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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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

¶ Hot: It’s too hot to do just about anything but read, and that’s what I spent all day yesterday doing. But inactivity on that scale is depressing, and I’m bedeviled, this morning, by a sense of the futility of things.

Noon

¶ Onward: Paul Krugman writes very optimistically (I think) about the “de-racialization” of American politics.

Night

¶ Sudden Death: The whole day was overshadowed by the looming of power cuts. Just when I’d decided that the crisis was past, I got a phone message from Con Ed. Here’s the gist.
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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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Morning

¶ Marion: The Édith Piaf biopic, La Môme (La Vie en Rose), made a big Marion Cotillard fan out of me, and I set about seeing as many of her movies as I could. Her presence in Ma vie en l’air, which didn’t even make it to the United States as a video, is somewhat decorative; the movie is really about two guys who don’t want to grow up. But she brings to it a screen-goddess quality that’s reminiscent of Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth. Unlike those divas, Marion Cotillard is a genuine actress, but, at least in this droll comedy, she’s a goddess, too. There are always a few goddesses running around, but today’s filmmakers don’t seem to know what to do with them.

¶ Newton Falls: The heartwarming story of a pluckily-revived paper mill in the middle of Nowhere, Upstate, will — ought to — make a great movie. But I wish that reporter Fernando Santos had given my inner business historian something more to work with.

Noon

¶ Exemptive: “What is the scope of the Commission’s authority to exempt?” This burning question is addressed as I write by a panel of securities lawyers that includes my dear wife. Tune in!

Night

¶ Dissertation: As the song says, “At Last.” I had a call from M le Neveu this evening. To get an idea of how unlikely it was that he would finish his dissertation — and I hasten to note that he has finished his disseration — have a look at the table entitled “Cumulative Completion Rates for Cohorts Entering 1992-4, by Fields” (scroll down a bit).
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Morning

¶ DC: Kathleen is off to Washington this afternoon. She’ll be participating in a panel discussion of the history of exemptive orders. Don’t you wish you could be there?

Noon

¶ Fat Lady Yet To Sing: With a headline like this, you know that the story is still not over: “Top Democrats Press for Unity After Obama Secures Victory .” 

¶ Sparkle Plenty: Happily, I don’t have to hire a service such as this. (A window washer’s blog! What will they think of next?)

Night

¶ Aria: Finally.

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Morning

¶ Suddenly, It’s Summer: The window unit in the blue room, necessary because the HVAC service is always sluggish there, is keeping the room with the most books cool and dry, which is good for them and good for me, too. But I’m sitting in the living room, with the balcony door open, keeping comfortable with a Vornado fan.

¶ Heather Does Not Have Two Mommies: RomanHans slays me with his parody of political correctness. Part I, Part II. We must all pester our favorite booksellers for the other titles in Roman’s “Heather” series, thus creating demand, and, perhaps, the books.

Noon

¶ Crackdown in Dujiangyan: A demonstration by grieving parents, protesting the shoddy construction that killed their children in classrooms, was more or less peaceably broken up by a swarm of intimidating policemen. Edward Wong reports.

¶ Under Construction: Ha ha ha, that’s what most of the pages say at the Web site of New York Crane and Equipment.

Night

¶ Clinch: You’ve got to love the headline: no Dewey Beats Truman! this time!

¶ Prima la musica: Listening to Mr Mozart (as Florence Foster Jenkins appropriatingly called him, making him one of us), K 516. Music one has known better (much better) than the back of one’s hand for over forty years. And tonight it sounds as though I’d never heard it before. The amazing Mr Mozart.
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Morning

¶ Quiet: The calendar is blank. Nothing on for the entire week. No excuses, in other words, for not attending to the prosaic domesticalities that have been piling up for weeks.

Noon

¶ Eco: At Varieties of Unreligious Experience, the Web site that he revived not too long ago (how quickly I lose track, though!), Conrad Roth lays into the historical fiction of Umberto Eco, which he used to like but now finds emptily pretentious.

Night

¶ Parade: Make nice, sez hizzoner. Don’t board up the borders because the [epithet deleted] are coming.

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Morning

¶ Crash: I could take a picture, but it wouldn’t be very informative: the crane rising among the buildings to the north is no longer there. According to images seen on NY1, the crane sheared away the walls of the apartment building to the south. Gothamist is already on the case.

Afternoon

¶ Jittery: All the commotion, though several blocks away, has been unsettling. I feel for the residents of the evacuated buildings — not your ordinary inconvenience. 

Night

¶ Children: What the latest updates on the crane collapse don’t show — and what I can’t photograph effectively; sorry! — is the crane-to-remove-the-crane that’s parked in the beau milieu of First Avenue, complete with son et lumière lighting. The son is provided by the helicopters that continue to hover overhead.
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Morning 

¶ Che bella giornata!: Another fine day. Good weather really gets better with age.

¶ Gérance dissausive: If you can’t read French, tant pis pour vous. JR’s crime analysis of the massacre of his sister’s chickens by a fox (or some other prédateur forestier),* would make a sort of sense in English, but the loss of  je ne sais quoi would be fatal.

Except that I know perfectly well what the quoi is: the French willingness to call a spatula a spatula. Just because a spatula is more or less a spade is no reason to be imprecise.

¶ Wings: When I grow up, I want to write just like Gail Collins.

Noon

¶ Art: My neighbor, Stash, went to an art show in the quartier. On the basis of his photos, better him than me is all I can say.

Night

¶ Cinderella: Far and away the most exciting object on exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt’s “Rococo” Show is Jeroen Verhoeven’s Cinderella Table.
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Morning

¶ Cool: After a muggy, summery afternoon yesterday, rains cooled things off a  bit, but it’s almost chilly this morning. Which is just fine.

¶ Have It Your Way: A bit of chuckleheaded reporting in today’s Times, about Democratic Party shortfalls in the Convention account: Leslie Wayne’s “Democrats Miss Marks to Finance Convention.”

Noon

¶ Please, Mr Postman: Reading “the personals” for fun is something I stopped doing a while ago. In an idle moment this afternoon, however, I noticed that some advertisers are listing e-mail addresses. This can’t be wise.

Night

¶ Papaflessa: That’s the name of the street in New Erythrea (Ν Ερυθραια) that my old foreign-exchange student friend lives on — or lived on the last time anybody I know had an address for her.

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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: This week’s Friday Front is brevity itself. The article by George Packer to which it links has enough intelligence for two.

¶ Tierce: David Brooks gives kottke.org a nice nod in today’s Op-Ed piece, “The Alpha Geeks.”

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¶ Matins: Just my luck. Coming across an unattributed line of Latin in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherworld, I google it and discover that, not to my surprise, it comes from Virgil’s Georgics:O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,
agricolas.
It’s a typical bit of aristocratic sentimentality: how happy the peasants would be if they only knew how lucky they are to be peasants. Yes, well. It took a moment to track down the source, though, because the first return at Google took me to a discussion of Tacitus’s Dialogue on Oratory. It was only by checking out the next couple of links that I discovered Amerloque: A Long-Term American Expatriate Resident in France Shares His Views.

¶ Sext: I tip my hat to Guy Trebay, who says a number of things that I’ve been thinking about the Thom Browne look.

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¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review, which is just about as disappointing as last week’s was inspiring.

¶ Tierce: Is there anything as compulsively readable as oral history? Florent, the pioneering restaurant in the meatpacking district that has finally, some might say, reaped what it sowed, will be closing late next month, and a number of habitués, including Calvin Klein and Roy Lichtenstein’s widow, join Florent Morellet and members of his staff at Frank Bruni’s microphone.

¶ Sext: How about a $150 burger? (Price subject to market fluctuations.) Where but at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe would you expect to find ground Kobe-style beef?

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¶ Matins: The curious thing about seeing Reprise on Friday was having seen The Four of Us on Wednesday: peas in a pod, if you ask me. A great deal of what I said about either one of these pieces works as a description of the other.

¶ Tierce: Take it from me: because I am older, I am wiser. Don’t be deceived by the fact that I’m, er, slower. Sara Reistad-Long reports.

¶ Nones: If I were young, and had the ambition that I so conspicuously lacked when I was young, I’d want to take this course, coming soon to NYU. Just imagine — that voice coming to you several times a week from the other side of the lectern.

¶ Compline: RomanHans, at World Class Stupid, is almost always very funny, but today he really tickled my funny bone. “The Hipster’s Guide to Starting a Home-Based Business.”

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¶ Matins: The latest Indiana Jones movie opened yesterday in Cannes, and here’s what BBC reviewer Mark Savage had to say:

It is a load of old nonsense, of course, but the journey is worth the price of admission.

¶ Tierce: The big story in this morning’s news is a Times study of the subway system’s elevators and escalators. If you live in New York, but don’t think that this is a big story, then you are part of the problem.

¶ Sext: It’s hardly a matter of general interest, but I’m tickled nonetheless that the Supreme Court has decided Kentucky v Davis in favor of the status quo. Municipal bonds retain tax-exempt status within issuing states.

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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: After a marvelous evening of theatre — Itamar Moses’s The Four of Us, the very first play that I have ever felt captured by, as in, “it was about me”; it was really just about creative, brainiacky young men generally, if you can generalize about such a demographic, and the prickly, clandestinely competitive arrangements that take the place of friendship in their lives. (If they’re lucky, they outgrow this awkwardness, but I’ve met many who didn’t.) Hey, enough about me! — what do I come home to find but an email responding to an old blog entry from over three years ago:

If anybody out there knows a sixtyish Greek woman née Katerina Koini, tell her to give me a shout. Kathy (as we called her) was a vibrant exchange student at Bronxville High when I was in tenth grade, and I’m still profiting from the things she taught me, such as, for example, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.

¶ Sext: Every time the pundits predict that Mrs Clinton is hors de concours, I remember the words of M le Neveu: “These are people” — the Clintons — “who come back from the dead.”

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