The litter in littérateur.

Sat 19 Apr 2008

Robert Marc and the hunt for the perfect glasses

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After wearing contact lenses daily for the past seven years, I decided recently to try wearing glasses. Of course, being the obsessive-compulsive type that I am, I refused all my optomitrist’s suggestions and struck out on my own to find the perfect pair of glasses—something in the black plastic, New York intelligencia mold. So, during a recent stay in Manhattan, I visited Robert Marc’s West Village and SoHo locations. (If Paris is the eyeglasses capital of the world, Manhattan is the U.S.’s.) The guy at the SoHo store seemed to have no idea how to fit a pair of glasses and handed me everything they had in black.

Fortunately, I had better luck at the West Village store, where the woman behind the counter had me in the right frames within a couple minutes. I ended up with the RM 172 frames pictured above. (The finalists were those and the RM 185 frames.) They’re not as light as my old titanium frames and the black is a little too glossy for my taste. However, they’re exceptionally well-crafted frafficionadoames with top-notch acetate. I also love the quirkiness of the blue pattern on the inside. A friend and color aficionado called it “secret blue.”

Of course, this meant that I needed something to balance the character of the RM frames, and, for that, I went to the Oliver Peoples boutique on West Broadway, down the street from Robert Marc’s disappointing SoHolocation. They haven’t arrived yet, but their Lance frame in 50mm seems to be the perfect all-black plastic frame. We’ll see!

Sun 16 Mar 2008

Today in the Times

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As is the Sunday ritual, I went through the New York Times today and noted the following:

Apparently, the B52s stay at the Bowery Hotel, the same hotel where I stayed during BEA last year. My room won points for being relatively quiet, having an iPod dock, and having MSG, which, by pure coincidence, happened to be showing an excellent game from the 2003 ALCS during the last night of my stay. Its being a two-minute walk from the Whole Foods on Houston didn’t hurt either.
Matt Bai has two stories in the paper. One is in the Magazine on Obama’s surprising success in racially homogenous states and his failure in diverse ones. The other contrasts the advertising-influenced of David Axelrod with the poll-driven nature of Mark Penn. (Note: I’ve met both Penn and Bai as part of my work, but, alas, not Axelrod.)
n+1 editor and Harvard alum Keith Gessen has the back page essay in the Book Review this week, which covers a few books about the struggle for college admissions. Of particular interest is The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue by David Samuels. I remember being fascinated by this story when it broke a few years back, probably because of its Gatsbyesque nature. I mean, how can you not be impressed by a guy who, at nearly 30, fakes his way into Princeton. And what could possibly be a better story for criticizing the whole college admissions game in the first place? Which reminds me of an op-ed piece that ran in the Times last weekend. Mark Leyner wrote a wonderful criticism of all the unjustified column space that’s lately been given to stories about literary hoaxes. The piece takes the form of a news story about the discovery that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” is actually a work of nonfiction. I’ve long argued that it doesn’t make much of a difference to me whether a work is classified as fiction or nonfiction. After all, I’m judging the work that a writer has produced, not her life. (But you say, “Her work was her life.”)
Finally, the paper ran a story about Samantha Power in which she’s quoted as having foreshadowed her own political demise as an advisor to the Obama campaign. The article tends toward gossip at times, but I found Power’s prescience to be disarming. But then again, I’m a fan looking for the positive.

After Ms. Power joined the Obama campaign, as an unpaid part-time adviser on foreign policy, people who knew her wondered — and worried — whether a person who is so naked about her passions could survive in the political world, where tact and coolness usually trump spontaneity.

Ms. Power herself worried. “That’s the one thing that terrifies me: that I’ll say something that will somehow hurt the candidate,” she told The Chronicle of Higher Education last year.

Sun 10 Feb 2008

Change Audi A4 B6 ignition coils yourself

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If you have a B6 platform Audi A4 like I do, you’ve probably experienced the failure of an ignition coil while driving. You know the feeling—you suddenly lose power, the car shakes when you accelerate, and the check engine light flashes. This has happened to me three times in the past five months, including one on the Golden Gate Bridge in December. It happened to me again last Friday on my way to work. And, although it’s no fun and potentially dangerous to be driving when a coil fails, replacing it is a snap. All you need to do is remove the engine cover to access the coils. The only frustrating part is that, unless you have a VAG-COM or some other way to read the CEL code, you’ll need to find the bad coil by replacing one at a time and starting the car until the CEL disappears. Nonetheless, the whole thing can be done in about five minutes, and you’ll save time and about $150 in so-called “labor” costs at the dealer. Honestly, I’m not sure how such a quick procedure can cost so much, but the dealers will get away with what they can. Changing an ignition coil on this car is far easier than changing a headlight or windshield wiper blades. You can buy the coils here for about $30 each.

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Sun 10 Feb 2008

Giants Super Bowl parade

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I made it back to New York last Tuesday morning and caught the end of the Giants Super Bowl victory parade down Broadway. Overheard afterwards on the street was a man asking a police officer, “Officer, do you know at which bar in the City I can find the cheapest beer?”

Sun 10 Feb 2008

My favorite things

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Well, actually, these are Kate and Andy Spade’s favorite things. I recently discovered the “Things We Love” page on KateSpade.info, which contains everything from Moleskine notebooks to the band Architecture in Helsinki to red velvet cake. Of particular interest to me were the French sweets at Laduree and this set of Pantone pens made by Pentel. If anyone knows where to find these pens, let me know!

And, as you may be aware, I’ve long kept a page here on this site of things I recommend.

Sun 13 Jan 2008

Shout Out Louds and Impossible

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I have been listening often to “Impossible” by Shout Out Louds over the past few weeks. Emotionally, it touches similar territory as David Gray’s “Shine,” though on a different level. Anyhow, the point is that right around the four-minute mark of “Impossible,” the song seems to be winding down, but then it returns when you least expected it—just when you thought it was over, it isn’t. I could get into the way that the formal break here in the song echoes its content and question whether you can actually separate form from content, etc., etc., but I’ll leave it at that.

Sun 13 Jan 2008

Lorrie Moore on Hillary Clinton

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In this weekend’s New York Times, one of my favorite writers, Lorrie Moore, dismisses Hillary Clinton’s appeal as a woman in the 2008 election cycle, asking: “Does her being a woman make her a special case? Does gender confer meaning on her candidacy? In my opinion, it is a little late in the day to become sentimental about a woman running for president.”

Moore continues:

Boys are faring worse [than girls] — and the time for symbols and leaders they can connect with beneficially should be now and should be theirs. Hillary Clinton’s gender does not rescue society from that — instead she serves as a kind of nostalgia for a time when it might have. Only her policies are what matter now, and here — despite some squabbling and bad advice that has caused her to “go negative” — the Democrats largely agree. But inspiration is essential for living, and Mr. Obama holds the greater fascination for our children.

Mr. Obama came of age as a black man in America. He does not need (as he has done) to invoke his grandfather’s life in colonial Kenya to prove or authenticate his understanding of race. His sturdiness is equal to Mrs. Clinton’s, his plans as precise and humane. But unlike her, he is original and of the moment. He embodies, at the deepest levels, the bringing together of separate worlds. The sexes have always lived together, but the races have not. His candidacy is minted profoundly in that expropriated word “change.”

Sun 11 Nov 2007

The amateur athlete

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When I interviewed Moneyball author Michael Lewis back in September, he mentioned a piece he was working on, which argued thatt college football players should be paid for they create a product that generates a significant amount of revenue for their universities. Growing up, I had a somewhat romatic notion of the amateur athlete who works on and displays his skills, untained by commercial interests. Of course, commercial interests are all over collegiate sports, so why not just call a spade a spade? Lewis writes in today’s New York Times:

College football’s best trick play is its pretense that it has nothing to do with money, that it’s simply an extension of the university’s mission to educate its students. Were the public to view college football as mainly a business, it might start asking questions. For instance: why are these enterprises that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with profits exempt from paying taxes? Or why don’t they pay their employees?

This is maybe the oddest aspect of the college football business. Everyone associated with it is getting rich except the people whose labor creates the value. At this moment there are thousands of big-time college football players, many of whom are black and poor. They perform for the intense pleasure of millions of rabid college football fans, many of whom are rich and white. The world’s most enthusiastic racially integrated marketplace is waiting to happen.

But between buyer and seller sits the National Collegiate Athletic Association, to ensure that the universities it polices keep all the money for themselves — to make sure that the rich white folk do not slip so much as a free chicken sandwich under the table to the poor black kids. The poor black kids put up with it because they find it all but impossible to pursue N.F.L. careers unless they play at least three years in college. Less than one percent actually sign professional football contracts and, of those, an infinitesimal fraction ever make serious money. But their hope is eternal, and their ignorance exploitable.

Sun 21 Oct 2007

Sox win!

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Just before midnight on the East Coast, the Red Sox secured their 11th ever World Series victory with a convincing victory over the Cleveland Indians. Didn’t David Ortiz look cute with his goggles on, ready to celebrate?

With the Yankees sadly eliminated early this year, I’ve felt free to root for the Red Sox throughout the Cleveland series. There’s nothing like October baseball in the Northeast.

Sun 21 Oct 2007

Premium Denim and the Great Gatsby

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Last weekend, by chance, I ended up at the Blues Jean Bar in the Marina. They have jeans, jeans, and more jeans. It’s rather impressive. However, I did a little research and it seems that their prices are over retail, so I doubt I would ever buy anything there. I also don’t like the fact that they keep all the jeans behind the “bar,” so you have to ask for everything. One thing I hate when shopping for clothes is interacting with the sales people.

Since last weekend I’ve given myself a minor crash course in premium denim. No, I definitely can’t distinguish the pocket design of one brand from another, but I did find a pair of jeans from AG called Great Gatsby. Being a complete sucker for all things Gatsby, I immediately wanted them. Not only did they bear the Gatsby name, but they also reminded me of another Gatsby-related piece of apparel, the Gatsby shirts from J. Peterman, which I first encountered in the Peterman catalog ten years ago when I was in high school.

However, after thinking about it, the AG jeans just seem downright stupid to me. While the Peterman shirts at least claimed to be inspired by Gatsby—the very shirt that Gatsby wore! the same sort of shirt that he would toss on the floor causing Daisy to weep!—I could never imagine Gatsby wearing AG jeans, not then and not now.

Though I can believe in the Peterman shirts, silly as they—and his whole catalog—may be, I can’t really believe that there’s anything at all Gatsbyesque about the AG jeans. It’s sort of like Moleskine notebooks, where the labels claim that Picasso and Hemingway used them. And, in fact, they actually did use similarly designed notebooks. Dave Eggers and many others actually use Moleskine notebooks themselves, which adds to their appeal. Of course, having the right tools counts for nothing if you don’t know how to use them, but their inspirational power—commercial and exploitative as it may be—also carries a degree of reality.

Sun 21 Oct 2007

Weekend notes

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Conversational reading has a fairly sharp piece about one of my favorite literary critics, James Wood.

I don’t think Wood believes there is much value in metaphors like Flaubert’s because as a reader he doesn’t appreciate what use they have in a novel. Wood is comfortable dissecting how an author attaches character traits to realistic people, but when an author tosses in an enigmatic metaphor, Wood finds it too fuzzy, and therefore meaningless. I think, perhaps, if he were better at imagining his way into the psychology of a work, he might better understand the value of metaphors like Flaubert’s.

Esposito seems to go a little over the top to make his point, for, after all, enigmatic metaphor and social commentary doesn’t really matter much without the existing creation in the novel of one real human being.

Prompted in part by this New York Times article, I’ve been reading up on recent cancer research. Most articles I’ve read, are, unfortunately, unlinkable (like this one), having come from ridiculously expensive medical journals. One of the recommendations I encountered in the Times is essentially to spend more resources on soi-disant “blue sky” research. One of the places that I became aware of at the beginning of this decade that actually works on this sort of stuff is the Webb-Waring Institute, which operates free of commercial interests.
An era ended in New York last week with Joe Torre’s departure from the New York Yankees. The teams from 1996 through 2001 played an essential part in my sense of who I am as an individual—Mo; Jeter; Posada; waking up at obscene hours in France to listen to the 2000 Subway Series; the 2001 playoff games that started on one day and finished the next, ending in October—and I’m rather sad about the end of things for Torre. These letters to the Times sports section express that sadness better than I can right now.

Sun 21 Oct 2007

J.D. Drew and the curse of potential

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J.D. Drew may be the toast of the town in New England after his grand slam yesterday against the Indians, but New York Times and Deadspin blogger Will Leitch writes about how Drew is one of the most disliked players he has ever watched. Leitch notes that “the real reason Drew rankles us so much is that he doesn’t seem to be having much fun. He’s not loafing, exactly, but he roams the diamond with the countenance of a man finishing out the end of a prison term. For all his obvious skills, he is thought to have no passion for the game.”

Drew’s case here seems to raise two questions: one about wasted potential and another about making one’s life’s work something for which one has no passion. But does Drew really have no passion or does he just appear that way? And is that such a bad thing? And what really is the difference? Is Drew simply not a hard worker? I think the sentiment about Drew results from a combination of his not having lived up to his projected potential from the time he was drafted and his apparently blasé demeanor on the field. If the guy had driven in 100 runs this year, would the fans really be all over him? I doubt it, but then again, when you play in front of thousands and thousands of people, performance matters in both senses of the word.

Sun 21 Oct 2007

The development round

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The New York Times has an editorial today about the 2001 Doha talks and the commitment to making it easier for poor countries to have access to global markets to sell their goods. However, as the Times notes:

The package for the poorest should be improved. At the very least, the duty- and quota-free access to markets in industrial countries should be extended to cover more of the poor countries’ most competitive exports, starting with textiles. Middle-income countries should also offer equivalent open access for exports from the least developed. And rich countries should tightly limit any exceptional subsidies and protections for agricultural products, like sugar and cotton, that poor countries can export.

Sat 20 Oct 2007

The New Yorker’s Arts Issue

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Earlier this week, I had lunch with New Yorker writer Alex Ross, whose new book The Rest Is Noise is an excellent history of 20th century classical music. Ross has an article in this week’s New Yorker about how the Internet, commonly held to have had a deleterious effect on the music business, has lead to a revival in the classical music business.

What really struck me in the article is a passage Ross quotes from the blog of pianist Jeremy Denk about the experience of playing Oliver Messaien’s “Quartet for the End of Time”:

Somewhere toward the middle of the last movement, I began to feel the words that Messiaen marks in the part, I began to hear them, feel them as a “mantra”: extatique, paradisiaque. And maybe more importantly, I began to have visions while I was playing, snapshots of my own life (such that I had to remind myself to look at the notes, play the notes!): people’s eyes, mostly, expressions of love, moments of total and absolute tenderness. (This is sentimental, too personal: I know. How can you write about this piece without becoming over-emotional?) I felt that same sense of outpouring (“pouring over”) that comes when you just have to touch someone, when what you feel makes you pour out of your own body, when you are briefly no longer yourself—and at that moment I was still playing the chords, still somehow playing the damn piano. And each chord is even more beautiful than the last; they are pulsing, hypnotic, reverberant . . . each chord seemed to pile on something that was already ready to collapse, something too beautiful to be stable . . . and when your own playing boomerangs on you and begins to “move yourself,” to touch you emotionally, you have entered a very dangerous place. Luckily, the piece was almost over. . . . When I got offstage I had to breathe, hold myself in, talk myself down.

Denk does an excellent job of conveying simultaneously the the way it feels to be overwhelmingly moved by something and the very impossibility of expressing that feeling. Also in this week’s magazine is a relatively interesting piece by Sasha Frere-Jones about why indie rock is so white.

Thu 18 Oct 2007

Orhan Pamuk at the JCC San Francisco

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By chance I discovered that Orhan Pamuk was reading at the JCC in San Francisco last night. Unfortunately, tickets were sold out. And yet, I decided to drive up to the city after work, anyway, to see if I might be able to score a ticket by standing outside on California Street. I happened to also be very hungry during the drive, and couldn’t help but make a sushi stop at Whole Foods before I got to the JCC. By the time I did arrive, it was 8:07 pm, and I was seven minutes late for the event and probably 15 minutes late for my chance at buying a ticket from someone going in with an extra. So, I went over to the ticket booth on a whim, and asked if they had any tickets available. And indeed they gave me one. “How much is it?” I asked, and the girl at the booth told me, “Don’t worry about it.” (Free ticket to see Orhan Pamuk! And I got sushi!)

I absolutely loved the event and am going to see him again tomorrow evening at Stanford. Some of the things I remember from his talk at the JCC, which will be broadcast on November 12 at 8 pm on KALW 91.7 FM:

The central work of the writer is spending a lot of time alone in a room, looking inside yourself and putting what you find on the outside.
Pamuk paraphrasing Adorno in response to a question about the writer’s position at the border of his culture: “Morality is to never feel at home anywhere.” The actual line from Adorno, which I looked up afterwards: “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”
Pamuk’s comments on always falling into depression when he reads the English translations of his work because English is the one other language he understands well enough to be critical of.

Overall, I came away from the event reminded of my love for both writing and reading, and I look forward to finishing up Pamuk’s Other Colors and then diving into Snow.

Sat 22 Sep 2007

I laugh more often now

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I attended two shows last week worth mentioned. The first was Peter Bjorn and John at the Wiltern in LA on Monday night. I missed the opening band, the Clientele, but their backing vocalist Mel Draisey joined PB&J for their performance of “Young Folks.” (I’m impressed by the fact that the Clientele quotes Jean Baudrillard on their website!) One thing I just learned about “Young Folks” is that the vocals in the album version are done entirely by the band, i.e. there’s no female singing the part that you think is sung by a female.

Overall, the band had a lot of energy, and I enjoyed the show quite a bit. Their set seemed rather short to me at only 14 songs, including most of Writer’s Block. Writer’s Block was the soundtrack to my summer, and “Young Folks” its theme song. However, it’s the song “Objects of My Affection,” that I’ve been thinking about recently. Its chorus: “. . . and the question is, was I more alive / then than I am now? / I happily have to disagree; / I laugh more often now, I cry more often now, / I am more me.”

In the song, these musings are prompted by encounters with writing and music that had been encountered before in another time. This reminded me of an article I read this summer in the New York Review of Books by Joyce Carol Oates. Her review of the “amnesiac” novels The Raw Shark Texts and Remainder includes this brilliant passage:

The amnesiac’s quest resembles the artist’s quest for inspiration: the artist must be alert to “messages” beneath the seeming disorder of the world, leaving himself open to disponibilité—availability of chance. For it is likely to be a “chance” image or encounter that will unleash a flood of memories, and allow the amnesiac to reclaim the narrative of his life.

I love the idea of the unexpected evocations, but the thing that really got me about this passage was the idea of reclaiming the narrative of one’s life, or as PB&J put it, being “more me.” It seems to me that most of my adult life has been devoted to returning to some narrative track that was set in adolescence. And nothing feels better than knowing that I’m back on it.

I also saw Arcade Fire and LCD SoundSystem play in the rain at Shoreline on Friday night. The venue seemed altogether too large for Arcade Fire; I wish I had been able to see them at someplace like the Greek in Berkeley or the Fillmore in San Francisco. However, I was delightfully surprised by LCD. One of my friends has been telling me about their song “All My Friends” for months, but I didn’t pay much attention to it or to the band, despite having picked up both of their albums. The live version of this song was absolutely amazing, soaring and wonderful. I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since the concert, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s likely the best song I’ve ever heard about the alienation and disappointment of adult life: “You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan / And the next five years trying to be with your friends again.” There’s also a decent cover out there by Franz Ferdinand.