Via the esteemed Greg.org (who has his own commentary as well), a lively discussion on the Wired New York Forum about Paul Goldberger’s recent piece on the wrinkles of Ground Zero real estate. The full text of Goldberger’s piece is in the post.
Up From Zero [Goldberger, New Yorker, 7/29/02]
Groundwork: How the future of Ground Zero is being resolved [Goldberger, New Yorker, 5/20/02]
The fortunately unstoppable McSweeneysification of the magazine continues, or vice versa, as gold medalist Roy Futterman has a little affectionate fun with the genre:
FUTURE WINNERS
OF THE NEW YORKER CARTOON
CAPTION CONTEST.By Roy Futterman
“You are doing something unusual, Harold!”
“I certainly am in a bar with other businessmen.”
“This desert island is a bummer.”
“I love being wealthy in the Hamptons.”
“I’m saying a cliché in a different context, Pam.”
“Boy, I sure do like intercourse.”
“I’m thinking something incongruous to what I’m doing.”
“Wanda, we are doing some nutty things in this picture!”
McSweeney’s [Main page]
Categories: NYer, Cartoons, McSweeney’s
Good tidings from Playbill News:
Jennifer Jason Leigh will star in Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party as part of The New Group’s new season Off-Broadway, which will also include the Wallace Shawn-Allen Shawn world premiere play-opera The Music Teacher.
New Group artistic director Scott Elliott will stage the work by Leigh (Smelling a Rat, Naked, Vera Drake) for his company’s 2005-2006 season, beginning previews in November at Theatre Row. More casting is yet to be announced.
Abigail’s Party, which centers on a dinner party gone awry, was first produced in London in 1977 at the Hampstead Theatre. It then became popular through the BBC television adaptation. The work was recently revived in 2002 at the New Ambassador’s Theatre, earning a nomination for an Olivier Theatre Award for Best Revival of 2002.
Actress Leigh (no relation to the British scribe) has appeared on Broadway in Cabaret and Proof. She is best known for her film work, appearing in such movies as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Rush, Single White Female, Dolores Claiborne, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and The Anniversary Party, which she co-wrote and co-directed with co-star Alan Cumming.
In February 2006, the Off-Broadway troupe will again team with actor-playwright Wallace Shawn on the world premiere of The Music Teacher. Shawn pens the new work billed as a “play-opera” which features music by his brother Allen Shawn. Casting and director are to be announced.
Shawn has collaborated with director Elliott as an actor on Hurlyburly, as a playwright for the revival of his Aunt Dan and Lemon and for the new adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, to be presented on Broadway next season. Other plays Shawn has penned include Marie and Bruce, The Designated Mourner, The Fever and Thought In Three Parts.
For more information on The New Group, visit the website at http://www.thenewgroup.org.
Speaking of Fast Times, where are our old flames Judge Reinhold and Phoebe Cates? Don’t they get their ’80s revivial, too? I know Reinhold was Aaron the Close Talker on Seinfeld, and he was tremendous, but what’s going on now? Quentin Tarantino, are you listening? Or at least John Waters?
Leigh in Leigh’s Party, Shawn and Shawn’s Music Teacher Slated for New New Group Season [Playbill News]
Categories: Shawn, Extracurriculars, Movies
And he is: a handy gallery of the good times and the less so, in the faithful SF Chronicle. The one of Sean and Dede in front of Harry’s Bar is particularly evocative, now that you know his fevered thoughts ’round about then. Funny Woodhall photo, too. It’s just how I pictured it.
Categories: Wilsey
…typeface:
A site called Our Corner Market sells this plaque in approximate Rea Irvin type for your house, just in case your neighbors don’t know you’re the New Yorker sort. This is the “estate size” (16″ H x 28.5″ W), but in the immortal words of Cole Porter, a country estate/is something I’d hate. Who wants to be a millionaire?
If, like me, you feel as though you’ll be paddling blissfully in clear, deep Wilsey Pond till the end of your days, you’ll fold this anecdote right into all the fantastically excessive others:
When Dede Wilsey saw the surface of the stone that had been chosen for the floor of the new de Young Museum, she was worried.
“What’s it going to be like in my Manolos?” she recalls asking herself.
The petite blond heiress tested mock-ups of the rough-hewn Italian stone in her designer heels and approached the architects.
“‘It’s a mistake,'” she recalls saying during a recent hard-hat tour of the new museum. “And they said, ‘Dede, you’re not serious. It’s already been ordered.’ And I said, ‘I’m not buying a $200 million museum where the floor hurts your feet. I’ll pay the difference.'”
In the end, the stone was changed.
Welcome to the wild world of Dede Wilsey, where public good is forged through the power of a Chanel suit, an iron will and a Midas touch. In Dedeland, the vertical surface at the entrance of the museum that celebrates the thousands of $1,000-plus donors is called the “dog wall,” because many of her canine companions have given generously to the museum and their names will be listed there alongside those of donors belonging to Homo sapiens. In Dedeland, the grates on the floors needed to pass muster with her Manolos to fend off possible lawsuits from similarly shod patrons. And in Dedeland, the massive Gerhard Richter for the central hall gets approval because, she says, she can “decorate around it.”
…
For those on her radar screen, her fund-raising acumen elicits praise and even a little fear. At a recent tour of the museum, Jim Ludwig, a friend of Wilsey’s and a de Young donor, half-jokingly told a group of assembled journalists, “San Francisco has never seen another fund-raiser like Dede. A lot of people are now afraid to sit next to her at dinner.”
…
There’s also a matter of having a calling. Some people are meant to ice-skate or write sonnets; Wilsey seems to have been born to raise money. “Unlike a lot of people, I love asking for money,” she says. “Not small amounts—I can’t stand to do annual drives—but big amounts. You get to your goal much faster. I just love round numbers.” [If this were the book, Wilsey might say something like: “Dede. Dad. Trevor. Todd.”]
…
When Wilsey gave the money for Wilsey Court, the vaulted-ceilinged central gathering place at the de Young, she wanted to also donate the art that would adorn the enormous wall. “If I gave the art, I could make sure it wouldn’t be too ugly,” she explains. In the end, she chose to commission a piece by Gerhard Richter, an artist whose more traditional work appeals to her but whose more challenging pieces remain, well, challenging. “We really hit it off,” recalls Wilsey of her trip to Cologne to visit the celebrated artist. “It’s mostly black and white, but there was some color, and I love color. My favorite colors are pink and green. I said, ‘I see lavender, and I see green.'” The painting, which is based on blown-up images of atoms, reminded her of the large pearls she was wearing. “And he said, ‘It’s a self-portrait.’ And I said, ‘OK. I’ll buy the thing.'”
The book is a giant. Buy it in hardback.
Forever Dede Young: Dede Wilsey is the charismatic driving force behind the new expensive de Young Museum [SF Chronicle, 9/04]
Categories: Wilsey
“Abuse! I mean, we don’t know that there’s been any abuse. They get three square meals a day, we give them Korans, they’re allowed to pray five times a day, no one’s getting beheaded as far as I know…. There’s a big difference between being tortured and being uncomfortable. Call me crazy, but I don’t think if you tried to kill my brothers and sisters in the Trade Towers that warrants a four-star hotel.”
—Rick Roberts on Guantanamo Bay (close paraphrase), Savage Nation
Not long ago, the day the story of Edward Klein’s ridiculous The Truth About Hillary broke, a different host on the same station (New York’s WOR 710 AM) refused to dignify Klein’s allegations with detailed discussion, and kept the commentary limited to the implications for her campaign. There’s also been some genuinely good parenting advice (no, not spanking). We need to note these honorable moments. “Aren’t you sick of what passes for political discourse in this country?” asked Roberts today. Yes. No matter how polarized things get, there’s still common ground it would surely serve everyone well to re-establish. Not caving in—recognizing where we aren’t at odds.
I came across Jeremy Paskell’s altered t-shirts at the corner of Bedford and Grand, and you can see more of them here. Paskell tags and re-cuts t-shirts (and designs new stuff) under his Fragile New York Clothing label. He’s also a photographer. Here’s the original of this shirt; as far as I can tell, it’s one of a kind. Model: the lovely and cooperative Mie.
More Paskell designs:
Shooting With Jeremy [Short Quicktime video of Paskell at work and answering questions from model Jillian Ann]
Two-Bedroom Apartment in Prewar Brick Building [Paskell in 2000 Shelter column, VV]
With apologies to Oprah, some Vermont alternatives to Faulkner, in the Rutland Herald. Look for New Yorkerists Galway Kinnnell, Ruth Stone, Bill McKibben, and Janisse Ray, among others.
Categories: Extracurriculars, Kinnell
Oh, this nostalgic fiction of “summer reading”! But hey, it sells books. From St. Petersburg Times business columnist Robert Trigaux’s survey of 15 Tampa Bay-area businesspeople on their beach-reading agendas:
A few books of particular insight, including one about the virtues of the snap judgment and instinctive hunch, appeared on multiple lists this summer. Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, wins praise from AmSouth’s Florida banking executive Susan Martinez, St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention & Visitors Bureau chief Carole Ketterhagen and Peter Rummell, CEO of St. Joe Co. (Florida’s biggest private land owner).
“EVERYONE who deals with people should HAVE to read it,” Rummell wrote (the capitalized words are his) in an e-mail.
Others mentioned books with similar themes. Deanne Roberts of Roberts Communications in Tampa, just back from a tour of Eastern Europe, is reading James Surowiecki’s long-titled The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. The book makes a counterintuitive argument that the wisdom of the masses “under the right circumstances” is often smarter than the smartest person in the crowd.
I love how much editorializing (“the capitalized words are his,” “long-titled”) Trigaux gets into this short passage; it can be a life saver in a thanklessly list-y piece like this. A roundup like this is actually a pretty good indicator of the attention span of American capital:
This time, Dan Brown’s super-selling The Da Vinci Code is still on a few lists but is no longer the dominating read it was in past years. And books about Middle East history, religion and terrorism—big topics on summer lists after 9/11—are less prominent but can be found.
…
One favorite (and I must agree) is Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, the New York Times columnist’s look at how globalization and technology have enabled anyone with drive and talent to compete with anyone else, anywhere. In the United States, that message is only now starting to sink in…. From the big picture to the highly focused, books on Six Sigma are also popular…. History also remains a hot topic.
Call me preoccupied (I am, happily), but Trigaux’s lede sounds a bit like the gossip columns Sean Wilsey quotes with such glee in Oh the Glory: “Other than her ability to run a Coca-Cola Enterprises call center in Tampa and her fondness for a swift Porsche, I knew little about Nita Pennardt.” Or it’s a Danielle Steel noir. Fiction students: Go make your millions!
Reading Lists of Business Elites [St. Petersburg Times]
Categories: Gladwell, Surowiecki, Extracurriculars