six degrees of peter feld

Nov 22

6h057:

I just realized how old Young Manhattanite is.

We recently tallied the cumulative Manhattan living experience of YM, not including the time Spiers had a roommate named Mario Armando Lavandeira in the West Village (ask her about it!), and it was 54 years. A little more than Peter Feld.

My cumulative Manhattan living experience is less than you think, only 21 years total. However, I have lived in Manhattan in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and ’00s.

Nov. 22, 1963

Lyndon Johnson is sworn in as president by Judge Sarah Hughes aboard Air Force One, Nov. 22, 1963.

[video]

Nov 21

"...these people at HarperCollins—even the dullest of them—are not unsophisticated. They are versed in the national semiotics, are familiar with the elements of portraiture. They know that this photo of Palin is mocking. They know this photo will make half the world recoil, or snort. And yet no one at HarperCollins stopped Sarah Palin from being made a laughingstock by her own dust jacket." -

You might want to read Rudolph Delson’s close reading of Sarah Palin’s new memoir, on The Awl:

…It is plain from the first that Palin writes carelessly, and the reader adjusts. The phrase “an economic train wreck”? It doesn’t evoke any railroad images, it is just a poorly engineered synonym for the noun “disaster.” “Climb into bed”? A sleepy variant for the verb “accommodate.” If she were not deaf to connotation, she would not use the verb “cling” (as in “they cling to guns and religion”) without irony; if she were not deaf to music, she would avoid the repetition of “lifeline” and “Pipeline.” But, again, in terms of vice-presidential memoirs, this is only averagely bad. At least it still makes sense. Continuing:

It didn’t make sense.
It seemed that true public service, crafting policies that were good for the people, had become increasingly derailed by politics and its infernal machines.

And so the prose goes to hell. One paragraph earlier, the train was the economy, and it was speeding toward a wreck. In this paragraph, the train is public service, and it has been derailed. In fact, the train is “increasingly derailed.” Never mind that, in English, a train cannot become “increasingly derailed,” any more than a fetus can be “increasingly aborted,” or than Christ Our Savior can be “increasingly born”—we already knew that no wreck and no derailment could stop this particular vice-presidential locomotive:

"What's this I hear about a pubic option?"

… “never mind”

De La Vega store, St. Mark’s Place

Abandoned crutches in Tompkins Square Park, where faith healing apparently takes place.