A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
Kurt Vonnegut died last night at 84, which reminded me that I forgot to post an item on the death of Abe Coleman. I mentioned him back in 2005, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, an impressive feat considering many contemporary wrestlers die of heart attacks before they reach 40.
I still await the day when I’ll be referred to as The Jewish Tarzan.
My wife’s car is gay.
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.”
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:
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.
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.”)
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.
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!
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.
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
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.