Real Lemons, Real Sugar, and Ice

This week's New York Magazine features a series of interviews with lemonade stand proprieters on how to cope with the squeeze of rising lemon prices. A random slice of the cuteness (from 10-year-olds Elinor Weissberg and Oliver Goldberg-Lewis) below:

How do you make the lemonade?

ELINOR: Real lemons, real sugar, and ice.

Do you sell anything else?

ELINOR: We sometimes tell people’s fortunes.

What kinds of fortunes?

ELINOR: We usually pick bad ones. Like this woman walked up and we said, “You’re going to grow a beard.”

Where do you put the money?

OLIVER: In a jar, but you have to hide it under the table. Otherwise, they will say, “Oh, you already have too much money! We’re not going to buy lemonade!”

Left Wondering about the Upper Hand?

Today's New York Sun hones in on an interesting bit of trivia that unites John McCain and Barack Obama: They're both left-handed. Which means that the next president -- like every president since 1974 (except for George W. and Jimmy Carter) -- will once again be a leftie. That's right: Ford, Reagan, H. W. Bush, Clinton and our next president-to-be're all lefties. So what? Well, since only 10% of the population is left-handed, the recent spree of lefties in the Oval Office is a statistical anomolie that may very well have a biological explanation.   The Sun pokes around for evidence linking left-handedness to other presidential traits like ambition or problem-solving skills but comes up only with ... hair whorls:

[Amar Klar's] research shows that the whorl for right-handers curls clockwise in 92% of cases. In left-handers, the distribution is random, with half exhibiting clockwise whorl and the other half spinning counterclockwise. Mr. Klar said he could spot a counterclockwise whorl from seeing Mr. McCain and Mr. Clinton on television and looking at the way they appear to comb their hair.

Also? Apparently those hair whorls have been linked not only to electability in recent decades but also to sexual orientation. This all must mean something, but I'm not really sure what. 

Microfameballers Unmasked

As more than a few of you know, I have had my share of awkward run-ins with various New York fameballs, including one who lives in my building (our conversation at the grocery story earlier this week was typical: "Hey, what's up?" "Oh, you know, pretty good"). So I was amused to see the phenomenon of microfame get parsed in New York magazine this week: "Though an element of luck often plays a role in achieving traditional fame, microfame is practically a science. It is attainable like running a marathon or acing the LSAT. All you need is a road map." I guess not everyone can content themselves with being just an Average Homeboy?

Scary Sadshaw

I was out of the country for the Sex and the City movie's grand summer-in-the-city opening, but I read Manohla Dargis's review ("All is right in this carefree world until Big casually asks Carrie if she would like to get married, a question that leads to the usual luncheon postmortem (oh my gawd, he proposed) and then the usual rom-com clothing montage and a staggering number of product placements (Louis Vuitton co-stars.)") from the other side of the globe with much amusement and a twang of homesickness. Now that I'm back, I still haven't seen the movie, and today I decided I probably won't, just because I don't think it will make me laugh harder than Anthony Lane's review -- which I finally got around to reading -- did. In the past I've suspected that Anthony Lane is a bit sexist (turns out I'm not alone in this opinion). The thing is, he's also hilarious. (Lane introducing Carrie and her pals: "there are four of them—banded together, like hormonal hobbits, and all obsessed with a ring"). The start of his review below:

Secrecy has clouded “Sex and the City” since it was first announced. When would the film appear? Who would find a husband? Would one of the main characters die? If so, would she commit suicide by self-pity (a constant threat), or would a crocodile escape from the Bronx Zoo and wreak a flesh-ripping revenge for all those handbags? As the release date neared, the paranoia thickened; at the screening I attended, we were asked not only to surrender our cell phones but to march through a beeping security gate, as if boarding a plane to Tel Aviv. There was even a full-body pat-down, by far the biggest turn-on of the night. Not a drop of the forthcoming plot had been leaked in advance, but I took a wild guess. “Apparently,” I said to the woman behind me in line, “some of the girls have problems with their men, break up for a while, and then get back together again.” “Oh, my God!” she cried. “How do you know?”

Additional thoughts: As I was pulling up the links for this post, I discovered that while I was away, the ostensible misogyny of this particular review generated quite a bit of discussion, neatly summarized here in New York magazine. But in this case, I'm inclined to agree with the commenter who writes, "Lane's review is so far from being sexist that it actually supports feminism." Rereading the review, I kind of got the feeling that Lane, in his weird way, actually had my back. After all, he concludes:

... there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, we’re not worth it.

I Recognized Her From the Gym

News that the Lower East Side has been named one of the country's most endangered historic sites by the National Trust for Historic Preservation got me thinking about the changing face of nearby St. Mark's Place. Over the years, the stretch of 8th St was the hangout of everyone from Thelonious Monk to W. H. Auden to Jeff Buckley, but today, New York magazine sums it up thusly: "It's tacky. It's garish. It's crawling with tourists and trend-starved teenagers." Just 25 years ago, however, it was the place where you might see a still unknown Madonna leaving the gym, as Amy Arbus did:

The picture of Madonna was taken before her meteoric rise. “I stopped her on the street because I recognized her from the gym,” Ms. Arbus said. “She was the one sitting around naked in the locker room the longest. I remember looking at her and thinking that with a body like that, I would too. In the picture she looks as if she knew what was about to happen to her.”

In the Belly of the Beast

Via New York Magazine's Approval Matrix: Jane Smiley and Curtis Sittenfeld agree to pen Lexus-themed literature for Lexus Magazine. What? Also, 51% of Lexus owners spend more than 30 minutes reading each issue of Lexus Magazine. What?

Soggy Pie

I very briefly met Wong Kar-wai earlier this week. He exuded cool and didn't take off his sunglasses; I was not disappointed.  Yesterday I saw My Blueberry Nights. It was awful -- actively, laughably bad. Oh well.  Maybe next year's effort will be better. 

What's So Amazing About Really Deep Thoughts

Yet the absence of imagination had / Itself to be imagined ... (Wallace Stevens)

For your consideration: Two articles (one from Mom) about making a science of observing the processes of consciousness. This first one is worth reading for Proust Was a Neuroscientist author Jonah Lehrer's earnest "surprise" at "how seriously all of these artists [Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein & co] took their art," (um, yeah); this second one for the "novelistic twist" (can't you see the film adaptation?) to the research sessions described at the end. There's a lot -- too much, really -- to be said on this subject. So I'll just say that sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words and close with two visual recommendations. Book: Graphic novelist Charles Ware's very cool depiction of the mind in the first thirteen years of the life of a character named Jordan W. Lint (included in the terrific new anthology The Book of Other People). Movie: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (don't be put off by the blurbiness). But that's just what I think.

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's ... Hanuman?

Two related stories about mythology-inspired comic books and cartoons in India come from my Mom; as a kid who grew up devouring classic Amar Chitra Katha titles, I have mixed feelings on some of these new trends (though I get that "It's absurd to be purist about one of pop culture's most pleasingly bastard and vulgar forms," as my former professor Sukhdev Sandhu puts it). This story from NPR features Indian animators at Virgin Comics who are riffing on Hindu mythological tales in their work. Though I don't think Virulents (in which a regenerating rakshasa is discovered by American troops in modern-day Afghanistan) is to my taste, I think it's good news that a country that has long prized (and profited from) rote memorization is seeing the growth of companies that encourage such imaginative originality. I have similar feelings about feature-films like "The Return of Hanuman," in which the title deity "is reborn as a boy who goes to school in khaki shorts, uses a computer, combats pollution and, most important, smashes the bad guys to pulp." Again, yay for creative hybridity (as in this fantastic Indianized Spider-Man comic -- reviewed by Sandhu -- starring one Pavitr Prabhakar in a spider-suit with a dhoti)! And yay for elements of an ancient culture being perpetuated in novel ways (that aren't grossly offensive). But there's also a lot to be said for simply passing on the timeless tales of Hindu lore -- in all their unrevised rich intricacy -- without necessarily trying to "update" them. (Call me old-fashioned? ... ) One way or another, with the Indian animation industry (now said to be worth $285 million) projected to boom to a worth of $1 billion by 2010 (according to the Washington Post), this story may have just started.

Losing Farther, Losing Faster

So, like lots of folks, early January finds me on something of a health food/exercise/weight loss kick. New York Sports Club's website has generated a series of slightly Spartan customized meal plans for me (eg, "snack: 20 small peanuts, 1 celery stalk") which I've been duly studying (though In Defense of Food looks like better reading material). In any case, I'm starting to suspect that I'm of Jonathan Lethem's ilk on dietary matters. "My tendency," Lethem says of his daily eating trajectory, "is to go from purity to decadence, like I'm reliving the fall of a great empire." Read his full chronicle of a week's meals -- hands down my favorite Grub Street "New York Diet" of all time -- in its entirety here. Watch out, Caligula!