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There’s the daily drudgery, and the filth, and the rats, and the anomie. And then there are moments when the sublime pokes its head above the mundane and shakes its hairdo at you. Last night, around midnight, I was walking east on Warren Street (or was it Murray?), and I came up on Broadway, and raised my eyes and saw this:

That’s the statue of “Civic Fame” atop the Municipal Building, rising above a nest of treetops in City Hall Park. The photo doesn’t do it justice.

That’s not all. Here’s the Woolworth Building taken from almost the same spot:

And here’s the fountain in City Hall Park, about 50 paces away:

And here’s the fountain and the Municipal Building together:

That’s all. But I get to walk past this stuff every day. Isn’t it kind of awesome?

What to do:

• Wash about half a bunch of asparagus, break off the woody ends, chop into roughly 3/4-inch pieces, and nuke them in the microwave in a covered bowl for about 2 minutes.
• Take an ordinary saucepan, pour in a quart (32 ounces) of stock (I used a Tetra-Pak of chicken stock), and turn the heat on low.  You want it to be hot, but not boiling.
• Chop a medium onion — minced if you’re a good chopper, or just rough small pieces, it doesn’t really matter.
• Put a second (heavy, if you have it) saucepan on the stove.  Melt about 2 tablespoons of butter over medium heat, and when it’s sizzling, drop in the onion.  Cook for a few minutes until the onion has started to get soft (but not brown).
• Measure about 1 1/2 cups of Arborio rice, pour it into the buttery onion, and stir it around.
• Add some salt and pepper.
• Pour about 1/2 cup of white wine (whatever you have handy) into the rice-onion mixture, and stir it over medium heat for a few minutes until most of the liquid bubbles away.
• Add about half a cup of stock to the rice mixture.  (I just dip a mug into one pot and pour it into the other.)  Keep the heat medium-high on the rice mixture and stir/scrape intermittently with a wide spatula, to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom or sides.
• As the stock bubbles away from the rice mixture, add another half-cup of stock and stir.  As it cooks, the mixture should be neither soupy nor dried out.
• Keep repeating this.  It will take between 20 and 30 minutes for all the stock to be absorbed into the rice.  Stop adding stock when the rice tastes cooked but still a little chewy.  You may have a little stock left over, which you can feed to the cat.
• In between dealing with the rice, grate about 1/2 cup of good Parmesan and set it aside.
• When the rice is done, fold in the grated Parmesan and adjust the seasonings.  Then fold in the asparagus you cooked in the microwave.  Then serve with a crusty bread.

I passed several of these parcels, unwanted and unloved, on my walk from the subway to work this morning. I even momentarily fingered a copy of the 2010-2011 Yellow Book, thinking “I should take this home, maybe I’ll need it.” Then I stopped myself. For what? What could possibly be in that book that I can’t find more quickly, search for more effectively, evaluate more usefully online? I set it down, walked into the office… and found a copy of the 2010-2011 Yellow Book already sitting in the office recycling bin.

Like the landline that it once existed to serve, the Yellow Pages is on its way out. Even nine years ago (!), when I was trying to promote my fledgling bookstore, the ad salespeople were already desperate. (I didn’t bite. What they were charging was ridiculous, and even in 2002 the Yellow Pages already felt “over.”) Now they must be apoplectic from the stench of their own imminent obsolescence. This is a business that still exists only because certain parties (ad salespeople, printing companies, certain types of traditional businesses and conservative businesspeople) are locked in a cycle of mutual addiction and denial, reinforced by a dollop of voodoo and magical thinking. Of all the types of advertising your small business could possibly pay for in the current environment, the Yellow Pages must be one of the least trackable, and it’s certainly one of the least nimble.

Which is why you saw things like this on the street today in Manhattan:

The first three photos above were taken about 7pm, roughly 15 hours after the elves made the last of their deliveries. That last photo was taken at midnight (approaching 24 hours after dropoff) in the lobby of an apartment building. I repeat: in almost 24 hours, nobody in this 10-unit apartment building took a copy. To the constituency allegedly intended to consume it (whose consumption of it is the product being sold to advertisers), this product is literally worth nothing. Why is this thing still being produced again?

There are only a couple cities in America in which you can get away with a look like this and not seem absolutely ridiculous (or worse), and New York is the only one where you can do it at any time of the day, any time of year. She was too put-together to get away with it in San Francisco (although, to be fair, nobody in San Francisco would say so to her face), and in L.A. she’d just look ridiculous unless she was on her way to an audition. But in the New York subway, at 9:15 in the morning, she looked terrific!

The occasion is this story about cafe life in Portland — you can read it. Myrick’s point is that if you want people to organically gather on the streets of your neighborhood, you need food and drink, suitable for all ages and stages in the community, sold and served in a way that lets people consume them in an organic fashion outdoors or visible from the street.

All true. But argh!

I don’t disagree with any of this, it’s all true, and I mean no disrespect to the exceptionally committed people at PPS — my reaction is more a sense of frustration and missed opportunity that this isn’t intuitively obvious, that it has to be said, and re-said, and re-re-said every decade or so, to every generation. If you, dear reader, are just figuring this out now, what have you been doing to your own downtown for the past 25 years? And how many young people have you driven away, how many working-age people have you effectively locked in their office buildings all day for how many days/weeks/years, how many old people have you consigned to spend their waning days sitting in their apartments (or, worse, sitting on a bench in the mall) because there’s nowhere worth going to?

Let’s get with it, America!

Anyone older than about 60 who grew up in a healthy community probably already knows that food is at the center of everything social. Nevermind community events like church socials and picnics — every town over a thousand people had a drugstore, with big plate-glass windows and a soda fountain or lunch counter, once upon a time, where you could see people going about the private business of eating in a semi-public way. And even younger people know it, if we’ve lived part of our lives in a healthy big city. I was living in the newly minted municipality of West Hollywood when the first round of modern artisanal coffehouses appeared in the early 1990s; the moment cafes started to appear, whole new populations began to use the street. Nothing has driven the sidewalk re-revitalization of Santa Monica Boulevard over the past decade more than streetfront dining.

Closer to home, think of New York: the most transformational change to the streetscape in the five years I’ve been here has been the simple addition of lots of chairs and tables all over the place, including in what used to be traffic lanes in the middle of Times Square. People want to sit down and, very often, eat and drink, in public. What are the healthiest public spaces in Lower Manhattan? One of them is Stone Street, which today is given over almost entirely to street dining. (Photo above: the pop-up cafe thrown up by the DOT on nearby Pearl Street last month.)

Or look at the opposite case. I was on a message-board thread this week about Fulton Mall, the tattered retail strip in downtown Brooklyn that (due to the volume of people passing through, and the lack of local alternatives) commands among the highest retail rents in New York City, despite the fact that nobody can stand it. Sure, Fulton Mall is filthy and disorderly and way too crowded, but if you’ve ever been to, say, the Venice boardwalk in Los Angeles, you know that filth and disorder and crowds are not sufficient to make a place unlovable. There’s something else. And something landscape designer Gil Lopez said on the list reminded me that one of the reasons everyone hates Fulton Mall is also one of the most obvious: there’s nothing to eat except junk, and there’s nowhere to sit down and eat it!

To me, Nazis are part of “history,” but I remember Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan perfectly well, not as history but as lived experience from my childhood. In fact, in 1980, I was practically old enough to vote for (er, against) Ronald Reagan, so it doesn’t feel so long ago. But Jim Rockford (and, for that matter, James Garner) in 1977 would remember Nazis not just as childhood experience, but from their (earlier) adulthood.

As a child, I often wondered why so much of our popular culture (TV, movies, etc.) was “about” World War II, and Nazis in particular. Some sliver of this presumably had to do with the fact that the crimes of the Nazis were so extreme, and some part of it presumably had to do with the overrepresentation of Jews in Hollywood. But I realize now that most of it was simply due to the fact that World War II was a big disruptive thing that had recently happened to all the grownups in the world. Even my parents, young as they were, were old enough to have been affected by it — my father was even stationed at Great Lakes Naval Station in Waukegan, Illinois for a time, although the war ended before there was time to deploy him.

Similarly, I wonder whether the young political people I work with are curious about why Ronald Reagan looms so large in the popular consciousness. Part of it is no doubt due to the fact that he was larger than life even in life, and part of it due to his charisma, and part of it due to his ideas; but part of it is simply due to the fact that Ronald Reagan was a big disruptive thing that happened to all of the grownups in the world. Everyone my age and older — that is, basically, everyone old enough to have kids in middle school now, or older — has personal memories of that era.

And if you really want to blow your mind, consider this: when my grandmother was born (and she is still alive and well), the Civil War was as recent an occurrence as the Vietnam War is now, give or take a year or two. And I remember the Vietnam War, or at least the end of it; and I’m not that old. So my grandmother must have interacted with people in her childhood for whom the Civil War was part of their adult lived experience. And the oldest of those people, in their childhoods, would almost certainly have interacted with people who remembered the Revolutionary War from their adult experience. That’s a pretty remarkable formulation of the short duration of American history to date.

First, Scrabble. I have to blame the Boon Companion for this; he got me addicted to iPad Scrabble, which we’re still playing at home. But most of my playing is via Lexulous, which is the Facebook game once known as Scrabulous, given a new name and a slightly different board configuration after an encounter with Hasbro’s lawyers. It’s still on Facebook, where you can play both in real time and via the correspondence method (“You have a move to make on Lexulous, Rich”); but I prefer to play on lexulous.com, where there are literally hundreds of Scrabble fanatics sitting in chat rooms 24 hours a day waiting to play with you immediately.

It turns out I’m a moderately good Scrabble player — but I’m an even better timed Lexulous player, and most of the fanatics on the site want to play timed. Timed games fit well with my satisficer personality, which races to find the best move available that can be thought up in the first 30 seconds, i.e., roughly the 85% move on average, and then gets bored and anxious trying to come up with something that’s 5 points better. Typically I play 8 minute games with a 10-second Fischer delay, but as I get better I’m going to inch the time limit down little by little.

(Side note: I saw Bobby Fischer in an elevator when I was going to the pediatrician’s, in Century City in L.A., when I was about eight or nine. This would put it in about 1974 or 1975. I was with my mom, who recognized him; she explained who he was, and I remembered hearing about him on the news — I was kind of a chess kid. I think that was both the most famous and the craziest person I met up to that point, at least until we saw Farrah Fawcett in the grocery store a few years later. Or I think it was Farrah. Anyway, I digress.)

The other game is SimCity 4, with the Rush Hour expansion pack, which I played for months before I started playing Civ IV. I figure it’s time to give it another shot, playing a bit more strategically. I’ll have more to say when I get a city to a more interesting point in development, but here’s the one I’m working now:

But after watching most of Season 2 and part of Season 3 of “Arrested Development” in less than a week, I have to apologize — David Cross’s portrayal of Tobias Fünke is one of the consistently funniest, most creative, most boundary-pushing comedic characterizations I can remember seeing anywhere. And it just goes on and on, episode after episode, and somehow he plays these unlikely situations, delivers these absolutely impossible lines, without busting up laughing.

Here’s a little snippet of Cross on politics:

And here’s an itty bitty snippet of insight into Tobias Fünke:

Are there any tips that minimize the stench of boiling cabbage and cabbage-like substances that actually work? A beloved member of my family (now deceased), who will remain nameless to protect her reputation, once said that if you put a piece of dry bread in the steamer, it soaks up the fragrance, but to be honest that always sounded like voodoo to me. (Plus, this woman once tried the fad of cooking fish in the dishwasher, but didn’t seal the packets very well — or maybe she added too much detergent, I forget — and ended up with a big mess. So I’m inclined to discount her advice by 40 percent right off the top).

I’m not talking about the city of Atlanta (2008 pop: 537,000), the municipality at the heart of the metro area, which has absorbed rapid growth over the past decade (due to both densification and immigration) and can presumably absorb plenty more on its ample vacant land. I’m talking about the Atlanta metropolitan area (oops, the “Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta MSA”) — the agglomeration of 20 counties, covering an area the size of Massachusetts, that is home to 5.4 million people.

Much of that land — and virtually all the land outside the Perimeter, except along traditional rail and road corridors like US 41 — was rational to develop only in an economy that counted on three things: unlimited cheap gasoline married to an unlimited willingness to build new highway mileage; endless real estate appreciation, leading to endless speculative residential construction; and a core city of Atlanta that was perceived as unsafe, tax-hungry, and crumbling. The recession’s taken care of the first two; and the third has been taking care of itself, as the city has spiffed itself up, embraced its advantages, and started living within its means. (When I left for good, the city of Atlanta was a much nicer and better-kept place to live than when I arrived eight years earlier, and the progress has continued.)

Geographically speaking, Atlanta is in an arbitrary spot. It is located where it is because of the decisions of railroad-builders and local boosters more than a century ago. Unlike most American cities, it is not on a river, not on the fall line, not on a traditional trade route. And it’s so far up in its watershed — in the Piedmont of the Appalachians — that even something as basic as water can by no means be taken for granted.

When I was in high school, the late Father John Gill, who taught me 9th-grade European history — and was also a California history fetishist, and our chaplain, and probably one of the most interesting adults who took me seriously before I moved away for college — said that if we wanted to make a mint, we should all study riparian law. He was thinking of California (where it’s also true), but his advice would have been useful in Georgia, too. The endless squabbling with Florida and Alabama over water rights — in which, the Economist writer points out, all of Georgia downstream of the Atlanta metropolitan colossus inherently sides with Florida and Alabama — may well be resolved in the favor of those downstream, which would make it difficult to sustain a population the size of Atlanta’s indefinitely without major civil engineering projects.

The City of Atlanta — the hole in the doughnut — will likely be fine. Dense enough to justify infrastructure investment, it’s also proportionally wealthier now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, so a solution will be found to serve the water needs of 600,000, or 800,000, or a million. But at least two or three of the remaining four million in the metro area are living unsustainably, and as foreclosures hollow out their neighborhoods and job losses devastate the county tax bases, there’s going to be a lot of shrinkage in the doughnut itself. And it looks like the go-go days of a decade ago are probably gone for good.

In the long term and even the medium term, that probably means densification, infrastructure, and quality-of-life improvements that my old friends in Grant Park and Candler Park and East Atlanta and Decatur, and the other inner neighborhoods I used to frequent, will get to enjoy. But it will also mean a lot of pain, spread out over a decade or two, for people who bought into an unsustainable lifestyle in places like Suwanee and Buford.

One of Gillis’s “Columbo” episodes was “Short Fuse,” shot in Palm Springs — including a memorable hand-to-hand fight on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway (pictured here).

Bonus “Today on Craigslist” from this weekend’s Glenn Beck rally, via Wonkette (note: subject matter not safe for work): well, I won’t post this one, but if you Google “wonkette tea party craigslist honor” you’ll probably find it…

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David Rowland created the 40/4 Chair in his apartment in Upper Manhattan in the 1950s; he died this month in Virginia.

In honor of this iconic designed object of the 20th Century, which has brought functional elegance to the most mundane of public occasions across America and around the world for more than half a century, let us have a moment of silence.

(pause)

And now will everyone please join me in the social hall for the kiddush, supplied this week by Mary and Marv Sheinblatt in honor of their late mother Myrtle, aleha ha-shalom…

And then I saw it. And it’s horrifying!

OK, not horrifying, exactly. But it’s basically a stockade fence enclosing a mud pit (it was a rainy day) with some foam noodles in it and a bunch of dirty children running around. I did see children playing with the foam noodles, but nobody was Building an Imagination Tower or Envisioning their Creative Future or Exercising their Mental Muscles or whatever, they were just, you know, hitting each other with them or climbing up on them and falling off, while their mommies and daddies played on their BlackBerries.

And, as the Boon Companion rightly pointed out, it looks like they spent more on the “reclaimed teak” decking and the stockade fence than they did on the kid furniture. Although I’m sure these are no dollar-store foam noodles; these noodles surely have the imprimatur of the American Association of Play Psychologists or whatever (only the best for Lower Manhattan’s “Generation Stroller”!).

I get the idea. And, anyway, who am I to talk? My mother was the queen of creative play, and I grew up in a house with a fully-stocked craft room and a full set of Colorforms and learned my math from Cuisinier rods and was allowed to draw with pastel chalk all over the driveway.

If you’re an Honorary Old, as I am, I know you’re thinking “what? Don’t I need a microphone and a headset and etc. etc.?” But no. Here’s what you do:

You open your Gmail.

In the Google Chat panel in the left rail, you click “Call phone.”

You enter the phone number.

The party answers and you hear their voice coming out of your computer, and you just, you know, talk, in the general direction of your computer. Your built-in mike is just fine. It’s not pin-drop quality, but it’s, you know, FINE.

I’ve been keeping my landline phone active for two reasons: “what if there’s an emergency and the power goes out,” and “what if I decide I hate the cable company and I need DSL.” But I’ve made a grand total of EIGHT outbound calls in EIGHT MONTHS on the landline, and received ZERO yes ZERO inbound calls. The $38 a month that I’m paying is starting to seem ridiculous. Is it time to give the thing up?

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In case you’re not an obsessive follower of this story, Orly is the über-Birther who’s bombarding the federal courts with frivolous lawsuits about Obama’s origins. Here’s a detailed history of the saga (juiciest part here — court’s judgment worth reading in its entirety).

Well, Orly’s back! She’s pissed off a Federal judge, the Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court, but she’s not letting it go. In our latest installment, Orly claims that Obama’s passport is doctored and she can prove it. If I’ve learned anything from TV about judges, it’s that they don’t like having their time wasted, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see that fine go up, and up, and up…

Or just buy a Scrabble set at your local drugstore ($14.99). But what fun is that? There’s nothing to click or push or slide, it doesn’t beep, and you have to rotate the board yourself.

Below are a couple of photos demonstrating that, yes, this complicated Bluetooth-enabled setup does in fact work. The game even keeps track of where you’re sitting, and rotates the board to face you when it’s your turn. (The first few times, this is really creepy.) Photos are reversed, because they were already uploaded that way and I’m lazy.

Which is why I’m always excited to see signage like this in American cities, in urban cores and near transit stations and so forth. (This photo courtesy of John Massengale.)

Actually, that’s London, which isn’t an American city, and of course they do it better than we do, but increasingly it’s showing up here, too. Like in this photo — you can see a large, easy-to-use city map on the oblique (left-facing) side of the kiosk at right, which are placed all around the central core of …

… Montreal. Doh! But I swear, Americans are catching up, at their typical slow-but-steady pace. And the quality is improving. WMATA just announced that they’re improving their walk maps in Metro stations. A sample (click map image to enlarge; download full map, 2.7 MB PDF):

That map’s too busy, but it’s a lot better than the current iteration. We need more of this — this sort of thing is part of the evidence people need that changing their longstanding behavior is a rational thing to consider.

A corollary worth noting is that the second-biggest construction project going on downtown — which causes a lot more disruption for most of us than the rebuilding of the towers — is only peripherally related to the World Trade Center. It’s the ginormous Fulton Street Transit Center infrastructure project. I’m aware of the transit center project constantly — every street in my neighborhood is torn up, steam is blasting out of holes in the ground, construction workers and Jersey barriers are everywhere, traffic is a snarl — but I rarely think about the World Trade Center project, except when I happen to be heading to the west side and bump into it. New York is dense, and crowded, and two blocks is a long way!

More info about the Fulton Street project, from the MTA.

My mother was born in Santa Monica, about 5 miles from here. My father came here with his parents in a bassinet, on a long boat ride from Seattle (or was it a train?), before he was old enough to talk. In fact, three of my four grandparents grew up in places that, from the vantage point of some New Yorkers, might as well be suburbs of Los Angeles (those places being Oakland, Seattle, and Spokane).

All of this is to say that, despite a long absence, my roots here are deep. Indeed, I’m part of a small minority in my family who have left the West for any extended period of time, and one of only two or three who have stayed away long enough to establish permanence somewhere else.

And that makes Los Angeles a place I return to with a sense of eager familiarity, even excitement, but also with trepidation. The experience is so thick with memories (most of them happy, or at least ordinary, but still, very, very present), so teeming with people I knew and places I used to go, so colored by choices made that forestalled other choices, overshadowed by alternate lives foregone in favor of the actual life I’m living now, tinctured with family obligations and disappointments and resentments and old scores — you know, so heavy — that, for all my pleasure in returning, it’s hard to stay too long, or to come too often.

Every visit starts the same way:

I walk out of the airport into that bright, bright sunlight, with billowy clouds overhead and the white concrete viaduct along World Way, and palm trees and the Theme Building. And I’m excited! It’s not gray here, it’s bright and the air is dry and clean and, even by the airport, the air carries a bit of honeysuckle and eucalyptus (the fragrances of my high school and elementary school, respectively) and the faint odor of beach sage and the sea, along with the jet fuel and car exhaust. There’s usually a breeze.

And I wait for the rental car bus, and it takes me to Budget, which has been in the same place, in the same configuration, for at least the 25 years I’ve been renting cars at LAX. I’ve been renting there forever because of some faint vestigial memory that, at some point decades ago, Budget was cheaper and had better cars, neither of which is true anymore — although it’s still a quick exit onto 96th Place, and a quick drop-off from Airport Boulevard when you’re dashing for a flight, so that’s something. The bus takes me around a ramp that was built in the 1980s but that I still think of as “new,” past the Radisson (which used to be the Hyatt, back when I used to know people who worked there and answered the phone “It’s a beautiful evening at the Hyatt at Los Angeles Airport, [name] at your service” on penalty of being written up if they diverged from the script), past Lot C where my father parked for every business trip he ever took.

So I wait in the Budget line, and get my car, and head up Airport Boulevard (past the Sheraton Four Points, which used to be the Renaissance, where I attended a memorable party in 1992), and I slow down for the dip at Manchester because in 1981, my taxicab-yellow 1971 Mercury Cougar XR7 bottomed out in the dip and a crack appeared in the windshield, from top to bottom, that I couldn’t afford to fix for a year. We called that car “the Beast,” both because its license plate had 666 in it and because the passenger-side door wouldn’t close right and because, really, who would paint a car aftermarket taxicab yellow? I bought the Beast out of a classified ad, after my mother’s transmission caught on fire climbing the Masonic Avenue hill in San Francisco and she took her old car back from me, from a guy who had an office in the same building in Encino where Councilman Marvin Braude kept his district office. He’s the same councilman I wrote a letter to in the second grade, in 1973, telling him that the “walk” cycles of the traffic lights on Ventura Boulevard were too short for old people and children to cross. And he actually answered me, establishing my faith in citizen action to change the world. (That letter he sent me, on the ornate letterhead with the embossed Los Angeles City Hall on it, is probably at the bottom of some plastic tub in my storage unit in Jersey City).

So I take the right onto La Tijera, passing 98th Street (where, in 1993, my friend Annie and I met every morning at 8:30, and one of us left our car in front of a random house and piled in with the other, so we could shave half an hour off our commutes by riding the carpool lane down to Costa Mesa where we were learning the fundamentals of direct response marketing), passing the new post office on the left (built on the grave of the Marie Callender’s, where my father and I used to stop for pie on the way to drop me at the airport to visit my mother in San Francisco), passing Pann’s, the Googie diner at the edge of Inglewood, still run by the same Greek family (and I can confirm that it’s the same family, four months ago the Boon Companion and I were eating at the counter at Pann’s and the elderly matriarch was puttering around behind the counter and we talked to her) after, what, sixty years, which opened around the time my father decided that being an optometrist in Inglewood wasn’t doing it for him and he wanted to go to medical school. And Pann’s is still there, and it still serves excellent burgers and milkshakes (not to mention coffee and pie), and I still stop there on the way to the airport, almost every time.

And I turn left onto La Cienega, pass Slauson and the oil wells and hit the downhill straightaway where I got a speeding ticket in 1990, and suddenly there it is in front of you as you go down the hill, the whole city, with the towers spread out right to left along the Olympic-Wilshire-Santa Monica corridor, from downtown to the sea, with the mountains behind. Right at the bottom of the hill, on the left, there’s a Target, which used to be Fedco, where we shopped back when you actually had to be a public employee or union member to get in — a little rattier than the Fedco in Van Nuys, but also bigger and more authentic. That was the place to get a deal on a TV, or cheap but well-made underpants, back in 1975.

See what I mean?

We’re now barely 15 minutes from the airport and I’ve typed a zillion words and I’m already exhausted, and you’re probably exhausted from reading it. And we’re nowhere near the parts of the city I actually lived and worked in yet. I grew up 15 miles away — imagine how loud the memories get once we cross over Sepulveda Pass! And it’s like this the whole time I’m here. It never stops, the rambling monologue in my head, until I get on the plane and go home. And, if I can, I spend the first 48 hours back in New York in my apartment, just reading, or listening to music — doing something quiet.

No wonder I’m spending tonight shut up in my hotel room (admittedly a nice room, in a nice hotel, the kind I like, not too expensive but with some personality and a very good restaurant, and where the valet brings the car out in 90 seconds if you call down), reading news from home (by which I mean New York). There’ll be time for more L.A. in the morning, and I have a long day ahead; I’d better rest up.

This long LA Times story about the purpose of orchestra conductors explains that the conductor is what overlays the music with an interpretation. Apparently orchestras can play without a conductor, but they usually aren’t very good; even if they’re technically proficient, which important orchestras always are, the music often sounds mechanical and soulless without the interpretive overlay of the conductor’s vision.

The article also confirms something that I sort of suspected, which is that most of the baton flourishes that mean anything to the orchestra are referring to points of musical interpretation that have already been discussed and rehearsed in regard to this particular performance. So a particular wave of the baton doesn’t mean, say, “tremolo” to every orchestra across all time, like a sign in ASL; rather, it means something like “ok, now! — do that thing we did in rehearsal at this point,” or “ok, the thing that’s called for in the score around this point starts… now.”

I’ll try to think of something pithy to say about this, but in the meantime I just thought it was interesting.

Not for the Squamish, er, squeamish.

Boogie ’til You Poop from Cedar Wright on Vimeo.

First posted at Vertical Carnival, reposted with much explanation on Jason Kruk’s blog.

This kind of dude stuff is not usually my thing. But despite the fact that in these 4 minutes of video, the word “dude” is uttered about 300 times in that flat Western accent New Yorkers hate, these are no Jackasses. Semi-professional rock climbing is serious stuff — these are athletes — and seeing this video got me interested enough to research their world, which is pretty interesting.

If you want to imagine yourself up on a crag, perhaps start here. (An “offwidth” is apparently a vertical crack that’s too wide to use one common climbing technique, but too narrow to use a different common climbing technique, making it harder to scale than others.)

If he reads this, I’m sure my mountain-loving buddy Andrew Gram will chime in here with a comment…