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Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
McCarthy could have called his narrative set in the late-19th century North American southwest, Unsettling the West. As Civil War vet "the kid" makes his way westward across the U.S. and in and out of Mexico, he is never far from a Grand Guignol landscape of lawlessness that makes the dystopian Australia of Mad Max look like Oz. A novel that deserves close reading, but makes the reader want to turn one's eyes from the horrors it reveals. (**)
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night
The story of Dick and Nicole Diver is one of two lives entwined by love but propelling each other in opposite directions. Richard Diver is a brilliant psychologist who falls in love with the mentally broken millionairess Nicole. As the latter grows stronger in their marriage and under his care, Dick finds himself dissipated by desuetude and ultimately ruined by the foreign milieu of the idle rich abroad. (***)
Jeannette Walls: Half-Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
Winding the clock back two generations before her memoir of growing up brutally poor, Jeanette Walls has written a novelized account of the life of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Born at the start of the 20th century, Lily Smith is a hardscrabble daughter of the West. As she grows, she will become a horse breaker, an elementary school teacher, a bootlegger, a rancher, a mother, and eventually a grandmother to the woman who's writing her story. Walls' follow-up to The Glass Castle is easier to read than the former, because it lacks the brutal infliction of poverty on children by wayward parents. There are tough times, but they are endured and overcome with grit and determination. (***)
Sarah Vowell: The Wordy Shipmates
Who were those Pilgrims anyway--who went from breaking bread with the Indians to massacring the Pequot tribe in cold self-justifying blood just a few years later? Author Sarah Vowell writes an entertaining tale of the Puritans, their political and religious development, and their personal squabbles writ indelibly in the history of America. (***)
Cormac McCarthy: The Road
Following a holocaust of unspoken origins, the physical world descends into dark grey lifelessness, with humanity following closely behind in moral entropy. It is the setting for a man and a boy to trudge forward on a road of survival with a planned destination of blind hope. (***)
David Carr: Night of the Gun
Acknowledging that he is not a reliable enough eyewitness, New York Times reporter/columnist David Carr investigates his own past as a train-wreck coke addict and alcoholic by interviewing people who witnessed it. Carr's book could have been an automythology involving fall, courage, and redemption, but neither he nor the people who were there are willing to gloss over the very ugly truth. (***)
Joseph Kanon: Stardust
Ben Kohler is summoned home from post-WWII Germany, where he is documenting the Holocaust, to Hollywood, where his brother lies near death after what is being publicized as an attempted suicide. Paranoia, secrets, and betrayal have not been left behind in Germany for the large population of German Jewish emigres who managed to flee the Holocaust and find refuge in America's movie industry. And post-war Hollywood is not the haven it first appeared, as anti-Communist forces regenerate the climate of paranoia and persecution at the start of a new, cold war. (***)
David Foster Wallace: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Don't be afraid to pick and choose or abandon any of Wallace's essays, which cover a wide variety of subjects with varying degrees of reconditeness. An exegesis on the state of literary analysis circa 1994 may not be your thing, whereas a detailed travel diary of a trip to the Illinois State Fair is right up your alley. DFW manages to blend erudition with an irreverant sense of humor; no small feat. But he endangers his narrative momentum and rhythm with footnotes that threaten to crowd all other prose off the page. They aren't footnotes so much as lengthy discursions that warrant their own sub-chapters or endnotes. (** 1/2*)
Jonathan Lethem: The Fortress of Solitude
Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude meet as young boys on Brooklyn's Dean St. in Boerum Hill. Lacking mothers--Dylan's mother abandons him and his father at an early age and Mingus is essentially sold into the custody of his father by his own mother--the pair spend their young lives navigating the perils of young men adrift in the lawless city that is youth. All of the characters are chasing an elusive peace: "Utopia the show which always closed on opening night." (***)
S.L Price: Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America
The true story of two talented ballplayers, Mike Coolbaugh and Tino Sanchez Jr., whose lives and careers collide on a minor league team playing in a small park next to a small river running between two small cities. When Sanchez hits an errant foul ball that strikes his first base coach Coolbaugh at the base of his skull, the latter's instantaneous death seems to encapsulate the cruel twists of fate that mark the lives of minor league baseball players. Aside from Coolbaugh, Sanchez, and their families, Price's book is about the Sisyphean struggle young men undertake to get a crack at the big leagues, or to eke out a living as a minor league lifer. (***)
Nick Hornby: Juliet, Naked
When a 40-something British woman named Annie realizes that she's wasted 15 years of her life co-habitating with a man of inaction as a bulwark against the boredom of living in a provincial northern seaside town in England, she tweaks her boyfriend by writing a contrarian album review on a musician's fansite. It's not just any musician, however, but Tucker Crowe, a man whose music and life her boyfriend has been scrutinizing for decades. When Crowe emerges from his J.D. Salinger-like reclusiveness to respond positively to Annie's review, Hornby's novel about jump starting one's life after years of wasted time gains momentum that rarely falters. (***)
Jon Krakauer: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman
Author Jon Krakauer obviously had extraordinary access to NFL star-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman's family. His book includes long and numerous excerpts from Tillman's private journals. Tillman was almost an anachronism in the 21st Century, who believed in honor, virtue, duty, and personal integrity. His values were only rivaled by the utter mendacity of the Army and Bush administration personnel who concealed the facts of his fratricidal death for political gain. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool cynic, but even I was shocked at how little respect could be paid to a man who gave his life for his country. (*** 1/2*)
Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet Either I am too old or Lethem wrote his main character Lucinda--a 29-year-old female bassist in a struggling band--as too young. Maybe it's because Lethem moved his setting from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, but all of the characters in "You Don't Love Me Yet" come across as one dimensional caricatures and none of them seem worth identifying with. (**)
Cormac McCarthy: No Country For Old Men The novel that spawned the Best Picture Oscar-winning movie No Country For Old Men is a story as meditative as it is violent. Sheriff Bell follows a trail of brutal death and mayhem while contemplating a nation that he feels has become unmoored. Anton Chigurh is a psychopath with a well thought out code of justice based on the inevitability of the moment, and where everything ends with him. I don't know Texas; but I get the impression that McCarthy knows it, very well. (***)
Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn Lionel Essrog is one of the four Minna Men, who small-time crook Frank Minna "adopted" as teens after they'd been relinquished to the St. Vincent's Home for Boys in downtown Brooklyn as children. When Frank Minna is murdered right under Lionel's nose, he feels compelled to find out who was responsible. Compelled because Lionel lives with Tourette's Syndrome, making him a detective given to bouts of physical tics and verbal outbursts that don't exactly lower his profile, but cause people to underestimate him all the same. He is a "free human freakshow," and Lethem has created one of the most original whodunnits of the genre. (****)
Paula Uruburu: American Eve Stanford White: hedonist, brilliant architect, and seducer of young girls. Harry Thaw: sadist, scion to a Pittsburgh family whose fortune only fueled his insanity, and self-proclaimed protector of young women he felt were morally imperiled by men like White. Trapped between the two is Evelyn Nesbit, one of the original American "It Girls," whose beauty made her both famous and infamous. Uruburu's account of a true story of seduction, rape, and murder is overly florid at times, but entertaining nonetheless. (***)
Joseph Mitchell: My Ears Are Bent From his days at The Herald Tribune, Mitchell shows how a little curiosity and the ability to poke one's nose where it wasn't invited can result in a superb story, told with skill. (****)
Kate Atkinson: Case Histories Three separate mysteries are, if not solved, moved to some sort of resolution by British private investigator Jackson Brodie, a divorced former cop whose mind is already halfway to his dream retirement cottage in France . (***)
Nick Hornby: Slam Hornby mastered the art of ex-romantic reflection in "High Fidelity." His latest novel involves looking forward, as a young teenage boy who finds himself thrust into adulthood with an unexpected pregnancy. Cameo advice provided intermittently by a Tony Hawk poster. (***)
Paul Auster: The Brooklyn Follies Divorced, retired, and recovering from cancer, Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood to die. While waiting, he discovers that he's got more life in him yet. (***)
Paul Auster: Man In The Dark Auster's quick-read novel follows the narrative structure and merits the predictable interest of an elderly man's stream of thoughts during a night plagued by insomnia. (**)
Jerome Charyn: Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of The American Revolution New York City during the American Revolution: a port city of treachery, spies, armies, officers, and whores. Johnny One-Eye drifts among them all, in a unique fictionalized take on the formative chapter of U.S. history. (***)
Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex An immigrant story of a gene that wends its way through generations of a Greek-American family in 20th Century Detroit before manifesting itself in the phenotype of a young woman named Callie. (***)
J.R. Moerhringer: The Tender Bar The true story of a boy-turned-young-man who found shelter, avuncular attention, and a sense of belonging at a local tavern in the commuter town of Manhasset, Long Island. (****)
Paul Bacon: Bad Cop Swept up with a desire to do something after the 9/11 attacks, Paul Bacon decided that he would sign up with the NYPD. Less saving the world than writing quality-of-life infraction tickets and racking up collars for outstanding warrants, a rookie cop discovers what real police work is all about. Hilarious and illuminating. You’ll never look at a cop on the corner the same way again. (***)
Gregory David Roberts: Shantaram A sweeping autobiographical tale of an escaped convict from Australia who finds refuge from the law, his past, and his own demons in the slums of Mumbai, India, where he operates a free clinic and becomes a mob bagman. Roberts’ prose tends towards the purple, but the scope of his story merits some allowances. (***)
Ben Karlin, ed. : Things I’ve Learned From the Women Who’ve Dumped Me A collection of humorous essays organized as life lessons gleaned from the disintegration of prior relationships. Funny despite occasional repetition of themes, e.g. early romance is akward and fraught with painful embarrassment. To paraphrase Dan Savage: all relationships are destined for failure, until you’re in the one that isn’t. (***)
Bernard Cornwell: Rebel First in a series of historic novels following the adventures of Nathaniel Starbuck, who rebels not against his famous abolitionist preacher father, but his northern upbringing as he chooses to fight for the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. The novel’s plot line leaves many strands dangling—to be expected in the introductory volume of a multi-part series. (** 1/2)
Richard Price: Lush Life Author Richard Price moves his fictional setting from the housing projects of New Jersey to those of Manhattan's Lower East Side, where PJs border block after block of tenements, occupied by poor immigrants, long-time residents, and an increasing number of slumming bohemians looking for a taste of what they think is the "real" NYC before it becomes completely gentrified. Loosely inspired by the real-life murder of a bartender working at a more upscale bar in the same neighborhood. Price continues to capture the essence of social friction in urban society, and the potentially spirit-breaking milieu of a neighborhood where faded dreams are always in sharp relief with the bright eyes of a never ending stream of newcomers. (***)
James Swanson: Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer Shortly after the end of an unpopular and costly war, a famous young actor puts a gun to the President's head and pulls the trigger, mortally wounding him in front of a crowd of people. The dashing assassin flees, assisted by co-conspirators, as a grieving nation quickly mobilizes a massive manhunt for Lincoln's killer. ()
George Orwell: Down And Out In Paris And London Heavily autobiographical, George Orwell's first novel is an auto-roman a clef in which his protagonist becomes intimately familiar with what it's like to be broke and hungry in a modern urban environment. (***)
Jonathan Mahler: Ladies and Gentlement: The Bronx Is Burning Highly entertaining look at NYC 30 years ago, when neighborhoods burned, blackout NYers looted, iconic politicians battled for the mayoralty, and Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson and the rest of the Yankees butted heads while improbably writing baseball history. (***1/2)
William Langewiesche: Cutting for Sign Neither a diatrabe nor a recommendation. Langewiesche takes a clear-eyed look at the cartographical fault line dividing the U.S. and Mexico and discovers less of a division and more of a metaphysical conundrum of what it means to attempt to divide two peoples in one world. (***1/2)
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa: The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) Originally considered unpublishable; a novel of Italy's 19th century Risorgimento, when principalities gave way to a nation state and principles of aristocracy gave way to a less cultured way of existence. (***)
Augusten Burroughs: Running With Scissors: A Memoir. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at Burroughs's memoir of his helter-skelter upbringing. With an alcoholic father who wanted nothing to do with him and a severely disturbed mother with delusions of literary grandeur, young Augusten finds himself deposited in the home of his mother's psychiatrist, surrounded by filth, pedophilia, and a cast of real people whose personal problems almost beggar belief. (***)
William Styron: Lie Down In Darkness. This Southern Gothic novel--Styron's debut--flashes back through the lives of the Loftis family members, painting a portrait of personal failures, emnity, and bitterness that leads to the suicide of youngest daughter Peyton. A sure holiday pick me up! ()
Mark Helprin: Freddy and Fredericka. As if channeling Mark Twain in his novel Roughing It, Mark Helprin perceives modern America with fresh eyes via two exiled royals reminiscent of Charles and Diana who are sent to the U.S. to re-earn their royal status. A ridiculously funny farce. (***)
Nick Hornby: A Long Way Down. Four strangers meet on New Year's Eve atop a London highrise, each with an individual plan to kill themselves. Sometimes, however, the best reason to live is the company of three suicidal strangers one just met. Hornby continues his streak of making life's bleakest moments also its funniest. (****)
Sarah Vowell: Assassination Vacation. Vowell misses no opportunity to relate every historical tidbit to how bad G.W. Bush sucks as a President, but otherwise has written an incredibly entertaining travelogue of her research into three Presidential assassinations that includes an enormous amount of info on history, personality, architecture, and context that makes the past come alive. Should be required reading for high schoolers. (***)
Augusten Burroughs: Magical Thinking. Good for fans of David Sedaris, who enjoy their personal memoirs with a bit of self-deprecating bite and large dose of personal tragedy, swallowed with eventual deliverance from personal hell. (***)
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee: The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail: A Play. Written in 1970, this play is supposed to be an allegory to a man willing to speak out against an unjust war. For Thoreau, it was the U.S. intrusion into Mexico in the 1840s. For the playwrights, it was Vietnam. I expect a theatrical revival of this work almost immediately as a protest against our current war. A good idea, but the work itself is insufferably earnest and heavy handed. Should appeal to and light a fire in the bellies of socially conscious 13-year-olds. (*)
Anthony Bourdain: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Bourdain is now a big star with his own TV show, or basically the type of celeb chef he reviles in the book that made him famous. I occasionally socialize with the kitchen crew of a famous Manhattan eatery and can attest that the pirate lifestyle of the pro chef Bourdain describes persists to this day. (***)
Patrick Suskind: Perfume, The Story of a Murderer. Suskind's historical novel of an olfactory "Rain Man" serial killer was acclaimed in the '80s, but now reads like a writer stricken with graphorrhea. Translated from German, Suskind is the Teutonic Bret Easton Ellis, with neverending paragraphs indicating his thesaurus should have been burned. (**)
Fredrick Exley: A Fan's Notes Talent is no guarantee of recognition or success. Frederick Exley's fictionalized memoir is a sad and occasionally hilarious recount of a life wasted in a haze of alcohol and unspent ambition. (****)
Mako Tanako: Thirty Years at The Broome Street Bar In the 1970s, downtown Manhattan was a wasteland. SOHO was a bereft industrial no-go area of town and Cass Gilbert's Custom's House [see BLIZZARD '06, 2/14/06] had been vacant for a decade and developers wanted to tear it down. During those last transformative 30 years, artist Mako Tanako [an incredibly gracious individual] has been exhibiting his art on the chalkboard at Kenn's Broome Street Bar. He erases his pieces every month. Fortunately, someone was prescient enough to capture them on film and they are collected in this book. Art can be as short-lived as talent and inspiration. (***)
James Crumley: The Last Good Kiss A snapshot of the seedier side of America in the already seedy and downtrodden earth tone 1970s. C.W. Sughrue is a functioning alcoholic private investigator on the trail of a non-functioning alcoholic novelist at the request of the latter's ex-wife. As he criss-crosses the mid- south- and pacific north-west, Sughrue finds himself bound to an ugly and pathetic intersection of skin flicks, family, missing persons, and deception that only murder and blackmail can resolve amicably. The most fun you'll have reading about others' misery. (***)
Natsuo Kirino: Out Belying the image of Japan as a halcyon society of high-tech gadgets and unlimited prosperity, Kirino's hard-boiled novel plumbs the depths of the lives of four actually desperate housewives. Their lives interconnect on the night shift they've taken to earn a few extra dollars an hour to keep their families out of poverty and become bonded when one kills her husband in a fit of frustration and rage. How do four women cope as they sink into a world of murder, yakuza, loan sharks, and despair? ()
Mark Helprin: Memoir From Antproof Case A sprawling and epic autobiography written by an old man sitting on a park bench in a garden in Rio de Janeiro. The fictional protagonist relates the passage of his life as a young man, inmate of a lunatic asylum, investment banker, fighter pilot, spouse of a billionairess, murderer, master thief, and life-long hater of coffee. Reminiscent of William Boyd's Any Human Heart, but funny instead of tragic. ()
Haruki Murakami: Dance Dance Dance A reasonably well off freelance writer takes a break from "shoveling cultural snow" to look into the disappearance of a call girl that he'd previously dated and who now cries for him in his dreams. His journey brings him to a hotel they once shared, a successful actor he went to grade school with, and a 13-year-old girl with pathologically bad parents [one of whom is a simulacrum of the author]. A piercing examination of the skeletons in Japan's then-economically-booming closet of consciousness. "What was that all about?" indeed. (****)
Haruki Murakami: South of the Border, West of the Sun Lacking the supernatural touches of his other novels, Murakami paints a picture of a man who by all rights should be satisified with his life: successful, independent, happily married. The reintroduction of a childhood love into his life, however, is cause for reflection on the elusiveness of happiness, or even its meaning. South of the Border is a real and imperfect place. West of the Sun is a fleetingly perfect dreamland. (****)
Michael Patrick MacDonald: All Souls: A Family Story From Southie MacDonald [a personable guy, but incredibly softspoken for a writer and in comparison to his verbose younger brother] violates his hometown's insular code of silence by revealing the corrosive culture of crime, poverty, and substance abuse that make South Boston one of the poorest ethnic communities in the U.S. Yet the Irish-Americans that live there are fiercely proud of the enclave they call their own. It is ultimately the memory of his four dead brothers that drives MacDonald to reflect on the paradox that is South Boston. (****)
Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel Japanese house-husband Toru Okado has lost his cat. A few weeks later he loses his wife. Then he starts receiving strange phone calls. And thus begins a novel that ranges from sublime beauty to scenes of the stark horrors of war. So far, incredible. (****)
Haruki Murakami: Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End of The World Murakami convincingly captures the voice of the Western hard-boiled loner transplanted to a Japanese context, except he's a neurologically/cybernetically gifted operative who finds himself in the middle of a dangerous game of info-espionage. Alternating chapters are devoted to a related story that is a stunning meditation on the nature of consciousness, being, and the immortal soul. Absolutely beautiful. (**** 1/2)
J.G. Farrell: The Singapore Grip Farrell concludes his end-of-empire trilogy in Singapore during the month before the city-state falls to the Japanese in WWII. Oblivious to the mortal danger approaching, Walter Blackett and his family swirl about in an existence of colonial farce. The story is weighed down by ponderous exposition on the Marxist view of colonialism, but is an entertaining read nonetheless. (***)
J.G. Farrell: Troubles Shell-shocked Major Brendan Archer returns from WWI--via a recuperative stay in a hospital for mental invalids--to London, then Ireland to meet his erstwhile fiancee in the resort town of Kilnalough. Her widower father is the owner of The Majestic Hotel, whose rapidly deteriorating structure is symbolic of the disintegrating British Empire, especially in Ireland, where Anglo-Irish rule is succumbing to the Troubles of 1919-21. (***)
William Gibson: Pattern Recognition Cayce Pollard is a professional "cool hunter", using her intuition to help marketers determine what will and won't be accepted as hot by the global marketplace. Her hobby is the examination of mysterious footage that is disseminated over the Internet. Her work and hobby collide as she criss-crosses the globe from London to Tokyo to Moscow in an effort to find out who's behind the footage, while personally reconciling the disappearance of her father in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Is Pollard engaging in pattern recognition or the apophenia her father warned her against? (***1/2)
J.G. Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur The second book in Farrell's trilogy of historical novels depicting the unraveling of the British Empire. Farrell addresses the Muslim uprising against their colonial masters in 1857 India with black comedy. (***)
Clifford Odets: Waiting For Lefty and Other Plays Odet's unapologetic pro-communist plays about the plight of downtrodden men and women in the 1930s would resonate more if he weren't such a stooge for the Soviets, who were busy massacring their countrymen while Odets and friends put on their plays. (**)
Stendahl: The Red and the Black Stendahl's classic novel follows protagonist Julien Sorel in post-Napoleanic, early-19th-century France. ()
Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Imagine if Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, and their band of "Jackasses" drove around the country and, in addition to filming their antics, heralded themselves as the vanguard of a legitimate psycho-spiritual-societal revolution. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters did in the 60s--and a lot of people fell for it. Were they fooling themselves as well? (**1/2)
Jon Krakauer: Under The Banner of Heaven In a sparsely populated, mountainous region few people have ever visited, a collection of religious fanatics has built a theocratic society centered on the subjugation of women and that brooks no dissent. And when God instructs them to kill, they obey. Welcome to fundamentalist Mormon country in North America. (***1/2)
David Sedaris: Holidays On Ice Sedaris' short collection of holiday-themed stories are as much a Christmas tradition to me as anything by Clement C. Moore. Non-fiction like "The SantaLand Diaries" and "Dinah, The Christmas Whore" share space with a hilarious fictional family Christmas letter and more. (*****)
Richard Price: Samaritan The author of Clockers returns to the New Jersey housing projects with a story of a man and his misguided sense of everyday altruism, who refuses to identify the person that bludgeoned him nearly to death. (**1/2)
John O'Hara: A Rage to Live John O'Hara chronicles the changing times of fictional Fort Penn, PA as the town and its people circle around golden girl Grace Caldwell Tate. (****)
Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy's tale of Jude Fawley, Sue Bridehead and their ill-fated love in 19th Century England. Aspires to tragedy, but unintentionally succeeds as a comedy of excessive bathos. (**1/2)
This is my dog in this fight. My pal Belle. Geaux Saints!
I have a rooting interest in this year’s Super Bowl.
I will be unembarrassed and say that it’s my friend Southern Belle, a Louisiana native and someone who could probably snap my wrist for writing this faster than I can say “ouch”.
The first time I was out with Belle socially I was with two other women at an after-hours dive. Because of the ridiculous nature of me being surrounded by three such improbably good looking women, someone approached Belle and inquired if she was a hooker.
That’s ridiculous, because she was wearing a tweed overcoat, and trust me on this, Belle acted like a pretty demure girl when she arrived in NYC. Plus, I was standing right there. “Back it up buddy!”
Anyway, Belle got to be a great bartender and even better bar manager, and got a mouth on her that would make a Marine blush. Friends started calling her Dirty Pirate Mouth, because how can you hear someone call a BINGO game and want to go to confession afterwards?. And this is what’s going to get me killed: I know she’s got a heart of gold; she’s a badass, but she’s a soft badass. She’s the “No, I am not a hooker!”-with a heart of gold. And I could not be a bigger fan. She is a quality friend.
Belle’s got two public passions: LSU and the Saints. This one’s for you kid. Geaux Saints!
America's two-party system can get ugly, but don't knock it; it works great.
Two-party government rocks because it works and is democratic in the sense that it serves the majority of Americans to their best benefit.
A lot of people rag on the United States’s two-party system as being oligarchic and overly centrist. “It’s too mainstream and middle of the road.” Yes it is; and that’s why it works. And that’s why the U.S.A tends to excel, whereas other countries tend to fall into disaster.
I won’t say the U.S. doesn’t fall into disaster–it clearly does, even recently. I’m saying that it doesn’t go into psycho-disaster mode where blood runs in the streets. Or just policy-disaster mode where a country’s economy gets run onto the rocks for a generation or two.
If one listens to a lot of politically active and highly vocal bloggers–and I unfortunately do–one will be accustomed to the accusation that the U.S. government is an “oligarchic” something-or-other and there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans.
A lot of people roll their eyes at this. I actually smile at the latter part, because it’s true! And it’s relatively awesome. For the purpose of this site, I’m not diligent enough to nail this down–I’m sure someone must have already–but there has to be a game theory study about how a two-party system wins the day for democracy.
I’ll cut it down: game theory is about the dynamics of individual actors in a group–winning and losing in individual numbers within groups of people. Why do you think Republicans and Democrats are so alike? Why do you think that presidential elections come down to percentage points and single electoral states? Why has even the latest so-called landslide been so close? The fact that a win by 7 percentage points–where 3.6% on either side changing their mind is decisive–is considered an epic victory. It’s because successful candidates have to adhere to the center!
Countries with multiple parties are like a closely divided Senate. When a vote is coming down to the line, those last two or three Undecideds wield extraordinarily disproportionate bargaining power. Think of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), who held out on the Obama Healthcare Bill until he was able to extract what is being characterized as a “sweetheart deal” that will save the State of Nebraska hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicare costs. Translate that negotiation to a country with a coalition government, where multiple parties have to be cobbled together to gain a majority. A single small party–usually a radical political outlier–can wield significant policy influence totally beyond it’s actual political base. This can lead to a large variance in the direction that a country takes–economically, politically, socially.
The common accepted economic wisdom is that “markets hate uncertainty.” I think that’s true and I think it extends to other avenues of social interaction. Certainty allows people to behave with long-term expectations. Large investments can be made with the reasonable expectation that they won’t be yanked away on unreasonable grounds.
The two-party system of the United States means that a presidential election can come down to less than a percentage point of the popular vote, where winner takes all. That pulls candidates inexorably towards the center, with the point of winning as strong as the force of gravity. Once a winner is decided, he or she can never stray that far from that center line without the risk of ruin for his party, [see Massachusetts Miracle--Not a Miracle]. The result is a nation with an even keel. It can slowly change directions, but it doesn’t jerk around like a racing yacht. One can build a five star restaurant on a cruise ship. One can’t NOT spill one’s drink on a speed boat. With a two-party system, it is the most expansive definition of a majority steering the ship. And that means a sometimes frustratingly slow and deliberate hand on the wheel.
Many complaints can be made about America’s political process–misdirection, manipulation, deception, corruption. All of those have their places. When you hear someone say that the problem with American politics is that Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same, know that that person is barking up the wrong tree. Just two parties are required to never veer too far from the center, which by definition is the majority of Americans. That two-party system stability is what has given the U.S. the ability to thrive. And that’s a ship of state I want to cruise on.
It’s opening night for U.S. Drag, the off-Broadway production of L&O producer Gina Gionfriddo’s stage play about love, murder and the NYC dream–something completely distinct from the American Dream. It’s directed by Michael Scott King and leads with Mariya Tsekalo King.
The New York Times on the original production: “Ms. Gionfriddo does capture the viciousness of a certain kind of New York dream. In the end, the lesson these women learn is simple. Fame is fame, however you get it. So when you meet a notorious serial killer in a dark alley, don’t run away. Ask for an autograph.”
The current production that opens tonight:
Gina Gionfriddo’s Blackburn Prize-winning play U.S. DRAG, a sharp-as-a-knife social satire, tells the darkly comic story of two recent college grads on the hunt for love, money, meaning, and Ed – New York’s most elusive serial attacker.
The cast of U.S. DRAG includes Katherine Horlitz (Allison), Mariya King (Angela), Matt Brown (James), David Carl (Ned), Michael Scott King (Evan), Reid Andres (Christopher), Laura King (Mary), Nicole Stoica (Janice/ Store Manager/ Bartender/ Christen).
The too-short run begins tonight at the American Theater of Actors on West 54th. Tickets are available at Theatermania.com Am I biased because my friends are starring in and directing the show?: Yep. Should you take my recommendation a little more seriously because my friends are starring in and directing the show? Pssht! Of course. A man with this much free time has it to cherry pick.
Being a big fan is a poor excuse to act like a jerk.
I think it was when Patrick Ewing the fellow spectator cocked his eyebrow at me and regarded me with . . . disdain, possibly contempt, that I became a much better basketball fan.
There’s something incomparably intense about the student section of a college basketball game. When I was an undergrad in the mid-90s, my team had both its feast and famine years. What wasn’t flagging was my fandom. I was a superfan. I was the guy who showed up two hours before a game to be in the front row of the student section and get on ESPN. I tried out to be the school mascot (didn’t get it.) I was also, I am required to admit, a bit of an asshole.
I can’t think of any other sport that offers fans a chance to get so close to competitors and interact with them. Places like Duke’s Cameron Indoor Arena are legendary for the home court advantage they offer the Blue Devils, simply by the crushing presence and closeness of the “Cameron Crazies.”
My home court in Landover, MD at the time was not comparable in any sense. It was an hour’s drive from campus, cavernous, and rarely filled to half capacity. Still, our student section was raucous, and we made ourselves heard. I’d like to hear from a college player whether the personal invective thrown at him from fans really throws him off his game. Or is his pounding heart and heavy breathing the thing that fills his ears at quieter moments, like when on a free throw line. For me, “baseline” meant the court’s border from which I could say base horrible things to guys I didn’t know.
Fans say some terrible things. Things that make no sense and are ridiculous. Things that involve private details that have been gleaned or exposed. Things that can be personal and, frankly, quite cruel on purpose. I said those things, and it got me on tv with Dick Vitale. Go team!
I don’t even remember what I was yelling at a UCONN player during an astonishingly close and exciting game at Madison Square Garden during the Big East Championship. I just remember Pat Ewing–sitting as a fellow fan and the Hoya above all Hoyas–looking at me and telegraphing “Kid, you are an idiot.” It was that moment that I came to realize–”Sports, it really is just a game.”
There was one other time that really brought things home for me. It was when I watched Spike Lee’s film “He Got Game.” The movie stars Denzel Washington and UCONN player-alum (current Celtic) Ray Allen. Allen was a too-often dagger in this Georgetown fan’s heart. He is an incredible basketball player; and I probably yelled things at him that I wouldn’t have yelled at Hitler.
So I watched Allen in the co-leading role of this Spike Lee Joint, and I was wondering how staggeringly awful Allen would be. But he was incredible. Really, really good. Possibly a better actor in that film than I’d ever seen him play basketball (and at the time that was unfortunately very very good ball). And I not only found it impossible to hate him, but I found it impossible not to genuinely like and admire the guy. I was embarrassed for myself.
If college students and superfans ever happen to read this I’ll give you my takeaway: those kids on the court are great guys by and large. Talented and hard-working guys who enjoy your taunts about as much as you would enjoy your English professor singling you out in class, yelling “Give it up! Why are you even here? You are a f’ing LOSER!” in front of your classmates. Your personal invective is an embarrassment to yourselves and your school.
I will continue to casually say “Duke sucks!” “Syracuse is for losers!” and “Nova blows!” completely unapologetically. But if a player for one of those teams fell near me in the front row while diving for a ball–I’d help him up, tell him good hustle, and say he wasn’t go to make his next 10 free throws. And that would be that.
This is not a post about pornography, so about 99.9% of you can just keep moving. This is about podcasts and iPods and my inability to conduct myself with dignity.
My biggest problem with podcasts are that I tend to listen to them in public, and they frequently get me laughing out loud to an extent that is completely undignified. And I mean giggling to the point of tears in public, which is one of the least manly things I can think of.
Podcasts are the 21st century reincarnation of old time radio. And my mother loves old radio shows, which is part and parcel of today’s post. Podcasts are Internet-distributed audio programs that can be about anything. Sometimes they are direct rebroadcasts of traditional radio programs like This American Life. Others are audio versions of traditional print features, like Dan Savage’s Savage Lovecast. Sometimes they’re completely sui generis creations of affinity programming where people just get to broadcast themselves talking to a like-minded audience.
One podcast that falls into the last category is the SModcast, produced by indie director Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier. The SModcast has spawned a book version of its greatest hits–accurately titled “Shooting the Shit with Kevin Smith”, but I can’t say I’m a superfan. I’m more just a fan of the medium and started listening to Smith’s show a few months ago.
Smith’s 1/17/10 podcast was an interview with his mother, which I was feeling sweet about because it was my own Mom’s birthday recently. They were describing his family background, and a wing of his extended family was described as fairly hardcore north-Jersey blue collar folks. Smith describes himself in comparison to his Uncle Joe, who ran a junk yard and “built shit with his hands” and was part of the family that got into “surprising” family violence. In his falsetto self-assessment, Smith the film director is not a man; he’s soft and round. “I’m a writer. I blog. I’ve got a podcast.” And that hit a little close to home.
It also made me laugh so hard, because I was walking home from the grocery store with some fruit. And as I was listening to Smith describe his extended family and their propensity for physical violence, I started thinking about that scene in the film adaptation of Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled novel “The Grifters.” There’s a scene where character actor Pat Hingle beats Anjelica Huston’s character with a bunch of huge California oranges wrapped in a towel.
“Yeah. Oranges, towel, big deal” you might think.
I will tell you that in all of my film-viewing history, it may be the most harrowing and terrifying act of implied violence [it happens off camera] I’ve ever witnessed. In fact, whenever I think of person-on-person violence that doesn’t involve guns and knives, I think of this scene.
So Kevin Smith is describing his relative total lack of masculinity compared to his extended family. And I’m listening to him describe their shocking violence as I walk down the street of my Brooklyn neighborhood, reminded of that scene from “The Grifters” with the oranges. And Smith sings out in a falsetto, “I’ve got a blog!” And I look at my groceries and see that my oranges are Clementinas–mini seedless oranges from Spain. “Easy to Peel!” it even says on their bag.
I could not have cried harder in public if I was a little girl who’d just dropped her ice cream cone on the 4th of July, which only made me laugh that much harder.
Tons of ink has been spilled and many gums flapped on Scott Brown’s victory over Sen. Martha Coakley, who filled Ted Kennedy’s seat upon his death. In the interest of your patience, I’ll just bullet-point a few things that stand out–and they have nothing to do with Sen. Brown the man or politician. Like many, it wasn’t until he won that I was aware of his existence.
This has been a much-discussed Achille’s heel for the Democratic party. I’m not going to go into a whole rant about Fox News (blah!), liberal media (rahr!), corporate bias (wah, bleh!!) The fact that the media is liberally biased in our narrow mainstream political spectrum is indisputable. Sorry, end of story.
If Democrats took a good long hard look at themselves in the mirror this week–and they definitely should–they should ask themselves about “Teabaggers.” That’s the derisive term for the people that were screaming publicly and clearly in opposition to Democratic Party goals. The high-handed dismissal of those people–who were gathering in public, not sequestering quietly–is a textbook repeat of how Democrats dismissed “angry white males” a generation ago.
If you’re not old enough to remember “angry white males,” I’ll explain that those were voters who swept Democrats out of Congressional power in response to the first-term agenda of the most popular president of our modern era: Bill Clinton. It’s true. The Democrats’ political golden boy two-termer won his second term by caving–or compromising as we like to call it–after Democrats lost Congress in 1994 for the first time since FDR and the New Deal. The loss was blamed on “Angry White Males”–these described irrationally furious malcontents that insisted on fighting the future.
I’m not going to debate the political views of those people at this point and time. Frankly, the debate is completely moot, irrelevant, of no concern to anyone wanting to be elected. Villifying, demonizing, and dismissing a vocal and highly motivated group who we generally call “voters” is a recipe for political suicide. Witness the political immolation of President George W. Bush.
What can President Obama take away from this? His coattails have turned to political garrots. There’s a Republican Senator in Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachussetts! I frankly cannot imagine a more unprecedented turn of events for the Democratic Party. Obama has turned from “celebrity” to box office poison, so to speak.
So change it up. Ditch your agenda, or just modify it heavily. Do you want to leave the future of your party in ruins so you can “make history” via a mystical high road that anyone who’s gotten this far in the game should know is pure fiction? That’s not how we play this game. If you want to get things done, then sell it to the people and get it done. Democracy is a messy business. Talk to George W. Bush, who had a compelling story and just totally failed at wanting to sell it. Think of Reagan, who knew that good salesmanship is good politics. Look towards LBJ, who had the backroom skills to bend ears and twist elbows to get his way. Those people that are sending you a message are voters, and Americans.
Where to begin with this review of The Lovely Bones? Crickets have chirped, mated, given birth, gone through some weird 7-year natural cycle before reawakening, and been eaten by crows in the metaphorical time I could ponder that question. The better question would be where did director Peter Jackson begin with The Lovely Bones, and end with it, and wander off in the middle?
The movie is based on a popular and highly acclaimed novel. I haven’t read that book, but people whose opinions I respect as sound have said it was a good book and I’ll believe them.
A few years ago, I was thrilled to get to go to the premier of Peter Jackson’s King Kong. For a movie lover, the red carpet, the swinging spotlights, just the sheer coolness of being able to go to a movie premiere with a beautiful woman on one’s arm–I was dazzled. Still, three quarters of the way through “King Kong” I scribbled in my notebook “THIS IS THE WORST MOVIE EVER”. This early, overly long, extraneous excursion is what I found fault with Jackson at that time. Apparently once you’ve produced a trilogy of films that has done obscene box office grosses one can pronounce “Hey, are you Peter Jackson, the film exec? I didn’t think so! Interrupt my creative genius when you’ve won some Oscars.”
And that way lies madness.
Are you still wondering whether I liked or disliked the movie? Exactly! Telegraphed; hinted at; unstated.
I will save the long forum-esque critique for elsewhere. Here is the bullet-point edition of why “The Lovely Bones” is a total disaster:
Too long. I wouldn’t care about a too-long movie, except when major actors left a story, and then never came back. Not major actors–critical dramatic story-moving actors.
Case in point: Mark Wahlberg is the primary actor in your entire film. He disappears and plays no role in the last half.
Introduction of great roles that aren’t followed through on. I haven’t read the book, but Susan Sarandon was one of the best things about the movie. Not leaving the theater early made me want to demand some sort of explanation from the theater manager. “What happened to that diary? What happened to the older daughter who was on the verge of being a murder victim? What happened to Sarandon? whose disappearance was as thematically and practically criminal as as the girls in a corn field?”
And accosting a theater manager is basic cruelty. They’re underpaid. They have no connection or responsibility for the piece of crap they just served you. Leave those people alone.
Without going on and on, I would guess that five or six different versions of this movie made it all the way to the end of production. All of them were chopped together in some type of amalgam that an idiot or some ass-covering dude thought would save his job by offering blame to spread around.
“The Lovely Bones” exists almost as an academic challenge, for one to read the book, and try to unwind the cinematic disaster that it spawned. That girl didn’t want to embrace mortality? The movie made me want to run towards death with open arms.
Foreign aid in a time of natural disaster is not just humane.
Examining the value of dollars spent on desperately needed humanitarian relief should always be a secondary concern; but it did raise the question in my mind.
The mega-quake that rocked Haiti is on par as a natural disaster with the quake and resulting tsunami that devastated Indian Ocean nations in 2004. While the United Nations dithered over relief program funding in the most crucial hours following the tsunami, the U.S. Navy was delivering time-sensitive aid like potable water and medical ships capable of caring for the critically wounded. Indonesia is the fourth most-populous nation in the world, and predominantly Muslim. There are a lot of nations in that region with large Muslim populations. Has the positive effect of U.S. humanitarian aid–specifically delivered by the military–ever been quantified in preventing popular radicalization that becomes possible when countries are torn asunder by natural disasters?
After a failed coup attempt in 1994, Chavez was imprisoned and then later elected democratically in 1998. Chavez is a quintessential tinpot dictator, but the tumult of 1999’s landslides and his following re-election enabled his radicalization as the volatile leader of a severely anti-U.S. political movement. A few years later Chavez became a knock-off of Cuba’s dictator for life Fidel Castro–except he had the OPEC petro-dollars to fuel his utopian fantasies.
As president of Venezuela, Chavez has been a one-man foreign policy disaster for the U.S.–underwriting narco-terrorists, inviting Iran to be a regional partner, and doing his utmost to radicalize the South American continent in opposition to U.S. interests. If the U.S. had extended a fraction of the money it’s given to neighboring Colombia, in the frankly futile “War on Drugs”, to Venezuela to rebuild its middle class neighborhoods, would Chavez and his clown show been re-elected?
Where do Haitian sentiments lie, vis a vis the United States? Just the other month, Jamaica’s government inducted U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY) into the Order of Jamaica–an honor on par with British knighthood. Rangel was honored for his openly malignant characterization of U.S. foreign policy motivations. “If you’re elected as president of a country, don’t depend on the US to respect the rule of law,” Rangel has said.
Jamaica is not Haiti, but it’s alarming that anti-U.S. sentiment is officially validated by such close geographic neighbors. Most importantly, Jamaica’s beef with the U.S. is tied to the accusation that the U.S. kidnapped Haiti’s president and exiled him to Africa. And as Chavez has demonstrated, neighboring nations who consider us enemies can have real and significant costs.
Now more than ever, the U.S. is geographically situated to best serve the dire needs of a nation in trouble. Will we seize the opportunity to re-shape a region’s perception of the U.S.? Are foreign aid dollars spent today significantly multiplied against combating anti-Americanism tomorrow? When the domestic political situation is so overwhelmingly spiteful, I don’t think such considerations are untoward in motivating leaders to do the right thing.
There’s a poetic irony to Jay Leno’s hostile public pillory at the hands of his peers this week.
If print obituaries are the realm of not speaking ill of the dead, late night monologues are where gloves come off and replaced with the sharp blades of cruel wit. It’s no wonder Leno is paranoid; he has few friends in the late night arena of which he’s supposed to be king.
Gawker has a compendium of late night hosts riffing on the drama at NBC, where it looks like Conan O’Brien is being pushed aside in favor of Leno. One would expect Conan to joke at Leno’s expense. Same with Dave Letterman, who got shafted by NBC in favor of Leno. But damn, everyone is piling on with punchlines where Leno’s the comedic punching bag. And they’re not just punchlines, there’s a fair amount of mean-spirited invective included. One hopes that as a comic, Leno can take a joke.
Leno revealed himself as a bizarrely thin-skinned and insecure comic in a documentary about standup comedians whose ostensible star was Jerry Seinfeld. One of the most memorable profiles is Leno’s, however, who admits that at least in the early years as successor of Johnny Carson he was so insecure about the possibility of success that he was sticking almost all of his million-dollar “Tonight Show” paychecks in his savings account–saving up for the inevitable rainy day when he was unable to book a show at a local comedy club in backwater North Dakota.
That type of paranoid insecurity may have landed–and then re-landed–Leno the job as the host of NBC’s 11:30 show previously known as The Tonight Show. Leno leap-frogged the presumed successor to Johnny Carson’s desk in Burbank, David Letterman, with the help of an overzealous agent and some personal back stabbing between friends. Let’s just say that O’Brien should have been more wary that Jay Leno wasn’t ready to retire for good when he took his old job.
How to drain excitement like a bathtub with a hole at both ends.
Reading this morning’s paper, one would think that Georgetown and UCONN’s respective basketball teams met at mid-court and flipped a coin over who’d record a win between two ranked Big East conference foes. If you missed yesterday’s hardwood match-up between Georgetown and UCONN, here’s a one-sentence synopsis: UCONN shut down Georgetown’s offense, ignored the Hoyas’ fabled defense, and dominated a conference rival on its home court; before Austin Freeman muscled Georgetown back into contention in the second half and the Hoyas tipped, scrambled, bobbled, and executed perfectly in the final 60 seconds to walk off the court with a win.
Despite the promising headline–”Hoyas and Huskies Show How Tight Big East Is”–this is how the game’s finale read in The New York Times (courtesy of the AP):
“After Connecticut missed two shots at the other end, Georgetown’s point guard Chris Wright blitzed upcourt and found Monroe for a layup. Connecticut forward Stanley Robinson’s 3-point attempt at the buzzer caromed off the rim, and the Hoyas had their victory.”
Let’s overlook the mostly passive framing of that finale, which sounds like the Georgetown men were playing walk-on roles in a UCONN losing performance. In the video above (advance to around the 1:00 minute mark for the final two possessions), one can see that about ten different players are close to taking hold of the ball in a single-possession scramble that ends without the usual college-ball surfeit of fouls and timeouts.
Oh yeah, the AP’s soporific description of the nail-biter finale doesn’t arrive until the 8th paragraph of the article. That’s three paragraphs before the author starts talking about guns brandished by NBA players a week earlier in the locker room of the arena where Georgetown plays its home games–as if the improbable comeback needed a narrative intervention to gin up some interest or excitement in its retelling.
UPDATE: The current online re-write shows how things can improve with a few minutes or hours to think about a story. The new AP opening to the same story:
“Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun stood at the dais in the bowels of the Verizon Center, exhaled and tried to explain how his team had let a 17-point second-half lead evaporate against Georgetown.
“I thought there were a couple of things they did,” Calhoun said of the Hoyas. “The first thing was having Austin Freeman in uniform. That helped a lot.”
Now that is a lede, even if Calhoun does get credit for coming up with the money line.
Note the continued passive construction of the story though: UCONN lost a game to a higher-ranked team on that opponent’s home court. The winning Hoyas are still peripheral to the theme. Thanks to Jim Calhoun for mentioning Austin Freeman’s career-highlight performance.
Eight notes in a scale. Eight beats to a measure. The result is a 64-button audio-visual square called the Bliptronic 5000 Synthesizer.
Watch the video and you’ll see how beats are measured out on the Bliptronic’s horizontal axis. In musical 4/4 time, one would have two measures of space to program. Eight notes on a scale constitute the vertical axis, where one can play all eight notes simultaneously, which allows chords to be played. The relatively small 64-key square of buttons, with a minimum of complicated notation (i.e. none), seems like an excellent introduction to the concepts of interaction between musical scales (vertical) and note values and meter (horizontal).
The ability to daisy chain multiple Bliptronics together offers the chance for multiple people to compose and play music together. I know that, at between $40 and $50, an instrument like this would cost about 4 times what a standard recorder (the musical wind instrument) would, but it seems that something like the Bliptronic would offer significantly more (and be more appealing) to young people being introduced to music. Plus, you hopefully wouldn’t be getting as much saliva all over a synthesizer as one would on a recorder.
Under-heralded rock star band Nada Surf is hitting the rode this spring–opening close to home with a series of album shows that’s a page out of Cheap Trick’s tour book.
The New York band will be playing three shows at three locations around NYC, each dedicated to the performance of a separate album out of its discography. March 25th kicks off three NYC nights with ‘Let Go’ performed at The Bowery Ballroom, ‘The Weight is a Gift’ at Brooklyn’s The Bell House, and ‘Lucky’ at The Music Hall of Williamsburg. The video above fittingly features Williamsburg and its bridge in the opening and closing shots. Tickets go on sale today at noon.
Nada Surf has a new album of cover songs coming out. In an era of bit torrential piracy, the band has an interesting strategy for combating piracy: the album will be initially released only in its physical form and available for purchase at the band’s shows. Obviously it will only take a few minutes before someone has ripped and distributed the disc online, but at least the band has realized that leading with touring revenue is the key to making money in today’s music market environment.
After a few dates in the mid-Atlantic US, Nada Surf will tour Canada, western Europe, and then return to the U.S. for some west coast shows in California and Oregon.
I imagine a poster tube for mailing would have been a better choice for shipping 2' curtain rods.
Did you hear the one about the midget who avoided paying full airfare by shipping himself in an express packing crate? Well, this is a different joke entirely.
Yesterday I received three two-foot-long curtain rods at a nearby UPS mailing center. Don’t blame UPS for this; they only received the package. I was expecting a small package–something I could carry home on the subway easily. As one of the UPS workers searched the store, I tried to be helpful by saying “It should be something curtain-rod shaped.” That was actually not helpful at all. In fact, I was standing right next to the box the whole time he searched. Stood on its end, I assumed that the box contained . . . who knows, some sort of statuary?
I decided to open up the box in the store, figuring that I had either been sent the wrong item or I was going to figure out some alternate way to configure three curtain rods to get them through a subway turnstyle. What I found got more than a few curious people at UPS laughing: three small curtain rods lying at the bottom of an over-sized box stuffed full of packing pillows.
A quick back-of-an-envelope calculation shows that the size of the box used to send my merchandise was about 20 times larger by volume than necessary. To prevent the rods from rattling around in such a huge box, the shipper used dozens of those air-filled pillow cushions. The gentlemen at UPS were nice enough to let me leave all of the unneeded packing material in their store. I left with just the curtain rods, which I carried home on the subway in one hand.
That a 70 minute serialized YouTube dissection of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace easily surpasses in entertainment value its own ten-year-old critical subject matter is a testament to the skill of the reviewer and the total original catastrophe perpetrated by George Lucas.
The reviewer, RedLetterMedia, catalogs in seven different ten-minute episodes why the first movie in Lucas’s Star Wars prequel trilogy is so inescapably awful. Some of the Marianas-sized faults in the movie include unmemorable characters, an unnecessarily byzantine plot, and story points that made absolutely no sense. All of these factors are helpfully held up in contrast to other Star Wars movies to highlight how bad George Lucas’s storytelling skill degraded between the completion of the original trilogy and the beginning of his prequel trilogy.
Ten years after the release of The Phantom Menace, much ink has been spilled complaining about how it didn’t meet expectations. The review above avoids most of the previous and now-hackneyed complaints, e.g. Jar Jar Binks makes viewers want to puncture their own eardrums to cease hearing his jabbering. Behind-the-scenes footage (presumably lifted from an extras-laden DVD release of the film) is well used showing Lucas surrounded by by yes men and the financial and technical resources to make a truly terrible movie.
Watch the first ten minutes and you’ll begin to see why, unlike a good movie that reveals more of itself with repeated viewings, The Phantom Menace only yields more confusion and less satisfaction as one attempts to peel back its baffling and too-many layers.
The Senate passed the Democrats’ trillion-dollar healthcare bill early this morning, paving the way for Americans to receive what President Obama describes as the healthcare we deserve.
There’s something Orwellianly unpromising about that turn of phrase. It’s not described as the healthcare we need. It’s certainly not the healthcare we want, with public opinion polls showing overwhelming opposition to the bill before it was passed. It’s the healthcare we deserve–like don’t even think about complaining because this is what we had coming to us. “Just desserts” are usually promised in an ominously threatening manner.
But it’s Christmas Eve, so I’m not going to dwell on it. I just hope that when the government is making its list of who’s naughty and who’s nice, I won’t wind up with a lump of healthcare-coal in my stocking.
Video sharing sites like Vimeo can serve as low-cost purveyors of corporate advertising.
There’s a difference between effective viral online promotion and simply tricking people into watching commercials. It can be measured in the amount of contempt generated for one’s brand among potential customers.
Today I came across an example of exactly how to fail completely at employing viral marketing. It was a commercial for a new Canon digital SLR with video recording capabilities. The ad takes the form of a funny/quirky video in the spirit and style of a group like Improv Everywhere. The intended purpose of the ad is to highlight the quality of video that can be shot using Canon’s camera.
“Fail completely” may be too strong a term if the adage “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” still holds water. Indeed, here I am talking about Canon’s advertisement. The downside is that I am talking about how stupid Canon is and how annoyed I am that they wasted three minutes of my life.
The ad industry is excited over the potential of viral marketing because it offers the the ability to distribute intended advertising on an exponential scale at very low cost. The effectiveness of viral marketing is rooted in employing the advertising audience also as the medium of distribution, through social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.
The feature of viral marketing that makes it appear slightly dangerous to corporate clients is that it involves a certain surrender of control over managing one’s brand. That’s not something that comes easily in a field where the careful cultivation and nurturing of a corporate brand is akin to safeguarding a virtual mantle that translates into a literal financial asset.
A few weeks ago I asked social strategist and digital influencer Julia Roy how instinctively control-freak brand managers could successfully loosen their grips and employ viral marketing effectively. She answered that one of the most important things in avoiding a backfire from viral marketing is for a company to treat its consumers and potential customers honestly. Viral marketing is a two-way collaborative effort that necessitates a level of trust between advertiser and consumer/agent. If that trust is violated or never established, at best the result will be a viral non-starter; at worst it will be a viral phenomena that puts one’s product and/or company in negative light with real damaging consequences for the business.
Back to Canon and its failed video advertisement. It appears that the company employed PlanetDog Media to produce and possibly perpetuate the quirky/funny video demonstrating the quality of video shot with one of Canon’s digital SLRs. While by itself the video is simply benign, it looks like PlanetDog Media decided to plant one of its viral seeds in the comments section of a popular NYC news site and opinion influencer Gothamist.com [a former employer of Lexiphane]. The comment was posted by someone using the disposable user id “splick13″, who has no record of other comments at the site aside from the Canon advertisement.
The post where the link was seeded was about Diane Sawyer’s debut as the now-permanent evening news anchor at ABC. The link was preceded by the comment “this short exemplifies diane sawyer in all her glory.” Of course the link to video sharing site Vimeo, which hosts the advertisement, has nothing to do with Diane Sawyer. From step one, Planet Dog Media has planted its seed only to kill it by over-fertilizing it with the manure of mistrust and deception. Within an hour of posting its deceptive ad link under the guise of a topical comment, another Gothamist reader responded dismissively, “Diane Sawyer is a spammer?”
The Vimeo user who posted the video has an identity as disposable as that of commenter “splick13″ at Gothamist. “Chris Dealy” joined Vimeo this month, has just the one video posted, has no contacts, likes, channels, albums, or groups to which he belongs. The one video featuring Canon’s camera, however, is tagged “PlanetDog Media” at Vimeo, a name that appears in the credits of the advertisement. Other tags lead users to sponsored links at Vimeo advertising electric toothbrushes and some other crap.
PlanetDog Media describes itself at its web site as a “new breed in the arena of production and post production for all systems of delivery” and vaunts its “stealthy approach to production.” From what I’ve seen, there is nothing very “stealthy” about this type of ham-handed approach to viral marketing. It’s more Keystones-meets-RoboCop in its lack of subtlety. Corporations looking to avoid sowing distrust and ill-will among among existing and potential customers should try to avoid viral campaigning rooted in deception recognizable as spam at first glance.
New York City got its fair share of 2009’s late-December snow storm that swept through the mid-Atlantic states. Not as many inches fell in NYC as in DC and Philly to the south or regions to the northeast, but the boroughs received just under a foot of unevenly distributed powder. Howling winds left some patches of ground and roofs bare, while elsewhere the snow drifted high. That was the case on the beach at Coney Island this afternoon, where beachcombers were replaced by snowman builders.
The sun was out, but it was brutally cold down on the beach for the same reason it’s nicer in the summer–a near-continuous steady wind. Today it sent streams of snow snaking across the sand and down into the water. Forget geo-tagging my photos; I think I should start thermo-tagging my pics, with wind chill adjustments.
An ambulance transporting a 100-year-old woman to Lutheran Hospital struck and killed an 80-year-old woman at a crosswalk at Bay Parkway early Tuesday morning. The driver of the ambulance was given a breathalyzer at the scene and wasn’t found under the influence of alcohol, according to NY1, but it’s not difficult to see how such an incident was literally waiting to happen due to poor traffic design.
The location where the accident occurred is an example of how poor traffic design puts pedestrians into a situation of high, if not probable, mortal danger. Illustration 1 shows where pedestrians walking south down Bay Parkway have a crosswalk that bridges the start of an on-ramp to the Belt Parkway, the major highway that encircles the southern portion of Brooklyn.
Bay Parkway is more of an avenue by New York City’s standard definition, with two lanes of traffic traveling in each direction that is regularly interrupted by traffic lights. The Belt Parkway, on the other hand, is a highway. Although the posted speed limit on the Belt is 50 m.p.h., cars regularly travel well above that speed if traffic allows it.
Illustration 2.
The crosswalk where the woman was killed Tuesday morning can be seen again in Illustration 2 from the perspective of the ambulance driver. One can see that the on-ramp entrance is curved gradually to allow drivers to enter it without slowing significantly. The ramp then extends for a few hundred feet in a relatively straight line, allowing for acceleration before merging into the Belt Parkway (Illustration 3).
Illustration 3.
From the driver’s perspective, this is an ideal transition from one of Brooklyn’s internal avenues to its peripheral highway system. After smoothly exiting Bay Parkway to the on-ramp, a driver can then accelerate quickly to highway speeds before merging again onto the Belt Parkway. An aggressive driver, e.g. an ambulance driver, could even manage to begin accelerating on Bay Parkway before even reaching the on-ramp.
Refer again to Illustrations 1 and 2 for the pedestrian’s perspective. Someone walking south on the crosswalk would have their back to traffic and need to have their heads turned approximately 140 degrees over his or her left shoulder to see traffic approaching them from behind. Pair the awkwardness of this maneuver while walking forward with the street-flow design enabling drivers to pass over this crosswalk with minimal to little hesitation, if not an increase in speed. The result is one in which a pedestrian is almost sure to be killed, as one was early Tuesday.
What is the solution? Well, first off I’d recommend not putting pedestrian crossings on highway on-ramps. The crosswalk shown above is somewhat safer when walking north and facing traffic–at least one will have the opportunity to dive out of the way of an oncoming car–but there really is no defensible explanation for a crosswalk encouraging driver speed and requiring pedestrians to have their backs to traffic.
This portion of Brooklyn is car country, but this intersection is also just across the Belt Parkway from the southern beginning of Brooklyn’s waterfront greenway–a major magnet attraction for pedestrians. Dept. of Transportation engineers need to get to their drawing boards and try to figure some reasonably safe way for pedestrians to navigate this traffic exchange.
Sen. Charles Schumer has a long-standing beef with the FAA and delays at the New York region’s airports, but this week it was Chuck who was causing the delay on a NY-to-DC shuttle and getting all huffy with a flight attendant for not knowing her place.
A US Airways flight attendant asked the senior senator from New York to shut off his phone before takeoff Sunday and suffered the lawmakers scorn. A Republican Congressional aide overheard the exchange between Chuck and the flight attendant, who was forced to personally ask the senator to curtail his conversation after he ignored the standard announced request to turn off mobile devices.
According to Politico, Schumer reportedly argued the finer points of the policy and only agreed to end his call when the attendant said she didn’t make the rules, she just has to enforce them. As she walked away, Sen. Schumer said to fellow Senator Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY), whom he was seated with, that the flight attendant was a “bitch.”
Despite ending his call, Schumer’s phone rang again before he could shut it off–presuming he had any intention of shutting it off in the first place. This is better than a Do-you-know-who-I-am? moment:
“It’s Harry Reid calling,” the source quoted Schumer as saying. “I guess health care will have to wait until we land.”
It’s a mash-up of old and new technology–a combination of the most detailed-map of Manhattan drawn in 1852 overlayed onto a Google Map image taken from a satellite.
The map was published by Matthew Dripps in 1852, and is titled “City of New York Extending Northward to 50th St.” Dripps published the map based on the work of surveyor and cartographer John F. Harrison and is a precursor of fire maps published that same year. It’s part of the David Rumsey Map Collection at Cartography Associates.
1852 map of Manhattan overlayed with Google Map.
What’s great about the overlay is that one can use a slider in the upper left-hand corner of the map to vary the transparency of the historical map over modern day Manhattan, offering the ability to toggle back and forth between the future and the past.
If one looks at the close-up image of downtown Manhattan above, one can see Columbia College located just west of City Hall. Today’s West Broadway was College Place in 1852, just five years before Columbia would move uptown to 49th St. and Madison Ave. Further to the west, one can see the World Financial Site and Battery Park City sitting in the North River of 1852, punctuated by the piers that extended from West Street at the water’s edge.
The David Rumsey Map Collection includes dozens of historic maps of sites around the world. They can be viewed in a similar manner with Google Maps or other applications.
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It’s opening night for U.S. Drag, the off-Broadway production of L&O producer Gina Gionfriddo’s stage play about love, murder and the NYC dream–something completely distinct from the American Dream. It’s directed by Michael Scott King and leads with Mariya Tsekalo King. 
This is not a post about pornography, so about 99.9% of you can just keep moving. This is about podcasts and iPods and my inability to conduct myself with dignity.
The Senate passed the 
Sen. Charles Schumer has a 
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