'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

I wasn't that surprised to learn that Seroxat causes birth defects because, while technology keeps producing devices which can do ever more marvellous things all in one tiny package, Seroxat exists as the equal and opposite reaction, a big bundle of bad effects in one heavily-marketed little pill. I'm just waiting for the revelations as to how many greenhouse gases are produced in its manufacture, and confirmation of which loopy dictators are on the stuff, but I already assume that it causes global warming and genocide too. The only great evil I have trouble linking to it is mayonnaise but trust me, there will be a link somewhere.

If your post-Wire reading has found you drawn in to the corrupt, skin-deep 'renewal' of Richard Price's New York, but you want something which comes in smaller chunks, I recommend you take a look at American Gangster and Other Tales of New York by Mark Jacobson. I'm not making a big leap here; I picked it up because I didn't quite feel up to Clockers at the moment and this looked similar, and lo and behold, there's Price doing an introduction. This book gets a lot of bad reviews from online chuckleheads who didn't notice the subtitle and thought it would just be the story of Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas, as seen in the recent film. No, it's an anthology; the article which inspired the film is here, but so is the one which became the sitcom Taxi (anthologies often take their title from one component piece, which nonetheless makes up a small proportion of the overall page count. Get over it). And like The Wire, this is a city's story told in part through its crime, but also through its media, its politicians, its oddballs. Even the weakest piece here, on Wynton bloody Marsalis, speaks to the overall theme of what New York has gained since its "near death" in the seventies, and what it has lost. Selected from three decades of journalism, mostly in New York magazine, it's a book which tells you a lot and yet does so in handily commute-length pieces.
(New York has New York magazine and The New Yorker. I am unaware of any mag called London, and The Londoner was Ken's crappy propaganda freesheet, mercifully put out of our misery by Boris. Why is that? I love Smoke dearly, it's the only magazine I buy, but it's not the same thing)

cappuccino_kid likes arty European films. I tend to favour Anglophone fare (though there is an anime exemption) and ideally I like it to feature explosions, drunken antics and/or an old-fashioned stiff upper lip. So when he pressed Last Year In Marienbad on me, I will confess to some reluctance. Nor was I initially convinced by dialogue like "You confine me in a whispering silence worse than death...like coffins buried side by side in a frozen garden", or the beautiful women and suave but odd-faced men, standing unnaturally still while the camera played silly buggers; this is a self-parodic French film par excellence. And yet, I wasn't smirking. All those tics I'd seen done to death and parodied a dozen times...somehow here they work. The film feels like a dream, rather than feeling like it's trying to feel like a dream. It transfixes. It is beautiful, as it roams in and around an apparently infinite baroque hotel, the doors and corridors expressing its theme of deferral. And it is really rather haunting.