La tienda está en SOHO, sobre Prince Street, casi esquina con West Broadway, pero ¡no sé como se llama! Y como no tengo perros, tampoco te puedo indicar cuanto cuestan los outfits.

Television

Simpson Family Values

A cartoon family whacked America’s funny bone in 1989, eventually becoming the longest-running TV comedy ever. As The Simpsons jumps to the big screen this month, not everyone involved—including the writers, the voices, and Rupert Murdoch—agrees on what has made it a pop phenomenon.

by John Ortved July 2007

This is an expanded version of the text that appears in the August 2007 Vanity Fair.

Also on VF.com: A Q&A with former Simpsons writer Conan O’Brien and our picks for the top 10 episodes ever.

The Story of D’oh: Lisa, Homer, Bart, Marge, and Maggie Simpson. View our picks for the 10 best Simpsons episodes ever. All illustrations Fox/Photofest.

In January 1992, during a campaign stop at a gathering of the National Religious Broadcasters, George H. W. Bush made a commitment to strengthen traditional values, promising to help American families become “a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons.” A few days later, before the opening credits rolled on the animated sitcom’s weekly episode, The Simpsons issued its response. Seated in front of the television, the family watched Bush make his remarks. “Hey! We’re just like the Waltons,” said Bart. “We’re praying for an end to the Depression, too.” While the immediacy of the response was surprising, the retort was vintage Simpsons: tongue-in-cheek, subversive, skewering both the president’s cartoonish political antics and the culture that embraced them. Twelve months later, Bill Clinton moved into the White House. The Waltons were out; the Simpsons were in.

When The Simpsons had premiered on Fox, in 1989, prime-time television was somewhat lacking in comedy. Despite a few bright spots such as Cheers and the barbed, happily crude Roseanne, the sitcom roost was ruled by didactic, saccharine family fare: The Cosby Show, Full House, Growing Pains, Family Matters. Of the last—the show that gave the world Urkel—Tom Shales piously declared in The Washington Post, “A decent human being would have a hard time not smiling.”

It was on this wan entertainment landscape that The Simpsons planted its flag. Prime time had not seen an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, in the 1960s, and the Christmas special with which The Simpsons debuted made clear that Springfield and Bedrock were separated by more than just a few millennia. In “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” Homer takes a job as a department-store Santa after the family’s emergency money is spent on tattoo removal for Bart. Following a motivational chat from Bart on the nature of Christmas miracles on television—meta-commentary was a Simpsons hallmark from the start—Homer risks his earnings at the track, on a dog named Santa’s Little Helper. When the dog comes in dead last, the family adopts him. While the ending sounds a tad cheesy, and it was, the seeds had been planted: up against impossible odds, and one another, the family ultimately bonded together and overcame. And the gags were solid: Homer is despondent at the length of his children’s Christmas pageant; a tattoo artist unquestioningly accepts 10-year-old Bart as an adult; the family’s Christmas decorations are clearly pathetic in contrast to the Flanders family’s next door. Critical reaction was nearly unanimous. “Couldn’t be better … not only exquisitely weird but also as smart and witty as television gets,” raved the Los Angeles Times. “Why would anyone want to go back to Growing Pains?” asked USA Today.

What followed is one of the most astounding successes in television history. The Simpsons went on to be a ratings and syndication winner for 18 years, and has grossed Fox sums of money measuring in the billions. It has won 23 Emmys and a Peabody Award, and was named the best TV show of all time by Time magazine in 1999. (The magazine also named Bart one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. “[Bart] embodies a century of popular culture and is one of the richest characters in it. One thinks of Chekhov, Celine, Lenny Bruce,” the writer cooed.) But the most telling accolade is that The Simpsons is TV’s longest-running sitcom ever, outlasting The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet’s 14 seasons.

Not surprisingly, given its success, The Simpsons has spawned many imitators and opened doors for new avenues of animated comedy. Directly or indirectly, the show sired Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, Adult Swim, and South Park, which, nearly a decade after Bart’s boastful underachieving, managed to regenerate a familiar cacophony of ratings, merchandise, and controversy when it premiered, in 1997. (The controversial label was perhaps deserved. Bart’s greatest sin has been sawing the head off the statue of the town’s founder; last year, on South Park, Cartman tried to exterminate the Jews.)

“It’s like what sci-fi fans say about Star Trek: it created an audience for that genre,” says Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy. “I think The Simpsons created an audience for prime-time animation that had not been there for many, many years. As far as I’m concerned, they basically re-invented the wheel. They created what is in many ways—you could classify it as—a wholly new medium. It’s just wholly original.”

“The Simpsons is the bane of our existence,” says Matt Stone, co-creator of South Park with Trey Parker. “They have done so many parodies, tackled so many subjects. ‘Simpsons did it!’ is a very familiar refrain in our writers’ room. Trey and I are constantly having our little cartoon compared to the best show in the history of television, The Simpsons. Why can’t we be compared to According to Jim? Or Sister, Sister?”

Not that there aren’t some debits on The Simpsons’ ledger—for every King of the Hill, there was a Fish Police and a Critic. But over 18 years, The Simpsons has been so influential, it is difficult to find any strain of television comedy that does not contain its DNA. And yet the show’s footprint is so much larger. Homer’s signature “D’oh!” has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. There’s a “Simpsons and Philosophy” course at Berkeley (for credit), not to mention the hundreds of published academic articles with The Simpsons as their subject. Even conservatives have come around. “It’s possibly the most intelligent, funny, and even politically satisfying TV show ever,” wrote the National Review in 2000. “The Simpsons celebrates many … of the best conservative principles: the primacy of family, skepticism about political authority.… Springfield residents pray and attend church every Sunday.” Next to pornography, no single subject may have as many Web sites and blogs dedicated to its veneration. The Simpsons has permeated our vernacular, the way we tell jokes, and how our storytellers practice their craft. If you look around, you can see the evidence, but as with any truly powerful cultural force, you can never see it all—it’s buried too deep.

Such lofty significance was never the goal of Matt Groening, a native of Portland, Oregon, who, with writing aspirations, moved to L.A. in 1977, at the age of 23, immersing himself in the punk-rock scene and working on novels. He was freshly graduated from Evergreen State College, a hippie school in Olympia, Washington, with no grades, exams, or required classes. After several menial jobs, he began recording his disgust with life in L.A. in a comic strip, Life in Hell, which he sent to his friends back home and distributed at the record shop Licorice Pizza, where he found work behind the counter. The strip featured deeply cynical, existential ruminations from a bunny named Binky, his illegitimate, one-eared son, Bongo, and a fez-wearing gay couple—who may or may not be identical twins—named Jeff and Akbar. It found its way into the Los Angeles Reader and then LA Weekly, in 1986, and eventually caught the attention of James L. Brooks, writer-producer of Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and writer-director of the film Terms of Endearment, among others.

Los guapos que abren la puerta de Abercrombie & Fitch, con razón está tan de moda esa marca.

Haruki Murakami artículo en el NYTimes.

Cookshop

Ayer cené en Cookshop, es el nuevo restaurant del chef Marc Meyers y tiene como premisa hacer gran comida americana. Creo que ahí está el problema, sobre todo para los que pensamos que la gran comida americana es peor que la gran comida de casi cualquier otra cocina del mundo. Además está basada en los principios de moda de ingredientes locales, orgánicos, etc. lo que al final resulta un menú bastante aburrido. Pero a juzgar por las reseñas que ha recibido tanto de New York Times como de New York Magazine, a los gringos sí que les fascina. Pero para mi no. La carne orgánica la encuentro un poco dura. El pescado que pedimos, Fluke es uno de mis favoritos. Sobre todo como lo sirven en Esca o en el Bernardin, casi crudo, con un poco de aceite de oliva y limón… pero en cookshop lo sirvieron empanizado y perdía todo su chiste….
Esta semana, el 17-18 de Julio Christies subasta los bienes de María Felix. Sí, aqui vino a parar su colección de joyas, antigüedades y cerámicas. Se me antoja ir na´más para curiosear.
Y… del 10 al 17, es LAMC Latin Alternative Music Conference, y vienen todos los chicos rockeros del momento. Va a estar super divertido el reventón.

The Founding Immigrants

By KENNETH C. DAVIS
Published: July 3, 2007

Dorset, Vt.

A PROMINENT American once said, about immigrants, “Few of their children in the country learn English… The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages … Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.â€?

This sentiment did not emerge from the rancorous debate over the immigration bill defeated last week in the Senate. It was not the lament of some guest of Lou Dobbs or a Republican candidate intent on wooing bedrock conservative votes. Guess again.

Voicing this grievance was Benjamin Franklin. And the language so vexing to him was the German spoken by new arrivals to Pennsylvania in the 1750s, a wave of immigrants whom Franklin viewed as the “most stupid of their nation.�

About the same time, a Lutheran minister named Henry Muhlenberg, himself a recent arrival from Germany, worried that “the whole country is being flooded with ordinary, extraordinary and unprecedented wickedness and crimes. … Oh, what a fearful thing it is to have so many thousands of unruly and brazen sinners come into this free air and unfenced country.â€?

These German masses yearning to breathe free were not the only targets of colonial fear and loathing. Echoing the opinions of colonial editors and legislators, Ben Franklin was also troubled by the British practice of dumping its felons on America. With typical Franklin wit, he proposed sending rattlesnakes to Britain in return. (This did not, however, preclude numerous colonists from purchasing these convicts as indentured servants.)

And still earlier in Pennsylvania, the Scotch-Irish had bred discontent, as their penchant for squatting on choice real estate ran headlong against the colony’s founders, the Penn family, and their genteel notions about who should own what.

Often, the disdain for the foreign was inflamed by religion. Boston’s Puritans hanged several Friends after a Bay Colony ban on Quakerism. In Virginia, the Anglicans arrested Baptists.

But the greatest scorn was generally reserved for Catholics — usually meaning Irish, French, Spanish and Italians. Generations of white American Protestants resented newly arriving “Papists,� and even in colonial Maryland, a supposed haven for them, Roman Catholics were nonetheless forbidden to vote and hold public office.

Once independent, the new nation began to carve its views on immigrants into law. In considering New York’s Constitution, for instance, John Jay — later to become the first chief justice of the Supreme Court — suggested erecting “a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.�

By 1790, with the United States Constitution firmly in place, the first federal citizenship law restricted naturalization to “free white persons� who had been in the country for two years. That requirement was later pushed back to five years and, in 1798, to 14 years.

Then, as now, politics was key. Federalists feared that too many immigrants were joining the opposition. Under the 1798 Alien Act — with the threat of war in the air over French attacks on American shipping — President John Adams had license to deport anyone he considered “dangerous.� Although his secretary of state favored mass deportations, Adams never actually put anybody on a boat.

Back then, the French warranted the most suspicion, but there were other worrisome “aliens.� A wave of “wild Irish� refugees was thought to harbor dangerous radicals. Harsh “anti-coolie� laws later singled out the Chinese. And, of course, the millions of “involuntary� immigrants from Africa and their offspring were regarded merely as persons “held to service.�

Scratch the surface of the current immigration debate and beneath the posturing lies a dirty secret. Anti-immigrant sentiment is older than America itself. Born before the nation, this abiding fear of the “huddled masses� emerged in the early republic and gathered steam into the 19th and 20th centuries, when nativist political parties, exclusionary laws and the Ku Klux Klan swept the land.

As we celebrate another Fourth of July, this picture of American intolerance clashes sharply with tidy schoolbook images of the great melting pot. Why has the land of “all men are created equal� forged countless ghettoes and intricate networks of social exclusion? Why the signs reading “No Irish Need Apply�? And why has each new generation of immigrants had to face down a rich glossary of now unmentionable epithets? Disdain for what is foreign is, sad to say, as American as apple pie, slavery and lynching.

That fence along the Mexican border now being contemplated by Congress is just the latest vestige of a venerable tradition, at least as old as John Jay’s “wall of brass.� “Don’t fence me in� might be America’s unofficial anthem of unfettered freedom, but too often the subtext is, “Fence everyone else out.�

Kenneth C. Davis is the author of “Don’t Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned.�

Es de noche. El día laboral ha terminado. Sólo quedan algunos workaholicos en las oficinas, algún niño despierto que no se quiere ir a dormir. Ahora es la hora de los adultos libres, es la hora de salir a cenar, a pasear, a vivir. Ojos de brujo está tocando en el Highline Ballroom. Cerveza y tequila. Un vestido vaporoso. Ganas incontrolables de bailar. Caderas. Faldas con cinturones en las caderas. Piernas. La gente está vestida sin cuidado, eso parece, pero si ves, si observas detalladamente te das cuenta, que esa falda tiene vuelo, que esos tennis saben brincar, que ese fleco fue cortado para llamar la atención y resaltar unos ojos profundos…
Ella domina el escenario. Ella, Marina, la de los dreadlocks, con diadema gitana, con una banda verde sobre la cabeza, le daban 30 centimetros de alto y parecían pesarle casi cinco kilos, pero aumentaban su gracia. Y ellos indomables, batiendo los instrumentos, haciendo rumba, ritmo, flamenco. La bailadora con tanta presencia. Y las luces, la música, el baile, el público agradecido. ¡Qué noche! Transportada a otro momento. Al lugar gitano, donde la sangre arde, donde el momento pesa, la pasión domina.

Hace unos años en California el editor de un periódico tuvo una idea, que Gustavo Arellano hiciera una columna respondiendo preguntas sobre como somos los mexicanos. Las preguntas, tontas, racistas y algunas en realidad curiosas ahora forman parte de un libro, y Arellano se ha vuelto en cierta forma el spokesman de los mexicanos. Es una pena, porque el Sr. ni es mexicano, ni habla bien español, su gran “claim� al mexicanismo son sus papás quienes inmigraron en los 60´s.
Pero el libro ha tenido gran éxito y por lo que veo las respuestas de Arellano sí que están chistosas y ponen a los gringos imbéciles en su lugar. Hace unos días un estudiante de Columbia un estudiante de post-grado para colmo, me preguntó si en México había otras ciudades además de la Ciudad de México. En verdad enferma ese grado de ignorancia. La otra que me choca, pero disfruto tanto contestar es cuando me dicen con una cara de espanto ¡Qué calor ha de hacer ahora en la Ciudad de México! Y entonces respondo con calma y seguridad que en realidad es época de lluvias, y que puede hacer friito, y que además en la ciudad de México, calor, calor lo que se dice calor, nunca, les explico las delicias de la gran Tenochtilan… se quedan con una cara de incrédulos .
En fin.

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