Tom Waits Meets New York

Tom Waits - Potter's Field from Phil Bebbington on Vimeo.

Cool juxtaposition.

[via Roger Ebert]

Paragraph of the Week

From E.B. White's Here is New York:

A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: "This must be be saved, this particular thing, this very tree. If it were to go, all would go--this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.

How to Make it in America Credits

YouTube politely informs visitors that embedding the pilot episode of How to Make it in America is disabled by request. Presumably that request was made by HBO, which, to its credit, has agreed to screen the entire first episode of this particular TV program on YouTube. I would have liked to embed at least part of that video here, but I can't, so feel free to visit the YouTube page directly if you're interested in checking out this episode.

I bring this up not because I think this show is any good--I wouldn't know; I haven't watched past the first 67 seconds--but because the opening credits are extremely good. No less an opening-credits arbiter than Alan Sepinwall calls it "one of the best HBO's given us in a while." And it's especially cool for the New York-centric audience which I imagine the readers of this blog comprise.

I think these credits are interesting because New York resentment seems pretty popular these days. There is, of course, the (false) dichotomy drawn between Wall Street and Main Street. And the sentiment expressed by some politicians over the past two years that New York isn't the "real" America. But these opening credits, combined with that song about an empire state of mind, demonstrate a sort of celebration of New York by some artistic types. Now, granted, the target demographics those politicians were trying to hit differ pretty dramatically from Jay-Z and HBO fans. It would be easy to conclude this post with some half-developed idea about the fracturing of American society. But I'm not sure that there's a larger point here, and, if there is, I'm fairly certain the fracturing of American society wouldn't be it. As a New Yorker, though, I appreciate the cultural attention being paid to the city. I think a couple songs and a montage or two is the least we deserve for cramming ourselves into subways and enduring a cost-of-living index more than double the national average.

Ad Alert

Hello and welcome to Ad Alert, a possibly recurring feature of this blog in which I list instances of advertising that freak me out.

Let's start with the story that's received probably the most attention, that of the M.T.A. selling the naming rights to a Brooklyn subway station to the London-based bank, Barclays. I think I'll let The New York Times raise a few questions:

This raises a few questions. An academic might talk of the intersection between public and private space. A straphanger may ask how all those names can fit into one announcement.

And if a company can pay to get its name on any station, a New Yorker might wonder what’s next: Coca-Cola Presents 59th Street-Columbus Circle?

The answer is maybe. Once upon a time, geographic relevance determined a station’s name, but now, the authority says it is open to any naming agreements that can raise revenue for its transit system, including ones not directly tied to location.

[snip]

Still, while selling station names could bring the authority revenue it needs, advertising experts say companies may not be as well-served.

“To be effective, the viewer needs to understand the relevance of the ad,” said Allen Adamson of Landor, a branding firm. “To rename the 59th and Lex stop the McDonald’s stop — it ain’t going to work. I don’t think it will stick.”

So not only is the M.T.A. possibly betraying its stewardship for $200,000 annually over the next 20 years (this might sound like a decent chunk of change, until you remember that the M.T.A. is facing a $1.2 billion deficit in 2009; yikes), but the plan might not even be effective. Alrighty.

On a related note, I was thoroughly confused by the new subway turnstiles at Penn Station's A Train stop, sponsored by H&M. Unlike the subway station naming rights, this idea actually makes some sense--it's a way to cover some of that $1.2 billion deficit without being too intrusive. Except the execution is horrific. Via the DesignNotes blog, here's what this bad boy looks like:

Double yikes. The alternate price listing is confusing as hell, especially in light of of the new subway fares, but I was more annoyed by the bright red coloration; as I first approached this new revenue model, I grew concerned that the subway station was closed and that I'd have to find a different train. Did H&M agree to this deal only if the finished product would be guaranteed to confuse subway riders?

Lastly, because I'm cool like that, I spent last Saturday night playing Guitar Hero with a few friends, and I noticed one similarity in all the disparate guitar hero venues: the conspicuous presence of Coca-Cola bottles and KFC containers sitting on a table. So there are now product placements in a video game that my friends paid for. This is quite a bit more disturbing than product placements in, for example, 30 Rock; that is a show that is, for the most part, provided free of charge, whether on Hulu or regular TV. If traditional advertising rates no longer can cover the costs of the show, then I understand the need to seek out alternative options. But Guitar Hero isn't something that is distributed free of charge--my friends had to pay money for it. And you can be sure that the video game isn't any cheaper because of the ads. What's next? Are we going to have product placements in novels? That possibility makes me nervous.

Paris, Rebooted

As part of The New York Times Magazine's recent Architecture issue, Nicolai Ouroussoff composed an article titled "Remaking Paris," examining the effort of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to improve one of the world's most iconic cities. According to Ouroussoff,

One of the first things Sarkozy did after he moved into the Elysée Palace was to convene a meeting of prominent architects and ask them to come up with a new blueprint for Paris. “Of course,” he said, “projects should be realistic, but for me true realism is the kind that consists in being very ambitious.” His job was to clean up the city’s working-class suburbs, and at the same time build a greener Paris, the first city to conform to the environmental goals laid out in the Kyoto treaty.

It's no secret that I'm fascinated by how cities work. I worked on compiling the index for the recently published Cities, Citizens, and Technologies: Urban Life and Postmodernity (a fine title, if I've ever seen one), and, more important, I attended a class taught by that book's author. That's really the extent of my formal training in architecture and city-planning, so many of the details described by Ouroussoff were lost on me. Also, I'm sure my comprehension of the various plans wasn't aided by the fact that I've spent a grand total of five days in Paris, with most of that time devoted to eating in restaurants and looking at things in museums. (Though, if you do want to learn more about what the various proposals would entail, there is a helpful narrated slideshow accompanying the article on the website; I would embed that slideshow here, if only The...Times allowed its videos to be embedded.) No, the really fascinating part of the article is Ouroussoff's conclusion, reproduced below for your edification:

Sarkozy has asked the 10 architectural teams working on the Paris plan to collaborate and produce a more cohesive blueprint for the future. The chances of a definitive plan emerging from such an effort seem remote — and even if one does, architecture won’t solve all the city’s social ills. Nonetheless, the Grand Paris project represents a critical shift in how we think of urbanism. The tabula rasa Modernist experiments of the 1960s and 1970s not only damaged cities across the world; their failure spelled the abandonment of visionary master planning. In places where large-scale urban projects did re-emerge, like China and the Middle East, older, poorer neighborhoods were often bulldozed to make room for new development at a frenetic pace, with little regard for how the pieces fit together.

The plans presented for Grand Paris suggest that it is possible to believe, once again, that government can play a decisive role in achieving a truly egalitarian city — and that architecture is essential to that transformation.

The goals of Sarkozy's project diverge strikingly from New York City's prime example of this type of city-engineering, that of Robert Moses's quest to incorporate large public works projects into the city and to improve automobile access in the five boroughs. The goals of the Paris plan --creating a city that is both egalitarian and green--are undoubtedly worthwhile and should be pursued. It might be because I've watched too much of The Wire in the past six months, but I find it hard to be optimistic that governments and its related bureaucracies can make decisions for the long-term public good, rather than for the short-term benefit of politicians. Time will tell if Sarkozy manages to pull this off. If he does, it might go a long way in allaying doubts about the effectiveness of what governments can do for cities.

Who let the bulls out?

January 9 will mark the beginning of the Professional Bull Riding Built Ford Tough Invitational tournament, held in Madison Square Garden. This particular Invitational tournament will occur daily throughout this weekend, and ticket prices range from $10 to $195.

Now: I'm not going to attend any of the PBR events because I'd rather watch football this weekend. But I can't help but appreciate from afar the sheer incongruity of a Professional Bull Riding event being held in the middle of the town in Manhattan. I worked today within a block of MSG and passed, on my way to the subway, a giant 18-wheeler-style truck parked next to the "World's Most Famous Arena," which contained a few extremely-bundled-up men selling bull-riding bandannas and t-style shirts and caps and who knows what else. Country music blasted from a jerry-rigged speaker system.

Is this the greatest possible instance of transplanting foreign values? Does anyone who lives within reasonable traveling distance from Manhattan actually care about bull-riding? Or--as would be the case with me, if I would, y'know, attend--is everyone buying tickets because it seems like a funny thing to do in NYC?

If any TDS readers will attend this event, I will happily publish a report.