Morning

¶ Poll: Behind the brouhaha about The New Yorker‘s Barack and Michelle Obama spoof cover, entitled “The Politics of Fear,” there’s the deepening impression that “race” (skin color) is still a matter about which black and white Americans don’t share a perspective.

Noon

¶ Turner: I took another look at the Turner show at the Met this afternoon. It’s growing on me!

Night

¶ Stone: Incidental to the Museum visit, there as a bit of book-buying, both at the Museum itself and at Crawford-Doyle, the favorite-bookstore that happens to be right around the corner on Madison, between 81st and 82nd. I could have bought this at C-D, but I’d already fallen for it at the Museum.

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This week’s images were taken one afternoon not too long ago; they show the storefronts and other edifices on the south side of 86th Street between Second and Third Avenues.

Morning

¶ Rental: From Sam Roberts’s story in the Times, this morning, about the dodginess of “1625” as the founding date of our fair city (Nieuw Amsterdam):

The first settlers apparently arrived in 1624 (or 1623) and encamped on Governors Island. In 1625, they shipped their cattle to Lower Manhattan, where more land and water were available, and a fort was planned there. In 1626, Peter Minuit made his famous purchase of Manhattan (except that he bought it from Indians who did not own it and that in their view, he was, like many subsequent residents of Manhattan, merely a renter, not an owner).

You gotta love it.

Noon

¶ Supreme: Try to make some time — this evening, perhaps, or first thing tomorrow morning — to read the envoi of Times Supreme Court commentator, Linda Greenhouse. After nearly thirty years on the beat, she is retiring (to Yale).  

Night

¶ Warrant: Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at the Hague, has submitted a warrant for the arrest of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, president of Sudan, charging him with genocide. It’s a first.
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Morning

¶ Tower of Eiffel: Now, here’s something I didn’t know: Gustave Eiffel worked on the construction of the Statue of Liberty, thus, according to Edward Berenson’s Op-Ed piece in today’s Times, “allowing him to test certain techniques he would use for his great tower in 1889.

Noon

¶ Attention! Yikes! “Google told to hand over millions of YouTube user details to Viacom in $1 billion case.” From the Telegraph.

Night

¶ Oops! When everyone but you is looking at your screen. Because you’ve already left for the holiday weekend.

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Morning

¶ Marble: What I’d really like is a cast-marble copy (whatever “cast marble” is) of Houdon’s Louvre bust of Voltaire — the one with the perruque. The new Scully bookshelf, with its rows of Library of America spines, seems to demand a completing cliché. But the one Web site that seems aware of a decent copy no longer offers it.

Meanwhile, I came across this site. which I would rename Glad I Don’t.

Noon

¶ A Little Learning: Hand-wringing in the UK about making school easy for kids.

Night

¶ Harris Pat: Spooky! Fossil Darling, on the phone with me but talking to LXIV as he often does, said to his companion, “I’ve always been true to you in my fashion.” About two beats later, I heard LXIV reciting the same Cole Porter lyrics that were coming out of my mouth:

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This week’s Daily Office photos were taken last week in Carl Schurz Park, by the East River. Last week’s pictures, as I hope Friday’s would make quite clear, were taken the previous week in Santa Monica, at the Huntington Museum, and in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Morning 

¶ Weekend Reading (Babies): I had a look, yesterday, at the Times Magazine for a change, intrigued, against my better judgment, by Russell Shorto’s cover story. As a piece of journalism, the piece embodies unfortunate trends in general-interest reportage, especially the whiff of apocalyptic gunsmoke (“No more European babies! No more Europeans!”) that is inevitably dissipated by gusts of common-sense exposition later on. Editors seem to like to front-load the drama and shove the useful information to the back end, whether to spare lazy readers or to reward diligent ones it’s hard to say.

Noon

¶ JVC Jazz: On Friday night, Kathleen and I went to a sold-out jazz concert at Carnegie Hall, featuring (first) Dianne Reeves and (then) Al Green.

¶ BookSaga: Down in Georgia, a fellow by the name of Perry Falwell runs an on-line bookshop. He scours the thrift shops for finds that he speeds along to interested customers. (Somebody’s got to do it, if Goodwill won’t.) His new Web log, BookSaga, is compulsively readable. I plan to stay tuned.

Night

¶ Gondry:  A few weeks ago, at brunch, a friend insisted that I rent and see Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. This evening, I got round to it. A great, great train wreck!

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Morning 

¶ Murcans: Send this clip to every friend that you have. Every enemy. Every body! A vote for the Democratic Party is a vote against the Republican Star Chamber. 

Noon

¶ Carlin: Social critic and funny man George Carlin dead of heart failure, aged 71.

¶ Housebroken: Even the House at Goodwood is a course — something of a steeplechase.

Night

¶ The Awful Truth: As Avenue Q taught us, the Internet is primarily good for porn. With Google as a yardstick of community standards, expect a lot of bugs-under-a-rock-squirming.
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Morning

¶ Transport: Joe Sharkey, who follows business travel for the Times, writes about the increasingly “upstairs-downstairs” nature of domestic air travel. The “commercial” airlines have lost nearly half of their “premium” customers to “business aviation” — smaller, upscale jets that used to be the preserve of jillionaires and corporations — since 2000.

Noon

¶ Panic: Within the past twenty minutes, I have drifted from a calm inattentiveness into a vortex of panic. How on earth am I going to be ready to leave New York by 1:30 tomorrow afternoon? And how did I manage to forget the Morning Read this morning? Must have been the McChouffe at lunch.

Night

¶ Bronx Cheer: Sex kitteness Dr Ruth Westheimer inducted into the Houston Bronx Walk of Fame, even though she has never lived on Westheimer Boulevard in the Bronx.

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Morning

¶ Little Black Dress: Fossil Darling is totally useless. I had to read about this in the newspaper!

Noon

¶ Oil Climbs Higher: Reading John Wilen’s report on the correlation between the rise in the price of oil and the fall of the dollar — not a matter of rocket science, since oil trades in dollars — I wonder just when Washington is going to develop some bipartisan political backbone.

Night 

¶ Free Speech: Food for thought: Adam Liptak’s survey of growing restrictions on freedom of speech in other advanced, liberal democracies.

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Consider the Boston Tea Party. 16 December 1773. Sam Adams and his “Mohawks” unload the Dartmouth, the Beaver, and the Eleanor into Boston Harbor. William J Bernstein, in A Splendid Exchange, makes me sit up in my chair when I read his account of this mythically well-known event. This is not what I was taught in school!

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Morning

¶ Brooks: As sermons go, David Brooks’s column on the evils of encouraging consumer debt is tidily effective: it’s both frightening and obviously correct.

¶ Kakutani: One might well ask why Janet Maslin didn’t review David Sedaris’s new book for “Books of the Times.” Ms Maslin writes very creditably about crowd-pleasers; she knows that prospective readers are looking for a good time. Michiko Kakutani’s idea of a good time, however…

Noon

¶ Sex and the Lightbulbs: I still can’t believe it! Yesterday, in view of the extreme heat and a consequent overloading of the power grid, Con Ed called Yorkvillians to ask us to turn off our “energy-intensive” appliances — everything except the refrigerator. Well, this afternoon, they called back! To say that, whatever the problem was, they’d fixed it! This takes us to an entirely new level of civic cooperation — and at least three bunny hops away from Idiocracy. If I’d known about the call sooner, I’d have stayed home and cranked up the a/c — and I wouldn’t have gone to see Sex and the City. But I’m sure glad I did!

Night

¶ Remains: Reading Cara Buckley’s story about the return of Native American remains from the American Museum of Natural History to the appropriate tribal area in British Columbia, it occurred to me (not for the first time) that, if I had to identify one collection from the omnium gatherum at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that does not, to my mind, belong there, it would be the immensely popular Egyptian art — most of which centers on human remains. (more…)

Morning

¶ Permission: When Kathleen, home late last night from Washington, told me that she just wanted to forward a message from her new personal computer to the office, before going to bed, I almost begged her not to. Then I wished that I had. Finally, though, I sort of fixed the problem.

¶ Eric: One of the smartest bloggers to grace the Internet has returned, après une longue absence, as a French textbook about a fellow called John Hughes (Zhan Ãœg) put it when I was in school (it is possible that I remember this because I never read next, or any other, sentence in the book), to the Blogosphere. “And they were Sore Afraid.”

Afternoon

¶ Strange Maps: Wow! If there was ever a site for me, Strange Maps is it! (Thanks, kottke.org.)

Night

¶ Full Faith & Credit: Article IV of the US Constitution begins:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

This will sound elitist, but I’d be amazed if one of this country’s three hundred million people knows what this clause means. What it means was just tested in one of our most conservative states, Virginia, and amazingly well. The justices of the Virginia Supreme Court (a state, not a federal, court) probably don’t like same-sex marriage any better than the lower judges who ruled the other, more popular way, but they do credit to their grand old man, Thomas Jefferson, a man who always seemed to know when to turn off his inbred inner bigot in favor of his outer enlightened idealist.

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William J Bernstein’s new book, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, is a paradigm-shifting book if there ever was one. In all the hoo-ha that we have had to listen to about Islam in the past seven years, no one has gotten to the heart of the matter more clearly than Mr Bernstein does here:

Alone among the world’s religions, Islam was founded by a trader. (Muhammed’s immediate successor, the cloth merchant Abu Bakr, was also a trader.) This extraordinary face suffuses the soul of this faith and guides the historical events that ricocheted over the land routes of Asia and the sea-lanes of the Indian Ocean through the next nine centuries. It’s traces are visible in today’s world, from the modern colonies of Muslim Indians in East Africa to the Lebanese merchants still active in West Africa to the “Syrians” who populated the third-world outposts of Graham Greene’s novels.

The most sacred texts of Islam resonate with the importance of commerce, as in this famous passage from the Koran: “O you who believe! Do not devour your property among yourselves falsely, except that it be trading by your mutual consent.” The most important passages on trade and commerce, however, are found in the hadith, the collected stories of Muhammed’s life, which offer advice on the conduct of trade from the general … to the specific.

…

Within a very few decades, the new creed would sweep from Mecca to Medina and back, next across the Middle East, and then west to Spain and east to India. In a commercial sense, early Islam can be thought of as a rapidly inflating bubble of commerce; outside lay unbelievers, and inside lay a swiftly growing theological and institutional unity. 

Mr Bernstein goes on to hazard a quickly-sketched explanation of Islam’s very rapid spread that makes it sound rather more like a Lions’ Club than a world religion.

Morning

¶ Regime Change: For the rest of the week, at least, I’ll be feeling my way with the Summer Hours version of the Daily Office entry. Two changes already in place: the entry will be posted at 10:30 every morning (instead of at 1:30 AM), and the first sub-entry of the day will not include a link.

Noon

¶ Orthodoxy or Death. How about an opera set on Mount Athos? Chorus of monks; fleet of St Ursula’s virgins, bound for sex slavery rather than martyrdom, foundering upon the rocky coast; rainbow bridge at the end leading to the newly-built Convent of Mount Pathos. Harry de Quetteville reports.

Night

¶ Information Age: Robert Darnton, in The New York Review of Books, makes the plausible argument that the Internet has not really changed anything on the “information” front. There has always been too much of it, and it has never been as reliable as we’d like it to be.

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Morning

¶ White. Here in the United States, it is now Summer. There’s nothing official about it, and it’s certainly not astronomically correct. But we Nice Folk have entered the time of White Shoes, and, in terms of blogging, that means Less is Easier.

¶ Lavish. The longer our misadventure in Iraq goes on, the greater the alignment between troops and opponents of the war. So far, it’s a lopsided alignment, to be sure, with opponents doing all the aligning.

Noon

¶ Long Weekend: The long Memorial Day weekend comes to an end, and we’ve had such a nice one, enjoying the fine weather out on the balcony, that Kathleen was surprised by an old nagging worry: all too soon, she would have to pack up and take the ferry back to the city. That’s how far away she felt — even though she was very much in the city. At home, in fact.

¶ Job Opp’ty: Looking for a career with a future? How about all those foreclosed houses, abandoned and falling into ruin? Plenty more where they came from! “Business Is Booming for Contractors of Foreclosed Homes.”

Night

¶ Indian Melon Salad: The official dish of summer in our house, an intensely American chicken salad, juxtaposing the flavors of table grapes, soy sauce, and curry.

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¶ Matins: One of these days, I’ll figure out how to write about the state change that overcomes a regular business company when it becomes what we loosely call “a big corporation.” Everybody knows that such a change occurs, but the law is ignorant of it. In any case, that day has not arrived; I am still in the preliminary rant phase.

¶ Tierce: WTF? Clyde Haberman works an entire column, today, out of the refusal of the Miss Grundys at The New York Times to print the word “fuck,” on the grounds, no doubt, that it is unfit.

¶ Nones: I guess it’s raining only in New York. They say it never stops raining in Seattle, but Karcher lucked out with a clear day for taking photographs of its Space-Needle cleaning project. Caution: do review these images within half an hour of lunch. (via Kottke. org)

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¶ Matins:  My idea was to mention the video that we watched this evening, after LXIV reminded us that JKM had strongly recommended it when we visited her in the place where, in the Ealing Comedy, at least, you could get a Passport to Pimlico. It’s an adorable movie, and I’ve just spent £9.95 ($100,000) on shipping to make sure that I have my very own copy of the DVD, which is not available in the U S of Movies, within the next ten minutes.

¶ Lauds: Speaking of Édouard (and this will make sense only to those of you who clicked through at Matins), I was very touched by a comment that Jérôme posted at the latest Sale Bête entry. The end of incognito?

¶ Tierce: Nice fix-it columns in the Times: Clyde Haberman on the Rockefeller Drug Laws, and Andrew Ross Sorkin on Kenneth Griffin, a hedge-fund whiz kid who thinks that Wall Street let the young ‘uns have too much fun with the car keys.

¶ Compline: Another season of  Orpheus at Carnegie ended last Saturday night. At first, I thought I wouldn’t be able to go, so I gave the tickets to LXIV. Then I could go, and he didn’t have a taker for the other ticket — and I went. But I let LXIV play host and sit in the aisle seat.

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¶ Matins: Jason Kottke is attending The New Yorker Conference — not to be confused with the New Yorker Festival, which takes place in the Fall. The Conference is a pricey event — $1200 last year (meals included); $2000 this. Kathleen has encouraged me to go, but I’ve worried that I’d feel like a rich kid whom the big boys were tolerating even as they milked me. On the other hand, getting in on Davos-for-brainiacs while it’s still cheapish (and requires no serious travel) appeals mightily. So I am following Mr Kottke’s every word.

¶ Nones: I’ve seen a number of movies in the past five years that have made me ashamed to be an American, but The Visitor is the first film to make me ashamed of being a lawyer.

¶ Compline: What I really wanted to do late this afternoon was to start in on the weekend tidying. I’m on a roll in that department: every time the apartment is swept by my attentions, things are not only better-organized, but there are fewer of them. Instead, though, I dutifully digested Thomas Powers’s review of recent books about our Iraqi misadventure, for this week’s Friday Front.

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¶ Matins: This may be the best dog video ever, probably because it captures, to perfection, the pleasure of being out alone with one’s pooch.

¶ Tierce: What’s this? A war-protest strike by Pacific dockworkers? Yesterday? You tell me why William Yardley’s story isn’t on the front page of the Times — instead of not one but two “stories” about the Obama-Wright rift.

¶ Compline: Although I was tolerably entertained by James Wolcott’s overview of the primary scene in the current Vanity Fair, I had to wonder if it merits all the commentary.

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¶ Matins: Today, I ascend to N! Will I regret it?

¶ Tierce: … And they don’t advertise. That’s part of how Steve & Barry’s, retailers with a price cap of $10 $8.98 per item, has become a billion-dollar company. What a chilling prospect for the Mad Men.

¶ Sext: Migs test-drives the latest in Philippine highways, and takes notes.

¶ Vespers: Where’s my hankie? Exxon Mobil’s first-quarter profits are so disappointing! (Other, more interesting news below the jump.)

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¶ Matins: The book that I ordered was Garry Wills’s What Paul Meant. The book that I got was Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World. That’s how it is with QPBC sometimes. You print one shaky digit on your reply card* and you’re screwed. I ought to have put what I got out on the windowsill. Instead, I started to read it.

¶ Tierce: An ongoing sad story: the catastrophically depleted ranks of Roman Catholic seminarians. Here’s a story about Dunwoodie, the late-Gothic pile on a hill that, when I was a child, loomed over brash new highways, greatly intensifying the bogus feel of the image. Already the Church seemed not so much traditional as airlocked.

¶ Nones: The Papal Schedule (He’ll be up bei uns at six on Friday afternoon). The Papal Apology (same old, same old).

¶ Compline: This just in (Dept of ROTFLOL): John the Doorman has assured us that the Pope is going to make a little parenthesis on Friday, to Bless the Bratwurst at Schaller & Weber.

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