“Bankrupt city pays for new trash cans with crowdfunding”

It is a mystery to me how this film is not seen as a modern classic, but then again I have not been back to watch it since I first saw it about a quarter of a century ago, so maybe it sucks. But I doubt it. Anyway, happy birthday Thomas Edward Hulce! Most people know you from Animal House or Parenthood or the Mozart movie but I don’t think you were ever better than you were here.

“I looked at the seller’s feedback and there was nothing negative. I bought it there and then because I thought it was a good deal. It said ‘photo’ and I was in two minds, but I looked at the description and the fact it was in the right category made me think it was genuine.”
 — “A Nottingham teenager says he has been duped into buying a photograph of an XBox One console on eBay — for £450.”

Here Is A Grim Vision Of A Horrible Future In Which You Might Have To Spend Some Time Alone With Your Own Thoughts

“The metals in your smartphone may be irreplaceable. If we run into a supply crunch, some features of modern life might be in trouble.”

The weekend will come, I am pretty sure, but they won’t make it easy for us to get there. While we run out the clock here are a couple of tunes that would be perfect for the soundtrack. See you on the other side!

[Via, via]

“He famously said, ‘The struggle is my life,’ but his life was also a struggle. This man who loved children spent 27 years without holding a baby. Before he went to prison, he lived underground and was unable to be the father and the husband he wanted to be. I remember his telling me that when he was being pursued by thousands of police, he secretly went to tuck his son into bed. His son asked why he couldn’t be with him every night, and Mandela told him that millions of other South African children needed him too. So many people have said to me over the years, It’s amazing that he was not bitter. I’ve always smiled at that. With enormous self-control, he learned to hide his bitterness.”
 — If you’re going to read just one thing about Nelson Mandela this may be the best bet. I mean, if you’re going to read just one thing about Nelson Mandela make it this, but that is probably not something you can do at your desk this morning, so just start off with the previous link and then think about working up to it.

Only 27 shopping days remain until the De Blasio Era begins, in which each subway car is its own Thunderdome of homeless people and left-wing crazies. And last night Bloomberg gave the first of his farewell speeches, and did that DARN THING THAT HE DOES where he suddenly starts saying awesome things:

[H]e recalled his unwavering support for a proposed mosque near the World Trade Center site, which much of the country angrily opposed.

“When a faith community wants to build a house of worship in a particular neighborhood,” he said, “we don’t tell them to look someplace else.”

“We are one city,” he added, “open to all, with equal rights for all.”

He invoked the pantheon of Great New Yorkers who, exploiting those enduring values, used the city as a laboratory for improbable inventions and unconventional ideas that changed the world. Charles Pfizer. Alexander Graham Bell. George Gershwin. Andy Warhol. Norman Mailer.

He paraphrased a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein: “If an idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.”

“We must always be a city,” the mayor said, “where absurdity is a virtue.”

DAMN IT WHY DOES HE ALWAYS DO THIS, JUST WHEN WE ARE ALL “GOOD RIDDANCE.”

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time.
So we have to ask them — in this case, Esquire writer Tom Junod.

My daughter, watching a Bob Dylan documentary: “If he was around today, he’d just rap all this. And he’d have to be cute.

 — @tomjunod

Tom! So what happened here?

We lost our dog in September. We just got a new one, five days ago. My 10-year-old daughter is obsessed with him, to the extent that she wakes herself up every hour or so to ask how he’s doing. That’s what happened when I was watching — again — Scorsese’s Dylan documentary. My daughter woke up, and asked about the dog. I said he was fine. She asked where he was. I said, “Right next to me.” She said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Watching a show.” She said, “I can’t sleep.” I said, “C’mon downstairs, and watch with me.” I wouldn’t have asked her if it were a school night, but it wasn’t — we had our parent-teacher conference the next day. So she came down. She happened to arrive at the point where Dylan was undergoing his second great metamorphosis — the first was from Zimmerman to Dylan, the second was from folkie to rocker. She knew of Bob Dylan; since she turned two, I’ve asked her to name the singer, whenever a Dylan song comes on, and she’s always been able to answer, “Bob Dylan!” But I think she was taken aback by the concert footage that Scorsese intersperses throughout the film — the almost sacrificial Manchester concert from ’66. Those old-school teeth, those seer’s eyes, rolling back into his head as he sings — she said, “This is a little creepy.” I answered in the time-honored baby-boomer fashion, misty-eyed nostalgia passing for wisdom: “Yeah, but look what one guy was able to achieve with just a guitar!” Then they showed him flipping the cards for “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and that’s when she said, “If he was around today, he’d just rap all this. And he’d have to be cute.”

Do you think your daughter is correct in her assessment of how things would go if the young Dylan appeared for the first time in 2013 and tried to break into the music business now instead of during the 1960s? How would that alternative universe play out?

Unfortunately, I think she’s spot on. Like any geezer, I always worry about that — “Who’s going to be her Dylan? Who’s going to be her Stones?” But I don’t think she’s worried at all. She’s a 10-year-old music fan — she’s more worried about who’s going to be my Ke$ha, and my Katy Perry. Still, I wonder if there is ever going to be another Dylan — and what kind of conditions would have to arise in order to produce one. A new drug? A new war? A revolution? Peak oil? But even those things would produce something and somebody other than Dylan. It’s not just because, let’s face it, he’d be laughed at if he tried out for one of the singing shows. It’s because some things in music disappear and don’t come back — not just the song structures, or the styles, but the emotions they conjure. I want her to feel the way I felt — and still feel — listening to Bob Dylan. I can’t imagine my life, if those feelings hadn’t existed. They seemed to connect me to something much bigger than myself. But she doesn’t want to feel the way I felt listening to Dylan any more than I wanted to feel the way my father felt listening to Benny Goodman.

Lesson learned (if any)?

Um, the times they are changing? Sorry. The main thing I learned was what I learn all the time — I’m pretty old, and my daughter’s pretty smart.

Just one more thing.
It’s been a long time since my daughter was eager to answer when a Bob Dylan song comes on and I ask who’s singing. She used to proudly announce, “Bob Dylan!” But that was back before she had musical autonomy, and her favorite record was “Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison.” Now she just rolls her eyes, and has been rolling her eyes ever since she listened to “Dynamite” — her generation’s gateway drug for synthetic dance pop. But my favorite part about what she said watching the Dylan documentary was “if he was around today.” It echoes perfectly the way she prefaces her questions when she asks me, say, if they had Minecraft or red Mountain Dew: “Back when you were alive.”

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

★★★★ The ordinary sky over the routine walk back from preschool had, if you looked straight up, a rainbow in it — a short, bright arc just off the zenith, convex sunward. It was mild again; the toddler’s monkey mittens had dangled unused on their string from his sleeves. A glow filled the old glass phone booth on West End, where a woman was on a phone call. Gradually, white clouds gathered, reticulating the sky, and by the end of the downtown ride the reticulations had closed over into solid gray. The sun came back briefly out the office windows, but was gone again before there was time to go looking for it. The damp evening air had a rustic smell of smoke on it. Lights gleamed on the long needles of a strand of pine rope so intensely it had to be fake.

Britain is a nightmarish hellhole where existence is a pitiless struggle in even the calmest of times, so it is heartbreaking to watch this remarkable footage of its wretched denizens forced to contend with heavy wind. Scroll down here for an even more remarkable graphic delineating the types of gust.

Meanwhile, I always suspected that the comical stereotype of Minnesotans as good-natured goofs who enjoy the simple wonder of everyday events as tourist board spin designed to disguise the fact that nothing really happens in Minnesota anyway so why not portray slack-jawedness as innocent joy, but the way these poor Midwestern saps react to snow convinces me that no, they really do regard the weather with empty-headed delight. I guess it takes all kinds to make a world.