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Culturally Speaking #17

By Sarah Stodola

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Here's a nice Jonathan Lethem short story (Once on the page click on the Lethem story), set like three minutes from my apartment. You'd never believe from reading this that my neighborhood is really cool and has a lot of young people in it.

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I have never been quite so disgusted to be an American as I was this week with Bush's proposed amendment to the Constitution to ban same-sex marriages. With all of the problems in the world, and with all of the amendments he could be proposing, that's the one he chooses. What's almost even more unbelievable is the lack of outcry over this, and the fact that support for the amendment actually exists, and that the Democratic candidates are also opposed to gay marriage.

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One more way that the sheer size of New York City can baffle the mind: Someone, somewhere in this city, must manage to cook 800,000 meals per day for New York school children.

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I haven't read it, but I know that Chuck Klosterman wrote an essay explaining that although Billy Joel doesn't exactly qualify as hip, he has encapsulated the essence of the lives of typical Americans in a way that no hip artists actually have. And I love Klosterman - a guy who could easily hide behind the facade of New York literary hipness - for pointing it out.

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I am just now discovering how great the interviews on Identity Theory are.

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I knew that A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was a success and all. But I had never thought of it in terms of that it made Eggers a multimillionaire, which it did.

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My friend Sara is an artist and her paintings were just rented out by the people filming a new Will Smith movie. Apparently, Smith's character is going to be a rich Manhattan loft-type guy and he needs some good artwork to fill his faux-loft. Now I will have to go see it - and I will have a perfectly valid excuse for paying to see a Will Smith movie.  And I have just written "will" way too many times in one paragraph.

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I have been duped...I donated two pounds while in the National Gallery in London this past December in order to help the museum purchase this Rafael, I think it was, that would supposedly make its collection complete.  In addition to my two pounds, which I think amounts to about $3, the museum paid approximately $41 million more in order to finally acquire the piece, only to later discover that it is a fake.  The moral of this story is that I need to hold on to my spare change at this point in my life.  And also that absolutely no limit to people's carelessness and gullibility.

Click here for last week's Culturally Speaking.

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2004 Me Three