Just finished a coding marathon on yet another blog and site I recently put up for friends from my first few years in college at the University of Montana. For some silly reason no one remembers, our large gang of friends referred to ourselves as "Team Rasta." Thus, the site is MTRastas.com. Granted, you kinda had to be there to really get off on the site, but perhaps you might be interested to see photos of me from when I was 18 or so in the photo gallery (don't be confused: there are two Ricks). Propers to my friend Nick for turning me on to a great utility called Express Thumbnail Creator that I used to make the photo gallery.

This is cute: a "Blogicon" (i.e., a lexicon of blogging slang).

'We Didn't Do Any Test Marketing.'
Wow. Abercrombie & Fitch really stuck their foot in it. It took hundreds of letters of outrage and more than a hundred protesters at their San Francisco store for the catalog retailer to realize that a series of T-shirts they came out with featuring 1920s-era Asian stereotypes might be offensive to some people. Among the several designs were one featuring grinning cartoon characters of two Chinese brothers wearing coolie hats and the text "Wong Brother Laundry Service...Two Wongs Can Make It White" and "Abercrombie & Fitch Crazy Kung-Fu Clinic -- Wise Man Say, 'We Smash You Face'." A DM News story (not online) quotes a spokesperson as saying "We were suprised by the reaction...We didn't do any test marketing." No duh. But they really thought they'd have to test market that? I just wonder who thought this was funny in the first place. Here is an MSNBC article.

A Day at the MOMA
My wife and I spent the afternoon Friday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my favorite museum in the world. We saw two of the current exhibits: "Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting" and "Life of the City", an excellent photo exhibit about New York City.

Gerhard Richter

I had known relatively little about the contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter before I saw the exhibit, but the exhibition was a broad retrospective with 180 paintings spanning from the late 1950s into the new millennium. My one complaint about the exhibit was the signage left something to be desired. At the outset of the exhibit was a succinct overview of the painter's life and importance to the art world, but I felt it left out some important details to help me interpret what I was seeing. For example, some of his work was overtly political, but it was not clear to me from the introduction that he had left his native East Germany (Dresden) to West Germany (Dusseldorf) when he was 29 years old in 1961 (something I clarified only later on the Net). Of course we would have learned much from the recorded tour you could rent, but we were too cheap for that (admission is already $12 for adults).

Aside from that quibble, I really enjoyed the exhibit. The main thing I can now tell you about Richter, as a casual art observer at best, was that he had three distinct styles: 1) a love of gray and photo-like images that were distorted with a strange blurring effect (achieved, we learned long into the exhibit, with a squeegee), predominantly through the 1960s (as seen in "Frau Niepenberg," 1965, the first image shown in this blog); 2) beautiful abstracts in vivid colors with fascinating compositions, ranging throughout the '70s and '80s (as see in "Korn," 1982, the second image shown here), and 3) sharp color photo-realism, through the '90s (as seen in "Lesende 2," 1994, the third image shown here).

In the late '90s and in the last couple of years, there were examples of paintings where he began further merging his various motifs, creating wild abstracts all in greytones, and photo-realist portraits overlaid with abstract themes in vibrant colors.

All in all, highly recommended. The exhibit runs through May 21.

Related Links

• Tricky Mickey's Art Pages on Gerhard Richter
• Artcyclopedia's Links to Gerhard Richter pages
• Book: "Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting" a complete catalog of the MOMA show, sold on Amazon.
• MOMA's current exhibits listings

"Life of the City"

The other exibit, meanwhile, we cruised through rather quickly, but it was beautiful and moving, and I wish I could have spent more time at it. The exhibit features hundreds of photos of New York City over the years crammed together on the walls like a crazy quilt along the walls throughout three gallery rooms.

The exibit is actually there separate exhibits in one. First are 150 photos from the museum's own collection. Many are from famous photographers, such as Diane Arbus, as well as photojournalists and amateurs alike. One of my favorites was of a long landscape shot of a New York street from 1948 (I wasn't taking notes at the time, so I forget what steet it was) showing store fronts including a bar proclaiming "Television" (a novelty at the time), a record store promoting "prices as low as 9 cents," and a second-storey school offering traing in "the talking pictures."

On the opposite wall throughout the gallery are hundreds of photos lovingly portaying New York through the eyes of amateur photographers. These are posted to the walls with just clear push pins, and obviously some visitors have simply pulled photos out of their wallets and added them to the collection with chewing gum, such as the charming closeup of someone's chiuaua.

In the center of the last room of the exhibit is a screen with an endless series of projected photos from September 11th. These images, still so horrifying yet entrancing, held a few dozen musuem goers silently transfixed as the real centerpiece of the exhibit.

The second and third part of the exhibit were inspired by "Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs," an impromptu installation that first opened soon after September 11th in a vacant storefront in Soho that exhibited hundreds of contribributed photos and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity. (It is worth noting that "Here Is New York" borrowed its name from a long essay of the same name by E.B. White, the book version of which has surged in popularity since September 11th.

I never saw the original Soho exibit of these photos, but the effect was still quite moving in this setting, and I admire the museum for giving home within its hallowed walls to this truly democratic collection.

The exhibit runs through May 21.

Related Links

• "Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photos" official site of the original exhibit
• Here Is New York book by E.B. White sold on Amazon
• MOMA's current exhibits listings

Media Myopia
Listening to the lastest coverage on the child molestation scandal in the Catholic Church aggravates a perennial pet peeve on mine with the media: the myopia and pack insticts that prevents reporters from looking at events from a wider perspective. In this case, I keep waiting for someone to look at other religions and see whether this is a pervasive problem there, as well. The media are pretending that this is the first time the world has considered the idea of child molestation among the clergy. To my mind, this has always been an open secret, that this kind of child abuse by religious figures is not uncommon.

I have a close friend who confided to me that his first sexual experience was at age 13 with the minister of his church, Lutheran, I believe (or certainly not Catholic, in any event). Worse still, the minister, who was married, had a son of his own the same age as my friend, and with the same name, no less!

The media has been so predictable and unimaginative in covering this scandal over the many weeks it has persisted: dredging up more and more reported cases of abuse, reacting to the Church hierarchy, interviewing the faithful about their reactions to what they see in the media, and so on. All reactive. Perhaps the celibacy of Catholic priests makes them especially vulnerable to sexual abuse, but I'm not so sure. At least I'd like to see some investigators in the media make the case that this problem does not exist to the same extent in other religions, or other public institutions, for that matter.

I just discovered Ryze.org, a very cool online networking association. It's mainly targeted towards Internet professionals, but not necessarily exclusively. It has a free level, where you can register and fill out various fields about yourself and your professional history, as well as hobbies, things you have to sell and are looking to buy, and so forth. You can post a photo and add a personalized biography or whatever. Every personal page also has a built-in guest book, so other members of the site can sign your guest book, as well as send you personal notes. And more, lots of features.

For premium services, range $4 (bronze), $5 (silver) and $10 (gold) per month, you have all sorts of premium search and filtering options and other bonuses. It's awesome for professional networking and sales leads.

I was invited by a guy I know, a dot-com entrepreneur, and had my doubts till I saw that the site was created by another guy I know in San Francisco and really respect, Adrian Scott. So I signed up. Within half an hour of playing with it, I upgraded to the Silver edition. Highly recommended.

I love finding available dot-com domains of clever phrases. You want it, it's yours: borntoblog.com (unregistered as of this writing).

Ashcroft, God & The Constitution
Reading the May issue of Harper's Magazine (which has little content online, so I can't link to the story), I was blown away by a quote in editor Lewis Lapham's opening "Notebook" editorial, titled this month "Deus Lo Volt." It's only in the last couple of issues of the magazine that I've been able to tollerate Lapham's editorials again, as his "well-what-did-you-expect?" tone in the first several monthsly following September 11th pissed me off so much I couldn't bear to read them.

The title of this piece is a reference to a speech given by Pope Urban II in 1095, urging his followers onward with the (original) Crusades, likening it to Bush's war rhetoric today. I have to agree that all the calls for God to bless America, use of the ridiculous phrase "evil doers" and the general religiosity of the language from the admistration has been among the most sickening aspects to the new world order.

Long before September 11, at Bush's presidental inauguration ceremony, my wife (a non-American) and I (an agnostic) were appalled at the incredibly lengthy and evangelical invocation given by (Billy) Franklin Graham Jr. (son of the more famous preacher man). I suppose I wouldn't be so adamant of a non-believer as to insist that an invocation has no place at an inauguration at all (tho, franky, that is was I'd interpret the separation of church and state to entail, but I'm enough of a societal realist to recognize that's not the most important governmental reform on the list), but the thing just went on and on, pure barn-storming bible-thumping stuff, that it just turned my stomach seeing the principal of separate church and state so abundantly refuted in practice.

But here's the quote from the editorial that blew me away. Lapham's describing that Attorney General John Ashcroft -- who was known to be a fundamentalist Christian when Bush proposed him for the job, and who has since instituted "optional" morning prayer meetings for his staff -- telling a class at the notoriously Christian-right Bob Jones University a few years ago that "we [Americans] have no king but Jesus." The editorial continues: "Speaking to 6,000 religious broadcasters last February [i.e., after he's in office] in Nashville, Tennessee, Ashcroft reconfirmed the statement, explaining that American freedoms come to us from Heaven, 'not the grant of any government or document, but our endownment from God.'"

Holy cripes! I mean, everyone is entitled to their religious views (that being one of the rights in those documents he refers to), but this guy is supposed to be the administration's top interpretter of our legal system. As Lapham put it, "the attorney general of the United States apparently believes that God wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights." He compares this to "The followers of Osama bin Laden [who] believe that they act in accordance with the word of Allah."

Bebop Steel Drums
One of the great things about living in NYC is the quality of the street musicians, particularly those in the subway. Rarely are those who dare to play this venue not excellent musicians, especially in the major stations like Time Square. This afternoon, I was coming back from a lunch meeting, not in any hurry, so I lingered for several minutes by a brilliant musician playing the jazz classic "Masquerade" on a pair of steel drums.

Hearing it, I was reminded of how much I grew to detest soca music in the year and a half I lived in the British Virgin Islands. The stuff, which relies heavily on the steel drum, is all rhythm and repetition, which is fine when you have a few rum punches in you and you just want to bump and grind with anonymous tourists at a hotel veranda party, but when you are trying to sleep and through the night air drifts from some neighbor's houseparty an 85-minute-long song the only lyrics of which are "Soca, soca, this is soca, alright, alright! Soca, soca, this is soca..." it was fairly detestable.

But I have always loved the sound of the steel drum musically, especially for jazz. That could sound predictable, as jazz is altogether my favorite style of music these days, but I do believe that the sound of the steel drum, with its piercing timber and the ability of skillful players to almost bend notes like a horn, is particulary well suited for the jazz genre. Unfortunately, most of the jazz steel drumming I've ever heard has been in the subways. I do have the album "Behind the Bridge" by Andy Narell, who plays jazz, of a flavor, on the instrument, but it's more smooth Latin jazz. I'm playing Narell's CD again now, and it's nice, but he's not even in the same league as the guy in the subway today.

Steel drum bebop: pure New York City.

I can see how this could just keep going indefinitely, but I just found another friend's blog! Emmanuelle Richard is -- you guessed it -- another journalist friend I knew from Budapest, who runs the elegant site Emmanuelle.net. Unfortunately for me, she's blogging in French, tho she does charmingly suggest that if you want it in "bad English" you can use Google's translation engine on it. A great irony is that I also emailed a journalist friend still living in Hungary that I had started a blog, and he wrote back asking "what's a blog?" After I mocked him, he wrote back in reply "I asked several intelligent people today...[I'll edit out the names for their sake] if they knew what a blog was. Theories varied from 'an intestinal blockage' to 'a new wireless mobile phone technology.'" Which would seem to indicate that you have to actually *leave* Budapest to understand how cool bloggers are.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
I used to have one blog
Now I have two

Introducing the new and improved: ExecutiveSummary.com

How strange is this? I just started this blog yesterday. I'm already hooked, even tho I don't know who, if anyone, is reading it. I did send around emails to a few friends announcing the birth of the blog, mainly those who I named in one of yesterday's entries, many of whom are journalist friends from when I lived in Budapest several years ago. Notably, I did not yet mention the fact that I've started blogging to my dad, nor any of my familiy, for that matter. So out of nowhere, my dad sends me an article today from epn world-reporter that he thought I'd be interested in. It's about how blogging is the big thing these days, and how all the cool current and former journalists are doing it. Weirder than that, however, is that I know the main guy they're interviewing for it, Matt Welch, who has his own blog at MattWelch.com. He is a part of my ex-Budapest journalist crowd. The same gang I was talking about yesterday who all have blogs. Except, I wasn't talking about him, because I didn't know he blogged until my dad sent me the article about it. Spooky. Zero degrees of separation. Resistance if futile. We all must blog.

Just watching the opening monologue of a repeat of Conan O'Brien, originally taped around the beginning of the year, where he makes a joke about how Bloomberg promised to take the subway to work every day. The joke on it wasn't very funny, I'll spare you. But I'm wondering whether Bloomberg does. Would be a good New Yorker follow up.

Rah Socialists!
Yes, I know France is the bigger story in the news at the moment, what with 17% of the population just voting for neo-Facist Le Pen and putting him in direct competition with Chirac for the next elections. (BTW, Did anyone else see the most recent Saturday Night Live, where they had a mock commercial for travel to France, touting its fine art, great dining and virolent anti-Semitism? It ended with a line to the effect of, "With everything that's going on in the world today, isn't it about time we got back to hating the French?" I'm sure it got someone's nose out of joint.)
But there was another European election story that hasn't gotten quite as much coverage: Hungary's. (In case you haven't figured it out yet, I lived there for a while and brought back a great souvenir: a wedding ring, so I kinda keep in touch with the place.)
They re-elected the Socialists! Yay!
In case it's not clear why that's a good thing, it's because the other guy was a jerk. A big nationalist spoiled brat (he's 38, a year and a bit older than me), Viktor Orban, the prime minister for the last four years, who thought the sun shone out his ass and took the country alarmingly to the right. (There was a great campaign with a photo of Orban letting an old peasant lady kiss his hand, which caused quite a stir at the time, juxtaposed against a photo of the lead candidate of the liberal Free Democrats kissing an old lady's hand. That about said it all.)
The Socialists were in power for four years just before Orban's government, and in my estimation they didn't do so badly. I was there for part of their term. What was striking was how these bunch of former Communists (granted, Hungary was considered the the best barracks in the camp for the last several years of East European Communism) instituted a bunch of real capitalist econimc reforms (e.g., liberalising the currency to much local suffering for a while and hastening privatization), economic biting of the bullet that the previous government, the right-wing MDF, Hungary's first democratically elected government after communism, had been unwilling to confront.
So the Orban government enjoyed many of the benefits of the Socialists' reforms that significantly improved the economy in the last few years. But Viktor, after betraying the original party's roots as young liberal idealists, took the country for a serious tilt to the right, rubbing all sorts of historical wounds and making alliances with a party as extreme right as Le Pen.
Although I saw first-hand what the ravages of Communism did to the spirit of that country, and I wouldn't wish a return to that on any nation, I am confident that the re-election of the Socialists to power in Hungary is another step in the right direction, for now, anyway, for that little country I have so much affection for.
For details, see a piece here written by a good friend of mine, Chris Condon, in Business Week.
Also a great NY Times piece that puts in excellent perspective just how divisive this election was for Hungarians. (It's all my wife talked about for weeks. She even flew back to vote in the critical first round of elections.)

First I should give some shouts out to all my friends who blog. NickDenton.org is a stylish site run by my friend Nick, who was the first to introduce me to blogs. The founder of Moreover.com, Nick also helped create the First Tuesday, an international Internet professional networking society with chapters in dozens of countries around the world at this point. Nick and I knew each other in Hungary in the early '90s when we were both journalists there, him for the Financial Times, me for the Boston Globe and others.

PeterMaass.com is probably the most exciting blog among my friends, in that he continues to work as a jet-setting freelance journalist writing for great publications like The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and elsewhere. As of this writing, he's blogging daily from Pakistan, where he's back to the region after spending several months there and in Afghanistan recently. Try to compete with that from my Harlem apartment overlooking a McDonald's parking lot. Hmmm.

Yes, all my friends are famous. No, not really, but several of those keeping blogs do happen to be success journalists and ex-jouranlist entrepreneurs. RebeccaMead.com features the work of my eponymous friend, featuring less actual blogs than an archive of her articles in The New Yorker (she's a freakin' staffer, la-di-da), including her piece about blogging from November, 2000, coincidentally around the same time (or shortly thereafter) that Nick started carrying on about how cool blogs were to the whole lot of us.

Then there is my friend Steve Carlson, the Original Mac Diddy, who produces NowEurope.com, a blog-like newsletter and discussion list about e-business in Europe. Steve still lives in Hungary (like Peter did, too, when we first met him; Rebecca's never been yet, which the rest of us tease her about). Steve was one of my partners in founding the Budapest Week newspaper, but that's a long story better left to another time. Steve's also the guy who first introduced me to the Internet, back around 1993, when we were surfing through CompuServe in Budapest. Because the local phone company, Matav, charged by the minute for local calls, it later ended up costing me more than $100/month for the sevice, but in the early days they comped us all because we were journalists. That and a buck fifty now gets you a cup of coffee here in NY.

Another of my gurus is the brilliant, odd and mysterious DDT (the less said the better), who is heroically wracking up massive credit card bills in the service of the greater good for the world, running the CyrptoRights Foundation, a seriously cool outfit trying to bring the right of encryption to human rights advocates around the world. Sounds esoteric? D tell's stories of aid workers and journalists crossing borders from dictatorships and having their electronic address books confiscated so the secret police can pay a visit on all local contacts. No kidding. Okay, it's not really a blog, but he's a weirdo who deserves some props and has taught me a lot about both cyberspace and meatspace.

Okay, I know other people who have web sites, too, but I'll spare you all the gory details for now. Just thought this Uptown honky should show he's got his own posse.

Peace out. R-

Okay, I now have a blog. How about that? It's what all the cool young people are doing, so I figured, what the heck? I already have a site and a lot of opinions, why not put them out there for the world to enjoy just like everyone else? So stay tuned! (Who am I kidding? As if you care.)