Losing my religion

Busted! Martha and Co. strolling away from the knishery on Thanksgiving afternoon. And, no, she doesn’t have the power to melt faces. I did that…

I like to flatter myself that I’m a savvy little rat — after all, I was a mere stripling when I gave God himself the heave ho — no small accomplishment in a house full of Irish Catholics. And, yet, I am occasionally surprisingly susceptible to matters of faith in more prosaic matters. Like most people, I tend to believe what I’m told — even by people I don’t personally know, at all. Especially when they live in my television.

Artist’s rendering.

I had my faith thrown in my face on Thanksgiving Day. I stayed in the city this year and my friend Frank and I made plans to see a movie and eat Chinese. Around four in the afternoon I made my way to the Sunshine cinema on the Lower East Side and, arriving ahead of my friend, decided to stop into Yonah Shimmel’s Knishery next door to the theater to get a cup of borscht. I walked into the small restaurant and was immediately met with the image of Martha Stewart sitting at a table with her daughter Alexis and some guy. It was surprising enough seeing her in such a place but seeing her there at dinner time on Thanksgiving Day was nothing less than stunning. It was like running into Santa Claus at the movies on Christmas Eve. My first impulse was to whip out my camera and document it but thought better of pissing her off (she has done time in the slammer, after all). So I quietly paid for my soup and posted myself outside the restaurant where I snapped the shot of her walking away that appears above.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was walking down Hudson Street, past the magazine store that’s between 12th and Jane, and was literally stopped in my tracks by espying, out of the corner of my little eye, the magazine cover depicted above in the window of the store. Though a fruitcake of longstanding, I am not particularly susceptible to many of the commonplace obsessions of my tribe — including fashion and supermodels — with one notable exception. Even an atheistic rat bows before an icon as formidable as Linda Evangelista. The defining quality of an idol is pure inviolable existence by regard and Evangelista, her face perfect and perfectly plastic, commands our attention — it is impossible to be near her image and not notice it.

Click to zoom

And this cover image is a minor miracle. For its annual art issue, W Magazine asked art world wiseguy, Maurizio Cattelan to use Evangelista as his canvas for a photo spread. Many of the images he made — including one of her as the Madonna — are visually fun and more or less interesting (if a bit obvious). But the cover shot is a tour de force. In one shot, taken outside NYU in Washington Square, Cattelan distills the world of the day into one hilarious snarky frame. A soldier, perhaps home from Iraq, walks past a black Obama stand-in and, in the middle of it all, a distraught socialite stares vacantly into the distance and silently holds her plaint/protest. By putting such a blatantly sarcastic and ironic tableau on its cover, Cattelan reminds us — in the midst of a collapsed economy — of the essentially elitist, detached and mocking nature of fashion. In the picture, Evangelista wears $1.5 million in real diamonds… and they’re merely decoration. Brilliant. Bravo to Cattelan and the ballsy W editors.

One of the joys of adulthood is inventing playful ways of masking vices as virtues, for example: I tell myself that I can avoid going to the gym (again) by taking a very long walk – it’s more mentally stimulating and better for my heart to boot! The fact that the very long walk will terminate at my favorite restaurant in Chinatown, where I will consume 10x the calories that I burned walking – see, that’s the playful part. Here’s another example: I crave pancakes like Kirstie Alley craves… well, pancakes, probably. Steaming hot buttermilk pancakes soaked in butter and real maple syrup is a simply perfect food – but one I shouldn’t indulge too often. Or should I? I happen to live in a city with 34 thousand restaurants – many of which serve breakfast. I also happen to have a blog (…see where this is going?) It is my responsibility to my loyal readers – nay, my duty –  to hunt down the best pancakes in New York City, eat them and report on it here. And so I shall.

The first stop on my flapjack odyssey took me to Pershing Square – an odd little venue wedged into the underside of a trestle outside the main entrance of Grand Central Station. On the strength of another blogger’s glowing revue on one of the foodie blogs, which referred to the pancakes at Pershing Square as “the best” in the city, I forded a river of tourists one early Sunday morning to take a window seat and sample what they had to offer.

Read the rest of this entry »

I made a pilgrimage this afternoon to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue to see something special: a draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand. For a moment I resisted the impulse to go, arguing with myself over the value of totems when what really matters are the ideas, not the artifacts, blah blah blah. Thankfully I lost that argument with myself. Totems and artifacts are important – they bind us to the particulars of abstract ideas and history; they allow us to imaginatively jump across the expanse of time and connect directly with the humanity of our ancestors. They help remind us that history, of even the most momentous variety, is made by people.

The documents, two sheets of paper or perhaps parchment, filled on both sides with Jefferson’s incredibly compact handwriting, were amazing to observe. Unfortunately these were not early drafts – there were no scratch outs or arrows indicating where sections should be moved. That would have been wonderful to see, a window into his mind as a writer, but what we have is invaluable. This draft, prepared by Jefferson for handoff to the Continental Congress, contains the famous condemnation of slavery that was later excised in order to guarantee sign off by some of the Southern states.

The way the documents were presented – standing up in glass cases that allowed viewers to read them from a distance of about 12 inches – one could imagine peering over Jefferson’s shoulder as he took painstaking care to prepare a flawless copy. There were things that were amusing and touching about the way he prepared the document. Though a draft, he took care to embellish the manuscript by hand drawing the kind of large type a printer would use to call out “United States of America”. He clearly wanted to convey the importance of what he was doing.

I spent awhile pouring over the papers, noting the particular style of his handwriting – the way he made his d’s and his t’s, how he used punctuation and, I admit, trying in vain to see of I could catch him using a semi-colon incorrectly (I could not). It was great fun. But what struck me as more moving than witnessing the document itself was observing a grandfather and his grandson (pictured above) discussing it and what it meant. As the older man recited the well known chronology of American independence the young man stared intently at the handwritten words on the page. Watching them I remembered the first rush of recognition I experienced when, as a teenager, it dawned on me for the first time that all the history I’d been taught in school, all the characters whose images and names were carved into stone pediments – the country itself – was the invention of men and women of flesh and blood, frail and courageous and imperfect and full of hope. When that moment of recognition comes it’s a wonderful thing.

News of Michael Jackson’s death came as a shock. But then… not really. I remember having conversations with a friend years ago, before Jackson’s life completely unraveled in a frenzy of tabloid headlines, about how he would manage impending old age. It was unimaginable that a man so in love with his own youth and talent could possibly endure the challenges of physical and mental decline that were inevitable. He would either become even more eccentric than he had already been – hole himself up like Howard Hughes and trade his public fame for lingering mystery – or he would die, perhaps by his own hand. There didn’t seem any other options for this tragic and enigmatic creature. So the shock was more of the nature of “oh… now.”

Like many, I was a fan who lost the faith and left the fold as his behavior and appearance became ever more bizarre. It was painful to watch someone who had touched us with an extraordinary talent drifting into apparent madness and, perhaps, criminality. So I was startled – and grateful – to hear something this evening during the first rush of memorials on the news that made me rethink what I thought I knew about him. None other than stalwart Sue Simmons – a blowsy fixture of local TV news in New York City – speaking unscripted about Jackson said (I’m paraphrasing), “he tried to become a character – neither black nor white, male nor female, young nor old – that would appeal to all people, who he hoped would follow him as he tried to make the world a better place.” I had never heard this before and it made him make sense for the first time. More than that, it made him seem almost tragically heroic. But not a hero. Any grandiose motivations pale into delusion when we consider the bad things he may have done. Sadly, that will be his epitaph as much as his music.

Ever since the economy started to tank there’s been a lot of blather online about whether the so-called Web 2.0 era is coming to an end. To the extent that “Web 2.0” is defined as a business model that relies on user-generated content to drive high-margin profits the answer is clearly “no” – all one has to do is look at the burgeoning growth of Facebook and Twitter to see there is still gold left in them ‘thar hills (though, in fact, neither Facebook nor Twitter have figured out yet how to mine that gold…). The poster child for successful Web 2.0 business is probably craigslist (they prefer the lower case c don’t you know). Last year CNet published [estimates] that the 30 person company generated $80 million in revenue – which works out to an astonishing $2.7 million per employee – and could well double that amount this year. Or maybe not. That estimate was made before craigslist came under scrutiny by various attorneys general and the dreaded mainstream media for their lax oversight of some of the shadier content on their site(s).

Watching the initial [response] of craigslist owner Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster to the shitstorm that erupted following the arrest of the “Craigslist Killer" (who used the site’s prostitution ads to connect with his victims) was remarkable. Cloistered away in their little Silicon Valley bubble they clearly hadn’t a clue about how to manage the scrutiny of meatspace media and ambitious law enforcement officials looking to score. At first they refused flatly to make changes to the way they did business, falling back on the Web 2.0 mantra that the craigslist community would police itself (after all, users provide the content for free, why shouldn’t they also provide the editing for free?). Then, when it became clear that Newmark & Co. were heading to court and maybe to jail on fraud charges, they acquiesced and agreed to change the way they manage listings for adult services – including hiring additional staff to screen out illegal material.

But at least one AG is not satisfied and has threatened to initiate criminal action against craigslist if they don’t remove even more objectionable material from their site by this Friday. Today, Buckmaster [responded] to the Attorney General of South Carolina in a blog post (of course) and just when I thought they couldn’t be more clueless about how to handle this PR disaster he surprised me. Instead of doing what any mature company would do in the face of aggressive policing (think Microsoft and the European Commission…), i.e., aiming to get the moral high ground by swiftly agreeing to meet or exceed demands for cleaning up their sites, Buckmaster demands an apology from the Attorney General, challenges the AG to prosecute South Carolina newspapers that also run off-color ads (and suggesting that he won’t because of cynical self-interest) and offers what I’ll call the “me-too” defense: craigslist shouldn’t be singled out for abetting indecency because all the other kids in the playground are doing it too! The PR trainwreck thunders on.

Sensing that this has the potential to tame the Web 2.0 golden goose that drives so much revenue with so little managerial oversight and cost, some of the New Media machers are weighing in with support: Mike Arrington at [TechCrunch] urges Buckmaster to “Stand firm. Don’t back down. In fact, just turn off the South Carolina site entirely and ban IPs from that state. Forever. And if they press criminal charges, fight it with everything you have.” Then, with a little less bravado, “And if you do end up in jail, don’t worry. I promise to visit at least once a month, even though it will be in South Carolina.”

New Media gadfly Jeff Jarvis takes time out from dancing on the graves of newspaper journalists to [offer], “And so, once again, the internet becomes a threat to the control and power of an elite and they are exploiting craiglist – and the murderer who used it – to reassert their control. But it has the marks of a witchhunt.” Jarvis doesn’t seem to get that the “elite” is law enforcement and the issue is violations of local decency laws. Minor matter.

Perhaps one of Buckmaster’s friends (does he have friends?) could suggest that he take some of that huge profit he makes from the site and hire a decent flack. And a lawyer.

© Paramount Pictures

"Yo, Dad, can I borrow the keys to the Enterprise?" Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Kirk (Chris Pine) aim to fill some big shoes.

At one point during the new Star Trek movie it occurred to me that perhaps the most amazing thing about it was the fact that I was seeing it at all. Forty years after the original TV series went off the air and thirty years after the first film version was released here I was again watching the redoubtable starship Enterprise fly across another screen. It was interesting, though, to note how the starship was represented here compared to its first big screen appearance back in 1979. Back then, before Hollywood had hit on the formula for milking a property to death, it had taken ten years to sort out the production path for the theatrical version. When it finally appeared it was practically a religious experience for faithful fans who had invested so much in the characters and ideas from the series. One of their rewards came in their first view of the Enterprise after the ten year drought: director Robert Wise spent a full five minutes of screen time displaying the new ship, the camera caressing every detail of the model starship with clear fetishistic delight. In the new film by director JJ Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman there is no such doting on the venerable spaceship; views of the Enterprise are for the most part reduced to establishing shots taken from a great distance in space or extreme close ups of firing weapons. Similarly, internal shots are restricted to scenes filmed on a stark overlit bridge or brief scenes in an engineering section that consists oddly of industrial-looking hydraulic tubes and steel scaffolding. The Enterprise, itself a major presence throughout the Star Trek saga, is here relegated to mere backdrop, a somewhat haphazardly designed set upon which the interpersonal dramas of the main characters play out.

I think that’s significant because it indicates where the priorities for the film makers lie and what they do and don’t understand about a cultural inheritance of which they are the latest custodians.

Read the rest of this entry »