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I failed a Mensa test — twice

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:00:00 +0000

American Mensa, an organization that admits people with an IQ in the top two percent of the population, claims nearly 60,000 members, including more than 2,300 in the Greater New York area (and a bunch of toddlers).

On a Saturday morning in late May, I went to see if I could become one of them.

Can Ultimate Frisbee go mainstream?

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:57:00 +0000

“You used to be an ultimate player, now you're just a guy who plays ultimate." I was out at ultimate frisbee spring league, which is played at the Parade Grounds in Prospect Park, complaining to my teammate Dan about some ache or pain or other. It was something a teammate had said to him, and it stung. It’s a fine line, of course, but with the dawn of the professional ultimate era -- the second seasons of America’s two professional Ultimate Frisbee leagues are now past their respective halfway points -- this painful distinction is only going to get more pronounced, and the question of what ultimate frisbee is will only get more complicated.

I am Nick Miller from “New Girl”

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 16:00:00 +0000

By all accounts I appear to “have my sh*t together.” I rarely actually feel like I do but if you looked at my life from the outside it probably would appear that I have a firm grasp on my future, my life and where I’m headed with both. The evidence is all there. I’ve found someone to spend my life with, have a career in my chosen field, and generally have enough money to both pay my bills and go out for the occasional dinner at places where sneakers aren’t allowed. Despite all of this, there are times where my life feels like I’ve begun a circus act without actually knowing how to juggle. The balls are in the air, the audience is watching, and I’ve even managed to catch and toss a few back up, but I’m probably going to miss the next one and they’ll all come crashing down and then everyone will know that I’ve been faking it the whole time. “New Girl” is my support group and Nick Miller is my sponsor.

I am not a Disney princess

Tue, 28 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When I was little, I had three dreams: to become the first female shortstop in Major League Baseball, to marry former Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez and to play a princess at Walt Disney World. My lack of hand-eye coordination and Martinez’s wife and children put the first two ambitions out of reach, but the third stayed with me.

Since I was 3 years old, my family has visited Walt Disney World almost every year. We’re one of those families that refuses to vacation anywhere else. We consider getting a beer at each of EPCOT’s national pavilions a horizon broadening experience. When I was little, we waited in line to do meet-and-greets with the Disney princesses. I’d approach Belle in her iridescent gown, or Ariel in her brassiere made of bivalve remains, and present them with my autograph book, marveling at how cheerful, and dainty and ladylike they were. As a neurotic, tomboyish 7-year-old, I found them nothing less than magical.

Richard Nixon, hero of the American Left

Sun, 05 May 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed, but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, "whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly."

— Richard Nixon, August 8, 1974

ON APRIL 27, 1994, outside a small home in Yorba Linda, California, President William Jefferson Clinton delivered the final eulogy at the funeral of Richard Milhous Nixon. At first, the speech seemed to abide by the unspoken rules of decorum that had informed every eulogy before it: praise the former president in broad terms; highlight his triumphs in foreign policy. Pay homage to his enviable family life. Do not, under any circumstances, say “Watergate.”

“Parks and Recreation”: TV’s most progressive show

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:38:00 +0000

NBC’s PARKS AND RECREATION, never shying from political controversy, examines current beltway tensions in ways one might expect from a more overtly political program. This season more than ever, the tendentious questions of American governance have become the show's lifeblood, its fictive small town of Pawnee, Indiana, struggling with political tribulations closely mirroring those on the national stage — and proposing some bold solutions.

The season’s first episode follows the lead character, Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope, to Washington DC, where she met real political figures such as Joe Biden (her hero), Olympia Snowe, Barbara Boxer, and John McCain. Recent episodes have been titled "Soda Tax" and "How a Bill Becomes a Law" and highlight the nitty-gritty — if comically histrionic — details about local politics. In addition, the show's constant use of innuendo surrounding current political events, reenactment of debates concerning economics and governance, and tongue-in-cheek references to the increasing conservatism of American politics have made Parks and Rec more a comedic primer in American politics than a primetime comedy.

When we all smelled like teen spirit

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000

RIGHT NOW ON the Bowery you can step into a time machine. It will carry you back to 1993 or thereabouts. It spreads over five floors in a great gleaming building, and to first acclimate you, a line of boxy Samsung televisions broadcast highlights from the year. This was before TVs were flat-screen or LCD or HD, when the initials that stood for high-tech – or any tech – in home entertainment were VHS. Here was a moment before the Internet was big, the World Wide Web did not exist yet (not really), AIDS was still “uncured,” Clinton had just been inaugurated, and it was a watershed moment for art.

This five-story teleportation device is an exhibit at the New Museum called “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star.” Ignore the subtitle. It’s from a Sonic Youth album that doesn’t appear in the show and was, in fact, released in 1994. Though, I’ve read some pretty baroque interpretations of why it fits with such a close textual analysis they veer on New Criticism.

Does “Downton Abbey” perpetuate gay stereotypes?

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:00:00 +0000

IT WAS A SEASON OF SADNESS, a season of tsuris; the anti-Passover, I guess, as at the last minute the Angel of Death, that occasional writing partner of Julian Fellowes, stopped at Downton Abbey after all. Yes, Season Three of the most successful drama in PBS history ended with both a death and a birth, as Fellowes is a generous host. If you didn’t watch, you can read on without fear; here be no spoilers. I’ll just say that we were left with a Major Character dead on a country road, blood leaking from (gender unspecified’s) mouth. Season Four, which we won’t get for a year, will pick up six months after the Sadness. Maggie Smith, in the role of Maggie Smith, will once more in her Don-Rickles-with-a-title mode trot out the zingers, his Lordship will disapprove of something or other, and Lady Edith will defy the example set by her late sister Sybil that Girls With Ideas come to early ends. Shit may, as they say, happen at Downton, but Fellowes believes that just getting on with it is the best revenge, a worldview that helps him infallibly locate and dramatize the perfect balance between what needs to change, and what must never change, with the latter given the weight.

William H. Gass, post-post-everything author

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 21:00:00 +0000

JOHN GARDNER, THE NOVELIST (and author of "On Moral Fiction"), was the first editor to publish Gass — a remarkable novella-length story called “The Pederson Kid,” in Gardener’s magazine, MSS. As the years passed, Gardner went on to call Gass one of his all-time favorites (as did Donald Barthelme and many others), but wished there were more morality pulsing through the veins of his novels and stories. Thank God Gass would have none of that. Thank God that morality for Gass is the ugly truth laid bare, grotesqueries and all, and that simple punishments, happy endings, and “lessons learned” are not suitable for the big reality of his fiction. What he has to say about humanity is communicated not by plot but through the radical vitality and violent inventiveness of his language.

When capitalism consumed the Internet

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 19:00:00 +0000

“Let’s grab all this new technology in our teeth once again and turn it into a bonanza for advertising.” These are the words of former Procter & Gamble CEO Edwin Artzt. Renowned for his business acumen, Artzt, always one to turn a profit, told his fellow captains of industry to aim their attention to something new, something unseen before, something that needed to be conquered.

The early Internet was certainly a different place. It seemed a time of unlimited potential, when the old barriers to communication and information were said to melt away like so much butter in the microwave. People would be linked in ways never seen before, all in a purely public and noncommercial space. Early analysts claimed that the old media conglomerates were going to be swept aside by a coming Digital Age. For those looking to the future, the Internet would be the democratic space since its underlying principle, the networked sharing of data, was inherently leveling, free, and transparent.

Down with song-lyric fascists

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Mrs. Pajiba-hyphenate’s biggest pet peeve around the house is that it drives her absolutely bonkers if, while idly sing-songing about the house, I botch the lyrics to the tune I’m belting out. It’s an annoyance that she’s passed on to my 5 year old, whose forehead veins pop whenever I mangle a lyric. He insists that I sing it again until I identify the correct lyrics, and it’s only then that the vein will subside.

It’s a very serious problem in our home, and I suspect it’s a problem in other houses around America: Song-lyric fascists are ruining our fun. Because here’s the thing: Song lyrics are constructs. They are guidelines. Song lyrics, like the Constitution, are living, breathing words. We bend them to our will. They are not meant to be taken literally. In fact, song lyrics are often indecipherable junk written to accompany the melody and rarely to stand on their own. They are not poems. We do not derive meaning from their words; we experience the music. The mood. The feeling. The joy or the sadness. The lyrics glue the music together, but they are not fixed.

Ten amazing memories: Heartwarming stories of my dog, Brando (2000-2013)

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When I was in first grade, I wrote my first "published" story, for our school's mimeographed weekly publication. It was a memoir actually. It was the story of our family cat, Puss, who had just passed away. It was only relatively recently that the significance of this first piece of writing came clear to me: This was, at that point in my life, a huge, mysterious event. It read, in its entirety, "My cat died. My cat is dead." I hadn't learned to be sentimental. Later that year, I discovered one of my first favorite books, "The Tenth Good Thing About Barney," by Judith Viorst. It was about a boy whose cat dies, and his mother tells him he should think of 10 good things to say about Barney when they have a funeral in their yard.

Is the small nonprofit in big trouble?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:01:00 +0000

IN A RECENT Los Angeles Times article about Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) efforts to raise $100 million, a fundraising consultant said, “People like to give to excellence. It’s excellence, not need that generates big gifts.”

If that were really the case, author Ken Stern argues, then D.A.R.E., the darling drug abuse education program started by former Los Angeles Police chief Daryl Gates and now in more than 75 percent of the school districts of this country, wouldn’t raise a dime, most after-school programs would be bankrupt, and the next disaster the Red Cross should be attending to would be in its own executive offices.

The ability to survive, even thrive, with programs that have been proven not to work is just one of the many oddities With Charity for All documents in the topsy-turvy, misunderstood, and mostly ignored world of nonprofits.

HP Lovecraft, pulp philosopher

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:22:00 +0000

H.P. LOVECRAFT'S WORK has not received a great deal of attention from literary critics. Until relatively recently, the majority of “treatments” of his oeuvre have been in the form of B-movies. While it’s surprising that Roger Corman, director of seven features based on the stories of Lovecraft’s great predecessor, Poe, only did one Lovecraft film (The Haunted Palace, itself marketed as “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace,” despite being based on Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward), some of the stable of effects of Lovecraft’s fiction — his characters’ tendencies to simply tell you their emotions (usually on a scale between repulsion and disgust), their inability to adequately describe the most startling creatures and architectures — make his stories ripe for the B-movie treatment. The telegraphed emotions of his characters justify stilted or hysterical acting, and the incomplete, contradictory visual descriptions of creatures like Cthulhu or the Old Ones — not to mention the “strange, beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars” hovering miles above us in At the Mountains of Madness — seem to cry out for a gauzy camera style that conceals the tawdriness of the set design, the recycled monster costumes, and the failures of the lighting crew.

Why do we love to look at strangers’ family photographs?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:58:00 +0000

ONE OF NEW YORK’s most sophisticated galleries of interactive art used to be on St. Mark’s Place. And I do mean on St. Mark’s, out on the sidewalk. Itinerant street vendors would set up tables piled with the detritus of anonymous lives, cast off books, earrings, scarves, toy trucks, every item compressed under the weight of a small sadness. It almost seemed unkind to look, as if you were staring at a stranger weeping in private grief. But the collection of black-and-white photographs shoved under a table practically sang out its conspiratorial invitation: Complete me.

I’ll never forget the moment when, after fishing blindly in this box of a thousand dead memories, I pulled out a work of art. It had not been intended as one; it was just a snapshot. But it was aesthetically bewitched. The time it took for a shutter to open and close in, oh, I don’t know—a sheared-off sliver of one second in Depression-struck 1932?—was the exact amount of time it took the eye to remake it. A picture of a picture, this time taken by the beholder.

The wonderful world of Warhammer workshops

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Among the plethora of burger joints and clothing stores on 8th Street in the East Village, the Games Workshop hobby center sits inconspicuously on the ground floor of a residential building. Look past the colorful plastic figurines posed for battle in the glass display cases, past the game tables down the center of the store manned (yes, they’re all men) by players intently measuring their opponent’s next move. Way in the back is where the action is. This is where the hardcore gamers spend their days chatting about technique and preparing for battle. But they’re not clutching controllers or mesmerized by a glaring screen. They are holding paintbrushes — one of the essential weapons of Warhammer.

Armed with paper towels and bottles of paint, each gamer painstakingly crafts their own army of twenty-eight millimeter models, figurine by figurine.

Searching for Bill Watterson

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 17:00:00 +0000

In the days of 4G wireless networks and Twitter, when virtually every moment of a person’s life can be tracked online and many people offer up that information freely, it’s a rare thing to come across a public figure who not only doesn’t buy into the idea of constant communication but takes themselves in the opposite direction — completely out of the spotlight. The term “recluse” seems like a dirty word, a slur — “private” or “introverted” seem much fairer ways to describe someone than a word that suggests agoraphobia — but that’s how many would describe artists ranging from Emily Dickinson to Marcel Proust, Harper Lee to J.D. Salinger.

Some say that the “recluse” is an endangered species, but to my knowledge, there’s still one artist who is keeping the idea of the private public figure alive: Bill Watterson, writer and illustrator of the beloved comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes."

Women over 50 are invisible

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Tira Harpaz. Harpaz is a graduate of Princeton University and Fordham Law School and the mother of three children. She was formerly a Senior Attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell and she is currently the founder and president of CollegeBound Advice, an independent college counseling firm. You can also read her first piece for Feministing.

Scientists at Duke University’s Center for Metamaterials and Integrated Plasmonics are close to perfecting an “invisibility cloak,” a breakthrough they have been working on since 2006. While I appreciate their efforts, I want to give them a tip: If you want to make a person invisible, just put them in the shoes of an over-fifty woman and abracadabra, watch them disappear.

Even a Mets fan can be optimistic on Opening Day

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:12:00 +0000

It was sunny and clear on Monday for Mets Opening Day, with no noisy planes overhead, so we could hear every bit of the conversations around us. The lulling pitter-patter of “fucks” in row 3 bemused our whole group—not just my father, who was new to Mets baseball, but the veterans of the trip to Flushing. I was there with my old roommate; we used to live in Flushing and walk to games along Roosevelt Avenue, through the carbon monoxide haze above the Whitestone Expressway and past the Iron Triangle's auto repair shops and psychotic guard dogs, restrained from tearing you to pieces by chain-link fences that also allow you to look into their eyes and see the contempt you’ve earned. Getting to the game in this way can be loud and gray and windy and sticky and dirty all at once and altogether disorienting, which is why almost nobody does it. Arriving at the park doesn’t seem like you’ve reached paradise, or that you’re free of any of this filth and misery—these are the Mets we’re talking about, after all. In terms of misery and pride, it’s hard to know where the team ends and the rest of Queens begins, except on Opening Day; then, for three hours, people are happy. On Opening Day, Flushing is a place transformed, all smiles and radiance in a generally fraught place just across the way from where your stolen car’s radials are being hawked at a chop shop.

American TV’s British invasion

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:48:00 +0000

THE BRITISH ARE COMING. They are bringing with them a time-traveling alien who fights monsters with a screwdriver and a bow tie. On March 30, Doctor Who returns to American television with a new batch of episodes, its popularity continuing a recent trend of British shows becoming available and successful in the United States.

The Pulitzer-prize winning historian David Hackett Fischer wrote that “in a cultural sense most Americans are Albion’s seed, no matter who their own forebears may have been.” He was referring to our political, social, and linguistic patterns, but it may be the arts and entertainment where the patrimony and connections are strongest. School curricula invariably include Dickens, Austen, and Shakespeare. The first American movie star was London-born Charlie Chaplin. Harry Potter is the fastest selling book series in US history, even though the boarding school culture on which Hogwarts is based is practically nonexistent here and some of the jokes (“spellotape” is a play on “sellotape,” the British name for Scotch tape) don’t translate. In 1965, half of Billboard’s number-one songs were by British bands. An Englishman won an Oscar for the role of Abraham Lincoln.