Links . . . of the undead! Just click “more”!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Oct. 24, 2008”
Unrequired Reading: Oct. 17, 2008
It’s time for your weekly dose of links, dear readers!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Oct. 17, 2008”
The Price of popcorn pimp hats
In my previous post, I mentioned how little of a crap I give for contemporary literature. There are very few works of fiction published this decade that particularly impressed me. Two of those books were Lush Life
In what seems to be an attempt at taking over the New York Sun‘s slot as Official Media Venue of Gil Roth, New York Magazine got Richard Price and Junot Diaz, the authors of those two books, to sit down for a conversation about New York City in the mag’s 40th anniversary issue. The rest of the annivesary issue looks mighty impressive, but I sat down to read this piece before any of the others.
NY: You must have seen neighborhoods evolve in all kinds of ways over the last 40 years.
RP: When you go to Harlem now, all the franchises are there—Starbucks and Linens ’n’ Things. It’s the same eight stores that are metastasized everywhere. And in neighborhoods where people have money, they’ll say, “Oh, a Starbucks, another fucking Starbucks.†But in Harlem, it’s like, ‘Hey, Starbucks, man! Häagen-Dazs and Baskin-Robbins! Yowee!†We’re all thinking There goes the neighborhood, and they’re thinking Here comes the neighborhood.
JD: Me and my girl beef about this. I know this is a weird thing to desire, but when you feel locked out of the larger culture, even if it’s a consumer-capitalist one, that’s a lot, bro. You know, there’s not a bookstore, and there’s not a place you can go if you wanna spend $5 for coffee. It weighs on people, man. It feels like you’re isolated, and you are. My girl loved it when a Starbucks opened up. But I’m one of those fuckers who’s like, “Naw, man, it’s corporate!†I’m like an idiot.
I gotta sit down and read Diaz’s short story collection somedarntime.
What It Is: 9/22/08
What I’m reading: Didn’t have much time to read this week, so I’m still on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye
What I’m listening to: Meet Danny Wilson, by Danny Wilson, and The Odd Couple
What I’m watching: the last series at Yankee Stadium.
What I’m drinking: Plymouth & tonic.
What Rufus is up to: Greyhound Planet picnic in Bridgewater, NJ, baby!
Where I’m going: New Brunswick, NJ, baby!
What I’m happy about: New York Magazine cited my post on The Glass Stampede in their Comments section last week:
What I’m sad about: They didn’t call me or my blog by name, so now I have yet another alias: Chimera Obscura. Sigh. I shouldn’t complain, considering I have at least six active e-mail addresses.
What I’m pondering: How working for the Long Island Rail Road seems to be a more dangerous occupation than Alaskan crab fishing.
Waiting for the eclipse
I haven’t slept well lately, so I assume my fourth estate alter ego has been working overtime on plumbing my mind for good arts articles. What’s in today’s edition of the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth?
- a walking tour of the architecture of Park Slope,
- a review of an exhibition on the origins of abstract painting in America,
- what we draw about when we draw Babar,
- Van Gogh: just because,
- and the coup de grace: the history (and sales record) of a possibly fictitious acolyte of Andy Warhol.
I guess this means I’ll get better nights of sleep once the Sun closes up shop, but my arts life is going to be a lot less interesting.
New Orleans, Beijing: Same Difference
Nicolai Ouroussoff: still here, still batshit-crazy. He asks why, if China could make a major architectural statement out of Beijing, the U.S. won’t do the same in . . . New Orleans. No, really.
Somehow, he misses the points that
- Beijing is the capital of a burgeoning world power, while New Orleans’ economy is driven almost entirely by drunken tourists,
- New Orleans, we now understand, faces destruction by flood every hurricane season, thanks to its georgraphy, a series of incredibly short-sighted development decisions, and the admitted incompetence of the Army Corps of Engineers,
- “New Orleans” and “coherent vision” don’t belong in the same article.
Maybe he’ll propose Frank Gehry to design new curved levees.
Fables of the Reconstruction
I’m no knee-jerk fan of either major party, so the ugliness of this election season has triggered one of my depressions. For me, these are characterized by what I call “wheels within wheels” phases, in which the world seems to reduce to the meshing of an impossibly complicated set of gears. I get stuck probing away at the mechanisms, trying to make sense of a planetary gearset that leaves no room for randomness, irrationality, or serendipity. It’s paranoia both grand and personal, but I’ve gotten better about getting it under control.
More importantly my wife helps ground me and elevate me, and that’s why I love her so.
This morning, I considered what I want to share with you about 9/11 this time around, and that’s when I reached the conclusion that the reconstruction of Ground Zero should remain perpetually in progress. After all, anything that actually gets finished will only be a letdown after all this buildup. Plus, it’ll boost employment among construction workers, city-state-federal lobbyists, starchitects, and Sheldon Silver.
And most importantly, it’ll be a fitting symbol of our state of endless war.
In the words of James Brolin, “Happy 9/11!”
In the words of my wife, “I hope Josh got his mom’s brains. Whoever she is.”
City of Glass
This week’s ish of New York Magazine has a neat article by Justin Davidson; it consists of a meditation on NYC’s architecture boom and how it fits in the city’s history, complemented by 50 before-and-afters of recent buildings. I’m conflicted about some of his points, especially on the relationship of new buildings with their neighborhoods, and the “walking travelogue” aspect gets a bit precious, but I think it’s an awfully worthwhile article, with some good conversation about the nature of the city. Mr. Davidson cops to a certain sadness to all the buildings that are lost, but, also understands that freezing any one moment in time is impossible:
Intelligent preservation is precious, but nostalgia is cheap, and every era nurtures its own variety. Those late-nineteenth-century Upper West Siders who still thought of Broadway as the bucolic, elm-lined Bloomingdale Road of their youths resented the incursion of brownstones in the 1880s. Their children must have been horrified in turn when those same houses were wiped away by the now-classic apartment buildings that line West End Avenue. Bitterness springs eternal.
I suppose I’ll always have Ben Katchor‘s Julius Knipl comics to fall back on, for That New York that I’ve lost.
As a plus, the article also turned me on to Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York!
Oh, and the “history of Columbus Circle” sidebar sent me spiraling back to 1982 or thereabouts, when my dad took me to a gift trade show at the New York Coliseum for work. I hadn’t thought of that day in decades, and thinking about it now makes me a little sad, because of all the other memories locked away in time’s vanishing city.
Unrequired Reading: Sept. 5, 2008
No more Friday summer hours at my office! I’m almost too sad to post a passel of links! (for more, just click more!)
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Sept. 5, 2008”
Sunshine
What’s in the Arts+ section of The Official Newspaper of Gil Roth today?
- a review of two biographies of Han van Meegeren, the famous Dutch forger of paintings,
- a review of Richard Todd’s essays on authenticity (nice complement/contrast to the forgery review),
- a review of a biography of Jacob Riis, the man who chronicled the horrors of tenement life in late 19th century Manhattan,
- a review of a book on the New Urban Renewal and today’s gentrification,
- Otto Penzler’s review of Anton Chekhov’s crime fiction.
Sometimes I think their editors say to each other, “Remember that thing Gil was muttering to himself about in 1997, when he thought no one was listening? We should assign an article on that topic!”