Mr. RENALDI in his nephew’s muscle car, as seen “on the Facebook.”

The comment I wrote that, curiously, ended up deleted:

I imagine your nephew telling his friends “What are you talking about? My gay uncle is the coolest. [TURNS PHONE TO FRIENDS] He looks cooler in my car than I do. So STFU.”

I just can’t win with Mr. RENALDI (MetaFilter; Fantastic Man).

Nicolas Winding Refn (no relation), The Treatment (2009.10.14, ≈22:49):

And then Bronson, that was kind of interesting, because I wanted to make a very feminine movie. Even though it was a film set in a prison dealing with very masculinity and violence, I wanted to make it very feminine. So I would listen to a lot of Pet Shop Boys. And that will drive you crazy, by the way, especially if you listen to it every single day for about three months. And my assistants were really starting to be annoyed. There’s only so many times you can hear “It’s a Sin.”

Because I did meet with the Pet Shop Boys about doing the music afterwards, but their attitude was like “You can’t afford us, baby” – which was probably right and actually very good, because what I ended up doing was that I started playing classical music.

Ryan Gosling:

I like to exercise. I don’t like to go to the gym. I like to do ballet. And I do gymnastics. Making muscles is boring. And they don’t do anything. They’re just like pets eventually. You have to feed them and take care of them.

Well, they’re not completely useless.

Muscles?

Yeah.

Gym muscles are useless. And they look stupid, because you can’t do anything with them. They have no practical use.

Okay, but did I read that you’re involved in some Thai-kickboxing movie?

Yeah. We shoot at the beginning of next year.

Who’s the director on that?

Nicolas Winding Refn…. And it’s also been fun, the press part, because when I come to a roundtable, I’ll leave and they’ll say, “Oh, so Nicolas said that you both made a movie baby in the back of your car.” Or like, “He penetrated you creatively. He impregnated you with a movie baby.”

We don’t do that at this table.

Put Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn together and what you should get is a remake of The Believer.

I just finish reviewing two issues of Eye and its lead writer, Steven Heller, “interviews” the magazine’s editor, John L. Walters, for the blog of a rival publication. Isn’t that bad enough? Well, it gets worse.

I have written for Eye since Number 1 and continue to admire the magazine’s ability to adjust to the new definitions of graphic design with smart and alluring journalism and commentary…. I am using the occasion of this auspicious Number 80 to reflect on the past and present with a few questions aimed at the esteemed editor.

Add in umpteen copy errors in this E-mail interview and what you end up with is the worst kind of logrolling in an already-debased demimonde of design “criticism.”

Coming up for issue 100

At the retirement party for an aged employee who doesn’t want to go, Wayland Heller puts on a floor show for John L. Burns.

Here is an official photo of a prototype of the Nissan NV200, New York’s Taxi of Tomorrow.

Quick: What design flaw will force millions upon millions of people to be seriously inconvenienced, and occasionally injured, year after year after year?

The passenger door handle. It’s vertical and you can only open it using your left hand. You have to rotate or pull the handle, then slide the door.

What’s wrong with this picture?

• Most people are right-handed. They will extend their right hand horizontally (palm down, thumb pointing left) to open the door. They will fail in that task twice over: The handle requires the other hand at a vertical angle.

• And even accepting that the design seems to work just fine for the minority that is left-handed, no one in that group naturally tries to open a car door with palm facing right and thumb at top.

• I am going to assume that the door handle is actually just a flap and you cannot actually wrap your fingers around it to get a grip and pull. I assume you have to use just your fingertips (endmost phalanges) to snap open the latch, and only then does the door flap pop up to become an actual handle. Then you have to drag the door open yourself. And while you’re trying to do that, you’re standing parallel to the door. How easy is it to drag a door transverse to your body?

• Power doors would not be a luxury item in a case like this. Of course they would break down. So fix them! Or invent a method by which the driver can open the doors manually, as in Japanese taxis.

• Even accepting that a sliding door has limited advantages, a horizontal handle you pull toward you with either hand, then use to slide the door, would be easy to include. But it won’t be.

  I predict New York City and Nissan will forge right ahead with a design flaw that will inconvenience millions of people millions of times a year and will never, ever get better. The level of inconvenience will never reduce. And some people, like those with arthritis, those with their left hand already full, and those who don’t have a left hand at all, will be shit out of luck.

  By design.

There’s a reason Mercedes-Benz engineers, as I have elsewhere read, insist that their genre of door handles, which are actual handles and can be grabbed onto with both hands by a fireman, are the only safe design.

Over a period of a month and a half, I contacted Nissan PR in Canada and the U.S. and the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission. Only the latter got back to me, not at all substantively.

Contrary evidence

On TV exactly once for five seconds, I saw B-roll that might suggest that the door handle, while still vertical, is raised off a depression and can be grasped with either hand. Even if true, it’s still vertical and your outstretched hand won’t be.

Do you loathe the word impactful? Well, try this on for size: Issue 78 (Winter 2010) of Eye, the (soi-disant) world’s most beautiful and collectible design magazine, is the least contentful in its entire run, worse even than Nº 76. [continue with: ‘Eye’ 78 & 79 →]

Warrior is an upcoming Lions Gate (perverse official orthography: LIONSGATE) motion picture somehow related to mixed martial arts. It stars Mr. TOM HARDY, the chameleonic and fascinating actor – never less so in his masculine roles (Bronson), because, when you get right down to it, masculine he isn’t. He loves his wife and only has eyes for the ladies, but needs a gay influence in his life and is half an æsthete. (And, whoops! that was also him – and his pinky – as Handsome Bob.) Like Messrs. FRANCO, REYNOLDS, COOPER, HAMM, and curiously many other actors, Mr. HARDY has left the 20th century behind.

I still object to the near-total overlap between young masculinity and guys beating the shit out of each other in an octagon. (More Nick Ring, fewer guys from the wrong side of the tracks.) But surely Warrior will be at least as unbad as Fighting.

Now, how does one promote a film like this? Lion’s Gate is a kind of artisanal shop. It’s almost like shooting Lord of the Rings in a barn in New Zealand, which Ian McKellen said really happened (they had to pause when planes flew overhead). A lot of the time, publicity head Tim Palen shoots a movie’s campaign. You’ll remember this polymath musclebear from the New Yorker’s inability to describe his phenotype accurately.

Here’s one of Palen’s photos for Warrior. (Unusually, they’re collected in a book.) People like me keep track of those things, and the resemblance to Steve Klein’s photoshoot of Justin Timberlake for Aréna Homme + is probably just coïncidental.

Nonetheless, wasn’t it a nice change of pace for Palen, maybe even meaningful, to be able to shoot masculine, homoerotic subjects like these for once?

More significant or important? Not really. Inspiring and fun for sure, which in part was because of the masculine nature of the subject but also because I’m a big MMA fan and I love the movie. I’m gay – and it’s all mixed up in there somewhere for sure, but I wouldn’t say significant or important. I’d say very lucky and blessed.

It is just no problem at all for a big strong old gay man to photograph for posterity one actor and fighter after another – half-naked, beaten to shit, in prime condition. Walk into it honestly and everyone feels respected. Now, Palen says it didn’t work that way (“Mostly these guys were on set playing fighters, so I was lucky enough to work with them when they were in that groove, and my camera wasn’t much different from the film camera”). But this would be another case of printing the legend.