On Condé Nast World Trade Center: For Real!?
I don't care what job it is, or what company it's for, you couldn't pay me enough to work in that crypt. That is just some bad, Poltergeist-level karma right there.
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On On Being Laid Off from Harper's
D'oh! I meant 2006. Oh man, I'm getting old.
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On On Being Laid Off from Harper's
Man, Harper's lost me somewhere around 1996 and their 594th cover story about how shitty and illegitimate the Bush Administration was, and how the war in Iraq was illegal and entered into under false pretenses, and how torture is bad, etc. and so on.
Hey, Harper's editors! If I'm reading your shitty magazine I probably already agree with you. This, of course, gets to my problem with a lot of old-guard lefty journalism: you keep telling me shit I already know as if it's a profound revelation you only just discovered.
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On This is Russia's Fifth Major Terrorist Event in a Year
This, by the way, is why airport security is a joke. There will always be a way, always be a weak spot that a committed person or persons can exploit to kill a whole lot of people either on airplanes or in the airport itself. All the scanners and enhanced pat-downs in the world won't be able to stop someone from blowing themselves up in, say, the clusterfuck around the security gate.
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On Dining Out in New York City
I have to say, this piece perfectly describes how my wife and I eavesdrop on people. I like it that you don't even pretend you're doing anything else.
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On False Nostalgia: How VH1 Ruined the Taste of a Generation
One more thing, this article explains so much to me about hipsters and hipster style. I get it now. All this nostalgic re-purposing of trends that weren't cool the first time around. I finally get the bizarre resurgence in recent years of: the Member's Only jacket, Sally Jessie Raphael Glasses, Skinny Jeans, neon, tights and oversized T-Shirts...it all makes sense.
How sad, how pathetic, to have no drive to create a pop-culture of your own. Just endless recycling and re-purposing.
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On False Nostalgia: How VH1 Ruined the Taste of a Generation
Minor quibble. If you make new films of Conan, Dune or Flash Gordon, they're not remakes per se. These are all properties that existed long before those early 80's films were made. And, it could be argued, are being remade partly because those versions sucked so badly, iconic though they may be.
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On How Are You Handling Christmas?
Two more (particularly personal) things to hate about Christmas in New York:
1) If you're freelancer, good luck getting paid past December 15th.
2) If you work in media or advertising, your boss always has this fantasy about all this work that's going to get done in the week after Christmas, until he realizes that all the clients jetted out of town on the 21st. Then he grudgingly, at the last second, lets everyone know you'll be closed that week too. This happens every god-damned year.
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On Let's Drink Some Port!
The problem with me and port, if it could be called a problem, is that whenever I drag a bottle out, say, at the end of a dinner party, I tend to drink the whole god-damned thing. Then I can pretty much scratch off the whole following day. It's just so sweet and nice, and sits very well on top of an evening of drinking, and you keep pouring these tiny little glasses of it, so it doesn't really seem like you're drinking that much.
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On The Most Flagrantly Tactless First-Rate Brooklyn Novelist
I grew up with LJ's younger son, and one of his daughters was one of my preschool playmates. Suffice it to say, he was as prickly in real life as he was in his written life.
I should buy this book and hand it out to my friends who've recently moved to Brooklyn then ask me why I can't stand going back to that neighborhood for even a dinner party.