Category: Uncategorized

Yay! Early birthday presents for me! My buddy Mark decided to help me continue my self-taught crash course in urban issues with City Life, by Witold Rybczynski! And he helped me get in touch with my psychotic banjo-playing alter ego by getting me White African, by Otis Taylor!

Ah, generosity! Not like I expect you to get me anything. . .

(You’ve only got till Wednesday)

I’ve only taken a swing at one woman in my life (I was asleep, and she woke me up at 4am by sneaking into my dorm room), but I’d probably drop the smackdown on Anya Kamenetz. Fortunately, Daniel Gross at Slate does a much better job, with less bloodshed.

(You think I’m overreacting, but stick through to the end of the article.)

(Update: I had no idea there were so many people who read the comments on Daniel Drezner’s blog. I’m glad that you all followed the link over here, and sorry if the brevity of my take disappointed you. I try not to make too many jokes about beating up women, because most people on the internet don’t know when you’re joking.

(So, while I’m not really ready to throw a stapler at Anya K.’s head, I have to admit that it was pretty funny that she technorati’d her way to this page, then offered “her side of the story” through her site.

(Now, despite the fact that Daniel Gross, in his e-mail response to AK’s complaints, goes on to denigrate my career choice (the “crappy trade publication” venue), I still think he’s coming out on top in this argument. Maybe this is due in part to the fact that, in my mid-30s, I’ve worked my way up within this crappy field to a nicely-paying job (one that occasionally leads to calls from Slate writers looking for industry trend information). I’ve had lucky breaks with my finances, but I also never lived outside my means and have yet to carry a balance on a credit card.

(Since my parents are immigrants and didn’t go to college, I don’t have a direct basis of comparison to decide if I had it tougher than they did. I do know that some of the kids who’ve worked in our company (graduating college after 1998) appear to be far more clueless and ‘entitled’ than my college and grad school buddies were.

(Anyway, what I’m saying is that Mr. Gross has a point about the need for patience.)

About six months ago, I wrote about how a friend-of-a-friend is in prison, and how harrowing it all looks to me, as an outsider.

Fortunately, it’s not all hellish, according to John Mandala of The Cellblock Cafe:

Eventually, I learned these “tricks of the trade,” and added my own creations, such as shredded fried roast beef with ketchup and mustard or fried mashed potatoes in butter. Within a few months, I was nicknamed, “Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee.” I soon realized that creating and sharing a tasty, nourishing meal was one of the few enjoyments prison life offered. Surprisingly, I began to experience another kind of nourishment, one of the soul. Creative cooking opened up an avenue of communication, which transcended prison politics, and a healthy meal crossed most cultural barriers as well.

More than a decade later, as a result of good behavior and other accomplishments in prison programs, I am now at Sing Sing Correctional Facilities medium security annex. I share a single stove with 75 men who are Jamaican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Asian, African-American, Italian and Caucasian. This experience has allowed me to be exposed to different cooking methods, recipes and to taste various types of food.

Without further ado, here are the prison recipes.

But I laughed.

Well, we tried listening to David Lee Roth again on the 3-minute drive to Amy’s bus stop. The first thing we heard was ‘Diamond Dave’ saying, “We have on the line a representative from the UAW.”

First thing to flash into my head? The episode of The Simpsons where Bart breaks his leg at the beginning of summer. He decides to chill out and watch Krusty the Klown:

Bart: [laughing at Itchy & Scratchy] You know, this isn’t so bad. I’ll just spend the summer getting better acquainted with an old friend called television.

[kids cheer, Krusty appears and laughs]

Krusty: Hope you enjoyed that, kids, ’cause Krusty’s out of here for the summer. In the meantime, we’ll be running [groans] “Klassic Krusty”. [laughs uncomfortably] Enjoy. . .

[the Krusty Show from February 6th, 1961 comes on]

Krusty: [chuckles] Good evening. Tonight my guest is AFL/CIO chairman George Meany, who will be discussing collective bargaining agreements.

Meany: It’s a pleasure to be here, Krusty.

Krusty: Let me be blunt: is there a labor crisis in America today?

[looks bored, lights cigarette]

Meany: Well that depends what you mean by “crisis”…

[Bart groans]

I can’t begin to do justice to the visual, which consists of an old Dick Cavett set, and Krusty in a black suit, with a white pocket square, smoking away.

Anyway, that was just about my feeling this morning, listening to the over-the-hill former lead singer of Van Halen discussing labor relations. The NYPost was pretty savage this morning (I’d link to the article, but the link would go dead in a week):

Something was missing yesterday as David Lee Roth took over for Howard Stern.

In a word: humor.

For a moment, it was like those Sunday mornings when I zip down to Dunkin Donuts (also 3 minutes away) and click through the stations. The hip-hop station always has its “public issues” show on, which is kinda jarring.

Of course, they put that on 8am on Sundays, not weekday morning drive time.

Back in the office today, for the first time in almost 2 weeks (except for a one-hour stop last Wednesday when I filled out 3 months’ worth of expense reports). What do I find waiting at my desk? A jar of glazed pecans and a giant bottle of Tanqueray! It’s like the holidays never end!

Should I worry about the fact that my associate editor bought me the gin (one of those 1.75L numbers that comes with its own handle)? I mean, if I’d dropped more hints about the two volumes that I’m missing from the new Proust translation, would she have looked for those instead?

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that Woody Allen’s films have sucked for more than a decade now. Last night, Amy & I watched Sweet and Lowdown, and enjoyed the heck out of it. Samantha Morton was just impossibly good, the music was great, and the fact that there was no “Woody” character in it was refreshing. Sure, the “I’m an artist, so I can’t be tied down” shtick was a little cartoony, but Sean Penn’s character didn’t need that sort of depth.

So I stand corrected: Not all of Woody Allen’s post-1989 flicks have been awful.

But I still can’t sit through more than 90 seconds of Curse of the Jade Scorpion.

Great article from Virginia Postrel in the NYTimes today about New Year’s resolutions:

In the early 1980’s, [Nobel economics laureate] Professor Schelling applied similar analysis to individuals’ internal struggles, seeking to develop what he called “strategic egonomics, consciously coping with one’s own behavior, especially one’s conscious behavior.”

The problem, he suggested, is that pretty much everybody suffers from a split personality. One self desperately wants to lose weight or quit smoking or run two miles a day or get up early to work. The other wants dessert or a cigarette, hates exercise or loves sleep.

Both selves are equally valid, and equally rational about pursuing their desires. But they do not exist at the same time.

[. . .]New Year’s resolutions help the earlier self overrule the later one by raising the cost of straying. “More is threatened by failure than just the substance of the resolution: one’s personal constitution is violated, confidence demoralized, and the whole year spoiled [. . .]”

So there! Read it all!

(I just read Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies last week. It’s a heck of a book, when it comes to identifying the shifting alliances of political ideology and the perniciousness of technocrats. I recommend it highly.)

I’m not sure what resolutions I can make for 2006. In the past year, I read more (and more deeply) than I ever have, experienced that revelation of love that culminated in popping the question to Amy, and did all sorts of charitable activity. I didn’t write as much as I want, so maybe that oughtta be it.

My big project (and those never work out for me, so it’s silly of me to mention it) is to read a lot about urban planning and city dynamics, to get a better idea about the historical development of American cities. If that leads to an essay of some kind, you’ll be the first to know.

Another resolution: I resolve to revamp my music-oriented Mad Mix blog and post more often. I have some ideas for a new graphic layout for it, and a way of making sure there’s a substantive post at least once a week, but it’s a matter of execution (as ever).

Here’s yet more Proust, quoting a doctor:

“Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realise how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not kow what they cost those who wrought them in insomnia, tears, spasmodic laughter, urticaria, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these, and which you perhaps have experienced, Madame.”

That said, Woody Allen’s films have sucked for more than a decade now.

New Year’s Eve is usually a time of reflection and drunkenness, dear readers, and I hope you all engage in plenty of both tonight. I’ll do a little reflecting right now, but no drinking, since it’s morning and I allegedly have standards.

The official VM fiancée & I are heading over to Café Matisse tonight for a five-course New Year’s dinner. It’s an early meal, so we’ll have time to get hammered at home tonight. Last year, we watched the first two Lord of the Rings flicks before the clock struck 12. We’ll have less movie-time this year, so we might just groove with Sun Ra instead.

Tomorrow, we’ll go to Princeton for our traditional New Year’s Day get-together with our friend Cecily, who will likely grill Amy about all sorts of wedding plans. We’re still trying to figure out what (if anything) I oughtta get engraved on my wedding ring. It won’t be this.

How would you go about recapping a year of your life? The gist of mine: helped Dad deal with / recover from heart surgery; proposed to Amy; read Proust; walked around a near-empty city.

There are plenty of other details, many of which you longtime readers have been subjected to: bought her a ring; gained new perspective on 9/11; bought a giant TV; saw a world of comics-geeks; moved this blog to a new provider, then a new platform; visited Cracker Biodome; watched Ric Burns’ 8-part documentary about New York City; read plenty of other writers. There’s more for a recording angel to catch up with, but there’s only so much room for memories. Sez Marcel:

If the name, Duchesse de Guermantes, was for me a collective name, it was not so merely in history, by the accumulation of all the women who had successively borne it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already seen, in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency. Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years. Our memories and our hearts are not large enough to be able to remain faithful. We have not room enough, in our present mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living. We are obliged to build on top of what has gone before and is brought to light only by a chance excavation, such as the name Saintraille had just opened up.

All of which isn’t to say much but Happy New Year, everyone. Live well.