“Palin’s people haven’t said anything about meeting Cameron. Their main interest is getting a picture of her with Lady Thatcher. I’m not sure they know who David Cameron is.”
-An unnamed “individual involved in talks” between Sarah Palin’s people and Margaret Thatcher’s minders discusses the former Alaska governor’s request to meet the former British Prime Minister. The Daily Mail reports that Palin

“could soon be on her way to Britain to boost her hopes of challenging Barack Obama in the 2012 US presidential election. Her representatives approached Margaret Thatcher to ask for a meeting as part of a bid to enhance her claim to be the ‘heir to Ronald Reagan’ and prepare to challenge Mr Obama.” Thatcher, who suffers from dementia, has made no public speeches since she had a series of strokes in 2002, but will probably still be able to dominate the conversation. (David Cameron, in case Palin’s people are reading, is the current Prime Minister of Knifecrime Island; it’s probably good form to ask for a meeting with him as well.)

I was shocked that a huge number of people were so quick to mock the New York Times for the paper’s suggestion that, hey, maybe its writers should wait more than six months after the invention of a new, trendy term to start casually using it in the newspaper. Are people in the year 2020 or 2050 really going to know what the word ‘Tweet’ means? Who knows? This “stodginess” is just one of the top common complaints about the Times. 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!

Thing the paper is run by and sympathetic to (gasp!) THE JEWS? Well! Here’s the Times straight up making fun of Germans who had their little no-Jews-allowed party house bought up by THE JEWS.

Catty stories about the President’s daughters? This did not start with Amy Carter or Malia ’n’ Sasha! Here’s an entire article devoted to mocking Taft’s daughter for a non-exclusive outfit. (P.S. I believe this also puts Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan’s career in the clear, historically speaking?)

Think the Times is obsessed with rich people real estate, and that it really hates gross poor people? Try this on for size!

Did you know that the Traitorous Times divulges secrets in the interest of our security? And attacks the NYPD? That they think the peoples’ right to know is more important than police and military secrecy? Let’s burn that newspaper down, but via a time machine, so we can do it in 1911!

THE LIBERAL MEDIA IS IN BED WITH THE WHITE HOUSE!

Devoted, fawning observance to trends among the rich in their “palatial homes”?

Stupid, tardy, vapid trend stories? How about “RICH PEOPLE START SLEEPING OUTSIDE”?

Venal, petty, anonymously sourced gossip, anyone?

The cautious introduction of slang terms and new language into the paper? Why, what is this job called a “trader”?

Bizarre bits of poetry and story-telling, for NO REASON?

The all-anecdote news story! Ordinary man a witness to a new invention! The horror!

Here is my favorite thing ever: a slavish yet cutting feature on a popular singer that devotes itself largely to her CRAZY OUTFIT. If only they’d had TRUFFLE FRIES back then!

Yes, what about this “GARMENT RESEMBLING A BAG”??

Can you believe the editorial page stakes out these crazy positions? WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE? Well here’s a trifecta for you. How about this insane editorial on the matter of someone named “Mr. Drexel” (I’m sorry, no idea who that might be, not very well future-proofed!) in a “social prizefight” who was knocked out by a new invention called “the haymaker,” which goes on to decry the lack of manliness in society and also denounces “monkey parties” and “pseudo-intellectual diversion of contemporary society”?

The only thing that really is new in the last 100 years is the introduction of a public editor; and the term limits of the third just expired, thank goodness. (So long, Captain Milquetoast!) In the end, this all suggests that, you know, maybe everyone should just get his or her own newspaper. Oh right, we all did! Lucky, lucky us.

He’d butchered hogs on his family’s farm as a kid, so after becoming a country music star, he knew how to set himself up for life after showbiz: a sausage company, established in 1969 right in his hometown of Plainview, Texas. It was a hugely successful venture, growing to be valued at $75 million, and inspiring a passionate devotion among fans who sometimes, very famously, could literally not get enough of the delicious spiced meat. Jimmy Dean died Sunday at the age of 81.

There’s still a ways to go on this, but: “Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have taken the first steps toward building functional, transplantable livers. In a study in rats, published online today by Nature Medicine, the researchers took donor livers, gently stripped them of their cells while leaving other material intact, and then used the remaining structure as a scaffold on which to grow healthy liver cells. The result was a nearly complete organ that was transplanted into the rats and remained functional for up to eight hours.” That’s right, bitches: Self-regenerating livers! I will SO drink to that!

To live in Los Angeles is to tolerate much, from a local ecosystem prone to catastrophe to the adoption of the automobile as a virtual exoskeleton to the assholic hubris of all things Laker-related. Usually there’s some trend-conscious rationale for these routine affronts to dignity and reason: Between lo-cal mojitos, a diehard Angeleno will regale you with the one about how southern California is a vital new millennial portal to the Pacific Rim, say, or reprise the hoary old line about the Golden State being the experimental group in the adoption of bold new popcult trends and lifestyle formations.

It’s harder to claim such cutting-edge cachet, though, when the regional economy is looking more and more like a permanent wasteland and the barons of SoCal’s entertainment-and-tech world aren’t so much blazing forward with new models of entrepreneurial brio new as mounting a full-scale retreat into feudalism.

Such, at any rate, is the sobering brunt of a recent real-estate dispatch from the Los Angeles Times’ Lauren Beale. On the Westside of L.A., where the “ultra-high-end” propertied class clusters, Beale notes, “today’s super-wealthy, seeking ever greater privacy, are increasingly buying adjacent properties as a buffer zone around their mansions. And that’s made the compound the hottest commodity on L.A.’s high-end market.”

“We’ve never seen this much activity going on” in the compound market, reports Bel-Air Sotheby’s broker Drew Mandile. Perversely enough, it seems that the multi-estate compound is its own symptom of the relentless pursuit of status in an economy grown so otherwise sluggish that no one-including one’s erstwhile neighbors-is really around to admire your own special rage-to-accumulate. “In a class-conscious society, people find new ways to demonstrate their status,” says Elizabeth Currid, an assistant USC professor [Ed. Note: And longtime Awl pal!] who specializes in “cultural shifts among the wealthy.”

“The middle class may be able to buy Louis Vuitton bags and nice holidays,” Currid notes, “but they can’t buy two mansions in Bel-Air. This is a way the global elite differentiate themselves.”

The odd thing about this dynamic, though, is that the super wealthy are differentiating themselves to an increasingly empty house-or houses, as the case may be. Indeed, the appeal of the compound is its reassuring remoteness from prying neighborly eyes.

“If you don’t have a neighbor anymore, you create more privacy,” Kurt Rappaport, the co-founder of the Westside Estate Agency brightly reports. Of course, Beale observes, the “buffer” homes picked up by the L.A. latifundia set aren’t kept vacant. “Some house family, friends, guests or staff.” And in the sort of helpful disclaiming aside that only makes sense in Los Angeles, she adds: “But these aren’t mother-in-law cottages or little guesthouses like the one Kato Kaelin holed up in at O.J. Simpson’s old place in Brentwood: Think multimillion-dollar mansions — next door, behind or even a few doors down.”

What’s more, Beale notes, the add-on estates aren’t entirely divorced from use-value. “The adjoining properties may be used during major fundraisers or large-scale entertaining, Rappaport said, to create more parking or as a place to stage the catering during lavish events. Some buyers have been known to tear down well-known homes for more elbow room.”

That’s the story of high-end L.A. in a nutshell, really: First time tragedy, second time catering staging area.

The lebensraum initiative is spearheaded by area film-industry and financial moguls-leading compound-holders include movie chieftain Terry Semel, producer-cum-LBO king Tom Gores, and Frank McCourt, the LA Dodgers owner now in the throes of a messy divorce. But the quest for domestic privacy is also a hectic pursuit of the town’s celebrity class, so they’ve also been moving into the multi-estate market, with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Ben Stiller, and Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas among the recent converts (though one can’t help suspecting that the latter couple is perhaps trying a bit too hard to advertise their need for privacy, in the same way that stars and executives on the brink of irrelevance thronged to 12-step conclaves as a relevance-sealing status move in The Player).

One of the earlier celebrity adopters, indeed, was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’d agglomerated four separate parcels, containing five homes, a pool and a tennis court, making up more than five acres in the Pacific Palisades, before unloading them in favor of a Brentwood spread. I guess that’s why John McCain earned an early Schwarzegger endorsement: Multi-home owning speaks to, um, multi-home owning.

But the McCourt fiefdom, now being carved up in divorce court, seems to be the most resplendent compound-or compound set, rather — lording over the L.A. market. When the couple pulled their Boston moving vans into Los Angeles in 2004, Beale writes, they unloaded their household into a starter estate featuring a “Palladin-style villa of 20,00 square feet as a main residence” for $25 million. By year’s end, though, they’d also scooped up a neighboring mini-mansion of 8,400 square feet for $6.5 million.” In 2005, they hopscotched over to Malibu, where a “John Lautner-designed architectural trophy home for more than $27 million” and its adjoining spread, a mere $19 million affair that nonetheless nearly doubled the McCourts’ portion of prized private beachfront from 80 to 146 feet. Maybe the Dodgers executive was already angling to acquire Manny Ramirez, and wanted to line up a secure landing port for contraband shipments of human growth hormone.

By now, of course, the market is already offering customized double-home lots for the less personally imperial, and perhaps more cost-conscious, buyer. The gated community of Beverly Park, Beale writes, now offers a “comparatively affordable two-dwelling compound with 18 bedrooms and 28 bathrooms”-evidently the Angeleno power elite has grown less continent as they’ve become more privacy-mad-all for a low, low $21.995 million. All told, there’s “more than 29,000 square feet of living space, a swimming pool, a sundeck, and a changing cabana.”

Of course, one could argue that maybe LA really is still on the socio-cultural cutting-edge, and fomenting the conditions for widespread social revolution in the bailed-out husk of the broader American political economy. After all, the city has already inaugurated its own version of Bastille Day, with the budget-mandated release of many inmates of the County Jail. The only hitch from here, though, is deciding just where to stage the Tennis Court Oath.

Chris Lehmann does okay in just one house pretty much.

You know, that oil spill-such a big Gulf! I mean, 660 quadrillion gallons sounds like a lot! And so little oil is being spilled into it, when you think like that. BP was so right when they put it that way. Hence why it’s not at all crazy that part of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig just washed up in Panama City, Florida.

This weekend brought the final post on the blog Lost City. It has, for the last five years, documented what is disappearing in New York. If you have not been a regular reader, the blog will remain, and you may go back through it and remember things and places in New York that you may have forgotten. The final post is worth reading. Its proprietor writes: “I began the blog because I was incensed and alarmed at what the city was becoming. It was losing its grit, its fabric, its very character. It was losing its New York-ness, and gaining nothing but Subway franchises and luxury condos….”

And goes on:

The City continued on its inexorable march to glossy mediocrity. Bloomberg, the billionaire, city planner Amanda Burden, the millionaire, and their cabal of equally wealthy real estate and Wall Street pals forged ahead and got the metropolis they wanted all along: homogenous, anodyne, whitewashed, suburban, toothless, chain-store-ridden, ordinary, exclusive and terribly, terribly expensive. A town for tourists and the upper 2%. He took a world-class capital of culture, individuality and independent endeavor and turned it into the smoothest, first-class, gated community Houston ever saw. Walk down Broadway on the Upper West Side, Sixth Avenue in Chelsea, Third Avenue in Yorkville-or look at the gaping hole of Atlantic Yards-and you will see the administration’s legacy.

(via)

Wedding Reception Crowd Says “Yahoo!” And Means It

Sometimes people groan when the DJ at a wedding reception plays Kool and the Gang’s “Celebrate!” Sometimes people dance silly on purpose or sing along ironically. There was a wedding in New Jersey on Saturday at which it’s probably safe to assume that the reaction was more fully heartfelt. It’s a nice story.

Alabama’s aspiring politicos have set such a high standard with their advertising this cycle that you can’t help but be upset when they fall short. Sure, this ad for Republican Rick Barber, who’s in a runoff a congressional nomination next month, ends with something of a flourish, but the man is no Dale Peterson. Hell, he’s not even a Les Phillip. But again, we’re judging against the masters here. Any other state, this would be a winner.

After much searching, in the summer of 2021 we found Afghanistan napping in a small hut that had been hastily built into a bombed-out former mountainside. “I wish it never happened. It was totally a nightmare,” said Afghanistan. “Sure, we called the Sudden Money Institute, those people who try to help lottery winners who live in trailers to not go crazy, but they were annoying and they kept talking about ‘trusts’ and ‘foundations’ and interest ratings, so, whatever, we eventually just blew them off.”

“Everybody had a hand out,” Afghanistan said. “All my cousins wanted a piece. How could I say no?”

Then, in the mid-10s, Afghanistan spent most of its money on an international chain of drive-through highway carwashes, called the Tribal Chieftains’ Rain-Makers, which were not a success. Afghanistan was forced to settle a class action lawsuit on behalf of employees over the uniforms-women employees claimed they were mangled because they couldn’t see through the headgear while operating machinery. The Rain-Maker chain closed, and Afghanistan went back home.

By then, all the money was gone.

“Yeah, it sucked,” said Afghanistan. “But at least I got laid a lot for a few years. Had a few laughs. You’d be surprised how many Miss America contestants you can fit in a Lamborghini Reventón.”