West Fourth Street Station

I took this picture when I was home last month and found myself in the mezzanine of West Fourth, which is among my least favorite stations because it’s so incredibly hot in the summer.

New York. December 2008.

The B-D-F-V is three levels below the street and it’s an inferno.  That, together with the sterile decor, have always reminded me of Super Mario Brothers World 1-4, the gray zone where you vanquish Koopa only to be told that the princess is in another castle.

Also, you can’t actually enter the station from West 4th Street, and that’s just weird.

Lawnguyland Freakout

That last post was boring.  This is better.

It’s the weirdest house in the neighborhood I grew up in.  Some kind of neo-Spanish style that still looks like the White House somehow.  Done up in Xmas drag, it’s some major Long Island kitsch.  The gaudiness is emphasized by drab normality of the surrounding homes (camera-shy).

Mineola, New York. December 2008

Fox News Apologia

I think the financial crisis has made me into a total structuralist.  A financial system that, since decoupling the dollar from gold in the 70s, increasingly dealt with abstractions could only come toppling down just the way it is.  I don’t think any other outcome was possible.  (And the idea of gold being some objective measurement of worth is pretty metaphysical, too).

Similarly, when Fox News does something stupid with racist/sexist/homophobic undertones, and people get mad, I don’t really know what to think.  That is what Fox News is for, so to speak.  That’s why people like it.  When they apologize, as they have done for airing a text message in support of “Barack the Magic Negro,” a song distributed by the guy who’s running to be part of the RNC, it doesn’t seem to mean anything.  Their viewership doesn’t regard them as an abusive boyfriend who keeps apologizing insincerely after every serious breach of trust.  They probably read the apologies as proof that the “actual,” “liberal” media who control everything and against whom Fox exists as the people’s alternative do actually control everything.

Further, who cares?  You either watch Fox News because you like hearing Sean Hannity talk about how great America is, or you watch some other channel because you like your news superficial and slightly less right-wing, or you read it somewhere because you like actual news that can’t fit in a chyron.

I think the future of Fox News, in 2009 and beyond, will consist of the same old thing plus the occasional consequence-free apology when they go too far.  So getting worked up about it has no meaning whatsoever.  In that way the network really mirrors the Republican party, and every so-called media watchdog is a Harry Reid, who might work up the gumption to issue a strongly worded letter when he’s not too busy policing fellow Democrats.