San Francisco vs New York

Pitting San Francisco's Haight Street versus New York's St. Marks Place is a fair contest; after all, the streets serve as twin coastal magnets for rebellious youth, andógiven the fickle nature of adolescent tastesóthe length of their respective reigns as the preferred catwalks for the weird and wonderful among us has bestowed upon these places a pedigree that no other American street can match.

Only London's Carnaby Street possesses the same mystique in the popular mind. But are any of these streets' reputations still merited?

Haight, St. Marks and Carnaby ruled as a triumvirate over hippy consciousness in the 1960's. But since then their priorities have diverged. St. Marksís beatniks turned to punk, whereas Haightís hippies turned to surfing, and it shows. This at least was my impression from last weekend's jaunt down both streets.

Haight is cleaner, wider, brighter, with more dainty boutiques selling hip skimpy things and bags and shoes. Especially shoes. St. Marks has a GAP store too now, but otherwise its consumer offerings are predominantly stall-based and of a certain sensibilityóa perennial best seller is "I fucked Mick Jagger" T-shirts. Haightís eating and drinking is done inside airy diner-like contraptions with more than one kind of mineral water. St. Marks offers dives and ethnic food and terrace cafes. Itís hard to find a smoker on Haight, while on St. Marks it's de rigeur.

Dress on Haight is surfer casual. There a hint of dot com preppy affectation, though maybe only because those are the clothes finding their way into second-hand stores now. On St. Marks, dress is approached more studiously: Kids flock together after school to curate their latest punk fashion creations. The other zealots are Japanese tourists, whose relationship to punk ranges from slavish to obsessional. Either way, itís a visual treat.

Haight Street is solving its homeless problem by denying the vagrants toilet facilitiesóor so it seems from the signage prominently displayed by every establishment you enter. This approach betrays what is perhaps the biggest difference between the two streets: Haight's small business owners are eager to put a respectable face on their street, one where its hippy pedigree is served up as nothing more than a viable shopping theme. But while the collective memory of Haight Street fades in the few remaining drugged-out minds of aging hippies, St. Marks remakes itself with every 15 year-old's first Mohawk proudly paraded across 2nd Avenue.

From Kyoto to missile defense

In the Week in Review section of last Sunday's New York Times an article quoted a lovely question by a flummoxed European reporter to Bush:

"You say the scientific evidence isn't strong enough to go forward with Kyoto. So then how do you justify your missile defense plan when there is even less scientific evidence that that will work?"

Phaemon's dog was right

At the end of Robert Graves's historical novel Claudius the God, emperor Claudius visits Vitellius, a dying courtier. Claudius ask the man why someone so virtuous as he had not supported the Republican cause during Claudius's reign. Vitellius's last words are "Phaemon's dog was right."

Claudius explains:
"It appears that Phaemon the philosopher had a little dog whom he had trained to go to the butcher every day and bring back a lump of meat in a basket. This virtuous creature, who would never dare to touch a scrap until Phaemon gave it permission, was one day set upon by a pack of mongrels who snatched the basket from its mouth and began to tear the meat to pieces and bolt it greedily down. Phaemon, watching from an upper window, saw the dog deliberate for a moment just what to do. It was clearly no use trying to rescue the meat from the other dogs: they would kill it for its pains. So it rushed in among them and itself ate as much of the meat as it could get hold of. In fact it ate more than any of the other dogs, because it was both braver and cleverer."

Phaemon's dog certainly seems right; and if this is the case we have ourselves a brilliant apologia for collaboration in unjust regimes. Or is the dog's option of scoring a moral victory by not participating in the eating of the spoils downplayed? Or is it his duty to be killed defending a just cause (his master's meat) even if there is no chance of succeeding?

But who is Phaemon? I cannot find a reference to him anywhere, which is unusual for Graves, whose novels are usually colored by real historical figures.

"Progress"

Progress is free internet access at LaGuardia while my flight to San Francisco is delayed by 12 hours.

King Herod Agrippa I

King Herod Agrippa I was a brilliant diplomat and ruler who secured the best possible deal for the Jews (and himself) under the reign of Roman emperor Claudius. But while scholars cast an approving eye on his realpolitiking, Agrippa I gets a bum deal in the Bible.

Agrippa felt he had to appease the more conservative elements in his constituency to ensure their support for his autonomous Jewish vassal state--and this meant persecuting a couple of early Christians. Conveniently, these Christians were also vocal anti-Roman separatists--hence the execution of James, one of the 12 apostles, which proved both popular and prudent.

He died suddenly in 44AD in Ceasarea, during games dedicated to Claudius. The city is now an archeological site, and the hippodrome where the games were held was being excavated in January, when I visited with Benny Mandler.

My Dominican chicken recipe

My Dominican chicken recipe:

1. Make friends with someone who has a Dominican Mother (in my case, Rosa).
2. Have Dominican Mother visit New York and cook too much food so that there is leftover garlicky peppery chicken marinade.
3. Acquire this marinade somehow.
4. Buy boneless chicken breast filets and a red onion.
5. Pour the marinade over the chicken. Call Rosa and find out you're also supposed to put salt and pepper on the chicken; but be careful: "The salt has to touch the chicken," she warns. Pouring the salt next to the chicken won't have the same effect.
6. Cut up the red onion, sautee it in a pan, add chicken filets.
7. Wonder aloud how long you're supposed to cook the chicken. Poll your guests (Charles Kenny, World Bankist, and Rike Schott, glass blowerin). Agree with Charles that the longer it's in there, the less likely you will die of salmonella.
8. Serve burnt chicken with salad and "100% real Idaho mashed potatoes" made from a box that contains shredded bits of white cardboard.

Ephrat has a new mailing address

Ephrat has a new mailing address in Senegal. It goes as follows:

Ephrat Livni
Peace Corps
BP 5001
Passy, Senegal

(Very) intermittent email contact is also to be had. I mailed her a bunch of New Yorkers last week (the magazines, not the humans) as well as Gore Vidal's Julian. Only fitting, really, as I've just restarted Graves's Claudius The God, which was a victim of Ephrat's voracious reading appetite last year.

Scrabble winnings

Today, I won $18.40 off Itay and $21.40 off Zach at Scrabble, all the while quaffing down some of Rosa's mother's delicious flan with pink lemonade. Words of the day were SCORNED and UNBATHED, the latter of which was unsuccesfully challenged, as were CORGI and FEN. It was a wonderful day.

Coolest photography site

My favorite site on the internet at the moment: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer for Czar Nicholas II, made color (!) pictures years before World War I using an ingenious system of colored lenses and multiple exposures. They've been rediscovered and are on exhibit at the Library of Congress and its web site.

To me, anything before World War II has a definite black and white feel to it. To see color pictures of an era before color is simply bizarreóit forces a contemporary sheen back onto long-dead people and situations. Interestingly, it seems easier not to judge historical actions of black and white people; but take a color picture of them, and the morality of their actions, such as those of the Emir of Bukhara (above), become suddenly relevant.

Imagine a color photograph of Alexander the Great in an unposed moment, or a video clip of Vercingetorix. Would we think of them differently? We have such things of Hitleródoes the banality of Hitler relaxing in a color documentary bring the magnitude of his crimes into even greater focus?

Movie review: Our Song

New York is being treated to a gem of a movie right now: Our Song. Set in deepest Brooklyn during the summer of 1999, it follows three teenaged girlsófriends and fellow school band membersóas they each grapple with the challenges of becoming adults.

But you can read the plot on IMDB; what I want to focus on is what is genuinely original about this film: It uses a documentary style of filmmaking, strongly reminiscent of Dogme 95 and its precursors (such as Vardaís ClÈo de 5 ‡ 7), but with an aim that is wholly different. Whereas Dogme films use the documentary style to heighten the emotional intensity of the story being told, I felt that Our Story is in fact a documentary that uses actors and a screenplay in an attempt to be even more realistic than a conventional documentary can be.

Filming a documentary can be like observing electrons: the very act of observing alters the reality being observed. Our Song circumvents this trap by meticulously reconstructing a reality, and it is done so convincingly and with so much humanity that I left the cinema convinced I have an understanding of what it is like to grow up in Crown Heights that no "real" documentary could give me. This makes it one of the best movies about New York I have seen to date.