March 2004

The shell of an unfinished apartment sits at Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, site of a 1960 airline crash that killed 134 people. The lot, empty since the crash, seems to resist all efforts to fill it.

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When I was small, my mom took me to see the first Benji movie, which I just adored. The latest film, Benji Returns: Rags to Riches, is now out, and its director, Joe Camp, refuses to take film-making cues from Hollywood. Let’s all hope he does well. Children need more from film than the endless exploits of spy kids and Scooby-Doo.

The next 15 shuffled songs on my iPod:

King of the Road, Roger Miller
Burnin’ Streets (London Is Burning), Joe Strummer
Tiny Barnes, Bearsuit
The Hole In My Heart, Dawn Parade
Perfect Day, Lou Reed
Possession (Live), Elvis Costello & the Attractions
Moonlight Zombie Dance, Bruce Lenkei
The Laughing Song, Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks
The Wind, Cat Stevens
Shiloh Town, Mark Lanegan
Rumba De Barcelona, Manu Chao
Sweet Happy Life, Rosemary Clooney & John Pizzarelli
Supermodel, Juliana Hatfield
I’m Gonna Make Him Mine, The Donnas
Spread, OutKast

Is this the new dinner theater?

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig has released his new book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, for free under a Creative Commons license. This means you can download and read the book without paying a penny.

Of course, you can still buy a Cory Doctorow, who has released three books in this fashion. For Doctorow, the experiment has been a success. Having the free downloads available appears to have helped, not hindered, sales of the book’s physical copies, by encouraging word-of-mouth recommendations and allowing readers to try before they buy.

[via Boing Boing]

Stupid tourists come to New York: This is a worthwhile story?

If I ever have children, one of the most important lessons I want to teach them is responsible debt management skills. My generation faces crushing debt loads, crippling interest rates and late fees, and deceptive practices from the agencies that we trust to “counsel” us.

Banks and other credit issuers pay colleges big bucks for the right to market to teenagers, and they send offer after offer for new cards to people with proven bad credit, and then they turn around and rail against debtors for being “irresponsible” and petition Congress to tighten consumer bankruptcy laws.

The trick is to teach kids to use credit responsibly without outright forbidding the use of credit cards. Teaching them how to build a good credit rating while still staying on top of their bills is an important skill, but that’s a hard balance for adults to manage, let alone for teenagers to understand.

Following up on yesterday’s post, Satan’s Laundromat and ForgottenNY have photos from Prospect Cemetery.

From the New York Times, two articles look at forgotten bits of the city’s past: a Queens cemetary, and a Bronx synagogue.

One of these days, I gotta get on one of those ForgottenNY tours.