State of Man

The higher I climb, the better I feel. I think: "If only I could go on climbing like this forever!"

-- Modern Man in Search of a Soul, By Carl Gustav Jung, William Stanley Dell, Cary F. Baynes

So I covered the Pittsburgh G20 at True/Slant and Philadelphia City Paper, which was amusing. Additional reports are forthcoming at Next American City magazine. My basic observation: The City of Pittsburgh called in way too many cops and the Protesters of Pittsburgh didn't know how to contend with them. What's the next step in organized resistence? I have no idea, but someone better get there fast. Otherwise, resistance movements are in jeopardy.

New work up at Philadelphia City Paper about the contentious history of Philadelphia's last remaining Anarchist newspaper.

The elimination of Books Behind Bars programs pisses me off over at True/Slant.

Patti Wood tells the Post-Gazette about some embarassing wardrobe malfunctions.

From Michael Chabon:

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Little Kid, Life Sentence

Pennsylvania has more juvenile lifers than any other state in the union. Stacey Torrance knows. He's been in jail since he was 14.

via citypaper.net

I keep getting these text messages from Bill McNelis that recall very specific, oddly interesting and sometimes inane moments from last year's bicycle trek across the country. Messages like:

"One year ago today, a triangle saves us, teddy bears for us both."

via Failblog.

New post at True/Slant:

I've begun blogging over at True/Slant because it's an interesting idea (a kind of steroidal version of both blogs and Web forums) and because it promises compensation. Yesterday's post was about the odd tendency to blame opinionated talking heads for society's ills:

Seems like Richard Florida should say something about this, right? Maybe he did and I just missed it.

"Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant."

--By Joshua Wolf Shenk for The Atlantic

What I said to Malkovich wasn't all that terrible, but in context of where and when I was asking it... well, it didn't go over smashingly. At the time -- which was like early 2003 -- Malkovich was heavily promoting a Chelsea NYC store and new line of clothing called Mrs. Mudd (which he had designed in its entirety, from what I recall). His idea, I gathered, was to create very fashionable, very trendy formal wear that looked more like uniforms than... however you want to describe what formal wear normally looks like. Bloggers and gossip artists at the time were not being kind -- saying, at their nicest, that Mrs. Mudd's Winter 2003 line looked like a very dark and extended appropriation of a suit perhaps worn by Sgt. Pepper. I noticed, though, that there were other

Can't exactly say I fall in line with the budding conservative revolution against -- of all things -- denim, but I guess it's relevant with regard to SOM. To wit:

This story ran Tuesday, outlining the current state of Richard Poplawski's incarceration: