Lush Life- (Found July 19, 2008 ) Matty's cell rang. "Excuse me," half turning away. "Got a pen" It was his ex. "Yup." Making no move to find one. "Adirondack Trailways 4432, arriving Port Authority, four-fifteen tomorrow." "A.m. or p.m." "Guess." "All right, whatever," glancing at Billy. Then, "Hey, Lindsay, wait." Matty lowered his voice, his head. "What's he like to eat" "To eat Whatever. He's a kid, not a tropical fish." One of the great things about Richard Price's novels, as opposed to his screenwriting for The Wire, is.http://www.felixsalmon.com/000887.html Gawker's decline- (Found July 19, 2008 ) Nick Denton has for some time been goosing Gawker's pageviews by encouraging long comments threads on Gawker posts. There's nothing wrong with that, and Gawker's comments system is excellent. But it turns out that even Gawker's loyal commenters will exit if pushed hard enough. When Nick Douglas posted a truly execrable blog entry on Friday afternoon a time when just about any blog entry is likely to get a longer-than-usual comments thread, since the site updates much less often on weekends ..http://www.felixsalmon.com/000874.html Nick Denton's task at Gawker- (Found July 19, 2008 ) I'm quoted in Allen Salkin's NYT article on Gawker tomorrow. I thought that he'd place more emphasis on the importance of Gawker's commenters for generating pageviews, since we talked quite a lot about that, but I guess Sunday Styles doesn't like getting into numbers. So here's the big idea which didn't make it into the article. Gawker's unique visitors have been stagnant for two years: they essentially reached their present level at the end of 2005. Gawker's pageviews continued to grow...http://www.felixsalmon.com/000875.html Email down- (Found July 19, 2008 ) I'm not receiving any email at my felixsalmon.com address, for some reason. If you need to reach me, my temporary email address is felix.salmon at gmail. Email back up. Crisis over.http://www.felixsalmon.com/000876.html Gawker's resurgence- (Found July 19, 2008 ) I am so losing my bet. Thanks to Tom Cruise, Gawker is going to easily set a new record for pageviews this month. Remember that the old record was 11.5 million pageviews in the month of October; Gawker got 5.3 million pageviews in 4 days between January 15 and January 18. The page with the Tom Cruise video has received over 1.8 million pageviews so far, and there's another 400,000 or so over at Defamer, too. Nick knew that he had something unique and special on his hands, and he's been taking.http://www.felixsalmon.com/000877.html The Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio- (Found July 19, 2008 ) After flicking through the wine list at Cafe Gray on Friday night, I've come up with what I'm calling the Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio, or RPR. The formula is simple: RPR=WE W is what you might call the quarter-median wine price: take the red wines only (to make things a bit more manageable) and find the price of the wine such that 25% of the wines on the list are cheaper, and 75% of the wines on the list are more expensive. E is simply the average price of a main course. At the...http://www.felixsalmon.com/000878.html John Adams: Encore!- (Found July 19, 2008 ) Last year, I extolled the virtues of listening to new-music pieces more than once. Yesterday, I went to Carnegie Hall to hear the new Doctor Atomic Symphony by John Adams, and it was wonderful; but it was also very dense and complex, and I'd love to be able to listen to listen to it again. The problem is that it's unlikely to be either performed in NYC or recorded any time soon. Which is why I think that last night's concert constituted a large missed opportunity on the part of David Robertson.http://www.felixsalmon.com/000879.html Transplant surgery- (Found July 19, 2008 ) Liesl Gibson: Best doctor ever!http://www.felixsalmon.com/000880.html West Texas- (Found July 19, 2008 ) On one's first trip to Marfa, the tour of Chinati is revelatory enough that you don't get too annoyed by the restrictions. On one's second trip to Marfa, the fact that you're shepherded out of Judd's masterpiece so that you can spend 15 minutes bored by Ilya Kabakov borders on the criminal. Also, the steaks at the Gage Hotel are very good but they're corn-fed beef from Wisconsin or thereabouts. What happens to the West Texas cattle Where can I get me some of those steakshttp://www.felixsalmon.com/000881.html A Masterpiece from Murakami- (Found July 19, 2008 ) I went to the Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum last night, it's well worth seeing. For me, the highlight is the painting above, 727-727, which unfortunately just doesn't work very well in reproduction. In real life, it's enormous each of the three panels is 3 meters high (that's 9'10", for Americans). Now Murakami has been painting (or getting his assistants to paint) very large paintings for a very long time, and many of his installations are significantly bigger than this:...http://www.felixsalmon.com/000882.html |