nyc recap pt 2

A few items before another day of museum-roaming:
– This humble blog (and that last post) were both mentioned in the blog of D Magazine, the Dallas city magazine, yesterday. Sez blogger/editor Tim Rogers: “Benton can type a whole lot better than you’d ever guess from reading his byline in the News. Some newspapers — the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Enquirer [sic] — actually let their reporters write. The News doesn’t. And the city is poorer for it.”
I suppose I’m flattered by the thought that vicious DMN editors are actively suppressing the public good whenever they touch my stories. (Actually, that line could come in handy during future editing battles: “Oh, sure, you could cut those five paragraphs about child development theory from my story. But the city would be poorer for it.“)
Then again, the other way of looking at it is: “Josh, your DMN stories are crap.” I prefer not to look at it that way.
Tim enumerates two interesting things about this blog in his post. I’ll offer up a third: It is, as far as I know, the only local blog to have one of its posts turned into a D Magazine piece! This post from May 2003, about Dallas’ own monkeyphonecall.com, became a D item, as detailed here. (The D story has since fallen off their website.)
– The CD Mix of the Month Club reunion was awesome. The bar was nice and the turnout was terrific — about 30 people, swapping CDs and swapping stories. (Alas, no swapping of spit. I had this dream of bringing CDMOMers together in sexual congress so that they might produce a new race of Super Mix Makers. Maybe next time.) It was terrifically nice to see all these people whom I’ve known for the last several years only through their email addresses. And it made me feel good about the hundreds of hours I spent folding liner notes, addressing labels, and stuffing envelopes.
There’s also talk about the NYC mix traders going on without me. While I find that vaguely disempowering, I’ll pass along information as I learn it.
– Went to the American Museum of Natural History yesterday. In the Asian cultures section, the museum has assembled little dioramas showing what various Asian cities might have looked like at various historical points of time — Ur in 1200 B.C., Bombay in 1700, that sort of thing. One of the displays was of Samarkand, the now-Uzbek city. It looked like a typical diorama, except for one item suspended from the diorama’s ceiling: a man in a turban on a flying carpet.
A flying carpet. This image of a real city at a real, historical point in time has a man on a flying carpet. Is this a museum or Ripley’s Believe It Or Not?
– Finally, the best reunion story of the week involves my friend Renya. See, back in 1990, the 10th-grade version of me fooled a few people into thinking he could speak French. As a result, I was chosen as one of the three Louisiana judges for Le Carrousel international du film de Rimouski, a French-language children’s film festival in Rimouski, Quebec. Renya was one of the Vermont judges. We got along, but when the festival ended, we parted ways.
Fourteen years later, a random Googling led to our reunion last night. After dinner at a French restaurant (appropriate), we headed to a film festival, where we saw a short film starring some of the people she works with. Let me tell you: Ethel Greenbaum is an actor on the move. Don’t be surprised to see her at the Oscars next spring. (Trailer here.)