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<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>The entire text of the following - plus
illustrations - can be found here:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT><A
href="http://www.suck.com/daily/98/12/21/">http://www.suck.com/daily/98/12/21/</A></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2><FONT size=2></FONT></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2><FONT size=2>[snip]</DIV>
<DIV>
<P>Then there's The Wall Street Journal.</P>
<P>If The Wall Street Journal were a person, it would live on a bus bench and
converse meaningfully with the passing traffic. Actual human beings, after all,
have a limited capacity for making sense of radically contradictory messages
bubbling up from different parts of the brain. Not so the strangest newspaper on
Earth. Day after day, largely without exception, the best reporting in the
country - the best reporting in the English-language press - appears on the
Journal's front page (and, really, throughout the news pages). Alix Freedman's
18 June story on the use of the antimalaria drug quinacrine to sterilize women
in the third world, for example, was rightly pointed to in the October issue of
Brill's Content as the kind of tough, smart journalism that can actually make
the world a measurably better place.</P>
<P>Rather impressively, the Journal also reaches deep into areas of the United
States that don't often show up in publications edited in New York; take the 13
November front-pager on an arson fire at a tiny Northern California town's high
school, a story that neatly explored the evolution of community in rural
American life. (For another recent example of the same kind of reporting, read
the 28 October page-one story on the controversy among onion farmers in Georgia;
another national paper would have made it seem quaint. It's not.)</P>
<P>And then, bellowing from the right side of the newsroom, there are the
hatchet-murderers on the editorial pages - hammering their polemics into a stone
tablet with primitive iron tools. Bill Clinton, he bad man. Dow go 15,000.
Liberal fire bad, burn. Max Boot.</P>
<P>And so it was an interesting set of possibilities that arose early this year,
when the Journal introduced a new lifestyle section to its Friday edition:
Ed-pages raw red meat stew, or elegantly prepared news side-supper? The section,
titled Weekend Journal, turned out to be both. It turned out - unlike the
wandering, identity-free Southern California Living - to be run by people who've
locked on to their demographic with remarkable clarity; folks who read the
Biddletown Post-Bugler probably wouldn't know how to relate, exactly, to a story
about "a growing number of wealthy pragmatists" who find that they
need a different kitchen for each wing and floor of their home, a story the
Weekend Journal came up with back in March. ("Cooking, after all, can be so
unglamorous - particularly in open-plan family kitchens where chaos is difficult
to conceal.") Nor would they murmur approvingly, we suspect, at the 20
November story on wine snobs who simply couldn't be expected to drink from
ordinary restaurant glasses. As the deliciously named Andy Kuntz, a frozen
custard retailer in Missouri, explains, his $75 Sommelier Hermitage glasses are
perfect if "it's a real classy dinner."</P>
<P>Meanwhile, the Journal's bizarre sane/not sane dichotomy drifts, at the end
of every week, into the Weekend section. There is, yes, a sort of cultural
editorial page at the back of the section, complete with a classy title that has
to make Andy Kuntz want to bust out the fancy stemware: It's called
"Taste." Among the recent tasteful contributions was deputy ed-pages
chief Max Boot's helpful explanation of the political differences between
professional athletes and professional entertainers. Footballers and baseballers
hang to the right, Boot explained, because they work at jobs that require
personal accomplishment; Hollywood types hang to the left, he continued, because
there are so many fucking Jews there. This isn't exactly how he phrased it, but
it's close enough for hand grenades or horseshoes. Or, you know, The Wall Street
Journal's editorial pages.</P>
<P>There's a terrific, nouveau piss-elegant scent wafting up from the Weekend
Journal, a delicious odor of frantically perfumed sweat from people who are
trying way, way too hard. And it makes for great reading.</P>
<P>Consider that there are plenty of people wandering this Earth - and Texas,
too - who make Steven Skilkin look elegantly restrained in the area of kitchen
architecture. A Los Angeles couple living in a 23,000-square-foot house (or
maybe we should call it a 23,000-square-foot "house") have kitchens on
each floor, with additional kitchens in the guest house, pool house, and tennis
court area. This, they explained to the Journal, isn't extravagance any more
than Skilkin's Willie Wonkaesque elevator-kitchen: It's just good healthful
common sense. "When the property is so big," explained Dr. Irene
Kassorla - a psychologist! - "you can't be running to the kitchen all the
time. You'd kill yourself."</P>
<P>Still better, mobile home park developer George Gradow and his wife,
Playmate-turned-actress Barbi Benton, maintain professional and residential
kitchens in their 27,500-square-foot Aspen home, known locally as the
"double double-wide." (Who but a mobile home park developer could
reasonably be married to Playmate-turned-actress Barbi Benton? And who but Barbi
Benton could be married to one of the nation's most important mobile home park
developers? See how elegant fate is?) And real estate developer Dennis Pryor and
his wife "like the fact that having a commercial kitchen minimizes their
contact with food preparation." ("We're very much offended by cooking
smells," Pryor explains.)</P>
<P>Finally, wonderfully, caterer-to-the-silly-rich Colin Cowie describes
precisely the value of keeping a kitchen near each and every individual section
of your home. "You have the ability to alarm the rest of the house,"
he explains, "and remain in an isolated capsule."</P>
<P>Here we have something approaching heaven: isolated in an alarm-encased
capsule, free from the nasty old world, swaddled inside the private world you
built with your mobile home park fortune.</P>
<P>And the best part? You'll have something to read while you're there.</P>
<P>courtesy of Ambrose Beers</P>
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