Another sign of Mr. Byrne’s constant forward motion is his voracious appetite for new music. He’s a regular visitor to the annual South by Southwest music festival Austin, Tex., where he will be a featured speaker in March. And any concertgoer in New York City is apt to spot him regularly, hanging out near the back of a room, generally without an entourage, his shock of near-white hair adding a few inches to his already impressive height. Last year he could be spotted sipping white wine in the lobby of Town Hall before a Cat Power performance, applauding the debut of Gnarls Barkley at Webster Hall and cheering the Brazilian funk artist Otto (who appears on a forthcoming Luaka Bop compilation) at Joe’s Pub.
“He really keeps his finger on the pulse,” said Ms. Diaz-Tutaan, whom Mr. Byrne became interested in after hearing the CD her band, Apsci, recorded for the tiny progressive hip-hop label Quannum. “That’s really inspiring to me — that this guy who has been around for such a long time and has been one of my musical influences is keeping up with things on a more underground level. He’ll just ride his bike to a venue, go in, check out the band and ride home.”
Mr. Byrne doesn’t seem to think there’s anything particularly remarkable about it. “Sure, I go out a lot,” he said. “I’m in New York, and I’m a music fan. But sometimes I go out to these shows and I go ‘Where are my peers?,’ you know? Where are the musicians from my generation, or the generation after mine? Don’t they go out to hear music? Do they just stay home? Are they doing drugs? What’s going on?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Or maybe they’re just not interested anymore. They’re watching ‘Desperate Housewives.’ ”
Category: Culture
SNL does iPhone
Saturday Night Live video.
The Case for Artisan Meats
The artisans themselves also continue to use the same methods they have always used. At some point after the second world war, as food production across Europe became industrialised, making hams in the traditional labour-intensive manner ceased to be a necessary way of life and became a wonderfully tasty two-finger salute to all the boiled, pink, anaemic, mealy, tasteless hams sitting on supermarket shelves and in refrigerated cabinets.
Curing meat celebrates heterogeneity like no other culinary process. McDonald’s manages to make hamburgers that taste the same from Cape Town to Novosibirsk; cured meats, with almost identical ingredients from region to region, taste wildly different. Italy produces six denominazione di origine controllata varieties of prosciutto, all of which are made from the whole leg of a pig, salt and perhaps a bit of sugar or spice. But by virtue of the airborne yeasts and moulds native to the particular region, variations in humidity, temperature and air quality, the diet and care of the pigs and the storage of the resulting hams, each of them tastes and feels quite different from the rest. The only other product for human consumption that varies so greatly from one area to another is whisky, which also relies on tradition, fanatical attention to detail and environmental alchemy. Just as Suntory can buy all the disused stills it wants, mimic the chemical and mineral composition of Scottish water and still produce something completely different from a Highland single malt, so a prosciutto from Parma will be softer, pinker and milder than a prosciutto from Modena, and a Lyonnais saucisson will have a tang that a salame Piacentino lacks.
Related: Fra’Mani:
Our mission is crafting salumi in the finest Italian pastoral traditions, using the highest-quality, all-natural pork.
Our pork comes from family farmers committed to the well-being of their animals and their land. The hogs are never given antibiotics, artificial growth hormones, growth-promoting agents or meat by-products. They eat only the finest grains and natural feed. This old-fashioned way to raise hogs produces pork of outstanding quality, which is the essential ingredient in all Fra’ Mani salumi.
The Art of Conversation
An excellent article from the Economist:
The Brown and Levinson model says, roughly speaking, that Person A probably does not want to be rude to Person B, but in the way of things, life may sometimes require Person A to contradict or intrude on Person B, and when that happens, Person A has a range of “politeness strategies” to draw on. There are four main possibilities, given in ascending order of politeness. The first is a “bald, on-record” approach: “I’m going to shut the window.” The second is positive politeness, or a show of respect: “I’m going to shut the window, is that OK?” The third is negative politeness, which presumes that the request will be an intrusion or an inconvenience: “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I want to shut the window.” The fourth is an indirect strategy which does not insist on a course of action at all: “Gosh, it’s cold in here.”
American Samoa Exempt from Minimum Wage Hike?
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
House Republicans yesterday declared “something fishy” about the major tuna company in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district being exempted from the minimum-wage increase that Democrats approved this week.
“I am shocked,” said Rep. Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican and his party’s chief deputy whip, noting that Mrs. Pelosi campaigned heavily on promises of honest government. “Now we find out that she is exempting hometown companies from minimum wage. This is exactly the hypocrisy and double talk that we have come to expect from the Democrats.”
On Wednesday, the House voted to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour.
The bill also extends for the first time the federal minimum wage to the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. However, it exempts American Samoa, another Pacific island territory that would become the only U.S. territory not subject to federal minimum-wage laws.
Meanwhile, some Senators are attempting to water down any sort of earmark reform. A cynical observer might wonder if those in the House knew this would happen in the Senate…
The Death of General Interest Magazines?
Of course, there are those who would argue that in a society that seems to have no general interest (other than, say, Paris Hilton and the Super Bowl) there is no room or need for a general interest magazine. But Mr. Stengel said he will not be imprisoned by the tyranny of big numbers in making changes at Time.
“I think it is a false choice to say that something that is mass has to be dumbed-down.” he said. “We want to be accessible, but we want our readers to know that we understand they are smart.”
A Semi Self Defense of Enron
I also have a minor challenge for aficionados of the Enron case.
Years ago, when I was at the Washington Post, one of my colleagues on the science desk—Bill Booth—called up a dozen or so Nobel Laureates in physics and asked them to explain, in plain language, the nature and significance of the Higgs Boson atomic particle. None of them could. This was at a time, mind you, when the physics community was arguing passionately for the construction of a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator to look for things like the Higgs Boson. So it wasn’t for lack of interest. They were gung-ho for nailing the Higgs Boson. They just couldn’t explain the Higgs Boson.
Can anyone explain—in plain language—what it is Jeff Skilling and Co. did wrong?
On Earmarks & Lobbyists
Doonesbury. Much more on earmarks, including local activity, here.
The Creation of American Girl’s 2007 Girl of the Year – Nikki
Christina Binkley visits Middleton’s American Girl (a unit of Mattel):
A little more than a year ago, executives at the dollmaker American Girl sat down to undertake a high-stakes marketing mission: cramming everything the company deems uplifting and authentic about American girls into a single plastic and cloth figure. The goal: to create a character so compelling that parents will pay $86 for an 18-inch doll and a paperback book.
Working with a trove of customer feedback culled from its magazine, Web and book-publishing empire, the company determined that the typical girl these days is dependable, athletic and loves animals. She is also completely overscheduled and stressed out. She skis like a demon, rides horses, trains guide dogs, plans school parties, washes the dishes, battles popularity crises and helps her little brother with his math homework.
The improbable result is Nicki Fleming, the company’s 2007 Girl of the Year — an annual event in which the Mattel Inc. unit releases, on Jan. 1, a new doll meant to capture the current state of girlhood. Nicki’s dog Sprocket, together with training treats, a collar and leash, sells for $24. Her horse Jackson with Western saddle costs $62; his tack box, curry brush and carrots are $34.
Mattel’s (Jill Barrad was CEO at the time) acquisition of Pleasant Rowland’s American Girl for some $700M lead the way to the creation of Madison’s Overture Center. Former Oscar Meyer CEO Bob Eckert currently runs Mattel.
Guns to Caviar Index
Reading the news, it’s easy to get the sense that the world is at war: strife in Afghanistan, chaos in Iraq, genocide in Darfur, upheaval in Lebanon, and a variety of insurgencies and border squabbles around the globe. Reading the news, it’s also easy to get the sense that the world is in the midst of a golden age of peaceful prosperity. Each year, tens of millions of Indians and Chinese join the middle class. Latin America and South America, previously dominated by authoritarian regimes and civil wars, are now generally democratic and enjoying steady growth.
So, which is it? Is the world more peaceful or more warlike? Since Americans are doing the lion’s share of the fighting and military policing, it’s difficult for us to answer the question objectively. Fortunately, there is an unbiased global economic indicator that sheds some light on the question: the Guns-to-Caviar Index.