I was walking down Hudson Street, past the magazine store that’s between 12th and Jane, and was literally stopped in my tracks by espying, out of the corner of my little eye, the magazine cover depicted above in the window of the store. Though a fruitcake of longstanding, I am not particularly susceptible to many of the commonplace obsessions of my tribe — including fashion and supermodels — with one notable exception. Even an atheistic rat bows before an icon as formidable as Linda Evangelista. The defining quality of an idol is pure inviolable existence by regard and Evangelista, her face perfect and perfectly plastic, commands our attention — it is impossible to be near her image and not notice it.

Click to zoom

And this cover image is a minor miracle. For its annual art issue, W Magazine asked art world wiseguy, Maurizio Cattelan to use Evangelista as his canvas for a photo spread. Many of the images he made — including one of her as the Madonna — are visually fun and more or less interesting (if a bit obvious). But the cover shot is a tour de force. In one shot, taken outside NYU in Washington Square, Cattelan distills the world of the day into one hilarious snarky frame. A soldier, perhaps home from Iraq, walks past a black Obama stand-in and, in the middle of it all, a distraught socialite stares vacantly into the distance and silently holds her plaint/protest. By putting such a blatantly sarcastic and ironic tableau on its cover, Cattelan reminds us — in the midst of a collapsed economy — of the essentially elitist, detached and mocking nature of fashion. In the picture, Evangelista wears $1.5 million in real diamonds… and they’re merely decoration. Brilliant. Bravo to Cattelan and the ballsy W editors.

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One of the joys of adulthood is inventing playful ways of masking vices as virtues, for example: I tell myself that I can avoid going to the gym (again) by taking a very long walk – it’s more mentally stimulating and better for my heart to boot! The fact that the very long walk will terminate at my favorite restaurant in Chinatown, where I will consume 10x the calories that I burned walking – see, that’s the playful part. Here’s another example: I crave pancakes like Kirstie Alley craves… well, pancakes, probably. Steaming hot buttermilk pancakes soaked in butter and real maple syrup is a simply perfect food – but one I shouldn’t indulge too often. Or should I? I happen to live in a city with 34 thousand restaurants – many of which serve breakfast. I also happen to have a blog (…see where this is going?) It is my responsibility to my loyal readers – nay, my duty –  to hunt down the best pancakes in New York City, eat them and report on it here. And so I shall.

The first stop on my flapjack odyssey took me to Pershing Square – an odd little venue wedged into the underside of a trestle outside the main entrance of Grand Central Station. On the strength of another blogger’s glowing revue on one of the foodie blogs, which referred to the pancakes at Pershing Square as “the best” in the city, I forded a river of tourists one early Sunday morning to take a window seat and sample what they had to offer.

Being a purist of the old school I ordered the plain buttermilk variety – a pristine palette, unsullied by complicating fruit – upon which to asses the chef’s skills and they arrived in short order and steaming hot. Good sign. But they arrived without butter. I chalked that up to the frantic pace of the restaurant and the clearly harried waiter. But now I suspect it was by design, that the butter was loaded into the batter. As you can see from the photo, the platter arrived looking close to perfect: an ideal serving size of three cakes each about 5 inches in diameter, not too thin or too thick and browned just enough to provide the toasty caramelized flavor we love without tasting burned. I’m partial to thinner pancakes – they stack better and aren’t as “cakey” in your mouth as thick ones can be – but there was something odd about the mouth feel of these cakes. I literally gagged on the first mouthful — it got stuck in my throat — and I had to wash it down with hot coffee. They tasted good but felt gummy, though they were cooked through, and I suspect it was because of too much fat in the batter. Buzz kill. The pure maple syrup accompanying the cakes was not warmed just room temperature – but at least not cold out of the fridge. The blueberry and strawberry garnish was pretty but irrelevant.

I’m not sure how someone could consider these pancakes to be the best in the city – but I’ll allow that maybe they were having an off day at Pershing Square. However considering that they weren’t cheap ($12 for 3 cakes), I’m not sure I’d be willing to front them the money for another try.

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I made a pilgrimage this afternoon to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue to see something special: a draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand. For a moment I resisted the impulse to go, arguing with myself over the value of totems when what really matters are the ideas, not the artifacts, blah blah blah. Thankfully I lost that argument with myself. Totems and artifacts are important – they bind us to the particulars of abstract ideas and history; they allow us to imaginatively jump across the expanse of time and connect directly with the humanity of our ancestors. They help remind us that history, of even the most momentous variety, is made by people.

The documents, two sheets of paper or perhaps parchment, filled on both sides with Jefferson’s incredibly compact handwriting, were amazing to observe. Unfortunately these were not early drafts – there were no scratch outs or arrows indicating where sections should be moved. That would have been wonderful to see, a window into his mind as a writer, but what we have is invaluable. This draft, prepared by Jefferson for handoff to the Continental Congress, contains the famous condemnation of slavery that was later excised in order to guarantee sign off by some of the Southern states.

The way the documents were presented – standing up in glass cases that allowed viewers to read them from a distance of about 12 inches – one could imagine peering over Jefferson’s shoulder as he took painstaking care to prepare a flawless copy. There were things that were amusing and touching about the way he prepared the document. Though a draft, he took care to embellish the manuscript by hand drawing the kind of large type a printer would use to call out “United States of America”. He clearly wanted to convey the importance of what he was doing.

I spent awhile pouring over the papers, noting the particular style of his handwriting – the way he made his d’s and his t’s, how he used punctuation and, I admit, trying in vain to see of I could catch him using a semi-colon incorrectly (I could not). It was great fun. But what struck me as more moving than witnessing the document itself was observing a grandfather and his grandson (pictured above) discussing it and what it meant. As the older man recited the well known chronology of American independence the young man stared intently at the handwritten words on the page. Watching them I remembered the first rush of recognition I experienced when, as a teenager, it dawned on me for the first time that all the history I’d been taught in school, all the characters whose images and names were carved into stone pediments – the country itself – was the invention of men and women of flesh and blood, frail and courageous and imperfect and full of hope. When that moment of recognition comes it’s a wonderful thing.

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Like many, I was a fan who lost the faith and left the fold as his behavior and appearance became ever more bizarre. It was painful to watch someone who had touched us with an extraordinary talent drifting into apparent madness and, perhaps, criminality. So I was startled – and grateful – to hear something this evening during the first rush of memorials on the news that made me rethink what I thought I knew about him. None other than stalwart Sue Simmons – a blowsy fixture of local TV news in New York City – speaking unscripted about Jackson said (I’m paraphrasing), “he tried to become a character – neither black nor white, male nor female, young nor old – that would appeal to all people, who he hoped would follow him as he tried to make the world a better place.” I had never heard this before and it made him make sense for the first time. More than that, it made him seem almost tragically heroic. But not a hero. Any grandiose motivations pale into delusion when we consider the bad things he may have done. Sadly, that will be his epitaph as much as his music.

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East Village, NYC 2/10/2008 2:49pm.

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Watching the initial [response] of craigslist owner Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster to the shitstorm that erupted following the arrest of the “Craigslist Killer" (who used the site’s prostitution ads to connect with his victims) was remarkable. Cloistered away in their little Silicon Valley bubble they clearly hadn’t a clue about how to manage the scrutiny of meatspace media and ambitious law enforcement officials looking to score. At first they refused flatly to make changes to the way they did business, falling back on the Web 2.0 mantra that the craigslist community would police itself (after all, users provide the content for free, why shouldn’t they also provide the editing for free?). Then, when it became clear that Newmark & Co. were heading to court and maybe to jail on fraud charges, they acquiesced and agreed to change the way they manage listings for adult services – including hiring additional staff to screen out illegal material.

But at least one AG is not satisfied and has threatened to initiate criminal action against craigslist if they don’t remove even more objectionable material from their site by this Friday. Today, Buckmaster [responded] to the Attorney General of South Carolina in a blog post (of course) and just when I thought they couldn’t be more clueless about how to handle this PR disaster he surprised me. Instead of doing what any mature company would do in the face of aggressive policing (think Microsoft and the European Commission…), i.e., aiming to get the moral high ground by swiftly agreeing to meet or exceed demands for cleaning up their sites, Buckmaster demands an apology from the Attorney General, challenges the AG to prosecute South Carolina newspapers that also run off-color ads (and suggesting that he won’t because of cynical self-interest) and offers what I’ll call the “me-too” defense: craigslist shouldn’t be singled out for abetting indecency because all the other kids in the playground are doing it too! The PR trainwreck thunders on.

Sensing that this has the potential to tame the Web 2.0 golden goose that drives so much revenue with so little managerial oversight and cost, some of the New Media machers are weighing in with support: Mike Arrington at [TechCrunch] urges Buckmaster to “Stand firm. Don’t back down. In fact, just turn off the South Carolina site entirely and ban IPs from that state. Forever. And if they press criminal charges, fight it with everything you have.” Then, with a little less bravado, “And if you do end up in jail, don’t worry. I promise to visit at least once a month, even though it will be in South Carolina.”

New Media gadfly Jeff Jarvis takes time out from dancing on the graves of newspaper journalists to [offer], “And so, once again, the internet becomes a threat to the control and power of an elite and they are exploiting craiglist – and the murderer who used it – to reassert their control. But it has the marks of a witchhunt.” Jarvis doesn’t seem to get that the “elite” is law enforcement and the issue is violations of local decency laws. Minor matter.

Perhaps one of Buckmaster’s friends (does he have friends?) could suggest that he take some of that huge profit he makes from the site and hire a decent flack. And a lawyer.

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© Paramount Pictures

"Yo, Dad, can I borrow the keys to the Enterprise?" Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Kirk (Chris Pine) aim to fill some big shoes.

At one point during the new Star Trek movie it occurred to me that perhaps the most amazing thing about it was the fact that I was seeing it at all. Forty years after the original TV series went off the air and thirty years after the first film version was released here I was again watching the redoubtable starship Enterprise fly across another screen. It was interesting, though, to note how the starship was represented here compared to its first big screen appearance back in 1979. Back then, before Hollywood had hit on the formula for milking a property to death, it had taken ten years to sort out the production path for the theatrical version. When it finally appeared it was practically a religious experience for faithful fans who had invested so much in the characters and ideas from the series. One of their rewards came in their first view of the Enterprise after the ten year drought: director Robert Wise spent a full five minutes of screen time displaying the new ship, the camera caressing every detail of the model starship with clear fetishistic delight. In the new film by director JJ Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman there is no such doting on the venerable spaceship; views of the Enterprise are for the most part reduced to establishing shots taken from a great distance in space or extreme close ups of firing weapons. Similarly, internal shots are restricted to scenes filmed on a stark overlit bridge or brief scenes in an engineering section that consists oddly of industrial-looking hydraulic tubes and steel scaffolding. The Enterprise, itself a major presence throughout the Star Trek saga, is here relegated to mere backdrop, a somewhat haphazardly designed set upon which the interpersonal dramas of the main characters play out.

I think that’s significant because it indicates where the priorities for the film makers lie and what they do and don’t understand about a cultural inheritance of which they are the latest custodians.

For the three of you who haven’t seen it yet, the new Star Trek is a “reboot” of the whole kit and kaboodle that has developed over the past 40 years. An origin story about how the characters Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov came to be part of the seminal storyline. It takes us, in just over two hour’s time, from the birth of James T. Kirk to his installation – with all stalwart comrades in tow – at the helm of the Enterprise as they face down their first big challenge: a Romulan meanie named Nero (Eric Bana), who has traveled back in time to wreak vengeance on the Federation – particularly on Vulcan. With so much plot to cover in such a compressed time some things are bound to suffer and story coherence would be one. Some reviewers have expressed bafflement at the villain’s motivation and a major fault of the movie is that it is never clearly explained until a brief speech more than halfway through the film just why any of it is happening. I knew from the start only because a friend shared a comic book “prequel” that explained the backstory (thanks Carl). One gets the sense that a lot more movie was filmed but left on the cutting room floor. I was struck by how little actual screen time the main antagonist had – a disappointing waste of Bana, who is a good actor.

But, truth be told, the whole angry Romulan premise is what Hitchcock called a “MacGuffin” – the plot device used to further the main story which, here, is the coming of age of James Kirk and Spock and how they came to be who they are. It must’ve killed the filmmakers that the title Star Trek – The Next Generation was already claimed because that’s exactly what this is: an attempt to reanimate a moribund franchise, populated by senior citizens, for a new generation of moviegoers who weren’t even born when the original series was on the air. And that requires starting fresh with a cast of (very) young actors who will – if all goes according to plan — carry the sequels forward for the next 10 or 20 years.

As a result, we’re presented with a preposterous set up wherein the fresh-faced and eager Starfleet cadets (at one point Chekov discloses that he is only 17!) are given the responsibility of running the fleet’s premier starship as it faces the grave alien challenge. Uh… okay. But the challenges to these nubile heroes don’t come only from outside the ship – there’s no shortage of interpersonal drama taking place on the venerable starship that at times makes it feel like The Hills in Outer Space. Much has been made of an internecine love triangle that is utterly implausible (are you telling me that a civilization advanced enough to have perfected trans-warp space travel hasn’t figured out that it’s bad news to be dating your co-workers?), but the real drama is between Kirk and Spock, who start out as enemies but – as with any good love story – are able to channel their passion into a bond that (the producers hope) will be eternal. Ah, young love!

The success of the actors and their characterizations vary a lot. Chris Pine seems to have prepared for his role as Kirk by watching one or two James Dean movies. He plays Kirk with a chip on his shoulder and spends a good part of the movie daring people like Spock to knock it off. The anti-hero who comes into his own in a time of crisis is in itself a hoary trope, tailor made for young actors trying to show their chops. Watching Pine, we long for early Shatner who, despite his well-known quirks, was an accomplished actor capable of subtlety and nuance (as evidence I refer you [here]). Zachary Quinto on the other hand was born to play Spock and brings an already mature talent to the role. Karl Urban is wonderful as Dr. McCoy, serving up wry comedy and intelligence along with the trademark lines we’ve come to expect (“Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor not a physicist!” brought down the house). British comedian Simon Pegg gets in some good licks as a feisty Scotty and Anton Yelchin as Chekov is adorable. Zoe Saldana is a serious disappointment. Her Uhura is hot and has attitude to spare but one thing she is not is professional. We barely see her do any work and her role on the ship seems primarily to be a point of romantic contention for the male leads. Nichelle Nichols’ calmly professional Uhura was (pardon the pun) light years more progressive. Watching the travesty they made of Uhura made me feel sorry for little girls in the audience.

Aside from implausible situations and bizarre character construction, the film is a collection of missed opportunities (one of the worst is the hamfisted screw up of a meeting between young and old Spock that the time-warp plot device affords – what might have been a classic scene becomes a mere setup for a joke). Director JJ Abrams has stated many times that he was not a fan of Star Trek and that’s obvious – he clearly doesn’t get the qualities of the series that made it last so long: characters and ideas. But he doesn’t really have to get it I suppose. His job was to get new faces in front of the audience in an entertaining way and he succeeds. However, if the owners of the property hope for it to live long and prosper (sorry, couldn’t resist…)  they need to remember what made it thrive for 40 years and not sell the next generation short.

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A couple of events occurred last week that might have seemed completely unconnected but were, I think, flip sides of the same coin: in the first case, a Swedish court convicted the owners of the Pirate Bay file sharing site of copyright violations involving facilitation of theft, sentencing them to fines and prison time, and, in the second case, Oprah devoted valuable on-air time to the Twitter phenomenon, introducing her legions of fans to the service and calling out Ashton Kutcher as the first Twitter user to gain over 1 million followers. What ties these apparently disparate events together is the fact that they demonstrate in unique ways the mainstreaming of the internet as a medium and its changing character(s).

Piracy 2.0

As an invention of technology, it makes perfect sense that the early proponents of the internet were members of the “technorati” – the geeky folk who build and fund tech start ups and those who buzz around them. Back in the 90’s as the commercial internet was just taking off, one could read one after another manifesto from these folks proclaiming the nascent medium a digital Valhalla, revolutionary in its potential. A good example was [“Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age”] in which futurist Alvin Toffler, venture capitalist Esther Dyson and others attempted to spell out the game-changing nature of this new technology and what was needed to foster it:

To start with, liberation – from Second Wave rules, regulations, taxes and laws laid in place to serve the smokestack barons and bureaucrats of the past. Next, of course, must come the creation – the creation of a new civilization, founded in the eternal truths of the American Idea.

Likening themselves to frontier settlers, they wanted complete freedom to reinvent commerce on the web any way they saw fit. Such freedom would, of course, lead to the unfettered creation of enormous wealth and that is exactly what happened (well mostly for well-connected technocrats, anyway). But the lack of oversight also led to a Wild West ecosystem online where hordes of thieves committed untold abuses of intellectual property. Sadly, some who should know better even sought to undermine claims of intellectual property by basically implying the [inevitability of theft] and [apologizing] for it under the rubric of “free culture”.

It was just a matter of time before the law caught up with the internet and that is what happened in Stockholm. In a landmark ruling, a Swedish court proclaimed that existing laws covering copyright applied to the online entity. While the punishment meted out by the court (one year of jail time and millions in fines) may be reduced on appeal, the judgment is an important precedent that moves internet transactions more firmly into a legal realm with a long history of addressing intellectual property claims and that can provide content owners greater protection. Though not popular with some zealous internet users, who, understandably might prefer a more lax environment in which to sample from creative works, ultimately it benefits them as well since it hastens the day when there are clear limits to what can and cannot be shared online and the ambiguity around liability is cleared up. The libertarian ethos of the inventor/early adopter crowd is giving way to something more traditional and that’s probably not a bad thing.

The Changing Face of Online Fame

Another example of a “changing of the guard” involved the sudden boost in popularity of [Twitter], thanks to high-profile efforts by Ashton Kutcher and Oprah. Since its release a couple of years ago the service has largely been the province of tech early adopters and their fans. Until fairly recently, the most popular users were the usual Who’s Who of the Silicon Valley scene: Robert Scoble with 80,000 followers; Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis with each about 40,000 and a few others ruled the roost — opining on the virtues of communication in 140 characters installments as if we were witnessing Gutenberg for the 21st century. For most of the rest of us (and, to be honest for the tech stars as well…) Twitter was merely the latest toy for vanity publishing – a way to extend our egos into the network. And, as with all other Web 2.0 inventions, the promise of equal access to audience was trumped by [network effects] – resulting in an “A-list” of users, and everybody else.

What turned out to be somewhat revolutionary was the disintermediation this toy provided to users who were already famous (real world famous, not tech famous). Once upon a time, famous people had to work closely with and for mainstream media outlets whose reach largely determined the public’s perception of them. As the internet fractured old media monopolies it led to a proliferation of new sites that trade on celebrity reputations (e.g., Perez Hilton, TMZ). Managing one’s image became infinitely more difficult in such an environment (just ask Britney). But social media services like Facebook and Twitter shift control away from the media outlets back to the celebrity. What fan wouldn’t prefer getting a message delivered directly to them from their favorite star over reading something about them on a blog or news site? In a celebrity-obsessed soundbite-driven culture, Twitter becomes the apotheosis of public relations image management: stars get to deliver their own sound bites directly into the heads of their fans. So easy even an actor can do it!

Alas, the former A-list is not very happy about these new usurpers of their social media thrones. The Philistines are knocking down the gates and there is [grumbling] about the cooptation of Twitter by “big media”. But that’s just sour grapes by those who see their influence dwindling. The rest of us should welcome the evolution. Imagine if television programming in the early days had been restricted to the offerings of the engineers who invented the medium? It would’ve died a quick death. But, happily, we got to watch Lucy. If I have to have someone else’s words broadcast to me through this new medium, I’d much rather it be someone who can at least entertain me. The New Media, same as it ever was.

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Sixth Avenue and 28th Street, 9:32am

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Who’s that girl? NYU artist Michael Cavayero examines our obsessions

If you’re in downtown Manhattan between now and April 19, stop by the [Broadway Windows] exhibition space to check out the work of [Michael Cavayero], a senior honors art student at NYU, who uses bold color and exaggerated line to deconstruct the tabloid princess. Lindsay then, now and — assuming she makes it — future.

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