quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

delete all the shit after the html in the url

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/arts/music/unusual-sounds-at-mostly-mozart-preview-at-avery-fisher.html
^wow

I leave it to reviewers during the season to describe specific ways in which Stravinsky’s Neo-Classicism (actually, as much neo-Baroque as anything else) may relate to Mozart’s Classicism. And I hesitate to delve further into details of the performances, because I was thoroughly distracted throughout.

The man seated directly behind me was connected to a portable medical device, presumably an oxygen cart to aid his breathing, that emitted a steady ticking. Hard to describe, it was really more a faint, dull metallic clank in a relentless rhythm that seemed somehow resistant to all the many other rhythms emanating from the stage.

I have no idea how many people heard it: 4 or 5 immediately around, 15 or 20 in the vicinity? And I have no idea how I would have reacted if not for a worrying experience of my own last year. As it was, I found it impossible to ignore.

Perhaps the most ill-timed cough I ever heard came at one of the most exquisite moments in all of Schubert, at a luminous harmonic shift in the slow movement of his posthumous B flat Sonata. (When I lamented that intrusion, I was criticized by readers suggesting that I didn’t know how bad it could be when you really had to cough during a concert. Oh, really? In a half-century of all-weather, all-health concertgoing?)

yelp reviews for the ruling class

Wallowing in the confusion bred of personal experience, I doubt that I would have complained even if there had been an intermission. But maybe next time I will, if only to spare you a lengthy explanation in place of what should be a short review.

quiddity and agony it may be, but i like to think there's a place for that kind of impossibly well-bred writing on arts esoterica in the good society we want to bring about

From the comments: That oxygen sound reverberates throughout the theater. We came all the way from Nevada to go to the Glimmerglass Opera Festival upstate: saw Carmen July 19. Act I and II wonderful; then after intermission the bang bang bang of someone's oxygen from the other side of the theater rang out throughout Acts III and IV. I could still enjoy the louder parts, but was only able to sit thru the softer parts with a little Lorazepam. Tough call for management, but very unfair to the other customers.

Most are sympathetic to the reviewer's plight, but this one stood out b/c of the Lorazepam.

i nominate matos to curate the whole fucking nytimes music page

is that what they're calling "editing" these days?

^^^^pleb

Now they're just fucking with us:

Even Marked Up, Luxury Goods Sell Fast
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
While average Americans watch their wallets, high-end retailers are selling out of expensive items, like Lissette Gutierrez’s Louis Vuitton shoes at Bergdorf Goodman.

http://i1.nyt.com/images/2011/08/04/business/Luxury-shoes/Luxury-hpMedium.jpg

"average Americans"

http://www.theonion.com/video/panel-of-caged-average-americans-weigh-in-on-econo,19694/

my name is Louis farrakhan and I am here to brunch with you

― davon cuul II (m bison), Thursday, July 28, 2011 2:38 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark

yeah i loved that

more quotes from this article-

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/04/business/sales-of-luxury-goods-are-recovering-strongly.html?hp

“If a designer shoe goes up from $800 to $860, who notices?” said Arnold Aronson, managing director of retail strategies at the consulting firm Kurt Salmon, and the former chairman and chief executive of Saks.

“You just can’t buy a pair of shoes for less than $1,000 in some of the luxury brands, and some of the price points have gone to $2,000,” said Jyothi Rao, general manager for the women’s business at Gilt Groupe, a Web site that sells designer brands at a discount. “There’s absolutely a customer for it.”

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/how-serious-a-crime-is-insider-trading/?hp

Three insider trading cases announced last week involved prominent defendants who traded on and tipped confidential information used for trading that resulted in comparatively small gains. These cases lend some support to the view that those who engage in this type of conduct may not perceive themselves as violating the law because there is no immediate victim.

The two civil cases brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission involved William A. Marovitz, husband of Christie Hefner, the former chief executive of Playboy Enterprises, and a former major league baseball player, Douglas V. DeCinces. Both men were successful in other business ventures, and while Mr. DeCinces made more than $1 million from his trading, Mr. Marovitz’s case involved gains and avoided losses of about $100,000, a modest amount to break the law.

The criminal prosecution of a former director of Mariner Energy, H. Clayton Peterson, which will very likely result in his serving a prison term, involved about $150,000 in profits realized by his son Drew, who received the tips.

Is it worth risking your reputation, and perhaps even going to federal prison, for such paltry amounts?

haha

5/5

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/nyregion/sold-as-lobster-salad-but-a-key-ingredient-was-missing.html?_r=1

can't really tell what tone the nytimes is taking with this, as is the case with so many recent noms to this thread, but outrage over fake lobster is great whether it itself is real or fake and if the nytimes is real or fake in its approval of it

I would like a lobster roll right now though (real or fake)

Krab

“We used to make a salad that we called a seafare salad” that contained surimi, Mr. Zabar said, which he described as “a Japanese version of crab meat using pollock as the base.” (Others define surimi as a crablike product manufactured from fish. Some say it is pollock that is mixed into a paste with starch and other ingredients, and cooked and shaped to look like crab meat.)

i love this weird journalistic impartiality around the definition of surimi -- "but who can really know for sure?"

Surimi -- the paste between two roffles

Surimi (or the American version - krab nigiri is what I always call it) is my guiltiest of pleasures.

aka seafood extender in australia

The best part of that article is the owner's absurd justifications for mislabeling food. The rich-people-mockery angle is that folks were shelling (lol geddit???) out $17/pound for it without examining what they were actually buying.

Surimi that comes in California rolls is okay but the pink spiral fish loaf version is really gross.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/opinion/new-yorks-urban-aloha.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/fashion/maybe-its-time-for-plan-c.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

I have some sympathy for these folks, good on them but...

Last year, Jennifer Phelan, 27, left a marketing job at a large law firm to become a private Pilates instructor in Boston. She had envisioned a life of “workouts, getting lots of sleep and blogging every day about health and fitness,” she said. Instead, her classes start as early as 6 a.m. and she feels wiped out by day’s end, which can be 14 hours later.

hahaha 'i'll totally be able to work out and get paid for it!!'

Charan Sachar, 37, a former software engineer who lives near Seattle, used to spend his downtime perusing Etsy, the D.I.Y. crafts site. He daydreamed of an unfettered life at his kiln, creating Bollywood-inspired teapots and butter dishes.

I love this thread so much.

butter dishes!

"scoops westside"

Lolz

"Matthew Kang, 26, a former commercial bank analyst in Los Angeles, has it worse. Last year, he quit his prestigious job to open Scoops Westside, an ice cream shop in Culver City. “I feel like a janitor sometimes,” he said.

At least janitors have a steady paycheck. Plan B might entail more freedom, but that often comes at the expense of financial security. "

Wow, so it's even worse than being a janitor!

Obvious, but pitch-perfect:

4.
Thingthree
London,KY
August 13th, 2011
3:39 pm
I completely agree. The American's who are able to quit their $250,000 a year job as a lawyer to pursue their dream job only to realize there is no manual labor fairy to wish all their hard work cares away have it tough. That a baker might lift her own bags of flour is a travesty the very idea of which is disheartening. Woe is the life of a baker who must suffer such misfortunes as accidentally cutting a finger in a moment of carelessness with a knife.
This article is fantastic and worthy of a place in the New York Times. It is most fortunate this article about the troubles of entrepreneurs who have to do work should be posted at such an opportune time; had it been posted a week later I would have never seen it as I must sell my computer to afford rent.

lol yeah. my parents owned a restaurant for about two years and it took a fucking toll on them.

http://www.creativewithclay.com/butter_dishes_june09_small.jpg

they're nice butter dishes.

they look like things you painted yourself at the clay-painting-studio downtown

weeeeell, to be fair, those are a bit beyond the average and dude's work is nice though not my style.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_-7KsYJKTlc/TfX9i6Z0rWI/AAAAAAAACNo/6-ILmrfqsew/s1600/IMG_3643-1.JPG
having just done some pottery i can compliment this unironically

but yeah, it's still on the outskirts of professional and it sure ain't my aesthetic

I love how people open businesses in industries which they have never actually worked for money.

People who have worked in restaurants for a long time will tell you that some of the worst owners to work for are those for whom running a restaurant was a "dream" escape from office work.

I'm talking more about full-service restaurants, but the point is the same: some of those proprietors had never before done a lick of manual labor, never mind working in a kitchen or dining room or bar, so it seems like they come at it only considering the perspective of the guest. Maybe think it's going to be a nightly party where they gain popularity and make connections, but it's not. It's hard work and long hours where you're dealing with perishable goods, pleasing the public, and herding a staff of students, actors, drunks, and coke- and pot-heads. The good ones suck it up and run the place, but the bad ones let the wheels come off while they hob-nob and comp bottles of Dom to their buddies.

At my last waitering job, the owners were a corporation, so in the roll of the harried owner was the revolving door staff managers who went stayed a year and then got regular office jobs. Like a couple of them said, they missed their friends and families, who were at home in bed when they got off work at 1:00 a.m.

Basically what Yerac said, but longer.

totally correct.