I Think I've Found My New Nickname

Found in a vending machine in a laundromat in northwest Tucson.  Kalil is the local bottling company, so I doubt this stuff is found outside Arizona.  But look--the DR has a period!  It's about time one of these soft drinks stood up for proper punctuation.

Eating the President-Elect, Part I

I was in Chicago for Thanksgiving, and I asked my friend Jen, "How come I'm not seeing any Obama stickers on the cars?"  She said, "In Chicago, it goes without saying."  

I guess this is the case, because here are a few pictures I took at a deli we visited a few days later.  I have to say I'm impressed at the accuracy of the drawing.  I couldn't do a recognizable Barack even in pen, much less in frosting.

UPDATE:  I should add that, although she's clearly very popular, not all of Obama's foodstuffs had him sharing the spotlight with his wife.  Here was a twofer I bought whose point seemed to be Illinois Presidential pride:

...And Here's Reason Kajillion-and-One

I was walking home from the PATH station (that's the train to/from New Jersey) and saw the following display at 14th and 3rd Avenue, a good distance away from where the ginormous flag had been earlier.  Apparently someone had brought along a drum.

It was like this everywhere, even at 3 a.m.  When the subway stopped and the doors opened, you could hear cheers from distant cars.  People were honking horns and shouting "Obama!" at passersby through their open windows.  I can only imagine what it must have been like in Chicago.

Why I Love Manhattan, Reason Number Kajillion

At tennish, Obama had 197 electoral votes and we figured we could stop worrying.  So while my friend Tracy and I were leaving a viewing and heading to her place in Jersey (where Jon Stewart lay TiVoed), we passed Union Square (roughly 14th St. and 4th Ave, for you out of town folks), and saw that someone had covered the entire apron near the street with a giant flag that a bunch of people were simply flapping up and down in a celebratory manner.  It was a lovely, fun, and essentially nonpartisan way to celebrate Election Day, and I even got a little video so you get some sense of the size involved.  Thanks a lot, Crazy Benefactor!

Halloween at Hallmark

I always tell people that the thing I miss the most about Hallmark is Halloween.  With all those incredible artists concentrated in one place, the annual Hallmark Halloween party was always a jaw-dropper, with amazingly elaborate costumes.  (One year, I saw a guy come as a credible Mount Rushmore, and another fellow appeared as a green plastic army soldier--complete with a plastic stand, which he'd sliced in two so he could separate his feet and move around.  But he had the pose down, and he was green top to toe.  It was staggering.)

But this post about geeky Jack-O-Lanterns reminds me of the other great thing about Hallmark: their artists can use any medium and still blow you away.  Note that most of the geeky pumpkins in the linked article aren't actually all that hard to make.  But this Jack Nicholson one I've reprinted here will make you blink and look four times.  So believe me when I tell you that there were at least twenty people at Hallmark capable of making this pumpkin--and if pressed, they could also do it in gesso, cookie sprinkles, or hammered tin.  It was moments like this that I would rear back and remind myself, "Oh, right--these are some of the best artists in the world."  When you're around them all the time, sometimes you forget.

(Thanks to Jennifer Lee-Olmstead for the link.)

Vandalism, Inc.

One of the odd things about New York is that people are actually paid to advertise products in a way that looks like vandalism.  Tonight I saw these two guys painting up a wall on behalf of some new Max Payne release.  They'd drawn a crowd of six onlookers, at two in the morning.  Avenue A near 13th Street.

Demonizing the Opposition

Bumper sticker. President Street near 4th Avenue, Brooklyn.

Cliff Notes Get Worse

Appalling DVD product at Virgin Music Store, Union Square. The next time I teach literature, I will only assign books that haven't been made into movies. Oy.

Wordplay in the Wild redux

Thanks to old high school friend Kentaro (which, come to think of it, also means 'thanks to Facebook'), I now have this example of what may be the loveliest ambigram you're ever likely to see outside of puzzle books and Dan Brown novels. Nicely done!

LATER: I just noticed, though. The cover is a spoiler! Look away, children! Look away!

Wordplay in the Wild

Nicely ambigrammatic logo. 3rd street and 1st avenue.

The Small-Hat Look

At One Man's Treasure, a vintage store in Jersey City, humoring my friend Tracy.

Sacramentables!

When I wrote my "non-book" of Christian Top Ten Lists back in 1992, one of the lists was "Top Ten Changes in the Church by the year 2050." And the item 7 on the list was, "Bread and wine in one tiny pill!"

Well, they've done it. I went to a church in my neighborhood this past weekend (long story, short version: I was taping interviews) and as I entered, I was handed a program and this, which I had never seen before:



There's a better picture here. It turns out they're now making communion in handy to-go combo cups, with the wafer right there in the top. No mess, no waiting, no crowding the aisles--and of course it's grape juice, not wine. The only thing missing is any actual sense of holiness or, God forbid, human touch.

The Catholic in me was horrified. The whole point of communion is to have an actual encounter with the body and blood of Christ, which is why you need a priest there in the first place. This sort of get-Christ-to-go approach could hardly be more blasphemous. The ecumenical part of me, though, was more ambivalent. Since it seems like superstition anyway, what better way to completely neuter it of any miraculous aura than to get a communion that was mass-produced by a machine?

Ultimately, though, I'm saddened by it. Not because it's tacky, though of course there's that. But because it's a symptom of what too many fundamentalist churches do when they misread the Bible. They get the bare score but none of the music. In his 1977 book Fundamentalism, James Barr points out that evangelicals tend to have an extremely empty theology: they believe in the virgin birth, not because virginity or Mary or any element of the story is a matter of great theological impact or reflection; it's because if you believe the Bible, then you have to believe a number of things in a checklist: the Flood; Adam and Eve; the Virgin Birth, etc. The important point is not the Virgin Birth itself; the important thing is checking it off, and then, having checked it off (thereby proving that you're not a liberal), to move on to the real center of contemporary Christianity in America: quiet times, Bible study, prayer and personal growth. A topic that has been the subject of Christian art for centuries has become, in Bible literalist hands and for all practical purposes, a mere shibboleth.

So in a sense, the Sacramentables are a symptom of a very real tendency in evangelical Christian thought: with no sacraments, no art, and a minimum of distracting symbols, the only reason they have communion is because the Bible tells them to. So why make it more important than it needs to be? A wafer in a prefilled thimble-sized plastic cup is as puny and comma-like a communion as you could conceive of. Of course, they'd never get rid of it entirely--that would be unbiblical! But they definitely show what they think about the Bible's demands by how they dress it up. (I should add, by the way, that this was a Pentecostal church, so you can also see how, in their interpretation of the Bible, direct communion with the Holy Spirit through tongues and miracles knocks a silly old wafer into a cocked miter. So I'm not saying they're spiritually starving, per se; I'm saying their focus has taken them way out of the mainstream of history and tradition.)

In the end, I think I'd prefer an actual meal--shared meals are part of religious ritual even in hunter-gatherer societies--with real wine and actual broken bread (no wafers please!) and no spiritualizing mumbo jumbo, so you could focus on what's really happening: the people, the conversation, the nourishment that all shared meals provide. Whatever all that adds up to, I think it's pretty clear that the Sacramentables offer the exact opposite.

You know what else it is, though? It's pretty fucking hilarious. Encapsulating the entire communion into that little package is just asking for abuse. I mean, how could a juggler resist?

Commercial Break (or Yes, But Can Manolo Blahnik Do This?)

This blog is brought to you by Nike...

(Fans waiting in chairs for the release of Nike's apparently amazing Air Force One sneakers. Rivington and Clinton, on Friday.) 

...and Dewar's...

(Cool ad across the street from the Nike fans, done completely in chalk.)

...and by the American Vampire League, whatever the hell that is:

(Fun ad at Houston and Avenue A, presumably for some sort of TV show involving vampires.  The apparent defacement is actually part of the poster.)

It Would Almost Be a Palindrome...

If it weren't for the damn X. Wordplay caught in the wild, which chain I will be leaving behind tomorrow.

Groovy-Looking Dragonfly I Saw Yesterday

This may be the coolest insect I've seen in an environment that's been completely littered with insects. From a distance, the wings were almost completely transparent, so it just looked like this thing had little black rectangles hovering near it magically. I wish there were a way to look up bugs (and other things) from their description, but I assume identifying this fellow would take more time than I can justify. I'm calling it "Pretty Black and Blue Thingy."

The Woman At The Used Clothing Store Forgot My Name

Crazy-Ass Conspiracy Car

Parked near the Grove Street PATH station. I can't help but think this will hurt its resale value.

Also, Try Punching the Kidneys

I'm in New York City for the apartment hunt (and, since it's done, I'm heading back today), but I'm staying at my friend Tracy's place, and one of the joys of staying at her apartment is the array of consistently hilarious weirdnesses she has hanging everywhere. This, for example, is a French poster about artificial respiration techniques--a real poster!--from a time when they didn't know that all of this advice was horribly, horribly wrong. (The middle bottom frame is particularly priceless: a guy's choking and you need to get some rope and find a seesaw to lash him to?) I don't know where my friend finds all this stuff, but I want her vision.

If you're interested in reading the French text, clicking on the photo should enlarge it enough to make it legible. Please note that the word at the bottom right is "panis" (which I guess means 'device' or something), not "penis."

Things I Love About New York: The New York Public Library

Taken in front of the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library. (Duh.) While I was taking this picture, I overheard some college kids behind me. One said, "Ooh! The New York Public Library! I remember that from..." and then someone else said "Let's..." and there was a confusion of voices. But the final word came from a different voice that said, "No. Let's only take pictures of places where good movies were made."

Since I doubt they were meaning to insult Breakfast at Tiffany's or Ghostbusters, I can only assume they were talking about this film.

Things I Love About New York: Hot Dogs

New York City sort of runs the gamut, hotdogwise, and it's always pretty good. On the low end, you have Gray's Papaya (this photo taken at 72nd and Broadway, though there are a few others, plus innumerable pretenders with names like Papaya King and Chelsea Papaya, etc.). The "Recession Special," which has been around since the LAST big recession, gives you two hot dogs and a juice drink for $3.50, which is a better deal than the price I paid for two hot dogs and a coke on the Florida State campus in Tallahassee. And the hot dogs really are amazing for what you pay: crisp, with lightly toasted buns, and a flavor that somehow suffuses the entire thing. Not health food by any means, but as guilty pleasures go, it's quite understandable.

On top of this, Gray's Papaya itself has a lot of odd character. Not just because it's selling papaya juice drinks ("great for digestion!" say the signs--there are hand-lettered signs all over the walls, each one as effusive as a cartoon panel), but because they sell "Polite New Yorker" buttons for a dollar each, and--as you can see from this picture--aren't afraid to advocate enthusiastically for things that have nothing to do with hot dogs or papayas. Before the current Obama sign, they were all in favor of Mayor Bloomberg. "Let's vote for a President who takes the subway!" said the sign. With so much character flying around, you almost don't care that there's no place to sit and you're elbow-to-elbow with other people, hovering over a slightly messy, very thin outcropping of a ledge? Almost. It depends on the day.

When you want a classier sort of dog, you can go to F & B, on 23rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. I took my friend Charles here today and he was quite impressed. What you see in the picture is the remains of the "guard dog" (a chicken dog with sauteed mushrooms and onions), and the "great dane" (a pork sausage, with imported pickled cucumbers, ketchup and mustard dressing, and German roasted onions). They're not only pretty large, but absolutely tasty--this is, for my money, the best chicken dog I've ever had. You can also get such delights as the "champion dog" (veal & pork bratwurst topped with home-made sauerkraut and dijon), the "hound dog" (french pork andouille stuffed with aged cheddar cheese and topped with coleslaw), or any of seven veggie dogs, including the "veggie healthy dog", which comes topped with hummus and carrots. So brilliantly simple; why didn't I think of that ever? The dogs will run you $3.50, but that's still not a whole lot, and it's a fun thing to think about later.

By the way, the cup contains shoestring fries and the sauce is the "sweet Thai chili" sauce, though they also offer garlic aioli, blue cheese, honey dijon, horseradish, and tartar sauce. Again--I want to slap my forehead and ask, "Why has no one thought of these simple variations before? Why aren't they widely available outside New York?"

Also, you may see bits of powdered sugar here and there. I had a beignet. It was very good, and only cost 70 cents.