from the stridently caucasian blog Stuff White People Like

#63 Expensive Sandwiches

post by clander

Having already covered breakfast and dinner options, the question remains: what do white people like to do for lunch? The answer: expensive sandwiches.

In most cities, if you need to find a cache of white people get yourself to a sandwich shop. Generally these places aren’t open for dinner, have a panini press and are famous for their bread. There are always vegan options and the selection of meats and cheese are strongly European.

The waiters and waitresses in these places are highly coveted by the white population. They are not quite as cool as bartenders, not quite as snobby as coffee shop workers, but still artsy, young, and more than likely to be a musician/artist/writer (since they only have to work from 11-3).

If you are in the position where you need to take a white person to lunch for business or pleasure, saying “I know a great sandwich shop,” will always bring out a smile. The white person will then tell you about the great sandwich shop in the town where they went to college and how they had a crush on a waiter, or that there was some special sandwich that they always ordered. This will put the person in a good mood.

It’s important to note that this type of restaurant is best for business or friendship situations as it is very neutral and does not carry connotations like Sushi or Breakfast.

These sandwiches generally start at $8.99. Remember that whenever a white person says they wants to go to a sandwich shop you are looking at at least a $15 outlay after tip and drink, $20 if the place has a good selection of microbrews.

Also note: white people will wait up to 40 minutes for a good sandwich.

Posted in Food & Beverage | 145 Comments »

from LA Weekly

La Luz de Jesus hosts the exhibit and signing of Michelle Carr’s sexy new book of photos

Photo by Mark Mauer

1 of 20 images [ click to view entire slideshow at LAWeekly.com ]

LA-based burlesque troupe The Velvet Hammer gets the coffee-table book treatment fromfounder Michelle Carr.

The big book is full of photos, backstage, onstage, and specially posed, as the one above. Carr signed copies of her book at La Luz de Jesus on Friday night.

Desire, photo by Austin Young

Editorial from the Washington Post

Leap Day No thanks to Julius Caesar.

Friday, February 29, 2008

THIS EXTRA day of February is part of the legacy bequeathed us by the Romans, along with their contributions in law, engineering, language, arts and letters, and the development of a numbering system that allows us to properly identify our Super Bowls. The institution of leap years was strictly a necessity, created by the failure of the 365-day year to match up with the astronomical year. The discrepancy is only about a quarter of a day, but just try to figure out where to put that six hours.

Julius Caesar, a man used to acting decisively on thorny problems, solved this one, somewhat, by adding a day to every fourth year, placing it, unfortunately, in the month of Februarius. He made the calendar change in 46 B.C. and was assassinated not too long after, possibly a coincidence. We have been stuck with this extraneous day ever since, an extension of a dreary and unpopular month and an occasion for obscure and quickly forgotten acts not suitable for anniversary remembrance. It is a day for senators to make speeches about the turnip tariff, for manufacturers to issue lint-filter recalls, for children to sullenly celebrate birthdays knowing that, unlike their peers, they will have only five or six such observances before they have to start paying rent. But keep this in mind: It’s only a day. Tomorrow it will be March, a better month for almost everyone, Julius Caesar excepted.

by Ben Greenman @ the New Yorker

The conservative author, publisher, and commentator William F. Buckley, Jr., has died at the age of eighty-two. This is not primarily a cultural story, and so shouldn’t really be on this blog, but it is in some small way a television story, if only because of Buckley’s decades hosting “Firing Line” and appearing on countless other talk shows. His most notorious appearance, of course, came in 1968, when he tangled with Gore Vidal over America’s policy in Vietnam. If you think today’s news-panel shows can get nasty, take a look at what things were like forty years ago: Vidal calls Buckley a crypto-Nazi and Buckley calls Vidal a queer. The incident led to further acrimony—Buckley and Vidal wrote essays for Esquire attacking each other, and then each man sought damages in court.—Ben Greenman

[ click to view original article at the New Yorker ]

From the Los Angeles Times

Dutton’s final page

After more than 20 years, an author closes the book on his favorite bookstore.
By T.C. Boyle

In 1985, I was living in Woodland Hills with my wife and two young children, about to publish my fourth book of fiction and beginning, in a vague way, to wonder about such things as marketing and retail establishments.

Up the street, squeezed into the mall next to the grocery, was a scion of the giant Crown Books chain. This particular Crown Books seemed entirely given over to titles and authors I’d never heard of; even more puzzling was the fact that these books were exclusively of the mass-market variety and that trade paperbacks (the sort that represented my modest backlist) wouldn’t even fit on the shelves.

Ever resourceful, I sent my wife and 5-year-old daughter in to reconnoiter. My wife, posing as an interested customer, told the clerk how disappointed she was not to find any of her favorite author’s books on the shelves, and she talked up my latest title until my daughter, unable to contain her enthusiasm, burst out with “Yes, and he’s my daddy!”

Ah, the sting of that. But salvation was at hand: Within the week — at the prompting of my editor all the way back in New York — I discovered the towering stacks and shadowy warrens of Dutton’s Books in Brentwood. I stepped tentatively through the door, fresh from the humiliation of Crown Books (and further blows at other chain stores), only to be tenderly wrapped in the aura of a bibliophile’s paradise — the lighting dim, the interior hushed, a smell of print investing the air as if the presses were even then churning away in the basement.

It was like stumbling into a Borgesian reality in which everything was made of books — the walls, the floors, the ceilings, even the employees. Before I could think, there was Scott Wannberg, one of the true literary zealots of our time, exploding from behind a cordillera of books to greet me. Within minutes, I’d signed the well-represented editions of my own titles, which were on permanent display right alongside those of all the authors I most admired, and then Scott was piling my arms high with books I absolutely just had to read. He had a sixth sense, knowing exactly what I wanted and needed, and from then on, though it was a bit of a haul from Woodland Hills, Dutton’s was my bookshop.

[ click to read full LA Times article ]

By DOUG HARVEY

Wednesday, January 9, 2008 - 3:45 pm

Some paintings give me diamonds, some paintings, heart attacks
Some paintings I give all my bread to, I don’t ever want it back
Some paintings give me jewelry, others buy me clothes
Some paintings give me children I never asked them for.

—Jagger/Richards/Harvey

Painting is dead. Painting isn’t dead. Painting is dead! No, it isn’t! Yes, it is! Isn’t! Is! Shut up shut up shut up shut up!!! Okay, now that we have that out of the way… Painting isn’t the denial-plagued zombie elephant in the room — art theory is. It’s one of the lines Leonard Cohen left out: Everybody knows a work of art that doesn’t speak for itself is a failure as a work of art. Fortunately, in spite of the best efforts we critics have mustered to impose Artforum’s Rules of Order on the rabble, art — and particularly the medium non grata of painting — just won’t shut up.

Brad Eberhard, Let’s Have Another Baby (2007)

Painters in the contemporary art world, particularly those from L.A., have to maintain a chameleonesque indeterminacy about their artistic intentions — be all things to all people — or face ghettoization. Is this an abstract painting? Or a painting of a painting of an abstract painting, wink wink? It’s the emperor’s new clothes all over. The ultimate irony is that the emperor is actually decked out in an Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat — the plausible deniability cultivated by painters for the social sphere creates a temporary autonomous zone in the studio wherein a thousand flowers have blossomed. No one can pin them down, so they can get away with anything. The psycho art-market bubble hasn’t hurt production either.

[ click to read full LA Weekly Article ]

David Byers and agencies (from TimesOnline UK)

Boy George, the former Culture Club singer, appeared in court today accused of chaining a Norwegian male escort to the wall of his Shoreditch home.

The 46-year-old pop-star and DJ denied assaulting and imprisoning Audun Carlsen on April 28 last year when he appeared at Snaresbrook Crown Court, east London.

Dressed in black and wearing dark glasses, the 1980s icon stood outside the court and smoked a cigarette before entering the building.

During the 20-minute hearing the singer, appearing under his real name George O’Dowd, spoke only to confirm his name, state his not guilty plea and say he understood the terms of his bail.

Related Links

• Boy George takes a broom to the Big Apple

The singer spent time talking with lawyers before leaving the court building, thanking fans who turned up to offer support.

He said only “no comment” to waiting press before leaving in a black Volkswagen people carrier. He was bailed to reappear for trial at the same court on November 24.

2007 Award Winners in Fiction and Nonfiction

Find the best new literary talent from 2007! Our distinguished panel of jurists have voted — and this year’s Discover Awards go to Joshua Ferris for his dazzling Then We Came to the End and to Kate Braestrup for her inspiring Here if You Need Me.

• See Past Winners & Finalists
• See Other Book Award Winners

from MediaBistro’s FishbowlNY

On Monday, Salman Rushdie headed to Pennsylvania for a speaking engagement at Widener University, located outside Philadelphia in the suburb of Chester

The town of Chester decided to act with prudence when they found out Rushdie would be visiting. So they swarmed the Widener campus with police SWAT teams and K-9 units. As a matter of fact, they even forced a police escort on Rushdie at a Philadelphia train station.

Rushdie, who frequently travels the New York subways unescorted and is a bit of a man about town in these post-fatwa days, was terrified and said:

“It’s insane! […] I was absolutely horrified. Assault rifles, tracker dogs - they scare me!”

Hmm. Maybe the Chester police department just wanted to protect Rushdie from Padma Lakshmi and the risk that his ex-wife would have had been in posession of her (alleged) favorite herb.

However, the most depressing part of this story is that Chester is one of the most crime-ridden municipalities in America. The police resources deployed to “protect” Rushdie could have been put to much better use elsewhere… It’s too bad for the good people of Chester that few of them happen to be famous writers — then maybe they could actually put a dent in the crime rate.

(Image via Southbank Centre)

Mark Brown, arts correspondent
Tuesday February 19, 2008
The Guardian

A 21-year-old playwright is to join theatre history as one of the youngest writers to have a debut play performed in London’s West End.

Photograph: Alex Macnaughton/Rex Features

Polly Stenham’s story of a dysfunctional middle class family, That Face, surprised most critics when it opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, central London, last year, and went on to win a string of awards.

Now a wider audience will have the chance to see it when it opens at the Duke of York’s theatre for a 10-week run in May.

Sonia Friedman, a West End producer, said she wanted to be involved in the play as soon as she saw it. “I can’t remember the last time I sat in a theatre and felt so moved and stunned by a theatrical experience. It was just so extraordinarily insightful and exciting,” she said.

The critics also loved it, with the Observer calling it “gob-smacking” and the Daily Telegraph critic calling it one of the most astonishing debuts he’d seen.

[ click to read full article at Guardian UK ]

from MediaBistro’s GalleyCat in New York City

Sunday night, poet Owen Sheers read from his first novel, Resistance, at KGB, pairing off with Richard Gwyn for one of the first events of Wales Week USA, an eight-day celebration of Welsh culture featuring, among other events, musical performances, art exhibitions, and a closed-circuit screening of last Saturday’s rugby game pitting the Welsh national team against the Italians (which, happily, they won 47-8).

Sheers and Gwyn will also read Wednesday night at Housing Works and Saturday afternoon at The Ear Inn with their fellow countryman, Lloyd Robson, and Thursday night Sheers is going to lead a discussion at the New York Public Library with the acclaimed travel writer Jan Morris. After the KGB event was over, I got out my camcorder and asked Sheers to tell me more about his participation in Wales Week USA, and about his fellowship at the NYPL’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers…

[ click to read full blog and videos at the GalleyCat pages ]

snipped from Shelf Awareness

In another publisher experiment making material available at no cost on the Internet, Random House began offering the entire text of Beautiful Children, Charles Bock’s debut novel, for free online as of 12:01 this morning until midnight on Friday, Leap Day. Readers will be able to share, e-mail or print the text, which is available as a PDF download at beautifulchildren.net/read. In cooperation with Random, Amazon.com, B&N.com, Powells.com and Northshire.com are making the file available to their customers.

Beautiful Children, which first appeared in primitive print form at the end of January, concerns the effect of the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy in Las Vegas on his parents and others.

Incidentally last week, Random House Audio announced that it will no longer require that retailers use digital right management (DRM) when selling audiobooks via digital download. The company decided, it said, “that this move will allow for healthy competition among retailers targeting the iPod consumer, without posing any substantive increase in risk of piracy.” Still Random can use DRM for authors who want it.

By Dan Neil, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
February 27, 2008

Not to go all Pauline Kael on you, but “Bullitt” — the 1968 crime drama starring a Ford Mustang GT390 and some guy named Steve McQueen — is a fairly tedious bit of Aquarian cinema: the chicka-chicka-waah soundtrack, the inscrutable plot, the anaerobic dullness of every second that McQueen is off-camera.

“Bullitt” scrabbles to its minor footnote status in film history on two counts. The first: It marks the only time any man ever looked cool in a cardigan — McQueen should have gotten the academy’s knitwear award. The second is the movie’s remarkable seven-minute chase scene, with real cars (the Mustang and a black Dodge Charger), real drivers and real stunts, no special effects. The only blue screen in this movie is the perpetual scrim of cigarette smoke.

McQueen — who would have turned 78 this March — made some fine movies, and some of his movies have great car action in them, but rarely, if ever, do the two qualities overlap. McQueen’s magnum opus, “Le Mans,” is about as strange a movie as can be found. The dialogue, such as it is, could be transcribed onto an index card. The plot is somewhere between furtive and nonexistent. It’s like Samuel Beckett at 200 mph. And yet, it’s a completely captivating document about endurance racing at its most glamorous. If you know what a Porsche 917 or a Ferrari 512M is, then odds are “Le Mans” is one of your all-time favorite films. Only please, don’t sit next to me on a plane.

Personally and professionally, I try very hard to separate Steve McQueen the actor — who was never better than in “Papillon” — and McQueen the motorsports idol, the patron saint of petrol, the king of cool, the hero to millions of gray-heads lost in an automotive time warp. Give me a break. I have no doubt that McQueen was a very hip cat. He smoked weed. He drove a Jaguar SS. He absolutely rocked a black turtleneck in a way Tom Cruise could never hope to.

[ click to read full LA Times article ]

By JEFF LEEDS

Published: February 26, 2008

LOS ANGELES — Mario Lavandeira, known to millions of fans as the gossip blogger Perez Hilton, has a habit of humiliating celebrities he dislikes by doodling explicit images across their photos on his Web site. But he has also long used perezhilton.com to rave about his favorite new music. And now the results of his effusive postings — “you will be foaming at the mouth!” — have attracted the notice of a major record label.

<– photo by Peter Kramer/Associated Press

Mario Lavandeira, a k a Perez Hilton, whose blog site is devoted to dishy gossip.

Mr. Lavandeira has been negotiating a deal that would provide him with his own imprint at Warner Brothers Records, a division of the music giant Warner Music Group, he said. This was confirmed by several other people associated with the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity because no deal has been made. The talks are preliminary, and an agreement is not certain, but Mr. Lavandeira could receive $100,000 a year as an advance against 50 percent of any profits generated by artists he discovers and releases through Warner Brothers, these people said.

A lawyer for Mr. Lavandeira and representatives of Warner Brothers declined to comment on the negotiations.

[ click to view full article at New York Times ]

March 2, 2008

Hardcover Fiction

by Paul Johnson in The Spectator

I gave up writing novels in my mid-twenties, when I was halfway through my third, convinced I had not enough talent for fiction. Sometimes I wish I had persisted. There is one particular reason. The point is made neatly by W. Somerset Maugham in Cakes and Ale:

These remarks need qualification. I’m not sure that the essay can be used for such a purpose. Hazlitt, a great essayist, wrote an extended essay — short book length — to exorcise the torturing spirit of his landlady’s awful (but to him divine) daughter, Sarah, and it did not work: merely got him into fresh, public trouble. It is true that Lamb, an even better essayist, occasionally used the form to rid himself of shaming memories: for instance, not sufficiently appreciating the kindness of his humble aunt who brought him culinary titbits when he was a charity boy at the Charterhouse, and in that delicate essay ‘Poor Relations’. But I have published, I calculate, about 800 essays without using one for exorcism. It works in poetry, especially to expunge the pangs of loss — witness Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ and Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, and most of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ — indeed nearly all Housman’s verse was exorcism. It can be made to work, I suppose, in non-fiction. I suspect there is exorcism in some of Ruskin’s prose, and Carlyle’s.

But fiction is the ideal medium for killing painful memories. The most excruciating emotional torture in Thackeray’s life — prolonged, too — was his hopeless passion for Mrs Brookfield, ending in heartbreak, bitterness and bad temper on the part of her unpleasant husband. But he cured himself by putting it all into Henry Esmond. Gustave Flaubert wanted to forget about his ten-year on-off affair with Louise Collet. So he wrote Madame Bovary, which did the trick and also proved to be by far his best novel because, unlike Salambo and Bouvet et Pécuchet, he had lived it. I think Anthony Trollope tried to deal with his illicit and unspoken love for the American girl Kate, not once but several times — she flickered in and out of at least three novels — but the fact that he had to repeat the dose shows it didn’t work, any more than did Aldous Huxley’s attempt to expel Nancy Cunard from his memory in Antic Hay.

[ click to read full article in The Spectator UK ]

Check out this nice little literary blog from NYC (and buy one of her shirts)…

Book Nerd
Location: Brooklyn, New York, United States

I work at an independent bookstore in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. Someday I will have a bookstore of my own in Brooklyn. I love reading books, talking about books, and being where literature hits the streets. I think independent bookstores can be a source for culture, community, and social justice. I live in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood with the ALP (Adorably Literate Partner), who reads everything that I don’t. You can reach me here: booknerdnyc at earthlink dot net.

Thanks to the graphic design help of my brilliant sister Sarah…

You can now purchase your own Book Nerd T-shirt!

Just imagine — bookish types walking around, all over the country, with their hair-band/L.A. gangster/motorcycle-mob typeface t-shirts, proclaiming their unrepentant book nerdism. It’s a beautiful thing.

[ click to visit The Written Nerd blog ]

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio, Feb. 20 (UPI) — The assistant principal of a school in Springfield, Ohio, is being investigated for allegedly writing and selling erotic poetry online, officials said.

South High School Assistant Principal Karl Perkins, 33, was placed on administrative leave after school officials learned a student downloaded erotic poetry allegedly written by Perkins under a pen name, Antonio Love, the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News reported Tuesday.

The student reportedly downloaded the book of poetry from Perkins’ Web site, www.antoniolove.com, which has since been shut down.

[ click to read rest of story at United Press International ]

1. Did you fart? Cuz you just blew me away.
2. [ censored for the sake of propriety ]
3. My Love fer you is like diarrhea, I can’t hold it in.
4. Do you have a library card? Cuz I’d like to check you out.
5. Is there a mirror in yer pants? Cuz I can see myself in em.
6. If you was a tree and I were a Squirrel, I’d store my nuts in yer hole.
7. You might not be the best lookin girl here, but beauty’s only a light switch away.
8. Fat Penguin! Sorry, I just wanted to say something that would break the ice.
9. I know I’m not no Fred Flintstone, but I bet I can make yer bed-rock.
10. I can’t find my puppy , can you help me find him? I Think he went into this cheap motel room.
11. Yer eyes are as blue as window cleaner.
12. If yer gunna regret this in the mornin’, we kin sleep til afternoon.

And…. The best for last!

13. Yer face reminds me of a wrench, every time I think of it my nuts tighten up

Reporter Gets Bird Poop In Mouth During Newscast

Atlanta, GA 1/30/2008 04:50 PM GMT (FINDITT)

A reporter gets a rude surprise as a bird pooped in his mouth during a piece he was covering.

The video has been e-mailed and sent all across the country. Many people are searching for the term “reporter bird shit” in order to find the unfortunately comedic clip.

The bird pooped on the reporter on his shoulder first, causing the reporter to look up. As he did so with his mouth open, the bird pooped again, landing right into his mouth.

Like any sane person, the reporter freaked out and had to get some help.

To view more videos or post your own, please go to http://video.finditt.com

[ click to view original story at TransWorldNews ]

from Shelf Awareness newsletter

If setting a good example will increase the number of readers in the U.S., then Amanda Patchin, owner of Veritas Fine Books, Garden City, Idaho, is setting an example extraordinaire. Her goal is to read 200 books–79,349 pages–this year.

The marathon read is Patchin’s response to the bad news about reading habits as summed up in last year’s NEA report, “To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence.” One of the findings was that young Americans spend an average of only seven minutes a day reading for pleasure.

According to the Idaho Statesman, Patchin, 27, “has obviously not participated in those studies. . . . [She] has read about 10,000 pages since Jan. 1. That’s more than 200 pages a day.”

You can learn more about her quest at 200books.com, where she sums it up this way: “200 books in 2008. Selected from Everyman’s Library. Reading while caring for a toddler and a new baby and running a small business. With daily blog posts chronicling the attempt. Yeah, I’m nuts.”