A couple of weeks ago, my review of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest ran in the New York Times Book Review. In it, I mentioned the “pathological coffee drinking” of Larsson’s characters in the book and its two prequels, especially by the character who serves as Larsson’s swingier alter ego, Mikael Blomkvist. I also floated my semiserious hypothesis that Larsson, who died of a heart attack at age 50, might have done himself in by drinking so much coffee, having “overcaffeinated himself to death.” (I also mentioned that Larsson’s intimates say he smoked a lot and ate mostly junk food, which couldn’t have served his body well.)
Well, my goofy little theory has triggered quite the animated online discussion—what a hackier writer might call a brew-haha—of Scandinavian coffee-drinking habits, my apparent ignorance of them, and Larsson’s untimely expiry. Both the Times’s Paper Cuts blog and the Web site of blogger extraordinaire Matthew Yglesias have offered feedback from readers who note that in both Scandinavian countries and U.S. areas with large Scandinavian-American populations, such as Minnesota, coffee is brewed, served, and sipped at all hours, nothing “pathological” about it. As one reader puts it, “It is clear that Kamp has never spent any time in Sweden or any other Scandinavian country. The coffee drinking in Scandinavian society is a normal social behavior, not the ‘overcaffeinated’ condition Kamp describes.”
First of all, guilty as charged: I have never been to Scandinavia, perhaps the result of an early trauma involving being forced to watch Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage at a too-tender age when it was broadcast on New York’s Channel Thirteen. But I do have awareness of the Scandinavian coffee culture, if not a thorough fluency in it; I first picked up on it years ago when eating at an Ann Sather, the Chicago mini-chain of Swedish diners where coffee is considered a normal beverage to drink with any meal at any hour. (I have a soft spot for Ann Sather, but I’m kind of grossed out by the idea of drinking coffee with a hearty lunch of meatballs and duck with lingonberry glaze.)
All that said, I maintain that Larsson’s coffee fetish transcended even the Scandinavian norm. Blomkvist’s coffee drinking is not the mere social sipping ascribed to all Swedes, but a 24-7 habit with not infrequent dips into the hard stuff: double espresso. There’s also a rather revealing moment in the second book of the Millenium trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire, when Blomkvist sneaks into the vacant apartment of his comrade in justice, Lisbeth Salander, and finds himself voyeuristically “admir[ing] with awe the espresso machine on its own separate table. She had a Jura Impressa X7 with an attached milk cooler... Blomkvist knew that a Jura was the espresso equivalent of a Rolls Royce—a professional machine for domestic use that cost in the neighborhood of 70,000 kronor. He had an espresso machine that he had bought at John Wall, which had cost around 3,500 kronor—one of the few extravagances he had allowed himself for his own household, and a fraction of the grandeur of Salander’s machine.” Heavens, the psychosexual suggestions of the phrase “attached milk cooler” alone have me fanning myself as I type.
Okay, onto the deleterious effects of Blomkvist’s/Larsson’s coffee drinking. Throughout the three Larsson books, Blomkvist drinks two kinds of beverages: coffee-based ones and alcoholic ones. Caffeine is a diuretic. So is alcohol. In moderate amounts, neither will compromise a person’s health, but, consumed in large amounts, especially in combination, they will cause serious dehydration. And Larsson’s is not a world in which people hydrate themselves.
Indeed, the only real water drinker in his large cast of characters is Blomkvist’s straight-arrow sister, Annika Giannini, a lawyer who represents Salander in Hornet’s Nest. There’s a moment in that book when, inevitably, the sexually omnivorous Salander, lubricated with beer, makes a pass at Giannini when they have a meeting in a bar. The upright attorney politely spurns her client and steers the conversation back towards business, “drinking mostly mineral water.” (The prude!)
As for Blomkvist, his one moment of fluidic correctness comes during his first postcoital moment with Monica Figuerola, his superfit new policewoman love interest. They wrap themselves in sheets and repair to her kitchen for “cold pasta salad with tuna and bacon.” Here, Larsson takes pains to note, “They drank water with their dinner.” This is the Stieg/Mikael version of doing something uncharacteristically romantic in the early stages of a new relationship, the way a newly besotted young lad will gladly endure a Katherine Heigl rom-com to impress his gal.
Well, that sums up my highly dubious literary autopsy of Larsson, whose death I sincerely mourn despite the silliness above.
June 13, 2010 
Link General Posts
I was on the Space Mountain ride, on my one and only trip to Disney World, when my brother left the message on my cell phone. It was December 28, 2004. It took me a few minutes to find my legs, adjust to the bright light outside, and notice that I had a voicemail. I dialed in. The news was grim. “I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this,” my brother said, “but Jerry Orbach is dead.”
Today, I feel the same gut punch. My octogenarian-style television viewing habits shall forever be altered. Yes, there are reruns ’round the clock, but the cancellation somehow puts a damper on the viewing experience; “Law & Order” is no longer an infinite resource.
And so, with apologies to Auden...
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message L&O Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the wizened neck of Adam Schiff,
Let the hairspray melt from Briscoe’s quiff.
It was my North, my South, my East and West,
My DVR mainstay and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that L&O would last forever: I was wrong.
Waterston is not wanted now: let him do summer stock;
Tear down the shooting permits on ev’ry block;
Dismantle the squad room and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
May 14, 2010 Link General Posts
Turner Classic Movies, better known as TCM or “L’Histoire du Cinéma avec Robert Osborne,” is putting on its first-ever festival right plumb in the middle of Hollywood. The TCM Classic Film Festival will take place from April 22-26, and its lineup of screenings and guest appearances is so magnificent that I shall simply link to it rather than describe it in full. But I will mention that I am introducing two films in conjunction with the festival programming based on the book Vanity Fair’s Hollywood, and, specifically, the articles of mine reprinted therein.
On Saturday, April 24, at 9:30 a.m. at Mann’s Chinese 6 theater, I will kick off a screening of Orson Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, by discussing its making and unmaking, and its lingering effects on Welles’s life and reputation, with Welles’s dear friend and confidant, the director Peter Bogdanovich. (I reported the story long enough ago to have interviewed the movie’s editor, Robert Wise, later a famous director in his own right. Wise died in 2005, and there’s no longer anyone associated with the actual making of Ambersons still alive. But Bogdanovich has amazing stories to tell.)
On Sunday, April 25, at 9 a.m. at the Egyptian Theatre, I will kick off a screening of Joseph Mankiewicz’s epic Cleopatra (yes, the one with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) by discussing its long and tortured making with Martin Landau, who played Marc Antony’s deputy, Rufio. (Landau is pulling quadruple duty at the TCM Festival, also appearing at screenings of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre [with the film’s director’s daughter, Anjelica Huston], North by Northwest [with Eva Marie Saint], and Crimes and Misdemeanors [again with Anjelica Huston, who by this time was his co-star].) Joe Mankiewicz’s engaging son, Tom, who interned on Cleopatra as a college kid, might join us. I have never seen Cleopatra on a proper theater-sized screen, so I’m as excited as any audience member will be.
The lineup of movies and people is, I reiterate, mind-boggling. The TCM Classic Film Festival is, as hyperbolic as this may sound, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see films from past golden ages of Hollywood on full-sized movie screens and see in the flesh some of the very people who were instrumental in these films’ production. My V.F. colleague Sam Kashner will introduce the mighty Sweet Smell of Success by chatting with Sidney Falco himself, Tony Curtis. Another colleague, Peter Biskind, will open a screening of Midnight Cowboy with a chitchat with Joe Buck himself, Jon Voight. And then there’s a screening of Singin’ in the Rain introduced by Stanley Donen himself?!? I’ll be there, pinching myself and thereby getting strange looks from others.
April 6, 2010 Link General Posts
The year was 1986. Performance art was still considered scary and threatening to noninitiates, part of the conspiracy of superiority that David Byrne was in on but you weren’t. That summer I saw a movie called Legal Eagles. I remember virtually nothing about it except that it was a waste of A-list talent (its stars were Robert Redford and Debra Winger, its director Ivan Reitman) and that it featured a preposterous sequence in which Daryl Hannah, playing a forbiddingly nonemotive performance artist, previewed her latest conceptual piece for Redford’s character.
Even though I was young and relatively unschooled in the ways of the avant garde, I remember Hannah’s “piece” as an abomination, a Beverly Hills person’s idea of what conceptual artists were doing in subterranean performance spaces in Manhattan’s East Village: way too literalistic, not nearly open-ended enough, and just... astonishingly wrong. I’ve never been able to get it out of my head. And now, thanks to the YouTube Memory Retrieval Machine, I’ve been able to watch it again. It hasn’t grown any less ridiculous. In fact, Robert Redford’s wide-eyed expressions of gobsmacked disbelief and fear are even sillier than I remembered, like Stymie’s reaction shots in old Our Gang shorts. Watch for yourself:
March 19, 2010 Link General Posts
I was startled upon opening the April issue of Vanity Fair to see a spotlight on Herman Wouk, author of The Caine Mutiny, Marjorie Morningstar, and The Winds of War, among other books. Startled because I’d presumed he’d been, oh, dead for at least two decades. It turns out he’ll be 95 in May, and he has a new book out called The Language That God Talks. (Maybe when you’re in your nineties, you start hearing it.)
Now that I’m armed with this new knowledge that Wouk is alive, I’m wondering if I should resolve an agitating episode from my freshman English class in high school. We were taking a test on The Caine Mutiny. The big essay question was, “Who is the real villain in The Caine Mutiny?” I knew a tricky question when I saw one, and figured that the teacher wanted us to weigh who was most culpable for the messy situation aboard the World War II minesweeper the USS Caine: Was it the tyrannical, corrupt, warped Captain Queeg; the cynical, jaded protagonist, midshipman Willie Keith; or the aloof, manipulative communications officer Tom Keefer?
I went with the obvious choice, Captain Queeg, saying the other two have their flaws but are not purely evil, as Queeg is. I wrote what I thought was an eloquent essayette to this end. And then I got a bad grade because my teacher said I was wrong! The “correct” answer, she said, is that the real villain of The Caine Mutiny is the U.S. Navy, which created a climate in which a monster like Queeg could rise up through the ranks, and in which people like Keith and Keefer would have their worst tendencies brought out.
I was outraged and crushed. (And, admittedly, a totally grade-conscious little priss back then.) First of all, how could there be an objectively right answer to the question “Who is the real villain of The Caine Mutiny?” And second of all, who expects a bunch of 15-year-olds to intuit that the “correct” answer is some abstruse anti-military meta-concept?
I vented to my mother about this (albeit not in those words) and told her that I’d love to know how Herman Wouk himself would answer the question. She mentioned that her Uncle Dan actually knew Herman Wouk, or had known Herman Wouk, and maybe they were still friends. Uncle Dan was a writer of some repute named Daniel Fuchs, a man who wrote a trilogy of novels about the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in the 1930s and later became a successful screenwriter out west. Such was my animated rage that I spent 45 minutes staring down Uncle Dan’s California phone number in our address book, trying to summon the nerve to call this relative I barely knew so that I could ask him to put me in touch with his putative friend Herman Wouk so I could ask Wouk what he thought of my English teacher’s smug little thesis and the stupid question that set it up.
But I never called Uncle Dan or pestered Wouk. And then the whole episode receded in my mind as the years went by and other grievances and perceived slights took its place. Yet now, knowing Wouk is still out there, I’m tempted to get his phone number and ask him who he thinks the real enemy in The Caine Mutiny is. Uncle Dan is long dead. But I bet, with my V.F. connections, I can get Wouk’s number.
—from the forthcoming “A Catalogue of Perceived Slights: A Memoir”
March 17, 2010 Link General Posts
Personally, I would love to be a recluse, withdrawn from society and enshrouded in mystique, with only a bagel shop and a P.O. box as my daily destinations. But for some reason, “recluse” is regarded as a pejorative word, as I discovered when I profiled Sly Stone for Vanity Fair—his family vehemently denied that his secretive, shadowy life qualified as reclusive—and again when I worked on my just-published V.F. piece about the late filmmaker John Hughes. Hughes’s sons, like Sly’s relatives, were adamant that their father, contrary to popular belief, was utterly engaged in the world.
I have to agree with them: Hughes was disengaged from Hollywood, which made him a recluse in the film industry’s eyes, but he otherwised lived a normal, out-and-about life in his later years, going to restaurants and hockey games in the Chicago area, opening his home to his and his kids’ friends, and inveterately schmoozing waitresses, garage attendants, and cab drivers when he traveled to New York and London. His was the quiet life of a successful man uninterested in fame, not the misanthropic world of a crank like J.D. Salinger—or the perpetual twilight of the drug- and paranoia-addled Sly.
I’m especially pleased that, as a sidebar to the main piece, we (V.F. and me) are able to present for the first time some short, light fiction that Hughes wrote for fun in his later years, under the pseudonym JL Hudson. One story, “The Things That Bother Jeanne Marie on Friday, January 16, 2006, 4:04 p.m.,” seems to directly acknowledge (and mock) the idea of withdrawn, self-involved crankiness.
February 10, 2010 Link General Posts
The prevailing mainstream-media widsom is that this decade we’re winding down just might be the worst ever—or at least the worst in recent memory.
I’m not ready to offer such a sweeping assessment myself, but, back at the decade’s midpoint, in late 2005, I stopped to contemplate the half-decade that had just passed and thought: This has been an ugly stretch. So ugly, in fact, that there was no way that VH1 and its stable of “fundits” could pull off one of those “I Love the Eighties”-type shows where they could rat-a-tat glib quips about all the horror that had unfolded.
Or could they?
(Courtesy of the archive of my semi-defunct site Snobsite.)
December 22, 2009 Link General Posts
Hey: If you have one of those e-readers made by Amazon, or the corresponding iPhone app, you can now wirelessly download my seriocomic survey of American foodism, The United States of Arugula, and make it part of your portable library.
I was initially wary of the Kindle, because I like real books and independent bookstores. But now that I have one, I find it complements rather than replaces my actual-book-reading. The Kindle is great for loading up on ripping yarns in the crime and thriller genres, which are a godsend during flight delays and long waits at the DMV. Actual books are great for the visual and tactile stuff that the Kindle can’t deliver on. I think Arugula makes for a good Kindle read—it’s not a visual book, and it fits the bill for anyone who needs a fun, absorbing read to get lost in during winter vacation (hint, hint). Besides, I’m eager to reach a new audience of readers in a new way. And the telepathy thing wasn’t working.
December 21, 2009 Link General Posts
My pals at Greenwich Letterpress have just relaunched their Web site, making it easier than ever to order the Food Snob place cards they devised with me. Sisters Beth and Amy Salvini are third-generation printers, and we are working on further Snob products that will adhere to our high standards of heavy paper stock and graphic drollery.
Beth and Amy were recently featured on LXTV 1st Look NY, which supplies content for those little TVs in New York taxicabs. In case you haven’t been cabbing, here’s the clip:
December 17, 2009 Link General Posts
The official dinner menu for November 24’s White House state dinner for the prime minister of India includes a salad made with “White House arugula.” Take that, A.O. “Tony” Scott!
November 24, 2009 Link General Posts
Some months back, I was goaded into experimenting with a microposting utility you might have heard of called Twitter. I’ve since lost interest in Twitter, but, given the hotness of vampire stories and the imminent release of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, I thought I’d reissue, in its entirety, a 24-tweet “teen novelette” that I composed one spring day. It is called “Bruce Weber and the Photogenic Vampires of the Adirondacks,” or BWATPVOTA for short. (I have never read a Twilight book, but I have interviewed Weber and know from experience that this is pretty much exactly how things go ’round his place.)
I now hereby present “Bruce Weber and the Photogenic Vampires of the Adirondacks, A Young-Adult Novel in 24 Tweets”:
BWATPVOTA, Pt 1: Kendra was discovered while rowing at the Schuylkill Navy Regatta. Her ponytail was like a sheaf of golden Champlain wheat.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 2: Porter was discovered while splitting rails on his grandpa’s ranch in Moab, UT. He had cheekbones you could gut trout with.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 3: Kendra and Porter met on a shoot at Splintery Posts, an old camp Bruce Weber owned in the Adirondacks.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 4: Fourteen youths had been booked for the shoot, all with abdomens as tight as drumheads. Only two, however, were vampires.
BWATPVOTA, Pt. 5: Porter first spotted Kendra draped across an old Packard coupe that had been converted into a planter. Weber snapped away.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 6: She wore a madras bandeau and a sarong made from the flag of Burma. Porter caught her eye—the most cerulean eye ever.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 7: The pheromones sizzled off their skin like summer raindrops on an overheated vintage Buick.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 8: They knew then that they desired one another. They did not yet know that they shared a desire to eat the photographer.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 9: The models’ hospitality tent was loaded with carnage: blood-rare steaks, huge haunches of lamb, joints of local elk.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 10: Weber was vividly aware that the teen metabolism knew no limits.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 11: Yet Porter ignored the buffet; he “dined” only when night fell. “Dude,” said a towhead named Andy, “aren’t you hungry?”
BWATPVOTA, Pt 12: “Andy, it’s just that I’m a v—” Porter caught himself. “...a, er, VEGAN.” Kendra had overheard it all. And now she KNEW.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 13: Weber was not ignorant of the fact that the young and beautiful were often shape-shifting beasts.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 14: Two of his favorite subjects from the early 1980s, Darren and Michael, had been werewolf lovers. They’d been all over GQ.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 15: Weber approached Kendra and Porter as they nuzzled. “This afternoon,” he said, “it’s just you two for me.”
BWATPVOTA, Pt 16: “We shall hike up to Crystalline Pond,” Weber said. “The light there is especially gorgeous... at dusk.”
BWATPVOTA, Pt 17: Dusk fell at the pond. Weber arranged things just so. Porter wore nothing but an ounce of Lycra. Kendra, only a canoe.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 18: A rivulet of sweat trickled down Porter’s sternum. Kendra moved quickly to swab it with a finger. “Wonderful!” Weber said.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 19: But as it got darker, they grew hungrier. A little past six, Porter really did gut a trout with his cheekbones.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 20: Porter used the slurry of fish blood and innards to write on Kendra’s thigh, BATS 4 U. Weber got it all on film.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 21: The light grew ever fainter, the areolae more puckered, but Weber loved the strange energy his subjects were giving him.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 22: It was when Weber turned his back to reload his Pentax that the sun disappeared, and Kendra shot Porter a knowing look.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 23: The following morning, the police dogs finally picked up Weber’s scent at the mouth of a cave near Crystalline Pond.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 24: But all the police ever found was a do-rag, a Pentax 67, and the most softly worn chambray shirt that had ever existed.
November 12, 2009 Link General Posts
In an audaciously small-time attempt at brand extension, I have collaborated with the talented young artisans at New York City’s Greenwich Letterpress on a series of place cards based on The Food Snob’s Dictionary. I must say that they turned out fantastically, and that they are, at $14 a packet, a perfect hostess gift (or hostile gesture) for the upcoming holidays. The cards come eight to a packet (two samples are shown above) and are printed on heavy stock. You may purchase them at Greenwich Letterpress’s lovely, endlessly browsable shop at 39 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, NYC, or order them online here.
November 8, 2009 Link General Posts
I judged a Piglet.
I wrote about Dad Lit.
I learned that Rockwell actually rocked well.
I delighted in discovering that my lighter work is ideal for convalescents.
November 3, 2009 Link General Posts
Because they’ve given him the voice of a lightly buzzed yuppie having a heart-to-heart with his “bro” shortly before leaving the bar and committing vehicular manslaughter.
October 30, 2009 Link General Posts
Having attended more Yankee games this season than in any year past, I’ve become fascinated by the now de rigeur “entrance music” that each batter chooses to be played as he steps up to the plate. Mark Teixeira uses “I Wanna Rock” by Twisted Sister; Derek Jeter uses 50 Cent’s “Get Up”; Nick Swisher uses “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” by the hat act Big & Rich. Fun stuff, and telling in its way, but pretty much what you’d expect from a bunch of jocks.
But late in the regular season, after the Yankees had clinched the division, I attended a game where they were starting a bunch of backups (who still demolished the hapless Kansas City Royals), among them the 30-year-old Shelley Duncan, whose impressive slugging in Triple A never quite seems to translate to the big leagues. But what an entrance-music choice! He strode to the plate to the White Stripes’s “Icky Thump.” Heavens, could there be a bona fide Rock Snob in the Yankees organization?
This naturally got me thinking what song I would choose if I were a Yankee position player. My first impulse was to make a joke of it and choose the gayest, most antithetical-to-jockdom song I could think of, something like Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” or Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy.” (I am, after all, from a small town.) But I soon realized that nothing could top the cognitive dissonance of the Yankee Stadium grounds crew’s ritual fifth-inning pantomiming of “YMCA,” a song conceived by Village People svengali Jacques Morali as an homage to cruising.
I then thought that something vaguely alt-rocky and Shelley Duncan-ish would be good, but what? Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” is one of the best pop singles ever recorded, and it has the right energy for a stadium, but the title phrase has become too cliché, not to mention redolent of steroid abuse. Big Audio Dynamite’s “C’mon Every Beatbox” is inspiring and dynamic but too English for the Bronx. The Beastie Boys’ “Sure Shot” has sports-appropriate lyrics and the right geographical pedigree, but it could almost qualify as jock rock.
So for the moment I’ve settled upon Lou Reed’s “Vicious,” because A) Reed is so New York; B) it’s a good, rollicking song to step up to the plate to; and C) there’s something subversive and enigmatic, especially in a baseball stadium, about the lyric “I hit you with a flower.”
October 27, 2009 Link General Posts
About a year ago I was a part of a group of authors that participated in a charity fundraiser in Sacramento, California. The star attraction was John Grogan, the guy who wrote Marley & Me. Grogan turned out to be a personable, unpretentious man, easy to talk to, and I ruefully confessed to him that, while I have a dog, I hadn’t worked out an angle for lucratively exploiting my dog’s inherently endearing dogginess.
But now, the drumbeat begins. My dog, a shiba inu named Trixie, has made two recent appearances in “the media”: first, as part of my photo portfolio in Time Out New York...
...and now, as the faithful companion animal and seeming collaborator in Ross MacDonald’s new contributor’s illustration of me in Vanity Fair:
The occasion for this new round of Trix-sploitation is my article about Norman Rockwell in the November issue of Vanity Fair. Rockwell was keen on including dogs in his portraits of work and family life, so having Trixie pose with me seemed apposite. (Though it borders on heresy to have a purebred in the picture; Rockwell’s dogs were invariably mutts.)
If you’re looking for a more immediate experience than my longish article on Rockwell, Ross and I did a slide show with audio voice-over for Vanity Fair’s Web site.
My dog, incidentally, is repped by Suzanne Gluck and Jennifer Walsh at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment.
October 8, 2009 Link General Posts
No sooner had I finished Nick Hornby’s highly entertaining new novel, Juliet, Naked, did I learn that its narrative was inspired, believe it or not, by my 2007 Vanity Fair piece on Sly Stone. Hornby says so in an interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross that you can read excerpts of and/or listen to here.
Let the record show that Hornby’s protagonist is a loser male Rock Snob obsessed with a reclusive musician named Tucker Crowe. But the person who actually gets to meet Crowe in Juliet, Naked—the way I actually got to meet Sly Stone—is the male loser’s pretty and more sensible girlfriend. Can we say that I fall somewhere in between the two characters?
October 6, 2009 Link General Posts
Like a lot of people, I was whomped by this year’s succession of big-name summertime deaths: Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Walter Cronkite, John Hughes, Ellie Greenwich, Teddy Kennedy, etc.
So I set out to explain—first to myself and then to Vanity Fair readers—why this particular round of deaths seemed to hit us with more force than others have. The result is an essay you can read on V.F.’s Web site called “Twentieth-Century Nostalgia, or the ‘Summer of Death’ Explained.”
October 4, 2009 Link General Posts
My post on the unsung but appealingly named NFL defensive tackle Leger Douzable prompted an e-mail from, of all people, Douzable’s mother, Felichia Henry of Tampa, Florida. Ms. Henry writes, “Thought you’d want to know that he was activated today to the Rams roster. Hopefully he has found a home for a very long time.”
Though Leger is no longer a Giant, I wish him well with the Rams, and we in the Leger Douzable Fan Club share his mom’s hope that he indeed enjoys longevity and prosperity in the NFL.
Now I have to get serious about those fan-club t-shirts...
October 3, 2009 Link General Posts
This week I grew a beard out of necessity; I cut my chin and cannot shave until the skin there heals. I’ve never been a beardy person, but it so happens that beards are very “now” in the five boroughs. Since acquiring the beard, this is what’s happened:
I don’t feel like a “David,” more like a “Ben” or a “Sam.”
I am overtaken by an urge to festoon my home with taxidermy.
I’ve been lost in reveries of reclaimed wood from old maritime chantries in rough parishes.
I’m keen to relocate to Sullivan County.
Lots of drainpipe trousers all of a sudden.
Lots of waistcoats, too. In tattersall and plaid.
No more Tanqueray or Maker’s Mark; now my cocktails are concocted with things like sloe gin and jenever.
I am compelled to make my own artisanal chocolate.
September 26, 2009 Link General Posts
