Required Reading: “Essayists, Chefs, Mad Dogs”
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I'd read it for the title alone…
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As a letter writer myself, I approve! (via Laughing Squid)
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via Kottke.org
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via Curbed SF
Overheard Today: State of the American Educational System (in a nutshell)
Sitting at the new Blue Bottle Cafe (which is excellent, btw).
Teenage Girl #1: What is postmodernism?
Teenage Girl #2: It’s like Jackson Pole-Lock. Bizzarre shit. You know. Like Kafka.
Teenage Girl #1: No answer.
I was as speechless as her.
Only I would complain…
The wondrous thing about the Internet is, now that we can individualize and commodify our taste down to the level of genetic code, we can also find mutations that will only annoy us. Yes us.
Try it. The next time something really really bothers you, be rigorously honest and say "Would bother anyone else? Like, in the whole world?"
Case in point: 5 minutes ago, I was ranting that the Library of Congress only has webcasts (which have to watched in front of your computer) and not podcasts (which can be downloaded and watched at any time) of its fabulous events. And then I stopped and said "Would this annoy anyone on planet earth but me?"
Then dowsed my head in a bucket of water.
Try it. It’s quite sobering.
Banking on Douchery:
A bunch of people I knew in college ventured up I-95 after college and became bankers in New York. I wished them well and hope to hannah they didn’t end up like this.
I’m speechless. It’s like some dark corner of 1983 come back to life. I’ve read this book before. He takes her home and disembowels her in the shower right?
Elie Wiesel Attacked in a San Francisco Hotel:
I’d really like to write a bunch of posts about my time here in Los Angels which has been both lovely and transformative but this item caught my eye and bears comment.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports the following:
Elie Wiesel, the renowned Holocaust author and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was attacked and dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator last week, possibly by a Holocaust denier who claims to have stalked Wiesel for weeks, police said Friday.
Wiesel, 78, was at the Argent Hotel on Feb. 1 for an interfaith conference when he was confronted around 6:30 p.m. in an elevator by a man insisting that he wanted to interview the author, said police spokesman Sgt. Neville Gittens.
Wiesel said he would do the interview in the lobby of the Third Street hotel, but the man insisted on going to Wiesel’s room. The man then stopped the elevator at the sixth floor, dragged Wiesel out and tried to force him into a room on that floor.
“That’s when (Wiesel) started yelling,” Gittens said. The man fled, and Wiesel went down to the lobby and called police.
Wiesel was not injured. He decided to leave the conference on “Facing Violence: Justice, Religion and Conflict Resolution,” and police escorted him to the airport.
I’ve had a few hours to cool my blind fury. Speaking then wouldn’t have been the best expression of what was in my head as well as my heart and the ignorant psychotics who engage in this behavior wouldn’t understand it anyway. Therefore, let’s talk reason.
Let’s say you don’t like Elie Wiesel. Despite having surived Buchenwald, won a Nobel Peace Prize, authored more than 40 books and been called a “messenger to mankind,” he has his detractors. Professor Norman Finkelstein has accused Wiesel of profiteering from his experience as a Holocaust survivor, a claim not without merit, and Wiesel’s unwavering support for Israel is, at the very least, troubling. Let’s say you’re tired of hearing about the Holocaust or you’re one of the willful imbeciles who believes it never happend. Even if you’ve agreed with everything I just said…
Elie Wiesel is a 79 year old man. I draw the line at abusing children, the impaired and the elderly. Got a fight to pick? Chose someone who can fight back. If they can’t physically, take it to a public forum and beat them with your arguments.
Attacking an old man, even one with the stature of Elie Wiesel, is what cowards do: slimy, punk-ass, thuggish cowards. If this is the best the opposition can mount, Elie Wiesel and the rest of us who believe in acceptance and humanity, who believe as Wiesel has said that we walk towards the future “carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope”, then we have already won. We have won and feel sorry that you have wasted your lives not seeing it yet. (via Michelle Richmond)
SF: City of Self-Righteous Idiots:
One thing you don’t see much of in the tourist literature is than San Francisco has more self-righteousness per square foot than any place this side of the nearest graduate student seminar. I think it’s probably because the town is small geographically and has been a haven for the dispossessed throughout its history. Therefore everybody guards their piece of it like a toddler with the last cookie. Except in this case, the toddler is probably has a double masters degree in folklore and making an ass of himself while claiming to serving the interests of whatever marginal community they belong to. Put another way, I’d never seen an interest group for canine physical fitness until I arrived here. They’ve probably got a member on city council and are perennially aggreived by the lack of respect dog agility receives in this town.
Never been here? Exhibit A: A guy gets on a bus with an expired pass. Can’t ride the bus with an expired pass. In his indignation at this enforcement of the law (an unjust law!), he manages to turn the whole bus against him and get the cops involved. All over the $1.50 it would cost to ride the bus home.
San Francisco: Home of the Golden Gate Bridge, Mission Delores, and the mountain out of a molehill.
UCLA Police Taser Student:
Over at Consumating, I found this discussion of an incident at UCLA where a student was tasers for refusing to leave the library after refusing to show ID to campus cops. The Fark thread on the incident is just plain scary.
I posted about this sort of thing before so you know where I’m coming from. I’m getting damn tired of living in a country where any abuse of power can be justified in the name of our safety. If we have to taser 23 year-olds for public misbehavior then the terrorists, whomever they are, have already won.
Classical Music: With friends like these…
With friends like these, contemporary classical music performance is in big trouble. In an uninformed, whine titled “Come to the Aid of Music Journalism”, Robert P. Commanday manages to be as unhelpful as he is regressive…
Pick any city, look at its newspaper, and you’ll find attention to classical music diminished to the basic minimum. It will focus on the “big ticket” events — which, in the Bay Area, means the San Francisco Symphony, Opera, and Ballet, plus the most celebrated visiting artists. As is well-known to any person interested in classical music, such coverage just skims the surface.
Who’s responsible? Newspaper publishers and their editors who have a hand in setting policy and then executing it. What to do about this downgrading of classical coverage? Go to the editors and lay it on. If you’re representing a performing or presenting institution — say an orchestra or concert series — then get your board members to put on the pressure.
Mr. Commanday rattles on for a dozen more paragraphs without mentioning the Internet, blogging, The Long Tail and the decimation of arts programming in public schools. He ignores that we have raised a generation and a half, the older of which now assume leadership positions in local media, without adequate music education. In his universe, which begins and ends with daily newspaper coverage, not showing up on page D1 means your arts organizations doesn’t exist.
Mr. Commanday, is it not 1957 anymore. The world of media of media is fractured, individualistic, and mircofocused. Daily newspapers face the greatest challenge in several decades of how to be all things to all readers and relevent to them as singular entities. They are doing their best and have a long way to go. I promise you that none of them have the time or the inclination to listen to symphony board members (which are still almost uniformly white, upper class, and middle-aged) “put the pressure on” so the newspaper can devote expensive column inches to their interests. The symphony board member may have once been the prize plum for a newspapers and its advertising team. But that was back when Eisenhower ran things. That prize plum now packs his kids’ diapers in a messenger bag.
So instead of seeing newspapers as the cause of your troubles and the answer to your prayers, why notthink a little? Think about hyperlocal media like Yelp and the Gothamist chain. Think about classical music blogs. Think about innovative programming like partnering with other local arts organizations, having symphony happy hours and reimagining the classical music space as one of interaction instead of passive consumption.
Mr. Commanday, having this discussion through the eye of a needle is living in a dreamworld. Please release yourself from the tired old paradigm of classical music as something we should support and tranform it into something we want to support. No one owes you media coverage. How about instead demonstrating why you deserve it? (via Arts Journal)
Enron Unveiled:
And speaking of self-immolation, how about reading all of the Enron email between 1999-2002? (via Sam Felder).