Publishing School and the Bat-Man Experience

In some ways publishing school is very different than the normal type of school. I've met, for example, more NYT bestselling authors (=two) in the last ten days than I have in the previous 23 or so years of my life (=0). But in other, more different ways, publishing school is pretty much the same as regular school. We get homework, our teachers give us grades, we eat in a cafeteria and complain about the food (Plain vegetables from the salad bar again? Keeping Kosher rocks.), and the ratio of females to males is 8.6:1. But, most importantly, we love field trips. Box factory it wasn't, but the publishing factory (or, company) was pretty OK. They even gave us a flimsy folder and a free book. Publishing school: like regular school, except with way more copy-editing.

I went last night to see that new moving picture about the bat-man. I'm not going to share my thoughts on the film itself because there are plenty of people way smarter than I writing about movies on the internet. But I do want to relay some thoughts about the film-viewing experience. It was pretty much unlike any other film-viewing experience I've ever experienced. On Sunday, I ordered a ticket to the Tuesday night, 1900h showing at the local i-maximum theater. By the time I emailed out to the publishing school listserv to invite some fellow publishing students to join me, the show was sold out. So I went by my lonesome. (Not the first time I've gone to a movie theater by myself, by the way; it's not too bad.) I didn't really know where I was going (Did you know that maps.google.com now gives directions via public transport? Take that hopstop!), so I left early and arrived early. By the time I showed up at 1820h, there were around 100 people--who had already purchased tickets--waiting on line inside the theater. Around five minutes later, the theater workers finished sweeping up from the previous show, the doors were dramatically thrown open, and all ~100 people scrambled in to find good seats. I've never been to a movie where all the good seats were taken a full half of an hour before the previews even started. (I managed to get a good seat.) The crowd was pretty much engrossed in the film while it was showing (i-maximum makes it hard not to be completely engrossed; take that, peripheral vision!). The audience erupted into applause as the movie finished (not so surprising, especially for your blogger, a veteran of the AMC Theater in West Orange), but I was surprised by some of the more intimate post-viewing reactions. I saw a bunch of couples--young and old--kinda hugging and kissing, as if they just experienced a seminal moment in their relationship. I got the sense that people viewed this viewing as some sort of important historic event. It may have been. I just think that it's pretty interesting that people reacted like that.

Just when I thought I said something in an effective manner, I notice that The Onion said a better thing way more effectively.

From July 15:

Going To Tops Of Things Still Favored By Nation's Tourists

NEW YORK—According to a report released Monday by the American Tourism Society, going to the tops of things is still the preferred activity among the nation's tourists. "Although driving past things and swimming in things have both grown in popularity over the last decade, going to the tops of things still surpasses both by nearly 30 percent," said ATS president Kimberly Davis, who was careful to point out that the photographing of things was not included in the report, since the near constant occurrence of this activity makes its frequency impossible to calculate. "In 2008, tourists remained committed to standing in long lines at the bottoms of things, paying upwards of $20 to gain access to the tops of those things, and then staring at other smaller, more distant things for a few minutes before descending, often to have funny pictures of themselves drawn incorporating the things in the background." Davis added that, perhaps as a consequence of the declining economy, the purchasing of miniature representations of the things that tourists enjoy going to the tops of has dropped by 14 percent.

I have nothing to add. Well played, The Onion.

A Summer of Firsts

I've done many a thing this summer which I had not previously--in my life--done. For example, this summer I, for the first time,...

• did laundry by myself,
• ate foie gras,
  
• slept in a waterbed (my verdict: kinda cool because you can sorta rock yourself to sleep by just moving around a little, but, ultimately, waterbeds are only a sometimes bed because you can't sit up on [in?] them, they're mad hard to get out of, and I woke up with a sore back; but it was fun to try, even if I kept worrying that the thing would pop, because that seems to be the thing that happens to waterbeds on TV),
• stepped foot in the part of this country between Cleveland and California (I think the technical title of this is the mid-coast),
  
• drank absinthe, twice, and I didn't hate it the second time,
• attended a non-Jewish institution of higher learning, and I'm not sure what took me so long,
• prayed with old Sefardi-type men in Spain,
• visited Europe (that time like ten years ago I spent two hours in the airport in London doesn't even come close to counting),
• saw a bull-fight (and that was, I can guarantee, the last time I'll see a bull-fight),
• did pilates,
• saw a popular moving picture on an i-maximum screen,
• um, rode in a hybrid car.

There's probably more, but I think we're way past the still-interesting line.

Turning the Tables on Tourists

It must have been the morning of July 3, in the small city of Granada, when I was walking around the El-Hambra, this really pretty 14th C. royal city sitting on a hill. It's pretty much the only tourist attraction in Granada. Every guide book we came across mentioned the local phrase, "If you haven't seen El-Hambra, you haven't lived."

I learned a very important lesson that day: Just because some tour books insist that you go see something, and just because the local population will question the very terms of your existence if you don't visit this thing, doesn't mean that you should feel compelled to visit the in question thing.

Because I have a secret: El-Hambra is boring.

Sure it's pretty, but, after a certain point (which point, I suppose, came after two weeks in Europe, spent looking at museums and things built by kings), pretty architecture isn't all that interesting. Ooh, look! Another fountain! And, oh, over there, another fountain! I never would have expected that this courtyard would also have a fountain!

After a couple of hours walking around, trying to force myself into being interested in like these carvings they have in every door frame, I just stopped pretending. This place was boring and I knew it. We didn't have a tour guide, and we didn't have those little audio guides. I was just looking at stuff I didn't understand. And, as we all know, looking at stuff you don't understand just isn't all that interesting, e.g., Magic Eye books. I always hated those things. They just made me dizzy, and I could never see that stupid clown who was supposedly lurking in the background. El-Hambra didn't make me dizzy, but I also didn't see any clowns walking around there.

Now that I was no longer distracted by all the architecture, I could afford to think a little bit about what was going on around me. All these tourists were just walking around, taking pictures of everything and anything. But these pictures weren't of anything interesting. They were just taking pictures because, by gum, that's just what you did on vacation while visiting a tourist attraction. And I thought to myself, I thought:

If these tourists can take pictures of boring things, what's to stop me from taking pictures of them taking pictures of boring things? There might not be anything interesting about my pictures, but at least they'd be meta-.

I decided that the next time I find myself with time to kill--let's say maybe starting in mid-August if I'm unemployed--I'd go around to different tourist sites around New York, taking pictures of those picture-taking tourists. I would spin this off into its own blog, get linked to by all the important blogs, and make a few bucks on the royalty advance from the inevitable book deal. But, not surprisingly, the interwebs were way out in front of me. Like so, and like so.

I'm not entirely satisfied with any of these existing efforts, so maybe there is still time for me to work on this project. But for now, I'll post a wonderful piece of writing excerpted from Don DeLillo's novel White Noise.

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

"No one sees the barn," he said finally.

A long silence followed.

"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."

Another silence ensued.

"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

"What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?"

Maybe one day I'll take pictures of taking pictures.

Thank goodness I still live in a world with telephones, car batteries, handguns [*bang*!] and many things made of zinc.

There's this extremely nerdy website which presents what most probably is the world's first interactive Periodic Table of the Elements. By clicking on any of the little element boxes, the interwebular traveler is escorted on a journey to an educational video explaining that element. Sodium, not surprisingly, is the most watched video. The internet has spoken, declaring sodium to be the most popular element.

I suppose this is a worthwhile educational tool, for those poor high schoolers forced to "learn" chemistry, but I can't figure out why they don't have a video ready for Zinc. There's tons of good zinc videos out there, ready to be linked to, like so:

Metropolis Notes

• The Paris Metro system has a helpful monitor in almost every station letting the Metro-rider know when the next two trains will arrive.
• The Madrid Metro system has a helpful monitor in every station letting the Metro-rider know when the next train will arrive.
• The Barcelona Metro system has a helpful monitor--which even counts seconds, although this measure is often inaccurate--in every station letting the Metro-rider know when the next train will arrive.
• Each bus (!) stop in both Seville and Granada has a helpful monitor letting the bus-rider know when the next bus will arrive.
• Madrid and Barcelona are the only two cities I've seen which have flat, stretch-out-upon benches in their Metro stations. Most cities avoid this so that people don't sleep on these benches. During my three days in each of Madrid and Barcelona I didn't see anyone sleeping on these relatively comfortable Metro benches, but I did see many people sleeping on benches in the parks of Madrid. (But it was during Siesta time, so maybe it is acceptable for businessmen, doctors, etc., to sleep on benches in the park during this part of the day. Siesta still confuses me.)
• All the parks in Paris have these green metal chairs, which come in two varieties: 1) normal sitting chairs and 2) normal sitting chairs which are slightly reclined. The cool part about these chairs is that they are not bolted to the ground. Pedestrians are allowed to pick up these chairs and move them about. On a warm end-of-June morning in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the park was fairly crowded, but there were plenty of available chairs. New York City has one or two such parks, including the awesome looking and as yet unvisited by me Paley Park.
  
• According to P. Geyh:

• Defined by originator David Belle as “an art to help you pass any obstacle”, the practice of “parkour” or “free running” constitutes both a mode of movement and a new way of interacting with the urban environment. Parkour was created by Belle (partly in collaboration with his childhood friend Sébastien Foucan) in France in the late 1980s. As seen in the following short video “Rush Hour”, a trailer for BBC One featuring Belle, parkour practitioners (known as “traceurs”), leap, spring, and vault from objects in the urban milieu that are intended to limit movement (walls, curbs, railings, fences) or that unintentionally hamper passage (lampposts, street signs, benches) through the space.

• I don't know if it would be fair to say that Parkour could only have been conceived of in a place like France--and not, for instance, in New York--because of the presence of several hundred unmoored chairs in Paris's parks, but I'm fairly confident that the ability to personalize (to, in a way, overcome) the urban environement didn't hurt Mr. Belle in this regard.
  

Weird Childhood Histories, Part 1

My current height of five-ten-ish almost exactly matches my height from 1999 (and every year in between then and now), when I was 14. Doing all my vertical growing in this short time period gave me a real edge on the basketball court, where I took advantage of those short, unbearded boys. It's no coincidence that the absolute prime of my athletic career stretched over the summers of '99-'00, before all those little boys somehow outgrew me. Around 10th grade, I found myself stuck in the unenviable position of being an undersized power forward in the ultra-competitive Yeshiva League. I attribute the moderate functionality which defined my high school basketball career to the length of my arms. They're longer than they, by rights, should be. It's generally assumed that your height (in inches) should equal your wingspan (also in inches). I would be willing to wager an ice cream that my wingspan is greater than the 70 or so inches of my height. I would tell you a more precise measurement if I wasn't now in Denver, lacking a tape-measure and any acquaintance of more than three days (that would be a fun ice-breaker: Hi, nice to meet you. Want to measure my arms?).

In my elementary school we had these annoying little annual government mandated fitness tests, where we had to do things like run a mile in less than eight minutes or do as many pull-ups as we could before our arms fell off. My favorite--by far--was the flexibility test. We had to sit down on the floor of the gym, spread our legs out to the sides in a vaguely V shape, and reach forward as far as possible. You were given a score measuring how far your fingers reached past your feet. Some of my friends couldn't reach all the way to their feet, for which they earned a score of like -2 inches, leading me to make fun of their negative flexibility. There were some girls, obviously, who were actually flexible, did full-fledged splits, and turned in a good reach. I liked this test the best because it was the only one I ever actually passed. I was just as inflexible as all the rest of the boys--probably even more so, in terms of real-life flexibility--but, thanks to my arms, I was able to consistently attain scores in the +3 to +6 range.

The Coors Fitness Center of the University of Denver offers classes in such fields as: Core-Ruption, Ab Blast, Power Sculpt, Kick Boxing, and Vinyasa Yoga (I'm not sure why, but I get the sense that all that training Batman does with Ras Al Ghoul in the snowy mountains was some form of Vinyasa Yoga). I'm not going to try any of those classes because they would probably kill me. But I did attend yesterday morning (at 0730h) a class entitled Intro To Yoga (every initial letter of every word in every class title is capitalized in the Summer 2008 Coors Fitness Center Schedule). It turned out that this class was taught by a sub. The class behaved pretty OK, but the instructor was more of a pilates person, so we ended doing that (not that I would have realized the difference). No one there was fooled by the length of my arms. Even the old guy on the far left side of the studio was way more flexible than I. I haven't been this sore in awkward muscles since trapeze school.