AnimaMundi

Gourmet Magazine RIP

We had a subscription to Gourmet magazine for a few years. I enjoyed looking at the luscious photographs, reading the articles and trying some recipes. The copies are still in our cellar. (If I toss them, you can be certain Conde Naste will start charging to access Epicurious.) I especially liked the travel pieces, but were the accommodations and restaurant suggestions all that affordable to those who could not live the Gourmet "good living" lifestyle? I always got a chuckle when Gourmet would offer their budget suggestions for a hotel. Once upon a time, we knew people who thought that they lived out of the pages of Gourmet, literally.

Regina's thoughts on the demise of Gourmet.

Gucci GG Plus Sneakers Only $316 @Bluefly.com

 
Economically speaking, things ain't right and won't be for sometime. You don't have to look very far. Billions of dollars are being thrown around like it was cotton candy. People say it's not that bad, as they click on those Gucci sneakers. "But, it's free shipping!" they say. My friend Mike, a self-employed plumber, said to me recently: "People don't realize how bad it really is". Mike is no alarmist. He's practical and hardworking.

Another friend, Alfonso in Dallas, is in the wine business. He says he keeps all of his wine in a closet. It must be a very spacious walkin one. He has never posted a photo of it it so I can't really say. I do know that it contains some wines of exceptional artistry and mystery. Now, during this metastatic economic shitstorm, he notes that some high end producers are raising their prices. In the meantime, inventories are backing up, wines begging to be closed out, wanting to find a good home. At least that's what I hope and in some cases I have been lucky enough to buy a few bottles at closeout prices. That might change if the closeouts become more plentiful. I might come close to having a full wine cellar. Then the winter weather would b mitigated some.

The Summer of Death Or Who Died Today?

A few days ago, I had written a short draft about the deaths of so many celebrities this summer, but then deleted it. It wasn't going anywhere and I was hot & humid-blitzed and still am.

Ironically, our current culture is one of a denial of death at all costs. Yet the media that we have created only serve to heighten our awareness of the deaths of many more people around the planet on any given day or month. The ghost in the machine seems to reflect another opposite facet of the obsessive cult of immortality and the puer aeternus.

It was when I saw this "Abundance of Death" post on Kottke that I started to think about the big D again, as I am wont to do every now and then. Coincidentally, this past winter was pretty deadly for friends and relatives, one of the more plentiful crops for the grim reaper in recent memory. Last February, I remember looking at my cousin's obit photograph in The Westerly Sun. I couldn't have seen that picture on the web say 10-15 years ago.

On August 20, 2009, I heard on NPR that the average life expectancy in the USA has risen to 78 or so. Men clock in at 75+. Women at 80+. Women have always and still rule. According to NPR's 2007 stats, we are still 3rd on the planet in terms of life expectancy. But the ever reliable Wikipedia, ranks us as #50. The figures are from the 2009 World Fact Book. Big discrepancy. I'll try to look into this slight gap.

The Daily Death highlights an increasing awareness of the deaths of celebrities and micro-celebrities due to the convergence of 24-7 news, gossip web sites, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds et al.

Kottke wrote about the future obituary glut in 2005: 

"Frankly, I don't know how we're all going to handle this. Chances are in 15-20 years, someone famous whose work you enjoyed or whom you admired or who had a huge influence on who you are as a person will die each day...and probably even more than one a day. And that's just you...many other famous people will have died that day who mean something to other people. Will we all just be in a constant state of mourning? Will the NY Times national obituary section swell to 30 pages a day? As members of the human species, we're used to dealing with the death of people we "know" in amounts in the low hundreds over the course of a lifetime. With higher life expectancies and the increased number of people known to each of us (particularly in the hypernetworked part of the world), how are we going to handle it when several thousand people we know die over the course of our lifetime?"

On my Google home page I have the NY Times obituaries in a side bar. Sometimes I find out about a death otherwise, e.g. Manny Oquendo who died on March 25, 2009, and wondered why his obit didn't get into the NY Times until April 12th. Here is one of the premier Latino bandleaders and timbaleros of all time and it took over two weeks for his obituary to show up in the NY Times! He was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, not that far from West 43rd St. in Manhattan, as the crow flies. But when a pioneer of the study ulcers dies it takes less than a week for his death to make the obituary hit list. WTF? I mean come on. I wonder how long it would take for Joey Shithead's death to make it into the NY Times obits?

In today's NY Times obit, there's a entry for Larry Knectel. Who the hell is he? He was part of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound group, The Wrecking Crew. How would I have know this unless I was a knowledgeable fanatic? I vaguely remember his name on the credits to some albums. The web makes us aware of the deaths of people we would never had known shit about. I have bought cd's as a result of the NY Times obit of a musician that I had heard of but did not own any of his/her work.

Lots of Death ahead. But the one death of the summer of 2009 that keeps on giving will never die, really. His death is the only one to bring down the mighty Twitter. Not many or any will do that again. Wait, it's Michael Jackson's birthday. On which day he was supposedly buried.

P.S. If it wasn't for the web, I think the death of Ellie Greenwich would have gone largely unnoticed. I didn't know who she was, but the music that she wrote, ah...

And Eunice Shriver and Ted Kennedy, the 3rd longest serving member of the US Senate? Who were the other two who served longer? One of whom is still a senator.

It's telling that when one mentions celebrity deaths, people take notice. During 2009, many people anonymous to the internet have died while struggling to make a life. Most of these deaths go unchronicled and unnoticed. Some of these people have created a life of service to humanity. They don't receive headlines and would shun it if they did. These people are the ones who pass the cup to the next generation.

On MSM, at the end of the year they show the faces of the people who died during 2009. It will be something else this year.  

 

P.S. I know that this is choppy and doesn't flow very well. That's because I had a very stolid boring high school English teacher. His nickname was "Tiger Lowry" and he had halitosis.

Update: The Awl is upset about coinage of the phrase "Summer of Death."

Was it NY Magazine?

I believe it was The Awl.

Update: The summer of death ain't over, yet. Ismael Valenzuela died yesterday.

Update: Mr. D has about a week left to the summer of 2009. In the interim Larry Helbert, Patrick Swayze, Sheila Lukins and Norma Rae.

Omission: Reverend Ike died on July 28, 2009.

Update: The Grim Reaper's swath of the summer of 2009 isn't over yet. RIP Mary Travers and Henry Gibson.

Update: Kottke spots Kurt Anderson quoting David Kipen on Twitter.

The Awl on the NY Times getting in on the act too.

I forgot about James Luther Dickinson and David Carradine.

The autumnal equinox is at 5:18 pm September 22, 2009.

The 2009 Summer of Death is now officially over.

 

Scout Prime at First Draft Says Farewell

Via the Great Greek Adrastos in NOLA, comes the news that Scout Prime of First Draft is bidding farewell. I didn 't know that she was the inspiration for the Rising Tide Conferences  in NOLA. When I started blogging in the spring of 2005 my focus was non-focused. Then the levees breached and 80% of New Orleans was under water. After staring at the tube dumbfounded for days, I started reading some NOLA bloggers for what was really happening. I haven't approached anything remotely comparable to her expertise and diligence on behalf of the city and its people. I always enjoyed reading her posts because they were filled with passion, dogged determination and hope. She is a candle amidst the MSM bullshit. What happened to the city and its people has always and will always remain with me. The horrifically outrageous things I saw and read about gave me an impetus to write something, anything. I thank her and all the NOLA bloggers for the way they roll.  

"Sound Unbound"

I have only read a few of the 36 pieces about media in all forms in this enlightening take on the remix and sampling. Assembled by DJ Spooky, the contributors take vastly different angles on pop media culture as recombinant mixes of what nature and man have created out of chaos. I'll try to post about some of the pieces in the book. I recommend it to those interested in music, sampling, plagiarism, remixing culture, media etc. 

 "Sound Unbound"

Bailout Explained

This is one of the better short explanations of the bailout. It's our problem.

Oh Roger, your son is doing ok.

Bush's Banana's

The more I learn what has just happened in these United States of America the Beautiful, the more I am amazed that the screwed populace of this great nation are not at this moment in the streets of our country's capitol clammering for their heads. Christopher Hitchen's in Vanity Fair:

I was very struck, as the liquefaction of a fantasy-based system proceeded, to read an observation by Professor Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, of the Yale School of Management. Referring to those who had demanded—successfully—to be indemnified by the customers and clients whose trust they had betrayed, the professor phrased it like this:

These are people who want to be rewarded as if they were entrepreneurs. But they aren’t. They didn’t have anything at risk.

That’s almost exactly right, except that they did have something at risk. What they put at risk, though, was other people’s money and other people’s property. How very agreeable it must be to sit at a table in a casino where nobody seems to lose, and to play with a big stack of chips furnished to you by other people, and to have the further assurance that, if anything should ever chance to go wrong, you yourself are guaranteed by the tax dollars of those whose money you are throwing about in the first place! It’s enough to make a cat laugh. These members of the “business community” are indeed not buccaneering and risk-taking innovators. They are instead, to quote my old friend Nicholas von Hoffman about another era, those who were standing around with tubas in their arms on the day it began to rain money. And then, when the rain of gold stopped and the wind changed, they were the only ones who didn’t feel the blast. Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron, the former bosses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have departed with $9.43 million in retirement benefits. I append no comment.

The 401-Keg

Oyster at Your Hand Hand Thief links to this:

If you had purchased $1,000 of AIG stock one year ago, you would have $42 left. With Lehman, you would have $6.60 left. With Fannie or Freddie, you would have less than $5 left. But if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have had $214. Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. It's called the 401-Keg....

Obama and C-H-A-N-G-E

How do they spell change in Jacksonville, Florida?

Via Maud Newton

Masters Of The Universe

Shed no tears for the Masters of the Universe, however, not that your correspondent actually thought you might. Most of the young Masters already have their own personal nut free and clear. “Nut” is the term for the amount of money you need salted away in weather-proof investments in order to generate enough interest to live comfortably in Greenwich on Round Hill Road, Pecksland Road or Field Point Road in a house built before the First World War in an enchanting European style, preferably made of stone featuring the odd turret, with a minimum of five acres around it and big enough to be called a manor. Every Master of the Universe knows the number.

Why Conservatives Led The Fight Against the Bailout: "Think of it as the government selling fire insurance for houses that are already ablaze."