Goodbye, Gates!

I went and said goodbye to The Gates today. I didn't bring my camera this time. (Which doesn't mean I didn't wish I had it with me. The possessive, disruptive lust is unrelenting.) The place was packed. What else could bring so many people to the Park in winter? I think the Times had it right when it said that it was like everyone was a dignitary on parade. I overheard a few people trying to understand the profit angle (there isn't any). Ah, capitalists. The whole thing is very democratic: it's free, it brings everybody out. I think the iPod is sort of the paid version of this: even insanely rich superstars own iPods (and Sidekicks, apparently ;-) ) because they're hip and best-of-breed, but they're cheap enough that average people can get them and feel connected with folks who are otherwise distant.

Best Gates parody: duh, The Crackers.

I arrived at The Gates by walking up 10th Ave, after discovering that the galleries at 25th and 26th are closed on Sundays. 10th Ave is an adventure in itself. It features unMahatthanlike gas stations, a drive-through McDonald's, rail yards, parking lots. I saw a massive postal truck manuever into a dock with fewer corrections than it takes me to park in an angled spot. ;-) There's also a hideous windowless AT&T equipment building (which has a twin downtown).

All sorts of other exciting things have been going on that I've neglected to write about. Learning to ski, getting better at ice skating, improving marginally at basketball, accidentally running 7 miles, eating at Artisanal and Restaraunt Saul, watching Bend it Like Beckham and Closer, friends getting engaged, finishing Peace War and slogging through The Brothers Karamazov, America's Next Top Model, the family on Wife Swap that lived in a bus.

Passage I've meaning to copy out of Brothers K., of ironic sky-is-falling lonely bowling relevance:

For everyone now strives most of all to separate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of his efforts is not the fullness of life but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation. For all men in our age are separated into units, each seeks seclusion in his own hole, each withdraws from the others, hides himself, and hides what he has, and ends by pushing himself away from people and pushing people away from himself. He accumulates wealth in solitude, thinking: how strong, how secue I am now; and does not see, madman as he is, that the more he accumulates, the more he sinks into suicidal impotence. For he is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people's help, in people or mankind, and now only trembles les his money and acquired privileges persish. Everywhere now the human mind has begun laughably not to understand that a
man's true security lies not in his own solitary effort, but in the general wholeness of humanity.

Cool find: Jonathan Sanfran Foer reading his first chapter.

Another cheap Google plug

We were talking last night about how the next OC episode is another movie homage/rip off, but I couldn't remember the name of the movie where the people are locked in a Target. Enter our snazzy new movie search and a tip from Mihai (thanks Mihai!). locked in a Target brought Career Opportunities right to the top!

Today's fun Google wildcard search

best * ever

Great, George

So, I was watching CNN and I saw George Bush say:

The propagandists have done a better job of depicting America as a hateful place, a place wanting to impose our form of government on people and our religion on people. And it's -- and we're behind when it comes to selling our own story and telling people the truth about America.

This is obviously a ridiculous statement. We are imposing our government upon them, and Bush is the one who is taking the lead in morphing democracy into theocracy here at home.

But, if you look at CNN's article about Bush, you find

"The propagandists have done a better job of depicting America as a hateful place, a place wanting to impose our form of thought and our religion on people," he said.

I admit that this is probably what Bush meant, but it sure as hell is not what he said. I'd like to think it's a Freudian slip from our Pathological Liar in Chief.

Whence marriage?

I went to the beautiful wedding of Catherine's friend in Birmingham this weekend, but I had been reading too much Brothers K and was in an overly analytical mood. When the minister described marriage and love as if both originated from and were the exclusive province of a Christian God, I found myself wondering about the institution of marriage. I was kind of surprised that I had read so little explaining how we got to the point where churches sanctified and appropriated what must have at one point been the spontaneous union of two people to form a family. I found some random articles and the Wikipedia entry but I'm still not satisfied. Still looking for something better. Maybe it's worth finding a book?

Wikipedia is fun

I've been on a big Wikipedia-reading kick lately. I think it started when Catherine started asking me about Hinduism, and all I really knew was that Krishna stole butter and ate it and killed a serpent in the lake. Today, for kicks, I looked up "water sports", which was disambiguated into the secondary definition of Urolagnia. I feel much more educated after reading up on this topic. The one thing that worries me most about Wikipedia is the stories I've heard about people who made subtle alterations to pages, changing, say, the number of home runs of some obscure baseball player, and have had it gone unnoticed (despite general success in identifying vandalism). I like the idea of editors - maybe they could periodically mark release branches, just like in code development. Speaking of Wikipedia, the live recent changes feed is slick.

Funny

I would never do this.