for 10 April 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Tim Cavanaugh
Special Guest Editor

Terry Colon
Art Director

Heather Havrilesky
Senior Editor

Joey Anuff
Publisher

Seriously, Tom, who died and made you Harry Reasoner?

David Warner
<dave@ninthkey.com>

Harry Reasoner.

p.s. You should have seen me flip out when Reagan was shot.

Best,

40th Street Black

Tom,

I enjoyed your piece on taxi mythos, although I'm not certain there was a point to it. If the point was to establish a taxonomy of cultural cab references, let me add two more that I feel were unjustly left out. On the other end of the spectrum from Taxi Driver, if equally gritty, is the 1998 film HellCab, in which Paul Dillon turns in a stoic tour DaFoe as a cab driver that picks up every nut in Chicago (like John Cusack, Gillian Anderson and Julianne Moore). File under: Working Class Anthem/Anathema. And how could any discussion on our perceptions of the big-city cabbie be complete without a nod to Sega's Gen. X, product placement vehicle, Crazy Taxi. Dig the demographics of both the cab drivers one can play as (the Lug, the Babe, the Rastafarian and the singer from Green Day?), and the fares one can pick up around the hip, VR town (African Americans tend to want to go to the KFC). OK, maybe that's a different column, but file under: Cultural Hyperbole.

Cheers,

Dr. Nathan The Freshmaker

Hi, Nathan:

Since "Tour Dafoe" is funnier than anything I wrote, I'm going to take all your advice to heart. I think my point was there exists an overwhelming and highly mutable cultural whispering-in-the-ear from cabbie culture to general American making-sense-of-stuff. I was sort of overwhelmed by the amount of material that surfaced when I started checking around, and a great deal of it didn't make it into an already-long article, thus sort of proving my point.

Hellcab I'm familiar with in both its largely unsuccessful movie (as I recall, the title was changed to Chicago Cab, and curiously got a lot of press as a change-of-pace move for the then-hot Gillian Anderson) and its amazingly lengthy, discourage-the-other-Chicago-theater-companies run as a late-night Windy City mainstay. In both forms, it does serve as a nice bookend to Taxi Driver, you're right. Viva Paul Dillon. The videogame, on the other hand, is a new one on me. For something not around when you need one, those damn taxis are everywhere.

Best,

40th Street Black

"Anyone over five feet tall, crammed into the truncated space left by a security shield in a converted car flagged down on Chicago's Miracle Mile, will grow wistful for the legroom of yesteryear's cabs."

I thought Chicago had a Magnificent Mile, not a miracle mile....

Erik Nelson
<EM-Nelson1@bigfoot.com>

Hi, Erik.

If this were a movie, right now would be the time I'd give you blankface stare, distract you, jump in a cab and speed away. Ugh. Maybe we can find a nice street in Lincoln Park and make that the Miracle Mile? I could never catch a cab up there, for some reason.

Best,

40th Street Black

surprised you didn't bring up London's black cabs. With their codes of behavior and cleanliness, and the requirement to learn every street of the city (called "The Knowledge"), being a London cabbie is the blue-collar Londoner version of being a professional, or a member of a military elite.

Mitch Wagner
<mwagner@world.std.com>

Hi, Mitch.

Thanks for reading the piece. I wish I had made some sort of reference to London cab culture in the piece so I could better pretend to be a completist. But there's so much material available, all of it quite distinct — in terms of cab culture England really does seem an island unto itself, stretching all the way back to that oft-reprinted Dickens profile. The contrast, particularly as it touches on class, probably deserves its own article someday in another publication.

Best,

40th Street Black

40th,

Man, I can't believe I sent that item including the mention of "Night on Earth" before I finished reading your piece.

I got caught up in a frenzy of remembering the film but not the name, going off to imdb.com, flashing back to the old days, etc. Then, on top of that, imdb doesn't even have Benigni on the first page, which also threw me.

More flashbacks, but much much hazier:

— National Lampoon's "My Meter is Running" column.

— In the late 1970s in Japan, cabbies (and, for that matter, airplane pilots) wore white gloves. I have no idea if the custom persists, but let's see how THAT plays in San Diego.

Ned Kittlitz
<kittlitz@world.std.com>

Hi, Ned.

Thanks for writing — twice! I understand the confusion on Night on Earth, particularly as I'll take any opportunity to blame IMDB for anything I can. I'm not sure why.

The white gloves is a new one on me. Like most articles of this type, there was just a ton of information on taxi practices in other countries which I couldn't include for space reasons. One connecting thread — which I don't think made it into the final draft — was how taxi drivers have seemingly become the lazy international reporter's common man of choice, profiled endlessly and plumbed for local insight. Over time, that has to have as distorting an effect as seeing New York City through cabbies' eyes would be.

Best,

40th Street Black

It must really have galled you to admit that Horowitz is right about leftist fascists at major universities. And then you add, unbelievingly, in so many words that "who cares if there is free speech on campus or not". Ah, now I get it, academia is supposed to be fascist! Gee, all these years and I thought universities were supposed to encourage free exchange of ideas. Thanks for clearing that one up for me.

Another of your weird takes is your apparent lack of awareness of the enormous amount of speeches and articles gurgling out daily from the reparations for Blacks crowd i.e. just about every Black politician, and magazine and newspaper columnist. My own university UW-La Crosse just had a "symposium" on race which strongly accented this very issue as reported by my hometown newspaper. If you don't think it's being propagated by many as an important issue, tell it to those people. If Gore or Bradley had been elected, this would be front and center a huge issue in Congress. So Horowitz tries to counter this nefarious avalanche by race hustlers and poverty pimps preaching to the academically deluded by getting his counter-argument published, and of course to you he's just a self-aggrandizing rabble-rouser.

But at least you realize there are leftist fascists. You seem to be able to grasp a few things. There may be hope for you yet.

sincerely yours

John Butala
<DRIFTLESS@webtv.net>

Thanks, John. Although you've mastered the art of assuming every interlocutor is a leftist/liberal/democrat until proven innocent (which is also the MO of great Horowitz himself), I plead not guilty of any of those labels. Nothing galls me except the fact that you claim to be in college in the United States and have a pretty questionable grasp of how to write an English sentence.

Somehow, it's not too surprising that you hear plenty of speeches about slavery reparations. That, as I indicated, is because you are in college, where the population generally doesn't have to worry about putting food on the table and can indulge in flights of fancy.

Which brings me to your misuse of words: I believe you want to say "unbelievably" rather than "unbelievingly". Unless you're accusing me of being a non-believer. Or unless you think "supposably" is a word too. And the phrase "in so many words" means exactly the opposite of what you apparently meant for it to mean.

My advice: Can the student activism and hit the fucking books. It's a tough world out there.

yr pal,

Addison DeWit