Imports vs. Exports: Bring it On!

The "Indian Premier League," a brand new 44-day 59-match cricket extravaganza (and "one of the largest and most- promising new business opportunities in India in recent years," according to Bloomberg's Andy Mukherjee) is quickly gaining on "Barack Obama" in Google Trends rankings! This surely in part due to the controversy erupting around the IPL's decision to import cheerleaders -- like those of the Washington Redskins (who apparently, may not even have Indian work permits) -- to spice up the sidelines. "What the cheerleaders are doing during cricket matches is ten times more vulgar than what used to happen in dance bars of Mumbai," Nitin Gadkari, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Maharashtra told Reuters. (As for "what used to happen in dance bars of Mumbai," well, the BJP worked to ban it.) The counterpoint of course: "Our stars wear skimpy dresses in movies but nobody seems to protest. Why this double standards?" Why indeed? As the spectator interviewed in this Washington Post video puts it, "Sexuality and cricket is the way forward!"

Brevity is the Soul of Wit

Happy 444th Birthday, William Shakespeare!

From First Lady to Lady Macbeth

From an article in The Nation entitled "Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream":

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American Right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

Home of the Brave

This New Yorker article about the U.S's future role in global affairs and this New York Times article about retired military generals being recruited to spout Rumsfeld-friendly talking points on Iraq as network television "military analysts" ... well, read them.

Missing the Train

The Subway Crush site might be new, but the experience -- and documentation -- of sudden strong feelings among underground commuters isn't.  This passage from Subwayland by Randy Kennedy describes the work of a man named Neil Goldberg, who would wait on subway platforms with a Sony handheld video camera for the sole purpose of filming the facial expressions of MTA passengers who missed their train:

Most interesting and striking in some of the 17 hours of footage Mr. Goldberg has taken so far is the way that commuters briefly let down their subway masks, allow their faces to register real emotion and then, realizing where they are, quickly bring the masks back up again.

"It makes it almost hard for me to watch sometimes," Mr. Goldberg said in his studio, where he will eventually distill the hours of recorded faces into probably five minutes of pure disappointment.  "Somehow, it's almost sad."

Go Obama!

From my brother: Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Labor, is going to formally announce his endorsement of Barack Obama later today. "She's an old friend," Reich told New York magazine (on the subject of Hillary Clinton), "I've known her 40 years. I was absolutely dead set against getting into the whole endorsement thing. I've struggled with it. I've not wanted to do it. Out of loyalty to her, I just felt it would be inappropriate." What pushed Reich over the edge was the Clinton campaign's ad response to Obama's "small town" comments:

We have three terrible traditions that we've developed in American campaigns. One is outright meanness and negativity. The second is taking out of context something your opponent said, maybe inartfully, and blowing it up into something your opponent doesn't possibly believe and doesn't possibly represent. And third is a kind of tradition of distraction, of getting off the big subject with sideshows that have nothing to do with what matters. And these three aspects of the old politics I've seen growing in Hillary's campaign. And I've come to the point, after seeing those ads, where I can't in good conscience not say out loud what I believe about who should be president. Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. They're lending legitimacy to a Republican message that's wrong to begin with, and they harken back to the past 20 years of demagoguery on guns and religion. It's old politics at its worst — and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It's just so deeply cynical.

Art Major Mess

All art is quite useless. -- Oscar Wilde

Alright. It's icky, but (for reasons not entirely clear to me), I feel I have the duty to post on Yale student Aliza Shvarts and her senior art project. Shvarts' project was billed as a provocative exploration of the relationship between art and the human body featuring layers of plastic sheeting smeared with the blood from a series of self-induced miscarriages. Shvarts said she filmed these miscarriages over a 9-month period when she alternately inseminated herself and took over-the-counter abortifacient drugs, and that she planned to project the footage onto the plastic sheeting. "Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it," she told the Yale Daily News, but it's not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone." Anyway, some scandalized parties came knocking, and the project was ousted as "creative fiction." Grossed out yet? Slate's Dana Stevens, who knows a thing or two about abortion and all along suspected that this was a scam, has assessed things nicely:

Hoax or not, I guess Shvarts’ installation is an accomplishment by some negative measure: In a single attention-getting move, she’s managed to make the pro-choice movement, feminism, performance art, and Yale all look bad at the same time ... Was Shvarts' point simply to trick people into being horrified that a young woman might really have done this to herself (and, depending on your point of view about abortion, ended the lives of several incipient human beings in the process). And if so, was her piece a success?

I suspect Shvarts just thought she could get away with pretending she had those abortions in the name of art, but if the deception was part of the project itself I'm a little more intrigued -- her work then becomes more like a highly-effective booby trap for reactionaries on both sides of the issue than just a tasteless and hollow fake-out.

High Five!

Another Dec alum reminded me that today is National High Five Day, a glorious holiday that traces its humble origins to UVa circa 2002 (and more specifically, this manifesto). High five! If you're stuck at a desk and aren't feeling the fingers-and-palm connection, I recommend this video from 2005 (which admittedly isn't actually all that funny but still really made me laugh).

That Model First Lady

This week Hillary Frey advocates for Carla Bruni as a "useful" and "modern" "model of feminism, and femininity." I'm not convinced. Yes, she looks great naked; yes, she's savvy and sophisticated enough to seduce politicians and rockstars alike. But what about the part where Bruni moves in with her French writer lover then goes on to have an affair -- and a child -- with his already-married son? She may be a bold icon of style, but Bruni's not exactly raising the bar for womankind with her accomplishments. As former French Vogue editor-in-chief Joan Juliet Buck says:

Versailles was conceived as a magnificent showroom for French goods, because around 1678, Colbert said to Louis XIV: We have to prove the French do things better than anybody. In 2008, at last, a model is married to the president, which is great PR for the further global extension of French luxury brands.

Or, as NYU European Studies professor Tony Judt puts it, Bruni is a "neat encapsulation of [Sarkozy's] presidency: eye-catching, over-compersatory and more than a little lacking in taste."

Pamela Anderson Reads! Unmarketable!

When my buddy Jyothi emailed me this picture of Pamela Anderson reading Unmarketable -- a New Press title by Anne Elizabeth Moore (not your average "beach read," y'know?) -- I was quite amused.  Of course I asked, can I stick it on my blog? She gave me a "YES please do!" but before I could get around to it, someone else posted about it (and took the high road):

Even when Pam Anderson, whose career has traded on the “ditzy blond” stereotype, decides to do something worthwhile with her time — say, for example, digging into an intellectually rigorous exploration of the commercial infiltration and co-optation of marketing into nearly every aspect of independent culture, as Unmarketable offers — entertainment writers and blog readers still relate to her as if she should never try to be anything more than a staple for low-brow punchlines peddled by Comedy Central boys. Let Pammy read and lay off the slut jokes, why don’tcha?

May Wah Healthy Vegetarian Food

I've recently been cooking more, and in the course of restocking the fridge this weekend, I discovered that the li'l vegetarian "mock meat" store around the corner, May Wah Healthy Vegetarian Food has its own adorable li'l blog. Though some of May Wah's products are a li'l daunting, I'm a total fan of this place, so it was nice to learn that not only was it the first of its kind (over a decade ago), but that it's also -- as the largest vegetarian distributor in New York -- probably unlikely to go out of business any time soon. Good news for me!

DeLorean Machine

If you're going to own a car in (mid-town) Manhattan, it might as well be one of these.

Plus! You're Fat! Feed Him Mints!

From Jezebel (click for details, there's a lot to laugh at). 

Woof

I just realized that this blog has been alive for a full three months.

Loyalty Vexed

The New York Observer has had an awful lot of articles about Facebook lately. Too many. Boring! Anyway, this week's NYO Facebook coverage consists of a little rant about the (admittedly annoying and, yes -- like most Facebook features -- "creepy. And, in fact, invasive") new "People You May Know" feature. Though the piece says little of note, it manages to end with a great quote on why "People You May Know" is so insidious:

Its infernal machine logic taunts you with people who could, theoretically, be your friends—but aren’t. Your page once served to document the extent of your social support network. Now it advertises the people you never connected to—the friends you don’t have.

Portrait of a Lady

File under: Black Sheep Alumni. Harvard's Ted Kaczynski can claim he was traumatized by psychological research conducted on him as an undergraduate, and sometime Stanford student Ted Bundy can blame heartbreak, but (according to HoosOnline), UVa's eminently industrious Temeka Rachelle Lewis -- the former English major responsible for scheduling "dates" between Emperor's Club VIP clients and employees -- has only Madison House volunteer experience (and all those sordid literary classics) to blame. "She's just too clean," Lewis's stupefied uncle told the Daily News when he learned of her line of work. "Even when she does the dishes, she puts on gloves. It just don't make any sense." But the UVa English Department website's careers page tells it like it is:

The notion that English majors are unprepared for interesting, productive, lucrative employment is an unfortunate, unfounded myth.

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. 

Unaccustomed Earth

She's got a new book out! This from Slate (via my brother):

In her fiction, learning "to not build walls around ourselves" doesn't begin to cover the challenges that await her characters. They are wanderers navigating elusive borders, bumping up against barriers and testing ties, uneasily wondering if they will hold or not. That doesn't prevent Lahiri—or Hema and Kaushik, or plenty of others in these impressive stories—from finding "kinship and beauty in unexpected places." But it inspires a perpetual vigilance and an awareness that, even as the globe shrinks, vast distances will never disappear.

Garfield Silenced

Today I came across this new variation on a classic exercise.

The Anecdote File

From the Memphis Commercial Appeal:

It is a small, green cardboard box, about the size of shoebox, its corners frayed and lid tattered. The cursive marker scribble on top is fading, and doesn't mean anything unless you know the box's provenance: "Mss 178," it says. "Box 51a. Anecdote file." The box's home is on the fourth floor of the University of Memphis' library, in special collections, among a trove of items collected by the Memphis Search for Meaning Committee following the April 4, 1968, assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Inside the box are notecards, numbered 1 to 347, and on them are typed, according to the archive's notes, "a collection of comments, overheard remarks, 'sick jokes,' eyewitness reports of incidents and first-person accounts of experiences that occurred before, during or soon after the period we are documenting."

Brooklyn Flea

I'm excited to check this out this weekend. 

It's Not Easy Being Green

Vowing to make New York City the center of the scientific universe — as it is for commerce, art and expensive dining — a panel of university presidents, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein of New York, the actor Alan Alda, the Columbia physicist Brian Greene and a Muppet announced plans on Wednesday for a World Science Festival to be held here at the end of May.

That's from the lead of The New York Times story about the late May event. The Muppet Newsflash confirms that the Muppet present at the announcement was Dr. Bunsen Honeydrew, pictured above. Unfortunately Dr. Honeydrew is missing from the list of the festival's speakers. Those included in the line-up: Francis Collins, Ira Flatow, and Oliver Sacks (but not Kermit). Dr. Greene, whose last book is on string theory -- and who is among the festival's speakers -- told the Times that the festival will not be about "fun" science. "This is the real thing," he said. (Soon after, Dr. Greene was sprayed with a can of silly string by Dr. Honeydrew).

Lady Liberty

Outside Liberty Income Tax in Cleveland, Ohio yesterday.  When my brother saw this shot he was reminded of this Statue of Liberation in Memphis, which tells a whole other story.

Cumpleaños Feliz

So life has its novelistic side, does it? Indeed it does! -- Mario Vargas Llosa

Mothers are great. Mine reminded me this morning that today is Mario Vargas Llosa's birthday.

Here's a pretty good interview with him and here's a better one.

Here are his observations on producing television.

To the left is a poster from his 1990 bid for president. Doesn't that font look like Helvetica?

A Wal-Mart Free Zone

As per the New York Sun, "ordinary New Yorkers" are being unfairly "deprived" of Wal-Mart and its every day low prices because the New York City Council is in "thrall to labor unions."  Pointing to a story about volunteers driving senior citizens from the Bronx's Highbridge Center to a Wal-Mart an hour outside the city, the Sun complains, "In other words, the same City Council that is preventing Wal-Mart from opening a store in New York City is using taxpayer money to pay a non-profit group in the Bronx to drive senior citizens an hour outside New York to shop at Wal-Mart." Hmmm.  Sounds like an okay arrangement to me. But this cool li'l video (via BoingBoing) makes it seem like just a matter of time before the Sun sees a Wal-Mart in the city anyway. 

Le Loup at Union Hall

The New York Times ("This seven-piece from Washington loves body-quaking, tribal rhythms as much as banjos and simple keyboard hooks, and keeps full catharsis just out of reach") and Gothamist had both flagged last night's performance by Le Loup and the Ruby Suns at Union Hall (as did others), so I was pretty sure that some sort of review would be online somewhere in blogville today. Ta da! A thorough report I can endorse.  (As some music critic once put it, "One nice thing about the Internet is that you don’t need to do all of your own thinking anymore." In my defense, when it comes to Le Loup, I already know what I think, and am a little wary of adding to the alleged din of erm,"faux omniscience re: a cultural moment" or something.)  Whatever, it was a great show!

Go Obama!

From George Packer, writing in this week's New Yorker:

Obama’s ability to contemplate the contradictions in Americans of all colors without going mad—to be made stronger by them—accounts for his power as a politician. He also pays the electorate the supreme compliment of assuming that it, too, can appreciate complexity. ... But it was Nixon’s Checkers speech, with its cheesy confession that he owed his parents thirty-five hundred dollars with interest (and loved America), that carried the day in 1952, and has more or less defined successful campaign rhetoric ever since. It isn’t clear that Obama’s elevated dialogue last week is in the long-term interest of his campaign. ... Obama is a black candidate who can tell Americans of all races to move beyond race. As such, he is uniquely positioned to put an end to this era, and uniquely vulnerable to becoming its latest victim.

Happy Dyngus Day

Don't forget your bucket of water and willow switch!

For Love and Money

Alright! Wait no more! This month's issue of the Boston Review is online! Hooray!

Granny Peace Brigade

An impressive collection of little old ladies gathered in Times Square -- in the rain -- this afternoon to knit stump socks for amputee soldiers and protest the Iraq war. I particularly liked this granny (pictured here in the purple poncho) who will be celebrating her 89th birthday in April:

Molly Klopot, 88, who was also arrested in 2005, addressed the group, saying, “The grannies have a special responsibility to say, ‘Get off your fannies and get on the street and stop this thing.’”

The Worst Poem Ever

Further proof that John Updike is a dirty old man (just in case you still needed convincing): This "brutally dismissive" review of The Best Erotic Poems in The New York Times (via Begley the Bookie) calls Updike's poem "Fellatio," "perhaps the worst poem ever written on any subject" -- which, for a writer known for his "seeming inability to write badly" is really quite a feat. Begley goes on to cite the poem in its entirety, so I won't. If you're curious and need a laugh, click here! If you'd prefer to soberly mourn the collapse of literature and the descent of literary studies into "trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy," click here instead.

Triple Canopy

Not long ago a friend asked me if I knew of any online literary magazines with innovative web design. This is a toughie -- in my experience, literary geekiness and web-programming geekiness seem to be the domains of ... well, different kinds of geeks, I suppose. However, once in a while a site like Triple Canopy pops up to testify that when geeks of different species do join forces, the result is formidable ...

Midtown is a Jungle

I have been wanting to see the elephants march through midtown ever since I moved to New York, but every year something stops me. This year is no different. Here is what I am missing:

The ribbons around their ears secure the medallions emblazoned with the circus logos on their foreheads. One year they wore red and white “I Love New York” skirts.

I'm Just Sayin'

If you try to go buy this month's Boston Review at one of these upstanding establishments, you will learn that it won't be in stock til March 29 ... save your pocket money and stay tuned, friends! 

Friday Pi Day

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692346034861045432664821339360726024914127372458700660631558817488152092096282925409171536436789259036001133053054882046652138414695194151160943305727036575959195309218611738193261179310511854807446237996274956735188575272489122793818301194912983367336244065664308602139494639522473719070217986094370277053921717629317675238467481846766940513200056812714526356082778577134275778960917363717872146844090122495343014654958537105079227968925892354201995611212902196086403441815981362977477130996051870721134999999837etc.

Eliot Imagined

My brother sent me this great read from The Washington Post in which Richard Russo begins to imagine the rich story beyond the basic Spitzer plotline:

I cannot speak for the real Eliot, but some part of my Eliot has known all along he's no saint, that he's not anybody's best hope, not even his own. He knows this even as some other part of him believes what people are telling him because, of course, he wants to. This has been his true conflict all along, and finally, explosively, it's been resolved.

Fresh, Delicious, and Kosher

From New York magazine: Help find this falafel joint (formerly Chickpea) a new name! The prize is $3,000 -- which would get you 504 kosher hummus and falafel plates! Or, like 1,538 pieces of kosher baklawa! Or an hour ... nevermind.

That Skeevy Girls Gone Wild Guy

When the Girls Gone Wild kingpin heads for Florida, you know spring time is on its way. The AP is reporting that Joe Francis (that's him in the brown t-shirt on the right -- not to be confused with this other guy) has made his way to the hotbed of spring break scandal that is Panama City, Florida, to take care of some legal business this week. The Panama City News Herald says Francis is expected to enter a plea tomorrow. After reading this thoroughly creepy LA Times story from a few years back (recommended to me by Genevieve), I say, lock 'em up!

Gubernotorious

A few things you might not have known about Eliot Spiter (from The New Yorker's December profile):

He wears only white button-down shirts, which he buys at Brooks Brothers. He bought a blue one once: “It was unnerving. Never wore it.” He gets up at five in the morning to jog; he’s known for it, and wants you to know it, but if it’s a pose it’s a hard-earned one. His first thought upon waking each day, he says, is a wish for two more hours’ sleep.

A few things you might not have known about the Emperors' Club (from Slate's Josh Levin):

For the john who just can't make up his mind, Emperors' Club's site map lists a buffet of options. Along with the requisites—"millionaire dating," "billionaire dating," "billionaire introductions"—there's a healthy supply of nonsexual fare, including private yacht charters and "authentic art for purchase." The site's contemporary art page claims that Emperors' Club represents "artists of superior mastery," linking to dedicated pages for Andrew Wyeth and Jeff Koons. Emperors' Club is a model of efficient Web design: The site's artist portfolios have the exact same layout as the prostitute portfolios.

And the observation that says it all (right up there with former New York City Mayor Ed Koch's assessment that "there's a screw loose"), from Douglas Muzzio of Baruch College in The New York Times:

Here’s a guy who won an overwhelming electoral landslide and has inflicted fatal wounds on himself publicly and privately. I’m not a psychologist, but this is just utterly, completely reckless.

Welcome to the Working Week

I'm finally reading Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, and it's pretty relentlessly hilarious. For example, though this isn't exactly how I feel about going back to work on a Monday, I have to say it makes a lot of sense:

There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to doing the laundry was enough to make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within arm's length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we would make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.

Swiffer. Citibank. Eva Longoria.

You know, I don't even really like Hari Kunzru. But his story in this week's New Yorker is kind of brilliant. Let me qualify that: It isn't "luminous" and it isn't "prescient," and it doesn't even have a satisfying ending, but reading it definitely made me queasy (ala this classic column from Underminer Mike Albo*). Anyway, a quick taste of "Raj, Bohemian":

I was a ghost, floating through a world of moving signage, people carrying shopping bags, immigrants handing out flyers for bars and language schools.  I went into a department store, dazzled by chrome and glass and brushed steel.  It was a palace of mirrors, zombie heaven.  Girls at the makeup counter, dressed like slutty pharmacists.  Rich men with ski tans fingering cashmere sweaters.  In the housewares department was a display cabinet of knives, gleaming with surgical allure. I bought the largest and headed back up the escalator to the teeming street.

*Mike Albo also once observed that "adulthood basically involves complex and enervating tasks like Internet dating, shopping for jeans, trying to remember your 15 various log-on codes and passwords, and deciphering your Verizon bill." This is something I contemplate nearly every time I misremember a log-on code or password.

Let's Be Honest, the Weather Helped

I went to the MoMA today to check out the "Color Chart" exhibition (running through May 12). Pictured: Part of Walid Raad's "Let's Be Honest, the Weather Helped," which made more of an impression on me than anything else on display. Raad explains his work this way:

Like many around me in Beirut in the late 1970s, I collected bullets and shrapnel.  I would run out to the streets after a night or day of shelling to remove them from walls cars and trees.  I kept detailed notes of where I found every bullet and photographed the sites of my findings, covering the holds with dots that corresponded to the bullet's diameter and the mesmerizing hues I found on the bullet's tips. It took me ten years to realize that ammunition manufacturers follow distinct color codes to mark and identify their cartridges and shells.  It also took me another ten years to realize that my notebooks in part catalogue seventeen countries and organizations that continue to supply the various militias and armies fighting in Lebanon: Belgium, China, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Libya, NATO, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, the USA, the UK, and Venezuela. 

Nothing to Unmask

"I like that foolishness is one of your most frequent tags," a loyal reader tells me (to date: thirteen posts). A few words on foolishness from Milan Kundera in The Curtain:

Just what is foolishness? Reason is capable of unmasking the evil hiding treacherously behind a fine lie.  But faced with foolishness, reason is powerless.  There is nothing to unmask. Foolishness does not wear a mask.  It is simply there, innocent.  Sincere.  Naked.  And indefinable.

Go Obama!

Because there's no such thing as too much weird feel-good Obama detritus. Or too many Ben and Jerry's flavors. Or too many bad puns! Pictured: The winner of Slate's Barack Obama ice cream flavor contest (graphic by Audience of Two).  Yes, Pecan!  (Much better than Conan O'Brien's suggested "Baracky Road.")  Tiramisuperdelegate, anyone?

Life is Very Short

This picture (from today's obit of Norman Smith in The New York Times) kind of makes me wish I were a pilot-turned sound engineer. It also kind of makes me wish my name were Norman.

Different Strokes

"Different strokes for different folks." That's the favorite proverb of paremiologist Wolfgang Mieder, who is quite literally a "proverbial scholar" -- someone who studies proverbs. "I would argue it had to grow on American ground, because it doesn't tell you what to do. It says, 'Accept the differences in people,' " Mieder says. "I think it's a truly liberating proverb." Mieder thinks the expression took popularity in the sixties with Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People" -- which I'm embarrassed to say, I recognize primarily as a Toyota jingle (but which is really so much more)! Thanks for sending the article, Mom.

No, no, no

Charlotte Allen, please go away! Some miserable excerpts from her Washington Post discussion of her miserable op-ed below:

Washington: Why did you write this piece?

Charlotte Allen: Totally for fun.

West Lafayette, Ind.: Your idea of fun is to paint a (horribly inaccurate) picture of your sex as stupid?

Charlotte Allen: How about an accurate picture?

Make it stop!

Everything is So Important

My sister-in-law sent me this. Ah, New Yorkers:

So I spent most of the week traveling, first to Philadelphia and then to Chicago. The trips were purely business: I had very little time outside of my hotel room or the shiny office facilities to which we shuffled back and forth to walk around or whatever. (Which is not really that big a deal, I've been to both places before. Plus Chicago was fucking cold.) Anyway, it occurred to me as I watched folks in both cities going to and from work etc. that part of the reason I'm not fit to be anywhere else but New York has something to do with the pace. I mean, the people elsewhere are doing the same things I'm doing: waking up hungover, dealing with soul-crushingly quotidian tasks like shaving and taking vitamins and smoking and sitting under fluorescent lights for nine hours until they can go home, etc. But we do it at a much faster speed here, because everything is so important. I think what's so depressing about Real America is when you look at what you do at half-speed you realize, holy shit, who gives a fuck? I'd rather be kept in my cocoon of intensity, where it seems like all the ridiculous stuff I'm bouncing around each day actually, you know, matters. Also, people are much fatter there.

A Nauseous Bag

The way I see it, the only real reason to bother reading drivel like Charlotte Allen's column in Sunday's Washington Post is for the sheer satisfaction of agreeing with the flood of irate responses it provokes. My favorite such response (from the Huffington Post):

No doubt many of you have had a hundred or so of your friends and colleagues pass along the stunningly inane article written by Charlotte Allen in today's Washington Post, in which she drags out each and every one of her own gender-identity insecurities like Hummel figurines and proceeds to use them as an audience for an embarrassing session of strenuous self-lovemaking. The resulting piece is a nauseous bag, unflinching in it's cliched ridiculousness, that reads like a bad prank.

Oh The Things You Will See!

This past weekend marked the birthday of Dr. Seuss, who was writing ad copy ("Standard Oil Company hired him to create monsters that live in the car, and he created the Moto-raspus, the Moto-munchus, and the Karbo-nockus") until 1937, when he published the book that would launch his career: And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street. Though Theodor Geisel's Mulberry Street is in Massachusetts, the strange sights of New York's own Mulberry Street have likewise provided considerable creative inspiration to many -- as evidenced by Mulberry Street, the movie, in which virulent rats turn people into zombies with their bites (Variety definitively named it "a cut above most zero-budget horrors"). I saw it at the Tribeca Film Festival last May, and I can assure you it delivers all the horror it promises. Out on DVD mid-March!