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Why I Watch The Oscars, Part 1

 

The Iceman Melteth

One of the disasters that befell us during my brief hiatus, here at home, was that we lost our refrigerator. I don't mean it ran away... I mean it just up and stopped working.

At first, we thought it was repairable, and so did the repairman. He carefully cleaned and dusted and tinkered, and in the end we got back a wheezy, grumbly thing that sort of made ice and sort of kept things cold... but it had "last legs" written across it.And about 5 days later, the whole thing just gave out. 

It probably didn't help that the refrigerator was built in 1968. After we found that out, it was hard not to admit that 40+ years of work for a fridge is pretty damn good. 

These moments - power outages, the death of an appliance - are a reminder and a wake up call to just how for granted we take some of the most basic technologies. My mom and I both quickly realized that the miracle of refrigeration is something you miss most when you need... ice cubes. Without ice for beverages, everything just seemed that much worse. I was reduced to filling up a large cup with ice to bring home after work, just in case.

(And, if you don't know, Starbucks is a place where one can get, on request, a cup of ice or water or both for no charge. Yes, we think a lot of people take too much advantage of it... but after this month's experience, I'm a lot less judgmental of the requests. I've been there... and sometimes, people just need ice and some water.)

Living without a refrigerator can be done, we found, for a little over a week without going completely mad. Towards the end, the constant dining out (it sounds fun but gets old, fast), the lack of ice (not to mention ice cream), the limited options when one is desperate for food... all became a bit much to bear. And when the nice lady at Sears said the refrigerator we wanted was unavailable for 3 weeks, we both blanched... and picked a more expensive one that could be delivered in 4 days.

Our new refrigerator, then, is something of a wonder.  I've realized that, because of where I've lived (the three houses of my parents, the last purchased in 1978; as well as a string of apartments until I moved here with mom), I have never lived before with a refrigerator made after 1980. They've clearly made some advancements. The thing is amazingly quiet. It's incredibly brightly lit. There's a lot of storage space and its inventively laid out.

But, even more scandalous... we now have ice and water in the door.

I don't know about you... but ice in the door was for other people. Fancy people. Decadent people. People who couldn't be bothered to run the tap and break an ice tray. We are not those people. We don't even have a dishwasher. Even my sister, who has a pretty high end kitchen, doesn't have ice in the door (they do have freezer drawer on the bottom, and its stainless steel, so its pretty glamorous. And don't get me started on her Viking stove).

So here we are, a couple of weeks later, living in glorious decadence with the refrigerator of some other, far more fabulous home. I really expect someone (maybe from thjose government panels conservatives fear so much) to show up and tell us that are fridge is simply not appropriate, and cart it away, and return us to the slightly smaller, freezer on the top (did I mention we got a side by side? I know! So bourgeois!) days  we used to know and love.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to put my fancy Irish butter into our specially cooled butter holder. :)

The Island Of The Day Before

The first thing that struck me, as I woke up this morning to the news of Japan's earthquake, was that because of the International Date Line, the warnings for a tsunami in Hawaii would mean that the waves would be hitting those islands at a time on the same day as the earthquake, hours before it actually struck the Japanese coast. That is, they were being warned to expect a tsunami that had already happened a day later, somewhere else. A literal island of the day before.

That sense of watching all of these events unfold at some kind of strange time and space remove from the actual events never left me. Here in the northeast, we are dealing with the after effects of two days of sustained rain, on top of more rain only a week ago. Many of the highways between my house and New York City are actually closed, even this evening. News organziations in the US, and especially on the east coast, struggled all day with balancing major world events and the local business of dealing with closed roads and downed power lines.

In a moment of such fearsome reminders of "nature's fury" and such, it's easy to feel small and kind of humble. Our lives as we know them can, literally, come apart in moments. The earth can move, the water can flood, and lives are completely changed. That sense of sudden disarray is even harder to fathom from the comfort of one's own perfectly fine living room.

It was one of those days when the morning paper is instantly "old news" - I never held onto the newspapers from the morning of Setember 11th, 2001. They were irrelevant by 9 am that day. Today was a similar sensation, stuck as I was most of the day at a job where one can seem especially cut off from love events as they unfold. It's very disorienting. All of this doesn't matter now. The real news is happening elsewhere.

As we go to bed in the northeast, it is midday in Japan, on the day after. We live our lives in the day before, and always have. It's rare for events in the future to reach back and affect the day before. It is tomorrow, Kevin, in a world where we are clearly so all connected to one another, and so humbled by the hugeness of events beyond our control. Our humanity, in these moments, I think, is how blithely we carry on, knowing that we are so small, so ineffectual, and so transient.

Sabado Gigante!

There are various ways to assess the health of retail sales leading into Christmas - my own tends to be the kind of unscientific observation of just trying to be out and about, watching shopper habits. How hard is it to find parking? How many people laden down with bags? What's on sale in the stores?

My sense is that this is an okay, but not great, Christmas, nowhere near the retail madness of the bubble years. People seem to feel a little less economically insecure, but retailers were banking on a real explosion of pent up demand, and so in the final weeks therehas been a lot of desperation selling. There are insane markdowns. People crowd around sale items, but a lot of regular priced items sit undisturbed. Things are crowded... but not wildly uncomfortable.

I've been working a cash register in the final days of holiday madness a few times (okay, a heck of a lot), and this year... is not so madness. I've seen worse, much worse ("The Christmas Wars", this week, on History), and though some of my newer baristas are a little freaked out, most of the expereinced hands aren't getting more than they can handle.

And so, this past weekend, the last weekend before Christmas, came and went without much fuss. I closed Friday and Saturday night - usually two of the most hectic, least organized nights of the year... and not much happened. We were a little busier than last year... but not off the charts. Sunday night, I spent the evening with my friend Red, darting through Soho (like a lay-ser), picking up a few last minute things. As bad as Soho has become - it's all tourists and bargain hunters - we weren't especially crushed, and the whole thing was over pretty quick.

So why am I telling you all of this?

Just to tell you that Saturday, as I was getting ready to start work, Bill Clinton walked past my coffee shop on his way to his car. He looked in, smiled, and waved at me. Bill Clinton.

Yeah, it was pretty awesome. Merry Christmas!

Morning Morsels: A Healthy Diet Of Common Sense

As bad as this Tuesday's election results were, and as many problems as the results perpetuate (and how few will be solved), there does some to be a resurgence, in some quarters, of saying some sensible things that make common sense. And though I spent some moments this morning (I wake up early, and screaming) being annoyed iwth some of the pointless bloilerplate of lefty apologists (Please stop me before I read Steve Benen or Mori Dinauer ever again!), I also was blown away by some sharp assessments of things that might actually matter. So for this morning, a few morsels of ideas that might get us to talk about the things that really need fixing:

1. Suzy Khimm, the healthcare crisis reporter at Mother Jones, has been guest posting at Ezra Klein's Washington Post blog, and she offers the most clear-eyed assessment of the painful debate about Medicaid that's coming, discussing the decision in Texas to consider dropping out of the program altogether:

To be sure, there's no question that Medicaid has been costly for state governments, and it's understandable that the lingering recession would make state officials feel panicky about the future expansion. There are deeper programs still: the cash-strapped program only pays providers 66 percent of Medicare reimbursement rates, making it hard for Medicaid patients to find doctors who accept their coverage. Such dilemmas strengthen the argument for simply federalizing the entire Medicaid program, protecting it from the ideological and fiscal battles on the state level.

But until the day comes that a better Medicaid overhaul is possible, states must also realize that simply trying to wash their hands of the problem by stripping Medicaid coverage from the poor — without providing a reasonable alternative — won't be the answer either. The uninsured poor will continue to get sick. They will continue to seek out health care. And many institutions — including state governments — will still end up paying for it.

2: Ezra's also been featuring his pal Dana Goldstein, whose focus on education issues leads to a great point about where "progressives" and conservatives find common ground on the wrong aspects of education reform:

This morning I heard a lecture by British education expert Geoff Whitty on the emerging similarities between school reform efforts in the Obama-era United States and the Cameron-era U.K., particularly around the concepts of school choice and accountability. Whitty was critical of policy makers and the media for selectively citing research findings in support of charter schools and — more interestingly and counter-intuitively — for being obsessed with finding “what works” in education and other social policy areas.

The “what works” framework, Whitty argued, tends to privilege attempts to create alternative administrative structures (like charter schools), when in fact, other types of interventions may be equally — if not more — effective.

3. Via the entirely hopeless Steve Benen, Ross Douthat makes the best case I've seen that Republicans are going to do themselves in by having no real plan for the issues they ran on:

Today’s Republicans, by contrast, know what they’re against (the health care bill, tax increases, cap and trade) but have a world of trouble saying what they might actually be for.

Instead, they tend to fall back on the reassuring story they’ve been spinning for the last two years, in which they lost to the Democrats only because they failed to hold the line on spending. It’s a narrative that flatters conservative self-regard, while absolving Republicans of the obligation to think too deeply about policy. All they need to do is say “no” to bigger government, and the rest will take care of itself.

This strategy has worked for them in opposition, thanks to the Democratic Party’s haste and hubris. But it isn’t a blueprint for governance, and it ducks the real reasons that the Republicans lost their majority. While the Bush administration overspent, it wasn’t spending and deficits that turned the country against conservative domestic policy between 2004 and 2008. It was the fact that the Republican majority seemed to have no answers to Middle America’s economic struggles, and no appetite for the structural reforms required to keep the United States competitive.

This is even more true today. The United States is facing three overlapping crises — the short-term challenge of a jobless recovery, the long-term crisis of entitlement spending and, in the medium term, an economy that wasn’t delivering for the middle class even before the financial crisis struck. The Democratic Party may have the wrong answers to these problems. But the Republican Party as an institution often seems to have no answers whatsoever.

4. Over at Open Left, Mike Lux offers some of the best breakdown of why middle/working class voters shifted to voting for Republicans. I don't share his hopeful assessment of how Democrats can fix their problems, but this seems dead on:

I wrote early in 2009 that voters were going to be in a very bad mood in November of 2010, and that this would be a blame election, where economically stressed swing voters would be wanting to take their misery out on someone. I was certainly right about that, but here's the ironic thing: I suggested that since I thought it was unlikely we could get them to blame the economy on Bush since we were in charge now, that our best hope was to get them to blame it on Wall Street. They did, that 35% who laid the blame on Wall Street's door were primarily the middle class swing voter bloc in this election, but they associated us Democrats and Obama with Wall Street more than Republicans. The TARP bailout and Obama and Geithner's vigorous defense of it, the kid glove treatment of the big banks at the hands of Geithner, the AIG and big bank bonuses that closely followed, the failure to prosecute or break up the Too Big To Fail banks: it all came together in those angry middle class voters' minds as Obama being associated with the same Wall Street actors people were blaming for their economic problems. The fact that once the financial reform bill that had some important wins for the middle class was passed, Democrats barely ever talked about it again didn't help.

5. And finally, David Sirota(!) over at Open Left takes apart the Olbermann mess and highlights the "Hollywood Minute" problem with our celebrity happy culture:

Most Americans struggling in this economic crisis probably don't even know and/or don't even care who Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or their counterparts on the Right are. That's no knock on Olbermann or Maddow at all - I have great respect for them and for the work they do. It's just a statement of reality that only seems shocking to uber-political junkies who, ensconced in the political media bubble, tend to overstate the cultural penetration of the political media class. And if members of the Silent Majority - ie. those outside that bubble - caught wind of the media back-and-forth over the Olbermann suspension (granted, a big if), it probably served as proof that the political media class really is narcissistic enough to believe the Broadcast News adage that they're the story - even during a Great Recession when media controversies shouldn't be the story.

Again, I'm happy that MSNBC only ended up suspending Olbermann for two days, and it's probably a good thing in the long run that the whole situation highlighted questions of ideology and partisanship in professional journalism. But it also highlights some really disturbing truths about the celebrity-prioritizing nature of our political activist culture - truths that, if left unaddressed, will likely continue to make it difficult to organize around the most important non-celebrity causes like, ya know, fixing the economy.

 

Friday Evening Flying College Dudes

jinb

Live At Red Rocks

I'm not a travel blogger, I don't do travelogues.

It's not my long suit; I do love to travel, but I don't do enough of it. And even then, I'm not one to obsessively catalog hotels, restaurants, airlines, airports... okay, maybe a little, but not enough to make a career of it.

All of that said, this has been a great week so far: Mom and I have been traveling around Arizona, first in Tucson, then driving north to Sedona, arguably one of the most beautiful places on earth. So I feel I'd be remiss to my friends and regular readers not sharing some of what we've seen.

Most of the pictures are on mom's camera... and unfortunately, she didn't think to bring along the cables. So for now, here are a few shots from my cell phone. Isn't the digital age amazing?

This is just outside Tucson, in the Saguaro state park. Down the road aways is the Desert Museum, which was very interesting and informative. This was taken on a promontory midway up a big peak. I didn't get a shot of the valley to the right of this.

I can't entirely put into words our arrival into Sedona; you drive up this highway, there's a bend in the road... and suddenly this is what's in front of you. The red rock formations surround Sedona proper (and Oak Creek, just to its south), meaning when you step out of your hotel, or any shop... there it is. Again. It is almost unbearably beautiful.

Today we went hiking around Oak Creek; this is the view on the trail up to the Red Rock Cathedral, a church carved into one of the formations. I didn't make it all the way up: the final stretch was especially steep, and Mom gave out very early on; which was a shame, since she missed stuff like this. On the plus side, she and I have been collecting rocks for The Most Adorable Nephew in the Universe, and I found a number of good samples.

That will have to do for now. Dinner calls, and hopefully, I will have some more over the next couple of days, before we fly home.

UPDATE: Turns out I do have the cable to link Mom's camera and my laptop. More pics shortly.

You Manipulative Son Of A...

Via Andrew Sullivan, one of the most flawless assessments of Glenn Beck yet, and further proof - as if it was needed - that Stephen Colbert is genius.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bend It Like Beck
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore

3... in the family, that's a magic number

Three years. Today.

When I started blogging, I was living in Boston, not sure what I wanted to write... but convinced that I had to try.

A lot has changed, yet again - I'm no longer in Boston, or writing every day, perhaps not writing exactly all I'd like or as often as I'd like... but I'm learning, fitfully, to live with what I can accept, and accept what I can live with.

What went through my mind, today, was all the support and encouragement I've had from friends and family, and how, when I started, I was surrounded by friends who either didn't blog, or who occasionally blogged, as I did, alone and perhaps kind of quietly. Now, my blogger friend has her own paid gig, my best friend posts his pictures online, and my fashion friend made her own leap into blogging just this past month. I am pleased, and proud, to know all of them... and to believe in what they do, too.

This has not been an easy year - not personally, or professionally, or blogging. I went from a heady feeling of sudden promise - all because so many politically minded lefties found themselves fighting for Hillary Clinton - to a precipitous drop in readers, attention... and my own interest. The up and down nature of blogging, more than anything, caught me off guard. I am not big on self promotion - it violates my WASPy, inbred sense of decorum and good taste - and I can't write controversy for controversy's sake ("Roman Polanski is a fucknut who deserves to be thrown in prison!"... eh, not so much). And because of my inner reserve, and my reliance on closely held anonymity... I know I have to accept a certain sort of limitation of audience.

What I've learned, this year and in all the time blogging so far, is a life lesson in writing what I love. Writing for me takes a certain alchemy: in the right mood, with the right topic, and the right amount of time... I can turn out amazing stuff. Take away any of those elements... and I get a bit stuck.

For all the heartaches and reversals... there's never a moment - never, not one... literally, no seriously, literally - when I think "not writing" is the solution. Not doing this blog, just giving up... that's not an option. And what I've realized is that... I have to put this blog up there on my list of priorities. It's not an afterthought. It's the thing that gives meaning to who I am and all of the rest of what I do.

Sixteen hundred and fifty posts, More than 110,000 page views. More than 1600 comments. I can live with that, feel good about it. I've made a promise to myself that in the next few weeks I will reinvigorate my blog, all the elements that go into it, and recommit myself to my personal mission of doing this with passion (and as J and j know... energy, enthusiasm and purpose). I also promise, finally, to do the thing I promise every year... I am sifting through those 1650 posts... and finding ones that I am proudest to call Best of NYC weboy. If it kills me... and it just might.

And confidential to Tom Watson... I love you, man. Let's figure out how to reinvigorate NewCritics. :)

xoxo webo

Absolutely Everyone Can Come Inside

Sorry for the long-ish break; work has been a bit hectic, and I'm leaving on vacation (but writing during it) tomorrow.

While I work on a couple of fresh posts... here, via Portly Dyke over at Shakesville is, as she puts it, a new womanist folk anthem: it's indeed so tuneful I found myself bursting into the chorus afternoon and evening yesterday. At work.

(and, as she notes... totally NSFW. You were warned.)