whim, I looked through the event schedule just now to see if there were any presentations that might be adaptable for the mag. What did I find?
11:00am – Brain Transporters – Jashvant (Jash) Unadkat, Ph.D., Professor, School of Pharmacy, Department of Pharmaceutics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
And it’s followed by a tour of Wollersheim Winery!
Now I’m kicking myself for not being a scientist.
A new reader!
VM reader, commenter, buddy and non-brooding Persian Faiz K. has become a dad!
Let’s give a big VM welcome to Isis Arianna K., who joined this world on Friday!
Monday Morning Montaigne: A Consideration Upon Cicero
This one follows Of Solitude, which covers the best way to approach retirement. Of Solitude ends with a lengthy paraphrase of Epicurus and Seneca, meant to contrast with not-so-good advice from Pliny the Younger and Cicero. It looks like the latter felt that retirement is the time to start burnishing one’s rep through books & letters, while the former figured that one had time enough for that in one’s prime. M. paraphrases
“Seek no longer that the world should speak of you, but how you should speak to yourself. Retire into yourself, but first prepare to receive yourself there; it would be madness to trust in yourself if you do not know how to govern yourself. There are ways to fail in solitude as well as in company.”
In the next essay, he writes a little more about Cicero, and the practice of publishing one’s letters. M. finds this pretty sleazy, but what I enjoyed most was his description of his own letter-writing, mainly because it sums up my own conversational style awfully well:
I have naturally a humorous and familiar style, but of a form all my own, inept for public negotiations, as my language is in every way, being too compact, disorderly, abrupt, individual; and I have no gift for letters of ceremony that have no other substance than a fine string of courteous words. I have neither the faculty nor the taste for those lengthy offers of affection and service. I do not really believe all that, and I dislike saying much of anything beyond what I believe. That is a far cry from present practice, for there never was so abject and servile a prostitution of complimentary addresses: life, soul, devotion, adoration, serf, slave, all these words have such vulgar currency that when letter writers want to convey a more sincere and respectful feeling, they have no way left to express it.
I mortally hate to seem a flatterer; and so I naturally drop into a dry, plain, blunt way of speaking, which, to anyone who does not know me otherwise, verges a little on the disdainful. I honor most those to whom I show the least honor; and where my soul moves with great alacrity, I forget the proper steps of ceremony. I offer myself meagerly and proudly to those to whom I belong. And I tender myself least to those to whom I have given myself most; it seems to me that they should read my feelings in my heart, and see that what my words express does an injustice to my thought.
In welcoming, in taking leave, in thanking, in greeting, in offering my services, in all those verbose compliments imposed by the ceremonial laws of our etiquette, I know no one so stupidly barren of words as myself. And I have never been made use of to write letters of favor and recommendation but that the man for whom they were written found them dry and weak.
Last week, I fussed endlessly over a recommendation letter for a member of my magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. He’s an Indian pharma-scientist, trying to get a green card so he can take a new job here in the U.S. I felt defeated by the time I was done writing it, ashamedly e-mailed the text to him, and heard back minutes later, “This is great! Thank you so much! Please put it on letterhead and send it over!”
So maybe M. & I just have low self-esteem.
Lazy Sunday
It’s a quiet Sunday here at Chez VM. Well, it was louder earlier in the day, when I was shredding bills and records as part of the process of rearranging my home office. The process started when I bought a new desk on Wednesday, replacing the two tables that occupied a wall of my room. The process continued yesterday, when I picked up a leaning bookcase from C&B, a desk organizer from Pottery Barn (they don’t list it on their site), and a couple of bulletin boards and paper drawers from the Container Store. Today involved figuring out where to put everything (hence the bill-shredding). If there’s good light tomorrow morning, I’ll take some pix and post them for those of you who are obsessed interested in such things.
Before buying up this stuff, Amy & I finally got to the local (within 30 miles) Imax to catch 300. It was
- a hoot
- utterly insane
- possibly the gayest movie ever (okay, the Gayest. Movie. Ever.)
I enjoyed it a bunch, even if it did overplay the “we’re fighting to defend reason and logic” angle. Gerard Butler was fascinating to look at, and this hearkens back to my original post about this flick: I’m more interested in the stylization of the movie, and the filmmakers managed to get the lead to resemble classical Greek art. I’m not talking about the chiseled abs phenomenon, which are major contributors to the “gayest movie ever” trophy, but the angles of his face, his beard, and his hair somehow gestalted into this living representation of a Greek bust, to me.
We had a laugh later in the day, when we noted that Gerard Butler’s filmography includes Beowulf (where I thought he looked a little like Paul Rodgers) and Attila the Hun. Looks like he can’t get away from historic slaughter flicks. Still, he did a great job in this one, making the Spartan king a, um, raging Scot. It’s not a movie to be taken seriously as history, but it was a thrill ride. My biggest problem with it is that it’s success means that the director is going to get the greenlight to make a movie of The Watchmen, which will be a disaster.
This morning, I realized that I’ve had a pretty strange run of Easter-weekend trips to the movies. I don’t tend to go to the movies often, but I guess there’s something about Easter: Hellboy in 2004, Sin City in 2005 and 300 in 2007. Can’t remember if I saw anything last year, and I’m not finding any references in the blog, which as we know is a backup drive for my brain.
Anyway, I hope all my Christian readers have a good Easter today.
Yesterday’s meander
I took a half-day yesterday from work. Cousins of my wife were in NYC and we were meeting them for dinner. Rather than risk running late with traffic, I decided to head in early.
Based on the location of the restaurant where I thought we were eating, I parked down in the west Village. As it turned out, Amy’s cousins (Wade, Robin, and Wade’s parents) weren’t interested in Italian that night, so she switched plans and we met up at a BBQ place near Times Square. In-between, I had about 5 hours to meander.
You know what that means: you can just skip this post and check out my collection of photos from the afternoon, or you can read whatever ramblings I come up with as I recollect my walk. If you’re one of those stupid brave souls who wants to stick with me through thick and thin, you’ve been warned.
It was stupidly cold for the first week of April: around 35-40 degrees, after a week of 60-70-degree weather the previous week. I wore a warm coat and grabbed my gloves before I left the house in the morning, so I was taken care of for two-plus-mile walk uptown.
See, dear reader, I actually had a goal for this walk, and it didn’t involve buying a ton of Orwell books over at the Strand. (Sure, I made my obligatory stop there, but it was only to use the bathroom! I swear! Okay, so I spent some time among the art books on the second floor, but I managed not to buy anything.)
People with too much time on their hands Astute readers may recall my recent post about Muji, the Japanese “no brand” company, and its amazing products. The slideshow mentioned that the company has a store at the Design Store at the Museum of Modern Art, so I figured I’d see just how ingenious and wonderful their products are.
Look. I don’t tell you how to live your life, do I?
So I made my way uptown from the Strand. I walked through Union Square, was disappointed that no one was protesting Israel, and decided to give my buddy Mark a call. He’s a public school teacher, and I had no idea if he was on break this week. I left him a message and kept walking.
At this point, around 2:30, I was starting to get pretty peckish. See, I have this tendency to Just Keep Going when that happens, and I know for a fact that this leads to my doing incredibly stupid things, as it appears my IQ and my blood sugar have a linear correlation. I needed to stop somewhere to eat, but my decision to keep “Passover kosher” made this a problem. See, in my incredibly half-assed universe, I’ve decided that I’ll stay off the leavened bread (and ancillary stuff) this week, even though I was heading out for pulled pork and brisket at Spanky’s for dinner. It’s hard work, being this inconsistent.
As it turns out, I was already becoming stupid, because I ended up getting lamb from a street-meat vendor. This was a bad idea both in the short term (when I realized I had nowhere to actually eat the stuff, and had to stand on a street corner while I devoured the lamb, lettuce, tomatoes and onions) and in the long term (when I lay in bed that night gripped by heavy nausea and realizing that, since my wife and I shared our dish at dinner, that my lunch was the culprit). Anyway, the lamb was delicious, though indecorous and mildly poisonous. Since I didn’t get too ill from it (basically, I spent the day feeling hungover), I consider myself a stronger man, and none of you can convince me otherwise.
Mark called back while I was huddled under a construction awning, eating my lunch. We briefly played phone tag, but soon got in touch and made tentative plans to get together once I’d finished up at MoMA.
From there, I decided to walk up Madison till I reached 53rd, at which point I’d head west for MoMA, which is between 5th and 6th. I figured that, since 5th heads south, I’d stick with Madison and if I got too cold, I’d get a cab up to 53rd.
(Bonus VM wisdom: David Gates, one of my favorite contemporary writers, once mentioned a great mnemonic for the easterly progression of avenues in NYC: Fat Men Piss Less, which stands for Fifth, Madison, Park and Lexington. Just try forgetting that one.)
New York is composed of a bazillion neighborhoods and districts, so it’s always possible to discover new sites that everyone laughs at you for never having seen. In this case, it was the Morgan Library, which I’d never heard of. I was impressed by the 36th St. side (here’s a pic from my flickr set), but wasn’t so interested in the modern section on Madison. I’ll have to go back some time to check out the collections and reassess the new section, which was designed by Renzo Piano and is supposed to be All That.
Just because I didn’t spend time at the Morgan doesn’t mean I was in some sort of rush. I had hours before dinner, and was conscious of my tendency to start rushing to get somewhere for no purpose. I just felt that I should save the museum for some other trip, when I’ve some idea of what I’d be looking for there (I think they have some Rembrandt drawings in the collection, which could make it worthwhile).
A few blocks up, I headed over to the south end of Grand Central. I’ve made a few visits to the terminal lately, but I came from the north or west. So I stopped and took some pics of the facade, which was typically glorious. I tried to get angles where “MET LIFE” wasn’t in the background.
Paradoxically, I started to become absorbed by how little I was thinking about myself. By now, you’ve surely guessed that I’m my favorite subject of conversation, among other things. But despite the cold and the wind, I found myself simply enjoying a mid-day walk uptown. There was a background anxiety about making sure I could get together with Mark and still get back to the Village in time for dinner (the plans hadn’t changed at the point), but it wasn’t too pressing. It would sort itself out.
Instead, I just eased into the throng (as it were), making little observations about the styles of retail in this neighborhood, noting the flow of traffic on different blocks, and keeping my eyes open for good photos. (This generally involves buildings. I’d love to take pix of people, but worry too much about getting my ass beat. This afternoon, the town crazy was on his way into our supermarket, and I thought, “I oughtta take a picture of him,” and then thought, “That’s an awfully big walking stick he’s carrying.”)
So there’s no Joycean reverie about NYC for you, dear readers. Just a guy in a nice coat walking uptown, until he reached the Muji section of MoMA’s Design Store. If you wanna find out what I actually bought there, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go through the flickr set. I kept snapping pix as I walked, figuring I’d get up to the Time Warner Center, laugh at it, get a coffee, and call Mark.
He told me that he wouldn’t have time to come down there to meet me, since he was still cleaning up his apartment, and we’d likely only get half an hour together, but if I wanted to come up to his place, that’d be great.
Now, there are two things you need to understand about my reaction to this invite:
a) it involved using the subway, which is fine in theory, but I’m always convinced I’m going to get on the wrong or mislabeled train, and end up on Staten Island;
b) Mark lives in Harlem and, to paraphrase Avenue Q, I’m a little bit racist.
But Mark walked me through the subway setup (that is, which line to pick up, and where to exit the station near his place), and I remained a little bit racist.
See, when I came up out of the subway stop, I saw a neat building, took a picture, and immediately thought, “I shouldn’t show that camera around here.” Why? Because I’m a racist. I was only a few blocks from Mark’s place, and it was broad daylight, but the lack of people in the neighborhood just made me nervous. “But only because I’m wearing a nice coat” and because I’m white. It was utterly moronic of me. Within a block or two, I said, “Mark’s lived here for years, and never had any incident,” and concluded that it’s Just A Neighborhood. But it was one of those instances where my point of view of white-guy-in/from-the-suburbs really made itself known.
Passing a black guy in a tracksuit, sitting on a stoop, I felt a little nervous. Then he smiled and called out to the UPS guy, and I realized, “This is where the guy lives. Don’t be such a douchebag.”
So, of course, I got to Mark’s place, and we shot the breeze for a while about books, friends, economics, his dad, my dad, his dog (whom I got to meet), Harvey Pekar, Robert Moses, Ben Stiller, and Mark’s unexpected invite to the previous night’s Knicks game, which he enjoyed (he’s not a huge basketball fan). Somehow, this all took place in about 30-40 minutes.
Eventually, I got the call that our dinner plans had changed, so Mark joined me on the trip to the BBQ joint. We had a drink at the bar while waiting for Amy, and continued our rambling conversation. It was a nice way to cap the day, since our conversation tends to be very easy. Even when we’re talking about complex subjects, I always have this feeling that Mark’s able to parse my sentences, and that frees me up to speak better. Because it’s rare that I can use a ton of clauses when I speak, and I really do find them necessary to make and qualify my points.
There’s not a lot more to tell. Amy arrived, and the breeze-shooting continued. I took a picture of the two of them, and realized that we need to get a nice pic of Mark, a good-looking guy who doesn’t photograph well in bars. Her cousins soon showed up, and told us about their day-tour in southern Manhattan. A rowdy Yankees fan kept cursing at the TV over the bar, which led me to say, “It’s only the second game of the season, dude. There are 160 more of ’em. Pace yourself.”
But the meal was good, and the conversation was fun. I like getting the perspectives of out-of-towners. Wade’s dad commented about the walk over from Times Square: “There were some burlesque shows over there.”
It was a phrase so astonishingly archaic that I could only reply, “The Square was a lot seedier in the ’70s and ’80s.”
There isn’t much more to write about. I’m really sorry about the lack of introspection, angst or anything else that you’ve come to expect from my posts (literary references, naked chicks, etc.). But it was a nice day, it yielded some good photos, and there’s always the story of how I scorched my finger while trying to put up a cork board earlier today.