Bloodless Coup

Btw, in the photo of New York (probably not the angle I would have used), does anyone remember what that building is that's just a little right of center? The one with the tall tv/radio tower that might look approppriate in Tokyo? I've having a brain freeze on that.

is that the conde nast building? i know it's one of the newer ones, and that's the one that comes to mind in roughly that location.

a propos the list generally, i think sao paolo should get bumped to hon. mention and pittsburgh moved into the top 15. but then i'm biased.

Well, if one is going to be bumped for Pittsburgh (which I could also support of course) if should be Sao Paolo (at least given that awful photo), Seattle or Frankfurt (and I'd likely bump those down in that order).

Oh, and yeah, given the location that's got to be the Conde Nast building. I guess forgetting that is what I get for having so far gone my entire life without having gone to Times Square. Not that I have any desire to go there - quite the opposite in fact.

you have to see times square. it's far more new york than people give it credit for, and the scale and thrum of it are incomparable. i just revisited the list. i also thought frankfurt could go. seattle, notsomuch -- it's newer than pittsburgh and has the mountains in the background as well as much more interesting geological features, waterfront, etc.

I love Manhattan, but I came withing about a block and half of that monstrosity once and I just couldn't take it. It was like it was trying too hard to be New York - or the New York that developers who supposedly love New York would want it to be. I now actively avoid it.

Hey, it gives me purpose - and how can you be in New York and not look down on something. :)

Give me the Villages, Central Park, the upper West Side, even Chelsea.

And if you count nature of course Seattle should stay on the list. I was simply thinking of it in terms of the buildings.

maybe from constant exposure to the city generally as a child, i'm immune, although of course times square now is nothing like it was then. even so, i find time square entertaining for all the reasons you find it intolerable. i think there's this shared nostalgia for a new york that never tried, but that's ridiculous -- new york has always been the very seat of affectation and self-aware reinvention. it's only fiting that the city is equally caught up in the same frantic malaise.

Just for you Moon, Gabriel at ModFab had this to say about Times Square today: I, Hate, Tourists -This was my mantra as I traveled Manhattan this weekend, where warm weather brought the photograph-obsessessed sidewalk hogs out in droves. I got especially homicidal trying to make the rounds of Times Square, where every corner was packed with immobile, open-mouthed rubes from Sheboygan agog at all the neon lights.

Gee, who wouldn't love that. :)

yeah, well that is the downside. my favorite Times Square observation: once, i walked a block or two behind a couple in matching silk black mickey mouse varsity jackets holding hands. $80 of jacket for which they paid $400 on display for all to see, their saccharine consumerist romance. ick.