“People define themselves by their real-estate holdings much more than their ZIP codes.”

Well, that’s a relief. For a second I thought people were being shallow.

Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered the Agriprocessors Inc. complex in northeast Iowa Monday morning to execute a criminal search warrant for evidence relating to aggravated identity theft, fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and other crimes, said Tim Counts, a Midwest ICE spokesman.

Agents are also executing a civil search warrant for people illegally in the United States, he said.

Anyone who’s been following the immigration issue in America during the last few years knows that one of the two paragraphs above is true, and the other is horseshit. The answer is below the fold.

A moment’s thought should give the answer. The ridiculously-named “ICE” is in the business of rounding up illegal aliens, not going after identity theft and “other crimes” against which all levels of government already have a bountiful supply of law-enforcement agencies and alphabet soup from which to choose.

No, what happened is the county sheriff got fed up with all the townsfolk complaining about the Hispanics in town (they’ve got enough trouble already dealing with all the Jews…), called up one of his buddies in whatever the capital of Iowa is, who called one of his buddies in Washington, who pulled some strings and got the migra to make take a little trip to northeast Iowa. There is no evidence of identity theft, no evidence of fraudulent use of Social Security numbers. Unless by “evidence”, they are referring to the presence of large numbers of Spanish-speaking people, among which one can reasonably guess there might be some illegals. However, a guess is not evidence. But in today’s climate of rounding up the foreigners who do our shit jobs for us at low wages, and sending ‘em back where they came from, so that you and I can pay higher food prices and enjoy a Spanish-free environment, a “guess” is good enough.

It seemed to be a constant during most of my childhood, the late seventies and early eighties. A candy bar cost a quarter and a bag of chips was 89 cents. (I ate a lot of both.) Well. Today I purchased a bag of Lay’s (the most disgusting chips on earth; and considering I live in New York City and have so many better options, like Utz or Herr’s–hey, all I can say is sometimes I get nostalgic for the extra-salty, flavorless chips of my youth) and received quite a shock when I looked at the weight of the bag.

Now I’ve noticed the gradual shrinkage of the standard potato chip bag (and many other products; the coffee can comes to mind) over the years. But I think we’ve reached a new milestone. The size of today’s $1.49 bag of Lay’s? 3 7/8 ounces. That is not a misprint. The standard bag is now less than half the size it was in my youth. If pressed, I would have guessed around five ounces. That’s the last size I recall specifically noticing. And here I thought there was something wrong with me because I finish a bag of chips in one or two days instead of the usual four or five. I knew the bags were getting smaller but less than four ounces?

What’s going on here? I think the snack food conglomerates are preying on Americans’ occasionally correct assumption that productivity increases are providing us real savings. After all, the price of a bag of chips has remained a constant $1.49 for what, a decade now? Given the inevitable inflation, they’re doing a great job keeping the price constant. Except… it’s all a pack of lies. Every couple years, shave off another quarter or eighth of an ounce. Keep the bag the same size, fill it with a little more air. No one will notice the difference. Well, bollocks on that. I am not stupid. I do not need to be fooled into thinking that Frito-Lay is doing me any favors by holding the line on the price of a bag of potato chips.

Just give me the damn eight-ounce bag and charge an honest price for it. I can handle it. The price of everything else has quadrupled (or more) in twenty-five years. Stop treating me like a child. Thanks.

THE HL23 tower … is the kind of commission Neil Denari has being waiting for his entire working life. Mr. Denari … has labored on the profession’s periphery for decades. But because of a recent demand for name-brand residential architecture in New York, he is finally getting a chance to test his ideas in the real world.

“The profession’s periphery” refers, I presume, to the 99.9% of architects who do the grunt work that doesn’t merit special attention from the Times. “The real world” probably refers to the rarefied atmosphere inhabited by the sort of architects who get invited to New York Times cocktail parties.

There’s the usual glorification of everything “strange” and “unexpected”, and the attendant condemnation of anything “banal”, which in the language used in Times architectural articles refers to any building that attempts to fit harmoniously within the existing urban fabric of the city:

In other cases, however, the seemingly noble aim of working within a neighborhood’s character leads to lackluster design. The scale and placement of the windows on the facade of Deborah Berke’s new limestone-and-steel apartment complex just across from 40 Bond, for example, does echo the neighboring buildings. But the results are tepid.

“Tepid” is Times-speak for “unchalleging” and “not designed to shock or confuse”; the opposite of every building designed by Times favorites such as Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei.

The Times gets it right, however, in the depiction of today’s newest Manhattan prototype, the international jet-setter:

But the banal interiors of New York’s luxury apartment buildings may also have to do with our reactionary times. Among architects it is now common wisdom that today’s clients are less willing to upend conventional living arrangements than earlier generations were. … This resistance may not be surprising for a class of people who increasingly want the same residential experience whether they are in Moscow, Paris or New York. Arriving in New York by private jet — or wishing they had — they tend to view their homes as personalized hotel rooms, and developers are more than happy to indulge them. Many of the new buildings provide the same kind of services you would find in a luxury hotel, from breakfast in bed to spa treatments to dog walkers.

Anyone who’s been priced out of Manhattan lately has been witness to this phenomenon. The jet-setters are filling the new (and the old) luxury buildings that draw the attention of the Times, while residences that were once within reach of the rest of us are now packed with their children: young, hip, and super-wealthy. The sort who eye a tiny $2000-a-month studio and proclaim “It’s so cheap!” in European-, Indian-, or Japanese-accented English. This is the more interesting story of what’s happening in Manhattan. It’s a story that’s beneath the notice of the Times, except for a once- or twice-yearly report bemoaning the fact that Manhattan isn’t “funky” any more.

I’ve been a fan since about 1982, when a friend taped me a copy of Logos (I was in eighth grade!) but it wasn’t until about 1992 that I began investigating them some more, beginning with the amazing Poland and Le Parc. As a child of the eighties, it’s not surprising that their 80’s work pleases me the most, with its heavy synth and strong melodies. Well, around 1995 I started investigating some more and eventually collected most of their mid-seventies work too, including such favorites as Phaedra and Stratosphear. Actually, I was inspired to collect their earlier material after listening to the box set Tangents, which collects a great deal of their work from the early 70’s to the late 80’s and remixes it all into my favorite late 80’s sound of theirs. It’s fascinating to compare the originals with the re-recordings.

Around this time, I received from a friend a couple albums that he didn’t like, including Melrose and Rockoon, and I have to say, I didn’t like the new direction the band was taking (and to this day I still don’t like these albums, or much of the output I’ve heard from the 90’s at all). Guitars are heavily emphasized, which is a bit jarring, but most importantly, there’s a specific keyboard sound that grates on my ears to the point where I can’t listen any more. It’s a kind of tinkly, pounding keyboard sound that reminds me more of crappy 80’s New Age than anything else. And it’s present on virtually every song TD put out in the 90’s.

So between 1995 or so and the present (2008) I’ve contented myself with collecting as much of the output from the late 60’s to the late 80’s as I could while studiously avoiding anything after 1990. Until I came across this newest album, Madcap’s Flaming Duty. There are two things that set this album apart: vocals (!) and the wonderful absence of that cheap-sounding New Age keyboard.

First, the vocals. Vocals are something that TD seems to flirt with about once every ten years, to almost universal condemnation. I haven’t actually heard any of the albums with vocals yet, I guess because that’s not what I turn to TD for. So on a whim I gave this new album a listen, not knowing what to expect, and to my surprise the vocals are extremely pleasing–a strong, melodic male voice that complements the music perfectly.

And what lovely music it is. It varies from classic TD synth-driven sounds to a more ambient, beat-heavy sound. Overall, the pace of the songs is more languid than in the (recent) past, with lovely melodies that unfold over six to eight minutes, reminding me of (for example) the wonderful For Against album Coalesced. I’m greatly looking forward to exploring this, in my mind the greatest TD release in 18 years, much more.

There are few things more irritating than listening to some pale, behoodied ectomorph hold forth about how much better New York City was before Rudy Giuliani got hold of it.

And one of those more-irritating things is when a “serious” writer resorts to grade-school strawman rhetorical techniques in order to bash his enemies.

What the rat–I mean hipster–population always forgets is that what seems colorful and diary-worthy when it can be escaped at a moment’s notice is considerably less so when you’re stuck in it forever.

Yes, because a disdain for New York’s current cycle of hyper-gentrification automatically means a desire to return to the bad old days of 2,000 homicides a year and rats chewing on your heels. Because the character of New York must be one or the other extreme; there is no middle ground. You know… the one that people who care about the city actually show a preference for: a city that is both interesting and livable. Because the fact of the matter is that while New York is indeed much more livable now than it was in 1990, it (and here I mean specifically, Manhattan) is also undeniably much more boring. The Meatpacking District serves as a convenient example of the progress that New York has made in the last ten or fifteen years. A neighborhood that once contained fascinating nightlife and affordable housing (and I don’t mean the faux “affordable housing” required by city codes and which nobody who has a job can actually qualify for–I mean actual, market-rate affordable housing) now contains million-dollar condos and Crate & Barrel. The corner of West 14th and Ninth Avenue that used to bristle with trannie hookers is set to feature a super-mega-deluxe Apple Store. The hookers are long since gone; doubtless they can’t afford to live anywhere in Manhattan. Our grade-school writer would probably cheer the loss of a harmless group of hookers as a win for “decent” society. Never mind that hooking is a victimless “crime”–there’s property values to think of! And seven-figure Wall Street whizzes don’t want to live amongst such scum. The Meatpacking District is the new Tribeca: unaffordable to mere mortals and devoid of interesting street life. The same pattern has changed other once-affordable neighborhoods such as Hell’s Kitchen (sorry, “Clinton”), the East Village and even much of the Lower East Side. What we’re left with in Manhattan is a core of long-time, relatively low-income residents who managed to hang on to their rent-stabilized apartments (a regulation I don’t support, but that is another story) and a massive influx of wealthy new residents who can afford rents that have been jacked up into the stratosphere and who move to Manhattan to enjoy the all the city has to offer, and who unwittingly have made it such a dull place. The rest of us live in Brooklyn and Queens.

Considering that my music collection is now at about 50GB, I considered the 80GB model for about… five seconds. My previous model was 30GB and packed to the gills. Anyway, like all iPods, it’s a fantastic little machine that I couldn’t live without during those long commutes on the subway.

I have one complaint, however. (You knew there would be a complaint.) It’s the horrible, boring, dreary Helvetica they chose to replace the stylish Myriad font (or proprietary variants thereof) that’s appeared on all iPods for years now. This new font is boring. See for yourself. It’s quite possibly the most generic font out there (and very similar to Arial–another boring font–which is ubiquitous in the Windows world, being the default font in new Excel spreadsheets for example). Apparently the motivation behind using this font in the new iPods is that Helvetica is also the standard font on the (over-hyped?) iPhone. (The new iMacs are designed to mimic the iPhone, too.) Oh well, it’s a small annoyance that just detracts ever so slightly from the pleasure I’ve always had using an iPod. No big deal. At least it’s not a Zune.

[Update Feb. 2008: I've heard the new Zunes are giving the iPod a run for their money, at least feature- and design-wise. Very interesting. The new Creative Zens look promising, too. Considering that I just switched back to Windows from the Mac, for reasons I'll not go into now, and considering that iTunes sucks on Windows, I'm kind of undecided how to proceed with my vast music collection. For now I'm just dumping it all into Windows Media Player.]

It starts with an insightful observation that people are “done” at the age of twenty: their views are fully-formed and will not change. From there, it veers into a discussion of various times and places where it was just peachy to perpetuate vicious slurs against “the other”, including, most notably, an unbelievably unfunny piece in the National Lampoon by none other than P.J. O’Rourke that with a straight face provides a categorical listing of every vile stereotype that was current in white American culture at the time. “Niggers”, “kikes” and “chinks” are well-represented. I suppose O’Rourke’s piece was meant to be humorous in some way, but from the hindsight afforded by 2007, I am hard-pressed to imagine that it was anything other than scandalous even as long ago as 1977, when it was written. Derbyshire provides the answer to why this sort of thing isn’t “funny” any more:

Why aren’t foreigners funny any more? The answer is of course: Multiculturalism. When there is a foreign family living in the house next door, and four of the ten people in the office where you work are foreign, it’s hard to crack jokes about foreigners without causing offense. It’s especially hard in a milieu where the ability to take offense instantly and promiscuously, even when plainly no offense was intended, is regarded as a mark of fine and delicate sensibilities, indeed of moral purity.

So the culprit is one of the biggest bugaboos of the right: the dreaded multiculturalism. Those damn foreigners living next door; I knew it was their fault. As if today’s admittedly lamentable penchant to take offense at anything and everything is at all related to the fact that I have “chinks” living on one side of me and “camel jockeys” on the other. Derb then more-or-less approvingly notes China and Japan, two very homogeneous and racist societies, and offers as proof that they haven’t lost their “humor” the fact that they are still comfortable making fun of the White Devil and wearing blackface or whiteface. Funny!

Derb laments the loss of humor that accompanies the rise of multiculturalism, totally oblivious to the fact that “making fun of foreigners” was never particularly funny to begin with. He is a big fan of tribalism: the understanding that “we” are better than “they”. And he has a point. The United States is without any doubt a better place to live than many others around the world. I fail to see, however, why it’s important to reinforce that fact with unfunny stereotypes of people you don’t even know.

You can argue about whether multiculturalism has made us better or worse, but I don’t see how you can deny that it has made us shallower. Are patriotism and multiculturalism even compatible? Having chosen the second over the first, have we not lost a dimension?

Derb doesn’t get that it’s possible to love one’s country without adhering to blind, destructive “patriotism”. In his tribal worldview, that was undoubtedly formed sometime in the middle of the last century per his thesis at the beginning of the article, it’s “us” against “them”. It’s that view that lacks any depth.