Bryan Joiner

March 11, 2010

High Tide in Brooklyn

I couldn’t wait five minutes. I was walking to the subway from work and called a friend who was in a conversation: He’d call back in five. I stood next to the stairwell, pacing, flipping my phone open to see if the numbers had changed. 4:51. Then, after an hour: 4:52. I couldn’t make it. Tourists flooded past me, men handed out newspapers: 4:53. What would I do when I got home? 4:54. Read a book, I suppose. 4:55. Now I could see 9 p.m., and it looked like my living room, with the TV on and a book in my hands. And by the time my phone flashed 4:56, I was through the turnstile and headed to my sixth home in eight years.

My superintendent got the boot last week; the management company fired him without remorse or much warning, it appears. He’s lived here for 39 years and they sent him a letter giving him two weeks to get out. People in the building were outraged, and took to the building’s e-mail list to register their outrage and arrange for him to see tenant lawyers. They even put a signup sheet downstairs to pledge support, which I missed — by the time I got there, the list had been removed and it was just an exhortation and a pen on a stick. Presumably those names were passed along to the people who deliver my rent statements. I have to suspect my landlords know it’s coming. They’ve done this before, and they’ve dealt with this before. It’s really hard to get someone out of their apartment in this city if they’re willing and able to fight back and whether they have rights that have been broken or not. This is part of it.

On the bright side, I’ve never been the target of something like this. I’ve been forced to move twice. Both times I lived on the second floor of a house in Queens, both times the owner sold the house, and both times were between 2004 and 2007 — not surprising, in restrospect. The amount of money poured into real estate then was staggering. In Woodhaven, Queens, a cluttered, low-lying and middle-class-at-best neighborhood, there were full attached condominiums going up that started at $650,000 by the middle of 2004. I didn’t know much about real estate at the time, and I knew jack about subprime mortgages, but I knew something was off. When the bubble burst, it took a few months for me to connect the dots. I took it for granted: to live in a city was to be transient.

That’s not how things are in my building now. Here, there’s permanence. When I moved in the person vacating the apartment told me of two local species: the “lifers” and the “steppers.” Lifers are self-explanatory. Steppers stayed 5-7 years. I was 31, and he was 37: MATH. It’s amazing that in Brooklyn, where everyone fancies themselves special, I became another puzzle piece. I was probably one before, too, but I was off the beaten path and that was its own reward. There’s an emptiness from having left Queens to move someplace so rigidly spectacular. I’ve seen this place plenty in movie sets, in sepia-toned photographs you can buy off the street. This place evokes the forties, or the twenties. White, tree-lined, beautiful when it snows. It won’t be much different in 20 years; its about slow changes, and slow movements in and out like my own.

Queens? Queens will be different. Queens is a place in motion, a place where the world constantly doubles back on itself, like the remains a giant wave following gravity back into the ocean and the teeth of another one. It’s not like that here, and so when there is something to overcome — like an unseemly eviction — the people become riled. There’s no denying the goodness of their quest. But having been where the heavy waves crash, time after time after time, I know it never stops. Just as Long Island has its turbulent Atlantic shore and its placid North Shore, Queens (tubulent) and yuppie Brooklyn (placid) express this idea — even if in doing so they inversely geographically situated to the actual tides, a funny little note. What’s not funny is a man who’s lived somewhere for 39 years being cast away from his home at a moment’s notice. For him, the years probably went by like minutes: 1971… 1972… 1973… 2009… 2010. And now, in a manner of seconds, he needs a new home.

I bet I know where he lands.

March 9, 2010

Up in the Air

Two weeks ago, I went to Ikea. It wasn’t glorious — how could Ikea be glorious? — but it wasn’t terrible. I needed things and I bought them, if reluctantly. I like to put things off, and Ikea doesn’t allow you to put things off. It’s all in front of you, and the price tags whittle away your impulses toward procrastination.

That was Sunday. On Friday, I invited my friend Ryan over to help me build my bedframe. I could do it without him, but I could do it faster with him. We got to work. We used little wrenches that Ikea gave us, and we used them effectively. We made half the thing until I noticed that something was wrong. Ryan was too high on making shit to see, and was confused as I explained it. The sides of the frame were four inches shorter than the bed itself. I looked at the box. The box said the sides were for a Twin/Full bed. My bed is a Queen. I picked up the wrong box. We consoled ourselves with spicy lamb sandwiches, and life was good and bad at the same time.

Last weekend was too snow-packed to fix the problem. This weekend I resolved to go back. I had to get a ride. Zipcar won’t have me. I convinced my friend Chris that it wouldn’t take very long for me to swap one small part out for another; initially skeptical, he resolved to interrupt his stagnant Sunday in Williamsburg to help me out, against every one of his instincts. We drove to the store and I steeled myself for the worst. It was much worse than I thought.

Ikea is designed to give the shopper the most pleasant, facilitated retail experience: Wide, clean lanes, full displays, everything. All the negativity is shoved into the Returns and Exchanges section. They make you take numbers, like delis, and you stand around with hundreds of anxious or angry former customers who just want their money back or to run some sort of scam on the retail giant. The percentages have to be like 90/10 percent, but everyone there feels pre-rejection feeling of rejection. There’s something about the holding area that says You’re Fucked before you’re even called, mostly because you’ve already been dehumanized to the point of farce. This isn’t Hell. It’s too boring to be Hell. It’s like Hell’s waiting room.

So anyhow, I waited in this mess for about 20 minutes before I decided that I didn’t want to wait anymore, mostly for Chris’s sake. He was so anti-Ikea that he had parked his car and decided to take in the soothing vista of New York Harbor, with its slow-moving rusted-out cargo ships and scenic Staten Island. Basically, I had about 10 minutes before he flipped and drove his back to the Burg with my sweater in tow. So I just got behind a register and pretended it was a line. When I got to the front, the cashier scolded me. “Next time,” she said, with the knowing inflection that there would be no next time, but we’d both pretend there would be so we could process my simple rutrn, “don’t come here unless I call you.” Scan, scan, card, sign, money, receipt. Back into the store I went to get the right size. Seven minutes later, I was headed back north. Chris drove me around the block, dropped me off, and sped home.

I got inside and put them in my hallway. It was only 3 p.m, and it was so nice out! Time to go back outside. But I lost steam, and I fell asleep on my earthbound bed. I awoke around 7 and realized that I was going to watch the Oscars, and that I’d better make the most of that fact. I heated up some popcorn and poured myself a water. A celebration! But I knew once the show started that the bed frame needed to be made. I’d waited too long. It was a full year ago that Chris told me I’d feel better sleeping up in the air; he said that there was something unspeakably regal about it. I believed him, but never took initiative. Now that I had, I couldn’t in good conscience wait any longer.

It was somewhere in between the Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards that I went to work. I stacked books on the far side of my room to rest the sides upon, and started screwing the pieces together on the near side. It went smoothly for the most part, but occasionally the pieces didn’t fit like they were supposed to, and it took the slightest bit of elbow grease to line them up, and I felt like a king. When it was all done (in 40 minutes, at most), I laid my boxspring and mattress back down and laid on the bed: A new view. An escalation. I was soaring. Chris was right.

But then, back into the living room to watch the Oscars. Suddenly everything was different. From there, the bed used to be only a feature of the bedroom. Now it was dominant. Regal. Royal. I was almost afraid of it. When I eventually tried to turn in, I was both nervous that I was going to fall off and effusively proud of whatever part of myself had actually gotten it done, as if it lived outside of me….

… and then I awoke, the terrestrial radio’s morning nonsense, which is perpetually inspired to be silenced. I dropped with the intent to hit the snooze button, and nearly faceplanted into the all. My legs had dangled for an unexpected half-second; I had forgotten that I was up in the air. I was dazed and braced myself against the dresser to gather my bearings. Remember what you did, I thought…

Then I walked over to the alarm clock, hit snooze, and jumped gingerly back onto the bed. I didn’t want to break the frame on the first day. I did this three more times before I got up. When I did, I slunk into the living room, confident that I lacked the energy for the pommel-horse leap back onto the bed. Chris and the Swedes had won. I was back on Earth for another 18 hours, and it was time to make the best of it.

March 4, 2010

Look up

I looked at the sky just now, and not fleetingly; I was outside, and I just looked up, up, up. It was just before dusk, and it seemed a miracle that it was 6:15 and there were still hints of blue. I noticed a bird’s nest in a tree branch that I initially assumed was a plastic bag, because so many of them come to rest there. It was too small to be the nest of a Morning Dove, which makes me happy, as their signature cooing has haunted me from West Tisbury to Forest Hills to the Tiger Woods 10 video game in which, on certain courses, it is a sound effect designed, likely, to put you at ease. When I lived in Forest Hills, in an old building in a wooded area of Queens, the birds would stand in the windowsill and coo. It took effort to bang the window, but they seemed to know the score even if you scared them away. They always came back.

I realized, as I craned my neck tonight, taking in whatever portion of the cloud formations I could, that it’s a rare thing for me to do. Most of my life at least recently has been spent looking straight ahead, or down. In Astoria, there was a shortcut to the train station that I would use on some mornings. The shortcut ran around and along a 60-ish-foot high wall over which the Amtrak passed — it was tall enough to pass over the elevated subway track. The latticework of Amtrak’s power lines ran above along the edges of the rails, and birds would stand on them just long enough to have their lives removed from this world… whereupon their bodies would fall to the ground in the walkway that so many people hurried along… only the walkway was also a driveway for a municipal parking lot, which meant a lot of tire traffic, and a lot of pancaked bird carcasses. You could tell how long a bird’s body had been there by the amount of blood. Lots of blood — recent death. No blood — a long time. I saw flattened skeletons fairly often, which looked like displays in a pop-up book where you pull on tabs and the figure jumps into three dimensions.

Eventually I stopped using the pathway except for the most pressing emergencies (being late for anything but work, I suspect). But I had to keep looking down. Dead animals, vomit, dog shit — they were everywhere.

That said, Astoria had its charms. The food within five blocks of my apartment was better than the food within 20 blocks of anyplace else I’ve lived, and cheaper. Greek, Czech, Italian, Afghani, Colombian, Thai — we had everything. What we lacked, and what Queens lacks in spades, is atmosphere. There’s nothing sexy about it, which leads some to believe there’s nothing interesting about it, but they’re wrong. At the same time, there’s a reason that no public figure you may know as from Queens still lives there, or would even dream of it.

I wish Brooklyn was as interesting. It’s not, at least not where I live now. This is a Yuppie’s Paradise, as lampooned here (that was written in my apartment, and I have no idea to what degree I am the intended target, but I’d put it at around 30 percent. I’d be fine with it if the spot-in description of myself and my neighborhood didn’t leave me cold). I am implored by friends to whom I rave about studio apartments in the East Village that if I was to leave here, the grass would suddenly become technicolor green, and my eyes would widen with the thoughts of returning. I’m not so sure. It’s hard to look up when you don’t think you’re at the center of something; oddly, it takes a big of egoism to look to the sky and think that the weather, the world, is there just for you — you have to feel big to feel small again. Or like the subway ads say, sometimes you have to take a step backward to take a step forward. I guess the problem with a studio apartment is that you don’t have space to take many steps at all.

But it’s not that space I’m worried about; it’s outer space. I miss it. When I was growing up, it was paramount, crushing. The stars and moon were bright enough that I could drive without lights, especially in the snow. Often, it was too light for me to go to sleep. I never considered getting a curtain, or one at least one that blocked all the light. I thought if one sleepless night happened, so be it. I’d get back to bed the next night. When I got to Chicago and saw a friend blocking every bit of light in his apartment 24/7, I couldn’t bring myself to follow suit. Years later, I relented, and I was like everyone else. I hate having closed curtains, but now it’s just what I do, so again: not much opportunity to just stare at the sky and think. Of course, the more I write about it, the more I miss it, even if I remember the occasional feelings of terror it inspired in me about my insignificance. But my problem isn’t feeling insignificant. It’s feeling too significant, as if the bulk of my life’s work has been done.

I can’t remember the last time I opened a Word document and thought about writing. Oh, I’ve written a ton, but I’m talking about thinking about the words burning onto the page, and into the reader’s mind. It was easier to focus when I was writing for print every day. Every word was irretrievable, and every word was my name, which was out there. Now, it’s in here. I’ve stopped looking at my daily hit count because I don’t care, but I don’t care only because it would hurt to much to do so. I had victory in my hand and it slipped away. I was being read, which is the single hardest thing to achieve as a writer, and I took it for granted. The only way to reconcile this, to myself, was to blame the world. I was a star who hadn’t gotten his just deserves, I thought — no matter, I was a star anyway. If no one was looking, that wasn’t my fault. It was theirs. I messed around with forms, writing about anything I wanted, thinking I was a master at everything as my star slowly faded to a dull, insignificant twinkle. Any residual glow now is no different than the guy in Bombay who opens up a Blogger account — it’s the glow of the screen, pointing nowhere. It’s not real, but it’s not fake either. It is what it is. It’s also what I look at for hours upon hours of the day, stuffing my brain full of information about people, places and things. That’s great and all, but looking up helps me unlock the information that’s already in my head. By remembering how small I am, I remember that the combinations in my head are mine and mine alone, and that’s a comforting feeling.

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March 3, 2010

The perfect sentence, the perfect beer

Day two of year two brings epiphanies, but only in the subway, where my writing-in-the-mind is impeccable. Today I dreamt-authored “throwing words around concrete walls, but the walls are never any less cold, gray, or unforgiving” while I traversed the 14th Street tunnel between the V and and 2 lines. When I crafted that sentence, I was walking up the slight incline that means you’ve finally reached Seventh Avenue, only to descend again onto the busy 2 train platform, a platform I used to frequent late at night when it meant a ride home. I can’t remember the last time I was there (nor can I really remember the context of my words), and I felt no particular nostalgia for it as I boarded an uptown 3 within seconds of getting there. I felt a slight pang of nostalgia when I ascended to 96th Street, but not for years past—for Super Bowl Sunday of three weeks ago, when I left the very same station to meet Ryan and walk to 125th Street to take the bus to Astoria. We were both excited to take the bus. It’s exceedingly rare that it’s a more attractive option, both aesthetically and practically, to reach a destination that’s amply served by the subway… but there it was. The day was cold, crisp, and sunny, and having flaked out on an early morning run to let the earth warm up a bit, we crunched up Amsterdam Avenue toward Columbia and promises of the M60, with its university student then crosstown traffic then airport employee user pool, sprinkled all the time with people like us who just wanted to go to Astoria and get to ride over a bridge.

Tonight, though, I was just going to Whole Foods for the second time in the last year. The first time had been 20 minutes earlier at the Whole Foods on the Bowery, which is perfectly nestled along one of my dozens of comfortable commute-home routes. I was looking for a specific product that had been recommended to me earlier in the day, and the Bowery location didn’t have it. They didn’t appear to, at least, and I looked several times. Often, after work, I’m not the in the mood for rejection, and this one of those times: I wasn’t asking, especially because I had been told that the product I sought was most assuredly at the 97th Street location. I was excited to go to 97th Street until the recommender had pointed out that I could try my luck at the Bowery, and I was a little bummed that it would be so easy. When it wasn’t, I took it as a sign to skip the ride home and head uptown. In terms of things getting my attention, this had it. I suppose it’s time to be come with it. The product is the “best beer on earth,” according to this, and it is called Brooklyn Black Ops, and apparently was brewed in a seriously limited run that is pretty much over. You can’t find it any more, or something. I like good beer, but most importantly I like things that sound cool, and the process of obtaining them making them even cooler, and that’s before you get to its wonderful, wholly-fabricated lore:

Brooklyn Black Ops does not exist. However, if it did exist, it would be a robust stout concocted by the Brooklyn brewing team under cover of secrecy and hidden from everyone else at the brewery. Supposedly, “Black Ops” was aged for four months in bourbon barrels, bottled flat, and re-fermented with Champagne yeast, creating big chocolate and coffee flavors with a rich underpinning of vanilla-like oak notes. They say there are only 1,000 cases. We have no idea what they’re talking about.

Simply put, the idea of chasing all around the city for one of the final bottles, which is supposed to pretty much blow your taste buds and liver (11.7% APV) to smithereens, was incredibly an incredibly appealing hunt on a gray, warmer-than-normal day on which I’d rather do anything than come home and stare at the TV. I never doubted that I’d find it at the 97th Street location, and I did. Then I went into the internal deliberation of one bottle vs. two bottles, which only arose because of the price. I settled on one. The joy was in the chase, and to savor every last minute of it as I would every last drop… and now it sits in my fridge, ready to go. It was an effort not to pound it tonight, but with its punch, I needed to put it off one more day. It won’t live until Thursday. I’ll probably write something after I drink it. I might even write it down, but I might not, and it might become another example of perfect craftsmanship dissolving into the void… and you’ll have to settle for the second-rate stuff like this.

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March 2, 2010

Brooklyn at 1

I have lived in Brooklyn for a year as of today. Earlier today, it seemed like this would make for a nice, reflective blog post, but then I’ve gone and cooked and eaten dinner and I’m feeling less into it. What is there to say? I guess I could make a list of goals for the next year and see if I can reach them, considering I probably didn’t come close to meeting the goals I set for myself a year ago. Then again, it’s possible I didn’t any goals at all. Last year I just wanted to escape Queens, and the feeling of escape led me to really enjoy the first year of living here in the very kid-like way I was still living in Astoria. With a year under my belt, I see more of the parts of my personality I’ve been neglecting — ones that have generally served me well throughout my life, provided I continue to do them.

For instance, I used to be insufferably particular when it came to arrangements, labeling and design of all sorts of things. I thought this was a unique trait until one day at the Maroon office when I went through a folder on the Maroon server and made sure all the file names were similarly capitalized, and Moacir exploded, faux-enraged, “Who do you think you are, ME?” That was about the same time I gave it up, as well, mostly because I was around a lot of extremely smart people where just minding my p’s and q’s wasn’t quite cutting it, or so I thought. My first quarter of college I performed the rather insane task of reading every single book assigned to me, but quickly realized in class discussion that my reading comprehension skills didn’t measure up to the class dicussion dominators. Looking back, I shouldn’t be surprised: those motherfuckers were smart. I was too, in different ways, but I took that personally and almost immediately retreated to the shelter of the newspaper office, where I would spend most of the next four years. After my stint as Editor in Chief, which ended my junior year, I began let go of my OCD-ish tendencies, and it’s been a steady unraveling ever since. To be fair, it probably served me well when I worked and lived in Queens; if you’re obsessed with making that place fit into neat boxes, it will drive you crazy. Queens is about survival, or as Ravi says, “Queens: People live here.” I’m sure there are exceptions (and thousands of them) to this, but in general I think it’s fair to say Queens defies neat categorization.

The problem was that when I rebounded from my Queens newspaper job with one at a trade magazine, I had fallen into bad habits that would only get worse. It was okay to just get things done in Queens because things were incredibly hard to get done; now I was just getting things done that were pretty unexceptional. Still, I became the nominal EIC within a couple years, and got the official title about nine months ago… and I wasn’t doing a good job. I’ll be the first to admit it. In fact, every day in the last few months, as my workload has steadily increased, has clued me into the fact that I’ve been doing a fraction of the work I should be doing. That I’ve earned some plaudits for it doesn’t make it better… it makes it worse. I don’t want to be complimented for unexceptional work, mostly because it’s not good for me. The last three months, I’ve worked as hard as I ever have, and today I was cleaning up my work area only to realize that my counterpart’s work space was immaculate, and along our shared cabinet space there ran a 38th-parallel like divide between her neatly arranged issues and my piled-up crap. It’s not that this happened; it’s that it’s been like this for months, maybe even years, and I never noticed it. The problem? I’m a freaking writer. I’m supposed to be aware of what’s happening around me, and this shit has been like this for a long, long time, and I had no idea.

Which leads me to my next question: What’s next? What’s the next thing where I’m like “I’ve been so oblivious/self-absorbed that I completely missed this?” Maybe it had already happened the night before, when, prompted by the oncoming one-year-anniversary, I started cleaning up the documents folder on my desktop. To my surprise, I had about 30 completed or mostly completed essays that I’ve written and done nothing with. Thirty! After years of writing pretty much exclusively for publication and ridiculing anyone who called themself a “writer” without doing so, I did the exact same thing. For four years! Now I have a pile of things to go through to see if they’re worth anything and if they are, make them into something better. I suppose that’s on my list of goals. Maybe that is my list.

It’s not that simple, but it is as simple as this: As long as I know what exactly I have to do, I can balance everything. I can get the p’s and q’s right if I’m paying attention. I’m fixing my desk at work not for appearance’s sake but so I can go back to being hyperaware of what’s happening around me. I’m doing the same thing at home, or trying to. The benefit I have now is that I’ve seen it from both sides: I’ve seen the benefits and the drawbacks of, effectively being OCD-ish, the benefits being that very hyperawareness and the drawbacks being that if you always thing linearly UR DOIN IT RONG. It’s certainly a good place to start, though, especially for me now, as the memories of Queens grow smaller and smaller. I still don’t feel quite at home here, but I’m not sure I do anyplace… though I certainly feel more like myself at my best more often nowadays. In the grand scheme of things, these are good problems to have. But my problem has been looking at the grand scheme at the expense of the microscopic one. Year two’s about that microscopic precision, and moving outward.

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February 26, 2010

Where are our cathedrals?

Thanks to MPdSP, I’ve hooked on to Tony Judt’s memoirs at NYRB (I own an e-subscription, so it’s just as well). In the most recent issue, he writes about riding the railroads around Europe in his youth, in awe of the train stations:

At their best—from St. Pancras to Berlin’s remarkable new central station—railway stations are the very incarnation of modern life, which is why they last so long and still perform so very well the tasks for which they were first designed. As I think back on it—toutes proportions gardées— Waterloo did for me what country churches and Baroque cathedrals did for so many poets and artists: it inspired me. And why not? Were not the great glass-and-metal Victorian stations the cathedrals of the age?

I’ll submit that they were. What do we have now? Certainly not airports, which is a shame because they’re the most obvious choice and the one to which many people I know have clung, tearing at the linoleum for significance in their knowledge and appreciation of O’Hare’s or Hartsfield’s concourse layouts or fast-food options. The emptiness of the airport space has been explored by many people in many forms, most popularly and recently in Up in the Air, despite its messiness. Everyone knows airports aren’t up to the aesthetic challenge of replacing train stations, and simply pointing this out does not make a great film anymore.

Are websites the new cathedrals? It seems that the answer is obviously yes but more obviously no. Certainly the rage engendered by every Facebook redesign would indicate that people have a fondness for the site that extends to the emotional: they think it’s theirs, not to be fucked with. But there’s nothing particularly aesthetically pleasing about it, nor does it function in the same way as a religious cathedral or train station. Those places are transitory by nature; you arrive, appreciate, and leave. In that way, Google would be a better corollary if it was much of a site at all. Facebook, by contrast, is designed like the world’s biggest airport you’d never want to leave — unlike Tom Hanks in The Terminal or that dude at Charles de Gaulle, they want you to live your life there. It keeps you where you are, instead of pushing you out, even if from an overload of wonder.

A friend told me that a professor once told him that the worst thing to do (one presumes as a tourist) was take a photo of the Grand Canyon. By taking the picture, you were absolving yourself of properly recording the memory, and one assumes ruining the view for anyone else who wanted to see it with fresh eyes, like the people who skip the “Scenes from Next Week’s Show”* on Lost.

* My brother and I used to watch the entirety of Beverly Hills 90210 in breathless anticipation of whether there would be “Scenes from Next Week’s Show” after the end credits. We called them “SCENES!” and would jump into the air, fists extended, when they would happen.

Of course, that was more than 10 years ago, and I can take a picture with my free-with-a-2 year plan phone I have now. Which I’ve done to take pictures of many things, my feet included:Also funny signs:

…and never food, but it’s only a matter of time. The point is that I use my camera to document the horribly mundane, or at least the amusing things amongst the horribly mundane ones. I also have pictures of my friend’s sixth-month old baby, which I uploaded and never showed anyone; what was the point? Did I take the picture to avoid paying real attention to her? And were the literally thousands of photos of the Grand Canyon to which my brother had been subjected make him not want to stay for more than three hours, after a treacherous four-hour drive (one way) to get there? And were the pictures I took on that trip the same reason I didn’t feel like I needed to hike into the Canyon on my return trip seven months later? Pushing further, I’ve never been to Westminster Abbey… but I know it from The Da Vinci Code. I’ve walked past Trinity Church hundreds of times, but the inside I know from National Treasure. The worst part is that even if I went inside, I’d still know it from National Treasure. It’s part of something bigger and ultimately aesthetically unspectacular (lower Manhattan), and by no means modern. The vast majority its visitors are running down a checklist, hoping to be awed… which is exactly what I would do if I was visiting. But I’d really be looking for the mundane; I’d think it was really funny, and noteworthy, if someone wrote “poop” on an official-looking sign or something.

In just my home city of New York, there are many structures that ostensibly pass as cathedrals: the Empire State Building, the Guggenheim, Yankee Stadium, the Met, Lincoln Center, the Natural History Museum, the Statue of Liberty, maybe the Tennis Center or Apollo Theater… but none of these are inspiring in the day-to-day, or even in the year-to-year. I don’t know if this is a result of American vacuousness, but if it’s not totally empty, it’s because one structure doesn’t easily top all the others. Everyone can appreciate maybe one of those places more than the other in the way they have their favorite slice of pizza or burger, and they can rhapsodize and intellectualize it all they want… but in the end, all of those discussions are really no different from one another. Awe is fleeting, but not by design.

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February 24, 2010

Scott Brown’s Primer

A primer for the new guy, by yours truly.

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February 23, 2010

ESPN: Making an example of Kornheiser

ESPN suspended Tony Kornheiser for two weeks ostensibly because he criticized Hannah Storm’s wardrobe, but he also criticized Chris Berman’s weight.

ESPN’s making an example of Kornheiser, throwing down the gauntlet against both perceived misogyny (good move) and intra-company criticism (bad move). Two weeks wouldn’t seem like much if Kornhesier didn’t co-host the only consistently bearable show on the network, but he does. For what it’s worth, he did what he could to get in front of the story, apologizing to Storm both publicly (on his radio show) and privately. In this sense, and only this one, his a victim of his own adulthood. By drawing attention to himself by doing the adult thing, ESPN did what it does — rule over its kingdom like a bunch of ecstatic-happy-to-be-here College Republicans. Having already admitted he was wrong — and he was wrong — ESPN inflicted punishment that they knew he would take without incident to teach the dumbasses who work there, which is basically everyone else, not to do this type of stuff.

The whole thing will go away soon enough, and I’m sure we’ll be treated to an Inside SportsCenter commercial where the two yuk it up at Kornheiser’s expense. If this keeps a less visible woman from getting mistreated by a less self-aware guy, fine with me.

2 Comments

February 22, 2010

Finish the Sentence

2 Comments

February 22, 2010

Credit Where Credit is Due

I’ll give HBO credit for one thing w/r/t How to Make it in America — buying off Gawker Media. Well played publicity from the POV of getting the show out there and nipping/forestalling the absolutely murderous trashing it would have received on a weekly basis on their 87 sites. Instead we get the Kabuki theater of semi-positive reviews, which is amusing enough in its own right.