Fruits of my labors

The yellow ones first. The pink and yellow ones should be out in another week or so.

SRO

Seems like shortly Aeroflot will no longer be the only airline that allows standing on planes during takeoff, crusing, and landing.

Airbus is offering clients the possibility of a standing seat.

The New York Times has prepared a graphic here.

So I guess it's true what they said about William Jefferson Clinton

You gotta love the New York Post, for their covers, if nothing else.

My only question of the portaitist is: why did you make Bill look so much like Ted Koppel??

Ouch

from Charles McGrath's profile of Gay Talese on the occasion of the imminent release of "A Writer's Life", his memoir:

"...one of the many porters or doormen on the Upper East Side who seem to know Mr. Talese by sight and nod respectfully when he strolls by. Whether or not they know anything about his books, they recognize good posture and good haberdashery when they see it. Mr. Talese, the son of a tailor, carries himself like a papal guard and, now that his nudist phase is over, is the best-dressed writer in New York. He makes Tom Wolfe look like someone who collects Mark Twain outfits from a thrift shop."

Safest birds in the Nordic region

From today's New York Times:

NORWAY: PENGUINS GET FIRST BIRD FLU SHOTS Eight penguins became the first birds in Norway to be vaccinated against bird flu after an aquarium in western Bergen won an eight-month battle with health authorities for the vaccine, the newspaper Bergen Tidende reported. "The Safest Birds in the Nordic Region," its headline declared. According to the news agency NTB, the first penguin vaccinated was a 9-month-old female, who promptly threw up. No outbreaks of the A(H5N1) avian flu have been found in Norway. (AP)

"Does Amitabh have a queer body?"

Just one of the many questions posed today, during the opening sessions of the four-day conference hosted by the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU unter the title of The Social and Material Life of Indian Cinema.

Arundhati Roy was seated among the audience during the afternoon and evening sessions, sharing many jokes and passing notes back and forth with Sohini Ghosh, who spoke during the morning on "Fear of the Queer and All Things Erotic: Censorship Debates and Emergent Narratives".

I started out in grad school studying literature, and read a fair amount of theory and criticism, but it's been years since I've heard phrases like "heteronormative structures", "hierarchy of desires" and "aesthetic of social realism", and it all comes back to me why I didn't want to do that PhD after all.

But in spite of some posturing (by some audience members) and unnecessarily bloated vocabulary (by both audience and panellists), Day 1 was interesting and I learned some things:

- In India, 40 seconds of footage was removed from the hetero love-making scene in Brokeback Mountain, whereas the gay love scenes were left untouched.

- American film students have commented to one of today's panellists that the Angry Young Man 1970s movies of Amitabh Bachchan remind them of the blaxploitation movies that were produced in the U.S. in the same decade.

- After his death in 1992, Satyajit Ray's bedding was being sold outside the crematorium before his body was even cremated.

But seriously, this is one reason - inspite of the excess of people with too much money, and the high rents, and the high cost of most things here - that I love New York city: sooner or later (more often sooner), the world (and all its many cultural offerings) will arrive at your doorstep. This conference, which, according to one friend "Has brought together everyone who's anyone in the Indian film studies field", has four days of jam-packed offerings plus breakfast and lunch included, is all entirely free.

And if one had decided to pass on the keynote address by Partha Chatterjee at the Asia Society (and reception) tonight, across town at Lincoln Center, Mira Nair was participating in a screening of Salaam Bombay.

Forever youngish

There are a couple of times a year when a New York magazine article is dead on about some phenomenon particular to life in this city, and the first issue I found waiting for me when I arrived from India had this one by Adam Sternbergh. Here's an excerpt:

"Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?

This is an obituary for the generation gap. It is a story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent. It’s about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning. It’s about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano."

And the photos of the guys on the cover, the girls inside, and the guys sporting their babies in their Snugglis (these are all real people wearing their own clothes, mind you, not models) just drive the point home beautifully.

Even Jack Bauer, the hero of the Fox TV series 24 played by Kiefer Sutherland, has been dressing like a Grup this season.

Is that a copy of The DaVinci Code in your pocket?

Seen recently at Strand Bookstore.

Privacy please

An enclosed litter box, for the chronically shy cat.

Sex and the City for British men

in their late 40s.

Manchild:

Four buddies have reached an age, and stage in life, where the world is potentially their big fat juicy oyster. Sports cars, shiny motorcycles, riverside apartments and gorgeous young girlfriends so sexy and willing… Surely knocking on the door of 50 can't be this much fun?

You know you're back in New York (city) when

you open a magazine and see an ad for a Passover seder at the very tony W hotels.