The Pyrotechnic Imagination

Arthur Lubow has a nice piece on Cai Guo-Qiang in the Sunday NYTimes Magazine.

For those that don't know, my blogger avatar is from Cai's piece Inopportune: Stage One when it was at MassMOCA.

It looks like you're thinking

I caught another great Kinkenborg piece on the road about e-mail, sms and instant messaging.

So why does I.M. seem so radical? I think it's the slight delay built into the system -- the pause when the software indicates that the other person is typing. On the telephone, that would sound like the awkwardness of dead air. In I.M., it sounds like thinking, and anything that can make the chatter of two people typing over each other sound like thinking is incredible.

From Wiring the Frog, or Personal Tales From the Electronic Present, 16 August 2007.

Hope Larson: The Escape Artist

The Times continues to feed my psyche. This time it's having Hope Larson whose Gray Horses enchanted me earlier this year. She's got a little strip on finding Elizabeth (Smith, nee Bond) Custance's grave in Nova Scotia. She was the estranged wife of Henry More Smith, one of Canada's most notorious con men. Larson is also the partner of Bryan Lee O'Malley whose Scott Pilgrim series is pure pop fun.

Astroland: A Night Over the Town

I've been to Coney Island three times this summer and gothamists seem universally nostalgic as Astroland and the Boardwalk will change with a huge redevelopment plan. So it was with particular glee I read constantly wonderful and usually rural Verlyn Klinkenborg's City Life piece today.

In particular:

If only more of life were as obvious as the Cyclone! What if every huge mistake felt as ineluctable as the moment when the gears mesh and the cogs cog and you feel those coaster cars lurch upward out of the station?

What if the pace of life always outpaced every dread and every dread contained so much secret pleasure? What if every day made your heart rise and your stomach sink and your head rattle, and the cost of doing it all over again was two bucks less than the cost of the original ride?

Here's to doing the good stuff over again, with a two dollar discount.

A Night Out With Dean and Britta at Heathers

Heather's on 13th is where we have 78 RPM Sunday's. It's a nice time listening to records, with the kids running around, Heather is a great host, and very conscientious of her neighbors. Still, since opening Heather has struggled with her neighbors who don't seem to want her no matter how quiet her patrons are. So it was with delight I read in the Style section about Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips grabbing a drink there:

The quartet walked up to Heathers, a bar on 13th Street. As they stood outside smoking Camels, the bartender — probably mindful of noise complaints — popped out to shush patrons like a wayward librarian.

In the paper there was a nice shot outside of Heather's that didn't make it on the web, but I'm happy to hear more stories of how considerate Heather is to her neighbors.

The Times Likes Tacos Too

Photo from NYCnosh Flickr set

Mark Bittman has a nice piece on making tacos at home, and it doesn't involve Old El Paso or seasoned ground beef.

He aptly captures what I've been looking for in my recent taco craze: "It’s about the ingredients, as high quality and as fresh as possible."

I think he's a bit too disparaging about the state of east coast tacos, though even among my favorites, there is a huge chasm between the top and middle tiers. My advice for taco hunters, besides just going to the Slope's Tacos Nuevos Mexico or Tehuitzingo in Hell's Kitchen, is that taco quality is an inverse function of decor sophistication, a primary trait being the abundance of green neon lighting. But good tacos exist in New York as surely as the Mexican workforce.

London: Books & Plays [Updated]

Why some habits are hard to regain and others so easy, I'll never understand. After a few days, the trip to London with my folks is digesting in a number of ways. So I'll try to break it down.

First off, as my habit, I loaded up on complementary reading material: Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby's memoir of his football obsession; Plays 1, the first collection of plays by Caryl Churchill, including Owners and Cloud Nine; and The Complete Plays of Sarah Kane. All of which delve into the not so pleasant aspects of the British psyche.

I managed to catch two plays: Titus Andronicus at the Globe and Enemies by David Hare (after Maxim Gorky) at the Almeida.

Titus, Shakespeare's money making blockbuster, lived up to expectations in this gory production. I've only seen this production and Julie Taymor's film, but both make me marvel at some of the soliloquays inbetween the horror... in contemplating grief and violence. The one major distraction was the awful bouffant mullets forced on Tamara's son's ..not quite fitting the otherwise predominant Elizabethan staging.

Enemies was searing with intense commentary on owners and the proletariat, and a nifty bit of metatheater, fitting for Hare's Stuff Happens, regarding the Iraq War, particularly the role in government to protect or exploit civilians. All sides seem tragic and disaster is prophesied. It was also good to get out of Central London as the Almeida required.

In a coda of sorts, I just read Korean filmmaker Park Chanwook's interview in Bomb by Esther Chae. Chanwook just closed a much heralded vengeance trilogy composed of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance. Chae mentions Titus among others as classic tales of vengeance and asks Chanwook to cite any Korean classics that deal with personal vengeance, to which he says there are none:

"We have tragedies related to war and colonization, but we don't have a culture where on expresses anger in an aggressive way. I didn't' have any literature to refer to. And I find it stifling that we don't have such traditions"

[Update] Ben Brantley must have been at my heels. The show I wanted to see but couldn't get a ticket for was Tom Stoppard's new play Rock N Roll that just opened. Brantley's review came out today. 2/3's down he give a mention of Enemies:

"What is to be done?" might also be the mantra of "Enemies," a new adaptation by the industrious David Hare of Maxim Gorky's 1906 drama of aristocrats and proletariats at loggerheads, which ends this weekend at the Almeida Theater.

Performed with naturalistic vibrancy by a fine cast directed by Michael Attenborough, "Enemies" oozes the juicy ruling-class angst, idiosyncrasy and moral paralysis associated with classic Russian fiction. But it also presents an array of ardent, revolution-ready factory workers. The more insightful of the fluttery aristocrats envy the workers their certainty. But it's telling that the uncertainty of the doomed upper-class characters is what feels convincing, and unsettlingly familiar.

A "Man Date" is not a directive

Discussed all over the city yesterday was the NYTimes' article on "man dates." The idea is that straight men going on outings that would otherwise, or ideally be with a woman are on a man date, and thus have some social navigating to work out. Though the concept was new to Times readers, followers of Kick.Ball.Action got a primer on Friday.

So my pals Joe, Jason, and I went on a guy outing Sunday: we saw Frank Miller's Sin City. It was good old fashion adolescent male fantasy pulp action. We saw bloody action, naked chicks, and all sorts of proper delinquency to disqualify us from a "man date."

Despite the dudity of Sunday, on Mondays, the three of us are taking a men's session of Pilates... no escaping the man date label here. It's held a private gym, where at the same time--as if to purposely turn up the gender irony, some ladies are taking boxing lessons as we are pilating. Any one who thinks Pilates isn't as taxing hasn't tried it.

We're going to keep it up for a few more weeks at least. In the mean time, we'll try to balance this out with some mean time: hit a few in the cage, muse about the NBA playoffs, discuss power tools.... (in truth, none of us swing a bat too well, and Whitney's a bigger fan of hoops than Joe and more enthusiastic about power tools than Jason).

Mashups + Search Engines = More efficient searches?

YaGoohoo!gle!

Relatedly, there is also the annotated NYTimes, all the news that's fit to link.

[update] if you didn't know, here is a description of a mashup.

Legacies are an anchor, by which I mean: a drag

Last Wednesday, I breifly mused on on how legacy features in Corp. IT helps keep Mac integration out, thus making those shops more vulnerable to changing technological environments. In this week's Times Magazine, Tom Friedman considers the "flattening of the world" by globalization, in part aided by freedom from legacy features:

That is why there is nothing that guarantees that Americans or Western Europeans will continue leading the way. These new players are stepping onto the playing field legacy free, meaning that many of them were so far behind that they can leap right into the new technologies without having to worry about all the sunken costs of old systems. It means that they can move very fast to adopt new, state-of-the-art technologies, which is why there are already more cellphones in use in China today than there are people in America.

Over dependance on oil, microsoft, a strong dollar (dare I include social security?), these are some of our economic legacies, grown strong from maximizing profit yields in the short term, but perhaps a drag overall in the long term. The one thing we can count on is change, not the legacies that we try so desperately to hold on to.