Bing tastes great! and gives you cancer

Am I the only person to look at the sample screens for Microsoft's new search engine and wonder, why do they have a big cigarette on their page?

technorati: bing, advertising, marketing

Today's fake: Ersatz reporter/Catholic "priestess" carried from press area

A woman who said she was a reporter for an obscure Georgia monthly newspaper, and who was wearing a cassock and also identified herself as a Roman Catholic "preistess," was carried out bodily by Secret Service agents from a press corral yesterday as President Obama was about to arrive at LAX to depart for Washington on Air Force One. The woman wanted to give Obama a letter asking him to "take a stand for traditional marriage," she said. The Secret Service asked her to leave when she refused to give the letter to an Obama staffer, and when she refused to leave, they carried her out. (Courtesy MediaBistro's Daily Media News email.

Today's fake: Crazy people make up the best stories

There's this insane person-slash-scam artist on the East Coast who portrayed himself as a Rockefeller family member. He has been exposed, captured like a moth, and is now on trial for various weirdnesses. This paragraph from a Boston Globe story today contains awesomeness:

Clark Rockefeller's meticulous scheme to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter required months of painstaking planning. He bought a home in Baltimore under the fake identity of a Peruvian ship captain, hid his $800,000 divorce settlement in gold coins, lined up three getaway vehicles, and told tall tales to get unwitting accomplices involved in the effort, one of whom thought he was driving Rockefeller that Sunday to Newport, R.I., to go sailing with the son of Senator Chafee.

I love that on the one hand he is capable of forming a "meticulous scheme" and of carrying on his deceptions for years, while at the same time being absolutely fucking nuts. But even better is the creativity and insane imagination. Eight hundred thousand dollars in gold coins! That's like the fantasy of every right-wing paranoid these days, because they all think there is going to by hyperinflation in a few years and the value of their gold -- they all have some -- will go up geometrically.

Best of all -- it had to be a Peruvian ship captain. God, I wish I had an imagination like that.

technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER

TV comedian kills them with the truth

In a presentation for companies that sponsor ABC television programming, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who has a show on the network, decided that the funniest, craziest thing he could say was the truth:

"Everything you're going to hear this week is bullshit. Let's get real here. Let's get Dr. Phil-real here. These new fall shows? We're going to cancel about 90 percent of them. Maybe more."

If ABC is so confident in its new fall shows, he asked, why is it announcing them at the same time it announces the midseason shows that will replace those fall shows? "This show 'Shark Tank' has the word tank right in the title," he said.

More at the NYT coverage of the annual "upfronts" presentations of coming fall television shows. Here's more, more, and more.

technorati: television, Jimmy Kimmel

The new McCarthyism

A Syracuse professor alleges that he was denied tenure after Fox News talker Bill O'Reilly attacked him and dubbed him "the new Ward Churchill."

One no longer has to be called a Communist, one only has to be compared to the latest neocon hobbyhorse. If you're a professor and you disagree with them, you're "the new Ward Churchill." If you're a minister, you might be dubbed "the new Jeremiah Wright" or "the new Al Sharpton." And so on. But compare some flamebot like Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck to McCarthy and you'll either get squawks of outrage or an out-of-right-field screed asking what was so bad about McCarthy in the first place?

technorati: Fox, Bill O'Reilly

Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts

Forty years later, in a 2004 interview, Dylan talked about the kind of interaction that keeps him from going out in public if he can avoid it. "People will say, 'Are you who I think you are?'" Dylan said. "And you'll say, Ahh, I don't know. And they'll say, 'You're, you're him,' and you'll say, 'Okay, yes?' And then the next thing is, 'Oh, no. Are you really him? I don't think you're him.' And that can go on and on."

Susan Strasberg used to tell a story about walking around New York with an incognito-in-plain-sight Marilyn Monroe. "Do you want to see me be her?" Monroe would say, and Strasberg describes the star turning on some imperceptible inner switch, then beginning to glow. Within moments the people who had been passing right by were stopping in their tracks, scrambling for pen and paper.

From an essay by Michelle Orange on mistaken identity in The Rumpus.

First thought, best thought

This NYT article about brain-wave research contains this central factoid: Your first 90 minutes of work are the best; don't let yourself be interrupted. After that first period, you can take a break, do other things. But preserve the freshness and sanctity of that initial period.

That fits with the oft-repeated recommendation to writers to wake up and write, first thing. And I've been dong that, more or less, for the last week, and getting a lot done. Sure enough, I can only go about an hour and a half before I lose steam.

technorati: writing, focus, concentrating

Man with strange transit-related name is missing

A man reportedly named Muni Bart Perzov is missing SFist reported. To read the one-paragraph story is to suffer a frisson of cognitive dissonance, at least for San Francisco Bay Area residents. It would be like a Chicagoan being named El Metra, or a New Yorker being named MTA Path.

I was reminded of the RER trains that serve suburban Paris. Even though the official names of the lines are A, B, C, D and E, the trains themselves have human-sounding nicknames that designate which branch of the line they're taking, names like ZEUS, VICK and NELY.

Old ladies making church

My friend Sara, whose religious conversion and consequent founding of a successful Food Pantry was the subject of her book Take This Bread, told me once that the old ladies who gather on the sidewalk for hours before the pantry opens to distribute food are, in their community with one another, fulfilling a spiritual need. "That's church too," she said of their alfresco klatsch.

I remembered Sara's words when I stumbled across this video:

Isn't that church too?

technorati: postmodernism,dancing, church, Sound of Music

Deep springtime

It's a gorgeous spring morning in San Francisco, chilly, clear and breezy; later today it's supposed to be really windy, and already I can see the tops of the clouds being blown diagonally off their bases.

If I haven't been posting here much, it's mainly because I started writing a new novel last week, and I'm devoting as much spare attention to it as possible. I haven't been posting on any of the other blogs I sometimes post on either. I just don't want to sacrifice my momentum with the novel -- which I conceived of twelve years ago, and made several false starts on within the past five years. Having finally figured out a way to go forward, at least to rewrite the opening so that it makes sense, I want to keep going. So there won't be too much ersatz commentary, attempts at journalism, or arch mockery to consume for at last a few weeks.

Today's also my 53rd birthday, and I give thanks for family and friends who have supported me over many years, in the past, today and in the future.

Exec at lending firm fulfills wishes of many, kills himself

The chief financial officer at Freddie Mac, one of the mortgage lending firms caught up in the economic tornado, killed himself after questions arose about the $800,000 bonus he got last year. His boss said the dead man would be "be most remembered for his affability, his personal warmth, his sense of humor and his quick wit."

Somehow I doubt it.

technorati: Freddie Mac, suicide, lending

'Katastroika'

You know, by now, about collapsitarianism (and its cousin, a so-called "Transition" movement that was written about in the NYT Magazine Sunday).

Now comes a new word to address the Russian version of apocalypse: katastroika. The following is from a World Affairs Journal article titled "Drunken Nation: Russia's Depopulation Bomb":

A specter is haunting Russia today. It is not the specter of Communism -- that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past -- but rather of depopulation -- a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation. The mass deaths associated with the Communist era may be history, but another sort of mass death may have only just begun, as Russians practice what amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing. ...

According to the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base for 2007, Russia ranked 164 out of 226 globally in overall life expectancy. Russia is below Bolivia, South America's poorest (and least healthy) country and lower than Iraq and India, but somewhat higher than Pakistan. For females, the Russian Federation life expectancy will not be as high as in Nicaragua, Morocco, or Egypt. For males, it will be in the same league as that of Cambodia, Ghana, and Eritrea. ...

Russia's patterns of death from injury and violence (by whatever provenance) are so extreme and brutal that they invite comparison only with the most tormented spots on the face of the planet today. The five places estimated to be roughly in the same league as Russia as of 2002 were Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. To go by its level of mortality injury alone, Russia looks not like an emerging middle-income market economy at peace, but rather like an impoverished sub-Saharan conflict or post-conflict society.

Clearly the 21st century is not going to turn out as a lot of people expected. But it will make for great material -- if there is still an entertainment industry and distribution network for the films, books and other media to be created.

technorati: Russia, zeitgeist, mortality

Baseball, twit by twit

I spent the afternoon at the ballgame, where Tim Lincecum gave a spendid performance, striking out 13 over 8 innings. But the Giants still lost, giving up two runs in the 9th and scoring a total of ZILCH themselves. Ya can't win if ya don't score.

I took my Peek Pronto to the game and, having figured out how to send posts to Twitter from the thing, spent the game twittering the action. It was partly a load test of the device, to see how it would handle periods of almost constant use. I found I actually lost the signal intermittently, which would seem impossible given the fact that I was high up in the stadium. But it might well be that there were simply too many people in the stadium, where 37,000 people were on hand, and it maxed out the network. (I think it's Verizon that Peek uses correction: it's T-Mobile.)

When the game ended, I found I had forgotten my cellphone at home. But at a ballpark -- especially one named after a phone company -- surely there are payphones, right? NOT. There are no payphones at "AT&T Park." How silly is that?

technorati: Twitter, baseball, Peek Pronto

Chris Adrian story in the New Yorker

In the April 20 New Yorker there is a short story so amazingly good, the kind you tell every friend about, so I am linking to it here: A Tiny Feast.

I was excited because I hadn't heard of the author before and he seems to be from San Francisco. A quick Google search proved my ignorance; he has several books and apparently has been famous for the last seven or eight years. So I probably won't be ringing him up for an interview. Some writers inspire me and make me feel like I could write as wonderfully as they do, even if a part of me knows I can't; this year I found Yiyun Li and Roberto Bolaño especially inspiring. Other writers -- classically Toni Morrison -- discourage and intimidate me and make me feel like I have no business trying to write. Chris Adrian is one of the latter, so even if I did wangle an interview I don't know what I'd ask anyway.

technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER

Analysis on 'Twitter storms'

The "digital" columnist at Advertising Age analyses the phenomena of "Twitter storms" such as the amazonfail debacle, saying in part:

By far the biggest issue most of the angry Twitterers had was that Amazon didn't respond until late Sunday and, when it did, the vague answer it offered to CNet -- the problem was a "glitch in the system" that was being fixed -- didn't satisfy the masses who had already spent the better part of Easter getting fired up. The next response from Amazon came Monday night, when it issued a statement calling the incident an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error."

Now, it's likely Amazon didn't really know what was going on -- at one point a hacker even tried to take credit for the issue -- but most social-media experts say that wasn't the problem. "A lot of people have this idea that you can only respond when you have every I dotted and T crossed and have figured out what's going on," said Jeff Rutherford, founder of Jeff Rutherford Media Relations. "It's perfectly fine if you say, 'We're aware there's an issue; we're not ignoring it, and we're working hard to get to the bottom of it.'" Amazon has always been tight-lipped from a public-relations standpoint and, in this case, it cost them.

I wonder how much it did cost them, or will cost them? Has anyone seen a dollar figure? Is it possible to ascribe a dollar figure to the loss of something intangible like reputation?

Two points: 1.) Amazon used to be known for fantastic customer service. I think they've lost hugely in that respect. 2.) In this economic climate it's difficult to determine how much business is lost from bad PR and how much can be blamed on slow spending. An NPR report this morning on plastic bottles quoted a bottled water industry spokesman as saying they blame any slowdown in sales on the economny, not on people seeking a less wasteful alternative to using all those plastic bottles.

technorati: amazonfail, Twitter, public relations

Test blog post

Testing ability to post tomy blog from my Peek Pronto.
I hit return once before this graf.

Ihit return twice before this graf.
:-)
A smiley happened.

Comedy reflects dark times -- AP

The recently released comedy "Observe and Report" -- which has sparked extremes of reaction from critics -- reflects the country's dark mood, writes the AP.

You know the good thing about the Great Depression? It was so long that popular culture had time to reflect it instead of just react to it. When we think of films of the 1930s we think mainly of escapist fare -- "The Thin Man" pictures, Busby Berkley and so on, all the way to "Gone with the Wind." The hard times themselves were reflected subtly, in gangster movies and B pictures. Finally, at the end of the decade, a film like "The Grapes of Wrath" (on the dramatic side) or "Sullivan's Travels" (on the comedic side) could directly address the condition of being poor.

Nowadays television reacts more quickly than any other medium. You're already seeing recession-themed stories on prime-time shows.

technorati: films, cinema, economy

Amazonfail being put to bed for the moment

A day after learning, along with most of the rest of the English-speaking world, about Amazon de-listing LGBT and erotic books, I see that the rankings on my own books have been restored. Not that they're much to brag about -- they are numbers 704,277 and 1,436,221 at the moment -- but at least they're there.

Someday we'll know what it was all about. The technical explanation, that some guy in amazon.fr fucked with the code, makes sense -- but only if you ignore the explanations about "policy" changes that some inquisitive authors got. Man, what a clusterfuck this whole thing was.

technorati: amazonfail, books

Amazon pulls functionality for 'adult' books

Amazon.com arbitrarily de-listed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of books for so-called adult content. They're still selling them, but no longer including the de-listed books in sales rankings. The de-listed books include award-winning gay-friendly books and general erotica. My own books are included, and they're definitely "gay friendly," but Stephen Elliott"s "My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up" is also affected, and it has practically no gay content.

Good coverage, comments on jezebel.com, Publishers Weekly.

Update: Associated Press is reporting that Amazon is now saying "There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed."

People on Twitter are putting up reaction using the #amazonfail tag.

technorati: amazonfail, amazon.com, books

How Colorado Springs became the 'evangelical Vatican'

The Colorado Springs Gazette, which seems to have doubled down on its coverage of the local evangelical industry -- somewhat belatedly, but any documentary evidence is a good thing -- today publishes a piece on how Colorado Springs became the nation's center for big-box Christianism.

technorati: Colorado Springs, evangelicals

This morning

I'm in a cafe in the Mission, sitting toward the front. It's a dimly lit cafe that's very quiet and comforting on a bright, cold morning. In the back there's a twelve-step meeting going on. "See, chronic alcoholics -- they don't know. One day they'll know but not today." They spell out Roman numerals that denote sections of their scripture: "That's X-X-V-I?" "No, it's X-X-X-V."

This morning I'm going to the SFMOMA to meet artist and writer Trevor Paglen and interview him.

Here's the interview on TheRumpus.net.

Paglen may be best known because of his appearance several months ago on "The Colbert Report" talking about his short book about the unit patches worn by people working on secret military projects, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me. He's also the author of "Blank Spots on the Map," a geographical approach to the black world of secret military projects, and co-author of Torture Taxi, about the Bush administration's uncharted rendition air flights.

But he's not just an author and academic -- he is in the geography department at UC Berkeley -- but a photographer whose work is hanging at both SFMOMA and the Altman Siegel Gallery in SF. His photographs, many of which use what he calls "Limit Telephotography" or the practice of taking very long-range telephoto pictures, peek into places you're not supposed to see and pick out needles -- secret surveillance satellites -- in the haystack of the night sky.

technorati: Trevor Paglen, secret

Focus on the Fundies: Haggard refuses to go away

Though he dropped off the radar for a few months after the excruciating HBO broadcast of the documentary film about him, former evangelical leader Ted Haggard is back in the news pages of the Colorado Springs Gazette, which continues to cover him the way the FBI tails former KGBers in the U.S. Included in the latest visit with the disgraced megachurch ringmaster is a scolding and eventual forgiveness by a former church member, as well as the news that Haggard and his wife are appearing on an upcoming episode of the TV show Divorce Court. Yes! And it's a two part episode, starting appropriately enough on April Fools Day. Behold!

I'll pause while you pick your jaw up off the floor.

Oh, and he's going to begin guest-preaching at Colorado Springs megachurches, billed as "a Christian businessman," a nod to his current supposed career as insurance salesman. And thus begins his real rehabilitation -- not the one he supposedly underwent soon after his outing that supposedly turned him back into a heterosexual, but the one that will inevitably return him to the only job he can do: evangelical preacher.

technorati: Ted Haggard, Colorado Springs, evangelicals

Recent posts on SF Metblogs

Albany's Little League parade

Emeryville's Borders bookstore goes downhill

SF wins again in "imposing its agenda" on auslanders

Stephanie, 10 years on

It's the tenth anniversary of Stephanie's death. Here she is in Boulder, October of 1995, holding up a grasshopper. She was thrilled with any interactions with wildlife.

'Emo jacket' should appear to makers of pr0n

German electronics company Philips Electronics has announced an "Emo jacket" that is "meant to let you more closely immerse yourself in the experiences" of characters in a DVD you're watching. The jacket is fitted with 64 thingies -- all right, "actuators" -- that are intended to give the wearer the sensation of being tapped in the spot on their body nearest the thingy. A radio receiver will receive signals encoded on the DVD and activate the thingies in whatever pattern the programmer has programmed.

For example, it is supposed to give you the sensation of having a "chill up your spine." I wonder what the German word is for that. On second thought, I don't want to know.

The story on C|Net suggests the obvious implications for porn, saying that at this point there are no plans to ship a matching pair of pants. But once the technoogy has been invented, it's only a matter of time, of course -- I'm guessing the Japanese will get right on it -- before you'll be able to watch porn with no hands.

technorati: technology, Phillips, jacket, entertainment, movies

Oregon trip

I'm visiting my mother in suburban Portland, Ore., and today we went to nearby Oregon City where there is a cool waterfall and even cooler "municipal elevator" that looks like something left over from a 1950s Worlds Fair. Click the picture to go to a photoset.

On the way back we recrossed the Willamette River via Canby Ferry, a little six-car ferry that crosses the river in a couple of minutes. Here's a map of the location. I used my digital camera to take this video:

technorati: Oregon, Willamette River, ferry

Whining for dollars

When I wrote up a little piece on whining writers for The Rumpus, there was one article I couldn't find that I wanted to link to. In today's listing of deals on Publisher's Marketplace, I got reminded:

Professor X's IN THE BASEMENT OF THE IVORY TOWER, about the vagaries of teaching English 101 and 102 at a college of last resort -- based on a popular Atlantic Monthly piece chosen by David Brooks for a Stanley Award, to Joy de Menil at Viking Penguin, for publication in March 2011...

Yeah... that was in The Atlantic last year. Pretty much a gloss on Lynn Fried's infamous 2005 piece in Harpers, Doing Time: My Years in the Creative Writing Gulag, only about teaching freshman English instead of creative writing, the Atlantic piece was another in the parade of whining by people who consider themselves above their jobs and the students (or readers) who are their audience.

I wonder why they are taking two full years to bring out the book, though.

technorati: teaching, complaining, whining

World to end sooner than expected

Slowing of the Atlantic Ocean current and other stuff will drown East Coast U.S. cities twice as fast as other places around the world.

Hey future -- sorry about that!

technorati: global warming, climate change, apocalypse

Focus on the Fundies: Obama not the Anti-Christ, authors decide

The authors of the "Left Behind" series of Christianist novels have announced they do not think Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ.

The frightening thing is that some people might have been waiting for that word from them. And what if they had said the opposite?

technorati: Left Behind, fundamentalists, right wing Christians

Morning Prayer

Yesterday there was a coincidentally large number of people at the Morning Prayer service at St. Gregory's which I attend and help lead, and one of the visitors found it a felicitous experience. He was lucky to encounter more than half a dozen people. This morning we were down to three again. But whether we have two people or a dozen, it's always a nice way to start the day. Every weekday at 8:00 a.m. (except Good Friday, when there's a morning service anyway).

technorati: Episcopal, liturgy, Morning Prayer

Focus on the Fundies: Obscure minister predicts calamity

Courtesy John Burton, that manic Christian "prophecy" guy I link to from time to time for laughs, here's another "minister" with an "urgent message" about "AN EARTH-SHATTERING CALAMITY ... SO FRIGHTENING, WE ARE ALL GOING TO TREMBLE."

For ten years I have been warning about a thousand fires coming to New York City. It will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires -- such as we saw in Watts, Los Angeles, years ago. There will be riots and fires in cities worldwide. There will be looting -- including Times Square, New York City. What we are experiencing now is not a recession, not even a depression. We are under God's wrath. ... If possible lay in store a thirty-day supply of non-perishable food, toiletries and other essentials.

Yes, when the righteous tremble, at least they will have a thirty-day supply of toilet paper. I'd love to see their shopping lists, actually. Imagine what's on them.

technorati: prophecy, Christians, evangelicals

Teaching, sex and death

Great post by Sirenita Lake on Open Salon, about a near-death experience.

I reviewed the options. It was 2:00 a.m. I was very alone. I could bang on the neighbors' door, but the neighbors were porn actors who appeared to be under-resourced in the brain department. I imagined myself doing the universal "I'm choking" gesture and them assuming I was dying to perform a blowjob.

technorati: sex, teachers, choking

The new economic reality, part XVLII

To the pictures of shell-shocked laid-off workers add this story from the LA Times (courtesy Valleywag). The lede sums it up:

Sitting in a bare cubicle, with her reading glasses perched halfway down her nose and typing away on a laptop she'd brought from home, Lois Draegin looked a bit like the extra adult wedged in at the kids' table at Thanksgiving. This accomplished magazine editor lost her six-figure job at TV Guide last spring and is now, at 55, an unpaid intern at wowOwow.com, a fledgling website with columns and stories that target accomplished women older than 40.

Even more compelling is the picture that runs atop the article, showing an already-exhausted Draegin being helped, no doubt for the 68th time, by a patient, fetching young blond.

The telling detail in the lede is the "empty cube." For me it evokes every unwanted, dusty spare cubicle into which I've been plopped as a temp or a contractor -- that and the picture showing the spiral notebook next to the keyboard, in which the new intern has undoubtedly written at the top her username, password, and the first of several URLs and directory names where things are stored.

Of course, it's sadder not to have a job at all -- even that unpaid one.

technorati: eoncomy, retraining, workers

Spam I'm not opening today

Ostensibly from "ROBERT S MUELLER III (FBI DIRECTOR)," an email with the subject "GOOD NEWS FROM THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION.(FBI)"

technorati: spam

The corporate life: excitement division

One of the VPs at work sends around the news that management has taken to referring to "fiscal year 2010" as "FX." How annoying is that? Just a little less annoying than someone referring to 2010 as "oh-ten," which I've already been hearing.

In the same "newsletter" they're holding a contest to pick the new name for the internal document repository website. To generate excitement, "the person who submitted the winning name gets $100. Cash. In this economy, cash can be useful." Yes, but I thought the problem was that there's not enough credit. Whatever. You know what would be really exciting? Give another $100 to a random person who votes for the winner. Now that would inspire everyone to vote.

Finally, they offer the news that our division of the company will now be posting updates on Twitter, the better to "keep you abreast of product and customer news, expert commentary, bylined articles, podcasts, blog posts, speaking engagements, trade shows, and more." The only problem? Twitter is blocked throughout the company by IT.

technorati: twitter, companies

A recognisable voice by any other name is, for a comic, shtick

To a short article about the premiere of Woody Allen's next film, online editors added a link to a supposed diary Allen kept during the shooting of his recent, Oscar-nominated "Vicky Cristina Barcelona." A typical excerpt:

July 15 -- Once again I had to help Javier with the lovemaking scenes. The sequence requires him to grab Penélope Cruz, tear off her clothes and ravish her in the bedroom. Oscar winner that he is, the man still needs me to show him how to play passion. I grabbed Penélope and with one motion tore her clothes off. As fate would have it she had not yet changed into costume, so it was her own expensive dress I mutilated. Undaunted I flung her down before the fireplace and dove on top of her. Minx that she is, she rolled away a split second before I landed causing me to fracture certain key teeth on the tile floor. Fine day's work, and I should be able to eat solids by August.

Of course, none of this so-called diary has anything to do with what happened during the shooting of the film. It's merely a promotional device, something you could see Allen sitting down and writing in the space of a few cab rides in Manhattan. Still, it's undeniably his voice, and you can't read it without hearing him -- the same kinds of jokes, phrases and pacing he's been using for nearly 50 years -- in other words, his shtick.

It's not that I don't harbor some admiration for it, it's that I wonder whom it's supposed to impress. Is anyone reading that piece naive enough to say to themselves, "Gosh, it's the same ol' Woody we have known and loved since 'Take the Money and Run.' I'm putting 'Vicky Cristina' on my Netflix queue straight off"? In order to have that reaction, the reader would have to have missed the last 12 years or so of Allen's career, which has been underwater since, at least, "Everyone Says I Love You."

technorati: Woody Allen, voice, writing

'This is what you guys have come up with?'

In the March 2 New Yorker, Ariel Levy turns in a massively entertaining portrait of a group of lesbian separatists of the 1960s and 70s, the "Van Dykes," so called because they all bought vans and went on the road, and because they all took "Van Dyke" as a last name. A now sixty-ish protagonist, whom the reporter calls "the last of the Van Dykes," reminds the reporter not once but twice that she is disappointed in her, the reporter's, generation and their version of what it means to be a lesbian.

"I don't want a wife," she told me. "I want sometbody that I can run around with, like Batman and Robin, you know? ... Your generation wants to fit in," she told me for the second time. "Gays in the military and gay marriage? This is what you guys have come up with?" There was no contempt in her voice; it was something else -- an almost incredulous maternal disappointment. "We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television -- we didn't sit around looking at screens," she said. "We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something. We were off doing whatever we wanted."

That is the end of the article, but at the bottom of the column is printed in small type:

NEWYORKER.COM
An audio interview with Ariel Levy

I haven't listened to it, but I get the palpable sense that after that scolding, the reporter -- born in 1974 -- will be only too happy to put in her two cents. That being said, she is a staff writer for the New Yorker -- it's not like she's some housewife with deferred dreams who hasn't done anything with her life.

But I do sympathize with the article's subject. Though I was much more one who, in the 1970s and 80s, did "sit around waiting for a screen to give a signal to do something" than I was a bold actor, I've shared the sense that the goals of generations X, Y and Z are somewhat paltry compared to the dreams of mine. We really did believe that by the time we reached our parents' age (i.e. now) we would see viable alternatives to capitalist institutions. Instead, we're splitting hairs over digital copyright issues, pretend "carbon offset credits," and even more ephemeral things like online identities and whether our airline frequent flier miles will ever be worth anything.

To sum up my generation's pitiful state, I offer this squib from another magazine, the back page of The Atlantic for March, where a columnist asks people to coin neologisms -- that's the whole conceit of the column. A reader writes in:

Often my wife and I will decide to watch a DVD, and then she will delay coming to sit down, thereby subjecting me to the repeat-loop sounds and visuals of the DVD's main menu. What the word or phrase for this interminable experience?" -- David K. Prince, Lansdowne, Pa.

I have only two words for you, Mr. Prince, the epitome of a man who "sits around waiting for a screen to give you the signal to do something": kill yourself. Preferably in the Grand Canyon, at Niagara Falls, or in some other way that your wife won't have to clean it up.

'Can't let New York win'

A New York teacher lost her memory and disappeared for three weeks before being fished out of the river near Staten Island. Tempted to start her life afresh in another city, she decided instead:

"I didn't want my life to change in such a way that the things I enjoy I couldn't enjoy anymore," she said. "It was just, I can't let New York win."

So while she suspects that some aspect of her life in New York triggered the "dissociative fugue state" she suffered, she feels that leaving the city would equal a sort of defeat. I understand her completely.

BREAKING: Dobson resigns from Focus on the Family

James Dobson, founder and head of the Focus on the Family religious education and lobbying organization, is stepping down, the Associated Press reported.

The 72-year-old Dobson, who is a psychologist by training, has been one of the most powerful religious conservatives in the U.S. for decades. His Focus on the Family organization, despite a financial downturn in recent years, is one of the most influential right-wing Christian organizations. It was a major donor to California's anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8, and its daily radio program is heard on hundreds of religious radio stations around the country.

However, the Proposition 8 win (after which Dobson said he was "jubilant" over the anti-gay law) may have been the group's high point. Earlier this month they lost a battle when the Colorado House passed a domestic partners health care bill. And while it was giving lavishly to the Prop. 8 battle, it continued to suffer financially, laying off 20% of its staff.

The new head of the organization is a retired Air Force general -- Colorado Springs is also home to the Air Force Academy, which has been the site of alleged proselytizing by evangelical Christians -- who is also a former executive with defense contractor Northrup Grumman.

technorati: Focus on the Family, religious right, conservatives, Republicans, Dobson

Focus on the Fundies: Colo. legislator says homosexuality akin to murder

After an openly gay Colorado legislator introduced a bill to extend health care benefits to domestic partners of gay people, a Republican colleague alleged it was an attempt to whittle away at the anti-gay marriage law passed by voters and equated homosexuality with murder, saying "I'm not saying this (homosexuality) is the only sin that's out there. We have murder. We have all sorts of sin. We have adultery. And we don't make laws making those legal, and we would never think to make murder legal." There's much more disgusting bigotry quoted in the article.

technorati: Colorado, homophobia, gay rights

Another entry in the 'most dubious criminal defense' contest

Alongside the recent entry in this category, add a dentist who says his touching of women's breasts was part of him treating their temporomandibular jaw syndrome which, he claims, "affects the muscles of the upper body."

technorati: dentists, sexual assault

$2 million for celebrity memoir, as male novelists grow limp

Glum observers of the publishing scene who want to reinforce their view that the industry is as broken as an over-extended mortgage lender need look no farther than the $2 million deal for Kathy Griffin's memoir. How many copies of a doorstop like that will Ballantine have to sell just to break even? And for what? (And no, the deal wasn't done by Molly Jong-Fast.)

At Salon, Laura Miller suggests that women are ready to dethrone men as the primary writers of American novels, saying "in my (admittedly limited and anecdotal) experience, literary men under 45 are as likely to idolize Joan Didion or Flannery O'Connor as Norman Mailer or John Updike." (I'm not under 45, but for the record, I do idolize Flannery O'Connor [but not Joan Didion].)

A related clue might be found in my interview with YiYun Li last month. When she wanted to think of an American novelist critical of American society, the first name that came to her mind was Toni Morrison.

Whatever the achievements of women novelists, it's definitely true that women buy more books than men, especially novels. This 2007 NPR story quotes British novelist Ian McEwan as saying "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead."

technorati: Kathy Griffin, publishing, novelists

Things I had to look up: en petit comité

From Bolaño's The Savage Detectives:

... we ended up getting used to those fucking shrooms and that's what we usually ordered, shrooms from Oaxaca, shrooms from Tamaulipas, shrooms from La Huasteca in Veracruz or Potosí, or wherever they were from. Shrooms to do at our parties or in petit comité.

En petit comité -- in a small group, or as this dictionary of colloquial French has it, "in a group of a few intimate friends."

This page asks, "¿Qué significa "petit-comité"?" The response: Se dice que se requiere hacer una cosa "en petit comité" para referirse a una situación donde es necesario o se desea hacer algo "en familia". Mm-hmm.

Strangely, most results on Google are uses of the phrase in the context of Spanish.

Porn zine dumping near church food pantry equals column

A woman in L.A. found that a distributor for a free gay porn zine was dumping issues of the publication in her recycling bin. The newspaper columnist who picks up the story somehow ties it to a local food pantry at an Episcopal church.

technorati: Los Angeles, food+pantry, columnists

The tigers are getting organized

A Sumatran tiger killed two illegal loggers in, yes, Sumatra -- bringing to five the number of loggers who have been killed by tigers there in less than a month.

Those tigers aren't dumb.

technorati: logging, tigers, Indonesia

Turns out there's a word for that: platzangst

In an essay in Harpers, a writer describes a circular effect in a story by Robert Bolaño:

The circular temporality, the idea that they are undertaking a repetition (but with a slight variation), owes something to Borges. It also evokes a variation on the phobia that the Germans call Platzangst: the illusion that one has made no progress at all while attempting to cross a vast, unending square.

(From The Wandering Years: Roberto Bolaño's nomadic fiction, April 2007)

Wow, I had no idea there was a word for that, or that it was regarded as a common psychological affliction. I thought it was just my own impatience and anxiety. I often experience it after getting out of my car and walking up to the door of a building such as the post office -- I know rationally that the door is only a few feet away but it seems enormously inconvenient to traverse the wide, ugly sidewalk to reach it. And it's also a feeling of selfishness: I'm not allowed to park in the handicapped spaces which are closest to the door, so I have a feeling of irritation while making those twenty or thirty extra steps. Platzangst! Now I know.

Fun with characters

I'm drafting characters for a new novel, the same idea I've been working on since just before New Year's. Here are a few tertiary characters, all of whom are involved in a project called "Famous for Nothing," abbreviated F4Ø:

Meliá is the main filmmaker, she is serious about it and has standards, like the filmmaker on the Mlps project who did 30 takes of a scene. She isn't so invested in the F4Ø project per se, as a comment on society or media, as she is in her craft and in using the project as a stepping stone to something greater. But she is as allergic to plot as any of them, in fact she considers plot little short of an imperialist scheme to sedate people. "Narrative is the new opium of the masses," she says but at the same time she has no faith in documentary either, because she also doesn't believe in objectivity, so the F4Ø project is as close as she can come to being purely subjective.

Trahan, her boyfriend (pronounced TRAY-han), is vaguely European. He is a failed grad student in rhetoric. It's him who is the originator of the F4Ø concept; it's his way of articulating, in the laziest way possible, his hostile and nihilistic attitude. The reason he is so resentful is -- he says -- he is the sole survivor of a bus plunge in the Austrian Alps, surviving only after being swept downriver from the crash site and finding shelter in the forest hut of a schizophrenic whom he has to kill and eat to survive the winter -- in fact, the first thing he has to do is kill the guy in self-defense. When it all got sorted out, he was the beneficiary of a huge insurance settlement; he also became rich from a ghost-written memoir published under his name, about his ordeal. So he got the idea that he was some kind of intellectual and tried to become an academic, but in fact the people who were humoring him with the memoir and all finally reached their limit, and he was kicked out of the university with a terminal master's. He exiled himself to America where, he said, you could get people to believe anything. He finances Meliá's filmmaking and the whole F4Ø project with his wealth. The project is his aggressively hostile joke on modern culture and life in general. In the F4Ø project, his character is a bike messenger-jazz poet, which is his attempt to make fun of hipsters.

Carmichael is a would-be comedian and performance artist who has failed to define a character, a shtick or a voice. He is therefore sympathetic to Meliá's distrust of narrative, because it makes him feel better about his inability to arrive at a voice or find something to say; therefore he has taken to acting because he can take refuge in the characters he plays: they have something to say, so he won't have to. In the F4Ø project he plays the role of a hipster, i.e. a foil for Trahan's character.

Shar is a young dyke who is studying to become a tattoo artist and also works as a stripper. Because she's a dyke, Trahan finds it funny to make her play the girlfriend of Carmichael's character, and she imbues the part with every stereotype of straight girl she can muster. Of course, this isn't far from the role she plays when stripping, and for that reason she insists on being paid, whereas the others do their parts for nothing.

Chinese blogger stabbed after talk at Beijing bookstore

A popular Chinese blogger whose work was censored last year was stabbed at a Beijing bookstore where he had just given a talk. Two men dragged him into the bathroom, saying something about how he should watch whom he offends. Sounds more like Mafia intimidation than something the government would do, doesn't it? Of course, in corrupt societies like China and today's Russia, the distinction between the actions of the government, of gangsters, and of industrial criminals is hard to make.

Xi Lai is reported to be recovering after emergency surgery. A picture is here. There are some reports saying he died after the attack but apparently that is not true. A report by a blogger familiar with his work is here.

technorati: China, bloggers

Like useless young men in a depression

MSNBC has a story about a woman who "went to work for weeks expecting to be laid off and felt relief when it finally happened."

It reminded me of the character Hungry Joe in Catch-22 who has fulfilled the number of bombing missions necessary to be sent back to the States, but lives in total terror. When Col. Cathcart raises the number of missions again, he's relieved, even though it means he'll have to go risk his life again over Italy.

In Yossarian's group there were only a mounting number of enlisted men and officers who found their way solemnly to Sergeant Towser to ask if the orders sending them home had come in. They were men who had finished their fifty missions. ... They worried and bit their nails. They were grotesque, like useless young men in a depression. They moved sideways, like crabs. They were waiting for orders sending them home to safety to return from Twenty-Seventh Air Force Headquarters in Italy, and while they waited they had nothing to do but worry and bite their nails and find their way solemnly to Sergeant Towser several times a day to ask if the orders sending them home to safety had come.

They were in a race and knew it, because they knew from bitter experience that Colonel Cathcart might raise the number of missions again at any time. They had nothing better to do than wait. Only Hungry Joe had something better to do each time he finished his missions. He had screaming nightmares and had fistfights with Huple's cat. ... Every time Colonel Cathcart increased the number of missions and returned Hungry Joe to combat duty, the nightmares stopped and Hungry Joe settled down into a normal state of terror with a smile of relief.

Woman will now be able to wipe her own ass

I love stories like this that demonstrate not all the freaks live in San Francisco. Some of them live in the depraved midlands, like... Salt Lake City.

A woman with fingernails each over two feet in length is in the news because she lost them when she was seriously injured in a car crash. This is one case in which the picture taken before the accident is undoubtedly the more horrifying.

Cris took one look at it and said, "Who wiped her butt for her?"