Why I'm Moving To Los Angeles

Well, it’s not for the weather, that’s for sure. LA weather basically sucks in my opinion because it’s too goddamn nice out all the time. If I could I would move someplace like Manchester or Dublin or, ideally, one of the darker pits of hell where it’s perpetually gray, gloomy and rainy out and people huddle up over pints in old stone taverns and have a generally pale, miserable look about them. Southern California, by contrast, is cursed with a pathologically temperate climate, sandy beaches, and rows of imported palm trees and everyone there is expected to maintain a buff and bronzed glow, which falls somewhat short of my ideal appearance. For me, the iconic image is that of a man under cloudy skies, clad in hat and overcoat, with a beer in his hand, darkness in his soul, and a limp fag dangling from his lips. That is the man I would like to become. But, alas, I am translating myself—in more ways than one—to a foreign shore where the automobile is king and happiness is a house in the hills—hills which will tumble into the ocean one day, as sure as the sun will set.

Not that the sun ever really sets in SoCal, but you get the idea. I’ve allowed myself to be tempted by the lure of film and the limitless reach that it promises. It occurred to me when I was out there last that my friends who had done television but no theatre after college, are now considerably better positioned than I am to snag roles on the New York stage, despite the fact that I’ve actually done theatre here. It’s the way of the world, I guess, and it’s nothing I can really be angry about if I’m honest. Theatre is and always has been an iffy economic proposition and I can’t really blame producers if they feel they require the ballast that “stars,” however dim, can provide. It’s not a great system artistically, but it does make a certain amount of economic sense—again, hard to argue with. Similarly, I find it eminently understandable—even laudable—that a Juilliard degree matters only marginally to the LA casting director, where to the NY casting director it’s the golden ticket. There’s a certain mischievous logic in this. Why should four years of Suzuki training and Alexander technique be a prerequisite for a guest spot on Scrubs? In this way, Hollywood seems a bit more egalitarian than the New York theatre world, currently in the throes of its MFA-worshipping phase. In Los Angeles your vowels will not save you; credential yourself up as you will, it’s still tough for everyone.

The matter of the weather, of course, will resolve itself and I may even grow to like it, but I wouldn’t count on it and in any case I’m going to seriously miss walking. But it’s time to move on. As Joan Didion put it in her mournful essay about switching coasts, “Goodbye To All That,” “I began to understand . . . that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.” This essay was written in 1967 when Didion was 33, but I don’t feel like I have a head start on her. After all, she’d lived in California before, so, for her, this was a return. It will all be new to me, of course, and that’s fine and I have friends out there and I’m resourceful, so I should be okay. But I can’t escape the feeling that moving to New York felt like such an accomplishment—like storming the gates somehow. And moving to LA feels like . . . just moving anywhere, really. Here’s some more Didion:

“Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.”

“Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited.”

“All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more.”

And there you have it. A 27 year-old shouldn’t find himself besieged by thoughts of mortality, at least not with any regularity. And while the number itself—twenty-seven—seems improbably high to me as I utter it, I can hardly say that I feel old. But I do not exactly feel young, either. I don’t know if New York is a city so much for the young, as Didion suggests, as it is for the romantic (a temperament which, for some, may only seem attainable by the young). Well, I suppose I’m feeling a little less sentimental these days, a little more hard-nosed. New York has toughened me up, I guess. And, not without gratitude, I will now say goodbye.

Reading Le Monde When You Don’t Understand French

So, I was reading Le Monde today, even though I don’t understand French and here’s what I learned: surprisingly little. French is really hard to read when you don’t know the language. Anyway, I did pick up a few things here and there, which I will attempt to share with you. PLEASE NOTE! This is my translation of a newspaper that was written in a language with which I have almost no familiarity, so I may get a few things wrong. But I also might get some things right? Who knows? Let’s see what happens!

1. The French President’s Getting Divorced! That’s what I assume this headline means: “Le divorce du couple Sarkozy ‘s'est très bien passé’, selon leur avocate commune.” Truth be told, I’d actually heard about this before in an American newspaper, where it was kindly reported in English. Nonetheless, let’s see if some more info can be gleaned from the French report. Ooh, it looks like it was a mutual separation—no hard feelings. At least that’s what I believe “séparation par consentement mutuel” means. Also, they’ve been married since 1996 (That’s what this means, right? “Cécilia et Nicolas Sarkozy étaient mariés depuis 1996”). Not a very long time, Mr. President! You couldn’t give it one last chance? Ah, there’s more: “Le chef de l'Etat est attendu jeudi à Lisbonne pour un sommet européen.” Now, for a minute I thought this meant that the "government chef" (?) was attending a European summit in Lisbon, but that sounded kind of retarded, so now I figure it refers to Sarkozy himself, who apparently not only ditched his lady but also shuttled off to the Iberian peninsula to get away from the whole thing. Alright, enough of le président. What else is going on in France?

2. Oooh, this article’s a little more complicated. Here’s the headline: “150 000 manifestants contre la réforme des régimes spéciaux de retraite, selon la police.” Now, the main thing I got from this is that in France they don’t divide their big numbers with commas; they just leave a space every three digits like they did here with "150 000." Interesting! Okay, let’s work this one out a bit. It sounds to me like there were 150,000 demonstrators protesting against the, uh, reform of special regimes of some sort and that they fought with police? I’ll bet that’s more or less right. (Any Frenchies reading this should correct me if I’m wrong about this stuff.) Alright, I think I figured it out. “Régimes spéciaux de retraite” actually refers to special (“spéciaux”) retirement packages that government employees get. It would seem that the protests are against Sarkozy’s attempt to reduce or eliminate these packages. Ah! Here’s some more interesting stuff! Check this out: “Le régime spécial de retraite des personnels de l'Opéra national de Paris a été créé en 1698 par Louis XIV. Celui des marins du commerce et de la pêche, en 1709. D'autres ont été mis en place au XIXe siècle : celui de la Banque de France (1806), de la Comédie-Française (1812), des fonctionnaires civils (1853), des chemins de fer (1855) ou des mines (1894).” Confusing, right? Well, I think I understand it. This little passage is basically listing the different government agencies whose employees get these sweet retirement packages. Interestingly, the years in parentheses indicate when the retirement packages were first instituted. And look how old they are! Paris Opera employees have been enjoying these benefits since 1698! You know what America was back then? That’s right, a waterlogged triangular fort in the tidewater filled with muddy houses and syphallitic British convicts, that’s what! Just goes to show you how long the French have been at it. Alright, what else is in this silly newspaper . . . ?

3. Hahahaha! This headline is great! “La chevauchée rock des French Cowboy.” Apparently, there’s some weird-ass Gallic band called French Cowboy, and they “chante en anglais un rock aride mâtiné à la sauce western spaghetti,” which I think means “sing rock songs in English with a side of western spaghetti sauce." Hahaha! If that's true, that's fucking hilarious. What else is in here . . . ?

4. Oooh, here’s some stuff about the United States. Always fun to see what they say about us in other countries. I bet they hate Bush. Maybe as much as I do! Let’s see. Here’s a fun one: “Nucléaire iranien : George Bush veut ‘éviter la troisième guerre mondiale.’” This looks like it’s about the potentiality of a nuclear war with Iran, so maybe it’s not so fun . . . but it’ll be fun to see what they say about Bush! Ah, Christ . . . this article is hard to understand! Here’s a quote I think I get. It’s from Bush: “Il reconnaît qu'il n'est pas dans l'intérêt du monde que l'Iran ait la capacité de construire une bombe nucléaire.” Hahaha! It’s funny to think of Bush speaking French. Um, it looks like he’s saying that it’s in the interest of the world (“dans l'intérêt du monde”) that Iran gives up its nuclear capacity (“que l'Iran ait la capacité de construire une bombe nucléaire”). Huh. Bush is as hard to understand in French as he is in English. Interesting.

Well, that’s all I have for now. Looks like there’s a lot of shit going down in France right now, though! This was fun! Also, because I was reading Le Monde in a public place (Doma Cafe on Perry & Seventh Ave), lots of people saw me with a French newspaper and probably thought I was smart and cosmopolitan. I’ll leave you with this final headline: “Au Mexique, arrestation d’un ‘poete cannibale.’” That, my friends, means that a cannibal poet was arrested in Mexico today. And on that note . . .

Of Douchebags and Asshats

Vanessa Grigoriadis has a 6,300-word piece in this week’s issue of New York Magazine about the web phenomenon known as Gawker Media, a digital empire founded by English recluse Nick Denton. Gawker’s holdings include Gizmodo (consumer electronics), Wonkette (Washington politics), Defamer (the entertainment industry), and Fleshbot (pornography). Grigoriadis’s sole focus, however, is Denton’s flagship site, gawker.com, which chronicles Manhattan media. Its mission is inscribed cheekily in its masthead: “Reporting live from the wordwide headquarters for the lucrative trade in ad hominem Internet biliousness.” I’ve visited the site daily for almost a year now and it pretty much defines the notion of guilty pleasure. Its tone of disgruntled bitchiness produces a style that, because of its superficiality, is eminently readable, but it can leave one pretty hollow if indulged in too compulsively. “Snarky” is the word commonly used to describe the Gawker style and Grigoriadis correctly identifies its infectiousness: “The tone [Denton] used for Gawker became the most important stylistic influence on the emerging field of blogging and has turned into the de facto voice of blogs today.” I want to find fault with the sweeping universality of this statement, but it’s pretty hard to argue with. When I think of blogging prose, I think snark, and for that I must begrudgingly tip my hat to Nick Denton.

Because its abuse is hurled primarily at the practitioners of traditional (i.e., printed) media, Gawker provides the vicarious pleasure of being in on the joke. It’s a site that treats journalists like celebrities and then gives them the Perez Hilton treatment. This application of tabloid hysteria to decidedly un-hip Gray-Old-Lady veterans is part of the site’s main appeal. For instance, Gawker writers practically salivate at any insider information on The New York Times, often printing e-mails sent by management and leaked by staffers, including several memorable memos taking reporters to task for flying first-class. It covered the death of “TimesSelect” with the kind of hyperbolic gusto usually reserved for corporate mergers.

Sometimes it seems that Gawker will post anything, no matter how insignificant, that comes from inside the newspaper of record. Last week, when a fire alarm went off at The New York Times's new headquarters on Eighth Avenue, Gawker immediately uploaded a post about this completely insignificant non-event, solely so its writers could fire off a couple of inside jokes. “THE FALCON CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER, RENZO PIANO,” a Gawker poster wrote, thus encapsulating in one sentence two primary Gawker characteristics. The first characteristic is a staff composed of over-educated liberal arts majors, whose knowledge of Yeats (from whom the above quotation is lifted) has ill-prepared them for a new media climate that increasingly devalues the printed word. The second characteristic is suggested by the expectation that you’ll know who Renzo Piano is. Unless you’re an architecture buff--or work for a Manhattan media company--you probably don’t know that Piano is the Italian architect who designed the new New York Times building. Gawker, above all else, prizes its own knowingness, despite the fact that the tone of most of its posts is that of a bitchy outsider.

Grigoriadis’s article is titled “Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass.” “Rage” may seem a but much, and I would have inserted “New York” before “creative underclass,” but otherwise it’s a perfect title. Everybody probably does suck when you are, as Grigoriadis writes, “depressed over the state of the industry and [your] inability to locate challenging work or a job with health insurance.” Gawker’s rise, Grigoriadis suggests, “dovetails” with the decline of printed media and its rants “fulfill a need” and that need is basically some sort of psychic release. “Youthful anxiety and generational angst about having been completely cheated out of ownership of Manhattan, and only sporadically gaining it in Brooklyn and Queens, has fostered a bloodlust for the heads of the douchebags who stole the city,” Grigoriadis writes.

And who are these douchebags? Well, they’re not solely media mavens whose bylines Gawker editors secretly covet. Recently, prolific Gawker poster Emily Gould submitted a profile of an Atlanta I-Banker named John Fitzgerald Page, in which she bestowed on him the title of “Worst Person in the World.” Apparently, Page, an aspiring actor as well as banker, had been approached on an Internet dating website by some woman who indicated, by sending him a "wink," she was interested in him. The response he sent back contained all manner of boorish boasts and dunderheaded queries. “I work out 4 times a week at LA Fitness,” Page wrote. “Do you exercise regularly? I am 6 feet tall, 185 pounds - what about yourself?” This display of machismo turned the lady off apparently, and she sent him a form e-mail in response saying she was no longer interested. Page, in turn, responded to her, saying:

“I think you forgot how this works. You hit on me, and therefore have to impress ME and pass MY criteria and standards - not vice versa. 6 pictures of just your head and your inability to answer a simple question lets me know one thing. You are not in shape. I am a trainer on the side, in fact, I am heading to the gym in 26 minutes!”

Page concluded his rant by noting that he can “bench/squat/leg press over 1200 lbs” (which is confusing, come to think of it; is he saying that he can actually bench 1200 lbs?) and suggesting that the “next time you meet a guy of my caliber, instead of trying to turn it around, just get to the gym!” So where does Gawker come into all of this? Well, the woman to whom Page unwisely subjected his ire, decided, rather than sit silent, to forward Mr. Page’s imperious diatribe to several hundred of her closest friends, at least one of whom, it would appear, works for Gawker.

Emily Gould, in full Gawker rage, slaughtered Page, and in an instant, transformed him from anonymous I-banker/background actor into a notorious Internet celebrity. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a story on him, in which Page declined to comment unless paid. “Inside Edition is offering me cash for an exclusive,” he said. Page let his anger be known to Gawker, as well, threatening to get his “legal team” involved. Five days after that threat, a new page appeared on his website, hawking custom-made t-shirts with slogans taken from his e-mails, including, “I’ve had lunch with the Secretary of Defense,” and “I drive a Bimmer [sic] convertible.”

Page was a real find for Gould, Gawker’s 26-year-old editor cum sexpot, who was quoted by Grigoriadis as saying “Peering into my in-box in the morning is like looking at the id of every journalist in the city." It’s an angry, vindictive id, and Gawker writers are encouraged to give it full vent. Gawker, Grigoriadis writes, “pushes its writers to be honest in a way that’s not always found in print publications. Little is repressed; the id, and everything else, is part of the discourse (including exhibition and narcissism).” So much venting would seem to be cathartic, and no doubt it is to some degree—both for readers and for writers. But there’s clearly a cost. It can be measured in the degree to which the intensity of Gawker’s fury can turn a truly noxious person like John Fitzgerald Page into a nearly-pitiable subject. Early in her article, Grigoriadis has a telling quote from Gawker senior editor Choire Sicha, “Not a week goes by I don’t want to quit this job, because staring at New York this way makes me sick.”

Where I Live Now

Moving is such an unbelievable pain in the ass. By the end of this week, give or take a few days, I will be out of New York for good, which, although I’m doing it for reasons that have nothing to do with the city per se, still feels like a betrayal. And I’m really gonna miss my house, a completely illegal NYC real estate anomaly that I landed in by pure happenstance, the details of which I will withhold for the sake of my housemates. (Yeah, Aubergine!) Suffice it to say we lucked out big time, those of us fortunate enough to set up camp in that huge old manse in Morningside Heights.

The house has been compared by many visitors to the one featured in The Royal Tenenbaums, and it bears a similarity. It is full of books, old furniture, and unexpected nooks and crannies (there are multiple rooms I've never been in), and it has a bright color scheme. (Furthermore, many of its residents, like the characters of that movie, seem to have a suspiciously large amount of time on their hands.) My room is on the second floor, overlooking the stoop. When I arrived, I spent the first three days of my tenancy painting it dark green and removing a spidery light sculpture that its previous resident had screwed to the wall. The radiator’s clang kept me up at night, but I fixed that, and once I had my bed, my couch and my books set up, I felt at home. It hasn't all been blissful and rosy, but it's certainly been affordable. Again, I won’t go into the details of the place, but I will say that some of the bedrooms are double the size of some one-bedroom apartments in this city and, by New York standards, we pay practically nothing. I mean, really, why the fuck am I leaving this place?

By comparison, I expect LA to be pretty pricey, and I know I'll have a lot of miscellaneous expenses to look forward to that I never had to deal with in NYC, from gas to health insurance to minor plastic surgery and teeth whitening (when in Rome, etc). Nevertheless, it feels like the right thing to do. I'm ready to be a little more ambitious. Oh, and I think the cross-country drive will be fun. It promises the chance to see the London Bridge in Arizona (I’m not making this up) and I'll be able to catch up on my podcast listening (unfortunately, I’m not making that up either). Ultimately, it's the opportunity to do film that’s really the impetus behind the move. Otherwise I never would decamp from the felicitous (cheap) housing arrangement I now enjoy. Whatever. I'm fine with it. Really, I am. I've no doubt the next few days will pass languidly, in a drunken stupor, enhanced by a slow motion slide-show of my life's possessions as they march slowly into a dozen cardboard boxes which will then be closed, taped, labeled and shipped to an undisclosed west coast address.

I’m looking forward to experiencing my first earthquake.

One more thing about the house. Last night Dave divulged its final secret to me. While we crossed Fifth Avenue and 13th Street, I asked him how much the current rent is for the whole house. He told me the number; I asked him to repeat it and he did. I was then promptly hit by a flatbed truck and declared dead.

Stop Including Me!

It’s hard, really, to know what will become of the movie industry, the recording industry, and the entertainment business in general, considering the ubiquity of piracy and the increasingly splintered target markets for products. As Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher noted in his blog last week, “The economics of the new model are uncertain . . . Goodness knows nobody pays for content anymore.” This uncertainty isn't really new, though; businesspeople have always been dismayed at the unpredictability of audience tastes. Nevertheless, there is true reason to be concerned when scarcely anyone can provide a logical reason to believe people will continue to pay for music. And movies won’t be far behind. Again, although there’s always been deep uncertainty in pop culture economics, it feels like something new is afoot. As the art critic Jerry Saltz wrote recently in New York Magazine, “Perhaps it was ever thus; it’s just more thus than ever.”

Enter the movie studio test audience. These have been around for decades, but I had my first experience with one last week, when Katherine and I went to see The Darjeeling Limited at the AMC on 42nd Street. Test screenings are usually conducted at malls in suburban California with a group of people who’ve been told beforehand that their input on a yet-to-be-released film is being solicited. At the AMC last week, though, we simply showed up for the movie and a group of fresh-faced marketing interns (I’m guessing) thrust index cards in our hands as we took our seats. On the card were printed a series of questions to be answered about the film, basically designed to determine whether we liked it or not.

This is nonsense and it should be illegal. First of all, we didn’t go to the movie as arbiters but as patrons who wanted to be entertained. We didn’t come to judge, we came to be delighted. The minute we switch caps—from audience member to member of the committee—we fatally diminish our capacity to be delighted. Doubts are introduced where no doubts would have been. We are no longer enchanted; we are instead critical, and as such, seeking to prove our worthiness, we seek out fault whether it exists or not. It is like being in a relationship and being told, “I love you,” and then being asked, “How does that make you feel? Do you believe me when I say ‘I love you.’” “Well,” you might say, “I did until you started asking me these inane questions.”

David Mamet, in his eloquent screed of Hollywood mores, Bambi and Godzilla, writes devastatingly of test audiences. “The audience,” he writes, “is invited to replace its capacity for amusement with the right of sitting in judgment.” He continues:

“These invited test screeners never engage that portion of the human mind that loves a story; no, they have become enmeshed in a fantasy of business, and they now work to imagine (as did those folks in the committee/audition room) what some notional other groups might just like. And they vote accordingly, thumbs-up, thumbs-down, in self-congratulation at having suspended that obviously now puerile, wide-eyed state of enjoyment of the unlicensed, unschooled, and mere ‘member of the audience.’”

The pernicious effect of such a fallacious system of “testing” is easily guessed at: rampant mediocrity. It other words, it takes the weirdness, the delightful eccentricity out and replaces it with, as Mamet puts it, “uniformity.” Mamet:

“For each human being is different. And the idiosyncrasy of the artist, this supposedly (by the executive) divisive tropism, is actually an ability to compel—to compel a disparate group of people not into a jury capable of consensus but into a group willing to suspend its rational capacity—into an audience.

“We may note further that the executive, in forming a lay and random group into a committee supposedly capable of forecasting dramatic success, indicts, and in fact unsays, his protestation of his own possession of superior financial or mercantile powers. For if a regular person wandering in a mall somewhere may be shanghaied into watching a test screening, and if his opinion, and the opinion of his like, are the basis upon which executives determine how to place their bets, why not eliminate the executives entirely and proceed directly to the mall wanderer?”

Why not indeed? Well, it’s what happened to me last week and I didn’t like it. Not one bit. Not because I was being put upon in some way; I can look out for myself, and I tossed the card I was given into the bin the minute I figured out what it was for. Rather, I disliked it because I dislike the idea of consensus in art, and because I felt gypped of the experience of watching a film with an unprepared, “real” audience.

It was a good movie, though, and I highly recommend it. Keep an eye out for Barbet Schroeder’s cameo two-thirds of the way through the film. He underplays his role and endows an exceedingly small part with pathos and believability. His performance is disarming. Perhaps I should have filled out that card after all and simply included a note in praise of Mr. Schroeder.

Ten Reasons Why I’m Thinking About Taking Up Smoking

1. Anxiety. Mainly about my own life and the directions it may or may not take, but other sources that contribute heavily include: the 2008 Presidential Election, NYC congestion pricing, supply-side economics, the Electoral College, Internet piracy, faith-based education, flash floods, and urban blight. Although puffing on a cancer-stick is hardly the same as popping a Xanax, it’s certainly cheaper and it doesn’t need a prescription. Furthermore, nicotine’s adrenaline rush would be a nice counter-balance to the depressive effects of my daily martini, making my evening disposition slightly less apocalyptic.

2. It Gives You Something To Do With Your Hands. This actually isn’t that much of a problem with me. I’m an actor so I’m pretty good at figuring out what to do with my hands (don’t saw the air too much!) Nevertheless, every once in awhile you do find yourself at a bit of a loss, either due to an awkward conversation or general nervousness in front of others. In cases like these, often a simple mechanical task would do the trick and lighting up is as simple as it gets. It’s considerably cooler than stuffing your hands down your pants and jiggling your change with one hand and adjusting your underwear with another.

3. Fire Is Cool. Well? Fire is cool, and if you don’t believe me, set something ablaze and tell me you don’t see the poetry in it. Me, I like to listen to the cigarette paper crackle and watch the tobacco smolder like a piece of burning coal. Lighting the cigarette is cool too, whether with a match or a Bic. Cup your hand against the wind and watch the flame lean into the end of the cigarette like a white-hot river encircling a piece of driftwood. Suck in the oxygen, light up, and inhale. There’s nothing like holding a bright-red glowing nub close to your lips to make you feel one with the elements.

4. Smoke Is Cool. Truer words have never been spoken, unless they were spoken by a mouth emitting smoke. What is it about smoke, anyway? It is essentially dirty air, waste matter dissipating itself into the oxygen we breathe. And yet it has a beguiling presence, billowing from the mouth, the nostrils, and expelled into the air like a cloud. One’s face is always more mysterious and appealing behind a smokescreen, and when smoke is released in an airless room, it rises in seductive circles and vanishes like a ghost. Poetry, people!

5. It Pisses People Off. Smoking’s also great because it pisses a lot of people off, which is always a worthy goal. Talk about huffing and puffing! Yank the chain of the feverish anti-smoking contingent and prepare yourself for a barrage of self-righteous vituperation. This is first-rate fun, I say. The only drawback is, despite their self-satisfied shrillness, they’re usually right. Smoking, as they say, “kills.” But, whatever! Light up on a weekday afternoon in front of an elementary school and watch the ensuing hijinks!

6. It Forces You to Go Outside. I wouldn’t have thought that this would be a big selling point for me, considering that I live in New York City and I’m outside all the time (To those of you tree-licking outdoorsy environmentalists tsk-tisking at the city slickers in their unnatural asphalt jungles, consider this: we don’t have cars and we do a lot more “hiking” probably than you do just getting to work. Think about it.) Nevertheless, it is appealing to be engaged in a task that forces you, by and large, to just be outside—not walking or sitting on a park bench, but just to stand there and get some damn air and appreciate things, dammit. And smoke.

7. Smoking Looks Cool. Yeah, so, smoking looks cool, obviously, or Humphrey Bogart wouldn’t have done it and neither would have James Dean, both the coolest movie stars ever, Q.E.D.

8. Politicians Don’t Smoke. Except for Obama, and he’s basically quit, thus further inhabiting the role of a “bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” that Joe Biden cast him in. Otherwise, this is a big check in the “pros” column as far as I’m concerned. The fact that none of the smarmy, hypocritical, K-Street-funded asswads on Capital Hill have the balls to light up a Satan stick and suck in some tar proves that smoking has something going for it.

9. It Would Anger My Parents. A delicate point this, as they will no doubt one day read this blog entry. Nonetheless, with apologies to the folks that set me going, this final point still retains some residual adolescent appeal. Hey, my parents are great people and as such they never really gave me reason to piss them off, a lost opportunity that still stings. Here then is my chance finally for some pointless, angsty rebellion. Cocaine’s a little pricey, and kind of illegal, and heroin involves needles, which hurt. Smoking would be just the way to piss off my folks a little bit—but not so much that they would disown me.

10. We’re All Gonna Die From Global Warming Anyway. It’s happening faster than even Al Gore says! There were melting ice floes on the North Pole this summer and last week was the hottest in October in New York since the Dutch set up tent! I’m giving it fifty, sixty years tops. In the meantime, you can find me in Siberia, purchasing land and rolling coffin nails with happy Slavic shepherds. Peace out.

JDLand

I guess it was about two or three years ago that I discovered JDLand, the “Near Southeast” DC Development website and fanatical urban-planning smorgasbord named after and maintained by Capitol Hill resident Jacqueline Dupree. I had been conducting a simple Google search for information on the new Nationals baseball stadium and JD Land was the first and only link I followed. Since then, the site has joined the rarified ranks of The New York Times, The Washington Post and Gothamist in my morning ritual and hardly a day passes that I don’t check in with JD.

So, what’s the deal with this site? Well, Dupree herself says it’s “pretty simple.” She lives north of the Southeast-Southwest Freeway and, she says, “as it became clear that the neighborhood two blocks to my south was going to undergo a huge transformation, I knew I wanted to document the changes, and have a record of what the area looked like before, during, and after.” The way she describes it, this almost sounds like a modest undertaking, but the scope of JDLand as both an urban planning document and a living historical archive is nothing short of breathtaking. Open the site and you are immediately greeted by a barrage of links, excerpted news articles, images, and an interactive map of the area in question, which, as you move your mouse across it, links you to Dupree’s own meticulously detailed pages for each and every development that’s been built, is in the process of being built, or is even just rumored.

In case you’ve missed it, Southeast Washington is in the midst of a massive transformation spurred by the ballpark and spread over more than ten square blocks. The area, which had formerly been home mainly to taxi depots, MetroBus garages, scattered nightclubs, and burnt blocks of industrial rubble, is reforming itself with stunning speed. According to Dupree’s own estimate, in the next 15 years this area should include “approximately 12 million square feet of office space, 9,000 new housing units, and 600,000 square feet of retail.” Additionally, the brand-new, Michael Graves-designed Department of Transportation Building opened last year on M Street, bringing a major federal agency to a once-blighted area.

In other words, the neighborhood is a unique study of urban planning in our current, increasingly bureaucratic age. (For an example of the miles of red-tape that inevitably threatens urban development these days, skim this article from the Washington Business Journal which describes a feud between two developers over a parcel of city-owned land north of the baseball stadium. One of the developers contends it was promised the right to build on the site by the Williams administration; the other more or less contests the administration’s ability to make such promises. The result: a prime piece of real estate right next to the ballpark that may remain a disused bus depot for years to come.) When I was in Washington last December, I visited the neighborhood and its potential was evident. There was simply so much empty space to be built up. The nightclubs had long since pulled up stakes and what remained of the old neighborhood seemed, frankly, pretty expendable: old garages, parking lots and warehouses. The ballpark is walk-able from any point and the streets are pleasantly narrow, if not tree-lined, making the prospect of sidewalk cafes in this former wasteland not entirely ludicrous.

It therefore hardly strikes me as absurd that Ms. Dupree should direct so much of her (unpaid) energies to chronicling late-night oversight hearings and city counsel press conferences on “near southeast.” The neighborhood, and its seemingly daily transformation, fascinates, and Dupree’s ability to consolidate disparate information (that wonderful map!) into a coherent vision of the future creates unexpected suspense. I never thought I would find the possible opening of a Starbucks dramatic, but when Dupree spread the rumor that the new DOT might soon be getting a new retail tenant, I was on the edge of my seat wondering what it would be and what it might mean for the neighborhood.

There is something about watching urbanity spring up before your very eyes that is strangely compelling. It’s the thrill of watching something come from nothing. In Stephen Sondheim’s musical about painting, Sunday in the Park with George, the artist Georges Surat sings as he contemplates his sketch pad, “Look, I made a hat / Where there never was a hat.” The artist himself seems not even to know how this transformation took place. His bewilderment is a point of pride: “I did something I can’t explain but only I could have done it,” he seems to say. City-creation can seem to represent a similarly mysterious progression. In an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, the author Michael Chabon, whose recent novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is set in a city of his own creation, reflects on his hometown, the famously “planned community,” Columbia, Maryland:

“I grew up in a place where the maps were translated into reality before my very eyes, where the houses would be built . . . There would be a street proposed, they would come out with stakes and strings and stake it out and then over the course of the next several months the street would be laid—the pavement, the sidewalks, the houses would grow and it would all sprout before my very eyes. It was this very powerful demonstration of somebody’s idea, somebody’s map that they just make up and they come up with all these names for streets and neighborhoods and so on and then there it is, it’s right before your very eyes.”

Such wonderment can clearly make one obsessive. Tolkien mapped out “Middle Earth” for his Lord of the Rings series, for instance, with a feverish meticulousness. Dupree has referred to JDLand as “my Obsessive-Compulsive Time-Sucking Vortex.” And, indeed, it does numb the mind to consider the sheer amount of material that Dupree collates every date, not to mention its frequently stunning dullness. (After detailing a rather complicated oversight hearing on her “News” page, Dupree recently wrote, “If you understood almost nothing in that last sentence, don’t worry about it.”) Nevertheless, JDLand is something of a masterpiece. Its sheer breadth is stunning and it has certainly set the standard when it comes to documenting urban transformation. Dupree herself, although she alternates between self-awareness and self-effacement, seems to have a sense of how unique she is. Under the "Contact JD" page, she issues the following warning: “Please do not ask if I would consider expanding this site's boundaries to cover Southwest, or Poplar Point, or Anacostia; you're not the first to ask, and I'm already sleep-deprived enough as it is, so the answer is already ‘no,’ unless you wish to pay me lots and lots of money.” Clearly, she’s developed a following.

It’s hard to know who Jacqueline Dupree really is just from studying JDLand. In a profile for the website CapitolHillVoice.com, Dupree’s work on JDLand is described as “conspicuously unopinionated.” One suspects, based on all of her efforts, that she is to some degree at least, pro-development. Still, although the real Jacqueline Dupree remains fairly elusive on JDLand, a visit to her personal website reveals the following statement: “I rarely felt challenged in life until computers came along.” Fortunately for us, she has decided to challenge herself by working on a very public canvas.

DC Blogobrawl

Confirming my oft-repeated gripe that DC is a company town, that no one moves there for the lifestyle but because of work, a fit has erupted in the Washington politico blogosphere, ostensibly about coffee shops, but really about oh so much more. Ezra Klein, a writer for The American Prospect, the wonky liberal periodical, recently noted in his blog that Seattle and Portland seem to have a lot of "awesome coffee shops and bookstores and generally nice features" that DC kinda seems to lack. Expanding on his theme, he wonders why Washington shouldn't have such amenities, considering that it's a city with "lots of young, computer savvy white people . . . but nary a coffee shop to serve them." With tongue slightly in-cheek, he decries the situation as "barbaric."

Speculating on the reason for the city's uncivilized lack of upscale Caucasian salons, Mr. Klein casually notes that although DC "has a lot of white people working in it . . . [it] is actually only 39% white." This is accurate enough. According to the last Census, 58% of the city's population is black, with the difference made up mainly by Asians and Hispanics. Leaving aside his implication that there aren't any dark-skinned latte aficionados, Klein does seem to have stumbled upon a fundamental flaw of the nation's capitol, one that has little to do with race and everything to do with the federal government. "The white people [in DC] basically have to be there. You don't move to DC because it's awesome, you move because it's where your work is. So there's little need to construct an affirmative agenda to attract residents." Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with the city's reputation for monumental blandness will accede the point here. Unfortunately, couched as it was in racial terminology, Mr. Klein's post did not make a very good landing among the city's laptop cognoscenti, and before you could say "filibuster," a cyberiffic firestorm ensued.

Faced with an onslaught of vitriolic posts by, one speculates, computer-savvy white people (with a healthy measure of rhetorically-savvy white guilt), Klein responded the next day with a hangdog retraction. Klein's excuse, more or less, was that he was writing late at night and that his point was "not that 'black people don't like coffee shops,'" but that DC just didn't seem to have many coffee shops "and other fun stuff." At this point it didn't really matter, though; the damage had been done. Eager to feast upon a fellow blogger's exposed entrails, Matthew Yglesias, associate editor of The Atlantic Monthly observed in his blog, that from where he lives on U Street he sees "lots of black people in coffee shops." DCist blogger Ryan Avent wondered, "Is he saying that black people don't like coffee shops and bookstores? What would they prefer?" Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The American Prospect, musing further on the coffee shop theme, asked about "that Starbucks on 13th and U Street--certainly that couldn't be a product of the Starbucks-Johnson Development Corps. effort to put coffeeshops in urban communities normally overlooked by retailers who are afraid to go into minority neighborhoods?"

All-in-all, the whole "blacks don't like coffee shops" O'Reilly-esque slip managed to get a lot of play. Fortunately, it didn't overshadow entirely Klein's more pertinent, if clumsily worded point: that, for a city of its size and stature, Washington displays a downright scandalous lack of urban amenities. After taking issue with Klein's racial insensitivity, Media Consortium blogger Brian Beutler said, "But I cannot possibly fathom why D.C. lacks the number of book stores, record stores, coffee shops, night clubs, 24-hour restaurants, etc., etc. that you'd expect based on it's [sic] relatively large population of wealthy, single young people." Well, well. Responding to this charge, Ryan Avent stuck up for the District and suggested the reason for the city's lack of fun stuff is that it's all "in Arlington (or Silver Spring or Alexandria.)" This has the ring of accuracy, and it's definitely true that the Washington metropolitan area is devilishly sprawling, with the effect that, for many, the District is only a peripheral "center."

But the real, and unmentioned problem is-and always has been-the tragically misguided 1899 height restriction law enacted by Congress. This is the law that arose from an uproar over the "soaring" 13-story height of the Cairo apartment building in Dupont Circle. Eager to squelch such architectural hubris, Congress decided that no building henceforth would be taller than their own, thus enshrining their own hubris forever into Washington's urban character. The fear was that DC would lose its "European" feel, the Parisian model which Thomas Jefferson admired as "low & convenient, and the streets light and airy." Thus the restriction of buildings to a height lower than the Capitol was enacted, ostensibly, for aesthetic reasons. The law was later modified to limit heights to the width of the street a building fronted, plus 20 feet, a devilish equation which damned any building that aspired to size to immediately negate the density which would have been its virtue by surrounding it with a sea of empty asphalt.

DC's height limit is a nefarious law, its implications much further reaching than most people realize. Its most obvious effect over the years has basically been to enforce sprawl. Businesses that might have located in the district are instead in Rosslyn. Residents who might have lived in the city chose Bethesda. More pertinently to Klein's point, office buildings that might have had ground floor retail have none because, with a height limited to about 8-10 stories, and with office space selling for more per square foot than retail, who wants to build a Gap?

There is an almost tragic irony here. The law that was meant to preserve a European character in the nation's capitol has actually resulted in entirely precluding one of the most appealing aspects of European cities: their street life. New York's urban vitality is America's only rival to the street life of European capitols and that city is a model of density. Furthermore, the low-rise charm that Jefferson found admirable in Paris still produced--as so many European cities do--an invigorating urban messiness and energy because it was erected on a narrow, haphazard European street grid. In Washington, as in most American cities, our streets are far too wide for easy pedestrian flaneurism. This is to be expected, of course; they were designed for cars, not people.

Despite Ezra Klein's racial misstep, forcing people to live on top of each other is the issue here, more than race or anything else. Washington forces its residents, and its would-be residents, to sprawl. All of the admirable development in the Penn Quarter, in the up-and-coming baseball district, and in other vital Washington neighborhoods, has been the result of resisting the urge that the 1899 law encodes. As Ryan Avent notes in his blog, "Residential density is growing across the city, and a more diverse retail base will follow." Well, let's hope so.

Of course, density alone can't counteract the dullness of a city where eccentricity is matted down by the caution of the khaki-pants belt-buckle Blackberry-clipped politico standard-bearers--but it'll help. The more people, the more likely there'll be some weirdos in the bunch. Maybe even some black people who like coffee shops.