I blog because I hope that if enough people are exposed to points of view that expand consciousness the attended world, there is hope we can transcend our current folly. Thus, the accumulated weight of the community of blogness is a force of transmemetic nature that may even make a massive difference. from abuddhas memes

I just learned that author J. H. Hatfield, an early casualty of the Bush presidential campaign, recently committed suicide in a hotel room in Arkansas. You may recall that his book, Fortunate Son, alleged that Bush did community service for a cocaine bust in 1972. Karl Rove & Co went on the attack, tipping off the right-wing Dallas Morning News that Hatfield had done jail time for a bizarre conspiracy to car bomb his boss. Immediately the media attention shifted to Hatfield, who was humiliated and cut loose by his publisher St Martin's Press (who had rushed his book into print without thorough fact-checking). After that, recall that nobody talked about GWB's coke use for the rest of the campaign. NYU media prof. Mark Crispin Miller wrote a foreword to the recently-released 2nd edition of Fortunate Son; it's worth reading.

Following the unconnected thread to Jims's "hey, hey, hey, what kind of clock is that ?" intrusion. I offer the latest stroller Mom incident. I'm sitting on a park bench in Van Vorst park here in JC, petting my dog in a way which removes the shedding hair from her back. So I'm grooming for a few minutes when I notice the toes of a pair of womens shoes pointing at me. I dont look up but I notice them still there a few minutes later. When I finally do look up I see some 30 somthing Mom is pointing her baby in a sling at me so's they can both drink in the sight of man with doggie. I can't think of any other senerio which would allow someone to stand and stare point blank at a stranger and gawk. And I dont find that excuse acceptable either Keep walking Mom. Bah.

Bill Schwarz - untitled ('70s nude), 2001, six images

Abuse Your Illusion

by Michael Atkinson

Village Voice, July 18 - 24, 2001

An exploding plastic inevitable, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within dares you to be amazed by its soulless mimeograph of humanity. In a dystopian future, this is the only type of movie we'd get to see: manufactured by hard-wiring, stamped from market-proven narrative templates, ostensibly distracting in the sheer bulk of its preprogrammed mayhem. All digital, all the time, Final Fantasy is not a cartoon, but rather a simulacrum of live-action Bruckheimer-ness so factory-pressed it should have an I'm-recyclable triangle embossed on every frame.

Think photo-realism without purpose, ironic or otherwise—and painted by nanotechnology. The movie's conspicuous artillery of faux details is its only Power Point, but today digital imaging is so ubiquitous that the achievement is authentically redundant. (Indeed, the masterfully imitated landscapes evoke the similar wonk-craft of "serious" live-action epics like Gladiator, The Messenger, and Contact.) It is said that a full third of the film's budget was spent on making the heroine's wispy hair convincingly wispy; how many heads of organic hair they could've bought is apparently irrelevant. The exercise is so elaborately pointless you'd think the Pentagon had bankrolled it.

Actually, it's a product of the same Japanese codeheads for whom the eponymous game series has been a spurting cash cow. The story itself is reheated Arthur C. Clarke: As giant alien "phantoms" (resembling microscopically photographed mosquitoes) besiege the earth, Identikit humans rally. There's a digital Ben Affleck (with Alec Baldwin's voice), a digital Neve Campbell (with Ming-Na's voice), a digital Jason Priestley (with Steve Buscemi's voice), etc. In this New Age, everything is helpfully color-coded: Silvery blue is good Gaia, leathery red is bad Gaia. For all of the monumental attention paid to visual fidelity (even a few lens flares and moments of handheld shakiness), the techies still can't manage to make two characters look convincingly into each other's eyes—it's like watching Disney World animatronic figures do soap opera.

The ultimate justification for Final Fantasy, it seems, is the wholesale subtraction of people from the entertainment equation; the games triumphed without the wetware, didn't they? But of course, they didn't: First-person electronic gaming revolves around and happens to a very human player, and without him/her, it's just machine love.

Magic the Hat

dress em up dubya

Quentin Tarantino's analysis of Top Gun from the film Sleep With Me.

"You know what one of the greatest fucking scripts ever written in the history of Hollywood is? Top Gun."

Good Morning Sinners

Scratchy vanity 45s, pilfered field recordings, muddy off-the-radio sounds, homemade congregational tapes and vintage commercial gospel throw-downs; a little preachin' and a little salvation.

"Hypocrisy is better than no standards at all."

This mornings hard copy nyt had a picture of stacked shipping containers, 3 high for as far as the eye could see, lining a street to block stone throwers stones.

webheads up

forgotten nyc

the carvings of avenue c

"Modern mechanical tattooing was invented in New York City at the end of the 19th century. In his shop in Chatham Square on the Bowery, Samuel O'Reilly modified Thomas Edison's "Electric Engraving Pen" and created the first device which could mechanically enscribe a tattoo into the skin. The speed and accuracy of the new technology revolutionized the artform and introduced it to the possibilities of the modern age. Surrounded by the modern urban setting of New York, early tattooing borrowed its imagery from various popular culture sources as it expanded and became more sophisticated."

Reminiscences of New York by an Octogenarian (1816 - 1860)

the oldest site in new york that has continously been used as a drinking establishment is ...?

Why Is New York City
Called "The Big Apple"?

The Congregation Anshe Chesed building at 172 Norfolk Street (now the Angel Orensanz Foundation) not only is New York’s oldest surviving synagogue (erected 1850) and one of its largest (capacity 1,200) but also was the first building on the Lower East Side erected specifically as a synagogue. The designer was Berlin-born Alexander Saeltzer, architect of the old Astor Library (now the Public Theater) on Lafayette Street, who modeled it after the monumental Gothic-style cathedral of Cologne.

plucked this one off the fmu message board :

Kathy Graham ckane@wpost.org
Bush Bush In The Puss
Wed Jul 18 12:31:31 2001


Who Cares What You Think?

Here's an honest to God (?) account of one person's meeting with the President in Philadelphia last week:

"So when the President was here on July 4, I had the opportunity to shake his hand. I wasn't sure if that was a good idea or not but I did it anyway, and said to him, "Mr. President, I hope you only serve four years. I'm very disappointed in your work so far." He kept smiling and shaking my hand but answered, "Who cares what you think?"

His face stayed photo-op perfect, but his eyes gave me a look that said, if we'd been drinking in some frathouse in Texas, he'd've happily answered, "Let's take it outside." A nasty little gleam.

But he was (fortunately) constrained by Presidential propriety. But that was the end of it until I turned away and started scribbling the quote down in my notepad, so as to remember the "Gift" forever. When he saw me do that, he got excited and craned his neck over the rubberneckers to shout at me, "Who are you with? Who are you with?" People started looking, so he made a joke: "Make sure you get it right." But he kept at it: "Who do you write for?" I told him I wasn't "with" anybody and pointed to one of his staff people who knows me a little, and said, "Ask him, he'll tell you."

Then I split.

Half an hour later, my boss (who had helped organize the event we were at) came up to me and said, "Did you really tell the President that he was doing a 'lousy fucking job'?" "No way," I said, "I was very polite, I just told him what I thought." Fortunately, he believed me. He wasn't happy with me, but he believed me.

But anyway, if you ever wondered if the Prez really is kind of a jerk, I'm here to tell you, he is, and I got The Gift to prove it. I'm thinking of making up T-shirts so we can share The Gift with everyone: "Who cares what you think?" - President George W. Bush, July 4, 2001.

Andrew Hudson
Spokesman, Mayor Wellington Webb
1437 Bannock Street, ST. 350
Denver, CO 80202

Direct (720) 865-9016
FAX (720) 865-8791
Pager (303) 640-0780
Cell (303) 880-9521

For information on Mayor Webb's Office
Do The Mouse

longest meal of my life was in Provence couple weeks back

6 hours, we sat down at 7:30 and signed the check at 1:30am

yes had 6 bottle os wine for 4 of us but due to the long meal i didnt feel anything, we had the 9 course truffle menu, and some dishes were great other ok, i had fun and time wasnt an issue for me as i had enhanced my system before but the service was bad exp since this was a 2* michelin spot

the chef supposably runs through the woods in the am and finds wild herbs and finds new cheese producers etc

great dishes were: wild mint soup with a wild shroom girole plus shaved truffle, grilled veggies w/ wild mountain parley n truffle sauce that included sunfloer floers in all the stages, a baby zuchini stuffed with spicy truffled tomatoe sorbet....

Moulin de Lourmarin in Lourmarin

but you must click restaurant at the bottom to see the story!!

forgive me but I could not pass on Hippie Chick. The seller just contacted me letting me know that he has a bunch of others from the same shoot. He will send me some scans so I can decide. Oh, I've already decided.

No links provided by the New Yorker for one of this week's Showcase pieces titled ART JOCKS penned by Alexi Worth which focuses on the new Joel Shapiro instalation in (on?) the Met's roof top garden (that's Mr Wilson's stomping ground). He kicks it off with a reference to Ad Reinharts quote on sculpture. "...somthing you bumped into when stepping back to look at a painting", then switched "painting" to "Dakota" for the occasion. Shapiros have long been the "must have" pool-patio adornment of choice in top (and near top) LA circles. He goes on to describe the five pieces, "flying Waleda like clusters of limbs", "speed skates", "marches", "topples", "kicks". "His biggest yet at 24' in bronze, aluminum and polychrome rocket-red."

You can tell he wants to slam them, but just won't spit it out. Not untill the final paragraph, I quote :

"Over the past thirty years, Shapiro's sculptures have become more insidiously likable and less conceptually demanding. Critics have implied that this is a bad thing, a drift toward Henry Moore-ish accessability. But Moore's matriarchs invite you to carress them; Shapiro's athletes want you to get out of their way. They project a healthy impatience, linking Degas's self-absorbed ballerinas to John Woo's kung-fu fighters. Sure, they're simpler and less mobile than we are. But they're also having a better time."

Finally ! (but he will still be able to eat lunch in this town again.)

Had a decent meal last night at Jane (Houston St. - north side - and Thompson.) Very nice room. Entrees around $19, apps around $9. We had good fried clams (very good fry, maybe not enough clams,) O.K. crab cake, O.K. tomato and watermellon salad, and a great fennel and beet salad with some sort of sliced hard cheese. For entrees we had a good eggplant and truffle oil risotto, a nice sea bass with gnocchi, and two meat dishes that looked good (but I didn't taste.) Maybe that doesn't sound like a great review, but overall it felt very nice. Maybe it was the service which was excellent. That always helps. Nothing to absolutely die for, but no mistakes either.

On the wine side we drank a good 99 Lingenfelder Reiseling (Terry Theise selection) and the ever popular 98 "Les Terraces" Rioja ($43 - a little cheaper than I've seen it elsewhere.)

Good choice by itself, plus it's pretty handy if you can't get into Lupa (who can?) and don't want to walk very far for a decent alternative. It gets my vote.

ate again last night at Locanda Vini & Alii--it rocked and was far superior to my fist visit--salad's, soup, app's and pasta's were all we ate--all but one were right on--room had some wine industry rockers and good mix of local's--jim is right the 1997 Pico Vini is very good in an old school way, but the wine star is the 2000 Petite Arvine IMnotsoHO.....