Nobody's Business

Color Me Bad

One reason I was relieved to leave the Netherlands behind had to to with the stifling requirements of government-mandated sameness. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of petty Dutch rules that governed everything from what you were allowed to call your newborn to what exact color you were allowed to paint your front door (in Amsterdam's city center, you may choose any color at all, as long as it is a particular shade of dark green).

To my chagrin, I've since learned that forced conformity is the rule in a good number of municipalities in the U.S. too (to say nothing of condo boards and homeowners' associations, which appear to be the favorite refuge of wannabe tyrants everywhere). The mentality is on perfect display here:

A property manager's decision to paint a rundown rental house pink is angering some neighbors, who say the owner is trying to get back at the city. BK Management repainted the house in the New Chauncey neighborhood district after city inspectors said the dwelling needed aesthetic improvements. Chad Budreau of BK Management said the owners originally wanted to install neutral siding but chose paint because of the cost. "We were able to get the paint for a very good price, and the students living there seem to like it a lot. A lot of people have actually called and complimented us on the color," he said.

Katy Bunder, who has lived in the neighborhood for 22 years, isn't one of them. "It's the worst I've ever seen on a home," she said. Bunder says the owners "intentionally devalued" the house.

Which  makes zero sense.

I wonder if Ms. Bunder would accuse the owners of these and these homes of having "devalued" them. Me, I think it's kinda nice that not every house has to be painted beige or eggshell-white; though if people like Katy Bunder had anything to do with it, no doubt that'd be the law.

Weekend Kid Blogging

Post-brunch sibling affection in the van Bakel household.

The secret is out!

You Make My Heart Sing

Most great children's literature, despite its greatness, is still an open book. As adults, we know why these books work. We see and recognize the masterful, rhyming whimsy in Dr. Seuss' greatest hits; the bursting-at-the-seams anarchy and just a hint of loneliness and lost-ness in the Eloise series (minus the dreadful Eloise at Christmastime, that is); the simple-minded, almost soulless innocence of Curious George.

All these books, while unique in their tone and content, and while groundbreaking in their day, are transparent enough. They're not quite formulaic, but they were written in an idiom that is fairly easy to copy, both for the original author and for the epigones following in his or her footsteps.

I know only three exceptions to this general rule: Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, a book that has occasionally forced me to pretend I had something in my eye; Alice in Wonderland, awash in odd imagery and day-glo allegories; and Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are. (Admittedly, Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon deserves at least an honorable mention here.)

Of these, to me, Wild Things is the most impenetrable mystery. It's Heart of Darkness for toddlers. It stirs something deep in me, and presumably in generations of other readers, that I cannot put into words. I'm tempted to compliment the book by saying that it is pure poetry, but that's a meaningless descriptor — especially for someone who, like me, has never cared for poetry that much.

Wild Things is, I believe, irreproducible. It appears fueled not by a calculated "what if" (what if a little girl lived in the Plaza Hotel, what if an explorer brought an African chimp to America), but by one author taking a kernel of an idea and recklessly letting it take him where it wants, giving in to the pull of his intuition and subconsciousness.

There's no internal logic to Where the Wild Things Are, no overt meaning (though lots of hidden ones), let alone (shudder) a message: rather, the book is a danger-skirting fever dream that Sendak rides without holding back, capturing a wisp of inspiration that can't be willed to return.

Sendak is an admirer of Herman Melville, and once said of Melville's books

"There's a mystery there, a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me."

I doubt there's higher praise for any author. It applies equally to Sendak himself.

Whether Spike Jonze's movie will do justice to Sendak's masterpiece, I don't know — I'm prepared for the film to be somewhere between a glorious flop and this generation's Kazaam.

So why am I even writing about Sendak on Nobody's Business? Because the irascible author tells scared little children to go fuck themselves. Well, almost.

Sendak told this week's edition of Newsweek that he would "not tolerate" parental concerns about the book being too scary. "I would tell them to go to hell," Sendak said. And if children can't handle the story, they should "go home," he added. "Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like."

That's a whole new level of caution-to-the-wind curmudgeonry. I have to say, I admire it a helluva lot more than the bromides of professional audience-panderers like Disney Corp (the a-holes who turned A.A. Milne's beautiful Winnie the Pooh into a godforsaken saccharine cuddleball).

I also like imagining how Sendak's remarks will rile the mollycoddlers and the nannies who insist that children's entertainment must be exclusively wholesome and educational (the kind of people who are not above trying to ban his books, such as In the Night Kitchen, from public libraries).

We need Wild Things, like Sendak. Yeah: Wild Things, too.

A Ban on Photoshop? This One's Personal.

It's come to this: A prominent New York Times scribe supports government-coerced speech.

Randy Cohen, the paper's self-styled resident ethicist, is in favor of mandatory warning labels on advertising images that have been Photoshopped. He hints he might even support a ban on such images, analogous to a law that Britain's Liberal Democrats have been pushing. (French parliamentarians have also been clamoring for mandatory warnings, with fines of more than $50,000 per violation.) Cohen got religious about the issue in the wake of the Ralph Lauren skeletal-model controversy.

Let me start here: I desperately wish that some kindly art director at the Times would digitally correct Randy Cohen's too-magenta, overly-shiny, yellow-toothed headshot (at right). Long live Photoshop!

And I advise anyone — Times pontificators, social activists, legislators — to keep their damn noses out of my business. How I make the people in front of my cameras look (and yes, I frequently use Photoshop to soften laugh lines, brighten smiles, discreetly slim belly bulges, and so on) is none of anyone's beeswax; it's between me, my clients, and those models.

The wannabe busybodies can make their images look they way they want and I'll make my images look the way I want. Then we'll let the marketplace sort out which photos consumers prefer. Fair enough?

To be sure, yeah, those 'shopped Ralph Lauren models look horrifyingly freakish to me; and in trying to belatedly suppress the images with stupid legal threats, the company sure didn't do itself any favors. The dreadful, what-were-they-thinking Photoshop work in question rightly reaped a firestorm of criticism, causing RL to apologize and (a)mend its ways. That's the way we take care of things in a grown-up democratic society — not by slapping mandatory warning labels and wholesale prohibitions on some of the things we don't happen to like.

Imagine, in a few short years: If I want to publish a photo that I took — hang it in a local gallery, put it in an ad, share it on Flickr — and I've used Photoshop's cloning tool or healing brush, I'll be forced to destroy the visual integrity of my image with a mandatory warning label, roughly as attractive as a bar code and possibly a whole lot bigger. If I disobey, my business may be fined out of existence.

That's nuts. And wrong.

I won't stand for anyone doing that to me, my images, my vision, my style, my business, or my clients.

And for what? To protect women from "developing an unrealistic self-image"? (Does anyone else see how sexist that notion is on its face — as if women are too weak-willed and lame-brained to be trusted with glamour photos that may shatter their delicate Victorian sense of selves?) Or is the goal to promote truth in advertising? In either case, then we should also ban or regulate, just for starters, push-up bras, breast implants, artificial eyelashes, botox, and lip gloss.

It follows that, if "reality" is the goal, or the only reasonable benchmark, we should require people to walk around with text stenciled on their foreheads saying they've had lipo, they still suck in their stomach at parties, and they've shaved their armpits. After all, those things are not what nature intended. They promote unrealistic body images, and, being augmented reality, are carried out to deceive.

Cosmetics are merely "hope in a jar"; Photoshop, on the other hand, offers guaranteed results. How is that a bad thing? I wonder how many people wouldn't like to look a little younger, a little trimmer, when they have their photo taken. In fact, I'd wager that rather a lot of the very same men and women who profess to abhor "photochopping" would, if given the option, prefer to look at a photo of themselves in which they're five pounds lighter, and in which they have mild laugh lines instead of deep crow's feet — "reality" be damned. They demand that other people's pictures be unretouched; I suspect they'd like their own portrait to be the sole exception.

I recently attempted to test this theory in a discussion on an online forum. To the local feminist who publicly excoriated fashion photography and Photoshop artifice, I extended this (I thought) rather generous offer:

I invite you to have your photo taken by me. After I'm done brightening eyes, smoothing skin, and so on [in Photoshop], you get to pick either the high-resolution before or after version to display to the world (Facebook/Flickr/YouTube et cetera). When would you like to schedule your free session?

I never heard from her again.

The effectiveness of any of the augmented-reality methods I mentioned above (Photoshopping included), and the degree to which they convince people that there's no choice but to copy that look in real life, depends entirely on the gullibility of the beholder. The answer to the problem, then, is not "Make more laws." The answer is not "Let's have a Photoshop / fashion police." The answer is "Stop being such an impressionable dimwit."

I'm genuinely happy about this YouTube video (below), which I recently watched twice with my seven-year-old daughter (who is anything but a dimwit but still plenty impressionable). It's a great discussion piece and we had a nice talk about it, one we'll repeat as necessary:

It seems to me that, as usual, education is a thousand times better than legislation.

This whole debate is ultimately about personal freedom — the freedom to pursue the image you can see in your head, whether you're a photographer or someone dolling herself up for a date.

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UPDATE, Wednesday evening: Cohen published a followup today that's even more gobsmacking.

By his own explicit if belated admission, a warning label would have no effect; after all, to his opponents' idea that surely we may expect a bit of critical, independent thought from the would-be victims, he replies

[This] erroneously assumes that simply knowing that an image is falsified immunizes you from its effect.

Interesting, no? So he's saying, labels won't help; and women can't be counted on to arm themselves with a modicum of skepticism. It seems that banning 'shopped images is the only solution Cohen is left with.

I remember an era when the Times was on the first line of defense against First-Amendment attacks.

Couldn't Have Happened To a Nicer Guy

From the New York Daily News, complete with mugshot goodness:

Bernard Kerik — former NYPD police commissioner, one-time Homeland Security Secretary nominee, national Sept. 11 hero — has a new label. Inmate No. 210-717.

Kerik got his assigned number at the Westchester County jail after becoming the first NYPD commissioner to wind up behind bars when a judge revoked his bail Tuesday for trying to taint the jury pool in his upcoming corruption trial. ...

"Mr. Kerik has a toxic combination of self-minded focus and arrogance that leads him to believe that the ends justify the means, that rules that apply to all don't apply to him in the same way, that rulings of the court are an inconvenience," [judge Stephen] Robinson said.

When the Mighty Prosecutor Tumbles Back To Earth

Remarkable post from Scott Greenfield, a prominent blawger, reflecting on the mindset of prosecutors — and on what happens when their pedestal implodes and they lose their job and find themselves literally living with their parents again, as happened to the once high-flying and perhaps overly self-righteous David Greenspan:

Oh, how wonderful to be so powerful, to be able to make life and death decisions for others with the might of the State behind you. How glorious to laugh about it with your friends at the bar afterward, how you showed this miscreant who's boss. And to make defense lawyers, many years your senior, talk sweet to you, beg you, cajole you, try to curry your favor, all to weasel some small concession out of you. How wonderful it is to wield such power.

And then one day it's gone. All gone. The judges who once loved you no longer know your name. The lawyers who quaked when you looked at them askance ignore you. You're nothing. You're nobody. All the bridges burned, the friends you thought you had, and nobody will take your calls. ...

Some may feel the Schadenfreude, but that's petty. They are only children, fed a false belief of importance and given powers far beyond their abilities and understanding.

Whole thing here.

I Pine for the Days of the Stagecoach

Here's a small anecdotal measure of the efficiency of the U.S. postal system.

So a product I ordered from Hong Kong was shipped on October 3rd and arrived at a New York sorting facility, after an 8,000-mile trip, on the 5th. Then our "neither sleet nor rain nor snow" paragons took over, unfortunately producing eleven days of zilch (and counting). As of right now, the status on the postal service's website still shows that my package is "in transit."

To call that "tracking" is to call Stephen Hawking "a silver-tongued orator."

By the way, the distance between New York and Downeast Maine is about 400 miles. An arthritic donkey could have covered that stretch by now.

More fun: The manager at my local post office says I'll have to wait at least another week before he's willing to begin making inquiries.

Fun News From the U.K.

• Farmer charged with not providing electrical light to his cows, could go to jail for a year.

• Motorist faces prosecution for driving through a puddle, splashing underage bystanders

There Ought To Be a Law. There Is. But Why?

James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern, asks an intriguing question when a New Yorker scribe quizzes him about David Letterman having allegedly been blackmailed by Robert Joel Halderman, a TV producer with knowledge of Letterman's intra-office trysts.

It's perfectly legal for Halderman to write, or threaten to write, a screenplay (or an e-mail to TMZ) exposing the fact that David Letterman had flings with "Late Show" employees. It's also legal for Halderman to ask Letterman for money as part of a business transaction. So why are the two things illegal when you put them together? In other words, Lindgren said, “Why is it illegal to threaten to do what you can do legally anyway?"

I'd never really thought about it, but I find that a convincing argument. Halderman is a douche — but why would he be a lawbreaker?

Think of it this way:

Saul Smilansky, the author of "Ten Moral Paradoxes," said that, in his opinion, what Halderman did wasn't heinous. "It's not terribly attractive, but it's still fairly standard capitalist practice," he said. "The Marxists used to say that capitalism is like blackmail — everyone tries to buy people off. Many social transactions look like blackmail when you examine them." He listed a few: "couples in divorce proceedings basically blackmailing each other to get a better deal," consumers telling a company "if they don't get a settlement they’ll go to the press" — in other words, any negotiations based on threats. What makes blackmail different? "There's no good reason to allow it," Smilansky said. "But our attitude towards blackmail, that it's so unusual, so terrible — it's just sanctimonious."

I frequently blog about unnecessary new laws — but unnecessary old ones can be plenty odious too.

The legislation I want most is a bill stipulating that for every new law that gets put on the books, lawmakers must abolish an existing one. The law against blackmail ought to be be a prime candidate for legislative overhaul, or, better yet, for scrapping altogether.

Am I missing something? Hit the comments.

"A Manipulation of Vulnerable People's Fears"

A heartfelt plea against superstition:

"Whilst it is obviously a load of nonsense it will appeal to people who are in distress or are vulnerable. It really is manipulation of people's fears and a complete fraud."

That's a Catholic clergyman from Cambridge, England, speaking out against a local center for the occult. Self-awareness has never been the Church's strong suit, I suppose.