Reeves Wiedeman

I am fairly certain the most shocking, and most enjoyable, two minutes of your week will be spent watching the Alaska Nanooks hockey team intro video:

[vimeo=http://www.vimeo.com/7577554]

(Via Clusterflock)

The magic of a mixtape, in two minutes (Video). Have a lovely weekend.

I rather enjoyed the NYT Magazine’s profile of James Paterson, but the pictures were easily the best part:

All are clever. They’re here, along with the words, and the cover image.

The best of this week’s New Yorker cartoons.

I always grab for a copy of Dwell when I’m browsing a newsstand. They’ve got some of the best architecture photography out there. Who knew they can also be used to describe the perilous psychological situation of our nation’s youngest, hippest things (see caption):

Even in your company, I feel so alone.

More here.

Details. Submissions.

Jan. 21, 2009, 9:43 a.m.
Q Train – 7th Avenue to Times Square

There’s an open seat between each person in my section of the car, like a checkerboard at the start of a match. There’s an orange one between the man reading a large type Torah and the woman with the stylish puma bag, and a yellow seat between her and the guy in the skull cap. There’s a guy sleeping two seats from him, then a woman with a purple hat pulled over her eyes. Two spots away is a girl operating an iPod and blackberry, and, across the subway door, another girl reading “Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts And You Don’t Know Why.” Orange seat, then a man reading on his iPhone. A woman is doing the same two seats over, on her Kindle. A man in a Yankee cap and Yankee jacket is across the aisle reading the Daily News sports section, and next to him a younger man with large-rimmed glasses whose legs, jeans and all, could fit inside the Yankee fan’s pants. And finally the girl with the Lord and Taylor bag, the bleached hair, the extra long eyelashes. She’s reading the bible.

A quick aside to give big ups to the Moms and Pops. A couple years ago they reopened a local store in Kansas City, an institution that just happened to be a favorite of New Yorker writer David Owen:

The next place we tried was a store that was called the Dime Store when we were children. It went out of business a few years ago but has been revived, in the same space, as the (New) Dime Store, by two people we knew when we were growing up…

As Anne and I drove to the (New) Dime Store, I predicted that the building’s interior atmosphere – which had once been flavored mainly by dust, plus a sort of comforting over-scent that was related to mildew in the same way that cognac is related to wine – would now be dominated by scented candles, and I was right. In addition, the old wooden floor had been cleaned and sealed, changing not only its smell but also the pitch and timbre of its creaking. Nevertheless, much about the (New) Dime Store seemed gratifyingly familiar. There was a broad selection of notions, just as there used to be, and the candy and toy sections looked very much the same, although the items had evolved.

The piece is for subscribers only. But you’ll get a good education on many things Kansas City – Winstead burgers, Nelson-Atkins art classes – should you choose to read it.

I just stumbled upon David Grann’s 2004 profile of Mark Halperin, he of the latest gossip-fest about the 2008 campaign. If you avoided the story, just read this to know everything you need to know about the concerns over the book – and Grann wrote this five years before the book came out!

“There is always some new tidbit,” Mark Halperin said. “You just have to ferret it out.” It was the first day of the Republican Convention, in New York, and although the sun had not yet risen, he had already laid out all he needed for his peculiar trade—three television monitors, a laptop, a BlackBerry, a cell phone, a pager—in a makeshift space on the fifth floor of Madison Square Garden. Outside the Washington establishment, Halperin is known, if at all, as a journalist (his official title is political director of ABC News), but within it he is considered the leading purveyor of inside dope. As the founder of The Note, a political news digest that appears on the ABC News Web site each weekday morning by eleven o’clock, he collects information the way bookies keep tabs on the latest odds, or photographers chase the fading light. He collects polling data, no matter what the time of year or the size of the sample. He collects any rise or fall—even the smallest blip—in the projected electoral count. He also collects dirt, such as the unsealed divorce records of Jack Ryan, a Senate candidate from Illinois, which detailed visits to an alleged “sex club,” and which forced Ryan out of the race. He collects other things, too: arcane statistics from documents that government agencies churn out but few read; embargoed political books (The Note footnoted Kitty Kelley’s gossipy portrait of the Bush family twenty-four hours before it was released, beneath the teaser “Here Kitty, Kitty”); wire reports; radio transcripts; pieces of legislation; the guest lists of Georgetown dinner parties; and other minutiae that are of little interest to the ordinary citizen but are essential to his calling (“2:00 p.m.: Sen. John Kerry and his family hold a barbeque at the Heinz Farm, Fox Chapel, Pa”). Mostly, though, Halperin collects leaks and scuttlebutt from the campaign consultants, strategists, pollsters, pundits, and journalists who make up the modern-day political establishment, or what Halperin calls “the Gang of 500.”

The story gave me a building sense of horror as it went on – sort of like The Hurt Locker, without actual bombs. Here’s to reasoned, thoughtful, narrative argumentation.

Hat tip to ladiesthings for putting me onto Freelance Whales a while back, and before they are ruined by big time publicity, I’d like to put you onto them as well:

And I could never tell as a kid
What that window door went to
Only told to stay away
I almost had an accident at age 6
When I found the key in the attic
And now the smell of these wood frames
Is the only sense I’ve left
So as you pull me from the bed
Tell me I look stunning and cadaverous

Listen here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1KJs_tiL5o]

I also love this song, played in a subway, no less.

The editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review writes about the fall of literary journals. He blames it on a lot of things, not least the inward thinking of creative writing programs:

To pull out of this tailspin, writers and their patrons both will have to make some necessary changes—and quick. With so many newspapers and magazines closing, with so many commercial publishers looking to nonprofit models, a few bold university presidents could save American literature, reshape journalism, and maybe even rescue public discourse from the cable shout shows and the blogosphere. At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I’m not calling for more pundits—God knows we’ve got plenty. I’m saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ’s sake, write something we might want to read.

Literary nonfiction has been on the march for a while. I wonder what could reverse the trend?