At the Faithful Dog Café....

... you can keep up the conversation while M and I do I-90 miles.

UPDATE: Home, at 3 a.m.  We drove about 980 miles, nearly all on Route 90. We'd turned the heat off for the long weekend, and it was down to 48° indoors. Bracing!

The atrocity that is Empire State Plaza.

You're walking in a neighborhood of 19th century townhouses...



... and you run smack into this:



New York spent $2 billion to demolish 98 acres of 19th century buildings, displacing 9,000 human beings, in order to build a sickeningly ugly collection of government buildings. Is there a worse architectural crime in the history of the world? I'm sure there must be, but...

... it destroyed a neighborhood, isolated downtown from Center Square and created a stark mall that is lightly used and segregated from city life....

Pure evil.



There's whimsy...



... leaden government whimsy.

Look into the sunset...



... and weep.

"I dare you to comb through an entire issue and find a single word between those covers..."

"... that doesn't leave you reeling with delight or nodding vigorously at the gobsmacking truth sparking like a Texas thunder storm just behind it."

The 20 best magazines of the last decade. The quote refers to the magazine in second place.

"Nothing will erase the immense, unbelievable injustice he has been subjected to."

"Nothing will take away the hysteria of those ones who have never stopped pouring contempt upon him, hounding him through hatred and asking for his punishment as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthysm era all over again. At least, the nightmare is about to end. At least the end of the hell is looming. And this, for the time being, is what does matter."

And can anything erase the immense, unbelievable fatuity of Bernard-Henry Lévy?  Can anything take away the hysteria of this man who has never stopped pouring contempt upon Americans, hounding us through hatred as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthyism — McCarthysm? — era all over again?

Tiger Woods seriously injured after crashing his car into a fire hydrant... and then into a tree.

This happened at 2:25 a.m. as he was pulling out of his own driveway. 

AND: The police say it was not alcohol related.

IN THE COMMENTS: save_the_rustbelt said:

The only thing that would make me leave my house at that time, without alcohol but out of control, would be a raging fight with my wife.

Man in green sneakers reads Sartre. Dog arrives.

The Sartre book was "Nausea"  — great title for reading in a café. And the combination of Sartre and a café got us talking about Sartre's waiter (in "Being and Nothingness"):

Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café....

The name of the restaurant was — aptly! — The Daily Grind.

"You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

Said William Jennings Bryan in 1896.



He was not talking about that sculpture in the Empire State Plaza in Albany, which I encountered up close.



My point of view:

Human gargoyles of New York.

All a part of the New York Capitol:









We had some discussion about whether the last one is racist and whether there was any significance to the fact that someone once took the trouble to paint the lips red.

"Don't look too closely... or you'll see the swastikas...."

Reading this comment from Scott (in the previous post)...

I haven't been through Albany in years. But I do recall that the NY State Education Building is this gigantic federalist pound cake of a building that takes up the entire block and comes right up to the sidewalks. The scale is just so wrong. It's a frightening building....

... made me want to post the little video I took while walking by that building yesterday. The post title is part of the video dialogue:

Beautiful Albany.

My favorite building in Albany is City Hall, also pictured in the previous post:



In front is a statue of Philip Schuyler, a Revolutionary War general, born in Albany:



Also lovely is the building that houses the New York Court of Appeals (the highest court in the state of New York). The Court of Appeals Hall has a fabulous rotunda:



The mural inside the dome is called "Romance of the Skies." It was painted by Eugene F. Savage:



A very new age vibe. With painted sparkles that remind me of a 5-year-old girl's princess fantasy. Visionary, painted in 1959. What it has to do with law, I'm not too sure. Is law some sort of astrology? But what else to paint in a dome in a government building? You can't depict a God anyone believes in, so why not some Greek/Roman gods?

Near the Court of Appeals Hall, is St. Mary's Church:



Nearby, is Academy Park, which has a cool sculpture of Lewis A. Swyer, who seems to want company:



In the background, you can see the New York State Capitol. All I want to say about that building in this post is that I love the magnificent equestrian statue of the Civil War general Philip Henry Sheridan that guards one side of the Capitol:



I won't go on to the New York State Capitol in this post. An overdone horror, it is only beautiful relative to the unbelievable atrocity that is the Empire State Plaza. It will take separate posts to attend to these complicated architectural matters. This post is called "Beautiful Albany," and I will end it here.

Where we are...

... in America...

Fashion.

No one seemed to notice where we were in the photo in the previous post. It's actually easy to see if you look at all closely. Today, we're somewhere else. Here's a favorite picture from today. It doesn't much reveal where we are, but there are pictures to come that will make it crushingly obvious.

We're giving thanks for everything.

And much love to all the Althouse blog readers, from Althouse + Meade.

A Thanksgiving reflection.

Who made Biden — and Katie Couric — look dumb?

It's not Biden's fault — or Couric's — that he — or she — looks like a doofus posing with reality show wannabes at the White House State Dinner. It's not their job to check identities. It's their job — at a party — to pose like this — or is there some gracious way to deflect posers? You might ask why they're throwing big parties when times are so bad. But what the hell? And when can we watch the big Oprah-Obama TV Christmas special? There's Obama putting up the White House decorations, the doorbell rings, and it's Oprah! The doorbell rings again... and it's — who? — Russell from "Survivor"?

At the Footbridge Nightclub...

... it's your stomping ground.

That solemn editorial about global warming looks pretty silly...

... with all those comments about Climategate.

Newspapers just aren't what they used to be, when the readers can instantly talk back.

"Despite the fact that Mr. Sparkman was found hands, feet and mouth bound with duct tape, rope around his neck and the word 'FED' written on his chest..."

"... analysis of the evidence determined Mr. Sparkman's death was self-inflicted."

Was he trying to jerk us all around? The official conclusion is that it was for the insurance, not for fame and deception.

Charis Wilson, model and muse, 1914-2009.

You know her as:

The model and muse to Edward Weston:

"He had been the master of the close-up of body parts," Ollman said of Weston. In "Dunes, Oceano," however, "the model is moving in space, there is no horizon line. It was a breakthrough for him, largely because of Charis' spontaneity. Her uninhibited style gave Weston a freedom that was vitalizing to him," [said Arthur Ollman, director of the School of Art, Design and Art History at San Diego State.]

Weston was aware of a change in his style. "The first nudes of C. were easily amongst the finest I had done, perhaps the finest," he wrote in his daybook in April 1934....

The 28-year age difference between Wilson and Weston gave their romance "a Bohemian, May to December quality," photography dealer and historian Stephen White said in a 2007 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "Charis brought an essence of youth, when Weston was starting to wear out."

Soon after they met in Carmel in 1934, she began to pour her writing talents into advancing his career. Along with editing his articles for Camera Craft magazine, she wrote some of them under his name, she recalled in her memoir. "My goal was to make the articles sound exactly like Edward Weston," Wilson wrote.

"She did write under his name," Ollman confirmed. "It was easy for her and slavishly hard for him."

Ah, so it's one of those stories about a husband and wife. And then it was one of these stories: "She fell from her place as 'exalted goddess to the more human, unenviable and inglorious role of helpmate and art wife." Oh? Is it so unenviable to be a "helpmate"? Would you want to be a helpmate to a great artist whom you dearly loved? And what exactly does an "art wife" do? Are we supposed to have a stereotype in our heads about that? I suppose — I would suppose if I were writing a roman à clef — that she thought of herself as a great artist and found the subordination irksome. Look at the photograph again and see the subordination.

Wilson left Weston in 1945. The following year she married a labor activist. First a photographer and then a labor activist. You're left to imagine the precise nature of Wilson's taste in men.

"My hero is Gandhi. I'm an extremely non-violent, peaceful person and a vegetarian. I don't even kill bugs."

Protests Matthew Roberts, 41, who has recently learned that his father is Charles Manson. He's considering calling the murderer who raped his mother:

"If I did talk to Charlie on the phone, I would say, 'I truly understand what it's like to be you, more than anyone could ever imagine on so many levels.'”

On so many levels...