Reeves Wiedeman

I’ve put together a rather self-indulgent photo slideshow from the New York City marathon. Big ups to my fellow photographers, Sonny Fabbri and Brendan Lowe – if you like a photo in the slideshow, chances are it’s theirs. And much love goes out to Jay-Z for (hopefully) not suing me.

You’ll notice a lot of isolated color. This is in part to emphasize the loneliness of the solitary marathoner’s existence. But it is mostly just because I thought it looked cool.

You can watch the slideshow below. But I recommend clicking through to Vimeo for best performance (and for bester performance, scroll down and hit the download button on the right side of the screen):

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/7854645]

For more photo slideshows, try here and here.

For a more leisurely perusal of some of the photos, head to my Flickr page. Some of my favorites are below:

Ariel Levy profiles Caster Semenya, a South African runner whose gender is in dispute:

She wore sandals and track pants and kept her hood up. When she shook my hand, I noticed that she had long nails. She didn’t look like an eighteen-year-old girl, or an eighteen-year-old boy. She looked like something else, something magnificent.

Nov. 24, 9:15 p.m.
Midwest Airlines – LGA to MCI

The man in seat 3B is reading Wine Spectator, the December 15th issue, so one assumes he’s a subscriber. He looks the part, with gently disshevelled blonde hair, and the collar raised on his black suit with thin, frequent blue and brown pinstripes. He looks not unlike Mick Hucknall, the back page interview in this issue, and, we learn, a British singer who has been vinting his own wines for the past decade.

Our Spectator is drinking his own glass of wine: Midwest Airlines’ house white, vintage year unknown. He spends some time with a feature article featuring a rolling hill of grapes on one page and a smiling 20-year old in a v-neck sweater, black hair buzzed with what appears to be a 3/8 razor, left leg propped up on something (a vinting device, no doubt) and his left arm propped on the bent knee. He flips quickly through “The Crusade Against Counterfeits,” but seems to genuinely read the small-print reviews in the back of the magazine. He soon bores of the magazine, puts it down, rescrews the gold twist-off top on his green glassed bottles of white (he had two), and dozes off.

Details here.

Argentina is nearly the size of India, but with less than one-thirtieth India’s population.

Ari Fleischer owns a sports communications firm. It’s called Ari Fleischer Communications. He is keeping us from having a college football playoff.

Brenda Ann Kenneally has a photo essay on children living in the gulf. It’s in black and white:

The whole thing is here.

(Via The Online Photographer)

Thanksgiving means food, and food means Calvin Trillin. Nobody tells the truth like a good Missourah boy:

I suppose I am programmed to expect that sort of result. I was raised by a man who, although he had never tasted coffee in his life, once told me that blindfolded I couldn’t tell the difference between coffee with milk and coffee without milk. It has never occurred to me that the software drummers who are in the habit of saying to the bartender “J. & B. on the rocks” or “Ketel One with a twist” might actually be able to recognize their favorite booze in a blind tasting. Many years ago, when a friend in England began raising chickens and boasting of the gloriously distinctive taste of their eggs, I secretly replaced the freshly gathered eggs in his larder with eggs from a London supermarket, and I try to remind him at least semi-annually that he raved about the next omelette to come out of the kitchen. In temperament and genes as well as in geographic origin, I’m from the Show Me state.

This article is on wine, which you will probably drink this weekend. For food, here’s Trillin again. Happy Thanksgiving.

I had the great pleasure to see The Dirty Projectors this weekend. So they naturally get this week’s aural story of the week spot. It’s “Stillness is the Move,” which starts with a baby having no opinions at all, hits a 20-something longing for a bigger city, and curls back to wonder where, well, you and I begin:

when the child was just a child
it did not know what it was
like a child it had no habits
no opinion about anything

maybe i will get a job
get a job as a waitress
maybe waiting tables in a diner
in some remote city down the highway

It’s all based on a 1980s German film. Listen and watch:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMPF6lpM0XM]

Listen to Beyonce’s sister cover it, here.

Who’s hotter, Rafa or Roger? The answer could determine who wins their next match.

For the do-it-yourself fashionista on your Christmas list, a coloring book/dress: