Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - Posts
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Fans of Scott Schuman's street style blog The Sartorialist—which posts elegant, color-saturated photographs of enviably chic individuals loitering on sidewalks from Moscow to Rio—should check out the Pipeline's spot-on guide to "getting shot by Scott." The blog presents a handy flow chart explaining which looks catch his eye. (If you're a man, be "old, rich and European"; if you're a woman, be "model pretty" or wear a "quirky hat".) The Pipeline leaves out a few Schuman staples—it also helps to be a crinkly-eyed great-aunt type or to have a charming, girlish ‘fro—but it effectively nails the range of styles he loves, which left me wondering: Is that range too narrow?
Reading the Pipeline's chart and flipping through the new Sartorialist book, due out from Penguin in August, I'm left once again with a feeling that's nagged at me in my years reading the blog: Schuman's photos are much more impressive individually than in aggregate. Gathered together, his subjects often seem rich and pampered, too many fashionistas wearing the same expensive and unwieldy shoes. But I can't help loving his work. I think that's because of Schuman's eye for facial expressions, for the people behind the clothes. He's attracted to a limited spectrum of looks, but he seems to have a generous lens, capable of finding the joy, wit, and candor in his subjects' eyes. You tend to feel you've met the people he shoots. Which is why I'll keep reading, even if it means I see men in rolled trousers and girls on bicycles again and again.
Photograph of Scott Schuman by Christopher Peterson
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I sigh even as I type the words “Tony Awards”—that everyone I know, even in an arts-obsessed workplace, chuckles every time I mention them says all you need to know about the place of Broadway theater in the larger cultural scene—but yesterday’s decision to ax journalists from the ranks of Tony voters has led to some of the most scabrous reviews of recent memory, and deservedly so.
People used to be warned not to pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel; in the age of the Web, it’s probably advisable not to piss off the people who make their living by distinguishing junk from genius.
The justification for the change was skimpy to say the least: “the Management Committee took into consideration the fact that certain publications and individual critics have historically pursued a policy of abstaining from voting on entertainment awards in general, to avoid any possible conflicts of interest in fulfilling their primary responsibilities as journalists.” Huh? Broadway Stars’ Matthew Murray translated that into English: “It's a conflict of interest for journalists—who live by the standards through which their very jobs and statuses within their professional community exist, and don't work professionally on shows or with people they write about—to vote for the Tony Awards, because they might write about the shows they see. But it isn't a conflict of interest for hundreds of other people to vote for themselves, their friends, or the shows in which they have a vested, public, and frequently financial interest.”
Time Out’s Adam Feldman put it best in Upstaged, the magazine’s theater blog:
[The decision] represents another regrettable step toward the marginalization of critics within the New York theatrical community. It is true that critics do not vote for the Oscar or Emmy Awards; but theater is an inherently more local and personal industry, in which critics have historically played an important role. (Not for nothing are Broadway theaters named after Walter Kerr and Brooks Atkinson.) But critics, and indeed criticism, are inconvenient to the modern theater marketer: Old-fashioned in our insistence on quality, unreliable in our support for expensive projects and less necessary in light of the diffusion of information in the Internet Age. We can expect to see more such gestures of exclusion in the future, each chipping away, as intended, at the status of critics within the theater world.
Photograph of Liza Minnelli by BRYAN BEDDER/Getty Images.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 16: "Basking sharks." A 26-foot, 5,000-pound basking shark washed ashore yesterday on a Long Island beach, and Googlers want to learn more before their next ocean dip. Luckily the basking shark is harmless and eats mostly plankton. Still, according to a 1894 New York Times article, the first person to describe the shark "tried to prove that this was the species of fish which swallowed Jonah ... Jonah could have lodged quite comfortably in a shark's stomach, and it would have been easier to enter that organ than to squeeze his way down the small throat of a whale."
No. 53: "how long is the new harry potter movie?" One hundred fifty-three minutes, according to IMDB. This puts the Half-Blood Prince at just over the series average of 150.3 minutes per Harry Potter film. Those with small children and/or child-size bladders will be glad to hear that the proprietor of the invaluable Runpee.com (a database that tells you the best times in a movie to take a leak) is watching the film right now, according to his Twitter status.
No. 97: "pet airways." In-flight treats are the newest luxury available to America's already pampered pets. Pet Airways is a new pets-only airline, where dogs and cats fly coach instead of whimpering in the cargo hold. Yesterday marked Pet Airways' inaugural flight when a modified turboprop plane took off from Baltimore's BWI Marshall with about 40 cats and dogs bound for Chicago. Tickets cost $150 to $299 one-way, depending on the route, and a trip from New York to L.A. takes about 24 hours. "It's a niche market, no doubt. But the pet community ... they get it," said co-founder Alysa Binder.
Basking shark image courtesy Wikipedia.