Category: Art

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Unrequired Reading: party like it’s 5767

Happy Jewish New Year, dear readers! In honor of Rosh Hashanah, this week’s Unrequired Reading features a bunch of Jewish-connected links and others that have nothing to do with Judaism.

First, we have Michael Totten’s interview with Yaacov Lozowick, author of Right To Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars. He thinks neither of the Lebanon wars is defensible, and provides some good insights into the shifting emotional landscape of Israelis during the most recent war.

If the story about Israel’s use of cluster bombs in the war’s last days proves true, that oughtta get categorized as “really REALLY indefensible.”

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Johnny Knoxville isn’t Jewish , but he gets to celebrate our new year with his new movie’s debut. Here’s an interview with him and Jeff Tremaine, the director of Jackass Number Two.

On Howard Stern this week, Knoxville admitted that he got the idea for getting gored by a bull (watch the trailer) from watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon. We’ll probably see the movie tomorrow, along with a shopping expedition to the new Century 21 store in Paramus, and a White Manna run. Because we’re all about the gracious living.

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For its first season or two, The State was one of the funniest television shows ever (I seem to recall the last season completely melting down in attempts at absurdism that went nowhere, as it its wont). Even though every other series in the world has gone DVD, The State languishes in MTV vaults. Good news: the first season is getting released on iTunes’ video store!

I can legitimately tie this into this week’s Jewy theme because of the great skit in which the cast members were all asked to introduce themselves and make a personal confession, as a way of becoming closer to the audience: “I’m Michael Ian Black. My real name is Schwartz, but I changed it because I’m ashamed of being Jewish.”

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My buddy Ian’s not Jewish, but he IS a chief petty officer! Congrats! Check out the pix from the ceremony!

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Cory Maye’s not Jewish either, but there are probably Jews at the law firm that helped get him off death row, pending a new sentencing hearing. Here’s hoping it’s the first step to springing Maye from prison!

Oh, and the “informant” whose tip led to the botched raid that landed Maye on death row probably doesn’t like Jews. He sure doesn’t like black people.

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Rich people don’t always stay rich. Larry Ellison is Jewish, and he spent a ton of money, but he managed to stay rich:

A raft of e-mail messages and financial documents introduced in a lawsuit that disgruntled shareholders filed against Mr. Ellison and other Oracle executives in 2001, give witness to some of Mr. Ellison’s budgeting practices. (The suit was settled last November and the judge in the matter subsequently unsealed financial documents submitted as exhibits in the case). The documents, first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year, also show how far Philip E. Simon, an adviser who described himself as Mr. Ellison’s “financial servant,” went in trying to persuade his boss to pay off about $1.2 billion in loans. (Neither Mr. Ellison nor Mr. Simon responded to interview requests for this article).

Mr. Ellison’s ledger around the end of 2000 included annual “lifestyle” spending of about $20 million, the purchase of a Japanese villa for $25 million, a proposed underwater archeology project earmarked for $12 million and his new yacht, budgeted at $194 million (news reports later said that the yacht’s final cost approached $300 million).

“I know you view me as a pessimist,” Mr. Simon wrote Mr. Ellison in an e-mail message in 2002, several months after banks began sounding alarms about Mr. Ellison’s debt. “Maybe you’re right, though I would disagree. Nonetheless, I think it’s imperative that we start to budget and plan. New purchases should be kept to a minimum. We need to establish and execute on a diversification plan to eliminate (yes, eliminate) all debt and build up a significant, conservatively structured, liquid investment portfolio.

“I know you don’t like to discuss this,” Mr. Simon added. “I know this e-mail may/will depress you. View this as a call to arms.”

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During my previous visit to Paris in 2002, I visited some of the monuments and shrines that commemorated the Jews that France shipped out for the camps. There’s plenty of other stuff for us to do this time around, as this BW slideshow sez.

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Sven Nykvist wasn’t Jewish, but he was the cinematographer on several Woody Allen flicks, including one of my favorite movies: Another Woman. (Also, he had an affair with Mia Farrow pre-Woody, which makes their subsequent collaborations just plain weird. On the other hand, Amy & I had exes perform the readings at our wedding, so hey.) He died last week after a long illness.

A few weeks ago, Amy was looking through our Netflix queue, and asked, “What is Light Keeps Me Company and why is it in our queue?”

Yes, she married someone who’s interested in seeing a documentary about a cinematographer. All I can say is, like Rembrandt, Nykvist’s work taught me new ways of seeing light. Rest in peace.

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Tiki culture: something that could bring all the world’s faiths together. Except the ones that prohibit drinking, I guess.

Yo-ho-ho and l’shana tova!

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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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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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Showtime!

We spent Tuesday “down the shore” with my brother, his wife, and their two daughters. Ostensibly, the trip was about introducing my nieces to the ocean and having a little vacation-within-a-vacation. But there were vital issues of man’s relation to the infinite that needed to be settled. So we went to the boardwalk and found that Addams Family pinball machine.

As I wrote last month,

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and pinball.”

My brother and I both love to play pinball–and this particular machine–but we play in very different ways. Like the brothers in Maclean’s sublime story, our methods say something about how we each achieve grace in this world.

You can go back and reread that post to learn what I wrote about our two styles (mine: fast and loose; Boaz’s: controlled and precise) and what they allegedly say about our ways of apprehending the world.

What’s important is that we lied to our wives and said, “You get some lunch for the kids; we’ll be over at the arcade for a little while.” Other women could have been nervous that their husbands would be heading over to a bar, or ogling teenagers in bikinis. Of course, any woman who would consent to marry me or Boaz knows what she’s in for: the NBA playoffs and occasional stops at comic stores (me), the NCAA tournament and occasional trips to see Springsteen (Boaz), and pinball (both of us).

So we walked into the arcade, headed to the overheated retro-game room (“Flashbacks”) in back, where John Hughes movie-posters adorned the walls and ’80s music played over the speakers, and we played.

It’s been years since we played pinball together, and I’d like to tell you that it was a glorious reunion, a moment when two brothers could put aside their differences and experience the joy they shared in years past.

Unfortunately, we stunk up the joint.

We were flat-out terrible in our first game. I’m talking Special Olympics bad. We kept looking at each other with that “we’re just working the bad bounces out” look that pinball players have. Both our final scores were under 10 million; a free game was at 56 million. We were embarrassed.

After that first disastrous game, Boaz said, “It’ll be interesting to see which of our styles of play comes around first.”

(Now, I don’t want that to sound like we were trying to beat each other. In fact, we’ve never played against each other. Sure, we both had final scores up on the board, but we never played with any sense of rivalry. It was all about beating the machine, not each other. If anything, we would cheer each other on when one of us would get into a groove.)

We wouldn’t have to wait long for an answer. It was on the second ball of that next game that It All Clicked for me. I got on a run where I hit target after target, sequences falling in line like dominoes. About 140 million points later, I said, “I wish that top right flipper wouldn’t stick.”

Bo agreed that it was holding me back.

It turned out that that game was only a warmup. In the third game, as my brother put it in yesterday’s comments, “Gil absolutely demolished the machine; he managed to make a life-affirming activity absolutely banal.” It was like those rare occasions at basketball when the rim feels as wide as a hula-hoop. (Okay, “THAT rare occasion.” I didn’t have too many of them, to be honest.) Every shot fell, and every bounce that could have lost a ball went my way. Afterward, we joked that the machine was saving the bad bounces for him.

At one point, I had a play that lasted so long, Boaz could’ve left for pizza, strolled over to the “Shoot Bin Laden” paintball booth, and taken the ski-lift back before I was done. But he wouldn’t have missed this run for the world.

This room in the arcade was hot, as I said, and we were both sweating pretty badly (it’s genetic). Any time the ball was held by the machine–like when Thing’s hand comes out and picks the ball up during the Greed sequence–I would quickly pat my palms against my nylon shorts. That was about it for the individual flare. Generally, it was like that feedback loop I described last month: hands on the flippers, and the rest of the body just a scaffold. A pinball machine.

I knocked out every “mansion room” and posted a final score of 450 million: second best on the machine, and probably the highest score I ever got. Jane, Amy & the kids showed up while I was finishing that game. I left the free games on the machine. “Libation to the pinball gods,” I told Boaz.

He stayed to play one or two more games, to show his older daughter what that machine is like. We all enjoyed the first Addams Family movie, and this machine has plenty of great sound-clips from it.

Me? I headed out for some pizza; it was 3 o’clock or so, and I hadn’t eaten lunch yet. (The lightheadedness of hunger probably helped me clean out my mind for that zen-ball run.) Jane walked out with me, shaking her head and sighing at the general goofiness of her husband and her brother-in-law.

I told her, “I’m sorry we took so long in there. If it’s any consolation, Bo’s never going to play pinball again.”

Postscript: Half an hour later, my wife flat-out destroyed me at Skee-Ball.

Postpostscript: When we got back to Boaz & Jane’s car, there was a parking ticket on it. I said, “I’ll pay that one. It’s my fault we were gone so long.”

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Between the lines

In case you’re sitting around bored this weekend, here’s an interview with a book designer who isn’t Chip Kidd.

Here’s a blog post by Dylan Horrocks (a.k.a. one of the finest cartoonists alive and an all-around swell guy who let me crash at his home in New Zealand a few years ago) on science and art.

And here’s the introduction to a new book on Leo Strauss. I found it pretty interesting, especially when it went into the east coast vs. west coast Straussians’ rivalry. It really heated up when they popped Biggie, that’s for sure.

I hope your weekend is exciting enough that you don’t read all this stuff.

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Everyone’s a critic

NYTimes movie critic A.O. Scott wonders why people go to bad movies, and why the hell he gets up in the morning:

For the second time this summer, then, my colleagues and I must face a frequently — and not always politely — asked question: What is wrong with you people? I will, for now, suppress the impulse to turn the question on the moviegoing public, which persists in paying good money to see bad movies that I see free. I don’t for a minute believe that financial success contradicts negative critical judgment; $500 million from now, “Dead Man’s Chest” will still be, in my estimation, occasionally amusing, frequently tedious and entirely too long. But the discrepancy between what critics think and how the public behaves is of perennial interest because it throws into relief some basic questions about taste, economics and the nature of popular entertainment, as well as the more vexing issue of what, exactly, critics are for.