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Cadzilla vs. Cancer (and Diabetes)

My dad has a tendency to give me “presents.” These generally consist of things he has no use for (see: massage chair, undersized bicycle, wobbly office chair). A few years ago, this present consisted of his old Cadillac, a 1986 black Fleetwood Brougham that I promptly nicknamed Cadzilla. It still ran fine, but the AC was dead, the stereo didn’t work without a Rube Goldberg attachment, and it could cost around $75 to fill the tank.

I drove it for a while as a second car to balance out my old Saturn, but gave up on the thing a few years ago. Since then, it’s been sitting in my driveway, or in the yard beside the house. I kept meaning to donate the thing to charity, but never got around to it till two weeks ago.

I started out by calling the Salvation Army. I figured they’d appreciate rolling out in a giant black Caddy on their way to fight damnation or whatever. They might even trick it out and make it a hopper, I thought.

Only problem was, the Salvation Army wouldn’t come out to pick it up. They insisted that I drive it to their drop-off point. In Newark, NJ.

Now, there are a number of factors that mitigated against this, starting with: the car needed a new battery and tires; the insurance and registration were expired; there’s no way I’m going into Newark in a big black Cadillac and making it out alive.

So it was on to Plan B: googling “donate car to charity”.

This led me to the American Diabetes Association. Two weeks ago, I filled out their online car donation form and figured I’d hear back promptly.

A week later, I decided to call to check on the status of my donation. Their rep said they’d received the donation-form, sent it on to the local tow company they use, and had no idea why I hadn’t been contacted. They gave me the number of the company and asked me to arrange the pickup.

I called, and was told to call another number. That led to an answering machine. I left my message, waited a day to hear back, and called again. I hung up on the answering machine this time, peeved that it was such a hassle to give something away.

So I went on to Plan C: the American Cancer Society.

I filled out their online donation form, and got an immediate e-mail response that they’d be in touch to schedule the pickup. Well done, I thought.

Then the tow company for the American Diabetes Association called back to schedule their pickup.

Did I feel a little trepidation over saying, “Between Saturday and Tuesday is fine”? Yes, I did. Did I tell them that I’d just re-donated Cadzilla to the ACS? No, I didn’t. In the off chance that the ACS actually sent a tow truck without calling to schedule it, I figured they could duke it out with the ADA guys, tire-irons a-flyin’.

Yesterday, I got home and found that Cadzilla was gone. There was a letter from the ACS in my mail, with a form to fill out to get a tax writeoff for Cadzilla. Now, I’m pretty sure that the ADA guys took the car, if only because there was no call back from the ACS, but the ADA guys didn’t leave a receipt for the car, as they mentioned on the phone.

At least Cadzilla’s gone to charity, but I feel bad because I’m going to have to lie to one of the groups about why the car is already gone. Maybe I can tell them that the Salvation Army took it.

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Indy 000?

When I tried my hand at literary publishing — I’m in recovery — I received almost zero support from any of the major chains. Amazon, on the other hand, had a program in place for me to sell books through them and have the same potential for exposure as just about every other book (notwithstanding co-op payment to get on the front page of the site). It’s one of the reasons that I still use Amazon for most of my new book purchases.

I’ll go to the Borders around the corner from my office, but it’s quite rare that I spend any money there; it’s more for general browsing. There’s a Barnes & Noble with a massive used book section a few miles away that I’ll trawl every few weeks or months, but that’s the extent of my chain-shopping, unless there’s some sort of immediate priority (like forgetting to get a Mother’s Day present).

The closest worthwhile independent bookstore is the Montclair Book Center, but I don’t think I’ve been there for at least eight months. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that there are 1,200 books downstairs, most of which I haven’t read. I’ve been on a book-a-week pace for few months now, which means it’ll only take me around 40 years to finish reading everything, provided nothing new comes out.

Anyway, over at Slate, Tyler Cowen has an article about the superfluousness of independent bookstores:

But with the advent of the Internet, the literary world has more room for independence — if not always in its old forms — than ever before. Amazon reader reviews, blogs such as Bookslut, and eBay — the world’s largest book auction market — all are flourishing and are doing so outside the reach of the major corporate booksellers. Print-on-demand technologies and self-publishing are booming. Along with Google and other search engines, they will allow niche titles to persist in our memories for a long time to come. This is the flip side of the same computerization that elevated Wal-Mart and Borders: Information technology brings more voices into book evaluation and supply.

Unfortunately, many virtues of the new order are relatively invisible. Consider the used-book market. It was much easier to find a good used bookstore 20 years ago. Yet it has never been easier to buy a good used book, with the aid of, among others, Abebooks, a superb central depot for used booksellers.

Enjoy.

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Bagel day!

Today’s my ninth anniversary at my job. I almost got myself fired several times in my first year here, so I consider it an achievement that I managed to work my way up to a position of responsibility over the years. The company has around 50 people, and I just figured out that only 10 of them have been here longer than I have.

I’ve always goofed on my lack of commitment and my general flightiness, but I have to admit that I’m pretty stable and devoted about work.

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25 years, huh?

A few months ago, I wrote an insanely rambling piece about the crappy state of contemporary literature.

In that post, I mentioned a conversation I had with an NYU prof (Elayne Tobin) and an author/critic (David Gates) about what novels since 1980 will become “canonical.” We had slim pickings, supporting my thesis that we live in a crap-era for fiction.

Well, now the NYTimes has asked a “several hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages” to name “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”

I don’t think my claim is contradicted at all.

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More posts about buildings and food

I came across BLDG BLOG yesterday, thanks to a link in the NY Observer. The most recent post, on the shortcomings of architectural criticism, is awfully read-worthy. It explores how an art form (and again, I’m using architecture as a stand-in for other art forms) can become too esoteric for its own good:

[S]trong and interesting architectural criticism is defined by the way you talk about architecture, not the buildings you choose to talk about.

In other words, fine: you can talk about Fumihiko Maki instead of, say, Half-Life, or Doom, or super-garages, but if you start citing Le Corbusier, or arguing about whether something is truly “parametric,” then you shouldn’t be surprised if anyone who’s not a grad student, studying with one of your friends at Columbia, puts the article down, gets in a car — and drives to the mall, riding that knotwork of self-intersecting crosstown flyovers and neo-Roman car parks that most architecture critics are too busy to consider analyzing.

All along, your non-Adorno-reading former subscriber will be interacting with, experiencing, and probably complaining about architecture — but you’ve missed a perfect chance to join in.

The mention of Adorno puts me in mind of the great essay, “Is Bad Writing Necessary?” which appeared in the late, lamented Lingua Franca a few years ago. (It took me a long time to find that article online after LF folded, but I dug it up on a Chinese site, cleaned up the typography, and saved it as a Word doc, which I present here.)

That essay explored the attraction of ‘esoteric writing’ of sorts, that use of academic jargon and deliberate obfuscation that (in my opinion) creates a closed, insulated circuit of theory that has little involvement in the real world. The writer contrasts this style of writing (as exemplified by Theodor Adorno) with the ‘windowpane’ style of George Orwell, which strove to be as unjargonistic as possible.

Even though I went to a theory-heavy undergrad institution, I ended up championing Orwell’s prose over the self-privileging of academic jargon (okay, maybe that should read, ‘Because I went to a . . .’). I understand that some concepts are awfully tricky and need plenty of work to explain, but if you can’t convey them to a reasonably intelligent person without resorting to a glossary of strange terminology, you’re probably just spinning your wheels.

(I’m not sure if the example of explaining the pick-and-roll to my wife this weekend applies, but that was an instance where, rather than resorting to basketball terminology, I used our salt and pepper shakers, a salad dressing bottle and a bottle-cap to demonstrate exactly what the p&r is. Then I explained to her how the Lakers’ terrible defensive rotation on the wing led to Tim Thomas rolling 20 feet for an unimpeded dunk.)

BLDG BLOG writer Geoff Manaugh also explores this idea of theory essentially having its head stuck up its ass:

First, early on, one of the panelists stated: “It’s not our job to say: ‘Gee, the new Home Depot sucks. . .'”

But of course it is!

That’s exactly your role; that’s exactly the built environment as it’s now experienced by the majority of the American public. “Architecture,” for most Americans, means Home Depot — not Mies Van Der Rohe. You have every right to discuss that architecture. For questions of accessibility, material use, and land policy alone, if you could change the way Home Depots all around the world are designed and constructed, you’d have an impact on built space and the construction industry several orders of magnitude larger than changing just one new high-rise in Manhattan — or San Francisco, or Boston’s Back Bay.

You’d also help people realize that their local Home Depot is an architectural concern, and that everyone has the right to critique — or celebrate — these buildings now popping up on every corner. If critics only choose to write about avant-garde pharmaceutical headquarters in the woods of central New Jersey — citing Le Corbusier — then, of course, architectural criticism will continue to lose its audience. And it is losing its audience: this was unanimously agreed upon by all of last night’s panelists.

Put simply, if everyday users of everyday architecture don’t realize that Home Depot, Best Buy, WalMart, even Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose, can be criticized — if people don’t realize that even suburbs and shopping malls and parking garages can be criticized — then you end up with the architectural situation we have today: low-quality, badly situated housing stock, illogically designed and full of uncomfortable amounts of excess closet space.

And no one says a thing.

I’m not sure why I’ve grown so interested in architecture and buildings in the last few years. Maybe it’s because of the sorta intersection of art, commerce, and real-world-ness (it’s a building). I should probably ruminate on that for a while.

Anyway, enjoy the article.

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No Soccer Moms

Well, I see who wears the pants in this theocratic tyranny:

[Iran’s] President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had ruled in April that he would allow women to go to soccer games and sit in a separate section of the stands. He wanted to “improve soccer-watching manners and promote a healthy atmosphere.”

But Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who under the Islamic Republic’s constitution has the final say — opposed the move.

“The president has decided to revise his decision based on the supreme leader’s opinion,” Iranian government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said Monday.

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Take it to the bank

Robert Reich, Clinton’s secretary of labor, argues for Wal-Mart’s inclusion into the banking/credit field:

I say, let Wal-Mart under the tent. Commercial banking is now one of the stodgiest and least-competitive parts of the American economy. Fees and prices are way too high. Service is lousy. The industry needs a shakeup. Have you ever had a bank give itself an interest-free “float” on your money while you waited two weeks for a check to clear? Have you ever filled out twenty-five forms to get a simple bank loan? Have you ever collected anything close to fair interest on money you keep in your checking account?

I guarantee you Wal-Mart’s low-price business model will force complacent bankers to do better.

I’ve still never been to a Wal-Mart, but they’re building one about 10 miles away, so maybe I’ll check it out.