June 2010

In a sign that they are perhaps the least self-aware retailer ever, the facade of a new Urban Outfitters store being planned for the Upper West Side will be designed to look like four different storefronts: “a hat store, a hardware store, a neighborhood bar and a bodega.” I’ll just let the designer explain the brilliant, sensitive rationale:

“The whole idea was to do this kind of ironic statement of lining the building with storefronts that would be reminiscent of independent businesses,” says Ron Pompei, creative director of Pompei A.D., which designed the store, slated to open in August. “It’s the story about the streets of New York as they once were.”

In writing this piece for TFT about first kisses (and the zine of same name), I came across this cute and instructive eHow article, “How to Have a First Kiss.”

A week or so ago, Thursday Styles filled us in on the “end of the best friend“–apparently kids these days mostly hang out in big groups. Ah, yes: “The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship.” I’m skeptical.

This article about an 89-year-old woman who fought the police during the Stonewall riots in 1969 and now sits in a nursing home trying (and mostly failing) to remember it all, is beautiful and heartbreaking.

Here’s a compilation of Publishers Weekly’s annual bestseller lists since 1910. Meanwhile, The Awl looks at complaints about The New York Times in 1910 and 1911, and finds not much has changed.

I’m sort of fascinated by this article in Harvard Magazine that follows up with some people who dropped out of the ivy league in the sixties, both to see how their lives turned out after (gasp!) abandoning a Harvard degree, and to ask how they think back on that time today.

For Father’s Day, the BBC points out that that dads in earlier times weren’t always “tyrannical patriarchs whose children were seen and not heard and lived in fear of father’s punishments.” If we imagine that benevolent–even loving!–fathers are a recent invention, “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

I’ve never seen Leave it to Beaver, now available in an exhaustive box set. “Think of it as a 234-episode history lesson, of a family, a country, a medium,” explains Neil Genzlinger in the Times. “Each installment has a few pearls worthy of that necklace June is always wearing (even while doing housework).” Bonus: According to Ken Osmond, who played Eddie Haskell, “Kids are still the same as they were in 1810.” The very same day, the Times ran an article about the 30th anniversary of Airplane!

“50 years after [Playboy Clubs] were invented and 22 years after they closed,” NPR’s Scott Simon talks to some former Playboy Bunnies.

In Foreign Policy, Christian Caryl hazards a guess as to why the 1970’s “are still haunting us today.”

Finally, there will be a movie based on those troll dolls that haven’t been much of a thing in years.

I’m getting obsessed with “View from the Top Floor,” Marc Miller’s carefully curated website that looks back at East Village history as seen from his perch at 98 Bowery. Here, he posts audio clips of answering machine messages that he’s saved, forming “a sound portrait of my life in the 1980’s composed of the voices of the people who were in it.” And here, he briefly discusses a column he wrote for the now-defunct East Village Eye from 1983 – 1986: “‘Miller’s Memorabilia’ specialized in unearthing obscure pictures from the past that would resonate with the East Village crowd.”

Predictably, there’s a Facebook fan page called “I Want My 90’s Nickelodeon Back.” 1,088,253 people “like” it and have thrown their support behind the cause: “To Mobilize Fans To Actively Participate and Take Part In Efforts To Return Shows That Were On Nickelodeon During the 1990’s.”

Skye Ferrante cannot write if it’s not on a typewriter, and his colleagues at the Writers’ Room can’t take the noise. There used to be a room reserved for noisy typists–mostly older folks–but they’ve all died, leaving Ferrante as the only typewriter-user who needs accommodating, in a space designed to be a quiet haven. Lest we forget, the Daily News points out that “[t]he 37-year-old writer represented a bygone era.”

In her BEA coverage, the LA Times‘ Carolyn Kellogg reminds us that the imminent death of publishing has been forecast almost as long as the written word has existed. “Twenty-five years ago, it was corporate conglomeration that was going to kill publishing, then the advent of chain retailers such as Borders and Barnes & Noble and later the rise of Amazon.com. Even as far back as the 15th century, Venetian judge Filippo di Strata declared of Gutenberg’s movable type, ‘The pen is a virgin; the printing press, a whore.’” (!!!) Kellogg continues: “What may be new is the exhaustion in the top ranks. [ICM agent Esther] Newberg expressed what other publishing veterans won’t say out loud: ‘One of the only good things about being old is that I won’t have to deal with this.’”

Flavorwire takes a look at some defunct magazines they didn’t know existed. My favorite is a parenting mag matter-of-factly called “Offspring.”

For this week’s Look Book, NY Mag goes to the prom, with a feature that reminds me of Seventeen’s old “School Zone.”

Here’s a really nice piece by Emma Kat Richardson at Bookslut, on You Couldn’t Ignore Me if You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation. She calls it “the latest in a recent trilogy of Generation X nostalgia volumes from the disaffected (now middle-aged) youth who defined an era of irony and cynicism,” the others being (arguably) Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power and Lizzie Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery.

In his review of Get Him to The Greek (a title that made me think, whenever I saw the poster, that this was somehow a movie about a fraternity, which made me confused), A.O. Scott finds that “sometimes debauchery can serve as nostalgia.”

Jeremiah Moss blogs about Bill’s Gay Nineties, an NYC bar that opened as a speakeasy in 1924, and was 1890s-themed. Apparently, the 1890s were very trendy in the 1920s.

No more books? No more handwritten inscriptions! “[T]here’s something else that may be lost if old-style books fade from the scene: the personality that authors — and the people who give books to others as presents — sometimes leave for posterity with their handwritten inscriptions….If e-books end up largely replacing traditional books, where would the extra personality that comes with an inscription go?”

I’ve really been enjoying geeking out on Stephen Vider’s blog, The Lazy Scholar, where he writes about the tantalizing array of archival material that’s available online. I especially loved his recent post on yearbooks. The presence of those glossy colored inserts so often stuck in the middle, he writes, “sadly exposes how generic most yearbooks actually are—they typically reveal less about any single place and time than they do about the art and sometimes artlessness of nostalgia.”

Cracked’s list of “5 Guilty Pleasures the Web Killed While You Weren’t Looking” offers some nostalgia for social shunning, one-night stands, and “hiding your stupid past.”

And in The Atlantic, James Parker dubs Lady Gaga “The Last Pop Star“: “…[W]ho will be post-Gaga? Nobody. She’s finishing it off, each of her productions gleefully laying waste to another area of possibility.”