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The End Of Sacks Files

2010-01-16T17:10:00.000-08:00

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I saw the Meat Puppets

2009-06-17T14:42:00.001-07:00

One perk of being in (or around) Washington D.C. so far: I find myself, for perhaps the first time in my life, faced with more concerts to go to than I have time for. Those who have been in big cities for longer than I can testify whether or not this is a mixed blessing, but I find especially due to the fact that D.C. isn’t really that huge, that the overall community here is less noxious.

(Mendy visited me in D.C. a little more than a week ago and one thing that we both happened to observe independently is the lack of noticeably straight-edge people walking around, at concerts or on the Metro. We were both under the impression, given that this is where straight-edge was born and the hometown of Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Rites of Spring et al, that such observances would happen at least occasionally. So far, nothing. Too bad I can’t shuttle back and forth from here to c. 1985 or so on weekends, to play catchup.)

So I went to see the Meat Puppets, along with Retribution Gospel Choir, at a tiny venue called the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hotel (spelling “rock ‘n’ roll” is always awkward, isn’t it?). Meanwhile, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood were playing nearby at the Verizon Center, with tickets there going for $50+, a fact I am only aware of because I heard a bunch of drunk blooze goobers on the way back on the Metro (a guy with spray-on hair striking up a conversation with an Italian woman, yelling, “I’m a guitarist, I’m a blues player! I’m a big fan of soul—Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye—have you heard of them?” Italian lady: “Do you know Ben Harper?”).

Now, Clapton and Winwood both have their shiny guitar moments (Winwood is tragically known mostly as a keyboard player today, maybe for his association with Hendrix on “Voodoo Chile,” but his slow-burning solo on “Dear Mr. Fantasy” is a psychedelic classic and certainly Traffic’s finest moment [and I would know, having heard plenty of Traffic vis-à-vis my father]). Neither of them can compare with Curt Kirkwood in his 1982-1987 prime. Not in terms of skill, not in terms of formal/melodic invention, whatever. My opinion about this is very resolute, even though I know I keep dumping on Clapton and yet I’m a pretty big fan of the Yardbirds, Cream, Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Blind Faith and Derek & the Dominoes (Delaney & Bonnie can suck it, however). Curt Kirkwood is an enormously skilled player, and he is easily the best and perhaps only reason to see the Meat Puppets today, particularly when he takes liberty with the material at hand and does his fingerpicking thing.

The opening act was Retribution Gospel Choir, starring another guy people don’t often think as a guitar god, Alan Sparhawk of Low. As a matter of fact, this band is pretty much Low as far as I can tell. Same bassist, at least. My own theory is that this band would not exist if not for the fact that drummer Mimi Parker needed to stay home and fulfill her Mormon duty by taking care of her and Sparhawk’s children, so Sparhawk just started a new band with a new drummer, who by the way was all right. I am not familiar with Retribution Gospel Choir’s album, but it did not take me long to figure out that the first song they were playing was simply a heavy, power-trio version of the Low song “Breaker,” from Drums and Guns. At the time, I thought, Wow, what a rocking improvement over the original, but having gone back to the original song since, which happens to have this amazingly intense simplicity to it, I now am in a continuous state of oscillation, being predisposed towards power-trio sounds anyway. At their core, though, Retribution Gospel Choir functions basically the same way as Low: songs that sound generic, or slow and boring, that you realize are actually clever and full of killer melodies, often injected with heartbreaking sounds. Amp up the “generic” factor a little bit, but not enough to be offensive, and you basically have Retribution Gospel Choir. If I heard any of this on classic rock radio however many decades from now, I wouldn't be too surprised.

After that, the Meat Puppets came on, the brothers Kirkwood looking harried and bored, although Cris Kirkwood kind of took on the role of resident goofball, in that he actually looked at and acknowledged the presence of an audience. Also, they had a new rent-a-drummer named Ted Marcus, apparently a former sound engineer for MTV. Those who know me know my intense physical displeasure whenever musicians, but particularly drummers, are rotated out of bands I like and audiences are presumed not to notice or care, but in this case I was simply unable to convince myself that their original drummer Derrick Bostrom was really a key ingredient on par with Grant Hart, Steve Shelley, Earl Hudson, or even Murph, what with his fairly rudimentary time-keeping skills. Anyhow, Ted Marcus did a good job.

I said before that Curt Kirkwood was really the only reason to pay $16 for this, as the band started their set with the title track from their latest album Sewn Together, this was made abundantly clear. I listened to it once, but I will defer to Curt Kirkwood’s expert assessment of the material, saying something to the effect that it sounds like a kid’s fruit juice commercial. Mind you, this is the actual artist describing his own music in this way, and not some critic. Not a good sign. And “Sewn Together” is a fairly generic mid-tempo county song that bears the dubious distinction of being really bad. When Curt started playing a solo, though, my ears perked up, and you could tell that Curt suddenly got a lot more interested, very occasionally indulging in guitar posturing and reacting with pleasure at crowd noise.

Those of you who like me are mostly fans of the Meat Puppets for their first three albums were rewarded intermittently with classic tracks. They played quite a lot from their 90s repertoire, which isn’t that bad but doesn’t have the singular vibe that Meat Puppets, II and Up On The Sun have. They did play the Nirvana-mandated “big three” from Meat Puppets II—being “Oh, Me,” “Plateau,” and “Lake of Fire,” in that order. All three were played somewhat differently and benefited from reworkings that highlighted Curt’s substantial guitar improvisations. As I was standing basically in front next to Curt, I could see him at work on the effects pedals, of which I noticed there were fewer than J. Mascis had. His way of playing through multiple registers is harder than one thinks (think of the first few bars of “Plateau” or “Aurora Borealis”) and you could tell that he changed some of the keys the songs were in to make them easier to play (or maybe sing).

Nevertheless. The undoubted highlight was an extended jam of “Up On The Sun,” played amazingly even faster than it was on record (let no one doubt that Curt can play the lead lines as clean and well-phrased as ever). The audience seemed to eat it up, even as the rhythm section started going in places that didn’t really resemble the original song at all. Another highlight for me was the instrumental “I’m A Mindless Idiot,” filtered through some sort of volume/phase pedal that finally explained to me how Curt got some of the effects that have eluded me for so long. Also, the encore of “Lost” was exhaustingly good, and they finished with their biggest hit “Backwater,” a remnant of the post-Nirvana years that is all right as a song but is fantastic as an example of how influence in the underground rock world is often reciprocal.

Tragically not represented at all was their first, most legitimately hardcore album, an album that few people seem to like. It certainly isn’t much of a gem, songwriting-wise, but I always liked it because it shows even then how inimitable a guitar style Curt Kirkwood has. If anyone ever tells you that the 80s don’t have the guitar gods to stack up to previous decades, tell them how full of shit they are simply by citing any of a number of bands from Our Band Could Be Your Life: D. Boon, Bob Mould, Roger Miller, Greg Ginn, Bob Stinson, and J. Mascis. Add to this the slightly more dubious proposition of Paul Leary, or Thurston Moore/Lee Ranaldo, or Ian MacKaye/Guy Picciotto. Add to this Dr. Know and Curt Kirkwood, absent from the book. Who among these is not brilliant, singular, a true hero of the form? Who are these morons who continue to propagate the theory that punk was the domain of the harmonically simple-minded? Rolling Stone, probably. Even when the songwriting is lax, which one can say of the original Meat Puppets as well as Sewn Together, one can still derive some sort of rudimentary pleasure in identifying the style of someone who couldn’t play otherwise if he or she tried. This is the key to the artistic success of the Meat Puppets, and the reason why they deserve just as much as Clapton to play at the Verizon Center, cranking out another solo for the zillionth time of some classic tune that, at its best, can remind you of why you found it revelatory in the first place.

25

2009-02-05T11:24:00.001-08:00

I refuse to post this on Facebook (seems like a bad idea) so I will do it here.

1. One of my biggest pet peeves, and I have no idea where this comes from, is that I am constantly bothered when someone else takes my seat in class. I always make it my goal on the first day of class to stake out a particular place in the classroom I want to sit, and because generally there are no assigned seating arrangements, chances are someone else will get to class before I do and I will have to find some other place to sit. This always bothers me a lot, although I never do anything about it.

2. One thing I am semi-consciously aware of is that I will often adopt the syntax or certain stylistic tropes of certain writers when having conversations. This usually happens when I am reading a lot of a particular writer I like, and it's kind of embarrassing. Thankfully, people don't notice when I do this most of the time. I noticed this particularly during my DFW phase back in September or so of last year, adopting a sort of meandering formalized style punctuated by lots of parenthetical jargony stuff (see what I mean?).

3. Lately, I've been thinking that I might have some very mild form of Asperger's Syndrome. I base this on the fact that I've noticed how bad I am in most situations where I have to hold a conversation, and also because of the sheer multitude of things I happen to not pick up on.

4. While others measure their life according to where they may be or the relationships they may have, I divide my life into a series of which albums I am most obsessed with at the time. Listening to certain albums after their prime listening period will always bring up a lot of associations. Right now, I think the album that most defines my life is either "Country Life" by Roxy Music or the Congos' "Heart of the Congos."

5. Despite the fact that I consider myself to be primarily a visual learner, I will almost always take a minimum of notes in class and in my day to day activities. I will almost never take notes in class unless it happens to be things written on the board, and I never do things like highlight readings for homework, and I never write in the margins of books. I noticed a year or so ago that if I think a phrase or point is notable enough for me to highlight, chances are that I will remember it anyway, so it doesn't make much sense to point out something I already know.

6. I'm not really one to play air guitar along to songs very often, but I am almost a compulsive air drummer, albeit mainly (not always) when no one else is around. This is probably because there are no actual drums for me to beat on most of the time, and sometimes I really feel a need to play them.

7. Unlike most of my friends, I have a larger appreciation and a wider set of knowledge of mainstream/superhero comics, and this has been the case since I was very young. As with anything else, I tend to choose the comics I read based on the writers I like. Some of my favorite comic writers include Alan Moore (of course) Grant Morrison, Brian Wood, Matt Fraction, Jonathan Hickman, Peter Milligan and Jason Aaron. These are the authors that I will read pretty much anything from, and you'll notice that they are pretty much all authors who divide their work between crazy creator-owned work with revisionist, high-quality takes on superhero comics.

8. I was remarking to someone not long ago that I think I have absolutely no concept of "cute." I almost never refer to anything or anyone as cute, and when I do, chances are I have no idea what I'm talking about. Cuteness, broadly defined, has no basis in my life, and doesn't really measure anything I would find valuable. This probably has something to do with my larger inability to gauge what is aesthetically pleasing.

9. I also think be a closet agoraphobe as well. I noticed this my freshman year of college, when I became supremely uncomfortable every time I was in the dining hall, although that has more or less passed. Still, large crowds of people probably disturb me more than they do most people I know.

10. I have completely excised the words "overrated" and "underrated" from my vocabulary, particularly when voicing criticism. I believe they are useless and overused words whose only function is that people (indie sorts of crowds specifically) use them as a shorthand for criticism. I don't find any criticism genuine that uses the standards of whether or not other people like or dislike it--chances are, you are just trying to to impress people with how novel your views are. When people tell me that, say, the Beatles are "overrated," chances are I will roll my eyes because (apart from how typical of a statement that is now) it doesn't seem to show any real thought or consideration to the actual music.

11. I have a preponderance for making lists, which used to be a lot worse than it is now. When I was bored in class, I would often make lists of favorite movies, books, candy, whatever. My friend Jim once remarked that if I were a low-rent Batman villain, I would be "The List," who would go around Gotham City committing petty crimes and leaving notes like "Top 10 Reasons Why Batman Can't Stop Me."

12. I have an extremely non-addictive personality. There have been many times when I have entertained the thought of, say, becoming a raging alcoholic, but I can't ever summon up the will to go through with it, because frankly I won't feel like it after not too long.

13. I took a jazz improvisation class last block and I learned just how much jazz was not for me. The continued emphasis of playing with a purely melodic sensibility, and the fact that I couldn't help but noodle, didn't help me. I am, however, starting to get into a lot of fusion artists, like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Soft Machine, and stuff like that. I'm not good at it, though.

14. The one thing that I am absolutely, unequivocally positive I do not want to do with my English major is become part of the publishing industry. Unfortunately, it seems like that's where every single English major at this school ends up going.

15. I have no use for spirituality or religion in any capacity. It is completely beyond my frame of reference and something I just cannot understand. Notions of "spirits" and "souls," astrology, all that stuff, bores me just as much as mainstream religion. However, I do make an exception for what I call "convenient coincidences," wherein something poignant or unexpected might happen, generally for the sole virtue of what could be its literary value later. For instance, a song that plays that happens to specifically refer to something that is happening in your life.

16. Lately, I've become interested in the kinds of things people write in suicide notes, by virtue of how extreme (or extremely reserved) they happen to be. I read a book about literary figures who committed suicide, and personally I think the best suicide note I've ever read was from Vachel Lindsay.

17. Of all the mediums I gorge myself with on a daily basis, television is one in which I've never gotten around to devising my own particular canon. I simply haven't watched "The Wire," "The Shield," "Mad Love," "Battlestar Galactica," or any of the other stuff people talk about. I saw one episode of "The Sopranos," and I liked it, but I haven't ever had an urge to watch it in its entirety.

18.I've found myself in the unique position of defending Israel lately. In high school, I would often find myself arguing (particularly with my mother) the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause and the two-state solution. Nowadays, I find myself arguing with ultra-leftists friends who feel suicide bombing is a legit method of fighting for freedom and that Hamas' cause is righteous. My general feeling is that there is nothing about Hamas or Hezbollah that suggests that they would like to do anything other than enforce theocracy on others.

19. It is said that there are five stages of grief. I believe I have only one, anger, and I skip all the others. Of course, that means I am simply pissed off most of the time. Most people notice this.

20. Since I was very young, I've been in the habit of reading several books at once. This is still the case. Most of the time I have five or six books I am reading at any one time, mainly non-fiction, but I like to switch it up.

21. Whenever I'm nervous, I will often whistle the opening bass line of A Tribe Called Quest's "Excursions." This happens particularly when I run into people or situations that I know may be awkward. Chances are, if I happen to be whistling that tune, I don't want to talk with or be around you.

22. I'm absolutely terrible with money. Since getting my apartment, paying bills is a chore that I forget about a lot. I am often afraid to look at my bank balance for fear it is low. This is one thing about being Jewish that I never picked up on.

23. The movie I have probably seen more times than any other is "Touch Of Evil." A few years ago I would often just put on the opening 4-minute tracking shot because it was so exciting to watch, but I've seen the entirety of it more than 20 times. It has so many enjoyable aspects, mainly the novelty of Charlton Heston as Mexicon narc agent but also the weird camera angles and of course Orson Welles, a man whose voice is so beautiful, I would listen to him talk about anything.

24. The cat the I currently live alone with has a bunch of different names. Carlson calls him Beans, which I think is a sucky name, so I decided to give him several different aliases. To date, these include: Cat, Dawg, Veto 2.0, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Willis, Wallace, Oswald, DJ Oswald, and Steak.

25. The Youtube video I watch more than any other is this one:

My Top Ten of '08 (for The Cornellian)

2009-01-06T20:33:00.000-08:00

Though 2008 saw the release of several high-profile and heavily hyped new albums from the likes of Fleet Foxes, No Age, and Vampire Weekend, it occurred to me as I was compiling this list that the majority of my favorite albums from 2008 were made by veterans of all sorts of fringe music scenes from the past 20 years. It was a good year, I think, for comebacks, although their aesthetic success in my mind doesn’t necessarily match up to the sort of critical and commercial success I think should be bestowed on these ten albums. I call 2008 the year of the rock vets resharpening their tools and making sounds that seem to transcend both what they were capable of in the past as well as the majority of popular sounds in this past year. Unfortunately, Axl Rose is not among them.

10. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Real Emotional Trash. Malkmus’ former band, Pavement, had a slight predilection towards lengthy jamming onstage, but they were diplomatic enough of a band most of the time to always make pop songcraft their primary focus (which is why the rock journalist tag of Pavement being the “indie Grateful Dead” never really stuck). Since then, Malkmus has forged a decent enough solo career that has veered increasingly into aimless but often wonderful noodling. Real Emotional Trash is the apotheosis of Malkmus’ gift as an improviser, which is partly why I wasn’t very impressed with the album the first few times I heard it, being predisposed towards ignoring the songs. As far as these things go, Real Emotional Trash is extremely listenable and tuneful, and has a good half-dozen or so incredible guitar solos from Malkmus himself. I don’t believe, after this album, that anyone can argue that Malkmus isn’t one of the key guitarists of this or any era.

9. The Magnetic Fields, Distortion. This is another album I didn’t really like at first, but subsequent listens have proved to me how wrong I was, initially. While I’m not a hardcore Magnetic Fields fan and I’m not one of those people that listens to the entirety of 69 Love Songs on a regular basis, this album struck me for several reasons. First, and most importantly, as is suggested in the title, this is a very distorted album with a lovely sort of fuzz pallor. Yet it’s a very simple sort of distortion, not heavily processed like you find on lots of hard rock albums, but more of a less abrasive, more fuzzy sort of distortion. The album is most directly comparable to the Jesus and Mary Chain, and several of the songs here are perhaps even better. “California Girls” and “Too Drunk To Dream” are just two songs that make it clear that when Stephin Merritt feels like it, he can produces dozens of good songs in a very short period of time.

8. Nine Inch Nails, The Slip. No one realizes this, but Trent Reznor keeps making albums that are better in almost every way than Nine Inch Nails during their mid-90s heyday. I believe that, partially inspired by Radiohead’s model for making music with In Rainbows, Reznor was inspired to make the kind of music he wanted to make, which in this album results in probably the most abrasive and most metal-oriented album to date. Unlike many notorious pop perfectionists, Reznor’s music is capable of sounding airy and unpolished, and is all the better for it. The best thing about this album, though, was the price: nobly, Reznor decided to put the album for free online as Radiohead did. The results were far less successful, which is a shame, because we need to support artists like Reznor. I never thought I’d say that.

7. Portishead, Third. The last Portishead album to be released was their self-titled album, in 1997. Since then, main instrumentalist and producer Geoff Barrow became horrified to find that Portishead’s debut album Dummy, once considered the paragon of the musical sub-genre known as trip-hop, had become an easy listening standard that people would play in massage parlors. At the same time, he became witness to a British club scene that had become sanitized and robbed of most of its vitality. When Third came out, no one was sure whether or not Portishead would fall on its face using the same tropes it did a decade earlier. No worries, though: Portishead managed to retool their sound while keeping the spy movie theatrics and adding a heavy industrial beat to awesomely intense songs like “Machine Gun.” Of course, that’s not the only trick they utilize, and as a songwriter and singer, Beth Gibbons continues to get better. This album also has one of the best ukulele interludes I have ever heard.

6. Jay Reatard, Matador Singles ’08. I’m not sure that this counts as an album proper, but it’s probably too good to not mention. Jay Reatard, real name Jay Lindsay, is another sort of post-punk renaissance man who has involved himself with all sorts of different garage and punk groups; his recent solo album Blood Visions was so good that I wasn’t sure how he would be able to top the level of quality of that album’s noisy and devilishly vulgar garage revivals. The new collection of singles, which were released over the last couple years on Matador Records, shows a slightly more composed and reflective Jay Reatard, even if that isn’t really saying much. Many of the songs don’t really rock at all, but stand out as incredibly moving and provocative (and certainly well-sung) pop songs. I’m not sure that this is the direction I would like to see Reatard go in in the future, but these singles make a nice detour and they are almost uniformly of high quality.

5. Q-Tip, The Renaissance. Q-Tip’s first album in nine years is appropriately titled: most of us were aware of his verbal dexterity, but he has also blossomed into an excellent producer during those years, and on The Renaissance, every song is produced by Q-Tip, save for one track, “Move,” which was produced by the late J. Dilla. Unfortunately, the rap music industry is particularly uninterested in its veteran players, no matter how vital they may still be, so The Renaissance didn’t get nearly the play it should have. That is a shame, because the album is almost completely excellent from beginning to end, and it does so partially by defying our expectations about rap music as well as what we expect from Q-Tip. For instance, a song like “Life is Better,” which has Norah Jones singing the hook, seems at first to be one of those saccharine “I’ll Be There For You”-sort of love songs. Instead, the hook leads into one long verse from Q-Tip where he discusses his influences as a rap artist as well as paying homage to a new breed of rappers. Similarly, a song like “Gettin’ Up” sounds at first like a sex goof, but then it becomes a somewhat moving and powerful meditation on the spiritual goodwill that can result from sex and intimacy. The production is uniformly great and Q-Tip’s voice is one of the most pleasurable things to listen to, no matter what he’s saying. And just prematurely: don’t accuse me of tokenism. If there were more decent rap albums I liked, I’d put them here.

4. TV On The Radio, Dear Science. Having now become the leading lights on the New York scene, I wasn’t sure what could be expected from TV On The Radio anymore. Dear Science was the band’s opportunity to show the country that they were now officially one of the great album bands of their era, and I believe they succeeded with perhaps their best album to date. The usual production tricks—loud, booming polyrhythms that utilize acoustic and electric drums simultaneously, non-descript background ambient noises, heavily processed guitar effects—are all there, but there seems to be a degree more of instrumental interplay between the members of the band. Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone trade off singing songs like Strummer and Jones, and in songs like “Dancing Choose” and “Shout Me Out,” you see a band chipping away at the foundations of their own song structures, creating mutated, dilapidated sound-creatures on a conducive yet organic assembly line.

3. Marnie Stern, This is It… An unlikely success story by any standard, Marnie Stern has managed to make an album that is simultaneously more harmonically expressive than most of her math/noise peers as well as more tuneful and interesting than most indie-pop albums. Stern is also, of course, an amazing guitarist, and one of the few that still manages to do anything interesting with fret-tapping techniques. However, the guitar theatrics are never merely theatrical, and in fact create a sort of hypnotic tape-loop effect that characterizes her songs as slightly off-kilter if at the same time surprisingly pleasant to listen to. Stern’s voice is an acquired taste, but I think I’ve got it by now, even if her lyrics for the most part aren’t the most coherent part of her act. Nevertheless, Marnie Stern represents the future: a fusion of mathy guitars and pleasant melodies.

2. Fucked Up, The Chemistry of Common Life. A Canadian hardcore punk band with an unfortunate name, Fucked Up basically surprised everyone with their unconventional method of piling on guitar overdubs for The Chemistry of Common Life. Ostensibly a hardcore album with a suitably abrasive lead vocalist who calls himself Pink Eye, it’s a piece of music covered with layers of sound, a style utilized by My Bloody Valentine but in this context can be compared more accurately to Smashing Pumpkins. It’s also rare among hardcore albums for several other reasons: it starts with a long flute solo, for instance, and the lyrics often deal with themes of religious alienation and spiritual longing, which are hardly the most apropos of hardcore subject matters. The larger point, however, is that the music present is heavy and thick with overdubs but also uniformly good, and listening to the entire thing at a loud volume (especially "Black Albino Bones") is an almost unreasonably cathartic experience. Some hardcore kids might not like the direction Fucked Up is going in, but it’s the perfect type of music for someone like me, I guess.

1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! If there was a fear that Nick Cave was putting his renaissance man image in jeopardy by spreading himself too thin (not only writing and performing music but also publishing two novels and having a screenplay filmed), those fears were quickly put to rest by Cave’s side project Grinderman, which involved only the core members of the Bad Seeds and put made Cave relevant again. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! Is his first album back with the Bad Seeds after the Grinderman project, but it’s encouraging to see that he’s kept much of the Grinderman spirit alive, transposing it to songs with slightly more expansive orchestration but are still, at their very core, gritty, dirty rock songs. It is, to my mind, the best album of 2008: an almost unparalleled aural experience that pays tribute to its twin totem roots of American blues music and the experimental path initially forged by the Velvet Underground, whose songs are heavily referenced throughout the album.

I like to think that the albums I love most are the ones that I judge on a most micro level, where I can recall with fondness not only specific songs but also specific parts of songs that blew my mind when I first heard them and caused me to repeat them endlessly. Here is a short list of some of those moments: Cave’s keyboard solo right after the break towards the end of “Today’s Lesson,” a noise so simultaneously cacophonous and tinny that it’s almost reveling in its “Nuggets”-like splendor; the incomparably sexy (there’s no other word to use, really) drumming in the post-apocalyptic composition “Moonland”; The part in “Albert Goes West” when Cave joins the chorus of “sha-la-la” vocals, which is followed by two mind-busting tom beats; The lyrics for “We Call Upon the Author,” which to my knowledge is the greatest song ever written about literary criticism (with the line, “Prolix! Prolix!/Another pair of scissors you can’t fix” becoming an anthem for the ages); the beginning of “Midnight Man,” which manages over a reciprocal bass line to make a noise approximating an orchestra warming up utilizing just a guitar and keyboard. However, I think the best song, and one of the best songs on the year, is “Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl),” a distillation of all the themes we expect from the new Nick Cave, now an aging, sexually-frustrated lothario who is also extremely self-aware about such matters. It’s an incomparable hard rock composition, with an ascending keyboard line of an almost absurd simplicity, and it also allows the lead singer to vent the vapidity of his maleness. If nothing else, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! has the power to unite sexually and emotionally maladjusted boy-men of any race or creed.

Ephemera

2008-12-25T19:52:00.000-08:00

A couple of notes, all of them oscillating wildly on my own personal relevance scale:

1. My buddy Greg just started a blog here, that I am both obliged and delighted to link to. It's good to have someone else to link to, to be honest. Though it might seem bizarre given that there are seemingly millions of blogs created every second, the blogosphere can be an awfully lonely place with little discursive reward unless you really whore yourself out like Perez Hilton or Drudge or whomever. Greg, by the way, played McCullough in "Dino & McCullough: The Legend Begins," if you haven't seen that yet. I have a big role in it as well, as an erratic homosexual police chief.

I think Mendy needs to get a blog, too, if only to expound on some of the more mystifying choices he made in his top ten list, like the Hold Steady, and explain why he puts Nick Cave so low on his list.

2. My predictions regarding Secret Invasion: strangely, not that far off, at least compared to the complete misfire that was my prediction for Civil War. If you recall, I claimed that the Skrulls would win the fight by detonating the Wasp using whatever growth formula the fake Hank Pym gave her, and would take out the rest of the group with the help of Norman Osborn. I was wrong in that respect: the Skrulls got their asses handed to them (and, judging from what I've read in the latest issue of New Avengers, Bendis still seems to have no moral qualms with annihilating the remainder of Earth's Skrull populace, with extreme prejudice), but Norman still got to look like the hero while Tony Stark ran off, and now he is running not S.H.I.E.L.D. or S.W.O.R.D. but a new organization called H.A.M.M.E.R., which I believe is an acronym yet to be determined. I was right that the Wasp died, but I was wrong in predicting that Jessica Jones would die trying to save her baby from Skrull-Jarvis: instead, Skrull-Jarvis just ran off with the baby, which I think is a pretty ballsy move on Bendis' part, to leave the possibility of infanticide as a dangling plot thread. Unfortunately, this still doesn't explain why Norman Osborn knew what was going on with Captain Marvel when he barged into Thunderbolts mountain, which is one of many inconsistencies and gaffes in this book. The Dark Avengers, as far as I can tell, won't be Skrulls but rather Norman Osborn's Thunderbolt's rejiggered as classic Avengers. From what I can guess, you got Moonstone as Ms. Marvel, Bullseye as Hawkeye, Venom as Spider-Man (how is he going to pull off not having the tongue thing?), and Osborn himself as the new "Iron Patriot," alongside Wolverine's son Daken, Marvel Boy, the Sentry, and Ares.

I'm actually pretty pumped for what might happen in "Dark Reign," particularly with Tony Stark now on the run from the government and Osborn having a government sanctioned band of grade-A psychos as his nu-new Avengers. However, I'm actually more interested right now in what has been going on with Final Crisis, which has managed to be blowing my mind further and further as Secret Invasion has gotten more and more formulaic. That comic is being written by Grant Morrison, one of my favorite comic writers, and after reading the entirety of his Seven Soldiers and seeing how it relates to what's going on now, I've realized that Morrison is basically recasting the entirety of the DC universe in his own crazy, narcotics-enhanced vision--this is entirely a good thing. In the future, I need to devote an entire post to the oeuvre of Morrison, which I find I can't get enough of these days.

3. My own top ten list is forthcoming. I'm in the midst of reading through all of Infinite Jest right now--my one goal for the break--and as expected, it's taking a while.

4. My father got two DVDs for Chanukah the other day, 24-Hour Party People and Joy Divison (not Control, the fictional Anton Corbijn movie, but the documentary that was released with it). I am extremely jealous, but I got a book of Tobias Wolff short stories, so I'm good for now.

5. Philip Roth project is going fine, I got 25+ pages with it and my sponsor seems happy with it. I had somewhat of a hurdle getting it past certain members of faculty who took umbrage with my lack of specificity, which is a problem with my writing I always have as well.

6. Just quickly, I want to gauge if there's any interest if I were to put some short stories of my own writing up here. Actually, more generally I want to see if I can gauge any response regarding anything at all.

7. Finally, R.I.P. Harold Pinter, one of those guys that really did deserve a Nobel Prize for literature. I remember buying a copy of The Room and The Birthday Party and enjoying them very much, and now (as I am wont to do whenever an author dies) I am inclined to read more.

My review of Chinese Democracy

2008-12-01T12:26:00.000-08:00

My review of Chinese Democracy, uncut. The reason I put albums in quotes as opposed to italicizing them is because that's The Cornellian policy.
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It would be unwise to review Guns N’ Roses’ new, unprecedentedly delayed album “Chinese Democracy” without first putting it into historical perspective. GnR’s last album, “Use Your Illusion,” came out in 1991. Bush 41 was waging war in Kuwait, and I was just entering kindergarten. Over the following decade and a half, Guns N’ Roses has been whittled down to frontman Axl Rose and a series of increasingly anonymous studio musicians. Izzy Stradlin, the rhythm guitarist who wrote all the best songs on “Appetite For Destruction,” left the band not long after, citing the fact that Axl would never show up to gigs on time. Lead guitarist Slash, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum held on for a bit longer, but after observing Rose managing the simultaneous feat of becoming more lazy and demagogic at the same time, they bailed and formed their own horrible band, Velvet Revolver.

Meanwhile, Axl Rose had been smart enough to retain creative ownership of the name “Guns n’ Roses” and started recruiting instrumental foils who would be smart enough not to question his genius or subvert his spotlight. In 1995, while I was in fourth grade, he started initial recording sessions for what would become “Chinese Democracy.” His new stable of musicians would include, among hundreds of others, keyboardist Dizzy Reed, multi-instrumentalist Chris Pittman, drummer Josh Freese, guitarists Paul Tobias, Robin Finck, Buckethead and Bumblefoot, and, most inexplicably, former Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson, whose transformation from archetypal anti-establishment rocker to paid employee of the biggest authoritarian in the business still makes me depressed. The average life span of a musician in Guns N’ Roses was something like three months and understandably so: Rose possessed something of a work ethic, but he was famously temperamental and an ardent perfectionist, given to recording hundreds of takes of each of his songs and discarding them at roughly the same rate.

Thirteen years later, I am a senior in college and “Chinese Democracy” has cost Geffen Records at least $13 million. In the past few years, one or two songs would occasionally leak on the Internet, to be followed by Rose and his team of lawyers demanding extreme litigious action to be taken against whoever leaked tracks with ridiculous names like “The Blues,” “Catcher In The Rye” and “I.R.S.” And yet, here it now is, in its final form: 14 tracks of new official GnR (making Rose’s songwriting average of about one per year significantly below what we generally expect of serious musicians). It was inevitable that the album would come out sounding as overdone as one would imagine a thirteen-year-old album would, but not even I was prepared for how truly insular Axl Rose had become in this past decade: This album will probably best be appreciated as an unintentionally hilarious series of extremely poor musical choices. Fortunately, we have no one to blame but Rose himself.

The album is a terrible, barely listenable mess with D-grade songwriting, utilizing state-of-the-art production values that already sound dated even a day after the album has been officially released. For a band that, despite their less than stellar work ethic, managed to produce remarkably consistent albums up to now, it is disheartening to see Axl Rose strike out fourteen times in a row, although some songs are more worthy attempts at capturing the old GnR magic than others. The reason for this is simple: Rose has simply no one in his fold with the temerity to try editing his more ridiculous impulses. Rose’s new army of five guitarists can all shred perfectly fine, but they are all drowned in a mix meant to subvert any means of displaying personality or character. Compare this to the Guns N’ Roses of old. Sure, Slash was a cheese merchant and not the most original guitarist in the world, but at least he played with flair and an intuitive blues vocabulary that was entirely his own. I can’t tell if the guitar solo in “Shackler’s Revenge,” for instance, is Buckethead, Bumblefoot or some other fret-wanker with a stupid name, but it doesn’t matter because it sounds like a solo played by ProTools and fed through a soul-sucking Lazarus machine. If nothing else, this new album is symptomatic of a popular genre I like to alternately call either “meathead rock” or “autotune rock.” “Chinese Democracy” resembles less the albums of the band’s past than it does the new breed of terrible establishment rockers like Mudvayne or Staind. I attribute this to Rose’s infatuation with the industrial stylings of Nine Inch Nails: though he may have found it novel to combine industrial beats with heavy, processed guitars, he ends up making an album only one step removed from that most dated of sub-genres, nu-metal.

“Chinese Democracy” is full of terrible attempts at genre cross-pollination. The opening title track and first single opens with a full minute of vaguely eastern-sounding droning (kind of like how Led Zeppelin’s “In Through The Out Door” starts, actually) followed by a ferociously dumb riff of the “Louie, Louie” sort. This is understandable, but then it is repeated for virtually the whole song. I’m not the biggest GnR fan, but I know Rose is capable of better songwriting than this. There was a time in their history when they were capable of throwing off pretty good riffs with abandon that would all make sense within the context of the song. You might not notice in a track like “Sweet Child O’ Mine” because of its ubiquity, but Slash was brave enough to discard the opening “carnival” riff, as good as it was, halfway through the song in favor of a more expansive and interesting song comprised of a chorus and verse that functioned interdependently, in addition to several memorable solos and an eerie breakdown toward the denouement. Rose is completely incapable of doing this anymore, so he instead tries to distinguish different parts of his songs with expensive ideas like gigantic choirs, ill-advised electronic noises, flamenco guitars, Pink Floyd-esque programmed soundscapes and hoary balladry. Often, all of these elements will appear within the same song. To say that the album sounds schizophrenic does a disservice to schizophrenics capable of producing great art. The only word I care to use for it, really, is “awful.”

Even the songs with a few bright moments, such as “Better” (not a cover of the Regina Spektor song, unfortunately), with its arresting vocals and catchy harmonics, are offset by moments of sheer ludicrousness, with Rose overstepping his meager talents at almost every turn and showing his true face as a meathead, chest-thumping rocker with nothing relevant to say. The lyrics themselves are filled with Rose’s usual boastful come-ons, alternating about every third song with an almost unnerving sentimentality. What’s weird is that several of the songs here could be about the process of the making of “Chinese Democracy,” such as when Axl says in “Catcher In The Rye” (trying to paint himself as the Salinger of rock, I guess), “All at once a song I heard/No longer wouldn’t play for anybody/Or anyone.” True, and funny, but for all the struggling rock musicians trying to make it by through their dedication and talent, watching someone like Rose burn limitless amounts of money on such a useless album and then boast about it is enough to make anyone want to give up the dream.

“Chinese Democracy” is already getting a few good reviews from media outlets—the always dependably rock establishment-reverent “Rolling Stone” gave it four stars, for example—but the chances of this album holding up the way “Appetite For Destruction” did are roughly congruent to the chances of Slash and Axl settling their differences in a WWE-style steel cage match. This is one of the worst albums I have ever forced myself to listen to multiple times. It is a disservice to the legacy of Axl Rose and company, and obviously proof that Rose either needs a genuine musical foil or needs to get out of the business altogether. I would suggest that this album should be forgot about altogether, but that seems unlikely. The only distinguishing characteristic of “Chinese Democracy” is its inherent “Heaven’s Gate”-ness, in that it will be forever characterized by just how bloated and unprecedented of a failure it turned out to be.

A comics-related post

2008-11-29T15:22:00.000-08:00

The last issue of Secret Invasion is upon us, and although the last few issues have been somewhat underwhelming, I'm still pumped to see what sort of twists might happen. A few days before Marvel's last big event, Civil War, I attempted to predict what would happen in the last issue. I figured that what was most likely to happen would be that Tony Stark would sacrifice himself battling off a crazed clone of Thor, which would simultaneously redeem himself in the eyes of the readers as well as call an end to the Superhuman Registration Act. As it turned out, I was dead wrong. Tony Stark lived (duh, a movie was going to come out), Captain America died, and the SRA is still in place, although it seems that Stark and co. are starting to care less and less about enforcing it as they realize that people like Spider-Man aren't even remotely a threat to anyone's safety.

Anyway, I thought I'd attempt to do something similar with Secret Invasion, to see how wrong I can possibly be this time. Here's what I think will happen. Though it looked like the Skrulls were going to be defeated last issue, I believe they are here to stay for the long run. In fact, I think they will covertly take over with the help of Thunderbolts leader Norman Osborn, who will turn out to be a turncoat the whole time (this would explain why Osborn knew what Captain Marvel was in the first place when he just busted into Thunderbolts headquarters without warning). The Skrull-controlled media will make it seem as if Osborn beat the Skrulls, and he will be redeemed in the public eye for whatever wrongdoings he committed as the Green Goblin. He will probably replace Stark, who will be framed as a Skrull criminal and locked up, as head of S.H.I.E.L.D. (if it still exists, and if not, then as head of S.W.O.R.D.). During the final battle, I believe that the Wasp is probably going to die as the result of whatever growth serum she took, and the ensuing explosion will injure many and probably kill Jessica Jones, amongst a few others (some of the Young Avengers, maybe, or members of the Hood's party). The heroes will be defeated and unable to voice their concerns with a media already biased against them. As a result, all superheroes are completely banned from being active, save for a new group of Dark Avengers, who are actually Skrulls in disguise and have their reputation bolstered by claiming to have the resurrected Steve Rogers on their team, now known as the Iron Patriot. The new Captain America, Bucky Barnes, will find himself completely outcast again. The rest of the heroes are driven underground and forced to team up with the likes of Dr. Doom or go to other countries like Wakanda.

We'll see how right I am.

Why I hate Van Halen (a dissection of "Jump")

2008-08-01T20:15:00.000-07:00

I just put this on my last.fm blog. Check me out sometime.
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Van Halen gets too much respect these days and I want to know why. I have my guesses, mainly that the people who enjoy this band grew up in the 80s and have an unhealthy attachment to anything heard on the radio during their formative years; additionally, we are starting to deal with the rise of young music listeners who faced a similar predicament, if only because their parents are those same listeners from the 80s. Surely, Van Halen had a few virtues far beyond those of the average cheese metal band (although its influence on the most horrid examples of the genre, such as Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Ratt, cannot be denied), but such modest virtues consisted solely of Eddie Van Halen's novel approach to guitar playing, which I will grant that, at the time of their debut album in 1978, may have seemed like a logical extension of the sort of things Led Zeppelin was doing, even as Led Zeppelin's better years were behind them, with Jimmy Page devoting himself full time to heroin and Aleister Crowley. Some believed that Eddie's chops were enough to offset David Lee Roth's horrible lyrics and even worse vocals in those days, but by the time something like "Jump" came around, I don't think anyone was attempting anything resembling good songwriting.

People seem to have a special spot in their heart for "Jump" among all Van Halen songs. I really can't figure out why. It's anchored by a keyboard riff that is as shockingly pedestrian as any that has been replayed over and over on classic rock radio, and you better believe that is saying a lot. It is a textbook case of beating a bad riff into the ground. "Jump" was part of Eddie Van Halen's opus 1984, which was a poor attempt on his part to master the keyboards in the same way that he had proven himself to be a master of guitar. Obviously, something went horribly wrong.

I begin with, as I must, with the lyrics. You might ask, why bother? Even the biggest David Lee Roth fan in the world has to admit that he is one of the two or three worst lyricists of all time (this is assuming that Roth is writing these lyrics, which I'm not sure--if it's Eddie, there's another reason for him to quit his day job). Roth of course was an amateurish singer, a preening prima donna of a showman, an incomparable chauvinist asshole, and, from all records, an impressive martial artist. Roth brings all these experiences and more to this beautiful opening aphorism:

I get up
and nothing gets me down

Whether or not it is true that it is difficult to get Roth down once he gets up, you have to wonder what he means by "getting up." Knowing Roth, it possibly has something to do with drugs but more likely is just Roth trumpeting his own irrepressible (read: annoying) personality, refusing to let all the haters hold him back. This opening line would make a lot of sense in a Viagra commercial, but beyond that, come on. Let's see if Roth can follow up this claim.

You got it tough
I've seen the toughest around
And I know, baby, just how you feel
You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real

This is Roth's statement of purpose, foregrounded by Eddie's already gratingly repetitive keyboard riff. As far as I can tell (and by doing this I am putting more thought into David Lee Roth's lyrics than anyone else in the history of the world, certainly more than Roth himself), Roth is trying to cheer up a woman who's not doing too well, telling her to "roll with the punches to get to what's real." This means, as far as I can tell, that if she just keeps taking it, eventually something good will come out of it. Thanks a lot, Roth.

Let's continue with what I guess is the bridge part, a blessed respite from that fucking tinny keyboard, kind of:

Oh can't you see me standing here, I've got my back against the record machine
I ain't the worst that you've seen
Oh can't you see what I mean?

Record machine? Surely he isn't referring too, I don't know, a record player of some sort? Perhaps a jukebox, which would suggest that Roth's players are in some communal place like a bar, or perhaps a local soda fountain. Then he says, "I ain't the worst that you've seen," which perhaps could be construed as an attempt by Roth at self-deprecation, until he says, "Can't you see what I mean?" So, he isn't the worst that you've seen, wink wink nudge nudge? Does that mean that he is, actually, the worst thing that you've seen? I doubt it. More likely, Roth believes that any sentence followed by ,"if you know what I mean" qualifies as a pickup line. He is entitled to think that as the singer of a successful rock band (albeit, apparently, an ungrateful one).

So after this is the chant. "You might as well JUMP!" which is followed by someone else yelling, "JUMP!" Every time Roth says the title of the song, someone else (Eddie?) responds in turn. I find this to be one of the most annoying aspects of the song, particularly because Roth has to continue shouting nonsense like, "Yeah, jump! Go ahead, jump! Might as well jump!" etc. I'm willing to postulate that, to people who grew up with this song, this may be the most affecting part. That is, if one can put aside what some could construe to be a casual message of encouragement to those who consider suicide. Others could possibly take it to mean, I don't know, doing something crazy because you're young and invincible. Or something like that. It seems a lot of terrible songs from the 80s cover the same topic.

The rest of the song's lyrics basically repeat the bridge and the chorus over and over again, although there is one more verse that is, as you'll see, complete nonsense:

Aaa-ooh, hey you! Who said that?
Baby, how you been?
You say you don't know, you won't know
until we begin.

Christ, I don't even feel like going into this any more. Obviously it's just stupid, and it's not even the most egregious example of Rothian nonsense. I have a theory for why he wrote lyrics like this (seriously, did he just make them up on the spot?). David Lee Roth once said something to the effect of, "Rock critics love Elvis Costello more than me because they all look like Elvis Costello." It seems that me that this brilliant realization of Roth's inspired him to be everything that Elvis Costello is not, and so, to counter Costello's proclivity to write intelligent lyrics, Roth chose the meathead route. He must have figured that the quality of an individual's lyrics is inversely proportional to how much said individual gets laid; for all I know, he could be correct (although Costello was no slouch).

By now you will be arguing, "well of course the music is more important than the lyrics." I agree with you, so let's take the music on its own terms. The entire production sounds, at this point, phenomenally dated, in the same way in which similar "classics" like Born In The USA and Thriller sound dated. As products of the 80s, all the levels are reduced to car stereo quality, making everything sound tinny and inexpressive; additionally, keyboards are front and center and all the non-electronic instruments sound as if they are electronically augmented, even if they are not. As a result, the music sounds as inauthentic and "non-live" as traditional rock music can get, in a way that Led Zeppelin or even previous Van Halen never did.

Let's talk about the overall arc of the songwriting. For someone considered an incredible virtuoso, one of the crowning princes of his instrument, Eddie Van Halen surely doesn't extend his experimental edge to his songwriting. I think this has to be intentional, and a good reason why he is far more popular and revered than more esoteric players like Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai (or progenitors like Zappa). Not that there's anything wrong with that: in fact, I think it's probably a good thing that Eddie tried to temper his virtuosity by channeling it into typical pop structures. Still, even as a pop song, "Jump" is really nothing special. If you listen to both the verses and the chorus (this is one of many, many mainstream 80s songs where the verse and the chorus are the exact same thing), you'll notice that what you have is a I-IV-V progression--which, as songs from "Louie, Louie" to "Get Off Of My Cloud" to at least every other Ramones song will attest, is as typical a chord progression as is possible. In "Jump"'s case, you got C, then F, then G. It's really as simple as that. Over this progression is the keyboard riff, which overpowers every other instrument to an absurd degree. It's the same thing over and over again. Obviously, that's the point, it's a riff, but let me explain my distaste. I feel as if I have different responses to keyboard riffs than I do with guitar riffs: with a good guitar riff, you can at least feel the joy of expressing that sort of thing through repetition, whereas with this keyboard there's no real way to tell if Eddie didn't just play it once, put it on repeat, and make a song out of it. The fact that he tries changing it to some degree once in a while doesn't really do much for me, as even when he does that, the rhythm doesn't change at all, as if the whole tune has been preset.

The less said about the ineffectual rhythm section running behind Van Halen and Roth, the better. It's really a shame how inferior Alex Van Halen is compared to his brother, and yet it's moving to see him try to become some sort of drum legend when all the chips are stacked against him. That number one chip being, of course, bassist Michael Anthony, who as far as I can tell has a hard time playing more than one note for an indefinite period of time. Well, so did Dee Dee Ramone, you claim, but Dee Dee didn't have a drummer who played copious and poorly considered fills all the time. Alex's drumming is famously flashy, yet counter-intuitive given the nature of the song. On "Jump," neither of them can play worth shit, which is good because Eddie is clearly running the show here, and you can tell by what instruments are prominent.

Oh, but Eddie...there are several things wrong with this song's structure. Apart from actually giving us some audible guitar during the bridge (the "record machine" part), the most prominent guitar playing is during the solo, which, I must say, is pretty piss-poor. It sounds like Eddie recorded it in bits and pieces and edited it together at the last second after realizing he forgot to put in a solo, like a pimply teenager who tries to desperately rub one out before his prom date arrives. I was disturbed to read on Wikipedia that Eddie considers this to be his finest solo, although I couldn't find any evidence of him pointing out why. It comes out of nowhere, has nothing to do with the rest of the song, is completely unmemorable, and (his greatest sin) sounds like it's just trying to waste time. It's this kind of onanistic chaff that deservedly gives virtuoso guitar playing its bad rap.

Eddie's keyboard solo, which immediately follows the guitar solo, is embarrassingly bad for an entirely opposite reason. Here, it seems he can barely get a hang on the instrument, and his "solo" is nothing more than a quick succession of triplets, rather than the full chord at once. I don't know if Eddie got a bit better at the instrument later in his career (I hear he did), but at that point, it seems he is stuck with the most rudimentary of chords--triads--and he is not adventurous enough to try anything else.

So it seems we have Eddie Van Halen exemplifying the two opposite poles of bad instrumental soloing: total incompetence, of course, as well as super-competence, and the resulting high self-regard for what is essentially aimless noodling.

By the way, I personally prefer this video of Van Halen playing. It includes a noble attempt at "Iron Man":

Children of the 1980s, guitar enthusiasts, lovers of shitty lyrics, hear my plea. The next time you hear "Jump" on the radio, ask yourself these questions: why is this a good song? Why is it even on the radio? Has this aged well? Maybe you should consider that it was that stupid video on MTV, coupled with its aggressive airing on commercial radio, that foisted this upon you, and as such you are not required to like it at all. Just think about it. There's nothing worthwhile in this song. It's just a piss-poor excuse for a synthesizer riff that must have taken Eddie Van Halen five seconds to come up with. It is aural boredom. If you want a great keyboard lick from the 80s, might I suggest "Enola Gay" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark? And, of course, "Take On Me" by a-ha.

The Batman, emphasis on "The Man," also: Watchmen trailer

2008-07-24T19:24:00.000-07:00

No thanks to you bozos, I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight, and of course as a fan of what Christopher Nolan is doing with the character, generally, I found it to be yet another very powerful and effective superhero movie (does anybody besides me notice the ratio of good superhero movies to bad superhero movies these days? No wonder they're a sure bet at the box office these days--it seems every other summer movie can't resist being labeled a mixed bag at best). Heath Ledger was extremely good, I thought, and definitely the best Joker I've ever seen on screen (don't count me as a fan of Jack Nicholson's impression), even as his portrayal didn't exactly match the conception I had of him from the comics. It was also fun and somewhat novel to see a movie version that argued basically the inverse of what V For Vendetta was going for: that, as Thomas Hobbes suggested, life is nasty and filled with awful people, and only self-appointed guardians of order, legitimately elected or not, can keep us from tearing ourselves apart. Much has been written about how the Joker has been remade as a political terrorist a la Zarqawi or whoever, and it's sort of interesting to see the formerly anti-establishment Batman teaming up with the cops to restore capitalism and democracy, albeit not by playing by the books (then again, who ever did?). I was also happy to see the Joker providing a true-life example of "the prisoner's dilemma" for us to witness--as a screenplay device, it's kind of hoary, and the payoff is even worse, but the idea of the Joker as a amateur political scientist strikes me as gold.

Some things bugged me, but I don't know if they qualify as actual criticisms of the movie. The film brings up a lot of properly weighty themes that are discarded without a moment's notice--the Joker-Batman inverted psychoses theory first posited (as far as I know) by Alan Moore; the interesting notion that Batman is indirectly responsible for most of the supervillains who hang around Gotham City; that Two-Face follows this tragic arc and remains, unlike the rest of the characters, unredeemed. I never felt, for all the speechifying done by various characters (including countless moments where Joker says something to the effect of, "I'm just like you, Batman, I'm the yin to your yang, Batman, you are order and I am chaos, blah blah blah"), any of this was satisfactorily resolved. When Two-Face finally gets involved in the action, as fearsome as he looks, it seems that he is supposed to represent the new breed of evil in Gotham--and he doesn't seem that bad. The conversation he and Joker have doesn't make any sense. Additionally, I felt the film crossed the line with having Batman devise some sort of widespread sonar device that could determine the location of anyone with a cell phone, even if it's meant to be temporary. Has it come to the point where audiences can only trust Batman if he is the superhero embodiment of Big Brother, working with law enforcement to take down unabashed anarchists? I don't think this is an encouraging development (and what would Batman have done with V?). I was pleasantly surprised by the ending, because it seems that Nolan is trying to set up something not frequently explored in the comics, that of Batman operating completely outside of the law and, indeed, in opposition to it. It would be cool to see a movie where Batman fought police brutality or battled war profiteers by waging corporate warfare as Bruce Wayne (there was an excellent arc in Morrison's JLA where Batman "buys out" Lex Luthor in order to stop one of his schemes). Won't happen though. The way the movie ends, I like to think it would dovetail nicely into an arc involving Killer Croc or Solomon Grundy (Batman has to relocate in the sewers) or maybe Catwoman. Then, maybe in the future, we can get a Superman team-up?

But let's not get into that. Let's talk about this Watchmen trailer.

I, like many millions of Americans, am a big fan of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. Many people like to say that it is the greatest comic book story of all time, and while I am trying to slowly wean myself from making grand pronouncements like that, I think it is absolutely essential reading for just about anyone. Certainly, if I were to ever teach a class on postmodern fiction, I would include that as required reading, no question. As a statement on industrial imperialism, compounded by the world's first US superpower employing people with literal superpowers, and the resulting fecundity of cold war resentment, it is without peer, and I honestly believe that, even with all the superheroes running around. The layers of detail and exposition warrant many repeated readings, and the ending is appropriately (given the times) morally ambiguous: I've had long arguments with people concerning whether or not we felt Rorschach's actions at the end were justified.

I feel as if Watchmen fans are now divided in two halves: those who can't wait for Zack Snyder's movie adaptation and those who are uneasy with the notion of Watchmen being made into a film, particularly by Zack"300" Snyder. You can count me among those who felt that 300 was an absolutely loathsome movie, which, if not an outright gesture of support for the continuing War on Terror was sufficiently xenophobic, homophobic, and full of enough macho self-posturing to make me want to gag. Additionally, the fact that Alan Moore explicitly stated that a movie cannot and should not be made of Watchmen was enough to give me additional pause.

Funny fact: I was delighted to find that Moore and I have similar feelings about 300, per an interview he did recently with Entertainment Weekly:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Don't you have the slightest curiosity about what Watchmen director Zack Snyder is doing with your work?
ALAN MOORE: I would rather not know.
He's supposed to be a very nice guy.
He may very well be, but the thing is that he's also the person who made 300. I've not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn't particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: [that] it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid. I know that that's not what people going in to see a film like 300 are thinking about but...I wasn't impressed with that.... I talked to [director] Terry Gilliam in the '80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ''Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, 'I wouldn't.''' And I think that Terry [who aborted his attempted adaptation of the book] eventually came to agree with me. There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can't.

He makes good points, and he admits he may be making generalizations.

Anyway, I saw the trailer, and I couldn't help but be taken aback by how strikingly similar to the comic it is, at least in terms of angles: in fact, I was downright moved by the proceedings. I'm not convinced yet this is a good idea, but who knows? It was a good choice to have them play the Smashing Pumpkins song "The End is the Beginning is the End," as it fits the heavily stylized industrial atmosphere, as well as give it an updated 80's flavor (although, it should be pointed out, that song was written by Billy Corgan not for any album but for the soundtrack for Batman & Robin--a bad omen if you think about it). The Owlship, I was pleased to see, looks very cool. Nite Owl now looks kind of like a doughy Batman ripoff, and it's kind of silly to see him dropkicking some prisoners, but whatever. Silk Spectre now wears less clothes, no surprise there. Dr. Manhattan looks very cool, and very similar to the comics, as does the Comedian. Ozymandius unfortunately looks pretty underwhelming, but maybe that's part of the point. My beloved Rorschach (who, incidentally, shares Mendelson's birthday), looks spiffy as well, although I'm dubious about how Snyder is going to try translating the constantly shifting patterns on his mask--having them change on screen gives it a slightly different effect than having them change from panel to panel.

Anyway, it's an addictive trailer. I will probably see it when it comes out, but consider me, like Moore, to be skeptical. Hurm.

An open plea

2008-07-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

Does someone want to see The Dark Knight with me, someone who preferably is already in Ames?

There's no way you will be interested in this

2008-07-14T14:49:00.000-07:00

My class schedule for next year, for those of you interested. In case you are confused, I go to a liberal arts school that's divided into nine "blocks," which translates into four classes one semester and five in the other. Looking back on my college career, I am proud to say that I never took a block off, and I never skipped class, not even when I was sick (not that I ever got sick). Unfortunately, the days when one got rewarded for this are now over, and I have to depend on my intellect to reap me benefits. I'm screwed.

1. Senior Seminar: Colonial Literature and Postcolonial Theory
2. Intermediate French
3. American Survey
4. Virginia Woolf
5. Jazz Improvisation
6. Topic: Who Owns Music? The Practice and Politics of Musical Borrowing
7. Advanced Critical Writing
8. Race, Sex, and the Constitution
9. Critical Theory

I know what you are thinking: Is this Sacks guy so hardcore that he is going to end his college career with Critical Theory? Damn right. I couldn't fit it anywhere else.

Some other notes:
-Regarding Intermediate French, I'm screwed. Part of a liberal arts education is that you need to take a requisite number of classes outside your major, which includes a language. Technically the only class you need to pass is one language class at the 205 level, but unfortunately you need to either make it through three beginning classes or pass into a higher level by taking a test at the beginning of freshman year. I passed into French 103, which meant I would have to take two classes. I took 103 back freshman year, but for numerous reasons I have had to keep pushing back when I would take 205. Now, I don't remember any French. This is bad news. I feel especially bad considering the amount of friends, particularly from high school, who have gone and lived in other countries and learned other languages. For some reason, I have tried to remain willfully ignorant of other languages, in part because I never really liked the French language to begin with. I wonder why I never went abroad, anywhere. I guess I couldn't imagine leaving my little liberal arts alcove, but now I'm gonna have to leave, or end up like Eric Stoltz in Kicking and Screaming (see that movie if you haven't).

-Jazz Improvisation is looking to be somewhat hardcore, although I'm sure I can take it way better than most people. I wonder if my teacher will be down for some jazz fusion in the form of, I dunno, Jeff Beck's Blow By Blow.

-I'm only taking Virginia Woolf because it's with the master of all things Woolf, and at Cornell there are disappointingly few classes devoted to a singular author (one on Milton, if I remember, and two on Shakespeare).

-I found out not long ago that a professor of some repute who recently left Cornell (and whose name is not really that googleable but I will withhold it, just in case), talked a bunch of shit about me to a friend of mine. He took great issue with my article on Mark Steyn, which angers me only because I consider that article/interview to be the only worthwhile thing I did on that paper, and he proceeded to tear me up for not being sufficiently critical of Steyn and Cornell for inviting a public speaker that a) didn't have old-school scholarly credentials, and b) maintained that multiculturalism is a deterrent on American progress. I felt like writing an angry E-Mail but I abstained, as surely he is a far superior rhetoritician. Still, I swear to God, if I were ever to become a professor I would not end up being a knee-jerk peacenik like so much of the faculty. I mean at least they can entertain a speaker's presence for a day or so.
-Jesse Helms was a prick.

Also, I need to consider giving this blog a bit more oomph. Those who have known me or seen me will understand when I say I have no concept of visual aesthetics, and I will pay someone to help redesign (and maybe get a guest blogger up in here, anyone interested?*) If some of my bloggier friends (Mendy, Jim, Ricky) want to work something out I would be glad and somewhat relieved.

Oh yeah, since Mendy posted a link to my last.fm meme I am bound by my code of honor to do the same for him: Here. I think his answers ended up being a lot more interesting then mine, but then he got lucky.

*Not Juell.

Quotes, for the sake of wasting time

2008-07-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

"These seances are intercut with concert footage, during which the band typically sings the lyrics through once and then gets mired in endless loops of instrumental repetition that seem positioned somewhere between mantras and autism. The music is shapeless, graceless, and built from rhythm, not melody; it is amusing, given the undisciplined sound, to eavesdrop later as they argue in a van about whether they all were following the same arrangement."
-Roger Ebert, on the music of Neil Young & Crazy Horse

"I always treat life and death with respect, but most people don't...Look, I love the Coen brothers; we all studied at NYU. But they treat life as a joke. Ha ha ha. A joke. It's like, 'Look how they killed that guy! Look how blood squirts out the side of his head!' I see things different than that."
-Spike Lee, offering the most ridiculous generalization masquerading as criticism I've heard in a while, and I'm not even that big of a Coen brothers fan.

"astenou6 you's da faygot spiderman is teh greatest marvel superhero character ever not because of his powers but, because of what he represents your to much of a noob to get taht!"
-Youtube user Ace48071, spreading the Spider-Man gospel in ways I could only hope to emulate.

"So here is the problem. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for 100,000 years, but apparently for more than 95,000 of these years he accomplished virtually nothing. No real art, no writing, no inventions, no culture, no civilization. How is this possible? Were our ancestors, otherwise mentally and physically undistinguishable [sic] from us, such blithering idiots that they couldn't figure out anything other than the arts of primitive warfare?"
-Dinesh D'Souza, undeservedly proud of his new counter-theory against "the atheists" claiming that it makes no sense that God would only choose to intervene in human affairs sporadically over the last 5,000 years (I generally have little regard for anything anyone says over the internet, and I include myself, but I was heartened to see people on D'Souza's site ripping apart this argument fairly readily).

Oh snap, you been shylock'd!

2008-07-09T18:00:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard, it's the new Fox news game show: respond to any attacks on Fox News' character by showing ridiculously Jewed-up pictures of the perpetrators. This is what Steve Doocy and co. tried to do on Fox & Friends in a segment in which Doocy was complaining about some attack against Fox News leveled by The New York Times. So they showed an obviously doctored photo of the reporter in question, Jacques Steinberg. Compare below (courtesy Media Matters):

Seems kind of weird. They also took down another "attacker," Steven Reddicliffe:

What the hell? The question isn't whether or not Fox News actually did doctor these photos: obviously, they did, and a spokeswoman for the company said that it is common practice on cable news networks to photoshop pictures of people, but why do it this way? First of all, this is some terrible, me-level photoshopping. Second of all, it looks like pictures straight out of 30s German propaganda, and not even the good stuff, like Leni Riefenstahl. Can you imagine them taking a picture of, say, Al Sharpton, and doctoring some huge red lips on it? Shameful.

And yet some people say that anti-Semitism is not a factor, or is unimportant compared to various other forms of prejudice. As if it's a contest.

Vanity Fair has gotten into the game, posting a bunch of ridiculous photos of Fox News personalities, although in this case I would imagine it would not be in their best interest to shylock somebody already Jewish, like Bill Kristol. Speaking of Bill Kristol, I just saw the movie Arguing the World and I would like to talk about it at some point. Not that it has anything to do with Bill, but the deep lack of respect Irving Kristol's peers now hold for him is telling, I think.

Philip Roth, Part VI: The End

2008-07-09T17:20:00.000-07:00

So, only three more books, all of them having nothing to do with any Kepeshes, Zuckermans, or Roths. The journey was fun and immensely helpful in regards to my honors stuff, and I hope to do this again with another author. But which one? Probably a white male. I fear I will spend the rest of my life feeling that I am woefully under read. I can now carefully consider myself a Roth scholar, but I want more. Indignation comes out in October.

Sabbath's Theater: If I were to choose one book from Roth's oeuvre to read again immediately, this one might be it, despite its comparatively massive length and the pallor of decay and gloom hanging over it. Make no mistake, this is an absolutely perfect novel that distills all the best aspects of Roth: comical scatology; spot-on dialogue; a feel for even the most minor of characters; an ability to pace; and a predilection to do new, interesting and novel things with the form. He squeezes every last drop of narrative potential from what could have been a very ordinary story about an aging, disgraced puppeteer near the end of his life, mourning the loss by cancer of a very special mistress and yearning to redo the whole thing again. Mickey Sabbath is an incredibly disgusting and vile, yet he is a lovable character, and his relationship with the doomed mistress, Drenka, is as touching as it is vomit-inducing (I swear, I don't know how he does this stuff so well). There are a good dozen or so brilliant moments that I feel like rereading immediately, including a transcript of a phone sex conversation (can't think of any better one off the top of my head), a Ulysses-esque digression imagined by Sabbath on a subway, Sabbath trying in vain to buy some vodka so that a woman he met at a rehab facility--where he was supposed to be visiting his wife--would sleep with him, Sabbath revisiting his home, the description of various depraved sexual practices that Sabbath and Drenka engage in without abandon, and several others. This is a very special book that packs an emotional wallop right to the very end, and has probably the best opening and closing lines of any Roth book I can think of. This book is about as depraved as Roth got, and it isn't for the faint of heart, but it's as moving a character study as I believe Roth is capable of constructing.

Shop Talk: Not much to say about this book: like Reading Myself and Others, this is straight non-fiction (a rarity for the author), although this time Roth is smart enough to take himself out of the equation, mostly, and presents a series of mostly interviews and appreciations of authors he admires. I found this book only intermittently interesting as I had yet to read many of the authors he interviews in this book, but it's always nice to hear Roth talk about how enamored he became with the artistic scene in Czechoslovakia (the book contains interviews with both Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima, both of ramble on intelligently about the positives and negatives in choosing to represent a society that is so hostile to open ideas and art) and also how he views himself in the pantheon of 20th century Jewish writers, via his appreciations of Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud (there's also a quick interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer--having read Singer, I really don't see how they would have much in common, but they are respectful). It should also be noted that his interview with Aharon Applefeld showed up almost verbatim in Operation Shylock. This is not necessary reading by any means unless you happen to be interested in the authors Roth is talking about, which in most cases I was.

Everyman: This book was quite a doozy to end on, and I'm sort of sorry I chose to end it this way. This is a very short and powerful read, although it doesn't offer much beyond this very novel notion that it is a biography (the protagonist of which is nameless) that consists entirely of Everyman's illnesses: Roth will mention in fleeting how his character lived 25 years with no health problems and move on to the next operation or hospital visit. The intent is obvious, to convey the horror and depression of someone who knows he is inching ever closer to the end of his life, and cursing the failings of his body and mind. As one can imagine, this does not make for happy reading. There is virtually nothing in the way of humor in this book, a rarity among Roth's works, and the descriptions of Everyman's few infidelities aren't terrible interesting compared with what we know Roth is capable of. There are many powerful sequences, but I suspect Roth intends them to be secondary to the overall mood of the piece, which is to convey his own anxiety about growing old and seeing his body fail (I'm told that Roth, unlike his older characters, is more or less in excellent health). This would have made a fitting epitaph had Roth chosen to end it this way, particularly the scene where he goes to the graveyard to visit the grave of his mother and father. I felt this passage to be absolutely heartbreaking:

Aloud, he said to them: "I'm 71. Your boy is 71." "Good, you lived," his mother replied. And his father said, "Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left."

I don't think that this is a sentiment that can only be understood by 71-year olds. If there's anyone in any of Roth's book that says anything worth taking to heart, it's Everyman's father.

Philip Roth, Part V

2008-07-02T21:16:00.000-07:00

As promised, I continue. At this point in my journey, I was reading pretty voraciously, at the rate of about one book every two days. I recommend to everyone trying to do something like that for a month, but after that it can get to be a problem. I was also plagued by headaches during this time, and still am.

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography: As I imagined, about as comprehensive as I imagine a "novelist's autobiography"--that is, not really at all. At first it seems like Roth wrote this for the obvious reasons, those being to address certain aspects of his fiction and compare them to real-life occurrences. That does happen a bit, but Roth doesn't seem to want to elaborate on any of it. Simply put, this isn't much of an autobiography, and Roth freely admits to being unable to stay away from embellishing certain themes even as he tacitly denies that, being as spiritually bankrupt as he is, they can actually mean anything. Still, though, there are anecdotes aplenty worth comparing Roth's fiction to, and independently a few stand out as being artfully presented. The framing device of having Roth send a manuscript of The Facts as well as a letter to his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, is confusing, as is Zuckerman's long written response to Roth at the end of the book. It does serve to highlight the fact that there are severe differences between Zuckerman and Roth--for instance, Zuckerman's dad died before his mom, and Roth's dad didn't die mouthing the word "bastard." Still, what is to be meant of Zuckerman's criticism of the preceding manuscript? Does it even count as self-criticism? Is it meant to prove that this "autobiography" is nothing of the sort, and still belongs under fiction? I tend to think the latter. Roth's autobiography isn't really different from his fiction, and Zuckerman recognizes that, if that makes any sense.

Deception: A Novel: This is a very bizarre read, structured as it is almost entirely of dialogue, with no description, no modifiers, and very frequently no idea who is talking to who. It's kind of brilliant, and it proves that Roth can write dialogue that, while not what we would call "realistic," is certainly fascinating enough on its own. It's called Deception, of course, because it is about a series of (imagined?) affairs that Roth has, principally with a married British woman and a Czech runaway. As one can tell, most of these conversations happen post-coitus, and Roth is expert at capturing both the desperation and the flippancy of such conversations. It is never boring, exactly, and strikes me as a possibly very good play, except part of the pleasure of the book is not knowing who exactly is talking. If that doesn't sound pleasurable to you, you probably don't want to read it. If you want to read a book of people rambling on intelligently about sex, and I almost always do, then you don't do much better than this. By the way, this novel falls under the "Roth" aegis even though the principle character is referred to as "Philip" only once--this becomes a critical plot point later in yet another one of Roth's futile attempts to write himself into his stories as a means to escape persistent drama.

Patrimony: A True Story: Roth's second, more streamlined attempt at writing a memoir is quite a gesture, basically detailing the story of his father's final years and his battle with cancer. Roth's father, Herman, comes off as an extraordinarily likable figure, a far cry from Zuckerman's father, and what's more he seems to have a sense of humor about his son's work. There are several very funny sequences, which one appreciates more and more as Herman's cancer gets worse and Roth is unable to do anything other than write about it. I appreciate very much how candid Roth is in going through the precise medical details of someone dying of cancer (this is something he would get into in later works). When his father does die in the end, of course it makes for compelling reading, but at least part of the compulsion has to do with wondering how the hell someone can sit down and write about something like that. But he does, plainly, honestly, and admirably in my opinion. While this book is quite a downer, it is as fitting of an epitaph as one could imagine of an 86-year old former insurance agent who just happens to have sired a notorious novelist. How he managed to do this and not be sentimental is anyone's guess, but he far exceeded my expectations.

Operation Shylock: A Confession: I can't begin to imagine what inspired Roth to write a book like this, but I can only imagine he had a score to settle with someone, probably regarding the state of Israel. While previously his alter-ego Zuckerman had balked at the idea of talking about middle-eastern geopolitics, Roth delves into the issue headlong for the first time since The Counterlife, and crafts a very unsettling and compelling fictional memoir. At least part of this account we know to be true--Roth had a bad reaction to some sort of painkiller meant to help him after a knee operation, and he became depressed and suicidal for a brief time. After recovering, Roth finds that, bizarrely, someone has been impersonating him in Israel, going to public events claiming to be the real Philip Roth and preaching the creed of "diasporism," a sort of reverse Zionism wherein Jews would leave what was supposedly an unlawful occupation of Israel and come back to live in Europe and speak Yiddish. What makes matters more bizarre is that this fake Philip Roth looks and acts exactly like the real one. The real Roth was already planning on traveling to Israel to interview the author Aharon Applefeld, so he decides to do a bit of detective work while he's there. Suffice to say, however bizarre one thinks the situation already is, it gets far worse. Roth has never been more politically incisive: while he is obviously critical of a ludicrous ideology like diasporism, he is unsparing in his criticism of Israel, but not necessarily denying the necessity of a Jewish state. This is multifaceted, compelling pseudo-journalism at work here. Whether or not all or part of this book is some sort of elaborate fantasy is unclear, but this is definitely a book one can imagine Roth enjoying writing, if only for the fact that he'd relish making a few new enemies in the process.

The Plot Against America: A bit plot-heavy by Roth standards, but given the subject matter, it needed to be. The notion of alternate histories and "what if" scenarios had been a big part of science-fiction and especially comic books for quite some time. Roth's idea, to imagine such a scenario in the micro, in reference to his own boyhood, makes it far more charmingly personal and less ham-fisted. At least, until the end. Here's what happens (happened?): The famous aviator, anti-Semite and Hitler sympathizer Charles Lindbergh becomes the Republican presidential nominee in 1940, and later defeats FDR soundly on an isolationist platform. As a result, America never enters World War II, which spells dire consequences for England and the rest of the world. Meanwhile, young Philip Roth is 10 and a perfectly innocent young boy, alarmed by the fear that his parents seem to exhibit now that Lindbergh is president. Eventually, things do start to happen: Jewish families are "relocated," there are camps for Americanizing young Jewish boys, and anti-Semitic riots start breaking out. There's a lot of brilliant stuff going on here, even if it all seems a tad unlikely, given the circumstances. In fact, the big twist at the end (a rarity for Roth to even attempt such a thing) seems to come out of left field, even if it does make perfect sense in a blunt sort of way. However, Roth's feel for his hometown and his childhood, even in this alternate universe, is as keen and expressive as ever. But what is his message at the end? That for all America's wrongdoings, it will eventually correct itself in the end? It does seem a tad convenient at times.

Almost done. Coming up: Sabbath's Theater (my favorite!), Shop Talk and Everyman. Then I am done.

Philip Roth, Part IV

2008-07-02T09:26:00.001-07:00

Sorry. In case you're wondering, I'm done, and have been for a while. I have already mentioned before how ridiculous it was to start with someone as prolific as Roth. In fact, he has a new book, Indignation, coming out in October. I'll read it when I get the chance and probably review it.

I'll do these all in quick succession. You might notice that pretty much all the books reviewed here border on straight up superlative--this was a man who had quite a winning streak later in life. It's been a pleasure, and immeasurably helpful in honing my honors thesis. I begin with the pseudo-continuation of the Zuckerman saga.

The Counterlife: Where this fits in the continuity spectrum of the Zuckerman novels is unclear; I get the impression that Roth never has really concerned himself with those issues, anyway. While the books that comprised Zuckerman Bound were essentially straightforward narratives with a fair amount of metatextual embellishment (such as the Anne Frank chapter in The Ghost Writer), The Counterlife is on a whole different level entirely. He experiments with the Zuckerman character using different fragments of narrative that often aren't elaborated upon or even referred to in the next chapter. A synopsis would be best served by addressing the individual chapters, but I don't think it's in your best interest for me to do so. Several aspects of Roth's work are worth talking about: for the first time, he takes on the gigantic subject of Israel, in a chapter where Zuckerman's brother leaves his family to join a fanatical Zionist kibbutz. The conversations that Nathan and his brother, Henry, have regarding the necessity and the foolhardiness of establishing the state of Israel strike me as being a far better attempt at political commentary than Our Gang. Some of the later chapters, which deal with anti-Semitism in Zuckerman's adopted England, seem less powerful, if only because I was shocked to find Roth aiming his vitriol at Christians, of all people. Not that they don't need it, but what sort of middle-ground is he suggesting, between fanatical Zionist bloodletting and a English passive-aggressive anti-Semitism? Zuckermanism, or something else none of us can subscribe to.

American Pastoral: And then, of course, is this beauty of a novel, which I have actually read before. It's often referred to as the "second" Zuckerman trilogy (The Prague Orgy counts as an appendix to the first one, and The Counterlife has no choice but to stand alone). What differs this trilogy from the previous one is that, while Zuckerman is once again the author, he takes a secondary role, instead choosing to highlight (and subsequently fictionalize) minor figures in his life and devise a way in which to make these lives reflect the tapestry of American social upheaval. American Pastoral is about "Swede" Levov, a Jewish Adonis and former sports hero who is the most fundamentally decent character I think Roth has ever created. He takes over his father's glove factory (leading to some brilliant exposition from Roth about the science of glove-making--you probably don't believe me but it is mind-blowing stuff), marries a former Miss New Jersey, and has a daughter. As good a husband and father as he is, he can't prevent his daughter from becoming increasingly radicalized by the situation in Vietnam, and she starts hanging out with unsavory, Weather Underground type characters. Eventually, she bombs a post office and kills someone, and subsequently vanishes. Seeing "Swede" Levov try to reconcile these feelings of paternal love with the knowledge that her daughter murdered someone is affecting, as is their final confrontation. I should add that their daughter, Merry, struck me as such a loathsome toolbag that it almost justifies the Vietnam war.

I Married A Communist: Once again, Zuckerman writes about a childhood figure, although ostensibly this time his recount of the life of the actor Ira Ringgold is less fictionalized than it is stratified through the minds of both Zuckerman and Ira's brother, who recounts about half of what goes on. This is often considered the weak link in the trilogy, and I agree with that assessment: Unlike Swede Levov and Coleman Silk, Ira Ringgold seems more of a victim not of the times but of his own pathetic attempts to stay attached to his communist ideology. Not that a great book couldn't be made out of this, and admittedly, it is filled with great stuff. While painted in broad strokes, Roth's depiction of the communist witch hunters is certainly entertaining and well thought out, although Roth has the habit of making all the enemies of communism by extension closet fascist sympathizers, with the exception of Ira's brother. Ira as a character still seems somewhat of a mystery, and his relationship with the young Zuckerman seems to be a tad on the convenient side: considering all that Zuckerman has been through, the fact that he never mentions this person before makes us wonder if Zuckerman isn't writing fiction again. As I stated before, I don't think that's something Roth is ever very concerned with.

The Human Stain: Almost unbearably emotionally resonant, in the manner of My Life as a Man and The Anatomy Lesson, this book packs quite a punch, even if Roth spends much of it attacking the shallowness and intellectual dishonesty of my age group (the "dumbest generation," Coleman Silk says at one point). Unlike the first two parts of the trilogy, this is set in the recent past, during the Clinton Whitewater hearings, and Roth makes much of how ridiculous it was that America was concerned with the sexual habits of the president. Against this backdrop, Roth tells the story of Coleman Silk, a neighbor of Zuckerman's and a professor at a small liberal arts college who gets kicked out for a supposed racial slur (he calls two students-- who happen to be black--spooks, referring to their continual absence from his classroom, not their race). The subsequent stress and disappointment ends up taking its toll on Silk's wife, so he implores Zuckerman to write his story. At first, Zuckerman refuses, but they become friends nonetheless. Silk, who is 71, starts having a torrid love affair with a 33-year old janitor whose life has been so tragic it verges on being a Chekhovian cartoon. All of this stuff is excellently told, and Roth easily manages to pull of the feat of having Zuckerman get in the minds of these different characters who don't even know who he is. While far from an impartial observer, Zuckerman manages to stay out of the fray until he is needed in the final sequence, which is quite a good one. This was made into a movie with Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, if you remember. This would seem at first like the least filmable of the trilogy, but I guess others disagree.

Exit Ghost: Roth's most recent book, and reportedly the last one to involve Nathan Zuckerman. This is probably a good thing, because after three straight books where he tried telling other people's stories, he has become self-involved to the point where he strikes me as being a bitter old phoney (sp?). Zuckerman, now in his 70s, is completely incontinent and impotent from prostate surgery, but is told that a possible cure is awaiting him in New York City. So, the reclusive Zuckerman travels to New York for the first time in several decades, and immediately starts kvetching about all the cell phones and iPods he sees. If anything, Exit Ghost is meant to mirror many of the themes and strands of the first Zuckerman book, The Ghost Writer. E.I. Lonoff is long dead, and a young hotshot writer tries to interview Zuckerman about his relationship with the writer, to be part of some sort of revelatory biography. In response, Zuckerman treats the young man like shit, vowing to go so far as to ruin his literary aspirations if he publishes this biography. Meanwhile, he starts having sexual feelings for a woman whose apartment he plans to rent for a year, feelings of course he cannot act upon due to his impotence. Meanwhile, he complains about how hard and humiliating it is to have to wear diapers, and the surgery doesn't do much to help him. This is a sad and very slight book, a bizarre end note to be sure. Zuckerman, towards the end of his life, no longer seems to be an interesting or enlightening character, but rather an old and disgruntled man furious about his impending death. It doesn't make for the most compelling reading.

Next: all of the Roth books, including The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, Deception: A Novel, Patrimony: A True Story, Operation Shylock: A Confession, and The Plot Against America (Why did Roth become so enamored with colons all of a sudden? Why have I?).

A moment of levity, by my standards

2008-06-23T16:46:00.000-07:00

Now that we've finally been rid of Hillary Clinton and her increasingly poorly managed (and racist) campaign, I can, I hope, safely say that I plan to vote for Barack Obama in this coming election. So, in case he was curious, he gets my oh-so-coveted endorsement.

This is not to say I am a blind partisan (or Obamabot, as they call them) drawn to unrealistic notions of "change." What appealed to me about Obama, and what always confused me with all these criticisms, was that he seemed to lay down in pretty concrete and intelligent terms what he planned to do. Partisanbots tried to paint him as having nothing but a bunch of vague utterances at the core of his campaign, and having seen the man speak a few times I can say that this is a mostly baseless accusation. I could give examples, and I might in a later post. Anyway, I will support the man, but not apologize for him. He seems like a good guy, and I find myself becoming more and more disturbed by McCain's behavior over the last few weeks, and Bob Barr is of course definitely out. Now Nader, I still might vote for him. Still though, Obama is not a perfect man, and in the interest of fair play, I present to you 10 Things I Do Not Like About Barack Obama

1. To start with an obvious one, his recent announcement to reject public financing. Not a bad idea in itself, but it seems the point he is trying to make is that, without big money interests, he can outspend McCain by however much he wants, while McCain is stuck with, at most, $84.1 million. Surely Obama, in the spirit of fair play, could have matched McCain's amount and offered to use the rest of the donations to do something else like, say, help people who are flooded or victims of genocide. As it stands, if Obama wins this thing, people will claim it is because of the money factor. Those of us who care about campaign finance reform, and we are a dying breed, weep.

2. The Obama campaign's response to accusations that he is somehow a secret Muslim. Obama's response was something along the lines of, "Of course I am not, I am a Christian like you." His response should have been, "Who gives a fuck?"

3. In one of the poorest examples of supposed "bipartisanship," Obama supported the Cheney/Rockefeller/Hoyer house bill that grants legal immunity to telecommunications companies who collaborate with our administration to spy on people. This is wildly unconstitutional and is unfortunately being supported by Nancy Pelosi as well as the majority of democrats in the house. It's possible Obama thinks that, as president-to-be, he would not use these warrantless wiretapping powers in vain, but come on.

4. He supported Joe Lieberman in his reelection bid after being ousted as the democratic nominee by Ned Lamont. Now I'm not the hugest Ned Lamont fan, but there are few people in the senate or anywhere else that I find so dishonorable and downright disgusting a political creature as Joe Lieberman. That is the subject of another post entirely, but it's worth pointing out that Lieberman did not respond in turn, and has now become a strong McCain backer. That is by far the least of why he is a scumbag.

5. His position on gay marriage. Doesn't support it, but supports "civil unions." Say what you want, but that's discriminatory. For supposedly the most "liberal" person in the senate, this is a glaring problem and offensive to homosexuals and non-bigots like myself.

6. The fact that he used to be an agnostic, which would be a pretty big deal if he still was (and a good thing), but then fell in with that lame church in order to circumvent stupid questions about his "faith." Looks like that didn't work out the way he planned.

7. Supports merit pay. 9 times out of 10, doesn't really work out the way it should, and the NEA wholeheartedly opposes it.

8. Made some generalizations about rap music that are pretty par for the course for ignorant old white politicians, but for someone who claims to have Jay-Z on his iPod, seems kind of an about face.

9. Said he liked Leon Uris. Blech.

10. Support of ethanol, which is troubling given that gas prices nevertheless make me want to cry. What's more, food prices are going up, which is particular bad timing given that vast swaths of the United States have been ravaged by national disasters.

I was thinking maybe I would do 10 things I would like about John McCain, again in the interest of fairness, but I don't know if I can even do that. His good qualities seem to be disappearing, one by one.

My top 50

2008-06-22T15:19:00.000-07:00

This is a last.fm meme I had been meaning to do for a long time. I would post it on my last.fm blog but I thought I'd do it here as well. I'm always interested to look at my top 50, in order to see what it perhaps says about me. Numbers here are rankings based on number of tracks scrobbled from each artist.

How did you get into 29? Big Black

Read about them in Michael Azzerad’s book, naturally. I think of the 13 bands profiled in the book, Big Black was one of the last bands I listened to and got into. I think only Beat Happening and Butthole Surfers came later. Anyhow I got Songs About Fucking first, because it was recommended by Pitchfork, and of course I was blown away. I was aware at the time of Albini’s producing (sorry, engineering) work for plenty of bands I admired.

2. What was the first song you ever heard by 22? Wire
It would have to be “Reuters” because the first time I ever listened to Wire I listened to Pink Flag all the way through.

3. What’s your favorite lyric by 33? Kyuss

“My hair is real long/No brains, all groin/no shoes, just thongs/I hate slow songs” is a good one.

4. What is your favorite album by 49? Jeff Beck

My iTunes counts Truth as a Jeff Beck album as opposed to a Jeff Beck Group album, so I will say Truth.

5. How many albums by 13 do you own? Game Theory.

Just one, actually. I should get more, but Lolita Nation has a lot of tracks and all of them are excellent, even the 14-second ones.

6. What is your favorite song by 50? Crime

“Instrumental Instrumental” always gets me going.

7. Is there a song by 39 that makes you sad? Johnny Thunders

Oh, yes. His entire repertoire is pretty heartbreaking in light of what happened to him. Obviously, “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory” comes to mind, but I would probably choose “So Alone,” cause Thunders’ guitar can always make me a bit weepy.

8. What is your favorite album by 15? Guitar Wolf

J-J-J-Jet Generation!

9. What is your favorite song by 5? The Clash.

This has to be the hardest question yet. I’ll say “Charlie Don’t Surf,” but as I say it, all these songs from London Calling come welling back—shit, let’s say “Charlie Don’t Surf.”

10. Is there a song by 6 that makes you happy? Minutemen

There’s several, but one that comes to mind is “History Lesson-Part II,” a heartwarming story of friendship and band harmony that is unprecedented in its autobiographical candor as well as its kind disposition.

11. What is your favorite album by 40? Jay Reatard.

Blood Visions is the only one I got.

12. What is your favorite song by 10? Frank Zappa

Jesus, another hard one. “Trouble Every Day” is so magnificent, even if it is on his first album. It also has probably his best, least random lyrics.

13. What is a good memory you have involving 30? Butthole Surfers

I actually have a wonderful memory of being at Chameleon’s in Mt. Vernon with some friends and everyone was playing shit music on the jukebox (Lynyrd Skynyrd and the like) and me and my friends sunk a bunch of money into it and played “Who Was In My Room Last Night” first. We ended up waiting about an hour listening to terrible music until finally we heard the “I’m flying, I’m flying” part. Then we all started headbanging.

14. What is your favorite song by 38? The La’s

“I Can’t Sleep” is the jumpiest and happiest of many jumpy and happy cuts.

15. Is there a song by 19 that makes you happy? Elvis Costello

Elvis isn’t the kind of lyricist who writes “happy” lyrics—nevertheless, the music for “The Impostor” is pretty cheerful for what it is (ska).

16. How many times have you seen 25 live? Queens of the Stone Age.

Never, but I would love to.

17. What is the first song you ever heard by 23? Meat Puppets.

Obviously it must have been “Lake of Fire” via Nirvana, and it was also the Meat Puppets cut on the Rhino 80s underground box set.

18. What is your favorite album by 11? Dinosaur Jr.

Has to be You’re Living All Over Me. Stiff competition from Bug and that’s about it, although all Dinosaur Jr. albums have good tracks.

19. Who is a favorite member of 1? Bad Brains.

Dr. Know is the MVP of all Bad Brains albums, at least until that Soul Brains nonsense when H.R. took over. As much as I love every member of the band, consummate musicians all, if forced to take one on a desert island I would choose Dr. Know, for his consummately brilliant soloing abilities as well as his ability to play really, really fast. Like Johnny Ramone and Van Halen rolled into one.

20. Have you ever seen 14 live? Frank Black.

No, but I will in a few weeks in Des Moines hopefully, although this time under the sobriquet “Black Francis,” so who knows if that counts.

21. What is a good memory involving 27? Fugazi

Any memory involving Fugazi is a good one. Walking around campus while listening to “Public Witness Program” on repeat seems like a good one, it was like my way of calming down after my music theory classes.

22. What is your favorite song by 16? Radiohead

Currently, I’m partial to “All I Need,” because I have a lot of very good memories associated with it. Apart from that, “Paranoid Android” will always have a good place in my heart, despite its ubiquity.

23. What is the first song you ever heard by 47? The Rolling Stones

Who knows? The earliest I remember is dancing to “Jumping Jack Flash” as a youngster.

24. What is your favorite album by 18? The Replacements

I’ll say Pleased To Meet Me, an album that continually surprises and moves me—not only does it have the awesome opener “I.O.U.”—a piss-take on all the Replacements fans bitching about their moving to a major label—but it also has the perfect ending in “Can’t Hardly Wait.” In between, it has “The Ledge,” “Skyway” and of course the mighty “Alex Chilton.” I even listen to “Nightclub Jitters” when I’m in the mood.

25. What is your favorite song by 21? R.E.M.

Anything from their first five albums is tops, but I’ll choose “Harborcoat” because it embodies the two aspects of R.E.M. I always liked the most—the jittery, off-kilter dance rhythms and the anthemic (if obscure) chorus.

26. What is the first song you ever heard by 26? 999

“Homicide,” via its placement on No Thanks: The 70s Punk Rebellion, which was my bible for a while back in high school. Of all the songs that I played and replayed, “Homicide” is definitely one I listened to often.

27. What is your favorite album by 3? Steely Dan

The Royal Scam. Maybe a month ago I would have said Aja, but I can’t get over those first two songs, especially the end of “The Caves of Altamira” when the horns start going crazy. Plus, all of them have amazing lyrics, including “Haitian Divorce.”

28. What is your favorite song by 2? The Stranglers

This might be the hardest one to do yet. As much as I deeply love pretty much every part of the Stranglers’ discography, particularly the first three albums, I will go out on a limb and say I am particularly enamored with “Down In The Sewer.” If you haven’t heard it before, you should, it’s like the best sort of punk “rock opera” or whatever they call it, and it has this really righteous and exciting ending. It keeps building and topping itself, which is the sort of thing I like (that’s why I like the Wipers so much).

29. What was the first song you ever heard by 32? Magazine

“Shot on Both Sides,” also via No Thanks. I should add, though, that the stupid Rolling Stone record guide said that Magazine never made anything nearly as good as “Shot on Both Sides,” a simply stupid assumption. If you haven’t heard Magazine, you must. Great, probably the best, post-punk.

30. What is your favorite song by 8? The Germs

I know their discography by heart, and I can tell you pretty easily what my least favorite song is (that would be “Shut Down (Annihilation Man)”. As for my favorite, “Let’s Pretend” comes to mind. Some of Pat Smear’s best work there.

31. How many times have you seen 17 live? Warren Zevon

0, and it looks like I never will.

32. Is there a song by 44 that makes you happy? Led Zeppelin

Anything off Led Zeppelin III. Particularly, “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp.”

33. What is your favorite album by 12? Pixies

Impossible question. Can’t answer it.

34. What is the worst song by 45? Stiff Little Fingers

“Here We Are Nowhere,” if only because it’s too short.

35. What was the first song you ever heard by 34? Sonic Youth

I remember hearing about Goodbye, Old Century on NPR but the first Sonic Youth song proper I heard was probably “Tom Violence” off EVOL. I remember being not that impressed, shows how stupid I was in middle school.

36. What is your favorite album by 48? Neil Young

On The Beach is the one I listen to the most, so I’ll say that.

37. How many times have you seen 42 live? Tom Waits

Never, but boy would I love to.

38. What is your favorite song by 36? The Jam

The one I listen to the most is probably their cover of “Heat Wave,” but considering that’s not a Jam original I’ll say “Set The House Ablaze,” which by the way Bloc Party completely ripped off verbatim.

39. What was the first song you ever heard by 28? Wu-Tang Clan

“Gravel Pit,” I think. I think I saw the video. Very weird video, if you haven’t seen it.

40. What is your favorite album by 7? Husker Du.

Once again, an absolutely impossible question to answer. What the hell, Zen Arcade.

41. Is there a song by 31 that makes you happy? David Bowie
Bowie generally doesn’t generally make me cheery, but I guess “Modern Love” might fit the bill.

42. What is your favorite album by 41? Battles

Easiest question yet. Mirrored by default. I suppose I could choose one of the EPs but I’m not going to.

43. What is your favorite song by 24? Stevie Wonder

“As,” though I’ve completely overplayed that song over the course of the last year. Gets me going, I guess.

44. What is a good memory you have involving 46? Of Montreal
The first time I heard “Disconnect the Dots” and proceeded to spend the next few weeks listening to only that song.

45. What is your favorite song by 35? Big Star

“Feel,” I guess. Never topped that.

46. Is there a song by 9 that makes you happy? At The Drive-In
Oh, hell yeah. “Rolodex Propaganda” has great, loopy backing vocals by Iggy Pop and is of course righteous like everything else they do.

47. What is your favorite album by 4? Wipers.

Shit, yet another impossible question to answer. If pressed, I choose Youth of America. Chances are if you don’t like it I don’t like you.

48. Who is a favorite member of 37? The Who
Keith Moon is undoubtedly the greatest instrumental powerhouse of the Who, and of course that is saying a lot. I am feeling dubious about this Keith Moon biopic with Mike Myers (who will play Townshend? Adrien Brody? Who has the nose?).

49. What is the first song you ever heard by 43? Pink Floyd
Again, it’s difficult to remember. It might be “Learning To Fly” because of my dad. Ick.

50. How many albums do you own by 20? Portishead

All three of the studio albums proper. There's a band that should record more often.

Reconciling myself

2008-06-10T20:48:00.001-07:00

Well, I certainly dropped the ball on this thing. I was seized, unfortunately, by one of those Salinger (or Residents!) moments where I felt like being a bit more anonymous. In fact, I don't even know what I'm trying to do right now. I'll give you a brief lowdown on what you may have missed, had you not been present during every moment of my life and don't happen to be a nu-nu. This is in relatively chronological order.

-On what I believe was 4/20, I delivered my symposium project on Philip Roth. Entitled "Telling a Man by the Songs He Sings: Claims and Counterclaims of Anti-semitism in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go," I had spent the last several months, reading through as much of Roth's work as I could while simultaneously producing a 15-page paper that my sponsor would find of enduring quality. Luckily, she didn't find my thesis or anything I said to be that bad (I was probably helped by the fact that, even as an American literature professor, and a Jew to boot, she wasn't that familiar with Roth). Of course, the day before I had to pare down the fucking thing to a manageable 10 minutes. It turns out that reading my entire 15-page paper took something like 25 minutes, so I spent all of Friday hacking it until I was pretty sure I had produced something utterly unintelligible. No matter: very, very few people showed up. I would wager there were maybe 10 people there, and that includes the three students also speaking during my session (entitled "Literary Landscapes: Paradise, Politics, and Religion"--check out my abstract and stuff here) and their respective sponsors, although my sponsor couldn't be there because, irony of ironies, she had to go home for Passover.

Anyhow, I finally did it, and at least my moderator seemed to like it, and was particularly impressed that I did all the research outside of class. I asked her if (as department chairman) this would be good to go as an honors thesis, and she said yes. So at that point I was pretty happy.

-All of the internships I applied for--and I won't bother naming them all here--turned me down. Every single last one of them. So, faced with few other ideas, I decided to go back home once again for the summer. Turns out this was a bad idea.

-I did, however, receive an academic award from the school, which was cool because along with the prestige (I'm aware, don't laugh at me) of it I got $100. It was the Winifred Van Etten award, in case you were wondering. It's not a big deal, there are enough of these to make me feel not so special. Still, it was nice, particularly because I had no idea what I was getting until it was announced at the English awards/Open Field party. Mouton, or someone in the English department wrote a lovely introduction for me too. The only reason I enjoyed it was because it was poetic justice for none of my stuff getting into Open Field, which is the campus literary magazine. This is even though Freeman thought one of my stories was good enough to be entered into the Nick Adams short story contest (which I lost unsurprisingly, although I should add deservedly--I read the story that won, and it is actually an amazing piece of work). Apparently, my peers didn't think anything I did was good enough. I was depressed, but that made it a bit better.

Weirdly, I was invited to attend the English awards night as well as the interdepartmental awards night. Since I had already gotten my award previously, I was just asked to stand up to be recognized. There was no reason why I should have gone. The whole thing was like three hours and nearly unbearable, despite what was supposed to be fancy food. Apparently, there are a lot of awards here.

-Got hired to be the new Arts & Entertainment editor of The Cornellian, which, unlike my job back in high school, actually pays a salary. I was going for Opinions editor but I'm not surprised that they didn't choose me. To date, I have written pieces about the new Portishead album, the new R.E.M. album, and Iron Man. As is custom, the new editorial staff does one issue at the very end of the year, and it ended up not going so well for me as the result of some advertising mishaps, so I basically had to do the whole thing over again. The result: an epic piece on Iron Man that took up the entire page. It wasn't my proudest moment, and it was sort of another reason to be depressed. I couldn't look at it afterwards, that was for sure.

-I saw Iron Man. Loved it. I don't think my review is online, but I'll post it at some point.

-Took two classes, both of which fucked me up in unexpected ways: Grammar & The Politics of English turned out to be a mind-blowingly frustrating class, although not so much with the politics part as it was with the grammar. I don't know if anyone here has ever had to diagram sentences. I certainly hadn't before, but now I can say that it is a loathsome, disgusting, and surprisingly helpful activity. I think I am a better writer for taking the class, and it was sort of nice to have a professor who didn't like anything I did at all. I definitely needed that, but too bad it killed my straight-A winning streak for the semester. I'm not as concerned with that as I am with the way I was demoralized--somehow, even as someone with enough knowledge and passion of issues pertaining to language politics and linguistics, I found I had little of value to say. I did, however, get to do a paper on Salman Rushdie, who readers will know I am a big fan of. I think my thesis was something like the Ayatollah couldn't have possibly read The Satanic Verses before he issued his fatwa, and he definitely didn't read it afterward either. I know, it's so obvious. Story of my life.

Contrast this with Contemporary Fiction, a class I owned unequivocally. I found, astonishingly, that I was more in my element doing literary analysis, and what's more, I found myself enjoying the theory--yes, the theory--of postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. Plus, we got to read some wonderful books, including one of my favorites, If on a winter's night a traveler. We also read Breakfast of Champions and J.M. Coetzee's Foe, amongst selections from a big Norton anthology of postmodern literature from the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Sherman Alexie, Marilynne Robinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others. Philip Roth was in the anthology (excerpting The Ghost Writer) but we did not read him in class. I felt very much on top of things and was very proud of the writing I did in the class. In fact, I feel like I might put it on here, except it doesn't seem that profound on the internet as it did in the classroom. Anyway, my professor seemed to like it, and me, a lot. I think he liked that I would actually talk about some of the postmodern theory while most would complain it was impenetrable. As he would likely say, that's the point.

-I keep chugging away at Philip Roth. Just finished Deception, by the way, so I'm entering the home stretch. In my next post I'll talk about The Counterlife through Exit Ghost, assuming I can remember anything about them.

-I ended my junior year by doing my take-home final while having an extreme headache, and later, after attending quarter draws night at the bar, getting extremely feverish. Also, I hate packing and I knew I would miss my roommate, Jeremiah, although I'll see him again next year.

-Came home for the summer. The drive back was excruciating. Not only was I feeling extremely sick, to the point where I couldn't eat anything, but it was raining as hard as I've ever seen, to the point where I couldn't really see on the road. It was risky business, but I made it home okay. I've looked, in vain, for a job. It's hard, because pretty much everything has been filled up by people who came back for summer long before I did, as a result of Cornell ending pretty late. I need money and I don't know what to do.

So that's it. I'll get back into the swing of things, slowly. My question is this: from reading this, does this constitute a life well-lived? Obviously I'm not including stuff that is personal, but let's just say that that part is covered. Am I doing enough with my life? What should I be doing? What am I doing wrong?

Michael Stipe is gay?

2008-04-09T10:37:00.001-07:00

Here's my review of R.E.M.'s Accelerate. Those who know about me and my relationship with the band can probably predict what I will say.
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Who could have predicted 20 years ago that R.E.M. would become the venerated institution that it is today, a stadium rock juggernaut comparable to U2 or the Rolling Stones? Certainly I wouldn’t have, nor would I have predicted that their precipitous (if somewhat unstable) rise to mainstream fame would coincide almost perfectly with a string of albums containing increasingly diminishing returns. Accelerate, R.E.M.’s 13^th album, has already been hailed in some critical circles as a “return to form” (a coded message for fans to stay away if there ever was one) and even as their best album since 1996’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which was the last album to involve their long-standing drummer Bill Berry. Don’t believe it, though: despite the increased prevalence of distorted guitars for the first time in a few years, there’s nothing here on this album to distinguish it from R.E.M.’s last several mediocre efforts. As much as I love this band, I have to admit that R.E.M. should have given this up a long time ago, if only to save us the embarrassment of the last few albums.

I am saying this as a passionate R.E.M. fan. I think I started listening to R.E.M. at around the same time that their previous album, 2004’s awful Around the Sun, came out. Like many, my first real exposure to R.E.M. came in the form of their debut album Murmur, as perfect a piece of music as has ever been conceived, in my opinion. The music contained on that album seemed to be the embodiment of everything I loved in a self-contained album: songs with wonderful, lilting melodies that would often veer off into unexpected rhythmic and harmonic tangents; hooks aplenty, all of them perversely discarded when other bands would have beaten them to death; the phenomenally gifted rhythm section of Berry and bassist Mike Mills, who could play off of each other with deadly precision; the comparative dead weight that was Peter Buck, the most endearingly ham-fisted guitarist of his generation; and finally Michael Stipe, perhaps the key innovator in a group of staggering talents, who kept the album afloat with his mumbled, half-sung vocals that begged to be listened and relistened to. I spent many hours in my room playing that record through, wondering to myself how such a group of misfits could make music so touching while rocking so hard, all while refusing to resort to stock punk or classic rock clichés.

Many people still regard Murmur as their finest achievement, and I would be inclined to agree, except that each of their succeeding albums were just as great and even greater in some respects. The albums that R.E.M. made on IRS before signing to Warner Brothers (Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Lifes Rich Pageant, Document) have, I would wager, about three bad tracks total between the five of them. For a while, R.E.M. was just one of a dozen or so American underground bands that couldn’t stop churning out one great album after another. I couldn’t believe that, in the span of five years, R.E.M. had released five great albums in a row. Who had done that, and after batting .1000 for so long, could they continue?

The answer was yes and no. R.E.M. became one of the many underground bands to sign a major label record deal, and in terms of musical quality, they would never reach the heights of those first five albums (although it should be noted that R.E.M., unlike many of their peers, was never on an independent label proper—IRS was just another wing of A&M Records, who nevertheless gave the group complete autonomy in marketing and distribution). There were still plenty of great songs, at least at first, but as complete works the albums didn’t cohere like they used to. At first it’s hard to complain about bad songs when an album like Out of Time contains a song as good as “Losing My Religion.” However, after a few albums, R.E.M. couldn’t even produce good singles. Meanwhile, songs like “Losing My Religion” and “Stand” became big hits on MTV, Michael Stipe started losing his hair and the band started playing stadiums. They released some good albums, like Automatic For The People, and some awful albums like Monster. After New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Bill Berry had an aneurysm onstage, left the band, and from then on the band functioned essentially as a three-legged dog, deprived of not only a technically adept and expressive drummer but also a key composer as well. The songs became even more languid, with more electronic flourishes: from then on out, basically everything R.E.M. did was deathly boring.

This brings us to Accelerate, which, if it doesn’t alter R.E.M.’s crash course downward, will at least serve to inoculate their inevitable disintegration with some loud guitar riffs. The thing is, though, that the riffs, no matter how loud you play them, are still pretty boring. The sheer impersonality of Buck’s sub-Mission of Burma lick at the beginning of Accelerate’s opener, “Living Well is the Last Revenge,” is enough to make me want to turn off this album and listen to Murmur again. Without Berry to inject his light, intuitive touch into these very simple songs, everything sounds the same. Not that I think he could have done anything with this songwriting: I’m pretty sure that Accelerate’s first three songs all use variations on the same three chords. As a singer, Michael Stipe can do no wrong in my opinion, but the less we hear of Mike Mills’ whiny backing vocals, the better. Then again I’ve always felt the worst parts of any R.E.M. album were Mills’ solo songs.

The album’s first single, “Supernatural Superserious,” is the only song on the album that has any discernible hook in the chorus, and it’s actually a pretty good one: “Yeah, you cry and you cry/he’s alive, he’s alive.” I gather that a lot of this album’s so-called energy comes from the band’s opposition to the Iraq War, and I must give Stipe some credit for not coming off as preachy or simplistic (as opposed to, say, his old Vote For Change buddy Eddie Vedder). I’ve always been divided on whether or not it’s a good thing when Michael Stipe’s lyrics are intelligible, but I think this album has some of his best lyrics yet. The song “Houston,” though it’s basically another dirge musically, starts off well, with Stipe intoning, “If the storm doesn’t kill me, the government will/I’ve got to get that out of my head/It’s a new day today and the coffee is strong/I’ve finally got some rest.” No preachiness, no pomposity, just an honest attempt at trying to enter a soldier’s head.

Even if I can detect Stipe’s renewed energy, I don’t think the rest of the band seems that engaged. Putting aside whoever the drummer is now, the one that Stipe & Co. refuse to make an official member of R.E.M., it seems like Mike Mills has never played in such a pedestrian fashion, and Mike Mills was a bassist I always thought could really play. Maybe it’s because he devotes more of his time to playing keyboards. Peter Buck remains as always my primary source of disappointment, however: when did he start trying to sound like a nondescript Clear Channel alt-rock guitarist? The gulf between Buck and his many imitators is no longer there. One of R.E.M.’s charms, originally, was that you could hear the instrumental interplay between all the members, but now it sounds like Buck’s guitar is just played by a computer, autotuned and turned to a reasonable level for maximum convenience. He needs to stop with the enormous amount of overdubs.

I’ve listened to Accelerate twice now and I already see no reason to listen to it again. Unfortunately it seems that R.E.M. has achieved the unthinkable: they’ve become a relic. That such a vital band, one of the best in my opinion, could keep producing such sub-par material is depressing, but then again R.E.M. is hardly alone among rock bands in this respect. That may be the secret history of rock ‘n’ roll: on the one hand, you have the stories of people dying tragically before they had a chance to achieve greatness; on the other hand, you have the artists that overstay their welcome, flog whatever is left of their fame in order to court their aging fans, and fail continually to produce material that anyone would find engaging. The fact that this happened to R.E.M. proves that it can happen to anyone.

Philip Roth, Part 3

2008-03-28T13:21:00.000-07:00

I managed to read five more books in a far shorter period of time, mainly because unlike last time I didn't have to wait for inter-library loans. Anyhow, I'm 15 books in now: more than halfway there and 4/9 of my way through the Zuckerman saga. It occurred to me that this might have been more interesting if I had devoted a post to each of the books but some of the books aren't really worth that--although, I should add, some of them are worth far more than that. I'll try to keep my comments to a minimum, but hey! If you want to see me talk for a really long time about Philip Roth, come see my symposium project in late April.

Reading Myself and Others: This is Roth's first piece of non-fiction, basically a collection of random things written since Goodbye, Columbus, including several meditations on writing about and receiving criticism from Jews, dissertations on his work and others' (Alan Lelchuk, Kafka, Milan Kundera), a few angry political essays and some memoirs. All of this is pretty iffy and even slighter than I could have possibly imagined: what's more, reading Roth talk about his own work is somehow unbearable, especially considering he already does enough of that in his fiction. He loves comparing himself to Kafka, which I already knew, but I didn't know he would compare himself in such a favorable way. This is not the self-deprecating Roth as I have come to know and understand him. It's like he's writing a college thesis on himself. However, his ending essay on Kafka is probably the best part of the collection and definitely worth buying the book for. In it, he imagines the author surviving tuberculosis and escaping the Nazis only to become an English teacher in New Jersey. I'm not sure what purpose it serves, but maybe it was a way for Roth to foist some sort of happy ending on one of his gloomier heroes. I don't know why anyone would read through this unless they would read everything else by Roth.

The Ghost Writer: And so it begins...kind of. Nathan Zuckerman popped up earlier as the hero of Peter Tarnopol's two short stories in My Life As A Man, but the relationship between that Zuckerman and this one seems to be only tangential, I think. Their parents have different careers, anyway. It's a weird way to start such a saga: Zuckerman, fresh off of his first novel, a great literary success, is invited to stay at the house of his literary hero E.I. Lonoff (Saul Bellow? I don't really know). Lonoff lives in isolation out in the woods somewhere, with only his wife and a young, pretty student to keep him company. The first part of the book is basically a conversation between the two, with Lonoff bemoaning the fact that he has substituted real experience for writing and how he wishes he could have that time back, while Zuckerman lavishes all sorts of praise on Lonoff. They also talk a lot about Henry James and Kafka, of course. Lonoff's wife freaks out at one point due to his passive-aggressive behavior, and then they all go to bed. While lying in bed, there is an arresting chapter (included in Norton's Postmodern Literature anthology) where he imagines that the pretty young woman is the surviving Anne Frank, who changed her name and moved to America to become a writer. It's one of the saddest and most bizarre things Roth has ever written. The whole book is sort of in that tone, however: sad, uncertain, resigned to the limits of true human interaction. It's all arrestingly portrayed, even if you don't get much sense of Zuckerman as a character yet. That comes later.

Zuckerman Unbound: This book takes place 10 years or so after the first one did, with Zuckerman fresh off the success of his book Carnovksy, which describes the masturbatory adventures of a Jewish kid from New Jersey. Sound familiar? Basically, this whole book is Roth trying to come to terms with his newfound fame, and his rationale for why he doesn't enjoy it as much as one would think, given that he is now independently wealthy. The publishing of Carnovksy, despite its success, is the beginning of the end. He loses his second wife, Laura, who views the novel as the final salvo against their marriage; his father has a stroke and dies, his last word being to his son, "Bastard," while his mother tries to fight off anxious reporters wondering about what she thinks being portrayed in such an unflattering light; he is hounded by the press and dates a famous actress on the side; and he receives threatening phone calls from parties unknown, although perhaps they come from a former quiz kid who keeps hounding Zuckerman outside his apartment. In the end he does indeed become "unbound," and I guess what we're supposed to come away with is that, despite whatever happens to him, he doesn't really seem to grow. Hell, he doesn't seem to even write anything anymore.

The Anatomy Lesson: At this point, Zuckerman still hasn't written a novel after Carnovksy, the reason being that he has just recently developed intense back pain that greatly inhibits his ability to sit down at the typewriter and write for any extended period of time. He tries seeking medical help, but there seems to be no physical cause to the pain: his therapist seems to think it's all in his head. Nevertheless, he is trapped by this intense pain, to the point where he can't even dictate his writing to anyone else. Instead, he decides to spend his time doing copious amounts of pain-killing drugs (weed, vodka, cocaine, lots of percodan) and carrying about with four mistresses who cook him food and occasionally have sex with him. Being estranged from his family (his mother dies of a tumor early in the novel), and already being called a has-been, Zuckerman sinks deeper and deeper into a mid-life crisis, eventually deciding to re-enroll into the University of Chicago, this time as a medical student. He reasons that obstetricians, unlike famous authors, don't get criticized for doing their job well. However, as we see, this doesn't help him very much. Amongst Roth's most emotionally taxing works, this is high up there with My Life As A Man. It's also probably my favorite of the trilogy, in that it is his most darkly funny, his most provocative, and his least politically naive book. I especially like the exchange he has with an enemy critic. Let's just say it's not what I expected.

The Prague Orgy: This is a brief novella that was appended to the end of Zuckerman Bound, making it somewhat like the literary equivalent of a new single a band would put on a greatest hits album just so you would buy the thing. It's definitely worth it, however: it's sort of Roth's attempt at The Trial in the way that The Breast was his "The Metamorphosis." It's much better than The Breast, however. Roth turns the previous three novels' arguments on his head. After spending all this time complaining about how American critics attack his book for not being socially conscious enough, Zuckerman travels to Czechoslovakia, where that sort of thing regularly gets people killed. It gives Zuckerman an opportunity to be grateful about something for once in his life. The goal of Zuckerman's trip is to reclaim a bunch of manuscripts written by a Czech author's (Milan Kundera) father, which are being hostage by the author's wife, who he left long ago. The wife, Olga, latches onto Zuckerman and wants him to marry her so she can leave her home, which has devolved into a thuggish police state. There is an orgy, as the title suggests, although surprisingly Zuckerman deigns from participating in it: the message is that in a place where literature, theater and film are so highly regulated, sex is about the only activity one can do, although even that is changing. It's one of Roth's funniest books, in a Kafka sort of way, and the ending is a pitch perfect end to the first trilogy, as well as a perfect lead-in to The Counterlife. My only question: when did Zuckerman's back get better?

Next on my agenda: I demolish the rest of the Zuckerman novels, which will probably take a bit more time. In order, they are The Counterlife, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, and finally Exit Ghost, which I just read Barack Obama has been reading recently.

I'm halfway done, and it's only going to get better from here.

What I'm reading these days

2008-03-21T14:23:00.000-07:00

For most of the afternoon I've been reading an addictive symposium from Slate, which asks the question, "How did I get Iraq wrong?" A convenient table of contents of all the contributors can be found here. Slate, along with The New Republic, are probably the best known examples of liberal publications that initially supported the Iraq War, although basically everyone at this point has changed their mind. Slate itself says the question is posited towards "liberal hawks," although Andrew Sullivan, a decidedly non-liberal sometimes hawk, is on there, and gives one of the best and most heartfelt replies. Everyone has a decidedly different take on their own foibles, from Jeffrey Goldberg ("I didn't realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be") to William Saletan ("Rather than bore you with my answer, here are lessons from the experience") to Christopher Hitchens ("I didn't"), and it's refreshing to read about journalists talk about the limits of their own understanding and experience (except for Hitchens I guess, who apparently has none).

Most importantly, though, I can now after all these years come to understand why they felt that way initially. I'll quote Jeffrey Goldberg:

This is why I find it impossible to denounce a war that led to the removal of a genocidal dictator. To borrow from Samantha Power, the phrase "never again" has in recent years come to mean "Never again will we allow the Germans to kill the Jews in the 1940s." The Holocaust proved that the world is a brutal place for small peoples, and it defines for me the nonnegotiable requirements of a moral civilization: to be absolutely intolerant of dictators who have committed documented genocides. The tragedy of this war—one of its tragedies—is that its immorally incompetent execution has, for the foreseeable future, undermined this idea. I believe, for instance, that Darfur demands our armed intervention, but we are now paralyzed because of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq occupation.

Moral absolutism on this issue isn't really possible. Too many of my friends object to the Iraq War on the grounds that war is evil and kills people, or that we are foisting our own way of life who want nothing to do with us. This is facetious arguing because a) in the case of severe human rights violations, we could and should be able to intervene to help people who otherwise would be killed, and b) a western, so-called democratic way of life is eminently preferable to situations where, say, women are stoned to death for being raped. If you can't recognize that, than you are just an ideological tool that cares more about so-called "progressive" politics than actual human beings, and you are no better than Hannity.

Anyhow, wouldn't it be great if The Weekly Standard or National Review did something like that? It would never happen. Again, that's what I'm talking about: to be an absolutist is to be an idiot. You can quote me on that.

Happy Birthday, Philip Roth (Part 2)

2008-03-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to update this blog regarding my reading of Philip Roth's repertoire in chronological order, but I decided to wait until today because it happens to be his 75th birthday. Three quarters of a decade with Philip Roth, and almost half a decade of writing novels. Who else can claim to have done that, and so well? Anyhow, I promised I'd update this every five books or so. Next on my list were:

The Breast: As Mendelson suggested last time, this is pretty slight, even for a novella of barely 80 pages. It's one of those books that literally begs comparison to other literary works--in this case, we're talking about "The Metamorphosis." In Roth's book, Professor David Alan Kepesh wakes up one day to discover that he has turned into a gigantic breast with 3-inch nipples. Never mind the fact that even imagining this takes a lot of work (how does he even move around, or talk, or do anything at all?), the point is basically that it's about this English professor full of all these fancy conceits who finds himself suddenly prey to a ridiculous situation that is in no way enjoyable, if only because he can't distance himself from it. It's an interesting way to go about the topic, basically acknowledging not only the ridiculousness but also the lack of originality of such a situation. I think Roth's main point in writing this novel, as is often the case, is that he gets a chance to talk about several of his literary heroes at length: not only Kafka, but also Nikolai Gogol, whose short story "The Nose" is often mentioned. I don't think this is a particularly successful or entertaining novella, and it definitely overstays its welcome, even at 80 pages. Still, I guess it's clever, for what it is.

The Professor of Desire: Honestly, I can't even remember this novel very well at this point. It's more of Kepesh--although I guess the part about him becoming a breast is ignored--basically rambling about Kafka while dealing with an evil, pot-smoking ex-wife and a comparatively decent second wife. This is all stuff Roth has dealt with before, although in this case it ends more optimistically than any other book of his I can think of. There's a funny episode where Kepesh dreams about meeting some whore that Kafka had sex with (Kepesh is a Kafka scholar, I guess). There's also some interesting digressions where he has very debased relationships with a couple of Swedish women, and also a part where he imagines writing a course syllabus for a fictional class on "desire." Hence the title. Other than that, there's nothing new to offer.

The Dying Animal: Of all the Kepesh novels, this is probably my favorite, although I am inherently critical of any author, I don't care how good, who brings out the, "I have an incurable disease" card at any point. This book is once again narrated by Kepesh, still an English professor and now known about town as somewhat of a public intellectual and cultural critic. He is also single again. He uses his fame to entice his young students, most of whom are less than a third of his age, into having sex with them (this usually happens after the class is over, of course). The book deals with his relationship with a Latina student, Consuela Castillo, and their relationship, as is always the case with Roth, is debased and filled with a lot of frank sex talk: I think particularly of a graphic scene in which Roth describes the 72-year old professor throat-fucking a 24-year old college senior. This is, as you would guess, pretty strange. Still, this short book gives Roth time to talk at length about the hypocrisies that are inherent in so-called monogamous relationships, and it's hard to disagree.

The Great American Novel: This book is not really appreciated by Roth purists, and I can see why. For one, it isn't about Roth's standard subject matter: it's about baseball. And yet, it's about as close to pure fantasy as Roth ever got. It is the very definition of self-indulgence, as one would expect from any book with a title like The Great American Novel. In fact, I'd have to say in form and tone it's closer to something like the movie Major League than it is to anything else in Roth's repertoire. Narrated by a fictional, legendary sports columnist/Hemingway buddy named Word Smith (yeah, that's about as subtle as this book gets), it describes the rise and fall of the (completely fictional) Patriot League, particularly the Ruppert Mundys, whose team members are all very bizarre and frequently have no limbs. It's this lavish fantasy of cripples, midgets, and foreigners playing baseball set against a backdrop of war and later McCarthyism, the force that ultimately brings down the League and erases it from historical record (Word Smith is supposed to be writing this as the last person who remembers, but no one dares publish his book for fear of being labeled a communist). I know a lot of people don't like this book, but I thought it was hilarious, even if there are very few points where I felt I was really learning much about either baseball or human existence. I would recommend this only for Roth purists, people who like baseball, or people who like that Abbott & Costello "Who's On First" routine. It's at about that level.

My Life As A Man: To date, this is my favorite thing that Roth has written, and it's certainly the most emotionally taxing. The book is structured in a bizarre fashion: it starts off with two short stories supposedly written by Peter Tarnopol, yet another English professor, who lives in New York. After we get those two (admittedly excellently written) stories, we enter into what is supposed to be an "autobiography" written by Tarnopol. Part of the fascination in reading this book is looking at Tarnopol's life and observing what parts he chose to put in his short stories and how he chose to change them (side note: Tarnopol's alter ego is Nathan Zuckerman, the main character of most of Philip Roth's novels for the remainder of his career). It's difficult to say which part of the book I enjoyed the most, as like Portnoy's Complaint, it is not really written in a linear fashion: it's basically grouped according to certain individuals that mattered in Tarnopol's life, including his horrid ex-wife Maureen Tarnopol, one of the most evil creations in the history of literature, his psychiatrist, and his new wife. The book is frighteningly dense and offers no easy answers or solutions. He even includes excerpts from a diary of Maureen's, which I don't really want to give away. It's really just amazing, really thoughtful stuff. Roth's grasp of dialogue has never been better, and for once his descriptions of world events don't seem naive and silly.

So that's it for now. Coming up next is his collection of non-fiction essays, Reading Myself & Others, followed by the beginnings of a long slog through all the Zuckerman books, starting with The Ghost Writer, and then Zuckerman Bound, The Anatomy Lesson, and The Prague Orgy. I'm excited.

Mark Steyn followup

2008-03-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

Mark Steyn on the Republican push to get Hillary nominated, with me:

"Well, that's essentially a Leninist argument, that things have to get a lot worse before they'll get better, so in a sense it's slightly unnerving to have conservatives making that claim because it is essentially a revolutionary argument. You know, the great Lenin thing was that traditions had to get worse, you need to assist conditions to get worse, and then society will be ripe for revolution. So when people say they need to make...and in part it is a delusion because you say, we need to get Hillary or Obama in there, then they'll screw things up so much that in 2012 or 2016, people will turn to a real conservative. It never works like that, it never ever works like that, and what they would do is, unless they're Jimmy Carter, that's a different thing, but what's more likely to happen is that society would carry on, not quite badly enough to cause the total meltdown of the Democratic party."

Mark Steyn on the same topic with Hugh Hewitt just a day after:

"I agree with Rush Limbaugh, who had a terrific line. He said if the Democrats in the media get to choose our candidates, what’s wrong with Republicans choosing theirs? And that’s a very good point. You know, when Democrats and independents vote for John McCain, we’re told that this shows he has great crossover appeal, and reaches out to moderates. Well, you know, a lot of Republicans voted for Hillary. That shows she has great crossover appeal, too. I’m happy to complicate the Democratic primary process for as long as we can [...] I mean, right now, the great advantage to what Rush did by sabotaging the process, if you accept that view of it, the great advantage of it is that it ensures whoever is the nominee is a weaker nominee."

I'm disappointed. Surely Mark Steyn wouldn't bother pandering to little ol' me, right?

My interview with Mark Steyn

2008-03-06T12:16:00.000-08:00

The conservative journalist Mark Steyn came to Cornell for the second annual Roe Howard Freedom Lecture, which is described in the brochure as a place for speakers who "challenge familiar ways of thinking," but based on Steyn and last year's lecturer, Dinesh D'Souza, I think that's basically code for "yearly right-wing lecture," which is fine, because we're getting George Stephanopoulos in May.

Anyhow, I made it my goal to interview Mark Steyn for The Cornellian. I've always found him to be an interesting character. Compared to most conservative pundits, he's far and away a far more clever and funny writer than any of them, and what's more he seems to come from more of a background of cultural studies, so when he talks about the depravity of today's hip-hop or whatever he actually knows what he's talking about and cites specific, non-Ludacris examples.

So I read his latest book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and was surprised to find that I agreed with much of it, which in retrospect isn't so surprising because most of his points are incredibly hard to argue--yes, freedom of speech is a good and necessary thing, Islamic sharia law is a bad thing, and disaffected western Muslims are exerting more control on the secular western lifestyle. As a committed atheist, I find it hard not to point out that a Muslim takeover of the west is to be avoided, but surprisingly, many of my fellow atheists would disagree with me, even as they have no problem taking on innocuous (so to speak) targets like Fred Phelps.

His speech was extremely engaging and thoughtful, even if he mainly just regurgitated the main points from his book, and the audience, which I observed to be a mostly liberal (liberal arts school, natch), couldn't help but be entertained by his anecdotes and his obviously massive rhetorical skills, which you will be able to tell in this interview really put me to shame. I had previously contacted his publicist about meeting him after the lecture to interview him, but unfortunately he had to leave to go to some dinner thing, so he asked if I would come by early in the morning.

So I showed up at Brackett House at around 8:45 with Hainstock's tape recorder in hand, knowing that I had until 9:30 when class started to get as much out of this man as I can. I think the majority of this interview tended to involve William F. Buckley, who died last week, but I didn't really intend that. I'll probably blog about Buckley's death tomorrow. My dad was actually a huge fan, and I remember watching Firing Line as a kid and not learning, until years later, that he actually wasn't British.

Unfortunately the tape recorder didn't last long enough, but I think I have a decent amount of material. I got the impression that Mark Steyn is an individual invested passionately in culture and art, and he believes they are causes worth fighting for, even worth dying for. Unfortunately, there are not that many people anymore who feel this way. I think I am smitten.

Nathan Sacks: Uh, ok. I'm here with Mark Steyn...I think I'm going to go through these questions. I think you answered some of these more or less last night...I guess feel free to go off on tangents as you see fit. I thought I'd start with...because I don't know if you feel you've already talked about this way too much already, or it's just way too early, but your thoughts on the recent passing of William F. Buckley and what this means for the conservative movement and for political discourse in general.

Mark Steyn: Well, he was a great man. It's hard to imagine how how important he was. There was no philosophical, intellectual conservatism in this country until Bill rounded one up and got one going 50-something years ago. If you look at what the Republican movement was after FDR was elected, it had sort of dwindled down into this ineffectual mass of country club Republicans on the one hand and...pathetic, really, isolationists on the other. They nominated as their presidential candidates moderates like Thomas Dewey, or non-partisans like Eisenhower. But there was no intellectual energy on the American right. And such energy as there was was completely unattractive: the anti-semitic aspects, the conspiratorial aspects, both of which Bill had a critical part in getting rid of. He was the great impresario of the movement. Without him, we would not have had Goldwater in '64, and then Reagan in 1980.

I would also add personally that, you know that every forceful young man turns into a genial, relaxed wit in old age, that's the way it normally goes. But right until the end, Bill Buckley was always interested in the future and where things were going. He was personally very kind to me as he was to basically two generations of writers in this country. He was a brilliant man at spotting young talent, and very generous about promoting it and encouraging it.

I've reached that stage in my life where I've become rather resentful of younger whippersnappers coming up who are hot and going places (laughs), because you realize you are essentially confronting your own obsolescence. Bill was never like that, he was an incredibly generous guy. I owe him an awful lot and so do two generations of American writers.

Nathan Sacks: So you've had several interactions with him over the years since you both worked for National Review, right?

Mark Steyn: Yeah, I wouldn't say I knew him well because in some ways he was an enigmatic, he was an impossibly glamorous figure, and I think that if you meet someone at a time when they are really at a stage in life by which they have been glamorous for a long time, it's very hard to relate to them from your point of view as a normal person. I remember, the first time I met Frank Sinatra, which was not an in-depth encounter, you're meeting a guy who at that stage hasn't been treated normally by people for 50 years (laughs). So in a sense that's sort of unnerving, and that was true of Bill, which was even more unusual because Bill was not a singer or a movie star. But he was someone who became a very glamorous personality through television and through other things.

I'll always remember, my little boy got obsessed with the Disney movie Aladdin, which I found a rather tiresome film, but the kid wanted to watch it over and over and over again. One thing I liked about it is that Robin Williams at one point in that movie...

Nathan Sacks: Yeah, I remember that...

Mark Steyn:...He goes into a William F. Buckley impression, and I remember saying to my little boy, "Oh, that's daddy's boss!" (laughs) And my kid thought that was pretty cool. But that's the point, Bill Buckley was essentially a political commentator who was sufficiently glamorous to be parodied in Disney movies, and that's very unusual.

Nathan Sacks: Yeah, I remember he says something like, "Oh, there's some provisos, a couple of quid pro quo..."

Mark Steyn: Right, right (laughs). That's right.

Nathan Sacks: Um, what did you think of the response, not necessarily from or National Review or The Weekly Standard, from the mainstream media...like I was watching Bill Maher and he was talking about, you know, conservatives--and you talked about this yesterday--conservatives should pay their respects to William F. Buckley by refraining from all these "Hussein" attacks or whatever...

Mark Steyn: Right, right. Well, I don't know. The idea that Bill represented this sort of urbane, genteel, civilized conservative, I think isn't the whole story. He would not have succeeded if he was. Now the mainstream media always liked ineffectual conservatives. They like the 1996 Clinton-Bob Dole campaign because Dole was a civilized loser. He was what the media wanted conservatives to be. They want someone who is perfectly old, amusing, but past it and no threat. That's how they saw Bob Dole, and that was their preferred character of conservatives.

Now, sometimes they get that conservative in life, sometimes the Republican party nominates Bob Dole while he's still alive, and they get their preferred Republican candidate. Other times, they wait until the guy is dead, and then they discover that, you know, he was a great figure after all. When Reagan died, this guy was thought of as a madman by these people from 1980 to 1988. In the 1980s, the best-selling poster was that Gone With The Wind poster with Reagan holding Thatcher like Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, and a nuclear mushroom cloud behind them saying, you know, "She promised to follow him to the end of the earth, and he promised to arrange it." They thought he was an apocalyptic nuclear madman. When he died, and they realized the country loved him, suddenly Reagan in death was this genial, avuncular figure. Again, a man of no political accomplishments, an intellectual lightweight, all the rest of it...but, in death they discover that he's okay.

And I think the same is true of Bill Buckley. The point about Bill Buckley isn't that he used long words, or he was urbane, or he was elegant, it was that he achieved things, he used language for a purpose. He wasn't someone...this idea that he used words like (inaudible) is not the case. He used language for a purpose, and he accomplished these purposes. That's what made him dangerous. In the 50s, he changed the American political scene. So the idea that they would like urbane, elegant conservatives who who use long words and don't say all the nasty and mean-spirited things that Ann Coulter and Rush and the rest of the gang did isn't really true. The fact is that Bill was sort of the Ann Coulter or Rush of his day.

Nathan Sacks: Yeah, well...I remember he said something during the 80s, something like gay people should be stamped or something like that...

Mark Steyn: (laughs) Well I think in all fairness it was HIV-positive people tattooed on the base of their spine, and....

Nathan Sacks: And also, he said something during the 50s about how he was opposed to the civil rights act, and he said something like...blacks, well not just blacks but blacks and uneducated whites shouldn't be allowed to vote, or something like that?

Mark Steyn: Well, he came to see that he was wrong on the issue of civil rights in the 1950s. And that was the one thing he was wrong he about. He was right about every other issue but he was wrong about that and he came to see that.

On the matter of AIDS, I think he was making a joke in bad taste (laughs). I think in fact Jeff Hart, his colleague at National Review, who...they had sort of a running joke, that if you have AIDS there should be tattoo on the base of your spine saying, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," (laughs) which in a politically correct age is in bad taste, but it's a joke. It's really just a good joke in bad taste. And I think that's the point, that Bill was...you know, I think you want the main arguments, you know there was something very strange going on in the 80s. In the early days of AIDS, no one had ever seen a public health crisis like this, where the politically correct reasons...governments all over the world were going to sort of huge lengths to portray this public health issue as something other than what it is.

I remember a friend of mine telling me about his spinster aunt who lived in Yorkshire, in England. It was a snowed out day, the wheels were covered with snow, and she was watching the postman get off his bicycle and struggle twenty minutes over the snowed out hills to get to her house. So she was all excited, because he must have been delivering something. When he got to the door, there was one letter, and it was a form letter from her majesty's government, telling her to cut out the unprotected anal sex (laughs). And it was absurd, only you know, it wasn't really absurd, because a lot of people died that shouldn't have died. But Bill was writing, in a sense, about the peculiar political position that Thatcher was in during this public health crisis.

Nathan Sacks: Okay, so you talked a bit about how you think the media likes these sort of innocuous, ineffectual conservative figures. Do you think John McCain fits that sort of role now?

Mark Steyn: Well, John McCain is almost like the uber-definition, the apotheosis of the media maverick. And by media maverick, I guess what I mean is that...

Nathan Sacks: You mean not a maverick, really?

Mark Steyn: Well, no. What gets you credit for being a media maverick, a maverick is someone who is a Republican who votes with the Democrats on a bunch of issues. Not all issues, but the ones they care about, like campaign finance, which no real person in America really cares about but which the media do, in part because it's a threat to their own unbridled political...it's a threat to their own particular positions. So, he's the definition of a maverick, because he's a Republican who votes with the Democrats. If you were to have...it's a much more disciplined party in that respect...but if you were to have a Democrat who consistently voted with Republicans, he wouldn't get half the kudos...I mean, Joe Lieberman, Lieberman is essentially a doctrinaire Democrat on many, many issues, on abortion and all kinds of things, but because he supports the president on the war he's considered not a maverick. So, McCain is...this whole maverick type is a creation of the media, and one hopes that Senator McCain stands for more than that, but he's a problematic figure for conservatives.

Nathan Sacks: Yeah, well we've already seen several conservative figures--I don't think you count yourself among them--say that they would rather vote for Clinton than McCain, so that four years later they could get the Democrats back or something....

Mark Steyn: Well, that's essentially a Leninist argument, that things have to get a lot worse before they'll get better, so in a sense it's slightly unnerving to have conservatives making that claim because it is essentially a revolutionary argument. You know, the great Lenin thing was that traditions had to get worse, you need to assist conditions to get worse, and then society will be ripe for revolution. So when people say they need to make...and in part it is a delusion because you say, we need to get Hillary or Obama in there, then they'll screw things up so much that in 2012 or 2016, people will turn to a real conservative. It never works like that, it never ever works like that, and what they would do is, unless they're Jimmy Carter, that's a different thing, but what's more likely to happen is that society would carry on, not quite badly enough to cause the total meltdown of the Democratic party.

The idea that if you get Hillary or Obama in there, and you get incremental socialized health care, you get government annexation of various areas of life, but not to such a catastrophic degree that in 2012, there will be a stampede to vote for a real conservative. I think that's the real delusion. There's a skill in a two-party democracy, there is a certain amount of skill in knowing the right moment to lose, but I think those people who are saying, well, you get Hillary, you get Obama, and...generally speaking, Democrats are very skilled. They control the House, they control the Senate, and they would make sure to use that opportunity to the fullest. So people saying...you know, Hillary wouldn't be that bad, in fact, and the reality is that, on the war...if the argument is that John McCain is best on the war, there is another argument that says that in a two-party democracy, parties don't fight wars, nations fight wars. At some point, this is a war the Democrats have to take ownership of, and wage it themselves in the nation's name.

So, in a sense, John McCain's biggest strength, which is his reluctance to lose in Iraq at a time when Hillary or Obama were stampeding for the surrender parade, I think that's an actually not a strength really, I think that's an argument for saying that, no, the Democrats have to take ownership for this war too, whether they want to or not.

Nathan Sacks: Okay, so...I guess, getting back to your book, I was going to ask you what inspired you to write America Alone. You already sort of talked about how you wanted to reframe the so-called War on Terror, which is a term you don't really like...

Mark Steyn: Right.

Nathan Sacks: But, you wanted to redefine it not necessarily as a war against, you know, bomb throwers but as a slow population takeover.

Mark Steyn: Right. Well I guess it really happened about six years ago, about six months after September 11, I was...you know, we had September 11, and on September 12 all of us were suddenly public experts on Islam. And when the Afghan campaign started, all of a sudden we were all experts on Pashtuns and the great history of Afghanistan. Once the Taliban had fallen, I thought that there were aspects of this I didn't understand and I really wanted to learn more about it. So I sort of scheduled a fact-finding trip to the Middle East. And I guess that's a rather grim thing, so I thought I'd treat myself to a couple of weeks in the fleshpots of Europe beforehand.

So I went to Paris, Vienna, and Brussels and so forth, and I visited, for the first time, the Muslim ghettos of Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and some other places too. I realized when I went on to the Middle East that, in fact, that actually was relatively relaxing compared to the Muslims in western Europe. The Muslims in the Middle East were far less alienated than the Muslims in western Europe.

And once you think about that, you realize that...yeah, Mohammed Atta was part of a German cell who pulled of September 11. The shoe bomber was a British subject. The Millennium Bomber, who was arrested on the British Columbia-Washington State border, was a Canadian. So, you realize that in fact it is the most westernized Muslims who have the most intense grievances. The issue here is the intersection of Islam and the west. It's not about these Pashtun goatherds in their caves: they're not really a threat to any of those people. What it is, it's the proportion of second and third generation Muslims who, the longer the spend in the western world, the more they loathe it. That's the particular challenge here, this idea that it's, you're at war with sort of...everyone would like to think they're at war with primitive savages jumping up and down and shaking a spear. It's not like that.

What is happening here is that...the Ayatollah Khomeini used a great term when he created this thing, "the great Satan," because he recognized that America is a seducer. What he means is that he feared that Muslims around the world would be seduced by this "Satan." They would be seduced by America into adopting America's ways, so they'd all end eventually eating cheeseburgers, and listening to Britney Spears, and doing all these terrible things. As he saw it, they would be seduced into this godless, soulless, western way of life.

The evidence is that the west is in fact is an inadequate seducer, and that far from seducing people to a western ways of life, a significant chunk of western Muslims grow more fiercely opposed to it the longer they are exposed to it, and that's a fascinating sociological phenomenon. And it's really at the heart of what this thing's about.

Nathan Sacks: The end of the book provides sort of a ten-step plan for, I guess sort of encouraging Muslims to embrace reform. I was just going to ask if you think that any of these steps have changed very much, or if you think that some steps are more important than others, particularly step nine, which is to end the Iranian regime.

Mark Steyn: I think so, because...I think that really does raise the vision of mushroom clouds on the horizon. The Iranians have walked the walk for thirty years. If they say they're gonna do something, they do it. They changed the facts on the ground in Gaza. They took Arafat's horrible little kleptocratic squat and they turned it into a fiefdom of fierce Islamism, with Hamas. They changed the facts on the ground in Lebanon, with Hezbollah. They blow up community centers in Argentina, which is a long, long way from anything having to do with the Palestinian question. Every day, they do not even accept the minimal obligations of sovereign states and they never have done it, from the moment they seized the US embassy, from the moment they issued essentially a hit contract on Salman Rushdie and then started killing his publishers and translators.

If they have nuclear technology, they will use it in some form. That's the point. Even if they only use it to blackmail the Arabs and the Europeans into doing what they want. It changes the facts in a way that America cannot afford, and the Europeans have psychologically accepted the Iranian nuclear bomb. America can't.

Nathan Sacks: You said that...someone asked you yesterday about the oldest Muslim population in America, Cedar Rapids, and why that wasn't such a bad thing, and you talked about how there's a big difference between a multicultural and a bicultural society.

Mark Steyn: Right.

Nathan Sacks: Do you think it is possible that what is happening right now in Britain or Canada could possibly happen in the United States, and what steps would have to happen in order for that to come to pass?

Mark Steyn: I think there's an issue here, clearly, not to the same degree. You know, it's never a thing of, you know, the French government gets 100% wrong when it's dealing with Muslims, and Americans get it 100% right. There's all kinds of different shades. There are issues here where these fellows who were picked up from Georgia Tech were going to blow up various targets in Washington, and they took that video of the Pentagon and you hear them talking over it saying something like, "This is where our brothers struck the Pentagon," and, "Allahu Akbar." You can see that even though they are people who were raised in the United States and hold US passports. They are not Americans, they are not Americans here (points at heart), where it matters. Their identity, as they feel it, is not American.

Now, that may be different for the longstanding Muslim population of Cedar Rapids. The evidence is that a certain number of young Muslims around the world embrace this Pan-Islamist identity. There is fewer in the States than in Canada or in Europe.

Nevertheless, you have things here in America that I think are worrying, like the Minneapolis taxi business where you had Minneapolis cab drivers who were denying service to people carrying alcohol, to blind people with seeing-eye dogs, to women who they regarded as being dressed inappropriately. What was worrying was that the reaction of the Minneapolis Airport Authority was initially to say, well, we're gonna have two different colored lights on taxi cabs. So we'll have whatever it was, a light that says we won't take blind people or people carrying alcohol or women dressed like tramps, but we'll have another cab over there with a flashing light on. So if you are blind, or carrying alcohol, or you're some underdressed slut, you can go and get in that cab.

And that's completely...it's only been forty years since part of this country abandoned separate drinking fountains, segregated by race in the south, and they abolished it because it was racist. And now it wants to, in fact, reintroduce segregation at a Minneapolis airport in the name of multiculturalism. And that's always the issue, it's not the provocations of the Muslim cab drivers. It's the supine attitude of idiotic white progressives and western progressives and multiculturalists terrified when these things come up. I don't want to see, I don't think there should have been separate drinking fountains forty years ago and I don't think there should be separate cabs for blind people, and for people carrying alcohol, and for women who aren't covered from head to toe now.

I don't think segregation in the name of racism is a good idea, and I don't think segregation in the name of multiculturalism is a good idea. But it's the latter that is the bigger threat now. When you look at Harvard just the other week, its gym introduced...it's supposedly a coed university now...but its gym just introduced gender-segregated sessions at the gym for the benefit of its Muslim women. Eventually we'll have separate colleges for boys and girls again, because, you know, in the name of multiculturalism. The new segregation in the name of multiculturalism is a much bigger threat.

Nathan Sacks: On a slightly different topic, what sort of strategies do you use...I guess I'm curious as I am somewhat of a journalist...in maintaining such a prolific body of work, and writing in so many locations? It seems that you get published often and everywhere, and I was wondering where you get the time and what your schedule is like.

Mark Steyn: Well, I'm actually a slow writer. People always think that I must be a fast writer, but I'm a slow writer, generally speaking. Left to my own devices, I'm one of those people who paces, walks around, doesn't do anything until he gets a first paragraph. Once I get that, I sit down and get rolling. But I'm generally a slow writer. When I'm on the road and I'm covering a political convention or I'm live at some event or a bomb goes off an hour and a half before deadline and they want an instant reaction, I can do that, but generally, I'm a slow writer. What works for me is, that would be impossible for me to do if not for the fact that I write for places that are in different parts of the world, so I'm often writing for different time zones, as it were. So you can sort of fit things in because there will be, you know, an early morning thing or a late evening thing. So that gives you a bit of an opportunity to readjust. I find I write actually in a slightly different way, according to whether I'm writing during the day or writing during the evening or whatever.

But I think that, generally, I mean, I wouldn't recommend that. Bill--we were talking about Bill Buckley--Bill used to pride himself on being able to write a column in 45 minutes. I've never been able to do that, never. He could: he had his thoughts organized very clearly, and he could do that, and he also...

Nathan Sacks: He also wrote something like 5o-something books, right?

Mark Steyn: Yeah, and at a certain point, he's got the right idea. The Bill Buckley way is the only way to make writing viable, because if it's difficult for you--if you're torturing yourself over your paragraphs, if you're shifting this and that, this back and forth, paragraph B to paragraph A--I think it becomes all but impossible. I think it's in condensed forms, those are very hard to do. That's why 32-bar songs are some of the hardest things ever to write, because you've only got so many syllables. There's no way it can be increased--you get 32 bars to say only so many notes. So that is something that's you've got to, it has to be worked back and forth, back and forth.

Similarly, I think, a column, if you're writing an 800-word column, that has a rhythm of its own too. It doesn't have the same precision as a 32-bar song, but you've got to understand how to launch a thought, explore the thought, and resolve the thought, all in that form, and that's actually quite difficult. It's not a skill necessarily worth acquiring (laughs), but it is a skill.

Nathan Sacks: Could you name, besides Bill Buckley, some of your favorite writers or public intellectuals, or people you tend to read no matter what?

Mark Steyn: Well I loved Michael Kelly, because--he died in Iraq five years ago--he was an immensely, he had a great way of looking at the world, a lovely way of looking at the world.

At this point the tape recorder ran out (should have gotten the digital one from the Cornellian office). I talked to him for about five minutes more before I had to go to class, which in retrospect I should have just been late to.

Anyhow, besides Michael Kelly he also mentioned his relationship with Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn) and mentioned Robert Kaplan as another writer he particularly admired. He also talked about how he refused to work for The New York Times because they insisted on dumbing down nearly everything he wrote (he cited writing something about someone having a "Dickensian air" only to find it had been changed to something like, "He had an air about him the resembled a character from a story by the British author Charles Dickens"), and how he sympathized with Americans who refuse to read because there is so little journalism that hasn't been sucked of its personality and vigor. We also talked briefly about his court case, and he told me that he was planning on live-blogging it, similar to what he did with the Conrad Black case, although I don't know how he's going to do it when he's on the witness stand.

All in all, I wish it had gone longer and I had said more, because I think he and I have more in common than I suspected. My article on his visit is going to be on the front page of The Cornellian, because I guess nothing bigger happened around here. I'll post that up when I feel like it, and hopefully they will post the actual article so I won't have to.

Phenomenally bad timing

2008-02-11T01:45:00.000-08:00

It's 3:44 and I have to wake up at 6 and I still can't get to sleep. Spoiler alert, I guess.

I suppose it's as good a time as any to talk about a movie I watched today, The History Boys. For those who don't know about it, a little background: it was originally a play written by Alan Bennett (who wrote The Madness of George III, whose title was changed in America to The Madness of King George because producers were afraid people would think it was a sequel) that apparently was extremely popular, so they made a movie out of it with all the original cast. Don't think this is some Rent-level fiasco, however--for starters, it's not a musical, and it's also extremely thoughtful and well-acted.

The story centers around an English boarding school where eight pupils are in their last semester (or whatever they call it in England) before college. All of them have gotten high enough marks to possibly get into Oxford or Cambridge, so there is a lot of pressure on them. The students have two teachers with divergent points of view: one, named Hector, likes to teach knowledge for knowledge's sake and makes many long-winded speeches on the power of literature; the other, a comparatively young teacher named Irwin, is far more pragmatic and lectures the students on how they can do well on their exams, which is not by obtaining knowledge but by finding a useful angle no one has thought of before, whether or not they actually believe in it (there is also another teacher, Mrs. Lintott, who is sort of the lukewarm water between them). The movie basically revolves around these eight extremely bright students struggling with whether or not the pursuit of knowledge will have any useful applications in their adult life.

Not much in the way of plot, but boy is there some good dialogue. I especially liked the way
there are no clear villains in this movie: the teachers have radically different teaching styles, but they are all treated sympathetically, and they all have huge character flaws. It is revealed, at some point, that Hector is a closet homosexual who likes to take his students home on his motorcycle in order to grope them in a sexual fashion. This may seem bizarre, but his character is never demonized, and it comes to make sense in a lot of ways: he seems to be sort of romantic poet out of time, and those romantic poets were certainly inclined towards sudden bursts of passion towards younger men (as Hector tries to defend himself, he claims that, "the transmission of information itself is an erotic act"). Irwin, it is revealed, is definitely someone who loves information for the sake of learning, but we learn that part of his drive to make the boys succeed is the fact that he didn't make it into Oxford or Cambridge himself. The kids themselves have a lot of problems too. One of them is gay and in love with another student (who happens to be straight and in a relationship with the school's secretary), one of them is an athlete with mediocre grades who nevertheless has family connections, one is going to go into the army.

The relationships between the students and their teachers is beautifully played out and made me wish I could have those sorts of relationships with my professors (except for the groping part...well, maybe not for some of them). It's been so long since I've seen a movie where people talk intelligently about literature, but they actually do, about Auden and Thomas Hardy and some other things I don't remember now. Hector, played by Richard Griffith, is a particularly good character and probably the heart of the whole movie. I think he is supposed to be based in appearance and demeanor on Harold Bloom, although there are some significant differences--he is an advocate for judging work on aesthetic values alone, but he is also extremely goofy and uses a lot of colloquialisms. If someone could tell me if this man is indeed based on Bloom, I would like to know.

This movie is highly recommended. It makes Dead Poets Society look even more like a piece of shit then it did before. They have actual conversations about poetry that make sense and make you think. Haven't seen that in a while.

Practicum tomorrow, little sleep for me

2008-02-10T23:25:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately it's times like this when I get very little sleep, and unfortunately I have nothing to help me with that. Have to wake up at 6 tomorrow too.

Anyhow Mendy has been commenting on my blog and I'm sure he doesn't know that he got me hooked on this song by Café Tacuba called "Volver A Comenzar." Check out an amazing live performance:

I'll let the man himself explain why it's so good:

I can say with little hyperbole that this is one of the best songs I've ever heard. It is an 8-minute single (an intrinsically awesome thing) by a band that, during my time there, struck me as the best in Mexico. Granted, I am a foreigner not inclined towards traditional Mexican music, but I know I’m not alone in this judgment.
But what can you even say about this song? From the immensely exciting buildup before the first verse to the point where the icy synth and tense guitars kick in, to Pinche Juan’s snarling delivery, to the unexpected section in the middle I’m tempted to call tender, to the part where the monster guitars kick back in after that, which is as exciting as hearing The Who for the first time ever, this is an absolute monster of a song. But also well-constructed, excellently played and really honest—it’s about getting old, thinking about your mistakes, not giving up and trying to start again. I have probably listened to this song upwards of 45 times, and I don’t think I could ever hear it and not think of December 2007.

The comparison to the Who I think is very apt, not particularly in musical style but in the fact it sort of builds up and slows down again, and then comes back for an explosive finish, kind of like "Won't Get Fooled Again" (the structure also mirrors "Disconnect the Dots" slightly). I've been really digging this song even though I don't speak a word of Spanish, and I was wondering if someone could translate the lyrics to me or something.

Seriously though, whoever plays the bass on this song has my undying love and affection. I didn't even know people could still play bass lines like that, especially with all the tricky rhythms during the breakdown.

This song is really fucking lush. You'd better love it. With songs like this, I don't see why illegal immigration is even a problem.

Philip Roth, Part I

2008-02-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

I think I mentioned previously that I was in the middle of reading everything ever written by Philip Roth in chronological order. That isn't exactly true--rather than read them in direct chronological order, I'm going to read all the books with the same characters (i.e. Zuckerman, Kepesh, Roth) in order, and apart from that read everything chronologically. You may also happen to recall from a previous post that one of my goals for this year was to read the entire repertoire of at least four authors. Philip Roth is a stupid place to start. I've read 5 of what I calculate to be 28 books, so this is going to take me some time, especially since ILL won't give me "The Breast" anytime soon. So far, though, I have read:

Goodbye, Columbus: Not technically a novel but a novella with five short stories tacked onto the end of it, all dealing in some way with the rejection of Jewish identity. Goodbye, Columbus itself is a pretty good if slight read, and it ends pretty abruptly, which is not true of virtually anything else in Roth's repertoire. His protagonist, Neil Klugman, is the first in a line of several Roth protagonists that I find are eerily like myself. He even works at his college library. The story basically details his romance with this rich shiksa, and how it eventually deteriorates due to the rules and strictures of her society, which includes not having sex. This is something Roth is going to come back to again and again. The language is right on, even if there are long stretches where nothing really happens and some of the characters of purposefully eccentric. I personally enjoyed a subplot involving a young black kid who goes to the library Neil works at every day to look at this book of Gauguin paintings. Roth doesn't do this very much, but I think he is much better at using African-American characters than, say, Saul Bellow.

The remaining five stories are very good, perhaps even better than the novella. I personally enjoyed "Defender of the Faith" and "Epstein," if you care, but you should definitely read all of them. This is a good place to start with Roth, not necessarily because it is first chronologically, but also because it introduces themes that would become much more pronounced later.

Letting Go: Technically Roth's first novel, alternately horrifying, confusing, gut-wrenching and silly. Reading about this book online, I get the impression that people don't seem to really like it, and particularly object to the 600-page length. I can sort of see this book being a decent 400-page book, but I don't know what exactly I would take out first. I don't know if this is a success, but there are scenes of astonishing power. Chief among them, to me, is Roth's description of a young couple sitting in a diner, passing time until they are scheduled to meet with an abortion doctor. Also, towards the end, a scene where the protagonist tries to argue with a man whose wife gave up her child to adoption to that same couple. This can sound kind of melodramatic, and it actually is at times, but there is still a lot of power there. My main quibble is that the book seems to be set up half first-person and half third-person, for whatever reason, but then Roth gives up the first-person aspect at the 400 page mark. Don't ask me why.

When She Was Good: This novel is unique in Roth's work in that it has a female, non-Jew protagonist, Lucy Nelson. It is also unique in that she is by far the least sympathetic and most cruel protagonist Roth has ever had, a jerk who continually makes selfish and unreasonable demands of her husband and her family, and then chastises them to the point of tears when they inevitably fail her. As a result, I think this book gave Roth somewhat of a reputation as a misogynist, and I think I remember reading that he happened to write this book at a time when he and his wife were having some problems. I don't think Roth is a misogynist, but I think his female characters are definitely skewed, if not in this book than in others. Apart from how shockingly evil Lucy turns out to be, this book is about as melodramatic as Roth ever got, and while he does some interesting things with the form, it seems like the first 50 pages amount to nothing and the ending is almost a cartoon.

Portnoy's Complaint: I've already read this book before, but it is a phenomenally easy book to reread. Those of you who haven't read it, I beseech you: it's very important that you do. As embarrassing as it is to say, it can tell you a lot about Nathan Sacks. Not the stuff about masturbating copiously into liver pies, I swear: more just my continual need to reject my identity, my uneasiness with having a double life being on the one hand "socially conscious" and on the other being completely selfish, and, as Portnoy says, "Heaven is a shiksa under your arm saying love, love, love," or something like that (a prize to whoever actually knows what the quote is). Basically I just can't play with Jewish girls, if only because my mom told me I should. Philip Roth knows my life!

Anyway, there's nothing else I need to say about this book. It's fantastically structured (an extended monologue to a silent therapist) and merits repeated readings. The dialogue is very loose and very hilarious. There are moments of this book that are absolutely disgusting (although the liver part is probably the peak), but only a prude could say this is not a great book.

Our Gang: This book seems to have been written by a different author. For starters, it's not really a linear novel, it's actually more of a "closet drama," which I learned from Wikipedia is a "play not intended to be performed onstage," despite the fact that there are a few stage directions.

Basically, Our Gang is posited as a very blunt political satire starring Trick E. Dixon (get it?) and numerous unnamed cronies both in the White House and in the press. It's supposed to be a satire of Nixon's supposedly secretive administration, his warlike tendencies, and his tendency to just lie, lie, and keep lying. There are some very funny parts to this book, particularly in the beginning, where Dixon supports William Calley's massacre of villagers in My Lai, but is given pause when he is asked if it is possible that some of the villagers could have been pregnant, and therefore Calley might have unknowingly performed an abortion, which Nixon viewed as, "an unacceptable form of population control." That's about as deep as the political satire in this book gets, which in a way is sort of good, because if it was any more subtle chances are it would be a lot more dated than it already is. It isn't helped by the fact that compared to today's politicians, Dixon seems relatively par for the course. It's an interesting footnote in Roth's career, and definitely worth reading (it's also really short), but I don't know why he wrote it.

Coming up, when I get the chance: The Breast, The Professor of Desire, The Dying Animal, The Great American Novel, and My Life As A Man.

In defense of not voting

2008-02-07T16:21:00.000-08:00

Another article I have written for The Cornellian. It was originally much longer.
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In the next few months, students should not be surprised to see mass E-Mails, commercials, and patronizing statements from celebrities telling the youth of America to get out and vote. Proponents of this vision of student-voting utopia are as disparate as Moveon.org, Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam (under the auspice of their Kerry-supporting “Vote for Change” tour) and the group Citizen Change, of whose founder, Diddy, coined the phrase “Vote or Die” (which I always felt to be an incredibly offensive gesture to anyone who was actually forced to die for their political beliefs). Youth voting advocates are going to hunt you down and try to guilt you into registering if you already have not; more importantly, perhaps, you will be treated as a “youth voter,” which to modern Democrats makes you almost a demigod, especially in a potentially life-altering election like this one.

Already we have begun to see this: rapper and producer Will.i.am released a Youtube video a few days before Super Tuesday starring a bunch of celebrities, ranging from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Common, confusingly singing/rapping/talking along to a speech by Barack Obama. But at least Will.i.am isn’t pretending to do anything other than support a specific candidate. In that sense, at least, he is a step above his peers. I don’t think I need to be telling anyone that they shouldn’t be supporting a candidate based on what celebrities endorse him or her: I hope to God that this is already blindingly obvious to all of you. However, I reject the notion that anyone’s vote is a) the most important civic duty one can do for his or her country, or b) the best way to change the course of the nation.

There are several legitimate reasons to not vote. Emphatically not among them, I feel, is the notion that your vote will not matter in the grand scheme of things. While this is almost always a correct assumption to make, not casting a vote isn’t likely to change that, unless several million people follow your lead. Similarly, I don’t think that being lazy or uninterested in the political process is a very legitimate rationale either. Not voting, to me, can be seen as a form of civil disobedience, especially useful if you just can’t stand the way we go about electing public officials.

Say, to take an obvious reason, that you simply don’t like any of the candidates present on the ballot. That is as good a reason as any to not vote, although a good amount of Americans seem to feel that a vote for the lesser evil is always the best policy, a position that could easily be refuted by citing several examples in world history. Or say that you simply want to have nothing to do with a bipartisan system of government that effectively squashes any chance for a third party to get a say at anything, and is often criticized (Ralph Nader) for trying to do so. Or say that you can’t support anything having to do with the Electoral College, and can’t understand why we don’t just make it a “majority-rules” election. Again, there is no reason to support such a system if you don’t believe in it, so not voting is a way of passive resistance.

The prospect of not voting in this coming election is relevant to me because it seems likely that the next democratic nominee will be Hillary Clinton, a person with whom I have several policy differences. What’s more, I am disturbed by the idea of having spent my entire life in a country caught in a warring Bush/Clinton dynasty (although I did spend the first two years of my life under Reagan, which blessedly I don’t remember). Considering I always felt I lived in a democracy (yes, I know—the joke’s on me), I’m a bit predisposed to the idea that anyone can become president, even if they don’t happen to have a certain last name. This isn’t probably true, though, so it might come to the point where I choose either a third party or even none of the above. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I defy anyone to prove to me why wasting my time voting for someone I don’t even like would be better spent than, say, sitting at home and playing video games.

Voting is not the be-all, end-all of your civic duty to America. There are several non-voting American citizens that do more for the welfare of our country than you or I could ever do. That’s because they actually do things far more important than voting: volunteering, helping the poor and needy, being a mentor, fighting for the rights of oppressed minorities—all of which actually help people in direct, concrete ways. And unfortunately, I don’t expect Diddy or anyone else to start a campaign of “Volunteer or Die,” probably because volunteering takes a significant amount of time, much more than twenty minutes every four years.

Honestly, chances are I will vote, not only because I view it as a way to be civically engaged but also because I genuinely enjoy the process. However, it is important to understand that there is absolutely no correlation between a low voter turnout and a badly managed government. To label nonvoters as simply apathetic and ignorant is silly. To coerce, bribe, or simply guilt people into voting—whether it’s by sending mass E-Mails or having popular bands recite ridiculously corny speeches—is undemocratic. The best way to get young people to vote is to stick to the issues and allow them to come to their own conclusions, and if that means choosing alternate methods of fighting the system, so be it.

Atheism is always moral and necessary

2008-02-07T16:13:00.000-08:00

Here's an article I wrote for The Cornellian (I don't know if it's going to be published or not) about Percy Shelley and the necessity of atheism. It was initially written as a response to an offhand comment my professor made last block about how atheists are generally viewed as "opinionated" and "contrarians."
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You wouldn’t know it by the recent litany of books on the subject, but there was a time when writing something refuting the idea of a God, and specifically a Judeo-Christian God, could get you into a lot of trouble. Percy Bysshe Shelley found this out when he published a pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism” in 1809, calling into question the idea that believing in a benevolent God was always a morally just viewpoint. Shelley published the pamphlet anonymously, but was still kicked out of University College, Oxford, when he refused to deny authorship. He would of course go on to become one of the best and best-known of the pure romantic poets, many of them, like Shelley, firm unbelievers.

Shelley was among the first prominent atheists to argue that much cannot be explained by rational science, but assigning certain phenomena to supernatural forces is neither morally nor scientifically sound. “God is an hypothesis,” he wrote, “and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.” You can’t claim to know something without proof, and if you don’t give me sufficient proof, why can’t I reject it? I myself, as an atheist (a term I don’t necessarily approve of, but I’ll get to that later), decided at a very early age that it is best to stick with what is observable, with the corollary that anything I observe could, of course, always be wrong. With that as my guiding force, I simply see no need to believe in God, and it seems more and more people are coming to the same conclusion every day.

Is there a change in the air? One would think so, based on the phenomenal success of a number of recent books, all dealing slightly differently with the problem of faith: Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Sam Harris’ Letter To A Christian Nation, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and, most recently, John Allen Paulos’ Irreligion. All of these books, particularly Hitchens’, have made quite a mark on the New York Times bestseller list, suggesting that there is an audience for fiery anti-religious polemics even in a country where at least one of the top-tier presidential candidates denies the existence of evolution. Of course, with their success has come a healthy amount of criticism, not only from religious figures but also supposedly “liberal” sources such as Michiko Kakutani, the chief book critic at The New York Times, who remarked that, “[a]t their worst, these books simply spewed invective against religion, helping to ratify believers’ accusations that atheists and agnostics lack respect for others’ convictions (something believers are frequently guilty of themselves).”

Well, no. It is quite possible to be a fundamentalist atheist incapable of being anything other than petty and mean-spirited, but I don’t think that any of these authors (save perhaps Paulos, whose book is the only one I haven’t read) fit that bill. Dawkins describes himself as a “cultural Christian” and celebrates certain religious events like Christmas. Hitchens has always professed a great deal of respect for other cultures and customs, going so far as to say, “I think that religious literacy is very important,” if only in that a lot of great literature is in some way indebted to The Bible, whether it be something like Milton’s Paradise Lost or the poems of William Blake. Dennett has similarly acknowledged that religion is a useful source of mythology. These are atheists who are contemptuous of religion, but one shouldn’t confuse that with being contemptuous of religious people. There are people who are openly hostile towards any individual professing religious views, but there are people like that on the other side of the debate as well.

The term “atheist” is problematic anyway because it encompasses such a broad range of cultural attitudes, political views, and states of mind. It is a term haphazardly defined by the absence of any particular point of view, and as a result, several prominent nonbelievers would like to see the word be abolished altogether, as it seems to suggest that there is a movement of like-minded individuals who gather in certain groups and think in certain ways. This is definitely not what is happening (although Dawkins happen to be the leader of a group of rationalists known as “brights,”—it’s not quite the same thing). Some, like the philosopher A.C. Grayling, have suggested that non-believers should instead go by the name “naturalists,” being linked by their rejection of any suggestion of supernatural governing agents. This seems to make sense to me, but a name is really nothing but a name, and in my quest to prove that there is no objective “truth” to anything, I’ll wear any tag you give me proudly.

I have no problem with people professing their religious freedom in whatever way they deem fit, as long as they aren’t hurting children or committing heinous crimes against unwilling participants. I would expect anyone else to encourage me to not do the same. I personally don’t care if anyone wants to pray in a public school, as long as they aren’t making my kids do it, and I think there are hundreds of more important problems than whether or not the Ten Commandments are on display in any particular courthouse, even if I think some of the individual commandments are pretty backwards and all of them could be successfully argued against. And if you decide to use your religion to justify bigoted, hateful, or stupid views, don’t expect me to sit back and act like I respect what you are saying. I will challenge anyone to debate me, and I will win, because I have science and rationality on my side.

I have several friends who consider themselves atheists, and none of them view non-belief as an absolute. I and several million other people merely believe that atheists, and American atheists in particular, act as a counterweight: we provide an important role in keeping our country from sliding into a religious police state governed by a book that is as contradictory as it is morally troubling, which is the exact opposite of what people like Mike Huckabee would want. Atheism is nothing more or less than necessary in a free society, and even if you don’t agree with it, don’t make the mistake of claiming that it subscribes to any sort of dogma other than, as Shelley says, “nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.”

Why I hate Paul Simon, or, a dissection of "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover"

2008-02-07T15:40:00.000-08:00

I actually wrote this a long time ago on my last.fm blog, but I thought I'd share it with anyone who is interested. In retrospect I should note that "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover" is, honestly, way too easy of a target, and I hope in the future to attack other stuff of Paul Simon's with similar gusto, in order to prove that this man is a lyrical meathead. Anyhow, enjoy.
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I don't like Paul Simon. I don't dig his uninspired compositions, I don't like how polished and sleepy they sound, I don't like his voice. I didn't like Simon & Garfunkel, I don't like "Graceland," I'm just not that into him. Now I know it is not my right to bitch about other people listening to him, but I think I can make a good argument for why he sucks.

I will use the famous song "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" as an example of Simon at his most self-consciously empty-headed. Plenty of people talk about how much of a lyrical genius Paul Simon is, but I don't see it. I think people confuse "lyrical genius" with "occasional use of 4-syllable words." Let's take a look at the opening lyric:

"The problem is all inside your head," she said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover

What problem, you ask? We get the fact that this is about some couple having difficulties in their relationship, but we can't really understand what exactly is going on? Is the guy too needy? Is the girl too needy? Is the guy not needy enough? Is this a lesbian relationship? Will he explain himself, or just continue to be vague? Let's continue:

She said it's really not my habit to intrude
Furthermore, I hope my meaning won't be lost or misconstrued
But I'll repeat myself at the risk of being crude
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover
Fifty ways to leave your lover.

You may notice that each succeeding sentence has absolutely nothing to do with the previous one. What the hell is this lady intruding on, and what does it have to do with her meaning being lost or misconstrued? Don't try to tell me this is anything other than incredibly, clunky, uninspired wordplay. Only the biggest idiot in the world would be impressed by him using the word "misconstrued," especially when he happens to rhyme it with "crude," any moron could have come up with that. But in my opinion it gets worse. This chorus is relatively well-known, and it surprises me that actual adults find it either funny or thought-provoking, as this is clearly the sort of thing you would sing in preschool:

Just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don't need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don't need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free.

Songwriter rule #1: You can't just cheat out of finding a good rhyme by adding some random person's name at the end of it. I defy anyone to defend this abysmal attempt at rhyming on any grounds, musical or otherwise.

Putting aside the horrible lyrics, I also reject the notion that Paul Simon is gifted as a tunesmith in any way. Using "50 Ways" as an example once again, I can say that while his chord changes aren't really that offensive, they are in no way really representative of any real "genius" at work. The song is the litest of lite-funk shuffle--if it was any liter it would be inaudible. The most interesting musical aspect of this song is Steve Gadd's stop-start marching pattern, which gives this song a smidge (just a smidge) more rhythmic heft than the average Simon song. But it's the absolute same beat throughout, and when you think he's going to try rocking out when the chorus comes, he keeps plodding along at the same speed. Compare this performance with his fiery drumwork on Steely Dan's "Aja" to see why he was actually thought to have some intuitive musical ability as well as technical skill.

In conclusion, this is a man has even tried to go to fucking Africa to try to liven up his lily-white compositions and he only succeeded in embarrassing Ladysmith Black Mambazo. And instead of appearing in music videos with
the South African musicians he works with, he has Chevy Chase. Fuck him.

This is a slightly better version of "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," I think, as performed by The Electric Mayhem (oh my God they actually have an artist page for them):

It's still a shame to see the normally unhinged Animal reduced to playing that monotonous Steve Gadd shuffle, but at least he has Rizzo to help him with playing tiny cymbals.

EDIT: Mendelson wrote to me not long after I wrote this to tell me that there is no possible way that Paul Simon could have made Ladysmith Black Mambazo more ridiculous than they already were. My point still stands.

Been a long time

2008-02-07T15:18:00.000-08:00

Sorry I haven't been updating this much. There are several reasons why this is, not the least because I was just in an incredibly busy class that I didn't know if it was proper to write about it, what with my name being so Googleable these days. I was just in a class called Reading in the Content Area, which is basically an Education class in which we studied different literacy theories, some of which I can definitely say have more value than others. Part of my class was actually going to a high school every day for two weeks, from 8-11 on every weekday except Friday, when I would spend the whole day there. This turned out to be an exhausting process. I was very unsure about whether I would blog about it, considering there are all sorts of privacy issues regarding my fellow teachers and students, and what's more I'm not sure the experience was all that positive.

Anyhow, even beyond that my life is just a torrid mess anyway. I'm really jonesing for another English class, but I'll have to wait a month--this block I have Secondary Arts & Languages, which is more or less the same class as last time. This means more visiting the same school. Hopefully I will have to talk less about Hannah Montana. No, don't ask me to explain what I'm doing.

What have I been doing with my time these days? Well, aside from fucking everything up, I've been writing a fair amount and reading even more. It must have been a wise person who said, "We write...so that we do not get more pissed off than we already are." I've been delving into a lot of fiction (okay), poetry (not so good), and essays I just sent into The Cornellian after I got a reply saying that I shouldn't complain until I have myself contributed something of value. Yes, I finally relented. I will post these all in due time, probably this evening actually.

Did anyone see Mitt Romney drop out of the race? Wonderful news, even if his concession speech was nothing but more Republican tomfoolery:

Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality. Some reason that culture is merely an accessory to America’s vitality; we know that it is the source of our strength. And we are not dissuaded by the snickers and knowing glances when we stand up for family values, and morality, and culture. We will always be honored to stand on principle and to stand for principle.

I think a weakened faith in the Creator is exactly what some of us could use right now. In fact, one of the articles I wrote for The Cornellian (I wrote a bunch, just in case) is about exactly that. I will post it later, even though I think I've made pretty much all of the arguments already in these pages.

You can also look forward to some writing on Philip Roth (I'm in the midst of reading all of his novels, in order of publication), the situation in Gaza, composing music for the upcoming Fuel open mic night, being a miserable individual, my roommate playing Persona 3, my fear of Hillary Clinton's inevitable nomination, and my love-hate relationship (mostly love) with L.A.M.F.

Sorry everyone. It's not like you care.

Hilarious alert

2008-01-14T22:14:00.000-08:00

I just happened to come across this trailer, and I can't stop laughing. Feel free to disregard everything but the last 30 seconds or so, as it's not really that funny. But that shark scene:

What's wrong with the Cornellian #1

2008-01-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

This is the first in an ongoing series detailing my thoughts on everything that is wrong about The Cornellian, which just had a new issue on stands today. As such, this post probably won't be very interesting to people outside the Mt. Vernon area. The Cornellian's web site has a policy of putting some but not all of its articles online, so I'll try to link when I can.

To The Cornellian,

While I think the idea of a student run newspaper is a good one, and I think there's a lot to talk about even on a small campus like this one, I find that nearly every issue of The Cornellian is a disappointment, especially in regards to the opinion page. Every few weeks, I am always able to point out multiple examples of blatant inaccuracies, specious claims, and downright unjournalistic ethics. Obviously to some degree my opposition to a large part of this newspaper is based on my own personal politics, but I feel that The Cornellian doesn't do anything new or challenging, and I think it probably could. Whether this requires getting an entirely new staff, I don't know, although I would doubt it.

Here is an abridged list of the articles I have problems with in Volume 128, Issue 8, with my comments. Of course you can choose to ignore any and all of these comments, but I think there is a lot of people who feel the same way I do.

Page 1, "Caucus in Mount Vernon" by Mariel Canas: This seems to be all information that could have been gleaned by looking at a Wikipedia page about the Iowa caucus. It's all interesting information that I feel pretty much everyone at this school already knows. I was a bit intrigued by the comments Senator Tom Harkin made about the process, including him saying that it is, "Democracy at its very best." Well, I and many others could very easily argue that it is a democracy at its very worst (disqualifying a particular candidate unless they get more than 15% of the vote, having candidate shills give caucus goers free food and gifts, basing the proportion of candidates on an informal head count, etc.) and it might have been more interesting to include comments by people who believe that the Iowa caucus is a media-controlled sham, and moreover induces a lot of patronizing fawning over Iowa voters by both candidates and pundits alike. That's why I was pleased to see Ravahn's Samathi's article on the subject, which I actually thought proposed something new and interesting, entirely apart from all the Iowan self-love.

Page 1, "A raise in minimum wage" by Jess Horn: This article has someone, asked about the minimum wage increase, saying, "It means I have to work less hours to make the same amount, which is great!" This is a really superfluous comment that doesn't merit inclusion. Surely you could find people who could argue for the minimum wage increase besides the fact that it means you work less and get more money.

Page 2, "Hookah: Safer than cigarettes?" by Heidi Mitchell: Is it just me or does CAFE have a committee that puts in one agenda-pushing article per issue? I don't see the reason for this article's existence, and neither apparently does the author, as apparently only one study has been done on the subject, and not a very conclusive study at that. Maybe this subject would be more worthy in a few years after a lot of research has been done. No one is probably going to argue that smoking hookah is particularly healthy, but it seems that the final paragraph in particular has very anti-smoking bias, even as it purports to say that there is not sufficient evidence to back it up. Yes, smoking is bad for you, but so is taking away the right to do with your body what you wish. Also, I would be interested to know of where in popular culture that tobacco hookah smoking is portrayed in a positive light.

Page 5, "Carefree train ride? Think again" by Clint Parry: I know this is supposed to be a humor piece, and I know humor is a subjective experience and it's sort of hard to criticize, especially when we're talking about a newspaper column. I just want to know though, have you gotten much positive feedback from this article? Has anyone thought it to be even remotely funny? Maybe I'm wrong, and if so, by all means carry on. I fail to see anything remotely resembling humor. Maybe I just don't take trains enough.

Page 6, "Please stop scribbling in my solitude" by Clif Ashley: I actually agree with this article, I only wanted to mention that Clif Ashley actually admits to "not bothering to commit to any kind of intense research," which is a disclaimer that I think needs to be used a lot more in the Cornellian, at least the way it's going now. So props to him for that.

Page 6, "Change I once stood for" by John Clogg: Again, there's nothing wrong with this article, although I am a bit tired of people making the insulting claim over and over again that he is a fit leader by virtue of his passion and oratory skills as opposed to any substantive accomplishments, which is a claim he would like to counter. One sentence sort of bugged me: "Obama appealed to our emotions while Gov. Richardson appealed to our intellect." You may think so, but speak for yourself. I saw both of them and I would say that Obama's ideas seemed a lot more clear and innovative than Richardson, and Richardson happened to make what I felt to be a few huge gaffes, among them claiming that it would be a good idea to oust Musharraf. I think a lot of people felt similar.

Page 7, "Don't spend what you don't have" by Vincent Anderson: This is a patronizing article ("This may come as a startling revelation, but unfortunately credit cards are not magic"--this is O'Reilly level smarminess) that commits the cardinal sin of treating its audience like idiots, and is moreover significantly less clever than it thinks it is. One can easily make points like the ones made here, that college students don't know how to manage money and that they often don't know the consequences of credit card debt, but to claim that somehow kids today are more likely to do this than in the past is absurd. Maybe you can find some statistics to prove this is true, but I don't think you can. College students have always been this way, and you definitely have no way of backing up your claim that somehow our generation is more "impatience and materialistic"--whatever that means--than previous generations. I'm always perplexed when journalists or pundits argue that previous generations were somehow superior to the new generation, which is always portrayed as lazy and vacuous. It makes me downright angry when someone of my own generation, so indoctrinated by their parents, tries to make the same argument and laments a time they can't even remember. Moralizing about whether or not to use credit cards when your purchase is under $10 is silly: sometimes you don't have the money on you and it's quite handy. Doesn't mean you're going into debt anytime soon, as long as you pay it later.

Also, I don't know whether or not your equating of Ronald Reagan with fiscal responsibility was supposed to be a joke, but either way I laughed.

Page 8, "Decision 2008" by Erin McNeill: Again, I don't see the point of putting stuff on here that you could get just as easily from Wikipedia. What's more, I find your decision to include only the top three candidates of each party incredibly offensive, especially to those who choose their presidential candidates based on their positions and not on their polling numbers. Maybe there is an issue of space, but with information so superfluous (Romney wants to "improve energy efficiency?" How controversial!), I don't see why spreading the love wouldn't help a little bit.

Page 10, "Movies of 2007: Good, better, best" by Jessica Jones and Melissa Bruce: I was going to say something about how it was convenient that all of the best movies of the year happened to be American studio releases with big movie stars in them, but I guess living in Iowa you don't have an opportunity to see much else unless you happen to look pretty hard. I also don't know how you can reasonably call a film "indie" when it is distributed by Paramount and has stars like Samuel L. Jackson and Justin Timberlake in it. I appreciate the refreshing comments about Tim Burton.

Page 12, "New sci-fi novel will have you 'Going Postal'" by Amanda Gibson: Why are you reviewing a novel that came out in 2004? Surely other books of note have been released since then. Is there some resurgence in popularity of the book that I am missing? I don't think it's usually policy to have a book reviewer read just any book, especially when it has absolutely no bearing on anything in the present.

Some suggestions I have for future issues: asking the local Bijou owner about their no R-Rated movie policy (and discussing discrepancies in the ratings system, perhaps); an investigative piece discussing what unaffiliated Cornellians feel about social groups, if anything; interviews with more professors, especially if they have been working on any valuable scholarship (same goes for students); interviewing students taking various graduate exams, and how it affects their lives and relationships.

Thanks,
Nathan Sacks

I think I'm going to make a lot of enemies out of this. Too bad. I stand for journalistic ethics, they don't. Not yet, anyway.

Who just can't wait to feel so frozen out

2008-01-09T23:32:00.000-08:00

After a particularly uneasy day and an uneasy class, I managed to stumble upon High Fidelity, a movie I have always had an uneasy relationship with, while channel-surfing. I ended up watching the majority of it, rather than doing my homework.

There's one part in the movie where John Cusack's character, in particularly dire straits, sits on a bench in the pouring rain and narrates to an invisible camera. It kind of made me wish that I could do that.

Sorry this hasn't been updated lately, but that will change soon. I just need to acclimate myself to the workload. Sorry.

Caucus

2008-01-04T11:47:00.000-08:00

Am I pleased with the results? Partly. Am I impressed by my fellow Iowa voters? Not at all, and in fact I am considerably less impressed by the caucusing system than I was four years ago.

My precinct, known as 3-5, was set to have its caucus in an auditorium in the Scheman Building. This auditorium, by the way, was not even remotely wheelchair-accessible, which would pose problems later that night. I came with my mom and dad (ducking all the Edwards people with free sandwiches along the way) and stood in a long, very disorganized line for five minutes in order to get this little white sticker. It didn't even say anything on it. I could have easily just walked in without it.

Anyhow, the auditorium was absolutely packed (close to 500 people) and moreover was a huge mess. I made my way over to the Obama camp, only to discover that pretty much everyone was scattered throughout. After about 15 minutes of sitting around and not seeing anyone I recognized, the caucus finally began. A lot of really mundane stuff was accomplished--electing people to run the caucus and working out the details of how we were going to split up. The final decision was that anyone not supporting the top 3 candidates would have to leave the auditorium and go elsewhere.

I didn't see this, being part of the Obama camp, but apparently Dodd, Kucinich, Gravel and Biden were immediately out of the running. Those who chose to support them were forced to realign themselves with a different candidate (the cutoff is that any candidate that gets less than 15% is disqualified), and much bribing and coercing was done, particularly by Obama supporters, to get them to come to their side. After that was finally all done (and that in itself took like half an hour, as no one seemed to know where to go), we finally got the totals, which amounted to something like 40% Obama, 30% Edwards, 25% Clinton and 5% other. So we won, which was good, but it took forever to count heads and what's more someone could have easily miscounted.

After delegates were chosen, most everyone left, and I stayed around for a little bit to hear if any interesting platforms were to be raised. Turns out no, everyone just wanted to go home. So that was my caucus.

I was happy to see Obama win, and even more happy to see Clinton in third place. I was not really happy with Mike Huckabee's victory, but I can't really think of anyone much better at present. Still, though, I can't believe how meaningless this all is, and how completely undemocratic it is on top of that. You want proof? Decide for yourself:

-Shills for the candidates were outside of Scheman giving away free sandwiches and cookies, all presumably in the name of their preferred candidate.
-Candidates with less than 15% of the vote were ineligible, and those that chose to support them could not do so, not even with a write-in vote.
-Furthermore, as Ricky told me, the less popular candidates tried to threaten the Obama campaign into giving up enough of their members to constitute 15%, or else they would defect to Clinton. This is horrifying.
-By counting heads as opposed to using a secret ballot, voters could be openly harassed for expressing their views. I actually think that the republican caucus does this better, because they do a normal ballot.
-Also, counting heads leaves a lot of room for error, and people had to recount several times.

This whole process needs to be dropped altogether. It's absolutely unconscionable that we as a nation have decided on a system that disqualifies one's views unless they happen to be shared by a certain percentage of other people. That's not democracy. That's a bunch of bullshit.

At the very least, take it out of Iowa. All I saw yesterday was white bread, white bread, white bread. Are these people really the ones that should be deciding the future of our country?

I take it back

2008-01-02T16:28:00.000-08:00

Remember when I said how wonderful it was to be an Iowan this time of year, what with all the attention and media and the glamor that goes along with it? I change my mind. It's getting more and more unbearable as we inch closer to Thursday. Today I had to field maybe a half-dozen automated calls, as well as another Obama person knocking on my door. And while I didn't really mind all the attention that much from all the candidates, I'm becoming increasingly bothered by all the frankly not deserved Iowa love coming from the candidates. What's worse, of course, is that Iowa voters eat it up. They love this, being told that they are the most important voters in the country. Frankly, it verges on being completely undemocratic, the way these candidates play into the "Iowa voters are gods among men" line. It's like the candidates are disgruntled teachers at a parent-teacher conference, and Iowa is the annoying rich kid.

I got at least three admittedly impressive but still automated calls from Joe Biden today. I have had enough. Hillary has taken over television. I'm actually not seeing much in the way of republican publicity, but I guess I don't really run in those circles. What's funny is that all these automated calls always begin with something like, "I apologize for this automated call, as I'm sure you are sick of them at this point..." Yeah, as if that's a good way to get my vote, Biden.

On a slightly related note, I got an E-Mail from Cornell College today. Apparently they are reopening the dorms temporarily tomorrow so that non-Iowa citizens can come back to Iowa and vote in the caucus (again, severely undemocratic). Also, both Scarlett Johannson and free pizza are supposed to be in College Hall 118 tomorrow at 5:30 to campaign for Obama. At first I thought this was ridiculous, having Scarlett Johannson show up when very few students are going to be on campus, but then I realized that that is probably a good thing for Scarlett Johannson, having an absolute minimum of creepy Cornell kids around.

New Year!

2007-12-31T14:42:00.001-08:00

I have made no secret of my almost fanatical disdain of Christmas, which is sensible given that I am Jewish and furthermore do not love horribly repetitive music. People might be shocked to learn that I am, however, a fan of New Years Day. It is not because I believe that there is any significance in some arbitrary date that may have started somewhat around when Jesus was born; rather, I like it because it encourages people to better themselves, in the form of resolutions. Every year I like to have as many resolutions as possible. Some of them don't work as well as others, but at least I write them down. Here are some of my more G-rated resolutions for this year:

1. As always, don't lie to anyone about anything, ever, in any situation. I have this resolution every year, yet somehow I always manage to break it in one way or another. I can improve that probably.

2. Work out more. I need to get rid of this paunch.

3. Try to keep in better contact with friends that aren't around me. Along those same lines, try to hang out more with everyone. It's something I probably don't do enough. This poses a problem, as my next few classes will probably be very hectic.

4. Learn the entire works of Scott Joplin/Fryderyk Chopin on the piano. So I can just sit down and play something whenever I feel like it.

5. As always, keep an open and practical mind. Refuse to judge people on any specific ideas or tastes they may have. After a while this becomes hard.

6. Read as much as humanly possible, including the entire repertoire of at least 4 authors.

7. Try to keep as detailed a dream log as I can. This will probably prove to be the most difficult.

8. Regularly update this blog, at the very least once a day. Has to be a substantial blog post as well, not like this one.

9. Learn more about the following subjects, which I know very little about: sports, cars, economics, food.

10. Shave on a regular basis (very important).

Anyhow, I think 2008 will prove to be a very good year, provided that we aren't all nuked to death after President Huckabee declares Religious War II: Judgment Day. Iron Man is coming out in May. Lil' Wayne has a new album coming out at some point. Hopefully nothing by M. Night Shyamalan will be released. Most importantly, I think I will be a better and happier person, because I'm going to try a lot harder to be that way. Plus, I have all the love and support of my friends at Cornell, which matters to me a great deal. They can do no wrong in my book. Well, one of them can, but I'm not going to say who.

Give a gift that keeps on taking

2007-12-30T20:36:00.000-08:00

I've been talking about politics too much lately. It's Iowa, I can't really help it. A short digression is in order, however.

For Chanukah this year, my uncle in New Jersey gave me a generous $75.00 gift certificate for this website called Kiva. You may have heard of it. It's been getting a lot of press lately, not the least from Bill Clinton giving it a glowing review on Fox News. Basically, it is a non-profit organization that finds flourishing businesspeople and entrepreneurs in third-world countries and puts them on this web site, and people can donate money through the internet to help get their business off the ground. Supposedly, after their business is getting going, your money is then reimbursed, and you can choose to either withdraw it or lend it to another business. Conceivably, you could help multiple businesses get going using a very small amount of money.

I've been having a hard time donating anything in the past few days, mainly because of all the press it's been getting. Every time I look for a new business it usually says something like, "Thanks Kiva lenders, together we have funded every single possible business on this site." So I have money to burn and no one wants it. Basically, it's becoming like eBay, where I have to religiously monitor the site until an opening comes up. I don't think most philanthropists have that problem ever.

Yes, Kiva is kind of a way for lazy white people to feel slightly better about themselves, but I think overall the cause is pretty righteous. I would recommend it to any of you that have any disposable income that you'd like to share, which I'll admit is fairly rare among college students. Look at it this way though: if you need some money, you can always just withdraw it at some point if you really want to. I can't really think of anything bad about this organization, unless one wants to argue that it is pushing "capitalist western values" upon the unsuspecting third-world populace, which I don't think really applies in this case.

In case you were wondering (and divulging this information absolutely runs counter to Jewish law), I donated money to Shamim Hameed's group in Pakistan, reasoning that Pakistan needs all the help it can get right now. Some day, you will know me as the man that singlehandedly saved Pakistan.

Biggest pat on the back award

2007-12-30T14:26:00.000-08:00

Aside maybe from the staff of Lucky: The Magazine About Shopping, is there any magazine as consistently hare-brained as The Weekly Standard? Maybe that's a strong word to use. They're not stupid, they're just infinitely less clever than they think they are. Look at this cover. Can you imagine all the disgusting, sanctimonious self-congratulation that went into this cover? Oh, we are so noble, we chose a good true-blood American unlike that socialist Time Magazine that dared to choose a non-American as person of the year. How patriotic we must be. A few things need to be brought up here:

-Time's choice of Vladimir Putin as Person of the Year, besides being a completely worthless award to bestow upon anyone (remember last year?), furthermore does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of that individual. The award goes to those who have done more to "influence the events of the year," as they say. The award has previously gone to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. I invite any contributor to the Weekly Standard to try to prove that Time had a pro-Hitler or pro-Stalin agenda.
-Putin, arguably, did influence the world more than any other individual. He already has a leg up on the competition in that he is president of the 9th most populous country in the world. The fact that he managed for the most part to put it in order (at the expense to some degree of individuals' specific rights, specifically journalists--back me up on this, Vitaly) is a mind-boggling achievement.
-Just because they didn't give the award to Petraeus doesn't mean they don't like Petraeus. Obviously, it is highly selective. I'm sure Petraeus would have been fourth or fifth, at least.
-Just because you give an army general your own bullshit award doesn't mean you suddenly win the patriotic award, Bill Kristol. It's still a badly mismanaged war, and bestowing Petraeus, a basically decent and noncontroversial figure, with the title of "American of the year" is basically a ploy to simultaneously undercut any criticism of the war while deflecting any criticism of your own views. Imagine declaring, say, Paul Wolfowitz or Dick Cheney as American of the year. You couldn't do that unless we were actually winning.

I was about to say something like I feel bad for Bill Kristol these days, being such a shill for the administration that he hardly counts as a journalist, let alone a decent human being. Then I found out he is now a columnist for The New York Times.

Ick, I can't believe I just defended Time Magazine.

Against the strategy of electability

2007-12-29T21:46:00.001-08:00

The Iowa caucus is coming up on Thursday and I have yet to really make a decision, although I am looking forward to it perhaps a bit too much (and I'm the kind of guy that likes to stick around after the voting is done to work on the party platform). The only bad part about this is that I basically can't watch any TV at all in the next few days without seeing Hillary, Hillary, Hillary, and sometimes Romney staring at me with their vacant, corrupt TV eyes in 30-second commercials. What a worthless thing, the campaign commercial. Is it even remotely possible to take them seriously? What kind of person is seriously swayed by them? Worthless.

As a result of this I've been getting into arguments with several different people, including my father, about the reasons to vote for a particular candidate. I've always had somewhat of a disdain (the more I look at it, misplaced), for people who choose to vote for their candidates based on who is most likely to be elected rather than who they most like/agree with. My dad's policy is always to vote for the Democrat he thinks can beat the Republicans. This seems to me to be everything that is wrong with American politics in a nutshell: it becomes more about winning the horse race and less about the issues as time goes on. It ends with us electing supposedly "down to earth" people that in actuality have no clue about how to be president, but boy, I could certainly drink a beer with him.

(Speaking of which, isn't Bush a former alcoholic? I would assume that means he's not allowed to touch alcohol, ever. So much for the "have a beer with" voting contingency, assuming it exists.)

In a perfect democracy, people would vote for who they thought was the best candidate. Not who they thought was most popular, not who they think will do the least amount of evil, certainly not the one with the most sanctimonious fucking commercials. It would put everyone on a level playing field and reduce the amount of fierce, completely unreasonable partisanship that grips both sides to an absurd degree. It would also allow third party candidates to have a fighting chance, which I think would be a nice change. I get angry at people who scoff at the few who voted for Nader in 2000 on the basis that he cost Gore a few thousand votes. If you think Nader is the best person to run for office, that's who you should vote for. If not, don't. But at least think about it.

I was originally planning on caucusing for Kucinich, basically because I took several online quizzes comparing my policy views with the candidates and Kucinich was my closest match in nearly all of them. For a while, this seemed to me to be the way to best gauge who I think would be the best president. Now I'm not so sure. I don't buy his UFO sightings, for one. For another, I think he has much of a plan regarding the war in Iraq (it makes Richardson look deep). But how to reconcile the fact that I agree with Kucinich on nearly everything while still being unsure of his qualifications? One of my favorite bloggers, Mightygodking, said something very useful on the subject:

"Yes, Kucinich agrees with me on certain positions, but you know who agrees with me on every position? Me! And yet, I would likely make a terrible President. Competency in the duties of the job itself is just as important as having the right agenda, and Kucinich just doesn’t have that competency."

Exactly, I figure. I was wrong to equate his stance on social issues with his ability to be, you know, diplomatic and reasonable. So I apologize, sort of.

Now I'm thinking I'm going to throw my support around Obama or Edwards, most likely Obama. They both seem pretty good to me, especially in comparison to Clinton, of whose faults I think I will write about more in depth sometime soon. Let me just say that I hope in the future that I don't have to explain to my kids that there was a time in American history when there were presidents that weren't part of some Bush/Clinton dueling dynasty.

I'll be sure to report what goes on in the caucus. This plans to be very interesting.

Benazir Bhutto

2007-12-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

I don't really have to say that yesterday's assassination of Benazir Bhutto, which it looks was likely engineered by al-Qaeda, is a particularly bad thing to happen right now. If there's anything I'm really pleased about, it's the surprising amount of coverage this is getting in the mainstream media. I can't remember the last time the death of any foreign leader was covered so extensively (unless it was with great fanfare, in the case of Saddam Hussein). Still, in these trying times, a bit of perspective is needed.

Bhutto was hardly a great leader to begin with. This was a woman who was elected prime minister of Pakistan twice, and both times she was forced to resign amidst allegations of extreme corruption. She had a ridiculously lavish lifestyle--not to say that that is necessarily bad in itself, but she definitely robbed her own people in order to get that way. Also, she was extremely reckless and petty, but some might see those as positive traits. If this is the closest we have to a democratic savior in the Muslim world, we have a long way to go.

I understand that things must be pretty bleak in Pakistan right now. I have no idea what I would do in this situation. I imagine things could go two ways, one far more likely than the other: either this assassination becomes a "powder keg" that leads to a full-out war between western and Muslim nations, or her death galvanizes enough democracy-minded individuals to result in something approaching an Islamic reformation. I can tell you which one I think is more likely.

Friday Poem III

2007-12-28T16:17:00.000-08:00

Again, I mine from the past, a true sign of creative bankruptcy. This week's one isn't that good, but it's sort of appropriate with the snowstorm outside and me being incredibly angry. I promise that next week I'll start putting new ones up.

The Cold

I can’t describe when I lose control
My frail body is no match
It is my enemy
It traps me where I happen to be
In solitary confinement
Free to leave at any time but unable
Unwilling to face something
Normal people deal with every day
I am filled with unreasonable hate
Towards this relatively mild annoyance
Clearly perspective is needed.

However, I am not a fan.

Scholarship for dummies

2007-12-27T20:30:00.000-08:00

Currently I'm in Naperville, Ill., home of my aunt and uncle, perusing their bookshelves and playing their pianos (as my uncle is a professional piano teacher, he has several). I am in between trying to finish Gravity's Rainbow and doing some Wikipedia editing (Paul Krugman, in case you were wondering). Honestly I'm not really enjoying it here right now, and I'm looking forward to going back. I decided a long time ago that I just hated any sort of trip with my family, especially long car rides. My reasons are many and varied, but let's just concentrate on one right now.

As my iPod has been dead for several months, and I am too poor/lazy/angry at Steve Jobs to seek a replacement, I was basically forced to sit in the family van and listen to whatever my parents felt like for six hours. Now that isn't necessarily bad, you think. Surely they could play some decent, non-Christmas music. Unfortunately, everyone in my family except me and my father hate listening to music. I know the very notion sounds preposterous. How can one hate music? Let's not even go there for now.

My family likes to listen to books on tape. I hate books on tape. They take forever to listen to, they're often read by horrible actors, and more often than not they are filled with stupid sound effects. Plus, I'm not really much of an auditory learner so I don't get much from them anyway. This time, however, it wasn't a book on tape I was forced to listen to but something called Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which isn't a book but rather an audio college course. The CDs are divided into lectures and posited as just a professor talking about a subject. This actually seems like an interesting idea if you've ever felt like learning about something but didn't want to do all that pesky reading and research.

My two younger brothers really like science-fiction and fantasy, to the point where they have absolutely no interest in the real world around them. I don't know if they'd be interested in someone talking about the fantasy book canon (which from what I was listening to, is an abysmally small one), though. Maybe they do. They seemed to not complain, and quite honestly the lectures about Tolkien were much more interesting than anything I've ever actually read from the man, but I'll get to that later.

The professor in charge of this lecture series was Michael D.C. Drout, apparently the biggest Tolkien nerd in the world as well as a professor at Wheaton College (the one in Massachusetts, not the one that just recently lifted its ban on dancing). In his first lecture, he argued that preeminent literary scholars and book critics of our day tend to ignore fantasy books or at least ghettoize them as mere "genre fiction," which I agree is unfair. However, Drout fails to come up with much in the way of fantasy books that should be considered mandatory reading, other than The Lord of the Rings, Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, and maybe the Harry Potter books. That immediately poses a problem: of the 12 individual lectures present, seven are exclusively about Tolkien. If he wants more respect for the fantasy genre, he needs to come up with a better list than that.

I guess it's sort of unavoidable to talk about Tolkien, though. I read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings when I was very young, and I wasn't a very big fan, despite being enamored with that sort of thing at the time. It just seemed like it was chock-full of useless languages and characters. I only saw the first movie in the series, and it was so long and boring I didn't bother seeing any of the others. It just really isn't my thing. I did gain a greater appreciation of Tolkien learning about his commitment to ancient languages and linguistics, and while I'm a bit skeptical about Drout's theory that The Hobbit is even tangentially based on Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt (how?), it still makes Bilbo Baggins more interesting of a character knowing that he isn't just this fantastic character devoid of human emotion or political feeling. Too much fantasy writing is like that.

In fact, I was just trying to think of any so-called fantasy novel that I think is any good at all. The closest examples I can think of are some of the more out-there novels of Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, all of whom I think fall under the tag "magical realism," which simply isn't the same thing. Fantasy is just too fundamentally limiting of an idea, I think. I prefer my wild ideas to have a grounding in real lives and real people. But then I guess that's the exact opposite of what fantasy's normal readership would want.

A problem I have

2007-12-25T15:16:00.000-08:00

Recently I had the opportunity to see Bill Richardson speak twice within the span of a few days, and I noticed a few things that bother me a great deal more than I think they did in 2004, when I was wet behind the ears and gunning for Kerry (yes I was, shut up).

For the most part, I agree with what Bill Richardson says, although I don't think he has his head on straight necessarily in calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and leaving a peacekeeping UN coalition, when we all know the UN probably won't do that, or at least don't do it well. I digress. Richardson is fine, but the people who go to these things, Republican or Democrat, are kind of disgusting. The one thing I said to Mendelson upon leaving the Memorial Union after seeing Richardson was that I think that people who raise their hands during Q&A sessions in order to make statements or comments rather than questions are the worst scum on the face of the earth. It just seemed that everyone there was extremely selfish and guided by a need to find a candidate who will promote the individual welfare of themselves. "What will you do for me?" being the first question anybody ever asks.

For example, a rather old gentleman sitting behind me kept making comments under his breath that were blatantly stupid or inaccurate. In the former category, we have this (and I am paraphrasing):

Bill Richardson: We need to understand that our individual freedoms come at the cost of many people's lives.
Old Man: (muttering) I don't agree with that, that's bullshit.

I thought that point was and is still fairly inarguable, the fact that people have died in order to preserve certain freedoms. I mean, it happened during the American Revolution.

The older gentlemen would also make inaccurate statements:

Bill Richardson: When I am president I will restore Habeas Corpus...
Old Man: (muttering again) You see, he's the only candidate who will actually say he will restore Habeas Corpus without being asked...him and also Dodd.

To which I wanted to turn around and respond, "Motherfucker, I saw Obama like a week ago and he said that exact thing." But of course I didn't, because I was watching Richardson talk.

Sometimes people on the ideological left just piss me off. Someone asked Richardson the very reasonable question of what to do about the unstable situation in Iraq and the likelihood of a civil war were we to pull out, and people started booing him. The fact that he asks a reasonable question and thinks about the consequences of leaving Iraq rather than just unthinkingly pulling out must have got all these old-school "liberals" really riled up.

Oh, and the statements, the horrible statements. One woman, rather than ask a question, basically said, "Bush wants us to give up our rights to serve his own agenda, but my parents didn't raise me that way to give up without a fight," and everyone cheered. Oh yeah, my parents taught me to always be completely subservient to authority. Come on.

Actually, the single most revolting thing about these events may just be the cheering. Every time Richardson says something they agree with, they whoop and holler. When Richardson says that he believes American intervention in Afghanistan is right, absolute silence. It's appalling. When I have an argument or conversation with a friend or relative, I don't cheer loudly every time he or she makes a good point. And I realize I am being hypocritical in saying that because I did do a fair amount of clapping. Were I president, I would make audience applause illegal until the conclusion of a presidential candidate's stump speech (loud applause).

I was also perturbed that we were told to stand for the pledge of allegiance just as Richardson came out. I don't like doing the pledge of allegiance or any pledge at all, and it's not because I am anti-American, despite what Bill O'Reilly says. As I don't like the idea of living in a police state, I don't believe in pledging allegiance to anything, especially abstract concepts. I could say something about how that goes back to religion, but I'm becoming a broken record.

Best album, or maybe thing, of the year

2007-12-23T23:10:00.000-08:00

I notice that I've gotten absolutely no comments so far. I think it's because I haven't told anyone about this blog yet. I'm afraid to because the URL is so regrettable. Sacks Files? I don't know why I even did that, but I already regret it.

This past evening I was at some bar downtown talking to several friends about what they felt was the best album of the year. Greg said he thought it was the new Les Savy Fav album Let's Stay Friends, Peter has been pulling for Sunset Rubdown, and Mendelson favors Beyond, which I'm almost inclined to agree, if not for this monster of an album:

Grinderman is basically Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds stripped down to two guitars, bass and drums. It is excellent, very primal, very Stooges stuff, and Nick Cave is of course an excellent lyricist. "No Pussy Blues" is the song that everyone talks about these days, and justly so. It's just an incredible, emotional, hilarious piece of music that also rocks incredibly hard (something Nick Cave has had some trouble doing in the past). And I'm not even one of those people (rock critics) who love "No Pussy Blues" because it's so true to my life...well, the "no pussy" part yes, the "blues" part not so much. I can't do this song justice. It's the best thing Nick Cave has ever done. Just listen to it. I give it the highest accolades possible.

My letter to Ev

2007-12-23T19:34:00.000-08:00

Here's the letter I just mailed back to Ev Cherrington. I believe the phrase you will be searching for is "fish in a barrel," but sometimes it matters a lot to state the obvious.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mr. Everett Cherrington:

Thanks very much for your letter and comments. I can't say I appreciated them, but it certainly gave me a lot to think about. I would like to address some of the points you made, beginning with the pamphlet you gave me from the "ex-gay" organization Exodus International.

The central point I was trying to make in my editorial was that I think it is an absolutely worthless endeavor to form an argument based on what I and many people believe to be a work of fiction. We could go on all day talking about what could possibly be true and what isn't true in the Bible, but in the end it carries no moral or intellectual truths in it that I couldn't otherwise either reject or come up with myself. That's why I complain when people like Eric Chamberlin use scripture in order to prove any point: it is simply not possible, scientifically, to prove that the Bible is inerrant, but there is plenty of proof to the contrary.

The pamphlet entitled "What the Bible Says About Homosexuality," in this regard, is an absolutely disgusting and misleading piece of Christian propaganda, and I would suggest you actually try to seek out and talk to gay people in the community that do not see a need to become born-again and are happy the way they are. I know you are trying to argue that it is essentially a humanist position to want to "save" gay people rather than kill them like the Nazis did, but in my mind, a life of forced, unreasonable shame can be a fate worse than death. The fundamentalist Christian position that homosexuality is somehow a "choice" has been proven demonstrably false, and the fact that you still claim it as fact merely paints Christianity as a cultish philosophy utterly opposed to new ideas or ways of thinking. But then again, isn't that all religion, at its core?

The pamphlet bewilderingly states that members of the gay community are, "aggressively pushing for acceptance of their lifestyle." Oh, how awful that must be, the fact that they don't want to be discriminated against and they want the same rights as everyone else. Quite an agenda. It's the same agenda that Jews had in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s and yes, the same agenda that Christians had during the days of the Roman empire, when they were being fed to the lions for professing their beliefs. And yet somehow you have come to believe that your beliefs trump all others, and that it is right that certain people should be discriminated against, as long as it's not you. Some would say there is a thin line between your way of thinking and hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan; I say that line is nonexistent. It's hate, pure and simple.

You also said in your letter something that I've heard many Christians argue when I bring up the point of how simply barbaric and amoral a lot of the Bible is: you say, "the standards were high and God desired for people to obey; children to obey their parents [...] but Jesus came to die for our sins in abolishing the law. Many other commands in the [Old Testament] are not followed in modern times as they are no longer applicable." Presumably, you are referring to my aside that Deuteronomy 21:18-21 demands that disobedient children be stoned to death. To you, Jesus' sacrifice made it so that this portion of the Bible is no longer relevant. I don't know how one goes about cherry picking which parts of the Bible are still relevant and which aren't, but I know that many people have very differing opinions, and these differing opinions lead to wars and death. I tend to view death and murder as morally abhorrent, but I guess you don't as long as it's on the cause of "righteousness," whatever that means.

I have carefully considered everything you have said to me and I reject all of it, happily and wholeheartedly. I feel I am a better person for not believing the dangerous and divisive aspects of the Bible, or the Quran or anything else. As such, I can live my whole life without feeling guilty or shameful because I am afraid of some invisible, petty deity is judging me, and I can be open to new ideas, new ways of thinking, new people and new activities. But it's not enough that merely I think this way, and that's why I wrote a letter to the Tribune. I believe the Bible has been a horrible impediment of world civilization and I am prepared to argue this with anyone. That doesn't mean that I hate anyone who professes a religious view, and it never did. In fact, many of the people I love the most are religious for different reasons, and many of the things I love about those people stem from their religion. However, this is not about them, this is about people like you who choose to justify hate and bigotry under the guise of religion.

I hereby extend an offer to a debate, whether in a public or private forum, so I can perhaps communicate these grievances and maybe even ask you a few further questions. In any case, feel free to write back, but please don't bother arguing with me unless you want to use logical arguments based on reasoning and observation. Otherwise I'm just not going to be very receptive.

Sincerely,
Nathan Sacks

The Black Dossier: brilliant or terrible?

2007-12-23T15:39:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to borrow a copy of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier from the library, despite the fact that it just came out a bit more than a month ago. I finished it today and I was looking at some reviews of it online, which seem to range from the usual Moore superlatives to just general confusion. It's difficult to imagine that even the most hardcore Anglophile wouldn't have at least some trouble reading this, and I suspect many people picking up this book expecting to see another admittedly eccentric but mostly linear action adventure will be very shocked: this comic book contains probably more prose than pictures, and what's more, the prose is absolutely, incredibly dense, I mean we are talking throwaway allusions to Gravity's Rainbow and Louis Feuillade films here, meaning that you will probably spend around six times as much time reading portions of the titular "Black Dossier" than you would reading the actual narrative. That is probably the ratio of how much time I spent, although I don't know if casual comic fans, who are known for their disdain of books without pictures, are even going to take the time to read Moore's uniformly brilliant riffs on some of the greatest writers and thinkers in human history.

I thought it was great. It's probably the best comic to come out all year, and it's certainly the most ambitious (it might even give that dense-masterpiece-to-end-all-dense-masterpieces Watchmen a run for its money in that regard). I scoff at those that say that it is too high-minded or too gimmicky. Yes, it does come with 3-D glasses, but they are essential to the last part of the narrative. Yes, a lot of it verges on straight-up pornography, but if you're trying to appropriate the style of erotic novelist John Cleland, what else are you going to call it? Also, the art is great, and I must give props to Kevin O'Neill for having the perfect art style to capture all this incredible detail.

There are so many great things about this book. Among them: the postcards showing the origin of Orlando (of Virginia Woolf fame); having Harry Lime pop up as the new M; making James Bond into the 1950s equivalent of a bro, complete with date-rape tendencies; the excerpt from "Sal Paradyse's" novel The Crazy Wide Forever, which is completely worthless and unintelligible just as I imagined Paradise's writing would be; Les Hommes Mysterieux and Zweilicht-Helden, the League's respective French and German equivalents, of whose members I won't give away; the fact that the German fascist dictator during World War II was Adenoid Hynkel; and the Pynchon nod, among other things. I still have mixed feelings about the ending in 3-D, which basically ends with a soliloquy by some guy who looks a lot like Moore talking about how these characters are so majestic and brilliant and will live much longer and have more of a pervasive influence than any of us will ever have. In fact, the final section sort of reminded me of a more highbrow version of the South Park episodes that took place in "Imagination Land."

Still though, this is a great comic. Pick it up if you're interested in a completely new take on the form. I understand that there will be more adventures of the League in the future. I don't know how Moore is going to top this, but I'm sure he can.

The cops are on their way

2007-12-22T15:25:00.000-08:00

Joe just showed me this not long ago, via Boing Boing I think: the FBI is spending $1 Billion on a new database of various physical characteristics. This is kind of scary. To me, this is all starting to sound like something out of 1984, and people have been complaining about if this is the FBI way overstepping the bounds of reason. Imagine what they could possibly put into a Biometrics database:

-Fingerprints, obviously
-Iris patterns
-Face shape data
-Credit card purchases
-Library books checked out

Maybe some other stuff. What's a bit weirder is that the FBI has already taken numerous DNA samples from about 1.5 million Afghan and Iraqi detainees, which means you or I could get away with murder far easier than they could. That simply isn't American, but then again they are detainees and they have no rights because they are terrorists.

The funniest part of the article comes from the ACLU, being classy as always:

"It's going to be an essential component of tracking," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's enabling the Always On Surveillance Society."

Think about that acronym for a second.

Is it about time I became a card-carrying member of the ACLU? It's long overdue. I will look into it later today.

I have at least one fan

2007-12-22T14:22:00.000-08:00

My dad showed me a letter I got in the mail sometime recently from a character named Everett Cherrington, also known as "the God-socks man," regarding a letter to the editor I sent to the Ames Tribune quite a long time ago (unfortunately, I can't find it on the Tribune's website, although I'm sure it's there somewhere). Basically, my very brief article addressed concerns I had about another editorial, written by Eric Chamberlin, that basically lambasted the Tribune for its supposed "homosexual agenda." I'm not kidding, there are like two people in Ames that actually believe this is true and write to the paper regularly about it.

Anyhow, I wrote a letter back, basically pointing out that those who choose to invoke the Bible to justify bigotry or anything else are wasting their time, that I don't view the Bible as inerrant truth and neither do most of the people I know, that hate speech is hate speech whether or not it is religious in intent, etc. Anyhow I got some nasty responses, far greater than what I'd expect for such an innocuous thesis, with nearly all of them stating how "angry" of a young man I must be (a comment that made me furious, of course).

Ev's took a long time to come, though. Here's his letter:

"Nathan,
I'm sorry you're so angry at the world for how you perceive gays are treated. In Deut. 21 God is just in his judgment because people were under the law. The standards were high and God desired for people to obey; children to obey their parents.
But Jesus came to die for our sins in abolishing the law. Many other commands in the O.T. are not followed in modern times as they are no longer applicable.
When Jesus died it was to fulfill the law; to pay for man's sins. We're all sinners in need of repentance. When we repent (change our thinking about God); admit we're sinners and ask him for forgiveness then we're "born again." Then when we die we can go to Heaven and not to Hell where one pays for his or her sins.
Please carefully consider what the enclosed pamphlet has to say.
Sincerely, Ev Cherrington"

Also in this letter was a pamphlet from an organization called Exodus International, a supposed "worldwide network of 'ex-gay' ministries." It basically details one man's quest to reject his own homosexuality in favor of God. It's full of revolting, misleading so-called facts:

"Today, many denominations have fully embraced homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle. How did this come about? The main reason is a shift in this century from reliance on God's Word to reliance on the latest scientific findings and personal experiences."

Aaargh! I don't feel I need to comment on this right now, but I will write a swift response to him, and I will probably post it up here when I have the chance.

Friday poem II

2007-12-21T14:13:00.000-08:00

This is me trying to be Bukowski, I think, which everyone should try occasionally.

The Untitled Poem About Resignation

“Damn, you’re calm,” they say to me,
My face a bleeding wreck from
Falling down a flight of stairs.

What I should have said is, “Fools,
Clearly I’m in too much pain
To do a fucking dance for you.”

Instead I say something else,
Something like, “Mmmphh,” which
I guess is code for, “I’m good.”

They all walk away and I
Almost grin, the fact dawned
That this was my family.

As the family fades away, I get stronger

My strength sapped by wasted days

Replaced with a decaying soup-like structure.

Oatmeal.

Back in Ames

2007-12-20T18:30:00.000-08:00

I'm back in Ames finally, and I'm not really happy or sad about that given that I was here but a month ago. Nothing has changed since then. Still, it's a very nice place to be, my room is as cozy and hot as ever, and I get lambchops for dinner. My parents always give me a good dinner on the first day back home. I didn't go back home yesterday because I decided to hang out with remaining friends instead, and I ended up having some really intense conversations about Russia/Stalinism/Leninism/Marxism/Christianity/American voter efficacy/secularism/North Korea. It was interesting, especially given that I was having these arguments with Duncan, Vitaly, and Hainstock, all of whom have different areas of expertise. That's always good when that happens. As the English major, I was basically pulling for Trotsky, obviously.

My plan for this break is to read, obviously first of all. I have The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan and some short stories from John Updike, as well as Alan Moore's new comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, which I've noticed has been getting middling to downright poor reviews.

Also on my agenda is to continue writing down everything I do everyday for the entirety of winter break. This is a tradition I started back in freshman year, mainly because I felt that my adult self (except I am an adult--adulter self?) would be interested to know about my musings, philosophies, and lifestyle habits as a college student, especially during that two weeks of debauchery known as winter break. Looking back at what I had written, there was definitely some interesting things going on. I don't want to get too specific, it is my own damn business, but I would say freshman year was all about a lot of self-loathing and pity, while sophomore year was about boredom. What will this break be about? Hopefully something preferable to either of those.

Aaron just gave me his Chanukah present, the newest issue of the British mag Mojo. I think he chose it because it has the reunited Led Zeppelin on the cover. It occurs to me that I haven't commented on this Led Zeppelin reunion, partially because I'm not a millionaire and couldn't get tickets but also because reunion shows tend to be suspicious stuff. I have looked at some grainy cell phone video clips of the show on Youtube, and from what I can tell, John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page play as good as they ever did, Plant sings probably better than he did before, and Jason Bonham does not even come fucking close. You can definitely tell the difference. It's a shame on the one hand, but that's what he deserves for making a career out of flogging his dad's corpse.

I "beat" the New York Post to death

2007-12-18T21:27:00.000-08:00

Check out this lovely headline: Ike Turner is dead. He was 76. I apologize for linking to anything that has to do with Rupert Murdoch, the most Hitleresque Australian ever, but just look at that headline!

A far better obit can be found in Slate, written by special guest writer Donald Fagen. Yes, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen. I've already taken way more abuse than I should have this year for my ardent support of most things Dan, and I'm sure if anyone listened to the lyrics they would agree with me. Simply put, Fagen is a great writer, and apparently pretty well-read, judging from his allusions to Faust (I mean, knowing about Faust isn't in itself that interesting, but I guess it's important because the musicians I know don't tend to read). Fagen's obit is far superior to any other I've read because he takes critically into account a) Turner's place within the spectrum of old bluesmen and b) his later boozing and wife-hitting years, which he understands are severe but also that it's quite possible that Tina had careerist reasons for implicating Ike as a wife-beater, just in time for her Private Dancer comeback. Anyhow, it's all pretty fascinating, and I come out of it feeling as if I should just be sorry for poor Ike. I listened to his performance on the Gorillaz track "Every Planet We Know Is Dead" and it's a lot sadder then it used to be.

BONUS: For anyone still doubting the genius of Becker and Fagen, I direct you to this open letter to Wes Anderson, which is one of the funniest things I think I have ever read. They basically dig into Wes Anderson's musical choices for all his films and how they are so predictable all the time, an exact complaint I have had:

"Again, each film increasingly relies on eccentric visual detail, period wardrobe, idiosyncratic and overwrought set design, and music supervision that leans heavily on somewhat obscure 60's "British Invasion" tracks a-jangle with twelve-string guitars, harpsichords and mandolins. The company of players, while excellent, retains pretty much the same tone and function from film to film. Indeed, you must be aware that your career as an auteur is mirrored in the lives of your beloved characters as they struggle in vain to duplicate early glories."

Damn. They come to the conclusion that Bottle Rocket is still Wes Anderson's best film, and that he should commission Steely Dan to write a song for Darjeeling Limited. Becker's choice for a song is called "Bottle Rocket 2." It's very funny.

An idea I've had

2007-12-18T20:48:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been kicking around some ideas to do at student symposium this coming spring. I definitely want to do something (especially considering the amount of talking I've been engaged in lately about going into academia). The problem is, I can't think of any particular author or artist I could consider myself an expert on that no one else has. I mean, I know Kerouac almost by heart, but so does every asshole. No one wants to see a symposium project on that. I was debating doing one on Hitchens, who is not a fiction writer, so I don't know about that. None of my professors have asked me to do anything, so I assume none of them are that interested in what I have to say. Whatever.

An option for the symposium, and for English honors in general, is to write some sort of short story, but I gather that not many people do this because the professors are intensely critical of fiction work. I think I could do it though. I was recently reminded of John Barth's great short story "Click," which deals very explicitly with the idea of "hypertextuality," wherein all works of science or literature could be connected to each other via hypertext links, not unlike the internet itself. "Click" was written in 1997, but when I read it a few months back I was shocked at how prescient it seemed. Whether he was presenting an absolutely new way of thinking or a new way of literature is debatable, but in these days of Web 2.0, it seems relevant, at least considering what I know.

"Click" offers a lot of interesting new perspectives on the craft of reading, but in the end, it's just basic text made to fool us into thinking that this "hypertextuality" goes beyond the printed page. My idea was to take Barth's ideas (which I don't think are necessarily his) and elaborate it into a symposium project wherein I would create a wikistory. To elaborate, I thought that I would start with a base text, perhaps only a few paragraphs long, that would contain links to other sections of the wiki, to be read at the readers' own discretion. These separate pages or articles would contain some sort of poem or prose, or even a picture, that would complement or illuminate what I was saying on the original page. Some of these pages would branch out further into other pages--the end result would add up to something along 20 pages of actual material, but the reader is free to look at it in several different ways.

My biggest problem is that I don't know how to make a wiki. My friend Karl is a very strong proponent of wikis, so maybe I will enlist him to help. This may be way over my head though. It seems like a good idea, but what about the actual plot? What would I write about? It's important that my subject matter work as a linear piece of literature as well as a pedagogical exercise, because otherwise I could write any cryptic bullshit I wanted, and I am not the kind of person that likes to do that.

Anyway it's just an idea. I probably won't go through with it. It's better than most of my ideas though.

The day before...

2007-12-18T20:21:00.000-08:00

Two days without blogging this early in the game is not a good sign. I need to step up, but as always, I find myself at a loss of what to say. I was just studying for my final, one that promises to be possibly the easiest final of my college career. All night I've been reading about neoclassicism, minimalism, postminimalism, etc. in bite-size chunks, and I think I have a pretty good grasp on the classical music end of things. Regarding the popular music end? Not even a challenge, not even gonna study. A day or so back I had a quiz where I was asked to match certain musical artists to their genres, and the choices were like the Sex Pistols, Nirvana, the Bee Gees and Talking Heads. Needless to say, it was very easy.

One interesting thing I have noticed in the news is Germany's latest declaration regarding Scientology as a dangerous cul t. Of course I am inclined to agree, for reasons more personal than one might expect, but this seriously infringes on anyone's right to religion. Now, I can understand that Scientology might pose a physical threat to certain people, and it is a very strange and seductive religion that has no qualms about fucking over its constituents. To a certain extent, that is their own fault, and the subjugation and brainwashing of kids is an unfortunate side effect of living in a semi-free democracy, and anyway Christians and Jews do it plenty too.

On the other hand, I understand that this is Germany we are talking about, and they know a thing or two about dangerous cults that restrict the essential freedoms and rights of humans. They must have a genuine concern, although I have yet to read what it actually is. It seems to me this all stems from Tom Cruise making some Nazi movie in Germany. Why all the Tom hate? Can someone explain this to me? Why no Travolta hate? He was the one who made the Passion of Scientology (which, I'm almost ashamed to say, I saw on opening day).

Regarding the "personal reasons" I was referring to earlier: my dad told me that a friend of his had a daughter who committed suicide as a result of monetary pressure from her Scientology church. At least that's what he said, I don't know if she readily admitted this before she killed herself. Sadly, this does seem to be how Scientology operates, at least according to L. Ron Hubbard:

"A Suppressive Person or Group becomes fair game. By FAIR GAME is meant, may not be further protected by the codes and disciplines or the rights of a Scientologist."

Basically, their doctrine is to completely destroy and demoralize anyone who dares criticize them. Well, I'll be one of many and call them out. Scientology is a crazy cult that does innumerable damage to defenseless children and adults alike. The church itself can be indirectly linked to the murder or suicide of several people within the church, yet they seem to operate outside the law. I don't care how wonderful Jerry Maguire or Road Hogs is, it is our duty to point this out.

Google Video treats

2007-12-15T20:15:00.000-08:00

Via the "Christopher Hitchens Appreciation Society" on Facebook, on which I am a proud member and contributor, I found a link to something called "The Four Horsemen," a two hour-long discussion between the Hitch, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, the four individuals that many would consider to be the vanguard of the new atheist movement, although two of them (not Dawkins or Dennett) would probably be appalled to find that they were labeled as part of any such group or movement. Here's a link to both hours. I think this is in Hitchens' house in D.C., as I remember it from when he did a tour of it in his C-Span interview:

Hour 1
Hour 2

That Sam Harris is quite a dish, isn't he? I've read God is not Great, The God Delusion, and The End of Faith, but not Dennett's book. That's something I will do over break.

Also, I think it's about time I read a lot of books challenging all these claims and arguing for religion. Are there any books like that that I could read and take seriously and don't use the Bible as a primary source?

Horror's ultimate quantity

2007-12-15T19:51:00.000-08:00

I watched the old-school horror flick The Brain That Wouldn't Die with Laura today, and while it isn't particularly good, and the title is very misleading, there are a few things worth writing about. Chief among them is that the big monster who appears only in the last few minutes of the film is actually a very real person with acromegaly, which causes gigantic, untreatable tumors. I merely assumed that it was a tall man with makeup. His name was Eddie Carmel; apparently he was part of some Palestinian freak show for most of his life but also appeared in a few movies.

I feel sort of weird now because I was so taken aback and almost scared by how grotesque this individual looked at the end of the film, but I didn't know that this was how the actor normally looked (I should have known better: the rest of the movie is as cheap as hell). It got me wondering about my own views regarding exploitation of people's inadequacies in art. Turns out I have no opinion, at least not as much as I used to when reality TV was among the first to make a spectacle out of doing disgusting things or being an idiot. Nowadays my soul is deadened to the point where I see no reason to condemn that sort of thing. I'm sure Carmel was paid well, and while I'm not sure he was happy to do it, it was probably a step up from the freak show. It's just one of the million aspects of being an earthling where you just have to shrug your shoulders and say, "too bad." That is, in itself, too bad.

(For those of you not in the know: a fact well-known among Cornell College students is that this campus will slowly sap away your idealism and your drive to do good deeds. This does, however, allow me to get more work done.)

The movie was part of a 12-DVD, 50-movie collection that Laura has. We've been watching quite a few of them lately. You can buy it at Wal-Mart for something like $5. All of the movies I assume are in the public domain now, and all of them have particularly terrible prints, but there are actually quite a few masterpieces, including Metropolis, Nosferatu, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, alongside some less-regarded but still classic outings from Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi. There are also some really horrible ones too. I suggest you stay away from The Gorilla or anything involving the Ritz Brothers.

Completely random note: The label for this post is going to be "movies" rather than "film," because I believe it's a more inclusive and accurate term. I remember in 11th grade, my AP Western Civilization teacher Kirk Daddow always told us to regard anything we watched in class as a "film" (because of the intrinsic seriousness of whatever we were watching, I guess). Throughout the whole year, I wanted to raise my hand and tell him that technically these weren't "films," since they were being shown on videotape, but I never did.

I got an A+

2007-12-14T12:17:00.000-08:00

For the first time in a very long time, I got an A+ on a paper. My professor even said it was one of the best papers he has ever gotten in his class. So, that put me in a cheery mood. In case you were wondering, I'm in Music History III: Romantic to Modern Era and I just did a paper on the banning of Richard Wagner in Israel (because of his Nazi ties, among other things). I don't think I want to put the whole thing on here because you don't really need to be interested, but here's the opening paragraph nevertheless:

The very existence of great art, however one chooses to define it, almost always necessitates a need to erect a political barrier between the work of art and the views of its artist. To take film as an example, one can be impressed and enthralled by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation while recognizing that it is a blatantly racist and inaccurate account of the beginnings of the Ku Klux Klan—similarly, that same person can agree with what Michael Moore is trying to say in Farenheit 9/11 while noting that a lot of it is misleading and propagandistic. The barrier seems reasonable enough, but as with almost all theories, problems can arise. What if this artist may have been indirectly responsible for the death of a friend or loved one? Such is the strange case of Richard Wagner’s legacy. Everybody who has studied Wagner at one point or another can probably agree on two central points: one, that he was one of the key composers in world history with a body of work that is almost unparalleled in terms of ambitiousness; and two, that many of his personal views, especially regarding Jews, were abhorrent and unforgivable, especially in light of how his views were co-opted and used by Hitler as a justification for the extermination of the Jewish race. In 1948, more than sixty years after Wagner’s death, the state of Israel was formed, partially as a response to the need of so many Holocaust survivors (many of whom were forced to listen to Wagner in concentration camps) to establish a Jewish state. Since that time, there has been an unofficial ban on playing the music of Wagner in the state of Israel, and the few attempts individuals have made to perform Wagner (notably by the Israeli conductor and composer Daniel Barenboim) have been met with a significant amount of conflict, both from Israeli citizens and public officials. The reasons Israelis offer for eliminating Wagner from the Israeli repertoire are understandable, but they reflect a certain amount of hypocrisy: Why ban Wagner and not other confirmed anti-Semites, as the majority of individuals in Europe during the late 19^th century at least harbored some sort of anti-Semitic belief? The answer lies not in the works of Wagner but in the image and symbol of Wagner, as used by Hitler. The unofficial ban on playing Wagner's music in

Israel

is more a result of Hitler's co-opting Wagner's views and music as part of his own agenda, as opposed to Wagner's views themselves, which often contradicted many aspects of Hitler's philosophy.

Kind of long-winded, but essentially correct, right? If my prof asks, I might make this into a syposium project. I'll talk about that later.

Friday poem

2007-12-14T12:10:00.000-08:00

This is something I think I'm going to try to do every Friday. I'm starting with a rather old poem of sketchy quality, but probably next week I'll start trying to put more recent ones up. This is merely a ploy to get me to write more.

It's Teriffic!

Wasn’t born long after the rules of “fair play”
Proved to shatter my brittle bones, those worthless lies
I saw the eyes of a man
Much bigger and stronger than me.
Smarter too (not that it mattered)
As my shattered bones and organs shifted together
To spell out a word
To point out my crimes
It hurt enough to scare me straight
(Pitter patter goes my spleen)
Till I thought of those eyes.

I was left to lament my sorry dissected self
More toad than man, more boring than Man
It’s hard to keep one’s thoughts on it though
So I turned on the radio.

God I hate the radio.

A once valid method of pulling teeth
Slowly and surely, slowly and surgically
Spineless vibrations welling up my eyes
Switch from songs to static, you might be surprised.

You insolent dolt, that’s the morphine talking
Do the nerves in your brain even bother anymore?
What’s in store for you old man
Another house and a kitchen
To make more snacks (can you even do that?)
Take a rat and a toad and make them a deal
You give them a list but
You give them no choice
It’s enough to drum along
(Stop poking at my spleen dammit)
Paradiddle. Morphine no more.

Excerpt #1 from the Eddie Hazel biography

2007-12-13T14:28:00.000-08:00

Part of the purpose for this blog is unloading a bunch of stuff I wrote randomly at one point or another, since none of it is going to be published. For the last couple of years I've been working very irregularly on a biography of deceased Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel, most well-known for the ten-minute guitar solo "Maggot Brain" and his rampant drug use.

Anyhow here's an excerpt I thought was kind of good, completely divorced of its concept:

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Critics of popular music tend to throw around the word “virtuoso” pretty liberally when referring to musical artists of a particular expressive power. Certainly Eddie Hazel is often tagged with this admittedly well-intentioned compliment, but doing so does a disservice to the amount of craft and imagination he was able to put into his playing. Eddie Hazel was no “virtuoso,” at least not by the terms that virtuosity is often defined (like most rhythm & blues guitarists of the time, he was not one to notate his music, nor was he likely to play lightning fast scalar solos or indulge in “fret-tapping”)—he was simply a blues guitarist, and the more one looks at the Steve Vais and Joe Satrianis of the world (Guitar World-sanctioned “virtuosos” both), the more it becomes absolutely clear that blues is the relative opposite of virtuosity. At the risk of generalizing about a subject that I know way too much about, it should be noted that electric blues playing has never been about playing fast or effortlessly—on the contrary, it’s about striving, sweating, desperately searching for some sort of truth or happiness in the form of that perfect note, upon which the blues player realizes that this note is far from perfect, and the journey must continue, ad finitum, ad nauseum. The tone of melancholy that pervades 99% of guitar blues is, at its basest level, the guitarist struggling to achieve transcendence, possibly as a way of communicating with his or her audience, possibly as a way of keeping the hell hound temporarily off the trail.

But I am getting way too hippy-dippy here. On a purely technical level, and Hazel is as perfect an example as one can think of, blues guitar solos revolve around fairly simple patterns and often involve the same notes played over and over again. What gives the guitar a special edge over many blues instruments is that, as a string instrument, it allows the player to bend the string and therefore slightly change the pitch, which simultaneously provides the player with two advantages: first, it can give the note a more interesting “crying” tone, moving the pitch back and forth as if it was a weeping baby, and second, it allows the guitarist to cover up for any mistake by “bending” the note to a more pleasing pitch. From the earliest delta blues records to Led Zeppelin, even untrained ears can pick up moments on studio albums where the guitarist flubs a note and quickly covers it up by bending it or moving back to the original note.

Professional musicians wouldn’t like to admit it, but it’s pretty easy for even a novice guitarist to play a convincingly “bluesy” solo if he plays the same three or four notes in a particular pattern (I submit Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” as the absolute nadir of bendy three-note solos). But in the end, it’s not about that. Great blues guitarists have a personality and vocabulary that they make their own—they might play the same three notes over and over, but it’s three notes that no one else would play in that particular way at that particular time. There’s a reason one can tell that it’s clearly Hazel and not fellow Funkadelic guitarist Michael Hampton playing the solo on, say, “Red Hot Mama,” and it comes down to the fact that listeners over time learn to notice the particular choices that great, unique guitarists make, even on the dime (and Hazel’s solos were rarely written beforehand).

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Thoughts?

Huckabee is not affable and charming, he's a jerk

2007-12-13T13:17:00.000-08:00

In a crowded field of scumbag competitors who, among their ranks, think that the official American policy on religion is monotheism, hang out with child molesters, take campaign donations from hate groups and John Mayer, and seemingly have no brain cells whatsoever, one can almost be forgiven for thinking that Huckabee seems like an acceptable alternative. This is wrong. This is another example of how the lesser evil argument is not going to do anyone any amount of good.

For anyone in this country who thinks that people should be allowed to believe (and not believe) as many gods as they want (and I would hope that there are many of you out there), Huckabee's religiosity is appalling. I have no problem with anyone getting a degree in theology, but just take a look at what Huckabee has said about homosexuality in the past:

"The governor regards 1968 as the dawning of ‘'the age of the birth-control pill, free love, gay sex, the drug culture and reckless disregard for standards.'"

Furthermore, his comments in 1992 that we should quarantine people with AIDS has gotten a certain amount of attention, as has his comment that, "Homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle." These sort of comments should not be tolerated by anyone who believes that discrimination is wrong, as opposed to permissible, which apparently these fuckers think is not a problematic thing to say.

The man does not believe in evolution. This is the 21st century. This is insane. I don't care how many profiles he gets in the Jesus York Times or Newsweek, he's still a bigot just like the rest of them (yes, including Ron Paul). I really wish the press would stop giving people like that a platform and allow non-bigoted republicans (yes, I know you're out there) a chance to say something. If I had to choose a republican candidate right now, I'd choose John McCain, despite his lame Woodstock comment (being a prisoner of war and having your balls electrocuted is sweet, I guess).

God, some of these blog posts are just no-brainers. Just be glad I didn't call this post "I hate Huckabee."

On the limits of Wikipedia

2007-12-12T19:21:00.000-08:00

Here's an essay I was writing that I was originally thinking of submitting to The Cornellian, but I've since had second thoughts since I can't bear to be associated with a newspaper of such ill repute (just look at it, I dare you). Is there something wrong with that? I really would like to not be part of the problem, frankly. I justify it the way Fugazi justifies not doing interviews in corporate magazines like Rolling Stone: even if I am pushing a good idea, it will just be lost in a sea of bad ideas. It's not like anyone is really clamoring to see my writing, anyway.

This is an essay about how I think Wikipedia should be taken a bit more seriously. Feel free to comment vigorously on the subject. It is definitely a debatable issue.

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Wikipedia Should be Considered a Citable Source

Like all of the most revolutionary acts of communication, from Gutenberg’s printing press onward, the open content reference web site known as Wikipedia has weathered criticisms by traditionalists and skeptics alike, its main offense being the allowance of anyone to contribute to a worldwide body of public knowledge. By anyone, that means you, me, and millions of other people that, at some point in our lives, have contributed something of value to a Wikipedia page. Almost overnight, the standard, peer-reviewed encyclopedias of the past (such as the World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica) became obsolete. To some, that posed quite a problem, but to the rest of us, this seemed like the dawn of a new and exciting age where the promise of free information (an idea preached more often than practiced) was actually coming true.

It is obvious that a new and exciting concept like Wikipedia would be greeted with the most amount of skepticism in academic circles. There are many reasons why this is, not the least among them being that it has always been the job of the professor or scientist to not accept any idea or theory without lots of evidence to back it up. For the most part, I have observed that professors, at least at Cornell College, do not believe that Wikipedia is a viable source for citation because they see it is a system fraught with problems. Cite Wikipedia in any form on an academic papers or even mention in passing that you looked at it for research, and it is likely you will be reprimanded or at least given a stern look. I would like to argue that even as I recognize that Wikipedia has certain problems, it has managed to overcome the majority of these problems in a most profound and satisfactory way. It simply doesn’t make sense that the Encyclopedia Britannica is considered an unimpeachable and unbiased source while Wikipedia isn’t. If anything, it should be the other way around, as Britannica reflects the biases of a privileged elite while Wikipedia allows anyone, regardless of age, creed, or class, to contribute. For instance, the section on Ludwig Von Beethoven in Britannica might have a lot about the volume and complexity of Beethoven’s works, but would it mention Abel Gance’s 1936 film Un grand amour de Beethoven? No it doesn’t, but Wikipedia does.

As mentioned before, most criticisms of Wikipedia have to do with its open-forum format, which leads many to believe that it’s a site filled with inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and an emphasis on what is perceived on popular, “low” culture over more high-minded intellectual pursuits. The last point is for cultural critics far smarter than myself to argue about, but for now, it should be noted that these inaccuracies and inconsistencies aren’t as plentiful as one might think, for the reason that Wikipedia, like any good system of ideas, has its checks and balances. As you read this sentence, thousands upon thousands of administrators are patrolling recent changes to the site, verifying claims and references, and amending or even deleting these pages according to their best judgments. These administrators were chosen to have these powers as a result of the amount of time and attention each made towards making Wikipedia as unbiased and accurate as it could be. Administrators in turn choose more administrators, many of whom specialize in certain fields and become administrators of certain areas (subcategories often referred to as “WikiProjects”). These administrators are also capable of locking down articles in the event that they become frequently vandalized, and preventing users from making edits until it is deemed safe again.

Any system that rewards hard and copious amounts of work with special privileges is often referred to in a knee-jerk fashion as intrinsically American, as Wikipedia has, although I would be quick to point out that Wikipedia’s idea of governing is hardly democratic, as there is a clear divide between the normal Wikipedia editor like myself and the administrator, and while administrators are capable of checking each other, normal editors cannot easily check the power of administrators. If anything, it is, as one Wikipedia administrator explained, “an anarchy with gang rule.” While I would be loathe to say that this school of thought breeds great and lasting nations, it seems that in the realm of free information dissemination, nothing could be more perfect. Who better to charge with the task of spreading knowledge than the most knowledgeable, or at the very least the most interested?

In my experience, and I have tested this, any attempt at vandalism on Wikipedia won’t last very long. At this point in Wikipedia’s short life-span, there is always the slight possibility that a piece of information is incorrect, but any amount of double-checking on the part of the researcher would be 99% likely to set the story straight. Try it out yourself: make some specious claim on some article and so how long it takes to be removed. It’s quite a fast process. More difficult to reconcile are the claims that articles on Wikipedia are, while not technically inaccurate, certainly biased in one way or another. Most of the times this bias can be dealt with on the individual article “Discussion” pages, but it had come to the point where some felt they were unable to get their viewpoint across no matter how much editing they tried to do. Andrew Schlafly, son of anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlafly, was so incensed by the fact that Wikipedia didn’t considered the Bible to be an unimpeachable historical document that he created his own homemade wiki: Conservapedia. On Conservapedia, you could find unbiased articles on, for instance, “The Gay Bomb,” an aphrodisiac chemical weapon that could turn its populace into homosexuals (and was apparently proposed by the Clinton administration). A more substantive level of criticism has been aimed towards documented cases of members of congress and special interest groups alike paying writers to make their Wikipedia pages paint them in a kinder light. This is an egregious offense, and one that is notoriously difficult to regulate due to the amount of anonymity users are allowed. However, I have noticed that administrators do a good enough amount of patrolling to make this almost a moot point.

I’m aware of these limitations, so I propose that in citing Wikipedia articles, as we would with citing anything else, we should put limitations on what is acceptable. My idea would be this: In order to be considered a citable source, an article must have been considered an acceptable member of at least one of the many hundred “WikiProject” groups. So, for instance, if you are citing something about a novel, you would have to make sure that the article was part of “WikiProject Books,” which can be seen by viewing the "Discussion" page at the top of the article. If it doesn’t belong to any group, it shouldn’t be cited. Additionally, the article being considered should be rated at least above “stub-class” on Wikipedia’s internal quality scale (a ranking usually determined by committee). These criteria make the level of quality and accuracy easy to verify by both student and professor. And, in case a professor has any lingering doubts about a certain statement or citation (and he or she always should), Wikipedia makes it very easy to search through its edit history, so it would be easy to observe whether or not the information existed in the first place.

I know that this is not an issue that professors or students choose to deal with very often, and it is true that there is often no need to cite Wikipedia, as it traffics in public knowledge, which in most cases doesn’t need to be cited. However, the option must exist. There are so many exciting and interesting things about Wikipedia, among them: the fact that spread of information is no longer confined to an elite group; that the notions of “high” and “low” culture are being shown to be patently false and justly obliterated; and, perhaps most importantly, that the internet is capable of providing us with an exponential amount of material more detailed and diverse than all the public libraries in the world combined. It would be a shame to see it rejected on college campuses simply because it is used too much.

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P.S. Does anyone know how to do cuts, like livejournal cuts?

Seeing Dinosaur Jr.

2007-12-12T18:17:00.000-08:00

I had the chance to see one of my absolute favorite bands yesterday, Dinosaur Jr. It was an excellent show, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to see the original lineup of J., Lou, and Murph. It was clear from what I saw that they weren't that happy to be there or even be around each other, but their playing was as good as ever. The majority of their set came from their recent album Beyond and while I definitely appreciate their old stuff a lot, their new album was pretty good too. I can't think of any genuine criticism I really have about the show, especially given that it was $20. Some observations:

-J., of course, was transcendent. He's exactly the kind of rock star I like and can relate to, in that he is not a good-looking person and he completely lacks charisma. He is a consummate musician's musician, though. Over the course of the 15-song set (12 songs, 3 encore songs), I would wager he played about 20 guitar solos, all of them melodically interesting and quite different from their studio incarnations. My personal favorite was "Forget the Swan" (see a clip of them playing it here!), which ended with an extended whammy-jam that was quite wonderful from my point of view.

-I was front and center the whole time, and my ears are still ringing as a result. I noticed that pretty much everyone else besides me had ear plugs, but that means they are pansies that didn't get the full frontal assault of J.'s marshall stacks. Also, I'm going to go deaf.

-In between songs, J. and Murph would often spontaneously break out into some reggae-sounding bits of music. I hope this shows up on the next album.

-After witnessing the two openers, Awesome Color and the Reaction, I came to understand why I think I like Dinosaur Jr. so much. Those two opening bands had plenty of extended guitar jams but underneath them were no songs: just riffs that they banged away for like five minutes, with no choruses or verses. Dinosaur Jr., on the other hand, has choruses, verses, and hooks aplenty, and they work well within the context of the song. Several songs, like "Freak Scene," have so many great parts to them that J. could have easily separated them into two different songs. Such is the talent of this man.

-I got a guitar pick from J. It was his birthday the day before. Earlier in the evening he was standing in front of me but I had absolutely nothing to say to him that wouldn't be incredibly annoying. Oh well. Also, I forgot to bring a camera.

-They are a hilarious looking band. J.'s head is absolutely huge, especially with that huge mop of gray hair. Murph looks like a soccer dad. Lou just looked really large. I was surprised.

-The highlight of the night? Either "Forget the Swan," or "The Wagon," or the 1-2 punch of "Kracked/Sludgefeast." Absolutely magical. No criticisms.

The closest thing to celebrity yet

2007-12-12T14:26:00.001-08:00

I thought I'd mention this before the White House erases this from its web site. On December 10, president George W. and the White House staged a Hanukkah reception/minstrel show to prove that our president can impart understanding on at least some religions. His guest-of-honor/token Jew this year was Yehuda Pearl, the father of deceased journalist Daniel Pearl, famously beheaded in Pakistan by Muslim extremists (you may remember they made a movie about him with Angelina Jolie). Daniel Pearl also happened to be my second cousin, and while I'd never met him, my mother has, and she maintains regular contact with Yehuda.

Anyhow, cousin Yehuda called a few days back to tell my mom that he had been invited by Bush to be part of this celebration, and he asked if he could borrow the menorah that belonged to my great-grandfather, Chayim Pearl. I guess my mom agreed and shipped it off to the White House, temporarily. So the menorah normally on my kitchen wall has been touched by Bush. My mom told me that as soon as she gets it back, she's going scrub the hell out of it.

For anyone wondering, my middle name is not "Pearl" but "Pour-El," a far less interesting but more Kryptonian sounding translation that my maternal grandfather uses as a last name.

And no, I'm not good with Photoshop.

EDIT: In the interest of fair play, I should direct you to Christopher Hitchens' recent article "Bah, Hanukkah: The Holiday Celebrates the Triumph of Tribal Jewish Backwardness." He is absolutely right about everything, of course, except maybe his assertion that Greek society was inherently more intellectually vibrant than Jewish society, when I'm sure there were exceptions. Expect this to be the first of many Hitchens references.