In the New Economy

Head of state

2009-06-08T20:16:00.000-07:00

The boy wanted to see if the President's hair felt like his own...

How do you like them apples?

2009-06-07T18:00:00.002-07:00

From the Good Will Hunting screenplay introduction by Gus Van Sant:

"We drove across the country."

"How long did it take you?" I asked.

"Fifty-five...?" Ben speculated.

"Fifty-seven hours," Matt said as a matter of fact.

"But the reason that we drive is we don't like to fly."

"Terrified of flying."

"We drive across the country about every two weeks."

"That's what is seems like."

Ben drives and Matt doesn't -- even when they are staying in L.A., Ben often ends up driving Matt around like the character in Good Will Hunting named Chuckie who drives Will. (Note that at the end of the film Good Will Hunting, Matt is driving the picture car and you can see how it's hard for him to steer a straight course.)

"When we say that we drove across the country, we mean that I drive and Matt rides along," Ben informs me.

"Fifty-five hours is fast, too," I say.

"Fifty-seven..."

"I mean..."

"Still fast though..."

"We're just trying to get to a meeting we have tomorrow at Fox and since we can't fly, we do this straight-through thing."

"Not a lot of sight-seeing," Matt says.

But Matt still doesn't take a turn at the wheel; he just makes up stories with Ben to keep him from falling asleep.

"A lot of Good Will was written on such cross-country road trips. We tell each other stories while in a particular character, usually to make each other laugh or to make sure that Ben doesn't fall asleep at the wheel."

"The stories have to be good or I start to nod off."

"So it sort of ups the ante as far as the story quality goes. When we get into an improv that we both like, that we both think is going well and dialogue we are relatively excited by, I will open up the glove compartment where I keep my notebook and write down a few notes that we will use later to recall the entire improvisation," Matt says.

"When we do finally stop the car I'll unpack a laptop computer and we'll write down the new pages by reinventing it," Ben says.

"We also write by fax," Matt says.

"Fax?" I ask them.

"We were often apart because of acting commitments, so when I was filming in Alpine, Texas, and spending a lot of time indoors trying to get out of the Texas heat I would write pages and send them off to Ben by fax. Ben was doing his film in Leadville, Colorado, and he would pick up the fax I sent to his production office, and work on the new pages and then send them back to me in Alpine."

"And let it be said," Ben adds, "that when we are doing this, most of the time we are trying to make ourselves laugh. We are going for a shared reactions. We're going for a good time."

"Or we cry. We might make ourselves cry, too," Matt says.

"Yes, and also a lot of the time we'll have a few beers while we are writing. We're just hanging out with each other trying to entertain ourselves."

"When we happen to be staying in the same hotel we'll write on the weekends or on our days off. Part of the reason we worked on this script so much was that we often had huge amounts of time off in strange cities and there was absolutely no choice but to keep yourself occupied or go crazy from the boredom, so we would write together to keep from going insane," Matt says.

I was witness to one of their many hotel room rewrites. There was a good deal of procrastination when during my particular visit. This could have been because they had been through so many rewrites before that they were tired of rewriting. There have been about ten rewrites in all. The first meeting that I had with them, we took a sight-seeing trip around West Memphis, Arkansas. Days later when things really got down to the wire and it seemed that we were just goofing off and hanging out and watching hotel movies and really not getting anything done at all, that's when Ben and Matt would fly into action and create something almost spontaneously with Matt standing in the middle of the hotel room demonstratively gesturing and editing ideas by drawing dotted lines in the air with his hands, with Ben writing down dialogue on his laptop computer. Ben not only does the driving but he also does the typing.

Two best friends driving across deserts, faxing each other between remote locations, and hanging out in hotels trying to make each other laugh and cry over a three-year period is how they managed to put this amazing screenplay together.

Ever since I read this in fifth grade, I've wanted to drive across the country with my best friend, keeping my notebook in the glove compartment to keep track of our burgeoning screenplay. It might take a little longer than fifty-seven hours, but, God will(hunt)ing, it seems I'm finally livin' the dream!

Prep school sure does prepare you

2009-06-06T07:00:00.005-07:00

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Yesterday in the mail I received an unexpected package.

My cuckoo bananas high school Nuclear Proliferation teacher, the finest penpal I've ever had -- whose name is so completely ridiculous that, "a short story fiction editor would say, 'Sorry, This name sounds implausible'" -- had sent me a quart of motor oil.

Mobil Clean 5000 5W-30 performance motor oil, "proven protection for 5,000 miles, guaranteed," to be exact.
A sign of senility, or a sign of the new economy?

In the new economy, you have to squirrel away your savings

2009-06-05T13:00:00.001-07:00

This is the squirrel who watched the Sox/Tigers game on Tuesday night. Literally about 1/8th of the broadcast was devoted to his antics. He seemed sort of...glum. Maybe he just got laid off from Chrysler. That would actually be really sad.

No country for old men

2009-06-05T07:00:00.001-07:00

Today marks five years since Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th President of the United States, left our shores for that great Berlin Wall of the beyond. May he rest in peace; may they have jelly beans where he's gone.

The worst thing about being sick in America, Ethel, is you are booted out of the parade. Americans have no use for the sick. Look at Reagan: he’s so healthy, he’s hardly human, he’s a hundred if he’s a day, he takes a slug in his chest and two days later he’s out west riding ponies in his PJ’s. I mean, who does that? That’s America. It’s just no country for the infirm.

(Roy Cohn to Ethel Rosenberg, “Angels In America, Part II: Perestroika,” by Tony Kushner).

If they don't win it's a shame

2009-06-04T13:00:00.003-07:00

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In the new economy, Motown's making soul again. This season, General Motors informed Comerica Field (home to the Detroit Tigers) that they wouldn't be able to continue sponsoring the General Motors fountain behind center field, which sends up showers of water whenever the Tigers score a homerun.

No matter, said Tigers owner Mike Ilitch. We're going to keep your sign up there. In fact, we're going to put Chrysler and Ford up there, too.

The vice president of communications for the team said of Ilitch's decision:

It's a community decision, not a business decision. He cares about the city of Detroit. This is something he wanted to do. It's for the Big Three.

All three logos now adorn the fountain, with a sign beneath that says "The Detroit Tigers support our automakers."

Threadbare in the new economy

2009-06-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

My dear friend BC sent me the following advice:

I have a solution for your thread conundrum. Buy white thread but use a Sharpie or marker to 'color' it black, blue, celadon, or orange. It works for me!

Now, homegirl's got a Fulbright under her belt, so these wise words are truly from a Wise Woman. Excellent idea, right? Hungary will be lucky to have her.

Take a picture, it'll last longer

2009-06-03T16:30:00.001-07:00

Every life list has, I would imagine, a sub-list exclusively dedicated to things to do in New York. My friend EBM is about to pack up his New York life for an adventure in the great beyond, and told me he's been making "sad lists" of things to do for the first time, and things to do for the last time. After vegging at Veselka, poetically pacing around Coney Island, and seeing the site of the old World's Fair (which I forced upon him), what is left to do? The answer is, of course: so much (and we all know it).

One of my major goals has always been to walk the entire length of Manhattan. The length of the entire island, ("from the Battery to the top of Manhattan" sing the Beastie Boys in "An Open Letter to NYC") is about 13.5 miles. I will happily confess that I got this idea from an essay Adam Gopnik wrote about Richard Avedon in the book Richard Avedon, Evidence: 1944-1994 which begins:

On an April morning sometime in the middle of the nineteen eighties, in his sixty-fifth or sixty-sixth or sixty-seventh year, the American photographer Richard Avedon called up a friend and proposed that together they walk the length of Manhattan Island. This invitation, as with any Avedon project, was a compound of quick sensitivity (the friend's wife was out of town on what the friend thought was a pointlessly quixotic pilgrimage to her Scandinavian homeland, and he had been ostentatiously moping for a week); grandiose ambition, decently tempered by fine-print realism (by "the length of the island" Avedon didn't, it turned out, really mean to walk from Spuyten Duyvil to the Harbor, but just the length of Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum to Washington Square -- the navigable river of commerce and art on which most of his sixty-odd years had been spent; still, a solid eighty or ninety blocks); an endless and omnivorous appetite for the things of the world (there were three or four exhibitions of photography and painting that he hadn't seen, and he had had one of his assistants type out the details on a neat card, with two suggestions for lunch, one very high -- a caviar emporium -- and one very low -- a particularly appealing hot dog stand by the Seventy-second Street pond); and a love for -- no, more than a love, a belief, a faith in -- the ineluctable beauty and power of the new (walking Fifth Avenue in a single morning was something that he had never done before, and would now have the joy of doing for the first time).

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Because Gopnik's essay also references a photograph Avedon took of W.H. Auden standing on St. Mark's Place during a snowstorm in 1960, I've conflated both stories and now imagine Richard Avedon walking the length of Manhattan in a blizzard.

Another sixty-five year old, Thomas Keane, completed Avedon's goal -- and then some -- when, on December 15, 1952, he made the front page of the New York Times (below the fold) for "Walking In Every Street in Manhattan." Keane, a Navy Commander, spent four years trying to walk "every street, avenue, alley, square and court" on the island:

When visitors have only an hour in town, the commander recommends the walk from Christopher Street on the west, eastward along Eighth Street, as a stroll that offers the greatest variety for the eye and for the ear.

His final walk was that final 13-mile stretch of Broadway from the tippy-top of the island to the Battery.

Fifty years later, Columbia librarian Caleb Smith set himself the same goal of walking every street in town. I just love his Sharpie-ed-out map of every street he traversed.

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Even if you never leave your own backyard, you should get to know every inch of what is available to you. Not a silly goal at all.

In the new economy, price of cereal grains skyrockets

2009-06-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

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The Times reported on a planned Catcher in the Rye sequel today. Some cuckoo bananas dude named John David California (do we think he would be "J.D. California" on the title page?) planned to pen this foolish fancy, but good ol' J.D. "I Only Eat Macrobiotic Foods" Salinger whopped him with a major lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court of Manhattan. This new installment would have, supposedly, featured "a 76-year-old character called Mr. C, who wanders the streets of New York after he escapes his nursing home, in a manner similar to Holden Caulfield's escape from an elite prep school." However, in the new economy, Mr. C has no health care, so, after slipping on the ice in Central Park while looking for ducks, he is unable to pay for a cast for his broken leg. And then he dies.

Cross the street and find a poet

2009-06-02T15:00:00.001-07:00

Vicious, like I hit you on the head with this flower.

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RH likes the Lou Reed reference from one of my recent posts. He says, "If Lou Reed had any humanity, he would be proud of you -- he would be proud of me!"

While Lou Reed may resemble an over-the-hill heroin monkey, here is some proof of his humanity, and his true heart. In December of 1995, he wrote the below piece for the New York Times magazine section after the death of Sterling Morrison -- his best man (and band mate). In fourteen years, I've never forgotten Morrison's "leaves" imagery. You won't, either. (The above picture is of Sterl).

"Sterling Morrison: Velvet Warrior," December 21, 1995:

Sterling said the cancer was like leaves in the fall, a perfect Morrison description; he loved the English language. When asked if he had a guitar to play, he said yes, he did, but he had watched seven-- he'd counted-- seven layers of skin peel from his body, and that had made guitar playing and quite a few other things painful. This eye for detail was very much Sterling. In fact, it saved my life once. We were playing in an airplane hangar in Los Angeles in 1966. This was two years after we'd got out of college, where we'd first met, student friends and musician buddies. I was standing near a microphone when I heard Sterl call gently but firmly, "Don't move." I turned my head just in time to see smoke, one of my guitar strings vaporized by the ungrounded microphone it had just touched. I would have been ashes.

I arrived at his house by train from the city with depressing thoughts in my head and not one decent suggestion. I was struck by how big he was. Perhaps that was accentuated by the extreme gauntness of his once-muscular physique. He was bald with nothing but skin over bone. But his eyes. His eyes were as alert and clear as any eyes I've seen in this world. Not once did he complain. We spoke of music and old band mates. We talked baseball. We never spoke of what was going on.
Maureen, old friend and Velvet drummer, and Sterling's wife, Martha, had gone downstairs. Sterl lay in bed, seeming to drift off, and I wondered if I should leave. I walked to the side of the bed to say goodbye when he suddently stuck his hand out. "Help me up," he said. He was strong despite the illness, but then he'd always been the strongest one. When he had played his passionate solos, I had always seen him as a mythic Irish hero, flames shooting from his nostrils. We sat like that, him upright in bed, me sitting with my back to an open window, holding his hand. And all the questions I had were answered and all the past differences resolved. And in the extraordinary moments when men transcend their bodies and words are spoken at their own peril, in those moments that move beyond speech and picture, in these moments that only an artist can capture, I saw my friend Sterling: Sterl, the great guitar-playing, tug-boat-captaining, PhD.-ing professor, raconteur supreme, argumenatative, funny, brilliant; Sterl as the architect of this monumental effort, possessor of astonishing bravery and dignity. The warrior heart of the Velvet Underground.
I missed the train back to New York and sat on the cement pavement waiting for another. I very badly wanted a cigarette and a drink. My God, I thought, We'll never play guitar together again. No more Nico. No more Andy. No more Sterl.
On the day of the Mass, I was in Cleveland playing rock-and-roll, my answer to every crisis. As the chords to "Sweet Jane swelled up, I hoped somehow my friend heard them and got a laugh. After all, he was the first one who heard the song the night I wrote it, more than 25 years ago, in the summer, before the leaves fell in the fall.

In the new economy, replace dates with prunes

2009-06-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, so, just so it's clear -- I did not have a television the entire year at school, so being home with my parents for a little bit and having a television is, like, a revelation. I just cannot get enough of Kim Kardashian!

The other incredible thing about being home in Rhode Island is that there is the two-dollar-a-ticket, second-run movie theatre in East Providence -- the Patriot Cinema. They even have recession-proof one-dollar-a-ticket Tuesdays. Never has patriotism been so fun! Some people find this whole scenario "sad," "smelly," and "depressing." But they would be wrong. It's exciting. And democratic.

However, if a boy takes you on a date to the Patriot he is either a) just not that into you or b) on the lam. In Rhode Island, it is just as -- if not more -- likely that the answer is b.

The new bourgeoisie

2009-05-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

Waiting for your thread collection to mature takes as
much time as any investment in the new economy.

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In the new economy, your financial stability will be determined by the breadth hand depth of your cleaning supplies, spice rack, and thread selection.

Cleaning supplies, spices, and thread are all mad expensive. And what is worse, they do not immediately pay for themselves. When rationalizing buying a $300 pair of boots, you divide the cost by the number of times you will wear them. Sure, they are $300 today, but by the end of the month, after wearing them ten times, they'll only be $30 (I know this is fuzzy math, but bear with me).

Not so with spices (or many culinary supplies in general). A jar of paprika can cost you, like, $10 if you don't go generic, and that's a lot of money to spend on a recipe that calls for only a quarter teaspoon of the stuff. The price of the spice only begins to seem acceptable when you realize that you're probably not going to have to buy paprika for another ten years -- meaning tonight's dash of it only cost you one third of one cent (or something). But you need serious financial foresight for this, and you need to have a ten-year plan in place for this rationalization to work. If you're a college student who is going to toss out the spices with the Malm dresser from Ikea when you vacate the premises, you're in trouble.

The same goes for cleaning supplies and also for thread. It sort of hurts to spend $4.99 on a spool of celadon thread to fix one button on one shirt -- at least for me, though I understand I'm a little hung-up about these kinds of things. Only if you plan to one day own a house with a closet where you can keep your tin of threads and needles, only if this celadon thread will be the first and last celadon thread you ever buy, only then should you buy celadon thread in the new economy. If you're a drifter without dental insurance or a place to store your notions and needles, you really cannot afford this kind of thing.

Of course, dragging your crushed cloves and Comet toilet cleanser around with you for the rest of your life might not sound appealing to some. The more financially secure you are, the more you have to lose, the more baggage you have -- and quite literally, because a spice rack takes up a lot of space. So the new economy might at least have this for a silver lining -- the freedom to roam.

Despite all the amputations, you know you can just get out and dance to the rock and roll station

2009-05-30T19:00:00.005-07:00

For most of my young adult life, I haven't believed in "soulmates," and in fact have actively appreciated the idea that there are many, many people with whom to fall in love, and with whom to be equally happy. Having a "type," or making a list of things you want in a lover is a pointless exercise. Once I left my all-girls school for a coed highschool and found myself suddenly meeting new boys, it always surprised (and pleased) me that the boy I would fall so head over heels for was someone who I couldn't have even conceptualized. You may think that there is no one out there -- or, after a heartbreak, you may think there will never be another out there -- but that's because you can't even begin to imagine this new person. You think you've seen the best there is, but when, one day, you fall again, you'll realize you never even had a precedent for this new love.

This is also the way I feel about pop music.

It is a never-ending source of relief and comfort to me that there will always be pop music, and that even when it seems like I have heard everything, something new and better will always come along. I thought I was a done deal way back in 2003, what with Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me a River," Usher's "Yeah," and Britney Spears' "Toxic" (which I truly believed represented the height of modern man's achievement) on the airwaves. Never could I have prepared myself for Madonna's "Push Me" in 2005 or Justin's "My Love" in 2006 (for realz this time, the peak of modern man's creative power). And, as I entered senior year of college and believed there was nothing left to love, I was blindsided by Rihanna's "Disturbia," and Lady Gaga's "Just Dance." Now, I know that there's never going to be another "Billie Jean," but I have much more hope in finding the next great pop song than I do in finding the next great American novel.

Sometimes when listening to the radio -- even just the word "radio" is so un-cynical, so bouncy and full of potential -- the new economy ceases to matter. A good pop song makes me feel like the world is alllllllrighhhhhhht (meant to be said like Lou Reed in the VU's "Rock 'n' Roll" -- a song that, in fact, is about little five-year-old Jenny who "turned on a New York station and couldn't believe what she heard at all." Her life is "saved by rock and roll"). Pop music blows my mind because I don't have to do anything in order to receive it. Although their heyday seems to have ended, there was a time when I used to sleep better just knowing the Neptunes were out there, keeping the pop industry on lock. Someone will always be coming up with the illest hooks, with or without my knowledge -- if a tree falls in a forest, somewhere, someone is writing a sick pop song.

Although I have always felt appreciation for the forever young, continually renewable resource that is pop music, my love for it has deepened since college. The "academy" says that everything has been done before, and even when you try to revamp shopworn ideas, you're not going to get anywhere Freud, Marx, or your professor didn't already go, so don't even try. But pop music is much more optimistic -- it's all been done before, but it will always be just as good, if not better. Even when the same ideas have been used over and over, there are no diminishing returns (well, except maybe for Auto-Tune, which is beginning to corrode the synapses in my brain).

My current raison d'être? Jesse McCartney's "How Do You Sleep." My serotonin levels go through the roof when, scanning the FM, my fingers find this song. How do I sleep? So much better knowing that this song is in the world.

In the new economy, we surf channels, not waves

2009-05-28T16:00:00.002-07:00

CH: Where's the clicker?
RH: Oh, I don't keep it near the television anymore. Because when someone steals the television and the DVD player I don't want them to get the remote, too.
CH: So you're really stickin' it to the thieves, huh? Like, "You may have my television, you jerks, but you're gonna have to get up off the couch every time you want to change the channel!"
RH: Yeah, yeah. That's right!

High interest rates!

2009-05-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

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Thanks to D$, I've now read up on the rising popularity of the pull-out method in the new economy.

The article he shared with me states that:

During a recession, it's no small thing that withdrawal is free.

Of course, I love the idea of analyzing birth control -- and all things -- in the sickly light of the new economy. But this still doesn't financially check out, you know? Yes, "withdrawal" may be cheaper than condoms, but is it cheaper than an STD? Or a baby?

In the new economy, pulling out during sex is much more risky than pulling out of the stock market. Next time you make a withdrawal, you might find yourself bankrupt!

Now I know why Bob's pants were square

2009-05-27T11:00:00.008-07:00

Talk about nineties surrealism.

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On the topic of teen pregnancy and the new economy, let's talk about birth control. More specifically, let's talk about the sponge. Yeah, that's right.

MCOB: Did you see the article about the sponge?
CH: The sponge? Like birth control?
MCOB: Elaine's sponge.
CH: Elaine's sponge?
MCOB: Elaine's sponge.
CH: Why is it called Elaine's sponge?
MCOB: They talked about it in the Times yesterday -- about the Seinfeld episode with Elaine and the sponge.
CH: Oh, was everyone, like, making fun of her for using a sponge?
MCOB: No, they stopped making them, and she was calling around everywhere trying to get them.

Well, that exchange pretty much (but not quite) tells you all you need to know about "Elaine's sponge." However, why not elaborate?

The "Today Sponge" is a spermicide-coated polyurethane barrier placed in the vagina to inhibit sperm. Wyeth manufactured the product between 1983 and 1994 -- pulling from shelves in 1995 due to cost and manufacturing problems. The product was briefly revived between 2005 and 2007, and then yanked from shelves again due to poor sales. Now, this very weekend past, the Today Sponge was reintroduced to stores!

Elaine's problem is that she -- like, apparently, many women -- loves the sponge. When she finds out it has been discontinued, she scours the city for it, eventually hoarding and selectively using what Sponges she can find. Describes the Times, Elaine:

starts rating prospective sexual partners by how “spongeworthy” they are. The show ends with her rejecting the overtures one morning of a man with whom she has had sex the night before; getting out of bed, she tells him, “I wish I could help you, but I can’t afford two of ’em.”

The Seinfeld episode supposedly helped shift the paradigm we use to think about birth control options. Now, birth control is not a medical decision but a "lifestyle choice," (think about the commercials for Yaz, or better yet, for Seasonale -- a busy, independent woman can't be bothered with twelve periods a year!).

Even though the Sponge is back, in the new economy, a busy, independent lady's lifestyle choice might not enable her to "afford two of 'em." They're used just once, and a box of three costs $14.99 -- that's, like, $5 per toss in the hay! Additionally, the Today Sponge does not protect against STDs and also has a 10% failure rate. I'm all for semi-gross, hands-on, female-friendly alternatives to birth control pills, but, like, I'm not so convinced on this one.

And if the chicks can't afford it, it's pretty doomed. It's hard to imagine a dude keeping a spare Sponge in his wallet, you know? He'd probably much rather have the fiver in there. So would I. I could spend it on a pint of Ben & Jerry's.

Girl meets job market

2009-05-27T07:00:00.003-07:00

Deep; like a canyon.

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In the new economy, all TV will be "reality." Duh. This trend has been accelerating for a while -- why pay money for writers, costumes, etc. when you can just roll tape on people just living their own cuckoo bananas lives?

A further degradation of television -- for the network that can't even afford the film to document the "reality" of others -- is to digest the reality television gossip of the past week. The E! network has been doing this for a long time with "The Soup," and many stations have their own version (VH1 and "Best Week Ever," and so on). So that's whatever. Now the Style Network is re-digesting its very own pop culture recap, "The Dish" and the host is...Topanga Lawrence!

I would have nothing but bile to spew at this offering were it not for Topanga (Danielle Fishel). Aside from being a Totally Rad Smart Chick for seven years on Boy Meets World, Topanga/Danielle also wrote a "book" in 1999 (Girl Gets Real) that deals with "body images" and "being happy with the way you are." She's totally adorable and has a Real Girl Bod (though minus five points for attaining it through Nutrisystems, for which she was a spokeswoman). She also was a special correspondent for the Tyra show for a little while. She didn't really give Totally Rad Smart Chicks much hope when the dude she was dating (Lance Bass) turned out to be gay, but that's fine.

She's still great, and I am so glad she has a job.

Book nine: Reborn

2009-05-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

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For my graduation, Clairest sent me the first volume (of three) of Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks, edited by her son David Rieff. This first volume covers her private musings from age 14 to 30 -- probably the most drastic period of transition in a woman's life. Homegirl goes off to Berkeley when she is barely sixteen, and over the next decade and a half has many lovers, marries and has a child, teaches at several schools, lives in Paris and New York, and also manages to see an average of eight movies a week (and that is barely an exaggeration). The journals are sometimes just pages and pages of books to read, lists of phrases or words, or daily agendas. Other times the pages are filled with deep, critical reflections on her own character and aspirations, her regrets and mistakes. It's fascinating, obviously.

1948, age 15:

...And what is it to be young in years and suddenly wakened to the anguish, the urgency of life?...It is humiliation with every slip-of-the-tongue, sleepless nights spent rehearsing tomorrow's conversation, and torturing oneself for yesterday's...a bowed head held between one's hands...it is "my god, my god"...(in lower case, of course, because there is no god).

1961, age 28:

Hating to be criticized is an inevitable response for one who does not feel he has responsibility for his own acts. Such a person views all his acts as coercions; they don't emanate from himself. Of course, then, all criticism is unfair, unjust.

The first female diary I ever read was Anne Frank's, and I have to say, every diary I have read since has pretty much been the same. This is both reassuring and disconcerting, but in the end the "reassuring" tally is higher. Every smart lady seems worried about the same things: how annoying she thinks other people perceive her to be, how annoying other people are, how much she hates herself, how brilliant she thinks she is. And sex. Whether she thinks about sex too much, not enough, is doing it wrong, and whether her overactive intellect detracts from her romantic life (and yeah, it usually does).

Susan Sontag, you sphinx! (Minx). It's good to read this stuff because it helps me to realize that no chick worth her salt has it figured out at this (that) age. Cannot wait to read the next two vols. Thanks, Cloire.

On Trop of the world

2009-05-26T07:00:00.004-07:00

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In the continuing saga of Tropicana orange juice and the brand's misguided packaging decisions, it appears that the grand poohbahs of pulp have decided to keep the failed package design and spherical, halved-orange cap for one product, and one product only:

Trop50.

Trop50 is perhaps the most disgusting "juice beverage" you can imagine (really, it's more of an "orange drink"). Yeah, sure, it has 50% fewer calories and sugar and still delivers 100% of your daily vitamin C. But it still tastes like one of those scented Magic Markers and looks like generic cola. This ish is so crazy-bad that I momentarily thought about changing my favorite phrase to "cuckoo oranges," but I decided that for consistency's sake, I'd stick to the bananas.

The only reason I tasted it is because my parents, who love the halved-orange cap (even though it's harder to turn) have been saving and reusing the two halved-orange caps they saved from the previous design. They mistakenly bought Trop50 in an effort to collect more caps. Yeah. I know; maybe our family deserved its punishment.

Book eight: The Emperor's Children

2009-05-25T07:00:00.001-07:00

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Claire Messud's The Emperor's Club was -- like I'm beginning to think all books are -- better the second time around. After reading a book the first time, we're left mostly with a vague recollection of plot and only a slight impression of the dominant mood. Social psychologists say that it's not the duration of the pain that we remember, or the intensity of the pain, either -- it's the intensity and the duration of the last bit of pain before the very end that forms our overall impression of the event. So it might be because of the last few chapters -- an unoriginal (by now) retelling of the fall of the Twin Towers -- that I remembered this book as unoriginal in the whole. (That's not to say that "post-9/11 fiction" is unoriginal, but rather that there have already been a few excellent examples, and we should leave it there).

On the second read, though, it was crisp, bouncy, and witty. The New York Times called it a "masterly comedy of manners." I've never been sure what defines comedies of manners, but I know that I like them (I would also put On Beauty, "Seinfeld," and the life of David Sedaris in this category).

The plot probably appeals to my narcissistic tendencies, too, being as it is about three smart Brown graduates living in New York City who are trying to be as glamorous as they always believed they would be (and, two out of three have definitely been foiled by the old-new economy). "In their way," says the Times, "these three embody the different methods by which American privilege is accrued and idly sustained." Hitting quite close to home, the most grounded of the three is constantly critical/envious of her best friend's family apartment on West 81st Street. Hmm.

It's a quick read (both times it took about four days) and it's smart. But somehow it also feels too trivial to really matter as a "great" novel. Either way, I recommend it.

Fake baked Alaska

2009-05-24T16:00:00.005-07:00

Bristol Palin wasn't able to go to her senior prom this spring because she just couldn't justify the cost:

I don't have that kind of time. And the dress is, like, $400, and the shoes, hair, makeup, it's way too expensive.

That's true. Four hundred dollars is a lot of money when you're raising a baby on your own -- being a mom is a totally new economy in and of itself. Sometimes I get anxious about buying pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream because I think, "That $4.75 may be the difference between a co-pay for my future daughter's braces and my child having scraggly British teeth." When that happens, I'll usually buy White Rose or Turkey Hill. So, I both sympathize with and commend Bristol for cutting costs.

However, you know what is affordable when you're a teenage mom? Tanning! In the most recent People magazine, Bristol says that while her father babysits for her, she hits the tanning salon:

My dad lets me go tanning quite a bit. That's the one thing I can do. And I try to exercise.

Is it more affordable to get skin cancer than to go to the prom? I'm not sure about that one, Miss Teen Mom Alaska. I know that I shouldn't be throwing stones here (I did go to Hollywood several times this spring and I ain't talkin' about the one in California), but like, seriously?

Total ballers

2009-05-24T11:00:00.003-07:00

Alfonso Soriano: like, the. Perfect. Guy.

We don't even know who he plays for anymore. Don' matta.

He's still a stand-up guy, and he totally subverts baseball

convention by tipping the scales at, like, a buck ten.

In the new economy, you might want to consider joining a ball club. Those boys make bank.

I don't know why they call it a "ball club;" it always seemed pretty pretentious to me. Baseball teams are multibillion dollar media conglomerates. They are not "clubs."

But maybe that's precisely what they are -- in which case, it's even more annoying. In all other sports, you have teams. Teams are groups that are put together to maximize profit and balance out abilities. They are often economy-sensitive -- they need to acknowledge the limitations of the current climate. Obama put together a team. He did not put together a club. Who had a club? You're damn right -- number 43. (But actually, let's call a spade a spade -- no one was clubbier than Jack F. K.).

Clubs are exclusive, and have no grounding in (or reliance on) reality. They are often the exact opposite of meritocracies. Club members support each other not whether they are the best and brightest, but merely because they belong to the same in-group. Who cares about the little people? You're in the club.

So maybe this is the perfect apellation for baseball, the only major North American sport with absolutely no salary cap and absolutely no salary floor (how in keeping with American capitalistic exploitation)! Just like in the American finiancial sector, in baseball, out of shape, tobacco-chewing dudes wearing pinstripes get to the top of the heap through outrageous, unlimited salary increases.

We call baseball the Great American Passtime only because it dovetails so nicely with the real great American passtime: cheatin' people outta their hard-earned billz!

Side anecdote: Last night RH and I were playing around on Sporcle. If you haven't yet discovered this black hole of the internet, proceed with caution. We were trying to guess the names of all the baseball players who had signed contracts worth $100 million or more (there are 18 of them, although A-Rod has signed two, making it 19 contracts on the list). To RH's delight, Ken Griffey Jr. signed a $116 million contract in 2000:

RH: Oh good! You know, I was so worried about him! I was really worried that he wasn't really making that much money.
CH: Yeah, I don't think you need to worry about him so much, Dad. He seems to have it under control.
RH: Now I feel much better.

To both our delights, Alfonso Soriano (who RH named "like the, perfect, guy" in 2004) signed a $136 million contract in 2007. Guess we don't need to send off that box of nonperishable items we packed up for him, after all.

Don't look no farther

2009-05-24T10:30:00.002-07:00

Have you missed the new economy? I have, too. I'm back now.

Many happy returns, etc.

2009-05-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

Hiding behind hands.

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Back in highschool I got Moso hooked on the "365 Day Game." It's not really a game -- more like a soul-sucking black hole of memory and spirit. Basically, it just requires you to remember things that happened 365 days ago (or, 365x days ago, since it can be the same date from any year), and then get nostalgic about them. As you may have noticed, I'm good with dates.

Not that this is really part of the 365 Day Game, but I've never been able to get it out of my head that today is both Janet Jackson and Krist Noveselic's birthday. She's 43, and he is now 44.

I'd gladly give up my motherboard for my mother

2009-05-15T15:30:00.000-07:00

So, the best and brightest of Silicon Valley were unable to save a single thing from my computer. This obviously means that they need more elementary school teachers out there to teach them basic reading, writing, and math skills. Thus, I've decided to move to the Bay to be an elementary school teacher so that no young woman ever has to lose her hard drive ever again.

However, I was able to get back the 2004 Accenture ad which, as luck would have it, I emailed to my mother all those many years ago. So, here it is!

If I've ever emailed you an Accenture ad or similar inspiring piece of electronic data, please hook me up. These trifles will have to form the bedrock of my new life.

Writing your name in water

2009-05-14T15:00:00.002-07:00

Accenture had a great ad campaign back in 2003-2004 -- all based around the phrase, "I am your idea." I don't even know what Accenture does, but it made me partial to them. My favorite was the print ad with a picture of a beach, waves coming in, with the following written in the sand:

I AM YOUR IDEA. ONE DAY YOU'LL LOOK FOR ME AND I'LL BE GONE.

So, before it all goes, put those ideas down -- paper, film, canvas, checkbook, plate, sidewalk, letter to a friend, whatever. (I had a screen grab of this advertisement that had been on my hard drive since 2004 but, hey, one day you look for it, and it's gone -- you have to use what you got when you got it).

Smells like teen spirit, all over again

2009-05-13T06:00:00.003-07:00

By and large, my music tastes were fixed by May 13, 1999 -- ten years ago today. This is when Rolling Stone put out the "Essential Recordings of the '90s" issue. I've been going off of that list ever since, pretty much.

In my house, we save magazines as if they were wedding albums. RH has three thousand-pound steel cabinets in the attic (how'd you even get them up there, Dad?) that contain every Life magazine from 1936 to 1972 -- that's over 1,500 issues. Okay, not every issue. There are still some issues that "we" hunt for on eBay -- usually they feature Joe DiMaggio or the Beatles (between 1936 and 1972, every woman was either hog-wild for the Yankee Clipper or the Fab Four, and so these issues of Life magazine are more elusive than those that feature, say, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor). Since RH is long gone to the sickness that is lit-hoarding (53 different editions of Catcher in the Rye, anyone?), MCO'B and I have tried to pare our own collections down. But with each purge (New Yorkers, Vogues, Architectural Digests, Vanity Fairs), I keep about five magazines: the ones that have Kurt Cobain on the cover, anything from 1999, and the "Essential Recordings of the '90s" Rolling Stone (which meets both of the aforementioned criteria, incidentally). Dog-eared and disintegrating, its relevance to me continues to this day.

Not only have I memorized the list, but I've also memorized the 100-word descriptions of each album, and I have special affinities for whatever songs were high-lighted in them. These mini-reviews have formed my tastes and precluded my judgments for the past decade of my record-buying -- or mp3 stealing -- life.

In my mind, "Pavement channeled the spirit of Buddy Holly through one of Lou Reed's blown amps, bringing miles of style to an indie-rock scene starved for a little romance." "In the middle of the grunge hangover of '95, Garbage's debut seemed all wrong," but it felt so right. And, as for Belle & Sebastian, "not since Nick Drake had so quiet a band spoken so loudly." Snoop Dogg "rolled in from the West to pick America's pockets, and his laid-back drawl was such a hilarious trick that he got away clean." The Bends proved that Radiohead wasn't a one-trick wonder, and "U2 would have sold crack to nuns to make this record." Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker has a voice that is "a bloody wail that goes soft at the center, a voice that feels like flesh pressing against you." My Bloody Valentine burned out after their feedback-cloaked masterpiece, but, "If they never return, Loveless was enough," and on Siamese Dream, "Billy Corgan took the idea of quality control to its obsessive conclusion."

Although I was raised listening to music from every era, in my heart of hearts, I've become convinced that this list is all I'll ever really need. It's indulgent, I know, but one's heart of hearts usually is.

"Nineties" and "nostalgia" are two words that sound very compatible to me. We all have our formative years.

I could be earning interest on that quarter if I kept it in the bank.

2009-05-12T11:30:00.002-07:00

Overheard at the gym:

A: Man, they're charging twenty-five cents for these lockers! You can't do that in the middle of a recession!
B: You get the quarter back when you return the key.
A: Oh. Still dumb, though.

If you really want to hear about it...

2009-05-12T06:30:00.004-07:00

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...the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like , and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Catcher in the Rye has been one of the most banned books since the beginning of time, whatever that means. But when I was in middle school, there was another boy, equally lonely, in town. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky came out in very early 1999 -- it was the first and only book that I've ever seen a commercial for (it was MTV's first foray in the publishing world). If you wore rubber bracelets in middle school, you probably read it at some point. The book is a series of letters written by a boy named Charlie to an unnamed friend. He is a sensitive kid -- a wallflower -- and he's experiencing the ache and bliss of all those firsts: kisses, beers, joints, parties, Rocky Horror Shows, football games, depressions. Perks is what we could now only call "emo," but it seemed ahead of the curve at the time for a YA novel, and deeply embarrassing in its honesty (and thus extremely true to its source material). Catcher in the Rye it isn't, but it needn't be.

The excerpt that perhaps pares the book down to its essence:

There is a feeling I had Friday night after the football game that I don't know if I will ever be able to describe except to say that is is warm. Sam and Patrick drove me to a party that night, and I sat in the middle of Sam's pickup truck. Sam loves her pickup truck because I think it reminds her of her dad. The feeling I had happened when Sam told Patrick to find a station on the radio. And he kept getting commercials. And commercials. And a really bad song about love that had the word "baby" in it. And then more commercials. And finally he found this really amazing song about this boy, and we all got quiet.

Sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. Patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. And I just sat between them. After the song finished, I said something.

"I feel infinite."

And Sam and Patrick looked at me like I said the greatest thing they ever heard. Because the song was so great and because we all really paid attention to it. Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way. I have since bought the record, and I would tell you what it was, but truthfully, it's not the same unless you're driving to your first real party, and you're sitting in the middle seat of a pickup with two nice people when it starts to rain.

What is the "infinite" song? In the book, Charlie is pretty enamored by the Smiths, so that's a lead. And he supplies a mixed tape track-listing that includes "Landslide," "Blackbird," "A Whiter Shade of Pale," and "Vapour Trail" by Ride (a good possibility for the infinite song). If they had ever made Perks into a movie, it definitely would have fit in with all those early-aught films where the soundtrack sold better than the tickets.

Stephen Chbosky, beloved emo pied piper, never wrote another book. Bizarre of bizarros, he wrote a rejected screenplay for Mysteries of Pittsburgh in 2000 and wrote the actual screenplay for Rent (which actually seems wholly consistent, in terms of middle school angst appeal).

In my mind, the "infinite song" was always "1979" by the Smashing Pumpkins. The book takes place in the school year 1991-1992, so that can't be the case, but still, that's the one I think of. No apologies ever need be made, I know you better than you fake it, etc. It's because the new-wave shimmer of the whole song is the sweetest kind of pain, and because I remember being nine and losing the song in between the fuzzy bands of other radio stations and then, miracle of miracles...finding it again. Before computers erased the radiostar, sitting by the boombox, cassette tape at the ready, waiting for your favorite song to come on -- and then capturing it! That felt pretty infinite, right there.

W(h)acked on the Scooby Snacks

2009-05-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

Were E.B. White still alive, surely he would include this in Elements of Style. It is not grammatically correct to say someone or something is "whack." Wack is the adjective, and whack is the verb.

Wack (adj.) -- very bad, extreme, far-out. E.g. "That ish is wack!"
Whack (v.) -- a smart, resounding blow. "Whack and unwrap" (the phrase printed on chocolate oranges).

Clocks slay time

2009-05-11T09:30:00.001-07:00

Final exam question from English 101: Faulkner, with Thadious Davis, December 2005:

What advice would you offer to someone who would like to read Faulkner but feels intimidated and has no idea where to begin?

Do you remember answering this one, PR?

For love or money

2009-05-11T06:30:00.000-07:00

I was told that if nothing is recoverable, I
can use my hard drive to build one of these.

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My hard drive is en route to DriveSavers in -- where else -- Marin County! If it can be saved, the Bay can save it.

DS: So what are your most important files?
CH: Any Word documents and any pictures.
DS: Can you be more specific about what files we're looking for? What's your personal folder called?
CH: Well, everything is divided by year, and then in every year, divided by subject. But then every year there is a folder called "Watergate." That's my personal stuff.
DS: So we're trying to save the Watergate files.
CH: Yes, we're trying to save the Watergate files. I don't want them destroyed.
DS: So the Watergate files are the most crucial.
CH: Yes, that's right.

Certo, certo, bella

2009-05-10T12:00:00.002-07:00

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From my social psychology textbook:

All stereotypes are grounded in fact. Consider the old joke that heaven is a place where you have an American house, a German car, French food, British police, and Italian lover, and everything is run by the Swiss. Hell, on the other hand, is a place where you have a Japanese house, a French car, British food, German police, a Swiss lover, and everything is run by the Italians.

In the New Maconomy

2009-05-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

In the new economy, back up your em-effing files.

Yours truly may be learning this the hard way. Freshman year, my laptop fell off my bunk bed and landed, open like a book, eight feet down on the floor below. As the Apple dude said to me, "You know what matzoh brie is? This looks like matzoh brie." But miraculously, the "intellectual" property of my laptop survived. I was able to transfer it to a new computer, and the Matzoh Mac was shunted to the side (along with one gee in billz).

This time, I was not so lucky. My new economy Mac (with an old-economy figure: as one of JH's pledges said to her a few years ago, "OMG, your Mac is so fat!") fell neatly onto the kitchen floor yesterday, landing flat on its back -- but cleanly, like Kerri Strug on her bum ankle. It looks just fine, but inside it is a-hurtin'. We went to Apple, who sent us to the voodoo doctor out in Lake Woebegone. They've had it all day, but so far my hard drive remains deaf, dumb, and blind. The Helen Keller of hard drives, with nary an Annie Sullivan in sight. That would mean seven years worth of writing (unpublished and genius, all of it) would be lost, as well as, among other sundry things, a love letter I wrote to John Kerry and never sent, drafts of a Supreme Court musical, the only extant photograph of me with acrylic nails, and "One Night in Paris" (that, at least, is replaceable).

In Wonder Boys, Grady Tripp eventually loses all 2,000 pages of his disaster/novel when fighting a bald giant named Booger and an ex-con welterweight boxer named Vernon Hardapple with a boa constrictor named Grossman. The syntax of that was confusing, I know -- it's not that Grady Tripp fights Vernon Hardapple, and Vernon Hardapple owns a boa. No, no, Grady Tripp fights Vernon Hardapple with the boa. And the boa is dead. All the while, the two thousand pages of his novel are drifting out of the backseat of his car (bear with me here) and he is left with exactly seven. Supposedly, this is sort of a liberating experience.

However, I am failing to find similar humor in my own situation. Failing because, really, there is no humor. This might be the end of ITNE, my friends.

It's always rainy in Philadelphia

2009-05-07T14:00:00.000-07:00

The smarties over at Tiny Gems are getting phillysophical about the weather. I've got nothing to contribute but 'ditto,' and memories from another senior spring, equally draining in its weathery wiles.

My senior spring of highschool -- which would be full, we were promised, of Slip 'N' Slide out on the Great Lawn -- was nothing but one New England spring monsoon after another. Day after day -- weekend after weekend -- it just rained and rained.

It rained so much that they started having ice cream not just on Wednesdays, but on Saturdays, too -- so that, I suspected, we would not kill ourselves at the prospect of another Saturday indoors, watching the clouds roll by.

It rained so much that one of the deans wrote an email to the entire senior class saying, basically, "Please don't kill yourself, though it is totally understandable that you want to and hey, I would, too, if I were you, but please refrain."

It rained so much that I wrote an email to my English teacher comparing 2005 Massachusetts to 1972 Vietnam. We had read Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato and in it, the soldiers' skin gets so puckery and dead with water that one of them takes his sabre (?) and just sloughs off the entire inside of his forearm as if it were butter. It eventually gets infected and I think he dies. Such was the mood those days of senior spring.

I was planning on retrieving the email and posting it in full (this English teacher was a semi-psychotic, compulsive ultra-marathon runner who was vaguely scared of people and strangely chauvinist in his literary tastes, and his response was priceless), but then I realized that this email, along with the entire rest of my life, is captured inside the autistic hard drive of my late computer.

In the new economy, who can afford a New Yorker subscription?

2009-05-07T07:30:00.001-07:00

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"If we're going to be friends with benefits, I want health and dental."

New word of the day: Methfacestrangefemale

2009-05-06T13:30:00.005-07:00

CH: OMG, the Black Eyed Peas are performing on the Ellen show right now and Fergie is like an SNL caricature of herself. She is wearing these strange appendages to the fingers of her right hand that make them all about 6 inches longer. What is wrong with her? Oh. And she is wearing goggles on her head. What happened to the 1950s? Y2K has produced some crazy ish.

LS: I saw Fergie on the Ellen show while I was ellipticalling, except I was like, "Is that Fergie? I mean, I know she's a former methfacestrangefemale, but, like, what is she doing?" Then I sweat out my confusion.

That's show business, baby!

2009-05-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

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CH shared this with me a little while back, saying something like, "This is the best thing in life." (Sorry if that's a misquote). It is Ronald Reagan's letter to Michael Jackson when Jacko was injured (?) in 1984.

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Show business people!

And you know what? Thurgood Marshall invented that dishwasher!

2009-05-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

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In an effort to let the whole presidents thing rest, I've transferred my energies to my (close) second-favorite federal branch. In early April, Justice Clarence Thomas (inexplicably, uncharacteristically) spoke from a "fancy hot-pink lectern" to a group of highschool-aged essay contest winners. Thomas hasn't asked a question from the bench since December 2006, so this was a big (weird) deal. The Times reported on it. Plenty of people were abuzz when this article first came out, but for those of you who missed it, some excerpts are below. Thanks to Moso for hooking me up.

Today there is much focus on our rights. Indeed, I think there is a proliferation of rights.

I have on many occasions or a number of occasions when things were becoming particularly routine gone down to my basement to watch 'Saving Private Ryan.'

I have to admit that I’m one of those people that still thinks the dishwasher is a miracle. What a device! And I have to admit that because I think that way, I like to load it. I like to look in and see how the dishes were magically cleaned.

Books six and seven

2009-05-05T16:30:00.014-07:00

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) was good in that hysterical realism, (sort of magical realism, too), White Teeth sort of way. It has ample references both to pop culture and to Dominican and American history. Not insanely awesome, but touching and not too kooky-cute. Definitely a book you will keep reading nonstop until it is finished.

Really, in my mind, Michael Chabon can do no wrong. Or rather, I'm in it for the long haul with Michael Chabon, and so even if he does wrong, I'm willing to accept it as just part of our deal (unlike Rick Moody, who I left on the side of the road when he wrote that autobio about wearing a black lace veil and taking Quaaludes for, like, five years of his life).

For anyone who has tried and failed at the Yiddish Policemen's Union, (or for those certain Wonder Boys who, perhaps wisely, never even bothered and found it was not necessary to read it in order to tell Michael Chabon, to his face, that it was a great book) I totally get where you're coming from. (However, if you try again, or maybe two more times, I promise you it is readable and not that bad). Anyway, Wonder Boys is completely a joy to read, and is more in the Mysteries of Pittsburgh young-people-and-crazy-antics-and-bisexual-rogues genre than the Kavalier and Clay heavily-researched-and-heavily-Jewish genre (not that I'm knockin' K&C; it's my second-fav book).

It's quick and pretty, and on the second reading, I have found it even more hilarious and charming. Main character Grady Tripp wishes he had writer's block -- he has found himself seven years and 2,000 pages into writing an interminable novel and he isn't even halfway done (one of the characters tells him his writing is beautiful but maybe he didn't need to include all that stuff about the "geneaologies of the horses"). It strikes me as endlessly amusing that poor Michael Chabon wrote this book on the sly while he, himself, was thousands of pages into a promised novel that was going nowhere. Way to pull yourself up by your bootstraps! Recommended, definitely.

Best leader of the free world ever?

2009-05-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

From David Leonhardt's New York Times interview with POTUS Obama:

At the end of our conversation, when I asked him if he was reading anything good, he said he had become sick enough of briefing books to begin reading a novel in the evenings — “Netherland,” by Joseph O'Neill.

National treasures

2009-05-05T14:00:00.004-07:00

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It is my mother who told me of the Vatican loaning the Pieta to New York's World's Fair in 1964. Then, naturally, it is my mother who told me of then-French Minister of Culture Andre Malraux loaning the Mona Lisa to the Kennedys in 1962. It so great to have an art historian for a mother! Even better is that she is a curator (getting to go behind-the-scenes of museums is like The Mixed of Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler plus The Da Vinci Code with a light dusting of "Gossip Girl").

In 1962, Jackie Kennedy and André Malraux, mutually enchanted and bewitched by the other's presence, met in Paris and later, in Washington. It is while walking M. Malroux through the National Gallery that Mrs. Kennedy had the utter audacity (in my mind) to say to Malraux how wonderful it would be if the Mona Lisa could be brought to the United States. Well, Malraux couldn't see why that couldn't be possible. That night, at a lavish dinner planned specially in his honor, he leaned over to his charming hostess and whispered in her ear, "Je vais envoyer la Joconde."

Neither the Louvre (nor, it turns out, the National Gallery) was pleased. Anyone could agree that travel would only be traumatic for such an old, fragile masterpiece as the Mona. Forget about the first four hundred years of her life. In the past half-century alone she had been stolen and hidden in a cupboard (1911, both Apollinaire and Picasso were questioned), transported to Toulouse in the back of a wine dealer's truck (1914, during WWI), hidden away during WWII (1940) and smacked with a crazy man's rocket rock (1956). The Mona Lisa had more dignity than this; she did not need to travel thousands of miles in "deep winter" just so that she could bow down before a lesser version of herself!

But Malraux was determined to follow through, and the Louvre began tarrying on the puzzle of how to transport Senorita Lisa with as little disturbance as possible. She needed, for instance, to be packed in such a way as to be easily carried by two men, but impossible to be carried by one. She had to be packed in an unsinkable container, should the ship she was on go under and she be thrown overboard.

On December 14, 1962, Mona boarded her ship to the New World, the S.S. France. After observing the strange, suspicious activity going on, passengers (who had not been told of their shipmate), began to fear that they were travelling with a nuclear bomb. To assuage their fears, the security detail travelling with the Mona was forced to reveal the identity of their charge. Mona Lisa-themed drinking games, galas, and dining menus followed. And on December 19, Mona arrived in New York at Pier 88.

On January 8, 1963, the Kennedys presided over the grand unveiling of their guest:

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This was an era in American diplomatic relations that is not likely to be repeated. For some reason, the Kennedys were seen as so glamorous that other countries just wanted to give them things. In 1965, Egypt gave the United States (and, also, specifically Jackie) the Temple of Dendur (now spectacularly in residence at the Met) to say thank you for our country's assistance in protecting other Egyptian monuments from the disruptive construction of the Aswan High Dam. Would this kind of thing happen in the new millennium (let alone in the new economy)?

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(This post was greatly informed by Margaret Leslie Davis's article for Vanity Fair).

The Real Supremes

2009-05-03T09:00:00.001-07:00

It's very exciting to have the Supremes in the news. Unless you were following the news closely during the 41 administration, Souter is one of the less easily-recallable SCOTUS justice names. However, he's a pretty fascinating character, and "pulling a Souter" is great addition to the cultural lexicon. Sophomore year I took a class that went down to DC to sit in on some oral arguments and these were my observations. It was a life-changing academic experience because it led me to discover my chosen profession. (Through this class I also met one of my favorite people in the world, RFC. In our mock trial she played Justice Kennedy and I played Justice Thomas and it was love at first sight). N.B. that this was a few years ago, so Justice Stevens is now eighty-nine years old.

A few observations on the justices, going from left to right along the bench:

Justice Stephen Breyer: Sounds like Mr. Rogers, and very obviously hates sitting on the end of the bench, since he flattens his body onto the table in the direction of the other justices.

Justice Clarence Thomas: Did not say a single word during two entire hours of argument. Instead, he rubbed his face for about 15 minutes at a time, completely obscuring his features. I’m sorry, but I don't understand why this man is on the bench. At least Scalia can form sentences.

Justice Anthony Kennedy: Looks like he will eat you. Stays relatively quiet.

Justice John Paul Stevens: Is 86, wears a bowtie and is adorable.

Chief Justice John Roberts: The youngest justice. Who cares if he hates abortion rights–he’s sexy! However, You’d think that such a virile man would long ago have rethought that position.

Justice Antonin Scalia: A wily, wily man, with a sense of humor to boot. But I hear that Satan is a pretty funny guy, too.

Justice David Souter: Has an extremely tiny head, and asked such ridiculous hypothetical questions that I thought the lawyer for the plaintiff in the second case might faint.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A small -- but fabulously feminist -- troll. She also likes to interrupt a lot. Girl power!

Justice Samuel Alito: Baby “Scalito,” appeared pretty tired yesterday, and seemed to be sleeping with his eyes open.

The Passed and the President: Presidential Obituaries

2009-05-02T18:35:00.003-07:00

7:34 PM, Friday, May 1, 2009: About to go drop off my thesis.
(Only three days, three hours, and thirty-four minutes late).

First sentence: American patriots used to gather around his porch to hear Ulysses S. Grant cough.

Thank you to CH, CT, JH, KM, MS, and MCO'B for helping me edit in the final days. You did not need to be so generous, patient, and thoughtful, but I am glad you were, because it made all the difference.

I will try not to blog about presidents for awhile.

Letterpress deaths

2009-05-01T14:00:00.002-07:00

Jimmy Carter's political death:

July 15, 1979

Lyndon Johnson's political death:

March 31, 1968

This blew my mind when I was in third grade

2009-04-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

Beatles: ...now here's another clue for you a-a-all, the Walrus was Pau-au-aul...
CH: Are you allowed to do that in a song?
RH: Do what?
CH: Say your own name?
RH: Sure.

Lookout kid, it's something you did

2009-04-30T14:00:00.006-07:00

Every year, the history honors students get to (have to) present their theses in 60 seconds. The presentations take place in College Hall 200 after the last big faculty meeting of the year, so all those profs who care not a whit about undergrads will still show up for some free food (in the new economy, academedicians still gotta eat). You have to stand at a podium on a raised dais in front of a microphone. The only way they could make it better (worse) is with a Jumbotron.

So, snore, the European section went first. How fast can you mumble your abstract? Can you fit 500 words into one minute? Sure, if you want to move your peers to tears. It was a slow quarter of an hour.

Then, the American (slash "World") history students were up to bat. We knocked those beard-scratchers dead with limericks about Newt Gingrich, ballads of governmental agency acronyms, witty asides and confident throwaways. My fav-int-pers-rel Dubs got up, said his name with all the energy of someone picking up his dry-cleaning, and then disappeared below the podium. A disappearing act -- brilliant! But then he emerged with speakers and a stack of cue cards under his arm. What? Were they?

Oh no, he didn't. But he did. And the text was about a Harlem gangster in the 1920s who got kidnapped.

Dubs spoke not at all, so I felt I had to compensate by speaking for both of us. My "presidents at the auction" script is below. It was very, very fast. This actually happened.

I’ve got a HISS in the house, wouldja give me Checkers?
I’ve got a HISS in the house, wouldja give me Checkers?
Get a Checkers, get a Checkers, got a Checkers
Gimme China, gimme China, got a China, gimme more
I’ve gotta Gate, Watergate, gimme Gate, Watergate
Seven-two, gotta seven-two, seven-three, seven-three, gotta seven-three, seventy-three, seventy-four
Not a crook, not a crook, did I hear a crook, gimme China gimme China SOLD!

I’ve got a pig in the bay, can I get a
Camelot, Camelot, got a lot, not a lot, gimme more, gimme more
Eternal flame, Jackie O, Camelot SOLD!

I’ve got a GREAT So-ci-e-TEE, wouldja give me health care?
I’ve got a GREAT So-ci-e-TEE, wouldja give me health care?
Medicaid, Medicare, Medicare, got a care, not a care, can I get a vote?
Get a vote get a vote, want a vote, got a vote
Voting rights, voting rights, got a right, got a right
Vietnam, Vietnam, hommany kids, hommany kids ya kill today?
Vietnam, can’t go wrong, shall not seek, wouldja gimme more SOLD!

Gipper, Gipper, can I get a Gipper?
Got a Gipper, gotta a Gipper,
Cold war, gimme more,
Reaganomics, histrionics, Wall Street, Teflon Man
Con-TRA, Con-TRA SOLD!

President president, got a president
Whatcha say whatcha say gimme gimme more
Legacy Legacy legacy got a memory
Can I get a legacy SOLD!

Just wanna finish my thesis

2009-04-30T12:00:00.001-07:00

Goodbye to the very most intense month of the year (any year, not just 2009). April is great, but perhaps it is for the best that she is ending. As always, she gets the last laugh. But that's why we love her.

Dead Kennedys? Nah, I'd rather go see the Pardoning Fords or Ronnie and the Commies

2009-04-29T16:00:00.004-07:00

More to come when I get a chance to take pictures of them.

Ronald Reagan's political death:

November 5, 1994 (?)

Gerald Ford's political death:

September 8, 1974

A little bit of writer's Block

2009-04-27T18:00:00.003-07:00

Sometimes when I'm feeling a little low on inspiration, I'll browse through Herblock: A Cartoonist's Life, an autobiography and collection of cartoons by Herbert Block, the resident political cartoonist at The Washington Post from 1946 to 2001 (I know, right?). Other times I'll flip through to make sure I'm on the right track. Never have I felt more energized as when, while writing about Jimmy Carter, I found a Herblock cartoon that corroborated my central thesis. If Herblock agreed, then I couldn't be so far off. Of course, he was able to say in a few strokes what I spent three thousand words circling around -- and what real historians or political commentators dedicate decades trying to describe.

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While it isn't really very original to invoke Herblock when writing a paper, his cartoons are, for good reason, sterling sources to consult. If you like American history or, really, want to learn a ton about it in a very enjoyable manner, grab yourself a Herblock book or check out the Library of Congress' comprehensive online collection.

Herblock's cartoons are just awesome. He was dead on about so much, and always ahead of the curve. Not only did he draw cartoons targetting the tabacco industry as early as 1933, but he was an outspoken critic of American isolationism during the 1930s, when many Americans felt we should leave Europe to its bloody fate. The moment the Reich took power in 1933, he was all over it, and continued to pen drawings that condemned both European fascism and our blind eye to it until we (finally) joined in the war effort.

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He drew every president from Roosevelt to Clinton (he lived to be 91), though his most famous caricatures are of a shifty-eyed Nixon with a five o'clock shadow (years before Nixon "lost" the debate against Kennedy because he wore Lazy Shave "beard stick"). This image of Nixon emerging from a sewer stayed with him his whole political career ("it is easy to fall prey to Herblockism -- the reverse of being starstruck" wrote Gary Wills while following Nixon on his 1968 campaign). Wrote Theodore H. White in his seminal book covering the 1960 election, The Making of the President:

Nixon, an extraordinarily sensitive man, suffered under the constant pounding of Herblock cartoons more than anyone outside his inner circle ever recognized. He would not let theWashington Post-Times Herald be delivered to his home for the entirely understandable reason that his children might see the Herblock cartoons.

But generous Herblock extended an olive branch when Nick Dixon finally took the Oval Office, through a cartoon of an empty barber's chair with a sign above offering "every president a free shave." It's the least he could do...and it's not like he had to hold himself in check for very long.

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Don't worry Mom and Dad, I prepared this post before tonight -- I'm working on my thesis right now!

My scientific days

2009-04-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

We have sat out in the sun painting my scars green – a bike accident, a paper cut, my best friend hit me – with tempera paint to make my body an interstate. As Marie Curie my body would be infested with radium, I would have died of a leukemia far worse, toiling over radioactive samples well into the night, telling time with zinc oxide mirrors and watches, playing with noxious waste materials and not wearing a mask, goggles, or gloves. My fingers would burn. I would have no prints to speak of, or to ink when they dragged me down to the desk for questioning. The fumes of my work would have dispelled every thought from my mind but the atomic masses of man-made elements: the lanthanides and actinides: samarium and plutonium half-lives, half my life spent emitting rays of digestion, particles of my body erupting, sending a clear magnetic route through my molecules. If I was Marie Curie I would not have married, my disfigured body far more attractive to nuclear diseases than young men.

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I would be lost inside a sphere of positive and negative charges switching on and off, I would go bald and the lining of my stomach would come up through my throat, but oh for Hiroshima I would do it and eat only crackers in the meantime. Long sleepless evenings spent over the lab bench, as Marie Curie I would have been much more stoic, I would not have had time for children but only alpha and beta particles – she copped out, she was dedicated to her work but her last words were, “take care of my daughter.” How about the atoms, Marie? Did you forget about me and the toxic waste products? You cared more about sex. You put the periodic table to shame with your eponymous element. This is yet another example of woman’s inadequacy. So if I had been you, Marie, I would have worked harder. You would have opened my body and found a purple coil of displaced neutrons and uranium. Just waiting.

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Pushing those poor electrons by switching the charges over and over until they know not what they are and relent, just go as fast as they can until they crash and spread. As Marie Curie I would have found a safe way to dispose of toxic byproducts or would have at least brought the whole world down with me, my skin erupting in blisters and pins and needles. I would have cut off parts of my body to perform tests on, none of this playing around with rats and monkeys. I would have been ugly but by God I would have been successful. I would have followed the road of Newton; he was asexual, and because he was starved for human touch he dreamed of objects flying towards him, that everything attracts everything else: he discovered gravity. That everything, while falling, will go faster and faster until stopped. Through abstinence he made laws, and maybe he got his pleasures elsewhere, maybe he jacked off to the idea of momentum and acceleration. If I were Newton I would have prayed every day and would have deprived myself of food if ever I thought of impure deeds. I would have demonstrated gravity not with a stupid apple, but by jumping off a building. Now that I come to think of it, Newton was just as much of a disappointment as anyone else, temptation prevented him from truly achieving anything. Couldn’t he have kept his mind out of the gutter? He should have gotten down on his knees and endlessly repeated the definition of velocity so that God might have saved his soul and career, but instead he dreamed of romance and kissing. I would have done it a lot better, I would have shown them what suffering for your work was all about, and I would have been dedicated and they would have said, “she really did something.”

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This morning I sat on the floor of my basement and searched through the New York City phonebook, looking for the addresses of all of my favorite poets. I don’t need to be pulled into backwoods suburban towns famous for one reference in one story, a super drug den or something. I am looking at boys waxing poetical, cursing their mother because their mother made them go crazy, made them hate girls yet not like boys, have an accurate disgust for knitting needles and an interminable dislike for potholders and basically food in general, probably ovens, too, all the symbols of women worldwide. It was scary, we hunched over bowls of rice that we used a microwave to manufacture because the stove was a pariah and had to be avoided at all costs, just like how standing in front of a microwave makes you susceptible to radiation, I said. That’s a myth, he said. Yeah, I know, I said. Exactly, I said. And I basically kept saying things in bigger and bigger words until my syllable count for the evening had been met, and then I retired to my bedroom to look out the window and think about making energy input equal to energy output, but everything just kept dissolving. So my words that night stretched across my logarithms, digits and letters interspersing in long columns because in order to get good marks in both writing and science, you have to learn both from the same textbook. I learned writing from chemistry, I learned chemistry from Cassady. Equations scarred my Ginsberg, iambic pentameter stained Avogadro until the human condition centered on potassium bisulfate, my teachers became worried about my questioning, my inquiries about sex and electrons and cold empty lonely fusion, magnetically controlled, of course.

Jimmy's a G

2009-04-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

Joanie Did's WorldPerfect

2009-04-25T17:00:00.003-07:00

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In 1996, Dave Eggers did an interview with Joan Didion for Salon. You can tell it's hecka old because "Dave Eggers is the editor of Might magazine." Not "Dave Eggers runs a cartel of literati," "Dave Eggers is post-post-postmodern," "Dave Eggers the hipster publishing don," or "Dave Eggers saves the world through writing tutors hiding behind a pirate concept store dummy front." Dave Eggers, just a guy. He asked JD about her computer/writing habits, and this is what he found:

DE: What do you use?
JD: I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer, so finally after about a month I got proficient enough that I could actually work on it without being distracted by it, and in fact then it started making me a whole lot more logical than I ever had been. Because the computer was so logical, it was always right, I was wrong ... and the time saved.
Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.

This is a deft comparison. The difference between linear writing (hand-writing, type-writing) and computer-writing is like painting/sculpture. A friend of mine asked JD about this "writing as sculpture" comment when she was at the Writers House and she basically said that WordPerfect is where writing begins and ends. Several people assented. Not knowing much about the gestalt difference between Microsoft Word/WordPerfect, I am very curious as to why there was such vigorous consensus.

Lyndon's always got it worse than you

2009-04-24T19:00:00.000-07:00

If, between now and 4:00 PM on Tuesday, you are looking for anything besides presidential history, you are going to have to go elsewhere. Dems da breaks.

From "TIME Person of the Year 1961: John F. Kennedy:"

Kennedy is a buff for physical fitness for himself and others, at one point suggested that his aides all lose at least five pounds—and that portly Press Secretary Pierre Salinger lose a good deal more. He swims twice a day in the heated White House pool, has taken up a rigorous series of calisthenics under the direction of New York University's Dr. Hans Kraus to help his ailing back. He does his nip-ups in the White House gym, in his bedroom, even on board the big presidential jet while flying off to important meetings.

From "TIME Person of the Year 1964: Lyndon B. Johnson:"

For a partial understanding of Johnson, one has to go back to the harsh hill country of west-central Texas where he was born in 1908. Historian Walter Prescott Webb describes it as a land of "nauseating loneliness," whose inhabitants were "far from markets, burned by drought, beaten by hail, withered by hot winds, frozen by blizzards, eaten out by grasshoppers, exploited by capitalists and cozened by politicians.

1964: President of the Year -- 1967: Pariah of the Year

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Incidentally, Johnson was also the Person of the Year for 1967, but only because so many people hated him that, began the piece, "inescapably, he was Man of the Year." Actually, the piece doesn't say that "so many" people hated him but rather that everybody hated him, from housewives to "hippies in their psychedelic enclaves." But I think everyone knows where my loyalties rest (in peace).

Cherry cherry

2009-04-23T12:00:00.001-07:00

At my highschool there was a cherry tree that, for ten or so days each spring, burst into such stupendous glory that it became the point around which the entire campus revolved. My senior year, our Biology teacher had us all work on a photo project for which we had to take ten photographs of the same thing every single week, and then ten photographs of it every day for the final two weeks. Other people chose an area (like the pond or the bird sanctuary) but I chose only this tree. Man, was she unattractive in January. And man, was she boring in February. But after four months with her, I fell deeply in love. And when she revealed herself in April, it was one of the most beautiful things I've seen.

Every year, one enraptured Biology teacher organizes a celebration of the tree, and sends out a campus-wide email inviting all to stop by, have some cookies and lemonade, and admire the tree and give her compliments. And every year, my cuckoo bananas Nuclear Proliferation teacher -- who is the finest penpal I have ever had -- forwards me the email.Welcome back, dear cherry tree. You are a sight to behold and I love you.

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thu 4/23/2009 9:29 AM
To: Students; Faculty & Staff - All
Subject: The Cherry Tree

On Friday morning, come see one of the natural beauties of the PA campus- the blooming Cherry Tree between Sam Phil and Morse Hall, and get cookies while they last!
If you are unable to see the tree in the next few days, I hope you enjoy the attachments of the tree at this time last year and the year before.
Cheers,
TC, for the Campus Beautification Committee

Tomorrow Never Knows

2009-04-22T12:30:00.001-07:00

The Fair's theme was "Peace Through Understanding," dedicated to
"Man's Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe."

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Today also marks the 45th anniversary of the opening of the 1964 World's Fair in Queens.

Myself, I am always collecting new facts about the fair (both the one in 1939 and the one in 1964). However, it was not until last year that I set foot on the former fairgrounds. My wonderful (and indulgent) friend EBM brought me out to Queens on a perfect spring day and patiently walked me around while I prattled on about hexagonal concrete tiles or something. (Thanks, Ev). Although there is very little left from '64 and basically zip left from '39, there are still some things left to see. Watch me up my nerdscore.

The Panorama.

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The only building left from 1939 is now the Queens Museum, and inside it houses the "biggest scale model of New York City," an attraction left over from the General Motors exhibit in 1964. It sounds kind of uninteresting, but when you're walking around the 9,335 square foot panorama, trying to pick out your apartment from the 895,000 individual structures that make it up, you'll be singing a different tune. It includes all five boroughs and even has a miniature airplane that flies in and out of LaGuardia.

The New York pavilion's "Tent of Tomorrow" with the Unisphere
in the distance (left) and a detail of the palazzo floor (right).

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The 1964 Fair also boasted the "largest terrazzo map of the state of New York," once again something that sounds a little bland until you've seen it. After the Fair closed, the map, which made up the floor of the New York State pavilion (which you may recall from "Men In Black"), was allowed to crumble into serious disrepair until the park realized it was worth saving. Now the whole thing is fenced off and they are attempting to restore it.

The Unisphere was lookin' good when we went to see it.

And the 1964 Fair's last claim to fame: "largest globe." The famous Unisphere is, obviously, still there, and has become a symbol of both the Fair and of Queens. At twelve stories high, it is definitely large. Man's achievement on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe. I think they got that right.

The age of Nixonland

2009-04-22T06:30:00.004-07:00

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Today marks fifteen years since the death of Richard M. Nixon, 37th President of the United States.

For those of you who have not had the time to read the text of Memorial Tributes Delivered in Congress: Richard M. Nixon, Late a President of the United States (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1996) or do not remember verbatim the speeches given at his funeral in Yorba Linda, I can give you a few of the important highlights.

Bob Dole said:

I believe the second half of the twentieth century will be known as the age of Nixon.

Bill Clinton (who, according to someone who will remain nameless, "shoehorned his way into what was to be a family affair"), said:

May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.

(Also, according to my source, Clinton, who knows him his Bible, was purposefully acting "like King David, who takes flight, smites Saul, and then eulogizes him").

And the Reverend Billy Graham, soul of soul, said:

John Donne said that there is a democracy about death. It comes equally to us all and makes us all equal as it comes. And I think that today every one of us ought to be thinking about our own time to die, because we, too, are going to die, and we are going to have to face almighty God with the life that we lived here.

We, too, are going to die.

Richard Nixon, total loser, sometimes winner, riddler of riddles and liar of lies, architect of peace, crook and Quaker, may you be resting in peace, wherever you are, with your Pat and your secret wiretaps on God.

Academedicians don't even know the alphabet!

2009-04-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

Recently said by a lady who shall remain unnamed:

I'd rather be ABD than ABC.

(ABD, in academic parlance, means "all but dissertation." ABC, in cuckoo bananas lady parlance, means "all but children").

From the man that buys the OJ

2009-04-21T09:30:00.002-07:00

RH wants to chime in that he liked the halved-orange cap, too, but it was harder to turn. While he originally thought that the halved-orange cap had "more ridges" that "orange pulp got stuck in," thus making it more difficult to twist, he now believes that it is simply easier to gain a purchase on the "squared edge of the old cap." Were this cap something he found on orange juice in a French supermarket (???), he told me, he would think, "Oh, how cute, the French do everything wrong!" But in America, land where "everything is perfect," he cannot stand for such a cap.

For one, my Dad totally loves France so I don't know what he is talking about. For two, he only thinks America is perfect because it's baseball season. For three, my family and I obviously have run out of things to talk about on the phone. Love you, Dad.

Viva Las Jesus

2009-04-21T06:30:00.003-07:00

Steadfast, loyal, and true!

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RH may have married one in 1986, but thirty years earlier he had a very different outlook:

I realized why I never dated Catholic girls. Because in the fifties, when Elvis was making his movies, they weren't allowed to go see them. And what was going on with that?

April 20, 2009

2009-04-20T17:00:00.002-07:00

April 20 is a complicated day, rife with conflicting significance. It's a day everyone celebrates marijuana usage. It's the birthday of the most evil person to ever live on this earth. Today, it marks both ten years since Columbine, and it is also the Boston Marathon. If that doesn't make you stop to think, then take a second. And stop. Think.

Big props to my BFF Moso for running la Maratona in a spectacular 4:25:29 (about 10:07 per mile overall). I was gettin' updates on her every 10K (from a chip on her shoe) and homegirl was holding steady with excellent pacing. She was actually faster after the first ten miles. Hopefully she's home carbobinging right now. Can't wait to hear about mile 22 (which was designated "my" mile).

And in regards to all of the other terrible and wonderful things that make up April 20 -- may God bless us all, and may we all learn to love each other. Life is pretty precious. I think one day we'll all be able to put that love first.

Orange agency

2009-04-20T09:30:00.007-07:00

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My friend MTV over at Tiny Gems recently wrote that "the best way to tell that a joke isn’t funny anymore is to check if it’s been printed in the New York Times." Oh, Times, I love you, but it is true.

In the midst of a crippling recession, who has the time and energy to care about the package their orange juice comes in? If you can complain about it, you can still probably afford it, so what's the big deal?

The Times finally got all snarky about the Tropicana redesign (and subsequent de-redesign) this past week. Alex Kuczynski got all adorably nutso and cute about the whole thing, bringing up her attachment to the Triscuit box of the seventies, etc. Despite the fact that this issue's a little old hat by now, she still was quite deft at linking the protest over the redesign to the neuroses in the new economy. Since when the is evolution of the orange juice container newsworthy?

Since the world has been in tatters, that's when. If the economic sands are shifting beneath your feet, it seems you want your orange juice container to look the same as it did when your 401(k) was worth more than, say, a carton of orange juice.

Kuczynski also found out some of the reasons why Paul Arnell, the "marketing and design guru" behind the change, was possessed to do such damage. Seems Tropicana is the only prominent brand that is not sold in a transparent bottle, and so he figured he'd put a picture of a glass of juice on the container. Is that so bad? Yes. I don't like to drink my juice from a glass. I drink it from a straw stuck in the fruit, itself, thanks. Can't afford glassware anymore, anyway.

Consumers (among them my mother) still liked the halved-orange cap that was introduced with the redesign. Arnell said, "It's charming. It's sincere. It's meaningful." But that detail doesn't seem to have stuck. Perhaps they had to get rid of the entire new design, both its flaws and its merits, in order to exorcise the pain of the new changes wrought by the new economy (phew!). A lot like having to sack LBJ (symbol of Vietnam) in 1968. And now no one ever talks about his nice halved-orange caps.

Tale of two Trotskys

2009-04-19T16:00:00.004-07:00

From Cometbus #50 (by Aaron Cometbus):

I was trying to explain the Morning Trotsky/Evening Trotsky thing to Nate, but he was not getting it.

"Why does he only get one piece of bread?" Nate wanted to know.

"Because he's in jail. Trotsky's always either in jail or in exile."

"Okay."

"So Morning Trotsky thinks out his situation. 'Makes sense to eat he majority of the bread now,' he says. 'That way I'll have the energy and nourishment needed to spend all day writing.'"

"What's he writing?"

"What isn't he writing? With one hand he's working on a book about shipbuilding, with the other he's working out the history of ancient China. No sooner has a fact grazed his brain, he considers himself an expert and has started a book on the subject."

"So what's the problem?"

"Well, evening comes around and suddenly Trotsky is hungry as hell."

"All the bread is gone."

"Right, you're catching on. Evening Trotsky is enraged. This isn't the first time he's been duped. The hunger hammers at the walls of his stomach then stands there tapping on the side of his brain. He can't write. He can't think. He paces around his cell nervously, polishing his pince-nez."

"What's that?"

"Those little glasses he wears, with no handles."

"I always wondered."

"Well, he's pissed as hell. Evening Trotsky curses Trotsky of the Morning. He pleads with him. 'Trotsky of the Morning,' he says, 'please be more considerate in the future. Follow this simple plan for the even and fair distribution of our food.'"

"He's talking to himself?"

"Sure, who doesn't? But what happens when morning comes? Trotsky of the Morning wakes up and yawns. He scratches, he stretches. With the advent of a fresh, new day he's able to think with more clarity than that poor, half-starved bastard Trotsky of the Evening. He realizes that more equitable division of the bread should take into account the hours passed in sleep. A full third of the day. Therefore, he divides the bread into three even pieces and gobbles down two of them straightaway."

"Daytime Trotsky is the asshole."

"Not necessarily, Nate. Both Trotskys are operating logically and rationally according to their own perspectives. That's the problem."

The new economy ages us all

2009-04-19T14:00:00.006-07:00

I'm over it. It's not like you're Voldemort. Sweet Frightwig shirt, bee tee dubs.

At some point during the Nirvana Unplugged MTV performance Kurt swings back and forth in his rolly desk chair and says,

Oh yeah, this guy representing the Leadbelly estate wants to sell me Leadbelly's guitar for five-hundred thousand dollars...I even asked David Geffen personally if he'd buy it for me.

When I was little I remember being like, "David Geffen, buy him the guitar! He's Kurt Cobain and he has deep, obsessive love for Leadbelly and no one else could possibly deserve that guitar more. And what is $500,000 to keep Kurt Cobain, most angelic and fragile of souls, happy?"

When I heard it a few days ago, I was like, "Wow, Kurt Cobain, you were definitely twenty-six years old. And dum."

Rough trips, tough strips

2009-04-19T12:30:00.001-07:00

Right now I am super into these new "Tough-Strip" bandages that Band-Aid is making. They are made of "super-stick adhesive -- stays on until you want it off" and are also "fiber reinforced -- for strength like duct tape." So basically, it's duct tape. But without the cool silver color and a thousand times the cost.

If you aren't quite edgy enough to rock straight-up duct tape on your knees, though, I still recommend the Tough-Strips. They def do not come off without a fight.

I will always and forever be Kathleen Hanna's grrl

2009-04-19T09:00:00.003-07:00

From "Jigsaw Youth," Jigsaw Fanzine #4 (1991):

We live in a world that tells us we must choose an identity, a career, a relationship, and commit...to these situations...as if we know what's gonna happen tomorrow, as if we aren't ever gonna change, as if we don't live in a world of constant flux, which we do. Don't freak out cuz the jigsaw is laying on the floor and it's not all the way done and has been laying there for 4 whole hours now, resist the freak out. You will get to it...it's all part of the process.

Everything in phlox

2009-04-19T06:30:00.002-07:00

Downtown Pittsburgh

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Michael Chabon, little wunderkind, began writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh when he was 21. It was published in 1988, when he was only 25. At first blush, it seems like a pretty conventional, narcissistic tale of the lazy daze of summer. When I first read it two summers ago, I thought as much and no more. Now, as I return for my third read, I’m pretty convinced it is brilliant. (Maybe this is only because I’m now on the brink of my Last Summer and I Suddenly Understand, but I don’t think so). Two things from the book have become a part of my personal gestalt.

The first is this exchange:

“You must mean Phlox.”
“Phlox? Her name is Phlox? There are girls named Phlox?”
“She is nuts,” said Arthur, with mingled scorn and enthusiasm.

The second is this passage on the female French major:

I admit I have an ugly fondness for generalizations, so perhaps I may be forgiven when I declare there is always something weird about a girl who majors in French. She has entered into her course of study, first of all, knowing full well it can only lead to her becoming a French teacher, a very grim affair, the least of whose evils is poor pay, and the prospect of which should have been sufficient to send her straight into business or public relations. She has been betrayed into the study of French, heedless of the terrible consequences, by her enchantment with this language, which has ruined more young American women than any other foreign tongue.

Second, if her studies were confined simply to grammar and vocabulary, then perhaps the French major would develop no differently from those who study Spanish or German, but the unlucky girl who pursues her studies past the second year comes inevitably and headlong into contact with French Literature, potentially one of the most destructive forces known to mankind; and she begins to relish such previously unglamorous elements of her vocabulary as langueur and funeste, and, speaking English, inverts her adjectives, to let one know that she sometimes even thinks in French. The writers she comes to appreciate – Breton, Baudelaire, Sartre, de Sade, Cocteau – have an alienating effect, especially on her attitude toward love, and her manner of expressing her emotions becomes difficult and theatrical; while those French writers whose influence might be healthy, such as Stendhal or Flaubert, she dislikes and takes to reading in translation, where their effect on her thought and speech is negligible; or she willfully misreads Madame Bovary and La Chartreuse, making dark romances of them. I gathered that Phlox, in particular, considered herself “linked by destiny” (liée par le destin) both to Nadja and to O. That is how a female French major thinks.

From what little I’ve heard, the forthcoming movie adaptation has totally flattened the plot back into its two-dimensional premise.

Oh well whatever

2009-04-18T12:00:00.002-07:00

ITNE swimming lessons will be mandatory for all babies. I remember reading
when I was younger that the Nirvana font is an extra-bold condensed Bodoni.

(image via)

In the new economy, at least this month, nothing is bearable to listen to except "Nevermind."

Nicotine bicycline

2009-04-18T11:30:00.002-07:00

Couldn't find a picture, wish I could.

(image via)

There is a part in the movie "Basquiat" in which Jeffrey Wright rides around totally high on his bicycle, wearing pajama pants and smoking a cigarette. This was a perfect movie moment.

Smoking is bad and I don't like it, but it is probably this scene that always sort of made me want to smoke. As soon as I had access both to a bicycle and to cigarettes I tried it out. However, unless your biking style is languorous (and, maybe, stoned), it's basically an impossible scenario to pull off. Biking essentially smokes the cigarette for you -- the headwind will smoke it down to its filter faster than you can say 'Jean-Michel.' But I have discovered that it feels almost as cool to ride around holding an extra-large Rita's custard with rainbow sprinkles (nothing says decadent frivolity quite like 900 calories of eggy ice cream melting down your arm). So that's an option. Still causes cancer, probs.

Books four and five

2009-04-18T08:00:00.001-07:00

(image via)

Book number four is Atonement by Ian McEwan. Having seen the film did not take any of the suspense out of the book. It is steadily, consistently engaging, despite my worry (and others' warnings) that "the war parts" would be slow-going.

(image via)

Book number five is An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender. It is about Mona Gray, a 20-year-old math teacher who is "in love with quitting." (Good idea, right)? In keeping, I started reading this book in seventh grade and quit after about 50 pages. For the next ten years I would be unable to remember the title but would be dogged by several images from it: the teacher who wears wax numbers around his neck to signify his mood, the man who cuts off a finger so he can be the first one in the newly built blue-glass hospital. However, upon re-reading, the idiosyncracies seemed overkill. It made me realize that good fiction is not about trying to collect every nonconventional thing and put them together, but to collect conventional things in a new yet realistic way (Netherland is a good example). But, in the end, the characters were still sweet and the gimmicks were only surreal interpretations of real emotions. When looking up info on the book, I learned that there's a movie version coming out this year starring Jessica Alba. They're surely going to take liberty with certain plot elements, because I really cannot imagine that Jessica Alba is going to eat bars of soap (something Mona Gray does to make herself sick whenever she thinks she is about to want to have sex). Yeah, there you go.

Le bon Mau(rice)

2009-04-17T06:30:00.000-07:00

M. Druon ne porte pas le tweed ici.

(image via)

Yesterday the New York Times announced the death of Maurice Druon, "co-writer of one of France's most patriotic anthems during World War II, who went on to write novels and serve his country as minister of culture and an official arbiter on language matters." When he died on April 14 he was 90.

The obituary, itself, says it best:

In 1966, he was elected to the Académie Française, which was founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 and is charged with the arbitration of French linguistic matters, revising the official French dictionary and determining which contemporary locutions ought to be admitted into the language. At the time he was the youngest of the academy’s 40 members, who are appointed for life and known as “the immortals,” but he would become its leader, or, as the post is called, its perpetual secretary.
Especially in matters linguistic, Mr. Druon was known as a cultural conservative who argued against relaxing the historical gender assignments given to all French nouns. He thought it foolish political correctness, for instance, to allow a woman serving as a government minister to be referred to as “la ministre” rather than “le ministre”; the word “ministre” was male, he said, no matter who held the post. However, Mr. Druon was also, from his World War II days, an Anglophile, and he allowed many English terms into the French lexicon, including “tweed” and the golf term “birdie,” according to Agence France-Presse.

Just imagine this man, an "immortal" of language arbitration, refusing to adjust the gender of occupational words, yet making a break for tweed! My mother rushed over to the Brown library to check out his books immediately.

Fried-ay in the Quad

2009-04-16T14:00:00.001-07:00

(image via)

It's Spring Fling week/end at school and wahoo! Let (the) Fling(s) begin! The best part is probably spending Friday in the Quad, where you see every single person you ever knew, and there is a moon bounce and water given out in tiny plastic dentist's cups. And it is going to be 70 degrees! You would think that the only thing that could make it better would be the fried Oreos. I thought so, too. Then I had some.

Five for $5. In the new economy, is it a bargain to be able to buy 5,000 calories for $5? Or are fried foods the ultimate economic no-no (requiring a repayment with 5000% interest for later medical fees)? Either way, I ate them last year and could have sworn that I had instead downed a handle of Banker's Club. Seriously, guys, it felt the exact same. I couldn't get up off the couch. I couldn't walk home without assistance. I couldn't see straight. I couldn't go out later that night. And I was hungover the next morning. So please don't make the same mistake I did (though I might do it again if someone will split 'em with me).

Nothing matters outside the Bos-Wash corridor

2009-04-16T11:00:00.002-07:00

RH in a recent email to me:

Since I don’t see them very often, the California teams confuse me. We played two teams this week, so I’m really messed up. I don’t know where one stops and the other starts (it’s as if they’re the same team, the Oakland Athletic Los Angeles Anaheim Angels).

Hopefully he will fully recognize the individuality of the California teams once I move to California. Oh, who are we kidding? I refuse to root for the Athletic Anaheim Dodgers, the Los Angeles Oakland Angels, or any combination thereof. California could never have produced a player like Jason Varitek, that renowned gargantuan of glory. Go Boston! And, as a shirt we saw in Bradenton said: "I root for two teams: the Red Sox and whoever beats the Yankees." Burn!

A taste for everyone

2009-04-15T08:00:00.003-07:00

(all images via Sartorialist)

When browsing through some of the March photos on The Sartorialist, I came across this note:

If "street-style" blogs are useful right now, in this difficult economic time, then it is because they highlight simple little styling tricks that can inspire us to see the wardrobe we already own in a new way.

Because he usually allows the images to speak for themselves, it seemed significant that Scott Schuman made this comment. Whether in written or photographic form, the Sartorialist's observations are always sensitive, understated, and encouraging.

Worth a thousand

2009-04-14T15:00:00.001-07:00

Artist Mark Wagner makes pieces out of dollar bills. Just like error coins or underwater Liberties, seeing things made out of money holds a perverse fascination for me. Yeah, yeah...especially ITNE. See many more photos of his work or read an interview.

Apocalyptic Liberty

2009-04-14T13:30:00.002-07:00

There are two ways you can tell that a movie takes place in the future (well, used to be able to tell). First, there is a female or black president. Second, the Statue of Liberty has been either destroyed or the water level of the earth has risen dramatically, but only high enough to come to her nose. In "Deep Impact," we actually see New York underwater and then hear a Statue of Liberty-specific sound effect as her head hits the floor (clunk). Most likely this Liberty-under-water trope will become even more cinematically frequent as a "harbinger of the future" since the minority-as-president trope is now moot.

New world royalty

2009-04-14T13:00:00.000-07:00

(image via)

Seasons of love

2009-04-13T06:30:00.003-07:00

I screenshot this from the library calendar.

This is a bittersweet day. This day in the semester is usually one of my favorite days -- the first day of the semester in which the upper part of the library is open until 2 AM. Two extra hours! Two extra hours to spend in the stacks or, more importantly, two more hours to spend with my carrel. However, this also marks the beginning of the end. The only reason we're getting these two hours now is because of how many hours we've squandered up 'til now. For the meantime, though, I'll live in the present, and relish the time remaining.

In the new economy, buy in bulk

2009-04-12T14:00:00.002-07:00

(image via)

"She had a weakness for JFK. Being an East Coast girl, she adored East Coast celebrities, especially those from prominent cities, especially cities with good baseball teams. She liked old money. She like Rockefellers, Carnegies, Mellons, Vanderbilts, Morgans. She was not interested in Stanfords, Gettys, Hersts or Huntingtons. She was not interested in the West Coast. She liked prep schools, and if there wasn’t a good one nearby, she liked public schools named after Eastern politicians. She liked New York, but she chose Garciaparra over Jeter. She was, after all, from Boston. But more than all of these things, she had a weakness for JFK. More specifically, JFK Jr. She was a sucker for John-John. I was not the boy for her.

"I was a sucker for stomach problems, meaning that my stomach cramped up over anything. I had a refrigerator which held only two 24-packs of economy-sized bottles of Pepto-Bismol. I got sick every time she was around because I thought she was fantastic. We talked about whatever she wanted to talk about. She spewed too much information in a single sentence and seemed to know virtually everything. She had footnotes for her conversations. She could figure out what a word meant by calling upon her knowledge of Latin roots. She had the Red Sox lineup memorized and knew all of the players’ full names (first, baptismal middle, confirmation middle, last). After we’d hang out I’d puke.

"It’s strange how we attribute love to the heart, which is really just an organ which pumps blood. Stranger still that our emotions can connect to our digestive system, that something can be so moving that it reverses the reactions of your body. She wore me out, but that’s the type of girlfriend you want when you’re young.

"She was the type of girl that liked to whistle and do handstands while wearing rollerblades. She was the type of girl that, if you threw a glass of water on her, she would throw a glass of Coke on you, because she had no concept of laundry or not being able to get out a stain. She was the type of rich girl that takes subways not taxis, but who never knows which train to take and so gets on all of them, hoping they will eventually hit her stop.

"In the end she broke up with me because she thought I was too predictable. In the end, I thought she was pretty predictable herself. She had a studied eccentricity which had begun to bore me. I no longer thought it was cool that she made me physically ill. I now got sick not out of excitement but out of habit. My throat was sore and I couldn’t eat whenever I wanted, and that was annoying. Maybe it was the fact that I was a year older than when I had met her, but I couldn’t see why she had ever appealed to me. I moved on to girls who did not overexert me.

"When she left my apartment for the last time the door clicked shut behind her. It was a click and not a bang and not a whiz, but the sound of the click during Russian roulette which means that you, for at least one more round, are going to make it through."

The sun never sets in the new economy

2009-04-12T13:00:00.002-07:00

Apparently this past Wednesday was not only Passover but Birchat HaChammah, a holiday which occurs once in every 28 years.

From The New York Times:

According to the celestial calculations of a Talmudic sage named Shmuel, at the outset of spring every 28 years, the sun moves into the same place in the sky at the same time and on the same day of the week as it did when God made it. This charged moment provides the occasion for reciting a one-line blessing of God, “who makes the work of creation.”

Also, this time it coincided with Passover, which hasn't happened in, like, 200 years. No one told me about this. Why is this? Is it because I'm Catholic? Suddenly Easter just doesn't seem as exciting.

Down in the valley, up in the sky

2009-04-12T06:30:00.002-07:00

My mother has always told me about the World’s Fair of 1964, which took place on a piece of land bordered by the Long Island Expressway and Grand Central Parkway. The site of the 1964 Fair (and, earlier, the 1939 World's Fair) was built upon a massive cinder dump that had accumulated along the west bank of the Flushing River in Corona, Queens -- what was actually the "valley of ashes" in The Great Gatsby. The area is now designated as Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

Following a promise to the late archbishop of New York, Pope John XXIII had decided that the Vatican would send Michelangelo’s Pietà to the Fair. The 469-year-old sculpture, which depicts Mary cradling Jesus after he has been removed from the cross, had never been out of the Vatican before. At the Fair, it was placed in a custom-made pavilion and bathed in neon-blue lights. Visitors could only see the sculpture by standing on one of three moving sidewalks placed at various heights. Why the heck was the Pietà in Queens? Now, of course, it is safely back in St. Peter’s Basilica behind bulletproof glass (installed after a mentally insane geologist ran up to it on Pentecost Sunday in 1972 and smashed it with a hammer while yelling “I am Jesus Christ!”) which is slightly more sinister than blue neon light, but which makes more sense, logically, and is just not as plain weird.

Deli belly

2009-04-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

All they need now is a ketchup flavor and a pizza flavor
and I would pawn my refrigerator and oven for cash.

(image via)

In the new economy, Jelly Belly will eliminate whole aisles of the grocery store. I haven't done grocery shopping in a few weeks, but luckily, my mother sent me some jelly beans for Easter. For the past few days, I've been having nothing but buttered popcorn, margaritas, bananas, grapefruits, coconuts, crushed pineapples, and peanut butter. So much food for so little money -- and so little storage space! Also, it's all nonperishable.

God is dead, but my hair is perfect

2009-04-11T11:00:00.001-07:00

1977: Birth of a B.H.L.

1993: Would you have the mettle to
open your shirt this wide in Afghanistan?

(images via)

"God is dead but my hair is perfect." This is the phrase coined by one journalist to describe Bernard-Henri Lévy (a.k.a. B.H.L., "bay-ash-elle"), the famed French philosopher and celebrillectual. If I could figure out who came up with that, I would write them a letter of thanks. So far, I still don't have the accurate citation, but everyone else seems fine with repeating it anonymously. In the meantime, Caroline Weber's cunning piece for the Times last fall is also good reading:

Sometimes a white shirt is just a white shirt. Just ask the French author and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has no interest in discussing the suavely unbuttoned garment that for his fans and detractors alike has become synonymous with his name. According to Lévy, colloquially known as B.H.L., he wears his signature chemises open to his tanned, flat abdomen for functional reasons only. ‘‘I’m constitutionally incapable of wearing a tie,’’ he says with a shrug. ‘‘They strangle me.’’ Beyond that, ‘‘my clothing has no importance whatsoever.’’ Or rather it is beside the point, since he cares not about fashion but about ‘‘trying to draw the world’s attention to wars and sufferings and problems that people might otherwise ignore.’’

Oh God. The French! The French! Truly the most advanced civilization in the world, no question about it.

It's tough but hang in there

2009-04-10T08:00:00.001-07:00

"What do you do with a degree in English?"

(image via)

Earlier this week, the career counselor for the class of 2009 sent out a 1,000-word email that was simply called "it's tough but hang in there." Gone are the official announcements about McKinsey! Gone are the formal descriptions of positions at Google! Now all we are left with in the new economy is lyrics from Broadway musicals starring puppets. It was half-terrifying and half-comforting, but seemingly one-hundred-percent well-intentioned. Some excerpts:

I know a lot of you are feeling discouraged right now. It’s tough to be graduating in, as one student I met with recently put it, “the worst economy since the ice age.” Unemployment rates continue to rise and there are fewer jobs out there. A lot of you have said to me, “this is just my luck to be graduating this year.” You may even consider the Broadway musical number from Avenue Q, “It sucks to be me” (hilarious, btw--if you don’t already know it—YouTube it) to be your own personal theme song.

I remember the fall of my senior year being so daunted by figuring out what to do next that I avoided career fairs like the plague.

And, I know it’s terrifying and potentially paralyzing.

But here’s the thing—even though it’s much easier to simply stick in your ear buds and rock out to your favorite playlist, or have a movie marathon in your room to avoid dealing with this—by checking out and not doing anything, you’re ensuring that you won’t get anything. As my younger brother likes to say, “You can’t win if you don’t play,” people.

Greats

2009-04-10T06:30:00.001-07:00

Sam Cooke and Muhammad Ali.

Happy birthday, D$! You share a birthday with the Titanic (whose maiden voyage began on this day, 1912). What does that mean?! But, you certainly have outlasted and shall continue to outlast. May this be a great day for you.

Phrasidential

2009-04-09T14:30:00.001-07:00

"He spoke to me like a Dutch uncle." This appears who knows how many times in Nixon's Six Crises. What is a Dutch uncle? According to Wikipedia:

Dutch uncle is a term for a person who issues frank, harsh, and severe comments and criticism to educate, encourage, or admonish someone. Thus, a "Dutch uncle" is a person who is rather the reverse of what is normally thought of as avuncular or uncle-like (which would be indulgent and permissive).

"Raising Cain." Jimmy Carter uses this several times to great effect in Keeping Faith. From Urban Dictionary:

Because Cain was the first murderer in the Bible, having killed his brother Abel, people use the expression "raising Cain" to describe acts of violence, criminal activity, or any other mischievous acts.

Carreled away

2009-04-09T14:00:00.002-07:00

Carrel 4140 has been my carrel for two years.

This heartbreaking email was sent to me last week:

Hello,

Your Van Pelt Library study carrel registration will expire on 5/15/09. If you would like to continue using your carrel, please complete the Carrel Renewal Request form before 5/15/09. If you are graduating (congratulations!), or are finished using your carrel, please use the form (above) to let us know that we can reassign it. Carrels that are not renewed by 5/15/09 will be cleared of books on 5/18/09, and will be made available to others. If you wish to register for a different carrel for the 2009-’10 academic year, contact us at vpcircdk@pobox.upenn.edu, and we will try to accommodate your request.

Enjoy the Summer!
Van Pelt Library Circulation

For the deeply nerdy, there is nothing cooler than being able to have all your books in one place and to not have to move them anywhere. Come footnoting time, you sit down and all of your sources are in arm's reach!

I have always loved annotated bibliographies. It was when I got to express my deep appreciation for my sources, and to write a public love letter to them, making a pitch for their usefulness in the hopes that after I used them, they wouldn't just sit on the shelf for another 30 years. Like, "Mmm...that book about marriage licenses among freed slaves in towns of less than 1,000 people in the states of Virginia and Mississippi was so extremely and specifically helpful and gave me charts of the exact data I needed! Please, someone go check in on it every once in a while to make sure it's doing okay!"

A rainbow of presidential memoirs.

The future of the past

2009-04-09T11:30:00.003-07:00

For the record, I find Charles de Gaulle airport totally awesome.

(image via)

From Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon, a pitch-perfect book of essays about Paris. If you have been to Paris and want to be reminded of the little things ("That's exactly what it's like!") or have never been and want to dream, this book is tops.

When we first started dreaming of coming to Paris, around 1989, long-termist, infrastructure-building Europe, many people said, owned the future. One only had to compare JFK and Charles de Gaulle airports, the one named after the vital young internationalist and the other after the old reactionary, to catch the irony. JFK was decrepit, dangerous, and almost unpoliced; you stumbled off your plane into, of all bizarre things, a linoleum staircase, with a sign above warning of illegal livery drivers (whose complexions, delicately, had been made neither black nor white but swarthy, like Barbary Coast pirates). You took a taxi over roads so potholed that the infrastructure was visibly rusted out, ruined. At Charles de Gaulle Airport, on the other hand, you came to a breathtakingly modern terminal, full of odd glass corridors and long, radiating, covered walkways, and exited onto a highway so up-to-date that regular announcements of upcoming traffic were posted along with the waiting time for a reservation at the Brasserie Lipp. No one will believe this now, but that is how it seemed then.

Today I was talking with DE and asked what it meant that our worst airport is named after our most worshiped president. He pointed out that while the airport may be the pits, it is still our "port on the world," ("That reminds me of a flight I took to China that left from there").

Nixon Agonistes

2009-04-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you feel like saying something in public, and sometimes it just fails. This is an exchange that I have attempted many, many times. And it never, never succeeds. All I want is a chuckle, but I never so much as get an eyebrow lift.

It happens at the library on a Saturday night at closing time (9 PM), when inevitably checking out books by or about Richard Nixon.

Work study student: Can I see your Penncard?
CH: Nothing like spending a Saturday night with Richard Nixon!
Work study student: ...

Burning love in Yoknapatawpha County

2009-04-07T08:30:00.001-07:00

Joel Williamson, a dynamite historian and also a friend of my family, has been working on a "book about Elvis and Faulkner" for at least a decade. It will be called ELVIS, FAULKNER AND FEMININE SPIRITUALITY. If that isn't the most devastating idea for a book ever, then return me to sender.

All I can find on the internet about it is a 1996 article from Time magazine about the growing number of academics interested in the King.

Joel Williamson, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, explores the links between two of the South's greatest icons, Elvis and novelist William Faulkner. "They were born within 27 miles of each other," he notes, "and both were obsessed with race and sex, and both were tremendously conscious of a class hierarchy."

I die.

Cut yer losses

2009-04-06T09:00:00.007-07:00

Woodrow Wilson throws out the opening day pitch, 1916.

(image via)

It's opening day! Although Obama won't be throwing out any first pitches (he was invited to do so, but in the new economy, he just don't have the time), it is still going to be a great afternoon and evening for baseball fans (a.k.a. good Americans). The beginning of the season means almost continuous televised coverage of Jason Varitek, that indubitable hunk of ham. Clean slate! New lease on life! Cut your losses and start again. However, this also means that my father will neglect his familial duties for the next six to seven months.

Belle and Sebastian, "Stay Loose"

2009-04-06T08:30:00.000-07:00

I was choking on a cornflake, you said have some toast instead
I was sleeping maybe three hours, you said you should get to bed

You don't know any dance steps that are new, but El sure as hell does

2009-04-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

After putting up the lyrics to Elvis' "Baby, I Don't Care," I received an email from RH. Had I seen the film of this song from Jailhouse House rock (1957, MGM)? In it, says RH, "El looks amazing. Very loose dark trousers, remarkable hair, attitude to die for."

This, indeed, is true. Elvis swings his hips around like a tetherball while a bevy of what can only be referred to as broads look on apathetically. It's racy as all get-out.

Perestroika

2009-04-05T15:00:00.001-07:00

Recently I've been coughing and frequently I cough at my friend Lala. It's a weird cough, and I tried to explain it a few nights ago. In the notes for Part Two: Perestroika of Angels in America, Tony Kushner takes time to explain the Angel of America's cough. While I am no angel (and by the way, the Angel of America is a total bia), this has always been my "inspiration cough," the referent I bear in mind when coughing.

The cough is a single, dry, barking cough, not wracking emphysemic spasms. Ellen McLaughlin's cough was based on a cat hacking up a furball. It was sharp, simple and effectively nonhuman. It was not funny so much as it was ominous, and always always dignified. It is my terror that the Angel be played for laughs. She will get them, and get better laughs, if her dignity is never (as in not for one single second) compromised.

"Baby, I Don't Care"

2009-04-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

You don’t like crazy music.
You don’t like rockin’ bands.
You just wanna go to a movie show,
And sit there holdin’ hands.

You’re so square.
Baby, I don’t care.

You don’t like hotrod racin’
Or drivin’ late at night.
You just wanna park where it’s nice and dark.
You just wanna hold me tight.
You’re so square.
Baby, I don’t care.

You don’t know any dance steps that are new,
But no one else could love me like you do, do, do, do.

I don’t know why my heart flips.
I only know it does.
I wonder why I love you, baby.
I guess it’s just because
You’re so square.
Baby, I don’t care.

Happy birthday, ET!

2009-04-05T07:00:00.001-07:00

More of Liz's beautiful paintings,
prints, and drawings can be seen here.

Buon compleanno to the awesome, babely, and totally rockin' Lizzietish, the daughter of my momma's best friend and, thus, my sister. Whether she is in Asheville or Abruzzo, she keeps it real. (Although lore has it that when the entire family moved from Wisconsin to Italy, Liz was the one who voted against it).

I wish I were with her to celebrate, but hopefully there will be many more birthday celebrations to share in the future.

The man who sold the world

2009-04-05T06:30:00.001-07:00

Today marks fifteen years since Kurt Cobain killed himself. He was twenty-seven.

Ten years ago, as MTV rebroadcast "Unplugged" 'round the clock, twenty-seven seemed incredibly old. But now it really doesn't, does it?

Wood type, perhaps from the Civil War

2009-04-04T06:30:00.000-07:00

Because I did not take the photo of the Letraset letters, I wanted to take my own photos of the wood type.

So eager to behave decently

2009-04-03T06:30:00.005-07:00

Beginning at 3 PM today at Kelly Writers House there will be a marathon reading of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 -- a book I have always loved, and can read over and over. Anyone who wants to read can sign up for a five-minute time slot, or can just stop by to see how it goes.

August Schreitmüller's sculpture "Güte" ("Goodness")
overlooks Dresden (Richard Peter, Air Force Magazine,
1946). After the firebombing of 1945, which features in
the novel, Dresden looked like "the surface of the moon."

From the website description:

Join us in our quest to become unstuck in time. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. released his celebrated anti-war science fiction novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death. The novel was soon banned from school libraries for its realism, and instated in their curriculum for its honesty. In the Writers House tradition of honoring banned books, we feature Slaughterhouse Five for the third annual marathon book reading. Surrounded by computer screens and sounds, multimedia installations, delicious cuisine, and varied hand-made collectibles, a series of readers will gather at the Writers House to deliver in one non-linear breath, Slaughterhouse Five. Beginning at 3 PM, the volunteer readers will each take five minutes to deliver a portion of the text aloud and into the night. The rooms of the house will be transformed, and if all goes well, we will be unstuck in time by the end of the night. Feel free to stop by for just a minute, or stick around for the whole shebang! For more information or if you would like to be a reader, please contact Allison Harris at hallison@writing.upenn.edu.

Last year the marathon reading was Lolita and it was great. There was corresponding food for every single part of the book that involved food -- from cold cuts to ice cream sundaes. It was pretty cool and fun, actually.

CH finishes thesis, goes to VP to celebrate

2009-04-02T14:30:00.004-07:00

The other CH.
Congratulations to CH on living the dream -- finishing a thesis!

Costello: When you pay off the first baseman every month, who gets the money?
Abbott: Every dollar of it.