Abandoned Car

There's this jungle green Ford Expedition--Eddie Bauer Edition--parked at the corner of W. 181st and Fort Washington in such a way so that the rear 40% of the car extended into the crosswalk. The car looks to be in decent shape. I'm no mechanic, but the only exterior problems I noticed were a lack of inflation in the aft tires and a sagging in the abaft bumper that seems to be more pronounced than is normal.

I first noticed the Expedition at around 1830h on Monday, March 9. As of 1500h on Wednesday, March 11, the vehicle remained in its position, still blocking the crosswalk. The only difference I noted is that the bright orange parking tickets have multiplied overnight: there are now four slips of paper protruding from under the wipers.

So many questions. Did the person who parked the car there know that the spot is illegal? Did the driver not care? How come no one has come to retrieve the car?

I'm not sure why this fascinates me so much, but it does. If I ever write a novel, there'll be a mysterious abandoned car somehow involved in the plot.

DFW on Jobs

The New Yorker last week excerpted a short story length section of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's unfinished third novel, which will be published sometime next year. The overarching theme of this book is boredom. Lane Dean, Jr., a character in the short story, works for the IRS.

Here is how Dean, Jr. works:

Then he did two more returns, checked the clock real quick, then two more, then bore down and and did three in a row, then flexed and visualized and bore way down and did four without looking up once, except to put the completed files and memos in the two Out trays side by side up in the top tier of trays, where the cart boys could get them when they came by.

And this is how he conceives of his job:

He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connect to nothing he'll ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never goes down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind's own devices.

If all this sounds familiar, it's probably because DFW has addressed these themes before. From his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005:

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

It's interesting to gain a glimpse into how a writer develops tropes and writes about issues that matter to him. Cool.

Reading on the Internet

Two quick links to people who are thinking about how to improve reading things on the Internet.

Mandy Brown, a creative director at W.W Norton (& Co.!), wrote an article called "In Defense of Readers" for A List Apart, about webpage design:

Many sites scatter related content around the article, instead of focusing it at the top or bottom, where it’s more useful and less likely to be a distraction. If you want your users to skim the page, then by all means, fill the sidebar with content all the way down. But if you want them to read—if the page was written and not merely filled up, if the text consists of carefully crafted prose rather than bullet points—then respect the reading process and move that content elsewhere. The middle of an article should reflect the solitariness of reading with a design that neither interrupts the text nor the reader.

Related: via Kottke, something called arc90 Laboratory created this program called Readability. It basically strips away all the clutter surrounding the actual content on webpages. Their website has a better description, along with demonstrations and installation instructions.

Your illiteracy has screwed us again, Charlie!

Back let's say two months ago, I had never seen an episode of The Wire. The only things I knew about the show were that there is a cool/interesting character named Omar and that they pronounce the word "shit" in a peculiar way. Now, about 43 viewing hours into the series I have a much better sense of what the show is about and why it has been consistently ranked as one of the very greatest achievement in the history of American television. I am in the process of filling a gap in my cultural literacy.

I've been thinking about cultural literacy because I just discovered, via J.E. Skeets's twitter feed, something called Greg Rutter's Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You're a Loser or Old or Something. I don't know if it's smart to watch or read or peruse all of these things in one sitting--these are things you should have already experience, not a playlist for a Saturday night when the subway is running local or whatever. But the collection is cool because it is one guy's take on what internet literacy is for non-loser young people.

This list reminded me of an article written by Jim Emerson, on Roger Ebert's blog, about movie literacy:

On the "Brokeback Mountain" panel, I talked mainly about the film as a work in the tradition of the classical American Western, exemplified by John Ford ("Stagecoach," "The Searchers") and Howard Hawks ("Red River," "El Dorado"), and the Hollywood love story, as exemplified by Douglas Sirk ("All That Heaven Allows") and many others. You can't fully understand a contemporary work of art or pop culture unless you know at least something about its heritage -- just as Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye" (which Roger Ebert dissected shot by shot with an audience during the conference) would be meaningless without the classic private eye movies and films noir it invokes and subverts, especially "The Big Sleep" and "The Maltese Falcon." "Brokeback Mountain" is not an "anti-Western," but (in the parlance of 1973), you could definitely say that "The Long Goodbye" is an anti-noir. It's like jazz: You have to know the notes Altman isn't playing to understand how he's riffing on and around the familiar melody of the generic private detective movie.

He then provides a helpful list of the 102 "movies I just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They're the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat 'movie-literate.' I hope these movies are experiences we can all assume we share."

If You're Into It

The New York Times Magazine's weekly interview this week featured the dynamic Flight of the Conchords duo, Bret Mckenzie and Jemaine Clement. Short, but worth a read:

Do you find it surprising that you’ve managed to have a hit television show in spite of your twangy accents?
Jemaine: In New Zealand, people don’t like the New Zealand accent, so we weren’t able to get a TV show there.

The Future of TV

Via Kottke, here's an article written by Michael Hirschorn in March '09 edition of The Atlantic, titled "The Future Is Cheese," about how--starting soon--it won't make financial sense for TV networks to produce high-priced, character-heavy shows, a k a, good TV. Lots of good stuff here, including this:

As network television takes up a lower-brow position in the cultural pecking order, the higher-quality, more expensive shows will become increasingly independent of the networks that broadcast them. Eventually, networks will stop being brands and start becoming, at least in part, mere “distribution platforms,” a first stop for cultural products on their long journey through other digital media, subscription services, and mobile devices—more like movie-theater chains, in other words, than like movie studios of yore. Just as a premiere in a movie house now largely serves as a way to market the DVD, or sell products, so too is the TV “premiere” just a billboard for the show’s future life.

Can you spell your first name for me?

The basketball blogging community has devoted much virtual ink to Allen Iverson's new haircut. And with good reason: Iverson's cornrows was the defining hairstyle of the NBA for the last decade. And since the NBA is the only (popular) North American sport whose athletes don't don some type of protective headgear, AI's head stylings have been the most influential in all of sport.

TrueHoop, as part of this round-the-clock coverage, presented this video of the haircutting process.



Despite the wide-ranging cultural, racial, and stylistic meaning of the NBA's blackest player moving away from the blackest hairstyle, I was most intrigued by Iverson's barber. More specifically, I'm intrigued by his name, namely: Chaun. You can hear Iverson pronounce it right before the 3:00 mark.

Eureka! We've discovered another spelling of this name!

We can now officially add Chaun to Sean, Shawn, Shaun, and Chone.

And, just for fun, try this Mental Floss game titled "Shawn, Sean or Shaun." I only got two out of five.