Englishman in New York

THE CRUDDIEST MOMENT OF THE CRAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE ON EARTH happened as I found myself watching five televisions simultaneously, each containing a different political pundit opining on the same subject. When I looked down toward my computer screen to see what the bloggers were saying about it, I noticed that a button on my shirt had come undone.

There I was, literally contemplating my own navel. But I didn’t even crack a smile because, in the relentless drone of insipid opinion, irony no longer held any meaning.

I knew then that this whole thing had been a very poor idea, one from which I would not return undamaged. Because the clock on the wall said I still had 14 hours to go.

So begins a phenomenal feature, Cruel and Usual Punishment, by the Washington Post’s humor writer Gene Weingarten, who locked himself in a room with just TV news, blogs and talk radio for company for 24 hours. Here’s a little more:

During the last years of his life, when my father’s eyesight began to go, he started hallucinating. He was seeing colorful little people in military uniforms dancing into his fuzzy line of sight; of all the images he could still make out, only these little people were completely and consistently clear. Diagnosis: He was not going mad. He was going blind, and when the brain finds itself starving for imagery, it sometimes creates its own.

Something of the opposite was happening to me: Overwhelmed with words and imagery, harangued with opinion, beset by twaddle, my brain hungered for simplicity and found it. What happens is that you focus on small things. For example, you suddenly become aware that sometime in the last few years, as if in a heinous conspiracy of the dimwitted, Americans have decided that the second month of the year is pronounced Feb-ooh-ery. Not Feb-RU-ery, which is correct, or Feb-YOU-ery, which is ignorant but tragically legitimized by the dictionary, but Feb-OOH-ery, which is a national disgrace far greater, in my opinion, than dissing the Marines. Or so it seems at the moment.

I am still seething over this when I notice an interesting two-pronged phenomenon. Prong one is that there is often an amusing disconnect between the subject of a broadcast and the subject of the news crawl beneath it. Prong two is that if you have five TVs on at the same time, and each features a talking head with the sound muted, and you also have a radio playing, it is very often possible to find one muted talking head whose lips happen to synch uncannily with the radio. And so, with only a little mental effort, one can watch a TV screen upon which George W. Bush strides purposefully down a path beside the White House, looking solemn and concerned, stands at a lectern and begins to speak in Laura Ingraham’s voice, whining about condoms, while below him runs a crawl reading, “Man Carrying Adult Diapers Kills Woman With Meat Cleaver.”

(Via Sacred Facts)

Related:
Curel and Usual Punishment (WaPo)
Short video of Weingarten experiment.\ (WaPo)
Transcript of Online Chat with Weingarten (WaPo)

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Pavement Films hit the streets of my neighborhood Prospect Heights a couple of weeks ago for Anorak.co.uk. You can’t move around here for Obama stickers, so we thought it would interesting to ask local residents why they were so excited by the Senator from Illinois. It was the Saturday before Obama’s now famous speech, but unsurprisingly the issue of race was never far from the surface.

By the way, our first video has been viewed over 4,700 times in the past month. Hardly an internet phenomenon, but not bad for a pair of Brits in New York. (And no small tribute to the filming and editing skills of A Brooklyn Lad.)

Related:
Race in the White House (YouTube)
Pavement Films Premier (EiNY)

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Welcome to Beijing airport’s new terminal three. As William Langewiesche reports for Vanity Fair, the floors are not the only area that the Chinese government is intent on having squeaky clean in time for the Olympic Games.

At the forefront stand the 15 million residents of Greater Beijing. In preparation for the Games, a municipal agency called the Capital Ethics Development Office is trying to whip them into shape, with campaigns against spitting on the street, using foul language (even though in Chinese), or getting rowdy while watching, for instance, Ping-Pong matches on TV. A survey conducted by Renmin University in 2007 showed that progress was being made (naturally), and that over the previous year public spitting had been reduced by 2.41 percent. According to the Chinese state news service, the survey was based on observations from 300,000 people at 320 public places and in 200,000 cars. Littering was down 2.44 percent. Meanwhile, the Civic Index was up by 4.32 percent. The Civic Index scores the Beijing population on its compliance with rules regarding public health and public order, attitudes toward strangers, etiquette at sporting events, and demonstrable enthusiasm for the Olympic Games. I myself have conducted a survey, based on 457.5 observations, and have concluded that 98 percent of the Chinese lack any measurable sense of irony. This is a preliminary finding only, and further funding is required, but there is no doubt that the Chinese Earnestness Index is extremely high. The 11th of every month is now officially Queuing Day, when people are expected to give up their traditional scrums and practice standing in orderly lines. The date was chosen as a variation of pictographic script, because the two digits 1 and 1, when placed together to form 11, represent the expected behavior during the upcoming world championship in delays. And, sure enough, on the 11th of every month Beijing residents earnestly go about the assigned practice, temporarily transforming the city into a variation of a Germanic ideal. Individualism then re-asserts itself on every 12th, but the Queuing Days help, and the Capital Ethics Development Office expects that the coming months will continue to show improvements.

Related:
Beijing’s Olympic Nightmare (Vanity Fair)

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Did anyone lose a pair of Prada glasses this weekend? (Via Kottke.)

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Our former housemate’s brother, Mark, has made a couple of appearances on this blog over the years, most recently with his plea to borrow thirty or more flights of stairs so that he could train for the annual Empire State Building Run-Up. (I never did find out how that went.) Anyway, he’s back. And this time he’s cooking chili con carne. Very strange to see our old kitchen at 31st street in Brooklyn, my first home in New York.

Related:
Brother Mark’s chili con carne recipe (Moose Productions)
Has Anyone Got Any Stairs? (EiNY)

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Sometimes the New York Times’ London correspondent Sarah Lyall really makes me homesick. Here’s an excerpt from her latest report on the much-maligned town of Slough:

The town is close to London, and has a $5 billion economy, one of Europe’s largest industrial parks and companies like Black & Decker, Amazon and Computer Associates. Because it is such a magnet for business, “people see it as a symbol for modern life” — one conveniently located next to three major highways, said Rob Anderson, a borough council member.

“We don’t do wisteria around the door and quaint little cottages,” he said. “If you want to go on holiday, go to Windsor. If you want to make money, come to Slough.”

The local government recently announced plans to spend $800 million to transform Slough’s tired downtown in the next decade. That could not come soon enough for 69-year-old Jim Hall, sipping a pint of lager in the March drizzle outside the Moon and Spoon pub, at a busy intersection in the center of town.

“It’s an ugly place, isn’t it?” he said, speaking above the din of the traffic and gesturing down the street, with its preponderance of concrete buildings. In the distance loomed the Brunel bus station and parking garage, Slough’s most prominent landmark.

Mr. Hall said that people in Slough are no more unhappy than people elsewhere in Britain. “I think people like to moan sometimes for the sake of it,” he said. “I don’t know why they bother, sometimes — nobody listens.”

Emma Cornelius, 36, who works for an American communications company in Slough, said that geographic satisfaction was all relative.

“If you had a choice of Slough or anywhere else in the area, Slough would be the last town you’d come to,” she said. “But compared to Watford, it’s fabulous.”

Or, as 16-year-old Diane Cotterell said: “It’s not the worst place in Britain; there are worse places, like Liverpool.”

Darren Hipkin, 30, a co-worker of Ms. Cornelius, said that while Slough’s downtown was slightly downtrodden, the atmosphere hardly joyous, its residents suffered merely from the things that other Britons did — “the economy, the taxes, this and that, you seem to be earning less and spending more.”

Actually, given the realities of the world, he said, he sometimes found himself perplexed, even annoyed, by the relentless enthusiasm of his American colleagues. “They get on the phone and say, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ ” he said, putting on a peppy voice. “You think, ‘Hang on, it’s Monday morning — I just got up.’ ”

Related:
A Town Trying Not to Live Up to Its Name (NYT)
Little Britain (EiNY)

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During our week in Costa Rica we saw capuchin monkeys every day and howler monkeys a couple of times, but we only saw this fellow, a spider monkey, once.

This picture was taken during a guided tour of Curu, a nature reserve about an hour’s drive from Montezuma on the Nicoya Peninsula. Spider monkeys are almost extinct in this part of Costa Rica, and Curu runs a program to reintroduce rescued and abandoned monkeys back into the wild. (I managed to get so close to this guy because he used to be someone’s pet. I hope to have a video up shortly.)

Curu is a great place to visit. The reserve is dedicated to rescuing and protecting threatened species such as Scarlet McCaws and crocodiles. And it’s packed with a variety of animals, including capuchin and howler mokeys, agoutis, ocelots, white-tailed deer and margays. It’s also full of birds, from hawks to hummingbirds, and a wide range of butterflies, including the spectacular morpho.

According to our guide, Curu was established by a European immigrant, Frederico Schutt, who bought the seventy hectares of land in the 1930’s for $5. His very elderly wife, Julietta, still lives in a house on the property with no electricity or running water. During our visit we passed one of her sons driving a herd of cattle through the woods on horseback. Quite another world from New York. What I wouldn’t give for an editor to send me back to write a feature about the place.

Related:
Howlers (EiNY)
Montezuma Holiday (EiNY)
The View From My Hammock (EiNY)
Costa Rica Wildlife (EiNY)

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Even the New York Post was smitten:

OBAMA’S RACIAL CANDOR

March 19, 2008 — Sen. Barack Obama went before the nation yesterday and delivered a refreshingly candid analysis of the impact of race in American life.

Whether the address resolves the questions many have about his relationship with his racially extreme former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is another matter.

Only time will tell.

But the speech was well-crafted and nuanced, recognizing the legacy of racism and discrimination in the nation while letting no one off the hook.

Obama condemned Rev. Wright’s toxic rhetoric - that God should not “bless America, but rather “damn America,” that 9/11 was a case of “America’s chickens coming home to roost” and that America has “supported state terrorism against Palestinians” - but attempted to place the slurs in a broader generational context.

“For the men and women of Rev. Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years . . . At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings,” he said.

But he didn’t excuse black anger: “All too often . . . it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.”

Obama said that he sees the flaw in Wright’s worldview, which preaches self-help on the one hand while screaming about racism on the other: “What my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

“The profound mistake of Rev. Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country . . . is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know - what we have seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation,” Obama said.

This is an important truth - of particular relevance to racial grievance-mongers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton - and it speaks to Obama’s own remarkable rise to political prominence.

This he also spoke to yesterday: “I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”

That is to say, if America is as bad as Rev. Wright would have it, the Barack Obama phenomenon would not remotely have been possible.

The senator did well to say so.

(MSNBC video via Clive Davis.)

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