Matins

¶ Maureen Dowd has made up her mind about Gen McChrystal. (NYT)

So the commander in chief can be bad-mouthed as weak by the military but then he can’t punish the military because that would make him weak? It’s the same sort of pass-the-Advil vicious circle reasoning the military always uses.

At Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody suggests that the general had made up his mind. (Snarkmarket)

There’s been a lot of noise about Gen. Stan­ley McChrystal’s Obama-badmouthing can­dor with Rolling Stone, but besides per­haps Col­son White­head (“I didn’t know they had truf­fle fries in Afghanistan”), Andrew Fitzger­ald at Cur­rent has dis­tilled it to its essence bet­ter than any­one on the net: first sub­stance (“Focus­ing on the few con­tro­ver­sial remarks misses the point of this RS McChrys­tal piece. Really tough look at Afg.”), then snark (“Let’s say McChrys­tal is fired… How long before he shows up as a com­men­ta­tor on FNC? Is it months? Weeks? Hours?”).

While We’re Away

¶ How to make people dependent on you, against their own interest: creating a sick system. (Issendai’s Journal; via  kottke.org)

Keep the crises rolling. Incompetence is a great way to do this: If the office system routinely works badly or the controlling partner routinely makes major mistakes, you’re guaranteed ongoing crises. Poor money management works well, too. So does being in an industry where the clients are guaranteed to be volatile and flaky, or preferring friends who are themselves in perpetual crisis. You can also institutionalize regular crises: Workers in the Sea Org, the elite wing of Scientology, must exceed the previous week’s production every single week or face serious penalties. Because this is impossible, it guarantees regular crises as the deadline approaches.

Regular crises perform two functions: They keep people too busy to think, and they provide intermittent reinforcement. After all, sometimes you win—and when you’ve mostly lost, a taste of success is addictive.

But why wouldn’t people eventually realize that the crises are a permanent state of affairs? Because you’ve explained them away with an explanation that gives them hope.

Now that we have the blueprint, let’s take it to work and share!

¶ Nige visits The Book Shop in Wirksworth, Derbyshire — not to for the first time.

On my last visit, I once again saw half a dozen and more books that were hard to resist, but I restricted myself to two titles – George Thomas’s biography of Edward Thomas for myself, and William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It for my Derbyshire cousin. She, bless her, returned the compliment by buying me two others that had caught my eye – Richard Mabey’s Gilbert White, and R.S. Thomas’s No Truce with the Furies. This collection – the last published in his lifetime – contains his heartfelt, insightful, long-matured Homage to Wallace Stevens, which I pass on…

I turn now
not to the Bible
but to Wallace Stevens.
Insured against
everything but the muse,
what has the word-wizard
to say?

This is the quiet richness of the lucky reader’s life.

¶ A brief history of American payments systems, from cash to PayPal. The entry is actually part of an interblog argument about “interchange regulation,” so skim past the opening blockquote. (Felix Salmon)

Every so often, non-bank players like Diner’s Club or American Express would come up with a bright idea in the payments space, and some of them made good money for their owners. More recently, PayPal took advantage of the fact that, unlike Europe, the U.S. has a very antiquated and expensive system for moving money directly from one bank account to another. (In Europe, it’s as easy as a phone call, or hopping online; there’s no fee.) So PayPal set up shop in the U.S. to facilitate payments directly between individuals, taking a small cut for itself along the way. But PayPal wasn’t an improvement on the simple European system: it was merely an “innovation,” if you want to call it that, born of sclerosis and greed in the U.S. wire-transfer system.

While we agree that AT&T oughtn’t to be in the payments business, the telcos have more experience with micropayments than any other group, and they’d have much to teach a bank that wanted to mine this territory. First, we need a bank to offer PayPal’s services. (TD, anyone?)

¶ At Discover, Ed Yong takes up the riveting linguistic case of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which is not (among other things) a dialect of Spanish.

The grand idea behind all of these singular observations is that as human language evolved, our mental abilities became increasingly entwined with linguistic devices. Those devices are part and parcel of modern language, and thus modern thought. NSL, being a new language, is the exception that proves the rule – as it developed, so did the abilities of those who learned it, from their skills at visualising objects in space to their capacity for understanding the minds of their peers.

Have a Look

¶ God Almighty Action Figure — complete with AK-47! (FAIL)

Matins

¶ How do we launch a campaign to implement Christopher Brownfield’s proposal for the Macondo (Deepwater Horizon) well? A former submarine captain, Mr Brownfield wants to demolish the well with non-nuclear explosives, and he wants the Navy to oversee the project. (NYT)

But control of the well itself should fall to the Navy — it alone has the resources to stop the flow. For starters, the Office of Naval Research controls numerous vehicles like Alvin, the famed submersible used to locate the Titanic. Had such submersibles been deployed earlier, we could have gotten real-time information about the wellhead, instead of waiting for BP to release critical details.

The Navy also commands explosives experts who have vast knowledge of underwater demolitions. And it has some of the world’s finest underwater engineers at Naval Reactors, the secretive program that is responsible for designing nuclear reactors for nuclear submarines. With the help of scientists in our national weapons laboratories and experts from private companies, these engineers can be let loose on the well.

To allay any concerns over militarizing the crisis, the Navy and Coast Guard should be placed in a task-force structure alongside a corps of experts, including independent oil engineers, drilling experts with dedicated equipment, geologists, energy analysts and environmentalists, who could provide pragmatic options for emergency action.

While We’re Away

¶ Anthony Lane’s searingly funny report from the Eurovision Song Contest. There cannot be an absurdity about this festival of dreckulacious and inauthentic music that Mr Lane has missed. (The New Yorker, available to subscribers only; just think of the retyping that we had to do and go buy a copy!)

Not a bad idea. Whether you’re presenting, performing, attending, or watching at home, alcohol is essential for getting through the Eurovision Song Contest, and the Norwegian pils served at the concession stands, as weak as fizzy rain, was simply not up to the job. How else could one face an opening band, from Moldova, who rhymed “We have no progressive future!” with “I know your lying nature!,” and who had taken pains to ensure that their violinist’s illuminated bow matched the bright-blue straps of the lead singer’s garter belt? A deranged Estonian smacked his piano with one raised fist, like a butcher flattening an escalope of veal. A pair of ice-white blondes, one with a squeezebox, decided to revive the moribund tradition of oompah-pah — or, presumably, since they were Finnish, oom-päa-päa. A Belgian boy came on to croon “Me and My Guitar,” otherwise known as “Him and His Crippling Delusion.” Three female singers from Belarus sprouted wings for the final chorus of “Butterflies.” A smirking Serb of indeterminate gender, wearing a tailcoat, sang flat, hiccupping now and then for dramatic effect. Order was at first restored by Marcin Mrozinski, from Poland, who was backed by five demure women in national dress, and then destroyed as two of the women tore the white blouse off a third, to reveal a sort of peasant boob tube. An old Eurovision trick this: the mid-song strip, timed to coincide with musical fatigue.

¶ Nicholson Baker would go on to write a lovely little book about his platonic, literary crush on John Updike, but the gist of it is captured in a letter that he wrote in 1985, on his Kaypro. (NYRBlog)

I thought this because I had just read a charitable review by you of a book I probably will never read by Andre Dubus, and this had made me go through the pile of magazines to find your story, which my girlfriend had mentioned: there was something wonderful about having this story of yours waiting there, in a wicker basket of magazines, indifferent to whether I read it or not, yet written by a writer whose personality and changes of mood I felt I had some idea of in a way you can only have of a writer who has written a great deal, lots of which you have forgotten, only retaining a feeling of long-term fondness which is perhaps the most important residual emotion of the experience of literature. And I thought all this in a second, pleased with myself, and then, as I passed out from under the brief shade of the tuxedo shop awning and diagonally crossed Route 9, I thought that you probably had written all this in some other book review or essay that I hadn’t read, or had read and forgotten; and this pleased me too, because after all it is a simple thought, mostly compounded of gratefulness and the pleasure that Sunday mornings have, and the good thing about Mr. Updike is that he is a true writer, and writes out the contents of his mind, and that idea occurred to him once, no doubt, suggested by some book he was reviewing, and he wrote it down; and that was what being a man of letters was all about.

¶ “Pearl Hawthorne” explains the importance of hand-written thank-you notes in professional life, and lays out the kabuki. (The Awl)

Third, wording: You do not have to go fancy. If you called the person by their first name in emails, then use their first name. If not, stick with the formal: Mr. or Ms.

Do not use Mrs. or Miss. This is not elementary school.

For the body of the note, all you need to do is thank the person for taking time to meet with you. And if you want the job, if there is a job, say you are excited about the possibility of working with the aforementioned addressee. Do not use the note to re-promote yourself, or reiterate your accomplishments. That is obnoxious. We already talked to you. We have your resume.

Remember: Thank you notes are humble—they show you are taking the time to thank someone for taking their time out for you. This is what the email can’t accomplish: emails are a dime a million. We write them all day, we know they take five seconds (and the really good ones take about ten.) We also write thank you notes, so we know they take time
and focus and involve hand cramps. We know it’s a pain in the ass for you to write them, look up our addresses, track down a stamp that is actually of the correct value…. But that’s the entire point.

¶ What Berlin’s lack of visual grandeur (ugliness? non-descriptness”) tells Tyler Cowen, and why he likes it. (Marginal Revolution)

I like that it’s ugly, because it keeps the city empty and cheap and it keeps away the non-serious.  There are not many (any?) splashy major sights.  Even the Wall is mostly gone.  The way to see and experience Berlin is to do things.  The ugliness selects for people who want to enjoy the city’s musical, theatrical, museum, and literary treasures.

Berlin is evidence that most tourists don’t actually care so much about history, culture, and museums, as it is not for most people a major tourist destination, despite having world-class offerings in each of those areas.  Mostly tourists like large, visually spectacular sites, or family activities, combined with the feeling that they are taking in culture or seeing something important. 

Have a Look

¶ Adolf Hoffmeister. Was it something in the Czech water supply? (The Rumpus)

Matins

¶ Deepwater Horizon notes: rig worker Tyrone Benton tells BBC News that one of the “pods” on the blowout preventer was known to be defective days before the disaster.

He said he did not know whether the leaking pod was turned back on before the disaster or not.

He said to repair the control pod would have meant temporarily stopping drilling work on the rig at at time when it was costing BP $500,000 (£337,000) a day to operate the Deepwater Horizon.

This is important because — as it only just occurred to us (you get what you pay for) — the relief wells currently being drilled will also have to be equipped with blowout preventers. Profit motives must have no place in evaluating their safety! We can see no reason why some sort of American military team should not be drafted to oversee the completion of the first relief well, which is still weeks away.  

Don’t miss “Boom,” Sean Flynn’s riveting countdown-to-disaster piece in GQ.

¶ Quaint old Japan: “For a variety of reasons, cultural as well as economic, the digital revolution has yet to wreak the same havoc on the news media here that it has in the United States and most other advanced countries.” Martin Fackler writes about JanJan, an alternative news site shuttered in May for lack of revenues. (NYT)

Mr. Motoki and others say that another reason for Japan’s resistance to alternative sites is the relative absence of social and political divisions. In politically polarized South Korea, OhmyNews thrived by appealing to young, liberal readers.

“It is only when the society sees itself as having conflicting interests that it will seek out new viewpoints and information,” said Toshinao Sasaki, the author of about two dozen books on the Internet in Japan.

Media experts say Japan has yet to see such critical questioning of its establishment press. They say most Japanese remain at least passively accepting of the nation’s big newspapers and television networks.

While We’re Away

¶ Which type of mobile browser are you?

A. “Repetitive now”
B. “Bored now”
C. “Urgent now”

The “repetitive now” user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.

The “bored now” are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don’t offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.

The “urgent now” is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.

That’s Stephen Wellman reporting on a Google presentation in April; Jason Kottke picked it up this weekend, adding his thought that this tripartion applies to the Web generally. Needless to say, we’re hoping that tablets will encourage a fourth class: “Reflective now.” (Information Week; via  kottke.org)

¶ President Obama’s heartbreaking medical secret: he suffers from antidrenalin, which leaves him “hopelessly crippled by clear, logical thinking at all times.” (The Bygone Bureau)

“My antidrenaline disorder has been tough for both me and my family,” he said at the press conference. “As a husband and father, it is something I am constantly dealing with. And that makes me frustrated.”

“No it doesn’t,” he added….

“Going into my first term as president, I knew that my antidrenaline disorder would be an obstacle,” the President concedes. “So to balance out my thoughtful, composed temperament, I brought on Rahm Emanuel.”

Kevin Nguyen’s spoof raises a question: why is it that the only alternative to Spock-like rationality that we can imagine is rage? Have the good ole’ disenfranchised white boys really hijacked the Zeitgeist? Can’t we think of some other passions? How about hope?

¶ Will memorizing poetry make a comeback in elementary schools? It’s hard to know where teachers bound to leave no children behind will find the time for recitations of whatever has replaced “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” as a classroom staple. But we’ll allow ourselves a heartening moment. (Associated Press; via  Arts Journal)

Though slow, or close reading, always has been emphasized at the college-level in literary criticism and other areas, it’s also popping up in elementary schools, Miedema said.

Mary Ellen Webb, a third-grade teacher at Mast Way Elementary School in Durham, N.H., has her students memorize poems upward of 40 lines long and then perform them for their peers and parents. She does it more for the sense of pride her students feel but said the technique does transfer to other kinds of reading — the children remember how re-reading and memorizing their poems helped them understand tricky text.

“Memorization is one of those lost things, it hasn’t been the ‘in’ thing for a while,” she said. “There’s a big focus on fluency. Some people think because you can read quickly … that’s a judge of what a great reader they are. I think fluency is important, but I think we can err too much on that side.”

¶ Deanna Fei’s ninetysomething grandmother haunted the writing of her first novel, A Thread of Sky, but that wasn’t the worst of it. (The Millions) 

Then, a few days before my book launch, my grandmother flew into town. She hadn’t said that she was coming for my book launch, only that she would be present at it. I took this to mean that the purpose of her visit was not support, but supervision.

When we spoke on the phone, she sounded benevolent, like a prison guard offering a cigarette on the eve of an execution. She said that she was eager to see me and that the book cover was pretty.

“I won’t be able to read your book. The English is too difficult,” she said. “So tell me the conclusion.”

“What do you mean?”

“What did you conclude? What is the outcome?”

I feigned a sudden inability to speak Chinese and got off the phone.

In a panic, I scanned the excerpt I’d selected for my first reading. It described ragged beggars and worldly entrepreneurs and earnest students, a sandstorm and drifting catkins and starless nights, desperate peasants and gleeful swindlers, the click-clacking of mahjong tiles in a teahouse and the serpentine stretch of the Great Wall, elderly calligraphists in Tiantan Park and young prostitutes in a karaoke club.

I imagined my grandmother jumping up in the middle of my reading with a pointed finger to denounce me: “You wrote bad things about China!”

Have a Look

¶ Weird Beards. (Dave Mead; via  MetaFilter)

¶ Neat Napkins. (Oddee)

¶ Something that did not happen to us yesterday. (FAIL)

Matins

¶ A thoughtful reminder that individuals and institutions ought to pursue rather different investment strategies. (Abnormal Returns)

Individual investors have some distinct advantages over institutions.  Most institutions need to be acutely aware of the indices against which they benchmark.  Individuals, on the other hand, are beholden only to themselves.  The performance of the S&P 500, for example, should be but a data point to an individual.  Many institutions need days to enter (and exit) their equity positions so as not to move a stock’s price.  An individual can do this (usually) in seconds.  Maybe most importantly individuals don’t have clients breathing down their necks.  As an individual investor you are your own client.

The point is that individual investors should look less at trying to invest like an institution and focus more on the advantages of their situation.  Most institutions can’t meaningful positions in small cap stocks.  Individuals can. Most institutions can’t undertake options strategies.  Individuals can.  Most institutions can’t day (or even swing) trade.  Individuals can.  Maybe most importantly an individual doesn’t need to trade (or invest) if the set-up isn’t right.  Most institutions are hemmed in by their need to “fully invested.”

¶ Dan Kois sees Toy Story 3, weeps copiously, sings praises. (The Awl)

Certainly you know, from the trailer and from general cultural osmosis and from that horribly depressing Times piece about how kids who were five when the first Toy Story came out ARE NOW TWENTY, that in Toy Story 3, little kid Andy is now college boy Andy and all his favorite toys face obsolescence.

But what you don’t know yet is that Toy Story 3 is totally bonkers. It has a mushroom cloud made of a trillion plastic monkeys, and it has a scene in which Buzz Lightyear is tortured under a bare light bulb. It has a terrifying horror-movie flashback. It has the best escape sequence since The Great Escape (or maybe Chicken Run). One of its heroes is a creepy walking, talking tortilla. It features an agonizing scene in which our favorite toys, facing a roaring inferno, close their eyes, hold hands and make peace with death. It makes an adorable teddy bear the terrifying villain and a baby doll his henchman. It toys with the old gag about the sexual identity of the Ken doll, deftly sidestepping offense and instead presenting the most surprising portrayal of gender fluidity in a 3-D family movie since Johnny Depp played the Mad Hatter as Madonna.

While We’re Away

¶ Seth Godin explains the Ace Hotel Lobby — that’s how as Felix puts it.

¶ At The Millions, Yevgeniya Traps writes rather well about her disappointment with a book that we nonetheless heartily recommend, Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists.

Some of the stories are more successful than others in conveying the final insight, though most fall somewhat short of the Joycean epiphany that is the prototype. (The most compelling of the chapters in this respect is, to my thinking, the story of the paper’s CFO Abbey Pinnola, who finds herself seated next to a recently fired employee on a long plane ride; the ensuing account of their tentative flirtation is genuinely revelatory, its conclusion unexpected in the best possible way, simultaneously surprising and, in hindsight, inevitable.) The short stories are meant to tie together through collision of characters, the intersection of themes, the classical unities of time and place; under the auspices of these commonalities, they are, we are lulled into believing, something greater than the sum of their parts. But where this is true in Dubliners, whose deceptively delicate particles, when assembled together, produce a surprisingly robust total, this is rarely the case in The Imperfectionists. The characters—coming in and out of focus, growing more or less important—do not really develop, and the new information we glean about them from story to story is not always illuminating. The change in perspective tends to come off as artificial, lazily telling what was not convincingly shown. Individually, as a short story, each chapter leaves just enough unsaid: we know something of a character’s experience as it is experienced, asking us to imagine beyond the story’s parameters. The revelations in subsequent chapters, matter-of-fact as they are, do little to truly complicate our perceptions. Presumably intended to magnify, the accumulation of detail, in the form of minor references to characters we thought we knew, instead reduces and flattens, unconvincingly extending the storyline. This is particularly glaring in the final summing up, a last entry in the newspaper’s history amounting to a perfunctory conclusion.

But then, we read this novel as an intensely refreshing fiction not so much about characters as about “the business of journalism” — it certainly evolves!

¶ At New Scientist, an entertaining if somewhat overstated piece about coral reefs, the rate of evolutionary change, and conservation efforts. At the end, a skeptic agrees that new findings suggest a change in the formula.

Malcolm McCulloch, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia, isn’t so sure. The study’s Caribbean corals have evolved as the environment around them changed slowly over the past 6 million years – the very rapid environmental changes happening now may be too much even for the creative fringes of coral reefs, he says.

But he agrees with the implications for conservation. The limited resources of most conservation efforts are put towards protecting central reefs, “because they were thought to have the best chances of survival”. This finding questions that logic, he says.

¶ Although the piece is pretty wild and unruly, we’re in almost complete accord with Gonzalo Lira’s engaging tirade about corporate anarchy in the United States, at Zero Hedge. We only wish that we could argue more forcibly against the following:

My own sense is, there will be no revolutionary change. The corporations won. They won when they convinced the best and brightest—of which I used to be—that the only path to success was through a corporate career. No necessarily through for-profit corporations—Lefties never seem to quite get how pernicious and corporatist the non-profits really are; or perhaps they do know, but are clever enough not to criticize them, since those non-profits and NGO’s pay for their meals.

Obama is a corporatist—he’s one of Them. So there’ll be more bullshit talk about “clean energy” and “energy independence”, while the root cause—corporate anarchy—is left undisturbed.

Once again: Thank God I no longer live in America. It’s too sad a thing, to watch while a great nation slowly goes down the tubes.

Have a Look

¶ More beautiful photographs from Touraine. Also, the charming portrait of an eighteen-month-old girl who in a phase “de vidage et de remplissage de contenus et de contenants. Vider un contenant quelconque et le remplir pour le vider à nouveau, ranger soigneusement les choses dans une boite, des cubes par exemple, vider et transvaser du sable ou de l’eau, ça l’occupe des heures..” (Mnémoglyphes)

Matins

¶ Chronicle of a crash foretold: Greece’s Olympic ruins. (WSJ; via  The Morning News)

The vacant venues, several of which dominate parts of the city’s renovated Aegean coastline, have become some of the most visible reminders of Greece’s age of excessive spending. Sites range from a softball stadium and kayaking facility to a beach volleyball stadium and a sailing marina.

As Greece sifts through the wreckage wrought by its enormous public debt, which sent tremors through world finance in recent months, the Athens Games are once again unifying this nation—this time as a target of criticism. They cost an estimated $7.4 billion to $14 billion, minor in light of the more than $370 billion of public debt, but that hasn’t mitigated the resentment.

While We’re Away

¶ The only solution is to sell you car and move into a densely-populated urban neighborhood, like ours for example. The conundrum? Whether or not to buy gasoline at pumps that Brtish Petroleum doesn’t actually own. (The Awl)

Okay so, sarcasm aside… over the last couple years, BP closed down all its company-owned stations, laying off nearly 12,000 people in 2009 alone across the organization in total. Their annual report phrased this as “the transfer of our US convenience retail sites to a franchise model.” So all of the 11,000 or so BP stations in the U.S. are essentially franchises now—and they actually do represent a not-at-all-huge part of the company’s income. But things get tricky when you let CNN explain this to you, in the very small words they like to use.

Have a Look

¶ Fooling around with Loren Ipsum. (PhiloSophistry)

¶ Software to  ease the distortions of wide-angle and panorama photography: the Panini Projection. (New Scientist)

¶ Menus from the restaurants of Old Colorado — well, not that old. Our parents could have ordered for us from one or two of them. Oddly, though, no souvenirs from the Brown Palace. (Colorado College; via  MetaFilter)

Matins

¶ Municipal liability for Newport’s Cliff Walk — they thought that they had settled it, but no. (NYT)

The State Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s decision that Newport was not liable, pointing to an exception in the law that holds landowners responsible for “willful or malicious failure to guard or warn against a dangerous condition” after “discovering the user’s peril.”

In its 3-to-2 decision, the court found that the city had long been aware of the Cliff Walk’s “latent dangers,” including the dirt paths that are in fact erosion trails created by rainwater runoff.

“It is beyond dispute,” the court said in its ruling, “that for many years, the city has had actual notice of the dangerous instability of the ground underneath the Cliff Walk and its eroding edge.”

The ruling found a “haunting similarity” between Mr. Berman’s accident and the 1991 death of Michael Cain, a college student who also stepped from the Cliff Walk onto a patch of ground that gave way and plunged to the rocks. Mr. Cain’s family lost a lawsuit on grounds that he was on the Cliff Walk at 2 a.m., after its closing time, and thus was trespassing.

Although we are wary of the drive to make somebody responsible for everybody else’s problems, we agree with the Court here. Surrounded by Newport’s mansions, which, for the most part, sit on well-tended grounds, it’s cognitively difficult to recognize that those paths leading down to the shore are not paths at all.

While We’re Away

¶ An excellent, inarguable alternative list of “20 Under 40.”   (The Millions)

To be sure, it’s hard to begrudge these 20 terrific writers their honor. We’ve been excited to read in the issue new work from friends (and interested to observe the generational influence exerted by 1999 honoree George Saunders). But, as the accompanying Comment suggests, “to encourage . . . second-guessing is perhaps the best reason to make lists.” And, wishing to see more such second-guessing, we’ve decided to rise to the bait and offer our own, non-overlapping, list of young-ish writers to watch.

¶ Janice Nimura sits on a bench in Carl Schurz Park and remembers the Slocum Disaster, which occurred within view of her perch 96 years ago yesterday.

Six hundred and twenty-two families lost relatives on the General Slocum. Half of the congregation of St. Mark’s Church died. By Memorial Day 1905, more than a quarter of the stricken families had left the neighborhood. By the end of the decade, Little Germany had largely ceased to exist, and thousands of Eastern European Jews had moved in.

Sometime shortly before 1910, my teenaged great-grandfather, a Galician Jew, landed at Ellis Island. A baker, he got married and raised three children at 168 East Second Street, a few blocks from St. Mark’s. Perhaps the previous tenants of his tenement apartment had been parishioners. St. Mark’s shut its doors in 1940, and reopened soon after as a synagogue. The remnants of the congregation merged with Zion Lutheran, on East 84th Street in Yorkville.

We’re sitting in Yorkville now. It’s no longer particularly German. But the Upper East Side, of which Yorkville is the easternmost part, was home to more victims of the Sept. 11 attacks than any other Manhattan neighborhood. Another catastrophe that unfolded on a gorgeous day. Remember the General Slocum today, and ponder the currents of history that are part of the view from one park bench.

¶ At The House Next Door, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard have a very lengthy but extremely interesting conversation about Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve.

JB: Well, I guess I don’t disagree with you that the writing is on-the-nose, at least by contemporary standards. But it is very effective in places, and it remains one of the film’s strengths on the whole. However, as for your charge that “virtually every shot in the film is utilitarian and nothing more,” I wouldn’t disagree. Sure, the last shot stands out, as you noted. And I’ve always rather liked the shot of Eve standing just offstage at the end of one of Margo’s performances, watching her idol taking her bows. And yet, in the context of the rest of the film’s visual blandness, that shot is utilitarian, too, upon further reflection; the only difference is that we’re given something comparatively interesting to look at. So much of All About Eve is nothing more than the actors centered in the frame, barking their lines (some memorable, some not), often in front of rather bland backdrops. And so it is that one of the most memorable shots in the film is the one of Eve and Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) walking down a sidewalk—memorable, alas, because it’s so clumsily staged in front of rear-projection.

Sadly, in terms of the cinematography, that’s not the only time that an oddity stands out. Of late, I’ve been puzzled by a shot at the end of Bill’s not-so-happy welcome-back party: The party sequence ends with Eve saying goodnight to Karen (Celeste Holm) and reminding her to put in a good word for her about becoming Margo’s understudy. Karen, standing at the top of a stairway, assures Eve she won’t forget and then descends the stairs. As soon as Karen leaves the frame, the camera zooms past where she was standing to focus on a painting that had hovered unremarkably over Karen’s shoulder during her conversation with Eve. In a very brief closeup, no longer than a second, we see what appears to be woman sitting in a chair, looking to her right, with figures standing over each shoulder—perhaps an angel over her right shoulder and something that looks almost like a court jester over her left shoulder. The painting is there and gone so quickly that it’s hard to say exactly what it portrays. In fact, right now I’m studying the paused image on my computer screen and I still can’t quite tell what I’m looking at.

It’s entirely possible, of course, that the painting is quite famous. I freely admit that my knowledge of that art form is limited. Furthermore, I recognized Toulouse-Lautrec’s Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret hanging in Margo’s living room (hence, she likes famous art). So perhaps you know exactly what that slow zoom reveals, and maybe I should, too, and maybe that’s why neither of the two commentary tracks on my DVD makes any mention of the zoom or the painting. Then again, unless the painting is as recognizable as Mona Lisa, I find the haste with which Mankiewicz cuts away from the painting, after going through the effort to (a) hang it there and (b) zoom in on it, to be baffling. Giving Mankiewicz the benefit of the doubt—and thanks to my close examination of the painting on my computer—I’ll assume that the painting symbolizes Karen’s place between an angel she sees (Eve) and a kind of demon she doesn’t (Eve again). Still, I think it’s telling that one of Mankiewicz’s few attempts at cinematic storytelling is essentially mumbled.

We couldn’t resist snipping this passage, not only because we disagree with the proposition that All About Eve is boring to look at — our guess is that these fellows don’t get to the theatre very often — but because neither one of them seems to be familiar with Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Mrs Siddons “as the Tragic Muse.” Siddons was the great Eighteenth-Century actress who gave her name to the fictional thespian society whose annual awards dinner serves as a frame for the narrative. 

So, yes, “the painting is quite famous.” It can be seen at the Huntingdon.

Have a Look

¶ The first traffic signal (Detroit, 1912).  (Design Observer)

¶ A big, big “Oops!” moment for schmearer Thomas Kinkade. (World Class Stupid)

¶ Choire Sicha labors in the archives of the New York Times and finds that those things you complain about have been besetting sins at the newspaper since at least a century ago. It’s funny to read the scans of old clippings. (The Awl)

So we’ve taken a long look back at the paper in 1910 and 1911, and found pretty much everything there that people complain about now: it’s beholden to Jews! It’s in bed with the President (even while quick to absolutely trash his daughters). It’s devoted to the stupid trends of the rich (and displays a crazy obsession with rich people and their real estate), it gives away information crucial to public safety, prints thinly sourced gossip, and has an insane op-ed page. And 100 years ago, it already had everyone’s favorite thing: a catty, mean profile of a famous popular singer!

Matins

¶ Swedish Paternity Leave. It’s expensive for taxpayers, and inconvenient for employers, but it’s transforming ideas of masculinity. (NYT)

Birgitta Ohlsson, European affairs minister, put it this way: “Machos with dinosaur values don’t make the top-10 lists of attractive men in women’s magazines anymore.” Ms. Ohlsson, who has lobbied European Union governments to pay more attention to fathers, is eight months pregnant, and her husband, a law professor, will take the leave when their child is born.

“Now men can have it all — a successful career and being a responsible daddy,” she added. “It’s a new kind of manly. It’s more wholesome.”

¶ “Belgium will not fall apart because of separatist success” — so says John Palmer in the Guardian. (Real Clear World)

The Flemish nationalists acknowledge that major policy areas such as defence and justice should remain Belgian until they can be transferred to the responsibility of a fully federal EU. Since this is an unlikely development in the near future, the nationalists will, in practice, settle for a further devolution of powers to the regions but within the Belgian federal state. Negotiations to form the next government will be long and difficult. Success or failure will probably come down to the thorny issue of the status of the Brussels region and the extent to which social security should no longer be a matter for the Belgian government but transferred instead to the regions – anathema to the dominant parties of the left in Wallonia.

Most Belgians don’t want to break up the country: point taken. Unfortunately, they don’t want to do much to salve the Fleming-Walloon breach, either.

While We’re Away

¶ It was easier to be wild in the old days. Bright young thing Teresa “Baby” Jungman, proposed to by Evelyn Waugh but turned down because he was already married, died at 102, an observant Catholic from beginning to end. (via  The Awl, sort of)

She was, however, very strict in her adherence to the Roman Catholic faith. Lord Longford was convinced that none of her admirers “got anywhere with her sexually”, and described her as “more like a nun, like a very friendly and fascinating nun”.

¶ Twentieth-Century Best-Seller lists, one for each decade. (Washington Post; via  The Morning News) Top-Ten CEOs in prison. Steve Tobak asks “why they did it.” (The Corner Office)

 Personality Disorder. Delusional, narcissistic psychopaths, call them what you want, it sounds like a no-brainer to me. I mean, most of these folks maintained their innocence to the end. That implies compartmentalization so they didn’t actually feel empathy for those affected by their actions. Denial is a powerful thing. Sure sounds like a behavioral disorder to me. Anyway, there’s no denying that each of these men functioned, and functioned exceptionally, until their issues caught up with them.

¶ Heading north means climbing uphill — according to our mental defaults. (Admit it: learning that the Nile flows north was a real shocker.) (Wired Science)

Volunteers also estimated that it would take considerably longer to drive between the same pairs of U.S. cities if traveling from south to north, as opposed to north to south, says psychologist and study director Tad Brunyé of the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command in Natick, Mass., and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. For journeys that averaged 798 miles, time estimates for north-going jaunts averaged one hour and 39 minutes more than south-going trips, he and his colleagues report in an upcoming Memory & Cognition.

Have a Look

¶ Building a re-polarizing bridge from Hong Kong to China. (kottke.org)

¶ Neat signage: “Interventions urbaines et françaises.” (TrendyGirl; via The Rumpus)

(To post a comment, visit The Daily Blague.)

(To post a comment, visit The Daily Blague.)

¶ Joe McGinnis lives next door! (Speakeasy)

¶ Avoiding phthalates. ( Good)

While We’re Away

¶ How viable is the state capitalism model? Too soon to tell. (Real Clear Politics)

¶ George Snyder thinks about eating, praying, loving — and buying paitinngs. He decides that Traverse City will do very nicely.

¶ Bob Cringely does the math on the Foxconn suicides.

Have a Look

¶ Are you ready to Enter the World of Boundless Sensual Enjoyments? (Brain Pickings)

¶ High wind in Jamaica (NYT)

 While We’re Away

¶ Waiting for the Top Kill (The Oil Drum)

¶ “Something Amis?” (Nigeness)

 Have a Look

¶ Storyboard. (We’ll try anything.) (Brainiac)

¶ All the iPad needs to make it perfect… (via Meta Filter)

¶ Christoph Niemann’s goblins (NYT)

¶ Inspector General’s report on the Bushly dysfunctional Minerals Management Service. (NYT)

 While We’re Away

¶ James Kwak asks a question that occurred to us as well: “Why Does Steve Ballmer Still Have a Job?”

¶ Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado. (The Rumpus)

¶ Martin Gardner, 95. (NYT)

¶ Naughty Fergie:  The latest in a series of “excruciating misjudgments.” (Guardian)

Have a Look:

¶ Dunkin’ Doughnuts! Happy Birthday, Elsa Maxwell (Stirred, Straight Up, With a Twist)

¶ Brooks looks, sees tease.

¶ “My wife won’t let me!” goes the punch-line to the old music-hall song. Conan O’Brien politely declines an invitation to the prom. (Letters of Note)

¶ Michael Tyznik’s much-better dollars (The Best Part)

¶ Neat anamorphic illusion, employing 400 candles. (reddit)

¶ LOLCANO. (Let There Be Blogs)

¶ Life goes to Fairfield County – in the days of the Editor’s wee-dom. (A Continuous Lean)

¶ Strange how-to books (e.g.: How To Be Pope). (Oddee)

¶ Human Centipede trailer (via  MetaFilter)

¶ “Furniture Music” — with balloons (ArtCat)

¶ Non-DIY.

¶ A video to remember the next time you’re consumed by MustHaveItis. (Poor Sony.)

¶ How long before we watch this on Law and Order?

¶ “I’ll never be short again.” [Editor’s note: Or too tall to hear what everybody’s saying.] (via kottke.org)

¶ Interesting bookshelves. (incredible things; via Oddee)

¶ Kathleen’s latest project. (more…)

¶ Stress-relieving vending machine. (via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Baraby Barford’s amazing and beautiful stop-motion animated short, Damaged Goods (Thanks to George Snyder)

¶ Jules Vernacular (via  MetaFilter)

¶ Paris 26 Megapixels (via  kottke.org)

¶ Inondations 1910 (via The Purest of Treats)

¶ Julian Montague’s retro codex capricci. (The Rumpus)

¶ The dollhouse on the ceiling. (Parallel World; via  The Morning News)

¶ The Sandpit.

¶ In our next life, we want to be… pencils. (via Oddee)