I feel an obligation, due to my 80s mediawhore upbringing, to go to see Miami Vice and perhaps I will overcome my dislike of both Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. My heart, though, will always belong to the real Crockett & Tubbs, Don Johnson and what’s his name.

 

• Short National Geographic video on the rise of Cuban hip-hop.
• Wikipedia entry on the subject
• Seattle Weekly article on the origin of Cuban hip-hop
• CD releases: Cuban Hip-Hop All-Stars, Vol 1

I’m an inveterate magazine buyer. It’s a horrible compulsion, because I used to work for a magazine once upon a time (*cough* college). I know how the articles get recycled — none of the writing is fresh — and that when they say they need to go “on location” what they really mean is they need a hot bikini-clad blonde with a boob job and a cooler of beer on a speed boat at Lake Havasu. But I digress. I have a stack of magazines on my desk and I thought I’d share what I’m reading & why.

Florida Travel & Life: We’re trying to plan a Christmas-time vacation to Key West and this issue has “An Insider’s Guide to Key West”. The tagline for the magazine is “One Great State, One Great Magazine”. I’ve been to Florida a lot. A LOT. I’m fairly sure that the entire state is not that great. Thus I’m not surprised to be unimpressed with the article, which points out all of the tourist traps that my Lonely Planet guide tells me to avoid. $4.99. – Tagline’s a lie.

InStyle: Every month I tell myself that I don’t need this magazine, that I’m not going shopping, that I’m not giving in to the Time-Warner-AOL media complex, that I don’t have to conform to a Hollywood-produced style of conspicuous consumption that none of us can possibly hope to live up to, etc. And then, like magic, every month, I find myself with a copy of the damn thing, hopelessly convinced that I really am going to buy that $350 sweater that looks so great on [insert impossibly thin star of the moment]. This month, Michelle Pfeiffer is on the cover in all of her airbrushed-to-perfection wrinkle-free 48-year-old glory. Number of earmarked pages: 2. $3.99 – Occasionally worth it for the party recipes and the gift ideas.

mental_floss: I had really high hopes for this magazine, but it just seems to be a collection of factoids and trivia bits. Can you really “feel smart again” if your brain is hopelessly cluttered with random bits of arcane knowledge like how the 2nd man to ever survive a ride over Niagara Falls died after getting an infection from a broken leg he got by slipping on an orange peel? $4.99 – A cheap party trick & the blog is better.

Food & Wine: I actually have 2 copies of this magazine on my desk — the May travel issue and the June grilling one. I have this only because my dad gave me a subscription. While I am capable of following instructions and have a nice array of cooking implements, none of them are here in DC and my best impromptu dish is Pop-Tarts. The magazine has been steadily going downhill, or sideways, or something, over the last 3 years that I’ve gotten it. It’s more Hollywood and style and less about food. Everyone is beautiful and everything is expensive. I’m guessing that the demographic skews a little older, maybe to the lawyer/I-banker/consultant/media exec crowd that does a lot of fine wine-buying and gourmet eating out. $4.50 – Occasionally worth it for the “Fast” section of recipes with fewer ingredients and a speedier pace.

Conde Nast Traveler: I am a sucker for travel magazines. I’d buy them all. This one I bought because the cover story is “Best Islands! 60 Easy Escapes” and it’s where I got the idea to go to Key West. The only thing that stops me from picking up everything from National Geographic to Frommer’s Budget Travel is that I don’t need any more enticement to spend my days daydreaming about being on a beach somewhere with a cold drink and a trashy novel. $4.50 – Worth every second of mental drift.
That wraps it up. The Food & Wines and mental_floss I’ll put downstairs for the building freecycle pile. the InStyle I’ll rip out pages of things I’ll never buy and then put it there as well. The Traveler, though, I’ll hang onto for a good daydream about the “7 Lush Caribbean Islands” or “Europe’s Secret Playground”. A girl’s got a dream and definitely not about hanging out on a motorboat with skeevy editors and a half-rack of Coors at the lake…

• Fell in love with Nortec Collective this morning
• Have you seen The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou lately? No, really. You have to see it. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go on an overnight drunk, and in 10 days I’m going to set out to find the shark that ate my friend and destroy it. Anyone who wants to tag along is more than welcome.”
• Download Mister Leisure’s live PA at Flammable in Seattle. Office chair-dancing is totally acceptable in this case.
• New media-hype vocab: CrowdSourcing. Instead of outsourcing your material, you source it from the world at large–an interested crowd. Watch for it. Wired thinks it’ll be hot.
• Every day I read Go Fug Yourself and laugh until my interns look at me funny. Then I stop and think about what else I can have them work on.

It is hot in DC. Hot hot. Legs sticking together, hair damp at the neck, underarms perpetually off-scented kind of hot. And, as if there was a memo that went out recently to the suit-wearing men in the District or perhaps a collective decision made at the weekly meetings in steam rooms and squash courts across the city, they all began wearing khaki suits at once last week.

The suits, I don’t mind them so much. They are basic, boring Brooks Brothers/Jos. A Banks/Men’s Wearhouse “summer suits”. They do not do much for the men, because (everyone knows) khaki makes your ass look big as Black Rock Desert. The men wearing the suits weren’t in any shape to be noted for their physique in the first place, anyway. The more heinous crime, though, is that they wear them with baseball caps. Not trucker hats–I’ve not yet seen one foam & mesh promotional advertisement for Bert’s Fish & Tackle. Proper canvas baseball caps for the team of their choice.

And now I am perplexed. Is this some sort of GQ fashion thing I don’t know about? Is there some sort of citywide activity challenging men to combine khaki and sportsmanship? I don’t know. I assume they are trying to recapture a carefree, jaunty, youthful look that they never really had. Or perhaps just trying to hide that growing bald spot from the vicious summer sun.

I was very grateful to see one former presidential candidate John Kerry, looking tall and tan and more salt than salt & pepper, in his khaki suit without the baseball cap. He was headed to the travel section at the Barnes & Noble, preparing to evade the next fashion memo, no doubt.

There is much swimming around in my head. I have been overloading on information lately… all kinds of information… and now I am trying to make sense of it. “Why this? Why now?” It is like a giant puzzle for which there are no correct pieces and I fear making the Hill Country of Texas look like the Matterhorn.
Lately there have been some challenging things happening to the people around me, the people whose blogs I read, countries far away some of whose citizens I am friends with. It is interesting to see how people rise to the occasion of a challenge. This reminds me of some of the better writing in “The West Wing”:

“…every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we’re reminded that that capacity may well be limitless”

These people have been inspiring in so many ways that I thought I ought to write them down before I forget:

• One friend has been having a hard time lately, what with June being Smiting Month and all. Someone even stole the birthday present I sent her! She is handling all of the traumas and challenges, though, with the same positive attitude and sense of scale that I have always loved about her.
• Another friend took a job in academia, after a long stint at the UN, only to find out that the school was in fairly dire straits. She proved her commitment by sticking out her contract, but then stood up for her needs by telling the dean she wouldn’t be staying given the enormous additional workload she’d been asked to do for no extra money. She’s also the bravest person I know, heading off to live in various recently warring states.
• Ariel’s husband was injured in a terrible bicycle accident. Rather than dwell on the scariness, which indeed looks quite scary, she’s all about being grateful that he wasn’t hurt worse.
• One of our former interns is Lebanese and was working for the UNDP in Jordan when the recent violence came up. His family is still in Lebanon, including his wonderfully talented mother, who is an internationally-acclaimed furniture designer. Khalil is working hard now on a global outreach program to spread the word about ending the violence in Lebanon.
• Everyone reads Dooce and I’m not one bit surprised to see her facing cancerous cells with a giant dose of humor.

I am lucky to be exposed to these people on a regular basis, to find the hope and the humor and the passion and the grace to deal with all of the challenges, big and little, that get tossed our way. Life, that little glow in each person that persists beyond all else, shines through in interesting ways when we are pressed by our circumstances.

I am reading Henry David Thoreau’s essay on Economy, which serves as the first chapter of Walden. Given its old-timeyness and Thoreau’s way with words, there is some new vocabulary for the modern reader:

obtrude: push out: push to thrust outward

fain: disposed(p): having made preparations; “prepared to take risks”

integument: A natural outer covering or coat, such as the skin of an animal or the membrane enclosing an organ.

consanguinity: Genetic relationship. Consanguineous individuals have at least one common ancestor in the preceding few generations.

suent: Uniformly or evenly distributed or spread; even; smooth.

dissipated: debauched: unrestrained by convention or morality. Intemperate in the pursuit of pleasure; dissolute. Wasted or squandered. Irreversibly lost. “Congreve draws a debauched aristocratic society”; “deplorably dissipated and degraded”; “riotous living”; “fast women”

publicans: Chiefly British. The keeper of a public house or tavern. A collector of public taxes or tolls in the ancient Roman Empire.

Sardanapalus: Ashurbanipal, or Assurbanipal, (reigned 668 – 627 BCE), the son of Esarhaddon and Naqi’a-Zakutu, was the last great king of ancient Assyria. He is famous as one of the few kings who could himself read and write, noted for his luxury and voluptuousness. A Sardanapalus is any luxurious, extravagant, self-willed tyrant.

tenon: A projection on the end of a piece of wood shaped for insertion into a mortise to make a joint.

aguish: affected by ague (ague: a fit of shivering or shaking)