The council consists of a mayor Frank Cownie and is elected in citywide vote, two at-large members, and four members representing each of the city's four wards. Naber was appointed as the new City Engineer. A plan to merge the governments of Des Moines and Polk County was rejected by voters during the November 2, , election. The consolidated city-county government would have had a full-time mayor and a member council that would have been divided among the city and its suburbs.
Each suburb would have still retained its individual government but had the option to join the consolidated government at any time. Although a full merger was soundly rejected, many city and county departments and programs have been consolidated. Des Moines has an extensive skywalk system within its downtown core. With over four miles of enclosed walkway, it is one of the largest of such systems in the United States. The Des Moines Skywalk System has been criticized for hurting street-level business, though a recent initiative has been made to make street-level Skywalk entrances more visible.
Interstate I cuts through the city, and I and I both pass through the Des Moines metropolitan area, as well as the city of Des Moines. The Des Moines Bypass passes south and east of the city. Characteristics of household ownership of cars in Des Moines are similar to national averages. The national average was 8. Des Moines averaged 1. Although Des Moines was historically a train hub, it does not have passenger train service. Northward and northwest bound, there were Chicago and North Western trains to destinations including Minneapolis.
The Wabash Railroad ran service to the southeast to St. The only international service is cargo service, but there have been discussions about adding an international terminal. The Des Moines Public Schools district is the largest community school district in Iowa with 32, enrolled students as of the — school year. The district consists of 63 schools: Des Moines is also home to the main campuses of three four-year private colleges: The University of Iowa has two satellite facilities in the city; Simpson College , Upper Iowa University , and William Penn University also maintain classroom facilities in suburban locations.
The city is also home to Des Moines University , an osteopathic medical school. The Des Moines market, which originally consisted of Polk , Dallas , Story , and Warren counties, [76] was ranked 91st by Arbitron as of the fall of with a population of , aged 12 and older. Cumulus Media owns five stations that broadcast from facilities in Urbandale: Saga Communications owns seven stations in the area: Iowa Public Radio broadcasts several stations in the Des Moines area, all of which are owned by Iowa State University and operated on campus.
The Des Moines-Ames media market consists of 35 central Iowa counties: Two non-commercial stations are also licensed to Des Moines: Mediacom is the Des Moines area's cable television provider. The Des Moines Register is the city's primary daily newspaper. As of March 31, , the Register ranked 71st in circulation among daily newspapers in the United States according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations with , daily and , Sunday subscribers. Additionally, magazine publisher Meredith Corporation is based in Des Moines.
The Iowa Energy, a D-League team, began play in They were bought by the Minnesota Timberwolves in and were renamed the Iowa Wolves to reflect the new ownership. Two other sports teams play in suburban Des Moines. Drake Stadium is home to the famed Drake Relays each April. Des Moines has 76 city parks and three golf courses, as well as three family aquatic centers, five community centers and three swimming pools.
The first major park was Greenwood park. The park commissioners purchased the land on April 21, The Principal Riverwalk is a riverwalk park district being constructed along the banks of the Des Moines River in the downtown. Primarily funded by the Principal Financial Group , the Riverwalk is a multi-year jointly funded project also funded by the city and state. Upon completion, it will feature a 1. A landscaped promenade along the street level is planned. Located just south of the downtown, the centerpiece of the park is a lighted 1.
A bridge in the park crosses the Raccoon River. The Water Works Park trails connect westward to Valley Junction and the recreational trails of the western suburbs: Windsor Heights , Urbandale , Clive , and Waukee. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Des Moines disambiguation. State capital in Iowa, United States. Timeline of Des Moines, Iowa. List of tallest buildings in Iowa.
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Media in Des Moines, Iowa. List of Des Moines sports teams. For more information, see Threadex. American nicknames; their origin and significance. Archived from the original on November 4, Retrieved December 10, United States Census Bureau. Retrieved May 11, Retrieved June 9, Archived from the original CSV on March 5, Retrieved June 8, Archived from the original on December 7, Retrieved December 20, Retrieved February 13, April 1, to July 1, ".
Retrieved October 4, Archived from the original on June 28, Retrieved January 13, The New York Times. Retrieved September 12, Thoughts on the Moingona Tribe". Newsletter of the Iowa Archeological Society. More than 6, artifacts were found". Retrieved October 10, Frontier Forts of Iowa: Indians, Traders, and Soldiers, — University of Iowa Press.
Fort Des Moines No. November 13, to March 21, Mills and Company, p. Earliest Census to ". Archived from the original on August 6, Retrieved November 21, A History in Pictures. Heritage Media, San Marcos, California. Archived from the original XLS on June 28, Retrieved June 30, Archived from the original on September 17, Retrieved on September 5, Retrieved February 15, Archived from the original XLS on June 15, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Archived from the original on May 12, Retrieved June 4, Archived from the original on August 13, Archived from the original on September 11, Retrieved January 31, City of Des Moines, Iowa. Retrieved June 28, Retrieved June 19, Retrieved September 21, Haunted Places August 13, Retrieved April 13, Archived from the original on January 20, He is a dear friend and a fellow Vanity Fair writer. A few years ago, Matt decided to take the kind of bold leap to which I am congenitally averse: With cameras and everything. Several arduous years later, Matt is on a glorious victory lap with the finished film, Valentino: The Last Emperor , which, as of this week, is the highest-grossing documentary of The Last Emperor is playing in limited release in a bunch of theaters nationally, with Matt himself introducing the film and taking questions in New York, Chicago, L.
I stepped outside my comfort zone to write this essay for the new issue of Vanity Fair. Now it is my duty to note that Nicolette has a new book out, the endearingly titled Righteous Porkchop. In large part, this is because she has framed the book as a memoir, recounting the road she took from single-gal East Coast environmental-advocacy lawyer and vegetarian to married California cattle rancher. Along the way, we learn that Nicolette was reluctant to let herself fall for Bill Niman because he has a mustache.
It must be said, though, that Bill is one of those rare contemporary men who can carry off a mustache without looking like a desk sergeant or an adult-film actor. There are two pieces by me in it, and further articles from more credible professionals like James Wolcott and Peter Biskind. And look, Richard Schickel raved over the book in the L. You can listen to a podcast of it here. Mine is the last segment. Wine, in my opinion, is not one of those things you should give up in these hard times.
Order a case of affordable stuff like this and give up your premium cable channels, or declare a one-month iTunes moratorium. It is exactly what it sounds like: I only wish my father had lived long enough to participate; he had tons of material. In March of , my wife, two children, and I traveled to Coral Gables, Florida, to attend a family wedding. There was a palpable air of anticipation and hubbub in our hotel as we checked in, but not, alas, because the Kamps had arrived. No, it was because Barack Obama was holding a fundraiser there the same night as our wedding which was taking place at a church down the road.
So, it turned out, did the Obama family; they were in the same situation, with Malia and Sasha on vacation from school. Bear in mind that this was still early , almost ten months before the Iowa caucuses; Barack Obama was still just one of several quasi-declared candidates, and his family was not yet cocooned by security and handlers. Barack would make a brief appearance in mid-morning, in a suit but with the jacket slung over his shoulder, bidding his wife and girls a tender and, it seemed, slightly bummed goodbye before spending his day stumping.
Thereafter, the two girls would spend their day splashing in the pool and distracting their mother from the magazines she was reading. My two kids would also spend their day splashing in the pool and distracting their mother from the magazines she was reading. Our kids are of similar ages and might actually have enjoyed playing together. But I was reluctant to violate their space, especially since they were on vacation, and especially because I had a sense that they would not get to enjoy such quiet, unmolested poolside chill time again.
They are about to embark on an extraordinary life experience that comes prepackaged with excitement and privilege, but they will also find themselves constantly scrutinized, guarded, escorted, judged, mocked, blogged about, photographed, and upheld as symbols of something-or-other by David Brooks. Why, in times of economic crisis and war, do news organizations still devote space to human-interest fluff?
I wrote an article for The New York Times about a celebrated glutton who was, perhaps, not as gluttonous as we thought. You can read it here. Just as echinacea is said to stave off colds before they take hold, so does the writing of Henry Alford stave off nihilistic post-holiday funks.
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A Search for Wisdom from Old People , will be published. Most of us Spy alums have been pretty undedicated to blogging I plead guilty on behalf of myself and Kurt Andersen , though Daniel Radosh is a notable exception. Anyway, Henry and his new Web site are delightful company, so give him a howdy!
You might have heard or read that Niman no longer runs the beef-and-pork company that bears his name. But he continues to live and work at the original ranch in Bolinas, California. None of the turkeys here, to my knowledge, received politically opportunistic pardons. So let the election results stand as a repudiation of the title haters and the arugula haters out there. My co-author David Lynch will join me at some events but not all of them, since he is laboring mightily to help April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman, of Spotted Pig fame, open their new restaurant, The John Dory.
Lynchie recently gave me a tour of the restaurant-in-progress, and it looks fantastic, with lots of piscine-themed tilework. Call it escapism, or the Beverly Hills Chihuahua effect. On October 30, at 7 p. Wine will be supplied by the Madison Wine Shop. On November 10, at 6 p. On November 11, at 6: On November 29, from 2 to 5 p. This is the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, an ideal day to stock up on stocking stuffers. On December 6, from 12 noon to 2 p. This is a really good deal. And in his indefatigably Kenny Shopsin-ish way—which is a sort of a Harvey Pekar -ish agitational dyspepsia complemented by a mop of hair worthy of the Heat Miser —he rebuffed them all.
Eve, sadly, died in , when she was only Not long before her death, she proudly showed me a portrait that another regular, Sean Lennon, had painted of her. Eat Me is satisfying in two ways: The writeup begins like this: During that period I tried very hard numerous times to apologize and make amends, but nothing would cool her.
We were really, really close. She rejected my love. Well, naturally, how could I not want to try the recipe, which is basically a corruption of Chinese restaurant-style chicken with cashews? Beyond its admirably high cookability rate, Eat Me has much to recommend it as a read.
A disquisition on how Shopsin roasts turkeys morphs into a story of the local butchers he used to buy birds from: Their names were Morris and Sidney; they were from Genoa. Sidney only had fingers on one hand because the fingers on his other hand were chopped off when someone accidentally turned on the meat grinder. Despite all my idiosyncrasies, I like to think that thanks to a combination of psychotherapy and drugs, I am pretty together.
Morris, on the other hand, was out of his fucking brains I never had a goal to make more money so that I could retire or so that I could hire a low-wage employee to do the cooking for me Running a restaurant for me is about running a restaurant. It is not a means to get someplace else. I wake up every morning, and I work for a living like a farmer.
Running a restaurant is a condition of life for me. And I like everything about this life. It was written with David Lynch, the wine guy from the Batali-Bastianich restaurant empire, not the fright-haired director of Blue Velvet. This is a recession-friendly event; admission is free. In no time, Yacht Rock became, in short order, an underground phenomenon, an overground phenomenon, a New York Times -approved neologism , and a Web meme with its own Wikipedia entry.
I plan on being there and finally meeting JD in person. Probably 75 percent of the pleasure I take in this show is predicated on already knowing these guys from Channel , but, aside from that, Visits is actually a sweet, authentic, and occasionally touching seriously! I thought it was silly to Swift Boat the innocent salad green at this point and at this point , but here we are, with just three months left before the national election, and arugula has become still more menacing to its detractors.
I had a wonderful great aunt named Fay Leshner who was born in and died in She was heavy, but not unattractive.
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Aunt Fay, though she worked in a dress shop, belonged in vaudeville: She played accordion and harmonica, talked like Bert Lahr, and loved crude jokes. One of her favorites: Here is a characteristic glimpse of her in action, playing accordion center , while her husband, Sam left , plays violin, and my grandmother, Tessie right , joins in on autoharp.
These are grabs from 8-mm home-movie footage shot by my grandfather, Eli Fuchs, and digitized by my brother, Ted. Aunt Fay died a few days after Thanksgiving in Five days after that, her lone son, my cousin Barry, and his wife, Lisa, had a baby daughter. The baby Fay, my second cousin, has since grown up to be a year-old fashion student, part-time model, and occasional babysitter for my kids. She never met her grandmother but has much the same sense of humor.
And she has a distinct, some-would-say-kooky fashion sense that is all her own, though it also evokes the collaborations of Peggy Moffitt, Rudi Gernreich, and William Claxton. Recently, Cousin Fay went on a work-study trip to London. We heard that she had been featured in the U. Are scruffy Brooklyn hipsters in shrunken American Apparel t-shirts defiling the memory of my great aunt by trysting on her bench? And then blogging about it? But then, I thought, Aunt Fay herself would have been amused by this post. She was an irreverent person, as this mugging montage demonstrates:.
Via his Web site , I sent him a note telling him a little about Aunt Fay and then cutting to the chase: Manske, a sweet kid from Texas who is indeed a Brooklyn hipster—he lives with his brother, Nathan, in Williamsburg—was happy to explain himself. Most of the members of LDT are artists of some sort.
There are writers, illustrators, directors, editors, designers, architects, musicians, and the like. He then unfurled this rather Judd Apatovian tale for me:. We went to the botanical gardens, and towards the end of the visit, we sat for a moment on a bench. We were just talking as brothers do, and we started talking about relationships, girls, boys, and sex in general. We were talking deeply and openly about things that we really had never talked about before, and in retrospect, it was really a bonding moment.
So there you have it all in one heart-warming, if slightly filthy, tale of the circle of life, and of life in the ever-mutating city of New York. Below is a photograph that Nick Manske sent me of him left and his brother Nate on the Fay Leshner bench. Give them an S! Rock told me then that he had actually retired the bit in , delivering it for the last time on the night it was recorded for his Bring the Pain HBO special at the Takoma Theatre in Washington, D. But the routine took a while to filter out to the masses in the non-HBO-subscribing world, and it took on new life when it was included in his album Roll with the New.
You know what the worst thing about niggas is? Niggas always want some credit for some shit they supposed to do A nigga will brag about some shit a normal man just What kind of ignorant shit is that? Needless to say, I can see why Obama chose to paraphrase rather than quote verbatim. Behold, above, a typical daily haul from my modest little trellis-ful of snap-pea plants.
I grew them, from seeds purchased here , on the tiny terrace that abuts my office in New York City. A cheap, local, delicious, minimially footprintish component of our early-summer dinners. I recently read a fine summary of the case against comments on the blog Luminous , written by a Web developer named Michael Barrish. There are many varieties of crap—off-topic, self-serving, ass-kissing, uninformed, superficial, showboating, belligerent, and of course, just plain dull—but the result is the same.
Yet there are certain sites where the comments are actually worth reading, and where the commenters themselves have formed a happy, civil community. On Serious Eats , the food site run by Ed Levine, the tenor of the comments is jolly and small-townish, with none of the nihilism, know-it-all one-upmanship, or loony vein-bulging you get on sites like Eater and Chowhound. See this old post by Ed about doughnuts , for example, in which Ed laments the state of the doughnut trade in New York, and take note of how the commenters chime in with their own thoughts and suggestions; Serious Eats is the most uncynical, undepressing food site out there.
Part of this is to do with Ed himself. The shop proprietor is a sunny, middle-aged enthusiast, the antithesis of the callow, attention-mad Webutante hater. Furthermore, as Ed has explained to me, Serious Eats commenters must register with the site to comment. Plus, it fosters a sense of community and cooperation. The eccentrically dressed young woman whose Sartorialist photo I link to above is my college-age cousin Fay!
Kirkland, after consulting with his colleagues, came up with this marvelous mini-treatise:. Sociologically this is quite interesting, characterizing a neighborhood in terms of its restaurants. Amen to that, professor! And is obsolete within five years. Losing the old Beatrice Inn, though: That , I admit, was a body blow. I continue to feel a visceral yearning for the subterranean red-sauce joint on a weekly basis, nearly three years after the fact—a circumstance not abetted by the fact that the space, its name and facade unchanged, now houses a club where Lindsay Lohan, assorted Ronsons, and both Olsens congregate, and where bouncers enforce a door policy.
Truth be told, there was no villainy in the switchover from the old Beatrice Inn to the new: But my wife and I had planned on growing old at the Beatrice Inn. Uncertain of gait Lindsay Lohan may very well be, but does she have any sense of the gemeinschaftlich? As opposed to sharing an arugula salad with, which is Mark Penn-Karl Rove code for committing sodomy. I know whereof I speak; I married into a family of brewski-chugging Scrantonians.
This riles me on two counts. First, why has it become political doctrine that a candidate must prove that he or she is just like the voter? But you can be damned sure that I have your best interests at heart, and that I am here to listen to you and represent you. They are members of one of the most elite institutions on the planet, the United States Senate, and they have adjudged themselves smarter and more qualified than other Americans to lead the country.
Finally, as much as I think Obama has nothing to apologize for, having willed himself through sheer smarts and drive to overcome his messed-up itinerant upbringing by an unendingly questing single mom—if he wants to live the yuppie dream, let him! In the tradition of Grace Bedell , the little girl who encouraged Abe Lincoln to grow his beard, I am encouraging Barack Obama to grow a mustache. So I urge Obama to be bold, be American, and be a mustache man. Does your mother kindle the Sabbath lights on Friday nights? But now, I have to say I appreciate the comedy of the Mitzvah Tank hustle.
You gotta be Jewish! You look too Jewish! Dehillerin, the renowned Paris kitchenware shop, because we have a definition for that, too. Michael, a genial fellow, was happy to oblige. Such unwarranted Rock Snobbery! This is a news story, not an arts-section critique! Evidently, someone at the Times must feel similarly: It can be an effective lyrical tool, both evocative and funny.
Everybody in town told you you were easy on the eyes, so you decided to become a supermodel. When you got to the Big Apple, they treated you like the worm. So you packed on a few pounds and started calling yourself an actress The YouTuber comments that appear below the video are the usual homophobic, subliterate vitriol, but I can only applaud Messrs. Its scandalous [to me then] opening sentence: This past football season was the first in which my father , hobbled by rheumatoid arthritis and assorted other ailments, did not feel up to accompanying me to Giants Stadium to watch our team.
In anticipation, I went to a sporting-goods store to pick out a size-small Giants jersey for my boy. In the racks, it looked like this: Burress lost his mother, Vicki, a diabetic, in , when she was only 49 years old. But I see it more as socially correct ive. My dad, a gregarious car salesman born in , the son of an immigrant from a shtetl, had friends and devoted customers of all races. The Giants beat the 49ers in a walkover in that game last October, winning It was at that point that the pathology that has afflicted my family for three generations—Giants fandom—infected a fourth generation, and that my son became as obsessed as my father, brother, and me.
My dad died on Saturday evening. But, needing something to distract us, my son and I turned on the game. It was by no means curative, but hey—it helped. Five days earlier, my father, ever the comforter, must have sensed how stricken I was when I walked into his hospital room and saw how bad he looked, how labored his breathing was. Since some people have asked I recently attended a pre-Christmas choral concert in which some of the poetry of Robert Southwell, a sixteenth-century Jesuit priest, was set to music.
They all posited the infant Christ as a Satan-trouncing little Rambo. With tears he fights and wins the field, His naked breast stands for a shield Not a funny fate at all. Which has its positive and negative ramifications. Or so I argue in the new issue of Marie-Claire. He was accompanied by the touring band of his sister, Vet, and his daughters, Phunn and Novena, joined him onstage. Gone was Vet and her amiable co-vocalist Skyler Jett. The show started off promisingly: Rather than tease the audience by not showing up until his band had already performed half their set, Sly bounded onto the small stage all by himself, a jovial figure in ersatz Flavor Flav gear and a pasted-on black Mohawk.
And yet I hear that the second show of the night, at He was joined this time by Paul Shaffer of Letterman fame, which evidently brought out the best in him. His name is David Wain , and comedy cultists know him from his stints in the troupes The State and Stella. He also directed the movie Wet Hot American Summer , a sendup of Meatballs -style teen-hormone comedies, and has another feature coming up, Little Big Men. Since his days with The State, Wain has combined a sweet upper-middle-class amiability with a depraved-sicko fearlessness that often entails multiple self-humiliations and, er, rubber phalluses.
All of these elements are on wondrous display in Wainy Days. Those upcoming engagements at B. For starters, the shows in question, at 8 p. When Sly Stone returned to performing this year, as chronicled in my story in the August issue of Vanity Fair , he did so with a band organized by his youngest sister, Vet Stone, with only one original member of the Family Stone, trumpeter Cynthia Robinson, behind him. That leaves only original bassist Larry Graham out of the picture. Yes, this all sounds obsessive, but I like to think of this as an example of benign Rock Snobbery.
Graham, of all the original members, had the most fraught relationship with Sly, and also the most success on his own, as the frontman of the delightfully named funk band Graham Central Station. The re-entry of my old motorcycling pal Sly Stone into public life continues. Over the summer, he played some festivals in Europe. As uneven as his European shows were said to be most of them at outdoor, multiple-act festivals , I have a good feeling about the engagements at B.
I sincerely hope things start to smooth out for Sly. Peg would have made a good blogger: She was contrary and dyspeptic before it was widely fashionable, and there are passages in the aforementioned book that sound more like Gawker than Astonishingly, Birds Eye frozen foods took up Bracken as an official spokescrank.
It will be in stores as of October 9. Here are some upcoming events related to this wretched circumstance:. This is just my one-hour slot. By the way, be careful when Googling Gina—there is also, it turns out, an adult-entertainment star by the same name. From to I worked as an editor at GQ magazine.
I soon realized that I was admiring the early work of Bruce Weber. I soon found out why: Bruce Weber was generous with his reminiscences, as were the surviving members of that staff, including Jim Moore, who was but a young intern when he started out there in I am privileged to know very slightly a tall gentleman from Liverpool named Peter Serafinowicz.
His last name rhymes with terrapin-o-wich, which was a popular snack in the time of Edith Wharton. Peter is a fantastically talented comic writer and actor who, while well known in Britain, is at this point only a cult figure in America. You might know him from his viral video in which he played all the Beatles save George whilst proving conclusively that John Lennon invented the iPod. Anyway, Peter has a new show premiering this week in the U. Start pestering your local executive-vice-president-in-charge-of-entertainment-programming now.
And, as ever, he manages to be more astute, even while writing on putatively superficial matters, than a thousand David Broders. Some years ago, I discovered that there was a New York-based landscape architect with the same name as me: It was an accidental discovery; I kept getting phone calls intended for him. But, my curiosity piqued, I decided to find out more about this other David Kamp. He turns out not to be just any landscape architect, but a highly regarded and forward-thinking one. His company, Dirtworks, PC , specializes in creating therapeutic environments for places like hospitals, senior homes, and autism centers—using groves, arbors, hedgerows, and the like to foster mental and physical well-being.
It helps preserve great artworks. Recently, I became acquainted with a director at one of the major art auction houses in New York, and she let me in on a trade secret: Wonder Bread is often used in the art world to clean oil paintings. You wad up a slice into a ball, she says, and you remove the grime and grit from the painting with a blotting, rather than wiping, motion. Repeat over the canvas with several slices of bread, section by section. And just like that, your dusky Mark Rothko will blaze and glimmer anew. Makes the bread taste great, too!
Now, the scorched-earth Clinton campaign is taking it to Barack Obama for making a tin-eared reference to arugula before an audience of Iowa farmers. A list inspired by the recent passings of Merv , Mrs. Astor , and the Scooter , none of whom I had the pleasure of meeting. Most of these figures were at the peak of their cultural relevance in the midth century. The further we get away from that time, the more remarkable I find it that I ever got to talk to them.
I have fixed this problem and apologize. I do try to answer every query that comes my way via this site, except for the ones from that curious man who goes on about something called Cialis. For those of you in need of a beach read, look no further than the paperback edition of The United States of Arugula , which has just been published with a new cover and better subtitle. I get this question a lot: But there was one , and only one, food person who turned me down for an interview: John Mackey of Whole Foods.
I guess he was too busy complimenting his own haircut to participate. Because I have to start using this site as a promotional platform for the pending publication of the paperback edition of The United States of Arugula , I am offloading the fun tidbits related to my Vanity Fair profile of Sly Stone to my other site, Snobsite. You can listen to our chat here. On the day Mark was taking pictures of Sly at his compound in Napa Valley, we waited expectantly for Sly to emerge from the house, and he did in the most wonderful way: Firefly in Duck Soup.
Some people are born funky, while others are simply fortunate to pose on a chopper motorcycle with the funky. I had ardently pursued an interview with Sly Stone, one of my favorite musicians, for years. But Sly remained elusive and reclusive—until this spring, when he decided to make a return to public life that is still in its fragile beginning stages.
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You might have noticed that the book-cover image on the upper right has been changed to reflect the new paperback edition of The United States of Arugula. The paperback comes out on July 17—a smaller, cheaper, more portable version that makes an ideal beach read, mountaineering companion, hostess gift, airplane time-passer, or languorous cocktail-hour page-turner.
In no way am I trying to drum up sales or anything. I have a brother named Ted who works in TV production out in L. A still of which sits above this text. Bey has an impressive CV—though not trained in architecture, he was for years the architecture critic of the Chicago Sun-Times , and, after that, he was the deputy chief of staff for planning and design for Chicago mayor Richard M. I suggested Walter Gropius, but what rhymes with that? Anyway, on Thursday night, June 21, at 6: Danny and I will keep you busy with readings from our respective food-related books, Setting the Table his , and The United States of Arugula mine.
This is part of a new series called Mad Sq Reads , and it takes place right in the middle of the park, at the foot of the Farragut Monument. There will also be books for sale, and Danny and I will be signing them, even if you stain them with Shack Burgers and caramel shakes. So Danny and I will have to hold our own as an attraction. There will be snacks, though.
Me, I thought the book was pretty good. In the end, it was serialised by the Telegraph. There were some lovely reviews. And yes, there were a couple of bad reviews. Actually, bad is an understatement. They were vicious beyond belief. I can walk to his penthouse apartment from my non-penthouse apartment. But the other reason was that he loomed large in my culinary awakening. The array of stinky cheeses and olive oils and whole-bean coffees and then-novel prepared foods made me realize that there was a lot more out there to eat than what my supermarket in central New Jersey offered.
See page of the book for specifics on this. But your entertainment dollar will go furthest at Giorgione. For one thing, Mr. DeLuca is an adorable, charismatic old-school New York neurotic. Though its ostensible purpose is to hold media organizations accountable for their mistakes and missteps, the effect is more one of dorky killjoyism—some gray-haired eminence of mild temperament is brought aboard to uphold Eisenhower-era standards of rectitude and emit the occasional harrumph.
On paper, she seems like yet another of the species, almost an ombuds-caricature: For that reason, I am often asked to weigh in on their decisions about everything from choice of mate to choice of career, coast or coffee maker. These old-timers have displayed a remarkable stick-to-itiveness over the years—no wussy Garry Trudeau sabbaticals for them! Thus began the cranky-old-man phase of my writing career, in which, at the age of 33, I found myself writing almost exclusively in lament form, relishing the past and forlornly shaking my head at latter-day cultural developments.
But lo, the ovoid-headed Family Circus gang continues to hang on, as does its creator, Bil Keane, who will turn 85 this year. I used to find The Family Circus unbearably corny, and took pleasure in ridiculing it. But all that changed in , when, as a young editor at GQ , I got the idea to do a Family Circus parody in our election-themed issue. Unfortunately, the legal people quashed the idea of hiring an illustrator to do a Keane parody, on the grounds that Keane could sue. To our surprise, Keane was thrilled to do it, and promptly delivered a wonderful two-page cartoon based on my script.
Little Billy Clinton looked just like any other ovoid-headed Circus -er, except he wore a blazer and had a head of bushy, graying hair. Souljah actually looked kind of adorable with an ovoid Keane head. Keane also drew a nude Gennifer Flowers making goo-goo eyes at Billy from behind a bush, and Arsenio Hall applauding Billy as he played sax. Read the rest of this post on Snobsite. His most famous running character—oh, the originality! I tuned Imus out in my teens, and was shocked to learn, in the early s, that his show had become a popular stop for senators and prominent mediafolk.
His comeuppance is overdue. So I was especially happy for the Lady Knights and took a keen interest in their tournament run. Last week I attended a dinner hosted by Steven Rinella , the most unpretentious man ever to have written a food book. The three of us somehow coalesced into a breezy vaudeville team that made the gathered audience laugh rather than just sit there catatonically, as bookchat usually warrants. So we vowed to reconnect in New York, and finally did last Thursday.
You can read his report here. In the first set of episodes, Steingarten hires the wunderkind English chef Paul Liebrandt to be his personal cook for two weeks. The midth century saw the emergence of The New York Intellectuals , a group of American writers and literary critics who advocated leftist, anti-Stalinist political ideas and who sought to integrate literary theory with Marxism. Many of the group were students at the City College of New York in the s and associated with the left-wing political journal The Partisan Review. The s and s also saw the rise in prominence of Ayn Rand , who was based in New York for many years and whose novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were both set in the city.
Parallel and counter to these mainstream groups have been such New York-centered underground movements as the Beat poets and writers, including Allen Ginsberg , Jack Kerouac , Gregory Corso and others, continuing into the s and beyond with such writers as Kathy Acker and Eileen Myles. Various movements down through the years have centered on avant-garde publishing enterprises such as Grove Press and Evergreen Review , as well as unnumbered zine -style pamphlets and one-off literary productions still available in independent bookstores today.
Over the years many literary institutions have developed in the city, including the PEN American Center , the largest of the international literary organization's centers. The PEN American Center plays an important role in New York's literary community and is active in defending free speech, the promotion of literature, and the fostering of international literary fellowship.
New York has also been a flourishing scene for Jewish American literature , as well as for Puerto Rican poets and writers, who call themselves " nuyoricans " a blending of the phrases "New York" and "Puerto Rican". While the state has an official poet Laureate , New York City does not.
Instead, by tradition it hosts an annual "People's Poetry Gathering", curated by the City University of New York and city poetry groups, in which ordinary New Yorkers offer their own lines to an epic poem for the city. This technique was also used in the creation of a spontaneous poetic response by New Yorkers to the September 11, attacks that became a travelling exhibition called Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning. The poems, with lines each for the stories of the destroyed World Trade Center towers, were printed on black, billowing cotton banners over 25 feet 7.
The American comic book was invented in New York City in the early s as a way to cheaply repackage and resell newspaper comic strips , which also experienced their major period of creative growth and development in New York papers in the first decades of the 20th century. Immigrant culture in the city was the central topic and inspiration for comics from the days of Hogan's Alley , the Yellow Kid , The Katzenjammer Kids and beyond. Virtually all creators and workers employed in the early comic book industry were based in New York, from publishers to artists, many of them coming from immigrant Jewish families in the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.
It can be argued that superheroes , the uniquely American contribution to comic books, owe their origin to New York, despite the fact that the first superhero, Superman , was created by two artists from Cleveland, Ohio. Even when not based explicitly in New York, superhero stories often make use of recognizable stand-ins for the city, such as Metropolis or Gotham City Gotham being a common nickname for New York. The form and narrative conventions of superhero stories frequently dictate New York-sized cities as the settings, even generically. Marvel Comics became famous for breaking with convention and setting their stories explicitly in a "real" New York, giving recognizable addresses for the homes of their major characters.
Both of the previous Spider-Man movies made heavy use of New York as a backdrop and included crowd scenes filled with "stereotypical New Yorkers. New York also served as an inspiration and home for much of America's non-superhero comic books, famously starting with cartoonist and Brooklyn native Will Eisner 's many depictions of everyday life among poor, working-class and immigrant New Yorkers. Today New York's alternative comics scene is thriving, including native New Yorkers Art Spiegelman , Ben Katchor and Dean Haspiel , graduates of the School of Visual Arts cartooning program the first accredited cartooning program in the country and many others.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world's largest and most important art museums, and is located on the eastern edge of Central Park. It also comprises a building complex known as "The Cloisters" in Fort Tryon Park at the north end of Manhattan Island overlooking the Hudson River which features medieval art. One of the premier art institutions in the world, its permanent collection includes more than one-and-a-half million objects, from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to contemporary art, and the art of many other cultures.
There are many smaller important galleries and art museums in the city. Among these is the Frick Collection , one of the preeminent small art museums in the United States, with a very high-quality collection of old master paintings housed in 16 galleries within the former mansion steel magnate Henry Clay Frick. The collection features some of the best-known paintings by major European artists, as well as numerous works of sculpture and porcelain. It also has furniture, enamel, and carpets.
The museum now boasts a collection 28, objects including paintings, sculpture, archaeological artifacts, and many other pieces important to the preservation of Jewish history and culture. Founded in by a group of Puerto Rican artists, educators, community activists and civic leaders, El Museo del Barrio is located at the top of Museum Mile in Spanish Harlem , a neighborhood also called 'El Barrio'. Originally, the museum was a creation of the Nuyorican Movement and Civil Rights Movement, and primarily functioned as a neighborhood institution serving Puerto Ricans.
With the increasing size of New York's Latino population, the scope of the museum is expanding. There is even a Museum of the City of New York. A number of the city's museums are located along the Museum Mile section of Fifth Avenue. In recent years New York has seen a major building boom among its cultural institutions. Long Island City in Queens is an increasingly thriving location for the arts, home to P. The museum commissions new work and presents challenging exhibits by emerging and established, national and international artists and hosts a diverse range of public programs including lectures, dialogues, and performances.
To some observers, New York, with its large immigrant population, seems more of an international city than something specifically "American". But to others, the city's very openness to newcomers makes it the archetype of a "nation of immigrants". The term " melting pot " derives from the play The Melting Pot , by Israel Zangwill , who in adapted Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to a setting in the Lower East Side, where droves of immigrants from diverse European nations in the early s learned to live together in tenements and row houses for the first time.
Among American cities this proportion was higher only in Los Angeles and Miami. The cultural diversity of New York can be seen in the range of official city holidays. As in many major cities, immigrants to New York often congregate in ethnic enclaves where they can talk and shop and work with people from their country of origin. Attendance at the biggest ones by city and state politicians is politically obligatory. New Yorkers of all stripes gather together for these spectacles.
New York City has a larger Jewish population than any other city in the world, larger than even Jerusalem. Temple Emanu-El , the largest Jewish house of worship in the world, became the first Reform congregation in America in New York, with its many ethnic communities and cultural venues, has a large number of major parades and street festivals. SummerStage in Central Park is one of about 1, free concerts, dance, theater, and spoken word events citywide sponsored by the City Parks Foundation.
The Village Halloween Parade is an annual holiday parade and street pageant presented the night of every Halloween October 31 in Greenwich Village. Stretching more than a mile, this cultural event draws two million spectators, fifty thousand costumed participants, dancers, artists and circus performers, dozens of floats bearing live bands and other musical and performing acts, and a worldwide television audience of one hundred million. The Feast of San Gennaro , originally a one-day religious commemoration, is now an day street fair held in mid-September in Manhattan's Little Italy.
Centered on Mulberry Street , which is closed to traffic for the occasion, the festival generally features parades, street vendors, sausages and zeppole , games, and a religious candlelit procession which begins immediately after a celebratory mass at the Church of the Most Precious Blood. The streets are closed to traffic and the festivities begin early in the morning and proceed late into the night. The parade also extends through other ethnic Puerto Rican neighborhoods throughout the city in Brooklyn and the Bronx. A major component of New Year's Eve celebrations in the United States is the " ball dropping " on top of One Times Square that is broadcast live on national television.
A 1,pound, 6-foot-diameter Waterford Crystal ball, high above Times Square , is lowered starting at For about four decades, until one year before his death in , Canadian violinist and bandleader Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians serenaded the United States from the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue. Their recording of the traditional song Auld Lang Syne still plays as the first song of the new year in Times Square. Because of its sheer size and cultural influence, New York has been the subject of many different, and often contradictory, portrayals in mass media. From the sophisticated and worldly metropolis seen in many Woody Allen films, to the hellish and chaotic urban jungle depicted in such movies as Martin Scorsese 's Taxi Driver , New York has served as the backdrop for virtually every conceivable viewpoint on big city life.
In the early years of film, New York City was characterized as urbane and sophisticated.
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With the city's renaissance in the s and s came new portrayals on television; Friends , Seinfeld , and Sex and the City showed life in the city to be glamorous and interesting. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.
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