As Usual, The Times Styles Section Is Right On Top Of Current Trends

You know it’s hard out there when you primp:

The social kiss is unpredictable, agreed R. Couri Hay, the society editor at Hamptons magazine.

“I never kiss on the first meeting,” he said, “but if someone offers a kiss, I feel I have to be polite and take it. Generally I really don’t want to be covered in lipstick.” The kiss “has been dumbed down,” Mr. Hay said. “It is supposed to be a sign of affection, but I’ve seen people recoil when they see someone they don’t even know coming in to lick their cheek.”

Despite the awkwardness, the cheek, or social, kiss is displacing the handshake, once the customary greeting in American social and business circles. It may be a growing Latin influence, an aping of European manners, the influx of women in the workplace or just a breakdown of formality: no one seems to know. It’s not just celebrities smacking the air or diplomats puckering up with the European style double kiss or Soprano family wannabees mimicking a sign of forced fealty.

. . .

The awkwardness — and inevitability — of the social kiss has led to strategies to deal with it. “I position my face just slightly to the side,” said Jeff Elsass, a Pilates instructor at the BioFitness Center in Manhattan, who is frequently greeted with kisses during his workday, “then I wait and see what the other person is going to do. That slight turn of the head can take you past the lip and the cheek.”

Where’s My Gravlax!?

New York Times reporters covering the Mayor’s inauguration demand to know where the gravlax is:

The thousands who crammed the space squished and pushed, and chased after floating plates of miniburgers, which, like elusive white stags on the horizon, seemed impossible to lasso. Those in the know simply stood on Chambers Street and waited for the tiny sandwiches and bite-size brownies to make their way out.

While on the topic, it is fair to say that Mayor Bloomberg has finally driven home his point about the joys of comfort food. He serves his dinner party guests meatloaf. He favors hot dogs. Everyone understands. At his next big event, perhaps he could offer some gravlax?

Halal Turkey

Another Thanksgiving, another super-cloying Times article about how new immigrants celebrate that ur-immigrant holiday:

Every November, Thanksgiving – a celebration of the original immigrant feast – plays out in this city of immigrants as the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians could have hardly fathomed in 1621: a cross-cultural hodgepodge holiday improvised by new American families often inspired and instructed by some of their youngest members. The children of immigrants act as pint-size ambassadors of all things Thanksgiving, urging parents throughout the world to prepare all-American turkey meals that they learned about in school and sharing their incomplete yet innocently sweet knowledge of the holiday’s origins.

. . .

Sometimes, the children are not so much teachers as they are cheerleaders. Occasionally, they are simply culinary advisers. Maha Attieh, 47, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, takes her children to the market when she goes shopping for Thanksgiving, which she usually celebrates at her home in Midwood, Brooklyn, with a turkey stuffed with rice, chicken cutlets, nuts and raisins.

“They make their own menu,” said Mrs. Attieh, who works at the Arab-American Family Support Center in Brooklyn. “What they hear in school, what they hear from friends, they want the same thing. I say, ‘As long as it’s halal meat, I’ll do it.'”

If You Have To Ask . . .

Page One Sunday Times, albeit below the fold — They’re Soft and Cuddly, So Why Lash Them to the Front of a Truck? Tsk, tsk . . . if you have to ask:

A bear with a prominent grease spot on his little beige nose spends his days wedged behind the bumper guard of an ironworker’s pickup in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. A fuzzy rabbit and a clown, garroted by a bungee cord, slump from the front of a Dodge van in Park Slope. Stewie, the evil baby from “Family Guy,” scowls from the grille of a Pepperidge Farm delivery truck in Brooklyn Heights, mold occasionally sprouting from his forehead.

All are soldiers in the tattered, scattered army of the stuffed: mostly discarded toys plucked from the trash and given new if punishing lives on the prows of large motor vehicles, their fluffy white guts flapping from burst seams and going gray in the soot-stream of a thousand exhaust pipes.

Grille-mounted stuffed animals form a compelling yet little-studied aspect of the urban streetscape, a traveling gallery of baldly transgressive public art. The time has come not just to praise them but to ask the big question. Why?

That is, why do a small percentage of trucks and vans have filthy plush toys lashed to their fronts, like prisoners at the mast? Are they someone’s idea of a joke? Parking aids? Talismans against summonses?

Don’t expect an easy answer.

Which is to say, expect one of those half-serious, unself-aware answers the Times loves to dredge up:

At the same time, [New York City Department of Sanitation artist in residence Mierle Laderman] Ukeles said, the trucker, perhaps uncomfortable with his soft side, may feel compelled to punish it.

“Binding a soft thing to a very powerful truck – there’s a kind of macho thing about that,” she said.

That double identification with both victim and agent of violence may reflect the driver’s frustrating position in society. Stuffed animals are found mostly on the trucks of men who perform hard, messy labor, which, despite the strength and bravery it demands, places them on the lower rungs of the ladder of occupational prestige.

The motley animal, then, can function as a badge of outsider status, a thumbed nose to the squares and suits. In that case, the cuter the mascot, the more meaningful its disintegration.

Thus, while Mr. [Dan] DiVittorio, of the Queens carting company, is quite fond of the red plastic skull that adorns his garbage truck, he will never forget its predecessor, a three-foot-high stuffed Scooby-Doo.

And it gets worse:

Scooby’s story lends credence to the theory of [School of Visual Arts art history lecturer Monroe] Denton . . . that the grille-mounted stuffed animal draws from the same well as the “abject art” movement that flourished in the 1990’s and trafficked heavily in images of filth and of distressed bodies.

“That is part of the abject,” he said, “this toy that is loved to death quite literally.”

The externalization of an indoor object is another abject trope, Mr. Denton said. “An important aspect of the abject is the informe, the lack of boundaries,” he said, using the French critical theory term, “the insides oozing out.”

Charlie Maixner, a steamfitter for Deacon Corp. in Jericho on Long Island, has taken the informe to its logical extreme.

On the dashboard of his Econoline van is an adorable and pristine white bear, a gift from his 5-year-old daughter. But the bear is not for the outside world. On the grille is Mr. Hankey, salvaged from a chef’s office during a kitchen renovation job.

Mr. Hankey, to the pop-culturally illiterate, appears to be a brown worm in a Santa hat. He is not. He is the carol-crooning excrement from “South Park,” where he is formally known as Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo.

This Man Knows Not How To Use Cell Phones!

A Manhattan judge overturns David Lemus’ conviction in the murder case of a Palladium bouncer killed in 1990 and the Times marvels about the specimen as he is released from captivity — “Free After 14 Years, and Learning to Use a Cell”:

In some ways, Mr. Lemus seemed like Rip Van Winkle. It was as if Mr. Lemus had been asleep for 14 years while the world moved on.

As he and his lawyers walked away from the courthouse, the lawyers handed him cellphones to talk to friends, and Mr. Lemus seemed to not know how to use them.