But when I look around these days, at the bars, at rooftop parties, on the streets and avenues of this still-great city, I see an army of young people out there having a good time. They retain all the optimism of youth. Their prospects may be just as grim as everyone else’s, but they don’t let that affect them. They use their relative poverty to their advantage, creating fun through thrift. They are building the very memories that they will look back on a couple of decades from now and think, “Man, that was the greatest summer ever.”

And it will absolutely be true. Two decades from now we will all be bog people living in warring tribes among the marshes of the New Jersey Meadowlands, skinning rats to provide pelts for warmth and eating their chemically-infested flesh for the tiny bits of protein we are able to provide to our bodies. As the kids of today huddle around the tire fires of tomorrow, they will tell stories to their undersized, two-headed children (assuming mankind remains fertile then) about those balmy summer days before the floods and fires when a six pack of beer and a bittorrented rip of the new Arcade Fire were very heaven. It will sound like paradise. [The Awl]

••••••••

My utter refusal to put words to screen around these parts (or any parts of the Internet, for that matter) can be explained in one word: Summer. Summer, darlings! I forgot to pay much attention to it for the bulk of July and early August, but then suddenly The Awl was already writing eulogies, and my Goddamn Cobra compatriots and I were putting the finishing pre-production touches on the western we’ve been planning since last fall, and tomorrow I set off for two weeks on the west coast, one week in the midwest, and holy September it will already be fall by the time I set foot in my beloved Brooklyn again!

So some summer had to be had these past couple weeks, because like a new acquaintance of mine said recently, re: being A Man, “Eventually you have to know when is the right time to be all schooled in the ways of Cusackian “Say Anything” (i.e. open your fucking mouth and share your feelings and express yourself) and when is the right time to get all caveman and slut it up something rough and proper.” Or, like another new acquaintance of mine said recently, “Shit is way fragile, man.” Now is not the time to get all Cusackian about this summer, because this summer is dissolving, fast! And because when we’re all nursing our 3-eyed cucumber babies and eating rat people, or whatever it is, then —well, I think you get the point.

But what I wanted to say—or what I wanted to show you, rather … hell, maybe it’s best if I just paraphrase Eli Cash: Well, everyone knows the kids in north Brooklyn are capable of this short of audacity to enjoy ourselves, this orgy of flagrant optimism. What this block party footage presupposes is … maybe it isn’t just us … ?

*Note: In my quest to simply show the diversity of ages and ethnicities voraciously enjoying this sunny summer Sutton street day … I may have kept in a lot of gratuitous footage of cute kids dancing to hipster DJs playing Lady GaGa … (also, please pardon my poor editing skills, and the occasional oohs and ahhs from Hugh and I in the background).

* P.S. This was my first-ever block party! Whole-street garage sales were the closest we got to block parties in the suburban Midwest …

And Lewis sounds like she’s having fun—not just the wry kind of ‘look at me now’ fun that comes from wearing impossibly short gold-sequined dresses and outshining your ex-boyfriend (Rilo Kiley guitarist Blake Sennett), like circa Under the Blacklight, but real, genuine fun. And guess what? Me, too, Jenny! Good for us. Perhaps we all become better sons or daughters after all ….

I think I saw something about someone wanting to start a Slow Journalism movement. I am on board. Or if no one said that, then I’m doing so now. We’ll wait somewhat longer to write up news and analysis, worry less about news pegs, blog about worthwhile books that were published four years ago and articles that appeared on the Web five months ago, or seven years ago. We’ll lose the morning, every morning, but we’ll win the week. Or the month.

He’s responding to Dave Weigel’s intro over at his new Slate blog, in which Weigel grapples with the speed of the political news cycle In This Day & Age (I do dig Dave’s elevator pitch: So: Who’s running the country, who wants to take it away from them, and what are they all doing wrong? Let’s find out.) Conor says he pays no mind to who publishes first; he gets his news from friends and those established voices he trusts:

The whole of Red State or Big Government could be writing about a story before anyone else, but having concluded that I don’t know when I can trust them, and it isn’t worth the time and effort to fact check their work before writing about it, I won’t see the story until Dave Weigel or Chris Beam or Tim Carney or Mark Hemingway or some other person whose work I follow gets to it.

And I really don’t care if it’s a day later.

It sounds a bit like a vote for “epistemic closure” (am I using that phrase right, boys? I willfully ignored that whole debate; Slow-Journo street cred, score 1 me …?), but I more or less agree. It fits the theory that the only currency journalists have In This Day & Age (god, I love that phrase; all the moral panic it breathlessly implies!) is their name, and they can contract that name, that voice, out to different publications, different sites, but they better maintain control of it, because it’s really their only card. Publications have been and will continue to rely on and invest in recognizable “voices” or “brands” rather than “the news,” per se. It’s why, in attempting reinvention, AOL snapped up name-brand political writers; or why it perplexes me that in Atlantic.com’s site revamp, it reorganized content away from a voice/blogger-centric layout (not that I doubt it had very good secret reasons).

And this is all reminding me of Clay Shirky’s latest book, Cognitive Surplus, which I am reading (slowly) right now. This is my favorite point so far:

The old choice between one-way public media (like books and movies) and two-way private media (like the phone) has now expanded to include a third option: two-way media that operates on a scale from private to public. Conversations among groups can now be carried out in the same media environments as broadcasts. This new option bridges the two older options of broadcast and communications media. All media can now slide from one to the other. An e-mail conversation can be published by its participants. An essay intended for public consumption can anchor a private argument, parts of which later become public. We move from public to private and back again in ways that weren’t possible in an era when public and private media, like the radio and the telephone, used different devices and different networks.

The point he makes is so simple, but it struck me, still; that is the root of so much of what we talk about when we talk about journalism, the Internet, writers, authors, amateurs, user-generated content, social media, social networks, email privacy, influencers, news … Everything (Dave Weigel’s Journolist emails; your facebook profile; a photo a girl from third grade found in her parents’ attic, the electronic love letters you really meant to keep between you and your intended, the rough cut of the song you send a few folks to preview) is public media. Which is why it makes sense that, amid this, you know, little social shift wherein a good portion of the world’s conversation became public media, trustworthiness is one of the few viable, remaining currencies.

Or something like that.

Anyway, Conor, count me in! Because I’d like to write about Georges Simenon mysteries and what sense, if any, can be made of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. I want to hear your and everyone’s thoughts on this 2001 Nerve essay, and not feel silly blogging about this New York Magazine article on soldiers and YouTube even though it’s over 2 weeks old. Because, I tell ya, getting out of DC helped give me a little perspective. It can be paralyzing when your drinking buddies are among some of the most well-known political or cultural bloggers. It can make you feel like there’s no point in writing a thing if you didn’t get there first, or don’t have a perfectly unique take.

Now Brooklyn provides its own kind of weird (everything you and/or your friends do ends up a sort of product that is very palatable for certain media types, I guess, but then again, sometimes you ask for it). But I don’t feel as paralyzed by the news cycle here. Sometimes, the whole business seems like a cross between a research experiment I might have set up in grad school (as it was, my thesis tried to discover some sort of ideological metamorphosis in U.S. celebrity-tabloid coverage based on our changing political & cultural atmosphere between 1996 and 2006. um, yeah) and a private game being played solely by those with the power, or misfortune, to believe in it. Or worse, to think they don’t.

But maybe that’s just me.

So well played, Mad Men, so well played (turns out with an iTunes season pass, you can’t watch ’til the next day, so I finished the premiere just moments ago) … I had to pause the recording for momentary glee (smiling, clapping, the whole nine yards) when Don Draper began telling the Wall Street Journal reporter about the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce backstory. What a perfect, beautifully-subtle nod to the shift from a 1950s media and relational culture (coded language, just the facts, ‘my work speaks for itself’) to the coming of the new journalism, the rise of confessional culture, the celebrity profile, Rolling Stone, all of that. And the use of that sort of Brit-rock-on-the-verge-of-psychedelia song (turns out it’s “Tobacco Road,” as covered by a band called The Nashville Teens) just as Don does this—all right, I’m fawning, okay, I’m fawning hardcore. Betty’s costume choices were perfect—so matronly, so political-wifey—and such a contrast to the young bride Barbie cocktail florals of earlier seasons. Peggy’s haircut, Don enjoying being slapped around by a hooker, that bikini ad (my god, that would never have flown in 1961!), that girl who works in the mute-Opera-chorus and looks like a second-rate Betty …I loved it all.

Anyway … “Here comes that British group with the American name … The Nashville Teens!”

I didn’t know what was going on with LeBron James.

My college friends—mostly ex-Clevelanders now living in Chicago—were appalled. It was the night he was making his big announcement, and our friend Greg had canceled on dinner plans. “He probably just wanted to stay home and watch LeBron,” someone said. “What’s going on with LeBron?” I asked.

Embarrassed silence, dismay, horror spread throughout the room! I hoped never to have to meet with such abject group shaming any time soon—but it was not my night. Because later that evening, my tongue loosened from a little too much Malbec and some concoction my friend calls “Kari juice,” I let slip a far graver statement. What, you wonder, could beat the horror of telling a bunch of Cleveland kids that you, a former Ohioan yourself, have no idea what’s going on with LeBron James?

I admitted I liked Betty Draper.

With the Mad Men season four premiere this evening, the chattering classes and us that orbit them have once again begun fawning over the series, and though I know it’s not fashionable, though I know it’s downright heretical, I want to come clean once and for all: I don’t only like Betty; she is, in fact, my favorite female character on the show. I think she’s sexier than Joan. I think she’s more interesting than Peggy. Yes, we’re all supposed to admire Christina Hendrick’s brave curves, and Peggy’s ambition. And I do. But my heart belongs to Betty.

Yes, she’s  used to getting her way. Yes, she’s rich, and insular; cold, and certainly not the world’s greatest mother. Betty’s not perfect—but none of the character’s on Mad Men are. And yet none of the others seem to be met with the same audience scorn as Betty Draper. Why?

When I’ve admitted to friends, recently, my feelings about Betty, they asked me if I’d finished season 3 yet. I had not. Wait ’til you finish season three, multiple people told me. I bet you’ll change your mind.

But I finished season three last night, and I just don’t see where I’m supposed to start perceiving Betty as especially horrible. Sure, she’s leaving Don for another man, but Disney princesses get more action that Betts got during the lead-up to this affair. Meanwhile, Don has been screwing around on her since the beginning of their marriage, and hiding a secret life (which Betty finds out about at the same time as all this is happening). I’m not one to cast fidelity as the be-all end-all of marital commitment, but for what it’s worth, I think the point clearly goes to Betty here.

So what then—what is it about Betty that turns people off so? Is it that she was raised rich? That she’s pretty? That’s she’s a certain kind of pretty? That she’s not a bastion of maternal compassion? All of it together? What?

I began suspecting folks’ hatred of Betty Draper had less to do with what Betty was, and more to do with what she was not. And what she was not was behaving in the way we like our victimized mid-century housewives to behave. Justin Miller at the Atlantic just comes right out and says it:

Betty was “hazily presented as a stultified victim,” as Ben Schwarz wrote in The Atlantic last year. And victimhood requires a sort of innocence, which is destroyed when she cheats on Don with an anonymous man at a bar and sets up an affair between her married friend and another man. Betty is no longer a victim of infidelity, by the end of the second season, but a believer in it.

So when our lonely housewife heroine feels such so thoroughly isolated she can only speak candidly with an 8-year-old boy, that’s sympathetically adorable, but this sympathy is conditional on her remaining totally helpless?

Well, either that or getting all Betty Friedman on our asses! Miller continues to lament that

… Betty isn’t the agent of her own salvation. It’s another man that’s letting her escape the Draper name by seducing her, proposing to her, and convincing her to leave her family. Betty is hardly an epitome of 1960s feminism. After all, what sort of heroine needs a man?

Most heroines, I’d say, just like most heros need a leading lady. What exactly are Don’s numerous affairs but proof of his “need” of a woman?

As one commenter on Miller’s piece says:

I actually like the fact that Betty’s kind of a jerk. It would have been too easy and obvious a trope to have written her character as a more morally (and emotionally) advanced and perfect creature whose frustrations, limitations and heartbreaks have been foisted upon her by the other jerks in her life and/or by the inequities of the time.

A bad reputation can set you free. After all, if you’ve already declared yourself to be a pot-smoking, acid-addled slut, your opponents are forced to oppose your ideas on their merits, rather than strategically revealing your hidden depravities. Shame is no weapon against the shameless.

- From an old Nerve essay I am just reading now, “A Ladies Man and Shameless,” by John Perry Barlow. It goes from giggle-inducing to sneakily gorgeous pretty quick, so watch out. It’s ostensibly all about love, sex and fidelity, but the reputation stuff also seems pretty relevant to all this end-of-forgetting hoopla …

Harvey is having a bit of a moment in America, as much as any neo-Marxist economic geographer can. Earlier this month, his lucid explanation of the “econopocalyspe” (accompanied by animated whiteboard doodles) was a modest hit on Boing Boing. Richard Florida borrowed his concept of the “spatial fix”–the idea that capitalism gets bigger and badder every time it’s wriggles out of a crisis–for his latest book, The Great Reset. And Harvey’s own book-length explanation of the crisis, The Enigma of Capital is set to be published on these shores in September.

On Tuesday night in Manhattan, Harvey discussed “experimental geography” and the role cities and suburbia played in the crisis. Starting from the idea of a “geographic unconscious”–”the way we think of space and time as ‘natural’ when they’re really constructed,”–Harvey blamed suburbia for brainwashing Americans into being good capitalists.

Mid-Summer Mix, Twenty-Ten: The Wisdom of Lobster Pops

DOWNLOAD

Tracks

1. Destroyer of the Void – Blitzen Trapper
2. The Suburbs – Arcade Fire
3. Nothing Changes – Anais Mitchell featuring The Haden Triplets
4. Learning – Perfume Genius
5. To Clean – Acoustic Family Creeps
6. It Doesn’t Have to Be Beautiful – Slow Club
7. Rill Rill – Sleigh Bells
8. Whiplash – Sunglasses
9. Long Day – Medications
10. Idea of Me – Makeout Point
11. “Honky Tonk Merry-Go-Round” – Patsy Cline
12. Troublesome Houses – Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & The Cairo Gang
13. The Tree – Blitzen Trapper, feat. Alela Diane
14. Til the Sun Rips – Woods
15. Summer Dust – The Love Language
16. We End Up Together – The New Pornographers

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About

1. Destroyer of the Void – Blitzen Trapper

I had really liked Blitzen Trapper’s Furr (2008), but 2009′s Black River Killer just bored me. “Destroyer of the Void,” though – the first track on the eponymous latest album from the band - is a 6-minute epic that starts all  Bohemian-Rhapsody-tinged then warps into some Led Zeppelin-style guitar rock before heading back into Queen territory. Yeah, that’s how I describe music: in terms of how it sounds compared to what my dad listened to. Anyway—well played, boys.

2. The Suburbs – Arcade Fire

Might Arcade Fire be the band of our generation? By our generation, of course, I mean the weird cuspers lost between flannel shirts and text messages, hovering on the edges of Gen X & Y, able to remember listening to Veruca Salt but still unable to escape Sleigh Bells, who managed to have Friendster accounts but also be the earliest adopters on Facebook, to have been banned from citing Internet sources in early college term-papers but never had a qualm about Starbucks. I remember hearing songs from the first Arcade Fire album on NPR while driving around my new neighborhood as a freshly-minted college graduate, back in 2004, and from then on “Neighborhood #1” became something of an anthem. And every few years since, the band seems to put out the same old album but updated slightly for the subtle shift of the previous few year’s petty zeitgeists. Or maybe I just listen to too much Canadian indie rock. Anyway, the full album, The Suburbs, is supposed to come out August 3; for now, we’ve got this.

3. Nothing Changes – Anais Mitchell featuring The Haden Triplets

4. Learning – Perfume Genius

Probably the most emo song on this mix, i.e., one of my favorites.

5. To Clean – Acoustic Family Creeps

If you’d asked me in July what album I’d take on a desert island with me, it’d be this 2009 release from Woods, a side-project album (I think; I don’t understand how all you weirdo noise/drone people release records) of manic psych-folk jams. Whatever it is, and wherever it came from, it’s goddamn gorgeous.

6. It Doesn’t Have to Be Beautiful – Slow Club

Oh, Slow Club! Probably my favorite recently-discovered band, the English duo channels Tilly & the Wall, Bright Eyes and Rilo Kiley—I guess we could just say Omaha circa 2003. So … damn .. catchy …

7. Rill Rill – Sleigh Bells

Speaking of catchy …

8. Whiplash – Sunglasses

No one can resist dancing to this one. Seriously. It’s already become a Sutton Street backyard-dance-party favorite … [p.s. WHO WANTS TO REMAKE THIS VIDEO???? Dude looks so much like a combination of my roommate Ian Parker and a kid I knew in college ...]

9. Long Day – Medications

10. Idea of Me – Makeout Point

Speaking of Veruca Salt …

11. “Honky Tonk Merry-Go-Round” – Patsy Cline

I heard a college friend-of-friends, Natalie Jose, cover this song in Chicago earlier this month (swoon!, p.s.) and haven’t been able to stop playing it several times daily since. Well I’m a-getting dizzy but I can’t stop …

12. Troublesome Houses – Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & The Cairo Gang

Oh, Will Oldham, you sexy, pot-bellied, bearded-like-my-crazy-agoraphobic-uncle genius, you! I can’t even really separate the quality of his songs from how much I <3 Will Oldham by this point*, so don’t take my word on this one. But it’s lovely. And it’s so, so the album Mr. Prince Billy would be making right now, having recently moved from the bluegrass state of his (and my!) ancestry to Brooklyn, NY. “I once had a house / and my family knew / where to find me / if ever they needed …”

13. The Tree – Blitzen Trapper, feat. Alela Diane

Could be Simon & Garfunkle circa Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.

14. Til the Sun Rips – Woods

15. Summer Dust – The Love Language

Sappy Smiths-esque doo-wop indie ballad. This one has montage written all over it, kids.

16. We End Up Together – The New Pornographers

It’s, you know … the New Pornographers. NP albums are always so hit and miss, and this one hasn’t won me over yet, but it is growing on me, especially the songs that sound like they might as well be A.C. Newman songs, like this one. Triumphant whimsy & longing and all that … (I think “Moves” will be the big hit, though?)

Enjoy!

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* He drinks Ricard! You know who else started drinking Ricard & Pernot a few months ago? This girl! Soul. Mates. … (ask me for a good anise liquor cocktail next time you visit)

McKibben rooftop dance party circa 2008

I’m sorry; I just couldn’t resist.

This is for the 1970s freaks among you:

[Stream/Download: http://goddamncobras.com/uni073/]

[x-posted, Brooklyn Home Companion]

It’s certainly intended as a warning for kombucha producers to get their acts together:

TTB has been advised that a major chain of grocery stores has removed a number of kombucha products from its shelves because of concerns about elevated alcohol content levels.  The distribution of an alcohol beverage product that is not labeled as such misleads consumers and could cause potentially serious consequences for consumers, especially pregnant women, children, and individuals who should avoid alcohol for medical reasons.  Accordingly, TTB encourages producers and distributors of kombucha products that are alcohol beverages to take immediate steps to ensure that their products comply with applicable Federal, State, and local laws regarding alcohol beverages.

As a result of the inquiries received on this issue, TTB is coordinating with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure that kombucha products that are currently on the market comply with Federal laws.  Right now, our primary concern is to ensure that consumers are not  misled about the nature of alcohol beverage products that might be marketed as non-alcohol beverages.  At this point in time, we do not know how extensive the problem is.

TTB plans to take samples of kombucha products from the marketplace and test their alcohol content in order to determine if the products are labeled in compliance with Federal law.  If TTB finds alcohol beverages that are not labeled in accordance with Federal law, we will take appropriate steps to bring them into compliance.  TTB will consult with FDA to ensure that the affected products comply with applicable Federal laws.  If the testing results from this labeling initiative indicate potential violations of the IRC, they will be referred to the appropriate office within TTB for further investigation, as necessary.

I’ll reserve comment for now.

Kombucha—for those neither crunchy, Asian, nor in close enough proximity to Brooklyn to have tried it—is a fermented tea. It grows from a giant spore called a “mother,” is slightly alcoholic, tastes a bit like vinegar, and is thought by many to have health benefits that range from increased energy to help with cancer recovery. Personally, I’ve found it delicious, and kind of addicting. The fizz, the yeast, the unusual taste—somehow, against all odds, it turns out to be incredibly refreshing.

Maybe it’s funny that I should call the drink addicting—some think kombucha could be part of the recovery process for alcoholics. By most accounts, the tea usually has an alcohol content of less than 0.5 percent (the limit for beverages not carrying a government warning). But content varies from batch to batch, and the amount of any particular element (lactic acid, gluconic acid, ethyl alcohol, B-vitamins, etc. ) that will end up in a finished batch can be unpredictable.

Last I heard, the FDA and the Alcohol, Tobacco, Tax and Trade Bureau were “looking into” the alcohol content of commercially available kombucha, spurred by state tests showing some brands had more than 2 percent alcohol content. Does Whole Foods know something we don’t?

And, at the risk of sounding like a 1940s reporter signing off: Will the kombucha battles kill the beverage before it even has a chance to become the next Vita Coco? Stay tuned…

The experience of reading these new volumes is akin to being taken into confidence by two writers who aren’t quite sure whether they like themselves very much, but are charmed and amused by the ways in which they don’t.

Interesting review of two new essay collections, Emily Gould’s And the Heart Says Whatever and Sloane Crosley’s How Did You Get This Number, from Boston Phoenix writer Sharon Steel. She suggests:

There’s only one thing more dangerous than being an ambitious, attractive twentysomething female stumbling through the publishing industry, attempting to secure quantifiable career success and, also, a fantastic boyfriend: the impulse to write about it. It’s understood yet unspoken that the publication of a memoir that generates some attention is likely to make a writer’s life, in a certain sense, unbearable; ultimately, though, her life will probably become worse in ways that are more interesting than it was before. Which is excellent fodder for a second book.

Um, writers … do you ever think maybe … and, shh!, look away if you’re not a writer, please, but … just occasionally, when you’re not busy being charmed by yourself or your friends or your political party or an exotic East Asian fishing village or something related to Marx, still— do you ever get the slightest suspicion that perhaps we, as a group, really are terrible people?

And yet!—… and yet, I suppose we have some qualities that redeem us. This, from Crawley, sounds commendable, and also (for creators of all kinds) like very sound advice:

I think of all the serious nonfiction about natural disasters or biographies of unsung artists being published. There’s a lot of 4 am why am I doing this again? That’s healthy in small doses. . . . Trust that you are not an asshole and you care about the big issues of the world. . . . and that if you’re lucky, you’ll actually get to them through the smaller ones.

“At this point in time, people’s real lives aren’t often trusted to be fascinating to others,” Steel editorializes. I think that is sometimes true & sometimes not. Regardless, I like Steels defense of the likes of Crosley and Gould, two current exemplars of this type who—no matter how you regard their literary merits or personal morals, individually—get a lot of projection heaped on them for representing this type so commendably. She concludes:

[...] if these two writers agree on anything, it’s this: it’s okay to be a woman who believes that she is the best subject matter for her work, and that her unreserved thoughts are interesting, valuable, strange, comical, and worth space on a shelf. It’s okay to be young and write as if you understand love and sadness, and to look back on stuff that just happened, instead of on properly faded memories. Because it leaves a reader free to try and see themselves, somewhere, in all that mess.

She has to go and end it on a rather corny note—”There’s something beautiful in being strong enough to say exactly what you wanted at the time, even if you’re led to believe no one is listening“—but I dig the drift.

Addendum:

Steel offers just about as good as any definition I’ve yet heard for Generation Y: … the one that hasn’t grown up cataloguing the glorious and terrible minutiae of their lives on the Internet, but has come into adulthood doing so.

Yeah. Hey Liz, It’s 10:35 and I was just driving in between jobs. So I had a minute and I wanted to call you and thank you for the i was take care of. I love the color. I’d like to shirt. I don’t work yet but your mom watch that, and I’ll probably wear at this weekend and then watch it again and take it out to California. Your mama college and she’s gonna. Thank you for both of us and I think you got him playing phone tag. She’d like to go to California and she left out this morning and I just called because I had a minute. So if you get this message. You do not have to call me back because I’ll be working. Hello she’d get in the next couple of minutes, but otherwise I’ll give you a call tomorrow or tonight or sunday or something, so hope you’re having a great day and love you and I’ll talk to you Later. Bye Bye.

And what my dad actually said:

Yeah, hey Biz, it’s 10:35, and I was just driving in between jobs so I had a minute, and I wanted to call you and thank you for the father’s day present. I love the color, I really like the shirt. I haven’t worn it yet but your mom washed it, and I’ll probably wear it this weekend and then wash it again and take it out to California. Your mom had called ya and she was going to thank you for both of us and I think you guys ended up playing phone tag. She left to go to California, she left, uh, this morning, and I just called because I had a minute. So if you get this message, you do not have to call me back because I’ll be working—unless you get it in the next couple of minutes, but otherwise I’ll give you a call tomorrow or tonight or sunday or something, so hope you’re having a great day and love you and I’ll talk to you Later. Bye Bye.

Google Voice: The medium is the (garbled) message?

Hahahahaha. That is the kind of bad pun you get from ex-communication students. McLuhan? Get it?

Ugh.

Apologies.

But seriously, y’all: Google Voice makes me laugh daily. I highly recommend.

P.S. Happy father’s day, dad!! Love you!!!

P.P.S. A dramaturgical note: If you were worried my mom may have run out on my dad (the whole up and leaving for California think), take heart—this is a prearranged trip ending in a predetermined amount of time. Also, my dad really likes uniquely-colored t-shirts.

The Obama administration more than doubled transportation spending on bicycling and walking last year as it seeks to coax Americans out of their cars, according to a Federal Highway Administration report released Wednesday.

[...] In March, Obama’s transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, announced a policy “sea change” that gives biking and walking projects the same importance as automobiles in transportation planning and the selection of projects for federal money.

Though I am sympathetic to former transportation secretary Mary Peters, who said biking paths and trails had no place in federal transportation policy.

The new policy is an extension of the Obama administration’s livability initiative, which regards the creation of alternatives to driving — buses, streetcars, trolleys and trains, as well as biking and walking — as central to solving the nation’s transportation woes.

Let’s nix streetcars and trolleys; factor in the creation of policy allowing for privately funded rail lines; and get New York City some more gosh darn (perhaps privately operated) ferries and water taxies, and I’m sold!

Now even as a youngster I was more prone to hangovers than almost anyone I knew or, at least, prone to worse hangovers from less alcohol. The amount I’m able to drink without feeling ill effects has lessened over the years, which I understand is pretty normal. But it’s been getting ridiculous in the past year or so, to the point where I can’t have two drinks in the course of an evening without reaping the effects the next day.

Ahh, “the effects.” This is where the puzzle part comes in.

These days, when I drink, I wake up the next day with extreme back pain, starting in my lower back and getting worse the closer it gets to my shoulders; a headache; and a stuffy nose the likes of which are rarely seen outside of January. No amount of pain medication, hydration, or any other hangover cure, scientific and homespun, does much good. I’ve researched alcohol intolerance, but found it mainly occurs in Asians and refers to symptoms that begin immediately after consuming alcohol (and while congestion is listed as a symptom, back pain is not).

I guess I’m wondering if any others have experienced similar reactions to alcohol as they’ve gotten older, or have any suggestions for how alcohol consumption could be tied to back pain & congestion? Perhaps it is uncouth to be blogging about my own personal health mysteries, but it occurred to me there may just be a burgeoning Dr. Hugh Laurie out there reading this who will be able to swiftly and over the Internet both tell me what my problem is and offer a way to avoid all these terrible symptoms while still getting to enjoy beer.

A girl can dream, can’t she?

Atlantic editor Benjamin Schwarz reviews two recent urban-ecology books—Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan and Sharon Zukin’s Naked City—in what more or less amounts to a takedown of Jane Jacobs acolytes, and one that had me chuckling out loud a few times at that (which may be more of a reflection on my sense of humor than profound hilarity). Schwarz writes:

Even if Zukin and Sorkin bemoan the city’s deindustrialization and are wistful for the higgledy-piggledy way manufacturing was scattered throughout New York (diversity! mixed use!), they’re compelled to make clear that they don’t miss the sweatshops and the exploitative, horrible life that went with them. And recall that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, in the heart of the Village on a block fronting Washington Square, burned in the second decade of the 20th century [...] Which means that even hazy melancholy for the New York of regular Joes with lunch pails returning after a good day’s work to their neighborhoods of kids playing stickball and corner drugstores dispensing egg creams can only evoke scenes pretty much limited to the years of the LaGuardia administration.

And:

Thanks to the profound influence that The Death and Life of Great American Cities has exerted, the West Village circa 1960 has come to epitomize—really to be the blueprint for—the urban good life. But in its mix of the new and the left over, in its alchemy of authenticity, grit, seedy glamour, and intellectual and cultural sophistication, this was a neighborhood in a transitional and unsustainable, if golden, moment.

He goes on to explain how the same cycle—industrial to bohemian to yuppie (or insert whatever adjectives make sense to you)—played out in SoHo, Tribeca and the East Village, and is currently playing out in parts of Brooklyn, and he mocks the authors’ romanticizing the precise moment on that spectrum that confers the most benefits on people like themselves:

… it’s clear that they pine for—and mistake as susceptible to preservation—the same sort of transitional moment Jacobs evokes in Death and Life, when an architecturally interesting enclave holds in ephemeral balance the emerging and the residual. Such neighborhoods still contain a sprinkling of light industry and raffish characters, for urban grit, and a dash of what Zukin calls “people of color,” for exotic diversity. Added to the mélange are lots and lots of experimental artists (for that boho frisson) and a generous but not overwhelming portion of right-thinking designers, publishing types, architects, and academics, and the one-of-a kind boutiques and innovative restaurants that will give them places to shop and brunch.

Zukin declares that she “resent[s] everything Starbucks represents,” which really means that her urban ideal is the cool neighborhood at the moment before the first Starbucks moves in, an ever-more-fleeting moment.

Bushwick (a neighborhood in north Brooklyn butting up against both Williamsburg and Greenpoint, along with Bed Stuy and Ridgewood, Queens) is at that fleeting moment, or is at least as close to that fleeting moment as the city has right now, as far as I know (do any people in Queens or Harlem dispute me?); Greenpoint already has one Starbucks, and Williamsburg has just kind of lost the PR battle. In a column on BushwickBK.com, Barrett Brown complains:

… we have some great number of more irregular readers who really, really, enjoy our Bushwick Chic feature because they spend literally hours each week obsessing over “hipsters,” a catch-all term that has come to refer to anyone who moves to Brooklyn from somewhere other than Puerto Rico or some awful Balkan country. Most such commenters come to BushwickBK by way of Die Hipster, the increasingly popular website with an editorial stance to the effect that hipsters should strongly consider dying.

So, this article also made me chuckle out loud. But that’s not where the similarities end! Because Barrett also demonstrates how silly it is when “gentrification’s discontents” idealize any particular point in the urban neighborhood life-cycle:

Certainly there are some great number of douchebags, pseudo-intellectuals, and no-talent “artists” among the many over-educated young people who have moved to Bushwick over the past decade. Certainly there are a number of locals who are fine, capable people — but whatever that number is, it’s not so high that Bushwick natives are able to fill the various creative jobs that always need filling, which is why Bushwick, like all of New York, must continually import talent to fill them, even in such cases as nativity would provide a significant edge in the carrying out of such work.

In a subsequent response, Barrett defends himself against commenters who call him racist:

Although the stereotypical characteristics of the “hipster” don’t apply to many Puerto Ricans, the objections based on the simple of act of moving to Brooklyn from somewhere else and the real and imagined effects this has on those who already lived here would seem to apply, yet such objections are only made against a subset of those who move here: whites in general and youngish whites in particular. Somewhat related is the bizarre belief that non-whites are somehow more “genuine” than whites, and thereby entitled to live in certain places that whites are not. Ironically, many whites of the sort that the anti-hipster crowd like to mock — and rightfully so — also hold this belief, which is not only unfair to whites, but also patronizing of non-whites, who are regarded thereby as somehow above the criticism reserved for other “transplants.”

I think we all fall victim to our own skewed ideas about “authenticity” from time to time; everyone has their Jane Jacobs utopia in some form or other. A few months ago, I was talking to a friend who had grown up in Greenpoint. He mentioned that, at one point, there was talk the neighborhood was getting a Wal-Mart. Wouldn’t that have been terrible?, I immediately thought

“I was really excited,” he said. For a boy who’d grown up with “mom-&-pop” corner stores and cramped, catch-all home goods outlets run or staffed by the area’s Polish, Hispanic or Italian residents, the bright, cheap, convenient plasticity of a local Wal-Mart sounded like a good deal.

I am a bit belated to noticing this, but: Courtney Love on the February cover of Spin magazine looks like an Olsen twin who took some sort of medicine with bad metabolic side effects and then crack-dieted the weight away, trying to channel Fiona Apple in the “Criminal” video. It’s a shame. Perhaps Love was never a great role model, but for a certain subset of teen girls in the 90s, she was at least … interesting. Unique. Seeing her airbrushed, injected and whatever into zombie-Heidi-Motag territory (the New Face has gone too far!), ranting about “skinny little bitches,” is just … disappointing.