“Children still enjoy playing traditional games like skipping and clapping in the playground despite the lure of mobile phones, computer games, and television, a study published on Tuesday found. Playground games are ‘alive and well … they happily co-exist with media-based play, the two informing each other,’ it said.”
 — Children like to go outside! Expect New York mag to weigh in shortly.

Sweet Christ, where did the time go? “LATER this week, Primal Scream will mark the 20th anniversary of their best-loved and most significant album with a gig in their native Glasgow. As part of the same birthday celebrations, a remastered edition of Screamadelica is released tomorrow in various formats, including a collector’s box set edition in a cake tin. Not many albums merit their own cake tin re-issue. Not many album sleeves are reprinted on a postage stamp either; Screamadelica’s bold primary coloured design was selected for the Royal Mail’s “classic album covers” series a year ago. But Screamadelica is a rare beast: an album which captured a moment, a scene, a lifestyle. Come Friday, we’ll all be partying like it’s 1991.”

by David Orr

As you may be aware, The Paris Review has been publishing a series of blog posts called “The Culture Diaries,” which are apparently diaries about… culture. The diarists thus far have been a delightful assortment of sophisticated folks, a few of whom appear to consume culture — perhaps even Culture — in amounts that would stagger much larger land mammals. Anyhow, since The Awl is basically The Paris Review with more videos of bears, the editors here suggested that I offer a glimpse into my own humble work schedule as the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review. (This is not, of course, in any way a parody of The Paris Review series. That would be uncivilized.)

9:00 a.m.: Wake from a dream in which François Villon and I are sharing a dream about Susan Sontag making out with Simone Weil. Hot. Yawn artfully. Make vain attempt to free my left arm, which is trapped beneath the slumbering bosom of “Marguerite,” whom I met last night at a party in Soho for a Hungarian rotogravure artist/DJ. No success.

9:02 a.m.: Ask my wife if she could perhaps assist. Merci!

9:25 a.m.: Post toilette, began my morning perusal of the Berlin papers. Sigh over inadequate coverage of my friend Gerhard’s production of Michel de Ghelderode’s Red Magic, which he has staged entirely in ecru. Philistines, the Germans. I will have to write stern letters to several editors. Possibly using my ostrich quill.

10:15 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then beignets.

10:30 a.m.: Prepare to enter my “writing mode.” Place one hand on a dictionary originally owned by T.S. Eliot (a fortune at auction, but worth it!). Place the other hand on a bathrobe belonging to Hart Crane. Place my feet in a laundry hamper thought to have been briefly in the possession of James Merrill’s dentist. Soak it in.

11:00 a.m.: Begin sketching thoughts about John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud into moleskin notebook. Ostrich quill? Oui. Oui indeed.

12:30 p.m.: Gaze poetically heavenward while sharing a light lunch of organic pearl onions and filet of local cassowary with James Franco and Harold Bloom at the Yale Club. Franco gets a little tipsy and punches a waiter while shouting something about “Twitter” (possibly “water” or “mother”; his enunciation was suffering). Waiter out cold. I cover waiter with my favorite made-to-measure ascot and flee.

2:35 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then petit-fours.

3:00pm: Drinks in Alphabet City with Greta, a Norwegian tea sculptor and amateur horticulturist whose great-grandfather invented the meatball. We agree that the state of Danish cinema is dire. Adrien Brody is seated beside us, and I deliberately order a Stella while smirking.

4:00 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then meatballs.

4:20 p.m.: Realize I’m a bit drunk. Decide to call on my friend Laurence, a philosopher cum structural engineer whose father invented the ounce. We debate the merits of capitalism in light of Dior’s recent scandals and the existence of Canada. I collapse on a settee and accidentally write three erotic short stories that will be falsely attributed to Michel Houellebecq by Le Monde.

6:30 p.m.: Realize that I am still a bit drunk. Realize that realizing that one is drunk is… banal? Yet what is banality but the infinite white space of sobriety? Write this down in Moleskine notebook for possible publication in N+1.

6:39 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review: “heymrfancyshrts.”

6:40 p.m.: Immediately regret text.

6:41 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein: “sorry mrfancyshrts.”

6:42 p.m.: Throw phone away.

6:43 p.m.: Retrieve phone and send text to James Franco that reads, in its entirety, “what.”

6:46 p.m.: Pre-prandial drinks with Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O’Rourke. Both wearing black.

8:00pm: Dinner with Jonathan Franzen in his private arboretum. Franzen sporting blindfold again, has trouble with fork. Awkward scene involving prawns.

9:30 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then slightly bloody shrimp cocktail.

10:00 p.m.: Attend Wallace Shawn’s latest play, Yes, I Was in ‘The Princess Bride’ but my Dad Edited The New Yorker and My Plays are Huge in Europe, Also Remember ‘My Dinner with Andre,’ Which You Probably Haven’t Seen But Feel Vaguely that You Should Have, and Yes, You Should Have.

12:00 a.m.: Participate in standing ovation.

12:05 a.m.: Standing ovation still going on.

12:08 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then leg cramps.

1:00 a.m.: Post-play drinks with two matadors, Gore Vidal, a team of Belgian weightlifters, the last man to see John Berryman alive, and Peter Singer. Tense moment between matadors and Singer is rescued when Vidal challenges weightlifters to justify Flemish.

2:30 a.m.: Home at last. Fall into a dream in which Villon and I are having a dream about Susan Sontag having a dream about Edmund Wilson’s cat making out with Simone Weil. Wake in terror.

2:35 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then… repose.

David Orr is the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review; his most recent piece was on Maxine Hong Kingston’s verse memoir. His book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry will be published in April by HarperCollins.

Images of Rimbaud and Eliot via Wikimedia Commons.

by Matt Langer and Choire Sicha

Now that the SXSW start-up bus has landed, it’s time to take things to the next level. In case you missed the fun, buses full of buspreneurs departed the four corners of the country (and Cleveland), bound for Austin, and along the way they built companies that were then besieged by incubators and investors. The winning companies were TripMedi and WalkIn, which, respectively, collect information about medical tourism (oh my God! Finally we can find the cheapest plastic surgery + safari package in South Africa!) and allow you to “check in” to not have to wait in line at places that have lines. Like I guess FedEx or something? More likely Shake Shack. For which there’s already an app! So it’s time to take hackathons and coworking to their logical conclusions: we’re going to hire a bus to circle Manhattan permanently.

It goes down the Henry Hudson and up the East River Drive and it never, ever goes to Brooklyn. On the bus, engineers and and social media specialists and useless hangers-on form companies in two-day bursts. The bus offers realtime streaming secondary market data for up-to-the-minute valuations of every startup on board. Then the bus stops twice a week (at the corner of Madison and 25th and then at Mott and Spring) to let VCs and angels and incubator scouts on. Checkbooks only! And then no one gets off the bus until they get $15,000 per company or give away 12%, whichever comes first.

The back rows of the bus have mandatory pair programming, the New York Observer has a dedicated seat on the aisle and the punchline is that the bus has no toilet.

But wait! In six months we’re going to pivot this model, and instead we’re going to put the investors on the non-stop startup bus, and let the startup folks get on twice a week to pitch. (That means the bus will have to go to Brooklyn.) Soon we’ll roll out a train of warring investor buses. Like, Union Square Ventures will have this tricked-out John Madden-style bus with purple-tinted windows. The Betaworks bus will be called the RSS Real Time and will serve high tea every three hours. This sounds nice except the buses will all have gunnery. Like in Mad Max. And at the back of the line will be the remora investors, in a little short bus, which doesn’t even have MiFi.

And maybe then the bubble will explosively pop.

How bad are things in Japan? As with any disaster in any large country, it’s both terrible and then also in parts, life is odd and normal. (Those who’ve been through these sort of things understand.) In America, the nuclear reactor news has dominated headlines all day. There certainly is a possibility that something terrible could happen! Also possibly not. Meanwhile, people estimate that 100,000 children are already displaced; and, here you can see the nuclear-crisis-related evacuation areas. And in Tokyo, at least one of the Hermes shops is closed, as per this list of signs of abnormality there. (It’s true.) Also, a local McDonald’s has actually closed. Last night, video from Ginza shows Tokyo to be definitely quiet, and yet strangely normal. These videos from Tokyo show the mix of normality and surreality. Meanwhile, Corning reports that their factories are running smoothly! (Many businesses are striving to not take a hit while being adjacent to human disaster.) The 6.0 quake this morning was rattling but not devastating. One thing to remember, to get a sense, is that it’s a five-hour drive from Sendai to Tokyo.

“Just two months after being sworn into office, Ohio Gov. John Kasich will lay out his plan for Ohio’s budget reduction on Tuesday at noon…. Ohio Representative Matt Lundy told NewsChannel5 that he learned of plans to sell the Grafton Correctional Institution and the North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility as a package to a private prison operator are part of Tuesday’s budget announcement. Right now, the North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility is privately operated, while Grafton Correctional is operated by the state.” You could make this stuff up but you wouldn’t be creative enough. The Ohio budget gap is $8 billion.

A children’s treasury of Obama fist-bumping.

Do not ask us how we missed this yesterday. (I blame Daylight Savings.) But in case you did too: “Protesters who marched at the home of Wisconsin state senator Randy Hopper (R-Fond du Lac) were met with something of a surprise on Saturday. Mrs. Hopper appeared at the door and informed them that Sen. Hopper was no longer in residence at this address, but now lives in Madison, WI with his 25-year-old mistress…. Mrs. Hopper intends to sign the recall petition against her husband. The petition has already been signed by the family’s maid.” Well, these things happen! It’s an American’s right to leave one’s spouse for someone younger, after all. It’s far more interesting that his new lover is a lobbyist. (For the future record, this was reported by Blogging Blue, whose website has since been traffic-pounded into oblivion over the news.) In other Wisconsin news? The Republican-controlled Senate is now pushing the line that Democrats actually can’t vote because they’re “in contempt,” as they skipped town to stall a vote on the governor’s heinous budget. Oh, I see, that’s how democracy works.

Oh yes: you probably do not know this, unless you read all of the papers. (And if you do read all the papers, that means you got to enjoy “Recall election could trigger change,” a real doozy from the Herald, though they also have this brisk and informative thing for those unfamiliar. Trigger change! It sure could. Or could not. Anyway!) Today the mayor of Miami and also a Miami-Dade county commissioner are up for a recall vote, which is notably the work of one man. One billionaire, no less: Norman Braman. Now… the squeaky thing here is: he’s right! There should be an ability to recall these people. And also there should be crazy things like “term limits” and fewer people ransacking the county, which is Braman’s agenda. And then there is absolutely no discussion of who comes next: there’s a monster-sized vacuum for a monster to pop up in. Given the scope of the pro-privatization, “anti-tax,” right-wing-funded political candidate training going on in the country, the rash of recalls we’ll likely see over the next year have the same problem. The post-recall elections are wide-open to anyone with the funding to run. And you know who’s got the money.

Jacqueline Goewey, Owner, Made Fresh Daily

by Andrew Piccone

Tell me about your job.

I was a magazine editor for years and one of my beats at one point for InStyle was food. Every month we would do a story about a party you could host at home from a chef with celebrity clientele. I did a lot of that kind of thing at that job and plus I always loved to cook. It happened that my friend Lauren Bentley who was also in the magazine world and I were both thinking about maybe doing some kind of baking enterprise. She had a little cupcake and custom cake business and I thought maybe we could do something like that. It just turned into us walking past this location, seeing that it was for rent and turning into something that was much bigger. That was December 18, 2008. The absolute worst, the depths of the recession. Do you remember December, 2008? Oh my God, it was completely scary for the first year. It was good that there were very few customers in the beginning, we barely knew what we were doing. It just kind of grew. Now we’re pretty successful. Lauren left to rejoin the fashion world and now I’m the sole owner.

What is the concept of the food here?

We’re going for American food. The term comfort food is so overused that at this point it just means unhealthy, and that’s not what I wanted to do. The idea is that this is the way I cook at home, and I want it to be healthy enough so that my kids can eat it. Not everything is organic, but the things that are important to me to be organic are. Like organic dairy, it just seems important to me. I try to be local, but basically it’s everything in moderation. When I can get local things, I’m very happy. I’m too small to have people deliver to me, so I do a lot of the shopping myself. We still get our dairy from Whole Foods because it’s the least expensive organic dairy out there.

Where in the city do you live?

I live in the Seaport with my husband and two kids and there was just no place in this neighborhood, the Financial District and Seaport, to get eggs, like good eggs. Except for a crappy diner or a high-end kinda thing. Even the places that are higher end around here aren’t open for breakfast. So it started as a place to serve breakfast. Also, I’m well aware the cupcake trend was so 2003, so I didn’t want to focus on just that. So we started out with the idea of breakfast and lunch, kid friendly but not really like kid-focused.

The Financial District is an interesting neighborhood. You’ve got an overwhelming amount of office workers and tourists and it seems like the locals are a minority. Who is your target customer?

Well, it depends. During the week our biggest meal is lunch and that’s mostly the people who work in the neighborhood. There are all kinds of different business people in the Seaport, artists and what not, but it’s mostly Financial District people. Brunch on the weekends is mostly locals. We don’t really get a lot of tourists because they stay mostly on Fulton Street, on the main drag. We get a few, but they’re a little scared to come this far away. I always thought we would be a tourist spot. It’s great because people find it on their own.

Tell me about your staff here.

I love working with people who are collaborative and come in with ideas. I don’t really hire anybody who’s not going to contribute ideas, I want people to be involved. Because we’re so small what we have tomorrow kind of depends on how well something did today. I don’t know most of the time what my menu is going to be tomorrow, we might not know what our muffins are going to be until that morning. There was a review on Yelp from a month or two ago from this person who came in and said he had a dry fritata sandwich. We don’t serve fritata sandwiches, so I don’t know what he had but, OK. Then he goes on to say he returned again and found the place to be an amateurish operation. Well, yes, we are a bunch of amateurs! I was not professionally trained as a chef, we’re figuring this out as we go! I love hearing people say though that our food “tastes so much better than anywhere else.” We do some catering and everyone says that it doesn’t taste like catered food. Our response is this is what food tastes like from people who care. Our staff has gotten so good at everything they make.

I hear that the Matt Damon film The Adjustment Bureau was filmed right around here. Did he or Emily Blunt ever come in?

That’s so funny. Yes, I basically got $500 dollars from the filmmakers because they were blowing up cars on the block for the film. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but they’re saying this whole block is in it. They shoot a lot down here though, on ‘Ugly Betty’ they pretended this was London last year, which really cracked me up. Matt Damon did not come in. We’ve had some random celebrities come in. Mayor Bloomberg came in once to use the bathroom. I think he was at another restaurant on the block that doesn’t have a bathroom, though I’m not sure if I should be talking about that.

Andrew Piccone is a photographer in New York.