Football is the loud, presumptuous goon of televised sports--barging in right when things are getting really good and changing the channel. 5 hours ago
Something about football that just rubs me the wrong way is how shitty ass college games push late-season MLB games off TVs in public venues 5 hours ago
Olivia Munn: Suck It, Wonder Woman!: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek
A conversational tone in a personal memoir can be a great thing, but sometimes it's good to let one's co-author and editors iron out the verbal tics and mannerisms that make for distracting reading in book form. On the other hand, it's Munn's personality that will draw readers to her book in the first place, and she doesn't hold back. She's a certified geek woman in a pin-up girl's body, which is part of what has made Olivia Munn a case-study in self-driven brand-building success. It's shorter than its 288 listed pages suggests, and is perfect fodder for a short flight. (**)
E.L. Doctorow: Homer & Langley: A Novel
Behind the darkened windows of a 5th Avenue mansion in uptown Manhattan, two brothers--Homer and Langley Collyer--have retreated from the 20th Century and the world at large. The younger brother Homer is secluded due to the onset of blindness as a young man. His older brother Langley retreats within the walls of his home after returning from WWI, scarred physically and mentally by mustard gas and the horrors of trench warfare. The brothers live their entire lives within their domestic redoubt, which becomes ever more crowded and cluttered with detritus. Their "Collyers Mansion", as any junk-filled home would soon become synonymous with, would eventually become their tomb. Doctorow excels. (***)
Philip Kerr: The One From the Other
Kerr continues on after his superlative Berlin Noir trilogy with this Bernie Gunther novel set in post-WWII Germany. As the nation struggles to get on its feet, so does protagonist and former cop, private eye, and SS member Bernie Gunther. Occasionally, Kerr's tough guy prose falls a little clunkily from his protagonist's hardboiled mouth, but Kerr continues to paint a vivid picture of pre-, at-, and post-war Germany as seen through the eyes of a sympathetic detective caught up in the Third Reich. (** 1/2)
Ben Macintyre: Operation Mincemeat
A detailed account of the WWII plot to deceive the Third Reich's war machine with a pseudonymous corpse slipped into the sea carrying some mail, two ticket stubs, and a love letter. "Web of spies" has never been so appropriate a term, as dozens of people and disinformation were woven from whole cloth in order to deceive the Nazis. (** 1/2)
Joseph Wallace: Diamond Ruby
Early 20th Century NY and Brooklyn is the central figure of Wallace's novel about a young girl who loses the adult figures in her life to tragedies during the first decades of NYC in the 1900s. Ruby knows she must take charge of what remains of her family, and that means exploiting her strong arm--first at a Coney Island sideshow, and then pitching for a minor league Brooklyn ball club. Along the way she befriends Babe Ruth, and Jack Dempsey, and makes enemies of bootleggers, gamblers, and the Commissioner of Baseball. A good summer read. (***)
David Gordon: The Serialist
Gordon breaks down the fourth wall of crime fiction by casting the author of the book as the protagonist who stumbles into a grisly series of mutilation-killings, sexual entanglement, and literary career opportunity. It's an, ahem, novel approach that ultimately only half-delivered on its potential. And a repeated mind-boggling mis-perception of New York's geography drove me to distraction. (** 1/2)
Rebecca Cantrell: A Trace of Smoke
Imagine what one would include when writing a murder mystery set in Wiemar Germany right before the Nazis rise to power, and Cantrell's got it. Sadist homosexual Nazis--check. Sadist heterosexual military men--check. Murdered cross-dressing MacGuffin--check. Prostitutes--check. Plucky child in danger--check. Heroine who wants romantic love and plucky child--check. Cast of supporting resourceful Jewish characters who ably help the protagonist without imagining their heavily foreshadowed impending doom--check. Oh yeah! Priceless jewel--check. (** 1/2)
Max Brooks: World War Z
I am arriving at the cultural zombie party not fashionably late, but a week after the party ended; awkwardly dressed as an undead ghoul on the hosts' doorstep and freaking out their babysitter because they've already gone out for the night. Brooks' "Oral History of the Zombie War" is a good way to play catch-up on the trend that's spawned parodies like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Jane Slayre. Brooks' collection of fictional first-person accounts is told straight, however, and with an eye towards how modern societies around the world would react to the dead rising and walking the earth. (*** 1/2)
Nick Schuyler: Not Without Hope
I hate to write this about Schuyler's true tale of summoning unimaginable strength to survive at sea while unsuccessfully attempting to save three of his friends, but his story is a little thin. I know! I know! That sounds terrible. The truth of the matter is that it would have made a great long magazine article; but the book feels padded. I admire Schuyler and don't underestimate his ordeal. The book just isn't that good. (**)
Sebastian Junger: WAR
The U.S. military fights wars on physical terrain and human terrain--the latter being the social aspect of war. Similarly, author Sebastian Junger has written a book about a combat unit in Afghanistan that examines the physical: the nuts and bolts of blood and guts, the physiology of combat stress, the logistics of close combat; and the human: the psychology of courage, the sociology of unit cohesion, and the mental wear imprinted on young men inexorably seared and forged in the practice of killing other men. (*** 1/2)
Tom Rachman: The Imperfectionists
Author Tom Rachman weaves together a skein of stories centered around an English-language daily newspaper with all the skill of an old-school layout editor composing a front page. Rachman's debut effort as a novelist has been widely heralded, and rightly so. His depiction of newsroom inhabitants rings true. The Imperfectionists is a funny novel, but tinged with the sadness of personal, professional, and organizational entropy. (***)
Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
McCarthy could have called his narrative set in the late-19th century North American southwest, Unsettling the West. As Civil War vet "the kid" makes his way westward across the U.S. and in and out of Mexico, he is never far from a Grand Guignol landscape of lawlessness that makes the dystopian Australia of Mad Max look like Oz. A novel that deserves close reading, but makes the reader want to turn one's eyes from the horrors it reveals. (**)
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night
The story of Dick and Nicole Diver is one of two lives entwined by love but propelling each other in opposite directions. Richard Diver is a brilliant psychologist who falls in love with the mentally broken millionairess Nicole. As the latter grows stronger in their marriage and under his care, Dick finds himself dissipated by desuetude and ultimately ruined by the foreign milieu of the idle rich abroad. (***)
Jeannette Walls: Half-Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
Winding the clock back two generations before her memoir of growing up brutally poor, Jeanette Walls has written a novelized account of the life of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Born at the start of the 20th century, Lily Smith is a hardscrabble daughter of the West. As she grows, she will become a horse breaker, an elementary school teacher, a bootlegger, a rancher, a mother, and eventually a grandmother to the woman who's writing her story. Walls' follow-up to The Glass Castle is easier to read than the former, because it lacks the brutal infliction of poverty on children by wayward parents. There are tough times, but they are endured and overcome with grit and determination. (***)
Sarah Vowell: The Wordy Shipmates
Who were those Pilgrims anyway--who went from breaking bread with the Indians to massacring the Pequot tribe in cold self-justifying blood just a few years later? Author Sarah Vowell writes an entertaining tale of the Puritans, their political and religious development, and their personal squabbles writ indelibly in the history of America. (***)
Cormac McCarthy: The Road
Following a holocaust of unspoken origins, the physical world descends into dark grey lifelessness, with humanity following closely behind in moral entropy. It is the setting for a man and a boy to trudge forward on a road of survival with a planned destination of blind hope. (***)
David Carr: Night of the Gun
Acknowledging that he is not a reliable enough eyewitness, New York Times reporter/columnist David Carr investigates his own past as a train-wreck coke addict and alcoholic by interviewing people who witnessed it. Carr's book could have been an automythology involving fall, courage, and redemption, but neither he nor the people who were there are willing to gloss over the very ugly truth. (***)
Joseph Kanon: Stardust
Ben Kohler is summoned home from post-WWII Germany, where he is documenting the Holocaust, to Hollywood, where his brother lies near death after what is being publicized as an attempted suicide. Paranoia, secrets, and betrayal have not been left behind in Germany for the large population of German Jewish emigres who managed to flee the Holocaust and find refuge in America's movie industry. And post-war Hollywood is not the haven it first appeared, as anti-Communist forces regenerate the climate of paranoia and persecution at the start of a new, cold war. (***)
David Foster Wallace: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Don't be afraid to pick and choose or abandon any of Wallace's essays, which cover a wide variety of subjects with varying degrees of reconditeness. An exegesis on the state of literary analysis circa 1994 may not be your thing, whereas a detailed travel diary of a trip to the Illinois State Fair is right up your alley. DFW manages to blend erudition with an irreverant sense of humor; no small feat. But he endangers his narrative momentum and rhythm with footnotes that threaten to crowd all other prose off the page. They aren't footnotes so much as lengthy discursions that warrant their own sub-chapters or endnotes. (** 1/2*)
Jonathan Lethem: The Fortress of Solitude
Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude meet as young boys on Brooklyn's Dean St. in Boerum Hill. Lacking mothers--Dylan's mother abandons him and his father at an early age and Mingus is essentially sold into the custody of his father by his own mother--the pair spend their young lives navigating the perils of young men adrift in the lawless city that is youth. All of the characters are chasing an elusive peace: "Utopia the show which always closed on opening night." (***)
S.L Price: Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America
The true story of two talented ballplayers, Mike Coolbaugh and Tino Sanchez Jr., whose lives and careers collide on a minor league team playing in a small park next to a small river running between two small cities. When Sanchez hits an errant foul ball that strikes his first base coach Coolbaugh at the base of his skull, the latter's instantaneous death seems to encapsulate the cruel twists of fate that mark the lives of minor league baseball players. Aside from Coolbaugh, Sanchez, and their families, Price's book is about the Sisyphean struggle young men undertake to get a crack at the big leagues, or to eke out a living as a minor league lifer. (***)
Nick Hornby: Juliet, Naked
When a 40-something British woman named Annie realizes that she's wasted 15 years of her life co-habitating with a man of inaction as a bulwark against the boredom of living in a provincial northern seaside town in England, she tweaks her boyfriend by writing a contrarian album review on a musician's fansite. It's not just any musician, however, but Tucker Crowe, a man whose music and life her boyfriend has been scrutinizing for decades. When Crowe emerges from his J.D. Salinger-like reclusiveness to respond positively to Annie's review, Hornby's novel about jump starting one's life after years of wasted time gains momentum that rarely falters. (***)
Jon Krakauer: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman
Author Jon Krakauer obviously had extraordinary access to NFL star-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman's family. His book includes long and numerous excerpts from Tillman's private journals. Tillman was almost an anachronism in the 21st Century, who believed in honor, virtue, duty, and personal integrity. His values were only rivaled by the utter mendacity of the Army and Bush administration personnel who concealed the facts of his fratricidal death for political gain. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool cynic, but even I was shocked at how little respect could be paid to a man who gave his life for his country. (*** 1/2*)
Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet Either I am too old or Lethem wrote his main character Lucinda--a 29-year-old female bassist in a struggling band--as too young. Maybe it's because Lethem moved his setting from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, but all of the characters in "You Don't Love Me Yet" come across as one dimensional caricatures and none of them seem worth identifying with. (**)
Cormac McCarthy: No Country For Old Men The novel that spawned the Best Picture Oscar-winning movie No Country For Old Men is a story as meditative as it is violent. Sheriff Bell follows a trail of brutal death and mayhem while contemplating a nation that he feels has become unmoored. Anton Chigurh is a psychopath with a well thought out code of justice based on the inevitability of the moment, and where everything ends with him. I don't know Texas; but I get the impression that McCarthy knows it, very well. (***)
Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn Lionel Essrog is one of the four Minna Men, who small-time crook Frank Minna "adopted" as teens after they'd been relinquished to the St. Vincent's Home for Boys in downtown Brooklyn as children. When Frank Minna is murdered right under Lionel's nose, he feels compelled to find out who was responsible. Compelled because Lionel lives with Tourette's Syndrome, making him a detective given to bouts of physical tics and verbal outbursts that don't exactly lower his profile, but cause people to underestimate him all the same. He is a "free human freakshow," and Lethem has created one of the most original whodunnits of the genre. (****)
Paula Uruburu: American Eve Stanford White: hedonist, brilliant architect, and seducer of young girls. Harry Thaw: sadist, scion to a Pittsburgh family whose fortune only fueled his insanity, and self-proclaimed protector of young women he felt were morally imperiled by men like White. Trapped between the two is Evelyn Nesbit, one of the original American "It Girls," whose beauty made her both famous and infamous. Uruburu's account of a true story of seduction, rape, and murder is overly florid at times, but entertaining nonetheless. (***)
Joseph Mitchell: My Ears Are Bent From his days at The Herald Tribune, Mitchell shows how a little curiosity and the ability to poke one's nose where it wasn't invited can result in a superb story, told with skill. (****)
Kate Atkinson: Case Histories Three separate mysteries are, if not solved, moved to some sort of resolution by British private investigator Jackson Brodie, a divorced former cop whose mind is already halfway to his dream retirement cottage in France . (***)
Nick Hornby: Slam Hornby mastered the art of ex-romantic reflection in "High Fidelity." His latest novel involves looking forward, as a young teenage boy who finds himself thrust into adulthood with an unexpected pregnancy. Cameo advice provided intermittently by a Tony Hawk poster. (***)
Paul Auster: The Brooklyn Follies Divorced, retired, and recovering from cancer, Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood to die. While waiting, he discovers that he's got more life in him yet. (***)
Paul Auster: Man In The Dark Auster's quick-read novel follows the narrative structure and merits the predictable interest of an elderly man's stream of thoughts during a night plagued by insomnia. (**)
Jerome Charyn: Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of The American Revolution New York City during the American Revolution: a port city of treachery, spies, armies, officers, and whores. Johnny One-Eye drifts among them all, in a unique fictionalized take on the formative chapter of U.S. history. (***)
Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex An immigrant story of a gene that wends its way through generations of a Greek-American family in 20th Century Detroit before manifesting itself in the phenotype of a young woman named Callie. (***)
J.R. Moerhringer: The Tender Bar The true story of a boy-turned-young-man who found shelter, avuncular attention, and a sense of belonging at a local tavern in the commuter town of Manhasset, Long Island. (****)
Paul Bacon: Bad Cop Swept up with a desire to do something after the 9/11 attacks, Paul Bacon decided that he would sign up with the NYPD. Less saving the world than writing quality-of-life infraction tickets and racking up collars for outstanding warrants, a rookie cop discovers what real police work is all about. Hilarious and illuminating. You’ll never look at a cop on the corner the same way again. (***)
Gregory David Roberts: Shantaram A sweeping autobiographical tale of an escaped convict from Australia who finds refuge from the law, his past, and his own demons in the slums of Mumbai, India, where he operates a free clinic and becomes a mob bagman. Roberts’ prose tends towards the purple, but the scope of his story merits some allowances. (***)
Ben Karlin, ed. : Things I’ve Learned From the Women Who’ve Dumped Me A collection of humorous essays organized as life lessons gleaned from the disintegration of prior relationships. Funny despite occasional repetition of themes, e.g. early romance is akward and fraught with painful embarrassment. To paraphrase Dan Savage: all relationships are destined for failure, until you’re in the one that isn’t. (***)
Bernard Cornwell: Rebel First in a series of historic novels following the adventures of Nathaniel Starbuck, who rebels not against his famous abolitionist preacher father, but his northern upbringing as he chooses to fight for the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. The novel’s plot line leaves many strands dangling—to be expected in the introductory volume of a multi-part series. (** 1/2)
Richard Price: Lush Life Author Richard Price moves his fictional setting from the housing projects of New Jersey to those of Manhattan's Lower East Side, where PJs border block after block of tenements, occupied by poor immigrants, long-time residents, and an increasing number of slumming bohemians looking for a taste of what they think is the "real" NYC before it becomes completely gentrified. Loosely inspired by the real-life murder of a bartender working at a more upscale bar in the same neighborhood. Price continues to capture the essence of social friction in urban society, and the potentially spirit-breaking milieu of a neighborhood where faded dreams are always in sharp relief with the bright eyes of a never ending stream of newcomers. (***)
James Swanson: Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer Shortly after the end of an unpopular and costly war, a famous young actor puts a gun to the President's head and pulls the trigger, mortally wounding him in front of a crowd of people. The dashing assassin flees, assisted by co-conspirators, as a grieving nation quickly mobilizes a massive manhunt for Lincoln's killer. ()
George Orwell: Down And Out In Paris And London Heavily autobiographical, George Orwell's first novel is an auto-roman a clef in which his protagonist becomes intimately familiar with what it's like to be broke and hungry in a modern urban environment. (***)
Jonathan Mahler: Ladies and Gentlement: The Bronx Is Burning Highly entertaining look at NYC 30 years ago, when neighborhoods burned, blackout NYers looted, iconic politicians battled for the mayoralty, and Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson and the rest of the Yankees butted heads while improbably writing baseball history. (***1/2)
William Langewiesche: Cutting for Sign Neither a diatrabe nor a recommendation. Langewiesche takes a clear-eyed look at the cartographical fault line dividing the U.S. and Mexico and discovers less of a division and more of a metaphysical conundrum of what it means to attempt to divide two peoples in one world. (***1/2)
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa: The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) Originally considered unpublishable; a novel of Italy's 19th century Risorgimento, when principalities gave way to a nation state and principles of aristocracy gave way to a less cultured way of existence. (***)
Augusten Burroughs: Running With Scissors: A Memoir. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at Burroughs's memoir of his helter-skelter upbringing. With an alcoholic father who wanted nothing to do with him and a severely disturbed mother with delusions of literary grandeur, young Augusten finds himself deposited in the home of his mother's psychiatrist, surrounded by filth, pedophilia, and a cast of real people whose personal problems almost beggar belief. (***)
William Styron: Lie Down In Darkness. This Southern Gothic novel--Styron's debut--flashes back through the lives of the Loftis family members, painting a portrait of personal failures, emnity, and bitterness that leads to the suicide of youngest daughter Peyton. A sure holiday pick me up! ()
Mark Helprin: Freddy and Fredericka. As if channeling Mark Twain in his novel Roughing It, Mark Helprin perceives modern America with fresh eyes via two exiled royals reminiscent of Charles and Diana who are sent to the U.S. to re-earn their royal status. A ridiculously funny farce. (***)
Nick Hornby: A Long Way Down. Four strangers meet on New Year's Eve atop a London highrise, each with an individual plan to kill themselves. Sometimes, however, the best reason to live is the company of three suicidal strangers one just met. Hornby continues his streak of making life's bleakest moments also its funniest. (****)
Sarah Vowell: Assassination Vacation. Vowell misses no opportunity to relate every historical tidbit to how bad G.W. Bush sucks as a President, but otherwise has written an incredibly entertaining travelogue of her research into three Presidential assassinations that includes an enormous amount of info on history, personality, architecture, and context that makes the past come alive. Should be required reading for high schoolers. (***)
Augusten Burroughs: Magical Thinking. Good for fans of David Sedaris, who enjoy their personal memoirs with a bit of self-deprecating bite and large dose of personal tragedy, swallowed with eventual deliverance from personal hell. (***)
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee: The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail: A Play. Written in 1970, this play is supposed to be an allegory to a man willing to speak out against an unjust war. For Thoreau, it was the U.S. intrusion into Mexico in the 1840s. For the playwrights, it was Vietnam. I expect a theatrical revival of this work almost immediately as a protest against our current war. A good idea, but the work itself is insufferably earnest and heavy handed. Should appeal to and light a fire in the bellies of socially conscious 13-year-olds. (*)
Anthony Bourdain: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Bourdain is now a big star with his own TV show, or basically the type of celeb chef he reviles in the book that made him famous. I occasionally socialize with the kitchen crew of a famous Manhattan eatery and can attest that the pirate lifestyle of the pro chef Bourdain describes persists to this day. (***)
Patrick Suskind: Perfume, The Story of a Murderer. Suskind's historical novel of an olfactory "Rain Man" serial killer was acclaimed in the '80s, but now reads like a writer stricken with graphorrhea. Translated from German, Suskind is the Teutonic Bret Easton Ellis, with neverending paragraphs indicating his thesaurus should have been burned. (**)
Fredrick Exley: A Fan's Notes Talent is no guarantee of recognition or success. Frederick Exley's fictionalized memoir is a sad and occasionally hilarious recount of a life wasted in a haze of alcohol and unspent ambition. (****)
Mako Tanako: Thirty Years at The Broome Street Bar In the 1970s, downtown Manhattan was a wasteland. SOHO was a bereft industrial no-go area of town and Cass Gilbert's Custom's House [see BLIZZARD '06, 2/14/06] had been vacant for a decade and developers wanted to tear it down. During those last transformative 30 years, artist Mako Tanako [an incredibly gracious individual] has been exhibiting his art on the chalkboard at Kenn's Broome Street Bar. He erases his pieces every month. Fortunately, someone was prescient enough to capture them on film and they are collected in this book. Art can be as short-lived as talent and inspiration. (***)
James Crumley: The Last Good Kiss A snapshot of the seedier side of America in the already seedy and downtrodden earth tone 1970s. C.W. Sughrue is a functioning alcoholic private investigator on the trail of a non-functioning alcoholic novelist at the request of the latter's ex-wife. As he criss-crosses the mid- south- and pacific north-west, Sughrue finds himself bound to an ugly and pathetic intersection of skin flicks, family, missing persons, and deception that only murder and blackmail can resolve amicably. The most fun you'll have reading about others' misery. (***)
Natsuo Kirino: Out Belying the image of Japan as a halcyon society of high-tech gadgets and unlimited prosperity, Kirino's hard-boiled novel plumbs the depths of the lives of four actually desperate housewives. Their lives interconnect on the night shift they've taken to earn a few extra dollars an hour to keep their families out of poverty and become bonded when one kills her husband in a fit of frustration and rage. How do four women cope as they sink into a world of murder, yakuza, loan sharks, and despair? ()
Mark Helprin: Memoir From Antproof Case A sprawling and epic autobiography written by an old man sitting on a park bench in a garden in Rio de Janeiro. The fictional protagonist relates the passage of his life as a young man, inmate of a lunatic asylum, investment banker, fighter pilot, spouse of a billionairess, murderer, master thief, and life-long hater of coffee. Reminiscent of William Boyd's Any Human Heart, but funny instead of tragic. ()
Haruki Murakami: Dance Dance Dance A reasonably well off freelance writer takes a break from "shoveling cultural snow" to look into the disappearance of a call girl that he'd previously dated and who now cries for him in his dreams. His journey brings him to a hotel they once shared, a successful actor he went to grade school with, and a 13-year-old girl with pathologically bad parents [one of whom is a simulacrum of the author]. A piercing examination of the skeletons in Japan's then-economically-booming closet of consciousness. "What was that all about?" indeed. (****)
Haruki Murakami: South of the Border, West of the Sun Lacking the supernatural touches of his other novels, Murakami paints a picture of a man who by all rights should be satisified with his life: successful, independent, happily married. The reintroduction of a childhood love into his life, however, is cause for reflection on the elusiveness of happiness, or even its meaning. South of the Border is a real and imperfect place. West of the Sun is a fleetingly perfect dreamland. (****)
Michael Patrick MacDonald: All Souls: A Family Story From Southie MacDonald [a personable guy, but incredibly softspoken for a writer and in comparison to his verbose younger brother] violates his hometown's insular code of silence by revealing the corrosive culture of crime, poverty, and substance abuse that make South Boston one of the poorest ethnic communities in the U.S. Yet the Irish-Americans that live there are fiercely proud of the enclave they call their own. It is ultimately the memory of his four dead brothers that drives MacDonald to reflect on the paradox that is South Boston. (****)
Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel Japanese house-husband Toru Okado has lost his cat. A few weeks later he loses his wife. Then he starts receiving strange phone calls. And thus begins a novel that ranges from sublime beauty to scenes of the stark horrors of war. So far, incredible. (****)
Haruki Murakami: Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End of The World Murakami convincingly captures the voice of the Western hard-boiled loner transplanted to a Japanese context, except he's a neurologically/cybernetically gifted operative who finds himself in the middle of a dangerous game of info-espionage. Alternating chapters are devoted to a related story that is a stunning meditation on the nature of consciousness, being, and the immortal soul. Absolutely beautiful. (**** 1/2)
J.G. Farrell: The Singapore Grip Farrell concludes his end-of-empire trilogy in Singapore during the month before the city-state falls to the Japanese in WWII. Oblivious to the mortal danger approaching, Walter Blackett and his family swirl about in an existence of colonial farce. The story is weighed down by ponderous exposition on the Marxist view of colonialism, but is an entertaining read nonetheless. (***)
J.G. Farrell: Troubles Shell-shocked Major Brendan Archer returns from WWI--via a recuperative stay in a hospital for mental invalids--to London, then Ireland to meet his erstwhile fiancee in the resort town of Kilnalough. Her widower father is the owner of The Majestic Hotel, whose rapidly deteriorating structure is symbolic of the disintegrating British Empire, especially in Ireland, where Anglo-Irish rule is succumbing to the Troubles of 1919-21. (***)
William Gibson: Pattern Recognition Cayce Pollard is a professional "cool hunter", using her intuition to help marketers determine what will and won't be accepted as hot by the global marketplace. Her hobby is the examination of mysterious footage that is disseminated over the Internet. Her work and hobby collide as she criss-crosses the globe from London to Tokyo to Moscow in an effort to find out who's behind the footage, while personally reconciling the disappearance of her father in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Is Pollard engaging in pattern recognition or the apophenia her father warned her against? (***1/2)
J.G. Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur The second book in Farrell's trilogy of historical novels depicting the unraveling of the British Empire. Farrell addresses the Muslim uprising against their colonial masters in 1857 India with black comedy. (***)
Clifford Odets: Waiting For Lefty and Other Plays Odet's unapologetic pro-communist plays about the plight of downtrodden men and women in the 1930s would resonate more if he weren't such a stooge for the Soviets, who were busy massacring their countrymen while Odets and friends put on their plays. (**)
Stendahl: The Red and the Black Stendahl's classic novel follows protagonist Julien Sorel in post-Napoleanic, early-19th-century France. ()
Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Imagine if Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, and their band of "Jackasses" drove around the country and, in addition to filming their antics, heralded themselves as the vanguard of a legitimate psycho-spiritual-societal revolution. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters did in the 60s--and a lot of people fell for it. Were they fooling themselves as well? (**1/2)
Jon Krakauer: Under The Banner of Heaven In a sparsely populated, mountainous region few people have ever visited, a collection of religious fanatics has built a theocratic society centered on the subjugation of women and that brooks no dissent. And when God instructs them to kill, they obey. Welcome to fundamentalist Mormon country in North America. (***1/2)
David Sedaris: Holidays On Ice Sedaris' short collection of holiday-themed stories are as much a Christmas tradition to me as anything by Clement C. Moore. Non-fiction like "The SantaLand Diaries" and "Dinah, The Christmas Whore" share space with a hilarious fictional family Christmas letter and more. (*****)
Richard Price: Samaritan The author of Clockers returns to the New Jersey housing projects with a story of a man and his misguided sense of everyday altruism, who refuses to identify the person that bludgeoned him nearly to death. (**1/2)
John O'Hara: A Rage to Live John O'Hara chronicles the changing times of fictional Fort Penn, PA as the town and its people circle around golden girl Grace Caldwell Tate. (****)
Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy's tale of Jude Fawley, Sue Bridehead and their ill-fated love in 19th Century England. Aspires to tragedy, but unintentionally succeeds as a comedy of excessive bathos. (**1/2)
This year's Dumpster Pool is just last century's Swimmobile.
Summer is doing us a favor this year. Lest we romanticize its passing too heatedly, it’s been broiling us on an asphalt brazier for the last few days leading up to Labor Day Weekend.
This weekend will be the last days that city pools will be open. As part of NYC’s Summer Streets program that ended two weeks ago, many New Yorkers stuck in the city had the opportunity to take a quick dip in a Dumpster Pool–actually a converted shipping container.
Almost everything in NYC is a reinvention, however. Pictured above is this summer’s Park Avenue Dumpster Pool and a Swimmobile, which were mobile pools that were trucked into underserved areas in New York 40 years ago. Swimmobiles were a feature of the NYC Parks Dept. under Commissioner August Heckscher III, who served under Mayor John Lindsay from 1967-1972.
Want to take a safe stroll around New York City? Avoid crossing at intersections.
It’s been my observation that nothing will lull a pedestrian into the path of an oncoming car or truck easier than a crosswalk and a green WALK signal. That pedestrian will be in his or her full rights to cross in safety–right of way and right in obeying the law; but that will come as cold comfort as they are run down in the street. And there is usually little-to-no legal penalty for a motorist who runs down a pedestrian in a cross walk–often approaching them from behind and to the side while making a turn on a green traffic light–as long as they claim they simply didn’t see the person. “It was an accident.”
A WALK signal for a pedestrian usually coincides with a green light for traffic moving in a parallel direction. That green light also applies to drivers moving in a parallel direction before turning through a crosswalk to make a right or left turn. Crossing safely at a crosswalk requires pedestrians to monitor if a car approaching from behind is going to make a right turn into them, or a car approaching from the front will turn left and cross a lane of traffic before crossing an occupied crosswalk. Doing both involves looking ahead, while also glancing back over one’s shoulder.
Jaywalking away from a crosswalk and an intersection means a pedestrian can monitor traffic by looking left and looking right. If a car isn’t coming, then it’s safe to cross quickly. It is not legal, but I have never been ticketed; and I have almost been run down several times in crosswalks.
If you are going to cross at an intersection, especially one containing a large truck like a sanitation vehicle or delivery truck, assume those drivers coming at you do not see you. Do not assume they’re going to slow down to let you pass. Pretend their job is to run you over and it’s your responsibility to move your ass out of the way. That’s not fair or right; it’s just the way it is.
I really liked Google Wave when it was first introduced, so it’s a little ironic that the form of its introduction is what doomed the innovative new mail product to oblivion.
As you can see in the video above, Google Wave was a real time email application that allowed multiple people to participate in a conversation, and then preserved that conversation so newcomers could get themselves up to speed by reviewing exchanges from origin to current state.
Google Wave was a great collaborative tool, but for some reason the company decided to leak it out into the marketplace in a manner than didn’t allow users to actually take advantage of its best qualities. Wave was introduced through the use of “invitations”. This is a cute [read: bullshit, ed.] way to generate buzz for a new product.
“Oh, it’s invite only!”
“I gotta get an invite!”
“Can I cadge an invite off of you?”
“You haven’t received your invite yet? I have! You’re a loser!”
The problem with this type of limited release is that it won’t work when you’re pushing a COLLABORATIVE TOOL.
I got my hands on a relatively early invite to Google Wave and was excited to use it. Unfortunately, it’s not that much fun to use by yourself. OK, it’s impossible to use by yourself. Why bother? I think I asked 3 or 4 people to join a Google Wave conversation and got hit with some variation of “Don’t have it”, “Can’t get it” before I gave up and forgot that Wave ever existed. Until I watched this video announcing the product’s death knell of course.
Back in 1984, NYC was a different animal. Before Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts to turn the city into a gilded tourist trap and his predecessor Rudy Giuliani made a name for himself fighting quality-of-life crimes like graffiti and drinking in public, New Yorkers had more reasons to be fearful. The murder rate in 2009 was a little more than 1/4 of what was recorded in 1984. One individual who crystallized the public’s fear of crime and split public opinion on how to fight it was Bernhard Goetz–the Subway Vigilante.
Accosted by several young men on a subway train, Goetz would use the unlicensed handgun he was carrying to shoot and seriously injure all four of them. A jury later acquitted him of all serious charges–including attempted murder, assault, and reckless endangerment–and found him guilty of illegal possession of a handgun.
The premier episode of William Shatner’s new show “Aftermath with William Shatner” on the Biography Channel features Bernhard Goetz and a number of prominent New Yorkers at the time, including Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa and crusading attorney Ron Kuby. Sliwa’s torturing of florid mixed metaphors makes the first five minutes worth it. “You would descend into the subways, into the bowels of the earth. It was like the armpit of the cesspool of crime.”
More than 25 years after the incident, Bernhard Goetz has his self-justifying story straight and by the numbers. Determining whether it’s entirely true or not is not the purpose of “Aftermath.” It’s hard not to be creeped out by the man Goetz has become. At this point, Goetz has retreated from humanity into the sheltering love of, and love for squirrels. Shatner cuts Goetz to the quick in the final line of the show. You’ll have to watch it.
Bumped into butcher Jeffrey Ruhalter (almost literally in the crowded Essex Market) Saturday while looking for bread. He recommended the excellent loaves at Pain D’Avignon, which was convenient b/c we were standing in front of the store. And Ruhalter would know, because his butcher shop is a few steps away.
My shopping partner that afternoon is opening a bar in the neighborhood and Ruhalter was very gracious in welcoming her to the neighborhood and wishing her luck. Ruhalter runs Jeffrey’s Meat Market in the Essex Market between Rivington and Delancey on the Lower East Side.
As we were filing from the arena and into the passageways that lead out of Madison Square Garden, I turned to my friend Melissa and said, “If I had the bank to buy tickets to see that same exact show all over again tomorrow night, I would definitely be going.” Later we discussed how the band’s stage show is perfectly suited for the recording of a concert film.
Arcade Fire bowed their previous album “Neon Bible” at a series of five shows at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. By all accounts, those performances were phenomenally good, and apt–”Neon Bible” features religious themes and a pipe organ heavily. There was some trepidation on my part about whether a significantly larger space like MSG would be a good venue to translate the band’s show and new album “The Suburbs” live. In retrospect, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.
Arcade Fire is huge. The band is literally numerous; there are about a dozen people on stage playing different instruments simultaneously. And their music is epically sweeping–large and loud to the point where it’s difficult to pick up where the band ends and the 25,000 fans singing along begin.
I’m not going to have to head back to the Garden for tonight’s show. Arcade Fire, in partnership with American Express, YouTube, and VEVO, will be livecasting the performance on YouTube. A trailer for the concert is above, and highly recommended viewing. Tune in at 10pm. I will be.
UPDATE: I was informed this evening that I won Week 17 of the Gormley x Ace Event Horizon Photo Contest. Thanks to everyone who voted.
Follow this link to vote for the picture at left [flickr version] in a photo contest associated with Antony Gormley’s “Event Horizon” project in Madison Square. It’s quick, easy, and totally painless.
Read more about “Event Horizon” in my post from earlier this month. Gormley placed 31 figures, modeled on himself, both at street level and on surrounding buildings near Madison Square Park. It’s an interesting project that will run through August 15th. My earlier post includes a map showing the placement of the figures, although I like the idea of having to search them out.
But I’m off topic: Vote for my photo at the Ace Hotel Photo & Video Contest. Thanks.
The courts have determined that street photography is legal. The next step is ending police harassment.
New York City is a paradox of photographic freedom. Private citizens in public are under almost constant observation by surveillance cameras, and the City is constantly throwing money towards projects that make that surveillance more comprehensive. Private citizens taking snapshots in public, however, are subject to regular harassment from police under the guise of “protecting” the city from terrorists.
The New York Times’ Lens Blog looked at the trouble people can get into with the cops when they try to take pictures in public. These run-ins with the law can range from simple intimidation to arrest. When a police officer tells someone that it’s illegal to take pictures of something in public for reasons of public safety, the fact is that he or she is talking through his hat. The right to take pictures in public has repeatedly been upheld in court and restricting photography is not something police departments consider official policy. Even police brass are having trouble communicating that to cops in the street though.
When police regularly use the possession of a camera as the grounds for temporary detention, personal search, or even arrest, it’s easy to see why they wouldn’t want to be sticklers for remembering that they’re not supposed to. In an age when nearly every person on the street has a camera in their phone, possession of a camera becomes practically a “memory carte blanche” for detaining people. In our opinion, the only way to deter this type of behavior is to begin to target cities where it hurts–the pocketbook.
We recommend taking a page out of “professional” bum Richard Kreimer’s playbook. Kreimer has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars by suing and settling lawsuits with municipalities who refuse to abide by court rulings that loitering laws are illegal. When towns and cities continue to arrest Kreimer for loitering–despite the courts’ striking down the legality of those laws–the bum sues and either settles or wins.
What the photographing public needs is a “professional” amateur photographer, who is willing to be arrested repeatedly for taking pictures around NYC. That person should then sue the City, and continue to sue over and over again, until it becomes worth the City’s while to tell cops to knock it off and leave photographers alone.
Recapture some of the thrill of the 2010 World Cup by rooting for New Yorkers representing their home nations in the COPA NYC tournament.
New Yorkers who caught soccer fever during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa can re-stoke some of that fire as COPA NYC reaches its semi-final matches. COPA NYC is modeled on the World Cup, according to The Wall Street Journal, but players on the field come from New York City’s own immigrant and ex-pat communities.
The tournament’s semi-finals will be played this Saturday at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, where Ireland faces Jamaica at 1pm, and Argentina will meet Poland at 4pm. The winners of those matches will meet at 4pm Sunday for the championship to win the Mayor’s Cup. That match will be televised live on NYC Life.
A nurse at a northern NJ hospital is charged with stealing hundreds of dollars from Abielo Mazariego, who was brought to the ER after a brutal public beating at the hands of teens.
After Abielo Mazariego was beaten by a trio of teens as others watched and videotaped the assault in Summit, NJ two weeks ago, the Salvadoran immigrant was taken to Overlook Hospital with severe head injuries. Essex County authorities have now charged one of the nurses at the hospital with stealing $640 dollars from Mazariego when he was brought to the emergency room unconscious.
Stephan Randolph is charged with third-degree theft by Essex County prosecutors, who were contacted by Mazariego’s family about the missing money. The El Salvadoran immigrant and father of four did not survive the beating at the hands of the teens, who have been charged with murder in his death.
Mazariego was sitting on a bench in a public promenade in Summit the evening of Saturday, July 17th, when he was approached by two young men. They allegedly placed a t-shirt over Mazariego’s face and then punched him repeatedly in the head until he was unconscious. The video of the assault was circulated to a large number of teenagers in the town of Summit.
NY Met and former Brooklyn Cyclone Ike Davis will have his bobble-headed likeness distributed at MCU Park August 2nd.
Bobbleheads are a popular giveaway at ballparks, and have even made appearances outside the world of sports. The Brooklyn Cyclones will give away one of the better variations of bobbleheads we’ve ever seen, with their upside-down Ike Davis. We’ll let the Cyclones promotions department describe it:
Davis made his pro debut with the Brooklyn Cyclones on June 26, 2008. Less than two years later, Davis is now starring at first base for the New York Mets, and has become something of a cult hero, thanks in part to three specific catches he’s made that have all had a similar stuntmanesque theme. Each time, he has flipped over the dugout railing to catch a foul ball in spectacular fashion.
The high-demand Cyclones’ bobblehead depicts the Brooklyn alum making just such a catch, and stands 7″ tall.
The Cyclones will be playing the Hudson Valley Renegades Monday and bleacher seats are only $5 (I LOVE the Cyclones!). The first 2,500 fans through the gates will get their Ike Davis upside-down bobbleheads. Even if you arrive later, the first place Cyclones usually put on a good show and manager Wally Backman isn’t shy signing bats and balls at the edge of the dugout after the game’s over. Plus, it’s Medieval Times Night! I don’t know what that entails, but it sounds fun.
A novel's protagonist was extrapolated from the real life woman who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
Jackie Mitchell threw like a girl; and in 1931 that was good enough to strike out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who were on an exhibition tour at the time.
Mitchell was 17 years old in 1931 and the sole female player for the minor league Chattanooga Lookouts when the Babe and the Iron Horse appeared in Tennessee. Flash-forward 80 years after a young woman fanned two of the best players in the history of the game, and a woman has never played an inning of official major league baseball. Baseball’s integrity as a desert for distaff talent is the playing field for Joseph Wallace’s recent novel, Diamond Ruby.
The story of Diamond Ruby is about a physically endowed young woman who is driven from throwing rocks at squirrels for food to the game of baseball, in order to feed her two nieces as her family faces starvation in New York City during the 1920s. Wallace spins a great tale that celebrates NYC and the sporting universe of its age–Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, and the ball clubs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn play central roles in the story. As Ruby tries to keep her head above water in the poverty-stricken, post-flu pandemic, sink-or-swim environment that is New York, she fights bootlegging gangsters, gamblers, the Ku Klux Klan, crooked cops, Coney Island sideshow operators, and bigoted doubters of a woman’s ability to play ball. Diamond Ruby is a great summer read to pick up between ball games or when heading to the beach, or even the Coney Island boardwalk.
Author Joseph Wallace will be one of the speakers at Gelf Magazine’s Varsity Letters series next week. He’ll be speaking and reading from Diamond Ruby at JLA Studios in DUMBO on Thursday, August 5th. Like all of Gelf’s events, Varsity Letters is free and located at 63 Pearl St. in Brooklyn, between Water and Front Streets. Doors open at 7 p.m.; event starts at 7:30 p.m.
Bitching about the outrageous processing or service fees tacked on to ticket prices is not even fair game anymore. Everyone just accepts that when one purchases tickets online for a live event that there will be an additional “tax” for the privilege of purchasing. We’re over the outrage. We did find the example above creatively galling enough to make note of, however.
It’s an offer to “Save money!” by paying a processing fee of “only $2 per ticket”. “How can one capture this economic windfall?”, you might ask. It’s simple.
Pay in advance, reducing the risk of unsold tickets for the theater
Pay in person at the box office, reducing need for any electronic payment infrastructure for the theater
Pay in cash, eliminating any credit or debit fees for the theater
We’re guessing that the $2/ticket processing fee is because the theater is not asking you to appear at the box office with your own paper and pens to physically create the tickets you’re about to purchase.
When you’re a musical advocate of third world revolution, expect to get knocked when you get engaged to a billionaire’s heir and start to enjoy the trappings of oppressive capitalist exploitation. Taking criticism lightly isn’t something that musical artist M.I.A. is known for, however. The Sri Lankan rap rebel princess went off on New York Times reporter Lynn Hirschberg after what she considered an unflattering profile and Twittered Hirschberg’s phone number. The video above, produced by The Kitty Box, parodies M.I.A.’s new, more comfortable LA lifestyle as a wealthy suburban mother.
M.I.A. will be back in NYC this weekend for a show on Governor’s Island Saturday.
UPDATE: Now this is what I’m talking about. The LA Times music blog picks up the story.
Whether exposing themselves at ground level, or appearing ready to attempt suicide, Gormley's figures are supposed to prompt a reaction.
Over the past two months, British artist Antony Gormley has flashed his manhood to more people in public than a dancer on a Gay Pride float in the West Village on Halloween. He won’t be arrested, however, because the exposure has actually just been in the form of anatomically inclusive statues based on himself and placed around Madison Square in Manhattan.
The public art project is called “Event Horizon”. Some of Gormley’s 31 figures are situated right in Madison Square Park, where they alternately interest, puzzle, and amuse passersby who are able to examine them closely. Other statues are placed more remotely, at the edge of buildings’ roofs or ledges. From a distance, one initially fears that a person is on the verge of jumping. The dichotomy is what Gormley was shooting for.
“One of the implications of Event Horizon is that people will have to entertain an uncertainty about the work’s scope: the spread and number of figures. Beyond those that you can actually see, how many more remain out of sight?”
I took the picture above in June from a corner of 26th St. and 5th Avenue. It’s one of Gormley’s statues at the top of the Flatiron Building on 23rd.
There’s an Easter egg-hunt element of appeal in searching for the figures of “Event Horizon”, but I’m including a map listing all of the locations after this jump. [Apologies--it's a little fuzzy.] The public show will remain in place until August 15th. Continue reading Event Horizon at Madison Square
UPDATE: The Mariners have allegedly balked at trading lefty ace and Cy Young winner Cliff Lee to the NY Yankees, citing possible health problems with one of the young Yankee prospects on the table in the deal. This is all according to Post reporter Joel Sherman, who initially reported that a deal putting Lee in pinstripes was as good as done. As of right now, however, it sounds like the only way Lee will pitch in the Bronx is as a visitor. This should makes tonight’s game in Seattle all that more interesting.
What was that feeling Yankees fans had in the pits of their stomachs for Phillies pitcher Cliff Lee after Game 1 of the 2009 World Series–fear, hatred? The Philadelphia lefty won the first World Series game pitched in the new Yankee Stadium by throwing a complete game in which he walked none, struck out 10, and allowed no earned runs. And while pitching a lights-out game, Lee had the temerity to snag infield hit balls behind his back and out of the air like it was an exhibition.
Yankee fans may have warmer feelings for the southpaw this season. Lee won Games 1 and 5 for the Phillies (the team’s only two wins out of six games), but the Yanks ultimately won the 2009 World Series. In my November 5 recap of the Bombers’ 27th World Championship [Thanks Yanks! 27 In The Books], I wrote:
Cliff Lee is an amazing pitcher. Don’t be surprised if the Yankees try to buy him out of Philadelphia for an obscene amount of money; and don’t hate him when he takes it.
But Lee didn’t head directly to the Bronx; perhaps that would have seemed unseemly. Instead the Phils traded him to the AL and the Seattle Mariners, where he made the 2010 All-Star team this season. The Mariners are playing the Yankees in Seattle just before that All-Star break and rumors are flying that Lee is on the verge of signing a deal with the Yankees. I would love to have Lee on the mound in pinstripes this October. At least the Yanks wouldn’t have to lean so hard on Sabathia and short rest when the team really wants a win.
Here is video of Lee just owning the Yankees in Game 1 of the 2009 WS. Warning, it’s still a little nauseating:
Cliff Lee will start (for the Mariners) against the Yankees and Phil Hughes tonight at 10:10 pm ET.
Shit blowing up. Buildings falling down. And lots of guns.
These are the essential elements of most summer blockbusters and are what make them desirous guilty pleasures. But I am a snobbish film sort, who would feel foolish skulking into a screening of The A-Team to see pyrotechnics and cinematic mayhem. That is where Inception comes in.
Watch the trailer above closely and you can see how the film serves the summer blockbuster purpose while remaining covered in a patina of sophistication. I will have to watch Inception multiple times, not because it is “freaking awesome,” but because I will need to peel back the layers of subtext hidden below the huge explosions and harrowing action sequences. That is what I will tell myself.
Inception is directed by Christopher Nolan, a director whose breakthrough film was Memento–a wonderfully original small-budget movie that was a mind-bending Escheresque revenge tale. Nolan solidified his big budget bona fides with The Dark Night–a Batman film that garnered an Oscar-winning performance by Heath Ledger in the role of anti-hero.
Nolan has stacked Inception with an equally distinguished cast. Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy. Come on!
Like Memento, Inception has the trappings of a by-the-book thriller but is wrapped around something otherworldly. In Memento it was anterograde amnesia; in Inception it appears to be the seeming manipulation of reality at its intersection with dreams. The latter’s trailer brings to mind the visual effects conjured in Alex Proyas’ 1998 film Dark City, starring Rufus Sewell and Jennifer Connelly.
Inception is a big-budget movie, shot on locations around the world and featuring an A-list international cast of Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning personnel. Judging the film solely by its trailer, it looks like a visually stunning picture that will have to be truly bad not to garner at least a decent critical reception.
I have already watched the theatrical trailer a few dozen times. In fact do yourself a favor and forget about the little embedded video above. Before pressing play, hit the expand button (the square at the bottom of the embedded clip w/ the four outward-pointing arrows) and watch it full screen with your computer’s volume turned up. I can’t wait for the whole film. Inception opens in theaters July 16th. That’s 10 days and counting.
UPDATE: Some critics have seen advanced screenings of Inception and are now falling over themselves to heap praise on Nolan’s film. So much praise that it has already inspired a backlash from David Poland. MovieLine looks at some of the gushing.
Apple's already cornered the market on sleek and thin. Let's make our phone short and squat and hope that appeals to someone; anyone.
Knowing full well that it was only a matter of time before market forces caught up with its well-meaning but ultimately doomed effort in the smartphone field, Microsoft told its Kin to think of the farm they’d own someday where they could “tend to rabbits”, and then put a bullet in the back of its head.
It only took 48 days and sales of less than 10K units before Microsoft put the device out of its misery last week. Today’s New York Times looks at the software giant’s difficulties in the consumer market, where individuals have the power to choose products rather than corporate IT departments purchasing software suites.
“In particular, the Kin debacle is a reflection of Microsoft’s struggle to deliver what the younger generation of technology-obsessed consumers wants. From hand-held products to business software, Microsoft seems behind the times.”
And the root of its inability to capture consumers’ interest is that the company has lost the interest of the younger generation of software developers, who have migrated to open source platforms like those offered by Apple and Android.
It’s an interesting read; and the most interesting fact is that Microsoft found its Kin sales were being submarined by sellers in its corporate partner Verizon’s stores. Salespeople were discouraging Kin purchases in favor of Android sales. That would make a successful product launch impossible no matter what one was selling.
Let’s waste no time in celebrating this nation’s greatness as we approach the 4th of July Weekend. Musician Matt Chertkoff will be appearing around NYC and northern NJ today performing live music about hot dogs–e.g. The Hot Dog Highway, Hot Dog Money, and Meat Pimp–with an accompanying break dancer dressed as a hot dog. Yep, this may give Nathan’s at Coney Island a run for its money in the 4th of July spectacle department.
Chertkoff, who is a trained jazz musician according to The Jersey Journal, will be visiting Katz’s Deli and Crif Dogs in Manhattan, as well as performing impromptu street sets at various hot dog stands. The string of performances is to celebrate the start of Hot Dog Month (July), as well as promote Chertkoff’s new album “Hot Dog Rock–It’s For Real!”
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There is no burying the lede on this New York Times 
Bumped into butcher Jeffrey Ruhalter (almost literally in the crowded Essex Market) Saturday while looking for bread. He recommended the excellent loaves at Pain D’Avignon, which was convenient b/c we were standing in front of the store. And Ruhalter would know, because his butcher shop is a few steps away.
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