Where the Battle of Algiers rages on
...Rick's Cafe Americain
Monday, May 05, 2008
Adult Education: Babies and American Industry
Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - 8 pm (doors at 7:30)
Union Hall in Park Slope
702 Union St. @ 5th Ave
$5 cover
Adult Education is a monthly lecture series organized by the Brooklyn-based nonprofit, Stay Free! Each month is devoted to a given theme, and 4-5 speakers will address some aspect of that theme using visual aids.
| Pamela Paul, “Baby Gear Your Mother Didn’t Have”
| Daniel Radosh,"Marketing to Christian Kids or The Secret Identity of Bibleman”
| Charles Star, “A Short List of the Worst Children’s Toys Ever”
| Gary Drevitch, “How Princesses and Pokemon Conquered America”
| Susan Gregory Thomas, “Barbie Goes Vertical: How the Marketing Industry Brands Infants and Toddlers”
DANIEL RADOSH is author of the new book Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a contributing editor at The Week magazine. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Playboy, Esquire, and GQ. In the early 1990s, Radosh was a staff writer and editor at Spy magazine.
PAMELA PAUL is the author of Parenting, Inc: How We Are Sold on $800
Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, Toddler Couture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers—and What It Means for Our Children. She writes for Time magazine and the New York Times Book Review, and is the author of two previous books, Pornified and The Starter Marriage. She and her family live in Harlem.
GARY DREVITCH produces the parenting Web site freelancedad.com, contributes to magazines like Parents and Jewish Living, and writes non-fiction books for children. He is also the senior editor of
grandparents.com. A father of three, he has become part of the Pokemon problem, and now seeks its solution.
SUSAN GREGORY THOMAS is an investigative journalist and broadcaster. Formerly a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report and co-host of public television’s Digital Duo, she has also written for Time, the Washington Post, Glamour, and elsewhere. She has two children, seven and four years old.
CHARLES STAR is a sometimes lawyer, sometimes comic, and host of Adult Ed. But he is mostly known for his excellent cat.
The Black Comedy Experiment
The Tank @ Collective:Unconscious
279 Church Street
$5 or $8 for a single show; $15 for a day pass; $25 for a weekend pass
Buy tickets here.
I’m very excited to announce that Carrie and I are starting a new monthly lecture series called Adult Education at Union Hall in Park Slope. The presentations will be short, amusing and informative ... but you won’t learn anything that you really need to know.
The first show, “Micro-genre” is about genres that are so specific that you probably didn’t even realize that they were genres. I’ll let Carrie’s description take over from here:
Adult Education
Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 8PM
Union Hall
702 Union St. @ 5th Ave (Park Slope)
FREE!
On YouTube, there are scores of toddler’s expressions after sucking on lemons. Entire groups of flickr photos are organized around photos of people wearing sweatshirts, photos of painted trains, photos of body hair. You could fill a small bookshelf with fake children’s memoirs. In this show, we discuss several examples of what we’re calling “micro-genres.”
Liz Clayton: The Architecture of Converted Fast-Food Restaurants
Paul Lukas: On Elevator World, American Jails, Nut Grower Monthly, and other obscure trade magazines
Heidi Cody: First National Icons: Native Americans in Grocery Brands
Jim Hanas: On meta-tourism: photos of tourists taking photos
Russell Scholl: On TV Commercials for Personal Hygiene Products
LIZ CLAYTON is an obsessive-compulsive who tries to contain the world in words and pictures. Her work has been published in the Globe and Mail, Time Out New York, and on three million websites. She recently moved to Brooklyn from Toronto, where she ran the Pontiac Quarterly reading series.
JIM HANAS is a freelance editor and writer who lives and works in Brooklyn.
PAUL LUKAS is a freelance writer and former zinester (Beer Frame) in Brooklyn. His Uni Watch column currently runs on ESPN.com
RUSSELL SCHOLL is a New York-based media archivist. He assembles moving image programs on a wide variety of subjects (the history of animation; early jazz shorts; burlesque; educational and propaganda films, etc.) and exhibits them at Barbes in Park Slope and other NYC venues.
CHARLES STAR (HOST) is a Brooklyn-based comedian who has written for the Onion News Network and Stay Free! magazine. Charles hosts the comedy show Pant-Hoot on the third Tuesday of every month at Magnetic Field.
On January 5, Claudia Cogan, Jiwon Lee and John F. O’Donnell hosted 50 First Jokes at The Creek and The Cave in Long Island City. Ultimately, over 60 comics told their first jokes (a previously unperformed joke or one written in 2008). This was mine.
Meanwhile, two Goldman managing directors acted as liaisons, helping bring Alex Rodriguez back to the New York Yankees baseball team, a classic Goldman deal that enhances the value of the firm’s 40 percent stake in the YES network - which it is trying to sell - while also pleasing Yankee fans. The symmetry was perfect: like the Yankees, Goldman, more than any other bank on Wall Street, is both hated and revered.
So now you tell me: did A-Rod approach people at Goldman Sachs on the advice of Warren Buffet? Or is it more likely that Goldman Sachs approached him, with an assist from Warren Buffet? Or asked A-Rod to give Warren Buffet a call.
I have a feeling that ARod may be making $30MM a year after all, with a little help from friends that aren’t the Yankees. Scott Boras is no dummy. He knows how important the sale of YES is to more than just the Yankees.
Susan Prekel (Montreal Comedy Festival, Comedy Central’s Live at Gotham)
Craig Baldo (Montreal Comedy Festival, Last Comic Standing, Premium Blend, ...)
Joe Garden (Features Editor for The Onion )
Sean O’Connor (This American Life, Cohost of Smiletime at Ochi’s Lounge)
Noah Garfinkel (Cohost of Totally J/K at Rififi)
Hosted by Charles Star (Onion News Network, Stay Free! magazine) with an educational interlude from Monkeywire.
This is not a pretty picture on many levels. (Note to self: Ablutions before taking the picture. Maybe a pedicure. Nobody needs to see those toes.) Still, it must be the picture of record, as it was taken on the morning of November 14, 2007 in order to confirm a bet with F-Train. As many* of you know, F-Train recently won a lot of bets when he gained over 17 pounds in under two and a half months. I tried to get him to take a double-or-nothing bet that he couldn’t do it again. Because he has been eating, he had enough energy to think through the bet and he declined. I assume he suspected that it was worth $20 to me to give him a heart attack.
In any event, in an effort to get back my money (or at least to delay payment) we have come up with a separate double-or-nothing: I have to get down to 195 by March 1, 2008. I have to lose 18.5 pounds in three and a half months. As in F-Train’s scenario, I will be dressed the same in every pic and the same scale will be in the same place when I take the picture. I’ll post an updated picture every two weeks or on any day when I feel like it. By the end it is my hope that I will not have to hold the camera as low to keep my gut out of the frame.
And now I’m opening the betting to you. Betting closes on Sunday and all monetary bets are the same for everyone: $20. If you want to get creative, I’m listening (and, FYI, married and a member in good standing of the New York State Bar). Betting closes on Monday, November 19, 2007 or, should I actually get 15 people to read this and care, $300. Leave the bets (or suggestions) in the comments.
Q: When was the last time you weighed 195 pounds.
A: I don’t remember. Probably college.
Q: Are you in a particularly fat phase right now?
A: Yes and no. The most I ever weighed was an appalling 252. I got down to about 202 last year, around my wedding, and then spent a year of marriage backsliding.
Q: How are your eating habits.
A: As I type I am staring at a packet of Razapplemagic Fun Dip. I am unlikely to win the battle of wills.
* Publicly attempt to define many as used here at your own risk.
I wrote this last Tuesday but forgot to post it. I have to get better about that.
November 6:
I had a salad for lunch today. This would be unremarkable but for the fact that Carrie and I just returned from our Paris and Madrid where we redid our honeymoon and dramatically improved the experience.
To recap the comparison:
LOW POINTS Honeymoon 1: I feel asleep at the wheel and drove into a very large tree and we got to see a Tompkins County ER.
Honeymoon 2: Our passports ended up in the laundry and we got to see the U.S. Embassy!
HIGH POINTS Honeymoon 1: I won $15 in a four person poker tournament with friends from college.
Honeymoon 2: As we looked down at the lights of Paris from Montmartre ... do I really need to finish this sentence?
Anyway, back to the salad. This was my first normal salad in over two weeks because, strangely, they don’t have vegetables in Europe. After our trip to Barcelona two years ago, we didn’t expect to find any in Spain. (It is my current understanding that it is illegal to either grow or import vegetables in that country. Which explains the pat down at the airport.) However, France shocked me. France is the epicenter of cuisine; I figured that green vegetables was part of the repertoire. I figured wrong. Potatoes? Lots. Squash? Sure. But NOBODY simply sautees some spinach or asparagus or broccoli. Even as a side dish.
There was nothing in all of Paris that could reasonably be called a salad by anyone not consulting for McDonald’s. Vegetables are apparently only to be used as garnish. And the only salads we ever saw were meat dishes ... on a bed of lettuce.
On our last night in Paris I thought we had finally stumbled upon something that looked like a salad we would understand: “frisee aux lardons”. I assumed I’d get a plate of frisee (I am the only person who would look forward to such a thing, I assume) with a bit of bacon for flavor. What I received was a plate of lettuce with a pound of diced, thick-cut bacon on top.
I will always regret that it was the one day I forgot to bring the camera.
On Tuesday, when speaking to a VFW group, George Bush assured the assembled, and presumably memory-addled, veterans that we would not pull out of Iraq because millions suffered when we pulled out of Vietnam and he won’t repeat that mistake.
In other words, even though we have been chastised for years that we shouldn’t compare Iraq to Vietnam. Vietnam was a disaster. Vietnam was a quagmire. Vietnam was a unique mess, and to compare the war in Iraq to the Vietnam War is unfair and unpatriotic. Until today.
Today, we can compare the Iraq war to Vietnam, but not because (as most people have concluded) Iraq is, in fact a quagmire and a disaster, but because apparently WE NEEDED MORE VIETNAM.
As my officemate pointed out, this is probably not a conclusion he would have come to if he had actually had to serve in Vietnam. Then again, with a recent calculation showing that Bush spent over 1/4 of his presidency on vacation, he hasn’t exactly served in Iraq either.
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Adult Education: Babies and American Industry
