Category: etc.

Credit where it’s due: one summer in the Hamptons, a housemate picked up Zsa Zsa’s autobiography at the Southampton library booksale–the one written in response to her Beverly Hills copslapping incident, not the other one–and it was hi-larious. Lots of stuff like, “I wear nothing in bed. Except for diamonds.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor In Critical Condition After Stroke [nbc4, via trent]
Buy Zsa Zsa Gabor’s One Lifetime Is Not Enough, from $0.49 at Amazon [amazon]

Nothing like a terrorist attack to whipsaw our sense of context, priorities and emotions. From Kottke‘s links this morning [note: the older, carefree links are at the bottom]:

# A series of explosions in London this morning during rush hour; at least 2 dead and 160 wounded   # 
The explosions were coordinated and officials have shut down the tube and central bus service.
# Mariopedia is “an illustrated listing of virtually every character, item, and enemy from the ‘Super Mario Universe'”   # 
# A list of mini golf holes based on movies   # 
“Raiders of the Lost Ark: You must putt the ball precisely into the idol’s head, or a 15-foot-high, 1-ton golf ball comes rolling after you.”

A scene this past weekend at a wedding in the Hudson River Valley:
At dusk, a 6-year-old boy would charge up to the younger kids and, with his fists full of sparklers, he would roar and shake his hands until they would run away crying.
When the sparklers went out, he marched around proudly, shouting, “I am the dominant democracy! I am the dominant democracy! Did you see them? They bow down to me!”
Happy Fourth of July!

The Times’ Kelefa Sanneh sounds pissed off, but weary, as he unpacks the contradictions and outright hypocrisy of mixtapes and the RIAA’s stunt raid on Mondo Kim’s last week:

So while record labels donate money to honor a man who helped promote mixtapes, the trade group representing the labels cracks down on those who sell them. And who goes to jail? Well, suffice it to say that the police haven’t arrested any of the major-label record executives who profit from the hype generated by mixtapes.And who scout out new talent at Kim’s. And the RIAA neglects to mention that the artists whose authority they claim also work hand in hand with mixtape producers to release, promote, test, and experiment with tracks.
Mixtape Crackdown Sends a Mixed Message [nyt]

While I smirked at the transparent publicity-hounding of Nike’s store-you-can’t-go-in-unless-you’re-cool-enough when I first saw it a few weeks ago, I figured it couldn’t work; no one’d fall for it and actually care because–hello!–it’s such an obvious stunt. I mean, the craptrap restaurant Jekyll & Hyde on 57th & 6th never lets people in immediately, either, but lines them up on the street. If tourist maroons fell for it, I always figured New Yorkers could spot a Barnum-level manipulation a block away. I guess I was wrong.
In this week’s NYT Magazine, a writer accompanies three celebrities in whose reflected glow NikeID wished to bask: an artist, a designer, and an NBA shoe salesman. [Never mind that the whole thing is fraught wtih publicist-paper complicity issues. This ain’t On The Media, folks, and I have a lot of room to talk, anyway, what with the Times picking up about a quarter of my Jamba Juice tab each month.]
What I got from the Times piece, though, was how hermetic NikeID’s own design concept for customization turns out to be, and how thoroughly at odds it is with the influencers and outside creatives’ tastes. I mean, “despite some gentle urging from the design consultants,” Vince Carter replicated the archetypal Nike shoe–white with a Carolina Blue swoosh–and both Sarah Morris and Narciso Rodriguez chose monochrome designs; Morris even chose the putty grey sample shoe.
Customizing Nikes is to expressing your individual creativity what rhythmic gymnastics is to sports. Whatever the people who actually do it obsessively say, most sensible people can see it for what it is after a couple of colorful swooshes.

Just Do It Yourself [nytmag]
Note: this post was inspired by Jen’s inspired takedown on Unbeige

While I smirked at the transparent publicity-hounding of Nike’s store-you-can’t-go-in-unless-you’re-cool-enough when I first saw it a few weeks ago, I figured it couldn’t work; no one’d fall for it and actually care because–hello!–it’s such an obvious stunt. I mean, the craptrap restaurant Jekyll & Hyde on 57th & 6th never lets people in immediately, either, but lines them up on the street. If tourist maroons fell for it, I always figured New Yorkers could spot a Barnum-level manipulation a block away. I guess I was wrong.
In this week’s NYT Magazine, a writer accompanies three celebrities in whose reflected glow NikeID wished to bask: an artist, a designer, and an NBA shoe salesman. [Never mind that the whole thing is fraught wtih publicist-paper complicity issues. This ain’t On The Media, folks, and I have a lot of room to talk, anyway, what with the Times picking up about a quarter of my Jamba Juice tab each month.]
What I got from the Times piece, though, was how hermetic NikeID’s own design concept for customization turns out to be, and how thoroughly at odds it is with the influencers and outside creatives’ tastes. I mean, “despite some gentle urging from the design consultants,” Vince Carter replicated the archetypal Nike shoe–white with a Carolina Blue swoosh–and both Sarah Morris and Narciso Rodriguez chose monochrome designs; Morris even chose the putty grey sample shoe.
Customizing Nikes is to expressing your individual creativity what rhythmic gymnastics is to sports. Whatever the people who actually do it obsessively say, most sensible people can see it for what it is after a couple of colorful swooshes.

Just Do It Yourself [nytmag]
Note: this post was inspired by Jen’s inspired takedown on Unbeige

So according to the NYT, Helmut Lang’s business sucked so bad, that sales dropped 60%–from $100 million to $37 million–over five years, and Prada rattles off a whole host of reasons why. It’s terrorism, Lang’s lack of business sense, he just wasn’t friendly, he cared more about art than fashion. And then there’s the possible effect of Bertelli’s decision to cancel the company’s jeans licenses “which were responsible for more than half of the brand’s revenues.”
Prada and Bertelli bought and killed a major one-time threat to their own power, and now they spin and cover it up with the willing help of the Times and the rest of the kiss-ass fashion press. They’re the Bush & Cheney of the fashion world. I have a feeling Karl Rove’ll be dressing better real soon.
I said it before, but damn, those people piss me off.
Decline and Fall of Helmut Lang [nyt]
Previously: Miuccia Pravda

So according to the NYT, Helmut Lang’s business sucked so bad, that sales dropped 60%–from $100 million to $37 million–over five years, and Prada rattles off a whole host of reasons why. It’s terrorism, Lang’s lack of business sense, he just wasn’t friendly, he cared more about art than fashion. And then there’s the possible effect of Bertelli’s decision to cancel the company’s jeans licenses “which were responsible for more than half of the brand’s revenues.”
Prada and Bertelli bought and killed a major one-time threat to their own power, and now they spin and cover it up with the willing help of the Times and the rest of the kiss-ass fashion press. They’re the Bush & Cheney of the fashion world. I have a feeling Karl Rove’ll be dressing better real soon.
I said it before, but damn, those people piss me off.
Decline and Fall of Helmut Lang [nyt]
Previously: Miuccia Pravda

I just got back from a visit to the new conservation department digs at MoMA [one word: AWESOME], and they’d just taken down the Richard Tuttle Letters sculpture today, to get it ready for the SFMOMA retrospective, and it was lying around on the table.
The conservator talked about interviewing Tuttle to see what his intentions were for the weak or broken solders, the accumulating fingerprints on the galvanized steel, even which side was the front and which was the back. Tuttle actually preferred the imperfections, the minor breaks, the accumulated history of wear and randomness, everything but the stickers some German museum stuck on what they thought was the back of the pieces. In another nod to non-prescriptiveness, Tuttle says there is no front or back.
This intentional abrogation seemed suitably interesting, admirable, even, and then I read Clay Risen’s review of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin in The New Republic. Risen decries the inevitable but apparently unanticipated transformation of the grim, abstracted Holocaust memorial, now full of children, into “the world’s greatest playground.” He cites Eisenman’s casual embrace of picnickers, skateboarders, and even defacement. “Maybe it would add to it,” he said. For some reason I can’t quite pin down, Eisenman’s “maybe” bugs.
Can advocating chance ever be be cleanly differentiated from abrogating or denying responsibility for the life of a work? Risen also slams the open-ended whateverness of abstraction, especially for memorials. He calls Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial a rare exception, an abstract memorial that succeeds by not dictating a message; it’s telling that he can’t come up with any others.
There’s little downside, little impact on our culture, ultimately, if a Richard Tuttle sculpture is repaired or displayed “wrong.” But what is the impact of a Holocaust memorial in Germany being “misread”? Or turned into a skatepark? Are there situations when embracing randomness is wrong, or when it should be questioned?
Stone Cold [tnr.com, sub req]

Just as there’s hardly an actor/waiter left in New York who hasn’t made rent by doing a couple day’s work on some Law & Order spin-off or other as an at-first tearful but increasingly suspecious relative or a neighbor who conveniently pins down the time of death by recounting what they were watching on TV, there’s hardly a blogger left in the city who hasn’t had to feign interest in Radar Magazine and cop to a fondness for the hard stuff while doing a “guest-editor” stint at some Gawker Media blog or other.
Forget S.I. Newhouse, Nick’s clearly on his way to becoming the Dick Wolf of the blogosphere, increasingly intdistinguishable spin-offs and all.
Come to think of it, Dickwolfer kinda sounds like a Gawker Media title already. Come to think of it. heh.
Memo to Diane Neal: Who are you again? [gawker.com]
GET YOUR 15 MINUTES! [radarmagazine.com]
Blogging, as in Slogging [nyt on guest-blogging, via gawker, please make me pure.]
[but not yet. 5/18 update with the best disclaimer ever: “(Disclaimer: Everybody involved in the Gawker-Radar spat works for or with everybody else involved, including The Observer.)”]

“Don’t ask Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media and its growing list of popular Web logs, about his empire…
…If his reluctance to be interviewed is theater, it is deft theater.”
– Excerpted from Nick’s eleventh NYT profile.
A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip [nyt, via memefirst, were the NYT’s ‘deft theater’ might be called The George Lucas School Of Boy, Do We Know How This Story’ll Turn Out Acting]

It turns out I’ve got about 1,000 words a day, maybe 2,000 if I’m just doing stream of consciousness.
Anyway, as you can guess from the last few days’ posts [sic], that wordstream has been gobbled up by another project. Now that’s it’s to bed, they’re backing up in my head while I’m at the Outer Banks. So you just wait until Saturday morning, when you’ll find me curled up on your doorstep, like an unwanted drunk.
In the mean time, please go register for a bunch of classes at The New School.

While the Republican Sanhedrin was proclaiming their own–and Tom DeLay’s–righteousness on the Sunday morning political talk shows, I spotted Harry Reid, Senate leader of what Bill Frist calls the “anti-faith” movement–at church.
They probably have to look up the address: Get Tom DeLay To The Church [frank rich, nyt]

Since all the pros are weighing in on it, let me say that Laura Shin’s umbrella review in Slate is wack. What purports to be a The New York Review of Umbrellas’s ignores some key aspects of New York City’s indigenous umbrella culture, and in ways that make me think it’s unconsciously geared to visitors, not residents, of the city.
This daytripper’s bias manifests itself in the criteria: saying smaller=better makes no more sense for umbrellas than bigger=better does for SUV’s. Unless you’re planning on carrying it folded up much of the time because, like the folks you see uptown with Century 21 bags, you don’t have an apartment or an office to stash stuff in.
Also, even in these Friends-friendly days, “plays well with others” is not a trait held in high esteem on New York City streets, especially not for umbrellas. For a lot of highly self-interested New Yorkers, bigger is better, even if it’s not, and getting your eye poked out is your problem, mac. [Note to Malcolm Gladwell: got another SUV story for you.]
Sure, there’s the Chinatown umbrella, but Manhattan’s other indigenous species–the Doorman Umbrella–is completely ignored. Maybe the writer lives in a walkup. These black giants are the Lincoln Town Car of umbrellas, more than you really need to do the job, and better if you have someone else doing it for you.
Lately there’s been a proliferation of Patented Umbrellas, which have those collapsible drinking cup-like sheaths on the tip. This is wrong. Convenient, surely, but wrong.
The Hotel Umbrella is an increasingly rare breed. These usually logo’ed Doormen Umbrellas are briefly loaned to guests at better hotels. [They’re getting rarer because some new better hotels now prefer to sell their guests an umbrella.] Someone once took my large black umbrella from the bucket at a shop, and left me with a nearly identical model courtesy of The Carlyle Hotel. Thanks.
The Firm Umbrella, the Golf Umbrella, and the Firm Golf Umbrella are usually seen in midtown, and truth be told, they’re probably being carried by some banker who moved to Rye when his second kid was born. In addition to being selfishly large for the street, these usually have the added benefit of being free (or at least it felt that way when you signed for it at the pro shop).
I recently lost my favorite umbrella, which had served me well for over six years. At the height of Niketown-hatin’ 1998, and figuring that they’d probably invest a lot in the R&D, I bought a big black Nike Golf umbrella. Yes, it had swooshes on it, but it was a small price to pay; the thing was light, strong, huge, and it never once blew out on me.
When someone stole it from a pizza restaurant a few months ago, I tried to replace it, but they sure don’t make’em like they used to. I ventured back into Niketown (what a dump), nothin’. The $15 model at the outlet you pass on 95 in Maryland was engineered to protect Nike’s margins, not my (or anyone else’s) head.
I know return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Un-brellas [slate, via kottke and TMN]