June 16, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Joe Ollmann, Cartoonist, Part 3 By Joe Ollmann This is the third and final installment of Ollmann’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1 and here to read part 2. DAY FIVE Recently, I went to Bar Pam Pam, a mysterious old-man bar in my neighborhood that I have often passed but never had the courage to enter. My friend Murray and I asked what was on tap, and the owner said, “Vieux Montreal” and stopped there. I liked that—it was like an old-time saloon. What kind of beer do you have? Just beer, stranger. This bar was wonderful, genuine, unmanufactured focus-group atmosphere, no loud music and a welcome refuge from hipsters and young people. The old-man bar, like many old men, is an institution that is dying out. It made me think of all of the other old-man bars that I know and love in Montreal. Come with me, I’ll show you … Bar Pam Pam I’ve already told you the appeal of this little gem, mere footsteps from my home! But a few notes from my visit there are worth the telling. A tipsy woman took out her guitar, randomly sang “Me and Bobby McGee” in heavily accented English, put the guitar back in its case, and continued drinking. No one else clapped or even seemed to notice this performance. Later, a heavy, bearded dude came in, and the bartender immediately brought a pitcher and glass to his table. “Why you bring this? You never see me before,” said the bearded man. “My friend, every night you come, this I know,” said the bartender, with a smile that was met by one from the bearded man. This was obviously their ritual. Read More
June 16, 2011 Softball TPR vs. High Times: The Stoners Win By Cody Wiewandt Team |1|2|3|4|5|6|7 Total HT |3|2|3|1|0|?|0 12* TPR |0|0|1|3|4|1|2 11 Of all the great rivalries in magazine softball, none is as heated as the annual High Times–TPR soiree. The Bonghitters, as they like to be called, are a formidable force despite their propensity for a very unathletic activity. (“We had a 29-game undefeated streak in the early 2000s,” former editor in chief Steve Bloom once boasted to The New York Times.) The Parisians rallied as best they could; two of our stronger players—Chris “Art of Fielding” Parris-Lamb and Paul “The Fixer” Wachter—removed their ties and dusted off their gloves for the game. There was some huffing (a few words at second base, a few elbows in the baselines), some puffing (a spirited rules discussion, an almost-spirited bench-clearing brawl), and when the dust cleared they had (just barely) blown our house down. Things we know for certain: we scored eleven runs. Things we don’t know for certain: they scored twelve. Like in Rashomon, it depends on who you ask. Yes, we succumbed to eviler forces when we let stand a phantom run they claimed crossed in the sixth, but, really, it just felt like the right thing to do. This is not to say we didn’t go down swinging—au contraire! Down by eight runs early, we did our best Dallas Mavericks impression to claw our way back to within one run of a tie. Then, in the sixth, our confidence faltered. A throwing error (by yours truly) and some timely Times hitting extended their lead to three, which is where it would sit until the final frame. A two-run homer by Jim “Big Tree” Rutman (his second of the day) briefly buoyed our spirits, but ultimately that was the closest we’d get to salvation. Although we lost, we’re not all sad. Three cheers for the Big Tree, whose two home runs collectively had enough juice to make it to Brooklyn. Two more cheers go out to our captain, Stephen “Andrew” Hiltner, for his fancy base running and his even fancier mitt. And we might as well throw in another one for the needed lesson in humility. It’s a long, long season—better to stay grounded. Until next year, High Times.
June 15, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Legendary travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor died this week at ninety-six. Described by the BBC as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene,” Fermor authored twelve books and numerous articles. A BBC tribute gives him his due. Australian minister for small businesses Nick Sherry has declared that the bookstore is doomed. Speaking in Canberra, the politician declared, “I think in five years, other than a few specialty bookshops in capital cities, you will not see a bookstore. They will cease to exist because of what’s happening with Internet-based, Web-based distribution … What’s occurring now is an exponential take-off—we’ve reached a tipping point.” Not one but two prominent “lesbian bloggers” are revealed to, in fact, be straight men. Francine Prose and Keri Hulme have sharp words for Naipaul. Rehabilitating the original “Uncle Tom.” Murakami publicly criticizes Japan’s nuclear policy. The return of Batgirl. Actor Mark Rylance quotes poet Louis Jenkins in his Tony acceptance speech. Werner Herzog will narrate an audio version of surprise-hit “bedtime story” Go the Fuck to Sleep. The 100 greatest nonfiction books?
June 15, 2011 First Person Part 3: To the Mandarin Oriental By Clancy Martin Last we checked, Martin was about to close a deal in New Orleans for a twenty-two-karat rose-gold cuff by Van Cleef & Arpels. He was wearing the trousers of former Parisian Nathaniel Rich after being booted from his hotel room. Martin needs to return to New York so he can resell the cuff and pocket the difference, but he’s running out of time. Click here to start from the beginning. At $11,000 he said, “Mazel.” I paid him the cash on the spot, right there in the restaurant, counting out each hundred dollar bill into his moist palm. “I am giving you this piece, my dear,” he said, when he rolled the money in a gray rubber band—he had an even thicker roll from which he’d removed one of the rubber bands—and stuck it into his pocket. “Because I have heard of your troubles. Our friend Nick Mehta speaks of you often, and not without sorrow and concern. If you should ever come back to our business, you know you could find a helping hand there. The gold market in India is booming. All of the software money from Mumbai is going straight into wedding jewelry.” Nick Mehta had known me since I was doing the runs at Fort Worth Gold and Silver Exchange when I was fifteen years old. The first time I ate poori bhaji it was made for me by Mrs. Mehta at ten o’clock at night on a dark, icy Friday in December. At that time I was picking up a seven-karat, half-million-dollar ruby for a client that was viewing it at nine the next morning, before we opened the doors for regular business. They officed in one of the big diamond buildings off of 635 in North Dallas, and it would take me two hours, on those winter roads, in my little nondescript Toyota truck (when you’re doing the runs in the jewelry business, you don’t drive a car that attracts attention) to get back to downtown Fort Worth. I did not know what stories Drew might be referencing, and I chose not to ask. I paid the check and left him there, finishing the last two inches in that lovely bottle of Roederer, and took a taxi straight to the airport to catch the next flight back to New York. Read More
June 15, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Joe Ollmann, Part 2 By Joe Ollmann This is the second installment of Ollmann’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY THREE Of late, everything in my life seems to be done in fifteen-minute increments, as if I am in my personal life digging up the powdered-wigged corpse of Andy Warhol’s too-oft-quoted chestnut, minus the fame. I’ve become fat, so I run for fifteen minutes every day (pathetic, I know, but I will return to this). My only reading time is during my fifteen-minute commute each morning. I meet with my wife after a night of work, and we watch part of a movie, sometimes as little as fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes: EVERYWHERE! Read More
June 15, 2011 At Work The Summer Issue: Six Questions for Amie Barrodale By Sadie Stein In Amie Barrodale’s “William Wei,” the eponymous narrator enters into an unusual relationship over the phone with a woman who claims to have met him at a party. What follows, as he says, “changed my life.” Barrodale took the time to answer a few questions. How would you characterize your work? When people ask me what kind of things I write, I just say I write stories. I don’t know what else to say. The details of this story feel real. What inspired it? I met someone who did this to me. Or something similar. Your fiction seems to deal frequently with questions of human disconnection. Disconnection, yes. I don’t know why. I find disconnection painful and very, very emotional, so I like to try to write about it. You can’t boil it down or sum it up. You can only describe it. A Google search tells me “William Wei” is “the Video Producer for Business Insider,” “Professor of Statistics at Temple University,” and a professor of surgery. Coincidence? The names came from nowhere but later I learned that Wei, in addition to being a surname, means “who are you?” in Chinese. Or I read that somewhere. I hope it’s true. It’s also a greeting for the phone, Wei. What writers are you into these days? Who are you reading now? I really like the stories Donald Antrim has been writing in The New Yorker lately. I love V. S. Naipaul and the novel Pitch Dark by Renata Adler. I also love Wong Kar-Wai, and I just now found, through your guys’ recommendation, Chris Marker. I’m traveling so I’m not reading; my suitemate took the book I brought, and I’m a little embarrassed to say what it was. What are you working on? I’m working on a novel, but I’m a little superstitious and yesterday a tarot card reader told me not to discus my idea—someone might take it. I mean, it was a friend with a deck of those cards. I would have discounted it, except that she was the second friend with cards to tell me that, about this book, so … Subscribe now and get the summer issue and a Paris Review beach towel!