Pale Wire (Popscene)

2006-07-02T23:40:00.000-04:00

Oh, duh.
I have a new blog

Just in case anybody cares, last month I started up a new version of the blog over at www.palewire.com. You should now consider this Web site inactive.

2006-05-15T21:47:00.000-04:00

The Short Version
Where you been?

In the days, rather weeks, of my absence (abdication?), I've been doing little of which we can be proud, yet much of which I could report, a condition I'm sure must be a terrifying prospect for you, kind reader. I promise to keep it short. My coffee is getting cold and the staff here at Amphora, Vienna's finest 24-hour Greek diner, seems ready to welcome the departure of this loitering blogger.

In between settling in at my new job, finding a permanent home for myself in Washington, and fulfilling the final requirements of my graduate program, I've managed to drive many thousands of miles in several long, tiresome treks and read several books in many short, invigorating bursts.

I finally did my duty and read the lodestar of my would-be profession, Woodward and Bernstein's All The President's Men, as well as the pair's authoritative summation of their antagonist's decline, The Final Days. While the former book is credited with setting the templates of manner and means for a generation of reporters, the latter's innovation of the practices that Woodward would go on to employ in erecting a shelf full of inside stories on subjects varying from Belushi to Bush deserves mention. As does Woodward's oftentimes boring, albeit occasionally revelatory, writing. August Kleinzahler's collection of poems, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, provided more spark, but in fitful, inchoate moments ferreted away from the day, rather than in any sustained, satisifying meal. Mahmood Mamdani's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim taught me many things about Muslim societies, put American foreign policy in a historical context considerably different than what I'm accustomed to, and provoked me to examine a few assumptions about how exactly this world of ours works. It's shame he doesn't give Soviet policy in Afghanistan the same scrutiny as America's. Backstory, Ken Auletta's collection of New Yorker pieces on newspapers and the media, went well. I enjoy how he can put all the players on the board in what seems such an facile way. His writing makes me feel like I get it. And the steady focus on the business side of the media business is refreshing in comparison to the windy prate that passes for so much of media criticism. John Baxter's memoir A Pound of Paper didn't teach me much, but the guy did make a great drinking partner. Baxter is like A.J. Liebling without the deadline, a gourmand on the make. The now departed Saul Bellow's ode to his departed friend Allan Bloom, Ravelstein, introduced me to another grand homme, this one more literary than the last only in commensuration to his Jewishness.

2006-04-30T22:14:00.000-04:00

Does C-SPAN have a copyright lawyer?
Ah, whatever, this is too funny to be illegal.

2006-04-22T20:27:00.000-04:00

The Shooters Roll
Tune in to that NOLA Bounce

As I write, results are beginning to trickle in after the opening round in New Orleans' first mayoral election since hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the region last fall (Times-Picayune coverage). The elite media is refocusing yet again, and New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh is wondering why a particular part of the city's highly touted heritage is going unappreciated (link).

There was a blitz of benefit concerts, including "From the Big Apple to the Big Easy," a pair of shows held simultaneously at Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall last September. A New Orleans jam session closed the show at the Grammy Awards in February. There have been scads of well-intentioned compilations, including "Our New Orleans: A Benefit Album for the Gulf Coast" (Nonesuch), "Hurricane Relief: Come Together Now" (Concord) and "Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Benefit Concert" (Blue Note), a live album recorded at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Benefit. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony last month, a video segment paid tribute to New Orleans music through the years, from Louis Armstrong to the Neville Brothers; there was also the inevitable New Orleans jam session.

But one thing all these tributes have in common is that they all ignored the thrilling — and wildly popular — sound of New Orleans hip-hop, the music that has been the city's true soundtrack through the last few decades.

Rap music remains by far New Orleans's most popular musical export. Lil Wayne, Master P, Juvenile, Mannie Fresh, B. G., Mystikal and many other pioneers have sold millions of albums, and they have helped make their city an indispensable part of the hip-hop world. Unlike all the other musicians celebrated at post-Katrina tributes, these ones still show up on the pop charts, often near the top. (Juvenile's most recent album made its debut at No. 1, last month.) Yet when tourists and journalists descend upon the city next weekend, for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, they'll find only one local rapper on the schedule: Juvenile, who is to appear on the Congo Square Louisiana Rebirth Stage at 6 p.m. Saturday.

I largely agree with Sanneh's thesis. Despite its widespread popularity with young Americans and the commericalization that's come along with success, hip-hop is still too young, too wild, too black to share the warm embrace the state and society now extend to blues, jazz and rock musicians shunned a generation ago.

But, while Ray Nagin and George Bush may not be throwing Juvenile any shoutouts this election year, there is still an underground effort going on to memorialize NOLA's hip-hop history.

Thanks to a tip from David Drake (blog), I've discovered an .mp3 mix of early New Orleans hip-hop (a variant strain known as "bounce music") uploaded by the elegantly named cocaineblunts last September. It's called Bounce for Relief. It's hot. It's here. And it's free for download, although dude asks that any downloaders make a contribution to Katrina charities. If you give it a go, leave your impression in the comments. We'll chat.

2006-04-19T20:54:00.000-04:00

If there was a Pulitzer Prize for patience
I'd nominate you, my friends.

Sorry I've been so inactive this past month. There's no good excuse. I've been busy with things even I'm not stupid enough to blog about and simply have not made the time.

As a peace offering, here's a blooper I just captured from WashingtonPost.com. I think we're all continually crestfallen by the milquetoast headlines the Webdesk churns out for the paper's online offerings¹, but this is an entirely different thing.

I can't say which story I want to read less.

¹I'm unable find it just now, but I swear I read a story the other day that profiled news sites dumbing down their headlines in hopes of attracting greater attention from search engines, which send spiders to crawl the Web in pursuit of certain basic keywords. Maybe that's Post.com good excuse. But I don't see how it alone could explain away lines as bland as "Sprucing up the Place" or as vague as "DeLay Charge Stays Outs," both of which adorned the same page I clipped up above.

2006-03-24T07:47:00.000-05:00

Anatomically Incorrect
Does Bill O'Reilly know his way around a brain pan?

(foxnews.com)

Midway through Nicholas Lemann's profile of Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly in this week's edition of The New Yorker, which you can read in its entirety by following this link, we're treated to what is fast becoming one of my favorite reportorial devices: quoting from your subject's vanity novel.

While nowhere near as revelatory as the bizarre bestiality scenes New Yorker writer Lauren Collins uncovered last year in Scooter Libby's Japanese historical fantasy "The Apprentice" (link), the graphic murder scene Lemann pulls from O'Reilly's 1998 thriller "Those Who Trespass¹" is still telling. And particularly so once you appreciate that the victim is a stand in for CBS newsman Bob Schieffer and the killer's hand belongs to you know who.

The assailant’s right hand, now holding the oval base of the spoon, rocketed upward, jamming the stainless stem through the roof of Ron Costello’s mouth. The soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent’s brain stem. Ron Costello was clinically dead in four seconds.

At different times likening O'Reilly's "amazingly nimble talent" to a beat cop, boxer and jungle cat, Lemann tries to capture the essence of the man who is the essence of cable news. In the context of the article, the book quote is there to hammer home how vindictive O'Reilly can be when he feels slighted.

What Lemann declines to do is point out that the quote can tell us something else, something that doesn't require any armchair analysis. That is this: Bill O'Reilly is a bad writer.

Let's look at it again, shall we. The chain of events O'Reilly describes has a spoon shooting upward through the roof of his victim's mouth and into the brain stem. The problem is that the brain stem, a column consisting of the midbrain, the pons and the medulla oblongata which serves as the relay station between the spinal cord and the forebrain, stands behind the mouth, not above it.

(brainexplorer.org)

But, then again, this is O'Reilly. Maybe we just need to factor in the spin.

¹Two editions of the book retail on Amazon.com, each with a slightly different title. The hardcover is "Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Murder and Television;" the paperback is "Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder." You can also buy the audiobook, which was recorded by the author himself.

2006-03-18T22:58:00.000-05:00

Articles of Faith
Following al Qaeda's paper trail

On Friday military intelligence quietly declassified a few Qaeda-related documents not included to last month's Harmony report (link). It's nearly always an illuminating thing to read Bin Laden and Co.'s internal correspondance, but after a couple years spent absorbing this stuff, it's the little things that really get me.

Things like how despite al Qaeda's generous vacation policy¹ members still had to submit requests for time off "2 1/2 months prior to travel" (link). And the fact that vacations are the second thing listed in its constitution. Or how about the stunning banality of the forms given to new applicants at training camps in Afghanistan (link)? I couldn't make this up: They actually asked applicants to list their hobbies.

Speaking of the military, on Wednesday I got an email back from our friend Penny Mellies in Fort Leavenworth. I sent her a short note asking for an explanation of the bizarre bar chart I wrote about earlier this week (link). Her complete response:

From a US perspective, it is meant to reflect the strategic importance of that region.

I've already sent her a reply that expressed my confusion about the lack of labels on the chart's x and y axes and requested further clarification on how something like strategic importance could be measured. She has yet to answer.

¹One week per month if you're married; five days if you're single. You also may interested to learn that a married member made 6.5 times more money than a single member, pulling in 6500 Pakistan rupees each month, compared to a bachelor's 1000 rupee salary.

2006-03-18T20:29:00.000-05:00

Someone call Jack Bauer!
Ben set his hair on fire again.

Excluding from consideration the perpetually dumbfounding realm of the cosmos, and the numbing rows of zeros we line up in a feeble human effort to account for its grand arc, there is, every once in a great while, a statistic that just blows my little mind.

For a time, my pet marvel was the estimate that 20,000 coal miners die each year in Chinese mines¹. That's Sago times 1,666.667.

My new nugget comes out of the U.S. Department of Transportation's 2006 pocket book. Here, dear reader, is a listing of the prohibited items intercepted at American airports in 2003 and 2004. It's too wide for my blog, so you'll have to click on the picture to see it at a decent size.

Yes, that is 22,000 box cutters².

¹In fairness, the Chinese government's official estimate is 6,000 deaths per year (link). The Hong Kong based Chinese Labour Bulletin put forward the 20,000 estimate (link). In fact, I now see that CLB just put out a new mining safety report on Thursday. Unfortunately I can't read Chinese. If you can, go here and report back what it says.
²Box cutters were the primary weapons used by many of the September 11 hijackers (link)

Category 3_

2006-03-15T09:19:00.000-05:00

WMD, it ain't
But my does it look pressing.

Anyone who can tell me what that chart means wins the sandwich of their choice. I swear to goodness itself that I found it in the U.S. Army's new pocket guide to Arab culture. I suspect it's supposed to be a breakdown of the regions where Arab people live, but its lack of supporting information and the mysterious header give it a geopolitical bent that boggles the mind.

You can read the whole thing by clicking here.

The chart is in on the fourth page, along with these tasty nuggets:

I've sent an email asking for clarification to Penny Mellies, the contact person listed for the guide's creator, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. If you want to call her, her phone number is listed as 913.684.7920/DSN552-7920.

If you could tell me what that DSN means, I'd appreciate that too. But no sandwich.

2006-03-14T09:31:00.000-05:00

The Gospel Gap
Someone link Bernie Goldberg

(stateofthemedia.org)

The Project of Excellence in Journalism just released their third annual State of the News Media report, which includes the poll results displayed above. The chart sets responses from members of the local and national media next to those harvested from the general public in a 2002 Pew Center poll (link).

What we see is that journalists are, if not largely godless, at least much more secular in their outlook than a large segment of their audience. Look, even the journalists who describe themselves as conservative lean toward secular sources of principle.

How all this affects the media's work, the numbers can't say, but the gap itself is interesting. There's an argument to be made here about rationality and Enlightenment principles and yadda yadda. What do you think?

That's just one nugget. There's plenty more to be digested over at the official site.

2006-03-14T06:19:00.000-05:00

Quoth the avian, "Nevermore."
Deep into the darkness peering, long we stood there, wondering, fearing

(smh.com.au)

Yesterday the economists at investment bank BMO Nesbitt Burns released their best guess on what an avian flu pandemic would look like (full report). Travel and tourism business would plummet, as would the demand for "nonessential services." We'd experience something called "social distancing." World GDP growth would slow somewhere between 2 and 6 percentage points, depending on the severity of the outbreak. And government and health care services would likely be run beyond "surge capacity."

On the upside, there's this:

It is important to remember that even with a severe pandemic, roughly 99% of the world’s population will survive. Borders will reopen and the free flow of goods, services and people will recommence. The global economy will survive the hit, and business and governments will learn many lessons.

On the downside, there's this: If we use the U.S. Census estimates as a starting point (link), that's 65 million dead people. I'm not really sure what the report means, but that number certainly makes this projection feel truthy.

Death management is crucial, but likely inadequate.

There's an aphorism for you.

For background information on avian flu and the potential for an outbreak, check the CDC's official page.

2006-03-12T08:01:00.000-05:00

Sunday in the City
Watch as Ben boldly splits infinitives by this Borg-like structure¹

Here I am, blogging live from the Starbucks on the corner of Lafayette and Astor in the self-proclaimed navel of the universe, New York City. It's 8:01 a.m, the 6 train just let out, and a crowd of weary-eyed New Yorkers are fielding their way through trash littered around the square, which is really more of a triangle. In its center is the 2,500 pound cube sculpted by Bernard Rosenthal and installed in 1967². You can see it pictured above. (You can also see an inspired and painstakingly documented prank involving the cube by clicking here.)

Anyway, I'm in New York. That's about all I have to share. I haven't gotten around to installing a nifty post tagging system like some other blogs have, but if I did I bet most of what I splurt out here could probably be categorized as either Books I've Read or Music I've Liked. So we're breaking fresh ground.

It's too bad it's raining, because I planned on walking through most of Midtown, the West Village, across Central Park and bathing in the lights surrounding Times Square before catching the train home to Washington from Penn Station. But such is the stratosphere, and so it's going. Maybe I'll make it back sometime.

¹For more information on the grave threat posed by the Borg cube armada, click here.
²Source: New York Magazine (Although the mag and the pranksters at All Too Flat sport differing opinions on the cube's height. The mag says it's 15 feet tall. The nerds, who claim to have harnessed the mysterious forces of trigonometry, say it's closer to 12. My money's on nerd magic.

2006-03-03T17:21:00.000-05:00

The Sam Donaldson Show
ABC newsman lets it all hang out for MU J-Students

(Dick Swanson)

Earlier this afternoon, Sam Donaldson used the sheer power of personality to hold me and a dozen of my classmates from the University of Missouri captive in the ABC News Washington bureau for more than two hours.

Running roughshod over the entire political history of the United States from 1960 to present, Donaldson ventured to rate the performance of each White House press secretary, offered imitations of characters ranging from George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan to Sen. Everett M. Dirksen, shared stories from his days as a restless young Republican in El Paso, Texas, expressed grave concerns over the current state of union, and even cajoled our gentle program director, former UPI White House correspondent Wes Pippert, into performing an improvised pantomime of the Cheney-Whittington mishap that featured Donaldson wheeling wildly out of a crouch and pretending to shoot a dumbfounded Pippert with an imaginary shotgun.

Collected below are some of the highlights from my notes. Donaldson was rolling too fast for me to get everything down, so I've limited this report to what I recorded hard and fast. His speech is punctuated with self-deprecating asides and anecdotal tangents. I was so busy scribbling down the substance of what he said that I often left those out. Assume that any ...'s signal such a remark. I've also juggled things around a bit to organize the quotes by topic¹. Believe me, this only scratches the surface.

On blowups at White House press conferences:

"There's often a kabuki dance going on. The thing to do is to find out what's really going on. It's very difficult.

You're seeing just a small portion [of a reporter's newsgathering]. By the end of the day what you get [in the press room] is only a portion of your story. ... The idea is that's what we're all about.

We can't win. If [the secretary] stays cool, he looks like a calm font of knowledge being beset upon. The impression doesn't transmit what's really going on there.

Reporters don't want to see a president fail. Why would they want to see a president fail?

Advice for any press secretary:

"Tell the truth! You can bob and you can weave and you don't have to voluteer that the emperor has no clothes." But you have to accept "that what we're doing is the American way, if you will. We're not the enemy."

Rating past podium jockeys:

Pierre Salinger

Donaldson referred to him only briefly as "the plucky Pierre Salinger."

Ron Ziegler

He "was the worst one in modern times. He lied. ... Ron Ziegler bought into the fact that he would lie about Watergate. ... His reputation never recovered."

Jody Powell

He "was a good one." He and Carter "were so close that he knew everything."

Marlin Fitzwater

"Marlon was the best." ... That's because "he understood our job. ... He put the president in the best light without treating the press like they were complete fools."

Dee Dee Myers

They didn't give her a chance. ... They didn't give her the information.

Mike McCurry

"He was good, but he knew just as well as all of us that Clinton was lying."

Scott McClellan

Doesn't have "the experience of Marlin Fitzwater, the close access of Powell or the savoir-faire of McCurry."

On Ronald Reagan:

"I found it impossible to dislike him."

On George W. Bush:

"This is not a dumb guy."

"The president came to power not really understanding the world having not been out in the world."

On how his administration handles the press:

They've been "arrogance 101 personified" and are "acting like they still have a 91 percent approval rating."

"The president and his men have a job to do and we have another job to do. We're all good Americans." .. They act like "we're the enemy, to some of them. They're cutting their own nose off."

On America in Iraq²:

"We're fools. ... The hope was that they let us get out before they kill each other...Tit-for-tat. Not that that's what their religion is about, but it's going to happen. We can't stop it, in my opinion."

"Mao said power grows out of the barrel of a gun, but in the end it comes from ideas. That's why we can't win in Iraq."

On the UAE port deal:

"I think the president's right. I think there's not a security issue."

On female presidential candidates:

"Five years ago I would have said there could well not be a way even if she walked across the tidal basin in a white robe. ... Today, I think yes--but not just any woman.³"

On the important role cameramen play in television news:

"Television is pictures. It's not some guy standing there. It's not good writing, although you can appreciate that regardless of media. It's the pictures."

On the future:

"Friedman's right. The world is flat."

On his career:

"I'm proud to say I'm a member of the old school. We make a lot of mistakes. We're lazy. But we try, we make the effort in a distinguished way."

¹ In other words, not all of this is in chronological order. He was, to use his own phrase, bobbing and weaving from topic to topic, often returning with knockout force to a theme he'd only jabbed in the earlier rounds.
²This was prefaced by an erudite recounting of the history of Iraq's formation and a direct comparison to the fractured former Yugoslavia.
³Hillary Clinton stands a chance, Donaldson said. Although he'd pick John McCain over her today (who he sees an unlikely GOP candidate). By 2008, he said things are likely to be fundamentally different than they are today.

2006-03-02T09:10:00.000-05:00

Know Your Rights
Or at least imagine cooler ones.

(National Archives)

The McCormick Tribune Museum just put out the results of a poll gauging how well we, the people, know the rights enumerated in the first amendment to our Constitution.

I think you can guess where this is going.

To their credit, 70 pecent of respondants didn't need to be reminded of their freedom of speech. But just 28 percent could name two of their rights, and less than 1 percent—in fact, just one lone dude out of the randomly selected sample of 1000¹—could name all five freedoms.

Pollers also asked respondants if they could name all five members of the cartoon Simpson family or all three judges on American Idol. Har har, tired, easy and apples/oranges. What's really bizarre, and about as troubling as I'll allow this sort of poll to be in my life, is the number of people who selected "the right to own and raise pets" (21 percent) or "the right to drive a car²" (17 percent) from a multiple-choice list. Here's hoping they were just screwing around.

The margin of error is listed as 3 percent. You can read the full results report, including the polling instrument, here. A few frequenters of PaleWire are experts in this sort of thing. I'd love to hear their thoughts.

And, for all you forgetful freedom lovers out there, here's the full text of the amendment itself:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. (source)

¹1000 is also the sample size used by The Gallup Organization (source)
²The Bill of Rights was ratified into law in 1791 (source). While determining the origin of the automobile requires first determining the defintion of an automobile, the mass production of what we would call a car (a vehicle propelled by a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine) did not begin until more than 100 years later.

2006-02-28T21:40:00.000-05:00

It's the Same Old Song
Ladies, shall you overcome?

Here are the latest stats from the US Labor Department on women in the workplace. The new 2005 fact sheet barely speaks to the gender pay gap singled out by a number of advocacy groups, but it does hold a few things of interest.

Some indicators point toward equality at the top:

Women accounted for 50% of all workers in the high-paying management, professional, and related occupations. They outnumbered men in such occupations as financial managers; human resource managers; education administrators; medical and health services managers; accountants and auditors; budget analysts; loan counselors and officers; property, real estate, and community association managers; social and community service managers; preschool, kindergarten, elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers; and registered nurses.

And the bottom:

The unemployment rate for both women and men was 5.1%.

But it's not all pant suits and shattered glass ceilings. I wonder if these numbers attempt to include illegal aliens working service jobs:

The median weekly earnings of women who were full-time wage and salary workers were $585, or 81 percent of men’s $722. When comparing the median weekly earnings of persons aged 16 to 24, young women earned 93% of what young men earned ($381 and $409, respectively).

2006-02-28T07:21:00.000-05:00

Oh no, it's happened again
Ben's gone laces over faces for a wispy Norwegian pop singer

(nrk.no)

Thanks to a link from the right and honorable gentleman Matthew Perpetua, curator of the sensational mp3 tipsheet Fluxblog (link), I've totally lost my head over the new single from Marit Larsen.

ABBA keys, pop hooks, flightly female vocals, HANDCLAPS, and dozens of little sonic Twinkies stuffed underneath the sofa cushions, "Don't Save Me" has sent me spinning. I'm told it's hit No. 1 in Norway.

I didn't know a thing about the woman before a few hours ago, but this Web site, which names Larsen "the best singer, songwriter, guitarist and pianist in the world," reports that she's 5'2" and nearly a year yonger than I am. That's all great, but she could be a registered sex offender at this point and I'd probably let it slide.

Download the single from Flux.
Watch the music video.
Buy the CD.
Read the much more informative Wikipedia entry.

2006-02-26T15:11:00.000-05:00

Bloggers Better Think Twice
Spare the mainstream media, or bring this dull work on yourself.

(The CIA World Factbook)

If you're a bookish type interested in boning up the port leasing flap rattling around Washington, you might be interested in browsing a few of the original documents that reporters, as well as government researchers and decision makers, are reexamining.

Here are five:

The State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor's most recent profile on the United Arab Emirates.

Link
Bonus: State Department Background Notes

The Rasmussen poll showing that just 17 percent of Americans favor the deal moving ahead and Democrats making big gains in public perception on national security issues.

Link (Summary is free but you have to register for detailed data)

The former 9/11 Commission's Fall 2005 report card on the government's progress toward meeting the recommendations in its original report. They gave the administration and Congress a D for its progress in the task of improving baggage and cargo screening on the seas and in the air.

Link

The 9/11 Commission's original report, which explicitly stated that "the vast majority of the money funding the Sept. 11 attacks flowed through the UAE"%, revealed that individual Emirati princes were suspected of being in close contact with Osama Bin Laden and introduced us further to Ali Abdul Aziz Ali^ and Mustafa al Hawsawi*, two Al Qaeda operatives accussed of aiding the hijackers financially and logistically from within the UAE.

Link

The already infamous# "HELL NO!" letter written to President Bush by Congresswoman Sue Myrick (R-North Carolina)

Link

% Footnote 32 on page 40 here
^ Last I heard, captured in 2003 (source) and currently held at an unknown location.
* Last I heard, captured in 2003 (source) and currently held at an unknown location.
# Bill Kristol called it "idiotic" on Fox News Sunday this morning.

2006-02-24T08:41:00.000-05:00

Mayor Williams' faith-based egotism
and DC's biblical struggle to keep its baseball team.

(Evan Vucci/AP)

You needn't hold a stake in district government's struggle over whether to construct a new stadium for its new baseball franchise, The Washington Nationals (née les Expos de Montréal), to appreciate the vainglory on display in Mayor Anthony Williams' blog post of Feburary 15, 2006 (link).

After leading with the assurance, still unrealized more than a week later, that his post will be nothing more than a casual aside before returning to the important business of answering email from DC citizens, Williams uses the "perverse problem" of the stadium battle to ponder the existential question he reads on the minds of every upstanding citizen: Nagged by empty-headed cynics, unsettled by the anomie of modernity, burdened by the weight of responsibility in a world of pain and suffering, where does Mayor Williams find the strength to be Mayor Williams?

How do I bear the relentless, incessant criticism? How do I function in a low – make that zero gratification – environment? How do I keep, or do I keep my wits in the midst of the cacophony we call local democracy? Let’s see, baseball’s feels betrayed, the council feels excluded, the citizens are anywhere from puzzled, penalized, and/or patronized, and the media is unmerciful. What to do?

One can look the other way, but this is not a good practice when crossing the interstate of local politics. One can try to ingratiate one’s self with the powers that be in hopes of clemency, but would you believe this fails my high standards of integrity? No? Well just accept that it simply doesn’t work. Oh, and I know, one can savor the criticisms for lessons learned or sift the sands of experience for deeper meaning, and this sounds good. The problem comes when you realize a lot of the criticism is, while well-intentioned, uninformed, self-interested, and or inconsistent. What happens when the judge in the flip-flop competition is flip-flopping himself?

Where to go, not for policy advice but for inner strength? Over the years I’ve stopped in many places looking for help and consolation. I’ve made it a point to read the great philosophers. The illumination is brilliant, but it’s a harsh, cold, light. In fact, it’s a brutal, barren world out there. Philosophy and the sciences have their place, but they only take you so far. Religion for me has come to play a central role. Really. I mean it. I’m not some evangelical wrestling you down asking demanding you be saved. I’m just saying that it provides a kind of warm hearth on a cold winter night (the kind we used to have before global warming).

You need an inner kind of gyroscope to stay steady in order to, as my Dad always said, keep your eye on the ball. At one of the interminable meetings in the baseball process one of the attorneys told me I had the patience of Job. I took this as a real compliment, because Job, with a book in Hebrew Scriptures in his name, brought us one of the great and dramatic poems in literature. To do this he endured the loss of his family, the removal of his property, the affliction of a terrible disease, and last but not least, a sorrow not even seen on Oprah! He asked God for a sign and God told him to well, trust Him. And Job did. That’s a powerful lesson of faith and hope against all obstacles.

I’ll just leave this way. I heard this reading in a mass I recently attended. It’s so appropriate for the public servant – with emphasis on the service. Seventy percent of the time we’re taking dinner orders and it’s our job to salute smartly and serve our boss, the citizens. Thirty percent of the time, however, we’re required to lead, whatever the hardships and discontent. And that’s what we’re doing with difficult decisions. We’re going to take incoming fast balls aimed at our heads, but we’ve got to stay strong, trying to keep our eye on the ball. We’ve got to stay on our mission, even though we can’t always give a sign.

“The Pharisees came forward and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. He sighed from the depth of his spirit and said, ‘Why does this generation seek at sign? Amen, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.’ Then he left them, got into the boat again, and went off to the other shore.” (Mark 8: 3-4)

It's nice that the mayor can find some solace for himself in tradition, but this whole thing smacks of a delusion of grandeur. It should be noted that the "zero gratification" environment he's required to endure comes with a six-figure salary (link). I've spent the last half hour trying to wrap my head around those last three paragraphs. Where does this sermon fit into his 70/30 scheme? Is he really comparing his push for the stadium to Jesus Christ's quest to redeem the eternal souls of all mankind? Why, oh why, would his handlers let him put something like this on the public record? What does this guy do all day?

Do the long-suffering citizens of Washington DC, be they baseball fans or not, even have a prayer, let alone a useful public servant?

2006-02-24T07:03:00.000-05:00

The Future Needs Help
Nerds, too.

According to a report issued by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last November (link), here are the ten occupations expected to grow the fastest between now and 2014:

Home health aides
Network systems and data communications analysts
Medical assistants
Physician assistants
Computer software engineers, applications
Physical therapist assistants
Dental hygienists
Computer software engineers, systems software
Dental assistants
Personal and home care aides

Six of them include either the word assistant or aide in their title. What with the baby boomers graying out and people in general living longer, the health stuff is no surprise. But what about the dental rankings? Here's how the BoL's Occupational Outlook Handbook explains it:

Population growth and greater retention of natural teeth will stimulate demand for dental hygienists. Older dentists, who have been less likely to employ dental hygienists, are leaving the occupation and will be replaced by recent graduates, who are more likely to employ one or even two hygienists. In addition, as dentists’ workloads increase, they are expected to hire more hygienists to perform preventive dental care, such as cleaning, so that they may devote their own time to more profitable procedures.

Fewer dentures equals more dentists. Good hygiene means more hygienists. The same thing can't be said for agriculture, where better farming means fewer farmers(link).

2006-02-22T08:55:00.000-05:00

Tropical Depression

Other than my first visits to Falls Church's most famous honkytonk, JV's Restaurant, for chili and NASCAR with the gang (My favorite character being a mellow dude who broke his long-held silence to buzz a sharp critique of Jeff Gordon's performance on Celebrity Poker Showdown through a throat box), the highlight of my holiday weekend was reading Brian Moore's novel, No Other Life.

Set in the former French colony of Ganae, a place you might but need not compare to real-life Haiti, it's the story a well-meaning native priest turned populist leader, a character you might but need not compare to the real-life Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who struggles to blaze a path for his people out of poverty without compromising his values or encouraging violence. It's told in the first person by a priest at the local university still struggling at an advanced age to figure out how he, a farflung white man from Quebec, found himself caught up in the political intrigue of a tropical outpost of the Third World.

Jon Banville was right back in 1993 when he praised the novel in The Times Literary Supplement as "an honest-to-god yarn, complete with alarms and excursions, gunfire, identifiable villains, a beautiful bitch and, of course, a hero pure in heart," but I also agree with Terry Eagleton's criticism that the narrator doesn't reveal enough of himself to lend Moore's narrative its desired weight, which aims to surpass critical mass when our kindly Virgil faces his darkest doubts about the authenticity of his faith.

Any Brian Moore fans out there? This was my first exposure to his work, and it's certainly gotten my attention. What would you recommend?

2006-02-21T19:28:00.000-05:00

I am John Galt
And, ladies, I'm on the prowl.

I've yet to read the main article, but a sidebar to Lori Gottlieb's cover story in the new Atlantic on the online dating phenomenon (link) offers an amusing list of niche matchmaking sites that have sprung up to service the specialized desires of the Web's many, and varied, subcultures. After the requisite political firewalling by both sides (Left, Right), things get interesting. There are exclusive dating clubs for finding Ivy Leaguers, millionaires, golfers, horse people, firefighters, partners in adultery, asexuals, and, of all things, devotees of Ayn Rand.

If you're unfamiliar with her work, check out Wikipedia's entry. It's far from authoritative, but, if nothing else, the page's contested status should communicate how embattled her legacy remains. A proponent—no, apostle—of individualism and free markets, Rand used her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to enshrine the image of the ideal capitalist, a tireless and supremely capable existentialist who must overcome the constraints imposed by a society organized to force compromises that can only pollute his or her vision.

It's stark stuff. Rand was indeed an absolutist. Her work treats government regulation as akin to shackles. She was so committed to capitalism that a six-foot tall dollar sign was displayed at her funeral.

And, like other passionate absolutists, her work tends to attract the affection of the young—although it can also claim a number of powerful adherents, including the recently retired chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. I initially read her two major novels (she was also the author of a number of philosophical tracts) as a college freshman. My Composition I professor offered extra credit to anyone who could conquer them. No small feat. At 1200 pages, Atlas Shrugged remains the longest book I've ever read, a distinction it's likely to hold the remainder of my life.

I won't go off too far with my opinions. Suffice it to say that my standby quip when the subject arises is to suggest that after waiting 1000 pages for Atlas Shrugged's mysterious hero, whose sudden disappearance created its own rhetorical expression, Who is John Galt?, the 90-page speech he unfurls by way of introduction is enough to make even a sympathetic reader wish the hero had stayed home.

I'd like to introduce you to some of the people who're so dedicated to Rand's brand of individualism that they are actively seeking a mate with the same subscriptions, but the site banned me after I tried to create a profile under the name Ellsworth Toohey, the villain of The Fountainhead. A prominent newspaper columnist who manipulates the vulgar emotions of the masses and encourages mediocrity by championing a selflessness and modesty that Rand obviously found both disgusting and destructive, Toohey serves as the counterpoint to Rand's hero, the bold, original and uncompromising architect Howard Roark.

I'm unsure how this particular group can justify preventing my free expression. I guess I'll have to go for a goth.

2006-02-20T20:29:00.000-05:00

Meet The Arts

I'm looking forward to seeing Art Brut at the Black Cat in April. Unlike most of the supposed "new rock revolution," they don't suck. In fact, they rock.

Here, have a listen:

Art Brut - "Formed A Band"
[Schuba's Tavern, Chicago, November 15, 2005]
Taking nod-and-wink knowingness to new levels of absurdity, this song, the band's debut single, is at once the freshest and the silliest rock song I've heard in the last year. It's an easy concept to summarize: "We are Art Brut. This is our first song. In it we will sing about forming the band. We will also touch on our goals for the group, which include 'talking to the kids,' hitting Top of the Pops and bringing peace to Israel and Palestine."

It's rowdy, repetitive, spastic. Plus, like most of the band's music, it requires a healthy patience for talkie parts. But it's also a hell of a lot of fun. And even if you don't like the song all that much, don't fret, because your obliging entertainers have included snippets of AC/DC, REM, The Modern Lovers and some charming banter in an inspired four minutes and nine seconds.

For something a little more polished, though not by much, check out the music video shot for their subsequent single "Emily Kane" or the studio recording of my favorite Art Brut song, "Good Weekend."

Their album, Bang Bang Rock and Roll, isn't out yet in America, but you can always buy it from Amazon.co.uk. A full recording of the Schuba's performance is available for purchase at emusic.

2006-02-19T21:52:00.000-05:00

Slangin'
Watch The Washington Post get 'jiggy' with it.

Besides its snuggily tone, here's what most struck me about Peter Slevin's front-page profile of Tammy Duckworth (Feb. 19), an Iraq veteran with two prosthetic legs who's running for Henry Hyde's old seat in Illinois' suburban 6th Congressional district. From today's Washington Post:

...Sen. Richard J. Durbin and Rep. Rahm Emanuel appealed to Duckworth when she was still recovering from her injuries, dissing the up-and-running campaign of fellow Democrat Christine Cegelis, who took 44 percent of the vote against Hyde in 2004. (emphasis added)

Yoiks! Is that the word "dissing" on the front page of The Washington Post? While I'm sure you've heard the term used before, here's its entry from, believe it or not, Mirriam-Webster's online dictionary:

Main Entry: dis
Pronunciation: 'dis
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): dissed; dis·sing
Etymology: perhaps short for disrespect
1 slang : to treat with disrespect or contempt : INSULT
2 slang : to find fault with : CRITICIZE

Not one to be left behind, the Oxford English Dictionary also includes an entry.

dis, n.
slang (orig. U.S., esp. in African-American usage).
Forms: 19- dis, diss. [Prob. shortened < DISRESPECT n. after DIS v.3]
Failure to show respect; abuse, disparagement; an expression of scorn or contempt, an insult.

Usage:
1986 Los Angeles Times 31 Aug. (Calendar) 87/4 Please give credit where credit is due{em}point an accusing finger at the Long Beach Police Department for not doing its job and stop the ‘dis’ (disrespect) on rap music for once and for all.

1993 Rolling Stone 18 Feb. 60/3 Tricks of the Shade, the Goats' debut, was recorded last year, when Bush-Quayle disses were less of a foregone conclusion.

2001 N.Y. Mag. 14 May 76/1 All fifteen tracks are one-dimensional disses and dismissals of scantily clad women, vengeful boyfriends, and the group's assorted doubters.

A quick search of the archives via Lexis Nexis shows this is far from the first time the Post has put the word in print. A search returned 190 articles, though a quick survey shows a number of those hits are proper nouns (Click here to learn more about the Norfolk city of Diss in the UK). The first reference to the word in the Post seems to have come on March 15, 1987, when a feature in the Washington Post magazine known as J Street included this brief glossary of slang words then in vogue with America's youth:

bumpin' (bum'pun) adj. First-rate, of high quality, attractive; usually in reference to material goods, esp. clothes, as in "That jacket is bumpin'."

bumpin' like a mug. Trend-setting and of high quality, again in reference to material goods; e.g., to describe the hottest portable stereo ("box"): "That box is bumpin' like a mug."

dis (diss) verb. To show disrespect, esp. to a teacher or other authority figure. Also, to harass, to ridicule, as in "The boys on the bus were dissing that girl."

junks (junks) noun. Basketball shoes, usually expensive ones; the only kind of shoe any self-respecting teen-ager is wearing (as this edition goes to press).

The first reporter to use the word seems to have been Joe Brown, who wrote it into a profile of the "divas" Diana Ross, Patti LaBelle, Stephanie Mills, Natalie Cole and Chaka Khan in August of 1989.

It seems that from the very start, the Post opted to expend the ink and use the two 's' version diss instead of the 25 percent shorter dis. Maybe because its closer to the phonetic pronunciation?

As far as I can figure, Slevin's usage today was the word's first appearance on the Post's front page. The editorial board has used it repeatedly for headlines (ex. Dissing Darwin, Dissing the District), but the only other front page article returned by Lexis was a Nov. 2004 story on the troubled basketball player Ron Artest. And that mention comes well after the jump. Plus it wasn't used by the reporters, but appears in scare quotes inside a quote from sports psychologist Paul Beard, who provided this insight into Artest's now legendary rampage (video link):

One intensity comes out of a self-drive. The other one is a desperate kind of intensity, 'You're not going to 'diss' me, I'm a star.' It's psychological. When a player's primary source of self-worth is tied up with being a star athlete, any threat to that status, real or imagined, becomes psychologically life-threatening."

Beard believes a sort of "psychological fusion," happened to Artest the moment he was hit by that cup.

2006-02-17T21:13:00.000-05:00

Art captures life imitating life
I bet this is how it really feels to play for the Detroit Tigers.

(AP Photo/Duane Burleson)

Click here to get your juices flowing with some more spring training photos.

2006-02-17T12:39:00.000-05:00

Povich: Media still draws mostly liberal English majors
For the record, I have a degree in—don't laugh—communication.

My cohort of Missouri journalism school students and I received a lecture this morning from Elaine Povich, a longtime Capitol Hill reporter who’s worked for both Newsday and the Chicago Tribune.

If you run her name through google, as I did this morning, one of the most common things you’ll find is this quote, which was taken down by a Washington Times reporter and printed on April 18, 1996:

More people who are of a liberal persuasion go into reporting because they believe in the ethics and the ideals. . . . A lot of conservatives go into the private sector, go into Wall Street, go into banking. You find people who are idealistic tending toward the reporting end.

Povich told our group that the comment came out of a conversation sparked when she was approached after she made a lengthy presentation on her book Partners and Adversaries: The Contentious Connection Between Congress and the Media. (I can’t tell you the reporter's name because I’m refusing to pay the Times' Web archive $2.95)

The reporter asked her about the survey included in the appendix to her book that found that 89 percent of Washington journalists voted for Bill Clinton instead of George Bush in the 1992 election (my copy lists a 2.8 percent margin of error). The results ran as the lead, along with the quote, which was subsequently picked up by the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and then widely cited as evidence of a leftward tilt in mainstream news coverage.

“Rush made me famous,” Povich said today. “But he wouldn’t let me call in and talk about it…I spent a year of my life working on that book and the only thing that anybody remembers is the so-called liberal media.”

She went on to say that conditions have changed since her infamous quote, pointing to an increase in conservatives brought in to staff places like Fox News, but not a whole lot.

“Who become journalists? Not engineers,” Povich said. “All engineers—except the one I married—are conservatives. English majors become journalists. And English majors are 90 percent liberal."

2006-02-15T07:28:00.000-05:00

Over Where?
A Missourian in Doha

Terry Ganey reported in the The Columbia Daily Tribune on Sunday that retired University of Missouri Journalism School Professor Roger Gafke is helping train journalists at the Qatar-based news station Al-Jazeera. The story also reported that Gafke and active Professor Byron Scott attended a conference sponsored by the network.

Ganey, the former statehouse bureau chief for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, turns up the innuendo, centering his story on how the school's involvement with a group George Bush is rumored to have floated the idea of bombing is creating "the potential for controversy."

Controversy with whom exactly is unclear. But our crafty correspondent does hint at two possible sources of friction:

Old enemies in the Republican-controlled General Assembly:
[J-school officials] haven’t forgotten state lawmakers’ criticism in 2001 when KOMU-TV wouldn’t allow broadcast reporters to wear American flag lapel pins.
Opposition within the faculty:
There was a faculty meeting last fall about involvement between the news agency and the school, but the issue went no further. School officials are seeking more information before moving ahead.

Supporting Ganey's case: A foreboding pretension issued from that august seat of power, the office of the spokesman of the state treasurer. The highly coveted position is currently held by the Honorable Mark Hughes. He said:

"The use of faculty and staff affiliated with the University of Missouri School of Journalism to train journalists or alleged journalists in a media agency like Al-Jazeera is questionable and merits public awareness and debate."

(The secretary of state reports Hughes' salary as $72,252, which is nearly double Missouri's median household income but still 19 percent shy of Scott's $88,821 earmarking.)

It's unclear to me whether Ganey's choice of the word "communicators" to refer to journalists at Al-Jazeera should be read as a sign of cowhearted hedging or old-fashioned clumsy writing, but things like that combined with the faint support coming out of the j-school are enough to make this blogger bristle.

"Initiatives in journalistic development in the Middle East are important for the school to consider," [Associate Dean Esther Thorson said.] "Such activities would be consistent with our historical mission to champion journalism and its role in democratic societies."

I'm reluctant to criticize Thorson (salary: $153,020) because I suspect she didn't know her words would be raised against Ganey's trumped up controversy. But it should be noted that her statement is factually incorrect. The nation where Al-Jazeera is based, Qatar, is a monarchy, and a large share of its viewers live in authoritarian states.

In fact, the one certified "beacon of freedom" in the region, Iraq, has banned Al-Jazeera from covering its democratic government.

Someone is going to have to come up with some legitimate reasons why Gafke's work is a bad idea before I think otherwise. Most of the complaints I've heard about Al-Jazeera have been either minor or partisan, and it seems to me that influencing its employees should carry with it the same, if not greater, urgency as the school's efforts to train journalists in the former Soviet bloc. There's really no excuse for Ganey's lazy and alarmist buzz-baiting. I expect better. If he's going to raise the specter of past criticism from the legislature, he could at least contact the critics themselves.

While it's well and good to talk big about journalistic "ideals" from the comfort and security of Columbia, it's also easy to forget that justice's work is far from done. Journalism isn't democracy's child, but its partner. And the course charted by its handmaidens ought to be one guided by principle, not political fashion.

Disclosure: I'm a graduate student in journalism at the University of Missouri and although I've never taken one of his classes I do know Prof. Scott. I once broke bread with him and a group of visiting Moldovan journalists at the esteemed Flat Branch Pub & Brewery. And while I'd bet he doesn't remember me, I also shared at least one group meal with Mark Hughes at the less fabulous Arris Pizza Palace in Jefferson City when I was covering the General Assembly and he was heading the state Senate's PR effort. How's that for balance?

2006-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

Hey lovers, you must not be lazy.
Searching for St. Valentine

For this was on seynt Valentynes day,
Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make,
Of every kinde, that men thenke may;
And that so huge a noyse gan they make,
That erthe and see, and tree, and every lake
So ful was, that unnethe was ther space
For me to stonde, so ful was al the place.

That's from Chaucer's The Parlement of Fowles, a 14th century poem referenced in The Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on today's patron saint, Mr. Valentine.

While the church recognizes at least three martyrs with a claim to the title, the entry notes that the tradition of exchanging tokens of romantic admiration we still practice today—literally, today—is less sacred than profane. It stretches back to England and France in the Middle Ages where customs enshrined in poetry like Chaucer's denoted this, the halfway point of the year's second month, as the day when birds began to pair.

Poetry they ain't, but I do have a couple valentines just for you, dear reader.

The Only Ones - "Lovers of Today"
A little-known single from a band mostly remembered, when it's remembered at all, for the punk masterpiece "Another Girl, Another Planet." What you might call the British "Blank Generation," this one certainly isn't optimistic ("We ain't got feelings / We've got no love / We ain't got nothing to say / We're lovers of today"), but it is pretty good.

The Drive-By Truckers - "Feb 14"
Here's the lead track from the forthcoming album by Blue-State America's favorite slice of Red-State rock since Steve Earle, The Drive-By Truckers. The bizarre popularity of this group with gangly graduate students like myself aside, they really do rock in a deep-fried, whiskey-and-women, Lynryd Skynyrd sort of way. Hardly their greatest songwriting achievement, this track still manages to stand on its own thanks to singer Patterson Hood's raw, raspy earnestness. I can't get enough of this guy's voice. You should hear his falsetto.

2006-02-12T12:01:00.000-05:00

Militant Meteorology
Hummer versus Nature

The snow storm that swept across the Northeast this weekend provided my first opportunity to personally witness the latest in local news technology: The Storm Chaser.

NYC's News 10 Now describes their new toy as a Hummer H2 converted into into "a state of the art, portable weather tracking system" equipped with "a computer, weather gathering instruments, and a portable weather studio." Not only can it defeat any storm, but the Storm Chaser is also prepared to dispatch the competition.

The StormChaser is the area’s first and only portable weather tracking system…and it’s one that can scale a 20 inch vertical wall, ascend a 60 degree incline, and has a wheel base of more than 120 inches!

If you're looking for a real kick, visit Channel 10's Web page and watch the promo video boast of taking weather coverage "one step further."

The one I saw was parked outside IHOP while the crew solicited opinions on snow.

As you might expect, some people think the money could be better spent.

If, like me, you're in the mood to scoff at local news, take a look at this screenshot I nabbed from Cleveland's WEWS homepage a few months back. I swear it's real.

2006-02-12T06:47:00.000-05:00

The Future is Now

I've finally added an RSS feed.

The address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/PaleWire.

If you roll with Firefox, there ought to an autodiscovery icon on your address bar. I've also installed a button at the bottom of the sidebar. Enjoy!

2006-02-11T21:56:00.001-05:00

Decoriana
or "I have this blog, so I might as well use it."

Click the shot above to catch a glimpse of my current desktop pattern.

It's a 1959 photograph of Ava Gardner taken by Wayne Miller on the set of Stanley Kramer's film On The Beach.

Create your own screenshots by clearing the desktop, hitting the Print Screen button on your keyboard and then pasting from the clipboard into Microsoft Paint. Free and easy image hosting is available at photobucket.com. Throw the links in the comments box. I'm curious to see where y'all live.

2006-02-09T23:27:00.000-05:00

TV PARTY
Grammys 2006 Rewind

Since it's a safe bet that you, like most of the television viewing audience, spent Wednesday night watching American Idol instead of the Grammy Awards, let me take a liberty and fill you in on what you missed.

Besides Kanye West wearing black OJ gloves and baring his chest hair, the show included the bizarre reappearance, gigantic mohawk and all, of that funkiest of recluses, Sly Stone; Mariah Carey belting out her summer hit "We Belong Together" (shut up, you love it); U2 reprising "One" with Mary J. Blige; and three other performances that now, thanks to the magic of YouTube.com, you can already watch again and again in streaming video.

First: Gorillaz, De La Soul and Madonna open.

Second: Jay-Z, Linkin Park and Paul McCartney perform the oddest live mashup I've ever seen.

Third: Bruce Springsteen turns down the lights for his cautionary GWOT parable "Devils and Dust" and then exits with three powerful little words.

And if for some reason (ex. sadism) you want to watch the whole thing instead of just the good bits, take a click over to Rhapsody's online stream.

2006-02-09T11:02:00.000-05:00

Enter, If You Dare
Storming the ivory tower

One of my recent fascinations has been listening to recordings of lectures at the University of California-Berkeley available through the school's Web site. Besides teaching me all sort of things about astronomy, physics, and the Reconstruction movement after the American Civil War, it has also provided an interesting (and free) window into America's most notorious campus.

My favorite find so far is a guest lecture on Afghanistan Steve Coll delivered to a foreign policy seminar last year. Dude knows things.

Today I'm getting a real kick out Prof. Thomas Laqueur's Tuesday lecture on witchcraft and religious war in his European history class. It's interesting to consider how the clash of overlapping political and religious loyalities in previous centuries resemble the events we've all been watching this week in Denmark, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan and elswhere.

Despite his university's reputation for browbeating its students with political rhetoric, Laqueur only lightly brushes the contemporary comparison, confessing how he himself is a bit unnerved to find his decades-old lectures taking on a familiar charge.

(Note for Andrew: Laqueur's lecture includes one of my favorite historical moments, and one that I think you'd have a particular interest in, The Defenestration of Prague.)

2006-02-06T08:39:00.000-05:00

Do the Dibby-Dibby Dive
Unearthing the roots of hip-hop

This Thursday every hipster's favorite reissue house, Soul Jazz Records, officially moves in on the hip-hop market with the release of the two-disc collection Big Apple Rappin': The Early Days of Hip-Hop Culture in New York City 1979-1982.

Most people my age have probably heard more rhetoric about the "old school" values of hip-hop's golden age than the music itself. While hardly the first effort to enshrine the era, this Soul Jazz release is special in how it offers the curious neophyte a representative sample while also digging deep enough to draw in the b-boys. Let's have a taste:

Brother D and The Collective Effort -
"How We Gonna Make The Black Nation Rise?"

The longstanding tension between the tantalizing potential of hip-hop's bully pulpit and the demands of the dancefloor moves front and center. This 1980 disco manifesto served as the inspiration for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's celebrated anthem "The Message." Brother D and his crew strut out over a throbbing bassline sampled from Cheryl Lynn's "Got to be Real" and deliver a call-to-arms laced with fevered mic tossing, infectious call-and-response lines and insistent political exhortations. This is rarity: a party song asking you to stop the party.

As you move to the beat to the early night,
The country is moving to, moving to, the right.
Prepare now or get high and wait,
Because there ain't no party in a police state.

2006-02-05T14:32:00.000-05:00

Think About Destruction
What would E.B. do?

E.B. White wrote the following in the Notes and Comment section of The New Yorker magazine on August 18, 1945, less than two weeks after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

Nuclear energy and foreign policy cannot coexist on this planet...The more deep the secret, the greater the determination of every nation to discover and exploit it. Nuclear energy insists on global government, on law, on order, and on the willingness of the community to take the responsibility for the acts of the individual.

Fifty years later, there are believed to be nine countries that possess nuclear weapons. Yesterday, the United Nations'- atomic energy agency voted to report Iran to the Security Council because of suspicions that its government is developing its own weapon.

After the vote, Iran announced that it would immediately end its voluntary nuclear cooperation with the agency and that it would begin full-scale production of enriched uranium, which can be used to produce electricity or to help build nuclear bombs.

I wonder what White would say about that. Knowing his dedication to the principle of world government, and his doomy view of the human race's prospects for the future, I would guess he'd say largely the same thing he did back then. Hectoring is one of the principle pursuits of the newspaperman.

What do you say? Is the diplomatic tack being taken towards Iran, which its leaders have largely spurned, the proper course of action? Is it fair for countries with large nuclear arsenals and robust access to energy resources to dictate the rules of the game? Is it realistic to think that Iran can be peacefully deterred by a group of nations, each acting in its own interests? And, if not, what is the acceptable cost (I'm talking about human lives here) of pursuing other methods?

The thing I'm really challenged by, and would love to hear informed opinions on, is what exactly a nuclear-ized Iran would look like. Would it have the same invasion insurance North Korea seems to enjoy now that the world's policemen are occupied elsewhere?

In case you were wondering, I came across the White quote while reading About Town, Ben Yagoda's delightful history of The New Yorker. It's been an enjoyable book for a news nerd like me. Yagoda brings White, Harold Ross and other major figures to life by drawing heavily from what seems to be an inexhaustible supply of internal correspondence. As a reader, you get an inside view as the magazine shifts from a light, if original, humor magazine into a literary power and, thanks to its blockbuster coverage of World War II, an institution in American journalism, publishing and public life.

2006-01-28T19:24:00.000-05:00

Nibble Nosh
A night at the deli

Dining at the local deli tonight with book and pad, my table was bordered by a mirthful family of churchgoers whose bubbly speculation about tomorrow's ecclesiastical offerings spilled over into its examination of the menu.

"What is this?" the group's matronly head inquired with an elevated, expectant chin. The genteel women possessed the brassy air of confidence, well-tailored trousers and sharp coif my imagination associates with the Hollywood stars of mid-century who managed to age honorably before plastic surgery became as common as amphetamine abuse. "What is this here—in the picture?" she asked.

"Actually, we don't know," said the waitress, craning over the woman's shoulder in a display of due diligence, if not genuine curiosity, for a focused squint. "It could be anything on the whole menu."

"Oh! But it looks so good," the woman said.

"It is," the waitress said.

I'm pleased to report that my new hometown is host to a surfeit of quality restaurants, not least among them a species I had no expection of encountering so near our nation's capital: The New York Deli. Whether the outpost of displaced New Yorkers or the kitsch creation of cynical restaurateurs, I am unqualified to judge. (Though the vulgar quality and sheer weight of the effort to populate the dining area with signs and symbols of New York is itself a bit suspicious. At tonight's choice, The Celebrity Deli, not just any photo of John Lennon adorns the wall, but a photo of John Lennon in a New York City t-shirt. A fact which begs the question: dost thou represent too much?) Of course, being a far-flung correspondent with no claim to tasting the fruits of the self-proclaimed capital of the world, it doesn't matter to me if tonight's corned beef and pastrami was an imitation; I wouldn't have known the difference. And, regardless, I think even the most orthodox adherent to New York's culinary customs would agree that any corned beef and pastrami is certainly better than no corned beef and pastrami at all.

2006-01-22T21:36:00.000-05:00

Looking for Truth in the Muslim World
What makes a scoop?

His name may not sound familiar, but there's a good chance you spent a few tense hours with John Miller. He sat side by side with Peter Jennings for the network's marathon coverage after the Sept. 11 attacks. A cop turned journalist (who has since turned cop again) Miller found himself in a unique position after the towers fell. Not only was he one of the few journalists in the world to have directly interviewed Osama Bin Laden, as a former deputy police commissioner for New York City, he was one of the best sourced reporters on the biggest story in the world.

To his credit, Miller didn't fool around. Teaming up with writers Michael Stone, Chris Mitchell and an unnamed cast of stringers, he cranked out The Cell: Inside the 9/11 plot and How the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop it within a year. Now, after nearly four years, it's finally made it's way to PaleWire, all thanks to the nourishing bounty of the Barnes and Noble discount table.

And a hearty thanksgiving is owed. While no display of editorial filigree—poorly punctuated, peppered with lame cliches, set in anemic type face, swathed in a shabby cover and frequently cast in grammatically disastrous sentences, this book is a mess—such a quick turnaround on something so complete still impresses me in 2006. Miller et al provide a deep history of al Qaeda, tracing its roots back to the mujahideen movement in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The main thrust of the story, however, is provided by the struggle of New York City's anti-terrorism unit to grapple with what now looks like a grossly overlooked threat.

Why did they fail to stop the 9/11 plot? I'm sure you've heard it all before: risk-averse bureaucracy, turf wars over intelligence, little political resolve at the top. Considering Miller's past (and present) occupation, the plumes of cop-shop cigar smoke curling away from most of his anonymous sources, and the great pains he takes to hammer home how hard law enforcement works (ex. The officers who made arrests after the first World Trade Center bombing are credited with doing "the impossible"), it's easy to be skeptical of the book's argument that street-level agents don't bear much blame. But there's enough evidence behind his case that I'm sympathetic to the idea.

Despite all the subsequent reporting that's been done to better fill in the record and how much more complicated things have gotten since the invasion of Iraq, you can still learn a lot about 9/11, al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden in this book. It's worth the bargain-basement price just for Miller's first-person account of his late-90s trip to Afghanistan to interview Bin Laden. And if you're interested in learning more about the situation before the Patriot Act renewal debate hits Congress next month, here's a good resource for doing what legislative aides like to refer to as "fact-finding."

There's one thing I'm struggling to sort out. Maybe you can help. Check out this quote from the book's final chapter:

Just before the September 11 attacks, the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) had been monitoring communications traffic between suspected al Qaeda telephones around the world, noticing a distinct increase in traffic. There was a lot of "chatter" on the lines. Most of the conversations were in code. Right after September 11, the traffic on those phone lines quickly dropped, since the CIA and NSA were by charter not supposed to spy on Americans on U.S. soil. That was the FBI's job. As a result, in almost every case, calls from telephones in the United States and suspected al Qaeda phone numbers abroad were not monitored on the assumption that the U.S. party might be American. After September 11, all that changed. An arrangement was quickly devised so that the NSA and CIA would intercept any call from a U.S. telephone line to a suspected al Qaeda telephone anywhere in the world. Instantly, a roving national security wiretap order would apply and the FBI would monitor the call. In addition fast response teams from the nearest FBI office would rush to the call's point of origin and try and observe the caller.

Now here's the lead from the Dec. 16, 2005, New York Times story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau that has caused so much consternation this past month:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible ''dirty numbers'' linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

Do you see any difference? The only things I see are the investigative role of the FBI sketched out in the first and the use of the phrase "without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required" in the second.

Is it possible that the Times big scoop wasn't even a scoop at all? Considering how the President and the Justice Department are threatening to put the paper's feet back on the fire with another leak probe, this could be an important question to have answered. Operator, put me through to Pinch Sulzberger.

2006-01-19T20:06:00.000-05:00

Osama's Book Club

Besides his cryptic offering of a "long-term truce on fair conditions," the thing that most struck me about the Bin Laden tape released today was this unexpected recommendation:

If Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you [the American people] to read the book ''Rogue State,'' which states in its introduction: ''If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended once and for all.''

Assuming the AP got the translation right, I think Bin Laden is talking about William Blum's Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, a book which forthrightly offers readers a catalog of terrorist acts committed by the US government. Chapters include: "Bombings," "Perverting Elections," "Kidnapping and Looting" and "A Concise History of US Global Interventions, 1945-Present."

A quick google search finds that many chapters are available on the Web in English and a variety of other languages. I also netted Blum's personal Web site, which bears the provocative index line "American_Holocaust.htm." The online resources all say that Blum is a former State Department official who left the government disgruntled over the Vietnam war and committed himself to writing and speaking out against American aggression.

In what I can only interpret as a big scoop for PaleWire, I think I might have caught Osama misciting his source. The "if I were president" quote he invokes above does not appear in the introduction to the pirated 2005 edition of Rogue State floating around the Web. In fact, an interview with Blum on the Znet Web site credits the quote in question to the dust jacket for Blum's more recent collection of essays Freeing the World to Death. But there is evidence that the phrase appeared in a 2002 edition of Rogue State. Though even if we grant him the benefit of the doubt, this still suggests Osama is slipping behind the times. Even his anti-American literature is out of date. Dude is losing his edge.

2006-01-15T15:46:00.000-05:00

Alec and I
Inside an Actor's Studio

21,000 more days. That's the best I can hope for. Or at least that's what Dr. Thomas Perls MD's survey at the The Healthspan Calculator told me. It determined that 83.8 years is as far as I'm likely to get, which means I've already spent 28 percent of my life.

It would be easy to panic about something like that: engraving a big black italic 'X' into my calendar sometime in autumn 2065; shouting questions into the rush of the abyss; shaving my head; joining a millennial cult; investing in some sort of digital countdown clock. But if you look at it sunny-side up, it's not so bad. If the shaky hustings of civilization hold up another century, and I manage to avoid any grisly auto accidents and the Avian Flu, I can look forward to another 60 years of ice cream sundaes, pop music, and blogging for you, dear reader. Cool!

I don't know how he felt about ice cream sundaes, but by most measures Alec Guinness had a nice, long life. He won an Oscar, excelled in a career that required daily interaction with beautiful women, owned a light saber, and lived to be 86 years old. Plus, near the end he got in the habit of taking up the sort of sincere self-reflection I so casually dodged above.

In his brief journal A Positively Final Appearance, Guinness looks back on his life from the vantage provided by the spare time he found in retirement and the cultivation he developed during a literary life. New York Times Notable Book or not, it often reads more like a blog than a book, with the distinguishing characteristic being perhaps its depth and elegance more than anything else. Mundane tales of the everyday—reactions to the day's paper, indulgent commentary on his pets' foibles, musings on the latest movies so tossed off you might expect to find them at SirAlec.blogspot.com—are enlived by a generous spirit and embroided with marvelous anecdotes from the life of a truly cosmopolitan man.

And besides having a bunch of cool stories about Noel Coward and Greta Garbo, Guinness is also a skilled stylist. His wicked sense of humor and gift for the brand of restrained understatement practiced by the best of his generation makes for a pleasant traveling companion. But just like your crotchety old grandfather, Sir Alec sees much to criticize in the world around him—the loss of the prim British manners he labors so hard to uphold first on that list—and a good deal in his own life to regret, yet nothing to be ungrateful about. In a typical bit of self-conscious British humility, Guinness continually inists his life hasn't amounted to much, always mindful to mention that his blessings have been many, more than any polite gentlemen could rightly expect, or dare to demand.

It's probably good he didn't live for the Star Wars revival that coincided with the new series, because it seems like he was getting a little tired of the attention towards the end:

A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The bad penny first dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.

"I would love you to do something for me," I said.
"Anything! Anything!" the boy said rapturously.
"You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do," I said.
"Anything, sir, anything!"
"Well," I said. "do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?"

He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. "What a dreadful thing to say to a child!" she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.

2006-01-14T07:56:00.000-05:00

Who likes the movies?
The best of 2005

I see a lot of them, myself. Here's a list of my 25 favorite released since the last time Hollywood held the Oscars:

25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
24. Kings and Queen
23. March of the Penguins
22. Pretty Persuasion
21. Syriana
20. Walk the Line
19. Hustle & Flow
18. The Squid and the Whale
17. Serenity
16. A History of Violence
15. Red Eye
14. The Constant Gardener
13. Happy Endings
12. King Kong
11. My Summer of Love
10. Gunner Palace
09. Walk on Water
08. Match Point
07. Broken Flowers
06. Good Night, And Good Luck
05. Capote
04. Brokeback Mountain
03. The Aristocrats
02. Head-On
Best Picture: The Best of Youth

And here's who I think deserve to win the individual awards, not who I think will win them, mind you.

Best Director: Marco Tullio Giordana - The Best of Youth
Best Actress: Sibel Kekilli - Head-On (pictured above)
Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman - Capote
Best Supporting Actress: Emily Blunt - My Summer of Love
Best Supporting Actor: Paul Giamatti - Cinderella Man
Best Original Screenplay: The Cast of The Aristocrats
Best Adapted Screenplay: - Larry McMurtry and Diane Ossana - Brokeback Mountain
Best Cinematography: Rodrigo Preito - Brokeback Mountain
Best Documentary: The Aristocrats
Worst Picture: Sin City

And here are the movies I still want to see:

2046
Cache (Hidden)
~~Crash~~
~~Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room~~
~~Grizzly Man~~
~~The Island~~
~~Junebug~~
~~Lord of War~~
Munich
~~Murderball~~
The New World
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
~~Thumbsucker~~
Wallace & Gromit
War of the Worlds

~~Why We Fight~~
~~The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill~~

What were your favorites? Who am I missing? Where did I screw up?

2006-01-07T13:27:00.000-05:00

The Middle Path

I did it. After months of intermittant interest, I finally finished Floating Off The Page: The Best Stories from The Wall Street Journal's "Middle Column." Like the title says, it's a collection of those curious confections that appear smack dab in the middle of Dow Jones' clarion for commercialism. The editor is WSJ veteran Ken Wells.

The layout's stern, businesslike demeanor—articles are numbered 1-67 in order of apperance and organized under headers like "The Way We Are Now" and "Style"—combined with the austere typography pull a neat trick: By standing soberly in contrast to the wry, colorful voices that fill the book, the presentation offers a simulation of the off-beat rhythm each story must have struck when it appeared alone in the middle of the Journal's famously formal front page, surrounded by dot-matrix portraits of government regulators and the latest news from the bond market.

"For more than five decades, the middle column of The Wall Street Journal has been the antidote to boredom, written by people who, at least while on this peculiar assignment, take delight in standing the usual front-page journalistic convention on its head. They find a subject that is merely delightful to read about—a man who has built a medieval catapult to throw grand pianos across his sheep pasture, for example—and try to persuade you of its significance. Or not," Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and the business bestseller Liar's Poker, writes in the book's foreword. "A goodly portion of the 1.8 million serious businesspeople who subscribe to the Journal will read it. Hundreds of thousands of business conversationalists will break the ice with some mention of the thing. (Q: 'Did you know, Penelope, that armies in the Middle Ages routinely flung dead, plague-filled cows at one another?' A: 'No, Really?')"

But that's not to say that it's without its own conventions, or that every article is a stroll along the Seine. Because the novelty and inventiveness of the story is the editorial imperative, the middle column is often manufactured without the quality of timeliness, referred to as a "peg" in the industry, that usually makes news, news. I read whole articles in this collection without picking up a cue from the characters or content betraying when the story was written. It's the style that gives up the game. If the content of the lead sentence doesn't give you your When, how it's written usually will. All writing, all storytelling is formulaic. And while the
the middle column has certainly proven itself more entertaining (more literary, Lewis or Wells might say) than the standard Anecdote—> Nut—> Context—> Kicker formula you find on the Journal's front page doesn't mean its writers don't abide by fashions of their own. Snappy one-line wisecrack? No way it was printed after the Chicago Daily News closed in 1978. First-person tomfoolery in the Tom Wolfe mode? It must be from the 1980s. Sharply drawn bit of color that sets the stage and introduces the main character? Welcome to the present, dear reader.

And there are a few serious stories mixed in, including Lucette Lagnado's haunting portrait of Emma Thornton, the mail carrier who serviced the 77th to 110th floors of One World Trade Center.

While a lot of the writing feels dated (Don't believe George Clooney. The quality of the news media, especially the elite print media, is miles ahead of where it once was.) the stories built with the telling details and generous tone that has consistently marked the best of American journalism still shine. Fun stuff.

2005-12-29T22:37:00.000-05:00

Umberto's Way

Today I finished plowing through Travels in Hyperreality, a collection of essays and newspaper columns by the Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco. Back in November I read another collection of his odds'n'sods, the much shorter Five Moral Pieces.

At its best, the writing sparks with life. Whether discussing Media Theory, the nature of power, Casablanca, L'Expo '67, the steady creep of multinational corporations, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the massive spectacle of professional sports, wax museums, or the sinister semiotics of blue jeans that impede the natural carriage of the scrotum, Eco writes with the same fevered intensity. This is exactly the sort of fancy-pants intellectual promiscuity we dour Anglos tend to frown on. But, unlike many of his peers (Jean Baudrillard, I'm looking at you), Eco's cheerful irreverence and refreshing modesty—not to mention his stunning gift for unveiling a sexual example to flesh out any abstraction—wins the day.

Many of these clippings probably could have been left to yellow in L'espresso's morgue, but the best stuff (a hilarious polemic against the World Cup, a brisk challenge of Marshall McLuhan which concludes with Eco suggesting that in fact "the media is not the message") all comes out of the top drawer.

The sample is too broad, and I too shallow, to distill it all down into a few sentences. But the most prominent theme I picked up, besides the looming presence of The Red Brigades, is Eco's persistant insistance that the world is more complicated than most people, including some really smart ones, would like to believe.

I feel like I shouldn't leave you without a taste of his sense of humor. Here is an excerpt from an essay on the role of the Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas in the history of ideas. It's meant to relate the "universe of hallucination" that preceded the development of empiricism. Aristotle was banned, reason was a "luxury" and:

Far, far away there is God, in whose attainable totality the principles of things, ideas, stir; the universe is the effect of a benevolent distraction of this very distant One, who seems to trickle slowly downward, abandoning traces of his perfection in the sticky clumps of matter that he defecates, like traces of sugar in the urine. In this muck that represents the more negligible margin of the One, we can find, almost always through a brilliant puzzle-solution, the imprint of germs of comprehensibility, but comprehensibility lies elsewhere, and if all goes well, along comes the mystic, with his nervous, stripped-down intution, who penetrates with an almost drugged eye into the garconniere of the One, where the sole and true party is going on.

2005-12-10T22:22:00.000-05:00

Simply, the best (Or at least I guess)

Tonight I finished leafing through Royce Flippin's collection of The Best American Political Writing of 2005.

Who's Royce Flippin, you ask. I wish I knew. Don't expect his book to tell you. I just read the whole thing and I have no idea, though I'm pretty sure I know the dozen or so magazines he subscribes to.

By now I'm sure you're familiar with the formula. Publisher hires some marginally famous writerly person to compile the year's best magazine writing on a particular marketable subject. Marginally famous person, who, at least by my lights, has typically edged a little further along the margin toward genuine fame than Mr. Flippin, cobbles together an up-and-down smattering of material from all the usual sources, making sure to include plenty of Big Names—all to justify the grandiose title plastered on the front. A quick Amazon search turns up this year's class:

The title is a bit of misnomer. The book was released on Oct. 10. What you're really getting is Flippin's version of the Best American Political Writing of late 2004 and the first half of 2005.

Following the formula, Flippin plays it safe, stuffing his book with articles from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Sunday Magazine and the other heavies in Washington reporting. He shows a favoritism for writers who aim for that middle-range focus somewhere between the ground-level reporting that fills in the public record and the long-after scholarly endeavors that eventually try to make sense of it all. Reporters are said to write the first draft of history. Flippin seems to favor those who try to write the second. What you'll find are plenty of "thinkpieces" that try to capture trends, challenge common assumptions, predict the future, or analyze patterns of behavior.

Don't expect any surprises. You're getting Bush-Kerry, Red State/Blue State, the political battle over Social Security, and what to do about this whole Iraq thing. The best stuff—James Fallows' well-sourced cost-benefit analysis of the buildup to the war, Andrew Ferguson's illuminating story on the honest graft of Jack Abramoff's Washington, Wil Hylton's profile of Alan Greenspan—presents the synthesis of reems of press clips with original reporting in a clear, conversational voice. But, particularly when it comes to the high-attitude stuff about "King Karl," THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM, and "What if Bush is right?", they are, sadly, often as shallow and overamplified as most of our politicians.

2005-12-08T20:02:00.000-05:00

Down and Out in Florida, Maine and Minnesota

I finally got around to Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. I doubt anyone needs a summary of this one. Myself, I was a little surprised about the rhetoric-to-work ratio. Granted, she got her fingernails dirty, but after all the hype I guess I was expecting a little more drama.

Not that it matters. So what if it's more rant than reportage? She bats for a pretty good average and the writing is mostly damn good. Even if you find Ehrenreich grating, there's no denying that life sucks for a lot people and ignoring it isn't going to solve much of anything. I doubt I'm ever going to hold it against someone for raising this subject. What did you think of it?

Anyone read her new book?

2005-11-29T09:26:00.001-05:00

Pop05

My 75 favorite singles of 2005:

075. R. Kelly - Trapped in the Closet
074. Vitalic - My Friend Dario
073. Heiko Voss - Call Me Killer
072. Missy Elliott - Lose Control / (JLC Remix) / On and On
071. Lindstrom - I Feel Space
070. Damien Marley - Welcome to Jam Rock
069. LCD Soundsystem - Daft Punk is Playing at My House / (Soulwax Remix)
068. Mariah Carey - Shake It Off
067. Richard Hawley - The Ocean
066. Sean Paul - We Be Burnin
065. Ciara f. Ludacris - Oh
064. Juliet - Avalon / (JLC Remix)
063. Outhud - It's For You
062. Geto Boys - G-Code
061. Basement Jaxx - Oh My Gosh
060. The Clientele - Since K Got Over Me
059. Prefuse 73 f. Ghostface and El-P - Hideyaface
058. The Strokes - Juicebox
057. The MFA - The Difference It Makes / (Superpitcher Remix)
056. LCD Soundsystem - Tribulations
055. Rihanna - Pon De Replay
054. Rachel Stevens - So Good
053. Girls Aloud - Biology
052. Saint Etienne - A Good Thing
051. Goldfrapp - Oh La La / (Tiefschwartz Remix)
050. Ada Blondix 2 - Maps (Michael Mayer/Tobias Thomas Remix) / Cool My Fire (Erlend Oye and Band)
049. Outhud - One Life To Leave
048. Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc.
047. Feist - Inside and Out / (Ewan Pearson Dub)
046. Fischerspooner - Kick in the Teeth
045. Robyn - Be Mine
044. Jamie Lidell - Multiply
043. Fischerspooner - Just Let Go / (JLC Remix)
042. Ladytron - Destroy Everything You Touch
041. Ghostface and Pete Rock - Be Easy
040. Royksopp - What Else Is There? / (Trentemoeller Remix) / (JLC Remix)
039. Michael Mayer - Lovefood
038. B. Sigel - Feel It In The Air
037. Fall Out Boy - Sugar, We're Going Down
036. Mario - Let Me Love You
035. Rachel Stevens - Negotiate With Love
034. Art Brut - Emily Kane
033. Three 6 Mafia - Stay Fly / (Remix with Trick Daddy etc.)
032. Franz Ferdinand - Do You Want To
031. New Order - Krafty / (Glimmers Remix)
030. 50 Cent f. Mobb Deep - Outta Control / (Remix)
029. Fannypack - You Gotta Know
028. Girls Aloud - Long Hot Summer
027. Bloc Party - Two More Years
026. Mike Jones f. Paul Wall & Slim Thug - Still Tippin / (Diplo Remix)
025. Snoop Dogg f. Justin Timberlake and Charlie Wilson - Signs
024. Benjamin Diamond - Let's Get High / (Braxe Remix)
023. New Order - Jetstream / (Richard X Remix) / (JLC Remix)
022. Kanye West f. Jay-Z - Diamonds (From Sierra Leone) / Diamonds
021. Kylie Minogue - I Believe in You / (Mylo Remix) / BPM
020. The Paddingtons - Panic Attack
019. Rachel Stevens - I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)
018. Bloc Party - Banquet
017. M83 - Don't Save Us From The Flames / (Superpitcher Remix)
016. Turbonegro - All My Friends Are Dead
015. Junior Senior - Itch You Can't Skratch
014. Kylie Minogue - (Can't Start) Giving You Up / (Alter Ego Remix) / Made of Glass
013. Natalie - Goin' Crazy
012. Saint Etienne - Side Streets
011. Madonna - Hung Up / (JLC Remix)
010. Trick Daddy f. Cee-Lo and Ludacris - Sugar (Gimmie Some)
009. DFA 1979 - Black History Month / (Alan Braxe & Fred Falke Remix)
008. Brazilian Girls - Don't Stop / (Riton Re-Rub / Dub) / (Extended Mix)
007. Art Brut - Good Weekend
006. Maximo Park - Apply Some Pressure
005. The Game f. 50 Cent - Hate It or Love It / Clipse - Hate It or Love It
004. Kelly Clarkson - Since U Been Gone
003. Mariah Carey - We Belong Together / (Remix)
002. Rex The Dog - I Look Into Mid-Air
001. The Futureheads - Hounds of Love

I'm going to try and compile them all in .mp3 format for anyone who is interested. In case you're curious, here's my 2004 list.

2005-11-26T19:27:00.000-05:00

Smart Talk

Today I finished Quick Studies, a collection of the "best" articles from the now defunct magazine Lingua Franca. From its ambitious opening 15 years ago until its sudden disapperance in 2001, the New York based pub chronicled the lives, times, and minds of the 1990s' sexiest beat ... academe.

Okay, so maybe not the sexiest. But more interesting than you might think.

Attacking the culture wars, affirmative action, and the occasional turf war with brio, thoroughness, and literary skill, LF brings to mind some strange crosspollination between The New Yorker and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

And their roster of writers lives up to that billing. Media Elite regulars like Larissa MacFarquahar, Robert Boynton, Jack Hitt, Ruth Shalit, and Laura Secor pitch in to offer compelling pieces that manage to make the ivory tower look downright swinging. What can the manic mating of Bonobo apes tell you about your life? Who the hell is that Zizek guy I heard about on BBC4? Did the Romanian secret police really gun down a professor in the men's room? All that, the latest word on the evolutionary origins of laughter, a philosopher who doesn't believe in philosophy, and Milan Kundera acting crabby.

And, of course, LF's greatest claim to fame, its role in physicist Alan Sokol 's elaborate hoax on the post-modern journal Social Text. Revisiting that wooly beast—and the sniping, taunting, hashing and rehashing that followed its romp—unearthes its share of pleasant nostalgia for news-gone-by, but it's also a helpful refresher on political and philosophical positions (Is there any difference?) that remain entrenched.

It's a really good book; the sort of thing no graduate student should miss, especially the ones most likely to read this blog.

Now if you'd allow me the license, I'd like to break from the banal reviewery, put on my thinking cap, and Do the Derrida by critiquing LF's "narrative" with one of literary theory's favorite questions: What's been omitted?

I welcome gripping stories about Grand Old Men, Insouciant Young Turks, and Wild Sexy Chicks no matter their profession. A good story is a good story—especially when it's about a sex-obsessed feminist with an open taste for graduate students and a hardened interest in the "long phallic tradition of desire." But I can't help wondering if maybe they elbow out other demographics, especially the Serious Journalist's perennial source of guilt, that old chestnut, the Boring But Important.

And there's nothing about Asian people. Nothing.

2005-11-21T16:29:00.000-05:00

Where they keep the books

I'm spending my afternoon today with The Great Unloved at the Cedar Rapids Public Library, which I'm sure you'll remember as the subject of one of The Onion's post-Sept. 11 parodies. The Internet surfers around me are ogling match.com profiles, browsing horror movie reviews, trash talking on a fantasy football league's message board, and goofing around with online computer games.

Moi? Just bloggin'. Earlier, I fingered up a bunch of a magazines.

Here are the highlights:

Consumer Reports, like everybody else, loves that iPod Nano,. They say it's "the top choice among MP3 players with what may be the best-yet combination of size, storage and ergnomic ease." They also report that there are now 28 varities of Coke and Pepsi products on the market. As far as Xmas goes, they suggest the Melitta Take2 coffee maker as the perfect gift for the well-caffeinated couple you don't want to spend much money on.
The Believer's layout remains unreadable.
Richard Linklater confesses his love of Casino to Spin's Chuck Klosterman.
National Geographic has some freaky photographs of Indonesian sea creatures. Some of the fish are so grotesque they gave me a good flinch. You can find a few bonus shots online, including this one of a miniture crab that bears a striking resemblance to the mushrooms in Super Mario Brothers.
The Nation's Katha Politt busts on Maureen Dowd's new book.

And, of course, Wal-Mart ads in the new Vogue. Meet the vivacious, colorfully named faces of Wal-Mart's attempt to shake its stretch-top, sweat-shop stigma. Names, professions, and brief biographies of each supposed Wal-Mart shopper are included. Here's a brief rundown:

Angela, clothing designer (a "chic sophisticate" with a "fashion passion")
Grace, graphic designer
Jenna & Julie Ann, interior design team
Katherine, a stylist's agent ("surrounded by fashion's most creative visionaries"
Joy, volunteer
Toni, bartender (Cultural studies majors seeking a thesis topic take note: Black woman photographed wearing a leopard print faux fur.)
Christine, management consultant
Cyndy, "avant gardener"
Jamie, event planner

And my personal favorite:

Arabella, a dashing journalist in white stretch cords, violet cable-knit turtleneck and trenchcoat.

Good piece on Iran in the new New Yorker, which features a big ticket roster (including Woody Allen) and a handful of Remnickian notes from abroad. Here's my favorite tidbit, from Jane Secor's visit with a member of The Basij, the youth militia the Supreme Council uses to maintain their control.

I asked Belashabadi what he thought should be done about the satellite channels on which Iranians watch illicit fare such as music videos, Western movies, and political commentary from Iranian exiles abroad. "The majority of the population is young," he said. "Young people by nature are horny. Because they are horny, they like to watch satellite channels where there are films or programs they can jerk off to." Th regime could filter the channels, he suggested, or it could try to educate the people to tune in to more wholesome programming. He concluded, "We have to do something about satellite television to keep society free from this horny jerf off situation."

My translator implored me, in a jaw-clenched monotone, "Please do not laugh right now. This is a very sensitive moment."

2005-11-01T23:41:00.000-05:00

Deadlines

I spent most of my Monday furrowing through Donald Barlett and James Steele's 2004 book Critical Condition.

Like most of their other work (including last week's Time magazine cover story) it's as much polemic as journalism. And, like most of their other work, it lands like a kick in the pants.

The nut: America's health care system is broken. Why? Because competition doesn't work in medicine. We banked on the free market, and the free market let us down.

After opening with a stark series of statistics that lay out America's huge investments (world no. 1 in per-person expense) and mediocre results (middle-of-the-pack life expectancy and infant mortality rates, more than 40 million with absolutely no insurance while millions more go "underinsured" compared to full coverage in other countries), B&S document a raft of personal tragedies and a mountain of examples of corporate corruption they then place at the feet of a system they argue is driven by a misguided, manic belief that the logic of Wall Street can solve any problem.

This stuff should sound familiar. We hear about it a lot in the media. But there's a lot to learn here about the intricacies of the system, how it measures up against the performance of other systems, and how it came to be in the first place. You get a hard-edged analysis of the political rhetoric out there and a lot more than the usual talking points.

I found the intellectual history of privatized medicine to be especially fascinating. B&S trace the idea back to an associate of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and make an interesting ideological connection between the cold, number-crunching actuarial approach to war embodied by McNamara and Vietnam-era realpolitik and the ethos of privatized health policy.

In the end, B&S advocate the creation of a Federal Reserve-like board charged with leading a single-payer health care system for all citizens. And they make a compelling case. Even if you disagree with their recommendations, or decline to share their optimistic attitude toward government solutions, they make it hard to argue that things should stay the way they are. As they paint it, it's difficult to imagine a government system more bloated, confusing, and unfair than the one we've already got.

It's a great book, but it suffers mightily from repetition. After you've established that the system is fundamentally flawed, it's unnecessary to use the words "shocked" and "stunned" as often as they do. If the thing is busted, you shouldn't be surprised when it acts dysfunctional. And, as effective as the tactic is, it doesn't take long before you can see the horrific anecdotes coming a block away. As soon as the latest middle-class mom, blue-collar stiff, or quiet widow takes their first step out on the page, you're already waiting for the anvil to drop.

2005-10-30T14:57:00.000-05:00

Dark Days

On Friday I finished Claire Massud's The Hunters, a collection of two novellas that did well on the 2001 prize curcuit.

Chicken soup, they ain't.

The first novella tells the harrowing life story of a Ukranian women who escapes the blitz to grind out the rest of her life in domestic purgatory as a cleaning woman for upper-class Canadians. She's had a tough life, and the day we join her for the recounting is one of the uglier ones.

The second is the first-person account of a lonely summer in London told by that most common of literary fiction characters: the depressed English professor. Massud does a fine Nabokov, dazzling at times with her narrator's rhetorical filigree. But as with M. Humbert—whose charm and oratory could not erase his culpability in a most beastial act—a dark strand woven through the story prevents us from welcoming Massud's protagonist as anything more than an entertaining, and gratefully passing, companion.

But, brighten now, dear reader, because where Nabokov offered little solace to the depraved père of his most famous creation—to whom damanation, if it came with peaceful rest, would almost seem a gift—Massud allows her characters to escape their pain, if only temporarily. The first story finds relief in coping with the cruelties, mysteries, and frustrations of life with an open-hearted and humble acceptance. The second, in the comfort and intoxicating thrill of unexpected, youthful love. There's too much painful, guilty history for any Happily Ever After, but it was enough to keep me away from the cognac.

In a general way, I'm disinclined from letting authors get away with happy endings to sad stories. But, I think because Massud does it so skillfully, and in a way that embraces sentiments I'm sympathetic to, I'll let this one slide.

2005-10-09T20:34:00.000-04:00

Waterworld

The sea is angry, my friends. Or at least that's how William Langwiesche makes it out in The Outlaw Sea, his unsettling 2004 book about seafaring in the new millennium.

It's made up of a pair of articles about the terrorist threat to America's seaports Langwiesche wrote for The Atlantic magazine, complemented by a terrifying account of the sinking of a European oceanliner, and an investigation into Indian shipwrecking yards singled out as abominations by distant European activists.

Like the Richard Preston book I reviewed earlier in this year, The Outlaw Sea is the sort of journalism designed to frighten. Langewische wants you to fear the sea. And why is that? Because, amidst their roaring waves, Earth's oceans are peppered with floating outposts of rotting steel where you can find new forms of poverty, commerce, crime, and—most notably—nationless terrorism. There, regulation is a farce, America is a villain, and the safety of civilization is far gone over the horizon's edge.

After impressing the grave threat posed to America's vulnerable seaports by rogue ships and exposing our own baffling inability to stop it (frankly, enough to get me a little lathered), Langwiesche aims for something bigger. There is a recurring theme about human frailty in the face of nature—not much stands between us and a violent death, particularly when we're at sea, and our dear author wants to make sure we don't forget it—but there's also a concerted effort to use the untamed and reckless nature of the sea as a symbol of the challenges of globalization. Thomas Friedman uses India's motivated crop of engineers and growing technological infrastructure to present globalization as an electronic-fueled struggle between minds, as a battle that can be won. William Langewiesche is not so optimistic. He doesn't write about Bangelore's well-groomed business campuses. He writes about how the other four-fifths lives in the starving slums of New Dehli. And instead of empowering Friedman's supercompetent class of achievers to "flatten the world," most of the institutions he introduces us to come off as ineffectual, misguided, inadequate.

So, life sucks for most everybody and things aren't looking up. But what can we do about it? Sorry, Langewiesche doesn't offer any answers. But he seems to think a good first step would be to get our heads straight.

[The Indian shipwrecking port of Alang] has become a metaphor in the crucial struggle of our time—that between the First World and the Third World, the rich and the poor. In a slightly different form, it is the same struggle that plays out in the open ocean. Beneath our perspectives on a shrinking world lurks an opposing reality, hidden in the poverty of places like South Asia, of a world that is becoming larger, and unmanageably so. Do we share a global ecology? On a certain level it's obvious that we do that therefore a genuine scientific argument can be made for the imposition of a Western knowledge and sensitivities. But making this argument is difficult, full of political risk and the opportunity for self-delusion. In practice, the world is as much a human construct as a natural one. The people who inhabit it have such radically different experiences in life that it can be almost surprising that they share the same air. This is inherently hard to accept from a distance. Too often we have a view of what is desirable for some other part of the world—on an ocean, in the slums from which sailors come, in Alang—which is so detached from the daily existence there that it becomes counterproductive, or even inhumane. At Alang, resentful Indians kept saying to me, "You had your industrial revolution, and so we should have ours." I kept suggesting in return that history is not so symmetrical. But of course they knew that already. They viewed Alang, and the ocean itself, with more complexity than they could express to me, and were using a simplified argument they felt I might understand. On the ship-scrapping beach at Bhittagong, in Bangladesh, I met an angry man who took the simplest approach. He said: "You are sitting on top of the World Trade Center, sniffing fresh air, and talking about it. You don't know anything." And then, of course, the World Trade Center came falling down.

Other than an overuse of the word "chaos," Langwiesche's prose is as elegant and facile as ever. He effectively uses narrative techniques to pull you along. His account of the sinking of the Estonia and the international struggle that followed is compelling, if a little long-winded. You can read more of his work in this month's Atlantic, on newsstand's now, where you can find the first installment of a two-part series on A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan, Libya, and North Korea's nuclear weapons program. I also read that this weekend. It's very good.

2005-10-06T06:18:00.000-04:00

I stayed up tonight and revisited Vlad Nabokov's Lolita. This rarely gets mentioned, but for all its turmoil, self-recrimination and concupiscent ardor, it's a bright, thrilling, fun novel. Thanks to my recent French education, it was even more fun this time because I could pick up most of M. Humbert's voyages into his mother tongue.

Think you're an expert? Visit here to take the Barcelona Review's very difficult Nabokov quiz.

2005-09-25T01:57:00.000-04:00

It's the economy, stupid.

I cracked, I caved, I capitulated. I bought Freakonomics.

While you were out carousing with your friends and/or loved ones this Saturday night, I could be found tucked in a booth over at the Country Kitchen, lavishing attention on a discounted hardcopy that caught me at weak moment earlier in the day.

If you're not already familiar, Freakonomics is a book by a edgy young economist that uses statistical data to provide provocative insights into complex issues, from the very trivial to the very significant. It's been a big hit this year—well, wait, I should qualify that—it's been a big hit this year in a Malcolm Gladwell sort of way, not a Oprah's Book Club sort of way.

The jacket and most of the promotion I encounted led me to believe this thing was going to be damn wacky. And, for a while it was. (Silly questions like: What do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?) But, before long, it becomes clear all the charm and daffiness in the early chapters are a ploy. Our authors are charming us over to their side, building trust with some innocuous displays of mental muscle before they move into touchier terrority. After we've been sufficiently wowed and wooed by their early feats of arithmatic acrobatics, we're hit with a theory that politicians on both sides of the aisle have labeled an indecent proposal: More abortions = less crime.

The book makes compelling arguments. Though, while its findings may unsettle some, I can't say my boat shook all that much. But I'm a godless jerk, so what else is new? Even if I did change my mind about something, I probably wouldn't admit it anyway.

No, but for serious, it's a good book. I was able to mow through it in one night, and in the process I learned a lot about the nature vs. nuture debate, not to mention a bunch of wild stuff about crack dealing, the KKK, and trends in baby names. I'm still a little alarmed that sound reasoning is considered so alien to the mainstream that it needs to be characterized as freakish before it sounds palatable, but, regardless, this book is still smart stuff. And fun, too. Freakonomics, I embrace you.

2005-09-23T06:25:00.000-04:00

Dokté Paul

This morning I finished reading "Mountains Beyond Mountains," Tracy Kidder's book about Paul Farmer, a relentlessly dedicated physician who has given his life to battling third-world disease tooth and nail, never writing off a life. It's a cause that many smart people call a losing battle hopelessly focused on the little picture. But Farmer, a trenchant critic of inequality and committed advocate for the poor, disagrees, arguing at the top of his voice for service to the poor as a moral imperative.

In the mid-1980s, amidst the dirty and downtrodden of Haiti's central plateau, one of the poorest areas in one the world's poorest countries, Farmer established a small clinic that came to be known as Partners in Health. His three-person group eventually grew into a multinational agency helping the poor and diseased all over the world. Farmer was vaulted to international renown in the worlds of medicine and anthropology. While the ascent transformed the good doctor from an unknown front-line clinician—Haiti's Albert Schweitzer, you might say—into an international player in the billion dollar field of "public health," Dokté Paul, as his Haitian patients call him, never wavered in his commitment to the most vulnerable.

Kidder's book is a tight piece of long-form journalism. Of course, you learn all about Paul Farmer, his youth, formation, education, personality, career, and family. But you also learn the history of the beleaguered nation of Haiti, visit its bustling hills, and taste of its bitter legacy; you learn how decisions made at a far-flung clinic, where one patient may be that day's focus, fit into the larger picture of international health policy, formed at great distance by competing and complex groups of bureaucrats assembled seasonally at Europe's toniest resorts; and, perhaps the most compelling reason to recommend the book, you may learn something about yourself.

It was a sobering thing to measure myself against the women and men in this book. I'm not a religious person, but I don't feel the least bit uncomfortable calling Paul Farmer a saint. And, like an intermittent Catholic awed before the church's beautified exemplars, I can hold up my life for comparison and feel shame. According to Farmer, that's a good thing: guilt is a motivator.

The doctor never cuts his nut just right, but I think his core message may have been best articulated by Jack Egan, a recently deceased priest who, when not busy crusading for his latest cause, was known to grab the nearest man, women, or child by the arm and ask "What are you doing for justice?"

2005-09-23T00:11:00.000-04:00

Now with 50 percent more handclaps

New music from indie darlings Franz Ferdinand and The Strokes have the Web talking this month, but I'd like to buzz about something else: the new album from Junior Senior, that two-man group of Danes who scored a surprise hit in 2003 with the irresistable "Move Your Feet."

The knock from the pop shy was that JS didn't have lasting power. Disposable was the watchword. Well, like The Kid strutting across the stage at First Avenue with his electric phallus in hand, I'm here to tell you it's another way.

They've done it again. And, for me, the title says it all. By combining Neil Young's most famous injuction with a beatific bit of slang from hip-hop's golden era, "Hey Hey My My Yo Yo" sums up the mashed-up, handclappin', breakdancin', anything-that-works attitude behind today's best pop. That's the anthem. Throw ya' damn hands up.

Alright, enough nonsense. Let's work.

Junior Senior - "Itch U Can't Skratch"

Junior Senior - "Ur A Girl"

Feel the love?

2005-09-17T12:24:00.000-04:00

Mutations

For anybody that read Richard Preston's book and remains interested in the "Amerithrax" investigation, today's Times has an update.

In 4-Year Anthrax Hunt, F.B.I. Finds Itself Stymied, and Sued

2005-09-03T04:30:00.000-04:00

Cutting Deep

Here is José González's folkie cover of "Heartbeats," the great electro song by his fellow Swedes The Knife. Both recordings were released domestically (tämja) in 2003 but didn't reach our shores until much later. The original landed in the United States last year—where it finished no. 5 on my 2004 singles poll—and González's take is set to be released next week. You can read a review of the album at PitchforkMedia.com.

In case you haven't heard it, here is The Knife's staggering original.

2005-08-31T03:20:00.000-04:00

Short Stack

I'm fresh back from the International House of Pancakes, where I rolled through the second half of Black Hawk Down. It took five hours, or two pitchers of coffee, depending on how you look at it.

Mark Bowden's book doesn't need any more notice, but, for whatever this is worth, I'd like to give it my official seal of approval.

Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a collection of seven short stories that alternates between conventional narrative and the author's first-person voice. It's a provocative book, but the fiction often feels flaccid. It seems Kundera resorted to the first person because he wasn't skillful or inspired enough to express his message in fiction. It does, however, provide a fitting home for several of the Czech author's more memorable aphorisms. They include:

Love is a continual interrogation.

and

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

In other news, I may be a masochist. A new copy of William Strunk's stern textbook The Elements of Style has sent my body into quivers of delight.

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise.

The thrill is almost prurient. I feel a sudden empathy for Marv Albert.

2005-08-16T23:22:00.000-04:00

Poplives

Fueled by a series of coffee binges at a local cafe, I charged my way through a pair of memoirs over the weekend: One by long-time Times theater critic and political columnist Frank Rich and the other by film critic and poet Geoffrey O'Brien.

The books have much in common. Both New Yorkers, Rich and O'Brien recount their youths through the lens of each's abiding passion, music. For Rich, the spectacle of Broadway's golden age is presented as an escape hatch for a young boy struggling to deal with the stigma and confusion of growing up in a "broken home." For O'Brien, pop music is the background music and bit player in a host of childhood memories, rites of passage and fanciful flights of imagination.

Though, as much as I might try to force the pair into an awkward tango, they remain very different books.

Rich is a newspaper man. And his book reads like it.

I was seeing my first Broadway show by myself, with my own ticket bought with my own money. When it was over, I decided I wouldn't rush right to the hotel: I stood outside the same stage door where Mom, Polly and I had once waited in van to be greeted by Judy Holliday, and joined the few other stragglers who asked the exiting cast members to sign their programs. After getting a single autograph, I found myself distracted, studying the actors as they streamed out of the theater to go wherever they were going before that night's performance; I wanted to see how they dressed, how they spoke, how they walked — I didn't care how they signed their names. I noticed that while they wore ordinary clothes when they emerged into Shubert Alley, they moved with a speed and a sense of purpose that set them apart from the audience members who blocked their paths. It was as if the actors belonged to a world exclusively their own, which they were in a hurry to get to for the few hours until they became part of the I Can Get It for You Wholesale family again.

O'Brien, the author of such sumptuous fever dreams as The Phantom Empire and Dream Time, is more Billboard than Broadway. And he's at his best not when he's reading from the teleprompter but when shocked off on a wooly waxing on pop as a flickering, fleeting reflection that evokes memories — both real and imagined — inspires confessionals, offers consolation and rewards with catharsis.

Our record collections are libraries not only of lost sensations but of lost ideas, lost theories about the nature of things. A fragile metaphysic—the gossamer speculations of a stretched-out and mostly pleasurable afternoon—was sustained, perhaps provoked, by certain chord changes. Now all we have are the chord changes. We value them inordinately because they are connected to something even more valuable that we can't quite have but can only approximate through this token, like the uniquely suggestive bit of driftwood carried home from Montauk so as to import the seaside to Second Avenue. The effect is all the more frustrating because most of these ideas and understandings were never spelled out in the first place. They hovered in the air around the record player. There was perhaps a smile of mute assent, mute because it did not seem necessary at the time to speak. Instead we communicated through our selection of tracks, like in the Godard movie where the quarreling lovers carry on a conversation by pointing to the titles of books.

I'd highly recommend both books.

2005-08-09T18:05:00.000-04:00

Tuesday morning, early August

After working the late shift last night, I slept in today and lounged in my bed with a collection of poems by August Kleinzahler, who was written up quite favorably in a recent edition of The Times. In a delicious bit of serendipity, one of the pieces captured my condition quiet well, though I did end up going to work.

Staying Home From Work

That is a mower from the city
you hear in the park
so mild a day no heat
nowhere to be till lunch
nothing to think
money
nobody
lie still and listen
like the boy did
long ago
listening to neighbors mow
sniffing summer through the curtains

Such care the city takes
not to let grass grow
too long
and should you fall again
to dreaming
no one will reproach you
or come seek you out
to put your off this sweetness
so rare
so minor a key were it music
if fabric
would come apart in your hands

2005-08-03T11:49:00.000-04:00

Hemlock, sir?

This morning I finished reading Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons. It's a two-act play about the downfall of Sir Thomas More, a respected and learned* advisor to England's King Henry VIII who found himself in disfavor after he failed to support the king's move to divorce himself from both his barren wife and the bishop of Rome.

More, who you may have encountered in a 100-level philosophy class as the author of Utopia, faced a confrontation similiar to those presented to Socrates and Galileo. Renounce your principles, the state said, or walk to the gallows.

I think the reason I so enjoy reading the work of playwrights, which are designed to be heard in a communal theater not read privately in this dork's bedroom, is because I'm allowed to turn over the dialogue in my own head, savor each utterance in the manner I choose, clothed in whatever luxaries of the imagination I see fit. It's a selfish thing. Like a novel, a script feels much more personal, much more my own than a play or a film, which are wholly designed by someone else and which I'm forced to share with others.

Plus I really like good dialogue. And this idiom demands it. There are plenty of great movies and even a few good novels written by men and women without an ear for the spoken word, but I've yet to run into a play that could succeed without it.

Packaging the highly formal language of the period in easily digestable characters, (who are admittedly a bit one-dimensional) Bolt does well.

There's an opportunity here for a debate about putting principle before personal safety and what happens with might conflicts with what's right. Did Galileo make the right choice when he denied his discoveries to save his neck? Is Sir Thomas More a hero, a saint, a fool? Perhaps all three? And what obligation do we have to speak up for our conscience, even when we know our voice may not be welcome? What is it in ourselves — for Bolt's More it was his conscience's fealty to God — if anything at all that we hold as inviolable?

Hell if I know. So I won't even try. But in keeping with the last few posts, I will share a quote from Bolt's preface that I think applies to my own craft.

The economy was very progressive, the religion was very reactionary. We say therefore that the collision was inevitable, setting Henry aside as a colorful accident. With Henry presumably we set aside as accidents Catherine and Wolsey and Anne and More and Cranmer and Cromwell and the Lord Mayor of London and the man who cleaned his windows; setting indeed everyone aside as an accident, we say that the collision was inevitable. But that, on reflection, seems only to repeat that it happened. What is of interest is the way it happened, the way it was lived. For lived such collisions are. "Religion" and "economy" are abstractions which describe the way men live. Because men work we may speak of an economy, not the other way round. Because men worship we may speak of a religion, not the other way round. And when an economy collides with a religion it is living men who collide, nothing else (they collide with one another and within themselves).

*Okay, that word was totally unnecessary. I just really wanted to imagine myself saying it with that regal English infliction that's given us such pleasures as "PRO-cess-SEAS," "ISSS-euhs" and "con-traer-VA-seas."

2005-07-21T16:05:00.000-04:00

Feel Good Inc.

After pulling an all-nighter at Steak and Shake, today I finished up The New New Journalism, a collection of interviews with 19 of America's top long-form journalists conducted by Robert Boynton.

This isn't an anthology. And it isn't for a general audience. But it should feel like God's gift to any would-be writer. Boynton digs underneath his subjects' fingernails, asking each author to answer a series of questions seeking the dirty details of how they do what they do.

Boynton does an admirable job exploring the what of New Journalism (or Literary Journalism or Narrative Non-Fiction or whatever you want to call it) in his introduction. But it's in the how that his book shines.

Need to know who inspires Alex Kotlowitz? Ever wonder how William Langewiesche starts his day? Curious what sort of notepad Richard Ben Kramer uses? Like to know when Richard Preston knows he's done reporting? Desperate to find out where Susan Orlean gets her story ideas? If so, this is the book for you, my friend.

And if, like most writers, you suffer from a deep-seated insecurity, the voices in this book should also provide a little reassurance.

Leon Dash, author of Rosa Lee and winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Writing is always painful and slow. I always need the help of a good editor.

William Finnegan, longtime New Yorker writer and author of Crossing the Line and Cold New World.

Reporting can be lonely, boring, depressing. But writing is definitely harder.

Jonathan Harr, author of A Civil Action

I have a very well-developed self-censoring mechanism, which has proven to be a great impediment, sort of like being a fat marathoner. I choose a word and immediately think, “No, that’s wrong.” I rework a sentence endlessly to make it clear, to make it flow. I spend hours on a sentence, or days on a paragraph. I go back every day and make changes, which makes me feel like I’ve done something that day.

I make myself write only when I’m forced to by the panic of imminent failure. I write when I know that I’ll fail if I don’t get it done by a certain point, and that all of the work I’ve done up until that point will be lost. Panic is the great motivator.

Jon Krakauer author of Into Thin Air and Into the Wild

I am not a good writer. … The first sentence is agony, and I rewrite the goddamn first sentence from the beginning every single day for weeks.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family

I love reporting and I dread writing…I obsess over the first paragraph for days.

Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and Moneyball

When I start writing, I always have the horrible feeling that I’m doing it for the first time. It never feels easier than it was before. I’ve always written with the feeling that I’m under some kind of onerous deadline.

Susan Orlean, New Yorker writer and author of The Orchid Thief

When I sit down, I always feel that I don’t have anything to write.

Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and The Cobra Event

Writing is far more difficult than reporting…I do have a regular method, but it is painful, if not chaotic. I’m not proud of it. It seems to work, but I hate it….I begin by writing a lead, which I can spend weeks on. At first, it is too complicated, wooden, dull, windy, aimless. There have been times when I’ve rewritten a lead anywhere from thirty to forty times. I write the lead and throw it out. I write a slightly longer lead and throw that out. Eventually I decide it sucks and move on to the middle phase of the piece…(When I finish a draft) I print the whole thing out and read it. I’ve usually convinced myself it’s more polished than it really is. So it’s quite a shock when I finally read it on paper. I think, “Oh my god! I have no talent. I must have had a silent stroke, I’ve lost my ability with words. I’m a fraud! Just look at this stuff.” My first drafts are terrible, and I don’t show them to anybody—especially not my editors. When I have shown my drafts to editors, they tend to panic.

2005-07-20T14:53:00.000-04:00

Poxie

Last night I finished Richard Preston's Demon in the Freezer. It's an expanded version of a New Yorker article he wrote about the dangers of biological weaponry and the anthrax scare that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In his typically facile voice, Preston employs the events of "Amerithrax," the FBI's codename for the anthrax case, as bookends for a detailed account of the history of biological warfare. He places special emphasis on what he and his sources think of as the most dangerous threat to humanity's health, smallpox.

Eradicated completely from nature more than 20 years ago by a dedicated group of scientists, the pox virus, which once claimed 2 million human lives each year, now only officially exists in two highly guarded labs. However, it is believed to be the subject of experiments in secret government testing centers and, perhaps, other private facilities around the world. The possibility that pox, or a genetically modified form of "superpox" could be loosed — intentionally or not — on a world lacking an effective vaccination strategy is, according to Preston and the government and military experts he consulted, very real.

This is a book meant to scare you. It has sentences like this:

Virus engineering is cheaper than a used car, yet it may provide a nation with a weapon as intimidating as a nuclear bomb.

Preston is, as always, an efficient and effective storyteller. In his words, the science is accessible and the personal details about the characters enrich the narrative. In case you didn't know, he's the dude who wrote The Hot Zone.

I also finished David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire this past week. It's great. Remnick, now the editor at the New Yorker, was the Washington Post's correspondent in Moscow through the 80s and early 90s.

Despite all I learned about Russia, all the great characters I met and the whole epic national stuggle thing, what I enjoyed most about the book is the sense of purpose I read between Remnick's lines. I have no idea what it's like to take on a project of such weight, what it's like to face such awesome responsbility as a reporter, but from afar this story feels like the one, given his heritage and education, that Remnick was born to tell.

I think that part of the reason I find journalism so satisfying and exciting is that it gives me a sense of some purpose being fulfilled, of some witness kept, some use being provided, of a life well-spent.

2005-07-07T21:04:00.000-04:00

Get Smart

A review I wrote about Steven Johnson's buzzy book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter ran in a local magazine today*. Instead of reading that book, you should pick up its antithesis, Neil Postman's polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I heartily enjoyed reading in preparation for my review.

I haven't finished much lately other than Lanford Wilson's excellent play Book of Days.

I've been busy studying French and burrowing my way through Remnick's tome (wait for it....) Lenin's Tomb. I've also been log jammed on my two-person book club's latest selection, The Tin Drum, and Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, which I'm trying to rush through again this week to ready myself for our local production, which closes after this weekend.

If you're looking for something fun to read, I'd suggest picking up the newest Harper's and reading Jack Hitt's "Mighty White of You: Racial preferences color America’s oldest skulls and bones." Goodness, do I ever love irreverent science writing.

*For a fun challenge, see if you can spot the two factual errors inserted into the story by my line editors.

2005-06-04T22:14:00.000-04:00

Alone (Again!)

This afternoon I buzzed through Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own. At once a lightly fictionalized memoir, a lecture-like summation of the literary effects of the second sex's systematic subordination and a commencement address for the would-be women writers of the world, it's a sparkling read. Woolf provides plenty of insight and wisdom packaged in beautifully rendered and imminently quotable prose. While she's clearly aiming to inspire, Ginny's unafraid to call it straight. Here's how she explains the dearth of great female literature.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.

While I agree with her general assessment — that independence and economic security are what female writers need most to reach their potential — it didn't hit me all that hard. I suspect her thesis felt so pedestrian because it's become so widely accepted. Because of that, the tangential adventures (I found the stuff about the "androgynous mind" particularly interesting) and rhetorical florishes I encountered along the way are what really got me. Have a taste.

The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in spearate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.

Time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge.

2005-06-01T15:35:00.000-04:00

Last night I tied off Anne Hollander's Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. It's an extended exploration of Western fashion's history, from ancient Greece to modern America.

Hollander offers a full-bodied account that explores the social, political and sexual role of costume as it's changed through the generations. The focus is on the push and pull between the two genders as fashion transformed from a straightforward primitive art into a complex modern form of expression.

Despite the common contemporary impression that clothing is the domain of women, Hollander argues that the march has been one led by men, who until very recently have set the standards for both sexes. She makes a compelling case on that point and also offers some other enlightening stuff, not just about the details of modern dress but also its sexual and psychological underpinnings, which she presents as a multifarious, capricious, titillating, intimidating but ultimately empowering thing.

Seen in one way, fashion makes many look remarkably alike; seen in another way, fashion permits each to look excitingly unique. Guilt and fear about this uneasy combination never seem to lessen; it is a responsibility.

If you do find and choose what strikes your most private fancy, you will, of course, reveal yourself. What will show, even if nobody is watching or interpreting that data, is which colors and shapes and styles of ornament you obsessively choose, which other ones you always avoid, which kinds of things you endlessly seek versions of—in sum, all that you might wish to hide, the things that contribute, even without your concious desire, to the image you unconciously long to resemble or believe you have.

...

But we know fashion isn't founded on reason; the desire to summon explanations only shows that we know how irrational it makes us all seem.

2005-05-24T11:03:00.000-04:00

Last night I finished off a collection of Kennedy Fraser's writings for the New Yorker magazine called The Fashionable Mind. It brings together all of her pieces on the fashion industry published between 1970 and 1981.

Never content to simply present the latest line (though she does display a well-trimmed knack for concrete description) Fraser, a British expatriate, used her column more as a place to take on the abstract ideas and larger trends underpinning the craft of clothiers.

Working in the now diminished tradition of journalist-as-sociologist (or is it vice versa?), Fraser wrote big. She made broad generalizations and drew sweeping conclusions, while also providing furious praise and trenchant criticism, in essays with such straightfoward titles as "Modesty," "Paris," "Couture," Fitness" and, of course, "Style."

Themes recurr -- the politics of dress length, Fraser's disgust with the empty "retro" trends of post-modernism, style vs. taste and art vs. commerce -- but when the fabric hits the floor it seems Fraser's writings are always aiming for insights the reach beyond the superficial, no matter the cut or quality of her subject.

Intelligent, literary and full of hyperbole, I found the collection a real pleasure. Fraser's sort of writing might be out of intellectual fashion right now, but there are few things like it to spur debate, inspire critical thought or prompt self-reflection.

It's a shame she's out of print. But seeing as the author has gone on to write numerous more pieces for the New Yorker and Vogue -- as well as publish another book -- I think that before long a fatter edition will be in order.

2005-05-23T19:04:00.000-04:00

Coasting

I just reread Stuart Dybek's Coast of Chicago, where I first met one of my favorite writers.

When I first read it, years ago, Coast came as a revelation. Now, visiting it again, I still find a deep attraction, particularly to its bookend stories, "Chopin in Winter" and "Pet Milk." But, much to my surprise, the prose poem and flash fiction-ish stuff inbetween doesn't do much for me anymore. They feel a little purple.

While, "Milk" remains my favorite Dybek story ("We Didn't" a close second), I think I now would say I prefer the story cycle of I Sailed with Magellan to Coast's mixture of forms.

What have been your experiences rereading books you greatly enjoyed years ago? Does it ever feel like looking at embarrassing old photos from high school?

Oh, and if you don't know who Stuart Dybek is you need to get hip, especially if you're from Chicago. Don't just take my word for it. Here's Toni Morrison:

Every American writer knows who Stuart Dybek is, yet many nonwriters do not. If you have any interest in writing whatsoever, go out and buy his books.

2005-05-20T20:41:00.000-04:00

I wrapped up Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark tonight. It's a tight little novel that captures well the combination of tragedy and comedy at which he and so many of his countrymen have excelled. And, unlike a certain blockbuster film I saw yesterday, it managed to compell throughout, despite our noble narrator spoiling the surprise with his opening sentence.

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man named Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

Like Joseph Heller, Nabokov is a great writer with only one famous book. That's a shame because both cranked out a number of minor masterpieces (Heller's Good as Gold might serve as a fine companion to LitD) and a couple other big boys.

LitD was originally published in Russian as Kamera Obscura in 1932. Nabokov, a man of many letters and languages, translated into English himself six years later.

2005-05-18T01:25:00.000-04:00

Drrty Mind

So, to borrow a Carver-ism, what do we talk about when we talk about love?

I wrote a while back about how I read Haruki Murakami's depiction of romantic love (I'm talking exclusively about the falling-in-love, two partner Eros thing here) in his novels. After reading Mrs. Dalloway, I think Ginny may be on the same page.

While they have their differences, both show romantic love as something starkly different from what I get out of most American cultural artifacts and myths. Love, in what I'll venture to call the American sense, fulfills us. Whether we're talking Sex in the City, Sideways or Seventh Heaven, it's a rite of passage that bridges the gap to stable adulthood. It is something that's sought and savored. It is a light going on, an explosion of color and, of course, a birthright.

In Woolf's novel, love is something else, which I guess we'll call the European version. To Peter Walsh, Clarissa Dalloway and the other inhabitants of Woolf's London, love is a certainly a powerful force, but not always a positive one. It's a maddening drive that compells acts both noble and juvenile, causing more problems than it solves; an irresitable urge that drives us to odd and often destructive ends. But beautiful all the same. Like the pleasures and pratfalls of the other fatalist pursuits -- fashion, food and friends -- it's often more trouble that it's worth. Yet it provides music if not meaning where otherwise they would be only a quiet desperation.

Lennon/McCartney was wrong. Love isn't all we need. It's all we got.

Maybe sorting this out is as simple as saying it's Old World values vs. Modern World values. I don't know. You got a definition? I'm just riffing here. It's late.

Jarvis, back me up.

Pulp - "F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E."

2005-05-17T12:22:00.000-04:00

British Literature

Thank goodness school is finally out so I can start learning again.

Beyond cramming to test out of a Macroeconomics requirement, which has been way more fun than it deserves to be (thanks largely, I suppose, to the freedoms such self-directed academic activities provide, ala drinking beer while studying), I've found the time to get back in the groove.

This week I got my first exposure to two highly regarded British novelists from Ian McEwan's Black Dogs and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Both came with a lot of hype. Here are sprinkling of the adjectives found on the back of McEwan's "study of the fragile nobility of the human spirit": "virtuosic," "subtle and unforgettable," "masterful and moving," "acute and alive, vivid," "redemptive," "fresh...vast and disciplined."

Hoo-weeeeh! That there some wordin'. I know you've come to trust such august voices of the literary establishment as The NY Review of Books, Times Book Review, Post Book World and The New Yorker, but -- gosh darn it -- you've got to believe me: it ain't that hot.

Sure, it's well crafted; the damn thing (a fictional memoir about a pair of starcrossed lovers told by their orphan son-in-law) reads as easy as a peanut butter sandwich. But, all in all, it seemed so slight. And a little too easy. Unless you're out to make a clear political point (see: Animal Farm, The Crucible) don't step to me with such straightforward symbolry. Yeah, dad's rational, mom's mystical and sonny's somewhere in between, I get it. But I can't really relate. Granted, the form is compatible with McEwan's themes about memory and the little myths we all write for ourselves, but it just didn't cotton to the characters for me.

And, in the end, it didn't add up to all that much.

Dalloway, on the other hand, brought the heat. I doubt the world needs one more lit-wit rambling on about it, so I'll spare you. But I should say it's worth your time. Go get it.

2005-05-01T21:36:00.000-04:00

Cheery-OH!

Alright, enough of this whiny livejournal crap. I managed to finish two final papers and write up through the results section of my research paper (read: fake thesis) today. I've decided to reward myself by calling it quits early and spending the evening with the New Yorker.

David Remnick manages to squeeze the following words in the first page of his profile on British PM Tony Blair. Hell yes.

propinquity
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English propinquite, from Latin propinquitat-, propinquitas kinship, proximity, from propinquus near, akin, from prope near -- more at APPROACH
1 : nearness of blood : KINSHIP
2 : nearness in place or time : PROXIMITY

faux-naïf
Usage: foreign term
Etymology: French
: spuriously or affectedly childlike : artfully simple

oleaginous
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French oleagineux, from Latin oleagineus of an olive tree, from olea olive tree, from Greek elaia
1 : resembling or having the properties of oil : OILY; also : containing or producing oil
2 : marked by an offensively ingratiating manner or quality

2005-05-01T14:43:00.000-04:00

I miss you, Books.

I took a blood oath to read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway with a friend of mine. But, thanks to the rigors of higher education, I haven't had the opportunity to read much more than half of it in the past month. You'd think that a graduate student in the humanities would be buried in books, but you'd be wrong. I punch numbers into computers.

(Right now I'm entombed in the computer lab buried beneath Memorial Union. Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over" just shuffled up on my iPod and the "they come to build a wall between us" line is resounding through my soul. Books, I won't let them keep us apart. If nothing else, Neil Finn understands us.)

As you can tell, when I'm not reading my brain starts to shrivle. I need it to be next week.

Here's a great bit from pg. 5:

Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason; they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.

The novel is just swimming in quiet desperation, though. That burst of life-love ain't exactly representative.

I'm in the process of devising my summer reading list. I never plan more than one or two books ahead, just going where the spirit leads me most of the time. But there are always a few I force feed myself. Here are seven I'm going to hit for sure:

David Remnick - Lenin's Tomb
Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
Thomas Friedman - From Beirut to Jerusalem
Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
Geoffrey O'Brien - Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory and the Imagined Life
F. Richard Ciccone - Royko: A Life in Print
Daniel Boorstin - The Discoverers

Hit up that comment box with suggestions.

2005-04-30T14:38:00.000-04:00

Having an mp3 player is great.

Here's the last bunch of songs that've come up on shuffle. I can't imagine how fab it'll be when I get this thing all filled up. It's only about one-third full right now.

Bill Hicks - I'm Talking to the Women
Kylie Minogue - Slow
Air - Remember
Bob Dylan - To Ramona
C.M. Smith - Casa Electro Trip
Alan Braxe and Fred Falke - Rubicon [Original Mix]
The Ronettes - The Best Part of Breaking Up
Johnny Cash - Cocaine Blues
The Millionaries - And The Rains Came
Paul Westerberg - World Class Fad
The Honeybees - She Doesn't Deserve You
Michael Jackson - Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough
Velvelettes - Needle in a Haystack
Newcleus - Jam on It
Jurgen Paape - So Weit Wie Noch Nie
The Killers - Mr. Brightside
Sage Francis - Gunz Yo
Billie Holiday - What a Little Moonlight Can Do
Belle and Sebastian - Get Me Away From Here I'm Dying
The Rapture - Echoes [DFA Edit]
The Strokes - 12:51
Miles Davis - Gone
Basement Jaxx - Oh My Gosh
Judas Priest - Exciter
Wu-Tang Clan - Method Man
Black Ivory - Wishful Thinking
A Tribe Called Quest - Push it Along
Black Sabbath - Snowblind
Wilco - The Lonely 1
The Clientele - What Goes Up
Gwen Stefani - What You Waiting For?
Bjork - Big Time Sensuality
Scott Walker - Dutchess
Belle and Sebastian - Stay Loose
New Order - Temptation [12 Inch Version]
t.a.T.u. - Not Gonna Get Us

2005-04-23T21:35:00.000-04:00

Speak, Melody

Saturdays have been weird for me lately. This is the first time I've lived by myself and on weekends I have all this time and space to myself. And I'm feeling unmoored. It's a new thing, all this energy and no place to put it. (Why not the blog?) I'd like to think this strange sense of malaise and anxiety mixed with restlessness stems from soul-deadening academic work they're demanding of me and which I've been avoiding like Marburg. But is that too easy? Maybe there's something missing. And maybe it's my fault, not theirs.

Kaito - "Saturday and Sunday"
In my opinion, the best song to come out of that whole micro-house thing. Like other standouts, it's mellow and meditative, yet strangely compelling in minor key sort of way; head bobs, the swirling sonics crawl up my back. But this one has something special about it, something elegiac, something really good.

2005-03-25T17:07:00.000-05:00

Holiday, Holiday

Spring break in Iowa. Too much good food, too much free time.

I've been doing my best to avoid any sort of productive work by reading novels, eating ice cream and listening to music all day (New Spoon: Bad, New Fischerspooner: Good).

There's been one, two, three detective novels by German author Jakob Arjouni, James Watson's famed -- and rather scandalous -- account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, George Orwell getting his reporter on, before getting his PolitCrit on, in The Road to Wigan Pier and Hermann Hesse being, well, Hermann Hesse, in his novel Damian.

The Arjouni novels are darn interesting. They're brief little bits of genre fiction in the vein of Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane which can be read in a couple hours time. His P.I. is Kemal Kayankaya, a bier slugging Turk living in Frankfurt who is not only an outsider by trade but also by birth. It's neat to see an American artform adapted into a different culture, sort of like the British grime and Indian bhangra I've been listening to a lot lately but with Humphrey Bogart and Philip Marlowe reimagined instead of Dr. Dre and the Wu-Tang Clan.

2005-03-15T09:18:00.000-05:00

Look Homeward, Fuckhead

I'll be traveling back home next week for Easter so it's coincidental, and may I say a bit serendipitous, that I stumbled across a poem by Denis Johnson this morning which attempts to capture the sensation of homecoming to, of all places, my native land.

Iowa City

The stifled musk of wood beneath linoleum
in the tall listening stairwells of certain
buildings stays, and the timbre the walls gave to your weeping
and to our snide talk and marijuana coughing,
that also stays, and some of the anger, and some of the stopped
feelings, the stranded, geologic
grieving of seedlings on a wind--and such we were--
they remain. But where do they remain?--the place
has gone, the receptacle
of these essences is mysterious.
I've returned to that same town, and nothing--
no raking, no ghostly notes, only
shopping malls standing where I beat you up
and spring's uncertain touch and stuck breath
and women who smell like flowers or fruit or candy
moved by delicate desires along the aisles.
As we did, the same trains drag through town,
summoned up out of the prairie and disappearing
toward places waiting for their conjuring,
mountains and glens and the snow coming down like dreams
in a silence and in a tiny souvenir.
----

I can't say I've ever beat anybody up--I'm no burly Kerouac-ian poet like Johnson and sometimes feel like I'm much too effete to be a proper American writer--but I can certainly identify with the lingering memories expressed in the first half (which nail what it was like for me to grow up in Iowa) and the empty surprise of finding them not nearly as haunting as you'd expect when you return home. Spring should be celebrated, but, like an eraser swept across a schoolhouse chalkboard, it only leaves the faintest traces of what came before.

2005-03-12T11:53:00.000-05:00

Up The River

So, I finally read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Yeah, I know you read it while you were earning that English degree. I was sitting in CMN 342: Intimate Relationships and reflecting on my lack of intimate relationships instead, okay?

I don't get why this book gets such a bad rap. From what I understand, Edward Said and the post-colonialism crew have all piled on because it doesn't offer a "full realized alternative to imperialism."

It's a novella, not a position paper for the state department or an essay in Foreign Affairs. There's this thing called SUBTLEY*; it's sort of what art is all about. Just because the narrator says something racist doesn't mean the book is. The arc of the story travels from one monsterous European act to the next, I must have come across at least a dozen instances were the Africans come out favorably next to the whites, plus London, Brussels (a "whited sepulchre") and the colonies are portrayed as some sort of gloomy, hellish nightmare.

Great book, anyway. I loved it. The Broadview Press edition I linked above has a neat introduction and a bunch of cool writing from the same period included in the appendix for context. Dig on that copy. It's cheap, too.

*There's irony, too, and that's probably more important but I couldn't resist writing subtley in all caps, which, come to think of it, is also ironic, but in a different sense.

2005-03-06T07:05:00.000-05:00

Talkback

I've converted to Haloscan commenting and trackback. It's much simplier and easier to use than the old system. It should make it easier for y'all (assuming y'all exist) to fire back.

2005-03-04T18:47:00.000-05:00

Silly (Eustace) Tilly

I gourged myself on Woody Allen's collected prose this week.

Brief and punchy, Allen's satires are mostly extended riffs. The thrill comes from seeing just how far he can carry his silliness before the grown-ups find out or he just plain runs out of material. He busts chops on the mafia, the government, the literary establishment, the young, the old, the Nazis, the Jews, business, academia and anybody else he can think of who take themselves seriously.

Allen is most successful when he stays on point. Too often, I felt, he gets carried away and takes it one absurdity too far.

The majority were first printed in The New Yorker.

Although it's not my particular brand of humor (I think it's a bit too showy. Sometimes I feel like his talent begs to be admired more than enjoyed.) I was struck by how much I'd read quoted or at least echoed elsewhere. I got here a little late.

2005-03-01T06:57:00.000-05:00

Winter Woolie

I finished Craig Thompson's graphic novel Blankets on Saturday afternoon.

It's the coming of age tale of a Wisconsin teenager who's grown up isolated from the world by a dysfunctional family, rural poverty and a repressive church.

And, like many men, he has a woman to thank for his growth.

So maybe I should clarify: It's a love story. With pictures. And it's great.

Like most graphic novelists I've read, Thompson doesn't have much of an ear for dialogue. But his language isn't the written word, it's the curved line. And he shows tons of imagination, advancing his story through a variety of narrative devices that jump between present action, imagination, past and future without a hitch.

This one is a must for anyone who ever attended vacation Bible camp.

2005-02-24T21:59:00.001-05:00

South by South West

My march through Murakami continued today as I rolled over South of the Border, West of the Sun, a minor key romance in the same vein as his other novels Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart.

While SotBWotS is not one of the Japanese author's more highly regarded novels, I had no problem tearing right through it, devouring the 200+ pager in one afternoon --> evening; my only break the brief respite of my cohort's weekly happy hour ritual.

The central struggle is over how we deal with the past (Can we control it, or does it control us? What power do we have to define ourselves?) but for the most part it's the same old Murakami: disappearing woman, blank protagonist, hypnotic prose.

The thing about Murakami's romances, as opposed to his more allegorical and dream-like novels, is that they're not about romance. They're about misery. The protagonists struggle with the pains of loneliness and their physical appetites (not necessarily for sex, either) while driven by painful hunger, a deep yearning. Love as not a blessing or a treat, but instead a fix, a brief contentment that provides relief and comfort as fleeting as our own bodies, the gift and the curse.

Yo, DJ! Pump this party!

Roxy Music - "Love is the Drug"

That's our jam.

2005-02-21T23:20:00.000-05:00

Finality, For Sure

I read Jessica Abel's Artbabe collection Mirror, Window tonight. It's all pretty slight, but compelling in a 20something pub romance sort of way. Her drawing style sets just the right pace.

R.I.Y.L.: Ira Glass, gossiping with your friends and the North Side of Chicago.

I checked out this copy from the Columbia Public Library. Funny that I moved here from Chicago before I finally read this.

2005-02-20T01:55:00.000-05:00

Bushie

Finished New York Times reporter Frank Bruni's Bush book tonight. Bruni covered Bush during his 2000 campaign and he writes us through the Afghanistan bombing after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Unlike Bob Woodward, Bruni was forced to analyze Bush from the outside looking in. He uses his own observations and reporting as well as information garnered from a wide variety of sources (many of them unnamed) to paint a picture of our elected leader.

Bruni portrays Bush as an affable, well-meaning but often bumbling dude who, thanks to family connections and an underappreciated political savvy, ambled his way into the Oval Office. He makes much of Bush's discomfort with the formality and gravitas of politics, casting him as the jester who became king.

I liked the book. It offers a well-rounded (not to mention well-written) picture of a guy too often charicatured. To his critics he's a pampered, backward imbecile. To his supporters he's a resolute and upright populist. In reality, he's neither. I think Bruni gets us a little bit closer to understanding the man. And for that I'm grateful.

I also read Alan Moore's graphic novel League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1 sometime in the last week. It's fun in an Indiana Jones sort of way, but not all that hot.

2005-02-12T04:18:00.000-05:00

House Cleaning

My favorite mashup maven is offering "remastered" versions of three of his best creations. Do yourself a favor and download these sparkling clean copies. Each is a classic.

Go Home Productions - "Sexual High"
Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" + Radiohead's "High and Dry"

Go Home Productions - "Shannon Stone"
The Rolling Stones' "Gimmie Shelter," "Honkey Tonk Woman" and "Sympathy for the Devil" + Shannon's "Let The Music Play"

Go Home Productions - "Like I Absolutely Love You"
Justin Timbo's "Like I Love You" + Scritti Politti's "Absolute"

2005-02-09T00:20:00.000-05:00

From Russia with Love

Finished Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart tonight. It's a sad, sweet little book that has all the trappings of Murakami: a lonely, bookwormy narrator, disappearing women, dreamlike plotting, oblique philosophical allegory and unrequited love -- all the stuff that makes me get weepy eyed.

I'm gearing up for his new one, which I'm wait listed for at the library.

2005-02-02T02:03:00.000-05:00

More Books

Too much school and my blog sucks. Give up on it and spend your time here. There will be a free mp3 everyday.

In past week I've finished one, two mindbending Denis Johnson books, one philosophical novel by Haruki Murakami and Chris Hedges' passionate essay on war.

They're all great. What can I say? Do you care? I don't know.

How about this?

Download Go Home Productions new mashups by clicking here and here.

2005-01-20T03:38:00.000-05:00

Not Saying, Just Spraying

This is purported to be the new Daft Punk single.

2005-01-14T18:27:00.000-05:00

Dream On

I finished Charles Johnson's Dreamer this afternoon. I didn't even consider it when I plucked her off the shelf last night, but it was an appropriate choice considering Martin Luther King Jr. Day is Monday.

Its the story of two physical similar men who differ as much spiritually as Abel and Cain, Ghandi and Nietzsche. They are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his fictional doppleganger Chaym Smith.

While its heavy allegory doesn't allow for much narrative detail or stylistic nuance (which you can find in Johnson's superb novel Middle Passage) and it's brief length doesn't allow for much development, Dreamer makes its points clearly and manages to tell a familar story in a new way. It enriches by lending fresh insight into King's thought and, through skillful contrast, shows how his personality and teachings fit into the larger picture.

2005-01-13T18:01:00.000-05:00

Bookodds&ends

I finished Tom Wolfe's big shit novel Bonfire of the Vanities this afternoon. Believe the hype. It's a lot of fun.

I also finished a couple others recently that I've neglected to mention. There was an awesome collection of essays by Daniel Boorstin and Jane Leavy's Sandy Koufax biography.

They're both great. And if you're in Chicago you can pick up a copy of the Koufax book at the Powell's on Lincoln for five bucks. It's ace stuff. Much like Remnick's Ali book, it's about more than just athletic achievements. It's all in the context, kids.

One thing that's interesting to me about Koufax is that while he's been such a hugely resonant figure for millions of Jewish-Americans most kids in the Heartland today are probably clueless about the guy.

You couldn't say the same thing about Ali. Or could you?

What's the halflife on celebrity?

Charles Lindbergh was maybe the most famous person on Earth between the two world wars. Today, I doubt 1 out of a 100 school children could tell you the first thing about him.

2004-12-30T07:18:00.000-05:00

Love Song

I woke up early this morning and finished James Baldwin's novel Another Country.

It's an emotionally brutal book: the story of a half dozen New Yorkers and their tangled, tortured relationships. They each grapple with love, race, success, failure and sex in their own way and, yet, strangely, together.

In a lot of ways it's similar to that movie Closer--except, ya know, it's good.

It opens powerfully, with the story of Rufus Scott, a lonely black bohemian stranded in the world's most merciless city.

He was facing Seventh Avenue, at Times Square. It was past midnight and he had been sitting in the movies, in the top row of the balcony, since two o'clock in the afternoon. Twice he had been awakened by the violent accents of the Italian film, once the usher had awakened him, and twice he had been awakened by caterpillar fingers between his thighs. He was so tired, he had fallen so low, that he scarcely had the energy to be angry; nothing of his belonged to him anymore - you took the best, so why not take the rest? - but he had growled in his sleep and bared the white teeth in his dark face and crossed his legs. Then the balcony was nearly empty, the Italian film was approaching a climax; he stumbled down the endless stairs into the street. He was hungry, his mouth felt filthy. He realised too late, as he passed through the doors, that he wanted to urinate. And he was broke. And he had nowhere to go.

Baldwin offers a grim portrait of his world, one that's often tough to endure. But his prose is so vivid and violent that, like the broken but hungry -- always hungry! -- lovers that populate his novel, I had a hard time not coming back for more.

2004-12-29T18:12:00.000-05:00

They said it

The courage to doubt, on which American pluralism, federalism, and religious liberty are founded, is a special brand of courage, a more selfless brand of courage than the courage of orthodoxy. A brand that has been rarer and more precious in the history of the West than the courage of the crusader.

-- Daniel J. Boorstin

2004-12-29T00:30:00.000-05:00

Knockout

As my winter break book binge continued on today, I put aside the three books I'd been wading through and devoured Thom Jones' short story collection, The Pugilist at Rest.

War, sex, death, rock music, boxing, existential philosophers -- this book has it all!

Written in a brisk, conversational tone, Jones' stories bristle with life. None of the stories hit me as hard as the title piece from his sophomore collection Coldsnap but they still pack plenty of punch. It joins the short list of books that I've read in one day.

If you like Raymond Carver or Ernest Hemingway, this guy is for you.

2004-12-21T21:29:00.000-05:00

The Greatest

I finished David Remnick's Muhammed Ali book, King of the World, today. I liked it.

It's a detailed telling of Ali's early years, covering everything up to the Floyd Patterson fight in '65, that's chief virtue is all the valuable context it provides. By exploring the entire culture of boxing at the time, telling the stories of Frank Carbo and Jimmy Cannon as well as Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson, Remnick is able to really get at Ali in a way I've never seen done.

But best of all is Remnick's writing. There are reasons he's managing editor at The New Yorker. Clear, simple writing that isn't afraid to make a stylistic florish but takes its greatest pleasures in savoring the details and characters that made boxing so colorful, it's exactly the sort of prose I'd like turn out.

While most of the material comes from second-hand sources, Remnick did a little reporting of his own. He bookends the tale with material from a personal visit he had with Ali, now suffering from Parkinson's disease, in the 1990s.

The book came out in '98. It must have been a big holiday gift at the time because I'm seeing used copies on the web going for around a buck. I got mine at the Goodwilll, without dust jacket, for about that much.

It's sort of fun to google the old critical notices. (Salon.Onion. ALA) Since all the reviewers would probably stab their mother to write for the NYer, I'm not surprised most of the reviews were pretty positive.

But, then again, it's a pretty damn good book.

2004-12-19T20:56:00.000-05:00

Violated

Depeche Mode has a cool remix/greatest hits collection out there right now. It features reworkings of their tunes by Air, DJ Shadow, My Bloody Valentine and Nine Inch Nails producer Alan Moulder and many more--including the band themselves.

Here are a couple tasty samples.

Depeche Mode - "Little 15" [Ulrich Schnauss Remix]
My good buddy Ulrich, who I introduced to you earlier, he does his thing on here.

Depeche Mode - "Halo" [Goldfrapp Remix]
And, as always, Alison knows just how to play me. This one doesn't coalesce all that well as an independent song, but -- goodness gracious -- is it sexy!

2004-12-19T16:43:00.000-05:00

Black Gold

After a brief flirtation earlier this fall, I finally settled down and committed to Arthur Kempton's Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music this week.

It's a messy but marvelous book. Kempton leads a tour of the bootstrappers of 20th century black music, from gospel kingpin Thomas Dorsey to his allegory of fitful integration and illustration of dreams deferred Sam Cooke to the pimp tactics of Barry Gordy and the gangster posturing of Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur. And in between -- you might say scattered by the wayside -- are the little-known tales of dozens of woulda'-coulda'-shoulda'-beens who never did be.

The one recurrent character, the never-missing link: The White Man. A ever-present force ready to come down hard any time it suits his interests.

Kempton does just as much bookkeeping as chartwatching, so this is far from a fan's guide to soul records. He's no fetishist, more of a Marxist. And he takes the long view, trying to place each character's experience in the large context of the African-American journey..

Click here to read Luc Sante review from the NY Review of Books -- a publication Kempton contributes to -- which attracted me to the book.

2004-12-19T05:03:00.000-05:00

One Big Tree

I spent my Saturday morning driving around the countryside south of Columbia. Decembers are mild here in Missouri, and it was a beautiful winter morning, the soft sun shining down an open sky.

During my travels, I stumbled upon a gigantic oak tree on a cleared piece of river flats near McBain, MO. In town I met some nice folks at Lucille's Beverages and Burgers, where they have a jukebox with George Strait and Patsy Cline alongside The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Madonna. They told me the Burr Oak is Missouri's largest oak tree and the second biggest in the entire United States.

I also decided that I love Ulrich Schnauss' Far Away Trains Passing By. I'd always liked it before, but I think that now -- three years after its release -- it has matured into one of my very favorite.

Ulrich Schnauss - "Knuddlemaus"
This is the lead track.

It makes me feel like I'm tucked in a window seat aboard a train Kraftwerkin' across the snowy Swiss Alps at midnight.

Really, it does.

Slabbin'

The Times ran a wonderful piece of unconventional journalism on Friday. Charlie LeDuff writes about Slab City, California, an abandoned military base in the Mojave desert where solitary senior citizens form a makeshift town out of their mobile homes each winter.

There are no amenities; no potable water, no electricity, no sewerage. Groceries can be picked up in town at the grubby market whose managers do not seem to mind that hundreds of people fill their jugs from the water tap. Mail is routed to a post office box - Niland, CA 92257. Gasoline is bought in distant towns like Brawley; prescriptions and liquor are bought in Mexico. Sewage is held in storage tanks or holes in the ground.

The north side of Main Street is Poverty Flats. The south side, the suburbs, where the relatively well-to-do motorhomies have their dinner dances and clubhouse trailers.

2004-12-16T19:12:00.000-05:00

Pop04

My 20 favorite singles of 2004:

20. Scissor Sisters - "Take Your Mama Out"
19. Natasha Bedingfield - "These Words"
18. Soulwax - "NY Excuse"
17. Ghostface f. Missy Elliott - "Tush"
16. Gwen Stefani - "What You Waiting For?" / "What You Waiting For?" [JLC Remix]
15. Kelis f. Andre 3000 - "Millionaire"
14. Belle and Sebastian - "I'm A Cuckoo (Avalanches Remix)"
13. Girls Aloud - "Love Machine"
12. Annie - "Heartbeat"
11. Ce'Cile - "Hot Like We"
10. Britney Spears - "Toxic"
09. Go Home Productions - "Jet Lady Joe"
08. Trick Daddy f. Lil' Jon and Twista' - "Let's Go"
07. Phoenix - "Everything is Everything"
06. Young Heart Attack - "Starlight"
05. The Knife - "Heartbeats"
04. Delays - "Long Time Coming"
03. Girls Aloud - "The Show"
02. Basement Jaxx f. Lisa Kekula - "Good Luck"
01. Usher f. Ludacris - "Yeah!"

Click here to see the entire top 100 list.

2004-12-15T20:08:00.000-05:00

Beige Haze

Cam'ron - "Harlem Streets"
If I had made lists then, the Hill Street Blues theme would have been top 10 all-time when I was 14.

2004-12-14T03:23:00.000-05:00

Why Not?

It's funny on so many levels.

2004-12-14T03:06:00.000-05:00

Daft Opera

Anna Netrebko - "Quando Men Vo"
On the most recent 60 Minutes they profiled a Russian opera singer named Anna Netrebko. She's real sexy, makes music videos and is more than happy to flirt with reporters, so she gets lots of favorable press. This is one of her songs.

LCD Soundsystem - "Daft Punk is Playing at my House"
The album has leaked. It's more of the same, and that's a good thing.

2004-12-14T02:58:00.000-05:00

51 Things I Considered Paying For

Click here to browse my favorite albums of 2004. Yippee!

Singles list to follow.