My bad, others' good

I'm thoroughly aware of my lack of posting recently. It's not a conscious decision, just a combination of being pressed for time, not too into anything in the news right now, and expending blogging energies on the Washington Square News Opinion Blog, which is very interesting, but lacking in outside input (hint hint).

Also, some more love on the posts might help me write more. Pieces ranging from nuggets like So we meet again, Dr. Hegel and To Demagogue to epics like 2005 and Catching Up have gone uncommented. Hardly an incentive, my blogger friends. Don't you know how sensitive I am?

Meanwhile, others are picking up my slack in the blogosphere. Shankar Gupta's blog/job application TK is up and running. Noam Besdin, the man who so graciously made me an honorary Jew, is blogging abroad as ItaliaNoam, much on the model of Ben's Prague blog, which is still a blog, though not from Prague.

If only Matt Buchanan's blog was done yet, I could fold it into this plug, but his loss...

The Gates

I got a look at The Gates today, not as a trip in itself, but I had to go from the Upper East Side to the Upper West Side and figured I'd walk. I was mostly motivated by the prospect of years from now someone saying: "The Gates was in Central Park and you never went to see it!?"

My overall statement on The Gates is that I can't judge it because the whole ordeal has become overbearingly self-aware. I understand the point of bringing color to a place that is brown and bringing novelty to a place that has been demure for 150 years. However, hardly being able to enter at 79th Street due to throngs of people and from then on having every post adorned with a tourist wearing orange and posing for a photo does not, for me at least, signal magic and wonderment.

I suppose The Gates never stood a chance with me. A few weeks of process stories about the logistics of the operation deadened any impact it could have on the imagination. Perhaps if it had been set up overnight without any notice and I just encountered it at dawn before anyone else, it would be worthwhile. Meanwhile, in the real world, the attendants wearing smocks emblazoned in orange with "The Gates" and the dates of the installation are just too much.